Good Morning Friends! The weird thing about the whole Mixtape Monday thing is if I did have something I really wanted to talk about, the impact is somewhat blunted given that I can’t do so until Tuesday. Firstly as you are all aware I am back and playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV. So much so that I am probably going to ignore most of the New World Closed Beta that I was looking forward to. Greysky Armada once again feels populated with lots of folks on any given night logging in and hanging out. Thalen, Rae, Waren, and I have been spending an awful lot of time online and with it has come more impromptu grouping opportunities. Something that has happened a few times recently is a treasure hunt map night, and we had a phenomenal time Sunday doing just this.
First off for the uninitiated, there is a thing collectively known as a treasure map in Final Fantasy XIV. For the most part, these come from gathering nodes and you can get one per day on a high-level Fisher, Miner, or Botanist. Additionally, there is a system called Wondrous Tails located in Idylshire, and for doing 9 events from the list of 16 possible events each week you get a guaranteed level 80 map designed for a full party aka 8 players. You “Decipher” the map which reveals the location in the world you need to head to. Once you feel like you have found the correct spot you execute another ability called Dig, which surveys the area looking for the chest. Upon opening it a series of encounters spawn and if you manage to defeat them all you get to open the treasure chest.
Starting in Heavensward there is a chance when you open the chest to instead spawn a portal to a special dungeon. Effectively you are guaranteed a single encounter, with a chance of additional encounters after the first one. These seem to come in two varieties, the roulette-style shown above and one where you are presented with actual doorways. In the doorway scenario, you are given your choice of two paths. If you choose correctly a new room opens up in front of you and you can proceed to the next encounter. In the roulette scenario, once the loot is dealt with an automated spin of the wheel takes place. Each symbol around the room represents a potential outcome. Essentially you are wanting to avoid landing on the purple portal with the monster face because that means a sweeper comes through and kicks your group out of the dungeon.
The fights themselves are sheer nonsense. We kept getting this one that was a giant mandragora that was honestly almost a minor raid boss in difficulty, and had a gimmick that the party had to deal with. Essentially there were two batches of tiny mandragora adds that spawned in. The first clump the tank aka me would take care of and hold with the boss. The others would run around the room and had no aggro table and each of them had a number over their head. The party had to kill these adds in numerical order in order to gain a bonus sack of loot before finally collapsing on the boss and normal adds to burn them all down. We went in with only one tank and one healer and for most of the night only six players but ultimately made it work.
The loot rewards are super varied and range from high-end crafting materials to things like housing items or minions. You also gain a shocking amount of gold in doing these maps along with a handful of the highest tier of tomestones, or as I will inadvertently call them “Bookrocks”. Right now the game plan is to start doing these every Sunday night and draw as much as we can from guild, friends, and the Super Dungeon Friends discord. The only challenge that got in our way there with one invite, is that the World Visit system was taking 3 hours or more to transfer players to Cactuar because he-who-must-not-be-named was streaming. I need to sure up a start time, but I am guessing sometime around 7 pm CDT/CST is going to be the start of festivities.
How fun these maps are and how shockingly lucrative they are for all players… is now leading me down a very specific rabbit hole. The most reliable way to get them is through gathering. You can harvest a map each day and then if you add that with the one you get from Khloe Aliapoh, that gives you a threshold of 8 that you can get in a single week’s time. There however is a challenge to how to store them, because you can only have one map in a bottle in your inventory and another map deciphered in your key items. That means you need to shuffle them to retainers and each of them can have a single one in their inventory, and an unlimited number posted on the Market Board… but also they sell quickly so you would, in theory, need to price outrageously to hold onto them. In order to feel like I am contributing to the mayhem… that means I REALLY need to get my disciples of the land up to 80. So I started doing some of that yesterday with Mining at 63, Botany at 62, and Fishing at 61.
There is definitely an “if you give a mouse a cookie” aspect to playing Final Fantasy XIV. The thing is though I am having a lot of fun and definitely feeling engaged. Between doing daily roulettes and beast tribe quests as well as trying to level more jobs and now falling into the gathering hole it seems like I will probably stay engaged for awhile. On top of everything thought there is just a feeling of the world being alive with so many new players coming and trying out the game. My city of choice is Limsa Lominsa and it is absolutely throbbing with new players, so many that often times moving causes a whole other set of players to load in. This game has a vitality that has been lacking from other MMORPGs I have played more recently and it reminds me of the way cities used to feel in Warcraft. The server downtime legitimately pained me that I could not be playing, and that hasn’t really been a feeling I have had for a game in a really long time.