Chilling with the Gods

Good Morning Folks! I started my mission in Final Fantasy XIV back in 2013 here in Limsa Lominsa as a Marauder main and I will be continuing that same lineage as Warrior in Dawntrail. Throughout all of it, however… I have sort of wished that the Aetheryte in Limsa was not the hub for the entire server. I feel like with the opening of Solution 9… a city that is way more fitting for all the folks who prefer to do modern glams with their catgirls is going to become the new hub. Not that I begrudge anyone hanging out in Limsa, it just makes loading into my free Aetheryte a bit slower due to the congestion. I’ve always personally preferred Hawker’s Alley or the Aftcastle as my haunts in the city.

I’ve been working my way through the Alliance raid from Endwalker and this morning I unlocked the final part. I have to say I really dig this content, not just because of the fights but because we are getting to learn more about the “Gods” of Eorzea. When you start the game you are asked to choose a patron deity, but up until this point, it had largely been a meaningless choice. You interact with various cults associated with the gods, but it is never in a positive manner. Hanging out with the gods during this quest chain has been delightful and it finally feels like this game has a proper pantheon. That was always something that Everquest nailed but World of Warcraft never seemed to really address, the religion of the folk of the land. Planes of Power is still one of the best expansions to hit ANY game because it did so much cool stuff with its pantheon.

This is going to get a bit spoilery so be warned. One of the things I had wondered about… is if during the quest chain, there would ever be a moment when my patron Deity acknowledges that fact. There is a point where you can bip around the phantom realm and summon forth various Gods to talk with. When I summoned Rhalgr, sure enough, he did in fact mention the fact that I was aligned with him. He also singled out something that I suspected… that the primals that we have fought are essentially incomplete reflections of these gods. Rhalgr mentions his connection to Ramuh and the Sylphs and if you go around the rest of the pantheon you can kinda connect the dots back to the other primals that have been summoned. Byregot seems somewhat like Titan, Azeyma somewhat like Ifrit, and Llymlaen maybe Leviathan. Anyway, there is a thread of connection there that I really dig.

In 2021 Square ran a promotion with Butterfinger that involved buying $5 of qualifying products and then submitting a photo of the receipt in order to get a code for a “chocolate” themed mount. This was a bit of a cumbersome mess and I never bothered. So while I will NEVER this mount because it looks entirely too much like poop… I will absolutely collect it just like I collected the Mountain Dew Zuu from this current promotion. Essentially Square has partnered with Twitch and is offering up the Chocorpokkur mount as a drop that comes from watching six hours of FFXIV-related streams. I will of course be farming this in a tab in the background… because six hours of Twitch viewership is sort of a “big ask” for someone who never really watches streams. Still cool that this is available again without needing to make any sort of purchase.

Also this morning the preliminary patch notes for 7.0 dropped, and if you are so inclined you can read through them all and daydream about the features coming into the game. It is a rather long read and I am slowly chewing my way through them. I gotta say though there is an armor set that seems to be leaning directly into the whole gunslinger vibe that I have been going for with my Mechanist. If nothing else I am going to need to collect that coat and I am hoping it has full support for both of the new dye channels. This reminds me that I REALLY need to level up my crafters because I hate paying the markup for dies. I’ve largely ignored that entire segment of the game because I didn’t want to buy them. Now that items have multiple dye channels though, I figure it will be too enticing to ignore.