Final Fantasy XIV

Good Morning Friends! I had a very rough weekend for a few different reasons. The main reason however is that Friday night my wife and I had the Pfizer COVID booster along with the Flu Shot. This was maybe not the best idea because I had all sorts of symptoms over the weekend and had no real clue if it was the Booster or the Flu shot, but absolutely know that both arms were sore as hell Saturday morning. We survived and I am feeling much better so far this morning, but yesterday was a bit rough. Saturday was largely “splitting headache” and everything aches territory, and yesterday was run a fever and feel like I am going to die for a couple of hours in the afternoon then things start to fade away. Interesting thing we heard about the booster is that the efficacy should only take about 48 hours to kick in, which means we should be good for any Thanksgiving shenanigans.

The above screenshot is from Final Fantasy XIV as I dipped in briefly over the weekend to try and start to get back into the swing of logging in again. I managed to finish the Doman Enclave and with it comes a really cool ceremony that reminds me of the similar ceremony from Horizon Zero Dawn. I need to find my footing in the coming weeks in FFXIV again, and spend a good deal of time cleaning out my retainers because a large part of the whole “level everything to 80” campaign was so that I could safely chuck a bunch of unneeded gear into the bin… or more likely feed it to the Grand Company vendor for seals. The other part of this that needs to happen is to cobble together some outfits for my retainers themselves as a number of them are quite high up in various professions.

Most of my weekend was spent playing Outriders and the New Horizon patch is in fact good. I got together with Waren a bit on Saturday and ran through some expeditions where he carried me an extreme amount. The rest of the weekend was spent trying to grind up the resources in order to catch up my gear to where maybe I won’t be quite the “backpack” that I ended up being. I also spent some time exploring various builds, and ended up changing my spec up completely to one focused on earthquake and bleed effects. I’ve never NOT been the center tree of Devastator so it is interesting how little it makes a difference survival wise dropping to what I thought was one of the “DPS” trees.

For those who might be curious here is my current talent choices and skills being used composited together into a single screenshot. Here is a note for developers where build diversity is a key part of your game. Maybe you should create a single screen that someone can take a screenshot of that includes all of the relevant choices made for that specific character. It would be nice if it had a rundown of the various bonuses being applied from gear along with the skills chosen and relevant talent choices. I’ve needed to fake out one of these screens so many times while playing different games when I wanted to share my “build” with my readers. I can’t think that I am the only one who wants to do this thing and surely it would be simple enough to create a screen that summarizes all of the various bits of data you already have access to.

I have also been spending a fair amount of time playing my “main alt” which is the Technomancer. Thing I have learned about Outriders at least, but I am wondering if it applies to all third person shooters… is that apparently I prefer playing a female character model because it takes up less space on the screen. The male character in outriders is kinda bulky, and is occluding a fair amount of the visual area… and honestly I sorta wish I could gender change my main to being something more svelte and taking up less space. I remember having this issue with the Norn in GW2, and why I ended up going with the much smaller Human when I rolled a main after beta. I need to pay more attention to this in the future and see if this is something that carries over to other games.

Lastly I am not going to talk about it much this morning, but I left a heated review of New World on Steam over the weekend. I’ve uninstalled the game and I am not really ready to talk about it in any manner that does not come across as angry gibberish yet. If you are super curious I littered my Twitter account with random threads throughout the weekend. Basically Patch 1.1 killed my desire to play the game with its changes to the end game camps, and after growing steadily more agitated Saturday night while recording the podcast… I decided it was better for my mental health to uninstall and force myself to walk away from it. The only game that I have ever loved this much and see managed this poorly is World of Warcraft, and I think that is probably why my posts on that game often come across as angry drivel as well. Key difference being that anger was spread out over a decades worth of decisions… and this was all crammed in a two month period making it seem so much worse.