Final Fantasy XIV

Killer Riffs

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Every so often I get something stuck in my head and am forced to push forward with it. This week it has been leveling more characters to 71, and the present fervor has largely been focused on the Bard. I spent an excessive amount of time in Heaven on High either solo or with some FC friends, and managed to finish off the ascent to 70 last night. I’ve been going around since then unlocking the various spells for the quests that I completely ignored during the process of leveling. This is a weird place to be in because the game will even let you drag an ability to the hotbar… but you can’t use the spell until you have completed the quest.

The other thing I have been doing an awful lot of is Main Scenario Roulette, which effectively is always going to be either Praetorium or Castrum Meridianum… aka the last two raid like dungeons required as part of the ARR main story quest. In both cases they have now disabled the ability to skip any cut scenes, which means you will be surrendering 30 minutes of your life. However this proposition becomes well worth it when you consider that doing this scenario at level 70 will pretty much make you instantly level 71. Even at level 79 when I completed this while working through a gap in experience to the next level… it was worth almost 75% of a level.

One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV is excessively good at is incentivizing content that no one wants to run. These were painful at level and continued to be a painful process to get through as a fledgling player who was trying to random queue for them. Now they become an experience in watching how players have figured out how to optimize the process to take the least possible amount of time in doing so. Sure the player gets to watch every single cutscene, but they also will get lost in a heartbeat if they are unable to keep up with the optimized routing through the place.

I did some experimentation and they are absolutely not chain running, as I maybe got 10% of a bar filled when I was not getting the Roulette bonus. This has become a ritual for me pretty much every night to get one free level on one of my alts and then go on about my business. I am absolutely now using this as a way of jumping across the gap at 60 or 70 to fix those missing runs on the latter that I talked about the other day. In truth I really liked both Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum because they felt extremely epic when we ran them with a full party of 8 players. Now it feels sorta like going back and soloing Molten Core.

Blaugust Stuff

As far as Blaugust goes… the sign-ups are starting to trickle in and I have been transferring them from the private sheet over to a more public listing. Additionally if you read this post early in the morning you may have missed that I added a Media Kit page that was requested. As time allows I will be moving some more of the event information over to that page so that it is kept in one spot. Additionally I want to go back and stub in data about the previous runnings of the event.

Missing Rungs

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I feel like I was busy all night long but didn’t really accomplish much. I think this is in part because I really did not do much if all on my Warrior. Instead I largely focused on leveling the Bard and the Samurai. I completed my daily hunts minus one mob on the SAM, which served to give me a pretty hefty chunk of experience. Combined with another run through Holminster Switch on Trust system managed to push that class up to 73.

Now begins the problem with the Trust system. I am ready to start running the 73 dungeon… but my trust party is still level 71 and will need copious amounts of grinding to get them up to the level needed to run the next dungeon. At this point I realized I needed more classes to soak experience from the first dungeon… which lead me to start working on my Bard which is likely my second favorite dps currently. The challenge there is I cannot yet start Heaven on High… as I am not 61.

This is the problem I foresee right now with the state of leveling alts, and I will break it down. Right now you have a ladder system with a few missing rungs. Once you have a character to level 17 or higher you can unlock the first of the two Deep Dungeons… Palace of the Dead. This provides a pretty fast path to level from 1-50… and then a considerably more grindy path from 50-60. At the low levels it takes one or two runs per level, and during that 50-60 grind it is something closer to six runs per level.

With Stormblood they added in a second Deep Dungeon called Heaven on High that starts at level 61. You can immediately see there is a gap that has to be traversed somehow, and I have yet to find a really great answer to this. No one is running FATEs anymore for anything but the highest content, so that method is largely out. The level 60 dungeons reward crap for experience because they were designed essentially for players who had reached the end game and were not scaled for such. You can continue running Palace of the Dead but it suddenly jumps up to taking around a dozen runs to get through that level.

I feel like the real answer here is that they need to drop the level for Heaven on High to 60. However I am open to ideas from my readers on how they bridged that 60-61 gap on their various alts? There will be another similar gap when I top the Heaven on High ladder at 70… as the Trust system doesn’t begin until 71. However on that side of the gap there is at least a pretty constant running of FATEs that I could deal with for a single level. Ultimately the challenge of Final Fantasy XIV is that they have nice systems in place now… but there are just some Everquestian Hell Levels to traverse to move between them.

Final comment of the morning… expect to see some news about Blaugust on Monday. I have a plan in the works and will make my traditional big post and start the sign up process then.

Cross World Traveler

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Last night was an evening of a bunch of competing objectives… most of which got completed or at least progress made towards them. The main and overarching goal was to make sure that my good friend Grace was able to run experts. I wound up running The Twinning and Incomprehensible Named Sad Robed People dungeon without her, and as such I wanted to make sure she got both unlocks last night. I am still not the biggest fan of The Twinning, because it seems like I just take way more damage than I do in any other instance.

However Grace healing it was a far better experience than with the previous healers that I had been in there with. Of the three 80 dungeons my favorite is the Sad Robed people one… which means I am likely going to have to learn its name. It has an art deco vibe that speaks to my soul… and reminds me of wandering around in Bioshock’s Rapture. The jazzy soundtrack is pretty freaking great as well, which made me realize how much Soken is experimenting with new constructs this time around. While I love his more metal boss themes… it is also nice to see him playing with a bunch of other genres as well.

Another side mission was getting people into the Linkshell… and dearest Rohiaux explained after making yesterdays post why the previous nights efforts were not working at all. It turns out that Square apparently blocks cross realm “tells” to players that you have not been in a party with before. Roh’s suggestion was to create a Cross Realm Party and then share out a password to everyone you wanted to invite… which makes an awful lot of sense but I also did not want to hamper myself from running content last night.

What I instead opted to do was to use the realm visit functionality to pop over periodically to Faerie, Gilgamesh and Jenova and from there I could send messages to people directly. It also allowed me to use the search functionality to see if someone was online in the first place. Essentially in lulls between content I would pop over to Limsa Lominsa and use the realm visit function on the main aetheryte. This allowed me to snag a Risa and a Leori… which gives me a beachhead on Gilgamesh and Faerie respectively. The next problem of course will be the relatively small size of a linkshell… buy that is a battle for another day… however we are already 1/3 full.

Lastly I spent some time working on my Samurai. I’ve swapped to doing as much in the way of the daily hunts as I can with the Samurai and then mopping up anything left over with the Warrior. I am also engaging in as many FATEs as I happen across while hunting for mobs. Lastly I am working on the Trust system and anytime I am not otherwise engaged I am running one with the SAM to both level the Trust NPCs and get some much needed XP. As a result I wound up finishing the night by running the 71 dungeon right before turning in and heading to bed.

What I really need more than anything at this point is the dungeon to actually start dropping striking gear and maybe even a samurai sword. I have a ton of caster and healer gear for classes that I will take forever to actually play… but my army of melee classes is starving a bit for modern gear. Everything that is available on the Auction House is at nonsense prices so I will not be going that route this time around. Instead I am hopefully going to keep running the dungeon until I can get some gear, which is also what needs to happen to level the NPCs. However I did manage to ding 72 which is progress!

I also feel like I need to start pushing some classes through Heaven on High so I have multiple characters that I can be running through the dungeon ranges as it takes so many more runs for the NPCs to ding than it does me. Long story short… I am super engaged in this game right now and loving it.

Robosquid Rides Again

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Last night was an evening largely about unlocking content. As part of the post 80 sequence of events there are two new dungeons to unlock. The first can be found in the Crystarium and the second is in Eulmore… but you have to exit the main city area to see that it is available. Both involve a very short amount of questing before you get the unmistakable instant unlock sound. Both are required for doing expert roulette, which is a thing I plan on doing at least nightly for the bonus bookrocks.

Last night I set about working on my gear situation as a whole. When you level by only ever running main story quests and generally speaking doing dungeons once before moving on… you sorta end up with a mishmash of gear. Since gear in Final Fantasy XIV is largely just a case of stats being stuck on an item, rather than the items themselves having much in the way of differentiation… I tend to take a fairly structured approach to gearing. Essentially I seek out whatever item is my lowest and replace it… eventually trickling upwards into replacing items that have barely any gain.

In running the two dungeons last night that needed to be unlocked I managed to get several pieces of the jewelry at level 430… so a neck, wrist and earrings. My current lowest items were my rings and my belt so I spent bookrocks judiciously on upgrading each of those slots. Now I really need a ring to drop in the 80 dungeons so that I can jettison my 415 that I am holding onto as the previous best in slot. I think my next bookrock purchase however is going to be saving up the 500 to get the slightly better weapon. Now however the benefit is diminished as other than one ring I have 430 or better in every slot for a cumulative score of 430.

What I really care about is survivability and not necessarily gear score… so after the weapon upgrade for damage output, I will probably be focusing on the two more expensive slots which are chest piece and legs, as they tend to have more stats on them. With one of our healers I feel perfectly fine right now. however since I did nothing but solo-queue all night long… with PUG healers I felt really squishy. Now of note… all but one of those healers were scholars which now have to fiddle with the pet instead of it being an optional mini-game. As such it could just be people getting adjusted to the new playstyles, because the time I was healed by a White Mage felt perfectly fine.

Mechateuthis by Barry Crawford

In other semi-related news… I am on my nonsense again. Robosquid Armada is somewhat become our particular brand for anytime we are doing stuff that we probably shouldn’t be doing. It all started in World of Warcraft when we were attempting to run all of the content in the game level locked and undergeared. The whole level scaling system patch broke this concept but since then we have recycled it particularly anytime we were going to do some grouping with people not necessarily in the Guild/Free Company structure. With the loosening of the restrictions on the Cross-Realm Linkshells, I decided to remake Robosquid Armada in Final Fantasy XIV.

In theory this will be a launchpad for linking up people on the Aether data center for filling slots in groups and eventually in raid content. Since Final Fantasy XIV is still somewhat archaic in the way invites work, it means that we will have to be online at the same time… which last night was the core problem. I have a list of various people on Aether that are not on Cactuar that I attempted to contact last night but failed miserably. If you are a regular on the blog or on my various social media channels ping me in game on “Belghast Sternblade@Cactuar” and I can arrange an invite to these here shenanigans. Right now it is full of people from Cactuar so it isn’t very properly cross-realm as of yet.