Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 35 of 129

Regularly Playing: September 2019 Edition

March 7, 2025September 6, 2019 by Belghast

For those who are new to this blog, I run a semi-monthly column of sorts where I track what I have been playing over the previous month. This does a few things but largely it allows me to track over the course of the years what I have been into at a given time. My blog serves as a bit of a record to jog my memory and help me firmly plant when certain events are happening. Also it allows my readers a window into what I am up to and what my thoughts are about a thing in short form. I also generally try and use this moment in time as a point to “true up” my sidebar widget.

To Those Remaining

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC / Switch

This one is sorta hanging on by a thread at this point, not for want of desire but more for lack of time. I have however booted it up and made a bit more progress over the past month as well as starting the Switch version. Word of warning, I would say if you are ONLY going to buy a single version of this game, maybe don’t buy the Switch version. It has some slowdown issues and the graphical fidelity are not up to snuff from what I have been used to with the PC version. As it stands I own copies of this I believe for every platform… largely because I want to support the hell out of this title and see more games in this series released.

I have been playing considerably more of Destiny 2 than I had in the months leading up to now. There is a bunch of exciting stuff happening not the least of which is the enabling of Cross Save. I can now play my guardian on every single console platform in addition to the PC and have gone through the process of moving my character from Battle.net to Steam. I am super pumped about the launch of Shadowkeep coming up in October. Of note if you have ever played the PC version then it would behoove you to go through the process of moving your character from BNet to Steam because after October 1st it will not longer be accessible through the BNet client.

I legitimately thought this one would be leaving my list this month. A new season started at the tail end of August and with the impending launch of World of Warcraft Classic a few days later, I fully expected to just skip out on this season. However I found myself once again logging in on a Friday night for the ritual Grace and I have maintained for the last several seasons. It is enough of a thing that it felt weird NOT to be playing Diablo 3 on an opening night. I had a lot of fun and we ran Demon Hunters just to make the season a little easier to complete. I’ve made it as far as unlocking the seasonal rewards and I am not sure if I will push any further.

This one is going to likely maintain a permanent slot on my list. Unfortunately I don’t really have any new screenshots because I no longer play on my phone where it is super easy to take screenshots. On my Galaxy Tab S4 I have to do a complicated volume down and power button to take a shot so I never do it. On my ZTE Axon 7 phone it is a 3 finger gesture to take a shot, and I am wondering if there is a way to restore that functionality to the tablet with an application or something. This game keeps my attention because they keep rolling out new events, with either brand new or revisiting boss encounters for me to play with. I pretty much play enough each night to complete the daily objectives and then head to sleep.

I went from hot and heavy to barely at all on this one. I got in, completed the Shadowbringers story and leveled the Warrior to 80 and my Samurai to 80 as well. Then I disappeared once again because other things released that pulled away my attention. I will continue to play this it fits and spurts for the remainder of this month I am certain, because my attention is being funneled super hard away from almost everything else that I have on my plate. I would really like to level a Magic DPS and a Healer so that I can see all of the Shadowbringers role quests. Still a great game I just am waiting on more story content to drag me back into it.

My attention span for this game has been limited this month, but with the upcoming release content for Throne of Eldraine and the Brawl event happening right now I want to poke my head back in. I have to say though I would play this WAY more if I could play it from my Tablet. My winding down and bed routine would probably include a quick rush through Dragalia dailies and then a few matches of MTGA. I feel like they are missing out on a lot by not having a tablet client, though I guess in theory I could stream this from bed with Parsec. I should investigate how feasible that really is. I sorta wish that I could configure Parsec to work in a sort of console friendly mode where instead of my desktop I am presented with a board of icons of applications to launch.

To The New and Returning

I am a sucker. I did in fact buy this on the PS4 to be able to play it now… when I would way rather have just waited to play it on the PC. The PC version is so superior to the PS4 version for my purposes… however for some reason Capcom is maintaining a staggered schedule of releases. I still love the game and as a result they are getting two purchases from me. I am what is wrong with games and I know I should feel ashamed. I am honestly not sure how much time I will have to devote to this but I really want to poke around and try and get used to a PS4 Controller again.

This is the grand daddy of all things on this list and is consuming the most of my time. As of last night I hit 28 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway to 29. I have plans already made to run Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deep tonight with guildies, and this game is dominating my headspace at the moment. I cannot fully explain why it feels so good but god does it feel good to be back in Vanilla WoW. I knew I would be playing it because Grace had never gotten to experiment, but on some level I fully expected it just to be the two of us running around and doing nonsense. Instead we have a legitimately large guild full of friends all seemingly digging this experience. Long live House Kraken!

To Those Departing

This one largely lost focus somewhere around the Earth Shrine. I probably will return to it because I really like the idea of legitimately playing this without the Four Job Fiesta rules. That said on some level I agree with Ash on this one that the rules actually improve the game. Right now I feel like I need to do all of the things to min-max my characters, whereas playing under the rules dictates my actions. It limits the scope of what is available and causes me to focus on specific strategies. That said now that I know this is a reasonable option I might sign on next year for the Fiesta from my tablet. I just wish this version synced with any other version of the game so I could pop between playing on the PC for example and the tablet. Everything should have cross save.

Summary

The last several months have been pretty stable to be honest with not a lot of changes happening. Mostly a few things shift into focus as a few other things fall out of focus. I expect this month will be about World of Warcraft Classic with a side dish of Monster Hunter World Iceborne and a little bit of Destiny 2 especially as we get closer to the launch of Shadowkeep. Destiny has made me wish that literally every game had cross save if not cross play. I am mostly fine with having to buy a client for each platform, but I would love to be able to carry my characters over to it. There is no reason why Diablo 3 on the switch couldn’t have connected to Battle.net for example, and I have zero excitement over Overwatch Switch as it stands because I fully expect that it will not be connected to Battle.net either. I want more ability to play with my friends on the characters I have already spent time building, because quite frankly I don’t generally have enough bandwidth to level something new.

Two Goals Down

August 14, 2019 by Belghast

The first goal of the night was to finish up my purple armor set for the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Over the weekend I had knocked out everything but the EAZ minibosses component, and I largely stopped there because I knew given yesterdays patch the requirement was being lowered to 50. I was sitting at 56 so my hope was that it would be as simple as logging in, equipping all of the gear and meditating in front of the statue.

What I did not expect was that all of the gear would be 750, which was a nice boost in item level. I just need to get some powerful items to bump things up on the weapon front to 750 as well. The funny thing is… I will probably be farming EAZ over the next few weeks to try and get slightly better perks on each of the armor slots. As it stands the Helm is ideal for the way I play, but all of the other items could use some work. I opened the rest of the boxes I had in my inventory and picked up four additional pieces of the purple majestic armor.

With the first goal knocked out quickly, I moved on to the second goal of the night which was getting the last little bit of a level on the Samurai and hitting 80. I opted for the short queue of a Trials roulette and got quite possibly the easiest option: Cape Westwind. It legitimately takes longer for the new player to watch the cutscene than it does to kill the boss, so we hung out chatting while waiting on the fight to start. Upon dinging 80 I equipped whatever gear I happened to have available and managed to get my item level up to 425.

From there I picked back up with the 74 Physical DPS Role quest, thinking the easiest and fastest way to gear would be completing the quest and getting the 430 gear from the smithy. It took some time though to chew through the remaining 74, 76, 78 and 80 quests so this consumed the majority of my play time last night. However I have now unlocked a second role and have access to physical dps gear. I wound up buying the 450 crafted blade, so I am now sitting at 435 which is enough to be able to dps Eden. Now that I am getting back into the swing of tanking a roulette or two each night, I should be able to bolster that level with tomestone gear.

Finally I spent the last hour or so catching up on the War Campaign quest series given that it appears to be the most coherent manner to catch up on story. I think I underestimated just how much story content had gone into the game since I left, because I keep chewing away at it and seem to be not actually making any headway. I started last night queuing for the pieced of the raid finder that involves the Jaina battle seeing as I needed that for the War Campaign. That was a fun fight overall, but I am not sure how I would feel about the middle section where as horde we are forced to fight Rastakhan? I like Rastakhan a lot.

I think for the forseeable future I will be poking my way along these three different paths of catching up on World of Warcraft in getting back into the swing of the game prior to the launch of Classic. Then working on various objectives in Destiny 2 and probably leveling a healer in Final Fantasy XIV. It has been enjoyable to play for an hour or so and then swap to something fresh and new. It has also been nice hanging out and talking to my friends in Facepull once again.

Fourth Time’s a Charm

August 13, 2019 by Belghast

I talked about Main Story Roulette some time back and it being one of the best ways to casually level a character. Last night I encountered the problem with this system, and weirdly one I had not encountered at any point prior in the process of pushing the Samurai to 80. The challenge is that when you queue for MSQ Roulette you are ultimately hoping to get Praetorium, because it is worth a significantly larger chunk of experience than the other option Castrum Meridianum. I’ve managed to pull Praetorium more times than not, and as a result when Castrum comes up I curse my fate… but largely play along nicely.

Apparently I hit a streak of people who are not willing to waste their daily bonus on Castrum. It took me roughly fifteen minutes to get through the queue each time, and when I got the first group within seconds all but four of us had bailed on Castrum. You can’t really run the place with four players reliably so I bailed as well and re-queued. Another fifteen minutes later I drew Castrum once again… and this time one of the two tanks refused to move until someone dropped from the party. Again once one person left there was a cascade of leaves until I opted to bail rather than run it down over half of the people.

A third time I sat through the queue and a third time I drew Castrum… and once again before I had even loaded in fully we were down a handful of people. The problem there is that no one queues for MSQ Roulette with the party in progress box checked. There is no reason to do this given that you would in theory be missing out on a bunch of experience that comes from the various boss kills. Again I returned to the queue a fourth time and finally this time it was Praetorium and everyone happily powered their way through it.

Unfortunately that does not stop the fact that Square has a problem on their hands, where a Roulette can produce one of two results and one of them is so disliked that folks are willing to take the 10 minute debuff that keeps them from queuing rather than deal with wasting their bonus on it. In theory they should probably buff Castrum to be able to reward the same amount of experience that Praetorium does. However if they do that… it will swing the balance in the other direction given that Castrum takes about half as long to run as Praetorium. There aren’t any great answers to this conundrum, but seeing as I encountered it three times in a row last night… it is a problem.

Belghast the Undead Warrior on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA-PVE RP server

The other thing that I took care of last night was reserving my character names on Bloodsail Buccaneers the PVE RP server that we plan on rolling on. As a result Belghast the Undead Warrior now exists there and is ready to start leveling when the gates open later this month. I also reserved a Belghast on Mankrik as a back up, but I doubt I will be using it. I don’t have a lot to say on this point other than the fact that if you are wanting names, you might want to log in and do this thing yourself. Several of my friends have already missed out on their chosen character names which is frustrating.

It seems as though I have steered a good number of my Horde side guild Facepull towards this server as well. So in theory we should have a decent number of people around at launch. Largely I just want to be able to field guild groups for dungeons and such. I fully expect to be running a bunch of Ragefire and Wailing Caverns. The only negative about playing a Forsaken is that they are so far away from everything. However the pull of having a second fear break is too great not to roll Undead.

Weekend Update: 2019-08-12

August 12, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve decided to try a new series of sorts called “Weekend Update” (name shamelessly stolen from SNL) since my Monday morning post tends to just be a rundown of what happened over the weekend. Right now it feels like I have a bunch of competing projects that I have theoretically been juggling reasonably well. At the very least they all appear to be making progress at the same time, which is I guess the master plan behind the juggling.

One of them has been getting a second 80 in Final Fantasy XIV, and this process has largely involved me logging in every day and running the Main Story Roulette. This means that I have seen an awful lot of the cut-scenes surrounding Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum. While it isn’t the same voice actor… every time I hear a Gaius cutscene it reminds me of Dracula from Symphony of the Night. I seem to be the only one because when I type “what is man but a miserable pile of secrets” in party chat I just get confused responses.

As of last night I am just a sliver into 79 and have been taking this opportunity to clean up a bunch of the side quests that I never got around to doing. I’ve finished cleaning up the Dwarven and related areas in upstate Kholusia. I moved over after that to the secret zone that you end up at around 79, and it has a ton of quests to knock out. In theory if I pull another Praetorium I might luck out and get close enough to 80 to be able to ding off of a Trials roulette or something similar. Then begins the process of doing a bunch of dungeon grinding to gear it!

On the Destiny 2 front I have reached a point where I just can’t bring myself to push any further. During this weeks TWAB, it was announced that they were lowering the total number of EAZ Miniboss kills from 100 to 50. This means in theory if I just wait for the Tuesday patch, I can log in that night and get my purple armor set without a bunch of mindless grinding. As a result I have spent my time either working on the Hunter to get her the blue set, or working on various other things I have neglected like the loaded question quest. This is why I am rocking a double fusion rifle loadout above.

After I upgrade the armor I will need to sort out what exactly I can do as far as the masterwork quests. However I have heard that these will be something you could complete after the Solstice event is over. I don’t really want to risk it however so I am going to try and knock out what I can while it is going on.

I don’t have a proper explanation for this one. I had not logged in since October of last year and then suddenly this weekend I found myself patching my addons up and logging into what had been my main when I was last actively playing. One of the things that I dislike about World of Warcraft when you are several patches behind, is that there is no real way of knowing what content you should be doing short of scouring WoWhead. The main story quest is a point of frustration for a lot of people in Final Fantasy XIV, but I love that there is zero risk of me doing things out of sequence.

I absolutely blindly accepted the quest that the game was trying to send me to… and apparently unlocked Nazjatar instead of all of the content I had seemingly missed between now and then. I guess this makes sense from a World of Warcraft perspective because it is a game that is constantly abandoning what has come before for the new and shiny future. I am going to blame this on the fact that we spent a lot of time this weekend talking about WoW Classic, and on that front we are going to be rolling Horde side on the PVE RP server Bloodsail Buccaneers. If you have interest in this nonsense let me know.