Final Fantasy XIV

Friends Save the Weekend

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Good Morning Folks! Sunday was amazing and helped rejuvenate my batteries quite a bit. Last week was fucking awful… full stop. Saturday was also sort of awful because I woke up and went to go get donuts like I always do… and my truck would not start. I was able to get it jumped but after a bunch of run around trying to get the battery and alternator tested, I wound up dropping it off at the shop next to our neighborhood and walking home. Sunday though… was phenomenal. Because of the generally shit week that I had, I missed out on running the raid fights on Tuesday night, and because Saturday was awful too… it got postponed to Sunday. This means that I got to hang out with Ace, Ash, and Thalen and have a generally amazing time doing all four raid fights… all of which were one-shots… though some of them were a bit on the rough side, and then unlock two expert dungeons for Thalen afterward.

We need to do this thing that we did way more often, and maybe Sunday is a day that works for everyone. I was also able to complete all of the left side pieces of 710 normal raid gear, which means I am mostly after a few more pieces of jewelry. This is the first time since Heavensward that I have ever been current with my gear. That should tell you something about how good Dawntrail has been that it has managed to keep my interest and despite largely spending all of my time in Path of Exile, I am still returning at least once or twice a week to hang out with friends in Eorzea. I would love to do the Savage version of the raid fights, but I am not sure that is in the cards for me… since I am not sure I want to do them through Party Finder.

In other news, I watched the Borderlands Movie… in part to see if the wide panning of it by both fans and folks who know nothing about the series was warranted. It was. This is maybe the worst video game adaptation I have ever seen… and retroactively makes the Uwe Boll slop from the 2000s look better. Everything looks like Borderlands but feels way more like one of those high-budget live-action commercials that video games seem to love to film… and less like a cohesive movie experience. I feel like this was probably a film assembled in the editing room because there is a lot of voice-over exposition. In fact the movie opens with a solid ten to fifteen-minute plot vomit of extraneous details that don’t actually matter to the core story of “vault hunters want to find the vault”.

Worse than all of that is the fact that everyone save for Jack Black seems to be phoning in their performance. No one seems like they want to be in this film or care at all about their character or what is going on. Tiny Tina is fine, and originally I thought we were just seeing the traditional child actor thing at work… but also this same actress played a perfectly cromulent young Ahsoka Tano…. so I am just guessing it was a bad script and bad direction. Is it a movie that is worth raging about and making the lives of those who created it hell? Absolutely not… and it is never okay to do that. However, you should probably not go out of your way to see this. The abomination that was the Monster Hunter movie was better than this. It was kind of cool to see Kevin Hart in a role where he was not the constant bumbling fool that was the brunt of everyone’s jokes however. Maybe he should do that more often.

Over in Path of Exile land I beat my first T17, and have now unlocked my sixth map device socket. It turns out that T17s are in fact totally reasonable… if you just so happen to spend a bunch of chaos orbs on rerolling them until you land on non-toxic modifiers. Like I can’t say that they are actually fun. I’ve done two now successfully and I did not enjoy fighting either boss at the end of them. I could see maybe running the mapping portion for fun, and skipping the boss… but then again… maybe it is just better to sell them. I can easily get 70 Chaos for a single t17 map… and there is no way in hell I am going to get 70 Chaos worth of loot or enjoyment out of running them myself. I still think T17s are just a “not for me” mechanic because I am all about zooming around and blowing shit up, and for the moment they get in the way of me doing that. I am happy I was able to get my map device slot without buying a carry, but also I doubt I will be doing any more of these.

I spent a good chunk of my available Divines on an Oriath’s End flask. This will be the second league in a row that I have used this item and while it isn’t necessarily revolutionary it does make up for not running maven boots anymore. Basically, I am already all about exploding things with Hinekora, Death’s Fury and this just adds an additional layer of explosions when I charge into packs. Usually, if a map boss spawns in a room with a lot of adds I can charge in and one-shot the boss with all of the subsequent explosions that are triggered. It is a bit of an extravagant expense given I had to pay ten divine orbs for it… but it also feels good when it triggers an entire room full of explosions. Last league was really the first league I invested a ton of effort into my Righteous Fire build after whatever it took to clear t16s and I gotta say this flask was probably my favorite addition. For as lauded as Mageblood is, it is actually sort of a boring option.

There is a challenge that requires you to have cleared 400 Depth in Delve, and for some reason on Saturday afternoon, I decided I was going to do this thing. At that point, I was sitting around 150ish depth and I thought it would be a quick jaunt down to 400. I was wrong. I am currently at around 300ish depth and it has taken me several days and several loads worth of Sulphite to get there. Now that I have set forth on this path… I guess I am going to do it. I’ve never been to 400 depth before and I might go all the way down to 500 while I am doing this thing. Basically, I am in the mode of trying to wrap up some challenges so I can get my totem pole because ultimately that has become my major goal for each league. I doubt I will finish as many challenges as I did last league, but it will be good to at least get another doodad for my hideout.

Tomorrow my schedule is going to be fried. I am not even sure I will get a blog post out, or if I do… it will be tomorrow evening. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Mine started out like shit, but it is amazing how much hanging out with some friends can help to improve things. I’m hoping that we can make the whole Sunday raid day thing happen more often.

Many Smol Possums

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This morning I had a delightful experience. For a few months, we have been getting up at 5:30 and going for a walk before things heat up. Part of this experience is feeding the outdoor feral cats that visit our home. Generally speaking, we have Greybie, Skippy, Big Boy, and Blackie waiting on us out front of the house. This morning there was another little face peeking around the corner of the house and in the dark I thought at first it was a cat. Once I got a good look it was a skinny little possum, that troddled off once I had “perceived” it. After my walk, I go out into the backyard and feed Tripod the three-legged stray calico that lives there, and as I was walking back into the house I noticed this momma possum hanging out in front of me. She was pretty chill about it and largely did not move until I was just about to go back into the house… at which point she wandered off towards the cat food I had set out.

Surely the joeys are about to be weaned because they were pretty big and VERY active. I felt for the momma because one of them kept slipping down and covering her face… which would lead her to push them back up onto her back. We’ve had some pretty extreme reactions from our family as we have shown them pictures. I told my dad we had a new weird-looking cat, and he appreciated it because they live in the country and have all manner of visitors like this. Another family member has been squicked out by the possums and thought they looked scary. Me… I just think they are adorable and wish they would be my friend. I don’t dare attempt to pet one because they have very hurty-looking teeth. I kinda hope that we have a bunch of baby possums underfoot in the backyard honestly. I am wondering though if they are living under our deck.

Last night we continued our shenanigans and realized we had missed unlocking one dungeon… Lost City of Amdapor Hard. We ran through it, Sohm Al Hard, Hullbreaker Hard, and Great Gubal Hard. All in all they pretty much all went smoothly. I am still seeing the recurring thing about Reapers having ants in their pants and being unable to stand still. I did screw up and start one dungeon without tank stance on, but recovered pretty quickly. Things ended up going onto Ace… who was heavily shielded giving me plenty of time to pick it back up. I am consistently annoyed that Tank stance gets turned off constantly… and while I am usually good about hitting it first thing. Ace and I had gotten to talking about something over Discord and I completely forgot about it.

We got a bit of a late start last night so did not end up doing anymore Alexander, but we did duo Ravana and Bismark Extreme. Ravana was pretty easy and we one-shot it without much problem… giving us the confidence to try harder things. Bismark however took a couple of attempts for us to get a pattern going. The first failure was trying to kill both of the Snake adds at the same time…. then the second go I turned off tank stance and Ace heal/dpsd one down while I dpsd down the other… only to have Ace get knocked off the platform. On the third attempt, we executed everything pretty perfectly and got our kill. We attempted Thordan Extreme and just could not make it through the very final phase. There was some mechanic we were failing to do correctly…. which would knock us both out in a single hit so we are going to need to do some research on how to solo that fight. Either that or we just wait until we have more levels on us and attempt it again.

Probably the coolest part of last night is that we killed two Extremes and got two Lanners to drop. We both rolled on and I won the one from Ravana, and then passed on the one from Bismarck so we each got one. Honestly, the distribution is pretty perfect because my gear is way more red in theme, and theirs is way more white on average just because healer gear is usually white. We’ve made a pact that once my Path of Exile shenanigans wind down a bit we will probably start working on farming all of the lanners… doggos… etc on our Cactuar mains. I am pretty sure Ashgar and Thalen might want to get in on that nonsense as well. I had to turn back on the mount music so I could cruise around listening to the Ravana music. I am glad they chose the Phase 2 music instead of the Phase 1 music… but either is pretty great. Side note we also both got a pony from our Extreme ARR shenanigans.

In other news, I patched up World of Warcraft and logged in enough to make sure my friend Finni had gotten an invite to House Stalwart. I am not actively playing the game and it will probably be a while before I check out War Within, but I did run through the quests to unlock the Warband fully on my OG Main Belghast. Right now the Warband is showing my Dark Iron Warrior, Tauren Paladin, and Vulpera Hunter from Pandaria Remix. It seems as though the Warband bank is bricked at the moment… but this is apparently a known issue. At some point I will get in and play around some more with it. Probably when my Dark Iron Dwarf transfers over from Pandaria to Retail. That is probably going to be who I play War Within on because I had a lot of fun being a Dark Iron.

Finally, today is the league start for Path of Exile Settlers League and I have decided that I am once again going to level a Righteous Fire Chieftain. There is a meme over on Reddit that indirectly calls RF players Cowards and I am fine with that. Largely I enjoyed the leagues when I started RF and regretted starting something else on the leagues where I have not… ultimately rerolling at some point. It is my happy place and I have reached a point of acceptance around that. I like playing other builds and I will absolutely roll something else along the way to play as well. I just like having my good stable base of a character to get through the atlas and into the endgame before I start experimenting with other things. I know at some point I am going to make a Gladiator Bleed character of some sort… and maybe something focused around Retaliation skills as well. I also want to try building something around the new Warden ascendancy… but those are all side projects that I will do after building a stable base of currency on the Chieftain.

If you play any of the games that I play regularly feel free to join me in the Super Dungeon Friends discord. It is a little community that I run that is admittedly not super active, but we have a league chat channel for example where we talk a lot about Path of Exile while the league is going on. I keep getting the notion that I am going to start streaming again at some point, and if I ever do I will be hanging out in this Discord while live. All are welcome pending they agree to the rules upon entry. It pretty much follows the guidelines that I have for this blog as can be seen in my Core Beliefs page, so if you align to those thoughts you would probably enjoy yourself just fine.

For The Cat

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Hey Folks! Last night was a bit of an odd night. We got started a bit later than normal and I also did not sleep for shit Tuesday night… which put me in a bit of a funk. I came close to just begging off of shenanigans but I am very glad that I did not. Going into last night we had seven dungeons to run and Alexander… which I honestly had forgotten about. I am glad that Ace kept that in mind because quite honestly that was probably my favorite bit of the evening. We attempted to legitimately queue for Alexander but given we are on Dynamis… the queue was not moving at all and I did not really want to force an entire group of mentors to do it with us. So instead we duo’d the content which was a heck of a lot of fun. We greeded everything and I know I walked away with enough bits to get to pieces of gear, not sure what Ace managed to pull.

Alexander was the very first raid that I was there to participate in on day one. As a result, it means a heck of a lot to me, and experiencing it again on brand new characters was amazing. The best part of this place is the music. It is just so damned good and honestly… the fights are pretty amazing as well. It was this wild trip down memory lane that was priceless. We cleared the first four parts of Alexander and unlocked the second part… which I think leaves us three dungeons to potentially run tonight. Friday night I will be mainlining Path of Exile, so before we ultimately take a break in this journey we are absolutely going out on a bang. The top shelf absolute bestest part though… the cat that lives on top of the Illuminati leader’s hat. On some level, I had completely forgotten about that.

Before all of this though we churned through Neverreap, Fractal Continuum, Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum, and Pharo Sirius Hard. Yet again we encountered another Reaper who could not stand still and kept standing in front of the boss while ping-ponging around the fights. I have been told by my reaper compatriots on Mastodon that this is not normal behavior but… I keep encountering it over and over. Like I am used to Bards and Machinists going willy-nilly because they don’t have to stay still while attacking but Reapers seem like this game’s Demon Hunter. I remember really hating Neverreap when it first came out and I am not even sure why. There are a few pulls that are bigger than normal, but between my cooldowns and Ace’s expert healing, it was no big deal at all.

This entire experience of going back and seeing things with fresh but wisened eyes continues to be so much fun. If you have a friend that you could convince to participate in this sort of nonsense, then I highly recommend it. Honestly, even if you just want to solo your way through Eorzea, it is probably a great experience. For years I have thought Alting in FFXIV made zero sense because nothing was account-wide and you would be essentially resetting all of the progress you had made to that point. In fact I absolutely remember chiding Ace about it once before when they created an alt because I could not see giving up my stable of high-level jobs or any of the kitsch that I had unlocked along the way. I was wrong… I was so very wrong. It is worth it for the experience of getting to pretend you are seeing it all for the first time again.

Legitimately… the last decade has been extremely rough. I’ve aged far more than ten years… and chipped away bits and pieces of my mental fortitude and well-being. However, going through this experience has honestly been healing. I had convinced myself that there were all of these things that I just couldn’t do anymore… that I was not equipped to do anymore. I am sure this sounds somewhat dumb… but mental barriers are real things and they are hard to push past. I feel younger today thanks to the nonsense we have been getting up to than I have in a very long time. I also feel more equipped to capture the joy in day-to-day life than I have been in quite a while. I am not saying that playing an MMORPG is the key to happiness… but doing so with a close friend sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyways! Tomorrow I will probably be on my Path of Exile nonsense but I am looking forward to one more night of doing fun content before we take a bit of a break.

Four Oneshot Fights

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the raid reset night for Final Fantasy XIV and with it came a visit back to my main character over on Cactuar. It is funny… I don’t really mind playing a Roegadyn until I spend time on my Lalafell. I am pretty sure once we hit level 100 and our “dare” is over… I am going to Fantasia my Kraken character to some sort of a Lala. I am just used to the way that they move and their specific perspective on the world. I feel like a bit of a lumbering oaf as a Roe… which I already am in real life being 6’4″ and rather “lorge”. I think that more than anything has been why I have always played short characters in MMORPGs because I think on some level I was I had a bit less height to contend with. My anxiety was tweaked going into last night because it was a very long day… and I was not really sure I was up for raiding. However, once I pushed through it I had a phenomenal evening.

Most of the other Greysky folks can’t operate as early in the evening as we have been, because by 7 pm we had knocked out all four raids… after spending a bit of time on Kraken finishing out the Heavensward MSQ. We had four one-shots… that honestly were not even close to failing at any point. Two of the fights had some really slow dps, and one of the fights had a mentor who was insistent that they be the main tank… and kept taunting off me when I pulled aggro… but all in all everything went smoothly. Side note… it is really bad form to hard taunt a boss off of another tank, especially given that tank swaps are few and far between in the normal content. It is SUPER obvious when it happens… so this is not the way to earn my commendation. I got extremely lucky and got the three remaining pieces of my chest allowing me to turn it in, and then also managed to pick up another piece of jewelry. That gives me four pieces of gear from Arcadion and next week I will either try for boots and helm or start chipping away at legs.

Like I said above we wrapped up Heavensward by finishing out the final trial. It was way faster to get to this point than I expected. Now I think we are going to take a bit of a break from questing in order to hop over and do the Path of Exile League. However, we also opened up a ton of dungeons and trials, which will probably take a few nights to chew through. It has been so weird experiencing all of this content with eyes that understand where things are going. There are little throwaway lines here or there that wind up looping back around and getting picked up later. The other thing that I noticed is that FFXIV expansions have a pattern that I did not really identify until Dawntrail. Dawntrail is very much clearly two separate expansions… the quest for the Dawn Servant and then the nonsense that happens after that with a bit of a lull in between them. Heavensward very much follows this same pattern where you have an initial denouement… before things get crazy again and speed you toward the finale. Thinking back you can kind of see this same pattern play out over and over between the various content sequences.

There are various mentions of places that we will eventually visit. Lots of discussion of Ala Mhigo of course, but I found it interesting that Tataru specifically calls out that F’lhaminn is in Radz-at-Han… which comes into effect much much later when you do the dancer quests. Yoshi P and crew have stated that they did not have the 10-year plan in mind when they launched ARR, but they certainly could have fooled me. Things line up way too tightly for it to have been sheer happenstance. I’ve long thought this was just an example of Yoshi P being overly humble. It is this careful planning that made me fall in love with the game and that more than anything was one of the things we called out specifically in AggroChat #52 when we did a spoiler show about the post-ARR wrap-up and lead into Heavensward. That was definitely an interesting thing to listen to some 9 years after we first recorded it. Side note this was the very first show that Ace/Grace showed up on… who rapidly became one of our regular crew and someone I depend on very greatly to support my particular brand of nonsense. At this point, they are basically the sibling I never had.

Anyways! Expect more Path of Exile shenanigans in the coming days but I am pretty happy that we got to the end of Heavensward before that started.