Final Fantasy XIV

Simplifying Summoner

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Good Morning Friends! I’m now starting to feel like I am actually rolling on Summoner. Yesterday I pushed it through to level 93 after running beast tribe dailies and then PVP, Main Story, Trial, and Alliance Raid roulettes. I got one of the Nier raids which was pretty awful and takes for freaking ever to clear… but I stuck with it. I do not love having cast times folks. Everything else about being a Summoner I am pretty on board with, but cast times are butts. Like the positive is that Titan and Garuda are all instant cast abilities, so it is really only Ifrit that becomes a problem. Like I said yesterday I can sort of vary my rotation a bit to make up for this fact but still having to stand still at any point feels awful.

I’ve also invoked some dumbassery to simplify my rotation. Summoner is a class that could benefit from having more modal buttons that shift what they do as you use them. So I decided to make my own in the form of a couple of macros. I am sure this is not efficient but I also do not care about being the best summoner on the planet. I only care enough about being decent enough to not get visibly called out for my halfassery. So as such, I made an AOE button and a Single Target button. Granted you will have to turn off error messages to keep from this being an awful experience. The above screenshot shows the three boxes you need to untick first in Character Configuration > Log Settings > General tab… and then by clicking through to the log filters section at the bottom of that same screen and unchecking error messages.

Single Target Spam

/micon gemshine
/ac "ruin IV"
/ac gemshine
/ac "ruin iii"

Multi Target Spam

/micon "Precious Brilliance"
/ac "ruin IV"
/ac "Precious Brilliance"
/ac "Outburst"

If you want to join me in my degeneracy there are the macros I am using. I threw Ruin IV in there just to have a place to put it since I would be spamming that button anyway. The idea is that single-target defaults to Ruin and multi-target defaults to Outburst but will use the elemental flavored version of those attacks if it is available. Since Bahamut and Phoenix already override Ruin/Outburst this still works in those phases as well. I’ve contemplated throwing in painflare as well into the stack to be super lazy, and it would absolutely work similarly to Ruin IV. I am sure I will have someone comment about how I am doing a disservice to the class but honestly… fuck that noise. You can blame this on me playing Guild Wars 2 a lot… but Final Fantasy XIV has way too damned many buttons to push on a regular basis and anything I can do to simplify that seems like a win to me. Side note… you could use any flavor of ruin in the macro and the game is smart enough to know what you mean and will downgrade Ruin III for example for earlier versions when you are running lower-level content.

I’ve gone back to tracking my job progress on my spreadsheet, though I do not give a shit about the trending I used to do where I kept track of where I was with every job every day. That was something I was doing in the lead-up to Endwalker, mostly to try and see if I could in theory realistically get everything to level 80 before the expansion. Now that I have all of the time in the world… I can just focus on where I am with each job. At this point I have Warrior and Machinist at 100 and am rapidly catching Summoner/Scholar up which gives me the double whammy of a caster and a healer. After that, I will probably level Samurai next because out of the melee jobs, it is probably my favorite. Then I will probably focus down family groups of classes that all use the same gear. So with Samurai I will also level up Monk. Then I will probably level Dancer and Bard to finish out my physical ranged. No clue when I will tackle the other things, but probably the easiest to level will be my other tank classes.

I think after today my Summoner should be at least level 95, which is ideal level for hanging out in the zone I keep referring to as Texaco. There is a rare FATE in that zone which gives you currency to get the Capybara mount which I really want. As a result of this mount being there, there tends to be a crowd always rolling around through the FATE trains. In theory if I get a decent chunk of time I can probably easily push through additional levels each day hanging out in the zone. Adding this into my rotation I will easily hit 100 on Summoner and Scholar probably sometime around Friday. That gives me the weekend to push through the role quests and by next week you will probably have me as a newly minted Mentor. May heaven have mercy on your souls.

Anyways! Still having a blast in Dawntrail and very much looking forward to the opening of the raid next week. My raid main is ready, and I am going to throw out a broader net to see if anyone wants to do some nonsense on Tuesday. I would love to go in with a full group, but even if I don’t have those folks I will probably PUG it with Ace.

Reading Stories to Baddies

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Good Morning Friends! I had a pretty early night last night and turned in around 8:30, so did not make a ton of progress. I did however get my Summoner to level 90 like I thought I would, and made it up to Titan on my Kraken Warrior which we will run first thing this evening. I like Summoner quite a bit, way more than I thought I would at this time. The only annoyance is the casting times, and needing to interrupt them in order to move out of things. I do wonder how the game would feel if they removed all casting times or allowed you to cast while moving. Most of the summoner rotation does not require a casting time and it is only really the Ifrit abilities that chain me into place, so in theory, if I know movement is going to happen I can just start my rotation at the other end with Titan or Garuda. After being used to dpsing while on the go with the Machinist, this has probably been the biggest adjustment.

One of the more notable aspects of the Kraken project is that mounts look so much cooler when they are not super tiny. I’ve been running around on my Fenrir bike as I am used to doing and it looks so much cooler when I can actually see the detail in it. This is especially notable as the mounts now bank as you turn lending a bit more realistic movement than they previously had. I am not saying I will give my the Lala life on my Cactuar main, but I appreciate seeing a bit more detail in all of the mounts and even the gear pieces. Catboy life is pretty great and I am happy I decided to roll with that racial choice. I’ve always dug the dark-skinned Miqo’te appearances. I wish they had more proper beard action going on but I will life with the tufts around my chin.

I also now understand why folks talk about the ARR MSQ being so rough around the edges. I know they have streamlined a lot of the content, but there are still chunks that seem to drag on forever. For example in the lead-up to Titan, there is this 20-step or so sequence where you have to learn about wine and recover a famous vintage. This is extremely tedious and while the payoff for all of your busy work is somewhat fun… it definitely feels like something that could have been trimmed back a bit. I think the Japanese appetite may be more into the mundane “day in the life” sort of content than the Western audience. I’m looking at you Persona series and all of your tedious running about to do social nonsense. Thankfully I just kept my head down and pushed through it and now can finally fight Titan.

Grousing aside… I have had a heck of a lot of fun exploring the ARR MSQ again with fresh eyes after ten years of playing this game. I have so many fond memories of this era for the game and the group of friends we played it with. Ace and I have lamented how far removed from that era we are. We were joking about our friend Mor yelling “Medica Twooooooo” each time he cast the spell… and that is sadly just a bygone era. It was after the late ARR/early HW era that folks migrated westward and time zones became a problem… and it just became impossible to agree upon a time that was early enough for the Eastern folks but late enough to not collide with work responsibilities for the Western folks. So really if we want to recapture some of that joy we are going to have to start from scratch and rebuild what we had.

It is on that note that I am starting to try and rebuild that friend group. I am not sure what the restrictions are these days but I know for certain that I can group with anyone on the Aether Data Center on my main, and Dynamis Data Center on my alt. What I am looking for is folks who can play in an Eastern timezone compatible range of hours on weekday evenings (not sure which yet), and play a wide variety of roles. What we have currently is a Tank (myself) and a Healer (Ace) and potentially a few others who might be interested in our FC/Friendgroup. So I am throwing out the request to my longterm readers out there… do you want to do some of the harder content in the game? At a minimum I want to do all of the Extremes and Normal raids… and would love to maybe work up to Savage content at some point. I am way more focused on having a fun group than a highly skilled well-oiled machine.

If this sounds like something you would be interested in, drop me a line on one of the MANY platforms you can contact me in, or just throw out a note in the comments below. We will be organizing over on the Super Dungeon Friends discord when things begin to pull together. So feel free to join.

The Kraken Project

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Morning Folks! This is the point where I fess up to cheating on my beloved Cactuar. One of the cool things that came with this expansion is the ability to overflow onto less populated servers. We did this a few times over the first few days of Dawntrail and there were four of us who independently chose the Kraken server over on the Dynamis Data Center. There is no small amount of running inside jokes about unleashing the Kraken that I won’t go into, but suffice it to say we have a connection with that server name. So when Ace and I started kicking around the notion of creating some baby characters, it seemed like an obvious choice, and “Belghast Tho’catte” was born. The very first character that I created in beta testing A Realm Reborn was a Miqo’te and I figured that was a good choice for this project. Hilariously Ace chose to play a Hrothgar so we are running around as a Tank/Healer duo of Cat-adjascent folks.

Within seconds of my logging in for the first time I was asked to help a Free Company form by signing a charter. In short order, the leader found enough signatures and I was suddenly a member of Darkwraith. Disturbingly quickly I was an officer in this Free Company, and instead of doing our own thing Ace and I largely decided to roll with this. The folks have been nice and chill to chat back and forth with while we have been leveling, and as a result, I’ve seen no reason to not stay. They are well aware that these characters are our alts and are cool with that. However, there is a limited amount of easy progress we can make on Cactuar each day so as a result we are spending quite a bit of time poking around and experiencing the old content.

The most hilarious part of this entire experience is just how fast you end up leveling. We’ve been doing each dungeon as it unlocks and last night we did Aurum Vale and Wanderer’s Palace… but in the MSQ we are only up to Brayflox. So that means I am a level 53 Warrior with a full item level 90 artifact set, but am doing a level 30-something MSQ quest. I have no clue when we will hit 100 but I am figuring at some point during Shadowbringers if not sooner. I have contemplated doing some PVP just so I can get some Poetics and be able to buy gear upgrades that way since I can’t zone into Ishgard without having completed the MSQ. I legitimately understand why folks end up doing a story skip, just because you end up getting locked from doing a lot of the content in spite of your level being high enough.

Once we got mount unlocks, the leveling became way more enjoyable. I’ve also started farming up MGP in the Gold Saucer because there are some cool cosmetics that you can buy there. I need a nice-looking Axe because I can get by with the Warrior Artifact appearance for a long while… but it is a bit before any cool-looking weapons start dropping. It has been so much fun doing the content again with fresh eyes after a decade’s worth of time has passed. I’ve made alts before but never gotten anything this far. Generally speaking, I peter out around the time you do the three-dungeon tour at 15ish. I just unlocked Palace of the Dead so I might grind up some alt classes using that. We both go to Brayflox before the end of the night and plan on running it first thing tonight. After that, I think the next big thing is Titan.

Over on Cactuar, my Warrior is now fully decked out in item level 700 gear… minus one ring which is always the case. I wish you could buy two tomestone rings at a given level, and I’ve not gathered the fortitude to PUG my way through the two Ex Trials. I really wish I had a full 8-player group of friends to run harder content with. With the raid opening soon, I am going to have to start wading into the party finder waters for such things. I have a discord that I started with the purpose of trying to find people to group with, so I might start putting out feelers there to see if I can get a group going. The biggest problem is that with the server congestion, datacenter and server travel have been a problem. I’m in a few linkshells that I could potentially recruit from as well. We will see how much gumption I have towards such notions.

Then over on my Summoner, that project has been rolling along swimmingly. Weirdly enough I find myself really enjoying the class. I dinged 88 last night and should be able to push through to 90 today. I have a full set of 660 gear waiting to be equipped for when I hit there, and I will probably start doing a lot more FATEs given that the new zones are always active. I will probably focus on “Texico” since I want the Capybara mount that comes from a Boss FATE in that area. Given that I am not starving for tomestones I am probably going to keep running leveling and high level on my Warrior and then focusing on MSQ roulette and the like for my Summoner to get levels faster.

I am very much still in the honeymoon phase with Final Fantasy XIV and my return to the game. I think the babby alt project over on Kraken is keeping me way more engaged than I would be at this point after having leveled two jobs to 100. There is really only so much that can be done that feels like progress until the content deepens, so having 10 years’ worth of content to chew through on a brand-new character feels good.

AggroChat #484 – Pray Return

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Last night we recorded a show in which we attempted to thread the most delicate needle.  Ammo, Bel, Grace, and Thalen have all finished the Dawntrail MSQ and only really want to talk about that.  Tam however has not even started it, nor has he finished any of the post-Endwalker content.  So we play this game of minesweeper where we attempt to talk about our thoughts and feelings about Dawntrail…  without actually revealing any meaningful information about the expansion.  Bel and Grace also talk about their experiences restarting the game with fresh alts on Kraken a brand new server where everyone is a sprout.  It’s hopefully a fun show and one where we don’t actually spoil anything.  Though we are absolutely looking forward to our full spoiler show at some point in hopefully the near future.

Topics Discussed:

  • Talking about Dawntrail without Talking about Dawntrail
  • Rerolling fresh alts on Kraken.