MMORPG

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.

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.

I’ve been having this issue for the last several weeks where it would seem my internet connection would randomly drop. This has been very annoying while doing Shadowbringers content, because I would have to go through a whole song and dance of reconnecting… waiting for my character to log out… and then trying to resume whatever it was that I was doing. This is especially horrible when I am tanking a dungeon or something similar. The other night I managed to hold aggro until I disconnected fully… and then found out that the boss we were fighting was immune to provoke and Shiana had to die in order for me to get the encounter back under control.

I had gone through a flurry of activity surrounding this. I have network monitors running on my machine trying to determine when and how the drops were occurring. I had robust logging running on my router and emailing me the logs every so often so I could scour them with a confused look on my face trying to discern any sort of a pattern. One night it might be at 7pm and the next night it might be at 8pm… or I might have a large stretch with no disconnects. I have cycled the router and the modem many times in impotent frustration with lack of anything better to do to try and fix it.

Last night however I decided to trace the issue from the wall… and this is the point at which I feel like an idiot for not doing this earlier. In my office the main coax feed comes in from the attic and is floor level back behind my desk. That then feeds up to the cable modem and makes the magic happen. This line of coax was unscrewed completely from the wall and seemingly hanging by only the bit of copper wire sticking out of it. It was a sheer miracle that we maintained any semblance of a connection to the internet. I am guessing the cats did something silly like rubbed up against the thing sticking out of the wall… and over time that unscrewed it. I will have to watch this more closely from now on but it seems to have solved the random disconnecting behavior.

Last night I got the first credits roll for Shadowbringers, and I feel like I can say nothing about it save for showing off this image. Holy hell was this an amazing expansion, and it took so many twists and turns before eventually delivering us onto quite possibly the most epic feeling dungeon and trial I have experienced. I have no clue how I survived the trial but we managed to get in a two attempts, through no help of my own since I was constantly screwing up one of the mechanics causing me to take stacks of vulnerability. I am not looking forward to doing that on Extreme. At some point in the future I will talk about my feelings on the story itself, but right now much like a Star Wars or Avengers film… I want to give people enough time to catch up and experience it for themselves.

What I will talk about however is how great the Trust system is. Yes I did this wrong and waited until 80 to touch the new mechanic that is supposed to help you get through the main storyline solo if you so choose it. It is quite possibly the coolest thing that has been added to Final Fantasy XIV and makes the MMO feel so much like a console game. I am quite frankly shocked it works as well as it does, and it effectively allowed me to sit back… and run a very relaxed dungeon in about 30 minutes start to finish. It does take a little longer than the equivalent dungeon might with actual players… but this is a reasonable trade off and I figure as the NPCs level up… that time gap might decrease as well.

I was also shocked at how good of a way it is to acquire gear for your alts. While I only walked away with two pieces of gear that were relevant to my Samurai… I instead gathered up a bunch of gear that I will probably at some point use as I start out my various sundry other classes. I have a feeling that one of my central focuses soon will be getting classes to 71 so they can start using the trust system as well. The only down point is it requires way more runs of a dungeon to level your party than it will be to level you… so in theory I could see needing to stagger leveling your characters. The unfortunate side effect of that is it means you will run an awful lot of the same dungeon over and over. Regardless it is really freaking cool and might be my new favorite solo downtime activity next to my old favorite of hunt logs.

This morning I have so many things to say… but don’t feel like I can really say any of it? By the internet rule of too soon I have fallen off the precipice that was the normal flow of Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve seen some stuff… and now really don’t feel like I can talk about it without ultimately ruining the game experience for all of the people who were further behind than me. As such I am just opting out of talking about any of the various bad ideas I experienced this weekend. Instead lets talk about Dwarves.

The level 78 gear set that comes through questing is the “Dwarf” set. For those not yet playing this game… Shadowbringers takes place in a “through the looking glass” sort of version of the world we known and love. In that world instead of Lalafell, you have the mining and tinkering Dwarves that are most widely known for wearing a helmet that gives them a non-descript black orb face with glowing yellow eyes. While there were technically Dwarves in the first Final Fantasy title… the ones we have come to love and respect for their Lali-ho-ness first appeared for me at least in the 4th title that we instead got as the 2nd title. Numbering is hard.

At least some part of my attachment to Lalafell is because I love small races… but small races that tend to be about the scale and proportions of a Fantasy Dwarf. Gnomes don’t do it for me… and depending on the game I can take or leave Halflings. Where my joy lies is with the subterranean masters… in part maybe because I secretly dream of a purely underground existence far from the reach of the evil sun? So once I was able to start BEING a Dwarf in FFXIV… you damned well can bet that I made some glamour happen. The 78 crafted set is dye-able and I have chosen soot black for the time being because it more or less goes with everything.

So yeah… for the time being that is all you are going to get out of me. Lali-hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! In part this gives my brain time to wrap itself around the events that just happened, and also you as the player time to catch up and experience it for yourself. There are spoilers… and then there are SPOILERS… and what I have been experiencing lives firmly in that second camp. Please do not leave comments below spoiling what I am talking about for my readers, because wow some stuff happened. Me saying that alone is probably bad enough.

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers is I believe now officially my favorite Final Fantasy game ever. I am just hoping they manage to stick the landing. At this point I am level 80 and working my way through to the ultimate climax of the game… but like a nesting doll things seem to keep unfolding before me. I’ve already gotten effectively two more areas to explore that I was not expecting… and it just sorta keeps going. They managed to pull a Phantasy Star Online 2 on me… and well I am holding on with both hands for now.

Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States… and as such I allowed myself to go into holiday mode and sleep in super late. We really didn’t do much of anything to celebrate, in part because having a single carved out day in the middle of a week is kinda butts. Sure when I go back today it is Friday… and thus the weekend-eve but it still feels jarring. I could have in theory taken the day off, but we already had the director and another manager gone… just leaving two managers to cover everything. That said I sincerely doubt there will be much going on as probably the majority of the workers took the day off if they could.

This weekend was the weekend of the great server split. I happened to get up to use the restroom and get a drink, and when I got back my client had cashed. This began a sequence of getting the 2002 Lobby Server error until I finally made it back in and was plunked in an over 2000 person queue. This was effectively the reality of Wednesday night, and I managed to fight through two of these queues, when finally I got disconnected again and simply gave up on making it through a third one. This seemed to be some localized issues to that specific night, as they did some maintenance in the wee hours of the morning and things were back down to 15-20 person queues all yesterday.

As far as the story goes… I am now stuck up against the pre-77 wall. The one that I hit at 76 seemed to be pretty short and was able to do my daily hunts and a few rounds of FATEs to get through it without much issue. This one unfortunately has me hitting it well before I have hit the halfway point of 76. That means tonight I am probably going to need to buckle down and grind it out in random queues of the 75 dungeon. That said I am mostly okay with this… as it contains my new spirit animal… the Batsquatch.

All in all I am still digging the story, but the flow slowed down a bit once I cleared the forest moon of Endor. When the game devolves into the more political stuff, I struggle to stay engaged. When it is all big damned call to action… I am fully on board with whatever nonsense it seems to throw me in. I feel like we are in the third act lull before things start to get really good again. I’ve officially got context for what the big trailer reveal presented, and I have to say I am feeling really weird about that sequence of events. I do not know who I can trust in this world.

The above screenshot is being shown without context, but I am happy to see it. It is a place I hope we will one day visit. I am sorta jealous of the side group that is operating there. In truth the Wednesday night server apocalypse is as close as we have gotten to seeing real problems with the Shadowbringers launch. All in all it has been a really smooth experience and hopefully I am not cursing myself… but I have yet to see anything similar to Raubhan Extreme. I look forward to getting off work and grinding my way past the wall I am against and seeing hopefully the 77 dungeon.