Final Fantasy XIV

Good morning you happy denizens of the interweb.  This morning is one of those mornings that I am struggling to find purpose and direction as I set about with writing my morning post.  Allergies are still laying siege to me, but at least the Dayquil seems to have completely worked its way out of my system.  At this point I am thinking I will just go back to taking some Allegra and seeing if that works.  I managed to get what appears to be a good nights sleep last night, so all signs point towards this being a far better day.

Lord of the Crag

One of the coolest fights so far that I have encountered is the second trial, this time fighting the Lord of the Crag.  Be warned there are likely several spoilers to follow so if you are not interested in them skip ahead.  Titan has always been one of the strong summoned creatures in the Final Fantasy mythos, and this time is no different.  In Eorzea he is the worshipped deity of a number of the beast races, and throughout the course of the quest line you end up exploiting one of the beast tribes Aetherite crystals to get to him.  While Ifrit was a difficult encounter due to one key mechanic… Titan is much more difficult in every way.

Firstly one of the coolest things about this fight is the amazing soundtrack.  The following link is the boss music for titan in the final phase.  It has a very Trigun feel to me, but from the very start of the fight this amazing rock theme is playing, which completely fits the feel of the encounter.  Titan is mad, and he is about to kick your ass!  The real challenge of the encounter is that the entire party takes lots of damage, a large chunk of it completely unavoidable.  My friends tend to favor the Scholar healer, so in some ways it made the encounter easier… but Scholars in general have trouble recovering from extreme spikes in damage.

Similar to Ifrit there is a do or die mechanic.  After you have dealt a certain amount of damage to Titan’s Heart will appear.  Similar to the nails in Ifrit you have to destroy the heart within a certain time frame.  Titan is going to jump up and perform a massive quake attack either way, but it is manageable damage if the heart has been broken, similar to the Ifrit Hellfire attack.  The biggest issue with the fight are the two avoidable attacks. 

Firstly every so often Titan will jump up into the air and slam back down in the center of the arena.  The closer to the center you are standing the more damage you take.  However if you are too close to the edge of the arena… you will get knocked off.  So this attack becomes a juggling act of being far enough away that your healer can recover from the damage, and not so far away that you get knocked off the platform and killed.  Second you have a shockwave like attack that shows up as a blue line drawn from titan to the edge of the platform.  If a player gets caught in this they take massive amounts of damage and similarly get knocked off the platform.

The Problem With Trials

We went into this fight completely cold, so it took a few tries for us to figure out the inner workings.  As a tank, I took massive amounts of damage from Titan on a regular basis.  I have to say the entire encounter feels extremely epic… and similar to Ifrit this is a Trial… meaning that the game for all intents and purposes pauses until you defeat it.  The big problem with Trials however is that there is little to no incentive for players to do them more than once.  I have been tanking it for various guild members as they got up to the phase, and the only reward is roughly 4200 xp and 300 gil, essentially far less xp and money than you would get for a single guildleave quest.

As a result… no one wants to do them more than once.  I mean I am always willing to tank Ifrit or Titan for guild members when they get up to the point… but there is absolutely no incentive for players to queue for them.  Quite frankly it is crap experience, and you often times end up with more of a repair bill than you could possible recover from the final reward.  I feel as though they really need to adjust the reward a bit to make namely tanks and healers willing to queue up for these and help get other players over the bottleneck.  Our guild healers have been solo queuing for the trials as a bit of a community service, but I am sure they are the exception rather than the rule.  Like with Ifrit… players are waiting multiple hours just trying to get through this roadblock… and unlike Ifrit… this encounter is not nearly as easy to roflstomp.

The Dungeons

At this point I have defeated every dungeon in the first part of the game.  They released two videos, the first of which I have embedded above, that give players a preview of all the dungeons they will encounter.  I have to say… having a new dungeon every 5 levels is really pretty awesome.  So far of all of the dungeons Haukke Manor is my favorite… mostly because it is essentially Castlevania in MMO Dungeon form.  Everything about the place screams Symphony of the Night… even the rock soundtrack.  Since SOTN is likely my favorite game ever… this dungeon is essentially my perfect one.  Sadly however, I have only actually run it the one time.  I am hoping when I get my gladiator up to the level I can talk some guild members into running it multiple times.

I thought it was a bit arbitrary when they divided the videos up into two parts.  However after last night… I realize there was a method to the madness.  All of the dungeons in the above video are more or less relatively easy.  Sure there are some rough mechanics here or there, but so long as you pay attention you are likely to get through without any wipes.  Last night I was completely out of it… so I intended to just piddle around on either the Warrior or the Dragoon working on leveling them.  However Tibuant has been not so patiently asking for Sunken Temple of Qarn for almost a week now.  Since he is in college, he has had a lot more playtime than the rest of us… and as a result shot ahead level wise.

Shit Just Got Real

He really wanted to wait to do Qarn for the first time with a completely cold guild group, and after hearing the pleading in his voice… for the hundredth time… I went in with the disclaimer that I was pretty out of it… and it would likely end in tears.  The above video you will notice… starts with the Sunken Temple of Qarn.  Essentially from what I can tell the video could be subtitled “shit just got real”.  Qarn in every way was a new kind of dungeon experience… filled with some truly brutal mechanics.  I had been watching for awhile in chat with people asking for the dungeon… and some of the side commentary made me nervous about the place.

I am not going to spoil any of the direct mechanics… but there are several mob types that can literally one shot the player… in fact that seems to be the new rule going forward.  If you don’t do whatever it is at the right time… you are going to die horribly.  The first boss encounter is a similarly brutal wakeup call, and will wipe the party before you really figure out the mechanic.  I always thought the 90 minute timer on an instance was an extreme amount of time to finish a dungeon run…  however last night we used almost every single minute.  We finished the final boss with a couple of minutes to spare.

I can’t say I am really looking forward to going back into the place.  Luckily we have almost an entire team that has yet to do the place… so they should be able to experience it completely fresh.  Namely they should not take Rae into it with them… she is really bad about spoiling mechanics without meaning to.  Granted I realize that I just went into detail about the Titan fight… but at this point most of our guild has long passed fighting that encounter… and I did warn you to skip ahead.  It was extremely fun having to figure out the mechanics on our feet and for the most part we did extremely well at all of the fights but the first and last one.  Some of the deaths were avoidable, where I simply stopped receiving heals at the wrong time.  Tib does a good job as a healer, but I can tell it is definitely not second nature.

Wrapping Up

Essentially the dungeons are hands down the best part about the FFXIV experience.  I had no real intent of doing any last night, but after getting guilt tripped into tanking Qarn I am glad I now have the experience.  I was so drained last night that I was just trying to avoid getting into anything at all.  Hopefully with the sleep today will go smoother.  I hope you all have a great day ahead of you, and that you get whatever it is that you need to get done accomplished.  I need to wrap up on one project, and begin stubbing out a second today.

Good morning you happy people in the wondrous digital frontier.  Today is yet another day marred by these horrible allergies.  I am so ready at this point for a hard rain or even a minor freeze to clear the crap out of the air.  I feel like I am having to deal with a full summers worth of allergies all within in few weeks.  Right now the ragweed count is off the charts, and this has always been one of my worst allergies.  Odd thing is… my wife has always gotten sick and lost her voice right after the start of the school year, but we never really figured out why.  Signs are pointing to ragweed induced hay fever, and so far treating it like that is seeming to work.  But the over the counter stuff we are using is making both of us massively drowsy…  but it is working well enough.

Cousin it’s your Cousin

The other day my friend Rae linked me this video… and it has been stuck in my head ever since.  I find myself constantly singing to myself “Niko it’s your cousin, why don’t you take me bowling”.  I had not been introduced to the Miracle of Sound before now…  I think maybe I had heard a few of the songs but they are all pretty amazing.  Essentially it is yet another ubiquitous YouTube star and similar to Malukah he writes songs almost exclusively based on video games.  Many cases he takes dialog from the game, and remixes them into really catch tunes.  One of the best tracks though is inspired by Game of Thrones called “Halfman’s Song”.  The guy is super talented and definitely worth watching more of the videos and subscribing to the channel in general.

Now comes the deep dark confession… that I have never played Grand Theft Auto IV.  So having played many of the games up to IV… I totally understand the type of character Niko’s cousin is… but I’ve never actually played the game or any of its expansions.  I played several of the others quite prolifically but the problem I run into each time is that the world feels dead to me.  Sure it is cool to roam around causing mayhem… but I always think it would be much more enjoyable if I could do it with friends.  I have this problem in a lot of games that feel like they SHOULD be MMOs.  While I adore the Elder Scrolls games… I have always longed to have friends with me in that world instead of more NPCs to interact with.

Lord of Ifrit

One of the cool features of Final Fantasy XIV is that every bit of instanced content has automatic scaling built into it.  As a result it is super easy to tag along with friends when they reach points you have already finished.  For example yesterday there were a few friends who had not passed the “Bowl of Embers” trial that as I have said before acts as a roadblock from you getting to new content.  So they needed an additional dps, and I tagged along as my Dragoon.  The only negative is that it will cause you to lose any abilities you did not natively have at the level it scales you to.  So you will find yourself adjusting to playing in a fashion you may not be used to.

In the case of my dragoon… I lose the ever amazing jump ability, as well as the third part of my combo chain.  So I had to revert to the older playstyle of flanking to get the buff then switching to impulse drive backstabs.  I wish they had gone with the more common scaling down abilities option rather than the old style EQ2 lose abilities method.  So far it has not been nearly as game breaking as it was in EQ2… since you lost access to newer versions of spells… causing you to have to go rifling through your spell book to find the ones that WOULD world for the instance.

Additionally I tanked the three dungeon sequence of Sastasha, Tam-Tara Undercroft, and Copperbell as a Gladiator.  I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at just how differently tanking as a Gladiator feels to tanking as a Marauder.  It is a more strategic feeling combat, more slow paced and deliberate.  Whereas the Marauder feels like an all out rage fest as you try and get as many mobs as you can in your overpower cone.  I can definitely see some merits in the other tanking style, and at some point I figure I will finish leveling gladiator to 30, and conjurer to 15 so I can pick up the Paladin soul.  My big disappointment is that you cannot change classes in a dungeon.  My hope was that I would be able to switch back and forth between Paladin and Warrior based on the requirements of a given fight.

Requiem for Kill Quests

One of the other disappointments so far with Final Fantasy XIV is it has roughly half the number of quests I would like it to.  The best means of gaining experience seems to be doing normal quests for NPCs.  The problem is there are only enough of these quests in the world to really support leveling a single class.  As a result for my sub classes I am forced to much grindier methods… such as fates, leves, and the occasional guild dungeon run.  I feel like this is a growing problem in games as they are trying really hard not to do “Kill 10 Rats” quests.  For whatever reason… these are now out of vogue with the player base in general… and as a result game companies are trying to scrub their games of them.

Thing is… I love kill quests.  One of my favorite things in Dark Age of Camelot was the kill quest givers.  They would send you off to kill random mobs, only giving you the direction from them for guidance.  I wish modern games had an NPC like this called a Huntsmaster that literally just sent you out into the world to kill X number of mobs.  Thing is… I naturally have an extreme bloodlust when it comes to carnage in a game.  I like killing things, and my friend get annoyed with me at times because I can only go so long without engaging in combat.  So if we are running to a dungeon… there will be numerous stops along the way for me to randomly charge a mob.  Having a kill quest gives me a way to focus this bloodlust towards what feels like a larger purpose.

I realize that I am in the minority… and most players seem to want deep and meaningful story content in the form of quests.  While story quests are fine… I honestly don’t really like them that much.  As I am playing a game I am building a narrative in my head… that is often times at direct odds with the narrative that the game is trying to tell me.  So as a result when I enter one of these story quests… it forces me out of my own little world that I am building for myself… and into the world that the game designers have deemed for me to participate in.  Like I said… I realize I play games in a largely different way than most players do.  I think I have developed this reaction after having spent years doing kill, escort and fedex quests… and as a result I have started building storyline to make all of them important to me.

I guess at the end of the day, I hate that these short bursts of purpose are now out of vogue with the player base.  I liked them especially because there was a clear end in sight.  With so many story quests, you never really know how many actions you are committing to upon accepting the quest.  You could be accepting a quest that would be three short steps all within the same zone, or an epic sixty step quest that involves travel through half of the games content to complete.  Ultimately I guess I don’t like the not knowing how much of my time I just promised to an NPC.  I hate abandoning quests, but there are times where I just don’t have the patience to jump through that many hoops at a time.  As a result I have always favored the super simple kill X quests as a way of getting in and doing something that feels like it means something in short bursts.

Wrapping Up

Well time for me to wrap things up.  They are having cake for my grandmother back in my home town this afternoon, so I am trying to figure out if I can realistically commit to going or not.  Additionally today will be laundry day so I will be spending most of the day swapping out loads.  All of this while fighting the allergies and the strong desire to just go back to bed… is going to make a less than enjoyable day.  I hope you all have a much better day ahead of you, and I hope that the start of the week is relatively smooth.

Good morning you happy people out in digital land.  The last two days have been pretty horrible, at least in the way that I have felt.  However at roughly 2:30 yesterday afternoon something “broke”, and I started feeling a bit better.  I shifted from being shivering and piling on as many blankets as I could find with no real appetite.. to being hot and having a ravenous appetite.  While my allergies are still going more or less haywire…  I think whatever bug I had has moved on and I will be well on the mend.  I am super thankful it is Friday however, as everything I seem to do just wears me out right now.

Dragoon Get!

After getting level 30 on my marauder and switching over to Warrior, I immediately set my sights on catching up my lancer.  One of the key design flaws in this game appears to be a severe lack of quests.  Essentially there are enough quests for you to level ONE class, but each additionally class you want to push up has to grind their way through the content.  Every 5 levels you can get a class quest that will upgrade your weapon and armor, but essentially other than that you are on your own.  There are of course leve quests but they are not really that good experience wise, and you are limited on the total number of those you can do a day.  Right now the best and fastest way to level is to grind Fates.

Fates are essentially a cross between the events in Guild Wars 2 and the Rifts in Rift.  They are random and sometimes player kicked off events that spawn in a zone.  They have a time limit to complete the objective, and players are rewarded based on contribution.  Unlike some games this one seems to be entirely based on the unmodified threat table.  As a result healers and tanks seem to have an easier time getting “Gold” ranking than say a single target dps.  There are certain zones that have become hubs of sort for Fate running, and roaming groups ping pong around the zones picking up credit.

Fate Grinding

This is essentially how I pushed from level 22 to 30 on my lancer, but running fate after fate.  Sure it was super repetitive… but there are a few advantages.  Firstly… Gil the currency is really hard to come by.  It is only awarded by doing quests, leves and fates.  There is no way to earn it from just killing random mobs.  As a result Fates become one of your best repeatable sources of money.  Additionally Fates reward grand company seals, which you can then use to upgrade your rank in your chosen grand company or buy some really nice gear upgrades.

After all my fate grinding I was able to bump my rank up several steps and buy a nice level 30 axe for my warrior and spear for my dragoon.. as well as a really amazing tanking hauberk that is pictured above.  Additionally there are certain fates that reward various nifty things from getting maximum contribution.  The fates are generally puns based on pop culture or songs… so the localization team had a lot of fun with them.  In Costa Del Sol there is a fate called “It’s Not Lupus” where you fight a boss named “Cancer”… which is a House reference… and if you get maximum contribution it gives you a little crab pet to follow you around.

Gold Sinks

One of the things that really concerns me going forward with the long term health of the game is the huge number of gold sinks, and relative lack of ways to actually earn money.  Always in the past my defacto answer for needing money was just to go farm mobs until I got the amount of cash that I needed.  I have always loved mindless slaughter…  however in FFXIV it has lost some of its luster since npcs out in the world NEVER drop loot.  That is just not a thing this game does at all… essentially your only sources of loot are dungeon chests, leve chests, quests and occasionally fates.  This leaves you with relatively few opportunities for money making.

Other than grinding fates over and over… the next best way for money seems to be running Guildleave quests.  The oddity about these however is that you only earn 6 allowance a day.  Now these allowances stack up until you have 99 of them, but if you are using them as a way to get money or to gain experience you can burn through them really quickly.  While the game is amazingly fun, and I really love the freedom of the whole multiclass concept… I can see how very quickly we are going to enter a territory of currency micro management.

In theory I am guessing all of this is to make the crafting that much more valuable, and force players to create a market economy.  That is all well and good but right now I would far rather dump my materials on our most seasoned veteran crafter to push him up in ability… than to try and sell items on the auction house to regain some of my lost gil.  The market also is completely unreasonable at times.  Gear seems to be dirt cheap overall, since you can gain it in multiple places… and there is really no functional difference between quested and crafted drops.  However all the other things… are way out into the stratosphere as far as cost.  Lord help you if you want black dye for example.

I am hearing of level 50 characters needing start alts just to run through the quests to steal money from them.  That is going to be a sad activity if that ends up being the way MOST level 50s pay for their repair bills.  Right now that seems to be one of the bigger money sinks.  Everything has durability, and everything you do damages it somewhat.  Ultimately this is going to be the thing that pushes me to level a crafter, so that I can end up repairing my own gear.  There has been talk of adding in dailies and other ways to earn currency, but we will just have to see how heinous these end up being.  If they are similar to the leve quests, which give me a random chance at really nice gear upgrades… then I might be completely fine with them.

Back On Track

Last night I finally got back to leveling my main class properly once more.  After dinging 30, getting the Warrior job I took a bit of a break from the main storyline to level a bunch of other things.  Right now I currently have 32 Warrior/Marauder, 30 Dragoon/Lancer, 22 Gladiator, 12 Pugilist, and 6 Thaumaturge.  As I said the other day I ran up the 12 Pugilist because it has some of the most powerful cross class abilities… namely the amazing “Second Wind” which equates to a free potion when used.  I seriously could not have passed the level 30 lancer quest if I did not have this ability… so far the toughest encounter I have faced in the game.

Leveling Lancer to 30 and picking up Dragoon was purely a “want to” not part of some broader scheme.  I have always loved Dragoons in the Final Fantasy universe.  There is just something about the jump command that mystifies me.  The ironic thing is… I dinged 30, finished the Dragoon quest… but have yet to actually fight anything and USE the jump command.  I immediately switched out my gear to my level 16 gladiator set and started leveling it.  My goal there was to hit 22, so that I could get the cross class ability “Provoke” which is literally one of the only snap aggro abilities in the game.  I figured this would greatly help me in the ultimate goal of my Warrior soul… tanking instances.

Essentially I am at a point where I have the low hanging fruit from both of the cross classes that feed into Warrior… namely Pugilist and Gladiator.  So I feel as though I finally have a full range of abilities at my disposal for being the best possible Warrior tank I can be.  Ultimately I will level my Gladiator at some point, because I would really like to have both a max level Warrior soul and a Paladin soul at my disposal.  Each of the tank classes functions vastly different, and I am sure there will be cases where either one will be far superior.  Normally I favor sword and board, but quite frankly… the weapons that gladiator gets look horrible for the most part… which is greatly destroying my enjoyment.

As of last night I am up to the next major dungeon in the storyline, Brayflox’s Longstop… so here is hoping we can get a group together tonight.  Quite frankly myself and the other tank have been the bottleneck in the ability to run dungeons.  The dps seem to always be far ahead of us in the quest line and they are waiting on us to catch up so we can tank the instances for them.  The only problem is… in order to effectively tank you need all of the sub abilities that feed into your class.  In both cases, myself and the other tank have been spending a lot of time picking up those sub class abilities.  Now that I finally have my set, I should be fine with mostly focusing on the main storyline from this point on.

Wrapping Up

Well it is once again that time, and I need to wrap up this post and get on with my morning.  I hope you all have a great weekend ahead of you.  For me I am hoping that I finish mending from whatever crap I have gotten, and that the allergens in the air die down a bit so I can live normally.  It is bad enough that my wife has even been bothered by her allergies… and she rarely if ever is.  Is it too much to ask for a cold snap so that everything will die out?