Final Fantasy XIV

I had a bunch of objectives to accomplish last night on what is effectively the final night of Stormblood. The first was to get my tank to 360 so that I could be able to run Ghimlyt Dark. That did not happen, and instead I wound up getting side tracked helping my good friend Jess run a couple of dungeons for her Anima weapon. The first of these was Gubal Library Hard and I thought in theory we could duo it, in spite of her being concerned about needing a healer. We did perfectly fine until on the final boss I forgot about the whole hide behind rocks mechanic on the Meteor and wound up dying… which ultimately ended up killing her as well. We dusted ourselves off and made it through perfectly fine on attempt number two.

Shortly after getting underway Ashgar had logged in and briefly bemoaned losing out on free “Light”, and as a result we waited on him to finish the instance he started while we were in Gubal. If nothing else I figured things would go faster and more smoothly with three people. We could have in theory been able to complete it as a duo, but there are a handful of rough encounters. We made it through without a hitch and got those steps of her books taken care of. From there it was a bunch of the running around and doing stuff tasks that were needed which we really wouldn’t be super efficient at helping. Around about this time my friend Grace logs in, and geared shifted once more.

The entire purpose for pushing up my warrior in gear over the last few days has been to make it ready to tank the final dungeon needed for the main story quest. Grace had been frantically trying to get her way there, and I knew without a doubt that I was not capable of doing this as a Warrior. I even created that spreadsheet to try and figure out how many things I needed to pick up to make it happen. Whatever the case in the end it wound up that I wasn’t really needed. I ninja invited Ashgar to the party and then checked to see if Sita was available to dps. Both agreed and we were off doing a full Free Company group to knock out the final dungeon she needed.

We struggled a little bit on the final boss, but only because the dance is a little odd to get used to. I myself had only run the dungeon once when I did so as a Samurai for my own main story quest. We wiped once in part because we lost a Sita and then while rezzing we lost a Grace. I was the last Lala standing and wound up hopping in an explosion since there was no way at all I could finish the encounter off solo. On the second try however we got things taken care of and Grace past this final obstacle. I would assume she wrapped the rest of the story and is now like the rest of us waiting for the expansion.

The third goal of the night was to get the Bard to 60… and I almost made that goal but simply ran out of time and or oomph to push across the finish line. I needed 2-3 runs of Palace of the Dead to make it happen, but I can easily wrap that up at some point during my downtime. Palace is a great activity to do while podcasting because it is largely mindless grinding, and that sort of stuff works well while talking. I just have to watch myself to keep from running “Dalaran” style laps around Quarymill.

I had an evening where I accomplished pretty much nothing I set out to do. However I still had a really fun time with the activities I took part of. One of the things I need to learn is to do this more often. Back in my WoW days I would sort of go with the flow and tank whatever was needed for the guild. Then in recent years I have tried desperately to cling to my own list of goals and objectives and wound up getting frustrated when I was pushed off that narrow path. Turns out when I allow myself to leave the garden path I have an awful lot more fun just letting things happen as they need to. So here is hoping I can follow that bit of advice as we stare down the barrel of the impending expansion.

For a bit of some time recently… in truth the majority of Stormblood… I’ve developed a bit of a mental block against tanking. When I took my long absence from the game, it felt like in returning to it… that I just wasn’t quite certain of my abilities anymore. It was more than “I got rusty”, it was almost like I was allergic to taking responsibility for others. I could blame a lot of things, but I think in part it was due to the fact that in the real world I had a lot of responsibility thrust upon me. Right now I have sixteen people who report to me, and it has taken me a little over a year to reach a point where I am largely comfortable with that notion.

Much like my lapses in blogging from the past… the longer it went on the harder it was to start back up again. Then recently I set down the path of finishing off my Nexus weapon, and that involved soloing a plethora of dungeons. Weirdly enough the act of soloing the dungeons sorta helped grease the gears and make me remember that yeah… I actually do sorta like this thing. The other night I got “ninja invited” into tanking a group for some friends, and once again… I didn’t actually die in doing some real tanking. It more or less made me remember why I loved Warrior in the first place, and now I sorta wish I had never strayed from the path with Samurai.

As a result last night I spend most of the night tanking the same dungeon over and over… Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum Hard largely because it is the dungeon that drops gear that is unilaterally an upgrade for most of my slots. The question is… why am I doing this mere days from the release of an expansion where my gear will no longer matter at all? Who knows. I do things on my own weird time table, but as of last night I am sitting at 355 and was able to figure out how that number is derived to see how much gear I would need to bump up to 360. For your own reference… if you are a class with a two handed weapon it seems to be counting as though you items equipped of that item level in both your main hand and your off hand slot. Additionally the system does not appear to be following rounding rules and simply drops the decimal places.

There are so many systems in this game that I have completely ignored over the last few years because I more or less have been in a semi-checked out state since sometime in Heavensward. For example none of my retainers have jobs. They are all still whatever base class that they started out with, in spite of being probably past the requirements of turning into jobs. As such I have never used any of the dungeon options with your retainers, and honestly sort of regret that. There is a lot of fiddling to be done in this game and I have done a pretty poor job of keeping up with it. Now I sit on the precipice of two different things that I want to participate in conspiring to split my time. We have Shadowbringers launching on Friday and then in August we have World of Warcraft Classic which will also each up copious amounts of my time. My goal right now is to attempt to juggle both.

In other news I finally did enough of the Squadron mini game to hit the next Maelstrom rank. For a really long time I had tried to avoid my Limsa Lominsa heritage as a Marauder, but over time I eventually came back to the fold and now feel exceedingly comfortable in the weird white rock fortress on the sea. Till Sea Swallows All! Similarly odd I recently swapped back to my Leviathan barding of old… aka the entire reason why my chocobo is turquoise in the first place in order to blend in with that armor. It is a way more fitting choice for a Maelstrom lad than it ever was for an Ul’dahnan.

It is bizarre… I have gone from not really caring much about Shadowbringers to really looking forward to it. Now I am contemplating following my heart again and leveling as a Warrior, because ultimately this will always be my main class. Sure that means I will have to do the really dumb thing and level as a DPS… but whatever I have done it before. I am a tank and will always be a tank. Every other role I try on feels like an ill fitting glove. So expect me to be running headlong into packs of mobs in the expansion.

It’s been a few days since I have written a post about Final Fantasy XIV. When we last addressed the game I was working towards infusing my Novus weapon so that it could in fact become a proper Nexus weapon. I’ve done that and now have the Nexus weapon glamoured over top of my real axe. I’ve made some progress on the next step in the quest aka the “Braves” weapon Ragnarok but unfortunately I’ve hit a wall. Basically you need 400k to progress past this and I am way too broke to do that at the moment.

Between my buying my way up to proper item level when I came back to the game, and the money spent on Materia… I have been hovering around the 150k mark for a bit now. That will regenerate over time, but for now we have to close the door on the Zodiac weapon quests and be happy with the shiny spikey state that the weapon currently is in. I am sure at some point in the near future I will pick this back up as expansions tend to come with a windfall of money. Additionally I am using the shit out of my retainers to auction off various baubles, which are moving… but moving slowly. In theory I need to learn some strategy for making money on a reliable basis in this game because I never quite landed on one that did not involve crafting.

For the last several days I have been entirely focused on cleaning house. Recently I pushed the last of my classes to 50, freeing up a bunch of room for getting rid of any older gear that was clogging my vaults that was not something I actually wanted to wear. With the new classes starting at level 60, it is highly unlikely I will ever have a sub 50 character again… and even if I do it will probably be along the lines of blue mage where it more or less came with its own set of gear that I did not really upgrade out of until 50. I currently have 9 items in my inventory… and this is the closest to “inventory zero” I have ever gotten. In truth several of these items could be tossed in the vault but whatever this is a stark improvement over having roughly five item slots free at any given time.

Over the last several days I have set about a very tedious process of sorting my retainers. Previously there really was no rhyme or reason to how I was storing things. At one point yes there was a pattern but as vaults overflowed I wound up just shoving things into any open slot I could find. Which lead to the situation of having a random assortment of items in pretty much every retainer’s vault, making it very hard to find upgrades as you encounter them. I subscribe to additional retainers, because ultimately I had to in order to keep up with the mess. What we have wound up with is the following scheme.

• Druin – Melee Weapons – Yes I have enough of these to warrant it’s own bank
• Tiga – Strength Melee Class Gear
• Tallow – Tank Gear
• Dauphin – Dexterity Class Gear
• Belgrave – Caster Gear
• Waxwood – Healer Gear
• Dorma – Jewelry for Every Class
• Finni – Crafting Gear, Materials, and Assorted Token Items

This is the final scheme that we ended up with, and largely Druin becoming a weapon vault was a thing that happened late in the process. I can honestly already see some need for variance as Tiga and Tallow the Strength and Tank vaults respectively are close to overflowing. So in theory I will have to do something in the near future to further split things up. I could in theory split off the striker and lancer gear into their own vaults, because there is a pretty clear delineation between those archetypes. However tank gear is tank gear… and they don’t really have much in the way of paladin or warrior specific gear for example other than class sets.

I can add one more retainer now if I so choose, and I figure with the coming expansion they will increase this by another slot. So in theory I could split up tank gear by slot, and have 3 of the slots in one bank and 3 of the slots in another bank or something like that. Whatever the case we have some semblance of organized for the first time in the roughly six years I have been playing the game. This is a major achievement because it absolutely does not carry over to any other game that I am playing. I tend to be a packrat in life and a bigger packrat in video games. A large part of why I no longer play Everquest II is that I just have too much crap and did not want to take the literal hours to sort through it.

In truth to get to the state I am in right now probably legitimately took me about 8 hours worth of diligent sorting and slowly ferrying items back and forth between vaults and or selling them. Here is hoping that I can manage to keep things in order as we go into Shadowbringers.

I am now officially in full swing of Nexus light farming and wound up spending my entire evening in Sastasha. In theory I could clear the entire place in roughly five minutes loaded in solo with undersized party. I had I had spent more of my time trying to optimize my route and my mob stacking… I could have potentially gotten it down to a bit lower. However for the uninitiated you might ask exactly why I spent two hours solid running the same dungeon over and over as many times as I possibly could squeeze into that two hour block.

Now some of this information comes from my friend Ashgar and other bits come from this Wiki page, but I am now in the step for the Nexus Zodiac weapon where I have to run a bunch of activities. Each activity produces a certain amount of light, and I have screenshot the table and placed it above. You effectively need to go from 0 to 2000 light to move past this step in the weapon grind, with different activities rewarding different amounts of light. So as you can see finding something that rewards Blinding Light for example is going to be way more effective than something giving you Feeble. Ash however suggested that generally speaking one of the early instances always rewards blinding light, and the trick is finding it.

The instances providing bonus light reset every two hours on the even hours… which doesn’t actually work for me when in truth they were on the odd numbered hours. So my bonus reset happened at 7 pm last night and I ground my little ass off until 9 pm getting in as many instances as possible with only a brief break to switch machines because I needed to call mom while grinding and wanted to move to where I could hook up a headset. I have no clue exactly how many runs I managed to get in but if you subtract about 15 minutes of the available time and bump my run time up to 6 minutes… you end up with me having run somewhere between seventeen and eighteen runs last night. In truth I think it was probably something in the neighborhood of fifteen to sixteen given where I wound up on the charts.

There is an in-game doodad that allows you to check how much light you have collected with a given weapon. Now I had run a couple of Frontlines that were both at Blinding Light, which is what leads me to believe that I was somewhere in the fifteenish range for runs completed. I started the night with the meter showing “No Activity” and finished the night with “Intense Aetheric Activity” as shown in the image above. In theory if I can happen upon another Blinding Light dungeon… in an absolute worst case scenario I am 5 runs away from completing. Alternately I could just run Sastasha 9 more times with no bonus and it would end up in the same result.

Whatever the case… I am apparently fully committed to this madness now and I have no clue what happens after I get the Nexus weapon. I have a feeling I will rapidly be entering a level of territory where it just isn’t worth it to keep pushing forward. Instead it is probably time to start another weapon if I so choose. Regardless this has done what it ultimately needed to do… give me a purpose for logging in every night and hanging out with the FFXIV crew prior to expansion launch next week.