Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 50 of 129

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was as the post title might give away… a really good night. Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds. The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead. The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests… which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems. There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest. This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players. Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us… but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos. Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to. The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad. While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot… I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights. Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence. I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks. It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do. All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun… except for maybe that middle section. There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four. I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content. That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood… the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content. I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content. Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior. Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell. The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice. That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people… so many other options open up.

Falling Crows and Ghost Moose

February 27, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend I largely set out to do one sequence of things… but instead of actually accomplishes it I spend a good chunk of the weekend piddling around in the Palace of the Dead. For those keeping score at home I am on a mission to get all of my classes to 50. Last week I pushed Summoner/Scholar and Black Mage and as a result this weekend I started in on my Dark Knight in an attempt to shift things up a bit. Originally I was not super keep in Dark Knight as a tanking class, but I have to say after having played a lot of it during this grind it is definitely growing on me. Last night while watching Talking Dead I managed to hit level 46 which means I have roughly 8 more runs of floors 51-60 before pushing this class to 50 as well. Up until around 42 I seemed to still be getting most of a level every single trip into the dungeon, but at that point it shifted to getting roughly half of a level so I guess that is something to note as you push your own characters. After the Dark Knight I am more than likely going to start up with the Ninja given that it is my next highest class sitting at 38. That will leave Monk, Astrologian and Machinist… the later two I still have yet to even accept the introductory quests. In part I am focused on the goal of 50, because up until that point the levels in PotD seem completely reasonable. The 50-60 grind however seems to take almost as much time as the 1-50 does, so in theory… when I actually pick up doing that side of the equation I will begin with my Bard who is already sitting at level 55.

In other weird weekend news… I apparently am now in the Crowfall pre-alpha? I talked a bit about it on AggroChat this week, if you are interested in more of my thoughts. Normally I would be posting a “Crowfall Impressions” post, because that seems to be the sort of thing I do when I get my hands on a new game. Unfortunately I am not really sure if I have a full post worth of feelings about the game. It is very alpha for start, so it feels like it isn’t exactly fair to really give the game anything resembling a review. That said… they are doing an alpha with zero NDA so I feel completely free to at least talk a little about the game. As I described it to my friends… Crowfall is in fact a piece of software that I installed and that offers the ability to launch when I click in the patcher. Past that I am not exactly sure what is going on in the game, and I am not really sure that I felt anything close to fun during the hour and a half that I spent grinding away to make a basic set of armor and weapons. It doesn’t really feel like there is much game yet, and maybe the murder box that is the PVP servers are more enjoyable. However based on the apparently cross shard server chat, it sounds like there is just a lot of spawn camping and ganking going on there. The big challenge I had was that there was simply not much to actually fight in the PVE server, and when I did find a boar or a bizarre crystalline cat my hud would lock up on loot allowing other players to come swoop in and harvest the leather and meat on the thing I just killed. Right now the game feels less fleshed out than Landmark did when it opened its doors to early access. It feels like it is trying to do a lot of things but I am not entirely certain if those things blend all that well.

Now in the “I want my Sunday back” territory… I logged in yesterday morning to work on my Archaeology questline in World of Warcraft. Of note… it has been 181 days since the launch of Legion according to the handy google “days since” query ability. The last two weeks have been the very first occasion to actually complete the Laying to Rest archaeology quest that rewards the Spirit of Echero mount. The last thing I really wanted to do was go grind arch nodes until I collected 600 moose bones… but then again I thought to myself if I ever wanted this mount I should probably do it now, since who the hell knows when it will be available again. I am not really sure how long it took in minutes… but I started watching Sword Art Online again somewhere during the first 100 bones… and I was able to watch three episodes in their entirety and started the fourth before I collected number 600. It was a slog of a grind, and while I am happy it is done… it feels like maybe a waste of time given that I am never likely going to ride the mount anyways. I chock this one up to simple and honest fear of missing out… because if I didn’t get it there might be a version of myself someday that wishes I had. Regardless it is done, but the second I turned in the quest I stuck around long enough to take the above screenshot and then bolted quickly from the game. In other happenings at some point during the grind I hit 800 Archaeology so that was at least something cool that happened as well as finishing up the Handle With Care achievement.

Tiny Black Mage

February 24, 2017 by Belghast

My madness continues… and last night I joined in with Grace and eventually Storm and Muspel to do some Palace of the Dead. Essentially PotD is the new FATE grinding, and while it can be sort of repetitive, I never seem to get tired of it. I mean I thought Tam was insane when he went through his own period of time where he lived in dank dungeon, but now I finally get it. What I am loving about it is that I can just hop in… run a bunch of Palace of the Dead… mentally be somewhere else like watching a movie or a television show and then still feel like I made significant progress at the end of the night. The first goal has been to catch up my classes to 50, because it is going to allow me to have a massive house cleaning of everything that has been clogging my retainers. I have a problem with gear, because I know that eventually I would love to have every single class to the level cap. That is just the sort of person I am. In World of Warcraft I actually achieved this goal prior to the launch of legion and had at least one of every alliance character sitting at 100, and three horde characters as well.

Currently I have my Warrior sitting at 60 and he is my only viably geared character for doing big kid stuff. Then you have my Dragoon that I also leveled to 60, but promptly abandoned because playing that class in Heavensward was just so much less enjoyable for me than it was in ARR. When I was last furiously playing the game I was working on my Bard, which had become my defacto dps class for awhile and I managed to get it up to 55. Then we drop down to my 50s which are Paladin that I have not touched since Heavensward because I simply don’t really like playing a Paladin tank. We have my newly raised trio of casters in the form of the Scholar, Summoner and Black Mage all sitting at 50. Then we drop down to some 30 somethings with Ninja at 38, Monk at 33, and Dark Knight at 33. I have yet to even pick up the quest to be a Machinist or an Astrologian but at some point I probably need to do that so that I can weave those into the rotation as well. Now I am sort of torn as to what I should pick to level next, but for the moment I am leaning towards either the Dark Knight because I miss playing heavy armor classes… or the Ninja because they are just really fun to play.

The other set of goals that is staring me in the face is that when I last left my crafting… I had managed to push everything up to 21… with mining and foraging sitting at 50. At some point I really want to start this grind again and push everything up to at least the point where I can make glamour prisms. In theory I should be doing my beast tribe dailies to use those to level my crafting, but I just haven’t reached a point of getting back into the game enough to sort everything out to be able to do that. Once I finished with the Sahagin I sort of let the beast tribe thing die once again… but in theory should be doing the Ixal at least for crafting levels. Whatever the case it seems like I have been assimilated back into Final Fantasy XIV, and have more goals than I can realistically accomplish. My Warrior gear could also always be improved, but I am just finding PotD a relaxing way to spend my evenings… but sadly one that is not terribly interesting to write blog posts about.

One Hundred Floors

February 21, 2017 by Belghast

So yesterday I mentioned that I had plenty of Aetherpool to get a weapon, but found out that I apparently needed to have completed the full 1-100 Palace of the Dead experience to purchase it. Confession time here… before last night I had never actually completed any further into PotD than floor 70. Most of my running lately has been resetting and running 51-60 over and over which tends to give between 1/2 and 3/4 of a level worth of experience depending on your level. I am sure this slows down in the post 50 grind, but regardless considering how fast most of the runs go it is well worth my time. Given how fast the queue is… I am guessing the community as a whole has also decided it is well worth their time. For the moment I have been focused on getting up my characters to 50, which would allow me to clean out a significant amount of gear from my extremely clogged retainers. Last night I hung out in a holding pattern until my wife got home, and then we both walked to dinner and finally around 7:30 I had arrived at a place where I could get committed to running something serious. I mentioned that I really needed to get to floor 100 and within moments Tam, Ash and Grace had volunteered for the run. All told it took roughly 2 hours to get through the 51-100 content, which no matter how you chop it is a raid like effort of sitting still in one place for a long period of time. As far as experience goes I went from 33 to 37 and am just barely shy of dinging 38 so just a little less than a half level per flight of floors. I also managed to bump my Aetherpool up to 85 weapon / 87 armor as seen in the final score shot from the dungeon.

The first five sets of floors were pretty chill, but quickly things kinda turned to madness. We had a sequence of floors with just a silly amount of Chimera and Dragon on them, and in truth we pomander of rage’d the last three floors just to go quicker. We picked up plenty of silver chests and exited with 9 treasures… but we didn’t exactly go out of our way to do full clears either. If we had unexplored rooms and the portal activated… we were far more likely just to hop straight in than to spend any more time. This become more so as we got into the last few flights and it was clear that we were all getting tired of the run. I am super thankful to my friends because I probably would not have successfully pugged my way through that one. I have had great luck with 1-10 and 51-60… but pretty much any other set I try they end up failing miserably and I am just out thirty minutes worth of frustration in the process. Grace on the other had has somehow managed to pug her way to 100, and I salute her. Her intestinal fortitude for dealing with strangers is so much stronger than mine. After running 1-50 for Muspel over the weekend, and then running 51-100 for me last night… I think it might be a long while before I sign up for another complete run of Palace of the Dead. I greatly prefer speed running the first flight over and over to trying to do the entire thing in a single sitting.