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Quest List Clean-Up

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve now reached a point on my Warrior where I feel like I am prepared for Dawntrail. I’ve gotten my gear level up to 630 and can technically do all of the content in the game if I so choose. I’ve started focusing on my Dark Knight a bit in trying to get it leveled to 90 as well with me splitting time between roulettes of running Frontlines and Mainstory with DRK, Trials and Alliance Raids with MCH, and then pretty much everything else with WAR. This is giving me one to two levels per day on Dark Knight given that I am also doing the Fae and Hippo dailies as well for an additional boost of experience. I am still having a blast tanking things, and plan on shifting to Gunbreaker whenever I have dinged 90 with Dark Knight.

Probably after I wrap up my tanks I will pop back over and snag Ninja and level it to 90 because that would round out everything but Reaper. I figure Reaper, Sage, and the two new jobs of Viper and Pictomancer will be treated as their own separate adventures at some point. Why do I want everything to max level? So that I will stop hoarding gear on the off chance that I might need it. This is a problem that I have and the only way I know around it is to max out all the things. At some point, I really would love to begin working on crafters because my “Land” jobs are still at Shadowbringers levels and my “Hand” jobs never graduated out of the old world. Crafting in this game is way too tedious for my tastes normally. I greatly prefer the “buy X amount of Y resource and make Z number of items to cap” crafting systems from other MMORPGs.

I think my real focus over the next few days is going to be doing my best to clear as many things out of my quest log as I can for the moment. I am sitting on 20 of 30 quests and would really like to see this cleared out a bit more before the launch of the expansion to give me some more headroom for questing. A lot of these will be simple enough but will require me to do specific content. A lot of the raid content I will probably do as a Machinist because I am just not sure I am ready for raiding yet as a warrior after having just gained back my ability to comfortably do dungeons. Come Dawntrail however I really want to do all of the raid content on Curve and will be pugging that if needed to accomplish it. I am not sure I will ever do Savage, but I at least want to clear the normals every week. I have a lot of debris in my quest log of raids long gone like Sigmascape and even some Alexander stuff.

I’ve unlocked the three Variant dungeons and can now run those, but I have not devoted the time to soloing them. I kind of love that there is now content in the game that can be completed with a variable party size, and that has multiple endings similar to the dungeons in Guild Wars 2. I think it would be fun to Duo these, but I would have to tip Ace over the edge into resubscribing to really make that happen. I am also really interested in the Criterion dungeons, which are similar to something like Mythic Plus is in World of Warcraft. I really dig all of the variable difficulty levels of content for variable sizes of parties so that if you have a certain number of friends that are available to do something, you can probably find something meaningful to fill your time doing.

As far as catching up on content goes, I think my focus is going to be getting up to date in Hildebrand. I fell off the wagon at some point in the past and know now that I am multiple quest series behind on this content. I know that the latest series is also what unlocks the relic weapons and that they are fairly easy to accomplish which is to some chagrin of the community. I remember the Bozja weapons were really easy to get started but a pain in the ass to complete. At some point, I would love to get to the point where I understand the appeal of either Eureka or Bozja but I have not been willing to devote the time to get into either system. They have both felt needlessly obtuse.

Mostly I feel pretty solid with where I am for the start of a new expansion. Both my Main job of choice WAR, and my DPS of choice are ready to go. It is going to be my intention to try and swap between these two so that maybe I exist in the main story with them both at 90 or pretty close to it. I’ve also emptied out my bags and Chocobo saddlebags so I am ready for an influx of new gear. I need to spend a bit more time clearing out my vaults because really… I think I am going to commit to buying full sets of Poetics gear at levels 80 and 90 for various jobs to level them up to 100 eventually. At that point… I don’t really need all that tweener gear because a fully maxed-out set of 80 gear can take you all of the way to 90 and I figure the same will be true for leveling to 100.

I’m trying really hard to get better about letting things go, because really if I want something again… it is relatively straightforward to go get it. I wish FFXIV had a better cosmetic system similar to the games that collect appearances as you acquire items. However, I feel like I will always be wanting things on the systems level because either due to design limitations of the game, or technical constraints… Final Fantasy XIV will always feel slightly behind the curve in the user interface and systems department. I just have to learn to accept its shortcomings and move on with my life, because I realize I am an outlier in the fact that I have played 500+ hours in most of the major MMORPGs out there and as such know there are much better solutions to be had. All games though have their shortcomings, and as much as I would love to normalize the playing field… that is never going to happen.

Problems With Goals

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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a tangent post, but given that, I don’t have anything terribly pressing to talk about… I am going to roll with it. I have a problem with goals. What I mean by that is not that I necessarily have a problem setting goals, but that I have a problem with accomplishing them. There is something baked into my brain that upon accomplishing a goal that required quite a bit of work… I suddenly want nothing to do with the thing after achieving it. This has been a curse for me throughout the years, that upon cresting that hill and accomplishing whatever it was that I thought I wanted… I no longer want it anymore. For example, I set forth the goal of getting to level 100 in Diablo IV this season, and instead of reveling in the accomplishment and joining in all of the reindeer games that are gated behind that level… I mostly checked out of the experience.

Similarly, I had a blast with Mists of Pandaria Remix in World of Warcraft while I was grinding towards an objective. I wanted to unlock all of the gear slots, which required me to complete all of the heroic dungeons, and heroic scenarios, and complete all of the normal mode dungeons that I had to get groups for manually. Once I completed that… I fell into the routine of farming World Bosses every day and then checking out… basically losing all forward momentum. It isn’t just that I lose focus and fail to set a goal… I began to reject whatever activity it was that I was doing and hop furiously over to something else. In the case of PMIX I tried leveling a few more alts but never really gained the same level of enjoyment out of it.

Honestly, I am not sure why I am so surprised by this each time it happens. I know I experienced the same thing when playing through Dragonflight. I finished the story, did a few days of world quests, and then decided that I was mostly done with the game in its entirety and bounced. Even in my beloved Path of Exile, I have experienced a bit of this. I’ve made far fewer characters in this league than I have in any previous. I set forth a series of goals but the major overarching one was completing the Gruelling Gauntlet Grinds challenge, and after finishing that I mostly checked out of the league only to return recently when a friend needed assistance with something. It is like there is a toggle switch in my brain that flips when I have checked something off my “to-do” list and then immediately wants to shed any presence of that thing from my brain.

I think in part this is why I occasionally drag my feet when I am enjoying something. For example, right now I am having a blast in Guild Wars 2 again. I am slowly working towards crafting my third legendary weapon but trying not to grind it out so much so that it becomes one of these overarching goals of mine. Similarly, I’ve yet to finish up the Secrets of the Obscure campaign because I am somewhat afraid that once I do so I might check out of the game again for an indeterminate amount of time. It is like I am trying to keep the fun going for as long as I can before finishing things up. There is something about that finality that I have never liked. I hate finishing a book series for example, and have been dragging my feet on reading the 4th book in the Stormlight Archive series because I know… that is all we have for the time being.

I’ve been back in Final Fantasy XIV playing through the post-Endwalker story and have honestly been having a lot of fun with it. I did not expect to become emotionally invested in it quite in the manner that I have. Similarly, I am afraid that when I catch up to the story, I am going to “nope” out of the game as I have done before. Prior to the launch of Endwalker, I went on this whole mission to level everything to 80, and I accomplished it… then was mostly done with Endwalker the second I finished the story. Basically, I know that I do not personally have a healthy relationship with finishing things. I am not exactly certain how I played World of Warcraft for as long as I did. A lot of that was the fact that I was heavily engaged in a raiding community and with that many goals that were never fulfilled. As a solo player, I find that I get easily distracted by the next thing on the horizon when I finish with anything.

Maybe all of this is okay, and I should just learn to accept myself. However, I find myself jealous of folks who can stick with the same thing day in and day out without wavering. The folks who get super engaged in a single community baffle me, especially given that I was once one of those people. I am not sure what changed in my brain and whether or not I can recuperate the part of me that used to stick with something for years at a time. Granted I tend to hyper-focus on a single thing at a time, but also quickly burn through it. I am hoping to delay the inevitable with Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV for as long as I can so that I can at the very least see my way through Dawntrail and see the content drop for Janthir Wilds.

All of this said… I know that major distractions are looming on the horizon that will claim me. I know I will play Last Epoch Cycle 2 when it drops in early July. I also know that I am very likely to play my way through Path of Exile 3.25 when it drops in late July or early August. So maybe it is okay that I keep jumping ship to the next thing because ultimately given enough time… I return refreshed and ready for more. At some point, I want to dig back into Valheim or New World, because I feel like I am never 100% done with a game that I have hyper-fixated on in the past… I am just done with it for the moment. Maybe I am just living that content locust lifestyle.

I’ve joked and said that blogging is often therapy for me and that I don’t set out writing a post with a fixed ending. This is one of those cases because I started out the post pretty down on myself because of my inability to follow through after accomplishing a goal, and now suddenly feel less bad about that practice as I near the end of this post. Anyways if you have made it this far… thanks for sticking around for my nonsense.

John Wayne and the Milkshake

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Good Morning Folks! Technically it is morning still at the time of writing this but it is considerably later in the day than I normally do a blog post. I’m in a funk. I think I can fully admit that right now. The thought of sitting down to write a blog post on most days when I am uncertain what I want to actually talk about… is a bit of a challenge at the moment. When I am actively sharing a build I am working on, or yammering about some cool game I am playing I do pretty well. When I bore myself thinking about what I have been up to… it doesn’t really bode well for trying to convert that into something readable. So instead you are getting an adventure in AI Image Generation using Stable Diffusion. This morning one of my coworkers was all excited about prompting Microsoft CoPilot to draw pictures for him.

I think this is a thing everyone goes through when they first start playing with AI Image generation. I tend to do more surrealist prompts… for example, I set forth the basic concept of “John Wayne Drinking a Milkshake”. This was more of a chore than I figured it would be. I had Luke Skywalker eating a bagel rather easily… but I was also trying to explain the concept of “hallucinations” to my coworker and this served as a good lesson. The above image is pretty much what I consider to be the most cogent example of what was generated. There are still some weird things going on with the eyes… and the milkshake that was rendered seems to be cookies and cream… which then was also inexplicably applied to the sleeves of the shirt because that makes perfect sense.

It was one hell of a journey to get there. At first, I thought I would try and get it to spit out “John Wayne in a 57 Chevy drinking a Milkshake”. There are so many things wrong with this image. Firstly you have the impossible space of a car that is sort of wrapping around the figures in a nightmare hellscape with two not-quite steering wheels… Legs that attach out of the wrong places… and right-side John Wayne appears to be sitting on the lap of a three-legged left-side John Wayne. Then there is the playdough fingers of the right subject and the extra joints of the left subject’s most visible arm and the melted playdough nature of the other arm. Legitimate nightmare fuel. The color palate is good though and FEELS like a 50s almost 60s-era photo. I decided that the bit of the prompt about the 57 Chevy was too challenging and that I did not want to fuck with it any longer so I abandoned it.

Let’s ignore the fact that we once again have two John Waynes. There are parts of this that look pretty solid. I have no clue why I got shirtless erotic John Wayne trying to hand me a Milkshake that someone is obviously holding with two hands… as evidenced by the phantom figures. There is some jacked-up perspective stuff going on where the mangled hand of shirtless Wayne is somehow holding the straw… which is much closer to the camera than the figure is. Like if you could somehow remove all of the nonsense on the left side of the picture and just have seated-Wayne at the counter with a single milkshake it would be somewhat reasonable.

Shit just kept getting weirder the deeper I went. This is probably my favorite because again two John Waynes… one of which is lovingly holding quite possibly the worlds largest milkshake. The other one is inexplicably wearing a miniskirt and one leg appears to be a table leg. I also sort of love the super skinny tall milkshake that is sitting on the ground. Basically, I wanted to show some hallucinations… and I got a fever dream to explain that concept. This is the problem I have had with “AI Images” is that for a second when scrolling past them… they seem normal. The longer you look at them the more surreal and nonsensical they become.

I finally had to start including that he was “standing alone” to start to reign in the nonsense and simplify things further. He was no longer drinking a milkshake but just holding one. Eventually, I got a few images that began to look reasonable. Even then the prompt was still a bit fucked up because if you go back to that first image for a figure who was “alone” there were still a couple of dead-eyed “AI Zombies” in the background. Basically I feel like AI in its current state is a neat party trick. If you want “Superman Riding a Horse with a Shotgun”, you are going to get something that fills that prompt… no matter how confusing or contorted it winds up looking. If you want specificity or correct answers… I am just not sure if we are at a point where large language models can fill that bill. I for example would never want to put anyone’s life in the hands of an AI-based decision engine yet.

If you want some surrealist nonsense as AI attempts to draw you a picture of something called “Glorbo”, then it absolutely has you covered.

Monsters Mastered

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of my evening hanging out in Path of Exile down in Delve hunting for bosses. I finished up the Masterful Monsters challenge last night which involved defeating 50 Delve, Syndicate, Bestiary, or Incursion bosses aka the endgame bosses from the original “Master Missions” that went away this league. I would say the vast majority of those 50 bosses came from Delve since I spent most of my time down there, but I did pick up a number of beast spawns to knock out some of those as well. It seems like Curiosity Vaal Aspects have slowed down in sales, so I decided to go ahead and turn one of them into an Adorned Jewel. I didn’t get a high roll but I at least got one that is over 100% increased buff so usable. I am contemplating swapping over to the Adorned version of the Righteous Fire build so might create a few more if sales don’t pick up.

I am still not certain how many of these achievements I am going to go for, but in theory I should be able to knock out the Heist one called Tactful Thievery easily enough given the stockpile of contracts I have. Sanctified Scarabs will also be pretty easy given napkin math I will need to run 9 more maps with four scarabs to hit the goal. Map Magnificence is a much longer stretch… but also doable if I just put my head down and grind maps. Once again per napkin math that should take me around 260 t16 maps to finish that one off. In theory, I could just burn through all of my corrupted maps on my Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion and not worry much about the rewards. After that, the objectives become significantly harder. If I can do The Feared… I will wrap up another one but given how hard Atziri was in that fight… I am not sure I will be able to survive long enough to take her down.

I also spent some time leveling my Witch, who for the moment is not yet ascended and leveling through abuse of Storm Brand of Indecision. Like I remember folks complaining heavily about how much this skill was nerfed into the ground, but it still feels phenomenal for leveling purposes. Basically, once I can equip most of the uniques I have sitting in the bank I will respec the character entirely to go down the Tornado of Elemental Turbulence path. I managed to fish for a level 1/20% quality one so I will begin muling it at level 34. I am going to be extremely slow leveling this character because at the moment I think I care more about knocking out “acheesements” than I do leveling yet another character.

In another piece of news… Maxroll has thrown their hat in the Path of Exile Bulk Trading game. On top of this, they have also created their own TFT competitor Discord that will eventually connect up with the new website. Recently Zizaran partnered with Maxroll, and he appears to now be the owner of this new Discord. On top of that streamers Subtractem, Crouching Tuna, and Tenkiei have joined in to moderate the moderators and make sure things stay transparent and on the up and up. So I wish them luck and I hope they continue to expand the functionality of this new site. So far it seems pretty solid for bulk trading and I might try and liquidate my coffins at some point over the weekend. I am still picking them up but I think I am mostly not going to engage with graveyard crafting any further. It just isn’t really my jam.

I don’t love that it is “Yet Another Discord” and I’ve only minimally interacted with TFT, but I do like Maxroll quite a bit and think that they are doing a good job of trying to create “best in breed” applications to support the games that they cover. I can’t see that anything they have done so far cannot be a positive in the grand scheme of things. Partnering with Zizaran was a good move as the official host of his guides. Pohx would be someone else I would love to see them work with, but he has invested a lot of time in his own website. Anyways I know that these posts are only useful for folks who are already engaged in Path of Exile, but given that it is already a struggle to keep posting this is kind of what you are going to get.