Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Friends! It is finally that time where we record our big full spoiler show for Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion. It has become tradition to record one of these when all of our crew have played through the expansion and yesterday afternoon Kodra finally finished it. We also ended up recording for far longer than we have EVER recorded for one of these shows. We started about an hour early and still finished up two hours late for a grand total of around four hours of podcast to edit.
The end result is that we are chopping this down into three separate shows which is a first for us. We have a storied history of double episodes but never a triple. Hopefully you enjoy the show, and if Final Fantasy XIV is not your jam then I guess we will see you hopefully in four weeks?
Good Morning Friends. I am so screwed up right now in my schedule. The last few days we have not been getting up and around until 9 am, because my wife has been on spring break all week and then I took a few days off to join her. Always in the past our cat based alarm clock would kick in and Josie would get hyper active trying to wake us up. For whatever reason she has decided that it is a far better use of her time to just keep snuggling with us as we sleep peacefully… which results in us just not waking up at all. I foresee us needing to set an alarm clock for the next few days or Monday is going to be very awful.
In Guild Wars 2 the Quaggan are a effectively anthropomorphic dolphins. One thing that Guild Wars in general really nails is just how damned good it is at creating these anthro races. Quaggans however take the cake when it comes to adorableness. However now that I am up in the northern reaches I have encountered the even more adorable Arctic variants that are based on Orcas. I now want to live with these adorable frens. Cooo Quaggan just blew your mind!
I’ve continued to slowly push my way into the Living World 3 zones and I have to say… I love the way these are designed. Bloodstone Fen was pretty damned horrible, but I have greatly enjoyed Ember Bay, Bitterfrost Frontier, and now Lake Doric are phenomenal. There are so many activities popping off at any given moment, and they all feel extremely rewarding. It has been extremely challenging for me to sit down and say that I am going to focus fire the quests, because I want to spend every moment doing all the things and getting all the rewards. I have been waiting anxiously to get to Lake Doric because apparently this is the prime real estate for farming crafting materials. I’ve not spent much time in there, but the Centaur camp does seem pretty awesome.
My biggest complaint with Living World 3 has been that every fight appears to be a “find the stupid gimmick” encounter. Like this one from last night where I had to make the big invincible boss charge through all of the little invincible veteran mobs, so that he would destroy them in the process. Then finally after doing all of that… the fight took mere seconds to finish because I actually got to fight something rather than juggling gimmicks. I really hate gimmick fights. They always just seem like a way of dragging the fight out rather than letting you burn something down and be done with it. I get that they are trying to extend the length of the encounter and make it feel more epic… but it just doesn’t end up doing that when something goes from “unkillable” to dead when you have jumped through a sequence of artificial hoops. I hope this improves as we move into later content.
These encounters aside, I am still very much enjoying my time in Guild Wars 2. I sorta wish I could have arrived at a point of peace with this game a decade ago. I feel like I have lost so much time with something I am really enjoying. There is reasonably no way in hell I will ever really get caught up. Instead I am just sorta chewing away at whatever content fits my fancy for the moment. Guild Wars 2 really is sort of the ultimate choose your own adventure experience. It isn’t going to push you towards any one objective but when you know how to find them… there are so many long term grinds that feel worthwhile.
Good Morning Friends. I am moving in slow motion today because I ended up sleeping in super late. I am technically in vacation mode for the next few days but decided I should probably still blog. In Guild Wars 2 last night I made some movement in Living World Season 3. I also came to a decision with what to do regarding my Perm Auction contract. Ultimately I went with an instant sale and got it over with because just having to think about it was stressing me out. All of the third party ways of trading goods seemed super sketchy and I decided I would rather have “some” money hassle free as opposed to maybe getting zero money and jumping through a bunch of hoops. The first thing I did with the windfall was spend about 500 gold in materials to help the Guild Hall upgrade a little quicker.
This screenshot does not do this justice. I am sorta terrified of deep water, and one of the most horrifying moments in my life for me was traveling to the edge of the continental shelf in a submarine and seeing the seemingly dark endless abyss. As a result games like Subnautica trigger a deep primal fear in me at times, and yesterday Guild Wars 2 absolutely tapped into this. I was swimming through an area in Mount Maelstrom and saw this gigantic fish thing and for reference… I am maybe about half the size of its fin. It is very hard to really appreciate the scale while in a very flattened screenshot and not seeing it in motion. I did my best to avoid it because it was also a champion.
I did have a moment yesterday that made me want to throw my laptop. I was doing this mission where I was supposed to be bonding with Aurene the baby dragon. The final stage was to fight a Mordrem and there is an ability that I had to fire that caused both my character and Aurene to attack at the same time. Problem is we would collectively get the mob down to around 25% health and then it would instantly heal back up. So my original thought process was that I was simply not burning hard enough to be able to defeat it in the hard time limit. I fought this thing for over an hour straight trying to burn harder because it could not kill me, and I clearly could not kill it.
Eventually I AFK’d during the fight and started watching YouTube videos to try and figure out what the gimmick was. It turns out that it is impossible to kill it in one go, and it does this ability that causes it to regenerate health by damaging you and Aurene. However it also gains health for damaging your pets. As a Necromancer on average I have somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten pets up at any given time, so to me it seemed like the Modrem was just healing back to full health instantly because it was soaking in tiny bits of health… but from like 12 targets at a time causing it to jump straight back to 100% health.
This is one of the frustrating things that can happen in Guild Wars 2 is that there are times… especially with older content that it is really bad at messaging what the hell is actually going on. Unfortunately with a Necromancer I have no control over my pets and once I have summoned them… I can’t dismiss them. So what ended up happening is I had to struggle to find a way to actually die on the encounter, and then restart at the check point and do the fight without my pets. After an hour of failing… the entire fight only took a few minutes once I figured out the gimmick that I had to follow. I really hate gimmick fights regardless of the game, but I hate them even more when it is deeply unclear what is actually going on.
Good Morning Friends! I have been piddling around the last few days trying to get my original GW2 main in order and see if I can salvage anything from it. Don’t get me wrong… I am still madly in love with the Necromancer Reaper but I do have some pangs of regret for never quite managing to love the Warrior. This has lead me down a bunch of paths, and one of these is to work on my build a bit. Right now it is in a state of flux but I am trying to settle in on an Axe/Axe and Rifle build. Rifle is effectively how I used to do big open world events and survive as a warrior, and seeing as I found a place I enjoy with my Guardian I am trying to make something solo work as a Warrior for shenanigans. Granted at this point I am sorta cosplaying a Revenant, but Rytlock does have a very classic look.
Part of this revitalization of the Warrior is that I pushed up Armorsmithing into the relevant 400+ range granting me access to make heavy armors as well as my existing ability to make light armor. All of the running amok I have been doing lately had mostly restocked my reserves of materials and it was pretty reasonable to grind up armorsmithing without much need to dip into the trading post. After that I had to add about 20 gold in materials but was able to bang out a full set of marauder gear to see if that improves things. I think the biggest problem with the Warrior is that I had no real design gear wise for him. He was wearing basically the cheapest exotic item that I could find in each slot, and I had no idea what I was doing and how likely that damaged his playability. Marauder is basically just higher survival Berserker gear, so I went with that and am going to be focused on a power build of some sort.
Other than this I have been spending a bunch of time working on World Completion. I find working my way through all of the old world zones to be extremely relaxing, and honestly lucrative given the number of events that I inevitably end up doing. At this point I am systematically working my way through the “Norn” zones after having burned through the “human” zones. I’ve knocked out a few other zones at random because I was just really close to finishing them already. I have a spreadsheet that I am keeping track of things in, but largely I have 16 out of 31 zones completed. I think my goal at the moment is to wrap up the Norn lands and then move on to Charr territory.
The other conundrum I am dealing with at the moment is that I seemingly won the lottery a few nights ago with a Black Lion Chest. There are a bunch of items that you can pull from these but among the rarest and I believe the most expensive is the Permanent Bank Access Contract. It is super easy to get time limited versions of this item, but the permanent version is apparently super rare. It has a theoretical face value of around 5,000 gold which is just a truly staggering amount. However due to auction house fees… I would have to have I believe 500 gold or so in order to post this. I am uncertain how direct sales work and if I really would get all of the 4,411 that it currently has as a direct sale price or if I would still get a huge chunk of gold removed from that as well. There are third party direct selling options but I am worried about fraud there, and have yet to really dive into the reddit/discord options for that.
For now the item sits in my bank account while I mull over what to do with it. I feel like it is way the hell too valuable to actually use, especially given that I already have easy bank access through the Mistlock Sanctuary pass. If I ever sell it, I am going to give a chunk of gold to Thalen to help with the needs of the Guild Hall seeing as he actually has those systems figured out and I am yet to wrap my brain around them. It seems like 5,000 gold would be “set for life” territory in a game like this where getting gold is rather challenging.
