Betrayal and Turmoil

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Good Morning Friends. It was a bit of a rough weekend with my asthma troubles starting on Friday and continuing through the weekend at least on some level. Then of course we got back our long lost missing hour of sleep… which never actually leaves me as refreshed as you think it would. I’ve been in a bit of a stupor and so far this morning doesn’t seem to be any different. I am largely doing fine and I am hoping at some point the coffee kicks in and I can get on with my day. My gaming this weekend was largely limited to New World as I continue to chase a large number of competing objectives. I’ve most recently been farming Orichalcum ore in a mining set in the hopes to getting Void Ore that I can at some point turn into Voidbent armor. With everyone trying to gear up, there has been a bit of a landrun on the stuff and finding an area that is not actively farmed is a pretty significant challenge.

Eight days ago when I posted a picture of the server map, Syndicate held five territories, Marauders held five territories, and Covenant had managed to get back a single territory. Unfortunately things are continuing to go downhill for my purple family, because as of last night we hold three territories, Covenant are up to two, and Marauders are up to six. How did this happen so fast you might ask? Well I talked about this the other day but two of the most PVP focused Syndicate companies defected to Covenant and in doing so left Everfall in shambles repair wise. Apex and Planet X were both at the core of much of the war planning for our faction and them betraying us has left not only a power vacuum but also a debt of knowledge.

I spent Saturday night in a three hour long meeting of the leaders of various Minda Syndicate companies, trying to determine the best course of action in how to “unite the clans”. Essentially what is left is Blades of DaTang that hold down Brightwood and Ebonscale Reach, and I think for the time being there is no real threat to those territories falling. DaTang are great folks, but the problem is that they don’t blend super well with other teams and tend to do things in their own way in large part to the majority of that company does not speak English. They are willing to assist as they can but aren’t really in a good place to be leading a larger war effort.

Once you get past DaTang, there are a bunch of scattered smaller groups that can each field a squad or two which means there is going to need to be coordination at a level that we are just not used to. With Apex and Planet X gone, they also took with them a lot of the folks that had the mechanical knowledge in how to put together a winning team and how to call the shots during the heat of battle. That is not to say that there will not be folks stepping up to the plate and learning, but one single act essentially set us back a month in PVP progress. So I expect in the coming days to see more shifting around on the map with Covenant making a serious bid for Windsward tonight. I would love to see Everfall purple again but in truth we are going to have to accept occupation until forces can be geared and trained to take it back.

I guess for now I am thankful that when Everfall was previously occupied, I shifted to using Brightwood as my hub of operations and ultimately that is where I purchased my first Tier 4 house. It is my hope that DaTang can continue to stand as a bulwark against the other two armies. That said the truth is as a completely PVE player, all of this shifting of tiles on the map is more about faction pride than actual functionality. Sure I can’t transfer items from my banks… but I never actually did that because I am too cheap to pay the transfer fees. Sure teleports are more costly… but I rarely ever teleported with Azoth and instead used my housing and inn network as a way of getting close enough and then running the rest of the distance. With a house in Windsward, Brightwood and Weavers Fen that gave me a cheap teleport to get pretty close to whatever content I happened to be doing.

Currently my Inn is in Everfall but that might shift significantly in the coming weeks… especially once the linked Marketplace goes into the game. Currently there is a bit of an Ironforge and Orgrimmar problem happening in New World, with two cities being the hub of all commerce on the server. Brightwood does a fair amount of trade as well, but nothing compared to Everfall and Windsward. Once the Marketplace can be accessed from any town, there are significant more reasons to spread out from the central corridor of the map. As I get to doing more endgame content it might make sense for me to move my Inn to Shattered Mountain, just to have rapid transit into that zone.

AggroChat #366 – FFXIV Endwalker Prologue Show

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Featuring:  Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Last week we brought you the Epilogue show for the patch content following the release of Shadowbringers that brings that core story to a close.  This week we dive into the content following that, namely patches 5.4, 5.5, and 5.55 that serve as the prologue to the events that we will be experiencing starting November 19th with the release of Endwalker.  I feel like we probably know less about what is going to happen going into this expansion than we have previously, but we talk about what takes place and what we do know about the future.  We also talk a bit about our mixed feelings regarding specifically the villains that we are going into this expansion with.

Topics Discussed

  • Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers
    • Patch 5.4 – Futures Rewritten
    • Patch 5.5 – Death Unto Dawn – Part 1
    • Patch 5.55  – Death Unto Dawn – Part 2
    • Discussion of the Endwalker Media Tour

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A Zerg Is Born

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Good Morning Friends! It is the weekend and I am very happy that my wife comes back tonight. She had the opportunity to present at an education conference and flew out Tuesday. I have to say when you get so used to having another human being in the house… things get really weird when the house is empty. Since I have been working remotely for roughly two years my spouse has represented that much-needed anchor to my daily cycle. Last night was a rough night, but mostly because I had an Asthma attack at 1 am and had to get up to take a breathing treatment. I am groggy as hell today, and moving slower than normal but at least I know this evening things will start to normalize a bit when she gets home.

This morning I woke up to some really weird news. I am part of the Minda Syndicate discord and since I am the governor of a company I have access to the leadership chat channel. It seems that yesterday while I was off doing fun things all night… we had a mass migration of some of the Syndicate’s strongest PVPers over to Covenant. Apex Fishing Co. previously held Everfall and kept it on lock for weeks until literally exploits in the PVP system caused them to lose it. Last week they managed to take it back and now that entire guild has migrated to Covenant and formed the Apex Mining Co. Similarly at the same time Planet X which is a strong PVP force even though they have never held a territory did something similar and founded Planet XXX on Covenant.

The reasoning was with the upcoming PVP changes giving more benefit for flagging, they wanted to be on the side that was underpopulated. However, I think they took their own problems with them because I cannot really see that many Syndicates actually running around the world flagged on a regular basis regardless of the luck bonus. I do however fully expect that the map is going to start flipping yellow. Goose the leader of the Minda Syndicate Discord took over as governor of the company now called Mindicate that holds Everfall, and I am hoping that he can muster the support in order to defend it successfully. Not being a PVPer at all, I have a feeling that we will once again lose our chosen Capital city. Brightwood looks to be the strongest basion for team purple since it is defended by the Blades of DaTang which appears to be staying strong on our faction.

I started my evening by participating in a few zone invasions. I have to say there is more than a little fatigue setting in, and it seems like it is harder and harder to get folks mustered to sign up for these events. It used to be a guessing game as to if I would actually get chosen for the team, and now I pretty reliably get chosen for every single Invasion that I sign up for. I view it as 630 gold for about 30 minutes worth of time spent, and it also lets me get out and experience more of the community. Last night I started with the defense of Green-held Reekwater and wound up helping out Cozy Cafe in Mourningdale. I think one of the much-needed changes is to allow players to sign up for events from anywhere in the world. Mourningdale and Reekwater are very out of the way for the standard flow of players through the game, so you have to either burn through a significant chunk of Azoth to teleport there or make a long run.

As I was in Mourningdale I kept seeing messages in recruitment about a “Zerg” run from Give Er from Shadow Wardens. The end of my invasion happened to coincide neatly with them changing locations so I hopped on the train. What ended up occurring was some of the most fun nonsense I have participated in a game in a very long time. It reminded me a bit of the fervor of the Hunt Trains in FFXIV or the big event clearing groups from Guild Wars 2. Essentially I teleported out to Ebonscale Reach and we went through a whirlwind of activities taking down some portals and storming the elite areas of the zone. It is nonsense to see a group of players bounding off a cliff trying desperately not to fall behind. So I followed this army, looted so many boxes, and took down a handful of world bosses.

As a result of my boss farming the other day, along with all of the loot gained from last night’s Zerg run, I have bumped up my snapshot to around 550 on armor pieces and 530ish on weapons. For whatever reason weapons seem to lag behind armor by quite a bit in the gear leveling process. There were a handful of pieces that I kept and I even managed to get a few pieces of the Arcana crafting set that I have banked for when someone needs that. Essentially out in the world, there are drops for each crafting profession, and wearing a full set is what allows the crafter to reliably hit item level 600 weapons and armor. I really need to get more serious about my crafting so that I can ultimately make some of those items.

Due to all of my recent adventures, I have a bank full of legendary crafting materials. That is one of the interesting things about endgame crafting in New World, is that in many cases you don’t “learn” the pattern. Instead, it shows up as something that you can craft when you possess the “Artifact” required to craft the item. I have the Artifacts for a Bow, a couple of Shields, a couple of Spears, a nice Warhammer, and this Hatchet. I’ve also picked up a few items that I think are associated with patterns that may not be in the game yet. What I like about these Legendary patterns is that they craft a fixed item with a specific stat loadout and not something that is randomly generated. There is a handful of these that I would like to have to be honest, but I need to get my refining up to 200 so I can start cranking out the materials.

While I didn’t get any screenshots from it, Eliyon and I ended up roaming around in Edensgrove last night. We started off with the initial goal of taking him to the boss I had been farming and starting to work on his snapshot. However what ended up happening is that we both got a quest to go to Malevolence, which is an elite area in the middle of the zone. On the way we bumped into the not quite sixty Vernie and the three of us spent the rest of the evening clearing out the elite area looking for the boss. We roamed the entire tower looking for Entropy, but it turns out the boss is not spawning at all right now due to a bug. It did prove that even with a small group made up of 2 60s and a 57 we could tackle the 62ish elite areas. In theory, we need to drag Waren along with us next time and try some of the other areas that I experienced through the Zerg group.

My hope is that these Zerg runs become a regular occurring event because it was stupid amounts of fun and we probably had sixty or so players running along. It has made me realize how badly the game needs a “raid group” construct for big open-world activities. We joined together in a bunch of individual five-player groups which worked well enough but would have worked better if there had been a raid group that we could have started.

Farming Adjorjan

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The other day when I posted my systems review post, one of the things that I highlighted was how annoying the gear snapshot mechanic was. Since then I have been trying to find a reasonable way to push this number up, and realistically the only way is by grinding something over and over and getting drops to slowly bump the number up. This has lead to me trying to seek out a way to do this reasonably without going insane in the process. Initially I had found a spot in Shattered Mountain with a circuit of a dozen or so Angry Earth and a single boss that had a pretty decent chance of dropping loot. However this took some time to farm the spawn and given that everything was 63 or 64 it had a high chance of leading to me just getting overwhelmed.

While doing some faction quests in Edengrove last night, I stumbled upon a boss spawn on roughly a one minute timer that drops loot almost every time you kill him. The NPC in question is Adjorjan and it is located in the Gasping Summit area shown on the above map. More than anything it also seems to have a higher than average drop rate of gear with gathering luck bonuses. I’ve picked up almost a full set of logging and mining gear and a handful of pieces of skinning. So far harvesting seems to be the most rare of the four, but I have picked up a few of those as well. Additionally I’ve managed to pick up a handful of loot drops that are legendary crafting items.

Last night we even ended up with a small party of four of us that happened to wander by and stuck around to see what all the commotion was. Having a rolling party made the farming go way more smoothly given that it is still a level 62 Silver Elite. Having a few folks there to talk with also made passing the time a bit more enjoyable. At this point I have managed to bump my gear score up to the neighborhood of 525ish and one of the guys I was farming with has pushed it up into the 550s in this one spot. There are a few weird drops however of level 19ish gear, which effectively feels like a wasted chance. However it wouldn’t be New World without irrational bugs.

So essentially if you are looking for a good way of bumping up your gear score, you might check this spot out and see if anyone is farming it on your server. So far it has been well worth my time and I guess I will be here for awhile until I push my gear score up a bit higher.