Hey friends, apologies for the lack of a post yesterday but I had issues. At roughly 3 pm on August 16th, we lost internet and did not regain it until roughly 10 am yesterday some 19 hours later. I have no clue what happened but during that 19 hours, I received 4 notices that we were being impacted by a current outage and 4 notices that the issues had been resolved… three of these were a lie. Whatever was going on seemed to impact a pretty wide area because one of my co-workers some 20+ miles away was also impacted and had their internet magically come back at the same time as I did. During the outage, I learned that I could in fact that I could function pretty normally while tethered to my mobile phone, including but not limited to attending conference calls, remoting into work, and even playing some Final Fantasy XIV.
Something that I have come to a bit of a decision on, is that Housing Savage is not for me. Over the last several days, I had been following a housing discord and going over to whatever plot happened to be open at the time. There were a few things that I have learned as a result. Firstly housing plots are open way more often than I ever realized, and two that milling around and clicking a sign over and over was actively harming my enjoyment of the game. We have a lovely Free Company house, and this affords me the luxury of a very cheap room that I can decorate. Getting a small house would effectively give me twice as much space, along with the ability to control the exterior but it would not actively change my gameplay experience. I already have access to pretty much anything I COULD have access to, through the Free Company house.
For those unfamiliar with the current system, if you have not entered your home in 45 days the plot is reclaimed and all of your stuff is dumped on the Resident Caretaker along with 80% of the value of the plot. When a plot is reclaimed an invisible timer is started before it actually becomes available on the market, and with this, the waiting begins. There are a number of theories as to how long this timer is, but based on what little hard information I could find it seems to be between 30 minutes and 36 hours and anywhere in between. During this time folks hang out in the housing, district clicking on the sign, and a number of individuals have figured out how to bot this process. What I had done recently was hang out there while waiting on instance queues to pop and periodically click the sign in a vague attempt to get a property.
The entire process of trying to care about getting a home though was bringing me down. I would far rather be out in the world doing things, than milling around with a bunch of bots trying to win the fastest fingers first race with an indeterminate starting line. When the housing district opens in Ishgard, there is supposedly a lottery system being introduced into the game that will allow someone to plunk money down on a property and let RNGesus choose who actually wins it. This would be so preferable to the current experience. I would happily go visit a plot, throw down my earnest money, and then walk away and continue playing the game hoping that maybe just maybe the randomizer is kind to me. My fear however is that this lottery is only going to apply to Ishgard, and as much as I do not love that town… I will absolutely go for a small property there. Once you get a single small, it becomes much easier to relocate to another property.
I am still on my mission to level all of the things to 80 before the launch of Endwalker. Right now I am largely focused on Ninja and Scholar. Currently, I do all of the easy progress activities on the Ninja, and when I feel like I am down to just no-lifer grinding activities, I switch back over to the Scholar and do some Palace of the Dead. Dragoon is also fairly high up there, but is largely there to soak Faerie dailies if I don’t have any other 70 somethings available to level through them. I don’t love Dragoon nearly as much as I once did, so I am fine with letting it sit there in limbo and level extremely slowly. Scholar is being worked up largely because it knocks two off my list when I get it to 80, given that summoner is a freebie associated with the Arcanist base class.
This also means that I spent a good chunk of last night working on the Heavensward class quests for Scholar. That is one word of warning for anyone that is leveling multiple jobs. They changed the way this worked starting with Stormblood, but for ARR and Heavensward you will absolutely be missing key abilities if you did not do your job quest chain. In Stormblood you just automagically get the new abilities and the same is true with anything gained during Shadowbringer. Essentially the first quest for Heavensward on each class is going to start at your trainer from A Realm Reborn, and then often times move into Heavensward zones from that point forward. In most of the cases there has been a bit of a hand off to a new NPC, but in the Scholar quest it continued the story of Wanderer’s Palace.
I’ve also periodically spent some time over on Catghast when the Palace of the Dead grind gets to me. I just managed to get him through Thousand Maws of Totorak, and I have to say tanking right now is in the best state it has ever been in FFXIV. All of these dungeons that used to be a pain in the butt, are a breeze given how easy spamming a multi-target threat ability is. I am probably more engaged with Final Fantasy XIV than I have been since the release of the game, and I am riding this high for as long as it lasts. I am sure the shine will start to tarnish eventually, but for now I am having a blast.
