I’ve been trying to figure out how to even begin to talk about Shadowbringers, especially with the limitation of not wanting to spoil anything for anyone who isn’t joining until Tuesday. I have to think at this point that is probably a very small group, given that if you are going to play a MMORPG expansion there really is no reason not to pre-order it. Regardless Shadowbringers head start began on Friday and I didn’t get in to play at all until that evening. I am woefully behind the pack in leveling because life happened this weekend in a way that pulled me off the computer.

For lack of a better term… Shadowbringers is to Final Fantasy XIV what The Burning Crusade was to World of Warcraft. This is the first time we are leaving the normal flow of the game and going somewhere that exists on another world. Both are games about broken worlds and a populace that is hanging on by a thread. However Burning Crusade represented a bombastic and comic book style version of that setting with literal fields of Hellscape or entire zones turned green from Fel energies. Instead Shadowbringers represents a much more subtle and adult version of peril… where the thing we all thought was a good thing ran amok and swept away most of the planet in a giant flood of flight energies… plunging the world into eternal daylight.

The story weaves around attempting to save this shard known as the first so it doesn’t end up triggering a cataclysm on our world known as the source. What you see is a world gone wrong… with lots of areas that will remind you so much of areas in Eorzea. Amh Araeng for example reminds me of the deserts of Southern Thanalan and parts of Ala Mhigo, just with the races and their characteristics all jumbled. Similarly Kholusia feels very much like La Noscea and with that Eulmore like a twisted version of Limsa Lominsa. I make the reference in the title but in many ways it reminds me of the subtle changes that were made to the world in Final Fantasy VI as you roam the World of Ruin.

On the Source we are well known as the Warrior of Light, and there is rarely a situation we are going into where the other party does not recognize us. In the First we are a stranger in a strange land and learn early on that we should not go about talking about our powers. This is a realm that had its own Warriors of Light, that ultimately unleashed the flood. As such it is a world that is resigned to its calamities and untrusting of any would be heroes that happen across their path wanting to lend a hand. Essentially this is the perfect version of the Outland… and the one that only Final Fantasy XIV could deliver to us. It is a setting rich in its own lore that is curiously divergent from our own, but also a setting that is going to feel eerily familiar at every turn.

As far as the class changes… I am loving Warrior and I have apparently abandoned all sense of trying to level in a measured manor. It took me some time to figure out some of the changes and I had to lean on Ashgar to tell me where my active mitigation went. Now that I am used to it however I am really enjoying myself, and loving the absence of TP. I’ve also spent some time playing Samurai and Bard but they both seem to largely be unchanged in real meaningful ways. On the other side I have heard of lots of classes that got massive reworks, and so far people seem to be enjoying them. I’ve spent some time playing as a Gunblade, which is a really weird tank but Tam seems to love it. I am sure I will play more of it as time goes on. Right now there is so much I want to do… but I am largely trying to keep myself focused on leveling and moving the MSQ forward so I don’t get left completely behind.

I am greatly enjoying myself and wish I could take the entire week to sit at home and play. I didn’t really get anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to play this weekend. Saturday was taken up by a string of horrible things going wrong… that started with an outdoor wedding on an Oklahoma summer day with a heat index of 111 degrees. I’m a little sun burned after that and the rest of the day sorta went downhill. On Sunday I had to catch up on all of the things that didn’t happen Saturday which put me feeling like I am 2 to 3 levels behind the pack. Thankfully Grace has been willing to healbutts whenever I finally unlock a dungeon, so I am at least able to progress through. However once again we are suffering from the too many tanks problem, but unfortunately… I just don’t feel comfortable playing any other role.

Also another reminder. There is a contest going on where I am giving away a 60 day time card. You can view the full contest rules over on this post, but essentially go there and leave a comment of at least two sentences telling me what you are looking forward to the most in the game. Tuesday morning I will collect the comments and decide a winner, since the cut off for the contest is the official launch day. Hopefully you too are enjoying Shadowbringers, and I was super careful not to give too much of the plot away for those who might not yet be to that point in the story.

It is official, as of reading this post Shadowbringers is now available for those who pre-ordered and got the head start. I’ve been in briefly this morning to snag a few screenshots for this post, and to create Rawrlbert the Wrothgar retainer and Lopera the Vierra retainer. That is pretty much as close to a race change as I am going to get given I am fairly committed to the lala-life. The queue was relatively short this morning, but I fully expect that by the time I get off work I will need to find an alternate activity to entertain myself while I wait for the queue to tick down.

In honor of this auspicious occasional I am running a contest of a sort. I have the digital code for a 60 day time card, and rather than using it myself I am going to be giving it away to my readers. One of the things that I hate are the giveaways that require you to sign up for thirty social media accounts to enter. Instead we are going to keep this nice and simple and your entry is making a comment on this post. In a minimum of two sentences give me a run down on what you are looking forward to with Shadowbringers or if you have been away from the game… what you are looking forward to returning to and doing the most.

It is important that you leave a valid email, because I will be choosing a winner from only the folks who gave me a way of contacting them after the contest. I will only be accepting comments that are legitimately answering the prompt, and if instead it is just a bunch of nonsense then I will drop those from the running. Once I have culled the list to only valid entries I will be using some sort of randomizer to pick the winner. The contest will run from the time of posting on June 28th through the close of day on July 2nd aka the official launch date for Shadowbringers. Here comes the TLDR summary block for the rules.

Contest Rules

• Contest Runs from June 28th through end of day July 2nd.
• To Enter Post a Comment on Tales of the Aggronaut with a minimum of two sentences either telling me what you are looking forward to the most in Shadowbringers or if you are returning to the game after a long absence what other things you are looking forward to.
• No Spammy/Nonsense Posts Will Be Accepted.
• Valid Posts Will be Gathered up and The Winner Chosen at Random.

Now I said I had no interest in forcing you to follow a bunch of accounts to enter this post. However if want to do this on your own, you can see all of the relevant social media links in the sidebar.

Help me in ushering in the Shadowbringers expansion with a bunch of interesting comments… and also maybe tell Rawrlbert what a good boy he is.

I had a bunch of objectives to accomplish last night on what is effectively the final night of Stormblood. The first was to get my tank to 360 so that I could be able to run Ghimlyt Dark. That did not happen, and instead I wound up getting side tracked helping my good friend Jess run a couple of dungeons for her Anima weapon. The first of these was Gubal Library Hard and I thought in theory we could duo it, in spite of her being concerned about needing a healer. We did perfectly fine until on the final boss I forgot about the whole hide behind rocks mechanic on the Meteor and wound up dying… which ultimately ended up killing her as well. We dusted ourselves off and made it through perfectly fine on attempt number two.

Shortly after getting underway Ashgar had logged in and briefly bemoaned losing out on free “Light”, and as a result we waited on him to finish the instance he started while we were in Gubal. If nothing else I figured things would go faster and more smoothly with three people. We could have in theory been able to complete it as a duo, but there are a handful of rough encounters. We made it through without a hitch and got those steps of her books taken care of. From there it was a bunch of the running around and doing stuff tasks that were needed which we really wouldn’t be super efficient at helping. Around about this time my friend Grace logs in, and geared shifted once more.

The entire purpose for pushing up my warrior in gear over the last few days has been to make it ready to tank the final dungeon needed for the main story quest. Grace had been frantically trying to get her way there, and I knew without a doubt that I was not capable of doing this as a Warrior. I even created that spreadsheet to try and figure out how many things I needed to pick up to make it happen. Whatever the case in the end it wound up that I wasn’t really needed. I ninja invited Ashgar to the party and then checked to see if Sita was available to dps. Both agreed and we were off doing a full Free Company group to knock out the final dungeon she needed.

We struggled a little bit on the final boss, but only because the dance is a little odd to get used to. I myself had only run the dungeon once when I did so as a Samurai for my own main story quest. We wiped once in part because we lost a Sita and then while rezzing we lost a Grace. I was the last Lala standing and wound up hopping in an explosion since there was no way at all I could finish the encounter off solo. On the second try however we got things taken care of and Grace past this final obstacle. I would assume she wrapped the rest of the story and is now like the rest of us waiting for the expansion.

The third goal of the night was to get the Bard to 60… and I almost made that goal but simply ran out of time and or oomph to push across the finish line. I needed 2-3 runs of Palace of the Dead to make it happen, but I can easily wrap that up at some point during my downtime. Palace is a great activity to do while podcasting because it is largely mindless grinding, and that sort of stuff works well while talking. I just have to watch myself to keep from running “Dalaran” style laps around Quarymill.

I had an evening where I accomplished pretty much nothing I set out to do. However I still had a really fun time with the activities I took part of. One of the things I need to learn is to do this more often. Back in my WoW days I would sort of go with the flow and tank whatever was needed for the guild. Then in recent years I have tried desperately to cling to my own list of goals and objectives and wound up getting frustrated when I was pushed off that narrow path. Turns out when I allow myself to leave the garden path I have an awful lot more fun just letting things happen as they need to. So here is hoping I can follow that bit of advice as we stare down the barrel of the impending expansion.

For a bit of some time recently… in truth the majority of Stormblood… I’ve developed a bit of a mental block against tanking. When I took my long absence from the game, it felt like in returning to it… that I just wasn’t quite certain of my abilities anymore. It was more than “I got rusty”, it was almost like I was allergic to taking responsibility for others. I could blame a lot of things, but I think in part it was due to the fact that in the real world I had a lot of responsibility thrust upon me. Right now I have sixteen people who report to me, and it has taken me a little over a year to reach a point where I am largely comfortable with that notion.

Much like my lapses in blogging from the past… the longer it went on the harder it was to start back up again. Then recently I set down the path of finishing off my Nexus weapon, and that involved soloing a plethora of dungeons. Weirdly enough the act of soloing the dungeons sorta helped grease the gears and make me remember that yeah… I actually do sorta like this thing. The other night I got “ninja invited” into tanking a group for some friends, and once again… I didn’t actually die in doing some real tanking. It more or less made me remember why I loved Warrior in the first place, and now I sorta wish I had never strayed from the path with Samurai.

As a result last night I spend most of the night tanking the same dungeon over and over… Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum Hard largely because it is the dungeon that drops gear that is unilaterally an upgrade for most of my slots. The question is… why am I doing this mere days from the release of an expansion where my gear will no longer matter at all? Who knows. I do things on my own weird time table, but as of last night I am sitting at 355 and was able to figure out how that number is derived to see how much gear I would need to bump up to 360. For your own reference… if you are a class with a two handed weapon it seems to be counting as though you items equipped of that item level in both your main hand and your off hand slot. Additionally the system does not appear to be following rounding rules and simply drops the decimal places.

There are so many systems in this game that I have completely ignored over the last few years because I more or less have been in a semi-checked out state since sometime in Heavensward. For example none of my retainers have jobs. They are all still whatever base class that they started out with, in spite of being probably past the requirements of turning into jobs. As such I have never used any of the dungeon options with your retainers, and honestly sort of regret that. There is a lot of fiddling to be done in this game and I have done a pretty poor job of keeping up with it. Now I sit on the precipice of two different things that I want to participate in conspiring to split my time. We have Shadowbringers launching on Friday and then in August we have World of Warcraft Classic which will also each up copious amounts of my time. My goal right now is to attempt to juggle both.

In other news I finally did enough of the Squadron mini game to hit the next Maelstrom rank. For a really long time I had tried to avoid my Limsa Lominsa heritage as a Marauder, but over time I eventually came back to the fold and now feel exceedingly comfortable in the weird white rock fortress on the sea. Till Sea Swallows All! Similarly odd I recently swapped back to my Leviathan barding of old… aka the entire reason why my chocobo is turquoise in the first place in order to blend in with that armor. It is a way more fitting choice for a Maelstrom lad than it ever was for an Ul’dahnan.

It is bizarre… I have gone from not really caring much about Shadowbringers to really looking forward to it. Now I am contemplating following my heart again and leveling as a Warrior, because ultimately this will always be my main class. Sure that means I will have to do the really dumb thing and level as a DPS… but whatever I have done it before. I am a tank and will always be a tank. Every other role I try on feels like an ill fitting glove. So expect me to be running headlong into packs of mobs in the expansion.