Pre-Expansion Prep

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It’s been a few days since I have written a post about Final Fantasy XIV. When we last addressed the game I was working towards infusing my Novus weapon so that it could in fact become a proper Nexus weapon. I’ve done that and now have the Nexus weapon glamoured over top of my real axe. I’ve made some progress on the next step in the quest aka the “Braves” weapon Ragnarok but unfortunately I’ve hit a wall. Basically you need 400k to progress past this and I am way too broke to do that at the moment.

Between my buying my way up to proper item level when I came back to the game, and the money spent on Materia… I have been hovering around the 150k mark for a bit now. That will regenerate over time, but for now we have to close the door on the Zodiac weapon quests and be happy with the shiny spikey state that the weapon currently is in. I am sure at some point in the near future I will pick this back up as expansions tend to come with a windfall of money. Additionally I am using the shit out of my retainers to auction off various baubles, which are moving… but moving slowly. In theory I need to learn some strategy for making money on a reliable basis in this game because I never quite landed on one that did not involve crafting.

For the last several days I have been entirely focused on cleaning house. Recently I pushed the last of my classes to 50, freeing up a bunch of room for getting rid of any older gear that was clogging my vaults that was not something I actually wanted to wear. With the new classes starting at level 60, it is highly unlikely I will ever have a sub 50 character again… and even if I do it will probably be along the lines of blue mage where it more or less came with its own set of gear that I did not really upgrade out of until 50. I currently have 9 items in my inventory… and this is the closest to “inventory zero” I have ever gotten. In truth several of these items could be tossed in the vault but whatever this is a stark improvement over having roughly five item slots free at any given time.

Over the last several days I have set about a very tedious process of sorting my retainers. Previously there really was no rhyme or reason to how I was storing things. At one point yes there was a pattern but as vaults overflowed I wound up just shoving things into any open slot I could find. Which lead to the situation of having a random assortment of items in pretty much every retainer’s vault, making it very hard to find upgrades as you encounter them. I subscribe to additional retainers, because ultimately I had to in order to keep up with the mess. What we have wound up with is the following scheme.

  • Druin – Melee Weapons – Yes I have enough of these to warrant it’s own bank
  • Tiga – Strength Melee Class Gear
  • Tallow – Tank Gear
  • Dauphin – Dexterity Class Gear
  • Belgrave – Caster Gear
  • Waxwood – Healer Gear
  • Dorma – Jewelry for Every Class
  • Finni – Crafting Gear, Materials, and Assorted Token Items

This is the final scheme that we ended up with, and largely Druin becoming a weapon vault was a thing that happened late in the process. I can honestly already see some need for variance as Tiga and Tallow the Strength and Tank vaults respectively are close to overflowing. So in theory I will have to do something in the near future to further split things up. I could in theory split off the striker and lancer gear into their own vaults, because there is a pretty clear delineation between those archetypes. However tank gear is tank gear… and they don’t really have much in the way of paladin or warrior specific gear for example other than class sets.

I can add one more retainer now if I so choose, and I figure with the coming expansion they will increase this by another slot. So in theory I could split up tank gear by slot, and have 3 of the slots in one bank and 3 of the slots in another bank or something like that. Whatever the case we have some semblance of organized for the first time in the roughly six years I have been playing the game. This is a major achievement because it absolutely does not carry over to any other game that I am playing. I tend to be a packrat in life and a bigger packrat in video games. A large part of why I no longer play Everquest II is that I just have too much crap and did not want to take the literal hours to sort through it.

In truth to get to the state I am in right now probably legitimately took me about 8 hours worth of diligent sorting and slowly ferrying items back and forth between vaults and or selling them. Here is hoping that I can manage to keep things in order as we go into Shadowbringers.

Wizards Unite Impressions

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Hi, I am Belghast and I am susceptible to hype… and like pretty much all of geekdom I have been playing around with Wizards Unite over the last few days since it’s release. First off… the servers were absolutely on fire when it clandestinely launched the night before its official release announcement. However by the end of the day on the 20th things seemed to be moving along normally. Niantic seems to have learned its lessons from the Pokemon Go launch and the fact that the game works at all… they seem to have planned adequately for the initial crush of users.

The play experience is not unsurprising for anyone who has played either Pokemon Go or the prior Ingress. If you live in a city core you will have lots of things to do. If you live in the suburbs or god forbid rural areas… the game will be a solitary wasteland. In the above image the middle pane is what the Wizarding World looks like from my office in the heart of downtown. The last pane is what the world looks like from my front door… because apparently I live on Privet Drive where we excel at quiet and mediocrity.

The gameplay largely revolves around recovering “confoundables” or spells gone awry by some force that we have not quite figured out. The timeframe of the game appears to be set in that of the Cursed Child with Harry and Hermione taking key positions in the Ministry of Magic and our character occasionally has need of interacting with them as we are on the SOS task force. Basically we are Wizard Cops trying to protect muggles from seeing things that they should not be seeing, and also rescuing various members of the Wizarding World that have been attacked by these rogue spells.

Howe we do this is by casting spells with our wand by tracing a shape on the touchpad screen. I’ve not nabbed a screenshot of this interaction but basically something along the lines of a Z or and E shape will appear on the screen and you are graded for how closely you can trace the shape. This grading appears to denote how successfully the spell was cast and how easy it is for the confoundable to resist said spell. Each time you need to cast a spell you consume something called Spell Energy… which in this game would be the equivalent of your stock of Pokeballs.

You regain by visiting the Poke Stop equivalent in this world. So far I have encountered Inns and Greenhouses, but there might be other times scattered around the world. You play a soft of mini-game but effectively it is just a roll of the dice because you seem to be assigned a random amount of energy that you are gaining. The problem is… each spell cast costs 1 energy, and in most case you get 2 or 3 at most energy back from an Inn with a 5 minute recharge timer. As a result expect to be spending a lot of time hanging out and waiting down that timer to recharge yourself, which again becomes more difficult for those in rural areas.

You can of course pay the in game currency of gold to recharge your energy meter. If I remember correctly it was 100 gold for 50 energy. Like every single mobile game they purposefully make the gold system obtuse… given that the prices and the amounts you purchase never line up. Effectively recharging your energy is a little over a dollar. Inventory limits are the key challenge to most things in this game, and similar to Pokemon Go they cost around 150 gold to increase them by increments of 10.

One of the more annoying challenges that I have encountered so far is the ingredients racket. These are used to craft potions and can only be used in a specific combination. However as you wander around the world you seemingly pick them up randomly so you will almost always have stacks of one type and next to none of another type. This is only an issue because ingredients are now what the Item inventory in Pokemon Go was, and you are limited to only 200 at a given time without purchasing vault extensions. I’ve found myself in the situation of having too much of one type of ingredient and being unable to pick up the ones I actually need when I encounter them.

The other problem for me personally is the Portkey game, which represent what was hatching an egg in Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is fully integrated with Google Fit and keeps track of the distance that I walk without the app having to be open. With Wizards Unite I am back to the era of needing to keep the app open at all times and drain my battery while playing. It feels like a massive step back and as such I have yet to “hatch” a single loot box to be able to tell you what exactly is located within. I am so used to not having to care about the app being open and having my watch catch my steps and direct them towards egg hatching that I will have to shift up my methodology to make this work. I hope the integrations come quickly.

As far as general game impressions… so far it just isn’t near as infectious as Pokemon Go was. With that game there was a certain amount of exploration and a sense of excitement each time I encountered a brand new type of Pokemon. Sure that excitement is diluted as you catch your 3000th pidgey just to grind experience, but even now I occasionally come across something I have never seen that quickens my pulse a bit. Wizard Cop… seems to largely just have too many dials, is too fiddly… and has a been there done that feeling. You notice in the post how I kept equating things back to Pokemon Go terms…. because most everything you encounter is effectively a reworked version of a mechanic we have already seen.

The deal breaker however so far is the Energy problem. This game is only fun if you can cast spells and collect doodads in the wild. When you have no energy you have no great way of collecting it other than hanging out at a location for a very long time and spinning the same plates over and over. The act of interacting with an Inn takes way longer than that of a pokestop, making it somewhat cumbersome to hit a bunch of them in a row. The feeling of interacting with most of the things with the game just feel less optimized than that of Pokemon Go, and as a result way more time consuming.

I could in the past stop in at the local QuikTrip and within a few minutes have captured all of the Pokemon on the parking lot. The equivalent took me a good fifteen minutes the other morning and I still had not gathered everything up. So far… it is interesting but I doubt it will ever reach the national obsession level that Pokemon Go did. The worst part is the fact that this is an AR game… and playing with AR enabled makes the entire experience actively worse as you have to do a fiddly motion controlled line up the stars mini-game in order to interact with anything. With AR off everything is just a straight forward capture, then again I also play with AR off in Pokemon Go so that might not be entirely damning.

I am not entirely sold on the experience, but would love to hear your thoughts? Are you finding it more or at least as enjoyable as Pokemon Go? Are you also finding yourself frustrated by the little mechanics? Leave me a comment below.

Intense Aetheric Activity

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I am now officially in full swing of Nexus light farming and wound up spending my entire evening in Sastasha. In theory I could clear the entire place in roughly five minutes loaded in solo with undersized party. I had I had spent more of my time trying to optimize my route and my mob stacking… I could have potentially gotten it down to a bit lower. However for the uninitiated you might ask exactly why I spent two hours solid running the same dungeon over and over as many times as I possibly could squeeze into that two hour block.

Now some of this information comes from my friend Ashgar and other bits come from this Wiki page, but I am now in the step for the Nexus Zodiac weapon where I have to run a bunch of activities. Each activity produces a certain amount of light, and I have screenshot the table and placed it above. You effectively need to go from 0 to 2000 light to move past this step in the weapon grind, with different activities rewarding different amounts of light. So as you can see finding something that rewards Blinding Light for example is going to be way more effective than something giving you Feeble. Ash however suggested that generally speaking one of the early instances always rewards blinding light, and the trick is finding it.

The instances providing bonus light reset every two hours on the even hours… which doesn’t actually work for me when in truth they were on the odd numbered hours. So my bonus reset happened at 7 pm last night and I ground my little ass off until 9 pm getting in as many instances as possible with only a brief break to switch machines because I needed to call mom while grinding and wanted to move to where I could hook up a headset. I have no clue exactly how many runs I managed to get in but if you subtract about 15 minutes of the available time and bump my run time up to 6 minutes… you end up with me having run somewhere between seventeen and eighteen runs last night. In truth I think it was probably something in the neighborhood of fifteen to sixteen given where I wound up on the charts.

There is an in-game doodad that allows you to check how much light you have collected with a given weapon. Now I had run a couple of Frontlines that were both at Blinding Light, which is what leads me to believe that I was somewhere in the fifteenish range for runs completed. I started the night with the meter showing “No Activity” and finished the night with “Intense Aetheric Activity” as shown in the image above. In theory if I can happen upon another Blinding Light dungeon… in an absolute worst case scenario I am 5 runs away from completing. Alternately I could just run Sastasha 9 more times with no bonus and it would end up in the same result.

Whatever the case… I am apparently fully committed to this madness now and I have no clue what happens after I get the Nexus weapon. I have a feeling I will rapidly be entering a level of territory where it just isn’t worth it to keep pushing forward. Instead it is probably time to start another weapon if I so choose. Regardless this has done what it ultimately needed to do… give me a purpose for logging in every night and hanging out with the FFXIV crew prior to expansion launch next week.

Chocobo Caveat Emptor

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I largely told myself that I would not do the thing I just did, in part because I thought it was nonsense. However if you have read this blog for long you know that I seem to be drawn to madness like a moth to a flame. I have done a bunch of really stupid things for very minimal amounts of enjoyment like creating accounts on Chinese Only MMOs. So the fact that I picked up where I left off in my Zodiac weapon quest really should not surprise anyone. The first step of course was to grind out a bunch of Alexandrite… for which thankfully I had a stockpile of Tomestones of Poetics to spend on treasure maps. Each map gives 5 Alexandrite… so 15 maps later I had the 75 needed to move to the next phase.

This is the step that largely held me in my tracks up until this point as it requires you to infuse 75 materia onto your weapon, starting with Rank 1 materia and shifting ranks roughly every 11 successful infuses. This is ultimately going to be a costly venture no matter how you go about it, but in my case I had been rat-holing Battledance and Savage Might materia for quite literally years, thinking eventually I would get around to doing this. I spent roughly 200,000 gil piecing together everything that I thought I might need. In many cases I had to buy way more than I wanted because only stacks were up on the board. I started liquidating everything I didn’t need in an attempt to recuperate a little bit of my woeful funding state and have gotten back 100k with several items still on the market. I was under 100k total gil for awhile… which didn’t feel super comfortable.

Another side effect of this entire process is I have officially done my first PVP in Final Fantasy XIV in the form of the daily frontline bonus. I’ve entered the Nexus step of the quest that requires me to do a bunch of stuff to gather 2000 points of light by doing “activities”. Most things seem to reward “feeble” light or 8 points at a time… but the daily Frontline queue rewards “blinding” or 96 points. I will of course make some more effort to do activities to farm light specifically, but for now I am casually queuing for frontlines every day. This also has the cool side effect of allowing me to start collecting some of the interesting PVP exclusive armor sets. Between the last two days I have already gathered up the full set of Bear themed armor that I had been eyeing for years.

So now we get to the title of this post, as I spent the majority of last night thrashing about with Amazon support staff. For the last few expansions Square Enix and Amazon have partnered to give some sort of an item leading into the expansion, this time around it is a Fat Black Chocobo mount. I figure that this is probably going to be something easy to do given that I already buy lots of stuff on Amazon. The problem is… this initiative is way more restrictive than any of the guidance would lead you to believe. If you go to the official Square Enix page you see the following wording.

Make a qualifying purchase of $19.99 or more on video games (excludes pre-orders) from the Amazon.com video games department to receive an item code redeemable on the Mog Station. Amazon will e-mail the Mog Station code directly to purchasers who qualify.

This offer only applies when purchasing qualifying items that are shipped and sold by Amazon.com.

If you go over to Amazon and manage to find one of the items that is specifically advertising the promotion you get a different but similar batch of text.

Black Fat Chocobo DLC.
Purchase any qualifying video game with a Purchase Price of $19.99 or above and receive the Black Fat Chocobo DLC. Must be shipped and sold by Amazon. Amazon will email your code within 2 days of the purchase date.Limit one per customer‘. Here’s how (restrictions apply)

When you click through to the “Here’s how (restrictions apply)” link you get a different wall of text that again says some pretty similar things and outlines exactly which items should apply for this promotion.

Promotion Details

Offer only applies to products and digital content sold by Amazon.com or Amazon Digital Services LLC (look for “sold by Amazon.com” or “sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC” on the product or content detail page).

Offer good while supplies last.

Digital content and services may only be available to customers located in the U.S. and are subject to the terms and conditions of Amazon Digital Services LLC.

Items must be purchased in a single order and shipped at the same speed to a single address.

Shipping charges may apply to discounted and free promotional items.

Amazon reserves the right to modify or cancel the offer at any time.

Offer is non-transferable and may not be resold.

Offer discount will be allocated proportionally among all promotional items in your order.

If any of the products or content related to this offer are returned, your refund will equal the amount you paid for the product or content, subject to applicable refund policies.

If you violate any of these terms, the offer will be invalid.

Unless an Amazon Gift Card is the stated benefit of the promotion, promotional codes (including those placed directly in accounts) may not be redeemed for Amazon Gift Cards.

So over the last few days I made a couple of purchases thinking I would be perfectly fine. The first of which was a digital game on the Switch being fulfilled by Amazon Digital Services. The second was a physical copy of Bloodstained Ritual of the Night for PS4 being fulfilled by Amazon.com. If you are following along those are the entities specifically called out in the promotion details paragraph above, however I never received a promotional code in either case. This prompted me to get on chat with Amazon support and jump through a sequence of hoops bouncing between platforms and ultimately ending up in the same result each and every time.

My purchases were not eligible for the promotion. No one has been able to tell me why purchases that fit the pattern of the promotional text above are somehow ineligible and no one has been able to transfer me to a department that can ultimately explain it either. There is a bit flipped in a database somewhere that dictates which items do and do not get the promotion and it does not appear to have any semblance of relation to what the text of the promotion states. So I largely post this as a warning. The only items eligible for this promotion are the ones specifically talking about the promotion on the product page.

The challenge there is that there are very few products that actually talk about the promotion. I spent some time between chat responses scouring the site looking for them and I believe I found three different products that had them listed, with no real rhyme or reason as to what does and does not given that everything I looked at was either being sold by Amazon Digital Services or Amazon.com as per the offer text above. The only item that I found that reliably has the promotion is the 60 day Final Fantasy XIV time card, which seems to be how most people are getting theirs. Unfortunately there is no real listing of products that have the promotion that I was able to find. Previously I was able to buy just about any damned thing on the site and have it count but for whatever reason Amazon fucked this one up.

Ultimately if you do not see the little “Black Fat Chocobo DLC” box below the price tag of the item you are looking at, then you are not going to get the mount code. The other place to look is under “Special offers and product promotions” which also should list something to the effect of an item being eligible for the mount. If you do not see either of these then you will simply run up against the brick wall that is Amazon support given that probably all they can see is that a bit in the database is or is not flipped to allow this promotion. What I find frustrating is how obtuse this promotion has been this time around. With Stormblood it was more along the lines of “purchase literally anything in video games section and get a code”. This time around there are weird stipulations that largely make it so you have to buy one single item to get the code.

Ultimately I would appreciate you spreading the word about this to warn other people from making a similar mistake.