cactuar

Final Fantasy XIV Minion Guide

by

I Love Mini-Pets

ffxiv 2015-02-22 10-52-44-08 One of my favorite things in any game is the collection of mini-pets and in Final Fantasy XIV they have a truly silly amount of them.  In talking to a guildie today I realized just how contorted it is to try and figure out how to get each of them.  They come from vendors, achievements, quests, an random raid and dungeon drops.  I thought for today’s post I would attempt to pull together a rudimentary list of where you can obtain which minions.  This will likely not be a complete list, but it is a good first attempt.  I will try and update it for new data as I find what I am missing.

Purchased Minions

This is probably the least complete of the information I have, but if you really want to find out how to get each of the minions, click the link and follow up to find out where the vendor is located.  Some of these require you to complete certain FATEs to get the vendor to show up. Anything marked Special event means it is from a holiday event or similar limited time happening.

Beast Tribe Purchased Minions

This next batch are vendor purchased, but require you to gain a certain amount of faction with a given beast tribe to access the minions.  It looks like each faction has two different minions.

Crafting and Harvested Minions

This category of minions is obtained either through a crafted pattern or through harvesting.  Click through to the minion to find out specifically what it takes to obtain each.

Quested Minions

There are a number of minions that can be obtained through the completion of quests.  Here is a list of those that I know of, as well as the quest that goes with them.  Be warned looking at the quest might be a bit of a spoiler at times.  Anything marked Special event means it is from a holiday event or similar limited time happening.

Achievement Minions

There are a number of minions that are associated with the completion of an achievement.  I’ve attempted to link the achievement to help you figure out what it takes to get each one.  Some of them are extremely involved.

FATE Minions

There are a number of minions that are obtained through the completion of specific FATEs.  Generally speaking these require you to get gold completion on the FATE in order to earn the minion.  These drop each time you get gold, meaning they are often extremely cheap on the market board.

Treasure Map Minions

With the introduction of the treasure map system, there are a number of extremely rare and highly sought after minions that come from completing these maps.  From what I understand it is a sub 1% chance of getting one of these minions, because of this… they go for millions of gil each.  Good luck!

Gardening Minions

When the housing garden plots were introduced, there are a number of minions that can be in essence grown.  Each of them requires you to do some truly contorted things to get a rare seed… that will then grow into the minion.  I don’t know the specifics but hopefully you can research how to do this elsewhere.  I am just providing a list of minions.

Retainer Venture Minions

Similar to the Treasure Map minions… there are minions that have an exceptionally rare chance of being returned from Retainer ventures.  Most of these come from exploration ventures of specific gathering types.  The rarity causes them to generally be priced in the millions.  Hopefully you will have some extremely good luck.

Dungeon Drop Minions

There are a number of minions that can be found as somewhat uncommon drops in various dungeons.  Several of these started as 100% chance drops, but as the market was flooded, Square decided to dial back the drop chance making them significantly rarer.  The best option for these is to farm them by running the dungeon multiple times.

Raid Drop Minions

A Number of the raids and trials drop minions.  Generally speaking when a trial drops a minion it is dropped every time you successfully complete it.  When a raid drops one, there is a chance it may or may not drop the minion.  The problem with raid drops is you are having to roll against potentially 24 other players… which means you need to roll exceptionally well to have a shot at walking away with it.

Veteran Reward Minions

Final Fantasy XIV has easily one of the best veteran rewards programs, rewarding players for subscribing to the game with various items.  At each step you get a minion, so I have jotted down the minion and the number of days subscribed you have to reach to earn it.

Mog Station Purchased Minions

Recently Square Enix introduced a number of RMT minions available through the Mog Station.  Each of these runs roughly $5.  So far these are limited to the various scions apart from Minfilia that comes from the yearly anniversary event.

Final Fantasy XIV Merchandise Bonus Minions

There are a handful of items that can be purchased that have a pack in code for a specific minion.  These are all exclusive and cannot be obtained through other means.

Eternal Bonding Ceremony Minion

Finally there is one other very specific minion that can only be obtained through attending an Eternal Bonding ceremony.  Having not actually done this myself yet, I am uncertain how this process works but I would assume it becomes purchasable after you attend.

Thats All Folks… for now

ffxiv 2015-02-23 21-43-30-57

That ladies and gentlemen is all of the minions that I happen to know about.  As they add more to the game I will try and keep this guide updated.  Tomorrow the 2.51 patch lands and with it I am sure more minions.  Also if there are other minions not included in this guide that you know how to get, please let me know and I will copy over the information.  Hopefully someone out here will find this information useful.

#FFXIV #Minion #Guide

Unlikely White Mage

by

Agendas

Yesterday a good friend and I were having a conversation and she said a certain phrase I have heard over and over before.  “Everybody has an agenda”, which is something I have just taken at face value in the past.  But this lead me down a line of thought that I had not actually travelled before.  If everyone out there has an agenda…  and this is pretty much just accepted common knowledge…  then what does the world think my agenda is?  I am out and about in the community on a daily basis interacting and mingling…  but I wonder how many people think I have some grand ulterior motive?  This lead me to assess what my actual Agenda is, and the only thing I could come up with is something along these lines.

To which I was immediately accused of being a cult leader…  but really isn’t every good group at least slightly cult like?  While I won’t be trying to convince everyone to wear matching tracksuits so that we can ride a comet…  I am trying to convince people that it is cool to hang out with friends and share these games we way with one another.  I feel like all of this starts with the fact that I grew up the only child of extremely busy parents.  I am exceptionally good at entertaining myself, but I always felt jealous of the kids that had close neighbors, or siblings to play with.  These days I try and surround myself with as many awesome people as I can find, and build a giant extended family of sorts.  Being the whirling dervish of social media interaction that I am sometimes… folks could get the wrong impression that I am “up to something”.  However in truth, I am just looking to hang out with interesting people.  I approach every interaction like this person could be a new life long friend, rather than someone who could bury a dagger in my back.

Unlikely White Mage

ffxiv 2015-02-04 22-04-17-93

Last night I had but one mission to accomplish.  Upon logging out Tuesday evening, I was sitting roughly one third of the way into 49.  White Mage has been the hardest class for me to level in Final Fantasy XIV in part because it is the least like the sort of character I normally play.  I set down the path of leveling a Conjurer so that I could become a Paladin, and then just kept up with the process thinking that I had 2 tanks, 1 ranged dps, 1 melee dps…  and the only thing I was really missing role-wise was a healer.  Originally I simply kept leveling Conjurer so that I could get to level 34 and get Stoneskin… which is extremely useful for soloing as a Paladin.  From there I figured I was close enough that I would go ahead and push for 50.  Additionally over the course of running so many dungeons and casual raids in this game, I had accumulated quite a bit of healer gear simply by greeding on it.  The final incentive came when I needed to spend down some of my soldiery tokens and opted to go ahead and purchase the level 110 White Mage weapon pictured in the image above.

As a result of all of this I got on last night, ran a guildhest, and two low level duty roulettes and finally reached my level.  After sifting through my bags I managed to equip enough gear to get me to level 85, which is not too shabby gear wise.  The hardest part of course was figuring out what my White Mage outfit would end up looking like.  I finally settled on the Loyalist Bilaud dyed Morbal Green, with gloves, pants and boots from the Acolyte set and the awesome shades Cylladora made for me ages ago.  I felt like I needed to go with something non-traditional since the white mage 110 weapon is a giant war mace…  and I happen to like it.  The end result is my take on a final fantasy battle priest, which is fitting considering I seem to spend as much time casting Stone II as I do healing.  Largely I am just happy this push is over, because leveling as a Conjurer/White Mage is slow going.  Chewing through every mob simply takes more time that I am used to from playing anything else.  My only suggestion for future CNJ/WHM players…  run it up first before you realize just how slow it kills things.

Ninja or Monk

ffxiv 2015-02-05 06-52-56-42 At this point I am not sure what my next Final Fantasy XIV project will be.  Right now my Rogue is 15 and my Monk is 33.  Both classes are extremely fun to play, but I think I will probably spend more time at max level playing the Monk than I ever would the ninja.  The Mudra system seems interesting, but it also seems like something that is extremely fiddly and likely to just piss me off… especially combined with just how “weak” survival wise the ninja ends up feeling.  Mostly I am biased against Ninjas after spending so much time running raids and dungeons with random ones.  Ninjas seem to either take no damage at all… or all of the damage at once.  Healing Ninjas as my White Mage has been the bane of my existence over the last few weeks, and I really don’t relish putting anyone through that.

ffxiv 2015-02-05 06-54-22-92 So you would think the decision is all wrapped up and I would be leveling Monk right?  Well not quite that easy.  Up until this point I had felt like the pugilist/monk play style was far less interesting than say a Dragoon, which is the reason why it has been lagging so far behind my other melee classes.  On top of this…  almost all of their gear sets look silly to me.  If I played a monk, I would ultimately be stuck wearing the Infantry set for the rest of his life, because I really have not cared for any of the other sets I have seen.  There is a set from Labyrinth of Ancients that looks amazing, but it is also one of the most hotly contested item sets in the game.  Last night I ran a guildhest with an adorable Lalafell ninja…  which got me thinking that since my goal in playing a Lalafell is to be adorable all the time…  maybe Ninja is in my future.  I guess time will tell which one I actually start playing.  In any case I would love to finish out my Disciple of War classes so I can clean all of that gear out of my banks.  Months ago I said I would like to hit 50 on all classes before the expansion, and with my raid schedule in World of Warcraft that is never going to happen.  Maybe I will set that goal a bit lower and target finishing out all of the Disciple of War classes before the expansion.

Extreme Gardening

by

Istanbul was Constantinople

SOESignGoingDown The strange news keeps happening this year, as yesterday we found out that the ever ubiquitous Sony Online Entertainment…  is no more.  As you can see from the picture swiped from twitter…  they wasted no time taking down the trappings of the old world… and are now ushering in the name Daybreak Game Company.  All of this happened because the great Sony mothership sold off SOE part and parcel to a technology investment firm.  The Columbus Nova Technology Partners owns several companies somehow connected to the tech industry, be they websites, applications or hardware manufacturers.  The mix of companies is rather bizarre with the only two that I recognize are the once king of media streaming Rhapsody and the task site Fiverr.

What will this mean for gamers you ask?  Quite honestly I have no clue.  I initially thought this was going to be a technology grab as they would gobble up and sell off parts and simply discard the rest.  However it seems as though CNTP has held several of the companies in their portfolio for awhile now, so maybe they have a much longer ranged end game.  Hell for all I know someone in the company was an Everquest fanboy back in the day and has always wanted to own the company behind the game.  Essentially this isn’t the end of the world for SOE fans, and it is far too soon to make any predictions.  If you are old enough to remember… SOE has not always been SOE.  Once upon a time was a smaller company called Verant Interactive… and even before that Redeye Interactive.  The ever outspoken Smedley took to twitter and had this to say…

answering a few questions people have emailed me
1) All our games are still up and will continue to be despite our new name.
2) Yes, we want to bring our games to Xbox One in addition to PS4.
3) Station Cash doesn’t change at all (though we will be rebranding it soon here).
4) We’re still making Everquest Next 🙂 nothing has changed.

Extreme Gardening

ffxiv 2015-02-02 21-10-55-14 For various reasons, be it Tam moving across country…  or Pax South… or simply a lack of the right roles we have struggled to pull together our Monday night raid proper to work on the Second Coil of Bahamut.  As a result last night was our first time working on Turn 6 in what I believe is over a months time.  It seems as though once the fight started we remembered much of the fight and were able to pick up essentially where we left off.  For those unfamiliar with the encounter, the boss is a giant Ochu, aka those angry tentacled plant things.  Rafflesia has a ton of mechanics that you have to deal with…  for starters she throws down bulbs that become expanding briar patch rings.  On our first attempts we tried dpsing these down but quickly realized that the goal was to focus down only specific ones.  As such we simply started making sure the center of the room was clear of briar patches, which means the rest of the room is very full of nasty spikey bits.

The hardest part of the fight is the “devour” dance.  Every so often she marks a target to be devoured, and then will turn to eat that player sucking in everyone else that happens to be in the frontal cone.  How we started mitigating this is by having that player run through right before they are to be devoured…  then that player and the tank dash through as the devour happens.  When it works right no one gets eaten… when it works badly…  well potentially everyone can get eaten.  Last night more or less was us cleaning up this process, and then later getting players with the “drop of honey” debuff purposefully devoured to cleanse them.  I was proud as hell of the progress we made because after a single night of tries over a month ago…  we still managed to come in and finish out Turn 6 in only three attempts, giving us plenty of time to move on to Turn 7 last night.

Statue Tag

ffxiv 2015-02-02 21-24-03-40 Turn 7 means getting to play with a very angry Lamia named Melusine.  Some of you might remember the boss name from Final Fantasy V, but far as we can tell there is no actual direct correlation as far as mechanics go.  As the sub heading goes, this fight is in many ways a game of statue tag…  in that she periodically casts an ability that causes three players at a time to turn whatever is standing directly in front of them to stone.  Now one can avoid freezing anyone by turning off the edge of the platform… however there are these huge lumbering adds that in theory need to be frozen in place by a player with the debuff.  This means from the moment it casts you have seven seconds to get into range of a statue and freeze it in the right place.  A few moments after placing a statue, she will pick a target in the raid and give them “Cursed Shriek” that functions much like the frontal cone “Cursed Voice” except it is an AOE that can literally hit the entire room.  The player with shriek then has to run behind one of the frozen giants and LOS the raid.

ffxiv 2015-02-02 22-06-25-84 This would all be relatively simple if not for the fact that she is picking targets in the raid at random and dropping a big assed fire AOE on them.  This means that at all times players should be spread out to avoid taking damage from multiple AOEs at the same time.  As a result when the Shriek goes off, it will inevitably freeze some players.  Thankfully the petrification fades on its own… but while stuck there you cannot react to anything.  There were a few times when I got frozen… and then got the cursed voice debuff…  forcing people to run out of my frontal cone because I could not aim the ability away from the raid.  To make matters worse…  she starts lighting up sections of the round platform we stand on… turning them into a field of angry damage over time death.  So as all of this dancing is going on… we also have to watch placement on the floor.  All told… we did pretty damned well last night on our first night of attempts.  On our best try we managed to get her down to 19% before things fell apart largely because we were not prepared for the final phase.  I have a feeling next Monday we will take her down and move on to Turn 8.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

by

The Morning Back

This morning is my first morning back to work, and I am surprisingly cheery about it.  At the very least I had a pretty easy time waking up.  I’m trying to type my morning post with a very attention craving cat sitting on my arm.  The cats are still not entirely used to us being back.  I can tell they missed us because they are pretty much smothering us 24/7.  Now I know our house sitter played with them… because we got text messages talking about how sweet and adorable they were.  I guess there is no substitute for mom and dad being home.  Kenzie the kitten still acts confused any time she realizes we are not in sight.  Off and on during the day yesterday she would come tearing through the house meowing trying to find me…  then upon doing so snuggle up tight.  I guess it feels good to be needed.

Gw2 2015-01-26 16-11-37-88I seem to have skipped the convention plague, or at least I don’t really feel much different than I normally do.  The biggest thing I am experiencing is a sort of jet lag feeling.  Like my brain is still on convention time and I am not quite used to being back and communicating with other human beings “normally” just yet.  As such I spent most of my yesterday chilling out on the sofa, and piddling around in Guild Wars 2.  Yup that is right, I downloaded it, patched it up, and spent my day mucking about in it.  I enjoyed myself I guess… but I am still in the same phase I always seemed to be with that game… trying to sort out what everyone finds so damned appealing about it.  I admit the video and the crowd were enough oomph to get me to give it another try.

Gw2 2015-01-26 14-46-17-74 During Pax they kept touting their community as the “friendliest” and I feel like that is a bit of a misnomer.  Sure when you die people seem to rush out of the woodwork to resurrect you…  but in doing so they NEVER SAY A WORD.  I feel like GW2 is the friendliest… because it is also the most silent.  I wandered about yesterday interacting with several other human beings and not a single one said anything to me, even when I thanked them for helping me out.  So I guess they are the friendliest because no one is being an outward asshole?  I still say for my money Final Fantasy XIV is a far more enjoyable community, even the gold spammers are polite.  All of that said I did begrudgingly enjoy myself, so I might be poking my head in now and again and slowly working my way towards the level cap.  Right now I am 53 so there is still a long ways to go until 80.

Mandervilles and Midgardsormr

ffxiv 2015-01-26 21-20-53-64 Last night our normal raid night in Final Fantasy XIV but with several people out that did not quite happen.  I spent most of the night hanging out in free company chat talking to various people and working my way through the latest of the Hildebrand quest lines.  It was once again completely insane, but as I ran through it I noticed… this quest seemed to make call backs to every single Hildebrand quest line we had experienced to date.  It was almost as though the Hildebrand storyline were a television series and the final episode reintroduces all of the themes from behind, wrapping them up in a neat bow.  My working theory is that this is the last we will see of Hildebrand before the expansion.  For that matter even the main story line feels like it is acting as the precursor to the upcoming expansion, easing us into the world that will be once Heavensward  launches.  I am absolutely fine with this notion, and eating every moment of it while it lasts.

ffxiv 2015-01-26 21-30-03-90

After a period of time we realized that we had a full group of people on teamspeak to do some of the new dungeons.  As with any patch this one introduced three new dungeons, two of which are hard mode versions of existing dungeons… and the third something completely new that fits the current storyline.  Since the new dungeon Keeper of the Lake will prevent moving forward in the main story, we opted to do that one.  For starters…  this dungeon has some of the more difficult boss encounters we have seen to date.  In fact I would say this is the first dungeon that we did not really feel overpowered for.  The gear that it drops is ilevel 100, but I would hazard a guess that maybe it was designed for players to mostly be in ilevel 120.  We however are all in the 110 range so it was a real challenge.  One of the cool asides about the dungeon were that a lot of the mobs we encountered were named after ships from the classic Shmup Einhander.  A few were references to other shooters like the mobs called the “Silver Hawks”.

ffxiv 2015-01-26 21-30-13-81 We had to do what we have done on so many first runnings of new dungeons…  limit break our way through every encounter.  The first encounter took two attempts and the final encounter took a lot of luck and two attempts to figure out what we needed to do.  It is easily the most difficult of the dungeons to date.  Ashgar had run Amdapor Keep Hard and said that this new series had a running theme.  Relatively easy trash encounters, that were not likely to kill the party… and really difficult bosses.   I honestly prefer dungeons to be this way.  Hard trash makes the dungeons frustrating, but when you arrive at a boss everyone naturally focuses on the encounter at hand.  Similarly to the Manderville quest line… this dungeon seems to be ramping us up for the end of the expansion, and I believe that these are the last set of dungeons we will see before the spring 2015 launch of Heavensward.  I hope to be able to run the other two soon, so that I can start doing hard mode roulette once more.  They were worth quite a few poetics, so it should finally be reasonable to gear up in full 120 gear.