crafting Archives - Page 4 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Madness Intensifies

May 18, 2015 by Belghast

No Getting Used to It

By the time yesterday afternoon rolled around I had well passed my stress quota. If I were a pinball machine the tilt sensors were going off. The previous week had been one of the more stressful experiences in part because I don’t really handle change as well as I could. That said my workplace right now is in a constant state of flux as we are going through a fairly massively floor rebuild. We have folks tearing down one cube only to take the pieces that were used to make it, and use it to build up a brand new cube. The positive is that I now have a pretty sweet set up with a more private cube that has an entrance hall of sorts, but getting to that process involved moving out of my office before going to lunch one day… and moving back in a few hours later. When you combine the fact that we had to cram all of the mothers day festivities into this weekend, we had car troubles, and had at least one partially sleepless night due to dodging tornados by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around I had just checked out.

So as I was sitting there on my sofa mindlessly crafting away last night it was pure dumb luck that I happened to look down and notice that the tell I had just received was from an actual person and not another gold spammer. It turns out that I happened to be sitting there crafting in the Alchemists guild in Ul’dah next to someone who was apparently an avid reader of my blog. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this a few times now, and each time it is this mixture of pride, awkwardness and confusion. I have somehow lulled myself into this state where I feel like I don’t actually have any readers, so when I write my post each morning I can be just as open as I want to… because I am ultimately just talking to myself. So when I am confronted with the fact that this is absolutely not the case I never know quite what to do. I snapped a photo with my reader and told him that he would have to be less of a stranger in the comment thread, also threw out a friend invite and said to holler if they needed anything. My friends joke about me being “THE Belghast” but man… that is not a thing I will ever get used to. I’m just a guy who does a few different things and tries to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the games I happen to be playing as I can. The big point of pride however came when my reader said that I was for the most part the reason why they were playing Final Fantasy XIV right now, so if my joy can be infectious then maybe I guess it is okay.

Madness Intensifies

The only real concentrated playtime that I had this weekend were either during the podcast on Saturday evening or starting about 4pm on Sunday afternoon until I went to bed. During that time I focused on getting all of those tradeskills that I managed to get to level 5/6ish the other day up to 11. At the point of going to sleep last night I had managed to get all of them up there except for Culinarian, which I will hopefully take care of tonight. I will say that so far I definitely agree with the notion of this being the ideal way to level tradeskills, but man… it also means that my entire life right now is pushing tradeskills. There is no way in hell I am going to cap my poetics especially since they have now doubled the cap to 900 per week. The positive however is that I am actually finding myself really enjoying the black hole known as crafting. I like the fact that I am for the most part relatively self sufficient. This was always the big reason why I pushed crafting up in other games is that when I wanted something for an alt… I didn’t want to have to pester someone else to make it for me.

It is going to be so amazingly nice to be able to repair my gear while we are in instances, or knock out random glamour prisms as my whims suit me. Right now I am taking no small amount of pride in the fact that I have been crafting all of my upgrades WHILE working on crafting. The cool thing is that each time I hit a plateau I can have a fire sale of everything that I used to get to that point. So when I finally bring Culinarian up to level 11 I will be shedding all the early level crafting gear that I have laying around. The other nice thing about doing it this way is that I have been able to select the cash reward item from each of my crafting quests. The negative is… that I am struggling to remember which quests I have actually completed. I am pretty sure there are one or two of the level ten quests that I still need to go back and do. I am really enjoying the chill nature of crafting, and I am liking that it gives me plenty of time to watch some Orphan Black. I managed to watch through the first seasons and just started the second season last night before stopping to watch Game of Thrones. I doubt I will make it to cap before Heavensward but I am hoping to at least get close.

Forced Engagement

The biggest problem with crafting right now is that it is feeding my instincts to check out mentally. When I am stressed I tend to disengage from the world, and while I am so focused on crafting my way through the levels… it is all too easy to simply not watch free company chat or anything else for that matter. One of the things I am going to have to work on this next week is trying to find a happy medium between my super engaging “lets run all the things” side and my “lets just nest and craft” side. I am hoping that now that my group at work is done with the moves that I can start to chill back out once again. The fact that every single day my world was changing significantly made me want to cling to something calm and relaxing in my game world. Tonight will be a return to my raid schedule so that should help significantly. There is still some stress in the real world around a potential car purchase that might be happening, but hopefully the big stressers are past me.

Mostly I want to apologize to anyone who was looking to run anything this weekend. I managed to run a Sunken Temple of Qarn with Liore, but past that I pretty much ran nothing at all. I had all these grand hopes of doing some pony farming, but that fell through when we tried to cram a visit with my folks in Friday night. Saturday was pretty much an entire lost day other than rushing home to podcast under the threat of severe weather. Hopefully as the week goes on I can do more fun stuff with the Free Company because I could use the activity to get my mind off other things. As we talked about on the podcast Saturday night, I really hope we down turn nine tonight… but in the grand scheme of things I think we are still a few weeks away. We are just now consistently getting to the dive bomb phase, now we just have to figure out what to do with the dive bombs. On our best attempt I think we got to around 35% which isn’t too shabby. I hope you all have a great week, and please if you are an avid reader of the blog… don’t hesitate to ping me in game sometime and say hi.

Hardcore Mining

March 9, 2015 by Belghast

Quest for Airships

Since the detail was first teased during the Las Vegas Fan Festival, our guild has been focused on making sure we can get a Free Company airship. The biggest concern however is that when Yoshi-P calls something “prohibitively expensive” it gives us serious pause. This is the man that thought 6-30 million gil for housing was “reasonable”, so if something is prohibitively expensive… what in the world could that be? Over the weekend a Polygon article came out with some quotes from the man himself, and I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Unless you did not have time to read the article, let me focus in on the part I am actually interested in.

“Once you have the workshop, you decide on what you want to make,” Yoshida says. “For example, if you’re going to build an airship, you go part by part. You start with the engine. Your free company teammates gather the materials necessary to build the engine. The crafters within the free company form a party, and then it’s a group effort to build the engine.”

Yoshida says the free company crafting system will grow and expand throughout content patches for the expansion — what he is calling the “3.X series of updates.” To create their ship, free companies will have to combine different engines, bodies and other parts. The ships will have different stats depending on the combinations made, leading to unique ships for different groups depending on their focus.

“Having as many options as possible is a good thing,” he says with a smile.

So our biggest concern with this statement is the fact that he says that you will need a party of free company crafters to complete some of these actions. Now currently we have at least a “light” party worth of Omni crafters, meaning that they have every single profession to max level. But since he doesn’t specify my concern is that it might require a “Full” party of eight crafters to do some of the things related to crafting airship bits. If that is the case we are pretty screwed, because while some of our members have embraced the rabbit hole that is crafting, there are players like me that have completely avoided it. I guess for me my reasoning was that I wanted to make sure I got my combat classes up and geared before diving too far into the crafting system. That said I have WAR, PLD, DRG, BRD, and WHM all geared to ilvl 100 or better… so I guess I have done what I set out to do.

Hardcore Mining

So this weekend I embarked upon the mission to finish leveling mining. At the beginning of the weekend I was sitting around level 30, and last night before going to bed I had just hit 44. My hope is that maybe I can finish leveling to 50 tonight before raid time. Right now I am out in Coerthas doing mining leves, and the leveling is going fairly quickly. My goal is to finish leveling mining and then start in on another Disciple of the Land class probably logging next. My original plan was to level all of my harvesting classes to 50 before setting in and actually leveling crafting proper. I thought this might make life a lot easier to funnel resources into the “making things” professions. My goal is to be able to help the guild craft that airship, and while it is probably going to cots me several points of sanity… I care that much about the end result.

Mining is pretty much pure tedium, in that it involves a lot of running around and clicking things repeatedly. As such I opted to hang out downstairs on my laptop and catch up on various television options while I repeated the same process over and over. Yesterday was all about watching the various episodes of Star Wars Rebels that I had missed. I have to say that show is absolutely phenomenal, and if you are not watching it yet… I highly suggest you do so. I am pretty happy with Disney’s leadership so far of the Star Wars brand. That show is chock full of really interesting characters, and it gives this whole guerilla fighters against the empire feel which is excellent. The danger of their situation is constant, and they managed to create an extremely insidious villain in the form of “The Inquisitor”.

Quietly Amazing

This morning when I went to log in and take a screenshot of me in my awesome mining regalia, I was greeted by this screen. Yup it looks like Cactuar was in fact full at 6 in the morning, and I am thinking this is pure insanity. I know for some time Cactuar has been locked from the creation of new characters during prime time hours. However I wonder if we are starting to reach that state of permanent lock status? That is going to be horribly unfortunate for anyone wanting to join our Free Company and the great little community we have built there. My hope is this is some sort of fluke, and they were doing maintenance on part of the servers in our cluster. I know our Free Company and me specifically has been the cause of a bunch of recent transfer and new character creation activity on our server, and I don’t really see that as something that is going to change. I love our folks, and they have been so amazingly helpful to the new people starting.

When someone asks for a dungeon, it seems like people stumble over themselves ready to help them out. At one point earlier this weekend I was going to DPS one of these dungeons, until another member who was working on their first character said they could use it too. I bowed out of the run to let the folks able to get experience that really matters get in on the fun. That seems to be the Final Fantasy way, quietly and unassumingly… being awesome. I mean at this point Final Fantasy is the second most popular MMORPG of all time… and it just kind of happened without folks really realizing it. Having over four million active accounts is a pretty great feat in this world where supposedly Wildstar didn’t even sell a million boxes at launch. Sure the expansion was pushed back a little further than I would have liked it, but I love the fact that there is content planned to cover that gap. Now that I am embarking on the madness that is crafting, I am also admittedly looking forward to having more time to work up crafters before the expansion hits.

#FFXIV #Mining #Cactuar

Accidental Achiever

December 29, 2013 by Belghast

Outside is Evil

Yesterday we recuperated from the whirlwind shopping trip around Joplin Mo. It was a pretty glorious day to be honest, because we were both in hibernation mode. We talked for a bit about getting out, because it really was a lovely day. But when it came to actually getting up and doing it… we both failed the willpower check. Personally I am completely fine with this notion, that we both stayed in, ate three meals in, and overloaded on relaxation. I hung out in my fuzzy blanket cocoon on the sofa and she upstairs in her loft of power (that you all will remember once it was my game loft).

I have a feeling that once summer happens the roles will switch with me inhabiting my office and the loft and she the downstairs, but it is cool that we have our own places and are still within vocal range of each other. I played a ton of World of Warcraft, attempted to play a closed beta I got into… but suffered from severe graphical issues that made it completely unplayable, and snuggled with my ferrets each and every time I passed their cage.

Accidental Achiever

I rarely if ever set out to master a tradeskill in a game, but instead it is a thing I usually do out of an odd sense of commitment more than anything. Lately I had been on a mission to level my rogue so I could get a transcriptionist up high enough to be able to start making living steel. I want the 30 bars that it takes to craft my Sky Golem pretty badly. So yesterday I was not paying much attention was I was pushing my way to 600 alchemist when immediately after getting it, I also got the Master of All Achievement. Sure enough… now that I think of it… I do have a max crafter of every profession. The only disappointment is you get exactly nothing for it… except for 75 achievement points.

This is a pretty massive undertaking if someone was to actually set out specifically to do this achievement. I think it is worthy of a crafting tabard, mount, or at the very least a title. I feel like this is a pretty massive oversight on the part of blizzard. Then again crafting is kind of its own reward. Being completely self sufficient feels amazing. Additionally you end up needing to hit the auction house far less often because your army of crafters can make damned near everything you would ever want made. It is a pretty great feeling knowing that you can make an entire set of gear for a friend, as I did for Scarybooster yesterday. In a matter of moments I had a starter set of gear for level 85 ready for him, and I did the same thing for my rogue Gloam.

A Vicious Sneak Thief

Speaking of my rogue, I am roughly halfway through Jade Forest and as of yesterday am about halfway into 87. I should finish up and ding 88 before I finish the area, and will likely skip Valley of the Four Winds entirely and go straight to Kun Lai Summit. When I am trying to power my way through to 90 the path I tend to take is to milk every last drop of experience from Jade Forest, transition to Kun Lai immediately after and then transition to Townlong as soon as you get the quest starter to go there. Finally this ends up with you either dinging 90 in Townlong or doing so just inside of Dread Wastes. Granted this is complete shit for your quest completion, but I figure it also gives you a lot of “questing to make gold” time if you so choose it at max level since xp gets converted up to gold.

Granted I have yet to actually do that one of of my 90s… since as soon as I hit maximum level I start going through the paces of trying to gear out the character and such. I am such a sucker for getting my characters those purples and am willing to sit through all manner of horrible LFR experiences just to do so. I should however have most of a set of timeless leather stocked away and ready for this guy when he needs it. I will just have to figure out how best to get the weapons. This time around I will likely just craft him a set of 463 agi swords and call it good until I can get something decent from LFR. Once I finish his leveling the characters I really need to work on are Belghast, Exeter and Belgarou as they are woefully behind Tallow and Belgrave in gear levels. Oh well… the faffing about with my characters never seems to end.

Hole In Itemization

December 18, 2013 by Belghast

Just Too Good to be True

I set out on a mission to attempt to earn a 498 pvp weapon last night through the justice point to honor conversion. For the most part it went easy enough, and while there were plenty of mouthy folks in LFG the instance runs themselves were smooth enough. I just kept my mouth shut and did my job as dps and pushed through it. It is amazing how much it defuses a troll when no one at all in the party responds. They make a few comments then quiet down themselves because no one is feeding them ammo. For awhile last night I was thinking that this was really going to be an awesome way to earn starter weapons. Unfortunately like so many great ideas this one had a massive flaw, that comes from the fact that I do not PVP… nor I understand how the PVP systems in any game work.

First flaw in the plan was the listed conversion rate was not 375 Justice Points to 250 Honor, but instead 500 Justice Points to 250 Honor. This was manageable but basically meant that you had to earn 3500 JP to be able to get a weapon. I did that last night without any real issue in a matter of hours. Second flaw… and this one is the fatal one. Apparently in order to purchase weapons with honor points, you have to have PVPed enough during the current season to earn 7500 honor. Since I have not PVPed at all on any of my characters during this expansion, let alone the current season I simply cannot purchase weapons. I have no desire to PVP enough to gain 7500 honor, which would be roughly 30 battleground wins. In fact that sounds like just about the worst possible way to spend my time I could imagine.

Jewelry Is Nice

Since I had already taken the hit converting 3500 Justice to 1750 honor… I really had no desire to take the hit again and convert 1750 honor back to 875 Justice. Other than weapons I have had a few glaring holes in my gear. I was still using a crafted 450 necklace and a 450 ring. While the weapons all require honor earned during the season to purchase, the gear however does not appear to have a similar requirement. As a result I picked out a fairly decent neckpiece from the vendor for I believe 1250 honor. This got me one step closer to my overall goal of being able to queue for Siege of Orgrimmar.

At this point I flew out to the Shadowpan Assault quartermaster in Townlong. Sure enough they had a decent ring as well. After plugging these two holes in my itemization and after picking up a slightly better weapon in the heroics I ran to get the stockpile of honor, I am now finally able to queue for Siege of Orgrimmar. While I didn’t necessarily get what I wanted out of the nights activity… I actually still got what I needed. Maybe the rolling stones were right all along.

Hole In Itemization

So after all of this, I return to the original thought process that there is a massive whole in itemization, at least from the standard late expansion “catch players up” mentality. I got into a bit of a discussion of an aspect of this yesterday over on Twitter. In previous expansions, there existed higher tiers of heroic level content. The prime example of this was Trial of the Champion that helped catch players up in gear, both on normal and heroic modes. Then later in the expansion you had the three instance story arc of Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection that ratcheted up the difficulty level as well as the rewards. I can remember Halls of Reflection heroic still being a significant challenge in Icecrown raid gear.

While I love the concept of the Timeless Isle, and the whole explore to find nifty things ideas… they are quite literally giving us epics in the process. This is extremely friendly to altaholics like myself, and has allowed me to gear out an army of 90s… but I feel little to know sense of accomplishment from doing so. The Wrath era sequence was probably my ideal for gearing. It felt significant gearing from heroic, to the trial 5 man and then finally being able to queue for the Icecrown 5 mans. Additionally the gearing seemed far more complete, since each 5 man tier dropped a complete set of gear including workable weapons.

Now it feels very much like, “Gratz on 90, here is your epic gear” but while you can queue for these raids… without having a way to get a decent weapon you become an instant drain on any group that ends up getting you. There are weapons you can get on the Timeless Isle, but like I said yesterday they are cost prohibitive (20,000 coins for a one-hander, 40,000 for a two-hander) and at 476 they are simply not worth the effort and do not provide enough of a bump over 463 crafted/heroic weapons to make it worth your time. Now that I can queue for Siege however I will hopefully get lucky enough to pick up a weapon that way. Additionally I will continue to run my nightly Heroic Scenario, as the potential 516 weapon would be well worth the time spent. Additionally these scenarios when run with a guild group put money in the guild coffers and count towards the weekly.

Crafting Hates Enhancement

My general theory is that this glaring hole was intentional… and by making it they did not want to devalue completely the 502 crafted weapons. I have my own opinions on the whole “crafting should be best” line of thinking, but I can see why they would want this. The problem however with this line of thinking is that there are simply not weapons available for every itemization. For enhance… they tend to favor slow weapons… so that rules out the daggers. That leaves Fist, Mace and Axe that are all usually 2.6 speed. In the 502 weapon itemization there is not a Fist, Mace or Axe that is agility based. The “rogue” weapon that is craft-able is a sword, which shaman simply cannot use.

I know in the past this has happened with Druids and other “weird hybrid classes”, but the fact that other players can nod and say “I know that feel bro” doesn’t really make it any better to try and work around. At this point I will start queuing my way through Siege LFR each week and hopefully in the process I will luck my way into a weapon. If not hopefully one of my nightly guild heroic scenarios will pay off and I will get one or more 516 random stat weapons. No matter which path I take however, my shamans fate is now in the hands of the random loot gods, which is never really a fun place to be.