Dynamis

Accidental Free Company

by

So it is no longer morning… but also feels really weird not to start a post with “Morning Folks”. I am still on the mend and struggling a bit, and Covid brain fog claimed me this morning and kept me from making a post. Instead, I thought I would do a bit of storytime because I find this funny. Shortly after the release of Dawntrail, my friend Ace and I started baby characters on the Kraken Dynamis Server. The new Path of Exile League came out which caused me to want to take a break, but at some point, I am sure we will return and pick up where we left off at the end of Heavensward. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and weirdly… it was weirdly enjoyable to actually be playing on a server where everyone was newbies either by new accounts or by fresh transfers.

Moments after logging into my character for the very first time on that server, I got an invite to sign a Free Company Charter. I thought sure… I have been that person trying to get my guild started before and would help out with this process. I half assumed that the moment it got started, I would get kicked out… but that was not what happened. Instead, I was promoted to an officer and later drug Ace into the madness just for funsies. We did not really have any plans to make a Free Company for our shenanigans, but having a few genuine new players around was rather charming. Based on our interactions… it was VERY clear we were the wizened elders of this group, but it was still fun to hang out while we were pushing the content through its paces.

We got busy doing other things, some of them on our mains… others in other games. The thing is, I kept logging in periodically when I thought about it to do the daily MGP grind just to get a reasonable base of currency built up on that character. While I was not actively playing, I was actively checking in on how things were going. There were a lot of fresh recruits that eventually left the Free Company leaving us down to just me and Ace who were logging in regularly, and then a trio including the originator of the FC that had not logged in within two months. I didn’t think much about this because Free Companies come and go in membership. Even our primary Greysky Armada goes through large blocks of time when Sol is pretty much the only person reliably logging in.

Late last week I logged in and saw a message that I had been promoted to the leader of the Free Company. So I guess I have now inherited Darkwraith… a super edgy named FC to keep up and running. I made a few tweaks… firstly I renamed the primary role to Leader, because “Master” squicks me out something fierce. I went with a Leader > Officer > Veteran > Memeber > Recruit naming scheme for the ranks because it felt less awkward and also sort of clearly delineated what each role was for. The only other thing that I am contemplating is shifting the Allegiance from Order of the Twin Adder to Maelstrom… because who the fuck ever wants to be part of team piss yellow? Mostly I plan on keeping the lights on and even inviting anyone else who wants to play on Dynamis. This is still 100% an alt project that I am never going to give my full attention to, but it is weird how this FC that I didn’t even intend on joining fell into my lap.

I am not going to lie… there is at least a large chunk of me that wants to rename this to something involving “Robosquids” given that Free Company renaming is a thing you can do easily. I am pretty sure the original owner of the Free Company is “gonezo”, given that he largely popped over to the server to get housing… and has also long since had that demolished. So at this point, the Free Company is essentially what we make of it. If you have alts on Kraken hit me up, because apparently, I lead a Free Company now. I have another group of friends who randomly ended up on the server so I might snag them to at least get the guild leveling at a decent pace.

For The Cat

by

Hey Folks! Last night was a bit of an odd night. We got started a bit later than normal and I also did not sleep for shit Tuesday night… which put me in a bit of a funk. I came close to just begging off of shenanigans but I am very glad that I did not. Going into last night we had seven dungeons to run and Alexander… which I honestly had forgotten about. I am glad that Ace kept that in mind because quite honestly that was probably my favorite bit of the evening. We attempted to legitimately queue for Alexander but given we are on Dynamis… the queue was not moving at all and I did not really want to force an entire group of mentors to do it with us. So instead we duo’d the content which was a heck of a lot of fun. We greeded everything and I know I walked away with enough bits to get to pieces of gear, not sure what Ace managed to pull.

Alexander was the very first raid that I was there to participate in on day one. As a result, it means a heck of a lot to me, and experiencing it again on brand new characters was amazing. The best part of this place is the music. It is just so damned good and honestly… the fights are pretty amazing as well. It was this wild trip down memory lane that was priceless. We cleared the first four parts of Alexander and unlocked the second part… which I think leaves us three dungeons to potentially run tonight. Friday night I will be mainlining Path of Exile, so before we ultimately take a break in this journey we are absolutely going out on a bang. The top shelf absolute bestest part though… the cat that lives on top of the Illuminati leader’s hat. On some level, I had completely forgotten about that.

Before all of this though we churned through Neverreap, Fractal Continuum, Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum, and Pharo Sirius Hard. Yet again we encountered another Reaper who could not stand still and kept standing in front of the boss while ping-ponging around the fights. I have been told by my reaper compatriots on Mastodon that this is not normal behavior but… I keep encountering it over and over. Like I am used to Bards and Machinists going willy-nilly because they don’t have to stay still while attacking but Reapers seem like this game’s Demon Hunter. I remember really hating Neverreap when it first came out and I am not even sure why. There are a few pulls that are bigger than normal, but between my cooldowns and Ace’s expert healing, it was no big deal at all.

This entire experience of going back and seeing things with fresh but wisened eyes continues to be so much fun. If you have a friend that you could convince to participate in this sort of nonsense, then I highly recommend it. Honestly, even if you just want to solo your way through Eorzea, it is probably a great experience. For years I have thought Alting in FFXIV made zero sense because nothing was account-wide and you would be essentially resetting all of the progress you had made to that point. In fact I absolutely remember chiding Ace about it once before when they created an alt because I could not see giving up my stable of high-level jobs or any of the kitsch that I had unlocked along the way. I was wrong… I was so very wrong. It is worth it for the experience of getting to pretend you are seeing it all for the first time again.

Legitimately… the last decade has been extremely rough. I’ve aged far more than ten years… and chipped away bits and pieces of my mental fortitude and well-being. However, going through this experience has honestly been healing. I had convinced myself that there were all of these things that I just couldn’t do anymore… that I was not equipped to do anymore. I am sure this sounds somewhat dumb… but mental barriers are real things and they are hard to push past. I feel younger today thanks to the nonsense we have been getting up to than I have in a very long time. I also feel more equipped to capture the joy in day-to-day life than I have been in quite a while. I am not saying that playing an MMORPG is the key to happiness… but doing so with a close friend sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyways! Tomorrow I will probably be on my Path of Exile nonsense but I am looking forward to one more night of doing fun content before we take a bit of a break.

Cold Criminals

by

Good Morning Friends. It has been a few days since I last gave an update on our progress on the Dynamis server Kraken. Once again fair warning that I am going to talk about spoilers for ARR and Heavensward during this blog post, so be forewarned. The first thing that honestly shocks me is how fast we ripped through Heavensward. I remember it taking longer than this but on the 19th we wrapped up the ARR post-patch content and as of last night we are one trial away from finishing Heavensward. I am not sure if they reduced the number of MSQ quests in HW or not, but it certainly feels like it. It may simply be that back then we had to do a certain amount of side questing to maintain our level so we did not hit hard walls with the MSQ, and now you can do only the MSQ and still end up wildly overleveled. At the time of writing this blog post, I am sitting at level 76… which is 16 levels over the original Heavensward cap…. and nearing the Shadowbringers cap.

Watching the final events of ARR play out was a bit difficult to get through. Even knowing that everyone is essentially alright, it still hit me in the feels as I had to experience the “death” of the Scions and Nanamo all over again. Mostly I still feel anger that I have not been allowed to murderate Ilberd yet, and I am still supremely annoyed that we essentially have to accept Lolorito’s actions. I always dislike political machinations in video games, because we get enough of that bullshit in the real world. Everything should be a glorious trial by combat… like our amazing legal aptitude at least in the Ishgardian court of law. I will say that playing through all of that content in rapid succession… does not have anywhere near the impact as when we had to get the events doled out to us over time. Having time to dwell on what was happening… made everything feel that more dire. We were super active at the tail end of ARR and the beginning of HW, so I remember many conversations happening surrounding these events. At some point, I want to listen to our spoiler show that we recorded back in 2015.

We did take a break from the story for a bit and burned through all of the Extreme versions of the ARR trials, and then attempted to duo Binding Coil of Bahamut. Everything went pretty smoothly until we got up to Nael… which is going to require a bit more strategery or gear because we kept getting wrecked in the final phase. We did Garuda through the dungeon finder system and it was a bit of a mess… which prompted us to just duo the remaining Extremes. It is pretty cool that even without a multi-year jump on gearing we can realistically do the fights with a small group. None of them were even all that close, and we were pretty much able to soak almost all of the mechanics. Probably the toughest thing that we did legitimately during the ARR era was Chrysalis which took three attempts to get the DPS to finish the final phase.

I think the thing that shocked me the most about Heavensward is how long you could go between dungeons and how few trials there were. I am used to a cadence of dungeon then trial then dungeon then trial, as we have had for the last few expansions. The first dungeon of Heavensward isn’t even part of the MSQ, so is entirely missable at least until you want to fly. I thought the flow of the Aether Current was pretty great because if you followed the MSQ you would be able to get all of the exploration nodes as they were painfully obviously located next to an NPC. We eventually got into a cadence of finishing everything but the final quest based aether current and then upon finishing the last dungeon… being able to fly in that zone. Azys Lla is freaking miserable to traverse without flying…. essentially since you can’t really see where you are going until you remove the fog of war from the map.

Probably my highlight of Heavensward is doing Limitless Blue aka Bismarck which we took care of over lunch yesterday. This was legitimately one of my favorite primal fights because I liked all of the moving parts of it. I remember when we were learning this fight on Extreme the first few weeks after the expansion launch. All of those muscle memories came back… save for not remembering the lighting strike phase. We had all clumped up which meant that a ton of people took damage from a lightning strike at exactly the same time. It is just cool to fight a giant sky whale from the back of a rock… being towed by an airship. Ravana has the coolest music… but this fight has the coolest visuals.

Tonight we will knock out the final trail of the expansion and will have wrapped up Heavensward before the Path of Exile League starts on Friday. That will allow me to take a bit of a break to focus on leveling and gearing there before returning to Kraken to start the Heavensward post content. All in all, I am still having a freaking blast seeing this content for the first time. It is making me remember how much fun I had while leveling in SWTOR when I did so as a fixed duo of characters. Tag teaming the content with Ace has been so much fun and honestly extremely beneficial to my mental health and happiness. It has made me remember that maybe staying by myself and doing everything solo mode… is not really the best possible way to experience things. Ace has generally been way ahead of me, but we seem to alternate between one catching up and the other catching up so it has shaken out in the end allowing us to stay within a few hours of each other at all times.

I used to think that rolling an alt and restarting the MSQ was a fool’s errand… but if you can find a friend to do it with you, it is an amazing experience.

Roegabel is Pretty Fun

by

Morning Folks! I legitimately did not expect to grow to like Roegabel… but I gotta say I am digging it. Tanking random dungeons feels specifically fun because I am ginormous and can play fully zoomed out while also knowing exactly where my character is in relation to effects. I also really dig this outfit I have assembled… which admitted was a bit of a challenge given how few cool armor sets I have access to right now. Yesterday I dinged level 65 and will probably hit 70 before I finish up the ARR post-patch content. Ace remembered the existence of silver chocobo feathers which allowed me and them to purchase two pieces of level 60 gear significantly upping our performance. I also picked up a level 70 weapon for when I finally ding that eventually.

Last night we wrapped up the Crystal Tower series and had what was quite possibly the smoothest Syrcus Tower run I have ever experienced. It is all made up by the fact that we had maybe the worst World of Darkness run that I have seen in a while. I was essentially main-tanking everything… and off-tanking whatever I could at the same time because none of the other tanks appeared to be willing to do anything. We had a moment on Cerberus where I died… because no one was tanking the Wolfsbane and I came back up assuming that one of the other tanks picked it up… only to find out that it was running amok and I had to taunt it back on me. We got through it and I maybe feel more positive about my tanking prowess when it comes to larger content. I mean I raid tanked for years but I am rusty as fuck. We also cleared Leviathan which is SO MUCH easier than I remember it being.

I also got far enough in the Manderville quest line for me to unlock the Battle at Big Bridge. I’ve gotta say… while I low-key find Hildebrand annoying… I LOVE the trial fights associated with the series. Fighting Greg was probably the highlight of the evening for me, and I look forward to unlocking the next trial. On my Cactuar main I am nowhere near caught up on the Manderville quests and did not even realize that there was a Shadowbringers Trial and an Endwalker Trial… so I guess I need to get through those so I can see if they are anywhere near as good as the ARR trials.

In other notes I have been in this morning after the patch and unlocked the first wing of the Arcadion. I expect tonight Ace and I are going to challenge this, and I might ping Masto to see if anyone is interested in joining in the nonsense. I have no clue when we will be doing this, but I am figuring fairly early in the evening. I need to figure out what items I want to focus on trying to get. I REALLY need a new ring, so I will probably run things until I end up winning one of those. So I guess I am specifically trying to snag “Light-heavy Holoearring” which is the token used for accessories. I noticed that at least as of this morning there was not a new bookrock type, so I am wondering if they are waiting until Savage goes in for that to happen.

In other news, the sign-ups keep rolling in for Blaugust 2024. At this point, we have a little over thirty folks signed up with still half a month to go until the event starts. You can as always find all of the links in a condensed form on the Media Kit page, but if you are interested in reading my yearly post you can find that here. I’ve seen so much traction in the Fediverse that it is charming to behold. I am hoping that converts to folks actually signing up and participating in the coming weeks. Once again huge thanks to folks like Massively OP for covering the event and lending some additional visibility. More importantly massive thanks to all of the participants who keep returning year after year and are the real reason why I keep this going.