ffxiv Archives - Page 12 of 78 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was as the post title might give away… a really good night. Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds. The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead. The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests… which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems. There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest. This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players. Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us… but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos. Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to. The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad. While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot… I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights. Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence. I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks. It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do. All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun… except for maybe that middle section. There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four. I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content. That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood… the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content. I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content. Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior. Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell. The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice. That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people… so many other options open up.

Tiny Black Mage

February 24, 2017 by Belghast

My madness continues… and last night I joined in with Grace and eventually Storm and Muspel to do some Palace of the Dead. Essentially PotD is the new FATE grinding, and while it can be sort of repetitive, I never seem to get tired of it. I mean I thought Tam was insane when he went through his own period of time where he lived in dank dungeon, but now I finally get it. What I am loving about it is that I can just hop in… run a bunch of Palace of the Dead… mentally be somewhere else like watching a movie or a television show and then still feel like I made significant progress at the end of the night. The first goal has been to catch up my classes to 50, because it is going to allow me to have a massive house cleaning of everything that has been clogging my retainers. I have a problem with gear, because I know that eventually I would love to have every single class to the level cap. That is just the sort of person I am. In World of Warcraft I actually achieved this goal prior to the launch of legion and had at least one of every alliance character sitting at 100, and three horde characters as well.

Currently I have my Warrior sitting at 60 and he is my only viably geared character for doing big kid stuff. Then you have my Dragoon that I also leveled to 60, but promptly abandoned because playing that class in Heavensward was just so much less enjoyable for me than it was in ARR. When I was last furiously playing the game I was working on my Bard, which had become my defacto dps class for awhile and I managed to get it up to 55. Then we drop down to my 50s which are Paladin that I have not touched since Heavensward because I simply don’t really like playing a Paladin tank. We have my newly raised trio of casters in the form of the Scholar, Summoner and Black Mage all sitting at 50. Then we drop down to some 30 somethings with Ninja at 38, Monk at 33, and Dark Knight at 33. I have yet to even pick up the quest to be a Machinist or an Astrologian but at some point I probably need to do that so that I can weave those into the rotation as well. Now I am sort of torn as to what I should pick to level next, but for the moment I am leaning towards either the Dark Knight because I miss playing heavy armor classes… or the Ninja because they are just really fun to play.

The other set of goals that is staring me in the face is that when I last left my crafting… I had managed to push everything up to 21… with mining and foraging sitting at 50. At some point I really want to start this grind again and push everything up to at least the point where I can make glamour prisms. In theory I should be doing my beast tribe dailies to use those to level my crafting, but I just haven’t reached a point of getting back into the game enough to sort everything out to be able to do that. Once I finished with the Sahagin I sort of let the beast tribe thing die once again… but in theory should be doing the Ixal at least for crafting levels. Whatever the case it seems like I have been assimilated back into Final Fantasy XIV, and have more goals than I can realistically accomplish. My Warrior gear could also always be improved, but I am just finding PotD a relaxing way to spend my evenings… but sadly one that is not terribly interesting to write blog posts about.

Ode to Cactuar

February 22, 2017 by Belghast

Cactuar is a strange place and I love it. This is of course the server a bunch of us play on in Final Fantasy XIV and compared to so many other game servers… this one just seems to have a bizarre and friendly spirit to it. There are a whole slew of us that have been practically living in Quarymill as we grind away at Palace of the Dead to level secondary classes and get a shot at tasty replica raid gear. As a result Grace and myself happened to be milling around in town waiting for the festivities proper to begin that evening. Grace pointed out that there were two people bouncing around on Big Chocobo mounts… and we both agreed something to the effect that we should both join in and make this happen. So within moments of us joining the fray and bouncing around wildly on our giant chocos… this happened. Granted a few more guildies came over and joined in the fun but most of us this from just random people talking in /say as we bounced around happily. This sort of thing is honestly an almost nightly occurrence on our server. I cannot count how many times I have been in a major hub like this and a random pony party broke out, where everyone mounted up on their extreme primal mounts and started running around. Sometimes it even evolves into a parade as we all run around throughout the zone.

Cactuar is a weird place and I love it. There are so many times I have had to step afk and typed /mdance before leaving… and come back to a whole bunch of other strangers there with me also dancing the Manderville and somehow almost perfectly synced up with me. I have so many people on my friends list because they had an amazing outfit and we just struck up a conversation, and we /wave madly at each other anytime we pass out in the world. Argent Dawn the server I play on in World of Warcraft has always had its bizarre streaks, but more often than not there was an undertone of malice there. In Final Fantasy XIV folks just seem to be interested in enjoying themselves far more than bringing other people down in the process. I am sure Cactuar also has its dark underbelly, but generally speaking folks are friendly and more than willing to join in the silliness if given a chance. It is funny how a server develops a certain culture, which is honestly the main reason why I question games that are essentially server-less. I know our server “feels” different than a lot of the other larger servers, and I am never quite certain how that sort of thing develops. I mean I guess it could simply be because our server mascot is a half man half cactus… which doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of being hardcore and brutal. Although… anyone who has ever fought a Cactuar knows the score as they fall over after a 10000 Needles attack.

In other news I finally got to see the Sophia primal fight, as there were a bunch of us who had never done it. I realize we are a few patch cycles behind on this one, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was like all of the things happening with Leviathan… but messaged far far better. There are a lot of moving parts on the fight, but we largely winged it without having seen it and only the most vague description of the fight from those who had. We single tanked it, and that role fell onto me… since really I don’t have a well enough geared anything else to do big kid content on. I had an awful lot of fun with the moving back and forth on the platform to avoid this ability or that… or the platform shift as the scales get out of balance. We also did a one tank, one healer Ravana Extreme and that fight is still madness. I would love to do that some more largely because I would really like to get my axe from there… also of as a side note I would love to do some more Bismarck for the same reason. I guess ultimately I really am a Warrior main, given that I didn’t swap at Heavensward and still have no plans to swap for Stormblood. Of all of the gear I own… it is my Warrior gear that I end up enjoying the most.

One Hundred Floors

February 21, 2017 by Belghast

So yesterday I mentioned that I had plenty of Aetherpool to get a weapon, but found out that I apparently needed to have completed the full 1-100 Palace of the Dead experience to purchase it. Confession time here… before last night I had never actually completed any further into PotD than floor 70. Most of my running lately has been resetting and running 51-60 over and over which tends to give between 1/2 and 3/4 of a level worth of experience depending on your level. I am sure this slows down in the post 50 grind, but regardless considering how fast most of the runs go it is well worth my time. Given how fast the queue is… I am guessing the community as a whole has also decided it is well worth their time. For the moment I have been focused on getting up my characters to 50, which would allow me to clean out a significant amount of gear from my extremely clogged retainers. Last night I hung out in a holding pattern until my wife got home, and then we both walked to dinner and finally around 7:30 I had arrived at a place where I could get committed to running something serious. I mentioned that I really needed to get to floor 100 and within moments Tam, Ash and Grace had volunteered for the run. All told it took roughly 2 hours to get through the 51-100 content, which no matter how you chop it is a raid like effort of sitting still in one place for a long period of time. As far as experience goes I went from 33 to 37 and am just barely shy of dinging 38 so just a little less than a half level per flight of floors. I also managed to bump my Aetherpool up to 85 weapon / 87 armor as seen in the final score shot from the dungeon.

The first five sets of floors were pretty chill, but quickly things kinda turned to madness. We had a sequence of floors with just a silly amount of Chimera and Dragon on them, and in truth we pomander of rage’d the last three floors just to go quicker. We picked up plenty of silver chests and exited with 9 treasures… but we didn’t exactly go out of our way to do full clears either. If we had unexplored rooms and the portal activated… we were far more likely just to hop straight in than to spend any more time. This become more so as we got into the last few flights and it was clear that we were all getting tired of the run. I am super thankful to my friends because I probably would not have successfully pugged my way through that one. I have had great luck with 1-10 and 51-60… but pretty much any other set I try they end up failing miserably and I am just out thirty minutes worth of frustration in the process. Grace on the other had has somehow managed to pug her way to 100, and I salute her. Her intestinal fortitude for dealing with strangers is so much stronger than mine. After running 1-50 for Muspel over the weekend, and then running 51-100 for me last night… I think it might be a long while before I sign up for another complete run of Palace of the Dead. I greatly prefer speed running the first flight over and over to trying to do the entire thing in a single sitting.