Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back in fighting form with the entire crew. We start off discussing SGDQ or Summer Games Done Quick a massive speedrunning community event. From there we talk a bit about the Path of Exile 3.25 Settlers of Kalgur spoilers and some of the changes that are being made. Then we roll into Last Epoch Cycle 2 which has so many amazing gameplay and polish improvements. Lastly Bel and Grace talk about their nonsense mission to replay all of the FFXIV content and some of the experiences from running old content with perfect understanding of where the game story is going. Bel has traditionally played a Lalafell and Grace a pretty dedicated Roegadamme… and they have dared each other to swap races. Last night after the show that happened and the show card shows the end results. Lastly Bel talks a bit about Blaugust which is coming up in a few weeks.
Topics Discussed:
SGDQ
Path of Exile 3.25 Spoilers
Last Epoch Cycle 2
So many improvements
Amazingly polished experience
Revisiting FFXIV A Realm Reborn
Redoing Old Content with Full Understanding of the 10-Year Story Arc
Morning Folks! Since I spent all day yesterday talking about my Summoner, I figured this morning I would talk a bit about our progress on Kraken characters. Fair warning for this older content I am going to be pretty open with story spoilers as I talk through it. This is ten-year-old content so you had your chance to play through it. When last I talked about our adventures, we had finished Brayflox and were hot on the tale of a rumble with Titan. Fighting the giant rockboy was as always a fun experience, and even though it went super smoothly we had plenty of time to bask in the great music. This however led us through the Coerthas phase of the MSQ… which is a heck of a lot longer than I remembered it being. The next major destination was Stone Vigil and we mostly kept our heads down until we were able to get there.
I thought that maybe after returning to the game I would find the Ishgardians less insufferable given that I understand the people and their motivations a bit more now. This was not the case. Haurchefant is a great boy as always, but the rest of them can largely die in a big fire. Now that I have actually met Halone… I have so much less patience for their bullshit. The whole paranoia in dealing with the Dravinian threat is equally tiresome, especially after having spent much time hanging with Dragons at this point. Ishgard is so very in the wrong on most of these matters, and it only feels more obvious on a second play-through. The whole business with the Inquisitor and not being able to get into Stone Vigil was a pain in the ass and made me just want to murder everyone until they stopped annoying me.
Last night we pushed through and fought Garuda, and it is hilarious doing that fight in the four-player version. So many muscle memories came flying back to me, at which point I realized just how many times over the years I have done that fight. I remember feeling like it was a real challenge back in the day, but now she mostly just falls over. We wrapped this up by starting on our course to Castrum Centi in Mor Dhona and an attempt at saving our magical pals. It seems like the next big thing we are going to do is a raid on Castrum Meridianum…. many many quests from now. We are sort of in that final grind to finish out the original ARR MSQ. I’m honestly looking forward to doing the patch content because really that is the part of the game that sold me properly on Final Fantasy XIV as a story.
It has been wild seeing scenes that I had long forgotten. I can probably regurgitate the cutscenes of Praetorium like a 5th Grade Class drone through the pledge of allegiance, but there are many scenes I have only ever seen once. For example, I did not remember the whole bit where Baelsar indicated that he was going to get down and dirty with Livia when he ordered her to his room in an hour. The Garleans seem so freaking laughable at this point because I have been making them fall over time and time again for years as I leveled my characters through Main Story Roulette. I remember thinking they were freaking cool the first time I experienced all of these cutscenes. Even Darth Vader though would lose his novelty and fear factor if you made him fall over in minutes every single day for years. I still really want Square to release some of these outfits as cosmetics. I would kill entire zones just to get hold of Nero’s hammer as a Warrior weapon transmog.
Back on the other side of the fence over on Cactuar, I pushed my Summoner forward a bit in levels. I dinged level 96 and in theory, should be able to get another two levels tonight. If I grind really hard, I might be able to hit level 99 and equip the artifact set of gear which would be slick. I really need to clean out my Armoury Chest a bit in order to figure out what gear I actually need in there. Right now I have stuff strewn out between that and my inventory and am pretty sure I have broken a few of my gearsets for other jobs in the process. I’m basically living in Shaaloani now doing FATEs between queue pops of roulette. I’ve yet to get any of the bits required for the “Guinea Big” mount, but I want it badly. Its a fun zone to hang out regardless though because of the phenomenal soundtrack.
Anyways! At some point, I need to check out the new Last Epoch cycle, but I have been so focused on FFXIV that I have barely given it the time of day this week. In the coming days, I am going to get a bit more serious with my recruitment of folks to do some raiding in the game. Since Cactuar is sort of hell to travel over to, we might choose a neutral ground in order to meet up and do the content.
Good Morning Friends! I’m now starting to feel like I am actually rolling on Summoner. Yesterday I pushed it through to level 93 after running beast tribe dailies and then PVP, Main Story, Trial, and Alliance Raid roulettes. I got one of the Nier raids which was pretty awful and takes for freaking ever to clear… but I stuck with it. I do not love having cast times folks. Everything else about being a Summoner I am pretty on board with, but cast times are butts. Like the positive is that Titan and Garuda are all instant cast abilities, so it is really only Ifrit that becomes a problem. Like I said yesterday I can sort of vary my rotation a bit to make up for this fact but still having to stand still at any point feels awful.
I’ve also invoked some dumbassery to simplify my rotation. Summoner is a class that could benefit from having more modal buttons that shift what they do as you use them. So I decided to make my own in the form of a couple of macros. I am sure this is not efficient but I also do not care about being the best summoner on the planet. I only care enough about being decent enough to not get visibly called out for my halfassery. So as such, I made an AOE button and a Single Target button. Granted you will have to turn off error messages to keep from this being an awful experience. The above screenshot shows the three boxes you need to untick first in Character Configuration > Log Settings > General tab… and then by clicking through to the log filters section at the bottom of that same screen and unchecking error messages.
If you want to join me in my degeneracy there are the macros I am using. I threw Ruin IV in there just to have a place to put it since I would be spamming that button anyway. The idea is that single-target defaults to Ruin and multi-target defaults to Outburst but will use the elemental flavored version of those attacks if it is available. Since Bahamut and Phoenix already override Ruin/Outburst this still works in those phases as well. I’ve contemplated throwing in painflare as well into the stack to be super lazy, and it would absolutely work similarly to Ruin IV. I am sure I will have someone comment about how I am doing a disservice to the class but honestly… fuck that noise. You can blame this on me playing Guild Wars 2 a lot… but Final Fantasy XIV has way too damned many buttons to push on a regular basis and anything I can do to simplify that seems like a win to me. Side note… you could use any flavor of ruin in the macro and the game is smart enough to know what you mean and will downgrade Ruin III for example for earlier versions when you are running lower-level content.
I’ve gone back to tracking my job progress on my spreadsheet, though I do not give a shit about the trending I used to do where I kept track of where I was with every job every day. That was something I was doing in the lead-up to Endwalker, mostly to try and see if I could in theory realistically get everything to level 80 before the expansion. Now that I have all of the time in the world… I can just focus on where I am with each job. At this point I have Warrior and Machinist at 100 and am rapidly catching Summoner/Scholar up which gives me the double whammy of a caster and a healer. After that, I will probably level Samurai next because out of the melee jobs, it is probably my favorite. Then I will probably focus down family groups of classes that all use the same gear. So with Samurai I will also level up Monk. Then I will probably level Dancer and Bard to finish out my physical ranged. No clue when I will tackle the other things, but probably the easiest to level will be my other tank classes.
I think after today my Summoner should be at least level 95, which is ideal level for hanging out in the zone I keep referring to as Texaco. There is a rare FATE in that zone which gives you currency to get the Capybara mount which I really want. As a result of this mount being there, there tends to be a crowd always rolling around through the FATE trains. In theory if I get a decent chunk of time I can probably easily push through additional levels each day hanging out in the zone. Adding this into my rotation I will easily hit 100 on Summoner and Scholar probably sometime around Friday. That gives me the weekend to push through the role quests and by next week you will probably have me as a newly minted Mentor. May heaven have mercy on your souls.
Anyways! Still having a blast in Dawntrail and very much looking forward to the opening of the raid next week. My raid main is ready, and I am going to throw out a broader net to see if anyone wants to do some nonsense on Tuesday. I would love to go in with a full group, but even if I don’t have those folks I will probably PUG it with Ace.
Good Morning Friends! I had a pretty early night last night and turned in around 8:30, so did not make a ton of progress. I did however get my Summoner to level 90 like I thought I would, and made it up to Titan on my Kraken Warrior which we will run first thing this evening. I like Summoner quite a bit, way more than I thought I would at this time. The only annoyance is the casting times, and needing to interrupt them in order to move out of things. I do wonder how the game would feel if they removed all casting times or allowed you to cast while moving. Most of the summoner rotation does not require a casting time and it is only really the Ifrit abilities that chain me into place, so in theory, if I know movement is going to happen I can just start my rotation at the other end with Titan or Garuda. After being used to dpsing while on the go with the Machinist, this has probably been the biggest adjustment.
One of the more notable aspects of the Kraken project is that mounts look so much cooler when they are not super tiny. I’ve been running around on my Fenrir bike as I am used to doing and it looks so much cooler when I can actually see the detail in it. This is especially notable as the mounts now bank as you turn lending a bit more realistic movement than they previously had. I am not saying I will give my the Lala life on my Cactuar main, but I appreciate seeing a bit more detail in all of the mounts and even the gear pieces. Catboy life is pretty great and I am happy I decided to roll with that racial choice. I’ve always dug the dark-skinned Miqo’te appearances. I wish they had more proper beard action going on but I will life with the tufts around my chin.
I also now understand why folks talk about the ARR MSQ being so rough around the edges. I know they have streamlined a lot of the content, but there are still chunks that seem to drag on forever. For example in the lead-up to Titan, there is this 20-step or so sequence where you have to learn about wine and recover a famous vintage. This is extremely tedious and while the payoff for all of your busy work is somewhat fun… it definitely feels like something that could have been trimmed back a bit. I think the Japanese appetite may be more into the mundane “day in the life” sort of content than the Western audience. I’m looking at you Persona series and all of your tedious running about to do social nonsense. Thankfully I just kept my head down and pushed through it and now can finally fight Titan.
Grousing aside… I have had a heck of a lot of fun exploring the ARR MSQ again with fresh eyes after ten years of playing this game. I have so many fond memories of this era for the game and the group of friends we played it with. Ace and I have lamented how far removed from that era we are. We were joking about our friend Mor yelling “Medica Twooooooo” each time he cast the spell… and that is sadly just a bygone era. It was after the late ARR/early HW era that folks migrated westward and time zones became a problem… and it just became impossible to agree upon a time that was early enough for the Eastern folks but late enough to not collide with work responsibilities for the Western folks. So really if we want to recapture some of that joy we are going to have to start from scratch and rebuild what we had.
It is on that note that I am starting to try and rebuild that friend group. I am not sure what the restrictions are these days but I know for certain that I can group with anyone on the Aether Data Center on my main, and Dynamis Data Center on my alt. What I am looking for is folks who can play in an Eastern timezone compatible range of hours on weekday evenings (not sure which yet), and play a wide variety of roles. What we have currently is a Tank (myself) and a Healer (Ace) and potentially a few others who might be interested in our FC/Friendgroup. So I am throwing out the request to my longterm readers out there… do you want to do some of the harder content in the game? At a minimum I want to do all of the Extremes and Normal raids… and would love to maybe work up to Savage content at some point. I am way more focused on having a fun group than a highly skilled well-oiled machine.
If this sounds like something you would be interested in, drop me a line on one of the MANY platforms you can contact me in, or just throw out a note in the comments below. We will be organizing over on the Super Dungeon Friends discord when things begin to pull together. So feel free to join.
