final fantasy xiv

Maelstrom Captain

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Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.

This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.

In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.

Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.

I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.

One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.

Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.

Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.

AggroChat #480 – Number One Fan

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Bel crash lands the introduction by completely managing to skip over Thalen.  We have a pretty packed show as several things got bumped from the previous show. We start off the show with some discussion of Luck Be A Landlord, a game that was compared to Balatro.  From there we talk a bit about Summer Games Fest, admittedly in a disjointed manner while also talking about the Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail Media Tour Embargo lifting.  Bel has now wrapped up the Post Endwalker content ans is significantly more excited for Dawntrail.  Grace talks about the Alan Wake II DLC and her experiences so far with Number One Fan.  Tam talks about Star Trek Resurgence.  Collectively we talk about some One Shot TTRPG Ideas, and Kodra shares some thoughts about Dropout TV.  Finally we talk a bit about Kodra’s experiences with the Kitsune Tails Demo on Steam.

Topics Discussed:

  • Luck Be A Landlord
  • Summer Games Fest
  • FFXIV Dawntrail Media Tour
    • Bel Wraps up Post-Endwalker
  • Alan Wake II DLC
    • Number One Fan
  • Star Trek Resurgence
  • RPG One Shots
  • Dropout TV
  • Kitsune Tails Demo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Worst Part About FFXIV

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Good Morning Friends! Remember yesterday when I said I was hesitant to finish up the Final Fantasy XIV storyline? Well… sometimes I contradict myself because I did precisely that. I was about maybe a third of the way catching up on the story when I started this mission over the weekend. I am honestly surprised at how fast that I managed to catch myself up. I went into this not being certain I would actually play Dawntrail, and now I find myself rather pumped for it. Truth be told I would have rather the Thirteenth storyline tied into the expansion, but I guess I am relatively happy to see it concluded for the time being.

As happy as I am with where the story wrapped up, I want to talk a bit this morning about the worst freaking part about this game. At two points last night I had to stop the flow of the story, to run to the market board and buy a piece of gear so that I could get over the arbitrary item-level gating requirements. Now I came back before the last set of crafted gear was put into the game so when I bought my way to relevancy I bought most of a set of 610 gear for a few million gil. This meant that my item level was sort of all over the place. I bought a new weapon when the last gear set went in giving me a single 640 item level item, and this mishmash was good enough to get me all the way to the last dungeon of the expansion.

When I set forth to do The Lunar Subterrane I needed an item level of 620 and I was sitting at 617. So I went to the market board, replaced my lowest-level item, and was able to get past this gate. It cost some 300k gil, but I figured I was probably good to go for a bit and could at least finish out the story. Then a few minutes later when I unlocked the final Trial… I was hit with a 5-level jump and again needed to make up the last two points to get over that hurdle. So once again I had to break my way out of the flow of the story to go pay my way to freedom again. It just feels awful to know that you have to keep getting nickeled and dimed by the market in order to see the conclusion of the story.

What I find most frustrating about this situation is… that Final Fantasy XIV has some rather damned good scaling tech. It would likely be trivial to scale players up to the minimum item level for a dungeon so that they can complete the story. Yoshi P has freely admitted that a large chunk of the player base returns right before the launch of a new expansion to catch up on the story… plays through the new expansion… and then disappears again until another expansion launches. It seems somewhat ludicrous that this has been a problem for EVERY expansion… and yet there has been nothing done to ease the pain. I am not saying that scaling should always be there… but folks catching up on the MSQ should be given a one-time pass of that gate so that they can actually see how things sort out without a lot of grinding. I have plenty of gil… it was easy for me to buy my way to freedom but not everyone has that option.

I think what makes all of this worse is that I am really rather pleased with how the post-Endwalker content was resolved. I had a lot of fun playing it. But there is this base level of resentment that I feel towards the game for draining my wallet just so that I could see it to its conclusion. Maybe I am just too used to Guild Wars 2 at this point where I set up a single set of gear several years ago and have been able to do everything in the game without ever needing to change it. I’ve gone through this with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker so I knew what I was getting myself in for. That does not make it feel any better to keep having to return to the Market Board to try and limp through the story gates, however.

All of that said… I am legitimately looking forward to Dawntrail. I am looking forward to seeing the new continent and I legitimately like Wuk Lamat. She reminds me of my friend Shandrah but with a Spanish accent. I don’t love some of the setup where we will be on opposite sides of a conflict from our friends, but I feel like before all is said and done we will end up together. I am very much looking forward to adventuring with Krille, and I am hoping that before all is said and done we get to see Zero once more. I became really invested in that character and want to see far more of her story and that of the Thirteenth. I’m also curious how the fuck Solution 9 fits into all of this because a weird cyberpunk city does not seem to make sense.

Problems With Goals

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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a tangent post, but given that, I don’t have anything terribly pressing to talk about… I am going to roll with it. I have a problem with goals. What I mean by that is not that I necessarily have a problem setting goals, but that I have a problem with accomplishing them. There is something baked into my brain that upon accomplishing a goal that required quite a bit of work… I suddenly want nothing to do with the thing after achieving it. This has been a curse for me throughout the years, that upon cresting that hill and accomplishing whatever it was that I thought I wanted… I no longer want it anymore. For example, I set forth the goal of getting to level 100 in Diablo IV this season, and instead of reveling in the accomplishment and joining in all of the reindeer games that are gated behind that level… I mostly checked out of the experience.

Similarly, I had a blast with Mists of Pandaria Remix in World of Warcraft while I was grinding towards an objective. I wanted to unlock all of the gear slots, which required me to complete all of the heroic dungeons, and heroic scenarios, and complete all of the normal mode dungeons that I had to get groups for manually. Once I completed that… I fell into the routine of farming World Bosses every day and then checking out… basically losing all forward momentum. It isn’t just that I lose focus and fail to set a goal… I began to reject whatever activity it was that I was doing and hop furiously over to something else. In the case of PMIX I tried leveling a few more alts but never really gained the same level of enjoyment out of it.

Honestly, I am not sure why I am so surprised by this each time it happens. I know I experienced the same thing when playing through Dragonflight. I finished the story, did a few days of world quests, and then decided that I was mostly done with the game in its entirety and bounced. Even in my beloved Path of Exile, I have experienced a bit of this. I’ve made far fewer characters in this league than I have in any previous. I set forth a series of goals but the major overarching one was completing the Gruelling Gauntlet Grinds challenge, and after finishing that I mostly checked out of the league only to return recently when a friend needed assistance with something. It is like there is a toggle switch in my brain that flips when I have checked something off my “to-do” list and then immediately wants to shed any presence of that thing from my brain.

I think in part this is why I occasionally drag my feet when I am enjoying something. For example, right now I am having a blast in Guild Wars 2 again. I am slowly working towards crafting my third legendary weapon but trying not to grind it out so much so that it becomes one of these overarching goals of mine. Similarly, I’ve yet to finish up the Secrets of the Obscure campaign because I am somewhat afraid that once I do so I might check out of the game again for an indeterminate amount of time. It is like I am trying to keep the fun going for as long as I can before finishing things up. There is something about that finality that I have never liked. I hate finishing a book series for example, and have been dragging my feet on reading the 4th book in the Stormlight Archive series because I know… that is all we have for the time being.

I’ve been back in Final Fantasy XIV playing through the post-Endwalker story and have honestly been having a lot of fun with it. I did not expect to become emotionally invested in it quite in the manner that I have. Similarly, I am afraid that when I catch up to the story, I am going to “nope” out of the game as I have done before. Prior to the launch of Endwalker, I went on this whole mission to level everything to 80, and I accomplished it… then was mostly done with Endwalker the second I finished the story. Basically, I know that I do not personally have a healthy relationship with finishing things. I am not exactly certain how I played World of Warcraft for as long as I did. A lot of that was the fact that I was heavily engaged in a raiding community and with that many goals that were never fulfilled. As a solo player, I find that I get easily distracted by the next thing on the horizon when I finish with anything.

Maybe all of this is okay, and I should just learn to accept myself. However, I find myself jealous of folks who can stick with the same thing day in and day out without wavering. The folks who get super engaged in a single community baffle me, especially given that I was once one of those people. I am not sure what changed in my brain and whether or not I can recuperate the part of me that used to stick with something for years at a time. Granted I tend to hyper-focus on a single thing at a time, but also quickly burn through it. I am hoping to delay the inevitable with Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV for as long as I can so that I can at the very least see my way through Dawntrail and see the content drop for Janthir Wilds.

All of this said… I know that major distractions are looming on the horizon that will claim me. I know I will play Last Epoch Cycle 2 when it drops in early July. I also know that I am very likely to play my way through Path of Exile 3.25 when it drops in late July or early August. So maybe it is okay that I keep jumping ship to the next thing because ultimately given enough time… I return refreshed and ready for more. At some point, I want to dig back into Valheim or New World, because I feel like I am never 100% done with a game that I have hyper-fixated on in the past… I am just done with it for the moment. Maybe I am just living that content locust lifestyle.

I’ve joked and said that blogging is often therapy for me and that I don’t set out writing a post with a fixed ending. This is one of those cases because I started out the post pretty down on myself because of my inability to follow through after accomplishing a goal, and now suddenly feel less bad about that practice as I near the end of this post. Anyways if you have made it this far… thanks for sticking around for my nonsense.