final fantasy xiv

Clearing ARR and Optional Dungeons

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Good Morning Folks! I am reading a lovely story about my murder faerie on this rainy day in Limsa Lominsa. I wish that it were actually rainy in the real world because maybe it wouldn’t be targeted to get upwards of 115 degrees Fahrenheit today. I managed to push my Summoner across the level 100 line on Friday which means I also have a lovely companion level 100 Scholar. Not that I have a clue what I am doing and had to go button by button on my Hotbar trying to find Esuna when it was required in a quest. I’ve not finished the healer role quest but my intent is to do this thing… and then make myself a Mentor because it is funny. The only hesitation I have is that I am not sure if I can hide my mentor tag once I have it… like I can do with my Commander tag in Guild Wars 2.

All of that said… the main reason why I have not finished any of this on Cactuar… is that I have been spending almost all of my time on my babby Warrior that lives on Dynamis/Kraken. Am I switching mains? Fuck no. This is just a really fun project and quite honestly all of the grouping I have been doing with Ace lately has been deeply beneficial to my mental health. At this point, we have finished the Main Story quest for A Realm Reborn, and it has been hilarious doing all of this content as a sprout that understands most of the mechanics. Truth be told I think most of the folks on Dynamis are rerolls because significantly more folks seem to just automatically understand what to do. Every so often you run into a proper sprout and it is delightful when you see one. I love the paternal instinct we seem to get around new players, and that is honestly one of the best things about starting FFXIV.

The best aspect of all of this however has been experiencing this content with the understanding of where things are going in this story. Once again fair warning for spoilers in the rest of this post. I feel like Square might have retconned a few things, but we are seeing the echoes of the end of days all the freaking time. They essentially split Praetorum up into two different dungeons, and a solo duty, and now during the Lahabrea fight he casts an attack also called “end of days”. More than that there are so many weird plot threads that are out there that we know get wrapped up before all is said and done. It is REAL hard to interact with “Urine Jar” knowing what a fucking heel he is at so many points during the story. More than anything it has been awesome to rewatch some of these cutscenes like our Carebear Stare that ultimately destroys Lahabrea.

One of the coolest aspects of the flow of modern Praetorium is you are left with this weird photo op moment after finishing up the first dungeon, but before fighting Ultima Weapon where you can sort of just roam around in the space and take screenshots. I am sure you can do some truly dumb things with gpose, but I am a noob and do not know how that system works in the least. I just took a few shots staring up at the big snake-dragon-taur. The lighting is especially awesome on the Ultima weapon fights because this used to look pretty matte black and now has shiny bits glinting in the light and the glow of all of the red greebles.

It would not be Ace and me if we did not engage in some complete insanity. This means that not only did we complete the storyline… but we also started down the path of unlocking our Zodiac weapons. It all started with an innocent enough conversation about whether or not we were going to run the Hard mode versions of the primals. I said that if we were going to do that… we should probably just start the Zodiac weapon chain because we would have to do them all anyways during that. This led us to roam around like mad on Saturday morning doing all of this in the period of about two hours. We now have a shiny Zenith weapon to show for our efforts and are now unlocking the Extreme versions of the fights… and contemplating going down that rabbit hole as well.

When you finish the ARR MSQ, you unlock a truly stupid number of dungeons… and again… being us… we had to run all of them. Between Saturday and Sunday, we have completed every single one of these dungeons and I have to say… the Hard modes still do occasionally deserve their name. Trying to teach folks how to do mechanics that the large chunk of the player base has not seen since this left Expert Roulette was definitely a thing. There were a few cases where we ourselves had to look things up because we did not remember how to stop dying to certain mechanics. The worst was absolutely Pharos Sirius where we had a troll Viper who kept running several rooms ahead of us and chaining shit back on top of us. The first time I tried to save him and wiped the party. The second time I just let him die four rooms away from where we were currently. At that point Ace decided not to rez him… and the game would not let me kick him… so thankfully he called us all noobs and left the party allowing us to get a fill from a lovely monk player.

All of this said… I do sort of wonder if this is going to be the case going forward any time we stray from the path and do content that is not absolutely required by the Main Story quest. Really all told there were really only two extremely rough spots, the second being Tam Tara Deepcroft Hard. Most of the dungeons have gone pretty easily. We saved Wanderer’s Palace Hard as our last dungeon of the sequence because it was one that we both knew extremely well and understood all of the possible pitfalls. We essentially guaranteed ourselves a smooth landing from this nonsense. We’ve now moved on to doing the Crystal Tower series of Alliance Raids. We did Labyrinth of the Ancients last night and it was a bit rough around the edges… but we got through it and will probably progress to Syrcus Tower tonight.

Throughout all of this nonsense… a dare happened. You have to understand that I am notorious for playing a Lalafell character, and Ace is pretty renowned for being a dedicated Roegadamme. Given that the game just seems to throw Fantasias at new characters… and I had four of them… a scheme was hatched where each of us was required to swap races. So after the podcast on Saturday, I ended up swapping over to a Roegadyn and Ace over to a Lalafell. This has felt extremely bizarre if I am being perfectly honest. I feel so fucking slow… and I have no clue where the hell Ace is half of the time because I am not used to looking for a Lala. We are mostly still rolling with it out of spite and our strong desire to not be the first one to break and Fantasia back to something else. Like there are no true stakes in this contest… just honor is on the line.

I had to shift up my glamour to something more sufficiently tanky, but all in all, I think I am pretty okay with this. I feel like it is not going to be me that breaks first. I went with the shortest possible Roe, but it still feels like I am playing the Incredible Hulk. I’ve always loved the look of this chestpiece so I decided to build something around it. I have the matching legs but not the matching arms… so decided to go with the Sentinels set for the time being. I mostly did not just want to run around permanently in the Warrior artifact gear set. Anyways… alting in FFXIV is way more enjoyable than I ever expected it to be. I will probably continue to share updates on our progress as we tackle more content.

AggroChat #485 – The Fantasia Dare

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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
    • The Fantasia Dare

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Ishgardians are Still Awful

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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.

Simplifying Summoner

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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.

Single Target Spam

/micon gemshine
/ac "ruin IV"
/ac gemshine
/ac "ruin iii"

Multi Target Spam

/micon "Precious Brilliance"
/ac "ruin IV"
/ac "Precious Brilliance"
/ac "Outburst"

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.