leveling Archives - Page 4 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

Deathlord Rises

May 30, 2017 by Belghast

For those not in the United States… apologies for taking yesterday off from the blog. I had an insanely busy weekend, and it was about half way through yesterday that I finally realized that it was in fact a Monday… and not a Sunday. Extended holiday weekends always feel a little odd, because it just seemed like I had two different Saturdays. One of the Saturdays we went to Oklahoma City in a whirlwind trip to hit the three Half Priced Books they have… in an attempt to get there and back before the tornadic storms hit that evening. Thankfully for the most part all we got was some rain… and not the grapefruit sized hail that they had been warning us about. Then Saturday number two… aka Sunday… we spent the day deep cleaning the house and working in the backyard. I once again have flower babies, that are going to need to be watered in a few minutes whenever I finish this post. I am going to give them some time to acclimatize to the back yard before taking any photos. Additionally right now our pool is a lovely shade of green because we are fighting an algae bloom… so hoping that clears up as well before I snap some photos. Then of course yesterday was me hanging out and doing nearly two weeks worth of laundry… because we were lazy as hell last weekend. I wound up going to sleep around 9:30 last night instead of the usual midnight… because maybe the crazy weekend was catching up with me.

In gaming news… I played a silly amount of World of Warcraft. Like I am not really certain what is going on but much like Grace I find myself in a mini renaissance with the game. It is funny how when I didn’t have flight I didn’t think I really missed it. I have always been one of those people who espouse the philosophy that not having flying during the early days of an expansion is a better thing. It forces us to get down in the weeds and not to skip quite as much content. That said… it is funny just how much more enjoyable the game has been since I could zip around wherever I wanted to go. I had zero desire to play alts prior to getting the Legion Pathfinder achievement and flight… and suddenly afterwards its like the skies have opened to a whole new day. I had mentioned before that I am now working on my first 100+ hordie and choosing to do it on this low population server that Grace has the majority of her horde characters on. That in itself has been an interesting experience. The challenges have been that there simply are not that many people out in the world so when you encounter something you cannot solo… it might be a bit before another player happens to wander along. The benefit however is that there are always plenty of ore nodes to mine and I figure when I start Broken Shore I will have zero issue finding treasure chests. I figure if I am going to stick around for long… I will have to at least level my tanking weapon so I can solo things a bit easier.

For the moment however I am loving being an Unholy Death Knight. Last night I managed to get about halfway to 109, which I hope means that I can push across the finish line to 110 tonight and begin properly gearing my character. I am completely caught up in the Order Hall quest line, and to the point where I have to be 110 to get the next step. I am sorta fast tracking my way through Stormheim at the moment, and if need be I will do the same in High Mountain. Years ago I compiled a list of the order in which you should do SWTOR planets and bonus series in order to get the most bang for your buck… and if I am going to do more alts I feel like I need to come up with the same sort of thing for classes and the order hall campaign. Grace has a good idea in that she waits to do the order hall dungeon steps until she has opened up that zones quest as well. Had I done this… that would have meant starting Highmountain First and not Azsuna like I usually do. As I have a mountain of alts still to level it would be nice to have some sort of a guide to go off of… and most of this information is available through a series of other sites… but not really written out as plainly as I would have liked. So that might be a little bit of homework going forward. I know that when Stormblood hits I am going to lose a lot of my gusto in World of Warcraft, so I guess in a way I am trying to get the most out of this moment.

Side Note: You should totally check out our AggroChat where we talk about the May game of the month Wolfenstein New Order

Listless

August 22, 2016 by Belghast

The past week was hyper focused on a single goal… getting Belgaoh my monk from 53 to 100. The weird thing about this process is that once completed… I am finding myself drifting a bit without purpose. The above screenshot is unrelated to anything, but I thought it looked cool so you are getting it with this mornings post. Starting yesterday I begin finally running my stable of characters through the Broken Shore content. I managed to snag all of the toys, and troll shoes transmog from my single leel 100 horde character, and on my second time through on an alliance character successfully got the bonnet cosmetic item. I am assuming that tomorrow there will be a new step on the quest chain being patched in, and this time around we will actually do the moving of Dalaran to the Broken Isles bit. Tonight is our Final Fantasy XIV raid, so that means I will go into this weeks patch not having run Broken Shores on the bulk of my characters. At least in theory the content isn’t going anywhere so I shouldn’t feel that much of a rush to push through it. I think this content will essentially be the “welcome to Legion” content for everyone from this point on wards. I will say it was really strange buzzing right past the quest starter for Cataclysm, Pandaria and Draenor on the monk. I think I have all of the quests sitting in my log, because they are given automatically when you zone into Stormwind, but I am not sure when if ever I am going to do them. At this moment I am contemplating using the Timeless Isle port to get to Draenor, but then again that would mean I need to open up Pandaria to get to it.

Even though I have completed one journey to 100… I am finding that I cannot seem to quit the Invasion Event. A good chunk of yesterday was also spent running characters through the event trying to get the last few 700 items for each. I managed to finish off Lodin and Tallow last night, which leaves Gloam, Exeter and Belglaive all needing a single item slot. Belglaive is a little more complicated because I used that character to purchase the pet, and as a result he is still missing several of the purchased pieces of gear. I just need to run ANY instances on him to get that finished off. I do have his Glaives upgraded to 725, and I have started a second set mooching off of everyone else’s spare tokens to upgrade them for my eventual Horde demon hunter. I wish the other weapons worked like this, in that they were bind on account and you could pass them around as needed. Some characters I have gotten more than my fair share of weapons… and then others like Exeter have yet to see a single one. I have this feeling that ultimately it is going to be Ex my Paladin that I will continue to run events on, as I try and get three weapons for him. The other big thing that I need to accomplish before this event is over is to try and find the Demon that spawns in Orgrimmar and Stormwind and get a Fel Spreader toy. I failed to get one the two times I tried it yesterday, with the one in Orgrimmar bugging out and running back to the Doomsayer and fading.

The big thing I have learned over the years is that I have a lot of fun playing World of Warcraft, so long as I have a goal in mind. For example this last week has been a blast as I leveled my way through to 100 doing events. In theory I could pick a Horde character and start doing the same, but I don’t really have any that are nearly as close to finish as my Monk was. Doing the event without flight was a pain in the butt, and I am not sure if I want to go back to that frustration right now. If I was going to pick a character on that side of the fence I would probably pick my Warlock since I have really enjoyed playing my Alliance lock… and I have full cloth heirlooms. Similarly I have full leather heirlooms, but of the leather classes the one I am most likely to play… is the Demon Hunter, which is easy as hell to get to 100. I do however have the cash to just go ahead and outfit my plate heirlooms up to 100 and then push something else that I would likely play. My Orc Deathknight is sitting at 60, so flight is possible, even if it is a slow version. I might be fun to be able to use this event to play with one of the other specs like Frost or Unholy. If the next goal is NOT the event however… I need to pick something be it Mount Farming or Dungeon Achievements because so long as I can keep a list of things I want to do… I will be able to stay engaged in this game. I really am having a lot of fun being around all of these people again. It is a bit like a reunion, because everywhere I turn on Argent Dawn I keep running into familiar faces from the past. I know we have roughly a week until the official launch of Legion, and with that comes a whole new set of goals so I just need to keep busy in the meantime.

The Top Floor

August 21, 2016 by Belghast

Off and on throughout this event I have used the “elevator” metaphor to explain how the experience bonus of the invasions has felt. It started off as a steady elevator, and then took a bunch of detours for maintenance. However at the end the final version felt like it was picking up speed as I finished the climb towards the top. The other day Devolore made a comment about this invasion that I think is worth sharing.

While I realize the goal of the event was not to level everything to 100… that is precisely what I set out to do. Before the initial change I managed to get my Priest from 92 to 100, and then turned around and got my Mage from 90 to 100. That left only my little monk that starting last Wednesday was sitting at only level 53. In the last four days I have finished the climb to 100, finally dinging off of an invasion last night after we wrapped up recording the podcast. It was a wild ride filled with pure madness, but overall it was an enjoyable one. This is the feeling I have been chasing for awhile, going into an expansion knowing that every single character on at least my primary server was ready to go and awaiting the next content release. There are a bunch of things I learned on the trip, and I took care last night to log some of my findings. The rest of this post is likely going to be a bunch of bullet points explaining what all I found out.

It took a total of 49 Invasions to go from level 53 to 100
I was wearing full heirlooms the entire way, so adjust accordingly
That makes it .95 levels per invasion completed
I saved 97 loot boxes while doing the even, 49 Blue, 48 Green.

The Loot

This is what 97 loot boxes from the event looks like sitting in my bank. I saved every single one from the moment I started climbing from 53 to 100, in a large part because I wanted a bunch of information to be able to draw conclusions from. On a whim I ended up opening all of my Green chests first, and they my Blue chests… which caused me to notice a pattern.

Phase 2 – Small Legion Chest – Can Contain

Bracers
Gloves
Belt
Boots
Weapons

Phase 4 – Large Legion Chest – Can Contain

Helm
Shoulders
Chest
Pants
Weapons
Coalesced Fel

In the course of the events I ran I got 118 items to drop from the chests, and around 2000 nethershards… but I was not keeping as good of track on that number as I did the others. As I opened the boxes I recorded the what dropped and divided up level 700, 710 and 720 drops in the hopes of being able to pull some percentages together on the chance of each.

Level 700 Item Drops

Helm – 9
Shoulders – 13
Chest – 10
Bracers – 11
Gloves – 11
Belt – 8
Pants – 9
Boot – 6
Weapon – 14
Coalesced Fel – 9

Level 710 Item Drops

Helm – 2
Shoulders – 1
Bracers – 2
Gloves – 1
Belt – 3
Pants – 1
Boots – 5

Level 720 Item Drops

Shoulders – 1
Belt – 1
Pants – 1

So in total I got 100 level 700 drops, 15 level 710 drops, and 3 level 720 drops. Using some quick and dirty math that means that I got a Warforged 710 item 12% of the time, and a 720 item 2.5% of the time. In any case… my Monk is likely going to be my best geared character once I complete the Broken Shores content and get my ring and trinket. Leveling through Invasions was often times frustration… but overall it was an extremely enjoyable experience. I would love to say I would do this same rough on my hordies… but with only nine days until the launch of Legion I just am not sure if I have that sort of grind in me. More than likely I will be focusing on filling the gear holes in my various characters, and pushing them all through the broken shores and follow-up content.