mining Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Mining Delays

Last night I had every intention to come right home from work and start mining like a boss. I made an oven pizza, fixed my plate and was all set to catch up on the last few episodes of Star Wars Rebels while mashing buttons to break rocks. However upon logging into the game I instantly had a group invite waiting from Tam, which generally means I am needed to go run something. Turns out last night I got drafted to tank a random expert roulette. Granted I had been capped on poetics for awhile at that point, seeing as I capped out sometime Saturday morning during the Pax East live stream. However I know my FC Mates were not quite there yet, and Ashgar needed a random expert for his alexandrite map. So I swapped back into my tanking gear and ran through Amdapor Keep Hard, which went pretty smoothly all things considered.

I kept trying to get back into mining last night but one thing or another kept sidetracking me. I started the evening at 44 and ended the evening at 47 which I guess isn’t too horrible all things considered, especially when I put in as little actual mining time as I did. This is why I tend to progress poorly through crafting content. If presented the option of smashing monsters in the face, I will always take that option. So over the course of the night I did an expert roulette, a random S Rank hunt, a treasure map… all to avoid going back to the mining grind. I will likely put in some effort on it this evening before my WoW raid, but I doubt I will hit 50 just yet. Hopefully at the least on Wednesday I can wrap that up and start work on the next profession.

Turn 9 Progress

Last night was my second night of work on Turn 9 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, or more correctly the final turn of the Second Coil of Bahamut. I spent significantly less amount time derping it up this week, and we spent more time kicking ass and taking names. When we last played we were unable to get through the meteor phase reliably. We were attempting the “roulette” method of everyone bunching up and then the group running around the circle each time someone gets a meteor. This method requires the group to run together, and then stop at certain points until the next meteor spawns in. The person who just got the last meteor has to cut across the circle to catch up to the party again. For me at least it felt like pure chaos and while we managed to get through the phase once or twice doing this… it never felt like something that was terribly repeatable.

This week we threw the suggested rules out the window and actually started to pull together that phase of the fight. Instead of grouping up, we all spread out along the outer ring of the room. As a meteor would drop, that player would run to another person and group up, essentially slowly dropping the rocks around the outside of the room equally spaced. It probably seems a lot more chaotic to watch, but for us it felt far more controlled as it gave time for folks to get off a few heals during this phase. Towards the end of the night we were able to consistently nail the meteor phase and get into phase three proper. Now we need to learn this phase, because right now without really knowing the pattern fully… it feels insane. My hope is if we can keep learning a phase a week we will down it shortly. I am really enjoying turn nine, because it feels awesome when we a nail super difficult phase.

Playing Big Kid

We performed admirably in turn nine considering that for the most part our entire raid felt out of it for one reason or another. In fact due to the daylight savings time crap, we considered even maybe trying something a bit easier. However once the heat of battle started, we managed to wake up and pull things together. However those first few pulls were rather questionable. After getting out of the dungeon I returned to mining for a bit, and had just finished a level when my friend Cuppy logged in. A few weeks back I had to halt an intended run of Sastasha because it was going to cut into raid time, and felt pretty horrible for having to do it. It turns out she pugged it and was now ready for Tam Tara Deepcroft, so no matter what my plans were I was totally down with running it with her. So I put on my Paladin outfit, and like always we had a number of volunteers ready to help out.

The final mix ended up being Cuppy on her Arcanist, me on my Paladin, Thalen on his White Mage, and Kodra barding it up. Like most low level dungeons it went extremely smoothly, but we took our time making sure to kill every last monster in the place for the maximum amount of experience. The only time I seem to find myself playing a paladin is when doing older content, because it seems significantly easier to tank with a paladin. Namely I find myself constantly teetering on the edge of not having any TP when I am playing my Warrior, whereas on the paladin I can just keep flashing and power through the place. If in an absolute worse case scenario I run out of MP, I could always resort to riot blade. Sadly however nothing of use dropped for Cuppy, so I have a feeling we will be running that place some more. The Acolyte’s set is amazing, and will hold a player until they are somewhere in their mid 20s. Doing piddly little dungeon runs like this really make me happy, and make me feel more connected with my free company, so it was an excellent way to close the evening.

Quest for Airships

Since the detail was first teased during the Las Vegas Fan Festival, our guild has been focused on making sure we can get a Free Company airship. The biggest concern however is that when Yoshi-P calls something “prohibitively expensive” it gives us serious pause. This is the man that thought 6-30 million gil for housing was “reasonable”, so if something is prohibitively expensive… what in the world could that be? Over the weekend a Polygon article came out with some quotes from the man himself, and I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Unless you did not have time to read the article, let me focus in on the part I am actually interested in.

“Once you have the workshop, you decide on what you want to make,” Yoshida says. “For example, if you’re going to build an airship, you go part by part. You start with the engine. Your free company teammates gather the materials necessary to build the engine. The crafters within the free company form a party, and then it’s a group effort to build the engine.”

Yoshida says the free company crafting system will grow and expand throughout content patches for the expansion — what he is calling the “3.X series of updates.” To create their ship, free companies will have to combine different engines, bodies and other parts. The ships will have different stats depending on the combinations made, leading to unique ships for different groups depending on their focus.

“Having as many options as possible is a good thing,” he says with a smile.

So our biggest concern with this statement is the fact that he says that you will need a party of free company crafters to complete some of these actions. Now currently we have at least a “light” party worth of Omni crafters, meaning that they have every single profession to max level. But since he doesn’t specify my concern is that it might require a “Full” party of eight crafters to do some of the things related to crafting airship bits. If that is the case we are pretty screwed, because while some of our members have embraced the rabbit hole that is crafting, there are players like me that have completely avoided it. I guess for me my reasoning was that I wanted to make sure I got my combat classes up and geared before diving too far into the crafting system. That said I have WAR, PLD, DRG, BRD, and WHM all geared to ilvl 100 or better… so I guess I have done what I set out to do.

Hardcore Mining

So this weekend I embarked upon the mission to finish leveling mining. At the beginning of the weekend I was sitting around level 30, and last night before going to bed I had just hit 44. My hope is that maybe I can finish leveling to 50 tonight before raid time. Right now I am out in Coerthas doing mining leves, and the leveling is going fairly quickly. My goal is to finish leveling mining and then start in on another Disciple of the Land class probably logging next. My original plan was to level all of my harvesting classes to 50 before setting in and actually leveling crafting proper. I thought this might make life a lot easier to funnel resources into the “making things” professions. My goal is to be able to help the guild craft that airship, and while it is probably going to cots me several points of sanity… I care that much about the end result.

Mining is pretty much pure tedium, in that it involves a lot of running around and clicking things repeatedly. As such I opted to hang out downstairs on my laptop and catch up on various television options while I repeated the same process over and over. Yesterday was all about watching the various episodes of Star Wars Rebels that I had missed. I have to say that show is absolutely phenomenal, and if you are not watching it yet… I highly suggest you do so. I am pretty happy with Disney’s leadership so far of the Star Wars brand. That show is chock full of really interesting characters, and it gives this whole guerilla fighters against the empire feel which is excellent. The danger of their situation is constant, and they managed to create an extremely insidious villain in the form of “The Inquisitor”.

Quietly Amazing

This morning when I went to log in and take a screenshot of me in my awesome mining regalia, I was greeted by this screen. Yup it looks like Cactuar was in fact full at 6 in the morning, and I am thinking this is pure insanity. I know for some time Cactuar has been locked from the creation of new characters during prime time hours. However I wonder if we are starting to reach that state of permanent lock status? That is going to be horribly unfortunate for anyone wanting to join our Free Company and the great little community we have built there. My hope is this is some sort of fluke, and they were doing maintenance on part of the servers in our cluster. I know our Free Company and me specifically has been the cause of a bunch of recent transfer and new character creation activity on our server, and I don’t really see that as something that is going to change. I love our folks, and they have been so amazingly helpful to the new people starting.

When someone asks for a dungeon, it seems like people stumble over themselves ready to help them out. At one point earlier this weekend I was going to DPS one of these dungeons, until another member who was working on their first character said they could use it too. I bowed out of the run to let the folks able to get experience that really matters get in on the fun. That seems to be the Final Fantasy way, quietly and unassumingly… being awesome. I mean at this point Final Fantasy is the second most popular MMORPG of all time… and it just kind of happened without folks really realizing it. Having over four million active accounts is a pretty great feat in this world where supposedly Wildstar didn’t even sell a million boxes at launch. Sure the expansion was pushed back a little further than I would have liked it, but I love the fact that there is content planned to cover that gap. Now that I am embarking on the madness that is crafting, I am also admittedly looking forward to having more time to work up crafters before the expansion hits.

#FFXIV #Mining #Cactuar