wildstar Archives - Page 12 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Coconut Hunt

June 2, 2014 by Belghast

Insanity Continues

This morning we woke up a little bit before our alarm normally goes off, and instead of getting up and starting the morning process… I opted to simply lay there in bed waiting for it to go off. When I got up moments later to turn off my 25 year old alarm clock, I heard a loud boom and saw a flash of lights out the window. Upon further investigation there was a fire truck pulling into our neighborhood. The rain had been coming down for awhile, so I found some shoes and wandered out to see what the commotion was. There across the street from our house, the neighbors jeep wrangler was on fire with flames shooting high out of the engine compartment. At this point I am trying to figure out what exactly happened in my head, because far as I know Jeeps just don’t spontaneously combust.

I would have tried to snap a photo but I figured that would be extremely crass… and also with the rain coming down I didn’t want to endanger my phone. So many things about this weekend have been absolutely bizarre. There was a point yesterday that while driving around we stopped at an intersection. Normally in Tulsa we have a lot of panhandlers that work intersections, but I was not prepared for what I saw when I looked to my left. There standing on the corner was a man in a Leatherface mask from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a suit with a cup out taking money. I am not sure if his shtick was working but he definitely seemed to be freaking lots of motorists out in the process. I am wondering what exactly was up with this weekend, because so many strange and unusual things happened. Is there some weird alignment of the magnetic forces going on or something… because at this point I am almost expecting a plane engine to come crashing through my roof or something.

Coconut Hunt

Over Mother’s Day weekend we happened to pop into a Walgreens for something on our way out of town and my wife found these Margaritaville drink packets in Pina Colada flavor. Since my wife’s mother loves Pina Colada we picked some up, and it turns out they are pretty amazing. They taste as close as you can get to the actual thing without having the alcohol in them. A few days passed and we went right back to the same store and they had none of them. At which point we checked the other stores in our suburb and were only able to find a few boxes. These went far quicker than I had expected, and that lead to our mission from yesterday. It turns out that by our estimation roughly 20% of all Walgreens seem to have gotten this product in. We went out yesterday running from store to store hunting for the illusive product. All told we managed to gather up 16 packages of them.

That means we are okay for 96 bottles of water before we have to go on another hunt. I feel somewhat like I am in a zombie movie foraging for supplies. I would think this was absolutely insane, but I might have to start doing the same thing. I have a similar obsession with this Cherry Pomegranate drink mix that seems to have gone out of production. The grocery store around the corner from me used to stock it, and now Dollar General seems to get it in as a seasonal item. So I figure at some point soon I will be making my own trip from store to store looking for it. In both cases we have been unable to find it online to just buy in bulk. I guess in the case of the Pina Colada that is not entirely true. You can get it online for $2.35 a box… whereas in the store it is $1 a box. For the time being I figure we will continue foraging, but what concerns us is that my wife’s sister stopped at every Walgreens from South Carolina to Oklahoma and only found 8 boxes.

Laugh it up Fur Ball

I did not expect to like Wildstar very much based on my frustrating experiences in Beta, but what can I say… it has grown on me. I am finally starting to feel like I grasp the interface and especially the mapping system. I would still like to see the ability to set a waypoint similar to other games and have a little thing blink on the side of the mini-map for which direction to go. I still don’t really care for the giant temporary arrow thing… but I am getting used to using it. My army of bots delights me constantly, as does my chosen character. I feel like I tried to make as close to the traditional “Belghast” appearance as I could with a fuzzy rat thing. It is the animations and movement that makes me happy. I streamed for a bit yesterday, and you can see me constantly bouncing and double jumping around.

I have to admit… double jump is a big part of my enjoyment. It is my firm belief that every game is better with double jump. I guess this is helped by the fact that I chose the Explorer path, which is essentially the “I like jumping puzzles” path. Thankfully you get path abilities like “Safe Fall” that have already come in extremely handy as I bound off the edge of things. The other thing I am loving is the fact that I seem to be able to solo a lot of the group content with my robot armada. Sure it takes a lot of concentration, and careful use of cooldowns and stuns… but I’ve managed to solo almost all of the 2+ boss type encounters. Bascially I need to come up with a verbiage to describe them… because right now I am calling them “Angry Skulls” and “Angry Skulls with Horns”.

As much as I might not want to… I really do enjoy the over the top nature of this game. There is absolutely nothing subtle about any of it… and I feel like starting in Crimson Isle and then moving to Deredune has made all the difference in the world for me. I rolled a new Chua Spellslinger and I plan on taking it the Levithan Bay to Ellevar route to see if it is somehow better now that I grasp the game concepts a little bit better. It might simply be that I have gotten used to the visual bombardment that is Wildstar. Compared to Elder Scrolls Online it still feels like trying to make sense of the Las Vegas Strip… but I am finding it enjoyable nonetheless. I can see why people are so fanatical about this game already, because it is very much like a “better” World of Warcraft. I remember being just as fanatical with Rift proposed being the same kind of thing. Basically the real challenge is going to be getting players to stick around for more than 1-3 months, but that seems to be the same struggle everyone is dealing with. For the time being I am switching back and forth between this and ESO, and trying to mix in as many other titles as I can in the process.

#Wildstar

Clinging to Past Glory

June 1, 2014 by Belghast

Twilight Zone

Yesterday I am pretty sure a rift opened up and somehow transported us to another universe. I would think that it was one or two limited events happening… but the entire freaking day was bizarre. For starters we were supposed to go to a wedding with some family at 1:30 in the afternoon. From the moment we woke up, my wife had text messages waiting from her family wanting to know if we were on the road yet. We have no clue why they were wanting us to be on the road at 8 in the morning… for a 1:30 wedding, but apparently they did. So I go out, get breakfast, write yesterdays blog post and go shower. We leave the house around 10 am, which we think is pretty damned good for a 1:30 wedding. While in transit my wife texts them saying that we should be there somewhere between 11:00 and 11:30.

You would think that the same family that was concerned that we were not on the road at 8 am… and continued to text all damned morning wondering if we had left yet, would be happy to know exactly when we would arrive. NOPE! We get up to my wife’s mothers house and no one is there. My nephew-in-law at some point ended up behind us, he was returning from working an early shift at the prison and was coming home to change. He was literally the only other person there, we had no clue where anyone was. Finally we get a text back stating that they are at a garage sale and that they have our least responsible aunt in tow with them… and her adopted daughter… and her hyperactive child. So quickly what I thought was only a few people ordeal ballooned into a massive family group. At this point I was wishing I had begged a way into just staying the hell at home and playing Wildstar… which launched yesterday.

Shortage of Chicken

Our family keeping to the insanity of the day decides that we are going to go eat before the 1:30 wedding. They pick what appears to be an extremely busy restaurant, roughly 15 minutes away from where we were at the moment, but in the same town as the wedding. Problem is we have a party of roughly a dozen people in a very small town, just a few minutes after noon. I remark before we go on this journey that there is no way in hell we are getting out of the restaurant before 1:30 as it is a little after 12:30 when we actually arrive and get seated. To make things even more surreal… most of us end up ordering the Chicken Strip basket. Apparently they assumed no one would ever order that… because they only actually had a dozen chicken strips. So we set about with the waitress to do some complex math and steal a chicken strip from each 3 strip basket trying to somehow divide the “loaves and fishes” enough to feed the family.

Somehow STILL we ended up short on chicken strips, but that doesn’t really matter considering the moment we got our food… we needed to ask for to go boxes and go pay out. Our family knowing that we were under a time crunch… apparently decided to talk incessantly instead of eat. I knew I was under a constraint so I scarfed away until I managed to down the two chicken strips and a basket of fries in record time. Everyone else walked out with food barely touched… so I am still wondering what the hell the point of eating before the wedding was since literally no one but myself and my nephew-in-law who also ate rapidly in silence, managed to get done with our food. I went to pay out as everyone else attempted to load up their stuff and get on the road. I don’t know where we are going… so I opt to follow my mother-in-law who takes us on another one of her “shortcuts” that end up taking twice as long to actually get anywhere.

Clinging to Past Glory

So at 1:40 we arrive at the site of the wedding, which thankfully was a very untraditional one. Due to some rain and some technical difficulties they had yet to get anything underway. Ultimately we arrived at just about the perfect time. One of the things you need to know about Oklahoma and our culture is that we absolutely worship at the altar of High School football. I am using the global we here because I could give two shits about sports in general, and the sportcentric culture made my own high school days miserable. Given my size I was constantly recruited to the football team, which I wanted nothing to do with. However I am very much not “joe everyman” when it comes to my area, and the majority of men eat, sleep and breathe football. In fact the entire reason why everyone was showing up for this wedding was the fact that it was being held at the local football stadium… with the 52 year old groom wearing a football uniform and the 38 year old bride wearing a prom dress. There were lots of jokes being made about “Redneck Weddings” but I feel this was a missed occasion, as it doesn’t get much more Redneck than this.

If you have never attended a high school homecoming game… then this won’t make much sense to you, but traditionally each of the candidates for the homecoming queen are brought in one by one in a convertible of some sort that has been decorated with their name and grade on the side. To keep with the homecoming theme of the wedding, each of the bridesmaids were driven in similar fashion. The thing is… normally in a homecoming game when one candidate reaches the center of the field the next candidate starts behind them. They say a few words about the candidate and them move on to the next one. The bride in this case had written long rambling walls of super personal text… which when read by a male announcer just came off as surreal. The thing is it took me about three bridesmaids to figure out that the announcer was not the person who wrote the text originally.

At first I seriously thought he was just rambling off the cuff, and as such could not figure out why he was going so slow. In all seriousness this phase of the wedding took roughly an hour. Each bridesmaid arrived in a car that fit their personality with a song playing in the background picked out by the bride. I fully understand the whole “her special day” aspect but it was 85* in the hot sun, on metal bleachers. She could have had a little common sense and kept things brief. Today I am fairly sunburned thanks to this madness. What made it even worse is the fact that she had roughly ten different bridesmaids that she had written two to three paragraphs about as they rode in. Once they had all arrived the bride came in packed into a Rolls Royce. When they opened the door it was like there was this giant poof of dress and tiny little arms sticking out from it.

groom_running_in

In what feels like the textbook definition of “clinging to past glory” the groom arrived by running out of a giant football helmet. This is a tradition here for high school games that the entire team runs out of one of these insane inflatable helmets and then runs through a paper sign held up by the cheer leaders. They asked all of the guests of the wedding party to go down on the field and make a “spirit line” as they call them… and then slowly the groom lumbered out onto the field breaking through the sign, having to stop a few times before making his way to center field where the rest of the wedding party was waiting. I can’t say anything though because there is no way in hell I could jog from the end zone to center field without damned near collapsing, so the fact that he made it in good time while squeezed sausage casing like into a football uniform is damned impressive.

My niece captured a better picture of him actually breaking through the banner. From there the wedding ceremony finally proceeded and after all of this setup… it actually went pretty quickly. They did the standard “sand” ceremony thing that has become so popular lately at weddings. Which I guess is fitting since it is a fairly blended family. This is the fourth or fifth wedding for the groom, so in part we were shocked they were making such a big ordeal out of it. The ceremony itself was proceeded by a preacher wearing a referee uniform, and every so often during the ceremony another ref would step up and throw a flag on the play. The preacher and the ref would confer for a moment before the second referee would give a ruling. Since it took them three years apparently to get to the point of actually having the wedding, one of the flags throw as for “delay of game”. It was cute little thing, but at that point we had been out in the hot sun with no shade for over an hour and most everything had lost its mirth.

All told we were out there a little over an hour and a half, but I feel horrible for the folks who didn’t arrive at the last minute like we did. In fact during the ceremony it rained a few times, and was raining before we arrived so not only did the early birds get cooked in the sun, but they also likely got drenched. We were surprised just how big of an ordeal it was, but I wish the bride and groom the best of luck. They certainly provided a memorable occasion, but one that was extremely strange to watch. While all of us have deep Redneck roots… you don’t expect to see a wedding in a football stadium. However I guess for some folks, the football stadium is their church, so only fitting that folks get married in it. As interesting as it was… I would have gladly stayed home and played Wildstar instead. Unfortunately part of being a responsible adult is showing up for this sort of thing even when you have zero interest in being there.

Peafowl on the Play

To add to the strangeness of the day, while driving back home we stumbled across this walking through a field. For those not familiar with Oklahoma… I guarantee that the peacock is very much NOT a native animal. In fact this was not even in someone’s yard, but instead in a random field out in the middle of nowhere. I assume the little guy is a pet and had wandered a bit too far out of his domain. Later on my wife posted this picture on facebook and found out that apparently it is in fact owned by someone in the vicinity, and that another person sees it almost every day when driving home. Seeing this however just seemed to underline just how strange the day was. Today I am meeting my mother for lunch, and I am hoping that we have a much more normal outing.

Finally Chua

Finally after all the madness I got to come home and play some Wildstar. At this point I had done nothing but create a couple of characters to reserve my names on Evindra the Role-Playing server. I of course created Belghast the Chua Engineer, and really it is the animations that make this game enjoyable for me. The most adorable thing so far is the dogpaddle animation when you try to swim. I managed to get far enough along to get my robots… and I love them so much. The game itself… I am still not just head over heels for. It has improved drastically since switching from Deadlocked to Steer… and it works so much cleaner. Deadlocked involved toggling back and forth between mouse look by clicking your left mouse. The problem is I always forgot to do this before entering a dialog with an NPC. So I would have to escape out, click off mouse look and then re-enter the NPC dialog box.

With Steer it works so much better in that if you are moving or in combat… you have mouse look on. If you are standing still, it gives you back your cursor so you can interact with NPCs or any other window. This addon alone greatly improves my enjoyment of the game, and makes the entire experience rather enjoyable. I feel like Wildstar is like a much better World of Warcraft. This is no slight to either game, because I still feel like WoW does an amazing job of what it does. However Wildstar seems like it might give it a run for its money. Out of the box I feel absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of things to do in every zone. The game just oozes complexity, and in part this is what made me dislike it quite a bit in beta. It felt like I was entering the game and already at a disadvantage and trying to catch up quickly in learning what everything did. I look forward to playing over the next few days and seeing exactly how much I do enjoy it after a week.

Contemplating Red

For a moment or two last night I thought that maybe we would not be recording an AggroChat this weekend. When it came time to do the recording, it was just me and Ashgar with no sign of Rae. After a bit I found out that even though he was travelling… Kodra would be available roughly an hour later than our normal start time. Additionally I managed to convince Tam to join in the discussion as well, so before I knew it we had a full team ready to go. The thrust of this weeks podcast is a discussion about Transistor… or at least the other half of the discussion we started last week. Be warned this podcast is spoilerific once we start talking about transistor… however we give you fair warning before hand. Prior to that we discuss Wildstar quite a bit as well as other games we had played last week.

I call this one Contemplating Red, because once we delve into Transistor we discuss the nature of the character of Red, the Transistor and the way the game treats gender roles. In the time before we started recording, Kodra wanted to know if we could talk about whether or not Transistor was a deeply sexist game. He was concerned that I might shy away from the topic, but I gave him the flag to go ahead because while I don’t want to necessarily dwell on controversial topics… I don’t want us to shy away from them either. I think in the end we all reached a point of peace with the themes of the game, and after bringing all of our thoughts to the table… realized the entire game was so much deeper than any of us thought. The end result is I am even more in love with this title. If you’ve beaten the game, I highly suggest you listen and share your own thoughts either here in the comments or over twitter.

#StrangeWedding #Transistor #Wildstar #AggroChat

Nexus Destiny

May 31, 2014 by Belghast

Bel Against Nature

As I said yesterday morning, last night we had a big end of school cookout to attend and in spite of my antisocial tendencies I enjoyed myself quite a bit. However this morning I am paying for that enjoyment as my sinuses and lungs are full of crud from “extended exposure to nature”. The food however was amazing as was the company. This little guy showed up towards the end of the night, and we all ended up snapping photos of him. Firstly I had zero clue that Tree Frogs existed in Oklahoma, secondly if they did I didn’t realize they could be green. Most of the frogs you see around here are muddy brown or grey to mix into the surroundings. According to the biology teacher in the midst this guy is NOT native to Oklahoma, but we have no clue where he comes from.

The other thing I am wishing I had snapped a photo of were the kittens. One of them tried really hard to come home with us, and I totally would have been cool with that… if I didn’t think it would completely upset the existing balance with our three cats. These babies were the most chill and relaxed I have seen. One of them I carried around in the crook of my arm on her back like I would a ferret. She was all to happy to have my scratch her belly, and none of them really seemed to use their claws at all. The most entertaining thing was listening to the back and forth with the parents as the various kids tried really hard to adopt one for their own. One girl damned near outlined a PowerPoint presentation for exactly why she should have a cat. But alas her mother decided that she would rather have a crying daughter than a divorce.

I have a sneaking suspicion that in our household this will not be the end of the talk of the adorable kittens. Right now our eldest cat is extremely picky, and I am afraid bringing a little one into the mix would set her off. That said it is impossible to find more relaxed cats than these I think. I am such a softie when it comes to little furry things. The desire to adopt them all is why we had six cats at one point. Over the years we’ve had two bunnies, six different ferrets, two sugar gliders, a hamster, a guinea pig, and in total ten different cats to date. So I am sure there will be more cats in our future, in spite of me putting up a good defense… I always eventually give in. Right now I am happy with just cats and ferrets though, and I doubt I will branch out into other fuzzy children again.

Newbie Blogger Initiative

Today is the last day of the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2014, and I feel like I should have probably done more. This year I have set in a different role, doing more personal tutelage of participants than big informational posts. Mostly this happened because as far as a advice goes I am not sure what I could say that has not already been articulated better. I don’t really know what I am doing, and I am still very much figuring it out on a daily basis. In a way I have been a Newbie this year as well in that this is our first year doing the podcast. Tonight will be our 8th episode, so I am pretty proud of how that has progressed so far. I am also very much a newbie at this whole streaming thing, even though this month I have cut down massively on the amount of time I have devoted to it. May is pure hell, but hopefully as we move into June things will chill out quite a bit.

About mid month I reworked my blogroll so I have all of the Class of 2014 blogs listed there. You should totally check them out because this crop is doing some pretty great things. What has been the most interesting for me personally is that a number of my long term friends have opted to start or recommit to blogs this month as well. I have each of them in my blogroll and I have been seeing some pretty great stuff come out of the “noobs”. We as a community need this event, to help replace the many people who just stop blogging each year for whatever reason. As someone who spends a lot of time doing this… I fully understand the desire to throw up your arms and stop. That said we need this transfusion of talent each year to help keep the gaming blogosphere a vibrant place.

Here is a rundown of my NBI topics this month.

The Ritual – my discussion of the writing routine
So You Want to Stream – primer on getting OBS working with Twitch.tv
Permission to Suck – My thoughts on getting started and posting regularly
Reaching Out – discussion of social networking and blogging
Class of 2014 – preliminary rundown of Class of 2014 early adopters
Not as Hard as it Seems – my getting started blog post

So I guess at the end of the month I didn’t do as poorly as I thought I did. Six posts devoted to NBI2014 is probably better than I did during the 2013 run. My only real regret is that I didn’t come up with anything brilliant for Syl’s Poetry Slam. I think maybe the topic of “Magic” threw me for a loop, because I have a very negative feeling towards “finger wigglers” as I call them. I am at home with swords and shields and shotguns… but I have always shied away from casters and wizards and spell slingers. I tried to come up with an epic about slaying an evil necromancer… but nothing really worked. So I wish I had come up with something, but I am sure she will have plenty of entries this year to choose from.

Nexus Destiny

Today is the beginning of the Headstart for Wildstar. I think the servers came up last night at Midnight PST, which would have made it 2 am for me. I have a deep seething hatred of all of these launch dates being centered around PST, but I not much you can do about it when a studio is from the west coast. I was so damned happy when the Elder Scrolls Online times were all based on East Coast. All of this gnashing of teeth aside, I got in this morning rather smoothly and created Belghast the Chua Engineer and Belgrave the Human Warrior. Both of which are on Evindra the PVE-RP server… which is where all the sane and rational people seem to be rolling characters. I say that jokingly, but almost all of my twitter list will apparently be on that one server, so even if folks are not all in the same guild it will be good to at least have them all centralized on the same server community.

This is the new Belghast… while I could not do anything vaguely close to my traditional “Bel” look as an angry bunny/rat/thing I feel like I captured the “feeling”. Something about playing as a Chua immediately made this game more enjoyable. I think mostly it is the animations, and the fact that in early games I always favored dwarves or small races in general. My original Everquest character was a Dwarf and my first WoW characters were all also Dwarves. So while this seems like a huge departure race wise for me… someone who mostly rolls humans, it is more a “getting back to my roots” of sorts. I am still up in the air about this game, but I am going to give it a fair shake. I did not intend to like Final Fantasy XIV at all, but ended up having a blast playing it. So I am hoping that Wildstar will be another similar case. I feel like this is precisely the game that I would have loved… about five years ago, but I’ve changed massively since then. Here is hoping there is a game inside of Wildstar that the current me will enjoy. In any case I plan on still playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls as well.

#Wildstar #NBI2014

Evil Genius

May 19, 2014 by Belghast

Best Laid Plans

This weekend I accomplished very little of what I had planned, but I did log into a nice surprise over in Elder Scrolls Online this morning. One of the cooler things about crafting are the tradeskill apprentices… I am using the EQ2 term, because quite frankly I can’t remember the in game name for them in ESO. Once a day they send you a care package of goodies along with a great note about what they had to go through to obtain it. The notes alone are worth the skill points, because some of them are absolutely hilarious. When I opened my care package this morning I noticed that I got a Tempering Alloy, which is the metal temper used to take a purple item to a orange quality one or a legendary. This is still one of the best aspects of the game, the ability to upgrade an item to whatever tier you might want.

Granted this is my first legendary temper, and I am sure it probably takes six or so to get 100% chance of upgrade, but I will squirrel this one away until I manage to get more. I had grand plans of dinging 50 and completing Coldharbor, and while I made progress on both fronts… it simply did not happen this weekend. I blame Ashgar for distracting me with his Final Fantasy 5 draft idea. I would love to say I will ding tonight, because I am maybe 1/5th of a level away from 50. I have a few rather epic quests that I am currently on that I want to see the completion of. Mostly right now I am suffering from too many things I want to play, and too little time to play them. I might have to start bringing my laptop to work and getting in some playtime over lunch again.

Yesterday was somewhat fragmented, in that we had to attend a wedding that evening. I have to say it is one of the more interesting weddings I have been to. The pair are both former students of my wife, and the mother of the bride is another teacher. I knew absolutely no one there, so the entire occasion felt extremely awkward. However it was made significantly less awkward for me when the bride started walking down the isle to a full orchestral version of the Legend of Zelda Fairy Fountain theme. So obviously at least one of the pair was a serious gamer, and in theory they both were, but it made a fairly nice processional theme. At the end of the wedding they queued up the Imperial March, so I feel like I could get along really well with the pair.

Evil Genius

One thing that I did accomplish this weekend was to play through the rest of the Crimson Isle campaign in Wildstar. My hope was to play the engineer enough to determine if this was a class I could get into, and as the gameplay progressed I enjoyed it more than the Warrior. I know without a doubt that I enjoy the Chua far more than I did the Cassian so in theory I guess I have my race and class. I am still not terribly sold on the game, but it is starting to grow on me. Surprising enough I found that I really enjoyed the explorer path. Normally I am not one for jumping puzzles but these felt okay to me. I am sure late in the game they will be as insane as some of the things I did to get SWTOR Holocrons, but even though those were painful… I enjoyed doing them. They gave me something to look forward to in every zone, so I am hoping the explorer path will do the same thing for me here.

Soldier path seems an absolute natural fit for me, but all of the “holdouts” felt extremely forced in that it did not feel like there was a lore reason for starting a ruckus at a specific location. Whereas with the explorer path in Crimson Isle you are helping the Chua scientists place monitoring stations high on the rock cliffs, and this felt cool to me. So far the thing I dig about the Engineer is that it is very much a “kill them all” class as well. You can circle strafe around gathering mobs up and shotgun blasting them down with impunity, or at least that is what it feels like right now. I am sure as the gameplay moves on, there are far more consequences to this gameplay style but I can see it might be fun to tank an instance this way.

Mystic Knights

Yesterday I officially progressed through the roughest part of the game for starting as White Mage. How I did it… is that I basically ground out enough levels to make it easier on myself. Getting to the Water Crystal was a challenge but when I did, the entire game got that much easier. Now I have a party full of Mystic Knights, which while not the best thing in the game are certainly far more offensive than the White Mage. Mystic Knight is a class I have never played in previous plays through the game, and I am kinda digging the way spellblade works so far. It gives me access to elemental attacks, without having to have a true spellcaster. Supposedly the Rapid Fire combo with Spellblade is a super powerful way of delivering elemental attacks later in the game.

I streamed for quite a bit yesterday afternoon as I pushed through the water temple sequence and gained the Mystic Knight. Last night I did not stream since I was mostly hanging out on the couch watching my sequence of Sunday night television shows. I found that watching tv is the ideal time to grind out levels, and that is why I am level 19 currently and have just now finished the fire crystal / karnak castle sequence. I think I did mostly okay in Karnak Castle and got all of the big name items, that I may or may not need later. The only thing I missed was the Main Guache, but since I have no use for daggers with my fixed party comp, I did not worry about that too much. I did pick up Esuna, Ribbon and Elven Mantle so should be fine moving forward. At this point I will have to consult a guide because I cannot remember for the life of me what comes next. I know that I do not get my ranger job until a bit later, so that is really what I need to do next.