[Blaugust Day 29][FFXIV] Almost there

Midgardsormr is pretty ugly.

Title has a double meaning today — almost there for the end of Blaugust, but also I’m “almost there” on being able to afford to buy my next Esoterics piece in FFXIV.  I’m typing this while alt-tabbed out of the game waiting for today’s expert roulette to pop, actually.  That will take me to 810 Eso, and I’ll need 825 for that next piece, so even though I could just wait and run another ex-roulette tomorrow which would cap me for the week and get me to having enough Eso for the leg piece, I know myself — I’m gonna queue right back up and get another 40 from a 2nd run which will let me buy the piece today.  And then tomorrow I’ll cap out for the week 😛

I’ve also gotten both Monk and Ninja to level 34.  Each did a leveling roulette dungeon — 1 yesterday, 1 today.  Coincidentally, they both got Haukke Manor.  The tank on the monks run was an obvious dps player trying his hand at the new “awesome class” of DRK.  How do i know?  He never stopped moving around.  i had to point out that Monks need to be able to position themselves so the tanks need to plant themselves in 1 spot so the mobs aren’t moving around either so that I can get into the monk dance (which with the inclusion of a new dot that grant greased lightning has no become “doesn’t matter, flank flank, behind, behind, behind, behind, flank flank, then 4x behind again, 2x flank,” and so on.  It’s actuallygotten to be slightly easier with the new “behind the mob” skill, so that’s pretty cool.

Today’s tank was also a DRK and said as we entered the dungeon that he’s new to tanking.  And then he turned off Grit.  1st fight he lost aggro every which way and was using Flash as his AE builder, so I piped up and said “DRK’s use Unleash — it’s better than Flash.” I also asked him to turn Grit on.  He started using unleash from then on, but it took a couple more fights with him struggling with aggro and the healer and other dps also asking him to turn on Grit before he finally did.  And then he never lost aggro again.  Amazing how using your tanking tools means you can tank effectively, isn’t it?

Of course, gear is also a factor.  Last night’s es-roulette run we had a tank who “only” had about 14K hitpoints, indicating that his gear was a little low.  I popped a quick examine on him and he was in mostly i160 drops from the expert dungeons, with a few law pieces here and there, but nothing upgraded to i180.  He appeared to be doing everything right in his skill use and positioning and such, but between me and the BLM (this was a good one who was always in Enochian) he couldn’t keep aggro for anything.  Well no… he was fine on the bosses, but if the trash fight had 5 mobs, then I’d have anywhere from 2-5 of them on me for most of the fight.  We had a good healer who got my commendation on that run — I never went down, so it was still an excellent run.

The queue still hasn’t popped and we’re well past the “average time” on it now.  The life of a dps…. 😉  OOH!  POPPED!  Gotta go!

Happy gaming out there!