[FFXIV] Job Progress Complete!

At least until the next expansion, anyway…  Yet another picture post —

First up — my new Dancer glamour.

Gunbreaker Artifact set

Dark Knight Artifact Set

Warrior Artifact Set

Finishing up Warrior got me the Soul of War title!

You’d think there’d be a title for completing “both sides” of the physical/magic jobs, but a mount is still nice!

My 1st ride on my new mount

And my amaro in flight too.

And, of course, I gotta have the “official summary screen” too 😉

Among the other leveling, I finished up my Qitari beast tribe too.

Now that all of my “leveling chores” are out of the way, I guess it’s time for me to actually finish up the 5.2 MSQ and start doing the expert roulette for the new gear grind.  Or maybe I’ll actually look in to Ishgard Restoration.  Or trying to finish up my Blue Mage spellbook.  Or… Or… Or…  So many choices still!

[FFXIV] Still more Job Progress

More pictures —

Monk level 80 Artifact Gear

Monk level 80 Facet gear

Red Mage level 80 Artifact Gear

Red Mage level 80 Facet gear

Red Mage Level 80 Neo-Ishgardian top

I made that last piece of gear myself. Might as well put that pentamelded crafting set to good use, right?

Black Mage level 75 “Ravel Keeper’s Set”

Black Mage Level 80 Artifact set

And BLM finished off the magic classes, so I got this lovely title.

When going through the MSQ it gives gear coffers for you. i saved all of mine figuring that tanks are most gear dependent when leveling, so now that I’m working on the tank jobs it’s times to crack those coffers open. This is the “Bluespirit” set usable at level 74.

Bluespirit again

The Zonureskin set at level 76

Zonureskin again

The Dwarven Mythril set at level 78. Makes me look like a giant dwarf. Oxymorons are the best!

Paladin level 80 Artifact set

Paladin in the Neo-Ishgardian fending set

After completing the last of the role quests, you get this title – and you may notice, I’m back with Greysky Armada. I missed the FC, so I joined back up!

Happy gaming out there!

[FFXIV] Job Progress

A picture post —

Dragoon at 70 and ready to level in the Augmented Scaevan Maiming set from Poetics

The glamour I used instead of the Scaevan appearance while leveling. Scaevan looked fine, but I liked this more.

Level 80 Dragoon artifact set. I rather like this look, so I’ve glamoured in on top of my Facet set.

Summoner level 80 artifact set

Summoner in Facet gear

Scholar level 80 artifact set

Astrologian level 80 artifact set

White Mage level 80 artifact set. I quite like this one and would love to glam it on to my Facet set, but that wouldn’t work if I chose to play the other 2 healers with the shared gear. 😦  Of course I don’t really like healing anymore, so it’s unlikely I’d play any healer so it probably wouldn’t matter…

White mage in the i450 Facet set. I’ve dyed it white since I took this, but I don’t have a screenie of that somehow. I thought I’d taken one. Ah well.. too lazy to log in to get one either 😛  But yeah, even though I said above that it’s unlikely I’ll play healer, I still like to be geared up so I have the option should the need arise.

Samurai level 80 artifact set

Samurai in the normal combat pose and without that odd-looking mask. Now for monk so I can get rid of the “striking” gear that’s cluttering up my bags…

Overall combat job progress as of today. Yes, I still need to finish the Facet set of Striking. Won’t be long, as you can see why in the next picture —

As you can see here…. I’m fully pentamelded on my crafting gear, for all 8 crafting jobs. I used the “Comfy Melds.” With the announced crafting changes for 5.2 next week this might not be ideal anymore, though. Time will tell.

My daughter’s “cat with red hair and red ears” modeling her new red and black dress from the Valentione event. I’ve been running MSQ roulette on this character a decent amount to gear it with Poetics for running through ShB, with the side effect right now that I was able to buy the Warring Lanner and the 2 primal horse mounts for it… and it’s level 78, in spite of barely being in Il Mheg in the MSQ right now. MSQ roulette gives a *ton* of XP. I’m still not fully i400 from Poetics yet. Honestly, I’ll probably just toss a set of Facet gear on her when she hits 80 and forget about the Poetics at that point.

My bunny’s current glamour. She’s now completed the Doma portion of the MSQ in Stormblood and has just returned to Gyr Abania, so it won’t be too long before she’s done with that and working the 4.1-4.5 content. In the meantime, she’s level 72 already and has Poetics saved to be able to get the i400 gear when that vendor actually opens up for her, though at present she’s still mostly in the i270 level 60 gear from Idyllshire in the Heavensward expansion. She’s gotten a little gear from the leveling dungeons the MSQ takes one through, but I’m pretty much biding time until I can improve that, though at this rate she might be 80 before I finish Stormblood and I’ll just toss Facet gear on her too. Who knows?

And there you have it.  Happy gaming out there!

[FFXIV] Omnicrafter complete

So I had a 1500-word ramble in my drafts about leveling up the gathering classes and my progress on the crafting jobs, but well… it was a ramble.  And it was from almost 2 weeks ago, so it was really out of date too so… It’s deleted and now this is in its place.

Right as I got my last one to 80. My gear’s better now…

I’m a full-on omnicrafter again — all my crafting and gathering jobs are level 80.  And I’ve even done enough collectible turn-ins that I almost have my “BiS” crafting gear fully pentamelded — just have the rings left, and I may even see about finishing those up this weekend.  Thing is, though…. I really only have ever leveled the jobs up for the sake of “completionism” and not becuz I ever really planned to craft anything, so I’m not really sure why I suddenly put so much effort in to crafting on this go-round.  Maybe becuz the recent changes to the xp awards made leveling up crafting and gathering to be more or less trivial, so with the ease of leveling i just blasted through it to “get it out of the way” and then since I was already “in the mode” it was easy enough to just keep doing it?  i don’t even know.

Level 80 Bard artifact gear

But anyway, so far as my FFXIV progress goes….  All the dex-based jobs are to 80 now, so that’s Dancer, Bard, Machinist, and Ninja.  I find that given the skill changes from 5.0 that I prefer bard, as I generally play for relaxation and Bard’s skills can almost all be put into a single-button macro.  “Dot 1, Dot 2, Spam the Macro” is about as simple a playstyle as one can get.  and while on the one hand, the lack of skill queue on macros is considered “bad” by serious players, but since Bard actually relies on a bunch of procs and so you not only have to register that the proc hit but then select the skill, I find without the macro I’d often (maybe 1/3 of the time) miss procs entirely.  Then there are the longer cooldown skills that I always would “save for a burst phase” or something…. but I don’t raid, so there really aren’t any burst phases for me to ever worry about.  Add in that since I was used to NOT using the skills since I was always saving them, and then I’d always forget to use them anyway, so… yeah, I’m a bad player 😉  But anyway, putting all those skills into a macro means they’re actually being used, so… my macro might honestly be increasing my bard dps just becuz I’m bad at hitting procs and using the big-hit cooldowns.

Level 80 Machinist Artifact gear

I’ve taken a page from Aywren’s book and been getting all the other jobs to 71 so I can run trusts with them, if I desire.  I’ve not done much with trusts yet, only unlocking up to the level 73 dungeon, but if I use trusts to level characters up, then I’m sure the rest will come rather easily over time.

Oddly enough, for the tanks, my formerly least favorite — the Warrior — is now my “Holy Hannah this is awesome!” tank job.  Go figure, right?  Yet in groups, it seems Warrior is the rarest to be seen.  I mostly see Dark Knights, then Gunbreakers, with Paladins being a distant 3rd, and hardly ever seeing a Warrior at all.

Level 80 Ninja Artifact Gear

Anyway — in the interest of cleaning out gear from my bags I was planning on leveling Dragoon next, followed with Samurai and Monk, but in the interest of being able to level my retainers, I may just to Summoner and Black Mage instead.  I think I’ve got a decent handle on Summoner now with its 30-second phases for the Bahamut summons and whatnot, but Black Mage is still somewhat throwing me for a loop.  I like how Enochian is now up while your Astral or Umbral buffs are up, not running on a separate timer anymore, and the A/U buffs are 15 seconds now instead of 12, so it’s much more forgiving on being able to keep the buffs up (especially since Transpose is available on 10 second cooldown, so if you remember to hit it you can always keep the buff up anyway), but even so, it still just feels as clunky to me as it did back in 3.0.  I still feel like I’m fighting the job to play it, not just fighting the monsters.  Red Mage feels a it underwhelming, but is fun to play, at least, so between the 3 casters it shouldn’t take me long to get them up to 80 so the retainers can cap out and I can clean up space in my bags 😉

Ye Olde Nutsy Mount

I finally caught up the Stormblood beast tribes, so I’m allied with the 3 of them now.  I also finished getting to Bloodsworn ranks with the Pixies just last night, and I even saved up enough Nutsy seals to buy the Lion Sin-Eater mount.  Which is so big it blocks half the screen and that’s annoying, so I took some screenies and will probably never use it again.

And this is only 800-ish words, so it’s far less of a ramble than the previous draft…  Happy gaming out there!

[FFXIV] Back after a long absence

Wow, last post was August 11?  I’ve very much gotten out of the habit of writing here…

A brand-spanking new Level 1 archer

That said, I’ve not really felt I have much to say in the gaming space.  I’ve mostly just been letting “Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms” run, plus a friend got me started on the mobile game “Raid: Shadow Legends” and that was more or less all the gaming I was doing for a while.  I’d log in to Warframe to advance the daily counter, but then usually log right back out.  When the Atlas Prime frame came out I bought it, but then I didn’t even bother ranking it to 30 until a couple of weeks ago when the new Grendel frame came out.

Level 15 in the “Brand New” gear from the tutorial quests

In my quest for novelty, I even went so far as to buy an ArcheAge Unlimited “box,” in spite of a) not having cared for the original game back when it 1st came out and b) not liking open-world pvp games in general.  I made it up to about level 41 before it just got old.  There’s no penalty for dying in a pvp battle, so it’s really not a big deal, but by the same token I haven’t figured out what benefit there is to doing pvp either, so I just don’t see the draw for the various gank squads that were out there.  I mean, sure, I saw that there was some “honor” points awarded for wins, but I have no idea what that’s for.  The game is frustratingly opaque and I felt I was spending more time alt-tabbed out looking for info on it than I spent actually playing.  SO after a bit over a week, I just stopped, as I wasn’t looking forward to logging in each evening.

Since glamour is now unlocked at level 15 instead of 50, I decided that I liked the racial top and boots, while using the “Brand New Skirt” as the leg appearance instead of the racial bikini bottom

As a result, I’ve been on more of a Netflix kick lately than a gaming kick.  And somehow I’ve gotten in to their Bollywood selections.  I’m not big on subtitles, but the films have been cute and engaging, and even a bit silly, and just plain entertaining all around, so…  There you have it.

And then I dyed it “snow white” for a more “white rabbit” type of appearance

But this weekend I decided to go give FFXIV another go.  I’ve wanted a bunny.. er Viera character since the expansion, but Gotter Dammerung won’t use fantasia to change.  She is who she is — immutably.  But character creation was closed with all the people playing for the expansion, so I couldn’t make a bunny either.  I could this weekend, though.  I’d planned back in the day to name it “Petra Leporidae,” (Petra = Peter, of course, and “Leporidae” is the Latin word for “rabbit,” so I thought it’d be a good joke) but in the moment of character creation I forgot that, so Chyarra Lefey was the name I picked instead.  Chyarra was more or less random, but Lefey has been a last name I’ve used since EQ2 launched as a way of having alt characters be recognizable to friends.

Another angle

Anyway, the plan is for it to be a dancer, but I gotta get to level 60 to unlock that, so I went with Archer as my intro class so that as I leveled it I’d be gathering the right jewelry for when 60 rolls around.  I’ve made it to level 41 in 2 days of play, so it’s coming right along.  As I recall it, I was quite bored with the Archer back in the day until I made it up to the upper 20’s.  With the simplification of skills that has been SE’s goal with the ShB expansion, well…  I was really only using 3 buttons until I hit 30 (granted, there’s a macro I wrote that consolidates 3 into 1, otherwise it would have been a whole 5 buttons).  Even with hitting 30 and becoming a bard, it’s still really only added 2 more buttons in the last 11 levels, and in looking at the skills that will be coming later, a lot of them are simply straight upgrade/replacements for existing skills, so I really don’t see a whole lot changing there, especially as most of the new skills are long cooldown with a high priority, so I can just add them in the to existing 1-button macro I’ve written.  We’ll see how it goes.

Since I took my main to 80 on Dancer, I suppose I could focus this character completely on Bard to 80 for a bit of a change too.  But I probably won’t.  I’m weird like that.

I got a blind invite to a Free Company and figured “eh, why not?” so I joined up. This coffin was in the FC house and made for a silly image, so of course I had to take the screenshot.

So,  I’m back in FFXIV, at least for a while.  I stopped back in July when I realized I just didn’t care about the boss fights and trials and whatnot.  I looked up the guide for the final trial of the expansion and found myself thinking “that looks annoying” and not looking forward to it as a fun challenge, so, if that holds true again, I may not last too long on this run either.  OTOH, I may look up the video on the final ShB trial again and finish that, then get Gotter and this new bunny through the new 5.1 patch’s MSQ and everything will be all hunky-dory too.  Who knows?  Plus I really ought to unlock all the new areas for my daughter to fly around on her Miqo’te.  It was fun to do before, so perhaps it will be fun to do again, right?

Happy gaming out there!