Final Fantasy XIV

[Slumber]

On 8/24/2017 at 2:45 AM, Samias said:

I really like how the new design of bard really integrates their songs into their rotation, compared to how it used to be foe's requiem and nothing else and how terribly clunky wanderer's minuet used to be as a stance. Good times. I'm currently trying to level black mage but the loss of old sound cues and the enochian buff icon has made things surprisingly difficult as I can't identify when I'm accidentally using the wrong skill anymore! I may need to change my button groupings to not accidentally bump ice spells in the wrong stance anymore, or something. I hope 4.1 at least brings back sound cues for when I *drop* a stance, since I got used to red mage having great audio and visual queues for when my bars were charging and it felt so natural.

And yeah, crafting is pretty hard to start until everything gets to 50 and you have a huge stable and cross class abilities. It's great at max level and Stormblood has made things more engaging and fun on that end than ever but it's a huge hurdle to even get started.

I did some Susano farming as well and got the dog on my 3rd successful run. Kind of incredible! I ran into an amazing samurai player who was party leader and super chill and was fantastic overall. I surprised myself with some good optimized healing and damage dealing too. They were even from my server so I hit em up on the friends list. Pretty rad.

I'm enjoying Bard a lot so far. I was kind of procrastinating until the Perform ability was revealed in the 4.1 stuff, and I was like "Alright. I gotta main Bard now." I secretly kind of hope you have to be musically literate to construct custom songs, just because it'd be easy for me to make them, and it'd keep too many people from spamming songs.

Still chugging away. Armorer, Goldsmith and Culinarian are still about 10 levels away, then all of my crafters will be at least 50. Unlocking the Moogle quests was an ordeal.

I still haven't tried Savage SB Primals. I plan on doing them+Attempting Omega Savage before 4.1 drops. On the other hand, I've been going through old Savage content with my FC. Got my Nidhogg birb, and despite doing it unsynced, Nidhogg EX is still probably the hardest thing I've done in the game.

Edited September 8, 2017 by Slumber

[Samias]

 

October 10th!

I also managed to clear Omega 1 Savage with my friends! It was a hard fought win during the boss's enrage cast. Our dps was fairly mediocre with one exception and we had 10 deaths, but we did it. It actually took fewer attempts than Susano and I got a tank neck piece out of it.

[Slumber]

1 hour ago, Samias said:

 

October 10th!

I also managed to clear Omega 1 Savage with my friends! It was a hard fought win during the boss's enrage cast. Our dps was fairly mediocre with one exception and we had 10 deaths, but we did it. It actually took fewer attempts than Susano and I got a tank neck piece out of it.

I've been slowly inching my FC towards doing Omega Savage. We just got together and got a bunch of people through Omega Normal for the first time, in hopes that we could get them somewhat ready for Savage. We haven't beaten Susano or Lakshmi yet, but got those down pretty well in the half-hearted attempts we've given both.

And yeah, can't wait for 4.1. Hope the Ivalice fashion is good.

[Samias]

I can't believe how many people are salty over the Rabanastre gear! It's all Tactics based and yet people seem to be hating on it. I got the caster chestpiece this week and it's pretty nice.

Also yeah, Omega is a nice step 1 for new players coming into the expansion. If you can beat Susano you can definitely clear O1S, as they are similar difficulty. My friend thinks O2S is even easier than 1 but I dunno about that one.

I managed to snag a medium estate for my FC. Everyone else survive the housingpocalypse OK?

[Slumber]

13 minutes ago, Samias said:

I can't believe how many people are salty over the Rabanastre gear! It's all Tactics based and yet people seem to be hating on it. I got the caster chestpiece this week and it's pretty nice.

Also yeah, Omega is a nice step 1 for new players coming into the expansion. If you can beat Susano you can definitely clear O1S, as they are similar difficulty. My friend thinks O2S is even easier than 1 but I dunno about that one.

I managed to snag a medium estate for my FC. Everyone else survive the housingpocalypse OK?

I mostly hate that the Monk/Sam gear is based on the female Samurai from Tactics. I was really, really hoping for the Monk blue vest/red pants, but we'll likely get those in part 2 or 3.

Also, we managed to clear both Lak and Sus, and we can now do them pretty reliably. My FC(Well, 13 of us+Another 11 through Alliance PF) just did Rabanstre. We're trying Shinryu EX tomorrow, and we figure if we can get that, we can AT LEAST get to Ov4S.

Also, my FC managed to get a mansion in Shirogane, and a bunch of our members were up to get small and medium plots for themselves. We pretty much own like, the northwest corner of Shirogane. Don't tell anyone, or they'll come for our heads.

Edited October 14, 2017 by Slumber

[Samias]

Good stuff on the housing btw! The Shirogane wards are pretty detailed and have a lot of extra hidey-holes to them. I stayed with Mist, although it's a bit funny how they really just enabled people to swim in the water but added nothing else. Unless I do the Savage arc + stump trick my plot doesn't have roof access anymore though.

I'm currently trying to make it up the Shiokaze Holstery tower but I've only made it halfway before my fingers hurt. Mario Odyssey is kind of helping me with my platforming skills but the jank geometry and my large elezen self don't make it easy to judge whether or not I'm colliding with awkward hitboxes...

[Slumber]

On 10/29/2017 at 10:11 PM, Samias said:

Good stuff on the housing btw! The Shirogane wards are pretty detailed and have a lot of extra hidey-holes to them. I stayed with Mist, although it's a bit funny how they really just enabled people to swim in the water but added nothing else. Unless I do the Savage arc + stump trick my plot doesn't have roof access anymore though.

I'm currently trying to make it up the Shiokaze Holstery tower but I've only made it halfway before my fingers hurt. Mario Odyssey is kind of helping me with my platforming skills but the jank geometry and my large elezen self don't make it easy to judge whether or not I'm colliding with awkward hitboxes...

No real platformer will help with FFXIV platforming. It's busted on so many levels. I've been trying to do the Kugane jump puzzle for so long while waiting for queues to pop on my Black Mage(I leveled Black Mage and White Mage to 50 with the Squadron stuff). I pretty much always get to the same spot before quitting.

[Samias]

Yeah I'm so bad at the FFXIV platforming. My lalafell friend managed to get all the Kugane sightseeing spots though.

I'm starting to progress on O2S after putting it off but we're kind of walled at 50% from a bunch of silly mistakes. Still, it's not that much more complicated than O1S, just far more punishing damage-wise. It's been awhile since I last felt a bit of panic from a boss's single aoe attack! Compared to all the Lakshimi farming I did beforehand where I was DPSing nearly the entire time, it's certainly a lot to be on top of, especially as my cohealer is a lot less experienced than I am.

[Slumber]

On 11/16/2017 at 12:39 AM, Samias said:

Yeah I'm so bad at the FFXIV platforming. My lalafell friend managed to get all the Kugane sightseeing spots though.

I'm starting to progress on O2S after putting it off but we're kind of walled at 50% from a bunch of silly mistakes. Still, it's not that much more complicated than O1S, just far more punishing damage-wise. It's been awhile since I last felt a bit of panic from a boss's single aoe attack! Compared to all the Lakshimi farming I did beforehand where I was DPSing nearly the entire time, it's certainly a lot to be on top of, especially as my cohealer is a lot less experienced than I am.

My FC finally started doing Savage. We've got O1S and O2S down pretty well. We still wipe fairly often, but we've got them down, and now we're working on Shinryu.

Anywho, I might get a USB keyboard piano to take Perform to the next level. 

[Samias]

Yeah, O2S is one I have down now but it can be a little tough to find a consistent party to do my clears with. Shinryu is pretty damn hard though! I've made it to the end of part 1 but no further, usually because the tanks miss the last ahk morn after Shinryu's divebomb and get wrecked, and then I get wrecked right after, and it all crashes down from there.

[Samias]

Yeah, O2S is one I have down now but it can be a little tough to find a consistent party to do my clears with. Shinryu is pretty damn hard though! I've made it to the end of part 1 but no further, usually because the tanks miss the last ahk morn after Shinryu's divebomb and get wrecked, and then I get wrecked right after, and it all crashes down from there.

[Slumber]

On 12/7/2017 at 1:08 AM, Samias said:

Yeah, O2S is one I have down now but it can be a little tough to find a consistent party to do my clears with. Shinryu is pretty damn hard though! I've made it to the end of part 1 but no further, usually because the tanks miss the last ahk morn after Shinryu's divebomb and get wrecked, and then I get wrecked right after, and it all crashes down from there.

Now that they've removed the restrictions on Omega Savage, my FC has gotten geared up, and we have O1S, O2S and Shin EX down pretty consistently.

Now we're working on O4S which is... Hmmm... We haven't even gotten to the real fight.

[Samias]

I'm pretty much bursting at the seams waiting for 4.2 to be released. The pug life has been cursed over the past couple weeks as most of the actual good content farmers on my data  center are on break until the patch hits. What was one reliable O1S and O2S clears are not so hot and my Shinryu EX parties are worse than ever. Alas. Conveniently my contract has a little break fairly early on in the patch cycle so I can go at some learning parties pretty hard, I think. White mage, my job of choice, got a tiny little convenience buff by allowing lillies to be used without any stacks, so I basically just have a better stoneskin available again. I'm disappointed in dark knight barely getting anything other than a reliability buff to their signature ability, but while I finally got the job to 70 I'm sad they really haven't addressed the severe imbalance in their number of defense buffs vs other tanks when it comes to doing their primary job. DPS be damned, why do they have one less defensive cooldown than the other two tanks, with Shadow Wall even being straight up inferior to both Vengeance (shorter duration and longer cooldown, not to mention the counter attacks) and Sentinel (higher damage reduction)?! Why get Dark Mind so early when there's nothing to utilize it on? Why is Dark Passenger still so damn MP expensive for such a minor effect?? The world may never know.

[Slumber]

On 1/28/2018 at 3:59 AM, Samias said:

I'm pretty much bursting at the seams waiting for 4.2 to be released. The pug life has been cursed over the past couple weeks as most of the actual good content farmers on my data  center are on break until the patch hits. What was one reliable O1S and O2S clears are not so hot and my Shinryu EX parties are worse than ever. Alas. Conveniently my contract has a little break fairly early on in the patch cycle so I can go at some learning parties pretty hard, I think. White mage, my job of choice, got a tiny little convenience buff by allowing lillies to be used without any stacks, so I basically just have a better stoneskin available again. I'm disappointed in dark knight barely getting anything other than a reliability buff to their signature ability, but while I finally got the job to 70 I'm sad they really haven't addressed the severe imbalance in their number of defense buffs vs other tanks when it comes to doing their primary job. DPS be damned, why do they have one less defensive cooldown than the other two tanks, with Shadow Wall even being straight up inferior to both Vengeance (shorter duration and longer cooldown, not to mention the counter attacks) and Sentinel (higher damage reduction)?! Why get Dark Mind so early when there's nothing to utilize it on? Why is Dark Passenger still so damn MP expensive for such a minor effect?? The world may never know.

I recently got God of the Hand(And Land), so me and another crafter/gatherer in my FC have been trying to gather mats for the new 4.2 craftable sets for the regulars in our FC.

Thankfully there's still a dozen or so core raiders in my FC still doing content in between major patches, so I've been able to just log in and go "Hey, who wants to do Omega Savage/Shinryu EX?" and get groups together. And any time somebody who isn't a hardcore raider in the FC logs in and wants to do stuff, there's usually a good chunk of people willing. It's made the lull since 4.15 easier to deal with. We stopped scheduling raids about two weeks ago, though, since we figured people were getting tired of Deltascape and Shin. Only two or three members were still trying to crack O4S before maintenance. Thankfully 4 new raids and 1 new trial should breathe life back into my group. Maybe we'll go back and try O4S when we get tired of Sigmascape.

And yeah, some of the character balances seem... weird. White Mages getting Stoneskin back makes me want to keep leveling WHM. Warriors are also effectively getting a simplified/faster rotation and getting(From what number crunchers have gathered) about a 10% damage buff on the high end, and probably more on the lower end. Dark Knights meanwhile, get the shaft. Paladins also get a nerf. Warriors might overtake the Paladins in the meta. It'll depend on if the WAR's raw DPS can overtake the PLD's utility, which it very well might, since it was already top of the tank DPS charts, and it was already starting to edge out PLD. It feels like Square's trying to make DRK the "Dungeon tank", which sucks at the high end since nobody cares about running dungeons after a certain point. DRK is going to need substantial buffs and rebalances eventually here. I'm confident they can do it, since they did it with SMN/SCH, its just a matter of if they will do it. As it stands, DRK, BLM and SAM need the most love.

And as for my main class... I'm interested in these Monk changes. I'm interested to see if Riddle of Wind will factor into the Monk's opener, if Tornado Kick will get any use now that there might be a quick way to build up Greased Lightning, I'm excited to see Perfect Balance get its cooldown reduced by a whopping 2/3 which should be a big boost to Riddle of Fire+Brotherhood bursts, and I love that Brotherhood now is a self-buff as well, giving Monks a way to generate chakra for themselves. I am curious to see how it all plays out in practice.

I'm excited for tomorrow.

[Samias]

I don't think the monk buffs will change the status of tornado kick too much, but it sure will be a lot easier to deal with long phase changes and mechanics that force downtime. It's a really good change for a job that has struggled for so long to be considered meta, and this may be the breakthrough that allows them to supplant dragoons for the melee slot of a speedrun comp (or create a triple melee comp situation).

The healer changes are mostly just smoothing things out so you don't have a situation where you never use divine benison (high level healers sometimes don't ever cast cure when a fight is fully committed to memory), where excog is wasted because your tanks/cohealer can't chill out and let the tank's dip, and The Spear is simply the same duration as every other card, making it roughly equal to the Arrow (or better if you're a bard/monk). I think it's a good adjustment, although the heal potency of excogitation and the shield % of divine benison may be reduced in the future with the margin of error removed.

I think pld will remain meta even with nerfs, although war is pretty much back to being the king. The utility of cover, intervention, divine veil and passage of arms is very convenient for progression raiding. It's just frustrating as someone who used to like playing dark knight to see paladin outperform them in nearly all situations except dealing aoe damage. It's not fun to level dark knight. It is fun to use them in raid content, albeit depressing at how little party utility they offer compared to their fellow tanks. I wish they'd swap the levels where you learn shadow wall and dark mind. I wish dark passenger didn't cost MP even if it meant a potency nerf/cooldown increase. I don't necessarily need an overhaul of drk but they really need to consider how drk is really thin on anything that isn't damaging OGCDs in their kit. It's too much offense, tuned to weak potencies, and lacking in expected tank utility. It's not great!

[Slumber]

Already took down Sigmascape. First thing I did when I logged on, lol. Fun fights. A bit more going on than the Deltascape fights outside of O3 and O4, which are par for the course.

And yeah, looks like TK is still mostly useless, but it's not quite as niche as it once was, it seems. I haven't messed around with Riddle of Wind, but it seems like it might be salvageable without a huge loss of DPS in the long run now, which means TK might be a decent move when a boss is lower than 5%.

[Samias]

I got my jimmies rustled by Alphinaud EX so I did Hell's Lid and started my Ananta beast tribe quests first. No Sigmascape yet, so that'll happen after work. Looooots of new crafter stuff but I didn't have enough scrips on hand from being lazy about custom deliveries. There's wool tops for 500 yellow scrips of either type!! Holy crap I can finally have some nice plain rugs in my house without sacrificing an arm and a leg to the RNG gods.

[Slumber]

33 minutes ago, Samias said:

I got my jimmies rustled by Alphinaud EX so I did Hell's Lid and started my Ananta beast tribe quests first. No Sigmascape yet, so that'll happen after work. Looooots of new crafter stuff but I didn't have enough scrips on hand from being lazy about custom deliveries. There's wool tops for 500 yellow scrips of either type!! Holy crap I can finally have some nice plain rugs in my house without sacrificing an arm and a leg to the RNG gods.

I was apparently super lucky to get into Sigmascape right away. All of my other FC mates got stuck at Cid, and only managed to clear O5 by the time maintenance started. 

I made sure to rub it in that I cleared it all. 

But yeah. Two other FC members were super hyped to see Wool Tops and some other mats as Yellow Scrip turn-ins. Somebody in Shout was mad because he had a few Wool Tops on the market board, and he's probably only going to get a fraction of what he wanted before 4.2, lol. 

I have a job interview later today, but when I get back I'll probably do everything else. It sucks having to go back to the old raid loot rules, because now I have to wait on my FC to start doing Sigmascape Savage. Byakko should be fun to do in the meantime, at least. 

Oh, also there was a Summoner with the UC Bahamut weapon and the title in my O8 clear group who kept dying, which made me feel better about myself not dying more than twice in that fight. 

Edited January 30, 2018 by Slumber

[Samias]

Yeah, it's pretty funny to see players with high tier raid weapons underperform when they aren't with their static. I've partied with some extremely good samurai in the past farming Susano, who managed to be top dps in the group by a large margin yet still died many times getting greedy for one more hit. Yet he was still hitting 98th percentile dps for his job! His raid logs were phenomenal.

Didn't get a chance to do Sigmascape last night since I was working late with some hard deadlines to meet at my studio, but I did set up a few glamour plates, finished both the new dungeons, and completed Byakko's normal trial. Byakko was actually crazy fun for a normal mode fight and I really enjoyed that boss transition.

[Slumber]

On 1/31/2018 at 10:27 AM, Samias said:

Yeah, it's pretty funny to see players with high tier raid weapons underperform when they aren't with their static. I've partied with some extremely good samurai in the past farming Susano, who managed to be top dps in the group by a large margin yet still died many times getting greedy for one more hit. Yet he was still hitting 98th percentile dps for his job! His raid logs were phenomenal.

Didn't get a chance to do Sigmascape last night since I was working late with some hard deadlines to meet at my studio, but I did set up a few glamour plates, finished both the new dungeons, and completed Byakko's normal trial. Byakko was actually crazy fun for a normal mode fight and I really enjoyed that boss transition.

Yeah, Byakko's fun. His transition is certainly something I can't remember seeing in an MMO.

[Samias]

So this is week 2 of the Fashion Report minigame and I'm having a lot of fun crafting things for myself and my friend! This week I was up really late anyway so I was experimenting on my own with what worked and didn't work, and did manage to break the 80 threshold with my own experimentation. Then I was able to refine my glamour up to 91 points with some outside help. I'm glad I'm an omnicrafter though, so a lot of the market fluctuations don't affect me too badly, but I keep a lot of items on hand.

[Slumber]

On 2/9/2018 at 11:25 AM, Samias said:

So this is week 2 of the Fashion Report minigame and I'm having a lot of fun crafting things for myself and my friend! This week I was up really late anyway so I was experimenting on my own with what worked and didn't work, and did manage to break the 80 threshold with my own experimentation. Then I was able to refine my glamour up to 91 points with some outside help. I'm glad I'm an omnicrafter though, so a lot of the market fluctuations don't affect me too badly, but I keep a lot of items on hand.

... I got God of the Hand because I thought it'd be good on a Monk. I haven't done much crafting since hitting level 70 on everything. Most of my time the last few weeks has been assisting our FC's main crafter.

Also, my FC and I got through O5S on week 1, and we're close to clearing O6S, so I'm happy at that. We didn't start doing Omega Savage until level 340 gear was out, so doing brand new Savage content with appropriate ilvls is a nice sign.

[Samias]

That's awesome to hear your prog is going well! I heard in a way 5 is harder than 6, but I also felt sort of the same about the previous tier, other than one person's mistake typically killing 4 people. Also I don't often post covers of music since this game rarely gets any love for arrangements/remixes but...

The bass solo is so good!

[Slumber]

On 2/13/2018 at 1:09 AM, Samias said:

That's awesome to hear your prog is going well! I heard in a way 5 is harder than 6, but I also felt sort of the same about the previous tier, other than one person's mistake typically killing 4 people. Also I don't often post covers of music since this game rarely gets any love for arrangements/remixes but...

 

We beat O6S on Saturday. Can confirm that it's easier than O5S in some ways. It's a lot more structured, and there's less randomness. But the enrage is a bit faster, and a few screw ups can lead to wipes. O7S seems like a doozy, but not impossible. 

Unfortunately my new job is going to get in the way of my raid nights for the foreseeable future, so I probably won't be around for our first O7S clear if we make it that far. It sucks, but we may be rescheduling. 

Edited February 19, 2018 by Slumber

[Samias]

https://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/lds/blog_image/jp_blog/assets_c/2018/03/jp20180312_iw_11-7354.html

I need this in my life.