Heavensward
26 entries. 20,428 words.
2015-05
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FFXIV – UI Wish List for Heavensward.
2015-05-27.
With the Final Fantasy XIV expansion Heavensward coming soon (June 23), I thought I would put together a list of all the nagging UI issues that I hope are addressed in 3.0. It’s a testament to how good the game already is that I have trouble coming up with any significant gameplay issues to complain about-only these nitpicky UI faults.
(Knowing how good Square Enix is at patch notes, I could probably go somewhere and find a detailed list of exactly what’s going to be in Heavensward, but let’s just assume there’s still some doubt about the feature set.
- MMORPG
- Musings
- Pre-Release
- Wish List
2015-06
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Finding Heavensward.
2015-06-19.
Normally everything related to FFXIV is an absolute pleasure to deal with, but getting into the Heavensward pre-order early access has been quite an unexpected challenge.
FFXIV was down all day Thursday for the big 3.0 patch which I downloaded Thursday night. I had absolutely no idea that I would have to do anything special to see Heavensward. I just assumed the patcher would know I had ordered it, it would download it, and it would magically appear the next time I ran the game after the servers came up.
- MMORPG
- Pre-Release
2015-07
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Progression Report – June 2015.
2015-07-04.
There were only two games I played any significant amount in June: Final Fantasy XIV (28 hours) and The Witcher 3 (18 hours). The latter is not an MMORPG, but since it feels exactly like an MMORPG I’m going to count it in my progression report.
In FFXIV I started in on Heavensward, but to be honest I’m still a bit burned out from all the catching up I did in May, so I haven’t played that much into the expansion.
- MMORPG
- Progression Report
- Single-Player
- Status
2015-08
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Progression Report – July 2015.
2015-08-02.
Blaugust Day 2
July was a quiet gaming month for me. Work continues to be hectic, and I’ve also gotten it into my head that I might try to take a Microsoft exam so I spent a lot of time reading and studying.
It was around the end of July last year that I lost my job-not from anything I did, but from a contract changing hands to a different company.
- MMORPG
- Progression Report
- Status
2015-12
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Getting Back Into MMORPGs.
2015-12-16.
I’m having a hard time getting back into some MMORPGs I used to play.
FFXIV. First of course is FFXIV, the game that I have an active subscription for that’s draining my money while I avoid logging in. Every time I try to get back into it, I keep running into this roadblock-Heavensward is hard. Well, maybe hard isn’t the right word. More like tedious. I’m mired at level 53 in the Dravanian Forelands where it takes an hour to run from one side to the other for quests since I don’t have flying unlocked there yet.
- MMORPG
- Status
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Games Of My Year 2015.
2015-12-26.
Here’s my year end “Best Of” list, because if you’re on the Internet, you have to do a year-end list of some kind. It’s the law.
2015 Contenders After studying my Steam purchase history and searching my memory, I’ve come up with the following list of new games that I purchased and played in 2015. These are only games that were released in 2015, not every single game that I purchased or played in 2015.
- MMORPG
- Opinion
- RPG
- Single-Player
2016-09
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FFXIV – Sohm Al Completed At Last.
2016-09-14.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss Legion already. There is something very comforting and familiar about playing WoW, even though I don’t have any of the nostalgia that most people have. You run around colorful scenery, click on things, and watch impressive numbers fly around the screen. It’s almost hypnotic.
To head off the withdrawal symptoms, I thought I’d try to get back into FFXIV and get something going there.
- MMORPG
- Status
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Bonding With Characters.
2016-09-15.
It’s only been two days and I already regret changing my main FFXIV character’s gender. Who is this total stranger running around in Eozera now? What happened to the free-spirited girl who rode to Gridania in search of fame and fortune, and ended up conquering titans and dragons? This new guy is an imposter. He hasn’t earned the right to be there.
Imposter! You don’t deserve to be in that grand company!
- MMORPG
- Musings
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FFXIV – New Abilities and The Aery.
2016-09-21.
I switched Tya back to her true form, and changed her hair again. She looks a little older and wiser now, maybe even a bit world-weary after all of her trials and tribulations. I changed her voice too, but the new “hiyah” when she’s firing arrows isn’t much better than the old one. (It would be nice if you could preview that when you’re selecting the voices.)
Halfway through level 54, it finally dawned on me that I was due for a new Bard ability, so I went searching for the Bard quest giver.
- MMORPG
- Status
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The Vault, The Whale, and Some GW2.
2016-09-28.
I’ve slowed down a bit, but I’m still making progress in Heavensward. I made it to level 57 and got through The Vault after putting it off for half a week. The last boss with all the chess pieces (or robot horse-men as I call them) was actually kind of fun. The post-dungeon cut scenes were less fun.
Sad kitty is sad.
After The Vault I was sent back to another part of the Sea of Clouds, and shortly thereafter I was asked to fight a big whale in The Limitless Blue.
- MMORPG
- Status
2016-10
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FFXIV – Palace of the Dead Discovered.
2016-10-03.
Most of my gaming over the weekend was preempted by other media consumption. First it was Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I could not put down between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, until I reached the third part of the book and had to have a break. (It’s a convenient stopping point, the reasons for which should be fairly obvious upon reading the table of contents.)
And then Sunday night I noticed that Deadpool was on HBO prior to Westworld, which I hadn’t yet seen.
- MMORPG
- Status
2017-01
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FFXIV – Unexpectedly Hard Dungeon.
2017-01-04.
Last night I only had time to play one game, so I decided to play some FFXIV again, as part of my as-yet unannounced goal of catching up with the Main Scenario before the expansion arrives. I was stuck at a point in the Main Scenario where the next quest requires level 58, but I was only at about 57.8. So I thought I would do a few quests to start getting a feel for my character again.
- MMORPG
- Status
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FFXIV – The Level 58 Slump.
2017-01-11.
I’m a little miffed that I’ve run out of level 58 quests in the Dravanian Hinterlands only about halfway to level 59. Alphinaud and [redacted] stopped talking to me about the Main Scenario almost immediately after I ascended to level 58 and entered Idyllshire, which is apparently the new Mor Dhona. They now want nothing to do with me until I get to level 59.
So I did every level 58 quest I could find around Idyllshire and the Hinterlands, mostly involving the gobbies’ loony adventures building their city government.
- MMORPG
- Status
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FFXIV – Finally 60.
2017-01-17.
It was a weekend of big achievements in Final Fantasy XIV. When last we left our intrepid Warrior of Light, she had run out of level 58 quests halfway to level 59.
I ended up doing some Clan Hunts, some Battle Levemetes (a word which I still do not think is a real word), and thanks to suggestions from Aywren, a handful of Beast Tribe quests for the Vath and Vanu.
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – 3.0 Main Scenario Complete.
2017-01-20.
A while back I said I was playing ESO again.. welllll, I sort of lost interest. (I think it’s because I find the quests very depressing, and it also seems like everywhere you go and everything you do is basically the same as what you did before.) So it’s mostly FFXIV and an occasionally foray into LotRO for me these days.
I finished the Aetherial Research Facility. I got a nice group with a very “professional” tank, who explained the mechanics concisely and non-judgmentally.
- MMORPG
- Status
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FFXIV – The Road To Void Ark.
2017-01-24.
Thanks to a bunch of tips, I learned that what I should have been looking for as a Crystal Tower-replacement is called Void Ark, not Alexander. It took me a little time to figure out how to unlock it, because the quest that takes you to it starts out in Foundation with some random guy on the street who doesn’t look like he would ever lead to anything good. I found him from the 3.
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – Void Ark and Weeping City.
2017-01-31.
First there was Void Ark. I watched a guide on YouTube but I didn’t understand much of it, so I just jumped in. (It’s easier to learn mechanics first-hand.) It turned out to be fairly straightforward to get carried through there. Just like the Labyrinth of the Ancients raid at 50, everyone is so over-leveled that you hardly even see the mechanics, and mostly all you have to do is follow along, avoid AOEs, and pick up the loot.
- MMORPG
- Status
2017-06
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Stormblood’s a’Comin.
2017-06-08.
FFXIV’s Stormblood expansion is arriving on June 16 for head start players, so I figure it might be a good time to talk about it. I pre-ordered it a long time ago, but I haven’t commented much about it. I did at one point write a post about some of the early feature announcements, but naturally, I never got around to publishing it, and it’s super obsolete now.
When last we left our intrepid main character back in January, she was sitting at ilvl 224, having just geared up with ilvl 230 items from The Weeping City.
- MMORPG
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Stormblood Very First Impressions.
2017-06-17.
Glad I got the memo about the dress code here. It’s here! Well, if you pre-ordered.
Upon first logging into Stormblood, I was greeted by this very prominent window explaining the new Song Gauge for the Bard job.
“Here we go,” I thought, sighing heavily. This was exactly what I was afraid of: Huge changes to my class that will require mental energy and work to learn. The FFXIV equivalent of a talent point respec.
- MMORPG
- Reviews
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FFXIV – Finding Fun Without Instances.
2017-06-19.
You’ve probably heard that there were one or two significant technical issues with FFXIV’s Stormblood early access over the weekend. Aywren summed it up pretty well. Even outside of the Stormblood content gate where I am, most times I tried to venture into an instance of any kind (dungeon, job duty, anything except PotD for some reason), I was disconnected from the server and couldn’t log back in with that character for up to an hour because of the dreaded Error 90002.
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – Antitower and 3.2 Finished.
2017-06-20.
Sunday afternoon I finally completed something I’ve been putting off for about six months now: The Antitower.
I wasn’t planning to, it just sort of happened. I had just gotten back from the grocery store Sunday afternoon. I sat down to figure out what to do for the rest of the day. My mood was better than usual for the waning hours of a weekend, and I was wondering if instances were still broken (I had heard they weren’t but I suspected they might go bad again as server congestion ramped up), so as an experiment I queued up for my nemesis The Antitower.
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – Sohr Khai and Palace of the Dead.
2017-06-21.
I started Monday evening with what I thought would be a quick trip through the level 54 job duty for the Samurai. I failed it three times. Apparently I haven’t learned nearly as much about playing the Samurai as I thought I had.
The instance first has you fighting a lot of opponents simultaneously. They hit you for a lot of damage, too. Of course our fearless samurai trainer from the East just stands there and watches while you struggle.
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – Stormblood Launch Day PvP.
2017-06-22.
I was dragging most of the day Tuesday so when I got home I stuck to simple, low energy tasks on Stormblood’s official launch day.
Being launch day, I first had to enter a code on my account page to activate the game again. Square Enix somehow continues to have one of the worst systems for activating your game account in the history of the universe. You have to enter a code to get into the early access (two of them, in fact), then you have to enter another code to get in on launch day.
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – Heavensward, What Happened?.
2017-06-23.
Still bumping around doing miscellaneous tasks of little import in Stormblood. But lately I’ve been thinking about Heavensward, the previous FFXIV expansion. I pre-ordered it early and was in there on early access launch day, but looking back on it two years later, I didn’t play it very much at all. (Yet for some weird reason, I remained subscribed the whole time.)
In FFXIV ARR (2.x), I leveled all of the following jobs to 50: Bard, White Mage, Dragoon, Black Mage, Miner, Botanist, Carpenter, Weaver, Alchemist, and Leatherworker.
- Blog
- MMORPG
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FFXIV – Heavensward Completed.
2017-06-29.
I’m going to squish my entire FFXIV weekend into one post. The short version is that I finished all of the Heavensward Main Scenario Quests so I can begin the Stormblood expansion. This required completing all of these instances:
Final Steps of Faith. A mostly-FC group got me through this trial pretty easily, except for one flashy lightning thing that zapped me dead in the second half.
I’m not sure but I think Aymeric was hitting on the Warrior of Light.
- MMORPG
2017-07
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FFXIV – Collectables Grokked.
2017-07-24.
I’m going to try to document here what I’ve figured out about gathering collectables in FFXIV, because there is almost a 100% chance that I will forget this someday and a future version of me will need to re-learn it.
Collectables are similar to the Grand Company Provisioning missions you can do once per day, which look like this:
Collectables are a bit better, though, because you can hand in a lot more every day.
- MMORPG