Endgame Viable

So apparently Zenimax lifted their NDA a day after I speculated why they hadn’t lifted their NDA. Neat. Anyway, now I can post what I wrote about ESO mainly after the second beta weekend I was in. Fair warning: The maximum level I have achieved is 7. That’s a couple of hours of gameplay. I have absolutely no idea what the endgame is like; I don’t even know what the maximum level is. (801 words.)

Zenimax is getting a lot of flak for their strict NDA, and I thought I would speculate on why they might think it’s a good idea to keep it in place, when other early games don’t. Which is not to imply that I think it’s a good idea, or a bad idea, or anything in between. I’m not a games journalist, so I couldn’t care less whether it has an NDA or not. (Usually journalists complain the loudest about NDAs because not being able to write a story means lost eyeballs.) Average joe gamer probably doesn’t care either. (665 words.)

Landmark continues to be a relaxing gathering experience. Remember when I said I couldn’t mine anything but Dirt, Stone, Tourmaline, and Agate? Well it turns out I had been running around all this time in a Tier 2 zone with a Tier 1 pickaxe. Doh! I have no idea how I got to Tier 2, but to get back I had to run to the central hub thingy-which probably has a cool name but I don’t know what it is-and click the big crystal hanging up in the air. I was then able to select a Tier 1 zone/place/island/thingy/whatever. Once I was in the right place, I found all kinds of copper to mine. There were orange spots on the ground everywhere! (520 words.)

In FFXIV, one of your endgame tasks is to follow the Relic Reborn quest line in order to build your “relic weapon,” which is one of the better weapons in the game (but not the best, of course, because that would be too easy). I’ve been pretty lazy about it because statistically the Artimes Bow doesn’t seem that much better than the Garuda Bow I’m currently using. But anyway the final step of the Relic Reborn quest (at least I think it’s the last one) involves retrieving some primal materials by defeating the three Hard Mode Trials. (1003 words.)

Last Wednesday, SOE patched Landmark with a pretty significant list of bug fixes. The only part that mattered to me, of course, was the addition of an invert mouse option. Yay! I can play! I’m still not going to build anything complicated, though, because … well, it’s going to get wiped. Either accidentally or intentionally. So there’s no point in wasting the effort. So basically all I’ve done so far is run around and chop down trees or dig holes in the dirt. (399 words.)

Don’t get me wrong, I am ecstatic to see Rift adding new “stuff” to the game, but unfortunately Dreamweaving-a crafting profession for enhancing Dimensions-is way far down on the list of things that interest me. Dreamweaving allegedly allows you to craft thingys and gizmos and whatsises for your Dimensions, but I have yet to do much of anything with my Dimensions, except dump in all the Dimension items that keep filling up my inventory. My Dimension space (which is so unattended that I don’t even know its name) looks like an episode of Hoarders. (402 words.)

On the issue of paying for Alpha access, I’m having a hard time getting worked up about it. On the surface it seems like an outrage, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds conceptually identical to pre-ordering. It’s long been a trend that if you pre-order an MMO, you get “early access.” I remember this was the case way back with Warhammer Online. It’s just that now, instead of 5 days of early access, you get 5 months of early access. Or more. (481 words.)

With such slow casting times, you’d think that the optimal way to play a Conjurer would be to spam Cures on the tank so he’s always full. That’s what I did in Rift, more-or-less, with the Purifier class. (Prior to Storm Legion, at least.) Welllllll, see, there’s this thing called ’threat.’ I may be completely wrong, but in my meager experience so far, I feel like healing generates a lot of threat in FFXIV. At least in the early levels. That means you can’t just keep blasting Cures all over the place unless you want every mob running straight toward you. (It reminds me a lot of the early days of Neverwinter.) So there’s a balancing act of casting just enough Cures to keep the tank alive but not enough to pull threat from him. Which leads to some uncomfortable waiting, knowing your tank is taking damage, but also knowing you can’t cast a heal on him without commiting suicide. If I’m in doubt, I cast the heal anyway and hope that the tank is aware enough to pull the mobs off of me before I get killed. Most of the time that works. Mostly. (589 words.)

During the time I’ve been waiting in FFXIV endgame queues for my Bard, I’ve leveled all my other adventuring classes to 15 through a combination of FATEs, levemetes, and hunting log completion. (You’d think leveling to 15 would be easy, but in reality the time it takes to get from level 10 to level 15 seems endless.) My goal was to get all the classes to 15, then pick one to dive into and level the rest of the way to 50. At the time of this writing, the winning class is Conjurer, which I have gotten to 27, mainly in dungeons. (459 words.)

Due to a heat pump failure, my normal schedule of writing scintillating posts (ha!) was totally borked. But lucky for you, I found some posts that I have previously rejected as being totally lame and irrelevant, pulled from the dregs of the barrel of mediocrity. My WoW Hunter has finally reached the level cap! Of Burning Crusade, that is. Which means he is now Level 70, a mere twenty levels and five years behind where everyone else is. I spent a weekend burning through quests (ha, get it?) in the Blade’s Edge Mountains and Netherstorm, and when I was nearing the end of level 69, I suddenly realized that it was pointless to finish the questing in the Outlands because the very first quests in Wrath of the Lich King would probably give me ridiculously awesome gear, higher experience, and more money. So I dropped everything and left. (447 words.)