Patch 8.1.5 Stuff
I’ve got about 10k rep in each Proudmoore and Zandalari to go in order to unlock the new allied races, so that is going to be something I work towards slowly over the next few weeks. I’m also going to be purchasing heirloom upgrades, starting with plate, in order to get alts leveled to 120. The Magni quest is a given, for the free item level increase and the LORE, and whenever Xal’atath calls, I will be forced to obey.
Heroic Battle of Dazar’Alor: Now 4/9, Hoping For More
Last week we got down Grong at last, and then rather easily did Opulence, which was great. The Conclave fight requires a different kill order than the one we used for normal, as using the same order caused us a lot of bad overlaps of boss abilities. When we switched it up, we were making progress, so I think we can down it this week and hit the first real wall in Rastakhan!
Final Fantasy XIV – 69 on Red Mage (Nice), Time for the Last Level and Gearing
Red Mage has been a real treat to play, as the rotating is very fun and the Dualcast mechanic gets around the pacing of FFXIV’s combat by offering a ton of instant casts to keep things feeling a bit more frenetic. I have around 9 million experience to go, which means when I do my roulettes tonight, I’ll probably cap out on job number 3. Gear-wise, my Casting set is very deficient, so I’ll have to start from scratch at 70, unlike with White Mage where I could slap on my Healing gear from Astrologian and immediately be able to jump into high level content.
I’ve finally purchased an apartment to match with my Free Company chamber, having housing in two different zones (Mist in Limsa Lominsa and the apartment in Shirogane) but the apartment has no furnishings and is unlikely to get any for a while because I’ll likely spend some amount of gil on gearing up RDM. I’d like to get a housing plot to build a house on, but while there was a lot in Shirogane on Gilgamesh (!) it was selling for nearly 4 million gil for a small plot, and it had about 20 people camping the placard waiting for the price to drop to buy it up. My hope is that the upcoming data center expansion and free transfers will nudge some people off to other servers, and maybe in Shadowbringers we’ll get Ishgard housing, which could be cool even if I’m not sure I would want it (Ishgard is very atmospheric, but also kind of bleak and dreary).
After RDM, I’m set to level Samurai, but I haven’t fully committed – I might opt to level Summoner/Scholar since leveling one levels the other and that would give me my last healing job plus another caster job with which my RDM can share gear.
3D Printing – Fixing The Thing
So I got my new 3D printer over the weekend! Building it was annoying, but largely fairly simple. Some parts are annoying (fitting the timing belt and tensioner, making sure the bowden tube is properly inserted, the variety of wires to connect) but overall, it wasn’t too painful. However, I’ve found that mine spits out molten plastic in clumps, which is fixable, but has multiple possibilities to investigate, so that is where I am now! Once done, I have a ton of good filament to play with and some ideas (desk phone stands, translucent WoW and FFXIV logos to light with LEDs), and I expect it will be a lot of fun – once I can get it working!
Various Other Gaming
I’ve been dabbling outside of MMOs slightly as of late – I tried a practice round and a few real rounds of Apex Legends, which has been an interesting and fun take on the battle royale craze of late. I’m also going to be taking some time to play/record Final Fantasy XIII, which I still haven’t started back on yet, short of making sure the game loaded and configuring settings (easy on my PC to just max everything out since it is a 10 year old PS3 game) and ensuring it ran smoothly. After barely trying the PS3 version, I picked up Catherine Classic for PC on Steam and will give it a shot.
News Updates – FFXIV and WoW News Forthcoming
I expect the next couple of weeks to be big on news for both of my main MMOs, as next weekend marks the final Fan Fest of this year’s rotation for FFXIV, and this event is likely going to see the final Shadowbringers trailer, the last new job announcements, among which a healer is expected, some job change and balancing info (the full list won’t be out for a while still), and hopefully the new benchmark (useful not as much for scoring your PC, although it does help tell you if you can really run the game, but for the hints at content that are embedded in it). There is also the news about patch 4.55b, which carries the final content of Stormblood! As for WoW, well, I wrote yesterday that with 8.1.5 on live servers, I expect that we will see 8.2 info start to leak out via PTR builds soonish, and I fully expect that Blizzard will deploy an 8.2 build just prior the FFXIV Fan Fest as a sort of counter-programming (intentionally or not, they’ve quite often done this, as the major x.2 patches of the last two expansions have launched to oppose the expansion launches for FFXIV, with Fury of Hellfire launching the same day as Heavensward and Tomb of Sargeras opening for raiding the same day as Stormblood). Among all of these events, I hope to have a lot of new things to be excited about!
Kaylriene 