Final Fantasy XIV

So I just cancelled my FFXIV sub before it would auto-renew next week.
It’s been 8 months and I had a blast (also 2 months longer than in 2019, when I first tried it). I started and finished Shadowbringers, I waited for the expansion to drop, I unsubbed WoW and kept FFXIV as my main MMO for some months, I played through an entire 6.0 patch cycle of Endwalker, I brought every crafter and gatherer to max-level, I raided Savage and killed 2 of 4 bosses (ok, that one’s not so much an achievement I guess). Also all the Tribal rep I started with the earnest goal of finishing them.

In the end I have 4 tanks at 90, healers at 90, 90, 87, and 74, 3 ranged dps at 90, and one melee (+ SMN at 87). I lost steam before finishing those 2, but it’s ok.

Summer is coming and I don’t want to raid in two games, and I like raiding in WoW, whereas here it was nice while it was a novel thing, but it’s not for me – so I’m glad I could step down without leaving the static hanging.

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Goodbye, Eorzea!Read More »

The big patch we’ve all been waiting for! Or wait, did I?

• MSQ – done, it was ok
• Tataru’s Grand Endeavor – not sure I finished it, a little confused here
• Alliance Raid – Unlocked it, haven’t run it yet
• Ultimate Raid – no interest
• New Dungeon – ran it once as part of the MSQ, was kinda nice
• New Trial – not done yet, not really keen on it
• Housing lottery – probably good, but I’m not interested in a house
• PvP – not interested
• Trusts – not interested
• MSQ Duty Roulette changed – not sure, I had used it a lot but it was boring
• Adventurer Plates – nice, but not a gamechanger

And some stuff was pushed to 6.15 it seems:

• New Beast Tribe – Might start these, I hope they’re for XP and not crafting
• Custom Deliveries – meh, too late, already got all crafters to 90

So overall there are some nice things but also many things I wouldn’t even be interested in if I was still in full hype mode.

Oh, and I still haven’t done the Alliance Raid, but I kinda want to get it done before I maybe unsub at the end of the month – ah well, one more week I guess.

Kaylriene has a nice post about goals in FFXIV up and I always find it interesting how these goals (or even complete playstyles) can differ for different MMO players, even ones who play the same game – or in this case, even raiding the same content.

Yes, I’m winding down my activity because I found Savage Raiding not to be my thing, but I’ve had fun with my static for as long as it lasted, but I simply couldn’t care less for gear. Well, except that part of my bad damage is the gear. Not really a big part, that’s mostly on me, but it is a part nevertheless. So I gues my goal was to finish P4S, but I’m happy enough to bow out now and let the others do P3S and P4S, I managed to get 2 of them down in my first ever raid tier. I’m definitely “good” enough to not stand in things, to learn the dance, to kill the boss – but I’m not good with damage and it’s not worth fixing for me. This killed the fun for me.

I also don’t care for gold (I’m at 15m right now because it just seems to accumulate with me doing the things I do) and I’m glad I didn’t go for a house, with the plan to unsubscribe and all. Not that I am against housing, but right now I’m not in the mood and so my half-filled apartment is good enough. I did not get as many jobs to 90 as I had planned, but maybe I’ll manage to finish the last few levels of SMN/SCH – that would be number 11+12 out of 19, a comfortable rounded 2/3. And the DoH/DoL ones are all maxed as well. Let’s ignore BLU here, shall we?

While I like the 5 new glamour plates with 6.1 I’m actually let down that they didn’t increase the size of the Glamour Dresser. I’d need to count but I think I could retire one, maybe two retainers who are only holding low-level gear for future glamour purposes and nothing else.

And I guess it’s a good thing I am not achievement hunting in every game. I really wanted to get the requirements for the Battle Mentor tag done, but simply by not playing enough I’m just shy of 1100 commendations out of 1500 I need – which would be easily fixed by tanking more. Most of the other achievements are a little meh to me – I came too late to the game for them to happen and I’m not going out of my way to spend an immense amount of time doing things I wouldn’t usually do.

I also managed to finish the Namazu and Qitari Beast Tribe grinds, which means I have Endwalker, Shadowbringers, and Stormblood done completely and for Heavensward I’m only missing the Moogles. I didn’t bother with ARR really, but I got the Ixal done and am halfway through the Kobolds and started with Sahagin. Meh.

So did I reach the goals I set up for Endwalker? I’d say mostly. I raided successfully (even if a bit slow) until I lost the fun. I leveled and geared a handful of jobs.

Might be bad timing with 6.1 coming out next week or so, but I’ve not been feeling like logging in to FFXIV a lot lately.

The person who is usually filling in for someone missing in our static was showing interest to join anyway and so I took the chance to bow out and they raided without me for the first time last night, progging on P3S. I was there at the start but let the others (who actually want to play) play despite the transition only being planned in 2-3 weeks.

We’ll see, maybe 6.1 is exciting and I absolutely plan to have a look at the Alliance raid, but I’m having much more fun with Guild Wars 2 and a bit more fun with WoW at the moment.

I plan to run a few more dungeons for irregular tomestones before reset but I’m not pushing it, really. I got my hairstyle and headgear, everything else is optional. One more mount probably, maybe two of them.

I resubscribed in August, that’s 8.5 months (+ the two weeks that roped me back in), and 4 of them in the new expansion – and I played nearly every day for most of the time I was subscribed. Probably the perfect time to take a short break.

Last night we finally did it and killed P2S, the second Savage fight of Endwalker’s first raid tier – after around 70 wipes (and quite a few close calls at 2-5% and enrage). Guess we’re not great but looking at the damage numbers we’re nearly as off-meta as it gets. (see below)

Really nice, except I wasn’t feeling well and made soo many mistakes. Also only a grey parse again at 4.15k DPS 🙁 Anyway, got no loot but let’s hope we can continue this.

Meanwhile I managed to get my Gunbreaker to 90, which makes it the 8th job at max level, now I just need to try to redo my bars and actually play a little at that level and not just downranked all the time. Next up: Astrologian (81.x) and Reaper (77.3), I guess. Been playing Summoner a little but I simply don’t like it, guess it’s back to Scholar (once I got Astrologian maxed) to boost the shared DPS via Healing and not the other way round. Come to think of it, it’s such an odd pair of jobs…

So, here’s a screenshot of the current “Top 50 for speed” on P2S, via fflogs.com:

So, we have the 2%+1%of tanks, the 8% of magic dps, 17%+11% of melee DPS, the 2% WHM, basically only our Scholar is in the meta and our Dancer is not a Machinist who wouldn’t even register. Still kinda weird comp, but it’s everyone playing what they like (except the WHM who was recruited as “we a not-shield-healer”, and the Reaper originally played as a Dragoon for P1S.

I wrote about our first visit to Asphodelos two weeks ago. Since then we managed to do P1S another time the following Sunday, this time without subs. We finished in 9:33, which was 26 seconds faster than the first kill, despite two new people, which was kinda nice already. Then we continued on to P2S with only reading up on half the tactics, but we managed to get to 80%, not yet Phase 2. But it looked good.

Next Sunday was not going to happen so we planned for Tuesday and Thursday last week, and so we went in for P1S again and finished after 2 wipes. The time was again 9:33, but with 2 deaths and a lot of damage down buffs. We all had the feeling we made so many more errors than the week before but routine seems to settle in, as shown by the time and the overall same DPS – but with deaths and personal setbacks. This is really nice. We then tried P2S again but due to time constraints only a few tries happened, but we got to Phase 2, so while we may not be quick in the grand scheme of things, for our hours invested we’re happy with the progress so far. This week we’ll be going for P1S on Tuesday and P2S on Sunday. I’d be a bigger fan of one raid day (even if these are very short), but organizing times for a static with people who work shifts and on weekends is hard. Certainly a lot harder than with a WoW guild where you just put a day and a date and it usually doesn’t matter if a single person can’t make it.

Regarding job levels I’m nearly done with all casters to 60 and I also hit 90 on Dark Knight and Dancer, but I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong because sometimes it still feels slow overall, but then again I am only doing all the roulettes and Pixie dailies, not much more…
I guess my focus is on Gunbreaker currently, then Astrologian and Machinist to 90, then maybe Scholar again. Oh, and I unlocked Reaper because I want to see the melee role quest in Shadowbringers.

But on the last two weekends I finally managed to push Miner and Botanist to 90, and getting a few of the Studium Deliveries in Old Sharlayan done.

Last night we finally managed to get our static together on the third Sunday where we had planned and went into Asphodelos. Roughly 33 wipes, the last two were due to enrage and a lack of DPS, but at least we made it so far.

One of eight couldn’t make it today, but we planned to continue with 7, then sadly one more was sick, so we had to sub in two people (who had already both killed him) and after five more wipes we had him down. Yes, it was nice to get it done, but it was also a bit of a letdown because it wasn’t “the team”, despite us just having started now in this expansion and most of us not having played together ever, or not recently. And one of the replacement folks was a reaper who did 20.8% of the damage, versus an average 15.x for the other 3 dps.

This is not to lay blame on them in any way, of course. I was parsing 1% (instead of 0%) on Warrior, but at least I was over 10% better than yesterday – with 3.51k DPS (2.08m damage, 8.73%), and I shouldn’t be behind our Paladin MT – so I’m certainly not in a position to criticize them.

Anyway, raiding is moderately fun but I am not and will probably never be a fan of how DPS-focused all the non-DPS jobs in FFXIV are, at least compared to WoW. That’s currently my number one downside in this game. If I am healing I want to heal and not perfect my DPS rotation, if I am tanking I want to do other things than paying attention to my DPS rotation.

It just feels bad if I am learning a new class (and as I played my Warrior just a little before Endwalker, and never did any “hard” content, I am counting it as new) and no matter how good it feels to be doing all the mechanics correctly and mitigating at the right time, if you get a 1% parse it kinda sucks. Then again I looked at some of the numbers, a #1000 kill in ~8:17 instead of our 10:00 (Enrage), the numbers for some random Warriors are:

• Orange 95% parse, 5,24k DPS, 2.61m damage, 10.96%
• Purple 78% parse, 5.04k DPS, 2.4m damage, 10.55%
• Blue 74% parse, 4.86k DPS, 2.42m damage, 10.17%
• Blue 50% parse, 4.75k DPS, 2.38m damage, 9.99%
• Green 39% parse, 4.66k DPS, 2.32m damage, 9.74%
• Grey 18% parse, 4.36k DPS, 2.17m damage, 9.12%

So I guess around 4.5k would be the benchmark to be good enough for Green, so that would probably be a reasonable goal. Or maybe getting to 10-15% first 😛

I want to say I didn’t play as much the last 2 weeks but I don’t think it’s true, it’s just that nothing big happened. Our second raid day went well, we killed Hydaelyn very quickly and then farmed her a bit for a few weapons. No one was really sure why it didn’t work the raid day before. Maybe it was time for a break and we would have managed, maybe not.

Today I got my first crafter to 90, Culinarian, so I can meld my gear myself now. How I did this was logging in before work (it’s Tuesday, reset day), using one of the gazillion 18h +crafting XP manuals, did my 12 deliveries, went to work, logged in again, did the deliveries again and then started crafting some Collectables until I dinged. Then I proceeded to do a few more for some other DoH jobs, but no need to rush it anymore. Also not completely sure where and how much the XP manuals helped.

No great new DoW/DoM dings to report either, although Paladin is close to 90, DRK is close to 80 RDM is close to 60, and I’m slowly getting AST from 70 to 80 as well. Also focusing on BLM a little, so I can have all casters at 60 soon.

Also when I met some friends on the weekend who still play, I noticed I hadn’t really thought about or missed WoW in any form the last 2 weeks. I heard a bit about 9.2 but nothing awesome. Let’s see if I’m in the mood to go back raiding. At least our times would not interfere with FFXIV…