Final Fantasy XIV

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…

There hasn’t been anything eventful happening in the last 2 weeks but that’s kinda good I guess.

Managed to grab some loot from Tomestones and raids, getting Warrior to 570 and Bard to 569 before the patch, and of course now there’s better gear now, iLvl 580. I just filled my weekly quota of 450 new Tomestones (Astronomy) and have yet to decide what to do, but White Mage is also very close to 570 due to Aphorism Tomestones, so I will probably buy the rest of the stuff tomorrow.

We did raid in the static for the first time last Sunday, trying Hydaelin (is that EX already? Or just Hard? I am still confused). It kinda went ok (despite not succeeding after a while) but I was a little under the weather that day and felt bad and I guess I also played badly. Anyway, Sunday is our designated raid day now and we have a group of ~10 people with some fill-ins. Let’s see how this will pan out.

A major thing I did today after procrastinating for a while is redoing my hotbars for the roles. This means filling the same (or roughly equal) skills in the same buttons, something that has served me very well in WoW (and to a degree in FFXIV) over the years.

So for tanks (primarily WAR) for example this would be:

• 1 + 2 Single Target Combo
• 3 +4 AoE Combo
• 5 + 6 third step of the Single Target Combo
• ctrl-1 Sprint (*)
• ctrl-3 + ctrl-4 situational AoE/spenders/big or on longer cooldown
• ctrl-5 + ctrl-6 Self-Heals
• Q – Interrupt
• E – Stun
• Shift-E – ranged attack
• F – Charge (or gap closer as they call it)
• Shift-F – some sort of damage skill, for WAR a spender
• G, Shift-G, H, Shift-H, Ctrl-G – mitigations
• Tilde – Taunt/Provoke
• Shift-Tilde – Mount
• Y – Shirk
• X, Shift-X – big cooldowns
• C – some sort of special: Fell Cleave, Sheltron, The Blackest Night
• V, Shift-V – Beast Gauge builders
• B – Toggle Aggro/Enmity Skill

I have a Logitech G710+ now, so that’s 6 G keys to the left of the keyboard, sadly not 18 anymore like with the G10.

Today I didn’t really have a lot to do except enjoying my spare time, so I did some duty roulettes and managed to get enough Tomestones that I am iLvl 565 on Warrior now and am only missing the headgear on the Bard I think, I even got the weapon. And then I managed to ding 90 on White Mage by doing some Endwalker leveling dungeons, then finally not forgetting to do the role quest this time and then finishing off with 5 sidequests in Sharlayan.

So the plans for the immediate future are now to do the four raid wings for tokens every week, kit out the Warrior with that 580 gear, and get some 570 Tomestone pieces for White Mage, preferably the Accessories again first. What’s next to level? Not sure, maybe pushing Scholar a bit as getting Summoner at the same time is nice. I don’t see much reason to grab Dancer/Machinist right now. Paladin would be ok. Maybe it’s good to have one job leveling in Endwalker content.

So, apparently FFXIV and gearing up is VERY different from WoW, I published the last post at 1m, in the morning of the 22nd, then went to bed, slept around 7h, got up, did some stuff and then ran all my roulettes until reset at 4 in the afternoon. And then… I was nearly there. My left side equip was all 560s from the role quest and by having already saved up 200 odd tomestones and then just running the roulettes on one day I nearly had enough. Sadly the ring is unique, so had to resort to buying (more expensive boots) and then only 5 were missing, so we did a trial roulette after 4 and just like that I was iLvl 565.

Then we went into the 4 wings of Asphodelos as a party of 3 dps. The first boss was a pushover, the second one is my personal nemesis, number 3 needed one or two wipes and the fourth was also pretty easy. So that was my first FFXIV raid when it was new and at level.

So yes, as a mostly WoW player I am kind of surprised. First of all, it’s actually easy, but not Raid Finder easy. Stuff is actually telegraphed (or foreshadowed by animations/effects) well enough that you can go in without watching a video and succeed, if you have a general grasp of mechanics. I would be even happier if it was a little bit harder, like not oneshotting a boss in week one. But I guess that is what the harder difficulties are for. Overall people seem to do mechanics, it’s not like Raid Finder where there seem to be people every time who have never done a raid boss at all and stand in everything. And by that I mean it’s such a running gag already, when Castle Nathria was new I had to explain tactics every time in RF. But then again they seem to be pretty convoluted and not so learnable as in FFXIV. If you haven’t done the fight in a WoW raid and have not read up I think most people (including me) will just blankly stare at what to do. In FFXIV I feel I can learn this a lot better.

Anyway, got 4 tokens (Legs/Chest need 4, rest need 2 each) and I will save them up for the Warrior, as my iLvl 565 is fine and I’m already at 795 tomestones, which will be 4 tanking Accessories. Or I’ll do some math tonight and see if I should spend them on more Bard gear. I like how easy this gear is to grind out. A couple of hours for a set, not… dozens of hours like in WoW.

Apparently there wasn’t enough to post about. I’ve been playing a lot of FFXIV but without lofty goals. After finishing the MSQ and people usually asking for a DPS to come join I leveled Bard to 90, but apparently I didn’t go fast enough because they had reached 90 by the time I had caught up. Not a problem though, I would’ve done this anyway pretty soon – and I even finished the Role Quest. White Mage is also nearly 85 and right now I’m slowly grinding Tomestones for 570 gear. I’ve hardly touched the other jobs, just bringing the three melee to 50 after I had finished the Endwalker MSQ, that only took a few hours combined.

For some reason I had misunderstood my FC (and the others in the soon-to-be raid group) and I kinda missed that the normal raid launched last night and I could’ve been working on iLvl 565 to be able to join it on normal mode. Yeah, it was in the patch notes but I guess I misunderstood our schedule and was still waiting for people to speak up and catch up. Now they’ve surpassed me, but I guess I still can get some stuff done over the holidays.

Endwalker? It’s great, I actually liked it a lot more than Shadowbringers, especially the leveling dungeons.

While I wasn’t a huge fan of the Warrior gear, I kinda like the Bard one.

Apparently I was too busy playing so I didn’t write anything.

Back on Friday I actually managed to log in very late and do some stuff. And then there was the weekend and 2 days of vacation time and last night I dinged 90 on Warrior.

I had planned to leisurely finish the MSQ today, so I got into the queue about an hour before work was supposed to end, it jumped from 1150ish to 1250ish, then I got in and played for like 4h, then I got booted in the second to last dungeon (duty, not the final trial) after wiping on the first boss 2-3 times, getting a replacement healer at 13%. When I managed to get in again the queue was at 5000, so I logged out for the night. Too bad!

Impressions? It’s been pretty cool but I guess I’m not a huge fan of playing for speed. I was #2 in our guild to reach 90 and maybe I’ll be #2 for the MSQ, but it only happened because of the 4 days I had time. I didn’t skip reading a single quest or cut scene and I tanked all duties, so no dungeon finder queue. Time well spent, but in no particular need to rush to max level in a game soon. But it was fun, but parts of it were very weird. Pretty cool to have it without spoilers, I like this so much more than in WoW.

Also I totally forgot to take note how many hours it took and I absolutely did idle a few hours somewhere, dutifully moving every 5-10min because of the fear of not being able to log in again. Showers, cooking, food, everything timed in 10 minute bursts. I’ll be glad if that is over.

Probably not happening.

Due to work and some errands I forgot to switch on my PC in my lunch break and start patching, so this is how it looked at 7 pm my time:

And now, nearly an hour later:

So even though I technically could still start playing at midnight, the queue will probably still be there.
I’m keeping an eye on this but I don’t have high hopes.

Of course it’s my own fault to a degree, but for WoW… I’m pretty sure I could download the expansion with 5-6 MB/s or whatever my connection is able to stomach. Guess there’s some potential to improve for Square Enix. (I have a 100 mbit/s line from Germany’s biggest ISP).