I spent the last weekend (well, two weekends ago as this is getting posted) doing pretty much nothing but crafting and a deep dungeon run in Final Fantasy 14. It might have taken eleven intense months, but I think I’ve finally gotten tired of crafting. I’ve been making gear for people and the amount of mind-numbing macro-clicking involved in it is driving me more and more rapidly insane. I have done nothing but lose myself in crafting, the grind for various currencies, and trying to get new gear for the last month or so and it is burning me out like nothing else has. I’m not at risk of no longer wanting to play the game or anything like that, but it made me kind of glad that I had to take a week off for holiday travel. I don’t know that I’m going to be changing much in the next couple weeks as we run up to the release of the next patch, but I’m really hoping I can at least take a break from crafting a few hundred materials and gear pieces every week. I mean, I’ve still got a lot of stuff to do as I’m writing this two weeks before it gets posted: crafting and gathering food to make, a couple gear sets to wrap-up, one more set of gear to entirely produce, limited currencies to earn, and so much questing to do in order to be fully caught up for the start of the whatever comes with the next major patch, but I hope I can get at least another week away from all that before the update drops so I can do other stuff like level other jobs and work on finding some roleplaying opportunities or do literally anything other than constantly grind away at preparations for whatever the next patch is going to require of me to make the next gear sets.
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Teamwork, Bonding, And Growing Frustration
Yesterday, while talking about the final steps of my Final Fantasy 14 crafting project in our discord, I joked about a bit of bad luck on my part traumatizing another player and myself. You see, the final step of making my top-notch crafting and gathering gear in Final Fantasy 14 was putting little stat-boosting things called “materia” into the gear. Most gear has one or two slots that you can place materia in without a problem, but it is also frequently possible to add more materia to a piece of gear via a process called “Advanced Melding,” which is how you wind up with gear that is “pentamelded” (meaning it has five materia melded into it, which is the absolute cap on melding). The reason most people don’t do it is because there is a decreasing chance of success with every subsequent Advanced meld, with the 4th advanced meld having only a five percent success rate, and that innocent little five percent number only means that you have a low chance of success, not that it will happen five out of one hundred times. Everyone who has done pentamelding has a horror story of burning up a huge chunk of materia in an instant (you can check a box to make the game just keep trying until it succeeds so you don’t have to click through the activity so many times) as your luck turns bad and you go from spending one to twenty on an attempt to spending over a hundred. Which almost always means that a significant amount of money also just vanished into smoke. Which is why, when I burned through 1,260,000 gil (FF14’s in-game currency), my friend (who was crafting other stuff next to me and had helped me acquire all the materia) and I simply froze and stared at the chat window’s little read-out. It was so much. Fully a third of what I’d bought in that round and I burned through it in an instant.
Continue readingIntrinsic Motivation Doesn’t Make Me Immune To External Discouragement
After wrapping up everything but the finishing touches on my Final Fantasy 14 gear project, I posted in my Free Company’s discord that I was planning to make myself new gear right after the patch drops with all my fancy new gathering and crafting gear. I wanted to know if anyone else was interested in participating in a fun little bleeding-edge gear crafting activity. So far, I’ve gotten one bite and a lot of silence (as I’ve mentioned before, I think most of the bleeding-edge players in my group have the in-game currency to just buy whatever they want, so they will just wait until the prices drop a little bit and buy it OR just accumulate it slowly by doing the raids and whatnot), but the bite I did get has been very interested in making this happen. It’s a player I kinda get along with and have been doing more and more with as I shift into endgame content, but he’s very combat-focused and a bit less crafting-focused. He is absolutely doing a bunch of crafting still, but he hasn’t even gotten all of his jobs to level 100 yet, so there is likely no way that he’d be ready in time given how much combat stuff he does every single day (it’s exhausting even thinking about trying to keep up with him!). That said, all of his gathering skills are at level 100 and he recently requested that I help him get somemid-tier gear for his level 100 classes. That took a little time (not much, given that I’ve done it already and have higher stats than when I did it myself), but I quickly realized that I should just get him up to the current top-tier of gathering gear. It’s a bit more work on my part, but less now that I’m using all top-tier gear and it’ll be a huge help to have someone gathering the new materials alongside me. He’ll probably still do mostly the combat stuff and I’ll do most of the gathering and crafting stuff, but it’s good to have someone ready to help out.
Continue readingSlowly Turning My Final Fantasy 14 Project Planning Towards The Next Patch
While I still have materials to process (a couple hundred, which feels like just so much given that it’s maybe three times as much material needed for my last craft which involved five full sets of gear and this is just two), I’ve hit the point in my Final Fantasy 14 crafting and gathering projects where all that’s left is to hit macros. Currently, it takes about half an hour to do twenty-four of these long-crafting macros, so I’m trying to pace myself and do about an hour of them a day around everything else I’ve got going on. If I can do that every day this week, I should have everything done this weekend in time for… well, in time for nothing, really. It’s not like I need a lot of these materials around. Most of them only get used for this crafting and gathering gear and whatever gear drops in the next expansion will almost certainly use entirely different materials. As far as I can tell from looking at past expansions, the final set in an expansion’s patches (which is what this set will be for the latest expansion) uses a mix of brand new materials and older high-level-but-not-starred materials. I have no idea if that will remain true for this expansion, so I don’t know what to do but maybe keep stockpiling things and hope that I can flip the materials later if they prove unnecessary. I don’t know if I’ll be able, though, since the need for them will be almost entirely gone once new gear exists. I mean, the stuff used in the crafting and gathering sets I’m making will probably still sell given that there will continue to be people like me who are showing up a bit late to the party but still want to get the full experience, but I have no idea about any of that older stuff. It’ll be a gamble.
Continue readingAll My Crafting Work In Final Fantasy 14 Has Paid Off
After a solid seven evenings and some partial days, I made the set of gear I needed for my upcoming Current Content Raid event in Final Fantasy 14. Rather than buy it all, I set out to do the work required to learn how to craft it all, get all my crafting classes leveled up, get my crafting and gathering jobs geared up twice, and ultimately get myself into a position where I could craft any released recipe with the right stack of buffs and ability combos. It was a lot of work, if I’m being quite honest, but that’s part of why I did it: to distract myself from my own life and all it’s problems that require me to wait an unknown amount of time for something else to happen. I started on a Monday, with the idea of doing it at all and a brief glance into what that would entail, which convinced me it could be done. The following night, I dug into it more deeply and almost convinced myself that it couldn’t be done. Since I was looking to feel at least a little overwhelmed to combat my rising anxiety, I dug in, made lists, did research, polled my FC full of experienced crafters, and came up with a game plan. From there, I spent the next few days leveling up my crafting jobs so I could earn the resources required to get better gear for my crafting and gathering jobs, doing even more crafting and gathering to get the currency necessary to unlock the ability to gather the resources I needed for more gear, and gathering all of these new resources so that, finally, last night, I could spend some time processing the materials into their crafted versions and then put together a full set of gear for the healer job I’ll be performing a few days from now (or a few days ago as this gets posted). This is almost all I’ve done over these last few days, with some time carved out for work and sleep and actually playing the game, but I hesitate to even guess at the number of hours I spent on it, even after reducing them as much as possible by dropping a total of almost sixteen million gil (the main in-game currency) over that same period (not all of it was on this project mind you, but that was about twenty-three percent of my total gil in what felt like such a short time and I wasn’t tracking my expenses closely enough to figure out which was tied to what).
Continue readingSetting Up A Serious Grind In Final Fantasy 14 To Distract Myself From My Life
I’m back in the saddle with Final Fantasy 14! Back to the lowkey socialization, the focused gaming, the attention-consuming escapism, and free of the need to think about my life and how much it sucks to be me this past week and a half while dealing with biological family problems (and how much it will continue to suck to be me while I’m still embroiled in this stuff for however long it takes). After my time away, I’ve come back at a bit of a loss for what to do next! There’s gear to accumulate, levels to gain, quests to do, and so much more, all of which is very familiar! This is how most patches usually start, with a huge number of quests, the ability to get new, better gear, and at least some confusion on my part about which of the many options I should start with. This time, though, the path is more muddled than ever. Instead of being able to use the resource I’ve been accumulating the whole time, “Tomestones of Poetics” to unlock new gear that’s pretty much the best stuff you can get at that point, I actually have to dig into the mud that is the various other Tomestones and resources from raids to figure out what’s the best gear for me to get right now, so I can do the current content in order to get better gear to prepare me for the harder current content while also getting myself into a position to be able to make or otherwise acquire the next set of gear that will come out with the next patch whenever that happens. It’s a lot and it’s taken me a couple days to figure out, but I think I’ve got it thanks to some incidental advice from the leader of my FC and my own organized nature.
Continue readingTaking A Break From Not Playing Final Fantasy 14 To Enjoy TEA Time
After barely playing Final Fantasy for a week (especially if you exclude the time I spent making alternate characters), I returned to it last night for a few weekly tasks and my weekly Ultimate Raid event. Our group had advanced through the first portion of The Epic of Alexander well enough that we started hitting the second portion, known as Limit Cut, that requires a huge amount of coordination and practice to execute well and doing it poorly will quickly get everyone killed. Last week, when we couldn’t do much practice due to weird lag and connectivity issues between literally everyone and the game’s servers, we turned instead to a simulator that lets you run mechanics with a group of other players in order to get the coordination down without having to fight your way through the whole thing every single time. That way, if you messed it up, it wouldn’t hurt as much to have to re-do it. We spent a bunch of time practicing it last week (as of writing this) and were still struggling to get through the mechanic since it requires a decent amount of situational aware, perfect execution, and consideration of where your allies are placed in relation to yourself. Now, the simulator isn’t a perfect recreation since some parts of the mechanic didn’t function properly and not accounting for the extra steps you needed to take could get you killed in the simulator while it wouldn’t hurt you at all in the real thing, so there was a little bit lost in translation when we finally made the jump from the simulator to the real thing yesterday (as of writing this), but we managed to get through the real thing much more easily than we did in the simulator.
Continue readingHitting Level 100 In Final Fantasy 14
After putting it off for about two months, I finally got my first job to Level 100 (the current level cap) in Final Fantasy 14. I also got three more to level 100 in rapid succession (one each day since then) [for a total of seven by the time I’m editing this the day before it gets posted], as I’ve shifted gears back to focusing on progressing the Main Scenario Quests of Dawntrail and needed to get one of each of the job types to level 100 for the Role Quests. With all that done, I can now focus entirely on the MSQ and getting as far as I can in whatever play time I’ve got most days. Everything else, for at least the next four evenings after I write this, will sit on hold [it did not, in fact, sit on hold, and I wound up doing a lot of side work] as I try my hand at getting through the main portion of Dawntrail in time for the new Deep Dungeon coming out the day before this gets posted (the day after this gets posted is the day there’s a group of people in my Free Company getting together to do said dungeon [but I will not be joining them because I’m taking a break]). I’m not going to skimp on sleep or avoid doing my weekly chores and whatnot around my apartment (nor am I going to cancel my D&D session for this reason, but it IS looking like I’ll be cancelling it for other reasons), but I did clear as much of my weekend as I could because I’m getting the good ol’ double-vax Flu-And-COVID combo on Friday. I am giving myself the space to crash super hard if I need it, but I have typically dealt with the double-shot combo without too much trouble in the past, so I’m hoping to see how much Dawntrail I can get through.
Continue readingTEA Time In Final Fantasy 14
After finally clearing the Alexander 8: Savage (aka A8S) raid, the core of our Difficult Content group decided that we’re gonna go into Ultimates now. Specifically The Epic of Alexander (TEA) as chosen by a poll. We’ve proven our abilities on A8S and now we’re ready for the big time. We recruited two other experienced players to replace the two of our A8S group that weren’t interested in doing Savages, and spent a hectic weekend preparing for our first session as what I thought was a planning session for sometime in the more distant future shoved everything else aside in order to start on the one day everyone had available. Which means, as of writing this, our group is down to one weekly “Content Rewind” session since the Monday one was displaced by Ultimate practice and we’ve had our first session. Things went pretty well, as far as Ultimates go. We’re making slow progress as we adjust to the new level of demands placed on most of us, each time getting a little bit further or messing up on something new, but it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Probably because I’d doing DPS for this group rather than the healing I was doing in the other group, but it’s like any other raid at the end of the day: you study the mechanics, work on getting your part down, and slowly move forward as the group comes together. I do miss the added complexity of healing on top of all that–having a challenge to throw myself into that’s constantly fluctuating and will likely never become rote–but there were people in our group who don’t have the versatility of skillset that I do, so I knew from pretty early on that I wasn’t going to get the chance to heal.
Continue readingFinally Digging Into Side Content In Final Fantasy 14
One of the quirks of essentially chugging Final Fantasy 14 is that there is a huge amount of the game that I just don’t understand, and perhaps even more that I don’t even know about. The focus on crafting, making money, story progression, and specific activities means that I’ve largely ignored significant portions of the game that showed up to fill in the gaps between major expansions. Sure, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on some of the side activities, like my Island Sanctuary and the Ishgardian reconstruction crafting activities, but I’ve mostly avoided the special activities of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. I dipped my toes into the first two, but never really spent the time to figure out why I would want to do any of them in the first place. I’ve been told the Cosmic Exploration stuff from Endwalker is fun and a great way to get some crafting experience, but I’ve enjoyed my current method of doing projects so I’m not sure I’d enjoy a new side activity, especially now that I’m finally moving forward in Dawntrail. The other two areas, though, are their own beasts. The Eureka exploration from Stormblood is a pretty significant time sink, even when you’ve got people to help speed up the process, and the Bozjan Southern Front in Shadowbringers has some really difficult barriers to cross in order to progress and no amount of bringing in my level 70 jobs to level them up will make that go any faster. Still, now that my Free Company (the FF14 equivalent of player guilds) is putting in some focused effort to completeing these activities, I’ve begun spending my thursdays desperately trying to stay alive as we all fight endless swarms of enemies to get the XP we need to level up the “elemental” level thing specific to the Eurekan exploration zone. It’s not the most fun, but it’s a refreshingly straight-foward activity so far and having a large group of other FC members to play with is enough fun for me.
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