Aywren Sojourner: Gaming and Geek Life

Some days, the stars all align and everything falls into place in a game you’re playing. Yesterday was such a day for me (for the most part).

To begin with, the title that I’d worked to earn during the season of the Ishgard restoration finally came in the mail. So now, my main has her crafting title, which I’m pretty happy about. I know that it’s not all that hard to earn that title, but overall, I jumped into that season with very little earned from last season, and managed to catch up on it all.

Tad Things

The next achievements were on my RP Alt, Tad. I leveled him to 70 after picking up a story jump to Shadowbringers, and have decided to focus on getting him through the expansion – yet another character through!

One of the things I wanted for him was a set of Late Allagan Aiming glamour, mostly because it fit his RP/story aesthetics. This set can only be purchased through Wolf Marks which can only be earned through PvP. So, for the past week or so, I’ve been diving into the world of Frontline Roulette.

I discovered that this was an excellent way to finish leveling his Bard, which I’d left dangling at about level 43. I needed to get to 50 so that I could level his retainer to 50. His retainer is locked in at the same level as his Bard, but Tad mains Machinist. The only way to use the switch jobs scroll on his retainer is to level one of the retainer’s jobs to 50 first.

Not only did I get Tad’s Bard to 50 via PvP, but last night I finished up the entire glamour set! I needed exactly 2,000 Wolf Marks to get the last piece yesterday. This was a possibility, but only if my team won the match. Lo and behold, my team won the match!

No only that, but last night I hit level 80 on Tad’s Machinist. He’s not done with the MSQ yet, but between beast tribes, Frontlines and just running quests/Trusts, I knew he was leveling fast.

I took some time out yesterday to gather all the materials needed to craft him a full set of Neo Ishgardian Aiming gear on my main. This set is not top gear for this patch, but is still relevant enough to get you the ilvl needed to take on everything through 5.3. So, he’s basically good to go gear-wise for progress-making.

If all goes well, I may be able to finish up most of base-game Shadowbringers MSQ for him pretty soon. I know it wasn’t on my monthly goals list to level Tad in particular, but that’s just how it fell.

More Glamour – Amon

My struggle with getting drops for Amon in Puppets Bunker is real. While my main lucked out and got the casting top drop the very first run, Amon has failed to win a roll on the Aiming or Casting top at least 4 times that I can think of.

Last week, I rolled on the last piece he needed for the Aiming set aside from the chest – these drops are also upgrades in gear for him. So it’s not just glamour I’m shooting for.

Having the rest of the set meant that I’d no longer have to worry about rolling and winning on something only to see the chest drop later in the raid (happens all the time). But now, the trick was to actually see the chest drop and to not lose out to another player. This has been tough to do since it seems as if a LOT of people are playing ranged DPS in this raid.

Last night was a doozy of a run (I have a Tales from the Duty Finder post in the works for it), but I was excited to see that I was the only ranged DPS in my group for the first time ever. That didn’t promise that the chest would actually drop, though.

But it did! And of course, rolling Need against no one else, I roll a 97. Where was that 97 so many weeks ago (when I rolled 9 instead)?

Anyhow, I got my aiming chest and Syn’s alt got her healing chest, too. All in the same drop!

I still have plans to work on the casting set for Amon – both for glamour and gear purposes. But I am so, so happy to finally see my luck turn around this week. I was getting pretty discouraged for a while there – even ran this thing 5 times in one week for a single drop a few weeks back. And for me, that’s pretty significant.

I need to do a post about the Bunker and my impressions of it, eventually. But that, and the story of last night’s run, will have to be for another time!

So the second season of the Ishgard Restoration has come to a close. While it was pretty fun to take part in a mass of gatherers and crafters bopping around the Diadem, I feel like I’ve seen my share of all of that for now. The season is just long enough to get stuff done but not over-staying its welcome.

In the end, I ranked 29 in my chosen crafting job and 52 as miner.

I did put some time into this project every day, though the last few days have been a little lighter than others. I’m also content that I’ve earned or bought every scrip reward that I wanted to pick up. The exception is some of the housing stuff – I don’t really have a need for Ishgard-themed furniture – and I still did not decide whether I wanted the Ufiti Horn bad enough to fork over that many scrips. So that’s the last item to work toward if I decide I want to.

However, I have a couple other characters whom I’d rather pick things up for instead. So if I dive back into Diadem, it will likely only be to work on things for them on down the line.

I also was surprised to earn the achievement that gave me the Malone minion – apparently I broke 50K points on my miner! As you can see above, I’m nowhere near that on my crafter, but I was quite happy to take this little fellow home.

With this season over and done with, I’m on to other projects now… namely earning some Late Allagan Glamour for one of my alts through PVP roulettes. There’s always something new to work on, I promise.

See a really nice guide to Diadem 5.3.1 here!

It’s odd to talk about “seasons” when it comes to crafting and gathering, but somehow FFXIV does things like this. The newest season launched on Tuesday, including a leaderboard and everything!

Last season, I just putzed around in the Diadem for most of the time, using it as a way to level my last crafters on my RP alt. I knew that the leaderboard was a thing, but really I was there for the fluff rewards and leveling. So when I earned a title from being in the top 100 of somthing (didn’t even check), I was pretty surprised!

Because I spent most of my time leveling on other characters, my main got the shaft last time around. She got a few things that were easy to get like the /bread emote, the blue umbrella and the dhalmel mount. But other than that, by the time I got around to thinking about doing something on her, I was already tired out from my other characters.

This time around is different. I’ve got a checklist of items I want to earn for her – both from the past and the new release. I’m also making an effort to rank in the top 100 to earn her the title, too. So far, that’s going really well!

I even was able to participate in one of the FATEs last night – something I haven’t been able to do in a while. That came totally by accident. I just zoned into the Firmament to make my turn-ins before bedtime and saw a mass of people there. That told me the FATE was coming soon, and sure enough, it was about to spawn in 5 mins, so I stuck around.

It mostly entailed breaking down rocks and carrying crates of stone to waiting wagons. There were so many people participating, it was hilarious to watch as they appeared and disappeared as the system struggled to render that many people. It was especially funny to watch all the bobbing boxes as you rushed the crates above your head towards the waiting wagons.

So far, I’ve been able to earn both the Albino Karakul (sheep) and the new Megalotragus mounts on my main. Those are the big ticket items (I’m still on the fence about the Ufiti mount though).

I’ve also earned the /highfive and /read emotes, with just two more emotes left to earn. I need both sets of Craftsman’s outfits, as well as two of the three hairstyles. So, I still have a LOT to work on.

In the meantime, Kupo of Fortune has been absolutely rigged this time around. Out of all the scratch tickets I’ve gone through, I’ve only managed to win the crown once – and that was for a Morpho minion (which I didn’t have, so that was good). I don’t remember having this much trouble at all last season. I really feel like these tickets got nerfed… or my luck has just been that awful. Either way.

I gave up and finally just bought the Weatherproof Gaelicat from the marketboard since that’s the main minion I really wanted. I’ve have had ZERO luck in getting it and very low luck in even getting scratch cards that HAVE a crown on it to start with. I do want the new outfit coffer for Amon, but I’m not willing to pony up 700K for it. I’ll wait to see if it comes down in price or if I manage to get lucky enough to win it.

Aside from that, I foresee a weekend of gathering and crafting ahead of me!

Over the long holiday weekend, I finally managed to finish one of the 2020 gaming goals that I set at the beginning of this year: to decorate my house in FFXIV. Though I’ve owned this house for a while, I’ve struggled to find a theme for it when it came to decoration. That’s finally changed — I now present the Sojourn Curiosity Shoppe on the Mateus server!

Part of this came from sitting down and trying to work through my main character’s story and background. This has been a struggle for me since it’s kinda hard to create a RP profile for a character that shares the same name as I use for my everyday net handle.

Finally, I did manage to get a very basic profile created on my Tumblr. And from that, this new housing project concept began to fall in place.

I’d previously had the idea to create some kind of museum or art gallery from my house. But something about it felt really dry and uninteresting. When I stumbled upon the idea of creating a curiosity shop — which is essentually the same idea, just with a whimsical twist — I jumped at the chance.

After playing this character for 7 years, I have all kinds of junk in my housing inventory. Now I could put it all to good use in a way that’s both in-character and hopefully interesting to others!

I set things up as displays and tried to keep items themed similarly within each section. There’s stuff for Allag, there’s stuff for the Steppes, there’s Hingan stuff, there’s void stuff, there’s even a corner for all my Gold Saucer knick-knacks.

There’s dhalmel heads and beaver burgers. Bomb cauldrons and void caskets. Really, anything that I could think of that might fit, and even things that didn’t, I found some place for it to go.

I also left just enough slots open to have some wiggle room for decorating during holidays, too. I’m sure I’ll end up adding more to it here and there – especially the bottom floor which feels like there’s still a few areas that need something more.

But for now, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. And I should be… I dug in my pockets deep to afford this!

Anyone on Crystal is welcome to visit and sign the guest book!

Note: There will be spoilers as I feel enough time has passed to discuss story.

Last night I finished my second playthrough of the 5.3 MSQ. For some reason, we chose to run our RP characters through first, and I’ve been putting off finishing up on my main for a while. Mostly because that story trial battle is… just as painful as I remembered it from the first week, honestly.

Overall, Patch 5.3 has been a great one with lots of fantastic QoL (flying in ARR zones!) and fun things for everyone to do (nice crafting/gathering rewards). I can’t complain about pretty much anything that the patch brought to FFXIV.

Storywise, 5.3 did everything to bring Shadowbringers to a nice clean conclusion and put a pretty little bow on it. In this time of IRL struggles, I get the sense that the devs may have felt the need to offer players something fairly uplifting in terms of tying up all the loose ends. And they did that well enough.

While I don’t think there was anything bad about it, there was also not all that much that gripped me like the original 5.0 storyline. There were a lot of nice touches and interesting pieces of lore – like the confirmation of your character representing the Azem, the 14th. And Emet creating a nice little stone just for you – that was endearing!

I think what troubled me was Elidibus, and how I guess we were supposed to see him as a sympathetic bad guy. I just don’t think we had enough time with him to do this. While he was a tragic figure, it was hard to connect with his struggles the way that I did Emet. Part of that was just his personality, I think. Maybe with a bit more time I would have warmed up to him.

I think it didn’t help that he was wearing Ardbert’s body for the time that we did get to know him. I know that was part of his thing — he took the identity and used the concept of the “Warrior of Light” to his own ends. He even became the avatar of the Warrior of Light for his battle.

I know that was intended to be the “neat twist” — the concept that the Warrior of Light became your enemy in the end. And that Warriors of Light from other shards were used to fight you… especially after the game had brought it home for so long that your character was the Warrior of Light.

But it was a tad disappointing to think that even the concept of what was good and right in these worlds were still influenced and somewhat manufactured by the Ascians. Not even the concept of Warrior of Light was safe from their meddling. Or maybe that’s the point.

Maybe it was intended for your character to step beyond the Warrior of Light and accept this Azem concept instead. I dunno. I’m sure that someone else out there has these concepts down a lot better than I do. I’ll just say there was a lot of brow-furrowing going on during all this for me.

The next order of topics – the one that I might get roasted in the fire of fandom – is just how easy the fan-favorite G’raha Tia got off in all of this. Absolutely every good he could have ever wanted was given to him in the end, and there was a lot of glossing over in terms of how it would leave the folks in the Crystarium – Oh, they’ll be finnnnnne!

I’ll just state my opinion that the Exarch/G’raha were both alright in terms of character, but nothing that special in the long run. The writers played the endearing hero-worship card using a cute character (similar to Haurchefaunt), and once again the ship-starved fandom ate it up.

Sorry folks. If anything, I’m fairly burned out on the Exarch/G’raha simply due to how much the greater fandom fawns and dotes all over him. He’s not a bad character, and plays an interesting part in the plot. But he’s not super dynamic, or gripping (to me), and obviously he’s put there to allow those who want the fan service to make it for themselves.

So yeah. Fan favorite gets off easy. I don’t mind that he gets a good ending, but boy did they go over the top to please Exarch/G’raha fans by giving him an almost absolutely perfect ending with very little consequence. This doesn’t bode well for his future character development.

For example – let’s look at Y’shtola. When she returned to the party in Heavensward, she was given a specific burden to bear and a challenge to overcome. This is part of her current and future development and something she still hasn’t found an answer to. There was a balance of a happy story (friend returned) but there were still consequences – and that is interesting!

G’raha got none of this that I can see so far. Maybe he will in the future, who knows. But again, with all that’s going on IRL, I can’t blame the writers for wanting to make folks happy. This is just me being a grouchy writer in my old age. XD

As for the cliffhanger at the end of the patch… we have another Ascian (Fandaniel) to deal with. Again. Though this one isn’t so hot on serving Zodiark, apparently.

And this one has, again, taken over a body of someone who died in a previous expansion (Asahi of all people). I know this is their thing, but… I dunno. I’m getting a little worn thin with having to readjust my mindset that this character’s body is not who that character used to be because now they’re an Ascian.

The one thing I liked about Emet was that he got his own model, and therefore, had his own character that was unassociated with any other character. But yeah, minor grouch on that.

Whereas Emet seemed rather strange and dramatic upon his entrance to the story, Fandaniel just seems over the top insane. Toss him in with a brooding Zenos and you know that there’s going to be trouble. Even if Zenos is not amused.

I’m not fully sure where this is leading (maybe the Empire expansion people have been hoping for) but it won’t be boring, that’s for sure. A little strange and eccentric? Probably.

We’ll just have to see!

Initially, I was going to post about being excited that a weekly crafting/gathering turn-in questline rewarded a really cool mount. It’s nice to see crafters/gatherers getting cool rewards!

Previously, the weekly deliveries mostly gave rewards in the form of scrips and experience, culminating in allowing you to dress up the NPC you were delivering items to. Let me note that while this is a neat little feature, it does require both the glamour crystal and the item of glamour in your inventory to dress up the NPC. Therefore, I’ve never bothered with it.

Getting an actual mount… now there’s a nice and unexpected reward! And while this is limited to level 70+ crafters and gatherers, really, it’s not just a reward for the delivery quests. It’s more a reward for having invested time into the entire Ishgard Restoration as a whole.

The quests that appear in the Firmament, and rebuilding the area for the Ishgardian lower class citizens, are an evolution and continuation of the final chapters of the end of the Dragonsong war.

Sure, we got the overarching storyline closure back during patch 3.whatever years ago. But there’s still a lot of unanswered questions dangling out there.

Okay, so dragons and people aren’t at war anymore. But how do they find a common ground? Or do they?

What about the people left with almost nothing in the ruins of a city besieged by the dragons? Now that the war is over, how is Ishgard picking up the pieces?

Many years later, some of these topics are touched upon in the quests you’ll find in the Firmament. If you have any interest in seeing the development of Ishgard’s story, I highly suggest checking into them.

Two major quest lines feature a little dragonling named Ehll Tou. Her curiosity for the life of people in the city drives her to come and live in the Firmament. There, she becomes the a student of crafting/gathering and desires to bring this knowledge back to her peers in a way that might encourage them to make connections with the people of Ishgard, too.

I won’t say any more about the story, other than it was an enjoyable surprise. Enough time has passed since Heavensward that it’s believable to see this exchange of knowledge and culture between people and dragons. I felt it was done well.

The fact that it ends with the gift of a dragon friend (mount) and the title “A Dragon’s Best Friend” is just icing on the cake. In the middle of the big epic that was the end of Shadowbringers in 5.3, I’m so happy that small tales like this were told and experienced.

It’s the end of another month, so let’s see how the goals turned out this time around! While I didn’t hit everything on my list, I am pretty happy with what I achieved this month.

• Finish leveling Samurai and do job quest ✓
• Level Dragoon via Beast Tribes ✓
• Ishgard Restoration Quests ✓
• Amon – Crafter Relics ✓
• Amon – Dancer Quests ✓
• Amon – Hildibrand ✓
• Tad – Level to 70 via Beast Tribes & Roulettes ✓
• Ben – Level via Beast Tribes & Roulettes ✓
• Zuri – Progress through Stormblood 

I’m pleased to say that I finished leveling Sam on my main and am working on Dragoon currently. I should finish up Dragoon shortly and start on Ninja next!

I also completed all of the Restoration quests on my two crafters, which was needed to unlock the new weekly turn-ins! So that was worth it.

I completely finished leveling Tad to 70, and Ben is sitting at level 67 right now. So they’re both about ready to start Shadowbringers! Zuri, however, kinda got lost in all of this. It’s really hard to pick up Stormblood again for whatever reasons, but I do want to power her through – maybe next month.

Amon had all kinds of progress (finally). I realized I was a lot further behind on Dancer quests than I knew, but got all those finished. I also finally finished the last Hildibrand quest and got him the Mambo.

Over this weekend, I made a huge effort to complete all of his crafting relics as well. That was about 4-5 tools and hours worth of time. I eventually had to break down and just make macros in the end. But I got it all done!

I also upgraded Amon’s crafting gear – which was an unplanned fluke. But hopefully I can make back some of the gil I spent on upgrading it all through a few timely crafts? We’ll see!

Overall, it was a good month for goals! Now I’m going to have to figure out what exactly I’m working on next month!

-Helpful spreadsheet for farming YoKai weapons here!-

Ironically, just about a month ago, I was lamenting the fact that my RP character, Amon, did not have the Whisper mount from the YoKai Watch event. Of my 8 characters on Mateus, there were only three who had not existed during the time the event rolled around for a second time.

Well, imagine my surprise when an updated version of this event was announced! Not only does this event add four new minions and weapons, but it’s heavily nerfed the original event.

To give you an example, the cost of Minions are:

• 1 Medal for the first minion
• 3 Medals for each minion thereafter

It takes getting gold on 48 FATEs while wearing the YoKai watch item to do this.

As for weapons, the costs are:

• 5 Legendary Medals for the first weapon
• 10 Legendary Medals for the each thereafter

I pulled this chart from the old YoKai Watch event spreadsheet. This is what it was for previous versions of this event:

Add to that the fact that Legendary Medals feel like they drop a lot more quickly, and it’s a much more accessible version of this event by far.

The opening day of the event, I decided to take Amon out to hunt the weapons that I felt would be the hardest to get after the FATE rush died down. The newest weapons require you to do FATES in Heavensward and Stormblood areas, so that’s what I did.

It took me roughly 4 hours to complete these weapons and I had way more than enough Medals for all the minions by the time I was done.

I spent the next two nights on my other two characters who did not have the Whisper mount, mostly in Western La Noscea. Hanging around the Sahagin area netted a pretty constant trickle of FATEs. I didn’t even bother with lower level FATEs because those were still dying too fast to the throng.

It takes somewhere around two hours of farming to get all 48 Medals needed for all of the minions. So I knocked that out on the other two characters, one each night.

At this point, I’m going back on the rest of my characters to at least get the additional new minions. This requires 12 FATEs, and really takes no time at all. It’s just mustering up the motivation to do yet more FATEs. XD

There is a new mount you can get if you end up collecting all of the weapons. You can also still get the second Whisper mount for collecting the first 13. I’m not sure if I’m going to go after those or not. I might. I have until patch 5.4 to do it if I do!

It feels like ever since 5.3 dropped, it’s been one event after another in FFXIV. And I’m late to writing about all of them.

As of this post, Moonfire Faire has a few days left to it before it winds down and The Rising begins. So there’s still some time to grab the rewards if you haven’t done the quests yet!

Speaking of rewards, not only do we get a nice dance emote, but also a fully dye-able summer outfit and outside housing decoration as well! It’s not often we get so many things during the same event, and all of this is easy to get.

There’s no jump puzzles or obstacle courses like there has been the past two years. When I pointed out I was surprised these didn’t return, an in-game friend noted that flying in ARR zones would make the jump puzzle trivial.

I face-palmed when I realized. I hadn’t even thought about that.

Instead, we get an event FATE, but it has nothing to do with battle. No, in fact, all you do is dance. This time around, a giant shark is threatening the fun of the Faire, and the bombards are to the rescue!

You guide the bombard based on the type of dance move you perform – one powers it up and another keeps it healed when the shark attacks it. Basically, you just stay out of the red circles and dance.

The FATE appears to spawn pretty quickly, and I’ve almost always seen people out there doing it. You need to fully complete it twice to get all the tokens needed for the full outfit and will have enough left over to pick up the lawn decoration if you get gold both times.

Of course, since more than one new dance was released (we also got the Bee’s Knees with 5.3), that lead to a number of dance-offs in the early days of the Faire.

At night, the summer fireworks have returned, and will stick around until the end of The Rising, which is the anniversary event that starts the very day after the Moonfire Faire ends.

That’s not even mentioning the YoKai event that started last week. I’ll talk about that in another post!