Aywren Sojourner: Gaming and Geek Life

Over this past weekend, my crafting goals for my RP alt have been met for the month, though I continue to work on leveling crafting every day. On top of that, I got the itch to finally spend some time redecorating the FC house yard this weekend. This was partially due to the new treehouse yard item and the fact that I’ve been holding on to a garden pond that my retainers brought me not long back.

The treehouse is a drop from something-something-new-Eureka-zone. I still haven’t done much in the way of Eureka, so when I heard that, I marked the item off as something I’d probably never see… or something that would be terribly overpriced on the marketboard.

I was shocked when I saw that it was exceptionally cheap (under 300K each), and I snagged two of them – one for my personal house and one for our FC house.

That was enough to get me on a decorating kick, so I jumped right into it. I’ve wanted a Shishi-Odoshi for our yard for a while, but last time I checked on prices, they were beyond what I was willing to pay. Seems like a lot of housing stuff was a good deal cheaper this weekend, so I went on a buying spree.

I didn’t buy everything, though. For one, I finally focused on using the HoH crafting drop I got to craft the Odder Otter Bench I wanted. It has cute little lanterns that light up at night and fits the rest of the Otter House design well.

I posted about the changes to our house (which has an open RP tag on it, indicating folks are welcome to visit and interact) on Tumblr, and we had a fun little group show up for most of Saturday. We cleared some content (World of Darkness and some unsynced dungeons) and just generally hung out for a while.

I also spent some time working on redecorating Amon’s Apartment — no pics of this yet. Maybe next post! I’m very close to being somewhat done there (these are always a work in progress), and have been adding odds and ends to my alt rooms in the FC house as well.

In the meantime, here’s some more pics of our FC house yard!

I meant to write about this earlier in the week, but there’s been a lot going on IRL, so it got pushed back. This past weekend was one of accomplishing a lot and getting lucky on rolls. As you can see in the picture above, I won the roll for the Bard chest piece from the Monastery and the OMG minion from Alphascape 4.

However, I decided to push ahead with upgrading to the Scavian ilvl 400 chest for both my Main and RP Alt. So the chest drop above became part of a glamour plate. I spent some time organizing glamour plates and macros that allow me to flip between them quickly. Quite happy with how that’s coming along.

Lab Progress

One of my main goals for the year was to work on decorating rooms for my many RP alts based on character themes. Amon’s personal room in the FC house has a lab theme, with a dab of library, study and a performing stage.

I was happy that I finally put the Behemoth horns to use in crafting the trophy housing item that I’ve been leveling Leatherworker specifically to make. Check it out!

There’s a cozy little sitting and study area…

Along the wall base, I’m using partitions to display the models that Amon’s been collecting over time. These have been random things retainers bring back, or gifts people have given him. I plan on continuing to add more of these as time goes on.

There’s a library/performance stage area. You can’t see it, but there’s actually a long red carpet that leads from the door to the stage itself. I was pleased by the effect that has.

The lab area itself includes lots of potions, a mineral rack, and a grow-light for experimental plants.

Oh, and a holding tank…

…where unassuming folks can get themselves caught.

I’m also currently reworking Amon’s apartment in the Lavender Beds with lofts and a slightly more home-like environment. I’m not quite done with figuring out what needs to be there yet, but when I get it closer to done, I’ll post about it.

I really want to figure out a theme for my Main’s house and tackle that next. I’m thinking something artsy with lots of sightseeing pictures, bookcases and window seats for lounging. We’ll see.

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these posts… mostly because it’s been a while since I’ve had a party bad enough to write about. And while I used a Leeroy Jenkins reference as a picture above, really, we had the exact opposite issue in our run yesterday.

This weekend was kinda crazy in terms of the amount of content our FC was running in FFXIV. But, overall, I got a lot done on both of my characters. One of my final goals was to cap Genesis Tomes for the week, which would give me enough to buy a chest piece on Amon.

I was 30 Tomes shy, and though the others weren’t on at the time, Syn and I decided to hop in a quick Expert run to get it done. This was apparently a mistake.

This is going to be a long post….

Continue reading “FFXIV: Tales from the Duty Finder: A Tank and Their Chicken Cannot be Parted” →

It was almost three years ago when I first earned mentorship on my main character, and ended up quite disappointed by the whole system. I knew that I’d never be able to run the mentor roulette since I haven’t unlocked all of the content it requires… and the roulette doesn’t just let you run what you already know.

I still think it’s dumb that I can’t help a sprout through Sastasha just because I’ve never run the Warring Triad, for example. A real waste.

Eventually, I just took the crown off and never put it back on again. I didn’t want the pressure of having something that indicated I’m supposed to be a good player when I feel like I stumble through higher end content more often than not.

That’s probably the reason I didn’t even realize that I was coming up on fulfilling the crafting/gathering requirements for Mentorship on my RP alt, Amon. In fact, it was only when I saw that I’d completed the achievement for crafting 100 collectables (something I did just casually with weekly turn-ins) that it occurred to me I had only one more achievement left to finish. This was to gather 300 collectables, which is something you can knock out in a few hours if you work at it. I was already about 2/3 of the way done.

So I finished that up last night. And this happened:

I have no idea whether I’ll actually put it to use in any way. Amon is a bit more social than my main is when it comes to interacting. I’m a little worried about poking my head into the Novice Network on my server — truth is, I don’t even know if it’s used for anything as I’ve seen very little in the way of sprouts who are marked as being a part of the network.

One way or another, Amon got his crown, as you can see above. And compared to the effort I put into it on my main many years ago, it was really pretty simple to complete. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I can’t say.

I have always loved the concept of the large, special FATEs in the open world of FFXIV. I still haven’t finished my second Ixion for the mount yet, but hope to some day. I also beat up the Behemoth not long ago, and am leveling my Leatherworker specifically to be able to craft the wall trophy from the horns.

Last night, as I was working on my Ixali beast tribe quests in North Shroud, I noticed the transition to Tension in the Shroud. This is a weather pattern that only comes around when Odin is lurking in the forest. His FATE doesn’t appear to be marked on the map, and Tension can span several zones, so it takes some searching to find him.

As luck would have it, he was in North Shroud, and parties started forming fairly quickly. I’m usually shy to use shout chat to ask for a party invite for these things, but I did this time, and Amon was instantly popped into a group.

I was surprised at how big a crowd Odin summoned, actually. I was also surprised that the FATE did not sync me down from 70, and it still lasted a pretty good amount of time even though there were probably a lot of max leveled people out there fighting.

In the end, we took him down, and many folks got the achievement, including Amon. I took my award and turned it in for a nifty set of barding, too. I’m pretty sure I’ve got this on my main already, but it’s always fun to revisit this kind of content. Hopefully, we’ll see more of this in the next expansion!

Back when patch 4.4 dropped the Alphascape raid, it was content we tried, but then put off sensing that we’d need to be a bit better geared to move through it smoothly. With everything else going on, it got lost in the shuffle, and somewhat forgotten.

Fast forward to this past week. We have a returning member to our little FC, and we’ve been helping him lift his ilvl to meet the requirements to clear MSQ and open the Monastery. Getting him into Alphascape was a good place to secure some accessory drops and help with that process. Not to mention the weapon from Sigmascape.

I really wasn’t going to run it on my RP alt, Amon. But since they were going to do them all from the start, I decided to tag along. Sadly, it’s another thing that my RP alt has now cleared that my main has not!

I never intended to raid on my RP alt, but the more I play Bard, the more I’ve been enjoying it. Also, Amon has the higher ilvl now (!!) and that makes him feel stronger to play than my main.

I suppose I have plenty of time before the next expansion to work on my main… but honestly, when the expansion hits, it’s just going to mostly bring characters back to the same starting point. So I don’t have a whole lot of of motivation to work all that hard as long as she can see the story that leads up to Shadowbringers.

I did enjoy the ending of the raid story, probably more than the other raid series. Both Coil and Alex had these massive, epic storylines running through them… still, till today, I don’t quite get everything that happened in Alex.

And while the concept of Omega and the story surrounding it is complex, the final parts of the ending was fairly simple and wholesome. I know that not everyone takes the inclusion of a chibi chocobo from another dimension all that seriously, but that’s fine. It was sweet and worth the effort to get there. Plus you get a minion.

Speaking of the effort to get somewhere…. I also was able to finally save enough MGP for the Fenrir mount on Amon. I already had it on my main from sometime last year. But this just goes to show that earning the 60K from the Fashion Report every week adds up over time.

I really didn’t do much else to earn MGP on Amon, and I only just started to do Fashion Report sometime late last summer/early fall. There may have been a few weeks I missed, too, and I even spent a bit of MGP along the way. So, it’s safe to say that doing Fashion Report weekly can earn you the mount in about six months.

Hey, I’m patient. It pays off. 🙂