Aywren Sojourner: Gaming and Geek Life

FFXIV Patch 5.11 drops tonight, and the biggest thing I’m hyped for is the release of the Ishgard Restoration. Advertised to be content especially for crafters and gatherers (though I believe non-crafters can get involved), it will be somewhat of a real-time server-wide building project to restore the areas in Ishgard that were decimated by war.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this idea — it reminds me of something out of the MMO Horizons (back when Istaria was still called that). The whole server of crafters and gatherers would come together to build and add resources to broken locations to unlock new areas and even races. I’m so stoked to see how this unfolds and will totally be putting in effort to it if at all possible.

The Big Crafting Change of 5.1

BUT!

Before jumping straight into that, let’s take into consideration that upon logging in for patch 5.1, high level crafter skill bars looked shockingly like this:

This was horrifying to log in to, I tell you. And the worst part of it was that ALL of your crafting jobs – all 8 of them! – were in this condition.

So many skills were removed and reworked. Almost nothing was NOT changed. So when you have 8 jobs worth of bars with skills you have no idea how to fix, what do you do?

I’ve never been a macro crafter – I’ve just muddled through and geared up enough to make the things I wanted to make. I’ve not crafted high-end gear or anything that requires the massive overmelds.

But I know that some folks are a lot more serious about their crafting than I. And for those folks, here’s some great resources:

• 5.1 Crafting Essentials – pretty much everything you need to know in super depth
• 2* Macro Rotations – for those serious folks

For folks who are like me and just want to know how to survive without the skills you know and love, here’s a quickie quote that talks about how to approach end game crafting:

Start with Reflect, Manipulation, Ingenuity, and use a Touch action five times. Great Strides, Ingenuity, maybe Innovation, Byregot’s Blessing, and Careful Synth until you’re done.

-Can’t find Reddit source (sorry)

Reflect seems to be the skill that’s everyone’s best friend now. I noticed this as I was sorting through my skills, even before I read the above. I suggest taking a bit of time to really sort through your remaining skills and see what they all do. I found some pretty interesting combos that are now my new mainstays. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed!

Cleaning Up Your Crafting Hotbar

–Credit to this Reddit thread for macros that helped me get all 8 jobs back into working condition!-

So, let’s rebuild those crafting hotbars. The easiest way I’ve found is using macros (here’s how to make macros in FFXIV if you’ve never done it).

Step 1: Strip your existing bars clean (if you want). This macro will do the trick:

/hotbar remove 1 all
/hotbar remove 2 all
/hotbar remove 3 all

If you have more than 3 bars, add one for the 4th, 5th, etc.

Choose one crafter to rebuild a new bar, switch to it, then use the above macro to clean off all the mess that was left when 5.0 hit. Now you have sparkly clean bars to build your new skill list!

Step 2: Once you’re familiar with the new skills, rebuild your crafting bars however you see fit. Keep in mind that they’ve done away with cross class skills, so all skills are now given to all crafting jobs. This makes it easier in the long run to build a bar that works for all of your jobs.

Step 3: Time to copy your new bar to each of your other crafters! Here’s a macro that can do that for you:

/hotbar copy LTW 1 current 1
/hotbar copy LTW 2 current 2
/hotbar copy LTW 3 current 3

Here, the “LTW” stands for Leatherworker. You’d replace that with the shorthand for whatever job you just fixed the hotbars on if it wasn’t leatherworker.

Also, if you have more than three bars, you’ll have to add more with 4, 5, 6, etc.

Now, all you have to do is switch to each crafting job and run this macro. It will replace the messy old bars with whatever the new setup was on the job you fixed.

And there you go! Your crafters bars are now set up and ready to go for the Ishgard restoration!

Also, remember, if you’ve never leveled crafters before, or you’re working to level them now, everything that gives crafting experience gives a ton more than it used to. So get in there and do grand company turn-ins, leves, beast tribe quests, and weekly scrip turn-ins! Good luck!

There’s a whole lot to say about FFXIV Patch 5.1, even without talking about any of the MSQ. I’ve finished the story, poked around at the new crafting and gathering, am working through the new Beast Tribe quests, completed the new 24 man raid, and have a good feel for what all the new changes are. Overall, I’m pretty happy with Patch 5.1.

This post is going to just brush over things at a high level. I’ll talk about the raid and MSQ on its own later.

FATE Activity

As you can see above, Amon finally got his second Formidable kill last night, which was enough cogs to finally buy the Ironfrog Mover mount! This is namely because people are back out on the maps and doing FATEs again.

New gem rewards are out there, and with folks doing FATEs and hunts, it’s been a much easier time to clear some of these. I still need this mount on my main, and have yet to try the Frog Suit FATE (I did see it called once this weekend, but was too late to get there on time), but I’m happy these are getting triggered and done again.

Pixie Beast Tribe Quests

I won’t go into any spoilers about these quests, but so far, I’ve been impressed with the depth of the lore we’re getting from them. The point of Beast Tribe quests has always been to expand on lore that normally wouldn’t be touched on. But something about these quests feel a little different in structure.

Maybe it’s because we’re building up a full instance instead of just making small changes to the area the pixies live in. I’m not sure what it is, but I also feel these are more structured and somehow deeper. I’m not going to look into it too much, though and just enjoy the ride!

Crafting and Gathering Changes

Holy wow… the changes to crafting and gathering. Pretty much all of my crafting hotbars were wiped out since so many skills were removed. Crafting became a completely different animal, and I wasn’t sure I was going to like that… at first.

Now that I’ve actually crafted some and tried things like the new deliveries, I feel okay with it. At my level, at least. I’m not sure what crafting is like under level 70. Not that it really matters because…

Crafting and gathering leveling has seriously been sped up to the point of insanity. Grand Company turn-ins, weekly script turn-ins, Ixali quests, leves…. they’ve all been buffed to given an incredible amount of XP.

For example, I’m leveling Zuri’s Fisher. She was level 31 when the patch dropped. Doing nothing but daily Grand Company turnins and the normal Fisher quests, she was getting 2-3 levels a day for a one HQ fish turn in! She’ll likely be level 50 today.

That’s just… buying a single fish off the marketboard and turning it in. Fisher leveled. That’s crazy!

I’m not fully sure how I feel about giving players this fast of a track to leveling crafting and gathering. I agree that days upon days of Ixali quests and leves were tedious and something better had to be done. But this was quite the turn-around.

I might even humor the idea of leveling more crafters and gatherers on alts…

Ahem. Let’s talk about Gathering improvements.

The Sneak skill is amazing! It turns on automatically (when you switch to a gather job outside town). No speed reduction. Use it all the time, even mounted. Nothing sees you as long as it’s not 4 levels above you. As a level 80 gatherer, that means nothing sees me. I haven’t tested S ranks yet, though. 🙂

How about that Auto Gather? Oh man. The most chill way to gather ever. Can even gather HQ with it. Why are you not out there gathering right now?

Instant sight skills that are always on. The fact that things you never gathered before are no longer hidden and have stupid hard 15% gather chance until after you gather them the first time. So nice!

I spent a good bit of time gathering for my crafting leves last night and it was a dream come true. Speaking of crafting leves… I shot my main’s Alchemist from 71 to 80 last night without breaking a sweat. Granted, I did already have some HQ mats left over from when Amon grinded the very same leves, but… the difference from that experience to this one was just incredible.

Desynth All the Things!

The other huge change was in Desynthesis. They removed all the point limitations. They removed all the level limitations. You can now desynth anything and everything no matter what level you are vs the level of the item. And this is incredible!

There were a number of items that were blues and greens that I’ve been carrying around and didn’t realize the game wasn’t allowing me to turn into my Grand Company. I hunted those down, and started buying gear pieces with all my Scrips since I have nothing else to do with them…

…And I just went nuts on both my crafting characters desything everything.

In fact, Amon, who had not desynthed a single item before this patch hit an achievement…

That was just clearing out inventory, and desything scrip gear in the space of like 15 mins. Not only that, but I find many of the mats I’m getting back from this process, especially fieldcraft demimateria, are selling really well. I don’t know how long that’ll hold true once other folks start breaking things down, but this weekend was nice for sales!

Other Odds N Ends

Aside from that, I’ve been knocking out goals left and right this weekend. I finished all my Dancer job quests on my main. Now all I have left are Gunbreaker quests.

I also blew through the 5.1 content on Amon in order to unlock the new crafting scrip turn-ins.

I’m full-up busy running beast tribes and Nuts hunts for the new mount every day on both characters. And I might work on PvP a bit in the future to get more of the new glamour gear. So I’m pretty content with this patch overall for what it does to give me interesting content.

Gosh, November. This is where people start asking where the year went.

My goals for this month may look like a lot, but are actually a bit lighter, since there’s a lot of overlap between the 5.1 content I want to do and leveling my jobs. I’m keeping the leveling aspect pretty low-key since I hope that’ll just be part of what organically happens while I’m doing other things. I do want to get all jobs to 80, but realistically, that won’t happen until next year.

So what am I looking at this month?

FFXIV Goals for My Main

• Daily Pixie Beast Tribe Quests
• Daily Nuts Hunts (For New Mount)
• Finish Dancer Job Quests ✓
• Finish Gunbreaker Job Quests
• Level Crafters with new weekly Scrip turn-ins ✓
• Get Eden Weapon for Red Mage ✓
• Upgrade Gear with Factory Coin Drops ✓
• Decorate House (?)
• Clean up Shadowbringer Quests

Aside from job quests and the Eden Weapon, most of these are things I’d be doing anyhow. I would like to clean up Shadowbringer quests to help level some. I might focus on the Pixie lands since this is where I’m spending time doing quests anyhow, and all of those quest markers are really cluttering the area up.

FFXIV Goals for Amon

• Finish 5.1 MSQ ✓
• Daily Pixie Beast Tribe Quests
• Daily Nuts Hunts (For New Mount)
• Level Red Mage ✓
• Level Crafters with new weekly Scrip turn-ins ✓

Amon’s goals are pretty similar to my main’s. I want to rep up with the Pixie Beast tribes and get that new Nuts Hunt mount. Red Mage is really the only other job he has (aside from Dancer), so I’m doing all the beast tribe quests and as many hunts as I can using this job.

FFXIV Other Goals

• Progress Tai through Shadowbringers
• Progress Zuri through Stormblood
• Level Zuri’s Fishing & Fishing Retainer

I’d like to make some progress with both Tai and Zuri this month. It’s just a matter of setting aside time, maybe on a weekend, to push through MSQ in their respective areas.

Fishing has been made silly easy to level, so as long as I remember to do my daily Grand Company turn-ins, I won’t have any problem there. I’m almost considering leveling other gatherer jobs on other characters at this point since it’s become so easy to do. But I think I’ll wait until I get some of these other large goals out of the way first!

Nintendo Switch

I still want to make progress in some Switch games. I know Pokemon is coming out this month, so I’ll likely get pulled into that for a while. But aside from that:

• Defeat next temple in Link’s Awakening
• Ring Fit leveling

And I think that’s more than enough to keep me busy this month! Looks like it’s going to be fun!

It’s that time again! FFXIV has dropped the preliminary patch notes for Patch 5.1, and here I am highlighting the most important and exciting elements (to me). Granted, I’m a lover of fluff and quality of life, so what excites me is probably not going to coincide with the general community.

Continue reading “FFXIV 5.1 Preliminary Patch Notes Highlights” →