Thoughts about Crafting

Apparently Muddy Water seems like a good starting point for Alchemists until rank 10 or so.

As I keep reading through the Disciples of Hand (DoH or crafter) forums, I find that each craft needs a skill from other crafts creating a giant round-a-bout cyclical/symbiotic relationship. It seems fairly beneficial to create and maintain your own equipment. The only problem is that you’ll be spending a lot of time doing stuff. Let’s see if I can break down what would be good for my Conjurer:

DoH
– Alchemist
– Weaver
– Carpenter

DoL
– Botanist
– Miner

Then of course you should return to either a DoM/W to harvest other goodies. Which equates to a lot of time playing. JUST DO EVERYTHING!!!!

Crafting mini-game
Put in a bunch of ingredients and select from a menu what you want to make. So the same ingredients may make different things.

Normal Synthesis – um… normalish
Rapid – high completion, low quality
Bold – low completion, high quality, consumes extra durability
Wait – for unstable explody stuff
*Durability in mini-game != end durability of item.
Cool Crafting Tutorial Video (Sound Required)

Crafting recipes
None in game. Need to look at websites to find recipes.

It seems the best way to earn ranks though is to do local leves over and over again. They can provide you with materials, there are quest rewards, and you earn XP. Another tip is to upgrade your crafting tools as soon as possible. This will greatly affect the outcome of your synthesis. Save every crystal you get and best of luck.

Non-related Useful Links:
Merchant List for Beginning Weapons
Lodestone (Official FFXIV Site)
Travel directions from Gridania –> Ul’dah –> Limsa Lominsa

Monitor

I purchased a Dell U2410 monitor from my friend Koitsu. It’s quite large and I feel slightly inadequate sitting in front of it. I didn’t realize how big it was. It also has input ports up the wazoo which I doubt I will ever use.

It took me a little while to get used to the touch buttons. They’re pretty cool though. My only complaint so far with using the menu system is that the beeping is super loud each time you press a button. I immediately disabled it. Koitsu also mentioned some sort of latency because the monitor uses some sort of chip to process the video. I can adjust the presets to “Game” and it should disable the use of that chip and reduce the latency, but then you can’t adjust any of the color settings. Oh well, I’m sure that’s fine.

In game mode when I opened Safari, I became temporary blind as the searing whiteness of my screen burned into my retinas. That teaches me to open a web browser without adjusting the brightness. Anyway, the monitor is in great condition, being used only once, and there are no live/dead pixels as far as I can tell. Now to wait for my computer…

Skillz Yo!

Or rather abilities… Reading the Conjurer forums on Allakhazam (ZAM) has led me to some useful abilities for a Conjurer. These abilities are also nice for soloing purposes.

1 Conjurer – Tranquility – Recover MP (10 min cooldown)
— Need to talk to the Adventurer Guild and complete quest line to obtain
4 Conjurer – Cure
6 Conjurer – Stoneskin
8 Conjurer – Repose – Bind
8 Conjurer – Shock Spikes
10 Conjurer – Radiance – Attack DMG –> MP

6 Pugilist – Second Wind – TP –> HP

4 Thaumaturge – Sacrifice – Regen
10 Thaumaturge – Punishing Barbs

At least up to rank 10.

Also cruising forums, it seems that it doesn’t really matter which city-state you start in. They’re more or less the same except for the different various guilds. It seems that Limsa Lominsa is a nice place for Guild Training books. However I’m sure that doesn’t really matter unless you start earning Guild Marks around Rank 20.

Each city-state is easy to get to as well. For about an hour walk or so, you can go from Gridania –> Ul’dah –> (angry mobs that don’t aggro low levels?) –> Limsa Lominsa. I just need to figure out which path. I’ve taken a look at some FFXIV map sites, but they’re not good at telling you which zone is connected to what. I’ll guess I’ll figure it out one day.

Other cool things:
Macro Tutorial
Suggested Macros

Some notes for attributes (taken from ZAM):

VIT will give you HP and defense, important if you solo
INT gives you potency, important for damage dealers
MND gives you mp, magic defense, and healing power
PIE is yummy … err.. magic accuracy

Elemental affinity increases damage for that elemental type. You can toggle AOE for spells:

/aoe on
/action Cure <me>
/aoe off


And it’s nice to spam Spirit Dart for Conjurer killage.

Alright…

I purchased an Alienware Aurora PC. That should satisfy all of my gaming needs for a while. It’s not super fancy. None of that SLI/Raid 0 stuff. However I did notice that it uses liquid cooling. There wasn’t an option to remove it unfortunately. Here are some of the specs:

Intel® Core™ i7 930 Quad Core Processor (2.8GHz, 8MB Cache)
Single 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460
6GB Triple Channel 1333Mhz DDR3
1TB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 7,200RPM, 32MB Cache HDD


It actually came out a bit cheaper than my original estimate. I removed the wireless card, had a 10% employee discount, and there was free shipping. The total price with tax came out to: $1,740.46. It should arrive by October 11th. Now to get a monitor. =)

Oh NOES!!!!!

Well, Chipya has officially crushed my dreams. Following his advice, I installed the FFXIV benchmark tool on my laptop. Then I installed Directx 9.0c. When I ran the tool, selecting Lalafell of course, it immediately crashed. This does not bode well for FFXIV playing in the near future. I remember when I first got this laptop and ran FFXI on it. It was blazing fast…

Now it’s four years later and here we are. My laptop has failed me and I will most likely not be able to run FFXIV when I receive the game. Perhaps I should wait for the PS3 console version due out in March 2011. So far away…

Alternatively I could purchase a new computer. I could go my standard Apple route and purchase an iMac 27″ for about $2,787. The highlights are:

2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor with 8MB level 3 cache; supports Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost
ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
8GB (four 2GB SO-DIMMs) of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
2TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard drive


Or, I can forget about Apple and their Bootcamp hacky shit and go with a cheaper PC that barely meets the FFXIV recommended requirements for about $1585:

Intel® Core™ i7 920 2.66GHz (8MB Cache) Quad Core Processor
Single 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460
6GB Triple Channel 1333Mhz DDR3
500GB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 7,200RPM, 16MB Cache HDD


I’d have to buy a monitor though. It’s hard to say. I wanted to get out of PC gaming because upgrading and maintaining a computer is costly. Especially for me, a person who doesn’t play that many PC games. I use my computer for pretty much Internet browsing, watching streaming videos, and iTunes. Now I can stream videos with Netflix on my PS3 or Xbox 360. I may not need a computer at all in the future.

Although for about $2,635 I could get this PC:

Intel® Core™ i7 930 Quad Core Processor (2.8GHz, 8MB Cache)
Dual 1GB GDDR5 ATI Radeon™ HD 5770 CrossfireX™ Enabled
6GB Triple Channel 1600MHz DDR3
1TB RAID 0 (2x 500GB SATA-II, 7,200 RPM, 16MB Cache HDDs)


I would still need to buy a monitor though…

Here’s a screenshot from 2006:

Besieged is awesome!!!

References:
Apple Store
Dell Desktops
FFXIV Official Benchmark Tool (A.K.A. Dream Crusher)

Lame

Hmm… due to credit card processing errors, I didn’t get my FFXIV CE copy today. Amazon.com has failed me. After fixing stuff, hopefully I’ll get the game soon.

Since I’m waiting to play, I decided to take a look at the Character Creation Process. After a quick look, it’s quite nice that Square decided to let you choose things like which server you want to play on and what not. I remember the whole rigmarole from FFXI when you had to earn money for a World Pass so your friends can transfer to your server. Smarter people would just create a character and then delete it if they didn’t appear in the desired world. Yah, fun times. Then Square did away with it a few years later.

I’m guessing that Gridania is the new Windurst, but who knows… I didn’t see anything about a Conjurer Guild there, but hey, the City-State quote from Allakhazam is from a Master Conjurer. Also there are trees there. Maybe I’ll get a cool item specific to my race.

Actually, I later confirmed on the Conjurer page that the guild is in Gridania.

Chipya told me to join the Figaro server. Some of his friends are going there, so might as well go there too. I’m his friend too right? =(

Apparently in FFXIV we select a diety. Rhalgr seems to be the closet to a Conjurer-ish diety… god of destruction… lightning element… sounds good. Whatever… it’ll probably screw me when I go crafting or something.

Interestingly enough, Square has Characters and Retainers. Apparently Retainers are mules and will cost an extra dollar. They can also sell stuff for you while offline. That’s pretty cool. I’m guessing Characters (+$3) are for the killage.

Hopefully my laptop will be able to play FFXIV. If not, that’ll just… be… I may cry. I’m not afraid to admit it.

References:
ZAM! (or Allakhazam from the old days)
Eorzeapedia – some random page

Level 85

Alright, so I gave in and reactivated my FFXI account. Me wants shoes. I ran around for a bit trying to remember how to play. No one from Enginerds was online. I suppose that’s not surprising. Perhaps I’ll play a bit more, but more than likely I will not.

Amazingly enough, my account was not deleted. I guess Toefer isn’t a popular name. In fact, if you look at FFXIAH.com, you only see two names that match “Toefer”, me and my mule.

I took a look at the ole Enginerds linkshell on FFXIAH and to no surprise Chipya is still active. I was a bit shocked to see that Keceltes was online sometime in May, but maybe that was just Rya trying to keep his account alive. Who knows…

I can’t believe the level cap is now 85. Now my character is under leveled and will probably stay that way. Sad times. Maybe I’ll go whore myself out to people in need of teleports to feel useful… T.T

I also went through my old FFXI website that is no longer public since Yahoo took down Geocities. Sweet sweet memories of elven deaths. Perhaps I’ll upload it again one day. Best quote ever:

Thursday, September 16th, 2004
(Keceltes) What should my provoke macro say?
(Kisndy) come to me! i am the sexy!

Other Links:
Rya’s FFXI Youtube Channel
My Character Profile on FFXIAH.com

Hermes’ Shoes

Browsed a couple of old forums today. It’s been a while since I played an MMO so a little adjustment is necessary to get back into… the… um… groove. I read about an interesting item called Hermes’ Shoes. It increases movement speed, but it requires you to have an active FFXI account before creating your FFXIV character (before January 2011). Lame.

Now I have to consider reactivating my FFXI account before playing FFXIV. Additional movement speed would be awesome, especially for cities. Also you get a $7 discount on your FFXIV account while both subscriptions overlap and the option to transfer your FFXI character name to FFXIV. Although I’m not sure if “Toefer Gilgamesh” would be a good name. I have enough trouble as is with making up a first name, now there’s a last name too? Oh well.

Maybe I’ll recreate Findok Maru from my old DAoC days.

Also read a forum post about playing the game, how to setup your PS3 controller with your PC, and other guides.

References:
Perks for Simultaneous Players of Both FINAL FANTASY XI and FINAL FANTASY XIV
A Day in the life of a Beta Conjurer
Setting up a PS3 Gamepad for FFXIV
Rocslock Youtube Videos
FFXIV Guides on Allakhazam

/panic motion

An introductory blog for my upcoming FFXIV experiences. It’s been a while since I’ve actually blogged anything so I hope it won’t be too boring.