Game Oddities

Since I started playing FFXIV, I’ve noticed a couple of weird things.

1) Blank Login Screen

I noticed this after playing the game for a while then quitting. Then when I try to restart the game, I login, get the SquareEnix splash screen, then nothing. I quit the game and try again, but more nothing. I then updated my Internet Options to include https://*.square-enix.com/ and it works. That is pretty dumb.

2) Controller interface to FFXIV cannot reconnect

I bought an Xbox controller for my PC to play FFXIV a bit better. Most of the controls seemed to favor controller play anyway, and I thought it would be more ergonomic than pressing a random combination of keys on the keyboard for long periods of time. Any time my controller turns off while FFXIV is running, when I turn the controller back on, it doesn’t work. In fact, when I do this, it makes the game run slower and doesn’t input any of my commands. That doesn’t make sense. I have to restart the game to make FFXIV recognize my controller.

The PC knows that I have my controller connected since I can push the center button to get my battery level, but FFXIV doesn’t.

Dumb.

Yet not dumb enough to make me stop playing the game…

Crafting Adventures

I don’t getz it.

Crafting takes a while. I started with Weaving and Carpentry, however I found that it a little bit harder to complete certain synthesis. I started looking at upgrading my equipment and it’s a bit crappy. To upgrade my Weathered Saw to Chocobotail Saw, it somehow requires Blacksmithing. I suppose that makes sense to try and intermingle the crafting trades together. Then I take a look at some of the crafting materials.

In order to make a level 12 Chocobotail Saw it requires a couple of items. One of them is to make an Ash Saw Grip. That requires level 18 Carpentry. What the hell?!?! To make something for my rank 12 Carpenter to craft better, I’ll need to be a rank 18 Carpenter? On top of that, I would need to level Blacksmithing. You can also forget checking the market wards since no one sells those items. Fun times.

I took a look at some other recipes for equipment, and it’s like that all over the place. To make an item that would help you at your current rank, you need to be at a higher rank to make the base materials. That’s stupid. Perhaps I just need to lower my standards and make crappier items. Or perhaps find a linkshell. That would probably work as well.

I also quickly discovered what “synthesis requires larger scale accommodations” means. It means that you can’t craft this piece of item until you buy assistance from some guy in the crafting guild or at an aetheryte camp. Depending on your rank it varies in price and the amount of assistance you get. Otherwise you will fail.

Oh well, for now I keep trying to work on local leves to get free materials to craft. I think during the next refresh, I’ll try local leves from different capitals for the same Discipline of Hand. Perhaps I’ll be able to skill up slightly faster. I’ve also accumulated too many items from local leve rewards. So I’ve been selling them and been making a good amount of cash for my rank.

Toefer the Blacksmith

Updates

Well, that’s pretty sweet. I log in to FFXIV today and made a run to the Market Wards. Now there are new options. Instead of names of random places, now they have names like Battlecraft, Fieldcraft, etc. It seems that Square has organized the Market Wards to reflect the types of items you want to sell. That is an excellent idea! That will make it much easier to look for and find items that I want to buy or compare prices of similar items that I want to sell. They also charge less “taxes” for selling certain items in those areas to encourage players to sell certain things there.

It looks like Square is apologizing for the horrible game play and has given players who purchased/registered a character before Oct. 25th an extra 30 days for free.

Koitsu shot me a couple of links that FFXIV will improve it’s UI by the middle of November:
Ask the Devs (10/15/10)
A Message from the Director (10/15/10)

Finally I can have my sortable items.

After playing for a couple of days, my fears of having too little gil have finally left me. Apparently, guildleves are a nice way to get some spending money. You just need to be rank 10 first. I find that playing the rank 10 guildleves with my Conjurer to be fairly easy and each time you do it, you can earn anywhere between 2,000-6,000 gil. I can do three in about 10-15 minutes. AOE is your friend. I typically pick up all the Battlecraft guildleves for rank 10+, teleport to Camp Emerald Moss, and then killage. One of the more annoying quests is “kill 6 things”. When you kill 5 of those things, the last one runs off. When you finally catch up with it, 3-4 of its friends pop out and kill you.

Favorite Past Time: Raped by Naked Moles.

So you have to be a little bit careful. Other than that, they’re fine. I usually spend the remaining guildleves on crafting because, “Hey, free materials!”

Weaving: Sewing it up yo!

Carpenter: Making Sh*t!

The game seems perfectly suitable to my casual game play. It usually takes me up to an hour to complete all the eight guildleves, then I stop playing. Maybe later I’ll put in more time to craft. That way I can at least upgrade my armor and make new weapons. Then I won’t be stuck using starter items. I wonder if there’s a merchant somewhere… I should probably look for one sometime.

Toefer Theangry (Figaro)

Second Day

I had a very short second day. I ended up doing chores and running errands, but I still managed to play for an hour or two. Anyway, I was wrong about the intro storyline. Apparently I did not complete it. I guess there’s a break in the middle where you’re suppose to level or something. Anyway, I earned an additional 15,000 bringing my total to 27,000 for just completing the quest.

Now that I felt a bit more comfortable buying items, I picked up some Botanist gear and went botanizing… I also picked up a couple of guildleves and went on my merry way. I got a couple of useful items, moko grass and some wind shards. That should help my weaving. I also gained like 7 ranks in Botany in a little over an hour. I thought that was impressive, but who knows. It’s probably average.

I also played around with macros. They’re a bit annoying. I wonder if you can equip a Macro with the /eaction command… Maybe I’ll try that later.

Chopping away

First Day

Well, the first day of playing wasn’t so bad. Played for about 12 hours and mostly goofed around. I completed all the starter quests with my Conjurer which netted me about 12,000 Eorzea Currency. I did a guildleve or two and ran around between each capital killing things.

It looks like for each capital, there are three easy to get to Aetheryte camps off of the main road. Including the ones in the capital you have to visit, I now have 12 teleport locations. The main road seems to be a central place for new adventurers. It’s more or less safe to travel between capitals, as long as you keep running, and there are plenty of things to kill along the way. There is one large road linking Gridania to Ul’dah to the port which takes you to Limsa Lominsa. Then if you exit east of Limsa Lominsa, there is one large area with another road linking three Aetheryte camps.

Trying to get to the other Aetheryte camps, off-road, got me killed. That was my first death actually. Instead of doing a face plant, I fell backwards and looked at the sky. It reminded me of an Elvaan death. I would’ve taken a screenshot, except I wasn’t sure how. Maybe I’ll look that up in the near future. My second death was running in between locations. An ant killed me somewhere in Ul’dah while I was trying to kill a Star Marmot, pretty much the low level mob for noobs. It was probably an Antling Digger in the Thanalan zone.

After completing the starter quest line, I didn’t really know what to do afterwards. My options seemed to be snag a guildleve or run outside and killed things. The guildleves aren’t too hard. I did them on solo difficulty. Essentially you get your battlecraft guildleve, run outside to a nearby camp, and initiate it. During the guildleve, you will be pointed to your mobs and only you can see them. You earn a little bit of money, but I think it’s better to do the ones that drop items.

After doing three guildleves, I thought it best to just kill things for a while. This seems to be the best way to earn experience quickly, at least for low levels. All you get from killing mobs though are items and crystals/shards. Throughout the day, I received about 43 different items which can net me about 22,000 Eorzea currency. Perhaps I’ll set it up in a retainer for now to sell at twice the price.

It looks like you can buy the starter weapons for the other classes from their corresponding guild. There are NPCs too around town that will sell those items, but I didn’t look for them. For the Discipline of Hand (DoH) and the Discipline of Land (DoL), both primary and off-hand weapons will cost a total of 2,100 or so Eorzea currency. After getting my Conjurer to level 10, I may now try my hand at a Botanist to get some items for Weaving.

The crystal/shard distribution seems a bit off. I earned tons of Earth, Fire, and Ice while little to no Water, Wind, and Lightning. Before I start off with Botanist, I allocated all of my elemental points between Wind and Lightning to hopefully earn some crystals for Weaving.

Point allocation was OK. For the most part while gaining physical levels, I allocated everything into VIT. I read somewhere on a couple of forums that you should take VIT all the way to 40 for a Conjurer. I now know that 40 is the break point in which it starts costing more points to raise one attribute.

Fighting took a while to get the hang of it. I still start running off in active mode after killing a mob. Also, casting spells is a bit annoying. Without the use of macros, you have to cast your spell and then click on you or the mob. I need to create a couple of macros for casting.

A couple of the mobs seemed bugged. While fighting, sometimes they would run off, heal, then run back and forth. I don’t think their regen rate is suppose to be so high. Sometimes while fighting a mob, it’ll regain full health then come back to you. At that point I went into passive mode, clicked somewhere off the mob so I wouldn’t be locked onto it, then {run away}.

Anyway, I think the plan for now is to level Botanist and hopefully get some Wind/Lightning crystals/shards. Maybe I’ll concentrate on completing more guildleves before they reset tonight. Or, I can do a couple of chores around the house. Decisions, decisions…

Computadora

Well, the new computer arrived on Thursday. It’s actually fairly large and barely fits underneath my desk. When booting the computer, the fans are really loud. Other than that, while I’m using the computer it’s really quiet. I haven’t tried playing games with it though so we’ll see. I found the case lights to be annoying. It generates extra heat that unnecessary. I did find it interesting that you can adjust the colors though.

I ran the Windows experience test. My scores were (on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9):
Processor – 7.5
Memory (RAM) – 7.6
Graphics – 7.4
Gaming graphics – 7.4
Primary hard disk – 5.9

Well, perhaps I should’ve gone with RAID 0. Oh well, that doesn’t bother me so much. I upgraded the OS to Windows 7 Ultimate, installed FFXIV, and created my new character on the Figaro server: Toefer Theangry. In hindsight, I probably should’ve looked up an equivalent surname.

Grass comes from the Middle High German word Graz, meaning angry or intense.
Chaffee comes from the French word Chafe, meaning to heat, to grow warm or angry.
Rout, old English for wrath, meaning angry or fierce.
And here’s my favorite, Faust from German, meaning fist. Used for a strong willed and rather angry person.

I just like it because it means fist. Let’s see… Toefer Grass… Toefer Chaffee… Toefer Route… Toefer Faust. In the end, it doesn’t really matter since THIS IS JUST A VIDEO GAME. So I’m happy with Toefer Theangry. After character creation, I didn’t actually get to play… at all. I became busy with stuff and was sad.

The box... taller than my trash can and twice as long.

And inside the box, was a smaller box...

And finally the computer...

...which barely fits underneath my desk. (NOTE: all lights are off except for blue alien head)

FFXIV Benchmark Score (large): 2249

FFXIV Benchmark Score (small): 4163

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. =)