Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.
These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.
A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.
I’ve been having more fun in the Palace of the Dead. While you can find lots of detailed guides online for the PoD, here’s a few hints that may organize your experience.
Palace of the Dead is way more fun than the normal dungeons. Killing goes much faster. You’re not just standing there wailing on trash mobs over and over. A few hits and they are down and you are moving on. Stuff is always popping up and changing. Floor to floor and within a floor. Normal dungeons don’t have re-spawns. Once the mobs appear and you kill them that’s it for those mobs. That area is cleared. You kill the mobs and move on. But in Palace of the Dead, stuff re-spawns all the time. Way more interesting.
The XP rewards are the primary reason you are here. You have lots of classes / jobs to level and this is the way to do it. Forget leves. Do your roulette’s once per day, but you can grind PoD all day long and there are no limits. Your mileage will vary based on your “Rested” status and whether you have “Road to 60” but typically each run of 10 floors will get you 20% – 30% of a level, and maybe a lot more. So you can put on a level in less than an hour typically. While the Main Scenario Roulette gives more, along with a lot of Tomestones but that’s only available once per day above level 50. But PoD is all day all the time and it starts at level 1 once you enable it with a battle class at level 17.
Here are some examples for an Archer at level 1-10, 11-20 and 21-30.
Dress for the experience. Your gear doesn’t matter, so you can use those fashion items or level 1 gear here if you like. I recently got an email with a set of cosmetic gear in leather with a fur collar. So I’m wearing that for all my folks in PoD. I’ve made a special gear entry for each class / job with that armor and the correct weapon / soul crystal. And that’s all. No jewelry, or anything else. It works fine, since in PoD your armor is standard and doesn’t show and your weapon is replaced, and can show. And it’s good to show it so others can see what class you are. So set this gear entry up to show the weapon. Not to show off, but it’s good if folks know what you are.
The Palace of the Dead, or Deep Dungeon, is a multilevel auto-generated dungeon that is designed for leveling your jobs. One of the odd things about FFXIV is that quests and Levequests don’t really give very much XP. Up to now I’ve avoided the Palace of the Dead since it can seem a little intimidating from the descriptions. But don’t let that worry you. I found a series of videos that cover the whole thing in seven short videos that describe what is up. Here is the play list for these guides.
The PoD is not that intimidating. I’m not going to dive deep into the description here, since the guides do a great job of doing that. I’m going to give you a sales pitch so that you don’t wait a long time, like I did, before you start using it.
I received a DMCA Copyright Violation Notice from my ISP and when I called my ISP, they reported a date and time and the program “World of Warcraft -name of private server”. I have removed the name of the private server that I was trying to use.
It turns out that the Client that I was trying to use was an old copy of the Legion 7.3.5 client that had not yet been modified to not reach out to Blizzard resources. So this client was trying to update it self to the latest client. But Blizzard had changed the resources to update the latest client, but is watching these old resources for accesses and then reporting those accesses back to ISPs with DMCA Copyright Violation notices. This of course has a chilling effect in my use of World of Warcraft private server since I could lose my internet access.
Ok. So apparently Blizzard cannot take down the private servers themselves – maybe because they are off-shore, or for some other reason Legally Out of Bounds to Blizzard.
So now Blizzard has gone after the users of WoW Private Servers.
Well since I am not playing WoW as provided by Blizzard, not because I refuse to pay, but because I don’t like the new features. I restarted my subscription back in the early days of Legion – middle 2017 – but left when the PTR [Private Test Realm] showed the direction that Blizzard was going with Level Scaling. I refuse to play because of Level Scaling, as I’ve pointed out several times before. Private servers have choices of other releases, such as Warlords of Draenor, Mists of Pandaria or Wrath of the Lich King.
Vanilla or Classic is not interesting for me. It’s too primitive. I wish Blizzard and the users well with Vanilla, but Warlords or Mists are the patches that I would choose, or I’ll play something else.
So I’m back to FFXIV.
Happy Gaming. Take Care.
:ww
I’ve found a private server that provides the Warlords of Draenor patch of Wow. That’s where I am now. These Private Server folks provide choices of patch levels – Wrath of the Lich King, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords and Legion. I chose WoD for two reasons.
In December 2017, Blizzard released details of their Game Wide Level Scaling and I was able to play it in the Public Test Realm [PTR]. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t articulate just why, but it seemed to be a betrayal of the nature of the game for me.
Now I understand better why I felt that way after watching a talk from the recent Game Developer Conference on Youtube. Here is that talk:
Published on Oct 3, 2018
A company called GameForge is the publisher of Tera in Europe. Oddly, they are going through a server merge too. I guess the the Tera population is collapsing worldwide. And they are screwing their users too. Apparently even worse than Enmasse here in NA.
Notice how they talk about character slots. Empty slots on the least populated- by your characters / slots – servers are just tossed out. So, apparently if you have server toons / slots as follows:
5 characters and Open 3 slots on Bahaar, 6 characters and Open 2 slots on Mystel, then you LOSE 3 characters and 3 Open slots.
And Unlike Enmasse, Gameforge did not give you a gift of 8 free slots to make up for some of your loss. Not sure where Enmasse came up with 8, maybe that’s the total number of GIFT slots that have been given over the years as new classes were introduced.
Like I said in the previous post, Tera has figured out a way, in laziness to just mess over almost every player. And it’s even worse and more unnecessary than is first apparent. This Server Merge is a big mess and it’s self inflicted.
Let’s look at what happens to characters. And then we’ll look at the implications for bank storage.
I thought it might be nice to start with some nostalgia from way back in 2014. Remember those server selection and character selection screens? Those were the days. Right? Remember the Island of Dawn? The Old start up area? Sigh.
Enmasse, agent in US and Europe for Tera, among other games, has figured out a new way to Screw their player base. This time it’s a “Server Merge”. Before we get into that, let’s remember the two ways that Enmasse has screwed it’s player base before:
Ok. So as you’ll read below, maybe this server merge is not a complete Screw Job, but it’s not as nice as it could be and it’s work for all the players that are still playing the game.
So, as you know if you watch things here, I’m a big MMO fan, and recently it’s Final Fantasy XIV. I just remembered that I had purchased a BluRay a while ago of Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, and wondered if I could play that. Not an MMO, but just a single player RPG. So I looked it up.
I tried to install the demo. Figured I’d check it out. I had three choices to get it:
First I tried the Microsoft Store. – FAIL. I tried to sign in with my Microsoft account to do that, but I got dumped to a page that said it failed. No real help there.
Try steam. No problem, at first. Program downloaded and installed. Then hung after a few clicks to set it up.
Just hung there forever like it was trying to reach some website. Although why would it by saving stuff online? It’s a single player RPG.
While upgrading the KVM switch to Displayport, there were some problems with cables. After sending a cable back that didn’t work, the replacement finally arrived. The new cable didn’t seat properly into the GTX 1050 Card in the Cooler Master NS200 case either.
After looking at a cable that worked – 6 ft- and then at the cable needed – 10 ft – the issue was discovered. The case has a bump next to the card interface that interferes with one of the cables and not the other. The 6 ft cable is slightly flatter where the bump is and so clears it to seat properly into the graphics card.
The top left pictures shows the CM NS200 case detail next to the graphics card. The Mini-ITX card does not allow another position for the graphics card. The top left picture shows a Displayport connector that works. The bottom left shows the before and after – the two ends – of the cable that does not work. The right connector has been shaved with an Exacto knife to allow it to fit past the bump and seat properly. The bottom right picture shows a detail of the modification of the cable.
Looks like not every one agrees on the clearance required for displayport cables. So beware if you rig doesn’t work as expected.
:ww
