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.
Tera just released an update that adds “Apex” skills – and flashy fireworks animations – to the end game for some classes. There are a few problems:
Only 7 out of the 13 Classes get new skills. Gee… Let’s PVP, and you have the new skills and I don’t. I’m toast. Presumably these new skills do more damage, not just have better fireworks.
If you had a choice in a Fantasy Life, would you choose to be Ugly?
Would you choose to grow old and die of old age? In a few years?
Well, if that’s your dream, you may soon will be able to do that.
Today I tripped across a character creation video posted by the developers of this game on Youtube. See below. I think they missed the memo that says that “This is a fantasy world where you can be the way you want to be, rather than putting up with Real-Life.”
Maybe this idea will get traction, but no other popular MMO that I’m aware of makes this choice. All other MMOs that I’ve played have made it easy to be attractive. Yes, there is usually a race or two that are, shall we say, Dramatic in their appearance, But they are usually not designed to be ugly. Apparently all the tribes of Elyria are designed to be, what I’ll call here, Dramatic, and all look similarly so. That is, all the Races, or Tribes, look like variations on a single or two similar looks. For me this is a turn off. An interesting take, but still a turn off. Here are some choices that they showcased in the character creation video. I don’t mind a dramatic choice, but there don’t look like there are any “Attractive” or “Fantasy” choices.
I’m not into “Body Shaming” or criticizing folks looks. Personally, I’m not that handsome. But I don’t seek out ways to identify myself with an Avatar that looks worse than I do. At least not all the time.
I admit that there is novelty here. But I’m not clear that this is going to be popular, especially since these are the Only Choices in the game. Looks like a turn off and bad choice for the game. This is a screenshot of the Concept Art from the website. Is this the fantasy life you would choose?
Ok. You’ll see that this is my RANT on Professions in FFXIV. I don’t claim to be an expert and maybe I got something wrong. So what? I’ve played a lot of MMOs and if it’s so opaque and so difficult then stuff it. RANT ON.
A couple of days ago I spent most of the day leveling mining and only put 3 levels on my miner. What a waste of time. There are 70 levels in each profession. How is this not a colossal waste of time and effort for so little payoff? Just a reminder of what we are facing in professions. [Cuts from other websites are done to avoid the images disappearing when other sites change. All cuts are done with the sites name to give them credit.]
Eight Crafting and three Gathering professions. And all level to 70, presumably.
Lets start with gathering. What’s wrong?
The Elin Gunner was released Nov 2017, and I logged in and made one, but didn’t finish leveling it to 65. You know, been busy with FFXIV. So now that I have my male Brawler up to 65, I’m spending evenings leveling the Gunner.
Once you reach level 59, you head to the Tirkai Forest to fight the Argons. You’ve seen them as you’ve leveled, but this is the first time you see what devastation they bring to the land as they invade. The whole area has a creepy blue glow and is covered with their growing pollution.
Level 64
Charlie has reached level 65, got the new gear and flight before finishing the story quests.
The key to doing this is doing dungeons along with Story Quests. At level 61, Charlie did Sabex Armory twice. Both were good runs and that pressed him up to 63 while he was doing the stories. He was using a 50% level post bonus at the time.
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Here are some tricks I’ve learned while leveling professions:
First, set up a cool toolbar to switch professions. I saw this one in a youtube video. Go to character options / hot bars and choose bar 7. You may like another one, but this is the one I saw used and it’s the most convenient for me.
Once you have the hotbar, then drag the items from your gear list into the hotbar and you can switch instantly between professions / jobs.
So you already have a high level job with gathering gear, right? That’s the best way to gather mats of course. And you’ll see that apparently you have to kill a few of whatever mobs before anything drops, so be patient. Odd. Never seen that described, but I didn’t get Yellow Yarzon Legs for about a dozen kills before they started dropping.
While leveling my Alchemist above level 20, I ran out of things to do. But then I found some “Housing” items.
I haven’t yet worked out how to get Guildleves which apparently are special quests for your profession. These are referenced in some guides I’ve seen, but the guy that was supposed to have them wouldn’t talk to me. More research required there.
But these items require mats that you’ve seen before except for the Dungeon Seedling from The Thousand Maws of Toko-Rak so sometime I’ll have to watch for those. Given the strangled state of housing in FFXIV, I’m not sure how these items will sell on the Market, but you get decent experience from crafting them anyway.
Oh, final tip. Use Stealth when fishing, even if you don’t think you need it.
I was fishing at Fools Falls and after a while the level 25 Fate Monster snuck up on me and killed me. Once something attacks, of course, you can’t change to your level 50 whatever and kill it since you are “In Battle”. Luckily some nice person responded to my shout and came by for a rez.
Happy Trails,
:ww
Charlie Nash, named after a Street Fighter character as I’ve said, has now made it to 60. So he’s started the climb to 65 in Savage Reach.
Above are some of the armors I’ve had along the way starting at about level 36 and continuing to the last one at level 60 as I’m ready to board the Airship for the new area. Notice how the previous armor looks a lot better than the new, much more powerful level 60 armor. It’s a Style Reset if you will, in preparation for the new climb to better things in the end-game. More later, but I digress.
To get to level 60, I’ve followed the Story quests with a few dungeons along the way. Near the end, the wait times for the Dungeons near Habere were not worth the wait, so I moved onto Pathfinder Post even though I was 58 and the quest was marked 59. Of course that was no problem for the still overpowered Brawler class.
In case you haven’t tried FFXIV crafting yet, here is what it looks like. So there are a few things to note about crafting:
Elin Gunner was released back in Nov 2017 and I made one at the time on one of my accounts. But last night as I was logging into my accounts to accept the free slots for making Male Brawlers, I came across an account which still had an Elin Gunner Reward box waiting in Item Claim. So I made an Elin Gunner just to claim the box.
I’ve always liked the name Vanellope for an Elin character name, and I have a couple of characters with that name on my various accounts. But then I looked her up and it sure looks like her name was designed for a gunner. I’m surprised that nobody on the server had already taken the name, it was so obvious: Vanellope.Von.Shootz
And I had a pile of Fashion Coupons on the account too. Fashion Coupons used to be a thing. Used to be that each day you would login and get Fed Bills, 5 as I recall, and then you could change them for Fashion Coupons. And FCs would drop at a decent rate from World Bosses and in Dungeons. But Fed Bills are gone, and the drop rate for FCs has been reduced as far as I can figure. Anyway, here’s an out of date site with Elin FC fashion costumes.
Anyway, I got her a sweet armor and gun costume with only about 1/2 of the FCs that I had on the account. Rock On!
Anyway, that’s why I don’t play Tera much anymore. It’s just a late night casual diversion for me now. They kept changing the rules too often:
Anyway, I’m not going to spend anymore money on a game that keeps changing the rules I care about.
:ww
As you level up, and get your achievements, you get the opportunity to purchase some goodies including a sweet mount – at least I think so – and some minions and Barding for your Chocobo. By the time you get to 40-50, you’ll have enough for the mount and a minion or two. To cash in on your Achievement Certificates for the sweet rewards, see Jonathas in Old Gridania. If you are interested in Barding, look carefully before you purchase. There are some, IMHO, dumb choices like the Black Mage barding where the Chocobo is wearing a really dumb looking hat. I particularity like the Wild Rose Barding pictured below. It’s colorful and stylish rather than grotesque.
There are lots of choices for cute minions too, and based on the Wiki pages, it looks like some minions in this game actually help you fight. I have yet to see that happen, but I keep an eye out.
The Magitek Death Claw mount is actually quite nice and only costs 6 Achieve Certs, which is about 300 Achievement points. BTW, you don’t lose your points when you spend the certs. It keeps track of which points you’ve spent, but doesn’t reduce your total. Anyway, I like the mount because it’s smaller than many of the other mounts so it’s less in your way of seeing where you are going. It does make an annoying buzz while flying. And someday in a higher level area, I’m hoping it does actually fly. We’ll see.
Yes, I admit that it looks strange to be hanging from your shoulder blades under the mount. But honestly, it doesn’t hurt a bit and the ride is quite smooth.
Enjoy,
:ww
