FFXIV had a streamed showcase on 5 February, 2021. It was over 2 hours long and can be found here on Youtube. For those of you who may not have 2 hours to spend right now, but want the highlights I’ve put up some slides from the show here. I’m not going to comment very much. There are plenty of folks on Youtube that will do that. But you can get the gist of what’s been announced in short form here from the slides: Enjoy.
Wheew. Not as bad as either Griffon or certainly Skyscale, the Roller Beetle is still a full two day process. Assuming you have all the maps required.
There are a few events that you have to wait on. Notably:
Kourna meta event to storm the Gandara Fortress. But this is on a schedule. You’ll need this for the Plague Scarab Egg for the feed.
Anomaly Spark requires the Ley-Line Anomaly, which I caught in Iron Marches on the schedule.
The Inquest Golem Mark II is on a schedule too in Mount Maelstrom.
The longest wait was in Far Silverwastes to get the Hearty Beetle Slime dropped by the Alpha Beetle event.
I lucked out in Bjora Marches by doing a couple of meta events there that gave me enough Eternal Ice to purchase the rest of the Inscribed Shards needed for the Desert Luciferin.
This is all much easier than even the Griffon or the Skyscale, so take heart and power through. And it’s all much easier if you have a flying mount. I saved lots of time by having the Skyscale before I did the Roller Beetle.
At long last I have a Skyscale Mount in GW2. It has been a long and punishing journey. The longest effort by far has been to get the various parts of the “Saddle”.
After the first few steps, there is the long grind for 250 of each of 6 different materials. This is a punishing grind for a couple of reasons:
(1) There is a throttle on each one of these materials so that only so many of them can be gathered each day. They are account bound when acquired so it’s not possible to purchase them on the market board. If they are gathered, then after so many are gathered, then then the nodes where they are gathered just dry up.
(2) Also, the areas where most of the materials are gathered are very dangerous for solo players. Thunderhead Peaks, and Kourna are so dangerous that solo farming is essentially impossible. I was able to farm Eternal Ice in Bjora Marches and with that material, you can purchase each of the other materials. But Eternal Ice gathering, or collecting from Events or Chests is throttled as well. I was only able to purchase 10 or 20 of the other materials per day since each 10 materials required 75 Eternal Ice. I was able to do chains of Meta Events in both zones of the BJora Marches map once or twice a day to get quite a few Eternal Ice to purchase other materials. It is reasonable to farm Diflourite in the Sandswept Isles as a Solo player and this is quite an interesting zone. I was able to get about 100 Mistborn Motes in a day with gathering and doing events in Dragonfall. I had another 150 or so of those from previous events and gathering from working Dragonfall during the Skyscale Achievements.
Back in October I started working on getting the Griffon Mount in GW2. After some frustration I have that mount now. Mounts in GW2 are account wide, so all my 18 or so characters have access to the Griffon.
It turns out that you don’t have to do all the story quests of “Path of Fire”, but only the last section. At least there’s that. There are some good guides for getting the Griffon. Mostly this is a matter of jumping puzzles to get Eggs and then the cost of about 250 Gold to buy the items required. In each of the Five maps there are eggs to collect and Events to participate in. You purchase various items from heart vendors and others. All in all, a reasonable effort.
I’ve pushed my way through most of the effort, and after grinding for a few days on getting Eternal Ice to get Kralkatite Ore, and a few more days farming Diflourite Crystals, I now need Inscribed Shards. Fighting my way around the map and doing some events got me about 20, and I made another round today for only 6. What a waste of time.
The reason I want Griffon and Skyscale is to have them for the upcoming End of Dragons expansion where we go back to Cantha.
So as of about a week ago, Gameforge has taken over Tera from Enmasse. And apparently Enmasse has shut down and when you go there, Firefox says the certificate is Expired. Not even a good bye.
Enmasse Certificate Expired?
So I fired up Gameforge Tera this morning and made a new character in one of my “Saved” slots. I saved slots we got over the years by putting dummy characters in them with names like “Place.Holder.A” and so forth.
The startup screens have changed and there is some choice that I didn’t look into. The left choice is the game I’ve played before.
The amount of work to get Skyscale to “Fly” in GW2 is punishing. For this amount of work, compared with the amount of work to get flying mounts in other games, this Skyscale mount should fly at the speed of sound and have a damage skill that could kill anything in the game in one shot.
But no. It doesn’t even really fly, as we mentioned before.
This is not a guide. There are better ones out there. I used a Youtube video to find all the Skyscales – Here’s the one I used. Most of them can be gotten if you have the Springer and you can borrow Skyscales from around the world once you unlock the Achievment. For two of the Scales, I had to get help to kill mobs that were nearby. Most of the scales were actually far from mobs, and I had no problem soloing them.
Finishing the last part of the story to unlock the achievement is very well written. Part of it is an arcade game where you’re riding Aurene to bring the Big “K” down. Quite a ride.
I’m working my way through Path of Fire to get the Griffon mount. It’s the first mount that looks like it’s flying, but it’s not.
The second “Flying Mount” introduced into GW2, Living World Season 4 is the Skyscale. This has enhanced flight mechanics, but still can’t really fly.
There must be some “religious objection” to flight. Ever since Gliders were introduced in Heart of Thorns, we could only “Glide” while all other popular games in the genre have True Flight. Well, not really…
Ok. I admit, I’m just a lurker. I don’t pay for Wow any more, I just play the starter or trial or whatever they call it. Yep. Recall that I played it for years and left when in Legion they did the “Universal Level Scaling”. That ruined it for me. Anyway, I check in periodically to see how things are doing, and of course yesterday was the big “Shadowlands Pre-Patch”. So I logged in, made a new toon and ran through the tutorial. I’m not going to spoil all of it. But you can do it too for only about a two hours investment. And you’ll wanna check out the new character customization options, although after FFXIV, I find those completely underwhelming.
Some shots from my Exile’s Reach experience
You are led by the hand, literally, through the experience on Exile’s Reach. It’s a common trope, nothing original here, Blizzard:
The ship to far off lands
The catastrophe that washes you up on the beach
The buddy that’s going to walk you through the whole experience, step by step.
But there are a few Wow specific tropes here too:
The obligatory “Bomb the masses from some sort of airship”, although this airship was just a little rotor and you dangle from a rope. Come on Blizz, the Goblins and Gnomes have better little one-man airships than this.
The “dress up an on Ogre” quest, or dress us as anything else, to sneak into the fortress, after which everybody ignores you anyway as you walk around with no costume.
and the minor dungeon tutorial where the NPC acts, or says she is acting, as your tank while you kill some trash and a boss.
Minor spoiler – watch out for those treasure chests lying around. They keep getting bigger and bigger as you go.
There is a marked difference between the GW2 Story Trials or Instances and the FFXIV Story Instances. I have many GW2 characters of all races and classes, but haven’t played it much recently. Back when Path of Fire came out I worked through the story and maps enough to get many of the mounts: Raptor, Springer, Skimmer, Jackal and Warclaw. I recently decided that I’d like to get the Griffon mount. To do this I need to complete the Path of Fire story on at least on character. So I started with my Necro, which was farthest along this journey. After about 4 hours I gave up in “The Departed” when I could not figure a way to kill “The Soul Eater”.
Windy Weather 