Category: Games

Game shareware utility programs or discussions on gaming topics.

Aethertech Class – Play As a Mech

A popular class in MMOs is the “Engineer” or Mechanical class. Usually employing gunfire of some kind. GW2, Wow, and Tera all have Engineer or  Gunner classes. One of the fetishes for these classes is a big gun. Well, for the Aion Aethertech class, the gun is bigger than all the rest.

This Mech is not a mount, but actually the weapon for this class.

It flies, and glides and when you “Disembark” you are carrying a CypherKey, which only allows you to “Embark” to ride your Mech. The Mech skills include punches, rockets and rocket powered fists. And this is all out of the box at level 10.

Tera Gunner, eat your heart out. My “Gun” is bigger than yours.

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Spiritmaster Pets

So far I’ve seen four pets of the Spiritmaster: Fire, Earth, Water and Wind. The Wind Spirit looks like a small griffin with a white / blue mane. The Tempest and Magma spirits appear, depending on your Faction, at level 50.

At about level 25 I’ve seen these pets. I prefer the Wind pet, although they all probably do the same damage and I’m not clear on any reasons for choosing among them.

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Character Boost Pricing

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I was just checking on some account services for some of my characters. These are ones that I’ve created a long time ago and need a coif and makeup.

Plastic Surgery is very like Wow’s Appearance Change and costs a little less. Rule of thumb: Game currency is a little more than a penny a coin. So about $10 on Aion and $15 on Wow. About the same.

But here’s where it gets weird. Say you want to play end-game and you don’t want to slog through all that leveling on the way and you have some coin to spend for that? On Wow a Character Boost will cost you $60. Since Battle for Azeroth is coming out and will raise the level cap to 110, I’m not sure what will happen. This price is for the level 100 boost that was active for Legion, the currently active expansion. So, $60 to start playing end-game content.

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Be A Glamorizer

My toons are level 50 plus and I’m farming “Main Sequence Scenarios” for Ironworks Gear for all my jobs. For some of the jobs, IronWorks Gear is very stylish. Paladin’s for example get nice looking black gear with blue highlights, like the rest of Ironworks gear. But Healer Gear looks like a Habit, and it’s a real drag for a man. So I decided to study up on Glamorizing my gear. In this article you’ll see that Glamours have changed. When first introduced to the game, there were three types of crystals, one for each Armor type – Cloth, Leather and Plate. But since path 4.2, it’s a much simpler system, and more accessible too. Glamour prism crafting used to unlock at level 50, but now you can unlock prism crafting at level 15, and in practice you can craft glamour crystals with two professions at about level 20, and at least one DPS job at about level 40 to farm the Wind and Ice Crystals is needed. More details later.

All the popular games have the ability to change the look of armor while leaving the stats alone. Wow calls it “Transmogrification” and Guild Wars 2 calls it Wardrobe. In Tera, there used to be a system similar to Transmog, but they removed that system and now you just wear a “Costume” that changes the look of your entire set of armor, or weapon. I guess Tera went big into “Selling” costumes to monetize the game. FFXIV sells “Costumes” too of course, they are just level 1 armor sets that can be Glamourized to any armor. You may have gotten a “Strife” armor box when you created your character.

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Recruiting the Realm

There is a Main Scenario quest called Recruiting The Realm.

Unlike most quests in the game, it’s not obvious how to find the folks that you need to visit. Except for Alphi, who is well marked. For the other targets, only the general areas are marked on the map, and especially in Limsa Lominsa, these folks are not trivial to find. There is a page for the quest with a list of the targets with their coordinates, but this is not that easy to use either. So what I’ve done is taken a picture of the mini-map for each of the targets.

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Be Sure and Have a Healer Job

I mentioned in a previous post about what happens at level 50 and running the Castrum and Praetorium for Ironworks Armor. And I probably mentioned that it takes 30 or more minutes to queue up for this each day because I played Red Mage or Bard, which are DPS. Well, Silly Me. Healers only wait 5 minutes for these events. Duh.

I have tank jobs, but after you run this, you see that it takes a while to learn the ropes, even as a DPS. There are apparently no shortage of tanks that want to “be in charge” to run this. If I were going to run as a tank I’d need to make a map of the place and have that on another screen. The Castrum is a flat area so that would be easy, but the Praetorium is a multi-level maze, so you really need to learn to run it. I can easily keep up as a DPS or Healer, but I’m not sure I’m up for leading. Anyway, Healer’s don’t wait very long.

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Elder Scrolls Online – First Impressions

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Elder Scrolls Online, or ESO, is a long time active title that has an enthusiastic following.  I recently saw a complete history of “The Elder Scrolls Franchise”, but oddly, this video leaves out any mention of The Elder Scrolls Online.

I recently saw that one of the Youtubers that I follow for FFXIV, also plays ESO, so I thought I’d give it a try.

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Leveling 50 to 60

Once you approach level 50, your job gets a couple of quests that given them better gear. A quest at level 45 gives all the major armor pieces except the chest and the job quest at level 50 gives the chest piece.

At level 50, the Main Scenario Duty Roulette gives you access to a repeatable quest that gives Tomestones of Poetics, usually referred to as simply Poetics. These Poetics are exchanged in  Revenant’s Toll for Ironworks Gear, which is item level 120, and is the most easily attainable powerful gear at this level. Each run takes about a 30 minute wait followed by 30-45 minutes for the run. The cutscenes cannot be skipped. Also each run gives a large amount of XP – usually enough to grant a level – and either 200 or an additional 200 if any member is doing the duty for the first time.

But what about the Main Scenario Quests – Heavensward expansion quests- beyond level 50? Don’t those help level? As it turns out, no, not at all.

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