I’ve been on a bit of a tear when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV the past few weeks. I’ve been leveling alt jobs and crafters, with getting Warrior, Paladin and Weaver to level 90 and Carpenter sitting at 86 right now. I’ve finished up the Tank story questline for this expansion which was pretty neat and I’ve managed to gear up my Dancer as much as I could with a combination of tomes and the weekly raid. I’ve also started gearing up my White Mage as I may be raiding as that in a few weeks but the verdict is yet to be out on that. It could just as well be Dancer. I guess we’ll see.

My main focus however has been working on getting all the Manderville weapons, which are the relic weapons of this expansion. There’s a bit of a lull in the game right now as everyone is waiting for the new patch to drop. We have a Moogle tome event right around the corner, which has some rewards I definitely have my eyes on, and all in all it’s a great time to turn to something that requires a bit of a grind. I have tried to get a lot of Relic weapons in the years I’ve been playing this game. Some I got during the appropriate expansion, or in case of my Dragoon Zeta right after, and there’s one expansion I’ve completely skipped because I really really dislike Eureka when it was released. Now however we are still on the first two steps of this relic weapon and seeing as how it’s just a tome grind so far it’s relatively easy to obtain them. It’s 1500 tomestones of astrology, which is the non-weekly capped currency, for the first stage of the weapon and then another 1500 tomes for the second. I’ve calculated that it’s about 800 tomes if you do all the roulettes in a day (I know I’m off by a few, but I can’t be arsed to look it up) so that means you get the base and the first upgrade doing four days of roulettes.
All in all not too bad, even though I am slightly disappointed that this is the way Square Enix decided to go for the relic weapon in this expansion. Although the Hildibrand quests tie-in is hilarious, as always, I wish they would make the steps to acquire the relic weapon upgrades a bit more interesting than just “go and grind out 1500 tomes”. Maybe they are listening to the fans, because this is the sentiment that lives in a big part of the playerbase, and the next step will be more interesting than just a tome grind.

Now. I’ve been working down a list of weapons and I’m currently sitting on four relic weapons plus the first upgrade. I obviously got the Dancer one and then I got the White Mage one next. This week I’ve finished both the Warrior and Dark Knight weapons, as shown in the screenshot above, and I’m currently working on the Sage weapon. Eventually I want all the weapons but seeing as how I don’t have all jobs at level 90 yet I have a nice list to work with, making it a doable project. I think I will get to a point where the moment a new job reaches level 90 I will have a weapon for it ready to go. For now though I’m sitting at 4/19 weapons obtained so I still have a long way to go!

As I’ve spent an hour this morning running around in my Dreamlight Valley I’d figure I talk a bit about that game today. A few weeks ago the new patch dropped giving us Simba and Nala, a new seasonal pass and the Easter event. There were also some quests added and of course a variety of new companions, furniture and outfits. But the big three things were the two new Disney characters, the new Starpath (aka season pass) and the Easter event. Which gave me plenty of reason to return to my Valley again after finishing up all the stuff I wanted to in March.

Unlocking Simba and Nala was pretty straight forward. A new room opens up in the Dreamlight Castle, you enter it, you go to their realm. A few quests need to be done that will require you to travel back and forth between their realm and the valley and at the end of it all they agree to come back with you. After which they start to remember that they were living in your valley all along. When they find out that Scar is there you get a bit of an interaction, but otherwise the process is smooth and they move into their home of Pride Rock without a hitch. From there I’m working on getting both to level 10, which in turn will unlock various other things in the way of furniture, clothes, designs and, with Nala’s quest line, new recipes for me to make.
The Easter event is pretty straight forward aswell. There’s eggs you can harvest from bushes and eggs randomly on the floor of your biomes. These eggs you can combine to plant seeds for a third type of egg and you need all of these to make furniture, some meals and to unlock three spring type bunny companions. All in all something you can be finished with in a week. On top of that you also get a weekly and daily quest from Wall-E to catch rabbits and make flower baskets, which in turn will reward eggs. It’s cute, it’s simple and it’s something to do when you don’t have anything else going on.

The Starpath is this game’s version of a season pass with rewards. It asks you to do certain tasks, as shown in the picture above, that will reward you with tickets. From those tickets you can then buy rewards like designs for on your clothing, outfits for the various characters in your valley, furniture and premium currency.
Seeing as how this is planned to be a free to play game once it goes out of early access the game needs to make it’s money somehow, so they implemented a premium currency because of course. The premium currency is also needed to unlock the full rewards of the Starpath and the full range of duties you can do for rewards. If you don’t unlock the premium path you will only be able to get certain rewards and the amount of duties you can do to earn tickets is reduced to three instead of six at a time. As you can see in the above screenshots I have six duties at a time, which means that yes, I used premium currency to open up the Starpath. Why? Because at the time of writing this post the game is not free to play yet. You need to buy into it with a founder’s pack and if you do it comes with premium currency as reward. I bought the cheapest pack, which was €29,99 and so far I feel like I’ve definitely got my money’s worth. I’ve spent almost 100 hours in the game so far (96,6 hours at the time of writing this according to Steam) and I’m not nearly done with it yet. I plan to rearrange my entire valley after I’m done with this Starpath so I can put down all the cool furniture I’ve gotten so I’m sure that will take up a lot of time before I’m happy with what I have. And with the new update coming in June, with another Starpath attached to it, there isn’t a lack of content to look forward to.
This months’ Starpath is tied to Disney Parks and it gives you a bunch of iconic Disney rides, clothes and designs that are tied to Park motifs and a few outfits for Donald and Goofy. There is also a community challenge running to place certain furniture, that you partially get from the Starpath, which in turn gives rewards as well. I think it’s a cute theme and it only makes my desire to visit one of the Disney parks in the US even stronger.

I’m just hoping that they will keep the regular updates coming, and that they tone down the prices of the premium shop a bit because it has people up in arms. And finally do something with the Forgotten Lands biome because the fact that there’s not really much up there, and there is clearly stuff that I need to get rid of but can’t yet, is slightly driving me nuts. In conclusion though I’m more than happy to play AND pay for the game in the foreseeable future. Let’s hope it’s a bright one!

The past few weeks I’ve been completely sucked back into FFXIV again. As I’ve written about it in previous posts and if you follow me on Twitter I’ve been working on multiple things at once. I got my Weaver to level 90 yesterday and have now started working on Carpenter. I’ve also completed the Studium questline associated with Weaver and it was adorable. The Loporrit beast tribe is my main source of leveling crafters for now, together with the weekly hand-ins to Ameliance Leveilleur. Granted it’s not the fastest way of leveling, but just doing 3 dailies per day is something I can keep up with.
Simultaneously I’m leveling my Paladin on the other beast tribe dailies, the elephant people, daily hunts and 10 FATEs for the weekly challenges. It may not be the fastest way to level, seeing as I’m using roulettes for something else right now, but I’m still getting about 1 level every two days this way and am now sitting comfortably on level 85. I don’t really mind leveling like this since I think Paladin has way too many buttons and I don’t think I’ll ever play it seriously, but I do want to get it to max level and this is the least stressful way to go about it.

My daily roulettes I’m using to grind tomes for the army of Manderville weapons that are available right now. I have the base and first upgrade done for Dancer and White Mage and the base for Warrior and I’ll get the upgrade for that tomorrow. I’m going down the list of classes that I have leveled to max so once I’m done with the Warrior upgrade the next one will be Dark Knight. Inbetween all the roulettes and leveling stuff I’ve been going through all the sidequests in my questlog and slowly ticking those off one by one. I need to go back to the Firmament because there’s a lot of them that popped up for me and I need to pick up the quest in Mor’Dhona to unlock the newest deep dungeon as well. But I’m in no rush to do so and I’m actually pretty fine just working on leveling alts and grinding out the many tomes I need for the relics.

Next to FFXIV I’ve been working on the newest content in Disney Dreamlight Valley, which includes the Easter Event, and I’ve started a new playthrough on Bravely Default II on my Switch. Oh and I’m leveling my Warrior in World of Warcraft to prepare for patch 10.1 seeing as I’m going to reroll to her instead of my Mage. I just really needed a game away from my computer and not something where I have to stare at a small screen on my 3DS so I figured I finally start tackling my Switch backlog. I think I have about 60 hours of gametime staring at me in Bravely Default II and I don’t think I will finish it in the next two weeks, but it’s something I can play when I feel like it or when I have some extra time on the weekends or my Wednesdays. I expect that I’ll have more time for it once I finish my stuff in my valley, but I’ll see when I get there. For now I’m going back to hunting down eggs and doing all the new content that dropped with the patch on April 6th. It’s a busy time with my games but I’m enjoying it! So let’s hope that sticks for a while.