Tag Archives: Gathering

Sandy’s MMO Sunday: Gone Fishing

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What a long strange week it’s been. I’ve been sick. There was a lot of watching League of Legends and a lot of playing Final Fantasy XIV. Even though I guess I wanted to take a bit of a break from farming a lot in this game I couldn’t resist the pull and have been spending this past week back on the leveling grind. This time for my crafters and Fisher, which was the last gathering job I didn’t have at level 80 yet.
Of course that couldn’t stand, so I looked at where I was on my Fisher and started tackling, haha, the Fisher quests from level 60-70 that I hadn’t completed yet. I also used a few levequests to get to 70 and then I started doing the gathering dailies that were added a while ago to supplement my Fisher with even more experience. And today I handed in the final few fish for the Crystarium questchain to push me over the edge and get to level 80. Another job leveled and another notch on my belt in FFXIV.

This leaves me with figuring out what my daily routine in FFXIV will be. I expect to spend a lot of time here untill Shadowlands launches at least, seeing as I don’t think I’ll play that much during pre-patch. Of course I’m going to do the event but I’ve already chosen my class so apart from getting used to “new” rotations and talents I think I’m all covered on the WoW front. So that brings me back to FFXIV. Since I’m leveling my crafting jobs anyway the Dwarven beast tribe dailies will stay a daily item on my list. Other than that I’m focused on gearing up my battle jobs so Expert Roulette will be a daily occurence aswell. I may throw in other roulettes aswell, even if it’s just to earn Poetics so I can buy the last few Shadowbringers relic weapons that I’m missing. All together that should provide me with about an hour to an hour and a half of time that I “need” to spend on FFXIV to get my stuff done on a daily basis. Not too bad at all, especially considering the fact that I’ve picked up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 again and want to spend some time getting properly into that game and hopefully finish it in the forseeable future.
Next to the daily stuff I want to finish off the Crystarium quests for Fisher and unlock the title that comes from that. If it’s as easy as the ones I’ve had so far that should be a breeze and probably doable in a single evening or day. There’s also some other Crystarium stuff that I can still do that is related to my crafting jobs. I may look into that aswell. All of this is not that urgent though, but a “nice to do” type of thing. With having all my battle jobs leveled and, hopefully, soon all my crafting jobs aswell I’m rapidly approaching the point where I really need to think about what I want to be doing in FFXIV, especially since I don’t really tackle endgame content there. However my time will probably be cut short by Shadowlands at that point, so I will deal with that once I get there.

All in all I’m pretty happy with my progress in FFXIV and I hope to be able to keep it up and get everything to level 80 sooner rather than later. For now I’ve happily cleared out my inventory of all my old leveling gear and can enjoy the look of a mostly empty armour bag again. Now I just hope I can keep it that way.

Gathering for Glory (and Gil)

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I’ve caught the gathering bug quite hard these days in FFXIV.
After getting my botanist to level 70 in December I’ve thought long and hard about what I wanted to do in the game. My static seems to have mostly fallen apart so I have no idea if I will be raiding in the new patch. I’m kind of worn out from leveling battle classes after pushing up AST and WHM very fast with the Alliance roulette, beast tribe dailies and just grinding roulettes in general. I’m not really in the mood to level another DPS right now and I despise Scholar as class which leaves me with leveling a tank. Which under normal circumstances would be fine but all my tanks are in the level 50 range and it would mean that I would want to run a lot of Palace of the Dead to maximize my experience gained. All in all I’m just worn out of it all so I wanted to turn my attention elsewhere.
I picked up my miner last week and just ran through a ton of leves and weekly handins to get her to level 70 as soon as I could. I actually don’t mind the whole mindless leve grind aslong as I can see some progress from it. And with the buffs to levequests, and the Stormblood ones being much less painfull than the Heavensward ones, I got to 70 in what felt like the blink of an eye. Ofcourse the handins from both M’naago and Zhloe helped a lot here and me being tired and thus being unable to focus on anything else also helped.

Now I just need to unravel the mystery that is Yellow scrips. I’m not going to aim for an entire set of gear for my Botanist or Miner yet but I do want to get atleast the weapons from Yellow scrips. It seems like I will have to farm collectables to stack up on them and then just spend them. Seems easy in theory but a lot harder in practice. I guess I will have to look up optimal rotations to get the right amount of collectability so I can hand in stuff for 23 scrips a piece, atleast that’s what I’m aiming for. I also want to unlock the Stormblood fokelore books and hopefully later on the Heavensward ones I missed aswell. I’ve already gotten both Fokelore books from Stormblood for my Botanist so now I just need the ones for Miner. I’m not sure what they do exactly nor am I really sure how I can start making money of off this but I will get there eventually.

Another thing I enjoy dearly when gathering is that you get to see great scenery and it offers up ample opportunity to take screenshots like the one I took above. Being a tough Miner staring out at the rock formation in the Steppes. I especially adore the cloud formations in the sky and the slight hint of sunglare in my screenshot. Stuff that I’ve not seen as much on my old PC thanks to the fact that I had to turn down all my settings to even be able to play.
Another thing I found on this new PC with gathering is that I have almost no lag. Normally there’d be some time between actions and I was so used to it taking a long time to hand in levequests that I was quite surprised with how smooth and fast everything goes now.
This has made leveling my Miner a breeze and an enjoyable breeze at that. However even though I’ve leveled Miner and Botanist relatively quick and together the last remaining gathering class had fallen a bit to the wayside.

Fisher is a bit typical in the Gatherers section. I’m only level 33 on it right now but unlike other Gatherers it doesn’t really use GP for instance. I feel like I also have no influence over the actual fish that I catch and whether or not they turn out to be HQ. I guess perception still somehow plays a part here as attribute that influences the catching of HQ fish but it’s still somewhat of a mystery to me. Especially considering that for mooching other fish you first need to catch HQ ones, making the whole mooching thing quite an unpredictable event. I now understand why people can spend hours and hours trying to catch a certain fish, especially if it involves double mooching which sounds really like my biggest nightmare. However I want my “Goddess of the Hand” title so I will have to bite the bullet and level up that Fisher whether I want to or not.
Luckily for me I do enjoy the leveling process itself. I like just going from questhub to questhub and fish up a plethora of fish. I get especially happy when I can get my hands on some HQ fish as I’m doing my quests since it means I can get double XP from the leves. I guess I could also fish up some stuff for my Grand Company but seeing as spamming leves is just super fast I feel like it’s a waste of time to do that.
I’m not really sure how long I can stay hooked on this whole leveling game but I hope long enough for me to get Fisher to level 70 this month aswell. This means I can finally convert/sell all the Gathering gear I kept a hold off for the past few months and ultimately empty out my Armoury chest and retainers a bit more. Because that really is my overarching goal with getting everything to maximum level: get rid of all the crappy low level gear that is now taking up space on my Retainers and in my bags.

I want to end this post witha  screenshot of me fishing in my most beloved zone: Eastern La Noscea. I love the sandy white beaches and the azure blue ocean. It reminds me of holidays, relaxation and fun. If I could book a flight to a location just like that I would be extremely happy. But for now I’ll just have to make do with the location ingame.

Gathering up a Storm

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Since yesterday evening or so I decided it was time to start working on my gatherers and crafters in FFXIV to break up the monotomy of just running roulettes and doing beast tribe dailies. Since both my miner and my botanist were the most advanced in level (next to weaver) I decided to tackle them first. I had gotten both of them leveled up to level 56 somewhere before Stormblood hit and then kind of let them rot. I never really got into the crafting and gathering game and the whole scrip farm blew right past me. I have no idea what Fokelore books are or when to buy them, I have no idea about Best in Slot or whether or not to pentameld and I certainly have no idea how to combine everything into becoming a crafting and gathering “god”.

Gathering a spider?

Gathering a spider?

So yeah. I bit the bullet and started leveling both classes again and I have to say everything goes better than expected. I have already brought my botanist up to level 62 and my miner is sitting just shy of level 58. I really want to get this Heavensward part of the gathering process out of the way, mostly because it’s quite tedious and it’s old content. I know there are probably some materials still useful from there and if I would do a bit of market/markeboard research I’m sure both mining and botany can be turned into quite profitable jobs to have. But for now I do none of this, I’m focussing on attaining level 70 first and foremost and after that I’ll see. I still have all my crafting classes to get up and also fisher, but I don’t really want to think about that.

One of the ways that I’m making this leve grind, because that’s the route I’m taking right now just spamming levequests, bearable is doing it to good music and making sure that I take regular breaks. Repeating the same levequest 3-4-5 times over is really boring and I can notice I’m zoning out hardcore as I’m doing all this gathering… And that’s just the leves. The classquests that Square Enix throw at you at certain levels are an even worse nightmare. I have to admit that I bought the items that I needed for the level 60 botany quest off the marketboard. I really didn’t want to spend that much time waiting for a specific node to pop and then praying that I can get HQ items from said node, which is never a guarantee. Especially when you’re sitting in shitty gear like me.
The shitty gear is something that will be staying for a bit because I’ve never done endgame and I’m just really dependant on whatever happens to be on the vendors and at the mercy of the crafters in my guild. Luckily they’re nice people and they whipped up a few gathering accessories for me that should last me a while..

I’m really wondering how the gearing process looks like for gatherers at max level. I saw that you could essentially buy a level 70 set of the vendors but I’m sure that scrip gear is better. M’naago should really help with this seeing as she’s the new Zhloe. Not having a weekly cap on scrips is also extremely helpful so in theory you could be geared in “no time” when you ding 70. I just hope that I can stay interested in this gathering spree untill then.

Another thing that I would like to do (even though I’m waaaaay to late really) is work on the various gathering related achievements. The rewards may be outdated but a golden pickaxe and botany tool still look really pretty so I might just do it for the glamours. It really comes down to just doing the gathering log for both classes and spend a ton of time gathering in the old continents. At heart I’m a collector and achievement hunter and it would fill me with immense accomplishment to just start ticking off “easy” to obtain achievements. Because while logging 1000 times from 21-30 nods in the various regions seems like a huge task, it’s really just tedious. I can’t really be attacked by wildlife anymore because I simply outlevel them, it’s more a question of careful planning and executing. Going for 1000 gatherings in one sitting is pure madness so I figured I’d break it up in chunks of 40. The average amount of gathering attempts is 4 and you’d have to do 10 nodes to get to that number 40. This way I can just keep track of what I’m doing and decide when to take breaks. Every 10 or maybe 20 nodes. Just to keep myself from going insane.
Next to that I want to “complete” the gathering log for both miner and botanist. Again this awards with a slightly outdated primary tool, but it’s pretty and it’s an achievement to work towards. This one will be a bit more difficult seeing as some of the stuff is locked behind timed nodes and I will have to figure out how everything works exactly, but I’m sure I’ll get there.

With dedicating even more time into FFXIV I will probably not be working on my backlog after all. I’m making this choice conciously right now. I just can’t seem to find the motivation and time to really play anything else anyway and the only game I’m really enjoying besides FFXIV right now is Super Mario Odyssey, which has turned into a “find all the moons” grindfest aswell. Maybe the release of Pokémon Ultrasun next week will change my mind, but for now I’m 100% focusing on FFXIV and obtaining as much as possible in there.