Baud Attitude

Way back in the Everquest days, I had a particular dislike of an NPC named Cros Treewind.  Cros was a high level druid, and he really really liked bears and wolves, and he roamed one of the Everquest newbie zones full of bears and wolves and would instantly kill any low level character he saw fighting a bear or a wolf.

Oh, and bears and wolves were both aggressive to most characters, so you didn’t even have to start the fight.

I was killed by Cros several times before I even knew what he looked like, by the way, because the only thing I typically saw was a single “Cros Treewind begins to cast a spell” followed by “You have been slain by Cros Treewind”.

Oh, and if you got high enough level to come back and take your revenge?  Well, technically he was a good guy so suddenly the local guards would try to kill you on sight and local merchants wouldn’t sell to you and basically he was a colossal dick that you just had to avoid.

So I never took out my frustration on Cros.

He got removed from the game eventually, and very few MMOs have anything even half as player-unfriendly.  Sure, there are Korean grinders and all-PvP-all-the-time MMOs and the like, but I don’t think any other MMO has ever had a friendly NPC who would kill you just for being attacked by a bear.

…except.

FFXIV has these things called “Hunt Mobs”, who are rare spawns that are high level and aggressive and hang out in zones far below their level and who… well, who generally are very large and easy to see from a distance and easy to avoid.  So they’re not really that bad.

But then there’s Marberry.

Marberry is a level 50 Hunt Mob who likes to hang out in little hidden corners of what is otherwise a level 25ish zone and basically jump out at any lowbie who comes too close to whatever little hidden corner he is in today.  When I was originally playing FFXIV a few years back, he killed me a LOT.

I have several jobs at max level now.  And the PVP queues are a little slow, so I have time between matches.

So I have been just sort of casually hopping back to Marberry’s home zone while I sit in queue, and checking each and every one of his spawn points – trust me, I know them all by now – and murdering the hell out of him on a regular basis.

Eventually I will probably get tired of this, but this poor punching bag of a mob is serving to get out YEARS of delayed revenge against not only himself but also a druid from a 20-year-old MMO that he has absolutely no connection to.

It’s good fun.

Lest you be in any suspense as to the results of my dalliance with beating up the other human players that populate Eorzea, I have not gotten any better.  I appear to possess negative PvP skill, and there is a firm argument that, when I die, the total PvP skill on my team actually increases by a fair amount.

That’s OK, though, because getting the cosmetic PvP armor I want doesn’t take skill or winning or any of that crazy stuff.  Every armor set costs 14,000 “wolf marks”, and a loss in the game’s mass battle “Frontline” mode rewards you 500 or so wolf marks.  Winning, which is a pipe dream, gives 1000.  So it’s better to win, really, but not essential.

In addition to the points for winning or losing a match, you also get 1000 marks for your first frontline of the day, and another 1000 marks for playing seven frontline matches in a week, and another 1000 should you WIN three of those seven.

I… haven’t yet gotten that bonus this week.  I’m at like, 2 for 11.

However, I did get enough currency from my turns as a catgirl punching bag to put together the healer PvP set.

Compared to the heavy armor look of the tanking set, it’s a much softer look.  There’s still a robotic theme to the visible bits, but the poncho sells the “this is a support character” look.

If you want the with-the-blast-shield-down-how-am-I-supposed-to-see-anything look, you can do that too.  It doesn’t light up like the tank set.

The back is basically just a reminder that Square should really do something about clipping tails.  Catpeople are the most popular race in the game, and all of the armor tends to look like this:

Seriously, it would not kill them to model in a notch.

It also has some awesome high-top sneakers.  I’m not sure how battlefield-appropriate these are, but let’s throw matters of a practical nature aside in favor of cool.

When I was masochistically running battleground after battleground in WoW in search of the PvP armor in THAT game, it took me ages because it was doled out completely randomly at the end of each match – there was no saving up currency and simply walking over to a vendor to fill out my virtual closet.  You could knock out the cosmetics in FFXIV in a week or so PER CLASS without doing much more than running a single match every day.

There ARE some super-grindy cosmetics and mounts locked away in the darker depths of the PvP achievements.  Some of them require, like, 300 frontline wins to receive.  For the people who really want to dig into PvP and make it Their Life In Eorzea, it’s good that they have that to look forward to.  For me, I’m comfortable with the super casual rewards.

In the past, I’ve mentioned that I play a lot of different MMOs but rarely dive into the PvP side of things.  PvP is one of those things that rewards skill and commitment and… well, I generally don’t have a ton of skill or enthusiasm for it, so my typical role in any PvP scenario is to try not to feed too many kills to the opposing side.

The biggest exception to this rule was Rift, which had a wonderfully-flexible skill system that let me create a character that looked like a fragile DPS class but that was actually really tanky and had self-healing abilities that nobody expected.  My role in Rift PvP was to seem like an easy kill and lure two or three members of the opposition into chasing after me, then keep them busy while the rest of my team took advantage of their sudden numerical advantage.

It worked pretty well.

I also did a fair bit of PvP in WoW, and whenever I get the urge to jump back on THAT particular treadmill I spend five or ten minutes in the PvP section of the game’s official forums and confirm for myself that, yes, Blizzard still hasn’t done a damn thing about the faction imbalance.

But let’s get on to what I really wanted to talk about, which was the PvP side of Final Fantasy 14, what drew me into it, and whether it’s a good time.

You know, I can save you all a lot of reading and just answer those questions with a) good-looking cosmetic armor and b) no, it’s pretty awful.  But, should you keep reading, I have words and pictures.

Let’s start with the cosmetic armor, since one of the highlights of the recent FFXIV patch was the addition of some very mechanical-looking armor sets.

This is the tanking set, and I obviously fell in love with the look to the point where I spent most of a weekend day slamming my face into the PvP brick wall in order to earn enough of the currency I needed to buy it all – even the hat, and I generally don’t bother with hats.  The red light on the visor can be toggled on or off which is a neat little detail.

Here’s a slightly more close-up view.  I can’t quite decide what it reminds me of.  It’s got a bit of Crysis to it, maybe?  Or Mass Effect?

The axe isn’t from the PVP set.  It kinda goes with the theme though.

And a back side shot.  Not a backside shot.  I would say that this isn’t that sort of blog, but it kind of is.

Basically, it’s got all sorts of exciting glowy bits and sharp angles and just does not AT ALL fit in with the high fantasy theme that most of the game embraces.  Then again, you can ride around on giant plush cats or flying beds, so it’s not like Square minds a bit of immersion breaking.

Getting the full set took playing 18 PvP matches, which obviously isn’t a ton to build an opinion from, but I’ve got one anyway.

FFXIV PvP has three modes.  “The Feast”, which is an affair that drops your four-man team into a small arena with another four-man team and asks you to kill the heck out of each other, “Frontlines”, which drops three 24-man teams into a much larger arena and asks you to kill the heck out of each other and also periodically do some objectives that I never really got the knack of, and “Rival Wings” which drops two 24-man teams into a MOBA, where you have a bunch of NPCs running around in addition to all of the other players that you need to kill the heck out of.  Rival Wings was particularly difficult to understand going in blind, so I only played one match of it.

For a quick hit of PvP, “The Feast” is probably the best mode, and it’s where I spent the majority of my PvP matches.

Not that I was very good at it.

FFXIV has the typical “what do we do with tanks in a PvP situation, anyway?” problem that plagues almost every MMO.  In the PvE side of the game, tanks exist to keep the attention of NPCs away from the squishy healers and glass cannons, but players are slightly more intelligent than NPCs and can simply ignore the tanks.

Everquest II and Scarlet Blade are pretty much the only MMOs that actually did anything intelligent with tanks in PvP, and the combined player base of those at their peak was probably enough to fill a medium-sized 24-hour pancake house.  But I digress.

Anyway, FFXIV’s solution appears to be to make every class just ridiculously difficult to kill. I’m not sure that healers CAN be taken down without at least three people devoting their entire attention to the task, and even your typical dress-wearing black mage can soak up hit after hit.  It doesn’t make for a very interesting time, if I’m honest, and it’s particularly dull as a melee class since FFXIV melee has a terribly short range and people can easily dodge and dance their way out of reach.

This is where “Frontlines” actually shines, by the way.  When you have 24-man teams, it’s not that hard to actually reduce the other side’s numbers pretty quickly if you catch them spreading out a bit.

I’m sure that there are some people who REALLY get into the kick-ball, stick-ball, kill-the-guy-with-the-ball side of FFXIV, but  I’m not one of them. It was a grind that never got to be ungrindy, and the best thing I can say for it is that it didn’t take TOO long to get the stuff I wanted from it.

Except, I kind of want the healer armor set.  And maybe the bard set.  So, it’s looking like I will get back to this next weekend. I’ll update this if it manages to hook me.

After a few weeks of not logging into any MMOs, I’m back on the Final Fantasy XIV train.  I took a break when I realized that all I was doing was logging in to grind out some currency that I could convert into extremely small upgrades for my character, and I’m back now because they released some new story content and a new raid – which is a lot more fun than just watching numbers get slightly larger.

Naturally, I jumped in to some older content to knock the rust off before doing anything too strenuous.  It went about as well as you’d expect.

After that very quick warm-up, I decided that I would jump in to the new raid, which is the first of a planned three-part series of 24-man raids based on Nier: Automata, which was one of my favorite games of 2017.

Short summary: It’s really fun, and they did a better job of integrating the two universes than I expected.  The raid available at this point more-or-less follows the story of the Nier: Automata introduction, then throws in a heck of a twist and a cliffhanger just at the point where you expect it to end.  The next raid in the series probably won’t be available for at least six months, and it’s going to be a rough six months.

There’s gear, of course, but the real money prize is a set of cosmetic armor that lets the lucky winner dress up like everyone’s favorite android.  Only three sets of this drop on any given raid, so actually getting your hands on it means beating out some pretty stiff competition.  Some of my guildmates have run the new raid upwards of ten times without being favored by the RNG.

I should feel bad about getting it on my first run.

That actually wasn’t the most surprising achievement of choosing today to return to FFXIV.  The BIG achievement was buying an in-game house, which may take some explaining if you are used to sensible MMOs which provide an unlimited supply of instanced housing.

FFXIV is not sensible.  There are four housing districts, each one with 18 wards, and each ward has 60 houses available for sale.  If all housing plots are sold, you simply can’t buy a house.  The only way to get a plot is to wait for a house owner to go 45 days between logins, at which point their house is demolished and the plot is made available for sale.

…well, let me expand on that, because that doesn’t quite cover it.  After 45 days, the plot enters a state where it WILL be available for sale at some random point in the next 24 hours.  It isn’t immediately buyable, and there’s no way to know when it will become purchasable.

I play on Tonberry, which is a very old and heavily-populated server.  Any housing plot that comes up for sale usually has a small crowd of people gathered out front, all of them repeatedly clicking on the “for sale” sign in the hopes that, when the house does tip over from “not available for purchase”, their mouse click will be the first one to hit the “Buy now” button.

It’s one of the worst aspects of an otherwise pretty decent MMO.

In the same patch as the new raid, they added three extra wards per district.  Houses in these new wards aren’t immediately available for purchase by new homeowners, however.  They are intended for guilds who don’t yet have a guild house, but are also available to current homeowners that want to relocate.  

People who relocate help the housing crunch in the original 18 wards out a bit, since moving dumps their old plot back into the market, albeit with a random timer on when it can actually be purchased.

The plots that are available after this, of course, are usually in the less-desirable housing districts.  Yes, Final Fantasy XIV has desirable and undesirable neighborhoods to live in, and I recognize this is ridiculous, but let’s move on.

I logged in earlier today and realized that there were quite a few plots available in the lousy neighborhoods, and none of them had anyone standing at the for sale signs waiting to buy them.  There were also a few available in nicer parts of Eorzea, but those were seeing a lot of competition.

I tried a few “for sale” signs, but even here most of them gave me the “this plot of land is not yet available for purchase” message.  One did NOT, and the game quite happily took a huge sum of virtual money from my character and welcomed me to the ranks of the landed gentry.

I then trotted off to one of the NICE plots in the new housing wards and told the game that  I would like to relocate my living quarters, at which point it charged me a second huge sum of virtual money and suddenly I realized that I was now tied to never unsubscribing for more than 45 days ever.

I spent roughly six million gil to own this house.  That is about 60% of all the in-game money I have earned in my character’s lifetime.  It gives me no benefits other than the vaguely warm feeling of having a personal space.

So, with the raid down, I should get on to the new story content.  Then… well, I guess I’ll be waiting for the next content drop.  Maybe I’ll spend the next few months trying out different wallpapers and rugs.