Chains of Promanthia Mission 5-3 Complete - Finally!

I finally finished up Chains of Promanthia Mission 5-3 this weekend. For those of you familiar with the Three Paths mission, you may understand the level of work it took to get all of the various segments done. The missions themselves weren't that bad, honestly. But the time it takes to gather up a group is horrendous. By this point in the game the Chains of Promanthia expansion has been out for quite some time. Most people who play are either already done with the missions, or not too concerned with progressing down that storyline. Consequently, it can take a very long time before you find others willing to join your cause and no concession has been made to allow low-man or solo progression available.

The rewards for other players to redo the missions to help strangers or acquaintances progress don't come anywhere near the level of effort it can take to complete the fights -- most notably the next mission I am up against, 6-4 The airship fight. (Consumable items for one attempt alone can cost upwards of 50,000 gil - a far cry from the 1000 experience points you can get as a reward.)

So, yes, I suppose you could say that I am a bit more that just a little annoyed with the whole process. It's a methodology of madness that I can only pray won't make its way into Final Fantasy XIV. Another thing that would be helpful in the newest MMO installment of the Final Fantasy franchise is better objective tracking. The only way to confirm you have gotten a specific cutscene required for mission progression is to either revisit the NPC, or find another NPC designated for the area to replay custcenes that you have viewed previously in that area. Then again, I am not certain that all of the NPC interactions can be accessed in the latter method. So much for looking at your Mission status in the menu. Three Paths was particularly bad with this. On more than one occasion, and even once by myself through a bit of confusion, you will get in a party and make your way to the point where you can engage in the fight only to find out that someone missed a step somewhere along the lines. At that point you can either disband and try again another time, or wait while they traipse across the game world searching for the cutscene they missed. We're not talking a 30 minute wait, either. Some of these chains can take an hour or even hours to complete once all the travel is factored in.

So why even bother? Really, I think the only reason that I'm even sticking around this long is to finish playing my Blue Mage. I simply love the way the class plays and I enjoy the different roles you can explore by changing your subjob. My most enjoyable experience thus far has been subbing Thief and helping with both damage and hate control. It's been over a year since I last played in a party with my Blue Mage, time enough to take several breaks and to level both Beastmaster and Red Mage to 75 and Black Mage to 60 (mainly to use for the CoP missions). My Blue Mage is at level 72, at which point I left it until I could unlock Sea access in order to obtain the most valuable spells in the Blue Mage arsenal. Without these spells, I'd only be a mockery of the potential the job offers, a gimp BLU that others snicker and laugh at, confined to Fields of Valor or Campaign.

Oh well. I'll keep you updated on my progress.

A Yellow Chocobo? Are you kidding?

Well, a few weeks ago I decided it might be fun to breed a chocobo for digging purposes in FFXI. I've got my dig delay time down to 6 seconds and I've read that digging with a raised chocobo helps to level digging skill noticeably quicker than with rented chocobos.

With this in mind, I tried to find players who had parents that had digging traits and chocobos that were of colors other than yellow. Unfortunately, not as many players have bothered with the whole chocobo raising thing this far after introduction. There are probably a few different reasons for this. I imagine that the time involved is a major contributing factor. Also, the thing that both aggravated players and burnt them out with the whole process initially has been near negated with the addition of dyes that can be used to temporarily alter the color of your raised bird.

Breeding a red male to a black female and selecting the tour de Jeuno for the female's traits gave me a chick that was born with substandard stats in all categories, but with the Burrow trait already learned. I had high hopes for this bird, as I paid nearly 40,000 gil for the vouchers for the parents that resulted in the egg. I took great care in checking in on my bird, even paying expensive internet charges to quickly log in to feed and walk the bird while on a Caribbean vacation with my family. Imagine my disgruntlement when the day came when you can first detect the color of your young bird. Yellow. So it turns out that one of the players I bought a voucher from sold me bad heritage. Perhaps Square-Enix should have implemented some kind of pedigree system. What it comes down to is that at least one of the parents had a yellow bird somewhere in its background.

Disappointing, yes, but not the end of the world. Had I been dead set on a colored bird, I could quit now and start again, but at this point I suppose I'll just go for digging stats and use this bird for digging only. I've already got a pure-bred blue chocobo, so it's not too big of a deal... I guess.

My Final Fantasy XIV Predictions

Well, I posted my FFXIV predictions to Triond the other day. I, like many, am eagerly awaiting the announcement of closed beta invites in hopes that I may be one of the select few that get to preview the game in its pre-release state.

Take a minute to check out my article to see what might be in store with the latest Final Fantasy MMO. Of course, I could end up being way off, and I do have a few more notions that I would like to put out there, but I would love to have a few more people chime in on the things I've thrown out there. Do you disagree with some of my predictions? Great, leave a comment and let me know what you think. It's all subjective at this point, but at least we can have some fun guessing about how the game will turn out while we wait.

What's Triond? Triond is an online article publication site that pays you for articles you submit. You get paid based on the number of people that visit your articles and you get a share of the ad revenue based on certain factors. From what I've found, the articles I've written with content relating to online games have done quite well. If you like to play Final Fantasy, why not get paid to write about it? If you want to know more about how the whole thing works, let me know and I'll write up a blog post to help you get started.

-Bradybones