There’s a lot of stuff I need to unlock in FF14… months of stuff that has nothing to do with Endwalker (Nov 23). So that means I’m working through a list of sorts, with the odd distraction along the way. Unlocking flight per expansion is one of them. I already had it for Heavensward (which retroactively applied to ARR), so it was more about Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

The neat part here is that the process is zone specific, rather than expansion wide. Boon and bane because each zone requires:

• Finding all the nodes on the map (8 or so) that attune you to the wind. Some of these are really simple, but there’s always one that’s a milk run to find.
• Completing 5 quests. One of them is on the MSQ chain. The other 4 are (with only 1 exception) simple quests.

The end result is a somewhat tedious process of unlocking it, with what effectively is an achievement system. I can take tedious.

Because the alternative is to not have any flying, like WoW insists upon every expansion. Or when they do, to put so much time gating that it takes weeks to get it done. They are either very complex faction quests that only open over days of effort, or are reputation grinds that take weeks to sort out.

But why does this even matter, what benefit does flight actually give?

Faster Access to Places

There are 2-3 places you can instantly teleport within FF14. I’m in the starting (level 1) city, I can easily reach the level 80 town with 2 clicks. Getting to anywhere is already pretty smooth. Moving around in the local map is certainly faster, and a huge benefit to gathering classes or FATE hunting. Since gathering is a sort of minigame, it’s not something that is easy to automate.

WoW has flight paths, boats, and portals. Getting to Shattrah is a crazy complex exercise. Northrend? Let’s say you want to do Bastion of Twilight, you’re looking at 15 minutes of travel. It takes forever to get anywhere, and flight gives you the ability to set your compass and just do something else. It also helps gathering bots, as the act of harvesting is only 1 click.

Access to Unreachable Places

There really aren’t any of these in FF14, at least that I can see. There are however places where it is difficult to reach, or time consuming. Stormblood has quite a few locations that are a vertical challenge to reach – and the final zone in Shadowbringers is really weird in that regard.

WoW had this at the start – TBC really went all in with this idea. Since then, it has instead relied on teleporters / flight paths to get people around. Navigation is relatively easy now, at least in terms of landscapes.

A Safe Place to Rest

There are only a few spots in any given map that are dangerous for players to AFK in FF14. Maybe you really luck out and a FATE spawns on you. Otherwise, you’re pretty much always in a safe space.

In WoW, almost any area is a death trap full of stuns and knockdowns. BfA was really bad for this – good golly was this bad. It makes the world feel more threatening and meaningful. For a couple weeks at least, then it’s just more hurdles to get where you want to go. The weekly raid bosses are a good example of this, when the game is fresh it’s actually hard to get to them. Once you have a few ilvls, then it’s just mosquitoes. Flying bypasses that annoyance.

A Sense of Pride and Accomplishment

Hah! No it doesn’t. You had it before the expansion launched, lost it because you are “discovering” a new world. The definition of explored is the debateable one.

FF14 doesn’t put a ton of focus on world exploration, at least in the context of the maps, outside the MSQ. So by the time you’ve completed the entire MSQ, there really aren’t many corners left to see.

WoW on the other hand has a LOT of exploration and optional content. I do buy the argument that if you bypassed it all, then there is still a lot of content left to do without flying. I can almost see why factions are a gate, since they are the prime mechanic to explore the map outside of the main quest. Now… does doing the same quest every day for 6 months a valid measure of explored? Ehh.

Forward

I think the fundamental bit where time management feels like it’s more respected in one game vs the other is they key differentiator. As much as this has been about flying, the real thing is how the developers view the players and what they are trying to do with their time. It’s an interesting design paradigm that applies to so much more than this singular issue – but is most certainly highlighted.

Not that I need to write a guide, but the information out there isn’t the clearest out there. Mainly because there are options depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. I mean, obviously you want to hit level 80, but what else are you doing?

• Are you trying to maximize money?
• Are you trying to go as fast as possible?
• Do you already have a level 80 job (e.g. MSQ complete)?
• Are you leveling crafting at the same time?
• Do you have a PILE of levequests available (3 come automatically per 12 hours, caps at 100)?
• Do you have a few ranks in the GC to purchase consumables?

Get Flying

Don’t bother with any gathering profession until you’ve unlocked flying for that expansion. Seriously, unlock that stuff. It’s faster than you think and a HUGE time saver in the long run.

Consumables / Gear

• Anything with 3% experience should be active at all times, you can find cheap food almost anywhere.
• Your GC sells books that doubles exp, last for 18 hours, and work up to level 50, for up to 1m exp. You’ll need a dozen or so per job.
• Your FC buff will give 10% bonus exp.
• The pre-order earring (20% bonus exp) doesn’t work for gathering.
• From 50-80, job quests reward books that double xp. You will get more than you need.
• You can buy gear in all capital cities. Not worth buying tools, and marginally for armor (not at all if you level 2 at a time).
• I do not recommend any jewellery purchases, or materia.

From 1-50 the job quests give more than ample rewards. You won’t get any jewellery, which is fine for the early levels. After 50, you will upgrade you gear at 53, 63, and 73. Why these levels? Because that allows you to equip everything but a belt with very good stats to get you to the next 10 levels. You can buy from the market board, which can be a bit pricey, or just complete the job quests at x3, x5, x8 and x0 to get basic versions.

This stuff mainly applies to Miner/Botanist – Fisher is all about Ocean Fishing and way more zen.

Class Quests

Every 5 levels you can access a Class quest. For normal quality items, buy them from the market. For high quality items, you need to farm them. Use the 100GP skill that increases HQ chance. I suggest that you “bank” 2 of them and get half way to the 3rd. So complete the level 20 quest, gather up until lvl 33, complete 2 quests and that should be enough to unlock the 3rd.

Levequests

These come in 2 flavors – a simple delivery and then a timed event. Early quests are more delivery focused, and once you hit 50 all quests are the later one. The ones prior to level 50 are also split across towns based on level ranges. Avoid those early ones like the plague.

You really want decent stats for these. There’s nothing worse than having a 40% chance to collect the base item… things drag on.

I would STRONGLY recommend having flight available for any levequest.

tldr; don’t do levequests before level 50.

Beast Quests

Not worth it for levelling.

Job Quests

From 1-60, you can buy all the material from the Market Board – and you really should. From 61+, you won’t be able to buy the material, you’ll need to actually gather it. This part can be tedious, as even with good stats, you’re going to have a 5% chance to collect a HQ item. Do them as they become available, they give great experience and odds are you can sell the gear for 20k per piece.

Starting (1 to 10)

This is simple enough, you just harvest for your given class, needing a level 5 node to pick from. North Shroud for Botanist, Central Thanalan for Miner. Get to 10 and head back to complete the class quest.

Choice A – Levequests or Diadem (11 to 50)

If you have TONS of Levequests, you can just pound through levels with relative ease, assuming you are just teleporting around or playing the market board for items. It is not braindead though, and it can cost you some gil.

Alternatively, you can head to Foundation and then Firmament (take The Brume exit). This will give access to some minor quests and unlock the Diadem. This is an instanced location where you start off heading to the left, take an air current, and land on an island with tons of nodes. If you have flying, this is ultra easy mode. This is brain dead and you will end up with Ishguard materials by the truckload. You can use these to level a crafting class, or sell them on the market for some rather easy gil. This is super brain dead and easy leveling up to 50.

You’ll unlock job quests every 5 levels. You can technically skip them all, as they have no impact on the ability to collect material from the Diadem and you buy the quest items on the MB.

Choice B – Levequests or Diadem (50 to 60)

Experience slows dramatically at 50 because your dbl exp consumable won’t work anymore. If you don’t have a pile of Levequests, then stay in Diadem. Diadem becomes extremely brain dead at this point – you can turn on a movie and just get to it.

I would strongly suggest Levequests instead from 50 to 80. They are much easier to locate (capital cities), come in batches, and should be giving a couple levels per turn in.

50 to 80

Levequests are the way to go, and you should pump up the difficulty for better rewards. You WILL need to use skills to maximize the harvesting, so that means some decent investment in jewellery to have enough GP. Pick up 2 of them, they should be in the same zone, and then go to work. This part goes relatively quickly as it’s much more streamlined than the 1-50 portion, and the maps are generally better designed.

Remember, it is always better to collect a base material than to miss a HQ one. Hit the base one for a chain of #4, and you can get a 100% chance on the final swing.

The only Gil you will receive is from the quest rewards. You won’t be able to sell any material gathered. If you want to recoup that money, then you should use this time to keep Retainers leveled up and once at 80, consider how market rates work on your server.

Let’s start with a disclaimer in that the all the allegations of abuse at Activision Blizzard are abhorrent. At no point am I defending any of those actions, and I’m not too far away from the idea that it’s simply too corrupt to continue. It’s a farce to believe that capitalism exists – it’s an oligarchy driven by a sole purpose, more power through more money. Power corrupts, plain and simple.

In my prior post I was somewhat curious as to what the fallout would be of the DFEH lawsuit. Considering what came before it, the odds of any significant impacts were rather low. A few shuffles, but generally not much else.

We’re at 2 weeks now, and J Allen Brack is gone (no surprise, he was named in the suit) as well as a formal release of the head of HR (who was out of that position in January, indicating knowledge this was all coming). That’s expected. The replacements with Kotick-assigned members is also expected, given that has been the trend for nearly 10 years now.

There are other bits in this too, all standard things that are part of the corporate dance. There’s an internal bad cop, the staff express dismay and write a letter, the good cop steps in with some sort of plan to address it (but not). Shareholders complain that the value of the stock is tarnished. There’s a lot of hand waving is what I’m getting at.

Kotick is a smart bugger, you have to give him that. Employees wanted a big response… they got one from one of the largest law firms on the globe. A firm that will report to Kotick, and zero reason to anything other than the bare minimum.

Tangent for a second. Amazon treats most of their employees as garbage and disposable (enabled by our massive consumer tendencies). They account for turnover rates near 150% per year. Amazon employs so many people and turnover is so high that they have a corporate risk that there are not enough people to replace those leaving and that they will have burned out that pool. In other words, they are at a point where it’s possible there are not enough people who want to work for Amazon in order to keep the thing moving. This is a new concept, where most companies figure that cheap labour is practically infinite (and to Amazon’s credit, they somehow found the value of that term.)

Kotick has only one concern here… making shareholders happy. Doesn’t matter who is stepped on to get there, there’s always another job applicant waiting to fill in the ranks. The stocks dropped by about 10% when the news broke on July 26 (the volume commensurate to shorts) and then bounced to halfway to continue the year-trend of a downward slope. The anticipation of the Q2 report had another dip (5%) which has pretty much bounced back after they reported that they met their financial targets (well, Activision did. Blizzard is still hemorrhaging players and their pipeline is even dryer than before.) And if you think he’s not going to do everything in his power to crush any possibility of a union, then you’re not paying attention.

Is it a good thing that Activision is trying to build a corporate culture on top of a “bro” culture? Honestly, yes. Corporate cultures evaluate risk to make decisions. Blizzard assumed (from the allegations) that a reminder was enough to stop the bad behaviour. If anything this raises the floor of bad behaviour to the industry average, rather than the bottom. Industry is still very bad, so it’s more about the lesser of two evils. There’s no “return path” for Blizzard here.

All back to the topic of actual meaningful change. I don’t see that actually happening in this case, not unless there is a massive financial incentive to do so. I’d love for that to not be the case, but we’re talking about companies that rake in billions of net revenue dollars per quarter (close to $10b a year). It’s like if you had $10 dollars and I said you need to pay me 10c a year and do what you want to your employees.

If ever there was a time for me to be completely wrong, I wish it was here.

All good looters have some RNG, though there’s a lot of debate as to how that RNG is applied. Diablo 3 went through two major revisions, with a horrible first pass under Jay Wilson, and then an amazing rebirth after Reaper of Souls. Games with any duration need to nail this down at the fundamentals, or they risk turning into Anthem 2.0

The good news here is that Outriders appears to get this part right, and mostly because of the combination of mods, limited stat pools, and weights.

Level Up

I do want to start with the mechanic of levelling up a weapon. From 1-40, the costs are relatively minor, depending on the quality of the item. Blue items in particular are super mega cheap to upgrade. At 40, you need Pod Resources to upgrade an item, and you need significantly more every increase. Enough where it’s pretty much 1 run per upgraded item.

Mods

Every green/blue item can have 1 mod. Any purple/orange item can have two mods. If you disassemble an item with a mod, you ‘learn’ that mod and can re-use it as much as you want. You can replace any 1 mod on any item. There are tiers of mods too, with purple items having the best ones right now. Orange items have some solid ones too, but they are quite situational – and you probably want to keep their good mods on the item and replace the other one.

This mod effectively lets you slot 6x boosts of your choice based your playstyle. 90% chance you’re going to want to mod on something like Death Chains for some really high DoT damage. Rather than hunting for an item with a perfect mod while leveling (pre item lvl 50) you can use pretty much any drop.

Limited Stat Pools

This is the real smart part… each item only has a set amount of stat rolls possible, and you can’t roll the same stat more than once on an item. Here’s an explanation. Given that each class build has a favored set of stats, you’re really drawing from a limited pool of options. So let’s say I want with my stats… well I want

• Firepower Bonus (not Health or Anomaly)
• Long Range, and Short Range/Cooldown Reduction (not Status, Leech, or Healing)

Those are actually some decent odds!

Random Weights

One bit I didn’t get into is the randomness on the base stats of an item. Armor and Firepower roll in a given range for any item, and a fairly significant amount as well (25% it seems). This isn’t anything earth shattering, and as a general rule doesn’t mean much for Armor. Weapons though…25% is a lot. The range is set on drop and isn’t related to item level. Purple will roll higher than blue though! It has nearly no impact on the quest portion of the game, but does mean a whole lot in expeditions.

Expedition Scaling

The gains from gear are not linear to the challenge from enemies. I’m at CT11, with ‘maxed’ out items for my level with the stat rolls I value. Enemies themselves are more challenging, either in new abilities from the champions OR simply having more hit points. The grunts aren’t so bad, but the champions and end bosses a heck more painful. The timers on expedition progress are generous enough to allow relatively easy movement of +1 CT per run, but I do die often enough now.

Right now, it seems the best path to CT15 is to find amazing rolls in the sub CT10 space, and then just upgrade them to get to CT15. Find an amazing weapon with a good mod, and same with 2 solid armor pieces. The rest can sort itself out.

Overall

That doesn’t mean you’re going to see the best gear drop quickly, but it does mean that there’s higher odds of finding something useful as you go through. It’s not the drop speed that we see in Diablo 3 now, where there are tons of catch up mechanics to optimize the RNG, but it’s a hell of a neat way to get people to keep playing!

More than anything here though, this goes to show that you don’t need a super complex loot pool to make it interesting.

I’ve gone super passive with WoW now that Valheim is taking up so much time. That said, I try to log in every day or so to post up some stuff.

With 9.05 coming today, it’s really the inclusion of valor tokens that would see any possible player spike. Maybe that will cause more players to run content, and therefore an uptick in new gear. New runs = new consumables. New gear = new enchants & gems. New tokens = likelyhood of alts actually playing.

Why is this important? Because the AH right now has become saturated due to low demand. An enchanting shard that went for 60g is now less than 30g. It’s not possible to make any profit on any enchantment. Potions are in a similar space, where the sales are much less than the value of the materials.

Of the various methods I’ve applied to make gold:

• Leatherworking (cosmetics or other) move 1 item every 5 days or so
• The cloth shuffle (Cloth–> Bracers –> Shards) turns in a 5g profit (I peaked at 70g)
• Transmog flips have dropped in volume by 75%
• Glyph sales are still oddly consistent.

I’ve now acquired all the glyphs that turn a 500g profit, but one (that’s a super rare WQ in the broken isles). Dark Absolution was the most painful of them, given the single run per day. It has sold for 12k a shot, and costs about 600g to make. I’ve also come to terms with the need to mill my own pigments for this, as Sallow can be quite expensive.

The Curve

I’m showing the gold progress from when I started Shadowlands til now, across all characters. You’ll see the trend is somewhat linear, while I only really stated the gold making efforts about a month ago. I have a habit of leveling characters with gathering skills. The monk was an herbalist, the DH was herbalism & mining. The first went the campaign route, the latter took the threads of fate route. Both turned in a similar profit range from the 50-60 portion. The daily quests still give about 2k in grey material, so that’s really the floor on the curve. Anything under 2k a day means you’re not playing, or at least it means you don’t have any cares about gold. Which, you know, makes sense given there’s very little to actually spend gold on.

Just looking at this you can see when I started playing Valheim pretty darn clearly.

Anyhoo, in the general goal of quickly paying for tokens, it would seem that 2-3 minutes a day selling glyphs is by far the simplest route. I’ve got enough gold now for 10 tokens at current value. I’d have to hazard that the prices on tokens goes up given the sheer glut of gold all around. But that’s for another time.

Still trying to find the right battle plan to make a quick token. The context of Stormrage is that it’s like 95% Alliance and one of the largest servers, so there’s a TON of competition in the market. That means prices are generally lower due to competition, but that there’s more general gold to make through higher volumes.

I’ve got a few methods that are proving effective.

#1 Transmog Flips

I’ve made about 200k since starting in just flipping transmog items. I scan once a week (takes about 5 minutes to complete), load up stock, then have a 24hr auction go up just around prime time. I usually have 30 or so items up at a time. I don’t bother with anything under 1k, or that sells less than 0.03 items per day. Just not worth the hassle.

#2 Glyphs

This one I lost a ton (like 15k) of money on because of the way the crafting was calculated, I then hardcoded it to be 100% based on market value, not milling value. Since then, there are a dozen or so glyphs that sell for 2k each, and I clean house every day. They are almost exclusively Legion glyphs, which are not from a vendor but require either a really long quest chain, faction exchange, or rare drops. This one is borderline more profitable than Transmogs, just takes a lot longer to set up.

A nice side note, I purchased 1000 Sallow Pigment (needed for Legion glyphs) for 1s each. The median price is 60g. Hell of a steal.

#3 Cloth / Shard Shuffling

There’s always a shuffle you just need to find it. In SL, it’s turning cloth into dust/shards. You only need level 50 (do the intro quest) and get like 20 tailoring in SL to get access to the blue bracers. They cost 10 Shrouded Cloth, 2 Lightless Silk, and 3 Penumbra Thread (which has faction discounts, so 7.25g is the cheapest price). They DE into 1.4 Shards, and 1.5 Dust.

At my market rates, it costs about 77g to make and sells for 105g. So let’s say 25g profit per. I can make / DE about 10 in a minute, so 250g per minute profit. Getting a good deal on cloth, or having a spike in value on dust/shards can (and has) doubled that profit margin. That’s the nature of high volume transactions, small changes can have massive repercussions.

#4 Transmog/DE Farming

To get the recipes for the glyphs, I needed to grind quite a bit. The best selling items drop from TBC zones, by and large. I could spend say 30m chain running dungeons and make a decent coin. Anything Legion and below I can chain pull the entire zone, bring to the boss, nuke everything, lag for 10s while I loot, and do it again to clear the dungeon. DE the BoP items, DE the BoE items that won’t sell, mail transmog item to an alt, and sell everything else.

Raids are also good… set it to 25 players and you’re pulling in 4-5k a run easily.

Things that are NOT working

• Leatherworking transmog is not working, at all. I think I sold 1 piece of Pandaria gear which should turn a decent profit. The costs are minimal thankfully. If stock sold, I’d have close to 100k profit.
• Alchemy prices are crazy volatile. Herbs go up and down 25% a day with no reason. Pots are all over the map. I could make 100g at 8pm, and lose 15g at 10pm.
• Enchanting remains stupid. Unless there’s a mystery source for cheap purple shards, there’s nothing on the AH that turns a profit.
• I have not tried BoE group farming. I prefer to set-it-and-forget-it, and grinding even for 100k/hr is not something I enjoy.

Token Prices

It’s around 120k for a token. Transmog can easily cover that, but the profit/minute is all over the place. The Cloth shuffle, at 250g/minute would mean 8 hours. Glyphs turn about 10k a day for 2 minutes of work, which does turn into a month affair but only 25 minutes of actual effort.

Can anyone turn a profit? Yeah, install TSM4, don’t configure anything, and just fill up the AH with your bags. Optimizing that profit takes more thought process, as would be expected. It’s an interesting mini-game.

Leveling and Torghast so far have a thumbs up. They have their quirks, but all told, positives. Now for the Maw.

I clearly remember the Timeless Isle in MoP, targeted as a daily activity to hunt down rares and frankly, gear the crap out of any alt you may have had. It was an interesting zone, and really quite innovative at the time. Each expansion has brought their own version to bear since then, with varying levels of success. Legion is still a high water mark for me. Nazjatar I have a crazy dislike due to zone design, and Mechagon seems like it could have used the space better. The less we talk about Tanaan, the better. None of them allowed for flying at the start, but all of them allowed mounting.

The biggest point about all of these is that they came after the main expansion, and were mechanically bound to catch-up mechanics and new storylines.

The Maw is this weird space where it takes a lot of pieces of those zones and puts them at the start of an expansion. It has plenty of rares and it’s own faction. Travel is improved over time. It has an interesting (-ish) time gate mechanic so that you can’t just grind it for hours. On the surface, it’s an interesting proposition.

The challenge is in WoW’s risk vs reward mindset, caked in through nearly 15 years of training. The rewards from the Maw are

• Faction & currency to improve travel (which is character bound)
• Faction & currency to improve RNG in Torghast (which is account bound)
• Faction and currency to randomly improve a low level conduit (character bound)
• Faction and currency to add a gem slot to a legendary (character bound)
• A weekly i183 gear drop chance
• A potential mount (3 days out of 14), but from a quest broken since launch
• Access to 2 more “hard mode” zones in the Maw

You can optimize and get ~1500 faction a day. 42,000 total to max, so you’re looking at a month of daily play to get there (weekly quests are there too).

Jailer Levels

As a time gating mechanic, this sort of makes sense. Level 1 is meaningless. Level 2 is easy to manage, if you’re not in an massive AE battle (e.g. Jailer event). Level 3 is a new level of annoyance, spawning an NPC that keeps you in battle for the entire map. Level 4 can’t be avoided, you just get scooped up and need to kill the target before they kill you, and survive the fall damage. Level 5 is just like level 3, but if they touch you, you die.

It’s entirely possible to run around with level 5, it is not possible to enter combat and survive at level 5. Completing both daily quests will get you to level 2. Hunt rares to go higher.

Early Experience

As a fresh 60, you’re dropped into the Maw to run some basic quests. Horrendously undergeared, and a map that makes little sense, it’s not a good first run. You’ll see some rares, and promptly get wiped out. Most players are going to have a rough time at the 150-ish gear level. That the mobs are so tightly spaced, you’re going to aggro tons of stuff just getting around. And thematically, the zone is supposed to be punishing, right?

I should mention it’s the first open world zone in which you cannot mount, and the game does nothing to explain why that is, or how to change it. If you’re a DK, be ready for a bad time.

Finally, its near impossible to navigate the Maw without an add-on. HandyNotes is practically required,

The Mid Game

Frankly, the only reason to even bother with the Maw is if you like Torghast. Aside from a potential renown quest from your faction, there are zero reasons to go into the Maw. There are no transmogs, the achievements are gated behind harder content, there are no gear drops.

This is further examined as you open up the other areas in the Maw and see that there’s no one there. All the players are in the “starter” area of the map.

The End Game

Is a month end game? I dunno. Is 1 gem slot worth a month’s faction grind? By the time you find value in the Maw rewards, you’ve so dramatically overleveled the zone that you’ll be killing everything in there in 5 GCD. And after you’ve done it once, it’s a near guarantee you’ll never want to see that zone again.

Overall

The Maw feels like an undercooked mechanic. It’s nowhere near as bad as the Isles in BfA, and that’s primarily because it can be done solo. But that’s also the Achilles heel here, if you don’t like Torghast, then there’s no reason to go in the Maw aside from the random renown quest. Every other system in the game offers a better reward for your time, even just walking around.

Credit to Blizz here in that no alts are required (or even suggested) to do the Maw. There’s zero in here for them, aside from a potential weekly quest for renown. It does make you question why they would have designed an ENTIRE zone that no one wants to go through. I have to hold out some hope that there are long terms plans for the Maw. The concepts here are well worth exploring.