FFXIV – Dun Scaith

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It was a big weekend for me in FFXIV, as I managed to finish up the Heavensward Main Scenario Quest, so I stand ready to begin Stormblood this week (just in time for everyone else to be finishing it :). However, since there is usually a two or three day lag between my gaming events and posts about them, let’s continue with last week’s adventures…

Normally I try to stay semi-focused on meaningful progress when I’m in an MMORPG, but I had a bit of time to kill Thursday so I started wondering if I could pick up two more points of item level so I could check out Dun Scaith, the final alliance raid in Heavensward. It would do little or nothing for me at this point, but I had a couple of quests in my journal that required it, and I just wanted to see it.

I went over to Idyllshire to check out the vendors, and I was surprised to find out that I had a stack of over a thousand Tomestones of Poetics. I’m not sure where they came from-I guess a combination of leftovers from before Stormblood and the various post-Stormblood activities that give out Poetics like candy.

The poetics allowed me to buy a 270-ilevel ring, bracelet, necklace, and earrings, and that was plenty to get me over the threshold.

I jumped into the Duty Finder without even researching the raid. Past experience has taught me that there is so much to think about in these raids that I can’t absorb even a fraction of it just from a video. (If you watch MTQ’s videos on Dun Scaith, it is literally wall-to-wall explanation in a near monotone from start to finish-hard to digest.) I have to experience it firsthand, then review it later to find out what I did wrong.

Past experience has also taught me that the community is probably overgeared for the raid by now, so one little DPS that doesn’t know anything probably won’t hurt that much. Or so I hoped.

I was expecting it to take all day to get into the raid, what with everyone doing Stormblood stuff, but it only took about 10 minutes. (Later I learned I must have been extremely lucky, as it was the only time I could get in.)

On par with every other alliance raid, it took about 45 minutes to complete. I died a lot. But there were no wipes, so it was a smooth run. I even got some new boots. I wasn’t expecting to get new gear from it, but now that I know there’s a new set of gear to acquire, I feel like I have to get it. :) I tried to queue a couple more times but they never popped, so I should probably give up on it. New Stormblood gear is just around the corner anyway.

I ended up with enough excess Poetics to buy the ilevel 270 Shire Conservator’s chest piece. It’s kind of a grayish meh, though. Not terribly appealing. But I got my ilevel up to a nice, round 250.

One other thing I did was try to find out what to spend Wolf Marks on. You get these from PvP. I have over 12,000 of them now and there’s a 20,000 cap and I have no idea what to spend them on. The vendors at the Wolf’s Den Pier have plenty of gear but it’s all for level 50 and 60 characters, which doesn’t help me much. I wanted to buy stuff for my Dark Knight job, which is now up to 36. I thought about getting some White Mage gear but the highest-level gear I saw was only ilevel 110 and I’m already wearing ilevel 115. Anyway it seems a bit pointless to buy PvP gear at all since everyone gets the same stats inside the arenas. I suppose it’s all meant for glamours.

I’m in a similar boat with Company Seals, too. I’m at the 50,000 seal cap and I have no idea what to buy with them. Nothing at the Grand Company vendor looks useful to me.

Oh one last thing I worked on between everything else was the long-neglected Hildebrandt quests. I just got the Manderville dance and unlocked the “Battle on the Big Bridge” trial-that should give you some indication of how far behind I am. That questline is … well, let’s just say it’s bizarre.