Kilieit

Yeah - for Doma, and Othard in general I assume, you're looking at horses. All the Domans in MSQ call chocobos "horsebirds" and complain about how bad they smell.

Technically the lore suggests that some people's Echo grants them the ability to learn more quickly, and to learn multiple disciplines. One of these people is the Warrior of Light, who is able to master most - if not all - disciplines of War, Magic, the Hand, and the Land. However: I feel like most people agree that that's a lore fudge to excuse the game mechanics of people mastering every class on one character. If you're interested in gaining people's approval in RP, I would advise caution. Most of the time, in most RP, people will be put-out if you say your character is a master in every field. Like, their character has spent her whole life studying to be X, and your character is just as good as her or better... and better at Y than her friend, who has also spent his whole life studying Y... and better at Z than his friend, who has spent their whole life studying Z? It feels unfair. Especially when you're talking about, like, twelve different disciplines. It's best to pick one or two, three tops, that your character best at, and say they're dabbling in the rest. It can be fun to roleplay learning from others! I would leave your character room to learn from other people's. Having her begin as a master at everything to begin with does not do this. And even in stories (rather than interactive RP), people relate more to characters that try and fail than to characters who succeed at everything. Decide what you want your character to do with their life; what do you want people to think of them as? Then pick their skills to bring that idea across.

This. Au Ra do not worship the Twelve. And yet, you pick a Guardian, from the Twelve, at CC... I picked one that suited Aghurlal from a meta symbolic standpoint - he, too, has a destructive father, seeks to build something better, and utilises the very tools his father utilised to destroy in order to do so. Likewise Cinu-a, another "wanderer" - and Shuukami, another proponent of icy vengeance.

I can't take Aghurlal (he hasn't done his character development bit that'll let him go to the Shroud yet) but I have a number of other characters - I'll try and pick one to take! Most likely are Telluric Medic, Confiance Desferme, or Y'Trinity Taqa. Only Medic is in the linkshell, so I thought it worth noting the other names.

As far as I can tell, yes to all. I don't know the past FF references (my only FF game was the original Crystal Chronicles for GameCube...), but: Soul Crystals are used in training people in Jobs because they make the learning process faster. Every time you gain a new ability during 30-50 job quests, there's a flavour text describing how the ability was revealed to you by the stone. . In several of the 30-50 job quests, you are granted visions of the Crystal's previous wielder; and, sometimes, that vision can speak. This may be in part due to a manifestation of the Echo (remember that all of the canonical quests are presented in the context of the player being an Echo user), but off the top of my head, I can think of the DRG 50, SCH 50, and some of the WHM 30-50 quests that do this. . Additionally, I believe that several Soul Crystals have canonically been mistaken for regular gems, or fitted into artefacts. BLM and PLD sprung to mind. I'm sure someone else can come in with a loredump and proper citations for most of this, but that's what I got off the top of my head. :3

Of all the DRG skills I miss most when I'm not playing DRG, the biggest one is Invigorate... RIP my TP bar

Mumbles into my hand. I hope they start phasing out PS3 support this expac. What? Graeham reminded me I still want my horns and face preset to be separate options. So Aghurlal can have curly-forward ones, like he does in my original artwork of him, without losing his babyface... Also housing item limit. I mean, I would hope they provide a good 6-12 months of notice, so that people who only play on PS3 have a decent amount of time to obtain a PC or a PS4. And I would also hope they provide a solid method of transferring PS3 licenses to other platforms for little or no cost. But nonetheless. If they want to keep moving forward with the tech used in the game, at some point they're gonna have to throw in the towel on the 10-year-old hardware...

God, yeah... I'm a PC player, so I think I have more room overall than you do. But, right now, my main DRG hotbar is full. I do not have any room for anything else in my main rotation. Anything else and I won't be able to reach it with the 1 to = keybinds, meaning that, because I'm a dumbass, I'm liable to forget to use it (when was the last time I remembered Phlebotomise exists? We just don't know). If they raise the level cap by another 10 and, accordingly, add another ~5 abilities... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While I understand the bit about people throwing a hissy fit when you don't have protect, the rest still makes little difference, imo. It's Sastasha... you don't need Eye for an Eye... nor a cleanse. (OR for that matter, protect really, but yeah...) Selene or Eos both have Embrace out the gate and that's really all you need. They go around hugging people who are hurting while you're placing your dots and spamming ruin. As opposed to being on CNJ where you, personally, are spending time casting that cure, fiddling with switching in and out of Cleric Stance, and casting a DPS spell somewhere in between. I mean, it's neither here nor there as it's only Sastasha normal... but SCH still, in my opinion anyway, wins out over CNJ/WHM at that level. Yeah, I think this is a difference in playstyle. Personally, I queue as healer because I enjoy healing - I find it satisfying to have tools to solve problems, and frustrating when literally every single one of those tools is arbitrarily taken away from me. "This makes it easier for you to DPS" isn't something that makes a healing class appealing to me, like, at all.

Armoury bonus being per-account instead of per-character would be absolutely amazing. Utilises tuning for an existing system, still doesn't speed you through MSQ on your first go around, and rewards you properly for finishing on one character before the rest.

While the rest of your story was entertaining, this very first line confuses me. Why would you go as any other healer class when with SCH you literally let the faerie do all of the work for you, effectively letting you become a third DPS... Or even just a lazy shit that watches YouTube while your faerie does all the work. I mean...once WHM has regen, then yeah I personally switch over. But SCH all the way as, again, the faerie can literally take care of the healing while you sit in cleric stance and DPS the whole time. At Sastasha, I can cross-class Protect or Cleric Stance. Most groups prefer you to use Protect and throw a hissy-fit if you don't. Selene's signature abilities are also locked out (Sastasha caps at 18; she learns her third ability, the AoE cleanse, at 20). Which means no cleanse, and no speed boost. Whereas CNJ/WHM has Protect and Cleric Stance and Medica and Esuna, all natively, all available in Sastasha, and, last but not least, you can cross-class {Eye for an Eye} (which you don't get as SCH until ACN-34). So yeah that's why. Especially when the chance is so high during early dungeons of getting a brand-new, shiny, Genuine Leafling group who are going to cause a lot of problems just by virtue of never having done it before. If you're queueing specifically for Sastasha (and/or Tam-Tara), I don't think I could recommend taking SCH if you can go as CNJ/WHM instead. I play SCH because I enjoy its versatility - but the level sync in Sastasha preserves absolutely none of that versatility whatsoever. Yeah... the bees are technically surviveable, I guess, if you're a tank with full VIT, decent gear, on full health, and with defensive cooldowns up. I think it's best to just keep the tank topped off as a priority, treat them as instant-death mechanic, and have a happy surprise if they aren't. If the healer was blaming the tank for dying to bees but wasn't keeping them topped off... the healer can jog on.

I signed up to Sastasha in-progress (as SCH - this was a terrible mistake; never queue sub-20 dungeons as SCH if you have CNJ/WHM available. Lesson learned.) to try and help a friend whose healer had AFK'd. I hoped and prayed I would get into my friend's group for an easy run. My prayers were not answered. They were not answered at all, my friends. In fact, I think Oschon was listening in on my prayers and silently noting how to spite me in every way possible. So I zone in. It's two DPS in what I can only assume is a pre-made, given the fact they haven't just quit. They're at the second pull and one of them evidently just died, because she's stood next to me as I zone in. What... what happened, I think, that could possibly cause the tank and healer to quit after the second pull? I learn this isn't actually even the second pull entire; one of its mobs is gone already. What... I don't have time to finish forensically investigating this mess, because we get a tank. Great, I think, barring the DPS being absolutely ridiculous we can get this done and all go home. Assuming this was my second mistake. So while the tank picks up the mob, I do my usual routine of... well, no, wait, I can't throw {Eye for an Eye} on the tank, because for some stupid reason I don't have it yet, even though literally any archer or lancer can cross-class it for themself if they want to. I figure he'll probably be okay, top him up, leave Selene with him, and run off to check the note. "Green," I say. I realise the tank is on much lower HP than I had expected, even with no E4E. What? Oh. He's run off. Away from Selene and into another trash pack. Okay. I fetch my faerie and sprint to catch up, topping the tank up and-- oh, wait, immediately gaining aggro from one of the mobs. What? He's been taking them for several moments already, surely he should have picked them up... whatever, I heal-tank the damn thing while the DPS take them out one after the other. I watch the tank over the next few pulls to try and figure out what's going on - he's not using Unleash. At all. He's cycling through mobs one at a time, doing the 1-2 aggro combo, and then... sitting on his thumbs, I guess? Because it takes him an age to get through all of them, even on small pulls. Selene is tanking now. She's better at it than this guy. We get to the first boss (holy shit, you guys, I've written ~5 paragraphs already and I'm only at the first boss) and the DRK runs to - blue. Um. Okay. "I said green ;P" I say in /p while running to green myself. It's just happenstance that I got their first and activated it first that means the tank doesn't trigger a trap. There's then an awkward ten seconds of the DRK spinning in circles, and both me and the PGL (the leafling ARC is silent throughout this entire run, btw) start running towards the switch, until the DRK finally triggers it. I regret not having {Esuna} (even Selene's cleanse is locked out at Sastasha level) because just about everyone stands in Charged Whisker. Whatever. I figure the DRK is probably new to the class, the leafling is probably a genuine leafling, and the PGL is just a bit slow 'cos it's Sastasha and who cares. I can deal with that. ...yeah, we carry on, and I notice the PGL is pulling aggro a weirdly large amount? Apparently the DRK noticed, too, because they started passive-aggressively marking the mobs. (They're still not using {Unleash}, by the way.) Only... the PGL is already attacking the correct mobs... and is still ripping aggro. Mmhmm. The DRK starts, um, charging off very confidently towards side rooms, and OH HELL NO. I am not doing a full clear with this group. So I take his lead, in a way, and start equally passive-aggressively placing waymarkers to put us back on the main pathway. It works. Oh, but what's this? Do my eyes deceive me? No, he bloody well did it again. He's still not using {Unleash}... ...no, my friends, he has cross-classed {Flash}. At this stage I am pretty sure the tank is a) an asshole b) trolling us. I signed up to help my friend in Sastasha, and instead I ended up as an unpaid babysitter for this guy's jollies for half an hour. I fear my resentment was beginning to show openly in /p, because - no, wait, this was perfectly justified. As we make the approach to the last boss (me, the PGL, and Selene are still basically tanking, btw) the DRK runs over the line and triggers the boss cinematic. By the time I'm cancelled out of it, DRK is on 10% and oh yeah, did you know the fence of the Sultana's Lap breaks line of sight? Because it does. (Me) thanks for locking me in a cinematic and LoSing me mid-pull I am so ready for this dungeon run to be finished, you guys. But no, this guy has one last hurrah to throw out. The adds spawn; all of them immediately aggro on me. I run towards the DRK. A useless endeavour. Not even a cross-fucking-classed {Flash}. I am trying to heal, but I'm being interrupted at every cast, and now so is Selene. And the DRK has this wonderfully helpful contribution to make: (DRK) ignore adds (DRK) burn (Me) please tank the adds then (DRK) scrub I am so glad he left before anyone could potentially give him a commendation. Saving grace: (Me) lol what a horrid tank (PGL) hfc i know (Me) did you see (Me) he had cross classed flash (Me) incredible (PGL) like jfc learn your job (Me) at least we got through it (PGL) that is very true (Me) have a good afternoon/evening both of you (PGL) you as well And a single comm, presumably from the PGL. (ARC still silent.) I think I've had my fill of pick-up groups for today...

It's completely possible for lowborn to join the Knights Dragoon, yeah.

I would have to find it, but I'm 99% sure a dev has said that it has to be a special vial of dragon's blood concocted specifically to serve that purpose, but it may not necessarily be that hard to make, as it was apparently distributed to a lot of heretics. After all, dragon blood is a relatively standard high-level alchemy ingredient for stat-enhancing potions. I mean, I know Alphinaud has said this or that, but NPCs have proven in the past to be unreliable sources for lore. Yeah, if there's dev confirmation on something then that takes precedence over whatever half-remembered thing I recall from MSQ I did last month Either way, it's diluted but not that diluted.

Well, Ishgardians are the only ones who have such a large portion of their history devoted to fighting airborne foes; which explains why they're the only ones to have developed such a style, at least as far as we can tell. And especially within the current living memory, Ishgard has had a very closed-off foreign policy - until very recently, it just wasn't that likely that anyone who wasn't born there would gain enough prestige and trust to be trained in one of their most exclusive forms of warfare. But besides all that, I mean... okay just gonna spoiler tag this. It's sort of tinfoil hat stuff and I'm not sure if any of it is confirmed, but it might be useful inspiration-wise?

As far as lore is concerned, I think anything's physically possible, within reasonable bounds of human-like divergence. I think the model presets are designed just to show the most common builds and features for an adventurer of the race in question. Doesn't mean they're the only ones. I mean, just with the Au Ra for example, we know it's possible for them to gain presumably quite a bit of weight in fat - but the in-game models aren't like this because chances are most adventurers are going to be relatively slim. ...but as far as representing in-game goes, yeah... we're pretty limited. In terms of the attitude conveyed by cposes and emotes, as well, it's a pretty specific "feel" from each race/gender preset combination... I'm lucky the au ra male emotes suit Aghurlal pretty well, on the whole. There are some emotes on some characters that I've practically blacklisted myself from using because they feel so OOC for the character.

Three of my characters existed on Zalera first, and there are still clones of them there, but... they're still level 1. I'm spending enough time and effort levelling my Balmung characters (all eight of them); alts on other servers are a bit outside of my reach at the moment...

So in the last few days I've been thinking of running an event. Or more of a plot, really, since it'll span 3-4 actual events if I stick to the initial idea I have here. I was thinking about how difficult it is to obtain in-character connections for Rogues' Guild characters. Because rogues are pretty flighty, right? It's hard to do stuff like you might for other classes - "ah yes, a conference on conjury" or "wonderful, a drinking session for gladiators"; but rogues don't want to reveal they're rogues, unless they're working. So something like this has to be... work. For the characters, at least.

I considered doing this for Aghurlal - his horns would've been more accurate, too - but his height still would've been way out (just in the other direction), and I would've been having to constantly correct people on his gender. Didn't seem like fun to me (get that trouble enough IRL), so I opted for overly-tall dude preset instead. At least the au ra male preset has hella hips. That much is accurate for him.

Our FC was considering making a showing to the Frankfurt one, but it's a bit expensive in terms of money and effort... I'm not sure anyone's actually made any concrete plans. I have a dumb phobia of passport control and can't make any of my "trusted people" come with me, so it looks like I'm giving it a miss this time around. >:

Actually yeah that's a good point. Chocobo porters are much cheaper - and much more of what your average commoner would expect to pay for. Comparable to a private taxi, I guess? And I'm afraid I don't have sources, but I seem to recall that adventuring pays, like... really really well. So the amount of money we earn as players - and as the Warrior of Light, remember, that's what we're considered to be in gameplay terms - can't really be compared to the average income of a regular person, even if you take into account the whole 3 minutes IRL = 1 hour in-game thing when it comes to per-hour pay. I guess the other place you could look to, for inspiration if not confirmation, would be other FF games..?

My only measure is the PGL quest NPC who mentions something like 200 gil is "almost a week's worth of--" something, because she's cut off. So I don't know if she means a week's food, a week's pay, a week's gear repairs, a week's drinking fund... I usually just fudge it, avoid listing specific numbers. I'm kind of crap with numbers anyway - I have a LD that means quantities are fuzzy at best to me - so I either estimate based on similar cost of in-game item, or I just say "some gil" - "not too expensive", "fairly steep", "pocket change", etc. I think it's feasible to avoid listing specific prices on in-character menus and so forth. Provide the list of items, provide a general meta value-statement ("upmarket restaurant" vs "cheap grub"), and let people emote the payment like "hands over exact gil amount", "hands over payment plus generous tip", "hands over gil but is a little short", etc.

For real... search info is only really long enough for the absolute vitals, and even then people don't always look at it. Bring on addon legality.

I actually have this problem too, with a really simple issue: my character's height. In RP, he's 5'9''. But the shortest his preset can be in-game is 6'6'', so his in-game model is 6'6''. This means he's about a head shorter than his own in-game model. This is a relatively small detail... until you have people emoting flavour that they're "looking up at the tall Au Ra" or "craning to see him" and so forth, when actually he'd be about the same height as them. Suddenly I'm having to backtrack and whisper them OOC to correct them. There's such a variety of heights in-game, so I can't just emote him as "the short au ra" off the bat, either. On the grand scale of things, he's still pretty tall! He's taller than most midlander hyur. He's taller than the huge majority of miqo'te, and taller than every lalafell. He's still taller than the huge majority of auri women, too. He's just... shorter than his in-game model looks. It's a lot harder in in-game RP to just slip in details about his relative height compared to the scenery than it is in longform RP - especially when we already have a visual (his in-game model) that's contrary to what I'm emoting, leading to confusion. It feels awkward as hell to whisper people up front before the RP even really begins like "yo btw my character is a head shorter than he appears in-game" because while it is one of the first things their character would likely register about mine... by whispering like that, it feels like I'm placing it higher up the OOC hierarchy of facts than it should be. It's not something I necessarily need to "warn" people about before they talk to him. Like, if my character was an aggressive murderer, I might warn people OOC so they don't accidentally initiate a darker-themed RP than they expected by talking to him. His height isn't like that - it doesn't impact the type of RP I do on him; it's just a minor detail, story-wise, that happens to be visually obvious to other characters in a way it isn't to their players. It feels like by telling people before it's relevant, I'm shoving it in their face unnecessarily and making it out to be a bigger deal than it is; but by leaving it until they already made a mistake, it feels like I'm being obnoxious and contrary...

I'm really happy with Aghurlal's apartment. So happy I fudged in a plot device to explain why he can suddenly afford one. I've also spent an embarrassing amount of time (and spreadsheets) planning out the rooms for my other, um, seven characters, despite the fact that only one of them is above level 30. #priorities Hopefully I'll have some pictures to show for it before this time next year...