Final Fantasy XIV, Part 14 (Two Week Owlbear Diary)

The weather has been getting nicer and the shelter-in-place order in my state has begun to lift, so there's been less Final Fantasy being played lately. I still like compiling these snapshots into posts, though, and I plan to do so for as long as there's something worth writing about.

Saturday, May 16. Heavensward complete! *trumpets and fanfare*

Sunday, May 17. Went out foraging for mushrooms in a rainstorm. Found about ten pounds of pheasantbacks. Ate 'em on toast with some sauteed onions, wild leeks, garlic, and fresh green peppers. Didn't get around to playing Final Fantasy today, but I feel like I leveled up Culinarian in real life.

Drippy and his new friend, a flying laurel goobbue, soar into the midnight sky

Wednesday, May 20. Raid night. We went up against (Extreme) Titan, Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, and Bismarck. This might've been the most successful raid night yet. Without a doubt, the highlight was killing Bismarck with an unsynched party of five just to see if we could do it.

We tried the same thing with Ravana and couldn't quite make it happen, so that's on the docket for next week.

Drippy and Truffle check in with the Vath storyteller after yet another fearsome battle with Ravana

Friday, May 22. I've got over well 3,700 screenshots at this point, so here's a few croppings from the Great Gubal Library and the Antitower. No sense in pressing Print Screen compulsively if I never show off the highlights, right?

One of the eldritch guardians of the Great Gubal Library

What a beautiful place.

Some undated things that occurred at some point:

Drippy went back through Haukke Manor with Truffle and Aericka. This time, Truffle was healer, Aericka was tank, and Drippy was DPS. We're all a little wobbly with our off-roles, but that's honestly a lot of fun for me. It's nice to figure out some of those earlier dungeons for ourselves instead of always running with a veteran group. We wiped a few times on the last boss, but eventually we stuck the landing.

Cutter's Cry PUG of the Month

Also, while running Cutter's Cry with the fine group of random individuals pictured above, we wiped on the endboss. I should say, they wiped. Drippy held his own, and managed to down the Chimera after a whole lot of sprinting, potions, and a lot of comboing into Storm's Path. Oh, and of course, party chat spamming go tank go

Growl all you like, kitten, you still got beat

Worfina completed Stormblood and is somewhere around patch 4.3 as of the time of this writing. I'm still doing Heavensward bridge content, right on the verge of Stormblood (3.0). We bookend the Owlbears' progress through this game quite nicely.

I ran the Void Ark last night, and I'm a little in love with it. What an awesome concept - I want to port it into a game of D&D so bad! No spoilers, but I might try to write that and share it on this blog at some future point.

I miss in-person gaming, I really do, but thanks to Discord and some excellent friends, this expedition to Eorzea has been a wonderful journey. There's a lot here to appreciate, and a lot more that I still want to see. Until such a time as Covid-19 is a distant memory, I'll be happy to watch the sun rise over the Sea of Clouds and whisper dang into my headset microphone.