The AIE Podcast #377 – Merry Pandamonium

On this episode of The AIE Podcast…

    WITT gets organized!
    Hey, Bioware, how soon is soon?
    Looking for New Life? Reach out on Discord!
    Red Alert, Red Alert- for the next two weeks, at least
    And, we have Abovan here to talk to us about AIE in FFXIV

All that and more coming up right now…

Podcast Audio

Raw Video

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Welcome to episode #377 of the podcast celebrating you, the Alea Iacta Est gaming community, the die has been podcast. This is Mkallah: To my left is Mewkow: – (catch phrase here). And to my right is Tetsemi: (catch phrase here). This week we are joined by special guest Abovan who are here to talk to us about AIE in FFXIV Welcome!

Since we have so much FFXIV news, we are going to talk to our guest first and then do this weeks news!!

GAME NEWS

We bought a house! A large house!

Big thanks to Reka for helping us in the move to the large plot.

Our new home is located in the Lavender Beds, 9th Ward, plot 33.

The new house is on a large plot, so the house is also large. Since it is a large, we get much more real estate to work with, both inside and out. The new house will feature 3 garden plots, all of the crafting stations, and more vendors in the house, such as materia affixers, which we did not have the NPC budget for in the old house.

The additional Garden Plots will help increase the rate that we can churn out the Thavnairian Onion. These items allow you to increase the level cap of your Chocobo Companion by 1. When you cap out, feed it to your bird, and you will be able to continue to level up your companion up to level 20.

As the house starts empty, it will take us some time to settle in and get a full decoration done. So, things are in flux right now in the house and things may move around until we settle in on a housing layout. However, when we do, we plan on having a big AIE home warming party. We are working out the details now. When we have some more defined plans, we will let everyone know via Discord.

Grade 3 Heat of Battle Buffs!

We are now cranking out Grade 3 Heat of Battle buffs. These buffs provide all member a flat 15% bonus to combat XP. Since this is a limited commodity and take 70 hours to make, we will run these on weekends. During the week, we will be running the Grade 2 Heat of Battle Buffs, providing a 10% bonus to Combat XP. If you are leveling up your first job, an alt job, or just playing around with a side project, the XP bonus can really help you out.

Executing the buffs, you don’t have to wait for an officer! Anyone with the member rank (about 30 days in the FC) and above can kick off buffs (as well as invite characters to the FC). If you see the buffs fall off, from Friday to Sunday, you are welcome to fire off the Heat of Battle 3 and Reduced Rates 2. Reduced Rates drops teleportation costs by 10%. During the week, Monday-Thursday, we run grade 2 of both of those buffs, Heat of Battle 2 and Reduced Rates 2.

Game News
The Endwalker Hype Train continues! The Square Enix dev team has released Live Letter 67, and a very emotional Naoki Yoshida came out to announce a 2-week delay for Endwalker. While delays are never fun, but this will ensure a more polished game that will be now released on December 3rd for pre-orders, December 7th for the general release.

With this change, the Endwalker schedule changes to…

12/3 – Head Start for Pre-Orders
12/7 – Official start for everyone else
12/21 – 6.01 – Pandæmonium, Normal mode. The first raid of Endwalker, and a great debate on how to pronounce ‘æ’.
1/4/22 – 6.05 Pandæmonium Savage. New entry level raid crafting gear introduced.

The live letter also has tons of new announcements on how Endwalker will work. 67 slides worth!

A few quick hits:

5 new series for the role quests! Not required for MSQ this time around. But a bonus quest line if you complete all of them will be made available in Patch 6.1 or later. No level 90 job quests, however.

Crafting and gathering quests lines in Studium, one of the new major areas in Endwalker.

New Treasure Map dungeon, Excitatron 6000 in patch 6.05 (the Savage raid patch). We do lots of treasure maps on Saturdays, so please look forward to the new maps!

Tons of PvP updates, including some small scale casual and ranked PvP with some skill based matchmaking.

Lost of HQ items are being removed. HQ crafts are still in play, however.

Fishing is getting a brand new mini-game interface!

EXP scaling is being re-worked. Important note: due to this change, any progress made towards a level will be reset back to 0 when Endwalker hits due to the EXP scaling.

New Immerse Sound Gamepack will be available. Allows for 360 sound, but does have a one-time cost for the Immerse license. A 14-day demo is available. (Abo’s note: I’ve used this in other games and it is incredibly awesome.)

New housing zone will be available in 6.1. Some FC only wards, some personally only wards. Both will have classic and lottery systems for purchasing the lots.

Got a vinyl record player? Like the Endwalker theme? Now you can get a 7” Vinyl single for 28 bucks on Nov 17th.

Finally, one of our community members and FFXIV players has a new FFXIV podcast!
OldManFranks, one of the long term members of AIE, has a podcast called ‘A Podcast Reborn.” Go ahead and give them a listen, but keep in mind that it can dive into the slight spoiler territory and “adult situations”.

Thank you for all of the great information,folks! Now, before we get into this weeks news, where can the peoples find you?

Now, to this weeks News!

AIE News

Streaming and Guild Podcast News
New Overlords (SWTOR) – http://www.newoverlords.com/

SWTOR Escape Pod Cast 403: Unlimited Power
http://www.newoverlords.com/swtor-escape-pod-cast-403-unlimited-power/

Unlimited news this week on 7.0 to go with our discussion of unlimited gear power over time.

Working Class Nerds – https://workingclassnerdscom.wordpress.com/

Episode 127: Doritos!!!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/143519/9498453-episode-127-doritos.mp3

After a LONG break due to Marcus’s illness, the boys are BACK! This week they’re joined by Doritos! Doritos is best described as a professional video game enthusiast; he raids with Marcus in SWTOR, is almost always in both Nick and Marcus’s streams, and is a HUGE Horizon: Zero Dawn fan. Enjoy!

Steampunk Rally Fusion, Lockup, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza – Boards & Swords #183
https://boardsandswords.com/blog/bs183

Philip is out visiting family, so Cory & Jimmy from the Dirtbags of Holding podcast are here to talk with Chris about things like: a Risk Legacy Sequel? A board game with stacking magnet cubes? A game called Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza? Stick around for the first game show in awhile also!

Fleet Action Report – (STO) – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqEKYJPKmiiYuj7eiHy6kOg

Fleet Action Report Ep 69 Haters Going to Hate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqOwGwSW2io

Fleet Action Report, a Star Trek Online informational stream; Nikodas and Grebog are traveling into the realm of hatred. For tonight, it’s a pair of small craft missions they’ll attempt to conquer.

NOMADS
If people are playing Forza Horizon 5, Jehdai has set up an xbox club, (its game specific, we still have the main XBox club, and one for FH4). Just search for AIE in the in game search. (clubs unlock a few levels in)

Diablo 3 season 25 is on the PTR, so that means that we are about 2 weeks away from its start. The new season will have soul shards to pay homage to the 25th anniversary of Diablo.

New World

New World is still in levelling phase. MFN every Thursday, tackling bigger incursions, running around the map.
New patches weekly, fixing the most glaring issues and exploits.
Amazon now talking about consolidating servers, after the initial rush.
Come play this action gorgeous PvPvE MMO, buy once and play forever

WoW
Patch 9.1.5 is Live!

A member of Where Is The Tank (WITT) organized a Mythic Tara-grew that included people from all of our AIE raid teams, and a few pugs. Inspiring teamwork there! They plan to continue Monday nights.

Behind the Curve (BtC) is 4/10 Heroic and making progress on Soulrender (aka Garrosh Nanny).

Kiddie Aggro (KA) and Better Late Than Never (BLTN) did Achievement runs for Glory of the Dominant Raider. It awards (Hand of Hrestimorak) a mount that looks like an armored glove and can play rock, paper, scissors.

Our Alliance side Raid Team Hell Froze Over (HFO) is 3/10 Heroic. Yes, we have an Alliance Guild on Earthen Ring and alts are welcome! No need to tell your main though.

SWTOR
There has been an outpouring of news from BW in the last couple of weeks as they ramp up for the new expansion. There is no release date yet, but they are still saying “Holidays 2021”. At release we will have QoL changes, 5 extra levels, new methods of gearing, new story, a new flashpoint, updated systems, and more. We will also be getting a new Operation a few weeks after the expansion launches.

Like any game studio, BW is introducing some changes that no one asked for, but there are two things coming that people HAVE been asking for: Multi-tagging and the ability to transmog weapons. Multi-tagging will change the shape of how we do World Bosses and will be especially great for us during MFNs. Swtor has long has an extensive and pretty convenient system for changing your character’s outfits, but weapons have always been left out of that picture. Now that we will be able to use quest rewards, special meaning looks, and all kinds of things to transmog our weapons independent of their value as gear.

So, if you always wanted to use Torchy as your blaster pistol and wanted to join in as everyone on a planet kills a World Boss, come join us in SWTOR. Now is the time to be getting those last few levels, cleaning out your inventory, acquiring a few XP boosts and generally just getting ready! Join us in the SWTOR discord channel with any questions or if you just want to chat about all things Star Wars.

ESO
Cool things the guild has been doing:
• Last week we took a tour of the new Deadlands zones to grab wayshrines, kill world bosses, and explore.
• A four person dungeon team has formed. AC/DC runs on Monday nights and is working their way through clearing all of the instanced dungeons on normal and veteran.
• Being lead off cliffs by Dankinia

Things planned or coming up for the guild:
• Our last official MFN of the year will be November 19th due to the holidays. We will resume our falling off cliffs and bridges fun on January 7th 2022
• MFN’s activities happen each week and involve either zone clears, daily dungeon runs, and/or public dungeon clears.

Game or press release news:
• Historically the New Life event starts the end of December and runs into the first week of January. Due to MFN being on an break for the holidays, we might miss doing this event as a group, but remember you can always reach out in discord and to try to find a guildmate to run stuff with.

FFXIV
See Game Notes

GW2
Seasons of Dragons: Return to Icebrood Saga happening now. Week 3, will unlock Drizzlewood Coast, which uses the games WVW systems on a PVE map). As a reminder logging in during the week will unlock the associated living world chapter for free. If you have been keeping up, we are only a couple weeks away from the legendary amulet reward. (Also as a reminder, these achievements will remain available forever.

Also included in the “Return to” Achievements are awesome rewards for doing strike missions. Strike missions are Raid level bosses that can be easily pugged. So far we have had Bonuses for Shiverpeaks Pass, The Voice and Claw of the fallen, and Whisper of Jormag. The bonus reward is 7 mystic clovers and 8 obsidian shards per strike bonus achievement completed. The 21 bonus clovers that we have been able to earn so far will save 153g (and approximately 39 Spirit Shards) from the cost of crafting a legendary. (Spirit shards are earned from rolling over the experience bar after you max out mastery tracks for a region. You also get a few for doing 3 of the daily tasks).

Next Beta Test is 11/30.
All 9 elite classes will be available with the new siege turtle mount. The siege turtle is a 2 person mount with massive cannons strapped to its back.

Guild Stuff: Next dungeons and more night is November 12th. Monday Fun nights at 8:30 Central Last if you need help with anything in game, don’t hesitate to ask in discord.

The expansion releases in February. Now is a great time to come back and get yourself prepared for it.

See you Tyria.

STO
New equipment slot for Environmental Suits was added for captains and bridge officers
New ship bundle in the Zen Store – T6 Saber Class and T6 Nova Class
Red Alert event is active for 2 weeks – Rewards include an Experimental Ship Upgrade Token, Specialization Point, and an Ultimate Tech Upgrade
FAR will be highlighting the current Red Alert event and Fleet Holdings on tomorrow’s show.

LOTRO
The Fate of Gundabad, LOTRO’s latest expansion goes live on 11/10 (Wednesday). It’s the last piece of the latest round of releases for LOTRO – the Brawler class, the Legendary item revamp – and finally Gundabad.

https://store-new.standingstonegames.com/gundabad/

CLOSE
And that’s our show for tonight. While the chatroom begins suggesting show titles, we want to thank I Abovan for joining us.

If you have a question or comment about our show, you can email us at podcast@aie-guild.org. You can also follow us on Twitter. The show is at @aiepodcast. Mew is at @themewkow, Mkallah is at @cyberwaif,and Tetsemi is at @ivorytiger. We record live with video every other Sunday at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. You can join the chatroom and play along with us on our website at https://aie-guild.org/podcast-live-stream/ and our Discord server for chat at https://aie-guild.info/discord . And for past episodes, you can see them on our Youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAIEPodcast ! Our theme was composed by the amazing Andrew Allen, follow him at @keyswithsoul! or visit his website http://andrewallenmusic.com/

And now it’s time to play all of the great AIE member segment we received this week, including…

And, due to the upcoming Holiday season, this is going to be our last show of the year. We will return in Mid-January with a bevy of new guest!

– This is Mkallah
– This is Mewkow
– This is Tetsemi

And this has been… The AIE Podcast.