Final fucking fantasy 22 3/4

[Sharkey]

Holy shit that sure is a maxed out everything. Anyway this moogle sword does its little "whoopywoohoo!" sound even in ostensibly serious cutscenes so I'm probably gonna be using it as a glamor forever.

Also can you be racist about Lalafells? Because I think I might be racist about Lalafells.

[Thad]

There was a runner in Fables where every swing of the Vorpal Blade was accompanied by a "SNICKER-SNACK!" comic book sound effect, no matter how dramatic the scene was otherwise supposed to be.

[François]

It is absolutely integral to the FFXIV experience to have fellow adventurers joining you for critical plot moments in the goofiest outfits imaginable. Moogle weapons have the advantage of being audibly goofy as well, which is a feat otherwise difficult to accomplish without resorting to Lalafell emotes.

And yes, there are two kinds of Lalafell: despicable little bastards and adorable little bastards. No exceptions.

THIS POTATO HAS KILLED

AND WILL KILL AGAIN

[Grath]

And yes, there are two kinds of Lalafell: despicable little bastards and adorable little bastards. No exceptions.

ALAB

[Büge]

Also can you be racist about Lalafells? Because I think I might be racist about Lalafells.

[Sharkey]

Okay so I was warned that the whole zodiac weapon thing was a massive waste of time but was like fuck it this whole game is a massive waste of time. Did the whole whole relic weapon questline and was like hell that wasn't so bad but then it's all now kill these bosses again in order. Okay fuck it whatever. Now do dozens of fates scattered all over the fucking continent to get twelve zodiac stones and alright, you're getting on my nerves. Now there are nine books you have to go through and each has a shitload of hunts and dungeons and trials and fates to do and you know what? Fuck you and fuck your stupid piece of shit sword.



Best part is this is for a prestige weapon I don't even like looking at. Fucker goes in a drawer now but I wish I could snap it in half and throw it in the quest giver's face.



I'm bringing back the moogle sword. I missed you buddy.

[François]

Yeah, good call. Each expansion has its set of relic weapons that's basically there to give people something to grind while waiting for the next expansion. It's basically not worth doing any but the latest ones unless you really really want the glam. Personally I tend to prefer the various primal/boss-themed weapons you can make or buy; even leveling up crafter jobs to make them yourself is less tedious than bothering with relics.

They've been changing things up with Endwalker, though: the relic equivalents are bought and upgraded with a type of currency you earn by doing mostly stuff you'd be doing anyway. And somehow there's still a segment of the playerbase complaining that this isn't grindy enough. They just really like spending time in the Aurum Vale I guess.

[Classic]

I don't want to oversell it, but Buge and the Talking Tyrants are pretty adequate as a group.
Also, previous expansion relic grinds are a lot more tolerable with other sickos going through it with you.

[Sharkey]

Righto, it's not like I'm attached to this random server. Is there like someone to hit up if/when I get a transfer? Do I send a moogle or some shit? I wanna be where the people are </ariel>

Anyway I went into this completely cold so among other things I was surprised when Gladiator evolved into Paladin. That doesn't seem intuitive to me. I mean there's a whole gladiatorial arena I never fucking fought in (except as a samurai for the samurai intro quest? The fuckin fuck?) Meanwhile nobody told me that Dark Knight is basically just Berserk. Kind of want to run with that because it fucking rocks but meanwhile I'm almost 60 with sword and board and I want to switch to Gun Sord just on account of that being the most hilariously stupidest weapon of all time. Meanwhile a moogle google tells me there's no moogle version of the gun sword which is frankly a fuckin travesty. I'm so torn right now.

[Friday]

As a dedicated DRK I can confirm that Dark Knights fuckin rule and that the true meme class edgelords actually play is Dragoon

on the floor, dead

anyway on a serious note every class is actually a tank

you can tank the mobs (tank)

you can tank the floor (dps)

or you can tank the dps who won't move away from the orange floor (healer)

I can assure you that the least amount of stress is playing tank, then dps, and if you want to rip out all your hair, try white mage, and if you want to rip out all your hair and also bleed from the eyeballs, try any healer that isn't white mage

[Newbie]

Anyway I went into this completely cold so among other things I was surprised when Gladiator evolved into Paladin. That doesn't seem intuitive to me.

Oh, I just heard about this one! In the original Japanese design, you don't progress gladiator to paladin, you progress gladiator to knight. Which is maybe still a little jarring, but it's a more natural progression for shield+one hander. But then when they localized, they replaced "knight" with "paladin" for some reason, and as the game went on, the devs decided the paladin theming worked better and leaned into it more.

[Büge]

Righto, it's not like I'm attached to this random server. Is there like someone to hit up if/when I get a transfer? Do I send a moogle or some shit? I wanna be where the people are </ariel>

If you ping me on Discord (Mercury01#6175), I can hook you up with the Talking Tyrants Free Company. They play on Aether/Sargatanas. The only onion in the ointment is that a server transfer is $18.

Anyway I went into this completely cold so among other things I was surprised when Gladiator evolved into Paladin. That doesn't seem intuitive to me. I mean there's a whole gladiatorial arena I never fucking fought in (except as a samurai for the samurai intro quest? The fuckin fuck?) Meanwhile nobody told me that Dark Knight is basically just Berserk. Kind of want to run with that because it fucking rocks but meanwhile I'm almost 60 with sword and board and I want to switch to Gun Sord just on account of that being the most hilariously stupidest weapon of all time. Meanwhile a moogle google tells me there's no moogle version of the gun sword which is frankly a fuckin travesty. I'm so torn right now.

You may notice a stark difference in the quality of writing between class quests. That's because each class quest line was written by a different person or persons. The Dark Knight quest line was written by Natsuko Ishikawa, who did such a good job that they brought her on to do the main quest for Shadowbringers.

anyway on a serious note every class is actually a tank

I was given to understand that every class is DPS.

if you want to rip out all your hair, try white mage

White Mage eventually gets the Blood Lily, which is a satisfying ability to cast if there ever was one.

Oh, I just heard about this one! In the original Japanese design, you don't progress gladiator to paladin, you progress gladiator to knight. Which is maybe still a little jarring, but it's a more natural progression for shield+one hander. But then when they localized, they replaced "knight" with "paladin" for some reason, and as the game went on, the devs decided the paladin theming worked better and leaned into it more.

As I understand it, the original conceit with Gladiators/Paladins was that the class was styled after both Secutor-type Gladiators and Roman Legionary Infantry, where the shield was the most important part, with the sidearm being secondary. They literally lean into this with the early shields being Scuta, swords being Gladii, and so on. I guess players felt like they wanted to be more like traditional sword-and-board fighters, so in future expansions, the shields got smaller and the swords got bigger.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen them lean into the Roman Infantry aesthetic, but given the way terminally-online chuds romanticize classical antiquity, perhaps it's for the best.

[Thad]

Gladii

Props for an actually-correct use of -ii as a plural. Good show.

[Thad]

Always a pleasant surprise when I fire up a podcast and the guest is Steve Tramer. I've known that guy since Mr. Leware's sixth-grade English class. (He used to post on Pyoko as Stiv, for those of you who've been around that long.) It's a trip hearing him talk about old Final Fantasy games because odds are pretty good we played them together 25 years or so ago.

Retronauts episode 537 features him, Nadia Oxford, and Andrew Vestal talking about Final Fantasy ROM hacks and it's pretty great. The free version isn't up yet but I'll try to remember to link to it when it is.

Also, Mr. Leware was a dick.

[Friday]

mine was too

what the fuck is it with middle school english teachers

[Thad]

The devious thing about Leware was he seemed like the Cool Teacher at the time. He was clever and witty and fun, and it wasn't until I was older that I really understood the kind of petty, power-tripping mind games he played on a bunch of twelve-year-olds.

(My grandparents, who both have a background in education, told me straight-up that he was way out of line, but like a lot of very insightful things they told me, it would take me awhile to appreciate that they were right.)

A friend of mine in one of his other classes got suspended for throwing a chair at another kid. Which is pretty extreme, granted, but Leware basically teed the whole thing up. He had this whole public humiliation thing he'd do where he'd set the group against somebody; he pretty much egged them all on to make fun of this one guy, who lost his cool and retaliated physically.

I guess I've got mixed feelings about the guy to this day, because he was a real advocate for me but also a total shitheel. As a case in point: he's the guy who convinced my family and the faculty that I should skip a grade, but then he lied to my face about who the honors eighth-grade English teacher was so I wouldn't end up in his class again.

Anyway, middle school sucks. My wife used to be a middle-school teacher and I never understood why anybody would *choose* to be in middle school. I got out of there as fast as I could; why would I go back?

[hngkong]

Anyway, middle school sucks. My wife used to be a middle-school teacher and I never understood why anybody would *choose* to be in middle school. I got out of there as fast as I could; why would I go back?

In one of my education classes they split up the class by those that wanted to teach middle school and those that wanted to teach high school. Out of 18 English secondary education students, two of us wanted high school. It blew my mind. Not even the only other guy wanted high school. It was me and a lady in her late 40, everyone else was SO EXCITED to work with middle school students.

I mean, in the end I ended up working at a middle school for six years... but yeah, middle school sucks.

[Büge]

Oh hey, my grade 6 teacher was an awful person too. She literally kept me after class once to tell me I was lazy and made me cry.

[Mongrel]

Middle school was a bit weird, because I had the same classmates from grade five all the way into high-school, for all of grade nine and about half of our classes in grade ten.

My sixth grade teacher was just a tired, cranky old lady doing her best Danny Glover two-days-from-retirement ass-covering. In that case we were just normal sixth-grade rowdy.

My seventh grade teacher was a goddamn saint. I don't think anyone did a mean thing to her all year. She read us The Hobbit in it's entirety and oh boy did that set me on A Path.

Our eighth-grade teacher, though, he was a huge dick (and had some, uh, questionable hygiene). But part of his being a dick was that he was closeted at a time when that would have absolutely carried professional consequences, which we all figured out rather trivially and subsequently handled with all the empathy and aplomb a class of early 90's eighth graders could muster. Which drove him to be a bigger dick, carrying on a kind of vicious circle. We were also bigger dicks to each other that year. Maybe we were just that age.
_____________________

As for teaching middle-school, well, even though I'm only working in elementary right now, with grade one kids, I get the middle school appeal and it's what I have in mind as a longer term goal. I should be doing some work with two different grade 4/5 classes next year, as well as the grade ones.

In grade one kids are still adapting to school as an environment. I don't want to say that grade one or two teachers are babysitters, because they're definitely not, but you definitely need a very strong parental instinct for wandering kids (physically or mentally). Those early years are so crucial it can be very stressful.

By middle school though, say grade four to seven, kids have developed stronger personalities, likes and dislikes. There's more material to work with and they're more defined as people, without having reached a point where most of them have started closing off. In practice, you're not going to singlehandedly help every kid who comes through your class find their path in life, but it's more feasible in middle school than it is at other times of a child's development.

Up here though middle school is definitely the least-picked choice. Most student teachers are opting for high school or elementary, so there's certainly no oversupply of middle-school teachers. At least in Ontario the system is pretty flexible though. Once you have your degree and certifications, you can go back and take the courses to be able to certify in a second stage of development, or even all three, as they're not particularly demanding. If you find you chose wrong and don't like the age bracket you're teaching it's very easy to transition to another one, so there should be a minimum of teachers feeling trapped or cranky.

Maybe I just lucked out, but most of the teachers at the school I'm at are amazing, and none are actually outright bad, I can only think of maybe one or two who are overstressed because they're not as good at maintaining discipline, but they're not crappy people or even necessarily crappy teachers. Even the principal is great - he's one of those guys that effortlessly projects huge Big Dad energy, not to mention his memory is amazing - he's able to carry the entire student body in his head.

The two student teachers I helped train this year are both on the high school track, so getting dumped into the deep end of elementary with no real prep was quite an eye opener, but they were real keeners and took to it well. I liked both of them a lot and I think they'll be great teachers and great with kids no matter what grades they end up teaching.

[nosimpleway]

Sixth grade was when all the ignorant innocence of childhood collapsed and I started showing signs of severe depression. I went from an A student to a D student almost overnight, which my father and sixth-grade teacher handled with understanding, grace, and forgiveness.

*checks notes*

No, that's not right...