#mod i have lmao

[saphushia]

kinda-wip-mostly-done skin of my wynncraft pc / oc because i've been playing that again lol.

his name is king and his backstory is that he got hit with the amnesia beam and mistook his name for a title, so he's now convinced he's royalty. he's actually a bandit but he's having too much fun with his inflated ego to believe anyone who tells him that

looking at him now i kinda wanna give him a crown but. i spent so much time making that hair look good aubdkjfg

[sealsdaily]

Today's Sea Lion Is: Listening Intently

[tritoch]

i know a lot of people (very understandably) dislike the paladin job quests in ffxiv, particularly HW, but i do think it's fun that, now that the pre-ShB MSQ revamp is complete, paladins now have a very cool and thematic in-game storyline that happens without a word being spoken: the development of passage of arms.

none of the below is directly stated in the script, but imo it's a fairly obvious gloss on what the game presents, if you assume a paladin warrior of light. spoilers for all expansions through the end of 6.X.

in the new version of steps of faith, as vishap breaks through each ward protecting ishgard from attack, lucia mounts a final desperate effort to hold him back, with a very familiar looking animation:

but even lucia can't hold back vishap's flame alone, so the temple knights surge forward to assist her. their efforts make the shield visually more powerful and larger. the temple knights here band together in defense of ishgard, and their knightly resolve to protect their home is the difference between victory and defeat.

lucia and the knights do ultimately succeed in defending the last ward, as you have to defeat vishap before their shield falls or you lose.

later in heavensward, obviously, we will get ffxiv's most famous (failed) attempt at blocking something with a shield.

this moment can be read as fairly impactful on the warrior of light's development; as i've noted elsewhere, after the trauma of watching haurchefant bleed out in their arms at level 57, at level 58 paladins learn to channel their magic into healing (and it's called "clemency," or mercy. mercy for whom? who was guilty?), and as someone pointed out on that post, at level 58 dark knights used to get "sole survivor", letting them heal in response to a marked target's death.

for a time, you literally carry haurchefant's shield with you, and 3.3 very much literalizes in genre fashion the idea that even when you are standing alone, your fallen friends stand with you. you don't need to call any allies to stand at your side and raise their shields with you because they are already there, in spirit.

stormblood marks a pretty important turning point in the warrior of light as a combatant, in my opinion, and the text makes this clear in several ways. first, in pretty much all your jobs, you've now far exceeded your trainers and are pioneering new techniques. this is no less true of paladin, which for 60-70 abandons any trainers at all for you to show off your peerless skills in a tournament.

second, stormblood is straight up a story about you getting stronger. at level 61, zenos kicks your ass. at level 70, you kick his ass. why? because you fought and got stronger and developed incredible new techniques and became a one-man army.

for a lot of classes, this story lines up nicely with the big rotation changes or flashy new finishers on the way from 60 to 70. SMN is now busting out bahamut and casting akh morn; RDM gets verflare and verholy; DRG starts harnessing nidhogg's power directly through dragon sight and nastrond.

the tanks are divided in two: warriors and gunbreakers get huge damaging upgrades at 70 in the form of inner release and continuation, each of which lets them hit the same button many times for lots of damage and satisfying animations. paladin and dark knight get more protective abilities; dark knight gets the blackest night, and there's been plenty said about that already by pretty much everyone.

paladins get passage of arms. instead of a relentless new attack (and you get requiescat at 68, which is a way bigger deal for your dps rotation), your big reveal at 70 for zenos in your fight in ala mhigo is a superior way to protect your party, a shield that lets you stand for your allies so they never have to fall for you again. it's lucia's same shield, except you need no allies' shields to reinforce you, proof of your martial prowess and your ability to transcend limits, and perhaps in truth a reminder that you never really stand alone.

in many respects passage of arms should really feel like a paladin signature move to you now if you are playing it at this point, because you should be popping it in pretty much every fight (you are using your mits, right...?). basically every FFXIV fight has at least one big AOE with downtime that warrants passage of arms usage, usually after the mid-fight add phase with slowly filling bar. since that AOE usually drops during downtime, there's no reason not to pop passage of arms (which otherwise restricts your movement and actions), and even on normal, sometimes every little bit counts on a damage check even if it means dropping DPS (thinking here of harrowing hell P10N on release, which was...less consistent for a lot of roulette parties than you might hope).

so from 70 onward, passage of arms is in a sense a paladin warrior of light's signature move, and certainly the one a player gets to most actually enjoy (since if you're using it, you're by necessity not doing anything besides moving your camera and admiring your sick animation). it doesn't have any competition in terms of spectacle until confiteor, and those you're usually throwing out in the middle of movement.

it's such a signature, in fact, that the only other person shown using your one-person version of passage of arms is your greatest admirer, who studied your legend for over a century.

and it's when he fails (should've popped arm's length, bud) that the warrior of light decides they can't let their friends fall for them, and sends them away with the transporter beacon. this is all wrong: you were meant to die for them, not the other way around. yours is the shield that stands between your allies and defeat. it is you who will win this passage of arms and break your opponents lance. and you do.

and then later, when they need to quickly establish zero's domain as a place of fallen grandeur, the home of someone who once believed in heroes but is now a cool and cynical vampire hunter d, what do they use? a decayed statue of someone in the paladin endwalker gear doing the passage of arms animation, of course.

from a visible instantiation of knighthood as a joint effort to defend what is sacred, to a tribute to the fallen friends whose memories stand by you and animate you, to a symbol of the wol's power as emulated by their allies or darkly mirrored in other shards.

not bad for a mit button you hit once per fight and otherwise never think about!

[aashwarr]

morning jogs with camille. with final exams coming up, camille is staying focused by keeping up with her morning routine. this includes a jog around downtown britechester.

[chiimeramanticore]

so i started playing fnv for the first time recently

[leopardmuffinxo]

i wouldn't want to be with anyone else

[14dayswithyou]

tell ren to turn his location on👉👈

I saw one of the posts of how ren does get jealous of pets being loved over him and alll that so now I have the thought of the one meme of ‘ah yes, me, my partner and their [enter normal pet size] foot [pet]’

I don’t have anything else, it did pop into my head though and I thought I’d share with the class.

⌞♥⌝ ItsNotVivy on Twitter actually made that exact meme with Ren a looong time ago!!

[cloud-ya]

magnaslayyyyy

[the-unknown-void]

This is what happened in Episode 8 right?

Made entirely in Garry's Mod!! (except the caption lol)

Reference:

And extra screenshots down here:

Cyn's facial expression is by far my favorite part hehehe, she is so utterly confuzzled.

What's going on in that background?? Featuring: floating Minecraft dog, Nori(heart) and HL2 fast zombie in a tree, upset HL2 citizen, random dead guy and Khan running with the railgun, N hanging off floating debris and Uzi trying to help him. (none are posed in detail so they're VERY awkward lookin)

Map: sb_new_worlds Feel free to ask what other addons I use! (related to this.. I couldn't tell you my entire addon list.)

[transformers-earthspark]

New scene: Meet Prowl!

Season 3 releases tomorrow!!

[ryllen]

Perhaps ... 😯 [x]

[lunarbun-ships]

comm sheet needed an update <3

[daily-basil]

Lonely Avatar!Basil. Because I am deep in the trenches of an obsession with The Magnus Archives and I can't do anything that isn't remotely connected to it

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

JOHN: if you normalized something (non-awful) because your family did it and then realized it was not, in fact, normal or remotely common, i would love to hear about it. i'll start.

JOHN: the villain in my bedtime stories was always the president of the home owner's association and i was sooooo confused when no one else had heard of him.

JANE: When I was a kid, my dad and I would play that game at the playground where the kid stays up on the climbing structure and the adult stays on the ground to chase the kid. Usually the adult is like a monster or a lava monster, or something. But my dad always pretended to be George Bush?

JOHN: OKAY?

ROSE: My mom never let me roll down the windshield when we were on highways, because, and I quote, "the car is goign so fast tht the wind can topple cars". And I just... never questioned it until years later. Turns out she just didn't like the noise.

DAVE: oh yknow that game grown ups do with young children where they chase you around and go "oh youre so cute i could eat you up! im gonna eat ya!" that kind of thing

DAVE: ok well when my bro did that i used to go "no you wont you love me. also im your only brother"

DAVE: then my bro would go really silent and tell me that actually No i had another older sibling that he cannibalized. i only survived because i was a cute baby and he waited too long and i got too big to fit in the pot anymore

DAVE: and it would make me really angry because i knew he was lying but i had no way to prove it and he thought it was the funniest thing ever

DAVE: anyway i only found out in school when i was trying for a "lol so relatable" type of joke with my friends that apparently being told your whole life that you had a dead middle sibling that my bro cannibalized isnt a common thing that other families also do

JOHN: ...dude,

[rockethorse]

The basegame wedding dress has a pregnancy morph??

[once-in-a-half-life]

my laptop is too weak for s2fm and i don't feel like learning sfm so I do the next best thing - recreating dead memes and stock photos from Pinterest in Gmod

part 2 part 3

bonus: