Patches and LS activity

Hey, it has been a while! I am still playing, but there just wasn't that much to write about... or was there?

The LS Luna Veneris has been great. As there is not much content provided by SE, the officers are very imaginative in adding LS events nevertheless. A while ago, we had a scavenger hunt. Owen, an officer, posted 9 pictues on the forum, and we all rushed to take the same screenies. The first 5 people got a gil reward, but for me it was just really fun.
I didn't want to participate at first, because it involved teleporting around all 3 cities and I didn't have too much anima at that time - but after I bumped into Sariae, the linkshell leader, I kind of got hooked with the idea, and actually made second place.

This is the pic I took from Sariae (task was to cheer an officer on), it was quite fun because all the officers tried to evade people by teleporting or running really fast - not always fast enough, as this picture shows! ;P

Other than that, we have been having crafting fairs twice a week. I love those. I can get my equipment repaired, and give my extra crystals to people.
Now that I have been taking up cooking, I can even contribute myself and help people out, which makes me quite happy. Dodo omelettes, which are good for crafting, are especially sought after. :)





I have stopped leveling THM altogether for now. In the last patch, a lot of stuff has been changed, especially SP-gaining. It's now static, which is what I wanted. Soloing is doable now, however party SP seem to be messed up. But I'm still not interested in party grinding as I find it too mindless, without tactics. However, despite teh fact that I now COULD level my THM I don't because I'm focussing on BTN and CUL - doing those leves takes up almost all my playing time.

My BTN with a new outfit, that Jeuth Altari made for me. I figured since I now level more slowly I wanted colored gear - hence the auburn. Jeuth even tossed in the Voyager's belt for free, and it even fits the Jerkin.




Well, what else. I temporarly had to turn down my graphics, because the card was overheating. I resolved that issue now, by cleaning it from dust and installing a second case fan. FFXIV sure does draw a lot of power :(

The November patch fixed a LOT of things. The UI lag is almost gone, managing retainer and selling stuff to NPC has gotten a lot easier and they made a lot more stuff more convenient. They improved targetting, they gave us 40 more inventory space... and much more that I can't remmeber now. Oh did I mention that before the patch they extended the free play period even more? I got 2 months for free now. They openly acknowledged that the game was not in the state that it should have been in at release. I think it's a good thing that they acknowledge that, however I believe that they shouldn't accumulate all the little things into a big patch, but patch once a week and improve steadily. A lot of people don't have the patience to wait that long. I do have it, because I'm enjoying my time in game. The next patch is scheduled for December sometime, so I'm looking forward to that. I hope they will implement the recipe book now. Culinarian is fun, but a lot of recipes take 6+ ingredients.

Just a random landscape picture to close this post. ;)

Okay, so I haven't posted in a while. I have slowed down in playing, but when I do I have fun. I have stopped actively leveling my THM. I do level it while doing leves, but of course very very slowly. I don't really mind because at the moment I do not like how THM is played. Maybe I will level up another DoW or DoM - but for now I'm having a blast with Botanist and Cook. Yep, I'm a cook now. I loved making pie dough :D For some reason pie dough sounds more yummy to me, than pie. <.< Anyway, crafting still needs way too many clicks, but they

 reduced the lag greatly, so it's okay. Crafting also lets me watch TV or something while I play. I took up cook because I always enjoyed that most and the linkshell doesn't have any high level cooks.
Botanist also supports cooking greatly and yeah, it just fits together really well.
My BTN is almost 25 now, which is when I will get Level 30 leves, finally. Adventurers get that at 23 already. As I said, I enjoy BTN greatly, however I have been hitting fatigue. And fatigue on BTN means, that I can't even farm because I damage everything I try to chop. This is REALLY annoying. I wouldn't mind less SP, but I don't even hit surplus because the game doesn't let me. Also a reason why I started leveling cook. When I hit fatigue on BTN I just cannot play BTN anymore.

A quite fun screenshot from the Level 20 THM quest, thought I'd share. Poor Lala carrying about 2 tons of books.

 Now these are screenies from the faction leve event I took part in some time ago. While I did have enough points to theoretically take leves, ALL of them, with no exception, gave me nothing but gil as a reward - which I am totally not interested in. I participated anyway, and it was quite fun.

However, I can't help to feel that this game will never live up to FFXI. At least not group play wise, it is just horrible. The targeting is bad, the SP gain for certain classes is bad, healing is mindless AOE spam, it doesn't matter weather you debuff a mob or

 not (normal mob, mind you, not talking about bosses) because they will die either way and it just feels like a bit hassle for SP and not fluent, enjoyable gameplay. Just what were they thinking, I really don't know. Of course I compare it to FFXI, because it's the same company that made both games and battle wise, FFXI was just SO MUCH superior, I can't even describe.
Oh well, but I'm repeating myself. :) My consequence is just that I don't level my DoM because it's not acceptable for me at it's current state.
Okay, what else is new FF - wise? They will have a bigger patch at the end of November, where they introduce a lot of stuff that should have been there at release. <.< Good news? You judge.

Miscellaneous

So, the linkshell I am in, Luna Veneris, is pretty awesome. People help each other out a lot. There are a lot of crafters as well as adventurers and gatherers in the linkshell and everyone seems to do their best to give mats to crafters, craft gear for adventurers, farm and help with leve quests.
I got a new kitchen skillet today which is being made by Sakari on this screenshot. The red gear I am wearing is gathering gear made by Sanjo, the pickaxe was made by Pikarya and I am wearing jewelry most of which is made by Red ;)  In turn, I pass a lot of shards and crystals as well as mats to my linkshell mates and it all works out really well.

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We had an event on Sunday, a crafting fair. Everyone gathers together, brings the mats for items they need and pass stuff to people who need it. Also, repairs are getitng done as well. This is supposed to be happening twice a week, and I was enjoying myself.

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I did my first party grinding... At first I was the only mage, so designated healer. It was... boring but efficient. There is nothing left from the awesome group play FFXI had. This is mindless thrashing of mobs and your role as a healer is spam aoe heal when ever someone takes damage, hoping to get skillpoints from it.
I believe the disciples of Magic got screwed here, as usually I would get 200 SP tops (more like 150, if unlucky less than 100) for a crab while the fighters got more than 300 sometimes. However this of course still is way more efficient than grinding solo. I went from 17 to 19 in... 2-3 hours, i don't remember. Lateron more people arrived, and also other groups so the sp rate went down a bit.
Also, they really need to fix some stuff. I sometimes get stuck in the Battle Regimen (which in itself doesn't work) which is a different battle mode where, in theory, the party members can do abilities in order to put debuffs on the mob (if I understand it correctly). I don#t know how I get in the mode, as I don't hit the shortkey for it, and, worse, I can't get out of it anymore without completely disengaging from fighting.
Also, my AoE spells sometimes don't hit everyone in the group, even though they were near. Which is kind of annoying. But overall I'm rather content with the outcome of that grinding. It is boring, yes, but if I am ever in the mood of doing something where I don't have to think, while still proceeding in the game, that's the thing to do.

Thoughts on Content

So, my THM and my BTN are both 16. I did the level 15 story quest, which is just awesome. Other than that I spend my time either doing THM leves and grinding a bit or harvesting on my BTN. I do that cycling between the three cities.

The leves are... boring. They are always the same for each camp. I think there is a pool of 5 or 6 leves for each camp, of which you get 3 with random rewards. All the DoW and DoM leves consist of running off, killing the leve target(s) , turning in the leve.
They do get a little harder, for example at the second camp the mobs start running away spawning friends who you then have to kill as well, and at the third camps I noticed that some leves consist of mobs in "disguise" with a bunch of real mobs there as well and your task is to find the disguised mob and kill it.
Generally all the same though. The rewards are usually gil and if you are lucky a crafting material and if you are VERY lucky some kind of gear, but that's rather rare.
At the 3rd camp the reward also might be so-called "Guildmarks" from which you can buy new abilities for your class at the guild.

The constant damaged gear (buggy too, you get the red gear damage sign but all of your equipment is repaired...), then you can either repair it at the NPC , but only to 75% or you have to bug someone to repair it (but then to 100%) or you put it up in your bazaar asking for repair and if you are lucky, someone will do it for the amount of gil you offer.
To me, this is just annoying, and they could implement better means to take out gil from the economy. For example implementing chocobos and airships and make them (as wlel as the ferry) cost a fee. You get gil easily in this game, I'm close to 500k now and I DID buy equipment for 40-50k occasionally. And I don't even play much.

Anyway, back to the point. There really isn't much to do besides grinding (be it with leves or not), and I conclude crafting and harvesting into grinding as well as you keep doing the same thing over and over again. Which is a little sad, especially considering that this is a Final Fantasy. While the story, like I said, is awesome, you of course don't always do that as the storyline only continues at predefined level intervals. (0,10,15,20...) I'm not sure if any story is implemented after level 20, actually.

The game has been getting pretty bad reviews and while I still think that after some time, this weill become an awesome game, I start to agree with those who say that SE should have waited another 6 months before bringing out this game. It's just not ready.

Exploring

 So, I felt like exploring the two remaining zones, Coerthas and Mor'Dhona. Again, by night at first - somehow I never manage to travel to new places by day. Coerthas is a huge foresty/stony landscape which I find okay, but not that amazing. The music was quite nice though. Also I found a couple of Grade 4 Botanist spots. On this screenie you can see an airship beside my character's head. Those fly around all the time, but we cannot actually use them as of yet. In Coerthas is also the city Ishgard (sp), but I didn't see that one as I only found out after I had left already. It's a real bummer that the zones are so huge and we don't have chocobos. Running everywhere is not fun, really. I got to one camp in each Coerthas and Mor Dhona though so now, if I have to, I can teleport to each zone of the current game.

A pond with fun dragons in it, also in Coerthas.

This is Mor Dhona. There is this cool structure with the dragon in the middle (I believe it's the same dragon as in the opening video) but you can't get there yet. The rest of the zone is horribly uninteresting.

More dragon thingies.

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Enough of exploring. As I have mentioned I am in a linkshell now. It is very social with a good amount of crafters and adventurers and I constantly give away mats and shards/crystals to the crafters that I get from fighting and harvesting. In turn, crafters give away gear for cheap or even nothing and in this screenshot our

 goldsmith, Red Mage, made Silver Chokers for everyone. Pretty much everyone online gathered around him to get one, hehe. Thanks again Red.

On a side note, I tried to upgrade my weapon but I couldn't get the mats from the stupid market wards ~.~... I want a search function so bad...

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Just because I haven't posted a screenie during a battle yet, I put this here. :P

Story

I hit THM 15 and therefore got the next story line quest. Here Final Fantasy stands to its name. The story (Limsa Lominsa) is nice. I'm not going to put spoilers here, just post some screenshots.
I was very surprised and happy to see that they had rendered cutscenes with voice not only at the beginning of the game! I got stuck in a sea fight :o!
I do regret though to have started in LL because I like the Gridania story better. If I had started in Gridania I would have missed the LL story completely though and I didn't want that.
Anyhow, I'll just post some of those awesome screenies I took. :)

Group play

It has been about a week and I have several topics I want to write about. I will split this in three posts though, so the titles fit.

First, I want to talk about group play.

This is how the screen looks like when in a group of 6. While it looks tidy and doesn't have unnecessary elements taking away space like for example character portraits, its functions are rather... non existant. First, you can't target your party members via the F-keys. Nor does it seem to work to klick their names on the menu (however I only tried this once and I might have mis clicked...). You have to either tab through all the characters on the screen until you reach the person you want or click the character model directly.
Both of which is PRETTY bad if you want to heal someone who is about to die. Basically if you are healer, you need to stay locked on the tank and do nothing else. That is freaking boring, I imagine. I really do not understand why they took away the great group gameplay form FF11. That was simple and awesome. This is stupid and complicated and just a mess.
I didn't even address the bugs. Sometimes you can't target your party members. They show as 0 HP and 0 MP and don't have their character names displayed above their heads and you just simply cannot target them. Then, when you are in a group of more than 2, not everyone will gain skill points from attacking the mob! Isn't that great?
That basically means that groups bigger than 3 are stupid and unefficient. At 3 you can have one healer who heals and ONLY heals (how interesting, isn't it?) and the other 2 can hit the mob (probably tank and DD).
Ugh, this makes me rather mad, as you can probably tell.
However, if you do not want any EP but rather the reward of a quest or something the group play can be fun especially because of the monster design. There aren't any innovating things though. Just mobs with AOE or cone attacks so you have to be positioned correctly and stuff, but this really isn't anything new. Just fun as it always has been.

Sorry for the rant. But this is just such a mess. I also don't really understand people who actually support this and think it's okay like this. I like the game overall but after the first few awesome days are over I start to see the bad parts of the game. And especially group play is so important.I guess there is nothing we can do but wait for SE to fix this.

First days of Retail - 1 week early

So, I got a Collector's Edition of FFXIV and therefore got to play a week earlier than those "only" getting the Standard Edition.

I kept the name Naurha Mups, and rolled on Besaid. I found a linkshell with a lot of nice people in it (Luna Veneris) which is BIG atm with a lot of people from all over the world.

Okay, so what's different from the Beta?

• menu lag is reduced
• you can scroll the inventory
• you get more alerts when you are doing something wrong. E.g you can't switch your abilities when in fighting mode. In OB the game wouldn't tell you that. Now it shows a message in the chat.
• less reward from the first few quests
• less time in between leves
• less gear rewards from leves
• more people --> flooded starting zones. Which is as expected, I guess it will get worse next week when the SE comes out. 
• probably more I forgot right now

Okay well. I started out in Limsa Lominsa this time, because I played both Gridania and Ul'Dah during Beta and I wanted to know the LL story. This is also where I was able to make this awesome screenshot:

I guess there will be a Musketeer class sometime in the future. But at this time, the NPC took the weapon away from me again =(.

I tried out Botanist for the first time. And, I love it. You can either harvest grass strips, or log trees, the latter is wrapped into a nice little mini game, basically hot and cold. I somehow just love the whole concept in FFXIV where you have to work to get stuff. To log and get wood, in other games you just have to right click the tree while having the axe in the inventory. Here you a) have to be a botanist to do so and b) complete the minigame to successfully log. During the whole time you play you just have the feeling to achieve something, to do something that has an effect and that is just totally awesome.

You basically see this little glowing orb on the map and there you can harvest. Another awesome thing is that these points are shared. You can have a lot of botanists harvesting or logging the same grasspatch  / tree. Your tree can't be stolen by others. Okay, that may be a little unrealistic, because especially in the starting areas you can have like 8 people hacking on a tree, but I prefer this over not being able to log at all. 

In this lower picture you see the minigame. The orange pointer goes up and down and you stop it at one point and it tells you how close you are to success. You have about 3-4 trys, during which you usually get closer and closer based on the messages the game gives you. 

You can log one tree or grass patch up to 6 times!

I grouped up with 2 people from the linkshell to do leves. It was the first time I did that and I have to say it was pretty awesome. We were 2 Conjurers and 1 Thaumaturge (me) and we pretty much just mana burned the mob groups. The feared Dodo's stood no chance against so much magic power! :D Doing leves is very lucrative. Each of us made about 70k gil while having a lot of fun.

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Just a very pretty sight of Ul'Dah by night, I think.

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Oh, this is something I want to talk about. Do you see the earring on the blond Lalafell and the Choker around my neck? In this game, you see the accessoiries you equip! And it isn't just a ring or whatever, this guy had "Fang Earrings" equipped. All the models of the deifferent accessoiries seem implemented. So much love in detail in this game.



So I'm still loving it. I just hope they implement some kind of search function in the market wards soon. You can't really trade well, because of this. So far I gave stuff to guild members or even NPCd stuff because it's just so annoying to trade without auction house or search function.

Last days of Beta!

I'm just going to post a few pics. But first I'll have to tell you all about something I read on a German forum concerning FFXIV. As we know, the game at its current state has its flaws, like rather bad ui, lag, etc.
And someone said, translated:
"I WANT to like this game becaue I have never seen such a beautiful MMORPG. But it won't let me. It' like seeing a beautiful person who constantly burps into your face".
Just wanted to share shis awesome quote as it made me laugh. A lot.

Anyhow, here a few screenies where I messed around with my archer.

Moogles! YAY! Cute fluffy weird little balls. :D

Another one, during the first story quest.

I wonder who named this guy. This is NOT a "Raging Ram". It's a weird round ball with horns, resembling a little to a sheep... Cute anyway.

My other character with Hamen ;) If he decides to play in the real game, this is probably how we are going to look, except that I'll main a caster.

Yes, my archer looks like a witch. But I mean... why should an archer not be able to wear a robe with a witch hat? This restriction never made sense to me in other MMORPGs. I mean, A cook can still wear a plumbers uniform, even though he isn't one? I mean I can understand when a potentially physically weak caster can't wear a plate mail, but other way around it makes no sense to me to forbid it. So yeah, now I'm looking cool (and the stats on the robe were still better than my starting equipment, btw.)

Second Thoughts on the Beta

After the tragic death of my Lalafell I created two new characters. A Miqote Archer and another Lalafell, Marauder this time.

The Archer plays quite nicely, they get a binding move pretty early, they do a lot of damage and since they can stay at distance they don't take much damage either. This is especially useful when fighting mushrooms that do a little aoe poison - Most of the time I could just run out of range and keep damaging him without being in danger.
Other than in WoW you actually have to refill your quiver once you used up a stack of arrows. If you don't refill you will throw stones, doing one damage a hit :)
The most basic arrows are very cheap. But technically I would say that a carpenter should be able to make arrows, but from what I saw you need a ton of mats to make 3 arrows. Taking a minute each craft it doesn't sound like fun when you have to do that to provide yourself with arrows... Maybe I just saw a particularly complicated recipe but that kind of put me off.

I started the Archer in Gridania and complete the first story quest. So apparently I'm one of the rare people that understand Moogle talk, hehe. I also explored a little bit, but in the forest around Gridania it's kind of hard to dodge mobs, because you only have those forest paths and not an open area where you could walk around. I made it to the second camp (only because some menacing looking mobs didn't aggro though). Not much to see except forest landscapes until then.

The Lalafell I created to play with my boyfriend Hamen. He had to go through a bit of trouble to make FFXIV run on his comp and even now it still lags although he plays on lowest graphics etc. He is now planning on getting a new system <_< Anyway, we ran around as Pugilist and Marauder killing mobs pretty quickly. Although I have to say that poison from Chiglets is really mean. 70 HP a tick is not funny when you have only 400 or so. I died twice to that :( We then changed jobs, me Gladiator (where the hell do you get a low level shield?) , him Lancer. We could kill stuff, but for some reason we both got super few skillpoints while doing so. I don't really know why. After getting a grand total of about 200 skillpoints after 20 minutes (on level 1, mind you!) I switched back to Marauder, promptly gaining skillpoints again. Not making much sense to me there... I must say, I miss the "old school" job names... Talking of Paladin, Warrior, White Mage, Red Mage, Lancer (well they got that one.. :/ )... and the likes. Why make new names for the same classes? It's not a big deal of course, just something I noticed which I would have preferred a different way. Also the beta is pretty nice to get first impressions, but it doesn't invite for long play because there is so little to do. You get the first story quest which you complete at around level 4. The next story quest commences at level 10 (so I heard) and in between you can do 4 leve quests a day and then grind. Or travel to another city and do the level quests there. I'm hoping they add a bit for the release, especially because the starting areas will be filled up again --> no mobs to grind on.
I'm still excited about the game, I think it has a LOT of potential. Just hope SE won't screw it up. :)

Awesome travelling with pretty bad ending.

So. After I bought myself a nice robe and couldn't find a hat I set myself the goal to craft a hat. Since I levelled clothcraft up a bit anyway. Problem: No wind shards to be found around Uldah. Internet told me to travel to Limsa Lominsa and kill sheep to get them so off I went!!

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The landscape around Uldah one last time, this time without sandstorm. As you can see the vision is very clear.

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This is the landscape in the next area. The sun was going down and I was hoping to get a red-skyish screenshot.

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Instead I got a screenshot where it looks like the ladybug killed me. It probably would have but it was really a big spider thing... No idea what's it called. It hit me for over 1000 damage :S

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Not much to say to this, I just found it pretty.

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Just like this. Alot of this stuff wants me to come back by day, I bet it looks even more awesome then. So much to explore, I don't think I will actually be questing or grinding much at all anymore until release.

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Here I am waiting for the ferry to take me over to Limsa Lominsa. 

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On the ferry, admiring the water effects. :)

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Uh yeah. A pirate taking me safely to Limsa Lominsa, hehe. 

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Dawn approaching. 

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Now the unspeakable happened!! I ran all the way to this blue... thingy thinking it was the lighttower where I was supposed to find a flock of sheep dropping huge amounts of wind shards! Instead, right when I clicked the thing, this big ugly crab killed me with one hit only to mock me after. He kind of danced at my dead body! Worse, the moment I clicked this, I think it set my homepoint right there. Everytime I hit "return" it said "This action can not be done right now" even relogging didn't help :-( So I think I am stuck there now. And even if I could get up, I'm not sure if the crab wouldn't just kill me again. So I guess I'll have to make a new character xD. Good thing it's only the beta.

Even the crab couldn't believe my bad luck. :(

Sooo yeah. Gonna roll out a new character! .. 19 frikkin points... for those who get the joke. The good news is, my boyfriend probably got his video card to work now so with a bit of luck we can play together soon. Gonna be more fun then I think =D!

Screenshots (1)

After remapping my apple keyboard I can now blend out the interface and therefore make nice screenshots.

Well, this was before I remapped. Those spots of flowers are everywhere in the area around Uldah. Also there is almost constantly a sandstorm kind of thing. Which is why the background looks so dusty, this has nothing to do with my system. In other areas you can see far without problems.

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Crafting (Clothcraft). While doing this you have to choose every few seconds what you do next. You have to base your decision on the color of this little glowing orb. If it's white, you are good to go, if it's yellow, even better, if it's red you better wait until it changes color. Each craft has its own animation and tool which I find very nice.

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:D I like this so much. I know emotes don't make a game, but this is just so cute that I have to post it.

Beta Key - First impressions

Hello,

I recently acquired an open beta key for Final Fantasy XIV. Yesterday I found the time to play it.

After I created a little Taru Traumaturge (Lalafell.. sorry if I use XI-Vocabulary here...) and watched the intro scene which was pretty amazing (Gridania). The graphics of the game are superb, and pure joy to walk around and just look at stuff.

After getting used to the controls (rather similar to XI, but not quite the same... I hope it will be customizable at release!). I explored a little, did my first quest and had a little bit of money, say 1000Gil. With this you can buy any weapon and therefore change job. I assume you know the basic mechanics of job changing here.
After I noticed that my Traumaturge has no access to Cure I wanted to play Conjurer first. However I was not able to find a merchant that sells the Conjurer weapon in Gridania! I'm pretty sure I'm blind because I found the merchants for just about every other class in the market quarter but whatever. :P

I just created a new character, this time Ul'dah. A bit stupid, the game crashed during the intro-cutscene! Anyhow, I quested, did those Guild Leves, grinded a bit... Did the first "main story quest" and after that was a rich Lalafell with 30k gil just from Quest Awards. That is MORE than enough to start out.

The battle system is the same as in FFXI so I like it. A lot of people complain about having to "click" the mob twice to actually attack, and my advice is: Don't use the mouse. Use the numpad, with 0 you can tab and you have a enter key right there as well. The arrow keys aren't far away either so that's the best solution for me.

Concerning crafting:
My boyfriend created a Galka (I don't even know how they are called in XIV...Rhoesomething) Alchemist. He failed the first quest and therefore was standing there with no gil, and no offfensive skill. How would he get money? I see a big design flaw right there. Most guild leves for the crafters require level 5 as well, but how is he going to level if he can't buy any mats?

Well, back to myself and my opinion on crafting. Yes, the menu is sluggish and slow as hell and that sucks and has to change. But I love the basic idea behind the crafting. You actully have to craft it yourself and not say "Make 200 Hempen Cloths, I'll go afk and be a level 10 Clothcrafter when I come back". I love that idea. They just have to add a "known recipe" section so you don't have to go through the inventory (which lags HORRIBLY) every time you want to make something. Just like it automatically adds the ingredients when you do the guild leves.

To all those people complaining about not being able to jump: People, this is FF! You just don't jump. Get used to it or leave the game alone.

Let's get to the bad stuff though. Gotta keep in mind that it's a beta though.
* no hotkeys for inventory, etc.
* doors or aetherytes are not targetable. You get a little action icon when you approach one and then have to select it in the menu. That feels really awkward. Target it via tab and when hitting enter open the door or display the interaction with the object would be much nicer.
* game crashes, but i expect this to stop after release
* no real tutorials. At the aetherytes you can select a manual kind of thing where stuff is explained, but that's about it. You kind of just get thrown in there and have to figure stuff out for yourself. Which I don't mind but I have read a lot of people complaining about this.
* Not enough spawn points of exp-mobs. This is really sucky. At peek times you run through this huge huge desert area and maybe every 5 minutes you can kill one mob. This flat out sucks. I don't mind grinding, not at all, but at this state you can't really even do that.
* controls are not customizable.