August 2013 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Awesome Wife

August 31, 2013 by Belghast

Good evening my dear readers… I am writing this far later in the day than normal… but there was good reason. Essentially today we greatly varied our normal weekend routine. Towards the end of the week my wife suggested we go to Muskogee today, and I suggested that we just get up early, shower and eat breakfast on the road. It has been in the hundreds temperature wise in Oklahoma this week, so I thought it would be better to get up there and back before it heated up too badly. Instead we ended up spending the entire day there, but we found a lot of spiffy things.

Awesome Wife

A few weeks back I wrote about my wife and how amazing she was when she spontaneously got me a huge haul of Legos when she went off on a shopping excursion with some of her friends. Well today was the last day of the big sale that she found them on… and she wanted to know if I wanted to make a trip up to see if there was anything else I wanted. Firstly I thought it was amazing that she was offering to make a trip to Muskogee just to go Lego shopping for me… but it gets better. When she was there early, she had told me that the place was not air conditioned and that if we ever made a trip back… that we would want to go early in the day.

As a result that is what is leading me to blog so late, as we pretty much were on the road as soon as we woke up this morning with no real time for me to knock out a morning post. During the day she was there she had texted me pictures of the various sets she found, but I really did not get a good feeling for what the store was like. We made a trip to the one in west Tulsa, and everything there was pretty much in neat and organized rows like a closeout store. Additionally that store was air conditioned… so I really could not grasp just how hot and oppressive the Muskogee store would be.

Above and Beyond

The above picture is of what I would consider the most organized section of Sooner Surplus. The various toys were scattered around throughout the store over the course of six different isles. In each isle there were legos mixed in, crammed back behind… above and under all the rest of the toys. Essentially Sooner Surplus is what appears to be a store that buys items that the stores like Wal-mart write off as a loss. The end result is a complete mishmash of everything you could imagine. All of it in new or like new state… sometimes with dented packages but everything around sixty percent of retail prices. For example the TIE Fighter she got me last time retails for $55 and the pricetag at the store was $35.

Until August 31st… aka today all of the toys, Legos included were an additional 20% off the already 60% pricetag. So first off I was completely floored that she thought about the Legos in the first place… but as I rummaged through the shelves today I finally grasped just how amazing she really was. The various sets the gathered up last time… came from about 12 different places in the store… some of them buried behind piles of other toys. So not only was she thinking about me when she saw the Legos… she went through a massive amount of physical effort to FIND all the sets in the first place. All of this in during an Oklahoma afternoon, in a metal building with no air-conditioning that seems to heat up like an oven really quickly.

A Real Trooper

So after picking me out almost $100 in Lego sets last time… she was more than willing to bring me back today and let me pick through the sets myself. This time around we got a lot of the larger sets. Granted in the above picture, one of the sets came from closeout in our Wal-Mart… but she still was amazing about letting me pick that one up as well. The Goblin King set above, was roughly $60 before the 20% discount… and it originally retailed in the store for over $100 by itself. The monster train set was roughly $40 and retailed for over $80 in the store. So all in all I found a ton of really good bigger sets for super cheap even before the discount… but knowing that we got an additional 20% off of everything was a huge push to pick them up.

The Optimus Prime set is Kree-o but everything I have seen shows that they are completely compatible with Lego. It originally retailed for $80 and before the 20% discount the above set was $20. Granted I don’t think the Kree-o product line has gone over as well as Hasbro could have hoped, but it still looks awesome, and had a ton of pieces. The set I had gotten from Wal-mart before was also originally in the $100 range, but we picked it up I think for $45. Essentially all told between the set from Wal-mart and the finds today at Sooner Surplus… my wife was a real trooper about me spending another $200 on Legos.

While we were there we found a few more sets for my niece and nephew. The big thing we were excited about is that we found another three sets from the Lego Friends line for her… and then got a really cool bigger dump truck set for him. Granted this pales in comparison to what I walked away with, but I am sure they will be happy when we give them to them. We went by the Wal-mart in Muskogee later and they had quite a few sets on clearance as well. I passed on a Hobbit Attack of the Wargs set for $20 without looking it up. Later on I realized that the set was a $50 set normally. My wife being awesome as always… encouraged me to get it… but i felt bad since I had already spent so much earlier.

Things People Pawn

We have always been huge fans of Pawn Shops. Essentially if I can get a price break by buying something second hand… I will always do it. Just with the Legos we are always looking for a good deal, and namely we frequently them fairly often looking for Camera lenses for our Canon Digital SLRs. We had never actually been to the Cash America in Muskogee, but on the last trip my wife actually found where it was located. So after getting out of Sooner Surplus we wound our way over there to check it out. It was extremely nice inside and the service staff there were extremely friendly.

That has always been the bane of our existence as pawn shops go. We go there to buy things, and it always seems like we have pure hell trying to get anyone to wait on us. The workers in pawn shops are usually either ignoring the customers or too busy with the folks there to pawn things. It always rubs me the wrong way since in essense we are there to give them money, not ask for it. Anyways the folks at this shop were the exact opposite super friendly. My wife looked at some of the rings and I roamed around the store for a bit. I cracked up when I saw the above items. I guess people will pawn damned near anything. I never thought of a generic coffee pot, a igloo water jug, and a toaster oven as high dollar items.

Further Excursions

Another place we have to go whenever we are in Muskogee or honestly any town that has one is Hastings. For those not familiar with it, it is this odd bookstore/movie/comic/toys/music/electronics store chain. They generally have prices that range on the high end, but when they put things on sale, or have used merchandise it is generally a really good deal. Since for the most part we have moved to digital books… I don’t so much buy books there any more, but I love looking through their random geeky kitsch. One of my favorite things in Borderlands 2… is anything produced by Jacobs manufacturing. I kind of have a fetish for the whole steam punk look of their weapons. One of my favorite places in the game is when you run across a non-functioning CL4P-TP model styled by Jacobs.

One the shelves at Hastings I stumbled onto exactly that… a Jacobs model “Clap-Trap”. I thought it was extremely cool… just not the $20 price tag worth of cool. Sure it would have looked awesome adorning my desk at work. But that seemed a bit much for a random action figure. I had seen several versions of the figure before, but always in the blue or yellow variant. I didn’t even know that the Jacobs model existed. I might have gone for it… but the paint job was not nearly as cool as it was in game. The wood grain looked extremely flat and was mostly just solid fields of brown. So while super cool… it would never look as cool as the awesome one from in game.

Pretty much the rest of the day was spent ping ponging around Muskogee. We went out to the Mall and hit several clothing stores looking for stuff for my wife. Additionally we had trips to Ross and Cato and found a handful of things. That has been the real challenge this year starting back to school is that since we have both lost quite a bit of weight (55 lbs for me and 45 lbs for my wife) a lot of her professional attire was just too big to remain looking professional. The frustrating thing is she seems to be in an odd spot where clothing is hard to find… most likely because so many people are currently in that size range. So as a result we have picked up separates wherever we could find them.

Wrapping Up

It was a fun day, and while it was hot as hell out there it was well worth the trip. I am so thankful I have such an awesome spouse… that while she may not fully understand my obsessions… she at least understands what is important to me and indulges my eccentricities. Quite honestly it is a two way street, as I have gone down so many roads that lead to one of her little obsessions as well. I guess at the end of the day that is why we work well together. Anyways… I hope you all have a great weekend, and apologies again for getting this post out so late.

FFXIV a Week Later

August 30, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks… I find myself still slowly shaking off the effects of taking some Benadryl before going to bed last night. My allergies have been killing me this week and as a result my throat is extremely raw from all the drainage. I feel like we are getting a summers worth of allergens all at once. The normal flow of things has been pretty messed up this year, for example we each night the windows are bombarded by junebugs… this is something that should have occurred around my birthday in mid June. Everything just seems to be happening later than normal.

A Week Later

Thus far I have been pretty harsh in my postings about Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn. The problem is… the infrastructure is still grossly inadequate, but the sad part about that is that the actual game itself is really good. When you first see the game it feels as though you are playing a Japanese interpretation of World of Warcraft. However the longer you play the more you realize it is a deeply nuanced game with a lot of really strong points going for it. The game still has very strong WoW elements… but it also is a whole lot Final Fantasy XII with some Rift and GW2 mixed in for good measure.

The key system for me that makes it extremely enjoyable is the job system. I’ve been a fan of this since I first encountered it playing a language hacked SNES rom of Final Fantasy V. What this does in reality is make it so you have no real need for alts. One single character can do literally every class in the game, and you are actually rewarded for doing this. When you switch classes you can take with you certain cross-class abilities. While these are rarely the signature attack of a given class, they do add quite a bit of flavor to your character.

Similarly the crafting system works much the same. You can fall into a black hole of crafting if you allow yourself. One of our guild members is I think trying to level every single craft profession. They are all insidiously tied in a way that makes it extremely beneficial to be able to craft multiple types of things. You will often encounter roadblocks where profession A requires you to have something from profession B and C. The dirty secret is… that many of these items that you need are also available on a few vendors out in the world… so if you know where those are you have no real need to multi-craft.

Multi-Classed

Currently my character is a 23 Maurader, 16 Gladiator, 15 Jouster and as of last night 6 Thaumaturge. Yes you heard that right… I do in fact have a few levels of Thaumaturge… a finger wiggler. The thing is every single class I have played has been fun. The caster for example has a really cool mechanic that switched back and forth between elemental fire and frost attacks. The fire attack gives you a buff that increases your damage output… but also increases the cost of your spells… whereas frost decreases damage output… but massively increases mana regeneration. So in order to play effectively you have to switch back and forth between the two buffed states, and it gives you the ability to regenerate back your mana… but still be attacking.

Right now I have pretty much focused on playing Marauder and plan on transitioning it to Warrior when I get to 30… as Warrior is a mix of 30 Marauder and 15 Gladiator. Eventually I plan on taking Lancer to 30 as well so I can pick up the Dragoon Job which requires 30 Lancer and 15 Marauder. The thing is the cross class dynamic completely changes the way you think about your character. For example I know at some point soon I am going to have to push Gladiator up to 22, because that will unlock provoke, one of the few snap aggro taunts in the game. As I have been tanking quite a few instances… this will be a key ability for me to have in the long run.

Tanking

Essentially for tanking early on you have two different flavors to choose from. The Marauder is your big two hander wielding tank that ends up feeling a bit deathknighty… if you forced a DK to rely on nothing but Heart Strike cleaves to hold aggro. The Marauder is extremely nuanced and there are a few buffs you want to juggle, but overall it is a very fluid feeling class. On the other side you have the Gladiator, which is a more traditional sword and board tank. It’s primary means of holding aggro is through flash, a spell that it casts that increases the threat of all targets surrounding it. In order to support this ability the Gladiator is given an attack combo that ends up regenerating their mana in the process allowing them to keep flash up all through the fight.

At this point I have tanked six instances as Marauder, and I really like the feel of it. I am starting to feel as thought I understand the mechanics extremely well. Hopefully as guild members level up I will be able to swap it up and try some instances as Gladiator to get a feel for how I like the differences. So far I naturally lean towards the Marauder since it has a big damned axe… and has a nice AOE cleave attack that is super useful when leveling out in the world. However my suspicion is that later on the Gladiator/Paladin will have much higher overall defense and the ability to soak more damage. Ultimately I plan on grabbing enough levels to pick up Paladin as well as something I can swap to when needed.

Dungeons

The dungeons quite honestly are shockingly good. I expected the standard theme park ride through a dungeon experience… but they are really intricate and nuanced. Essentially so far it seems like there is a golden path that allows you to quickly progress through the dungeon. However in each one I have encountered there are tons of optional things you can do… rooms that have no reason to ever enter other than for the chance as getting a bonus chest of loot. Last night we were in a dungeon and there were pull chains every so often… each had a completely random chance of spawning some event… or in an extremely rare case getting a chest of loot. It took time… and the encounters that were spawned were fairly painful… but we ended up with 3 bonus chests by doing that.

Additionally the boss encounters are messaged extremely well. So far we have done no real research on the dungeons we have encountered, but just by watching the way the mobs behave we have been able to figure out the key mechanic of most fights. That is not to say there have not been the occasional item that completely wipes the group when we didn’t do something… but in those cases it was really painfully obvious what we were supposed to do… we just were not paying attention. The fights have a lot of things going on… are often times frenetic and rely on you to both tank mobs and allow your dps to burn the occasional add down unassisted. Overall it is one of the best dungeon experiences I have had in several years.

Tragedy

This game is extremely good… and I would honestly go so far as to say it is an amazing experience. There is simply so much in the game that you do not see at face value. So many deep systems supporting your gameplay experience that it takes awhile to get into. The tragedy of all of this is… that even as good as the game is… it is still supported by a grossly inadequate infrastructure. Yesterday Reinhart posted a translation of a letter on the Japanese forums that explains the problems. Essentially they were not expecting the game to be the success it is… currently they have capacity for 218,000 players to be logged in at the same time. From what I have heard they were initially only expecting to have 100,000 concurrent users.

Right now they have way more than this trying to play the game, and as a result we end up with all the technical problems we are dealing with. I honestly believe they are trying their best to deal with the issues… but I also believe that more than likely Squaresoft did not have the faith in this game than the really should have. The first release was a complete disaster, and I feel as though they threw some money at it in hopes of turning into a modest profit generator… but instead it has been way more popular than they ever could have imagined. While I am happy they are exceeding their expectations… it makes for an extremely frustrating experience.

I have had a Microsoft Sidewinder 4X keyboard for some time, and one of the nifty features it has is a bank of hardware macro keys. Until the release of this game I had never actually configured them to do anything. Now I have a key that presses the 0 button every 1.5 seconds… this is essentially what I am reduced to if I ever hope to log into the game. For those who do not know this… hitting 0 on the numpad is basically the equivalent of hidding X on a joystick… it is the continue to the next step key. As a result you can log into the client by spamming 0… and with the constant world is full errors this is essentially how we get it… hit the hardware macro and fiddling around on phones or tablets until it lets us in.

Wait to Purchase

My hope is that in the coming weeks they will resolve these issues and it will be smooth sailing ahead. The problem is… the damage may have already been done. In the United States we are going into the Labor Day weekend… and if the game is not fully playable over that break… then it will cause a ton of negative vibes among the US populace. This game is extremely worth the purchase, and as much as I dislike saying this… is fully worth the monthly subscription fee. However right now my advice to friends is to wait before purchasing it. Sure you can probably go form store to store to find a copy of the game… but you are ultimately just setting yourself up for frustration.

The gameplay experience is extremely good, which makes the inability to actually get into the game and play it all the more frustrating. This combination of amazing game and total lack of infrastructure is what made me such a ball of directionless fury early in the week. As a result if I can save anyone that frustration I would. I feel like eventually things will settle down… be it a week from now or a month from now. The game will still be an amazing experience at that point… so I highly suggest you just sit on your money and play something else in the meantime. I promise the collective community with sound an “All Clear” sign when the game is ready for primetime.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get on the road. I have a project charter to knock out today, and I am trying to figure exactly where I will hide out while writing it. The problem is that I get so many random questions throughout the day that it throws off my train of thought. I am thinking about grabbing the small conference room on the floor we go to for laptop lunches. I can hang out in there and compose freely without interruptions. I hope you all have a great day and that it is the beginning of an amazing labor day weekend. I will be involved in a big NDA protected event, so not sure how much gaming news I will have to report this weekend.

Lure Liquidation

August 29, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land, I am easing my way into cognizance this morning. Last night I slept fairly well, but not as deeply as I had been recently. The primary difference is I decided not to take a Tylenol pm last night and it seemed to still work. Essentially I had hoped I was over whatever hump was causing me to wake up every few hours… and it seems to have been the case. I really did not want my sleep patterns to become dependent on a drug… even if it was simply an over the counter one.

The Exodus

The funny part about our Wednesday night “un-official” guild night… is that we never end up doing exactly what I had planned on doing in the first place. Originally I had posted on Twitter and the guild forums that it was going to be a lure liquidation night… and while we did a lot of that we did not start the evening doing it. I logged in around 6:30 or so and at that point we have only a few people around. After I had finished with my dinner I noticed we had 5 characters that were 50+ online. So I started trying to put together something that would make a workable group make-up for a dungeon.

Lukian bravely specced his cleric into healer and worked on his setup for doing just that. I on the other hand built a quick bard build and attempted to remember how to do that. That left Psynister as our tank, and Fynralyl and Vernall to dps things down. Initially we started the instance and then quickly realized that it was grey to all but one of us. I thought maybe this would change after we actually started the fight it might change… but apparently Exodus of the Storm Queen uses old world logic for determining how something cons to players.

After the first boss we all left the instance… and manually mentored down in the 51-52 range. This is really something Trion needs to fix. You need to be able to queue with a mixed level guild group and it automagically mentors everyone down to the closest fit for a given dungeon. This would really simplify the process of mixed level groups doing things together. After manually mentoring… we realized that we had the deserter debuff… so one of us ran over to Iron Pine Peaks and manually zoned us into the instance. Quite honestly… this process needs a lot of work. It is awesome that it is viable… but it should be just a thing you click a button to do.

After the initial hiccups the instance went relatively smoothly… and we only had one wipe… namely because I could not really remember any of the boss fight strategies… or at least misremembered the wrong parts. Granted not a single piece of viable gear dropped, but we got some useful rune crafting mats out of the process. I had been wanting to run ANY form of a dungeon for weeks… so this at least filled that niche. It was fun and each of the players fell into their roll pretty naturally. I figure I suck at barding… but there really isn’t much to do with barding now that codas refresh the cool down of motifs.

Lure Liquidation

After the dungeon we noticed we had a few more people online, so we decided to start by opening some crafting rifts… since we each had a stockpile of grandmaster lures sitting unused. Previously when Lukian and I had done this… it seemed like the best chance of crafting materials was when summoning them in the high end zones like Ashora or Infinity Steppes. The only problem is… I was on my 56, Fyn and Psyn both 57 and Dethbridge that joined up with us 54. None of us had any of the porticulums out in any of the zones. However we had some ports relatively close to Ashora, so we set our sights there. Lukian stepped afk to grab a bite to eat as we caravanned across Kingsward.

Deth was not with us yet, so when we got out to Ashora we dropped a guild banner to let him port his way out. I have to say that is an extremely cool addition to the game… I just with the cool down was not quite so heinous. An hour just really limits the usefulness especially when the guild is trying to bounce around the world and do something. We opened the one Outfitter lure I had on my rogue, and quickly realized that one 60, a 56, 2 57s and a 54 was simply not enough dps to close level 60 crafting rifts and hit all the timers. So after we got one phase away from completion… I decided to take one for the team and grab my warrior that is raid ready dps.

After this switch up the rifts closed extremely smoothly and we were able to burn through the crafting lures. The only problem with Ashora is that this tends to be the place where everyone and their brother open rifts. As a result the world was littered with abandoned Hunt rifts… but we decided to go ahead and try a few of these as well. With a 60 healer, 60 dps, 57 tank, 58 and 54 dps we we able to close them pretty effectively. We had talked about doing some hunt rifts, so I was more than willing to latch onto someone elses effort. I know hunt rifts spawn in the wild… but since every single one in Ashora seemed to be a hunt… I am figuring someone is spawning them with the hopes that someone else would come around and close them behind them.

I have to say this random running around and doing things together was exactly what I had needed after the recent days of frustration and anger over the generally botched state of the Final Fantasy XIV launch. This was pure and simple fun, running around aimlessly as a group of guildies finding mayhem as it lay out in our path before us. We got at least one ding out of the action, and I think our 54 got a large amount of xp from each of the 60 rifts we closed. I know we each walked away with a fair stack of catalysts for crafting epicy goodness, and a bunch of random level 60 materials on top of that. The hunts each provided quite a bit of Torvan Hunters rep and a decent number of infinity stones as well.

The Hive

After a couple of hours of running around, Fyn decided it was time for bed for her… and as a result we broke up the rift running party. Lukian asked if I had ever done the level 60 chronicle and I had not. Since it was supposedly pretty fast I agreed to group up and knock it out. I am extremely impressed with what I saw. The previous chronicles had essentially been dumbed down version of the raid encounters to date… but this one appeared to be a unique beast of its own. Essentially you are invading an architect hive… and the NPC you are helping out is pretty much my favorite in the entire Rift universe… Atrophinius. There are a couple of repeatable quests that you can perform for him, giving you writs of notoriety for your faction of choice.

The fights were all pretty simple, and while I died a few times out of a mix of not knowing the encounters and the trademark Belghast overzealousness… we never actually wiped as a group. The gear you get out of the chronicle is relatively nice, and it can be upgraded to essentially pre-elite blues at best. It is a good way to get your feet wet and gear over the course of a handful of days. Additionally it rewards a little bit of the elite dungeon currency for finishing each run… so you could eventually buy elite purples if you were diligent enough. Essentially it seemed like there were three encounters and a bonus chest that spawned randomly in the zone.

It was a really fun and simple dungeon designed for two players. The visuals were just amazing looking.. and there was an added mini-game in that they have hidden artifacts scattered throughout the dungeon… so while you are clearing the place you are constantly keeping your eyes peeled for them. At least in our run, they seemed overly fond of hiding them in the various lighting fixtures of the dungeon. I am not sure if I would do this as an every night thing… but I definitely enjoyed myself and would gladly run it again.

Wrapping Up

Like I said above… this was precisely the kind of night I needed to wash away all the frustration from previous nights. Before starting up rift last night I decided to try logging into Final Fantasy XIV and encountered the World Full 1017 error for 15-20 minutes as I ate my dinner. So while I was able to get in multiple times over my lunch break… it seems to have been mostly a fluke. However my guildies are reporting that as a whole it is far easier to get logged in… or at least you only have to leg hump the login server for 30 minutes or so before you get access. I do hope they get things sorted out… having a mostly unplayable game over the labor day weekend is a pretty massive sin. Speaking of that… I have one of those NDA events going on… if you too have an NDA event going on this weekend let me know… it may very well be the same one and we can work towards a shared goal. Anyways… enough cryptic talk aside… I hope you all have a great day.

Too Much Chaos

August 28, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. No its okay… I promise I won’t be grumpy, ranty Bel today. Quite honestly my initial rage over the horrible infrastructure of Final Fantasy XIV is over for the most part. I said many things in my anger yesterday, that I wish I could take back… namely had a few choice fights with friends. Today’s post is my attempt at an apology. Hopefully I will be able to mend whatever fences that berserker Belghast tore down in the process.

Dealing Poorly

Yesterday at the time I wrote my post, and subsequent posts I made on the Stalwart guild forums… I was a very pissed off Bel, filled with lots and lots of righteous indignation. I had to vent out that anger in the only way I felt was safe to do it… with my words. The problem is that has long lasting negative repercussions as well. My words tend to have a lasting effect long after the anger that caused them has subsided. So this morning while I am pretty chill about the whole situation… the reverberations of my anger are still bouncing around.

As a young adult I had issues with anger, namely because I didn’t feel like I really could express it. I felt like I had so many expectations on the way I should act and behave, so as a result I would keep packing down the frustration and rage somewhere beneath the surface. I guess I had hoped that it would just fade away. The problem is it never really did and there was a buffer of only so much crap I could take before it would all come spilling out in a torrent towards whoever was the last person who pissed me off. The “last straw” never ended up being someone worthy of my rage… just the last unfortunate soul who ended up adding something to the stack.

Then all these frustrations would come spilling out in a pyroclastic blast targeting whoever happened to be in the way. I remember there was an incident I am not proud of at all… where a friend had been picking on me about something… working a sore nerve over and over. The kid was not a bad kid, nor did he really mean what he was saying… but it finally reached a point where it had built up over the course of a few days and I just snapped. I ended up picking him up and next thing I knew I had thrown him down a flight of stairs. Thank god he was okay… but it was at that point I realized that I could actually hurt someone with my anger.

Too Much Chaos

Basically at that point I realized that I could no longer afford to keep packing the powder keg and holding in every little bit of anger… because when it finally exploded I really had no control over the direction the explosion would occur. For the most part the idea of venting more often has worked for me… but at times there are just things that I can’t vent about. So lately I have been packing the powder keg once more… and the accumulation of little frustrations and anger here and there that I just could not react to have been building. While I don’t really think of myself as an extremely ordered person… I feel like I can only really handle so much uncertainty and chaos in my life. I am good at dealing with small variations in my daily life… but for the most part I need the majority of my routine to remain unaltered.

The last month has been a combination of so many chaotic situations clashing at one time. Firstly my work environment has been insane… until Monday morning we had 61 active projects divided up among 3 employees… myself included. The bulk of these projects involve me juggling my time in a way so that I get just enough done… to keep from pissing any one business unit off. Every single one of these projects is some business units “number one priority”… so quite honestly I take a lot of the chaos on myself to protect my team mates from it. My thought has always been that if I could keep them focused on individual tasks… and me working on the random occurrences we could get more done than if all of us were being interrupted constantly.

Added to this… my home life has been a mess lately as well. My wife is a school teacher, so the last month and a half has been entirely about the preparation for going back to school. This involves accumulating materials, with our weight loss finding clothing, and finally all of the responsibilities of day to day living shifting back onto me. She literally ends up working 80 hours per week once you factor in all the after hours work… so as a result during the school year I pick up the slack with household chores. But each year there is a massive adjustment period as I try and deal with her being in a state of chaos as she gets used to going back to dealing with school work 24/7.

On top of this our weekends have been pure chaos lately as our neighbor… decided within two weeks to get married. So my wife was pulled in a completely different direction just as the height of the back to school crap was starting, in trying to help out with the planning of that as well. Additionally I got put in a position where I had to photograph my very first wedding. All of which were things I just could not say no to. Now that the wedding is over… the neighbors daughter has had to have emergency surgery… so the chaos continues on in helping deal with that. I say neighbor but they are basically our family… when I had the massive bleed out incident a few years back… she was the one that cleaned up the mess while I was in the emergency room. Likewise any time anyone has ever gotten hurt… we have been the ones that got called and rushed to the hospital.

Finally… we have the Final Fantasy XIV launch. With all the rest of this chaos in my life… I just could not take the one sanctuary I had left… my gaming world to be thrown into a disarray as well. So yesterday I blew up in a whole bunch of directions when I finally reached my peak of crap I could deal with at one time. Quite honestly I think I made myself sick in the process… and after I had exploded out my rage… I just felt woozy and sick to my stomach. I had essentially done what I have tried not to do… I packed the powder keg and let it explode on its own. All of the things I could not react to… because I had to be a “good guy” and take it in stride… just came pouring out and the failed game launch became my target.

After the Storm

So as I said… this is my way of apologizing to the people I offended yesterday… and the ones that got in the path of my rage. Since I spent the last two days complaining about the Final Fantasy XIV launch… I felt like there was a point that maybe I had not given enough time to. The game itself is extremely good, when you can get into it and actually play. Last night after much frustration, a group of players managed to make their way through the login lottery and we pulled together a dungeon group. At a point in the main story arc, you are lead through the three level 15ish dungeons available to players: Satasha, Tam-Tara Undercroft, and Copperbell. This is going to be a point of content for some players… because the main storyline quest halts until you have run all three.

I had not been able to do any of the quests, and there were various other members of our party that were missing one or two of the later dungeons. So as a result last night we just ran the entire quest chain back to back. I have to say… I am surprised at just how well our group managed. The marauder is a seemingly extremely capable tank. Essentially I used a combination of overpower and the cross class gladiator flash skill to hold AOE aggro on multiple targets. There were many cases where when pulls were timed correctly we could get single mobs, instead of chaining large groups. The dungeon style was somewhere between Burning Crusade “Crowd Control Everything” and Wrath of the Lich king “AOE Roflstomp”. Essentially they felt just about perfect.

Basically in each of the dungeons there was a golden path you could take.. that would get you from point A to point B the fastest… or there was a more indirect route that would lead you past a large number of treasure chests along the way. We chose to take the more winding path and while most of the chests gave us potions or crafting materials… we did manage to get a few pieces of pink gear in the process. The dungeon design as a whole felt extremely solid, and I look forward to seeing the later ones as the difficulty ramps up. I hope soon to run the same three dungeons, but this time as gladiator to get a feel for which tanky class I like better.

Really Damned Good

Basically the problem with FFXIV is that it really is amazingly good. The game lands somewhere for me between World of Warcraft and Rift… in that you have a WoW like world… that happens to be filled with lots of random events and various event style quests that you can do. Additionally everything scales downwards… and as a result you can continue to do all of these events as it will sync your level. When we stepped into the dungeon last night… it synced us all down to level 15 without any player intervention. The only negative about their system however is the fact that you actually lose abilities… rather than just scale them downwards. Everquest 2 used to do this same thing… and it was extremely frustrating losing an ability that you had come to rely on.

It is that the gameplay is really great that makes the poor infrastructure at launch all that more of a tragedy. I have teetered back and forth on the edge of whether or not I would be playing this long term for some time. Ultimately I want to find a way to mix in playing this and playing Rift at the same time. Tonight for certain I will be back in Rift, as there are lots of things I want to do there… and the worst part about playing FFXIV has been the absence of all my guildies from Rift. I think tonight I either want to kill many rifts, or try and do a dungeon. I have not tanked in Rift in ages… and I want to dust my spurs off and get back in the action there.

Anyways where I was going with this… was that I hope my rants over the last few days do not permanently sour people against Final Fantasy XIV. It is a really solid game if you can get past the infrastructure and just play it. My only suggestion would be to wait until the server problems have worked themselves out in the next few weeks before taking the plunge yourself. Since dungeons automatically scale, you will likely always be able to find support for the early dungeon running. The world is amazingly populated despite all the issues logging in. I think more than anything, they have had a far bigger response than anyone ever could have imagined from a re-launch of an originally failed game.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to get out the door and on the road. Lots of crap to do today… and lots of issues that need to be dealt with. I plan on playing Rift tonight, because quite frankly I miss it. Now that the madness and the anger over not being able to play FFXIV has subsided, much of the “omg I have to log in” has as well. I feel like I need a chill night of just piddling around in Telara. I hope you all have a great day, and that this midpoint in the week goes smoothly.