Support Belghast

Good morning all you happy people in digital land.  So far I am having another allergy ridden morning as I struggle to shake off my stupor.  Right now I just want to go back to sleep, but I know that is really not within the realm of possibility.  My lungs are pretty junked up this morning, so starting to wonder if I need to take a breathing treatment.  Here is hoping that by the time I have finished writing this post that things will have cleared up and I am feeling much better.  I kinda wish I had one of those cookies from the Matrix that makes everything feel “right as rain”.

Moment of Truth

This morning is in essence the moment of truth for Squeenix.  Either players will be able to log in normally or at least within a few tries and get on with playing Final Fantasy XIV… or they will likely start to drop out of the game giving up.  Today’s maintenance has been sold as the cure to the problem in many ways.  If it ends up not being so… I am questioning just how much patience players will have.  I know my guild is getting to the point where our patience is worn extremely thin at this point.

I originally thought the title of this subject was going to be “Epic Letdown”.  Launching Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn was literally the first thing I did when I got upstairs.  I was greeted with the familiar 1017 shuffle as pictured above.  My immediate thoughts were “what the fuck”.  This has been such an up and down rollercoaster.  I feel like I have gone through the stages of grief with the outrage and the denial and finally I have arrived at the sad acceptance that they didn’t have a clue one what they were doing.

However I did a few quick searches and stumbled across this post.  Essentially it said that they were going to throttle logins immediately after the servers came back up… and in theory they have just now come back up.  Then over time this morning they will ratchet down the restrictions to make sure that the servers stay stable.  In essence that makes sense I suppose.  So shortly after this… I attempted to log in and got a 20 player queue and in within a few minutes.  Right now things seem tentatively “better”.  Time will tell as to whether or not the login lottery is gone… or if I am just seeing the effects of it being 6:30 in the morning. 

I want so hard to believe that things are back to normal, or at least back to Beta 3 normal…  because the recent norm has been pretty jacked up.  We have several people in the guild who are unable to purchase the game and get onto Cactuar, so here is hoping that in the coming days they are able to do so.  An encouraging sign was that apparently Squeenix gave Amazon the nod to go ahead and start offering digital sales and downloads yesterday afternoon.  That was the point at which I started to get extremely hopeful… because to me that meant they really felt this was the solution.  Here is hoping that it remains playable over the next few days as more players come online.

Support Belghast

Last night was a pretty momentous occasion for our little guild over in Rift.  It was the first time since the founding a few months back that we had five level 60 players online at the same time… or quite honestly even in the guild period.  Over the last few days Fynralyl and Psynister hit 60 on their main characters, and within the last week or so Sylladora did as well.  They joined myself and Lukian who had been 60 for some time and simply been waiting for some more guildies to start up regular dungeon runs.  The only problem with this… is we have a bit of a strange group composition.

The five of us add up to be 2 warriors, 2 mages and a cleric.  Lukian had been working on a healing spec, so I knew we had that covered.  Either Psynister or I could tank… so that should be good… but I thought Psyn pretty much ONLY had a tank spec, and since he needs tanky gear for elites I figured it was best to have him in that role.  Fyn and Sylla would of course be dps… which left us missing one key role…  Support.  At the last minute I remembered that in Storm Legion, Beastmaster had turned into a support tree, so after a little bit of fiddling I reset one of my unused roles to be the default Trailblazer preset (Beastmaster/Tempest/Reaver) support build.

It took me a little bit to get a grasp on my hot bars and set up a few macros, but within 10 minutes we were ready to go with me queuing as a support role.  It turns out that the Beastmaster is essentially a big walking buff bot.  I bring with me 6 different group and raid buffs that do everything from increase our damage, to reduce our damage taken, to causing a small hot every time I do a finishing move.  Essentially I am a lot like an Everquest bard…  I make everyone in the party somehow better, but you don’t really notice it until you don’t have one.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at just how cool the re-skinned beastmaster cat pet looked.  The previous version was this ugly emaciated blue thing, so apparently with storm legion there was a massive improvement in the models.  I have to say playing it does not feel nearly as gratifying as playing a Bard… which was the only Rift support I have been used to.  The effects of my work are far less tangible.  I know that just me being in the party is reducing all damage taken by 5% and causing everyone to deal 5% more damage…  but you really don’t show up on the meters either in the damage or healing you do.

I need to do more research into the support warrior roles, and come up with potentially a better spec.  I went for this one namely because you could be semi effective at range with the addition of the tempest abilities.  Also I feel as though I really did not have much time to soak in the abilities before trying to create some haphazard hot bars.  It worked well enough however and we were able to get through the random normal 60 we queued for.  Sadly only one piece of gear was usable… and even it was for the wrong spec. However hopefully over the coming weeks we will get some folks good gear.

Wrapping Up

Somewhat of a low news morning for me, but I did ramble on at length about two things so I figure this is a good place to cut it off.  I need to finish getting ready and get on the road.  I still feel like death warmed over, and my lungs still feel like crap.  So much of me wants to just say fuck it and take a sick day… the only problem with that is I don’t really see any end to this until the weather gets colder.  It is like all the allergies are hitting at the same time.  Anyways.. hopefully all of you out in digital land are doing far better than I am… and that you are all having an amazing week.  I am resigned to telling myself that we are at the halfway point to the weekend.