Littlest Odin

Flirting with Viral

Last night when I got home I had a message waiting on me, wanting to know if I had talked to a certain blogger.  At which point I gave my perspective, that I thought they were trying to keep a fairly low profile lately.  This started the gears in my head working, thinking about the fine line each of us walks each day when we post.  I admit that I live in a small amount of fear of one of my posts ending up going viral for some reason.  I mean ultimately as a blogger you want readers, but there is a limit to that.  Right now I have a dedicated group of a couple hundred regular readers and this feels comfortable.  It feels like I group I could reasonably have a conversation with, and remember the names and faces of each of them.  I write some fairly personal posts, and this feels like a small enough community to share that sort of intimate details with.

The problem is there have been a few of my posts that have for one reason or another gotten picked up in a much larger sphere of influence.  When this happens I find the whole experience stressful.  While it is cool to suddenly see your readership spike, at the same time personally I feel almost invaded.  Like this group of people that are not “my” people are trampling my lawn and ruining the flower beds.  The group of readers that I have now feels organic, and they have one by one found my blog for their own personal reasons.  Having a huge influx of people brings with it wholly different ideas of what community means, and what proper interaction between a blogger and reader is.  There were a few posts of mine that got picked up by WoW Insider back when this was for the most part a WoW blog… and it was as though the Mongol Horde was knocking on my front door step.

It is awesome to feel like your blog is a popular thing…  but at the same time I think most of us live in fear of our side project getting too big.  That someday something will happen to cause it to grow out of control and develop a life of its own, rather than this thing that we have fought hard to develop in just a certain way.  With the recent strife in the gaming community, I admit I have been more afraid of my blog suddenly being found by the “unwashed masses”.  I am still uncertain if I was the target of a DDoS a few weeks back, because it seemed like only my sites on the provider were actually effected.  We live in this climate where having a differing opinion to that of the riot mob has serious consequences, and that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies.  Still however i put myself out here every morning, hoping that the right people will see this… and the wrong people will get bored before finishing the first paragraph of one of my posts.

Littlest Odin

ffxiv 2014-11-05 19-37-53-758 A few nights ago I happened to be paying attention to chat at exactly the right moment, when through one of my many social Linkshells I saw a call that Odin had spawned in South Shroud.  For those unfamiliar with the concept, Odin is one of the coolest primal forces to have existed in the Final Fantasy universe.  In each incarnation there is generally the mechanic that if you take too long in attempting to defeat him he will cast Zantetsuken and destroy the entire party in a single attack.  Zantetsuken of course is the name of his sword which apparently roughly translates to “Sword of Vengence”.  The Final Fantasy XIV incarnation is just as painful, and involves him casting massive area of effect abilities that are extremely hard to get out of, and in some cases can in fact one-shot the player.  When Odin spawns it is as part of a fate, and players fight desperately in this chaotic mess to generate enough threat to qualify for Gold level participation.

If you participate at all in the fight you get an item called Odin’s Mantle, and if you manage to get gold you end up getting five of them at once.  Once you have collected five, either through getting Gold once or something else multiple times you can take them to Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona and trade them for some interesting stuff.  The king prize at least as far as I am concerned is Zantetsuken itself, which while no longer that good of a weapon is still an amazing item for the purpose of glamouring onto other items.  Another really popular item is Slepnir’s barding, that makes your Chocobo look like Odin’s mount Slepnir.  However since I actually picked up Slepnir itself from the cash shop, that was no longer a big deal to me.  So this time around I picked up Hjalmr aka Odin’s trademark helm.  In honor of the new look I dyed my Soldiery chest black to blend things together a bit better.

When the Dark Knight becomes a reality, I am really hoping that they release a two handed version of Zantetsuken that I can then glamour onto my weapon.  Even though I am wielding an axe, I still think I make a pretty badass tiny Odin.  The funny thing a bout this is that Odin actually spawns as the race of the person that landed the last killing blow.  So when I fought him the other night in South Shroud, he had actually spawned in Lalafell form.  Nothing says awesome like a tiny bundle of death oneshotting players left and right.  Both Odin and Behemoth are really cool experiences, and while I hate that I am constantly missing them… there is something about the extremely slow respawn timers that gives them a sense of mystique.   I am not sure what the actual timer is, but at least as a player it seems to be several days. In any case it is the sort of thing that I drop whatever I am doing to join in the fun… or will at least until I have gotten all of the shiny baubles that are available to win.

Dungeons with Friends

ffxiv 2014-11-05 21-55-32-810I have always liked to tank for my friends, but for whatever reason in Final Fantasy XIV I have always found the experience to be a bit stressful.  I am not sure if it was just lack of confidence in my abilities, or still getting used to the subtle differences of the way tanking works in this game…  but for whatever reason I have tended to prefer dpsing in dungeons and letting my friend Ash take the tanking lead.  However over the course of the last few months I have been “feeling my wheaties” and with the release of brand new content I find myself actually preferring to tank.  I guess this is a good thing since Ash right now is in the middle of a move and will be without internet for an undetermined amount of time.  Additionally for the longest time I DPS’d in part because he had no “non-tank” jobs to play, and since I had multiple dps we could pick and choose whatever we needed the most.  That however has changed as he now has a monk available, and it is allowing me to climb back into the tanking seat.

As such I have spent a lot of time lately tanking the new expert dungeons of Snowcloak, Sastasha Hard, and Qarn Hard.  In fact I am starting to get requests from outside of the guild to tank for people.  Last night I finally accepted one of these after turning them down for various completely legitimate reasons.  I felt horrible for having to keep declining because I was generally either already spoken for by the guild, or in the process of trying to wind down enough to log out for the night.  I have to say I had a blast tanking for folks that I am less familiar with, and maybe just maybe I will gather up the courage to start tanking for complete strangers as well.  I am not sure what has changed but upon getting my 110 weapon threat generation seems to no longer be an issue.  The encounters just stay glued to me, which allows me to have more freedom and less watching of “bejeweled” making sure someone doesn’t get eaten by a stray mob.  In any case that sense of unease I had while tanking seems to be dissipating and I am enjoying myself more each time we run something.

My Readers

I would like to think that even if I had no readers at all that I would keep doing what I am doing on a daily basis.  Most of the time I write my posts like I am talking to myself, but in truth it is really helpful to know that I have people listening on the other end of the line.  I have always been impressed with my readers, at how thoughtful and kind they are.  The moment I first knew I had a dedicated audience, was shortly after I had started my blogging each day thing.  For whatever reason I did not get a chance to write my post that morning like usual, and I had intended to write it over lunch.  That morning I was deluged with folks asking me if I was okay, and making sure everything was alright.  They were concerned when they did not see a post waiting there for them when they did their normal crawl of blogs.  I’ve always tried to respect my audience and keep my blog a mostly positive influence in their lives.  Here is hoping that I can continue to do this, but please know how much it means to me that you all are dedicated to taking this journey with me.

5 thoughts on “Littlest Odin”

  1. When I first started playing FFXIV I rolled a Gladiator, blissfully unaware it was a tank class; I thought it was DPS.

    In olden tymes I used to tank a lot. Talking EQ, DAOC, stuff like that. But it was a kinder, gentler community back then.

    Anyway I tanked Satasha once and man was it stressful. As a low level gladiator, at least you have (iirc) 1 taunt and it’s on a fairly long cooldown (someone will correct me if I’m remembering wrong) and I just couldn’t figure out how to hold aggro well.

    After that, I switch jobs to an Archer. LOL. And then drifted away from the game for a few months. When I came back I re-rolled and was careful to pick a LOLDPSWUT? class.

  2. Organic versus runaway train. That’s the absolute worst and I agree 100%. Yesterday I had an overwhelming urge to write a rebuttal to another post I read somewhere, but in order for it to make sense, I would have had to pingback, which could have drawn out a whole of crap that I didn’t want to have to deal with.

    Blogging is great because we start off pondering into the void, and as people find our outlets and like our stuff, we know they return because organically they like our posts. When the gates come down and people are bussed in via someone else’s blog, we have NO IDEA who these people are. It’s out of our hands. If we could be absolutely sure these random drive-bys were as civil and dedicated as our usual visitors, it wouldn’t be so bad, but we can’t. It’s real double edged sword.

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