Twintania Down

Hitting Heroics

WoWScrnShot_121514_055933 I guess I have given the wrong impression over the last few posts.  I have nothing against Heroics, in fact I ran the shit out of them over the first few weeks of Warlords of Draenor.  That is of course how I geared up to 630+ for raiding purposes.  I would have been royally screwed without the various heroic, warforged and socketed pieces I picked up along the way.  With my alts however I was trying a mostly academic experiment to see if you could go directly into looking for group without actually having set foot in a Heroic.  I personally could not, but in theory if you had slightly better luck than I did…  you might just be able to do it.  That said when faced with a choice between furthering this little experiment, and actually being able to run LFR this week before the reset…  I chose the path that would let me run LFR.

When a guildie was asking for folks in guild chat to run a daily random, I signed up and for the most part it went smoothly.  By that I mean I did not seem to screw anything up, and managed to push out sufficient dps.  We have done enough of these by now that they pretty much always go smoothly, even when it involved two of us playing on alts.  I managed to pick up a neckpiece off the first boss, and a nice pair of shoulders off the guaranteed piece from the final boss.  Combined this gave me enough of a boost to be able to queue easily. which I did late in the evening.  I managed to get into the LFR after about 10 minutes and the entire thing was over in about 20.  From there I netted a pair of boots, so I am well on my way to being mostly viable on this character.

Twintania Down

ffxiv_12152014_225042 The highlight of the evening however is that we managed to push across the threshold and defeat Turn 5 in the Binding Coil of Bahamut… aka Twintania.  The night as a whole started off a bit strange, because due to him moving and needing to finish packing…  Tam was not available.  This meant we had to pull things together without him…  something we are not exactly experienced in doing.  Thankfully Kodra was a responsible adult and got us all going.  We had a slightly different makeup  than normal, which meant among other things dual White Mages instead of a White Mage and Scholar.  While both White Mages healed their little butts off… the difference was noticeable especially when both healers were busy mitigating mechanics like conflagration.  It is kinda hax to have a healer fairy constantly dumping out heals even whenever its master is otherwise occupied, and when that goes away it is noticeable.

It took us roughly an hour to get through to the final phase cleanly with everyone up and no one in jeopardy.  When we finally downed the fight it felt really repeatable… which is good because we are likely going to repeat it pretty often.  Firstly Tam needs to defeat Twintania to be able to progress into the Second Coil of Bahamut, but secondly I have a feeling that we would all really like to have Turn 5 weapons at least for glamour purposes.  I feel really damned proud of our group.  All told it took us four nights of attempts to down her, and that is saying alot that the fight is still this tough even with the echo buff.  I cannot fathom what being on the bleeding edge feels like in Final Fantasy XIV… but I am super happy to be following along a year behind and enjoying the content with my friends.

Screenshot Failure

ffxiv 2014-12-16 06-40-03-38 In my Boy Scout days, there was an entire troop of special needs adults that camped near us.  We had developed a bond with their scoutmaster since he was from a neighboring town, and over time we got to know all the scouts from that troop pretty well.  There was one named Rusty, who was constantly carrying around an old Nikon SLR camera snapping photos.  He would excitedly coo to himself “wooooboy that was a good one”, after each photo he would take.  After watching him take photos the entire time without ever reloading film, my dad a professional photographer happened to look at the counter on the camera.  There was no film at all in it, and the simple act of taking the photos made him feel happy.  Last night I was apparently Rusty, because while we had this epic night of raiding… and Cyl and I looking adorable in santa costumes…  I found out much to my frustration at the end of the night that not a single screenshot was saved.

For some time I have had this elaborate setup where all of my screenshots regardless of game got dumped into a single directory.  This makes the morning routine of blogging and snagging screenshots for said blogs much easier.  As a result for years I ran Fraps, and it just worked flawlessly.  However when I started streaming, I had to find something that did not have a negative interaction with OBS.  For that I have relied on DXTory, but lately it has been acting flaky as hell.  There was an issue with it where leaving it running in the background would cause it to stop listening to keypress events, and therefore not recording screenshots.  So last night before the raid I stopped and restarted it… making sure it was correctly bound to the Final Fantasy XIV process.  However at the end of the night… after taking so many wouldbe awesome screenshots…  the directory was empty.  I guess for the time being I will go back to FRAPS since I am not really streaming much anyways…  but just hoping that some of our guildies got some good shots.  The picture of Twintania down was captured by Ashgar, who gladly provided it for this post.

3 thoughts on “Twintania Down”

  1. For the past 3 weeks or so any time I’ve tried to take a scrrnie in FFXIV it’s said right in the middle of the HUD “Screenshot failed” in spite of making that camera click sound that it does.

    Fortunately I’ve got my Dropbox set up that any time I take a screenshot that it drops Windows screenie (both my screens) into a folder. Just a matter of cleaning off the 2nd screen out of the shot then, which is semi-annoying, but also quick, at least.

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