Extreme Gardening

Istanbul was Constantinople

SOESignGoingDown The strange news keeps happening this year, as yesterday we found out that the ever ubiquitous Sony Online Entertainment…  is no more.  As you can see from the picture swiped from twitter…  they wasted no time taking down the trappings of the old world… and are now ushering in the name Daybreak Game Company.  All of this happened because the great Sony mothership sold off SOE part and parcel to a technology investment firm.  The Columbus Nova Technology Partners owns several companies somehow connected to the tech industry, be they websites, applications or hardware manufacturers.  The mix of companies is rather bizarre with the only two that I recognize are the once king of media streaming Rhapsody and the task site Fiverr.

What will this mean for gamers you ask?  Quite honestly I have no clue.  I initially thought this was going to be a technology grab as they would gobble up and sell off parts and simply discard the rest.  However it seems as though CNTP has held several of the companies in their portfolio for awhile now, so maybe they have a much longer ranged end game.  Hell for all I know someone in the company was an Everquest fanboy back in the day and has always wanted to own the company behind the game.  Essentially this isn’t the end of the world for SOE fans, and it is far too soon to make any predictions.  If you are old enough to remember… SOE has not always been SOE.  Once upon a time was a smaller company called Verant Interactive… and even before that Redeye Interactive.  The ever outspoken Smedley took to twitter and had this to say…

answering a few questions people have emailed me
1) All our games are still up and will continue to be despite our new name.
2) Yes, we want to bring our games to Xbox One in addition to PS4.
3) Station Cash doesn’t change at all (though we will be rebranding it soon here).
4) We’re still making Everquest Next 🙂 nothing has changed.

Extreme Gardening

ffxiv 2015-02-02 21-10-55-14 For various reasons, be it Tam moving across country…  or Pax South… or simply a lack of the right roles we have struggled to pull together our Monday night raid proper to work on the Second Coil of Bahamut.  As a result last night was our first time working on Turn 6 in what I believe is over a months time.  It seems as though once the fight started we remembered much of the fight and were able to pick up essentially where we left off.  For those unfamiliar with the encounter, the boss is a giant Ochu, aka those angry tentacled plant things.  Rafflesia has a ton of mechanics that you have to deal with…  for starters she throws down bulbs that become expanding briar patch rings.  On our first attempts we tried dpsing these down but quickly realized that the goal was to focus down only specific ones.  As such we simply started making sure the center of the room was clear of briar patches, which means the rest of the room is very full of nasty spikey bits.

The hardest part of the fight is the “devour” dance.  Every so often she marks a target to be devoured, and then will turn to eat that player sucking in everyone else that happens to be in the frontal cone.  How we started mitigating this is by having that player run through right before they are to be devoured…  then that player and the tank dash through as the devour happens.  When it works right no one gets eaten… when it works badly…  well potentially everyone can get eaten.  Last night more or less was us cleaning up this process, and then later getting players with the “drop of honey” debuff purposefully devoured to cleanse them.  I was proud as hell of the progress we made because after a single night of tries over a month ago…  we still managed to come in and finish out Turn 6 in only three attempts, giving us plenty of time to move on to Turn 7 last night.

Statue Tag

ffxiv 2015-02-02 21-24-03-40 Turn 7 means getting to play with a very angry Lamia named Melusine.  Some of you might remember the boss name from Final Fantasy V, but far as we can tell there is no actual direct correlation as far as mechanics go.  As the sub heading goes, this fight is in many ways a game of statue tag…  in that she periodically casts an ability that causes three players at a time to turn whatever is standing directly in front of them to stone.  Now one can avoid freezing anyone by turning off the edge of the platform… however there are these huge lumbering adds that in theory need to be frozen in place by a player with the debuff.  This means from the moment it casts you have seven seconds to get into range of a statue and freeze it in the right place.  A few moments after placing a statue, she will pick a target in the raid and give them “Cursed Shriek” that functions much like the frontal cone “Cursed Voice” except it is an AOE that can literally hit the entire room.  The player with shriek then has to run behind one of the frozen giants and LOS the raid.

ffxiv 2015-02-02 22-06-25-84 This would all be relatively simple if not for the fact that she is picking targets in the raid at random and dropping a big assed fire AOE on them.  This means that at all times players should be spread out to avoid taking damage from multiple AOEs at the same time.  As a result when the Shriek goes off, it will inevitably freeze some players.  Thankfully the petrification fades on its own… but while stuck there you cannot react to anything.  There were a few times when I got frozen… and then got the cursed voice debuff…  forcing people to run out of my frontal cone because I could not aim the ability away from the raid.  To make matters worse…  she starts lighting up sections of the round platform we stand on… turning them into a field of angry damage over time death.  So as all of this dancing is going on… we also have to watch placement on the floor.  All told… we did pretty damned well last night on our first night of attempts.  On our best try we managed to get her down to 19% before things fell apart largely because we were not prepared for the final phase.  I have a feeling next Monday we will take her down and move on to Turn 8.

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