Battle in the Big Keep

AggroChat 45 – The Citzens of Earth Show

Last night we recorded the episode devoted to the very first AggroChat Game Club title, Citizens of the earth.  During the episode we talked about the various aspects of our game play experience.  For this game play experience myself and Rae played on the PC, Tam and Ash on the Vita and Kodra on the 3DS.  It seems like this game was not quite ready for primetime, because all of the console experiences were somehow fraught with problems.  We attempt to dive into the mechanics in depth, talking about the interesting way the game recruits new characters to your party.  We also dive into discussion about the storyline and our general feel on how successful the game ended up being for each of us.

I have to say this first game made us completely re-evaluate our process for picking titles for the future.  As such going forward we will be doing a round robin starting with Rae.  This months title will be Trine 2 which is awesome because I know that has been in a number of Humble Bundles as well as a Playstation Plus title.  Our hope is this will make it a fairly easy title for people to join in the fun with.  Since this game has two very different experiences for single player and multi-player we will be trying both.  I know personally I plan on playing some on the PS4 as well as on the PC to give myself a feel for how the game performs both on a PC and on a console.  It should be interesting, and I hope you all will join in the fun and give Trine 2 a play this coming month.

Battle in the Big Keep

On Saturday nights before podcast time we have started doing a semi-raid night where we gather up whoever happens to be on and run eight player content with them.  The random nature of these nights is quickly making it one of my favorite evenings of the week.  Last night we finally had a full eight player group ready for the latest of the Hildebrand quests.  Once again we get into a battle with “Greg” aka Gilgamesh, but the awesome part is this time we really do get to see Enkidu his longtime companion.  This entire sequence has been huge for our guild, because we have  deep ties to Final Fantasy V.  For years Ashgar has been twisting our arms to participate in the Four Job Fiesta with him, and as such we are all very familiar with the shenanigans of Gilgamesh.  The sequence of events is almost directly ported from Final Fantasy V and as such we love every new step.  There is just so damned much nostalgia wrapped up in this game that it is amazing.

I have to say the conclusion of the Hildebrand quest chain was well worth the wait.  I don’t want to spoil anything about the quest chain or the fight…  but this is quite possibly my favorite encounter in any game.  Everything about it is just so amazing, the only problem is I am not sure how someone is going to complete it being less geared than we are.  I was taking so damned much damage as a tank it was silly…  which makes me think it has to be percentage based.  Otherwise it would flat out kill any paladin tanks I know in the game.  I have roughly 11k health and when he cast Sword Dance it would whittle off about 8000 health in a short period of time.  We ran the fight back to back, and I swear there will be not getting tired of it for me at least.  Also it drops an Enkidu chicken pet..  so I must have it.

Random Groupy Bits

One of the things I am really enjoying right now is having so many different people playing the game at different levels of completion.  This is meaning that we need to keep running different activities and revisiting older content.  I am absolutely eating this up, because I never really know what I might be needed to tank each time I log into the game.  I would love to see us do a semi regular night of doing nothing but the things that can drop pets.  Last night Exale needed Good King Moggle Mog, but ended up dropping from a duty and garnering the 30 minute debuff.  Instead we pulled together a group and did the Dragon Neck encounter… aka Ultros.  The first few times we did this it was super frustrating, but the last couple of times we seem to be getting better.  To mix things up Ashgar and I swapped roles and he took Ultros and I tanked Typhon.

We had one bobble in not getting enough water in the various Kappa transformed players “bowls” to interrupt Typhon, but on our second try it went pretty much flawlessly.  I am generally pretty horrible at rolling on pets, in fact on Enkidu I rolled an 11.  However when Ultros dropped at the end of that encounter, I managed to roll a 95.  You can see in the above image me in ninja form standing beside the adorably creepy wind up Ultros minion.  I maybe have a problem with minions… right now I have 60… and am constantly looking to get more.  It is the little fun things in the game world that make it enjoyable for me.  I need to get off my ass and get on with doing the various beast tribe dailies because each of them has both a minion and a mount waiting at the higher levels of faction.  I am a little disappointed that there are not more mounts in the game that are dropped off normal dungeon content rather than extreme mode primals.  Eventually someday I hope to join in the extreme mount farming fun, but so far these always seem to happen on Saturday nights… when we are recording our podcast.