Cat Bel and Snowlion

Alone and Awake

ARCHEAGE 2015-06-08 09-43-12-18 This morning I am doing everything a bit discombobulated.  I ended up taking a massive name yesterday, and as a result took some melatonin to force myself to get to sleep at a decent hour.  The end result is me waking up at 4:30 instead of 5:30…  so I am just going to roll with it.  Today is the first morning I am getting ready by myself, and that is always a strange prospect.  We are now entering the season when my wife travels to go to conferences, and this time she will return in a little over a week on my birthday.  It is always strange to go through this each year, and as normal as it is I never seem to get used to it.  Technically yesterday was my first day without her, but since my allergies were trying to kill me, my focus was on simply surviving the day and less on living in it.  The allergies seem to be improved, but then again I am not actually out in the world yet.

Yesterday however I was struggling to breathe from the moment I woke up so that at least is not happening.  You’d think that staying home all day would have been an excellent opportunity for some gaming, but alas I actually tried to do some work.  Around noon I was feeling worse and opted to lay down for a nap… and wound up sleeping until 4 pm.  So I am guessing that maybe there was more at work than just the allergies.  I am not a big nap taker because generally it means I cannot sleep that night, and even when I do take a nap it is rarely longer than an hour.  So for me to sleep that long probably means I needed it.  The end result today however is that my time scale for everything is a little off.  As again I am mostly just going to roll with it and see if I can function normally today just offset by an hour.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

ARCHEAGE 2015-06-08 18-25-31-72 So as it turns out you apparently do only get two character slots in ArcheAge regardless of what the tooltip says.  Thanks to everyone for helping explain this one, because even Trion support seems not to know.  As of the conversation I had two nights ago they thought I should have at least gotten four.  So I purchased a third slot and moved on with the creation of my own Cat Belghast also known as Belglaive on the Tahyang server.  I have to admit, that at first I thought I was not going to like this whole cat man thing, but the longer I play the character the more I am actually enjoying.  I will admit part of the enjoyment is the snowlion mount I get to ride on.  If you thought carrying a foal around on your back was adorable… just wait until that is a lion cub.  One of the first quests is to go out into a field and cheer up a forlorn lion cub… and absolute adorableness ensues.   The animations are a little strange to get used to, like for example when I do a charge attack instead of sliding into the target with my shoulder I seem to leap into the target feet first, which is a little disjointed.

I also opted to go for a completely different path.  Always in the past I had chosen to go Battlerage and Defense, but instead I am mixing things up and going Battlerage, Shadowplay and Auramancy which is apparently the “Dark Runner” class.  I felt the more feral nature of the Firran character called for something more vicious and less tanky.   For the time being I am going down the path of Dual Wield which is giving everything a really awesome feel.  Right now I charge in, whirlwind, and then hit my normal attacks and things seem to just evaporate.  I just got a new attack from the Shadowplay tree but honestly I rarely have time to hit it, things are simply dying that fast.  Now I at least feel comfortable that I have something on both sides of the fence whichever direction we plan on going as a group.  I think the last thing said was that we would let Kodra decide which direction he wanted to play.  I feel comfortable on either side now, but I will say my leaning is still towards the side that will eventually get dwarves.

Ice-skating with Primals

ffxiv 2015-06-08 21-21-03-01 One of the things that has been noticed with our group is that we start out extremely solidly on a fight and then deteriorate over the night.  This means our first or second attempt will almost always be the best of the evening, and then maybe just maybe we pull things out by the skin of our teeth at the end of the evening.  As a result Tam wanted to try something slightly different last night and we went into turn nine for a half dozen or so attempts before moving on to something else for the evening.  Sure enough we had some of our best attempts early on and then got significantly worse from there.  When we hit that point where we were just making stupid mistakes we opted to shift focus and go make attempts on Shiva Extreme.  This is the last of the primals that we have not attempted and beaten on Extreme mode.  I have to say I was not really fully prepared for how annoying this fight ended up being.  I’ve said before that there are two types of fights in Final Fantasy XIV.  The first is one where you have to learn a dance and repeat that dance over and over until you win.  The second type is where you adjust to things that are happening and move around to account for this fact.

We are extremely good at the second type, and tend to defeat those encounters quickly.  However when a fight requires us to memorize a pattern and execute said pattern over and over…  we tend to struggle there a bit.  Last night however I feel proud of the progress we made.  We were consistently getting Shiva into the 30% range for most of the night, we just need to get better at two things really.  The first thing… we are really bad at moving behind her and stacking tight enough for the bow attack which does a 270 degree arc attack in front of her that will oneshot everyone including the tank.  When she hit me with it, the attack dealt 18,000 hit points… which even for my  silly warrior health pool was way too many.  The other thing is that we need to get better at dodging circles.  These come in the form of hailstorm that causes the group to spread out and not overlap, and later in the form of circles on the ground.  Between these effects and the bow… that pretty much accounted for all of our party deaths.  If we can figure out how to stay alive through all of that mess we will easily defeat her.

6 thoughts on “Cat Bel and Snowlion”

  1. The primal fights sound like a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to running them, even if only once to experience them, when I hit 50 and make it through the story. 🙂

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