Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 35 of 118

Frustration

June 27, 2017 by Belghast

I am rapidly entering the territory of being unable to talk about things that I want to talk about… without getting deep into spoiler territory. Before I get into that sort of thing… I thought I would leave you with this picture of me… in an 80s music video… or a Olan Mills photo backdrop whichever way you want to spin it. Yes I did in fact stop in the middle of a pull to take this screenshot… no I don’t feel at all guilty about it. Last night featured some amazing highs… and some crushing lows. At the start of the evening I rather effortlessly pulled together a group of friends to run the sixth and final leveling dungeon, and it was amazing. It felt so much like they learned their lessons from the two 8 player dungeons that happened at the end of A Realm Reborn and managed to cram that same sort of epic feel into a 4 player dungeon. It is weird how people never seem to have a problem waiting for cut scenes in a normal dungeon, but god forbid you watch them in any of the 8 player or 24 player content. Whatever the case it was awesome, and featured a lot of really cool mechanics and several extremely challenging but still reasonable encounters. I theorized this as them wanting to make sure a group of random players could complete it since this will of course be part of the expert roulette. Then after these warm fuzzies… they dropped the bottom out and pushed me right into the third trial after a lengthy cut scene doing the story set up for it.

Now we are entering the realm of spoilers, because I am not sure how else to talk about my frustrations. There is a common thread among my Free Company… and that is folks who have technically finished the expansion but not yet seen the credit roll. For those uninitiated, there is in fact a credits roll at the end of each expansion… and then again at the end of an expansion cycle of patches. The reason why we have not seen the credit roll is because so far very few have lucked out to actually defeat the final primal fight. This is a pug killer, and last night saw me making my first attempts. On the first attempt we walked in with me playing a tank, Tam playing a Red Mage, Grace playing a Scholar and Solaria playing a White Mage… and while we got close several times we just could not push it across the finish line. This is one of those fights where you judiciously hold a healer limit break in reserve…. because at some point you are straight up going to need to rez most of the party. What makes this fight so much worse than “mechanics the fight” aka Thoradin is that everything literally hits so much harder. I feel like this is simply an issue of scaling and expecting everyone in the party to have potentially farmed Dungeon 6, rather than to attempt it immediately upon completion. The amount of damage that the party was taking and the tankbusters when they hit me… just added up to a frightening amount of healing that needed to be done in perfect situations. When players were taking damage when they didn’t need to… it just became more than anyone could handle.

The fight as a whole combines some of my least favorite mechanics from other fights, namely the destructible floor concept that we encountered in Sohr Khai. The other part of the fight that I really do not like is that there seems to be a significant RNG element to it. The boss has an aether meter and when it reaches full it does an attack… but which attack it does seems to be randomed from a large pool of possible attacks. The problem with this is that some of these are far easier to deal with than others… and this also completely flies in the face of FFXIV encounter design as we have known it to date. FFXIV encounters are traditionally a dance that is done that the players have to learn the steps to… but once they do it feels like an elegant chorus rather than a win on some chance table. There are some elements in this encounter that do happen in sequence but then there are others that seem to be pulled out of a hat that you just have to deal with. It feels like in order to get through the fight with a PUG we need firstly solid players… but also a hell of a lot of luck. As a result there is a group of us that might be high center until we can field most of an 8 player group made up of entirely our free company folks. That might be awhile since everyone tends to be leveling at vastly different speeds… and we have an excessive number of tanks and healers as opposed to some dps. After last night though…. I think I am going to take the night off and play some Diablo 3 since the Necromancer pack releases today.

Crazy Axe

June 26, 2017 by Belghast

As of last night I am now officially at the Stormblood level cap. That said I still have a bunch of content left to run because I know my MSQ is stalled behind at dungeon at the moment…. and then I also know from hearing folks talk about it that there is another trial of some sort after that. I was feeling a little too out of it to go seeking a dungeon group, so instead I focused on finishing the warrior quest line, which gave me a set of gear that I will probably never wear at least cosmetically… and this bizarre axe. As a whole though Stormblood provided me with lots of glamour fodder, including this chest piece that I have become rather fond of. I actually dinged 70 while running the second primal. I decided to do a trials roulette, and next thing I know I am zoning into that fight. The first pull went about as well as you would expect that a modern era primal fight would go. On the second pull however I took a moment to ask folks if there was anything about the fight that they didn’t understand, and answered a bunch of questions. As I was able to do I also hollered out when a few key mechanics were coming up to remind folks about them. Things went off the rails a bit during that second attempt but we managed to hold on and ultimately finished the fight.

The story as a whole has continued to be amazing, but I am finding myself at a loss for screenshots to put in my blog posts that are not insanely spoilery. I find myself trying to snap moments where nothing much is going on that won’t give away any major story beats. I find it interesting how generally speaking I am not that beholden to a story in other games… but in Final Fantasy XIV I am anxious to find out what is going on. I guess part of it is that in a single player story… the experience doesn’t feel real. What I mean by that is it is something that I experience and then once the story has reached its conclusion it is functionally over… at least for another several years until they release a sequel. In an MMO… story sets the stage for what is to come and gives us a glimpse in what we will be doing a few months down the road. The story feels more alive to me because I am going to be living it, and I am going to be adjusting to whatever changes it happens to bring to the stage for a long while. My friends and I are going to be fighting our way through the epic battles that are proposed each time the story leads us some place new. I guess this is why I get into the lore of Destiny as well, because even though the grimoire cards are a crummy system… they give us a glimpse at the future to come and let me start day dreaming about epic adventures that are just over the horizon.

Another thing that happened this weekend was the “launch” of Secret World Legends. Sure they are calling it a head start, but if you are letting in everyone who played the previous game… you are effectively launching it. More than anything I wanted to get in and make sure that all of my stuff transferred just fine, and more importantly that my lifetime subscription did in fact transfer over into lifetime patron status. For those who played the first game… I highly suggest you check out the page on the transfer system so you can claim anything that might be eligible for transfer. I’ve heard that this system is only going to be available through August 31st and there are a bunch of guidelines and fine print to follow to make sure everything copies just fine. I probably need to do some more fiddling to make sure that everything does in fact copy. I had a character of each faction so in theory it should have… but I probably need to go ahead and create those other faction characters so I can double check. The most important item was of course the Csicon alien smiley t-shirt… which I am rocking in the image above. So far I am digging the game changes, but unfortunately it just happened to launch at a really horrible time for me since I am so heavily engaged in Stormblood. I will continue to piddle around and experience the content, and it serves as an awesome “taking a break” game for me right now. We talk a bit about but Secret World Legends and Stormblood on this weekends podcast, which I am embedding below.

Quiet Night

June 23, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a chill night for me, compared to the last several nights at least. I purposefully stayed off voice chat because my wife and I were catching up on various shows that we had missed while she was travelling. As a result I watched a bunch of episodes of Fear the Walking Dead and iZombie in a row. I am still really not feeling “Fear” mostly because I still don’t care about the characters. This is going to be a point of reference that is lost on some folks… since blockbuster has been gone for awhile. Once upon a time when a big movie was out in the theater… a bunch of sound similar movies would show up at the local blockbuster video on the rack. I admit there were a couple of times I rented one of these for the fun of it… and they are just bad… like sharknado levels of bad. Fear the Walking Dead feels like one of those movies… but instead trying to pass itself off as its sibling… The Walking Dead. I am seriously not sure why I am even watching it, apart from the fact that most of us at work are using this as sort of our Walking Dead methadone. As far as iZombie… I love everything about that series because I still hold a massive candle for Veronica Mars… and it sort of feels like that with zombies.

As far as gaming goes…. I had a quiet night of trying to hit 67 so I could continue the MSQ. About 10 pm I managed to get to the point where I am finally ready to run dungeon four and opted to call it for the night. I am so amped about the events that are happening right now… and so looking forward to getting a group together tonight and running it. I also love how the community generally refers to things as Dungeon Number or the X level MSQ dungeon… as not to give away any spoilers. The names of the dungeons themselves… could in fact be spoilery… this one probably more than any so far. That is one of the things I love the most about FFXIV and its players is overall there is a fair bit of consideration for the feelings of others that is lacking a lot of the times in online gaming. Sure there are jerkfaces out there, but your average person has a sense of caring about others. I think all of the forced dungeon running and the constant need to group with other players eventually beats this sensibility into you as you go. I’ve always been a “World Tank” where I roll up on people in need and tank the mobs for them… but Final Fantasy XIV is the only time I actually get tanked for it. There have been so many times I did this… and then wound up in a conversation for the next fifteen minutes with the player that I just helped out. Happened last night… I wound up hopping into a FATE that someone was attempting to solo… and just on the edge of dying and before I knew it I was running through a bunch of other FATEs with this player. Those are the moments that I really appreciate gaming with other people in the world.

Leaving the Steppes

June 22, 2017 by Belghast

The pool guys did in fact come out and power wash the pool yesterday and now we are playing babysit the water hose. It takes an excessively long time to fill up a pool with a single water hose. In truth I am questioning if it will be done by this evening… and then we have that awkward problem of do we leave it running tonight with the fear that it might overflow? As far as gaming time went I very obviously spent some more time in Stormblood. First I have to tell you that I unequivocally love this expansion. I can’t really get into all the reasons why without a whole bucket load of spoilers but suffice to say I am super impressed with what they have done and where they are going. Heavensward was this deep dive into the culture of the Ishgardians… and for the most part except for a few notable exceptions they were assholes. This expansion before launch seemed like it would be a similar exploration of Doma and Ala Mhigo… but was I was not expecting was this wonderful journey through the culture of the Raen and Xaela Au’Ra. This is really making me hope that in future expansions they might explore the culture of the Roegadyn or the Lalafel… because really I want to know why the Lala are like the most prolific race in Eorzea. If there is someone pulling the strings… 99.9% of the time it is going to be a Lalafel.

As far as my further journeys in Stormblood, I have now made it through the third dungeon which we ran as soon as we could get enough people around to do it last night. I also ran the second dungeon again for Neph and the first trial, which the more I am exposed to it the more I like it. There are so many cool elements and mechanics going on there that I am really looking forward to learning the fight on Extreme mode. I have no clue how far away the fourth dungeon is, but I have more or less finished up in the Steppes and am returning to Yanxia for what I am assuming is going to uncover the back half of that zone. Every single bit of the story has been good, and it is making me bummed that I am currently story locked until I figure out a way to ding 67. I am roughly a quarter of a level from dinging so I have a handful of options… but the one I am probably going to take is to run back and start doing side quests in the Steppes until I can push on through. Whatever lead on the content I did have has now evaporated once I went back to following the MSQ only. In theory tonight I will spend some time collecting Aether Currents so I can fly in a third zone, and doing side quests for probably the Mol.

The Steppes of Azim might be my favorite zone in all of Final Fantasy XIV. I always seem to go for the Nagrand like zones in games, the big flowing grasslands perforated by rocky outcroppings. I thought the Heavensward zones were physically imposing, but the Stormblood zones overall feel much larger in size and scope. I am still behind as the highest progressed finished dungeon four last night, and I am just barely on the other side of the third dungeon. I have however passed a lot of other players like Neph and Ash, but still feel like I am lagging from where I would like to be. I figure this is going to be a week and a half in total to get to 70 and start gearing up for the end game proper, or in my case… start leveling the Samurai. I have what I think are several Warrior quests to do so I might simply focus on doing those at the beginning of the night and see where that gets me level wise.