binding coil of bahamut Archives - Page 2 of 3

Foundation of Folks

April 9, 2015 by Belghast

Statistics Funk

One of the problems with creating content is every now and then you will have something that you are very proud of, but the community doesn’t seem to be all that interested in. That is not to say that I am not proud of most of the things I am involved in. I love what this blog has become, and I love AggroChat… but that seems to be less about me and more about the group dynamic that we have assembled. However I feel like “Bel Folks Stuff” was one of those projects that I poured more of myself into than most. The idea was that I would grab interesting people and have natural conversations with them where we discussed whatever happened to be on their mind. I feel like for the most part that mission has succeeded, and I am very proud of the six episodes we have so far. In the episodes I have talked with:

Unfortunately after the release of the latest episode I did that thing you are never supposed to do… I did a deep dive into the statistics. In many ways this secondary podcast has been a labor of love, and right now it gets several orders of magnitude fewer listeners than AggroChat. So I question… what I did wrong with it? Maybe I have simply done a poor job of advertising it? It isn’t part of The Gaming and Entertainment Network so that right there is one strike against it. I release them with questionable regularity, which is another strike against it. I also question whether or not it was a good idea to treat it as separate from the other things that I do. I have wondered for awhile if I should have just released it as part of the AggroChat content stream.. as a sort of bonus episode or something. In any case… since looking at the stats I am exceedingly bummed about the limited audience. Maybe there just is not the appetite for listening to gamers rattle on? Anyways… this isn’t going to necessarily stop me from making more but I also feel like my guests have been awesome in their willingness to do the show… when there really isn’t much benefit from it.

Foundation of Folks

For some time now, I’ve had various people tell me that I use exercise any connections I have within the games industry to turn the “Folks” podcast into an industry interview show. I suppose I could do that, but the problem is I am afraid that would fundamentally change the nature of the show. It might be idealistic, but I wanted to create a show without pretense about its purpose. I wanted to have people on and just talk, and whatever topics we happened to cover naturally is what we would end up talking about. If I have people on the show that are known for this or that, there is the pressure to ask them about what they are famous for. By the same token, I would feel obligated to give them time to plug whatever hot project they happen to be working on. At that point we have a traditional interview show and not what I was hoping for. Maybe it is strange but I was hoping to have authentic conversation with a bunch of people, and almost forget for a time that we were recording the conversation.

I guess I question if I could talk “industry” folks into that sort of notion. So far the people I have had on the show I have a deep connection with already. These are people that I have gamed with, blogged with, or exchanged more tweets than I can count. Right now it feels like I am just having a conversation with a friend. I worry that I cannot keep up that dynamic with people I am not quite so personally invested in. Then there is the problem of how would I even sell this notion to someone, when I obviously cannot guarantee much in the way of listeners. That is the obvious sell for most big podcasts… is “talk to me and I can give you X number of ears”. I don’t have that going for me on any level. So yeah right now I am in this existential funk about “Bel Folks Stuff” and even though I love doing it… I am questioning if it is worth the scheduling headaches and the extra work on my part to keep it up. I want to keep it up, but damn… just bummed.

Second Static

Last night when I got home… I was wallowing in my frustration over the podcast… so much so that I forgot that last night was to be the inaugural running of the second static group within the Free Company. The guild has been insane, and we are apparently so active and so prevalent that we jumped from 16th to 6th in the FFXIV free company activity standings. I will say for some time there has not been a single city I have been in that I did not at least bump into one person with the [GREY] tag. In order to help get the second static off the ground, myself and Kodra has offered to fill in as whatever role they needed us in. I ended up main tanking to Damai’s off tank as we managed to work through several content items. So while I started the evening in a bit of a malaise I finished it pumped about the prospects of having two active static teams within our free company.

We started off with Garuda Extreme, which I know very well… just not well enough to explain adequately apparently. This always seems to be a thing for me… I can do something, but I can’t necessarily tell you how to do it. For awhile we tried using the Duty Finder to fill our missing slots, but honestly had significantly more luck creating a party in the Party Finder. We met a few nice people on the server as well. We managed to clear Turn 1 and Turn 4 of Binding Coil of Bahamut as well. I was pleased that we one shot 4, since I remember having a significant amount of trouble with it initially when Ashgar and I tanked it. To add to the confusion for the sake of this arrangement… the roles were flipped from what I am most used to. The positive is… I feel like I could actually farm four over and over in an attempt to get my bear mount. I need to figure out which piece of high allagan I am missing so I can focus down those. I would really love to wear that full set of gear. Anyways the end of the evening was definitely better than the day, so I am thankful that I have such an awesome group of people to spend my game time with.

Rotund Buddy

April 5, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 51 – Awesome Outfits

Last night was a bit of an odd showing because for various reasons and the majority of the week it looked like it would be the Ashgar and Belghast show. However some timing worked out well and we managed to talk our good friend Thalen into joining the fun. Thalen is one of those people that I have known in some context for over a decade. While he didn’t raid with us in LNR, he had connections to our raid through mutual friends and we spent a lot of time conversing with his raid Last Horse that Warenwolf also came from. Post Vanilla he has been a pretty permanent fixture of any guild I have been part of, and for the late BC early Wrath era we together with a few others representing the founders of the Duranub Raiding Company. Needless to say Thalen is one of those people that has always been in my life in one form or another for a very long time.

We had this strange meandering show last night where in truth none of us had really been playing much of anything super exciting. We dove into a few odd topics like World of Warcraft making some bad calls with Warlords of Draenor, and how important it is for us to look awesome when we are playing games. We talk about some of the lengths we have gone to in order to track down cosmetic gear. As far as games discussed we talk Dungeons and Dragons, Mega Man ZX,. Shin Megami Tensei IV, Persona 4 Golden, Axiom Verge, and a little Darkest Dungeon. We like always talk a lot about Final Fantasy XIV and what we have been up to there. Thalen has now leapt ahead of me in the classes to 50 race… with six to my five. However he did make a smarter call then I did with leveling Arcanist which essentially gets you both Scholar and Summoner. I think if I can ever get my Arcanist to 30 I will be set, since I can queue as a healer from that point on.

Rotund Buddy

Yesterday I decided spend a bit more of my winnings from the Golden Saucer. The first 8000 mgp I earned went towards buying the ponytail upgrade for the Aesthetician. After that I was not quite certain what I should pick up. I have been going back and forth on buying the blood sword for some time, simply because it is freaking awesome looking. The problem is I am not sure if I have a decent looking shield to go with it… and I really don’t spend that much time tanking on my Paladin other than very low level content. It seemed like it might end up being a waste of 10,000 mgp. Instead I decided to go with something that would make me happy all the time. I ended up grabbing the “Heavy Hatchling” minion, which is adorably waddle-y fat. It sits there barely staying upright and every so often almost looses its balance as it sniffs around looking for food.

The best part about the pet is that it doesn’t run around like a normal minion. Instead it hops around on its butt. I seriously was easily amused for a good ten minutes after getting it running circles in the Gold Saucer. Most people I know have been working on saving the cash to get the Setzer jacket, which is cool… but I was never much of a fan of Setzer in Final Fantasy VI to be honest. He was a means to an end for me… he had the worlds only Airship… and I needed an Airship. He never actually got any play other than those few times when you absolutely had to use every single character you had gotten. The jacket is just too flamboyant for my tastes… I think I prefer a dyed version of Snow’s jacket better for most cosmetic outfits. Anyways I guess the next 10,000 mgp I end up with I will finally go ahead and pick up that blood sword.

Coil Revisited

Last night we decided to take a bunch of the new 50s into the Binding Coil of Bahamut to do turns one through four. It many ways it felt like coming home, because it had been so long since we last did any of the content. I managed to pick up another piece of the High Allagan plate armor, which was pretty awesome. We had a bit of a stumbling block on coil turn 2, in part because we collapsed to early on the first attempt. On attempt two we pushed through without much issue. I was pleasantly surprised that we oneshot turn four, since I remember us having some issue with it. Since we were doing so well we opted to go ahead and push into Turn 5, so that the new recruits could see the difference. Unless you have experienced it… you cannot fully appreciate how much the content drops the bottom out on you when you get into turn 5. I got all sorts of warm fuzzies though walking in because our experience of learning turn 5 was so enjoyable for me.

All in all the group did admirably, and we managed to make it to the dive bomb phase several times. Admittedly we had myself, Ashgar and Cylladora that had been there numerous times… but they picked up and learned the fight extremely quickly all things considered. At the very least they made progress in a single night that took us several weeks. I hope we can go back there with the same group and get them all through turn 5. I have a feeling this is going to be a somewhat regular occurrence since you need turn 5 to unlock the second coil of Bahamut. In other news… I am really hoping that we make some serious progress on the fourth phase of Turn 9 this Monday. I am so ready to defeat that encounter so we can move forward into the Final Coil of Bahamut. At this point we have a few months before Heavensward, and it is probably hoping for too much… but I would really love to defeat the Final Coil before the expansion lands.

We Like To Help

March 24, 2015 by Belghast

Reluctant Roulette

I thought I would take a few moments this morning to address a few things we are noticing among new recruits to our Free Company. I believe for the most part the majority of this group reads my blog at least sometimes, so here is hoping that my post will find it’s audience. If nothing else this serves as a good reminder to anyone new to Final Fantasy XIV or considering playing it. The first behavior I am seeing an awful lot of is an absolute reluctance to EVER use the Duty Roulette system at all. It seems like most of the players have come from several years in World of Warcraft, where “pugging” has become a dirty word. I fully understand this and quite honestly I was scared to use the Duty Roulette system… that is until another FC mate tiptoed into the water and reported back that it was actually pretty awesome. I dislike random groups in other games more than most people, and I will be the first to say that the community in this game is simply better.

The other thing you should know is that those of us who are veterans are using the Duty Roulette system constantly. On a given night if nothing much is going on I will be queuing for either Hard Mode or Trial Roulette, and at least once a day I am trying really hard to get in at least one Expert Roulette. Sure you occasionally stumble onto an elitist, but it is nothing like other games where you are belittled and kicked from the group for not instantly being amazing. More often than not when a player says they are new, someone will take the time to explain the encounters to them. Honestly I often give my player commendations to new players for having the strength to stand up and tell the group. It makes the run go so much smoother when you know for certain if a player is going to have the requisite ancestral knowledge to understand the common way a given fight is done. More than anything I suggest you give Duty Roulette a chance. I’ve actually met several people on Cactuar through the roulette system, and it makes me happy to see them around.

We Like to Help

One of the other behaviors I am seeing a lot of is players not asking for help. I realize that in some groups this might not be the norm, but in our Free Company for the most part people enjoy helping others. Now there might be times for this or that reason that someone cannot help, and that is perfectly fine. However if we don’t know a given player needs something, it is impossible for us to read minds. Our hope is that this creates an atmosphere where people are freely saying what they need to do, and others are responding that they can help out. A prime example is that we have known for a bit that Neph needed Dzemael Darkhold, so when she popped on the other night we ran the dungeon to make sure she got it. Similarly we have done countless primal fights or lower level dungeons to help our dps players especially fight their way through the queue system. Self service and the Duty Roulette are always valid choices, but when you are confronting a thirty minute long queue… please speak up and pending it is not a raid night folks should be able to pull together a dungeon pretty easily.

Running dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV is not quite like running dungeons in other games. The fact that the game auto scales your level to match the dungeon, and rewards you with money if you are max level… means that running lowbies through dungeons is always a positive prospect. In other game my primarily problem with running low level dungeons was that it ended up feeling like I was babysitting players, because at max level I could just one shot most of the encounters in the zone. In Final Fantasy XIV, these dungeons are still viable, and it feels like you are doing something meaningful regardless of the level range. I will never get tired of running places like Haukke Manor or Stone Vigil, and Primal fights like Garuda still end up being a challenge for our scaled down groups. It is interesting trying to remember how you functioned without your high level abilities, and this alone makes a lot of things far more interesting than you might think. So please if you need help, be it a dungeon or help with some crafted gear… speak up in chat. Right now Tam is doing an interesting census of players to find out if they are interested in raiding, so I highly suggest you fill that out from the guild message of the day.

A Night with Nael

Last night was a bit of a refresher night in many ways. Namely we had a few people out, which meant we snagged one of our new recruits to help out with turn nine. The problem is our group does things a bit different than the “norm” for turn nine groups. So there was a bit of adjustment, similarly it had been over a week since I last set foot in the zone, and I was more than a tad bit rusty myself. I still feel like we made some progress, but we are hitting this wall on the third phase where we are just not pushing Nael hard enough to keep from getting two dragons. In our attempt to push harder, we are getting this awkward transition to phase four and getting a dragon at the same time… which is leading to a wipe. I feel like I am simply not doing enough dps on my Dragoon to really make up the difference. My tank is level 122 gear wise, but my dragoon is only 112. Honestly I never expected to be dpsing in a raid situation, so my Dragoon has essentially gotten table scraps as far as gear goes. I have been pushing to grab a piece of 120 gear our of World of Darkness each week in the hopes of boosting my dragoon dps just a little bit.

This however means repeating World of Darkness over and over without seeing any drops. Last night represented my sixth and seventh run of the week, and thankfully on the final boss I saw a piece drop that I did not already have. Sure it was only the belt, but at the 11th hour on the night before reset… I will take quite literally anything. I was just about to reach the point where I was going to start rolling on everything just to get a piece of gear before the zone reset today. Largely I feel like I am being a boat anchor on our group with this fight. We need more dps, and I am just not going to the extreme lengths that Kodra is willing to to tweak his dps. The optimal dragoon rotation is twenty seven steps long according to the guides I have read… and quite frankly there is no way in hell I am going to be able to pull that off flawlessly every single time. Instead I do a much more simplified and repeated sequence, but when we are on this razors edge of being able to do it versus not being able to do it… it feels like I am failing the group. As such my answer is to try and pour gear into the problem, and as soon as World of Darkness uncaps on the 31st I will be running it until my eyes bleed farming a full set of gear.

Turn 9 Progress

March 10, 2015 by Belghast

Mining Delays

Last night I had every intention to come right home from work and start mining like a boss. I made an oven pizza, fixed my plate and was all set to catch up on the last few episodes of Star Wars Rebels while mashing buttons to break rocks. However upon logging into the game I instantly had a group invite waiting from Tam, which generally means I am needed to go run something. Turns out last night I got drafted to tank a random expert roulette. Granted I had been capped on poetics for awhile at that point, seeing as I capped out sometime Saturday morning during the Pax East live stream. However I know my FC Mates were not quite there yet, and Ashgar needed a random expert for his alexandrite map. So I swapped back into my tanking gear and ran through Amdapor Keep Hard, which went pretty smoothly all things considered.

I kept trying to get back into mining last night but one thing or another kept sidetracking me. I started the evening at 44 and ended the evening at 47 which I guess isn’t too horrible all things considered, especially when I put in as little actual mining time as I did. This is why I tend to progress poorly through crafting content. If presented the option of smashing monsters in the face, I will always take that option. So over the course of the night I did an expert roulette, a random S Rank hunt, a treasure map… all to avoid going back to the mining grind. I will likely put in some effort on it this evening before my WoW raid, but I doubt I will hit 50 just yet. Hopefully at the least on Wednesday I can wrap that up and start work on the next profession.

Turn 9 Progress

Last night was my second night of work on Turn 9 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, or more correctly the final turn of the Second Coil of Bahamut. I spent significantly less amount time derping it up this week, and we spent more time kicking ass and taking names. When we last played we were unable to get through the meteor phase reliably. We were attempting the “roulette” method of everyone bunching up and then the group running around the circle each time someone gets a meteor. This method requires the group to run together, and then stop at certain points until the next meteor spawns in. The person who just got the last meteor has to cut across the circle to catch up to the party again. For me at least it felt like pure chaos and while we managed to get through the phase once or twice doing this… it never felt like something that was terribly repeatable.

This week we threw the suggested rules out the window and actually started to pull together that phase of the fight. Instead of grouping up, we all spread out along the outer ring of the room. As a meteor would drop, that player would run to another person and group up, essentially slowly dropping the rocks around the outside of the room equally spaced. It probably seems a lot more chaotic to watch, but for us it felt far more controlled as it gave time for folks to get off a few heals during this phase. Towards the end of the night we were able to consistently nail the meteor phase and get into phase three proper. Now we need to learn this phase, because right now without really knowing the pattern fully… it feels insane. My hope is if we can keep learning a phase a week we will down it shortly. I am really enjoying turn nine, because it feels awesome when we a nail super difficult phase.

Playing Big Kid

We performed admirably in turn nine considering that for the most part our entire raid felt out of it for one reason or another. In fact due to the daylight savings time crap, we considered even maybe trying something a bit easier. However once the heat of battle started, we managed to wake up and pull things together. However those first few pulls were rather questionable. After getting out of the dungeon I returned to mining for a bit, and had just finished a level when my friend Cuppy logged in. A few weeks back I had to halt an intended run of Sastasha because it was going to cut into raid time, and felt pretty horrible for having to do it. It turns out she pugged it and was now ready for Tam Tara Deepcroft, so no matter what my plans were I was totally down with running it with her. So I put on my Paladin outfit, and like always we had a number of volunteers ready to help out.

The final mix ended up being Cuppy on her Arcanist, me on my Paladin, Thalen on his White Mage, and Kodra barding it up. Like most low level dungeons it went extremely smoothly, but we took our time making sure to kill every last monster in the place for the maximum amount of experience. The only time I seem to find myself playing a paladin is when doing older content, because it seems significantly easier to tank with a paladin. Namely I find myself constantly teetering on the edge of not having any TP when I am playing my Warrior, whereas on the paladin I can just keep flashing and power through the place. If in an absolute worse case scenario I run out of MP, I could always resort to riot blade. Sadly however nothing of use dropped for Cuppy, so I have a feeling we will be running that place some more. The Acolyte’s set is amazing, and will hold a player until they are somewhere in their mid 20s. Doing piddly little dungeon runs like this really make me happy, and make me feel more connected with my free company, so it was an excellent way to close the evening.