cactpot Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Thanks to my Friends

This morning I had every intention to sleep in, but I guess my body the way that I have trained it over the years conspired against me. I woke up moments after the alarm would have gone off normally, and then stayed in a sort of half sleep half awake state until I finally gave up around 6:30. Now an hour later… I am finally pulling myself away from my insanely scrolling twitter feed to attempt to write a blog post. I guess I had forgotten just how overwhelming being on twitter can be on your Birthday. I love each and every one of you, and maybe this year more than most… which is something I will elaborate on shortly. June is the travel season for my wife, and each year she has a series of conventions and other events that she travels to. This has been a thing for several years, but no matter how often it happens… you never quite get used to it. During the month of June she will be gone for a week, home a few days, gone another week etcetera. So the best Birthday present I could possibly get right now is her flying home today… and I am really hoping that her plane is not delayed by the remnants of the Hurricane.

Now in the past I have struggled with this existence of being alone for the better part of a month. This has generally been the time of the year when my depression flares up the most, since I am generally speaking sitting alone in a house with my thoughts and a menagerie of animals. This year however has been different, and I think it is thanks to all of you out there that relentlessly check in on me. I feel like I am surrounded by so many awesome people that seem to love me that I am never really completely alone. There is always a message waiting on my response somewhere, or someone looping me into a conversation. The AggroChat crew especially has become this second family that hunts me down if they don’t hear from me in a few days, because they know my tendencies to cocoon when the depression starts. I want to thank all of you for essentially keeping me from dropping into my normal yearly funk. My friends and my free company have been this offsetting force of amazing in my life and as a result have kind of made every day my wife has been away more tolerable.

Splashy Pony Brothers

I spent my final night in FFXIV before the downtime the same way I have spent many nights, hanging out on Teamspeak and helping folks do content. It seems so strange that last night was the end of one era of Final Fantasy and tomorrow morning will begin another. In a way I kind of like the fact that we have this entire day outage, because I guess in some way it makes the whole process seem more real. In some games I have literally logged out of one client and back into a brand new one over the course of thirty minutes, and it always felt strange. I am sure there are people out there that are frustrated by being locked out of the game for this period of time, but I guess for me it makes the experience more meaningful. I am just hoping that I can get to sleep early tonight and that the excitement won’t be too overwhelming, because in many ways it feels a bit like Christmas Eve and I am five years old.

Last night we managed to down Odin with a batch of new people, and in the process met a really nice White Mage on Cactuar, that I have subsequently friended. I am consistently surprised by just how nice people generally are when we find them through the server party finder system. In fact this one gets bonus credit because we screwed up and originally thought we needed another dps. Upon explaining our screw up she was cool and said that she also could heal the fight. Moments later we were making attempts on Odin and shockingly I think it only took us three tries before we defeated him. After that we attempted to sort out what we were doing next, with many people mentioning Titan… but in the end we wound up going to do Leviathan Extreme instead. This is one of my favorite fights, but this time they needed me to be a Paladin and do the stun lock thing. I am just not comfortable tanking as a paladin and the whole experience felt frustrating, as compared to my warrior. However I managed to do a decent enough job that we pushed through and got the defeat. To make things even cooler a pony whistle dropped and now Mor and I can be splashy pony brothers!

A Strange Birthday

So now that I am wrapping up my blog post I need to hurry around like mad. I need to be at the airport to pick up my wife around 1:30, and in the meantime I need to attempt to pick up the house. While it is not exactly in bad shape, because really I haven’t done anything that crazy since she has been gone… it needs a round of sprucing up so she has a nice place to come home to. Additionally I need to gather up the information I need to get my car tag, since she mentioned maybe doing that on the way home today so that we don’t have to get out of the house and do it tomorrow. So while I would love to hang out in my pajamas and play video games all day… I suppose I will have to go off and be and adult. It is going to be awesome to have my wife home again, but it is also a strange experience getting used to not being the only person in the room. Unfortunately it will be a short lived experience because if I remember correctly she is heading back out again on Sunday, but this time for a much shorter trip.

In the meantime my Final Fantasy XIV client is patched, and I am floored that it was only 4.3 gig. From what I am hearing this morning however they have apparently been patching in assets for months. Supposedly half of the zones that we will be exploring have been in since the launch of A Realm Reborn. I hope this all means that tomorrow is going to be an extremely smooth launch, but I still need to get my laptop started patching as well. I am sure there will be some sort of a final patch when the servers come back up from the downtime that lets the client know it is time to be Heavensward, but I am hoping it is a small one. I guess in theory this game is scaled to work well over consoles, so it makes complete sense that it would have really tight patches. So far I am impressed and I am hoping that feeling continues through the launch. This game had an exceptionally rocky start with the relaunch in August 2013, and I am hoping they have learned their lessons.

The Lottery

This weekend I had a pretty great time puttering around Final Fantasy XIV. As of yesterday afternoon I am officially capped on Poetics again, and it seems like each week this is getting easier. Right now my focus is on getting my dragoon 130 weapon since I am being called upon to dps in coil occasionally, and as such I feel like I should have the best weapon available to me. Had I really been thinking straight I would have gone for the dragoon lance first instead of the axe. At this point I need to cap one more week and then part of another to end up getting the weapon. This week I got another encrypted tomestone, and this coming week I will get the carbontwine so that when I finally get the poetics together I will be ready for it. We have a minor patch tomorrow, and I would really love if they completely removed the poetics cap or at least raised it… but I don’t think that is actually going to happen.

Part of what makes my time in Final Fantasy XIV so enjoyable is the community. In some games you want to spend as little time with other players as possible, but in FFXIV we all sort of congregate in several common areas and the casual interactions with other players ends up being a pure joy. With the 2.51 patch they added the Golden Saucer and with it the Cactpot lottery system. Once a week you can buy a ticket for the big drawing, that could be worth as much a million MGP. This drawing happens every Saturday evening, and if you are there at exactly the right time you can see the above spectacle as a series of wheels raise from the floor and “roll” the new number. What is awesome is a good chunk of the community gathers around to watch this happen. I ended up chatting with a few people I had never met but that just had awesome outfits, and while I didn’t win anything other than the consolation prize… it is always a part of the week I look forward to.

Splashy Pony

Before the podcast on Saturday evening we gathered together and worked on Leviathan Extreme. Now a few weeks ago we had made some serious progress here, so we went into this adventure thinking we had a good shot at actually downing it. Levi Extreme is probably one of the more enjoyable fights in the game I have experienced. While it shares some unrecoverable mechanics with Titan Extreme, it seems to do so in a much more predictable manner. The primary difference between normal and extreme modes is that when the elemental converter goes off, Leviathan knocks the sides off the boat making the players susceptible to being knocked off in the water if you stand in the wrong places. Additionally there is a new add type that spawns that if not stun locked and burned extremely quickly can fear players off the boat. The combination of these two mechanics and the fact that if someone dies… you have a few moments to resurrect them before their corpse is knocked of… makes the fight extremely tense at times.

However we worked through all of these issues and on each attempt kept creeping closer and closer to success. I think we had about ten minutes left on the timer when we finally defeated Leviathan, but as the night went on it felt more solid. I think we could probably farm this encounter each week letting folks get their extremely awesome Leviathan weapons. The amazing part is that we actually managed to get one of the mounts to drop. These are not an every time occurrence from what I understand, and actually rather rare. Not only did we get it to drop, but I actually managed to roll high on it. Now in the above picture you can see me riding around on my splashy pony with water splash effects that it leaves behind everywhere it goes. Leviathan has always been one of my favorite summons in the Final Fantasy universe, so I am damned happy to have his pony. Hopefully we can get the guild a bunch more of these over time. You can see Thalen sporting the Leviathan fist weapons, which are the item that dropped in addition to the mount. I want the Leviathan axe so bad, so hopefully we can muster the oomph to do this one on a regular basis.

Ready for Heavensward

This morning before sitting down to write this blog post I ran my way through the new benchmark application to test systems to see if they are ready for Heavensward. I guess my system passed with flying colors, and there are some moments in the demo where it worked the hell out of my machine. I tend to play Final Fantasy XIV on a frame locked 30 fps largely because that is what I have gotten used to. I happened to be running fraps during the demo loop, and the highest frame rate I saw was around 75 fps and the lowest dip was during this “raid” section with tons of spell effects going off at around 35 fps. All in all I am pretty damned pleased with that, especially since I never run with full spell effects on. I prefer to run with the limited spell effect options because it makes 24 man raids feel less seizure inducing to be honest. As the demo played out though I have to say I am getting really amped to be playing all of this content. The world of Heavensward looks amazing, and the DX11 textures are so much clearer than what we are currently used to.

The highlight of the demo reel however is seeing the new Dragoon rank 3 limit break animation. If this is any indication then I think we are going to be really happy with all of the new class specific limit breaks. The only thing that concerns me is that the dragoon dive is a really long animation, so I am wondering what the rest of the party sees as this is going off. As you can see the Dragoon becomes a spirit dragon and then leaps up into the air crashing down on the target driving the force of the spirit dragon through it. I tried to get screenshots at good times during its animation but it really does not do it justice. Thankfully if you are stuck at work and cannot run the animation, they released a video of the entire benchmark so you can get your fix. I am really pleased with the performance of my system however and I have no doubts in my mind that I will be able to run Heavensward without issues. This whole releasing a benchmark thing is such a great idea, and I am wondering why more companies don’t do this. This way if you do need to make upgrades, you have more than enough time to figure out how you are going to do this.