Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Flight in Draenor

WoWFlight

This mornings post is going to be a little odd, because I have already written it once before.  I sat down at the keyboard like normal this morning and started banging out a post, and within a paragraph of finishing it and hitting publish…  we had a power outage.  Unfortunately I was composing on my local machine, and also unfortunately it seems that LiveWriter only recovers if it crashes… and not the entire computer powering off.  As a result I am composing a second post… in which I am going to attempt to say all the sage things I said before.  This experiment is likely going to fail miserably.  In my original post I got a little salty over the announcement yesterday that Blizzard was adding in a meta-achievement that would allow you to unlock flight in Draenor for all of your 90+ characters.  The problem being I was grumpy for a silly reason, and now upon rewriting this post I have realized that.  Sure it felt good to rant a bit, but overall it was largely meaningless.

What I do feel like yesterday’s announcement signals is that Warlords of Draenor has been a testament to the fact that Blizzard does not understand its core demographic at all.  As a friend said last night, Flight is a Genie that you cannot put back in the bottle.  Once it was given to the players they will always crave its freedom.  While I personally agreed with the decision to take flight away, and supported the supposed line in the sand they drew, it seems like the villagers with pitchforks storming the ramparts made Blizzard change their mind.  Warlords as a whole has been a bit of a comedy of errors, with extremely good aspects like the raid encounters… and extremely bad aspects like the facebook game style garrisons and the demolition of crafting.  Ultimately my frustration with the flight move is it seems so rushed, and that they simply drew a card from the Final Fantasy XIV deck on how to deal with it.  Last October Square announced that they would add flight, but through a system that forced the player to explore a zone and learn how to harness the winds.  This meta-achievement seems like a rushed clone of that concept, and while it made me grumpy at first… I realize that every single game draws upon the best parts of every game before it.  I guess next week when Heavensward head start begins we can determine if it really was the good idea that Square hopes it is.

Clockwork Mayhem

KittyBelglaive

I spent a good chunk of my night playing ArcheAge and I have to say the more I play Kitty Belghast the more I enjoy him.  Technically I am not Belghast at all… because apparently someone on Tahyang has my name.  To make matters worse they made an Elf Archer… which is pretty close to being the “anti-belghast”.  However I am getting by just fine with Belgrave the Nuian and Belglaive the Firran.  I finished up my questing in the mines and have moved now into a junkyard of clockwork machines.  I am really enjoying my Darkrunner build, because it just feels awesome to rush headlong into things with two swords drawn.  Everything was going well until I stumbled onto a quest to kill 20 discarded clockworks.  As I wandered through the junkyard I found them sitting there in several clumps of smaller mobs surrounded by an aggressive Harani.  At first I thought these were like the other packs of mobs I had encountered, so I pulled and popped my AOEs… only to get murdered in the most horrible fashion.

It turns out that when ArcheAge says something is an “Elite” quest it means it.  It also turns out that these are part of the Clockwork Rebellion event, which is the mirror of the Oblivion Rift event I had done before on the Nuian side.  These are absolutely scaled for groups to complete them, but instead being the stubborn fool that I am, I tried to solo it.  What I like the most is the fact that this game allowed me to do just this.  Through careful pulls I was able to peel smaller chunks of the large packs off and take care of them in multiple passes.  I found that I could take three or four of the little robots if I absolutely had to, and then would need to regenerate my health and mana back before trying another pass.  In doing this I whittled down the quest until I was able to complete it and get an achievement for doing so.  I have to say this sort of careful and methodical gameplay was extremely rewarding, and reminds me of an older era of gaming.  My hope is that once Kodra gets the ability to play ArcheAge that he too will find the game he had been looking for with Pathfinder Online.  In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun being kitty bel.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

tinybeltinycid

Several weeks ago I had ordered the Final Fantasy XIV Art Book from the Square Enix store, and last night when I got home it was sitting there waiting on my doorstep.  The coolest part so far is the fact that it has almost all of the weapon and armor designs from the game, and shows the production art behind them.  What makes that even more awesome is that each one of them has a sentence or two of notes below that explains some of their ideas that went into the design.  If it is a weapon with animated parts it explains how the weapon bits actually move and function together and the idea behind them.  If that was not cool enough it also included a tiny Enterprise minion that also has an even tinier Cid sitting on the deck.  I am thinking this is the ideal minion to run around with as a Lalafell, because Tiny Cid actually makes me feel big.

I had logged out of ArcheAge and into Final Fantasy XIV last night because in theory it was the night our second static runs.  Whenever my schedule works with it, I try and offer my services to make sure it can fill.  Last night however after sitting around and waiting for a bit we were standing there with four people.  The leader called the raid, and we instead shifted focus to running Art the bear tank from our WoW raid through some instances.  The most frustrating part about leveling a DPS right now is the fact that the queues are so ridiculously long.  As I have been leveling my Ninja lately my average wait time is around 40 minutes.  So we built a free company group and I got the job of tanking.  I tanked Copperbell as a Warrior, and Halatali as a Paladin and enjoyed both of them.  I like tanking lower level content in part because it makes me realize just how limited my toolbox used to be, and how hard it was to actually hold aggro on mobs.  Was a fun night all around, and I actually look forward to doing more of this as I work on leveling my Dark Knight eventually.