Heroic Ogron

Bonding of House Noye

ffxiv_01012015_201417 When the 2.45 patch went into Final Fantasy XIV they added a nifty new feature called the Eternal Bond ceremony.  This allows players in game to get hitched in an instanced ceremony that they can invite all of their friends to.  I’ve talked about my friends Ayla and Joren Noye before, and they’ve made several appearances in photos at least on this blog.  So I was pumped when I received an in game mail message with a bunch if invites to their Eternal bonding ceremony.  For some reason I had it stuck in my head that it was at 5 pm my time, but when I logged in about 4 pm to prepare for the festivities I noticed the invite said 7 pm instead.  My heart sunk as I realized that it was going to conflict with my raid group in World of Warcraft.  Since neither were on, I sent my apologies and the spare invites back to them just in case they needed to hand out more copies.

ffxiv_01012015_200523 Thankfully Rae and Ashgar attended the ceremony from our free company, and Ash took lots of photos.  I have to say Squeenix did a really good job with this ceremony design.  I’ve seen similar “wedding” features built into other games but the look of this one is really magical.  I feel horrible that I missed it, but at least I was able to see it thanks to all the awesome screenshots.  I will have to give my apologies in person to Ayla and Joren…  but I think they actually read this blog as well.  So I am sorry that I missed the proceedings but it looked beautiful.  You both are really awesome individuals and are part of what make FFXIV a fun place to be.  Thanks for including me in the proceedings, just sucks that I could not attend.

Heroic Ogron

Wow-64 2015-01-01 20-37-12-25 In general this week of raiding has been a rough one.  All things considered we honestly probably should have just taken the week off.  That said we did manage to make significant progress.  While we struggled Tuesday night, we managed to get all of the bosses down that we had downed previously, opening up last night for trying something new all night long.  Since our DPS has increased significantly we set our sights on the Twin Ogron encounter, which other than the RNG elements is apparently not that much more difficult than Kargath.  RNG is specifically the problem… there were a few times where I took deaths to a horrible venn diagram of fire.. or the shield charge would go in the wrong direction.  All of these are in part because we were missing key individuals that normally play specific roles in this fight…  but we struggled through and managed.

After what felt like a dozen or so attempts we had that click moment when everything seemed to go perfectly.  The biggest frustration with the fight is always the fire.  While there are ways to mitigate the horribleness of the RNG by placing the bosses where we place them…  this still doesn’t take care of things 100% of the time.  The axes still go down in strange places, and the flames can pin players into a corner.  The problem is on heroic…  the fire is really really bad.  There was one point where I ended up having to take a double stack… popped enraged regeneration, shield wall, and last stand and STILL ended up dying to the fire.  I feel like this is going to be one of those fights that is never quite on “Farm” status, at least not on heroic.  Too much can go wrong in too short a period of time… dealing way the hell too much damage.  That said for a very rough week I am damned proud of the team for downing yet another heroic boss.

A Day of Huntering

Wow-64 2015-01-02 10-00-45-84 Other than raiding the majority of my day was spent playing Lodin my hunter, and working my way through the quest content.  This time around I had some very specific goals.  When I leveled my Deathknight I jumped every two levels to the next zone.  This time I am doing something similar, expect in two key zones…  firstly I wanted to make sure I had gained enough faction in Talador to get to Revered with the Exarch.  Now that I am moving into Spires of Arak, my goal there is also spend enough time to be able to hit Revered with the Arrakoa.  This way I can go to Ashran and purchase two trinkets to bring my overall gearscore up a bit.  This was something that I could not do on my Deathknight and ultimately I had to get trinkets from my Garrison to bring up my ilevel.  Remember my entire goal here is to be able to hit 615 as soon as I can so that I can queue for LFR and start getting access to easy epics.

The only real problem with skipping content is that you are also skipping followers that you can use in your garrison.  Lodin thankfully has quite a few, and it will be a bit before I build a barracks…  so for the time being I can only have 20.  Thankfully there are a couple of easy ones like Tormack and Blook that I can pick up along the way.  So far I am really enjoying playing Lodin but it is very hard to stay focused.  Every time I turn around I am killing beasts to farm leather… which I can ultimately do for hours.  This is a very faffy character, so it is hard to stay on task and keep pushing the questlines forward.  I guess that is in part why this character has appealed so much to me while playing around on break.  Since my life very much right now is all about faffing around…  it seems like the ideal pairing.  My hope is over the next couple of days I will manage to push through to 100 and finish the character off.  It will be nice to have access to a hunter since they are still doing so much damage.