extreme Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Extreme Whales

July 9, 2015 by Belghast

Last night I got a little piece of advice from Syp, who said that I should take care of myself and that no one would care if I took a few days off. I greatly appreciate the sentiment, and while I feel like this is probably the most brilliant idea… I am not likely to do it. In part this “every morning” thing is a much needed routine in my life. Much like dreams are a way for us to sort through the days events, in many ways this morning blog post is a way to reorder my thoughts before I start a new day. While it started with the goal of “write more content” It has wound up somewhere in a therapeutic space. Getting up every morning and writing something… is important to me in ways I don’t fully grasp. Additionally I have now done this two and a half years roughly, so another part of me simply does not want to “break the chain”. I am however likely to fiddle with my format a bit until my wrist is fully healed.

Extreme Whales

Right now we are in this limbo area where people are still in the process of gearing in order to be able to do higher level content. To do Alexander the first raid you must be ilevel 170, which means you need to have a full set of Tomestone of Law gear with at least one upgraded item. Since I only hit 60 a few days ago I am not quite there yet. As of last night I managed to hit ilvl 166 and in theory should be able to upgrade another piece of gear tonight if I manage to get any play time. For awhile now I have filled in for the Wednesday night raid group, which was admittedly a bit of an imposition when I was still raiding in World of Warcraft… but now is not so much. Wednesday night is generally speaking a pretty good night for me to raid considering that my wife is off at church for a large chunk of it. So as we move forward into Heavensward I am probably going to offer myself as a more permanent part of that group. Since we could not do Alexander we set our sights last night on Bismarck Extreme, which only has a requirement that individuals be level 60.

The fight is in essence a series of dps checks, because apparently the island we are standing on gets more and more battered as the fight goes on. At a base level the fight works pretty much the same as it does on hard, except for the fact that you realistically need to get down the back scale during the first chain phase. I feel like Wulf and I made a lot of progress on learning this fight as tanks, with the hardest part being the elemental snake swap. The snakes send out a debuff that makes it so that players need to be dpsing the snake of the opposite color of the buff they currently have. This means tanks also need to swap targets, and at first we were trying to meet in the middle and trade off, but it seems that quite honestly this is a job for provoke. Right before a potential swap Wulf and I would target each others snakes and then hit the taunt if we saw that we needed to. Thankfully it seems to work magically, because normally speaking “just taunting” has minimal effect in this game when it comes to swapping targets.

While we beat the first dps check, we consistently failed at the second one… which is burning down the elemental snakes before hitting the point of no return where the skies to dark… and Bismarck nukes us into oblivion. Thankfully each of us still has a lot more gear we can get so we are simply hitting a gear wall. I think if we get enough upgrade pieces in the next week we will totally rock this fight and down us the first extreme primal of the expansion. Then we will move on to Ravana Extreme… that happens to drop the best weapons in the game currently. I have to say I had a blast with the fight, and it was awesome working with Wulf. The few times I had tanked for the WoW raid, it was when he happened to be out for the night, so I think this might be the first time we have actually worked together in progression content. In part I somewhat hope we have the people to pull this together for an attempt on Saturday during the pre-podcast raid block.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

July 2, 2015 by Belghast

The Teamspeak Conundrum

Yesterday I spoke for a bit about one of the reasons why I have not streamed that often. Namely that I have friends who would prefer not to be broadcast over my stream, which means when I DO stream… I have had to wall myself off from my social network of friends by dropping down to the “streaming” channel. As a result there is only so long I can seem to go without popping back upstairs because I simply get lonely down there all by myself. Over the last year or so I have tried to figure out a set up that would work, to let me stream freely without the fear of broadcasting my companions. The defacto tool is Virtual Audio Cables, but folks have talked about it being cumbersome and the more I looked into it… and they started talking about setting up batch files to do this or that… it honestly scared me away. Honestly even the website seems a bit cludgy… so I kept looking for other solutions.

In the mean time I made attempts to make this process work using both Voice Meter and Breakaway Audio. Neither tool admittedly was designed to do this, but I had found guides online that supposedly allowed it to work. Problem being after setting everything up… it never seemed to work for me and there was extremely limited documentation on what I could do to tweak my setup. Last night I finally decided to dig down into Virtual Audio Cables, and found the guide embedded above. For starters… this is the point at which I complain that YouTube is the worst means of disseminating information. What I needed in all of these cases was a good blog post with annotated screenshots… all I could actually find were a series of haphazard videos. That said the above video, when followed actually produced the results exactly like I wanted. Last night I was able to stream practically all night long, while hanging out with friends… and not broadcasting a single thing they said. Additionally I bound a separate push to to talk key just for the stream so that folks watching the stream are not getting “half” of the conversation. The videos below are the results of my evening of streaming.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

The picture does not exactly go with this story… but oh well it is my prerogative. Solaria’s fishing outfit looks amazing, and it makes me want to level fishing. It does however show you that the Greysky Armada spends a ton of time milling around our guild house in The Mists. One of the things I love about this game is that we are constantly interacting with our neighbors. Last night Damai and I were talking in /say and a neighbor joined in, saying that he needed a dps and a tank for Sohm Al the second dungeon in Heavensward. Damai was already spoken for, but I offered up my own services as a tank. We queued and got in quickly and the below embedded video is the results of that run. I did a few stupid things, one of which that wiped the party but we had a great time running dungeons with people who were essentially complete strangers until I last night. I think it is awesome that you can have these casual run in acquaintances.

During the early days of World of Warcraft had this rich tapestry of social connections that reached into many of the other raiding guilds on the server. When I needed someone for an activity our raid was running, I could reach out into these social channels and draw upon dozens of different people who were milling around looking for something to do. Cataclysm however pretty much destroyed this network, and I have never really been able to build an equivalent in any other MMO… that is until Final Fantasy XIV. The people here on Cactuar seem to crave interaction with folks outside of their insular guild units. I am in my maximum number of linkshells and while folks get lost in their own little world… especially while leveling in Heavensward… I have still been able to draw upon them to fill groups. As we move into more “maintenance” mode this is going to become more true. The only thing I wish was that there was a way to create more “formal” guild alliances. There are a handful of free companies that we hang out with regularly, and it would be nice to have a shared channel of communication that was not “opt in” like a linkshell.

Another Titan Extreme

Wednesday is normally the raid night of our second guild static. Since the raid leader was not around he left it up to Damai to organize something… and while we did not really have the appropriate numbers to work on Second Coil of Bahamut, there were still a large number of folks needing Extreme Primals to unlock more content. I was asked if I “felt like tanking Titan Extreme” to which I replied “there is never a sequence of events that exists… where I feel like tanking Titan Extreme… but I will if you need me”. Titan Extreme is just one of those fights that is maddening on so many levels and I would place it among the five hardest fights in all of the A Realm Reborn content. That said I make it out in my mind to be far worse than it actually is, and at this point I have the dance memorized. This fight is absolutely about repeating the same sequence of actions over and over until the boss falls down, and as I have commented in the past… this is the sort of fight we fail miserably at. We are amazing at fights where we have to think on our feet and adjust to change… but doing this on Titan extreme ultimately ends up screwing the entire raid when it comes to Weight of the Land damage.

What I found amazing is just how challenging this encounter still is even though many of us were being downscaled to 50, and our gear downscaled with us. A Realm Reborn content is absolutely going to remain relevant for new folks that have yet to experience it. This makes me more happy than just about anything else in Heavensward. We still have a bunch of people coming up through the ropes that have not seen any of the 2.0 raid content, and my hope is that we can have an old school night where we work on this as a guild and get people through it. This is what I wanted from World of Warcraft all along… a way to run old content and make it still relevant to current players. There were epic experiences like Blackwing Lair and Ulduar that are just diminished because we overgear the shit out of it, and there is no real way NOT to be overpowered… other than making some alts and level locking them at fixed points in time. Granted we tried to do this once with a raid of level 60 locked alts… but it still was not the same. Final Fantasy XIV however seems to have figured out how to make it work, and I am damned thankful. We eventually got the kill and I edited out just that part in the above video.

Splashy Pony Brothers

June 18, 2015 by Belghast

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.

Shiva Down

June 17, 2015 by Belghast

Last Of the E3 Shows

I think at this point I am ready to be done with E3 2015 for awhile. In theory yesterday was the tail end of the major conferences. I have to say that when I originally made my statement that Bethesda had won E3, I was doing so with an over exaggerated amount of hyperbole. I have to say however as the dust settles… they still managed to put on the best event and was the only show where every single thing they announced was something I cared about, at least on some level. The most frustrating event for me personally was the Square Enix event, in part because they combined a line up of amazing games… with a high school speech classroom quality of presentation ability. I am not sure how they managed to make these games seem boring, but they certainly did. All of that said I am completely amped to get my hands on Just Cause 3… or that game that lets me blow everything up. I got a see a little bit of game play on Twitch yesterday evening that showed them taking out bridges… and I could not be more enthralled.

The surprise of the year still is Microsoft in the fact that they presented me with what was an overall enjoyable conference after several years of being frustrated by their product offerings. The problem being that last night during PC Gaming show they pretty much destroyed all interest I had in picking up an Xbox One, when they started announcing that several more previously Xbox exclusives would be coming to PC. It seems as though I am going to finally get to play Gears of War in the new premastered form, and get my hands in the new Killer Instinct. This makes me question even more of their previous “exclusivity” statements because it seems like they are treating Windows 10 and Xbox One as the same platform. I guess in the grand scheme of things I am completely fine with this. This lets me focus on a Gaming PC to get the Xbox exclusives and PS4 Console to get any remaining Sony exclusives.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5

Of all the games that I saw over the course of the last three days, the one that I am the most gleefully happy about is probably a surprising title. I am so damned excited to see the return of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater franchise to modern gaming, and yesterday I got to watch some game play on the twitch stream. It looks and feels like a beautifie d version of the game I loved and remember spending so many hours playing in the original playstation, and later the playstation 2. I cannot fully explain my love of this game, other than the fact that one upon a time I was a little skater punk kid. While I never had the skill to do half of the things that you can do in THPS, I always wanted to carve and insane session out like my one time idols. This is absolutely a guilty fantasy fulfillment experience for me, that allows someone who is relatively uncoordinated and has a shitty sense of balance to do insane grinds down every possible surface I can find.

Now Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD has been available on Steam for awhile now, and while I enjoy it quite a bit… it is missing a lot of the reasons why I enjoyed the THPS series. Firstly I loved the create a Skater mode that allowed me to essentially create a version of myself in the game and work my way through a “career mode”. This feature thankfully has been confirmed to be in the new THPS5, as is the create a skate park feature that is also missing from HD. Apparently there is going to be an in game market of sorts that will allow you to swap skate parks with folks online, greatly extending the replay ability of this title. The negative is that it will initially release on the PS4 and Xbox One and then later on the other platforms including PC. For me this is a simple decision since I played all the original Tony Hawk games on with a playstation controller in my hand, I have no problem picking this up for the PS4 which will also let me play it over my Vita. Watching folks play this game, and seeing the new version of Warehouse and School 2… that has been renamed to School 3… just put a massive cheesy grin on my face.

Shiva Down

I had originally intended to write about this yesterday, but wound up with far too much to talk about on the E3 news front. Monday night was our last raid night before the expansion lands Friday morning, and as such we focused on the two things that have been in our way for awhile now. The first of which is the last of the extreme primal encounters, Shiva. This fight is such a frustrating experience because it combines elements we are horrible at. Namely our group is bad at doing the same dance over and over. For example on Turn 9, everyone else does this method where they stack up and run as a group to drop the meteors. However for us we simply do this thing we lovingly refer to as the “Benny Hill maneuver” where we just try and spread out around the edge of the room and move as the meteors drop. Shiva combines elements of get away from everyone and stack the hell up in a way that ultimately ended up in many deaths along the way.

The worst of her mechanics is the bow attack, which she starts in phase two. This fires arrows in a 270* arc from the front of her meaning that you have to be stacked tight on her ass to keep from getting hit. What makes it worse however is that the normal damage dealt by bow to the tanks is truly insane. Ashgar and I had to essentially cycle through cooldowns while in bow phase to have a shot in hell of staying alive. On the attempt we defeated her, our strategy absolutely revolved around staying alive long enough to get a level three limit break… and then using that to resurrect the entire party and finish her off. There is something so damned satisfying about the level three healer limit break, it is like a giant screw you to the boss when you can bring back your entire party. It makes the whole experience seem like one of those insane Anime come from behind victories. While we did not get much further in Turn 9, we did manage to take down the last of the Extreme primals so I can go into this expansion with a feeling of accomplishment. Granted I know we will be fighting all of these extreme primals again partially for ponies and partially to get other guild members through the quests. I feel like I am completely ready for Ishgard now, and I am going to have so much trouble sleeping tomorrow night.