Chain Run Dungeons

Worst Party Comp Ever

FFV_HorriblePartyTime Last night I was feeling more than a little out of it, or at least too out of it to actual do much of anything meaningful in Final Fantasy XIV.  So after finishing my hunt quest and randoming my way into an Aery dungeon group…  I opted to just log out for the night.  For a period of time I considered simply going to sleep… and this is honestly the option I should have taken.  The Four Job Fiesta is like a religion to my good friend Ashgar, and until the night before last I had not actually even registered for it officially.  So as I sat there swaddled in a comfy blanket on the very comfy sofa… I opted to dig the xbox controller out of the console beside me and officially start my fiesta.  The rest is history as I was up fairly late getting my start in the world.  In past Fiestas my party comp has not been terribly horrible… or at the very least I have bought my way to freedom using the Jobfair donation system.  This time however being I think my fourth year participating…  I am just going to let it ride.

So when the game assigned me monk for my Wind job…  I didn’t think much about it.  I figured that would be an easy beginning to the game.  When it gave me Berserker for my water job however…  I started to dread this decision I had made.  Then when I was assigned Beastmaster as my fire job… I realized this was going to be a really odd ride.  I figure the answer to my freedom will once again be out level the content, and I have already gotten a start on that notion as I just defeated the Library of Ancients at level 21 which is about five levels or so off the normal pace I believe.  Next time I play I will be going after my earth job.. and wondering if it will be salvation or another nail in the coffin on this horrible party.  Admittedly I have never actually used the Beastmaster but I always hated how fiddly Gau was in Final Fantasy VI and never actually used him as a result.  In theory this is going to be a return to that sort of thing, but I need to do some serious research on what all I need to do and when I need to do it, especially as I am just about to get an airship for the first time giving me a wider range of freedom to go off collecting abilities.

Chain Run Dungeons

ffxiv_dx11 2015-06-23 21-11-03-54 In part the reason why I opted to log out last night instead of play is that I am sitting on a strange wall.  Right now I am about half way to level 57 and I have a bunch of options on how to get there.  I could go do all of the quests that I missed doing while skipping my way around the world and ignoring most of the side quests.  I am sure that Square has intended me to level using these, and the fact that I am largely ignoring them is completely breaking their content design.  I could always go join a FATE train somewhere, as this has always been a viable method of leveling especially now that so many people are doing it and there are almost always FATE groups in the party finder.  It seems that Northern Thanalan is once again an active hotbed of FATE running, and in theory this would even be good experience for a Heavensward character.  I am doing my daily hunts but they are honestly more for the currency provided and while they each provide a decent chunk of experience… there are far better and quicker ways to get it.

All of these are completely viable options, but I would far rather just run a bunch of dungeons.  The problem is that my preference will always be to run dungeons with the Greysky Armada folks.  Unfortunately they are either quiet about what they need for dungeons, or have not unlocked a given dungeon yet.  I’ve run a few groups a night for the last several nights, but if I am going to rely on dungeons as a means of leveling I am going to have to step out into the larger community and just start random queuing.  Now we get into the dilemma last night…  I could have tanked a run for the guild, but I did not have the presence of mind to do so with strangers.  Don’t get me wrong I love the FFXIV community, but dealing with anyone that I don’t already know inflicts a mental toll on me.  My default and original state is that of an introvert… and over the years I have forced myself to be more extroverted…  but doing so…  drains me.  Last night I was an energizer bunny that had wound down, but tonight hopefully I will begin chaining dungeons once more in order to get the last of my level so I can move forward in the story again and hopefully unlock dungeon four.

Unusually Trying Week

Not really sure why but this week has been a really rough one for some reason.  In part I think it is because at the start of the week I had to deal with the being alone, as my wife was once again travelling.  Thankfully only for a few days and as of Wednesday she should be home for the rest of the summer.  It just seems like everything has been stressing me out far more than it should.  I labored over the decision to go ahead and cancel the World of Warcraft account, just to keep it from auto renewing.  I have stressed over a dozen different small issues at work, and I have been stressed that I no longer have the ability to do everything in Final Fantasy XIV.  Right now I am a tank… and if the group already has one of those it means I have to sit out and watch from the bench as the group goes off and has fun.  I liked that I could work my way into any group and fill whatever slot they happened to need, because in truth…  running things with my guild is always the thing that I love to do the most.

The problem is that I will get there once again, but there is an almost insurmountable amount of leveling standing in the way.  I have this odd relationship with grinding… I enjoy it, but only when I don’t realize it is there.  If I am grinding towards a goal of some sort…  then I realize how much work is going to be needed to get to where I want to go… and simply start to shut down.  When I am just grinding as part of my default state of running around and attacking everything in sight… it becomes a happy and carefree place instead.  The problem being that right now I know the end goal… and for whatever reason I am having trouble compartmentalizing and ignoring the finish line.  I think I am just wired strangely… because so long as I don’t know where the finish line is I will keep pushing ahead blindly until I finally accomplish whatever it was that I wanted to accomplish.  However once I know where the boundaries are, and what it is going to take to get there…  the game changes and in a strange way goal setting de-motivates me.  So long as I am on this fun romp of discovery, life is grand…  but right now I need to somehow figure out how to ignore the goals and go back to playing everything for sheer enjoyment.

Ruins of Kel Voreth

One More Day

Tomorrow has a fairly significant sequence of events happening.  Firstly my wife is flying back into town from the first conference of the summer, and secondly she is doing so on my birthday.  Currently I care far more about the first part of that statement than the second.  These conferences are always rough especially when they straddle my birthday.  There have been times in the past when I was all alone for the occasion and it is really hard to keep from disconnecting from the world.  However tomorrow when I ding 38 I will have my wife back home, and I hope her trip is safe and expedient.  The flight back home from this event in past years has been riddled with downtime and layovers… and I hope she actually arrives on time this year.

As far as the birthday part of tomorrow, I really have no clue what I will be doing.  I took the day off from work mostly because she would be flying in and I would need to get to the airport and pick her up without really knowing an exact time based on past years experience.  I figure I will likely either play Wildstar or something on the PS4 while waiting.  Past that I have no real big plans, as I won’t likely get together with family until the weekend.  I always have a sort of contest to see which automated bot wishes me a happy birthday first.  So I am curious who will win that race this year.  Its funny when we live in a time when that is a “thing” and I take a perverse sense of pleasure in it.

I just hope that I will be breathing tomorrow.  For the last several days my allergies have been going haywire and this morning it finally hit my lungs.  I woke up today struggling to breathe, and am contemplating taking a breathing treatment.  If it stays too bad even after the treatment I am not sure if I will be able to go to work in this condition.  Having asthma and allergies is a blast…  and right now the cottonwood is blowing hard outside.  I wish I could find wherever the cottonwood tree is and remove it… because it seriously makes my life miserable every year.  However I guess were it not for the cottonwood… the would be something else to take its place in the making my life miserable department.

Buying Rapidfire

VisualBoyAdvanceM 2014-06-17 06-13-11-765

As of yesterday morning I was sitting outside the Fire Powered Ship sequence that ultimately leads to the fire crystal.  I had been assigned the Geomancer for my fire job, and having had it in the past…  I knew I really wanted no part of it.  As a result I ended up using Gilgabot’s Job Fair to buy my way to freedom.  If you end up with an assignment that you really do not like for whatever reason, you can donate more money to charity to “buy” the class you really wanted.  As a result I ended up picking up the ranger for my fire crystal, though it might have been interesting to see what it would be like with a ninja instead.  The ranger gives me access to rapidfire, probably the most overpowered melee-friendly secondary ability in the game.  With the knight it will likely be an i-win button against a few of the later fights.

Last night I played through the Fire Powered Ship, collapsing Karnak Castle and the Ancient Library in rapid succession.  I continued on to Jachol and Cresent Island and now have officially gained my Ranger crystal.  Tonight I will play through the Ancient Desert which should be interesting to say the least.  Not sure if I will steam roll the sandworm or get steamrolled to be honest.  I would really like to get through Soul Cannon tonight if I can and pick up my earth crystal.  I went ahead and requested this yesterday when I picked up the fire crystal just so I would know whether or not I wanted to buy my way to freedom again.  I was given the Dragoon which honestly I am fine with.  I’ve always loved the dragoon in the Final Fantasy games that have had them, so actually looking forward to finishing with it.  Maybe it is that I have just recently played through this much of the game already during our draft game, but it seems like it is going so much faster for me.

Ruins of Kel Voreth

Belghast.140616.221241 Last night at some point during the night I had muted Teamspeak, and not realized it.  So while I had wondered why everyone was being quiet I didn’t really think much about it until Tam messaged me asking what I was up to.  I guess they were pulling together a dungeon run, and while I had considered going to sleep… I opted to stay and dps the run since Shandrah would be tanking.  I have to say the Wildstar dungeon experience is kinda amazing.  I know I have said this about other games, but Wildstar dungeons really do feel like World of Warcraft raids.  We would have likely wiped over and over were it not for the fact that Shanbot has been running the dungeons with pugs since she often plays during a west coast timeframe host often.  As a result she knew exactly what to do on each of the boss strategies, and we managed to make it through the instance without much in the way of wipes.

Belghast.140616.233202 As the dungeon went on the encounters ramped up significantly.  One of the things i liked was that there seemed to be a bit of randomness to the dungeon itself.  One of my friends mentioned that when they had been in the dungeon the quests they were given were completely different.  The final encounter was something that could only be described as “Bullet Hell MMO”.  As a fan of the Bullet Hell shooter, I found the encounter really interesting.  We wiped the first time because it had bugged out and we managed to get phases one and two happening at the same time.  Without this bug occurring the encounter was actually rather manageable.  I am honestly amazed that any pugs are able to get through this dungeon, let alone do so in a timely manner.  Now I find myself really looking forward to running it again.

Belghast.140616.235401 The big change for me last night was that I had literally just finished setting up a DPS build in my second slot.  I had been slogging through content since about level 20 as a full tank, and honestly I thought I might have an easier time dpsing my way through the encounters.  It was fortuitous that at that moment almost exactly, Tam got ahold of me to dps the dungeon.  Now I feel like I have both hotbars set up and ready to go if I need to do this again.  I really liked dpsing as an engineer and might have to install damage meters just to see if I am even vaguely close to the other dps in performance.  I feel like I am lagging behind, but maybe that is just because I am not used to doing it.  A lot of the engineer dps abilities are tightly targeted and it is hard trying to lay them down in a way that the mobs won’t move out of them until the effect fades.  I look forward to giving it another try another night… and increasing my performance.

Wildstar PVP

Tonight ZeliBeli has scheduled a PVP night in Wildstar, so I will be doing that along with some FF5.  If you are on Evindra Dominion you should totally check out the anook event if you are interested.  I have not even touched PVP so far in the game, so I look forward to getting my feet wet with friends.  As it stands right now, since tomorrow is my Birthday I do not have a Elder Scrolls Online night scheduled, because really I have no clue what tomorrow evening might bring.  Here is hoping that my wife is back home and that all of her flights were successful.  In the meantime, going to beat things up with the guildies in Walatiki Temple.

#Wildstar #FF5 #FourJobFiesta #RuinsofKelVoreth

Manifest Destiny

The Doldrum

Last Tuesday my wife flew off to her first conference of the year, and for the most part I had been unaffected by this.  Sure I’ve missed having her around, but during the work week my time is so metered that I barely notice that I exist, let alone another person.  However the first Saturday is always the day it really hits me.  It doesn’t help that we are struggling with record pollen counts and the cottonwood is blowing with a vengeance that means I cannot breathe at all… and feel generally shitty.  As a result I have completely fallen off the walking wagon, I am sure Monday I will get back into the swing of things, but the last several days I have walked a rather pitiful amount.

Right now I feel very lonely, and as a result have been forcing myself to hang out on Teamspeak as much as possible.  For the most part the whole dumping of mumble thing has gone relatively smoothly.  The folks I chat with on a nightly basis have just transitioned cleanly, leaving only a few stragglers on mumble.  I am looking forward to Wednesday when she flies back into town, and in the meantime I am trying to busy myself and surround myself with as many friends as possible.  My natural instinct is to “turtle” and pull my head up inside my shell, never to be heard from again.  But I know based on past experience that is exactly the wrong reaction to feeling a bit depressed.  I just have to get through a few more days for this current salvo.

Manifest Destiny

Destiny First Look Alpha_20140614185716 Literally within moments of posting yesterdays blog entry, I had a friend of mine hook me up with a Destiny alpha code.  I love our community so damned much, and I am not sure if this person wants to be named by name… but yeah thanks so much.  After a 6.9 gig download that went remarkably faster than I expected and next thing I knew I was logging in and creating a new character.  My instinct was to go human, but for whatever reason they do not have any facial hair options.  I cannot create a “proper” Belghast without a beard, so instead I choose to go their robot option called the Exo, which had some really slick configuration choices.  The other racial option was some sort of tank grown looking protohuman called an Awoken that seems to be based on vampires/ghosts/elves in appearance.  If you are familiar with Defiance, they feel a lot like the Castithans.

Destiny First Look Alpha_20140615113330 So this won’t be the only comparison I make the Defiance, because really so far Destiny feels like Defiance done better.  I feel like Defiance was an MMO with Shooter elements, whereas Destiny is a Shooter with MMO elements.  Subtle difference there, but being a really solid shooter first… and gear swapping mmo second seems to make all the difference in the world.  Defiance was a cool idea, but the moment to moment gameplay felt unexciting, because it lived halfway between two worlds.  Everything about the shooter elements of Destiny is solid, and while I fail miserably at playing console shooters… I was able to pick up the controls quickly and felt like I had more control that I normally do with a gamepad.  Right now I am somewhat hooked, and hope to get in and play with some friends and explore the ruins together.

I still do not know quite how to hook up a mic and get it working, but I streamed most of my gameplay yesterday to twitch and then dumped it to my youtube channel like I normally do.`  In the beginning I was super uncertain of the controls, but by the end of my play session I was starting to feel far more confident with aiming the dual analog sticks.  Destiny is a title that I went from mildly interested in, to really looking forward to the release.  I fully expect to pre-order this title and play it when it launches in September.  I chose to play the Titan which is the closest thing they have to a tank in the game.  I’ve you’ve played Mass Effect, it feels really similar to the paragon, in that you have a mix of ranged weapons with super powerful melee attacks.  I would like to see how this plays with a group, because I kept encountering things I definitely could not take by myself.  At this point I’ve beaten the first “on-rails” mission and opened up the more open world missions.  Look forward to playing this a lot more over the next months.

Dances with Orcs

WoWScrnShot_061514_115209 While I was piddling around and streaming things, I also spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Warlords of Draenor.  I figured since I have been granted the ability to play the Alpha, I should probably be testing it.  Also in a way I am playing it in memory of River, since he was so amped about being invited to the alpha.  The game is trying super hard to be modern and relevant, but under the covers it still feels like a ten year old game.  I am still working my way through the quests which have the added benefit of building my Garrison.  Yesterday I completed a sequence of quests to unlock the Alchemy Hut and in theory the ability to run alchemy crafting missions.  I have not however gotten enough Draenor era herbs of the right kind to be able to complete this.

WoWScrnShot_061514_115151 Something I am highly enjoying is the fact that while I am out in the world, I am constantly gathering new followers for my Garrison.  Some of them are even call backs to the TBC era Draenor.  If you are like me and completed the netherwing dailies to get those mounts, you will remember the fel orc that buzzes past the tower constantly…  Mulverick!!!!  Well one of the early quests involves rescuing him from an Ogre strong hold.  When you do he agrees to join your garrison as a follower.  While I spent most of my time playing alliance, I am really hoping when that content opens up that we see similar nostalgic references.  Ultimately that is going to be the hook for people if they can manage to wield it correctly.  Nostalgia is a pain, and even as jaded as I currently am about the experience… this game can still manage to hit me in the feels occasionally.

So while streaming yesterday, some random stranger in the channel suggested that I run the first instance… and while I had nothing better to do, I figured sure… what the hell.  So I joined a group in progress that had cleared to the first boss of Bloodmaul Slag Mines and apparently lost their tank.  It got off to a bit of a rocky start as as soon as I pulled the boss I disconnected from the server.  Warlords of Draenor is very much an alpha, and as such I have had more than my fair share of issues staying connected.  However once I got back in the run went relatively smoothly from that point on with zero deaths.  I still am not sure how I feel about the current state of Deathknight Tanking.  The rotation feels off with large empty spaces where I can really do nothing at all.  I am slowly moving things around, using soul reaper a lot more and using death siphon each time it is up… and things are starting to feel a bit better.  I will continue to test and see if I can hit on the magic feel good spot for the class, but in its current state… I am considering going back to warrior tanking.

AggroChat Talks E3 2014

This week we were without Kodra and Ashgar because of various real world commitments, so once again we grabbed Dallian and Tam and talked about the various things that happened during this years E3 show.  I have to say I thought this years show was strong enough that I actually went out and bought a playstation four at least in part to what I was seeing.  We talk about so many different things that it ends up being a bit more disjuncted than normal, but overall upon listening to it and editing all morning… I think it is a pretty strong show.  You can hear our take on what is coming down the pipe gamewise.  Right now the game I am looking forward to the most is No Man’s Sky, and we talk at length about it.  I would be curious to find out what you thought of this years showing as well.

Four Job Fiesta 2014

One last quick blurb… this years Four Job Fiesta is now open!  I have officially registered by not started.  It looks like this year I will be starting as a Knight, which should be pretty simple.  If you are interested at all in Final Fantasy… or better yet are interested in making money for a great charity… you should totally sign up and play along with us.  I will likely be streaming good chunks of my gameplay.  I am pretty much forced to play this because Ashgar holds a gun to our heads and makes us sign up each year.  We love him dearly and do not want to face his wrath.  But really it is a pretty fun time, and there is a lot of community spirit going on as folks complete the game.  Here is hoping I do not get stalled and actually finish this year.

#FFV #FourJobFiesta #AggroChat #WarlordsofDraenor #Destiny