ffxiv Archives - Page 28 of 78 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Northern Thanalan Problem

July 12, 2015 by Belghast

Button Mash Bard

Last night during the podcast I piddled around in Final Fantasy XIV as I often do. The fact that I had to edit a section of the podcast out because of my rapid fire keyboard mashing… means I was piddling around on my bard. Of all of my classes… this is the one that I seem to give the least shits about actually playing correctly. I will leave good barding up to Shiana, Warenwolf and Thalen… me I just mash buttons and pray. One of the problems is that I have all of these characters currently sitting at level 50 that I got to cap last expansion. The bard, the white mage and the paladin among them. The problem being right now without quest support there is no real handy way to get to level 51, which is the level you need to be to hit the first dungeon. On my dragoon I have been pretty much living in dungeons, and as a result I have managed to make a significant push in level, as he is roughly half way to 55.

So last night I struggled to figure out just how to get my bard over the hump, so I could start doing the same with him. I wandered around a bit in Western Coethas only to remember that even with the armory bonus… FATEs in Heavensward are still pretty terrible. Then Ashgar mentioned that I should do what I did at 49… and just go to Northern Thanalan. So I zoned into that area and it took longer to load than either Ishgard, Mor Dhona or Idyllshire. It turns out that pretty much everyone is living in this zone, and I guess it makes sense. On average FATEs in Western Coerthas rewarded my bard 28,000 experience. On average FATEs in Northern Thanalan rewarded around 21,000 experience… and the zone is about a fourth of the size of Western Coerthas… and has just as many FATEs. This means that there is a constant train of pink marks showing up all over your map.

Northern Thanalan Problem

On the live letter this week they mentioned that they would be tweaking FATEs to make them a better value proposition for players, and I think this is a bit of an understatement in the level of the issue that is happening. One of the interesting things about the internet and mmos is that players will figure out the shortest route to solving a problem and abuse the hell out of it. Quickly players realized that they could simply level faster by living in Northern Thanalan… and that is quite literally what is happening. I would estimate last night during the podcast there were somewhere close to 200 players in zone fighting over the FATEs that spawned, and in a crazy game of whack-a-mole as soon as one dropped the next one would be up and the rush would begin across zone to get the first hits in on it. We experienced these same problems at release with the abuse of a very specific FATE in Northern Thanalan called “Dark Devices” and it seems like once again this zone is the king of the fast leveling curve.

The problem with this is that it makes the game boring. You stand in zone and hang out there until you are 60… and quite literally players are doing this on their alternate classes, riding this elevator to the top floor and then getting off just in time to gear for Alexander. The end result is that we are starting to see level 60 players who have not done a single class quest and as a result have NONE of their new class abilities. Time doing class quests is time taken away from the “super efficient” level mill of Northern Thanalan. Here in lies problem two… this zone is a fun zone to run FATEs in… and absolutely worth while for players post 45 when Central Coerthas starts to slow down. My biggest fear is that we are going to see a bit of an overcorrection that leads to Square nerfing the FATEs in this zone once again to try and prod players to leave it. What I want to see instead is that they incentivize the content in the new areas… to make it worth spending time there and doing the FATEs.

More Carrot to the Stick

Those first days after launch, the FATEs were getting run and every single major boss fate was dropping all sorts of awesome items. Then players realized, or at least Reddit realized that mathematically the FATE grinding experience was shit. I want to see players in the zones doing the content the zones have to offer. We long speculated that they purposefully under-incentivized the FATEs to get players to actually do quest content, because at the launch of A Realm Reborn… it was absolutely a problem with players completely ignoring quests until they hit the level cap. The issue here is that dungeons are gated through the storyline… and without players entering the dungeon system… the queues got more than a little out of whack. So I guess I support the notion of nerfing FATEs temporarily… but at this point something needs to be done to derail the Northern Thanalan train once again. I don’t think we can probably afford to wait until 3.1, so I am hoping that we see a minor patch that introduces a series of tweaks that right this ships course.

In the meantime I am guessing I will start running Levequests to get over that 50 to 51 hump, because after the madness of last night… I really did not find the Northern Thanalan experience enjoyable. I had way too many flashbacks of the way the dark devices grind felt. I absolutely rode that up on my Bard and then never touched it on another character again. The game has some really awesome FATEs in the new areas that each tell a story… some of which we ended up talking about last night. I want Square to find a way to add enough carrot to their stick, in order to convince players that staying in the zone they are currently in and running FATEs is a valuable option. Mostly I want to be able to knock out all of the different zone boss fates because there are interesting things sitting on their loot table if you manage to get to gold contribution. Two weeks into the expansion though I am still loving it in spite of all the minor problems we have complained about. We talked about this last night in the podcast, that it seems like we complain a lot… but it is more a case of us wanting them to iron out the rest of the wrinkles… because the game is really damned polished already.

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.

The Gearing Game

July 8, 2015 by Belghast

False Starts

Yesterday I made an attempt to go to work, but ultimately was told to head home by my boss. Over the last few days I have been pretty much living on the couch with my leg slightly elevated and alternating icepacks on it. The problem being that I don’t exist like this in the real world, where sitting at a desk generally requires that your feet be on the ground. While I love the arrangement of my cube at work, it really does not allow for me to elevate my leg at all. Not surprisingly within an hour of being at work my knee was swelling something fierce. So I headed home and started the process of icepacks over again until it started to behave somewhat normally. The positive is however that the area that is actually swelling is rather small and contained as compared to the day the fall happened, so I guess I am recovering quickly.

The biggest problem, the one that effects this blog is the fact that my wrist has hurt an awful lot. After struggling through yesterday mornings post, I was pretty much typing one handed for most of the day. I wore a brace most of yesterday and as of this morning it is feeling much better. It is still extremely tender when I move my wrist too quickly or to any extreme of motion… but overall it is more functional. Hopefully this means I can return to normal typing instead of this frustrating one handed mess that I dealt with yesterday. Since it is also my “mouse hand” that is effected I have been surprised that really using a mouse doesn’t hurt much at all. I guess in general I am used to keeping my mouse sensitivity so high that I barely have to move my hand at all to send the cursor flying across the screen. Hopefully today will be a much better day and I will continue to mend quickly.

The Gearing Game

Like most players in Final Fantasy XIV, my life revolves around the acquisition of Tomestones of Law. To get a full set of “law” gear it takes roughly 3500 and they have given us many options on how to get them. Firstly there are three dungeons that reward 80 tomestones each, and an additional 40 if you can manage to catch someone who still has their first time bonus or “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it. In addition to that you get 100 tomestones for both a low level roulette and a high level roulette each day, and an additional 60 for a trial roulette. The one that surprises me however is that Expert Roulette is only worth 80, but I guess in theory it has a face value of 160 to 200 since you are getting stones from the dungeon proper as well. In order to get into Alexander, the raid that just opened players need to reach a combined ilevel of 170 which also happens to be the level of the tomestone gear. So in theory you need a full set in order to step through its doors.

Where you can cheat a bit is through those ubiquitous “Clan Hunts” that I have been using as filler leveling. It turns out all of the items needed to upgrade your gear from 170 to 180 come from Centurio Seals. Hopefully you have been doing these religiously because in order to get a full set of gear upgraded to the next step it is going to take a grand total of 2795 seals. Now granted you can hop on the hunt train like you could in the previous expansion and in theory grind this out in a weekend. Personally I happen to find the daily hunt mechanic rather relaxing, as I can log in… fly around the gorgeous zones and pick off the mobs one at a time. Right now I have four pieces of gear… chest, helm, ring, and weapon. Currently I have upgraded the weapon and ring to 180, and am saving enough hunt marks to upgrade the chest piece next. There will come a time when I stop messing with anything other than three star and elite hunt marks, but for the time being they also serve to help level my dragoon for the lower level ones.

Dragoon Dungeoning

Right now if there is a moment when I am not engaged doing something else, or tanking something that can gain me law stones… I am pretty much in the dungeon queue on my Dragoon. Right now the dps queue seems relatively manageable sitting around the 10 minute mark for “leveling” dungeons. As a result it is my hope to ride this queue for as many classes as I can manage. After running a couple of max level dungeons, I settled into a couple of quick runs on the dragoon who is now up to “Sohm Al” level. I have to say I find this pretty relaxing as well, because I can just sit back and poke things with a stick. I opted to go ahead and record my dungeon run to add it to the stack of dungeon videos I have on my youtube channel. I had not actually recorded any when I was not currently tanking, so it gives a slightly different perspective of the fights. I have to say I am really digging the “tribal” look that comes from Sohm Al. That helmet is freaking amazing, and is likely going to go in my glamour bin for future usage. At this point I am roughly halfway through 53 so I figure it will take two more dungeon runs to hit 54, and then five to six past that before I can do the next dungeon at 55. Embedding the video and cutting this post short today without a second paragraph.

Nael in the Coffin

July 7, 2015 by Belghast

Strange Dreams

For the last few nights I have had the strangest but at the same time most vivid dreams. The problem is that they are for the most part utter nonsense. For example this morning I woke up from a dream involving writer Beau Hindman. He had reached out to me to ask if I had any gmail invites… and for those of you for whom that makes zero sense… Google mail was once upon a time invite only and invites were rationed and carefully guarded. I told him that I had a couple that I could hand out, and he asked me to send one to someone. Turns out the person in question was an old man that lived in the small town my wife grew up in. Apparently Beau really needed to get ahold of this person… and apparently using the phone was just too cumbersome? Trust me… I fully understand a lack of wanting to call someone… so I too would probably go through strange lengths to avoid it.

When the guy didn’t accept the invite, I had to drive up to the small town and talk to him in person. He was afraid that the internet would steal his soul, and by having an email account he would be supporting the terrorists or something. So I spent the next hour talking him into accepting the invite, all so Beau would be able to contact him. Sure it is madness, and honestly Beau and I are not even in contact that often, but somewhere in my brain it made all of this make sense. That is the crazy thing about dreaming… is at the time none of this seems as irrational as it does when you are trying to break it apart later. I guess Beau got pulled in because I know that he is originally from Oklahoma, and my wife often gets a staring role in my dreams… so it is strange the way the mind weaves this seemingly plausible tapestry out of bits and pieces of leftover memories.

Nael in the Coffin

Monday nights is traditionally our Final Fantasy XIV raid group night, and last night was no exception. For months… literally… we have been working on learning the dance on Turn Nine of the Coil of Bahamut. For a long time now we have been super close to pushing over the edge, and held up on the madness that is the dive bomb phase. Last night we wanted to defeat Nael by any means necessary so we could move on with our lives. Not sure if it was true for all of our group, but I have developed a love and hate relationship with this fight, and was more than ready to put it behind me. One of the features added with Heavensward is the ability to queue for something as an undersized group. What this does in theory is zone you into a place without scaling your level down to the appropriate place. What this means in practice is that you can now wreck certain zones for the purpose of collecting those dungeon drops you missed in the past. Since several of us were sitting at level 60, we decided to give this option a shot on turn nine and see what would happen.

The truth is the very first attempt out of the gate we straight wiped to mechanics and over confidence. After that it still took us a few tries to get the dance close enough to being correct to be able to finish off the encounter. The funny thing is… that even with 20% echo and 10 more levels… the fight can still straight up eviscerate you. I think we managed to down it on our fourth attempt last night, and can now move on with our lives into Final Coil. On one level it bums me out that we didn’t “do it for real” by facing this encounter at level 50. On the other hand however I am happy to be done with being in there. There comes a time when you just get sick of seeing the same encounter over and over, and I remember our group reached that same place back in WoW’s Blackwing Lair with the Firemaw encounter. It is going to be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring us as far as content goes. Today is the official launch of Alexander, but as it stands right now… none of us are even vaguely closed to “geared enough” to tackle it.

Ice Packs and Grinding

Yesterday I stayed home from work because I was struggling to walk around. So my key focus in life became making sure I was ice packing every hour or so for maximum effect. This meant that most of the day I spent it hanging out on the couch with my leg propped up a bit. It also means I spent a lot of time piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV. Throughout the day I worked on getting all of my Clan Hunts for maximum upgrade token goodness, and did all three of my bonus law roulettes, which left a lot of time to work on my Dragoon. Now previously I had managed to get it to level 51, which is key because that unlocks access to the dungeon Dusk Vigil. So yesterday I spent the majority of my in game time queueing for Dusk Vigil over and over. Before raid time last night I was but a sliver away from 53, which should grant me access to the second dungeon… Sohm Al. The only problem with Dusk Vigil is that technically nothing in it other than the jewelry are strictly upgrades from what I had been wearing.

Sohm Al on the other hand… everything in there should be full of upgradey goodness other than maybe the weapon. The other good thing about running all these dungeons is that I am able to soak up gear for my alt jobs for when I finally get around to leveling them. I like that pretty much every dungeon in Heavensward offers an item set, which is unlike the old world where only every so often did a dungeon actually drop something cool looking. I really want to finish the Dragoon set from Dusk Vigil because it looks kinda amazing. It is a blue set of armor that looks just like the one that Lucia is wearing in the cut scenes. In the news of me… well I am largely functioning better thanks to the constant ice packs. At this point the swelling is down significantly and I am hoping I can function today without a lot of pain. I am sure come this evening I will need to ice pack once more but for the time being… life seems to be grand, or at least getting there.