final fantasy xiv

The Ancient Library

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Land of Lost Cables

This morning I feel like the world is angry at me.  Namely we spent the last two days doing some hardcore cleaning and rearranging of both my and my wife’s offices.  This involved taking loads of stuff to good will, and even more loads of stuff out to the dumpster we rented.  However it feels like maybe the end is in sight.  The funny thing about this process is I am finding things that I did not remember existed.  Like for example… wedding pictures…  I did not remember we had a book of wedding pictures.  I realize that statement sounds weird… because everyone remembers photos at their wedding right?  Well for us… we eloped and there was a pretty limited group of people that COULD have taken photos.  I am guessing my cousin Sarah took the photos because she does not appear in any of them, but it was still kinda cool…. and god did we look young.

We also found a stack of photos from our college graduation… and apparently overall shorts were a big thing in 1998… because both my wife and my niece were wearing them.  The other awesome thing about cleaning is finding all the things I have bought and re-bought a dozen times.  Like right now I have bins labeled video, audio, usb and network…  and all of them are overflowing with cables.  I seriously should not need to get any form of a USB cable for example for life.  I have every possible connector save for maybe USB 3.  In addition I found more iPhone/iPad cables than I remember us ever having.  So as I dismantle my office today to do the final leg of this process I should have more than enough cables to hook things up however I want to in the final configuration.

The Ancient Library

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-03 20-27-25-13 Since we are expected to participate in the Four Job Fiesta every single year…  our circle of friends has developed a deep understanding of the content contained within Final Fantasy V… in part because Ashgar has such a deep understanding of said content.  So when it was leaked that Heavensward would include the Library of Ancients needless to say we were a little excited.  Thursday night I managed to get up to the appropriate level to do the dungeon, and last night after Page64-ffv-iosall of the cleaning I sat down and managed to get a guild group to run it.  I have to say I am really damned impressed with the experience and this might be my favorite dungeon yet…  which is a pretty mighty feat considering I really really love The Vault, with its Scarlet Monastery 2.0 feel.  What is best is the way that many of the mobs pop out of books just like they did in Final Fantasy V.  In fact one of the mobs that you run into over and over is good ole page 64.

As you might suspect it has the ability to cast level 5 doom… which apparently plays by the rules set forth in Final Fantasy V.  This means players who are 59 are unaffected, but those level 60 players have to get the hell out or they straight up die.  Granted we have not actually tested this, so it might just be a rumor.  Once again I streamed my run of the dungeon so that I could capture it in video form.  The absolute best part of the dungeon is of course Byblos which takes the place of the middle boss.  The best part is when you kill him he says “Soon, the seal of the master will be open.”  I love it when Final Fantasy XIV does some fan service and so accurately depicts a mob from another game in this one.  One thing I learned is that the Gale Cut attack can be completely avoided if you just move from out of front of him when he is casting it.  So far every dungeon in Heavensward has been better than the last, so I am completely amped to see what the end game dungeons are going to be like.

The Road to Sixty

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-03 18-14-48-09The library finally paid off and I started to get some warrior drops.  The set that comes from the Library is one that I am going to have to farm up because I either look like a Sherlock Holmes era inspector or a refugee from Diagon Alley.  In either case I am a fan of it, and it looks pretty adorable when I run around like this.  Tam is going to be quick to point out that this is not a plate set of armor…  and I will give him that.  It is very much not plate, but instead a cloth robe…  but it looks adorable so I am just going with it for the time being.  The only thing that I have yet to see at all this expansion is a weapon drop.  Every single dungeon seems to drop a nice weapon, but in all cases I have seen zero axes.  As a result I am struggling through on the HQ white weapons that you get through the storyline.  I figure soon enough I will be able to purchase a nice end game weapon as after last nights shenanigans I am roughly a sixth of a level away from sixty.

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-03 19-45-58-51 My hope is tonight…  in my newly arranged office… I will be able to push the rest of the way into sixty.  It seems there is a dungeon that folks are waiting to run that comes at the end of the main storyline.  I am more than happy to tank for my friends… I just have to get to max level first.  As horrible as 58 was… I have to say so far 59 has been pretty chill.  Just through pushing through the main storyline in the final area and then doing some side quests and two dungeon runs… I have been able to conquer most of this level.  Had I managed to actually do my clan hunts yesterday rather than getting pulled straight into a dungeon I might have dinged last night before logging.  In theory I could do that tonight and hit the cap… then catch up on the last bit of story that leads to the final dungeon.  My god… the story…  things happen and I want so bad to talk about them, but most of my readers I would assume are not quite there yet.

Bismarck Harpooned

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Depths of Madness

As I warned you all, I am writing this the night before I intend to post it…  at 11pm after a fairly long day of working on our little side projects.  Essentially the offices of both myself and my wife need reorganizing in the worst possible way.  Neither has really been torn apart and put back together in a very very long time.  In fact a good chunk of today was spent shedding documents…  from 2005 or so that we kept for god knows what reason.  I had forgotten just how many bills and statements used to pile up from the mail… that are now delivered electronically.  So I spent my time alternating between shredding documents until the shredder overheated…  and boxing up things I no longer needed or wanted for Goodwill.

The problem being that I feel completely overwhelmed in how much is still left to go through.  I am horrible about just boxing things up to get it out of the way… so I have several of these boxes loaded with miscellaneous stuff.  So this whole mission is part de-cluttering but even more important a sifting of things back into logical bins.  At the same time I am trying to make my computer space more friendly, and have a better option for hooking up my console systems and still being able to capture footage from them through my computer.  Another thing I am trying to do is to give myself a workspace where I can fiddle with computers or more importantly assemble the mountain of Lego sets I have.  Then I am trying to free up some additional room to have places to display said Legos when I finally get them together.  Needless to say the next few days are going to be busy.

Bismarck Harpooned

ffxiv_07022015_200623 If you have ready this blog for any period of time, you will know that I am pretty much willing to get drug into anything if a guild member needs it.  There are some exceptions that I avoid like the plague…  I am looking at you Aurum Vale.  However if the need is great enough I can always get my arm twisted enough to run whatever it is.  Bismarck on the other hand is an encounter that I truly enjoy, so the moment someone mentions that I almost jump at the chance to run it.  What makes Bismarck so interesting is the fact that it is a vastly different style of primal fight.  While you are ultimately in a fight against the giant flying whale, you are having to deal with a lot of different elements rather than fighting it directly.  The goal is to fire two giant harpoons into the whale that allow you to wench it to the side of the island you are standing on.  From there you can dps down its weak spot.  To make things more interesting you have to deal with all sorts of weather effects, different sorts of adds, and the whale itself slamming into the platform periodically.

The funny thing about pugging a Primal encounter is that you never fully understand the mechanics at work unless someone actually takes the time to explain them.  One of the mechanics that we did not grasp completely was what exactly to do with the water globules during phase three.  It took us three attempts to get through Bismarck because we were essentially having to figure out what exactly to do with them.  The first time we killed the adds and died to lightning damage, the second time we left the water globs up… and then took a massive  burst of damage when they exploded.  The real mechanic is a bit more subtle.  If there is story weather happening, you leave the water globs up to soak the lightning damage which will ultimately kill them.  If the skies are clear however… you kill the adds before they explode.  Once we grasped this more clearly we wrecked this primal.  I have a pretty nice video of our kill above that I edited out of my stream.

Finally Fifty Nine

ffxiv_06302015_202857 The bulk of my evening was spent wandering around trying to find ways of getting experience.  After having pretty good luck with Clan Hunts Wednesday night, I started off my evening getting a new set and working through those.  It seems like they provide about an eighth of a level upon completing the first two tiers, which is nothing to sneeze at.  After finishing these off I went back out to the Hinterlands to do quests for the crazy goblins within.  These quests involve more than your normal amount of running around as you help them build their new perfect society.  I managed to just have enough quests to push on through to 59 without any further dungeons or fate running.  Now I am in the final stretch to 60, and I have heard it goes considerably faster.  I also just unlocked the next dungeon, and I have been looking forward to running it since I first heard about it.  Hopefully tomorrow before or after the podcast I will be able to pull together a group and run it.  In the mean time however… I need to head to bed because we have to get up early tomorrow to deal with more cleaning.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

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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

ffxiv_07012015_195121 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.

Hell Levels

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Playing with Forge

Last night I spent a good chunk of time playing with Forge.gg and in doing so I forgot the problem from before… that it ultimately broadcast all of the audio from teamspeak.  However I did manage to pull a few nifty clips from one of the dungeon runs.  The problem being I have no clue how exactly to embed them in a site.  There are a bunch of features that I would love to see added to forge, namely the ability to easily get an embeddable snippet.  Similarly I would love to see a feature like Twitch and Hitbox have to export the video to youtube.  The big take away from last night is that I need to sort out how to extract teamspeak audio from my stream.  This has been on my ToDo list for some time but I have yet to actually sit down and do anything about it.  Which is somewhat unfortunate since I have several different tools installed right now that can essentially do the same thing.  I started working through a tutorial for something called Breakaway Audio this morning, but have been running into issues…  namely Teamspeak doesn’t seem to recognize the channel I set up for it.

Ultimately it would be awesome to solve this issue because I think I would end up streaming quite a bit more.  The big thing for me is that I have to choose between being sociable with my friends on teamspeak…  or streaming what I am doing.  However if I solve this issue… in truth I am probably not going to mess with Forge that much, and simply just use Twitch.  The always on functionality is cool…  but I have to disable FRAPs to make it work which takes away my primary means for collecting screenshots from games.  Generally speaking I disable whatever screenshot functionality exists in a game, and then use FRAPs to collect the screenshots in a generic “gameshots” folks, giving me a quick place to look for something I want each morning when I work on my blog post.  To get Forge to work however I have to completely exit out of this software and it did not seem to work with DxTory either which has always been my fallback general screenshoting software.  I still feel like maybe Forge isn’t a great fit for me, but I see a lot of people using it and enjoying it.

Hell Levels

ffxiv_06302015_202922 Once upon a time in Everquest there was the concept of a “Hell Level” meaning that there were certain levels that were far more difficult to get than others.  While back then these were literal mathematical break points where the experience needed was greater than the previous levels or the levels after.  However this term has continued on into MMORPGs as a frustrating patch in the leveling curve.  Right now it feels like 58 is a Hell Level because I very quickly hit another level wall, and really did not have much in the way of experience between it and the last one.  So I am currently running around in the Dravianian Hinterlands doing quests, in an attempt to make up the difference.  The problem being at this point I have yet to even reach the halfway point through level 58.  I am pretty sure that the folks that are sixty in the guild have simply chain run dungeons.

I could do that, but in truth I would rather just wait until people in the guild actually need runs.  Like last night I helped a guildie through The Vault, which is where all the forge.gg clips came from.  There is just something more satisfying for me to be tanking for friends.  I ultimately have this protective nature when it comes to my friends and family, and this makes tanking feel more “real” I guess for lack of a better word.  The community in Final Fantasy XIV is awesome, and I have seen nothing bad to speak of with the influx of people for Heavensward.  I absolutely could queue for dungeons and be just fine, because at this point I know the fights well enough to be able to explain them to anyone.  The problem being when I am tanking for strangers,  I feel like I have to put on the mask of “super tank” and be bigger and better in everything I do.  I feel like I am on stage in a way, but with my friends I can just chill and I don’t stress quite so much when aggro twitches or I am slow to turn the mobs.  I know no matter what I do in the dungeon they are still going to love me when the dungeon is finished.

Viva La Fake Friday

Today is my “Friday” for this week!  This is because here in the United States most of us are getting off Friday for the Independence Day holiday.  I opted to also take Thursday because we have things we are going to be doing over the break.  For whatever reason my family growing up always did some project over the fourth, and recently I started talking about wanting to rearrange my office to be a better set up for gaming and streaming.  My wife jumped on this and said we could do a lot of the little things we had been wanting to do over the extended break.  This escalated quickly and now we are having a small dumpster delivered in our front yard on Friday.  As a result I am going to be flipping a lot of my posting, meaning I will be writing posts each night and working on stuff around the house during the days.  The first of these is likely to begin tonight, but to you the reader… it will appear just like any morning post.

I always feel the need to be honest with my readers about my schedule, because I guess to me staging content ahead of time…  feels like it breaks the nature of my whole experiment.  The original idea was that I would post something every morning without fail, and for the most part I have done this.  Just sometimes the writing actually occurs the night before.  I hope I survive the next few days because the whirlwind of change is about to suck me in.  My hope is that when I exit on the other side I will have a much better space to do my PC gaming in, and if I can also sort out my audio issues…  my hope is to also begin streaming a hell of a lot more.  The next few days however might be a lot less talk of gaming… and a lot more talk of my failings at doing home improvement stuff.

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