final fantasy Archives - Page 9 of 21 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Heavensward Hype

March 8, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion. Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page. Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December. The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show. However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets. The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main… I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well. Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon… you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing. As the above image shows it was well worth the wait. My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had. I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear. As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am. I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least the current set is something I would happily wear. This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of. If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action. I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward. Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra. If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client. On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in. Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout. All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th… so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it. However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch. I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really… the first expansion is a crucial time for any game. I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content. That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways. I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions. Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content. In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull… even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches. So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting… because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.

Hunting Bookrocks

November 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Freeze

Last night was another prime example of the odd weather patterns here in Oklahoma. When I got home from work it had managed to heat up enough to kick on our air conditioning. Then over the course of one of the worst wind storms I can recall, that pretty much wrecked the gate to our backyard… it dropped from a balmy 80 degrees to 33 degrees and still really windy this morning. Being veterans day, and being that I am off work today… I had planned on having the Heating and Air guy out today to do our yearly “winter” inspection. I am guessing that I picked the perfect day because tonight it is supposed to plummet even colder. I realize that all of you northerners are thinking that the temperatures I am describing is nothing… but for someone raised to live in 70 degree to 115 degree climate this is pretty cold.

The problem with the heating and air folks coming out is the fact that my office was a mess. I have a bad habit of just tossing empty boxes in the corner and over the course of a year the pile of boxes had gotten pretty epic. It made me realize just how much stuff we order from Amazon. While we do not have curbside recycling here, we do however have these little bins called “Mr Murf” that I can take the cardboard to. So I have loaded the back of my jeep with the various assorted boxes, condensing them as best I could. In addition I went out into the backyard and unhooked the hose from the house in preparation for a hard freeze. The last step was to gather up all the trash and put the bin out next to the curb, feed the cats, feed myself and sit down to blog. All in all I have had a damned productive day and it is only 7:30 in the morning.

Hunting Bookrocks

I rushed around so much this morning so that, one it would actually get done, and two I could spend the rest of my day leisurely farming for bookrocks in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I finished the night last night I managed to cap my Tomestones of Poetics, and similarly I am close to another piece of armor with my Tomestones of Soldiery. Generally speaking running content on reset day yields some of the best results, so I will more than likely be hitting a mixture of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and Expert Roulette in an attempt to get the precious precious bookrocks. At this point I really want to get my pants drop out of Syrcus Tower so I can stop running it as a dragoon. Ultimately I would rather be running it as a class that has a higher likelihood of getting drops like my Bard. However given my past luck with MMOs, I know the moment I take anything other than the class that can roll “need” on them… they will start dropping every single time.

In The Burning Crusade I raided Karazhan every single Sunday for over a year. During this time tanking it, I managed to get Attumen’s mount, but never managed to get the tanking necklace that eluded me. After a years time I got tired of dragging a character in there that only needed a single item, so I started healing it on my paladin… letting another up and coming tank take my space. The first time I was in there as a Paladin… the tanking neck dropped. That has always been the case for me… I have exceptional luck early on and then there are one or two items that will not drop no matter how many times I attempt to get them. Then there are super rare items that everyone seems to be able to get but just end up taunting me. I am looking at you Headless Horseman mount. When I was farming that regularly, almost every time someone in my instance would get their mount… but I would not. I guess it could be worse… I could be Rylacus or Tamrielo… who simply don’t get drops at all.

Rapidly Backpedaling

I am still completely up in the air as to whether or not I will be playing Warlords of Draenor come Thursday. Had you asked me two weeks ago I would have said an absolute and resounding “Nope”. Then Blizzcon happened… and the extreme heartstring tugging of the Looking for Group documentary. That thing crit me straight to the feels for 9999… yeah I am still thinking in Final Fantasy numbers here. Unfortunately I felt things that I have not felt stirring in me about World of Warcraft since probably I last set foot on Draenor or at the very least last set foot in Northrend. This started an unraveling of my resolve against playing World of Warcraft. Basically there are two important pieces of data. The first being that my subscription does not officially run out for another 19 days. The second being that thanks to them opening preorders what seems like a year before the expansion actually launched… I’ve already pre-purchased the game and used my boost to 90 to push up my Night Elf Mage.

So there you have it… I have both access to my account to play, and the expansion already sitting there waiting on me. The problem is my problems with the expansion are still there. There is an excellent video from Qelric condensing her views about the Death Knight class in the expansion, and while I have never been able to be that concise she sums it up nicely. All that I have been able to say… is that they just felt wrong somehow. Like I never could quantify exactly what that meant. All of that said… if I do end up coming back I will more than likely do so on Belghast my warrior, with a return to protection tanking. I managed to get into Belghast a little bit right before I quit playing before the launch of Elder Scrolls Online and was having a reasonably good time with it. The protection changes seem to be mostly good, and the feel is solid. I would be kinda nice to set foot in Draenor on the character that came into its own during the Burning Crusade expansion. BC was the era where I transitioned from Hunter main to Warrior Tank main, so there is a whole bundle of nostalgia wrapped up in that setting.

The one thing I know for certain… I will never be leading the World of Warcraft House Stalwart again. When I came back last year, I fought hard to try and mend the rift that had built up in the guild in my absence. I tried desperately to get the two factions to talk to one another, but no amount of me acting as a bridge between… managed to actually help. This broke my resolve, and eventually the problem child in the equation left… and things apparently have been rather blissful in his absence. World of Warcraft is not a game I can play seriously any more. I tried to go back to raiding regularly with this last expansion and it just did not fit with the way I want to play the game. So long as I was a damned dirty casual I seemed to be enjoying myself, but the moment people started relying on me for anything… I was back in the position that I fought so hard to escape the first time. If I do play again, it would be as a secondary game the same way that I continue to play Rift. It is time for the Warcraft branch of House Stalwart to have a true leader, not just a figurehead that long ago stopped loving that position.

Given that it is Veterans Day here in the United States, I thought it fitting to show my thankfulness for the service of our men and women in the armed forces. This actually means quite a bit to me, because while I have never served in the Military myself… both of my grandfathers did. We lose sight on just how hardcore World War 2 must have been. The Grandfather on my fathers side was wounded during the D-Day invasion, and had a machine gun emplacement shoot down his back as he was trying to duck into a foxhole. Had he not happened to quite literally fall on a medic, he would have died as the machine gun and sliced through his lung and it was collapsing. They bandaged him up just enough to send him back out into battle, where he eventually participated in the Battle of the Bulge. During that leg of the campaign it was so cold that he lost half of his toes to frostbite.

My Grandfather on my Mother’s side was in the Tunisian front and captured during the Battle of Kasserine Pass, and spent time in a prison camp. Eventually he joined in with others and staged and escape managing to eventually get back to Allied lines. While on the run he was aided by various farming families in the Italian countryside. My wife’s step father on the other hand was a veteran of the Korean Conflict. He was a member of the Chosin Few, a group of service men trapped on a peninsula in the Chosin Reservoir that held off Chinese forces. The thing that I found the most interesting is that all three men were completely stoic about their service. Not a single one of them wanted any recognition for what they had done for our country. In fact none of them really wanted to talk about it at all. It was only later in life that each was willing to give us little tidbits of information regarding what all they had been through. I quite literally cannot imagine what they had to go through to survive, and I am thankful that I will never have to know. So on this Veterans Day I am thankful for all of the men and women who have served our country so that I can have the life of safety and personal freedoms that I lead.

#FFXIV #WoW

Holiday Countdown

November 10, 2014 by Belghast

Gone Viral

Yesterday did not go as planned in any sense of the word. Well to be honest the morning went pretty smoothly and I had a rather relaxing go at piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV while doing laundry. However that all changed mid afternoon as we started battling a virus infection on my wife’s laptop. The night before she had some weirdness going on with several DllHost.exe in memory consuming lots of system resources. She rebooted and it seemed to go away at least temporarily. However yesterday morning the virus scanner picked something up and deleted it… which seemed to only cause things to escalate from there. She started getting errors in Powershell which to the best of my knowledge we never actually installed on her system.

It seems as though a new strain of something called Trojan.Poweliks had gone out into the wild on the 8th and she had the bad luck to hit the wrong site and the wrong time and contract it. For a bit we thought maybe it had been stopped, as the virus scanner found several items and correctly identified them as Poweliks. Strange thing is that this only seemed to piss off the system, as constantly more things were popping up with the same infection. Finally around 10pm we decided to just wipe the system taking the “nuke it from orbit” approach. So that is precisely what I did after watching Walking Dead. At least this solves one problem… as that laptop had a 32bit version of Windows 7 on it… which prevented us from giving her some more ram. Problem solved.

Dragoon Legs

Since the 2.4 patch release I have been on an insatiable quest to finish out the level 100 Dragoon set from Syrcus Tower. Sure I could get better items from the soldiery vendor, but at this point it is a matter of principle. I have gathered up every item but one, the legs that drop from Amon the next to last boss. At this point I can run Syrcus Tower in my sleep, as I have quite literally been in there three to five times a night. I have seen the legs drop exactly three times… each of those times I had the misfortune of being in the same dungeon with another dragoon. Each time I lost, one of them by a single point on the roll. Essentially these legs have become the bane of my existence… but I am not giving up, not by a long shot. I know that the moment I switch classes and start running Syrcus as my bard… the legs will drop on the very first time and go uncontested to another Dragoon.

One of the interesting options you have as part of the Duty Roulette is that you can check the “join party in progress” check box… meaning in theory you could get dumped into a partially cleared instance. I actually managed to luck out twice with this… the second time they were on Zande the final boss in the raid. Now when you join it dumps you at the beginning of the instance and you have to take a teleporter that brings you relatively close to the boss that the group is working on. Apparently they pulled before I could get there so the above picture is me dancing the Manderville as the final meteor plummets towards the party. The funny thing is that I still got to roll on all of the items that dropped even though I got locked out of the encounter. While I didn’t win anything… this was the easiest 15 poetics and 20 soldiery I have ever earned.

Holiday Countdown

xmascountdown

It feels like this has been the year of gaming blogosphere events. The first was the always awesome Newbie Blogger Initiative, then I had my own super successful Blaugust, and Izlain just wrapped up Bragtoberfest, and now the ever amazing MMO Gypsy is wanting to create a virtual advent calendar. It seems there is tradition in her area of the world of the “Advent Window” where each member of a town or village decorates their home to represent a day of the advent season, the days leading up to Christmas Day. In a way we are a virtual village, with our blogs representing our homes and the town being made up of the gaming blogosphere as a whole. The idea that she talks about in her blog is that for each of us to create a post on an assigned day highlighting all of the positive things about the gaming community.

If you have a blog and are interested in participating, you can sign up by either leaving a comment in the post announcing it, or dropping Syl a line on twitter. I have been informed that since I helped with the logo, that I had no choice but to participate. Of course I would have signed up anyways, but I will just let Syl think she has some serious pull to order me around like that. I think it is going to be a really interesting event, and hopefully we can come up with some way of visualizing the days of the month to carry out the window on the world feel. All of the specifics about the topic, title, how you get your day assigned can be found in the original post. We have had so much negativity this year in the broader gaming community, and as such it is up to us the gaming bloggers to show that there are still positive voices in our world.

Gaming Blogosphere

While it was not my original intent, I am ending up making thankfulness posts that ultimately relate to the topic I just posted. Similarly this morning I am extremely thankful to be a member of the Gaming Blogosphere. That term in itself is a fairly ephemeral thing, because it means so many different things to so many different people. Ultimately it was the Blog Azeroth folks that gave me the spark to start Aggronaut.com so many years ago. Like so many Tales of the Aggronaut started as a single focus blog, with my intent being focused on World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking. However this shifted focus to being a general tanking blog, with some raid leadership topics… and then ultimately abandoning being World of Warcraft focused at all. At each step of my journey I have had supportive voices cheering me on from the community, and were it not for them I likely would have fallen completely into obscurity.

For a long time it felt as though we didn’t have a very strong sense of community out here in the “not entirely devoted to World of Warcraft” blog space. However the events I talked about in this post have helped to create a much more cohesive sense of community. This combined with the fact that this year we launched The Gaming and Entertainment Network has given me a deeper sense of belonging to something larger than just myself. I am deeply thankful for the other bloggers that I interact with on a near daily basis, and thankful that they have for some reason accepted me into their good graces. You have been a supportive voice when I desperately needed one, and I am so thankful to have all of you.

Littlest Odin

November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 by Belghast

Flirting with Viral

Last night when I got home I had a message waiting on me, wanting to know if I had talked to a certain blogger. At which point I gave my perspective, that I thought they were trying to keep a fairly low profile lately. This started the gears in my head working, thinking about the fine line each of us walks each day when we post. I admit that I live in a small amount of fear of one of my posts ending up going viral for some reason. I mean ultimately as a blogger you want readers, but there is a limit to that. Right now I have a dedicated group of a couple hundred regular readers and this feels comfortable. It feels like I group I could reasonably have a conversation with, and remember the names and faces of each of them. I write some fairly personal posts, and this feels like a small enough community to share that sort of intimate details with.

The problem is there have been a few of my posts that have for one reason or another gotten picked up in a much larger sphere of influence. When this happens I find the whole experience stressful. While it is cool to suddenly see your readership spike, at the same time personally I feel almost invaded. Like this group of people that are not “my” people are trampling my lawn and ruining the flower beds. The group of readers that I have now feels organic, and they have one by one found my blog for their own personal reasons. Having a huge influx of people brings with it wholly different ideas of what community means, and what proper interaction between a blogger and reader is. There were a few posts of mine that got picked up by WoW Insider back when this was for the most part a WoW blog… and it was as though the Mongol Horde was knocking on my front door step.

It is awesome to feel like your blog is a popular thing… but at the same time I think most of us live in fear of our side project getting too big. That someday something will happen to cause it to grow out of control and develop a life of its own, rather than this thing that we have fought hard to develop in just a certain way. With the recent strife in the gaming community, I admit I have been more afraid of my blog suddenly being found by the “unwashed masses”. I am still uncertain if I was the target of a DDoS a few weeks back, because it seemed like only my sites on the provider were actually effected. We live in this climate where having a differing opinion to that of the riot mob has serious consequences, and that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies. Still however i put myself out here every morning, hoping that the right people will see this… and the wrong people will get bored before finishing the first paragraph of one of my posts.

Littlest Odin

A few nights ago I happened to be paying attention to chat at exactly the right moment, when through one of my many social Linkshells I saw a call that Odin had spawned in South Shroud. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Odin is one of the coolest primal forces to have existed in the Final Fantasy universe. In each incarnation there is generally the mechanic that if you take too long in attempting to defeat him he will cast Zantetsuken and destroy the entire party in a single attack. Zantetsuken of course is the name of his sword which apparently roughly translates to “Sword of Vengence”. The Final Fantasy XIV incarnation is just as painful, and involves him casting massive area of effect abilities that are extremely hard to get out of, and in some cases can in fact one-shot the player. When Odin spawns it is as part of a fate, and players fight desperately in this chaotic mess to generate enough threat to qualify for Gold level participation.

If you participate at all in the fight you get an item called Odin’s Mantle, and if you manage to get gold you end up getting five of them at once. Once you have collected five, either through getting Gold once or something else multiple times you can take them to Revenants Toll in Mor Dhona and trade them for some interesting stuff. The king prize at least as far as I am concerned is Zantetsuken itself, which while no longer that good of a weapon is still an amazing item for the purpose of glamouring onto other items. Another really popular item is Slepnir’s barding, that makes your Chocobo look like Odin’s mount Slepnir. However since I actually picked up Slepnir itself from the cash shop, that was no longer a big deal to me. So this time around I picked up Hjalmr aka Odin’s trademark helm. In honor of the new look I dyed my Soldiery chest black to blend things together a bit better.

When the Dark Knight becomes a reality, I am really hoping that they release a two handed version of Zantetsuken that I can then glamour onto my weapon. Even though I am wielding an axe, I still think I make a pretty badass tiny Odin. The funny thing a bout this is that Odin actually spawns as the race of the person that landed the last killing blow. So when I fought him the other night in South Shroud, he had actually spawned in Lalafell form. Nothing says awesome like a tiny bundle of death oneshotting players left and right. Both Odin and Behemoth are really cool experiences, and while I hate that I am constantly missing them… there is something about the extremely slow respawn timers that gives them a sense of mystique. I am not sure what the actual timer is, but at least as a player it seems to be several days. In any case it is the sort of thing that I drop whatever I am doing to join in the fun… or will at least until I have gotten all of the shiny baubles that are available to win.

Dungeons with Friends

I have always liked to tank for my friends, but for whatever reason in Final Fantasy XIV I have always found the experience to be a bit stressful. I am not sure if it was just lack of confidence in my abilities, or still getting used to the subtle differences of the way tanking works in this game… but for whatever reason I have tended to prefer dpsing in dungeons and letting my friend Ash take the tanking lead. However over the course of the last few months I have been “feeling my wheaties” and with the release of brand new content I find myself actually preferring to tank. I guess this is a good thing since Ash right now is in the middle of a move and will be without internet for an undetermined amount of time. Additionally for the longest time I DPS’d in part because he had no “non-tank” jobs to play, and since I had multiple dps we could pick and choose whatever we needed the most. That however has changed as he now has a monk available, and it is allowing me to climb back into the tanking seat.

As such I have spent a lot of time lately tanking the new expert dungeons of Snowcloak, Sastasha Hard, and Qarn Hard. In fact I am starting to get requests from outside of the guild to tank for people. Last night I finally accepted one of these after turning them down for various completely legitimate reasons. I felt horrible for having to keep declining because I was generally either already spoken for by the guild, or in the process of trying to wind down enough to log out for the night. I have to say I had a blast tanking for folks that I am less familiar with, and maybe just maybe I will gather up the courage to start tanking for complete strangers as well. I am not sure what has changed but upon getting my 110 weapon threat generation seems to no longer be an issue. The encounters just stay glued to me, which allows me to have more freedom and less watching of “bejeweled” making sure someone doesn’t get eaten by a stray mob. In any case that sense of unease I had while tanking seems to be dissipating and I am enjoying myself more each time we run something.

My Readers

I would like to think that even if I had no readers at all that I would keep doing what I am doing on a daily basis. Most of the time I write my posts like I am talking to myself, but in truth it is really helpful to know that I have people listening on the other end of the line. I have always been impressed with my readers, at how thoughtful and kind they are. The moment I first knew I had a dedicated audience, was shortly after I had started my blogging each day thing. For whatever reason I did not get a chance to write my post that morning like usual, and I had intended to write it over lunch. That morning I was deluged with folks asking me if I was okay, and making sure everything was alright. They were concerned when they did not see a post waiting there for them when they did their normal crawl of blogs. I’ve always tried to respect my audience and keep my blog a mostly positive influence in their lives. Here is hoping that I can continue to do this, but please know how much it means to me that you all are dedicated to taking this journey with me.