heavensward Archives - Page 3 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Remote Play Working

August 21, 2015 by Belghast

Remote Play Continued

I am not exactly sure why but I have been obsessing over the whole concept of using my laptop downstairs as a remote thin client for my gaming machine upstairs. My grand hope has always been to be able to devote time and resources to the gaming machine, and just use any laptop in the house to play games remotely. After last night I think maybe I have it working as intended. For the last several days I have been struggling with Splashtop Personal, and in spite of lots of folks reporting good results with it… I never could get anything even vaguely close to playable. Namely the biggest problem was mouse lag, and when you are playing games that require mouse movement… this is a huge problem. I spent time crawling the forums, looking for answers and after trying a series of supposed registry hack fixes… the best I could ever seem to get out of Splashtop was something in the neighborhood of 25 fps which a more common stable 20 fps. Yesterday I installed a brand new AC1200 wireless card in my laptop, so that should literally rule out ANY connectivity issues. I was seeing 650 Mbps stable wireless and did not see any significant improvement in performance as a result. Now on the other hand… web surfing and downloading anything is now absolutely amazing… so I don’t regret the $20 spent on the new usb 3.0 wireless dongle.

Now I said I thought I had solved it… but as to this point have talked nothing about the failures. What finally worked is Steam In Home Streaming… with some hackery. Steam Streaming has worked fine for steam games, but not every game that I want to play is on steam. The biggest elephant in the room is games on Origin, but I think I found a workaround for this one. If you add Dragon Age Inquisition to Steam and attempt to launch it directly, it will fail every single time. However the workaround seems to be that you add the Origin launcher to steam and then remotely launch it… and while that window is up you can launch the game you want to play. The caveat is that you have to completely exit Origin after every game play session or it won’t actually work. As a result Splashtop Personal is coming in handy anyway as a way of making sure I do not have Origin running before heading into game. The same thing seems to work with the Battle.net launcher, and the Final Fantasy XIV launcher. Having steam open those gives you access to the application that you are actually wanting to play over the remote session. As far as performance goes, there was some strangeness with audio that I ultimately solved by setting both the client and “server” machine to 2 channel 16 bit 48000 hz audio. After that I was able to play Dragon Age Inquisition remotely with the exact same frame rate I was seeing sitting at my machine upstairs. I am guessing the new wireless made all the difference in the world because I could feel zero lag input, and it made for a pretty amazing experience. As a final thought if you want to play a steam game that does not have a launcher of its own… I have heard having steam open notepad.exe works the same.

The Heavensward Episode

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the upcoming episode of AggroChat that we will be recording Saturday night and releasing Sunday morning. After all of us had completed the 2.55 content, we recorded a full spoiler episode where we hashed out out ideas about what just happened and where the game would be heading. This week we plan on doing the same thing for the 3.0 story content to date as a preparation for whenever we receive 3.1. We had put off the show in an attempt to get as many people through the 3.0 story as possible, but at this point we figure the statute of limitations is officially up for these spoilers. I am mainly writing today because we are taking input from the community. There are several ways you can send us your ideas either through the aggrochat email or the aggrochat twitter account. Of if you feel more comfortable you can leave your thoughts below. Our goal is to talk through our own ideas and the ideas that we receive on air Saturday.

There is a lot of stuff that happened between 2.55 and 3.0 and some of it had some pretty major ramifications for the games story. I’ve been extremely careful not to spoil too many details even with the screenshots that I use. That said there are things I just need to talk about. There are characters that we lost along the way, and new characters that we gained… and it is going to be good to finally be able to openly talk about all of this. The final cinematic for 3.0 sets up a brand new villain that we will likely be facing, and I have so many ideas on what that one is going to mean. Also there are less spoiler theories as well like this being the expansion of multiple element primals. If you think of Ravana, he is very clearly a mixture of Fire and Earth. Bismarck similarly is a mixture of wind and water. Would that make the next primal a mixture of Lightning and Ice? I cannot think of any existing summons from other Final Fantasy games that really fits that theme, so I am guessing they would be crafting a brand new one just for FFXIV. That only covers three primals however and I fully expect that each patch will have its own new one. So are we going to start seeing new elements, or are they going to tie directly into the new primary enemy that I mentioned above. Essentially… we have stuff to talk about and would love to have your input.

Of Bird Boyfriends

The AggroChat game club game show is also quickly sneaking up on us, and I think of all of the hosts I am the only one who has yet to touch this months title. Grace picked Hatoful Boyfriend as the game of the month title, and I have to say at first I had a small bit of trepidation about this title. If you remember Kodra has gushed about this title numerous times and even streamed a bunch of his gameplay. I watched some of it… and it seemed like pure madness. At the core this is just not a me game, largely because there is not death and destruction. That said I am actually starting to look forward to finally giving this a try, because it DOES seem like pure madness. I could use a bit of surreal insanity in my life, and some of the possible endings sound so damned bizarre that I have to see them for myself. I’ve been largely putting off starting however because I thought it might be funny to stream my first moments in the game. As such I have been trying to find a time when my streaming would not be too much of a nuisance for my wife who is going through the normal “back to school” frustrations. It seems like tonight however might be an excellent time and right now I am planning on starting my stream at roughly 6 pm CST for anyone who wants to see me attempt to date some “birbs”. I plan on playing on voice activation so you can get all of my subtle responses and not just the ones that I want coming through over push to talk. I am not sure exactly what will happen, but I have a mixture of excitement and dread at the same time.

Bahamut Is Down

August 4, 2015 by Belghast

Some Personal Stuff

I feel like it has been pretty noticeable that I have been in a bit of a funk for the last few weeks. When this happens I tend to extract myself from the world until the passes, which isn’t necessarily the smartest thing that I can do. However over the years I have done this as my coping mechanism, because I am always afraid I will snap at someone when I get moody. For a bit yesterday I was wondering if my magical happy pills were not longer working, but then my wife asked me something. Was my low as low as it has been in the past… and to be honest no. Normally the world would be crushingly oppressive, and instead I just felt sort of permanently bummed out. So I guess maybe things are working just fine, they are just filling in the valleys so that the lows are quite as low as they would have been otherwise.

Yesterday was one of the more stressful days that I have had in awhile. We had someone patch a server and due to a conflict between the Windows Update Service and MacAfee that we have seen numerous times now… it caused a process deadlock that ended up taking down production services for hours. This was stressful in so many ways, because while there was nothing I did to cause it… there was also nothing I could really do to help it either. It was another department with another manager… and another set of priorities responsible for the fault and the fix. So when I came home… I was at an extremely low point. However my wife and I went out to dinner, and then as the evening went on I started to feel better about the world. It was like peeking out of a fog to see a lovely day behind it. I guess in the grand scheme of things… if all of my low spots are like this from now on… I will count myself lucky because while it sucked, it was manageable.

Bahamut Is Down

One of the struggles in game is that I feel like I am caught between two worlds a bit. It has taken longer than I expected to get the Monday night raid group pieced together and ready to do Heavensward content. As a result we have been focusing on trying to get through the Final Coil of Bahamut, and made some significant progress. Last week we were just shy of forming a group, so going into Turn 13 last night… we were all rusty. However it feels like we got our bearings more quickly than normal and made a few adjustments. Previously I had been tanking Bahamut at the twelve o’clock position which seems the most obvious place to drag him as you are running in… and do the traditional drag the boss while running thing. Instead we swapped things up and I drug up back to the six o’clock position we entered the room at. This allowed Ashgar to pick up the adds significantly easier and also allowed the DPS to burn them down faster.

The real challenge however was like always… we suck at dive bomb phases. However in spite of the fact that you ultimately have to deal with something like five divebomb phases, they seemed to come together more smoothly than we were used to. Essentially you have to find Bahamut, and move out of the way while also moving out of the way of Twintania that comes barreling through immediately after him. I think we only made it through two or three of these phases completely clean, however we did manage to rez the few players that got pushed into a wall. I am constantly impressed at still how difficult of a fight this is. Sure this is expansion old content at this point, but I am damned happy to be able to say I have defeated Bahamut, and I have a title and a minion to show for it. Paragon to a really spiffy White Mage Cane as a result, and part of me wants to try and muster the troops to do this more often so that we can farm the really awesome weapons for folks. I have to say… the most stressed I have ever been in Final Fantasy XIV is trying to find a way to survive Ahk Mourn. On the positive side… Alexander turn 3 has caused me to get really good at timing Holmgang.

Alex Finally

Last night was a significant night because not only did it see us beating Turn 13 of Final Coil of Bahamut… but it also saw us officially starting this expansions raid content as a group. I love the Wednesday night group, and I am enjoying what is happening there… but there is something extra special about getting the Monday night group into Alexander. While Kodra, Grace and I are parts of both teams, there will always be something special about my first Final Fantasy XIV raid group. So it makes me happy that this week everyone was up to 170 and several were considerably beyond that… even though it took a little bit of cheatery to get Ash’s paladin in the zone by wearing some strength jewelry. We only really had time to do turn one of Alexander, but we came really damned close to oneshotting it. Had we not started freaking out because we thought we were coming up against the hard enrage… we absolutely would have downed it in the first try.

On the second attempt everyone felt more confident and we pushed the dps so much harder than before. The awesome thing about coming in on a Monday is that several of us were already capped on Alexander pieces for the week which meant pretty much all of the newish folks walked away with something spiffy. I look forward to coming in next Monday and clearing all four turns of Alexander, and getting everyone their freebie accessories. From there maybe some Bismarck and Ravana? It makes me happy to feel like I am making forward momentum with both teams. The only thing that frustrates me a little bit is that I feel like we should go back and do Turn 8, which is the turn that Monday night skipped to start work on Turn 9. So maybe next week I can talk people into doing that so that we finally can close the book on the Coil of Bahamut. I don’t want to sacrifice getting people through Alexander for it, but I would love to be able to say I have beaten each of the turns. All in all it was a pretty great night, not just for the raid victories but for also clearing away the fog that I have been dwelling in.

Anook Community Award

July 29, 2015 by Belghast

Prepping for Blaugust

At this point we are getting super close to the launch of Blaugust, and the sign ups keep coming on the Nook. There is still time to sign up and be ready for the start of this exciting month. Also remember there is zero penalty this year for starting late and catching up. Last year my friend Tamrielo did something absolutely insane and wrote 31 really well formed posts in a 48 hour period. While I would never suggest anyone do something like that, it is absolutely possible to start a week late and make up the missed progress. Similarly I know folks will be attending Gamescom or Pax Prime during this month, so it is absolutely a good idea to stage the content ahead of time. For the WordPress users out there I highly suggest you check out their pretty excellent mobile app (iOS, Android) that gives you access to your blog on the go, and does a decent job of letting you compose a post on the go.

I tend to be a very pro WordPress person, but blogger is perfectly acceptible as well and while I have never used it there seems to be a mobile blogger client also (iOS, Android). The primary reason why I tend to suggest WordPress is just that there is a path between WordPress.com free hosted service, and moving to a WordPress.org installation on your own custom hosting. There are a number of guides out there to help this process along. What I like so much about this is the fact that it lets someone get their feet wet and decide if this blogging thing is for them… before plunking down the money it takes to rent space on a web host and purchase a domain. There are lots of people that never make the jump between COM to ORG, but it is nice that there is always that option if you want to do something with your blog that is not supported through the official channels. There are also guides for going from Blogger to WordPress, but they tend to be far less straight forward.

Anook Community Award

Last night something really cool happened, namely that Lonrem the tirelessly working community manager of Anook.com posted an excellent “best practices” document on the Blaugust Nook. If the document were not enough in helping people get the most out of their Anook experience… he also slipped a tidbit of information in down at the bottom. For a few weeks now we had been talking about Anook wanting to sponsor some sort of award. It was finally decided that the best way to have an Anook reward is to have the users of the website vote on their favorite posts. Here are the basics of this award posted straight from his document.

I’ll also announce here that Anook is going to support Blaugust with a special prize! I’m going to tally up the Hearts that each blog post gets for each blogger (Blaugger?) and award the top blog with a game code. I’m going to see if I can round up other prizes from some of our friends and partners as well, no promises there! This does give a bit of an incentive to post regularly, start on the first of August, but also to share the link to your blog on Anook! If you’ve got any questions, let me know!

This is really awesome to have our first “real” sponsor… because my pocket didn’t really count. Last year when I started this, I decided to host the challenge off of Anook because it is a network that I love. Lonrem singlehandedly won me over with his devotion, and the features basically keep me from ever having to build yet another custom SMF forum for anything. So I fly the Anook banner on my stream and mention it on every AggroChat just because I love the site. I am humbled that the site is returning some of that love and helping us get this challenge started in a bigger and better way this year. I’ve had an idea through this contest of creating a games of the week where I suggest a handful of free to play games that folks play, and then write about their experience to help get those creative juices flowing. While I might have been dreading the loss of my free time that Blaugust means… I am absolutely getting pumped about how much more “real” this whole thing feels for 2015.

Surprise Alex

It is not uncommon for me to log in to Final Fantasy XIV in the evening and hear the all too familiar chime of a group invite before the game has completely loaded. My guildies are used to ninjaing me into tanking all manner of things, and I assumed that it was yet another case of “daily expert”. So I accepted the invite without thinking much about it, and found myself shocked when I saw the Alexander loading screen. To make matters worse the ninja alex was turn 2, which is quite possibly the most frustrating thing for a tank to take on without having a second tank in there that they trust. The problem being that pugs like to stack all of the mobs together, which makes it impossible for the tanks to effectively hold aggro on them. What happens instead is that both tanks burn through all of their resources and the mobs spend the entire fight bouncing back and forth between them. This would be fine and good if it were safe for a single tank to take them on… problem being that in the later phases you have to try and carefully split the damage to even it out. All of the mobs on one tank is pretty much a certain wipe.

The positive of getting pulled into Alex like this however is that it took away my normal reluctance to such things, and as of last night I now have three of my four pieces of loot for the week. All that is left is Turn 1, and quite honestly it is the least stressful for me to pug. The tanks have clearly defined roles and for the most part they go fairly smoothly now that most people are pretty well geared. At this point for that final item I want either a chain which would instantly give me a belt, or a pedal… which would also instantly give me an item because I have a second one in my inventory. I have to say the way gearing works in Alex is a little maddening, but I feel that honestly it is their way of trying to delay people reaching level 190 geared. With Esoterics in place, I can’t really see going for say the Alexander chest piece since it takes getting a lucky roll four weeks in a row on Turn 4. My first Esoterics item of course will be the 200 weapon, because for a tank that is the single most useful upgrade. After that I will probably assess my weakest pieces and go after what I need the most… which is more than likely going to be my chest piece. Of course in the mean time Square could do what they seem to always do… and change up the game by taking away loot restrictions. That said I still think it is a little early in the patch for that to actually happen, and more than likely won’t be until 3.1.

Om Nom Dance

July 26, 2015 by Belghast

A Late Start

I am getting a super late start this morning on my blog post… well because things and reasons. Last night when we finished recording AggroChat, my wife asked if it was time for bed or if I needed to stay up and edit the podcast. I thought to myself… that bed sounded like an amazing idea and just straight up crashed. This meant that this morning however I had to rush around a bit and edit the post while consuming breakfast. Another thing I noticed is that apparently Final Fantasy XIV patched out their idle kick, because I was still standing in there in the middle of the Dravinian Lowlands afk all night long. I was apparently similarly lazy in logging out from Teamspeak, which meant as folks started trying to pull things together… I went ahead and agreed to tank a few things.

Also I finally got around to doing my Minotaur Om Nom Nom Dance video voice over. One of the dungeons that you unlock at 60 is the Fractal Continuum which includes a really strange fight. At face value the Minotaur works just like pretty much all of the Cyclops encounters you have fought to this point. He alternates between doing a frontal cone attack that you need to dodge and a full 360 degree sweep attack that you also should avoid. Where it differs however is he will start channeling a group wipe attack, that you can only break… but essentially feeding him a mob. While doing this he does a goofy little dance of sorts… which I have taken to voicing over when I tank the dungeon. This generally throws Grace into a fit of hysterics laughing… so I decided I should really edit together a video of the “dance”.

AggroChat 67 – The Astebreed Show

This week we record yet another AggroChat Game Club game featuring the game Astebreed, which is an interesting mix of strange Anime Storytelling and Bullet Hell shooter. What makes the game very unique is that you are a mech… with a sword as well as your laser weapons. As far as the story goes, I think several of us were equally confused so we rely on Tam to decode it all for us… because he apparently was able to follow it the entire way. We have a lot of conversation about the tone of the game, the boss fights, the controls that may or may not have worked… and the total package.

Since adding Grace and Thalen to the podcast they were not in the initial rotation of AggroChat picks, so we did the most gamer thing ever… and rolled some dice before the show to graft them into the rotation. That means for the month of August Grace got to pick a title and we will be playing the bird dating sim… Hatoful Boyfriend… and Kodra was happier than I have ever heard him be. He loves this game, and drove us slightly mad with it when he was playing it. Now we are going to get to experience this madness for ourselves, and I am willing to bet that Game Club Seven is going to be one of the more interesting episodes of AggroChat in our history.

In Search of Esoterics

I have been a massive slacker this week when it came to grinding Esoterics, and as such am sitting at around 180. As a result I need a whole bunch today and tomorrow in order for me to have a shot in hell of hitting the 450 weekly cap. Generally speaking if you log in every day and run an expert roulette dungeon… you can cap fairly easily. Guess what I have not been doing at all. Essentially I have just not been up for group content and as a result I have been playing an awful lot of SkyForge in the meantime which is almost entirely a soloing experience for me. However after dropping a bunch of stress last night, and finishing the paperwork on our impending home renovations I am starting to feel a little less “under the gun”. Sure I could stress about it some more, but in my mind the decision process is over and now we just have to wait for everything to happen.

I did however have a nightmare scenario run through my mind this morning, that makes me wonder just how they are going to deal with our cable connection while ripping off the siding. I really hope I will not be without internet for two weeks. This afternoon my plan is to sit here and grind expert dungeons for anyone who is willing to run them with me, and as a result whittle away my missing esoterics. I would really like to be able to get that tasty level 200 weapon within the first three weeks. If not there is always the next two weeks I can cap to make that happen, but preferably I would like to be getting as many as I can at least until I get a few pieces of gear under my belt. The rest of the time however I am still working on pushing my Dragoon higher and at this point I am still roughly 3/4 of the way through 58. It kinda sucks to have dueling priorities, because I would really love to get him at 60 and geared so I have other options than just tanking.