ifrit Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Axe to Grind

May 12, 2015 by Belghast

Lung Infections Suck

I’ve been in a strange place the last few days, where I am still recovering from what has turned out to be an infection in my lungs. It has been allergies central around here and unsurprisingly my lungs have reacted negatively to it. I had been dragging along for awhile with what felt like a constant persistent dry cough. Last Friday I finally decided to go to the doctor when I coughed up a small bit of blood. Turns out my lungs were actually in far worse shape than I thought. Since then I have been on a pretty heavy dose of prednisone and am on the mend, but man… I have to say I am still drained as hell. I attempted to go to work like normal yesterday but ended up coming home about halfway through the day. Today I am making another attempt to go a full day, so I am hoping the strength stays with me. What is so strange about this one is just how drained I feel as a result of simply existing.

Why are my lungs betraying me you might ask? The above photo is not intentionally abstract but instead my my phones camera attempting to focus on what are ultimately hundreds of tiny particles of Cottonwood seed. This is what we jokingly refer to as summer snow, and with all the rain we have been getting the Cottonwoods have been blooming in overdrive blanketing the law with a mat of white fabric and making the air look like it is quite genuinely snowing. Thankfully I have a day or two of reprieve thanks to the recent round of storms, but I am sure as soon as things dry up again the bloom will begin a new. Normally this happens around my birthday in June but I guess all the moisture moved up the time table. In any case it sucks to live through and I am just hoping that I can limp through until it has finished. In the meantime I will continue to take this high dose pack of prednisone and antibiotics and pretend to be a normal human being.

Axe to Grind

For months now we have been slowly keying folks through the various primal fights in our Final Fantasy XIV free company. While a chunk of us have been sitting on the Ifrit step, the final of the original set of Extreme primals… it seemed like every time we set out to attempt it we were missing a seventh or eighth that also had it unlocked. So we would once again shift focus and do another round of Garuda or another round of Titan to get people caught up. Last night, finally after a new round of Titaneers we managed to get eight people on at the same time with the ability to do Ifrit. Now I realize I could have been pugging my way through the primal encounters, and with all of the mount farming parties this is a relatively straight forward prospect. There is just something rewarding about doing a fight that is new to you, with nothing but your free company surrounding you. It makes the kill that much sweeter and the experience that much more magical as you accomplished a new mission with friends. Once again we went into the fight without much research, but managed to pick up the basics extremely quickly.

It took us several attempts but by the end of our first night ever working on the boss we had downed an Ifrit and moved on to other things. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get this quest out of my log. I know the big push for this at least from Ashgar’s side was to get the sweet axe I am pictured holding in the first picture. For those who have completed some of the later story, you will recognize this as the axe that Moenbryda wields. It is just one of many weapons you get as a reward for defeating the original trio of Primals, but I went with the axe because it is probably one of the more unique appearances in the game. Now I doubt if it will ever offset my usage of my Malignant Mogaxe, but it is still pretty awesome to have it as an option for when I decide to change up my outfit a bit. Glamouring/Transmogging/Wardrobes are one of the simple pleasures of a modern MMO. The ability to look like you want to look is what makes these games fun to play for me. Gone is the era of looking exactly like every other player in the game, and here to stay is the ability to craft your own appearances. After playing Everquest and being able to tell every single item a player was wearing based on its color and appearance… I have to say I am happy to be living in modern times.

Back to Nael

Yes I realize this is not a picture of Nael Van Darnus but I didn’t snap any pictures from our attempts on Turn 9 last night. Instead this is a picture of me rocking the Garuda bow because I finally feel like I have an outfit floofy enough to support it. This weekend I managed to finish getting my 120 set from World of Darkness which makes up a chunk of the outfit above. Since picking up the Garuda bow I have been looking for a reason to use it, and finally I think the gold and white in the Bogartyr coat works well enough with the gold and white on the bow. Now if anyone tells me that is really blue and black I will reach through the internet and punch them in their soul. A few weeks back we set down on a new mission, which involved alternating between working on coil and working on other things. Since then we have finished the original three primals, Leviathan Extreme and Odin and as a result feel like we are no longer beating our heads against the wall that is turn nine. Coming back to Nael tonight felt far more fresh than it has in a long time.

I was somewhat concerned that we would have lost progress, but in truth we picked up right where we left off and started making fast progress. Everything about the fight is smoother now and we have been making it into the final dance phase every single attempt. The awesome thing about this is that it feels like last night we were finally getting the pattern down. In fact the last few attempts we were making it to the dive bombs phase consistently. Now if we can just master where the dive bombs need to go… I have a feeling we will be clearing turn nine finally and moving on to the final coil. I love my static group, and I love the way folks just keep plugging away without getting frustrated. We have been on this boss for a very long time, and no one seems to have any diminished desire to KEEP doing the boss, or keep trying to succeed. In fact everyone seems to keep doing little things here or there to tweak their performance and make things work more smoothly. I love my free company, and I love the raid we have built around it… my hope is that we can keep trying to get more people into the mix and maybe with Heavensward expand to a third static because the two we have now are just awesome.

Lord of the Storms

February 19, 2015 by Belghast

Region Limited Items

One of the things that game companies continue to do that drives be absolutely insane is to treat game regions differently. I realize there are functional reasons why certain areas of the world have to be a walled garden, but stop placing exclusive items in those walled gardens. World of Warcraft did this with a number of limited edition pets and mounts only available in the China region and it seems as though Square Enix seems to have done the same. For I assume political reasons the Heavensturn new years event did not appear on the Chinese servers. Instead it was replaced with a lunar new year event featuring awesome red lantern decorations throughout the world. If you want to see a full folio of pictures you can check out this link over on the lodestone.

The culmination of this event is a battle with Xi the New Years beast… which appears to be an insanely remodeled Behemoth. At first I thought this was a new mount but apparently that is not the case. Through completing this event you get the extremely adorable remodeled Nana Bear minion that looks like a panda with a little sprig of bamboo. I really hope that Yoshi P and crew decide to bring this same event to the global servers. I realize that for extremely idiotic reasons the Chinese servers are going to miss content that is politically unpalatable to their government, but it sucks when they get nifty exclusive content to replace it. I really hope they choose to do the right thing and make it available, even if only through the Mog Station store. I would absolutely pony up the traditional $5 price for a panda nana bear.

Ifriting with Jae

Last night and this morning too for that matter… I have been feeling absolutely horrible. As such I made last night some what of an early one going to bed around 9pm. Before that however I offered my services to the free company to help a bunch of players catch up on content that had been gating them. The above picture is of me and Jaedia doing some Ifrit, though admittedly she is stuck in a cut scene I believe when I took this picture. Yesterday there was an excellent post by Liore talking about how good the community is. There are times however when the community is not amazing, but even then it is rarely as bad as it can be in World of Warcraft. When we ran Ifrit, we had to random in a single dps to make it happen. Upon zoning in we did our normal greetings and the ninja named Justin’s only the comment was “kik me”. We ignored the first one, but he kept repeating it.

To which I responded the above… and he started doing the /angry emote. Not sure what he thought that would do, but he eventually piped up again saying to “kik me”, this time Ash chimed in with “We Said No”. Ultimately he huffed and puffed a bit more with his angry emote, and then resigned himself to do the fight. Now there are probably ways he could have trolled us, but I give him credit in that he eventually straightened up and did the content as intended. I mean I feel sorry for the guy to some extent, it sucks to be sitting through the 40 minute queue as a ninja… only to find out that you got randomed into a primal encounter… something that notoriously yields little to no experience for completing it. So in the end, even though he was a bit of a jerk about it… I still gave him a player commendation as a consolation for him having to sit in another 40 minute long queue. That right there is the WORST encounter I have had with another player in Final Fantasy XIV in months. All in all not too bad at least based on the encounters I have on a near nightly basis with someone in garrison chat.

Lord of the Storms

Continuing with the theme of helping free company members catch up, we had a player working on his relic quest. For some reason the queue time for the Dhorme Chimera is exceptionally long, so we have been trying to pull together a quick group when someone needs this. Through begging and cajoling I was able to get seven players on at once which meant we were either going to random a player or ask for help. The preference is to ask for help because the fight only really needs a single tank, especially if the tank is as geared as I am. However if you queue into it randomly you have to start the fight with two tanks and two healers in a standard eight man configuration. So while we have an example this morning of the worst of the community, I can give you an example of the best of the community as well. Several of us are members of a linkshell called “We Stand as One” and at this point I am not 100% sure how we ended up in it. I asked in LS chat if anyone was up for helping, and I had no less than eight responses saying to invite them. We killed the Chimera fast enough that we didn’t even get a level one limit break.

After that we did Ramuh Hard mode…. which in essence is the “normal” mode since that is the lowest version of the fight. Solaria needed the fight for her story quest, but unfortunately Nyahn had not quite unlocked it. As such we dropped him, and picked up a few more willing volunteers from the linkshell and proceeded to wreck the Ramuh encounter. I remember being so massively stressed the first time I did this in a random group. There are two phases where you have to burn down some adds or everyone in the raid dies. We did not even get close to the timer easily sailing past both obstacles. The best part about Final Fantasy XIV is the fact that these primal fights are really enjoyable encounters. Generally speaking folks will line up to volunteer to experience them, because it is the sort of thing you only do once in awhile when a player needs it. The raid encounters in general seem to be the same way. They are enjoyable experiences and no one much minds when a group is learning and wipes quite a bit. All in all it was a pretty great night in game, and while I didn’t really accomplish any of my goals… it was great to see others accomplish theirs.

Carried to Greatness

August 8, 2014 by Belghast

Some days are harder

There are some days where the magic just doesn’t seem to want to happen, even when you feel like you have a lot to say. This morning I have been sitting around for the last twelve minutes doing everything I could to avoid opening LiveWriter and begin banging away on the keyboard. Sometimes it happens and this is perfectly okay. Yesterday there was a series of tweets that I was party to about what happens when you decide you want to go in a different direction than you started. You would be shocked and amazed at just how many times I start in one direction and then decide that it is not in fact what I want to say. There have been so many paragraphs sacrificed on the altar of mood swings, and I am here to tell you that this is perfectly okay.

In fact I would go so far as to say this is entirely expected as part of the daily writing ritual. There are going to be days you struggle to find meaning from your cluttered mind, and it is completely fine for you to jettison one idea in favor of another. Please do not ever feel obligated to complete a thought. Just because you get two sentences down on the page, does not mean you have to follow up with the rest of a paragraph. If you can have sketches in the margin of a notebook, you can surely also have room for the same thing to be happening with your writing. There are so many things that Blaugust is “about” but one of them definitely is about being comfortable with your own words, and knowing when they work and when they do not. Not everything you write has to be a masterpiece, and some things are destined only to be pushed out the airlock.

Carried to Greatness

One of the things I have been avoiding doing since coming back to the game is wrapping up my Relic weapon quest in Final Fantasy XIV. Before we left we had completely a number of the steps as a group. I went through the extreme cost of getting the base weapon, and getting the two materia fused to it. Then as a guild we conquered both the Chimera and the Hydra. Finally I was up to the three Hard Mode primal fights of Ifrit, Garuda and Titan in that order. A week or so ago I managed to get through Ifrit but I figured that was a fluke considering just how easy of a fight it is. I also had intimate knowledge of that fight considering we had legitimately downed him as a guild. The only problem is when we did it as a guild, I was using my bard job and not my warrior one… and did not get credit for it.

Garuda scares the shit out of me. This was a hard fight for us to learn as a four man team at level, so I could not image just how frustrating and painful it would be as a tank. I watched as my guildies that were not tanks queued for it and got it taken care of without issue, but still I was pretty gunshy. Had it not been for Ashgar queuing up as a tank last night and talking about just how easy the encounter was… I likely would still be waiting. Sure enough upon queuing I ended up getting dumped into a group with lots of folks that were in raid gear, and essentially I became the groups mascot. Before I knew it we had downed Garuda and I was moving on to the next step in the quest chain that involved a good deal of running around. All of my nerves were literally for nothing because at this point in the game… folks have progressed so far past the hurdle that was hard mode Garuda that it became manageable without really knowing the fight myself.

Titan on the other hand was still a challenge. Once again I was the mascot of the group and really served to give no benefit other than miniscule dps. The problem with titan is there is so much that goes on between the attacks that knock you off the platform, the attacks that can one shot you, and the crazy exploding rocks that can make you into a venn diagram. It took my team three tries to get through the encounter, and with each wipe we gained a stack of echo… which works much the same as the determination buff in World of Warcraft. After all of the nervousness I was sitting there with all the components I needed to finish my Bravura. While this is no longer the be all end all weapon… it still feels like a big deal to me. I honestly questioned if I would ever complete it, so now I am absolutely pumped to be holding it in my hands. I still need to farm a few more “bookrocks” before I can upgrade it to the next step, but hopefully I will get those tonight.

Nostalgia Crit 9999

Gearing Up to Celebrate 10 Years of World of Warcraft

Something I have been meaning to talk about for a few days is the recent announcement of the World of Warcraft 10th anniversary events. Firstly lets get the fact that they are announcing them in August when the anniversary is not until the tail end of November out of the way. I guess they need some good news to be honest considering how most of the community expected to be playing Warlords by now. For those who have not followed the information they are doing a number of interesting things for the anniversary. For starters anyone who logs in during the event is going to get a new pet in honor of it… the Molten Corgi. When I first heard about the pet I honestly thought I had misheard some bit of information and it was related to Rift instead. It feels weird to have two different MMOs obsessed with the adorable stub legged puppies. That said it is exactly that… adorable and fiery and sufficiently epic to announce the 10th year of a game.

Keeping with the theme they are bringing back Molten Core, and making it a max level dungeon… and making it a special 40 man LFR. Anyone who manages to make it to the end of the dungeon will earn a special Core Hound mount. I have not heard if this is going to be complete-able with a guild group or not, or if this is going to only be an LFR thing. I honesty feel like LFR is a decent simulacrum for the way actual 40 man raiding felt. The amount of random fuckery that went on during most 40 man raids as 20 people carried 20 warm bodies to victory, seems like it could only be simulated by the LFR system. It makes me wonder what all sorts of callbacks will they have. Will there be a new version of Thurderfury for example? The updated Quelserrar for example was something I hotly sought after, because I loved the look of that blade.

If all of this were not enough they are bringing back the one and only time that world PVP actually worked… Southshore vs Tarren Mill. They are apparently creating a special 100 vs 100 battleground to play out the epic battle of town versus town that used to play out on a nightly basis. This is seriously the only time in WoW history that I actually willfully participated in PVP, and so many friendships grew out of it that I still keep in touch with today. This era of wow was one of those lightning in a bottle moments, and I can’t even remember why it stopped. I am sure it was in reaction to something that blizzard did to screw with the mix, but I remember by the time Ahn’qiraj rolled around no one was actually doing this fight any longer. Maybe the battlegrounds were the nail in the coffin? At this point I honestly cannot remember.

All of this sounds awesome and is loaded with so much nostalgia it is like a sucker punch to the veteran players face. The problem is… we remember these events from the past of WoW as being so much more epic and enjoyable than they actually were. For years we have viewed the early days of wow through rose colored lenses of a time when “things were right and good”. When in reality they really were not that great. The amount of lag that happened in Southshore for example made most of the deaths absolutely random. The amount of drama and bullshit that accompanied Molten Core and the loss of three hours of your life every week to run it was equally insane. These are not exactly moments to be heralded as the way things ought to be. They were us making the best out of a bad situation and enjoying what game play we could find where we could find it.

I came in late to Molten Core after my raid had already broken its back doing the hard work to get it on farm status. I was carried to my full set of Giantstalker, and then proceeded to run the dungeon every single week until pretty much the end of Vanilla. I still have large sections of the pulls in that place memorized, as I geared up first my hunter, then my paladin and my warrior running the place for various people who needed able bodied fill-ins. None of my “good memories” of this time in Vanilla have anything to do with the actual places we were running. It was the people I happened to be running them with. You cannot reassemble the raid I cleared Molten Core with, or the social channel that we ran Southshore versus Tarren MIll out of. Those players have all scattered to the wind and a bunch of random socially inept strangers are a piss poor substitute.

Liore made a post earlier this week about that you can’t go back home, and it is true. While everything about this event is laced with the drug that is nostalgia… none of it is real. How we feel about that time in World of Warcraft is an accumulation of everything that was happening at the time. It was the people and the places and the fact that there was literally nothing else to do at the time, because WoW was the only game on the market that offered anything vaguely close to this. No amount of wishing is going to actually turn back the clock and recapture the joy and experiences you had back then. Don’t get me wrong… I will probably log in during the event to get my shiny trinkets… but I go into it knowing this is a pale comparison to the way things actually were. There is no such thing as going home, because both you and the place you are going have changed in the process of getting away from it.

Writing Prompts

Now for a few more writing prompts. I wondered if this would end up being useful but based on the fact that a handful of people have been drawing from them I guess it is a worthwhile cause. Today’s prompts are all laced with the venom that is nostalgia.

What period in a game or game do you wish you could return to? What is that thing that is now gone that you wish you could be playing again?
We all accidentally get rid of something that we end up wanting later on. What have you deleted/disenchanted/sold that you later kicked yourself for doing?
We have all left something unfinished in our effort to move on to something new. What achievement have you never completed that you always wished in the back of your head you had?

#Blaugust #FFXIV #WoW