odin Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Thanks to my Friends

This morning I had every intention to sleep in, but I guess my body the way that I have trained it over the years conspired against me. I woke up moments after the alarm would have gone off normally, and then stayed in a sort of half sleep half awake state until I finally gave up around 6:30. Now an hour later… I am finally pulling myself away from my insanely scrolling twitter feed to attempt to write a blog post. I guess I had forgotten just how overwhelming being on twitter can be on your Birthday. I love each and every one of you, and maybe this year more than most… which is something I will elaborate on shortly. June is the travel season for my wife, and each year she has a series of conventions and other events that she travels to. This has been a thing for several years, but no matter how often it happens… you never quite get used to it. During the month of June she will be gone for a week, home a few days, gone another week etcetera. So the best Birthday present I could possibly get right now is her flying home today… and I am really hoping that her plane is not delayed by the remnants of the Hurricane.

Now in the past I have struggled with this existence of being alone for the better part of a month. This has generally been the time of the year when my depression flares up the most, since I am generally speaking sitting alone in a house with my thoughts and a menagerie of animals. This year however has been different, and I think it is thanks to all of you out there that relentlessly check in on me. I feel like I am surrounded by so many awesome people that seem to love me that I am never really completely alone. There is always a message waiting on my response somewhere, or someone looping me into a conversation. The AggroChat crew especially has become this second family that hunts me down if they don’t hear from me in a few days, because they know my tendencies to cocoon when the depression starts. I want to thank all of you for essentially keeping me from dropping into my normal yearly funk. My friends and my free company have been this offsetting force of amazing in my life and as a result have kind of made every day my wife has been away more tolerable.

Splashy Pony Brothers

I spent my final night in FFXIV before the downtime the same way I have spent many nights, hanging out on Teamspeak and helping folks do content. It seems so strange that last night was the end of one era of Final Fantasy and tomorrow morning will begin another. In a way I kind of like the fact that we have this entire day outage, because I guess in some way it makes the whole process seem more real. In some games I have literally logged out of one client and back into a brand new one over the course of thirty minutes, and it always felt strange. I am sure there are people out there that are frustrated by being locked out of the game for this period of time, but I guess for me it makes the experience more meaningful. I am just hoping that I can get to sleep early tonight and that the excitement won’t be too overwhelming, because in many ways it feels a bit like Christmas Eve and I am five years old.

Last night we managed to down Odin with a batch of new people, and in the process met a really nice White Mage on Cactuar, that I have subsequently friended. I am consistently surprised by just how nice people generally are when we find them through the server party finder system. In fact this one gets bonus credit because we screwed up and originally thought we needed another dps. Upon explaining our screw up she was cool and said that she also could heal the fight. Moments later we were making attempts on Odin and shockingly I think it only took us three tries before we defeated him. After that we attempted to sort out what we were doing next, with many people mentioning Titan… but in the end we wound up going to do Leviathan Extreme instead. This is one of my favorite fights, but this time they needed me to be a Paladin and do the stun lock thing. I am just not comfortable tanking as a paladin and the whole experience felt frustrating, as compared to my warrior. However I managed to do a decent enough job that we pushed through and got the defeat. To make things even cooler a pony whistle dropped and now Mor and I can be splashy pony brothers!

A Strange Birthday

So now that I am wrapping up my blog post I need to hurry around like mad. I need to be at the airport to pick up my wife around 1:30, and in the meantime I need to attempt to pick up the house. While it is not exactly in bad shape, because really I haven’t done anything that crazy since she has been gone… it needs a round of sprucing up so she has a nice place to come home to. Additionally I need to gather up the information I need to get my car tag, since she mentioned maybe doing that on the way home today so that we don’t have to get out of the house and do it tomorrow. So while I would love to hang out in my pajamas and play video games all day… I suppose I will have to go off and be and adult. It is going to be awesome to have my wife home again, but it is also a strange experience getting used to not being the only person in the room. Unfortunately it will be a short lived experience because if I remember correctly she is heading back out again on Sunday, but this time for a much shorter trip.

In the meantime my Final Fantasy XIV client is patched, and I am floored that it was only 4.3 gig. From what I am hearing this morning however they have apparently been patching in assets for months. Supposedly half of the zones that we will be exploring have been in since the launch of A Realm Reborn. I hope this all means that tomorrow is going to be an extremely smooth launch, but I still need to get my laptop started patching as well. I am sure there will be some sort of a final patch when the servers come back up from the downtime that lets the client know it is time to be Heavensward, but I am hoping it is a small one. I guess in theory this game is scaled to work well over consoles, so it makes complete sense that it would have really tight patches. So far I am impressed and I am hoping that feeling continues through the launch. This game had an exceptionally rocky start with the relaunch in August 2013, and I am hoping they have learned their lessons.

Impending Patch

Last night was an odd evening for a handful of reasons. For starters when I first got home I attempted not to get into anything terribly involved. As such I did a random low level duty roulette and managed to get Haukke Manor. I think overall it went really smoothly, especially considering we had a brand new White Mage that had never healed it before. I attempted to explain all of the fights, and was shocked and amazed that my party requested a full clear instead of the normal abbreviated rush. Everything went pretty smoothly all things considered as I took the time to explain the final fight and what I was expecting from each of the party members. I’ve found that often times on fights with very specific mechanics, no one wants to admit to not knowing what to do. If I simply give an abbreviated explanation, overall it tends to go considerably smoother.

When my wife got home we walked to dinner and hung out for a bit. By this time I was absolutely starving, but to be fair she warned me exactly when she would be getting home. I should have eaten a snack when I first got home or something, because by the time we hit the Mexican restaurant I was absolutely famished. When we left the house it looked like it might open up on us, and originally we were headed to a BBQ place, but while walking it started sprinkling a little bit. Thankfully by the time we got out of the restaurant any signs of sprinkles had disappeared and we walked home on an extremely gorgeous evening. I love being within walking distance of several restaurants, because there is just something cool about being able to walk to dinner in an otherwise traditional car culture.

Hopelessness of Odin

With the patch downtime quickly approaching, but the time I got back from dinner I had roughly an hour and a half of play time left before the servers went down. I tanked another low level random, and then opted to start working on my Paladin Hunt log. For various reasons I have shifted my focus from working on my White Mage to pushing up the Paladin. As I said yesterday I went from 28 to 35 Sunday and managed to get 36 and almost 37 last night. I was essentially minding my business and porting from zone to zone cleaning up sections of my hunt log. When I zoned into South Shroud I thought the place looked really odd. One of the cool things about FFXIV is that you can check the current weather conditions by mousing over a little icon on the minimap. When I did that I started to get excited… the conditions were “Hopelessness” which is a unique weather condition when the Odin event has spawned. I shifted to my warrior job and shouted into zone “WAR LFG” and within seconds I got an invite.

It seems that Warriors are the kings of cheesing out FATE contribution, so they are apparently highly sought after for fights like Odin. It seemed like everyone was coalescing on Urth’s Gift, so I headed that way. I had never actually managed to catch Odin in progress before, and by the time I got there someone had just pulled him. I was not quite ready for the sight in front of me, which seemed to be roughly 200 players working away feverishly to get him down. The above shot is from the battle, and pretty much represents what the experience feels like. The entire area is a wash in spell effects, which makes his attacks extremely hard to see. During the battle he periodically casts these massive AOE fields that you realistically need to run out of. I avoided most of them, and with less than 3% of his bar left I finally ended up dying. I rode out the battle before releasing and managed to get gold contribution, which means I earned 5 Odin Mantles.

What is awesome about getting gold contribution is the fact that you actually get enough of the tokens to be able to purchase something right then. Both Odin and Behemoth have a number of really cool items you can pick up for mostly cosmetic purposes. You can get barding that makes your chocobo look like Odin’s mount, or you can get a helmet and chest graphic that makes your gear look just like his. The item however that I was interested is the one that any Final Fantasy fan will immediately recognize… Zantetsuken his insane sword. While the stats on the blade are no longer that great, thanks to the wonders of the glamour system I can make any blade look like this. My good friend Ashgar has had one for some time now, but I had to scrounge around this morning to find a picture of someone wielding it. As soon as I get my paladin up to 50 I too will be rocking the blade of Odin… which to be truthful is probably longer than my Lalafell is tall.

Winding Down

After the excitement of Odin I was wandering around, and popped over to Uldah to purchase more Ventures when I ran into the ever amazing Sagacyte Luxaloix. It is always awesome to bump into twitter folk while wandering about the server, and it seems like last night was a night for doing so. Earlier in the evening Sagacyte had bumped into the very amazing Spiral Sun and posted about it as well. Thankfully the meetings were commemorated in picture, so I could totally use them… as in my rush I absolutely forgot to take one. I love bumping into folks I know while wandering about the server. When doing Odin there were a bunch of folks from the Howling Moon free company in the thick of the battle as well. I was pumped to find out that Ayla Noye also managed to get gold contribution from the event, so we will all be rocking Odin goodies in the housing zone.

On top of all of this it appears that the 2.38 patch that went in this morning has a ton of quality of life modifications to existing systems. It seems they are focusing on making some tweaks to make 2.4 go more smoothly, including some visual changes to Limsa Lominsa… which makes me wonder if the new Thief and Ninja NPCs will be located in that city. The biggest news for me personally from the patch is the new command to copy an existing hotbar. One of the big frustrations is that when you switch jobs, most of your hotbars change with you. That means when you switch from Gladiator to Paladin for example you have to reconfigure your hotbar, as it defaults to giving you ones filled with the abilities in the order in which you received them. This command will let you copy one current hotbar to a new hotbar slot in a different profile.

Another big one for me which is kinda silly is I am pumped that they added a /hug emote. In every MMO this has kinda been my default interaction with a player that I happened to meet out in the world. Apparently the Japanese are not big huggers, because after a year of the game they still had yet to put that emote in. As a result my default had been /joy which is what happens to be pictured above. So I will be happy to be able to do drive by huggings in game soon. Another awesome change is the ability to scale back the spell effects. Maybe I would have actually been able to see what Odin looked like were this system in place last night. In any case, the patch looks to be a great one and I look forward to delving into all the things they added like Personal Player housing.

#FFXIV