Tricksy Shotgunner

Surprise Banner

RemotePlay 2016-05-26 06-16-13-62

This weekend as I have said before I will be going to visit friends in St Louis, or more literally Lake St Louis.  As a result we will be taking the weekend off from the podcast, and I will be taking the weekend completely off from my blog.  I am not sure if I will be making a post Monday or not…  because in theory if things work as intended we should be back Sunday night.  One of the things I was mildly relieved about was the fact that I would not be missing an Iron Banner.  There is a nasty bug going on right now that happens in a certain circumstance… which primarily involves the rocket launcher from the raid… if it happened to roll with the Clown Cartridge perk.  It combined with Cocoon meant that you could have limitless regenerating ammunition and be able to fire rockets long before the heavy ammunition showed up in crucible matches.  As a result they completely cancelled Trials of Osiris, and looked like they were going to cancel this months Iron Banner.  However yesterday unexpectedly Lord Saladin showed up at the tower, and just like that Iron Banner was on for the month of May.

I know without a doubt that there is no way I can manage to get three characters through to rank 5 this time around because I will be out of town for most of it.  However I decided to focus on my hunter that is my second highest light character.  The hope being that somewhere in this process I get some decent infusion fodder if nothing else.  This go around the weapons are the Fusion Rifle and Sidearm… neither of which I am actually interested in.  As far as armor we have Chest and Arms again, both of which are pieces that my Hunter has.  In theory I should probably be doing this on the Warlock because he could use both of them.  I did however manage to ALMOST hit Rank 3 last night on the Hunter and knocked out some of the harder achievements like “top score” for a match.  It was a lot of fun, and a whole bunch of that I chock up to the Lord of Wolves Shotgun.  I had not really fallen in love with this weapon, but I had moved it to the hunter at one point because it was 335 light and I needed something to get my light levels up.

What makes this weapon awesome is that it works unlike pretty much any other shotgun.  Firing it feels more like a pulse rifle, and at least now… no one seems to be expecting it.  So many times I managed to pick people off just outside of normal shotgun range with a single burst to the head.  While it doesn’t hit quite as hard as a traditional shotgun…  it still hits plenty hard and the perfect balance perk seems to help quite a bit with the otherwise nasty recoil.  This feels like one of those meta breaking weapons, that will probably only work well against untrained players.  There are plenty of ways to counter it… and lord knows last night several people figured it out.  However for guarding flags… this combined with Trip Mines seemed to be super effective.  Hunters are just brutal in any of the PVP modes, and that throwing knife… so much fun to use, so much cursing when it is used against you.  I am certain that I pissed off a handful of people during the night, because there was this one guy that seemed to make it his personal mission to seek me out and kill me…  not always effectively which probably only added to the frustration.  Its my hope that maybe I can push to Rank 5 tonight and then maybe try pushing the Warlock when I get back from my trip.

Goal Failing

ffxiv_dx11 2016-05-24 18-54-08-12

As stupid as it might sound… this is the thing that I have missed the most from Final Fantasy XIV.  The whole standing around and interacting while in the at the Free Company thing.  Unfortunately this is also something that doesn’t really happen that often.  It feels like with Heavensward there are not as many reason to keep returning to the Free Company house as there used to be.  Also the FC is going through that pre-patch doldrums with not that many people being on within a given night, unless that night is Tuesday.  I have been trying to clear my schedule so that I can participate in Tuesday night shenanigans and this week was no exception.  For whatever reason however we struggled quite a bit, and in part I think that was because we were way short of a standard 8 player group.  Towards the end we were down to five players… 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 dps which for most of the classic Extreme Primals was doable but considerably more difficult.  As a tank I had to start dealing with mechanics that I usually never see like weight of the world.  The other bummer was that through all of this struggle… we didn’t see any pony drops… and no real interesting weapons either.

As far as failing at my goal… it was my intention to get in every night and run at least one expert.  The problem being… nobody has been around and my desire to solo queue is minimal.  It is one of those hurdles that I need to push myself over, because I realize that it is not terribly likely that I will run into one of the “git gud” idiots.  Most of the community is pretty damned chill, but there is a small fraction that feels just as toxic as any other.  It was one of these people that halted another friends queue frenzy, and I guess I am afraid I will bump into one of those and have my happy reunion with this game halted.  If you can bring two players into a four player group… you can mitigate a lot of frustration and if nothing else kick the offending party.  However I wish I had a regular group of people to queue with for nothing more than a single expert, because god knows I need the currency to buy upgrades.

 

Musical Steeds

Muscle Memory

ffxiv_dx11 2016-05-17 19-10-18-92

The tale of our run in Final Fantasy XIV has been interesting, namely we played for roughly two years straight… and then after the launch of Heavensward that original group more or less faded away from the game.  When we played the game at launch, I was towards the end of the pack when it came to leaving, and this time it seems like I was among the first.  I had split priorities when it came to FFXIV and WoW raiding… and to be truthful I was burning out intensely in both.  I last played regularly in December of 2015, and for whatever reason I’ve just not had much drive to dip my toes back in.  As additional story content was released, I made a college try to come back and consume it.  Unfortunately however I never actually made it all of the way through the 3.2 content.  As a result I admit I had more than a little trepidation upon returning, because I wondered how much skill I would have lost.  It turns out “muscle memory” is ungodly strong, and for the most part I was able to sit down and begin rotating through abilities and hitting hotkeys by reflex.

ffxiv_dx11 2016-05-17 20-39-11-95

What also helped however was the content we were doing.  Now our raid group met on Tuesday nights for two years, and it seems as though the current batch of Greysky folks have kept up that tradition.  This time instead however it has been turned in to a pony farm night.  Now back when we were doing the Extreme Primals legitimately, I had managed to get the whistle for the Leviathan pony, and counted myself damned lucky.  In the meantime however it appears that Square has increased the drop rate, and getting those musical horses seems to be a pretty regular occurrence.  What shocked me was just how quickly the boss fights came back, even in their currently abbreviated state.  For example I instinctively followed the normal tank queues for Titan… even though I initially stood on the wrong slice of cheese.  I was happy to know that I could in fact still apparently tank in this game, and I think I will feel significantly better actually doing some duty finder for gear currency.

A Good Night

ffxiv_dx11 2016-05-17 21-16-18-00

It felt really great to be back, and equally great to be playing Lala-Bel again.  There is just something about this character that makes me happy, and maybe some of the funk I have been in has been due to the fact that I haven’t been playing him lately.  After the raid my friends Tzi, Rylacus and Nyte helped run me through The Antitower, the first of the 3.2 dungeons.  I poked around a bit afterwards trying to figure out where all the other dungeon quests started, but sleep claimed me pretty quickly.  I know I will be doing Destiny raid tonight, but the hope is to return to FFXIV in the coming days.  I mean maybe the answer is to simply play all the things.  Right now I am getting enjoyment out of WoW and FFXIV again… so maybe the idea is to simply ration them both.  I know I have a lot of catching up to do in FFXIV so it serves as an excellent game to grind away while downstairs.  When I left in December I was one of the better geared characters in the Free Company… and now I am probably one of the worst geared.  I know this… because in running the Antitower I managed to pick up no less than two upgrades, which is generally a good sign that you are way behind the curve.

I managed to get the Garuda pony which was an easy drop since everyone else in the raid had one, and was quite literally just farming it to get me one.  Then I rolled on Nightmare that dropped from Titan, and managed to get the lucky roll.  The only thing there is… I guess I didn’t fully realize that this was a rare drop from any of the first three primals… even thought Ashgar said as much.  I didn’t quite grok it at the time, or I would have probably passed on the roll.  We did not however see any of the ACTUAL pony that is supposed to come from Titan.  We did however manage to get at least one person a Leviathan mount, and I believe one other mount…  but I am drawing a blank.  All in all it was a really fun night and I am going to try and juggle my schedule so I can start making this a weekly thing.  Hopefully I didn’t do anything that pissed anyone off too terribly.  I felt a little bad falling right back into my overbearing tank mode… but like I said I was largely relying on instincts to get through the evening and that comes with the tendency to pull.  Ashgar however pulled for me a few times expecting that I would provoke it back from him, and I did like a good lalatank.  It was kinda great getting to hang with Tzi and Rylacus again, even thought poor Tzi had no voice at all.  Maybe I am over my mental block against MMOs, or maybe I just happened to choose the right nights to play again.