primals Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Depths of Madness

As I warned you all, I am writing this the night before I intend to post it… at 11pm after a fairly long day of working on our little side projects. Essentially the offices of both myself and my wife need reorganizing in the worst possible way. Neither has really been torn apart and put back together in a very very long time. In fact a good chunk of today was spent shedding documents… from 2005 or so that we kept for god knows what reason. I had forgotten just how many bills and statements used to pile up from the mail… that are now delivered electronically. So I spent my time alternating between shredding documents until the shredder overheated… and boxing up things I no longer needed or wanted for Goodwill.

The problem being that I feel completely overwhelmed in how much is still left to go through. I am horrible about just boxing things up to get it out of the way… so I have several of these boxes loaded with miscellaneous stuff. So this whole mission is part de-cluttering but even more important a sifting of things back into logical bins. At the same time I am trying to make my computer space more friendly, and have a better option for hooking up my console systems and still being able to capture footage from them through my computer. Another thing I am trying to do is to give myself a workspace where I can fiddle with computers or more importantly assemble the mountain of Lego sets I have. Then I am trying to free up some additional room to have places to display said Legos when I finally get them together. Needless to say the next few days are going to be busy.

Bismarck Harpooned

If you have ready this blog for any period of time, you will know that I am pretty much willing to get drug into anything if a guild member needs it. There are some exceptions that I avoid like the plague… I am looking at you Aurum Vale. However if the need is great enough I can always get my arm twisted enough to run whatever it is. Bismarck on the other hand is an encounter that I truly enjoy, so the moment someone mentions that I almost jump at the chance to run it. What makes Bismarck so interesting is the fact that it is a vastly different style of primal fight. While you are ultimately in a fight against the giant flying whale, you are having to deal with a lot of different elements rather than fighting it directly. The goal is to fire two giant harpoons into the whale that allow you to wench it to the side of the island you are standing on. From there you can dps down its weak spot. To make things more interesting you have to deal with all sorts of weather effects, different sorts of adds, and the whale itself slamming into the platform periodically.

The funny thing about pugging a Primal encounter is that you never fully understand the mechanics at work unless someone actually takes the time to explain them. One of the mechanics that we did not grasp completely was what exactly to do with the water globules during phase three. It took us three attempts to get through Bismarck because we were essentially having to figure out what exactly to do with them. The first time we killed the adds and died to lightning damage, the second time we left the water globs up… and then took a massive burst of damage when they exploded. The real mechanic is a bit more subtle. If there is story weather happening, you leave the water globs up to soak the lightning damage which will ultimately kill them. If the skies are clear however… you kill the adds before they explode. Once we grasped this more clearly we wrecked this primal. I have a pretty nice video of our kill above that I edited out of my stream.

Finally Fifty Nine

The bulk of my evening was spent wandering around trying to find ways of getting experience. After having pretty good luck with Clan Hunts Wednesday night, I started off my evening getting a new set and working through those. It seems like they provide about an eighth of a level upon completing the first two tiers, which is nothing to sneeze at. After finishing these off I went back out to the Hinterlands to do quests for the crazy goblins within. These quests involve more than your normal amount of running around as you help them build their new perfect society. I managed to just have enough quests to push on through to 59 without any further dungeons or fate running. Now I am in the final stretch to 60, and I have heard it goes considerably faster. I also just unlocked the next dungeon, and I have been looking forward to running it since I first heard about it. Hopefully tomorrow before or after the podcast I will be able to pull together a group and run it. In the mean time however… I need to head to bed because we have to get up early tomorrow to deal with more cleaning.

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.