Invaders from Mars

Weekend Goals

This weekend I set out with a handful of goals, and as always not everything got accomplished.  The first goal was to manage to get to 20 in Destiny.  Had the servers not gone down last night I might have actually hit it, as I am a little ways into 19 and still have quite a lot of story content t o do.  The second goal was to finish my second Animus book, and that one got wrapped up yesterday afternoon without much issue.  Sadly I don’t have the “bookrocks” stockpiled to buy another one, but in theory I could hop on the nightly hunt mob train and get there without much issue.  The third goal was to cap out my soldiery tomestones, and while I am not quite there I am close enough that tonight’s elite roulette will get me there.  Finally I had planned on trying to get to 10 on my Knight in Trove, which I didn’t quite make but I am now level 9 and also have a level 6 gunslinger.

All in all I think I had a pretty productive weekend full of focused faffing.  I think the Godmother would be proud of my little checklist of accomplishments… or at least almost accomplished items.  This is what keeps me motivated in games, is to have things that I want to tick off a list.  I am finding that I am exceedingly good at grinding headlong towards a goal, but when I lose sight of that goal I start to get bored.  One of the more interesting side goals of the weekend was to figure out how to configure JoyToKey and in part thanks to this tutorial video from Beau Hindman, I managed to get it running with little issue.  So now I am running around in Trove using my Xbox 360 controller and I have to say it works pretty well.  There are some wonky issues with occasionally my view drifting off slightly to one side or the other, but I think that is more an issue of the thumb sticks not entirely centering each time.  I might see if I can lower the sensitivity at some point to make it less twitchy.  The big thing I notice is the amount of time you spend mapping and remapping controls until you find the thing that feels most comfortable.

Invaders from Mars

Destiny_20140928212227 As always it was the love of loot and the desire to acquire more of it… that ended up lighting a fire under my ass in Destiny.  Previously I had been happy to slowly poke my way around the patrol missions, wandering aimlessly through objectives.  However due to the various loot issues going on that patch 1.0.2 intends to address,  they are basically having a loot giveaway event.  As we talked about in the podcast Saturday night, folks are frustrated with the grindy nature of the endgame, and as such they rolled out a limited time event that addresses that at least to some extent.    The event that is going on is known simply as The Queen’s Bounty, and through it a series of items appear on the bounty board.  Supposedly if you complete a handful of these you end up earning a legendary quality weapon.  Basically I want to get in on this loot grab before it goes away.

Destiny_20140927232244 I had managed to get to level 16 before setting foot on Venus, through just wandering about on the moon doing patrol missions.  As such I knew that if I just worked my way up through the backlog of story content I had waiting on me, I would ding 20 without much issue.  So yesterday I set forward doing just this.  I got to experience Venus and Mars… and so far I have to say I still prefer good old Cosmodrome and the Moon.  Venus can be extremely pretty, but everything seems to have this yellow green haze to it.  Additionally I have come to realize I am really not a huge fan of fighting the Vex.  The fact that I have to shift from aiming for the head to aiming from the yellow glowing spot in their belly can be frustrating at times.  Additionally fighting them is a bit like fighting a zombie horde.  The Fallen and the Hive had a fair amount of cowardice in their moves.  You can push and pull them around the map, but the Vex just keep advancing regardless of what you do like this unrelenting mass of shambling robots.

Destiny_20140928204249 Once you land on Mars however… the Cabal take heavy metal up to eleven.  This is very much the Warhammer 40,000 faction, in that they seem to have a cavalcade of ever more insane mechanized environmental suits to do battle with you.  There is this one baddie known as a colossus that has some sort of a chain gun that just pinned me down stunned as it ripped through my shield in a few moments.  The Phalanx however were what became super maddening.  They are basically a space marine with a giant riot shield.  They fire out from around the corner and appear to be deadly accurate regardless of how awkward that position must be.  The best tactic seemed to be either to toss a grenade, or try and bait them to move in one direction would looping around behind them.  In any case… my sequence of hand cannon one shots pretty much stopped when I reached Mars.

Destiny_20140928212751 At some point it appears that Destiny reset the player preferences, because apparently my grouping setting got flipped from invite only to allowing anyone to join.  In part I am thankful for this because I was joined by Nidrew who basically carried me through a few of the rougher missions, or at the very least kept me from having to start over.  So long as one of us stayed alive we could eventually respawn back up.  I find that aspect of the game interesting, that when a team mate has fallen, your focus goes from finishing the objective to just staying alive for 25 seconds so that they can revive and get back in the fight.  Of course you can go over and rez them youself, but often times they got pinned down in a fire fight and running back in there might end up being suicide.  In any case I am very thankful for the help, and when I stopped I was sitting at 19 so hopefully I can push on through to 20 tonight and maybe start working on the bounties.

Book of Deeds

ffxiv 2014-09-28 15-56-37-128 When you see this text pop across your screen it feels extremely epic…  until you realize that this was just one of nine books that you have to do…  and you have so many left to go.  I love the feel of the Relic weapon quests because they still remind me so much of just how difficult it was to get your epic weapon in the original Everquest.  The reality is that it is going to take me an insane amount of time to complete it, far longer than is reasonable considering lots of my FC mates are taking the significantly shorter route to a ilevel 110 weapon.  I don’t want to call it the easy way, because it is in itself a significant amount of grinding, but with the most recent patch it just got way easier to acquire the necessary bits.  In fact since that patch went in I already have everything waiting in my inventory to be able to get my ilevel 110 Axe, I just need a bit more soldiery which I should get Tuesday when the reset happens.

5OpoacO That said I still plan on going through with the Relic quest chain, because man… the Bravura Nexus looks amazing.  I borrowed this image from the FFXIV reddit, but man I really want to swing that weapon.  Granted the step between where I am currently and where you get that weapon involves months of work, but at some point I will be swinging it happily.  Granted by the time that happens they will probably add another tier of progression in there, and it will already be outdated but screw it… it looks awesome.  Final Fantasy XIV is really good so far at giving me things that I want to get that require lots of work to get them.  I’ve always been extremely luck with drops, so getting that item to drop off a boss seems to be an ineffectual way of keeping me engaged.  Giving me something that I have to do every week to slowly inch my way towards victory…  that seems to actually work at keeping me around.  I love the way that the books work so far in that each one slowly incrementally improves your current weapon.  Someday I will get there, I just hope that the rest of the people I am playing with will still be playing when it happens.

#FFXIV #Destiny

The Atma Weapon

Hat For All Occasions

hatforalloccasions A few weeks ago my friend Tam stumbled onto a hat in his inventory that he has picked up somewhere.  It seems he played the game significantly longer than we did, and it seemed to come from some event, or at least that is the impression I got.  It was a cute white bunny samurai hat and he used it with his cavalry armor to create a rather unique looking tanking set.  This lead me over to the market boards to see what other interesting hats existed, and I stumbled on a very similar hat but it was red and black, and instead of having a closed in mask the visor was completely open.  I managed to pick it up for only 1500 gil or so, and immediately I noticed it fit perfectly with my Warrior relic set.  So I glamoured it onto the item and started my life as a bunny samurai tank.

Shortly after that I noticed that it also seemed to work pretty well with my Dragoon armor since it also had a lot of black and gold in it.  So once again I glamoured the item over my helm and began another life as the bunny samurai dragoon.  Tonight I finished getting my Bard job up to ilevel 90, and as I was re-glamouring my pieces to the foestrikers gear set, I wondered just how well the bunny helm would work there too.  Turns out I like the look since the Foestriker set has a lot of red in it already.  So basically I am a bunny samurai for all occasions.  I think Tam is a little bummed that I took his style idea and ran with it…  but seriously…  it works amazingly well for a Lalafell.  Sadly however I don’t think the bunny samurai thing will work quite so well for my caster sets.  I can’t really see a bunny samurai healer being a thing… but damned if I won’t try and make it happen.

The Atma Weapon

ffxiv 2014-09-03 06-25-58-043 I’ve talked a few times in the past about the Relic weapon quest chain in Final Fantasy XIV.  Essentially for those who are not familiar, it involves a long series of quests and battles to forge a weapon and then harden it while doing battle with the three original Primals.  The end result is your relic weapon, which then can continue to be upgraded through additional quests.  The first “Zenith” step is extremely simple in the grand scheme of things.  It involves purchasing three Thavnairian Mists from a vendor in Mor Dhona for 300 tomestones of mythology each.  So to get this step you literally just need to run practically any of the endgame content be it dungeons or raids, they all reward decent chunks of Mythstones.  Once you have your items you simply take them back to the same vendor that originally forged your weapon and by using the forge yourself you can perform the upgrade.  This takes the original ilevel 80 item to ilevel 90, and at this point I have the Zenith step on Warrior, Dragoon and Bard.

The next step is significantly trickier, but last night my friend Warenwolf managed to complete his, so I have renewed focus in finishing mine up.  Essentially the Atma step is a tricky way of making players revisit old content.  You get the various Atma parts by grinding FATEs in twelve different zones.  Kodra noticed that the zones that are missing… are the ones that were traditionally FATE grinding hubs at release.  So gone is South Shroud and Costa Del Sol as well as the later hubs of Coerthas, Mor Dhona and Northern Thanalan.  The final list looks a little something like this.

  • Southern Thanalan: Atma of the Scorpion
  • Eastern Thanalan: Atma of the Bull
  • Western Thanalan: Atma of the Twins
  • Central Thanalan: Atma of the Scales
  • Central Shroud: Atma of the Maiden
  • East Shroud: Atma of the Goat
  • North Shroud: Atma of the Archer
  • Upper La Nocea: Atma of the Water Bearer
  • Middle La Nocea: Atma of the Ram
  • Outer La Nocea: Atma of the Lion
  • Lower La Nocea: Atma of the Fish
  • Western La Nocea: Atma of the Crab

Upon doing some research last night it seems that there is an equal drop chance for all zones that never actually improves over time.  In fact you don’t even have to get Gold completion, you can get an ATMA to drop on bronze, silver or gold just so long as you have participated enough to actually get credit for the event.  Supposedly the drop chance for an ATMA is somewhere between 1% and 10% depending on who you talk to.  I have managed to get four drops so far, but some of my guild members have ground for upwards of six hours and never seen so much as a single one.  I feel like this is the sort of thing that is best done in passing, however with Waren getting his it has lit a bit of a fire under me to go ahead and grind out mine as well.  Sure there are other paths to upgrades, but at this point I feel like I want to do this.

Western Thanalan

2014-09-03 06_40_53-Western Thanalan - Final Fantasy XIV _ A Realm Reborn (FFXIV ARR) Database The zone I have been hung up on for the last three nights is Western Thanalan.  I have been trying to knock these out in a single region before moving on to others.  Western Thanalan might just be the bane of my existence, and probably one of the hardest zones to habitually FATE grind in.  As you can see from the map the zone is broken into three four sections divided by a series of pathways connecting them.  This means it is extremely tedious to cross and often times by the time you get to a FATE a different group of adventurers will have whittled it down to nothing.  Now that I at least know that Atma parts can drop on bronze contribution I am far less stressed.  Previously I knew I needed to get to a FATE before the 50% mark to be able to pull enough aggro to earn Gold contribution.  Now I simply just need to touch it, or hit a few overpowers to get credit at all.

I could move on to another zone, but I feel like this is probably the most difficult of them all.  I might as well get the worst one out of the way so I can move onto other zones that are easier to traverse.  I feel like more than likely Southern Thanalan will be another problem child, however you can pretty much live in the north or the south either one and grind plenty of FATEs since that zone is so diverse level wise, there is not a ton of overlap between the events.  Additionally it seems like there is almost always a FATE up in the Amalja Beast Tribe daily area.  Here is hoping  that I will manage to get this ATMA tonight and be able to move on, while still keeping some of my sanity.  However my mission is set, and I will get my damned Atma relic upgrade.

#FFXIV #RelicWeapon

Carried to Greatness

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

ffxiv 2014-08-07 21-02-33-014 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.

ffxiv 2014-08-07 23-19-55-252 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