samurai

Orthos and Pink Beans

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Hey Folks! I did not make it terribly far last night but spent most of my evening in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been fighting some sort of unnamed crud so when my wife decided to head to bed around 8:30 to read, I decided to follow and wound up falling asleep pretty rapidly. I’ve been avoiding the desire to roll a new character in Path of Exile because I know there are a series of short events coming up starting this week, and I don’t want to burn myself out. Also, I have already made seven functional builds this league and I am uncertain what I might want to build after those. So as a result I had the intent of working on the Main Story Quest but wound up fiddling around with Eureka Orthos instead on my Samurai.

I got the first twenty floors done but only because my friend Donald Serrot took pity on me and queued. For whatever reason this version of the Deep Dungeon does not seem anywhere near as popular as the previous ones. I guess for starters… it is way more punishing with the mechanics having several AOE attacks that I found out just straight-up one-shot you. The boss fights as well are significantly more challenging than a Deep Dungeon tends to be. I’ve got no idea why the team decided to go in this direction, but it is somewhat of a bummer given that I could not get the last part of the dungeon at all last night and finally gave up after the two folks who seemed to be queueing along with us bailed. Huge thanks still to Don for helping me out. The first queue… was over 50 mins so had I not gotten some help I likely never would have gotten it going.

This morning I noticed that the Fall Guys collaboration started in the Gold Saucer. This introduces a new area called the Bluderville Square that is completely decorated in they Fall Guys style. What this introduces is a new queued zone where a bunch of players complete to get through all of the Fall-Guys-inspired obstacles and win the crown. If you have ever played Fall Guys it proceeds very similarly, where each round culls the total number of contestants until the final round crowns a single winner for the event. The cool thing is that even if you fail miserably like I did… you get some MGP and Fall Guys event points so that eventually you will be able to purchase whatever you want from the event.

There is a whole slew of items available for the currency tied to the event. You can check out the full listing on the Fall Guys event page. I think I probably want to at least pick up the two minions the Pink Bean and Pegwin, but I am not sure what else really interests me. Getting eliminated in the first round earned me 50 points so even if I continue to failboat this miserably I can chip away bit by bit on getting some of the rewards. If nothing else this event seems to be a good source of bright primary-colored dyes so if you are inclined it might be something to stock up on. There are housing items, but I am uncertain that I want to decorate my home to look like an obstacle course.

Even in the case of failing out miserably… 680 MGP seems like a reasonable reward. I am wondering if there is a daily cap on how many times you can attempt the event. You could in theory fail out pretty quickly and then go about your way queuing for another round. I will probably do some testing around this to see if I hit some sort of cap at some point. I don’t spend a ton of time in the Gold Saucer, but it was fun enough to try at least a few times. I suck at jumping puzzles so this is not really down my alley. It is cool to see something weird like this go into the game though.

AggroChat #308 – Dance Battle Time

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

This evening we record an entire show where we basically talk about three games.  The first of these is Ooblets which came out this week in early access and how it is a blending of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Pokemon and a Card Battler.  From there we talk about Ghosts of Tsushima and how it presents Samurai gameplay in a new high fidelity light.  Additionally we talk a bit about Kurosawa mode which offers you a unique black and white/film grain way of playing the game.  Finally Bel talks about his adventures being a post apocalyptic fedex driver in a world seemingly run on twitter likes…  aka Death Stranding.  He talks a bit about the odd social aspect of the game where other players can only have a possible positive impact without ever causing any negatives.

Topics Discussed

  • Ooblets
    • Early Access
    • Dance Battles
  • Ghosts of Tsushima
    • Ghost Mode
    • Samurai Mode
    • Kurosawa Immersion Mode
  • Death Stranding
    • Beautiful World
    • Interesting Social Mechanics

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Leveling DPS is Butts

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One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character.  One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal.  When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip.  Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story.  As always I leveled my Warrior first because well…  like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission.  There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best.  However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up.  You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job.  The only problem there is…  quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest…  is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

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Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life.  There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible.  Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear.  When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time.  Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61.  There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder.  There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner.  My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough.  Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished.  I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it.  I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded…  much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

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I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage…  I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story.  My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete.  Unfortunately…  these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit.  I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE.  Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing.  In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves…  but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood.  There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs.  I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening.  However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar.  There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals…   they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

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If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot.  You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70.  However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up.  Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon.  Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes…  with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes.  If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum.  However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all…  it was noticeably dragging.  Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy.  At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there.  I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1.  Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again.  This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company…  because leveling DPS is butts.