sohm al Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Gearing Game

July 8, 2015 by Belghast

False Starts

Yesterday I made an attempt to go to work, but ultimately was told to head home by my boss. Over the last few days I have been pretty much living on the couch with my leg slightly elevated and alternating icepacks on it. The problem being that I don’t exist like this in the real world, where sitting at a desk generally requires that your feet be on the ground. While I love the arrangement of my cube at work, it really does not allow for me to elevate my leg at all. Not surprisingly within an hour of being at work my knee was swelling something fierce. So I headed home and started the process of icepacks over again until it started to behave somewhat normally. The positive is however that the area that is actually swelling is rather small and contained as compared to the day the fall happened, so I guess I am recovering quickly.

The biggest problem, the one that effects this blog is the fact that my wrist has hurt an awful lot. After struggling through yesterday mornings post, I was pretty much typing one handed for most of the day. I wore a brace most of yesterday and as of this morning it is feeling much better. It is still extremely tender when I move my wrist too quickly or to any extreme of motion… but overall it is more functional. Hopefully this means I can return to normal typing instead of this frustrating one handed mess that I dealt with yesterday. Since it is also my “mouse hand” that is effected I have been surprised that really using a mouse doesn’t hurt much at all. I guess in general I am used to keeping my mouse sensitivity so high that I barely have to move my hand at all to send the cursor flying across the screen. Hopefully today will be a much better day and I will continue to mend quickly.

The Gearing Game

Like most players in Final Fantasy XIV, my life revolves around the acquisition of Tomestones of Law. To get a full set of “law” gear it takes roughly 3500 and they have given us many options on how to get them. Firstly there are three dungeons that reward 80 tomestones each, and an additional 40 if you can manage to catch someone who still has their first time bonus or “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it. In addition to that you get 100 tomestones for both a low level roulette and a high level roulette each day, and an additional 60 for a trial roulette. The one that surprises me however is that Expert Roulette is only worth 80, but I guess in theory it has a face value of 160 to 200 since you are getting stones from the dungeon proper as well. In order to get into Alexander, the raid that just opened players need to reach a combined ilevel of 170 which also happens to be the level of the tomestone gear. So in theory you need a full set in order to step through its doors.

Where you can cheat a bit is through those ubiquitous “Clan Hunts” that I have been using as filler leveling. It turns out all of the items needed to upgrade your gear from 170 to 180 come from Centurio Seals. Hopefully you have been doing these religiously because in order to get a full set of gear upgraded to the next step it is going to take a grand total of 2795 seals. Now granted you can hop on the hunt train like you could in the previous expansion and in theory grind this out in a weekend. Personally I happen to find the daily hunt mechanic rather relaxing, as I can log in… fly around the gorgeous zones and pick off the mobs one at a time. Right now I have four pieces of gear… chest, helm, ring, and weapon. Currently I have upgraded the weapon and ring to 180, and am saving enough hunt marks to upgrade the chest piece next. There will come a time when I stop messing with anything other than three star and elite hunt marks, but for the time being they also serve to help level my dragoon for the lower level ones.

Dragoon Dungeoning

Right now if there is a moment when I am not engaged doing something else, or tanking something that can gain me law stones… I am pretty much in the dungeon queue on my Dragoon. Right now the dps queue seems relatively manageable sitting around the 10 minute mark for “leveling” dungeons. As a result it is my hope to ride this queue for as many classes as I can manage. After running a couple of max level dungeons, I settled into a couple of quick runs on the dragoon who is now up to “Sohm Al” level. I have to say I find this pretty relaxing as well, because I can just sit back and poke things with a stick. I opted to go ahead and record my dungeon run to add it to the stack of dungeon videos I have on my youtube channel. I had not actually recorded any when I was not currently tanking, so it gives a slightly different perspective of the fights. I have to say I am really digging the “tribal” look that comes from Sohm Al. That helmet is freaking amazing, and is likely going to go in my glamour bin for future usage. At this point I am roughly halfway through 53 so I figure it will take two more dungeon runs to hit 54, and then five to six past that before I can do the next dungeon at 55. Embedding the video and cutting this post short today without a second paragraph.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

July 2, 2015 by Belghast

The Teamspeak Conundrum

Yesterday I spoke for a bit about one of the reasons why I have not streamed that often. Namely that I have friends who would prefer not to be broadcast over my stream, which means when I DO stream… I have had to wall myself off from my social network of friends by dropping down to the “streaming” channel. As a result there is only so long I can seem to go without popping back upstairs because I simply get lonely down there all by myself. Over the last year or so I have tried to figure out a set up that would work, to let me stream freely without the fear of broadcasting my companions. The defacto tool is Virtual Audio Cables, but folks have talked about it being cumbersome and the more I looked into it… and they started talking about setting up batch files to do this or that… it honestly scared me away. Honestly even the website seems a bit cludgy… so I kept looking for other solutions.

In the mean time I made attempts to make this process work using both Voice Meter and Breakaway Audio. Neither tool admittedly was designed to do this, but I had found guides online that supposedly allowed it to work. Problem being after setting everything up… it never seemed to work for me and there was extremely limited documentation on what I could do to tweak my setup. Last night I finally decided to dig down into Virtual Audio Cables, and found the guide embedded above. For starters… this is the point at which I complain that YouTube is the worst means of disseminating information. What I needed in all of these cases was a good blog post with annotated screenshots… all I could actually find were a series of haphazard videos. That said the above video, when followed actually produced the results exactly like I wanted. Last night I was able to stream practically all night long, while hanging out with friends… and not broadcasting a single thing they said. Additionally I bound a separate push to to talk key just for the stream so that folks watching the stream are not getting “half” of the conversation. The videos below are the results of my evening of streaming.

Sohm Al with Neighbors

The picture does not exactly go with this story… but oh well it is my prerogative. Solaria’s fishing outfit looks amazing, and it makes me want to level fishing. It does however show you that the Greysky Armada spends a ton of time milling around our guild house in The Mists. One of the things I love about this game is that we are constantly interacting with our neighbors. Last night Damai and I were talking in /say and a neighbor joined in, saying that he needed a dps and a tank for Sohm Al the second dungeon in Heavensward. Damai was already spoken for, but I offered up my own services as a tank. We queued and got in quickly and the below embedded video is the results of that run. I did a few stupid things, one of which that wiped the party but we had a great time running dungeons with people who were essentially complete strangers until I last night. I think it is awesome that you can have these casual run in acquaintances.

During the early days of World of Warcraft had this rich tapestry of social connections that reached into many of the other raiding guilds on the server. When I needed someone for an activity our raid was running, I could reach out into these social channels and draw upon dozens of different people who were milling around looking for something to do. Cataclysm however pretty much destroyed this network, and I have never really been able to build an equivalent in any other MMO… that is until Final Fantasy XIV. The people here on Cactuar seem to crave interaction with folks outside of their insular guild units. I am in my maximum number of linkshells and while folks get lost in their own little world… especially while leveling in Heavensward… I have still been able to draw upon them to fill groups. As we move into more “maintenance” mode this is going to become more true. The only thing I wish was that there was a way to create more “formal” guild alliances. There are a handful of free companies that we hang out with regularly, and it would be nice to have a shared channel of communication that was not “opt in” like a linkshell.

Another Titan Extreme

Wednesday is normally the raid night of our second guild static. Since the raid leader was not around he left it up to Damai to organize something… and while we did not really have the appropriate numbers to work on Second Coil of Bahamut, there were still a large number of folks needing Extreme Primals to unlock more content. I was asked if I “felt like tanking Titan Extreme” to which I replied “there is never a sequence of events that exists… where I feel like tanking Titan Extreme… but I will if you need me”. Titan Extreme is just one of those fights that is maddening on so many levels and I would place it among the five hardest fights in all of the A Realm Reborn content. That said I make it out in my mind to be far worse than it actually is, and at this point I have the dance memorized. This fight is absolutely about repeating the same sequence of actions over and over until the boss falls down, and as I have commented in the past… this is the sort of fight we fail miserably at. We are amazing at fights where we have to think on our feet and adjust to change… but doing this on Titan extreme ultimately ends up screwing the entire raid when it comes to Weight of the Land damage.

What I found amazing is just how challenging this encounter still is even though many of us were being downscaled to 50, and our gear downscaled with us. A Realm Reborn content is absolutely going to remain relevant for new folks that have yet to experience it. This makes me more happy than just about anything else in Heavensward. We still have a bunch of people coming up through the ropes that have not seen any of the 2.0 raid content, and my hope is that we can have an old school night where we work on this as a guild and get people through it. This is what I wanted from World of Warcraft all along… a way to run old content and make it still relevant to current players. There were epic experiences like Blackwing Lair and Ulduar that are just diminished because we overgear the shit out of it, and there is no real way NOT to be overpowered… other than making some alts and level locking them at fixed points in time. Granted we tried to do this once with a raid of level 60 locked alts… but it still was not the same. Final Fantasy XIV however seems to have figured out how to make it work, and I am damned thankful. We eventually got the kill and I edited out just that part in the above video.

Lord of the Hive

June 22, 2015 by Belghast

Fears for Launch

All in all it was a pretty great head start weekend, but there was one big problem that I fear is only going to get worse as we move forward to the official launch tomorrow. Right now the initial datacenter login procedure is having some major issues. What is happening is that several of the highest population servers are all on the Aether data center that I also happen to play on. When you attempt to connect to that data center, if it cannot find a slot the client times out… throws a nasty error and exits. This is like the worst possible way to handle this error, and my hope is that we see a patch soon at that at least takes you back to the start screen allowing you to attempt to connect again. Normally speaking it takes a half dozen tries to get past this screen before getting into the login server queue… at which point you have won and get to play the game. Last night I opted to switch machines and got stuck behind the login issues for roughly fifteen tries before being able to make it into the game. If we are running into these problems on a Sunday evening… I feel like life is going to be unbearable come Tuesday for the official launch of the game.

I love Square but sometimes they just make horrible design decisions when it comes to infrastructure. The way the client works is that you log in on the launcher, and then it launches the game passing in an encrypted token with your authentication information. As a result if anything goes wrong with the client, it essentially crashes back to desktop and to the launcher forcing you to log in again. If you have the mobile authenticator this means entering another one time password and beginning the entire process over again. If you remember the above image from the original launch of the game… and all the infrastructure issues we had to deal with. They all came from the fact that they launched the game without any form of a queue system. The positive is that they have fixed that issue and for the most part the game has been stable if you can get past the Data Center gates. I had some initial lag on the first day, but after that the game has been flawless… once you get logged into it. My hope is that with the launch of the game we see a small patch that changes how the client works, in that it no longer drops back to desktop on timeout errors, but instead allows you to attempt a reconnection.

Lord of the Hive

Yesterday was a big day of taking on new content, and potentially there will be some story spoilers here, so apologies ahead of time. When I wrote my last blog post I mentioned that I had unlocked the first trial and yesterday after dropping my wife off for her next trip I managed to attempt it. Ravana the Lord of the Hive appears pretty quickly through the story as being the primal associated with the Gnath, an insectoid beast tribe from the Dravinian Forelands. Instead of waiting around for a full guild group, I queued for it and managed to get a group relatively easily. In the group was a paladin tank that had apparently done the fight a few times, and helped us through the various pit falls. It was decided that I would end up tanking, since the Paladin was wearing mostly strength gear and since Ravana hits extremely hard. This fight like so many other primals has a hard wipe mechanic that if you do not dps down the adds fast enough a saber falls to the ground. Towards the end of the add phase he sucks the entire group up into a whirlwind and they take damage for each saber that is left on the ground in this fashion… in my experience more than one… maybe two is a full raid wipe.

Now with the Free Company I have, my point of view on dps is a bit skewed. Most of us rolled into this expansion in most of a full set of level 130 gear, and most of our dps do silly amounts of damage. We were flat out failing at the dps check mechanic, so I suggested that I go into my new deliverance stance and help with the adds. That seemed to make all the difference in the world as I was able to shred the adds pretty quickly in my new pseudo dps stance. We made it through the encounter, but took long enough to get a limit break three, and another limit break two… and the group was getting precariously close to a second “saber” phase. I didn’t realize our dps was that low, and honestly I walked out of the fight thinking it was just “that hard”. Later in the evening yesterday we walked into the encounter with seven of eight members of the group being from our free company. We did not manage to get a limit break three at all before he died, and during the add phase he didn’t even get a single saber to hit the ground. With that sort of dps… the fight was actually really easy, but I still am concerned about what the fight will be like on extreme mode.

Sohm Al

The second bit of content that I got to experience new yesterday was the dungeon of Sohm Al. You reach it very shortly after finishing the first trial encounter, and it happens to act as a gate keeper for your final Aether Current that you get upon completing the quest. Thankfully as soon as I got there in the content I had healers and dps ready to go with me, so I was able to get a full guild group for my first experience in there. I have to say I am really liking the dungeon design so far, in that they are extremely fun experiences to go through. They remind me very much of the last set of dungeons that they released as far as difficulty level. Additionally so far they seem to be dropping some interesting looking gear, that I hope to collect a full set of. The tanky set that comes from Sohm Al looks like the armor that the Lucia wears, so it might be my next appearance set that I wear for a bit. The new crafted gear that you get from quests however appears to be influenced from the Varlet set that comes from the previous 2.55 expert dungeons. I’ve expanded the number of retainers that I have once more, and now I am feeling less constrained about the awesome things that I am collecting.

When the game released originally I did what I always do in MMOs and tried to complete every single quest objective that it places in front of me. The problem being that in Final Fantasy XIV there are a fixed number of quests available for ALL of your jobs. This meant that after my very first job… I was forced to grind them up using FATEs and dungeons with zero quest support. This time around they seem to be flooding us with quests, but I am tackling them in a very methodical method. Essentially I am following the main storyline until I reach a level gate, meaning that I have to have progressed another level to get the next step. At this point I go back and start working my way through the side quests looking for any that unlock Aether Currents, and after I have completed those, I start doing a bare minimum needed to get to the next level threshold. The goal is that I save plenty of side quests for when I start working on my dragoon, and hopefully that eases that process at least a little bit. Last night I hit another level gate in the story content, but thankfully I have maybe an eighth of a level to go before hitting 55 and progressing again. I am not sure if we are going to raid tonight or not, but in any case my hope is to push through to the next level and continue the story, because it is getting really damned good.