Heroic Ogron

Bonding of House Noye

ffxiv_01012015_201417 When the 2.45 patch went into Final Fantasy XIV they added a nifty new feature called the Eternal Bond ceremony.  This allows players in game to get hitched in an instanced ceremony that they can invite all of their friends to.  I’ve talked about my friends Ayla and Joren Noye before, and they’ve made several appearances in photos at least on this blog.  So I was pumped when I received an in game mail message with a bunch if invites to their Eternal bonding ceremony.  For some reason I had it stuck in my head that it was at 5 pm my time, but when I logged in about 4 pm to prepare for the festivities I noticed the invite said 7 pm instead.  My heart sunk as I realized that it was going to conflict with my raid group in World of Warcraft.  Since neither were on, I sent my apologies and the spare invites back to them just in case they needed to hand out more copies.

ffxiv_01012015_200523 Thankfully Rae and Ashgar attended the ceremony from our free company, and Ash took lots of photos.  I have to say Squeenix did a really good job with this ceremony design.  I’ve seen similar “wedding” features built into other games but the look of this one is really magical.  I feel horrible that I missed it, but at least I was able to see it thanks to all the awesome screenshots.  I will have to give my apologies in person to Ayla and Joren…  but I think they actually read this blog as well.  So I am sorry that I missed the proceedings but it looked beautiful.  You both are really awesome individuals and are part of what make FFXIV a fun place to be.  Thanks for including me in the proceedings, just sucks that I could not attend.

Heroic Ogron

Wow-64 2015-01-01 20-37-12-25 In general this week of raiding has been a rough one.  All things considered we honestly probably should have just taken the week off.  That said we did manage to make significant progress.  While we struggled Tuesday night, we managed to get all of the bosses down that we had downed previously, opening up last night for trying something new all night long.  Since our DPS has increased significantly we set our sights on the Twin Ogron encounter, which other than the RNG elements is apparently not that much more difficult than Kargath.  RNG is specifically the problem… there were a few times where I took deaths to a horrible venn diagram of fire.. or the shield charge would go in the wrong direction.  All of these are in part because we were missing key individuals that normally play specific roles in this fight…  but we struggled through and managed.

After what felt like a dozen or so attempts we had that click moment when everything seemed to go perfectly.  The biggest frustration with the fight is always the fire.  While there are ways to mitigate the horribleness of the RNG by placing the bosses where we place them…  this still doesn’t take care of things 100% of the time.  The axes still go down in strange places, and the flames can pin players into a corner.  The problem is on heroic…  the fire is really really bad.  There was one point where I ended up having to take a double stack… popped enraged regeneration, shield wall, and last stand and STILL ended up dying to the fire.  I feel like this is going to be one of those fights that is never quite on “Farm” status, at least not on heroic.  Too much can go wrong in too short a period of time… dealing way the hell too much damage.  That said for a very rough week I am damned proud of the team for downing yet another heroic boss.

A Day of Huntering

Wow-64 2015-01-02 10-00-45-84 Other than raiding the majority of my day was spent playing Lodin my hunter, and working my way through the quest content.  This time around I had some very specific goals.  When I leveled my Deathknight I jumped every two levels to the next zone.  This time I am doing something similar, expect in two key zones…  firstly I wanted to make sure I had gained enough faction in Talador to get to Revered with the Exarch.  Now that I am moving into Spires of Arak, my goal there is also spend enough time to be able to hit Revered with the Arrakoa.  This way I can go to Ashran and purchase two trinkets to bring my overall gearscore up a bit.  This was something that I could not do on my Deathknight and ultimately I had to get trinkets from my Garrison to bring up my ilevel.  Remember my entire goal here is to be able to hit 615 as soon as I can so that I can queue for LFR and start getting access to easy epics.

The only real problem with skipping content is that you are also skipping followers that you can use in your garrison.  Lodin thankfully has quite a few, and it will be a bit before I build a barracks…  so for the time being I can only have 20.  Thankfully there are a couple of easy ones like Tormack and Blook that I can pick up along the way.  So far I am really enjoying playing Lodin but it is very hard to stay focused.  Every time I turn around I am killing beasts to farm leather… which I can ultimately do for hours.  This is a very faffy character, so it is hard to stay on task and keep pushing the questlines forward.  I guess that is in part why this character has appealed so much to me while playing around on break.  Since my life very much right now is all about faffing around…  it seems like the ideal pairing.  My hope is over the next couple of days I will manage to push through to 100 and finish the character off.  It will be nice to have access to a hunter since they are still doing so much damage.

The Gospel of Faff

The importance of pee

I just thought the sub heading would be humorous, but really it heralds some good news.  Yesterday my Grandmothers kidneys started working again.  Apparently when the body is dehydrated they completely shut off.  The body is all “nope!” no one can have any moisture at all.  This apparently was the last crucial step before she was mostly out of the woods.  She is still in pretty bad shape, but they have been waking her up periodically to make sure she is responsive.  They are keeping her mostly sedated however so she will sleep and rest.  All of the hospital staff have been impressed with just how much of a fighter she is.

So I want to thank all of you for your thoughts during the last few days.  This is the woman who at least gets half of the credit for raising me to be the person I am today.  I didn’t go to daycare, I went to Grandmas house, because she was local and available… and more importantly willing.  We’ve always known she is strong, but this whole episode just proved that to any shadow of a doubt.  So while we are not in the “all clear” yet, we are probably up to a 70% chance of her making it out of this little episode unscathed.  I am sure she will need some therapy after laying in bed for several days immobile.

The Gospel of Faff

This word has been in my vocabulary since I believe high school but I don’t really know how exactly I picked it up.  So when I encountered the Godmother of Faff, I latched onto it with both arms to represent a certain game play style.  However the more I use it, the more it seems to draw confusion among my friends.  Sometimes it gets misread with a certain “self flagellating” connotation, or if you are Scary you apparently read it as some kind of shorthand for flatulence.  So I thought I would spend a bit of time this morning clearing the air about all things faff.  Since this is essentially British slang, I felt we had to go to the official source…  the Oxford dictionary.

image So there is the definition, copied and pasted via greenshot from the oxford dictionary website.  The thing is…  this leads one to believe that it is a bad thing.  I tend to take a much more zen approach.  “Faffing about” is just another in a long line of words used to describe enjoyable but often purposeless activity.  I’ve used many versions of this over the years.  I’ve “piddled” and I’ve “dinked around” and occasionally “goofed off”.  I had a bit of an odd childhood, in that my mother to some extent lived vicariously through me.  She wanted me to do all the things she always wanted to do… but never could afford.  So as a small child I was drug through a series of activities like piano practice that I had no real interest in, but felt no less obligated to do.

As a result I felt like I never got to just be a kid, without purpose or direction.  When I was allowed that time I savored it.  Now as an adult, I am really cautious about anything that places undue burden on my “free” time.  While I feel like Godmother and I probably use the term “Faff” in different ways, our viewpoints are very complimentary.  For me “Faff” represents a play style of allowing myself to get lost in the minutiae of little things that happen along the way.  It is a freedom of not having to have a goal or a focal point for the evening.  That I have permission to log into a game and “mess around” for awhile without necessarily having a tangible reward at the end.

HDPlacard_BelFaffsAbout_720 So as I have begun to stream my game play when possible, I have brought this same idea there as well.  I am not doing something important or grand, but instead just doing what I always do.  I log into mumble, into a special channel called “Bel is Streaming” and then proceed about my normal business and what happens… happens.  Sometimes I do something really interesting, other times I just piddle around leveling.  Last night for example I recorded one of my normal Onyxia and Tempest Keep clear nights, where I run through characters through Onyxia and the two that can solo Tempest Keep all in search of mounts.  Sure there is purpose there, but it is not the kind of big overarching and soul crushing purpose that you feel forced to do it.  Before last night it had probably been three weeks since my last mount farm night… and I am perfectly okay with that.

As is the way with Faff

eso 2014-02-15 11-33-23-02 I had every intent last night to play some more Heroes of the Storm, however that simply did not happen.  Sometimes you get caught up in doing the things you are doing and next thing you know… it is bedtime.  Part of the “Gospel of Faff” is accepting that this is going to happen and being somewhat okay with it.  Some people thrive on goals, and lord knows I have a bunch of little ones.  But for me it is the journey that is so much more important than the destination.  I think in part that is why I have enjoyed The Elder Scrolls online so much.  The game presents before me a whole bunch of rabbit trails that I can get hopelessly lost following.  It is arranged in a way that keeps me from being able to “quest efficiently”.  WoW has made me really good at gathering a bunch of quests, and doing them all before returning to the hub to get more.

The freedom to wander around and get lost in the process of leveling is a really awesome thing.  While World of Warcraft is a really on-rails experience most of the time, I am trying to embrace ways to play it where the objectives don’t matter nearly as much as the journey.  This is far more about my mental state while playing, than what I am actually doing.  However I am trying really hard to always endulge the rabbit trails.  If my addon alerts me to a rare mob in the vicinity…  even if I am on my way to some important objective I try and pull myself from the path to try and track the foe down.  As a result I end up seeing things I may have never seen before in the process.  I had spent most of my time playing WoW trying to avoid the quagmire that is Kalimdor, and now I feel like I am trying to embrace it.

Faffing in the Fjord

Losing Time

It seems that no matter what I do to prepare for it, Daylight Savings time still kicks my ass every year.  This go round I purposefully started trying to get more sleep from about Thursday onwards, in an attempt to get used to the earlier bedtime.  Saturday night I even started referring to things based on EST instead of my normal CST time… to attempt to trick my brain into thinking that was normal.  So last night… I hoped above hope that my brain would be able to power down and go to sleep at a decent hour.  But instead there I lay in bed trying to get to sleep.  I ended up taking some nyquil and playing Bravely Default in bed until I fell asleep.

I am sure Daylight Savings time made sense when we were primarily an agrarian society, however I have no clue why it still exists.  Why do we as a country do this to ourselves each and every year.  To be honest I do like having a lot more sunshine in the evenings, but since that is the case why not stay offset an hour permanently instead of shifting back in the winter?  I mean the days are so short that it really doesn’t matter at all in November if we offset back or not.  For whatever reasons even falling back and gaining the hour still seems to screw with my internal systems.  I realize that bitching about it will do exactly nothing…  but it makes me feel better.

Faffing in the Fjord

So yesterday thanks to the time drain I was feeling a little bit out of sorts.  I got up like I do every Sunday morning and played through my Steampowered Sunday game pick for a few hours, then wrote my review of sorts over it.  This week was of course Brutal Legend, and if you were interested in winning your own copy… make sure you click the extremely obnoxious vote here button at the bottom of the review.  Once I got finished up with all of that silliness I began the massive chore of laundry for the week.  Actually in truth it had been a few weeks since we had done laundry, so I knew I needed something that I could walk away from and check on the loads periodically.  Generally speaking solo leveling fits the bill perfectly.  I am not sure exactly why, but I decided to fiddle with FFSplit and try and figure out this live streaming business.

Normally speaking I always end up leveling my characters through Northrend in Borean Tundra.  While it is extremely boring and grindy, it just seems quicker.  The zone itself is laid out in more of a hub and spoke pattern and you can progress your way through the zone without a ton of travel time.  However since I had not done so in a really long time… I opted to move my little dwarven Warlock to Howling Fjord.  A few hubs into the zone I remembered why I stopped doing this…  so much travel time.  I figured I would share my pain by streaming it so the world could see.  The above video is not terribly interesting, but is me spending my afternoon… or at least roughly two hours of it going through the paces of leveling a warlock in Howling Fjord.  You can watch me playing video games badly!

More than anything I used this as a way to test how well streaming directly to Twitch.tv works, and then using that to upload to Youtube.  So far so good, but I kept my microphone muted during this trial.  I was feeling fairly antisocial, but at some point soon I hope to livecast something meaningful.  I still need to figure out a good size to put my postage stamp video feed into the stream.  At this point I am juggling back and forth between 320 wide and 240 wide, but before I do this for real I want to pretty up my twitch stream a bit with some artwork.  Right now this is just stock FFsplit with no real alterations.  However credit goes to Scopique, who told me this would be a much easier way to record videos…  it just took me months and months to actually fiddle with it.

Belazon Lives!

Diablo III 2014-03-08 18-41-05-93 The other big thing to come from this weekend is that I managed to push my Barbarian to 60 in Diablo 3.  The irony of this is thanks to a certain drop, I have completely shifted focus in the way I play it.  Previously I had been all about dual wield and cleave, using rend to soak back up some health.  However it was either Friday or Saturday night that I got a truly amazing drop that caused me to completely change my build for it.  I ended up getting the level 59 version of the “Three Hundredth Spear” to drop, which buffs my throwing damage by 55% and my ancient spear damage by 59%.  So as a result I completely rearranged my abilities to be able to use this and now I am more of a hoplite build with spear and shield.  Funny how my pure melee class ended up turning into a ranged.

Overall it works extremely well, and I can throw out some truly silly damage on a boss fight.  At one point Saturday the trio shown above were working our way through the various bosses in the game, letting Ashgar get the achievement for killing them all wearing nothing but blues.  At this point I was using the Boulder Toss rune for Ancient Spear, and it was insane to watch the bosses health move significantly each time a boulder landed.  The only problem with this rune is that it changes the functionality of ancient spear significantly.  The thing I like the most about it is that it acts almost like a League of Legends skill shot, in that if you can line up a bunch of mobs in a “wave” you can burn through them quickly as your ancient spear will hit each of them in a row.

Diablo III 2014-03-08 22-42-21-30 I was never really a big fan of the Amazon in Diablo 2, but so far my Belazon build seems to be pretty enjoyable.  While on a “role”-bending trick, I decided to start a baby mage and attempt to go for the melee mage build.  While functional, it just doesn’t feel like a class I would really enjoy.  I don’t really like feeling like a glass cannon, and apart from a few shield abilities the class has really weak survival.  In my few minutes of playing with my friend Tibuant, I died several times… when I have maybe died twice in total on my Barbarian.  I think it might be a class that is enjoyable to solo on, because many of my deaths were simply because Tib and I were not really in sync while playing.  He would be off in one direction and I would be off in another, which always ended up with me getting swarmed.  I think until the Crusader actually gets unlocked I will mostly piddle around on my Monk and Barbarian attempting to get paragon levels.

Married at the House of Vacuums

Belgarde Keep

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-14 06-11-05-53 Over the last two days there have been a couple of significant patches to Landmark.  You can check out the patch notes herehere for more information.  The most exciting of the changes is the fix to the way trees/plants/rocks kept respawning on our claims with no real way to remove them.  In previous shots of my forest keep the overall view had been obstructed by a couple of giant trees.  Now you can see a fairly clear view of the place.  I have given up on calling it a temple, because really it no longer looks anything at all like a temple.  Instead I have officially renamed it to “Belgarde Keep”.  Last night I spent quite a bit of work starting to flesh out the details.  You can see in this image that we now have the wooden posts sticking out from each floor as though they were coming from the ceiling beams.  Additionally I have started replacing my main columns with ones that include some inset stucco.

Another really cool thing of note last night is that with the patches Sapphire and Ruby have been more sane and rational to collect.  In fact if you are lucky you can now find surface spawn nodes.  Over the course of a couple of these nodes I managed to gather up more of each gem than I had gotten to date allowing me to finally craft the Indigo Pick.  Of course I got a rather crappy one on my first attempt, but all the excess sapphires allowed me to craft another cobalt pick, and after a little bit of farming tonight hopefully I will make a second shot at the Indigo.  While they have reduced the amount of burled wood you need slightly to convert from raw to the craftable material…  this still seems to be the bottleneck in almost everything that I want to craft.  I made another attempt at a better axe last night and managed to get one just slightly faster.

At this point my focus over the next few days is to attempt to get a better Indigo pick, gather the materials for upgraded machinery and continue to work on fine detail for the keep as a whole.  I need to start gathering the tier 5 resources but to be honest I am not even sure what they look like at this point.  Right now the biggest thing I am not quite happy with in my keep design is the single pillar that supports the balcony.  I expect now that the tree is out of the way I will rework that design feature extensively.  I might try a curved balcony, I have ideas in my head on what that would be to craft but not sure exactly yet now to go about it especially since I would need to curve both the railing and the flooring.

Toxic Love

Wow-64 2014-02-14 06-28-16-80 Earlier in the week I posted about the ongoing Love is in the Air event happening right now in World of Warcraft to coincide with Valentines Day.  I had pretty much ignored the event until the last few days because in general, I queue for the dungeon each day and I walk away each day with nothing but a stack of useless Love Tokens.  In past years I have queued faithfully each day only to somehow miss getting any of the pets and mounts.  So this year I was not any more expectant of something cool…  but since everyone else was doing it I felt I should probably start running them each day on all 6 of my 90s.

Giant-chu-chu Finally last night my streak of nothing changed… at least to some extent.  While I did not manage to get one of the mounts, I did however get the toxic wasteling pictured above.  I realize it is just a ball of slime, but I find it far cuter than the other oozeling that I have.  This is one of the newer models and minus the insane eyes… it kinda reminds me of a ChuChu from the Legend of Zelda series as pictured on the right.  At least I feel like this years queueing was not a complete and total waste.  While I would love to get the a Swift Lovebird I simply did not start the event soon enough to gather up the needed 250 tokens.

norexmanningday

I have to share this image really quickly that @ManaBrownies posted over on twitter yesterday of ALL THE LOVEBIRDS.  The thing that tickles me the most however is not the fact that you have multiple love birds and mini pet versions… but instead their guild name.  I love that name so much, and if you don’t get the reference…  which is probably likely since it is totally esoteric.  I suggest you watch Empire Records, which oddly enough is on the long list of favorite movies.

Married at the House of Vacuums

In honor of Valentines Day I have another related factoid.  My wife and I were Married at the House of Vacuums.  Before we get to that point I have to explain a bit about our wedding in general.  All we ever wanted was a very simple wedding.  In college when we began planning it, we pictured this simple outdoor wedding with just the immediate family.  However over time this plan morphed to nightmarish proportions.  My mother took ahold of the guest list and started wanting to add everything under the sun, including my fourth grade teacher.

Then there was the fact that an outdoor wedding was simply not good enough.  Since I grew up catholic, apparently you are not really married in the eyes of the church unless it happens inside of a catholic church.  So she wanted us to have two weddings… the real outdoor wedding and then another smaller service in a catholic church so we were “legitimate”.  I have never been really big on rules and regulations, and there was no way in hell I wanted to have two separate weddings just to make some religion happy.  Especially one that I do not abide by myself and have not been a member of since I had the freedom to choose my own path in life.  She was getting entirely too involved in the process and planning something neither of us wanted.

Finally there was the issue of who to walk my wife down the isle.  She is from a split household, one that split years after her birth.  So she had two complete households and as a result two fathers.  Her step dad was a quiet and unassuming man, and would do literally anything for her… often making excuses to plan a trip up to college to come see us for the silliest reasons.  Her biological father at that point in her life was not terribly engaged, and while I have come to love him… was very pushy and brash.  So her step father would have been quiet about it, but wounded for life if he did not get to walk her down the isle.  Whereas her biological father would have made a grand scene likely disowning us if he was not the one to walk her down the isle.

image We had set and unset the date many times, but as the three ring circus careened off in a direction we were not willing to go with it, we decided that we needed none of it.  All that mattered was that we were together, and as a result we opted to elope.  That conjures visions of romantically running away to some fabled location, but in truth we simply managed to run around town and gather all the necessary things to be legally married in one day.  We found a little marriage chapel in town, that had an opening the next day.  While we were not technically married at the House of Vacuums, the marriage chapel we went to was around the corner in the same strip mall.  My cousins and our best friend at the time stood up for us as witnesses, and we had a nice simple wedding service presided by a female minister that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of any longer.

Parts of our family, namely my mother was I am sure pissed at me for years over robbing her of her big day.  However like everything else in our lives we managed to get married “our way”.  My wife and I are both very non-conventional and pragmatic, so eloping to the House of Vacuums was simply “our way” of dealing with the challenges at hand.  There has not been a single day I regretted our decision, and now I have an interesting story to tell.  At the end of the day that is worth far more to me than having been crammed into a tuxedo and forced to go through a series of events we didn’t really want in the first place.  At one point her biological father offered us a large sum of money to elope… but he never actually made good on that promise.  I guess it was a good thing we did it because we wanted to.