Moggle Mog Extreme

Bowling Aftermath

It feels like I have been on this sequence of strange posts lately, so this morning I am trying to get back to the normal swing of things.  This weekend was spent mostly recovering from Friday night, and not in the way that you might think.  We had a “team bonding” outing with my co-workers to go bowling, and it had been about a decade since I had last attempted to hurl a large marble down a wooden plank.  We bowled three games, and it feels like that was one too many for me.  The biggest issue I had was the fact that the shoes were absolutely awful.  At some point they changed from what I knew as the standard bowling shoes to these strange velcro things that I never could get to fit well at all.  I have a size 13 shoe, but my foot is not all that terribly wide at least not anymore.

I am not sure if they handed me a wide width or if they just make them insanely wide to accommodate lots of different feet but in any case my foot was sliding around like crazy in them.  Normally I would be able to fiddle with the laces to get it tight enough to work for me.  However the hook and eye velcro strap mess just would not synch terribly tightly.  Leaving my foot sliding around in the shoe most of the night.  At the end of the evening I had what felt like a stone bruise and it still hurts to flex my toes.  Other than that the evening was rather enjoyable, apart from the fact that I have zero skill at bowling these days.  The absolute best game for me was around 100, and I am not sure if I got any strikes.  The thing I did learn is that I apparently throw the ball exceptionally hard.  The lanes had a miles per hour readout saying how hard you threw each ball, and most of my coworkers were in the sedate range of 10-13 mph.  The hardest I saw from me was 22.5 mph, and the slowest about 18 mph…  apparently I was angry at the lanes.

Moggle Mog Extreme

ffxiv 2015-03-28 20-39-39-78 From an accomplishment standpoint, the highlight of my weekend is definitely Saturday night before the  podcast when we pulled together a raid.  One of the fights that we held in almost a state of reverence is Good King Moggle Mog Extreme.  It seemed like the pinnacle of difficult fights because it was so different from the normal version.  Anytime we brought the fight up, it was quickly ushered away as being too much of a pain in the ass for us to try.  Maybe it is the progress in turn 9, or maybe it is something else… but when it was brought up this weekend there was more of a chorus of “might as well” than anything.  What makes Moggle Mog extreme so difficult is that you have a very limited window to perform the fight.  At roughly 90% Mog stops taking damage from player attacks.  Instead when any member of his “court” of Moggles dies, he saps his own life healing all Moggles to full health.

From a functional standpoint this means that you need to drop the health of every single Moggle before finally finishing one off.  Two make this more complicated there is a tank swap mechanic, and at certain points during the fight the White and Black Mages will cast a spell that needs to be interrupted by dealing a damage to them.  You get three rounds to lower Mog’s health, before he starts channeling Ultima, which will wipe the entire raid if it casts.  Mog is also immune to any damage while any member of his Moogle court is alive.  This means that on the final turn you have to make sure every single Moogle is down low enough to be able to finish them off in a few hits, and jump straight on the boss and burn like hell.  I am not sure if it was on our third or fourth attempt but we managed to get everything to work just right and finished the fight.  It feels extremely good to have beaten a fight that all of us had declared was “complete bullshit”.

Appleanche

ffxiv 2015-03-28 23-14-40-50 I spent most of the rest of my in game time alternating between two activities…  World of Darkness and Botany.  In World of Darkness I have once again had zero luck in getting one of the two pieces of Dragoon loot that I need to drop.  Right now I am down to the boots that drop from the very first boss, and the chestpiece that drops from the second boss.  This makes for some demoralizing gameplay late in the instance when I know I have zero hope of getting anything cool apart from maybe a puff of darkness minion.  Sunday is a notoriously bad day for running raids in any game, but it seems like this is doubly the case in Final Fantasy XIV.  The worst was a dungeon where we ended up having to fight the Cloud of Darkness boss five times before we finally did things well enough to win and get our loot.  That run was fraught with other issues however so it was not a huge surprise that we were failing at the end of the raid.  I spent more than my fair amount of time tanking adds a a Dragoon.  Hopefully I can get in tonight and maybe just maybe pick up a chest piece before the raid.

Saturday during the podcast and last night during the 90 minute season finale for The Walking Dead I worked on leveling Botany.  My goal with trade skills thus far has been to brute force my way to 25 without the assistance of leves, while I have my recruit a friend helm experience bonus.  Once I hit 25 I start working on leves allowing me to shoot up quickly from that point on.  During the podcast I managed to hit 25, and then last night I started working on leves in the South Shroud area.  Botany has one of the best named leves I have encountered called Appleanche where you are asked to pick a bunch of Sprite Apples from this grove within a set amount of time.  Not sure why but that quest just makes me happy, and overall there is something amazingly calming about harvesting flowers and chopping down trees in this game.  After a few hours of Botany I found it rather easy to get to sleep last night, so maybe that is something I should indulge at the tail end of the night every night.