September 2013 - Page 8 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Good afternoon folks… I have been a horrible slacker this morning and am just now sitting down to blog. Quite honestly… I feel like crap again… even more so than I did yesterday morning. The allergy thing is kicking my ass… right now my lungs and head feel like they are full of concrete. I rolled out of bed around 9 am and have been moping around the house since. Essentially it feels like the seasons are all jacked up… this is the way I normally feel mid July.

State of FFXIV

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I am just starting off this post with a reminder… that the current state of Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is bad. The game is fully playable and really damned enjoyable if you can make it into game. However at least once a night one of us gets essentially permanently locked out for the evening. Making it through the login tries as shown above takes brute force and luck. This weekend has honestly been far worse than anything since the last night of the head start. The lobby server and JP and EU/US realm lists are taking a dump on a regular basis, so it is by sheer luck that any of us are making it in to play the game at all.

So once again… I highly suggest that you DO NOT BUY THE GAME YET. Give it a month or so, right now Square seems to be working on fixing things… but they are doing so at a glacial pace. Supposedly we will have a all realms maintenance on Wednesday to add resources to the servers. The bad thing is that essentially it is happening during primetime for the United States. I hope that this remedies some of the issues, but they could have done much better timing wise. Considering like 90% of the players are in EU/US… timing it in a way as not to convenience the Japanese players only further cements my believe that Square in general could give zero shits about the US/EU player base as a whole.

I have heard through the blog and twitters verse that people are hunting from store to store trying to find a copy. Seriously… save yourself the headache and wait until they restore digital sales. We each have our preferred methods for getting through the login lottery. Yesterday evening I set up my “spam 0 over and over” macro and used the time to clean my office and break down a few dozen Lego models into parts. As I was finishing up and cleaning the top of my desk with a wet wipe I got through. Others seem to try for 30 minutes and then go off and do something else. Whatever the method is… you are far better just waiting until you don’t have to jump through the egregious hoops.

Bowl of Embers

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One of the big problems right now in the game is there are a large number of absolute bottlenecks that prevent you from moving forward. The first of these is the “Bowl of Embers” quest line that leads to an instance. I am going to try my damnedest not to spoil anything, because the instance is really damned cool and feels extremely epic. However you have to do it with a well balanced 4 man group. Once again we have the same problem in FFXIV as we have always had in the games leading up to this point. DPS is simply more popular than Tanks and Healers, and since leveling a healer is fairly difficult… they are FAR rarer than tanks are.

As a result there are literally hundreds of players bottlenecked by not being able to get this quest completed. The most jacked up thing about it is… you are offered no more quests ANYWHERE until you finish this one. I got my way to the quest, and then continued leveling as I didn’t have a guild group handy. I managed to push my way from 15 to 20 doing nothing but my hunting log quests and guildleaves. I thought the game got super sparse never realizing that I was being held back by not having done the Bowl of Embers.

Upon completing this one quest… there were quests everywhere waiting on me. One of my friends decided to take it upon himself to queue as a healer one night while we were all out questing. One poor thaumaturgist had been waiting in the bowl area for 3 hours… not realizing she could leave the area and continue playing the game while queued. So she had literally been just sitting there waiting on the queue to pop all that time… getting more and more frustrated as each hour passed. So far this is the worst thing about the game play that there are roadblocks like this every so often that halt not just the main story… but ANY questing.

Warrior Get!

My focus of late has been two fold… firstly to get to level 30 Marauder so I could do the Job Specialization quest and become a Warrior. Secondly it has been to get far enough in the storyline to unlock the Haukke Manor dungeon. That is another odd thing about this game… you can’t queue for a dungeon until you have unlocked it through the main storyline. Essentially the other players have apparently had more playtime than me and the other tank. So we have had a guild group just waiting to do Haukke Manor but no tank to do it. A few players have risked pugging, but the vast majority of us really only care to group with guild members.

So as a result I have felt a certain internal pressure to level through the quest chain as fast as I could so I could start tanking this instance for people, as it appears to be another logjam in the storyline. One of the weird things about taking a job is that you gain one really powerful effect upon getting it… but end up giving up your ability to cross class other than from two specific lines. So essentially a Warrior can only gain cross class abilities from Gladiator and Pugilist. This sucks a little bit because I had a really nice survival and slow ability from the Lancer line.

Right now my next plan is to focus on leveling my lancer for a bit, because I would really like to get it to 30 so that I can have a second job by picking up Dragoon. That way I would have both a dps and tanking job that I could fall back on for alternate dungeoning. The only negative is that while leveling the lancer I will essentially have to focus on running fates and guildleaves as I have already completed most of the quests available. To some extent I wish there were a number of repeatable quests available that you could do regardless based on your current class.

Daedalus Returns

Another really cool thing that happens at 30 is you unlock the ability to turn your riding chocobo into a battle companion. Essentially they can take up the role of healer, dps or tank and become similar to the mercenaries in the Everquest games. Of course you forfeit the ability to ride them as they are battling beside you, but it allows you to tackle more difficult encounters solo as you bring your own little duo along for the process. They level as you fight with them, and you use this to purchase abilities. Far as I can tell you can eventually teach them all of the three stances abilities.

Summoning them costs a Gysahl Green, which is the traditional Final Fantasy Chocobo food of choice. I am going to have to figure out which vendor sells the greens so I can buy a big stack. You get the first one as part of your quest chain. So far my Chocobo only knows the first level heal, but I literally just got this ability before coming downstairs to force myself to blog. The game really has so many little hooks that make you care about it. It reminds me at times of Everquest 2 in the number of intricate systems it has behind the scenes that it takes awhile to find. This game screams WoW clone at first viewing… but the more I get into it, the more rich it is.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to bang out a blog post and keep my one post a day streak up. Tomorrow I will be returning to the normal scheduled early morning posting. Overall this extended weekend has been a really odd case. I figure no one is likely waiting with baited breath to read my posts anyways. More than likely folks will catch up on their RSS readers after the long holiday weekend. I hope you all have had an excellent one, and I hope you keep my friend Sylladora in your thoughts. I just found out she is having to put down her dog this weekend, and it is always extremely rough to lose a long companion like that.

Altoholic Cure

One of the interesting things that FFXIV seems to have made me finally understand is that I am not in fact an altoholic. Now if you look at the long history of me and games… you will see many screens that look like that filled with multiple max or at least high level characters. In Rift for example I have a 60 warrior, 57 rogue, 51 cleric and multiple 20 something’s scattered out along multiple servers. You would immediately think that I am in fact an altoholic… but recently a series of games have proved this otherwise.

One of the things that has proven the most tantalizing for me about The Secret World and now Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is the fact that I can literally have one character and do everything in the game on it. One of the frustrating things about playing alts for me has been that I did not always take everything I had acquired from one character and carry it forth into the next. I hated the feeling of starting over on achievements and mounts and pets etc. So when I started playing The Secret World, it was completely mind-blowing that I literally could have one character that could do anything at all in the game.

Multiple Roles

I have come to realize that I don’t start alts because I necessarily care about playing another character. This should have been clued in by the fact that in WoW every single human character tended to have the exact same appearance. Belghast and Belgrave look exactly the same… minus the fact that Belgrave has the nifty Death Knight glowing eyes thing going on. I end up starting new characters because I want to fiddle with new mechanics. So much of the appeal of Rift to me has always been that I had up to 9 saved specs per character and could switch between them at will to fit my current mood.

Final Fantasy XIV is proving to be the ultimate distraction at the moment, because I can play every class and do every tradeskill on one character. It is not only supported, it is in fact suggested because you open up the maximum number of possibilities with cross class actions by doing this. To some extent it reminds me of the way Horizons was in the ability to freely switch between classes at will. Horizons is one of those games that you either loved or you hated… and for me I mostly mourned the potential the game had. My main character was a Reaver, which was an advanced class that required I believe 20 warrior and 15 spiritualist. Then in addition to that I poured on 24 levels of Cleric so I could have some cross class healing, and 15 levels of Mage so I could have access to all the elemental weapon buffs.

The way the game worked is when you were playing another class, you could carry with you 1/2 of the levels worth of spells. So at 24 cleric, I would use up through level 12 healing spells on any other class I chose to play. This lead to some really open ended gameplay that I loved… I could build my own class of sorts by picking up the abilities that I liked best from each of the other classes. Granted they gimped you slightly by doing this… making your xp gain go drastically slower based on your number of classes. I did love however playing a character that was in essence a jack of all trades… and not limited to only one specific role. Post Horizons this has been a concept I have missed greatly, and what I believe has lead me to rolling tons of characters trying to reclaim that freedom.

Class Freedom

One of the things that feels the coolest while playing Final Fantasy is that each of us have multiple roles that we are actively or semi-actively leveling. For example my character is 27 Marauder, but I also have 18 Fencer, 16 Gladiator and 6 Thamaturgist. Instead of running dungeons last night with our main spec we realized that we had a pretty solid group composition with our secondary specs. So instead of tanking, I switched to dpsing as a fencer, and we had two arcanists that both served the role as part time dps and part time healer… letting someone who is traditional dps try out his tanky marauder. We went back and re-experienced the lower level dungeons and had a blast doing it.

The most awesome thing about this is… as you are tanking on your main spec… you can acquire those drops that would have been excellent for another class but would end up rotting on the ground of a dungeon somewhere. This was always something that stuck in my craw as a tank. I didn’t mind being needed in the specific role, but I always hated seeing gear that would have been awesome for an alt rotting on the corpses of bosses because no one in the instance needed it. I always longed for a way to pass that gear along from my main down to an alt and see it go to good use. I personally hate seeing gear sold or disenchanted… I love seeing it go to use regardless of WHO can use it.

So as a result… as I am playing my main spec I am picking up quest rewards that I can use later for various other classes in the game. Likewise there is never a case where I don’t have access to my full compliment of mounts or pets or other cosmetic goodies. All of this is why that Final Fantasy XIV is turning out to be way more compelling for me than I ever expected going into this. Originally I thought this was mostly a game I would play occasionally because I had some friends playing it. Instead I am finding a game that is so much better than it has any right to be based on the past track record Squaresoft’s MMO failures.

I find myself looking forward to each little milestone in the game, and likewise looking forward to switching weapons and leveling my little lower level classes. When you switch roles, you have access to various cross class abilities from each. So as a tank I can cherry pick all of the various survival abilities so that my Marauder has 4 “Oh Shit” buttons I can press in an instance. Likewise as a DPS I can cherry pick abilities that will either increase my survival or increase my dps. While you don’t have as much freedom as you did in Horizons, it still feels the same… that each of your classes is making every other class you play better in the process.

Wrapping Up

Well I had no clue I was going to write a love song for the class system in FFXIV before I started… but now that I did it makes sense. That is the one aspect of the game that I find the stickiest so far. It is making me really wish that I could have a Warrior, Cleric, Rogue and Mage all in the same character in Rift even if it meant having to pay for adding the additional classes. Anyways I hope you all are having a great Sunday and that you have a great rest of the Labor Day weekend.