October 2013 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Class of 2013 Rundown

October 7, 2013October 7, 2013 by Belghast

Sandman Spurned

I am having one of those mornings where I am progressively groggier as the day goes on, regardless of how much coffee I imbibe. Last night I had another case of simply being unable to shut off my brain. Upstairs at the keyboard I was falling asleep, but as soon as I went downstairs and laid down… all vestiges of sleep seemed to disappear. Eventually I got back up, and as a result I am paying for it this morning with a greatly decreased mental state. I wish I had some grand cure for not being able to think.

Newbie Blogger Initiative

nbilarge

We are just about to enter our second week of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and it seems to continue to gain momentum as we go. I really need to find the time to update my class of 2013 blogroll, because at the time I created it we only had 6 blogs in the program, and just moments ago I went to the forums and counted 18. So in the weeks time that the program has been underway that number has more than doubled. Remember it is not too late to join yourself. If you are interested please check out the website and post on the forums.

Class of 2013 Rundown

Check them out, add them to your news reader and potentially add them to your blog roll. Lets give these newcomers some much needed link love. I have been reading most of these and they are posting some good stuff. Additionally check out the NBI Info and Articles thread on the forums for a run down of all the sponsor topics that have been posted.

Much Ado About Mathosia

October 6, 2013 by Belghast

Much Ado About Mathosia

A few days ago I wrote about the upcoming zone event that had been advertised for Rift, called Mayhem in Mathosia. So I have to say it sounded really cool, major invasions going on for a few days in certain areas of the world. I did not have a chance to log in Friday night, but after running around town I logged in yesterday evening and participated for an hour or so. I have to say overall I am extremely disappointed. I expected there to be more going on than there actually was.

I wandered around Freemarch did several major invasions and quite honestly the entire time I was wondering why exactly they made a big deal about this. The invasions themselves felt absolutely no different than the ones that NORMALLY happen in Freemarch. As far as the loot that was supposedly available, I saw no sign of that either. The only thing out of the ordinary I managed to get were a bunch of gifts that you could give to the people of freemarch. I am guessing there is an achievement for giving these out, as it did not seem to really do much of anything otherwise.

Maybe after doing FATEs in FFXIV I have come to expect more out of an event, or maybe I had just worked this up in my mind to be something bigger than it actually is. In either case I found the experience overall disappointing. I fear that in order to see any of the loot they are touting you would have to literally grind events for hours… and the frustrating part there is there was a significant amount of time that passed between the spin down of one event and the start up of the next. The event so far seems like “much ado about nothing”, and while I am sure I will pop in and participate in some of the other zones… it is no longer a priority for me.

A Fitting End

Since the Rift event was a massive disappointment, I ended up back in FFXIV with the guild. For awhile now we have been trying to get eight players to 50 so we could finish out the storyline. The final arc takes place over the course of two eight man dungeons, and I really wanted to experience it with my guild members and freshly. One of our members got impatient and finished things up on his own, since he was the first 50… but he has generally been really good about keeping the surprises silent so we can experience dungeons together for the first time. Dallian was the last to reach 50 of the 8 man team, and as a result we spent a bit of time last night killing random stuff in Northern Thanalan to push him across the line.

The conclusion felt as epic as this game deserves, and the fact that it takes place over two eight man dungeons and an eight man trial only adds to this feeling. There has only been one other MMO that I have played that had anything close to an ending, and so far this game sets better with me. At the end of SWTOR you had a nice clean tie up… that went nowhere… nothing in the world changed around you. However in Final Fantasy you essentially have completed one chapter of the game, and are treated to a nice epilogue.

This would have been cool enough alone… but the moment you finish the sequence… you are given the NEXT set of quests to start carrying on AFTER the events of the finale. The peace you just fought for is only the opening act of a much more dangerous tale. The thing is… while you are playing out the finale, at no point does it feel like anything other than the end of a game. You are even treated with credits upon finishing the quest. It feels like finishing any other Final Fantasy game, but in the continued traditional of being the most inappropriately named series… there is nothing final about it.

I am really looking forward to seeing new content released. It has been rumored that the 2.1 patch will include a new 4 man, 8 man and the 24 man raid content. If we can somehow manage to keep our entire guild interested… we might someday be able to do the 24 man content by ourselves. At very least we seem to have a really well balanced 8 man team. The two 8 man dungeons were a bit of a letdown in one area however. The 8 man guild hest was extremely awesome in that there was no main tank… and as fights progressed both tanks were equally active. However in the two Garlean dungeons, there was definitely one main tank and one tank dealing with everything BUT the boss. After how equitable the division of labor was in the hest, it was disappointing to see it fall back to the old standby of main tank/off tank.

NBI2 – How I Blog

October 5, 2013 by Belghast

My Process

nbilarge

This morning I wanted to devote some time to write up a post as part of the Newbie Blogger Initiative. On the weekends I have a lot more time to allow a post to gestate before actually sitting down to write it. This morning is no exception, as at this point I have gone out and gathered breakfast, milled out in a game for a bit and finally have sat down to start writing. As I wandered around in game this morning I struggled to figure out just what I wanted to say, that might in some small way benefit someone starting out in the Newbie Blogger Initiative.

Then it dawned on me… maybe I should write about my process. I have written a bit about this in the past, but I figure it is always a decent topic to revisit. On April 26th of this year I embarked on what I like to call a Grand Experiment. The experiment is that I will blog something every day, and while I have done this a few times… I try my best never to use the calendar to schedule a post. I feel like the majority of this is an exercise in getting me to write something fresh every single morning. The results are mixed, I have a stable group of readers but for the most part I am not breaking down any walls as far as readership.

Self Hosting

I started my blog back in 2009 and made several conscious decisions when setting it up. I am a web developer by trade, but the last thing I want to do when I get home is do more web work. As a result I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, yet retain as much control over my own site as I could. I had previous experience using Blogger.com and WordPress.com and both felt extremely limiting. Since I have long had a really solid webhost it was an easy decision to roll my own WordPress.org install.

There are a lot of things you have to consider when rolling your own website. Firstly the security of your website. WordPress is without a doubt the most commonly used open source CMS on the planet… as a result there are lots of exploits floating around. This means once a day even if you are not posting, you need to log in and make sure none of your plugins or the core wordpress need updating. This is far more maintenance than most bloggers want to deal with, but doing so keeps you as safe as you reasonably can be.

The tradeoff for the hassle is that you can have more opportunity to brand your website and configure it in the way you want it to work. As a result I use a large number of off the shelf plugins as well as custom bits of code to build the site that exists today. As I said in the last post my blog has changed quite a bit over the years, it went from WoW Tanking, to General Rift, to the current game agnostic build. In all of these times I have not really changed the overall template for the site, just reskinned it. The template I am using originally was a generic WoW skin, and then over time I have mutated it to where very little of the underlying template still exists.

Composing

I’m using a little bit of blogception here, but this is a screenshot of me editing the post I am currently working on in Live Writer. Ultimately when I decided to start writing I wanted it to be as fool proof as I could get. On a daily basis I simply did not want to fiddle with anything… I wanted to be able to write up a post, post it, and get on with the day without a lot of tweaking. Early on someone suggested to me Windows Live Writer, and I have been using it ever since. If you are on Linux I know there are Drivel and Bloglio that work very similarly. Basically it is Microsoft Word for your blog.

When you first configure your blog in Live Writer, it pulls in all of the style sheets that you use for your posts. After this process when you compose in tool it looks almost exactly like the final post. The other nice thing about it is that it manages all the interaction with the WordPress media system, so inserting an image in livewriter with automagically create a thumbnail and a full size image and upload both of them to the media resources section of your blog. The feature I like the most however is the ability to do Word wrapped images extremely simple allowing you to definte the gutter for the image. Basically it is a desktop publishing software for blogging, and if you have ever used something like that it feels extremely familiar.

Content

Most mornings I have a thing that I want to talk about, so I just sit down to write whatever that thing is. However there are some mornings like this one in particular where I sit down at the keyboard and nothing comes out. Having a process in place for blogging when your ideas run freely is important, but even more so is having a process in place for how to recover from writers block. There are basically two things at my disposal that I use to help me through mornings like that.

Firstly I have my blog roll, and namely my RSS reader that contains my blog roll and some other industry sites in it. Personally I use Feedly, but so long as you have a resource to fall back on for reading. When in doubt react. Through the course of reading a few posts you should find something that peaks your interest enough to ramble on about it yourself. I think it is extremely important in this case to not only follow blogs that are like minded, but also follow blogs that almost always take an opposing view. It is hard to think of things to write in an echo chamber.

Secondly I keep a google doc going with ideas, snippets and various things that I think I might want to write about someday. I limit myself to only one post a day, and as a result there are often things left on the cutting room floor. Since I write early in the morning, it is pretty easy to forget what these other things are when you are under pressure to perform. Having a google doc ready and waiting for you to prune ideas from is a really good thing. I tend to add to the document whenever I think of something I might want to explore, and then when I use a topic instead of removing it from the list I cross it out… that way I can sometimes revisit old topics if I want to… and I know exactly which ones I have used in the past.

Writing Time

This was the hardest bit for me, was to establish a time when I was going to write no matter what. Most mornings I get up, shower, make coffee, and then it is writing time until I go off to work. I usually leave myself an hour or so to find a topic, write about it, publish it, and advertise it on social media. This has worked fairly well for me, and on the weekend I notice that NOT having a time limit, often causes me to dawdle around and not get things done as efficiently. Having a fixed amount of time, puts my brain under pressure… and I have always been able to perform better when the adrenaline is flowing.

This works for me… but you have to find what works for you. I have known many bloggers that wrote as soon as they got home from work, or wrote last thing before they went to bed. Any time works, but the important thing is that you reserve a bit of time each day to write. Even if you like to work on super complicated posts that take multiple days to finish… devoting a small bit of time each day will make those posts come easier. Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint… and it took me a long time to realize this. You have to put in place practices that keep you posting regular content rather than slinging out posts in short bursts. The one thing that I have learned… and had to learn the hard way… consistency is more important than content.

Tonberry Tactics

October 4, 2013 by Belghast

Not Enough Coffee

This is one of those mornings when I feel like there is simply not enough coffee in the world to make me out of this stupor. In part this is my own making. At 4:40 I woke up on my own accord, thanks to my very own bladder alarm going off… and then I decided it was an awesome idea to go back to bed… knowing that I would be awoken by the alarm at 5:30. Had I just gotten on up and proceeded with the day… I likely would be just fine right now. So instead I sit here staring at the screen trying to make thoughts coalesce into word form.

Today should be an interesting day for me. When I was younger I was part of my high school gifted and talented program. I feel as though maybe the entrance requirements were a little lax if they were willing to take me. The gifted and talented coordinator, that we lovingly referred to as Jaunamama fought hard to get us some truly unique experiences, many of which I suspect came out of her own pocket. One of these was the Tulsa Town Hall lecture series.

Essentially she would take two of us on the long trek to Tulsa to attend one of the lectures in the series, then make a grand day of it all. We would go to lunch someplace nice, and usually finish the afternoon with a tour of the Philbrook or something along those lines. For the last five years, I have worked across the street from the performing arts center without thinking much about it. This year however upon listening to the advertisements on NPR, something clicked and I signed up for the lecture series. Luckily I have a pretty awesome boss and he has filed this down in my PPR as “Personal Development”.

FATE Crack

A few days ago I complained about the Dark Devices FATE in Northern Thanalan, but to be truthful… once you reach about 45 the zone as a whole tends to be the best place to level. So as a result I have been spending quite a bit of time out there doing the various fates. There are a number of 25k-40k experience boss fates, one of which that drops a pet if you manage to get gold. So as a whole the zone is really worth while even if it did not have everyone’s favorite… Dark Devices. I guess to some extent… I understood why the fate was so popular but I never really understood its full potential until yesterday.

Over lunch I was working on leveling my Bard like I have been the last several days, and when I did the ubiquitous “BRD LF FATES” shout in zone, I got invited to be a part of a custom built dark devices group. Essentially the eight man group consisted of 3 White Mages, 3 Black Mages, 1 Bard for mana song, and 1 Paladin for flash. How the group works is a thing of terrifying brilliance… and totally relies on poor game mechanics. Essentially the mission at hand is for the black mages to spam attacks, the paladin to spam flash… and the white mages to cast regen on opposing players.

Regeneration Tagging

While this does not seem too heinous at face value… it gets there quickly. Apparently one of the ways that healing works is that when regeneration is ticking on a player, it causes aggro to be generated on the pull for the healer that cast it. So far that seems to be working as intended… it has worked that way in most MMO games. Where things go off the rails is the fact that apparently it also TAGS the mob to the healers party. This means by keeping regen up on opposing parties, you can essentially siphon off their kills and give your group credit. This is the king of all “dirty pool” maneuvers, and I do not condone it in the least… however this is so prevalent that if you have a white mage in your party… they are more than likely doing it.

When it works… it works insanely well. In Final Fantasy XIV there is the ability to chain kill mobs and each additional mob you kill adds a multiplier to the process. I believe you are initially given 60 seconds once the chain begins, and if the counter is low enough, each additional kill resets the counter back to 10 seconds. As a result a big AOE group can get some extremely high chains, but I believe eventually the multiplier caps out around 200%. During the lunchtime group… we managed to get a 354 uninterrupted chain… meaning after the first 20 or so of those… every single mob killed was worth +200% of its face experience value. As a result I made literally over 75% of a level on one single phase of a fate.

Regressive Gameplay

Dark Devices is a serious gimmick, and still one that I hope they break… because quite frankly it is a bit of an unfair advantage to those players that can get access to a good AOE group. That said… since it is not considered an exploit I am certainly going to benefit from it as much as I can. Yesterday at lunch I was level 45 and after a few more hours out in Northern Thanalan I am over halfway through level 49. Granted I have the insane post 50 xp bonus going on for my bard, but that is some seriously fast leveling. No wonder you see the same people out in the zone every single day farming the fate, over the course of a few weeks you could push almost every single class you had to 50. I did not start out there until around 44, and as a bard you really don’t have all the tools you need to be successful until 46. However I am seeing fresh 40s out there trying to make the fate work for them. The method if nothing else… is brutally efficient.

The thing that strikes me the oddest about this entire process is how much it reminds me of the original Everquest. Essentially I have leveled my Bard almost entirely through FATE grinding, and as a result that means sitting in a zone shouting for a group. This is essentially the same sort of thing I can remember doing so many times in the Dreadlands. Throughout the course of the night I would end up in multiple groups that would hunt mobs outside Karnor’s Castle, or various other key farm spots around the zone. If you by miracle ended up with an extremely well balanced group, you might even brave the railroad that was Karnor’s Castle itself. As much as you can solo in FFXIV, you can never beat the type of experience you can get with a party… especially while running FATEs.

I think to some extent it is this throwback to an earlier time… this regressive gameplay that has made the game so damned sticky for me. It is like going back and playing Everquest, but taking with me all the bells and whistles and perks of a modern MMO. Essentially the game is almost completely solo-able if you so choose to… but the group content is extremely good when it happens. My huge problem with EQ2 is that while the soloing is amazing, any time you get more than two players together in the same place it feels like a facerolling mess. Granted I have not actually played a lot of the Velious dungeon content, but even the big dungeons like Mistmoore have felt this way to me. FFXIV does an amazing job with the dungeon content in making it feel like it requires effort and planning to get through it.

Tonberry Tactics

A few days ago we took a group into Wanderers Palace and had some mixed results. Over the course of the dungeon run we figured out how a lot of the tactics worked, but simply ran out of time before we could formulate a winning strategy for the final encounter. We like to go into these dungeons completely cold, and figure out the boss mechanics on the fly rather than trying to rely on some guide to tell us how to do it. So since we failed to finish the dungeon, there were several of us who had been plotting revenge. Yesterday during the day, over IM we conspired to build a team to take on the challenge that night.

Overall I have to say the run went tons smoother, but primarily because we understood how the mechanics worked. We went through the dungeon essentially wipe free and that left us with worlds of time to distill just how to defeat the final encounter. After a few failed tries, we figured out the rhythm of the fight and managed to find a way to juggle the constant stream of adds, and the insane amount of damage the Tonberry King deals from his Grudge attack… that scales based on the number of adds you kill. As a whole the entire encounter felt like a giant tug-of-war match, trying to keep me alive as the tank, but keep the adds off the healer.

I didn’t get much from the dungeon other than the experience of running it, but I believe both our Bard and Dragoon walked away with some really nice upgrades. From the second boss a really nice chest piece dropped… but it was statistically identical to the one I received from my level 50 class quest. So I passed and let someone else pick it up as a greed item… though honestly if it is the same stat wise, it won’t be of much use to anyone. This is not the type of dungeon I want to run more than once a night, because it takes a lot out of you… however I enjoyed myself. Quite honestly there are not ANY dungeons that I really want to chain run, because even with the smoothest group these dungeons require more of you than previous games.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again and I need to finish this up. I have not really posted much for the Newbie Blogger Initiative this week, but I have plans to do so this weekend. During my Saturday and Sunday posting time I have much more time to work through a topic, so I figured I would use both days to post advice articles. There is so much good stuff out there this year, and I need to get on with updating my blogroll to include the rest of the blogs that have signed up during the Class of 2013. I hope you all have a great day and that it continues on into a great weekend.