August 2014 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Belghast the Healer

August 7, 2014August 7, 2014 by Belghast

Lack of Rundowns

Over the last few days the whole post rundown concept has simply not been sustainable. As I said yesterday I have had a whole bunch of technical issues with my two primary machines, leading me to be super late with my blog post. As a result the whole rundown thing just hasn’t been in the radar. At this point since I am having to edit them back in later, I am wondering if it really is sustainable for me to keep doing. My morning blogging ritual gives me thirty minutes to an hour of time to work in a blog post. The verification and retrieval of the links takes almost that long as well because ultimately I end up reading the posts as I go. So on the week days I simply do not have enough time to keep up the practice.

The first few days I simply edited the list in at work over lunch, but the problem is my work world has gotten significantly busier as well. All of this frustrates me since I want to find a way to showcase all of the awesome posts other than my ubiquitous retweets. What I really want to showcase is the fact that out of the 45 or so participants… 35 of those have not missed a single day. Then we have another batch that is also awesome of bloggers who started late but have been faithful ever since. My biggest hope is that this spirit of community and shared purpose extends past the month. I know the Newbie Blogger Initiative as it has run on, has gotten to be that way… in that I am still in regular contact with a lot of the people I mentored during the month. I posted awhile back about the lack of community out here in the non-game-specific space… but hopefully we are changing that one blog at a time.

Running for Grand Prize

Began Late but Not Missed a Day Since

Belghast the Healer

Yesterday I managed to get to level 16 on my conjurer, the required level to start the Duty Roulette process. Now you have to realize that I have not really healed anything in years, at least not a dungeon. Probably the last time I regularly healed was during the Burning Crusade on my Paladin in World of Warcraft. That was roughly seven years ago, and it is a role that I tend to shy away from. The reasoning is my very first MMO experience was as a Cleric in Everquest, and it pretty much burned me on the role from that point out. That said I like to always have at least a healing option in my stable of alts, and since I now have every possible role other than healer… I figured it was time to do something about that. So I channeled all of my bravery and queued for the Duty Roulette… there is honestly something about that name that is so much more fitting than “finder”. When you hit the button you really are taking a huge chance on what exactly you are going to get in the process.

Thankfully for my very first dungeon I got an amazing group. I seriously probably could not have assembled a better “starter” dungeon group than I ended up with. We had dps that never pulled aggro, and a tank that managed to pick up every single add without fail. There was never a point at which I drew healing aggro on anything, and I literally did not have to heal anyone other than the main tank. In the back of my mind I knew this was a rarity as far as random dungeon groups went, but I was thankful to have it as my “breaking in” period. For the most part everything went smoothly and we made it to the end of Tam-Tara Deep Croft in what felt like record time… without skipping any content in the process. I was thinking to myself that yeah, I could maybe do this healing thing.

Reality Sets In

So if I got the idyllic situation for my first run, my second run was the absolute worst possible situation. We get started and the tank is the only one of us not communicating at all. Like people tend to be pretty friendly and I open every dungeon run with a simple “Hey Folks, How Goes It?”, which usually starts up some chatter as we do the dungeon run. The tank was completely silent, and sat there for a few minutes and then suddenly lurched forward without warning and pulled. My immediate thought was console player, since they tend not to respond to anything… ever… or if they do they respond in very short single character replies. It was a gladiator tank and he proceeded to start beating on a single target, and ignoring everything else in the pack. The moment I cast a single heal it all magnetized to me and I essentially became the main tank at that point. Problem was that the target he was on… he wasn’t really tanking either and the first time a dps started attacking it they would pull it off of him.

After a few pulls like this the tank proceeded to AFK, at which point the group kicked him and we cleared the way to the first boss without a tank at all. It was me, a thaumaturge and a pugilist and I healed through the damage. When we got another tank it this one was wearing most of the relic armor set, so my hope was that she would do all of the things that the other tank wasn’t. Turned out that she was an extremely competent tank and the rest of the run went smoothly. By the time group three had rolled around I was starting to feel my wheaties, and thought I could take on anything. I didn’t really struggle last night until I encountered my first group wanting to use weird tactics at the expense of the healer. In Halatali on the final boss, there are these adds that need to be killed before they get to the fire in the center of the room. If you don’t catch one it does an AOE burst on the entire party. My group ignored these completely and as a result I had to heal through constant AOE burst damage… Medica was my friend.

More Chill Than Tanking

The major reality check that I was not quite prepared for was the fact that it is so much more relaxing to heal than to tank. Granted that might just be a me thing, but I feel like I am constantly having to watch everything and make sure I have aggro on it all as I play a game of “bejeweled” making sure all of the gems are bright orange squares. Healing on the other hand is more like playing whack a mole, and that invokes so much less stress. I have to make sure I am not standing in shit, and then I have to make sure all of the bars are full. That’s it, that is my only focus and I feel like I can relax considerably. Sure there are moments where you have to work hard to top everyone off, but that isn’t “every single pull” where I feel like as a tank you are constantly struggling to maintain threat over your party. At this point of course I have only healed the first few instances which admittedly are much easier than the ones to come, so we will see if I change my opinion significantly as I go.

The long and short is that I am embracing this new role and enjoying myself. In the video at the beginning of this block I heal three different dungeons and all of the groups go relatively smoothly. I am glad that my party cannot hear my stream of consciousness commentary, because it would likely piss a lot of them off. Ashgar was talking about getting commendations so much faster as a healer, and I can see that to some extent. During one of the dungeon runs I got three commendations, meaning that I got every one available. However there are multiple dungeons I have walked out of without a single one, which is something that is super rare for me as a DPS. I feel like tanking is the flashy job that everyone appreciates… not dying is significantly less tangible. As a tank I have always appreciated my healers, because they are the lifeline that allows me to do the batshit crazy things I do. I feel like there isn’t as much appreciate for healers from the general public. You only notice the healers when they are doing a poor job.

Writing Prompts

I’ve been stressed and busy the last few days and as a result I have not added any new prompts to the stack. However as I have seen a few people dipping into them I thought I should add a few more to the pile.

What is the most thankless job in gaming? I am trying to keep this broad on purpose because I am not meaning the holy trinity. There are so many roles from ore farmer, to sniper that are played in various games. What one gets the least credit?
What is your favorite appearance item or set of items? Everyone has something that they keep in their inventory just because they love the look of it. What is yours?
What does MMO mean to you? This term gets used broadly, but doesn’t really have a firm definition. What does it mean to you and where do you draw the line between traditional online games.

#Blaugust #FFXIV #Conjurer

Tiny Conjurations

August 6, 2014 by Belghast

Failure to Launch

Right now to be truthful I am having all manner of issues with my machines here at the house. With my gaming machine I think I have narrowed it down to the power supply, and plan on replacing that tonight. My laptop however I think was bit in the ass by the same nvidia driver issue that seemed to start everything. I am not sure what is wrong with Nvidia Driver 340.52 but both machines started having issues shortly after installing it. It might all be unrelated, but I likely would skip this driver for the time being because I wouldn’t want to wish my issues on anyone. Thankfully I was able to roll back to a system state on my laptop before the driver, so here is hoping that fixes things there.

As far as my desktop when I attempt to power it on, things flicker on for a brief second before immediately stopping. The fans won’t even make a full rotation, and based on all reading this is likely a PSU issue. Now in the past when my PSU has gone south, nothing at all happened, so this is new ground for me. However I am willing to try it since a PSU is a relatively cheap component to replace. Otherwise I would be something wrong with the motherboard… and I really don’t want to go down that avenue unless I absolutely have to. The problem is that I am running out of machines… worse case scenario I can try and get this machine my spare in gaming condition. I think it would run most of the things I might want to run, just not as well.

As far as me, I have been feeling like crap as well. The stress of having my machines in various states of “down” combined with allergy season wreaking havoc on my sinuses and lungs lead to me deciding to take a day to mostly rest and collect myself. My lungs have not been behaving well for the last couple of days, and the constant sinus headache has been causing me to eat ibuprophen like candy. So here is hoping by the end of today I will have all of my machines up and running smoothly as well as me doing the same. If not I guess we have to explore other avenues, and if I don’t get to feeling better soonish I guess I will have to run to the doctor. As a result of all of this my morning post is delayed. I did not really get a chance to post a big rundown of the blaugust folks either… but I guess at this point things are rolling along smooth enough that hopefully everyone is already reading the incoming posts.

Tiny Conjurations

Last night before all the computer issues started with my laptop, I decided to work on the conjurer job. At this point I have a 50 warrior (tank), 50 bard (range dps) and 50 dragoon (melee dps) so the only thing I am really missing at this point is a healer. All of the available healers require various levels of conjurer, so I figured it would be a good starting place. I am still not certain if I will be going White Mage or Scholar as far as healers go, but in any case I am slowly working on the levels. Conjurer I think has to be the hardest thing to level to date, mainly because all you really have to kill the mobs with is Stone and its various derivatives. Even in cleric stance, which is surprisingly enough the dps stance… you can’t really burn down mobs that fast. My plan is to mostly level through dungeons, but the problem with that is that I have to actually get to 15 first to do it.

Last night I tried my hand at healing Guildhests since those start at level 10. The main problem there is that folks don’t really seem to have a handle on tanking. I healed a total of four, and in each of them the tanks made zero effort to try and pull any mobs off of me. This means in the first one I ended up dying horribly, and in the later ones I mostly focused on healing myself… since I apparently was heal tanking. Guildhests really aren’t worth the frustration experience wise, so I went back to grinding near Horizon. I have a pretty massive stack of leves built up, so I opted to work through some of those. At the point my system troubles started, I was just shy of 15, which hopefully means I can jump straight into healing dungeons instead of grinding on my own.

Feels like Home

Yesterday afternoon Tam and I were talking about how much like home this game is feeling. I think in part it is due to the fact that Greysky Armada the free company is a thing uniquely created by the group of players that played FFXIV at launch. House Stalwart is very much a creation of my own, and it feels like my guild. White Masks is very much a creation of Tam and it feels like his guild. Greysky Armada is this wholly different thing that incorporates the best of each of us into something totally different. I think that is why coming back to it is so comfortable, because its an us thing not a me or him thing. Not sure if any of that makes any sense at all, but the folks that mostly do the AggroChat podcast have all been hanging out on voice chat for a few years now, and the FFXIV guild is 100% rooted in that little group.

Now that is not to say that everyone else isn’t welcome, but we kinda lead the guild as a team and not as a monarchy aligned under any one of us. On top of all of this is feels really awesome to see everyone back in Eorzea. I like this game a lot, and things just seem to work for me. Especially now that I went ahead and embraced the adorable making myself a Lalafell. At this point I am really hoping that the magic will last for awhile, and that we can all enjoy this space for more than a few months. Ultimately that is what I keep looking for… a place to set down roots and settle down. The problem is each of the games either has problems that bother me enough to where I don’t want to play it… or it lacks the people to make a comfortable environment. My hope is that FFXIV will be the game we all can agree on, since for the most part we all pined for it a little.

#Blaugust #FFXIV

Lalafellication

August 5, 2014 by Belghast

Blaugust is About Blogging

Earlier I had most of a blog post finished when my system took a dive on me. Nothing appears to be recoverable so you are going to get my rapid fire version. It seems that too many people are getting hung up on the notion of daily blogging. Yes I am having a contest and giving away prizes, and yes this entire thing started as me challenging people to take the daily blogging routine I do. That said more importantly, Blaugust is about Blogging and doing so regularly. If you normally post once a week and you begin posting three times a week thanks to this initiative, then I consider it more than successful.

If you don’t feel you can do the daily blogging thing, then alter it to fit your needs. There are a few people who have ramped up their posting in the spirit of Blaugust, and that is awesome. I feel like posting on a schedule is a valuable thing, and if you can’t make seven days a week… try five and if that is even too much then try three. The hope is that you will develop a routine that becomes far harder to break than individual one off postings. I went through huge lapses in my blog before I adopted the daily stance, and I pretty much started this without much ramp up. It was a struggle at first but over time it became significantly easier and now I can crank out a post about almost anything. Find what works for you, and stick with it.

I plan on editing back in a list of the day four blogs.

Hitbox Sorta Fixed

A few days ago I posted railing about the various shortcomings of the hitbox live streaming service, and since then they have attempted to fix a few things. Previously I had used twitch to back up my live stream to youtube, making it significantly easier to share and embed in blog posts. When I switched over too hitbox I thought things were going to work similarly. Unfortunately the entire time I have used hitbox the export to youtube process has been broken. This week they seem to have fixed it with a few limitations that make it damned near useless to me. Yesterday I tried to export all of the videos that were hanging out on my hitbox page in limbo and out of the whole batch only two made it there. The two videos were in the 20 to 30 minute range, and anything longer failed.

I guess this means that unlike twitch that can export up to two hours of video to youtube, hitbox is going to limit the users to only 30 minutes at a time? For me at least this makes the feature meaningless, and since I still cannot download the videos I have already recorded it means my various series on youtube have glaring holes as I number things sequentially. The only positive is that you can apparently embed video directly in your posts now, so here is hoping that actually works. I am wondering if trying to embed it in live writer is what ultimately crashed my system earlier, so I am going to not test the waters until I have finished today’s blog post. In any case I still like hitbox for the fact that there is no stream delay, and it makes having a conversation much easier. The problem is with the fact that I now have to record the video locally and manually upload to youtube, it has severely soured my streaming of late.

Lalafellication

Last night I took the plunge and did something I had been considering for a few weeks. As part of the preorder process I had a vial of Fantasia sitting in my inventory. This allows you to re-edit your appearance, and in practice change your race and even gender in the process. While I liked the look of Belghast the Highlander, I had long wished I had embraced the adorable and went Lalafell. I think I only made it as far as I did in Wildstar because I thought the Chua I was playing was adorable. So last night I took the plunge and you can now see the end results. So far I have no regrets.

I ran a few instances last night and everything about combat is now cute. It did take some getting used to the difference in perspective, and it may have caused me to step in some bad stuff that I thought I was well clear of. All things considered I really like the decision I made because now I can take adorable pictures everywhere I go, and participate in the ever popular “if I fits, I sits” meme. Everything I do seems cute and harmless, even when I do a dragoon jump into things. I am a fan and I am sure it will make my adventures far more memorable.

Completely Broke But Happy

The other big thing that happened last night is that all of us pooled our money together and bought a small house in The Mists, the housing zone for Limsa Lominsa. Basically it was a zone of compromise in that a few of us preferred Gridania and others preferred Uldah, but everyone was pretty amiable too the notion of the Limsa housing. The other huge benefit is that we found absolute prime real estate in the third housing ward. We are guessing that the house must have been repossessed because it is smack dab in the middle of the zone with a Market Board and Summoning Bell steps outside of our front lawn. We don’t have a lot in the house but we did manage to pick up a Chocobo Stable, Aetherite Shard and a Mailbox allowing us to cheaply port from anywhere in the world to our house. Now I will have to begin the grind to try and get the 300k gil needed to buy my personal room.

This whole experience highlights what I have been saying about the server community on Cactuar. Within moments of purchasing the house and getting the basics configured we were swarmed by our neighbors welcoming us to the neighborhood. It seems they were super happy to see the house occupied and we now have a few friends in the houses surrounding us. The guild that was visiting in the picture lived in a huge house above us, and apparently since this house went dormant they were no longer able to jump down through our plot, because they were blocked by the building bounding box. They were extremely appreciate of once again having a fast route to the market boards. Later in the night we had some other neighbors welcome us, and it is this sort of interaction that I am valuing the most about the server. This is the first time in a long time I have felt like I was part of a larger community. Final Fantasy truly is a special game, and I hope especially as more people return to it we can set down some permanent roots here.

#FinalFantasyXIV #HitBox #Blaugust

Dragoon Soars

August 4, 2014August 4, 2014 by Belghast

Blaugust Weekday Style

The last several days I have done a pretty significant rundown of the posts from the previous day. However as I only have thirty minutes to an hour to post in the morning, and that whole feature is pretty time consuming I am probably going to have to stop that over the week. Either that or I might just edit it back in when I have a moment. So far things seem to still be going awesomely. Lots of interesting posts coming out, and I think it is awesome that they aren’t all traditional gaming posts either. I am seeing a lot of different depth, including quite a few helpful tutorial type posts.

What amazes me is I honestly thought by day three or four I would see a lot of falloff as folks decided this daily posting madness thing was not for them. However instead I am starting to see the length of the individual posts increase. A few folks that might have started with minimal posts have ones that are not starting to get significantly meatier. If nothing else the initiative has met my goals for it, which was to essentially shake up a boring time in the blogosphere and get it hopping again. I think it makes a nice pair to the Newbie Blogger Initiative, one beginning at the beginning of the summer and the other at the end as folks are wrapping up and preparing for the fall.

Day Three Rundown

Guardians With a Guildie

This weekend was an odd one with us having a birthday party up near the lake for my niece on Saturday and my wife staying there to spend a few days with her mom. Since I would be all by myself I tentatively planned on seeing Guardians of the Galaxy Sunday morning for a matinee, but oddly enough when I got home from the party I had a message waiting on me from a longtime friend and guildie. It seemed he has the same idea and wanted to know if I was interested in going to see it with him. The initial plan to see it at the IMAX fell through since they were sold out, so we changed venue to here in my town at our smaller theater. I have to say it was pretty awesome to see Vernie, as from what the two of us could remember it had been about two years.

It is kinda sad that we live in the same town but see each other that infrequently. Both of us tend to land on the side of being a little introverted, so while we always seem to enjoy meeting for lunch or something similar… we never seem to think of doing it. It seems like a lifetime since we worked together, and in reality it has actually been a decade ago. I keep trying to figure out ways to get him on where I work, but the positions never seem to line up quite right at any given time. In any case we met yesterday for an 11 am movie and went to Baja Jacks a local texmex place. If you’ve been to a Moe’s or a Chipotle you know the concept. The subway build your own thing model, but I like this local place considerably better than the chain versions.

As far as the movie it was pretty awesome. Guardians of the Galaxy has always been somewhat of a third string Marvel franchise, so I think it is pretty great that they are bringing them to the forefront. In reality they are having to scape a bit to get “movie worthy” comics due to some pretty poor licensing arrangements around certain characters. For example I’ve heard that the “Avengers” series of movies cannot involve any mutant humans, because the folks doing the X-Men movies have fully reign over those. Similarly Spiderman was farmed off and licensed separately as well as the punisher… so they have fragmented what was meant to be a cohesive universe. All of that said I am happy in a way because it means that we are getting to see some properties that would have been on the fringe.

I’ve always thought Rocket Raccoon was a badass, so was happy to see him brought to living breathing CGI life. The voice actor and the animators did a great job of bringing him together and making him a sympathetic character. The movie definitely has a “loveable band of misfits” vibe to it, and it works well. This is not the dark brooding “I’m batman!” flavor of super hero movie, but instead a crazy technicolor romp through the galaxy. For what it is, it is really awesome and they managed to infuse a ton of humor in the mix. I mean zany humor and not the normal gallows humor that seems to infect the super hero genre. I feel like they have themselves another interesting property on their hands, and I would totally plunk down money to see another film with the same crew. I do wonder how they might integrate this into the overall avengers storyline. It will be interesting to see what happens, and if you can wrangle your own guildie to go see it with… I highly suggest you do.

Dragoon Soars

This weekend my central gaming focus was to push my dragoon to level 50 and be able to run the big kid stuff with my friends. When I got home from seeing guardians I made the final push and dinged. The awesome thing is I had a ton of gear waiting on me, since through running dungeons with my other 50 jobs I had picked up a number of things. Moments after hitting the level I had replaced pretty much all of my dragoon set. I opted to pay the 2000 or so gil per item and apply a glamour to go back to my dragoon armor appearance. However the moment I set foot into my first dungeon… I got a chest piece that was a significant upgrade and therefor wrecked the appearance again. I am considering just reverting my gear back to the original appearance and drying it all white to match the chest piece. I realize I have had this graphic numerous times in the past, but something about the white version just looks awesome.

I spent most of the evening running around the map attuning myself for the various dungeons that have gone in since launch. There are a significant number of them and if you are curious how to get attuned to each check out this helpful post I found. Right now the only things I am not attuned for involve some serious quest work to unlock like Crystal Tower. I should not however be holding by my friends when it comes to options for things we can run. I really want to try Pharo Sirus, but I question if we have the gear yet. Granted Tam has all the gear in the world right now since he has had some pretty good luck with drops and is the only one of us to successfully complete his relic weapon.

Since I was initially tanking, I am working my way through the Bravura quest chain which is the warrior Relic. Right now I am up to the step where I need to tank Garuda Hardmode and I have to say I am a little intimidated by it. Ifrit Hard is extremely easy to tank, but I remember us struggling to get folks through normal mode Garuada… so I am more than a little edgy about the thought of tanking it cold. I need to do a bit of research before I throw myself into the duty finder and give it a shot. After that the only step remaining is to do Titan, which I am sure will be the toughest fight yet. Then of course I need the bookrocks to get the weapon and upgrade it… however that should be significantly easier. I have enough to get the weapon, but should not be terribly far from getting the ones to upgrade it. Then of course I get to start all over again to get the same thing for my Dragoon.

Writing Prompts

Here come another set of writing prompts for you avid Blaugust initiates. Once again do not feel any specific compulsion to write about them, I am just churning them out to help those who get stuck. You can see a full list of all of the prompts to date on the Blaugust nook forums.

Has there ever been a game encounter you were afraid of? For example I am spooked of tanking Garuda hard… has there ever been a fight or encounter you dreaded?
What is the coolest moment you and experienced with a game community? Has someone gone out of their way to help you, or was there a really interesting player in a community you have been a part of?
Do you collect in game pets? Various games have turned this into a minigame but are you a pet collector? If so why? If not why as well?

#Blaugust #GuardiansOfTheGalaxy #FFXIV