December 2014 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Deathknightly Values

December 15, 2014 by Belghast

Ogron Going Down

Last Thursday we struggled quite a bit with the Twin Ogron encounter. It felt so completely random that I could not quite grok how to deal with the fire. This weekend I resolved to fix this problem and did quite a bit of research to try and grasp exactly how the fire worked, because once we figured that out I figured we could easily down them. Yesterday afternoon I watched what felt like a dozen different videos until I finally found one that showed the fire clear enough for me to catch what exactly was happening. If you watch this video it clearly shows what happens to the fire when the axe lands on the ground. As such I created this handy visual aide for our raiders, because it seems as though the fire travels in the direction the axe’s handle is leaning. This means there is a relatively safe spot on the far side of the axe head.

By relatively safe I mean that you only have to deal with dodging fire from one of the axes. It seems like there is some time between when the first axe falls and the second axe falls, which also added to our confusion during the encounter. Essentially we need to move the raid behind the axe head and then be prepared to adjust to dodge the second axes incoming fire. Now the fire does not travel in a straight line, which also makes it seem more random, but instead arcs outwards in a curve, but not one steep enough to curve back on itself. My hope is with this tidbit of information we will rock the hell out of Pol and Phemos and take their candy. When I realized how it was working I was absolutely pumped… and I am sorry to anyone I tried to explain this to yesterday. I was a little over stimulated by the discovery, and probably made very little sense.

Deathknightly Values

The focus of my weekend gaming was to finish the push of my Deathknight to 100. Saturday night I managed to hit 99 which just left me a single level to push through on Sunday. The problem is my focus shifted from acquiring levels, to instead acquiring gear as Nagrand is really my last opportunity to improve my ilevel before being confronted with the choice of running dungeons. My side goal of course was to somehow manage to hit 615 ilevel before sitting foot in a single heroic to prove it could be done. My friend Cuppy said she managed to do it, but as I got further through Nagrand my heart started to sink. Each quest turn in that I did not get a blue or purple upgrade from was like a punch in the gut, because I knew more than likely I would not make my goal. When I dinged 100 last night I still had quite a bit left to go of Nagrand, but I continued to soldier onwards in search of items to bring up my ilevel.

After wringing every drop of potential gear goodness from the zone… I was still way short of my goal sitting at only 609, so not even heroic ready. I had one last shot at getting the level up there, because I had yet to do the quest that would give me a ilevel 640 ring. I queued as dps for normal Skyreach and the queue popped considerably faster than I was expecting. We steamrolled the place, and unfortunately I got no upgrades. I did however complete the quest for the ring and it took me to 612. I purchased a second ring which took my total “in bag” iLevel to 614, so one shy of being able to queue for LFR. Now one of the problems with switching zones every two levels is the fact that I did not do much faction work in Spires of Arak. This means I am shy of the honored required to buy the Arakkoa trinket. Once I get that faction up a bit, and purchase that trinket I should be able to queue for LFR… but I also raid tonight so not sure how all of this is going to work out. I doubt I will be able to get in on the free epic goodness of LFR before the reset tomorrow.

Hatch Phase

As I said above, tonight is our raid night in Final Fantasy XIV and I am hoping we are able to finally push past Turn 5 and get Twintania’s candy. From what I have heard this is the roughest content we will face until Turn 9, and I am okay with that. Mostly because I hope it means that turns 6-8 will be much faster progression than Turn 5 has been. Twintania is probably the single most complicated raid encounter I have ever faced, and I like it. It is kinda like having to learn five different boss fights, and as of last week we were finally up to the last phase which is reportedly the easiest to get through, or at least nothing compared to the twister phase. My hope is that tonight we can see enough of it to absolutely wreck her. Thankfully we have not come close to hitting the thirteen minute hard enrage for the encounter.

I realize at this point that Binding Coil of Bahamut and Turn 5 are quite literally a year old at this point, but it still feels super relevant. In fact there are large swaths of the FFXIV community that can’t do it. That has been the interesting thing about FFXIV raid content is that it remains difficult even with the Echo buff. I am perfectly fine not being on the bleeding edge of progression in this game, but I am super happy that we are still progressing in our own way. My real hope is that after struggling to finish this fight as a team… the various extreme mode primals are going to seem easy when we return to fighting them. We have learned to move as a group, and play off each others strengths… and quite literally have had a raid forged by fire. I am pumped to see what we can do during a “normal” fight, instead of this insane assemblage of phases.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

December 14, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra. Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding. I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam. It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content. Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point. When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits… I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions. Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions. Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding. This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again. All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast. As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion. I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison. I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week. In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week. Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction. Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion. We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison… but for some reason he could not accept the quest. So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up. While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do… start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins. More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them. The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point. After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall… which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout. He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion. We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags. So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it. I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing. I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills. During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot. I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable. Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100. Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world. I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version. While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker… I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too. I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards… you die a little inside each time you get a green. Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either. At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun. Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile. One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area. Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically… would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear? Better yet… why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up? I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic. I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.

Full on Melee

December 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Damai Method

Last night I spent most of the evening working on my Deathknight, who is at this point level 98. I am doing what I am lovingly referring to as the “Damai” method for leveling him, but in truth I know Kylana and several others did it as well. The idea is that you spend exactly as much time as you need in a zone to jump to the next zone. Basically if you are leveling your way through Draenor you are given a quest to jump to Gorgrond when you ding 92, Talador when you ding 94, Spires of Arak when you ding 96 and finally Nagrand when you hit 98. The idea is to keep moving for maximum leveling speed, but unfortunately minimum content completion. You do however want to stick around in Spires of Arak just long enough to get your outpost and save some goblin friends so you can unlock the Salvage Yard.

This method goes against every instinct I have, but I probably will be doing quite a bit of it to push up my army of 90s… hopefully before the MC LFR helmet grab is finished. My plan is to stick around Nagrand and cross my fingers hoping I get enough upgrades from my Dwarven Bunker to be able to hit 615 without much issue. Mostly I am doing this to see if I can in theory completely skip Heroics jumping straight into LFR. I am honestly not sure if this is even viable. I might be screwed and have not gotten enough faction with the birdmen or the draenei to buy those two 615 trinkets. If I am stuck in the same place I was last time, with needing to PVP to get into heroics… then basically this is not a viable method and there is really no point in skipping content. I will of course let you know as the weekend goes how well this worked because I fully expect to be 100 during that time.

Full on Melee

One of my frustrations with MMO design in its current state, and all state for the foreseeable future is that having too many melee in your party is a massive liability. During the entire time I have played MMOs there has never been a time when having a bunch of melee was favorable for any encounter. More often it was spending time as a raid leader trying to convince players that preferred melee to switch over to their ranged characters for the sake of “balance”. Balance generally means that if more than 30% of your damage is coming from melee you are pretty well fucked. It frustrates me to no end because I really do not care for playing ranged characters. I find them boring with their incessant finger wiggling and standing in one spot to cast a spell only to move again to cast another spell. Nothing is enjoyable about that, and a large chunk of my problems with Deathknights at the moment is that they FEEL like a caster, not a melee.

While I know there are definitely players who prefer to play ranged casters, I have feel like we would not have this constant “full on melee” problem were it not that casters on average are less enjoyable to play? This has been a constant problem the entire time I have played MMOs that the melee players always outnumber the ranged… so maybe just maybe that means it is time to readdress the way ranged feel to play. There is two games that I have been able to stomach playing ranged characters, and in both of them it was because you could cast while moving. Granted in the case of Final Fantasy XIV this is exactly ONE class that can do this… but still the ability to move around freely while attacking is a big part of why I enjoy playing melee in the first place.

Brief Periods of Fun

Granted folks are going to write in with comments telling me that in World of Warcraft most of the ranged classes have abilities that allow them to cast and move at the same time. Here is the problem… so you are telling me for brief moments when I use a cooldown the class won’t feel like crap to play. Apologies but that does not convince me that playing a ranged class is a good idea. I would far rather stick to playing something that feels awesome all the time, rather than having to rely on cooldowns to bring me brief moments of happiness. Ultimately I don’t have any good answers here. Ultimately even removing the requirement to stand still to cast doesn’t go all the way into fixing my hatred of casters. I really really dislike the concept of a cast time on abilities as well. I like mashing buttons and seeing an effect when I mash it… and there is something primal and visceral about being up close with a mob rather than kiting it around like I am scared for it to touch me.

At the end of the day… I accept the fact that I am melee and can only really ever be happy playing melee. I just wish that I did not constantly feel like I was a detriment to my friends for choosing to play one. Every game reinforces that by playing melee dps I am making a poor lifestyle choice, but I keep thinking that surely game designers can come up with a way that does not punish your raid for having an abundance of players standing toe to toe with the mobs. Until that day however… as leaders we are going to have to continue furious horse trading to convince players to keep picking ranged casters so that we can have our balance. But I can’t help feeling like we would not have this problem were ranged a more enjoyable choice in the first place. Every time a bell rings, a melee loses its wings… and becomes a ranged.

Boogey Bested

December 12, 2014 by Belghast

Bladefist Banished

One of the cool features this expansion is that each of the raid difficulties shares a separate lockout. This means you can go to normal with one group, heroic with a a completely different group… and then mythic yet again with a different group. However for the case of our raid this also means that when we get a boss solidly on farm on Normal mode we can ramp up the difficulty and try it on Heroic as well. Before last night we felt we solidly had the mechanics down for Kargath Bladefist, as we managed to one-shot it this past Tuesday before pushing forward and doing the same to Butcher. Last night our raid lead decided before we returned to working on Brackenspore that we should at least give a few attempts at Kargath heroic. Turns out this was a pretty great idea because on the first attempt we managed to make significant progress.

One of the things I like about normal and heroic being the same mechanics is that it allows you to get the key concepts in the fight down solidly before moving up a difficulty level. Our biggest challenge seemed to be reacting fast enough, since everything the boss and his environment does is serious business. I was the first death because I managed to get knocked back into a flame pillar and just evaporated. Similarly we lost a lot of people to the berserker charge because in normal you can survive a tick or two while getting out of the way… but in heroic it straight wrecks you. On attempt four we managed to get our mojo working and downed him in what felt like a fairly solid and repeatable victory. Unfortunately I am not sure if anyone in the raid actually got loot, as we seemed to mostly get double gold.

Boogey Bested

Wednesday morning I referred to the next fight we worked on as the Brackenspore Boogey, and I still feel like this is an apt term. The entire fight is this awkard dance between the tank swaps, and the burning of the fungal creep, and even the placement of the raid next to the appropriate mushroom and burning down the add quickly. Each of those things can screw the raid up if not handled properly. I have found myself falling back into being a rather vocal member of the raid, and unfortunately its a role I am not sure I can stop from doing. When you lead a guild and a raid for as long as I have, you find yourself filling a vacuums of responsibility whenever you see them. I felt like it would help if I started calling various things out, since this fight is all about awareness of what is going on. So when I saw that the add had spawned, or the creep was getting too close to the boss… I was announcing this over Teamspeak. Hopefully our raid leader and crew as a whole does not want to throttle me.

The awesome thing is… we went from getting wrecked to wrecking things rather quickly. One of the positives about LFR is it gives you a time to work on mechanics when the overall risk is extremely low. You can pretty much ignore every single mechanic on LFR but we treated it Wednesday night as a dress rehearsal for the real fight. After Tuesday night I had some theories on how the tank swap needed to happen, and Wednesday night our two tanks refined these to glossy perfection so that last night that was just a non-issue. All that remained was dealing with the particular quirks of the fungal creep, pushing enough dps and interrupting on the add and dealing with mob positioning. The only problem with the fight as a whole is that it is insanely long. I am pretty sure our first try lasted around fifteen minutes, but that is mostly because we fought the moss longer than we really should have. Our second attempt ended with us downing the boss, and it felt extremely solid.

That Click Moment

If I had to sum up in one thing the reason why I enjoy raiding, it would be the “Click Moment”. There is something magical that happens that I still can’t quite explain, but I have watched it occur over and over. There is a clear moment when everyone in the raid grasps what needs to happen and just does it. You can go from wiping horribly one attempt, to everything going smoothly the next, and it is as though some collecting cog just happens to click into place between those two tries. I still find it phenomenal how a boss fight goes from utter chaos to a well oiled and repeatable machine in a single attempt. Sure there are some boss kills where you kill the boss in spite of yourself, our raids first Sindragosa 25 man kill was this way with us barely killing her as the last person got frozen. Most of them however there is this magical spark that takes a boss from impossible to farmable, and I still marvel each time I see it.

This week it felt like we reached that moment on three of the four bosses we downed, and quite honestly I feel like Tectus and Heroic Kargath are both repeatable… but more DPS race than anything else. Twin Ogrons on the other hand… we are still very much in the utter chaos phase. This fight has a lot of moving parts, with at least one of them feeling completely random. Every so often during the fight Phemos will throw down his weapon, and from it will radiate fire. The fire moves in a pattern that is not really predictable… or at least the problem is we have not quite groked how to predict it. It seems to spread first in a star pattern and then sidewind through the room unpredictably. Watching it while completely zoomed out it reminds me so much of Conway’s Game of Life simulation. I keep thinking that it cannot be as random as it seems… and I feel like the “click” moment for this fight will be whenever we reason out how the fire works. All in all however it felt like an amazing first week of raiding for me… and I am hooked.

The Kill Count

Normal Kargath
Normal Butcher
Normal Tectus
Heroic Kargath
Normal Brackenspore

I can’t wait for the reset so we can wreck everything all over again and start making some serious progress on Twin Ogrons. I feel like there is just a lot of research we need to do between now and then. I am also looking forward to Monday night in Final Fantasy XIV because I feel like we are going to down Turn 5 finally. We have functional mastery over all of the phases except the last one, and finally got to see enough of it to grok how it works. Now it is just a matter of pulling together all of the moving parts and claiming victory so we can move forward into the Second Coil of Bahamut. I guess I am a “Raider” again… and surprisingly I feel none of the frustrations that I did previously, even when we have struggled a bit to clear Turn 5. It seems like I am now in two different raid groups that are about the ideal mix of casual and serious so that I feel like I am not being chastised for screwing up… but at the same time feel like everyone is working towards the same goal. I am in a very happy place as a gamer right now.