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

Tower Diving Time

December 3, 2014 by Belghast

Server Go Boom

Last night was the launch of Highmaul in World of Warcraft, or at least it should have been. For the majority of the night we tried in vain to log into Argent Dawn. While a handful of us made it to the character select screen, even fewer of us made it in game. Those in game however could not actually play the game, as the world was just fundamentally broken… mobs un-lootable or not spawning at all. All of the problems seemed to be related to the Chicago data center, where the Ruin battle group that Argent Dawn is attached to is located. Lately there has been a lot of talk of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks going on against the various MMO providers, but this is a nebulous concept that most people struggle to really understand. Thankfully there is a site like IPViking that can visualize this traffic in a way that it makes sense. Watching their attack map is like watching missile launches in some war game simulation… both terrifying and mesmerizing at the same time. The above image sadly is not from last night, but just one they have as an example on their website.

During the launch of Warlords of Draenor, there were very clear attacks against Blizzard. Last night however I did not actually see attacks targeting blizzard, but instead attack after attack targeting the St Louis area. I could only assume that the attacks are associated in some way to the things surrounding Ferguson in the St Louis metro area. This however speaks to the way the internet actually works, instead of the way that we all assume it works. The hard facts are there are a limited number of pathways across the United States, and if an attack is blocking traffic from reaching the Chicago data center, it is effectively also blocking anyone from reaching those servers. I ran a traceroute last night and from Tulsa area my packets went to Dallas before going over to the AT&T network somewhere in the vicinity of Wichita before the packets just died. I can only assume that the packets kept getting lose in the maelstrom of attacks between me and the Chicago data center.

Tower Diving Time

After a point I gave up on trying to get into anything within World of Warcraft, and wandered between a couple of games. My original intent was to do some Syrcus Tower on my Bard job, but when I got into Final Fantasy XIV the dps queue for Syrcus was reporting 30 minutes… which is significantly longer than I have ever actually seen it. So I abandoned that notion and instead decided to play some Heroes of the Storm. My good friend Rae finally managed to get her invite from Blizzard and apparently spent the better part of last night playing it as well. I had a strong feeling that she would like the game, based on her seeming love of League of Legends. For me it is a much stronger game because I like its focus on the team win, and not so much on individual performance. That said Rae was still constantly checking the meters during the matches, which I can only hope will be something that fades over time as those League tendencies potentially fall away.

I had really not played it much since the game reset that happened awhile back, wiping out our progress. As such I had completed the tutorial but was still sitting at level 1, having not actually played any real matches to level up with. Thanks to the +50% xp friend bonus, I managed to level up last night to five, and unlock many of the features of the game. I’ve noticed that they have front loaded a lot of the stuff so that you get the interesting items sooner. At level 5 it feels like I have all of the tools needed to really play the character how I would want to. I am a huge fan of Muradin and in all the times playing the game, that has been the character that most fits what I want to play. That said I am also rather fond of Raynor and Tyrael… and if I am going to play a support you can’t beat Uther. I think the main reason why I like Muradin is his Avatar ability that causes him to grow in size and become extremely sturdy, allowing me to tower dive obstacles if I really need to, or survive team fights. With passive health regeneration he has some serious sustain, and most of the time I never actually needed to return to base.

Bloggy XMAS Countdown

I feel bad that I did not advertise this sooner, but there is an event that I am going to be part of that is happening in the blogosphere. The awesome Syl of MMO Gypsy had this idea of creating a virtual advent calendar of sorts within the blogging community. Apparently in her country it is custom to decorate the various shops and houses around town to represent a day of the advent. As such she has created this truly awesome Advent Calendar of gaming blogs. I am currently scheduled to be one of the posters for 12/9 and I will begin prepping for that soon. The problem is I am still not quite sure what I am going to talk about. I have a few ideas, but we will just have to see how that sorts out. In the meantime this is day three of the postings and I highly suggest you go back to the first and read your way forward. I thank Syl for coming up with the idea and making it happen, and once again there has been this massive outpouring of support which is truly awesome.

Inky and the Sneeze

December 2, 2014 by Belghast

Made in the Shade

Last night was a night entirely devoted to Final Fantasy XIV as Monday nights are the raid night for the Greysky Armada the free company we are all a part of. As such I forwent logging into World of Warcraft at all and just milled around aimlessly in game until time for raid. I say aimlessly but there were a lot of things that actually happened, not the least of which was convincing @CurlyWench to hang out with us on Teamspeak. I asked if she needed anything run, and next thing we are pulling together a group to run Haukke Manor… with me healing it. Honestly Haukke is one of the easier ones to heal, apart from that final boss fight. She was tanking, and uncertain of her abilities, and fortunately or unfortunately she ended up in a group with two tanks who were more than happy to share secrets. The run went extremely smoothly, and I managed not to let us die.

When we got out of the dungeon run, one of our guildies Cylladora was up to some Shenanigans. She said over Free Company chat that anyone that came and sat in our pool with her would get a present. So over the course of a few minutes our pool was full of people reclining wearing spiffy new sunglasses that she had made us all. It was an extremely awesome gesture, and managed to create a moment when we were all inhabiting the same place at the same time, and talking through /say instead of tells or free company chat. One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV has mastered is creating situations where players need to interact with one another. The housing district we are part of is extremely vibrant, and I cannot go to the market board down from our house without receiving at least one or two /cheers and /hugs.

This has admittedly been a bit of a stark contrast from World of Warcraft lately, and it has been something weird to get accustomed to. The Garrison system is awesome, but it has done an extremely good job of isolating players and keeping them from mingling. We might all be sharing the same actual space but we are each phased into our own instance of it. As such we really have no need for Ashran or Stormwind or any other player hub, but instead spend the majority of our time hanging out in our private town. Admittedly I am mostly fine with this, because there is a lot of negativity in my Warcraft server community that I really don’t feel like exposing myself to on a constant basis. That said it is nice to see the same people every time you go to the bank, or hit a mailbox… and instead we just see our collection of scripted bots. Final Fantasy on the other hand has somehow mastered the ability to bring people together… and ultimately keep them together.

Inky and the Sneeze

The 2.4 Final Fantasy XIV Patch introduced the continuation of the Hildebrand storyline. For those who are not familiar with this name, he is a bumbling investigator and international man of mystery that solves mysteries by quite literally falling into the correct answer through pure accident generally speaking. This is essentially how Final Fantasy XIV introduces pure absurd concepts from previous games, and brings them into this world without completely breaking cohesion. The Final Fantasy series has several completely silly bosses, and one of the more memorable ones from Final Fantasy VI is Ultros. While I love Ultros, he might be a bit dated for modern sensibilities… since he is essentially a walking tentacle hentai joke. This time once again he is paired with his “buddy for life” Typhon. Some of you might remember the pair working the Coliseum in Final Fantasy VI, and this time around they are working at the Coliseum in Uldah.

The quest line leading up to Dragons Neck is absolutely insane, and as such the fight itself is equally insane. Basically the crux of the fight is trying to stay in the arena. Various fights will knock you out of the ring, at which point so long as there is ANYONE else in the ring you can run right back in. However there are some absolutely horrible attacks that can knock everyone out of the ring if not interrupted. I won’t go much further into the strategy other than that, as not to spoil the fight for people. We managed to get the fight down in spite of ourselves and it dropped the Wind-Up Ultros mini pet… which means we are likely to start doing this as the warm up for Binding Coil each week until all of us get this awesome pet. It was at times a frustrating fight, but also a really enjoyable break from the standard raiding faire.

Twintania Final Phase

The main show last night was us returning to Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut to work on Twintania. This fight is the great killer of many raids in Final Fantasy XIV and holds the key to unlocking the Second Coil of Bahamut. I know many people who have struggled at this fight for ages never quite able to push across the finish line. In our first night of trials we barely made it to phase two of the fight, or more so we barely made progress into phase two. Last night we polished the first two phases, phase three, and made significant progress on phase four which is really the last major phase of the fight. The final phase is simply “don’t stand in fire” which is a lesson we have long ago mastered. There is a thirteen minute hard enrage, but I don’t foresee us getting even vaguely close to that. In fact we were doing extremely well on the final attempt… and had we not run out of time on the duty timer… we might have downed her last night.

The end result however is that all of us are hungry to get back in there next week and wreck this fight, allowing us to move on to the Second Coil of bahamut. Twintania is one of those fights that you really have to experience rather than be taught through videos. Quite honestly I find most fights I need to experience to really learn. I am not one of those people that can watch a series of videos and grasp the key concepts needed to get through a fight. I can however read a written description of the abilities and piece together how things work. The problem that we keep running into is that no one wants to write out a full length description of the fight, or go into any sort of explanation as to WHY things work. The videos are keen on saying “just do this” or “just do that” without explaining why they are doing it.

This became super clear with phase three of the fight when Twintania dive bombs the party. All of the guides told us to meet in one place, this little depression and then run to the center of the room. We tried this over and over before finally guessing at what was actually happening. It turns out this is straight up a geometry exploit that they are trying to do. In truth the fight should be exactly like Onyxia during the deep breath phase, where Twintania dive-bombs in a straight line towards the location where the marked player was standing when the symbol appeared over their head. The geometry hack is dependant upon everyone in the party standing in this little depression in the map, which means Twintainia actually dive-bombs a much lower plane than the rest of the ground. So all we have to do is run to higher ground and the attack will miss us entirely.

This is totally a hack, but apparently one that Square Enix has yet to patch… likely because they thought it was a clever way of handling the encounter. The problem is not a single video explained how this mechanic worked, or why doing this one thing negated the attack. Once we grasped upon exactly what was going on, we got it down in moments and immediately started progressing into the final real phase of the fight. Maybe I am old, or more so I know I am old… but maybe it is starting to have consequences. I find Youtube as a generally horrible way to learn information, and in all cases I would rather have an explanation of how something works written out in long form… rather than someone’s video of them doing whatever it is that they are wanting to convey. Maybe I am just stuck on the paradigm of video as entertainment means… instead of video as learning technique. In any case… we managed to figure things out as a group and hopefully next week will have officially cleared the first coil of bahamut.

Dance Dance Deathwing

December 1, 2014 by Belghast

Return of the Dailies

One of the constants in World of Warcraft since I believe the Burning Crusade expansion… is the construct of the daily quest. It has taken many forms over the years, but the crux of all of them is that it is something that you will be greatly benefited by if you do it every single day. This expansion seems to have abandoned some of the more heinous faction grind dailies, but fear not the idea is alive and well. This time however it has taken up residence in your Garrison, with the buildings that you built dictating what kind of daily quests you get. Many of these are daily resource gathering, and as such I have started attempting to do these every morning before I blog. Right now with two characters it seems to take me about fifteen minutes to do all of the gathering and making sure the various work order queues are full. By the time you extend that over all eleven of my Alliance faction characters however you are still going to take up a pretty large chunk of the day doing nothing but fiddling with bits and bobs in your garrison.

The most lucrative and I feel likely the most important daily is the one gained from the scout in your town hall. This rewards between 800 and 1000 apexis crystals which are essentially this expansions version of “justice points”. They can be spent on various bits of gear, which then can be upgraded through several tiers that I believe tops out at 665. Thankfully most days there is someone asking in guild to form up a group and we go do it together. However yesterday my timing was off completely, and as such I resorted to the open party finder. The nice thing about the assaults on the various locations is that they can be completed in a raid, and as such this allows you to use the raid finder to get a group rather quickly. Yesterday from the moment I finally got a group to accept me (it took several before one did) to the moment I completed the quest was about fifteen minutes or running around in a large circle at the Iron Docks pits. Which in the grand scheme of things really is not too terrible for 1000 apexis crystals.

The Firelands

Yesterday I continued my tour of older raids, attempting to solo my way through all of the content. Firelands is a raid that I never actually set foot in before, largely because it happened while I was gone from the game. I quit World of Warcraft initially with the launch of Rift, and at that point my raid was working on Cho’gall in Bastion and had just downed Maloriak in Descent. So there were two raids I never actually got to see in Cataclysm, both of which I was a little apprehensive to try and solo. Black Temple for example I have run so many times, including when the content was legitimate… that I know the place like the back of my hand. These new raids I figured I would learn as I go. To be truthful there really wasn’t much of anything in the raid that gave me issues, and like often is the case… steamrolling it often rewards you several achievements. The most interesting of the fights was probably Beth’tilac.

I had no clue what I was doing, but apparently did things optimally as I got an achievement for never letting any of the spiders hit the ground before killing her. I have to say I am so thankful for spammable heroic throw. While under normal circumstances it does not deal that much damage, it does at least give me an option for ranged dps as a warrior, and I have been using it liberally while soloing this old content. This is definitely a raid I plan on soloing weekly because not only is there some cool transmoggy bits, but also a few mounts that can drop that look extremely sweet. Additionally killing anything in the zone gives Avengers of Hyjal rep… and Belghast has always been the character I was proudest of having some strange Exalted reps on.

The Dragon Soul

The other raid that I tackled yesterday was Dragon Soul, the end of the expansion raid and one littered with tons of lore and cinematics. Once again I went into this raid completely fresh with no prior knowledge of it, and as such I took a few deaths here and there to things I needed to deal with. Most of the content was really straight forward, but I hit an absolute roadblock on the Spine of Deathwing encounter. In fact I had to actually take a break and do some research on how to actually do that fight. I can see why this encounter was the bane of so many raid groups, in fact I know a handful that actually broke up as a result of not being able to finish it. That said ultimately I figured out a solid way to solo it. For those unfamiliar with the fight when you land on his back you are on a section where 4 corruptions, these giant fiery tentacle things have spawned. Two things happen when you take one down that are important. Firstly a Hideous Amalgamation spawns, which will be important later… then a fiery spot appears on the ground that you can stand in to root you to Deathwing’s back as corrupted blood spawn from each of the open wounds.

The key feature of the fight is that Deathwing will try and roll you off of his back. In order to keep this from happening you need to have a fiery tentacle buff that shows that you are tethered to his back. When he rolls all of the Hideous Amalgamations fly off, which for the first few times is something that you want to happen… after a bit however you are going to want to halt that process. Ultimately what I did was stand on one side of Deathwing in a fire spot rooting me to his back until 10 blood had spawned. You technically only need 9, but I found it worked smoother if I had a spare. When each blood dies it spawns a fire patch on the ground… and ultimately you need to drag a Hideous Amalgamation through 9 of these until he grows in size. So when I first land on his back I hill 3 Corruptions, leaving one up until I have gathered up the 10 bloods… I take them out in one shot and then kite the Amalgamation through the fire until it grows… kill it next to the back plate… which allows you to kill an exposed tendon holding it to Deathwing’s back and move on to the next section.

Dance Dance Deathwing

The challenge is to “dance” back and forth on his back so that he doesn’t actually roll all the while you are kiting and dpsing down the add. Because if he rolls it resets the entire process knocking the amalgamation off his back. So ultimately I would stand in the fire, collect 10 bloods… then kite over to the last corruption… hit thunderclap which is enough damage to take out all of the bloods and the corruption. This spawns the amalgamation and I move immediate to the other side allowing him to go through it… and keeping deathwing from rolling. Then finally kite back while killing the Amalgamtion, let it explode and knock the plate loose. At which point I stand in the fire again rooting me to his back, and dps down the tendon holding the plate onto the back. After you have taken down one section the next areas go faster because you have more holes in the back.. and therefore are generating a lot more corrupted blood each round.

This step in the fight literally took me a dozen or so deaths before I got the pattern down well enough to be able to make it through the entirety of the fight without either not getting knocked off, or not allowing a fully loaded amalgamation to get knocked off. I feel like now that I know the fight I can pretty much repeat it whenever I need to, but in any case it was an interesting thing to learn how to solo. For the entirety of the weekends raid running, the only fight that managed to get the best of me was Nefarian 2.0. Even then i am thinking I might be able to do something to mitigate the insane amounts of damage I was taking. So I have not given up on that one, because I really really want to farm up a Reclaimed Ashkandi. I did apparently manage to get an extremely rare flying mount Experiment 12-B when I took out Ultraxion. Given the comments from folks in guild, apparently I spent all of my good luck on getting that to drop. Most of them never saw it the entire time they ran Dragon Soul. In any case it was a fun weekend, I am likely going to start farming these various raids each week.