Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

Banquets and No Caffeine

This has been a strange week for me, for several reasons but not the least of which has been my mission to try and stop energy drinks cold turkey.  I have been less functional than I normally am, but I am hoping that at some point I will crest and things will start to get more normal.  This morning seems to be the worst of it, or what I am hoping is the worst of it.  When I went out for my normal early morning breakfast run, I was so damned tempted to buy a monster.  Fortunately I stuck to my guns and just picked up a Dr Pepper instead.  I think what has made the last two days so awful is that for one reason or another I have not been fixing coffee in the morning as per my usual routine.  As such this morning I woke up with the worst splitting headache I have had in years, which I can only attribute to not having nearly enough caffeine in my system to sustain me.

Yesterday itself was a bit of an odd one as well.  The bulk of the day was spent piddling around online and doing laundry other than my brief period of time recording Battle Bards.  The highlight of the day was pretty much hanging out and talking with Syl and Jae for several hours.  The low point was the fact that in the evening I had to go to an employee banquet.  In the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal, and this was I think the fourth or fifth one I have gone to.  The problem is…  they are largely long drawn out awards shows with the exact same meal from year to year.  The positive of this however is the fact that there is really great cheesecake.  The negative is, most of the food tastes like it has been sitting out for hours.  This years frustration is that they never came around with coffee after dinner, so I am not sure exactly what was up with the wait staff this year.  They acted disorganized, when in the past they have always been a picture of lightning precision.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

The problem with having a banquet to go to meant that we would be getting home way later than normal.  I gave my aggrochat crew a heads up, but Kodra sadly was just too sick to stay on and record.  As a result we recorded the show with a very sleepy me, Ashgar, Rae and Tam.  Granted Tam was probably not all that sleepy considering it wasn’t all that late for his newly pacific time zone self.  For me we didn’t get started recording until 10 pm… and that meant 11 pm for Ashgar who got progressively less communicative as the show went on.  Moments before we were about to hit record… Tam completely blew my mind.  I’ve embedded the video above… the man in the videos hobby apparently is to make actual food… with doll sized utensils and then record it for YouTube.  I had no real words for what I was seeing.  As you are watching it… remember that he is putting this much effort into what is essentially a single spoon full of food.

When we finally recovered from that…  we had a relatively normal show talking about Final Fantasy XIV and our defeat of Turn 6 and work on Turn 7 of Binding Coil of Bahamut.  I break the pattern and discuss my experiences in Blackrock Foundry last week, and start a discussion about randomness in encounters and why it is both a good and frustrating thing.  From there we delve into Tam’s faffing about in Elite: Dangerous.  This reprises a conversation we have had before about his ultimate concept for a space game, where we all exist on the same ship, but can play vastly different roles.  We decided in this grand space adventure he would be Wash, I would be Mal, and Rae of course would be Kaylee.  I would love to have a game where pilot Tam could drop me off on a planet to explore while providing cover fire… then help me evac with all of loot I found, taking it to a near black market and unloading our spoils.  Towards the end of the show we get into a discussion of the North American League Championship Series and how watching it has changed for Rae, Tam and Ashgar now that they also have a Fantasy League going on.  It was a fun hour of conversation, albeit a very sleepy one.

I’ve Been Doing It Wrong

One of the more interesting tidbits that came out of last nights podcast is that apparently I have been playing Arcanist wrong all of this time.  More so than that I have apparently been playing damage over time classes wrong in every game I have tried playing them.  There have been few things I have hated more than playing a DoT heavy class, because the gameplay always felt slow and boring.  What I had been doing all of these years was something relatively simple… I would send my pet to the target, apply my dots, and then use whatever weak nuke I happened to have to burn it down.  I commented last night that I would rather level another Conjurer than play Arcanist.  To which Tam was absolutely shocked…  and he started to explain how he leveled where he ran around willy nilly and dotted everything in site up, letting Carbie fight to hold aggro while chain pulling everything.  I tried this, in the middle of the podcast and damned if it did not work miraculously.

Truth is I simply do not think like a “finger wiggler” as I have always called them.  I want to clash face to face with the mobs and burn them down one by one while holding aggro on everything else.  That is my comfort zone, what I am used to, and the gameplay I always seem to return to.  Arcanist and other dot classes apparently need to be played in a style that I had never thought about.  Simply dotting up everything in sight and waiting for the dots to kill them while attacking other things.  As Tam said, it is apparently easier to kill ten things at once  than one thing…  now knowing this I managed to get from 18 to 20 Arcanist with extreme ease in the amount of time it took to finish the podcast.  This is just such a foreign concept to me, that it is taking awhile for me to grasp.  So far it is working… maybe I will in fact have a Summoner/Scholar, the class that I never thought I would end up getting to max level.