Great Serpent of Ronka

Good Morning Friends, I must start off this post by apologizing. I probably gave some of you a heart attack yesterday when I was talking about the event to get the Regalia in FFXIV. I misread the timeline and it is in fact October 18th and not September 18th that the event finishes, giving you roughly a month instead of a week to complete it. I appreciate the reader who commented about this because I legitimately had simply glossed over that there were two different months in that statement. I’ve updated the previous post in order to hopefully keep anyone who was slow at reading it from having the same negative reaction. Another quick update is that yesterday I modified the masthead for the site, and finally after over a year have included PSO2 Belghast into the character collage. As always huge thanks to Ammosart who does most of my artwork, and that one collage represents some seven different commissions over the course of multiple years.

One of the things about this mission to level everything to 80 that has proven beneficial, is that as I adjust to each new class I learn some of its quirks. The hope is that after the experiment, I will be able to better support the unique needs of each class while I am tanking. One completely new adjustment however is how much time I have spent healing because that is more or less a role I have wholesale avoided since Everquest. There are a lot of little things that players need to know about healers in order to stop putting them in no-win situations. For example, you should never break the line of sight from your healer… especially if you are deciding that you are going to take damage. Healers cannot heal through walls and if you are out of range or in a whole other room… chances are you are going to die and that healer is going to feel like a failure as they resurrect your stupid ass.

I talked about this a bit on Twitter, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about some general theory around fight placement. I cobbled together this quick diagram to aid this discussion, but the idea is pretty straightforward. In a good scenario, the tank has pulled the boss and spun it away from the party so that frontal attacks won’t cause needless splash damage. The melee is set up either at the flank or in the rear of the boss depending on positional requirements. The healer and ranged DPS are spread out in a ring around the boss just outside of melee range so that they can run in for donut attacks or run out for any other markers, but close enough to be within splash healing range. This more or less allows the party to work efficiently, with healers doing some AOE healing while focusing on bigger heals for the tank.

However, what often happens is the bad scenario shown with the red box. Too often do I see tanks just walk up and start tanking the boss or pack of mobs in place without care for facing. This forces your melee to be back behind the encounter and vulnerable to any adds that join part way through from behind. Too often the healer has spread way the hell out and the ranged DPS is off in practically a whole other county completely out of the range of healing, and no one but the tank and melee is in the range of any splash AOE healing. Essentially my goal going into a fight is to optimize the conditions so that we have the greatest chance of succeeding and having a nice clean and swift run. Nothing slows down the party more than having to run back from a wipe because the fight mechanics that we had control over… were just carried out in a poor manner.

There are always going to be scenarios where this does not work, but it is a basic approach that works some 90% of the time. Another thing that took place yesterday, is that I managed to get the Stewards gathering beast tribe to Sworn which unlocked access to this goofy mount.

If you press the mount special button, which apparently replaces your pet hotbar… the “Serpent” springs forth from the mount and circles you before ducking back inside the jar. This is pure nonsense and is truly delightful. It reminds me a lot of the easter egg mount that springs forth a baby chocobo. You may not think it is worth leveling gathering up to Shadowbringers levels in order to get said mount, but for me it was a huge bonus of something I was already going to do.

There are many nights that I wraap up all of the activities that could give me “easy” levels pretty quickly. Traditionally this would be when I would fall into a rhythm of pushing up something through one of the Deep Dungeon systems. Last night however I apparently was restless because logged out and played a handful of other titles. The primary of these was Deathloop, which released yesterday. Prior to getting my hands on it, my initial impression based on the trailers was “What if Arkane created Bioshock but set it in the swinging 70s No One Lives For Ever visual language”. So far that more or less seems to be true.

This game is the same well crafted artistry that we have come to expect from the Dishonored series, and even some of the same visual language for set design is at play here. The device that bars your entry to your flat, reminds me a lot of the mechanism that was used to bar entry into plague ridden buildings for example. The only real problem I am having early on is that one… for some reason print screen is just straight up blocked and as a result ShareX doesn’t work for me and I have had to revert back to using F12 for Steam Screenshots. Secondly the lack of the ability to manually save your game is a real pain in the ass, and while absolutely intentional due to the gameplay… ends up just pissing me off as I have to keep repeating the same level over and over because I needed to bail for one reason or another. The idea is that you complete one entire level as a single pass, and then your gameplay state is snapshotted at the beginning of the next mission. What I want instead is just an ability to quicksave out of the game and return to that save state at a later time.

So far I am enjoying the game enough to stick with it, but am probably not going to spend much time with it until the weekend. This is absolutely the sort of game that I am going to need to carve out large chunks of time, rather than my normally fragmented gameplay. For one reason or another, during the week I seem to end up AFKing quite a bit, which is not conducive to a game that wants me to play one entire segment in a single sitting. This is one of those situations where the console players may have it easier, given that the PlayStation 5 allows you to pause a game and return to it at a later date. I feel like Arkane is going to have to patch in some sort of save game system, because right now what exists is awful and had I known about it… I might have given the game a hard pass for the time being.