AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 93 of 111

Heavensward Hype

March 8, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion. Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page. Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December. The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show. However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets. The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main… I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well. Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon… you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing. As the above image shows it was well worth the wait. My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had. I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear. As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am. I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least the current set is something I would happily wear. This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of. If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action. I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward. Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra. If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client. On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in. Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout. All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th… so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it. However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch. I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really… the first expansion is a crucial time for any game. I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content. That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways. I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions. Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content. In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull… even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches. So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting… because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.

Year Behind and Loving It

March 1, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 46 – Hards for Cards Extreme

Last night we once more recorded an episode of AggroChat and this time as one might expect our episode was almost entirely about Final Fantasy XIV patch 2.51. The patch introduced so much casual content to the game it is just silly. The primary addiction for our free company however has been the search for Triple Triad cards. While for some this has meant the constant dueling of NPCs to win specific cards, for me it has been doing hard content in the hopes that maybe just maybe it would drop a card. Yesterday Tam did some quick math and realized that over the course of the week I had completed more than 90 hard mode trials. Each of these trials rewards 5 poetics, and I capped almost exclusively through chain running them to get various primal cards. There are still a ton more that I need but so far I have managed to gather up Ifrit, Garuda, Gilgamesh/Enkidu, Ultros/Typhon and Good King Moggle Mog.

What I find amazing about this patch is the way that each of us has reacted to it slightly differently. Some of us have spent time racing Chocobos, others playing the catcpot lottery, and even others doing the various GATE events scattered throughout the golden saucer. Last nights show was overwhelmingly about our love of Final Fantasy XIV, but we did manage to slide a few other topics in. Tam and Kodra talk Elite: Dangerous and their recent missions to go asteroid mining. Kodra talks a new game that he has started called Deer God, and how it is not quite ready for primetime… but still charming. It was a fun show to record, and it is rare that all five of us are so completely enthralled with the same content at the same time.

Year Behind and Loving It

One of the things that made last nights show so damned entertaining to record, is we were essentially basking in the afterglow of a big raid win. Saturday night for a couple of hours before the podcast we have been doing this impromptu raid thing as a way of allowing some of the folks that cannot make our normal Monday night raid get some action. We alternate between doing serious content, and doing whatever eight man content one of our free company mates needs to get them off center. So as such last night we started off with the Chrysalis, the 8 man trial added with the last bit of storyline. It took us a bit to learn this fight but I was really pleased to see we could step in after a week and essentially down it in our first attempt. There was a bit of an intermission as we had to let Warenwolf catch up on the cinematic, but after that we set our focus on Titan Extreme.

For awhile we have had the awesomely named “Quake me up before you O’Ghomoro” sitting in our quest logs taunting us. This has been one of those things that I think all of us wanted to put behind us… but quite frankly Titan Extreme is one of the most demanding fights I have experienced in awhile. It requires the entire raid to move with confidence and precision, and there is a really slim margin of forgiveness. As we talked about on the Podcast it also does something really interesting, in that it makes you relearn your instincts. We died so many times because it is my tank instinct to run back in after a knockback and turn the boss. However in this fight there are reasons why that is the wrong decision, and it took awhile last night for me to get past that urge. Sure it is a year late in us beating this content, but damned does it not feel amazing that we did it… and that content that is over a year old is still relevant.

Faffing with the Mandervilles

This has become my new favorite screenshot, that I took on a whim the other night in the Manderville Golden Saucer. Before last nights raid, I opted to glamour my axe to the very awesome and very fitting Malignant Mogaxe. Most of the Good King Moggle Mog weapons have a bit of a silly side to them, but this one is just a very brutal looking axe with a Moogle pattern inlaid into the blade. It happens to match colorwise with my hair and my current chest piece nicely. This has been the best part about chain running Hard Mode Trials is the fact that I am picking up so many of the awesome primal weapons for Glamour purposes. I talked about this a bit last night, but since I have 5 level 50 classes… I have taken to collecting my Triple Triad Cards through running content because it kills two birds with one stone. There is always the chance of getting the cards that I want to drop, but at the same time all the while I am trying to get it I am stockpiling tomestones of soldiery that I can then use to buy gear for my army of classes.

Over the course of the weekend I managed to get Warrior and Paladin to 116, Dragoon to 110, White Mage to 100… and now I just need to catch up my Bard that is still sitting at 95. While it might seem tedious to run the same primal fights over and over… for me I guess it is much the same as soloing old school raid content in World of Warcraft. The fights and zones just feel epic, and I am happy to repeat them over and over. That has been one of the best things about having a fresh influx of new players… I am able to play “big kid” and run the old content with people seeing it for the first time. There is nothing quite like re-running content that never actually gets truly trivial. What I like the best is the fact that my chosen way of playing the game… is not the only one. Each of my free company mates has figured out their own particular style of play… and all see to be happy doing it. Nothing quite like being in a group where everyone seems to be happy.

Battle in the Big Keep

February 22, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 45 – The Citzens of Earth Show

Last night we recorded the episode devoted to the very first AggroChat Game Club title, Citizens of the earth. During the episode we talked about the various aspects of our game play experience. For this game play experience myself and Rae played on the PC, Tam and Ash on the Vita and Kodra on the 3DS. It seems like this game was not quite ready for primetime, because all of the console experiences were somehow fraught with problems. We attempt to dive into the mechanics in depth, talking about the interesting way the game recruits new characters to your party. We also dive into discussion about the storyline and our general feel on how successful the game ended up being for each of us.

I have to say this first game made us completely re-evaluate our process for picking titles for the future. As such going forward we will be doing a round robin starting with Rae. This months title will be Trine 2 which is awesome because I know that has been in a number of Humble Bundles as well as a Playstation Plus title. Our hope is this will make it a fairly easy title for people to join in the fun with. Since this game has two very different experiences for single player and multi-player we will be trying both. I know personally I plan on playing some on the PS4 as well as on the PC to give myself a feel for how the game performs both on a PC and on a console. It should be interesting, and I hope you all will join in the fun and give Trine 2 a play this coming month.

Battle in the Big Keep

On Saturday nights before podcast time we have started doing a semi-raid night where we gather up whoever happens to be on and run eight player content with them. The random nature of these nights is quickly making it one of my favorite evenings of the week. Last night we finally had a full eight player group ready for the latest of the Hildebrand quests. Once again we get into a battle with “Greg” aka Gilgamesh, but the awesome part is this time we really do get to see Enkidu his longtime companion. This entire sequence has been huge for our guild, because we have deep ties to Final Fantasy V. For years Ashgar has been twisting our arms to participate in the Four Job Fiesta with him, and as such we are all very familiar with the shenanigans of Gilgamesh. The sequence of events is almost directly ported from Final Fantasy V and as such we love every new step. There is just so damned much nostalgia wrapped up in this game that it is amazing.

I have to say the conclusion of the Hildebrand quest chain was well worth the wait. I don’t want to spoil anything about the quest chain or the fight… but this is quite possibly my favorite encounter in any game. Everything about it is just so amazing, the only problem is I am not sure how someone is going to complete it being less geared than we are. I was taking so damned much damage as a tank it was silly… which makes me think it has to be percentage based. Otherwise it would flat out kill any paladin tanks I know in the game. I have roughly 11k health and when he cast Sword Dance it would whittle off about 8000 health in a short period of time. We ran the fight back to back, and I swear there will be not getting tired of it for me at least. Also it drops an Enkidu chicken pet.. so I must have it.

Random Groupy Bits

One of the things I am really enjoying right now is having so many different people playing the game at different levels of completion. This is meaning that we need to keep running different activities and revisiting older content. I am absolutely eating this up, because I never really know what I might be needed to tank each time I log into the game. I would love to see us do a semi regular night of doing nothing but the things that can drop pets. Last night Exale needed Good King Moggle Mog, but ended up dropping from a duty and garnering the 30 minute debuff. Instead we pulled together a group and did the Dragon Neck encounter… aka Ultros. The first few times we did this it was super frustrating, but the last couple of times we seem to be getting better. To mix things up Ashgar and I swapped roles and he took Ultros and I tanked Typhon.

ffxiv 2015-02-22 10-52-42-36

We had one bobble in not getting enough water in the various Kappa transformed players “bowls” to interrupt Typhon, but on our second try it went pretty much flawlessly. I am generally pretty horrible at rolling on pets, in fact on Enkidu I rolled an 11. However when Ultros dropped at the end of that encounter, I managed to roll a 95. You can see in the above image me in ninja form standing beside the adorably creepy wind up Ultros minion. I maybe have a problem with minions… right now I have 60… and am constantly looking to get more. It is the little fun things in the game world that make it enjoyable for me. I need to get off my ass and get on with doing the various beast tribe dailies because each of them has both a minion and a mount waiting at the higher levels of faction. I am a little disappointed that there are not more mounts in the game that are dropped off normal dungeon content rather than extreme mode primals. Eventually someday I hope to join in the extreme mount farming fun, but so far these always seem to happen on Saturday nights… when we are recording our podcast.

Games I Want to Revisit

February 16, 2015 by Belghast

Tomorrow morning is going to be what seems like a frosty one. So I am once again cheating and writing a blog post the night before I intend on posting it. I assume in the morning I will need to spend all of my available time scraping windows and warming cars to make sure we can get in safely. Lately I have been poking my head around Guild Wars 2, a game that I had until Pax South completely written off as “not for me”. Since then I have reached a point of peace with the game, and actually found that I am enjoying it quite a bit. So this morning my post will be a revisiting of games that I would like to give a second or third chance.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic has the dubious honor of being quite possibly the worst possible free to play conversion I have ever experienced. If I did not know any better, it might be absolutely functional for a new player. That said having played the game in release and realizing just how gimped the game is without spending a lot of money, infuriates me. Essentially I cannot bring myself to play this game without actually paying for a subscription. I have attempted to play this game a few times since release, but never for terribly long. My last voyage into the game was to try and play a Sith Juggernaut, since I had not really experienced much of the dark side content. When our guild was actually playing regularly I managed to level a Jedi Guardian, Jedi Shadow, and a Trooper Vanguard… so yes all three available tanks. When I finally left the game I was slowly working on leveling my Chiss Smuggler.

Since then they have released several expansions each with their own story extensions. I feel like maybe I am missing something having not seen any of this content. That was the one thing above all else that really excelled with The Old Republic, was that the traditional Bioware story was excellent. This weekend on the podcast we talked a bit about Kodra’s experiences with the smuggler storyline, and I have to say I got those pangs of remorse in my stomach for never having experienced it. On top of this, there is still so much content Sith side that I have never actually seen. The problem that I ran into the last time I played was that the questing just felt so repetitive. These quests are very much World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King era in the way they are constructed. While the storyline itself is excellent, it just felt tiring to keep trying to push through the planets. Still all of this said… I feel like I should give it another shot.

Lord of the Rings Online

Lord of the Rings Online and I have a strange relationship. I never actually played this at launch, but during one of my many breaks with World of Warcraft I joined some friends playing it. There are things I love about this game, and then there are things that frustrate me. I love the community of this game, almost more than I like the game itself. Landroval is an amazing place, and there are so many times I find myself wandering around Bree listening to player created concerts rather than actually completing content. I’ve never been successful at trying to play this game for free, so ultimately I end up subscribing to remove the roadblocks. There is just so much content that I have yet to experience. Last time I played I had just made it to the Trollshaws, which I think is in my late 30s. I greatly enjoy the Champion as far as a class goes, and found it really enjoyable to solo. Which was super important because I have never really found a stable group playing this game.

I follow so many blog of players devoted to LoTRO and I have to say I feel like somewhat of a failure that I have never had a max level character there. As such it sits in a unique place as far as regrets go for me. I am sure I will end up reinstalling this game at some point, and poking my head back there to give it another go. It has been I think two years since I last tried to play, and since then I am sure quite a bit more content has been released. The game is full of so many special moments of nostalgia for followers of the book series. The above picture is from Weathertop, one of these early “oh my god I am actually standing here” moments in these games. I just wish I could clone myself and play all the games I want to play at the same time.

Neverwinter Online

When this game was released I played off and on during the first week… and then never set foot in it again. The biggest problem I had was that while the game was a good action rpg… Elder Scrolls Online was simply a better one. In the weeks since joining open beta for Neverwinter and the ultimate release… I was let into the double super secret alpha testing program for ESO. So all of the time and devotion I would have spent playing Neverwinter, I instead poured into the alpha testing program for ESO. As such I feel like I never really actually gave this game a chance. I enjoyed the Guardian Fighter quite a bit, and it was an excellent mix of tank and brawler giving me the ability to do damage with my favored sword and shield. Again the biggest problem is that I was trying to compare it to the Dragonknight Sword and Shield that I was playing in Elder Scrolls Online and Neverwinter just coming up short.

What interests me about potentially going back is the fact that not only is there official content waiting on me, there is an absolutely insane amount of player created content. My friend Tipa from West Karana blog, has seemingly done an amazing job of recreating some of the nostalgic content from the original Everquest with the Neverwinter foundry toolset. At some point I really want to go in and experience this first hand. The biggest thing holding me back is the fact that firstly, I am not really sure if I can remember my account information. Secondly Perfect World has never given me the warmest of fuzzies, and I’ve always found some of their practices to be a week bit sketchy. Even taking these into consideration I am sure at some point I will reinstall this game and give it another go. There is just too much left there to experience that I have not seen at all.