Grand Experiment Archives - Page 69 of 200

Roguepocalypse

October 29, 2014 by Belghast

Awesome Overload

Yesterday was seriously one of the hardest days to get through I have experienced in a very long time. When I troddled off to work the Final Fantasy XIV servers were up and back from maintenance, and as I worked all day long I would see little tid bits of information here and there about just how great this patch ended up being. For the uninitiated yesterday was the release of Patch 2.4 “Dreams of Ice” which introduced a ton of new content, not the least of which is the Shiva primal encounter that the patch is named for. It is truly staggering to think about the amount of content that has been released for this game since launch. Roughly every quarter players get a major patch the size of 2.4, that generally introduces 1 to 2 new primal fights, 3 new hard mode dungeons, new main story quest chain, new Hildebrand story chain, new gear, new glamour bits, new hair styles and in this one they even introduced a brand new class and job combination in the Rogue and Ninja. On top of that we seem to see at least one minor content patch each month, the last one added personal housing so still no slouch content wise.

So when you contrast that with other games that can go six months to an year without any new content, it is phenomenal. This patch however is not with its controversies. Up until this point everything that has been available in game has either been earned doing in game things, or through subscription rewards. The game has some pretty insane subscription rewards that include tons of interesting mounts, pets and cosmetic items. This patch however introduced the cash shop, and they sprinkled a few really awesome items on it, not the least of which is the Slepnir mount you can see me on in the above picture. There is so much gnashing of teeth over the fact that this mount is $24, and the mini-pets on the store are $5 each. At this point however a cosmetic shop just seems like the status quo. One of the more interesting things they are doing with it is that each year there are unique rewards for completing holiday events. To allow players to get previous items they are putting the older items up on the cash shop for a minimal fee. Thankfully I have managed to pick up most of the holiday items I might want, but it is nice knowing that I could potentially get the items I missed during the Christmas events.

Focused Gameplay

Though out the day yesterday I thought about just what I would try and tackle that night when I got home. My focus was going to be on unlocking the three new hard mode dungeons so I could be ready to run them as the rest of my free company became available. I could always queue for the dungeon finder and take my chances with strangers, but I would really rather experience this content fresh with a guild group. There is something awesome about having to reason your way through the fights for the first time as a team, even if you fail to make the 90 minute timer. Even with my laser focus… there are certain things any proper Lalafell must do. While wandering around Uldah I bumped into Sagacyte Luxaloix and before I knew it we were dancing the manderville as is Lala tradition. Moments later we were joined by a friend of his Lirrianna Darkholme and there in the middle of the streets of Uldah we had an impromptu Lalafell dance party. We were all very busy, but traditions must be observed and social graces administered.

For those looking into unlocking the new content, there is an excellent blog post from a Lalafell blogger I just stumbled onto this morning talking about the start of each of the new content items. After we finished with our customary dance party, I went on about my business of unlocking the dungeons. Both Sastasha Hard and Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard were relatively simple to unlock, with fairly straight forward go and talk to this guy then go to the dungeon style quests that start in Mor Dhona. For Snowcloak however it is yet another quest tied deeply into the main storyline. So I set forth beginning that chain and two and a half hours I had reached a point where I was standing at the gates of the new Snowcloak dungeon. When they put in new story content… they put in a lot of story content. This however is what makes the game so damned phenominal, is that they keep moving the story forward and giving you a reason to care about the characters you meet. As a friend said last night, it is not so much that your character is the “big damned hero” but more that your character is the social glue that keeps all of the good guys working together. You are the one person they trust due to past interactions, and the lubricant to make things happen when something goes wrong.

Roguepocalpyse

I did not actually intend to start a rogue last night, but I ended up picking up a new quest in Limsa Lominsa near the Aetheryte crystal that just happened to lead me to the guild. I figured while I was there what was the harm of going ahead and unlocking the class. The server has quite literally gone insane for Rogues and Ninjas. The above photo is a scene from inside the Rogues guild in Limsa Lominsa, and there are even more folks milling around outside of the place. The Fisherman’s Guild port has never seen this much activity ever, and really the guild does a pretty piss poor job of disguising itself with all these people swarming around it. So while I picked up the Rogue I had no plans to level it until I got bored waiting around on a group to happen. Last night myself, Tam and Ash hatched a plan to make the guild some money that we could stockpile for our guild airship. Wanderers Palace is the bottleneck for the Relic weapon quest, in that you need a bloody weapon component to craft the precursor weapon for the entire quest chain. For most classes these are common enough that you can pick up a high quality version of the weapon for 20-30k gil and just be on your way.

This means that all of these newly minted rogues will need one eventually so that they can start down the Relic quest chain. As you can see there are only two currently available on the Cactuar market system and they are holding steadily at 300k gil each. The finished weapons are holding steadily at 500k gil a piece and both are in high demand. So we thought we could run Wanderers Palace a few times and if nothing else stockpile some blades for the guild, and at best pick up a bunch to sell on the market while the demand is high. We struggled to find a fourth, as there were a handful of folks available… but they all appeared to be either AFK or in a duty already. So while we waited around for something to happen… I decided to start working on the rogue. Overall the class is really damned fun to play, and in part it is the animations that make it so enjoyable. You feel like a whirlwind of death as pretty much every attack is some sort of a spin move. Additionally the way you hold your daggers… makes me actually kinda like wielding daggers. They feel brutal and swift, instead of awkward stabby weapons like daggers feel in so many games.

The only problem is that everyone is playing a rogue. This is what every fate looks like practically anywhere in the game right now. An army of rogues, their chocobos and a blinding flurry of circular slashes as far as the eye can see. As the second shot shows, some rogues have taken to putting Flash on their bar and run around gathering up all of the fate mobs while the rest of us hopelessly chase after them trying to do as much contribution as possible. I remember fates feeling like this at launch, and in reality it is like we have returned to that post launch period at least a bit. Additionally there are a ton of folks out there doing the fates as well trying to farm their Atma pieces, and it seems that the drop rates are in fact reasonable now. I’ve heard tales of folks completing a full set of atmas in a single evening, but I still feel you need to be lucky to make that happen. While I don’t so much care about my rogue, I plan on riding the FATE gravy train with my monk to see just how many levels I can squeeze out.

Broken Roulette

The influx of rogues has lead to some serious madness. I have not actually tried to queue as one, but I saw this tweeted awhile back with someone being stuck in the queue for over 120 minutes. DPS queues previously were 15 to 20 minutes on my server, and the low level roulette queues last night were reporting around an hour. Thankfully none of this madness has hit Syrcus Tower yet, as my dragoon queue there was still near instant last night. I feel like non-ninja dps will have a better shot at getting into dungeons, especially ranged dps since the game tries to match a ranged and a melee for each four man team. In any case if you have a tank or a healer that you plan on leveling, right now is the ideal time to do it. You will get instant queues and probably get the extreme gratitude of the ninjas inside the instance who have been waiting anxiously to do a dungeon. This reminds me of the way Ifrit and Titan were shortly after launch. My friend Tam used to queue doing “community service” as he called it. One time he ran into a poor black mage who had been sitting waiting on Ifrit for 3 1/2 hours. I am not sure if I will do it tonight, but I plan on working on my White Mage to help with the influx of folks queuing for things.

#FFXIV #Rogue #Ninja

Heavensward Job Speculation

October 28, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Downtime

Yesterday the world mourned as we were unable to play Final Fantasy XIV. While technically at this very moment the servers should be up, I am pretending that they are not so that I don’t get horribly sidetracked this morning. While locked out of the game yesterday, it lead many of us to start speculating about what the classes and jobs that have yet to be identified might be for the Heavensward expansion. Right now there have been extremely scant confirmed details. The Dark Knight being the only class that is 100% verified and confirmed by the Square Enix. However during the events of Las Vegas there was a moment when maybe the Samurai was confirmed. As Soken scrolled around on screen looking for a specific track to play, he scrolled past a folder labeled “Samurai”.

So while this isn’t a confirmation by any case it has caused a lot of folks to assume this is the next class. Since Dark Knight is a tank, would this maybe make Samurai a DPS? In any case I plan on playing one whatever it ends up being. There is a thread out on Reddit trying to collect various tidbits of information that Yoshi-P has said during official statements. While this thread predates the Las Vegas Fan Fest, there is still a lot of interesting information in it. Primarily the confirmation that there would be at least one gun glass, and that it would not be the gun classes that we would expect. What I think is meant by that is that there is been a Corsairs guild in Limsa Lominsa for ages, it just isn’t labelled as such formally. Since Merlwyb herself is a Corsair, it has always been assumed that this would be an early expansion class. I feel like Yoshi-P is specifically saying this isn’t the case.

The Agent

So if not the Musketeer/Corsair class then the question becomes what exactly will the gun job be. During the London Fan Fest Yoshi-P took the stage wearing a really awesome Black Mage outfit, however as soon as he stripped down out of the top part of it… he was wearing a black and gold 007 t-shirt. Then he pantomimed the traditional Bond opening sequence with a finger gun seen above. Normally I would think… this is Yoshi… he does all sorts of interesting things, this is pretty much the standard fare. However in Las Vegas the Dark Knight job that was eventually conformed in London… was first introduced with a Batman t-shirt. So this leaves us with what exactly is this job he is trying to tell us. Turns out there is in fact a job from one of the Tactics series games called “The Agent” that is apparently exclusive to that games “Cid” character. In fact the analogy pretty much fits Bond perfectly, considering the Agent is described essentially as a womanizing spy.

The Machinist

There however is a significant contingency that seems to believe that Yoshi might have already told us what the gun class would be. During an interview with MMORPG.com they asked him what his favorite class that is not currently in Final Fantasy XIV. He gave two specific answers, the first being Dark Knight which was confirmed in London. The second one he announced is the Machinist, specifically the version coming from Final Fantasy Tactics. This is traditionally a ranged attacker class, so it could very easily be this gun based class folks are assuming it would be. The version of this class that I am most familiar with is Edgar from Final Fantasy VI, and in that version he wields a wide variety of ranged contraptions, each of which giving him a different unique attack. Having not played much of the Tactics games, mostly because the game play style never really clicked with me… I am not sure exactly how this differs. It would be cool to have a traditional engineer type class, that fights using gadgets. Oddly enough the FFXI Puppet Master class is apparently considered a Machinist according to the wiki, and that is already a class that I would dig seeing in FFXIV.

The Chemist

Another possibility would be the Chemist, as it is one of the few traditional Final Fantasy “healer” jobs that exist but are not already in game. There is a precedent for being a gun class apparently. While I do not know which game this came from, the Wiki lists them as being able to equip guns in at least one game. Hoping that someone can fill in these details in the comments below as to which game they actually used guns. In any case even if this is not a gun glass I think it is a pretty strong candidate for a healer. They would present a unique healing style that isn’t already in the game, and could even do something similar to what they are doing with Ninjutsu to support the “mix” gameplay style from previous games. What if you had a series of commands that represented “ingredients” and then you had a mix command that you pressed afterwards. The combat effect would be based on which three ingredients you combined. Sure this would make for a strange healing style, but you could give them really strong heal over time capabilities to make up for and buffer the fiddly nature of mixing just the right potion in the heat of battle. I think this would be a really interesting game play style for someone looking for a class with an exceptionally high skill cap.

Blue Mage

One of the things that screams Final Fantasy to me is the more interesting classes. Every game has the holy trinity of Tank, Healer and Melee/Range DPS. Final Fantasy however has traditionally had some exceptionally nuanced classes that blur these lines. For me at least the king of the “odd” classes is the Blue Mage, in its various forms. This apparently is another class that there is at least some precedent for being a gun class, based on past games. However even if this never makes it in as a gun class… I still want the class in the game badly. In part because I know this would make a good friend of mine exceptionally happy… and we would likely never find it playing any other job. The Blue Mage game play style would be extremely difficult as compared to the traditional MMO tropes… but I feel like it would be something interesting to add in with a series of intricate quests similar to the “Egi” quests needed to learn the various “lore” spells. I could see getting pulled into a series of dungeon encounters to be able to learn things like “Doom” that are traditionally in their spell list. I could also see it playing out far more organically and you have to actually learn your spells through running dungeons and defeating encounters. In any case I think it would be an extremely interesting addition.

Berserker

Last bit of speculation this morning is one that seems like an absolute no brainer. In Final Fantasy V the Berserker had the ability to Equip Axes, which made them the almost natural choice for these weapons that most job could not use. As a DPS job, this makes them an ideal fit to be paired with the Marauder class and represent their DPS job, much the same way as Scholar and Summoner currently come from the Arcanist class. I have no clue if we will see this happen during the Heavensward expansion, but I think at some point each of the classes will end up getting a second job. It seems like a no brainer to make this happen, since most of the abilities in the marauder class could easily support the Berserker. The only question is how exactly would the game play work. I seriously doubt that they would try and replicate the weird glitchy “berserk” game play where the character just kind of goes off on its own making poor life decisions and getting the party killed. Instead I feel like it would be a traditional melee dps option, something they are of no shortage of currently. if nothing else I think this is a thing that is going to happen sooner or later, and I would welcoming having another class that uses all of the badass looking two handed axes.

Heavensward Job Speculation

Something to remember when reading this… everything but the Dark Knight is pure speculation. Yoshi-P is notoriously poor at keeping secrets, so I feel like he has already given us a bunch of information to figure out what sorts of classes and jobs we will see for the expansion. I also feel over the coming Live Letters he will start leaking more details, and hopefully between all of this we will start to be able to piece together what the final line-up is going to look like. I don’t think we will get much more confirmation however until the December 20-21 Tokyo Fan Fest. There are a ton of jobs that I would love to see in FFXIV. Mostly I feel like we have the strong core classes already in place, and would love for them to start adding in more of the trademarked Final Fantasy “quirk”. There are a ton of jobs that can be inspiration from decades of games, in any case I feel like we will have lots of interesting options this spring. Now I need to wrap this up and get to work… so I can rush home after work and play Patch 2.4.

Catastrophic Rollback

October 25, 2014 by Belghast

Extra Life is Go!

This morning team alliance of awesome has been streaming for awhile by the time I write this post. This means the Extra Life marathon has been kicked off and the thunderbirds are go! So I highly suggest you tune into the Alliance of Awesome team and see how all is streaming. I personally won’t be coming on until significantly later in the day where I plan on playing a brand new Secret World character named “Belstream” on the Arcadia server. I’ve gone through the character creation already and am sitting at the very start of the New York zone. I went Illuminati this time, because with all of the “conspiracy” floating around in the gaming community it seemed rather fitting. The Secret World is one of those games that I love but don’t end up playing all that often. I am a lifetime subscriber, and I still consider that money well spent.

One of the interesting challenges today is trying to fit in the recording of a podcast around the various stream times. Kodra and Hiddenwings stream before our normal recording time, and I stream almost immediately following it. I will be going from 11pm EST to 3am EST, and then after me is I believe Scarybooster and then finally Cav will be finishing off the entire process. From what I understand both Stargrace and Braxwolf intend to do the entire 25 hours… so during a lot of the stream there will be multiple channels on Team AofA that you can be watching. When I last tuned in, Stargrace was streaming some Divinity Original Sin, so you should see a wide variety of titles today. I personally am mostly going to stream MMOs. I had originally planned on streaming some Destiny, but with my current frustration with the game that probably isn’t the best idea. Maybe going to substitute in some Rift Nightmare Tide if it is behaving.

Catastrophic Rollback

The last few days I have been sick, as I said in my blog my lungs pretty much betrayed me. As a result I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch poking around in Rift Nightmare Tide. Over the course of Thursday I watched one and a half seasons of American Horror Story, made it about half way through 60 and made some significant progress on several different tradeskills, finally crafting myself a nice set of blue weapons. Then something bad happened. When I was working on my blog post yesterday the Faeblight server was completely offline, and while I thought this was odd I just went on with my business of writing a normal blog post. Later in the day on twitter I heard that Laethys, Faeblight and Wolfsbane were all offline and that there had been something that happened to the hardware for that server cluster. When I got home the server was back online, and I logged into my character only to notice that I had lost an entire days worth of play time. My character was sitting back at 1% experience into 60… pretty much the point at which you normally zone into the zone.

A thread on the forums confirmed the issue, that there had indeed been a rollback. The goofy thing is it seems to be an uneven rollback. I have all of my Planar Attunement experience gained, as well as all of my Minion experience. My character however was completely rolled back, including the fact that I no longer had the spec or macros that I set the day before when I started to level the character. The biggest problem is… I spent a lot of platinum training various skills… and all of THAT seemed to be missing like I had in fact trained the skills but had nothing to show for it. As an IT professional I have had things like this happen to me too. A backup is only as good as the time you need to restore it… and it is often times impossible to tell if a backup is actually going to work correctly. Having been in the shoes of these folks before myself… I feel generally horrible for the stress that they are going through. Supposedly Faeblight is hit the worst and they are having to manually go back through logs to try and figure out what all was actually lost.

I can take this with a grain of salt, knowing that sooner or later Trion is going to make things right for me. They always have in the past, and I have a feeling they will during this time. I mean this is probably the most catastrophic rollback I have experienced since the ill fated launch of Horizons back in 2003. Unfortunately rollbacks were something that happened during those days, so we accepted it at face value and moved on. Rollbacks these days however are almost unheard of, and as a result the players on the forums are out for blood. There are some players who had power leveled themselves to 65 and maxed out several of their tradeskills… and all of that effort was completely lost. I am super thankful I have been playing the expansion extremely casually at this point. All of this said I am certain that Trion will make things right in the end, the biggest frustration for me was setting back up all of my hotbars and my new spec again.

ArcheAge Update

I have not been playing much of late, especially with all of the other games on my plate. However I felt like I needed to post an update. I have been pretty down on ArcheAge as a game from my pretty horrific experiences with the Alpha/Beta community. In part I think a lot of those early players were Streamers and did horrific things to other players to entertain their audiences. I can remember one incident where I had to cross a bay in a rowboat, and folks were lined up trying to capsize and subsequently drown us as all of the little newbies tried to cross the open water. Coming back and playing on the Naima server at launch… I have to say I have not experienced any of this non-combat griefing. I have gone afk in town numerous times, and have not found myself pushed out into a bunch of mobs and dead on the ground… this was something that happened constantly in alpha.

The game is still compelling, but I have yet to actually make it to the contested zone levels this time around. I am still in my early 20s, but I hope to make a push at some point to see just how the open pvp areas feel. If the early game is any indication, maybe the production player base is more reasonable than the barbaric alpha playerbase was. I can deal with danger, and I can deal with the possibility of death… what I could not deal with was the constant jackassery that I experienced in the alpha community. This is still not my primary game, especially with all of the exciting things happening in FFXIV this week, and the launch of Rift Nightmare Tide. However I still have a large number of friends playing the game, and it has been nice to pop my head in and talk to people I have not seen in years. Unfortunately the guild I was planning on joining imploded this week, and has been replaced by another one. So I will have to make the necessary inroads to get invites there. Also unfortunately it seems they might not be as casual friendly, which would be unfortunate… because for each of the serious players I know playing the game, they have a couple of not so serious friends that are also playing with them.

#ExtraLife #Rift #ArcheAge

Bel Folks Stuff Debut

October 24, 2014 by Belghast

An Evening With Syl

A few weeks back I talked about a new kind of podcast I was planning on doing. Where I grab one of the very interesting members of our community and chat with them a bit. Somewhat of an informal interview podcast. Thankfully everyone I have talked to about this idea thought it was cool and has been willing to volunteer for the process. Since my friend @Gypsy_Syl and I have notoriously struggled to find time to actually hang out together on voice chat, I figured it would be awesome to start this entire process with her. Thankfully she graciously accepted and last Sunday at noon my time which was 7 pm her time… we sat down to record a show. I am really pleased with how it turned out, and while I still feel like I am absolutely “winging it” I can see how this is going to work with other “Folks” as well.

Right now the plan is to do this as a semi-monthly show, because quite honestly with daily blogging and weekly podcasting with AggroChat, I don’t feel like I can really add much more to my schedule. Naming a thing is always the hardest part, after some time I landed on more of a statement of what the show was… than an actual name. “Bel Talks To Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”. This however was way too long to be the title of anything… so I just shortened it to “Bel Folks Stuff”. It’s quirky I know, but I figure the folks that will be listening won’t care much about the title… but will instead be tuning in to listen to someone from our community talking about stuff that they enjoy. So please tune in and enjoy “An Evening With Syl” the very first episode.

Gobbie-Boom

Last night I spent most of the night working on my Monk, trying to push him ever higher in level. I was happy the other night to graduate from Totorak to Haukke Manor as it is a considerably more enjoyable dungeon. My friend Ashgar likes to refer to Totorak as “The Thousand Yawns of Total-Nap”. For me, I don’t mind the dungeon that bad but it does definitely seem to drag on, especially in that section where you keep having to bust poison balloons and move through the green sludge. Last night however I got to move into one of my favorite dungeons… Brayflox’s Longstop. The reason why I like Brayflox is simple… it has some really awesome sets that come out of it. While tanking the place I had managed to gather up a full set of Cavalry, and while healing I had managed to gather up most of a full set of Battle Mage. However every time I ran the place, either Infantry did not drop… or someone else was with me that wanted it far more.

As you can see from the above picture, last night I managed to get the Infantry Chest to drop. So far I only have legs, hat and chest… but I figure I will be running a lot more Brayflox. One of the things that I didn’t really cover in my guide is that every night I always do at least one completely random dungeon run. This is worth a massive amount of xp even if you end up getting one of the primals… that normally rewards next to no experience. After that I tend to just queue for whatever the highest level dungeon I can run happens to be… especially if I am playing DPS. Nothing sucks worse than wading through a thirty minute dps queue, only to end up getting Ifrit. So I expect over the next few days to queue up for Brayflox, and then run FATEs while waiting on the roulette to pop. The only thing I wish is that you could queue with your chocobo out, because this greatly lowers my survival in FATEs to have to run without him.

Using My Boost

This morning Faeblight appears to be down, so I can’t actually log into the game and take any proper screenshots. As a result you get a shot of my menagerie of characters. This is fitting because in reality I was going to talk to the boost to level 60. As you can see I have a whole slew of characters that I could have used this on. Mostly I struggled with a choice between boosting Belgrenth my Dwarven Mage, or Belgaroth my Bahmi Cleric. Belgrenth is still stuck down in his 20s, but overall I enjoy questing on him because the launch content feels better to play than the Storm Legion content. Belgaroth however I had just started the Storm Legion slog with, and felt like I was making no real progress. So did I go for maximum number of free levels… or did I go for helping me skip the content I wanted to skip on an otherwise really enjoyable character.

As I am sure you can tell from my lead up… I ended up using it on the cleric because skipping Storm Legion sounded like an awesome deal. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a good use for the free boost to 375 crafting, so I ended up spending it on survival… something that I struggled to level on my other characters. If I had been thinking really I would have used it on fishing… because as time goes that one seems to take significantly longer to level. The other big news from yesterday is that I think I figured out a pretty decent leveling build for Belghast. All of the warrior builds I was using when I last played have seemed to have gotten nerfed significantly. Once upon a time I could farm things with impunity and keep myself at nearly full health. Those days were long gone as upon starting the Nightmare Tide content it was a struggle just to stay alive.

I landed upon a thread on the official forums by a guy named Inny proposing his leveling spec for 3.0. You can check out the full magelo build here but essentially it is a 42 Warlord, 34 Champion, 0 Liberator build. So far it seems to be working pretty well, and the combination of a few minor heals and the combination of Weapon Defense and No Permission to Die allow me to stay alive in most situations. No Permission to Die need some really specific timing to make it work, as it heals you to 50% if you receive a killing blow in the time that the buff is up. The biggest boost to my survival was crafting a new set of weapons. Thankfully it was pretty easy to gather up the materials to do that, but unfortunately I have pretty much burnt through all of my available platinum on tradeskills. Hopefully that will start to regenerate as I quest, so I can do the same for Armorsmithing as I did for weaponsmithing. All in all the content is enjoyable, or at least significantly less grindy feeling than the Storm Legion content was.