Guild Leadership

Good morning you happy people of the digital domain.  Last night at least in one way did not go at all like I had expected.  My wife and I originally planned on travelling to my hometown last night to go visit my Grandmother on her birthday.  However my wife got held up at work, and didn’t end up making it home until six thirty or so.  I called my mother at some point to find out “how late is too late”, only to find that she simply was not feeling well today and had been sleeping a lot.  Tuesday she had oral surgery so I think she was simply recovering from that.  As a result I made a long call to her, that way she could continue resting rather than entertain guests.  I figure we will make a trip up to see her over the weekend.

The Event

September 11th has a weird significance to me.  Sure I remember watching as the World Trade Center events unfolded, but I am not talking about that at all.  Nor am I necessarily talking about my Grandmothers Birthday… which unfortunately the World Trade Center bombings have made the easiest date for me to remember ever.  For me… 9/11/2012 was the single worst day I have ever had to experience in my career.  I found out yesterday that a coworker never really understood why we called it our “9/11 event”… we were not being metaphorical… that is simply the literal date it happened.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day that we completely burned down our web infrastructure, and had to begin rebuilding it all from scratch.  Essentially one of our security personnel mistook a routine network intrusion scan, from a company that we pay to do exactly that… as an actual breech of our network.  9/11/2012 is the day the decision was made, by forces other than our department to shut everything down… take all the sites offline… and ship the machines off for federal investigative forensics.  It was the single worst overreaction I have seen in my history as an IT professional.

The result of all of this meant the beginning of a very dark period of that involved lots of 60-70 hour weeks trying to rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up.  Additionally it was the beginning of one of the biggest lapses in content my blog has experienced.  Much like the real 9/11 has completely changed the culture of the United States…  this event completely changed the culture of our company.  From that point on… even though we realized within a few days that we essentially cried wolf and that nothing at all had happened that was not included in a network intrusion service that we pay for… all things going forward carried an undertone of extreme security.

We have survived and I feel like the department as a whole is better off, but it was an extremely bad period to be me.  It did allow us to “reboot” several things in the way our processes work, and shed old code that had been sitting around since the early 90s.  The irony is… that a year after the fact we are still not completely done rebuilding everything we demolished that day.  We have rebuilt all of the important infrastructure, and added numerous new things to the mix… but there are still a handful of minor legacy systems that we have not addressed.  You can only do so much with a staff of three people to completely rebuild two decades worth of infrastructure.

One Room Dungeon

Last night was another guild night Wednesday over in Rift.  Originally I thought I was going to be considerably late due to the whole visiting my grandmother thing.  Instead I got home at a decent hour after taking my wife out for dinner and running a few errands.  When I logged in, we had a large assemblage of players available so I started asking for volunteers for a little mission.  Archive of Flesh is a level 57-60 dungeon, that supposedly has a chance to drop a doodad that is required to upgrade the depleted chest piece to its third state, and level 57 spec specific chest piece.  What I gathered up for volunteers was Caithris 57 Tactician support, Delariond 60 Mage dps, myself playing a 57 rogue, Lukian a 60 cleric tank, and Psynister a 56 cleric healer.

What we experienced with that group composition was almost raid like difficulty.  However over the course of multiple wipes… we managed to struggle through, learn the encounters and completed the dungeon.  The odd thing about Archive of flesh is that in essence it is a one room dungeon.  Everything of any significance occurs in the room pictured above… or the upper pathways over the room.  The room changes slightly over the course of the encounters as new bosses are revealed, each one slightly changing the rooms dynamic.  But I just found it interesting that you could make a completely compelling dungeon.. without involving any crawling at all.

To some extent the Trial of the Crusader raid in WoW did exactly this.  However that really never felt like a compelling experience.  It felt more like a slipshod raid that allowed the designers to roll something out quickly, rather than spending much time on creating a new zone.  This on the other hand felt like a completely story driven experience so that you almost forget that you have not left the entrance to the dungeon.  Weird thing is… Golem Foundry… that we ran directly after this dungeon… had almost the same kind of thing going on.  Single room with various shafts and hatches that reveal new encounters.  Both of them felt really good, and I really enjoyed the essentially “trash less” dungeon experience, without making it feel overly cheap like the Crusader encounters.

It was a fairly good run, as most of us walked away with extremely significant upgrades.  Unfortunately the upgrade doodad did not drop, so none of us were walking away with a really nice upgraded chest piece out of the ordeal.  Rae (Caithris) and I both walked away with half a levels experience towards 58.  I hope I can catch my rogue up and push it to 60 within the coming weeks.  This is largely selfish I realize, but since my warrior is already raid ready… I would really like to start running my rogue that actually needs some loving with the various guild dungeon runs.  Additionally I really like playing rogue for support than I did playing Warrior.  Bard and Tactician just feel better overall than the somewhat confused Beastmaster role.

Overall though it was a really great night.  We got in… ran a couple of dungeons and had a blast doing it.  I hope we can continue to do this as a regular thing.  The only frustration is we had a large number of folks that showed up after we had already pulled together a group.  As a result we were two short of making a second group.  So here is hoping that we can get a few more higher level folks up there and start running two groups on Wednesday nights.  I know we have the folks in our numbers, it is just a matter of getting people online during the time period.  In hindsight we should have broken apart our group between the two dungeons and tried to get some of the folks waiting in the wings in the process.  But quite honestly at the time none of us really thought about that.

Wrapping Up

This feels like a really odd post… breaking a lot of the normal formatting that I do with my blog.  Hopefully it is still overall readable.  I figure tonight will be a return to FFXIV after the server maintenance.  I am really hoping that Cactuar will be unlocked and some of the folks who have been waiting to roll there can start their characters.  My goal for tonight is to run Cutter’s Cry and maybe another Sunken Temple of Qarn.  I really want to see what is in the “treasure room” that we completely missed.  I hope you all have a great Thursday and that it serves as the gateway to a really awesome weekend.

Good morning you happy people of the digital verse, I am slowly waking up this morning.  Normally I have this open and writing well before six, and at this point well past.  I had a good nights sleep but I also feel like I could have likely slept forever this morning.  It took me a few minutes to realize that the alarm was going off, and that it was a thing I should care about.  Hopefully the coffee beside me will cure this present stupor.

Unintended Night

Last night I had every intention of coming home and playing some Rift to try and push my rogue up to 60 for dungeon running.  However that is not at all what happened.  I logged into mumble, where everyone was currently in FFXIV so I ended up joining them as well.  Not that it takes much coaxing to get me into the game mind you… it was just counter to my original plans.  Tentatively I agreed to run Brayflox’s Longstop to help the people still needing gear from it.  However this ended up taking quite a bit of time to pull together.  So as I munched on the super tasty Chicken Tiki Masala takeout… I continued on with my questing.

Currently I am out questing in the Coerthis Highlands region that is essentially the “snowy zone” for the game.  Not sure what it is about snowy climates but they usually end up being some of my favorite ones in any given game.  I was a huge fan of Winterspring in the original WoW, and Icecrown seemed to be the zone I always defaulted to going to when I wanted to kill something… since Ice + Undead is a pure winning combination.  Coerthis is no let down as you wander around a truly inhospitable climate ringed with extremely fierce and isolationist royal houses.  I won’t go into details about the main story arc for the zone… but suffice as to say it is hard to win friends.

One of the best things about Coerthis is the Svaras fates, or at least off the top of my head I think that is the name of them.  Essentially there is a really awesome series of fates that begins by following a soldier northwards from Camp Dragonhead.  You battle numerous drake attacks along the way, until you reach a ruins to the north.  When that fate ends another begins immediately to hold of against a dragon onslaught.  Finally when this second fate ends, a third one begins to destroy the mother dragon Svaras herself.  They go pretty quickly, but the first fate rewards around 5000 xp, the second around 10,000 xp and the final dragon fate roughly 20,000 xp.  So if you can hop on and ride the entire thing out, you mob up over 35,000 xp and a large number of grand company seals.

Add to this big main fate a number of smaller fates that spawn in the central corridor of Coerthis, and it becomes a fairly solid fate zone.  The only danger is that the entire zone spans from 30 at the lowest points to 50 at the highest points.  So there is a high chance of roaming into areas that are just too high for you currently.  On other cool notes however… in my wandering around last night I located the plateau that Behemoth spawns on.  This is a big end game primal fight, that my server has taken down at least once.  Not sure how difficult it is, but from what I have seen it looks absolutely amazing.  I am sure there is the chance as some spiffy gear from it as well.

Brayflox Conquered

Brayflox’s Longstop is a level 32 dungeon that appears as part of the main storyline.  Essentially everyone is forced to run it in order to progress their quest chain forward.  As a result I ran it quite some time ago for the first time, and did not like the dungeon at all.  Essentially it was the first dungeon that I learned how unreliable overpower becomes after your transition to warrior.  It is decent for initial aggro, but you simply cannot hold multiple targets for long with it.  Essentially Overpower was a crutch that I needed to discard, and this involved developing some new tactics.  Brayflox was the run that I ended up going through most of these growing pains… so I remembered it in a less than fond way.

Ironically… this is the dungeon that everyone in my guild seems to want to run.  Admittedly it has some of the coolest “unique” gear sets in the game to date.  As a side effect our players have been wanting to run the place til their eyes bleed trying to collect the last set pieces.  The big bottleneck we have is that there are essentially two tanks right now.  Myself and Ashgar are our only dedicated tanks at the high end of the level range.  We have one additional dedicated tank in the mid 20s, and a bunch of alternate tanks that are hovering in the 15s.  So since all of us prefer greatly to run dungeons as a guild, everyone ends waiting on myself or ash to be able to run the instance.

Ash was not available last night, the 1.5 HD remix of Kingdom Hearts was released… and he had given us warning he would be spending time playing that.  So as a result I offered to tank Brayflox in his place.  The funny thing is… after having conquered the Sunken Temple of Qarn… this dungeon felt like a cakewalk.  The primary difference is that I have developed strategies for multi-target tanking that did NOT rely on Overpower since then.  As a result the dungeon no longer felt like the chaotic mess that it did the first few times I ran it.  The good thing about the dungeon is that it is really pretty good experience, and with roughly ten chances at bonus chests… you end up with a good amount of loot, some of it was actually an upgrade to my current gear.

It was thanks to the two dungeon runs in Brayflox that I was able to ding 39 and equip the Flames grand company axe that was sitting waiting in my bag.  The grand company seal gear is really amazing, and I have found that it lasts normally twice as long as the average item for a given level range.  Last night Ash finally made it on, and the group that had not gone to Qarn ended up running it.  During the run he ended up getting a unique named axe, but after rattling off the stats… the grand company seal axe was still slightly better.  So it is equivalent or better to a dungeon drop for the level.

Four Oh

After the Brayflox runs wound down, I decided to continue on with the main story quests out in Coerthis.  Over the course of the next few hours I managed to whittle down the gap to four to something extremely manageable.  After a good Svaras fate, I was within a stones throw of dinging… so I ended up picking up one of the more “killy” leve quests I had available to me.  After a few minutes of collecting pages, and summoning a big baddie… I dinged 40.  This opened up a bunch of gear to me… allowing me access to the majority of the Mithril set and a the new line of parry jewelry.  I feel as though the majority of the crafters on our server much be stalled out in this range, because all of the gear for the level could be purchased around 1000 gil… which I considered a steal.

After equipping all my new shiny baubles… it took my unbuffed, non-defiance hitpoints to 2230, which is a sizeable increase over where I was previously.  Right now I kinda look like a mishmash of gear sets, but I can live with that.  Nothing I am wearing looks too terribly heinous, even though it is technically from about four different “appearances”.  Now I really want to run the next optional dungeon, Cutter’s Cry… as a number of my Flames hunt log mobs come from there.  Additionally I would like to continue to push dragoon up.  I got him to 32 so I would have the option of dpsing Brayflox… but considering the relative guild tank shortage I doubt that will ever really be an option.

Cactuar Locked

Right now my biggest point of frustration is the fact that while everything appears to be working great server wise… and I can log in at almost any moment without a queue…  we still have a completely locked server.  As of right now I know of at least four people waiting to make characters on Cactuar the server we are on that cannot because it is seemingly perma-locked.  There is a list on the FFXIV ARR website that updates five times a day… and while other servers are coming off the lockdown… Cactuar appears to be permanently stuck in that state.  It is my hope that with today’s lengthy maintenance period… that we will finally get some additional resources and the folks who have been waiting in limbo can roll on the server.

Additionally if they offered us a way to transfer the entire guild to another server… we would likely jump at the chance.  Personally I would love to have us move to Gilgamesh, since that seems to be where the majority of folks I know that are NOT in my guild are located.  The problem is… right now our guild is level capped… and we have a massive stockpile of the guild currency to spend on the day long buffs.  I would not want to readily give that up, so in order to make a jump feasible we would need to transfer as a total unit… rather than a bunch of piecemeal server transfers.  I don’t necessarily relish the thought of moving, because after the initial launch the server community here has ended up being not too shabby.  At the very least, the public channels are not quite the painful experience that they are for me in most games.

Wrapping Up

Tonight is going to be an odd night.  We need to run up to my hometown after work to wish my Grandmother a happy birthday.  After we get back from that, whenever that is.. I will be over in Rift alternatively working on my Rogue and trying to get some dungeon runs started.  I am kinda hoping that folks won’t mind running the normals that a 57 rogue can attend, as I really prefer playing support as a rogue than I did on my warrior the other night.  The problem is I really have no clue when exactly I will be getting on, since getting away from my hometown is generally painful.  I hope you all have a great day ahead of you, and I hope mine is productive and that I can get online tonight at a decent hour.

Good morning all you happy people in digital land.  So far I am having another allergy ridden morning as I struggle to shake off my stupor.  Right now I just want to go back to sleep, but I know that is really not within the realm of possibility.  My lungs are pretty junked up this morning, so starting to wonder if I need to take a breathing treatment.  Here is hoping that by the time I have finished writing this post that things will have cleared up and I am feeling much better.  I kinda wish I had one of those cookies from the Matrix that makes everything feel “right as rain”.

Moment of Truth

This morning is in essence the moment of truth for Squeenix.  Either players will be able to log in normally or at least within a few tries and get on with playing Final Fantasy XIV… or they will likely start to drop out of the game giving up.  Today’s maintenance has been sold as the cure to the problem in many ways.  If it ends up not being so… I am questioning just how much patience players will have.  I know my guild is getting to the point where our patience is worn extremely thin at this point.

I originally thought the title of this subject was going to be “Epic Letdown”.  Launching Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn was literally the first thing I did when I got upstairs.  I was greeted with the familiar 1017 shuffle as pictured above.  My immediate thoughts were “what the fuck”.  This has been such an up and down rollercoaster.  I feel like I have gone through the stages of grief with the outrage and the denial and finally I have arrived at the sad acceptance that they didn’t have a clue one what they were doing.

However I did a few quick searches and stumbled across this post.  Essentially it said that they were going to throttle logins immediately after the servers came back up… and in theory they have just now come back up.  Then over time this morning they will ratchet down the restrictions to make sure that the servers stay stable.  In essence that makes sense I suppose.  So shortly after this… I attempted to log in and got a 20 player queue and in within a few minutes.  Right now things seem tentatively “better”.  Time will tell as to whether or not the login lottery is gone… or if I am just seeing the effects of it being 6:30 in the morning. 

I want so hard to believe that things are back to normal, or at least back to Beta 3 normal…  because the recent norm has been pretty jacked up.  We have several people in the guild who are unable to purchase the game and get onto Cactuar, so here is hoping that in the coming days they are able to do so.  An encouraging sign was that apparently Squeenix gave Amazon the nod to go ahead and start offering digital sales and downloads yesterday afternoon.  That was the point at which I started to get extremely hopeful… because to me that meant they really felt this was the solution.  Here is hoping that it remains playable over the next few days as more players come online.

Support Belghast

Last night was a pretty momentous occasion for our little guild over in Rift.  It was the first time since the founding a few months back that we had five level 60 players online at the same time… or quite honestly even in the guild period.  Over the last few days Fynralyl and Psynister hit 60 on their main characters, and within the last week or so Sylladora did as well.  They joined myself and Lukian who had been 60 for some time and simply been waiting for some more guildies to start up regular dungeon runs.  The only problem with this… is we have a bit of a strange group composition.

The five of us add up to be 2 warriors, 2 mages and a cleric.  Lukian had been working on a healing spec, so I knew we had that covered.  Either Psynister or I could tank… so that should be good… but I thought Psyn pretty much ONLY had a tank spec, and since he needs tanky gear for elites I figured it was best to have him in that role.  Fyn and Sylla would of course be dps… which left us missing one key role…  Support.  At the last minute I remembered that in Storm Legion, Beastmaster had turned into a support tree, so after a little bit of fiddling I reset one of my unused roles to be the default Trailblazer preset (Beastmaster/Tempest/Reaver) support build.

It took me a little bit to get a grasp on my hot bars and set up a few macros, but within 10 minutes we were ready to go with me queuing as a support role.  It turns out that the Beastmaster is essentially a big walking buff bot.  I bring with me 6 different group and raid buffs that do everything from increase our damage, to reduce our damage taken, to causing a small hot every time I do a finishing move.  Essentially I am a lot like an Everquest bard…  I make everyone in the party somehow better, but you don’t really notice it until you don’t have one.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at just how cool the re-skinned beastmaster cat pet looked.  The previous version was this ugly emaciated blue thing, so apparently with storm legion there was a massive improvement in the models.  I have to say playing it does not feel nearly as gratifying as playing a Bard… which was the only Rift support I have been used to.  The effects of my work are far less tangible.  I know that just me being in the party is reducing all damage taken by 5% and causing everyone to deal 5% more damage…  but you really don’t show up on the meters either in the damage or healing you do.

I need to do more research into the support warrior roles, and come up with potentially a better spec.  I went for this one namely because you could be semi effective at range with the addition of the tempest abilities.  Also I feel as though I really did not have much time to soak in the abilities before trying to create some haphazard hot bars.  It worked well enough however and we were able to get through the random normal 60 we queued for.  Sadly only one piece of gear was usable… and even it was for the wrong spec. However hopefully over the coming weeks we will get some folks good gear.

Wrapping Up

Somewhat of a low news morning for me, but I did ramble on at length about two things so I figure this is a good place to cut it off.  I need to finish getting ready and get on the road.  I still feel like death warmed over, and my lungs still feel like crap.  So much of me wants to just say fuck it and take a sick day… the only problem with that is I don’t really see any end to this until the weather gets colder.  It is like all the allergies are hitting at the same time.  Anyways.. hopefully all of you out in digital land are doing far better than I am… and that you are all having an amazing week.  I am resigned to telling myself that we are at the halfway point to the weekend.