Guild Leadership Archives - Page 22 of 108

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.

Fighting Fate

February 28, 2015 by Belghast

Smoothies for Everyone

Every so often either my wife or I will get an idea in our heads and ultimately it leads to the other person either embracing it… or getting so sick of hearing about it that we simply give in. Several years ago I got it stuck in my head that I really wanted a juicer. I did copious amounts of research and finally ended up with a rather expensive model by Breville as it was the highest rated. After attempting to make juice a few times… I deemed it simply was not worth the effort and the colossal mess that went into the process. When you watch a juicer commercial they always seem to produce the prettiest almost Technicolor juice you could ever imagine. In reality what you produce is a lot of various shades of brown, and while it tasted just fine… you had to pour a lot of fruit into even a single glass. Ultimately the juicer is being loved by a far more sensible family right now, and I gave up on the notion… happy to see it getting some use.

So when my wife decided that she wanted a Nutribullet because one of her coworkers used it… I thought we were just about to walk down this same path. Surprisingly this I guess is a “juice” maker that we can exist with because it is so damned simple. We picked it up on Thursday and over the last few days we have been making all sorts of concoctions. My wife has been hitting pinterest and finding various recipes, and me… well I have just been trying to perfect a breakfast shake that combines my morning coffee with enough nutrients to keep me going until lunch. The trick seems to be to make my coffee the night before and set it in the fridge so that it blends better. Right now I am mixing in a banana, some peanut butter, some nutella, coffee and some honey to sweeten it all. I think I am pretty close, but I think the secret will be to fix my coffee like I normally would before setting it in the fridge. In any case the resulting smoothie is shockingly filling. Other than that I have been fixing a wide array of orange juice based drinks when I feel hungry. If nothing else this is already far more of a success than the juicer ever was.

Fighting Fate

Since I have been sick so much lately and realistically it has been too cold to do much of anything at all… I have spent a lot of time on the couch watching television. By watching television I mean either watching shows steaming over the network or on demand cable. I really don’t spend too much time passively watching live broadcast television other than adult swim. Over this period I have caught up with Scorpion, watched Halt and Catch Fire season 1, and finally got around to watching the last season of boardwalk empire. I might be going into some spoiler territory here so if you have not watched the show you might want to skip ahead to the next segment. For me this show has been about my love of Steve Buscemi, and without him I likely would not have ever watched it. I mean I have enjoyed watching “gangland” movies in the past, but I am not really the godfather type. What made this series so interesting for me was the fact that they took this favorite character actor of mine… and crafted a complex character that only he could bring to life.

Nucky Thompson is at the same moment repulsive and endearing… and you are never quite certain which side of him you are going to get. He is one of the more brilliantly flawed characters I have seen on either the small or large screen in a long while. Sitting down to watch the show from the first moment… you get an impression that none of this is going to end well. All the while you watch however you find yourself secretly rooting for Nucky to finally reach whatever pinnacle he is trying to reach, and that he can finally find some happiness. So as I sat down to watch this final season, I ultimately knew that all gangland themes end in death and destruction. To the last moment however I wanted Nucky to find a way to trick fate, and sidestep his own demise. The way that they brought this chapter to a close was so perfect, so touching, and at the same time so satisfyingly “just”. If you have not watched Boardwalk Empire… and ignored my warnings about spoilers… I still suggest you go watch the show. The end result of the experience is overwhelmingly positive and something I would suggest to almost anyone.

Primal Payouts

One of the awesome things about having so many people around lately in the Free Company is the fact that we can actually pull together impromptu group content. Last night on a whim when we realized we had eight geared 50s on at once… we opted to give Odin a shot. While the ilevel requirement is something small… it is a trap. This is probably the most difficult and chaotic fight we have experienced in awhile. The healing and dps requirements just seemed brutal, and we did not even make it to what is termed the “heal check” of the encounter. As the night went on we got better at the “dance” of moving in and out of the circles of death, and given more time I think we could have probably beaten him. This is a single tank fight, and our combination of players last night ended up giving us two dragoons and three bards…. which was a strange combination of abilities. I could have potentially gone bard and had more dps time on the boss, as he is constantly spawning circles on to of him that have to be moved out of… or you essentially die. Additionally we will probably do this fight in the future using a Warrior tanking it rather than a Paladin because of the insane amount of damage… and simply needing the larger health pool to soak it.

Other than that I spent most of my night running random primals in one form or another. The chant of “Hards for Cards!” is still alive and well in the guild. Over he course of the night I managed to pick up both the Ifrit Triple Triad card and the Gilgamesh and Enkidu Triple Triad cards. The big bonus of running all of these hard mode primals is the fact that I am also collecting so many of the cool weapons that they can drop. My ninja is going to be set when I finish leveling it as far as cosmetic weapons go. Right now I am focusing Garuda who has yet to drop me a card, but we did as a guild get a few more people flagged for Titan Extreme by killing Garuda Extreme. I am super happy with the current state of how the guild and the game are going for us. We keep getting a slow trickle of new players, which keeps giving us a reason to revisit older content. This is the thing that I wish World of Warcraft could figure out. Running old content, and making it still be relevant helps to bond players to the guild as a whole. Final Fantasy XIV does so much right to get the social aspect of an MMO perfectly, that I just wish the other games I played made half that effort.

#FFXIV

Fun With Trains

February 27, 2015 by Belghast

Bel’s Blog Bonanza – February 27, 2015

For those not familiar with it, I write a bi-weekly column on MMOGames.com and they made the huge mistake of letting me name it myself. As such I gave it the completely bombastic title of “Bel’s Blog Bonanza” and every other week I give a run down to the best of my ability of the current hot topics circulating through the gaming blogosphere. This week I talk about the echo effects of the rather brutal interview of Peter Molyneux by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. This had many responses out in the community, and I picked a few of the ones I felt represented the various feelings the best. Additionally the Crowfall Kickstarter has been huge on the blogging front with an absolutely overwhelming number of posts contemplating what everything means thusfar.

This week has also been huge as far as game patches went with the two remaining subscription juggernauts of Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft both releasing a significant patch on Tuesday. From the Final Fantasy XIV side from we had a large number of posts talking about their experiences with the Manderville Golden Saucer and related items that came into the game this week. On the World of Warcraft front we had quite a few reactions to the various features that were put in with the first patch of the expansion. While the viewpoints of FFXIV 2.51 seemed overwhelmingly positive, the reactions from the World of Warcraft players were a little bit more mixed… which I assume is what you would expect from having a much more mature community. The honeymoon was over long ago and now folks are viewing the game through less than rose colored lenses. In any case check out the post and let me know what you think of the column.

Fun With Trains

Last night I finally started to feel like I was getting back into the swing of things. Yesterday as a whole I felt considerably better than I had since last Thursday. With it being a raid night, and we had cleared all of the encounters we had worked on during my medicated stupor on Tuesday… this meant that last night was entirely a learning night. Some people get depressed at the concept of constant wiping, but for me it feels cool because we are getting to try new things. Last night we set our sights on Operator Thogar, which for those who are unfamiliar with Blackrock is the “Train Boss”. His room is essentially a train depot with four different tracks. At various points during the fight a train will come barreling through the room and if you are on the wrong track at the wrong time… it will flat out one shot you. For me as a bit of an abomination as Gladiator DPS… it will take me down very close to death but not actually kill me.

As you move through the encounter some trains will simply buzz through, and others will stop and drop off adds. Among the types that drop adds there are ones filled with simply mindless trash mobs, and others filled with what we have termed “specialists”. It is these specialist trains that cause the problems and quite simply last night we were not getting them down fast enough… while at the same time dodging trains. It seemed like melee had the dance down pretty well, which is generally the case since melee is used to constantly moving. We just need our ranged and healers to get used to the rhythm of the fight to be able to time when they can cast and when they have to be moving. Basically we died constantly at this same point… where we have a pack of specialists and we did not get them down with enough time to move to the far edges of the room and split up. I feel like this is a critical juncture and once we nail that we will have the encounter.

Killing the Flamebender

Generally speaking if we do not make serious progress on our first few attempts, it is almost better to switch targets and let folks digest the mechanics for a week. When we come back the following week there is absolutely a marked improvement. Since this is the case with our raid, our leader called the halt on the Orc Trainmaster and we went back to working on Flamebender Ka’graz. If you remember we actually made some solid progress on her awhile back getting her down into the 30% range if I am remembering correct, so I knew going into the night that more than likely this was going to be a fight we could fine tune and get through. Once again this is a fight with a lot of moving parts. Players have to avoid lines of fire that get drawn on the floor as she targets a ranged dps and attacks them. This means the melee spend most of their time shifting around trying to keep from standing in these.

The crucial part of the fight seems to be dealing with the two lava wolf spawns. This was the point at which we spent the most effort improving last night. We shifted around trying several different combinations and finally landing on actively calling which target which group of players should be attacking. Like I said last time these work like Corehounds and if they are not brought down at the same time… they both re-ignite. The other big thing we tweaked was where the group collapsed, attempting to do so in the center of the room rather up within melee range of where the boss is tanked by default. I think the combination of both of these was what actually allowed us to get through that second flame puppy phase with essentially a full compliment of players. From there it was just repetition of the things we were already good at doing… and when the third dog phase happened we were able to ignore them and finish off the last 3% of the boss. As is rare for us we actually managed to get everyone to stand still long enough to take a kill shot.

Hards for Cards

February 26, 2015 by Belghast

Feeling Mostly Human

I guess for better or worse the second day of medication trick worked again. Round about the time I took my fourth dose of prednisone I started feeling more or less human again. Today I am feeling significantly better, but I am going to try not to push myself terribly hard. The goal will be to simply take things slow and do what I can. I got out long enough to go to the grocery store yesterday, as my wife suggested I get some vitamin C in me… and simply walking around long enough to gather up a few items damned near killed me. So here is hoping I can successfully navigate my way to work and back home again.

I want to take a moment real quick to thank all the folks who have been constantly checking on me. I log in each morning to a barrage of “feeling any better yet?” and I have to say it makes me feel really damned lucky to have some awesome friends. This has legitimately been the worst I have felt in a really long time. Largely I have kept people in the loop so they don’t expect miracles from me during this period of time. I missed the raid on Monday completely, and barely made Tuesdays. Time will tell if I make it through today with enough energy to be able to make the one tonight. Largely I figure there is nothing I do in any of them that could not be missed for a week if I absolutely had to. Mostly right now I am dreading going back to work after being away for a day and a half. But I will struggle through with at least a feigned smile.

Hards for Cards

We have decided to copyright the term “Hards for Cards” because while it sounds a little rude… it accurately describes what we largely did last night. There are many ways to earn triple triad cards. The two primary ways revolve around either repeatedly dueling NPCs hoping to get lucky, or repeatedly running dungeon and raid content… also hoping to get lucky. I have to say though, given the two options I would far rather run the dungeons and raids, because at least then I am also gaining tomestones. I started off solo queuing for Trial Roulette, giving me a random assortment of whatever trials that folks seemed to be running. For the most part all of the primal trials have a chance of dropping their Triple Triad card equivalent. Before long we had a small team of us running Trials, and towards the end of the evening a full eight man. Through all of the content I ran last night I managed to get the Ultros/Typhon card and the Good King Moggle Mog card… which are both far better cards than anything I had managed to earn through an NPC Triple Triad duel.

The other big accomplishment last night was through through an influx of tomestones from all the random trials… I was able to purchase the 110 weapon for my last 50. Granted I have a slew of classes that I have yet to level to 50, but as of now I have 110 weapons for WAR, BRD, DRG, WHM and as of last night PLD. This also means that since all of my gear is currently WAR/PLD that both of my tanks are sitting at ilevel 116 which makes me pretty pleased. I am not sure how much action my paladin is going to actually get however, since I have a definite preference towards the warrior style of tanking… but I would like to at least bring it out of mothballs now and then for duty roulette. I really need to psyche myself up to tank more for the duty finder. The community is pretty great most of the time, and there is really nothing but my own anxiety keeping me from doing it. I just greatly prefer tanking for friends… and last night I tanked several instances and really enjoyed myself. I just need to push myself to do it more with strangers, considering I would definitely not mind the constant gil bonus for queuing as a tank.

The Little Things

I have essentially bankrupted myself in World of Warcraft purchasing all of the heirloom items that I had access to, but had yet to pick up. The majority can be purchased in the museum in Ironforge, however a handful can still only be purchased on the guild vendor. Thankfully these have all had their cost lowered to the 500g for the level 60 step. In the course of picking up the last few items I noticed a doodad for sale on the vendor that I had not seen before. The item was called “Garrison Guild Banners” and did precisely what the name said. I think this is probably a testament to just how few heroics I actually ran in this expansion given that apparently you get one from an achievement earned by completing all of the heroic dungeons. I am guessing it is upper blackrock spire that I never actually completed. The item was cheap, 100g but man has it added a lot of enjoyment to my garrison.

Another little thing I can check off my list is that I finally have the level 2 Menagerie unlocked. I was never one of those people that really had much issue with the fact that the Pet Menagerie was essentially a dead spot in my Garrison. I simply never had leveled a pet to 25, and as a result was not able to participate in the quest used to unlock the Menagerie in the first place. I always felt kind of bad that as much as I like mini-pets… that I had not really spent much time playing WoW Pokemon. However with the 6.1 patch they introduced a simple quest that allows you to earn an Ultimate Battle-Training Stone… which in essence boosts one pet from level whatever to level 25 the current cap. This is available to every level 100 character you have with a tier 3 Garrison, so I managed to build a team of three level 25 pets shortly after logging in on Tuesday.

I did no research at all, and instead went with three of my favorite pets… which is a fact that I am sure will make my life more difficult. I went with the Terrible Turnip largely because its special ability should make the capture of pets more easy… which is the main reason why I wanted a level 25 pet in the first place. After that I chose to level my next two favorite pets… Mini Thor from the Starcraft II Collectors edition, and Murkalot which was a Blizzcon bonus item. Currently the team makes me happy… but I doubt I will be wrecking much face anytime soon. If nothing else they should allow me to power level additional 25s with greater ease. With my heirlooms, and my new pet army… I am poised to start working on my Horde alts. So that is likely going to be one of my many downtime activities in the near future. In the meantime… keep being awesome readers, and I will see you all tomorrow!

#FFXIV #WoW #TripleTriad