Guild Leadership Archives - Page 56 of 108

Whorleater

August 18, 2014 by Belghast

Monday Morning Coming Down

This morning I quite literally could not remember if it was Monday or Sunday. I had to turn on the television just to make sure it really was Monday and that I should be getting up instead of heading back to sleep. This is not the best possible start to the work week, but I am slowly climbing my way to consciousness as I sip this coffee. Not quite certain why this morning is such a struggle, because in theory I got to bed at a decent hour last night. My wife and I both spontaneously decided it was bedtime at roughly 10pm. Ultimately I managed to get to sleep a little bit after that fact, but this morning I am still periodically trying to type with my eyes closed.

I would say it was a medium busy weekend as far as weekends go. We spent a good deal of time attempting to clothing shop for my wife, which means I spent a good deal of time messing about on my phone. Sadly in both our excursion to Muskogee and our outing yesterday afternoon she did not find much of anything. I did however find more severely discounted Legos and added a couple more Lord of the Rings sets to my collection. Other than the shopping excursions and dropping my jeep off to get oil changed and a flat fixed… the bulk of my weekend was spent in Final Fantasy XIV. Overall it was an extremely productive weekend all around.

Whorleater

One of my goals this weekend was to catch up on the main storyline quest to be prepared for the eventual 2.4 patch. So far there have been three major content patches in Final Fantasy XIV and in each they have progressed the main storyline adding a new primal to fight. The first patch added Good King Moggle Mog, the second Leviathan, and the third patch added Ramuh. Before yesterday morning I had caught up in the quest chain to Leviathan, but had limited luck in getting a group. However yesterday I managed to get a group within ten minutes of queuing. The fight takes place out on the ocean. The storyline is that they have built a special platform to help neutralize his abilities and allow you to fight him. So you are towed out into the middle of the ocean and left to fight him off alone.

The fight feels deeply foreboding and the music that plays in the background only serves to reinforce this. They are after all asking you to duel a god. During the fight itself the platform is attacked by the head of Leviathan and his tail. The DPS shifts back and forth between fighting the tail and destroying these globules that spawn up on deck. I am not sure exactly what killing them does, but I know that ignoring them completely wipes the raid. Every so often Leviathan will do this attack where he lays his body across the bow of the platform causing it to rock violently against the waves, and tilting the entire platform to one side dragging everyone there. Seeing this in action looks amazing since the entire horizon shifts slightly as the platform lists in the waves. It took a few tries but we managed to down him without much issue.

Lord of Levin

After defeating Leviathan a large chunk of us from the free company moved on to do Battle of the Big Bridge which is an optional primal like encounter where you face Gilgamesh the samurai. The most awesome thing about this encounter was the fact that we managed to pull it together through the use of several different linkshells. We picked up a person from our housing linkshell and then another person through a social linkshell that Tam was a part of. The fact that people are willing to drop what they are doing and help out with things like this makes me happy. The Big Bridge encounter doesn’t really reward much of anything, and there are no drops to speak of, just a crazy time running around. The best part about it is almost all of the Dialog that Gilgamesh speaks comes directly from encounters with him in Final Fantasy V. Speaking of which… I really need to finish my play through of that game for the four job fiesta.

After finishing the Gilgamesh encounter, I spent much of the afternoon working my way through the main storyline to get caught up and ready to take on the next encounter the Striking Tree. In the Final Fantasy mythos Ramuh tends to be a friend to humanity, helping them along the way. In Final Fantasy V it is Ramuh that teaches your party more or less how to channel the power of the Espers (summons) and call them in battle. In this game his role has shifted slightly, but he still acts with reason and wisdom rather than fury and rage like the other primals. The Striking Tree hard is a battle about proving your worth to this elder god more than defeating him. We failed miserably, or at least did not succeed. Our time ran out before we managed to defeat him.

It seems like when you are dealing with the newest tier of content they completely remove the echo buff system. Meaning that as we wiped, we did not get a stat boost allowing us to slowly overcome the obstacle. I knew this was the case for the various Extreme mode versions of the encounters but I was shocked to find it as the case for Ramuh. Ultimately we simply lacked the DPS to burn through a series of adds. Ramuh has a similar wipe mechanic to Ifrit, in that if you don’t dps down the adds you cannot survive the next attack. We were able to limit break one round of adds, but this was short lived as we lacked the dps to continue on after that fact. Basically I reached a point where I was one of the most geared players in the instance, and could simply not carry the group as a whole. I plan on giving it a shot on a night that is not Sunday, since that tends to be a lousy time for MMO groups in general.

Fully Geared Dragoon

Through all of this running around this weekend I managed to “finish” gearing my dragoon. I say finish in quotes because there are still several things I can get that are upgrades, however they are all much slower prospects and either involve getting lucky drops in Syrcus Tower, joining a Coil of Bahamut raid, or saving up Soldiery bookrocks which the game tends to reward 5 to 10 at a time. At this point I have level 90 gear or better in every single slot, with a level 100 ring from the soldiery vendor and level 100 gloves from Syrcus Tower. I feel like my Dragoon dps is as good as I can get it for the time being, and more than ready for us to begin Coil when we have enough people. Now my focus shifts to gearing out my warrior who right now is sitting in the low 70s, but in part only because of me using some of my DPS jewelry to buff him up a bit.

There was a huge sense of accomplishment last night when I bought the belt that replaced my final sub 90 item. In a few weeks time I have managed to catch up to Cylladora who continued playing the game long after we all left. Last night I also tanked my first dungeon since coming back and overall I think it went smooth enough. I was pulling pretty quickly and trying to figure out how to maintain aggro again. It feels like the win condition as a warrior is the fact that I have steel cyclone, and the goal of every pull was to build up enough rage to be able to start the next fight with this attack. When I managed to do so things stayed fairly glued to me. When I didn’t I struggled to play catch up with overpower. Tam was playing his summoner and there is always going to be a point where I lose control of adds to his dots, however for the most part I was able to mitigate this pretty successfully. I guess the real determination is going to be whether or not I start pugging for duty roulette or not. If they rewarded me extra bookrocks I would do so in heartbeat, but the extra money may or may not be worth the headache.

#FFXIV #Blaugust

Death by Adorable

August 16, 2014 by Belghast

Back to School Time

I’ve said this before but the two most frustrating times in the life of a teacher spouse are the beginning of school and the end of school. It is hard to watch your spouse going through a stress filled ballet and not really having much that you can do to stop it. Here in Oklahoma it is of course the beginning of a new school year, and while my wife does have have students yet she has been back officially at work several days now. To be truthful this summer she barely got any time off at all considering she was up in her classroom almost every day. Apparently during the welcome back speech that the principal gave he mentioned this fact.

Today we are going out on that ritual of rituals… back to school shopping. It is in fact not just a ritual that the students go through. I am sure we will be hitting lots of different clothing stores in search of that “first day” outfit that we always seem to get. Back to school sales are like porn for teachers, and I am not sure if the rest of the world knows this or not. The odd thing is that this year the sales are just lacking. I am not sure what exactly it is, but so far it is not only that the stores don’t have much in the way of sales going on, but they don’t have much in the way of interesting stuff either. In the past Target and Walmart both would have these dollar sections full of all sorts of organization ideas that my wife would come away with inspired from. This year they are pretty much non-existant… and I don’t think Walmart even has their dollar section.

The biggest disappointment I have is in Office Depot. Once upon a time they were among the most supportive businesses for teachers. We had a teachers appreciation card that gave us a discount on damned near everything we bought, and while the discount wasn’t amazing… it felt like it was something. Several years back they replaced this program with one similar to that of Best Buy where you get gift cards for every X dollars that you spend. Even this has been reduced to a pittance. On top of this the stores themselves seem to have gone through a state of decline as they just don’t have the stock that they used to. I think this is the first year that I can recall where they didn’t have a teachers appreciation day, or give teachers the ability to buy more than the limit on the sales. In any case it has been frustrating to watch this, and for my wife it is like ruining Christmas morning.

Death By Adorable

For some time I had been blocked from progressing along the main storyline quest by the Thornmarch Hard primal fight. Instead of waiting for the rest of the guild to catch up so we could do the fight legitimately as an 8 man team, several of us decided to go ahead and knock it out of the way. The fourth primal of course is Good King Moggle Mog the king of the Moogles. It is a council fight of sorts, but to really call it a council fight is a bit of a misstatement. It is a fight of sheer chaos for the most part. First you are presented with a series of Moogle adds, each one representing a class in the game. Some of these are more important for you to kill than others, and as DPS I pretty much just followed the marked targets. After defeating all either of the Mooglesguard the king himself spawns and the actual fight begins.

The council aspect comes into play in that when you kill an add the King inherent their power. The Black Mage for example does an AOE ability that spreads through the entire room, the White Mage heals, the Warrior a giant version of steel cyclone, and the Paladin taunts and pulls everyone into him. These last two can be brutal in that the Paladin and Warrior and time them to happen at the same time essentially wiping the raid. This fight as a result is all about killing things in the right order and keeping the various Mooglesguard away from targets that buff them. I am not 100% sure what order we went in but I know without a doubt that Black Mage and White Mage were the first two to go down. I also know that we killed warrior, but left Paladin up in the successful attempt. However we only managed to down them because someone got off a limit break as we were wiping horribly at the time.

The fight itself is sheer chaos and the hardest part about pugging it was that no one seemed to be able to agree on the “correct” kill order. In many ways it reminded me of the Paragons fight in Siege of Orgrimmar, but at least there everyone agreed that one target was far more important than the others. I am glad to be through the fight and able to move on with my main storyline quest. That said I would gladly go back and do it another time. Extreme mode sounds like insanity, because supposedly you have to carefully dps down each of the Mooglesguard without killing them, because the king himself is immune to damage… however when any member of the Mooglesguard dies he heals all of them back to full from his own health pool. So in theory you have to burn down all of the moogles down to near death and then kill one off draining the health of the King in the process. The madness of constantly having to fight all eight Mooglesguard and deal with the king at the same time just seems like pure hell.

Syrcus Tower

The only other big thing that I did last night was work through the quest chain leading up to the next step of Crystal Tower. From what I hear Syrcus Tower is a significantly different beast than Labyrinth of the Ancients. Whereas in Labyrinth you could theoretically get a piece of loot from every encounter, each time you chose to run it, in Syrcus you are limited to receiving a single piece of loot per week. This has made it a frustrating time for a lot of people as they watch so much really good loot rot. I guess the bulk of people running it are doing so in hope of getting a piece needed for weapon upgrades. So no one actually rolls on the gear, and that means in general if you are going in there for gearing purposes you have your pick of whatever you could want.

The only problem is it takes awhile to run and I have yet to actually have time to really queue for it. Instead of doing it I ended up doing a random hard mode dungeon with the guild. So hopefully tonight I will be able to dip my toes into the dungeon proper. At this point I have progressed significantly gear wise. Right now I am sitting at 83 ilevel and the only pieces that are sub 90 are my boots, belt and gloves. All of which can be upgraded through a number of means, not the least of which are running hunts and gaining bookrocks. Additionally I could luck out and get replacements for any of those slots while running Syrcus. It seems like the hardest thing to get is jewelry as far as drops go, and as a result I have spent most of my bookrocks and hunt tokens on getting those sorted out. Still really enjoying the game and pumped to see more people joining in every few days. Our hope is that as some point we can try the actual raid the Binding Coil of Bahamut which is an 8 man duty.

#FFXIV

We Have The Date

August 15, 2014 by Belghast

That’s a Lot of Fish

Last night I did something a bit different than my normal fare and actually hung out with several of my coworkers. While I hang out with Rae at least in the virtual sense almost every night, this was a bit different. For my boss’s birthday his brother took him to a thing called Rifftrax put on by the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. They do the same basic thing, but they do it live and stream it to theaters all over the country. Since he had such a great time he decided it would make an excellent group activity. So last night we met for dinner and then continued on to the nearby theater to watch the Matthew Broderick version of Godzilla ripped apart by the MST3K guys.

First off this is a much bigger deal than any of us realized, as we spent probably a bit too long at the restaurant and had maybe 20 minutes before the start of the film. By the time we all got to the theater and inside the place was absolutely packed. Apparently if you want to get seats together you have to arrive well ahead of time, and it almost has a tail gating mentality. Instead we all split up mostly into groups of two to find a place to sit. So this ended up with me being down on the front row leaning back in my seat and trying to watch the movie. Thankfully we didn’t really CARE about the movie… but instead the commentary. Afterwards they said that it was a bit hard to hear the dub over as you got further back in the theater so I guess the awkward angle was worth it.

This is totally something I would do again, and it has been a long while since I have laughed this hard. I guess I had completely put large sections of the Broderick film out of my memory. I mean I remember it being bad at the time, but I didn’t remember it being THIS bad. If you have the chance to see Rifftrax in a nearby theater I suggest you take up that opportunity. They do this apparently as a semi regular thing here, so I will have to follow the schedule and see what is next. It seems like the next showing is November 4th where they do that campy classic Anaconda. I will have to see what is going on but I would really like to maybe try and go.

We Have the Date

Yesterday was the big announcement for the Warlords of Draenor release date and now we know exactly when to expect it to land. Some time ago Godmother ran a contest to see who could guess the date, and I apparently came the closest along with River. I remember at the time River saying something to the effect that I looked lonely on the spreadsheet so he decided my guess was as good as any. Now that said I did have some logic behind my guess, I was not just randomly picking numbers. My general theory was that we would not see a World of Warcraft expansion until after Blizzcon. So knowing the Blizzcon dates I figured they would want to take advantage of the Blizzcon-Bump but get product out there before Thanksgiving and the holiday madness begins. I apparently was right but Blizzard threw everyone for a loop by making the release a Thursday. I don’t think anyone was expecting that.

Once again the good folks at Blizzard have managed to craft together a really awesome cinematic. Were I a horde player I would probably be cheering the awesome orc action. Instead it just seems like another really awesomely animated feature explaining the premise of the expansion. The events play out a little different than I would have thought. All along I thought that Garrosh would actually stop Grommash from drinking the blood, but it seems like good ole Grom was already making that decision. Garrosh however just gave him the backup he needed to defeat Mannorath. I feel like the events of this expansion will serve to set up for the long fabled Burning Legion expansion, since we obviously screw with the way things were supposed to work out. I figure you can’t kill a demon like Mannorath without having some pretty negative repercussions.

Overwhelming Meh

Like I said, were I a horde player I would likely be heralding in yet another overwhelmingly horde focused expansion. Thing is I am not, and I have never cared a single bit about any of the horde lore. It was just that faction filled with monstrous humanoids and a handful of people that I cared enough about to roll alts to be able to play with. Nothing about the horde is really my thing, apart from the whole “everything has spikes” aspect. I expected yesterdays event and subsequent trailer to pump me up and prepare me for what was inevitable, my temporary return to World of Warcraft. The thing is it seems to have had the opposite effect. I am even less interested in the expansion than I was going into the day, and I can’t really put my finger on the why.

I have been in Alpha/Beta for some time now, and all in total I have played somewhere between six and eight hours. During that time I have just felt like I was forcing myself to play the game. I felt obligated to test the content since friends had gotten me into it. Nothing I was doing however really did it for me, and even with the existence of some interesting ideas like the Garrisons, it all felt rehashed. The Burning Crusade was one of the most exciting expansions for me, and it was the era of so many cool things for me as a raider. I expected to be wrapped up in this whirlwind of nostalgia upon returning to it… albeit in a pre-destruction state. While Draenor is gorgeous and I can see the underpinnings of the areas I used to love… it all just feels really old at this point.

This expansion is going to be amazing for those players that are currently enthralled with the game. There are going to be a handful of other players that maybe quit wow but didn’t really play other games in the meantime… that will return and fall back in love again. However I fear for those of us who have gone nomadic and played every game that has come down the pipe… the overall game is just starting to feel its age. The systems don’t quite work as well as other games on the market, it isn’t the culmination of the best ideas any longer. Instead it is a combination of what they could get to work within the existing framework of the game. It will definitely breathe new life into the game a whole and introduce a bunch of new doodads for the players to get involved with, but so far it has all felt very hollow to me. As much as I want to be excited, I am wondering if I have actually truly outgrown the game. I had more fun doing Godmother’s survey than I have had actually playing the game in a very long time… so that tells me I was pretty much living off nostalgia to this point, and maybe that font has been exhausted.

Revenge on Pharo Sirius

August 12, 2014 by Belghast

Robin Williams

This morning is a rough one, more than anything because I don’t quite know what to say but at the same time feel like I need to say something. It is unlikely that anyone was not touched by at least one of the many faces of Robin Williams. You had the coked up version from Mork and Mindy, the family friendly version from Aladdin, the bawdy rapid fire version from Good Morning Vietnam and finally the extremely gifted and serious one as seen in movies like Goodwill Hunting and the Fisher King. There was a Robin Williams for everyone, and he was absolutely adept at switching to just the right version of himself for the role. Throughout the evening last night, folks kept popping onto TeamSpeak and announcing the news with shock that the words themselves were rolling off their lips. In many ways it will be hard to envision a world without him, because he has been such a comedic force of nature my entire life. He was like the tidal forces… just a thing that existed and we were quietly enriched for the presence.

He of course was a very public proponent of gaming, supposedly naming at least two of his children based on game characters. The most famous of these was his daughter Zelda, because he was supposedly “playing a lot of Zelda” at the time. He also struggled with all manner of addictions, so much so that I cannot think of cocaine without thinking of him at least in passing. Brilliance often burns bright by standing far too close to the flame. It is also reported that he struggled with depression, and I know specifically what that feels like. You develop all sorts of coping mechanisms to push away the bad thoughts but they never actually leave you. They are unrelenting in their pursuit of you and constantly gnawing away at the best of days. I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a “cured” state, just “functioning better”. So I choose not necessarily to wallow in the memory of this mans greatness, but instead to salute just how long he managed to chase his demons away before they consumed him. At the same time I wonder just how long I will be able to accomplish the same.

A Room of my Own

On a far lighter note, I thought I would show off my new room in the guild house. Granted I don’t have much of anything in it yet, and primarily the things that I do have, I purchased because they were cheap. It just felt wrong to own a private room but not have anything in it. Tam has this glorious room with all sorts of rare items that he has crafted through goldsmithing, but since I have avoided crafting like the plague in this game I have very little to show myself. The room was purchased with my recent wealth generated by the sale of some Materia that I got through questing. Two of them sold for 100,000 gil a piece and the third sold for 500,000 gil giving me some money finally to play around with. The private room in the guild house costs 300,000 gil but unlike other games there are no upkeep mechanics. So even though it is crazy expensive to get housing, it is at least a one time expense.

At some point I need to dip my toes into the crafting system, because it seems like all of the really cool housing stuff is crafted. Unlike some games there really doesn’t seem to be a ready made drop component here. Like in EQ2 you could go clear specific dungeons and walk away with pieces of furniture or statues, but here you walk away with rare crafting materials. In fact this has been the point of much disappointment as the last several bosses of most of the hard mode content drops nothing but crafting mats that are then turned into some of the best in slot items. This was part of my major disappointment the first time playing the game, that nothing ever really dropped interesting gear out in the world. I think maybe if I learned to appreciate the crafting system I would “grok” why I should care about getting that high quality Pieste Skin.

Revenge on Pharo Sirius

Last night for me was mostly a night to catch up on the main storyline quest. There are a number of trials that are unlocked post 50 through continuing down the main storyline. Each time they add a new patch they add new storyline content, and at the not so subtle constant nudging of Tam I worked my way to getting caught up on the King Moggle Mog encounter, which is the first of these new trials you get to. The problem is it causes you to run a series of dungeons and guildhests that no one actually wants to run ever. As a result I had to queue for Sunken Temple of Qarn, aka the dungeon with the bees that one-shot unsuspecting players. Overall the dungeon went extremely smoothly in part because as a Dragoon I could sit on the bees and interrupt them as soon as they went to cast the final sting spell. After this I had to run through a couple of guildhests with amazing names “Hero in a Half Shell” and “More than a Feeler”. The best thing about FATEs and Guildhests are the awesome puns.

After I finished my guildhests we decided to go off and seek revenge on Pharo Sirius. I guess at some point after patch 2.1 my friends had tried coming into here and gotten absolutely wrecked. So it has been both revered and feared since, and they wanted to get revenge. At this point we have significantly better gear, as at that time none of us had our relics and at this point most of us also have a good deal of gear to back said relics up. While there were some extremely tricky parts, I have to say overall the dungeon went pretty smoothly. They remembered enough of the pitfalls from before to keep us from getting hung up on them again, yet the boss encounters were still fresh enough that we had to do a good deal of thinking on our feet. We beat the dungeon with plenty of time still left on the timer, whereas the first time they were here they hit their 90 minutes and simply ran out of time to continue trying.

Mammets of Halatali

After clearing up our revenge issues with Pharo Sirius we opted to move on to Halatali Hard Mode. Essentially we have been working our way through unlocking the various dungeons so that each of us can begin doing Hard Mode roulette in the duty finder. Similarly we have a whole slew of trials to unlock before we can do those as well. As of last night I am missing Hard Mode Stone Vigil, Hard Mode Haukke Manor and Lost City of Amdapor before I can do the hard mode roulettes, and I think Tam and Ashgar are just down to two of those. The tentative plan is to run the missing ones tonight, and if not I can always directly queue for whatever ones I happen to be missing. I would just rather experience the new content as a guild than with a bunch of random strangers. Although I doubt we will have enough people to actually do the trials at any point soon, so I probably will go ahead and queue for Moggle Mog and Battle at the Big Bridge to get through those trials so that I can move on in the storyline.

Just like the other hard modes, it seems things have changed since we last were here. After working so hard to clear out the dungeon the first time, it seems as though a series of “friendly” gladiators have taken up residence in the dungeon and are prepared to challenge us to a series of difficult encounters. I say friendly in quotes because each time you get near one of them they seem to heckle you with random sayings. The whole dungeon reminds me a bit of the Crusaders Coliseum in World of Warcraft, and in fight you end up pushing your way through a bit of trash before coming up against another big boss encounter. There were some extremely interesting mechanics, and in a few places we took some deaths… but managed to spring back and figure out the “thing” we needed to learn to defeat whatever horrible attack they were throwing at us. As a whole I feel like this could be a dungeon run extremely quickly now that we know the mechanics. All in all it was a pretty great night, and I managed to catch up on the storyline… and hopefully tonight we can unlock the rest of the dungeons. I still have yet to set foot in Crystal Tower, but if all else falls through I might do that.

#FFXIV