Destiny Archives - Page 44 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Months Behind but Loving It

October 1, 2014 by Belghast

Happy Bragtoberfest!

During the month of October Izlain and J3w3l of Couch Podtatoes are running a special event they are calling Bragtoberfest. The idea is to share the fun you are having gaming with your friends. You can check out all of the details on Izlain’s blog Me Vs Myself and I. I thought it was fitting that on this fight October morning, that I do in fact have a handful of gaming achievements to “brag” about as it were. The event however is not just for crowing about your gaming achievements, but instead sharing that magical feeling we all have while playing a game we are really into. Over the past months there has been quite a bit of negativity either coming from or leveled against gamers. Bragtoberfest is an opportunity to embrace the good and present a positive viewpoint of gamers having fun being gamers.

Months Behind but Loving It

Back in July a large number of us that played Final Fantasy XIV at launch, returned to the game to give it another shot. I was the first to come back thanks to a free weekend, and enjoyed it so much that I ended up roping a lot more of my friends to join me. We played for roughly three months after launch and then for various reasons all wandered off into the next big game. As such we never really made much progression at the time. As a guild we had managed to take down Hard Mode Ifrit while working on the relic weapon chain, but that was literally as far as we had managed to get. So coming back we have had this whirlwind of catching up, and experiencing content that is almost a year old at this point, but still very new at the same time. Over the last several weeks on Tuesdays we have been pulling together an eight man raid team and working our way through Binding Coil of Bahamut. At this point we have defeated the first four turns and had originally planned on focusing on turn five last night.

However last night we had one of the members missing, and were subbing in a player that was relatively new to the Final Fantasy XIV end game. As such we opted to set our sights on a different target, the first of the Extreme modes… Garuda. Most of us had managed to get attuned for this fight and had been for quite some time, however there is just something about the Garuda fight that is terrifying. For starters it has one of the most awesome and at the same time creepy introductions. The normal mode Garuda fight kicked our ass so many times while trying to get folks through it around level 43 when you encounter it in the game. All of this gave me pause when I thought about the difficulty of doing the fight on Extreme mode.

One of the most interesting things about the Final Fantasy XIV endgame is that you have a fixed amount of time to make attempts. For Garuda and most instances you have exactly 90 minutes to defeat the encounter before the game punts you from the instance and you have to start over from scratch. For the most part we all went into this fight last night without functional experience of how it works and learned on the fly as we went. Each attempt we made adjustments to the strategy, shifting the targets between myself and Ashgar until we figured out an ideal mix of who needed to tank what where. There are three phases to the fight, and the last two phases rotate back and forth between them until you defeat her. Once we had managed to get through a single rotation of phase three we pretty much had the fight in our sights. At that point we had roughly nine minutes to defeat the encounter as a whole. We pushed through and managed to get it just in time, and as such finished a quest we all had sitting in our logs for some time allowing us to now move on to Extreme Mode Titan.

Flaming Axe of Doom

While bragging about cool stuff, I managed to finish gathering my 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery and am now the proud owner of the awesome flaming axe Conquerer. While I would love to be wielding a Bravura Novus instead, that quite honestly is still a good long ways off. I am still slowly working my way through the 9 Animus books, and then after that I have to do the Novus grind… which involves collecting a bunch of Alexandrite and binding 75 pieces of Materia to my weapon. This step is not only time consuming but also extremely expensive. As such I have been stockpiling money and Materia as I go to hopefully be able to complete this step. As far as the current Animus grind, I am 2 books into it and still have 7 more to go. My good friend Cylladora however is down to two books left, so I am pumped to see her progressing so quickly.

All of this made me decide a few weeks back to go ahead and gather up the Soldiery “bookrocks” and get the slightly easier to get level 110 weapon. The process for that is somewhat contorted as well but involves winning an Unidentified Allagan Tomestone from Syrcus tower or Second Coil of Bahamut. You then take this and 10 Rowena’s Tokens and trade for a Weathered Conquerer which in its own right is a really nice level 100 weapon. Each of the Tokens is sold for 130 Tomestones of Soldiery in Mor Dhona for a grand total of 1300. You then take your Weathered weapon to Drake in Hyristmill and trade both it and a Sands of Time to him to receive the level 110 “unweathered” version.

This is all possible thanks to the fact that in patch 2.38 they started allowing Sands of Time to drop in Syrcus tower. Since you can only win a single item per week in Syrcus, that means that I gave up on usable gear for the last two weeks to gather up the UAT and the Sands. Similarly I had to make sure I capped my Tomestones of Soldier each week to make sure I could get to 1300 in time, since you can only early 450 a week. I am damned happy to have a level 110 weapon, which is almost best in slot. You can technically get ilevel 115 weapons now either through the Second Coil raid or through the completion of the Nexus step of the Relic weapon chain. My goal is still to complete the Relic weapon, because I love the feel of the quest chain and the look of the eventual weapon. However for the time being I can feel happy knowing that I am going to be able to generate plenty of threat with a weapon at least as good as anyone in our little raid group.

The Queens Bounty

Monday night I pushed through to level 20 and started working on the Queen’s bounties in anticipation of trying to get gear from the event before it goes away at the end of this week. Last night after the raid I talked a couple of friends into helping me out with making this happen. The only problem is that as a fresh 20, I could not actually RUN the Queens Bounty Strike. Thanks to Kodra and Shiana we pushed through a couple of strike missions and after a few lucky drops and some upgrades… I managed to get to 21 light which allowed me to queue for the Queens Bounty content. So it was myself, a 24 and a 27 queueing for the content, and the game decided to give us all 24 mobs. As such I finally begin to understand the rage that some of my friends have felt while grouping with higher level players than themselves. Quite simply I could not actually land decent attacks on anything. I was aiming straight for the head and making content, but just simply not making a dent in it with my level 18 blue hand cannon.

My friends assured me that this was not anything I was necessarily doing wrong but instead just a simple component of the mobs being a few light levels higher than me. As such I tried my best to limp along through the content but spent a lot of time hugging the ground. At the end of the mission I managed to get the chest piece drop, but at that point it was already well past time for bed. My hope is to go back tonight and try for the helmet and maybe the sniper rifle. I still have four more tokens left to go and I just picked up a few more easily bounties this morning. Level disparity problems aside I am still digging the way this game feels. While I am not sure I would ever complete the raid, I am definitely going to shoot for gearing up in full purple gear. The biggest thing is I wish to god I could get a purple weapon drop. That would at least make me feel less useless. At the end of the night I was sitting at 22 just a single upgrade away from 23, so I am pretty damned happy with the results in any case.

#FFXIV #Garuda #Destiny

Electronic Gaming Monthly

September 30, 2014 by Belghast

Tied to Screens

At least once a week I see a report in the news talking about how we have become too tied to our screens and we have lost social interaction. While I agree that as a culture we are pretty damned addicted to technology, this view point that not interacting face to face is aberrant or strange seems to be a pretty extrovert centric. For the introverts the era of instant non-face to face communication allows us to leave far richer lives than if we were left up to our natural curmudgeon tendencies. I am not one of those people that goes out seeking face to face interactions, and while I can handle it in short doses… it completely drains me and causes me to retreat inside my shell. Whereas digital interaction, doesn’t really cause much stress at all as I can interact when I feel like it, but withdraw just as easily as closing down a chat window.

Dealing with people simply causes a lot of anxiety for me. We have various friends that we will go out with semi-regularly… but even then I struggle. When we make the initial plans it sounds like a great idea, then as it creeps ever closer to the time of the event… I start looking for ways out of it. It goes from something extremely fun, to something I am dreading. Then finally when I force myself to go through with it I have a good time in spite of myself, but this whole rollercoaster I put myself on is something I would rather simply avoid entirely. It takes a lot out of me to go through it each time. So when I see someone complaining that we are losing social interaction, I feel they simply are not taking me into account. Sure there are fewer people for the extroverts to get their warm fuzzies from, but for us extroverts it means we are forced into a lot less awkward interaction as a result. I feel like thanks to the internet I live a far richer and involved life than I ever would have on my own.

Electronic Gaming Monthly

While on an oddly introspective tear this morning, I thought I would talk a bit about a little back and forth I had yesterday about something I miss. In my travels I stumbled onto the Podcast A Life Well Wasted again… which tragically only ever released seven episodes. It is this great This American Life for Video Games feel, and I would love to have more of it. I re-listened to the first episode talking about the death of EGM magazine and was struck with waves of nostalgia for that time in video gaming. Electronic Gaming Monthly at the time was this inch think omnibus devoted to all things video gaming covering arcade, consoles, hand held and even on rare occasion PC gaming. I read the magazine pretty religiously from roughly 1990 to around 1996. It and White Dwarf were the magazines that I waited each month to arrive, and before I actually subscribed I would anxiously watch the news stand at my local grocery store for the next copy.

Back then a lot of my fervor for the magazine centered around them giving me the dirt on the next arcade fighting game. I remember it was the first magazine to post full moves lists for Street Fighter 2, and I memorized them like some arcane text. The arcades were this crazy place where people speculated about potential moves, and by the time Mortal Kombat 2 arrived there were all these unofficial moves sheets floating around the arcades with half of the attacks speculative or complete and total bullshit. EGM was the voice of authority, only publishing things that they had verified as working. At the same time they had this irreverent review style that appealed to me greatly at the time. Gaming was still very much an insider thing, and an excluded subculture… so it just felt awesome to have a magazine talking about the things I actually cared about.

I really don’t know why I stopped reading the magazine, other than maybe the internet got better at reporting the news I cared about… or simply that I got busy and poor in college and could not long shell out the then $7.00 price tag for a magazine each month. Before this episode I was acutely aware that Electronic Gaming Monthly no longer existed, but I never really knew when exactly it happened. In fact the last time I went to a news stand I didn’t see any magazines devoted to video games, so I am guessing that is entirely a bygone era. Once upon a time I used to think that working for EGM would have been the coolest job in the world. There were times I day dreamed about becoming a “video game journalist”. I guess in some way with my blog I have been, or I am at least as legitimate as that term ever really was. I do miss an era when the magazines did not feel beholden to the manufacturers to make sure they got at least a 6 out of 10 score. The aspect of the scoring system that I appreciated the most was that you usually got three different reviewers points of view, instead of just one.

Quite honestly I think a lot of what made that time in gaming history so magical is the actual lack of information we had about anything. Right now we know everything about the games that are being made before they even exist. Hell we obsessed over Titan and all we really knew about it was a name, but still folks managed to dig up little nuggets of information about it. EGM worked, because we were starved for information on our hobby. They were one of the few sources of this information, and while they might only give us 100 words on a single game… that was far more than we were getting anywhere else. The wild speculation, the misinformation, the rampant rumors all got laid low by a single issue of this magazine giving fertile ground for the next crop to spring up until it arrived to quell them again. I miss that era… and I think in a way that’s why the 16-bit games are so important to me… because they are wrapped up in that shroud of mystique. I miss Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Beginning the Real Grind

Last night I accomplished one of the goals I had set out to do Sunday and finally pushed through to level 20 in Destiny. At this point I feel like the real leveling curve begins as I start searching for gear with +light on it. Right now I have managed to find a blue chest piece with 5 light, so I am barely if at all moving in the right direction. Similarly I started working on the Queens Bounty and managed to knock one of them out for killing Fallen Ultras. I am roughly halfway through the 200 headshots one, so hoping I can grind that out in the next couple of days. I am really not sure how many of these I can complete before I actually get to take my swing at the loot piñata. I could really use an upgraded hand cannon as the level 18 green one I have been using feels not quite so epic any longer. I have to say I am really digging Mars so far. I find the Cabal extremely satisfying to kill, like even the relatively weak Legionaires.

At some point around level 18 I got sent to the shipwright again, and she let me pick a new design. I have to say I am digging this one a lot more than I did the collectors edition version. The paint job is okayish, but I am really loving the design of this ship. This is the first design I would have likely picked on my own. I absolutely hate the style of the first ship, and the collectors edition ship still has enough elements that it annoys me. This however is finally a good looking star ship. I think mostly I extremely dislike asymmetrical designs, so as a kid I loved the X-Wing and A-Wing… but the B-Wing and Millennium Falcon frustrated me. I could forgive the Millennium Falcon however since it was essentially cobbled together out of a bunch of other ships… but that B-Wing… man no mercy for that. In any case I am still digging destiny, and it is beginning to remind me more and more of Phantasy Star Online. That was really my first venture into online gaming, so there is a large bit of nostalgia there as well.

#Destiny

Invaders from Mars

September 29, 2014 by Belghast

Weekend Goals

This weekend I set out with a handful of goals, and as always not everything got accomplished. The first goal was to manage to get to 20 in Destiny. Had the servers not gone down last night I might have actually hit it, as I am a little ways into 19 and still have quite a lot of story content t o do. The second goal was to finish my second Animus book, and that one got wrapped up yesterday afternoon without much issue. Sadly I don’t have the “bookrocks” stockpiled to buy another one, but in theory I could hop on the nightly hunt mob train and get there without much issue. The third goal was to cap out my soldiery tomestones, and while I am not quite there I am close enough that tonight’s elite roulette will get me there. Finally I had planned on trying to get to 10 on my Knight in Trove, which I didn’t quite make but I am now level 9 and also have a level 6 gunslinger.

All in all I think I had a pretty productive weekend full of focused faffing. I think the Godmother would be proud of my little checklist of accomplishments… or at least almost accomplished items. This is what keeps me motivated in games, is to have things that I want to tick off a list. I am finding that I am exceedingly good at grinding headlong towards a goal, but when I lose sight of that goal I start to get bored. One of the more interesting side goals of the weekend was to figure out how to configure JoyToKey and in part thanks to this tutorial video from Beau Hindman, I managed to get it running with little issue. So now I am running around in Trove using my Xbox 360 controller and I have to say it works pretty well. There are some wonky issues with occasionally my view drifting off slightly to one side or the other, but I think that is more an issue of the thumb sticks not entirely centering each time. I might see if I can lower the sensitivity at some point to make it less twitchy. The big thing I notice is the amount of time you spend mapping and remapping controls until you find the thing that feels most comfortable.

Invaders from Mars

As always it was the love of loot and the desire to acquire more of it… that ended up lighting a fire under my ass in Destiny. Previously I had been happy to slowly poke my way around the patrol missions, wandering aimlessly through objectives. However due to the various loot issues going on that patch 1.0.2 intends to address, they are basically having a loot giveaway event. As we talked about in the podcast Saturday night, folks are frustrated with the grindy nature of the endgame, and as such they rolled out a limited time event that addresses that at least to some extent. The event that is going on is known simply as The Queen’s Bounty, and through it a series of items appear on the bounty board. Supposedly if you complete a handful of these you end up earning a legendary quality weapon. Basically I want to get in on this loot grab before it goes away.

I had managed to get to level 16 before setting foot on Venus, through just wandering about on the moon doing patrol missions. As such I knew that if I just worked my way up through the backlog of story content I had waiting on me, I would ding 20 without much issue. So yesterday I set forward doing just this. I got to experience Venus and Mars… and so far I have to say I still prefer good old Cosmodrome and the Moon. Venus can be extremely pretty, but everything seems to have this yellow green haze to it. Additionally I have come to realize I am really not a huge fan of fighting the Vex. The fact that I have to shift from aiming for the head to aiming from the yellow glowing spot in their belly can be frustrating at times. Additionally fighting them is a bit like fighting a zombie horde. The Fallen and the Hive had a fair amount of cowardice in their moves. You can push and pull them around the map, but the Vex just keep advancing regardless of what you do like this unrelenting mass of shambling robots.

Once you land on Mars however… the Cabal take heavy metal up to eleven. This is very much the Warhammer 40,000 faction, in that they seem to have a cavalcade of ever more insane mechanized environmental suits to do battle with you. There is this one baddie known as a colossus that has some sort of a chain gun that just pinned me down stunned as it ripped through my shield in a few moments. The Phalanx however were what became super maddening. They are basically a space marine with a giant riot shield. They fire out from around the corner and appear to be deadly accurate regardless of how awkward that position must be. The best tactic seemed to be either to toss a grenade, or try and bait them to move in one direction would looping around behind them. In any case… my sequence of hand cannon one shots pretty much stopped when I reached Mars.

At some point it appears that Destiny reset the player preferences, because apparently my grouping setting got flipped from invite only to allowing anyone to join. In part I am thankful for this because I was joined by Nidrew who basically carried me through a few of the rougher missions, or at the very least kept me from having to start over. So long as one of us stayed alive we could eventually respawn back up. I find that aspect of the game interesting, that when a team mate has fallen, your focus goes from finishing the objective to just staying alive for 25 seconds so that they can revive and get back in the fight. Of course you can go over and rez them youself, but often times they got pinned down in a fire fight and running back in there might end up being suicide. In any case I am very thankful for the help, and when I stopped I was sitting at 19 so hopefully I can push on through to 20 tonight and maybe start working on the bounties.

Book of Deeds

When you see this text pop across your screen it feels extremely epic… until you realize that this was just one of nine books that you have to do… and you have so many left to go. I love the feel of the Relic weapon quests because they still remind me so much of just how difficult it was to get your epic weapon in the original Everquest. The reality is that it is going to take me an insane amount of time to complete it, far longer than is reasonable considering lots of my FC mates are taking the significantly shorter route to a ilevel 110 weapon. I don’t want to call it the easy way, because it is in itself a significant amount of grinding, but with the most recent patch it just got way easier to acquire the necessary bits. In fact since that patch went in I already have everything waiting in my inventory to be able to get my ilevel 110 Axe, I just need a bit more soldiery which I should get Tuesday when the reset happens.

That said I still plan on going through with the Relic quest chain, because man… the Bravura Nexus looks amazing. I borrowed this image from the FFXIV reddit, but man I really want to swing that weapon. Granted the step between where I am currently and where you get that weapon involves months of work, but at some point I will be swinging it happily. Granted by the time that happens they will probably add another tier of progression in there, and it will already be outdated but screw it… it looks awesome. Final Fantasy XIV is really good so far at giving me things that I want to get that require lots of work to get them. I’ve always been extremely luck with drops, so getting that item to drop off a boss seems to be an ineffectual way of keeping me engaged. Giving me something that I have to do every week to slowly inch my way towards victory… that seems to actually work at keeping me around. I love the way that the books work so far in that each one slowly incrementally improves your current weapon. Someday I will get there, I just hope that the rest of the people I am playing with will still be playing when it happens.

#FFXIV #Destiny

Leopard Print Paladin

September 22, 2014 by Belghast

Susceptible to Grind

This weekend I played a good bit of Destiny because it is the perfect game for those moments when I don’t feel like I am get into something terribly detailed. I play this game much in the same fashion as I play Diablo 3, in short bursts with the ability to jettison out if needed to go do something else. As such this has become in many ways the game I play when I know we are going to be leaving the house soon. I am never more than just a teleport to orbit away from safety, which makes me consume the game voraciously in small doses. As such I have mostly been running the game in private mode with my fire team locked down to keep people from popping in at random. I feel like I don’t want to deal with the expectations of others when I am playing a game in this fashion. Generally speaking I am either moments from leaving the game, or playing the game while camping something in Final Fantasy XIV… and in either case I am not exactly responsive enough to be a proper group mate.

The bulk of my gameplay has been doing either patrols on the Cosmodrome or on the Moon. I finally got a blue engram to drop, but unfortunately it was for my class item… which is essentially just decoration. Instead of the traditional “flag football” towel, this one is a series of 3 banners that hang down from my waist. One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am deeply susceptible to grinding. I find it super easy to zone out and just wander around aimlessly in an area. I seem to be able to get infinite amounts of entertainment value from simply wandering around killing Fallen and Hive on the moon and accepting the little mini-quests. As such I was level 16 before I actually finished the Moon this weekend and got the quest chain sending me to Venus. I am sure I will be 20+ before I finish Venus, because as soon as I unlock the next patrol zone… that is more than likely what I will be doing quite a bit of.

I think part of the problem with Destiny is the fact that it has relatively little to go with as far as Story goes. As such I find absolutely no sense of urgency pushing me forward to keep completing missions. In a game like Mass Effect 3 I felt like I was moments away from doom at all times, so I just had to keep pushing forward and trying to turn back the tide in a war larger than myself. In Destiny they have failed to infuse the narrative with any of this. Sure things are going horribly wrong out in the galaxy, but we have this last city that seems completely immune to the effect of what is happening. Sure The Traveler is “dying” but I don’t feel this happening, I feel like that is generations away and I have just been drafted into essentially a science fiction stalemate. So I have zero issue wandering about and taking time to smell the “helium coils” as it were. The moment to moment gameplay are what keeps me engaged with this game, and the story line and as such story quests could not exist at all and I would still be happy.

Leopard Print Paladin

At the beginning of the weekend I was a level 40 newly christened Paladin of Uldah. Over the course of the weekend I managed to push my way through to 46 and get the first of my spiffy gear. For those who are not familiar with Final Fantasy XIV, at 45 you complete a class quest that will reward you four pieces of “Relic” gear that represents the defacto look for your class. This means you get a full set of gear minus two slots. The belt is not terribly important because no belt really changes the look of something drastically. However the other missing piece is the chest piece and it is essentially the item that always ties a class set together. On the Lalafell the paladin “short shorts” look is minimized by the total lack of height, however of anyone else it looks like you are wearing white boxer shorts without the chest piece that gives you the plate skirt that is so characteristic of a paladin in this game.

There is a full set of gear that drops in the dungeon Dzmael Darkhold, that rarely sees much use since it is level 44, and at 45 everyone gets their class set. However the one piece that is extremely useful is the chest, which thankfully in all of my journeys I have gathered up a few of these. The problem is that for pretty much every class there is something goofy going on with this set. For the tanks the set features an inexplicable leopard print inlay, with no way to “dye” the pattern away. So as a result for the last few levels you end up looking a bit goofy until you finally ding 50 and get that class chest piece. Thankfully for me I also managed to pick up a nice pink quality chest for 47 that should make the outfit look a little bit more put together for the last few levels.

Red Bunny Samurai

The other thing I am realizing is just how much of my other gear will work for Paladin. Almost all of the dropped pieces and jewelry from the endgame levels worth for Marauder, Warrior, Gladiator and Paladin. The problem with this is that I have several of the pieces glamoured to look like the Warrior class set. Apparently this will not show as such when I equip them however, and quite frankly the Syrcus tower set looks like crap for plate wearers. So I am wondering what set I am going to glamour to that can be neutral and work for both classes. The most important thing after all is that I still have a proper bunny hat. While I freely admit that I stole wearing this helm from Tam, I think I have more than made it my own… since it was clearly designed to be worn by a Lalafell. He tends to favor the white one with the full face mask, where I am enamored with the red one that allows my full face to show through.

My goal for the coming days is to push the paladin to 50 and get it fully geared in 90 or better items. I’ve been stockpiling hunt marks to be able to do this the moment I ding, but I am really not sure how many pieces I will actually need to buy. All of my jewelry is dual class, as well as my chest, belt, and boots. That just leaves three pieces of gear that I actually need to purchase, and then again I will need to spend the requisite 1125 tomestones of mythology to get the zenith weapon and shield. Right now I have a dilemma I suppose in that I am really close to being able to purchase my next Animus book, but I am also really close to 50 at this point. I don’t have the tomestones to do both. In theory I can get the book and the process of simply getting my relic weapon should give me more than enough tomestones to be able to at least craft the relic. Then I can deal with grinding out the rest as a paladin if I so choose. In either case I should have another animus book and a 50 paladin soon enough. Then I suppose my focus turns to finishing off my White Mage.

#FFXIV #Destiny