Destiny Archives - Page 45 of 46 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Dance of my People

September 15, 2014 by Belghast

Enter the Jigglehats

Yesterday the Breaking Brick Mountains event started in FFXIV which is a repeat of an earlier event used to commemorate the launch of DragonQuest X. For those not terribly familiar with the Dragon Warrior/DragonQuest franchise, it has a rather distinctive art style. So seeing that art style appear in Final Fantasy XIV is extremely entertaining. The quests have this great Dragon Quest stylized “Quest Accepted” and FATE related text that just makes me happy to see in game. The quest itself is rather simple. You talk to Havak Alvak near the Central Thanalan gate in Uldah, which sends you to talk to the Beefy Businessman down by the Thaumaturge guild. From there you have to find a specific fate called “Brick by Brick”. This will lead into one of two other FATEs either called “Brick by Stone Brick” or “Brick by Gold Brick”, both granting you quest completion.

One of the things I love about Final Fantasy XIV seasonal and special events is that they are super easy to complete. I used to hate how frustratingly grindy other games events were, in that if you did not participate every single day of a holiday you could not get all the prizes. Even with the Lightning Returns event, and trying to collect all of the weapons… it essentially meant I had to farm 5 different FATEs and then was completely done. This event in total took maybe 30 minutes, and most of that was travel time. Completing the quest nets you a Thug’s Mug cosmetic helm and a Wind-up Brickman cosmetic pet. Next to the Beefy Businessman there is a Toughie Peddler NPC that sells the amazing “Jigglehat” or more properly known as the King Slime Crown.

It has become common place for our guild and the members of Howling Moon free company to mingle around while waiting on things to happen. The events of last night are pretty common, in that we each tend to hang around the market board just down from our house, which can be seen in the background of the above image. It all started when Joren Noye started up with this amazing outfit that he had built around his Jigglehat, that was mostly comprised of a dyed to match vanya robe. What happens when to amazing Lalafell meet? Well we dance of course, and within moments the ever adorable Jade Taiga showed up as well. Well it was not long before Ayla Noye joined in as well, and we had an impromptu jigglehat party. You have to love any game that supports this sort of random dancing in silly hats. My friend Tam is convinced that the entire point of this game is to collect ever more amazing hats.

Paladin Soul

I spent most of yesterday working away quietly on my Gladiator turned Paladin. I completed the final level 30 Gladiator quest, and went through the opening quest for becoming a Paladin. So far the 30 and 35 quests that I have completed are significantly easier than most of the job quests that I have done on other characters. I am guessing that at some point in the near future they will drop the floor out from under me with a quest that is significantly more difficult than the others. I personally thought the final level 30 Gladiator quest was rather challenging, in that I seemed to fail it the first time for no apparent reason. I was doing everything they had told me to do and then all of the sudden I got duty failed. Upon trying it again this morning I apparently did all of the things that I was supposed to and then some because I passed, but still have no idea what I did the first time versus what I did the second time.

I started the day at level 28 and finished the evening about halfway to 36. I have yet to really sit foot in a dungeon yet, and have been mostly doing the FATE grind. First in Costa Del Sol and now I am out in Coerthas. In part I guess I like FATE grinding because it is mindless and something I can do over and over. Additionally I have really become addicted to the whole Quick Ventures system, and I view FATEs as a way to feed Venture tokens to my Retainers. For those that are unaware you can buy 5 venture tokens for 1000 grand company seals at your grand company quartermaster. So far I am digging playing the Paladin again, but in truth I am mostly leveling this so that I once again have a good class for grinding FATEs to get Atma parts. I maybe made a mistake in going for the Atma weapon on my warrior first. That is pretty much the ideal fate grinding class, and in order for me to get another one up with that sort of survival… I am going to have to play my paladin.

Moonwalker

Other than playing quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV, I spent the bulk of the rest of my weekend playing some Destiny. At this point my Titan is level 10 and I am spending most of my time in the Moon Patrol zone. While I was waiting for FATEs on Saturday to spawn for my Animus book, I was hanging out on the PS4 wandering around either the Cosmodrome or Moon Patrol areas. This is pretty much the ideal play style for me. I like wandering about doing mini quests and killing lots of Fallen and Hive aliens. However if you listen to our podcast you can tell that several of our cast have a real issue with the fact that the game has very little tangible story. The story that does exist is questionably written and even more questionably acted. For me, it is enough story to keep me entertained, but we have already agreed that I need and more importantly want significantly less story than most folks. Wandering around and killing things is totally enough motivation to keep me enthralled, especially when the controls feel so damned good.

The weird thing for me is I tend to lose motivation to do the various missions whenever I actually unlock the patrol zone. It is as though the mission only serve as a vehicle to unlock patrol and once I have done that I have no real interest in progressing further. At some point soon however I should really finish clearing out the moon, but in the mean time I am wandering around the surface looking for interesting stuff. I love it when I find a chest or a new place that I had overlooked previously. I love exploring this game, but find it more than marginally frustrating when I encounter the “turn back now” wall around the outskirts of the areas. At least with the Cosmodrome you have understandable boundaries that limit you to just being on this one island. On the moon you can see forever, so it makes no sense why I cannot wander out in the open, as there are no logical obstructions. In any case, I am still really enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it.

#FFXIV #Destiny

Angry Red Ball

September 10, 2014 by Belghast

Starting Coil

For some time now after coming back to the game, we have been in a process of getting enough level 50 characters up to be able to tackle the official 8 man raid in the game. Now there is a 24 man raid, but to some extent I equate that to the LFR system in World of Warcraft. Both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower are tuned in such a way as to allow complete strangers to be able to complete them. They are however an excellent source of gear, and all of us have been doing them pretty much on a weekly basis on a shot of getting some ilevel 100 gear. The Binding Coil of Bahamut however is serious mode raiding, or at least it was when the game was released. It takes eight players through a series of separate “turns” as they call them… or floors as I think of them as we traverse one big raid.

Last night we took a friend of the guild in with us to get to our eight players, and she and another guildie had a sizeable amount of experience in the dungeon. For the most part we were trying to figure out the fight on the fly, however after a few wipes Spiral started giving us tips. Thanks in part to these tips we made adjustments and progressed pretty quickly through Turn One. Since we had not been there terribly long we opted to continue on to turn two. The First half of Binding Coil of Bahamut consists of five turns in total, with an extremely large boss encounter waiting at the end of it. In order to progress to the next turn, your group has to have defeated the previous one. I can see this becoming a bit of a pain later on as we bring new folks in that have not been keyed for the one we are actually working on.

Angry Red Ball

When we reached the second turn, I feel like the bottom dropped out from under us. The first turn once we adjusted a bit was rather manageable. So I had this fear that we would simply blow out the entire first half of the raid due to the fact that we way over geared the level that the encounters were designed for. This was pushed aside however as we started the second ADS encounter. ADS is a angry red ball defense system that you encounter as the first boss in turn one, however this time around it brings friends. The entire encounter is somewhat of a gauntlet in that you are trying to get to the boss before it enrages, which the process starts the moment you encounter the first mini-boss. You proceed down towards ADS by taking a series of optional bosses out, Each time you take a specific boss out, it removes a negative effect from the final encounter, but at the same time adds some form of a buff.

On our first turn we tried to take as many mini-bosses out as we could, and I think we only actually left one alive. The end result was absolutely brutal as we fought a severely buffed and hasted final boss. After that we more ploddingly identified which orbs removed which buff and gave which buff to figure out the path we could afford to take. Spiral had told us that every group she had been with went left, but we wanted to know WHY they went left. As a result we ended up going right, and for a period of time this seemed like the correct answer. The mini-boss before ADS removed this frustrating mechanic known as Rot that causes a debuff to be passed around the raid like a baton. If the debuff is NOT passed, everyone in the raid takes a significant amount of damage. We thought this would make the ADS encounter more manageable, however after a few tries we noticed that it was giving ADS an insane haste buff, causing it to absolutely wreck us.

The Left Path

So at this point we figured out why exactly every group went left, and by trial and error decided that this would be the best course of action. It is at this point that I should explain that we knew a supposed easy way to defeat the boss from the moment we walked in. The thing is while we can totally cheese out the Binding Coil of Bahamut, we will not in any fashion be able to cheese the Second Coil of Bahamut that features turns 6 through 10. I figure that if we learn these fights now, we will have an easier time learning the fights in Second Coil, because we will have some insight into the way that the designers of the raid content think. So throughout all of these tries we had a guaranteed win condition in our pocket, but we chose not to use it for as long as was feasible as to learn the fight for real.

Admittedly our biggest issue with this content was the fact that we lacked a Bard. I can already tell that group composition is going to be a pretty critical thing for certain fights. Normally we would have had Warenwolf on his Bard, but he was not available tonight. We could have shifted players around to get a bard, however we were not really prepared for that and didn’t see that zoning back out and back in was really worth it. As a result we struggled through and came within a sliver of defeating the boss a few times before taking not of just how late it was getting. Finally when we were just about to call it, we opted to take the easy route. Apparently ADS is one of the few bosses that is actually significantly easier to defeat after it enrages. Instead of having to deal with mechanics like Rot, you have to deal with constant AOE pulse damage through the raid. It literally becomes a burn phase and an endurance match for the healers to keep the raid up long enough to dps the encounter down.

Post Apocalyptic Halo

After we had finished the second turn we all dispersed, and I filtered off into playing some Destiny. I really did not want to get too terribly involved in anything, so I opted to just poke around in the level two mission that I had already defeated. One of the cool things about the way the world is laid out, is that you can just wander around off the main course allowing you to explore new areas that are not necessarily involved with the current task at hand. I had not unlocked the completely open world version of the zone yet, so this was the next best thing. Funny thing is a little bit into me poking around I had someone from my friends list join my fire team. I have to say I am not quite used to this concept yet of someone just randomly dropping down into your game. I sent him a message warning him that I was kind of just poking around aimlessly and went on about my business.

Interesting thing of note is that apparently if your friend zones into one of the “darkness” areas that are instanced… it also pulls you into the area as well. So one moment I am wandering about killing level 7 mobs that I had stumbled onto, and then the next I am being sucked into the battle with the Archon at the end of the level 2 mission. This was all fine and good as it is a pretty fun encounter, and since there were two of us the game scaled up the difficulty a bit. The problem is… moments into the encounter my partner in crime disconnected from the mission leaving me there to deal with all of the mobs alone. It turns out he was trying to upload a video clip and it disconnected him, which for future reference might not be the best thing to do in the middle of a fire fight. I managed to finish off the encounter solo and got a nice helm as a reward for doing so. On that note I shut things down for the night and tried to figure out why exactly my Vanguard Armory was not showing up. Thanks to Ashgar I went in and did some “renew licenses” function within the PS4 settings, and that seemed to clear it up immediately.

#FFXIV #BindingCoil #Destiny

Destiny is Gorgeous

September 9, 2014 by Belghast

Squandering the Morning

This morning I have absolutely squandered my morning away, because today the servers for Destiny came up. In truth the servers came up over the night, and there are already a large number of folks milling around in Tower that are level 10 or so. This morning my overriding goal was to get a character created and get it to tower so I could eventually meet up with friends and play. This formidable mug you are seeing represents the new version of me in Destiny. At character creation you are given the choice between Human, some sort of translucent skinned humanoid, and robots. Generally speaking I tend to heavily favor humans but there is a fatal flaw in the character creator… no beards. Since I can’t have a beard then I pretty much have to go robot.

All in all I am fine with this because I feel like a badass with the green glowing eyes. I played robotic characters in City of Heroes and Champions Online, so I guess that fits my motif anyway. I ended up rolling a Titan again, because I have to admit I like having the insane attack that slams the ground and knocks all of the enemies away. Additionally I found I liked having a jet pack better than some form of a modified jump. In theory the titan becomes more tanky over time, which also definitely fits my overriding goals in pretty much any game. Similarly I know that there will already be a lot of Warlocks and Hunters among my friends, so I figure it is best to stick with what I know and enjoyed playing in alpha and beta.

Destiny Is Gorgeous

The thing I keep forgetting after large blocks of time being out of the game is just how damned gorgeous this game is. I guess as a habitual member of the PC master race, I have a hard time realizing that the consoles have finally caught up. Always in the past there was something wrong with the console images, either they were grainy or washed out or blurry. They lacked the saturation and definition that I was so used to from playing on a PC. The PS4 however playing destiny looks amazing, and I doubt it would perform any better on a PC, or at least not with the mid range video cards I generally purchase. The big difference of course is that I am running around this landscape with the joystick rather than a keyboard and mouse. This is the biggest adjustment for me, because I still don’t quite feel comfortable without the precision control to make headshots that a mouse gives me.

Thankfully Destiny has more than a fair amount of aim assist, and while I can’t really draw a bead and get head shots reliably, I can chew down encounters with body shots. I managed to make it through the first tutorial level in pretty good time, and as I now idle in Tower to write this… random people keep landing and dancing with me. I am not exactly sure when I will really get a chance to start this game properly. I know we have plans for this evening, but I might pop in after that to at least run the first couple of missions. This is one of those games that I don’t mind being behind the curve. I am not really competing with anyone to get to max level first. I feel like Destiny is going to fill the same role that Diablo 3 does. Fun game that I can get into quickly, kill some stuff and pop back out without many hard feelings. I like the big open world areas in Destiny for this, in that I can land and make my own objectives or simply run around looking for interesting stuff.

Beginning Coil

The picture is completely unrelated here, but I look adorable like always in my White Mage outfit. I mentioned earlier that we already had plans for tonight, and primarily that is because we have decided to start raiding Binding Coil, and this evening is the time that seemed to work the best for most people. I honestly figure by the time evening rolls around Destiny will be completely unplayable, so I thought this might be a good idea to give us all something to focus on other than the inability to play with our new toy. For some time we have been gearing up and wanting to start Binding Coil fresh as a guild. I believe that mostly we will be going into this one completely fresh, in that none of us are really doing research ahead of tonight. One of my biggest joys is figuring out content with my friends, and I think we will do just fine.

One of the most awesome footnotes about the community however is the reaction folks have had to us beginning Binding Coil. Now this raid in one form or another has been out for a year, and they simply keep adding new turns to it. So as I have talked to some fairly serious raiders about our guild starting the Coil fresh, I’ve received a completely unexpected reaction. Were it World of Warcraft, I would have gotten reactions like folks chiding us for being “Months Behind”. Here I have gotten nothing but positive responses, talking about how they wished they could go back and see the Coil with fresh eyes again, and that we would enjoy ourselves. This overwhelming sense of others wishing us well and being happy for us is extremely refreshing. I am glad that this same strong community attitude extends to raiding as well as the dungeon content we have experienced. Hopefully we will go in, clear the first turn and walk away with some awesome memories.

#FFXIV #Destiny

Follow the Shiny Bauble

July 19, 2014 by Belghast

Too Many Things

So for whatever reason this weekend has conspired to have a bajillion competing things happening at once it seems. Firstly this weekend is like the prep weekend for the conference that I will be taking off from work next week to help my wife with. Three years ago her and several of her twitter buddies decided to make a conference appear out of thin air, and this year it is being hosted here in the Tulsa metro. As a result I am being a dutiful husband and helping out however I can. That means today I will be moving things and testing out the various technology in each of the classrooms that will eventually host random speakers.

Right now my only fear is that the systems are designed to be hooked up to a VGA out and 3.5 mm jack. Some of the newer laptops only actually have HDMI out… especially the Mac laptops. So here is hoping those people bring their own hookups because otherwise we might be pantomiming some of the power point presentations. Needless to say my entire day today will be spent running around like a madman trying to get things set up as much as we can. The problem is there are lots of other things going on this weekend. Honestly I think game companies do this shit on purpose… where they should time their events to be on opposite weekends as a thank you to the fans.

Destiny Beta

This weekend is the return of Destiny to my PS4. I wish I could embed some video from my play sessions to date, but alas the Hitbox export to Youtube is still on the fritz and I have not figured out how to embed videos directly. But if you are so inclined you can check out the first and second videos. At some point this weekend I want to record some more footage in the hopes that someday I can upload it somewhere meaningful. The second video is especially hilarious because I did not realize that it was picking up teamspeak while I recorded as well as my PS4 chat. However once again it seems like the PS4 only picks up MY side of the conversation even though I am picking it up from an external capture card. I really wish I knew a way to hang out on teamspeak, but have my voice from teamspeak get transferred as mic input to PS4 party chat. I have some ideas but it involves a massive rube goldbergian effort.

I have to say I still very much love this game, and compared to the Alpha weekend… it seems extremely polished now. A lot of the issues with voice acting are gone and the end product feels really good. Similarly I seem to get items that are way over my level a lot less, so I am actually able to use and equip the various ingrams I find. Ingrams for un-initiative are basically like unidentified loot from Diablo or similar games. You get them while out in the field and you have to take them back to town… or in this case Tower to have a scribe identify them for you. Most of the time the items you get are way better than anything you have access at that level, and they often have the side effect of “leveling up”. When an item reaches a certain point they unlock special abilities that you can purchase on the item. I have a pair of gloves for example that greatly increases the striking power of my grenades.

Everything about this game is awesome if you really want to get down to it. You take a really good shooter, probably one of the best I have played in years and wrap it in a warm blanket of MMO style progression… and you have a game that is right in my wheelhouse. My only question is just how many of the traditional Call of Duty/Battlefield crowd will be jumping ship. I really don’t feel like the game is for that demographic, but instead for the players that absolutely love Borderlands 2. While the loot doesn’t drop quite as frequently as it does in BL2, all of the leveling options feel really good. The one thing I wished from BL2 was that I would have a persistent character that existed on the server, instead of one that existed in my local save game, with all of the things that come along with that. Destiny gives me that, and I really think we are looking at the new model for MMO gaming. Player Interaction light, action oriented co-operative and competitive environments. That is not to say that grouping is not key in Destiny, but it is on a scale that is much more casual friendly in that you only need two other people to really tackle the most intense of situations.

Once again I am playing a Titan, because it fits my personality. I want to be able to rush in, gun things down and throw them the hell back with a shockwave. I don’t remember the name of the attack but you get it around level 5 or 6 and it is executed by pressing left and right shoulder buttons at the same time. There are few more satisfying things in a game than jumping up in the air and watching everything fly away from you in brilliant slow motion ragdoll physics. This class makes me feel powerful and mighty, and about as subtle as a nuke. All of which fit me perfectly in how I like to play. Kodra was playing through Wolfenstein last night… and to make a point Tam asked if I could remember what the crouch button was. Kodra immediately chimed in “you mean the most important button?” and I was like “Nope! I have no clue what crouch is… I just baited the enemies to come attack me in the open and gunned them down.” Subtlety feels like a complete waste of time when you could just kill every last thing that moves.

An Old Friend

Another thing going on this weekend that is fighting for my attention is that they are having a free weekend for Final Fantasy XIV ARR. For whatever reason lately I have been missing the game, and I feel like it is one of those games that I parted on good terms with. I simply ran out of things that I wanted to do. Right now the biggest problem I have with the game is that the people I know that are still playing it… are spread out in various tiny puddles scattered across a long list of servers. When I first connected to the game it had me choose my Data Center, which temporarily gave me some hope that they had done something to consolidate the long list. Apparently that is not the case and each server is still its own little island as far as grouping and guilding, but instead the Data Centers serve the purpose of the Battle Groups in World of Warcraft. They are essentially your pool of players for doing anything that requires a group.

The game is just as enjoyable as it ever was. The hardest thing so far was remembering where the hell I kept my abilities and getting my hotbar back in order. I think I got most everything to a place where my fingers can return to muscle memory for hitting. I am sure a few things are out of place but the key combos that I hit constantly are all in the right places. The main thing I did last night was participate in a hunt, which is a kind of daily event that appeared in a patch while I was out. Basically each day you got to a hunt NPC and they give you this card… which is a physical item in your inventory with a bunch of wanted posters for the day. These involve wandering around the world and killing specific mobs that appear in specific places. The first three were pretty easy, and then the tedium set in for the last two. Apparently these mobs were part of rarely occurring FATEs so I had to just sit around waiting for it to spawn. For the most part it wasn’t too bad except one of them occurred in a level 3 area… so I couldn’t even work on leveling my chocobo while I waited. I am not sure if there is enough here to keep me for very long, but I am enjoying playing for the time being.

The Path Not Taken

Another big thing happening this weekend is the beginning of ArcheAge closed beta. Up until this point there were only two ways to get into Alpha testing. Either you had to know someone like I did, or plunk down your $150 and buy the most expensive founders pack. This weekends the floodgates have opened letting everyone in that has bought even the cheapest of founders packs. The problem is I feel like I have been burned by my experiences in Alpha. The community was so heinous and toxic that I just don’t want to have anything to do with it. At this point Glyph is running in the background right now downloading the 21 gig patch that is needed to get it up and running in closed beta, but that said I am not sure if I will play it much. There are a lot of problems I have with the game, not all of which can be improved.

I still have a fundamental problem with the character design. While I managed to find one I could live with, I am still not terribly happy with it and the lack of “real” beards in most Korean games. I do want to give it a try to see if letting in all of the closed beta players may have fixed some of the problems with the community. One of two things is going to happen… either the super toxic voices are going to be drowned out in the sea of not so horrible… or they will adapt to the “young eating” culture that is the Alpha game. I know Trion is working hard on trying to find ways to moderate the toxicity, but I am just not sure if it will be enough for me. At the end of the day I am a huge carebear and want to spend my time collaborating with other players… and not competing with them.

Follow the Shiny Bauble

The thing that frustrates me the most about this weekend and weekends like it when it seems like every single company is fighting to steer the hype train, is that it trains us to be flighty. I feel like what is happening right now is that each of these companies is trying to fight for front page presence against any news that might be coming out of QuakeCon. The problem is… your player base is nowhere near as loyal as you might want them to be. By constantly dangling shiny baubles in front of our faces… all it really does is train us to constantly be on the look out for the next shiny bauble. So many weeks when it comes to gaming I feel like the James Woods character from Family Guy “Oooh a piece of candy”. Ultimately I feel like the constant vying for our attention is only serving to make us less interested in staying any one place for terribly long.

Look at me for example… I already play a long list of games with no real signs of landing in any one place for terribly long. This weekend I am looking at playing three more games that I was not really playing before. But I didn’t start out this way, because I played Everquest for 3 years, Dark Age of Camelot for 3 years, and then World of Warcraft for a solid 7 years before the launch of Rift and the beginning of my rampant nomad phase. Now I just follow whatever happens to suit my mood, and as a result I am popping between games on a weekly basis. I feel like in part I was trained to be this way by the game industry constantly dangling an every tastier steak in front of me. So I feel like stacking all of these events on the same weekend is just the highly of how frenetic things have gotten. I decided long ago that life was too short to be playing something I was not enjoying, so I doubt I will be changing my nomadic ways any time soon… but folks have to stop and thing that the constant fight over the hype cycle is only serving to make more people nomadic in the process.

#Destiny #FFXIV #ArcheAge