Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 119 of 129

Pugs Over Easy

October 9, 2013 by Belghast

Pugs Over Easy

If you have read my blog for very long at all, you will know that I am extremely gun shy about grouping with strangers. Namely in my time tanking I have had some pretty horrible experiences both as a tank and believe it or not healer in the various games I have played. Prior to World of Warcraft, I did this all the time… but with the advent of the dungeon finder everything seemed to go downhill. Today’s post is not really a reflection of any real or imagined events that have happened to myself recently, but instead spurred on by finding the most perfect analogy that wraps up my feelings about pugs.

My friends have all been following the release of Jinx the new champion for League of Legends extremely closely. Midday yesterday they linked me this thread on the forums posted by someone called Dread Pirate Arbuthnot. The intent was to explain what ranked play is like, but for me it rang true of the vast majority of my pugging experiences. As a DPS you can fade quietly and anonymously into the background and just do your job… but as a tank or healer… you always end up to blame for whatever failings the group has. On with the copypasta!

Look I can describe ranked play in a really simple analogy

So you want to eat a cake, right, but you only have eggs. So you have to find four other people who have milk, sugar, a blender, and chocolate. But you show up, and the blender guy throws his blender to the ground and screams EGGS OR I FEED, and then the other three people start yelling at you to give up your eggs. Then you have to piece together the broken blender, and it’s not really working properly, but you found some tape so it’s working. Except the beaters are kind of wibbly wobbly now, so it isn’t mixing the batter very well. The other four players start to scream at you for not blending the cake well enough, since that’s your job, and then the milk guy has to go leave for 15 minutes because his mom just made dinner.

Are you understanding this so far? Ok good

So any ways once milk guy is back you have the cake, and its time to put it in the oven. The problem is that there are professional baking teams who just played a world baking tournament, so everyone wants to bake a cake like theirs. Even though your cake is chocolate, they want to cover it with icing meant for a vanilla cake, because that’s what the Asian cake bakers do. You try to insist that your cake would be much better with chocolate icing, but they tell you to commit suicide. Finally, your shitty cake monstrosity comes out of the oven and it isn’t even edible because of the whole process, and apparently cakes need more ingredients than just eggs and milk and chocolate.

Then you go into the post cake lobby and everyone unanimously agrees its your fault

Then you immediately hit the ‘bake again’ button and pray that this time you can just ADD THE GOD DAMN EGGS

This seems to happen regardless of how many guild members you bring into a pug. Last week at some point I got drafted into trying to get one of our healers and her dps hubby through the Cutters Cry instance in FFXIV. I knew I should tank it, but I could really use gear on my Bard at the time… so at the nudging that it would be okay I stayed in as a dps class and we attempted to pug a tank. I knew this would be a decision I regretted.

Tolerance for Frustration

We proceeded to go through the instance with the tank only ever trying to hold aggro on a single target in each pull. Additionally it felt like he was going out of his way to stand in every bad thing he could. We limped along and did not manage to finish the dungeon before the timer ran out… and at the end… the tank was raging against us for somehow holding him back. We kept our cool and didn’t respond in kind… but this just bookends every experience I have had in pugging. When I saw the above post, it explained the feeling so well.

Granted there is a lot of league of legends specific stuff buried in there…. but the thrust of it is true. Doing a successful dungeon run with random people involves a crazy juggling act and if any one person doesn’t bring their specific ingredient it falls to hell quickly. Without a doubt the person that gets the blame is almost always the tank or the healer. In the case of the single target tank, I am pretty sure he all his rage was directed at our healer… who could not keep him healed because the adds kept killing her. While I and her husband did as much kiting as we could to keep her alive… and we made it as far as we did because of this… there was only so much you could do when the tank only wanted to tank a single mob at a time.

I guess after years of really good guild groups I have found my tolerance for frustration extremely lowered. On a regular basis I have one of my less patient friends asking me to queue for various things with him… and my answer is always the same. I will only do it if we have a full guild group. Ultimately I would rather wait weeks to make that happen, than to step foot into and tank another PUG group. Granted I am exceedingly lucky in that I generally DO have a large guild group that I can rely on. As a result I try my best to help the other members of the guild with whatever dungeon they happen to be needing at the time. It just works better when you have a non-judgmental group of friends doing something, than a bunch of strangers.

NBI Poetry Slam

October 8, 2013 by Belghast

Internet Dragons

Last night my group wanted revenge for the previous two attempts at Amdapor Keep. During the day we plotted our path and strategized what we would change, and when our fearless healer made it online, we went into the dungeon once more. It has been a long time since a dungeon had gotten the better of any of us. That is one of the odd things about Final Fantasy XIV is that you have a fixed amount of time to finish any dungeon. For Amdapor Keep we had 120 minutes, and quite frankly we used every single minute of that in past attempts to try and reason through the fight.

On my first run through the dungeon, the group I was with had mastered the first boss encounter, and in the subsequent two runs we had one shot it without much issue. This meant on attempt two we spent nearly an hour and a half working on the Demon Wall encounter. For anyone that has played a Final Fantasy game, they will immediately realize the encounter, as it is one of the more legendary ones that seems to appear in most games. Essentially you have a fixed amount of time to destroy the wall before it destroys you. In the MMO version, it essentially reaches a point where there is just too much damaging going out to be healed through.

However the little tweaks we employed in the strategy worked well enough that on our first attempt, I managed to get knocked off the side and the group still recovered without a tank to finish taking down the wall. This brought us forth to new batch of trash… that basically included a version of the boss from Haukke Manor mixed in multiple times within the packs. I don’t think we actually wiped on any of this trash, but it was some of the more annoying trash I had encountered to date. Finally we were up against the final boss of the dungeon… that is some form of a black dragon.

It took us 30 minutes of tries but we managed to formulate a workable strategy, and then it clicked in place once we learned the secret to avoiding massive amounts of damage. With 30 minutes to go we managed to make it through the encounter, this time without losing a player and finish off the boss. Amdapor Keep is doubly awesome in that it rewards both the currency we need and some fairly nice gear as well. Over the course of the dungeon our dragoon got a pair of boots, bard a chest piece and I believe legs, scholar healer neck, ring and pants… and alas me the tank nothing but the satisfaction of killing the encounter. I hope to go back in now that we can hopefully farm the dungeon for goodies.

NBI Poetry Slam

Yesterday one of my good blogger friends Syl posted a call to arms of sort. Her idea is that we “shake the bonds of srs blogging bzns” and join the ranks of many other bloggers who have written poetry over the subject of games, gaming and MMOs. If this concept were not fertile enough, she also pinged me over Twitter to let me know that she was expecting an entry from me. So I realize I am not getting out of this at all. Warning… just like my blog, my poetry is “different”.

I spent a lot of time writing poetry in the past, and even participated in more than a few poetry slams at various coffee houses during my high school and college days. I tend to draw inspiration from beat poets… but my own brand of poetry is a bit “odd”. She was expecting a poem about my current MMO crush… Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn… but I chose to draw inspiration elsewhere.

The Tank

born of stone
embraced by fire
Juggernaut standing
with stalwart purpose
and sharpened will

moving slow
into dank crypt
long axe slung
across broad tense
rampart shoulders

leading cautiously
this weary band
of wizened adventure
moving closer
to the maelstrom

with pealing cry
and furious motion
swings bold axe
cleaving flesh
commanding attention

this is my domain
my steely sphere
of present influence
and none shall pass
my constant vigil

Hopefully that will appease the Syl god and she will not sent me furious messages over twitter of disappointment. I think it is a pretty cool idea and I look forward to reading what other people come up with. NBI started out with a simple purpose of trying to help out new bloggers, but it has taken on a weird blogging festival atmosphere for the various sponsors. Its almost like a holiday that lets us mingle together with a shared purpose, and I feel like this poetry slam idea really adds to that purpose. Syl will be collecting all the entries on her own blog, so it will be interesting to read them all together in one place.

Much Ado About Mathosia

October 6, 2013 by Belghast

Much Ado About Mathosia

A few days ago I wrote about the upcoming zone event that had been advertised for Rift, called Mayhem in Mathosia. So I have to say it sounded really cool, major invasions going on for a few days in certain areas of the world. I did not have a chance to log in Friday night, but after running around town I logged in yesterday evening and participated for an hour or so. I have to say overall I am extremely disappointed. I expected there to be more going on than there actually was.

I wandered around Freemarch did several major invasions and quite honestly the entire time I was wondering why exactly they made a big deal about this. The invasions themselves felt absolutely no different than the ones that NORMALLY happen in Freemarch. As far as the loot that was supposedly available, I saw no sign of that either. The only thing out of the ordinary I managed to get were a bunch of gifts that you could give to the people of freemarch. I am guessing there is an achievement for giving these out, as it did not seem to really do much of anything otherwise.

Maybe after doing FATEs in FFXIV I have come to expect more out of an event, or maybe I had just worked this up in my mind to be something bigger than it actually is. In either case I found the experience overall disappointing. I fear that in order to see any of the loot they are touting you would have to literally grind events for hours… and the frustrating part there is there was a significant amount of time that passed between the spin down of one event and the start up of the next. The event so far seems like “much ado about nothing”, and while I am sure I will pop in and participate in some of the other zones… it is no longer a priority for me.

A Fitting End

Since the Rift event was a massive disappointment, I ended up back in FFXIV with the guild. For awhile now we have been trying to get eight players to 50 so we could finish out the storyline. The final arc takes place over the course of two eight man dungeons, and I really wanted to experience it with my guild members and freshly. One of our members got impatient and finished things up on his own, since he was the first 50… but he has generally been really good about keeping the surprises silent so we can experience dungeons together for the first time. Dallian was the last to reach 50 of the 8 man team, and as a result we spent a bit of time last night killing random stuff in Northern Thanalan to push him across the line.

The conclusion felt as epic as this game deserves, and the fact that it takes place over two eight man dungeons and an eight man trial only adds to this feeling. There has only been one other MMO that I have played that had anything close to an ending, and so far this game sets better with me. At the end of SWTOR you had a nice clean tie up… that went nowhere… nothing in the world changed around you. However in Final Fantasy you essentially have completed one chapter of the game, and are treated to a nice epilogue.

This would have been cool enough alone… but the moment you finish the sequence… you are given the NEXT set of quests to start carrying on AFTER the events of the finale. The peace you just fought for is only the opening act of a much more dangerous tale. The thing is… while you are playing out the finale, at no point does it feel like anything other than the end of a game. You are even treated with credits upon finishing the quest. It feels like finishing any other Final Fantasy game, but in the continued traditional of being the most inappropriately named series… there is nothing final about it.

I am really looking forward to seeing new content released. It has been rumored that the 2.1 patch will include a new 4 man, 8 man and the 24 man raid content. If we can somehow manage to keep our entire guild interested… we might someday be able to do the 24 man content by ourselves. At very least we seem to have a really well balanced 8 man team. The two 8 man dungeons were a bit of a letdown in one area however. The 8 man guild hest was extremely awesome in that there was no main tank… and as fights progressed both tanks were equally active. However in the two Garlean dungeons, there was definitely one main tank and one tank dealing with everything BUT the boss. After how equitable the division of labor was in the hest, it was disappointing to see it fall back to the old standby of main tank/off tank.

Tonberry Tactics

October 4, 2013 by Belghast

Not Enough Coffee

This is one of those mornings when I feel like there is simply not enough coffee in the world to make me out of this stupor. In part this is my own making. At 4:40 I woke up on my own accord, thanks to my very own bladder alarm going off… and then I decided it was an awesome idea to go back to bed… knowing that I would be awoken by the alarm at 5:30. Had I just gotten on up and proceeded with the day… I likely would be just fine right now. So instead I sit here staring at the screen trying to make thoughts coalesce into word form.

Today should be an interesting day for me. When I was younger I was part of my high school gifted and talented program. I feel as though maybe the entrance requirements were a little lax if they were willing to take me. The gifted and talented coordinator, that we lovingly referred to as Jaunamama fought hard to get us some truly unique experiences, many of which I suspect came out of her own pocket. One of these was the Tulsa Town Hall lecture series.

Essentially she would take two of us on the long trek to Tulsa to attend one of the lectures in the series, then make a grand day of it all. We would go to lunch someplace nice, and usually finish the afternoon with a tour of the Philbrook or something along those lines. For the last five years, I have worked across the street from the performing arts center without thinking much about it. This year however upon listening to the advertisements on NPR, something clicked and I signed up for the lecture series. Luckily I have a pretty awesome boss and he has filed this down in my PPR as “Personal Development”.

FATE Crack

A few days ago I complained about the Dark Devices FATE in Northern Thanalan, but to be truthful… once you reach about 45 the zone as a whole tends to be the best place to level. So as a result I have been spending quite a bit of time out there doing the various fates. There are a number of 25k-40k experience boss fates, one of which that drops a pet if you manage to get gold. So as a whole the zone is really worth while even if it did not have everyone’s favorite… Dark Devices. I guess to some extent… I understood why the fate was so popular but I never really understood its full potential until yesterday.

Over lunch I was working on leveling my Bard like I have been the last several days, and when I did the ubiquitous “BRD LF FATES” shout in zone, I got invited to be a part of a custom built dark devices group. Essentially the eight man group consisted of 3 White Mages, 3 Black Mages, 1 Bard for mana song, and 1 Paladin for flash. How the group works is a thing of terrifying brilliance… and totally relies on poor game mechanics. Essentially the mission at hand is for the black mages to spam attacks, the paladin to spam flash… and the white mages to cast regen on opposing players.

Regeneration Tagging

While this does not seem too heinous at face value… it gets there quickly. Apparently one of the ways that healing works is that when regeneration is ticking on a player, it causes aggro to be generated on the pull for the healer that cast it. So far that seems to be working as intended… it has worked that way in most MMO games. Where things go off the rails is the fact that apparently it also TAGS the mob to the healers party. This means by keeping regen up on opposing parties, you can essentially siphon off their kills and give your group credit. This is the king of all “dirty pool” maneuvers, and I do not condone it in the least… however this is so prevalent that if you have a white mage in your party… they are more than likely doing it.

When it works… it works insanely well. In Final Fantasy XIV there is the ability to chain kill mobs and each additional mob you kill adds a multiplier to the process. I believe you are initially given 60 seconds once the chain begins, and if the counter is low enough, each additional kill resets the counter back to 10 seconds. As a result a big AOE group can get some extremely high chains, but I believe eventually the multiplier caps out around 200%. During the lunchtime group… we managed to get a 354 uninterrupted chain… meaning after the first 20 or so of those… every single mob killed was worth +200% of its face experience value. As a result I made literally over 75% of a level on one single phase of a fate.

Regressive Gameplay

Dark Devices is a serious gimmick, and still one that I hope they break… because quite frankly it is a bit of an unfair advantage to those players that can get access to a good AOE group. That said… since it is not considered an exploit I am certainly going to benefit from it as much as I can. Yesterday at lunch I was level 45 and after a few more hours out in Northern Thanalan I am over halfway through level 49. Granted I have the insane post 50 xp bonus going on for my bard, but that is some seriously fast leveling. No wonder you see the same people out in the zone every single day farming the fate, over the course of a few weeks you could push almost every single class you had to 50. I did not start out there until around 44, and as a bard you really don’t have all the tools you need to be successful until 46. However I am seeing fresh 40s out there trying to make the fate work for them. The method if nothing else… is brutally efficient.

The thing that strikes me the oddest about this entire process is how much it reminds me of the original Everquest. Essentially I have leveled my Bard almost entirely through FATE grinding, and as a result that means sitting in a zone shouting for a group. This is essentially the same sort of thing I can remember doing so many times in the Dreadlands. Throughout the course of the night I would end up in multiple groups that would hunt mobs outside Karnor’s Castle, or various other key farm spots around the zone. If you by miracle ended up with an extremely well balanced group, you might even brave the railroad that was Karnor’s Castle itself. As much as you can solo in FFXIV, you can never beat the type of experience you can get with a party… especially while running FATEs.

I think to some extent it is this throwback to an earlier time… this regressive gameplay that has made the game so damned sticky for me. It is like going back and playing Everquest, but taking with me all the bells and whistles and perks of a modern MMO. Essentially the game is almost completely solo-able if you so choose to… but the group content is extremely good when it happens. My huge problem with EQ2 is that while the soloing is amazing, any time you get more than two players together in the same place it feels like a facerolling mess. Granted I have not actually played a lot of the Velious dungeon content, but even the big dungeons like Mistmoore have felt this way to me. FFXIV does an amazing job with the dungeon content in making it feel like it requires effort and planning to get through it.

Tonberry Tactics

A few days ago we took a group into Wanderers Palace and had some mixed results. Over the course of the dungeon run we figured out how a lot of the tactics worked, but simply ran out of time before we could formulate a winning strategy for the final encounter. We like to go into these dungeons completely cold, and figure out the boss mechanics on the fly rather than trying to rely on some guide to tell us how to do it. So since we failed to finish the dungeon, there were several of us who had been plotting revenge. Yesterday during the day, over IM we conspired to build a team to take on the challenge that night.

Overall I have to say the run went tons smoother, but primarily because we understood how the mechanics worked. We went through the dungeon essentially wipe free and that left us with worlds of time to distill just how to defeat the final encounter. After a few failed tries, we figured out the rhythm of the fight and managed to find a way to juggle the constant stream of adds, and the insane amount of damage the Tonberry King deals from his Grudge attack… that scales based on the number of adds you kill. As a whole the entire encounter felt like a giant tug-of-war match, trying to keep me alive as the tank, but keep the adds off the healer.

I didn’t get much from the dungeon other than the experience of running it, but I believe both our Bard and Dragoon walked away with some really nice upgrades. From the second boss a really nice chest piece dropped… but it was statistically identical to the one I received from my level 50 class quest. So I passed and let someone else pick it up as a greed item… though honestly if it is the same stat wise, it won’t be of much use to anyone. This is not the type of dungeon I want to run more than once a night, because it takes a lot out of you… however I enjoyed myself. Quite honestly there are not ANY dungeons that I really want to chain run, because even with the smoothest group these dungeons require more of you than previous games.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again and I need to finish this up. I have not really posted much for the Newbie Blogger Initiative this week, but I have plans to do so this weekend. During my Saturday and Sunday posting time I have much more time to work through a topic, so I figured I would use both days to post advice articles. There is so much good stuff out there this year, and I need to get on with updating my blogroll to include the rest of the blogs that have signed up during the Class of 2013. I hope you all have a great day and that it continues on into a great weekend.