Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 37 of 118

Readyish

June 15, 2017 by Belghast

Some time ago I started a thing. The first piece of information you need to understand this… is to know that Final Fantasy XIV for whatever reasons does not have an idle kick. I remember this causing so much issue during the launch during, and them finally having to implement one. However at some point they turned it back off and sometimes we abuse the hell out of it. Kodra is notorious for staying logged into things… and Final Fantasy XIV is not exception. I remember there have been times when he has stayed logged in in some hub like Mor Dhona for literal days. One night he happened to be AFKing and I decided it would be funny to update the guild MOTD to say something to the effect of finding Free Company members AFK and taking awkward photos with them. This was something that regularly happened in World of Warcraft, and most of the photos were questionable to say the least. Sita however has decided to turn this into an art form and the photos just keep getting better. As you can see.. I made the mistake of going afk right out in front of our guild house. I had been alt tabbed doing other things and it wasn’t long before a number of photos of me and other people showed up on Sita’s twitter feed.

You have to admit they are pretty great. Sita has caught a bunch of Ashgar, Sol, and Kodra as well over time. As far as Final Fantasy XIV goes… we are now in the great outage that is preparing everything for the headstart launch of Stormblood. In theory at 2 am PDT or 4 am my time on Friday the servers come back up… and we officially transition into 4.0. Am I completely ready for this? Truthfully no. I feel like I have done very little to prepare for the launch of an expansion, but I did manage to mostly clear out my bags and also put a dent in some of the stuff that had been clogging my retainer. The biggest problem right now is I don’t remember at all where the MSQ last left off. If I had to guess… the Rising Stones in Mor Dhona since everything seems to take place there. I am not nearly as pumped for this launch as I was for Heavensward, only because I have so many other things to distract me. I am still spending a significant amount of time in World of Warcraft doing random stuff and enjoying myself. I think part of my trepidation is that I know the moment I log in Friday, my character will have changed. Warrior from all accounts is one of the least changed classes, but with Heavensward I knew that more or less I was only going to be adding tools to my kit rather than swapping for a slightly different kit. Functionally those first few levels are largely going to be me getting accustomed to driving a new character, and I am hoping I pick it up quickly.

I think the part I am looking forward to the most however is seeing all the faces show up and seeing the Free Company be a thriving hub once again. That is the part of an MMO cycle that is the hardest to really put into words, is how awesome the launch of a new batch of content is. Folks you might not have seen in months suddenly show up and are interested in doing stuff. I’ve been in one of those cycles where I have simply not been around, and I am looking forward to digging in and getting involved in shenanigans. That said I don’t really want to launch of Stormblood to stall any of the other things I have going on. For example I still want to keep moving the whole RoboSquid thing forward and continuing to take down dungeons with minimal gear and level. I am probably going to take a few weeks off of the Friday night thing in World of Warcraft, but ultimately I want to return to that as well because I still enjoy hanging out with that group of friends. Then there is the huge backlist of things that I really need to play that are not MMO based. E3 had this weird effect of making me want to play games that are already out, more so than making me long for the games on the horizon. Well that is other than Destiny 2… I kinda want access to that now. That said it will have released before I realize it. The older you get the faster time seems to move and right now entire months evaporate before I realize it. Stormblood seems like it was still off in the distance… and now instead it is launching tomorrow.

Turtles and Failknighting

May 31, 2017 by Belghast

Over in Final Fantasy XIV they are having this Make it Rain event, which in truth is a really short quest that leads you to the Gold Saucer where all MGP winnings are increased by 50%. For awhile now I had been closing in on the Adamantoise mount just by doing the weekly and daily cactpot options. However last night the between the free 20,000 MGP you get for the quest and hitting a 1/2/3 combo for 15,000… I finally pushed over the line and was able to purchase it. Now I know Ashgar is holding out for Fenrir but for me… it was always about the turtle. Since I was a little kid I have had a connection with them, largely because I grew up slightly out in the country and spend a good deal of time playing with random terrapins that wandered into the yard. I am the sort of person who will swerve wildly to miss a turtle… or honestly any animal for that matter. What makes this mount even better however is that it can fly… pending you are in a flyable zone and not sitting outside the free company house. Add this to the pile of mounts that Lalafel look adorable on, and I figure I will be riding it in place of my standard Chocobo for the time being.

After that I logged into Belgrok and started pushing towards 110 in World of Warcraft. For the most part it took finishing up the back half of Stormheim, going back to Val’sharah and doing Bradenbrook… and finally doing the first tiny bit of High Mountain for me to hit the level cap. From there it was all about trying to get some gear from whatever quests that were available at the time. In the most questionable of ideas… Grace and I decided to take our freely 110 characters over to the invasion happening in Val’Sharah. This is normally a perfectly reasonable idea, but on a low population server everything that is in the world becomes a little bit more difficult. We were mostly doing okay until we reached the part where we had to do the scenario. At which point we got queued with a super chill rogue who did not call us horrible at all… even though we kinda were. There was this epic fight at the top of the tower where the rogue solo’d down the boss there with an over abundance of skill. He himself was pretty minimally geared, but was obviously far better at survival than either of us were and kept running away from the boss and using columns and such for line of sight… just long enough for his self heal to be up before engaging again. The yakkity sax madness largely continued when we got up to the final eyeball boss… but all in all we managed to finish things up and get some gear in the process.

The unexpected thing about this low population server… is that it seems like someone had flooded the market with really cheap 835 plate armor. I managed to get my item level up to 814, which hoping we have another night of some upgrades through world quests might actually see me able to get into heroics. Right now I really need 2 rings, 2 trinkets and some shoulders… because all of those slots are bringing down what would otherwise be a reasonable position to be in. In the grand scheme of things the only reason why I want the ability to do heroics… is that the queue times for those are generally far shorter than the queues for normals. I am up to the point in the Order Hall campaign where I need to run a bunch more dungeons and I am not really looking forward to doing so with 45 minute queues per dungeon. Whatever the case I am now in the phase where I begin gearing… which tends to be the phase that I enjoy an awful lot as everything is potentially an upgrade. I need to go ahead and unlock the Broken Shore… but the truth is that I am not sure I would even be able to survive out there. A lot of my success with that area has been due to the fact that I am normally playing a grossly overpowered protection warrior. I am sure it is going to be a miserable time as an extremely undergeared dps deathknight. Side note I took the screenshot above before I reapplied my transmog just to show off what a mess that a freshly dinged 110 looks like.

Leave the Game Better

May 23, 2017 by Belghast

For real, if you wanna see more positivity in our WoW community, take steps! Take action! Be that change.

— Pandagosa 💙 (@Sammthrax) May 23, 2017

Last night as I was winding down for the evening I ended up getting pulled into a discussion about positivity and the Warcraft community. I’ve long been a proponent of doing whatever I can to try and make MMO gaming environments better for other players. I am what I would call a “world tank” meaning that I permanently run around in tanky stance while questing and often times go out of my way to “tank” things that don’t even matter to me. If I am riding through a zone and I see a squishy player fighting a boss mob… then nine times out of ten I am going to hop off my mount and charge over to help out. I don’t even care about factional boundaries here, and I am one of those players that is just as likely to help out the Horde as I am the Alliance when it comes to taking the threat onto myself and letting people kill their monsters in peace. I’ve been graced with a class that simply cannot die under most circumstances… and I sort of feel like it is my duty to help other people out whenever I can. I cannot count the number of times I have been doing a quest and had someone roll up late… and then continued to pull packs of elites just to make sure they finished their quest. They always seem sorta surprised when I send them a tell asking them “how many more” they need for the quest. Growing up I was in scouting, and even managed to get my Eagle… and there was a rule of camping that went a little something like “leave the campsite in as good of condition if not better”. I sort of have this same view towards MMOs or the world in general honestly… if I can improve the world by my presence I am going to shoot for that.

Prior to the launch of Legion, I had gotten used to some of the cultural norms in Final Fantasy XIV. Namely people talk during dungeon runs… at least enough to give a friendly introduction at the beginning and at the end. In part this is because there is a system in place over there that allows you to give a single commendation each run, to whatever player for whatever criteria you feel fit the situation. I give them out for all sorts of reasons… glorious outfits, extremely competent dps, or just someone being jovial and friendly. In part this friendly atmosphere exists… because they reward you being nice to other players, and will straight up ban you for talking about damage meters in game. It creates this weird bubble where things don’t work there the way they work in any other MMO community. Knowing this… with the launch of Legion and as we started queuing up for content… I started trying to apply the same logic the World of Warcraft and shockingly more often than not it worked. Just breaking the ice at the beginning of a run with a “Hey Folks!” seemed to go an awfully long way in improving the experience as a whole. I noticed my usual silent runs become perforated with discussion, as it was like one person saying something broke down whatever dam was there preventing conversation.

Another thing I have done this expansion cycle that seems to have helped my own attitude is that I am just not dissecting the game and tearing it apart like I used to. I am trying really hard to just take things at face value, and more often than not completely ignore the patch note cycle until I am ready for something. Sure this means I have not exactly been on top of the ball on a lot of things… like Broken Shore, and have been doing things in a grossly inefficient manner. However it also means that I am not exposing myself to a lot of external stimuli until I am actually ready to consume it. More than this however… I just haven’t shared my doubts publicly because I haven’t felt the need to. A few weeks into the Nighthold raid cycle I disappeared from the game, and faded away quietly. I just felt like I wasn’t enjoying myself nearly as much as I was when doing other things. So I simply walked away and did other things for awhile. There was a moment where I could make a clean break, and my raid had a tank to step in and take over for me. In the past I would have felt the need to explain to my readers why I did this. Instead I just left and eventually put some thoughts together in my big “regularly playing” post, but even that probably wasn’t needed other than I was catching up my sidebar… which is already completely out of date again. However because I didn’t really make a big deal about it… it was so much easier to just slide back into the game a few months later when the mood hit me again.

While it might sound odd, I think for me not writing about World of Warcraft and its failings… helped me to feel better about the game for the long term. It also kept some negative vibes out of the community. Sure I currently have a laundry list of things that bug me about the game, but I have come to a point of acceptance that World of Warcraft will never actually be the “one true game” for me. I know that I will keep venturing off to play other games because it is in my nature, and that it will still feel enjoyable to keep coming back and revisiting all of my friends in the WoW. In part this is why I am so excited that Destiny 2 is now going to be entering this same realm. For well over a decade I have cultivated a community in the Blizzard games, and it seems like it is going to be awesome to be able to take all of these people with me into another love of mine when it launches on the PC. While I would love to see Blizzard as a company make an attempt to instill a positive attitude in its players by introducing systems that reward the good apples… more than systems that punish the bad, I largely accept that it is going to be up to me and players like me to be the agent of change in the world. I know we all keep returning to the MMO space to decompress from our days out in the real world… but there is nothing keeping us from being a little nicer to one another in our adopted second home. Games tend to develop a culture of support or toxicity… and maybe I am naive but I feel like a game can change. I feel like we can slowly erase the toxic nature that has developed over the years and put back in its place one that is largely supporting of others. Now this doesn’t just apply to WoW, but is I think an admirable goal in any game you play.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.