Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 62 of 129

Ravana Attempts

August 18, 2015 by Belghast

Unbreaking Google+

Last night I had a message from a long time friend of mine, asking me why I was no longer posting my daily posts on Google+ to which I kinda gave a head tilt and went “huh”? I had certainly seen my posts making their way to G+ anytime I checked my messages over there. Then I took a closer look and saw that they all said “shared only with you” which kinda defeats the purpose of syndicating posts in the first place. It turns out that nothing I have posted since July 28th has made it to G+ which is more than mildly frustrating. I un-linked my account from Jetpack Publicize and relinked it a few times, but I never saw the prompt that I once saw asking me to select what type of sharing level for my posts. So I took to the search engine to try and figure out what was happening. Sure enough it seems like Google did something to change its policies with what level of access external apps have access to your account. You apparently need to go into Settings > Manage Apps & Activities and then find the WordPress app or whatever else you are using for syndication. This will allow you to edit the permissions for how it will be sharing to your feed, and like I said before apparently the new default is “Only You”.

After posting about this last night it seems that this pretty much happened for everyone universally. I thought I would take a quick moment and at least explain how to fix it. As far as syndicating my posts… I tend to take the approach of broadcast what I write pretty much everywhere. Each of the social networks kinda has its own vibe and while I greatly prefer using Twitter, there are folks that read my content that equally greatly prefer G+ or Facebook or even Tumblr. My goal has always been to deliver my content as in as painless of a manner as possible for folks to read. I personally am not a huge fan of Facebook, and in fact I went through the crazy process of deleting my personal account once upon a time because it annoyed me. However when I started blogging I signed up for an account just for the purpose of reblogging my content because I know there are people who do prefer to use Facebook. Granted it might get annoying as shit if you follow me on multiple platforms to constantly see duplicate postings, but I guess that is a chance I am willing to take because I don’t want anyone to feel excluded or left out of the process. Maybe this is strange but my daily posting thing… feels like all of us are taking a journey together and I don’t want to leave anyone behind.

Ravana Attempts

As is always the case last night was we gathered up the Monday team and did some eight player content in Final Fantasy XIV. We started the evening by burning through all four parts of Alexander Normal for the folks who are not running it and capping out early like I am. At this point my Warrior is sitting at level 190 and I have everything I can get out of Alexander other than the chest piece. So as of today I will be largely running the place to help out the gear on my Dragoon. At some point I hope to get the chest piece but largely for cosmetic reasons because the Alexander gear set looks amazing. Last week we managed to burn down Bismarck Extreme and now both the Monday and Wednesday teams are keyed for the next primal encounter. As such instead of beating the sky whale again we decided to make attempts on Ravana Extreme. Now going into this place we had heard horror stories about how rough the encounter was and how it was another Titan Extreme where you had to move exactly at the right time and keep repeating a pattern. Honestly I didn’t see that at all. Instead I saw an encounter with a repeatable pattern but significantly more wiggle room to adjust as we went.

We made some serious progress last night, and I think more than likely we will be able to defeat him next week. Each attempt we kept creeping closer to the goal, and essentially what is going to be the make or break moment is dealing with the Final Liberation phase. If we can learn that particular dance we will have the encounter, and it honestly did not feel like we were too terribly far off from that process last night. Granted at this point we are significantly better geared than the first groups that attempted the fight, but my hope is that we can get in and start farming this guy so that folks can get the really awesome weapons. In truth I hope that we can farm both primals because there are absolutely weapons that come from both of them that I would like to see. We had the two handed sword drop from Bismarck last Monday and it looked amazing. It is the stupid things like getting glamour items that motivate me, and at some point I want to organize 2.0 extreme primal farming runs so that we can start to get folks their ponies. As it stands we only have a couple of ponies in the guild, and I think my Leviathan pony was the first. We need to figure out a method because really I would like to make sure everyone gets at least ONE primal pony before other people roll on it. Granted eventually it would be awesome to have people get a full set, but I would be happy with having everyone with just one as a starter.

Entering Whitevale

This morning I am having one of those mornings when I am easily distracted. The cats are tearing through the house chasing each other like they have gone mad. There is a dog barking and it sounds like it is coming from my back yard… even though it is really across the green belt. I keep flipping over to twitter, and having to force myself to put my fingers back on my keyboard and type in my WordPress window. Largely since this is Blaugust I wanted to include this little tidbit because it absolutely happens to me too. There are days when you cannot keep your train of thought, and I have learned to just go with it. Start writing the things that seem most natural and eventually somehow you will get back on track. Last night was one of those nights for me as well, and I flipped back and forth between games quite a bit as the evening wore on. Before the raid I spent time over in Wildstar with the purpose of trying to “finish Galeras”, which is a bit of a daunting task because there are a silly number of quests in that zone and many of them you will never actually find unless you go wandering around aimlessly. Bit by bit however I explored the regions of the map that had yet to be explored and I am now relatively confident that I have at least gotten most of the quests out of the way.

That now means the moment I have been dreading is upon me… and I had to take the flight out to Whitevale. I guess in part the reason why I have been avoiding doing this is that Whitevale ultimately was the zone that broke me when I played the game at launch. I am not sure entirely what it is about the place, but it felt like moving slowly through molasses. I think in part it was due to the fact that Dominion side there simply were never that many players in the zone, meaning that I could never get a group to do any of the group objectives, and the mob density meant that it was super hard to move anywhere without having to fight a dozen mobs. The zone also seemed to have a higher concentration of the challenger and superior difficulty mobs than the other zones. It seemed like I could not move anywhere without seeing one of those horrible flashing red shielded mob types that I had to try and chew through in vain. As a result I have honestly been scared of getting to this zone because it was my fear that once again it would break me. I have actually been enjoying the content so far, and finding playing the game refreshing. So hopefully maybe I can make my way through Whitevale because supposedly everything on the other side of it… is significantly better.

A Quiet Night

August 12, 2015 by Belghast

Second Time Just as Sweet

Every now and then things get left on the cutting room floor for one reason or another. For example I really wanted to make my post about the possibility of making our own convention… but I had lots of other things to talk about as well. In Final Fantasy I am presenting sitting in this interesting position being a part of two very different static raid groups. Last week in the Wednesday night group we managed to get Bismarck Extreme, and I was absolutely over the moon about it. This had been one of those challenges that we had struggled with over the course of a few weeks, namely in getting enough geared people online at the same time to take it down. That has been the biggest challenge for Wednesday nights honestly is getting people to commit to regular attendance. With my original raid group on Monday nights, attendance was never the issue. The struggle there was mostly gearing, or at least the fact that we did not have two geared tanks for awhile. However that changed as soon as Ashgar got his Paladin to 60, and geared it in record time. Over all the gearing levels of Monday still lag behind Wednesday, but we found out this week that it apparently doesn’t really matter all that much.

Last Monday we finished up turn 13 of the Final Coil of Bahamut and started the first turn of Alexander Normal. This week I figured the plan was to run all four phases of Alexander normal, mostly to help folks get some gear pieces. I did not realize that we had intended to do attempts on Bismarck at the end of the night. After struggling so much to get through that fight on the Wednesday group, I honestly expected us to walk away with a lot of experience but no kill under our belts. I was absolutely wrong, and I am shocked at just how amazing getting a first Bismarck kill felt with my second raid team. In the past in World of Warcraft, the first kill of a boss is special, but additional kills feel significantly less so. I remember getting my first 10 man Arthas kill several months ahead of us getting it as a 25 man raid and that blunted the excitement considerable. I have to say getting through Bismarck Extreme a second time is just as sweet as it was the first time. My hope is that both groups can start doing this on a semi regular basis which will give me access to so many expanse totems. Now I guess I really do have to get serious about the Ravana Extreme fight.

A Quiet Night

I had every intent of coming home and working on getting my Alexander drops for the week, but that didn’t really pan out. I hit somewhat of an irrational low spot yesterday, and as a result I didn’t really feel like being around all that many people. As such I avoided logging into Final Fantasy XIV and instead played a few other games. Mylin started a discussion over twitter about the Everquest II Time Locked servers, which I guess was responding to some comments I had made earlier in the week. The problem being that I was spending the evening downstairs on my laptop, and I guess I had never actually installed Everquest II on it. There is a streaming client for these occasions, the problem is that the EQ2 streaming client is horrible. The performance halts every few minutes as the game downloads more assets, making the game experience nigh unplayable. I should have simply waited the thirty minutes to an hour that it would take to download the full thing… but I was being impatient. The end result was a frustrating stutter stop experience as I attempted to quest my way through Freeport. Honestly this is a dual problem for me, because no matter what I try the new Freeport always performs like shit. I really miss the old multi-zone Freeport because I never had these issues back then. Now I generally want to avoid going to that town like the plague. I noticed both the Neriak and Gorowyn ambassadors were offering me a switch in my allegiance, but I was uncertain if Gorowyn even existed in this version of the game.

Ultimately I need to do some reading because I will more than happily pop to the Darklight Woods starter experience if given an option. I consider it the absolute best starter zone in the game. I’ve burned through my stockpile of station cash and I feel made some awesome decisions. I ended up picking up a handful of the bags that are being offered since I did not really want to go tailor just to make bags, and I ended up picking up a set of shadowknighty looking cosmetic armor. I have long felt that if you look good you feel better about playing your character. Finally I spent the last of it picking up the tanky rhino mount, but I’ve never really cared for the way mounts look in this game… so I tend to have it permanently hidden. As a result I feel like a bard in that I am just running irrationally fast for no apparent reason. Mounts can make moving around cities awkward as you ultimately end up blocking some of your view as you try and get into buildings and such. I am still only level 11 because really… I had forgotten how slow progression used to go in this game before all of the assorted experience bonuses.

Saving Farmers

I could only handle the stutter and stop gameplay of the streaming client so long before I jettisoned Everquest II for favor of Wildstar. This is a game I want to devote more time to playing because I am really enjoying myself. It scratches the World of Warcraft style game itch pretty well, and playing the Exiles has this fun firefly vibe to it. Quite honestly I think had I started Exiles I probably would have stuck around longer than the initial month. I was not a huge fan of the Dominion, but the Chua made playing them tolerable for awhile. Personally I still think red versus blue faction divides are extremely dumb, and this game is just another reason. My friends wanted to play Dominion, so I joined them there and had a fairly miserable time being a cartoon bad guy. If I could have grouped with them on my Exile it would not have been a problem. Instead there was a faction wall, and I am pretty much universally against faction walls. The difference this time however is that no one I know actually plays Dominion on Entity. This is actually somewhat sad as I can log into my Chua and the Dominion capital city is an absolute ghost town. I roamed around for a good ten minutes one night before seeing a single other player, and when I finally did it was because there were a few people hanging out at the bank.

As of last night I dinged twenty two and finally can use a spiffy sword that I had been holding in my inventory for awhile. There is just something about a weapon upgrade that is special. I could be wearing ten levels lower of gear in every other slot, but if I have a current weapon… I feel good about my life. There were some oddities going on with the server, because it seems like the opening of the free to play beta made more people realized that the game still existed. I admit I am guilty of forgetting to log in. I get caught up in Final Fantasy XIV and doing Eorzean things, but I think I am going to make an effort to start logging in more. Since I have friends playing over there already it might be easier to remember. I am trying my best to push through the Galeras content as fast as I can because I am just ready to see new areas. I did move into the desert region of the zone so that was a bit of a welcome change, although as of last night I was back in rolling hills and farm lands. At some point I need to do the two dungeons I recently unlocked to see if I can get any spiffy upgrades. The highlight of the night however was getting to the next Shiphand mission, because so far those are my absolute favorite part of Wildstar.

Communing with Fae

August 10, 2015 by Belghast

Freemium Magic

While I still have aspirations to cease the swiss army posts… I guess in reality I live a fairly swiss army life. This weekend was really no different, and the one hundred plus degree temperatures just caused us to spend more time than normal indoors. When this happens I start to get a little wanderlust at least from the standpoint of what games I am playing. As a result this weekend I played a mixture of Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars the Old Republic, Minecraft, and some Magic Duels. You can blame the podcast we recorded Saturday for the later, because both Thalen and Kodra talked about playing it. I have several assorted versions of the Duel of the Planeswalker magic game cluttering my steam account. I end up picking them up when they go on sale and then only ever playing them a few times. Ultimately part of the excitement of magic for me is playing with physical cards and opening physical packs. We have joked about it before but “that new pack smell” is really a thing, and it can be intoxicating. That little tingle of excitement as you rush through the “commons” to find out what rare you got in that pack is a thing I have repeated thousands of times over the years. So is the sinking feeling when I see that rare is a blue or a white… the two colors that I most have a negative reaction towards. The real life magic really really wants me to play White, because I have an insane number of rare angels… but all I ever really want is the dark and sinister Black cards.

Right now I am still about halfway through the unlocking story of the White deck of Gideon Jura. The game does a really cool job of telling you the story of how each of the planeswalkers found their spark, which according to Kodra is the central focus of the Origins story line. The only negative that I have so far is that you have to wade through a lot of tutorials before the game just lets you play. Normally I would say these could be skipped but the game rewards you in gold for watching them, and that is gold that you will need later for purchasing packs. Where this gets really frustrating is when a new card mechanic is introduced and it stops whatever duel you are in the middle of to show you a tutorial on how that mechanic works. I can absolutely see however how this would be beneficial to brand new players, and even for me there are card mechanics that are being called by names that I don’t recognize in spite of fully understanding the game play behind them. The other big frustration with the Duels client is the fact that it crashed on me, numerous times… so I am guessing they are still having some issues. From what I can tell you stay connected to their servers even though you are essentially playing a single player match, and if that server connection wavers your game cannot seem to recover gracefully. I figure this is going to be something I piddle with from time to time when I am not in the mood for other games.

Communing with Fae

As I wrote yesterday Arcanist has always been the class that I struggled the most in playing. For whatever reason I have caught the desire to play it, and I spent most of yesterday working my way through content doing a mix of low level roulette, Haukke Manor, and guildhests. As a result early yesterday evening I managed to push across the line and ding 30 while in one of those Haukke Manor runs. After that it was chasing down two different job quests and learning how to be both a Scholar and a Summoner. The thing that I did not initially realize was the fact that the two Carby summons ultimately become the Faerie summons. I guess this makes sense, as without them somehow overwriting those low level abilities there would be no way for the job to scale down and effectively heal low level content. The other thing that I was not really expecting was how “un-healer-like” low level instances ultimately felt. My first dungeon as a Scholar ended up being Halitali… where I have exactly one useful heal button. So instead I just made sure I was standing next to the tank and dotted everything up. I am not sure when the class feels more “healer-ly” but until then I am just pretending I am still playing an Arcanist.

The other shocker for me was just how relatively easy the Summoner job quest ended up being. As you can tell by the Summon III icon, I had to fight Ifrit and after fighting him in several different versions… I have to say it was way easier than I expected it to be. I cast dots on all of the things, and then eventually he fell over… which I am guessing is how summoners are supposed to play? This play style is just so weird to me because it feels oddly passive. Maybe a better way of putting it is it feels like I am playing a completely different game than the rest of the people in my group. Much of the time leveling to 30 was spent tabbing through targets, applying dots, and then tabbing back to the first one to reapply dots after I had finished one circuit of the mobs. This just doesn’t feel natural to me I guess because it feels like the sort of triage that I do as a healer… but to damage all the mobs rather than heal all the players. I guess the truth is that I have never really successfully played a damage over time class, and it almost makes me want to fire up and play my Warlock again to see if this new outlook makes that class more enjoyable. In any case I now have a Scholar so I can begin leveling that through the instant duty finder queue. I should try and catch up to Tzi and Rylacus and run up with them.

Spending Time with Carby

August 9, 2015 by Belghast

Sleep Hates Me

I am getting a fairly late start this morning because insomnia is a pain in the ass. Last night we recorded an episode of AggroChat like normal, and ran around two hours in total recording time. By the time I did my initial edit pass and exported the show to MP3, it was already midnight. I decided to save my progress and finish things up this morning instead, and my hope beyond hope was that I would get a good nights sleep. The problem being that the moment my head hit the pillow I was awake. I kept thinking that if I laid there long enough I would eventually drift off to sleep, but as 2 am came and passed I was really wishing I had just stayed up long enough to publish the post last night. This is the worst part about insomnia is not necessarily the inability to get back to sleep, but the feeling that you are wasting your time by TRYING to sleep. Had I gotten up I could have done any number of things until sleep finally claimed me… but the harder you attempt to sleep the harder it seems to be to finally have it happen.

I’ve struggled with bouts of insomnia most of my life, and figuring out how to function on a couple of hours of sleep is an unfortunate survival skill I have had to learn along the way. Thankfully this happened on a Saturday night… and not a Sunday night… because I have done the sleep walking my way through work because I couldn’t sleep thing and it sucks. The key fault yesterday was that I ended up taking a nap thinking that it would help me stay up and edit the podcast. My system is wired in such a way that if I get any additional sleep I am screwed. I can take a thirty minute cat nap, and it will completely upset the balance of things can cause my body to think it got a full nights sleep. Granted a “full night” for me is between five and six hours of sleep… and realistically anything more than that causes me to get groggy. Essentially I live my life in a permanent state of sleep deprivation, but unfortunately that seems to simply be the way I am wired to function. All of this aside the show was an extremely enjoyable one to record and we talked about a big umbrella of titles from Final Fantasy XIV, to Wildstar, to Sword Art Online… to the elephant in the room… the World of Warcraft Legion expansion announcement.

AggroChat 69 – Ahk Mourn and Key Limes

Content Density

I have this strong desire to level to the current cap in Wildstar, but the problem I ultimately have is this is an exceptionally content dense game. Normally speaking this is a good quality, but the problem is that I struggle to keep up with the quests before out leveling them entirely. In a game like Final Fantasy XIV it makes sense… so that you can save quests for other jobs, however in a game like Wildstar it just feels daunting when you realize that you are completing less than optimal quests just to dig down to the ones that matter again. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday playing around on my Human Warrior on Evinda yesterday, poking my way through the quests. Right now I am mostly focused on working through my path quests, but unfortunately I have only actually done about half of the ones available for the Galeras zone, and I am already feeling overwhelmed. I have to say this is not really my favorite area of the game, and I am more than ready to push past it… even though I know Whitevale is waiting on me. Whitevale more or less was the zone that killed my progress on my Chua Engineer, because the content was just so tightly packed.. and simply moving around became tedious.

As of yesterday I am sitting at level twenty, and I am considering just pushing through some dungeon runs rather than spending a bunch of more time questing. I had this overwhelming feeling yesterday that I spent a lot of time doing something… but whatever it was didn’t really accomplish much in the grand scheme of things. I did however set up a new outfit which I am pretty happy with. At some point I need to spend time searching the auctioneer for interesting appearances. Right now I don’t have any hats that I really like, so I am going with the cybernetic monocle as the best of the worst. This game so far is reminding me a little too much of Warcraft in the hat department, because I can’t really find any that I like. In World of Warcraft I habitually hit every single hat offering because they all looked stupid, and I am afraid that might also be my fate here. This is so strange since in Final Fantasy XIV I have dozens of hats that I love wearing… including the very awesome Bunny Samurai hat that I have been wearing most recently. Maybe I just have yet to find my way to the really cool threads yet. Right now I plan on leveling some more today and seeing if I can get a group going for a dungeon.

Spending Time with Carby

Arcanist has been the class that has eluded me the most in Final Fantasy XIV. I want to like it, because I adore running around with a giant sparkly carbuncle pet. The problem being it is a “finger wiggler” and quite possibly the “most” finger wiggly of all classes. I however thanks to the help of my AggroChat crew at least “get” how to play one. It is essentially put up dots on all of the things and check to see if it is dead yet. Generally speaking I pick something to play during our podcast and this week that honor fell to playing the Arcanist. I keep telling myself that if I can ever manage to get it to 30, then I will become a Scholar and life will be golden. I get to queue as a healer and see how the other side feels when it comes to dungeon healing, after playing a fair amount of White Mage. As of last night I am sitting at 26, and man does it feel like a really long ways to 30. The problem with dungeoning as an Arcanist is that it just feels so damned awkward. You have this strange mixed bag of tools, but only really end up using your dots and ruin as a spell of last resort. Occasionally I throw a heal if the tank is getting exceptionally low or if I am, but otherwise cycle through the adds… dotting each of them.. then returning to the first one and starting the process all over again (which is rarely needed because they are usually dead by then).

Essentially going forward it is my plan to run a low level roulette each day on the Arcanist because yesterday I managed to get a full level and a half out of it. Doing this should get me to thirty in good pace, and then I can figure out how to scholar heal! If nothing else now that I have gotten in my Carby plushes I have a minion Carby to follow me around. I have to admit that is part of my reluctance to level is the fact that I know going Summoner causes me to loose my Carbuncles. The Egis have grown on me, but they are in no way as cool as the Carbuncle. I can’t believe I am saying this… but I am actually jealous of Alphinaud and his Ruby, Onyx and Obsidian Carbuncles. Part of me hopes that they introduce a quest line that gives you these three Carbys as optional replacements for Garuda, Titan and Ifrit Egis. If they did that… I would absolutely have renewed vigor in my desire to become a summoner. As it stands now I feel like this is a class that has beaten me, and I want to push past any frustration and not let it win. If nothing else I do think the book casting animation looks pretty sweet… you know for a finger wiggler. Yeah… i’m going to go stab something with a sword or hit something with an axe now.