Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 63 of 129

Bahamut Is Down

August 4, 2015 by Belghast

Some Personal Stuff

I feel like it has been pretty noticeable that I have been in a bit of a funk for the last few weeks. When this happens I tend to extract myself from the world until the passes, which isn’t necessarily the smartest thing that I can do. However over the years I have done this as my coping mechanism, because I am always afraid I will snap at someone when I get moody. For a bit yesterday I was wondering if my magical happy pills were not longer working, but then my wife asked me something. Was my low as low as it has been in the past… and to be honest no. Normally the world would be crushingly oppressive, and instead I just felt sort of permanently bummed out. So I guess maybe things are working just fine, they are just filling in the valleys so that the lows are quite as low as they would have been otherwise.

Yesterday was one of the more stressful days that I have had in awhile. We had someone patch a server and due to a conflict between the Windows Update Service and MacAfee that we have seen numerous times now… it caused a process deadlock that ended up taking down production services for hours. This was stressful in so many ways, because while there was nothing I did to cause it… there was also nothing I could really do to help it either. It was another department with another manager… and another set of priorities responsible for the fault and the fix. So when I came home… I was at an extremely low point. However my wife and I went out to dinner, and then as the evening went on I started to feel better about the world. It was like peeking out of a fog to see a lovely day behind it. I guess in the grand scheme of things… if all of my low spots are like this from now on… I will count myself lucky because while it sucked, it was manageable.

Bahamut Is Down

One of the struggles in game is that I feel like I am caught between two worlds a bit. It has taken longer than I expected to get the Monday night raid group pieced together and ready to do Heavensward content. As a result we have been focusing on trying to get through the Final Coil of Bahamut, and made some significant progress. Last week we were just shy of forming a group, so going into Turn 13 last night… we were all rusty. However it feels like we got our bearings more quickly than normal and made a few adjustments. Previously I had been tanking Bahamut at the twelve o’clock position which seems the most obvious place to drag him as you are running in… and do the traditional drag the boss while running thing. Instead we swapped things up and I drug up back to the six o’clock position we entered the room at. This allowed Ashgar to pick up the adds significantly easier and also allowed the DPS to burn them down faster.

The real challenge however was like always… we suck at dive bomb phases. However in spite of the fact that you ultimately have to deal with something like five divebomb phases, they seemed to come together more smoothly than we were used to. Essentially you have to find Bahamut, and move out of the way while also moving out of the way of Twintania that comes barreling through immediately after him. I think we only made it through two or three of these phases completely clean, however we did manage to rez the few players that got pushed into a wall. I am constantly impressed at still how difficult of a fight this is. Sure this is expansion old content at this point, but I am damned happy to be able to say I have defeated Bahamut, and I have a title and a minion to show for it. Paragon to a really spiffy White Mage Cane as a result, and part of me wants to try and muster the troops to do this more often so that we can farm the really awesome weapons for folks. I have to say… the most stressed I have ever been in Final Fantasy XIV is trying to find a way to survive Ahk Mourn. On the positive side… Alexander turn 3 has caused me to get really good at timing Holmgang.

Alex Finally

Last night was a significant night because not only did it see us beating Turn 13 of Final Coil of Bahamut… but it also saw us officially starting this expansions raid content as a group. I love the Wednesday night group, and I am enjoying what is happening there… but there is something extra special about getting the Monday night group into Alexander. While Kodra, Grace and I are parts of both teams, there will always be something special about my first Final Fantasy XIV raid group. So it makes me happy that this week everyone was up to 170 and several were considerably beyond that… even though it took a little bit of cheatery to get Ash’s paladin in the zone by wearing some strength jewelry. We only really had time to do turn one of Alexander, but we came really damned close to oneshotting it. Had we not started freaking out because we thought we were coming up against the hard enrage… we absolutely would have downed it in the first try.

On the second attempt everyone felt more confident and we pushed the dps so much harder than before. The awesome thing about coming in on a Monday is that several of us were already capped on Alexander pieces for the week which meant pretty much all of the newish folks walked away with something spiffy. I look forward to coming in next Monday and clearing all four turns of Alexander, and getting everyone their freebie accessories. From there maybe some Bismarck and Ravana? It makes me happy to feel like I am making forward momentum with both teams. The only thing that frustrates me a little bit is that I feel like we should go back and do Turn 8, which is the turn that Monday night skipped to start work on Turn 9. So maybe next week I can talk people into doing that so that we finally can close the book on the Coil of Bahamut. I don’t want to sacrifice getting people through Alexander for it, but I would love to be able to say I have beaten each of the turns. All in all it was a pretty great night, not just for the raid victories but for also clearing away the fog that I have been dwelling in.

Luck in Alex

August 3, 2015 by Belghast

What Happened to Bel Folks Stuff?

I figure at this point some of you out there have to be asking yourself this question. Quite honestly I am not sure what has happened, other than the fact that I am still fighting a bit of a funk. With AggroChat I am supported by my cast of friends, and we have a specific format that we follow… and that takes a lot of the pressure to perform off of me. With “Bel Folks Stuff” I have to be “On” the entire time we are recording. The end result is a much more draining experience, and I have to be in a certain mindset to make it work. I walked back and forth on this point in my mind numerous times. I still have a long list of people that I would like to have on the show, but do I force it just for the sake of keeping what passes for a schedule?

So far the answer I have kept giving myself is “No”. This blog… I can make a post out of thin air, but when it come to a podcast… that is not a skill I have achieved yet. The podcast and the idea behind it are not dead yet though, even if I am going on two months without a show. In part I did not set a strict schedule because I wanted the process to feel natural and spontaneous. The problem being that in order to get this sort of approach I have to be feeling up to the challenge. Since Blaugust is this big challenge about creating regular content, I thought it was also important to talk about my own failings. While we are running like clockwork with AggroChat, Bel Folks Stuff on the other hand is a bit of a mess. Hopefully I will peek through whatever fog I happen to be in and will get back my moxy. For the time between… all I really have is a heartfelt apology that I have failed to do more shows.

Luck in Alex

Other than my odd little Minecraft mission, I had one major goal yesterday. That was to get close to capping Esoterics and finish getting items from Alexander. Earlier in the week I had managed to get into an Alex group with a few guildies, and in that process knocked out drops from 2, 3, and 4 leaving me only 1 to worry about. Alexander turn one tends to be the more sane of them, and at this point it is the one that almost everyone knows how to do well. I had mentioned this goal Saturday on voice chat, and my friend Warenwolf mentioned that he would like to go along with me. The problem being that I took most of the day to get into the mood for doing some Alex. However last night we zoned in together, and managed to get through it with absolutely no frustrations. I myself needed either a Pedal or a Chain which would get me my boots or belt respectively. It turns out that both Waren and I were on the lucky side as I won the Chain and he won a Bolt taking both of us to 182 item level.

On the other side of the goal, my adventures through the weekend have taken to 30 Esoterics away from capping. A single expert tonight will push me over the cap, and put me in a good place for getting my weapon either Tuesday or Thursday. Getting a new weapon is always a huge motivation factor for me. As a habitual melee player… weapons mean so much and are essentially the soul of the class. When you get a new one… your class for a moment feels completely new to you as you experience bigger numbers or higher threat values. While I have enjoyed my level 180 weapon… I am more than ready to toss it in the dustbin because the 200 axe looks freaking amazing. It is a return to the feel of the original Warrior artifact set that I felt in love with. Right now the plan is to try really hard to grind out the rest of my esoterics on Tuesday, so that I have the axe ready for our Wednesday night raid.

Hunts are Great XP

This expansion many of us have been following a little trick on how to make leveling feel less painful. Clan Hunts are something that I find extremely relaxing as I pop around through several different zones taking out hunt marks and getting centurio seals in the process. There however has been some method to my madness, and that method revolves around trying to take down as many hunt mobs as I can with a level or under leveled job. Essentially the plan has been that for Western Coerthas, Sea of Clouds and Dravianian Forelands that I end up using a character around level 50. Originally this was my Dragoon, until I managed to get him to around 55 and I simply did the entire course of hunt marks with him. Now I am doing this with my Bard, and while I have not really played him other than this process… I already have him to 52. The next two in line for leveling like this are my Paladin and my White Mage… while the Paladin is probably going to be doable… I am questing just how easy it will be for me to push the White Mage through hunts.

What is nice about this process is that I personally focus on my hunts and not necessarily how fast I am gaining experience. As a result it seems that I magically got to level 52 on the Bard without really trying. Ultimately as you get higher in level those early Hunts stop paying out quite so nicely in the experience department, and you reach a point where you have to grind to get to the level cap. However before you hit that juncture… it certainly feels nice to see your classes almost leveling themselves. The best part about all of this is that this process feeds my ability to keep upgrading Law gear, and the other awesome happening of the weekend is that my Dragoon is a single ilevel away from being able to do Alexander as well. In the process of grinding out my Esoterics on Tuesday, I should get enough Law to get to 170 and then I have two options for doing Alexander each week. There are some nights I can stomach the process of tanking that place, and others that I would enjoy sitting in the backseat and dpsing more. I would be happy if I never had to tank turn two again.

Anook Community Award

July 29, 2015 by Belghast

Prepping for Blaugust

At this point we are getting super close to the launch of Blaugust, and the sign ups keep coming on the Nook. There is still time to sign up and be ready for the start of this exciting month. Also remember there is zero penalty this year for starting late and catching up. Last year my friend Tamrielo did something absolutely insane and wrote 31 really well formed posts in a 48 hour period. While I would never suggest anyone do something like that, it is absolutely possible to start a week late and make up the missed progress. Similarly I know folks will be attending Gamescom or Pax Prime during this month, so it is absolutely a good idea to stage the content ahead of time. For the WordPress users out there I highly suggest you check out their pretty excellent mobile app (iOS, Android) that gives you access to your blog on the go, and does a decent job of letting you compose a post on the go.

I tend to be a very pro WordPress person, but blogger is perfectly acceptible as well and while I have never used it there seems to be a mobile blogger client also (iOS, Android). The primary reason why I tend to suggest WordPress is just that there is a path between WordPress.com free hosted service, and moving to a WordPress.org installation on your own custom hosting. There are a number of guides out there to help this process along. What I like so much about this is the fact that it lets someone get their feet wet and decide if this blogging thing is for them… before plunking down the money it takes to rent space on a web host and purchase a domain. There are lots of people that never make the jump between COM to ORG, but it is nice that there is always that option if you want to do something with your blog that is not supported through the official channels. There are also guides for going from Blogger to WordPress, but they tend to be far less straight forward.

Anook Community Award

Last night something really cool happened, namely that Lonrem the tirelessly working community manager of Anook.com posted an excellent “best practices” document on the Blaugust Nook. If the document were not enough in helping people get the most out of their Anook experience… he also slipped a tidbit of information in down at the bottom. For a few weeks now we had been talking about Anook wanting to sponsor some sort of award. It was finally decided that the best way to have an Anook reward is to have the users of the website vote on their favorite posts. Here are the basics of this award posted straight from his document.

I’ll also announce here that Anook is going to support Blaugust with a special prize! I’m going to tally up the Hearts that each blog post gets for each blogger (Blaugger?) and award the top blog with a game code. I’m going to see if I can round up other prizes from some of our friends and partners as well, no promises there! This does give a bit of an incentive to post regularly, start on the first of August, but also to share the link to your blog on Anook! If you’ve got any questions, let me know!

This is really awesome to have our first “real” sponsor… because my pocket didn’t really count. Last year when I started this, I decided to host the challenge off of Anook because it is a network that I love. Lonrem singlehandedly won me over with his devotion, and the features basically keep me from ever having to build yet another custom SMF forum for anything. So I fly the Anook banner on my stream and mention it on every AggroChat just because I love the site. I am humbled that the site is returning some of that love and helping us get this challenge started in a bigger and better way this year. I’ve had an idea through this contest of creating a games of the week where I suggest a handful of free to play games that folks play, and then write about their experience to help get those creative juices flowing. While I might have been dreading the loss of my free time that Blaugust means… I am absolutely getting pumped about how much more “real” this whole thing feels for 2015.

Surprise Alex

It is not uncommon for me to log in to Final Fantasy XIV in the evening and hear the all too familiar chime of a group invite before the game has completely loaded. My guildies are used to ninjaing me into tanking all manner of things, and I assumed that it was yet another case of “daily expert”. So I accepted the invite without thinking much about it, and found myself shocked when I saw the Alexander loading screen. To make matters worse the ninja alex was turn 2, which is quite possibly the most frustrating thing for a tank to take on without having a second tank in there that they trust. The problem being that pugs like to stack all of the mobs together, which makes it impossible for the tanks to effectively hold aggro on them. What happens instead is that both tanks burn through all of their resources and the mobs spend the entire fight bouncing back and forth between them. This would be fine and good if it were safe for a single tank to take them on… problem being that in the later phases you have to try and carefully split the damage to even it out. All of the mobs on one tank is pretty much a certain wipe.

The positive of getting pulled into Alex like this however is that it took away my normal reluctance to such things, and as of last night I now have three of my four pieces of loot for the week. All that is left is Turn 1, and quite honestly it is the least stressful for me to pug. The tanks have clearly defined roles and for the most part they go fairly smoothly now that most people are pretty well geared. At this point for that final item I want either a chain which would instantly give me a belt, or a pedal… which would also instantly give me an item because I have a second one in my inventory. I have to say the way gearing works in Alex is a little maddening, but I feel that honestly it is their way of trying to delay people reaching level 190 geared. With Esoterics in place, I can’t really see going for say the Alexander chest piece since it takes getting a lucky roll four weeks in a row on Turn 4. My first Esoterics item of course will be the 200 weapon, because for a tank that is the single most useful upgrade. After that I will probably assess my weakest pieces and go after what I need the most… which is more than likely going to be my chest piece. Of course in the mean time Square could do what they seem to always do… and change up the game by taking away loot restrictions. That said I still think it is a little early in the patch for that to actually happen, and more than likely won’t be until 3.1.

Muscle Memory

July 28, 2015 by Belghast

Unexpected Happenings

There is a specific moment in my time playing Final Fantasy XIV where I realized that the Cactuar community was something special. It was the night that we purchased our Free Company house, and all of these neighbors showed up to welcome us to the neighborhood. Many of those folks welcoming us were from the Howling Moon free company, and over the months of playing I got used to seeing all of these people hanging out at the Marketboard right in front of our house. Among them the pair that I got closest with was Ayla and Joren Noye. There were many nights like this one where we did silly things to pass the time between queues. Then several months ago they disappeared, as did most of the people I had become close with from that Free Company. I asked around in the guild but no one seemed to know what happened. It is always hard when friends disappear that you are close with… but not yet close enough to exchange all of those personal details.

With Heavenward they were back as I had hoped, but started playing a little later than most. I guess over those months they had some personal stuff to deal with, but I was amped to have them back wandering around in our neighborhood. Since then at least once a night we exchanged random happy emotes and a flurry of /say conversation as we fiddled with our retainers. When I got the hint that maybe things were not as wonderful in their guild as they once were, I did the thing that I always do… offered them a home. I didn’t really expect them to take me up on the offer, but last night as I was starting my daily hunts… I got a tell out of the blue from Joren. He told me that things just weren’t the same, and if it was still okay he would like to take my offer. Needless to say I was absolutely thrilled and delayed a guild dungeon run until they were ready for the invites. I cannot put into words just how excited I am to have them on board, we may even have to reconvene the council of squishy hats to celebrate.

Muscle Memory

This morning I happened to randomly click through to a re-tweeted blog post from DragonChasers about SkyForge. On it was a comment from the blogger Jeromai that struck a bit of a chord with me, because I am absolutely the sort of person that would frustrate him.

You know what’s really frustrating to me? People who can do it (whatever it is), but cannot describe or break down or teach exactly -how- they are doing it, beyond “I dunno, I just do it” or “here, just watch a video of me doing it,” or worse, “lol, it wuz easy, I don’t know how come you can’t do it.”

To me, folks who really know what they’re doing can also break down and explain roughly what they’re doing or the tactics they’re using or what they’re keeping track of, even if execution by someone else requires a lot of personal practice.

Sometimes people say that they don’t really know how to explain it, because they don’t want to explain it. For me personally I quite literally cannot explain how I do half of the things I do. Essentially I try and commit as much of the things that I do to muscle memory as I can, so that I can do them… without thinking about them. So when I tank an instance… I do so many little things that I can’t really break apart the things that I am doing automatically… from the things that I am doing intentionally. I’ve always been a player that played mostly on instinct and reflex rather than mindful reflection on strategy. I think this all comes from why I play games. Ultimately they are a means of relaxation for me, and many times I find myself zoning out into the sublime motion of playing the game without really having to think about it. This has strengths and weaknesses, and the big problem that I run into particularly is when I have to unlearn my reflexes and replace them with something else.

For example on the Titan Extreme fight in Final Fantasy XIV there is a place where I absolutely have to ignore every instinct I have built up and stop myself from running back into the boss after an attack. I struggled with that for our first attempts, because I had to commit an exception to the rule to muscle memory knowing that there would be a follow up attack that would kill me if I ran right back in. The other big weakness is there are so many things that I do on a daily basis that I cannot tell you step by step what I am doing unless I happen to be sitting at the keyboard and doing them. At work I am awesome at fixing problems and troubleshooting things… but I am horrible at trying to walk someone else through the process of doing all of these things. The positive is… once something has been committed to reflex it stays with you forever. I fired up F-Zero the other day for likely the first time in two decades… and I still knew every corner and place to use my booster on the tracks and easily got first place. Same goes for an MMO, I can sit down in front of a game that I have not played in years… and if I set the hot bars up the same way as i had them before I can return to playing the game like no time has passed.

The Final Stretch

My big accomplishment for the night is finally pushing across the line and dinging 59. I was able to replace the lance that I absolutely hated with this pretty cool one from the Ancient Library dungeon. This is the point where I realize that I have apparently not run the library as much as I thought I had. When it came to the level 57 gear, I had most of a set… and apparently do for just about every possible class I would care to level. The 59 gear however from Library, I have only a small smattering of pieces and next to nothing when it came to lancer gear. Thankfully I had squirreled away a set of High Quality 58 gear from the quests… since at that point I technically had better gear on my Warrior from running dungeons. That should more than get me through to 60 before really needing anything else gear wise. When I hit 60 I have waiting on me a 180 weapon, and a bunch of 170 and 160 pieces that should make up pretty much a full set.

My hope is that I will be able to leap frog to 170 the Alexander requirement pretty quickly. The thing I need to sort out in the meantime is how to do a better job of maintaining the Blood of the Dragon buff. The problem that I keep running into is that I will get thrown into a situation where I cannot safely get back to the boss in time to hit either a Fang and Claw proc or Wheeling Thrust. So my buff drops… and I have to wait whatever is left of the minute long recast time to throw the buff up again. I assume that once I hit 60, if there is a situation where I know Blood of the Dragon is about to fall… this is when I mix in a Gierskogul to spend the buff on an attack rather than let it fade completely. Remember the whole muscle memory thing from above? I had a previous rotation committed to that swap space… and now have to revise it. Given some time at 60 I will relearn what I need to do, because honestly I am not looking for the insanity of the optimal dragoon rotation… but instead looking for something that is “passable”. I don’t care if I beat our top dps… but I just want to make sure I am not the bottom of the pack either. I feel like I just don’t have enough of a competitive nature to ever be a truly successful dps player.