Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 76 of 129

Madness Intensifies

May 18, 2015 by Belghast

No Getting Used to It

By the time yesterday afternoon rolled around I had well passed my stress quota. If I were a pinball machine the tilt sensors were going off. The previous week had been one of the more stressful experiences in part because I don’t really handle change as well as I could. That said my workplace right now is in a constant state of flux as we are going through a fairly massively floor rebuild. We have folks tearing down one cube only to take the pieces that were used to make it, and use it to build up a brand new cube. The positive is that I now have a pretty sweet set up with a more private cube that has an entrance hall of sorts, but getting to that process involved moving out of my office before going to lunch one day… and moving back in a few hours later. When you combine the fact that we had to cram all of the mothers day festivities into this weekend, we had car troubles, and had at least one partially sleepless night due to dodging tornados by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around I had just checked out.

So as I was sitting there on my sofa mindlessly crafting away last night it was pure dumb luck that I happened to look down and notice that the tell I had just received was from an actual person and not another gold spammer. It turns out that I happened to be sitting there crafting in the Alchemists guild in Ul’dah next to someone who was apparently an avid reader of my blog. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this a few times now, and each time it is this mixture of pride, awkwardness and confusion. I have somehow lulled myself into this state where I feel like I don’t actually have any readers, so when I write my post each morning I can be just as open as I want to… because I am ultimately just talking to myself. So when I am confronted with the fact that this is absolutely not the case I never know quite what to do. I snapped a photo with my reader and told him that he would have to be less of a stranger in the comment thread, also threw out a friend invite and said to holler if they needed anything. My friends joke about me being “THE Belghast” but man… that is not a thing I will ever get used to. I’m just a guy who does a few different things and tries to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the games I happen to be playing as I can. The big point of pride however came when my reader said that I was for the most part the reason why they were playing Final Fantasy XIV right now, so if my joy can be infectious then maybe I guess it is okay.

Madness Intensifies

The only real concentrated playtime that I had this weekend were either during the podcast on Saturday evening or starting about 4pm on Sunday afternoon until I went to bed. During that time I focused on getting all of those tradeskills that I managed to get to level 5/6ish the other day up to 11. At the point of going to sleep last night I had managed to get all of them up there except for Culinarian, which I will hopefully take care of tonight. I will say that so far I definitely agree with the notion of this being the ideal way to level tradeskills, but man… it also means that my entire life right now is pushing tradeskills. There is no way in hell I am going to cap my poetics especially since they have now doubled the cap to 900 per week. The positive however is that I am actually finding myself really enjoying the black hole known as crafting. I like the fact that I am for the most part relatively self sufficient. This was always the big reason why I pushed crafting up in other games is that when I wanted something for an alt… I didn’t want to have to pester someone else to make it for me.

It is going to be so amazingly nice to be able to repair my gear while we are in instances, or knock out random glamour prisms as my whims suit me. Right now I am taking no small amount of pride in the fact that I have been crafting all of my upgrades WHILE working on crafting. The cool thing is that each time I hit a plateau I can have a fire sale of everything that I used to get to that point. So when I finally bring Culinarian up to level 11 I will be shedding all the early level crafting gear that I have laying around. The other nice thing about doing it this way is that I have been able to select the cash reward item from each of my crafting quests. The negative is… that I am struggling to remember which quests I have actually completed. I am pretty sure there are one or two of the level ten quests that I still need to go back and do. I am really enjoying the chill nature of crafting, and I am liking that it gives me plenty of time to watch some Orphan Black. I managed to watch through the first seasons and just started the second season last night before stopping to watch Game of Thrones. I doubt I will make it to cap before Heavensward but I am hoping to at least get close.

Forced Engagement

The biggest problem with crafting right now is that it is feeding my instincts to check out mentally. When I am stressed I tend to disengage from the world, and while I am so focused on crafting my way through the levels… it is all too easy to simply not watch free company chat or anything else for that matter. One of the things I am going to have to work on this next week is trying to find a happy medium between my super engaging “lets run all the things” side and my “lets just nest and craft” side. I am hoping that now that my group at work is done with the moves that I can start to chill back out once again. The fact that every single day my world was changing significantly made me want to cling to something calm and relaxing in my game world. Tonight will be a return to my raid schedule so that should help significantly. There is still some stress in the real world around a potential car purchase that might be happening, but hopefully the big stressers are past me.

Mostly I want to apologize to anyone who was looking to run anything this weekend. I managed to run a Sunken Temple of Qarn with Liore, but past that I pretty much ran nothing at all. I had all these grand hopes of doing some pony farming, but that fell through when we tried to cram a visit with my folks in Friday night. Saturday was pretty much an entire lost day other than rushing home to podcast under the threat of severe weather. Hopefully as the week goes on I can do more fun stuff with the Free Company because I could use the activity to get my mind off other things. As we talked about on the podcast Saturday night, I really hope we down turn nine tonight… but in the grand scheme of things I think we are still a few weeks away. We are just now consistently getting to the dive bomb phase, now we just have to figure out what to do with the dive bombs. On our best attempt I think we got to around 35% which isn’t too shabby. I hope you all have a great week, and please if you are an avid reader of the blog… don’t hesitate to ping me in game sometime and say hi.

Happier Without Meters

May 13, 2015 by Belghast

Deliberate Exclusion

One of the puzzles I have been trying to sort out the entire time I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV is why exactly the community as a whole seems to be friendlier to other players. I’ve talked about the various literal “social engineering” missions that the development staff have made in order to spin things that would normally be a negative as a positive. When I see the new player bonus in a dungeon I actually get excited rather than frustration over having to potentially teach someone new mechanics. Quite honestly I am wondering if it is something far more simple than anything, a line in the sand that the folks running the game drew long ago and have since reinforced numerous times. In Final Fantasy XIV running a DPS log parser is not only unsupported by the game, but it is actually an actionable offense. This has had an interesting chilling effect on some of the elitism that you normally see in communities.

Since simply mentioning parsed logs in private free company chat can end up with a GM knocking down your door… it changes the way folks interact with the data gained from log parsers. That is to say people are still parsing the logs, but the first rule of “FFXIV-APP” is there is no “FFXIV-APP”. This means that no one gets called out in the middle of a pug for having “weak dps” and no one is standing around in “trade chat” linking their latest boss kill. The players that do parse, do so quietly and in secret and I believe in the end this makes the “meters” less of a competition and more of a personal diagnostic tool. It seems that once you take this competition out of a community it has some pretty wide reaching trickle down effects. I’ve always thought of dps meters as a distraction, and back during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, we had rules against mentioning them or linking them in raid chat. I largely just found the automated spam annoying, but it also seemed to cause players to focus on things that were less important than the mechanics of a fight.

Accidental Experiment

The problem is that meters are a double edged sword. Eons ago while the earth was still cooling I needed a add-on called Omen in World of Warcraft to let me know how I was doing on threat. Later on these features got rolled into Recount, and Skada and the rest of the meters. As a result I simply got used to running the meters all of the time, but after a point they were no longer needed. Tank threat became a non-issue with the introduction of Vengeance to help mitigate the lower damage that tanking characters generally had. Once introduced into my life I started feeling like I needed meters all the time to let me know how things were going. I became addicted to the metrics and numbers associated with raiding, and as such spent a good deal of my time staring at bars and percentages rather than actually playing the game. Some weeks back I talked about being frustrated with the current state of my mods, and actually went so far as to start installing several of the addons that I had been using.

One of the addons that ended up getting pulled was Recount, because I had this plan of switching over the Skada. The funny thing is that I got interrupted during the middle of what I happened to be doing, and while Recount absolutely got installed… I never went so far as to install another meter. The first time I noticed was during a raid a few weeks back, but since I was so used to NOT having meters in Final Fantasy XIV it didn’t bother me terribly much. This combined with the fact that I knew someone in the raid was going to parse our logs anyways caused me to simply ignore the fact that they were not there any more. The end result was that I felt generally happier about my night of raiding. I spent more time in the moment of the game play rather than focusing on how I was doing versus this player or that in the meters. I decided to just go with this and run without meters for awhile to see if it improved my overall outlook on the raid.

Happier Without Meters

The funny thing is that I actually think it did. World of Warcraft stopped being a competition for me and more of an experience. Sure the fights are still nowhere near as engaging or enjoyable for me as the ones in Final Fantasy XIV but I am spending more time “in” the fight and less time worried about other non-important things. The funny thing about this is that apparently it had other effects on my game play as well. The constant concern about how I happened to be doing may have been actually holding me back from actually doing well. I figured I was still firmly in the middle of the pack dps wise, until after the Flamebender Ka’graz fight one of our mages said something that made me curious. He said something to the effect of “I can’t believe I was beat by a protection warrior”. To which point I confessed that I had installed my meters some time ago, and had no clue how I was actually doing anymore. To which my raid leader responded “Well, Bel, You Did Well” and linked me the url of the live parse.

There are a lot of mitigating factors behind my performance and I know this. For starters I recently got the four piece set bonus and for gladiators it essentially increases everything useful to us by 20%. More than that I think the absence of meters caused me to stop worrying about every button press and rely more on what I knew I should be doing when I should be doing it… instead of trying to second guess myself all of the time. In essence I stopped caring about my performance and just started playing the damned game, and while it most definitely improved my levels of happiness it also seems to have actually improved how I was performing. I am just not a hyper competitive person about most things, and accidentally eliminating that stimulus from my game experience seems to be a net positive for me. I know that there are always going to be meters tracking my performance but I also feel like so long as they are not in my face all of the time I can try and ignore them. Now I am not suggesting that you uninstall your meters, and that it is some new path to happiness. However for me it seems to have given me a new lease on a game I was starting to hate playing.

Axe to Grind

May 12, 2015 by Belghast

Lung Infections Suck

I’ve been in a strange place the last few days, where I am still recovering from what has turned out to be an infection in my lungs. It has been allergies central around here and unsurprisingly my lungs have reacted negatively to it. I had been dragging along for awhile with what felt like a constant persistent dry cough. Last Friday I finally decided to go to the doctor when I coughed up a small bit of blood. Turns out my lungs were actually in far worse shape than I thought. Since then I have been on a pretty heavy dose of prednisone and am on the mend, but man… I have to say I am still drained as hell. I attempted to go to work like normal yesterday but ended up coming home about halfway through the day. Today I am making another attempt to go a full day, so I am hoping the strength stays with me. What is so strange about this one is just how drained I feel as a result of simply existing.

Why are my lungs betraying me you might ask? The above photo is not intentionally abstract but instead my my phones camera attempting to focus on what are ultimately hundreds of tiny particles of Cottonwood seed. This is what we jokingly refer to as summer snow, and with all the rain we have been getting the Cottonwoods have been blooming in overdrive blanketing the law with a mat of white fabric and making the air look like it is quite genuinely snowing. Thankfully I have a day or two of reprieve thanks to the recent round of storms, but I am sure as soon as things dry up again the bloom will begin a new. Normally this happens around my birthday in June but I guess all the moisture moved up the time table. In any case it sucks to live through and I am just hoping that I can limp through until it has finished. In the meantime I will continue to take this high dose pack of prednisone and antibiotics and pretend to be a normal human being.

Axe to Grind

For months now we have been slowly keying folks through the various primal fights in our Final Fantasy XIV free company. While a chunk of us have been sitting on the Ifrit step, the final of the original set of Extreme primals… it seemed like every time we set out to attempt it we were missing a seventh or eighth that also had it unlocked. So we would once again shift focus and do another round of Garuda or another round of Titan to get people caught up. Last night, finally after a new round of Titaneers we managed to get eight people on at the same time with the ability to do Ifrit. Now I realize I could have been pugging my way through the primal encounters, and with all of the mount farming parties this is a relatively straight forward prospect. There is just something rewarding about doing a fight that is new to you, with nothing but your free company surrounding you. It makes the kill that much sweeter and the experience that much more magical as you accomplished a new mission with friends. Once again we went into the fight without much research, but managed to pick up the basics extremely quickly.

It took us several attempts but by the end of our first night ever working on the boss we had downed an Ifrit and moved on to other things. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get this quest out of my log. I know the big push for this at least from Ashgar’s side was to get the sweet axe I am pictured holding in the first picture. For those who have completed some of the later story, you will recognize this as the axe that Moenbryda wields. It is just one of many weapons you get as a reward for defeating the original trio of Primals, but I went with the axe because it is probably one of the more unique appearances in the game. Now I doubt if it will ever offset my usage of my Malignant Mogaxe, but it is still pretty awesome to have it as an option for when I decide to change up my outfit a bit. Glamouring/Transmogging/Wardrobes are one of the simple pleasures of a modern MMO. The ability to look like you want to look is what makes these games fun to play for me. Gone is the era of looking exactly like every other player in the game, and here to stay is the ability to craft your own appearances. After playing Everquest and being able to tell every single item a player was wearing based on its color and appearance… I have to say I am happy to be living in modern times.

Back to Nael

Yes I realize this is not a picture of Nael Van Darnus but I didn’t snap any pictures from our attempts on Turn 9 last night. Instead this is a picture of me rocking the Garuda bow because I finally feel like I have an outfit floofy enough to support it. This weekend I managed to finish getting my 120 set from World of Darkness which makes up a chunk of the outfit above. Since picking up the Garuda bow I have been looking for a reason to use it, and finally I think the gold and white in the Bogartyr coat works well enough with the gold and white on the bow. Now if anyone tells me that is really blue and black I will reach through the internet and punch them in their soul. A few weeks back we set down on a new mission, which involved alternating between working on coil and working on other things. Since then we have finished the original three primals, Leviathan Extreme and Odin and as a result feel like we are no longer beating our heads against the wall that is turn nine. Coming back to Nael tonight felt far more fresh than it has in a long time.

I was somewhat concerned that we would have lost progress, but in truth we picked up right where we left off and started making fast progress. Everything about the fight is smoother now and we have been making it into the final dance phase every single attempt. The awesome thing about this is that it feels like last night we were finally getting the pattern down. In fact the last few attempts we were making it to the dive bombs phase consistently. Now if we can just master where the dive bombs need to go… I have a feeling we will be clearing turn nine finally and moving on to the final coil. I love my static group, and I love the way folks just keep plugging away without getting frustrated. We have been on this boss for a very long time, and no one seems to have any diminished desire to KEEP doing the boss, or keep trying to succeed. In fact everyone seems to keep doing little things here or there to tweak their performance and make things work more smoothly. I love my free company, and I love the raid we have built around it… my hope is that we can keep trying to get more people into the mix and maybe with Heavensward expand to a third static because the two we have now are just awesome.

Botany Mastered

May 10, 2015 by Belghast

A Very Cardgamey Show

It seems when I think we have nothing to talk about… we end up talking for two hours finally having to force ourselves to stop talking to close out the show. Last night was one of those night as I was joined by Tam, Kodra, Thalen and Ashgar. Sometimes a clear theme is presented and last night inadvertedly this happened. As we rambled through the various things we have been playing, it turns out that a lot of us had been playing card games in one form or another. We got this interesting peak into the secret underground gaming scene of Seatle that Kodra has now apparently gotten his ticket into. He recorded this weeks AggroChat on a quick jaunt away from this all day gaming event that was happening in a nearby hotel. The kind of event that isn’t advertised, and that you apparently have to know someone to get into. This is not starting to sound like fight club at all is it?

Other than that I shift things around a bit in the show and I actually go first. Usually by the time we get around to the games I have been playing my co-hosts are bordering on being asleep so I opted to talk about my stuff first. Which was a large course of Echo of Souls, and beating Wolfenstein The Old Blood which is an absolutely enjoyable but exceptionally short version of the original Wolfenstein game redone in New Order style. Machinegames has somehow created this magical mix of the glory days of the 90s era shooter mixed with the narrative power of modern gaming. Ashgar once again is going through his DS collection and playing things that he had not beaten before, this time jaunting down a time travelling avenue. Thalen extolled the joys of Hand of Fate, and Kodra rediscovered Heroes of Might and Magic 3. More than that however we talked a lot about card games and board games in general. Was a fun and chill show to record and hopefully that comes across in the production.

Botany Mastered

Last night while recording the podcast and editing it I spent my time in Final Fantasy XIV working on Botany. For some time I have been working on pushing up the two critical harvesting abilities Mining and Botany before actually starting the Disciple of the Hand push. I figured having the ability to go out into the world and gather things would be beneficial when making the push to level all the other things. The Disciple of the Land classes also gave me a bit of a buffer to psyche myself up for diving headlong into the pit of madness that is crafting. At this point begins the money grind and thankfully I am up to almost 2 million gil to help support this push. I guess the first order of business is to level all of the professions to 15 so that I can get the best cross class abilities to help with the rest of the grind. My original thought was to take everything to 15 in no particular order, and then start walking them up 5 levels at a time. So take everything to 20, everything to 25 etc. This also allows me to convert all of the crafting gear along the way hopefully keeping my vaults from overflowing.

Another thing that I really need to start doing is working on my beast tribe daily quests. One of the things that Ashgar talked about on the podcast was the interesting quest that comes at the end of maxing each of the factions. There is apparently a storyline that somehow joins up all of the rebellious beast tribe factions into a “Justice League” of sorts. I would really love to see this storyline before Heavensward launches, but at this point I have right around a month to accomplish all of this. I am not sure if I have given myself enough time, especially given that I keep dinking around in other games at the same time. I am starting to feel under the gun with wanting to accomplish so many things before I officially say goodbye to “A Realm Reborn”. So far FFXIV 2.0 has been an amazing ride and I am amped about what Heavensward and 3.0 has to offer. I guess tomorrow night the 2.57 patch will be going in, and I am wondering what exactly it will bring as well. I would be extremely happy if they uncapped Poetics gains… but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Bad At Shadowrun

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time working on Shadowrun Dragonfall and I have decided that I need to just start over. I spent too much of my time on my main character too focused on a specific tree. I was planning on going all melee all of the time and quite frankly that is a poor choice to go with. I spent most of combat running around the room chasing down mobs that would move away from me and attack from ranged. Additionally I am going to have to throw out some of my instincts because I straight wiped my party trying to stay and fight against unwinnable odds. All of that said there are aspects of the game I am really enjoying, but right now I am just pretty horrible at actually doing it. I also need to learn to save far more often because this game will straight kill you at times with a smile. It is going to be an interesting show when we ultimately talk about this game but I am really wanting to make it further than I did with the previous games. I would love to beat this one because in many ways the gameplay reminds me of the Fallout series.

The thing is the game gives you one of every classes so I guess what you end up playing is just for flavor. I will probably go Street Samurai once again because that was always my favorite character to play in the actual Shadowrun campaigns I have been in. I didn’t really care that much for the little dwarf I rolled so I will probably go something more generic like a human this time around. All in all I was a fun several hours I spent yesterday, and as it is raining insanely outside… I plan on going downstairs and hanging out on the sofa all day while watching Netflix. Shadowrun is precisely the perfect kind of game for a day like today. So I will either be doing that or be working on tradeskills in final fantasy. In any case I have a gloriously lazy Sunday ahead of me. These are the types of days that gaming was made for. This massive lung infection has gotten me out of having to travel for Mother’s Day so right now we are planning on having a re-roll there next weekend when the world is not actively trying to kill us. Hopefully you have an awesome day too.