Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 81 of 129

Rotund Buddy

April 5, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 51 – Awesome Outfits

Last night was a bit of an odd showing because for various reasons and the majority of the week it looked like it would be the Ashgar and Belghast show. However some timing worked out well and we managed to talk our good friend Thalen into joining the fun. Thalen is one of those people that I have known in some context for over a decade. While he didn’t raid with us in LNR, he had connections to our raid through mutual friends and we spent a lot of time conversing with his raid Last Horse that Warenwolf also came from. Post Vanilla he has been a pretty permanent fixture of any guild I have been part of, and for the late BC early Wrath era we together with a few others representing the founders of the Duranub Raiding Company. Needless to say Thalen is one of those people that has always been in my life in one form or another for a very long time.

We had this strange meandering show last night where in truth none of us had really been playing much of anything super exciting. We dove into a few odd topics like World of Warcraft making some bad calls with Warlords of Draenor, and how important it is for us to look awesome when we are playing games. We talk about some of the lengths we have gone to in order to track down cosmetic gear. As far as games discussed we talk Dungeons and Dragons, Mega Man ZX,. Shin Megami Tensei IV, Persona 4 Golden, Axiom Verge, and a little Darkest Dungeon. We like always talk a lot about Final Fantasy XIV and what we have been up to there. Thalen has now leapt ahead of me in the classes to 50 race… with six to my five. However he did make a smarter call then I did with leveling Arcanist which essentially gets you both Scholar and Summoner. I think if I can ever get my Arcanist to 30 I will be set, since I can queue as a healer from that point on.

Rotund Buddy

Yesterday I decided spend a bit more of my winnings from the Golden Saucer. The first 8000 mgp I earned went towards buying the ponytail upgrade for the Aesthetician. After that I was not quite certain what I should pick up. I have been going back and forth on buying the blood sword for some time, simply because it is freaking awesome looking. The problem is I am not sure if I have a decent looking shield to go with it… and I really don’t spend that much time tanking on my Paladin other than very low level content. It seemed like it might end up being a waste of 10,000 mgp. Instead I decided to go with something that would make me happy all the time. I ended up grabbing the “Heavy Hatchling” minion, which is adorably waddle-y fat. It sits there barely staying upright and every so often almost looses its balance as it sniffs around looking for food.

The best part about the pet is that it doesn’t run around like a normal minion. Instead it hops around on its butt. I seriously was easily amused for a good ten minutes after getting it running circles in the Gold Saucer. Most people I know have been working on saving the cash to get the Setzer jacket, which is cool… but I was never much of a fan of Setzer in Final Fantasy VI to be honest. He was a means to an end for me… he had the worlds only Airship… and I needed an Airship. He never actually got any play other than those few times when you absolutely had to use every single character you had gotten. The jacket is just too flamboyant for my tastes… I think I prefer a dyed version of Snow’s jacket better for most cosmetic outfits. Anyways I guess the next 10,000 mgp I end up with I will finally go ahead and pick up that blood sword.

Coil Revisited

Last night we decided to take a bunch of the new 50s into the Binding Coil of Bahamut to do turns one through four. It many ways it felt like coming home, because it had been so long since we last did any of the content. I managed to pick up another piece of the High Allagan plate armor, which was pretty awesome. We had a bit of a stumbling block on coil turn 2, in part because we collapsed to early on the first attempt. On attempt two we pushed through without much issue. I was pleasantly surprised that we oneshot turn four, since I remember us having some issue with it. Since we were doing so well we opted to go ahead and push into Turn 5, so that the new recruits could see the difference. Unless you have experienced it… you cannot fully appreciate how much the content drops the bottom out on you when you get into turn 5. I got all sorts of warm fuzzies though walking in because our experience of learning turn 5 was so enjoyable for me.

All in all the group did admirably, and we managed to make it to the dive bomb phase several times. Admittedly we had myself, Ashgar and Cylladora that had been there numerous times… but they picked up and learned the fight extremely quickly all things considered. At the very least they made progress in a single night that took us several weeks. I hope we can go back there with the same group and get them all through turn 5. I have a feeling this is going to be a somewhat regular occurrence since you need turn 5 to unlock the second coil of Bahamut. In other news… I am really hoping that we make some serious progress on the fourth phase of Turn 9 this Monday. I am so ready to defeat that encounter so we can move forward into the Final Coil of Bahamut. At this point we have a few months before Heavensward, and it is probably hoping for too much… but I would really love to defeat the Final Coil before the expansion lands.

Darkest Dungeon

April 4, 2015 by Belghast

Twitch and Hitbox

Yesterday was a bit of a strange day in that I recorded two different podcasts that were not AggroChat on the same day. Early in the day I recorded another episode of Bel Folks Stuff, that was completely on the spur of the moment since I was off for Good Friday. Right now I am tenantively planning on releasing this on Wednesday. Then in the evening I guested on an episode of the Multiplaying podcast. While talking on that podcast or actually I think during the “after party” we were talking about Twitch and Hitbox. During yesterday morning I did my first real test of using JoiCaster to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time. Other than some technical difficulties it largely worked and I was able to produce a video of myself playing Darkest Dungeon.

The problem is that I had like five times the number of people watching the twitch stream as I did the hitbox stream at the same time. So much so that I stopped watching the chat on Hitbox and wound up missing a few comments. Last night I realized something, that my love of Hitbox is somewhat clouding my judgment. Me trying to make that happen is kind of like trying to make MySpace happen because you happened to like this or that feature better than Facebook. At this point Twitch is ubiquitous, everyone has an account and it is widely supported by lots of third party sites. There are several things about Hitbox that just feel better, but there just aren’t the number of people there that there are on Twitch. In theory I think I am going to abandon this whole multi-streaming thing and just stick with Twitch from this point on. It pains me to say it, but Hitbox as cool as it might be… is just too late to the party.

Darkest Dungeon

As we announced last week during the AggroChat episode, this month I chose Darkest Dungeon as my round robin pick for the game club. This is one of those games that I have seen circulating in among my friends but I largely avoided it, so that I could go into it fresh as a game club pick. Yesterday I played it for the first time, in the block above you can see the result of my stream. I have to say even though the game is pretty unforgiving… I am really enjoying the hell out of it. At its core it is a rogue like RPG dungeon crawler, with a really awesome woodcut art style… and an interesting sanity mechanic. So in part it feels a bit like playing Call of Cthulhu. Everything seems to have a chance of effecting your sanity, and when your characters get too stressed a saving throw is triggered. If they succeed this internal roll they gain a positive trait, and if they fail it… they gain a negative trait.

The cool thing is… these are not just passive debuffs but they actively change the way the character starts interacting. For example in the above play session my Vestal gained the “greedy” negative trait… which oddly enough made her far more blood thirsty in combat. There were a number of times where she just attacked without my say. This morning when playing the game a bit one of my highwaymen got the fearful trait causing him to periodically retreat to the back of the pack, changing what abilities you could actually use to attack with. The only real negative so far is that “the only way out is through” meaning once you start a mission it seems like the only way to leave the mission is to either finish it successfully… or kill off your party. The positive there is that party members are roughly as disposable as they are in Rogue Legacy. There are always fresh recruits available through the wagon in camp. At this point I have lost one entire party… and a few single characters here and there and it feels like I am still making forward momentum. I feel like this game is going to generate some interesting conversation at the end of the month.

Alligator Pears

Yesterday was a very strange day for me, largely because I was trying not to get too terribly involved in anything. With the two podcasts, and not really knowing the scheduling of the second one I stayed out of the mix for most things. This means that the vast majority of my time online was spent working on Botany. At this point I have managed to take it to level 35 which is the beginning of the more grindy levels. Thankfully I have for the most part a full allotment of leve quests to get me through them. Working on harvesting has become my “during podcasts” activity, because it is slow paced and proding and does not require much attention. So while recording both Bel Folks Stuff and Multiplaying I slowly worked my way through harvesting a ton of stuff… namely Alligator pears. I am not sure exactly what they are… but I certainly did manage to gather a dozen stacks of them. In truth I kind of expect they would look a bit like an avocado in real life.

Now I need to figure out what item I need for my level 40 Botany quest and start collecting that. So far that has been how I have leveled, I focus fire whatever item I need for the next quest and then when I collect enough of those I start doing Levequests. Botany seems so much more peaceful than mining was, and I guess it is in part because it almost exclusively takes place in the games extremely beautiful forest areas. There is just something relaxing about walking around, listening to the music and chopping down trees. Today however I really need to spend some time working on getting actual content in that can earn me poetics. I did take a break from the harvesting for awhile yesterday to run some new folks through Tam-Tara Deepcroft. Tanking low level content is always enjoyable, and it gives me a chance to break out my sword and board and paladin it up. The constant trickle of new players still manages to floor me, but everyone seems happy and well adjusted which makes me happy in turn.

#FFXIV #DarkestDungeon #Twitch

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 1

March 31, 2015March 31, 2015 by Belghast

A few days ago my good friend Rowanblaze tagged me in his post about Developer Appreciation Week 2015. To the best of my knowledge this event was actually started by Scarybooster, but I cannot for the life of me remember if I actually got a post in while it was going on. If not then this is something I absolutely need to remedy. This morning as a result my post is going to be a little contorted but I really enjoyed the format from Ravanel of Ravalation… so I am rolling with that. Thus begins my super contorted and rambling Developer Appreciation Week post.

Funcom Games – The Secret World Team

This game is absolutely phenomenal. I was lucky enough to get on board early and do one of the lifetime subscriptions and I have to say I have never once questioned that investment. Knowing that it is always waiting there for me to return to the world of the Templars and the Illuminati… makes me happy inside. While there are a lot of interesting things about the game, the part that always floors me is just how well written the quests are in this game, and how well the whole cinematic feel of them works. I greatly prefer silent protagonist games, because they allow me to substitute my own inner dialog into the scenes. What is awesome about TSW is they manage to do this is a way so that the silence feels like an answer. I desperately need to poke my head back in and try out the new combat changes, because the nightmare level content was ultimately what crushed the hopes of my group. From what I hear a lot of these rough spots have been ironed out.

Square Enix – Final Fantasy XIV Team

I am constantly amazed at just how damned good this game really is. Every detail of the game has a loving care applied to it. Once again it is the storyline that first sold me on the game. It gave me a series of characters that felt like my party in a traditional Final Fantasy game… and then made me care about each and every one of them.. yes even Thancred. What has kept me coming back however is just how good their content is, and how frequent their updates are. I’ve heard that the team is only around fifteen people… and that they are doing both the live patches and expansion development at the same time. I am floored that they can manage to crank out a new patch every month, and major patch every few months… all the while working on a brand new expansion? The way they manage to make content remain relevant to the players is pure magic, because I really enjoy running low level content with friends… and making it feel like it matters again. Last night they patched in the 2.55 content… and I am completely amped to log in and play it.

Turbine – Lord of the Rings Online Team

If there was a list of games that I wish I played more of, Lord of the Rings Online would be near the top. There is so much for me to enjoy in the game, even not factoring in the fact that I love the franchise behind it. The gameplay is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era, and more than anything it has always reminded me a bit of a modern updated Dark Age of Camelot. That said the part that has always stood out for me is just how well they have managed to create the world of Middle Earth… everything is how I had imagined it while reading the novels. There are so many moments like the above picture where I reach some fabled destination and I have to just stop and sit in awe that I am in this or that place. Another strange thing that I love about this game are the horses. They have the absolute best horse movement of any game. As you are moving around the horse feels right, which adds so much to the feeling that you are in a living breathing world… and not just a themepark.

Trion Worlds – Rift Team

This was the game that finally came along and successfully dislodged me after playing seven years of World of Warcraft, and that in itself is no small feat. What makes me love the game however is its class system. I love being able to mix and match bits and pieces of class trees to make something unique that does exactly what I want it to do. Especially from a tanking front, this game will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the first game to give me both charge and deathgrip in the same build. The raid content was absolutely insane, and I greatly enjoyed the times I was able to experience it. This is one of those games that I boot up every few weeks to poke my head in, especially now that it is free to play. I’ve spent a lot of its four year history with an active subscription, and there is just something about the world that keeps me coming back. With the impending release of the new Wardrobe system I am looking forward to popping back in and playing some more. Trion was the first team to make me believe that a company could keep a monthly content release schedule, and through it all they have created some very impressive work.

SOE/Daybreak – Everquest II Team

Everquest II for me is a tale of the path not taken. With EQ2 and WoW releasing at the same time, some of my friends went to EQ2, and I and the majority of my friends went to WoW. That said this has been one of those games that I keep coming back to so that I can re-experience this ball of nostalgia that is Norrath. This game has hands down the best world building of any game on the market. I love the world of Norrath 2.0 with all its detail and quirkyness. Sure it is not exactly how I remember it from the original Everquest, but that is part of the charm for me. Every now and then you will be knee deep in a dungeon, and you will see some little call back that makes you realize “oh my god this is that place” that you recall from your memory, changed over time and presented in so much higher fidelity. While I have issues with the combat system and likely always will… this is a game that I cannot seem to keep myself away from for long. Even today EQ2 is a sort of comfort food for me… where I will hang out inside and vege out on the couch dusting off my Shadow Knight and exploring Norrath with new eyes.

To Be Continued…

I feel like I have so many developers that I want to show my appreciation for… that I had to break these up into multiple posts. Tune in tomorrow as I talk about several more developers. Hopefully this will cause your own upwelling of nostalgia and end up with you posting your own thoughts in blog form. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to use my comment space for that same mission. There is so much negativity out there, that I believe completely in this notion of the Developer Appreciation Week. Reach out and show your appreciation to those games you love.

Moggle Mog Extreme

March 30, 2015 by Belghast

Bowling Aftermath

It feels like I have been on this sequence of strange posts lately, so this morning I am trying to get back to the normal swing of things. This weekend was spent mostly recovering from Friday night, and not in the way that you might think. We had a “team bonding” outing with my co-workers to go bowling, and it had been about a decade since I had last attempted to hurl a large marble down a wooden plank. We bowled three games, and it feels like that was one too many for me. The biggest issue I had was the fact that the shoes were absolutely awful. At some point they changed from what I knew as the standard bowling shoes to these strange velcro things that I never could get to fit well at all. I have a size 13 shoe, but my foot is not all that terribly wide at least not anymore.

I am not sure if they handed me a wide width or if they just make them insanely wide to accommodate lots of different feet but in any case my foot was sliding around like crazy in them. Normally I would be able to fiddle with the laces to get it tight enough to work for me. However the hook and eye velcro strap mess just would not synch terribly tightly. Leaving my foot sliding around in the shoe most of the night. At the end of the evening I had what felt like a stone bruise and it still hurts to flex my toes. Other than that the evening was rather enjoyable, apart from the fact that I have zero skill at bowling these days. The absolute best game for me was around 100, and I am not sure if I got any strikes. The thing I did learn is that I apparently throw the ball exceptionally hard. The lanes had a miles per hour readout saying how hard you threw each ball, and most of my coworkers were in the sedate range of 10-13 mph. The hardest I saw from me was 22.5 mph, and the slowest about 18 mph… apparently I was angry at the lanes.

Moggle Mog Extreme

From an accomplishment standpoint, the highlight of my weekend is definitely Saturday night before the podcast when we pulled together a raid. One of the fights that we held in almost a state of reverence is Good King Moggle Mog Extreme. It seemed like the pinnacle of difficult fights because it was so different from the normal version. Anytime we brought the fight up, it was quickly ushered away as being too much of a pain in the ass for us to try. Maybe it is the progress in turn 9, or maybe it is something else… but when it was brought up this weekend there was more of a chorus of “might as well” than anything. What makes Moggle Mog extreme so difficult is that you have a very limited window to perform the fight. At roughly 90% Mog stops taking damage from player attacks. Instead when any member of his “court” of Moggles dies, he saps his own life healing all Moggles to full health.

From a functional standpoint this means that you need to drop the health of every single Moggle before finally finishing one off. Two make this more complicated there is a tank swap mechanic, and at certain points during the fight the White and Black Mages will cast a spell that needs to be interrupted by dealing a damage to them. You get three rounds to lower Mog’s health, before he starts channeling Ultima, which will wipe the entire raid if it casts. Mog is also immune to any damage while any member of his Moogle court is alive. This means that on the final turn you have to make sure every single Moogle is down low enough to be able to finish them off in a few hits, and jump straight on the boss and burn like hell. I am not sure if it was on our third or fourth attempt but we managed to get everything to work just right and finished the fight. It feels extremely good to have beaten a fight that all of us had declared was “complete bullshit”.

Appleanche

I spent most of the rest of my in game time alternating between two activities… World of Darkness and Botany. In World of Darkness I have once again had zero luck in getting one of the two pieces of Dragoon loot that I need to drop. Right now I am down to the boots that drop from the very first boss, and the chestpiece that drops from the second boss. This makes for some demoralizing gameplay late in the instance when I know I have zero hope of getting anything cool apart from maybe a puff of darkness minion. Sunday is a notoriously bad day for running raids in any game, but it seems like this is doubly the case in Final Fantasy XIV. The worst was a dungeon where we ended up having to fight the Cloud of Darkness boss five times before we finally did things well enough to win and get our loot. That run was fraught with other issues however so it was not a huge surprise that we were failing at the end of the raid. I spent more than my fair amount of time tanking adds a a Dragoon. Hopefully I can get in tonight and maybe just maybe pick up a chest piece before the raid.

Saturday during the podcast and last night during the 90 minute season finale for The Walking Dead I worked on leveling Botany. My goal with trade skills thus far has been to brute force my way to 25 without the assistance of leves, while I have my recruit a friend helm experience bonus. Once I hit 25 I start working on leves allowing me to shoot up quickly from that point on. During the podcast I managed to hit 25, and then last night I started working on leves in the South Shroud area. Botany has one of the best named leves I have encountered called Appleanche where you are asked to pick a bunch of Sprite Apples from this grove within a set amount of time. Not sure why but that quest just makes me happy, and overall there is something amazingly calming about harvesting flowers and chopping down trees in this game. After a few hours of Botany I found it rather easy to get to sleep last night, so maybe that is something I should indulge at the tail end of the night every night.