Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 89 of 129

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

February 8, 2015 by Belghast

Banquets and No Caffeine

This has been a strange week for me, for several reasons but not the least of which has been my mission to try and stop energy drinks cold turkey. I have been less functional than I normally am, but I am hoping that at some point I will crest and things will start to get more normal. This morning seems to be the worst of it, or what I am hoping is the worst of it. When I went out for my normal early morning breakfast run, I was so damned tempted to buy a monster. Fortunately I stuck to my guns and just picked up a Dr Pepper instead. I think what has made the last two days so awful is that for one reason or another I have not been fixing coffee in the morning as per my usual routine. As such this morning I woke up with the worst splitting headache I have had in years, which I can only attribute to not having nearly enough caffeine in my system to sustain me.

Yesterday itself was a bit of an odd one as well. The bulk of the day was spent piddling around online and doing laundry other than my brief period of time recording Battle Bards. The highlight of the day was pretty much hanging out and talking with Syl and Jae for several hours. The low point was the fact that in the evening I had to go to an employee banquet. In the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal, and this was I think the fourth or fifth one I have gone to. The problem is… they are largely long drawn out awards shows with the exact same meal from year to year. The positive of this however is the fact that there is really great cheesecake. The negative is, most of the food tastes like it has been sitting out for hours. This years frustration is that they never came around with coffee after dinner, so I am not sure exactly what was up with the wait staff this year. They acted disorganized, when in the past they have always been a picture of lightning precision.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

The problem with having a banquet to go to meant that we would be getting home way later than normal. I gave my aggrochat crew a heads up, but Kodra sadly was just too sick to stay on and record. As a result we recorded the show with a very sleepy me, Ashgar, Rae and Tam. Granted Tam was probably not all that sleepy considering it wasn’t all that late for his newly pacific time zone self. For me we didn’t get started recording until 10 pm… and that meant 11 pm for Ashgar who got progressively less communicative as the show went on. Moments before we were about to hit record… Tam completely blew my mind. I’ve embedded the video above… the man in the videos hobby apparently is to make actual food… with doll sized utensils and then record it for YouTube. I had no real words for what I was seeing. As you are watching it… remember that he is putting this much effort into what is essentially a single spoon full of food.

When we finally recovered from that… we had a relatively normal show talking about Final Fantasy XIV and our defeat of Turn 6 and work on Turn 7 of Binding Coil of Bahamut. I break the pattern and discuss my experiences in Blackrock Foundry last week, and start a discussion about randomness in encounters and why it is both a good and frustrating thing. From there we delve into Tam’s faffing about in Elite: Dangerous. This reprises a conversation we have had before about his ultimate concept for a space game, where we all exist on the same ship, but can play vastly different roles. We decided in this grand space adventure he would be Wash, I would be Mal, and Rae of course would be Kaylee. I would love to have a game where pilot Tam could drop me off on a planet to explore while providing cover fire… then help me evac with all of loot I found, taking it to a near black market and unloading our spoils. Towards the end of the show we get into a discussion of the North American League Championship Series and how watching it has changed for Rae, Tam and Ashgar now that they also have a Fantasy League going on. It was a fun hour of conversation, albeit a very sleepy one.

I’ve Been Doing It Wrong

One of the more interesting tidbits that came out of last nights podcast is that apparently I have been playing Arcanist wrong all of this time. More so than that I have apparently been playing damage over time classes wrong in every game I have tried playing them. There have been few things I have hated more than playing a DoT heavy class, because the gameplay always felt slow and boring. What I had been doing all of these years was something relatively simple… I would send my pet to the target, apply my dots, and then use whatever weak nuke I happened to have to burn it down. I commented last night that I would rather level another Conjurer than play Arcanist. To which Tam was absolutely shocked… and he started to explain how he leveled where he ran around willy nilly and dotted everything in site up, letting Carbie fight to hold aggro while chain pulling everything. I tried this, in the middle of the podcast and damned if it did not work miraculously.

Truth is I simply do not think like a “finger wiggler” as I have always called them. I want to clash face to face with the mobs and burn them down one by one while holding aggro on everything else. That is my comfort zone, what I am used to, and the gameplay I always seem to return to. Arcanist and other dot classes apparently need to be played in a style that I had never thought about. Simply dotting up everything in sight and waiting for the dots to kill them while attacking other things. As Tam said, it is apparently easier to kill ten things at once than one thing… now knowing this I managed to get from 18 to 20 Arcanist with extreme ease in the amount of time it took to finish the podcast. This is just such a foreign concept to me, that it is taking awhile for me to grasp. So far it is working… maybe I will in fact have a Summoner/Scholar, the class that I never thought I would end up getting to max level.

Unlikely White Mage

February 5, 2015 by Belghast

Agendas

Yesterday a good friend and I were having a conversation and she said a certain phrase I have heard over and over before. “Everybody has an agenda”, which is something I have just taken at face value in the past. But this lead me down a line of thought that I had not actually travelled before. If everyone out there has an agenda… and this is pretty much just accepted common knowledge… then what does the world think my agenda is? I am out and about in the community on a daily basis interacting and mingling… but I wonder how many people think I have some grand ulterior motive? This lead me to assess what my actual Agenda is, and the only thing I could come up with is something along these lines.

I am a very simple monkey. My world pretty much revolves around making new friends and trying to recruit them into my zany extended family

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) February 4, 2015

To which I was immediately accused of being a cult leader… but really isn’t every good group at least slightly cult like? While I won’t be trying to convince everyone to wear matching tracksuits so that we can ride a comet… I am trying to convince people that it is cool to hang out with friends and share these games we way with one another. I feel like all of this starts with the fact that I grew up the only child of extremely busy parents. I am exceptionally good at entertaining myself, but I always felt jealous of the kids that had close neighbors, or siblings to play with. These days I try and surround myself with as many awesome people as I can find, and build a giant extended family of sorts. Being the whirling dervish of social media interaction that I am sometimes… folks could get the wrong impression that I am “up to something”. However in truth, I am just looking to hang out with interesting people. I approach every interaction like this person could be a new life long friend, rather than someone who could bury a dagger in my back.

Unlikely White Mage

Last night I had but one mission to accomplish. Upon logging out Tuesday evening, I was sitting roughly one third of the way into 49. White Mage has been the hardest class for me to level in Final Fantasy XIV in part because it is the least like the sort of character I normally play. I set down the path of leveling a Conjurer so that I could become a Paladin, and then just kept up with the process thinking that I had 2 tanks, 1 ranged dps, 1 melee dps… and the only thing I was really missing role-wise was a healer. Originally I simply kept leveling Conjurer so that I could get to level 34 and get Stoneskin… which is extremely useful for soloing as a Paladin. From there I figured I was close enough that I would go ahead and push for 50. Additionally over the course of running so many dungeons and casual raids in this game, I had accumulated quite a bit of healer gear simply by greeding on it. The final incentive came when I needed to spend down some of my soldiery tokens and opted to go ahead and purchase the level 110 White Mage weapon pictured in the image above.

As a result of all of this I got on last night, ran a guildhest, and two low level duty roulettes and finally reached my level. After sifting through my bags I managed to equip enough gear to get me to level 85, which is not too shabby gear wise. The hardest part of course was figuring out what my White Mage outfit would end up looking like. I finally settled on the Loyalist Bilaud dyed Morbal Green, with gloves, pants and boots from the Acolyte set and the awesome shades Cylladora made for me ages ago. I felt like I needed to go with something non-traditional since the white mage 110 weapon is a giant war mace… and I happen to like it. The end result is my take on a final fantasy battle priest, which is fitting considering I seem to spend as much time casting Stone II as I do healing. Largely I am just happy this push is over, because leveling as a Conjurer/White Mage is slow going. Chewing through every mob simply takes more time that I am used to from playing anything else. My only suggestion for future CNJ/WHM players… run it up first before you realize just how slow it kills things.

Ninja or Monk

At this point I am not sure what my next Final Fantasy XIV project will be. Right now my Rogue is 15 and my Monk is 33. Both classes are extremely fun to play, but I think I will probably spend more time at max level playing the Monk than I ever would the ninja. The Mudra system seems interesting, but it also seems like something that is extremely fiddly and likely to just piss me off… especially combined with just how “weak” survival wise the ninja ends up feeling. Mostly I am biased against Ninjas after spending so much time running raids and dungeons with random ones. Ninjas seem to either take no damage at all… or all of the damage at once. Healing Ninjas as my White Mage has been the bane of my existence over the last few weeks, and I really don’t relish putting anyone through that.

So you would think the decision is all wrapped up and I would be leveling Monk right? Well not quite that easy. Up until this point I had felt like the pugilist/monk play style was far less interesting than say a Dragoon, which is the reason why it has been lagging so far behind my other melee classes. On top of this… almost all of their gear sets look silly to me. If I played a monk, I would ultimately be stuck wearing the Infantry set for the rest of his life, because I really have not cared for any of the other sets I have seen. There is a set from Labyrinth of Ancients that looks amazing, but it is also one of the most hotly contested item sets in the game. Last night I ran a guildhest with an adorable Lalafell ninja… which got me thinking that since my goal in playing a Lalafell is to be adorable all the time… maybe Ninja is in my future. I guess time will tell which one I actually start playing. In any case I would love to finish out my Disciple of War classes so I can clean all of that gear out of my banks. Months ago I said I would like to hit 50 on all classes before the expansion, and with my raid schedule in World of Warcraft that is never going to happen. Maybe I will set that goal a bit lower and target finishing out all of the Disciple of War classes before the expansion.

Extreme Gardening

February 3, 2015 by Belghast

Istanbul was Constantinople

The strange news keeps happening this year, as yesterday we found out that the ever ubiquitous Sony Online Entertainment… is no more. As you can see from the picture swiped from twitter… they wasted no time taking down the trappings of the old world… and are now ushering in the name Daybreak Game Company. All of this happened because the great Sony mothership sold off SOE part and parcel to a technology investment firm. The Columbus Nova Technology Partners owns several companies somehow connected to the tech industry, be they websites, applications or hardware manufacturers. The mix of companies is rather bizarre with the only two that I recognize are the once king of media streaming Rhapsody and the task site Fiverr.

What will this mean for gamers you ask? Quite honestly I have no clue. I initially thought this was going to be a technology grab as they would gobble up and sell off parts and simply discard the rest. However it seems as though CNTP has held several of the companies in their portfolio for awhile now, so maybe they have a much longer ranged end game. Hell for all I know someone in the company was an Everquest fanboy back in the day and has always wanted to own the company behind the game. Essentially this isn’t the end of the world for SOE fans, and it is far too soon to make any predictions. If you are old enough to remember… SOE has not always been SOE. Once upon a time was a smaller company called Verant Interactive… and even before that Redeye Interactive. The ever outspoken Smedley took to twitter and had this to say…

answering a few questions people have emailed me
1) All our games are still up and will continue to be despite our new name.
2) Yes, we want to bring our games to Xbox One in addition to PS4.
3) Station Cash doesn’t change at all (though we will be rebranding it soon here).
4) We’re still making Everquest Next 🙂 nothing has changed.

Extreme Gardening

For various reasons, be it Tam moving across country… or Pax South… or simply a lack of the right roles we have struggled to pull together our Monday night raid proper to work on the Second Coil of Bahamut. As a result last night was our first time working on Turn 6 in what I believe is over a months time. It seems as though once the fight started we remembered much of the fight and were able to pick up essentially where we left off. For those unfamiliar with the encounter, the boss is a giant Ochu, aka those angry tentacled plant things. Rafflesia has a ton of mechanics that you have to deal with… for starters she throws down bulbs that become expanding briar patch rings. On our first attempts we tried dpsing these down but quickly realized that the goal was to focus down only specific ones. As such we simply started making sure the center of the room was clear of briar patches, which means the rest of the room is very full of nasty spikey bits.

The hardest part of the fight is the “devour” dance. Every so often she marks a target to be devoured, and then will turn to eat that player sucking in everyone else that happens to be in the frontal cone. How we started mitigating this is by having that player run through right before they are to be devoured… then that player and the tank dash through as the devour happens. When it works right no one gets eaten… when it works badly… well potentially everyone can get eaten. Last night more or less was us cleaning up this process, and then later getting players with the “drop of honey” debuff purposefully devoured to cleanse them. I was proud as hell of the progress we made because after a single night of tries over a month ago… we still managed to come in and finish out Turn 6 in only three attempts, giving us plenty of time to move on to Turn 7 last night.

Statue Tag

Turn 7 means getting to play with a very angry Lamia named Melusine. Some of you might remember the boss name from Final Fantasy V, but far as we can tell there is no actual direct correlation as far as mechanics go. As the sub heading goes, this fight is in many ways a game of statue tag… in that she periodically casts an ability that causes three players at a time to turn whatever is standing directly in front of them to stone. Now one can avoid freezing anyone by turning off the edge of the platform… however there are these huge lumbering adds that in theory need to be frozen in place by a player with the debuff. This means from the moment it casts you have seven seconds to get into range of a statue and freeze it in the right place. A few moments after placing a statue, she will pick a target in the raid and give them “Cursed Shriek” that functions much like the frontal cone “Cursed Voice” except it is an AOE that can literally hit the entire room. The player with shriek then has to run behind one of the frozen giants and LOS the raid.

This would all be relatively simple if not for the fact that she is picking targets in the raid at random and dropping a big assed fire AOE on them. This means that at all times players should be spread out to avoid taking damage from multiple AOEs at the same time. As a result when the Shriek goes off, it will inevitably freeze some players. Thankfully the petrification fades on its own… but while stuck there you cannot react to anything. There were a few times when I got frozen… and then got the cursed voice debuff… forcing people to run out of my frontal cone because I could not aim the ability away from the raid. To make matters worse… she starts lighting up sections of the round platform we stand on… turning them into a field of angry damage over time death. So as all of this dancing is going on… we also have to watch placement on the floor. All told… we did pretty damned well last night on our first night of attempts. On our best try we managed to get her down to 19% before things fell apart largely because we were not prepared for the final phase. I have a feeling next Monday we will take her down and move on to Turn 8.

Much Darkness

February 2, 2015 by Belghast

Very White Mage

I won’t say that the sparkle is gone from World of Warcraft, because I am absolutely looking forward to starting Blackrock Foundry on Tuesday. However the shine has diminished enough that I no longer have any real pressing needs to spend non-raid time doing. As a result I have been spending considerably more time lately in Final Fantasy XIV. While I was at Pax South the 2.5 patch dropped and I have course have been working my way slowly through all the new stuff. Last Tuesday I was getting dangerously close to the 2000 soldiery cap, so I opted to purchase another of the 1300 soldiery level 110 weapons. Now I have one of these already for my Warrior, Bard and Dragoon… but rather than purchasing it for the Paladin my other 50… I instead opted to purchase it for my White Mage. Problem there is that my White Mage was only level 45 at the time of purchasing it. As such I now kind of feel like I should finish leveling, and for most of the weekend that is what I set my mind to doing.

I figured I would solve two problems, namely that I had been out of Venture tokens for months… and I miss running Quick Exploration ventures. For the uninitiated this game has a strange banking and auctioning system that revolves around the hiring of NPCs called retainers. Some time ago they added in the functionality to send your retainers out on missions for you… very similar to how the garrison mission system ended up being. One of these is called Quick Exploration, in which your retainer brings back something completely random. It could be something amazing like a rare primal weapon, or it could be something absolutely useless like fish glue. I spent most of my day piddling around doing levequests which have a chance of rewarding venture tokens but at the same time reward not too shabby experience. At the beginning of the day I was 45 and at the end I am almost 48… so making slow but steady progress. Probably going to start doing some beast tribe dailies tonight to mix things up.

Much Darkness

Syrcus Tower had been a thing for the majority of the time we have been back in the game. Which as we are realizing was like six months ago. One of the big additions in the 2.5 patch is the conclusion of the Crystal Tower series of raids, The World of Darkness. This only serves to further confuse me since WoD now means World of Darkness the dungeon, World of Darkness the pen and paper setting or the aborted mmo… or of course Warlords of Draenor. For the uninitiated the Crystal Tower series follows for the most part the theme of Final Fantasy 3. These are what I often refer to as the “casual raid” content and reward some nice “catch up” gear for players. In a Crystal Tower raid you are part of an 8 player full party, which is then part of a 3 full party alliance… making 24 players taking on the content. We have long joked that since 4 players is a Light Party, and 8 players is a Full Party… then 24 players should have been a Heavy Party or something similar.

At this point we have run Syrcus aka part two… so much we can literally sleep walk through it, so it was really refreshing to have to struggle through this raid. In fact we flat out wiped on the first encounter because of so much craziness going on. Each encounter has a laundry list of things that you need to watch out for or react to. Everything in the place just looks gruesome. I took a moment to snap a picture of this boss, which looked brutal but ended up being one of the easier encounters. This is another first and last boss are the worst scenario, but I have to say the Cerebus fight in the middle was pretty frustrating. I think a large part of that was the chosen strategy our group decided to employ. I don’t want to spoil the mechanics, but for folks who have ever fought C’thun it is going to feel fairly similar.

To some extent I forgot that we were back under loot rationing and rolled on a dragoon piece winning it. Normally speaking it is faster to queue as dps, and I just roll greed on the warrior items. The Final Fantasy XIV loot lockout system is fairly unique in that you can run content as often as you like, but you can only receive a single piece of gear. Granted both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower have had this restriction lifted for some time, but I forgot that World of Darkness being brand new would still have it in place. This is both good and bad, in that when you get a piece of gear you can stop running it for the week. But if you need only ONE MORE item… it becomes maddening when you cannot manage to get it drop, and keep running it over and over each week. I am not in a horrible place gear wise on my warrior so I guess it doesn’t matter that much that my first piece of World of Darkness loot went to the Dragoon.

So Zombie

Another activity this weekend is that I patched up H1Z1 and decided to pop in for a bit to give it another shot. I am still on the Carebear server Willamette and was surprised honestly that there had not been a rollback of any sort from my previous character. In the above picture I feel like I kinda looke like Nes from Earthbound had a really bad day. Overall it was more enjoyable because the world was populated with “stuff”. When I last played I logged out in a small town, and inside a house that was well fortified. Upon logging back in… the house was no longer well fortified but thankfully I did not get swarmed. In fact I watched a zombie completely ignore me and run chasing off after a deer, which admittedly was rather comical. A lot of things about the game seem to have improved drastically, like the fact that damage against zombies seems more predictable… and less likely for me to flat out end up dead as a result.

When I last played I kept looking for items in cabinets, trashed cars, etc… but apparently “container loot” was bugged… meaning the only items to be found were ground spawns. This time around I managed to find a backpack, craft a bow and arrow, and find lots of food… making my chances of survival not entirely dependant upon eating three million blackberries. I still found water something difficult to find, so I need to do some research to find out what other sources I can use for it. I know you can fill a bottle if it is raining… but not sure if you can go stand in a stream and fill a bottle as well. In any case I plan on popping my head in again this week as time allows because the game is starting to feel less alpha.