Final Fantasy XIV

Schedule Conflicts

The strangest thing about being on a lengthy break is just how contorted your schedule ends up getting.  In part I guess I need the normal weekly rhythm to make me feel like the world is right.  Last night for example we had a raid in Final Fantasy XIV, but since I did not go to work that day I almost completely forgot that it was a thing.  Similarly I am going to struggle to remember that I have a raid tonight in World of Warcraft because of the same exact problem.  There is a primus song that gives us the wisdom “Weekends don’t mean quite so much when you’re unemployed, cept for the fact you get to hang out with your workin friends”.  The same can essentially be said for week days too when you are on vacation, as everything feels like some extremely extended weekend.

This morning for example we almost completely forgot about setting the trash out to the curb.  In fact were it not for my wife reminding me we probably would have been screwed.  For some reason I ended up sleeping in until almost 9:30 this morning, which is why this post is getting out the door so late.  I feel there needs to be a term for this, since we have “Jet Lag” for when you cross multiple time zones…  we need “Holiday Lag” or something similar for when your days no longer have the same meaning that they used to.  I am not really complaining mind you, since I am not at work and getting to lounge comfortably in my fuzzy pants at 11 am.  Things could be considerably worse, but man it is strange to get used to.

One More Bard

I had to share this photo today.  Once again it is me and the amazing Ayla and Joren Noye, dancing around in our holiday best.  I have actually glamoured my bard gear to look like last years holiday set since it kinda reminds me of Link from the original Legend of Zelda when you have the red armor right before you take on death mountain.  I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel that goofy things like this happen in our housing neighborhood.  What is even more awesome is that Ayla and Joren are going to go through the new Eternal Bonding ceremony on New Years day, and I was invited…  as well as anyone from the free company.  It should be awesome to see and I think we get a pet for participating.  At some point I need to make my way into game and work out what I am going to wear for an outfit.  I do have the tuxedo somewhere, but I kinda want to create my own custom spin on it.  Wondering what the Tuxedo jacket looks like with the Soldiery Kilt.

We lacked the numbers last night to do anything of major significance… so instead we decided to run a Syrcus Tower as a FC.  I wanted to run as my bard since that is the character that needs gear… and since there are always more bards in a full party I wanted to be able to roll need.  This however gave us the three bards in our party once we randomed in a couple of players.  We kinda wrecked the damage on everything, and our group was always the first to finish whatever adds we had spawned on us.  This was true even on Zande when the non-FC bard managed to get locked out of the final fight.  Our comets were still the first to go down in every round, and we ended up helping the others dps theirs down as well.  Sadly no bard gear dropped, but it was a fun and fast run without any of the normal bullshit that happens in Syrcus.

Ranged State of Mind

In truth I have been playing my Bard quite a bit, and the nostalgia of Warlords of Draenor has even lead me to break back out Lodin my Hunter in World of Warcraft.  There is a strange sense of nostalgia playing him, because in truth I have not taken playing him seriously since vanilla.  I’ve talked about it before but Lodin was the raid main I never intended to play, and as such as soon as I got to Burning Crusade he was quickly abandoned.  Since I have brought back Belghast my Warrior out of retirement… it feels like it is also fitting to dust off Lodin.  Right now he is 89 and sitting in Townlong Steppes, so my hope is to finish leveling him to 90… equip the set of Timeless Isle gear I have waiting on him to make the first little bit of Draenor easier… and then work on leveling him to 100 next.  My enjoyment of him as a whole improved exponentially when I got Arcturis the spirit beast bear my last time playing him.  I’ve always liked running around with a dwarf and a bear… and Arcturis is really an amazing creature.

I think part of what excites me about playing a Hunter again is the introduction of the Lone Wolf talent.  I have always hated having a pet while dungeoning or raiding.  They always seem to do exactly the thing I don’t want them to do at the moment.  As such I’ve always personally found that raiding with something that you don’t have direct control over a liability.  That said I love having a tanky pet while leveling and farming, because at that point it is like having a two player party…  just one that you are controlling both halves of.  The Lone Wolf talent seems to be the best of both worlds… it lets me dungeon and raid as a pure marksman without the need to fiddle with pet mechanics, but also wander around the world as an amazingly efficient team.  Much the same was as Gladiator made me way more interested in Warriors…  Lone Wolf does the same for me and hunters.  Now I just want to get leveled up so I can see if it is as enjoyable as I think it will be.

Carabiner Failure

Several years ago I picked up a cheapy Carabiner in a hardware store and started using it as a key chain.  I liked it because I could hang my keys on my pocket or anything else for that matter when I had my hands full, and that I could easily separate out my house keys, and both sets of our car keys as needed.  The spring in the original one got loose and I replaced it with the black one that I have currently.  Over the last few months I had a few incidents where a key fell off in my pocket but I didn’t think much about it, that is until this weekend.  Saturday we took my Mother in Law to Joplin and we spent pretty much the entire day running around town.  Joplin is roughly two hours away for us, and it is just different enough from the normal pace to make it interesting.  While in Joplin we hit a bunch of different stores and even spent time in the mall, so it was an absolutely packed and busy day.

When we were walking out to the car at Sams Club our final stop…  my heart sank as I realized that my keychain “felt funny”.  Sure enough I was missing the key to my Jeep, but the problem is I had no clue where it might have slipped off.  We looked around the parking lot and didn’t see it at all.  We traced our footsteps back to the store we were in before Sams thinking it might have fallen off there in the parking lot also.  Essentially we had no luck, and were about to simply chock it up to being a $150 mistake…  given that is roughly what it takes to get a new key made for my jeep given it is one of those combo keys with the remote built in.  Yesterday while running errands my wife called around to the various stores we had been to, to see if anyone had turned in a key.  Sure enough at Sams they had a grungy key matching the description of mine.

Yesterday was an extremely strange day.  I had been up until 2 am the previous night working on the podcast, and then was up at 8 am that morning working on it again.  After errands my wife went off with her sister to visit her mother again…  and we had tentatively made plans to go today to Joplin. I was living in this strange zone of sleep deprivation, where things seemed like good ideas.   So in my lack of wisdom… I decided to drive by myself the two hours to Joplin and two hours back… on what was one of the dreariest days imaginable.  I have to say it was a rough trip, but I made pretty good time and acquired the key that was in fact mine.  I finally crashed last night around 9 am… and then was back up this morning at 4:30 because my wife was upstairs watching Law and Order…. and I kept hearing the “Doink Doink” sound.  Pretty much as soon as I finish writing this post I am laying back down, however I did manage to get back my keys which is pretty awesome.

Garrison Leveling

Since the launch of Warlords of Draenor I have managed to level two of my stable of characters to 100, but even more than that I have managed to push up most of my level 90s to at least 91 while unlocking their Garrisons.  As such this has allowed me to flip through them each day running missions and doing crafting content, giving me access once more to having all available tradeskills.  I thought nothing much about this until the other day when my Paladin dinged 93 from completing follower missions.  I guess I knew I had been gaining experience from my Garrison, but I did not really think about it being much if anything.  Turns out that you could in theory level your alts entirely through doing Garrison content.  In fact I am managing to keep a stockpile of gear to level into on my paladin at least, so if you had the patience of a saint you could in theory gear a character to epics doing nothing but daily quests.

There is just something strange about that thought process, considering it is just about the most passive way to level that I could imagine.  That said you are managing to get a bunch of incidental experience each time you clear out your mine, or harvest your herb garden.  By the same token each follower mission rewards you similar experience to actually completing a quest.  I just find it so strange that Blizzard decided to implement this system, because it seems like such a departure form the way things have worked in the past.  Granted I expect fully to actually level my alts for real in the near future, but it is nice that I am slowly creeping forward on each of them as I swap between them each day queuing more work orders, and follower missions.

New Class Footage

I have not talked much about Final Fantasy XIV since monday’s post, but there has been a bunch of news floating around the interwebs as this weekend was the Fan Festival in Tokyo.  It seems at this point all of the new classes have been revealed.  We have known about the Dark Knight for some time, and I fully plan on switching to that as my main job when it is released.  On top of that we now know that the healer is going to be the Astrologian, which looks to be some sort of healer that heals through the use of Tarot cards.  The gun class is in fact one that Yoshi P had hinted at some time ago as being one of his favorites, the Machinist.  In both cases they look pretty slick and have a lot of people excited about them.  The Machinist feels like it is going to be a slow firing blunderbuss type class which may or may not be all that enjoyable to play… seems like the cooldowns on attacks might be frustrating.

The most important thing to me is that they finally showed off some footage of each of the classes.  The Dark Knight looks like everything I possibly hoped it would be.  Ashgar and I joked that while it makes me very happy… it is likely going to make Tam very sad… since he seems to really dislike random spikey bits on things.  That said I personally find it amazing, and the animations may just top Warrior, although I have yet to see anything that really tops Steel Cyclone.  I love the way two handed classes feel in FFXIV, because there is a certain heft to the movements, like the weapon is extremely heavy and difficulty to wield.  I feel like the Dark Knight is going to let me live out my “Tiny Odin” fantasies even more than I can now as a Warrior.  I really look forward to seeing more information about the actual attacks that these classes can do, but I am sold… and am more than ready to throw my money at the screen.

Hitting Heroics

I guess I have given the wrong impression over the last few posts.  I have nothing against Heroics, in fact I ran the shit out of them over the first few weeks of Warlords of Draenor.  That is of course how I geared up to 630+ for raiding purposes.  I would have been royally screwed without the various heroic, warforged and socketed pieces I picked up along the way.  With my alts however I was trying a mostly academic experiment to see if you could go directly into looking for group without actually having set foot in a Heroic.  I personally could not, but in theory if you had slightly better luck than I did…  you might just be able to do it.  That said when faced with a choice between furthering this little experiment, and actually being able to run LFR this week before the reset…  I chose the path that would let me run LFR.

When a guildie was asking for folks in guild chat to run a daily random, I signed up and for the most part it went smoothly.  By that I mean I did not seem to screw anything up, and managed to push out sufficient dps.  We have done enough of these by now that they pretty much always go smoothly, even when it involved two of us playing on alts.  I managed to pick up a neckpiece off the first boss, and a nice pair of shoulders off the guaranteed piece from the final boss.  Combined this gave me enough of a boost to be able to queue easily. which I did late in the evening.  I managed to get into the LFR after about 10 minutes and the entire thing was over in about 20.  From there I netted a pair of boots, so I am well on my way to being mostly viable on this character.

Twintania Down

The highlight of the evening however is that we managed to push across the threshold and defeat Turn 5 in the Binding Coil of Bahamut… aka Twintania.  The night as a whole started off a bit strange, because due to him moving and needing to finish packing…  Tam was not available.  This meant we had to pull things together without him…  something we are not exactly experienced in doing.  Thankfully Kodra was a responsible adult and got us all going.  We had a slightly different makeup  than normal, which meant among other things dual White Mages instead of a White Mage and Scholar.  While both White Mages healed their little butts off… the difference was noticeable especially when both healers were busy mitigating mechanics like conflagration.  It is kinda hax to have a healer fairy constantly dumping out heals even whenever its master is otherwise occupied, and when that goes away it is noticeable.

It took us roughly an hour to get through to the final phase cleanly with everyone up and no one in jeopardy.  When we finally downed the fight it felt really repeatable… which is good because we are likely going to repeat it pretty often.  Firstly Tam needs to defeat Twintania to be able to progress into the Second Coil of Bahamut, but secondly I have a feeling that we would all really like to have Turn 5 weapons at least for glamour purposes.  I feel really damned proud of our group.  All told it took us four nights of attempts to down her, and that is saying alot that the fight is still this tough even with the echo buff.  I cannot fathom what being on the bleeding edge feels like in Final Fantasy XIV… but I am super happy to be following along a year behind and enjoying the content with my friends.

Screenshot Failure

In my Boy Scout days, there was an entire troop of special needs adults that camped near us.  We had developed a bond with their scoutmaster since he was from a neighboring town, and over time we got to know all the scouts from that troop pretty well.  There was one named Rusty, who was constantly carrying around an old Nikon SLR camera snapping photos.  He would excitedly coo to himself “wooooboy that was a good one”, after each photo he would take.  After watching him take photos the entire time without ever reloading film, my dad a professional photographer happened to look at the counter on the camera.  There was no film at all in it, and the simple act of taking the photos made him feel happy.  Last night I was apparently Rusty, because while we had this epic night of raiding… and Cyl and I looking adorable in santa costumes…  I found out much to my frustration at the end of the night that not a single screenshot was saved.

For some time I have had this elaborate setup where all of my screenshots regardless of game got dumped into a single directory.  This makes the morning routine of blogging and snagging screenshots for said blogs much easier.  As a result for years I ran Fraps, and it just worked flawlessly.  However when I started streaming, I had to find something that did not have a negative interaction with OBS.  For that I have relied on DXTory, but lately it has been acting flaky as hell.  There was an issue with it where leaving it running in the background would cause it to stop listening to keypress events, and therefore not recording screenshots.  So last night before the raid I stopped and restarted it… making sure it was correctly bound to the Final Fantasy XIV process.  However at the end of the night… after taking so many wouldbe awesome screenshots…  the directory was empty.  I guess for the time being I will go back to FRAPS since I am not really streaming much anyways…  but just hoping that some of our guildies got some good shots.  The picture of Twintania down was captured by Ashgar, who gladly provided it for this post.