Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 95 of 129

Deathknightly Values

December 15, 2014 by Belghast

Ogron Going Down

Last Thursday we struggled quite a bit with the Twin Ogron encounter. It felt so completely random that I could not quite grok how to deal with the fire. This weekend I resolved to fix this problem and did quite a bit of research to try and grasp exactly how the fire worked, because once we figured that out I figured we could easily down them. Yesterday afternoon I watched what felt like a dozen different videos until I finally found one that showed the fire clear enough for me to catch what exactly was happening. If you watch this video it clearly shows what happens to the fire when the axe lands on the ground. As such I created this handy visual aide for our raiders, because it seems as though the fire travels in the direction the axe’s handle is leaning. This means there is a relatively safe spot on the far side of the axe head.

By relatively safe I mean that you only have to deal with dodging fire from one of the axes. It seems like there is some time between when the first axe falls and the second axe falls, which also added to our confusion during the encounter. Essentially we need to move the raid behind the axe head and then be prepared to adjust to dodge the second axes incoming fire. Now the fire does not travel in a straight line, which also makes it seem more random, but instead arcs outwards in a curve, but not one steep enough to curve back on itself. My hope is with this tidbit of information we will rock the hell out of Pol and Phemos and take their candy. When I realized how it was working I was absolutely pumped… and I am sorry to anyone I tried to explain this to yesterday. I was a little over stimulated by the discovery, and probably made very little sense.

Deathknightly Values

The focus of my weekend gaming was to finish the push of my Deathknight to 100. Saturday night I managed to hit 99 which just left me a single level to push through on Sunday. The problem is my focus shifted from acquiring levels, to instead acquiring gear as Nagrand is really my last opportunity to improve my ilevel before being confronted with the choice of running dungeons. My side goal of course was to somehow manage to hit 615 ilevel before sitting foot in a single heroic to prove it could be done. My friend Cuppy said she managed to do it, but as I got further through Nagrand my heart started to sink. Each quest turn in that I did not get a blue or purple upgrade from was like a punch in the gut, because I knew more than likely I would not make my goal. When I dinged 100 last night I still had quite a bit left to go of Nagrand, but I continued to soldier onwards in search of items to bring up my ilevel.

After wringing every drop of potential gear goodness from the zone… I was still way short of my goal sitting at only 609, so not even heroic ready. I had one last shot at getting the level up there, because I had yet to do the quest that would give me a ilevel 640 ring. I queued as dps for normal Skyreach and the queue popped considerably faster than I was expecting. We steamrolled the place, and unfortunately I got no upgrades. I did however complete the quest for the ring and it took me to 612. I purchased a second ring which took my total “in bag” iLevel to 614, so one shy of being able to queue for LFR. Now one of the problems with switching zones every two levels is the fact that I did not do much faction work in Spires of Arak. This means I am shy of the honored required to buy the Arakkoa trinket. Once I get that faction up a bit, and purchase that trinket I should be able to queue for LFR… but I also raid tonight so not sure how all of this is going to work out. I doubt I will be able to get in on the free epic goodness of LFR before the reset tomorrow.

Hatch Phase

As I said above, tonight is our raid night in Final Fantasy XIV and I am hoping we are able to finally push past Turn 5 and get Twintania’s candy. From what I have heard this is the roughest content we will face until Turn 9, and I am okay with that. Mostly because I hope it means that turns 6-8 will be much faster progression than Turn 5 has been. Twintania is probably the single most complicated raid encounter I have ever faced, and I like it. It is kinda like having to learn five different boss fights, and as of last week we were finally up to the last phase which is reportedly the easiest to get through, or at least nothing compared to the twister phase. My hope is that tonight we can see enough of it to absolutely wreck her. Thankfully we have not come close to hitting the thirteen minute hard enrage for the encounter.

I realize at this point that Binding Coil of Bahamut and Turn 5 are quite literally a year old at this point, but it still feels super relevant. In fact there are large swaths of the FFXIV community that can’t do it. That has been the interesting thing about FFXIV raid content is that it remains difficult even with the Echo buff. I am perfectly fine not being on the bleeding edge of progression in this game, but I am super happy that we are still progressing in our own way. My real hope is that after struggling to finish this fight as a team… the various extreme mode primals are going to seem easy when we return to fighting them. We have learned to move as a group, and play off each others strengths… and quite literally have had a raid forged by fire. I am pumped to see what we can do during a “normal” fight, instead of this insane assemblage of phases.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

December 14, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra. Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding. I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam. It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content. Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point. When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits… I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions. Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions. Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding. This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again. All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast. As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion. I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison. I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week. In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week. Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction. Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion. We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison… but for some reason he could not accept the quest. So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up. While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do… start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins. More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them. The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point. After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall… which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout. He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion. We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags. So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it. I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing. I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills. During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot. I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable. Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100. Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world. I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version. While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker… I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too. I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards… you die a little inside each time you get a green. Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either. At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun. Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile. One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area. Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically… would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear? Better yet… why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up? I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic. I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.

Boogey Bested

December 12, 2014 by Belghast

Bladefist Banished

One of the cool features this expansion is that each of the raid difficulties shares a separate lockout. This means you can go to normal with one group, heroic with a a completely different group… and then mythic yet again with a different group. However for the case of our raid this also means that when we get a boss solidly on farm on Normal mode we can ramp up the difficulty and try it on Heroic as well. Before last night we felt we solidly had the mechanics down for Kargath Bladefist, as we managed to one-shot it this past Tuesday before pushing forward and doing the same to Butcher. Last night our raid lead decided before we returned to working on Brackenspore that we should at least give a few attempts at Kargath heroic. Turns out this was a pretty great idea because on the first attempt we managed to make significant progress.

One of the things I like about normal and heroic being the same mechanics is that it allows you to get the key concepts in the fight down solidly before moving up a difficulty level. Our biggest challenge seemed to be reacting fast enough, since everything the boss and his environment does is serious business. I was the first death because I managed to get knocked back into a flame pillar and just evaporated. Similarly we lost a lot of people to the berserker charge because in normal you can survive a tick or two while getting out of the way… but in heroic it straight wrecks you. On attempt four we managed to get our mojo working and downed him in what felt like a fairly solid and repeatable victory. Unfortunately I am not sure if anyone in the raid actually got loot, as we seemed to mostly get double gold.

Boogey Bested

Wednesday morning I referred to the next fight we worked on as the Brackenspore Boogey, and I still feel like this is an apt term. The entire fight is this awkard dance between the tank swaps, and the burning of the fungal creep, and even the placement of the raid next to the appropriate mushroom and burning down the add quickly. Each of those things can screw the raid up if not handled properly. I have found myself falling back into being a rather vocal member of the raid, and unfortunately its a role I am not sure I can stop from doing. When you lead a guild and a raid for as long as I have, you find yourself filling a vacuums of responsibility whenever you see them. I felt like it would help if I started calling various things out, since this fight is all about awareness of what is going on. So when I saw that the add had spawned, or the creep was getting too close to the boss… I was announcing this over Teamspeak. Hopefully our raid leader and crew as a whole does not want to throttle me.

The awesome thing is… we went from getting wrecked to wrecking things rather quickly. One of the positives about LFR is it gives you a time to work on mechanics when the overall risk is extremely low. You can pretty much ignore every single mechanic on LFR but we treated it Wednesday night as a dress rehearsal for the real fight. After Tuesday night I had some theories on how the tank swap needed to happen, and Wednesday night our two tanks refined these to glossy perfection so that last night that was just a non-issue. All that remained was dealing with the particular quirks of the fungal creep, pushing enough dps and interrupting on the add and dealing with mob positioning. The only problem with the fight as a whole is that it is insanely long. I am pretty sure our first try lasted around fifteen minutes, but that is mostly because we fought the moss longer than we really should have. Our second attempt ended with us downing the boss, and it felt extremely solid.

That Click Moment

If I had to sum up in one thing the reason why I enjoy raiding, it would be the “Click Moment”. There is something magical that happens that I still can’t quite explain, but I have watched it occur over and over. There is a clear moment when everyone in the raid grasps what needs to happen and just does it. You can go from wiping horribly one attempt, to everything going smoothly the next, and it is as though some collecting cog just happens to click into place between those two tries. I still find it phenomenal how a boss fight goes from utter chaos to a well oiled and repeatable machine in a single attempt. Sure there are some boss kills where you kill the boss in spite of yourself, our raids first Sindragosa 25 man kill was this way with us barely killing her as the last person got frozen. Most of them however there is this magical spark that takes a boss from impossible to farmable, and I still marvel each time I see it.

This week it felt like we reached that moment on three of the four bosses we downed, and quite honestly I feel like Tectus and Heroic Kargath are both repeatable… but more DPS race than anything else. Twin Ogrons on the other hand… we are still very much in the utter chaos phase. This fight has a lot of moving parts, with at least one of them feeling completely random. Every so often during the fight Phemos will throw down his weapon, and from it will radiate fire. The fire moves in a pattern that is not really predictable… or at least the problem is we have not quite groked how to predict it. It seems to spread first in a star pattern and then sidewind through the room unpredictably. Watching it while completely zoomed out it reminds me so much of Conway’s Game of Life simulation. I keep thinking that it cannot be as random as it seems… and I feel like the “click” moment for this fight will be whenever we reason out how the fire works. All in all however it felt like an amazing first week of raiding for me… and I am hooked.

The Kill Count

Normal Kargath
Normal Butcher
Normal Tectus
Heroic Kargath
Normal Brackenspore

I can’t wait for the reset so we can wreck everything all over again and start making some serious progress on Twin Ogrons. I feel like there is just a lot of research we need to do between now and then. I am also looking forward to Monday night in Final Fantasy XIV because I feel like we are going to down Turn 5 finally. We have functional mastery over all of the phases except the last one, and finally got to see enough of it to grok how it works. Now it is just a matter of pulling together all of the moving parts and claiming victory so we can move forward into the Second Coil of Bahamut. I guess I am a “Raider” again… and surprisingly I feel none of the frustrations that I did previously, even when we have struggled a bit to clear Turn 5. It seems like I am now in two different raid groups that are about the ideal mix of casual and serious so that I feel like I am not being chastised for screwing up… but at the same time feel like everyone is working towards the same goal. I am in a very happy place as a gamer right now.

L is for Loot Piñata

December 11, 2014 by Belghast

Kinder Gentler LFR

Last night we opted to enter the “Looking For Raid” version of Highmaul as a guild, similar to how we did Molten Core, since that made the entire experience so much less chaotic. We brought with us both tanks and a couple of healers, and since we have done the fights on normal now figured we would be able to push through any issues we came along. Oddly enough the LFR tool did not make one of us the leader of the group even through we accounted for 15 of the 25 slots. Instead it chose this shaman healer who’s name was some combination of “Faceroll” and “Ballerina” that I am sure he thought was exceedingly clever when he created the character. I say “he” because the actions and commentary felt like a “dudebro” playing the character.

Moments after we started clearing he started barking orders generally starting off with “alright you fuckfaces”. Moments later however he was gone from the raid. The beautiful thing about doing LFR as a guild is that you can pretty much rapid-fire vote kick someone and have more than enough votes for it to succeed. After that was over, the rest of the run went exceptionally smoothly. I kinda dig being able to act as a force of good in looking for group, getting rid of the toxic players when we see them. What I find amazing is just how willing people were to work within the parameters we set for them. We treated LFR like it was an actual raid, with marking locations to stand in and this made the entire experience go solidly and by the numbers.

L is for Loot Piñata

Maybe it is because we have done the normal version of this place, but god Looking for Raid seemed simple. As in it felt like you could straight up ignore every tactic and just keep mashing buttons until the bosses fell down. All told the actual combat time of the raid took maybe 20 minutes for three bosses. I saw plenty of people looting goodies, so hopefully lots of folks got nice stuff. The only problem I see is that there is little to no reason to do heroics right now. Sure you get 50 Garrison resources for your first heroic of the day, and a bag of gold, but it feels like they really have taken away all of the reason to actually group up for heroics once you are over ilevel 630. Previously all serious players had to do a handful of heroics a week to make sure they were capping out Valor points, but with that gone there is little to no reason to draw well geared players into the fray.

Quite honestly you can hit the LFR requirement of 615 relatively easily through doing the quests in Nagrand with a Dwarven Bunker giving you increased chance of getting blue and purple upgrades. As such I cannot see any reason at all for folks to actually do the heroic grind once the rest of Highmaul has been released. Unless the next part significantly ramps up the difficulty, this is going to be essentially Timeless Isle 2.0 in the form of a raid. Granted I don’t much care about people getting easy gear, in fact I am looking forward to it as I try and gear my army of alts. I loved the Timeless Isle for the ease of catching characters up. That said the heroic experience in this expansion is really good, and while difficult is fun to do with your friends. Maybe they are expecting heroics to be a guild only thing? I have a feeling we are going to see a pass that maybe starts adding in some reasons for doing things, because it feels like they completely ignored the reward part of “risk vs reward”.

Social Engineering

The problem that I can see is soon the queues for heroics will be insanely long, because Blizzard seems to be fundamentally bad at social engineering. I say this because I am playing another game that is exceptionally good at social engineering and making players WANT to run older content. Final Fantasy XIV has this long quest chain that involves giving players non-raiding ways to upgrade their main weapon. It starts with the Relic weapon, and each upgrade bumps up its ilevel and its stats. The most famous bout of social engineering comes into play when you reach the Atma farming step, which involves you going back to every zone in the game and running FATEs until an “Atma of the” item drops. The reason why this is most definitely social engineering is that they purposefully kept the ATMAs from dropping in the zones that were already natural FATE running hotbeds of activity. Thing is it works… there are now players in most every zone running FATEs as they work on the Atma weapon step for their characters.

Similarly they created the Nexus step that involves farming “light” from various activities like doing Hard Modes, Experts, and related large group activity. Additionally they created the concept of “bonus light” which targets certain encounters that have especially long queue times. When one of these bonuses is in place all these players come from out of the woodwork and start running it, I happened into Hard Mode Garuda during one of these periods and it was insane to see just how fast that encounter evaporated. Now with the latest step it involves running various hard mode dungeons until you get a specific item to drop, thus getting tanks and healers…. and everyone else to start queuing for these encounters. I realize that I am being engineered, but I don’t care because it works. It keeps the game thriving and vibrant and keeps the overall queue times low enough to allow me to do whatever content I need to do at the time. I never feel like I am being exploited, because they managed to have just enough of a reward to make the risk worthwhile.