MMORPG Archives - Page 367 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Pugilism

September 3, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land… I am somewhat awake and once again sitting at the keyboard in the morning. I know that over the holiday weekend I was a slacker and ended up logging late in the day for two days… but now it is time to return to reality and as such the morning posts begin once more. All in all it was a pretty good Labor Day weekend, we ran out and did quite a few things and I managed to get in a decent amount of playtime in on various games. I even managed to hit the suggested point in the NDA title, so I call the weekend as a whole a success.

Another Cool Find

Yesterday my wife went shopping with her mother and sister and I pretty much stuck around the house doing laundry, changing the ferret cage, and playing a lot of Final Fantasy. Right now there is a lot of closeout going on at the various Wal-mart locations around us, and she said she would check the ones in Joplin if they ended up there. I had honestly pretty much forgotten about it when I got a series of texts asking about various sets. I still think it is so damned cool that she is more than willing to feed my addiction to all things Lego.

At the first store there were many sets that I already had, and one that I had picked up at our store… but in amongst the various heavily marked down boxes was a gem. The Gungan Sub is a set I have thought was cool for some time, but it had an $80 pricetag that like all the bigger sets makes me not willing to pick them up. However yesterday she found it for only $40 so it was a definite buy especially considering this one is another out of print set from 2012.

This apparently is a re-release of a model by the same name that came out in 1999 for the release of the Phantom Menace. It looks like the model has been improved in every way, and in addition there is the first Queen Amidala minifig which is pretty sweet looking. Of course in the travels my wife found lots of stuff for herself, including a bunch of scarves that were on clearance and a few tops. It sounds like she had a good time hanging with her family, but I still think it is awesome that she thought to check the Legos and actually found some.

Pugilism

Now that I managed to get to 30 on my main class and pick up the Warrior job I have backed down a bit from pushing through the levels. One of the frustrations with specialization is that you can no longer access all of the cross class abilities. So by switching into Warrior I lost access to all the nifty toys I had from my Lancer sub class. As it stands currently, Warriors only have access to cross class abilities from the Gladiator and Pugilist classes. Since there are quite a few good low hanging fruit in the Pugilism tree, I decided to swap over and run up a few levels there.

I have to say I enjoy the way pugilist feels. In many ways it reminds me of the way the martial arts hero felt in City of Heroes. You have lots of awesome kicks and punches and a really interesting combo system. Basically how combos work in this game is that when you hit an ability, it will highlight the next ability in sequence… and if you press it you get some special added effect. The problem is if you miss the second attack, it is a lost opportunity.

With the Pugilist, each attack applies a short term buff to your character, and this buff is what controls the ability to proceed through to the next attack. This means even if you fail to hit the target with the second attack, there is always a chance to pull out a second attempt at the attack and proceed down the combo tree. Additionally they get a third step in their combo building process amazingly fast, within the first few levels. This makes the class design feel extremely responsive early on in the leveling process.

Right now my goal is to hit level 12, which will give me access to a few really nice cross class abilities. First we have Featherfoot, which increases evasion by 25% for 15 seconds. Next we have Second Wind, that is a variable heal that builds off attack power. Lastly we have Internal Release, which increases Critical Rate by 30% for 15 seconds. I have heard that the Marauder ability Berserk which increases attack power by 50%, will greatly buff Second Wind. While Berserk keeps you from using special attacks for 30 seconds after its duration… it could be a handy combo in a clutch situation where you are tanking and need a large heal NOW.

Primetime Patching

At the point of posting about the prime time patch, I had not really don’t the time conversion myself. Essentially the “Wednesday patch” is actually a Tuesday evening patch for the United States. I feel as though a million oceanic players are reveling in the frustration saying “see what it feels like”. The maintenance period is essentially 7 pm to 1 am central time, so pretty much encompasses the entire playable time period I would normally be in a game. All will be forgiven if this fixes the issues and we can finally stop the “1017 shuffle”.

I heard an interesting theory about what is happening to the servers and why they cannot support any more players. The theory states that it is not actually a problem with the individual shards themselves, but a problem with not having enough resources on the “instancing server”. The game makes constant use of throwing players into instanced scenes in the game as you complete some of the games more epic quest moments. This additionally is supposedly the same server that is used by every dungeon in the game. The majority of player disconnects involve going into or coming out of an instanced area.

The theory further poses that it is this instance infrastructure that was just too small to support the current deluge of players. This server was supposedly scaled for around 100,000 concurrent players, whereas we have well over that on a given basis. This is also why in the final beta test, before they imposed the caps… the main issue at hand was the complete and total failure of the instance system halting players from progressing in their quests. If this is in fact the case they may literally be able to throw servers at the problem…and after this maintenance all may be resolved. I really hope this ends up the case… because the game is far better than its shitty infrastructure shows.

Wrapping Up

Well it is time for me to take the trash out, feed the cats and get on the road. I hope you have a great short week ahead of you. My hope is that no real crisis arise and I can get some things knocked off my extremely long list. More than likely tonight I will be back in Rift, as I am sure the guild thinks I have fallen off the face of the earth. Looking forward to trying to get some more dungeons going this Wednesday for guild night. Crossing my fingers that the maintenance fixes everything, and I will be able to play FFXIV at will, and not feel like I need to play it whenever I can actually connect to the game servers.

Warrior Get!

September 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good afternoon folks… I have been a horrible slacker this morning and am just now sitting down to blog. Quite honestly… I feel like crap again… even more so than I did yesterday morning. The allergy thing is kicking my ass… right now my lungs and head feel like they are full of concrete. I rolled out of bed around 9 am and have been moping around the house since. Essentially it feels like the seasons are all jacked up… this is the way I normally feel mid July.

State of FFXIV

FFXIV_ReviewOfHeadStart

I am just starting off this post with a reminder… that the current state of Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is bad. The game is fully playable and really damned enjoyable if you can make it into game. However at least once a night one of us gets essentially permanently locked out for the evening. Making it through the login tries as shown above takes brute force and luck. This weekend has honestly been far worse than anything since the last night of the head start. The lobby server and JP and EU/US realm lists are taking a dump on a regular basis, so it is by sheer luck that any of us are making it in to play the game at all.

So once again… I highly suggest that you DO NOT BUY THE GAME YET. Give it a month or so, right now Square seems to be working on fixing things… but they are doing so at a glacial pace. Supposedly we will have a all realms maintenance on Wednesday to add resources to the servers. The bad thing is that essentially it is happening during primetime for the United States. I hope that this remedies some of the issues, but they could have done much better timing wise. Considering like 90% of the players are in EU/US… timing it in a way as not to convenience the Japanese players only further cements my believe that Square in general could give zero shits about the US/EU player base as a whole.

I have heard through the blog and twitters verse that people are hunting from store to store trying to find a copy. Seriously… save yourself the headache and wait until they restore digital sales. We each have our preferred methods for getting through the login lottery. Yesterday evening I set up my “spam 0 over and over” macro and used the time to clean my office and break down a few dozen Lego models into parts. As I was finishing up and cleaning the top of my desk with a wet wipe I got through. Others seem to try for 30 minutes and then go off and do something else. Whatever the method is… you are far better just waiting until you don’t have to jump through the egregious hoops.

Bowl of Embers

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One of the big problems right now in the game is there are a large number of absolute bottlenecks that prevent you from moving forward. The first of these is the “Bowl of Embers” quest line that leads to an instance. I am going to try my damnedest not to spoil anything, because the instance is really damned cool and feels extremely epic. However you have to do it with a well balanced 4 man group. Once again we have the same problem in FFXIV as we have always had in the games leading up to this point. DPS is simply more popular than Tanks and Healers, and since leveling a healer is fairly difficult… they are FAR rarer than tanks are.

As a result there are literally hundreds of players bottlenecked by not being able to get this quest completed. The most jacked up thing about it is… you are offered no more quests ANYWHERE until you finish this one. I got my way to the quest, and then continued leveling as I didn’t have a guild group handy. I managed to push my way from 15 to 20 doing nothing but my hunting log quests and guildleaves. I thought the game got super sparse never realizing that I was being held back by not having done the Bowl of Embers.

Upon completing this one quest… there were quests everywhere waiting on me. One of my friends decided to take it upon himself to queue as a healer one night while we were all out questing. One poor thaumaturgist had been waiting in the bowl area for 3 hours… not realizing she could leave the area and continue playing the game while queued. So she had literally been just sitting there waiting on the queue to pop all that time… getting more and more frustrated as each hour passed. So far this is the worst thing about the game play that there are roadblocks like this every so often that halt not just the main story… but ANY questing.

Warrior Get!

My focus of late has been two fold… firstly to get to level 30 Marauder so I could do the Job Specialization quest and become a Warrior. Secondly it has been to get far enough in the storyline to unlock the Haukke Manor dungeon. That is another odd thing about this game… you can’t queue for a dungeon until you have unlocked it through the main storyline. Essentially the other players have apparently had more playtime than me and the other tank. So we have had a guild group just waiting to do Haukke Manor but no tank to do it. A few players have risked pugging, but the vast majority of us really only care to group with guild members.

So as a result I have felt a certain internal pressure to level through the quest chain as fast as I could so I could start tanking this instance for people, as it appears to be another logjam in the storyline. One of the weird things about taking a job is that you gain one really powerful effect upon getting it… but end up giving up your ability to cross class other than from two specific lines. So essentially a Warrior can only gain cross class abilities from Gladiator and Pugilist. This sucks a little bit because I had a really nice survival and slow ability from the Lancer line.

Right now my next plan is to focus on leveling my lancer for a bit, because I would really like to get it to 30 so that I can have a second job by picking up Dragoon. That way I would have both a dps and tanking job that I could fall back on for alternate dungeoning. The only negative is that while leveling the lancer I will essentially have to focus on running fates and guildleaves as I have already completed most of the quests available. To some extent I wish there were a number of repeatable quests available that you could do regardless based on your current class.

Daedalus Returns

Another really cool thing that happens at 30 is you unlock the ability to turn your riding chocobo into a battle companion. Essentially they can take up the role of healer, dps or tank and become similar to the mercenaries in the Everquest games. Of course you forfeit the ability to ride them as they are battling beside you, but it allows you to tackle more difficult encounters solo as you bring your own little duo along for the process. They level as you fight with them, and you use this to purchase abilities. Far as I can tell you can eventually teach them all of the three stances abilities.

Summoning them costs a Gysahl Green, which is the traditional Final Fantasy Chocobo food of choice. I am going to have to figure out which vendor sells the greens so I can buy a big stack. You get the first one as part of your quest chain. So far my Chocobo only knows the first level heal, but I literally just got this ability before coming downstairs to force myself to blog. The game really has so many little hooks that make you care about it. It reminds me at times of Everquest 2 in the number of intricate systems it has behind the scenes that it takes awhile to find. This game screams WoW clone at first viewing… but the more I get into it, the more rich it is.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to bang out a blog post and keep my one post a day streak up. Tomorrow I will be returning to the normal scheduled early morning posting. Overall this extended weekend has been a really odd case. I figure no one is likely waiting with baited breath to read my posts anyways. More than likely folks will catch up on their RSS readers after the long holiday weekend. I hope you all have had an excellent one, and I hope you keep my friend Sylladora in your thoughts. I just found out she is having to put down her dog this weekend, and it is always extremely rough to lose a long companion like that.

Altoholic Cure

September 1, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am sitting here trying to wake up. I kind of feel like death warmed over right now because my allergies are going into overdrive. My throat just feels absolutely raw and no amount of Benadryl or anything else seems to make the allergic crap go away in full. I had a pretty great day yesterday, and today I am looking at just milling around the house doing as little productive as possible.

Altoholic Cure

One of the interesting things that FFXIV seems to have made me finally understand is that I am not in fact an altoholic. Now if you look at the long history of me and games… you will see many screens that look like that filled with multiple max or at least high level characters. In Rift for example I have a 60 warrior, 57 rogue, 51 cleric and multiple 20 something’s scattered out along multiple servers. You would immediately think that I am in fact an altoholic… but recently a series of games have proved this otherwise.

One of the things that has proven the most tantalizing for me about The Secret World and now Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is the fact that I can literally have one character and do everything in the game on it. One of the frustrating things about playing alts for me has been that I did not always take everything I had acquired from one character and carry it forth into the next. I hated the feeling of starting over on achievements and mounts and pets etc. So when I started playing The Secret World, it was completely mind-blowing that I literally could have one character that could do anything at all in the game.

Multiple Roles

I have come to realize that I don’t start alts because I necessarily care about playing another character. This should have been clued in by the fact that in WoW every single human character tended to have the exact same appearance. Belghast and Belgrave look exactly the same… minus the fact that Belgrave has the nifty Death Knight glowing eyes thing going on. I end up starting new characters because I want to fiddle with new mechanics. So much of the appeal of Rift to me has always been that I had up to 9 saved specs per character and could switch between them at will to fit my current mood.

Final Fantasy XIV is proving to be the ultimate distraction at the moment, because I can play every class and do every tradeskill on one character. It is not only supported, it is in fact suggested because you open up the maximum number of possibilities with cross class actions by doing this. To some extent it reminds me of the way Horizons was in the ability to freely switch between classes at will. Horizons is one of those games that you either loved or you hated… and for me I mostly mourned the potential the game had. My main character was a Reaver, which was an advanced class that required I believe 20 warrior and 15 spiritualist. Then in addition to that I poured on 24 levels of Cleric so I could have some cross class healing, and 15 levels of Mage so I could have access to all the elemental weapon buffs.

The way the game worked is when you were playing another class, you could carry with you 1/2 of the levels worth of spells. So at 24 cleric, I would use up through level 12 healing spells on any other class I chose to play. This lead to some really open ended gameplay that I loved… I could build my own class of sorts by picking up the abilities that I liked best from each of the other classes. Granted they gimped you slightly by doing this… making your xp gain go drastically slower based on your number of classes. I did love however playing a character that was in essence a jack of all trades… and not limited to only one specific role. Post Horizons this has been a concept I have missed greatly, and what I believe has lead me to rolling tons of characters trying to reclaim that freedom.

Class Freedom

One of the things that feels the coolest while playing Final Fantasy is that each of us have multiple roles that we are actively or semi-actively leveling. For example my character is 27 Marauder, but I also have 18 Fencer, 16 Gladiator and 6 Thamaturgist. Instead of running dungeons last night with our main spec we realized that we had a pretty solid group composition with our secondary specs. So instead of tanking, I switched to dpsing as a fencer, and we had two arcanists that both served the role as part time dps and part time healer… letting someone who is traditional dps try out his tanky marauder. We went back and re-experienced the lower level dungeons and had a blast doing it.

The most awesome thing about this is… as you are tanking on your main spec… you can acquire those drops that would have been excellent for another class but would end up rotting on the ground of a dungeon somewhere. This was always something that stuck in my craw as a tank. I didn’t mind being needed in the specific role, but I always hated seeing gear that would have been awesome for an alt rotting on the corpses of bosses because no one in the instance needed it. I always longed for a way to pass that gear along from my main down to an alt and see it go to good use. I personally hate seeing gear sold or disenchanted… I love seeing it go to use regardless of WHO can use it.

So as a result… as I am playing my main spec I am picking up quest rewards that I can use later for various other classes in the game. Likewise there is never a case where I don’t have access to my full compliment of mounts or pets or other cosmetic goodies. All of this is why that Final Fantasy XIV is turning out to be way more compelling for me than I ever expected going into this. Originally I thought this was mostly a game I would play occasionally because I had some friends playing it. Instead I am finding a game that is so much better than it has any right to be based on the past track record Squaresoft’s MMO failures.

I find myself looking forward to each little milestone in the game, and likewise looking forward to switching weapons and leveling my little lower level classes. When you switch roles, you have access to various cross class abilities from each. So as a tank I can cherry pick all of the various survival abilities so that my Marauder has 4 “Oh Shit” buttons I can press in an instance. Likewise as a DPS I can cherry pick abilities that will either increase my survival or increase my dps. While you don’t have as much freedom as you did in Horizons, it still feels the same… that each of your classes is making every other class you play better in the process.

Wrapping Up

Well I had no clue I was going to write a love song for the class system in FFXIV before I started… but now that I did it makes sense. That is the one aspect of the game that I find the stickiest so far. It is making me really wish that I could have a Warrior, Cleric, Rogue and Mage all in the same character in Rift even if it meant having to pay for adding the additional classes. Anyways I hope you all are having a great Sunday and that you have a great rest of the Labor Day weekend.

FFXIV a Week Later

August 30, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks… I find myself still slowly shaking off the effects of taking some Benadryl before going to bed last night. My allergies have been killing me this week and as a result my throat is extremely raw from all the drainage. I feel like we are getting a summers worth of allergens all at once. The normal flow of things has been pretty messed up this year, for example we each night the windows are bombarded by junebugs… this is something that should have occurred around my birthday in mid June. Everything just seems to be happening later than normal.

A Week Later

Thus far I have been pretty harsh in my postings about Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn. The problem is… the infrastructure is still grossly inadequate, but the sad part about that is that the actual game itself is really good. When you first see the game it feels as though you are playing a Japanese interpretation of World of Warcraft. However the longer you play the more you realize it is a deeply nuanced game with a lot of really strong points going for it. The game still has very strong WoW elements… but it also is a whole lot Final Fantasy XII with some Rift and GW2 mixed in for good measure.

The key system for me that makes it extremely enjoyable is the job system. I’ve been a fan of this since I first encountered it playing a language hacked SNES rom of Final Fantasy V. What this does in reality is make it so you have no real need for alts. One single character can do literally every class in the game, and you are actually rewarded for doing this. When you switch classes you can take with you certain cross-class abilities. While these are rarely the signature attack of a given class, they do add quite a bit of flavor to your character.

Similarly the crafting system works much the same. You can fall into a black hole of crafting if you allow yourself. One of our guild members is I think trying to level every single craft profession. They are all insidiously tied in a way that makes it extremely beneficial to be able to craft multiple types of things. You will often encounter roadblocks where profession A requires you to have something from profession B and C. The dirty secret is… that many of these items that you need are also available on a few vendors out in the world… so if you know where those are you have no real need to multi-craft.

Multi-Classed

Currently my character is a 23 Maurader, 16 Gladiator, 15 Jouster and as of last night 6 Thaumaturge. Yes you heard that right… I do in fact have a few levels of Thaumaturge… a finger wiggler. The thing is every single class I have played has been fun. The caster for example has a really cool mechanic that switched back and forth between elemental fire and frost attacks. The fire attack gives you a buff that increases your damage output… but also increases the cost of your spells… whereas frost decreases damage output… but massively increases mana regeneration. So in order to play effectively you have to switch back and forth between the two buffed states, and it gives you the ability to regenerate back your mana… but still be attacking.

Right now I have pretty much focused on playing Marauder and plan on transitioning it to Warrior when I get to 30… as Warrior is a mix of 30 Marauder and 15 Gladiator. Eventually I plan on taking Lancer to 30 as well so I can pick up the Dragoon Job which requires 30 Lancer and 15 Marauder. The thing is the cross class dynamic completely changes the way you think about your character. For example I know at some point soon I am going to have to push Gladiator up to 22, because that will unlock provoke, one of the few snap aggro taunts in the game. As I have been tanking quite a few instances… this will be a key ability for me to have in the long run.

Tanking

Essentially for tanking early on you have two different flavors to choose from. The Marauder is your big two hander wielding tank that ends up feeling a bit deathknighty… if you forced a DK to rely on nothing but Heart Strike cleaves to hold aggro. The Marauder is extremely nuanced and there are a few buffs you want to juggle, but overall it is a very fluid feeling class. On the other side you have the Gladiator, which is a more traditional sword and board tank. It’s primary means of holding aggro is through flash, a spell that it casts that increases the threat of all targets surrounding it. In order to support this ability the Gladiator is given an attack combo that ends up regenerating their mana in the process allowing them to keep flash up all through the fight.

At this point I have tanked six instances as Marauder, and I really like the feel of it. I am starting to feel as thought I understand the mechanics extremely well. Hopefully as guild members level up I will be able to swap it up and try some instances as Gladiator to get a feel for how I like the differences. So far I naturally lean towards the Marauder since it has a big damned axe… and has a nice AOE cleave attack that is super useful when leveling out in the world. However my suspicion is that later on the Gladiator/Paladin will have much higher overall defense and the ability to soak more damage. Ultimately I plan on grabbing enough levels to pick up Paladin as well as something I can swap to when needed.

Dungeons

The dungeons quite honestly are shockingly good. I expected the standard theme park ride through a dungeon experience… but they are really intricate and nuanced. Essentially so far it seems like there is a golden path that allows you to quickly progress through the dungeon. However in each one I have encountered there are tons of optional things you can do… rooms that have no reason to ever enter other than for the chance as getting a bonus chest of loot. Last night we were in a dungeon and there were pull chains every so often… each had a completely random chance of spawning some event… or in an extremely rare case getting a chest of loot. It took time… and the encounters that were spawned were fairly painful… but we ended up with 3 bonus chests by doing that.

Additionally the boss encounters are messaged extremely well. So far we have done no real research on the dungeons we have encountered, but just by watching the way the mobs behave we have been able to figure out the key mechanic of most fights. That is not to say there have not been the occasional item that completely wipes the group when we didn’t do something… but in those cases it was really painfully obvious what we were supposed to do… we just were not paying attention. The fights have a lot of things going on… are often times frenetic and rely on you to both tank mobs and allow your dps to burn the occasional add down unassisted. Overall it is one of the best dungeon experiences I have had in several years.

Tragedy

This game is extremely good… and I would honestly go so far as to say it is an amazing experience. There is simply so much in the game that you do not see at face value. So many deep systems supporting your gameplay experience that it takes awhile to get into. The tragedy of all of this is… that even as good as the game is… it is still supported by a grossly inadequate infrastructure. Yesterday Reinhart posted a translation of a letter on the Japanese forums that explains the problems. Essentially they were not expecting the game to be the success it is… currently they have capacity for 218,000 players to be logged in at the same time. From what I have heard they were initially only expecting to have 100,000 concurrent users.

Right now they have way more than this trying to play the game, and as a result we end up with all the technical problems we are dealing with. I honestly believe they are trying their best to deal with the issues… but I also believe that more than likely Squaresoft did not have the faith in this game than the really should have. The first release was a complete disaster, and I feel as though they threw some money at it in hopes of turning into a modest profit generator… but instead it has been way more popular than they ever could have imagined. While I am happy they are exceeding their expectations… it makes for an extremely frustrating experience.

I have had a Microsoft Sidewinder 4X keyboard for some time, and one of the nifty features it has is a bank of hardware macro keys. Until the release of this game I had never actually configured them to do anything. Now I have a key that presses the 0 button every 1.5 seconds… this is essentially what I am reduced to if I ever hope to log into the game. For those who do not know this… hitting 0 on the numpad is basically the equivalent of hidding X on a joystick… it is the continue to the next step key. As a result you can log into the client by spamming 0… and with the constant world is full errors this is essentially how we get it… hit the hardware macro and fiddling around on phones or tablets until it lets us in.

Wait to Purchase

My hope is that in the coming weeks they will resolve these issues and it will be smooth sailing ahead. The problem is… the damage may have already been done. In the United States we are going into the Labor Day weekend… and if the game is not fully playable over that break… then it will cause a ton of negative vibes among the US populace. This game is extremely worth the purchase, and as much as I dislike saying this… is fully worth the monthly subscription fee. However right now my advice to friends is to wait before purchasing it. Sure you can probably go form store to store to find a copy of the game… but you are ultimately just setting yourself up for frustration.

The gameplay experience is extremely good, which makes the inability to actually get into the game and play it all the more frustrating. This combination of amazing game and total lack of infrastructure is what made me such a ball of directionless fury early in the week. As a result if I can save anyone that frustration I would. I feel like eventually things will settle down… be it a week from now or a month from now. The game will still be an amazing experience at that point… so I highly suggest you just sit on your money and play something else in the meantime. I promise the collective community with sound an “All Clear” sign when the game is ready for primetime.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get on the road. I have a project charter to knock out today, and I am trying to figure exactly where I will hide out while writing it. The problem is that I get so many random questions throughout the day that it throws off my train of thought. I am thinking about grabbing the small conference room on the floor we go to for laptop lunches. I can hang out in there and compose freely without interruptions. I hope you all have a great day and that it is the beginning of an amazing labor day weekend. I will be involved in a big NDA protected event, so not sure how much gaming news I will have to report this weekend.