MMORPG

Great Serpent of Ronka

by

Good Morning Friends, I must start off this post by apologizing. I probably gave some of you a heart attack yesterday when I was talking about the event to get the Regalia in FFXIV. I misread the timeline and it is in fact October 18th and not September 18th that the event finishes, giving you roughly a month instead of a week to complete it. I appreciate the reader who commented about this because I legitimately had simply glossed over that there were two different months in that statement. I’ve updated the previous post in order to hopefully keep anyone who was slow at reading it from having the same negative reaction. Another quick update is that yesterday I modified the masthead for the site, and finally after over a year have included PSO2 Belghast into the character collage. As always huge thanks to Ammosart who does most of my artwork, and that one collage represents some seven different commissions over the course of multiple years.

One of the things about this mission to level everything to 80 that has proven beneficial, is that as I adjust to each new class I learn some of its quirks. The hope is that after the experiment, I will be able to better support the unique needs of each class while I am tanking. One completely new adjustment however is how much time I have spent healing because that is more or less a role I have wholesale avoided since Everquest. There are a lot of little things that players need to know about healers in order to stop putting them in no-win situations. For example, you should never break the line of sight from your healer… especially if you are deciding that you are going to take damage. Healers cannot heal through walls and if you are out of range or in a whole other room… chances are you are going to die and that healer is going to feel like a failure as they resurrect your stupid ass.

I talked about this a bit on Twitter, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about some general theory around fight placement. I cobbled together this quick diagram to aid this discussion, but the idea is pretty straightforward. In a good scenario, the tank has pulled the boss and spun it away from the party so that frontal attacks won’t cause needless splash damage. The melee is set up either at the flank or in the rear of the boss depending on positional requirements. The healer and ranged DPS are spread out in a ring around the boss just outside of melee range so that they can run in for donut attacks or run out for any other markers, but close enough to be within splash healing range. This more or less allows the party to work efficiently, with healers doing some AOE healing while focusing on bigger heals for the tank.

However, what often happens is the bad scenario shown with the red box. Too often do I see tanks just walk up and start tanking the boss or pack of mobs in place without care for facing. This forces your melee to be back behind the encounter and vulnerable to any adds that join part way through from behind. Too often the healer has spread way the hell out and the ranged DPS is off in practically a whole other county completely out of the range of healing, and no one but the tank and melee is in the range of any splash AOE healing. Essentially my goal going into a fight is to optimize the conditions so that we have the greatest chance of succeeding and having a nice clean and swift run. Nothing slows down the party more than having to run back from a wipe because the fight mechanics that we had control over… were just carried out in a poor manner.

There are always going to be scenarios where this does not work, but it is a basic approach that works some 90% of the time. Another thing that took place yesterday, is that I managed to get the Stewards gathering beast tribe to Sworn which unlocked access to this goofy mount.

If you press the mount special button, which apparently replaces your pet hotbar… the “Serpent” springs forth from the mount and circles you before ducking back inside the jar. This is pure nonsense and is truly delightful. It reminds me a lot of the easter egg mount that springs forth a baby chocobo. You may not think it is worth leveling gathering up to Shadowbringers levels in order to get said mount, but for me it was a huge bonus of something I was already going to do.

There are many nights that I wraap up all of the activities that could give me “easy” levels pretty quickly. Traditionally this would be when I would fall into a rhythm of pushing up something through one of the Deep Dungeon systems. Last night however I apparently was restless because logged out and played a handful of other titles. The primary of these was Deathloop, which released yesterday. Prior to getting my hands on it, my initial impression based on the trailers was “What if Arkane created Bioshock but set it in the swinging 70s No One Lives For Ever visual language”. So far that more or less seems to be true.

This game is the same well crafted artistry that we have come to expect from the Dishonored series, and even some of the same visual language for set design is at play here. The device that bars your entry to your flat, reminds me a lot of the mechanism that was used to bar entry into plague ridden buildings for example. The only real problem I am having early on is that one… for some reason print screen is just straight up blocked and as a result ShareX doesn’t work for me and I have had to revert back to using F12 for Steam Screenshots. Secondly the lack of the ability to manually save your game is a real pain in the ass, and while absolutely intentional due to the gameplay… ends up just pissing me off as I have to keep repeating the same level over and over because I needed to bail for one reason or another. The idea is that you complete one entire level as a single pass, and then your gameplay state is snapshotted at the beginning of the next mission. What I want instead is just an ability to quicksave out of the game and return to that save state at a later time.

So far I am enjoying the game enough to stick with it, but am probably not going to spend much time with it until the weekend. This is absolutely the sort of game that I am going to need to carve out large chunks of time, rather than my normally fragmented gameplay. For one reason or another, during the week I seem to end up AFKing quite a bit, which is not conducive to a game that wants me to play one entire segment in a single sitting. This is one of those situations where the console players may have it easier, given that the PlayStation 5 allows you to pause a game and return to it at a later date. I feel like Arkane is going to have to patch in some sort of save game system, because right now what exists is awful and had I known about it… I might have given the game a hard pass for the time being.

Get Your Regalia Now

by

Good Morning Friends! It is the Tuesday after a weekend, which seems to be when I sit down and have a big ole catch-up topic. Shocking to no one I spent most of my weekend playing Final Fantasy XIV as I continue down this mad quest to level everything to 80 before Endwalker. It always feels like I am at a standstill until I do one of these posts and realize just how much progress I have made since the last one. Based on my quick napkin math, I have 70 days until Endwalker launches, however, I have been calculating this wrong all this time. The Endwalker early access period begins on November 19th, which means I actually only have 66 days worth of pre-expansion leveling time. I have a grand total of 96 levels to get in various classes so that means I need to get at a minimum of one and a half levels each day in order to meet this goal.

Essentially leveling alt jobs in Final Fantasy XIV is a bit of a hurry up and wait game. There are easy levels to be gained by completing the roulettes for the day and getting the bonus experience associated with them. Then that drops down to slow leveling, which is the more grindy method of either queuing for the highest dungeon available, doing the deep dungeon, or going out and doing Bozjan front. Since we last reviewed my job levels I have finished Dark Knight and pushed it to 80. I’ve also put on nine levels of Monk, ten levels of White Mage, and one measly level of Black Mage that I did last night. Not that it really counts towards the goal, but I did gain three more levels of culinarian through Ixal quests. I am focusing on White Mage a bit more than Monk at the moment because Monk has more options available to it for gaining experience, and with White Mage… it is always a bit of a struggle for me to level as a healer and I am trying to get it out of the way. Black Mage however is probably going to be a bit more of a challenge than I originally thought, because at this very moment it is very much not feeling like my jam.

One very important note for anyone out there also playing Final Fantasy XIV, or inclined to return… the Final Fantasy XV crossover event is happening again. From the 13th through October 18th you can complete the quest chain and unlock access to buy the Regalia 4 seater car mount, Noctis’ outfit, and hairstyle, as well as a number of orchestrion scrolls. So far with these crossover events, we have gotten it twice… and then never again. We got the Final Fantasy XIII event exactly twice, the Yokai Watch event exactly twice, and my fear is this might be your last chance to get the mount. The FFXIII stuff did eventually make its way to the MogStation store, but if you have the ability you might as well earn this legitimately rather than have to pay the premium for a multi-seater mount later. The big gotcha however is that the items are sold with MGP, the Gold Saucer currency… which means in order to get the mount you will need 200,000 mgp which is no easy feat to gather during the time the event is running.

In other news, I spent a bit of time over the weekend participating in the Open Beta for New World. The game feels extremely solid and has gone through so many changes for the better. Some of the last fit and finish things seem to have been working on the character creation system. I don’t have any specific data, but it feels like there are just a bunch more options than there were before. Additionally, I am super happy that scars have been split apart from the face selection, which means I no longer have to keep playing with that one facial model that had the scar. Combat feels really good and it feels a little less punishing than it did previously if you miss a block. I spent some time playing around with the two-handed axe, which was new to me. I still think my overall focus is going to be the more tanky sword and shield but focusing on strength as my primary stat allows me to swap out to either of the two-handers for a backup weapon without having to split stats. Right now every level up I am putting one point into strength and another into stamina and it seems to be working pretty well.

I don’t really want to get distracted from my FFXIV goals, but I do expect to be piddling around in New World when I have exhausted those easy levels each day. I am going to have to watch myself though because I am known for going obsessive about a single thing at a given time. I successfully played FFXIV and Destiny 2 at the same time, so hopefully, I can do the same with FFXIV and New World. They really are wildly different experiences, and I can’t see myself really going hardcore into the settlement war system, so being a casual crafter/tank might be a chill way to finish out the evenings.

[Edit] – I completely misread the Regalia event, and it is October 18th, not September 18th that it closes so you have roughly a month to gather the 200k MGP.

Praise the Electron

by

Yesterday kinda sucked, and to be honest this week so far has been fairly awful. The core problem with a holiday that gives you off a Monday, is that a five-day week is still crammed into the remaining four days. However, that specifically is not what made yesterday awful. My wife was out for the evening, and with that generally comes a binge of guilt-free completely unresponsive gaming. However, the moment I got off my last conference call for the day, there was a loud boom coming from the direction of the power substation for the neighborhood and everything went dark. This was the beginning of what was ultimately a 4.5 hour long blackout. Thankfully my phone was fully charged, and as it got progressively darker in the house I found a candle. Apart from that I ordered some takeout and snuggled with my cats while I waited for the lights to come on. It was a stark reminder how many of the things I enjoy require electricity… and those that don’t explicitly require it do require good lighting.

Moments after my wife walked in the door… the power came on, so needless to say I did not make near the progress last night that I had hoped. Let’s review how far I have managed to make it in various jobs since the last time I posted one of these images. Dark Knight, I have taken from 76 to 79 and I should be able to easily take it to 80 tonight. Monk, I have taken from 63 to 66 and potentially can put on another two levels there if I focus a bit. I’ve gained a single level of White Mage, but it really has not been a focus. Lastly and disconnected from any of my pre-Endwalker plans… I have pushed Culinarian from 21 to 24 largely because I have had some extra beast tribe allowances and been using them with the Ixal to help level that up a bit albeit slowly. At some point, I am going to want the ability to craft my own food, so I will probably be slowly working that up.

In my travels, I encountered the strangest thing. It isn’t at all uncommon to encounter players that do not yet have a job and are leveling as one of the base classes in Palace of the Dead. However, yesterday while in Heaven on High, I did a bit of a double-take when I noticed we were running around with a Thaumaturge and not a Black Mage. Something important to note… your Class turns into a job around level 30 and Heaven on High requires you to be level 61 in order to enter. I blanked out the player’s name because this isn’t about shaming them, but I posted it on Twitter and got a bunch of different responses. Firstly most people thought they were simply a troll, and I could see that given that they do have a few actual jobs. In the run, the player said something to the effect that they wanted to be a Thaumaturge and not a Black Mage and was super defensive about that point… which makes me think they have gotten this line of questioning more than once.

Another friend thought that maybe they were just a hardcore roleplayer and devoted to leveling as the base class for some of the jobs. Notice they have level 80 in Gladiator, Conjurer, Lancer, Rogue and have taken Pugilist to 50 and Thaumaturge to 68. If it is a roleplayer, that is fine… but please god don’t make your alternate way of playing the game the problem of live players. In the Deep Dungeon system it doesn’t matter that much, but in actual proper duties you are missing like half of your abilities if you enter the dungeon as the Class and not the Job. Back in the day there was a bit of precedent for doing this, because often times as a Class you had more access to a wider variety of cross class abilities than you did as the final Job. Now however it is largely just playing the game “wrong”. My personal theory is that they are no-lifing the Deep Dungeon systems to level a bunch of things and have not come up for air long enough to actually finish the job quests.

Once I finish off the Dark Knight today, I am probably going to focus a bit more seriously on White Mage and try and get it up to 80. Monk is going to continue getting a bunch of time with me focusing on doing that class with the roulettes that I am not comfortable healing. Wierdly I feel way more comfortable doing things like Alliance Raids with the White Mage, because at least there are other healers who can maybe help out when I falter. I do my best to carry my own, but I am not nearly as good at healing as I am at other roles, and I own that. That said I am getting better and I am going to have to given that two of my remaining classes are healers and I don’t just want to grind them up exclusively being green dps in the Deep Dungeon.

Post Expansion Victory Lap

by

Good Morning Friends! This morning I thought I would rework something that I have threaded in a few different forms. Additionally, this is a great time for you to appreciate how adorable the next-door neighbors of our FC House are in their matching crafting smocks. One of the great things about having been afforded the ability to play content slowly in Final Fantasy XIV is that I have had time to sit down and sort out my feelings about what I just experienced. If you are brand new to the game, then you have been given the ability to binge the content in a very netflixian manner and it comes with positives and negatives. I personally think it might be a good thing to take some time after each major expansion and let what you just experienced soak in, before rushing headlong into the next expansion. This morning I am going to offer some distractions worth consuming after each expansion.

Please Note: Each block contains soilers for the expansion I am outlining.

A Realm Reborn

While this is technically not an expansion, it plays much the same role given that it is a direct continuation of the story found in 1.0. As such the first thing I think that is worth re-experiencing is the full trailer of the Battle of Carteneau. The game opened with this and at that time you didn’t fully understand everything that was happening. However, upon reaching the conclusion of A Realm Reborn it should have a lot more meaning. Below is the extended edit that includes the scenes you experience by completing Coil of Bahamut.

That is pretty heavy, and for a lighter palate cleanser then I would highly suggest watching Dance Eorzea Dance. This is ultimately the video that turned me into a Lalafell, so be wary of its power. Denmo McStronghuge has this wonderful way of condensing an entire expansion into a single music video.

Another thing if you are interested in it is that over the years we have done full spoiler shows of the AggroChat podcast, the first of these happening back in April of 2015. This predates me going through the process of uploading this to youtube and creating a showcard. Instead below is a link to the MP3 if you care to listen.

Heavensward

Oh lord, this expansion is an emotional rollercoaster, and I know I would have absolutely needed a break to let everything sink in after its conclusion. One of the first things that I think everyone needs to do is watch the “final” trailer for the expansion, because if you watched this prior to playing… there are a lot of elements that won’t really mean anything until you have played your way through at least some of the content. Looking back now, knowing what you now know… it will mean significantly more.

Once again we have the amazing work of Denmo to cheer us up after being confronted with all of those feels once more. This is the first video that I can remember watching of his, that he really started pushing the bounds of what you can reasonably do with filming inside of Final Fantasy XIV.

The AggroChat crew had so many feels about this expansion, and we recorded a full spoilers show in August of 2015. This would have only covered the main story, and I think we pushed it off as long as we did because we were wanting to make sure all of our regulars had made it through it. I think I started the video thing with episode 74, so this just came in a little too early for that so once again I am embedding the audio.

Stormblood

Stormblood is an odd place in the story because they tried so many new things and attempted to broaden the scope of the game significantly. As a result, it ended up feeling a bit more location-focused than having quite the strong story arc of the other expansions. I still love it so much, but rewatching the trailer doesn’t have quite the same impact as it does for other expansions. However I still think it is interesting to rewatching knowing what you will now know.

Now here is where things go a little off the rails. Denmo created what is quite possibly his greatest achievement with the original Stormblood “Find Your Dance, Eorzea” music video. The challenge however is that it ended up getting copyright claimed and effectively nuked from YouTube. He edits these videos so tightly that they are bound to the song, and you could never simply replace a track and make it work. The original video is available on Dailymotion however.

Denmo took the footage and then cut it into another video that is also excellent in its own right after the first was taken down.

By the time Stormblood rolled around, I had gotten my act together and was uploading our videos to YouTube and creating proper show cards. This is Episode #167 of AggroChat and was recorded on July 30th of 2017.

Shadowbringers

There is a bit of a misnomer that I keep seeing from the community. There will be people talking about Shadowbringers being when the story really gets good. That is true in one sense of the statement, but in truth, Shadowbringers would be largely meaningless nonsense were it not for all of the story that came before it. This is a culmination of so many plot points starting from your first minutes wandering in Eorzea and I am wondering if things would land quite so hard if you had not experienced all that came before. Because of the weight of this story, I feel like the final trailer means so much more in hindsight than any of those prior … with Heavensward being a close second.

Given the somber tone that follows most of Shadowbringers, it is only fitting the Denmo also shifts things up a bit and presents one of the most heart felt and thoughtful dance videos to date.

We had so much to say about this expansion that we ended up recording what ultimately was an almost four hour long mega show, and then divided it up into two parts. These were recorded on August 24th of 2019 and represent shows 265 and 266 of the podcast.

Finally if you really want to give yourself a sucker punch straight in the feels… then check out this video by Fluff Stuff called Remember Us. Oh lord… some eye dampness occurred when watching this yesterday.

This game has so many important moments that they get lost if you rush through them too quickly. I highly suggest you take some time after each major story block to reflect upon what just happened. There is no need to rush ahead and there is no real reason why you HAVE to be at the level cap in November when Endwalker releases. There will still be plenty of time to do all of the things, given that none of them ever really stop being relevant.