Rift Archives - Page 22 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Support Belghast

September 4, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you happy people in digital land. So far I am having another allergy ridden morning as I struggle to shake off my stupor. Right now I just want to go back to sleep, but I know that is really not within the realm of possibility. My lungs are pretty junked up this morning, so starting to wonder if I need to take a breathing treatment. Here is hoping that by the time I have finished writing this post that things will have cleared up and I am feeling much better. I kinda wish I had one of those cookies from the Matrix that makes everything feel “right as rain”.

Moment of Truth

FFXIV_ReviewOfHeadStart

This morning is in essence the moment of truth for Squeenix. Either players will be able to log in normally or at least within a few tries and get on with playing Final Fantasy XIV… or they will likely start to drop out of the game giving up. Today’s maintenance has been sold as the cure to the problem in many ways. If it ends up not being so… I am questioning just how much patience players will have. I know my guild is getting to the point where our patience is worn extremely thin at this point.

I originally thought the title of this subject was going to be “Epic Letdown”. Launching Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn was literally the first thing I did when I got upstairs. I was greeted with the familiar 1017 shuffle as pictured above. My immediate thoughts were “what the fuck”. This has been such an up and down rollercoaster. I feel like I have gone through the stages of grief with the outrage and the denial and finally I have arrived at the sad acceptance that they didn’t have a clue one what they were doing.

However I did a few quick searches and stumbled across this post. Essentially it said that they were going to throttle logins immediately after the servers came back up… and in theory they have just now come back up. Then over time this morning they will ratchet down the restrictions to make sure that the servers stay stable. In essence that makes sense I suppose. So shortly after this… I attempted to log in and got a 20 player queue and in within a few minutes. Right now things seem tentatively “better”. Time will tell as to whether or not the login lottery is gone… or if I am just seeing the effects of it being 6:30 in the morning.

I want so hard to believe that things are back to normal, or at least back to Beta 3 normal… because the recent norm has been pretty jacked up. We have several people in the guild who are unable to purchase the game and get onto Cactuar, so here is hoping that in the coming days they are able to do so. An encouraging sign was that apparently Squeenix gave Amazon the nod to go ahead and start offering digital sales and downloads yesterday afternoon. That was the point at which I started to get extremely hopeful… because to me that meant they really felt this was the solution. Here is hoping that it remains playable over the next few days as more players come online.

Support Belghast

Last night was a pretty momentous occasion for our little guild over in Rift. It was the first time since the founding a few months back that we had five level 60 players online at the same time… or quite honestly even in the guild period. Over the last few days Fynralyl and Psynister hit 60 on their main characters, and within the last week or so Sylladora did as well. They joined myself and Lukian who had been 60 for some time and simply been waiting for some more guildies to start up regular dungeon runs. The only problem with this… is we have a bit of a strange group composition.

The five of us add up to be 2 warriors, 2 mages and a cleric. Lukian had been working on a healing spec, so I knew we had that covered. Either Psynister or I could tank… so that should be good… but I thought Psyn pretty much ONLY had a tank spec, and since he needs tanky gear for elites I figured it was best to have him in that role. Fyn and Sylla would of course be dps… which left us missing one key role… Support. At the last minute I remembered that in Storm Legion, Beastmaster had turned into a support tree, so after a little bit of fiddling I reset one of my unused roles to be the default Trailblazer preset (Beastmaster/Tempest/Reaver) support build.

It took me a little bit to get a grasp on my hot bars and set up a few macros, but within 10 minutes we were ready to go with me queuing as a support role. It turns out that the Beastmaster is essentially a big walking buff bot. I bring with me 6 different group and raid buffs that do everything from increase our damage, to reduce our damage taken, to causing a small hot every time I do a finishing move. Essentially I am a lot like an Everquest bard… I make everyone in the party somehow better, but you don’t really notice it until you don’t have one.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at just how cool the re-skinned beastmaster cat pet looked. The previous version was this ugly emaciated blue thing, so apparently with storm legion there was a massive improvement in the models. I have to say playing it does not feel nearly as gratifying as playing a Bard… which was the only Rift support I have been used to. The effects of my work are far less tangible. I know that just me being in the party is reducing all damage taken by 5% and causing everyone to deal 5% more damage… but you really don’t show up on the meters either in the damage or healing you do.

I need to do more research into the support warrior roles, and come up with potentially a better spec. I went for this one namely because you could be semi effective at range with the addition of the tempest abilities. Also I feel as though I really did not have much time to soak in the abilities before trying to create some haphazard hot bars. It worked well enough however and we were able to get through the random normal 60 we queued for. Sadly only one piece of gear was usable… and even it was for the wrong spec. However hopefully over the coming weeks we will get some folks good gear.

Wrapping Up

Somewhat of a low news morning for me, but I did ramble on at length about two things so I figure this is a good place to cut it off. I need to finish getting ready and get on the road. I still feel like death warmed over, and my lungs still feel like crap. So much of me wants to just say fuck it and take a sick day… the only problem with that is I don’t really see any end to this until the weather gets colder. It is like all the allergies are hitting at the same time. Anyways.. hopefully all of you out in digital land are doing far better than I am… and that you are all having an amazing week. I am resigned to telling myself that we are at the halfway point to the weekend.

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.

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.

Lure Liquidation

August 29, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land, I am easing my way into cognizance this morning. Last night I slept fairly well, but not as deeply as I had been recently. The primary difference is I decided not to take a Tylenol pm last night and it seemed to still work. Essentially I had hoped I was over whatever hump was causing me to wake up every few hours… and it seems to have been the case. I really did not want my sleep patterns to become dependent on a drug… even if it was simply an over the counter one.

The Exodus

The funny part about our Wednesday night “un-official” guild night… is that we never end up doing exactly what I had planned on doing in the first place. Originally I had posted on Twitter and the guild forums that it was going to be a lure liquidation night… and while we did a lot of that we did not start the evening doing it. I logged in around 6:30 or so and at that point we have only a few people around. After I had finished with my dinner I noticed we had 5 characters that were 50+ online. So I started trying to put together something that would make a workable group make-up for a dungeon.

Lukian bravely specced his cleric into healer and worked on his setup for doing just that. I on the other hand built a quick bard build and attempted to remember how to do that. That left Psynister as our tank, and Fynralyl and Vernall to dps things down. Initially we started the instance and then quickly realized that it was grey to all but one of us. I thought maybe this would change after we actually started the fight it might change… but apparently Exodus of the Storm Queen uses old world logic for determining how something cons to players.

After the first boss we all left the instance… and manually mentored down in the 51-52 range. This is really something Trion needs to fix. You need to be able to queue with a mixed level guild group and it automagically mentors everyone down to the closest fit for a given dungeon. This would really simplify the process of mixed level groups doing things together. After manually mentoring… we realized that we had the deserter debuff… so one of us ran over to Iron Pine Peaks and manually zoned us into the instance. Quite honestly… this process needs a lot of work. It is awesome that it is viable… but it should be just a thing you click a button to do.

After the initial hiccups the instance went relatively smoothly… and we only had one wipe… namely because I could not really remember any of the boss fight strategies… or at least misremembered the wrong parts. Granted not a single piece of viable gear dropped, but we got some useful rune crafting mats out of the process. I had been wanting to run ANY form of a dungeon for weeks… so this at least filled that niche. It was fun and each of the players fell into their roll pretty naturally. I figure I suck at barding… but there really isn’t much to do with barding now that codas refresh the cool down of motifs.

Lure Liquidation

After the dungeon we noticed we had a few more people online, so we decided to start by opening some crafting rifts… since we each had a stockpile of grandmaster lures sitting unused. Previously when Lukian and I had done this… it seemed like the best chance of crafting materials was when summoning them in the high end zones like Ashora or Infinity Steppes. The only problem is… I was on my 56, Fyn and Psyn both 57 and Dethbridge that joined up with us 54. None of us had any of the porticulums out in any of the zones. However we had some ports relatively close to Ashora, so we set our sights there. Lukian stepped afk to grab a bite to eat as we caravanned across Kingsward.

Deth was not with us yet, so when we got out to Ashora we dropped a guild banner to let him port his way out. I have to say that is an extremely cool addition to the game… I just with the cool down was not quite so heinous. An hour just really limits the usefulness especially when the guild is trying to bounce around the world and do something. We opened the one Outfitter lure I had on my rogue, and quickly realized that one 60, a 56, 2 57s and a 54 was simply not enough dps to close level 60 crafting rifts and hit all the timers. So after we got one phase away from completion… I decided to take one for the team and grab my warrior that is raid ready dps.

After this switch up the rifts closed extremely smoothly and we were able to burn through the crafting lures. The only problem with Ashora is that this tends to be the place where everyone and their brother open rifts. As a result the world was littered with abandoned Hunt rifts… but we decided to go ahead and try a few of these as well. With a 60 healer, 60 dps, 57 tank, 58 and 54 dps we we able to close them pretty effectively. We had talked about doing some hunt rifts, so I was more than willing to latch onto someone elses effort. I know hunt rifts spawn in the wild… but since every single one in Ashora seemed to be a hunt… I am figuring someone is spawning them with the hopes that someone else would come around and close them behind them.

I have to say this random running around and doing things together was exactly what I had needed after the recent days of frustration and anger over the generally botched state of the Final Fantasy XIV launch. This was pure and simple fun, running around aimlessly as a group of guildies finding mayhem as it lay out in our path before us. We got at least one ding out of the action, and I think our 54 got a large amount of xp from each of the 60 rifts we closed. I know we each walked away with a fair stack of catalysts for crafting epicy goodness, and a bunch of random level 60 materials on top of that. The hunts each provided quite a bit of Torvan Hunters rep and a decent number of infinity stones as well.

The Hive

After a couple of hours of running around, Fyn decided it was time for bed for her… and as a result we broke up the rift running party. Lukian asked if I had ever done the level 60 chronicle and I had not. Since it was supposedly pretty fast I agreed to group up and knock it out. I am extremely impressed with what I saw. The previous chronicles had essentially been dumbed down version of the raid encounters to date… but this one appeared to be a unique beast of its own. Essentially you are invading an architect hive… and the NPC you are helping out is pretty much my favorite in the entire Rift universe… Atrophinius. There are a couple of repeatable quests that you can perform for him, giving you writs of notoriety for your faction of choice.

The fights were all pretty simple, and while I died a few times out of a mix of not knowing the encounters and the trademark Belghast overzealousness… we never actually wiped as a group. The gear you get out of the chronicle is relatively nice, and it can be upgraded to essentially pre-elite blues at best. It is a good way to get your feet wet and gear over the course of a handful of days. Additionally it rewards a little bit of the elite dungeon currency for finishing each run… so you could eventually buy elite purples if you were diligent enough. Essentially it seemed like there were three encounters and a bonus chest that spawned randomly in the zone.

It was a really fun and simple dungeon designed for two players. The visuals were just amazing looking.. and there was an added mini-game in that they have hidden artifacts scattered throughout the dungeon… so while you are clearing the place you are constantly keeping your eyes peeled for them. At least in our run, they seemed overly fond of hiding them in the various lighting fixtures of the dungeon. I am not sure if I would do this as an every night thing… but I definitely enjoyed myself and would gladly run it again.

Wrapping Up

Like I said above… this was precisely the kind of night I needed to wash away all the frustration from previous nights. Before starting up rift last night I decided to try logging into Final Fantasy XIV and encountered the World Full 1017 error for 15-20 minutes as I ate my dinner. So while I was able to get in multiple times over my lunch break… it seems to have been mostly a fluke. However my guildies are reporting that as a whole it is far easier to get logged in… or at least you only have to leg hump the login server for 30 minutes or so before you get access. I do hope they get things sorted out… having a mostly unplayable game over the labor day weekend is a pretty massive sin. Speaking of that… I have one of those NDA events going on… if you too have an NDA event going on this weekend let me know… it may very well be the same one and we can work towards a shared goal. Anyways… enough cryptic talk aside… I hope you all have a great day.