Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Happy Blaugust

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Today is the first day of August and with it comes two things. Firstly my wedding anniversary. My wife and I have been married Twenty One years as of today, which is weird because like I have been married longer than my baby boomer boss. Then again he is on I think his fourth marriage and I only have the one, so even though the age difference it makes sense. We’ve been that “stable” couple in our families and in theory have been the most responsible of adults… even though adulting is occasionally super hard. I am very happy to have a steady partner in this journey.

The second thing is of course the official beginning of Blaugust, though technically on the schedule it goes into July and September a bit as a sort of ramp up and ramp down. However now is the time when the posting counts towards the goal of posting something every single day of August. What you make of it however is up to you. The first year it was a very super serious event and I only really gave credit for “winning” to those who made at least thirty one days. However that had the trickle down effect of burning a lot of people out, and I fear lead to more blogs closing as a result. From that point on we have had a more relaxed festival of blogging thing going on and focusing on simply posting more regularly than trying to meet a fixed target. There are of course awards to be given at the end of the event for people who meet even the most basic of posting requirements.

As far as gaming goes, I spent last night working on the new Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. I decided to go with a gaming image because I have gotten tired of the Blaugust logo leading every post so far this week. I am not sure if I am going to be able to get everything done in order to get the fully upgraded set of armor, but I had some fun last night. The specific screenshot is of me apparently breaking Gambit Prime. We tied the first round and then went into a second round where we filled our motes quickly… and a primal never spawned. In fact nothing spawned at all during the event and we just stood around killing invaders as they came over and any blockers they happened to send. It did allow me to very quickly complete the “kill seven guardians in gambit” task because we legitimately just stood around waiting for someone to spawn in.

So far we have managed to gather up 60 players in this blogging game. One of them is a daily Vlogger but that counts too (we love you Wolfy). Generally speaking we still have a few trickle in after the first of August, so there is absolutely still time to sign up and participate. We are down a bit from our high of 90 participating blogs last year, but then again that makes a bit of sense given that we took a year off from the event and there was a bit of a nostalgic rush of folks signing up. I expect to see a few more sign-ups but I am not sure if we will make up the 30 player gap. The truth is… it isn’t for everyone and I am not going to shame the folks who tried it out last year and decided it wasn’t for them. Without further waffling about… here is the list as it stands today.

On some level what we are trying to accomplish here feels a bit anachronistic, given the shift away from blogs and to new media. However this yearly re-igniting of the fires seems to be helping. Last year was the first year that we started the Blaugust Discord, and for the first time in all of the incarnations of Blaugust, Newbie Blogger Initaitive and the Developer Appreciation Week… we managed to keep something going all year long. At any point you could pop into the Discord and see activity within the last few days, and often times had people actively chatting. I cannot fully explain how happy that made me even when I myself would get busy and fail to chime in on topics.

When I first started this blog it was in the heyday of World of Warcraft blogging, and we were in the middle of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. With that came the extremely active Blog Azeroth community and its outreach to anyone who was interested in writing about the game. My very first twitter folk were attached to that community, and even today there are folks like Jess that I see on an almost nightly basis in Final Fantasy XIV. I made ties that have lasted over a decade and a lot of that was because Fimlys maintained an IRC channel associated with that community and more specifically the Twisted Nether Blogcast. The constant interaction lead to forming some pretty deep bonds that still last today, and it was my hope that Discord could play the same role with our community.

When I stopped blogging about World of Warcraft, I felt like I was falling into a vacuum and a lot of what I dealt with for those first several years was trying to carve out a community of some sort outside of a single game. There were a bunch of us out here on the frontier that would flit back and forth between games and has our own Independent Island States of a sort. Syp was the first to really unite the clans with the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and each time we ran an event we rallied together towards the same cause. Blaugust was born out of that desire to get people together and meld together all of these independent voices into something more cohesive.

I am emboldened by this event because each year we meet brand new people who are out here on the outskirts of other communities doing our own thing. I feel like we do finally have a broader sense of togetherness, a common spirit that we are all laboring towards the same goal of making this community a better place. I am truly happy to share this journey each year with you, but more importantly I am constantly excited to see it keep on happening without my prodding. Each of you that participates is critical to this process, and I want to thank you all for continuing to join me in this madness.

Happy Blaugust Everyone! Now here are the links I keep sharing each time I post the blog list. If you have yet to sign up please make your way to the Google Form and do so. If you have ever wanted to do this, then take a chance and we will be there to support you along the way.

Grinds Are Not a Spectator Sport

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I feel like I thoroughly squandered my evening in a delightful manner, as I have done for most of the recent nights. The problem with grinds is that they don’t exactly make for exciting reading material. I closed out the night just a little ways into 57 on the Red Mage. I am still somewhat shocked and amazed that I am enjoying the class as much as I am. However I really have not found a single class design in Final Fantasy XIV that I did not enjoy at least on some level. Probably the ones that I like the least are Ninja and Monk, in part because they also seem the most “fiddly”.

Then again I have not touched either of them since Shadowbringers and I probably owe it to myself to do that. Dragoon used to be on the list of fiddly classes, but the recent changes have greatly improved the flow of combat for that class. Maybe Monk and Ninja got similar tweaks… but I have a feeling that I will still have to memorize a bunch of attack patterns on the Ninja to keep from getting a bunny on my head. Possibly the least fun to play in Deep Dungeon content is the Summoner which generally speaking throws up dots on something and then gets to do nothing with them because it dies instantly to some melee dps.

I am in this weird mode where I just sorta want to level all of the things. I am greatly enjoying the flow of Deep Dungeon, and by that I mean both Palace of the Dead which will take you from 1 to 60 with relative ease and Heaven on High which picks up at 61 and drops you off neatly at 70. The only thing I can really relate it to is Diablo, because it occupies a very similar space in my brain as that of doing Nephalem Rifts or Bounties. I pop in and focus on something largely mindless while being treated to the always amazing soundtrack of the game. It is the perfect level of mindless engagement that I need to clear away a day worth crap from my brain.

All of that said… I am also keeping my eye on the horizon. I know that around August 27th the gates open on World of Warcraft Classic. I’ve more or less stopped playing the beta in preparation of the eventual grind to come. There is no sense in leveling characters that will ultimately just go away when that leveling process is anything but trivial. Right now the target is to level up an Undead Warrior, in part because I know my friend Grace will be leveling something Undead and that makes life a little easier on the connecting and running content together side.

Quite frankly due to the wild success of Shadowbringers I have no clue how many other people we will have with us along for the ride. Had Shadowbringers bombed or largely been a forgettable experience, I figure everyone would have jumped on the Classic boat just for something to do. On a similar note I am not entirely certain how much time I will be devoting to the experience myself. I figure I am going to need a little something less hardcore to keep swapping over to in order to sorta dull the pain of the grind.

I guess at this point… I am curious. How many of my readers plan on going down the dark path that leads to World of Warcraft Classic? I’ve already decided for the purpose of tracking, I am going to treat WoW Classic as a separate game from World of Warcraft given that it will be a vastly different experience. Right now for example I am not touching WoW Live at all and have not been for honestly longer than I realized. The last time I played WoW Live with any regularity was in November some seven months ago. Hell that alone probably is one of the longer lapses in gameplay I have experienced since Cataclysm.

Once again I am posting the most up to date version of the list. There have been a few people who have signed up since yesterday and our totals are up to 41.

Here is a quick summary of the Blaugust 2019 Links as well.

Passport to the Crags

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This past weekend was a weird mix of extremely busy periods and extremely languid gaming stretches. On Friday itself we went through a whirlwind of activity where we got a ceiling fan installed in the bedroom, went and got copies of our birth certificates, found a place to do passport photos on zero notice and managed to talk an appointment only passport application location to see us as a walk in because they were thankfully not busy. However the whirlwind of activity meant that I will not have to take a day off work in the future to try and wrap things up. I personally found the whole process of applying for a passport to be exceptionally stressful given that neither of us have had one before.

Saturday I managed to get in on a run clearing Eden with nearly a full free company group, and I joined while downstairs which means I was not on voice chat. That is probably not something I will repeat again because I more or less felt lost the entire time. However I managed through it enough to finish… with Meca-Titan and Hydra-Leviathan being the hardest fights to adjust to. I do think it is sorta badass that we are seemingly on a path to repeat much nastier versions of all of the Primals we fought before. I also think I will be trying to get in on a guild group on the night this opens from now on, rather than waiting as late in the week as I did.

My main project for the weekend was getting the Dragoon leveled to 71 so that I could start doing Trust content with it. It is weird the way I think of the various jobs as though they are different characters, even though technically it is all the same Lala Bel each time. Through all of the running of content I managed to collect enough poetics to deck the Dragoon out in most of a full set of Scaevan gear, and the pieces that I didn’t pick up on the right side of the gear screen were augmented by items picked up in the first Trust dungeon.

Another side note is that I managed to pick up another full set of barding, this time the Expanse barding originally from Bismarck. I actually managed to pick up two full sets of it, and the second of which I gave to Ashgar who happened to be standing there at Heaven on High as well. I mean I could sell stuff on the market place but would ultimately rather find most of it a home amongst my friends. Some of the things that are dropping in the dungeon have to have wreaked havoc on the prices as all of the Thavnarian gear seems to drop there as well. It is a nice bonus incentive for leveling in this fashion however to pick up previously hard to get items.

I should have in theory taken the Dragoon as a win for the weekend… but instead I started pushing up the Red Mage in Palace of the Dead. It is weird going from Heaven on High bad to PotD, because it is very clear that they learned several lessons between the two designs. PotD seems actually a much harder dungeon experience than HoH, and I actually managed to wipe out completely on the third floor of a run last night. In part this is due to a bunch of tanks starting to try pulling everything to the portal and waiting for folks to burn it all down… which sorta works at times in HoH but does not work at all in PotD. It is still a much better leveling experience for dps than pretty much anything else available in the game. Largely I like the fact that I do not need to give a shit about gear in the least, and I get to run dungeons while listening to random tracks from the amazing FFXIV musical back catalog.

It was a good if not busy weekend, but we got a lot accomplished in the real world as well as me ticking a bunch of boxes in the virtual world. On the Blaugust front people continue to trickle in and we are up to I believe as to the time of writing this 34 entrants. There was apparently a problem with some of the links on the previous list. They came directly from the sign-up sheet and a handful were missing the scheme part of URI… aka the https:// bit. This should be updated and the new list of folks looks a little something like this.

Once again a reminder that you still have plenty of time to sign up and participate in this years running of Blaugust. Here again is the summary of links with pertinent information related to that.

Nerfed I guess

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Last night I could have done a bunch of things, but instead of doing something productive… I piddled around on alts. Timing and a last minute run to Walmart made me unavailable to run content for Thalen which bums me out a little bit. My focus was largely to get the Dragoon to 61 and capable of starting in on Heaven on High. I noticed that Main Scenario Roulette even had DPS as the bonus role, so I decided to roll the dice and give that a shot again. What I ultimately needed was just a little over half of a level to hit 61.

Since I talked about this yesterday, this time around I managed to pull Praetorium and even with adventurer in need bonus… I just managed to get slightly more than half of a level. I am thinking at some point they stealth nerfed how much experience this was giving out during the 5.01 patch making it significantly less rewarding. Maybe they saw the numbers that told them that people like me were using it to fix gaps in the MSQ while leveling in Shadowbringers and they wanted to nip that in the bud. Regardless it is still a viable way to bridge the gap but it now takes two days worth of runs instead of a single day.

I will likely keep doing this thing given it is a really low pressure way of getting across that chasm. Sadly I think I am out of level 60 characters apart from the Gunbreaker, and I am doubting that I want to tank Castrum/Praetorium on a class that I have barely played at all. I could in theory start up a Dancer and push it across to Heaven on High levels. More likely I will start mixing up HoH and PotD runs and pushing some of my 50s to 60s to start this process all over again. I have no clue at all why I am suddenly obessed with leveling all of the things, but I apparently am.

As far as Eden goes I still have not touched it. Right now I know Warenwolf and Thalen both will need it and we are tentatively making plans for Friday night pending on a bunch of variables. Today is effectively my Friday this week, as I am taking tomorrow off to deal with a bunch of errands that need to be taken care involving locations only open during the 8 to 5 window. So in theory I probably will have some time to push characters between those activities. We had an installer reschedule us for 8:30 in the morning so it is my hope that we have our afternoon completely free.

As far as Blaugusty things… we continue to pick up steam as we roll towards the official start in a little less than two weeks. Timing this thing is always a challenge because I don’t want to make the announcement too far ahead of the event that we lose steam before it has officially started. Last year I posted on I believe the second week of July which seemed maybe a bit too early. I effectively waited a week later and so far it seems to be providing enough of a reminder and catalyst to get people engaged.

So far we are up to 29 official sign-ups with still a few more who will likely be buzzer beaters that I know are planning on participating.

I will also likely keep providing a daily summary of links for latecomers to have a quick way of onboarding.