Games Archives - Page 407 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

Unstuck

July 3, 2017 by Belghast

It is always bizarre when I make a post on a Monday… and almost everything that I was talking about on Friday has changed. This is one of those situations. When I wrote Friday we had a cute dog in our back yard… but it was still a dog. We had not slept very well for several nights in a row… because doggo wanted to be barking lots. There were several times that my wife got up and snoozed out on the back patio in an attempt to keep the dog from waking the neighbors. While I didn’t get the brunt of it… because the dog latched onto her and not me… I did get a significant interruption in my sleep patterns because when someone else in the house is moving about I wake up, or at least go into super shallow sleep mode. Functionally we were following two lines of thoughts… the best possible solution was to find the original owner and in attempting to do this… we cast a pretty wide net of posting about the dog any place we could think to do so. The second line of thought was to try and find a “dog person” to take him, and find him a good permanent home. Saturday afternoon I got a few excited messages from my wife who was out chilling with the dog on the back patio. It turns out that one of her facebook posts reached the human responsible for doggo, and within thirty minutes or so my wife was walking the pupper back home. Rocko as the human calls him… lives about dozen and a half houses away and had probably just escaped when he decided to start following my wife. We had a bunch of assumptions.. that he was in fact loved, and that he had a female human that looked after him… and that he had not actually traveled very far based on the way the pads of his feet looked. All of that turned out to be completely true and while the puppy seemed to be happy enough with us… once he got in range of his sibling he seemed to get super amped. Thankfully we were able to connect the dots and find his original home.

As far as the other thing that was distressing me… that had cleared up as well. When I last wrote about it, I talked about my struggles to find a group capable of getting through the Royal Menagerie trial. Also at that time there were several of us hung up on that step and functionally high center in the expansion. The Trial itself lasts for 60 minutes and after the five full attempts worth to get through it…. I had spent roughly 300 minutes of my life doing the fight over the course of the week. Friday night however Ashgar my usual co-tank reached the point where he was also needing the Trial, and we gathered up two heals, two tanks and a dps to take into the encounter. Up until this point we had all been talking about our battle scars that had been invoked by the fight… and then because apparently Ash is super lucky we managed to one shot the fight. The best part about this is the fact that three of us were stalled in the MSQ and got dislodged by that one victory. Saturday evening Kodra also reached that point, and similarly we rallied the troops… this time bringing six players in… and once again we one shot the encounter. So maybe I just had a streak of bad luck, but it was maddening nonetheless. However since pushing past on Friday I have been on a gearing spree and am sitting at 302 I believe now on my Warrior. When not doing roulettes though I have been working on the Samurai and have that job up to 58 so far. I need to do some research on the Extreme Primals because yesterday Grace tried to convince me and Tam to do this thing. I originally thought I would wait until the rest of the group got there as well… but I don’t mind the through of joining a party finder group… but I just need to be able to know what the hell is going on beforehand. Unfortunately there is no MTQ guide for either yet, and I am going to have to rely on one of the other guides to get the basics of the fight.

Army of Bone

June 28, 2017 by Belghast

As I said yesterday morning I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and the trial that has a good number of us completely high center on finishing the game. For those unaware Diablo 3 released its first in what I hope is a series of smaller addon packs that infuse the game with a little new blood… or skeletons in this case. While not really an expansion pack, Rise of the Necromancer adds the much wanted class to Diablo 3 and it is implemented in a way so that it blends seamlessly with the rest of the game. I will talk a bit more about that later, but here is functionally what you get for your $14.99… which is amusingly easily within the bounds of converting a single WoW Token to Blizzard Balance.

Non-Combat Pet – disgusting half baked flesh golem thing
A Pair of Cosmetic Wings – you can see me rocking them in the above screenshot
Necromancer Themed Banner Shape, Sigil and Accent
Necromancer Portrait Frame
Pennant – looks similarly Necromancery
Two additional character slots – which I was apparently close to being out of
Two additional bank stash tabs

Lets be honest… I probably would have paid $15 for two more bank tabs but as far as I am concerned that is plenty of goodness for the price. The Necromancer itself is insanely fun and most of last night I went around being followed by an army of undead minions. I cheated a bit in that I crafted a full set of Cain set gear and hung on to my Leoric’s Crown which had a 95% multiplier on it… for the Flawless Royal Ruby that I slotted in it… giving me 130% bonus experience and 112 bonus experience per kill. Now in my travels I have never leveled a Gem of Ease, which was the route that my friend Grace took to leveling significantly faster than me. Regardless the experience is flying and last night I managed to make it to level 56.

The key difference this time as compared to my normal seasonal characters is that I opted to play through the original game story as is to try and catch any changes that were put in place for the necromancer. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how well this new class blends with the original experience because they have shimmed in Necromancer specific responses from NPCs and Companions alike. This is the first time I have actually run the game with the scoundrel as my companion and he regularly makes comments about not needing any more empty skulls following us around. There was an event in Act II where I encountered a Necromancer out in the desert… which I greeted as a long lost friend rather than a strange traveler. Sure it feels a little weird to have the Paladin accept you as a friend… when you functionally defile the dead and bind them into your service… but whatever if you can manage a minor bit of hand waving what is left is a really enjoyable experience. The other thing that was awesome… is that it has been years since I last saw these cinematic and I was impressed with just how well they still hold up. I have so much love for Diablo 3 and it is the game that I am always rooting for good things to happen to… and small content packs like this one definitely seem like a viable way to continue growing the game. I am more than willing to keep plunking down this $15 price point to get new classes and assorted stuff to go with it.

I am really hoping this means we might see the Druid or Amazon as a result. Even more than rehashing characters from Diablo’s past… I would love to see them branch out and start giving us brand new concepts for characters. What about giving us a redeemed demon, or a fallen angel to control for ourselves. I just feel like there is a lot of life left in this game and I want to see them keep moving forward with expanding it. What I think is cool is that functionally this expansion pack was split into two halves… the first being the content listed above… and the rest being simply patch 2.6.0 which adds three new areas to the game for everyone regardless if they purchase the pack or not. Something called Challenge Rifts also went into the game as well as the usual number of tweaks and balances preparing us for the next season. I like this idea of expanding both the free content at the same time as giving us an additional way to keep spending money with the game and supporting its development. This is a weird balancing act that all of these “buy once, play forever” type of games seems to struggle with… as in what is content that should just be free because you bought the game, and what is content that is reasonable to charge an extra fee for. I feel like this balance with Diablo 3 seems about right and I think at this stage in the game it probably works far better than releasing a full expansion with a complete new act and 10 more levels to grind through each time you start a new character. I would love to hear my readers thoughts on this one. I for one am a happy camper, but I would be curious to hear some dissenting opinions.

Frustration

June 27, 2017 by Belghast

I am rapidly entering the territory of being unable to talk about things that I want to talk about… without getting deep into spoiler territory. Before I get into that sort of thing… I thought I would leave you with this picture of me… in an 80s music video… or a Olan Mills photo backdrop whichever way you want to spin it. Yes I did in fact stop in the middle of a pull to take this screenshot… no I don’t feel at all guilty about it. Last night featured some amazing highs… and some crushing lows. At the start of the evening I rather effortlessly pulled together a group of friends to run the sixth and final leveling dungeon, and it was amazing. It felt so much like they learned their lessons from the two 8 player dungeons that happened at the end of A Realm Reborn and managed to cram that same sort of epic feel into a 4 player dungeon. It is weird how people never seem to have a problem waiting for cut scenes in a normal dungeon, but god forbid you watch them in any of the 8 player or 24 player content. Whatever the case it was awesome, and featured a lot of really cool mechanics and several extremely challenging but still reasonable encounters. I theorized this as them wanting to make sure a group of random players could complete it since this will of course be part of the expert roulette. Then after these warm fuzzies… they dropped the bottom out and pushed me right into the third trial after a lengthy cut scene doing the story set up for it.

Now we are entering the realm of spoilers, because I am not sure how else to talk about my frustrations. There is a common thread among my Free Company… and that is folks who have technically finished the expansion but not yet seen the credit roll. For those uninitiated, there is in fact a credits roll at the end of each expansion… and then again at the end of an expansion cycle of patches. The reason why we have not seen the credit roll is because so far very few have lucked out to actually defeat the final primal fight. This is a pug killer, and last night saw me making my first attempts. On the first attempt we walked in with me playing a tank, Tam playing a Red Mage, Grace playing a Scholar and Solaria playing a White Mage… and while we got close several times we just could not push it across the finish line. This is one of those fights where you judiciously hold a healer limit break in reserve…. because at some point you are straight up going to need to rez most of the party. What makes this fight so much worse than “mechanics the fight” aka Thoradin is that everything literally hits so much harder. I feel like this is simply an issue of scaling and expecting everyone in the party to have potentially farmed Dungeon 6, rather than to attempt it immediately upon completion. The amount of damage that the party was taking and the tankbusters when they hit me… just added up to a frightening amount of healing that needed to be done in perfect situations. When players were taking damage when they didn’t need to… it just became more than anyone could handle.

The fight as a whole combines some of my least favorite mechanics from other fights, namely the destructible floor concept that we encountered in Sohr Khai. The other part of the fight that I really do not like is that there seems to be a significant RNG element to it. The boss has an aether meter and when it reaches full it does an attack… but which attack it does seems to be randomed from a large pool of possible attacks. The problem with this is that some of these are far easier to deal with than others… and this also completely flies in the face of FFXIV encounter design as we have known it to date. FFXIV encounters are traditionally a dance that is done that the players have to learn the steps to… but once they do it feels like an elegant chorus rather than a win on some chance table. There are some elements in this encounter that do happen in sequence but then there are others that seem to be pulled out of a hat that you just have to deal with. It feels like in order to get through the fight with a PUG we need firstly solid players… but also a hell of a lot of luck. As a result there is a group of us that might be high center until we can field most of an 8 player group made up of entirely our free company folks. That might be awhile since everyone tends to be leveling at vastly different speeds… and we have an excessive number of tanks and healers as opposed to some dps. After last night though…. I think I am going to take the night off and play some Diablo 3 since the Necromancer pack releases today.