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A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Getting Tanking Groove Back

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This is admittedly a post that I am not entirely certain how to get started. I’ve been thinking about it for a bit and yesterday’s blog post was a bit of a filler while I sorted out my thoughts further. It is my Birthday today and as a result, I am getting around much more slowly than usual. I did go get bonus donuts though so that was tasty. When I started this blog back in 2009 its original purpose was to be a “World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking Blog” patterned off of another idol of mine who was doing something similar with her experiences as the main tank for a raid. I was the main tank from Burning Crusade through Cataclysm, at which point I hopped off that bandwagon and had to sort of reinvent the concept of this blog. Basically tanking is in my DNA and I have done a heck of a lot of it over the years.

Something happened though during Shadowbringers that sort of broke me. I am not sure how or why it happened, but I stopped being willing to queue for random groups with strangers. I would still be willing to tank for my friends, but those groups became fewer and further apart. Instead, I started spending most of my time on a DPS alt, because it didn’t really require anything of me to join a group and blend in. I am not sure if it was my lack of willingness to take responsibility for the success or failure of a group, or that the community as a whole was feeling less friendly than it did previously. Whatever the case I developed a mental block against tanking that held for roughly five years. When Endwalker launched I exclusively did that content with the Trust system and tanked zero dungeons for random people.

I honestly think I probably would have stayed in this “stuck” state indefinitely were it not for my recent foray into Pandaria Remix. It was a temporary environment with extremely low stakes and to get anything started… you either had to hope someone accepted you into their party finder group or in my case… just start your own. It quickly became just the status quo that I was forming groups on the regular, at first just for the world bosses, and then later for the normal mode raids that did not have dungeon finder support. I got so comfortable building groups that it sort of whittled away at that mental block to the point where I felt ready to do more. I think the magic of Pandaria Remix is that it is a 90-day experiment and no matter how bad things go… everything you are doing is just temporary which makes the player base considerably more forgiving about everything.

Even then when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV for the purpose of catching up to the pre-Dawntrail content… I stuck with a DPS character. This was in part because somewhere along the line I had stopped gearing Paladin which was my Endwalker main job. All the while though… there was a not-so-subtle itch in the back of my skull telling me that I really wanted to try tanking again. I set my mind to finishing out the story and then my goal was to siphon off resources to the point where I could build up a decent set of gear for tanking purposes. That plan didn’t exactly carry forth as intended.

When Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn first launched, I went all in on Warrior and it was my main job up until Endwalker. I loved EVERYTHING about the job… except Overpower which last I knew was a frontal cone attack that you had to carefully time in order to make sure you clipped everything in front of you. A lot of the appeal of Paladin was that I could have a much more chill experience hitting everything around me in a big circle. However, as much as I love the concept of Sword and Board, there was just something much more enjoyable about hitting things with a big axe. Essentially I got the itch to level my Warrior and then noticed that at some point when I was not looking Overpower was changed to function almost exactly like the Paladin AOE. This set a plan in motion to level up and gear my Warrior so that I could switch to it as my main in Dawntrail.

However, at this point, I was not actually tanking much of anything. For the first few levels, I was running a daily Frontline and then doing the Hippo Endwalker dailies to get essentially one easy level each reset. However when I got to level 88… I started to get impatient and started queuing for what I thought of as some of the low-hanging fruit like Mainstory Roulette. It went pretty smoothly and felt pretty great… which built up my confidence to start queueing for Leveling, and eventually the Mid-level roulette, and so on. When I survived the embarrassment of forgetting to throw my stance on… trying to turn it on while pulling… accidentally dragging it off my bar… and then wiping the group… I figured I could handle anything. Truth be told… easing back into tanking has felt good. It has felt like I am exercising a skill that I had forgotten about and put away in the closet for some reason.

At this point I think I am on my fourth day of doing all of the roulettes as a tank… or at least everything but Trial and Alliance Raid. It isn’t so much that I don’t think I can do those… but more that I am not sure I want the hassle of tanking those yet. I’ve started splitting time with Dark Knight and Warrior as I am trying to level up that job… with the ultimate goal of getting all of my tanks to 90 so that I can jettison all of that old tanking gear. I’m honestly having a freaking blast and I feel more alive in Final Fantasy XIV than I have in years. It is like I had forgotten at some point along the way, just how freaking fun the dungeons are in this game and how well-designed they are. Do I remember every mechanic perfectly? Absolutely not. However, I am remembering most of them enough to limp my way through the fights while also racking up a lot of commendations along the way. Comms feel good.

I’ve managed to get my tanking gear up to a decent enough level for starting the next expansion and I will keep picking up the rare tomestone gear as I move forward. I did buy a shiny crafted Axe because I did not want to deal with the nonsense of getting a similar axe and then trying to augment it. Once the expansion goes live I will be spending my Poetics on getting maxed out level 80 and 90 sets for various roles so that I can level those in a chill manner. Generally speaking that max raid tier is good enough to get you all the way through the next expansion. My goal is to get really merciless with what I actually hold onto gear wise, because I am tired of having my vaults stuffed full of random trash. I’ve also been having quite a bit of luck buying loot boxes with Grand Company Seals.

I guess my next goal is to reclaim my raid leader heritage and get comfortable forming Squads with my mostly unused Catmander tag. Baby steps I know… but I think the dam that burst with me getting comfortable tanking for strangers may also sweep downstream and eventually batter down the dam that that was placed there to stop me from leading larger groups. Also, appreciate Thumper the baby Siege Turtle because he is precious. Anyways… I am now looking forward to Dawntrail more than I have previously because I actually want to try and progress through the raid tiers and extreme fights while they are current. I am trying really hard to apply the lessons learned during Pandaria Remix to playing more serious games… because at the end of the day… the opinion of strangers does not matter in the least. However, it does seem a bit like some of the toxicity I was seeing in the FFXIV community when it had a mass influx of WoW players… has potentially died down as well.

I hope you have a most wonderful day. I am going to be cleaning my office… which is probably not the most exciting birthday activity but I put together a new cabinet and I need to migrate stuff into it.

Maelstrom Captain

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Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.

This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.

In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.

Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.

I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.

One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.

Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.

Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.

The Worst Part About FFXIV

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Good Morning Friends! Remember yesterday when I said I was hesitant to finish up the Final Fantasy XIV storyline? Well… sometimes I contradict myself because I did precisely that. I was about maybe a third of the way catching up on the story when I started this mission over the weekend. I am honestly surprised at how fast that I managed to catch myself up. I went into this not being certain I would actually play Dawntrail, and now I find myself rather pumped for it. Truth be told I would have rather the Thirteenth storyline tied into the expansion, but I guess I am relatively happy to see it concluded for the time being.

As happy as I am with where the story wrapped up, I want to talk a bit this morning about the worst freaking part about this game. At two points last night I had to stop the flow of the story, to run to the market board and buy a piece of gear so that I could get over the arbitrary item-level gating requirements. Now I came back before the last set of crafted gear was put into the game so when I bought my way to relevancy I bought most of a set of 610 gear for a few million gil. This meant that my item level was sort of all over the place. I bought a new weapon when the last gear set went in giving me a single 640 item level item, and this mishmash was good enough to get me all the way to the last dungeon of the expansion.

When I set forth to do The Lunar Subterrane I needed an item level of 620 and I was sitting at 617. So I went to the market board, replaced my lowest-level item, and was able to get past this gate. It cost some 300k gil, but I figured I was probably good to go for a bit and could at least finish out the story. Then a few minutes later when I unlocked the final Trial… I was hit with a 5-level jump and again needed to make up the last two points to get over that hurdle. So once again I had to break my way out of the flow of the story to go pay my way to freedom again. It just feels awful to know that you have to keep getting nickeled and dimed by the market in order to see the conclusion of the story.

What I find most frustrating about this situation is… that Final Fantasy XIV has some rather damned good scaling tech. It would likely be trivial to scale players up to the minimum item level for a dungeon so that they can complete the story. Yoshi P has freely admitted that a large chunk of the player base returns right before the launch of a new expansion to catch up on the story… plays through the new expansion… and then disappears again until another expansion launches. It seems somewhat ludicrous that this has been a problem for EVERY expansion… and yet there has been nothing done to ease the pain. I am not saying that scaling should always be there… but folks catching up on the MSQ should be given a one-time pass of that gate so that they can actually see how things sort out without a lot of grinding. I have plenty of gil… it was easy for me to buy my way to freedom but not everyone has that option.

I think what makes all of this worse is that I am really rather pleased with how the post-Endwalker content was resolved. I had a lot of fun playing it. But there is this base level of resentment that I feel towards the game for draining my wallet just so that I could see it to its conclusion. Maybe I am just too used to Guild Wars 2 at this point where I set up a single set of gear several years ago and have been able to do everything in the game without ever needing to change it. I’ve gone through this with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker so I knew what I was getting myself in for. That does not make it feel any better to keep having to return to the Market Board to try and limp through the story gates, however.

All of that said… I am legitimately looking forward to Dawntrail. I am looking forward to seeing the new continent and I legitimately like Wuk Lamat. She reminds me of my friend Shandrah but with a Spanish accent. I don’t love some of the setup where we will be on opposite sides of a conflict from our friends, but I feel like before all is said and done we will end up together. I am very much looking forward to adventuring with Krille, and I am hoping that before all is said and done we get to see Zero once more. I became really invested in that character and want to see far more of her story and that of the Thirteenth. I’m also curious how the fuck Solution 9 fits into all of this because a weird cyberpunk city does not seem to make sense.

Janthir Wilds Announcement

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As I talked about in yesterday’s post, we were essentially in a holding pattern waiting for the announcement to drop for Guild Wars 2 Expansion 5. This sort of leaked out in drips and drabs throughout Monday and Tuesday morning, and then finally landed with the trailer showing up officially on YouTube around 11 am CDT. The leaks seemed to be entirely correct, most of which came from a Polish magazine article that jumped the embargo. I gotta say right off the bat, I don’t love that the expansion does not follow the X of Y naming scheme. It should have been “Wilds of Janthir” but pushing that eye twitch aside… I freaking love the logo. I especially love the animated version that shows up in the trailer. Mostly JW is going to be an awful abbreviation and I am scared of what the community at large is going to call it.

The trailer is super good, however, and I gotta say that they nailed the features of this expansion. I will elaborate on those in a bit. A hype trailer needs to evoke a sense of mystery and make you want to dive into that expansion. It also needs to tease enough features to begin you daydreaming about each of them, and I think this trailer nails that in spades. We got enough of a sketch of the plot to hold us over until the expansion drops in August. I think it is interesting that we saw Caithe and I kinda wonder if each of these micro expansions is going to essentially feature one or two characters that we know from the dragon cycle while introducing characters to new or lesser-known characters. I thought it was cool that we are apparently going to be running around with Malice Swordshadow and Countess Anise again… which should be a hilarious combination. Anise is legitimately one of my favorite characters in Guild Wars 2.

First up… let’s talk about my favorite expansion for the feature. PVE Warclaws are a great idea and I admit that I have found myself riding one around on more than one occasion because “Battle Cat” is a strong desire for anyone who grew up with MOTU. More than this though I feel like this is going to be awesome for players who want to dip their toes into the World vs World game mode. WvW without a Warclaw is sort of miserable. We all did it and we all limped along behind the mass of players trying to collect all of the bits we needed to finally craft ours. This is going to flatten that curve significantly and make it much easier for folks to get started into the fun side of that game mode. Few things feel cooler than riding in a clump of players thundering across the plains on their Warclaws. I would love to see this mount take up a similar role to the Siege Turtle in PVE combat of helping to break down objective obstacles.

Next up we have the Homestead… which honestly I thought was maybe a bit of hopium. ANet has already said that our home instance nodes are going to transfer to this system, which I hope means that we can maybe place them in a single area for efficiency’s sake. More than that I am hoping that we will be able to earn resources for our new “home” instance. I am assuming this is going to essentially be a baby version of the Guild Halls which hopefully means we got a good deal of control over the placement of cosmetic items. It would be cool if these had a similar evolving system that uses the Scribe tradeskill to upgrade your home. From a profit standpoint, this should unlock all sorts of things on the Gem Store for players to buy for their “player housing”. This is a cash cow in other games and I cannot see it being anything but that here as well. I am hoping all of the trophies that you can earn for your Guild Hall, can be placed in your player house as well.

Probably the piece I am the least excited about is the addition of a new weapon for each class. I never really liked using spears in underwater combat, because melee underwater felt like ass. However, it does seem like they are playing heavily with the definition of what a spear can be based on the varied class-specific animations that they show off. Like I am assuming that the charging wolf slash thing has to be a Ranger-specific ability for example. We will have to see how this shakes out in the long run, but as someone commented on Mastodon yesterday… we’ve not really had good spear skins for a decade now so there is going to have to be a lot of catching up cosmetic-wise to rival the feel of other weapons.

As far as the zone look and feel goes… I am getting DEEP Grizzly Hills vibes not just in the types of terrain but also the musical choices of the trailer. I am hoping this was absolutely intended because that is still one of my favorite zones to spend time in while roaming around Northrend in World of Warcraft. I love that we are getting more Kodan goodness… or in this case “Bearkin”. I love me some Stoic BearBois and am ready to help them out. I am hoping this also means we have Quaggan however… because the symbiotic relationship between those two races in the Shiverpeak Mountains is always something I have loved. It feels like there is going to be a lot of verticality to these zones which should be really fun for Skyscale riders, but less fun for pretty much everyone else that has not gone through either process of unlocking that mount. I am amped to see what the zone metas might look like in these areas… because really at the end of the day that is the “special sauce” of Guild Wars 2 that no one has managed to capture.

I am super happy that the team seems to have been able to nail the yearly cadence as the new expansion is dropping on August 20th. The preorders are up with $25 for the Standard edition and $50 for the Deluxe edition which comes with a set of tentacle monster themed unlimited use gathering tools, an extra character slot, and some sort of special table that we will be able to use in our homestead. As always there is a $75 Ultimate Edition available which essentially comes with $50 worth of Gems for the cash shop allowing you to basically get those for half price. I gotta be honest if you are new to the game that $75 pack is probably worth it because you can then turn around and use those 4000 gems to unlock various living world content which is essentially like their own expansions. A set of infinite gathering tools is roughly $30 worth of gems so even there… you are getting a pretty good deal by bumping up from the $25 Standard to the $50 Deluxe. I am probably way more free with spending money on Guild Wars 2 since it does not have any sort of recurring subscription fee.

You will notice that I did not mention raids, and honestly… that is mostly because I have yet to do ANY of the previous seven “wings” as the community refers to them. Maybe at some point, I will get into that, but for now, I don’t have enough friends playing regularly and at times I could participate in order to embark upon that system. Maybe my new found boldness from Pandaria Remix will translate to Guild Wars 2 and I will actually start using my damned Catmander tag. Even without taking Raiding into account and the announcement of some sort of new PVP Game mode… there is more than enough here to make me exceptionally hyped.

Have you been following the Janthir Wilds announcement? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.