Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 125 of 129

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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

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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.

Warrior Get!

September 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good afternoon folks… I have been a horrible slacker this morning and am just now sitting down to blog. Quite honestly… I feel like crap again… even more so than I did yesterday morning. The allergy thing is kicking my ass… right now my lungs and head feel like they are full of concrete. I rolled out of bed around 9 am and have been moping around the house since. Essentially it feels like the seasons are all jacked up… this is the way I normally feel mid July.

State of FFXIV

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I am just starting off this post with a reminder… that the current state of Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is bad. The game is fully playable and really damned enjoyable if you can make it into game. However at least once a night one of us gets essentially permanently locked out for the evening. Making it through the login tries as shown above takes brute force and luck. This weekend has honestly been far worse than anything since the last night of the head start. The lobby server and JP and EU/US realm lists are taking a dump on a regular basis, so it is by sheer luck that any of us are making it in to play the game at all.

So once again… I highly suggest that you DO NOT BUY THE GAME YET. Give it a month or so, right now Square seems to be working on fixing things… but they are doing so at a glacial pace. Supposedly we will have a all realms maintenance on Wednesday to add resources to the servers. The bad thing is that essentially it is happening during primetime for the United States. I hope that this remedies some of the issues, but they could have done much better timing wise. Considering like 90% of the players are in EU/US… timing it in a way as not to convenience the Japanese players only further cements my believe that Square in general could give zero shits about the US/EU player base as a whole.

I have heard through the blog and twitters verse that people are hunting from store to store trying to find a copy. Seriously… save yourself the headache and wait until they restore digital sales. We each have our preferred methods for getting through the login lottery. Yesterday evening I set up my “spam 0 over and over” macro and used the time to clean my office and break down a few dozen Lego models into parts. As I was finishing up and cleaning the top of my desk with a wet wipe I got through. Others seem to try for 30 minutes and then go off and do something else. Whatever the method is… you are far better just waiting until you don’t have to jump through the egregious hoops.

Bowl of Embers

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One of the big problems right now in the game is there are a large number of absolute bottlenecks that prevent you from moving forward. The first of these is the “Bowl of Embers” quest line that leads to an instance. I am going to try my damnedest not to spoil anything, because the instance is really damned cool and feels extremely epic. However you have to do it with a well balanced 4 man group. Once again we have the same problem in FFXIV as we have always had in the games leading up to this point. DPS is simply more popular than Tanks and Healers, and since leveling a healer is fairly difficult… they are FAR rarer than tanks are.

As a result there are literally hundreds of players bottlenecked by not being able to get this quest completed. The most jacked up thing about it is… you are offered no more quests ANYWHERE until you finish this one. I got my way to the quest, and then continued leveling as I didn’t have a guild group handy. I managed to push my way from 15 to 20 doing nothing but my hunting log quests and guildleaves. I thought the game got super sparse never realizing that I was being held back by not having done the Bowl of Embers.

Upon completing this one quest… there were quests everywhere waiting on me. One of my friends decided to take it upon himself to queue as a healer one night while we were all out questing. One poor thaumaturgist had been waiting in the bowl area for 3 hours… not realizing she could leave the area and continue playing the game while queued. So she had literally been just sitting there waiting on the queue to pop all that time… getting more and more frustrated as each hour passed. So far this is the worst thing about the game play that there are roadblocks like this every so often that halt not just the main story… but ANY questing.

Warrior Get!

My focus of late has been two fold… firstly to get to level 30 Marauder so I could do the Job Specialization quest and become a Warrior. Secondly it has been to get far enough in the storyline to unlock the Haukke Manor dungeon. That is another odd thing about this game… you can’t queue for a dungeon until you have unlocked it through the main storyline. Essentially the other players have apparently had more playtime than me and the other tank. So we have had a guild group just waiting to do Haukke Manor but no tank to do it. A few players have risked pugging, but the vast majority of us really only care to group with guild members.

So as a result I have felt a certain internal pressure to level through the quest chain as fast as I could so I could start tanking this instance for people, as it appears to be another logjam in the storyline. One of the weird things about taking a job is that you gain one really powerful effect upon getting it… but end up giving up your ability to cross class other than from two specific lines. So essentially a Warrior can only gain cross class abilities from Gladiator and Pugilist. This sucks a little bit because I had a really nice survival and slow ability from the Lancer line.

Right now my next plan is to focus on leveling my lancer for a bit, because I would really like to get it to 30 so that I can have a second job by picking up Dragoon. That way I would have both a dps and tanking job that I could fall back on for alternate dungeoning. The only negative is that while leveling the lancer I will essentially have to focus on running fates and guildleaves as I have already completed most of the quests available. To some extent I wish there were a number of repeatable quests available that you could do regardless based on your current class.

Daedalus Returns

Another really cool thing that happens at 30 is you unlock the ability to turn your riding chocobo into a battle companion. Essentially they can take up the role of healer, dps or tank and become similar to the mercenaries in the Everquest games. Of course you forfeit the ability to ride them as they are battling beside you, but it allows you to tackle more difficult encounters solo as you bring your own little duo along for the process. They level as you fight with them, and you use this to purchase abilities. Far as I can tell you can eventually teach them all of the three stances abilities.

Summoning them costs a Gysahl Green, which is the traditional Final Fantasy Chocobo food of choice. I am going to have to figure out which vendor sells the greens so I can buy a big stack. You get the first one as part of your quest chain. So far my Chocobo only knows the first level heal, but I literally just got this ability before coming downstairs to force myself to blog. The game really has so many little hooks that make you care about it. It reminds me at times of Everquest 2 in the number of intricate systems it has behind the scenes that it takes awhile to find. This game screams WoW clone at first viewing… but the more I get into it, the more rich it is.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to bang out a blog post and keep my one post a day streak up. Tomorrow I will be returning to the normal scheduled early morning posting. Overall this extended weekend has been a really odd case. I figure no one is likely waiting with baited breath to read my posts anyways. More than likely folks will catch up on their RSS readers after the long holiday weekend. I hope you all have had an excellent one, and I hope you keep my friend Sylladora in your thoughts. I just found out she is having to put down her dog this weekend, and it is always extremely rough to lose a long companion like that.

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.