Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 49 of 129

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.

Mechanics Defeated

April 12, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not ultimately end up like I thought it would, for many reasons. Firstly this weekend we had a death in the family… but man is it harder to explain than that. When you grow up in a small town, families that are connected to each other through a marriage end up mingling an awful lot. Because of kids birthday parties and school events, you are constantly encountering this whole other family that is not actually related to you. So when I say a death in the family, it was not actually my or my wife’s family, but instead the father of a brother in law in wife’s side. So when it happened we made a trip up to Friday night to attempt to offer support, and do our normal thing of bringing paper goods since during a death in the family a household goes through way more of everything. The funeral itself is today, and because of the weird familial restrictions of bereavement leave policy I don’t get a day off. Last night was the viewing, which is sort of like a wake but not actually a wake… and I did not think we were going to go. However when I got off from work my wife indicated that we probably should at least make a showing. I thought this largely meant that I would be gone from our normal Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans. It was roughly an hour drive either direction, and then by the time we went to the event and ate dinner I fully expected to be about an hour late for fun time.

However we opted to pick up some food and eat it while travelling… I would explain what we got but it probably would not make sense to anyone who did not grow up in a tiny town. I also apparently drove like a bat out of hell, because I made it home and was only about fifteen minutes late… with folks still trying to pull the group together. With me it meant we had seven people available to do stuff… and in some quirk of bravado we decided to pug that 8th layer and keep working on “Mechanics: The Fight” or Thordan Ex. We got a Dragoon that said they had run the fight on a healer before… and we proceeded to start attempting to make progress. A few seconds into the fight and the Dragoon was already dead. During that first attempt I think they were rezzed four different times… and more than likely through the entire sequence of the attempts averaged around three deaths per outing. As if summoned by our tears… Kodra showed up and we rejoiced and disbanded our party finder group to bring him in. The hilarious part about this is that we all started talking about how much we had gotten used to having a good Dragoon. Then a few seconds into the first attempt… Kodra died in EXACTLY the same manner as our pug dragoon.

We rebounding from this and started making proper attempts. The night was mildly stressful because we once again had a slightly different line up than normal. Muspel was filling one of the slots, and his only level 60 and geared character is his warrior. That mean’t Ashgar was not tanking along side me and instead running DPS on his monk. This is not normally a big deal other than the fact that every attempt I have been in the offtank role, and last night was my first night actually tanking the main boss. It took some adjustment, namely during the dragons eye phase to know that I had to actually step through the boss to make sure I was clear of the effect. Similarly there was a dance of times I needed to stack up… and then hurriedly run the hell out before he cast a frontal cleave. I am pretty sure I killed someone at least once during one of these interchanges, or when having to run across the Arena to place to boss so that the dragon eye and boss were in the same orientation. However on what would have been our last attempt due to the timer, we brought all of these elements together and managed to get our very first Thordan Ex kill. Now to move on to the Warring Triad Extremes, but hopefully we can keep popping Thordan each week so we don’t actually forget the dance.

Mechanics: The Fight

April 5, 2017 by Belghast

In our continued trend of being months behind the curve and happy about it… last night we worked again on Thordan Ex. We jokingly refer to this fight as “Mechanics: The Fight” because it this weird amalgam of every mechanic from binding coil and a mix of new ones. This is a prime example of what I think of as the archetypal Final Fantasy XIV fight… where it relies on you memorizing a DDR like pattern and then everyone in the party completing that pattern flawlessly. That however is not exactly the sort of fight our group excels at. When we go up against a “managing sheer chaos” style fight, we tend to be able to pull those out as one shots. However when you ask us to memorize and execute a specific pattern… it takes forever for us to memorize the dance. I am especially bad at pattern matching and memorization… and as one of the primary tanks this is not exactly a great thing. We did however get to the point last night where we were getting everyone through the dive bomb phase and through the meteor phase. There is a whole lot of bullshit that happens at the tail end of the fight and we were noticing that things started to completely fall apart during the pillars phase…. so I feel like if we can get through that… we can get through the rest of the fight. I also feel like this is the sort of fight that once the pattern is learned and beat into our brains… we will be able to execute it pretty flawlessly from that part out. Which is a good thing… because there are a lot of us that would like to farm birbs.

Speaking of Birbs…. I can now poop chocobos. Right now the Hatching-Tide event is going on in Eorzea, which sort of serves as the Easter celebration. Lets be fair… that like so many Eorzean Holidays… Hatching-Tide is mostly nonsense. The yearly event usually revolves around eggs and spriggans… that often times steal the eggs or somehow interact with the eggs. None of this really matters however because the important part is the fact that this year there is a mount. You can ride around on a giant floating egg… and ejects a baby Chocobo on command. So I think most of us that completed the event spent a good deal of the evening riding around on eggs and hurling chocobos at people. This is a prime example of why I love this game so much at times, because it is just down right absurd. There are so many “why not” moments that the game has where they put silly things in the hands of the players… who then do things like create Fat Chocobo parades. In Idyllshire last night there were a whole slew of people trying to synchronize the ejecting of Chocobos… which is an extremely aptly named place now that I think of it since so many people go there to Idle. For now I have fallen off the “get every class to 50” wagon but I hope to hop back on shortly. I just have too many games I want to be playing… and as a result am sort of playing all of them poorly.

Ballad of Cowboy Ninja

March 13, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend largely belonged to Final Fantasy XIV and the brief appearance of the Cowboy Ninja. One of the huge benefits of leveling through Palace of the Dead is the fact that you end up with a bunch of treasure tokens… that often times reward awesome cosmetic gear. Pretty early into my process of pushing the Ninja from 38 to 50 this weekend I stumbled across the above Cowboy hat and from that point out my path was set. I gathered a bunch of appearance goodies that I had collected from running the dungeon over and over… namely because my appropriate level gear was a subligar and harness. The three main appearance items that all came from palace of the dead are of course the Boarskin Survival Hat, Survival Shirt, and the Wind Silk Bottoms which are these bizarro red plaid pants. Through out the weekend I ran the dungeon wearing this outfit and gathered up a bunch of commendations… I largely believe in appearance alone. I am still around 25 coms away from my golden magitek mount so… in truth anything I can do to rake them in is a bonus!

I think another huge factor for getting coms is being talkative in dungeon runs. While Final Fantasy XIV tends to be a much more friendly experience as a whole than World of Warcraft, it is still a largely quiet one… especially when it comes to grinding Palace of the Dead 51-60 over and over. Everyone more or less knows their roles and falls silently in place doing them, and I try my best to break up this monotony with some comments here and there. I always start the dungeon run with a “Hey Folks :)” and finish with some variant of “Thanks for the run. Have a good one!” and then I watch as the coms slowly trickle in. Sure it is formulaic, but it seems to work… and the truth is I usually get responses back from the other players which is part of my larger goal of breaking the silence and getting folks interacting. I mean it is not so formulaic that I have a macro set up or anything… so there is at least that. Regardless I hit 50 during Talking Dead last night and started working my way through the Ninja quests. I had forgotten that I had a full set of high quality level 115 gear sitting in my bank waiting on me, that I picked up while questing my way through Heavensward. So I also now look like a proper ninja as well.

The other thing that I spent a significant amount of time playing this weekend was Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. At this point I have made a proper foothold in the world beyond the plateau, and in my travels I met Hestu. I am pretty sure he is my spirit animal… and all he really wants to do is shake his maracas for people. Thankfully by the time I encountered him I already had a few seeds to throw his ways, which I got by uncovering the hiding places of some of the Korok. I still have this very mixed relationship with this game. On one hand there are a bunch of things that I would love to change… and on the other hand I just can’t seem to stop playing it. There are absolutely things that feel needlessly obtuse and arcane… but by the same token you feel rewarded when you finally figure out how this or that system works. In many ways it reminds me of when I first set foot into Minecraft and had no clue how to craft anything at all… and simply started throwing things into the crafting bench to see what I might be able to make with it. Cooking works exactly this way, and while I have no clue how to duplicate some of my efforts… every now and then I get something truly awesome in the process.

Another thing that is needlessly arcane is the process of taking screenshots from the Wii U. For awhile I have known that you can hit home… click Miiverse and save a screenshot through that method. The problem there is that there is really no way of actually getting at that screenshot other than looking in your album in Miiverse. I mean you can share it with other people using Miiverse… but is anyone actually using Nintendo’s pseudo social network? As a blogger I of course want access to the screenshots for the purpose of posting them on this blog, and in order to do that… you have to follow a completely different process. The process begins much the same as the Miiverse route, but instead after hitting home you bring up your browser and navigate to this address… i.nintendo.net. This process will bring you to a “Nintendo Image Share” page that will allow you to connect to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr and post whatever happens to be on your screen at the moment you bring up the browser. This in theory works on 3DS as well, but I have yet to test it out. The images of me in Kakariko Village and of Hestu were snapped in this manor and it seems to work extremely well. I mean like everything to do with Nintendo it is needlessly complicated… but it works. As always I configured my Wii U to post to my screenshot twitter account that I have connected to the PS4 as well. I highly suggest having a secondary account for screenshots… that way you can without feeling bad dump twenty screenshots in a single night. I do however need to check this out on the 3DS and see if this will finally allow me to get proper screengrabs of the games I am playing there. How was your weekend?