Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 54 of 129

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

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At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

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After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

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In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.

Dankest Dungeon

July 22, 2016 by Belghast

Palace of the Dead

Last night I was not terribly certain what I would be doing with myself. For the last several days I have been heavily focused on transmoggy things over in World of Warcraft, but on the same day that patch was released the newest patch landed in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I left work I saw Tam ask if anyone would be interested in taking a trip into the Palace of the Dead… or as he has begun referring to it the “Dankest Dungeon”. This had been something on my radar for a long awhile, with the theory being that you had a brand new leveling path for alts. I have an army of alts and honestly you can only manage so much FATE grinding before you need some other path. It seems like everyone on my server has gotten the same idea, because apparently to queue for the dungeon you have to be standing in Quarrymill. I snapped this photo last night but if you looked in any direction you would have seen pretty much the same density of players. In many ways this reminded me of the wall Revenant’s Toll felt on raid reset day. Neph wanted to play her Dark Knight, Tam his Black Mage, and Thalen his Machinist… which left me needing to do the team focused thing and play a healer. Anyone who knows me very well will know I am not really the best healer in the world. The irony there is that I started my MMO career in Everquest as a cleric… the go to healer for any serious content. I also feel that experience pretty much generated a massive mental block against ever wanting to do it again.

Now I have had a White Mage for a good while, and actually enjoyed myself leveling that. However for whatever reason the Scholar class has never really clicked with me. Before the launch of Heavensward I managed to get Arcanist to 30 and actually claim both the Scholar and Summoner jobs but pretty much stalled out shortly thereafter. I felt like I sucked at the class and simply stopped queuing for dungeons, because for ever Tam Tara there would be five Brayflox that I struggled to deal with. The interesting thing about the deep dungeon is how it has its own parallel leveling system, and how it apparently invents things that simply don’t exist. For example when you go in as a job… you don’t exactly get the path that you took to get to your level. For example I had Eos and Selene really quickly rather than my Carbunkle friends, which is I guess the same thing that happens when you get leveled down in a dungeon. On the other side of the equation, Kodra commented about having a serious challenge dealing with trying to function in the dungeon as an Arcanist without the Scholar job. Arcanists play this strange role of not quite but almost healer, that I remember struggling with when I ran dungeons… because I was also note quite a dps. The early levels seem to heavily favor dps, with the last set that we completed before I was literally falling asleep at the keyboard… needing us to actually do proper group tactics to get through.

Weapons of Light

So as you move through the dungeon there are chests that you open that do a bunch of different things. Firstly you get a shared group inventory that contains these items called Pomanders. These cause various effects both to buff your party, and to counter act the negative effects of the dungeon. For example there is one that shows the entire map so you can navigate to only the rooms that contain chests, or another that will disable all traps in a floor. There are still others that are designed to counter act very specific negative effects gained from certain encounters, like Pox that stops all health regeneration. This one is particularly nasty if placed on the tank… which it was for a significant period of time last night. The natural instinct for me is to clear every room, but you are timed from the moment you set foot inside and have sixty minutes to clear ten floors. At first this seems like an easy task, as we quickly breezed through the early levels. However once we got onto the third set of floors that timer started to make a big difference, and in theory you are given roughly six minutes per floor. As a result we started pulling the levels in a minimal clear fashion with our dps fanning out at times to scout ahead and try and determine which path we should go down as a group. The name of the game is finding the blue and silver chests that contain “gear” upgrades… and by that I mean +1 to your arms and armor score which serve as the gear for the dungeon.

The most interesting thing about the experience is how you gain your abilities during the normal arc that occurs as you level up. However for whatever reason I thought I would hit a ceiling and simply stop getting abilities when I hit level 31 which is what would have happened were I running dungeons. Instead I continued to move forward and am now in my 50s gaining heavensward scholar abilities that are unlocked through quests. So in theory this is a crash course in how to play your class… long before you actually get the abilities. As to whether or not this worked… I started out the dungeon run extremely rough and almost all of the healing was coming from Selene the murder fairy. As we moved forward I started to get the hang of it, and was using adlo like a mad man followed up with some direct healing. People died, a bunch… or at least more than I am happy with… and we ended up wiping on a really bad luck trap spawn. However as the night progressed I started feeling significantly more comfortable healing as a scholar. In theory I would feel much better stepping into a dungeon now than I did before last night. All in all I got roughly three levels which is a slightly faster progression rate than running dungeons, but not the sort of speed that is going to lead to a lot of chain power leveling. I had a lot of fun and just wished that we had been able to start earlier in the evening so that I could see the end of the dungeon. I definitely want to do this again soon.

Everything Must Go!

July 19, 2016 by Belghast

Rushed Raiding

Last night was the second running of our reconstituted Monday night group, but unfortunately this time around we were missing a Thalen. So instead of working through the content we planned on doing with was Ravana Extreme, we opted to start work on the second part of Alexander. We had seven folks gathered up so we figured grabbing a single pug wouldn’t hurt at all. We also decided to be up front with the pug, in that they were hanging out with a group of learners. The most awesome of possible circumstances happened in that the game ended up giving us someone on our own server. As a result we met a new friend Lux Tenebrae who happened to join up as a semi-permanent 8th last night. We like to go into fights fairly blind, and then adjust and shift until we have a grasp on the movie parts. So both of the Alexanders that we completed last night took more than one attempt, but at the same time it feels like we have a firm enough grasp on the fights to be able to come in next week and completely wreck them. The fights themselves were extremely fun, and pretty much anything with the Alex background music is going to rate high on my radar. We had to cut things short however because last night began the maintenance period that will eventually get us patch 3.35 which for all intents and purposes is the “Deep Dungeon” patch. I think every single one of us is looking forward to this as a way of leveling our army of alts.

However once we got out of the raid we had roughly thirty minutes left before the servers reset. At the not so subtle nudging of Neph we pulled together an expert group and decided to go for it. By the time we got zoned in we had less than thirty minutes to go and Hullbreaker Hard set out before us. We had an early wipe due to hubris and standing in stuff, but we recovered quickly and made it through the zone in a good clip. When we pulled the final boss we had two minutes left on the official clock from the set time of the maintenance period. The thing is we continued on fighting after time was at least in theory up. Then something strange happened… firstly Kodra got disconnected, but we were able to finish the boss without him. We got our loot and zoned out… and then both Tam and I got disconnected at exactly the same moment. Then moments later Neph did as well. So it seems like quite literally they were flushing connections one at a time as they cycled through the server preparing to shut it down. The positive is that three of us managed to get credit for the expert… the negative is that Kodra did not but I am sure we will all be willing to make it up to him later. This was one of the funnest dungeons I have fun in a long while because we were really pushing ourselves trying to beat the timer… which while we didn’t quite make it we came really damned close.

Farewell to Gold Farms

The other part of the evening was spent going from character to character and purchasing Smuggled Sack of Gold over and over until I completely depleted my garrison resources. Yesterday was essentially liquidation night of everything from my garrison that might sell for a decent bit of gold. I also went to Wrath era Dalaran and checked the various PVP vendors to see if any of that gear was something I might want for transmog purposes given that with today’s patch all of that is getting shifted away from gold to honor based purchases. On a handful of my characters this also meant scrapping lumber yards to build trading posts… just to liquidate their resources for cash. The whole process was an extremely fun atmosphere because quite literally everyone else in the guild was pretty much doing the same. In a shared chat earlier in the day macros had been posted to speed up the process and there we sat spamming away purchasing gold bags and opening them at the same time. In many ways it felt like we were all saying goodbye to what ended up being a frustrating expansion, and more than that… saying goodbye to our daily garrison chores. Today the first of the Legion pre-patches go live and with it a removal of pretty much all of the ways to make gold from the garrison. This is a bit of a double edged sword because even someone like me, was able to compile a decent amount of gold just by logging in periodically and opening bags of gold from my garrison missions.

That said not a single moment of doing this really felt fun. It was a chore for me because I felt like if I was not cycling through all eleven characters on Argent Dawn I was essentially “leaving money on the table”. So doing my Garrison chores mean spending thirty minutes to an hour doing nothing but interacting with NPCs and queuing missions all before doing anything fun or interesting. So removing the gold from Garrisons will always be removing any leverage it had over me to actually do the crap contained within those instanced walls. What gets replaced instead is the every so much more exciting mission of farming all of the transmog bits from all of the old world dungeons and raids. Most of my characters have a fat stack of salvage crates waiting to be opened in the hopes of gathering up new appearances to unlock for the system. I still think overall the transmog changes are a bit of a half assed system compared to what other games have, but it is a far better system than World of Warcraft currently has. Tonight will more than likely be spent going character by character and checking things into the transmog system and getting rid of everything that is literally clogging my bank, void storage and inventory. I started a bit of this last night in selling off any non cosmetic gear that was for alternate specs other than whatever I considered my “main” role on a character. Getting things in the Transmog system however will pretty much clear up the rest of the space and allow me to actually start saving more interesting items.

Lettuce Fairies

July 14, 2016 by Belghast

Air Conditioning Saga

The last several day have been interesting to say the least, but in ways I have not really talked about in my blog. We moved into our house in 1999 and at that time the air conditioning unit was original to the house circa 1980. So the fact that our unit would fail has been this weight hanging over us for well over a decade. For at least a decade it has had a slow leak which meant that roughly once a season it would freeze up solid, and the service folks would come out and top off the Freon and get us up and going again. Each and every service guy has said essentially the same thing… keep the unit going as long as we can because “they don’t build them like this anymore”. A few weeks ago we finally reached the endgame with our unit as something rattled loose and started trying to vibrate it to death. The actual fix was going to cost over $1000 and that was simply something I could not in good conscious do given that the unit as a whole would still eventually fail sooner rather than later regardless of said fix. I did however come up with a hedge fix that held us until them… which was essentially placing a huge sandstone rock on top of the unit which dampened the rattling enough to keep things going for a bit while we sorted out options for a replacement unit.

Now in some parts of the country air conditioning might be an optional thing… but in Oklahoma with our regular over one hundred degree fahrenheit days it is an absolute necessity. So Monday and Tuesday we had workers in the house installing the new unit, and the last several days we have been trying to get used to the way it works. Traditionally AC units are either on or off, meaning you either get 100% power or nothing at all. This new one has a stepper motor that goes from 35% to 100% in 1% increments, which is really odd to get used to because it rarely ever shuts off completely. It just sort of cycles down to next to nothing at times, but essentially tries to maintain a stable temperature at all times. The other thing this unit has is a built in dehumidifier, which means we have been going through this adjustment period when we are trying to figure out what the new norm is. Previously we kept the house around 73 degrees, but that is honestly way too cold now… so for the last bit we’ve landed somewhere around 75 degrees and that seems to be working out okay. Finally the unit has a built in hospital filtration system, which means all of the air in the house is almost completely allergen free…. which was almost immediately noticeable the first time I stepped foot outside of the house after sleeping a night under the new system. I was like walking out and hitting a wall of pollen and humidity.

Goobbue Rider

ffxiv_dx11 2016-07-13 21-54-53-49 — Chompy Teeth Monster FTW!

Needless to say the last several days this has taken most of my energy, and as a result my gaming has been extremely scattered consisting of some Pokemon Go and a bunch of logging into various things and doing maintenance type tasks and then logging out again. One of those tasks that I have been trying to do religiously however is the Sylph quests in Final Fantasy XIV… or as we usually call them the “Lettuce Fairies”. Since the moment I saw that there was a Goobbue mount I have wanted one, but the Slyphlands in general and the daily quests they offer are probably the most annoying set to grind. So during the 2.0 content I nibbled away at them but never really made a concerted effort to work on them. However at level 60 they are insanely easy and actually when everything is not aggroing out… the Sylphlands are rather charming. So over the last bit I have been focused on pushing through the reputation grind so that I could be a tiny Lalafell on a giant monster. Last night I managed to complete the last of the quests and now I am riding tall on my big buddy. Next up I am working on the Sahagin quests for no particular reason other than the fact that they were the next highest. I really did not know how much faster the quests go when you hit the rank three quests and can start doing nine a day. If nothing else this gives me a solid purpose to be in game and see folks every night even if I am not necessarily running complicated content.

Descending Further

Last night I also played quite a bit more Necropolis, and I think I finally get the comparison to Dark Souls. Both are games that when you encounter a completely new type of monster, you are likely going to die a lot. A number of my deaths have been caused by me learning how to properly battle a specific type of critter, and since my attacks are rather slow and deliberate it is not like I can simply spam my attack key and pray for the best. I’ve also found myself needing to bait monsters to keep them from swarming me at the same time. So those Everquest/DAoC body pulling skills are coming in handy. All of this said I am still not terribly far into the game. Last night I made it through the first floor and managed to transition to the second floor… where the mocked me for this achievement. Then moments later I encountered a brand new type of monster and died horribly within moments. I think the worst thing about restarting each time is going back to the original crappy starter weapon. I wish I could somehow carry my loadout into the next life, but I guess scavenging usable equipment is a large part of the game play. I think this is very much going to be one of those “play a bit each night” type of games for me, because I cannot really see grinding my face against it.