Guildmom Shade Victim

by

Good Morning Folks! I am not sure why I used an exclamation point other than habit, but it isn’t that I have terribly exciting news to talk about. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing some Final Fantasy XIV and along with a lot of roulettes and trials with my friend Ace, I also spent a bit of time unlocking the Endwalker Alliance Raid. I have these memories of playing Final Fantasy XIV super seriously… but they all stem back from ARR and Heavensward. I am realizing from Stormblood onwards I have very much been in a holding pattern of doing the expansion content and then disappearing until the next expansion release. I would love to figure out a way to more “sustainably” play Final Fantasy XIV in the future where I level up and do content as it is released rather than in one big burst at the end.

I gotta say though, what I have seen of it so far… I am really digging the Alliance Raid. Heavensward, Stormblood, and honestly Shadowbringers all had annoying Alliance Raids. This one however seems super chill and along the lines of the original Crystal Tower series before it was watered down massively. Alliance Raids SHOULD be chill experiences… it is the World of Warcraft LFR equivalent. Mathbot can die in a fire because no matter how many times I run it, I cannot seem to grok what the fuck I am supposed to be doing during that encounter. Dun Scaith… is a nightmare and starts with the hardest boss up front and center and then gets gradually easier after that. I’ve only done the first part of the Endwalker 24-player raid, but so far I am digging it a lot.

I’ve leveled the Gunbreaker to 87 at this point and there should be no possible way that I do not hit 90 before the expansion drops. This means I should be able to continue cleanout out tank gear that I do not want for cosmetic purposes. All in all, Gunbreaker is still “fine” and feels more dpsy than the other tanks. When it comes to a tank I really care about two things… how easy it is to generate threat quickly and how many survival tools I have on my toolbelt. Nothing really beats the Warrior, especially in that second column so as such that is the tank I tend to gravitate towards constantly. It was fun taking an expansion and playing a lot of Paladin, but I will be happy to get back to smashing things with an axe when Dawntrail drops.

For those curious… I did actually finish doing my class quests on the Gunbreaker. It took Solaria logging in Sunday morning and throwing shade at me to actually get off my butt and do it. The weird thing is I already had continuation on my hot bars. However at this point I am a “real” Gunbreaker and the combo options it opens up are nice, but also… don’t explicitly fit into either of the columns that I really care about for tanking. If it had given me another off-global cooldown heal… I would have picked it up sooner. I figure though if “Guild Mom” is willing to give me shit about it, then I probably should take care of business. Truth be told… once I ding 90 I likely will never play Gunbreaker again until I am trying to level it to 100.

In the larger column of “oh god why did you do that Bel”, I bid on another house. Truth be told there just isn’t much to spend gil on in this game and I am still bummed about losing my previous house. I found a plot that I like in Limsa again and will know in a few days whether or not I win it. I won’t be devastated if I don’t get it, and honestly, I don’t have a clue what I will actually do with it if I do win it. However, there is always that whisper in the back of my skull telling me that I need a house. I think maybe what tarnished the experience last time is that I found what I considered to be my perfect plot… aka the first Free Company house plot we ever had. The problem is… it wasn’t that house, and was mostly an empty shell that did not bring back all those memories… nor were any of the neighbors the same. I was trying to recapture a moment in time, more than build my own new moment. With that in mind, I think a house will feel more mine if it isn’t in that historic plot.

In the column of “things I remember that exist” is the Blue Mage. At some point, I really want to finish leveling this up and do more content with it. I still really dig the glam that I came up with for it. I also want to pick back up where I left off in the various Relic weapon quests and do some more of those. I think they might be my long-tailed grind in this game like trying to get Legendaries are in Guild Wars 2. It has been weird coming back this time, because on previous return trips I was still very much in that mental block mode against group content. I plan on raiding in Dawntrail and am actually looking forward to doing at least the normal mode every week. This has all reawoken something in me, and it is odd to say the least. I will probably still play ARPG seasons as they release but I think I have made my peace with MMORPGs again.

To be truthful I think Ace is feeling the same thing. There is this part of ourselves that was super vital to who we are as gamers that we both had sort of put up on a shelf. Now that I have taken it down and dusted it off… I am finding that it still mostly fits.

AggroChat #482 – Roguelike Asteroids

by

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! We are down essentially half our folks and as a result, we have a bit shorter show than our normal fare.  We start off with some discussion about Grace’s return to Final Fantasy XIV and how Bel “influenced” them into coming back.  From there we talk a bit about Four Job Fiesta and how the White Mage start is REALLY rough.  We dive into Nova Drift and talk about its roguelike take on Asteroids or Geometry Wars. Tam talks about his love of arcade racers and talks about playing the 2012 Need for Speed: Most Wanted and then Ash and Bel try and sell him on Forza Horizon.  Tam also talks about What the Car…  which is also loosely a “car game” but not really.  Then we try and wrap up the show and suddenly remember that a Nintendo Direct happened and talk about some of the games showed off.

Topics Discussed:

  • Bel Lures Grace back to FFXIV
    • Speedrunning a Post Expansion
  • Four Job Fiesta in Final Fantasy V
    • White Mage Start is Awful
  • Nova Drift
  • Need for Speed: Most Wanted
  • Forza Horizon Series
  • What the Car
  • Nintendo Direct

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Chill Edgelord

by

Morning Folks! I popped into the game for a bit this morning before sitting down to write this blog post about nothing and dinged 89 on Dark Knight. That means I am very easily going to polish off that job today probably by doing a set of Hippo Dailies and a MSQ Roulette. Then I plan on shifting my focus to Gunbreaker so that I can potentially get all of my tanks to 90 prior to the expansion and clear out even more gear. I like the concept of Dark Knight more than I actually like playing it. After level 80 it is a pretty fun class to play, but prior to about level 70… it just does not feel like I have nearly enough tools to make the process enjoyable. So this means things like MSQ Roulette are less than enjoyable because I don’t have for example a charge ability… and have very limited mitigation “oh shit” buttons.

Yesterday my friend Ace reinstalled the game, but I mostly left them alone because coming back… is “a lot”. I know each time I have returned to the game after time away… it takes me a few days of futzing before I finally get back into the rhythm of what I actually need to do. I am kinda hoping by tonight however they have sorted things out and have some modicum of goals in mind, and I can help be pocket-tank to rocket them through the Post-MSQ. Not that I intend to rush them or anything, just trying to be helpful… without also being fucking annoying about it. I know I personally hit a “give a fuck” wall when I encountered the first trial fight, and it took me half a year to get back around to engaging with it again. My goal is to help ease some of those barriers.

I warned you at the top of this post that I did not have much to talk about this morning, and I am delivering in spades. I have a problem… and that problem is constantly searching for the ultimate controller. There is part of my brain that thinks that if I ever find the ideal controller for my mammoth hands… I will finally prefer that style of play over a mouse and keyboard. I know this is a fallacy but I have ordered yet another well-reviewed controller… this time the Gulikit King Kong 3 Pro. Because I was in no rush I popped over to AliExpress to grab it and save ten bucks roughly over the Amazon price. Generally speaking, this is a thing I at least check when I buy a controller or one of my emulator consoles because they are all coming from China anyway… might as well pay the least amount for said item.

What interests me about this controller is that it is roughly the same form factor as a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller… which I dig, but comes with Hall Effect sticks that are interchangeable similar to that of an Xbox Pro controller. I also dig the Gameboy-esc color palate. China has retro nonsense on lock honestly. Of course, at some point after I have played around with it, I will report my thoughts. I linked one of the many review videos on this controller which at least piqued my interest enough to try it. One of these days though… I am going to have a massive controller sale or something because I have sooooo many.

Anyways! For a week where I worked two days… I am exhausted and looking forward to the weekend. I hope you all have a wonderful Friday and a great weekend and I will see you again when I post the AggroChat episode on Sunday. Then again I might see you sooner if you are on either Bluesky or Mastodon because I have been more active lately.

Ill-Fitting Pants

by

Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.

I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.

In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.

Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.

I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.

I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.

Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.