Tales of the Aggronaut

Post Pax

January 30, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I finally got back to the real world after a detour into Paxville. What I mean by that is that Thursday through Sunday I was hanging out in San Antonio for Pax South. This marked the third year of attending for myself and the third year of the South branch of Pax as a whole. The only problem with this whole situation is that in my haste to pack I forgot to grab my laptop. This mean I was largely disconnected from the world during the entire show. I had every intent of getting up Friday morning and knocking out a blog post… and while I could have commandeered my wife’s laptop… I simply opted to roll with the whole disconnected thing. Sure I had my phone but the first rule of Pax is that internet rarely works at all from the vicinity of the convention. The first day we were coordinating over a slack channel, but that died during the evening… and from there we had to fall back on text messages that while slow eventually did arrive at their intended target.

I failed miserably at the whole meeting up with folks aspect this year… that is if you were not already in the group of people that I had the ability to text message. I know that MidahHiker was there, but it is sheer madness trying to find anyone in the crowd. I also know WallSavvy from Tequila Mockingbird my Destiny Clan was around… but he spent most of his time hanging out at the Overwatch tournament which was this giant ball of humanity… that ended up so packed that they made folks give up their seating to cram more people into the giant mosh pit that was the audience. I spent most of my time roaming around with Ashgar and Paragon… with occasional visits from Rae when she wasn’t off doing stuff with her brother or watching the Overwatch tourney herself. I also managed to connect with the Cosplay duo of Maovis and Exale… who brought his wife and super chill baby to meet me while I was standing in the hour and a half long line for Dauntless.

Speaking of lines… lets talk about what I didn’t get to play. The Nintendo Switch was the announcement that probably sold more tickets to Pax South than just about anything. However quite literally… if you were standing in line to play Zelda Breath of the Wild… then that was probably just about all you were going to do that day. When I first got to the convention I managed to enter in a trajectory that took me past the Nintendo Booth and it was this swirling quagmire of humanity that I got stuck in for about fifteen minutes until I could chart a course through it. Even on Friday the line reached out of the booth, around the corner and down two other booths lengths along a sheltered corner of the exhibition floor. I mocked up an image from the convention floor layout to attempt to show the line… it was double length next to the Nintendo Booth and then stretched along the entire length of the Nexon booth and was capped somewhere around the Rooster Teeth booth. There was supposedly a shorter line for Mario Kart and ARMS but I did not even attempt it… because time slowed to a standstill anytime you were near the Nintendo area. There were simply too many people for me to handle.

The show as a whole was significantly larger than the previous two years, with it moving into an entirely brand new area of the convention center. The only negative there is that I could no longer get up above the floor and take cool aerial shots. The weirdest part about this PAX experience is that the show as a whole consumes three floors of the convention center, with a fourth floor down at riverwalk level taken up usually by press appointment suites. I never actually left the main floor, because there was more than enough there for me to do both Friday and Saturday. I also spent a significant more time playing in the tabletop area this year than I had in past years. The other new thing that happened this year is that I gave up on parking and took Lyft into the convention both days. This made the whole experience so much more enjoyable because instead of getting up super early and trying to fight traffic in order to get one of the limited parking spots downtown… I chilled out in the hotel, ate a peaceful breakfast, and then hailed a rideshare. There was never a point where I waited more than five minutes, and the ride in itself was no more than 10 minutes…. so within 15 minutes I could be on the show floor pretty reliably. Three of the four trips were amazing… the final trip however the guy got lost a few times and wound up with a much bigger bill than I should have. I talked to Lyft however and they almost instantly sent me a refund for part of the cost, which was pretty damned cool. I am absolutely going this route in the future because it gives me the best of both worlds… easy access to the convention but a hotel with access to the various shopping areas for my wife to hang out in.

As far as the hotel goes… these images do not do it justice. I am used to having a bedroom of sorts with a sitting room attached, but largely in one big open floorplan. Instead of that we had literally three separate rooms. The living room was way deeper than the photo shows and had recliner, sofa with pull out bed, television, extra dressers, and a relatively comfy desk with a ton of plugins available from the top. The “kitchen” area was a full wet bar with cabinets below, sink, and microwave with a fully enclosed roomy bathroom to the left side of it. The bedroom had your normal fare but what I noticed is… my wife could be listening to the television in the livingroom area and I could be watching something completely different without any bleedover. They served a huge breakfast each morning where I largely chose sausage, eggs, breakfast potatos with country gravy. My wife however had a wider mix of things. They also served dinner each night so one night they had Taco fixings, and another night they apparently had something pasta oriented but I was not around for that one. All in all it was a great trip… and the icing on the cake is that we realized the massive Half Priced Books Dallas flagship store is less than a block off the route that we take home making it super easy to stop in and hit that during the trip. Over the next few days I plan on talking about individual games I played so I reserved today mostly as a sort of overview post.

Odd Remembrances

January 26, 2017 by Belghast

I am taking a break from packing and cleaning to knock out a blog post while eating dinner. I will of course embargo this so that it seems like I actually released it in the morning. However we all know what is happening… that I am making my way to Pax South. I have a whole bunch of anxiety about going to the convention once again, but in the grand scheme of things I think this will be a really good year. For the last couple years there has been the stress of having to make press appointments and attempt to be the surrogate of a publication at the convention. This time around I represent no one but myself… and of course the blog and podcast. I will also once again have my good friend Ashgar to roam around with, which should be awesome as well. I’ve made a pact to just go do things… rather than spend the entire convention walking around in circles looking for something to do like we managed to do last year. Tomorrow will of course be spent driving, and I am hoping I can remember to pack everything that needs to be packed. I made myself a Trello board in a vague attempt to keep track of things… and I already failed to get away from work with something so I am off to a grand start.

This is going to be a bit of an odd post, but earlier on twitter I happened to read a tweet from Matticus, to which a friend replied that he was “THEE Matticus”. Instantly the above clip went through my head, and it is something that I have found myself mimicking throughout the years. The problem being… no one has a damned clue what I am referencing. This is the point where I realize that the movies that were seemingly important to me growing up include some oddities. There is of course Star Wars and Indiana Jones… but also a lot of movies that have not really stood up to the test of time. Why they are special to me… is for an equally odd reason. I grew up without cable television, in fact the first time I had cable was in 1996 when I moved away from home and got an apartment at college. While I lived on the outskirts of my town… the cable refused to run down my driveway because it would have taken them just outside of the city limits. As a result I largely existed with over the air television… often watching excessive amounts of UHF stations because they seemed to have far more interesting broadcasting than the major networks. The other salvation however was the VHS tape… of which I had plenty both legitimate and with crudely scrawled labels on their spines.

One of my dads work buddies took it upon himself to help my predicament and it became a regular thing for us to send home a package of blank tapes, and at some point in the future receive a bundle of some of the most random movies. These all consisted of whatever happened to be currently playing on HBO during the block of time when he was recording something, and as such there are weird streaks of movies that all came out in the same one or two year period that stick out in my mind. The first of these is of course Romancing the Stone… which while an action flick probably would not have even made it on my radar were it not for the fact that it was one of the few action films we had, prior to the local video store closing the liquidating all of their movies. Of note this is the point where I picked up Alien, Aliens, and Predator. The truth is while I remember the plot well… the only line that sticks out of the whole movie is the “zee joan wilder?”, and even then largely because my cousin and I thought it was hilarious to quote it.

Another one of these movies that holds a special place in my heart is My Science Project, which is admittedly a pretty forgettable 80s science fiction film. It is this weird mix of a bunch of themes at the time crudely cemented together with a bad time travel plot line. In truth it was the time travel aspect that I liked the most, and even to this day I have an silly enjoyment of anything Fisher Stevens is in. Once again… this is not even a movie I probably would have rented but the fact that it mysteriously showed up on one of these recorded tapes meant that I watched it way more often than I probably should have. Rental movies were sort of a special occasion type thing, at least until I got into the middle school era. The first video rental place we had in town had a sort of shopping club buy in aspect to it, and the rentals were like $5 a piece… which was madness for 1984. I think the membership cost something silly like $100… but we had one even though we didn’t use it that often. I had a bad habit of renting the same movies over and over… like Ultraforce… which I was simply enamored with because of the flying motorcycle scene. The 80s really were a strange time.

Heavy Crowns

January 25, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve admittedly been pretty sporadic in my gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV since just shortly after the launch of Heavensward. For whatever reason the story this time never quite clicked in the same way that it did during A Realm Reborn. Additionally Alex never felt nearly as interesting as Coil… so it just felt like I was grasping at things to tie me to the game but struggling to find them. More than all of these I think the two dungeons per cycle business hurt the most, because it turned something that I used to love… Expert Roulette into a grind because there was always the dungeon you enjoyed… and the dungeon you disliked in every patch cycle. All of this said I have been poking my head in periodically and was at least aware of the mentor program. The idea being that Square would create a way to identify players who know lots about the game… which was an interesting theory. In practice it largely just means you have a Tank, DPS and Healer at the level cap. Also as I found out last night it apparently makes you feel like you need to run around barking orders and throwing shade on how bad you feel the rest of the party was doing. Even though I was attuned for it… I never actually ran the second of the 25 player raids called the Weeping City of Mhach. Collectively folks just call it the “Wiping City” and for good reason… because we died an awful lot but given that it was the first time myself or Grace had been in there… I thought we did largely okay.

The funniest part of the night was the Forgall fight… which involves becoming zombie but not going full zombie and avoiding some things while absolutely standing in others. In short it is the traditional insane dungeon fight that simply requires constant execution… and has mechanics that will straight wipe entire parties. It is a rarity that there are fights where you need to use the healer level three limit break… but during the course of this fight we used it at least twice… and there might have been a third time I didn’t realize. We were at a point where we had no tank and maybe three people total still up, and a bunch of us assumed we were wiping it out and running back. We were wrong… as the “Mentor” continued barking orders and telling people to rez this person or that person… during a contorted fight that felt like it took 20 minutes to finally beat. The truth is I had no clue what I was doing, but I finally got finished off by an actual fight mechanic as one of the attacks takes you to 1 hit point… and requires chain healing to keep the tank from instantly dying afterwards. We had maybe a single healer up at the time and I fell down hard… but just in time for another tank to get rezzed and pick it up. I feel like this was the sort of fight where we needed to play Yakety Sax … but slowed down to the point where it almost sounds like a funeral dirge.

The fight that I got the most enjoyment from however had to be Ozma… an encounter that I had heard about for awhile now. Largely I had heard about it being the group killer, in that it required a lot of moving parts that rarely got coordinated properly among the alliances. Thankfully I was on voice chat with my Free Company and they were able to give me enough of a heads up about what I should be doing. It also helps that early into the fight we lose the entire B alliance, giving me a run seeing the mechanics the first time and then allowing me to take that experience into the second smoother attempt. All in all we nailed it pretty well on the second go, and for the most part by the end of the encounter I learned everything that I needed to do to appropriately tank the fight. The reason we were running Wiping City however was to get me some gear… and unfortunately not a single tanky piece dropped. However I do feel confident enough to probably solo queue tank for the place and start soaking up more gear that way. The risk of playing FFXIV irregularly is that the game moves on without you… and I hit yet another wall with the latest patch. I was sitting at 220 from my last attempt to catch up… and this time around the first dungeon requires 230. There are of course a lot of more grindy ways to catch me up… but we were trying to take as many short cuts as possible.

Before disappearing and flaking out last time I had managed to put in some progress on the 235 weapon from Palace of the Dead and as I talked about yesterday our little run pushed me pretty far… but not quite over the tipping point. So last night once finishing the Wiping City, we broke up into a smaller group and did some Palace of the Dead and over the course of a few runs managed to get me to 39 weapon 32 armor. During all of the stuff I managed to accumulate enough Lore tombstones to upgrade my earrings to 230, and at some point during the evening Tam hooked me up with a set of 250 legs to replace my then lowest slot. I had enough cash accumulated to manage picking up the 250 ring as well since my next lowest slot was that. All together those four pieces of gear pushed me up to exactly 230 item level, and thus makes me viable for a lot more content including the dungeon that is blocking my quest progress. Unfortunately however I have had this patch cycle spoiled for me, because before I remembered to turn off player titles… I actually happened to be running Deep Dungeon with someone that was showing their new title off. Now I am not sure exactly how it is going to go down… but I know something is going to go down. Ultimately that is not necessarily going to ruin the impact, just a bit of a bummer to have it spoiled in a way that really should not have even been a thing. While I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as “caught up”, I am at least in a much better place than I was. I need to do a lot more palace of the dead so that I can pick up the next weapon… but that one requires 60 weapon/armor which is still a very very long ways away. My only revision of that content would be to make the end of sequence mini-boss drop one of whatever your lowest rank happens to be armor or weapon. Also of note… you can see that thanks to the new weapon I did some glamouring and am once more the Bunny Samurai.

Derpest Dungeon

January 24, 2017January 24, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not exactly go as intended, but it was a pretty great night nonetheless. Originally I had hopes of getting a Mythic+ group together so that I could use my +5 Maw of Souls keystone. That said I didn’t really exert a whole lot of effort in finding it either, and when I finally got settled in for the night after a bunch of idling there were only a handful of us on. Instead I opted to work on my time walking dungeons in the hopes that I might get more of that tasty tasty Essence of Aman’Thul from the weekly quest. When we got a group together it consisted of Rylacus and his son Tinoke who both still needed 2 dungeons… myself who needed 4 and then Bled and Phy just because they are awesome and love me enough to do a bunch of time walking dungeons. In truth I had completely pug tanked one of the dungeons so I could have suffered through it if I had to, but I enjoy tanking for my friends way more than I enjoy tanking for strangers. In any case we got to chit chat back and forth on Discord while doing the dungeons and that made the four go much faster. I had hoped by the time we finished there might be more people around, so we could pull together that Mythic+ but alas that was not the case. In truth I am guessing it was a good thing since a crisis arose while we were doing the Time Walking heroics.

I hate printers, probably more than any piece of equipment ever. They never seem to work as intended and always require an inordinate amount of fiddling. One of the things you have to know is that many nights my wife can print as much as an entire ream of paper for her class. When I am upstairs I am also at least in part the warden of the printer, and get yelled up at to fix issues when they arrise. Now earlier in the evening she was printing perfectly fine… and then all of the sudden things stopped spooling entirely. I tried my best to correctly diagnose the problem, but none of the rampant googling actually provided anything that was useful. Of note… we have a massive workgroup printer that weighs about 200 lbs and is precariously connected to a machine that acts as a print server via parallel to usb cable. It works 99% of the time but is just brittle enough to make me constantly uncertain of what might be causing the problem. We tried a sequence of rebooting the laptop and rebooting the “server” to no luck. She was able to hit file shares on the “server” without issue, but any time she tried to access the printer it said that it did not exist. However I could print to that printer from any other computer on the network so the connection was still there and active. Finally in my destination I started fiddling with home group settings, and changed her share settings because I was literally trying everything I could reasonably think of. Instantly it was like something refreshed her machines permissions and she could suddenly see the printer and life was once again good. Once again… let me express my undying hatred for printers.

Apparently Tam had been trying to get a hold of me while deep in printer diagnosis hell. Over the weekend I made a vague attempt to catch up on the Final Fantasy XIV content, but hit a both literal and figurative wall… in the form of the Baelsar’s Wall instance. I was not about to pug tank it… and it turns out apparently I couldn’t anyways because my item level is too low. I am currently sitting at 220 but apparently need 230 to get there. When I finally got patched up and logged in, Ash was needing to go to bed which left us with Tam and Kodra and seeing as I had not actually run any of the second half of the derpest dungeon, we opted to form a group for that. I have to say… while I have struggled in the past to get in and have fun… the deepest dungeon really hit the spot. The deepest dungeon serves the purpose of being quite possibly the easiest way to get weapon upgrades, with a mini game system that I have talked about in the past that involves collecting “gear” and leveling both your weapon and armor to 30. When you have collected 30 you can turn that in for a very solid 235 weapon which would be a sizable upgrade for me. Now when I entered last night I was sitting at the point where I stopped playing last time… which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 weapon and 14 armor. By the end of the night if I remember correctly I was sitting at 30 weapon and 28 armor… so pretty close to being able to collect my first weapon. It seems like the 51-100 floors move your item levels considerably faster… either that or we simply got lucky. To be honest, I had more fun in FFXIV last night than I have in a long time… and the above screenshot is there to simply serve as a reminder to just how insane Cactuar is as a server.

[Edit] – I can’t re-title the post without breaking every link that I syndicated this morning. That said I am finding out that “Derp” has some problematic roots and is a word that makes a lot of folks uncomfortable. It’s not really a word that is of any importance to me so going to attempt to jettison it from my vocabulary.