Seasonal Bits

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Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me.  Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely.  For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters.  Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies.  I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar.  The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time.  Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny.  From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV…  while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there.  This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves.  Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory.  This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along.  Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

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The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool.  I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection.  I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes.  The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well.  Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution.  That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being.  I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image.  This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post.  I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning…  which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it.  DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result.  I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb.  Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog.  In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season.  I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Two More Fall

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Last night was a pretty great night.  For the last several weeks since Emerald Nightmare released, Wednesday nights have been raid night.  At this very moment we are just raiding one night a week, and at first that probably held us back a little.  However given the last two weeks I think overall gearing was a bigger issue.  Last week we went from only being able to take down Nythendra to adding Elerethe Renferal, Ursoc, and the Dragons of Nightmare to the list.  Though admittedly both the Ursoc and Dragons kill felt like sheer dumb luck and bursty dps.  This week however we largely added to the mix what felt like repeatable versions of those kills.  Myself and Art the other tank finally sorted out something resembling a workable taunt rotation on Ursoc, and the fight went from being insanely spikey…. to pretty damned easy.  Similarly with Dragons of Nightmare we just straight up did the fight like we knew what was happening this time… and it went down in a single attempt.  Elerethe would have been a one shot were it not for both of us tanks getting knocked off the platform.  That was not my proudest moment.

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However I am in fact super proud that we managed to get things together for Il’gynoth and added our very first kill this week.  Overall it felt like our dps increased between the two weeks, and with it a better sense of what needed to die when.  Instead of leaving the Horror up for quite a while we had nice gaps to burn it in… and while we cut it a little close for comfort at around the 10 seconds until wipe mark, it was still a victory.  From there we decided to take a stab at Cenarius and actually extended past our normal run time because we made decent progress on the fight.  It still feels like there are a lot of levers we could and should tweak to make sure that fight is more repeatable, however we got the kill and hopefully will begin work on Xavius next week.  I realize this is “just normal” as the chorus of the more serious raiders might say… but screw it I am happy with our progress.  I feel like we are even probably going to start mixing in some heroics before too much longer.  Especially with the release of Karazhan on the 25th and it adding some additional gearing options for folks.  I am hoping to get a team going there pretty quickly, because I am more excited about that place than pretty much any content in any MMO.  I loved the original Karazhan and good or bad, ran it quite literally every Sunday afternoon for what felt like two years to help gear folks and their alts, only to later be replaced by Zul’Aman runs.  I think more than anything… most of us are simply going to be happy that before long we can complete the balance of power quest step and move on to the next batch of mythics.

Light Rising

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I’ve been on a bit of a Destiny kick lately, and that has involved trying to do at a minimum all of the Rise of Iron bounties that Shiro hands out each week.  These largely involve running around the plaguelands and doing “stuff” like specific patrols and participating in world events.  I’ve also recently discovered the bounty that is the Archon’s Forge.  I admit I was a little intimidated for awhile, given that when you enter the forge it essentially locks you out of leaving.  My ultimate fear is that this place would murder me with great prejudice given my relatively low light levels.  That fortunately was not really the case, and I was also pleased to see that the same sort of “key trading” behavior exists in the forge as it did in the Court of Oryx.  I’ve been playing entirely solo so far since the launch of Rise of Iron, mostly because I am playing in short bursts rather than hanging out and making myself available to the clan for shenanigans.  However pretty much any time I have rolled down to the Forge, there have been people there waiting and willing to summon stuff for us to fight.  I still have trouble with the “purple” quality keys, but both green and blue ones seem largely feasible.  Unfortunately it seems like you have zero control over what sort of key drops for you, and at this very moment I happen to be sitting on a purple key myself.

The forge is quite literally a modern day version of the “loot cave” because after thirty minutes or so of running keys back to back… you end up with a full mail box.  This is not actually a screenshot from last night, but one I had laying around from one of my previous trips into the Forge.  Last night however it became significantly more lucrative for me personally.  Patch 2.4.1 did some juggling of things in preparation for the release of the Heroic Mode raid.  As a result the light economy of items got bumped up a bit, allowing folks a slightly easier time catching up.

  • Rare Engrams will now decrypt up to 365 Light
  • Legendary Engrams will now decrypt up to 385 Light
  • Exotic Engrams will now decrypt up to 400 Light
  • Faction packages will now provide drops up to 390 Light

So as a result to these tweaks… I entered last nights play session at 554 and exited at 560 and on the cusp of pushing over the line with several 361 items.  In the first screenshot I am decked out in Future War Cult colors… because I picked up some quest asking me to do a bunch of content both PVE and PVP repping the FWC.  I have no clue what that actually will lead to but I am interested to see.  The moment to moment gameplay of Destiny still feels as great as it ever did, and I am pumped that I can pop in for an hour and do a few things and feel like I moved the needle forward.  I am super loot centric in my games, and so long as I am progressing my gear levels I feel like I am making meaningful progress.

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The ultimate short term goal is to get to 365 so that I can join in all of the reindeer games…  namely have access to the normal mode of the raid.  I’ve heard amazing things about it, but I have just lacked the drive to grind things out in the strike play list.  In fact I have yet to run a single strike since the implementation of Rise of Iron…  which seems a little odd given how often I used to run them for nothing more than burning Three of Coins.  I feel like I am torn in a bunch of different directions right now and trying to juggle actively playing four different games:  Destiny, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV.  As a result I am doing a somewhat shitty job of keeping up in any of them other than World of Warcraft, where I seem to be spending most of my time.  That said in WoW I feel like I am bumping up against the ceiling for the gear levels I can realistically achieve other than through my Wednesday night raid… so some of my drive there is siphoning off.  At the very least I am not really doing the world quests like I used to, because I know there is shit for gear out of them at my levels.  This excess time seems to be getting funneled right back into Destiny, but I do need to steal a little bit of it and work on my gearing in Final Fantasy XIV as well.  I am absolutely holding our group back from doing some of the new content because I am about 15 item levels short of being where I should be.  If only I could clone myself… and keep those clones at home all day long playing all the things I want to be playing.

FFXIV Early Decisions

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Last weekend was the 2016 Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas and with it was the reveal of the brand new expansion…  Stormblood.  Also with it has come a brand new renewed interest in the game by folks who have yet to play it, or never really got a stable footing in the game.  Yesterday a friend of mine started asking his twitter timeline a bunch of questions about the game, and it made me realize that a post explaining some stuff might be a timely thing.  In traditional MMO terms, there are a bunch of decisions that you make at the beginning of any new game that can often times dictate your options later in the game.  The most common of these are things like choosing a faction, or even sometimes a starting race.  Final Fantasy has far fewer trip ups like this but those that do exist I thought I would explain a bit, namely from the perspective of someone who has played other MMOs.

Data Center

One of the first questions you are going to be asked is to choose a Data Center.  For those familiar with World of Warcraft as I am guessing most players who are interested in MMOs are… this relates to your Battlegroup.  While the individual server you are going to play on is super important because that limits your day to day interactions… equally and sometimes even more important is the Data Center you are part of.  Data Centers are the pool of players that you draw upon any time you queue for anything in the Duty Finder, meaning the population of the servers in your Data Center is going to greatly effect queue times.  I personally play on the Aether Data Center which is one of the ones suggested for North American players, and it also happens to have a whole slew of high population servers to pick from.  So this data center contains the following servers…

  • Adamantoise
  • Balmung
  • Cactuar
  • Coeurl
  • Faerie
  • Gilgamesh
  • Goblin
  • Jenova
  • Mateus
  • Midgardsormr
  • Sargatanas
  • Siren
  • Zalera

Server

Inside of the Data Center you are going to choose a server.  I for example am on Cactuar which seems to be a high to medium popultion server in the grand scheme of things.  Square has a mechanic in place that keeps players from rolling on higher population servers during prime time.  That means during the evening hours specifically servers often time lock down for new character creation.  There is a thread on the forums that is updated every few hours with the status of these servers for new character creation.  So at this very moment at 6:30 in the morning Cactuar is open for new character creation, but by the time evening rolls around it is likely going to be locked down.  Still using Aether as an example, right now Balmung and Gilgamesh are already locked down barring new character creation.  In World of Warcraft terms most players try to find a place on the higher pop servers, thinking they will have more options.  However in FFXIV that absolutely means any time you have a major patch or the rollout of a new expansion, you are going to be locked out behind a pretty lengthy queue.  With the launch of Heavensward Cactuar experienced some queues, but nothing along the line of the hour or longer queue times that say Gilgamesh did.

Sadly FFXIV does not offer cross realm play in the way that World of Warcraft does, so that means for doing FATEs or any of the raiding options that are not accessible through the duty finder, you are going to be limited by the active population on your server.  I am completely biased about Cactuar, because I love the community there.  However my ultimately suggestion would be to find a similarly medium to high pop server… rather than one of the “always locked” servers to play on.  These communities still generally have active raid groups, but allow you to skirt some of the negative aspects of the end game community, as well as mostly allow you to skip the queues.  Additionally the higher the population of the server, the less likely you will ever be able to own housing.  Final Fantasy XIV housing other than apartment is non-instanced and has a limited number of houses available per realm.

Race

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In creating a new character you are going to be asked to choose a race.  For anyone who has played a faction based game this is immediately going to cause some anxiety because generally speaking that locks you into a subset of the population.  Races however in Final Fantasy XIV are cosmetic choices in nature, as is the “god” that you follow… and your characters birthday.  These are all flavor options, that really do nothing to limit your ability to play with your friends.  Final Fantasy XIV is a game with no firm walls that ever segregate you from parts of the population.  In fact Races are pretty fluid in this game, given that most folks change race at least once due to the fact that the game gives away Vials of Fantasia at a few points in the main story quest.  I started out a Hyur Highlander, before ultimately finding my true calling in life the Dunesfolk Lalafell.  I could extoll upon you the virtues of playing a Lalafell… but then again I have friends who feel equally passionately about pretty much all of the races.  This essentially is about finding your own groove in the game, because you are going to spend a lot of time looking at your character.

Class

The other big decision you are going to be asked to make immediately… is what class you want to play.  Normally speaking in MMO terms this is one of the more important things you have to decide.  However in Final Fantasy XIV is is really not that big of a deal.  This is a game where each character, can be every single thing in the game.  I started the game as Marauder the class that ultimately becomes a Warrior… and I am still “maining” Warrior to this day.  However I also have a reasonably functional Bard and Dragoon… and literally every other class/job combo in the game at least started.  This is a game where it greatly benefits you to have a single character, that just happens to have a bunch of jobs because of cross class abilities, which are a sub set of class abilities that you can then use on other jobs.  Of note a lot of this is changing, but it will still function in some form or another with Stormblood.  Crafting works essentially the same way allowing you to be every possible crafting profession on a single character.  The only thing that your class really does is lock you down to a starting city, because it takes awhile in the main story quest before you unlock the ability to travel between the three main capital cities.

  • Gridania
    • Archer – Ranged DPS
    • Conjurer – Healer
    • Lancer – Melee DPS
  • Limsa Lominsa
    • Arcanist – Ranged DPS/Pet Class
    • Marauder – Tank
    • Rogue – Melee DPS
  • Ul’dah
    • Gladiator – Tank
    • Pugilist – Melee DPS
    • Thaumaturge – Ranged DPS

Grand Company

At some point in the Main Story Quest…. you are going to choose to join a Grand Company.  These represent factions within the three main cities of Gridania, Limsa Lominsa and Ul’dah.  Unlike factions in other games… they don’t really lock you from freely grouping with other players, but they do have some ramifications.  For starters they dictate the capital city that you are going to be by nature spending a lot of time in, as you interact with the various vendors associated with that faction.  Secondly they dictate what the appearance of your grand company weapons and gear looks like, as each of them has a very specific style… that trickles down to even chocobo barding.  Finally there are a few PVP modes that are Grand Company based.  However at any point you can swap grand companies… for example I started off as Immortal Flames the company associated with Ul’dah and decided at some point to switch to The Maelstrom the company associated with Limsa Lominsa.  Swapping essentially throws you back to the beginning ranks with the new company, but also saves your previous progress with the one you are leaving.  That way if at any point you decide to swap back again… you can pick up where you left off.

Permanent Ramifications

Ultimately Final Fantasy XIV is a game with a bunch of flexible boundaries.  The only ones that are “permanent” are your choice of Data Center and Server… and even then there is a construct in place for paid server moves.  Once you have chosen a server however… literally every decision you make can be undone and changed pretty easily.  This is a game that expects you are going to want to “be all the things” and ultimately rewards you for doing so.  For those looking at getting started in the game, I am hoping this run down of the decision making helps.