A Good Night

While tensions were at times a little high, and a handful of people were on edge… I have to say last night in Highmaul was as close to a perfect night as we have seen.  Everyone just did the things they needed to do and we started knocking down one boss after another.  All told last night we cleared 6/7 normal mode bosses and 2/7 heroic bosses with some end of the night tries on heroic butcher.  We still need to work on the specifics of that fight but I feel like we made more progress last night than we have in previous attempts on him.  I also managed to have a decent night loot wise finally picking up some piece with Bonus Armor on them.  Brackenspore dropped a significantly upgraded neckpiece, Tectus a significantly upgraded ring, and through the course of the night I picked up a trash drop cloak.  So while I only actually gained a single ilevel gear wise… I gained significantly better itemization across the board.

The other thing that felt better last night was my dps as a whole.  A few raids ago I switched to using Weak Auras, and it has honestly taken some getting used to in order to rely on them rather than watching my hotbar.  Last night felt like I reached a point where I was mostly watching the auras and their timers.  As such I did a much better job of making sure I kept Shield Charge up without overlapping it into the territory of a previous one.  Additionally after some reading I started prioritizing Revenge over Shield Slam if both were up at the same time.  The end result was a significant boost in damage output.  On most fights last week I was doing between 18k and 19k depending on the circumstances.  This week I was doing more in the range of 20k to 22k with cleave heavy fights of course giving me a damage boost.  Essentially this gives me hope for the viability of Gladiator dps in the long run, since with some “proper” gear I am competitive.

Before the Fall

The other cool thing that happened yesterday was that in the morning Square Enix dropped the trailer for the “Before the Fall” patch in Final Fantasy XIV.  In truth it looks like the patch is going to be a combination of three parts 2.5, 2.51 and 2.55 with various features coming in phases.  The trailer was another one of their infamous ten minute long tours of all the content being placed in the game.  First off in 2.5 we are getting three new dungeons including Hard Mode Wanderers Palace… where form the looks of it we might just be helping out the Tonberries.  We are also getting a Hard Mode version of Amdapor Keep which looks like it is going to have more than a few rough spots.  Finally we are getting a completely new location called he Keeper of the Lake as we fight what appears to be a ruined Magitek facility with some sort of god sleeping in it.  The big bad boss at the end looks something like Leviathan, but crawling through my Final Fantasy ancestral memory I am really not sure who it might be.  The only “snake” boss that is not Leviathan popping into my head is Midgar Zolom but I doubt that is it.

[Edit] upon posting this I just saw a post talking about who this boss is likely.  Supposedly “The Keeper of the Lake” refers to the remains of Midgardsormr aka the god of the Dravinians from what I understand.  So with the upcoming expansion set in Ishgard, and focusing on the war between that nation and the Dravinians, then it totally makes sense that we the players will unwittingly wake Midgardsormr.

Probably the portion of the video I am most looking forward to is the opening of the World of Darkness raid.  For those not familiar with Final Fantasy XIV raiding, there are essentially two basic paths.  You have the serious raiding core that is the “Coil of Bahamut” instances which are strict 8 man battles, and then you have the casual raids that are the “Crystal Tower” instances.  I have it under the authority of Ashgar that all of these fights so far have been based on events, places and bosses found in Final Fantasy 3.  As a result he hinted at the “World of Darkness” raid some time before they actually announced it.  Right now Labyrinth of the Ancients, and Syrcus Tower are fun…  but with World of Darkness we see a greatly improved ilevel available for casual 24 man raiding.  The only hard part will be getting used to only being able to snag a single item per week.  The other big bonus is that more than likely these will drop the items needed to “un-weather” the level 120 gear and turn it into level 130 gear.  The hope is that they do in fact let us loot a single upgrade item and a single actual item per run like has been hinted at.

Enkidu Arrives

It is impossible to talk about this next section without at least dropping some spoilers about the Hildebrand quest storyline.  If you have not done it and care about being surprised when people show up…  you maybe shouldn’t read forward.  Granted the Hildebrand quest storyline as a whole will only really make sense to folks who have played a lot of different Final Fantasy games.  One of the characters you meet fairly early on in the Hildebrand storyline is Gilgamesh who is a fairly storied comedic character in the Final Fantasy universe.  Generally speaking he is accompanied by his imp friend Enkidu.  My personal first encounter with Gilgamesh was in the game Final Fantasy V but I am uncertain if that was his actual first appearance.  In that game he plays the role of a major bad guy, but at the same time…  comedic relief often times as inept as he is deadly.  Enkidu often feels like the “straight man” in their act, the one that keeps Gilgamesh in line.

As you encounter Gilgamesh in Final Fantasy XIV he is alone which is explained when he first introduces himself to the character. But where are my manners? I have yet to properly introduce myself. I am Gilgamesh, and that is my companion, Enkidu! …Well, not really. It has been many moons since last I saw him, so to ease the burden of loneliness, I tamed a rooster and painted it green.  So at this point we know Enkidu does exist in the universe, we just have yet to meet him.  Now we zoom forward to this patch, sure enough when they are doing the Hildebrand quest line they show a character that looks very much in every way like the traditional image of Enkidu.  So this likely means that we are going to see Gilgamesh in the storyline again, but more important than that… that hopefully we have yet another awesome boss battle to look forward to.  While I have actually only done the Ultros fight once… it was extremely fun and serves for a nice diversion from our progression through Binding Coil.

Tale of Two Raids

Last night I spent the evening in Final Fantasy XIV with my raid of friends working our way through figuring out Turn 1 of the Second Coil of Bahamut…  that is universally known as “Turn 6”.  I know its confusing, but the “Coil of Bahamut” all three parts are treated as though they were one big raid, in spite of the fact that they do occur in three different locations.  One of the interesting things about our Monday night group is that we specifically try and do as little research as possible before going into the fights.  A lot of the joy we have found has come from figuring out the mechanics on the fly and last night was no different.  Granted last night specifically it probably cost us a kill, since we had the boss down to the 10% territory and simply ran out of time for more tries because we spent so much time trying to figure out how to even do the fight.

On the other hand you have the raid group that I am part of that meets tonight in World of Warcraft.  There we attempt to do all research humanly possibly, watching video of the fight from multiple angles and reading as much information about the fight as we can to be prepared for anything.  I can’t really say which way is better, since they are so vastly different.  I feel like maybe way number one works better in the long run, because so many times I feel like there is a lot of conflicting information when you attempt to “research everything ever”.  While it might take a lot of otherwise meaningless wipes, we in the first method we seem to ONLY learn the way that works for us.  Whereas in the second method we seem to have to discard a ton of information before we can find the path that actually works for our group.

Ignorance Was Bliss

This has the side effect of playing into a theme that has been running in my head for some time, that maybe “more information” isn’t always “better”.  As gamers we have started demanding almost absolute transparency from the developers of the games we play.  We want to know the moment something is being planned, and how it is going to be implemented… and for the love of god how it ultimately will effect all of the work we have done to that point.  We get so caught up in the minutiae of the games we play, and sites like MMO Champion are all too happy to data mine all the tid bits of information even before the companies can tell us.  It is human nature to love feeling like we have insider information, but if everyone knows… is any of it really insider information?  The problem is I think we get lost in a sea of data points and miss the fact that the entirety is far more beautiful than the assemblage of parts.

I love Hotdogs and Bologna, but my continued love of both is dependant upon me not getting hung up on the fact that in both cases they are essentially a congealed slurry of all of the meat parts that have been deemed “unprofitable” for sale in other forms.  Sometimes it is absolutely better to not know how the things you love are made, and as a result I feel like knowing all of this information sets us up for a great pitfall.  There is a gulf between what we as players THINK happens behind the scenes at a game company and what actually does happen.  Just like oil prices can crash if someone murmurs about rumored political problems in an oil rich reason… our enjoyment of the game can also come crashing down if we hear rumors about “problems at a studio”.

Trying to Find Magic

I have been fortunate or unfortunate… depending on your point of view to have had many friends that work for different game studios.  As a result I get to see a completely different side of the industry that most players can see the effect off, but not really understand the way things actually work.  The above picture if of Belgrod Sternblade in Elder Scrolls Online, a character based on my long line of “Bel”something characters in the games I play.  It is awesome to have a namesake in a game, but I am not sure if it was worth the price I paid by being inside the circle of knowledge regarding ESO before it launched.  By the time the game released I had been playing the game in one form or another for over a year at that point.  We as players have the tendency to latch onto the way things used to be, rather than the current state and I was absolutely guilty of that.  From a polish and functional standpoint the game improved leaps and bounds from the moment I started playing… to the moment it launched.

The problem is I could not let go of the fact that I liked the user interface so much better several revisions before the version that actually launched.  Similarly there are players that cannot let go of the fact that we never got the “Path of the Titans” alternate progression path in Cataclysm, or the Dance Studio in Wrath of the Lich  King.  When a developer gives us too much information, especially when features are in a state of flux and “not quite ready for primetime” they are only setting up for player disappointment later when for whatever reason that feature is not nearly as shiny as the “oversold” version.  The fact that I played Elder Scrolls Online through so many revisions absolutely damaged my overall enjoyment of the game when it launched.  So much of the content felt “old” by then, when in reality the game had only been out a few weeks.

Box Art Decisions

As a child I can remember purchasing games on a regular basis without any prior knowledge other than the fact that it “existed”.  Admittedly the box art and the images on the back of the box played a massive role in my choosing habits.  This caused me to miss some really awesome games… I am looking at you Mega Man with the worlds worst box art.  However there were other games that I picked up because they had awesome artwork…  but had some really rough edges that I came to love, only because I was forced to sit there and “enjoy” the $50 that I had just spent.  As such games like Lagoon that admittedly have a ton of problems… are ones I think upon fondly because I stuck with the game long enough to work past the rough spots.  Sure there was the fact that I had sunk my money into a game that was maybe not as awesome as I thought it would be…  but I feel like I also had more of a willingness to put up with the rough spots of a game to try and find the good in it.

I feel like we are bombarded on a daily basis with reason why we “shouldn’t” like this or that, and I myself do it constantly.  I started down a diatribe on twitter yesterday about how much I disliked our Capitol cities in Ashran, and how they feel so much worse than any expansion city to date.  At no point did I mean that the fact that Ashran has shitty cities is adversely effecting my game.  To be truthful I simply don’t go there apart from picking up “roll tokens” once a week, and then maybe if my hearthstone is down.  Otherwise I spend my time in my Garrison, or using the Shrine in Pandaria as my transportation nexus.  The fact that Blizzard has not given me sufficient reason to care about the new “main” city doesn’t stop me from enjoying other aspects of the game.  That said I enjoyed blowing off steam about a small thing that was bothering me.  The problem is… my voice just added to the chorus of negativity surrounding a game that has been out several months at this point.  I feel bad because ultimately I am still having a fun time in part because I am trying not to get hung up on the small details and keep looking for the larger beauty.