Tales of the Aggronaut

Kargath’s Hat

December 17, 2014 by Belghast

Festive Occasion

Today is going to be a really strange day, for so many reasons. The group I am with at work is the first group in years that I have actually cared about holiday parties. So when my boss had a party a few years ago, it was quite literally the first “work Christmas party” I have ever actually attended. This year due to some odd circumstances we are not actually having a real party, but instead doing a Christmas lunch of sorts. The plan is to have a long lunch at a local restaurant, and then in place of our normal Wednesday staff meeting we are having these product demos. This year we had these team projects that we had been working on as we had time. Each of them did something that we felt was needed in our environment.

In the meeting this afternoon we have to demo our progress, but I am taking this probably way more seriously than I actually should. I have a product pitch like presentation, with a power point and everything. My hope is that I can burn through the presentation pretty quickly, because once all of the products have been demo’d we are off for the rest of the afternoon. I have a feeling that if any one person runs too long there will be much groaning, so I am trying to make sure things are polished enough to go quickly without stumbling on anything. In any case today is going to be a strange day, and hopefully it will be a fun one.

Kargath’s Hat

This morning I am struggling a bit to focus as I write my blog post. In part I am groggy from having stayed up a little bit too late, but I am also struggling to figure out how to explain just how awesome last night was. This so far has been hands down the best start to an instance raid wise I have experienced in World of Warcraft. Generally speaking our guild and the raids connected to it, have taken a significant amount of time getting our act together before actually hitting the content. With this raid we attempted to hit the ground running on the week the content was actually released. Of course Argent Dawn our server did not cooperate… and the game was essentially unplayable for us on that Tuesday, however the following Thursday they managed to down the first two bosses. Since then we have been progressing steadily each week. Last week we managed to down our very first Heroic boss as well, but due to some bugs not a single person in the raid got any loot. The bosses share separate lockouts, but it seems like last week you were only able to receive loot from one of those lockouts.

As such we altered the order in which we did the content so that we could take down Heroic Kargath first before doing any of the normal mode content. That way if we were only going to get loot from one version… we would at least get the heroic version. I can’t say we have this boss down on “Farm” yet because it took us a few tries to get him down, but it does feel like it was more solid than last week. Last week was definitely a “by the seat of our pants” kill, feeling like we barely got him. This week we had a few rough attempts but then on the time we killed him everything went pretty solidly. I struggled a bit with staying alive this week in general, which is part really bad luck and part sluggish reaction speed. When he died I got quite possibly the worst helmet I could use statwise…. which directly replaced the previous version I had… but at least it has the festive green text saying “Heroic” on it.

Twin Ogron: Doubly Dead

Wow-64 2014-12-16 22-00-15-15 This week on normal everything is starting to feel like it is easily farmable. We downed Kargath and Butcher with ease, before moving forward to Brackenspore. After struggling a bit last week, this week everything felt smooth. I can say that pretty much every job on that fight happened flawlessly, but we also got some luck on the mushroom spawn placement. In any case we one-shot Brackenspore before moving on. Tectus on the other hand gave us a bit of a problem. While we one-shot him last week… it was definitely a lucky attempt. The way we were “handling” things was far more “by the seat of our pants” than it really needed to be. In fact the attempt mostly involved me running around like crazy dragging the bosses with me, trying to avoid crap as best as I could and keep the melee out of it. If we were going to take on that fight on heroic, we needed to start developing a strategy and last night we did just that. The first few attempts were nonstarters, but there was a moment when everyone started to grasp what needed to happen and just executed it. While we had like 20 seconds to the enrage timer on our first attempt, this time we managed to down him with a minute and a half left, feeling like the fight is definitely in the sustainable territory.

The fight we struggled with last week of course were the Twin Ogron: Pol and Phemos. More than anything we really did not have solid strategies for dealing with things like the fire and whirlwind. We made a half hearted attempt on Tuesday, and then managed to get some serious tries Thursday… which was enough to propel some research on the matter. Our attack was two prong… firstly we changed up where we were fighting the Ogron, and secondly we now understood how the axes work and where the fire comes from. Things went perfectly, and the new placement combined with understanding the patterns gave us our first Twin Ogron kill… and it was a one-shot. In one night we managed to clear six bosses, one of which being a brand new kill… I feel like that is pretty much a banner night for our raid. Now we need to do research for the next encounter, which I actually saw on LFR after last nights raid… and which is why I was up way too late. It looks like it is going to be madness, but hopefully we can struggle on and make good attempts this Thursday. Unfortunately I spent a token on every boss but normal Kargath, and the only piece of loot I walked away with was the heroic hat. It’s amazing how being handed fistfuls of gold can make you so sad.

Twintania Down

December 16, 2014 by Belghast

Hitting Heroics

I guess I have given the wrong impression over the last few posts. I have nothing against Heroics, in fact I ran the shit out of them over the first few weeks of Warlords of Draenor. That is of course how I geared up to 630+ for raiding purposes. I would have been royally screwed without the various heroic, warforged and socketed pieces I picked up along the way. With my alts however I was trying a mostly academic experiment to see if you could go directly into looking for group without actually having set foot in a Heroic. I personally could not, but in theory if you had slightly better luck than I did… you might just be able to do it. That said when faced with a choice between furthering this little experiment, and actually being able to run LFR this week before the reset… I chose the path that would let me run LFR.

When a guildie was asking for folks in guild chat to run a daily random, I signed up and for the most part it went smoothly. By that I mean I did not seem to screw anything up, and managed to push out sufficient dps. We have done enough of these by now that they pretty much always go smoothly, even when it involved two of us playing on alts. I managed to pick up a neckpiece off the first boss, and a nice pair of shoulders off the guaranteed piece from the final boss. Combined this gave me enough of a boost to be able to queue easily. which I did late in the evening. I managed to get into the LFR after about 10 minutes and the entire thing was over in about 20. From there I netted a pair of boots, so I am well on my way to being mostly viable on this character.

Twintania Down

The highlight of the evening however is that we managed to push across the threshold and defeat Turn 5 in the Binding Coil of Bahamut… aka Twintania. The night as a whole started off a bit strange, because due to him moving and needing to finish packing… Tam was not available. This meant we had to pull things together without him… something we are not exactly experienced in doing. Thankfully Kodra was a responsible adult and got us all going. We had a slightly different makeup than normal, which meant among other things dual White Mages instead of a White Mage and Scholar. While both White Mages healed their little butts off… the difference was noticeable especially when both healers were busy mitigating mechanics like conflagration. It is kinda hax to have a healer fairy constantly dumping out heals even whenever its master is otherwise occupied, and when that goes away it is noticeable.

It took us roughly an hour to get through to the final phase cleanly with everyone up and no one in jeopardy. When we finally downed the fight it felt really repeatable… which is good because we are likely going to repeat it pretty often. Firstly Tam needs to defeat Twintania to be able to progress into the Second Coil of Bahamut, but secondly I have a feeling that we would all really like to have Turn 5 weapons at least for glamour purposes. I feel really damned proud of our group. All told it took us four nights of attempts to down her, and that is saying alot that the fight is still this tough even with the echo buff. I cannot fathom what being on the bleeding edge feels like in Final Fantasy XIV… but I am super happy to be following along a year behind and enjoying the content with my friends.

Screenshot Failure

In my Boy Scout days, there was an entire troop of special needs adults that camped near us. We had developed a bond with their scoutmaster since he was from a neighboring town, and over time we got to know all the scouts from that troop pretty well. There was one named Rusty, who was constantly carrying around an old Nikon SLR camera snapping photos. He would excitedly coo to himself “wooooboy that was a good one”, after each photo he would take. After watching him take photos the entire time without ever reloading film, my dad a professional photographer happened to look at the counter on the camera. There was no film at all in it, and the simple act of taking the photos made him feel happy. Last night I was apparently Rusty, because while we had this epic night of raiding… and Cyl and I looking adorable in santa costumes… I found out much to my frustration at the end of the night that not a single screenshot was saved.

For some time I have had this elaborate setup where all of my screenshots regardless of game got dumped into a single directory. This makes the morning routine of blogging and snagging screenshots for said blogs much easier. As a result for years I ran Fraps, and it just worked flawlessly. However when I started streaming, I had to find something that did not have a negative interaction with OBS. For that I have relied on DXTory, but lately it has been acting flaky as hell. There was an issue with it where leaving it running in the background would cause it to stop listening to keypress events, and therefore not recording screenshots. So last night before the raid I stopped and restarted it… making sure it was correctly bound to the Final Fantasy XIV process. However at the end of the night… after taking so many wouldbe awesome screenshots… the directory was empty. I guess for the time being I will go back to FRAPS since I am not really streaming much anyways… but just hoping that some of our guildies got some good shots. The picture of Twintania down was captured by Ashgar, who gladly provided it for this post.

Deathknightly Values

December 15, 2014 by Belghast

Ogron Going Down

Last Thursday we struggled quite a bit with the Twin Ogron encounter. It felt so completely random that I could not quite grok how to deal with the fire. This weekend I resolved to fix this problem and did quite a bit of research to try and grasp exactly how the fire worked, because once we figured that out I figured we could easily down them. Yesterday afternoon I watched what felt like a dozen different videos until I finally found one that showed the fire clear enough for me to catch what exactly was happening. If you watch this video it clearly shows what happens to the fire when the axe lands on the ground. As such I created this handy visual aide for our raiders, because it seems as though the fire travels in the direction the axe’s handle is leaning. This means there is a relatively safe spot on the far side of the axe head.

By relatively safe I mean that you only have to deal with dodging fire from one of the axes. It seems like there is some time between when the first axe falls and the second axe falls, which also added to our confusion during the encounter. Essentially we need to move the raid behind the axe head and then be prepared to adjust to dodge the second axes incoming fire. Now the fire does not travel in a straight line, which also makes it seem more random, but instead arcs outwards in a curve, but not one steep enough to curve back on itself. My hope is with this tidbit of information we will rock the hell out of Pol and Phemos and take their candy. When I realized how it was working I was absolutely pumped… and I am sorry to anyone I tried to explain this to yesterday. I was a little over stimulated by the discovery, and probably made very little sense.

Deathknightly Values

The focus of my weekend gaming was to finish the push of my Deathknight to 100. Saturday night I managed to hit 99 which just left me a single level to push through on Sunday. The problem is my focus shifted from acquiring levels, to instead acquiring gear as Nagrand is really my last opportunity to improve my ilevel before being confronted with the choice of running dungeons. My side goal of course was to somehow manage to hit 615 ilevel before sitting foot in a single heroic to prove it could be done. My friend Cuppy said she managed to do it, but as I got further through Nagrand my heart started to sink. Each quest turn in that I did not get a blue or purple upgrade from was like a punch in the gut, because I knew more than likely I would not make my goal. When I dinged 100 last night I still had quite a bit left to go of Nagrand, but I continued to soldier onwards in search of items to bring up my ilevel.

After wringing every drop of potential gear goodness from the zone… I was still way short of my goal sitting at only 609, so not even heroic ready. I had one last shot at getting the level up there, because I had yet to do the quest that would give me a ilevel 640 ring. I queued as dps for normal Skyreach and the queue popped considerably faster than I was expecting. We steamrolled the place, and unfortunately I got no upgrades. I did however complete the quest for the ring and it took me to 612. I purchased a second ring which took my total “in bag” iLevel to 614, so one shy of being able to queue for LFR. Now one of the problems with switching zones every two levels is the fact that I did not do much faction work in Spires of Arak. This means I am shy of the honored required to buy the Arakkoa trinket. Once I get that faction up a bit, and purchase that trinket I should be able to queue for LFR… but I also raid tonight so not sure how all of this is going to work out. I doubt I will be able to get in on the free epic goodness of LFR before the reset tomorrow.

Hatch Phase

As I said above, tonight is our raid night in Final Fantasy XIV and I am hoping we are able to finally push past Turn 5 and get Twintania’s candy. From what I have heard this is the roughest content we will face until Turn 9, and I am okay with that. Mostly because I hope it means that turns 6-8 will be much faster progression than Turn 5 has been. Twintania is probably the single most complicated raid encounter I have ever faced, and I like it. It is kinda like having to learn five different boss fights, and as of last week we were finally up to the last phase which is reportedly the easiest to get through, or at least nothing compared to the twister phase. My hope is that tonight we can see enough of it to absolutely wreck her. Thankfully we have not come close to hitting the thirteen minute hard enrage for the encounter.

I realize at this point that Binding Coil of Bahamut and Turn 5 are quite literally a year old at this point, but it still feels super relevant. In fact there are large swaths of the FFXIV community that can’t do it. That has been the interesting thing about FFXIV raid content is that it remains difficult even with the Echo buff. I am perfectly fine not being on the bleeding edge of progression in this game, but I am super happy that we are still progressing in our own way. My real hope is that after struggling to finish this fight as a team… the various extreme mode primals are going to seem easy when we return to fighting them. We have learned to move as a group, and play off each others strengths… and quite literally have had a raid forged by fire. I am pumped to see what we can do during a “normal” fight, instead of this insane assemblage of phases.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

December 14, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra. Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding. I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam. It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content. Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point. When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits… I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions. Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions. Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding. This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again. All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast. As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion. I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison. I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week. In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week. Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction. Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion. We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison… but for some reason he could not accept the quest. So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up. While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do… start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins. More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them. The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point. After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall… which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout. He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion. We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags. So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it. I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing. I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills. During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot. I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable. Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100. Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world. I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version. While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker… I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too. I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards… you die a little inside each time you get a green. Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either. At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun. Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile. One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area. Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically… would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear? Better yet… why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up? I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic. I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.