Tales of the Aggronaut

Bel Folks Stuff Debut

October 24, 2014 by Belghast

An Evening With Syl

A few weeks back I talked about a new kind of podcast I was planning on doing. Where I grab one of the very interesting members of our community and chat with them a bit. Somewhat of an informal interview podcast. Thankfully everyone I have talked to about this idea thought it was cool and has been willing to volunteer for the process. Since my friend @Gypsy_Syl and I have notoriously struggled to find time to actually hang out together on voice chat, I figured it would be awesome to start this entire process with her. Thankfully she graciously accepted and last Sunday at noon my time which was 7 pm her time… we sat down to record a show. I am really pleased with how it turned out, and while I still feel like I am absolutely “winging it” I can see how this is going to work with other “Folks” as well.

Right now the plan is to do this as a semi-monthly show, because quite honestly with daily blogging and weekly podcasting with AggroChat, I don’t feel like I can really add much more to my schedule. Naming a thing is always the hardest part, after some time I landed on more of a statement of what the show was… than an actual name. “Bel Talks To Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”. This however was way too long to be the title of anything… so I just shortened it to “Bel Folks Stuff”. It’s quirky I know, but I figure the folks that will be listening won’t care much about the title… but will instead be tuning in to listen to someone from our community talking about stuff that they enjoy. So please tune in and enjoy “An Evening With Syl” the very first episode.

Gobbie-Boom

Last night I spent most of the night working on my Monk, trying to push him ever higher in level. I was happy the other night to graduate from Totorak to Haukke Manor as it is a considerably more enjoyable dungeon. My friend Ashgar likes to refer to Totorak as “The Thousand Yawns of Total-Nap”. For me, I don’t mind the dungeon that bad but it does definitely seem to drag on, especially in that section where you keep having to bust poison balloons and move through the green sludge. Last night however I got to move into one of my favorite dungeons… Brayflox’s Longstop. The reason why I like Brayflox is simple… it has some really awesome sets that come out of it. While tanking the place I had managed to gather up a full set of Cavalry, and while healing I had managed to gather up most of a full set of Battle Mage. However every time I ran the place, either Infantry did not drop… or someone else was with me that wanted it far more.

As you can see from the above picture, last night I managed to get the Infantry Chest to drop. So far I only have legs, hat and chest… but I figure I will be running a lot more Brayflox. One of the things that I didn’t really cover in my guide is that every night I always do at least one completely random dungeon run. This is worth a massive amount of xp even if you end up getting one of the primals… that normally rewards next to no experience. After that I tend to just queue for whatever the highest level dungeon I can run happens to be… especially if I am playing DPS. Nothing sucks worse than wading through a thirty minute dps queue, only to end up getting Ifrit. So I expect over the next few days to queue up for Brayflox, and then run FATEs while waiting on the roulette to pop. The only thing I wish is that you could queue with your chocobo out, because this greatly lowers my survival in FATEs to have to run without him.

Using My Boost

This morning Faeblight appears to be down, so I can’t actually log into the game and take any proper screenshots. As a result you get a shot of my menagerie of characters. This is fitting because in reality I was going to talk to the boost to level 60. As you can see I have a whole slew of characters that I could have used this on. Mostly I struggled with a choice between boosting Belgrenth my Dwarven Mage, or Belgaroth my Bahmi Cleric. Belgrenth is still stuck down in his 20s, but overall I enjoy questing on him because the launch content feels better to play than the Storm Legion content. Belgaroth however I had just started the Storm Legion slog with, and felt like I was making no real progress. So did I go for maximum number of free levels… or did I go for helping me skip the content I wanted to skip on an otherwise really enjoyable character.

As I am sure you can tell from my lead up… I ended up using it on the cleric because skipping Storm Legion sounded like an awesome deal. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a good use for the free boost to 375 crafting, so I ended up spending it on survival… something that I struggled to level on my other characters. If I had been thinking really I would have used it on fishing… because as time goes that one seems to take significantly longer to level. The other big news from yesterday is that I think I figured out a pretty decent leveling build for Belghast. All of the warrior builds I was using when I last played have seemed to have gotten nerfed significantly. Once upon a time I could farm things with impunity and keep myself at nearly full health. Those days were long gone as upon starting the Nightmare Tide content it was a struggle just to stay alive.

I landed upon a thread on the official forums by a guy named Inny proposing his leveling spec for 3.0. You can check out the full magelo build here but essentially it is a 42 Warlord, 34 Champion, 0 Liberator build. So far it seems to be working pretty well, and the combination of a few minor heals and the combination of Weapon Defense and No Permission to Die allow me to stay alive in most situations. No Permission to Die need some really specific timing to make it work, as it heals you to 50% if you receive a killing blow in the time that the buff is up. The biggest boost to my survival was crafting a new set of weapons. Thankfully it was pretty easy to gather up the materials to do that, but unfortunately I have pretty much burnt through all of my available platinum on tradeskills. Hopefully that will start to regenerate as I quest, so I can do the same for Armorsmithing as I did for weaponsmithing. All in all the content is enjoyable, or at least significantly less grindy feeling than the Storm Legion content was.

A Real Monk

October 23, 2014 by Belghast

Being Sickly Sucks

My life story is pretty simple, and can be pretty much summed up by my body repeatedly betraying me. I was born with a primary immune system issue, which is far from “boy in the bubble” territory, but mostly means I have a “lazy” immune system. Essentially all of my antibodies and defense mechanisms hang out saying “these guys aren’t so bad” until finally one of these foreign actors torches the place, and forces them to fight back and repel whatever bad things invaded my body. Throwing a sucker punch into the works I have some pretty severe asthma and allergies. More often than not what starts as allergies or an undefended against cold ends up triggering the asthma and locking me down.

Right now my lungs are betraying me and since yesterday afternoon have been struggling to breathe. I am doing the normal “take breathing treatments every few hours” thing, which is helping but just considerably slower than I would like it to. By the time I went to bed last night I was actually feeling almost human. Waking up this morning however my body seems to have rebelled against me once more. At this point I am uncertain if this is just a cold or something deeper, but in any case the initial treatment is the same, rest and medication. I am so ready for nanites to exist, I will gladly embrace our robot overlords if they bring with them the ability to fix my dumb malfunctioning body. Maybe I can have like cool cybernetic parts too… in the future I will totally be Adam Jensen.

Nightmare Tides

I was reminded yesterday by my friend RowanBlaze that it was the launch day for Nightmare Tides. I managed to get in for a bit but didn’t stick around terribly long for a number of reasons. The first was that the servers were really populated, like can’t engage a single mob without having a swarm of players on it with you. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means that the expansion as a whole seems to be pretty well received. The second was that after spending about thirty minutes doing “bag maintenance” and removing all of the old Storm Legion quests from my log, I honestly just felt drained. I was afterall not feeling amazing in the first place, and when you combine this with the fact that the once awesome build that Pkudude helped me find in the first place isn’t quite as awesome as it once was… I just lacked the oomph to go out onto the forums and find whatever it is that the latest leveling build happens to be.

The thing I did mess around with however is the new Minions system. So far I am a fan, other than I have no clue how to actually earn adventurine. The idea is that Minions are mini-pets with a purpose. My biggest disappoint is that not all mini-pets are minions… and not all minions are mini-pets. This aspect of the system is deeply confusing and they would have been far better serviced if they had simply done what Blizzard did and assign attributes to ALL existing mini-pets. That aside it is a fun little mini-game where you send your pet out on missions. The more missions you run the better xp it gains… and I would assume at some point you start to unlock more dangerous missions as a result. I got a nice jellyfish minion as part of my preorder (that also happens to double as an in game companion) but there are a number of basic mini-pets that you can pick up for 1 plat each. The other way you can obtain them is either by buying randomized packs… or by spending the Nightmare Tides zone currency on individual ones.

Admittedly I have been doing a pretty poor job of keeping track on the progress of this expansion. An awesome reader of mine hooked me up early on with beta access, and I spent quite a bit of time poking around the first zone. I did not however delve too deep into the systems because I wanted to spoil the experience as little as possible. Mostly I was trying to decide if I wanted to pre-order or not, and I enjoyed myself enough to throw some more money Trion’s way. Now I am trying to figure out all the things I happened to miss. If nothing else Minions are an interesting diversion to the leveling process as the user interface has made it super simple to hop in and out of the Minion screen, notifying you when your current missions is complete in the same place the dungeon finder tools show up. Since I am essentially done with Destiny for the time being, I might end up streaming some Nightmare Tides leveling this weekend during the Extra-Life marathon.

A Real Monk

The bulk of my evening I spent watching television and working on leveling my Pugilist in Final Fantasy XIV. I have this crazy goal of reaching 50 on all combat and crafting classes by the Spring 2015 release of Heavensward, and for some reason of late I have hung on working on the pugilist. I think in part because this is my last Disciple of War class to level… at least until next week when the Rogue/Ninja is released. For the longest time I just could not get into the pugilist, but lately I feel like I have finally gotten into the “rhythm” of playing it… or what everyone refers to as “the dance”. When I was working up my guide I declared Monk being less positional dependant than the Dragoon… and in a way this is absolutely true. Monk attacks will still land and qualify for the next step in a combo regardless of where you are in relation to the target. Dragoons on the other hand, the combo will not continue unless the attack was performed from the right position.

Saying that however leaves out the fact that a monk that is NOT doing positional attacks… is a monk that is completely ineffective and might as well just be auto attacking. There seems to be a massive damage output difference between keeping up all of your stacks and dancing around the target to just standing there and beating on it from one place. The thing I like the most about the monk so far is that the position attacks seem to be eaiser to land that for the dragoon. The Dragoon attacks have a lot of lead up time to the attack, and notoriously your tank is going to twitch the target at exactly the wrong moment… making it so that Heavy Thrust for example doesn’t land. With a monk this never seems to happen… or at the very least it is not as crippling of an event as you can still continue going to your next attack. If you miss a Heavy Thrust… you have to Heavy Thrust again… until finally one lands.

So I am happy to finally get what people like about playing the Monk. Last night I ran a really horrible Halatali for my daily roulette. If you are a Gladiator tank out there, please for the love of god do not use Riot Blade. We tried to explain to this tank three for four times exactly what he needed to do to hold aggro. However he almost willfully ignored us. At one point I actually voted to abandon the party after one of our dps bailed on us. Unfortunately the NEW dps didn’t understand why we were trying to abandon party and voted it down. After that I ran a few instances of Totorak and a few of Haukke after I graduated up into that dungeon. Finally near the end of the night I dinged 30 and was able to complete my monk quest. Now I am no longer a pugilist but a proper monk, and finally have some decent AOE capabilities. Actually looking forward to finishing leveling this job and getting it geared out.

#FFXIV #Rift #NightmareTides

Wish I Was Proud

October 22, 2014 by Belghast

Fatigued and Forlorn

My wife and I have very different online circles. She is super hardcore into mathematics, and I pretty much only following gaming folk. As such we don’t actually follow each other on twitter, since there really is very little overlap between our communities. The math conference that I helped out with over the summer has lead to a bit of overlap, but it is still super minimal. The other day she hollered into my office at me “What is your gamers gate shit doing in my feed?”. Sure enough the madness that has infected what used to be my happy place, had spread over into other communities. These were not folks choosing sides in the battle… they were folks shocked and dismayed at the death threats and hatred being directed towards women. Once again reinforcing a very negative stereotype against our community, one that I feel we have fought really hard to get past.

I’m 38 and have been a gamer my entire life. There are things that I have done through gaming that I am extremely proud of. I am proud of the days of trying to make 25 people that have no tangible connection to one another work as a well oiled machine… or at least an oiled enough one to take down a boss. I am proud of the community that I built from the ground up that over the course of its existence has housed literally thousands of “stalwart” gamers. I am proud of the blog that I have built, and my two podcasts (one of which has yet to see the light of day). I am proud of the events like Blaugust and the Newbie Blogger Initiative that I have been involved in. I am proud to know so many awesome people, some of which have actually transitioned into my day to day life… or that I have hired because of their awesome non-gaming abilities. All of these things took lots of effort to make happen and were all pretty cool things that I SHOULD feel proud of.

Wish I Was Proud

The problem is I can only feel proud of these within certain “safe” circles because the world as a whole still sees us as basement dwelling troglodytes. The problem is… as much time as we have spent trying to change this image with really awesome things like Extra-Life… Gamers Gate is proving them completely right. It is proving to the world that we are not quite ready to crawl out of the primordial ooze of our basements, not quite ready to exist in normal society yet. Chris Kluwe spun up a pretty incendiary rant yesterday about how the whole situation pisses him off, and I feel everything that he is saying… I just wish he had chosen to write the article without the same sort of aggressive language that I expect from the GG folks. Ultimately that article itself somewhat proves we are not quite ready to pull ourselves up out of the muck.

While I work for one of the coolest bosses in the world, I am still part of a society that seems gaming as an aberration. I live in flyover country, and here gaming is still viewed as something “kids do”. We were inching closer and closer to being able to get people to understand that going home and raiding with our friends is no different than going out to a bar with theirs. We had reached a point where just maybe folks were starting to understand that waiting in line for a video game release is no different than waiting in line for a midnight showing of the latest movie. Our culture was slowly grafting itself to the mainstream… and this was a good thing for those of us still dependent upon the mainstream for our livelihood. Every day that Gamers Gate exists, and makes the press about their impotent “movement” and the harassers that freely associate with it… is a day that chips away at the progress we have made towards being “normal”.

Tried to be Neutral

I honestly did not sit down this morning and intend to write this post. Sometimes you sit down at the keyboard and and your words develop a life of their own. I started out this GG madness trying to stay in the middle, and remain supportive to those who needed supporting, but unaligned to either Gamers Gate or the Anti-Gamers Gate camps. The events pretty much made this an impossibility as the assault on the already under represented sections of our community continued. The thing is… the longer this went on the more it pushed me into the Anti-GG camp. So much so that I have systematically pruned my social media of anyone supporting it. The problem is… there is just as much negativity going on against it as well. Over the last year and a half I have worked seriously to limit the amount of negative feedback I keep in my loop. Its not that I am trying to be a Pollyanna or anything… I just find it healthier to dwell upon the good things, and avoid the bad ones.

The problem is I don’t feel like I can avoid Gamers Gate, because it has become so attached to every part of this community that I love. It is like this disease that has spread, and I am uncertain how exactly to cut it from these limbs without sacrificing the things I care about in the process. Ultimately I just want it to go away, and I want the hatred and the fighting to stop. I want people to treat each other with basic human decency. Because really at the end of the day that should be a basic thing. Since the golden rule of “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself” is woven into every single religion and culture on our planet… you would think that it shouldn’t have to keep being explained. There is nothing that can be salvaged at this point from Gamers Gate. The media has spoken, and they have rightly chosen to focus on the real harm to actual lives that is being done with this “movement”. It is time for it to go away, or it might literally succeed in destroying the games we love.

All Saints Wake

October 21, 2014 by Belghast

Path of Madness

For the most part I have willfully ignored the crafting systems in Final Fantasy XIV. By all accounts it is a black hole that is easy to fall hopelessly into. The reason behind this is that pretty much every craft… relies on every other craft. Blacksmith might require something from the Goldsmith, or Leatherworking require something produced by Alchemists. The folks in my guild who have fallen deep into the system, have ultimately ended up leveling every single craft. As a result we have at least two “Omni-crafters” as they seem to be called in the community. Over the weekend while watching the live stream I started tiptoeing down this path by working on Mining. I figured raising Mining to 50 would be a good entry point, and needed to gather materials for pretty much everything else.

As of last night I am closing in on 30, and I figure that now is when it actually starts to become difficult to push forward. The positive is that the fruit of my labor actually sells really well. For a bit I was grinding ore nodes near camp drybone for Alumen, because I could sell it on the Market Board pretty much as soon as I posted it. This apparently is needed badly in leatherworking, and since it is crazy easy to get I won’t mind gathering it up again later as I actually need it. I am finding that you can actually level crafting professions pretty quickly using leves, but unfortunately you have a limited number of these available at any given time. Thankfully I started with a stack of 99, and am slowly depleting them as I push up mining.

Level All The Things

When not working on mining, I have been working on my pugilist. Since they announced that the Rogue and Ninja would be Dexterity based, I have been wanting to level the Monk so that I can get rid of all of the low level strength gear I have clogging up my bank. This is the last of the Disciple of War jobs I have left to level considering I have a level 50 Paladin, Warrior, Dragoon and Bard. Granted on the 28th this will no longer be the case with the release of the Rogue/Ninja but I can work on that eventually as well. I have this goal that I am setting out before me, to try and level all classes to 50 before the expansion hits next spring. Right now you can see on the little image to the right what I have left to level. My intent is not only to level the battle classes but also the Disciples of the Hand and of the Land.

Of course this is going to take a lot of effort and a lot of time, but I am just crazy enough to do it. As such I feel like I am mostly going to focus on this game. I will of course go off on tangents and play other games like I always have, but this is something I would really like to accomplish, so that I can be ready to push up any class I choose come expansion time since all of them are getting upgraded to level 60. Not only do I want to level all of my classes but I would like to gear out all of them as well. Right now I already have the relic starter for my White Mage, but it is my intent to get that started for the others as well. Not to mention as soon as Syrcus Tower unlocks from its single item per week limit, I expect to be in there a lot soaking up gear for various classes. Quite honestly the idea of leveling all of the battle classes doesn’t really phase me… I was going to do this anyways. What worries me is if I will lose my sanity trying to level all of the crafting classes. Mostly I just want to be self sufficient. I am tired of buying things off the Market Board… and even more so I am tired of having to inconvenience other players to craft things for me. In World of Warcraft I had max level crafters of ever type in Mists of Pandaria, and I really liked being able to take care of whatever I happened to need… and I really want to get to that position here.

All Saints’ Wake

Tis the season for Halloween events in games, and generally speaking these are my favorite events. By far the king of Halloween events is the Nights of the Dead over in Everquest 2. If you have never experienced that one, you should totally fire up an EQ2 account just to do it. My intent is to do it over the weekend in honor of the holiday proper. In Final Fantasy XIV, this will be my second year doing All Saints’ Wake which is their version of this venerable tradition. One of the cool things I am finding about FFXIV is that each year they change the events completely. This is both a positive and a negative. It is positive in that you have a whole new set of rewards to collect and brand new quests to keep you entertained. This is a negative in that you can no longer get the past years rewards, so players new to the game are at a disadvantage… at least from a nifty cosmetic baubles perspective.

However during the Fan Festival they announced that they planned on offering the previous years items on a limited time cash shop, allowing folks to buy the ones that they had missed. The two ghost costumes from last years event are among the first two items on the shop, and I believe they listed the price of each as $5 which is reasonable if you actually want that item badly. I personally missed the Christmas events, so I am more than likely going to use the cash shop to catch up on the previous years goodies. In any case… things are still attainable, but the individual quests can only be completed during a specific years event. This year the All Saints’ Wake runs from Monday, October 20, 2014 at 1:00 a.m. (PDT) to Monday, November 3, 2014 at 6:59 a.m. (PST). Which should give players plenty of time to get in and do the quest chain that starts in Old Gridania, but ends up winding through all of the cities finally finishing with a FATE that occurs in Uldah. One of the highlights of the event is that you get illusions cast on you by the NPCs, and among them are all of the various city leaders as well as Minfilia. You can see me above doing the manderville as the ever adorable Nanamo.

The rewards for doing the entire quest chain is the costume that the NPC is wearing in my first screenshot. It is a really cool looking traditional witch costume, which works perfectly for casters. These of course are cosmetic items and can be glamoured over pretty much any item. To get the other rewards you are going to have to do a little grinding. The FATE in Uldah is a parade, where you have to cast a seasonal cheer buff on Citizen NPCs that appear along the parade route. You have to avoid casting the buff on the Thaumaturges, or they will dispell your illusion. What makes this a little challenging is that the Citizen npcs run around in a specific area, and the buff is a ground targeted AOE. The purpose of the fate is to collect Demonic Cookies which are then used as currency to buy the last two rewards. Getting Gold in a fate earns you 6, silver 3, and bronze 1. The two purchased rewards are the Eerie Barding as pictured above, and the demonic Pumpkin Earrings. Both of which are really cool so it is worth the time spent doing the fate, to get both items you need a total of 16 cookies which really isn’t all that much “grinding” at least nothing compared to the various grinds for WoW Holiday items.