Tales of the Aggronaut

Carried to Greatness

August 8, 2014 by Belghast

Some days are harder

There are some days where the magic just doesn’t seem to want to happen, even when you feel like you have a lot to say. This morning I have been sitting around for the last twelve minutes doing everything I could to avoid opening LiveWriter and begin banging away on the keyboard. Sometimes it happens and this is perfectly okay. Yesterday there was a series of tweets that I was party to about what happens when you decide you want to go in a different direction than you started. You would be shocked and amazed at just how many times I start in one direction and then decide that it is not in fact what I want to say. There have been so many paragraphs sacrificed on the altar of mood swings, and I am here to tell you that this is perfectly okay.

In fact I would go so far as to say this is entirely expected as part of the daily writing ritual. There are going to be days you struggle to find meaning from your cluttered mind, and it is completely fine for you to jettison one idea in favor of another. Please do not ever feel obligated to complete a thought. Just because you get two sentences down on the page, does not mean you have to follow up with the rest of a paragraph. If you can have sketches in the margin of a notebook, you can surely also have room for the same thing to be happening with your writing. There are so many things that Blaugust is “about” but one of them definitely is about being comfortable with your own words, and knowing when they work and when they do not. Not everything you write has to be a masterpiece, and some things are destined only to be pushed out the airlock.

Carried to Greatness

One of the things I have been avoiding doing since coming back to the game is wrapping up my Relic weapon quest in Final Fantasy XIV. Before we left we had completely a number of the steps as a group. I went through the extreme cost of getting the base weapon, and getting the two materia fused to it. Then as a guild we conquered both the Chimera and the Hydra. Finally I was up to the three Hard Mode primal fights of Ifrit, Garuda and Titan in that order. A week or so ago I managed to get through Ifrit but I figured that was a fluke considering just how easy of a fight it is. I also had intimate knowledge of that fight considering we had legitimately downed him as a guild. The only problem is when we did it as a guild, I was using my bard job and not my warrior one… and did not get credit for it.

Garuda scares the shit out of me. This was a hard fight for us to learn as a four man team at level, so I could not image just how frustrating and painful it would be as a tank. I watched as my guildies that were not tanks queued for it and got it taken care of without issue, but still I was pretty gunshy. Had it not been for Ashgar queuing up as a tank last night and talking about just how easy the encounter was… I likely would still be waiting. Sure enough upon queuing I ended up getting dumped into a group with lots of folks that were in raid gear, and essentially I became the groups mascot. Before I knew it we had downed Garuda and I was moving on to the next step in the quest chain that involved a good deal of running around. All of my nerves were literally for nothing because at this point in the game… folks have progressed so far past the hurdle that was hard mode Garuda that it became manageable without really knowing the fight myself.

Titan on the other hand was still a challenge. Once again I was the mascot of the group and really served to give no benefit other than miniscule dps. The problem with titan is there is so much that goes on between the attacks that knock you off the platform, the attacks that can one shot you, and the crazy exploding rocks that can make you into a venn diagram. It took my team three tries to get through the encounter, and with each wipe we gained a stack of echo… which works much the same as the determination buff in World of Warcraft. After all of the nervousness I was sitting there with all the components I needed to finish my Bravura. While this is no longer the be all end all weapon… it still feels like a big deal to me. I honestly questioned if I would ever complete it, so now I am absolutely pumped to be holding it in my hands. I still need to farm a few more “bookrocks” before I can upgrade it to the next step, but hopefully I will get those tonight.

Nostalgia Crit 9999

Gearing Up to Celebrate 10 Years of World of Warcraft

Something I have been meaning to talk about for a few days is the recent announcement of the World of Warcraft 10th anniversary events. Firstly lets get the fact that they are announcing them in August when the anniversary is not until the tail end of November out of the way. I guess they need some good news to be honest considering how most of the community expected to be playing Warlords by now. For those who have not followed the information they are doing a number of interesting things for the anniversary. For starters anyone who logs in during the event is going to get a new pet in honor of it… the Molten Corgi. When I first heard about the pet I honestly thought I had misheard some bit of information and it was related to Rift instead. It feels weird to have two different MMOs obsessed with the adorable stub legged puppies. That said it is exactly that… adorable and fiery and sufficiently epic to announce the 10th year of a game.

Keeping with the theme they are bringing back Molten Core, and making it a max level dungeon… and making it a special 40 man LFR. Anyone who manages to make it to the end of the dungeon will earn a special Core Hound mount. I have not heard if this is going to be complete-able with a guild group or not, or if this is going to only be an LFR thing. I honesty feel like LFR is a decent simulacrum for the way actual 40 man raiding felt. The amount of random fuckery that went on during most 40 man raids as 20 people carried 20 warm bodies to victory, seems like it could only be simulated by the LFR system. It makes me wonder what all sorts of callbacks will they have. Will there be a new version of Thurderfury for example? The updated Quelserrar for example was something I hotly sought after, because I loved the look of that blade.

If all of this were not enough they are bringing back the one and only time that world PVP actually worked… Southshore vs Tarren Mill. They are apparently creating a special 100 vs 100 battleground to play out the epic battle of town versus town that used to play out on a nightly basis. This is seriously the only time in WoW history that I actually willfully participated in PVP, and so many friendships grew out of it that I still keep in touch with today. This era of wow was one of those lightning in a bottle moments, and I can’t even remember why it stopped. I am sure it was in reaction to something that blizzard did to screw with the mix, but I remember by the time Ahn’qiraj rolled around no one was actually doing this fight any longer. Maybe the battlegrounds were the nail in the coffin? At this point I honestly cannot remember.

All of this sounds awesome and is loaded with so much nostalgia it is like a sucker punch to the veteran players face. The problem is… we remember these events from the past of WoW as being so much more epic and enjoyable than they actually were. For years we have viewed the early days of wow through rose colored lenses of a time when “things were right and good”. When in reality they really were not that great. The amount of lag that happened in Southshore for example made most of the deaths absolutely random. The amount of drama and bullshit that accompanied Molten Core and the loss of three hours of your life every week to run it was equally insane. These are not exactly moments to be heralded as the way things ought to be. They were us making the best out of a bad situation and enjoying what game play we could find where we could find it.

I came in late to Molten Core after my raid had already broken its back doing the hard work to get it on farm status. I was carried to my full set of Giantstalker, and then proceeded to run the dungeon every single week until pretty much the end of Vanilla. I still have large sections of the pulls in that place memorized, as I geared up first my hunter, then my paladin and my warrior running the place for various people who needed able bodied fill-ins. None of my “good memories” of this time in Vanilla have anything to do with the actual places we were running. It was the people I happened to be running them with. You cannot reassemble the raid I cleared Molten Core with, or the social channel that we ran Southshore versus Tarren MIll out of. Those players have all scattered to the wind and a bunch of random socially inept strangers are a piss poor substitute.

Liore made a post earlier this week about that you can’t go back home, and it is true. While everything about this event is laced with the drug that is nostalgia… none of it is real. How we feel about that time in World of Warcraft is an accumulation of everything that was happening at the time. It was the people and the places and the fact that there was literally nothing else to do at the time, because WoW was the only game on the market that offered anything vaguely close to this. No amount of wishing is going to actually turn back the clock and recapture the joy and experiences you had back then. Don’t get me wrong… I will probably log in during the event to get my shiny trinkets… but I go into it knowing this is a pale comparison to the way things actually were. There is no such thing as going home, because both you and the place you are going have changed in the process of getting away from it.

Writing Prompts

Now for a few more writing prompts. I wondered if this would end up being useful but based on the fact that a handful of people have been drawing from them I guess it is a worthwhile cause. Today’s prompts are all laced with the venom that is nostalgia.

What period in a game or game do you wish you could return to? What is that thing that is now gone that you wish you could be playing again?
We all accidentally get rid of something that we end up wanting later on. What have you deleted/disenchanted/sold that you later kicked yourself for doing?
We have all left something unfinished in our effort to move on to something new. What achievement have you never completed that you always wished in the back of your head you had?

#Blaugust #FFXIV #WoW

Belghast the Healer

August 7, 2014August 7, 2014 by Belghast

Lack of Rundowns

Over the last few days the whole post rundown concept has simply not been sustainable. As I said yesterday I have had a whole bunch of technical issues with my two primary machines, leading me to be super late with my blog post. As a result the whole rundown thing just hasn’t been in the radar. At this point since I am having to edit them back in later, I am wondering if it really is sustainable for me to keep doing. My morning blogging ritual gives me thirty minutes to an hour of time to work in a blog post. The verification and retrieval of the links takes almost that long as well because ultimately I end up reading the posts as I go. So on the week days I simply do not have enough time to keep up the practice.

The first few days I simply edited the list in at work over lunch, but the problem is my work world has gotten significantly busier as well. All of this frustrates me since I want to find a way to showcase all of the awesome posts other than my ubiquitous retweets. What I really want to showcase is the fact that out of the 45 or so participants… 35 of those have not missed a single day. Then we have another batch that is also awesome of bloggers who started late but have been faithful ever since. My biggest hope is that this spirit of community and shared purpose extends past the month. I know the Newbie Blogger Initiative as it has run on, has gotten to be that way… in that I am still in regular contact with a lot of the people I mentored during the month. I posted awhile back about the lack of community out here in the non-game-specific space… but hopefully we are changing that one blog at a time.

Running for Grand Prize

Began Late but Not Missed a Day Since

Belghast the Healer

Yesterday I managed to get to level 16 on my conjurer, the required level to start the Duty Roulette process. Now you have to realize that I have not really healed anything in years, at least not a dungeon. Probably the last time I regularly healed was during the Burning Crusade on my Paladin in World of Warcraft. That was roughly seven years ago, and it is a role that I tend to shy away from. The reasoning is my very first MMO experience was as a Cleric in Everquest, and it pretty much burned me on the role from that point out. That said I like to always have at least a healing option in my stable of alts, and since I now have every possible role other than healer… I figured it was time to do something about that. So I channeled all of my bravery and queued for the Duty Roulette… there is honestly something about that name that is so much more fitting than “finder”. When you hit the button you really are taking a huge chance on what exactly you are going to get in the process.

Thankfully for my very first dungeon I got an amazing group. I seriously probably could not have assembled a better “starter” dungeon group than I ended up with. We had dps that never pulled aggro, and a tank that managed to pick up every single add without fail. There was never a point at which I drew healing aggro on anything, and I literally did not have to heal anyone other than the main tank. In the back of my mind I knew this was a rarity as far as random dungeon groups went, but I was thankful to have it as my “breaking in” period. For the most part everything went smoothly and we made it to the end of Tam-Tara Deep Croft in what felt like record time… without skipping any content in the process. I was thinking to myself that yeah, I could maybe do this healing thing.

Reality Sets In

So if I got the idyllic situation for my first run, my second run was the absolute worst possible situation. We get started and the tank is the only one of us not communicating at all. Like people tend to be pretty friendly and I open every dungeon run with a simple “Hey Folks, How Goes It?”, which usually starts up some chatter as we do the dungeon run. The tank was completely silent, and sat there for a few minutes and then suddenly lurched forward without warning and pulled. My immediate thought was console player, since they tend not to respond to anything… ever… or if they do they respond in very short single character replies. It was a gladiator tank and he proceeded to start beating on a single target, and ignoring everything else in the pack. The moment I cast a single heal it all magnetized to me and I essentially became the main tank at that point. Problem was that the target he was on… he wasn’t really tanking either and the first time a dps started attacking it they would pull it off of him.

After a few pulls like this the tank proceeded to AFK, at which point the group kicked him and we cleared the way to the first boss without a tank at all. It was me, a thaumaturge and a pugilist and I healed through the damage. When we got another tank it this one was wearing most of the relic armor set, so my hope was that she would do all of the things that the other tank wasn’t. Turned out that she was an extremely competent tank and the rest of the run went smoothly. By the time group three had rolled around I was starting to feel my wheaties, and thought I could take on anything. I didn’t really struggle last night until I encountered my first group wanting to use weird tactics at the expense of the healer. In Halatali on the final boss, there are these adds that need to be killed before they get to the fire in the center of the room. If you don’t catch one it does an AOE burst on the entire party. My group ignored these completely and as a result I had to heal through constant AOE burst damage… Medica was my friend.

More Chill Than Tanking

The major reality check that I was not quite prepared for was the fact that it is so much more relaxing to heal than to tank. Granted that might just be a me thing, but I feel like I am constantly having to watch everything and make sure I have aggro on it all as I play a game of “bejeweled” making sure all of the gems are bright orange squares. Healing on the other hand is more like playing whack a mole, and that invokes so much less stress. I have to make sure I am not standing in shit, and then I have to make sure all of the bars are full. That’s it, that is my only focus and I feel like I can relax considerably. Sure there are moments where you have to work hard to top everyone off, but that isn’t “every single pull” where I feel like as a tank you are constantly struggling to maintain threat over your party. At this point of course I have only healed the first few instances which admittedly are much easier than the ones to come, so we will see if I change my opinion significantly as I go.

The long and short is that I am embracing this new role and enjoying myself. In the video at the beginning of this block I heal three different dungeons and all of the groups go relatively smoothly. I am glad that my party cannot hear my stream of consciousness commentary, because it would likely piss a lot of them off. Ashgar was talking about getting commendations so much faster as a healer, and I can see that to some extent. During one of the dungeon runs I got three commendations, meaning that I got every one available. However there are multiple dungeons I have walked out of without a single one, which is something that is super rare for me as a DPS. I feel like tanking is the flashy job that everyone appreciates… not dying is significantly less tangible. As a tank I have always appreciated my healers, because they are the lifeline that allows me to do the batshit crazy things I do. I feel like there isn’t as much appreciate for healers from the general public. You only notice the healers when they are doing a poor job.

Writing Prompts

I’ve been stressed and busy the last few days and as a result I have not added any new prompts to the stack. However as I have seen a few people dipping into them I thought I should add a few more to the pile.

What is the most thankless job in gaming? I am trying to keep this broad on purpose because I am not meaning the holy trinity. There are so many roles from ore farmer, to sniper that are played in various games. What one gets the least credit?
What is your favorite appearance item or set of items? Everyone has something that they keep in their inventory just because they love the look of it. What is yours?
What does MMO mean to you? This term gets used broadly, but doesn’t really have a firm definition. What does it mean to you and where do you draw the line between traditional online games.

#Blaugust #FFXIV #Conjurer

Tiny Conjurations

August 6, 2014 by Belghast

Failure to Launch

Right now to be truthful I am having all manner of issues with my machines here at the house. With my gaming machine I think I have narrowed it down to the power supply, and plan on replacing that tonight. My laptop however I think was bit in the ass by the same nvidia driver issue that seemed to start everything. I am not sure what is wrong with Nvidia Driver 340.52 but both machines started having issues shortly after installing it. It might all be unrelated, but I likely would skip this driver for the time being because I wouldn’t want to wish my issues on anyone. Thankfully I was able to roll back to a system state on my laptop before the driver, so here is hoping that fixes things there.

As far as my desktop when I attempt to power it on, things flicker on for a brief second before immediately stopping. The fans won’t even make a full rotation, and based on all reading this is likely a PSU issue. Now in the past when my PSU has gone south, nothing at all happened, so this is new ground for me. However I am willing to try it since a PSU is a relatively cheap component to replace. Otherwise I would be something wrong with the motherboard… and I really don’t want to go down that avenue unless I absolutely have to. The problem is that I am running out of machines… worse case scenario I can try and get this machine my spare in gaming condition. I think it would run most of the things I might want to run, just not as well.

As far as me, I have been feeling like crap as well. The stress of having my machines in various states of “down” combined with allergy season wreaking havoc on my sinuses and lungs lead to me deciding to take a day to mostly rest and collect myself. My lungs have not been behaving well for the last couple of days, and the constant sinus headache has been causing me to eat ibuprophen like candy. So here is hoping by the end of today I will have all of my machines up and running smoothly as well as me doing the same. If not I guess we have to explore other avenues, and if I don’t get to feeling better soonish I guess I will have to run to the doctor. As a result of all of this my morning post is delayed. I did not really get a chance to post a big rundown of the blaugust folks either… but I guess at this point things are rolling along smooth enough that hopefully everyone is already reading the incoming posts.

Tiny Conjurations

Last night before all the computer issues started with my laptop, I decided to work on the conjurer job. At this point I have a 50 warrior (tank), 50 bard (range dps) and 50 dragoon (melee dps) so the only thing I am really missing at this point is a healer. All of the available healers require various levels of conjurer, so I figured it would be a good starting place. I am still not certain if I will be going White Mage or Scholar as far as healers go, but in any case I am slowly working on the levels. Conjurer I think has to be the hardest thing to level to date, mainly because all you really have to kill the mobs with is Stone and its various derivatives. Even in cleric stance, which is surprisingly enough the dps stance… you can’t really burn down mobs that fast. My plan is to mostly level through dungeons, but the problem with that is that I have to actually get to 15 first to do it.

Last night I tried my hand at healing Guildhests since those start at level 10. The main problem there is that folks don’t really seem to have a handle on tanking. I healed a total of four, and in each of them the tanks made zero effort to try and pull any mobs off of me. This means in the first one I ended up dying horribly, and in the later ones I mostly focused on healing myself… since I apparently was heal tanking. Guildhests really aren’t worth the frustration experience wise, so I went back to grinding near Horizon. I have a pretty massive stack of leves built up, so I opted to work through some of those. At the point my system troubles started, I was just shy of 15, which hopefully means I can jump straight into healing dungeons instead of grinding on my own.

Feels like Home

Yesterday afternoon Tam and I were talking about how much like home this game is feeling. I think in part it is due to the fact that Greysky Armada the free company is a thing uniquely created by the group of players that played FFXIV at launch. House Stalwart is very much a creation of my own, and it feels like my guild. White Masks is very much a creation of Tam and it feels like his guild. Greysky Armada is this wholly different thing that incorporates the best of each of us into something totally different. I think that is why coming back to it is so comfortable, because its an us thing not a me or him thing. Not sure if any of that makes any sense at all, but the folks that mostly do the AggroChat podcast have all been hanging out on voice chat for a few years now, and the FFXIV guild is 100% rooted in that little group.

Now that is not to say that everyone else isn’t welcome, but we kinda lead the guild as a team and not as a monarchy aligned under any one of us. On top of all of this is feels really awesome to see everyone back in Eorzea. I like this game a lot, and things just seem to work for me. Especially now that I went ahead and embraced the adorable making myself a Lalafell. At this point I am really hoping that the magic will last for awhile, and that we can all enjoy this space for more than a few months. Ultimately that is what I keep looking for… a place to set down roots and settle down. The problem is each of the games either has problems that bother me enough to where I don’t want to play it… or it lacks the people to make a comfortable environment. My hope is that FFXIV will be the game we all can agree on, since for the most part we all pined for it a little.

#Blaugust #FFXIV

Lalafellication

August 5, 2014 by Belghast

Blaugust is About Blogging

Earlier I had most of a blog post finished when my system took a dive on me. Nothing appears to be recoverable so you are going to get my rapid fire version. It seems that too many people are getting hung up on the notion of daily blogging. Yes I am having a contest and giving away prizes, and yes this entire thing started as me challenging people to take the daily blogging routine I do. That said more importantly, Blaugust is about Blogging and doing so regularly. If you normally post once a week and you begin posting three times a week thanks to this initiative, then I consider it more than successful.

If you don’t feel you can do the daily blogging thing, then alter it to fit your needs. There are a few people who have ramped up their posting in the spirit of Blaugust, and that is awesome. I feel like posting on a schedule is a valuable thing, and if you can’t make seven days a week… try five and if that is even too much then try three. The hope is that you will develop a routine that becomes far harder to break than individual one off postings. I went through huge lapses in my blog before I adopted the daily stance, and I pretty much started this without much ramp up. It was a struggle at first but over time it became significantly easier and now I can crank out a post about almost anything. Find what works for you, and stick with it.

I plan on editing back in a list of the day four blogs.

Hitbox Sorta Fixed

A few days ago I posted railing about the various shortcomings of the hitbox live streaming service, and since then they have attempted to fix a few things. Previously I had used twitch to back up my live stream to youtube, making it significantly easier to share and embed in blog posts. When I switched over too hitbox I thought things were going to work similarly. Unfortunately the entire time I have used hitbox the export to youtube process has been broken. This week they seem to have fixed it with a few limitations that make it damned near useless to me. Yesterday I tried to export all of the videos that were hanging out on my hitbox page in limbo and out of the whole batch only two made it there. The two videos were in the 20 to 30 minute range, and anything longer failed.

I guess this means that unlike twitch that can export up to two hours of video to youtube, hitbox is going to limit the users to only 30 minutes at a time? For me at least this makes the feature meaningless, and since I still cannot download the videos I have already recorded it means my various series on youtube have glaring holes as I number things sequentially. The only positive is that you can apparently embed video directly in your posts now, so here is hoping that actually works. I am wondering if trying to embed it in live writer is what ultimately crashed my system earlier, so I am going to not test the waters until I have finished today’s blog post. In any case I still like hitbox for the fact that there is no stream delay, and it makes having a conversation much easier. The problem is with the fact that I now have to record the video locally and manually upload to youtube, it has severely soured my streaming of late.

Lalafellication

Last night I took the plunge and did something I had been considering for a few weeks. As part of the preorder process I had a vial of Fantasia sitting in my inventory. This allows you to re-edit your appearance, and in practice change your race and even gender in the process. While I liked the look of Belghast the Highlander, I had long wished I had embraced the adorable and went Lalafell. I think I only made it as far as I did in Wildstar because I thought the Chua I was playing was adorable. So last night I took the plunge and you can now see the end results. So far I have no regrets.

I ran a few instances last night and everything about combat is now cute. It did take some getting used to the difference in perspective, and it may have caused me to step in some bad stuff that I thought I was well clear of. All things considered I really like the decision I made because now I can take adorable pictures everywhere I go, and participate in the ever popular “if I fits, I sits” meme. Everything I do seems cute and harmless, even when I do a dragoon jump into things. I am a fan and I am sure it will make my adventures far more memorable.

Completely Broke But Happy

The other big thing that happened last night is that all of us pooled our money together and bought a small house in The Mists, the housing zone for Limsa Lominsa. Basically it was a zone of compromise in that a few of us preferred Gridania and others preferred Uldah, but everyone was pretty amiable too the notion of the Limsa housing. The other huge benefit is that we found absolute prime real estate in the third housing ward. We are guessing that the house must have been repossessed because it is smack dab in the middle of the zone with a Market Board and Summoning Bell steps outside of our front lawn. We don’t have a lot in the house but we did manage to pick up a Chocobo Stable, Aetherite Shard and a Mailbox allowing us to cheaply port from anywhere in the world to our house. Now I will have to begin the grind to try and get the 300k gil needed to buy my personal room.

This whole experience highlights what I have been saying about the server community on Cactuar. Within moments of purchasing the house and getting the basics configured we were swarmed by our neighbors welcoming us to the neighborhood. It seems they were super happy to see the house occupied and we now have a few friends in the houses surrounding us. The guild that was visiting in the picture lived in a huge house above us, and apparently since this house went dormant they were no longer able to jump down through our plot, because they were blocked by the building bounding box. They were extremely appreciate of once again having a fast route to the market boards. Later in the night we had some other neighbors welcome us, and it is this sort of interaction that I am valuing the most about the server. This is the first time in a long time I have felt like I was part of a larger community. Final Fantasy truly is a special game, and I hope especially as more people return to it we can set down some permanent roots here.

#FinalFantasyXIV #HitBox #Blaugust