Tales of the Aggronaut

FF5 Draft: White Mage Hell

May 18, 2014 by Belghast

Today I am swapping things up a bit with my Steampowered Sunday post. Originally the goal of this column was to force myself to play some games that were sitting in my steam backlog… which is huge. However over time this has mutated a bit into “bel plays a game and reviews it”. Today we are going to see some further mutation of this as I write about some madness that I allowed myself to get involved with along with my Aggrochat podcast co-hosts Kodra and Ashgar as well as occasional fill-in host Tam. For some time Ashgar has participated in the Four Job Fiesta charity event that now helps out the Child’s Play charity. The goal of this is to play through the epic game Final Fantasy 5 using a fixed set of jobs.

For those not familiar with Final Fantasy 5, it was a 16 bit era title that allowed you to choose what classes a fixed set of 4 characters would be by assigning them jobs. While in the job they gained abilities that could then carry over into other jobs. This became a min-maxers dream as you could make some extremely broken combinations. As a result for years players have done various wierd combinations of this game for fun, and the Four Job Fiesta capitalized on this and turned it into a grand charity event. For awhile Ash has wanted to do an internal draft of this game, where four of us get together and draft out a viable party made of of the different available jobs. As a result each player has to make some compromises to determine what they want to go after first.

To facilitate this Ash decided to set up a card deck game using the amazing Google hangout app Roll 20. He laid out the various sprites for the characters in rows representing the Wind Crystal, Water Crystal, Fire Crystal and Earth Crystal… adding the Freelancer as an optional job for the Earth Crystal given that specific one only has four options. So again for those not as deeply familiar with the title as it seems to be among our little circle of mumble users… the setup looks something like this.

The Job Options

Wind Crystal

Knight
Monk
Thief
Black Mage
White Mage
Blue Mage

Water Crystal

Red Mage
Time Mage
Summoner
Beserker
Mystic Knight
Mime

Fire Crystal

Beastmaster
Geomancer
Ninja
Ranger
Bard

Earth Crystal

Dragoon
Dancer
Samurai
Chemist
Freelancer

The Draft

The rules of the game that we are playing under is that each player must always have one of a given job, and from the moment you get your crystals… every character must have a job. There are alternate rulesets where you can play with freelancer until you get all four jobs available, but we are playing with the more pure ruleset. This as always means that some of the parties will have a much easier time than others. Whoever gets stuck with Thief and White Mage will be struggling, since both of them have issues early game, and whoever has the Black Mage will have a supremely easy time rolling over everything in their way. We opted to go with a draft order that minimized the advantage of being first, and the disadvantage of being last… that looks a little something like this.

ABCD | DCBA | BDAC | CADB

We decided to roll a 20 sided die in the Roll20 addon to get started and pick the order. Ashgar using his dice hacking abilities rolled an 18, Tam rolled an 8, Kodra rolled a 5… and I rolled a very lowly and painful 2. Meaning that in the above scenario Player A would be Ashgar, B would be Tam, C would be Kodra and I got stuck bringing up the rear with D. However due to the order of the draft I feel like maybe I had a slight advantage. Of course the Black Mage was gone by the time it got around to me, but I still had plenty of really good things to pick from, considering in this draft I got to make 2 picks back to back. When all was said and done our party compositions looked like this.

Belghast – White Mage, Mystic Knight, Ranger, Samurai

Ashgar – Blue Mage, Summoner, Beastmaster, Dancer

Kodra – Black Mage, Red Mage, Bard, Chemist

Tam – Thief, Time Mage, Ninja, Dragoon

This surprisingly left the Knight completely untouched, which is an extremely good early game starter. Not unsurprisingly no one picked the Berserker or Mime, or the Geomancer. However I think we were all somewhat shocked that no one at all picked up the Freelancer, which ultimately ends up being one of the best options since they can be super customized. I think overall each of us had a plan in the works, namely mine involved using Ranger to feed my Samurai. Ash seems to like Blue Mage and Beastmaster which are super fiddly combinations… but he is methodical enough to make them work amazingly. Kodra of course went for the power combo of Black Mage/Red Mage which will mean he has an extremely easy play through. Tam went with a super focused build of being able to feed the Ninja and Dragoon, but will have the roughest start of all of us… since you cannot get thieves a weapon in the first town.

Reality Setting In

It was really during the first “post job” boss encounter that the reality of my choices set in. I wanted to go for a very melee party, which meant I needed some extremely strong healing. There is no stronger healer in Final Fantasy 5 than the White Mage, so it seemed like a no brainer pick. However I did not really “grok” the reality of trying to play through with ONLY white mages up through the water crystal. Karlaboss aka the fight above is the moment it really set in what I had laid out in front of me, as I slowly dinked away at 650 hp… 10 damage at a time. Granted there was no way in hell he was going to kill me… but the entire process is just slow and tedious.

I made it through to the ship graveyard where finally I could start to grind away at the mobs. My white mage party is uniquely suited for combating the undead, since this flavor of FF allows for you to case cure on the undead which becomes an offensive spell. I made an early mistake in that I tried to podcast while playing this game, and wound up running out of mana and dying horribly. However I reloaded from an earlier save state after we finished the podcast and continued on the journey. I opted to grind my way to 10 on the undead hoping that would give me enough of a buffer to get through the next few fights before I finally get the water crystal and can make a party full of mystic knights. Granted I will still have to keep one player a white mage, but that should work just fine given I will still need some healing.

White Mage Hell

The boss at the end of the ship graveyard was a complete pushover. Generally speaking this is a pretty rough time for most parties considering she starts out living and turns undead a few rounds into the fight. The undead version has the nasty added issue of poisoning players each time she hits them. This quickly gets out of control for most parties, however with an army of white mages I just pushed forward nuking the hell out of her with cure. It took two rounds of this after she turned undead to finish her off. I calmly cured the poison and moved on. However as easy as this fight was, the next one turned out to be absolutely brutal.

As I climbed the north mountain to get to the wounded dragon Hiryuu, I started to question if I should have ground higher than ten in the ship graveyard. I simply could not do crap against the mobs on the mountain, other than simply out survive them. Additionally the flail that I picked up, and is now my saving grace… seems to miss quite a lot. Instead of fighting I opted to run away from almost all of the fights leading up to Magissa. I knew this encounter would take a truly insane amount of time. She has 650 hp and as you can see from the above shot I was only whittling away around 12 hp per attack. This was a sheer battle of willpower to keep moving forward at a snails pace.

When she summoned her pet Forza, I ignored him completely, realizing that there was no way at all I could keep up with fighting him and Magissa and the regeneration spell she casts on him. Instead I opted to cast protect on my entire party, and used one of my white mages to heal folks up while the others slowly dinked away at Magissa until she fell. Finally I turned my attention to Forza and focused all of the attacks on him. Even doing this the “right” way, it still took about thirty minutes to push my way through the encounter with my army of “horrible monks”. I was completely drained after that fight, and it was getting close to midnight so I stopped playing and streaming. At some point today I will pick up where I left off. You can watch the entire thing on my twitch stream, or you can check out the videos that I have uploaded to YouTube embedded below. Additionally Kodra is streaming his play through so check out his channel as well.

AggroChat Episode 6

This week we have myself, Kodra and Ashgar for Aggrochat. Rae was unavailable because honestly I feel like she was probably asleep. She spent the day hanging out at the local Renaissance Faire with her brother and our good friend Dallian that appears on last weeks Aggrochat. This week we had a bunch of things to talk about, or at least things that Kodra especially was excited to discuss. The first of these was the new champion in League of Legends… Braum. Next we talked about the Hex vs Wizards of the Coast lawsuit and what it means for the game and TCGs in general. We also get on this long drawn out discussion of Kickstarter Fatigue and what it means for the kickstarters that are still coming out, and whether or not that is still a viable means of funding a project. Like always we get lost on lots of rabbit trails between all of this points.

#AggroChat #FF5 #FinalFantasy5 #FourJobFiesta #SteamPoweredSunday

Munchkin Mania

May 17, 2014 by Belghast

Too Old for This

Every now and then I will say something like “I am too old for that”, and I don’t really believe that is ever the case. It is just a shorthand for “I am old enough to release that it has consequences and am unwilling to deal with those.” When you get older, you realize that your actions have severe negative effects on your wellbeing at times, and attempt to avoid these at all costs. The funny thing is… staying up until midnight is not a huge deal, I do it all the time. However this usually means that I have had a gradual winding down throughout the evening and am at a super chill place when midnight actually comes. Last night I was out driving through town at 11pm, and it had a vastly different effect, and this morning I am paying for it.

While I greatly enjoyed my evening, I now feel groggy and useless this morning as I sit here attempting to assemble a post. It is a sort of post excitement hang-over of sorts, and as I think about it… it really feels like a mild version of an actual hangover. I am sure I could have slept in more, but my wife brought one of the ferrets in to “play” this morning, and when I looked at the time and felt the grumbling in my tummy I figured it was “good enough”. I can’t be grumpy with my wife for waking me, because in reality it was a good thing I was up at 8 am, will keep my schedule from being thrown off too much. Additionally I wake her up with the ferrets at pretty much any opportunity I get… so turn about is fair play.

Munchkin Mania

So what exactly doing that caused me to drive home last night through the rain at 11:30 at night? Well as I said yesterday a good friend of mine is in town for the weekend to attend the Muskogee Renfaire. As a result Rae decided we needed to have a game night, where we would play board games, eat pizza and generally have a good time. It had been ages since any of us sitting at the table had played munchkin, so we had to relearn the rules. Honestly it probably would have just been faster if we had called up the Munchkin episode of Tabletop on my chromebook and watched it to “grok” the rules a little faster. I am known for being all about the death, destruction and ultimately loot in the games I play, so Munchkin is one of those games that is ideally suited for my sensibilities… even before you factor in that the cards are hilarious.

Our mistake however was the fact that Rae owns both the base set and the Cleric and Ranger sets. We decided to just jumble everything together and play with some massive decks of cards. The problem with this is that in doing so it drags out the game immensely. I should have taken a picture of my hand, but at one point last night I had some dozen bonuses in play and I felt like a little kid playing dressup. I feel like somehow Rae stacked the deck or something, because she managed to win BOTH of the rounds of Munchkin that we played. She is a sneaky one, and kind comes out from nowhere. At one point I was set up to win, and I thought no one could do anything about it. However she was sitting all that time on a card that allows her to right the monster instead of me. Unfortunately my cards were in play, reducing the monster to something we could not buff enough to defeat her.

This is the fun of munchkin, there are no such things as permanent alliances. Essentially anyone that is level 9, just became everyone on the boards enemy. Dallian had the bad luck of drawing a lot of instant level up cards, meaning he became the focus of our aggression early in each game. Like I would manage to sneak in the level up cards every now and then to kinda keep people from noticing that I was gaining power. He on the other hand would lay down 3 in one turn, making folks realize “oh crap! he is winning!” at which point we all turned our guns to bear down on him. I kinda feel bad that this happened since he was the visitor to our fair city and all, but all is fair in love and loot.

Warming Coldharbor

At some point I need to get out and pick up the dry cleaning today, but other than that my key mission is to get through Coldharbor, or at the very least ding 50 trying. At this point I am really amped and ready to move on to the veteran level content. Aldmeri Dominion is the first stop on the veteran content for the Daggerfall Covenant, and this is the faction that I have played the least of. In fact I have not even got past Auridon, or even halfway through it on any character in beta. So I am really looking forward to exploring this area, and killing copious amounts of elves in the process. As my friend said, if you like killing elves… you get to do that more in Aldmeri than any other faction. Unfortunately I kinda wish I could align with the Maromer… angry snake worshipping pirate elves are so much cooler than the Aldmeri.

Other than this I know I want to play some more wildstar at some point. I would really like to see if my Chua Engineer remains fun as I start getting more abilities. Additionally I feel like I have been neglecting ArcheAge, so I will probably be playing some more of that. Basically today I want to vegetate and play lots of games. We have to go to a wedding tomorrow, so today is my one real shot at messing about happily in various games. Hopefully you too can have a relaxing weekend, and I am hoping that Dallian and Rae have a blast at the Renfaire. They really are not my thing, but from everything I have heard says that the one here at the Castle is one of the better ones in the country. One of the absolute best things I have ever heard of is one year when a guy went dressed as Spock, and he kept scanning people with his tri-corder and muttering “fascinating”.

Rebooting Minecraft

May 16, 2014 by Belghast

Guild Meeting

I have an exciting evening planned that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. One of my long time House Stalwart guild members is here in town, and tonight we plan on having a board game night. Dallian/Doctor Hannah appeared on Episode 5 of AggroChat, and we mentioned the upcoming visit there. He lives in the Little Rock area which makes him a neighbor of ours as far as the internet is concerned. I always think its cool when I get to meet someone in the flesh that I have gamed with for ages. I think the plan tonight is to play loads of Munchkin and eat pizza at Rae’s house. We’ve tried to invite several of the locals to meet up, so it should be really fun. I am contemplating bringing some magic starter decks, but that might be a little too involved. We’ve been talking with a co-worker about maybe trying to play some magic over lunch soon. Apparently his wife is super into the game and would probably even come up over lunch to play it.

I don’t really do this sort of thing that often. I guess the last guild member that I met up with was Lummox who happened to be about fifteen minutes away from where I happened to be staying in Albany. It is always interesting to see how someone is in real life verses their in game persona. For the most part, a lot of the people I have met have been fairly similar. I have to say the closest was probably Urcasio and Ravener, who were pretty much exactly the people I would have expected based on in game interactions. Since I generally find it easier to meet over food, Dal and I are meeting up before this evening for lunch. For years I have been talking about how amazing Ron’s Hamburgers are, and more importantly their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. So we are meeting up at my favorite location today around 11ish. I would love to somehow steal him to town like I managed to do with Rae. I feel like I am trying to build this little gamer community, one person at a time.

Rebooting Minecraft

Last week one of my new friends Missysmojo decided to try her hand at playing Minecraft. I joked with her that she would end up losing the next three months of her life. She opted to stream a little bit, and it got me thinking. It has been years since I have played Minecraft with any regularity. There have been a few times I patched up my client and connected to the guild server just to see what folks were doing, but I had felt like I had “beaten” Minecraft for some time. In this last year there have been significant changes in the game, and probably even more before that I really never noticed. So I thought I would start a brand new game and play completely legit. No mods, no helpful minimap… just the vanilla client and a texture pack (because yeah that is necessary). The above video is the results of that process last night. I am not really sure yet how often I will be streaming Minecraft, but I expect to continue where I left off each time.

For starters… I am really not used to the game any longer. I kept trying to “suck in” blocks and drops like you do in Trove. The low performance of the game frustrated me, because I am not used to it “chunking” and loading in parts of the game slowly freezing my client momentarily when it does. I am sure this is something I can tweak, because I probably just don’t have enough memory flowing to the default client. There used to be a tool called Magic Launcher that handled a lot of the memory allocation for me, so I might look into that. Another dumbass move is I totally thought I was on “survival” mode for the first little bit, running scared from potential monsters… only to find out that I actually was in peaceful mode on the client. Once I noticed that and changed it things started to get interesting.

For starters, it seems like the creeper spawn rate is insane. I maybe saw one or two zombies and skeletons the first night after flipping it to a normal mode, but I saw what felt like half a dozen creepers. I managed to trap four chickens inside my base and I dug a pit like I often do and have them down there for a constant source of eggs, feathers and meat. At some point I want to try and drag a couple of cows and pigs in there as well so I have all of my livestock needs handy. Most of the video involves me setting up “base” as I hollow out a mountain, search for coal and finally start digging down into the earth in search of steel. I encounter a cave with a skeleton spawner in it… and have a pretty epic battle trying to break the cave and torch it off. I had quite a bit of fun, or at least more fun with Minecraft than I have had in ages.

Bunny Doom

I love everything there is to love about the Shin’hare, and the fact that they exist makes Hex so much more enjoyable than Magic the Gathering ever could be. It’s an entire race of adorable evil samurai bunnies… you could slap that into ANY game and I would play it. As a kid one of my favorite comic book characters was Usagi Yojimbo… so everything about this deck feeds my enjoyment. Not to mention that my favorite deck combination in Magic the Gathering was Green and Black… and the Shin’hare are exactly that… Life and Blood aka Green and Black. In some ways it reminds me of playing my thalid deck circa Fallen Empires. I would constantly use that deck to feed my black “sacrifice or I feed” cards. While I am lacking some of the cards in Hex to make this work really well, the starter deck mixed with a few cards I got from my packs seems to be working okay.

Last night I got in and played a few hands against the AI, mostly because it was getting late and I didn’t want to deal with people. I am anxious for when trading comes into play, because of my group of friends I think I am really the only hardcore bunny player. I should be able to help some of them out with cards they are looking for and bolster my bunny army. My all time favorite card is still the Uzume, Grand Concubunny. Not only is the artwork adorable, but the card is insane when you get it out into play.

When I first read this card, I assumed it would start dropping the 0/1 battle hopper tokens that the other Shin’hare cards do on the table. While that would have been good enough, considering the normal concubunnies you have to expend resources and tap them to get this effect. The real effect however is so much better, in that it summons a random non-unique bunny card into play. This can be ANY card, even ones you don’t currently have in your deck. It is literally generating cards for you, but the problem is this makes the card and insane aggro magnet.

I need to formulate some ways to protect the card, because really it is too damned valuable to not have it on the board for more than a few turns. Hopefully soonish I can get together with my other friends currently in the closed beta and play some actual matches. I feel like Kodra is in a completely different league with me, and like to play a style of magic that I do not… but this will not stop me from attempting to beat him. He royally kicked my ass in hearthstone, but it didn’t stop me from coming back for more. These type of games for me are about the moment to moment play and not whether or not I win. In fact that can pretty much be said with any game I play, I am just not that competitive. It is about the journey not the win conditions.

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Cyrodil Excursion

May 15, 2014 by Belghast

Turning a Corner

I am still not overwhelmed with excitement about Wildstar, but I am maybe starting to turn the corner on this game. Last night I opted to work on the warrior a bit more, and it turns out the area I was languishing around had no actual quests for me. One of the frustrations with the game is that the quest advisement on the minimap makes zero sense to me. I keep trying to figure it out, but end up just hopelessly lost as I keep opening my main map to find the objectives. I know there is some sort of a golden path system that you can turn on to get advisement but I find that whole process frustrating. All I really want is a blip on the edge of the minimap showing me where I should head to get to the next sequences of quests. Additionally I had mobs that I simply could not find. There was an NPC in town that no matter how many times I moved through an area, never seemed to be where the quest turn in location was marked on the map.

All of this said, in my flailing I happened to stumble upon an instance of sorts revolving around trying to save Outpost M-13. I was woefully underleveled for the content but found it extremely enjoyable anyway. I entered the instance at level 10 and all of the creatures I stumbled across were 13 to 14. You start the mission as a hired shiphand on a cargo freighter delivering crystals. You are boarded and it is your job to try and protect the freight. I did fairly well here until it came time to fight the actual boss, and then I struggled a bit… having to try two or three times to get past him. Finally we land on a planet, that is absolutely gorgeous. You roam around with a 1950s style spaceman helmet, exploring what appears to be an asteroid with minimal gravity. What is awesome here is that when you jump you get hangtime like you would expect in lower gravity. Finally you wind your way around to Outpost M-13.

The next sequence of events plays out like the movie Aliens as you explore the base and subsequent mine looking for either survivors or the cause of the catastrophe. Mostly if more content like this exists in Wildstar… I might be happy to play it. While I simply could not chew through the hive queen boss, and will likely have to return “at level” I had a blast doing it. If nothing else this sells me on their universe, because stuff like that is really fun. The game still feels rather awkward at times, and I still have my problems with the warrior overall, but at the end of the day I am a melee player. While running around as a Chua with a shotgun was fun, it just doesn’t feel like “me”. So while I am still having issues with their UI design a bit, I am hoping I can fix most of that with modifications. I need to do some searching to see if I can find a serviceable mini-map replacement.

Cyrodil Excursion

For roughly a week I had on the Anook Alliance of Awesome calendar an event called “Faffing About in Cyrodil”. The idea was to grab as many guildies as we could and head to Cyrodil looking for whatever we could do. When we pulled together and finally coalesced we had roughly a dozen players, and not the most balanced party… but we worked with it. At first we made a valiant attempt on Fort Glademist, that was currently being held by the Aldmeri Dominion. However we struggled to even take the Lumbermill. This was partially because we mostly just charged in aimlessly and spread ourselves too thin, but even more so that we were a group of bolstered to level 50 characters… and it was being guarded by actual veteran rank players. The problem with bolstering is that it levels you to 50… but the base stats for a 50 without the benefit of armor increases or anything of the sort. This means as a whole we represented a pack of level 50 paper dolls for someone to rip through.

After making a couple of attempts we got tired of the running back and decided to shift focus to what my original goal was… collecting skyshards and beating bosses. The cool thing about Cyrodil is that it is pretty much a normal questing zone in addition to being a zone full of PVP objectives. So we wandered around the zone, often times aimlessly, collecting the various skyshards along the way. At the end of the night I was up three skill points and had dinged 49, and various other folks in the party had dinged as well. The dungeons in Cyrodil are really good experience, not to mention insane amounts of loot. It is somewhat sad that instanced dungeons are rather pitiful experience if you are not completing the quest, however you can gather up a group of friends and roll through the Cyrodil dungeons for hours and almost level exclusively that way. The respawn is fast enough that we were constantly having to fight our way back out of the dungeons as stuff was popping only one or two packs behind what we had just killed.

I was streaming last night and captured almost the entire thing, and as always posted it up on my youtube channel. It seemed like folks were having a good time, even though we didn’t really have any success at the PVP aspect of cyrodil. It is my intent to do this more often, and I will likely be trying to schedule another one of these nights for next Wednesday. However I think I am going to try and start it a little earlier in the evening. As the night drug on, you could tell that most of us were barely holding in there. This is the negative side effect of being a guild almost entirely made up of 30 somethings… and mostly LATE 30 somethings and 40 somethings. Five thirty in the morning comes really early, so I personally try very hard to head towards bed by at least 11. For our east coast folks that had a lot of them staying up til midnight or so. Hopefully with time we will find a happy medium that works for both the east coast and west coast contingencies.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #WIldstar #Cyrodil