Tales of the Aggronaut

Pugilism

September 3, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land… I am somewhat awake and once again sitting at the keyboard in the morning. I know that over the holiday weekend I was a slacker and ended up logging late in the day for two days… but now it is time to return to reality and as such the morning posts begin once more. All in all it was a pretty good Labor Day weekend, we ran out and did quite a few things and I managed to get in a decent amount of playtime in on various games. I even managed to hit the suggested point in the NDA title, so I call the weekend as a whole a success.

Another Cool Find

Yesterday my wife went shopping with her mother and sister and I pretty much stuck around the house doing laundry, changing the ferret cage, and playing a lot of Final Fantasy. Right now there is a lot of closeout going on at the various Wal-mart locations around us, and she said she would check the ones in Joplin if they ended up there. I had honestly pretty much forgotten about it when I got a series of texts asking about various sets. I still think it is so damned cool that she is more than willing to feed my addiction to all things Lego.

At the first store there were many sets that I already had, and one that I had picked up at our store… but in amongst the various heavily marked down boxes was a gem. The Gungan Sub is a set I have thought was cool for some time, but it had an $80 pricetag that like all the bigger sets makes me not willing to pick them up. However yesterday she found it for only $40 so it was a definite buy especially considering this one is another out of print set from 2012.

This apparently is a re-release of a model by the same name that came out in 1999 for the release of the Phantom Menace. It looks like the model has been improved in every way, and in addition there is the first Queen Amidala minifig which is pretty sweet looking. Of course in the travels my wife found lots of stuff for herself, including a bunch of scarves that were on clearance and a few tops. It sounds like she had a good time hanging with her family, but I still think it is awesome that she thought to check the Legos and actually found some.

Pugilism

Now that I managed to get to 30 on my main class and pick up the Warrior job I have backed down a bit from pushing through the levels. One of the frustrations with specialization is that you can no longer access all of the cross class abilities. So by switching into Warrior I lost access to all the nifty toys I had from my Lancer sub class. As it stands currently, Warriors only have access to cross class abilities from the Gladiator and Pugilist classes. Since there are quite a few good low hanging fruit in the Pugilism tree, I decided to swap over and run up a few levels there.

I have to say I enjoy the way pugilist feels. In many ways it reminds me of the way the martial arts hero felt in City of Heroes. You have lots of awesome kicks and punches and a really interesting combo system. Basically how combos work in this game is that when you hit an ability, it will highlight the next ability in sequence… and if you press it you get some special added effect. The problem is if you miss the second attack, it is a lost opportunity.

With the Pugilist, each attack applies a short term buff to your character, and this buff is what controls the ability to proceed through to the next attack. This means even if you fail to hit the target with the second attack, there is always a chance to pull out a second attempt at the attack and proceed down the combo tree. Additionally they get a third step in their combo building process amazingly fast, within the first few levels. This makes the class design feel extremely responsive early on in the leveling process.

Right now my goal is to hit level 12, which will give me access to a few really nice cross class abilities. First we have Featherfoot, which increases evasion by 25% for 15 seconds. Next we have Second Wind, that is a variable heal that builds off attack power. Lastly we have Internal Release, which increases Critical Rate by 30% for 15 seconds. I have heard that the Marauder ability Berserk which increases attack power by 50%, will greatly buff Second Wind. While Berserk keeps you from using special attacks for 30 seconds after its duration… it could be a handy combo in a clutch situation where you are tanking and need a large heal NOW.

Primetime Patching

At the point of posting about the prime time patch, I had not really don’t the time conversion myself. Essentially the “Wednesday patch” is actually a Tuesday evening patch for the United States. I feel as though a million oceanic players are reveling in the frustration saying “see what it feels like”. The maintenance period is essentially 7 pm to 1 am central time, so pretty much encompasses the entire playable time period I would normally be in a game. All will be forgiven if this fixes the issues and we can finally stop the “1017 shuffle”.

I heard an interesting theory about what is happening to the servers and why they cannot support any more players. The theory states that it is not actually a problem with the individual shards themselves, but a problem with not having enough resources on the “instancing server”. The game makes constant use of throwing players into instanced scenes in the game as you complete some of the games more epic quest moments. This additionally is supposedly the same server that is used by every dungeon in the game. The majority of player disconnects involve going into or coming out of an instanced area.

The theory further poses that it is this instance infrastructure that was just too small to support the current deluge of players. This server was supposedly scaled for around 100,000 concurrent players, whereas we have well over that on a given basis. This is also why in the final beta test, before they imposed the caps… the main issue at hand was the complete and total failure of the instance system halting players from progressing in their quests. If this is in fact the case they may literally be able to throw servers at the problem…and after this maintenance all may be resolved. I really hope this ends up the case… because the game is far better than its shitty infrastructure shows.

Wrapping Up

Well it is time for me to take the trash out, feed the cats and get on the road. I hope you have a great short week ahead of you. My hope is that no real crisis arise and I can get some things knocked off my extremely long list. More than likely tonight I will be back in Rift, as I am sure the guild thinks I have fallen off the face of the earth. Looking forward to trying to get some more dungeons going this Wednesday for guild night. Crossing my fingers that the maintenance fixes everything, and I will be able to play FFXIV at will, and not feel like I need to play it whenever I can actually connect to the game servers.

Warrior Get!

September 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good afternoon folks… I have been a horrible slacker this morning and am just now sitting down to blog. Quite honestly… I feel like crap again… even more so than I did yesterday morning. The allergy thing is kicking my ass… right now my lungs and head feel like they are full of concrete. I rolled out of bed around 9 am and have been moping around the house since. Essentially it feels like the seasons are all jacked up… this is the way I normally feel mid July.

State of FFXIV

FFXIV_ReviewOfHeadStart

I am just starting off this post with a reminder… that the current state of Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is bad. The game is fully playable and really damned enjoyable if you can make it into game. However at least once a night one of us gets essentially permanently locked out for the evening. Making it through the login tries as shown above takes brute force and luck. This weekend has honestly been far worse than anything since the last night of the head start. The lobby server and JP and EU/US realm lists are taking a dump on a regular basis, so it is by sheer luck that any of us are making it in to play the game at all.

So once again… I highly suggest that you DO NOT BUY THE GAME YET. Give it a month or so, right now Square seems to be working on fixing things… but they are doing so at a glacial pace. Supposedly we will have a all realms maintenance on Wednesday to add resources to the servers. The bad thing is that essentially it is happening during primetime for the United States. I hope that this remedies some of the issues, but they could have done much better timing wise. Considering like 90% of the players are in EU/US… timing it in a way as not to convenience the Japanese players only further cements my believe that Square in general could give zero shits about the US/EU player base as a whole.

I have heard through the blog and twitters verse that people are hunting from store to store trying to find a copy. Seriously… save yourself the headache and wait until they restore digital sales. We each have our preferred methods for getting through the login lottery. Yesterday evening I set up my “spam 0 over and over” macro and used the time to clean my office and break down a few dozen Lego models into parts. As I was finishing up and cleaning the top of my desk with a wet wipe I got through. Others seem to try for 30 minutes and then go off and do something else. Whatever the method is… you are far better just waiting until you don’t have to jump through the egregious hoops.

Bowl of Embers

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One of the big problems right now in the game is there are a large number of absolute bottlenecks that prevent you from moving forward. The first of these is the “Bowl of Embers” quest line that leads to an instance. I am going to try my damnedest not to spoil anything, because the instance is really damned cool and feels extremely epic. However you have to do it with a well balanced 4 man group. Once again we have the same problem in FFXIV as we have always had in the games leading up to this point. DPS is simply more popular than Tanks and Healers, and since leveling a healer is fairly difficult… they are FAR rarer than tanks are.

As a result there are literally hundreds of players bottlenecked by not being able to get this quest completed. The most jacked up thing about it is… you are offered no more quests ANYWHERE until you finish this one. I got my way to the quest, and then continued leveling as I didn’t have a guild group handy. I managed to push my way from 15 to 20 doing nothing but my hunting log quests and guildleaves. I thought the game got super sparse never realizing that I was being held back by not having done the Bowl of Embers.

Upon completing this one quest… there were quests everywhere waiting on me. One of my friends decided to take it upon himself to queue as a healer one night while we were all out questing. One poor thaumaturgist had been waiting in the bowl area for 3 hours… not realizing she could leave the area and continue playing the game while queued. So she had literally been just sitting there waiting on the queue to pop all that time… getting more and more frustrated as each hour passed. So far this is the worst thing about the game play that there are roadblocks like this every so often that halt not just the main story… but ANY questing.

Warrior Get!

My focus of late has been two fold… firstly to get to level 30 Marauder so I could do the Job Specialization quest and become a Warrior. Secondly it has been to get far enough in the storyline to unlock the Haukke Manor dungeon. That is another odd thing about this game… you can’t queue for a dungeon until you have unlocked it through the main storyline. Essentially the other players have apparently had more playtime than me and the other tank. So we have had a guild group just waiting to do Haukke Manor but no tank to do it. A few players have risked pugging, but the vast majority of us really only care to group with guild members.

So as a result I have felt a certain internal pressure to level through the quest chain as fast as I could so I could start tanking this instance for people, as it appears to be another logjam in the storyline. One of the weird things about taking a job is that you gain one really powerful effect upon getting it… but end up giving up your ability to cross class other than from two specific lines. So essentially a Warrior can only gain cross class abilities from Gladiator and Pugilist. This sucks a little bit because I had a really nice survival and slow ability from the Lancer line.

Right now my next plan is to focus on leveling my lancer for a bit, because I would really like to get it to 30 so that I can have a second job by picking up Dragoon. That way I would have both a dps and tanking job that I could fall back on for alternate dungeoning. The only negative is that while leveling the lancer I will essentially have to focus on running fates and guildleaves as I have already completed most of the quests available. To some extent I wish there were a number of repeatable quests available that you could do regardless based on your current class.

Daedalus Returns

Another really cool thing that happens at 30 is you unlock the ability to turn your riding chocobo into a battle companion. Essentially they can take up the role of healer, dps or tank and become similar to the mercenaries in the Everquest games. Of course you forfeit the ability to ride them as they are battling beside you, but it allows you to tackle more difficult encounters solo as you bring your own little duo along for the process. They level as you fight with them, and you use this to purchase abilities. Far as I can tell you can eventually teach them all of the three stances abilities.

Summoning them costs a Gysahl Green, which is the traditional Final Fantasy Chocobo food of choice. I am going to have to figure out which vendor sells the greens so I can buy a big stack. You get the first one as part of your quest chain. So far my Chocobo only knows the first level heal, but I literally just got this ability before coming downstairs to force myself to blog. The game really has so many little hooks that make you care about it. It reminds me at times of Everquest 2 in the number of intricate systems it has behind the scenes that it takes awhile to find. This game screams WoW clone at first viewing… but the more I get into it, the more rich it is.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to bang out a blog post and keep my one post a day streak up. Tomorrow I will be returning to the normal scheduled early morning posting. Overall this extended weekend has been a really odd case. I figure no one is likely waiting with baited breath to read my posts anyways. More than likely folks will catch up on their RSS readers after the long holiday weekend. I hope you all have had an excellent one, and I hope you keep my friend Sylladora in your thoughts. I just found out she is having to put down her dog this weekend, and it is always extremely rough to lose a long companion like that.

Altoholic Cure

September 1, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am sitting here trying to wake up. I kind of feel like death warmed over right now because my allergies are going into overdrive. My throat just feels absolutely raw and no amount of Benadryl or anything else seems to make the allergic crap go away in full. I had a pretty great day yesterday, and today I am looking at just milling around the house doing as little productive as possible.

Altoholic Cure

One of the interesting things that FFXIV seems to have made me finally understand is that I am not in fact an altoholic. Now if you look at the long history of me and games… you will see many screens that look like that filled with multiple max or at least high level characters. In Rift for example I have a 60 warrior, 57 rogue, 51 cleric and multiple 20 something’s scattered out along multiple servers. You would immediately think that I am in fact an altoholic… but recently a series of games have proved this otherwise.

One of the things that has proven the most tantalizing for me about The Secret World and now Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn is the fact that I can literally have one character and do everything in the game on it. One of the frustrating things about playing alts for me has been that I did not always take everything I had acquired from one character and carry it forth into the next. I hated the feeling of starting over on achievements and mounts and pets etc. So when I started playing The Secret World, it was completely mind-blowing that I literally could have one character that could do anything at all in the game.

Multiple Roles

I have come to realize that I don’t start alts because I necessarily care about playing another character. This should have been clued in by the fact that in WoW every single human character tended to have the exact same appearance. Belghast and Belgrave look exactly the same… minus the fact that Belgrave has the nifty Death Knight glowing eyes thing going on. I end up starting new characters because I want to fiddle with new mechanics. So much of the appeal of Rift to me has always been that I had up to 9 saved specs per character and could switch between them at will to fit my current mood.

Final Fantasy XIV is proving to be the ultimate distraction at the moment, because I can play every class and do every tradeskill on one character. It is not only supported, it is in fact suggested because you open up the maximum number of possibilities with cross class actions by doing this. To some extent it reminds me of the way Horizons was in the ability to freely switch between classes at will. Horizons is one of those games that you either loved or you hated… and for me I mostly mourned the potential the game had. My main character was a Reaver, which was an advanced class that required I believe 20 warrior and 15 spiritualist. Then in addition to that I poured on 24 levels of Cleric so I could have some cross class healing, and 15 levels of Mage so I could have access to all the elemental weapon buffs.

The way the game worked is when you were playing another class, you could carry with you 1/2 of the levels worth of spells. So at 24 cleric, I would use up through level 12 healing spells on any other class I chose to play. This lead to some really open ended gameplay that I loved… I could build my own class of sorts by picking up the abilities that I liked best from each of the other classes. Granted they gimped you slightly by doing this… making your xp gain go drastically slower based on your number of classes. I did love however playing a character that was in essence a jack of all trades… and not limited to only one specific role. Post Horizons this has been a concept I have missed greatly, and what I believe has lead me to rolling tons of characters trying to reclaim that freedom.

Class Freedom

One of the things that feels the coolest while playing Final Fantasy is that each of us have multiple roles that we are actively or semi-actively leveling. For example my character is 27 Marauder, but I also have 18 Fencer, 16 Gladiator and 6 Thamaturgist. Instead of running dungeons last night with our main spec we realized that we had a pretty solid group composition with our secondary specs. So instead of tanking, I switched to dpsing as a fencer, and we had two arcanists that both served the role as part time dps and part time healer… letting someone who is traditional dps try out his tanky marauder. We went back and re-experienced the lower level dungeons and had a blast doing it.

The most awesome thing about this is… as you are tanking on your main spec… you can acquire those drops that would have been excellent for another class but would end up rotting on the ground of a dungeon somewhere. This was always something that stuck in my craw as a tank. I didn’t mind being needed in the specific role, but I always hated seeing gear that would have been awesome for an alt rotting on the corpses of bosses because no one in the instance needed it. I always longed for a way to pass that gear along from my main down to an alt and see it go to good use. I personally hate seeing gear sold or disenchanted… I love seeing it go to use regardless of WHO can use it.

So as a result… as I am playing my main spec I am picking up quest rewards that I can use later for various other classes in the game. Likewise there is never a case where I don’t have access to my full compliment of mounts or pets or other cosmetic goodies. All of this is why that Final Fantasy XIV is turning out to be way more compelling for me than I ever expected going into this. Originally I thought this was mostly a game I would play occasionally because I had some friends playing it. Instead I am finding a game that is so much better than it has any right to be based on the past track record Squaresoft’s MMO failures.

I find myself looking forward to each little milestone in the game, and likewise looking forward to switching weapons and leveling my little lower level classes. When you switch roles, you have access to various cross class abilities from each. So as a tank I can cherry pick all of the various survival abilities so that my Marauder has 4 “Oh Shit” buttons I can press in an instance. Likewise as a DPS I can cherry pick abilities that will either increase my survival or increase my dps. While you don’t have as much freedom as you did in Horizons, it still feels the same… that each of your classes is making every other class you play better in the process.

Wrapping Up

Well I had no clue I was going to write a love song for the class system in FFXIV before I started… but now that I did it makes sense. That is the one aspect of the game that I find the stickiest so far. It is making me really wish that I could have a Warrior, Cleric, Rogue and Mage all in the same character in Rift even if it meant having to pay for adding the additional classes. Anyways I hope you all are having a great Sunday and that you have a great rest of the Labor Day weekend.

Awesome Wife

August 31, 2013 by Belghast

Good evening my dear readers… I am writing this far later in the day than normal… but there was good reason. Essentially today we greatly varied our normal weekend routine. Towards the end of the week my wife suggested we go to Muskogee today, and I suggested that we just get up early, shower and eat breakfast on the road. It has been in the hundreds temperature wise in Oklahoma this week, so I thought it would be better to get up there and back before it heated up too badly. Instead we ended up spending the entire day there, but we found a lot of spiffy things.

Awesome Wife

A few weeks back I wrote about my wife and how amazing she was when she spontaneously got me a huge haul of Legos when she went off on a shopping excursion with some of her friends. Well today was the last day of the big sale that she found them on… and she wanted to know if I wanted to make a trip up to see if there was anything else I wanted. Firstly I thought it was amazing that she was offering to make a trip to Muskogee just to go Lego shopping for me… but it gets better. When she was there early, she had told me that the place was not air conditioned and that if we ever made a trip back… that we would want to go early in the day.

As a result that is what is leading me to blog so late, as we pretty much were on the road as soon as we woke up this morning with no real time for me to knock out a morning post. During the day she was there she had texted me pictures of the various sets she found, but I really did not get a good feeling for what the store was like. We made a trip to the one in west Tulsa, and everything there was pretty much in neat and organized rows like a closeout store. Additionally that store was air conditioned… so I really could not grasp just how hot and oppressive the Muskogee store would be.

Above and Beyond

The above picture is of what I would consider the most organized section of Sooner Surplus. The various toys were scattered around throughout the store over the course of six different isles. In each isle there were legos mixed in, crammed back behind… above and under all the rest of the toys. Essentially Sooner Surplus is what appears to be a store that buys items that the stores like Wal-mart write off as a loss. The end result is a complete mishmash of everything you could imagine. All of it in new or like new state… sometimes with dented packages but everything around sixty percent of retail prices. For example the TIE Fighter she got me last time retails for $55 and the pricetag at the store was $35.

Until August 31st… aka today all of the toys, Legos included were an additional 20% off the already 60% pricetag. So first off I was completely floored that she thought about the Legos in the first place… but as I rummaged through the shelves today I finally grasped just how amazing she really was. The various sets the gathered up last time… came from about 12 different places in the store… some of them buried behind piles of other toys. So not only was she thinking about me when she saw the Legos… she went through a massive amount of physical effort to FIND all the sets in the first place. All of this in during an Oklahoma afternoon, in a metal building with no air-conditioning that seems to heat up like an oven really quickly.

A Real Trooper

So after picking me out almost $100 in Lego sets last time… she was more than willing to bring me back today and let me pick through the sets myself. This time around we got a lot of the larger sets. Granted in the above picture, one of the sets came from closeout in our Wal-Mart… but she still was amazing about letting me pick that one up as well. The Goblin King set above, was roughly $60 before the 20% discount… and it originally retailed in the store for over $100 by itself. The monster train set was roughly $40 and retailed for over $80 in the store. So all in all I found a ton of really good bigger sets for super cheap even before the discount… but knowing that we got an additional 20% off of everything was a huge push to pick them up.

The Optimus Prime set is Kree-o but everything I have seen shows that they are completely compatible with Lego. It originally retailed for $80 and before the 20% discount the above set was $20. Granted I don’t think the Kree-o product line has gone over as well as Hasbro could have hoped, but it still looks awesome, and had a ton of pieces. The set I had gotten from Wal-mart before was also originally in the $100 range, but we picked it up I think for $45. Essentially all told between the set from Wal-mart and the finds today at Sooner Surplus… my wife was a real trooper about me spending another $200 on Legos.

While we were there we found a few more sets for my niece and nephew. The big thing we were excited about is that we found another three sets from the Lego Friends line for her… and then got a really cool bigger dump truck set for him. Granted this pales in comparison to what I walked away with, but I am sure they will be happy when we give them to them. We went by the Wal-mart in Muskogee later and they had quite a few sets on clearance as well. I passed on a Hobbit Attack of the Wargs set for $20 without looking it up. Later on I realized that the set was a $50 set normally. My wife being awesome as always… encouraged me to get it… but i felt bad since I had already spent so much earlier.

Things People Pawn

We have always been huge fans of Pawn Shops. Essentially if I can get a price break by buying something second hand… I will always do it. Just with the Legos we are always looking for a good deal, and namely we frequently them fairly often looking for Camera lenses for our Canon Digital SLRs. We had never actually been to the Cash America in Muskogee, but on the last trip my wife actually found where it was located. So after getting out of Sooner Surplus we wound our way over there to check it out. It was extremely nice inside and the service staff there were extremely friendly.

That has always been the bane of our existence as pawn shops go. We go there to buy things, and it always seems like we have pure hell trying to get anyone to wait on us. The workers in pawn shops are usually either ignoring the customers or too busy with the folks there to pawn things. It always rubs me the wrong way since in essense we are there to give them money, not ask for it. Anyways the folks at this shop were the exact opposite super friendly. My wife looked at some of the rings and I roamed around the store for a bit. I cracked up when I saw the above items. I guess people will pawn damned near anything. I never thought of a generic coffee pot, a igloo water jug, and a toaster oven as high dollar items.

Further Excursions

Another place we have to go whenever we are in Muskogee or honestly any town that has one is Hastings. For those not familiar with it, it is this odd bookstore/movie/comic/toys/music/electronics store chain. They generally have prices that range on the high end, but when they put things on sale, or have used merchandise it is generally a really good deal. Since for the most part we have moved to digital books… I don’t so much buy books there any more, but I love looking through their random geeky kitsch. One of my favorite things in Borderlands 2… is anything produced by Jacobs manufacturing. I kind of have a fetish for the whole steam punk look of their weapons. One of my favorite places in the game is when you run across a non-functioning CL4P-TP model styled by Jacobs.

One the shelves at Hastings I stumbled onto exactly that… a Jacobs model “Clap-Trap”. I thought it was extremely cool… just not the $20 price tag worth of cool. Sure it would have looked awesome adorning my desk at work. But that seemed a bit much for a random action figure. I had seen several versions of the figure before, but always in the blue or yellow variant. I didn’t even know that the Jacobs model existed. I might have gone for it… but the paint job was not nearly as cool as it was in game. The wood grain looked extremely flat and was mostly just solid fields of brown. So while super cool… it would never look as cool as the awesome one from in game.

Pretty much the rest of the day was spent ping ponging around Muskogee. We went out to the Mall and hit several clothing stores looking for stuff for my wife. Additionally we had trips to Ross and Cato and found a handful of things. That has been the real challenge this year starting back to school is that since we have both lost quite a bit of weight (55 lbs for me and 45 lbs for my wife) a lot of her professional attire was just too big to remain looking professional. The frustrating thing is she seems to be in an odd spot where clothing is hard to find… most likely because so many people are currently in that size range. So as a result we have picked up separates wherever we could find them.

Wrapping Up

It was a fun day, and while it was hot as hell out there it was well worth the trip. I am so thankful I have such an awesome spouse… that while she may not fully understand my obsessions… she at least understands what is important to me and indulges my eccentricities. Quite honestly it is a two way street, as I have gone down so many roads that lead to one of her little obsessions as well. I guess at the end of the day that is why we work well together. Anyways… I hope you all have a great weekend, and apologies again for getting this post out so late.