Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

FFXIV a Week Later

August 30, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks… I find myself still slowly shaking off the effects of taking some Benadryl before going to bed last night. My allergies have been killing me this week and as a result my throat is extremely raw from all the drainage. I feel like we are getting a summers worth of allergens all at once. The normal flow of things has been pretty messed up this year, for example we each night the windows are bombarded by junebugs… this is something that should have occurred around my birthday in mid June. Everything just seems to be happening later than normal.

A Week Later

Thus far I have been pretty harsh in my postings about Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn. The problem is… the infrastructure is still grossly inadequate, but the sad part about that is that the actual game itself is really good. When you first see the game it feels as though you are playing a Japanese interpretation of World of Warcraft. However the longer you play the more you realize it is a deeply nuanced game with a lot of really strong points going for it. The game still has very strong WoW elements… but it also is a whole lot Final Fantasy XII with some Rift and GW2 mixed in for good measure.

The key system for me that makes it extremely enjoyable is the job system. I’ve been a fan of this since I first encountered it playing a language hacked SNES rom of Final Fantasy V. What this does in reality is make it so you have no real need for alts. One single character can do literally every class in the game, and you are actually rewarded for doing this. When you switch classes you can take with you certain cross-class abilities. While these are rarely the signature attack of a given class, they do add quite a bit of flavor to your character.

Similarly the crafting system works much the same. You can fall into a black hole of crafting if you allow yourself. One of our guild members is I think trying to level every single craft profession. They are all insidiously tied in a way that makes it extremely beneficial to be able to craft multiple types of things. You will often encounter roadblocks where profession A requires you to have something from profession B and C. The dirty secret is… that many of these items that you need are also available on a few vendors out in the world… so if you know where those are you have no real need to multi-craft.

Multi-Classed

Currently my character is a 23 Maurader, 16 Gladiator, 15 Jouster and as of last night 6 Thaumaturge. Yes you heard that right… I do in fact have a few levels of Thaumaturge… a finger wiggler. The thing is every single class I have played has been fun. The caster for example has a really cool mechanic that switched back and forth between elemental fire and frost attacks. The fire attack gives you a buff that increases your damage output… but also increases the cost of your spells… whereas frost decreases damage output… but massively increases mana regeneration. So in order to play effectively you have to switch back and forth between the two buffed states, and it gives you the ability to regenerate back your mana… but still be attacking.

Right now I have pretty much focused on playing Marauder and plan on transitioning it to Warrior when I get to 30… as Warrior is a mix of 30 Marauder and 15 Gladiator. Eventually I plan on taking Lancer to 30 as well so I can pick up the Dragoon Job which requires 30 Lancer and 15 Marauder. The thing is the cross class dynamic completely changes the way you think about your character. For example I know at some point soon I am going to have to push Gladiator up to 22, because that will unlock provoke, one of the few snap aggro taunts in the game. As I have been tanking quite a few instances… this will be a key ability for me to have in the long run.

Tanking

Essentially for tanking early on you have two different flavors to choose from. The Marauder is your big two hander wielding tank that ends up feeling a bit deathknighty… if you forced a DK to rely on nothing but Heart Strike cleaves to hold aggro. The Marauder is extremely nuanced and there are a few buffs you want to juggle, but overall it is a very fluid feeling class. On the other side you have the Gladiator, which is a more traditional sword and board tank. It’s primary means of holding aggro is through flash, a spell that it casts that increases the threat of all targets surrounding it. In order to support this ability the Gladiator is given an attack combo that ends up regenerating their mana in the process allowing them to keep flash up all through the fight.

At this point I have tanked six instances as Marauder, and I really like the feel of it. I am starting to feel as thought I understand the mechanics extremely well. Hopefully as guild members level up I will be able to swap it up and try some instances as Gladiator to get a feel for how I like the differences. So far I naturally lean towards the Marauder since it has a big damned axe… and has a nice AOE cleave attack that is super useful when leveling out in the world. However my suspicion is that later on the Gladiator/Paladin will have much higher overall defense and the ability to soak more damage. Ultimately I plan on grabbing enough levels to pick up Paladin as well as something I can swap to when needed.

Dungeons

The dungeons quite honestly are shockingly good. I expected the standard theme park ride through a dungeon experience… but they are really intricate and nuanced. Essentially so far it seems like there is a golden path that allows you to quickly progress through the dungeon. However in each one I have encountered there are tons of optional things you can do… rooms that have no reason to ever enter other than for the chance as getting a bonus chest of loot. Last night we were in a dungeon and there were pull chains every so often… each had a completely random chance of spawning some event… or in an extremely rare case getting a chest of loot. It took time… and the encounters that were spawned were fairly painful… but we ended up with 3 bonus chests by doing that.

Additionally the boss encounters are messaged extremely well. So far we have done no real research on the dungeons we have encountered, but just by watching the way the mobs behave we have been able to figure out the key mechanic of most fights. That is not to say there have not been the occasional item that completely wipes the group when we didn’t do something… but in those cases it was really painfully obvious what we were supposed to do… we just were not paying attention. The fights have a lot of things going on… are often times frenetic and rely on you to both tank mobs and allow your dps to burn the occasional add down unassisted. Overall it is one of the best dungeon experiences I have had in several years.

Tragedy

This game is extremely good… and I would honestly go so far as to say it is an amazing experience. There is simply so much in the game that you do not see at face value. So many deep systems supporting your gameplay experience that it takes awhile to get into. The tragedy of all of this is… that even as good as the game is… it is still supported by a grossly inadequate infrastructure. Yesterday Reinhart posted a translation of a letter on the Japanese forums that explains the problems. Essentially they were not expecting the game to be the success it is… currently they have capacity for 218,000 players to be logged in at the same time. From what I have heard they were initially only expecting to have 100,000 concurrent users.

Right now they have way more than this trying to play the game, and as a result we end up with all the technical problems we are dealing with. I honestly believe they are trying their best to deal with the issues… but I also believe that more than likely Squaresoft did not have the faith in this game than the really should have. The first release was a complete disaster, and I feel as though they threw some money at it in hopes of turning into a modest profit generator… but instead it has been way more popular than they ever could have imagined. While I am happy they are exceeding their expectations… it makes for an extremely frustrating experience.

I have had a Microsoft Sidewinder 4X keyboard for some time, and one of the nifty features it has is a bank of hardware macro keys. Until the release of this game I had never actually configured them to do anything. Now I have a key that presses the 0 button every 1.5 seconds… this is essentially what I am reduced to if I ever hope to log into the game. For those who do not know this… hitting 0 on the numpad is basically the equivalent of hidding X on a joystick… it is the continue to the next step key. As a result you can log into the client by spamming 0… and with the constant world is full errors this is essentially how we get it… hit the hardware macro and fiddling around on phones or tablets until it lets us in.

Wait to Purchase

My hope is that in the coming weeks they will resolve these issues and it will be smooth sailing ahead. The problem is… the damage may have already been done. In the United States we are going into the Labor Day weekend… and if the game is not fully playable over that break… then it will cause a ton of negative vibes among the US populace. This game is extremely worth the purchase, and as much as I dislike saying this… is fully worth the monthly subscription fee. However right now my advice to friends is to wait before purchasing it. Sure you can probably go form store to store to find a copy of the game… but you are ultimately just setting yourself up for frustration.

The gameplay experience is extremely good, which makes the inability to actually get into the game and play it all the more frustrating. This combination of amazing game and total lack of infrastructure is what made me such a ball of directionless fury early in the week. As a result if I can save anyone that frustration I would. I feel like eventually things will settle down… be it a week from now or a month from now. The game will still be an amazing experience at that point… so I highly suggest you just sit on your money and play something else in the meantime. I promise the collective community with sound an “All Clear” sign when the game is ready for primetime.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get on the road. I have a project charter to knock out today, and I am trying to figure exactly where I will hide out while writing it. The problem is that I get so many random questions throughout the day that it throws off my train of thought. I am thinking about grabbing the small conference room on the floor we go to for laptop lunches. I can hang out in there and compose freely without interruptions. I hope you all have a great day and that it is the beginning of an amazing labor day weekend. I will be involved in a big NDA protected event, so not sure how much gaming news I will have to report this weekend.

Lure Liquidation

August 29, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land, I am easing my way into cognizance this morning. Last night I slept fairly well, but not as deeply as I had been recently. The primary difference is I decided not to take a Tylenol pm last night and it seemed to still work. Essentially I had hoped I was over whatever hump was causing me to wake up every few hours… and it seems to have been the case. I really did not want my sleep patterns to become dependent on a drug… even if it was simply an over the counter one.

The Exodus

The funny part about our Wednesday night “un-official” guild night… is that we never end up doing exactly what I had planned on doing in the first place. Originally I had posted on Twitter and the guild forums that it was going to be a lure liquidation night… and while we did a lot of that we did not start the evening doing it. I logged in around 6:30 or so and at that point we have only a few people around. After I had finished with my dinner I noticed we had 5 characters that were 50+ online. So I started trying to put together something that would make a workable group make-up for a dungeon.

Lukian bravely specced his cleric into healer and worked on his setup for doing just that. I on the other hand built a quick bard build and attempted to remember how to do that. That left Psynister as our tank, and Fynralyl and Vernall to dps things down. Initially we started the instance and then quickly realized that it was grey to all but one of us. I thought maybe this would change after we actually started the fight it might change… but apparently Exodus of the Storm Queen uses old world logic for determining how something cons to players.

After the first boss we all left the instance… and manually mentored down in the 51-52 range. This is really something Trion needs to fix. You need to be able to queue with a mixed level guild group and it automagically mentors everyone down to the closest fit for a given dungeon. This would really simplify the process of mixed level groups doing things together. After manually mentoring… we realized that we had the deserter debuff… so one of us ran over to Iron Pine Peaks and manually zoned us into the instance. Quite honestly… this process needs a lot of work. It is awesome that it is viable… but it should be just a thing you click a button to do.

After the initial hiccups the instance went relatively smoothly… and we only had one wipe… namely because I could not really remember any of the boss fight strategies… or at least misremembered the wrong parts. Granted not a single piece of viable gear dropped, but we got some useful rune crafting mats out of the process. I had been wanting to run ANY form of a dungeon for weeks… so this at least filled that niche. It was fun and each of the players fell into their roll pretty naturally. I figure I suck at barding… but there really isn’t much to do with barding now that codas refresh the cool down of motifs.

Lure Liquidation

After the dungeon we noticed we had a few more people online, so we decided to start by opening some crafting rifts… since we each had a stockpile of grandmaster lures sitting unused. Previously when Lukian and I had done this… it seemed like the best chance of crafting materials was when summoning them in the high end zones like Ashora or Infinity Steppes. The only problem is… I was on my 56, Fyn and Psyn both 57 and Dethbridge that joined up with us 54. None of us had any of the porticulums out in any of the zones. However we had some ports relatively close to Ashora, so we set our sights there. Lukian stepped afk to grab a bite to eat as we caravanned across Kingsward.

Deth was not with us yet, so when we got out to Ashora we dropped a guild banner to let him port his way out. I have to say that is an extremely cool addition to the game… I just with the cool down was not quite so heinous. An hour just really limits the usefulness especially when the guild is trying to bounce around the world and do something. We opened the one Outfitter lure I had on my rogue, and quickly realized that one 60, a 56, 2 57s and a 54 was simply not enough dps to close level 60 crafting rifts and hit all the timers. So after we got one phase away from completion… I decided to take one for the team and grab my warrior that is raid ready dps.

After this switch up the rifts closed extremely smoothly and we were able to burn through the crafting lures. The only problem with Ashora is that this tends to be the place where everyone and their brother open rifts. As a result the world was littered with abandoned Hunt rifts… but we decided to go ahead and try a few of these as well. With a 60 healer, 60 dps, 57 tank, 58 and 54 dps we we able to close them pretty effectively. We had talked about doing some hunt rifts, so I was more than willing to latch onto someone elses effort. I know hunt rifts spawn in the wild… but since every single one in Ashora seemed to be a hunt… I am figuring someone is spawning them with the hopes that someone else would come around and close them behind them.

I have to say this random running around and doing things together was exactly what I had needed after the recent days of frustration and anger over the generally botched state of the Final Fantasy XIV launch. This was pure and simple fun, running around aimlessly as a group of guildies finding mayhem as it lay out in our path before us. We got at least one ding out of the action, and I think our 54 got a large amount of xp from each of the 60 rifts we closed. I know we each walked away with a fair stack of catalysts for crafting epicy goodness, and a bunch of random level 60 materials on top of that. The hunts each provided quite a bit of Torvan Hunters rep and a decent number of infinity stones as well.

The Hive

After a couple of hours of running around, Fyn decided it was time for bed for her… and as a result we broke up the rift running party. Lukian asked if I had ever done the level 60 chronicle and I had not. Since it was supposedly pretty fast I agreed to group up and knock it out. I am extremely impressed with what I saw. The previous chronicles had essentially been dumbed down version of the raid encounters to date… but this one appeared to be a unique beast of its own. Essentially you are invading an architect hive… and the NPC you are helping out is pretty much my favorite in the entire Rift universe… Atrophinius. There are a couple of repeatable quests that you can perform for him, giving you writs of notoriety for your faction of choice.

The fights were all pretty simple, and while I died a few times out of a mix of not knowing the encounters and the trademark Belghast overzealousness… we never actually wiped as a group. The gear you get out of the chronicle is relatively nice, and it can be upgraded to essentially pre-elite blues at best. It is a good way to get your feet wet and gear over the course of a handful of days. Additionally it rewards a little bit of the elite dungeon currency for finishing each run… so you could eventually buy elite purples if you were diligent enough. Essentially it seemed like there were three encounters and a bonus chest that spawned randomly in the zone.

It was a really fun and simple dungeon designed for two players. The visuals were just amazing looking.. and there was an added mini-game in that they have hidden artifacts scattered throughout the dungeon… so while you are clearing the place you are constantly keeping your eyes peeled for them. At least in our run, they seemed overly fond of hiding them in the various lighting fixtures of the dungeon. I am not sure if I would do this as an every night thing… but I definitely enjoyed myself and would gladly run it again.

Wrapping Up

Like I said above… this was precisely the kind of night I needed to wash away all the frustration from previous nights. Before starting up rift last night I decided to try logging into Final Fantasy XIV and encountered the World Full 1017 error for 15-20 minutes as I ate my dinner. So while I was able to get in multiple times over my lunch break… it seems to have been mostly a fluke. However my guildies are reporting that as a whole it is far easier to get logged in… or at least you only have to leg hump the login server for 30 minutes or so before you get access. I do hope they get things sorted out… having a mostly unplayable game over the labor day weekend is a pretty massive sin. Speaking of that… I have one of those NDA events going on… if you too have an NDA event going on this weekend let me know… it may very well be the same one and we can work towards a shared goal. Anyways… enough cryptic talk aside… I hope you all have a great day.