aggrochat Archives - Page 33 of 35 - 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

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

May 11, 2014May 10, 2014 by Belghast

Graduation Day

I just thought I would start the post off with a picture of two ducks. These are the ducks that we encounter quite often on our evening stroll around the neighborhood. I guess they have decided that we are not really a threat, because shortly after snapping this photo the male duck decided to come up close enough to almost touch. Granted he might have just been putting some distance between me and his mate, but I would like to think we are a recognized thing by now. Now that you’ve had a lovely vignette, let me tell you about my day. My nephew graduated from college today, and being the loving family we are… we attended. This was an experience in both vertigo and insanely uncomfortable seating. For starters the basketball stadium it was held in had some of the steepest seating I had ever experienced. When they asked us to stand for the singing of the national anthem… I literally felt like I was going to topple over the “cliff” and down into the stands below me.

All in all it wasn’t really a bad day, but it was most definitely a tiring one. I did however manage to top 10,000 steps on the fitbit, instead of my usual 8,000 to 9,000. This was in part because we parked four blocks away from the stadium and walked it rather than fighting for parking. The whole side effect of today and what will inevitably happen tomorrow is that I simply do not have the “oomph” to stay up late enough tonight to do a Steampowered Sunday. In fact as early as we are going in the morning to see my mother, I won’t really have a chance to write a blog post in the morning either. As a result I am writing this one Saturday night, and will publish it in the morning. I hate when I have to “cheat” like this, but it is far better to do that than to miss posting something at all.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

This morning I talked about the little family of robins, that had nested in the white rock. When I came home tonight there were two chicks poking their heads out of the nest until I got close enough to investigate. They instinctively ducked down to try and remain hidden but I was able to get my phone up enough to snap the photo on the side. I feel like each of these photos is somehow softening the blow of what I am about to say. This week you damned near did not get a podcast. Admittedly this is one part miscommunication and one part poor planning on my side. It was Friday during the day when I realized that I would not be home in time to record the podcast. Originally for some reason my wife and I thought my nephews graduation was early in the day. However upon further investigation Friday, we realized that it was at 4 pm in the afternoon. That meant in a best case scenario figuring 2 hours for the graduation, an hour for anything after the graduation, and another 2 hours drive to get back home… this put me being back around 9 pm, and hour after we normally record.

To make things more interesting it seemed as thought both Ashgar and Kodra were not able to record at all this weekend. Ashgar had a similar situation to me and when I spoke with him Friday it was from an airport as he was flying home for his sisters graduation. Kodra on the other hand, I am not really sure what was going on, but he was neither available Friday or Saturday evenings. He would potentially be available very late on Sunday, but that didn’t really give me much time to get things posted, since I normally post our new episodes Sunday. After some scrambling, it seemed as though Tam was also not available. As the day went on Rae and I discussed whether or not we even wanted to record with two people down. I was of the opinion that we would just take the week off, but I guess Rae was really gung ho about going forward. She thought in a worse case scenario it would just be the two of us and we would do a relatively short podcast.

Doctor Hannah to the Rescue

While my wife and I were walking Friday night, Rae was able to get ahold of a good friend of ours Dallian and he was able to fill in for us. I had long thought that Dal might be a really good fit for the show, and him being able to do it on such short notice was almost serendipitous. So we almost did not record the show, but in truth it ended up being one of the more enjoyable ones to make. We talk about a number of gaming topics from Wildstar, to ArcheAge and the obligatory Elder Scrolls Online discussion. We also dip our toes into the world of comic books and Magic: The Gathering and Dallian tells us the riveting tale of how he created the @Doctor_Hannah twitter account. Hopefully the amount of fun we had recording this one translates to our listeners.

Hopefully next week things will be at least partially back to normal. We should have Ashgar and Kodra back, but I believe Rae may not be available. Dallian is coming into town to visit us, and either we will have both Rae and Dallian or neither of them. In any case next week should be interesting as well. At this point I am going to close off this post and crash, as I need to get up super early to make my Mothers Day visitations. I want to wish all the Mother’s out there a very happy day, and I will see you all Monday morning for another early morning post.

#AggroChat #Podcast #ESO #Wildstar #ArcheAge

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD

May 4, 2014May 3, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #12

This weeks episode of Steampowered Sunday is chock full of self indulgent cheatery. Firstly we have plans on going out and about Sunday morning, so I am technically playing the game and doing this review Saturday night shortly before recording AggroChat. The second bit of cheatery is that normally I play through a game in my steam back catalog. That however is not the case this week as currently steam is having a sale on all Activision titles. Among the list was one that caught my eye. I had noticed it a few times in the past but was never at a price point I was wiling to snap it up for. However yesterday for $5 I figured it was well worth that just for a trip down memory lane.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-32-02-65 Something you need to know about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise is that I played the hell out of it. I was one of those little skater kids, and I even went so far as to have the “Tony Hawk” style “hangover” haircut. As a result when this came out for the original Playstation I latched onto it with both hands. One of the things I always wanted was a really good skating game, however we were stuck with either Skate or Die that at least had a free style ramp mode, or 720* which lacked any kind of free skate option… and if you took too long you were chased by an angry swarm of bees. No game gave me what I wanted, which was the ability to faff about without a timer ticking and do all sorts of nifty tricks. This game franchise had exactly that, and I spent countless hours playing and it and it’s higher resolution cousins on the Dreamcast.

Memory Lane

When the I got my Playstation 2 one of the first titles I picked up was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. So I knew one of two things was going to happen. Either I would have a wonderful romp down memory lane, or I would be severely disappointed by the crappy remake. Thankfully the game is pretty much a 1080p remake of the original playstation title, and this is a good thing. Playing the game with a XBOX 360 controller on my PC feels almost exactly like I remember playing it on the PSX. All the tricks worked essentially the same, and I struggled with the same problems I ever did. The game works the same way, each map has a ton of objectives and as you move your way around the area you get bonus scores for collecting them. As always the first objective I generally go for is for grabbing the letters S K A T E scattered around the room.

Additionally all of the old secrets are exactly where I remember them, and accessed through the same kind of tricks. I really was not expecting anything more than a graphical update, so I was not terribly disappointed to find that literally nothing had changed. I got the same enjoyment crashing through the room on top of the ramp as I ever did. One of my favorite things about the series was trying to find all the named “gaps” and a lot of these work the same as they always did. The only thing that is confusing really is that the game is like a remix of all of the Tony Hawk titles. There are maps from the early THPS games as well as the later Underground games. Overall this gives you a good mix of things to go and explore, and Free Skate mode is just as much of a guilty pleasure as it ever was.

Stripped Down Game

My biggest complaint about the game is that it is greatly stripped down. Gone is the ability to create custom skaters, and also gone are the weird unlockable characters like the Neversoft eyeball guy, and Spiderman. The lack of ability to create your own skater really hurts my overall enjoyment of the title. I liked creating a skater that was a reasonable facsimile of myself and customizing his stat package to be only the things I cared about… namely street skating. I found that overall Eric Koston has the closest stat package to what I would want, so I have been using him. The game has been out for two years, so I doubt that we will be seeing any kind of DLC that adds in the missing functionality. My only hope is that maybe just maybe someone cares enough to create a mod that lets you do the same thing.

The other missing feature is the skate park creator. I spent hours building interesting skate parks to go explore, and I remember THPS 2 for the Dreamcast had a wide variety of items you could choose from. I realize this title was released not only on the PC but also tablets and phones… so there is a limited amount of stuff they could realistically squeeze into the game given those constraints. Even with these missing features, I have definitely gotten my $5 worth of fun. Sure I still have my playstation, playstation 2 and dreamcast… but I am not going to go dig them out of the closet and hook them up just to play Tony Hawk. This little download has allowed me to relive some of those memories without having to do that.

Watch Me Suck at THPS!

As has been the trend lately, I recorded the entire play though of THPS, or at least a good chunk of it. You can see just how bad I suck at the game these days, and how many jumps and tricks I miss. I had a blast doing it, and I need to figure out a better option for a push to talk key while playing a game that requires a controller. As a result there are huge blocks of time where I say nothing. But it is fun nonetheless. If you had good memories of the game like I did, you might check out the sale while it is still going on. Well worth the few bucks, and the game performs extremely well. I didn’t notice anything glitchy about it, so it seems like a pretty solid experience.

Episode 4: Mentors for Everyone

Last night we recorded Episode 4 of the AggroChat podcast, and once again we had our regular cast in place. Kodra was back from his business trip, and Rae was no longer trying to join the circus. I tried a little experiment last night, that I probably won’t repeat again. I had been concerned that I had been overly directing the flow of conversation, so I tried to take a step back and let the rest of the hosts introduce topics. The end result lead me to do way more editing and massaging on this episode than normal as I deleted a ton of awkward pauses. The end result is still fairly interesting. We ended up talking about the current state of Elder Scrolls Online with its launch and remaining bugs. We talked quite a bit about ArcheAge and how intrigued I am by it. Finally I nudged the rest of my panel into talking about League of Legends. They had been threatening for weeks to derail the podcast, and I encouraged it… and the end result was not terribly derailed after all.

#SteamPoweredSunday #AggroChat #TonyHawkProSkater #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

The City of Crows

April 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays. Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts. However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom. So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it. Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day. I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later. The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way. I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties. In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts. I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel. One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form. Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday. I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai. Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here. The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons. If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra. If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture. There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes… but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r. Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for. I am however happy enough to be moving on. The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again. Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things. This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore. I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable. In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here. The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location. It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine. This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place. If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled. If you are into mages and such you should really like this place. In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals. You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive. From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind. The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms. The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear. The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game. First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system. It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it. Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking. To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up. So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would. Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business. As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24. Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie. I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely. This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear. At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly. Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be. It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting. If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level. If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy. You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai