alexander Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.

A Small Patch

July 22, 2015 by Belghast

Blaugust Clarifications

Yesterday I had a handful of questions about Blaugust that I thought I should address this morning, just in case anyone else had it. Firstly it is absolutely okay to write content ahead of time and stage it to release over the course of the month. With both Pax Prime and Gamescom happening during the month of August, this is more than likely going to cut into some writers schedules. I know last year there were several folks doing great… and then they went to Gamescom and dropped off the face of the planet. Being able to cover schedule irregularities is a necessary coping skill to deal with keeping a schedule. While I personally prefer not to schedule posts ahead of time, quite literally everyone else does this. So for the purpose of Blaugust this still absolutely counts towards your thirty one posts.

Another question that I had is whether or not it is cool to tell a story in thirty one parts. This is also absolutely fine, and like I said yesterday this is a challenge about longevity and regularity… not necessarily what you are writing about. A prime example of this is during my NaNoWriMo run in 2013… I knew that I could not do it and blog at the same time. So instead I just posted my nightly words each day as my blog post. So over the course of the month I essentially broadcast the draft of my story to the world. In the case of the person who asked me yesterday, they wanted to write the back story of their primary game character over the course of the month. That seems completely valid, and at the same time something that would be extremely awesome. The constraints of this contest are about producing thirty one posts during the month, and so long as those posts mean the constraints of the challenge you are doing just fine.

A Small Patch

I have a good friend Rylacus who is going to be starting Final Fantasy XIV soon. Over the year plus I have been contiguously playing this game I have talked to him about the patching schedule. I mentioned that about once a quarter we get a big patch, and usually more than once a month we get little minor patches. The problem being that he had no real frame of reference as to what I meant by those two things. Yesterday 3.0.5 was released and this is absolutely what I would call a “small patch” by FFXIV standards. When I linked him the patch notes he was completely floored by the fact that we call that a minor patch. A lot of things happened yesterday, not the least of which is the introduction of the Esoterics tier of Tomestones. I keep thinking at some point they are going to run out of goofy names to call these, but they seem to have a limitless fount of them. This allows players to purchase item level 200 items, and returns us to the state of the weekly tomestone cap of 450. The weapons once again are priced just enough to force players to hit that cap three weeks in a row to get them.

Yesterday was also another significant moment for me and my Warrior as I finished upgrading all of my gear to level 180 (other than the Alexander ring that I should be getting tonight… ). This means I am essentially “done” gearing with Law and can now start diverting that to my Dragoon who is roughly halfway to level 58. I was reaching this point where running dungeons was not nearly as important for me as it had been in the past, and then bam… a small patch releases and once again I am infused with this desire to hit the dungeons every single day. This time around Expert Roulette is going to be my key focus, and we have learned in the past that through running a single roulette every day for several days in a row.. you can cap your tomestones without doing anything terribly insane. What I marvel at however is the timing of their content. Quite literally just as we started slowing down our dungeon running fervor… they launched yet another tier of gear giving us even more reason to get excited about running dungeons again. This game is absolutely phenomenal at figuring out the right mix of carrot and stick.

Final Coil

Another huge thing yesterday is that Savage Alexander opened and now the bleeding edge of Final Fantasy XIV raiders can throw themselves against that content. As of this morning it seems like only a handful of free companies have defeated the first turn, and only one or two have managed to defeat the second. So it seems like it will take folks a good deal of time to actually conquer this raid. For our guild however, we are still very much in the gearing process and have yet to be able to field a reliable “normal” Alexander run on a regular basis. What our Monday night group has been working on instead is finishing out the Final Coil of Bahamut. I realize we are quite literally “months behind” as the saying goes, but I am still very much enjoying myself. We managed to take down Turn 12 on Monday night and made what I feel is significant progress on Turn 13. Ultimately it will probably take us a few more weeks, which is good… because we still only have one geared tank for the Monday raid.

As a result… I ended up solo tanking turn 13… which is quite possibly the most hectic thing I have done in a long time. My world became entirely centered around making sure I had five stacks of wrath at the right moment… so I could hit Inner Beast plus another cooldown… in order to survive the tankbuster… which of note means that it literally does enough damage to decimate my 25,000 hit points. The worst timing however was on the pull when quite literally I was hitting my fifth ability and gaining my fifth stack of wrath… as the attack was casting that I needed Inner Beast for. Needless to say that night stressed me the hell out… but hopefully we can down him soon. I would love if the axe dropped, because it is super amazing looking. What I really hope however is that we can finish gearing and start work on Bismarck Extreme, Ravana Extreme and Alexander for gear.

Alexander Ready

July 13, 2015 by Belghast

Assorted Updates

First up I want to thank everyone for checking in on me after my Saturday post. I am doing largely okay myself, but I wanted to talk about my own struggles in the hopes that it might bring someone out of the woodwork and let them know that they really aren’t as alone as they might think. I am still processing the information about my friend, but again I am more concerned about another one of my friends for whom the news is much closer. I was absolutely overwhelmed by the support you all gave me though, and I am consistently amazed at just how loving a community the twitter and blogosphere communities can be. Sure there are people out there that make these places toxic environments, but I seem to have filtered out any possible negative elements from my own feed so that all I really see is positive people who have always been willing to embrace me when I needed it. In part I am hoping that if someone is struggling… they also see the overwhelming response I got… and maybe it convinces them that it is worth reaching out and talking to someone.

This weekend was very much the “last call” for the dumpster, as it should get picked up today. The weekend before we tackled both of our offices, and Saturday we tore into the upstairs bathroom. For several years now it had gone neglected, and the upstairs shower room was essentially a catch all of big things that we “intended” to take to good will but never actually got there. As a result that room had probably not been opened for roughly a decade. We fixed that… and did a bunch of little things throughout the weekend as well. This is also seemingly the weekend of finally taking care of things we intended to do. Over the course of Saturday I took three full loads to goodwill, and at the end of the day we were finally able to deploy this amazing Tardis shower curtain that I have had for a few years, with the intention of going in that bathroom. The cats are confused as hell with the constant changes in their world. The upstairs bathroom also serves as the littlebox room… and our eldest cat just sat in there Saturday evening confusedly meowing… because she didn’t recognize the place.

Office Improvements

A week ago I posted an “in progress” shot of my office and this weekend I continued to refine it. One of the side benefits of Saturday was getting a cabinet that would fit under the printer table, that now serves as my toolbox. This allowed me to sort the various tools that I found while cleaning and organize them in one place. Sunday however became the day I tackled hooking up the consoles again. Below the television that is proudly displaying Street Fighter Alpha 3 (we will get to that in a bit) is a cabinet that contains my PS3, PS4 and Xbox 360. I had to cut holes in the backing board of the cabinet to fish the cords through but in the end in works pretty well. While I had my PS4 torn apart I also performed the upgrade from the stock 500 GB hard drive to a new Samsung 2 TB one… and the nice thing about this setup is that it is close enough to the router that I can actually hard wire the network instead of relying on wireless for everything. My hope is that this improves the performance of remote play through both the Vita and the PSTV.

All of these are hooked into an HDMI switch box that then goes through my Elgato capture card into my PC, allowing me to capture video from any of the devices. The new device that is playing SF Alpha 3 however is a side project that I started a couple of years ago. I had purchased a Foxconn Netbox PC some time ago for the purpose of turning it into an emulator machine. Problem being in my old setup there was never really a good place to hook it up, and while I managed to get an operating system loaded on it… I never did the required fiddling to make it all work. In the meantime I had been searching for a more turnkey solution and finally landed upon Lakka, which is a custom Linux distribution designed entirely around running the RetroArch emulator platform. The awesome thing about it is that it also has Samba set up so it mounts each of the required directories as windows shares so you can simply copy files to it over the network. So as of yesterday I got it up and running and have NES, SNES, GB, GBA, DS, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear and a few Arcade games running on it. Really happy with the way it is working, the only negative is that apparently the N64 emulator will not run at all on 32 bit hardware… so I can live without that.

Alexander Ready

From a gaming perspective my world has revolved around getting to item level 170 in Final Fantasy XIV. This is the magical breaking point that allows you access to the new Alexander raid, and can be attained through a combination of law gear and clan hunt based upgrades. As of last night I am sitting at 173 with every item upgraded to 170 or better except for one of my rings. Yesterday afternoon I managed to get into turn one of Alexander with Wulf and Grace and on our second attempted pushed through the encounter. It was a really fun fight to tank along side Wulf, and while he continued on into the progression… I dropped out to help folks with dungeons. My hope is that maybe tonight I can get in some more of Alexander because supposedly at the end of the quest chain, you end up getting a “Bolt” the item that can be exchanged for an accessory slot. This would ultimately make it so that I didn’t need to somehow purchase a second tomestone of law ring, but instead jump straight to the 190 equivalent.

I am really happy that in theory my gear grind is coming to a close at least on the Warrior. This is largely because I really want to start pushing my focus to the Dragoon so I can get it up to level as well. Right now I am roughly half way to 55, and honestly a few more dungeon runs would get me there quickly. Right now however every waking moment in game has been spent making sure I do all of my duty roulettes so that I can get all the bonus law I can manage. Even with a shift in focus to the Dragoon I will still probably end up getting a bunch of law, simply because I get called on by my friends in the free company to tank random stuff. I quite literally could be happy if I did nothing but run dungeons, because this set of dungeons is freaking amazing. The last few days I have managed to get The Vault as my low level roulette, and I am perfectly fine with this because that place is so much more enjoyable than doing another Brayflox or god forbid Aurum Vale. While I am still struggling inside with the news I got on Friday, the weekend as a whole was pretty successful in at least taking my mind off of it for large blocks of time.