cactuar Archives - Page 13 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Play What You Love

August 17, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 18

This week on AggroChat I am joined by regular hosts Rae, Ashgar and Tam which means we are unfortunately without a Kodra this weekend. He is off enjoying the sights, sounds and gaming opportunities of GenCon. I swear one of these years I want to go to this, because it has been like the pinnacle of all gaming shows in my head since I was a youngin reading Dragon magazine. I realize that in reality it is a fair bit smaller than likely even PaxSouth that I will be going to in January, but there is just something extra epic about GenCon. In honor of this convention we talk at length about the latest rendition of Dungeons and Dragons… the fabled Fifth Edition and why you should be excited for it. Wizards of the Coast at this point pretty much knows that they made some serious mistakes with fourth edition, allowing for the meteoric rise of Pathfinder. In 5th Edition it feels like they are trying to pay for the sins of the past with awesome.

In addition to D&D 5th, it was a pretty significant week in gaming in that GamesCom, the Blizzard Warlords announcement and SOE Live were going as well as an event for EVE and SWTOR. I talk about the things that really stuck out to me from the GamesCom feed, including the PS4 Shareplay system and the controversy over Tomb Raider exclusivity. We talk about the World of Warcraft Warlords launch announcement and the subsequent trailer, and the general feeling of “blah” we seem to have towards it. Finally we talk about Everquest Next and that it does in fact seem to be a game they are actually working on and not just vaporware. Additionally we talk about the upcoming changes in Landmark, and how it is a step in the right direction but not enough to get Ashgar interested again. It is a pretty packed show so hopefully you will tune in.

Play What You Love

Since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV and the release of the 14 day trial program, I have had a number of friends give it a shot. A good number of them have gone ahead purchasing and subscribing to the game and this is awesome. However for a handful of players it just didn’t click for whatever reason and they sent me heartfelt apologies for not being able to get into the game. This is perfectly natural, not all games are for all people… and in the current gaming climate we are in there is more diversity than ever, so there really is no excuse to play something you don’t enjoy. So I feel like each of us owes it to ourselves to play whatever it is that we love, and never apologize for doing it. Life is too short to spend time playing something you just don’t enjoy for some reason.

Right now I am enjoying the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV, and I feel like this is a game I could settle down in. However if I reach a point where I am not enjoying it any longer, you can bet I will move on to whatever seems to “feel good” to play at the time. If you stick around and play a game you just aren’t enjoying it only really leads to you either getting completely burnt out, or extremely bitter about the fact that your friends are forcing you to play something you hate. If you allow yourself to glide along through a whole bunch of different fun experiences… I feel like we all end up happier as a result. So please if you try this game or any other and you really don’t enjoy it… go play something else. All you ever have to tell me is that it just “wasn’t for you” and I will completely understand.

Blaugust Prompts

I have been rather slack with a lot of the Blaugust related things, but the biggest of these is my original intent to collect a bunch of writing prompts. While the threat on the forum has a ton of these already I still need to add a bunch more. So today here goes a few related to this weeks podcast and this weekend post.

What game do you love that none of your friends seem to enjoy? Is there a game that you keep returning to but wish your friends were playing along with you?
For me GenCon is this fabled event, what is yours? What is the event that you would love to attend but have never had the opportunity to do so for whatever reason.
What makes a good community? What aspects of a game or social community do you enjoy, and what aspects detract from it?

I am extremely proud of all the bloggers who are participating daily in the Blaugust event. Thanks for making this a truly awesome month.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

Death by Adorable

August 16, 2014 by Belghast

Back to School Time

I’ve said this before but the two most frustrating times in the life of a teacher spouse are the beginning of school and the end of school. It is hard to watch your spouse going through a stress filled ballet and not really having much that you can do to stop it. Here in Oklahoma it is of course the beginning of a new school year, and while my wife does have have students yet she has been back officially at work several days now. To be truthful this summer she barely got any time off at all considering she was up in her classroom almost every day. Apparently during the welcome back speech that the principal gave he mentioned this fact.

Today we are going out on that ritual of rituals… back to school shopping. It is in fact not just a ritual that the students go through. I am sure we will be hitting lots of different clothing stores in search of that “first day” outfit that we always seem to get. Back to school sales are like porn for teachers, and I am not sure if the rest of the world knows this or not. The odd thing is that this year the sales are just lacking. I am not sure what exactly it is, but so far it is not only that the stores don’t have much in the way of sales going on, but they don’t have much in the way of interesting stuff either. In the past Target and Walmart both would have these dollar sections full of all sorts of organization ideas that my wife would come away with inspired from. This year they are pretty much non-existant… and I don’t think Walmart even has their dollar section.

The biggest disappointment I have is in Office Depot. Once upon a time they were among the most supportive businesses for teachers. We had a teachers appreciation card that gave us a discount on damned near everything we bought, and while the discount wasn’t amazing… it felt like it was something. Several years back they replaced this program with one similar to that of Best Buy where you get gift cards for every X dollars that you spend. Even this has been reduced to a pittance. On top of this the stores themselves seem to have gone through a state of decline as they just don’t have the stock that they used to. I think this is the first year that I can recall where they didn’t have a teachers appreciation day, or give teachers the ability to buy more than the limit on the sales. In any case it has been frustrating to watch this, and for my wife it is like ruining Christmas morning.

Death By Adorable

For some time I had been blocked from progressing along the main storyline quest by the Thornmarch Hard primal fight. Instead of waiting for the rest of the guild to catch up so we could do the fight legitimately as an 8 man team, several of us decided to go ahead and knock it out of the way. The fourth primal of course is Good King Moggle Mog the king of the Moogles. It is a council fight of sorts, but to really call it a council fight is a bit of a misstatement. It is a fight of sheer chaos for the most part. First you are presented with a series of Moogle adds, each one representing a class in the game. Some of these are more important for you to kill than others, and as DPS I pretty much just followed the marked targets. After defeating all either of the Mooglesguard the king himself spawns and the actual fight begins.

The council aspect comes into play in that when you kill an add the King inherent their power. The Black Mage for example does an AOE ability that spreads through the entire room, the White Mage heals, the Warrior a giant version of steel cyclone, and the Paladin taunts and pulls everyone into him. These last two can be brutal in that the Paladin and Warrior and time them to happen at the same time essentially wiping the raid. This fight as a result is all about killing things in the right order and keeping the various Mooglesguard away from targets that buff them. I am not 100% sure what order we went in but I know without a doubt that Black Mage and White Mage were the first two to go down. I also know that we killed warrior, but left Paladin up in the successful attempt. However we only managed to down them because someone got off a limit break as we were wiping horribly at the time.

The fight itself is sheer chaos and the hardest part about pugging it was that no one seemed to be able to agree on the “correct” kill order. In many ways it reminded me of the Paragons fight in Siege of Orgrimmar, but at least there everyone agreed that one target was far more important than the others. I am glad to be through the fight and able to move on with my main storyline quest. That said I would gladly go back and do it another time. Extreme mode sounds like insanity, because supposedly you have to carefully dps down each of the Mooglesguard without killing them, because the king himself is immune to damage… however when any member of the Mooglesguard dies he heals all of them back to full from his own health pool. So in theory you have to burn down all of the moogles down to near death and then kill one off draining the health of the King in the process. The madness of constantly having to fight all eight Mooglesguard and deal with the king at the same time just seems like pure hell.

Syrcus Tower

The only other big thing that I did last night was work through the quest chain leading up to the next step of Crystal Tower. From what I hear Syrcus Tower is a significantly different beast than Labyrinth of the Ancients. Whereas in Labyrinth you could theoretically get a piece of loot from every encounter, each time you chose to run it, in Syrcus you are limited to receiving a single piece of loot per week. This has made it a frustrating time for a lot of people as they watch so much really good loot rot. I guess the bulk of people running it are doing so in hope of getting a piece needed for weapon upgrades. So no one actually rolls on the gear, and that means in general if you are going in there for gearing purposes you have your pick of whatever you could want.

The only problem is it takes awhile to run and I have yet to actually have time to really queue for it. Instead of doing it I ended up doing a random hard mode dungeon with the guild. So hopefully tonight I will be able to dip my toes into the dungeon proper. At this point I have progressed significantly gear wise. Right now I am sitting at 83 ilevel and the only pieces that are sub 90 are my boots, belt and gloves. All of which can be upgraded through a number of means, not the least of which are running hunts and gaining bookrocks. Additionally I could luck out and get replacements for any of those slots while running Syrcus. It seems like the hardest thing to get is jewelry as far as drops go, and as a result I have spent most of my bookrocks and hunt tokens on getting those sorted out. Still really enjoying the game and pumped to see more people joining in every few days. Our hope is that as some point we can try the actual raid the Binding Coil of Bahamut which is an 8 man duty.

#FFXIV

Labyrinth of the Ancients

August 14, 2014 by Belghast

Manderville With Friends

Yesterday I had a bit of a rough day at work from the mental and emotional sanity standpoint. So I was pretty much bummed throughout the day and this carried on to coming home that night. I did have a weird sequence of events happen that lead to me meeting a new friend. When I play a game on a specific server I have gotten in the habit of creating a column in tweetdeck with the server name and the game name in it, just to see what happens to be going on in that community on social media. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV I did that and created a column that said “FFXIV Cactuar” giving me any FFXIV posts related to Cactuar. It has been less than amazing considering that it also catches all posts about the cactuar creatures… and as a result I had gotten out of the habit at looking at it.

When I looked yesterday however there were a bunch of posts from a seemingly friendly person playing on our server. In fact there were pictures posted of the mists housing district, and I thought wow… wouldn’t it be a crazy coincidence if we ended up virtual neighbors. Turns out she is in ward 1 of the Mists which pretty much means “we bought housing the second it was available”. We friended each other in game and next thing I know she is coming to visit our house in the ward. What do you do when you have guests over? Dance the manderville of course. After a bit I got a few guildies in on the act, and she even taught us what happens when you get a bunch of Moogle pets together. After a short period of time they apparently start dancing in a circle together. With some experimentation it seems like lots of pets interact with others of the same type. When you summon a Pudgy Puk for example, all the other Puks rush over to greet the newcomer. It is little details like this that make the game so amazingly charming.

The awesome side effect of all of this madness however is that through twitter we all met a new friend. As the evening progressed she pulled two of my guildies into Syrcus tower and I think they had a pretty good time. She on the other hand seems super excited to actually know some people on during the EDT primetime. She hails from a huge guild on the server, that apparently at one point was one of the highest progressed guilds, otherwise I would totally try and steal her into the guild. It might still happen because her group is not active at all, as for whatever reason most of them went missing posts patch 2.2. In any case it was a pretty awesome random happening, and I think its always great to meet more awesome people on the server I play on.

Labyrinth of the Ancients

As far as my evening, my wife and I walked a mile and some change to dinner and when I got back everyone was otherwise engaged. So I decided to take the plunge and queue for the first of the crystal tower instances. Labyrinth of the Ancients is essentially the Final Fantasy XIV version of the WoW LFR system. You queue up individually or as a group and are matched up with other players forming three groups of 8 or 24 in total. Each “alliance” as they call it works as a team to make its way through the tower, and often times has to split apart so that each time covers a specific mechanic. The first part of the dungeon drops ilvl 80 gear, and has no loot restrictions, which makes it a pretty popular place to grind out some basic gear. Additionally each run through rewards both kinds of “bookrocks” making it a decent way to get some currency.

In total I made two runs last night through the raid. The first run seemed to be going really smoothly with us one-shotting the first boss encounter. However there was a portion that involved us splitting up into three teams and our team kept failing. I am not really sure what was happening as my role in the fight was super focused on burning down the “boss” at the end of the platform. Apparently however the adds were not getting handled and the ranged dps that is supposed to burn them down failed to do so. The end result was a slow cascade of players leaving the group until finally the game asked us if we wanted to abandon the duty since there really was no shot in hell of getting fillins. Unlike World of Warcraft the Final Fantasy duty system allows you to say “I only want fresh raids” and this is the default option…. so for the most part it is very hard to get people to join your group. In future runs I might just flag myself as a fillin to see if the queue goes any faster, as each time I have queued it took around thirty minutes.

Second Chances and Onion Knights

I took a break, stretched my legs and got a drink and then sat down to queue for Crystal Tower again when my group failed out. It was roughly thirty minutes again when I got a brand new group. At first I was wondering if this would be a repeat of the last group when we struggled to defeat the Bone Dragon encounter. However from that point onwards everything else went pretty flawlessly, and in no time at all we were through the dungeon and I was on to being flagged for Syrccus tower. Most of the look was meaningless for me, however form the Behemoth encounter a lancer hat dropped. I mostly rolled on it for the cosmetic look and that I was the only lancer in my sub team. When loot drops, it drops for your 8 man group and not for the 24 man raid instance as a whole. This means you are only really in competition against a handful of players, and so far I have been the only dragoon on each time.

I was able to scrounge up a picture of what the completed Onion Knight set looks like, so yeah I totally rolled for cosmetic purposes. In truth I would really like to get all of the pieces of the Wolfram set because I am really digging the appearance there. I seem to have lucked into the chest and helmet. The Chest was 66,000 gil and the Helmet was 80,000 gil on the Market Board, and since then I have not seen ANY piece of Wolfram gear cheaper than 150,000 to 200,000 gil. I am sure the crafter that posted them that cheaply is kicking themselves, but as a result I have some really awesome ilvl 90 gear. I will have to ask some of my crafter friends what exactly it takes to make more pieces because yeah… I could totally use some more of it. In any case I had a fun time checking out the raid instance. I think it is all of our hopes to be able to do Binding Coil of Bahamut at some point as a guild, especially since that is only an 8 man raid. I really like the encounters in this game so far, and I look forward to seeing what more of the raids look like.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #CrystalTower

Belghast the Healer

August 7, 2014August 7, 2014 by Belghast

Lack of Rundowns

Over the last few days the whole post rundown concept has simply not been sustainable. As I said yesterday I have had a whole bunch of technical issues with my two primary machines, leading me to be super late with my blog post. As a result the whole rundown thing just hasn’t been in the radar. At this point since I am having to edit them back in later, I am wondering if it really is sustainable for me to keep doing. My morning blogging ritual gives me thirty minutes to an hour of time to work in a blog post. The verification and retrieval of the links takes almost that long as well because ultimately I end up reading the posts as I go. So on the week days I simply do not have enough time to keep up the practice.

The first few days I simply edited the list in at work over lunch, but the problem is my work world has gotten significantly busier as well. All of this frustrates me since I want to find a way to showcase all of the awesome posts other than my ubiquitous retweets. What I really want to showcase is the fact that out of the 45 or so participants… 35 of those have not missed a single day. Then we have another batch that is also awesome of bloggers who started late but have been faithful ever since. My biggest hope is that this spirit of community and shared purpose extends past the month. I know the Newbie Blogger Initiative as it has run on, has gotten to be that way… in that I am still in regular contact with a lot of the people I mentored during the month. I posted awhile back about the lack of community out here in the non-game-specific space… but hopefully we are changing that one blog at a time.

Running for Grand Prize

Began Late but Not Missed a Day Since

Belghast the Healer

Yesterday I managed to get to level 16 on my conjurer, the required level to start the Duty Roulette process. Now you have to realize that I have not really healed anything in years, at least not a dungeon. Probably the last time I regularly healed was during the Burning Crusade on my Paladin in World of Warcraft. That was roughly seven years ago, and it is a role that I tend to shy away from. The reasoning is my very first MMO experience was as a Cleric in Everquest, and it pretty much burned me on the role from that point out. That said I like to always have at least a healing option in my stable of alts, and since I now have every possible role other than healer… I figured it was time to do something about that. So I channeled all of my bravery and queued for the Duty Roulette… there is honestly something about that name that is so much more fitting than “finder”. When you hit the button you really are taking a huge chance on what exactly you are going to get in the process.

Thankfully for my very first dungeon I got an amazing group. I seriously probably could not have assembled a better “starter” dungeon group than I ended up with. We had dps that never pulled aggro, and a tank that managed to pick up every single add without fail. There was never a point at which I drew healing aggro on anything, and I literally did not have to heal anyone other than the main tank. In the back of my mind I knew this was a rarity as far as random dungeon groups went, but I was thankful to have it as my “breaking in” period. For the most part everything went smoothly and we made it to the end of Tam-Tara Deep Croft in what felt like record time… without skipping any content in the process. I was thinking to myself that yeah, I could maybe do this healing thing.

Reality Sets In

So if I got the idyllic situation for my first run, my second run was the absolute worst possible situation. We get started and the tank is the only one of us not communicating at all. Like people tend to be pretty friendly and I open every dungeon run with a simple “Hey Folks, How Goes It?”, which usually starts up some chatter as we do the dungeon run. The tank was completely silent, and sat there for a few minutes and then suddenly lurched forward without warning and pulled. My immediate thought was console player, since they tend not to respond to anything… ever… or if they do they respond in very short single character replies. It was a gladiator tank and he proceeded to start beating on a single target, and ignoring everything else in the pack. The moment I cast a single heal it all magnetized to me and I essentially became the main tank at that point. Problem was that the target he was on… he wasn’t really tanking either and the first time a dps started attacking it they would pull it off of him.

After a few pulls like this the tank proceeded to AFK, at which point the group kicked him and we cleared the way to the first boss without a tank at all. It was me, a thaumaturge and a pugilist and I healed through the damage. When we got another tank it this one was wearing most of the relic armor set, so my hope was that she would do all of the things that the other tank wasn’t. Turned out that she was an extremely competent tank and the rest of the run went smoothly. By the time group three had rolled around I was starting to feel my wheaties, and thought I could take on anything. I didn’t really struggle last night until I encountered my first group wanting to use weird tactics at the expense of the healer. In Halatali on the final boss, there are these adds that need to be killed before they get to the fire in the center of the room. If you don’t catch one it does an AOE burst on the entire party. My group ignored these completely and as a result I had to heal through constant AOE burst damage… Medica was my friend.

More Chill Than Tanking

The major reality check that I was not quite prepared for was the fact that it is so much more relaxing to heal than to tank. Granted that might just be a me thing, but I feel like I am constantly having to watch everything and make sure I have aggro on it all as I play a game of “bejeweled” making sure all of the gems are bright orange squares. Healing on the other hand is more like playing whack a mole, and that invokes so much less stress. I have to make sure I am not standing in shit, and then I have to make sure all of the bars are full. That’s it, that is my only focus and I feel like I can relax considerably. Sure there are moments where you have to work hard to top everyone off, but that isn’t “every single pull” where I feel like as a tank you are constantly struggling to maintain threat over your party. At this point of course I have only healed the first few instances which admittedly are much easier than the ones to come, so we will see if I change my opinion significantly as I go.

The long and short is that I am embracing this new role and enjoying myself. In the video at the beginning of this block I heal three different dungeons and all of the groups go relatively smoothly. I am glad that my party cannot hear my stream of consciousness commentary, because it would likely piss a lot of them off. Ashgar was talking about getting commendations so much faster as a healer, and I can see that to some extent. During one of the dungeon runs I got three commendations, meaning that I got every one available. However there are multiple dungeons I have walked out of without a single one, which is something that is super rare for me as a DPS. I feel like tanking is the flashy job that everyone appreciates… not dying is significantly less tangible. As a tank I have always appreciated my healers, because they are the lifeline that allows me to do the batshit crazy things I do. I feel like there isn’t as much appreciate for healers from the general public. You only notice the healers when they are doing a poor job.

Writing Prompts

I’ve been stressed and busy the last few days and as a result I have not added any new prompts to the stack. However as I have seen a few people dipping into them I thought I should add a few more to the pile.

What is the most thankless job in gaming? I am trying to keep this broad on purpose because I am not meaning the holy trinity. There are so many roles from ore farmer, to sniper that are played in various games. What one gets the least credit?
What is your favorite appearance item or set of items? Everyone has something that they keep in their inventory just because they love the look of it. What is yours?
What does MMO mean to you? This term gets used broadly, but doesn’t really have a firm definition. What does it mean to you and where do you draw the line between traditional online games.

#Blaugust #FFXIV #Conjurer