cactuar Archives - Page 5 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Obsession with a Skillet

May 25, 2015 by Belghast

To Achieve Self Sufficiency

There are a lot of reasons why people craft in online games. Some start down the path because there is an item that can be created that is better than something that they can get through other means. Others start down the path to earn money, or be able to play the market. For me I have always been the type that crafts so that I don’t have to rely on anyone else. I have the most awesome guild in the world, and in it are a group of individuals that would drop whatever they happened to be doing to craft me anything that I might happen to need. The problem being I hate asking people for things. I am the type of person who would give away anything to anyone that might need it, but when it comes to me asking for something… it goes against every bone in my body to impose on someone else.

As a result I tend to level crafting so that I can make my own gems, brew my own potions and enchant my own gear. In World of Warcraft for example I have one of every single craft at maximum or at least near maximum level. This has allowed me to basically take care of my own needs and it makes me pretty happy. In Rift I have the same thing, in fact I spent a large chunk of my bonus currency when they converted to free to play unlocking all of the trade skills available on my main character. So self sufficiency is an important mission to me, and it is a bit strange that until last week I had not actually touched the crafting system in Final Fantasy XIV. In part I had watched lots of my friends fall into the black hole that I am now in and wanted to avoid doing so until I had at least leveled one of every combat role I might need.

Obsession with a Skillet

Like I wrote yesterday I have now left the territory of being able to purchase goods from a vendor and craft those up in rapid succession. You can get to fifteen in a given crafting profession relatively easily. Sure it takes a lot of time and getting to fifteen in all professions took me roughly two weeks of piddling at leveling off and on to get there. Now however it seems like the challenge is not the leveling portion but the acquisition of items to use in crafting. While my friends seem to think I am insane in doing this my strategy falls along the lines of picking a single item and then farming up three for four stacks of materials and mindlessly crafting a given item until I ding. This worked extremely well for leatherworking in that I simply gathered up enough aldgoat skin and allumen to be able to craft up four stacks of aldgoat leather. Sure it was pure tedium to craft that many items in a row, but I did so while watching television so it ultimately was not that bad. The crafting system while more involved than just pressing a button and crafting an entire stack of items, is simple enough that you can pretty much do it through muscle memory.

Last night I spent crafting mortar by combining stacks of limestone and fine sand, both of which I mined up myself. This pushed me from 15 in Alchemist to 21 over the course of the evening, watching Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, Veep and Last Week Tonight for a reference in just how long it takes to push a profession. After that I started work on Culinarian by crafting a bunch of salted fish. I purchased three stacks of fish from the market place because it was relatively cheap, and the table salt I crafted by combining rock salt and distilled water. I managed to make it to 16 last night before heading to bed, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post I will begin the journey once again. Ultimately I decided to push Alchemist and Culinarian first because they are ultimately the professions I like the least. The strange thing is… that each step I make towards 50 makes me happy because I am that much closer to being self sufficient. While honestly I am not to the point of being able to make all that many useful things… I know eventually I will get there.

To Lost Causes

At this point I have 25 days to push eight professions from 15ish to 50, and I don’t feel like there is a way in hell for me to make that work. Even if I took that month off from work and did nothing but craft full time… I don’t think I would be able to make it. Even knowing this fact… I am still going to try. If I can at least get to 40 by the time Heavensward launches I will be happy enough. There are so many other competing things that I would like to accomplish but right now I am as my friend put it past the “event horizon” and the only way out is through. Crafting has dug its hooks into me and I am currently obsessed with getting caught up. I wish I had not waited so long to make the push, but in the grand scheme of things I tend to only feel the drive to do something… when pushed on from external forces. The impending launch of Heavensward is the catalyst that makes me want to do this, and for that I guess I am thankful.

Right now I am so thoroughly amped about the launch of this expansion, more so than I have been since potentially the launch of Shadows of Luclin in Everquest. That was really my “first” expansion launch, and I was so unbelievably excited about what it might hold for me. Everything I have seen about Heavensward is making me feel that excited about it all. I think this expansion is going to be just as game changing, because the new content feels so vast. The scale of everything seems to be amplified, and that makes me so happy. The world building of Everquest embraced the feeling of everything on a large scale, and my hope is now that the team has proven their mettle with a smaller experience that we will see them branching out and building worlds on a bigger scale. My hope is that with the introduction of flight that we will see less hard edges in the world. I admit I am leery about flight because in both World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 it changed the way I played the game potentially for the worse. In both cases I skipped content because I could simply fly over the top of it… and I am hoping that Square can approach flight from a slightly different direction.

The Madness Continues

May 24, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #58 – Eight Is Enough?

This week we explore the age old question of podcasting.. just how many hosts can you have before a show descends into madness? As the title suggests we ended up with eight hosts on this weeks AggroChat and I think for the most part we exited on the other side with our sanity still in place… or what little we actually had of it to start. This week Ashgar and Kodra are both travelling, and as such I made plans to cover for them if they were unable to make it for the show. However because they are the consumate professionals that they are… they figured out a way to podcast remotely. This left me with the choice of either backing out on the folks I had arranged or just push forward into madness. Like usual I chose the path of madness.

This week we have quite possibly our longest show to date as we aske the question if Eight is Enough? This week we talk about Kodra’s trip to Canada, and his descent into Pathfinder Online. This spurs a discussion about the recent crop of MMO nostalgia titles and how they all somehow miss the boat on what made those early MMOs so interesting. Since all of us literally are playing Final Fantasy XIV we spend a good deal talking about our two groups working on turn nine of the Second Coil of Bahamut, as well as contrasting WoW and Final Fantasy raiding experiences. Grace talks about her experience leveling a ninja and how this game causes us to play things we didn’t think we would ever like playing. I talk about my complete and total embrace of the black hole that is the crafting system and how I have managed to push all classes to fifteen this week.

On top of this we talk Sword Art Online in both the Anime and Game forms. We talk a bit about how each of us is trying to wrap up our time in Shadowrun in preparation for next weeks show. We talk Mad Max Fury Road and to a lesser extent Orphan Black. Ashgar talks about his continued experiences with Radiant Historia, and Thalen ventures into Broken Age. Dallian and I talk about our experiences this week playing Witcher 3, and how the Hearthstone mobile app doesn’t work nearly as well as we would have hoped it would. Finally we wrap things up with some discussion about Moonrise and the impending steam early access. It was without a doubt one of the biggest shows we have recorded but also extremely enjoyable to participate in. It seems we somehow were able to juggle eight people on a show without complete chaos.

The Madness Continues

The insanity that is the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system continues. It was a rainy day here in Oklahoma so I spent most of it curled up on the couch watching television and banging away slowly on crafting. As of yesterday evening I had managed to push every single crafting profession to fifteen, which essentially signals the end of “easy mode” crafting. During those first levels everything you need can be purchased off of a vendor and it is simply an act of brute forcing your way through the levels. Now I begin a trek through the dark territory that involves copious farming of materials. Last night while podcasting I farmed up three stacks of allumen and aldgoat skin for the purpose of leveling leatherworking. I was not sure just how much Aldgoat Leather I would ultimately need to get through to 30 but I suspected it would be quite a bit. Towards the end of the podcast and while editing I crafted up the entire stack of materials, making some 410 Aldgoat leather and it pushed me from level 15 to level 21.

In theory if I can just find something like this to farm at each step of the way I might make it through the 50 levels of crafting with ease. It seems that in leatherworking at least there is an item like that every 10 levels that can be mass farmed and crafted up. The ones that I worry the most about are Alchemist and Cullinarian because they seem to be the most fiddly of the professions. Right now I am farming up Limestone and Fine Sand to make a ton of Mortar because I actually need some to hand off to Cylladora to craft a Moogle themed wallpaper for me, for my personal room. Yesterday in the mix of things that I ran I helped some guildies get through Good King Moggle Mog and managed to get the rare crafting material to drop. Who doesn’t want Moogle themed wallpaper for their personal room? Anyways I am finding the whole crafitng thing oddly soothing but it has absolutely consumed every last moment of my play time. Now that I am having to farm up materials however I am at least venturing out in to the world some.

Poking My Head Out

Yesterday was quite literally the first day I have done something other than craft for the last two weeks. Maybe it isn’t quite that drastic, but the majority of my time in game has been working on some craft or another. Yesterday I ran Haukke Manor with some guildies and got to play my rogue. I have to say that class is just fun to play in that the animations are amazing. While it is only 28 right now I am thinking it might be the next class that I push to 50. A huge chunk of this desire admittedly is the fact that I have a pair of Moogle themed daggers waiting for maximum level. Mog weapons make everything more enjoyable, as I am using the mogfork on my dragoon and mogaxe on my warrior. Other than Haukke I ran an expert with Grace and Tam, and then later that night ran the Battle at Big Keep and The Chrysallis with guildies. It was good to actually stretch my warrior muscles a bit after all of the crafting. I feel like at this point I have more than I could ever actually accomplish still to do before the launch of Heavensward. There are only twenty six days until the Heavensward head start, and there is no way in hell I am going to finish a lot of my side projects before then.

Quite literally I feel like I could take a month off and focus on nothing but Final Fantasy XIV and still have things that are left unfinished before the expansion. Right now it seems I have opposite problems between Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there is nothing I really want to do, but in Final Fantasy I have what feels like dozens of competing desires. It is actually hard getting used to the notion that I will be going into this expansion with a lot of unfinished baggage, but I guess in the grand scheme of things that gives me reason to keep poking my head back in on the old world. The things that I absolutely want to finish before Heavensward is that I want to complete the Post Moogle storyline. I feel like I really just need a good afternoon to work through all of that content, so I am wondering if maybe that is going to be my mission on Monday. Put on Orphan Black on the television and quest my way through to one of the coolest hats in any game. Even writing this… I am realizing just how much content there is in this game yet to do.

Botany Mastered

May 10, 2015 by Belghast

A Very Cardgamey Show

It seems when I think we have nothing to talk about… we end up talking for two hours finally having to force ourselves to stop talking to close out the show. Last night was one of those night as I was joined by Tam, Kodra, Thalen and Ashgar. Sometimes a clear theme is presented and last night inadvertedly this happened. As we rambled through the various things we have been playing, it turns out that a lot of us had been playing card games in one form or another. We got this interesting peak into the secret underground gaming scene of Seatle that Kodra has now apparently gotten his ticket into. He recorded this weeks AggroChat on a quick jaunt away from this all day gaming event that was happening in a nearby hotel. The kind of event that isn’t advertised, and that you apparently have to know someone to get into. This is not starting to sound like fight club at all is it?

Other than that I shift things around a bit in the show and I actually go first. Usually by the time we get around to the games I have been playing my co-hosts are bordering on being asleep so I opted to talk about my stuff first. Which was a large course of Echo of Souls, and beating Wolfenstein The Old Blood which is an absolutely enjoyable but exceptionally short version of the original Wolfenstein game redone in New Order style. Machinegames has somehow created this magical mix of the glory days of the 90s era shooter mixed with the narrative power of modern gaming. Ashgar once again is going through his DS collection and playing things that he had not beaten before, this time jaunting down a time travelling avenue. Thalen extolled the joys of Hand of Fate, and Kodra rediscovered Heroes of Might and Magic 3. More than that however we talked a lot about card games and board games in general. Was a fun and chill show to record and hopefully that comes across in the production.

Botany Mastered

Last night while recording the podcast and editing it I spent my time in Final Fantasy XIV working on Botany. For some time I have been working on pushing up the two critical harvesting abilities Mining and Botany before actually starting the Disciple of the Hand push. I figured having the ability to go out into the world and gather things would be beneficial when making the push to level all the other things. The Disciple of the Land classes also gave me a bit of a buffer to psyche myself up for diving headlong into the pit of madness that is crafting. At this point begins the money grind and thankfully I am up to almost 2 million gil to help support this push. I guess the first order of business is to level all of the professions to 15 so that I can get the best cross class abilities to help with the rest of the grind. My original thought was to take everything to 15 in no particular order, and then start walking them up 5 levels at a time. So take everything to 20, everything to 25 etc. This also allows me to convert all of the crafting gear along the way hopefully keeping my vaults from overflowing.

Another thing that I really need to start doing is working on my beast tribe daily quests. One of the things that Ashgar talked about on the podcast was the interesting quest that comes at the end of maxing each of the factions. There is apparently a storyline that somehow joins up all of the rebellious beast tribe factions into a “Justice League” of sorts. I would really love to see this storyline before Heavensward launches, but at this point I have right around a month to accomplish all of this. I am not sure if I have given myself enough time, especially given that I keep dinking around in other games at the same time. I am starting to feel under the gun with wanting to accomplish so many things before I officially say goodbye to “A Realm Reborn”. So far FFXIV 2.0 has been an amazing ride and I am amped about what Heavensward and 3.0 has to offer. I guess tomorrow night the 2.57 patch will be going in, and I am wondering what exactly it will bring as well. I would be extremely happy if they uncapped Poetics gains… but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Bad At Shadowrun

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time working on Shadowrun Dragonfall and I have decided that I need to just start over. I spent too much of my time on my main character too focused on a specific tree. I was planning on going all melee all of the time and quite frankly that is a poor choice to go with. I spent most of combat running around the room chasing down mobs that would move away from me and attack from ranged. Additionally I am going to have to throw out some of my instincts because I straight wiped my party trying to stay and fight against unwinnable odds. All of that said there are aspects of the game I am really enjoying, but right now I am just pretty horrible at actually doing it. I also need to learn to save far more often because this game will straight kill you at times with a smile. It is going to be an interesting show when we ultimately talk about this game but I am really wanting to make it further than I did with the previous games. I would love to beat this one because in many ways the gameplay reminds me of the Fallout series.

The thing is the game gives you one of every classes so I guess what you end up playing is just for flavor. I will probably go Street Samurai once again because that was always my favorite character to play in the actual Shadowrun campaigns I have been in. I didn’t really care that much for the little dwarf I rolled so I will probably go something more generic like a human this time around. All in all I was a fun several hours I spent yesterday, and as it is raining insanely outside… I plan on going downstairs and hanging out on the sofa all day while watching Netflix. Shadowrun is precisely the perfect kind of game for a day like today. So I will either be doing that or be working on tradeskills in final fantasy. In any case I have a gloriously lazy Sunday ahead of me. These are the types of days that gaming was made for. This massive lung infection has gotten me out of having to travel for Mother’s Day so right now we are planning on having a re-roll there next weekend when the world is not actively trying to kill us. Hopefully you have an awesome day too.

Night of Primals

May 6, 2015 by Belghast

Juggling Games

One of the challenges for me during the Newbie Blogger Initiative is determining which days I should make NBI related posts and which days I should do my traditional thing. It is a bit of a juggling act because I want to keep pumping out articles in support of the initiative but I also don’t want my blog to stop being… well “my blog”. As always I am juggling a silly amount of games. Right now as it stands I raid Tuesday and Thursday in World of Warcraft, Monday and Saturday in Final Fantasy XIV and for the time being I am also filling in on Wednesday nights with another free company static group. I would not mind staying with them indefinitely but I would love to get to a point where I am more optional than the current tank role that I am playing. Finally on Friday nights I have been trying to join in the festivities with the Black Dagger Society as I play some Wildstar. Other than this I am also trying to juggle playing Marvel Heroes and some Rift… and needless to say I feel like there is always something I want to be playing.

Last night was a WoW night and we once again stepped into Blackrock Foundry. I did not place the sign above but I was wondering if it was going to foretell my evening. At the beginning it did seem like maybe it was prophecy, because we had a rough start. We wiped several times on heroic and tempers were flaring a bit. Our raid leader made the right call and took us back outside flipping the difficulty to normal. From there the night got significantly better. I was once again being frustrated by Flamebender Kagraz not dropping pants or a sword for me, but that has now been par for the course so I really wasn’t that upset. Last week we made serious progress on Furnace encounter so I was extremely happy when our raid lead said we were heading that direction. Apparently we had not forgotten the progress we made because in a single attempt we downed our first new boss since March 19th. While heroic difficulty is where we will find upgrades, there is a huge part of me that wants to be able to say we cleared at least normal difficulty before the 6.2 patch. We are now two bosses away from being able to say that.

Night of Primals

One of the things our Monday night group has decided to do is to spend no more than two nights in a row on any one encounter. It has felt like we have ground our faces against turn nine for awhile now, so it is refreshing to get to see something else. Monday night was our first “off night” in this rotation and we opted to get the folks that missed Leviathan Extreme their kill. This fight went smoothly and by the numbers and other than some of the folks who were new to the fight struggling to stay on deck, we were able to make some serious progress. I want to say it was on attempt four that we managed to push through and defeat Levi Ex unlocking Ramuh for a large number of the folks, and getting a nifty summoner book. From there we moved on to Odin as our group had not actually downed it before. We made one night of attempts but then got enthralled by the push for Turn 9 never to return. We shifted things around a bit this time and had me tanking it and Ashgar dpsing, hoping that my insane health pool would help soak the horrible Sangital attack.

The assumption seemed to be correct as it would take me down to around half health instead of almost killing me. The thing is… we have gained a lot of gear since when we last tried this fight so I am pretty sure Ashgar as a Paladin would have been fine as well. We managed to take out Odin and get a piece of the armor set. I believe it was the gloves, but I really want to take this guy down more because I need to be a Lala-Odin. From here we opted to take on Titan Extreme in part because it was standing in the way of us working in Ifrit Extreme and finishing the first set. When we downed Titan before we were missing a significant number of the folks that we had on last night. This fight has been the bane of our existence for awhile because it is precisely the kind of fight we are generally bad at. If a fight requires us to adjust to conditions on the ground, then bam we are on top of that. If it is a fight that requires us to do the exact same thing over and over with laser precision… went tend to fail. Fortunately we managed to catch up to speed quickly and on I believe our fourth attempt we downed Titan once more keying a whole new batch of players for Ifrit. It was one of the most enjoyable nights of raiding I have had in any game, because each of the primal encounters were so drastically different.

The Old Blood

This game I honestly forgot was releasing yesterday, that is until in the middle of the raid I had someone message me over the steam client asking me if I was having trouble with the game. After the raid I opted to boot it up and give it a look see. I have agreed to play this game in part to let Kodra know if I think he would be interested in it. He and I both loved Wolfenstein: New Order… but completely different reasons. I loved the game because it felt like a throw back to the 90s shooter era, and he loved it for the complex character interaction and development. It was awesome that the game supported both things so completely, and by the looks of “The Old Blood” it seemed like the 90s shooter part. Essentially this game is a loving reworking of the classic Escape from Castle Wolfenstein game that I spent so many hours playing during High School. If it is nothing more than Machine Games redoing that game… I would be completely fine with this.

While I have only played a few minutes of the game right now, I have to say I am amped about it. The game is just as gorgeous as New Order, and seems to have the exact same kind of dialog between characters. The problem being that I have a feeling there is a much smaller cast given that the entire game takes place inside of Castle Wolfenstein. This next bit is going to include spoilers because the introduction is pretty short, but still extremely fun. Essentially the start of the game centers around this plan between you and a British agent to sneak inside Castle Wolfenstein and steal the blueprints to Deathshead’s compound… aka that thing you are storming at the beginning of New Order. The problem being that when you get into the offices of occultist Helga Von Schabbs, the plans are missing. There is nothing in the safe in the wall, and you and Wesley quickly draw unwanted attention and a firefight ensues. While trying to make your escape you are captured by Rudi Jager and thrown in the cell that you in theory begin the original Wolfenstein in. From there you have to escape the castle… and quite honestly I did not make it much further. The game is rather short, supposedly only two chapters, but for the price that seems more than reasonable. I think I am going to love this game, but I still question if there is enough story in it to appease Kodra.