cactuar Archives - Page 8 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Reluctant Healer

March 19, 2015 by Belghast

Tyranny of Blank Page

I’ve been going through a bit of a spell the last several mornings where I get upstairs, sit down, and stare into the abyss that is a blank screen not really knowing quite what to fill it with. So this is a post to tell all of the people that read me, that seem to think I have this limitless font of material… that sometimes it runs dry. In part it feels like I am just not doing all that much of any interest in the games I am playing. Due to various issues at work my in game time has been very distracted. Often times I might be at the screen but I am doing a generally poor job of paying attention to the people around me. Even last night while sitting on Voice Chat, it was like it was filtered and muffled in the background of my mind, taking a few minutes to pull my focus forward and actually understand what someone just said. Suffice to say it is me, not the games I am currently playing that is causing the problem and in an attempt to make things better I went to bed pretty early last night.

The last few days have just been odd to exist in my skin. I had a very interrupted weekend, where I did not accomplish much in the way of gaming. Then each morning my routine is thrown off because my wife is on spring break, and while in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t change my schedule that much… something feels fundamentally off. It has been nice having her home during the day because it means I don’t have to figure out something for dinner that can be reheated easily. Last night she made this amazing batch of Chicken and Dumplings, and from the sound of it the recipe was super easy. Largely just dump a bunch of stuff in the crock pot and give it an appropriate amount of time. The thing that frustrates me the most about my current “out of it” state, is that I feel like at any given moment I am letting down five people because I am not doing whatever they need me to do. Between MMOGames, the fledgling AggroChat site, the insanely growing free company in Final Fantasy XIV, the guild in World of Warcraft and various sundry other side projects I feel pulled in so many places. When I am “myself” and in my right mind, with the appropriate frame of reference… it all seems to work. When I am in this current stupor nothing seems to function and I am failing in equal parts at all of it.

Reluctant Healer

One of the more interesting side effects of my current mission to cap poetics every single week, is the fact that I seem to be absolutely rolling in Tomestones of Soldiery. As a result I have been using it to bolster all of my other classes, and most recently I have been pouring it into my White Mage. The ultimate irony is that I am sitting at 104 gear score, but have yet to heal anything at level 50. I have to say I am looking pretty badass though in my daystar gear set. Overall I am a huge fan of all of the soldiery gear, though I feel like I should probably be spending the points on my Bard instead. My bard actually gets use anytime we need a ranged dps for something and not a tank. This doesn’t happen extremely often, but far more often than I would ever consider swapping to heal something. I have to admit that healing in Final Fantasy XIV was really fun up through Brayflox… and then it is like things got too real for me. I had too many flashbacks to my early days as a healer, and it stopped being nearly as much fun.

I know I have covered this numerous times but I started my MMO career as a Cleric in Everquest. For years I had played Clerics in Dungeons and Dragons and managed to turn them into these awesome holy warriors. Picking the right deity here, and the right spells there… could turn what is usually a support class into an amazing front line battle priest. Unfortunately this design went against everything that was Everquest, and I spent a lot of my time soloing using the good ole Root and Nuke combination. Then when it came to raiding… I had to learn about the frustration that is the Complete Heal Rotation, where every 2 to 3 seconds the main tank is getting a full heal, so you have to time the 12 second cast so that someone is always starting up the next one. All of this makes me really reluctant to heal anything, because I never want to get back into a mode of operation where that style of game play is the normal. So I guess I have a bit of a mental block towards actually putting myself out there as a viable healer. I would gladly do it for anyone in the free company, but I just haven’t really made it widely known that it was an option.

Guild Tanking

Instead I am far more comfortable taking up the mantle of a guild tank. In my current daze I have probably missed a half dozen opportunities to tank for guildies. Last night I managed to catch one of these as Solaria and her daughter Isalenne needed to run Haukke Manor. I would have tanked anything for them, but it so happens that Haukke is probably one of my favorite dungeons in the entire game. I love the whole Castlevania feel to the place, and while leveling my healer I seemed to get that place almost every single time I popped into the low level roulette. As a result I have pretty much every pull memorized, and Isa commented on just how relaxing the run was compared to the average duty finder one. I actually got into a discussion on twitter yesterday about DPS queues and class balance and I realize that I am 100% part of the problem. I will happily don the mantle of the serious tank when it comes to my friends… but when I solo queue for the duty finder… I do so as a DPS. I’ve never really learned how to turn off that part of me that takes total responsibility for the success or failure for the group when I am tanking. As such I am willing to take that burden for my friends, but cannot bring myself to do it for strangers.

The problem is I know deep down in my bones how generally awesome the Final Fantasy XIV community is. I know that I have tanked for random strangers before while leveling… and actually enjoyed it. The problem is I have this mental wall that I struggle to get around. Since the introduction of the Ninja, the DPS queues in Final Fantasy XIV have been completely out of control. If you do a low level duty finder you can be sitting in that queue for over thirty minutes as dps, and if you are a ninja… it trends extremely close to infinity as the game seems to try to stick a ranged and a melee in a group if at all possible. The end result is a lot of frustration for newer players that just need to get dungeons running. As such I try my damnedest to intercept people needing dungeons and make them happen among free company members. The problem is… not all of my friends are on Cactuar, and not all of them are in our Free Company. I really should be a better person and do more “charity queues”, which is a term we came up with shortly after release when everyone seemed to need Ifrit but no one could get a group. Various members of our free company would queue for Ifrit and help a bunch of people through that obstacle. I remember one Black Mage had been sitting in that queue for three hours, so really I need to step up to the plate and do more random tanking. Knowing this however is slightly different from doing this… but I am going to try and force myself out there.

Thriving Community

March 12, 2015 by Belghast

Oklahoma Conventions

Pax South was my first real gaming convention, and I have to say I had an absolute blast there. Don’t get me wrong I had been to a few conventions in the past, even worked a few comic book conventions when I worked at a comic book shop, but they were nothing like Pax. This got me thinking about what I might be missing out on here locally. It turns out we have a not insignificant number of conventions that happen within a short driving distance. In fact at the tail end of this month a pretty big retro gaming convention is happening in the Oklahoma City area. As you can see from the handy little button thing on the right it is happening March 28th and 29th at the Oklahoma Expo Hall of the Oklahoma State Fair Park in Oklahoma City… Oklahoma. Yeah that was a lot of Oklahoma in a row, even as a lifer I thought it was a bit excessive.

Super! Bitcon is going on its second year, and seems to be a pretty cool place to go especially if you are into “retro” gaming… or as I like to call it “my childhood”. They have several well known guests on the docket like Smooth McGroove, Alpha Omega Sin, and Patrick Scott Patterson. They also apparently have a fairly large exhibitor hall with several local and regional companies showing off the games they have been working on, as well as a free play arcade and gaming museum. There is this #IamSuperBitcon thing from social media where folks talk about their experiences last year that is really interesting to watch as well. The absolute best part of all of this is that you get a two day pass for only $10 and for this… I thought it would be a sin for me to pass up going. Oklahoma City is only an hour and a half drive for me from Tulsa, so not a big deal at all. One of my new goals this year is to try and hit up as many of these smaller conventions as I can to tide me over until the next Pax. As we get closer to time I will talk about the Heartland Gaming Expo and the XPO games convention both in the Tulsa area. It just excites me that we have this thriving games culture seemingly in my own back yard.

Thriving Community

One of the topics that I have been mulling over in my head is why exactly we have manages to stay happy and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV for the better part of this last year. So often we pop into a MMO and last a few months only to flit off to another title a month later. At the same time I have been examining why I stayed in World of Warcraft for over seven years, and continue to return to it. I think the answer to Final Fantasy XIV is two fold. Firstly we returned to the game after a sequence of boom bust cycles in MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. I was personally looking for a place to “settle down” for awhile, and Final Fantasy XIV had been the only title that all of my friends seemed to leave “on good terms” with. So we set down roots, and I started getting involved in the Cactuar community as did the rest of my guild. This process was aided by the fact that we had nothing on the horizon to draw our attention away from the game. As such we have been able to play the game without the distraction of shiny new objects and their promises of a better gaming experience.

I think this lull in MMO releases has helped a lot of games that were stable get more so. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV last July they were at I believe 2.5 million subscribers, and last week they announced that they had blossomed up to 4 million subscribers. That is a fairly significant growth over what is essentially two quarters, and I think that in part it has a lot to do with the fact that there is really nothing out there to pull attention away from it. Don’t get me wrong Warlords of Draenor happened, and I have been playing it… but that is only a draw to players who still have warmth in their hearts for the World of Warcraft franchise. I think the answer to why we have stayed is that we were given enough time to set down roots. We not only have friends in our free company, but are members of several active linkshells that give us access to raiding and grouping beyond our own numbers. This sort of environment is contagious and has made recruiting more members to the fold exceptionally easy. All of which builds upon itself giving me the piece the kept me coming back to World of Warcraft all of this time… a stable and thriving community. The awesome thing is… I can have my cake and eat it two, because at this point my community in World of Warcraft is vastly different than my community blooming here in Final Fantasy XIV.

The Botanist

I had every intention to come home and have a quiet night of powering through the early levels of botany. In fact that is precisely how my evening started, with me brute forcing the level 10 trees near Bentbranch in the Central Shroud. Right now I am working towards the level 10 quest, which will require 99 Crow Feathers. My goal is to be able to have 99 waiting and ready for when I ding 10 and can immediately turn in that quest and move on to the next sequence. However last night it was only a matter of moments before someone in guild needed something… and the adventurer inside me leapt at the chance to do something “not crafting”. My friend Arkenor needed a run of Haukke Manor, and another group needed a run of Copperbell and thankfully we had the right mix of people to make both happen. I tanked Haukke on my Paladin and another run when smoothly. I have said this before, but I keep having to say it over and over. I love how damned easy and rewarding it is to run lower level content with your friends.

Once the crafting thing was tossed aside I spent most of the rest of the night running content. We moved from Haukke into a random Expert Roulette picking up Cav to add to Ash, myself and Thalen. Once finished there I ran a few trials roulette and a hard roulette… and before I realized it was 9:30 and I was starting to get a bit tired. This is the way an evening can evaporate in Eorzea, with a bunch of chain events that make you wonder where the time went. So sadly I did not make much progress on Botanist, but I am feeling that Sunday I will have another “catch up on television” day downstairs on my laptop and push forward again. At some point I need to run a good deal more content however because I would really like to cap my poetics this week, and I have barely put a dent in them. If I keep running a few roulettes each day, I should be able to do it without much difficulty. The only monkey wrench in this plan is the fact that most of Saturday I will be out of town, leaving me only Sunday to really work on such things. In any case… I had a fun evening with my Free Company and have zero regrets of not making any flower picking progress.

Hardcore Mining

March 9, 2015 by Belghast

Quest for Airships

Since the detail was first teased during the Las Vegas Fan Festival, our guild has been focused on making sure we can get a Free Company airship. The biggest concern however is that when Yoshi-P calls something “prohibitively expensive” it gives us serious pause. This is the man that thought 6-30 million gil for housing was “reasonable”, so if something is prohibitively expensive… what in the world could that be? Over the weekend a Polygon article came out with some quotes from the man himself, and I talked a little bit about this yesterday. Unless you did not have time to read the article, let me focus in on the part I am actually interested in.

“Once you have the workshop, you decide on what you want to make,” Yoshida says. “For example, if you’re going to build an airship, you go part by part. You start with the engine. Your free company teammates gather the materials necessary to build the engine. The crafters within the free company form a party, and then it’s a group effort to build the engine.”

Yoshida says the free company crafting system will grow and expand throughout content patches for the expansion — what he is calling the “3.X series of updates.” To create their ship, free companies will have to combine different engines, bodies and other parts. The ships will have different stats depending on the combinations made, leading to unique ships for different groups depending on their focus.

“Having as many options as possible is a good thing,” he says with a smile.

So our biggest concern with this statement is the fact that he says that you will need a party of free company crafters to complete some of these actions. Now currently we have at least a “light” party worth of Omni crafters, meaning that they have every single profession to max level. But since he doesn’t specify my concern is that it might require a “Full” party of eight crafters to do some of the things related to crafting airship bits. If that is the case we are pretty screwed, because while some of our members have embraced the rabbit hole that is crafting, there are players like me that have completely avoided it. I guess for me my reasoning was that I wanted to make sure I got my combat classes up and geared before diving too far into the crafting system. That said I have WAR, PLD, DRG, BRD, and WHM all geared to ilvl 100 or better… so I guess I have done what I set out to do.

Hardcore Mining

So this weekend I embarked upon the mission to finish leveling mining. At the beginning of the weekend I was sitting around level 30, and last night before going to bed I had just hit 44. My hope is that maybe I can finish leveling to 50 tonight before raid time. Right now I am out in Coerthas doing mining leves, and the leveling is going fairly quickly. My goal is to finish leveling mining and then start in on another Disciple of the Land class probably logging next. My original plan was to level all of my harvesting classes to 50 before setting in and actually leveling crafting proper. I thought this might make life a lot easier to funnel resources into the “making things” professions. My goal is to be able to help the guild craft that airship, and while it is probably going to cots me several points of sanity… I care that much about the end result.

Mining is pretty much pure tedium, in that it involves a lot of running around and clicking things repeatedly. As such I opted to hang out downstairs on my laptop and catch up on various television options while I repeated the same process over and over. Yesterday was all about watching the various episodes of Star Wars Rebels that I had missed. I have to say that show is absolutely phenomenal, and if you are not watching it yet… I highly suggest you do so. I am pretty happy with Disney’s leadership so far of the Star Wars brand. That show is chock full of really interesting characters, and it gives this whole guerilla fighters against the empire feel which is excellent. The danger of their situation is constant, and they managed to create an extremely insidious villain in the form of “The Inquisitor”.

Quietly Amazing

This morning when I went to log in and take a screenshot of me in my awesome mining regalia, I was greeted by this screen. Yup it looks like Cactuar was in fact full at 6 in the morning, and I am thinking this is pure insanity. I know for some time Cactuar has been locked from the creation of new characters during prime time hours. However I wonder if we are starting to reach that state of permanent lock status? That is going to be horribly unfortunate for anyone wanting to join our Free Company and the great little community we have built there. My hope is this is some sort of fluke, and they were doing maintenance on part of the servers in our cluster. I know our Free Company and me specifically has been the cause of a bunch of recent transfer and new character creation activity on our server, and I don’t really see that as something that is going to change. I love our folks, and they have been so amazingly helpful to the new people starting.

When someone asks for a dungeon, it seems like people stumble over themselves ready to help them out. At one point earlier this weekend I was going to DPS one of these dungeons, until another member who was working on their first character said they could use it too. I bowed out of the run to let the folks able to get experience that really matters get in on the fun. That seems to be the Final Fantasy way, quietly and unassumingly… being awesome. I mean at this point Final Fantasy is the second most popular MMORPG of all time… and it just kind of happened without folks really realizing it. Having over four million active accounts is a pretty great feat in this world where supposedly Wildstar didn’t even sell a million boxes at launch. Sure the expansion was pushed back a little further than I would have liked it, but I love the fact that there is content planned to cover that gap. Now that I am embarking on the madness that is crafting, I am also admittedly looking forward to having more time to work up crafters before the expansion hits.

#FFXIV #Mining #Cactuar

Heavensward Hype

March 8, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 47 – Scrabble is for Olds

Last night is another case of us sitting down, saying we had nothing to talk about… and then ending up talking for an hour and a half about everything imaginable. We talked about Ashgar and the insanity he is currently going through working on his Relic Novus in Final Fantasy XIV. We talked my recent journey back into Bravely Default and how that game requires a certain measure of degenerate play to defeat encounters after a certain point. We talk about Tam’s brush with near death as he decides that no one should ever be bit by a Black Widow spider because it hurts like hell. I talk about my experiences in Blackrock Foundry and the World of Warcraft selfie toy filling up my twitter feed. I talk about hitting level 80 on my first character in Guild Wars 2… and how empty it feels since the last 15 levels or so were essentially given to me for logging in daily.

Our longest discussion however that spawned the quote that I am using for the title of this show was about board games and miniature gaming. We talk about “long” board games, those taking several hours to play out… and the frustration of having to devote that much time to a game you are essentially “behind the curve” in the entire time. We talk about games that require less time to get into and play, and that can be played for a number of times in a single evening. This also spawns a discussion into miniature gaming talking about the problems with Warmachine and Warhammer 40k contrasted with some of the strengths of Infinity. As always it is a long rambling discussion between a bunch of friends, and since you apparently like that as AggroChat listeners… then this should be a banner episode.

Heavensward Hype

Yesterday was a pretty huge day for Final Fantasy XIV in that Yoshi P was at Pax East giving a presentation on the upcoming expansion. Thankfully it was live streamed to the internet, and you can check out the entire presentation from yesterday over on their twitch video on demand page. Honestly at first I thought it was going to be a disappointing repeat of all of the information that had come out of the Tokyo Game Show back in December. The show started with essentially revealing the same information about the Au Ra race and the three new classes that happened during that show. However quickly it segwayed into showing us things like the amazing level 60 class sets. The above image is that of the Warrior set, and while I still intend to play Dark Knight as my main… I have to say I will be rapidly leveling Warrior as well. Instead of breaking rocks with axes… they seem to have just skipped a step and made the axe itself out of a rock.

Since this is essentially the expansion of the Dragoon… you would expect the level 60 class armor to be amazing. As the above image shows it was well worth the wait. My biggest hope is that they don’t have the female “belly hole” problem that the earlier dragoon armor had. I have to say though that I will continue poking things with a spear if for no reason other than the collect this gear. As usual I was not quite so amped about the caster sets, but then again I never really am. I have no clue what is going on with the Black Mage set , at least the current set is something I would happily wear. This set is a bit more “demon lady gaga” than anything else I can think of. If you want to check out all of the new class armors you should hit up this youtube video that shows each set in action. I am happy that maybe just maybe I will finally have a Bard set that I am not ashamed to wear.

Not a Spring Release

The biggest news to come out of yesterday is a firm and concrete release date for the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion… Heavensward. Within the next few weeks they are apparently releasing a brand new benchmark application to allow us to test out the Direct X 11 changes, and play with all of the racial customization options on the Au Ra. If this works like the previous benchmark it should allow us to export our saved characters and then import them into our actual game client. On March 16th the pre-orders will open and like usual the physical collectors edition is going to have some sort of a big dragon statute pack in. Apparently earlier they had announced that we would be getting a flying dragon mount as part of the collectors edition as well, which in truth are the type of rewards I care a bout. All of this time we had heard “spring 2015” for the release date, but it turns out that the game will be launching on June 23rd with early access starting June 19th… so not spring but summer.

It turns out that they apparently did have a May date in mind for the launch, and they tried to make it. However as Yoshi P apologized they wanted to make sure they had a very polished product for launch. I for one support pushing back by a few weeks to make sure we have a really polished game, because really… the first expansion is a crucial time for any game. I want to make sure they are able to keep this quiet momentum they seem to have going into the new content. That said we also still have one full major patch waiting in the wings, and I am not sure there would have been enough time for us to really get to complete that content before the expansion anyways. I feel like that is the prime difference here as there is with other expansions. Most expansions land at the tail end of a six month or longer lull with no new content. In the case of Warlords of Draenor it was at the end of a 16 month lull… even with the impending expansion… they still have content releases planned up to the moment 3.0 launches. So in the mean time I will be working on my crafting… because it sounds like we are going to need a team of crafters to complete our free company airship.