dungeons Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

More SkyForge Thoughts

July 19, 2015 by Belghast

Controller Support

One of the questions left unanswered from yesterday was whether or not the game had controller support. On a whim I picked up my controller towards the end of one of yesterdays streams and I noticed that I could in fact control my character with it. Today I popped into game with the mission of trying to test this theory out. It seems that maybe they are working on controller support but that it does not actually work fully. I could control my character perfectly using both of my analog sticks, and if I hit the A button on my XBox 360 controller I could perform any of the normal actions that require the spacebar. However it did not actually seem to interact with the world, and pressing A when not hovering over an objective did not perform the jump action, which is normally the default action for spacebar. I went so far as to go into the keybindings section and it would not let me bind anything to controller presses.

Now of course if you wanted to go so far as to use Xpadder you could easily get this game up and running. It takes care of the toughest part which is getting the analog movement feeling right. My hope is that in subsequent patches it is going to add full controller support, and then this game is likely to increase significantly in enjoyment. Left button spammy attacks feel less spammy when done with a controller button. Since writing yesterdays post I have added another few hours worth of gameplay, and I have to say my verdict is still very mixed. I even talked about it a bit on last nights podcast. On some level I am feeling about this game much the same as I felt about Guild Wars 2 when it was in testing. There is something that compels me to keep trying to figure it out, but at the same time I find it extremely easy to stop playing after completing a single mission. The act of running a mission just wears me out, in a way that content in Elder Scrolls Online used to wear me out. Things are so ridiculously tightly packed that on normal solo missions you spend so much of your time mindlessly grinding through huge encounters.

Isola Digs

This morning however I ventured into what seems to be another large shared cooperative zone, much the same as the very first mission in the game. It involved a series of around 25 smaller objectives that were scattered throughout the map. The frustrating thing about this zone in particular is that the objectives were super linear, meaning when I tried to do my normal thing and hop off the path… I missed an objective that I then later had to double back through the entire zone to go find again. As a whole though I have to say I like this style of zone so much better than the little instanced mini dungeons I had completed more recently. The game also feels better when lots of other players are wandering around, which greatly speeds up the amount of time it takes to burn through the various health bars of the bosses. This tells me that a lot of my frustrations was simply that I was soloing content designed for groups to take down. The fact that I could fairly easily solo content as a paladin, maybe points to that class being a little overpowered for this sort of thing? Then again tanks in most games are adept at soloing bosses that were originally meant for a group to take down… I am looking at you Deathknight.

The other cool thing about this region is that it seemed to be full of boss encounters that did not seem to be tied to a specific objective. There may be a quest that I missed somewhere that opened these up, but from what I saw there was a fire, water and wind warden. Above you can see me taking on the fire one. The only thing missing elemental wise is earth, which I did not really see while wandering around. I managed to get a few greens off these bosses, so my theory is they are just there to make your experience more interesting. The boss fights with other players helping were significantly more enjoyable, but I could still shield up as a paladin and whittle them down until I succeeded. There was only one single encounter where I even came close to dying. At the last minute a wave of players rushed in and helped me finish the boss off.

Combat Still Repetitive

All of this said… my problem with the combat still exists. It just doesn’t feel like I can do anything interesting with the encounters. I did add a new combo attack to my repertoire, and while I abused the hell out of it.. each individual fight still seemed to take a little bit longer than they should for the game to feel really “fun”. The mobs still suffer from the same problem where they tend to be one trick ponies, and keep using the same attack sequence over and over. There is almost always one thing that you should dodge out of, but other than that it is grind them down with your main attack until they are gone. There are a lot of things I do like however when it comes to the interactions with other players. This seems like a game where everything is open tagging, and if you are in an area and have dealt any damage to a pack… you seem to get full credit for the entire pack. Similarly if there is an objective, it seems like everyone can click said objective, and that seems to have changed from one of the closed beta streams I happened to watch.

As a result I found myself wading into a lot of fights that I did not strictly need to just to help out the other players. Unfortunately not a single one of them did I actually communicate with. There are a lot of ifs about this game, and I am not quite certain how much I will be playing of it. In theory I kinda dig the model of purchasing classes or having a slow tedious process of unlocking them. To some extent I wish I had gotten in on the ability to play the Berserker, because I think that might be a class I would really enjoy. I have heard that you can go to the training center and test drive all of the classes, much like you can test drive champions in a moba, so that might be one of the things I do next. At this point I have played around five hours of the game, and I have enjoyed it just enough to keep me coming back to try and find the secrets that I seem to be missing as to why this game is really fun. Ultimately there will be a point where I just give up on it, but I have not quite reached that yet. After all it gives me a bit of a diversion from leveling my Dragoon and gearing in Final Fantasy XIV. If you want to check out the last two videos I have posted since yesterday I will be embedding them below.

Port Naori – Instanced Dungeon-like Mission

Isola Digs – Open World-ish Shared Zone Mission

(was still encoding at the time of posting this… so might have to check back later)

The Gearing Game

July 8, 2015 by Belghast

False Starts

Yesterday I made an attempt to go to work, but ultimately was told to head home by my boss. Over the last few days I have been pretty much living on the couch with my leg slightly elevated and alternating icepacks on it. The problem being that I don’t exist like this in the real world, where sitting at a desk generally requires that your feet be on the ground. While I love the arrangement of my cube at work, it really does not allow for me to elevate my leg at all. Not surprisingly within an hour of being at work my knee was swelling something fierce. So I headed home and started the process of icepacks over again until it started to behave somewhat normally. The positive is however that the area that is actually swelling is rather small and contained as compared to the day the fall happened, so I guess I am recovering quickly.

The biggest problem, the one that effects this blog is the fact that my wrist has hurt an awful lot. After struggling through yesterday mornings post, I was pretty much typing one handed for most of the day. I wore a brace most of yesterday and as of this morning it is feeling much better. It is still extremely tender when I move my wrist too quickly or to any extreme of motion… but overall it is more functional. Hopefully this means I can return to normal typing instead of this frustrating one handed mess that I dealt with yesterday. Since it is also my “mouse hand” that is effected I have been surprised that really using a mouse doesn’t hurt much at all. I guess in general I am used to keeping my mouse sensitivity so high that I barely have to move my hand at all to send the cursor flying across the screen. Hopefully today will be a much better day and I will continue to mend quickly.

The Gearing Game

Like most players in Final Fantasy XIV, my life revolves around the acquisition of Tomestones of Law. To get a full set of “law” gear it takes roughly 3500 and they have given us many options on how to get them. Firstly there are three dungeons that reward 80 tomestones each, and an additional 40 if you can manage to catch someone who still has their first time bonus or “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it. In addition to that you get 100 tomestones for both a low level roulette and a high level roulette each day, and an additional 60 for a trial roulette. The one that surprises me however is that Expert Roulette is only worth 80, but I guess in theory it has a face value of 160 to 200 since you are getting stones from the dungeon proper as well. In order to get into Alexander, the raid that just opened players need to reach a combined ilevel of 170 which also happens to be the level of the tomestone gear. So in theory you need a full set in order to step through its doors.

Where you can cheat a bit is through those ubiquitous “Clan Hunts” that I have been using as filler leveling. It turns out all of the items needed to upgrade your gear from 170 to 180 come from Centurio Seals. Hopefully you have been doing these religiously because in order to get a full set of gear upgraded to the next step it is going to take a grand total of 2795 seals. Now granted you can hop on the hunt train like you could in the previous expansion and in theory grind this out in a weekend. Personally I happen to find the daily hunt mechanic rather relaxing, as I can log in… fly around the gorgeous zones and pick off the mobs one at a time. Right now I have four pieces of gear… chest, helm, ring, and weapon. Currently I have upgraded the weapon and ring to 180, and am saving enough hunt marks to upgrade the chest piece next. There will come a time when I stop messing with anything other than three star and elite hunt marks, but for the time being they also serve to help level my dragoon for the lower level ones.

Dragoon Dungeoning

Right now if there is a moment when I am not engaged doing something else, or tanking something that can gain me law stones… I am pretty much in the dungeon queue on my Dragoon. Right now the dps queue seems relatively manageable sitting around the 10 minute mark for “leveling” dungeons. As a result it is my hope to ride this queue for as many classes as I can manage. After running a couple of max level dungeons, I settled into a couple of quick runs on the dragoon who is now up to “Sohm Al” level. I have to say I find this pretty relaxing as well, because I can just sit back and poke things with a stick. I opted to go ahead and record my dungeon run to add it to the stack of dungeon videos I have on my youtube channel. I had not actually recorded any when I was not currently tanking, so it gives a slightly different perspective of the fights. I have to say I am really digging the “tribal” look that comes from Sohm Al. That helmet is freaking amazing, and is likely going to go in my glamour bin for future usage. At this point I am roughly halfway through 53 so I figure it will take two more dungeon runs to hit 54, and then five to six past that before I can do the next dungeon at 55. Embedding the video and cutting this post short today without a second paragraph.

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.