duty roulette Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Reluctant Roulette

I thought I would take a few moments this morning to address a few things we are noticing among new recruits to our Free Company. I believe for the most part the majority of this group reads my blog at least sometimes, so here is hoping that my post will find it’s audience. If nothing else this serves as a good reminder to anyone new to Final Fantasy XIV or considering playing it. The first behavior I am seeing an awful lot of is an absolute reluctance to EVER use the Duty Roulette system at all. It seems like most of the players have come from several years in World of Warcraft, where “pugging” has become a dirty word. I fully understand this and quite honestly I was scared to use the Duty Roulette system… that is until another FC mate tiptoed into the water and reported back that it was actually pretty awesome. I dislike random groups in other games more than most people, and I will be the first to say that the community in this game is simply better.

The other thing you should know is that those of us who are veterans are using the Duty Roulette system constantly. On a given night if nothing much is going on I will be queuing for either Hard Mode or Trial Roulette, and at least once a day I am trying really hard to get in at least one Expert Roulette. Sure you occasionally stumble onto an elitist, but it is nothing like other games where you are belittled and kicked from the group for not instantly being amazing. More often than not when a player says they are new, someone will take the time to explain the encounters to them. Honestly I often give my player commendations to new players for having the strength to stand up and tell the group. It makes the run go so much smoother when you know for certain if a player is going to have the requisite ancestral knowledge to understand the common way a given fight is done. More than anything I suggest you give Duty Roulette a chance. I’ve actually met several people on Cactuar through the roulette system, and it makes me happy to see them around.

We Like to Help

One of the other behaviors I am seeing a lot of is players not asking for help. I realize that in some groups this might not be the norm, but in our Free Company for the most part people enjoy helping others. Now there might be times for this or that reason that someone cannot help, and that is perfectly fine. However if we don’t know a given player needs something, it is impossible for us to read minds. Our hope is that this creates an atmosphere where people are freely saying what they need to do, and others are responding that they can help out. A prime example is that we have known for a bit that Neph needed Dzemael Darkhold, so when she popped on the other night we ran the dungeon to make sure she got it. Similarly we have done countless primal fights or lower level dungeons to help our dps players especially fight their way through the queue system. Self service and the Duty Roulette are always valid choices, but when you are confronting a thirty minute long queue… please speak up and pending it is not a raid night folks should be able to pull together a dungeon pretty easily.

Running dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV is not quite like running dungeons in other games. The fact that the game auto scales your level to match the dungeon, and rewards you with money if you are max level… means that running lowbies through dungeons is always a positive prospect. In other game my primarily problem with running low level dungeons was that it ended up feeling like I was babysitting players, because at max level I could just one shot most of the encounters in the zone. In Final Fantasy XIV, these dungeons are still viable, and it feels like you are doing something meaningful regardless of the level range. I will never get tired of running places like Haukke Manor or Stone Vigil, and Primal fights like Garuda still end up being a challenge for our scaled down groups. It is interesting trying to remember how you functioned without your high level abilities, and this alone makes a lot of things far more interesting than you might think. So please if you need help, be it a dungeon or help with some crafted gear… speak up in chat. Right now Tam is doing an interesting census of players to find out if they are interested in raiding, so I highly suggest you fill that out from the guild message of the day.

A Night with Nael

Last night was a bit of a refresher night in many ways. Namely we had a few people out, which meant we snagged one of our new recruits to help out with turn nine. The problem is our group does things a bit different than the “norm” for turn nine groups. So there was a bit of adjustment, similarly it had been over a week since I last set foot in the zone, and I was more than a tad bit rusty myself. I still feel like we made some progress, but we are hitting this wall on the third phase where we are just not pushing Nael hard enough to keep from getting two dragons. In our attempt to push harder, we are getting this awkward transition to phase four and getting a dragon at the same time… which is leading to a wipe. I feel like I am simply not doing enough dps on my Dragoon to really make up the difference. My tank is level 122 gear wise, but my dragoon is only 112. Honestly I never expected to be dpsing in a raid situation, so my Dragoon has essentially gotten table scraps as far as gear goes. I have been pushing to grab a piece of 120 gear our of World of Darkness each week in the hopes of boosting my dragoon dps just a little bit.

This however means repeating World of Darkness over and over without seeing any drops. Last night represented my sixth and seventh run of the week, and thankfully on the final boss I saw a piece drop that I did not already have. Sure it was only the belt, but at the 11th hour on the night before reset… I will take quite literally anything. I was just about to reach the point where I was going to start rolling on everything just to get a piece of gear before the zone reset today. Largely I feel like I am being a boat anchor on our group with this fight. We need more dps, and I am just not going to the extreme lengths that Kodra is willing to to tweak his dps. The optimal dragoon rotation is twenty seven steps long according to the guides I have read… and quite frankly there is no way in hell I am going to be able to pull that off flawlessly every single time. Instead I do a much more simplified and repeated sequence, but when we are on this razors edge of being able to do it versus not being able to do it… it feels like I am failing the group. As such my answer is to try and pour gear into the problem, and as soon as World of Darkness uncaps on the 31st I will be running it until my eyes bleed farming a full set of gear.

Feeling Mostly Human

I guess for better or worse the second day of medication trick worked again. Round about the time I took my fourth dose of prednisone I started feeling more or less human again. Today I am feeling significantly better, but I am going to try not to push myself terribly hard. The goal will be to simply take things slow and do what I can. I got out long enough to go to the grocery store yesterday, as my wife suggested I get some vitamin C in me… and simply walking around long enough to gather up a few items damned near killed me. So here is hoping I can successfully navigate my way to work and back home again.

I want to take a moment real quick to thank all the folks who have been constantly checking on me. I log in each morning to a barrage of “feeling any better yet?” and I have to say it makes me feel really damned lucky to have some awesome friends. This has legitimately been the worst I have felt in a really long time. Largely I have kept people in the loop so they don’t expect miracles from me during this period of time. I missed the raid on Monday completely, and barely made Tuesdays. Time will tell if I make it through today with enough energy to be able to make the one tonight. Largely I figure there is nothing I do in any of them that could not be missed for a week if I absolutely had to. Mostly right now I am dreading going back to work after being away for a day and a half. But I will struggle through with at least a feigned smile.

Hards for Cards

We have decided to copyright the term “Hards for Cards” because while it sounds a little rude… it accurately describes what we largely did last night. There are many ways to earn triple triad cards. The two primary ways revolve around either repeatedly dueling NPCs hoping to get lucky, or repeatedly running dungeon and raid content… also hoping to get lucky. I have to say though, given the two options I would far rather run the dungeons and raids, because at least then I am also gaining tomestones. I started off solo queuing for Trial Roulette, giving me a random assortment of whatever trials that folks seemed to be running. For the most part all of the primal trials have a chance of dropping their Triple Triad card equivalent. Before long we had a small team of us running Trials, and towards the end of the evening a full eight man. Through all of the content I ran last night I managed to get the Ultros/Typhon card and the Good King Moggle Mog card… which are both far better cards than anything I had managed to earn through an NPC Triple Triad duel.

The other big accomplishment last night was through through an influx of tomestones from all the random trials… I was able to purchase the 110 weapon for my last 50. Granted I have a slew of classes that I have yet to level to 50, but as of now I have 110 weapons for WAR, BRD, DRG, WHM and as of last night PLD. This also means that since all of my gear is currently WAR/PLD that both of my tanks are sitting at ilevel 116 which makes me pretty pleased. I am not sure how much action my paladin is going to actually get however, since I have a definite preference towards the warrior style of tanking… but I would like to at least bring it out of mothballs now and then for duty roulette. I really need to psyche myself up to tank more for the duty finder. The community is pretty great most of the time, and there is really nothing but my own anxiety keeping me from doing it. I just greatly prefer tanking for friends… and last night I tanked several instances and really enjoyed myself. I just need to push myself to do it more with strangers, considering I would definitely not mind the constant gil bonus for queuing as a tank.

The Little Things

I have essentially bankrupted myself in World of Warcraft purchasing all of the heirloom items that I had access to, but had yet to pick up. The majority can be purchased in the museum in Ironforge, however a handful can still only be purchased on the guild vendor. Thankfully these have all had their cost lowered to the 500g for the level 60 step. In the course of picking up the last few items I noticed a doodad for sale on the vendor that I had not seen before. The item was called “Garrison Guild Banners” and did precisely what the name said. I think this is probably a testament to just how few heroics I actually ran in this expansion given that apparently you get one from an achievement earned by completing all of the heroic dungeons. I am guessing it is upper blackrock spire that I never actually completed. The item was cheap, 100g but man has it added a lot of enjoyment to my garrison.

Another little thing I can check off my list is that I finally have the level 2 Menagerie unlocked. I was never one of those people that really had much issue with the fact that the Pet Menagerie was essentially a dead spot in my Garrison. I simply never had leveled a pet to 25, and as a result was not able to participate in the quest used to unlock the Menagerie in the first place. I always felt kind of bad that as much as I like mini-pets… that I had not really spent much time playing WoW Pokemon. However with the 6.1 patch they introduced a simple quest that allows you to earn an Ultimate Battle-Training Stone… which in essence boosts one pet from level whatever to level 25 the current cap. This is available to every level 100 character you have with a tier 3 Garrison, so I managed to build a team of three level 25 pets shortly after logging in on Tuesday.

I did no research at all, and instead went with three of my favorite pets… which is a fact that I am sure will make my life more difficult. I went with the Terrible Turnip largely because its special ability should make the capture of pets more easy… which is the main reason why I wanted a level 25 pet in the first place. After that I chose to level my next two favorite pets… Mini Thor from the Starcraft II Collectors edition, and Murkalot which was a Blizzcon bonus item. Currently the team makes me happy… but I doubt I will be wrecking much face anytime soon. If nothing else they should allow me to power level additional 25s with greater ease. With my heirlooms, and my new pet army… I am poised to start working on my Horde alts. So that is likely going to be one of my many downtime activities in the near future. In the meantime… keep being awesome readers, and I will see you all tomorrow!

#FFXIV #WoW #TripleTriad