ffxiv Archives - Page 13 of 78 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Weekend of the Dead

February 20, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend it finally happened… I finally reached a point where I am full saturation once again in Final Fantasy XIV. I am not really sure if it was the Fan Fest news trickling out over the weekend, or the introduction of Stormblood. Whatever the case I spent the majority of the weekend plunked down on the sofa playing FFXIV. Now the bizarre part of this however… is that I played a bunch of classes that I traditionally never play. I almost exclusively played finger wigglers, which lead my guild to wonder if I had been replaced by a pod person. Would I even know if that actually happened? I mean do the pod people actually know that they are pod people? Whatever the case two different things were happening this weekly. Primarily I was using the Palace of the Dead to level classes that would be cool to have at max level… but that I don’t really want to level properly. Namely Scholar and Summoner, which admittedly is the same leveling process… but I spent most of the weekend running around with Garuda Egi in dps form. I finished the grind Sunday Afternoon and then went rummaging through my vault to find something to wear. Thankfully I managed to scrape together enough gear that I picked up along the way to hit somewhere in the vicinity of 110.

From there I spent a good amount of time catching the Summoner and Scholar up on their quest chains… which were laughably easy now that I overgeared them by a significant portion. The thing that is making the leveling process awkward is that I switched Grand Companies between now and the last time I leveled… and as a result my vault is full of a bunch of Immortal Flames gear that I cannot actually use. Side note… Maelstrom completely fails because the low level Black Mage weapon is a one-handed item. Regardless I managed to catch up quickly and now have four sets of awesome gear… 2 for summoner and 2 for scholar because I guess they just straight up give you the recolored version now? The recolor was pretty different on scholar so I went with the good ole classic. On summoner however they both looked pretty samey and I went with the evoker set not really knowing if that is the original or the reskin. Side note… summoner “Egis” are hilarious as a Lalafel since they are always larger than you are.

After getting Summoner and Scholar to 50… and through their class content… I shifted gears and started working on Thaumaturge. I had managed to get it to 26 a long time ago only because it was the level needed for a cross class ability. I stopped there expecting to never pick it up, but instead tonight I dusted things off and tried to make a viable build work. I guess in part I am wanting to get all of my casters to 50… so I can have a massive cleaning out of my vault given that I have so much gear laying around and there is zero way I can survive another expansion with the vault in its current state. In truth I think it would be kinda cool to get ALL of my classes to 50, but given that I have not even started on Machinist and Astralogian…. and only have Dark Knight to 33 that might be awhile off. I do however find Palace of the Dead extremely relaxing, especially the manner in which I am running it. I am simply running 51 to 60 over and over which still seems to move the bar up nicely on weapons. The other side benefit of the weekend is that I can now purchase my next weapon upgrade for the Warrior… however in order to do that I am going to actually have to beat level 100 at some point. I can begin pestering my friends about that now… but having run 1-50 for a friend this weekend… I know just how much of a slot doing an entire PotD can be in one sitting.

Chateau Belghast

February 13, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bizarre one. We are still very much under the gun of a release date, and I attempted to do whatever I could to further that goal. However for all of Saturday our building was without power, and I was instead on call just in case something went wrong. The building power went down at 6:30 in the morning, and by the time we started recording AggroChat we had not yet gotten the all clear. I was just hoping that things would cycle off of the generators as successfully as they did cycling onto them, and that I would not end up getting interrupted during the podcast. Sunday was a mixed bag of work and doing all of the other things that we ultimately put off until Sunday like laundry and various errands. The weekend as a whole wound up being a very random mix of games as I played whatever I could during the brief moments of downtime. As you can see by the Chateau Belghast image above, I started fiddling around with Fallout 4 once again, and scrapped my old house and built this one instead. The inside is largely unfurnished but I am digging the outside quite a bit. It took me far longer than it should have to sort out how best to attempt centering the neon text, but in the grand scheme it seems to look okay. The frustrating bit with their neon font is that is is in no way monospaced with the characters all varying pretty wildly in width.

In Final Fantasy XIV I am still very much getting back in the swing of things, and have fallen into the pattern of doing Beast Tribe dailies. In theory I started down this path because I wanted a reliable source of ventures for my retainers, so that I could keep sending out my gatherers on field exploration. However I also really like mounts, and over the course of the last week or so I have been pushing up the Sahagin, not necessarily because I love the mount, but more because it was the next closest faction. For a long period of time, it was the faction I was spending the rest of my daily allowance on while working on the Sylph. Yesterday however I managed to push Sahagin across the finish line and now have my truly bizarre Sapsa mount to ride around on. I figured what better place to take a picture of it than in the waters of The Mists, where the Free Company house is located. Next up should be the Kobolds as once again… they are the next closest given that I had been spending my extra ventures on them while working on the Sahagin. I mean I know there are lots of other things I SHOULD be doing… but I just can’t bring myself to pug dungeons yet. After a string of bad experiences with Palace of the Dead… I don’t much feel like pugging that one either. The problem there is as we talked about on the podcast, is that if you fail… you lose all progress gained which seems deeply punitive for a random group activity.

Finally I spent a good amount of time this weekend playing Elder Scrolls online. I failed to take any screenshots so instead you get an interior shot of my home. I pushed forward the story line in Malabal Tor a bit, but the big problem with ESO is that I tend to wander wildly. I find it extremely hard to stay focused and instead I wind up going after the next object on the horizon that looks interesting, and as a result never seem to end up getting my objectives accomplished. There is always a fallen log to harvest, or an outcropping of ore to mine. Whatever the case I find myself continuing to move steadily towards 160 champion levels, which is the current item cap. Unfortunately I have a feeling this is probably going to change with Morrowind, but for the time being getting there.. and being able to craft a set of gear that will last me for a bit tends to be my focus. The other thing that I am realizing is that 160 champion levels is just a drop in the bucket given that quite literally every build I find expects you to have at least four or five times that amount. There is a part of me that wishes I had never actually faded away from this game, because at this very moment I am so impossibly behind the curve. Then again I think that overwhelming amount of content is what has been drawing me there much in the same way as it did for A Realm Reborn until we caught up. I know there is more to do than I have time to do it… and in some way that is insurance from ever really getting bored.

Heavy Crowns

January 25, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve admittedly been pretty sporadic in my gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV since just shortly after the launch of Heavensward. For whatever reason the story this time never quite clicked in the same way that it did during A Realm Reborn. Additionally Alex never felt nearly as interesting as Coil… so it just felt like I was grasping at things to tie me to the game but struggling to find them. More than all of these I think the two dungeons per cycle business hurt the most, because it turned something that I used to love… Expert Roulette into a grind because there was always the dungeon you enjoyed… and the dungeon you disliked in every patch cycle. All of this said I have been poking my head in periodically and was at least aware of the mentor program. The idea being that Square would create a way to identify players who know lots about the game… which was an interesting theory. In practice it largely just means you have a Tank, DPS and Healer at the level cap. Also as I found out last night it apparently makes you feel like you need to run around barking orders and throwing shade on how bad you feel the rest of the party was doing. Even though I was attuned for it… I never actually ran the second of the 25 player raids called the Weeping City of Mhach. Collectively folks just call it the “Wiping City” and for good reason… because we died an awful lot but given that it was the first time myself or Grace had been in there… I thought we did largely okay.

The funniest part of the night was the Forgall fight… which involves becoming zombie but not going full zombie and avoiding some things while absolutely standing in others. In short it is the traditional insane dungeon fight that simply requires constant execution… and has mechanics that will straight wipe entire parties. It is a rarity that there are fights where you need to use the healer level three limit break… but during the course of this fight we used it at least twice… and there might have been a third time I didn’t realize. We were at a point where we had no tank and maybe three people total still up, and a bunch of us assumed we were wiping it out and running back. We were wrong… as the “Mentor” continued barking orders and telling people to rez this person or that person… during a contorted fight that felt like it took 20 minutes to finally beat. The truth is I had no clue what I was doing, but I finally got finished off by an actual fight mechanic as one of the attacks takes you to 1 hit point… and requires chain healing to keep the tank from instantly dying afterwards. We had maybe a single healer up at the time and I fell down hard… but just in time for another tank to get rezzed and pick it up. I feel like this was the sort of fight where we needed to play Yakety Sax … but slowed down to the point where it almost sounds like a funeral dirge.

The fight that I got the most enjoyment from however had to be Ozma… an encounter that I had heard about for awhile now. Largely I had heard about it being the group killer, in that it required a lot of moving parts that rarely got coordinated properly among the alliances. Thankfully I was on voice chat with my Free Company and they were able to give me enough of a heads up about what I should be doing. It also helps that early into the fight we lose the entire B alliance, giving me a run seeing the mechanics the first time and then allowing me to take that experience into the second smoother attempt. All in all we nailed it pretty well on the second go, and for the most part by the end of the encounter I learned everything that I needed to do to appropriately tank the fight. The reason we were running Wiping City however was to get me some gear… and unfortunately not a single tanky piece dropped. However I do feel confident enough to probably solo queue tank for the place and start soaking up more gear that way. The risk of playing FFXIV irregularly is that the game moves on without you… and I hit yet another wall with the latest patch. I was sitting at 220 from my last attempt to catch up… and this time around the first dungeon requires 230. There are of course a lot of more grindy ways to catch me up… but we were trying to take as many short cuts as possible.

Before disappearing and flaking out last time I had managed to put in some progress on the 235 weapon from Palace of the Dead and as I talked about yesterday our little run pushed me pretty far… but not quite over the tipping point. So last night once finishing the Wiping City, we broke up into a smaller group and did some Palace of the Dead and over the course of a few runs managed to get me to 39 weapon 32 armor. During all of the stuff I managed to accumulate enough Lore tombstones to upgrade my earrings to 230, and at some point during the evening Tam hooked me up with a set of 250 legs to replace my then lowest slot. I had enough cash accumulated to manage picking up the 250 ring as well since my next lowest slot was that. All together those four pieces of gear pushed me up to exactly 230 item level, and thus makes me viable for a lot more content including the dungeon that is blocking my quest progress. Unfortunately however I have had this patch cycle spoiled for me, because before I remembered to turn off player titles… I actually happened to be running Deep Dungeon with someone that was showing their new title off. Now I am not sure exactly how it is going to go down… but I know something is going to go down. Ultimately that is not necessarily going to ruin the impact, just a bit of a bummer to have it spoiled in a way that really should not have even been a thing. While I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as “caught up”, I am at least in a much better place than I was. I need to do a lot more palace of the dead so that I can pick up the next weapon… but that one requires 60 weapon/armor which is still a very very long ways away. My only revision of that content would be to make the end of sequence mini-boss drop one of whatever your lowest rank happens to be armor or weapon. Also of note… you can see that thanks to the new weapon I did some glamouring and am once more the Bunny Samurai.

Derpest Dungeon

January 24, 2017January 24, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not exactly go as intended, but it was a pretty great night nonetheless. Originally I had hopes of getting a Mythic+ group together so that I could use my +5 Maw of Souls keystone. That said I didn’t really exert a whole lot of effort in finding it either, and when I finally got settled in for the night after a bunch of idling there were only a handful of us on. Instead I opted to work on my time walking dungeons in the hopes that I might get more of that tasty tasty Essence of Aman’Thul from the weekly quest. When we got a group together it consisted of Rylacus and his son Tinoke who both still needed 2 dungeons… myself who needed 4 and then Bled and Phy just because they are awesome and love me enough to do a bunch of time walking dungeons. In truth I had completely pug tanked one of the dungeons so I could have suffered through it if I had to, but I enjoy tanking for my friends way more than I enjoy tanking for strangers. In any case we got to chit chat back and forth on Discord while doing the dungeons and that made the four go much faster. I had hoped by the time we finished there might be more people around, so we could pull together that Mythic+ but alas that was not the case. In truth I am guessing it was a good thing since a crisis arose while we were doing the Time Walking heroics.

I hate printers, probably more than any piece of equipment ever. They never seem to work as intended and always require an inordinate amount of fiddling. One of the things you have to know is that many nights my wife can print as much as an entire ream of paper for her class. When I am upstairs I am also at least in part the warden of the printer, and get yelled up at to fix issues when they arrise. Now earlier in the evening she was printing perfectly fine… and then all of the sudden things stopped spooling entirely. I tried my best to correctly diagnose the problem, but none of the rampant googling actually provided anything that was useful. Of note… we have a massive workgroup printer that weighs about 200 lbs and is precariously connected to a machine that acts as a print server via parallel to usb cable. It works 99% of the time but is just brittle enough to make me constantly uncertain of what might be causing the problem. We tried a sequence of rebooting the laptop and rebooting the “server” to no luck. She was able to hit file shares on the “server” without issue, but any time she tried to access the printer it said that it did not exist. However I could print to that printer from any other computer on the network so the connection was still there and active. Finally in my destination I started fiddling with home group settings, and changed her share settings because I was literally trying everything I could reasonably think of. Instantly it was like something refreshed her machines permissions and she could suddenly see the printer and life was once again good. Once again… let me express my undying hatred for printers.

Apparently Tam had been trying to get a hold of me while deep in printer diagnosis hell. Over the weekend I made a vague attempt to catch up on the Final Fantasy XIV content, but hit a both literal and figurative wall… in the form of the Baelsar’s Wall instance. I was not about to pug tank it… and it turns out apparently I couldn’t anyways because my item level is too low. I am currently sitting at 220 but apparently need 230 to get there. When I finally got patched up and logged in, Ash was needing to go to bed which left us with Tam and Kodra and seeing as I had not actually run any of the second half of the derpest dungeon, we opted to form a group for that. I have to say… while I have struggled in the past to get in and have fun… the deepest dungeon really hit the spot. The deepest dungeon serves the purpose of being quite possibly the easiest way to get weapon upgrades, with a mini game system that I have talked about in the past that involves collecting “gear” and leveling both your weapon and armor to 30. When you have collected 30 you can turn that in for a very solid 235 weapon which would be a sizable upgrade for me. Now when I entered last night I was sitting at the point where I stopped playing last time… which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 weapon and 14 armor. By the end of the night if I remember correctly I was sitting at 30 weapon and 28 armor… so pretty close to being able to collect my first weapon. It seems like the 51-100 floors move your item levels considerably faster… either that or we simply got lucky. To be honest, I had more fun in FFXIV last night than I have in a long time… and the above screenshot is there to simply serve as a reminder to just how insane Cactuar is as a server.

[Edit] – I can’t re-title the post without breaking every link that I syndicated this morning. That said I am finding out that “Derp” has some problematic roots and is a word that makes a lot of folks uncomfortable. It’s not really a word that is of any importance to me so going to attempt to jettison it from my vocabulary.