ffxiv Archives - Page 15 of 78 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Other Worlds

September 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night marked my return to the Monday night raid thing in Final Fantasy XIV, that I had not been able to attend the last few weeks for one reason or another. I know most of my blog coverage lately has been about Legion, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for lots of other games. The intention was to pull together last night and do a lot of raidy bits, but I kinda ruined that. I’ve written about the struggles to get Luna integrated with our household and the other two cats. Things are still not going well, and I am not sure if they ever will at this point. She simply hates other cats, and I cannot seem to get her from charging the other cats when she sees them. This is a sort of behavior I have never seen in any of the other cats we have had throughout the years. It has gotten so bad that the only real way we can stop her is by dousing her with a spray bottle. Which seems to do NOTHING for the long term effect and only distracts her for the moment… because seconds later she is charging once again. So the only other option is to keep her shut up in my wife’s office… which is a somewhat shitty life. Now we are on that hard precipice of trying to decide what is best for her and what is best for our other two cats. We have some options, but one of them is of course to return her to the organization we adopted her from. I’ve never really felt as much as a failure as I do right now because we have tried so many things… including the extremely expensive pheromone night light things. In any case… Tam really likes to just queue the group instead of doing a ready check, and there was a period of time where I was away from the screen dealing with cats. The end result of too many of these premature queues unfortunately is that I locked the entire group out, at which point we dissolved instead of waiting thirty minutes for it to clear. We did however at least get a single kill in before that happened, and knocked out some needed content for one of the guildies.

The other game I have been occasionally poking my head into is Guild Wars 2. I have a really fraught relationship with this game, but it has been something that I have patched up multiple times and attempted to play. I say attempted, because no matter how many times I try there is just something that never quite clicks with me. I made it to about 65 on my own recognizance… and then got boosted due to the daily login system the rest of the way to 80. While I have tried a bunch of different classes… it feels like the one I still like the most is Warrior in spite of how lousy melee generally feels in this game. During a recent sale I managed to pick up Heart of Thorns for $18… and I figured it was well worth giving it a try for that price. With that came with a boost to 80, but I have not figured out what class I actually want to use it on. During Pax South 2015 when they announced the expansion… I thought Revenant was going to be the class for me. However the boost allows you a “try before you buy” sort of functionality… and in practice the class just doesn’t feel like anything I am interested in. It is this strange amalgam between WoW Shaman, Deathknight, and Rogue and in a way that just doesn’t exactly feel like something I want to play. During the boost it hands you a hammer and a pair of swords, but I am wondering if maybe one of the other weapon combos feels better since as warrior I only really like greatsword and hammer. In any case I popped in last night for a bit and started actually trying to move my original story forward… I stalled out around 60 and just never tried to pick it back up. Maybe the story will hook me into the game in a way that the gameplay never actually did.

A New Tank Enters

August 23, 2016 by Belghast

Down to Goblin Town

This morning I am having one hell of a hard time getting started, largely because it feels like I don’t really have a whole lot to talk about. It was a Monday night, and that means raiding in Final Fantasy XIV. However it was also a night that I was seeming to have a pretty frustrating migraine headache. So in truth it was a good thing that we were breaking in a brand new tank… or at least one new to our group. Pixel Executioner I am pretty sure is something that once upon a time I knew from the Blog Azeroth community, but thanks to the miracle of the fact that everyone seems to be connected on the internet I am getting to know him again thanks to Neph. Pix had apparently never quite finished the original run of Alex so we started our evening there, with turn four otherwise known as “Burden of the Father”. This went down in really short measure, and so long as you are tanking the boss… you really don’t have a clue there are any mechanics that need to be dealt with. The only thing as the boss tank that you have to worry about is Discoid which signals you are just about to take a ton of damage. As a result this was the absolute perfect first tanking foray of the evening to break him into the rhythm.

After that we moved into the next part of Alexander and ran through the next four turns. The awesome thing about this is that it gave me a nice little break between fights to kinda chill out and try really hard to forget my head was trying to kill me. I am pleasantly surprised where we have come as a group, because I remember struggling a little bit when we first did Alex Midas, but last night it seemed really easy. Well that is until we reached turn seven… which has a significant amount of madness going on. The awesome thing there is that we finally learned how to mechanic one of the phases. Previously the answer to getting through the fire jail was just to have rez ready to go to bring back whoever happened to get locked in it. Instead this time we learned that during the fire phase you just stand still and do nothing until your group brings you out of it. If you move however… you die… and we were trying to do stuff and move… which is apparently a bad idea? The best part about the night is that we managed to actually finish the second Alex for Pix. We were coming down the to the end of our normal run time, and I honestly thought we did not have anywhere near enough time to finish. However we managed to pull a victory out on the final boss… having only gone about five minutes over our normal close time.

It was a really great night and apparently luck was on my side. For awhile now I had been sitting on one of pretty much all of the items needed for the various armors that require two items. Over the course of the evening apparently the game decided it liked me, because I won a significant number of rolls and suddenly shot up in item level. I managed to complete the arms last week, but this week I managed to complete helm, boots and belt bringing my item level up to a respectable 113. At some point I really need to spend some time getting back in game and finishing off my weapon in Palace of the Dead, because there were several moments last night when the fact that Pix my co-tank had one… made it harder to maintain threat. In all honesty I have been struggling to remain interested in Final Fantasy XIV. I am enjoying raid nights, but I am simply not wanting to put any of the other time in to make sure I am geared enough. Which I know has to be frustrating to my raid mates. I feel like I am fairly horribly geared as a whole, at least compared to what I could be. The problem being when I sit down after a long day of work… I keep logging into World of Warcraft instead of Final Fantasy XIV. Especially with the launch of Legion happening next week… my FFXIV time is likely to continue to be in Triage mode for awhile.

Game Changer

August 16, 2016 by Belghast

In Another Castle

Last night was my raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, but before hand my key focus was trying to get my Mage to 100. I am not exactly sure what has lit a fire under me, but I am on this mission to have at least one server full with level 100 characters. As you can see in the above image, I am actually extremely close to getting there. Now granted I have the OTHER side of my linked server to start working on… but Belgaoh my Monk remains the only sub-100 character I have on Argent Dawn. The only problem there is he is SIGNIFICANTLY behind the curve sitting at only level 53 right now. I keep thinking that if I can get on at the right time, and have at least one easy to get to invasion event I will be able to push him through to 60 so that he can fly, which is going to be the key to getting more events on him. As of yesterday I thought I was nearing the end of the gear grind and even created a spreadsheet as an attempt to track progress in outfitting my characters in level 700 gear. The take away from that process seemed like I was going to spend the next several days working on my leather wearers to catch them up in progression.

Then this happened. I opened I believe 34 chests that I had gathered up on the mage in leveling from 90 to 100, and out of those chests seven different items came up as warforged. Apparently yesterday during the day at some point they patched in the ability for chests to spawn warforged gear, meaning that all of those characters I thought I had finished with really have only scratched the surface. I still think however my core mission is to get all of my characters outfitted in at least 700 gear, and if some of them get more trips to the candy shop in the hopes of finding warforged… then that is fine too. Ultimately I realize that all of this gear is going to be replaced within the first few minutes of questing in the Broken Isles. However for the time being I think this is probably a brilliant idea. The longer they can keep players actively participating in this event the better, because for the time being it is an amazing source of leveling and gear for everyone involved. I somehow doubt I will be able to get my monk all of the way to 100 in the short time available without focusing ENTIRELY on the monk, but I am definitely going to ride the elevator for as long as I can.

End of Expansion

One of the things I am realizing is that I apparently love the end of expansions. Cataclysm was the expansion that broke me and my desire to be playing World of Warcraft, causing me to fade away and go play other games. However I remember clearly that towards the end of the expansion I came back and really enjoyed myself. There was so much to be doing, and everyone had a great casual attitude about it all. For me personally I knew that nothing I was doing really mattered in the grand scheme of things, because as soon as Pandaria was released every last piece of gear I gathered would be replaced with greens. So in this low pressure environment I allowed myself to piddle around without purpose and had a complete blast. Similarly I remember coming back at the end of Pandaria and having the same fun experience, running around aimlessly on the timeless isle and doing all the little things that were fun but served no major purpose. Here I find myself once again in a similar pattern with Draenor, and I feel completely in my zone. The problem is that I wish I knew how to bottle this feeling and keep it alive during the rest of the expansion.

I am not sure how to take the joy that I feel at the end of an expansion when I am unfettered by expectations and pressures…. and keep that alive during the rest of the game. There is a switch that flips in my brain when an expansion launches that says “okay Bel, you need to be useful… go grind your face off”. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off completely because I think that is the thing that keeps getting in my way when it comes to enjoying an MMO for the long haul. I essentially burn myself out, over and over… game after game… by focusing on some lofty goal that I cannot accomplish without significant help from others. I end up ignoring the goals that are entirely up to me to complete, and those are probably the things that I technically enjoy more. I have had a blast alting my way to 100 over the last few weeks and bringing my own personal army up to snuff. As I look towards Legion, and Starfall Prophecy and whatever the Final Fantasy XIV expansion ends up being… I need to figure out how to keep this magic from the end of an expansion alive every single day I play the game.

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

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At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

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After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

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In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.