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Blackhand Down

June 10, 2015 by Belghast

Gliders Away

Whatever has a hold of me allergy wise is driving me insane. I struggled my way to work yesterday only to be not so subtly asked to go home by my boss. Apparently I sounded fairly horrible. So I headed to the house and took a breathing treatment and attempted to be productive remotely. Last night I took several Benadryl before heading to bed so I am hoping that helped get me over whatever hump I was struggling with. This morning my head feels a lot clearer, but that might all change the moment I open the front door and are exposed to the world again. My friends have joked that I need a bubble… and there are days that I agree with them. To make matters worse we are under an Ozone alert day meaning that the air quality levels are already going to be horrible today. There is a whole list of things that we are not supposed to do during an Ozone alert day, but the show must go on.

Yesterday I was a little bit spread out in what I ended up playing. It was of course my World of Warcraft raid night, and at least on some level I was excited about getting in and getting more attempts in on Blackhand. I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around on Cat Belghast in ArcheAge and honestly the more I play that side of the fence the more charming I find it. I am naturally drawn the Nuians simply because it is the race I can create the closest facsimile of “Belghast” proper in. However it is pretty much a bland European fantasy world, with the same vistas and characters we have encountered in essentially every MMO. What makes Haranya interesting is they combine the tribal Firran with the Harani that are essentially steampunk engineers. Quite honestly the Harani remind me of the Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X, and doing quests just seem more interesting than the Nuia side of the house. I know Ashgar has a preference towards the cat people, and I guess I am developing that as well. In any case I am really enjoying my time spent piddling around in ArcheAge.

Blackhand Down

Last week on Thursday we had made a significant amount of progress on Blackhand. On our best attempt we managed to get hit to 11%, so it was my hope that after some time away from the fight we could pop back in and pick up where we left off. What made last Thursday challenging was that we were extremely short on melee so the walls were going down very slowly. Last night we had some of our normal melee which made that part easier, but we were also down two of our main healers which added its own challenges. However right out of the gate we managed to push to phase three like it was easy and at least match that 11% progress. The rest of the night was spent fine tuning things and on our very last attempt of the night our raid leader managed to bring in a additional healer which seemed to push us over the top. Unfortunately I spent the tail end of that fight in the lava as I managed to get clipped by one of the smashes while trying to execute spam Blackhand.

It feels extremely good to have defeated this raid tier, especially since Heavensward is right around the corner. This was functionally my last week of raiding in World of Warcraft before going on a bit of a sabbatical. I had hopes that we would be able to down him at least by Thursday, but now we are in the interesting position of not really knowing what to do with ourselves. I guess Thursday if we have the people we will venture back into Heroic and see what mischief we can get up to there. I know several of us are a single kill away from being able to get Mythic gear out of our Garrison loot boxes. So in theory it would be nice to knock that kill out as well. Similarly it has been talked about maybe just having a Heroes of the Storm night instead, since several of the raid are also playing that game. In any case it feels like I managed to squeak by another milestone fight before the buzzer. So that is two raid Warlords raid tiers I have managed to defeat in this expansion and I am pretty happy with that.

Closure

Even thought I am not enjoying World of Warcraft fight now as much as I had hoped I absolutely loved getting to raid with the guild again. Coming back I was in an odd situation where I simply did not know many of the folks that had joined the guild I founded in my absence. I am so happy to have been welcomed back with open arms and been allowed to get to know so many of them. I am not saying I am “done” with World of Warcraft, but if I was I would be able to end on a happy note. In a months time I might be raring to go and begin raiding again and pushing forward into Hellfire Citadel. Right now however I just know that I need a break from this game. I don’t want to try and split my attention between the new and shiny Heavensward content and Warcraft that feels very much like a worn in shoe. It is comfortable, but as you walk down the street you happen to notice every blemish and scuff and remind yourself that you really should buy a new pair of shoes. I am just thankful for the most part that people seem to “get” why I am taking a break.

I talked with Rylacus the man who wears the crown these days and explained it as this. If I was forced to play Warcraft, when there was another game I would rather be playing… it would ultimately lead to me quitting the game again. I think instead of I just back away for awhile, and let myself get Heavensward out of my system… or at least to a manageable level I will once again be able to juggle multiple games. The only problem I see is that there are a lot more people than just me that are in desperate need of a break. Yesterday it was revealed that once again World of Warcraft is timing their next infusion of crack with the launch of a major game. It seems that the 6.2 patch is going to land right around the time Heavensward officially launches. The current rumor is June 23rd, and for some that might be just enough to keep them from straying. For me personally, my heart already belongs to Final Fantasy XIV… I just spend time in Warcraft so that I can hang out with the friends that are still there.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

June 9, 2015 by Belghast

Alone and Awake

This morning I am doing everything a bit discombobulated. I ended up taking a massive name yesterday, and as a result took some melatonin to force myself to get to sleep at a decent hour. The end result is me waking up at 4:30 instead of 5:30… so I am just going to roll with it. Today is the first morning I am getting ready by myself, and that is always a strange prospect. We are now entering the season when my wife travels to go to conferences, and this time she will return in a little over a week on my birthday. It is always strange to go through this each year, and as normal as it is I never seem to get used to it. Technically yesterday was my first day without her, but since my allergies were trying to kill me, my focus was on simply surviving the day and less on living in it. The allergies seem to be improved, but then again I am not actually out in the world yet.

Yesterday however I was struggling to breathe from the moment I woke up so that at least is not happening. You’d think that staying home all day would have been an excellent opportunity for some gaming, but alas I actually tried to do some work. Around noon I was feeling worse and opted to lay down for a nap… and wound up sleeping until 4 pm. So I am guessing that maybe there was more at work than just the allergies. I am not a big nap taker because generally it means I cannot sleep that night, and even when I do take a nap it is rarely longer than an hour. So for me to sleep that long probably means I needed it. The end result today however is that my time scale for everything is a little off. As again I am mostly just going to roll with it and see if I can function normally today just offset by an hour.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

So as it turns out you apparently do only get two character slots in ArcheAge regardless of what the tooltip says. Thanks to everyone for helping explain this one, because even Trion support seems not to know. As of the conversation I had two nights ago they thought I should have at least gotten four. So I purchased a third slot and moved on with the creation of my own Cat Belghast also known as Belglaive on the Tahyang server. I have to admit, that at first I thought I was not going to like this whole cat man thing, but the longer I play the character the more I am actually enjoying. I will admit part of the enjoyment is the snowlion mount I get to ride on. If you thought carrying a foal around on your back was adorable… just wait until that is a lion cub. One of the first quests is to go out into a field and cheer up a forlorn lion cub… and absolute adorableness ensues. The animations are a little strange to get used to, like for example when I do a charge attack instead of sliding into the target with my shoulder I seem to leap into the target feet first, which is a little disjointed.

I also opted to go for a completely different path. Always in the past I had chosen to go Battlerage and Defense, but instead I am mixing things up and going Battlerage, Shadowplay and Auramancy which is apparently the “Dark Runner” class. I felt the more feral nature of the Firran character called for something more vicious and less tanky. For the time being I am going down the path of Dual Wield which is giving everything a really awesome feel. Right now I charge in, whirlwind, and then hit my normal attacks and things seem to just evaporate. I just got a new attack from the Shadowplay tree but honestly I rarely have time to hit it, things are simply dying that fast. Now I at least feel comfortable that I have something on both sides of the fence whichever direction we plan on going as a group. I think the last thing said was that we would let Kodra decide which direction he wanted to play. I feel comfortable on either side now, but I will say my leaning is still towards the side that will eventually get dwarves.

Ice-skating with Primals

One of the things that has been noticed with our group is that we start out extremely solidly on a fight and then deteriorate over the night. This means our first or second attempt will almost always be the best of the evening, and then maybe just maybe we pull things out by the skin of our teeth at the end of the evening. As a result Tam wanted to try something slightly different last night and we went into turn nine for a half dozen or so attempts before moving on to something else for the evening. Sure enough we had some of our best attempts early on and then got significantly worse from there. When we hit that point where we were just making stupid mistakes we opted to shift focus and go make attempts on Shiva Extreme. This is the last of the primals that we have not attempted and beaten on Extreme mode. I have to say I was not really fully prepared for how annoying this fight ended up being. I’ve said before that there are two types of fights in Final Fantasy XIV. The first is one where you have to learn a dance and repeat that dance over and over until you win. The second type is where you adjust to things that are happening and move around to account for this fact.

We are extremely good at the second type, and tend to defeat those encounters quickly. However when a fight requires us to memorize a pattern and execute said pattern over and over… we tend to struggle there a bit. Last night however I feel proud of the progress we made. We were consistently getting Shiva into the 30% range for most of the night, we just need to get better at two things really. The first thing… we are really bad at moving behind her and stacking tight enough for the bow attack which does a 270 degree arc attack in front of her that will oneshot everyone including the tank. When she hit me with it, the attack dealt 18,000 hit points… which even for my silly warrior health pool was way too many. The other thing is that we need to get better at dodging circles. These come in the form of hailstorm that causes the group to spread out and not overlap, and later in the form of circles on the ground. Between these effects and the bow… that pretty much accounted for all of our party deaths. If we can figure out how to stay alive through all of that mess we will easily defeat her.

Good Game in Disguise

June 8, 2015 by Belghast

Boating to Freedom

Over the last few days I have been all over the place as far as my game playing has gone. Saturday night while recording the podcast I worked on my Rogue in Final Fantasy XIV, and Sunday morning I spent a good deal of time playing Wildstar. However after talking about ArcheAge at length during the podcast I spent Sunday afternoon and evening working on leveling a brand new character on the server the rest of the AggroChat folks have been playing on. Our show ended up unintentionally talking about how games change and giving them a second chance. If you have been reading my blog for very long you will know I did not exactly give ArcheAge a glowing review at launch. In truth the game was rather good, but the community that had arrayed around it was among the most toxic I had experienced.

The moment that sticks out the most in my memory is still crystal clear. There is a moment in the early human storyline where you are asked to cross a bay in a rowboat. Now around the time the game launched high level players were hanging out in the middle of this area with their huge boats, trying to capsize and subsequently drown anyone trying to cross this bay. It took every bit of maneuvering to make it across the bay, as I watched many other players sent to the bottom. Up returning and starting my level process again I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at just how chill the community has become. For all I know they might be off in some far corner of the world being assholes to each other, but at the very least no one seems to be getting their jollies out of griefing new players.

Good Game in Disguise

In all the time I spent watching chat this weekend, I have to say that similarly the general banter has improved as well. The awesome about about this is that I can finally focus on the fact that the game underlying all of those layers of frustration is actually rather good. We talk about this at length on the podcast, but in many ways this is the game Rift should have been, or at least by that I mean that the skill trees seem to work so much better. The key problem with Rift skill trees is that there are a lot of different flavors of the same ability, that can then be arrayed in a macro to simply push one after another. The skill trees in ArcheAge have very little if any duplication between them. In Rift the warrior tree for example have essentially the same basic attack, and same combo point dump. This is required since any tree could be used as the starting point for a given spec.

In ArcheAge however there are trees that have basic attacks, and those are the only ones that the game will let you start with. From there however the sky is the limit and it will allow you to mix in any combination of three trees. The coolest part to me is that each combination has a fixed class name. In the past I had tried Doomlord and Paladin, but this time while leveling I decided to go with Auramancy for my third tree. The end result is this awesome mix of debuffing and magical shielding that I think will end up in being an extremely strong tank. Right now I seem to be having an extremely easy time taking tearing through the content and just managed to ding fifteen. Now this is in theory my third time leveling through the content so I am sure part of the ease comes from remembering what I need to do in various situations, but overall it does feel like maybe I am taking less damage at least in part due to the debuff I can throw out during every combat encounter.

Waiting for Heavensward

The main question is how long we will stay, and if we will manage to make it into the open pvp areas. Who knows, I do know that in a week and a half we will have Heavensward to pull us away. In the meantime it seems like most people are at least taking a minor break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the big launch. I have the days surrounding the launch off work, so I am more than likely going to be pushing it pretty hard. Right now it is my intent to level my Warrior first, and then after getting it to 60 switch focus to playing Dark Knight. I really do love my Warrior and the more I have played it recently, the more I realize just how happy I am with that class. Everything about its tanking style “feels” right to me, and as exciting as the new and shiny Dark Knight might be, I have a feeling that I am always going to be a Warrior tank. Who knows, it might launch and I might think it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. But in reality I keep expecting to keep swinging the big axe.

In the meantime however I am having a blast piddling around in both Wildstar and ArcheAge and exploring these two games that I am giving a second chance. There is a significant problem however with my ArcheAge account so I am hoping the good support folks at Trion can get that taken care of shortly. I have two characters on my account, but I am supposed to be able to create up to six. All of the character slots are grayed out, and I cannot even connect to servers other than the two that I am already on. So in theory something must be jacked up with my account. Now considering my account is extremely old, and I have been playing for a very long time… it makes me wonder if something is related to the age of the account dating back to alpha. Makes me wonder if it is somehow counting characters I made on test servers? I spoke with a nice GM yesterday and he escalated it, so hopefully it will get addressed soon. Right now we are largely torn between which faction to level on… but at the moment I am limited to only the one since I cannot roll any new characters. So I am curious, what are you doing to ease the tension while waiting on Heavensward?

Storm Surge

June 5, 2015 by Belghast

Wall Jumping

World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week. What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games. I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night. I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me. It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit. I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man. Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand. I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have. This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two. Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going. This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group. In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns. We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart. On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop. After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun. Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game. Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold. Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him. The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing. Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy. The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots. Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold. Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together. This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together. Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet. I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play. Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya… it was time to log out for the raid. Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid. Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing. It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it. I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point. I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week. Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight. I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior. There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet. I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active. They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people. This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there. They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them. Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window. There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat. I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.