final fantasy xiv Archives - Page 44 of 81

Mistakes Were Made

May 20, 2015 by Belghast

Thing that Happened

The last few days have been extremely strange for me, in that I have been processing a sequence of events. I wrote over the weekend that we had a bit of car trouble and found out there was a recall on our Pontiac Torrent related to it. In a sequence of events we also found out that an earlier repair was in fact the source of a recall as well, so in theory we should be getting reimbursed for that work also. Monday we scheduled an appointment with our local GMC dealer to get the new recall taken care of, but in the meantime my wife started looking at vehicles. Both her Torrent and my Jeep Grand Cherokee had been paid off for well over a year and we were just reaping the benefits of no car payment. Other than the recent recall however hers was in extremely good condition. Mine on the other hand had some issues. All of which were largely minor: cracked windshield, broken drivers seat, and in desperate need of new tires.

As a result I had been looking for some time and kicked around all sorts of ideas for vehicles. That said I have always been extremely happy with the Pontiac Torrent and fully intended at some point to get around to looking at the Chevy Equinox the modern cousin. In my wife’s searches she stumbled across a phenomenal deal, the kind that you can’t really say no to. So part of me felt like the time table of events was extremely quick, but by the same token I also felt like we had to jump on the deal while it was available. As a result I am now the proud owner of a shiny new 2013 Chevy Equinox with a truly silly list of amenities that I never actually expected any vehicle I owned would have. I mean this has silly things like heated seats and a backup camera that makes driving a car kind feel like an arcade game. I have yet to even figure out half of the things that are in it because I really have not driven it enough for it to feel “really” mine yet. Last night I turned over the keys to my Jeep and I admit I was a little sad to do so, mostly because I guess I was more attached to that vehicle than I realized. I think more than anything I am just trying to wrap my head around the notion that I have a new car.

Crafting to Eleven

Before the World of Warcraft raid I managed to pop into Final Fantasy XIV long enough to push Culinarian to eleven. This means I now have every craft to that tier, and can start getting rid of my early gear. In fact it just dawned on me that other than fishing I have started literally every class in the game. Right now my sights are set on pushing everything past fifteen, which is apparently where the interesting and unique abilities come into play from each crafting profession. Up until this point they have all seemed to have exactly the same things: a success buff, a durability heal, and an ability to increase quality. The positive about this setup is that right now all of my hotbars look essentially the same, so through muscle memory I can hit the ability that I need when I need it. One of the things that I do like about crafting is that your control points seem to regenerate each time you craft an item. I was half expecting them to work like gathering points and regenerate over time or per harvest. This makes crafting a much shorter game, which I like significantly better.

While I have joked for some time that crafting in Final Fantasy XIV is a black hole… I am here to report that this is actually a literal thing that happens apparently. I cannot tell you the last time I ran an expert dungeon for poetics, nor can I really tell you the last time I was in non-crafting gear. Because of the whole automobile thing, I ended up at a car dealership Monday night instead of attending our raid. So quite literally for the last several times I have played the game I have done nothing but crafting. The thing that shocks me is just how surprisingly “okay” I am about this thing that is happening. I am finding that I really do enjoy the crafting system, and there is something oddly gratifying about it. I expect by the time I hit 50 in every profession I will have a serious hatred for some aspects of it, but other than the fact that it is a constant gil sink… I am completely fine with turning money into crafting ability. I keep thinking about the final destination being an amazing place where I can craft anything I need on a whim.

Mistakes Were Made

I did a thing last night that I knew better than to do… but ultimately did it anyways. First off I feel like I need to get some baggage out of the way. The Witcher franchise and I have a very checkered past, namely I have been told by friends that I trust that it is this amazing experience… then I attempt to play it and it feels like shit. The first Witcher game without a doubt has the most cludgy controls I have ever experienced, and I quite literally have not made it out of the tutorial fight even though I have tried to play it multiple times. So I thought I would just skip the first one and start with the second… the problem being for whatever reason I cannot get Witcher 2 to load on my machine at all. It will boot up, but never actually starts and apparently this is a known issue with Windows 8 and that game. So I had planned to completely write the series off and skip the third one, given my lack of success with the previous two. Then several weeks back I ordered a new video card, and low and behold it came with a free copy of Witcher 3 delivered through the GOG Galaxy client. Of note I have to say I am a big fan of the Galaxy client so far, it is extremely clean.

Last night after the raid I decided to fire up the game, expecting to play for only a few minutes. The end result is that I played for an hour and a half without pause, and also without realizing it. The game is really good, like Skyrim good and runs beautifully on my system. There is a certain amount of narrative faffing that happens in the first few minutes of the game, but quickly you are dumped into a living world setting with only some vague suggestions on what you should be doing. From there you can choose to follow the directions on the map, or just wander off on your own finding interesting things in the countryside. Given my history with Elder Scrolls Games, I immediately hopped off the beaten path and started wandering around. I found a Wraith guarding a place of power, defeated it… claimed the power of the location and apparently earned my very first ability point. The entire sequence of events felt extremely natural and engaging. Additionally I completed a handful of quests that involved using my “Witcher powers” to find clues. Again it felt extremely nice, and I am finding myself getting enamored with the game without actually meaning to. I’ve been switch hitting between 360 controller and mouse and keyboard, and honestly I think I like the 360 controller the best so far. Looking forward to playing a good deal more of this over the coming nights.

Madness Intensifies

May 18, 2015 by Belghast

No Getting Used to It

By the time yesterday afternoon rolled around I had well passed my stress quota. If I were a pinball machine the tilt sensors were going off. The previous week had been one of the more stressful experiences in part because I don’t really handle change as well as I could. That said my workplace right now is in a constant state of flux as we are going through a fairly massively floor rebuild. We have folks tearing down one cube only to take the pieces that were used to make it, and use it to build up a brand new cube. The positive is that I now have a pretty sweet set up with a more private cube that has an entrance hall of sorts, but getting to that process involved moving out of my office before going to lunch one day… and moving back in a few hours later. When you combine the fact that we had to cram all of the mothers day festivities into this weekend, we had car troubles, and had at least one partially sleepless night due to dodging tornados by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around I had just checked out.

So as I was sitting there on my sofa mindlessly crafting away last night it was pure dumb luck that I happened to look down and notice that the tell I had just received was from an actual person and not another gold spammer. It turns out that I happened to be sitting there crafting in the Alchemists guild in Ul’dah next to someone who was apparently an avid reader of my blog. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this a few times now, and each time it is this mixture of pride, awkwardness and confusion. I have somehow lulled myself into this state where I feel like I don’t actually have any readers, so when I write my post each morning I can be just as open as I want to… because I am ultimately just talking to myself. So when I am confronted with the fact that this is absolutely not the case I never know quite what to do. I snapped a photo with my reader and told him that he would have to be less of a stranger in the comment thread, also threw out a friend invite and said to holler if they needed anything. My friends joke about me being “THE Belghast” but man… that is not a thing I will ever get used to. I’m just a guy who does a few different things and tries to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the games I happen to be playing as I can. The big point of pride however came when my reader said that I was for the most part the reason why they were playing Final Fantasy XIV right now, so if my joy can be infectious then maybe I guess it is okay.

Madness Intensifies

The only real concentrated playtime that I had this weekend were either during the podcast on Saturday evening or starting about 4pm on Sunday afternoon until I went to bed. During that time I focused on getting all of those tradeskills that I managed to get to level 5/6ish the other day up to 11. At the point of going to sleep last night I had managed to get all of them up there except for Culinarian, which I will hopefully take care of tonight. I will say that so far I definitely agree with the notion of this being the ideal way to level tradeskills, but man… it also means that my entire life right now is pushing tradeskills. There is no way in hell I am going to cap my poetics especially since they have now doubled the cap to 900 per week. The positive however is that I am actually finding myself really enjoying the black hole known as crafting. I like the fact that I am for the most part relatively self sufficient. This was always the big reason why I pushed crafting up in other games is that when I wanted something for an alt… I didn’t want to have to pester someone else to make it for me.

It is going to be so amazingly nice to be able to repair my gear while we are in instances, or knock out random glamour prisms as my whims suit me. Right now I am taking no small amount of pride in the fact that I have been crafting all of my upgrades WHILE working on crafting. The cool thing is that each time I hit a plateau I can have a fire sale of everything that I used to get to that point. So when I finally bring Culinarian up to level 11 I will be shedding all the early level crafting gear that I have laying around. The other nice thing about doing it this way is that I have been able to select the cash reward item from each of my crafting quests. The negative is… that I am struggling to remember which quests I have actually completed. I am pretty sure there are one or two of the level ten quests that I still need to go back and do. I am really enjoying the chill nature of crafting, and I am liking that it gives me plenty of time to watch some Orphan Black. I managed to watch through the first seasons and just started the second season last night before stopping to watch Game of Thrones. I doubt I will make it to cap before Heavensward but I am hoping to at least get close.

Forced Engagement

The biggest problem with crafting right now is that it is feeding my instincts to check out mentally. When I am stressed I tend to disengage from the world, and while I am so focused on crafting my way through the levels… it is all too easy to simply not watch free company chat or anything else for that matter. One of the things I am going to have to work on this next week is trying to find a happy medium between my super engaging “lets run all the things” side and my “lets just nest and craft” side. I am hoping that now that my group at work is done with the moves that I can start to chill back out once again. The fact that every single day my world was changing significantly made me want to cling to something calm and relaxing in my game world. Tonight will be a return to my raid schedule so that should help significantly. There is still some stress in the real world around a potential car purchase that might be happening, but hopefully the big stressers are past me.

Mostly I want to apologize to anyone who was looking to run anything this weekend. I managed to run a Sunken Temple of Qarn with Liore, but past that I pretty much ran nothing at all. I had all these grand hopes of doing some pony farming, but that fell through when we tried to cram a visit with my folks in Friday night. Saturday was pretty much an entire lost day other than rushing home to podcast under the threat of severe weather. Hopefully as the week goes on I can do more fun stuff with the Free Company because I could use the activity to get my mind off other things. As we talked about on the podcast Saturday night, I really hope we down turn nine tonight… but in the grand scheme of things I think we are still a few weeks away. We are just now consistently getting to the dive bomb phase, now we just have to figure out what to do with the dive bombs. On our best attempt I think we got to around 35% which isn’t too shabby. I hope you all have a great week, and please if you are an avid reader of the blog… don’t hesitate to ping me in game sometime and say hi.

Happier Without Meters

May 13, 2015 by Belghast

Deliberate Exclusion

One of the puzzles I have been trying to sort out the entire time I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV is why exactly the community as a whole seems to be friendlier to other players. I’ve talked about the various literal “social engineering” missions that the development staff have made in order to spin things that would normally be a negative as a positive. When I see the new player bonus in a dungeon I actually get excited rather than frustration over having to potentially teach someone new mechanics. Quite honestly I am wondering if it is something far more simple than anything, a line in the sand that the folks running the game drew long ago and have since reinforced numerous times. In Final Fantasy XIV running a DPS log parser is not only unsupported by the game, but it is actually an actionable offense. This has had an interesting chilling effect on some of the elitism that you normally see in communities.

Since simply mentioning parsed logs in private free company chat can end up with a GM knocking down your door… it changes the way folks interact with the data gained from log parsers. That is to say people are still parsing the logs, but the first rule of “FFXIV-APP” is there is no “FFXIV-APP”. This means that no one gets called out in the middle of a pug for having “weak dps” and no one is standing around in “trade chat” linking their latest boss kill. The players that do parse, do so quietly and in secret and I believe in the end this makes the “meters” less of a competition and more of a personal diagnostic tool. It seems that once you take this competition out of a community it has some pretty wide reaching trickle down effects. I’ve always thought of dps meters as a distraction, and back during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, we had rules against mentioning them or linking them in raid chat. I largely just found the automated spam annoying, but it also seemed to cause players to focus on things that were less important than the mechanics of a fight.

Accidental Experiment

The problem is that meters are a double edged sword. Eons ago while the earth was still cooling I needed a add-on called Omen in World of Warcraft to let me know how I was doing on threat. Later on these features got rolled into Recount, and Skada and the rest of the meters. As a result I simply got used to running the meters all of the time, but after a point they were no longer needed. Tank threat became a non-issue with the introduction of Vengeance to help mitigate the lower damage that tanking characters generally had. Once introduced into my life I started feeling like I needed meters all the time to let me know how things were going. I became addicted to the metrics and numbers associated with raiding, and as such spent a good deal of my time staring at bars and percentages rather than actually playing the game. Some weeks back I talked about being frustrated with the current state of my mods, and actually went so far as to start installing several of the addons that I had been using.

One of the addons that ended up getting pulled was Recount, because I had this plan of switching over the Skada. The funny thing is that I got interrupted during the middle of what I happened to be doing, and while Recount absolutely got installed… I never went so far as to install another meter. The first time I noticed was during a raid a few weeks back, but since I was so used to NOT having meters in Final Fantasy XIV it didn’t bother me terribly much. This combined with the fact that I knew someone in the raid was going to parse our logs anyways caused me to simply ignore the fact that they were not there any more. The end result was that I felt generally happier about my night of raiding. I spent more time in the moment of the game play rather than focusing on how I was doing versus this player or that in the meters. I decided to just go with this and run without meters for awhile to see if it improved my overall outlook on the raid.

Happier Without Meters

The funny thing is that I actually think it did. World of Warcraft stopped being a competition for me and more of an experience. Sure the fights are still nowhere near as engaging or enjoyable for me as the ones in Final Fantasy XIV but I am spending more time “in” the fight and less time worried about other non-important things. The funny thing about this is that apparently it had other effects on my game play as well. The constant concern about how I happened to be doing may have been actually holding me back from actually doing well. I figured I was still firmly in the middle of the pack dps wise, until after the Flamebender Ka’graz fight one of our mages said something that made me curious. He said something to the effect of “I can’t believe I was beat by a protection warrior”. To which point I confessed that I had installed my meters some time ago, and had no clue how I was actually doing anymore. To which my raid leader responded “Well, Bel, You Did Well” and linked me the url of the live parse.

There are a lot of mitigating factors behind my performance and I know this. For starters I recently got the four piece set bonus and for gladiators it essentially increases everything useful to us by 20%. More than that I think the absence of meters caused me to stop worrying about every button press and rely more on what I knew I should be doing when I should be doing it… instead of trying to second guess myself all of the time. In essence I stopped caring about my performance and just started playing the damned game, and while it most definitely improved my levels of happiness it also seems to have actually improved how I was performing. I am just not a hyper competitive person about most things, and accidentally eliminating that stimulus from my game experience seems to be a net positive for me. I know that there are always going to be meters tracking my performance but I also feel like so long as they are not in my face all of the time I can try and ignore them. Now I am not suggesting that you uninstall your meters, and that it is some new path to happiness. However for me it seems to have given me a new lease on a game I was starting to hate playing.

Axe to Grind

May 12, 2015 by Belghast

Lung Infections Suck

I’ve been in a strange place the last few days, where I am still recovering from what has turned out to be an infection in my lungs. It has been allergies central around here and unsurprisingly my lungs have reacted negatively to it. I had been dragging along for awhile with what felt like a constant persistent dry cough. Last Friday I finally decided to go to the doctor when I coughed up a small bit of blood. Turns out my lungs were actually in far worse shape than I thought. Since then I have been on a pretty heavy dose of prednisone and am on the mend, but man… I have to say I am still drained as hell. I attempted to go to work like normal yesterday but ended up coming home about halfway through the day. Today I am making another attempt to go a full day, so I am hoping the strength stays with me. What is so strange about this one is just how drained I feel as a result of simply existing.

Why are my lungs betraying me you might ask? The above photo is not intentionally abstract but instead my my phones camera attempting to focus on what are ultimately hundreds of tiny particles of Cottonwood seed. This is what we jokingly refer to as summer snow, and with all the rain we have been getting the Cottonwoods have been blooming in overdrive blanketing the law with a mat of white fabric and making the air look like it is quite genuinely snowing. Thankfully I have a day or two of reprieve thanks to the recent round of storms, but I am sure as soon as things dry up again the bloom will begin a new. Normally this happens around my birthday in June but I guess all the moisture moved up the time table. In any case it sucks to live through and I am just hoping that I can limp through until it has finished. In the meantime I will continue to take this high dose pack of prednisone and antibiotics and pretend to be a normal human being.

Axe to Grind

For months now we have been slowly keying folks through the various primal fights in our Final Fantasy XIV free company. While a chunk of us have been sitting on the Ifrit step, the final of the original set of Extreme primals… it seemed like every time we set out to attempt it we were missing a seventh or eighth that also had it unlocked. So we would once again shift focus and do another round of Garuda or another round of Titan to get people caught up. Last night, finally after a new round of Titaneers we managed to get eight people on at the same time with the ability to do Ifrit. Now I realize I could have been pugging my way through the primal encounters, and with all of the mount farming parties this is a relatively straight forward prospect. There is just something rewarding about doing a fight that is new to you, with nothing but your free company surrounding you. It makes the kill that much sweeter and the experience that much more magical as you accomplished a new mission with friends. Once again we went into the fight without much research, but managed to pick up the basics extremely quickly.

It took us several attempts but by the end of our first night ever working on the boss we had downed an Ifrit and moved on to other things. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to get this quest out of my log. I know the big push for this at least from Ashgar’s side was to get the sweet axe I am pictured holding in the first picture. For those who have completed some of the later story, you will recognize this as the axe that Moenbryda wields. It is just one of many weapons you get as a reward for defeating the original trio of Primals, but I went with the axe because it is probably one of the more unique appearances in the game. Now I doubt if it will ever offset my usage of my Malignant Mogaxe, but it is still pretty awesome to have it as an option for when I decide to change up my outfit a bit. Glamouring/Transmogging/Wardrobes are one of the simple pleasures of a modern MMO. The ability to look like you want to look is what makes these games fun to play for me. Gone is the era of looking exactly like every other player in the game, and here to stay is the ability to craft your own appearances. After playing Everquest and being able to tell every single item a player was wearing based on its color and appearance… I have to say I am happy to be living in modern times.

Back to Nael

Yes I realize this is not a picture of Nael Van Darnus but I didn’t snap any pictures from our attempts on Turn 9 last night. Instead this is a picture of me rocking the Garuda bow because I finally feel like I have an outfit floofy enough to support it. This weekend I managed to finish getting my 120 set from World of Darkness which makes up a chunk of the outfit above. Since picking up the Garuda bow I have been looking for a reason to use it, and finally I think the gold and white in the Bogartyr coat works well enough with the gold and white on the bow. Now if anyone tells me that is really blue and black I will reach through the internet and punch them in their soul. A few weeks back we set down on a new mission, which involved alternating between working on coil and working on other things. Since then we have finished the original three primals, Leviathan Extreme and Odin and as a result feel like we are no longer beating our heads against the wall that is turn nine. Coming back to Nael tonight felt far more fresh than it has in a long time.

I was somewhat concerned that we would have lost progress, but in truth we picked up right where we left off and started making fast progress. Everything about the fight is smoother now and we have been making it into the final dance phase every single attempt. The awesome thing about this is that it feels like last night we were finally getting the pattern down. In fact the last few attempts we were making it to the dive bombs phase consistently. Now if we can just master where the dive bombs need to go… I have a feeling we will be clearing turn nine finally and moving on to the final coil. I love my static group, and I love the way folks just keep plugging away without getting frustrated. We have been on this boss for a very long time, and no one seems to have any diminished desire to KEEP doing the boss, or keep trying to succeed. In fact everyone seems to keep doing little things here or there to tweak their performance and make things work more smoothly. I love my free company, and I love the raid we have built around it… my hope is that we can keep trying to get more people into the mix and maybe with Heavensward expand to a third static because the two we have now are just awesome.