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Enjoying Wildstar

May 3, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 55 – Calling All Bloggers

This week I start off the show, and even title it with a pretty massive plug for the Newbie Blogger Initiative. What is the NBI you ask? Well this is the time of the year when Veteran bloggers support new folks wanting to get started in this madness. This year we are making an extra special push to try and help new podcasters, youtubers, and streamers along with the bloggers. Additionally I myself am making a special push to try to rekindle the fire in some of our wayward bloggers who are no longer as regular as they used to be. The entire month of May is dedicated to helping folks get started and find their niche, and since most of the AggroChat crew have participated in the past, it is time to get the word out.

As far as the rest of the show we had myself, Tam, Ashgar, Kodra and Grace. As always we spent a good deal of time talking Final Fantasy XIV since we are all still heavily playing it. Right now Greysky Armada our Free Company is back holding the bronze medal again for being the third most active Free Company on our server Cactuar. This week also saw myself and Grace spending some more time playing some more Wildstar. The Black Dagger Society the guild I am connected to has been having a guild night on Fridays and as such I have started joining in the festivities. Additionally there was talk of Marvel Heroes, Diablo 3, Ashgar returning to his Gameboy Advance roots, Tam winning his first Infinity tournament since the move, and similarly Kodra beating VVVVVV for the first time in his new place. Since this month is devoted to Shadowrun for the Gameclub we are also starting to play some of this. It was a fun show in spite of being in that pre-E3 gaming doldrum.

Making Progress

I’ve been down a bit on raiding lately in my posts so I wanted to take a moment to give a bit of an update of sorts. The Tuesday before last was very seriously one of the worst nights of raiding I have had in a very long time. It really made me question if I wanted to keep trying to raid in World of Warcraft, and I posted this long discussion about it. It seems like I actually gave voice to some of the same feelings that many of our raid had been having, but for whatever reason had not actually talked about. As a result a dialog has started among some of the members, and I have to say I think things are starting to improve. Tuesday this week was still a pretty rough night, but it felt at least somewhat better. Thursday however on the other hand felt really good. We were a much trimmed down group due to some absences but I also felt like we were working better as a team. We lowered the bar slightly and worked on normal content again, clearing everything we had ever cleared before in a single night and putting in some serious work on the forge encounter.

If we had another hour of attempts I feel like we probably could have downed the encounter. Things were flowing so much better than they ever had before. We were getting through to the second phase, and then approaching it with a sense of direction and purpose. We were alternating between burning down the Elementalists and focusing down the waves of adds. We managed to push through to the final phase, and if we were at our full numbers we might have been able to defeat it. I think we learned a lot of good lessons that we can hopefully apply this Tuesday. The thing is… I am feeling something that I have not felt in a very long time… the desire to get back in there and give it another shot. I am actually looking forward to raiding in World of Warcraft this week, and that is a pretty awesome thing. Maybe just maybe we can make the changes necessary in the raid to make it a better experience for all of us. At this point I am glad I said something, and started the discussion. I guess the truth is if you are not having a good time, chances are you aren’t the only one.

Enjoying Wildstar

Similarly this week I have been enjoying quite a bit of Wildstar. I am still taking it nice and slow, but at this point I am level 16 with just a short ways to go to 17. I have officially finished the Algoroc zone and will be moving into the next area. The Black Dagger Society has been awesome to me, and I am super thankful to Chestnut and Chaide for giving me a friendly home to hang my hat in. It turns out that Friday nights are somewhat of a guild night for grouping, and they have been working on lower level content. Currently I do not have any other commitments Friday nights, so I am going to try and make that my Wildstar day. This week they ran me through the earliest Protostar dungeon, and it does a pretty great job of teaching you what you need to do to succeed in a Wildstar instance. Honestly I wish that this would have been the first dungeon when we were playing at launch, because I feel like it would have cleared up a lot of the frustrations had by many players.

The group we went into Wildstar with was made up of some pretty disparate points of view and skill levels. For some the extremely frenetic pace of the dungeons was a point of frustration especially as we were trying to learn “on the fly” all of the various things we were supposed to be doing. This dungeon eases the player in teaching them the various mechanics and then building upon them as the phases go, finally culminating in a boss fight that is fairly representative of what I saw in the “real” dungeons. While the dungeon is essentially a giant tutorial, it is still extremely fun and when a random stranger asked me if I wanted to join them… I happily ran it again. The other big switch I have made is previously I was focusing entirely on tanking as the warrior and now I am starting to build out my dps abilities as well. In most games I level as tanky as much as anything else in an effort to be as survivable as I can be for fighting the named encounters. In this game I feel almost more survivable playing DPS as I do as a tank. Essentially the amount of damage I deal more than makes up for the extra damage I might be receiving. I am still pleasantly surprised that I am enjoying Wildstar as much as I actually am. Pretty happy I decided to give it another shot.

Flower Power

April 30, 2015 by Belghast

Bad Brain

This morning I am struggling a bit to get started with my normal blogging process. Right now I am going through what I generally term as a “low spot” in my mental health. I have been feeling depressed and generally disconnected from the world lately. It is like I am staring out a window and watching the world go by in fast motion. Additionally I seem to be focused on only the bad things. Like I could have a dozen normal conversations, but my brain is heat seeking in on the moments that don’t go perfectly. Analyzing them, breaking them apart, wallowing in my imagined failure. What frustrates me the most is that I have a pretty awesome life, but when my brain is on a down cycle it certainly doesn’t seem like it, and my internal critic has been working overtime.

The thing is, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if my brain would just stop with statements like pointing out that I have gained weight, or that I am failing to live up to this or that goal. It always has to be the bully and take things one step too far. My brain is telling me constantly that I am an imposter and that no one actually likes me, and that at best everyone simply tolerates my actions. My brain is kicking things up another notch over the last few days, and incessant about telling me that the world would simply be a better place if I no longer existed. The thing is… I know deep down inside my core that my brain is a liar, but man… is it relentless. I am not expecting anything from this, but I figured I would open up a bit more into my own personal struggles. No one likes hanging around with someone that bums them out, but maybe me talking about it helps someone else who is struggling with the same demons. I know my brain is wrong, and that this will pass in time… but right now, it is pretty hellacious to live with 24/7.

Flower Power

Last night was yet another running of the second static in our Final Fantasy Free Company. We are still struggling a bit to gather up the eight people needed to raid, but hopefully as people continue leveling and gearing that will change a bit. Ultimately I would love it were I able to be an optional in this group, since I have my group that meets seriously on Monday already, and our secondary night on Saturday before the podcast. That said at raid time we managed to gather up seven people and attempted to pug an eighth. That didn’t go terribly well, because while we were talking about the fights he ran off and pulled some golems. I mean on one level I get it, because we had not said much in the game chat, and were sorting things out on voice chat… but taking it upon yourself to pull is rarely the right answer. After a few wipes he refused to resurrect and we kicked him, abandoning duty and bringing in Ashgar. From that point on the night seemed to improve.

Things were far more tense than they should have been, and there was a bit of an outburst on Teamspeak but other than that things fell in place fairly well. I would be bummed that this team managed to get turn six in a single night of tries, whereas it took our team two nights… but this group is leaning heavily on past experience. When we tried to do each turn we tried really hard to go in as a blank slate and figure things out as they happened. It was cool though to get another raid boss killed with this group and we moved on to Turn Seven. There are a lot of moving parts in that fight, and largely the group still needs to figure out how best to control the Renaud freezing action. It is a really fun fight and even more than turn six, it came back to me quickly as we started going through the motions. I am starting to wonder though if I should be running Paladin on these fights since Damai is a Warrior main. Not sure what additional benefit having a Paladin would give the group since it has a slightly different skillset. Would at least give me practical experience doing stuff as my “other” tank class.

Another Outpost

The other game that I played a significant amount of yesterday was State of Decay Year One Survivor Edition. I am back to playing Marcus after going on some crazy misadventures as Maya. When I last played I got the radio announcement that a military presence had been spotted on the outskirts of town. Having done this song and dance before I knew that it was best to take Maya over there to check it out. Additionally at that point Marcus was doing the whole “not sure how long I can go on” thing, meaning he was exhausted and needed to be rested. Around this same time I got reports that two hordes of zombies were getting close to town. I’ve found the best way to take out a horde is vehicular zombiecide. So I laughably grabbed the Pizza Delivery car and took the the roads running them down. This ends up stirring up quite a few additional zombies in the process, but far less in my experience than trying to put down a horde with gun fire.

After quelling the two hordes I moved on to the Military encampment and it went just as well as it had in the past. The military wants everyone to stay inside and shelter in place… which is fine and good until the zombies try breaking down your door. The military house was next to one of the survivor houses I was working on gaining trust with. Unfortunately the person that normally gives me quests to complete to gain their trust was not available, so not sure exactly where they wandered off to. About this time I got a frantic radio message from Lucy telling me that her brother was trapped and needed my help. He had managed to get himself pinned down in a barn, and I had to ride in and save the day. This actually was tougher than I thought it would be and ended up having to clear about nine zombies to get to him and save him. By this time Maya was going through her whole “too exhausted to continue” routine, but I managed to finish things off and get back home with Jacob. So there we are, back home and ready for another jaunt out with Marcus. Hopefully I will get in and play some more tonight.

Splashy Pony

April 27, 2015 by Belghast

The Lottery

This weekend I had a pretty great time puttering around Final Fantasy XIV. As of yesterday afternoon I am officially capped on Poetics again, and it seems like each week this is getting easier. Right now my focus is on getting my dragoon 130 weapon since I am being called upon to dps in coil occasionally, and as such I feel like I should have the best weapon available to me. Had I really been thinking straight I would have gone for the dragoon lance first instead of the axe. At this point I need to cap one more week and then part of another to end up getting the weapon. This week I got another encrypted tomestone, and this coming week I will get the carbontwine so that when I finally get the poetics together I will be ready for it. We have a minor patch tomorrow, and I would really love if they completely removed the poetics cap or at least raised it… but I don’t think that is actually going to happen.

Part of what makes my time in Final Fantasy XIV so enjoyable is the community. In some games you want to spend as little time with other players as possible, but in FFXIV we all sort of congregate in several common areas and the casual interactions with other players ends up being a pure joy. With the 2.51 patch they added the Golden Saucer and with it the Cactpot lottery system. Once a week you can buy a ticket for the big drawing, that could be worth as much a million MGP. This drawing happens every Saturday evening, and if you are there at exactly the right time you can see the above spectacle as a series of wheels raise from the floor and “roll” the new number. What is awesome is a good chunk of the community gathers around to watch this happen. I ended up chatting with a few people I had never met but that just had awesome outfits, and while I didn’t win anything other than the consolation prize… it is always a part of the week I look forward to.

Splashy Pony

Before the podcast on Saturday evening we gathered together and worked on Leviathan Extreme. Now a few weeks ago we had made some serious progress here, so we went into this adventure thinking we had a good shot at actually downing it. Levi Extreme is probably one of the more enjoyable fights in the game I have experienced. While it shares some unrecoverable mechanics with Titan Extreme, it seems to do so in a much more predictable manner. The primary difference between normal and extreme modes is that when the elemental converter goes off, Leviathan knocks the sides off the boat making the players susceptible to being knocked off in the water if you stand in the wrong places. Additionally there is a new add type that spawns that if not stun locked and burned extremely quickly can fear players off the boat. The combination of these two mechanics and the fact that if someone dies… you have a few moments to resurrect them before their corpse is knocked of… makes the fight extremely tense at times.

ffxiv 2015-04-25 20-41-29-38 However we worked through all of these issues and on each attempt kept creeping closer and closer to success. I think we had about ten minutes left on the timer when we finally defeated Leviathan, but as the night went on it felt more solid. I think we could probably farm this encounter each week letting folks get their extremely awesome Leviathan weapons. The amazing part is that we actually managed to get one of the mounts to drop. These are not an every time occurrence from what I understand, and actually rather rare. Not only did we get it to drop, but I actually managed to roll high on it. Now in the above picture you can see me riding around on my splashy pony with water splash effects that it leaves behind everywhere it goes. Leviathan has always been one of my favorite summons in the Final Fantasy universe, so I am damned happy to have his pony. Hopefully we can get the guild a bunch more of these over time. You can see Thalen sporting the Leviathan fist weapons, which are the item that dropped in addition to the mount. I want the Leviathan axe so bad, so hopefully we can muster the oomph to do this one on a regular basis.

Ready for Heavensward

This morning before sitting down to write this blog post I ran my way through the new benchmark application to test systems to see if they are ready for Heavensward. I guess my system passed with flying colors, and there are some moments in the demo where it worked the hell out of my machine. I tend to play Final Fantasy XIV on a frame locked 30 fps largely because that is what I have gotten used to. I happened to be running fraps during the demo loop, and the highest frame rate I saw was around 75 fps and the lowest dip was during this “raid” section with tons of spell effects going off at around 35 fps. All in all I am pretty damned pleased with that, especially since I never run with full spell effects on. I prefer to run with the limited spell effect options because it makes 24 man raids feel less seizure inducing to be honest. As the demo played out though I have to say I am getting really amped to be playing all of this content. The world of Heavensward looks amazing, and the DX11 textures are so much clearer than what we are currently used to.

The highlight of the demo reel however is seeing the new Dragoon rank 3 limit break animation. If this is any indication then I think we are going to be really happy with all of the new class specific limit breaks. The only thing that concerns me is that the dragoon dive is a really long animation, so I am wondering what the rest of the party sees as this is going off. As you can see the Dragoon becomes a spirit dragon and then leaps up into the air crashing down on the target driving the force of the spirit dragon through it. I tried to get screenshots at good times during its animation but it really does not do it justice. Thankfully if you are stuck at work and cannot run the animation, they released a video of the entire benchmark so you can get your fix. I am really pleased with the performance of my system however and I have no doubts in my mind that I will be able to run Heavensward without issues. This whole releasing a benchmark thing is such a great idea, and I am wondering why more companies don’t do this. This way if you do need to make upgrades, you have more than enough time to figure out how you are going to do this.

On User Interfaces

April 24, 2015 by Belghast

User Interface

Last night while running dungeons I got into a lengthy discussion with my friend Damai about the user interface layout in Final Fantasy XIV. As such I thought it might be useful to talk about my chosen layout this morning. One of the awesome things about this game is how adaptable the stock interface is to whatever you want from it. One of the big features that is poorly documented is that every single element can be scaled up or down. Some of these windows that are targetable can be scaled at any time, the rest can only be scaled in user interface edit mode. To Scale a window target it and hit Control and Home. This toggles through a series of available sizes from tiny to massive. As you can see in my interface I have lots of different hotbars, some of which are scaled as small as I can get them, and others a more standard size.

My layout is pretty straight forward. I tend to set up all user interfaces the same if given the option so that my main block of hotbars is stacked in the center of my screen, with my own health information and targets health information is directly above them so that I only have to look down a slightly from the center of my screen to see it. This is extremely important when you are dealing with encounters that transition at a certain percentage or something similar. I snapped this photo between pulls, but what is missing on the left side of my hotbars is the available targets window showing current emnity gems. On the right side of my hotbars is my party list which I have placed as such to make healing easier. I am right handed, so I tend to set my heal bars on the right side of the screen to make the movement more natural. All the other bits are largely extraneous like the lower lefthand bar includes all of my class icons allowing me to switch between classes faster. Pretty much every game I play has a set up similar to this, but in the FFXIV user interface I feel like this is my ultimate version of that design.

Messy Interface

Tuesday night I snapped a picture of my raiding interface in World of Warcraft from comparrison and I have to say… it is getting to the point where I struggle to play with this mess. At some point soon I need to trash everything and start from scratch trying to build something less intensive. I feel like one of the triumphs of Final Fantasy XIV is that it gives me a much more slim line interface but also manages to communicate to me all of the information contained within my World of Warcraft interface… but just in a much more compact fashion. Hell I would hazard that if I were playing World of Warcraft with the interface I have in FFXIV I would be enjoying it significantly more. This is the point when Tamrielo would chime in with some commentary about the conversations we have had in the past on user interfaces. I like a very specific design and when a game doesn’t support that layout I get frustrated quickly. So many of my complaints about Elder Scrolls Online were the fact that its interface would not support the layout I was looking for.

Once upon a time I had an interface that I was extremely happy with in World of Warcraft. On the left side of my hotbars is where I kept recount for damage and threat meters. On the right side I kept grid, an extremely combat view of the party and raid frames. The problem is grid died several expansions ago and no mod has come along to present the raid frames in quite so perfect a fashion for me. Grid gave me exactly the right amount of information, and as a tank I loved it because it would put a little red dot on any frame that was currently drawing aggro. I could at a glance tell if I had the majority of the mobs. There are other raid frames that work somewhat similar, but all of which are geared towards healers. Grid could be made to work for anyone who simply needed to see at a glance how the raid was doing. I feel at this point I need to just start from scratch, and build back only the features I actually want and need. All of the prepackaged user interfaces end up frustrating me because I don’t have full control over them. So as such for me to be happy, I am going to have to simply delete my interface folder one weekend and start over.

Interfaces are Important

This might seem like an odd thing to some, but when it comes to my enjoyment of a game I would say that the user interface ranks near the top of “most important things” to me. There are many games that I think I would enjoy, if they just had a better interface or better control scheme. Ultimately what this means however is my ability to manipulate things in such a fashion as to bring them in line with what is familiar for me. I’ve included three different games with three different interfaces, but as you can see there are some basic elements that I set up in each of them. While I am not literally cloning the exact same layout in each game, I am still bringing them closer into line with what I expect to be the case. I expect targets to appear on either side of my character and for the hot bars to be stacked in some fashion below my character. I am extremely combat focused so I want all of the important things that I need to see to be close to the center of my screen.

The things I tend to push off to the margins of the screen are the things that I am not dealing with often like Quest trackers, and hotbars for buttons that I don’t want to have to go digging to find, but that I also don’t need often. I am a creature of habit and I end up ultimately remapping things to work similar between games. If I am playing a class with some sort of a builder effect, then I will always put the “dump” ability for that effect on the 7 key. In Rift for example this is my single target finisher, on my Warrior in FFXIV this is Inner Beast. I will always place my interrupt hotkey on the 0 key that way my brain is wired to hit that key without thinking when I see something I need to interrupt. Similarly if I have an engagement ability that pushes me into combat, I will always place that ability on either 4 or 5 depending on the game… which can get confusing at times. Taunt regardless of the game however is always going to be sitting on 6, and if I am playing a stealth class… I recycle that key for my stealth ability. Because I play so many games, I have to create some sense of standardization between them. I guess in my mind I am just playing versions of the same game, and that ultimately is how I can switch back and forth between games without missing a beat. This is also why the interface is so important to me.