final fantasy xiv Archives - Page 52 of 82

Disconnected Dragoon

March 18, 2015 by Belghast

Missing a Raid

Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I was moving through molasses the entire day. In part it was the whole staying up late and babysitting servers bit, but also we had so much stuff going on during the day connected to the two outages. It turns out that after much research they were not actually related. I knew I was not exactly in “fighting shape” so I let my raid leader know that I would not be attending the WoW Raid that night. This is in part a good thing because they were apparently talking about having to do a paired down raid due to limited healers, and it is probably a good thing to rotate folks a bit. At this point I would never mind having to sit out for a night because I have so much other stuff going on that I could be doing. When I got home I took a nap and that helped quite a bit, or at least made me feel something vaguely human.

I asked my wife not to let me sleep more than an hour, since I generally struggle with the concept of napping. If I take a nap, it means I am not likely to get a good nights sleep. My body plays this game with me, where it only wants to get five to six hours of sleep a night. When I nap, it means I am going to have this massive bout of insomnia that night. Thankfully the short nap managed to do what it needed to do and I was still able to sleep fairly well as a result. I spent most of the night hanging out on the couch catching up on Better Call Saul. The irony of be getting into this series is the fact that I have never actually watched Breaking Bad. I mean I have watched the first episode, but since my wife showed some interest in the show I didn’t really want to start it on my own without her watching along. Otherwise there would come a point where I would have to start back from scratch and watch everything over again. I managed to catch up through episode seven, and that show is just becoming more interesting as it goes.

Disconnected Dragoon

When it came to actual gaming last night, I was a bit more distracted. I spent some time logged into Final Fantasy XIV because our Free Company is just insanely vibrant, but I really didn’t do all that much gaming. I ran a few roulettes, and managed to get yet another piece of 130 gear thanks to another carbontwine, but mostly I just spent a lot of time hanging out at the free company house when I got up from my nap. It really is surreal to see the number of people online… and at some point I need to catch up with my whole guild census project and record all the new people in our spreadsheet. One of the problems with FFXIV is that there is no good guild notes functionality so we are having to keep an external list of which character belongs to which personality. Its tedious but for whatever reason I struggle to relate in game names back to twitter and blogger names. I spend a lot of time thinking “I think that is this person” but never fully committing because my memory is extremely fallible. That is my deep dark secret, that in other games I remember everyone… because I can check the officer notes.

I am not sure how I really made it through the sequence of Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower and World of Darkness… but I am guessing at this point I can just do those on auto pilot. I am hoping I was not “that dragoon” in most of the instances, because I managed to get several commendations. Generally speaking if I go in, and manage not to die… I get commendations. I should have spent the night working on botany, but instead I mostly stood around a lot staring blankly at the screen. I feel like over the last several nights I have been particularly antisocial. Largely when I am watching something on Television I stay off voice chat, and go for large periods of time without reading free company chat either. I know at some point Arkenor asked for a group, but it was not until it had actually formed that I noticed. I have been a less than stellar “Bel” lately, and I am hoping tonight I will be feeling back to my normal self. I feel like I have missed a lot of what is going on, and I am hoping to remedy that.

Time to Landmark

It has been well over a year since I last played Landmark in any fashion. That game has evolved in such a way that if you are not playing constantly you fall behind in the number of changes. At this point I simply feel behind the curve and it has been a real barrier from me jumping back into the game. This morning I read something interesting however, that Landmark plans to have one more major character wipe before opening its doors to the public. My theory is that this might be precisely the ideal time to pop my head back in and see how the game has progressed. Right now this wipe is slotted for sometime around April 29th. So my hope is that I can pop in and experience all of the new content fresh and not be so entirely out of touch with it. Honestly the most enjoyment I had in the game was the process of “leveling up” which was completing a series of arbitrary goals to keep moving up through the different types of picks and tools you can create. Once I had access to everything the game quickly became stale for me.

For reference when I last played the game… the Caves system was not yet patched in. So this means I have that and all of the player combat to experience fresh. The problem is I am torn on the whole Daybreak thing. I am still rather pissed about the layoffs, but at the same time the folks who are still on staff there are struggling to make this whole thing work. My Landmark account is a sunk cost as I purchased it so long ago. I might as well get some use out of it, and see what this game has become in the months since I let my claim get repossessed. There was a point where I realized I was only logging in just long enough to mine copper to pay the upkeep on my claim. This is one of the things I don’t like about upkeep systems. If you are only playing the game to pay upkeep, are you really playing the game at all? I am actually looking forward to the character wipe now and hopefully I will be able to reignite the spark I once had for this game.

Warrior Milestone

March 16, 2015 by Belghast

Tired of Selfies

This weekend while out running around in Joplin I kept myself entertained thanks to my twitter feed. Among the constant stream of updates was a series of posts from Alternative Chat, where she attempted to tell a story through twitter and succeeded beautifully. The only problem is that in the weeks since the release of 6.1 I have developed a knee jerk negative reaction to seeing a wow selfie posted in my twitter feed. It was a real struggle for me to look past the medium of the pictures to peer at the underlying story. Largely my problem with selfies is that they are this distorted caricature of what our avatars actually look like. The angles are all distorted, and it is impossible to control your facial expressions as they go through a series of seemingly random contortions. Like I had said before I thought that with time folks would get bored with them, and move on… but as the weeks continue it only seems to be more prevalent.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying, because I still love taking photos of my characters. I just prefer the picture above to the selfie I lead off the first paragraph with. There is just something much more visually appealing to being able to see more of your character than simply your face, torso and part of your arms. The biggest problem I have with selfies is the fact that it becomes hard to take in the entire picture. During Alt’s twitter story, it was as much about the places she was at rather than her character. I struggled to see enough of the elements in the background to immediately indentify where she was actually standing to take the picture. I realize that for the purpose of that story it was in an almost travelogue format, but the times when she broke from it and took a traditional screenshot were my favorite segments of the story. Not that I expect this to change anyone’s practices, but I am just saying now that I have a major preference towards traditional screenshots as compared to the distorted version that is a selfie.

Warrior Milestone

This weekend I did not manage to get nearly as much playtime in as I had hoped. Saturday we spent pretty much the entire day until about thirty minutes before podcast time running around. We ended up having to go visit my Mother-In-Law and made a day trip of it meandering our way there and to Joplin through a series of small towns. My wife and I both have this thing where we like to go hunting for interesting items on clearance, and I have managed to pick up quite a few awesome Lego sets for less than of their original price. This weekend however, I found a ton of sets… but nothing that I really could not live without. Ultimately my vice is Star Wars and Space/Futuristic themed sets. My most recent find was three of the sets from the “Agents” line at a local target for slightly less than half off the original price. Needless to say I did not really get much play time in Saturday. Sunday until 4pm I ended up helping my wife with a few things around the house, namely putting together a large cubical storage unit and a smaller bakers rack unit for our closet.

So by the time I finally got logged in downstairs and was able to play Final Fantasy XIV I felt under the gun to help make up some ground. At this point I am sitting at 254 poetics out of 450 for the week… and all I have is tonight to somehow manage to cap. I don’t have a feeling that I am going to make it, because we have a raid. However when I get home from work I am going to try my damnedest to get it through a combination of duty roulettes. I did however manage to run through the three Crystal Tower instances and get another Carbontwine allowing me to upgrade my Helm from 120 to 130. Similarly I managed to get enough Poetics to buy another piece of jewelry, so that I could use one of the Carboncoats I had laying around. This took me to 120 ilevel which for me at least is somewhat of a mental milestone. There is something about breaking another 10s barrier in my gear score. I am now sitting at just over 11,000 hit points, which is only going to serve to make my healers complain more strongly about my health pool when I am fully buffed. It makes me feel useful though the more gear that I can manage to pile on.

Foraging Slowly

One of my hopes this weekend was to spend a good deal of time on the sofa watching television and working on my Botany. This never actually happened, for various reasons. I spent a bit of time yesterday morning watching a movie and importing by hand 48 episodes of Aggrochat into the new Aggrochat.com website. I did however manage to work on botany some during the recording of this weeks AggroChat, and at this point I am level 16. The brute force leveling is finally starting to slow down, but I keep telling myself that every level that I can gain in this fashion is going to let my level allowance build back up so I can push through the levels more quickly later. When I pushed mining I managed to drop down to 30 leves left, and over the last few days it has managed to regenerate back up to 65, so when it caps I will begin pushing Botany a bit harder.

I had honestly wondered about stopping Botany for a bit to get fishing up to 15 as well. That way I can start getting rid of all of this gathering gear that I have clogging my banks. Since I only have Fishing and Botany left, my hope is that I can maybe stair step them both up together pushing it up 5 levels at a time so I can shed a bunch of gathering gear in the process. That really seems to be the ideal way to level classes in general. I have four retainers and they are all full of gear that I think I will use at some point. I turned in a bunch of the Syrcus Tower dragoon gear last night for company seals, and I need to really spend an afternoon identifying the stuff that I want to keep and sorting it out from the stuff I don’t want to keep. All of the Scylla’s healing gear for example is prime territory for giving away… considering I am slowly replacing it with soldiery items to help burn down my tomestones. Honestly as soon as I have Soldiery equivalents all of the gear from Syrcus Tower is suspect because I consider every single set “ugly”.

Thriving Community

March 12, 2015 by Belghast

Oklahoma Conventions

Pax South was my first real gaming convention, and I have to say I had an absolute blast there. Don’t get me wrong I had been to a few conventions in the past, even worked a few comic book conventions when I worked at a comic book shop, but they were nothing like Pax. This got me thinking about what I might be missing out on here locally. It turns out we have a not insignificant number of conventions that happen within a short driving distance. In fact at the tail end of this month a pretty big retro gaming convention is happening in the Oklahoma City area. As you can see from the handy little button thing on the right it is happening March 28th and 29th at the Oklahoma Expo Hall of the Oklahoma State Fair Park in Oklahoma City… Oklahoma. Yeah that was a lot of Oklahoma in a row, even as a lifer I thought it was a bit excessive.

Super! Bitcon is going on its second year, and seems to be a pretty cool place to go especially if you are into “retro” gaming… or as I like to call it “my childhood”. They have several well known guests on the docket like Smooth McGroove, Alpha Omega Sin, and Patrick Scott Patterson. They also apparently have a fairly large exhibitor hall with several local and regional companies showing off the games they have been working on, as well as a free play arcade and gaming museum. There is this #IamSuperBitcon thing from social media where folks talk about their experiences last year that is really interesting to watch as well. The absolute best part of all of this is that you get a two day pass for only $10 and for this… I thought it would be a sin for me to pass up going. Oklahoma City is only an hour and a half drive for me from Tulsa, so not a big deal at all. One of my new goals this year is to try and hit up as many of these smaller conventions as I can to tide me over until the next Pax. As we get closer to time I will talk about the Heartland Gaming Expo and the XPO games convention both in the Tulsa area. It just excites me that we have this thriving games culture seemingly in my own back yard.

Thriving Community

One of the topics that I have been mulling over in my head is why exactly we have manages to stay happy and engaged with Final Fantasy XIV for the better part of this last year. So often we pop into a MMO and last a few months only to flit off to another title a month later. At the same time I have been examining why I stayed in World of Warcraft for over seven years, and continue to return to it. I think the answer to Final Fantasy XIV is two fold. Firstly we returned to the game after a sequence of boom bust cycles in MMOs like Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. I was personally looking for a place to “settle down” for awhile, and Final Fantasy XIV had been the only title that all of my friends seemed to leave “on good terms” with. So we set down roots, and I started getting involved in the Cactuar community as did the rest of my guild. This process was aided by the fact that we had nothing on the horizon to draw our attention away from the game. As such we have been able to play the game without the distraction of shiny new objects and their promises of a better gaming experience.

I think this lull in MMO releases has helped a lot of games that were stable get more so. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV last July they were at I believe 2.5 million subscribers, and last week they announced that they had blossomed up to 4 million subscribers. That is a fairly significant growth over what is essentially two quarters, and I think that in part it has a lot to do with the fact that there is really nothing out there to pull attention away from it. Don’t get me wrong Warlords of Draenor happened, and I have been playing it… but that is only a draw to players who still have warmth in their hearts for the World of Warcraft franchise. I think the answer to why we have stayed is that we were given enough time to set down roots. We not only have friends in our free company, but are members of several active linkshells that give us access to raiding and grouping beyond our own numbers. This sort of environment is contagious and has made recruiting more members to the fold exceptionally easy. All of which builds upon itself giving me the piece the kept me coming back to World of Warcraft all of this time… a stable and thriving community. The awesome thing is… I can have my cake and eat it two, because at this point my community in World of Warcraft is vastly different than my community blooming here in Final Fantasy XIV.

The Botanist

I had every intention to come home and have a quiet night of powering through the early levels of botany. In fact that is precisely how my evening started, with me brute forcing the level 10 trees near Bentbranch in the Central Shroud. Right now I am working towards the level 10 quest, which will require 99 Crow Feathers. My goal is to be able to have 99 waiting and ready for when I ding 10 and can immediately turn in that quest and move on to the next sequence. However last night it was only a matter of moments before someone in guild needed something… and the adventurer inside me leapt at the chance to do something “not crafting”. My friend Arkenor needed a run of Haukke Manor, and another group needed a run of Copperbell and thankfully we had the right mix of people to make both happen. I tanked Haukke on my Paladin and another run when smoothly. I have said this before, but I keep having to say it over and over. I love how damned easy and rewarding it is to run lower level content with your friends.

Once the crafting thing was tossed aside I spent most of the rest of the night running content. We moved from Haukke into a random Expert Roulette picking up Cav to add to Ash, myself and Thalen. Once finished there I ran a few trials roulette and a hard roulette… and before I realized it was 9:30 and I was starting to get a bit tired. This is the way an evening can evaporate in Eorzea, with a bunch of chain events that make you wonder where the time went. So sadly I did not make much progress on Botanist, but I am feeling that Sunday I will have another “catch up on television” day downstairs on my laptop and push forward again. At some point I need to run a good deal more content however because I would really like to cap my poetics this week, and I have barely put a dent in them. If I keep running a few roulettes each day, I should be able to do it without much difficulty. The only monkey wrench in this plan is the fact that most of Saturday I will be out of town, leaving me only Sunday to really work on such things. In any case… I had a fun evening with my Free Company and have zero regrets of not making any flower picking progress.

Serious Spelunking

March 11, 2015 by Belghast

Kromog Fell Down

Once more we entered the Blackrock Foundry, and once more we made some progress in our eventual goal of killing Blackhand. Generally speaking on Tuesday nights we try and clear all of our “farmed” content, some of which is less farmed than others. We struggled a bit at Oregorger this week, but managed to get him on what I think was our third attempt. That fight is just frustrating no matter how often you do it. I am not really sure what we were doing differently and if we were breaking boxes in the wrong order, but Oregorger was not going where we expected him to go. Eventually through a combination of luck and perseverance we managed to defeat him, and move on to more interesting fights. Quite honestly other than this rough spot, it was a pretty banner week given that we were down at least one healer the entire night.

Once again I got nothing of any use from the evening which is starting to get frustrating. This is two weeks now without a single upgrade, even after spending plenty of bonus roll tokens. My hope is that eventually there is going to be a week where everything I need drops all at once. It is just frustrating when you can feel the entire raid getting better geared… and you are still stuck at roughly the place you started Blackrock with. Our big accomplishment of the night is that we finally managed to defeat Kromog or Kologarn 2.0 as we tend to refer to him. On the attempt we managed to down him I think I was the only person dead, or at least one of the only. My issue was that I danced around with one of the tanks for a bit as we kept going for the same hand. All told though it was a pretty great night of raiding, and I look forward to making progress on Thogar on Thursday.

Serious Spelunking

While raiding is enjoyable and an important part of my week, it was far from the most important thing on my mind last night. Since I have a level 50 of every role, I have decided to deep headlong into the hole that is crafting in Final Fantasy XIV. Since I am making this my new mission I have decided to take it on in a rather methodical way, and that means focusing on leveling my Disciple of the Land “gathering” professions first to hopefully make feeding materials to the OTHER professions that much easier. If you have been reading my blog you have known that over the last few days I made a very serious push to finish leveling mining. Last night at the beginning of the evening I was what felt like a stones throw away from 50 sitting at 48 and some change. The problem is my evening did not work out exactly how I intended, and one thing or another kept sidetracking me. By raid time I had managed to push through to 49 but had to take a break to beat up orcs and such.

After the raid however I went back to pushing the gathering leves. The 45 leves in Coerthas send you all over that zone, or more importantly in three distinct areas. One of the tricks I figured out is the keep doing the one closest to the leve master, with a hopes of stacking all three of the ones that were further away at the same time… and then going out and completing those together. Each time you complete a leve it resets the ones the master offers. Essentially it took a few trips to the closest leve and one trip to the three furthest and I dinged 50. I have to give huge thanks to Thalen for hanging out and crafting me a full set of level 50 miner gear that I am wearing in the above picture. The best part… is that /visor turns off and on the headlamp. I have to say that a game is amazing if it can even make the crafting gear feel epic.

Lumberjack Time

I wasted no time sitting on my laurels, because I have so much more to level in order to reach my goal of being an “omni crafter”. This morning I started down the path of the botanist, which is essentially the guild of lumberjacks. I have to say though… after playing a Warrior for so long… that axe feels really puny. As of this morning I am sitting at level 5 and have completed the first quest. For this next stretch I am going to try and push through as long as I can stand it on just harvesting material alone, to hopefully allow my level quest allowance to regenerate a bit. Right now I only have 35 allowances, so it took most of the 99 maximum that I was sitting at to go from 30 to 50 mining. That is really my only frustration with this process, is that I don’t really understand why there is a leve allowance in the first place. There have to be better ways to farm gil than to grind leves over and over.

At least with leveling a battle profession, I can rely on dungeons and fates to replace the need for leves. But with crafting of all kinds it feels like you desperately need those to augment the experience you gain through harvesting. My hope is that once I start down the crafting path proper, I can use the Ixal dailies to make some serious headway. The goal right now is to stair step up each of the professions. So the first goal will be to take all of them to fifteen, then start raising them by 5 levels at a time. The hope is to make it so that when I need an item from one profession for the one I am currently working on… I can craft those without much fuss. This is a pretty significant undertaking, but I think I can accomplish it without burning out too badly. Honestly so far with the gathering professions I find them extremely relaxing. You end up hanging out, listening to the amazing music in this game, and clicking sparkly nodes. Compared to tanking… it is a piece of cake!