final fantasy xiv Archives - Page 64 of 82

L is for Loot Piñata

December 11, 2014 by Belghast

Kinder Gentler LFR

Last night we opted to enter the “Looking For Raid” version of Highmaul as a guild, similar to how we did Molten Core, since that made the entire experience so much less chaotic. We brought with us both tanks and a couple of healers, and since we have done the fights on normal now figured we would be able to push through any issues we came along. Oddly enough the LFR tool did not make one of us the leader of the group even through we accounted for 15 of the 25 slots. Instead it chose this shaman healer who’s name was some combination of “Faceroll” and “Ballerina” that I am sure he thought was exceedingly clever when he created the character. I say “he” because the actions and commentary felt like a “dudebro” playing the character.

Moments after we started clearing he started barking orders generally starting off with “alright you fuckfaces”. Moments later however he was gone from the raid. The beautiful thing about doing LFR as a guild is that you can pretty much rapid-fire vote kick someone and have more than enough votes for it to succeed. After that was over, the rest of the run went exceptionally smoothly. I kinda dig being able to act as a force of good in looking for group, getting rid of the toxic players when we see them. What I find amazing is just how willing people were to work within the parameters we set for them. We treated LFR like it was an actual raid, with marking locations to stand in and this made the entire experience go solidly and by the numbers.

L is for Loot Piñata

Maybe it is because we have done the normal version of this place, but god Looking for Raid seemed simple. As in it felt like you could straight up ignore every tactic and just keep mashing buttons until the bosses fell down. All told the actual combat time of the raid took maybe 20 minutes for three bosses. I saw plenty of people looting goodies, so hopefully lots of folks got nice stuff. The only problem I see is that there is little to no reason to do heroics right now. Sure you get 50 Garrison resources for your first heroic of the day, and a bag of gold, but it feels like they really have taken away all of the reason to actually group up for heroics once you are over ilevel 630. Previously all serious players had to do a handful of heroics a week to make sure they were capping out Valor points, but with that gone there is little to no reason to draw well geared players into the fray.

Quite honestly you can hit the LFR requirement of 615 relatively easily through doing the quests in Nagrand with a Dwarven Bunker giving you increased chance of getting blue and purple upgrades. As such I cannot see any reason at all for folks to actually do the heroic grind once the rest of Highmaul has been released. Unless the next part significantly ramps up the difficulty, this is going to be essentially Timeless Isle 2.0 in the form of a raid. Granted I don’t much care about people getting easy gear, in fact I am looking forward to it as I try and gear my army of alts. I loved the Timeless Isle for the ease of catching characters up. That said the heroic experience in this expansion is really good, and while difficult is fun to do with your friends. Maybe they are expecting heroics to be a guild only thing? I have a feeling we are going to see a pass that maybe starts adding in some reasons for doing things, because it feels like they completely ignored the reward part of “risk vs reward”.

Social Engineering

The problem that I can see is soon the queues for heroics will be insanely long, because Blizzard seems to be fundamentally bad at social engineering. I say this because I am playing another game that is exceptionally good at social engineering and making players WANT to run older content. Final Fantasy XIV has this long quest chain that involves giving players non-raiding ways to upgrade their main weapon. It starts with the Relic weapon, and each upgrade bumps up its ilevel and its stats. The most famous bout of social engineering comes into play when you reach the Atma farming step, which involves you going back to every zone in the game and running FATEs until an “Atma of the” item drops. The reason why this is most definitely social engineering is that they purposefully kept the ATMAs from dropping in the zones that were already natural FATE running hotbeds of activity. Thing is it works… there are now players in most every zone running FATEs as they work on the Atma weapon step for their characters.

Similarly they created the Nexus step that involves farming “light” from various activities like doing Hard Modes, Experts, and related large group activity. Additionally they created the concept of “bonus light” which targets certain encounters that have especially long queue times. When one of these bonuses is in place all these players come from out of the woodwork and start running it, I happened into Hard Mode Garuda during one of these periods and it was insane to see just how fast that encounter evaporated. Now with the latest step it involves running various hard mode dungeons until you get a specific item to drop, thus getting tanks and healers…. and everyone else to start queuing for these encounters. I realize that I am being engineered, but I don’t care because it works. It keeps the game thriving and vibrant and keeps the overall queue times low enough to allow me to do whatever content I need to do at the time. I never feel like I am being exploited, because they managed to have just enough of a reward to make the risk worthwhile.

Bel’s Magical Van

December 9, 2014 by Belghast

A Very Bloggy Xmas Day 9

Roughly a month ago my good friend Syl came to me with the idea of her Bloggy Xmas event. I took a stab at a logo, and she finished it off to what we have above. From there I was essentially drafted into the process, and was certain I would be slotted for one of the days. It seems that fate determined that mine would be today. The idea behind the countdown was to have an advent calendar of sorts leading up to Christmas, and apparently in her country it is tradition for all of the little villages to decorate their windows taking on one of the days. I have struggled with what exactly to do for this, but it seems like most of the other participants have decorated their blog with a somewhat personal story. As such I am guessing that is the direction I am taking as well.

Bel’s Magical Van

For quite literally over a decade now, I have had friends that have joked about me and my white panel van full of candy. Because how else could I seem to keep recruiting people into whatever mad adventure I have planned. In fact the guild that I founded is based upon this concept of never openly recruiting… but always recruiting. I have always had this irrational desire to try and collect as many awesome people around me as I can, and as I play games or socialize online… I am always looking for more people to stuff in my van and whisk away into my extended family. That is ultimately what I am building, a big network of extended family for me to play games with, and all joking aside it really isn’t something that I do intentionally. I have this overriding sense that everyone deserves a good home, and when I see someone without one… I tend to try and adopt the strays. I mean there is a reason why until this weekend we had four rescue cats and two rescue ferrets… I have a hard time saying no when any thing needs a good home.

If you want to find the reasons behind why I am the way I am you have to scroll back through my history to my childhood. I was the single child of two very loving parents, or as we in the united states call it an “only child”. To make matters worse we lived out in the country, or at least too far from city to make meeting up with friends a practical occasion. I didn’t have the normal cadre of neighbor kids to run around with, and being a sickly child I spend most of afternoons with Mr Rogers, Electric Company and the Sesame Street gang. I got exceptionally good at entertaining myself a trait that I am thankful for today, but I also longed to have other people to play with. I was more or less raised by my grandmother, as she was my babysitter and companion during my formative years. While she was awesome, she was also busy with the chores around the farm. I can pretty much guarantee however that it is her that taught me to love games. Her default “Idle animation” was sitting at the table playing solitaire, and we also played together absolutely insane amounts of trouble and candy land.

Wanting a Tribe

I remember the most exciting times for me were the times when my cousins would come to visit and I was suddenly surrounded by other kids my age. I remember wanting a baby brother or sister so bad, so I could have someone to play with whenever. I would have been an awesome brother… well pending they were willing to submit to playing whatever game I wanted to play. During my elementary and middle school years, I pretty much spent my weekends “grouped up” with friends at either their house or mine. Instead of one best friend I had two, and it pretty much stayed that way until high school. I’ve always had this strange dichotomy inside of me… I want to be surrounded by people… but when I have them I never quite know what to do with them. I’ve used the term “alone in a crowd” before to describe how it feels. Engaging at the level that I want to engage takes a lot out of me, so I have to take these periods to essentially hibernate and draw strength to engage again.

I’ve always built “tribes” for as long as I can remember. I never just played with one other person… I tried to assemble groups of people to play with. I had an unusual upbringing for being a pretty hardcore geek. The traditional American experience for a 30-40 year old geek is that of being the misfit and being picked on. Since my parents friends kids ended up growing up to become the popular kids, and also as a side effect of growing up in a very small town… I was given a lot more acceptance that I likely would have gotten anywhere else in the world. Folks took my quirks as just “me being me” and pretty much left me alone, and I guess it doesn’t hurt that I am 6’4” and no one really seemed to want to mess with me. In High School I kinda gathered up misfits that needed a home around me, the folks that WERE picked on mercilessly. By my association with them it extended them a small bubble of protection… and I guess I became a tank for the first time. It taught me that I actually liked protecting people, I liked feeling like I was helping my friends.

A Digital Family

When I entered the internet age, all of these instincts and traits that I picked up along the way followed me as well. I found it hard to think of the people I was interacting with as “just pixels”, and in fact I am fundamentally opposed to that line of thinking. When you encounter another person, they have hopes, dreams and aspirations… and we have all arrived online for different reasons. I started sifting through the folks I encountered and trying to keep “the good ones”. When I found someone that needed a home, and wanted to participate in a larger community… I started trying to stuff them in my pocket and carry them with me from that point on. It wasn’t long before I had amassed this large network of people that I wanted to stay in touch with for as long as I could. In my own family, I have never really felt like they understood me. They are extremely loving and nurturing, but I have never fit the mold that they seemed to want to press me into. What I realized years ago is that online I was assembling my own family, the one that does fully understand me… and appreciates the nuance of my character. At this point I have encountered quite literally multiple thousands of other players… and from those I have adopted a fraction… but still a large enough group that this community of contacts is also literally thousands of players. With the transient nature of the internet, folks come and go, but the memories they leave behind is nonetheless important. I feel like it is my job to act as the glue, to try and bind this digital family together. The problem is I am never quite satisfied, and keep meeting awesome and interesting people along the way. I will continue trying to stuff these people into my van and adopt them into my family. I’ve been called many things in my pursuit… the Cruise Director, a Bus Driver, an Ombudsman, I even had one former guildie refer to me as the “Prom Queen” because everyone seemed to know me. At the end of the day I just want to surround myself in a blanket of awesome people to share my game time with, and I feel like that job will never be finished. If you need a good home, and are community minded… chances are I will try and adopt you too.

AggroChat Episode 34

December 7, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Name Great Cat

This is going to be a really rough post to get through, so I am sitting here avoiding writing. That said I need to actually get through this, otherwise I will sit here staring at the empty page all day. Yesterday started off fairly normally, I got up, got showered and went out for breakfast like I have for years. The problem is what happened during the middle of the day pretty much broke my heart. Fifteen years ago this past Thanksgiving weekend, the above cat entered our lives as we rescued her from the cold of my parents barn. There is some confusion about her name, because I originally named her Sasha having always liked the name. My wife however had a living terror of a student named Sasha in her class that year… so the name actually stuck. The only people who ever called her that were the veterinarian and my mother. When we got her, she was tiny and into everything like kittens always are… there was a common refrain of “you little shit” as we cleaned up one mess she made after another. Well the name stuck and she was forever called “Little Shit” from that point on.

She never would have guessed her name was a bad thing however because we said it with the utmost love. She was my baby girl, but she spent as much time being my wife’s baby as she did mine. There were so many nights I fell asleep with her purring loudly on our pillows. She had the most amazing purr that you could literally hear like three rooms away. For most of her life she always wanted to be somewhere near us, as evidenced by the two pictures above. In fact I always tried to make sure she had room to lay down either at my feet or on the sofa near me. You don’t realize how much you have changed your life to fit someone else. She had all sorts of quirks, like while we were getting ready in the morning she would hop in the shower first and get a drink of water while the shower was running. Actually that was only one of two ways she was willing to get a drink, the other being from a bright red cup we left on the bathroom floor. There were many times in the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of that cup banging around, letting me know that I needed to get up and fill it up for her.

Some Rough Times

We have had two boy cats that had thyroid issues, so we were well aware of the tell tale signs. A bit over two years ago we started seeing them in her, so we got her into the vet and had been treating her with a topical cream that I had to smear into her ear morning and night. She was an absolute trooper and stayed still as I “greased” her ears as I referred to it. About one in three cats experience some digestive problems associated with thyroid disease, so when she started having issues with inappropriate elimination… we thought it was all tied to the issues as a whole. It became a nightly task for me to come up and pick up the messes left by her during the day. Frustrating as it might have been, she was worth every bit of the effort. Over the last two weeks however it had gotten noticeably worse. She was spending pretty much all of her time sleeping on the couch, and then barely making it off the couch before having to go potty. Yesterday afternoon we took her into the vet to see if maybe we needed to tweak the dose of thyroid medicine again.

Little shit had always been a waddly cat with a huge belly, and we always attributed it to her just being built “stocky” she reminded us of one of those strong country women, that while they might not win a beautify competition had the sheer presence to get job on the farm done. As she lost weight her belly became more distended, which again we attributed to her odd body shape. However upon seeing it the vet was immediately concerned. Upon taking some X-Rays the news was pretty grim. There was a massive growth in her stomach region pushing in on her bowels and likely causing pain to eat and got to the bathroom as well. With her age there was nothing really surgery wise that they would recommend as the likelihood of recovery was pretty slim. We were left with the extremely hard choice of either taking her home and waiting for her to get worse and die, or letting her go. She had always been a very clean girl, with extremely preferences in her potty habits. She hated a dirty litter box, and there were certain kinds of litter that she absolutely refused to use. I could tell the last year was rough on her, because when she was force to used to bathroom in a bad place there was a look of panic on her face. With the extreme increase over the last two weeks it felt like we were not terribly far from her messing herself in her sleep, and that is something she would not have wanted to happen.

So we made the decision that seemed like it was going to be the best for her. She had struggled with many things over the last few years. She was struggling to move around the house, and we had to install pet stairs on the sofa for her to get up and down easily. She had not slept with us for about a month, spending nearly 24 hours a day sleeping in my chair on the sofa, snuggled into blankets that I am sure smelled like me. When we tried carrying her to bed, she would last for a bit but ultimately hop down and return to the sofa. Cats do an amazing job of hiding what ails them… and I think she was trying to keep away from us from showing how much she hurt. I wish I could have fixed her, made it all better… but I couldn’t this time. Truth is she has probably always had this mass in her belly, and we always thought it was just her unique shape. This might have been the first time she ever had an x-ray… and unfortunately it happened far too late. I wish I could go back in time and have caught this earlier, but I am not really sure how we could have known. All I know is that I lost one of my best friends, and one of the sweetest animals we will likely ever have. Yesterday it felt like my world was falling apart, and I am still not sure if the gravity has really hit me. Laying down last night, as I called for the cats to come to bed… I had to stop myself from yelling for Little Shit. We will miss you baby girl.

AggroChat Episode #34

I am so thankful to the awesome people that I record with. During the day yesterday I was not sure if I could go on that night and record a podcast. Then something happened over twitter. Someone mentioned me stating that they had found the podcast that day and was really enjoying it. Turns out they listened from show 33 to 24… so some 14 hours of our podcast in a row. I have to say hearing that greatly improved my day and gave me that push to keep going last night. I just was not sure if I could be my normally jolly self, and carry the show… so Kodra stepped up and did an excellent job as master of ceremonies. Actually he did a phenomenal job matching pretty much everything that I normally do and then adding his own flourish.

There was much discussion of Final Fantasy XIV as usual with Raven talking about completing her second Novus weapon and beginning a second Nexus grind, and several of us talking about our victory over Ultros and solid attempts on Tier 5 in Binding Coil of Bahamut. I talk World of Warcraft raiding, and looking forward to beginning the Highmaul Raid after missing Thursday and my raids first two boss kills. We talk Heroes of the Storm, since this week they finally saw fit to give Rae an invite. That game is exceptionally fun and better suited for a more casual gamer than League of Legends is. Over the course of the week we have played quite a bit of it and talk about our personal hero preferences and playstyles. Kodra runs a much tighter ship than I seem to, because we actually clocked in at just barely over an hour once editing was finished. Extra special thanks to Kodra for steering the ship while I couldn’t quite muster the oomph to do so.

Angriest Red Ball Revisited

November 25, 2014 by Belghast

Bridge Refresher Course

With all my recent posts about World of Warcraft, you would think that I had switched allegiance entirely, but this is not the truth by any means. Right now it is new and shiny and I am attempting to claw my way to a reasonable foothold of raid preparedness. That said I am still very much playing Final Fantasy XIV, and for the last few weeks we have been pulling together “raid” content on Monday nights. We really want to see the new Ultros fight, but unfortunately Thalen still had yet to do Battle at Big Bridge, so last night we started the evening off knocking that out of the way. It made a rather nice high point to start the evening on since that fight is so amazing. The majority of us are Final Fantasy V fans, so seeing the fight is like watching the bridge fight play out in that game.

The strange thing is that as many times as we had run it, I had never actually tanked it. Not that there is actually anything to tanking the fight. For the tank at least it is as tank and spank as they really come in Final Fantasy XIV. The only challenge was the various adds between the two phases of the boss, and even then it is was only because we have some extremely overgeared dps for the fight that just melted them. While I attempted to hold aggro it was pretty much futile. In any case it knocked that out of the way so that hopefully this week the folks that needed it can catch up on the Hildebrand storyline and get ready for Ultros. I would really rather do that fight for the first time as a guild, so we can have the experience of figuring out the content on the fly.

Angriest Red Ball Revisited

Turn Five of Binding Coil of Bahamut has been looming over our group for some time. I have to admit there has been a sense of fear about it, because in truth it has been content than killed many a static raid team on our server. It is the notorious gatekeeper to turn 2, and there are many folks that have cleared one through four never to actually manage to get in a turn five kill. The fight itself just has this insane array of mechanics that are almost impossible to memorize before going into the fight. Since it had been months for us clearing the first four turns we opted to start with those as a fresher course. Overall it went nice and smooth and we burned through the first few coil instances getting the folks who had not been there realm exploration achievements. I managed to get the Heavy Allagan chestpiece to go with my other two pieces of Allagan gear.

When we downed turn four after a few baubles here and there we decided to use that momentum and push us forward into a couple of attempts at Twintainia the boss of turn five. There is a lot of stuff to focus on during this fight. However we did manage to get to roughly the halfway point in the fight after a couple of attempts. I mark this as pretty damned good progress, and a pretty good night overall for us to down Big Bridge, four turns of coil and make that much progress on five. I feel like as a whole we have way more confidence in regards to our success chances at turn five. It is no longer this looming and scary target that we have not actually experienced. Folks talk about it with so much frustration and reverence, but I feel like we can totally down this. Now after seeing the fight I also feel like I have a far better point of reference for doing my own research in the coming week.

Up Too Late

After our evening of raiding in Final Fantasy XIV, I popped out and got into World of Warcraft in an attempt to find a group to run Auchindoun with. Much like there was a legendary cloak chain in Pandaria, there is a legendary ring one in Warlords. The first phase is actually relatively simple and only actually requires that you run Skyreach and loot and item off the final boss. This nets the player a really nice ilevel 640 ring for there troubles, which is a much needed gear level boost for getting into content. The next steps require you to clear four heroic dungeons, gather up a silly amount of apexis crystals and then complete a solo event of sorts. Last night I was up to the final step in this sequence which requires a trip into Auchindoun to loot an item off the final boss. However there was another player that required one more “core” the step before Auchindoun, so I agreed to run that heroic first before we ran the one I actually needed so that both of us knocked out the final step at the same time.

The end result was that I ran two heroics back to back and did not actually make it to bed until almost 1 am. The other result however is that other than 100 apexis crystals and a solo event, I am really super close to the next step in the ring quest chain. As a result in theory I should be able to knock out the 680 ring before we step foot into Molten Core as a guild tonight. I am really looking at venturing forth into Molten Core, it has been years since I last experienced the raid “for real”. I remember there was a time where a “good clear” took about three hours of my life. I am hoping we can manage to do it in a far shorter time. That said I have prepared myself for the potential of it taking that long if not longer. I know we are going to try and go into it with as many tanks and healers as we can so that we can potentially control the pace of the run. If everyone other than a handful of dps are with us on voice chat… hopefully things will go more smoothly. In any case hopefully at the end of the night I will have a spiffy mount.

Furry Children

I’ve always had a soft spot for animals. In this age of global strife and suffering, I’ve become rather accustomed to it… but the moment that Sarah MacLachlan animal charity video plays on the television… and it is like a sucker punch to the gut. There has never been a time when we have not had several furry children, and each of them is unique and special. This morning I am thankful for all of them that have shared our life. Presently we have four cats, which I think officially qualifies us for “crazy cat lady” status. Our eldest came home with me years ago on a Thanksgiving day, so this time of year is all the more important to me. She is getting up there in age and has many issues but I am so thankful for each year we have with her. In addition to our cats we also have two amazing ferrets, that are both as sweet as can be and are always clamoring for our attention. They both know exactly what it takes to get daddy to play with them, and they are the source of many delays while getting ready in the morning. Animals enrich our lives in ways that I cannot fully account for, and this morning and every morning I am thankful to have them.