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Revenge on Pharo Sirius

August 12, 2014 by Belghast

Robin Williams

This morning is a rough one, more than anything because I don’t quite know what to say but at the same time feel like I need to say something. It is unlikely that anyone was not touched by at least one of the many faces of Robin Williams. You had the coked up version from Mork and Mindy, the family friendly version from Aladdin, the bawdy rapid fire version from Good Morning Vietnam and finally the extremely gifted and serious one as seen in movies like Goodwill Hunting and the Fisher King. There was a Robin Williams for everyone, and he was absolutely adept at switching to just the right version of himself for the role. Throughout the evening last night, folks kept popping onto TeamSpeak and announcing the news with shock that the words themselves were rolling off their lips. In many ways it will be hard to envision a world without him, because he has been such a comedic force of nature my entire life. He was like the tidal forces… just a thing that existed and we were quietly enriched for the presence.

He of course was a very public proponent of gaming, supposedly naming at least two of his children based on game characters. The most famous of these was his daughter Zelda, because he was supposedly “playing a lot of Zelda” at the time. He also struggled with all manner of addictions, so much so that I cannot think of cocaine without thinking of him at least in passing. Brilliance often burns bright by standing far too close to the flame. It is also reported that he struggled with depression, and I know specifically what that feels like. You develop all sorts of coping mechanisms to push away the bad thoughts but they never actually leave you. They are unrelenting in their pursuit of you and constantly gnawing away at the best of days. I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a “cured” state, just “functioning better”. So I choose not necessarily to wallow in the memory of this mans greatness, but instead to salute just how long he managed to chase his demons away before they consumed him. At the same time I wonder just how long I will be able to accomplish the same.

A Room of my Own

On a far lighter note, I thought I would show off my new room in the guild house. Granted I don’t have much of anything in it yet, and primarily the things that I do have, I purchased because they were cheap. It just felt wrong to own a private room but not have anything in it. Tam has this glorious room with all sorts of rare items that he has crafted through goldsmithing, but since I have avoided crafting like the plague in this game I have very little to show myself. The room was purchased with my recent wealth generated by the sale of some Materia that I got through questing. Two of them sold for 100,000 gil a piece and the third sold for 500,000 gil giving me some money finally to play around with. The private room in the guild house costs 300,000 gil but unlike other games there are no upkeep mechanics. So even though it is crazy expensive to get housing, it is at least a one time expense.

At some point I need to dip my toes into the crafting system, because it seems like all of the really cool housing stuff is crafted. Unlike some games there really doesn’t seem to be a ready made drop component here. Like in EQ2 you could go clear specific dungeons and walk away with pieces of furniture or statues, but here you walk away with rare crafting materials. In fact this has been the point of much disappointment as the last several bosses of most of the hard mode content drops nothing but crafting mats that are then turned into some of the best in slot items. This was part of my major disappointment the first time playing the game, that nothing ever really dropped interesting gear out in the world. I think maybe if I learned to appreciate the crafting system I would “grok” why I should care about getting that high quality Pieste Skin.

Revenge on Pharo Sirius

Last night for me was mostly a night to catch up on the main storyline quest. There are a number of trials that are unlocked post 50 through continuing down the main storyline. Each time they add a new patch they add new storyline content, and at the not so subtle constant nudging of Tam I worked my way to getting caught up on the King Moggle Mog encounter, which is the first of these new trials you get to. The problem is it causes you to run a series of dungeons and guildhests that no one actually wants to run ever. As a result I had to queue for Sunken Temple of Qarn, aka the dungeon with the bees that one-shot unsuspecting players. Overall the dungeon went extremely smoothly in part because as a Dragoon I could sit on the bees and interrupt them as soon as they went to cast the final sting spell. After this I had to run through a couple of guildhests with amazing names “Hero in a Half Shell” and “More than a Feeler”. The best thing about FATEs and Guildhests are the awesome puns.

After I finished my guildhests we decided to go off and seek revenge on Pharo Sirius. I guess at some point after patch 2.1 my friends had tried coming into here and gotten absolutely wrecked. So it has been both revered and feared since, and they wanted to get revenge. At this point we have significantly better gear, as at that time none of us had our relics and at this point most of us also have a good deal of gear to back said relics up. While there were some extremely tricky parts, I have to say overall the dungeon went pretty smoothly. They remembered enough of the pitfalls from before to keep us from getting hung up on them again, yet the boss encounters were still fresh enough that we had to do a good deal of thinking on our feet. We beat the dungeon with plenty of time still left on the timer, whereas the first time they were here they hit their 90 minutes and simply ran out of time to continue trying.

Mammets of Halatali

After clearing up our revenge issues with Pharo Sirius we opted to move on to Halatali Hard Mode. Essentially we have been working our way through unlocking the various dungeons so that each of us can begin doing Hard Mode roulette in the duty finder. Similarly we have a whole slew of trials to unlock before we can do those as well. As of last night I am missing Hard Mode Stone Vigil, Hard Mode Haukke Manor and Lost City of Amdapor before I can do the hard mode roulettes, and I think Tam and Ashgar are just down to two of those. The tentative plan is to run the missing ones tonight, and if not I can always directly queue for whatever ones I happen to be missing. I would just rather experience the new content as a guild than with a bunch of random strangers. Although I doubt we will have enough people to actually do the trials at any point soon, so I probably will go ahead and queue for Moggle Mog and Battle at the Big Bridge to get through those trials so that I can move on in the storyline.

Just like the other hard modes, it seems things have changed since we last were here. After working so hard to clear out the dungeon the first time, it seems as though a series of “friendly” gladiators have taken up residence in the dungeon and are prepared to challenge us to a series of difficult encounters. I say friendly in quotes because each time you get near one of them they seem to heckle you with random sayings. The whole dungeon reminds me a bit of the Crusaders Coliseum in World of Warcraft, and in fight you end up pushing your way through a bit of trash before coming up against another big boss encounter. There were some extremely interesting mechanics, and in a few places we took some deaths… but managed to spring back and figure out the “thing” we needed to learn to defeat whatever horrible attack they were throwing at us. As a whole I feel like this could be a dungeon run extremely quickly now that we know the mechanics. All in all it was a pretty great night, and I managed to catch up on the storyline… and hopefully tonight we can unlock the rest of the dungeons. I still have yet to set foot in Crystal Tower, but if all else falls through I might do that.

#FFXIV

Crafting Gae Bolg

August 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Cleaning

With the return to school rapidly approaching, this weekend we engaged in what has become a ritual of ours… the semi annual back to school deep cleaning. With all of the travel over the last several summers our lives have become about trying to just keep moving forward. As a result the house keeping falls a bit by the wayside. I am adept at picking up and vacuuming but when it comes to actually deep cleaning a room, I lack the attention to detail that my wife has. So yesterday we decided that we would devote a good chunk of the morning to getting a bunch of things done that needed to be done. The above image is part of the load we ended up taking to goodwill that had been sitting around our house as clutter.

For me I mostly did the brute force cleaning, and the gathering and relocation of objects. Once the brute force pass was done my wife would come in and do the fine detail work with chemicals and such since my lungs can’t really handle that sort of thing. We worked together as a team and the house looks great as a result. We still have a bit more laundry to finish up tonight, but overall the house is ready to go into the school year. Personally I don’t so much care, but the cluttered house is a major stressor for my wife, and anything I can do to help her transition back into the school year to go more smoothly I am willing to do. Over the next few days I know she will have several other things that need to get created or shopping trips that need be made all in the name of “back to school”.

This time of year is almost like Christmas for a teacher, but for whatever reason this year the back to school sections of stores have been pretty puny. My wife as going through her past blog posts from previous years, and during this time she was constantly finding neat things to use in her classroom. This year there has been nothing. We did make a mad dash out to Office Depot yesterday afternoon to pretend we didn’t know each other and buy two separate bundles of 3 magnetic white board erasers each. Once upon a time Office Depot used to let teachers buy more than the limit of sale items like that, but as a whole that store has really gone to shit. If it was not the option we happened to have in town, we would likely never actually go to it. They used to be extremely supportive of educators, but lately they have really screwed with their appreciation programs to the point where it simply isn’t worth the hassle and instead we just go to staples when given the option.

Errands for a Smith

My gaming yesterday was largely about trying to play catch up and get attunements knocked out of the way. For the last couple of nights I had been hoping to catch up with Warenwolf so that he could attune the needed Materia to both my Lancer and Archer weapons for their respective relics. The relic weapon quest is something akin to the epic weapon quest from Everquest and Everquest 2, the primary difference being that now you can complete most of it through the duty finder. The first step in the process is to craft a base weapon that Geralt the smith will improve into the relic weapon. There are several ways you can go about this, the intended way is to farm Wanderers Palace for an item component, and then have a crafter of that type take it and some rare metals to craft together a weapon for you. The more realistic way is to simply watch the market boards for someone who has already crafted it.

After dumping all of my free money into the guild house, I had to play catch up and finally Friday evening I managed to get enough gil together to be able to purchase the base weapon. The biggest frustration I had is that you do not need a high quality weapon, as the conversion to the relic weapon will ultimately destroy the base item in the process. However there seemed to be nothing on the market but high quality weapons, which demand a premium. The next step is to take this weapon and fuse two materia of a specific type to it. After that you bring it back to Geralt and he begins sending you on various other tasks. The first of which is to defeat the Dhorne Chimaera in Coethas Highlands. Both myself and Rae were working through this quest at the same time so we tag teamed all of the steps.

The Chimaera went pretty smoothly and was much easier than I remembered when we did it as a guild. We turned in once again at the smith and he sent us into Amdapor Keep to retrieve some rare tome. This group was a bit of a frustration as it was lead by a gladiator who had apparently not tanked the zone since release. Once upon a time you could rush to the first bosses gate and skip all of the trash in the process. He tried this twice and we failed twice, and then from that point on he was pissy the entire run. This guy really is one of the first jerks that I have encountered in the game so far, however we kept our heads down and finished the dungeon without much issue. After a quick turn in at the smith again we were off into Coerthas Highlands to “temper” the unfinished weapon through combat where you have to kill eight of three different types of mobs.

Crafting Gae Bolg

ffxiv 2014-08-10 21-32-31-504

After the weapon tempering phase it is on to do yet another world boss battle, this time Hydra which is located in as a sub dungeon in Halatali. This fight went far faster and easier than I remembered as well so I was starting to feel excited that we might just wrap this up in a single night. After turning in again it begins the hardest part of the quest where you have to defeat each of the hard mode primal encounters starting with Ifrit. Rae and I were up to the challenge so we queued together and hoped for a quick run. It turns out that when you queue as two dps it actually goes pretty quickly since the game tends to favor prebuilt chunks of parties over singlets. When I was running these as my Warrior it felt like I was absolutely carried to my Bravura weapon. It might be a side effect of the fact that Sunday is rarely a great day for random grouping, or we might just have gotten unlucky but each and every primal fight we encountered last night was a struggle to get through.

Ifrit for the most part went smoothly enough, taking us a couple of attempts to get him down. Garuda on the other hand was a nightmare. We had a pair of tanks that didn’t really know what they were doing and they were from the same guild. The better geared of the two tanks was oddly enough less experienced. It turns out that for roughly 200 hunt emblems you can get a full level 90 set of relic lookalike gear, and that is what both of these guys were wearing. We wiped mercilessly and this scholar in the group was getting pretty pissy. I mean I get being frustrated, but instead of trying to teach the players what needed to happen in the encounter they just wanted to rant and rage. Rae stepped up to the plate and explained the encounters and after we got a three stack of the echo buff we managed to push through it.

Titan is without a doubt the most difficult of the hard mode primal encounters, and this time it was no different. Once again we did not experience the carry factor that I had when I was running up my warrior. Everyone in the party seemed to be similarly or lesser geared than the two of us. Lots of bad things kept happening including the second healer just standing in stuff constantly and dying early. On the attempt where we beat it, all of us died to various effects and a group of four players… a Scholar, a Monk, a Gladiator and a Warrior managed to push Titan down the last quarter of his health winning us the battle. I wish I could have given each and every one of them a player commendation because wow… they really were badasses.

Thankfully during this entire process I managed to get enough “bookrocks” to not only craft the weapon Gae Bolg but immediately turn around and upgrade it to the ilevel 90 version as well. Early in the day I had decided to queue for one of the hardmodes and while we made it through just fine… I felt like I was pulling down the party because my Dragoon did not have his relic weapon. Now that I have it I feel like I can queue for the harder dungeons with more confidence. As part of the whole running around yesterday, both Rae and I attuned ourselves for Crystal Tower, which is as Tam explained it “Baby’s First Raid”. I am hoping to run that tonight and maybe get some more upgrades, but thanks to the spiffy weapon I picked up I am no longer quite so worried about dragging down the team.

#FFXIV #Relic

Belghast the Healer

August 7, 2014August 7, 2014 by Belghast

Lack of Rundowns

Over the last few days the whole post rundown concept has simply not been sustainable. As I said yesterday I have had a whole bunch of technical issues with my two primary machines, leading me to be super late with my blog post. As a result the whole rundown thing just hasn’t been in the radar. At this point since I am having to edit them back in later, I am wondering if it really is sustainable for me to keep doing. My morning blogging ritual gives me thirty minutes to an hour of time to work in a blog post. The verification and retrieval of the links takes almost that long as well because ultimately I end up reading the posts as I go. So on the week days I simply do not have enough time to keep up the practice.

The first few days I simply edited the list in at work over lunch, but the problem is my work world has gotten significantly busier as well. All of this frustrates me since I want to find a way to showcase all of the awesome posts other than my ubiquitous retweets. What I really want to showcase is the fact that out of the 45 or so participants… 35 of those have not missed a single day. Then we have another batch that is also awesome of bloggers who started late but have been faithful ever since. My biggest hope is that this spirit of community and shared purpose extends past the month. I know the Newbie Blogger Initiative as it has run on, has gotten to be that way… in that I am still in regular contact with a lot of the people I mentored during the month. I posted awhile back about the lack of community out here in the non-game-specific space… but hopefully we are changing that one blog at a time.

Running for Grand Prize

Began Late but Not Missed a Day Since

Belghast the Healer

Yesterday I managed to get to level 16 on my conjurer, the required level to start the Duty Roulette process. Now you have to realize that I have not really healed anything in years, at least not a dungeon. Probably the last time I regularly healed was during the Burning Crusade on my Paladin in World of Warcraft. That was roughly seven years ago, and it is a role that I tend to shy away from. The reasoning is my very first MMO experience was as a Cleric in Everquest, and it pretty much burned me on the role from that point out. That said I like to always have at least a healing option in my stable of alts, and since I now have every possible role other than healer… I figured it was time to do something about that. So I channeled all of my bravery and queued for the Duty Roulette… there is honestly something about that name that is so much more fitting than “finder”. When you hit the button you really are taking a huge chance on what exactly you are going to get in the process.

Thankfully for my very first dungeon I got an amazing group. I seriously probably could not have assembled a better “starter” dungeon group than I ended up with. We had dps that never pulled aggro, and a tank that managed to pick up every single add without fail. There was never a point at which I drew healing aggro on anything, and I literally did not have to heal anyone other than the main tank. In the back of my mind I knew this was a rarity as far as random dungeon groups went, but I was thankful to have it as my “breaking in” period. For the most part everything went smoothly and we made it to the end of Tam-Tara Deep Croft in what felt like record time… without skipping any content in the process. I was thinking to myself that yeah, I could maybe do this healing thing.

Reality Sets In

So if I got the idyllic situation for my first run, my second run was the absolute worst possible situation. We get started and the tank is the only one of us not communicating at all. Like people tend to be pretty friendly and I open every dungeon run with a simple “Hey Folks, How Goes It?”, which usually starts up some chatter as we do the dungeon run. The tank was completely silent, and sat there for a few minutes and then suddenly lurched forward without warning and pulled. My immediate thought was console player, since they tend not to respond to anything… ever… or if they do they respond in very short single character replies. It was a gladiator tank and he proceeded to start beating on a single target, and ignoring everything else in the pack. The moment I cast a single heal it all magnetized to me and I essentially became the main tank at that point. Problem was that the target he was on… he wasn’t really tanking either and the first time a dps started attacking it they would pull it off of him.

After a few pulls like this the tank proceeded to AFK, at which point the group kicked him and we cleared the way to the first boss without a tank at all. It was me, a thaumaturge and a pugilist and I healed through the damage. When we got another tank it this one was wearing most of the relic armor set, so my hope was that she would do all of the things that the other tank wasn’t. Turned out that she was an extremely competent tank and the rest of the run went smoothly. By the time group three had rolled around I was starting to feel my wheaties, and thought I could take on anything. I didn’t really struggle last night until I encountered my first group wanting to use weird tactics at the expense of the healer. In Halatali on the final boss, there are these adds that need to be killed before they get to the fire in the center of the room. If you don’t catch one it does an AOE burst on the entire party. My group ignored these completely and as a result I had to heal through constant AOE burst damage… Medica was my friend.

More Chill Than Tanking

The major reality check that I was not quite prepared for was the fact that it is so much more relaxing to heal than to tank. Granted that might just be a me thing, but I feel like I am constantly having to watch everything and make sure I have aggro on it all as I play a game of “bejeweled” making sure all of the gems are bright orange squares. Healing on the other hand is more like playing whack a mole, and that invokes so much less stress. I have to make sure I am not standing in shit, and then I have to make sure all of the bars are full. That’s it, that is my only focus and I feel like I can relax considerably. Sure there are moments where you have to work hard to top everyone off, but that isn’t “every single pull” where I feel like as a tank you are constantly struggling to maintain threat over your party. At this point of course I have only healed the first few instances which admittedly are much easier than the ones to come, so we will see if I change my opinion significantly as I go.

The long and short is that I am embracing this new role and enjoying myself. In the video at the beginning of this block I heal three different dungeons and all of the groups go relatively smoothly. I am glad that my party cannot hear my stream of consciousness commentary, because it would likely piss a lot of them off. Ashgar was talking about getting commendations so much faster as a healer, and I can see that to some extent. During one of the dungeon runs I got three commendations, meaning that I got every one available. However there are multiple dungeons I have walked out of without a single one, which is something that is super rare for me as a DPS. I feel like tanking is the flashy job that everyone appreciates… not dying is significantly less tangible. As a tank I have always appreciated my healers, because they are the lifeline that allows me to do the batshit crazy things I do. I feel like there isn’t as much appreciate for healers from the general public. You only notice the healers when they are doing a poor job.

Writing Prompts

I’ve been stressed and busy the last few days and as a result I have not added any new prompts to the stack. However as I have seen a few people dipping into them I thought I should add a few more to the pile.

What is the most thankless job in gaming? I am trying to keep this broad on purpose because I am not meaning the holy trinity. There are so many roles from ore farmer, to sniper that are played in various games. What one gets the least credit?
What is your favorite appearance item or set of items? Everyone has something that they keep in their inventory just because they love the look of it. What is yours?
What does MMO mean to you? This term gets used broadly, but doesn’t really have a firm definition. What does it mean to you and where do you draw the line between traditional online games.

#Blaugust #FFXIV #Conjurer

Lalafellication

August 5, 2014 by Belghast

Blaugust is About Blogging

Earlier I had most of a blog post finished when my system took a dive on me. Nothing appears to be recoverable so you are going to get my rapid fire version. It seems that too many people are getting hung up on the notion of daily blogging. Yes I am having a contest and giving away prizes, and yes this entire thing started as me challenging people to take the daily blogging routine I do. That said more importantly, Blaugust is about Blogging and doing so regularly. If you normally post once a week and you begin posting three times a week thanks to this initiative, then I consider it more than successful.

If you don’t feel you can do the daily blogging thing, then alter it to fit your needs. There are a few people who have ramped up their posting in the spirit of Blaugust, and that is awesome. I feel like posting on a schedule is a valuable thing, and if you can’t make seven days a week… try five and if that is even too much then try three. The hope is that you will develop a routine that becomes far harder to break than individual one off postings. I went through huge lapses in my blog before I adopted the daily stance, and I pretty much started this without much ramp up. It was a struggle at first but over time it became significantly easier and now I can crank out a post about almost anything. Find what works for you, and stick with it.

I plan on editing back in a list of the day four blogs.

Hitbox Sorta Fixed

A few days ago I posted railing about the various shortcomings of the hitbox live streaming service, and since then they have attempted to fix a few things. Previously I had used twitch to back up my live stream to youtube, making it significantly easier to share and embed in blog posts. When I switched over too hitbox I thought things were going to work similarly. Unfortunately the entire time I have used hitbox the export to youtube process has been broken. This week they seem to have fixed it with a few limitations that make it damned near useless to me. Yesterday I tried to export all of the videos that were hanging out on my hitbox page in limbo and out of the whole batch only two made it there. The two videos were in the 20 to 30 minute range, and anything longer failed.

I guess this means that unlike twitch that can export up to two hours of video to youtube, hitbox is going to limit the users to only 30 minutes at a time? For me at least this makes the feature meaningless, and since I still cannot download the videos I have already recorded it means my various series on youtube have glaring holes as I number things sequentially. The only positive is that you can apparently embed video directly in your posts now, so here is hoping that actually works. I am wondering if trying to embed it in live writer is what ultimately crashed my system earlier, so I am going to not test the waters until I have finished today’s blog post. In any case I still like hitbox for the fact that there is no stream delay, and it makes having a conversation much easier. The problem is with the fact that I now have to record the video locally and manually upload to youtube, it has severely soured my streaming of late.

Lalafellication

Last night I took the plunge and did something I had been considering for a few weeks. As part of the preorder process I had a vial of Fantasia sitting in my inventory. This allows you to re-edit your appearance, and in practice change your race and even gender in the process. While I liked the look of Belghast the Highlander, I had long wished I had embraced the adorable and went Lalafell. I think I only made it as far as I did in Wildstar because I thought the Chua I was playing was adorable. So last night I took the plunge and you can now see the end results. So far I have no regrets.

I ran a few instances last night and everything about combat is now cute. It did take some getting used to the difference in perspective, and it may have caused me to step in some bad stuff that I thought I was well clear of. All things considered I really like the decision I made because now I can take adorable pictures everywhere I go, and participate in the ever popular “if I fits, I sits” meme. Everything I do seems cute and harmless, even when I do a dragoon jump into things. I am a fan and I am sure it will make my adventures far more memorable.

Completely Broke But Happy

The other big thing that happened last night is that all of us pooled our money together and bought a small house in The Mists, the housing zone for Limsa Lominsa. Basically it was a zone of compromise in that a few of us preferred Gridania and others preferred Uldah, but everyone was pretty amiable too the notion of the Limsa housing. The other huge benefit is that we found absolute prime real estate in the third housing ward. We are guessing that the house must have been repossessed because it is smack dab in the middle of the zone with a Market Board and Summoning Bell steps outside of our front lawn. We don’t have a lot in the house but we did manage to pick up a Chocobo Stable, Aetherite Shard and a Mailbox allowing us to cheaply port from anywhere in the world to our house. Now I will have to begin the grind to try and get the 300k gil needed to buy my personal room.

This whole experience highlights what I have been saying about the server community on Cactuar. Within moments of purchasing the house and getting the basics configured we were swarmed by our neighbors welcoming us to the neighborhood. It seems they were super happy to see the house occupied and we now have a few friends in the houses surrounding us. The guild that was visiting in the picture lived in a huge house above us, and apparently since this house went dormant they were no longer able to jump down through our plot, because they were blocked by the building bounding box. They were extremely appreciate of once again having a fast route to the market boards. Later in the night we had some other neighbors welcome us, and it is this sort of interaction that I am valuing the most about the server. This is the first time in a long time I have felt like I was part of a larger community. Final Fantasy truly is a special game, and I hope especially as more people return to it we can set down some permanent roots here.

#FinalFantasyXIV #HitBox #Blaugust