final fantasy Archives - Page 2 of 22 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

Crazy Axe

June 26, 2017 by Belghast

As of last night I am now officially at the Stormblood level cap. That said I still have a bunch of content left to run because I know my MSQ is stalled behind at dungeon at the moment…. and then I also know from hearing folks talk about it that there is another trial of some sort after that. I was feeling a little too out of it to go seeking a dungeon group, so instead I focused on finishing the warrior quest line, which gave me a set of gear that I will probably never wear at least cosmetically… and this bizarre axe. As a whole though Stormblood provided me with lots of glamour fodder, including this chest piece that I have become rather fond of. I actually dinged 70 while running the second primal. I decided to do a trials roulette, and next thing I know I am zoning into that fight. The first pull went about as well as you would expect that a modern era primal fight would go. On the second pull however I took a moment to ask folks if there was anything about the fight that they didn’t understand, and answered a bunch of questions. As I was able to do I also hollered out when a few key mechanics were coming up to remind folks about them. Things went off the rails a bit during that second attempt but we managed to hold on and ultimately finished the fight.

The story as a whole has continued to be amazing, but I am finding myself at a loss for screenshots to put in my blog posts that are not insanely spoilery. I find myself trying to snap moments where nothing much is going on that won’t give away any major story beats. I find it interesting how generally speaking I am not that beholden to a story in other games… but in Final Fantasy XIV I am anxious to find out what is going on. I guess part of it is that in a single player story… the experience doesn’t feel real. What I mean by that is it is something that I experience and then once the story has reached its conclusion it is functionally over… at least for another several years until they release a sequel. In an MMO… story sets the stage for what is to come and gives us a glimpse in what we will be doing a few months down the road. The story feels more alive to me because I am going to be living it, and I am going to be adjusting to whatever changes it happens to bring to the stage for a long while. My friends and I are going to be fighting our way through the epic battles that are proposed each time the story leads us some place new. I guess this is why I get into the lore of Destiny as well, because even though the grimoire cards are a crummy system… they give us a glimpse at the future to come and let me start day dreaming about epic adventures that are just over the horizon.

Another thing that happened this weekend was the “launch” of Secret World Legends. Sure they are calling it a head start, but if you are letting in everyone who played the previous game… you are effectively launching it. More than anything I wanted to get in and make sure that all of my stuff transferred just fine, and more importantly that my lifetime subscription did in fact transfer over into lifetime patron status. For those who played the first game… I highly suggest you check out the page on the transfer system so you can claim anything that might be eligible for transfer. I’ve heard that this system is only going to be available through August 31st and there are a bunch of guidelines and fine print to follow to make sure everything copies just fine. I probably need to do some more fiddling to make sure that everything does in fact copy. I had a character of each faction so in theory it should have… but I probably need to go ahead and create those other faction characters so I can double check. The most important item was of course the Csicon alien smiley t-shirt… which I am rocking in the image above. So far I am digging the game changes, but unfortunately it just happened to launch at a really horrible time for me since I am so heavily engaged in Stormblood. I will continue to piddle around and experience the content, and it serves as an awesome “taking a break” game for me right now. We talk a bit about but Secret World Legends and Stormblood on this weekends podcast, which I am embedding below.

Tiny Wings

June 16, 2017 by Belghast

This is likely going to be a super short post because reasons. Last night was an interesting shift from my personal status quo because I guest hosted on the For the Lore podcast. They were recording their yearly E3 multi-episode and for also reasons… @Samodean was forced to miss. So as a result @ZenBuddhist pinged me over twitter to see if I was willing to join him and @LodurZJ as an alternate. In the past I have always really enjoyed guesting on other podcasts in part because it lets me see how exactly everyone else is doing this recording thing. AggroChat as a whole is largely done almost by accident, and it is sometimes nice to see how those who have a clear purpose actually piece together things. It had also been entirely too long since I had done this sort of thing. The only gotcha was their normal recording time is about 1 hour sooner than I could realistically get to the screen and settled in for the night. Thankfully they pushed it back a little bit and I was able to join in. Hopefully once again I did not make too much of an ass of myself. I am not exactly sure what their release schedule is, because in truth the only release schedule I know is our own. However in the near future you should be able to catch me on the first of a two part episode covering E3 2017 on the For the Lore site.

In other news… Stormblood has officially begun… or at least the head start for those who pre-purchased the game. This expansion had some fairly sweeping changes, and when I first logged in it felt like my hotbars were on fire. Many of the buttons that I had slotted were replaced by a shared pool of role specific abilities. So that mean’t things like provoke and stun now exist in that shared tree from which I was able to slot 5 abilities in total. This is ultimately going to lead to some interesting choices because unlike before with cross class abilities… there were way more than five choices from that pool that I wanted access to. I have a feeling we are going to be swapping up to attempt to tailor for specific fights. For example I now seem to have an AOE taunt… which isn’t that important for leveling… but I could absolutely see needing that on specific fights or if you were taking over the add tank on a specific encounter. For the most part Warrior feels the same with the big change being that we lost the 5 stack resource… that I never can remember the name of and instead get the beast gauge. This swap has a bunch of positive benefits to the class as a whole. For example there were many fights where I would need to hold back using Inner Beast for specific mechanics… but this meant there was the opportunity cost of being capped out at 5 stacks of the buff. Now I have a gauge that goes from 10-100… or functionally 10 stacks of my resource meaning that even while holding back an Inner Beast I can also keep building up at least one more attack in reserve. The other amazing quality of life change is I am not sure if this meter actually decays over time… I have been able to hold onto beast charges for way longer than I could have the equivalent stacks before.

The negative of the launch so far is that the Duty instance system seems to be toast. That means there is a point in the main story quest where you simply cannot proceed past. The folks that habitually skip cut scenes seem to be far worse off because it seems to keep them in a bit of a locked state where they can’t interact with NPCs at all. As a pretty rabid cut scene watcher… I did not have this problem but I did absolutely hit the wall already. There are some that are raging against the machine in chat, and others that keep telling them to calm down. There are of course new Jobs to work on and other things to occupy time until this gets fixed. I am absolutely certain someone somewhere is having a really bad day and working as hard as they can to remedy this. In truth we don’t even know if this is a development thing, but could instead be an infrastructure issue with the hosting environment. Whatever the case… folks are getting stalled out but that sort of goes hand in hand with the release of anything. All in all I am happy that my character largely is going to make the transition without massive horrible feeling changes, and that we get to explore a new part of the world. For the moment I am not bothering to glamour back my helm… and apparently have tiny floppy wings instead of bunny ears.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.