four job fiesta Archives - Page 3 of 3

Dabbling with Danger

At work there are a bunch of us who have at one point or another played Magic: The Gathering. I don’t play the game regularly, because I simply do not have the time to commit to going to a shop regularly to play. However I still love playing the game, and it is wrapped up in so much nostalgia for me. My first starter deck was from unlimited, and I dabbled a bit here and there through Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and started getting serious about the time revised came out. I played super actively until the launch of Ice Age and then for one reason or another got out of it. At that point I was really into the World of Darkness games, and was doing far more pen and paper than magic… also I started college and seemed to have far less disposable money.

I flirted with the game again my Senior year, because there was this great culture at the local game shop. I came in at the tail end of Mirage, played through Visions and was super involved with Weatherlight… probably my favorite expansion to date. When I left college I also left the community I liked hanging out with an playing magic regularly, so I stopped playing again. Since then I have picked up the occasional pack of cards to see what was new, but never really got involved with the game again. That was until I found out that we had a bunch of former magic players at work, and I thought it would be awesome to foster a sort of lunchtime M:TG group. Yesterday I got to break this awesome reaper miniature again, as I tutored my friend Rae through her first game of Magic. This could end in madness, but my hopes is that we can just develop a casual magic culture to hang out and enjoy.

The Ancient Library

Last night while waiting on the pizza to arrive and Elder Scrolls Online to patch, I decided to attempt to play some more Final Fantasy 5. I had a near mishap where I thought for a moment I had lost my saved game and had to revert back to a period of time when I was still in white mage hell. However that was not the case, and I managed to restore back and get to where I should have been. I kinda went crazy at one point and ground my way to 19… which means that in order to be safe for the Ancient Library I needed to be at least 21. So most of the time waiting on the Pizza was spent grinding aimlessly trying to get the last two levels so I could start my quest proper. You might ask why I need to be 21?

If you enter the Library of Ancients, there are various creatures that can cast the dreaded Level 5 Death spell. This will target any character with a level that is a multiple of 5, aka ending in 5 or 0 and pretty much instant kill them. This means in order to be safe you have to enter the library at something OTHER than that. Now if you have a Blue Mage, you want to de-synchronize your party so that you have exactly one party member at a “5” level so you can learn it. Both fortunately and unfortunately I do not have one so I just needed to be safe as I finished the library. The above monster is Byblos the guardian of the library, and I found him pretty easy considering I had ground to a much higher level than you normally need for the encounter. Most people natively get here around 15, so at 21 I was significantly higher.

Goodbye Ship, Hello Chocobo

Final Fantasy 5 is a story about destroying modes of transportation and then curiously finding a new one to replace them. After the library you find new information that allows the fire-powered-ship to start moving again without the power of the fire crystal. Unfortunately as you move to your next destination you encounter an earthquake and the fire-powered-ship gets sucked into a giant whirlpool. Conveniently you just happen to be on an island that just happens to have a Black Chocobo Forest. I know from lore that these are Black Chocobo, but I will be damned if this one is not pink… so you pilot your Pink Chocobo around the world visiting all the destinations that you missed and picking up any gear or spells that you might need.

Let There Be Rangers

The big takeaway from the encounter with the Pink Chocobo, is that it had the last two fire crystal jobs stuck in its gullet. One of which was the Ranger job that I had been waiting patiently for. This means from this point out I must have a White Mage, Mystic Knight and Ranger in the party at all times. I opted to shift Faris and Galuf to rangers in order to teach them the Rapid Fire ability as soon as I could. Basically you enter a period where you can reach most of the world so it is a great time to finish up anything you left unfinished. I headed up to Istory and went ahead and defeated Ramuh for example. Since I do not have a summoner in my party, this was a completely optional step… but Ramuh is generally my favorite of the espers so I figured I would go ahead and fight him.

Once finished messing around the room I proceeded with opening the way to the Tower of Ruin. The desert area is one of my least favorite, mostly because the sandworm fight is a pain in the butt. Considering my party composition, it was not really technically difficult, just annoying in that the Sandworm jumps between one of three holes on the screen. You don’t target the worm itself, but instead the hole it came out of, this means that more often than not you can target a hole and it might have moved before the attack lands. With the white mage, I was able to heal through anything the worm could throw at me, and it was simply a matter of wearing it down. Mostly this just meant that my rangers could not benefit from their !Aim ability, as it took way too long for it to actually resolve the damage.

Airship Go!

Once you complete the Tower of Ruin you get rewarded with access to the airship, and find out that your fire-powered-ship didn’t get destroyed, but instead fell into a chamber underneath crescent isle. Now you have this really awesome base that you can launch either the fire-powered-ship or airship out of. You end up faffing about running several mini missions all in the effort of trying to teach your airship how to flight higher to reach the earth shrine that has been elevated up into the air by the power of yet another crystal draining… and ultimately crystal destroying machine. We are nearing the sequence of events that I hate each time I play this game.

The Earth Shrine is guarded by four missile launchers and the extremely frustrating boss Soul Cannon. This is the point at which I stopped playing for the night. I made an attempt at the missile launcher fights, and while I managed to get through one of them… I didn’t back out and save like I should have. The big problem with the fights are the “rocket punch” attacks that cause your characters to go confused, and the Rocket Launcher that is an insanely nasty percentage based attack. Thing is if I can get enough time to Spellblade, the Rocket Launchers drop fast but I seem to spend my entire time trying to heal up and un-confuse my party. If I am struggling with the Rocket Launchers I have having trouble fathoming just how bad the Soul Cannon encounter will be. I am thinking this might be time to grind again and get a level advantage.

Being 22 has allowed me to just steamroll the encounters leading up to this one, but that level gap has closed on me. So I am thinking I will spend some time over the weekend watching TV and grinding away to build back up a buffer. Additionally I would really like it if most of my characters had Rapidfire as an option for the Soul Cannon encounter. I think I got through it during last years Four Job Fiesta by double casting lightning attacks, so if I can get two Mystic Knights with Rapidfire I might be able to do the same kind of trickery. Spellblade is a super powerful ability, but it sucks in that it takes one turn to cast in which you essentially do nothing. The Soul Cannon sequence is one of the big hurdles that most players get hung up on, so I don’t feel too bad that I am having to rethink my strategy before moving forward. I am sure with the Black Mage/Red Mage combo Kodra was able to just absolutely destroy it. What I really need is a bunch of Ribbons, but I think at this point in the game I only have access to the one I have.

#FF5 #FinalFantasy #MagicTheGathering #MTG

Today I am swapping things up a bit with my Steampowered Sunday post. Originally the goal of this column was to force myself to play some games that were sitting in my steam backlog… which is huge. However over time this has mutated a bit into “bel plays a game and reviews it”. Today we are going to see some further mutation of this as I write about some madness that I allowed myself to get involved with along with my Aggrochat podcast co-hosts Kodra and Ashgar as well as occasional fill-in host Tam. For some time Ashgar has participated in the Four Job Fiesta charity event that now helps out the Child’s Play charity. The goal of this is to play through the epic game Final Fantasy 5 using a fixed set of jobs.

For those not familiar with Final Fantasy 5, it was a 16 bit era title that allowed you to choose what classes a fixed set of 4 characters would be by assigning them jobs. While in the job they gained abilities that could then carry over into other jobs. This became a min-maxers dream as you could make some extremely broken combinations. As a result for years players have done various wierd combinations of this game for fun, and the Four Job Fiesta capitalized on this and turned it into a grand charity event. For awhile Ash has wanted to do an internal draft of this game, where four of us get together and draft out a viable party made of of the different available jobs. As a result each player has to make some compromises to determine what they want to go after first.

To facilitate this Ash decided to set up a card deck game using the amazing Google hangout app Roll 20. He laid out the various sprites for the characters in rows representing the Wind Crystal, Water Crystal, Fire Crystal and Earth Crystal… adding the Freelancer as an optional job for the Earth Crystal given that specific one only has four options. So again for those not as deeply familiar with the title as it seems to be among our little circle of mumble users… the setup looks something like this.

The Job Options

Wind Crystal

Knight
Monk
Thief
Black Mage
White Mage
Blue Mage

Water Crystal

Red Mage
Time Mage
Summoner
Beserker
Mystic Knight
Mime

Fire Crystal

Beastmaster
Geomancer
Ninja
Ranger
Bard

Earth Crystal

Dragoon
Dancer
Samurai
Chemist
Freelancer

The Draft

The rules of the game that we are playing under is that each player must always have one of a given job, and from the moment you get your crystals… every character must have a job. There are alternate rulesets where you can play with freelancer until you get all four jobs available, but we are playing with the more pure ruleset. This as always means that some of the parties will have a much easier time than others. Whoever gets stuck with Thief and White Mage will be struggling, since both of them have issues early game, and whoever has the Black Mage will have a supremely easy time rolling over everything in their way. We opted to go with a draft order that minimized the advantage of being first, and the disadvantage of being last… that looks a little something like this.

ABCD | DCBA | BDAC | CADB

We decided to roll a 20 sided die in the Roll20 addon to get started and pick the order. Ashgar using his dice hacking abilities rolled an 18, Tam rolled an 8, Kodra rolled a 5… and I rolled a very lowly and painful 2. Meaning that in the above scenario Player A would be Ashgar, B would be Tam, C would be Kodra and I got stuck bringing up the rear with D. However due to the order of the draft I feel like maybe I had a slight advantage. Of course the Black Mage was gone by the time it got around to me, but I still had plenty of really good things to pick from, considering in this draft I got to make 2 picks back to back. When all was said and done our party compositions looked like this.

Belghast – White Mage, Mystic Knight, Ranger, Samurai

Ashgar – Blue Mage, Summoner, Beastmaster, Dancer

Kodra – Black Mage, Red Mage, Bard, Chemist

Tam – Thief, Time Mage, Ninja, Dragoon

This surprisingly left the Knight completely untouched, which is an extremely good early game starter. Not unsurprisingly no one picked the Berserker or Mime, or the Geomancer. However I think we were all somewhat shocked that no one at all picked up the Freelancer, which ultimately ends up being one of the best options since they can be super customized. I think overall each of us had a plan in the works, namely mine involved using Ranger to feed my Samurai. Ash seems to like Blue Mage and Beastmaster which are super fiddly combinations… but he is methodical enough to make them work amazingly. Kodra of course went for the power combo of Black Mage/Red Mage which will mean he has an extremely easy play through. Tam went with a super focused build of being able to feed the Ninja and Dragoon, but will have the roughest start of all of us… since you cannot get thieves a weapon in the first town.

Reality Setting In

It was really during the first “post job” boss encounter that the reality of my choices set in. I wanted to go for a very melee party, which meant I needed some extremely strong healing. There is no stronger healer in Final Fantasy 5 than the White Mage, so it seemed like a no brainer pick. However I did not really “grok” the reality of trying to play through with ONLY white mages up through the water crystal. Karlaboss aka the fight above is the moment it really set in what I had laid out in front of me, as I slowly dinked away at 650 hp… 10 damage at a time. Granted there was no way in hell he was going to kill me… but the entire process is just slow and tedious.

I made it through to the ship graveyard where finally I could start to grind away at the mobs. My white mage party is uniquely suited for combating the undead, since this flavor of FF allows for you to case cure on the undead which becomes an offensive spell. I made an early mistake in that I tried to podcast while playing this game, and wound up running out of mana and dying horribly. However I reloaded from an earlier save state after we finished the podcast and continued on the journey. I opted to grind my way to 10 on the undead hoping that would give me enough of a buffer to get through the next few fights before I finally get the water crystal and can make a party full of mystic knights. Granted I will still have to keep one player a white mage, but that should work just fine given I will still need some healing.

White Mage Hell

The boss at the end of the ship graveyard was a complete pushover. Generally speaking this is a pretty rough time for most parties considering she starts out living and turns undead a few rounds into the fight. The undead version has the nasty added issue of poisoning players each time she hits them. This quickly gets out of control for most parties, however with an army of white mages I just pushed forward nuking the hell out of her with cure. It took two rounds of this after she turned undead to finish her off. I calmly cured the poison and moved on. However as easy as this fight was, the next one turned out to be absolutely brutal.

As I climbed the north mountain to get to the wounded dragon Hiryuu, I started to question if I should have ground higher than ten in the ship graveyard. I simply could not do crap against the mobs on the mountain, other than simply out survive them. Additionally the flail that I picked up, and is now my saving grace… seems to miss quite a lot. Instead of fighting I opted to run away from almost all of the fights leading up to Magissa. I knew this encounter would take a truly insane amount of time. She has 650 hp and as you can see from the above shot I was only whittling away around 12 hp per attack. This was a sheer battle of willpower to keep moving forward at a snails pace.

When she summoned her pet Forza, I ignored him completely, realizing that there was no way at all I could keep up with fighting him and Magissa and the regeneration spell she casts on him. Instead I opted to cast protect on my entire party, and used one of my white mages to heal folks up while the others slowly dinked away at Magissa until she fell. Finally I turned my attention to Forza and focused all of the attacks on him. Even doing this the “right” way, it still took about thirty minutes to push my way through the encounter with my army of “horrible monks”. I was completely drained after that fight, and it was getting close to midnight so I stopped playing and streaming. At some point today I will pick up where I left off. You can watch the entire thing on my twitch stream, or you can check out the videos that I have uploaded to YouTube embedded below. Additionally Kodra is streaming his play through so check out his channel as well.

AggroChat Episode 6

This week we have myself, Kodra and Ashgar for Aggrochat. Rae was unavailable because honestly I feel like she was probably asleep. She spent the day hanging out at the local Renaissance Faire with her brother and our good friend Dallian that appears on last weeks Aggrochat. This week we had a bunch of things to talk about, or at least things that Kodra especially was excited to discuss. The first of these was the new champion in League of Legends… Braum. Next we talked about the Hex vs Wizards of the Coast lawsuit and what it means for the game and TCGs in general. We also get on this long drawn out discussion of Kickstarter Fatigue and what it means for the kickstarters that are still coming out, and whether or not that is still a viable means of funding a project. Like always we get lost on lots of rabbit trails between all of this points.

#AggroChat #FF5 #FinalFantasy5 #FourJobFiesta #SteamPoweredSunday