greysky armada Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Reluctant Healer

March 19, 2015 by Belghast

Tyranny of Blank Page

I’ve been going through a bit of a spell the last several mornings where I get upstairs, sit down, and stare into the abyss that is a blank screen not really knowing quite what to fill it with. So this is a post to tell all of the people that read me, that seem to think I have this limitless font of material… that sometimes it runs dry. In part it feels like I am just not doing all that much of any interest in the games I am playing. Due to various issues at work my in game time has been very distracted. Often times I might be at the screen but I am doing a generally poor job of paying attention to the people around me. Even last night while sitting on Voice Chat, it was like it was filtered and muffled in the background of my mind, taking a few minutes to pull my focus forward and actually understand what someone just said. Suffice to say it is me, not the games I am currently playing that is causing the problem and in an attempt to make things better I went to bed pretty early last night.

The last few days have just been odd to exist in my skin. I had a very interrupted weekend, where I did not accomplish much in the way of gaming. Then each morning my routine is thrown off because my wife is on spring break, and while in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t change my schedule that much… something feels fundamentally off. It has been nice having her home during the day because it means I don’t have to figure out something for dinner that can be reheated easily. Last night she made this amazing batch of Chicken and Dumplings, and from the sound of it the recipe was super easy. Largely just dump a bunch of stuff in the crock pot and give it an appropriate amount of time. The thing that frustrates me the most about my current “out of it” state, is that I feel like at any given moment I am letting down five people because I am not doing whatever they need me to do. Between MMOGames, the fledgling AggroChat site, the insanely growing free company in Final Fantasy XIV, the guild in World of Warcraft and various sundry other side projects I feel pulled in so many places. When I am “myself” and in my right mind, with the appropriate frame of reference… it all seems to work. When I am in this current stupor nothing seems to function and I am failing in equal parts at all of it.

Reluctant Healer

One of the more interesting side effects of my current mission to cap poetics every single week, is the fact that I seem to be absolutely rolling in Tomestones of Soldiery. As a result I have been using it to bolster all of my other classes, and most recently I have been pouring it into my White Mage. The ultimate irony is that I am sitting at 104 gear score, but have yet to heal anything at level 50. I have to say I am looking pretty badass though in my daystar gear set. Overall I am a huge fan of all of the soldiery gear, though I feel like I should probably be spending the points on my Bard instead. My bard actually gets use anytime we need a ranged dps for something and not a tank. This doesn’t happen extremely often, but far more often than I would ever consider swapping to heal something. I have to admit that healing in Final Fantasy XIV was really fun up through Brayflox… and then it is like things got too real for me. I had too many flashbacks to my early days as a healer, and it stopped being nearly as much fun.

I know I have covered this numerous times but I started my MMO career as a Cleric in Everquest. For years I had played Clerics in Dungeons and Dragons and managed to turn them into these awesome holy warriors. Picking the right deity here, and the right spells there… could turn what is usually a support class into an amazing front line battle priest. Unfortunately this design went against everything that was Everquest, and I spent a lot of my time soloing using the good ole Root and Nuke combination. Then when it came to raiding… I had to learn about the frustration that is the Complete Heal Rotation, where every 2 to 3 seconds the main tank is getting a full heal, so you have to time the 12 second cast so that someone is always starting up the next one. All of this makes me really reluctant to heal anything, because I never want to get back into a mode of operation where that style of game play is the normal. So I guess I have a bit of a mental block towards actually putting myself out there as a viable healer. I would gladly do it for anyone in the free company, but I just haven’t really made it widely known that it was an option.

Guild Tanking

Instead I am far more comfortable taking up the mantle of a guild tank. In my current daze I have probably missed a half dozen opportunities to tank for guildies. Last night I managed to catch one of these as Solaria and her daughter Isalenne needed to run Haukke Manor. I would have tanked anything for them, but it so happens that Haukke is probably one of my favorite dungeons in the entire game. I love the whole Castlevania feel to the place, and while leveling my healer I seemed to get that place almost every single time I popped into the low level roulette. As a result I have pretty much every pull memorized, and Isa commented on just how relaxing the run was compared to the average duty finder one. I actually got into a discussion on twitter yesterday about DPS queues and class balance and I realize that I am 100% part of the problem. I will happily don the mantle of the serious tank when it comes to my friends… but when I solo queue for the duty finder… I do so as a DPS. I’ve never really learned how to turn off that part of me that takes total responsibility for the success or failure for the group when I am tanking. As such I am willing to take that burden for my friends, but cannot bring myself to do it for strangers.

The problem is I know deep down in my bones how generally awesome the Final Fantasy XIV community is. I know that I have tanked for random strangers before while leveling… and actually enjoyed it. The problem is I have this mental wall that I struggle to get around. Since the introduction of the Ninja, the DPS queues in Final Fantasy XIV have been completely out of control. If you do a low level duty finder you can be sitting in that queue for over thirty minutes as dps, and if you are a ninja… it trends extremely close to infinity as the game seems to try to stick a ranged and a melee in a group if at all possible. The end result is a lot of frustration for newer players that just need to get dungeons running. As such I try my damnedest to intercept people needing dungeons and make them happen among free company members. The problem is… not all of my friends are on Cactuar, and not all of them are in our Free Company. I really should be a better person and do more “charity queues”, which is a term we came up with shortly after release when everyone seemed to need Ifrit but no one could get a group. Various members of our free company would queue for Ifrit and help a bunch of people through that obstacle. I remember one Black Mage had been sitting in that queue for three hours, so really I need to step up to the plate and do more random tanking. Knowing this however is slightly different from doing this… but I am going to try and force myself out there.

Slow and Steady

November 3, 2014 by Belghast

Longevity

There was a point yesterday when I realized something that somewhat shocked me. I have been back in Final Fantasy XIV for longer than the combined time my guild was active in both The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. There has been a trend over the last few years where when we move into something new we last around two months and then move on again. Elder Scrolls lasted roughly two months, and Wildstar in truth less than a month before folks petered out. For Final Fantasy XIV I have been going strong since July so this will be going on four months. In truth this is the longest I have played any game in awhile without pause. I am not sure if Rift counts since I tend to always be playing that game off and on, and the period of large amounts of activity last year only lasted a few months at most before it was back to me and a skeletal crew logging in periodically. Another thing I have noticed is that I tend to turn the lights off when I finally go, meaning that I am one of the last people to leave.

In Elder Scrolls Online this was maybe a bit different, since Sig and PK were both active considerably longer after I stopped logging in on a regular basis. I however only recently actually went through the process of cancelling my account there. Wildstar on the other hand I was all too willing to cancel my account, but sadly by the time I did the entire guild was completely toast. I guess I wonder what has made us grazers of MMOs rather than large scale consumers. For awhile I thought it was just the ramifications of coming from a multi-year game like World of Warcraft, and being unfettered and experiencing some kind of options overload. I still feel like there are so many good games out that to be played, and just not enough time to really experience them. I wish I could realistically play FFXIV, Rift, EQ2, LoTRO, TSW and Landmark all at the same time. The problem is when I rampantly multigame like that I get absolutely nothing accomplished in any of them.

Slow and Steady

Right now I am enjoying making slow and steady progress in all of my endeavors in Final Fantasy XIV. Last night I managed to hit 108 ilevel on my main job which is the warrior, and in part that is because of the 2.4 patch. There is a big of a paradox going on after the Dreams of Ice patch. Unlocking the loot in Syrcus Tower means that it has gotten significantly easier to farm the ilvl 100 gear drops and the Sands and Oils of Time needed to upgrade level 100 soldiery gear to level 110. The problem is that it feels like it is significantly slower to grind out Tomestones of Soldiery than it was to get Tomestones of Mythology. So as a result I am sitting on several unused Sands of Time and a couple of unused Unitentified Allagan Tomestones because I lack the Soldiery “bookrocks” to purchase either a weapon or another slot of gear to use the sands on. At this point I am closing in on the 1300 Tomestones of Soldiery needed to purchase a level 100 weapon, which I will then turn into a 110 weapon with one of the sands, finally giving my Dragoon something decent to poke things with. Before this patch I never would have spent soldiery on an alternate job, so it makes me happy to finally start progressing my Dragoon again.

The other side effect of the patch is that it seems to have become significantly harder to gear your very first character. Previously you could hop on the “hunt train” and farm up enough Allied Seals to purchase a full set of ilevel 90 gear within a few hours. For 270 Allied seals you could purchase an entire set of gear for a new job, which in the grand scheme of things even if you didn’t do the insane hunt process was only about a week of doing the daily hunt quests. This was a huge benefit to getting new players into the game quickly. This has slowed down considerably because all of the level 90 gear is gone from the hunt vendor and replaced with the level 100 Soldiery equivalents. Unfortunately this also means that the items themselves have gone up massively in price. The pieces can be purchased for 660, 400, and 300 for the various slots adding up to a grand total of 4020 allied seals for an entire set of gear. Right now this just seems absolutely insane to me. I feel like a later patch is probably going to reduce this price but that for the time being they are trying to make it easier to get soldiery gear… but not so easy that we can cap out over night and run out of things to progress.

Active Free Company

Another awesome thing about the 2.4 patch is that it has seemed to revitalize our server as a whole. Cactuar has sprung to life as so many players I think had taken breaks before the launch of this latest patch and all of its goodness. Granted a flurry of the activity has been leveling rogues, but that seems to be slowly tapering off. Similarly there has been a resurgence of activity in our guild as folks have joined up to start working on characters on our server, or returned from their own pre-patch absences. At several points yesterday we had around a dozen players online, and that still is not including some of our more active members that were curiously missing from the fray this weekend. I know Rae was off doing work related stuff, and Kodra was sick most of the weekend… and Ashgar busy packing for his move. With all of those things factored in it seems even more impressive that we were able to field the numbers that we did. I ran several of the new dungeons with groups of friends, and have yet to actually make my way into the expert duty roulette without a premade group.

Granted I am fully expecting that the upcoming launch of Warlords of Draenor will pull a few players away here and there, but I think the majority of our group is well insulated against the effects of WoW at this point. I am generally the one who returns, and right now as it stands I have no plans of playing at launch. In fact were it not for the level 90 boost that we got from preordering so far ahead of time… I doubt I would have even purchased the expansion this time around. I kinda wish I could claw back that purchase to be honest, but I guess that is the problem with preordering going roughly a year before the release date. That seems so long ago at this point, especially considering the short periods of waiting for new content I am getting used to in Final Fantasy XIV. This game is rolling out a new major patch each quarter, and a minor content patch on a semi-monthly schedule and I hate to say it… but you get spoiled. I don’t think I could return to a game with a year between content patches again after this.

Fuzzy Children

As I said yesterday this month I am trying to come up with something each morning that I am thankful for, turning it entire an entire month of “Thanksgiving”. This morning I am thankful for my “Fuzzy Children”, aka my pets. My wife and I have no intent of ever having human children, so our babies are as close as we will get to having kids. Presently we have three cats, one kitten, and two ferrets and they are all awesome. Each of them have their own personalities, and each of them their own routines that I would not change even if I could. Animals have a way of enriching your life for just existing, and while I might complain about this or that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t know what to do without one animal at my feet and another on my lap… and another wandering around my office knocking stuff over. I am thankful for my fuzzy warm bundles of happy, and the joy they bring.

Tiny Conjurations

August 6, 2014 by Belghast

Failure to Launch

Right now to be truthful I am having all manner of issues with my machines here at the house. With my gaming machine I think I have narrowed it down to the power supply, and plan on replacing that tonight. My laptop however I think was bit in the ass by the same nvidia driver issue that seemed to start everything. I am not sure what is wrong with Nvidia Driver 340.52 but both machines started having issues shortly after installing it. It might all be unrelated, but I likely would skip this driver for the time being because I wouldn’t want to wish my issues on anyone. Thankfully I was able to roll back to a system state on my laptop before the driver, so here is hoping that fixes things there.

As far as my desktop when I attempt to power it on, things flicker on for a brief second before immediately stopping. The fans won’t even make a full rotation, and based on all reading this is likely a PSU issue. Now in the past when my PSU has gone south, nothing at all happened, so this is new ground for me. However I am willing to try it since a PSU is a relatively cheap component to replace. Otherwise I would be something wrong with the motherboard… and I really don’t want to go down that avenue unless I absolutely have to. The problem is that I am running out of machines… worse case scenario I can try and get this machine my spare in gaming condition. I think it would run most of the things I might want to run, just not as well.

As far as me, I have been feeling like crap as well. The stress of having my machines in various states of “down” combined with allergy season wreaking havoc on my sinuses and lungs lead to me deciding to take a day to mostly rest and collect myself. My lungs have not been behaving well for the last couple of days, and the constant sinus headache has been causing me to eat ibuprophen like candy. So here is hoping by the end of today I will have all of my machines up and running smoothly as well as me doing the same. If not I guess we have to explore other avenues, and if I don’t get to feeling better soonish I guess I will have to run to the doctor. As a result of all of this my morning post is delayed. I did not really get a chance to post a big rundown of the blaugust folks either… but I guess at this point things are rolling along smooth enough that hopefully everyone is already reading the incoming posts.

Tiny Conjurations

Last night before all the computer issues started with my laptop, I decided to work on the conjurer job. At this point I have a 50 warrior (tank), 50 bard (range dps) and 50 dragoon (melee dps) so the only thing I am really missing at this point is a healer. All of the available healers require various levels of conjurer, so I figured it would be a good starting place. I am still not certain if I will be going White Mage or Scholar as far as healers go, but in any case I am slowly working on the levels. Conjurer I think has to be the hardest thing to level to date, mainly because all you really have to kill the mobs with is Stone and its various derivatives. Even in cleric stance, which is surprisingly enough the dps stance… you can’t really burn down mobs that fast. My plan is to mostly level through dungeons, but the problem with that is that I have to actually get to 15 first to do it.

Last night I tried my hand at healing Guildhests since those start at level 10. The main problem there is that folks don’t really seem to have a handle on tanking. I healed a total of four, and in each of them the tanks made zero effort to try and pull any mobs off of me. This means in the first one I ended up dying horribly, and in the later ones I mostly focused on healing myself… since I apparently was heal tanking. Guildhests really aren’t worth the frustration experience wise, so I went back to grinding near Horizon. I have a pretty massive stack of leves built up, so I opted to work through some of those. At the point my system troubles started, I was just shy of 15, which hopefully means I can jump straight into healing dungeons instead of grinding on my own.

Feels like Home

Yesterday afternoon Tam and I were talking about how much like home this game is feeling. I think in part it is due to the fact that Greysky Armada the free company is a thing uniquely created by the group of players that played FFXIV at launch. House Stalwart is very much a creation of my own, and it feels like my guild. White Masks is very much a creation of Tam and it feels like his guild. Greysky Armada is this wholly different thing that incorporates the best of each of us into something totally different. I think that is why coming back to it is so comfortable, because its an us thing not a me or him thing. Not sure if any of that makes any sense at all, but the folks that mostly do the AggroChat podcast have all been hanging out on voice chat for a few years now, and the FFXIV guild is 100% rooted in that little group.

Now that is not to say that everyone else isn’t welcome, but we kinda lead the guild as a team and not as a monarchy aligned under any one of us. On top of all of this is feels really awesome to see everyone back in Eorzea. I like this game a lot, and things just seem to work for me. Especially now that I went ahead and embraced the adorable making myself a Lalafell. At this point I am really hoping that the magic will last for awhile, and that we can all enjoy this space for more than a few months. Ultimately that is what I keep looking for… a place to set down roots and settle down. The problem is each of the games either has problems that bother me enough to where I don’t want to play it… or it lacks the people to make a comfortable environment. My hope is that FFXIV will be the game we all can agree on, since for the most part we all pined for it a little.

#Blaugust #FFXIV