MMO Archives - Page 305 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Extreme Whales

July 9, 2015 by Belghast

Last night I got a little piece of advice from Syp, who said that I should take care of myself and that no one would care if I took a few days off. I greatly appreciate the sentiment, and while I feel like this is probably the most brilliant idea… I am not likely to do it. In part this “every morning” thing is a much needed routine in my life. Much like dreams are a way for us to sort through the days events, in many ways this morning blog post is a way to reorder my thoughts before I start a new day. While it started with the goal of “write more content” It has wound up somewhere in a therapeutic space. Getting up every morning and writing something… is important to me in ways I don’t fully grasp. Additionally I have now done this two and a half years roughly, so another part of me simply does not want to “break the chain”. I am however likely to fiddle with my format a bit until my wrist is fully healed.

Extreme Whales

Right now we are in this limbo area where people are still in the process of gearing in order to be able to do higher level content. To do Alexander the first raid you must be ilevel 170, which means you need to have a full set of Tomestone of Law gear with at least one upgraded item. Since I only hit 60 a few days ago I am not quite there yet. As of last night I managed to hit ilvl 166 and in theory should be able to upgrade another piece of gear tonight if I manage to get any play time. For awhile now I have filled in for the Wednesday night raid group, which was admittedly a bit of an imposition when I was still raiding in World of Warcraft… but now is not so much. Wednesday night is generally speaking a pretty good night for me to raid considering that my wife is off at church for a large chunk of it. So as we move forward into Heavensward I am probably going to offer myself as a more permanent part of that group. Since we could not do Alexander we set our sights last night on Bismarck Extreme, which only has a requirement that individuals be level 60.

The fight is in essence a series of dps checks, because apparently the island we are standing on gets more and more battered as the fight goes on. At a base level the fight works pretty much the same as it does on hard, except for the fact that you realistically need to get down the back scale during the first chain phase. I feel like Wulf and I made a lot of progress on learning this fight as tanks, with the hardest part being the elemental snake swap. The snakes send out a debuff that makes it so that players need to be dpsing the snake of the opposite color of the buff they currently have. This means tanks also need to swap targets, and at first we were trying to meet in the middle and trade off, but it seems that quite honestly this is a job for provoke. Right before a potential swap Wulf and I would target each others snakes and then hit the taunt if we saw that we needed to. Thankfully it seems to work magically, because normally speaking “just taunting” has minimal effect in this game when it comes to swapping targets.

While we beat the first dps check, we consistently failed at the second one… which is burning down the elemental snakes before hitting the point of no return where the skies to dark… and Bismarck nukes us into oblivion. Thankfully each of us still has a lot more gear we can get so we are simply hitting a gear wall. I think if we get enough upgrade pieces in the next week we will totally rock this fight and down us the first extreme primal of the expansion. Then we will move on to Ravana Extreme… that happens to drop the best weapons in the game currently. I have to say I had a blast with the fight, and it was awesome working with Wulf. The few times I had tanked for the WoW raid, it was when he happened to be out for the night, so I think this might be the first time we have actually worked together in progression content. In part I somewhat hope we have the people to pull this together for an attempt on Saturday during the pre-podcast raid block.

The Gearing Game

July 8, 2015 by Belghast

False Starts

Yesterday I made an attempt to go to work, but ultimately was told to head home by my boss. Over the last few days I have been pretty much living on the couch with my leg slightly elevated and alternating icepacks on it. The problem being that I don’t exist like this in the real world, where sitting at a desk generally requires that your feet be on the ground. While I love the arrangement of my cube at work, it really does not allow for me to elevate my leg at all. Not surprisingly within an hour of being at work my knee was swelling something fierce. So I headed home and started the process of icepacks over again until it started to behave somewhat normally. The positive is however that the area that is actually swelling is rather small and contained as compared to the day the fall happened, so I guess I am recovering quickly.

The biggest problem, the one that effects this blog is the fact that my wrist has hurt an awful lot. After struggling through yesterday mornings post, I was pretty much typing one handed for most of the day. I wore a brace most of yesterday and as of this morning it is feeling much better. It is still extremely tender when I move my wrist too quickly or to any extreme of motion… but overall it is more functional. Hopefully this means I can return to normal typing instead of this frustrating one handed mess that I dealt with yesterday. Since it is also my “mouse hand” that is effected I have been surprised that really using a mouse doesn’t hurt much at all. I guess in general I am used to keeping my mouse sensitivity so high that I barely have to move my hand at all to send the cursor flying across the screen. Hopefully today will be a much better day and I will continue to mend quickly.

The Gearing Game

Like most players in Final Fantasy XIV, my life revolves around the acquisition of Tomestones of Law. To get a full set of “law” gear it takes roughly 3500 and they have given us many options on how to get them. Firstly there are three dungeons that reward 80 tomestones each, and an additional 40 if you can manage to catch someone who still has their first time bonus or “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it. In addition to that you get 100 tomestones for both a low level roulette and a high level roulette each day, and an additional 60 for a trial roulette. The one that surprises me however is that Expert Roulette is only worth 80, but I guess in theory it has a face value of 160 to 200 since you are getting stones from the dungeon proper as well. In order to get into Alexander, the raid that just opened players need to reach a combined ilevel of 170 which also happens to be the level of the tomestone gear. So in theory you need a full set in order to step through its doors.

Where you can cheat a bit is through those ubiquitous “Clan Hunts” that I have been using as filler leveling. It turns out all of the items needed to upgrade your gear from 170 to 180 come from Centurio Seals. Hopefully you have been doing these religiously because in order to get a full set of gear upgraded to the next step it is going to take a grand total of 2795 seals. Now granted you can hop on the hunt train like you could in the previous expansion and in theory grind this out in a weekend. Personally I happen to find the daily hunt mechanic rather relaxing, as I can log in… fly around the gorgeous zones and pick off the mobs one at a time. Right now I have four pieces of gear… chest, helm, ring, and weapon. Currently I have upgraded the weapon and ring to 180, and am saving enough hunt marks to upgrade the chest piece next. There will come a time when I stop messing with anything other than three star and elite hunt marks, but for the time being they also serve to help level my dragoon for the lower level ones.

Dragoon Dungeoning

Right now if there is a moment when I am not engaged doing something else, or tanking something that can gain me law stones… I am pretty much in the dungeon queue on my Dragoon. Right now the dps queue seems relatively manageable sitting around the 10 minute mark for “leveling” dungeons. As a result it is my hope to ride this queue for as many classes as I can manage. After running a couple of max level dungeons, I settled into a couple of quick runs on the dragoon who is now up to “Sohm Al” level. I have to say I find this pretty relaxing as well, because I can just sit back and poke things with a stick. I opted to go ahead and record my dungeon run to add it to the stack of dungeon videos I have on my youtube channel. I had not actually recorded any when I was not currently tanking, so it gives a slightly different perspective of the fights. I have to say I am really digging the “tribal” look that comes from Sohm Al. That helmet is freaking amazing, and is likely going to go in my glamour bin for future usage. At this point I am roughly halfway through 53 so I figure it will take two more dungeon runs to hit 54, and then five to six past that before I can do the next dungeon at 55. Embedding the video and cutting this post short today without a second paragraph.

Nael in the Coffin

July 7, 2015 by Belghast

Strange Dreams

For the last few nights I have had the strangest but at the same time most vivid dreams. The problem is that they are for the most part utter nonsense. For example this morning I woke up from a dream involving writer Beau Hindman. He had reached out to me to ask if I had any gmail invites… and for those of you for whom that makes zero sense… Google mail was once upon a time invite only and invites were rationed and carefully guarded. I told him that I had a couple that I could hand out, and he asked me to send one to someone. Turns out the person in question was an old man that lived in the small town my wife grew up in. Apparently Beau really needed to get ahold of this person… and apparently using the phone was just too cumbersome? Trust me… I fully understand a lack of wanting to call someone… so I too would probably go through strange lengths to avoid it.

When the guy didn’t accept the invite, I had to drive up to the small town and talk to him in person. He was afraid that the internet would steal his soul, and by having an email account he would be supporting the terrorists or something. So I spent the next hour talking him into accepting the invite, all so Beau would be able to contact him. Sure it is madness, and honestly Beau and I are not even in contact that often, but somewhere in my brain it made all of this make sense. That is the crazy thing about dreaming… is at the time none of this seems as irrational as it does when you are trying to break it apart later. I guess Beau got pulled in because I know that he is originally from Oklahoma, and my wife often gets a staring role in my dreams… so it is strange the way the mind weaves this seemingly plausible tapestry out of bits and pieces of leftover memories.

Nael in the Coffin

Monday nights is traditionally our Final Fantasy XIV raid group night, and last night was no exception. For months… literally… we have been working on learning the dance on Turn Nine of the Coil of Bahamut. For a long time now we have been super close to pushing over the edge, and held up on the madness that is the dive bomb phase. Last night we wanted to defeat Nael by any means necessary so we could move on with our lives. Not sure if it was true for all of our group, but I have developed a love and hate relationship with this fight, and was more than ready to put it behind me. One of the features added with Heavensward is the ability to queue for something as an undersized group. What this does in theory is zone you into a place without scaling your level down to the appropriate place. What this means in practice is that you can now wreck certain zones for the purpose of collecting those dungeon drops you missed in the past. Since several of us were sitting at level 60, we decided to give this option a shot on turn nine and see what would happen.

The truth is the very first attempt out of the gate we straight wiped to mechanics and over confidence. After that it still took us a few tries to get the dance close enough to being correct to be able to finish off the encounter. The funny thing is… that even with 20% echo and 10 more levels… the fight can still straight up eviscerate you. I think we managed to down it on our fourth attempt last night, and can now move on with our lives into Final Coil. On one level it bums me out that we didn’t “do it for real” by facing this encounter at level 50. On the other hand however I am happy to be done with being in there. There comes a time when you just get sick of seeing the same encounter over and over, and I remember our group reached that same place back in WoW’s Blackwing Lair with the Firemaw encounter. It is going to be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring us as far as content goes. Today is the official launch of Alexander, but as it stands right now… none of us are even vaguely closed to “geared enough” to tackle it.

Ice Packs and Grinding

Yesterday I stayed home from work because I was struggling to walk around. So my key focus in life became making sure I was ice packing every hour or so for maximum effect. This meant that most of the day I spent it hanging out on the couch with my leg propped up a bit. It also means I spent a lot of time piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV. Throughout the day I worked on getting all of my Clan Hunts for maximum upgrade token goodness, and did all three of my bonus law roulettes, which left a lot of time to work on my Dragoon. Now previously I had managed to get it to level 51, which is key because that unlocks access to the dungeon Dusk Vigil. So yesterday I spent the majority of my in game time queueing for Dusk Vigil over and over. Before raid time last night I was but a sliver away from 53, which should grant me access to the second dungeon… Sohm Al. The only problem with Dusk Vigil is that technically nothing in it other than the jewelry are strictly upgrades from what I had been wearing.

Sohm Al on the other hand… everything in there should be full of upgradey goodness other than maybe the weapon. The other good thing about running all these dungeons is that I am able to soak up gear for my alt jobs for when I finally get around to leveling them. I like that pretty much every dungeon in Heavensward offers an item set, which is unlike the old world where only every so often did a dungeon actually drop something cool looking. I really want to finish the Dragoon set from Dusk Vigil because it looks kinda amazing. It is a blue set of armor that looks just like the one that Lucia is wearing in the cut scenes. In the news of me… well I am largely functioning better thanks to the constant ice packs. At this point the swelling is down significantly and I am hoping I can function today without a lot of pain. I am sure come this evening I will need to ice pack once more but for the time being… life seems to be grand, or at least getting there.

Finishing Heavensward

July 6, 2015 by Belghast

Trying to Break Me

When we planned this four day weekend of house manipulation… I knew somewhere along the lines I would end up harming myself. Now I have any number of minor injuries from the weekend including that time I sliced my finger open and bled all over the old PC I was pulling a hard drive from, or the time I got my arm pinched behind something and created a really strange bruise on my wrist. However yesterday I took my self mutilation to a new level, as I was carrying the final box out to the car for the last Goodwill load of the weekend. I went to set the box down carefully because it had something poking out of it… and I apparently lost my balance and wound up rolling down the driveway towards the mailbox. The end result is that I have one exceptionally banged up and bruised knee that makes it hard to walk, a second banged up knee that is far better off, and a wrist that I am guessing I have tweaked a bit because I ultimately landed on it. I am completing ignoring the piece of chat that seems to be embedded in my palm because in the grand scheme of things that one is just minor.

At this point I am trying to alternate between staying off my knee an getting up every so often and walking a bit to keep it from freezing up too bad. At the same time I am keeping ice packs on it every few hours which seems to be helping. The above photo is actually a massive improvement from yesterday when my knee cap itself was roughly five times its normal size. Today it hurts a lot less to stand on my knee, but a lot more to touch it… so I am hoping that means most of the trauma is just as a surface level and not actually effecting the joint itself. It seems like the pain in walking was mostly related to the swelling. Today actually my bigger complaint is my wrist that hurts like the dickens when I twist it. Thankfully nothing seems broken… except my pride. More than anything I just feel stupid for falling. I feel stupid that it happened on quite literally the last box… which in itself was an after thought. I am just thankful that while I put myself in a bit of pain that it seems like I am still fairly sturdy.

Finishing Heavensward

In similar fashion to 2.0 the end of the 3.0 story concludes in a series of group story content. Thankfully however it seems they have learned their lesson and instead of making long eight player dungeons, they created a single four player story mode dungeon and an extremely fun trial encounter. I won’t go into much detail about either because spoilers… but this time around they managed to get the risk and reward equation just right. I’ve now run the four player story dungeon I think four times, and will happily run it as many times as needed because at face value it is worth 80 Tomestones of Law, and when you factor in the “virgin bonus” as we have taken to calling it… you get 120 tomestones for what is a relatively quick dungeon run. Similarly while the trial only rewards 10 tomestones per run, it is fast enough and enjoyable enough that when we mentioned last night that we needed people to run it… folks jumped at the chance just to see it again.

Just like 2.0 the 3.0 credit roll resolves some of the current conflicts… but opens up just as many questions about our future. As it stands right now I am completely amped to se what 3.1 brings, because things happened… and I am intrigued as to how they will resolve. This is the thing that I love so much about the way Final Fantasy XIV expansions seem to work. They end on this warm and fuzzy point… but at the same time feel like you just completed the games introduction. You know that there is going to be twice as much content before you see the end of expansion credit roll. The only thing I am finding myself really disappointed in is my class quests. They felt disconnected and extraneous to the Heavensward content. Now I hear that some quests especially that of the summoner is deeply connected to this expansion, however for the Warrior which is the class I took to 60 first… it was a fun romp with axes but nothing more. I remember having a serious difficult time with my level 50 warrior quests… and nothing that I experienced in this expansion class quest wise even caused me to break a sweat.

And my Axe, and This Dungeon

At the launch of 2.0 getting Tomestones of Philosphy was a very painful grind, and as such it lead most of us to stop playing the game. When we came back they managed to fix some of these problems and we were able to actually get into the end game content. It seems like they have learned their lessons because the Tomestones of Law grind seems exceptionally easy. In the very meager content that I managed to run, I gathered up the 570 I needed for my weapon. Since I also had been running a significant number of Clan Hunts I managed to gather up the 395 seals needed to get the item to upgrade my 170 axe into a 180. So far I am really liking the way this works, you do dungeon content to get tomestones to buy the gear… then do hunts to get the bits to upgrade them instead of relying on random chance at getting a drop from a raid somewhere. My hope is that in short order I will be able to finish my law set and be in raiding form. For the moment I will be focusing on my worst slots first, so that I can improve my viability the most… as quickly as possible.

Last night I also managed to tank my very first level 60 dungeon, called the Fractal Continuum. I have to say I like this dungeon already so much more than I liked the whole Wanderers Palace/Amdapoor Keep thing that we had at the launch of 2.0. The other dungeon available is called Neverreap and I have yet to run it, but have heard it is similarly enjoyable. I have to say it was plenty challenging, especially the last encounter but at this point we are in essence a raid experienced group of players and were able to rely on mechanics we learned while raiding to defeat the encounters. I feel that the game set a pretty realistic starting gear place as well, in that you have to be at least ilvl 155 to run it. There is a gear vendor out in the final zone that should help players “catch up” and fill out any slots they have serious deficiencies in. I personally need to pop out there and check the vendor myself because I still have a few aging quest rewards. I feel like I am pretty happy with the state my next few months will be in as I gear out my jobs and level the ones that are not sixty.