MMO Archives - Page 350 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Boogey Bested

December 12, 2014 by Belghast

Bladefist Banished

One of the cool features this expansion is that each of the raid difficulties shares a separate lockout. This means you can go to normal with one group, heroic with a a completely different group… and then mythic yet again with a different group. However for the case of our raid this also means that when we get a boss solidly on farm on Normal mode we can ramp up the difficulty and try it on Heroic as well. Before last night we felt we solidly had the mechanics down for Kargath Bladefist, as we managed to one-shot it this past Tuesday before pushing forward and doing the same to Butcher. Last night our raid lead decided before we returned to working on Brackenspore that we should at least give a few attempts at Kargath heroic. Turns out this was a pretty great idea because on the first attempt we managed to make significant progress.

One of the things I like about normal and heroic being the same mechanics is that it allows you to get the key concepts in the fight down solidly before moving up a difficulty level. Our biggest challenge seemed to be reacting fast enough, since everything the boss and his environment does is serious business. I was the first death because I managed to get knocked back into a flame pillar and just evaporated. Similarly we lost a lot of people to the berserker charge because in normal you can survive a tick or two while getting out of the way… but in heroic it straight wrecks you. On attempt four we managed to get our mojo working and downed him in what felt like a fairly solid and repeatable victory. Unfortunately I am not sure if anyone in the raid actually got loot, as we seemed to mostly get double gold.

Boogey Bested

Wednesday morning I referred to the next fight we worked on as the Brackenspore Boogey, and I still feel like this is an apt term. The entire fight is this awkard dance between the tank swaps, and the burning of the fungal creep, and even the placement of the raid next to the appropriate mushroom and burning down the add quickly. Each of those things can screw the raid up if not handled properly. I have found myself falling back into being a rather vocal member of the raid, and unfortunately its a role I am not sure I can stop from doing. When you lead a guild and a raid for as long as I have, you find yourself filling a vacuums of responsibility whenever you see them. I felt like it would help if I started calling various things out, since this fight is all about awareness of what is going on. So when I saw that the add had spawned, or the creep was getting too close to the boss… I was announcing this over Teamspeak. Hopefully our raid leader and crew as a whole does not want to throttle me.

The awesome thing is… we went from getting wrecked to wrecking things rather quickly. One of the positives about LFR is it gives you a time to work on mechanics when the overall risk is extremely low. You can pretty much ignore every single mechanic on LFR but we treated it Wednesday night as a dress rehearsal for the real fight. After Tuesday night I had some theories on how the tank swap needed to happen, and Wednesday night our two tanks refined these to glossy perfection so that last night that was just a non-issue. All that remained was dealing with the particular quirks of the fungal creep, pushing enough dps and interrupting on the add and dealing with mob positioning. The only problem with the fight as a whole is that it is insanely long. I am pretty sure our first try lasted around fifteen minutes, but that is mostly because we fought the moss longer than we really should have. Our second attempt ended with us downing the boss, and it felt extremely solid.

That Click Moment

If I had to sum up in one thing the reason why I enjoy raiding, it would be the “Click Moment”. There is something magical that happens that I still can’t quite explain, but I have watched it occur over and over. There is a clear moment when everyone in the raid grasps what needs to happen and just does it. You can go from wiping horribly one attempt, to everything going smoothly the next, and it is as though some collecting cog just happens to click into place between those two tries. I still find it phenomenal how a boss fight goes from utter chaos to a well oiled and repeatable machine in a single attempt. Sure there are some boss kills where you kill the boss in spite of yourself, our raids first Sindragosa 25 man kill was this way with us barely killing her as the last person got frozen. Most of them however there is this magical spark that takes a boss from impossible to farmable, and I still marvel each time I see it.

This week it felt like we reached that moment on three of the four bosses we downed, and quite honestly I feel like Tectus and Heroic Kargath are both repeatable… but more DPS race than anything else. Twin Ogrons on the other hand… we are still very much in the utter chaos phase. This fight has a lot of moving parts, with at least one of them feeling completely random. Every so often during the fight Phemos will throw down his weapon, and from it will radiate fire. The fire moves in a pattern that is not really predictable… or at least the problem is we have not quite groked how to predict it. It seems to spread first in a star pattern and then sidewind through the room unpredictably. Watching it while completely zoomed out it reminds me so much of Conway’s Game of Life simulation. I keep thinking that it cannot be as random as it seems… and I feel like the “click” moment for this fight will be whenever we reason out how the fire works. All in all however it felt like an amazing first week of raiding for me… and I am hooked.

The Kill Count

Normal Kargath
Normal Butcher
Normal Tectus
Heroic Kargath
Normal Brackenspore

I can’t wait for the reset so we can wreck everything all over again and start making some serious progress on Twin Ogrons. I feel like there is just a lot of research we need to do between now and then. I am also looking forward to Monday night in Final Fantasy XIV because I feel like we are going to down Turn 5 finally. We have functional mastery over all of the phases except the last one, and finally got to see enough of it to grok how it works. Now it is just a matter of pulling together all of the moving parts and claiming victory so we can move forward into the Second Coil of Bahamut. I guess I am a “Raider” again… and surprisingly I feel none of the frustrations that I did previously, even when we have struggled a bit to clear Turn 5. It seems like I am now in two different raid groups that are about the ideal mix of casual and serious so that I feel like I am not being chastised for screwing up… but at the same time feel like everyone is working towards the same goal. I am in a very happy place as a gamer right now.

L is for Loot Piñata

December 11, 2014 by Belghast

Kinder Gentler LFR

Last night we opted to enter the “Looking For Raid” version of Highmaul as a guild, similar to how we did Molten Core, since that made the entire experience so much less chaotic. We brought with us both tanks and a couple of healers, and since we have done the fights on normal now figured we would be able to push through any issues we came along. Oddly enough the LFR tool did not make one of us the leader of the group even through we accounted for 15 of the 25 slots. Instead it chose this shaman healer who’s name was some combination of “Faceroll” and “Ballerina” that I am sure he thought was exceedingly clever when he created the character. I say “he” because the actions and commentary felt like a “dudebro” playing the character.

Moments after we started clearing he started barking orders generally starting off with “alright you fuckfaces”. Moments later however he was gone from the raid. The beautiful thing about doing LFR as a guild is that you can pretty much rapid-fire vote kick someone and have more than enough votes for it to succeed. After that was over, the rest of the run went exceptionally smoothly. I kinda dig being able to act as a force of good in looking for group, getting rid of the toxic players when we see them. What I find amazing is just how willing people were to work within the parameters we set for them. We treated LFR like it was an actual raid, with marking locations to stand in and this made the entire experience go solidly and by the numbers.

L is for Loot Piñata

Maybe it is because we have done the normal version of this place, but god Looking for Raid seemed simple. As in it felt like you could straight up ignore every tactic and just keep mashing buttons until the bosses fell down. All told the actual combat time of the raid took maybe 20 minutes for three bosses. I saw plenty of people looting goodies, so hopefully lots of folks got nice stuff. The only problem I see is that there is little to no reason to do heroics right now. Sure you get 50 Garrison resources for your first heroic of the day, and a bag of gold, but it feels like they really have taken away all of the reason to actually group up for heroics once you are over ilevel 630. Previously all serious players had to do a handful of heroics a week to make sure they were capping out Valor points, but with that gone there is little to no reason to draw well geared players into the fray.

Quite honestly you can hit the LFR requirement of 615 relatively easily through doing the quests in Nagrand with a Dwarven Bunker giving you increased chance of getting blue and purple upgrades. As such I cannot see any reason at all for folks to actually do the heroic grind once the rest of Highmaul has been released. Unless the next part significantly ramps up the difficulty, this is going to be essentially Timeless Isle 2.0 in the form of a raid. Granted I don’t much care about people getting easy gear, in fact I am looking forward to it as I try and gear my army of alts. I loved the Timeless Isle for the ease of catching characters up. That said the heroic experience in this expansion is really good, and while difficult is fun to do with your friends. Maybe they are expecting heroics to be a guild only thing? I have a feeling we are going to see a pass that maybe starts adding in some reasons for doing things, because it feels like they completely ignored the reward part of “risk vs reward”.

Social Engineering

The problem that I can see is soon the queues for heroics will be insanely long, because Blizzard seems to be fundamentally bad at social engineering. I say this because I am playing another game that is exceptionally good at social engineering and making players WANT to run older content. Final Fantasy XIV has this long quest chain that involves giving players non-raiding ways to upgrade their main weapon. It starts with the Relic weapon, and each upgrade bumps up its ilevel and its stats. The most famous bout of social engineering comes into play when you reach the Atma farming step, which involves you going back to every zone in the game and running FATEs until an “Atma of the” item drops. The reason why this is most definitely social engineering is that they purposefully kept the ATMAs from dropping in the zones that were already natural FATE running hotbeds of activity. Thing is it works… there are now players in most every zone running FATEs as they work on the Atma weapon step for their characters.

Similarly they created the Nexus step that involves farming “light” from various activities like doing Hard Modes, Experts, and related large group activity. Additionally they created the concept of “bonus light” which targets certain encounters that have especially long queue times. When one of these bonuses is in place all these players come from out of the woodwork and start running it, I happened into Hard Mode Garuda during one of these periods and it was insane to see just how fast that encounter evaporated. Now with the latest step it involves running various hard mode dungeons until you get a specific item to drop, thus getting tanks and healers…. and everyone else to start queuing for these encounters. I realize that I am being engineered, but I don’t care because it works. It keeps the game thriving and vibrant and keeps the overall queue times low enough to allow me to do whatever content I need to do at the time. I never feel like I am being exploited, because they managed to have just enough of a reward to make the risk worthwhile.

Brackenspore Boogey

December 10, 2014 by Belghast

The Reluctant Tank

Last night was an extremely interesting night, for many reasons. The first of which is that it was my first night raiding Highmaul in any capacity. The Argent Dawn server was completely unstable for various reasons, primarily because the Chicago data center itself seemed to be unstable. Then last Thursday I had plans which kept me away from the raid where they downed Kargath and Butcher for the first time. Last night I had every intent of trying out my Gladiator dps chops, and had been researching the fights as a dps. Then something happened… our main tank got stuck at work and was not going to be there at all. While I was not even aware that technically I was part of the tanking team, I got drafted to tank the instance I would assume because of my years of experience. While I didn’t know all of the fights, I did rely heavily on over a decade of experience and we seemed to do fine.

Thankfully I also had a really seasoned co-tank to work with, that while he too was not exactly solid on some of the mechanics… was more than willing to try anything I suggested. As the night went on it started to feel more and more natural, with me pivoting into the lead role. I really hope that I did not absolutely steamroll the tank, but I figured he was used to playing the second tank role in his previous configuration, so it might be less stressful for him to stay in that role. Whatever the case it seemed to work really well, and I am happy to say that we stormed in and one shot both Kargath and the Butcher extremely quickly. I had hoped to get more loot out of the dungeon to help augment my gear, but alas I spent three roll tokens and only walked out with twi pieces of gear.

Brackenspore Boogey

We spent most of the night last night working on Brackenspore, an encounter that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. It very much feels like the “this is the end of the easy bosses” encounter that has so many moving parts. Quite honestly we don’t quite have a lot of mechanics down pat, but hopefully having seen the fight we can do some research before Thursday. The biggest problem as a tank is we never quite found the sweet spot to do the tank transition. The boss does some really horrible mechanics, firstly there is a stacking nature dot on the active tank called Rot. Ideally the tank should not have more than four stacks of this at any time. However there is another horrible mechanic called Necrotic Breath that is a frontal cone and causes anyone in said cone to take 22k damage and have a debuff that reduces healing by 99%. To make things more frustrating there is an add, with a lot of health… that is essentially a second boss. It casts an ability called Decay periodically which needs to be interrupted or else it deals 80k nature damage to the entire raid.

If all of this were not enough… there is a mechanic on the fight called Creeping Moss that is essentially a fungal creep that if unchecked will cover the entire room. Anything standing in the creep increases their damage dealt by 50% and causes them to regenerate 2% health every 2 seconds. As such the mobs need to be pulled out of this at all costs, and you end up having to devote to dps to run about the room with a flame thrower destroying the creep to keep it at bay. To make matters even worse… there are good and bad mushrooms that spawn around the room. You have to move the boss away from the bad mushrooms, but attempt to position them close to the good ones… which are then used to counteract Infesting Spores that stacks nature damage on the raid. We are still very much getting the swing of the fight, and figuring out all of the levers to flip and widgets to prod. I think on our best attempt we got him down to 70%, but hopefully a lot of research AFTER having made an attempt will cement the mechanics in our heads.

DPS Check Passed

After doing some attempts on Brackenspore, the raid leader decided we needed to swap up for a bit and try something else. As a result we rolled over to Tectus that apparently the group had made attempts on last Thursday. This is one of those infamous Blizzard dps check fights, with a relatively short enrage timer and several “get out of the stupid” mechanics causing the raid to move around while pushing dps as hard as possible on the boss. I did not actually get a picture of the boss itself, because it went pretty quickly. The trash directly before the boss is in essense “the boss”. You have these three small rock elementals… and by small I mean five times as large as a player model that you have to burn through… from their rubble arises Tectus the actual boss. While fighting Tectus you are constantly having to move out of these swirling patches on the ground that ultimately spawn spires of earth that knock the players back and deal damage to them. Additionally there are patches of fire that appear that you need to move out of, so lots of stuff going on… that needs to be avoided.

This goes into overdrive because when you dps down the biggest version of Tectus, two medium sized versions spawn at the same time. One tank takes one, the other tank takes and holds the other. When the party dpses down a medium mob, four small mobs spawn. In theory the offtank takes medium tectus and one small tectus… whereas the other tank takes three small ones. This becomes extremely hectic because they are super hard to target at this point. In theory the dps burns down all of the little spawns… and then breaks the other medium causing four more smalls to spawn. The roughest phase is when we have five mob up, four smalls and one medium. During this phase each of the mobs spawns circles on the ground, making it sheer madness to try and find safe places to stand. Once you burn through the smalls things calm down for a few until we get another batch of smalls. This is out and out a dps race, and we downed the boss last night with I think 15 seconds left to spare.

Back in the Saddle

While I am actively raiding in FFXIV, there is just something more hectic about World of Warcraft raiding. I think that technically speaking Final Fantasy XIV is probably more challenging, but the sedate pace caused by the longer global cooldown… makes it feel more sane and rational. World of Warcraft on the other hand is a pure adrenaline rush when it goes well, and there are few things more exciting than getting a new boss down. Granted I did not quite have the same payoff as my other raiders, because that was my first night there. I am however pretty damned proud that I picked up tanking on a character I have not tanked on since downing the Lich King… and was not a liability. I guess playing a class is something you never quite forget, regardless of how many changes have been made. I did manage to pick up a few really nice upgrades as a result of my three roll tokens spent.

I swear that the game is conspiring against me actually ever wearing my engineering goggles, because the molten core helm was technically better… and then this helm dropped last night which is even better than the first goggle upgrade. On Butcher he dropped a really nice pair of gauntlets for me that replaced my warforged heroics rather nicely. This combined with the chestpiece I crafted for myself has taken me to ilevel 637 which is not too shabby overall. Tonight we are going into LFR as a guild, and hopefully I can pick up another item or two there as well. I am not going to waste any coins as I would rather prefer to save those for normal or heroic mode gear. Supposedly at the beginning of Thursday night we are going to give Heroic Kargath a shot, which should be really damned fun. I was surprised to find out that each mode has its own unique lockout, so hopefully we can start doing on heroic the mobs we have on farm on normal. Was a great night, and happy to be back raiding.

Bel’s Magical Van

December 9, 2014 by Belghast

A Very Bloggy Xmas Day 9

Roughly a month ago my good friend Syl came to me with the idea of her Bloggy Xmas event. I took a stab at a logo, and she finished it off to what we have above. From there I was essentially drafted into the process, and was certain I would be slotted for one of the days. It seems that fate determined that mine would be today. The idea behind the countdown was to have an advent calendar of sorts leading up to Christmas, and apparently in her country it is tradition for all of the little villages to decorate their windows taking on one of the days. I have struggled with what exactly to do for this, but it seems like most of the other participants have decorated their blog with a somewhat personal story. As such I am guessing that is the direction I am taking as well.

Bel’s Magical Van

For quite literally over a decade now, I have had friends that have joked about me and my white panel van full of candy. Because how else could I seem to keep recruiting people into whatever mad adventure I have planned. In fact the guild that I founded is based upon this concept of never openly recruiting… but always recruiting. I have always had this irrational desire to try and collect as many awesome people around me as I can, and as I play games or socialize online… I am always looking for more people to stuff in my van and whisk away into my extended family. That is ultimately what I am building, a big network of extended family for me to play games with, and all joking aside it really isn’t something that I do intentionally. I have this overriding sense that everyone deserves a good home, and when I see someone without one… I tend to try and adopt the strays. I mean there is a reason why until this weekend we had four rescue cats and two rescue ferrets… I have a hard time saying no when any thing needs a good home.

If you want to find the reasons behind why I am the way I am you have to scroll back through my history to my childhood. I was the single child of two very loving parents, or as we in the united states call it an “only child”. To make matters worse we lived out in the country, or at least too far from city to make meeting up with friends a practical occasion. I didn’t have the normal cadre of neighbor kids to run around with, and being a sickly child I spend most of afternoons with Mr Rogers, Electric Company and the Sesame Street gang. I got exceptionally good at entertaining myself a trait that I am thankful for today, but I also longed to have other people to play with. I was more or less raised by my grandmother, as she was my babysitter and companion during my formative years. While she was awesome, she was also busy with the chores around the farm. I can pretty much guarantee however that it is her that taught me to love games. Her default “Idle animation” was sitting at the table playing solitaire, and we also played together absolutely insane amounts of trouble and candy land.

Wanting a Tribe

I remember the most exciting times for me were the times when my cousins would come to visit and I was suddenly surrounded by other kids my age. I remember wanting a baby brother or sister so bad, so I could have someone to play with whenever. I would have been an awesome brother… well pending they were willing to submit to playing whatever game I wanted to play. During my elementary and middle school years, I pretty much spent my weekends “grouped up” with friends at either their house or mine. Instead of one best friend I had two, and it pretty much stayed that way until high school. I’ve always had this strange dichotomy inside of me… I want to be surrounded by people… but when I have them I never quite know what to do with them. I’ve used the term “alone in a crowd” before to describe how it feels. Engaging at the level that I want to engage takes a lot out of me, so I have to take these periods to essentially hibernate and draw strength to engage again.

I’ve always built “tribes” for as long as I can remember. I never just played with one other person… I tried to assemble groups of people to play with. I had an unusual upbringing for being a pretty hardcore geek. The traditional American experience for a 30-40 year old geek is that of being the misfit and being picked on. Since my parents friends kids ended up growing up to become the popular kids, and also as a side effect of growing up in a very small town… I was given a lot more acceptance that I likely would have gotten anywhere else in the world. Folks took my quirks as just “me being me” and pretty much left me alone, and I guess it doesn’t hurt that I am 6’4” and no one really seemed to want to mess with me. In High School I kinda gathered up misfits that needed a home around me, the folks that WERE picked on mercilessly. By my association with them it extended them a small bubble of protection… and I guess I became a tank for the first time. It taught me that I actually liked protecting people, I liked feeling like I was helping my friends.

A Digital Family

When I entered the internet age, all of these instincts and traits that I picked up along the way followed me as well. I found it hard to think of the people I was interacting with as “just pixels”, and in fact I am fundamentally opposed to that line of thinking. When you encounter another person, they have hopes, dreams and aspirations… and we have all arrived online for different reasons. I started sifting through the folks I encountered and trying to keep “the good ones”. When I found someone that needed a home, and wanted to participate in a larger community… I started trying to stuff them in my pocket and carry them with me from that point on. It wasn’t long before I had amassed this large network of people that I wanted to stay in touch with for as long as I could. In my own family, I have never really felt like they understood me. They are extremely loving and nurturing, but I have never fit the mold that they seemed to want to press me into. What I realized years ago is that online I was assembling my own family, the one that does fully understand me… and appreciates the nuance of my character. At this point I have encountered quite literally multiple thousands of other players… and from those I have adopted a fraction… but still a large enough group that this community of contacts is also literally thousands of players. With the transient nature of the internet, folks come and go, but the memories they leave behind is nonetheless important. I feel like it is my job to act as the glue, to try and bind this digital family together. The problem is I am never quite satisfied, and keep meeting awesome and interesting people along the way. I will continue trying to stuff these people into my van and adopt them into my family. I’ve been called many things in my pursuit… the Cruise Director, a Bus Driver, an Ombudsman, I even had one former guildie refer to me as the “Prom Queen” because everyone seemed to know me. At the end of the day I just want to surround myself in a blanket of awesome people to share my game time with, and I feel like that job will never be finished. If you need a good home, and are community minded… chances are I will try and adopt you too.