MMO Archives - Page 385 of 442 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Labyrinth of the Ancients

August 14, 2014 by Belghast

Manderville With Friends

Yesterday I had a bit of a rough day at work from the mental and emotional sanity standpoint. So I was pretty much bummed throughout the day and this carried on to coming home that night. I did have a weird sequence of events happen that lead to me meeting a new friend. When I play a game on a specific server I have gotten in the habit of creating a column in tweetdeck with the server name and the game name in it, just to see what happens to be going on in that community on social media. When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV I did that and created a column that said “FFXIV Cactuar” giving me any FFXIV posts related to Cactuar. It has been less than amazing considering that it also catches all posts about the cactuar creatures… and as a result I had gotten out of the habit at looking at it.

When I looked yesterday however there were a bunch of posts from a seemingly friendly person playing on our server. In fact there were pictures posted of the mists housing district, and I thought wow… wouldn’t it be a crazy coincidence if we ended up virtual neighbors. Turns out she is in ward 1 of the Mists which pretty much means “we bought housing the second it was available”. We friended each other in game and next thing I know she is coming to visit our house in the ward. What do you do when you have guests over? Dance the manderville of course. After a bit I got a few guildies in on the act, and she even taught us what happens when you get a bunch of Moogle pets together. After a short period of time they apparently start dancing in a circle together. With some experimentation it seems like lots of pets interact with others of the same type. When you summon a Pudgy Puk for example, all the other Puks rush over to greet the newcomer. It is little details like this that make the game so amazingly charming.

The awesome side effect of all of this madness however is that through twitter we all met a new friend. As the evening progressed she pulled two of my guildies into Syrcus tower and I think they had a pretty good time. She on the other hand seems super excited to actually know some people on during the EDT primetime. She hails from a huge guild on the server, that apparently at one point was one of the highest progressed guilds, otherwise I would totally try and steal her into the guild. It might still happen because her group is not active at all, as for whatever reason most of them went missing posts patch 2.2. In any case it was a pretty awesome random happening, and I think its always great to meet more awesome people on the server I play on.

Labyrinth of the Ancients

As far as my evening, my wife and I walked a mile and some change to dinner and when I got back everyone was otherwise engaged. So I decided to take the plunge and queue for the first of the crystal tower instances. Labyrinth of the Ancients is essentially the Final Fantasy XIV version of the WoW LFR system. You queue up individually or as a group and are matched up with other players forming three groups of 8 or 24 in total. Each “alliance” as they call it works as a team to make its way through the tower, and often times has to split apart so that each time covers a specific mechanic. The first part of the dungeon drops ilvl 80 gear, and has no loot restrictions, which makes it a pretty popular place to grind out some basic gear. Additionally each run through rewards both kinds of “bookrocks” making it a decent way to get some currency.

In total I made two runs last night through the raid. The first run seemed to be going really smoothly with us one-shotting the first boss encounter. However there was a portion that involved us splitting up into three teams and our team kept failing. I am not really sure what was happening as my role in the fight was super focused on burning down the “boss” at the end of the platform. Apparently however the adds were not getting handled and the ranged dps that is supposed to burn them down failed to do so. The end result was a slow cascade of players leaving the group until finally the game asked us if we wanted to abandon the duty since there really was no shot in hell of getting fillins. Unlike World of Warcraft the Final Fantasy duty system allows you to say “I only want fresh raids” and this is the default option…. so for the most part it is very hard to get people to join your group. In future runs I might just flag myself as a fillin to see if the queue goes any faster, as each time I have queued it took around thirty minutes.

Second Chances and Onion Knights

I took a break, stretched my legs and got a drink and then sat down to queue for Crystal Tower again when my group failed out. It was roughly thirty minutes again when I got a brand new group. At first I was wondering if this would be a repeat of the last group when we struggled to defeat the Bone Dragon encounter. However from that point onwards everything else went pretty flawlessly, and in no time at all we were through the dungeon and I was on to being flagged for Syrccus tower. Most of the look was meaningless for me, however form the Behemoth encounter a lancer hat dropped. I mostly rolled on it for the cosmetic look and that I was the only lancer in my sub team. When loot drops, it drops for your 8 man group and not for the 24 man raid instance as a whole. This means you are only really in competition against a handful of players, and so far I have been the only dragoon on each time.

I was able to scrounge up a picture of what the completed Onion Knight set looks like, so yeah I totally rolled for cosmetic purposes. In truth I would really like to get all of the pieces of the Wolfram set because I am really digging the appearance there. I seem to have lucked into the chest and helmet. The Chest was 66,000 gil and the Helmet was 80,000 gil on the Market Board, and since then I have not seen ANY piece of Wolfram gear cheaper than 150,000 to 200,000 gil. I am sure the crafter that posted them that cheaply is kicking themselves, but as a result I have some really awesome ilvl 90 gear. I will have to ask some of my crafter friends what exactly it takes to make more pieces because yeah… I could totally use some more of it. In any case I had a fun time checking out the raid instance. I think it is all of our hopes to be able to do Binding Coil of Bahamut at some point as a guild, especially since that is only an 8 man raid. I really like the encounters in this game so far, and I look forward to seeing what more of the raids look like.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #CrystalTower

Revenge on Pharo Sirius

August 12, 2014 by Belghast

Robin Williams

This morning is a rough one, more than anything because I don’t quite know what to say but at the same time feel like I need to say something. It is unlikely that anyone was not touched by at least one of the many faces of Robin Williams. You had the coked up version from Mork and Mindy, the family friendly version from Aladdin, the bawdy rapid fire version from Good Morning Vietnam and finally the extremely gifted and serious one as seen in movies like Goodwill Hunting and the Fisher King. There was a Robin Williams for everyone, and he was absolutely adept at switching to just the right version of himself for the role. Throughout the evening last night, folks kept popping onto TeamSpeak and announcing the news with shock that the words themselves were rolling off their lips. In many ways it will be hard to envision a world without him, because he has been such a comedic force of nature my entire life. He was like the tidal forces… just a thing that existed and we were quietly enriched for the presence.

He of course was a very public proponent of gaming, supposedly naming at least two of his children based on game characters. The most famous of these was his daughter Zelda, because he was supposedly “playing a lot of Zelda” at the time. He also struggled with all manner of addictions, so much so that I cannot think of cocaine without thinking of him at least in passing. Brilliance often burns bright by standing far too close to the flame. It is also reported that he struggled with depression, and I know specifically what that feels like. You develop all sorts of coping mechanisms to push away the bad thoughts but they never actually leave you. They are unrelenting in their pursuit of you and constantly gnawing away at the best of days. I don’t really believe there is such a thing as a “cured” state, just “functioning better”. So I choose not necessarily to wallow in the memory of this mans greatness, but instead to salute just how long he managed to chase his demons away before they consumed him. At the same time I wonder just how long I will be able to accomplish the same.

A Room of my Own

On a far lighter note, I thought I would show off my new room in the guild house. Granted I don’t have much of anything in it yet, and primarily the things that I do have, I purchased because they were cheap. It just felt wrong to own a private room but not have anything in it. Tam has this glorious room with all sorts of rare items that he has crafted through goldsmithing, but since I have avoided crafting like the plague in this game I have very little to show myself. The room was purchased with my recent wealth generated by the sale of some Materia that I got through questing. Two of them sold for 100,000 gil a piece and the third sold for 500,000 gil giving me some money finally to play around with. The private room in the guild house costs 300,000 gil but unlike other games there are no upkeep mechanics. So even though it is crazy expensive to get housing, it is at least a one time expense.

At some point I need to dip my toes into the crafting system, because it seems like all of the really cool housing stuff is crafted. Unlike some games there really doesn’t seem to be a ready made drop component here. Like in EQ2 you could go clear specific dungeons and walk away with pieces of furniture or statues, but here you walk away with rare crafting materials. In fact this has been the point of much disappointment as the last several bosses of most of the hard mode content drops nothing but crafting mats that are then turned into some of the best in slot items. This was part of my major disappointment the first time playing the game, that nothing ever really dropped interesting gear out in the world. I think maybe if I learned to appreciate the crafting system I would “grok” why I should care about getting that high quality Pieste Skin.

Revenge on Pharo Sirius

Last night for me was mostly a night to catch up on the main storyline quest. There are a number of trials that are unlocked post 50 through continuing down the main storyline. Each time they add a new patch they add new storyline content, and at the not so subtle constant nudging of Tam I worked my way to getting caught up on the King Moggle Mog encounter, which is the first of these new trials you get to. The problem is it causes you to run a series of dungeons and guildhests that no one actually wants to run ever. As a result I had to queue for Sunken Temple of Qarn, aka the dungeon with the bees that one-shot unsuspecting players. Overall the dungeon went extremely smoothly in part because as a Dragoon I could sit on the bees and interrupt them as soon as they went to cast the final sting spell. After this I had to run through a couple of guildhests with amazing names “Hero in a Half Shell” and “More than a Feeler”. The best thing about FATEs and Guildhests are the awesome puns.

After I finished my guildhests we decided to go off and seek revenge on Pharo Sirius. I guess at some point after patch 2.1 my friends had tried coming into here and gotten absolutely wrecked. So it has been both revered and feared since, and they wanted to get revenge. At this point we have significantly better gear, as at that time none of us had our relics and at this point most of us also have a good deal of gear to back said relics up. While there were some extremely tricky parts, I have to say overall the dungeon went pretty smoothly. They remembered enough of the pitfalls from before to keep us from getting hung up on them again, yet the boss encounters were still fresh enough that we had to do a good deal of thinking on our feet. We beat the dungeon with plenty of time still left on the timer, whereas the first time they were here they hit their 90 minutes and simply ran out of time to continue trying.

Mammets of Halatali

After clearing up our revenge issues with Pharo Sirius we opted to move on to Halatali Hard Mode. Essentially we have been working our way through unlocking the various dungeons so that each of us can begin doing Hard Mode roulette in the duty finder. Similarly we have a whole slew of trials to unlock before we can do those as well. As of last night I am missing Hard Mode Stone Vigil, Hard Mode Haukke Manor and Lost City of Amdapor before I can do the hard mode roulettes, and I think Tam and Ashgar are just down to two of those. The tentative plan is to run the missing ones tonight, and if not I can always directly queue for whatever ones I happen to be missing. I would just rather experience the new content as a guild than with a bunch of random strangers. Although I doubt we will have enough people to actually do the trials at any point soon, so I probably will go ahead and queue for Moggle Mog and Battle at the Big Bridge to get through those trials so that I can move on in the storyline.

Just like the other hard modes, it seems things have changed since we last were here. After working so hard to clear out the dungeon the first time, it seems as though a series of “friendly” gladiators have taken up residence in the dungeon and are prepared to challenge us to a series of difficult encounters. I say friendly in quotes because each time you get near one of them they seem to heckle you with random sayings. The whole dungeon reminds me a bit of the Crusaders Coliseum in World of Warcraft, and in fight you end up pushing your way through a bit of trash before coming up against another big boss encounter. There were some extremely interesting mechanics, and in a few places we took some deaths… but managed to spring back and figure out the “thing” we needed to learn to defeat whatever horrible attack they were throwing at us. As a whole I feel like this could be a dungeon run extremely quickly now that we know the mechanics. All in all it was a pretty great night, and I managed to catch up on the storyline… and hopefully tonight we can unlock the rest of the dungeons. I still have yet to set foot in Crystal Tower, but if all else falls through I might do that.

#FFXIV

Crafting Gae Bolg

August 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Cleaning

With the return to school rapidly approaching, this weekend we engaged in what has become a ritual of ours… the semi annual back to school deep cleaning. With all of the travel over the last several summers our lives have become about trying to just keep moving forward. As a result the house keeping falls a bit by the wayside. I am adept at picking up and vacuuming but when it comes to actually deep cleaning a room, I lack the attention to detail that my wife has. So yesterday we decided that we would devote a good chunk of the morning to getting a bunch of things done that needed to be done. The above image is part of the load we ended up taking to goodwill that had been sitting around our house as clutter.

For me I mostly did the brute force cleaning, and the gathering and relocation of objects. Once the brute force pass was done my wife would come in and do the fine detail work with chemicals and such since my lungs can’t really handle that sort of thing. We worked together as a team and the house looks great as a result. We still have a bit more laundry to finish up tonight, but overall the house is ready to go into the school year. Personally I don’t so much care, but the cluttered house is a major stressor for my wife, and anything I can do to help her transition back into the school year to go more smoothly I am willing to do. Over the next few days I know she will have several other things that need to get created or shopping trips that need be made all in the name of “back to school”.

This time of year is almost like Christmas for a teacher, but for whatever reason this year the back to school sections of stores have been pretty puny. My wife as going through her past blog posts from previous years, and during this time she was constantly finding neat things to use in her classroom. This year there has been nothing. We did make a mad dash out to Office Depot yesterday afternoon to pretend we didn’t know each other and buy two separate bundles of 3 magnetic white board erasers each. Once upon a time Office Depot used to let teachers buy more than the limit of sale items like that, but as a whole that store has really gone to shit. If it was not the option we happened to have in town, we would likely never actually go to it. They used to be extremely supportive of educators, but lately they have really screwed with their appreciation programs to the point where it simply isn’t worth the hassle and instead we just go to staples when given the option.

Errands for a Smith

My gaming yesterday was largely about trying to play catch up and get attunements knocked out of the way. For the last couple of nights I had been hoping to catch up with Warenwolf so that he could attune the needed Materia to both my Lancer and Archer weapons for their respective relics. The relic weapon quest is something akin to the epic weapon quest from Everquest and Everquest 2, the primary difference being that now you can complete most of it through the duty finder. The first step in the process is to craft a base weapon that Geralt the smith will improve into the relic weapon. There are several ways you can go about this, the intended way is to farm Wanderers Palace for an item component, and then have a crafter of that type take it and some rare metals to craft together a weapon for you. The more realistic way is to simply watch the market boards for someone who has already crafted it.

After dumping all of my free money into the guild house, I had to play catch up and finally Friday evening I managed to get enough gil together to be able to purchase the base weapon. The biggest frustration I had is that you do not need a high quality weapon, as the conversion to the relic weapon will ultimately destroy the base item in the process. However there seemed to be nothing on the market but high quality weapons, which demand a premium. The next step is to take this weapon and fuse two materia of a specific type to it. After that you bring it back to Geralt and he begins sending you on various other tasks. The first of which is to defeat the Dhorne Chimaera in Coethas Highlands. Both myself and Rae were working through this quest at the same time so we tag teamed all of the steps.

The Chimaera went pretty smoothly and was much easier than I remembered when we did it as a guild. We turned in once again at the smith and he sent us into Amdapor Keep to retrieve some rare tome. This group was a bit of a frustration as it was lead by a gladiator who had apparently not tanked the zone since release. Once upon a time you could rush to the first bosses gate and skip all of the trash in the process. He tried this twice and we failed twice, and then from that point on he was pissy the entire run. This guy really is one of the first jerks that I have encountered in the game so far, however we kept our heads down and finished the dungeon without much issue. After a quick turn in at the smith again we were off into Coerthas Highlands to “temper” the unfinished weapon through combat where you have to kill eight of three different types of mobs.

Crafting Gae Bolg

ffxiv 2014-08-10 21-32-31-504

After the weapon tempering phase it is on to do yet another world boss battle, this time Hydra which is located in as a sub dungeon in Halatali. This fight went far faster and easier than I remembered as well so I was starting to feel excited that we might just wrap this up in a single night. After turning in again it begins the hardest part of the quest where you have to defeat each of the hard mode primal encounters starting with Ifrit. Rae and I were up to the challenge so we queued together and hoped for a quick run. It turns out that when you queue as two dps it actually goes pretty quickly since the game tends to favor prebuilt chunks of parties over singlets. When I was running these as my Warrior it felt like I was absolutely carried to my Bravura weapon. It might be a side effect of the fact that Sunday is rarely a great day for random grouping, or we might just have gotten unlucky but each and every primal fight we encountered last night was a struggle to get through.

Ifrit for the most part went smoothly enough, taking us a couple of attempts to get him down. Garuda on the other hand was a nightmare. We had a pair of tanks that didn’t really know what they were doing and they were from the same guild. The better geared of the two tanks was oddly enough less experienced. It turns out that for roughly 200 hunt emblems you can get a full level 90 set of relic lookalike gear, and that is what both of these guys were wearing. We wiped mercilessly and this scholar in the group was getting pretty pissy. I mean I get being frustrated, but instead of trying to teach the players what needed to happen in the encounter they just wanted to rant and rage. Rae stepped up to the plate and explained the encounters and after we got a three stack of the echo buff we managed to push through it.

Titan is without a doubt the most difficult of the hard mode primal encounters, and this time it was no different. Once again we did not experience the carry factor that I had when I was running up my warrior. Everyone in the party seemed to be similarly or lesser geared than the two of us. Lots of bad things kept happening including the second healer just standing in stuff constantly and dying early. On the attempt where we beat it, all of us died to various effects and a group of four players… a Scholar, a Monk, a Gladiator and a Warrior managed to push Titan down the last quarter of his health winning us the battle. I wish I could have given each and every one of them a player commendation because wow… they really were badasses.

Thankfully during this entire process I managed to get enough “bookrocks” to not only craft the weapon Gae Bolg but immediately turn around and upgrade it to the ilevel 90 version as well. Early in the day I had decided to queue for one of the hardmodes and while we made it through just fine… I felt like I was pulling down the party because my Dragoon did not have his relic weapon. Now that I have it I feel like I can queue for the harder dungeons with more confidence. As part of the whole running around yesterday, both Rae and I attuned ourselves for Crystal Tower, which is as Tam explained it “Baby’s First Raid”. I am hoping to run that tonight and maybe get some more upgrades, but thanks to the spiffy weapon I picked up I am no longer quite so worried about dragging down the team.

#FFXIV #Relic

Amazing Neighbors

August 10, 2014 by Belghast

10 Years 10 Questions AggroChat Edition

Last night was another Saturday evening which means we recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week we were joined by Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam who will hopefully be becoming a much more regular member of the cast. As per my post yesterday morning, my good friend Godmother is working on a thing for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. Last night we decided to skip our normal podcast and instead took up the Alternative Chat 10 Years 10 Questions survey. As a result we ran a bit longer than our normal cast, but since we will be without Kodra next week we wanted to push through all ten questions. I have to say I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and even though I know a lot of the information we talked about… I still found out a few interesting things in the process. I am hoping that we gave Godmother some usable content.

I am really happy she is doing this and I look forward to reading and listening to the end result. I believe she has a master plan of doing a documentary podcast about all of this stuff and our responses. While all of us are not really current WoW players, we all owe so much to the game including our friendships. None of us would have known each other without this game and that is pretty crucial to all of us at this point. As Kodra says during the cast, we have a lot of love for each other and it is entirely thanks to this game that we may or may not want to play anymore. I figure that even among the former players we all have to give the game props for giving us so much in the process.

Amazing Neighbors

I have to say that our trip through Final Fantasy XIV just keeps getting more charming. In the 2.1 patch shortly after we quit they put in housing wards. In these semi-instanced wards you have various plots of land that you can purchase for an exorbitant amount of money. The interesting thing about this is that they become a sort of player made town as they have market boards, summoning bells and vendors on top of all of the player housing. I wrote about this some time ago but we found an amazing plot of land in a very heavily built up ward in the Limsa Lominsa area called the Mists. Just like we apparently lucked out on picking the right server we also apparently lucked out and picked one of the coolest wards. Within moments of us plunking down our house we had neighbors welcoming us to the area.

Friday night however something even cooler happened. It turns out that the other residents of the ward decided to create a neighborhood based linkshell. Now we are constantly chatting and getting to know the other awesome members of our ward including the massive guild that lives up the hill from us. It has been awesome to get to know everyone. The above screenshot is me and a member of that guild randomly breaking out into the Manderville dance while standing around at the market board. I took a bunch of screenshots because we were almost perfectly synchronized and it ended up pretty awesome to watch. The little things like this in this game just make me so happy.

It is almost as though we stepped through a time machine and found the server community that assholes forgot. Even as we have moved into harder content, the folks are still extremely chill and willing to work with the people who don’t know the fights. The end result is that even when I have good reason to gripe at someone for failing miserably to do something… I find myself NOT saying anything, or instead being supportive because I just don’t want to do anything to damage this amazing environment. The way people interact with each other reminds me of those early days of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot… when individual player reputations still mattered and everyone held other players up to higher standards. I am so amazingly happy I decided to re-up Final Fantasy XIV.

Hard Modes with Friends

Last night after the podcast we all decided to stick around and work on some hard modes. I have to say we all kinda dreaded just how hard these might be, but in reality at the 55-60 overall gear score we were sitting out they were difficult but also very manageable. I don’t want to get too much into the various strategies because one of the biggest joys for me is figuring these things out completely cold. However I have to say I really enjoyed myself, and we managed to run Hard Mode Copperbell Mines and Hard Mode Brayfloxs Longstop. In both cases the fights were challenging but after a bit of thinking on our feet we managed to push through and succeed. I look forward to doing the other hardmodes because they were really rather awesome.

What makes them so cool is that unlike World of Warcraft heroics… these are entirely new dungeons. When you step foot into Copperbell MInes for example, there are giant holes in the wall where the mobs from the first version popped out, as well as things like a broken elevator that are the results of your last trip there. To make things even cooler the dungeon music has been changed slightly as well and is more akin to the heavy metal themes to the various primal fights. The zone I absolutely cannot wait to do is Hard Mode Haukke Manor since the original version is this awesome Castlevania like romp through a Haunted Mansion. The hard mode version absolutely has to be amazing, so maybe later this evening we can get that going. For the time being I am absolutely eating up every moment of this game, and I still have a long list of things that I want to be doing.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust