MMORPG Archives - Page 200 of 412 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bunny Fail Tank Returns

March 2, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story. I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process… and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced. When I say I bounced… I bounced hard. I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on. At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla. I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me. That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content. It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to. I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV. There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system. However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tvAs a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again. I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards. In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly… I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency. I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable. At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315. Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency. Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace. I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using. There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly. We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros. I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch. All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me. Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.

Frying Pans and Nora Braves

February 28, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have had a hankering to play some State of Decay. This was a game that I originally started playing on the Xbox 360, then picked up when it was eventually released on the PC. When the Year One Survivor Edition came out I picked that up too… as well as buying it for a friend that I thought would enjoy it. Since I had not actually tried streaming from my Xbox One, I decided to pick the game up on that platform and give it a go. Basically Undead Labs is an awesome developer and I have no problem supporting them by picking it up on multiple platforms. We don’t officially have a release date for State of Decay 2… but based on the trickle of activity I am hoping we get some more news soon. My hope is the sequel takes everything that worked well about the first game, but adds in the ability to hang out and explore the zombie filled landscape with friends.

Watch Hanging out playing some State of Decay YOSE on Xbox One from Belghast on www.twitch.tvSo as a result last night I fired up the stream while testing out a few new screen elements and bashed some zombies. If you are for any reason interested you can check out the Twitch VOD here (or click the embedded player above thanks to Jaedia), but it involved a lot of me stumbling around trying to figure out what to do and a few gloriously brutal deaths. I also may or may not have run over the NPC that was following me around and bashing things with a frying pan. The kinda cool thing last night is I had a bunch of folks that were completely different from what I would consider the normal crew of people who take pity on me and hang out while I stream. It’s really bizarre for me to have someone pop in the channel that I don’t actually know. It was a surprising amount of fun to just hang out and publicly fail at playing a video game.

Right now I don’t have much in the way of stamina as far as “being on” goes. I lasted a little bit over an hour before needing to go do something else with less of an audience for a bit. I am not sure if it was just that I was tired dying in State of Decay and wanted to play something else for awhile, or if I was tired of interacting. I need to sort out a proper way to swap games when I am just not feeling the one I am playing, because in truth I wound up logging into Monster Hunter World and farming content and it would have been nice to have a little company doing so. I originally logged in with the goal of doing a little SOS Roulette, but noticed a note in the Login Bonus about the Aloy event going live. For those who are curious, the quest is titled “The Proving” and shows up under events as a 6 Star High Rank mission that requires the player to be Hunter Rank 11, so you may need to do a little bit of progressing to get there.

There are two pieces to the set, a full suit of armor similar to the Ryu gear that literally transforms you into the Aloy character model. Additionally there is a version of Aloy’s bow that can be upgraded to a Rarity 7 weapon with some elder dragon bits. The gear can be upgraded a total of 10 times allowing it to remain fairly relevant for a long while. If you want to craft the gear you are looking at collecting the following….

Aloy Armor

Nora Brave Trophy – 4 – Obtained from Event Quest
Anjanath Pelt+ – 14
Anjanath Nosebone+ – 6
Anjanath Gem – 1
30,000 Zenny

Aloy’s Bow

Nora Brave Trophy – 2
Anjanath Fang+ – 3
Monster Keenbone – 5
Anjanath Plate – 1
16,000 Zenny

Aloy’s War Bow – Upgrade to Rarity 7

Nora Brave Trophy – 3
Anjanath Scale+ – 7
Elder Dragon Bone – 3
Wyvern Gem – 1
32,000 Zenny

Now it should be noted that the only part of this that you absolutely have to collect during the event are the Nora Brave Trophies which drop at least one per mission… and there was one time I lucked out and got four in one shot. The rest of the bits can be gained from either normal High Rank Anjanath hunts or in the case of the upgrade by taking down Elder Dragons to get those bones. I ran the mission a total of five times last night and got everything I needed to craft both the base rarity 5 bow and the rarity 5 armor. The cool thing about this is that it not only makes you look like Aloy… but you also MOVE like Aloy. Not really sure how to describe it other than that, because it feels like you are playing Horizon Zero Dawn set in the Monster Hunter World setting. I have no clue how long this event is going to run, but personally I knocked mine out doing good ole SOS Roulette. That said more than willing to help folks get their parts if they need them. Honestly I might farm it a bunch while it is available because it seems to be a really good way to get High Rank Anjanath parts.

Angry Spiky Boy

February 22, 2018 by Belghast

Before I start this mornings post I have a deep burning question for my readers that may be more in tune with the Monster Hunter lore than I am. What are the flags representing that are displayed in Astera? There is one more banner that is not displayed in this screenshot that makes up the main sail of the ship I happen to be standing on currently. The only theory I have right now is that maybe that sail is the banner of the first fleet, and then each additional flag from left to right is the other four fleets? The symbols are the ones that we see on the loading screen, but those literally mean nothing to me… but I am guessing they are part of the monster hunter lore? The most prominent one that we see on a regular basis is the Sapphire Star displayed on the far right banner which sorta lead me to believe that maybe it is the symbol of the fifth fleet that we are part of. I’ve poked around a little bit online but have not really seen much talk of this heraldry.

As far as activities of the night, we spent a bit of time fighting with the multiplayer systems. I was under the impression that if I logged in and joined the squad session… that would be something easy for other squad members to do. However as the evening drug on we realized that all of us had done this thing… and we were in two completely different squad sessions. There were two players in one and four players in the other… so nowhere near the session cap of 16. Making life even more challenging was the fact that the group of two could not join the group of four without getting a network error. The four of us in the first session had to join the newer session, so it makes me wonder… do sessions eventually time out or something of the sort?

Mor and I spent a good deal of time farming nonsense, before a few of us decided on trying to get past the Nergigante roadblock. Ash had recently arrived at that step in the quest, and Kodra with a little bit of leg work was able to get there as well. So the three of us combined with Tam decided to make a few attempts last night. For the uninitiated, Nergigante is a fight where you simply cannot get hit. There is a one two punch move that he pulls off that first stuns you in place and then decimates you. If your team members are fast enough they can throw some crystal burst at him to distract him from pummeling your friends. However we were not always fast enough. The above screenshot is of Nergi just about to pound poor Ashgar into the ground.

Similarly here is a screenshot of him completely wrecking my world. The problem is you have three faints before the quest fails, and unfortunately things seem to go from “perfectly fine” to “oh god why” at a moments notice. I’ve been told that this fight is a little bit more predictable solo with only you and your Palico to worry with and the buffer of two faints for yourself instead of having to share a pool for the entire group. I will probably try this thing tonight, but whatever the case the fight feels really stressful because I simply cannot get in and deal much damage before needing to roll out to safety. At first I wondered if ranged fighters had a better time of it… but since I have been playing bow quite a bit lately for fun… I am guessing not. The biggest problem I personally have with bow is the lack of ability to dodge out of the way in the same manner as I do with longsword.

I’ve been on high center for the last two weeks and would really like to move past Nergi and on to other fights. So in theory tonight if I actually make it home from the current icemageddon, I will likely spend the evening working on trying to get through this one on my own. In other interesting news… Byf has started releasing lore videos for Monster Hunter World. The first one came out yesterday and talks about the fall of what seems to be a pretty technologically advanced civilization that existed in the Monster Hunter universe before the current relatively primitive one we have currently. Byf and Myelin were a good deal of what made the original Destiny so special for me, because they dug deep into the lore and assembled the fragments into a cohesive narrative. I am hoping that Byf can do the same for Monster Hunter seeing as I am coming in so late into the series. There is clearly a bunch of interesting stuff here, and I am looking forward to learning more about it.

Bludgeoned with Adorable

February 21, 2018 by Belghast

I have been a horrible person and should feel bad. One of the usual suspects missing from the Monster Hunter madness has been my good friend and often partner in crime… Grace. Her original line of logic was that she was going to wait until the PC release, and I was largely cool with that because when I started playing Monster Hunter World I absolutely intended to do what I did with Destiny 2. That is to restart when the PC version came out and focus on that from that point forwards as my primary platform. However the longer I have played Monster Hunter World the more I have doubted if I could actually do this thing.

Quitting Destiny 2 on the console and restarting on PC felt like it was a no brainier… and at the end of the day I was not really giving that much up. However I already feel way more attached to what I have on Monster Hunter World than I ever did to a handful of weapons that I easily regained the moment I started grinding things out again on Destiny 2. The other core problem is the fact that there is no announced date for Monster Hunter World for the PC. When I decided to restart Destiny 2 only a month had passed since the launch of the console versions, and really… it allowed me to redo all of those things I maybe should have done differently.

When Monster Hunter World finally launches on the PC something along the lines of six months or more will have passed and that is more than enough time to get acclimatized to a game and pass the threshold of being willing to give all of that up to go elsewhere. In part Monster Hunter World feels more like an MMORPG than Destiny 2 did, and those are the sort of games that you really move into. I love my gear and my weapons and having to give all of that up would feel extremely alienating. While I might have every intent of trying out the PC release, I have a feeling I would bounce pretty hard without my stuff. Now in Destiny 1 I reached this point and it was in part why I had so much struggle getting any measure of traction on the Xbox One client. I am not saying never to Monster Hunter World on the PC… just that I doubt it will become my primary platform over night.

As a result Mor and I have been waging this guerilla campaign of deluging Grace with pictures of Palicos and Poogie. Last night for example I sent her the above image of the two Palicos in my room playing harp music for me. I think the final straw that broke her with adorable… is when I sent one of the Tailrider Safari cutscenes. Whatever the case she relented and downloaded the game last night, installing it and joining the madcap community of folks playing Monster Hunter World. When she first started Destiny I made the mistake of trying to drag her around to experience all of the content that I loved. However this wound up with a really choppy experience so for the most part I am going to be around to answer questions, but try my level best to just let her experience this game.

That is not to say that shortly after taking down the Great Jagras I did drag her through a Kulu-Ya-Ku kill for completely “pure pure” reasons as PizzaMaid would say. The Great Jagras costume for palicos is not exactly a good one… so instead I figured that a single kill of Kulu would get her more than enough parts to make that set of armor for her Palico so she could begin the process of dressing it in increasingly ludicrous costumes. As a result she is now the proud owner of a lute wielding fake moustache cat, and I think the barbs of the hook are officially set. The game is completely nonsense but has a charm to it that is undeniable once you experience it. I also think that while taking down that Jagras, she got a taste of the other side of the coin that makes the game super fun to experience.

Regardless… I should feel bad by bludgeoning my friend over the head with adorable pictures from the game until she caved. However I don’t really because this is absolutely the sort of game that she would love and was only waiting for an undetermined PC release date that might see her playing alone. For awhile I had said that Horizon Zero Dawn was worth every penny of buying a PS4 just to play it. I feel like Monster Hunter World is also sort of in that category, with the exception being that it also exists on Xbox One. The problem there is… my core base is on PS4 and as a result I see very little reason to play anything but the scant exclusives on the Xbox platform. Most Xbox exclusives eventually see a PC release apart from Forza and Halo, and in the grand scheme of things at least in that scenario I would rather wait. PS4 is my console and ecosystem of choice and I am pretty happy about that.