second coil of bahamut Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Flower Power

April 30, 2015 by Belghast

Bad Brain

This morning I am struggling a bit to get started with my normal blogging process. Right now I am going through what I generally term as a “low spot” in my mental health. I have been feeling depressed and generally disconnected from the world lately. It is like I am staring out a window and watching the world go by in fast motion. Additionally I seem to be focused on only the bad things. Like I could have a dozen normal conversations, but my brain is heat seeking in on the moments that don’t go perfectly. Analyzing them, breaking them apart, wallowing in my imagined failure. What frustrates me the most is that I have a pretty awesome life, but when my brain is on a down cycle it certainly doesn’t seem like it, and my internal critic has been working overtime.

The thing is, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if my brain would just stop with statements like pointing out that I have gained weight, or that I am failing to live up to this or that goal. It always has to be the bully and take things one step too far. My brain is telling me constantly that I am an imposter and that no one actually likes me, and that at best everyone simply tolerates my actions. My brain is kicking things up another notch over the last few days, and incessant about telling me that the world would simply be a better place if I no longer existed. The thing is… I know deep down inside my core that my brain is a liar, but man… is it relentless. I am not expecting anything from this, but I figured I would open up a bit more into my own personal struggles. No one likes hanging around with someone that bums them out, but maybe me talking about it helps someone else who is struggling with the same demons. I know my brain is wrong, and that this will pass in time… but right now, it is pretty hellacious to live with 24/7.

Flower Power

Last night was yet another running of the second static in our Final Fantasy Free Company. We are still struggling a bit to gather up the eight people needed to raid, but hopefully as people continue leveling and gearing that will change a bit. Ultimately I would love it were I able to be an optional in this group, since I have my group that meets seriously on Monday already, and our secondary night on Saturday before the podcast. That said at raid time we managed to gather up seven people and attempted to pug an eighth. That didn’t go terribly well, because while we were talking about the fights he ran off and pulled some golems. I mean on one level I get it, because we had not said much in the game chat, and were sorting things out on voice chat… but taking it upon yourself to pull is rarely the right answer. After a few wipes he refused to resurrect and we kicked him, abandoning duty and bringing in Ashgar. From that point on the night seemed to improve.

Things were far more tense than they should have been, and there was a bit of an outburst on Teamspeak but other than that things fell in place fairly well. I would be bummed that this team managed to get turn six in a single night of tries, whereas it took our team two nights… but this group is leaning heavily on past experience. When we tried to do each turn we tried really hard to go in as a blank slate and figure things out as they happened. It was cool though to get another raid boss killed with this group and we moved on to Turn Seven. There are a lot of moving parts in that fight, and largely the group still needs to figure out how best to control the Renaud freezing action. It is a really fun fight and even more than turn six, it came back to me quickly as we started going through the motions. I am starting to wonder though if I should be running Paladin on these fights since Damai is a Warrior main. Not sure what additional benefit having a Paladin would give the group since it has a slightly different skillset. Would at least give me practical experience doing stuff as my “other” tank class.

Another Outpost

The other game that I played a significant amount of yesterday was State of Decay Year One Survivor Edition. I am back to playing Marcus after going on some crazy misadventures as Maya. When I last played I got the radio announcement that a military presence had been spotted on the outskirts of town. Having done this song and dance before I knew that it was best to take Maya over there to check it out. Additionally at that point Marcus was doing the whole “not sure how long I can go on” thing, meaning he was exhausted and needed to be rested. Around this same time I got reports that two hordes of zombies were getting close to town. I’ve found the best way to take out a horde is vehicular zombiecide. So I laughably grabbed the Pizza Delivery car and took the the roads running them down. This ends up stirring up quite a few additional zombies in the process, but far less in my experience than trying to put down a horde with gun fire.

After quelling the two hordes I moved on to the Military encampment and it went just as well as it had in the past. The military wants everyone to stay inside and shelter in place… which is fine and good until the zombies try breaking down your door. The military house was next to one of the survivor houses I was working on gaining trust with. Unfortunately the person that normally gives me quests to complete to gain their trust was not available, so not sure exactly where they wandered off to. About this time I got a frantic radio message from Lucy telling me that her brother was trapped and needed my help. He had managed to get himself pinned down in a barn, and I had to ride in and save the day. This actually was tougher than I thought it would be and ended up having to clear about nine zombies to get to him and save him. By this time Maya was going through her whole “too exhausted to continue” routine, but I managed to finish things off and get back home with Jacob. So there we are, back home and ready for another jaunt out with Marcus. Hopefully I will get in and play some more tonight.

Gold Token Currencies

March 3, 2015 by Belghast

Obligatory WoW Selfie

With the launch of patch 6.1 I have to admit I was mildly frustrated that I had not managed to get the selfie camera to appear on my main character. Instead it showed up in the garrison list of my hunter, so it took me a few days to notice. Even then the default form of the camera is not a toy yet until you receive the follow up garrison mission to upgrade it. Now that I finally have it sitting in my toy box… I guess I have to do the obligatory picture. Now I have seen so many of these now that I decided not to tweet it, but nonetheless I think its cute and charming. I am surprised by just how little control over facial expressions you have, so I guess to get the picture you want to take would involve an extreme amount of patience. This makes the folks who have posted essentially little story vignettes using the camera all the more impressive.

I know that Blizzard has caught hell from a certain brand of player over this patch not having any “tangible” content. I for one am plenty happy with the results, namely because we got the content that goes with this patch ahead of time. Traditionally Blackrock Foundry would have been delayed until a patch rather than put in ahead of time and unlocked at a specific time. Do we really want to fault Blizzard for being proactive? While it might be stupid, little features like the selfie cam, twitter integration, heirloom system and color blind system breathe life in the game for a lot of players. While the raiders and pvpers tend to be very vocal groups, they don’t represent the “average” player. I would imagine that the average player runs LFR and is happy to be doing so, and things like the garrison and heirloom systems really add to their enjoyment. What I see is a blizzard that is trying really hard not to fuck up the gains they got with Warlords, and a very jaded community that is almost happy to see them fail. The rabble over this patch is precisely why we can’t get nice things.

Gold Token Currencies

Some time ago Blizzard teased the introduction of a monthly subscription token currency that can be purchased and sold to other players for in game gold. At the time I dubbed this “BLEX” since it seemed to be based on the Eve Online Plex concept. Some time has passed and I think many of us had simply forgotten about this until yesterday when an official blog post appeared talking about the “WoW Token”. Firstly I disapprove of the boring name, and I also disapprove of it being wow specific… but both of those are beside the point. It seems like we are now going to be getting the chance to purchase a subscription token and then sell that token on the open market. Unfortunately many of us are questioning just how open said market will be given that the FAQ states that systems will be setting the price of the currency not the players. That honestly concerns me a bit, because it makes me think that Blizzard will be trying to manipulate both sides of this equation.

I’ve played several other game that had something similar to the WoW Token, and in all cases played the game at the moment they introduced it. Generally speaking for the first month it is a buyers market, with a bunch of players trying to play “catch up” and purchase in game currency for real world money. Then things shift a bit, and the value of the currency goes up significantly, as the ready supply of folks jumping on the RMT bandwagon slow to a trickle. Ultimately the amount of a token needs to match the value proposal given by third party gold sellers. Based on some quick googling it looks like $15 gets you around 20k to 30k gold. So in order to stem the tide of third party gold selling Blizzard has to make sure that the token currency is worth at least that much, essentially that it is easier to use official systems than to risk the danger of unofficial ones.

The positive effect is if this works, the gold selling and gold hacking are in essence going to be a thing of the past. In the games that have had these token systems, there is still gold selling but nowhere near the levels that existed before hand. Essentially having a legitimate system drives the price down so much that it is simply not profitable for anyone to bother with. Unfortunately from the standpoint of players hoping to play for free… this is more than likely going to be out of reach. The price of a monthly token seems to rise with inflation, meaning that as it becomes easier to get money in game… it also starts costing you more of it to purchase your token. I feel like only the most dedicated of players with the most free time, or the best auction house schemes will ever be able to actually play World of Warcraft for free. In any case… I still think this is largely a positive move.

Final Boss Music

Last night I experienced a bit of a baptism by fire, as it seems that my raid group in Final Fantasy XIV skipped turn 8 and went straight into turn 9 the week I was out sick. The awesome thing is that it seems like they made serious progress that first night of attempts, and last night in spite of me having to play catch up and seeming to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time… we made forward momentum. This is the epic boss fight at the end of the second coil of bahamut, and just like turn 5, this one seems to be a guild killer. I know groups who have been working on learning this one for over six months. Knowing this I have to admit I went into the fight with a bit of a mental block about just how difficult it might be. Turns out just like everything else in Final Fantasy XIV… it is a rather predictable pattern that just requires lots of precision and execution.

Most of the wipes were absolutely due to me doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. However as the night drug on I started to grasp the dance and we all got considerably more precise at doing it. We actually managed to make it to the final phase which is no small accomplishment. Unfortunately unlike turn 5, the final phase here really does seem to be the hardest. That said we do seem to finally have a firm grasp on the “meteor” and “golem” phases and we were pretty much executing those flawlessly. Now we just need to get back in there and start working on that final phase. I am hoping within four nights of attempts we will have killed us a turn nine and be able to official move on to “current” content. I love my Final Fantasy XIV raid group and Free Company, for keeping me engaged for roughly seven months now… which admittedly is somewhat of a record.