shiva Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Wrong Proportions

July 18, 2024 by Belghast

Comparing the Noct Tanking Set from my Lalafell main and my Roegadyn alt

Good Morning Friends. I have to say I was overwhelmingly excited when I got to the point of the ARR MSQ when it started doling out the formerly Binding-Coil-era gear sets. For pretty much all of my time as a Lalafell I have used this set, dyed jet black, with the bunny kabuto for my signature look. So I was ecstatic to be able to have this appearance on my Roegadyn alt. Sure I could not wear the tanking skirt with it that comes from a level 80 dungeon, but I could get MOST of the way to replicating the appearance. I bounced around between all of the servers in Dynamis until I found the cheapest bunny kabuto for 160k and snapped it up to be able to compile the look. Then in all of my horror last night I realized… the proportions are all wrong on a Roegadyn. It just looks too bulky and my bunny ears are way the hell too small to really work in the same way. So alas… I wasted a bunch of money on something I am probably never actually going to wear until I fantasia again.

I guess I should once again give a fair warning that as I am talking through this ARR revisit, I am going to be talking about spoilers. Be warned if you have not made it this far into the game.

Title Screen for Urth’s Fount the Odin Fight

We started off last night by running Snowcloak and then Odin which represented all of the new things that we had not run yet. Snowcloak was just as sleepy as it always is… and I maybe overpulled a few times leading Ace to have to scramble to keep my ass vertical. We pulled through it and it was a largely enjoyable experience. I still lament the loss of the proper version of the yeti fight where you throw snowballs at him. From there we ran Odin thinking it would be a long queue… but got in almost instantly. This fight is still exceptionally tough and we got some bad RNG on the first attempt and had to deal with a spear phase while he was casting his one-hit enrage attack. The second time though we managed to take him out right before the cast timer was finished. This fight is legitimately still probably more difficult than most of the ARR era Extremes.

Shiva Cutscene from Akh Afah Amphitheatre Hard

Knowing that Shiva was not too far off we put our heads down and quested along furiously until we unlocked Akh Afah Amphitheatre (Hard). It is sort of sad how stinking easy the ARR Hard versions are. When you have spent so much time farming the extremes to get mount drops for folks… the Hard versions just sort of feel like a cakewalk. I keep waiting for mechanics that never come, like I did not remember there was now ice floor phase in the Hard version, or at least not one we had gotten to yet. The music is still so freaking great and if you have not listened to it in a while, you own yourself to click through and do so right now. I have so much love for this era of the game because it represents the period of time when our little FC was the most active and dedicated. It was the era when we were actively fielding raids and hanging out with each other multiple times per week. While Ace and I have recaptured some of that in small bursts… I still miss all the rest of our team.

The Keeper of the Lake Entrance Unlocked in Mor Dhona

I stuck around last night and pushed through the story up until the point where Keeper of the Lake unlocked. I am very much looking forward to this dungeon because I can remember it being one of my favorites. It also has some freaking amazing music and a few really fun fights that make the player feel super cool for honestly dodging some rather simplistic mechanics by today’s standards. The story is heating up and honestly… I am starting to feel some “feelings” because I know what is about to happen in the next patch. It is hard to explain how emotionally it hit me to play through this content the first time. I was so oblivious to the catastrophe that was about to befall my character and my friends… but seeing it all again you can absolutely see the underpinnings of foreshadowing. A game had never quite doing anything like this before, not at least in the MMORPG space… so I was simply not prepared for the level of betrayal that was impending and as such did not heed the warnings.

The hardest part of this replay is having to run quests with Ilberd knowing what is about to happen. I so despise this person and everything that he and the Crystal Braves come to represent. I’m immensely bothered by what the hubris plays out in Alphinaud and I just want to shake some sense into his obliviousness. The writing was absolutely on the wall. I am seeing it now and it was clearly there for us… if we just chose to look at it. Last night seeing Ilberd say “you never betray your own” was just too fucking much. If I could change the course of the game I would… I would strike him down right now and suffer the consequences. I hate “Cold War” periods in video games… because I am a character of action, not politics. I was not designed for this, and quite honestly I think most of us are not equipped to handle it… which as a result is why this whole sequence managed to blindside so many. Unfortunately, this is a card that only works once… and every betrayal from this point forward has been spotted ahead of time because now we know it is possible… and now we are always on the lookout. Ilberd and crew shoot our faith… in a way that can never be regained.

Anyways… I am deeply looking forward to Heavensward because I want to hunt a Sky Whale. I’m probably looking forward to that fight than almost anything else at this point. Heavensward had some freaking amazing primal fights.

Shiva Down

June 17, 2015 by Belghast

Last Of the E3 Shows

I think at this point I am ready to be done with E3 2015 for awhile. In theory yesterday was the tail end of the major conferences. I have to say that when I originally made my statement that Bethesda had won E3, I was doing so with an over exaggerated amount of hyperbole. I have to say however as the dust settles… they still managed to put on the best event and was the only show where every single thing they announced was something I cared about, at least on some level. The most frustrating event for me personally was the Square Enix event, in part because they combined a line up of amazing games… with a high school speech classroom quality of presentation ability. I am not sure how they managed to make these games seem boring, but they certainly did. All of that said I am completely amped to get my hands on Just Cause 3… or that game that lets me blow everything up. I got a see a little bit of game play on Twitch yesterday evening that showed them taking out bridges… and I could not be more enthralled.

The surprise of the year still is Microsoft in the fact that they presented me with what was an overall enjoyable conference after several years of being frustrated by their product offerings. The problem being that last night during PC Gaming show they pretty much destroyed all interest I had in picking up an Xbox One, when they started announcing that several more previously Xbox exclusives would be coming to PC. It seems as though I am going to finally get to play Gears of War in the new premastered form, and get my hands in the new Killer Instinct. This makes me question even more of their previous “exclusivity” statements because it seems like they are treating Windows 10 and Xbox One as the same platform. I guess in the grand scheme of things I am completely fine with this. This lets me focus on a Gaming PC to get the Xbox exclusives and PS4 Console to get any remaining Sony exclusives.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5

Of all the games that I saw over the course of the last three days, the one that I am the most gleefully happy about is probably a surprising title. I am so damned excited to see the return of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater franchise to modern gaming, and yesterday I got to watch some game play on the twitch stream. It looks and feels like a beautifie d version of the game I loved and remember spending so many hours playing in the original playstation, and later the playstation 2. I cannot fully explain my love of this game, other than the fact that one upon a time I was a little skater punk kid. While I never had the skill to do half of the things that you can do in THPS, I always wanted to carve and insane session out like my one time idols. This is absolutely a guilty fantasy fulfillment experience for me, that allows someone who is relatively uncoordinated and has a shitty sense of balance to do insane grinds down every possible surface I can find.

Now Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD has been available on Steam for awhile now, and while I enjoy it quite a bit… it is missing a lot of the reasons why I enjoyed the THPS series. Firstly I loved the create a Skater mode that allowed me to essentially create a version of myself in the game and work my way through a “career mode”. This feature thankfully has been confirmed to be in the new THPS5, as is the create a skate park feature that is also missing from HD. Apparently there is going to be an in game market of sorts that will allow you to swap skate parks with folks online, greatly extending the replay ability of this title. The negative is that it will initially release on the PS4 and Xbox One and then later on the other platforms including PC. For me this is a simple decision since I played all the original Tony Hawk games on with a playstation controller in my hand, I have no problem picking this up for the PS4 which will also let me play it over my Vita. Watching folks play this game, and seeing the new version of Warehouse and School 2… that has been renamed to School 3… just put a massive cheesy grin on my face.

Shiva Down

I had originally intended to write about this yesterday, but wound up with far too much to talk about on the E3 news front. Monday night was our last raid night before the expansion lands Friday morning, and as such we focused on the two things that have been in our way for awhile now. The first of which is the last of the extreme primal encounters, Shiva. This fight is such a frustrating experience because it combines elements we are horrible at. Namely our group is bad at doing the same dance over and over. For example on Turn 9, everyone else does this method where they stack up and run as a group to drop the meteors. However for us we simply do this thing we lovingly refer to as the “Benny Hill maneuver” where we just try and spread out around the edge of the room and move as the meteors drop. Shiva combines elements of get away from everyone and stack the hell up in a way that ultimately ended up in many deaths along the way.

The worst of her mechanics is the bow attack, which she starts in phase two. This fires arrows in a 270* arc from the front of her meaning that you have to be stacked tight on her ass to keep from getting hit. What makes it worse however is that the normal damage dealt by bow to the tanks is truly insane. Ashgar and I had to essentially cycle through cooldowns while in bow phase to have a shot in hell of staying alive. On the attempt we defeated her, our strategy absolutely revolved around staying alive long enough to get a level three limit break… and then using that to resurrect the entire party and finish her off. There is something so damned satisfying about the level three healer limit break, it is like a giant screw you to the boss when you can bring back your entire party. It makes the whole experience seem like one of those insane Anime come from behind victories. While we did not get much further in Turn 9, we did manage to take down the last of the Extreme primals so I can go into this expansion with a feeling of accomplishment. Granted I know we will be fighting all of these extreme primals again partially for ponies and partially to get other guild members through the quests. I feel like I am completely ready for Ishgard now, and I am going to have so much trouble sleeping tomorrow night.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

June 9, 2015 by Belghast

Alone and Awake

This morning I am doing everything a bit discombobulated. I ended up taking a massive name yesterday, and as a result took some melatonin to force myself to get to sleep at a decent hour. The end result is me waking up at 4:30 instead of 5:30… so I am just going to roll with it. Today is the first morning I am getting ready by myself, and that is always a strange prospect. We are now entering the season when my wife travels to go to conferences, and this time she will return in a little over a week on my birthday. It is always strange to go through this each year, and as normal as it is I never seem to get used to it. Technically yesterday was my first day without her, but since my allergies were trying to kill me, my focus was on simply surviving the day and less on living in it. The allergies seem to be improved, but then again I am not actually out in the world yet.

Yesterday however I was struggling to breathe from the moment I woke up so that at least is not happening. You’d think that staying home all day would have been an excellent opportunity for some gaming, but alas I actually tried to do some work. Around noon I was feeling worse and opted to lay down for a nap… and wound up sleeping until 4 pm. So I am guessing that maybe there was more at work than just the allergies. I am not a big nap taker because generally it means I cannot sleep that night, and even when I do take a nap it is rarely longer than an hour. So for me to sleep that long probably means I needed it. The end result today however is that my time scale for everything is a little off. As again I am mostly just going to roll with it and see if I can function normally today just offset by an hour.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

So as it turns out you apparently do only get two character slots in ArcheAge regardless of what the tooltip says. Thanks to everyone for helping explain this one, because even Trion support seems not to know. As of the conversation I had two nights ago they thought I should have at least gotten four. So I purchased a third slot and moved on with the creation of my own Cat Belghast also known as Belglaive on the Tahyang server. I have to admit, that at first I thought I was not going to like this whole cat man thing, but the longer I play the character the more I am actually enjoying. I will admit part of the enjoyment is the snowlion mount I get to ride on. If you thought carrying a foal around on your back was adorable… just wait until that is a lion cub. One of the first quests is to go out into a field and cheer up a forlorn lion cub… and absolute adorableness ensues. The animations are a little strange to get used to, like for example when I do a charge attack instead of sliding into the target with my shoulder I seem to leap into the target feet first, which is a little disjointed.

I also opted to go for a completely different path. Always in the past I had chosen to go Battlerage and Defense, but instead I am mixing things up and going Battlerage, Shadowplay and Auramancy which is apparently the “Dark Runner” class. I felt the more feral nature of the Firran character called for something more vicious and less tanky. For the time being I am going down the path of Dual Wield which is giving everything a really awesome feel. Right now I charge in, whirlwind, and then hit my normal attacks and things seem to just evaporate. I just got a new attack from the Shadowplay tree but honestly I rarely have time to hit it, things are simply dying that fast. Now I at least feel comfortable that I have something on both sides of the fence whichever direction we plan on going as a group. I think the last thing said was that we would let Kodra decide which direction he wanted to play. I feel comfortable on either side now, but I will say my leaning is still towards the side that will eventually get dwarves.

Ice-skating with Primals

One of the things that has been noticed with our group is that we start out extremely solidly on a fight and then deteriorate over the night. This means our first or second attempt will almost always be the best of the evening, and then maybe just maybe we pull things out by the skin of our teeth at the end of the evening. As a result Tam wanted to try something slightly different last night and we went into turn nine for a half dozen or so attempts before moving on to something else for the evening. Sure enough we had some of our best attempts early on and then got significantly worse from there. When we hit that point where we were just making stupid mistakes we opted to shift focus and go make attempts on Shiva Extreme. This is the last of the primals that we have not attempted and beaten on Extreme mode. I have to say I was not really fully prepared for how annoying this fight ended up being. I’ve said before that there are two types of fights in Final Fantasy XIV. The first is one where you have to learn a dance and repeat that dance over and over until you win. The second type is where you adjust to things that are happening and move around to account for this fact.

We are extremely good at the second type, and tend to defeat those encounters quickly. However when a fight requires us to memorize a pattern and execute said pattern over and over… we tend to struggle there a bit. Last night however I feel proud of the progress we made. We were consistently getting Shiva into the 30% range for most of the night, we just need to get better at two things really. The first thing… we are really bad at moving behind her and stacking tight enough for the bow attack which does a 270 degree arc attack in front of her that will oneshot everyone including the tank. When she hit me with it, the attack dealt 18,000 hit points… which even for my silly warrior health pool was way too many. The other thing is that we need to get better at dodging circles. These come in the form of hailstorm that causes the group to spread out and not overlap, and later in the form of circles on the ground. Between these effects and the bow… that pretty much accounted for all of our party deaths. If we can figure out how to stay alive through all of that mess we will easily defeat her.

A Tale of Three Games

November 18, 2014 by Belghast

Cold Snap

Our Final Fantasy XIV group has ended up taking about a month long break following the launch of the 2.4 patch. For various reasons we have not rallied the troops on Tuesday nights, and as such we have opted to move our group content night. Tuesday has turned out to be just as bad a day to do anything serious as it was in every other MMO. For some reason it seems that Final Fantasy XIV patches more often than not late Monday night leading into Tuesday morning. This means along with the normal weekly reset we are often times dealing with marginally unstable servers. Since Monday tends to be a night where most folks focus on getting the last poetics needed to cap for the week, we figured it was also a relatively low volume raid night. So going forward we are going to try and pull together 8 man group content Monday nights with whomever we can muster at the time.

Often times who we have available will dictate what we can do. Last night we started off with Shiva Hard Mode, since most of us had not actually completed it. I have to say the fight was rather enjoyable, and it was kinda like a strange mishmash of titan and ifrit. It took us a couple of tries to see all the mechanics and then we straight stomped her. Granted this is just a hard mode and we are used to mostly attempting extremes. After that we went back and did Garuda Extreme again, because there was at least one member of the party who had not completed it. Traditionally we would be working on Titan Extreme, but it was good to go back and see that we could in fact repeat our victory. Granted it had been well over a month since we had last done the fight, and as such all of us were a bit rusty. However after a few wipes we nailed it like we actually knew what we were doing. Hopefully by next week everyone will have unlocked Ultros so we can take that on as a group, and this should have keyed most everyone for Garuda… so we can make attempts on Titan Extreme again.

To Skip or Not to Skip

After our group broke apart in Final Fantasy XIV I opted to poke my head into World of Warcraft and see what mayhem I could cause. I apparently was significantly closer to 96 than I realized, because upon entering the game and beginning work again on the Gorgrond content… I dinged within doing a few of the bonus areas. I still have a handful of bonus content areas to complete, but now this gives me a dilemma. I am at an ideal point to transition to the new zone that unlocked at 96… Spires of Arak. The problem being I have yet to do anything at all in Talador other than set up my garrison outpost. It looks like a really cool zone… but I am wondering if doing it will basically screw me for getting into normal mode dungeons. The problem that I ran into with Pandaria is that I leveled significantly quicker than the content would normally allow… and this means that I ended up needing to skip entire zones in the process. Normally I would keep plugging on, but I would really like to be available for at least a normal mode tank when I reach 100. The gear level that I came into the expansion with is just not going to hold long enough for me to do meaningful content.

It was my experience in Pandaria that if you could get into Townlong Steppes and Dreadwastes at the level cap to enter them… you could end up getting enough gear upgrades from questing that you were more than ready to set foot into normals… and quite possibly you were within an upgrade or two away from being able to do heroics. I guess in theory I could keep plugging away at Talador and simply finish all the content in the game before worrying about doing dungeons. Ultimately I do want to finish the content, because this expansion actually has a storyline that I care about for once. I guess my only desire to rush to 100 is so that I can get in on the initial wave of folks needing to run dungeons. While tanking for strangers was not as bad of an experience as I had expected… I feel like once everyone hits cap that experience will degrade significantly. Ultimately I will need to make a decision and move forward. Right now I am leaning heavily towards just skipping Talador entirely for the moment and diving into the Spire of Arak for maximum upgrade potential.

A Tale of Three Games

At midnight of last night another game launched that will be fighting for my attention, or significantly earlier than midnight if you know how to use a VPN to cause yourself to show up as another region. This once again is proof positive that region lockouts are dumb, because they are so painfully easy to circumvent if you really want to. I however did not care enough to do this, and my Monday night was already pretty full so I just waited until 11pm my time to get in and play the game. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game with so many hopes wrapped up in it, that can either be booned or bashed within the first few hours of game play. Will this game return to Dragon Age: Origin style game play, or will it be more akin to Dragon Age 2. Quite honestly I don’t have an answer for you yet because I just have not seen enough of the game.

I am however already questioning my choices, and thinking that maybe I should not have gone sword and board tanky. The game unfortunately gives you a tank for your very first character, and while I have not even completely the introduction… I am already having flashbacks of trying to make two tanks work to keep Alistair in my party. The description mentions having proficiency with a two hander as well, so hopefully one of us can equip one of those and be done with it. Quite honestly the game felt a little sluggish, but I think maybe I had something installing in the background when I made my attempt to play it. For whatever reason it seemed to run silky smooth.. and then absolutely thrash the hard drive every so often without much rhyme or reason as to why. My hope was that it was just a background process thing… and not the game doing something dumb like trying to dial into the dragon age servers periodically. The game took a significant time to load… which I do think we can probably blame on busy servers as everyone was trying to launch the client at exactly midnight. Hopefully as the week goes on, I will have more to report on it… other than it exists.

My Cousin

No matter how smoothly this Thanksgiving goes… it was going to be a rough one regardless. This is going to be the first dinner without my grandmother, who has been such a fixed point and an anchor in our family. She represents that last in a long line of degrading family events that pretty much means all of the normality that I grew up with as far as family and holidays goes is gone. When my grandmother on my fathers side passed away, those meals just stopped in any semblance of order. We would say that we would try and get together, but ultimately we each made a quick visit in private to my grandfather… and that reason for maybe passing each other in the drive way even left when he passed away. Similarly with my wife’s family… when he step dad passed away the era of having big family meals went away… and folks opted to break apart into much smaller units. The last bastion of the big family get together was my Grandmother on my mothers side… and this past year she passed away. Predictably holiday plans have been non functional.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, because it is one of the last pure ones. Sure the day after thanksgiving is this black mass to consumerism… but thanksgiving day itself has remained relatively pristine. It was a day about getting together and having a meal with your family, and that mission was just simple enough to stay pretty true to its original goal. There is something about sharing a meal with friends and family that is just special to me… and for years I tried to convince my family to turn Christmas into Thanksgiving 2.0… where we just got together and shared conversation and food… and forgot the presents. My grandmothers house was this focal point of all of the family activity. She was such a strong matriarch and she is as much a reason for why I am the person I am… as anyone in my life is. I spent the majority of my childhood at her house, with her as my companion and friend. So this Thanksgiving was always going to be a hard one, no matter what happened.

The interesting thing that I have noted as we have gone through a series of recent funerals is how well my generation seems to get along with one another. When my grandmother passed away, I stayed long after most of the folks had left just talking to my cousins. My generation just does not fit into our family as a whole… we went out into the world and for the most part all did something with our lives beyond the boundaries of the small town my family hails from. The other day my wife was lamenting how strange Thanksgiving would be without my grandmother on facebook, and at this one of my cousins announced that she was intending to invite us to have the meal with them. Apparently she had gone through the same malaise and similarly they had a few deaths in their family that pretty much ended up with the holiday decimated. So as such here we go trying to start our own new traditions. Hopefully Thanksgiving will go smoothly, but in any case it will be better than spending it without family.