stormblood Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Leaving the Steppes

June 22, 2017 by Belghast

The pool guys did in fact come out and power wash the pool yesterday and now we are playing babysit the water hose. It takes an excessively long time to fill up a pool with a single water hose. In truth I am questioning if it will be done by this evening… and then we have that awkward problem of do we leave it running tonight with the fear that it might overflow? As far as gaming time went I very obviously spent some more time in Stormblood. First I have to tell you that I unequivocally love this expansion. I can’t really get into all the reasons why without a whole bucket load of spoilers but suffice to say I am super impressed with what they have done and where they are going. Heavensward was this deep dive into the culture of the Ishgardians… and for the most part except for a few notable exceptions they were assholes. This expansion before launch seemed like it would be a similar exploration of Doma and Ala Mhigo… but was I was not expecting was this wonderful journey through the culture of the Raen and Xaela Au’Ra. This is really making me hope that in future expansions they might explore the culture of the Roegadyn or the Lalafel… because really I want to know why the Lala are like the most prolific race in Eorzea. If there is someone pulling the strings… 99.9% of the time it is going to be a Lalafel.

As far as my further journeys in Stormblood, I have now made it through the third dungeon which we ran as soon as we could get enough people around to do it last night. I also ran the second dungeon again for Neph and the first trial, which the more I am exposed to it the more I like it. There are so many cool elements and mechanics going on there that I am really looking forward to learning the fight on Extreme mode. I have no clue how far away the fourth dungeon is, but I have more or less finished up in the Steppes and am returning to Yanxia for what I am assuming is going to uncover the back half of that zone. Every single bit of the story has been good, and it is making me bummed that I am currently story locked until I figure out a way to ding 67. I am roughly a quarter of a level from dinging so I have a handful of options… but the one I am probably going to take is to run back and start doing side quests in the Steppes until I can push on through. Whatever lead on the content I did have has now evaporated once I went back to following the MSQ only. In theory tonight I will spend some time collecting Aether Currents so I can fly in a third zone, and doing side quests for probably the Mol.

The Steppes of Azim might be my favorite zone in all of Final Fantasy XIV. I always seem to go for the Nagrand like zones in games, the big flowing grasslands perforated by rocky outcroppings. I thought the Heavensward zones were physically imposing, but the Stormblood zones overall feel much larger in size and scope. I am still behind as the highest progressed finished dungeon four last night, and I am just barely on the other side of the third dungeon. I have however passed a lot of other players like Neph and Ash, but still feel like I am lagging from where I would like to be. I figure this is going to be a week and a half in total to get to 70 and start gearing up for the end game proper, or in my case… start leveling the Samurai. I have what I think are several Warrior quests to do so I might simply focus on doing those at the beginning of the night and see where that gets me level wise.

Underwater Adventures

June 20, 2017 by Belghast

I feel like I have always been a bit weird when it comes to MMOs. I like underwater content… pending I don’t have to care about breathing. I took the Vashjir path in World of Warcraft and I enjoyed for the most part the underwater sections of the Nightmare Tide expansion in Rift. So it is little surprise that I am really enjoying the underwater sections of Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. I feel like they made a strong decision not to force us to screw with breath bars, and I love that they implemented surface swimming in lots of old world areas like Costa Del Sol. The real part that I loving is the fact that there are cities in giant bubbles on the ocean floor, and while sure they couldn’t help but make a slight Gungan reference during one of the quests about speeding us on our way… overall I am loving it. More than anything I feel really happy to be in love again with Final Fantasy. The rough few days at the start of this expansion really made me second guess whether or not I would actually get that magic back. For awhile now FFXIV has been a game I felt like I should play… but just wasn’t into. I would log in and go over to the Gold Saucer to play my daily scratch off cards… but then quickly log right back out. I has this hope that when the headstart began we would all get enthralled in the game once more and start playing it as our primary MMO. However in those first few days when it seemed like everything was shit, and we couldn’t move forward the MSQ… I was starting to doubt myself. I am thankful that I was not in fact wrong and I am setting dozens of happy people gobbling up content in the free company every night.

The only negative is however… that I am functionally one full day behind everyone else. That would not seem like much but it feels like I am habitually one full zone behind the rest of the crowd… or at least the folks I traditionally run dungeons with. Now because of the first timers bonus everyone is more than happy to help someone through a dungeon. Last night Void needed Xelphatol one of the 3.4 dungeons and I managed to get a sizable chunk of experience at level 63, so doing any dungeon content with the bonus is really worth it. The biggest problem I have is that I see all of the (!) icons and feel like I need to do them all. I remember going through the same problem with Heavensward and it taking one full zone before I finally realized that I should probably not do all of them and instead just focus down on the main story quest line. Now that I have shifted to a MSQ and unlock only approach I am starting to gain ground once more. At this very moment my MSQ is gated by the first Primal encounter, but I hit it at around 10:30 last night… and just didn’t have it in me to attempt to pull together a group to get it done. Today however once I get time I will probably do just that and get rolling again. All in all I am loving the expansion, and in truth it feels more “Final Fantasy” than FFXIV has at any point because we finally have a real danger in the form of the Garlean Empire. We had a few spats with them in A Realm Reborn, but that was functionally finished the moment we cleared the launch content… and while there has been a flirtation that more was to come we had not really seen it until the precursors leading up to Stormblood. Fighting against an Evil Empire is the core of the best Final Fantasy experiences for me, and I am super happy to finally have that feeling back in FFXIV.

Raubhangeddon Over

June 19, 2017 by Belghast

Having a birthday on the internet is a really weird thing. By the time I woke up yesterday morning in our hotel room I already had a flood of messages from folks. I cannot put into words the warm fuzzies I got seeing that. I attempted to keep up with thanking everyone individually but as we started roaming around Kansas City yesterday I completely lost track of where I was in the mix. By the end of the day it was just a daunting task to try and sort out who I had thanked and who I had not. By the time we made it home I was completely drained and crashed pretty hard. So if I did not manage to thank you individually I apologize and please know that every single person meant the world to me. As far as our trip… it was really enjoyable. Once again we did our thing which is to hit every single Half Priced Books store in the metro, along with a few other stops like Micro Center and IKEA… all things we don’t have in Tulsa. This is the second year in a row we have done this, and it was largely born out of the fact that getting my wife home after the AP reading turned into a very unpredictable experience. Functionally when the shindig lets out they are trying to fly a surge of 4000 or so people out of a tiny little airport. It is roughly a four hour drive from Tulsa to Kansas City with a bunch of variables that could speed it up or slow it down. The first year she was doing the AP grading there, she ended up getting flown to Dallas and then having a long layover there so that it took roughly 8 hours for her to get home. Admittedly… me driving up to get her and driving back home is still 8 hours…. but at least by spending the night it is chopped up in a few segments and lets us go do some stuff in this case Saturday night and Sunday morning. I always hate it when my birthday lands on Father’s Day because it also means everything is madness. Micro Center is normally a fun experience, but in this case there were workers stationed every few feet and just walking around the store I wound up getting asked 8 times if they could help me. I am not exactly sure why I find this so offensive… but I wish there was a system where you could get a sticker from the first person you meet that says “leave me the fuck alone”.

The other big happening of the weekend was the Stormblood launch, and in some ways it went really smoothly… and in other ways it went tragically wrong. Please note that I love Square Enix and the Final Fantasy XIV team… but you are going to get some salt from me on this post. On Friday the head start began, which is an event only available to folks who had pre-ordered the game prior to a certain point. This is really key because it is a fixed group of people, pulled from a known quantity of folks who plunked down money and purchased your game ahead of time. In order to get into Headstart it means that you needed to register a code that was sent to you by Square Enix via email with the Mogstation. Over the years there have been a number of events where the team has says that they just did not expect the numbers… namely at the relaunch of A Realm Reborn and I at least partially gave them the benefit of the doubt in this statement. However with the launch of a brand new expansion for a game with a known set of players… and a known set of preorders… that should have given them a head start on trying to figure out how much server throughput they needed for the launch. They failed this miserably and for all of Friday and all of Saturday… everyone was stuck on the same quest that required the creation of a solo instance. That means every player in a given Data Center is fighting for what is apparently a very limited number of slots available for running this quest. The result was a mixture of reactions from the players… and the creation of lines as folks attempted to go about this quest in an orderly fashion. Final Fantasy XIV is literally the only place you would ever see this solution… and it didn’t take long even here before it broke down. Granted the line concept was some superstitious nonsense given that you were not just competing against your fellow servermates… but also everyone else in the Aether data center in my case. So while Cactuar isn’t a massive server… it is large enough, but becomes completely drowned out by the size of the player base of Balmung and Gilgamesh which share the same server cluster.

Yesterday during the day however at some point they put in a fix and remedied the situation, so last night in my sleepy state I attempted to move forward only to be claimed by sleep and a server disconnect in the middle of a lengthy cut scene. This morning I popped in with every intent of taking a few screenshots and wound up playing for about an hour popping around and doing quests. I am hoping we are through the worst of the launch, but I expect another influx of players on Tuesday when the game releases in stores. Hopefully they have learned their lessons and have spare resources ready to stand up if they run into more problems. In the era of virtualized servers, leased datacenter space, and all manner of licensing options… it feels like there is little excuse not to have some resources waiting in the wings to stand up at the first sign of trouble. I have a feeling there were a lot of design decisions on the infrastructure side that maybe don’t scale terribly well in modern computing terms. The game is doing some odd things, like it came out during one of the E3 discussions that every time you move in the server… your entire player object is passed around including your inventory and armory chest as part of one huge object. This came up when they talked about not wanting to expand out inventory space too much because it might crash the server in passing around too big of an object. This just seems like a weird way of going about things, and one susceptible to memory hacks or at least rollbacks from crashes. At this point I just need to play catch up because I have Free Company members that are already 66 or higher.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.