tanking Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Om Nom Dance

July 26, 2015 by Belghast

A Late Start

I am getting a super late start this morning on my blog post… well because things and reasons. Last night when we finished recording AggroChat, my wife asked if it was time for bed or if I needed to stay up and edit the podcast. I thought to myself… that bed sounded like an amazing idea and just straight up crashed. This meant that this morning however I had to rush around a bit and edit the post while consuming breakfast. Another thing I noticed is that apparently Final Fantasy XIV patched out their idle kick, because I was still standing in there in the middle of the Dravinian Lowlands afk all night long. I was apparently similarly lazy in logging out from Teamspeak, which meant as folks started trying to pull things together… I went ahead and agreed to tank a few things.

Also I finally got around to doing my Minotaur Om Nom Nom Dance video voice over. One of the dungeons that you unlock at 60 is the Fractal Continuum which includes a really strange fight. At face value the Minotaur works just like pretty much all of the Cyclops encounters you have fought to this point. He alternates between doing a frontal cone attack that you need to dodge and a full 360 degree sweep attack that you also should avoid. Where it differs however is he will start channeling a group wipe attack, that you can only break… but essentially feeding him a mob. While doing this he does a goofy little dance of sorts… which I have taken to voicing over when I tank the dungeon. This generally throws Grace into a fit of hysterics laughing… so I decided I should really edit together a video of the “dance”.

AggroChat 67 – The Astebreed Show

This week we record yet another AggroChat Game Club game featuring the game Astebreed, which is an interesting mix of strange Anime Storytelling and Bullet Hell shooter. What makes the game very unique is that you are a mech… with a sword as well as your laser weapons. As far as the story goes, I think several of us were equally confused so we rely on Tam to decode it all for us… because he apparently was able to follow it the entire way. We have a lot of conversation about the tone of the game, the boss fights, the controls that may or may not have worked… and the total package.

Since adding Grace and Thalen to the podcast they were not in the initial rotation of AggroChat picks, so we did the most gamer thing ever… and rolled some dice before the show to graft them into the rotation. That means for the month of August Grace got to pick a title and we will be playing the bird dating sim… Hatoful Boyfriend… and Kodra was happier than I have ever heard him be. He loves this game, and drove us slightly mad with it when he was playing it. Now we are going to get to experience this madness for ourselves, and I am willing to bet that Game Club Seven is going to be one of the more interesting episodes of AggroChat in our history.

In Search of Esoterics

I have been a massive slacker this week when it came to grinding Esoterics, and as such am sitting at around 180. As a result I need a whole bunch today and tomorrow in order for me to have a shot in hell of hitting the 450 weekly cap. Generally speaking if you log in every day and run an expert roulette dungeon… you can cap fairly easily. Guess what I have not been doing at all. Essentially I have just not been up for group content and as a result I have been playing an awful lot of SkyForge in the meantime which is almost entirely a soloing experience for me. However after dropping a bunch of stress last night, and finishing the paperwork on our impending home renovations I am starting to feel a little less “under the gun”. Sure I could stress about it some more, but in my mind the decision process is over and now we just have to wait for everything to happen.

I did however have a nightmare scenario run through my mind this morning, that makes me wonder just how they are going to deal with our cable connection while ripping off the siding. I really hope I will not be without internet for two weeks. This afternoon my plan is to sit here and grind expert dungeons for anyone who is willing to run them with me, and as a result whittle away my missing esoterics. I would really like to be able to get that tasty level 200 weapon within the first three weeks. If not there is always the next two weeks I can cap to make that happen, but preferably I would like to be getting as many as I can at least until I get a few pieces of gear under my belt. The rest of the time however I am still working on pushing my Dragoon higher and at this point I am still roughly 3/4 of the way through 58. It kinda sucks to have dueling priorities, because I would really love to get him at 60 and geared so I have other options than just tanking.

Alexander Ready

July 13, 2015 by Belghast

Assorted Updates

First up I want to thank everyone for checking in on me after my Saturday post. I am doing largely okay myself, but I wanted to talk about my own struggles in the hopes that it might bring someone out of the woodwork and let them know that they really aren’t as alone as they might think. I am still processing the information about my friend, but again I am more concerned about another one of my friends for whom the news is much closer. I was absolutely overwhelmed by the support you all gave me though, and I am consistently amazed at just how loving a community the twitter and blogosphere communities can be. Sure there are people out there that make these places toxic environments, but I seem to have filtered out any possible negative elements from my own feed so that all I really see is positive people who have always been willing to embrace me when I needed it. In part I am hoping that if someone is struggling… they also see the overwhelming response I got… and maybe it convinces them that it is worth reaching out and talking to someone.

This weekend was very much the “last call” for the dumpster, as it should get picked up today. The weekend before we tackled both of our offices, and Saturday we tore into the upstairs bathroom. For several years now it had gone neglected, and the upstairs shower room was essentially a catch all of big things that we “intended” to take to good will but never actually got there. As a result that room had probably not been opened for roughly a decade. We fixed that… and did a bunch of little things throughout the weekend as well. This is also seemingly the weekend of finally taking care of things we intended to do. Over the course of Saturday I took three full loads to goodwill, and at the end of the day we were finally able to deploy this amazing Tardis shower curtain that I have had for a few years, with the intention of going in that bathroom. The cats are confused as hell with the constant changes in their world. The upstairs bathroom also serves as the littlebox room… and our eldest cat just sat in there Saturday evening confusedly meowing… because she didn’t recognize the place.

Office Improvements

A week ago I posted an “in progress” shot of my office and this weekend I continued to refine it. One of the side benefits of Saturday was getting a cabinet that would fit under the printer table, that now serves as my toolbox. This allowed me to sort the various tools that I found while cleaning and organize them in one place. Sunday however became the day I tackled hooking up the consoles again. Below the television that is proudly displaying Street Fighter Alpha 3 (we will get to that in a bit) is a cabinet that contains my PS3, PS4 and Xbox 360. I had to cut holes in the backing board of the cabinet to fish the cords through but in the end in works pretty well. While I had my PS4 torn apart I also performed the upgrade from the stock 500 GB hard drive to a new Samsung 2 TB one… and the nice thing about this setup is that it is close enough to the router that I can actually hard wire the network instead of relying on wireless for everything. My hope is that this improves the performance of remote play through both the Vita and the PSTV.

All of these are hooked into an HDMI switch box that then goes through my Elgato capture card into my PC, allowing me to capture video from any of the devices. The new device that is playing SF Alpha 3 however is a side project that I started a couple of years ago. I had purchased a Foxconn Netbox PC some time ago for the purpose of turning it into an emulator machine. Problem being in my old setup there was never really a good place to hook it up, and while I managed to get an operating system loaded on it… I never did the required fiddling to make it all work. In the meantime I had been searching for a more turnkey solution and finally landed upon Lakka, which is a custom Linux distribution designed entirely around running the RetroArch emulator platform. The awesome thing about it is that it also has Samba set up so it mounts each of the required directories as windows shares so you can simply copy files to it over the network. So as of yesterday I got it up and running and have NES, SNES, GB, GBA, DS, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear and a few Arcade games running on it. Really happy with the way it is working, the only negative is that apparently the N64 emulator will not run at all on 32 bit hardware… so I can live without that.

Alexander Ready

From a gaming perspective my world has revolved around getting to item level 170 in Final Fantasy XIV. This is the magical breaking point that allows you access to the new Alexander raid, and can be attained through a combination of law gear and clan hunt based upgrades. As of last night I am sitting at 173 with every item upgraded to 170 or better except for one of my rings. Yesterday afternoon I managed to get into turn one of Alexander with Wulf and Grace and on our second attempted pushed through the encounter. It was a really fun fight to tank along side Wulf, and while he continued on into the progression… I dropped out to help folks with dungeons. My hope is that maybe tonight I can get in some more of Alexander because supposedly at the end of the quest chain, you end up getting a “Bolt” the item that can be exchanged for an accessory slot. This would ultimately make it so that I didn’t need to somehow purchase a second tomestone of law ring, but instead jump straight to the 190 equivalent.

I am really happy that in theory my gear grind is coming to a close at least on the Warrior. This is largely because I really want to start pushing my focus to the Dragoon so I can get it up to level as well. Right now I am roughly half way to 55, and honestly a few more dungeon runs would get me there quickly. Right now however every waking moment in game has been spent making sure I do all of my duty roulettes so that I can get all the bonus law I can manage. Even with a shift in focus to the Dragoon I will still probably end up getting a bunch of law, simply because I get called on by my friends in the free company to tank random stuff. I quite literally could be happy if I did nothing but run dungeons, because this set of dungeons is freaking amazing. The last few days I have managed to get The Vault as my low level roulette, and I am perfectly fine with this because that place is so much more enjoyable than doing another Brayflox or god forbid Aurum Vale. While I am still struggling inside with the news I got on Friday, the weekend as a whole was pretty successful in at least taking my mind off of it for large blocks of time.

The Ancient Library

July 4, 2015 by Belghast

Land of Lost Cables

This morning I feel like the world is angry at me. Namely we spent the last two days doing some hardcore cleaning and rearranging of both my and my wife’s offices. This involved taking loads of stuff to good will, and even more loads of stuff out to the dumpster we rented. However it feels like maybe the end is in sight. The funny thing about this process is I am finding things that I did not remember existed. Like for example… wedding pictures… I did not remember we had a book of wedding pictures. I realize that statement sounds weird… because everyone remembers photos at their wedding right? Well for us… we eloped and there was a pretty limited group of people that COULD have taken photos. I am guessing my cousin Sarah took the photos because she does not appear in any of them, but it was still kinda cool…. and god did we look young.

We also found a stack of photos from our college graduation… and apparently overall shorts were a big thing in 1998… because both my wife and my niece were wearing them. The other awesome thing about cleaning is finding all the things I have bought and re-bought a dozen times. Like right now I have bins labeled video, audio, usb and network… and all of them are overflowing with cables. I seriously should not need to get any form of a USB cable for example for life. I have every possible connector save for maybe USB 3. In addition I found more iPhone/iPad cables than I remember us ever having. So as I dismantle my office today to do the final leg of this process I should have more than enough cables to hook things up however I want to in the final configuration.

The Ancient Library

Since we are expected to participate in the Four Job Fiesta every single year… our circle of friends has developed a deep understanding of the content contained within Final Fantasy V… in part because Ashgar has such a deep understanding of said content. So when it was leaked that Heavensward would include the Library of Ancients needless to say we were a little excited. Thursday night I managed to get up to the appropriate level to do the dungeon, and last night after all of the cleaning I sat down and managed to get a guild group to run it. I have to say I am really damned impressed with the experience and this might be my favorite dungeon yet… which is a pretty mighty feat considering I really really love The Vault, with its Scarlet Monastery 2.0 feel. What is best is the way that many of the mobs pop out of books just like they did in Final Fantasy V. In fact one of the mobs that you run into over and over is good ole page 64.

As you might suspect it has the ability to cast level 5 doom… which apparently plays by the rules set forth in Final Fantasy V. This means players who are 59 are unaffected, but those level 60 players have to get the hell out or they straight up die. Granted we have not actually tested this, so it might just be a rumor. Once again I streamed my run of the dungeon so that I could capture it in video form. The absolute best part of the dungeon is of course Byblos which takes the place of the middle boss. The best part is when you kill him he says “Soon, the seal of the master will be open.” I love it when Final Fantasy XIV does some fan service and so accurately depicts a mob from another game in this one. One thing I learned is that the Gale Cut attack can be completely avoided if you just move from out of front of him when he is casting it. So far every dungeon in Heavensward has been better than the last, so I am completely amped to see what the end game dungeons are going to be like.

The Road to Sixty

The library finally paid off and I started to get some warrior drops. The set that comes from the Library is one that I am going to have to farm up because I either look like a Sherlock Holmes era inspector or a refugee from Diagon Alley. In either case I am a fan of it, and it looks pretty adorable when I run around like this. Tam is going to be quick to point out that this is not a plate set of armor… and I will give him that. It is very much not plate, but instead a cloth robe… but it looks adorable so I am just going with it for the time being. The only thing that I have yet to see at all this expansion is a weapon drop. Every single dungeon seems to drop a nice weapon, but in all cases I have seen zero axes. As a result I am struggling through on the HQ white weapons that you get through the storyline. I figure soon enough I will be able to purchase a nice end game weapon as after last nights shenanigans I am roughly a sixth of a level away from sixty.

My hope is tonight… in my newly arranged office… I will be able to push the rest of the way into sixty. It seems there is a dungeon that folks are waiting to run that comes at the end of the main storyline. I am more than happy to tank for my friends… I just have to get to max level first. As horrible as 58 was… I have to say so far 59 has been pretty chill. Just through pushing through the main storyline in the final area and then doing some side quests and two dungeon runs… I have been able to conquer most of this level. Had I managed to actually do my clan hunts yesterday rather than getting pulled straight into a dungeon I might have dinged last night before logging. In theory I could do that tonight and hit the cap… then catch up on the last bit of story that leads to the final dungeon. My god… the story… things happen and I want so bad to talk about them, but most of my readers I would assume are not quite there yet.

Bismarck Harpooned

July 3, 2015 by Belghast

Depths of Madness

As I warned you all, I am writing this the night before I intend to post it… at 11pm after a fairly long day of working on our little side projects. Essentially the offices of both myself and my wife need reorganizing in the worst possible way. Neither has really been torn apart and put back together in a very very long time. In fact a good chunk of today was spent shedding documents… from 2005 or so that we kept for god knows what reason. I had forgotten just how many bills and statements used to pile up from the mail… that are now delivered electronically. So I spent my time alternating between shredding documents until the shredder overheated… and boxing up things I no longer needed or wanted for Goodwill.

The problem being that I feel completely overwhelmed in how much is still left to go through. I am horrible about just boxing things up to get it out of the way… so I have several of these boxes loaded with miscellaneous stuff. So this whole mission is part de-cluttering but even more important a sifting of things back into logical bins. At the same time I am trying to make my computer space more friendly, and have a better option for hooking up my console systems and still being able to capture footage from them through my computer. Another thing I am trying to do is to give myself a workspace where I can fiddle with computers or more importantly assemble the mountain of Lego sets I have. Then I am trying to free up some additional room to have places to display said Legos when I finally get them together. Needless to say the next few days are going to be busy.

Bismarck Harpooned

If you have ready this blog for any period of time, you will know that I am pretty much willing to get drug into anything if a guild member needs it. There are some exceptions that I avoid like the plague… I am looking at you Aurum Vale. However if the need is great enough I can always get my arm twisted enough to run whatever it is. Bismarck on the other hand is an encounter that I truly enjoy, so the moment someone mentions that I almost jump at the chance to run it. What makes Bismarck so interesting is the fact that it is a vastly different style of primal fight. While you are ultimately in a fight against the giant flying whale, you are having to deal with a lot of different elements rather than fighting it directly. The goal is to fire two giant harpoons into the whale that allow you to wench it to the side of the island you are standing on. From there you can dps down its weak spot. To make things more interesting you have to deal with all sorts of weather effects, different sorts of adds, and the whale itself slamming into the platform periodically.

The funny thing about pugging a Primal encounter is that you never fully understand the mechanics at work unless someone actually takes the time to explain them. One of the mechanics that we did not grasp completely was what exactly to do with the water globules during phase three. It took us three attempts to get through Bismarck because we were essentially having to figure out what exactly to do with them. The first time we killed the adds and died to lightning damage, the second time we left the water globs up… and then took a massive burst of damage when they exploded. The real mechanic is a bit more subtle. If there is story weather happening, you leave the water globs up to soak the lightning damage which will ultimately kill them. If the skies are clear however… you kill the adds before they explode. Once we grasped this more clearly we wrecked this primal. I have a pretty nice video of our kill above that I edited out of my stream.

Finally Fifty Nine

The bulk of my evening was spent wandering around trying to find ways of getting experience. After having pretty good luck with Clan Hunts Wednesday night, I started off my evening getting a new set and working through those. It seems like they provide about an eighth of a level upon completing the first two tiers, which is nothing to sneeze at. After finishing these off I went back out to the Hinterlands to do quests for the crazy goblins within. These quests involve more than your normal amount of running around as you help them build their new perfect society. I managed to just have enough quests to push on through to 59 without any further dungeons or fate running. Now I am in the final stretch to 60, and I have heard it goes considerably faster. I also just unlocked the next dungeon, and I have been looking forward to running it since I first heard about it. Hopefully tomorrow before or after the podcast I will be able to pull together a group and run it. In the mean time however… I need to head to bed because we have to get up early tomorrow to deal with more cleaning.