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

Bunny Returns

May 24, 2016 by Belghast

Samurai For Hire

Another happening over the weekend is that I appear to have fallen back into the habit of logging into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis. It had been roughly six months since I was last regularly playing the game, and in that time I went from being just about as well geared as you could be… to being woefully and insanely behind the curve. So much so that the gear coming out of the expert roulette is often times an upgrade over the piece I was wearing. The positive however is that the game does a pretty damned good job of helping you catch up, and I now have a huge amount of content I could be running. I’ve been trying to do an expert a day to get back into the swing of things, but I still greatly prefer to wait and do said expert with friends. The other interesting sequence events is something that I talked about on the AggroChat podcast this weekend. Not long ago I had returned to World of Warcraft and was attempting to be part of a raid group run by some friends of mine. So much so that I even managed to recruit a bunch of other friends who were not actively raiding. All of this sounded amazing on paper, until we actually sat down and started raiding. From the first outing… I kept wondering what I was doing wrong because it just didn’t feel all that fun.

What was happening was this was my first time tanking in Warlords of Draenor other than a times where I had to fill in without notice. It just didn’t feel the way I remembered tanking in World of Warcraft to feel. Even more so I had started wondering if I just wasn’t really a tank at heart anymore. I spent the majority of Warlords as a DPS, and I really enjoyed doing that… even though I never really hard the drive to put up big numbers. In fact while we were raiding Blackhand, I even went so far as to uninstall my DPS meters because I didn’t want to be bothered with the guilt of not topping the meters. Ironically not having meters made my performance go up significantly. All of this said I started to wonder if I just was not a tank main at heart anymore. I developed this mental block against tanking, and started looking for ways to avoid it. Then last Tuesday I participated in the Pony farm night, and the only gear set I was certain of happened to be my tank set. My hope was that muscle memory would take over and it did… and ultimately I had a blast tanking again.

The Feel Matters

The reality is that I still very much like tanking… its just that I don’t enjoy taking in World of Warcraft. In part I think it is because I have gotten used to a game where the fights are messaged extremely clearly. In Final Fantasy XIV there is never a question of “did I move far enough out” of this or that effect because there is a clear line on the ground showing you the effected radius. In World of Warcraft there is never really this line because the areas of effect generally extend out quite a bit further than the graphic being drawn, meaning that as a tank you are constantly second guessing. WoW also still feels very “mash a bunch of buttons and pray” at least while playing a Warrior, whereas FFXIV feels more deliberate and purposeful. Maybe its just that I fell into bad habits over the years, and cannot seem to break myself of them. Whatever the case I have been having a blast tanking in FFXIV and am thinking that while I will probably level tanks in WoW… I won’t return to actively filling that roll in group content anytime soon. It just doesn’t feel right anymore, however if you need an Expert tank in FFXIV I am your man!

Also as you can see from the above image… I have started down the path of madness that is the relic 2.0 weapon… or 3.0 depending on how you want to count it. As a result I spent a good deal of my weekend running FATEs and have suddenly remembered…. that I actually LOVE doing FATEs. I checked and I am actually dangerously close to the 3000 FATEs achievement, which should tell you something. This step in the weapon is reminiscent of the Atma step in the previous weapon, but it feels a lot less egregious. You need to get three of each elemental drop… however the drop rate of each individual crystal seems significantly higher than Atmas. At this point I have 3 earth, 3 ice, and 1 fire… and have been spending time out in Churning Mists as of last night not having any luck getting a single one yet. I did however decide this was a perfect opportunity to do something I had been considering for a long while. As of last night I am not longer an Immortal Flame but now a proud member of the Maelstrom. I’ve made decent progress already in pushing up my rank and I believe I am currently sitting at the 5000 seal step. However doing doing these FATEs for the weapon the grand company seals seem to be coming insanely fast. Hopefully before long I will be sitting at max rank yet again. The only negative is… all of that awesome Immortal Flames gear is now essentially dead to my alts… until I repurchase the Maelstrom equivalents.

Hellfire Assault

March 3, 2016 by Belghast

Weekends are Bad

One strong constant in my life is that weekends are bad for me when it comes to making plans. This is counter-intuitive since for MOST of the living world… weekends are the time they can regularly commit to doing stuff. The truth is that weekends are really the only time that my wife and I are both together and pointed in the same direction for any lengthy period of time. During the week she has a mixture of responsibilities, commitments, and spur of the moment activities that often times keep her from getting home until eight or nine in the evening. Whereas I tend to have a fairly predictable schedule, that gets me home by 5 pm CST most nights. This means that the only time we actually get to do anything as a couple is on the weekends, and as a result I have tried really hard to be pretty sparse with committing myself to things that occur on Saturday or Sunday. I am already breaking that rule heavily with the recording of AggroChat Saturday nights… but generally speaking by the time our 9pm CST start time rolls around we are home anyway. There however have been a long list of activities that have happened on Sunday and Saturday afternoons that I have flaked like mad on. There was the whole pen and paper role-playing game that happened at 2pm CST, that by some freak occurrence I managed to make four or so of… before life caught up with me and I started being unavailable. Then similarly I thought “Sunday is TV Night” and started trying to raid with my friends Horde side… only to find that I am just barely making it into my chair some nights before Walking Dead. As it gets nicer outside… we push back our range of activity further… so pretty much the entire summer months are a no-go for planned activities on the weekend.

As a result I thought I was pretty much done raiding in World of Warcraft at least until Legion hits. Then my good friend Carth decided to pull together a casual raid group and after everyone voted on the best day of the week… I lucked out and it landed on Wednesday nights. This is pretty much the perfect raid night for me, given that my wife is already committed to church that evening and I can pretty much do whatever I want to do without causing a major imposition. Last night was the first official outing, and we planned on raiding from 7:30 pm cst to 10 pm cst but wound up going a little over due to the overall successes of the group. We absolutely had a few “ringer” dps in the mix, but even accounting for that… I think we did really well. For a bit we would end up having to pug some people… but we managed to pull together a 10+ player team. The roster was super comfortable and included so many long time friends: Carthuun (on Aalis), Tick (on Taavish), Giulietta, Kylana, Edana (@catinglasses), Jasmynne (Carth’s Wife), Bleddwen (@KerynWeylan)…. with myself and Damai tanking and a mixture of ringers that cycled through for which I don’t know all of the mains from Praetorian Guard.

Significant Progress

We did significantly better than I expected on our first outing. We managed to clear up to Iskar in a single evening, and the only boss we really struggled a bit at was Kilrogg. That is pretty much the first fight where the mechanics really start to matter, and as a result it took us two attempts for folks to get the whole visions thing down solidly. On the second go however everything seemed to just work like plan. It was a bit messy at the end, but any kill you walk away from with a victory is a good kill in my book. The awesome thing about all of this as well is that we got a lot of gear for people who needed it. Bleddwen one of the two healers… that was quite literally drafted last night on the spot… walked away with I believe eight pieces of gear. Our other healer walked away with three pieces, but one of those was a tier set piece. I managed to pick up my first piece of tier gear as well, and I am hoping next go round Kormrok will be nice and drop the Warrior piece so I can throw on that two piece bonus. As much as I loved raiding with my Horde side family, I have to say it felt good to be Belghast again in a raid. I mean I have done Gladiator dps for awhile now, and it is really fun… but what I mean is Belghast the tank. It kinda felt good to go back to my roots with the character that was my main through most of those really memorable fights.

It doesn’t hurt that the folks that we raided with… are for the most part the folks I play all of these games with. The two healers we had… have healed me many times in Final Fantasy XIV so it felt natural to see that relationship shift to World of Warcraft. The awesome thing about this as well is that it seems like we have two tanks and two healers locked down solidly. That means we probably need a shift healer and potentially a shift tank to fill in the gap, but otherwise we have a really solid team. There is a certain amount of learning mechanics on the fights, like Iskar… but I forsee us being able to start Heroic before too long. It would be amazing if we could push through it as well and get folks some Moose loving. In any case it was a nice, relaxing and casual raid night, with the folks I probably would have been hanging out with anyways. The only gotcha seemed to be that we were having trouble with our normal Teamspeak server, and as a result are probably going to be migrating to Discord for next week. I had been wanting to give Discord a real world trial, and this seems as good as any time. I love the concept, and I just wish that it were a slack plugin rather than a completely separate application. For text chat purposes, I still like Slack and their notification system just works better… however for voice… at least based on testing last night Discord is seeming to be the new way to go.

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.