warrior Archives - Page 13 of 18 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bahamut Is Down

August 4, 2015 by Belghast

Some Personal Stuff

I feel like it has been pretty noticeable that I have been in a bit of a funk for the last few weeks. When this happens I tend to extract myself from the world until the passes, which isn’t necessarily the smartest thing that I can do. However over the years I have done this as my coping mechanism, because I am always afraid I will snap at someone when I get moody. For a bit yesterday I was wondering if my magical happy pills were not longer working, but then my wife asked me something. Was my low as low as it has been in the past… and to be honest no. Normally the world would be crushingly oppressive, and instead I just felt sort of permanently bummed out. So I guess maybe things are working just fine, they are just filling in the valleys so that the lows are quite as low as they would have been otherwise.

Yesterday was one of the more stressful days that I have had in awhile. We had someone patch a server and due to a conflict between the Windows Update Service and MacAfee that we have seen numerous times now… it caused a process deadlock that ended up taking down production services for hours. This was stressful in so many ways, because while there was nothing I did to cause it… there was also nothing I could really do to help it either. It was another department with another manager… and another set of priorities responsible for the fault and the fix. So when I came home… I was at an extremely low point. However my wife and I went out to dinner, and then as the evening went on I started to feel better about the world. It was like peeking out of a fog to see a lovely day behind it. I guess in the grand scheme of things… if all of my low spots are like this from now on… I will count myself lucky because while it sucked, it was manageable.

Bahamut Is Down

One of the struggles in game is that I feel like I am caught between two worlds a bit. It has taken longer than I expected to get the Monday night raid group pieced together and ready to do Heavensward content. As a result we have been focusing on trying to get through the Final Coil of Bahamut, and made some significant progress. Last week we were just shy of forming a group, so going into Turn 13 last night… we were all rusty. However it feels like we got our bearings more quickly than normal and made a few adjustments. Previously I had been tanking Bahamut at the twelve o’clock position which seems the most obvious place to drag him as you are running in… and do the traditional drag the boss while running thing. Instead we swapped things up and I drug up back to the six o’clock position we entered the room at. This allowed Ashgar to pick up the adds significantly easier and also allowed the DPS to burn them down faster.

The real challenge however was like always… we suck at dive bomb phases. However in spite of the fact that you ultimately have to deal with something like five divebomb phases, they seemed to come together more smoothly than we were used to. Essentially you have to find Bahamut, and move out of the way while also moving out of the way of Twintania that comes barreling through immediately after him. I think we only made it through two or three of these phases completely clean, however we did manage to rez the few players that got pushed into a wall. I am constantly impressed at still how difficult of a fight this is. Sure this is expansion old content at this point, but I am damned happy to be able to say I have defeated Bahamut, and I have a title and a minion to show for it. Paragon to a really spiffy White Mage Cane as a result, and part of me wants to try and muster the troops to do this more often so that we can farm the really awesome weapons for folks. I have to say… the most stressed I have ever been in Final Fantasy XIV is trying to find a way to survive Ahk Mourn. On the positive side… Alexander turn 3 has caused me to get really good at timing Holmgang.

Alex Finally

Last night was a significant night because not only did it see us beating Turn 13 of Final Coil of Bahamut… but it also saw us officially starting this expansions raid content as a group. I love the Wednesday night group, and I am enjoying what is happening there… but there is something extra special about getting the Monday night group into Alexander. While Kodra, Grace and I are parts of both teams, there will always be something special about my first Final Fantasy XIV raid group. So it makes me happy that this week everyone was up to 170 and several were considerably beyond that… even though it took a little bit of cheatery to get Ash’s paladin in the zone by wearing some strength jewelry. We only really had time to do turn one of Alexander, but we came really damned close to oneshotting it. Had we not started freaking out because we thought we were coming up against the hard enrage… we absolutely would have downed it in the first try.

On the second attempt everyone felt more confident and we pushed the dps so much harder than before. The awesome thing about coming in on a Monday is that several of us were already capped on Alexander pieces for the week which meant pretty much all of the newish folks walked away with something spiffy. I look forward to coming in next Monday and clearing all four turns of Alexander, and getting everyone their freebie accessories. From there maybe some Bismarck and Ravana? It makes me happy to feel like I am making forward momentum with both teams. The only thing that frustrates me a little bit is that I feel like we should go back and do Turn 8, which is the turn that Monday night skipped to start work on Turn 9. So maybe next week I can talk people into doing that so that we finally can close the book on the Coil of Bahamut. I don’t want to sacrifice getting people through Alexander for it, but I would love to be able to say I have beaten each of the turns. All in all it was a pretty great night, not just for the raid victories but for also clearing away the fog that I have been dwelling in.

Luck in Alex

August 3, 2015 by Belghast

What Happened to Bel Folks Stuff?

I figure at this point some of you out there have to be asking yourself this question. Quite honestly I am not sure what has happened, other than the fact that I am still fighting a bit of a funk. With AggroChat I am supported by my cast of friends, and we have a specific format that we follow… and that takes a lot of the pressure to perform off of me. With “Bel Folks Stuff” I have to be “On” the entire time we are recording. The end result is a much more draining experience, and I have to be in a certain mindset to make it work. I walked back and forth on this point in my mind numerous times. I still have a long list of people that I would like to have on the show, but do I force it just for the sake of keeping what passes for a schedule?

So far the answer I have kept giving myself is “No”. This blog… I can make a post out of thin air, but when it come to a podcast… that is not a skill I have achieved yet. The podcast and the idea behind it are not dead yet though, even if I am going on two months without a show. In part I did not set a strict schedule because I wanted the process to feel natural and spontaneous. The problem being that in order to get this sort of approach I have to be feeling up to the challenge. Since Blaugust is this big challenge about creating regular content, I thought it was also important to talk about my own failings. While we are running like clockwork with AggroChat, Bel Folks Stuff on the other hand is a bit of a mess. Hopefully I will peek through whatever fog I happen to be in and will get back my moxy. For the time between… all I really have is a heartfelt apology that I have failed to do more shows.

Luck in Alex

Other than my odd little Minecraft mission, I had one major goal yesterday. That was to get close to capping Esoterics and finish getting items from Alexander. Earlier in the week I had managed to get into an Alex group with a few guildies, and in that process knocked out drops from 2, 3, and 4 leaving me only 1 to worry about. Alexander turn one tends to be the more sane of them, and at this point it is the one that almost everyone knows how to do well. I had mentioned this goal Saturday on voice chat, and my friend Warenwolf mentioned that he would like to go along with me. The problem being that I took most of the day to get into the mood for doing some Alex. However last night we zoned in together, and managed to get through it with absolutely no frustrations. I myself needed either a Pedal or a Chain which would get me my boots or belt respectively. It turns out that both Waren and I were on the lucky side as I won the Chain and he won a Bolt taking both of us to 182 item level.

On the other side of the goal, my adventures through the weekend have taken to 30 Esoterics away from capping. A single expert tonight will push me over the cap, and put me in a good place for getting my weapon either Tuesday or Thursday. Getting a new weapon is always a huge motivation factor for me. As a habitual melee player… weapons mean so much and are essentially the soul of the class. When you get a new one… your class for a moment feels completely new to you as you experience bigger numbers or higher threat values. While I have enjoyed my level 180 weapon… I am more than ready to toss it in the dustbin because the 200 axe looks freaking amazing. It is a return to the feel of the original Warrior artifact set that I felt in love with. Right now the plan is to try really hard to grind out the rest of my esoterics on Tuesday, so that I have the axe ready for our Wednesday night raid.

Hunts are Great XP

This expansion many of us have been following a little trick on how to make leveling feel less painful. Clan Hunts are something that I find extremely relaxing as I pop around through several different zones taking out hunt marks and getting centurio seals in the process. There however has been some method to my madness, and that method revolves around trying to take down as many hunt mobs as I can with a level or under leveled job. Essentially the plan has been that for Western Coerthas, Sea of Clouds and Dravianian Forelands that I end up using a character around level 50. Originally this was my Dragoon, until I managed to get him to around 55 and I simply did the entire course of hunt marks with him. Now I am doing this with my Bard, and while I have not really played him other than this process… I already have him to 52. The next two in line for leveling like this are my Paladin and my White Mage… while the Paladin is probably going to be doable… I am questing just how easy it will be for me to push the White Mage through hunts.

What is nice about this process is that I personally focus on my hunts and not necessarily how fast I am gaining experience. As a result it seems that I magically got to level 52 on the Bard without really trying. Ultimately as you get higher in level those early Hunts stop paying out quite so nicely in the experience department, and you reach a point where you have to grind to get to the level cap. However before you hit that juncture… it certainly feels nice to see your classes almost leveling themselves. The best part about all of this is that this process feeds my ability to keep upgrading Law gear, and the other awesome happening of the weekend is that my Dragoon is a single ilevel away from being able to do Alexander as well. In the process of grinding out my Esoterics on Tuesday, I should get enough Law to get to 170 and then I have two options for doing Alexander each week. There are some nights I can stomach the process of tanking that place, and others that I would enjoy sitting in the backseat and dpsing more. I would be happy if I never had to tank turn two again.

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.

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.