warrior Archives - Page 14 of 18 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Nael in the Coffin

July 7, 2015 by Belghast

Strange Dreams

For the last few nights I have had the strangest but at the same time most vivid dreams. The problem is that they are for the most part utter nonsense. For example this morning I woke up from a dream involving writer Beau Hindman. He had reached out to me to ask if I had any gmail invites… and for those of you for whom that makes zero sense… Google mail was once upon a time invite only and invites were rationed and carefully guarded. I told him that I had a couple that I could hand out, and he asked me to send one to someone. Turns out the person in question was an old man that lived in the small town my wife grew up in. Apparently Beau really needed to get ahold of this person… and apparently using the phone was just too cumbersome? Trust me… I fully understand a lack of wanting to call someone… so I too would probably go through strange lengths to avoid it.

When the guy didn’t accept the invite, I had to drive up to the small town and talk to him in person. He was afraid that the internet would steal his soul, and by having an email account he would be supporting the terrorists or something. So I spent the next hour talking him into accepting the invite, all so Beau would be able to contact him. Sure it is madness, and honestly Beau and I are not even in contact that often, but somewhere in my brain it made all of this make sense. That is the crazy thing about dreaming… is at the time none of this seems as irrational as it does when you are trying to break it apart later. I guess Beau got pulled in because I know that he is originally from Oklahoma, and my wife often gets a staring role in my dreams… so it is strange the way the mind weaves this seemingly plausible tapestry out of bits and pieces of leftover memories.

Nael in the Coffin

Monday nights is traditionally our Final Fantasy XIV raid group night, and last night was no exception. For months… literally… we have been working on learning the dance on Turn Nine of the Coil of Bahamut. For a long time now we have been super close to pushing over the edge, and held up on the madness that is the dive bomb phase. Last night we wanted to defeat Nael by any means necessary so we could move on with our lives. Not sure if it was true for all of our group, but I have developed a love and hate relationship with this fight, and was more than ready to put it behind me. One of the features added with Heavensward is the ability to queue for something as an undersized group. What this does in theory is zone you into a place without scaling your level down to the appropriate place. What this means in practice is that you can now wreck certain zones for the purpose of collecting those dungeon drops you missed in the past. Since several of us were sitting at level 60, we decided to give this option a shot on turn nine and see what would happen.

The truth is the very first attempt out of the gate we straight wiped to mechanics and over confidence. After that it still took us a few tries to get the dance close enough to being correct to be able to finish off the encounter. The funny thing is… that even with 20% echo and 10 more levels… the fight can still straight up eviscerate you. I think we managed to down it on our fourth attempt last night, and can now move on with our lives into Final Coil. On one level it bums me out that we didn’t “do it for real” by facing this encounter at level 50. On the other hand however I am happy to be done with being in there. There comes a time when you just get sick of seeing the same encounter over and over, and I remember our group reached that same place back in WoW’s Blackwing Lair with the Firemaw encounter. It is going to be interesting to see what the next few weeks bring us as far as content goes. Today is the official launch of Alexander, but as it stands right now… none of us are even vaguely closed to “geared enough” to tackle it.

Ice Packs and Grinding

Yesterday I stayed home from work because I was struggling to walk around. So my key focus in life became making sure I was ice packing every hour or so for maximum effect. This meant that most of the day I spent it hanging out on the couch with my leg propped up a bit. It also means I spent a lot of time piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV. Throughout the day I worked on getting all of my Clan Hunts for maximum upgrade token goodness, and did all three of my bonus law roulettes, which left a lot of time to work on my Dragoon. Now previously I had managed to get it to level 51, which is key because that unlocks access to the dungeon Dusk Vigil. So yesterday I spent the majority of my in game time queueing for Dusk Vigil over and over. Before raid time last night I was but a sliver away from 53, which should grant me access to the second dungeon… Sohm Al. The only problem with Dusk Vigil is that technically nothing in it other than the jewelry are strictly upgrades from what I had been wearing.

Sohm Al on the other hand… everything in there should be full of upgradey goodness other than maybe the weapon. The other good thing about running all these dungeons is that I am able to soak up gear for my alt jobs for when I finally get around to leveling them. I like that pretty much every dungeon in Heavensward offers an item set, which is unlike the old world where only every so often did a dungeon actually drop something cool looking. I really want to finish the Dragoon set from Dusk Vigil because it looks kinda amazing. It is a blue set of armor that looks just like the one that Lucia is wearing in the cut scenes. In the news of me… well I am largely functioning better thanks to the constant ice packs. At this point the swelling is down significantly and I am hoping I can function today without a lot of pain. I am sure come this evening I will need to ice pack once more but for the time being… life seems to be grand, or at least getting there.

Ding 60 Warrior

July 5, 2015 by Belghast

The End is Near

This morning I have places on my body that are sore that I did not even know existed. That said I feel like we have accomplished a lot this extended weekend. Essentially my office and my wife’s office have not seen a major clean and reorganize in over a decade. As a result mine especially was this dysfunctional hell hole, that I simply lacked the oomph or planning to figure out how to fix. I’ve talked about the things I didn’t like about my setup for awhile, and my wife being the master planner that she is came up with a plethora of options… some of which we finally implemented this weekend. Similarly she really has not used her office in a year and a half for various reasons, and really wanted to go into the new school year with the ability to use it as a functional work space. For me I wanted the ability to broadcast easier and simply have just a more comfortable space to hang out in.

Originally the plan was to just work from Friday through Sunday… but on a whim I opted to take Thursday off as well. Quite honestly I have no clue how I would have even come close to finishing were it not for taking Thursday off. That was essentially the day I realized just how deep the rabbit hole went. We’ve taken a lot out to the dumpster we rented, and we are now working on preparing our second load to good will. But last night I managed to get the office essentially configured. Right now there is a lot more organizational stuff to do as I box up all of the miscellaneous cables that I have laying around from tearing down my computers the first time. Similarly there are a few places in my office where I want to add some sort of cabinet or shelving but the above picture I took last night shows the basic layout. So far I am really happy with it, and I think it is going to work well for the long run. The mission for today is to set back up all of my consoles and rewire them to the PC via the Elgato.

Ding 60 Warrior

With all the activity during the day, I have to admit I have been crashing pretty early most evenings during this break. When I logged out Friday night I was roughly a sixth of a level away from 60, and figured a couple of dungeon runs would get me there. Through out the day yesterday there were a few times where I took a break, but didn’t want to talk as much time as a dungeon run would require. As such I started working on my clan hunts, thinking that I could dink my way through a few creatures at a time and get some experience in the process. Clan Hunts are worth a surprising amount of experience, so as you are leveling seriously… do not over look them. By the time I wound down for the night and wrapped up the clan hunts I was within a stones throw of 60. When Thalen asked if I would be willing to tank the Library for him and Solaria… I jumped at the chance because I knew without a doubt I would ding inside of there.

Sure enough on the way to the second boss I dinged and also managed to pick up a few more items including this spiffy helmet… that doesn’t really thematically match its chest piece… but is still cool nonetheless. Upon getting out of the dungeon I did the last few quests that allowed me to unlock the first of the level 60 dungeons, and I am hoping to run that today. It took me almost exactly two weeks to hit the level cap, which is pretty good as far as I am concerned. I did not have the raw time to throw at this game that some of our other free company members did, but I still feel like I moved through the content fairly quickly. Now I can go back and start working on leveling my army of alt jobs, so that I can be multifunctional once again. That is honestly the thing I have missed the most while leveling… is the fact that right now I am “only” a tank. I know I have lamented this several times, but it is my hope to at least get the dragoon up there quickly. Now begins the fun end game gearing process that I obsess over so much.

Moogles are Lazy

Due to the Independence Day holiday we opted to record this show a little early this week, and instead of spending Saturday night talking about games, we spent Friday night. As a result there are several of us who were not quite to level 60 in Final Fantasy XIV but have since caught up and pushed through to the level cap. However we spent a good deal of time not talking about FFXIV. Grace managed to finish the crazy attunement system in Wildstar and attended her very first raid. She gives her opinion of the system and how it compares to WoW and FFXIV raiding. Additionally we go down the rabbit hole that is the Four Job Fiesta and talk Final Fantasy V and the various group compositions fate has given us this year. I apparently was one job off from the legendary group composition that the person who started the event go their first year: Monk, Berserker, Beastmaster and Dancer. Instead the gods saw fit to give me a Samurai so I could quite literally “pay to win”.

We purposefully saved our discussion of Heavensward to the end of the show because I knew that was the one thing we were all playing. It is extremely difficult to discuss this game without going into spoilers, so there are some details that might be spoiled if you have not played up through the Aery dungeon yet. The awkwardness of this show was the fact that Ashgar is quite a ways behind the rest of us, making it extremely difficult to add to discussions… because at least one point during the show he made a conjecture that we knew the truth about, but could not really go into it for fear of spoiling key plot points. My theory is that once we have all finished the 3.0 story arc we will do yet another big “spoil everything” show, like we did for 2.55. The best snippet for me was when Grace decided to talk about her new loathing for Moogles after completing the Churning Mists zone. Moogles are in fact lazy bums.

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.