warrior Archives - Page 16 of 18 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Warrior Milestone

March 16, 2015 by Belghast

Tired of Selfies

This weekend while out running around in Joplin I kept myself entertained thanks to my twitter feed. Among the constant stream of updates was a series of posts from Alternative Chat, where she attempted to tell a story through twitter and succeeded beautifully. The only problem is that in the weeks since the release of 6.1 I have developed a knee jerk negative reaction to seeing a wow selfie posted in my twitter feed. It was a real struggle for me to look past the medium of the pictures to peer at the underlying story. Largely my problem with selfies is that they are this distorted caricature of what our avatars actually look like. The angles are all distorted, and it is impossible to control your facial expressions as they go through a series of seemingly random contortions. Like I had said before I thought that with time folks would get bored with them, and move on… but as the weeks continue it only seems to be more prevalent.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying, because I still love taking photos of my characters. I just prefer the picture above to the selfie I lead off the first paragraph with. There is just something much more visually appealing to being able to see more of your character than simply your face, torso and part of your arms. The biggest problem I have with selfies is the fact that it becomes hard to take in the entire picture. During Alt’s twitter story, it was as much about the places she was at rather than her character. I struggled to see enough of the elements in the background to immediately indentify where she was actually standing to take the picture. I realize that for the purpose of that story it was in an almost travelogue format, but the times when she broke from it and took a traditional screenshot were my favorite segments of the story. Not that I expect this to change anyone’s practices, but I am just saying now that I have a major preference towards traditional screenshots as compared to the distorted version that is a selfie.

Warrior Milestone

This weekend I did not manage to get nearly as much playtime in as I had hoped. Saturday we spent pretty much the entire day until about thirty minutes before podcast time running around. We ended up having to go visit my Mother-In-Law and made a day trip of it meandering our way there and to Joplin through a series of small towns. My wife and I both have this thing where we like to go hunting for interesting items on clearance, and I have managed to pick up quite a few awesome Lego sets for less than of their original price. This weekend however, I found a ton of sets… but nothing that I really could not live without. Ultimately my vice is Star Wars and Space/Futuristic themed sets. My most recent find was three of the sets from the “Agents” line at a local target for slightly less than half off the original price. Needless to say I did not really get much play time in Saturday. Sunday until 4pm I ended up helping my wife with a few things around the house, namely putting together a large cubical storage unit and a smaller bakers rack unit for our closet.

So by the time I finally got logged in downstairs and was able to play Final Fantasy XIV I felt under the gun to help make up some ground. At this point I am sitting at 254 poetics out of 450 for the week… and all I have is tonight to somehow manage to cap. I don’t have a feeling that I am going to make it, because we have a raid. However when I get home from work I am going to try my damnedest to get it through a combination of duty roulettes. I did however manage to run through the three Crystal Tower instances and get another Carbontwine allowing me to upgrade my Helm from 120 to 130. Similarly I managed to get enough Poetics to buy another piece of jewelry, so that I could use one of the Carboncoats I had laying around. This took me to 120 ilevel which for me at least is somewhat of a mental milestone. There is something about breaking another 10s barrier in my gear score. I am now sitting at just over 11,000 hit points, which is only going to serve to make my healers complain more strongly about my health pool when I am fully buffed. It makes me feel useful though the more gear that I can manage to pile on.

Foraging Slowly

One of my hopes this weekend was to spend a good deal of time on the sofa watching television and working on my Botany. This never actually happened, for various reasons. I spent a bit of time yesterday morning watching a movie and importing by hand 48 episodes of Aggrochat into the new Aggrochat.com website. I did however manage to work on botany some during the recording of this weeks AggroChat, and at this point I am level 16. The brute force leveling is finally starting to slow down, but I keep telling myself that every level that I can gain in this fashion is going to let my level allowance build back up so I can push through the levels more quickly later. When I pushed mining I managed to drop down to 30 leves left, and over the last few days it has managed to regenerate back up to 65, so when it caps I will begin pushing Botany a bit harder.

I had honestly wondered about stopping Botany for a bit to get fishing up to 15 as well. That way I can start getting rid of all of this gathering gear that I have clogging my banks. Since I only have Fishing and Botany left, my hope is that I can maybe stair step them both up together pushing it up 5 levels at a time so I can shed a bunch of gathering gear in the process. That really seems to be the ideal way to level classes in general. I have four retainers and they are all full of gear that I think I will use at some point. I turned in a bunch of the Syrcus Tower dragoon gear last night for company seals, and I need to really spend an afternoon identifying the stuff that I want to keep and sorting it out from the stuff I don’t want to keep. All of the Scylla’s healing gear for example is prime territory for giving away… considering I am slowly replacing it with soldiery items to help burn down my tomestones. Honestly as soon as I have Soldiery equivalents all of the gear from Syrcus Tower is suspect because I consider every single set “ugly”.

Leopard Print Paladin

September 22, 2014 by Belghast

Susceptible to Grind

This weekend I played a good bit of Destiny because it is the perfect game for those moments when I don’t feel like I am get into something terribly detailed. I play this game much in the same fashion as I play Diablo 3, in short bursts with the ability to jettison out if needed to go do something else. As such this has become in many ways the game I play when I know we are going to be leaving the house soon. I am never more than just a teleport to orbit away from safety, which makes me consume the game voraciously in small doses. As such I have mostly been running the game in private mode with my fire team locked down to keep people from popping in at random. I feel like I don’t want to deal with the expectations of others when I am playing a game in this fashion. Generally speaking I am either moments from leaving the game, or playing the game while camping something in Final Fantasy XIV… and in either case I am not exactly responsive enough to be a proper group mate.

The bulk of my gameplay has been doing either patrols on the Cosmodrome or on the Moon. I finally got a blue engram to drop, but unfortunately it was for my class item… which is essentially just decoration. Instead of the traditional “flag football” towel, this one is a series of 3 banners that hang down from my waist. One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am deeply susceptible to grinding. I find it super easy to zone out and just wander around aimlessly in an area. I seem to be able to get infinite amounts of entertainment value from simply wandering around killing Fallen and Hive on the moon and accepting the little mini-quests. As such I was level 16 before I actually finished the Moon this weekend and got the quest chain sending me to Venus. I am sure I will be 20+ before I finish Venus, because as soon as I unlock the next patrol zone… that is more than likely what I will be doing quite a bit of.

I think part of the problem with Destiny is the fact that it has relatively little to go with as far as Story goes. As such I find absolutely no sense of urgency pushing me forward to keep completing missions. In a game like Mass Effect 3 I felt like I was moments away from doom at all times, so I just had to keep pushing forward and trying to turn back the tide in a war larger than myself. In Destiny they have failed to infuse the narrative with any of this. Sure things are going horribly wrong out in the galaxy, but we have this last city that seems completely immune to the effect of what is happening. Sure The Traveler is “dying” but I don’t feel this happening, I feel like that is generations away and I have just been drafted into essentially a science fiction stalemate. So I have zero issue wandering about and taking time to smell the “helium coils” as it were. The moment to moment gameplay are what keeps me engaged with this game, and the story line and as such story quests could not exist at all and I would still be happy.

Leopard Print Paladin

At the beginning of the weekend I was a level 40 newly christened Paladin of Uldah. Over the course of the weekend I managed to push my way through to 46 and get the first of my spiffy gear. For those who are not familiar with Final Fantasy XIV, at 45 you complete a class quest that will reward you four pieces of “Relic” gear that represents the defacto look for your class. This means you get a full set of gear minus two slots. The belt is not terribly important because no belt really changes the look of something drastically. However the other missing piece is the chest piece and it is essentially the item that always ties a class set together. On the Lalafell the paladin “short shorts” look is minimized by the total lack of height, however of anyone else it looks like you are wearing white boxer shorts without the chest piece that gives you the plate skirt that is so characteristic of a paladin in this game.

There is a full set of gear that drops in the dungeon Dzmael Darkhold, that rarely sees much use since it is level 44, and at 45 everyone gets their class set. However the one piece that is extremely useful is the chest, which thankfully in all of my journeys I have gathered up a few of these. The problem is that for pretty much every class there is something goofy going on with this set. For the tanks the set features an inexplicable leopard print inlay, with no way to “dye” the pattern away. So as a result for the last few levels you end up looking a bit goofy until you finally ding 50 and get that class chest piece. Thankfully for me I also managed to pick up a nice pink quality chest for 47 that should make the outfit look a little bit more put together for the last few levels.

Red Bunny Samurai

The other thing I am realizing is just how much of my other gear will work for Paladin. Almost all of the dropped pieces and jewelry from the endgame levels worth for Marauder, Warrior, Gladiator and Paladin. The problem with this is that I have several of the pieces glamoured to look like the Warrior class set. Apparently this will not show as such when I equip them however, and quite frankly the Syrcus tower set looks like crap for plate wearers. So I am wondering what set I am going to glamour to that can be neutral and work for both classes. The most important thing after all is that I still have a proper bunny hat. While I freely admit that I stole wearing this helm from Tam, I think I have more than made it my own… since it was clearly designed to be worn by a Lalafell. He tends to favor the white one with the full face mask, where I am enamored with the red one that allows my full face to show through.

My goal for the coming days is to push the paladin to 50 and get it fully geared in 90 or better items. I’ve been stockpiling hunt marks to be able to do this the moment I ding, but I am really not sure how many pieces I will actually need to buy. All of my jewelry is dual class, as well as my chest, belt, and boots. That just leaves three pieces of gear that I actually need to purchase, and then again I will need to spend the requisite 1125 tomestones of mythology to get the zenith weapon and shield. Right now I have a dilemma I suppose in that I am really close to being able to purchase my next Animus book, but I am also really close to 50 at this point. I don’t have the tomestones to do both. In theory I can get the book and the process of simply getting my relic weapon should give me more than enough tomestones to be able to at least craft the relic. Then I can deal with grinding out the rest as a paladin if I so choose. In either case I should have another animus book and a 50 paladin soon enough. Then I suppose my focus turns to finishing off my White Mage.

#FFXIV #Destiny

White Mage Soul

August 27, 2014 by Belghast

The Best Intentions

Yesterday I read a post by Missy Mojo lamenting just how “un-fun” Blaugust has become for her. I fear that there are a lot more people out there feeling the same. I hear the same sort of lament in Kodra’s voice each night as he says he really needs to do his blog post. The idea behind Blaugust was simple, to challenge people to do the same thing I do and write something, anything every day. The thing is that the challenge grew legs of its own and sucked in a lot of newly minted bloggers along with the veterans. I figured I might have five or so veteran bloggers take up the challenge as I did a year and a half ago. The thing is I didn’t get there over night, and in fact had been blogging for around four years before I decided to post regularly.

This is probably the worst kind of event for someone new to the craft to start under, and we had huge participation by folks who started just for this even or started under the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I promise my intention was not to grind people down with daily blogging, but instead to fill the gap that often happens in later summer for content. In many ways it has worked better than I could have imagined, and tragedy in my own life has caused me to fall behind in the reading department. My biggest fear is that this whole experiment will cause large lapses in content for the newer folks like Missy. If you are doing this every day and not enjoying it, then it kinda defeats the point of blogging in the first place. I give you complete permission to drop out of the contest with no hard feelings or lamentation.

White Mage Soul

The primary goal of yesterday for me was to get my conjurer to 30 so that I could become a White Mage. Since I already have a 50 tank, 50 ranged and 50 melee… I felt like I needed some sort of max level healer at my disposal as well. As far as healers go, I have enjoyed my time healing dungeons on the conjurer far more than I have enjoyed any healer in a long time. The style just feels natural and I can usually land in a relaxing rhythm during each dungeon. I figure the healing will get more complicated as I get more tools at my disposal but for the time being I am enjoying myself. I had leveled Arcanist to 15 over the weekend in preparation for nearing 30 conjurer, since White Mage is a combination of the two. I might return to leveling Arcanist at some point so I can become a scholar, but I feel no real pressing need to either.

The thing I found funny was that the level 30 Conjurer quest was far more difficult than the quest to actually become a white mage. Even moreso I found it odd that in order to do my quest to get the unicorn mount I had to shift back to Conjurer as well. In any case I finished both and am now an up and coming white mage ready to take on the world. After coming home from the rosary last night I worked my way up to 32 so that hopefully someday tonight I can start running Brayflox for gear. I have two pieces of the battlemage set but I would really like to get the rest of it, or at the very least the robe. Additionally I would not mind seeing the white mage ring drop either.

Gearing the Warrior

Since it is pretty certain that I will be needing my Warrior for when we start Binding Coil of Bahamut hopefully soonish, I opted to start rolling on Warrior gear in Syrcus tower. Yesterday Tam and I decided to queue together for our weekly loot run. Unlike other games you can run Syrcus as often as you like, but you can only take a single piece of loot from there each week. The nice thing is this allows you to keep running it in the hopes of getting that one item you need. Since most of the people in there are after the item to craft their weathered weapon almost all of the gear rots, or at the very least it isn’t terribly contested. The run started off really smoothly, and our group had a warrior tanking… which to some extent made my heart sink a little. My goal going into the place was the pick up some warrior loot, but I brought my dragoon just as a backup in case something phenomenal dropped.

The first boss went extremely smoothly, and I was feeling like our tank was doing an amazing job. On the first boss the warrior gauntlets dropped and moments afterwards the tank was asking for us to pass or roll so he could equip them. We all did as asked and the moment he got the loot he dropped from the party. This was the first time I had seen this happen, but apparently it is a frequent occurrence in Syrcus. The awesome part though is that he was replaced by a really well geared Gladiator, and on the very next boss the Warrior chest piece dropped, allowing me to pick it up easily. So that combined with picking up the soldiery tome ring takes my Warrior to 91 ilevel and more than ready for the Coil.

#FFXIV

Whorleater

August 18, 2014 by Belghast

Monday Morning Coming Down

This morning I quite literally could not remember if it was Monday or Sunday. I had to turn on the television just to make sure it really was Monday and that I should be getting up instead of heading back to sleep. This is not the best possible start to the work week, but I am slowly climbing my way to consciousness as I sip this coffee. Not quite certain why this morning is such a struggle, because in theory I got to bed at a decent hour last night. My wife and I both spontaneously decided it was bedtime at roughly 10pm. Ultimately I managed to get to sleep a little bit after that fact, but this morning I am still periodically trying to type with my eyes closed.

I would say it was a medium busy weekend as far as weekends go. We spent a good deal of time attempting to clothing shop for my wife, which means I spent a good deal of time messing about on my phone. Sadly in both our excursion to Muskogee and our outing yesterday afternoon she did not find much of anything. I did however find more severely discounted Legos and added a couple more Lord of the Rings sets to my collection. Other than the shopping excursions and dropping my jeep off to get oil changed and a flat fixed… the bulk of my weekend was spent in Final Fantasy XIV. Overall it was an extremely productive weekend all around.

Whorleater

One of my goals this weekend was to catch up on the main storyline quest to be prepared for the eventual 2.4 patch. So far there have been three major content patches in Final Fantasy XIV and in each they have progressed the main storyline adding a new primal to fight. The first patch added Good King Moggle Mog, the second Leviathan, and the third patch added Ramuh. Before yesterday morning I had caught up in the quest chain to Leviathan, but had limited luck in getting a group. However yesterday I managed to get a group within ten minutes of queuing. The fight takes place out on the ocean. The storyline is that they have built a special platform to help neutralize his abilities and allow you to fight him. So you are towed out into the middle of the ocean and left to fight him off alone.

The fight feels deeply foreboding and the music that plays in the background only serves to reinforce this. They are after all asking you to duel a god. During the fight itself the platform is attacked by the head of Leviathan and his tail. The DPS shifts back and forth between fighting the tail and destroying these globules that spawn up on deck. I am not sure exactly what killing them does, but I know that ignoring them completely wipes the raid. Every so often Leviathan will do this attack where he lays his body across the bow of the platform causing it to rock violently against the waves, and tilting the entire platform to one side dragging everyone there. Seeing this in action looks amazing since the entire horizon shifts slightly as the platform lists in the waves. It took a few tries but we managed to down him without much issue.

Lord of Levin

After defeating Leviathan a large chunk of us from the free company moved on to do Battle of the Big Bridge which is an optional primal like encounter where you face Gilgamesh the samurai. The most awesome thing about this encounter was the fact that we managed to pull it together through the use of several different linkshells. We picked up a person from our housing linkshell and then another person through a social linkshell that Tam was a part of. The fact that people are willing to drop what they are doing and help out with things like this makes me happy. The Big Bridge encounter doesn’t really reward much of anything, and there are no drops to speak of, just a crazy time running around. The best part about it is almost all of the Dialog that Gilgamesh speaks comes directly from encounters with him in Final Fantasy V. Speaking of which… I really need to finish my play through of that game for the four job fiesta.

After finishing the Gilgamesh encounter, I spent much of the afternoon working my way through the main storyline to get caught up and ready to take on the next encounter the Striking Tree. In the Final Fantasy mythos Ramuh tends to be a friend to humanity, helping them along the way. In Final Fantasy V it is Ramuh that teaches your party more or less how to channel the power of the Espers (summons) and call them in battle. In this game his role has shifted slightly, but he still acts with reason and wisdom rather than fury and rage like the other primals. The Striking Tree hard is a battle about proving your worth to this elder god more than defeating him. We failed miserably, or at least did not succeed. Our time ran out before we managed to defeat him.

It seems like when you are dealing with the newest tier of content they completely remove the echo buff system. Meaning that as we wiped, we did not get a stat boost allowing us to slowly overcome the obstacle. I knew this was the case for the various Extreme mode versions of the encounters but I was shocked to find it as the case for Ramuh. Ultimately we simply lacked the DPS to burn through a series of adds. Ramuh has a similar wipe mechanic to Ifrit, in that if you don’t dps down the adds you cannot survive the next attack. We were able to limit break one round of adds, but this was short lived as we lacked the dps to continue on after that fact. Basically I reached a point where I was one of the most geared players in the instance, and could simply not carry the group as a whole. I plan on giving it a shot on a night that is not Sunday, since that tends to be a lousy time for MMO groups in general.

Fully Geared Dragoon

Through all of this running around this weekend I managed to “finish” gearing my dragoon. I say finish in quotes because there are still several things I can get that are upgrades, however they are all much slower prospects and either involve getting lucky drops in Syrcus Tower, joining a Coil of Bahamut raid, or saving up Soldiery bookrocks which the game tends to reward 5 to 10 at a time. At this point I have level 90 gear or better in every single slot, with a level 100 ring from the soldiery vendor and level 100 gloves from Syrcus Tower. I feel like my Dragoon dps is as good as I can get it for the time being, and more than ready for us to begin Coil when we have enough people. Now my focus shifts to gearing out my warrior who right now is sitting in the low 70s, but in part only because of me using some of my DPS jewelry to buff him up a bit.

There was a huge sense of accomplishment last night when I bought the belt that replaced my final sub 90 item. In a few weeks time I have managed to catch up to Cylladora who continued playing the game long after we all left. Last night I also tanked my first dungeon since coming back and overall I think it went smooth enough. I was pulling pretty quickly and trying to figure out how to maintain aggro again. It feels like the win condition as a warrior is the fact that I have steel cyclone, and the goal of every pull was to build up enough rage to be able to start the next fight with this attack. When I managed to do so things stayed fairly glued to me. When I didn’t I struggled to play catch up with overpower. Tam was playing his summoner and there is always going to be a point where I lose control of adds to his dots, however for the most part I was able to mitigate this pretty successfully. I guess the real determination is going to be whether or not I start pugging for duty roulette or not. If they rewarded me extra bookrocks I would do so in heartbeat, but the extra money may or may not be worth the headache.

#FFXIV #Blaugust