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

Dark Knights and Brayflox

April 12, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 52 – FFXIV Story Spoiler Show

Since August 2013 Final Fantasy XIV has been a fairly significant part of our lives. While we had a break in there, we have been in place for at least the last eight months soaking up every ounce of content that Square Enix can throw at us. Throughout this game the story of the game has been a constant topic of conversation among the aggrochat crew and friends. Each time a new tidbit of story was released it would start rampant speculation as to where the story might be going. As we made our way through the current patches content, I think it is safe to say that none of us could have guessed how this would have ended.

As the credits rolled on the conclusion of the 2.0 storyline… the first reaction is that you absolutey have to talk to someone about it. This week we do a complete no holds barred spoiler filled romp through the Final Fantasy XIV storyline to date, talking about its conclusion and some of the elements from previous patches that might play into the future of the Heavensward expansion. If you have not reached the climax of this story arc, then I highly suggest you file this show away and return to it later. During most shows we try really hard not to directly spoil any content, and we will be returning to that next week. This week… we need to get this out of our systems, and if you have finished the storyline, chances are you do too.

Dark Knights and Brayflox

We talk about this a bit at the end of the show but yesterday they had a big live letter at like 3 in the morning my time, going over more details about the Heavensward expansion including some concrete details about the new jobs and how they would be starting. For some time they had said that they would not be starting at level 1, and that they did not have classes backing up the jobs. We speculated what that meant, and started to wonder if this would mean like other jobs they would start at level 30. Sure enough as per the slide above this has now been confirmed that new jobs will in fact start at 30, which means these new classes will be cutting their teeth on the likes of Brayflox. Another interesting tidbit is that apparently in order to experience these new jobs, or the new Heavensward content… you are going to have to have completed the main story through the conclusion in 2.55.

This is quite honestly a shocking devotion to their storyline and one that I stand behind whole heartedly. One of the things that frustrated me about the Warlords of Draenor launch is the fact that it felt like they were essentially abolishing everything from the previous expansions from both a class standpoint by giving everyone a free level 90, and from a crafting standpoint in that you can level from 1 to max level through the garrison system. Sure this is going to create a barrier between new players and the content that players are now playing… but I have a feeling that Square Enix like always is going to find a way to make the old world content relevant. One of the slide bullet points that I have not been able to find much explanation about says something to the effect of “2.0 content adjustments”. So I hope this does in fact mean that we will have reasons to keep returning to older stuff.

Decisions Decisions

One of the slides that I saw that made me the happiest was that there are apparently eight new dungeons with the launch of the content. Now I have no clue how many of these will be “leveling” dungeons and how many will be “end game” dungeons. We also know that the expansion will be launching with the Alexander raid, and two primal encounters Ravana and Bismark. I know that over the course of 2.0 they introduced something like 18 new dungeons and I believe 16 trials. So I feel like eight dungeons is a pretty good place to be launching considering how much content gets added over time. Right now I am finding myself pretty torn in that I am not sure which direction I really want to take. I have waned to play a Dark Knight since the moment my friends first started trying to convince me to play Final Fantasy XIV. Now that I have it however… I am just thinking about much much fun I have running content as a warrior.

I know without a doubt that I will have both at 60 and well geared, but I am not really certain which one I am going to push up first. So quite honestly right now… a lot of this is going to depend on how much enjoyment I get out of the Dark Knight once early release starts. I doubt we are going to get any sort of a test realm to play with them on. I wish that were the case because I feel like Dark Knight is eight going to be a class I immediately love, or a class that I can’t really stand to play. The whole spell tank thing can go in either direction, but if it ends up being more akin to the Shadowknight or the Deathknight… then I am all a bout it. If the end result feels very casterly… then I will most likely just stick to smashing things with my axe. Basically I feel like either this is going to be the class that I have always wanted to play… or the class that Tam has always wanted to play. However I feel like one of us is going to end up disappointed.

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