Month: January 2015

BEL FOLKS STUFF #4 – EVENING WITH PETTER

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This month the Bel Folks Stuff podcast focuses on the amazingPetter Mårtensson.  Petter has been an extremely busy man, and has had a ton of side projects over the years.  In his normal fashion he even offered to guest on Aggrochat if we could ever work out the time zone issues.  Our listeners could know him from any number of places.  For several years he worked for the european gaming magazine GameReactor both as a writer and as an on-air anchor.  Similarly while dormant for several years, he is the man behind theDon’t Fear the Mutant blog.  On the podcasting front he has been extremely active in the CSICON network serving as a host on several different shows including Claims the Normal, Three MMOSketeers, Enochian Frequency and most recently Who’s Who.

In addition to all of this he was involved in creating the A Tale of Internet Spaceships documentary talking about the culture behind EVE online.  Now he is also writing a monthly Final Fantasy XIV column for MMOGames.  Like I said… he is an extremely busy man and I am thankful he took the time to sit down with me and have a length conversation…  mostly about non-gaming stuff.  I think the most interesting thing about the conversation was the delve into Futurism and the things we would love to see.  We also geeked out a bit about Doctor Who, which apparently is something that happens on every podcast now that he hosts the Who’s Who show.  Definitely was an interesting conversation, and I hope you all enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

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Aggrochat #39 – Pokemon, RNG and Roguevania

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This week we have a shorter show than usual in many different ways.  For starters we only actually ran right at an hour.  Secondly we are short Tam and Rae.  Tam travelled across the country, and is apparently bad at time zone conversions, so until we sort out a better time to record for the growing west coast contingency we are going to be shorthanded.  This week we talk about a wide breadth of topics including Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, Rogue Legacy, Valdis Story, ittle Dew, World of Warcraft, Aquasphere and Adventure of Link.  With a few other short discussions slid in here and there like we always have.  Additionally we talk about the fact that Belghast, Ashgar and Rae will all be attending Pax South in a few weeks.  We are hoping to meet some of our listeners, so drop us a line to let us know if you also will be attending.

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On Tank Training

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As those of you who pay attention on Twitter may have noted, I’ve been having some issues with the state of tanks in low-level instances in Fina Fantasy 14 lately. While I level my complaints directly at Riot Blade (and Gladiators in particular) that’s not really the core of the issue. MMOs are bad at teaching you how to play them, and for a role like a tank, that’s A Problem. Rather than continue to berate anonymous Gladiators for not knowing better, I’d just like to clear up a few things. While this post focuses on Gladiators/Paladins, some of it is also applicable to Marauders/Warriors as well. For a few reasons (*cough*) marauders tend not to have the same problems at low levels.

Maintaining Threat

While I’m not going to claim that it’s always easy (it’s not), tanking in FF14 isn’t terribly complicated. Your job in any given pull is to keep all of the enemies attacking you until all of them are dead, and also doing the best you can to keep yourself alive while doing this.The second part could be its own post, so I’ll stick to explaining the first. FF14, like many other MMOs at this point, uses a threat system (usually referred to in-game as “enmity”) to determine what enemies attack (most of the time). Tanks have abilities that are very good at generating threat, and using these liberally is one of the keys to being successful. To track you you’re doing, the party list and the enemy list both have different ways to display your current threat.

First, the enemy list tracks your threat status on all enemies, with green for low threat, yellow for medium, orange for high, flashing orange for a last chance warning, and red for when something has enough threat to attack you (aggro). (These are also all different shapes so they can be differentiated even with color blindness.) Tanks should strive to keep this as red as possible. The party list tracks who in your party has the most threat on your current target. Because the enemy list unfortunately doesn’t have a color for “about to lose aggro”, this is the only real way to see when someone else is getting dangerously high on threat. it can be helpful (especially if you have a Summoner or Black Mage in your party) to tab between enemies and see if any of them are doing unfortunate things.

party list enemy list

Why Riot Blade is a Trap

For Gladiators, the abilities that do bonus threat are (in the order you get them) Savage Blade, Flash, Shield Lob, Rage of Halone, and Circle of Scorn. That last one only comes in at 50 and isn’t really relevant to this discussion. The problem lies between the levels of 12 and 26, where you have access to Riot Blade but not Rage of Halone. This means that for damage, the ideal combo is Fast Blade->Riot Blade, and out in the world this is perfectly fine. However, Riot Blade wasn’t on that list I mentioned earlier, so in dungeons you’ll lose threat to the classes that do more damage than you (which is to say all of them) if you use that combo exclusively. Fast Blade->Savage Blade amplifies the bonus threat on savage Blade, and keeps things where they should be: attacking you. Riot Blade does have a use, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Riot Blade

Provoke and You

Provoke is a Gladiator ability earned at Level 22, and currently holds the spot of “most required cross-class skill in the game” for Warriors. (If you are playing a Warrior and you do not have this skill cross-classed, get those extra few levels of Gladiator right now.) It’s the game’s only true taunt, so it’s essential for tank swaps, and it can be helpful when you lose aggro on a particular enemy. However, Provoke works by giving you threat equal to whoever the current highest threat person is, plus one point. This means that unless you immediately take some other threat-causing action, you’ll lose the target immediately. It also means that if you pull with provoke, you have exactly one point of threat and any action taken by anyone else will pull off of you. Shield Lob does have bonus threat attached, and should be used for pulling whenever possible.*

*There are edge cases where provoke’s longer range allows it to be useful for pulling, usually to grab a patrolling enemy.

Mooglesguard

Savior of the Universe

Flash is essential for Gladiator tanking. It does no damage, but a lot of threat to all enemies near you; I guess they don’t like light shining in their eyes or something. The range is just barely longer than melee range, so don’t use it expecting to hit enemies halfway across the room (and if you use it running in you’ll probably hit nothing). Flash is your only tool to build threat on multiple enemies simultaneously between when you get it at level 8 and when you get Circle of Scorn at level 50. Even if you use high-threat attacks on your primary target, not using Flash will result in everything else running to murder your healer as soon as they heal you once. Using it once is frequently not enough, either. How many times you should use it and how frequently varies depending on your personal gear, how many enemies there are, how long they’re likely to live, and if anyone in your party is using AOE attacks (attacks that hit multiple targets). Belghast’s recommendation from today’s post is generally a good one: Pull with Shield Lob, Flash twice once things are near you, and Savage Blade combo until dead.

Since Flash does eat a decent chunk of your MP bar, the only acceptable use of Riot Blade in dungeons is to earn back the MP to use Flash more. It can be useful, particularly if you have DPS that are level synced from 50, to tank by spamming just Flash until you are out of MP and using the Riot Blade combo only when you can’t use Flash.

DODGE

Adventurer in Need

There are some additional nuances, but what’s here is enough to carry you through until you hit 50, provided you also remember not to stand in glowing red things. I hope this helps beginning Gladiators; If you are one of them and you’re in the low-level queue, I thank you for making the queue shorter for the rest of us.

Source: Ash\\’s Adventures
On Tank Training

Comings and Goings

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Disgracie.140511.214827Happy New Year!

You may have noticed that it’s been awfully quiet around here lately. The truth is that I’ve been playing less WildStar. I resubbed to WoW because that is where a large number of my friends went. And then I spent the last month agonizing over that decision and hating myself and being annoyed and surly, even if I wasn’t always sure why I felt that way. Hopefully getting it out of my system in blog form will be cathartic for me and maybe either eye-opening for some folks or reassuring for others who might be going through a similar situation.

MMOs Warm Bodies and Betrayal

These games we love are only at their best when their virtual worlds are populated. While sometimes we might fantasize about playing a MMO completely solo, the truth is they just work better and feel more alive with bustling economies and people around to join in the fun. Since for most of us our free time and often our money are limiting resources, there’s not a lot of room for multiple time-consuming MMOs in our lives. There’s some room for multiple MMOs to exist in the market, but lots of discussion gets pinned on “WoW-killers” or “Next Great Thing” and doesn’t leave a lot of room for individual people to enjoy and be vocal about many games at once.

Especially in the case of WildStar, which I’ve been an advocate for from the pre-launch hype through the highs and lows of launch and through the population decline and server merges, it feels like even admitting I also play WoW is some betrayal. That giving subscription dollars and my free time to both is somehow admitting the defeat of WildStar or kicking it while it is down. WildStar still seems to me to have plenty of happy players making it into a living world, but I’m sure that Carbine would be happier to see subscription numbers increasing. Since I want the game to succeed, I feel like a jerk for enjoying multiple games, instead of advocating for the one I like best.

That can't be good for property values.

Home is Where…?

The interesting thing is that playing both has made me love and appreciate WildStar even more, yet WoW is where I’ve been spending more time. I made up this quick list of things I like about each game:

WildStar –

World and Lore – I love sci-fi, I like this world, and I like being a part of the story as it develops. I absolutely can not wait to see what happens with Drusera and what other worlds we might visit next!

Art and Visuals – This game is beautiful. Every time I log in I can’t stop taking screenshots, or just running around my house looking at the sky.

Music – My favorite MMO soundtrack hands-down, and perhaps second only to Bastion as favorite video game music period. Like so much of WildStar for me, it wasn’t what I expected at all, and I love it!

Combat – The telegraphs and active combat do have a learning curve, but after you get used to it everything else seems incredibly boring by comparison.

Healing – Healing in WS is unlike any other MMO I’ve played, feels more like a natural extension of the combat instead of its own minigame.

Customizability – Character appearance, costumes, mounts, paths, the Limited Action Set, there’s just tons of options to really make your character your own.

Housing – In its own category from customization because it could be a whole game in itself. Any of you who’ve read this blog from the beginning know that it was housing which really sealed the deal for me with WildStar even though I hadn’t cared much for it in other games.

Zero-G Hoverboarding – ‘Nuff said.

 

World of Warcraft –

Ease of Access – Within a week or two of returning after a long absence I was able to catch up with my guild and start raiding. WoW is king of low-barrier-to-entry, for good or ill.

Personal History – It has been around 8 years since I first step foot on Azeroth, and that history is baked into my characters, and the lens through which I view that world. I also have a stable of alts ready to tackle pretty much any content I would like to do.

Time-appropriate Activities – WoW has so much content of different types that it is always easy to find something to do that feels like progress, even if it is just refreshing garrison missions. Raids and dungeons take appropriate amounts of time, varying with their difficulty.

Content – There’s 10 years worth of stuff to do.

Friends – I’ve made a lot of friends through WildStar, but the truth is most of my friends end up pulled back into WoW’s gravity well. This is really the biggest factor, and also the one that makes me wish there was some secret to convincing everyone to love WildStar as much as I do.

Given all those things to like about both games, what do I actually end up doing with my time? Do I spend time in WildStar enjoying the active combat, and focus on the accessible group content in WoW? Nope. In WildStar lately I just run around my house, sometimes doing my mini-instance and fussing with my decor. In WoW, outside of 4 hours of raid time per week I just end up sitting in my garrisons on my herd of alts, updating missions and fussing over follower gear. I never seem to feel like I have enough time to spend in WildStar to get over my inertia and go out into the world to do things. Meanwhile I feel like if I’m not constantly micromanaging my followers in WoW then I’m missing out on some theoretical benefit. The net result is that my MMO time lately feels incredibly unproductive. I get down on myself for not spending enough time in the game I like better, but when I do play WildStar I miss my friends or just don’t have the energy after a long day to engage with some of the content I enjoy.

The kicker is my love of raiding. I can raid LFR, normal, or hard mode in WoW after minimal spin-up time, but after playing WildStar since launch I am still not raid attuned, nor do I have a group of people I could even raid with. Even if I got over those hurdles, I get the impression that raiding in WildStar would probably require a lot more than 4 hours per week of effort. In fact if I could find a raiding guild in WildStar that would help get me up to speed, then I’d definitely have to leave WoW and those friends behind, which fills me with guilt and sadness.

In the end I certainly won’t be leaving WildStar anytime soon, but I don’t know what the future holds for WoW for me or what my play time will look like in the coming months. I know some folks manage to play multiple MMOs by scheduling separate days for each one, so maybe that’s something that would work for me. Do any of you play multiple MMOs with success? What are your secrets to making it work?

Source: Moonshine Mansion
Comings and Goings