Tonight we are joined by our normal cast of Belghast, Rae, Tam, Kodra and Ashgar as we devote the majority of the show to lots of different things Final Fantasy. We talk the release of the Final Fantasy XV Demo and how this has sent Tam back into the 90s. We talk Final Fantasy Type-0 and how we are enjoying this very different Final Fantasy Offering. We also talk about how the Final Fantasy franchise going to more “on rails” games turned several of us off the franchise for awhile. Ashgar beats Ori and the Blind Forest and talks a bit about his feelings regarding the ending. Tam talks about his enjoyment of Dreamfall Chapters and how it isn’t really required that one has played the previous games. Rae talks about her new Noms website, where they plan on making a recipe a week and reflecting on what the various authors think of it.
I talk about my current funk with my World of Warcraft raid and how the frustrations there are harshing my enjoyment. We also delve into a deep session once again where we talk about the differences bertween WoW and FFXIV raiding. We also have a session of “Tam Told us So” now that the news about crafting specialization has taken some of the focus away from us all becoming Omni Crafters. I talk about my return lately to Elder Scrolls Online and the conversion to a Buy To Play system. I talk about a game I did not expect to like but find myself begrudgingly enjoying, and that is ZMR: Zombies Monsters Robots. Finally we close out the show with some discussion about the League Championship Series and the introduction of the new roaming support champion… Bard.
During this show we are joined by our normal cast of Belghast, Rae, Tam, Kodra and Ashgar as we devote the majority of the show to lots of different things Final Fantasy. We talk the release of the Final Fantasy XV Demo and how this has sent Tam back into the 90s. We talk Final Fantasy Type-0 and how we are enjoying this very different Final Fantasy Offering. We also talk about how the Final Fantasy franchise going to more “on rails” games turned several of us off the franchise for awhile. Ashgar beats Ori and the Blind Forest and talks a bit about his feelings regarding the ending. Tam talks about his enjoyment of Dreamfall Chapters and how it isn’t really required that one has played the previous games. Rae talks about her new Noms website, where they plan on making a recipe a week and reflecting on what the various authors think of it.
I talk about my current funk with my World of Warcraft raid and how the frustrations there are harshing my enjoyment. We also delve into a deep session once again where we talk about the differences bertween WoW and FFXIV raiding. We also have a session of “Tam Told us So” now that the news about crafting specialization has taken some of the focus away from us all becoming Omni Crafters. I talk about my return lately to Elder Scrolls Online and the conversion to a Buy To Play system. I talk about a game I did not expect to like but find myself begrudgingly enjoying, and that is ZMR: Zombies Monsters Robots. Finally we close out the show with some discussion about the League Championship Series and the introduction of the new roaming support champion… Bard.
FFXIV For PS3 Closeout
Yesterday we spent the day mostly roaming around, in an effort to get out of the house more than anything. Tis the season for post Christmas clearance in all the various stores as they start closing out one seasons stuff in preparation for summer. This is generally an awesome time to pick up all sorts of random bits, but more often than not I am hunting for Legos. I’ve already found several sets deeply discounted and I have reached the point where I really don’t pounce on something until it is at least half off or more from the original price. In my journeys yesterday I noticed that it seems like all of the Target stores are closing out their PS3 copies of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. This creates a unique opportunity for players who have been on the fence about playing the Game. Throughout my journeys yesterday I found it between $6 and $10 for a boxed copy of FFXIV PS3. Now if you act very quickly you can turn this PS3 copy into a PS4 copy with several caveats.
Firstly this offer goes away on March 31st, so you will have a limited amount to time to actually do it. Secondly you have to have a PS3 or access to a PS3 to make this work. You have to log your PSN account into a PS3 and bind that PS3 to your account. Then you have to boot up FFXIV and log into the game, thereby registering your PSN account to your Square Enix account. Finally you have to go into the Mogstation and you can click the link that should now appear at the bottom of your account screen. This should give you a code that you can then enter through the Sony Playstation store on your PS4 to get a copy of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn of PS4. This is a ton of hoops to jump through but it should allow you to get a copy of FFXIV ARR for really cheap. There are some caveats here… firstly when you claim your PS4 copy, it nullifies your PS3 copy. Secondly this does not give your account a PC License, which would be a separate purchase. I did this some time ago myself but I had forgotten all of this bullshit that you have to do until yesterday when a friend was trying to make this work. I normally play on my PC but I like having the option to play on PS4 especially since you can remote play through a Vita or PSTV. Granted the controls are kinda wonky, but it would be well worth figuring it out for leveling and crafting as such.
City Building
Another game that I have been playing around with lately is the confusingly named Cities: Skylines. It seems like I was suffering the same confusion that so many other gamers seem to be… that Skylines was somehow connected to the Cities XL and Cities XXL franchise. That colon apparently is there to somehow differentiate the games, because they are in fact from two different companies. I had played XL in the past and was not terribly impressed, so when I say the buzz about Skylines I for the most part ignored it. That was until I actually watched some game play footage and saw that the game was essentially everything I wanted the last couple of Simcity titles to be. Overall the game feels very much like a logical successor to Simcity 2000, which was really the last big city building game that I enjoyed playing. If you take the concepts from that game, and bring them up to modern standards you have the Skylines interface. The game strikes this balance between trying to have mind bending graphics and being pleasant to look at and play with.
I took this screenshot because I am pretty damned proud of getting my first upgrade. Apparently in the years since I have played Simcity 2000, I have gotten pretty horrible at city building. The biggest problem I am having with skylines is that it seems difficult to figure out how best to build the roads and utilities to conserve space for zoning. The above city is actually my second attempt at creating something viable, and so far it is working okay. My first city was a complete mess because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I have a feeling that this second city will also be a learning experience as I try and figure out how best to optimize putting in an electrical grid and such. All I do know for certain is that skylines is definitely a way to lose an hour without realizing it. I started playing this as my wife was getting ready to leave yesterday morning, and next thing I know she was ready. I feel like I need to watch some people playing it to figure out how best to do things again. The standard grid that I used to build in doesn’t appear to really work here. If nothing else this feels like the true “next best city building game.
I’m already forgetting the lessons of Blaugust. I might be a bit busier than I was then, but I should keep in mind that I don’t need to write an entire book every time I hit post. With that in mind, here are a few things that came up this past week in FFXIV. While the game balance at 50 is generally somewhere between “good” and “excellent”, there are a few periods where skill order makes no sense whatsoever. Lancers, for example, do the most DPS between the levels of 12-25 by spamming Impulse Drive, and ignoring the 2-step combo that they have. The Black mage rotation doesn’t really make sense until you have both Fire III and Blizzard III, which isn’t until 38. But the worst case of this in my opinion is the Paladin.
Skill Order
When you get your Job Stone as a warrior, the skill you get at Level 30 is Defiance. It improves your survivability, helps you hold threat, and allows you to build stacks that you can’t spend for five more levels. Paladins instead get Sword Oath, which increases the auto-attack damage you do (admittedly by a decent amount). The skill they get that increases their threat and survivability (Shield Oath) is withheld until level 40. The level 35 skill is Cover, which does not assist in threat or survivability. This wouldn’t be such a big problem, except that dungeons at this point start getting quite a bit more challenging (Brayflox’s Longstop and The Sunken Temple of Qarn are a giant wake-up call) and all DPS jobs get a massive stat boost from their job stones (and some of them also get important damage skills at 30). Unfortunately, this means that Paladins are at a rather large disadvantage, and I know from enough times healing and tanking Brayflox that it isn’t just player perception.
Problem Resolution
All is not lost: Paladins are perfectly capable of doing the content in this level range, it just takes a bit more work. It comes down to two things, really: Cooldowns and Target Switching.
Paladins are blessed with an entire suite of damage reduction cooldowns, and they can even steal the Warrior’s best one at that level range. In addition, the pace of combat in FFXIV is such that you can use something with a cooldown of 90 seconds about every other fight if you want. My first instinct when I was playing was to save cooldowns for emergencies, but you will get some more suited to this purpose later. Things like Convalescence, Foresight, and Rampart are nice to use whenever they make the healer’s life easier. Making their life easier then makes your life easier.
This one was a bit unintuitive to me at first too, but it’s useful and nearly required in the 30s. The only Paladin Combo that matters 95% of the time (Fast Blade->Savage Blade->Rage of Halone) has a threat modifier on the second hit, and a larger threat modifier on the third hit. It can be extremely helpful when tanking multiple things to land the second or third hit on something that isn’t your primary target, because Flash starts to not be enough in some cases. (These cases are named Summoner and Black Mage) On the other hand, if you have a strong single-target DPS in the party (Monk, Dragoon, Ninja) you might lose aggro on the primary target if you switch, so know when not to. If your party contains a Summoner and a Dragoon, mark targets and hope.
I’m not proud.
At the end of the tunnel
At level 40, you finally get Shield Oath (and will forget to use it roughly once a day for the rest of your time playing this class). At 38, you get Sentinel, a cooldown actually worth saving for emergencies (which is why it’s not in my macro). The dark days of the 30s don’t last forever, and once you get through them you’ll (hopefully) know how to be a better tank with lessons that once again apply once you have to deal with the class that can cast Flare. Have fun!
There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia. I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.
Exeteroth Iceforge
I’ve been sitting here for a bit staring at a blank screen, not quite sure what to write for my Storytime Saturday post. Which lead m to start thinking about the things I miss in games. One of the casualties of the whole Daybreak Games debacle was the majority of the in game GM department. From what I have heard they currently have only a single GM per game, which makes me wonder why there is not talk about bringing back the Guide program. For those who are not familiar with the concept, the Guide program was a series of player volunteers that gave up some of their in game time to serve as junior GMs on a server other than their own. These guides took care of a lot of the day to day requests like players stuck in geometry, and minor behavior infractions. The guide system always felt really cool because you knew more than likely you were getting another seasoned player helping you out, and in part you felt more connected to them because of it.
This freed up the GM staff to do some interesting things like live events. It was always extremely awesome when something was going on, and it was amazing how fast word trickled through the community. Players would drop what they were doing to flock to whatever zone something cool was happening in. The unfortunately thing is it has been literally years since I last participated in something like that. Modern games seem to have a GM staff that simply does not come out to play anymore. There was a time when on Xegony in Everquest we knew all of the GMs and guides assigned to our server. There were so many times they would be hanging out in zone with us as we took down a raid boss, cheering us on. The problem is there were tales of GMs doing questionable things to help out some of the top tier guilds. I really hope they were just rumors, because while we might have had GMs in zone with us they never did anything to assist us other than to lend moral support.
Spawn Rights
One of the rights of passage in Everquest was the obtaining of the epic weapon. This was an extremely long process that involved the camping of many rare spawns. I’ve talked in the past about playing a cleric which was actually one of the less annoying epic weapons to obtain. The worst ones relied upon steps in raid instances that were extremely rare spawns. I remember getting home from work, logging in and seeing messages in guild chat that “Pasta” was up, and everyone immediately knew that it meant we were going to the Plane of Hate that night. Magi P’Tasa was a super rare spawn on what I vaguely remember being a two week long spawn cycle buried deep within the Plane of Hate. When it was up… it became a race among all the various raid guilds on the server to see who could field a raid first and clear to it and defeat it. So many times there was a fever pitch battle to try and log people in fast enough, and get us all into Hate in order to grab the spawn rights first.
That was one of the awesome things about Xegony is that for the most part the raid guilds respected each others “spawn rights”. Meaning that if someone was in a zone, it was more or less off limits to any other guild trying to come up and muscle them out of it. So whoever gained a foothold in Hate for example, owned Hate until they were doing farming it. These farm sessions could last days at times, especially on the weekends. This however was not the case on every server. Originally I started on Veeshan, the home of the fabled Fires of Heaven raid guild. They respected no ones “spawn rights” in any form, and there were constantly tales of them steamrolling their way through a zone that someone else was currently farming to muscle through to the spawn they needed. Often times training mobs on the rival guild to keep them busy while they got what they were after. I feel like in part the reason why we have instanced dungeons in World of Warcraft, is in part because of these sort of shenanigans.
Murky Depths
The cool thing is that while all of this was going on, it was not unusual for guides and GMs to be hanging out watching the race for the spawn. I have to say the coolest instance of GM intervention I ever experienced was while I was working on my own epic weapon quest. At the bottom of Lake Rathetear was a particularly annoying step that involved farming a set of Aqua Goblins until a rare named goblin called Lord Bergurgle spawned. Like so many of the spawns in Everquest this on was based on a random chance anytime you killed the placeholder. This often meant spending hour after hour on the bottom of Lake Rathetear which was a slog of a camp because the bottom of the lake was pitch black…. with nothing other than some crumbling ruins to stare at. During one of my sessions down on the bottom of the lake a random GM popped by and spend several hours just keeping me company as we waited on the spawn. It was awesome that she was more than happy to chat away keeping a lonely cleric company while waiting on an annoying spawn.
Basically I miss this sort of interaction between the customer support staff and the player base. During these early days there was so much more cooperation between players and customer service, because it felt like we were in this together. That we were working together to make this game we both loved all the more awesome. I am not saying that CS is not doing an amazing job currently, but I miss this era of manual and personal intervention with the players. The GMs and Guides were physically in the game with you, not connected into it through a chat server in a call center somewhere. In part it was also cool that “guide robes” were something that was instantly recognizable as a person of authority. It was like a uniform that every player immediately recognized and respected. They were the in game security guards and forces of right and good. I keep hoping now that we have these smaller niche games that they will bring back something like the guide program. I think it is good for the community as a whole to have representatives in direct contact with the player base on a regular basis. If nothing else it is fun to fondly remember this era in MMOs, even if I doubt it will ever fully return. I feel like this is probably something that gets harder to support the larger the game gets.
