March 2015 – Page 8

Return of the Flumph

March 17, 2015 by Thalen

It was recently decided that the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign I've been playing in will be switching to 5th edition for our next session. On the whole, I'm excited since 5e feels much more like Dungeons & Dragons should, in my opinion. My stance on 4e has always been that it's a perfectly good system for strategic combat, but it's not D&D. I am , however, disappointed that I won't get to debut my rebuilt warlock who never lets his opponent stand up, ever.

With a 5th edition session in the near future and needing to port my character over, I went ahead and picked up the core books as well as the two adventures that have been published so far. I had leafed through a friend's Player's Handbook and determined that I liked the system, so I figure there's a reasonable chance I'll want to run some games in the future. I also figure the adventures will be useful in getting an idea of how the creators of this edition think the game should play.

So anyway, I've been reading through those books and in the Monster Manual I found something amazing. The flumph is back.

The original flying spaghetti monster

For those not in the know, the flumph is a perennial entry on lists of weird, crazy, or useless D&D monsters (along with such luminaries as the flail snail and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing). The flumph is one of the rarest of D&D monsters, a lawful good aberration. It's also basically a floating telepathic jellyfish that is helpless when knocked on it's back. Flumphs are awesome.

The fact that the flumph is, for the first time, among the initial set of monsters published for an edition of D&D says a lot about the design team's willingness to try and recapture the feel of older editions and marry it with a cleaner ruleset. The Dungeon Master's guide is full of the sorts of random tables that made the first AD&D books so much fun. Example artifacts have DM chosen (or randomly generated) minor benefits and flaws, just like AD&D. One of the example traps is the classic Tomb of Horrors sphere of annihilation trap.

Ultimately, D&D is a game about creating stories. A little weirdness and a little randomness can go a long way towards making a story memorable. 5e seems to have been created by folks that realize that, and that brings me great joy. I'm sure the flumphs are happy too.

Guar Wrangler

May 26, 2015March 17, 2015 by Belghast

Horrible Night

Last night was supposed to be our guild attempt on Turn 9 again in Final Fantasy XIV. I logged in ready to go, and then all hell broke loose. We had two servers go down at work, and I spent my night working with a coworker trying to bring them back online. While all this was happening, the guild rightfully filled my spot and the show went on without me. It sounds like maybe they got through another phase but I was not paying that close of attention to what was going on in Teamspeak. I spent most of the night watching those servers, trying to make sure that they were not going to go down again. I got a 9:30 pm call from my boss which freaked me out, because my mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that something had happened again. Turns out he was just returning my call from earlier in the evening that apparently he missed.

The problem is as stressful as my actual evening went… it apparently spilled over into my dreams. In my dream I was interviewing Robert Downey Jr. and he was extremely agitated. He was pacing around the room, and I kept trying to the bottom of why. Suddenly he got mad with me and transformed into the Ironman suit from his briefcase. He fired a shot at me, and I responded by turning into the X-O Manowar suit. We battled back and forth in this conference room. One of his repulsor beams blew a hole in the wall and outside I could see the Ultramarines fighting some sort of giant Kaiju. Finally they defeated it and stormed into the building to assist me. Moments from capturing Robert Downey Jr. turned Ironman… I apparently woke up. It was a strange night.

Capping Poetics

While semi-afk and working on servers I happened to notice movement in my game screen. It turns out the entire guild was swarmed around me trying to lure me back from wherever I happened to be. Unfortunately it didn’t work and it took another thirty minutes or so before things were finally restored. Since I missed the boat for raid time… and quite honestly I didn’t feel like I should get involved in something that serious I opted to run hardmodes for poetics. I went into the night sitting around 200 poetics of the 450 cap. Through a series of hard modes, trials and a random expert with guildies when the raid was over I managed to get within a single point of capping. This meant I was within a single trial of cap, so I stayed up and did just that… managing to get the most frustrating Ifrit Hard mode I have ever experienced. The tank failed to have shield oath up, which meant that the white mage quite literally tanked Ifrit for most of the kill.

If nothing else capping poetics was a bit of a silver lining to an otherwise shitty night. Right now I am very much in this mode of trying to cap every week so I can finish gearing out my main the Warrior. As far as pieces to purchase, I need a couple of pieces of jewelry, the belt and the chest piece… and then a bunch of weeks to past to get the necessary carboncoat and carbontwine to upgrade them to 130. In any case there is still a lot of upgrades ahead of me, and my hope is to get to as much 130 gear as I can before the release of the 2.55 patch which is supposedly March 31st. That seems really damned soon considering we just recently had the Golden Saucer patch, but I guess they are wanting to give players time with that patch to finish things up before June 19th and the Heavensward headstart. I guess now that I think about that, it is only giving players a month with 2.55 which makes sense as something that they would want to do.

Guar Wrangler

After the night that I had I should have just gone straight to bed. The problem is I was still very much still “worked up” over the events. I likely could not have slept if I had tried, so throughout the night I had been patching up Elder Scrolls Online, and decided to pop my head in. It turns out that they flipped the switch for Tamriel Unlimited a bit early, and folks were able to log in and play last night. Overall the transition seemed smooth enough, and all of my pets and such got sucked into the new collections system. Similarly I was granted 4500 crowns to spend on the in game shop, and with that I picked up the stealth armor pack that had this very cool covenant armor set, and the guar that I am riding on. I also picked up the Wildhelm dog pet, because he looked adorable.

As far as the game itself, I had been popping my head in Tamriel once or twice a week for awhile now. After the change I didn’t really detect anything to strange other than the fact that I now had a champion point to spend, and had to respec my character completely. That was the hardest part, trying to decide and remember what I had before. I feel like I probably ended up with a similar build to before… but I can’t be too certain. I am still heavily sword and shield dragon knight, and that seems effective. I wandered around and managed to take out a world mini-boss at some ghost pirate camp without much issue, so I am happy with the results. I look forward to getting more time to explore the Aldmeri Dominion now that the champion system feels like I am actually making forward momentum again. Now I just have to live with the consequences of having limited sleep.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Guar Wrangler

Return of the Flumph

August 12, 2015March 16, 2015 by Thalen

Warrior Milestone

May 26, 2015March 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”.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Warrior Milestone