Great Serpent of Ronka

Good Morning Friends, I must start off this post by apologizing. I probably gave some of you a heart attack yesterday when I was talking about the event to get the Regalia in FFXIV. I misread the timeline and it is in fact October 18th and not September 18th that the event finishes, giving you roughly a month instead of a week to complete it. I appreciate the reader who commented about this because I legitimately had simply glossed over that there were two different months in that statement. I’ve updated the previous post in order to hopefully keep anyone who was slow at reading it from having the same negative reaction. Another quick update is that yesterday I modified the masthead for the site, and finally after over a year have included PSO2 Belghast into the character collage. As always huge thanks to Ammosart who does most of my artwork, and that one collage represents some seven different commissions over the course of multiple years.
One of the things about this mission to level everything to 80 that has proven beneficial, is that as I adjust to each new class I learn some of its quirks. The hope is that after the experiment, I will be able to better support the unique needs of each class while I am tanking. One completely new adjustment however is how much time I have spent healing because that is more or less a role I have wholesale avoided since Everquest. There are a lot of little things that players need to know about healers in order to stop putting them in no-win situations. For example, you should never break the line of sight from your healer… especially if you are deciding that you are going to take damage. Healers cannot heal through walls and if you are out of range or in a whole other room… chances are you are going to die and that healer is going to feel like a failure as they resurrect your stupid ass.
I talked about this a bit on Twitter, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about some general theory around fight placement. I cobbled together this quick diagram to aid this discussion, but the idea is pretty straightforward. In a good scenario, the tank has pulled the boss and spun it away from the party so that frontal attacks won’t cause needless splash damage. The melee is set up either at the flank or in the rear of the boss depending on positional requirements. The healer and ranged DPS are spread out in a ring around the boss just outside of melee range so that they can run in for donut attacks or run out for any other markers, but close enough to be within splash healing range. This more or less allows the party to work efficiently, with healers doing some AOE healing while focusing on bigger heals for the tank. However, what often happens is the bad scenario shown with the red box. Too often do I see tanks just walk up and start tanking the boss or pack of mobs in place without care for facing. This forces your melee to be back behind the encounter and vulnerable to any adds that join part way through from behind. Too often the healer has spread way the hell out and the ranged DPS is off in practically a whole other county completely out of the range of healing, and no one but the tank and melee is in the range of any splash AOE healing. Essentially my goal going into a fight is to optimize the conditions so that we have the greatest chance of succeeding and having a nice clean and swift run. Nothing slows down the party more than having to run back from a wipe because the fight mechanics that we had control over… were just carried out in a poor manner.
There are always going to be scenarios where this does not work, but it is a basic approach that works some 90% of the time. Another thing that took place yesterday, is that I managed to get the Stewards gathering beast tribe to Sworn which unlocked access to this goofy mount.
If you press the mount special button, which apparently replaces your pet hotbar… the “Serpent” springs forth from the mount and circles you before ducking back inside the jar. This is pure nonsense and is truly delightful. It reminds me a lot of the easter egg mount that springs forth a baby chocobo. You may not think it is worth leveling gathering up to Shadowbringers levels in order to get said mount, but for me it was a huge bonus of something I was already going to do.
There are many nights that I wraap up all of the activities that could give me “easy” levels pretty quickly. Traditionally this would be when I would fall into a rhythm of pushing up something through one of the Deep Dungeon systems. Last night however I apparently was restless because logged out and played a handful of other titles. The primary of these was Deathloop, which released yesterday. Prior to getting my hands on it, my initial impression based on the trailers was “What if Arkane created Bioshock but set it in the swinging 70s No One Lives For Ever visual language”. So far that more or less seems to be true.
This game is the same well crafted artistry that we have come to expect from the Dishonored series, and even some of the same visual language for set design is at play here. The device that bars your entry to your flat, reminds me a lot of the mechanism that was used to bar entry into plague ridden buildings for example. The only real problem I am having early on is that one… for some reason print screen is just straight up blocked and as a result ShareX doesn’t work for me and I have had to revert back to using F12 for Steam Screenshots. Secondly the lack of the ability to manually save your game is a real pain in the ass, and while absolutely intentional due to the gameplay… ends up just pissing me off as I have to keep repeating the same level over and over because I needed to bail for one reason or another. The idea is that you complete one entire level as a single pass, and then your gameplay state is snapshotted at the beginning of the next mission. What I want instead is just an ability to quicksave out of the game and return to that save state at a later time.
So far I am enjoying the game enough to stick with it, but am probably not going to spend much time with it until the weekend. This is absolutely the sort of game that I am going to need to carve out large chunks of time, rather than my normally fragmented gameplay. For one reason or another, during the week I seem to end up AFKing quite a bit, which is not conducive to a game that wants me to play one entire segment in a single sitting. This is one of those situations where the console players may have it easier, given that the PlayStation 5 allows you to pause a game and return to it at a later date. I feel like Arkane is going to have to patch in some sort of save game system, because right now what exists is awful and had I known about it… I might have given the game a hard pass for the time being. The post Great Serpent of Ronka appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Get Your Regalia Now

Good Morning Friends! It is the Tuesday after a weekend, which seems to be when I sit down and have a big ole catch-up topic. Shocking to no one I spent most of my weekend playing Final Fantasy XIV as I continue down this mad quest to level everything to 80 before Endwalker. It always feels like I am at a standstill until I do one of these posts and realize just how much progress I have made since the last one. Based on my quick napkin math, I have 70 days until Endwalker launches, however, I have been calculating this wrong all this time. The Endwalker early access period begins on November 19th, which means I actually only have 66 days worth of pre-expansion leveling time. I have a grand total of 96 levels to get in various classes so that means I need to get at a minimum of one and a half levels each day in order to meet this goal.
Essentially leveling alt jobs in Final Fantasy XIV is a bit of a hurry up and wait game. There are easy levels to be gained by completing the roulettes for the day and getting the bonus experience associated with them. Then that drops down to slow leveling, which is the more grindy method of either queuing for the highest dungeon available, doing the deep dungeon, or going out and doing Bozjan front. Since we last reviewed my job levels I have finished Dark Knight and pushed it to 80. I’ve also put on nine levels of Monk, ten levels of White Mage, and one measly level of Black Mage that I did last night. Not that it really counts towards the goal, but I did gain three more levels of culinarian through Ixal quests. I am focusing on White Mage a bit more than Monk at the moment because Monk has more options available to it for gaining experience, and with White Mage… it is always a bit of a struggle for me to level as a healer and I am trying to get it out of the way. Black Mage however is probably going to be a bit more of a challenge than I originally thought, because at this very moment it is very much not feeling like my jam.
One very important note for anyone out there also playing Final Fantasy XIV, or inclined to return… the Final Fantasy XV crossover event is happening again. From the 13th through the 18th you can complete the quest chain and unlock access to buy the Regalia 4 seater car mount, Noctis’ outfit, and hairstyle, as well as a number of orchestrion scrolls. So far with these crossover events, we have gotten it twice… and then never again. We got the Final Fantasy XIII event exactly twice, the Yokai Watch event exactly twice, and my fear is this might be your last chance to get the mount. The FFXIII stuff did eventually make its way to the MogStation store, but if you have the ability you might as well earn this legitimately rather than have to pay the premium for a multi-seater mount later. The big gotcha however is that the items are sold with MGP, the Gold Saucer currency… which means in order to get the mount you will need 200,000 mgp which is no easy feat to gather during the time the event is running.
In other news, I spent a bit of time over the weekend participating in the Open Beta for New World. The game feels extremely solid and has gone through so many changes for the better. Some of the last fit and finish things seem to have been working on the character creation system. I don’t have any specific data, but it feels like there are just a bunch more options than there were before. Additionally, I am super happy that scars have been split apart from the face selection, which means I no longer have to keep playing with that one facial model that had the scar. Combat feels really good and it feels a little less punishing than it did previously if you miss a block. I spent some time playing around with the two-handed axe, which was new to me. I still think my overall focus is going to be the more tanky sword and shield but focusing on strength as my primary stat allows me to swap out to either of the two-handers for a backup weapon without having to split stats. Right now every level up I am putting one point into strength and another into stamina and it seems to be working pretty well.
I don’t really want to get distracted from my FFXIV goals, but I do expect to be piddling around in New World when I have exhausted those easy levels each day. I am going to have to watch myself though, because I am known for going obsessive about a single thing at a given time. I successfully played FFXIV and Destiny 2 at the same time, so hopefully I can do the same with FFXIV and New World. They really are wildly different experiences, and I can’t see myself really going hardcore into the settlement war system, so being a casual crafter/tank might be a chill way to finish out the evenings. The post Get Your Regalia Now appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Mixtape Mondays: Mason and Librarian

Good Morning Friends! I apologize for missing a Mixtape Monday last week, but I was fully in holiday mode and not caring about the world one little bit. For anyone who might be new to my blog, every Monday I post a playlist full of songs that have been lovingly crafted like one would have done with a precious blank cassette tape. I think that was part of what made Mixtapes in general so carefully crafted because, to be honest… a pack of high-quality blank cassettes was freaking expensive. Like legitimately a pack of three quality tapes was about half the price of an album… which is fine but nothing that you felt like you could squander. Anyways… nostalgia trip finished because today I craft my mixes for you in modern formats like Spotify and YouTube playlists.

Mason and Librarian

Often times the mixes I share with you have a clear theme to them… and I have to be honest this is probably not going to be one of those. There is a theme, but it is a deeply personal theme that won’t actually relate to anyone outside of my own skull case. In late high school I had two wildly different friends that lived a few houses down from each other, and as one drifted further down paths that I did not want to follow… I ended up clinging to the other. The day I crafted this mix, I was thinking about the wild juxtaposition of these two friends because really at their core they could not be more different. One grew up to follow in his father’s footsteps and became a Stone Mason, and the other followed his childhood passions and become a Librarian. I don’t really have much connection anymore to the first one, but talk at least weekly to the second one and chances are he will actually see this mix at some point when he catches up on my blog. Like it won’t make much sense, but this is an album that reminds me of the two of them more than actually relates to them.

Track List

  • True Nature – Jane’s Addiction
  • Freak Scene – Dinosaur Jr.
  • Violet – Hole
  • Misery – Soul Asylum
  • Welcome to the Fold – Filter
  • Nothing – Stabbing Westward
  • Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart – Stone Temple Pilots
  • Sabotage – Beastie Boys
  • Points of Authority – Linkin Park
  • When Worlds Collide – Powerman 5000
  • Space Lord – Monster Magnet
  • Lay Lady Lay – Ministry
  • Pets – Porno for Pyros

Listen on Spotify

Listen On YouTube

With that, we close the nineteenth chapter in this Mixtape Monday series. This is one of my favorite ones to listen to because the same thoughts that lead me to choose this specific lineup are sort of now imbued in the final product, and listening makes me think about these two friends. I have a wealth of close acquaintances, but I have very few really close friends in the world that I have let down my armor in order to see me behind this facade. I am thankful some years back I reconnected with the Librarian, who is awesomely moving to my town and hopefully once the pandemic is a bit less scary we can do some real world shenanigans again. As always I hope you enjoyed this Mixtape and if you are new to the series you can find the entire series run over at the archives below. The post Mixtape Mondays: Mason and Librarian appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #359 – PlayStation Play 2021

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we start the show off with Kodra talking bout Celeste and making it past the Farewell segment of the game.  We talk about the conclusion of the Epic versus Apple lawsuit and how it is pretty bad for both companies, but especially bad for Epic.  From there we talk about our impressions of the games shown off at what would have been the Sony E3 show if that happened.  This leads into a discussion of Tam recently trying out Avengers and how it is still not a good game after all this time.  We talk for a bit about Pathfinder Secrets of Magic book and martial spellcasters in general.  Finally, we have a bit of a discussion between Thalen and Kodra about Super Mario Maker with children.

Topics Discussed

  • Celeste
    • Farewell to Farewell
  • Epic versus Apple Conclusion
    • Bad for both
    • Ruling against Epic
  • Sony Playstation Play Showcase 2021
  • Avengers is Still Bad
  • Secrets of Magic
  • Super Mario Maker with Kids
The post AggroChat #359 – PlayStation Play 2021 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.