August 2015 – Page 45

Progression and Achievement

August 5, 2015August 4, 2015 by Tamrielo

I used to be a bleeding-edge-of-content type. At various points in my MMO-playing career, I’ve pushed hard against the wall of the most advanced content in various games at various times, and I’ve reached a point where I no longer feel the need to chase that. That having been said, I still love the sense of accomplishment of beating something legitimately difficult, even if I’m not doing it the fastest, or the hardest possible way.

Last night, we beat Turn 13, finishing out the Binding Coil of Bahamut in its entirety. Even at the expansion power level, the final boss isn’t a trivial encounter, and took us more tries to beat than the first section of Alexander (expansion raid content, which we did immediately after T13). Part of this has to do with how shallow the power curve is in FFXIV– we’re not looking at orders of magnitude of power increases for the most part. The other part is that the mechanics of the fight are very, very nasty. Even on “easy”, it will happily wreck you if you don’t know what you’re doing.

What I like about this pace of content is that it keeps everything fun. Sure, we’re not going to be the first to beat everything, but we can and will beat it all, and we’ll do it without burning ourselves out. The only time I’ve been fatigued with the regular raid we run has been when we were bashing our heads against Turn 9, and even that was much less nasty than the severe burnout I was feeling doing Naxx40 in Vanilla WoW, or some of the plane raids as they came out in EQ, or hardmode Soa in SWTOR.

this picture is titled “swtor-soa-bug-fix” which should tell you a lot about the frustrations with that awful, awful fight.

I think a big part of it is that I feel like I’m getting a reward that’s more than an item or a title or an achievement for beating a boss. I’m getting a solid, notable chunk of story. The cutscene following the defeat of Arthas in Wrath of the Lich King is basically par for the course for FFXIV raids; every Coil ends with a cutscene like that, and there are also a goodly number of equally significant ones scattered throughout the progression. I’m getting a big chunk of interesting story that means a lot more to me than a fancy new sword or a piece of armor that will be outdated with the next release.

Indeed, at no point while we were raiding Coil were any of the drops going to be relevant for us. They look cool, and that’s about it; we were never going to see upgrades out of there. I think it helped things, and made our experience a lot smoother and more fun. We did each thing as often as we wanted to, rather than grinding them repeatedly just to get drops to gear up for the next one.

As for myself, I got a little burned out getting my gear level up high enough to take on Alexander, grinding Law tomestones to get upgrades. I haven’t had the desire to log in and grind more dungeons, and I’ve been holding off on raiding Alexander on my own until I can see all the pieces of it with my team. I’m looking forward to new dungeons and new story quests to keep moving things forward, but in the meantime I’m branching out into a few other games. I may make a return to Archeage and muck about with that, although as mentioned before I’ve been fairly deep in SAO: Hollow Fragment.

After a fairly long period of being a bit uninterested in the games I had available to me, it’s exciting to have things I want to play again.

Source: Digital Initiative
Progression and Achievement

On Success

August 4, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #4

As you may have heard by now, our previous raid night was spent working on content that we were 10 levels above. For a bit now, our raid group has been working on clearing the last of the raid content from the 2.x series, the Final Coil of Bahamut. We finally beat the final boss on Monday, and I have to say it feels pretty good.

Months Behind

At no point in this game have we been raiding on the bleeding edge. We beat Turn 5 (The hardest boss in the game at release) shortly after the Final Coil of Bahamut (Turns 10-13) came out. We were stuck on Turn 9 for months (and the same phase of it, at that), despite making decent progress with every other raid we attempted. We finally beat it after Heavensward, and I was more happy that it was over than happy I’d beaten it. Things were a bit better moving into Final Coil, because the boss fights there are really cool. (I think T11 is mechanically one of my favorite fight concepts in the game.) As a result of being so drastically behind, we out-geared and/or out-leveled all of the content we’ve been doing.

And Loving It

It turns out that these raids are still pretty fun this way, and nothing was a pushover (except T10, which we got below 50% on the first pull without explaining things). Mechanics are still capable of wiping you if you mess up, and while the DPS numbers are now kind of easy, standing in things meant to kill you will usually still kill you. In the final dungeons (T5, T9, T13) there are still things that can kill you with no save, like Twisters, Divebombs, or messing up fire/ice. What really gets me are some of the numbers on things not meant to kill you. Akh Morn in Turn 13 is an attack meant to be shared between the tanks that does massive, increasingly large amounts of damage as the final phase goes on. I have no idea how anyone survived this at 50 (and especially in the first groups to clear, who didn’t have full loot from the rest of Final Coil). 10k+ damage through cooldowns is kind of intense. It was certainly a rush to actually beat it.

What the Future Holds

Currently we’re looking at participating in more current content next week, probably either continuing with Alexander or taking on The Limitless Blue (Extreme). The raiding experience in this game has been quite enjoyable, so I hope this continues.

Shiphand Buddy: Fragment Zero

August 5, 2015August 4, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 4

Welcome to our first installment of Shiphand Buddy! Are you ready to face the dangers of Fragment Zero?

I love the retro sci-fi theme of the introduction to this one

What: Unlock the secrets of a creepy skeech-filled asteroid and save the Ekose captain

When: Available at level 6

Where: Quest givers are in Algoroc, Celestion, Deradune, and Ellevar

Gold Timers: Normal: None; Vet: 30:00

Gracie’s Run Time: Normal: 12:58 ; Vet: 17:59

Shiphand Buddy Says: This is the newest shiphand and it has some nice touches like cute old-school sci-fi themed cutscenes and a story that ties into the world story a little more than just “some folks went into space and bad things happened to them.” The vet gold timer can be a little tight if you are new or if your dps is on the low end, but once you’re used to where to find everything you should have a few minutes of cushion.

There are 3 tunnels, you go left first, then right, then finally straight, before returning to the start again. The black box you need to collect can spawn in several random locations. I like to check the spot on the right side right after killing the first skeech waves at the start while I am close. The first tunnel has a strain infestation. There’s 3 fairly obvious big strain creatures to kill before you can find the missing crew member and move on. Make sure to kill the xenobite eggs along the walls for your gold medal.

Lines show my approximate path. Dots are possible Black Box locations.

When you exit the first tunnel, you need to gather cargo. By far the fastest way to do this is to kill the “Looter” skeech, which drop many crates at once. I usually clear the area immediately to the left as you exit the tunnel, since there are several looters up there and one of the black box spawn points is up there as well. If I get all my cargo and still haven’t found the black box I check the last location before entering tunnel number 2.

The second tunnel is full of skeech, be wary because more waves will spawn behind you as you progress. To get gold, you need to use 3 panels in this tunnel to shut down the defense system. The first is down a side passage on your left after the entrance. The second is nearby on the elevated area. The third is on a cubby on the left in the last room. Kill the skeech matron, find the missing crew member and fight your way back out.

I try to skip as much trash as possible on the way to the last tunnel, usually heading immediately right after exiting tunnel 2 and using the zero-g plus my movement abilities to bypass the skeech up in that hilly area. If you have around 80% of the “kill skeech” target met when you enter the last tunnel you should be on track to complete it for your gold medal.

The last tunnel is a pretty straight shot to a mini-boss. Just dodge and/or interrupt and he shouldn’t give you any trouble. There’s some lore all the way in the back if you’re a collector! Rescue the ekose, wait for him to do his thing, then run back outside. The final bit is just silly fun. Stay in the bubble, watch out for telegraphs, and kill a whole lot of skeech!

Skeech? Skeech!

Differences between normal and Vet: There’s no timer and no black box to find on normal, and no minimum number of skeech to kill to get gold. There’s also no “Looters”, so you have to loot 10 crates off the ground.

Other thoughts: This isn’t the fastest, but it is a great choice for finishing some contracts. You can easily knock out “kill skeech”, “kill strain”, “interrupt telegraphs”, and “get multi-kills” in this shiphand.

Shiphand Buddy returns on Thursday with our next mission: Outpost M-13!

Source: Moonshine Mansion
Shiphand Buddy: Fragment Zero

#Blaugust Day 4: Making Connections

August 5, 2015August 4, 2015 by Thalen

My primary reason for blogging is to express my thoughts and get some of what I think about into a more finished form and in front of an audience. In addition to that though, there's also a desire to better connect with a community that I'm a part of but don't always interact with. I'm an introvert by nature so I have a tendency to lurk at the edges. Blogging is one step towards counteracting this but I also want to be better about commenting on the blogs of others.

Liore's post about the importance of comments is what really got me thinking about this. I rarely comment on blogs. To a great degree this is because I second guess myself and end up deciding that what I was going to say is silly or obvious. I've often written a comment then deleted it and moved on rather than hit the submit button. But even the least comment says 'I read this and thought it interesting enough to remark on', which is a nice thing to see in response to something you wrote.

I've decided to make a deliberate effort to comment on multiple blogs each day of Blaugust, and hopefully get in the habit of doing so more in the future. I have to imagine that with something like 80 blogs participating at least a few will inspire a remark from me each day. At the same time I'm going to try to make a point of engaging with those who comment on my blog. It seems only right to let those who went to the trouble of responding to my thoughts know that I value their input.