August 2015 – Page 48

Luck in Alex

August 5, 2015August 3, 2015 by Belghast

What Happened to Bel Folks Stuff?

I figure at this point some of you out there have to be asking yourself this question. Quite honestly I am not sure what has happened, other than the fact that I am still fighting a bit of a funk. With AggroChat I am supported by my cast of friends, and we have a specific format that we follow… and that takes a lot of the pressure to perform off of me. With “Bel Folks Stuff” I have to be “On” the entire time we are recording. The end result is a much more draining experience, and I have to be in a certain mindset to make it work. I walked back and forth on this point in my mind numerous times. I still have a long list of people that I would like to have on the show, but do I force it just for the sake of keeping what passes for a schedule?

So far the answer I have kept giving myself is “No”. This blog… I can make a post out of thin air, but when it come to a podcast… that is not a skill I have achieved yet. The podcast and the idea behind it are not dead yet though, even if I am going on two months without a show. In part I did not set a strict schedule because I wanted the process to feel natural and spontaneous. The problem being that in order to get this sort of approach I have to be feeling up to the challenge. Since Blaugust is this big challenge about creating regular content, I thought it was also important to talk about my own failings. While we are running like clockwork with AggroChat, Bel Folks Stuff on the other hand is a bit of a mess. Hopefully I will peek through whatever fog I happen to be in and will get back my moxy. For the time between… all I really have is a heartfelt apology that I have failed to do more shows.

Luck in Alex

Other than my odd little Minecraft mission, I had one major goal yesterday. That was to get close to capping Esoterics and finish getting items from Alexander. Earlier in the week I had managed to get into an Alex group with a few guildies, and in that process knocked out drops from 2, 3, and 4 leaving me only 1 to worry about. Alexander turn one tends to be the more sane of them, and at this point it is the one that almost everyone knows how to do well. I had mentioned this goal Saturday on voice chat, and my friend Warenwolf mentioned that he would like to go along with me. The problem being that I took most of the day to get into the mood for doing some Alex. However last night we zoned in together, and managed to get through it with absolutely no frustrations. I myself needed either a Pedal or a Chain which would get me my boots or belt respectively. It turns out that both Waren and I were on the lucky side as I won the Chain and he won a Bolt taking both of us to 182 item level.

On the other side of the goal, my adventures through the weekend have taken to 30 Esoterics away from capping. A single expert tonight will push me over the cap, and put me in a good place for getting my weapon either Tuesday or Thursday. Getting a new weapon is always a huge motivation factor for me. As a habitual melee player… weapons mean so much and are essentially the soul of the class. When you get a new one… your class for a moment feels completely new to you as you experience bigger numbers or higher threat values. While I have enjoyed my level 180 weapon… I am more than ready to toss it in the dustbin because the 200 axe looks freaking amazing. It is a return to the feel of the original Warrior artifact set that I felt in love with. Right now the plan is to try really hard to grind out the rest of my esoterics on Tuesday, so that I have the axe ready for our Wednesday night raid.

Hunts are Great XP

This expansion many of us have been following a little trick on how to make leveling feel less painful. Clan Hunts are something that I find extremely relaxing as I pop around through several different zones taking out hunt marks and getting centurio seals in the process. There however has been some method to my madness, and that method revolves around trying to take down as many hunt mobs as I can with a level or under leveled job. Essentially the plan has been that for Western Coerthas, Sea of Clouds and Dravianian Forelands that I end up using a character around level 50. Originally this was my Dragoon, until I managed to get him to around 55 and I simply did the entire course of hunt marks with him. Now I am doing this with my Bard, and while I have not really played him other than this process… I already have him to 52. The next two in line for leveling like this are my Paladin and my White Mage… while the Paladin is probably going to be doable… I am questing just how easy it will be for me to push the White Mage through hunts.

What is nice about this process is that I personally focus on my hunts and not necessarily how fast I am gaining experience. As a result it seems that I magically got to level 52 on the Bard without really trying. Ultimately as you get higher in level those early Hunts stop paying out quite so nicely in the experience department, and you reach a point where you have to grind to get to the level cap. However before you hit that juncture… it certainly feels nice to see your classes almost leveling themselves. The best part about all of this is that this process feeds my ability to keep upgrading Law gear, and the other awesome happening of the weekend is that my Dragoon is a single ilevel away from being able to do Alexander as well. In the process of grinding out my Esoterics on Tuesday, I should get enough Law to get to 170 and then I have two options for doing Alexander each week. There are some nights I can stomach the process of tanking that place, and others that I would enjoy sitting in the backseat and dpsing more. I would be happy if I never had to tank turn two again.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Luck in Alex

On Knowledge vs. Experience

August 12, 2015August 3, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #3

For a while now, Tam and Kodra have been talking on the podcast and otherwise about Sword Art Online, an anime which at this point is actually 3 years old. Yesterday I decided that maybe I should become more familiar with it, and watched the first 15 episodes. Prior to this, I was familiar with the premise and the two main characters. I’ll avoid specific spoilers in this post, but some basic plot info follows. If that’s too much for you, tomorrow’s post is likely to be about something else.

All Fun and Games

Sword Art Online (SAO from here on out) is an anime about an MMO. Its central conceit is that the players are all trapped in the game, and if they die in the game they die for real. SAO takes this premise seriously, because there’s not point in making such a threat if no one actually dies. This much I knew before Tam and Kodra even started talking about it. I learned prior to watching it that it does focus more on relationships than I originally thought, and it’s not really an “action” show. I figured that this would tell me what to expect.

…

I was not prepared. SAO knows how to deliver the emotional punches really hard. The first arc of SAO is probably a good 8 sads out of 10, and the lead-in to the second arc doesn’t make it look like it’ll be happy either (although Episode 15 also inspires other feelings). It starts early, as one of the most memorable moments is in episode 3. It doesn’t stop there, but that’s really the first hint that not everything is going to be okay. Even knowing that bad things were likely to happen, it hit me pretty hard.

I will say that SAO got me very interested in its world and characters, and I see why certain other people have been going on about it. I did pick up the game (It’s pretty cheap at $20), so you may hear about that in a little while.

Bel’s Big Adventure

August 5, 2015August 2, 2015 by Belghast

Posting Late

Today I am getting an extremely late starting in getting my “morning” blog post out there. At this point it is almost 2pm as I sit down to write this. There are a lot of reasons behind that, in part because video takes a really long time to render. Not to mention the fact that somewhere between streaming and now we also went out and ran errands. Blaugust is alive and kicking and I am still shocked and amazed at the turnout. My wife has even spawned her own version of it within the Math blogosphere without really meaning to. I think it is pretty awesome when the spirit of Blaugust spreads to communities that were not a part of the first year. As of this morning I had eighty four bloggers signed up and tracked on the list I am keeping. I am still trying to catch up on day one honestly because that many blog posts… is an awful lot of reading. This is absolutely an amazing problem to have.

If everyone managed to make it through the entire month with a post for every day… that would mean 2604 posts pending we don’t keep picking up more people along the way. This is really the idea is to get out there and get started on creating more content for our community. One of the things that keeps coming up from time to time is how blogging is dead, and I love it when we can prove every single one of those naysayers wrong. There is something magical about putting your thoughts on the page and sharing it with the world. For me personally it is deeply cathartic to share my thoughts and feelings. Over the years I have learned to open up more and share more of myself, and as a result my bonds with my fellow bloggers has gotten stronger. In many ways this community that you are part of is a big support group, because every time I have struggled there has been someone out there to help pull me back to my feet.

Bel’s Big Adventure

There has been a thing I have wanted to do for awhile. Some of my favorite Minecraft video series have been adventures with a very simple premise around them. When I play Minecraft however I tend to be a base builder. I craft these extremely intricate underground structures, and never tend to move around much as a result. As a way of combating my instincts, I am going in a completely different direction and starting a series of videos called “Bel’s Big Adventure”. The idea is simple… only keep what I can carry in my inventory and keep moving North. Each time I make camp and reset my spawn point by dragging along a bed, workbench and a furnace. Each day I have to find the resources I will need to make it through to the next day. Today I streamed for roughly two hours, and I am editing these into smaller videos, the first of which is about thirty minutes in length and involves my hitting the first major obstacle… a big ocean.

The Minecraft version I am using is 1.8 and I am using the GLSL Shader Mod 1.8 combined with SEUS v10.1 to produce the nifty more realistic appearance. As for the Texture pack I am running Chroma Hills which is known to work fairly well with shader packs. Finally I have the Mapwriter mod running largely to keep me pointed northward, because it shows an Arrow in that direction. Other than these largely cosmetic mods I am using the stock Minecraft 1.8.3 that I freshly installed this morning. It has been well over a year since I last played Minecraft, and as a result there is a lot of stuff in the game that I have not seen yet. For example… I had no clue that there were Bunnies in the game until I came across a black colored one. Similarly in what will likely be in episode two I encountered something bizarre that cursed me so that I couldn’t mine anymore. Most of today has been spent either recording, editing or rendering the video so that I could embed it in today’s post. Hopefully someone will enjoy it, but if not I at least enjoyed the adventure. If I find something really interesting in my journey I might stop and set up a more permanent camp in order to explore better. Since I spent the bulk of my day so far working on this side project, and will likely spend a good chunk more I plan on cutting this post a bit short. Let me know what you think of this idea, and I am also open to other objectives for me to look out for along the way.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Bel’s Big Adventure

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

August 2, 2015August 2, 2015 by Thalen

One of the things that continually impresses me about Final Fantasy XIV is that the developers are very good at learning from their mistakes. Sometimes systems don't work quite how they were intended to at first, but improvements get made and the game develops over time. One good example of this is cutscenes.

The storyline in FFXIV includes a lot of cutscenes throughout, many of which can be fairly long. All well and good, but at first those cutscenes would often be in the middle of dungeons. If not everyone in the dungeon wants to watch the cutscene, then you end up with some members of a group either having to wait for the others to finish, or running on ahead and starting fights without the person who was watching the cutscene. The very worst offenders were the final two 8 person trials in the initial story, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. It is entirely possible for a player to watch the cutscene triggered before a boss in one of those trials and find that by the time the cutscene is over the rest of the group has already defeated the boss and moved on without them.

In the content that was added in later patches however, mid-dungeon cutscenes are noticably rare. When they do exist they are usually very short. Cutscenes at the beginning of dungeons are usually quite short as well, with the long ones almost always placed at the end of dungeons where watching them won't hold the rest of your group up. The lesson was learned and adjustments were made to avoid repeating the mistake.

I've been working on my crafting jobs recently, and I've noticed the same sort of thing there, where choices appear to have been made to address weaknesses in the crafting system or to fix elements that don't have the expected effect.

Crafting in FFXIV is a mini-game that involves using various abilities to fill a progress bar while also trying to increase a quality bar as much as possible to improve your chance of producing a high quality verison of the item you're making. For final products a high quality item is noticeably better than the normal version, having higher stats across the board. You have a limited number of actions to do this with as well as a limited amount of crafting points to spend on your abilities. To complicate things even further, your craft has a material condition which can vary over the course of the craft, adding an element of randomness to the process.

In theory, one needs to pay attention to material condition and react differently depending on the current condition since it heavily affects the amount of quality added by abilities. In practice, at most points in the process changing which ability you use would result in wasting the effects of previously used abilities or using too many crafting points and running out too soon. Thus, condition ends up just being something you don't pay much attention to that occasionally greatly helps you or screws you over.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

In Heavensward, all the crafting jobs get a new ability at level 53, Precise Touch, which increases item quality. This ability is identical to the very first quality increase ability you receive, Basic Touch, with two differences. Precise Touch can only be used when material condition is Good or Excellent, and it adds a level of Inner Quiet to your Stack. Inner Quiet is a status you can stack that increases the effectiveness of all you quality increase abilities.

That's useful in and of itself, of course, but more importantly that stack can then be spent to fuel the ability Byregot's Blessing, which increases quality by an amount dependent on the size of the Inner Quiet stack.

What this means is that any time you would normally use Basic Touch, it is better to use Precise Touch if possible. Now you need to pay attention to material condition so you can use the better ability. It's not a huge change, but a small step to slightly more complex crafting. Of course, whether you think that's a good thing or not will depend on whether you view it as interesting complexity or not. I'm still not entirely sure on that point, but it's at least an attempt.