Month: August 2016

Activate Interlocks! #Blaugust2016

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Last night was, I believe, the fourth night of our recently reconstituted raid team's journey through the content that has been added to Final Fantasy XIV in our absence. Having made our way through the 5th through 7th stages of the Alexander raid we found ourselves facing what most of our group referred to as Voltron. I know who he really is though. He's Bruticus.

Activate Interlocks! #Blaugust2016
He's formed by Onslaughter, Brawler, Blaster, Vortexer, and Swindler
Unlike the previous couple of stages, this one was entirely one long fight against the robots. First Onslaughter, then the remaining four in pairs, and finally all five combined into the mighty Brute Justice. It took us a few tries; first to get DPS focused or split in the right places at the right times and then to tighten everything up so we could finish the fight before getting steam cleaned to death. We did it though, and I hope we go back and beat him up some more in the future because it was a fantastically fun fight.

Activate Interlocks! #Blaugust2016
Cool adventurers never look at the explosion
After we were finished with that we wrapped up the night with some attempts at Extreme Ravana, the boss we had been working on when most of us drifted away from the game. We were quickly reminded that better gear only gets you so far in this game; mechanics are still king. The whole fight involves a lot of movement and in the second half it turns into a complicated dance to direct attacks where you want them and not get anybody killed. We came pretty close though, and I'm certain we'll finish him off next time. After that's done I suppose Extreme Thordan would be the next step along the way? It's been far too long since I faced off against the Knights of the Round.

We Killed Voltron

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Our group in FFXIV has been slowly working our way through raid content together. This week we finally got through the 8th boss of the Alexander raid. It is the kind of boss our team excels at, with enough chaos that everyone has to think on their feet. Also, as always, the music in that fight is just flat out amazing, blending together the other themes from Alexander but also managing to be its own unique sound. Basically I admitted that the first time through I was barely remembering to heal because I was too busy listening to the music.

We Killed Voltron

That’s me, always super professional, but more importantly, super fashionable.

After that success we decided to finally go back to kill Ravana EX. Unfortunately for us, it had been so long that most of us forgot the very specific dance required on that fight, and since we had less than a half hour left in our raid time we didn’t manage to kill it. We did get far enough that I’m positive we’ll get it quickly next week.

I love that we got our raid group back together, and I love raiding in FFXIV more than any other MMO recently. Somehow I still can’t quite make myself get too invested in the game outside of raid time. One of my goals for this Blaugust is to spend more time in FFXIV outside of raids. At a minimum I still need to try Deep Dungeon, which all my friends are raving about. Maybe I can finally finish leveling my astrologian that way.


We Killed Voltron

Blog, August, Blaugust

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Pronunciation Guide

Yesterday evening I had a weird sequence of events happen, that I feel like I have to share with you all.  As I said yesterday my wife has her own version of Blaugust that is part of the Math Blogging/Twitter community she spends most of her time in.  When I stumbled onto the awkward name that is Blaugust, I jammed Blog and August together because for me they have the same “Og” sound so they fit together well enough to be a word.  I took for granted that this would be the case for everyone, and they would immediately grasp why the name is what it is.  The truth is I didn’t invent the word, as apparently there had already been something called Blaugust going on within a circle of bloggers in Australia for years, and without realizing it I co-opted their thing and made it OUR thing.  So in part because of this… last night I had an awful lot of trouble grasping the above tweet.

This spawned a whole sequence of tweets within the alternate reality Blaugust community about how they pronounced Blaugust, and even spawned a hashtag.  So after a bit of passing back and forth various clips of folks pronouncing the words and saying the phrase “I’m going to blog in august”, I was drafted to record something along the same lines.  I am not sure if my wife was too embarrassed to do so, or simply as she says I had a headset on.  So the first recording was simply me saying some equivalent of the phase.  Which spawned a request for me to say the words Blog, August and Blaugust within the same clip…  and I obliged as well.  I just found this sequence of events funny because I never thought that someone else might not get the jammed together nation of this event.  I mean “blog” itself is a crude concatenation of Web and Log, so it only makes sense that the name of our event is an equally crude joining.

Raidy Bits

Blog, August, Blaugust

As far as proper gaming news… well last night was once again our new raid team night in Final Fantasy XIV.  A good number of us took a significant break after the launch of Heavensward and as a result we are super behind the current content curve.  As a result over the last few weeks we have been working our way through Alexander Midas.  We would have gotten through sooner but there have been several occasions where we did not have quite the same make up of folks, which lead to us repeating certain sections of the raid.  Tonight we started with Midas Seven again to catch up Kodra who was absent when we last attempted it, and oneshot it with a pug… and no explanations.  We zoned in last week and warned the pug player that none of us had done the fight, and when he proceeded to start explaining we said “thanks but no thanks” and I pulled.  I am sure the random was expecting a complete wipe, and it was not necessarily our neatest kill… but we did the thing that brings us great joy and that is learning a fight on our feet as we go.

Blog, August, Blaugust

I am not one of those people that can really gain any knowledge of an encounter while watching a video.  By the two minute mark I have already zoned out completely and lost any real information that might have been useful.  Now if you can find a proper guide written out in long form, I can usually get lots of information there,  however for me to truly grasp the fight I need to be doing it.  That means I need to wipe over and over and adjust to things that are going wrong until at some point everything clicks and we win and get tasty loots.  Last night in this case was about learning the most insane Voltron fight ever, and that is Midas Eight.  It took us a handful of attempts but we managed to get through the encounter and even look like we knew what we were doing.  From there we moved on to our old friend Ravana Extreme, that we never actually beat.  While we were a little rusty, we managed to piece together enough of the fight to die horribly to final liberation.  Which means once we conquer that we will down us a bug… and I fully expect that will be the case next week.

 

Blaugust Strikes Again #Blaugust2016

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Another year has passed and Blaugust has come around again. Another opportunity to try and get in a habit of regular blogging. I made it a good few months keeping at least a weekly schedule after Blaugust ended last year; perhaps I'll be able to keep it going longer this time around. I would like to pick up the ongoing D&D and book review features I was doing and get them going again. I haven't decided yet if I want to go back and review books I've read in the interim, or just start fresh. The latter is more in keeping with the spirit of the thing, but a couple of those books are ones I'd really like to talk about. Maybe I'll just catch up on them by doing additional reviews during the week.

Part of the reason I started posting less is that I fell out of playing MMOs and stopped having those as a source of content. For whatever reason most of us who play Final Fantasy XIV together stopped logging in altogether and went to do other things either singly or in groups. Warframe served as the primary group game for a few of us for a while but ultimately it got repetitive and stopped being a daily thing. We tried out Archeage and Blade & Soul, at Tamrielo and Belghast's urging respectively, but neither really grabbed me beyond the early levels.

Within the past month or so, though, pretty much all of the Aggrochat group have jumped back into FFXIV and been getting caught up on it. We played up through the end of the current expansion and defeated the final boss, Nidhogg, and have made Monday a regular raid night to work on the other raid content that either we didn't make it through before we left (Extreme Ravana, mostly) or has been added in the meantime (More floors of Alexander, Sephirot, and so on). It was pretty cool how quickly we all got back in the swing of it and were able to take on new (to us) content. We don't know yet how long it'll be before the next Expansion hits, but I feel like there's enough to do to hold us most if not all of the way to it.

Not Sephiroth. This is a different guy. He lives in a tree.

When not raiding, I've been working on getting additional combat and crafting jobs leveled up using the Beast Tribe quests that were added since last we played. Just like with the Ixal quests in 2.0, Moogle crafting quests are a quick way to level otherwise grindy crafting jobs, and the Vath and Vanu Vanu quests scale to the level of the class you do them as and award a good chunk of XP. I finally got Paladin to level 60 and can theoretically tank now, though I don't have the necessary item level to run current content with it. That's easily fixed with tomestones though, I just need to collect enough. Next up is Summoner / Scholar so that I have a healing job available if needed.