Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 634

Falling Crows and Ghost Moose

February 27, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend I largely set out to do one sequence of things… but instead of actually accomplishes it I spend a good chunk of the weekend piddling around in the Palace of the Dead. For those keeping score at home I am on a mission to get all of my classes to 50. Last week I pushed Summoner/Scholar and Black Mage and as a result this weekend I started in on my Dark Knight in an attempt to shift things up a bit. Originally I was not super keep in Dark Knight as a tanking class, but I have to say after having played a lot of it during this grind it is definitely growing on me. Last night while watching Talking Dead I managed to hit level 46 which means I have roughly 8 more runs of floors 51-60 before pushing this class to 50 as well. Up until around 42 I seemed to still be getting most of a level every single trip into the dungeon, but at that point it shifted to getting roughly half of a level so I guess that is something to note as you push your own characters. After the Dark Knight I am more than likely going to start up with the Ninja given that it is my next highest class sitting at 38. That will leave Monk, Astrologian and Machinist… the later two I still have yet to even accept the introductory quests. In part I am focused on the goal of 50, because up until that point the levels in PotD seem completely reasonable. The 50-60 grind however seems to take almost as much time as the 1-50 does, so in theory… when I actually pick up doing that side of the equation I will begin with my Bard who is already sitting at level 55.

In other weird weekend news… I apparently am now in the Crowfall pre-alpha? I talked a bit about it on AggroChat this week, if you are interested in more of my thoughts. Normally I would be posting a “Crowfall Impressions” post, because that seems to be the sort of thing I do when I get my hands on a new game. Unfortunately I am not really sure if I have a full post worth of feelings about the game. It is very alpha for start, so it feels like it isn’t exactly fair to really give the game anything resembling a review. That said… they are doing an alpha with zero NDA so I feel completely free to at least talk a little about the game. As I described it to my friends… Crowfall is in fact a piece of software that I installed and that offers the ability to launch when I click in the patcher. Past that I am not exactly sure what is going on in the game, and I am not really sure that I felt anything close to fun during the hour and a half that I spent grinding away to make a basic set of armor and weapons. It doesn’t really feel like there is much game yet, and maybe the murder box that is the PVP servers are more enjoyable. However based on the apparently cross shard server chat, it sounds like there is just a lot of spawn camping and ganking going on there. The big challenge I had was that there was simply not much to actually fight in the PVE server, and when I did find a boar or a bizarre crystalline cat my hud would lock up on loot allowing other players to come swoop in and harvest the leather and meat on the thing I just killed. Right now the game feels less fleshed out than Landmark did when it opened its doors to early access. It feels like it is trying to do a lot of things but I am not entirely certain if those things blend all that well.

Now in the “I want my Sunday back” territory… I logged in yesterday morning to work on my Archaeology questline in World of Warcraft. Of note… it has been 181 days since the launch of Legion according to the handy google “days since” query ability. The last two weeks have been the very first occasion to actually complete the Laying to Rest archaeology quest that rewards the Spirit of Echero mount. The last thing I really wanted to do was go grind arch nodes until I collected 600 moose bones… but then again I thought to myself if I ever wanted this mount I should probably do it now, since who the hell knows when it will be available again. I am not really sure how long it took in minutes… but I started watching Sword Art Online again somewhere during the first 100 bones… and I was able to watch three episodes in their entirety and started the fourth before I collected number 600. It was a slog of a grind, and while I am happy it is done… it feels like maybe a waste of time given that I am never likely going to ride the mount anyways. I chock this one up to simple and honest fear of missing out… because if I didn’t get it there might be a version of myself someday that wishes I had. Regardless it is done, but the second I turned in the quest I stuck around long enough to take the above screenshot and then bolted quickly from the game. In other happenings at some point during the grind I hit 800 Archaeology so that was at least something cool that happened as well as finishing up the Handle With Care achievement.

Tiny Black Mage

February 24, 2017 by Belghast

My madness continues… and last night I joined in with Grace and eventually Storm and Muspel to do some Palace of the Dead. Essentially PotD is the new FATE grinding, and while it can be sort of repetitive, I never seem to get tired of it. I mean I thought Tam was insane when he went through his own period of time where he lived in dank dungeon, but now I finally get it. What I am loving about it is that I can just hop in… run a bunch of Palace of the Dead… mentally be somewhere else like watching a movie or a television show and then still feel like I made significant progress at the end of the night. The first goal has been to catch up my classes to 50, because it is going to allow me to have a massive house cleaning of everything that has been clogging my retainers. I have a problem with gear, because I know that eventually I would love to have every single class to the level cap. That is just the sort of person I am. In World of Warcraft I actually achieved this goal prior to the launch of legion and had at least one of every alliance character sitting at 100, and three horde characters as well.

Currently I have my Warrior sitting at 60 and he is my only viably geared character for doing big kid stuff. Then you have my Dragoon that I also leveled to 60, but promptly abandoned because playing that class in Heavensward was just so much less enjoyable for me than it was in ARR. When I was last furiously playing the game I was working on my Bard, which had become my defacto dps class for awhile and I managed to get it up to 55. Then we drop down to my 50s which are Paladin that I have not touched since Heavensward because I simply don’t really like playing a Paladin tank. We have my newly raised trio of casters in the form of the Scholar, Summoner and Black Mage all sitting at 50. Then we drop down to some 30 somethings with Ninja at 38, Monk at 33, and Dark Knight at 33. I have yet to even pick up the quest to be a Machinist or an Astrologian but at some point I probably need to do that so that I can weave those into the rotation as well. Now I am sort of torn as to what I should pick to level next, but for the moment I am leaning towards either the Dark Knight because I miss playing heavy armor classes… or the Ninja because they are just really fun to play.

The other set of goals that is staring me in the face is that when I last left my crafting… I had managed to push everything up to 21… with mining and foraging sitting at 50. At some point I really want to start this grind again and push everything up to at least the point where I can make glamour prisms. In theory I should be doing my beast tribe dailies to use those to level my crafting, but I just haven’t reached a point of getting back into the game enough to sort everything out to be able to do that. Once I finished with the Sahagin I sort of let the beast tribe thing die once again… but in theory should be doing the Ixal at least for crafting levels. Whatever the case it seems like I have been assimilated back into Final Fantasy XIV, and have more goals than I can realistically accomplish. My Warrior gear could also always be improved, but I am just finding PotD a relaxing way to spend my evenings… but sadly one that is not terribly interesting to write blog posts about.

Random Screenshots #3

February 23, 2017 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about. Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm… when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30. Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch. As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3. That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching. It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show… be prepared for some disturbing content. That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode. Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about. I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar. I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners. Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is. The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion. For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt. Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable… but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked. Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me… where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home. I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams. This is one of those games that I root hard for… just from a distance.

We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do… but still don’t end up playing that often. I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype. I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized. I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed. I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content… let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne. I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point… they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing. I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing. This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World. To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character. To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create. However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it. Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on. When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed. I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long… and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it. This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp. If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender… you wind up with Blood Dragon. If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory. It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry… nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.

Ode to Cactuar

February 22, 2017 by Belghast

Cactuar is a strange place and I love it. This is of course the server a bunch of us play on in Final Fantasy XIV and compared to so many other game servers… this one just seems to have a bizarre and friendly spirit to it. There are a whole slew of us that have been practically living in Quarymill as we grind away at Palace of the Dead to level secondary classes and get a shot at tasty replica raid gear. As a result Grace and myself happened to be milling around in town waiting for the festivities proper to begin that evening. Grace pointed out that there were two people bouncing around on Big Chocobo mounts… and we both agreed something to the effect that we should both join in and make this happen. So within moments of us joining the fray and bouncing around wildly on our giant chocos… this happened. Granted a few more guildies came over and joined in the fun but most of us this from just random people talking in /say as we bounced around happily. This sort of thing is honestly an almost nightly occurrence on our server. I cannot count how many times I have been in a major hub like this and a random pony party broke out, where everyone mounted up on their extreme primal mounts and started running around. Sometimes it even evolves into a parade as we all run around throughout the zone.

Cactuar is a weird place and I love it. There are so many times I have had to step afk and typed /mdance before leaving… and come back to a whole bunch of other strangers there with me also dancing the Manderville and somehow almost perfectly synced up with me. I have so many people on my friends list because they had an amazing outfit and we just struck up a conversation, and we /wave madly at each other anytime we pass out in the world. Argent Dawn the server I play on in World of Warcraft has always had its bizarre streaks, but more often than not there was an undertone of malice there. In Final Fantasy XIV folks just seem to be interested in enjoying themselves far more than bringing other people down in the process. I am sure Cactuar also has its dark underbelly, but generally speaking folks are friendly and more than willing to join in the silliness if given a chance. It is funny how a server develops a certain culture, which is honestly the main reason why I question games that are essentially server-less. I know our server “feels” different than a lot of the other larger servers, and I am never quite certain how that sort of thing develops. I mean I guess it could simply be because our server mascot is a half man half cactus… which doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of being hardcore and brutal. Although… anyone who has ever fought a Cactuar knows the score as they fall over after a 10000 Needles attack.

In other news I finally got to see the Sophia primal fight, as there were a bunch of us who had never done it. I realize we are a few patch cycles behind on this one, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was like all of the things happening with Leviathan… but messaged far far better. There are a lot of moving parts on the fight, but we largely winged it without having seen it and only the most vague description of the fight from those who had. We single tanked it, and that role fell onto me… since really I don’t have a well enough geared anything else to do big kid content on. I had an awful lot of fun with the moving back and forth on the platform to avoid this ability or that… or the platform shift as the scales get out of balance. We also did a one tank, one healer Ravana Extreme and that fight is still madness. I would love to do that some more largely because I would really like to get my axe from there… also of as a side note I would love to do some more Bismarck for the same reason. I guess ultimately I really am a Warrior main, given that I didn’t swap at Heavensward and still have no plans to swap for Stormblood. Of all of the gear I own… it is my Warrior gear that I end up enjoying the most.