Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 635

One Hundred Floors

February 21, 2017 by Belghast

So yesterday I mentioned that I had plenty of Aetherpool to get a weapon, but found out that I apparently needed to have completed the full 1-100 Palace of the Dead experience to purchase it. Confession time here… before last night I had never actually completed any further into PotD than floor 70. Most of my running lately has been resetting and running 51-60 over and over which tends to give between 1/2 and 3/4 of a level worth of experience depending on your level. I am sure this slows down in the post 50 grind, but regardless considering how fast most of the runs go it is well worth my time. Given how fast the queue is… I am guessing the community as a whole has also decided it is well worth their time. For the moment I have been focused on getting up my characters to 50, which would allow me to clean out a significant amount of gear from my extremely clogged retainers. Last night I hung out in a holding pattern until my wife got home, and then we both walked to dinner and finally around 7:30 I had arrived at a place where I could get committed to running something serious. I mentioned that I really needed to get to floor 100 and within moments Tam, Ash and Grace had volunteered for the run. All told it took roughly 2 hours to get through the 51-100 content, which no matter how you chop it is a raid like effort of sitting still in one place for a long period of time. As far as experience goes I went from 33 to 37 and am just barely shy of dinging 38 so just a little less than a half level per flight of floors. I also managed to bump my Aetherpool up to 85 weapon / 87 armor as seen in the final score shot from the dungeon.

The first five sets of floors were pretty chill, but quickly things kinda turned to madness. We had a sequence of floors with just a silly amount of Chimera and Dragon on them, and in truth we pomander of rage’d the last three floors just to go quicker. We picked up plenty of silver chests and exited with 9 treasures… but we didn’t exactly go out of our way to do full clears either. If we had unexplored rooms and the portal activated… we were far more likely just to hop straight in than to spend any more time. This become more so as we got into the last few flights and it was clear that we were all getting tired of the run. I am super thankful to my friends because I probably would not have successfully pugged my way through that one. I have had great luck with 1-10 and 51-60… but pretty much any other set I try they end up failing miserably and I am just out thirty minutes worth of frustration in the process. Grace on the other had has somehow managed to pug her way to 100, and I salute her. Her intestinal fortitude for dealing with strangers is so much stronger than mine. After running 1-50 for Muspel over the weekend, and then running 51-100 for me last night… I think it might be a long while before I sign up for another complete run of Palace of the Dead. I greatly prefer speed running the first flight over and over to trying to do the entire thing in a single sitting.

Weekend of the Dead

February 20, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend it finally happened… I finally reached a point where I am full saturation once again in Final Fantasy XIV. I am not really sure if it was the Fan Fest news trickling out over the weekend, or the introduction of Stormblood. Whatever the case I spent the majority of the weekend plunked down on the sofa playing FFXIV. Now the bizarre part of this however… is that I played a bunch of classes that I traditionally never play. I almost exclusively played finger wigglers, which lead my guild to wonder if I had been replaced by a pod person. Would I even know if that actually happened? I mean do the pod people actually know that they are pod people? Whatever the case two different things were happening this weekly. Primarily I was using the Palace of the Dead to level classes that would be cool to have at max level… but that I don’t really want to level properly. Namely Scholar and Summoner, which admittedly is the same leveling process… but I spent most of the weekend running around with Garuda Egi in dps form. I finished the grind Sunday Afternoon and then went rummaging through my vault to find something to wear. Thankfully I managed to scrape together enough gear that I picked up along the way to hit somewhere in the vicinity of 110.

From there I spent a good amount of time catching the Summoner and Scholar up on their quest chains… which were laughably easy now that I overgeared them by a significant portion. The thing that is making the leveling process awkward is that I switched Grand Companies between now and the last time I leveled… and as a result my vault is full of a bunch of Immortal Flames gear that I cannot actually use. Side note… Maelstrom completely fails because the low level Black Mage weapon is a one-handed item. Regardless I managed to catch up quickly and now have four sets of awesome gear… 2 for summoner and 2 for scholar because I guess they just straight up give you the recolored version now? The recolor was pretty different on scholar so I went with the good ole classic. On summoner however they both looked pretty samey and I went with the evoker set not really knowing if that is the original or the reskin. Side note… summoner “Egis” are hilarious as a Lalafel since they are always larger than you are.

After getting Summoner and Scholar to 50… and through their class content… I shifted gears and started working on Thaumaturge. I had managed to get it to 26 a long time ago only because it was the level needed for a cross class ability. I stopped there expecting to never pick it up, but instead tonight I dusted things off and tried to make a viable build work. I guess in part I am wanting to get all of my casters to 50… so I can have a massive cleaning out of my vault given that I have so much gear laying around and there is zero way I can survive another expansion with the vault in its current state. In truth I think it would be kinda cool to get ALL of my classes to 50, but given that I have not even started on Machinist and Astralogian…. and only have Dark Knight to 33 that might be awhile off. I do however find Palace of the Dead extremely relaxing, especially the manner in which I am running it. I am simply running 51 to 60 over and over which still seems to move the bar up nicely on weapons. The other side benefit of the weekend is that I can now purchase my next weapon upgrade for the Warrior… however in order to do that I am going to actually have to beat level 100 at some point. I can begin pestering my friends about that now… but having run 1-50 for a friend this weekend… I know just how much of a slot doing an entire PotD can be in one sitting.

Weekend of the Dead

February 20, 2017 by Belghast

Box of Spoons

February 17, 2017 by Belghast

I feel like I was given a box full of spoons. One of my friends said that awhile back and I had no clue what it meant at the time… but after some research… yeah I totally get it. I have been largely functioning on adrenaline and fear for the last several weeks as I had this big looming deadline swinging dangerously over my head. Yesterday however was the day… and we launched… and despite having a flurry of activity and a pretty active bug tracker we largely survived. We had a happy hour yesterday where our boss picked up the tab, and I cannot fully express how awesome it was that he did that… and even more so that I work with a group of people that I enjoy working with enough to go to happy hour. This site had a heavy toll on both myself and Rae who has been the mastermind of its design. By the time we sat down at the pub… I felt like I had several weeks worth of tired crashing down upon my shoulders. Last night I flailed about a bit trying to play various games… and even succeeding in doing a few delves in Elder Scrolls Online. However before long I was back to staring blankly at my laptop and decided it was time for sleep. I slept better than I have slept in a long time… with my periods of waking up being replaced by dreams where I thought I woke up and did things. Apparently Kenzie was going nuts and it woke my wife up… but I seemingly was blissfully unaware.

We still have a hefty list of things to sort out, and bugs to fix… however they all seem so much less significant than the overarching goal of launching. The chief content provider remarked that launching a website was like giving birth, and given that she has a teenage daughter I am going to take her word for it. It is definitely like something, given that yesterday was the culmination of a few years worth of planning and a years worth of furious development and re-development and then ultimately trying to hop up and down on the trunk until the various components fit enough to close the lid. You always start out with these lofty pristine goals, and then as you start managing towards a date you have to sacrifice some of that naivety and start trying to focus on what actually works or will work well enough for the time being. I hate managing to a date… because it feels like you are doing development wrong, especially when you are doing something that you have never actually done before. I mean I have launched plenty of sites… but we essentially threw away most of our comfortable tools this time and launched out into a brand new direction that if we managed to pull it off was going to be amazing. What is also the hard part is this is the first time I was the one actually managing the timeline and making sure things were getting done. I would have been so screwed if like I said before… I didn’t have a really amazing group of people to work with.

The images you are seeing are not from my random screenshot tool, but I would forgive you if you thought that given that up until this point in today’s post I have not actually talked about gaming. Instead these are sort of post cards from the gaming that I did while in this state. I have been playing quite a bit of Elder Scrolls Online, because of the segmented nature of its questing allows me to get in… turn a single symbol on my map from black to white… and feel like I have accomplished something. I am still slowly pushing my way through Malabal Tor, but if I get a full day of questing this weekend I might be able to get through it. Last weekend during the AggroChat podcast I started working on my Warlock in World of Warcraft, and was shocked that it pretty much took the entire podcast to get through the intro scenario, artifact weapon, and class order hall quests. I really should have done what so many of my guildies did and chain ran all of my characters up to the point where they choose the first zone in Legion. In that intro scenario there were two of us… which made it take significantly longer than it was intended. As a result they maybe need to scale that back given that we are reaching a point where no one is running it. Finally at some point over the last week I participated in all four turns of the third section of Alexander and man… is that a thing. I greatly enjoyed the fights so much more than I did the middle section of Alexander, because Voltron sorta broke me. The final boss was sufficiently epic, and both 9 and 12 required a bunch of attempts to finally push through it. I rolled lucky and managed to get two helm tokens and two of the four needed pants tokens… so I guess I will be wanting to run more of this? It was a lot of fun, but was sort of dulled by the stupored state of being in constant stress mode. I am looking forward to feeling like I can actually enjoy the world once more.