Tales of the Aggronaut

Family Calls

Over the weekend we had a crisis arise, but not one that directly effected our family.  Early on Saturday around 2 am in the morning, my former brother-in-law while drunk wrapped himself around a tree.  He was exceptionally lucky for many reasons.  Firstly for hitting a tree he managed to get out of it with this life…  but with several broken ribs and a collapsed lung.  Secondly he managed to do all of this without injuring anyone else, and on private property…  so there were no charges.  Thirdly this means he did not get a DUI, and also means he is not in jeopardy of losing his job which in the contract has a morality clause.  The problem is since death of my wife’s sister, a half dozen years ago…  he has managed to systematically burn every bridge he had to rely on.  My wife’s sister was a stabilizing force in his life, and without her he simply went out of control.

The thing is, given the age difference between my wife and her eldest sister this man was in many was as much a father to her as anyone else.  He was this constant force in her life, which has made it impossible to completely write him off like so many have.  So my wife got up at 3 am on Saturday and sat with him until 5 pm when someone finally relieved her.  He never once thanked her for this or apologized for putting her through this…  but nonetheless she feels obligated to be there.  In a way I think she feels like her sister would want her to be there, trying to watch out for him.  Last night she packed a bag, and went off to the hospital to stay the night, and took off work to spend the day there today.  This morning I am a bit out of it because I never really sleep well when she is not at home.  The cats kept me company, but I kept rolling over in bed being surprised that she was not there beside me.  I have a feeling this is going to be a long day for both of us.

Defeating the Steps

With the 2.55 patch Final Fantasy XIV added the rest of the story line to set up the release of the expansion coming in June.  With it came yet another Trial, the problem being that this trial is significantly different than the others.  Instead of a big boss battle, you have an epic fight against a dragon on a bridge in which you with the help of your Ishgard allies use all sorts of machinations at your power to win the day.  There are far more moving parts than your average story mode trial, and this means that players need to know their roles and perform them with split second precision at times.  As such this has become the bane of the duty finder, causing players to simply not queue for trials roulette right now.  I talked about this effect in other posts, since it has seemed to take a significant amount of time to fill trial duty parties.  I myself queued three different times and each time the group failed… and then slowly disintegrated beyond our ability to stitch it back together.

Last night during our normal raid spot we took this encounter on, since we were down a few key people.  I played the role of tank, which is a confusing mess of picking up adds and trying to drag them to the front of the bit dragon…  so that the players with cannons can hit them.  All of this time we are trying to avoid being stepped on and taking around 3000 hp worth of damage, often times being stunned at inopportune times.  As the Dragon nears the cannons he explodes them causing AOE damage to anyone standing around them… and to the adds if they happen to be in range of them.  At key points during the fight two players have to use these pillars to chain the dragon in place… and a third has to target and fire the Dragon Killer weapon.  The timing here is super tight, if the dragon is not chained he will simply dodge the attack.  In any case on our third attempt we managed to get all of the pieces in the right order and defeated the trial.  Now I have waiting ahead of me what is supposedly the most important storyline in the game yet.

Moggle Mog Revisited

When we managed to down Moggle Mog extreme, there were a number of players missing from the group.  As such last night we had four players who had not seen the encounter.  We considered going and fighting Titan Extreme, but honestly none of us really relished the though of throwing ourselves against that.  Moggle Mog and Titan are examples of two very different primal fights.  In Titan it is all about repeating the same procedure over and over until you beat the boss, something we are apparently not great at.  Moggle Mog on the other hand involves a lot of thinking on your feet and adjusting to the situation as it happens… a type of game play that we seem to excel at.  With the new players that had not seen the fight it took us a handful of tries, but we managed to down him once more and got one of our newer players Grace a spiffy pink ribbon.  I got the last one but unfortunately it doesn’t show up under my plate armor.  I would absolutely wear it with pride however if it did show up.

Afterwards I started working through the post Steps of Faith content, but that was ultimately short lived.  I was significantly more tired than I realized and before long I was logging for the night.  I snapped this photo of me hanging out with Tataru, Minfilia’s right hand woman.  Not sure why exactly, but early on in this game I latched onto her as one of my favorite characters.  She is awesome and I feel deeply under appreciated in the Final Fantasy XIV scions storyline.  There have been many times where she has saved the day, and gotten nothing more than a half heated acknowledgement by Minfilia.  For all of these reasons I feel like Tataru and I are buds, and it was a cool moment in the story that allowed me to snap this photo.  I would far rather be working for her, than the often clueless leader of the Scions.  Tataru at least would know how and when to use a linkpearl, and I have actually seen her do things that were actually helpful…  rather than just playing at the whole damsel in distress thing.  Tataru for Scion President 2016!

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Defeating the Steps

Rainy Weekend

The problem with three day weekends… is that ultimately you find yourself in need of a fourth day.  While I kept a pretty strict schedule, for whatever reason having three days off in a row tends to shift you out of work mode and into vacation mode.  This morning getting up was absolute hell, and my wife is going through the same thing.  I watched her start to get up only to face plant back on the bed…  a move I likely would have tried had I not needed to get up and turn off the alarm.  In the grand scheme of things I managed to get to bed fairly early last night, or at least early for me.  To make matters worse I am supposed to be in this conference call most of the day…  which for those indoctrinated means fighting desperately to keep from falling asleep and snoring as someone on a speaker phone drones on at length about something.

To make matters worse I am freaking freezing this morning.  Not literally but we are going through one of those periods that we do here in Oklahoma where I am uncertain if we should have on the heater or the air conditioner.  So since it is 55F outside I am upstairs with my zipper hoodie on trying to warm up.  We were supposed to have this lovely Easter weekend, but in truth it was cloudy, windy and rained most of the day.  We went out at one point to visit family in the hospital and it only managed to warm up to around 53F.  The highlight of yesterday however was that getting out and about, and it being relatively lousy out meant that we were able to go to our favorite Desi restaurant and not have any semblance of a line.  Their awesome Desi Rice ended up making both lunch and dinner for me yesterday.  There are times I wish we had a place closer, but I think it would lose some of the specialness of having to make a pilgrimage to go eat there.

Guild Runs

One of the simple pleasures of the weekend came from running lots of content with my guild.  I am amped that folks are getting into their 50s and needing content that will actually pay out in tomestones.  This has been a point of internal conflict for me lately, is that I desperately want/need to cap poetics, but I also want to be there to help people when they need runs.  With the influx of people into our guild I could easily spend every waking moment tanking this or that for one of our free company members.  The problem is for the low level stuff it puts me no closer to my weekly cap goals.  Now that the 130 weapon is within sight, I really really want to get one.  This means that I am going to need to gather up 1300 poetics, which in turn means that I am going to need to cap several weeks in a row to reach that.  So it frustrates me that while I enjoy running stuff for the lowbies, that I am spending time on content that won’t get me any closer to that goal.

Saturday and Sunday however, lots of people needed lots of upper level content which allowed me to feel useful and helpful, but at the same time keep inching towards the goal of hitting 450 poetics for the week.  Over the course of the day we ran experts and hardmodes, each of them slowly incrementing that total so that by the time I slept I was only around 100 poetics away, which seems doable tonight between raiding, the daily expert, and potentially running the new trial.  That honestly is my huge hope for tonight is that we will be able to run the Steps of Faith trial really quickly, because I have tried with two random groups only to have half of the group bail on me after a single failure.  That trial is also gumming up the works right now of the trial roulette because the moment people random into it, they are abandoning party and taking the penalty.  The result is that people seem to just be avoiding the trial queue, because we ran a few this weekend and they took forever to form.

Loot and Mental Breaks

I’ve spent what feels like a silly amount of time playing Darkest Dungeon this weekend, and I have to say I am still loving it.  Essentially I have been playing through at least one adventure per day, which seems to be about the right amount for me in one sitting.  After that I log into whatever game I am going to be playing for the night.  At this point I have lost one entire party, a couple of singles and pushed three characters to the point of having a mental break.  That said I am having a blast doing it and I finally defeated the Apprentice Necromancer, the first real objective in the game.  Right now my ideal party would include a Bounty Hunter, a Highwayman, a Jester and an Occultist.  No particular reason other than the group comp seems to work really well for me.  As far as healers go I really really like the Occultist, because I guess I am really good at winning the roll that keeps him from bleeding my characters.  I have seen as much as 16 points of health healed on a single turn by an occultist, whereas the plague doctor seems to only be able to dink heal single points.

The bounty hunter right now is my absolute favorite hero, but that might just be because he looks pretty much like every character I tend to play in games.  I love the whole grappling hook thing, and the ability to use it as either a ranged weapon or to pull targets within his melee range.  Highwayman just seems really strong with his range abilities, and if the target can bleed he has a nice attack there as well.  Jester is really brutal, with two attacks that deal a lot of bleed damage.  The biggest problem I have with them is that one of their best attacks is this jump dirk ability that also places them in the first slot in your party, potentially pushing the bounty hunter out of melee.  So I try really hard not to actually use that ability unless I think I can finish someone off with it, because the person in the first party position tends to soak some of the worst attacks.  So far I am going into dungeons with lots of food, bandages and torches and doing remarkably well.  I am sure as I go further the game is going to get more punitive.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Loot and Mental Breaks

AggroChat 51 – Awesome Outfits

Last night was a bit of an odd showing because for various reasons and the majority of the week it looked like it would be the Ashgar and Belghast show.  However some timing worked out well and we managed to talk our good friend Thalen into joining the fun.  Thalen is one of those people that I have known in some context for over a decade.  While he didn’t raid with us in LNR, he had connections to our raid through mutual friends and we spent a lot of time conversing with his raid Last Horse that Warenwolf also came from.  Post Vanilla he has been a pretty permanent fixture of any guild I have been part of, and for the late BC early Wrath era we together with a few others representing the founders of the Duranub Raiding Company.  Needless to say Thalen is one of those people that has always been in my life in one form or another for a very long time.

We had this strange meandering show last night where in truth none of us had really been playing much of anything super exciting.  We dove into a few odd topics like World of Warcraft making some bad calls with Warlords of Draenor, and how important it is for us to look awesome when we are playing games.  We talk about some of the lengths we have gone to in order to track down cosmetic gear.  As far as games discussed we talk Dungeons and Dragons, Mega Man ZX,. Shin Megami Tensei IV, Persona 4 Golden, Axiom Verge, and a little Darkest Dungeon.  We like always talk a lot about Final Fantasy XIV and what we have been up to there.  Thalen has now leapt ahead of me in the classes to 50 race… with six to my five.  However he did make a smarter call then I did with leveling Arcanist which essentially gets you both Scholar and Summoner.  I think if I can ever get my Arcanist to 30 I will be set, since I can queue as a healer from that point on.

Rotund Buddy

Yesterday I decided spend a bit more of my winnings from the Golden Saucer.  The first 8000 mgp I earned went towards buying the ponytail upgrade for the Aesthetician.  After that I was not quite certain what I should pick up.  I have been going back and forth on buying the blood sword for some time, simply because it is freaking awesome looking.  The problem is I am not sure if I have a decent looking shield to go with it…  and I really don’t spend that much time tanking on my Paladin other than very low level content.  It seemed like it might end up being a waste of 10,000 mgp.  Instead I decided to go with something that would make me happy all the time.  I ended up grabbing the “Heavy Hatchling” minion, which is adorably waddle-y fat.  It sits there barely staying upright and every so often almost looses its balance as it sniffs around looking for food.

The best part about the pet is that it doesn’t run around like a normal minion.  Instead it hops around on its butt.  I seriously was easily amused for a good ten minutes after getting it running circles in the Gold Saucer.  Most people I know have been working on saving the cash to get the Setzer jacket, which is cool…  but I was never much of a fan of Setzer in Final Fantasy VI to be honest.  He was a means to an end for me… he had the worlds only Airship… and I needed an Airship.  He never actually got any play other than those few times when you absolutely had to use every single character you had gotten.  The jacket is just too flamboyant for my tastes…  I think I prefer a dyed version of Snow’s jacket better for most cosmetic outfits.  Anyways I guess the next 10,000 mgp I end up with I will finally go ahead and pick up that blood sword.

Coil Revisited

Last night we decided to take a bunch of the new 50s into the Binding Coil of Bahamut to do turns one through four.  It many ways it felt like coming home, because it had been so long since we last did any of the content.  I managed to pick up another piece of the High Allagan plate armor, which was pretty awesome.  We had a bit of a stumbling block on coil turn 2, in part because we collapsed to early on the first attempt.  On attempt two we pushed through without much issue.  I was pleasantly surprised that we oneshot turn four, since I remember us having some issue with it.  Since we were doing so well we opted to go ahead and push into Turn 5, so that the new recruits could see the difference.  Unless you have experienced it… you cannot fully appreciate how much the content drops the bottom out on you when you get into turn 5.  I got all sorts of warm fuzzies though walking in because our experience of learning turn 5 was so enjoyable for me.

All in all the group did admirably, and we managed to make it to the dive bomb phase several times.  Admittedly we had myself, Ashgar and Cylladora that had been there numerous times…  but they picked up and learned the fight extremely quickly all things considered.  At the very least they made progress in a single night that took us several weeks.  I hope we can go back there with the same group and get them all through turn 5.  I have a feeling this is going to be a somewhat regular occurrence since you need turn 5 to unlock the second coil of Bahamut.  In other news… I am really hoping that we make some serious progress on the fourth phase of Turn 9 this Monday.  I am so ready to defeat that encounter so we can move forward into the Final Coil of Bahamut.  At this point we have a few months before Heavensward, and it is probably hoping for too much… but I would really love to defeat the Final Coil before the expansion lands.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Rotund Buddy

Twitch and Hitbox

Yesterday was a bit of a strange day in that I recorded two different podcasts that were not AggroChat on the same day.  Early in the day I recorded another episode of Bel Folks Stuff, that was completely on the spur of the moment since I was off for Good Friday.  Right now I am tenantively planning on releasing this on Wednesday.  Then in the evening I guested on an episode of the Multiplaying podcast.  While talking on that podcast or actually I think during the “after party” we were talking about Twitch and Hitbox.  During yesterday morning I did my first real test of using JoiCaster to stream to both Hitbox and Twitch at the same time.  Other than some technical difficulties it largely worked and I was able to produce a video of myself playing Darkest Dungeon.

The problem is that I had like five times the number of people watching the twitch stream as I did the hitbox stream at the same time.  So much so that I stopped watching the chat on Hitbox and wound up missing a few comments.  Last night I realized something, that my love of Hitbox is somewhat clouding my judgment.  Me trying to make that happen is kind of like trying to make MySpace happen because you happened to like this or that feature better than Facebook.  At this point Twitch is ubiquitous, everyone has an account and it is widely supported by lots of third party sites.  There are several things about Hitbox that just feel better, but there just aren’t the number of people there that there are on Twitch.  In theory I think I am going to abandon this whole multi-streaming thing and just stick with Twitch from this point on.  It pains me to say it, but Hitbox as cool as it might be… is just too late to the party.

Darkest Dungeon

As we announced last week during the AggroChat episode, this month I chose Darkest Dungeon as my round robin pick for the game club.  This is one of those games that I have seen circulating in among my friends but I largely avoided it, so that I could go into it fresh as a game club pick.  Yesterday I played it for the first time, in the block above you can see the result of my stream.  I have to say even though the game is pretty unforgiving… I am really enjoying the hell out of it.  At its core it is a rogue like RPG dungeon crawler, with a really awesome woodcut art style… and an interesting sanity mechanic.  So in part it feels a bit like playing Call of Cthulhu.  Everything seems to have a chance of effecting your sanity, and when your characters get too stressed a saving throw is triggered.  If they succeed this internal roll they gain a positive trait, and if they fail it… they gain a negative trait.

The cool thing is… these are not just passive debuffs but they actively change the way the character starts interacting.  For example in the above play session my Vestal gained the “greedy” negative trait… which oddly enough made her far more blood thirsty in combat.  There were a number of times where she just attacked without my say.  This morning when playing the game a bit one of my highwaymen got the fearful trait causing him to periodically retreat to the back of the pack, changing what abilities you could actually use to attack with.  The only real negative so far is that “the only way out is through” meaning once you start a mission it seems like the only way to leave the mission is to either finish it successfully… or kill off your party.  The positive there is that party members are roughly as disposable as they are in Rogue Legacy.  There are always fresh recruits available through the wagon in camp.  At this point I have lost one entire party… and a few single characters here and there and it feels like I am still making forward momentum.  I feel like this game is going to generate some interesting conversation at the end of the month.

Alligator Pears

Yesterday was a very strange day for me, largely because I was trying not to get too terribly involved in anything.  With the two podcasts, and not really knowing the scheduling of the second one I stayed out of the mix for most things.  This means that the vast majority of my time online was spent working on Botany.  At this point I have managed to take it to level 35 which is the beginning of the more grindy levels.  Thankfully I have for the most part a full allotment of leve quests to get me through them.   Working on harvesting has become my “during podcasts” activity, because it is slow paced and proding and does not require much attention.  So while recording both Bel Folks Stuff and Multiplaying I slowly worked my way through harvesting a ton of stuff…  namely Alligator pears.  I am not sure exactly what they are… but I certainly did manage to gather a dozen stacks of them.  In truth I kind of expect they would look a bit like an avocado in real life.

Now I need to figure out what item I need for my level 40 Botany quest and start collecting that.  So far that has been how I have leveled, I focus fire whatever item I need for the next quest and then when I collect enough of those I start doing Levequests.  Botany seems so much more peaceful than mining was, and I guess it is in part because it almost exclusively takes place in the games extremely beautiful forest areas.  There is just something relaxing about walking around, listening to the music and chopping down trees.  Today however I really need to spend some time working on getting actual content in that can earn me poetics.  I did take a break from the harvesting for awhile yesterday to run some new folks through Tam-Tara Deepcroft.  Tanking low level content is always enjoyable, and it gives me a chance to break out my sword and board and paladin it up.  The constant trickle of new players still manages to floor me, but everyone seems happy and well adjusted which makes me happy in turn.

#FFXIV #DarkestDungeon #Twitch

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Darkest Dungeon