Ashs Adventures – Page 16

On Ships that have Sailed

August 12, 2015August 5, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #6

It’s interesting seeing things about a game that I’m done playing. If you are unaware, WoW: Legion was announced today, with the addition of Artifact Weapons (among other things). With this, they finally, finally have a weapon that feral druids give a damn about because it looks cool. (Ok, there was one other.) The Druid relic weapon enables form customization for feral and guardian druids, something that has been a complaint since I started playing and was kind of, sort of, not really addressed in Wrath, with the addition of forms based on hair/skin color.

It’s taken me a while of not playing WoW to realize that I care more than I thought about how my character looks when playing MMOs, and going back to the same cat/bear forms is kind of a drag. The transmog system was a great step in the right direction, but no matter what my normal armor looked like, I still turned into the same bear. No matter how awesome that weapon upgrade was, I sure couldn’t see it in cat form. Really I’m glad that they’re doing something about this, but it’s maybe too little, too late.

Other things they’re adding sound cool, like the class hangouts for all of the classes (Monks, Druids, and DKs pretty much already had these, but it’s nice to spread the love). The Artifact weapons look a lot like the weapon upgrades in Destiny (which despite my overall thoughts on Destiny, is a cool system) so I hope they work out here too. If MMO-Champion’s writeup is to be believed, they might even understand why 5-person dungeons are worth keeping around. It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes. WoW can be a successful, sustainable MMO even at numbers far below its current ones, so I think players of the game have a lot to look forward to. I just don’t think I’ll count myself among that number in the near future.

Also, I’m not sure anyone needed Demon Hunters.

On Success

August 5, 2015August 5, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #4

As you may have heard by now, our previous raid night was spent working on content that we were 10 levels above. For a bit now, our raid group has been working on clearing the last of the raid content from the 2.x series, the Final Coil of Bahamut. We finally beat the final boss on Monday, and I have to say it feels pretty good.

Months Behind

At no point in this game have we been raiding on the bleeding edge. We beat Turn 5 (The hardest boss in the game at release) shortly after the Final Coil of Bahamut (Turns 10-13) came out. We were stuck on Turn 9 for months (and the same phase of it, at that), despite making decent progress with every other raid we attempted. We finally beat it after Heavensward, and I was more happy that it was over than happy I’d beaten it. Things were a bit better moving into Final Coil, because the boss fights there are really cool. (I think T11 is mechanically one of my favorite fight concepts in the game.) As a result of being so drastically behind, we out-geared and/or out-leveled all of the content we’ve been doing.

And Loving It

It turns out that these raids are still pretty fun this way, and nothing was a pushover (except T10, which we got below 50% on the first pull without explaining things). Mechanics are still capable of wiping you if you mess up, and while the DPS numbers are now kind of easy, standing in things meant to kill you will usually still kill you. In the final dungeons (T5, T9, T13) there are still things that can kill you with no save, like Twisters, Divebombs, or messing up fire/ice. What really gets me are some of the numbers on things not meant to kill you. Akh Morn in Turn 13 is an attack meant to be shared between the tanks that does massive, increasingly large amounts of damage as the final phase goes on. I have no idea how anyone survived this at 50 (and especially in the first groups to clear, who didn’t have full loot from the rest of Final Coil). 10k+ damage through cooldowns is kind of intense. It was certainly a rush to actually beat it.

What the Future Holds

Currently we’re looking at participating in more current content next week, probably either continuing with Alexander or taking on The Limitless Blue (Extreme). The raiding experience in this game has been quite enjoyable, so I hope this continues.

Source: Ashs Adventures
On Success

On Success

August 5, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #4

Months Behind

And Loving It

What the Future Holds

On the Most Awkward Scene in Videogames

August 12, 2015August 4, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #5

Blaugust is pretty good at getting me to finish my drafts. This is a post about That Scene in Final Fantasy 10. It’s fairly early (a few hours in), and the game’s 13 years old, so this is all the spoiler warning you’re going to get. There is a scene fairly early on where Yuna is attempting to show Tidus how to laugh. It’s incredibly, unbelievably awkward, and it’s frequently pointed out as an example of bad writing, or localization. If you don’t believe me about this, see for yourself:

The thing is, I think this scene does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to demonstrate how Tidus is strange, and doesn’t fit in, and isn’t really adjusting well. Spira is not a terribly happy setting in FFX, and attempts to make it brighter are doomed to failure. In case you’re wondering, it’s also not any less awkward in Japanese. What might be worth arguing is the value of this. Tidus is the player avatar (for better or worse), I think and making him look stupid turns some players off the game. This is really part of a deeper JRPG vs. WRPG thing, but I won’t go into that here.