Grace

Content by Grace

Raiding!

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Remnants of Hope in Genetic Archives

After playing WildStar for a full year, I finally got myself attuned to the first raid, Genetic Archives. And by got myself attuned, I mean my loving guildies dragged me through the final few dungeons I needed to finish it. Before my hiatus, I had been moving ahead pretty quickly and trying to get into raiding as soon as I could. After I returned, though, I was much happier just doing dailies and contracts, and making some money. I felt rusty and slow, and didn’t want to need to be carried through things. As it turns out, those few weeks of going solo did help me ease back into the game enough to at least carry my own weight through the vet dungeons I needed. I had also jumped into a couple world boss groups, which meant as soon as I got to that point in the attunement chain I could immediately turn the quest back in. In short order I found myself around on a raid night with no excuses to keep me from being pulled into GA.

My first reaction was “this is very purple,” then “holy cow 20 people in a raid,” and “that’s a lot of telegraphs.” My raiding history has spanned several MMOs and raid sizes, but I always seem to prefer the smaller 8-10 person raids. As a healer it feels so much nicer to get to know the group and how they work together, and it feels like each player’s contribution matters more. For my first WildStar raid, however, I was extremely happy to be just one little DPS in a crowd. That way every time I got murdered it didn’t slow the group down too much! Logistically, recruiting and maintaining a 20+ person roster is much more of a nightmare for raid leading. I also think for a somewhat niche game like WildStar that asking guilds to maintain huge rosters to be able to raid is just not a great idea, which I guess is why they got rid of the 40-person size raids.

“But Gracie, we don’t care what you think about raid sizes, what were the encounters like?” Well, I was surprised at how…unsurprising they were. After getting to know the style of this game, and seeing the crazy vet dungeon encounters, I imagined all kinds of nightmarish possibilities for what the bosses would be like. Instead, the vet dungeons do a pretty great job of preparing you, and mechanics are similar to what you’d expect from any modern raid. There were definitely lots of telegraphs to dodge but everything seemed reasonable. I am certain it was helped by being in there with an established raid group that had cleared those bosses already.

I guess my assessment is: WildStar raiding is fun! If you are intimidated by the echos of “HARDCORE” and terrified of some sort of telegraph hell, don’t be! If you can make it through all the content for the attunement then you can definitely deal with what the first floor of GA will throw at you. What are you waiting for? Get to it cupcakes!

Source: Moonshine Mansion
Raiding!

AggroChat #64 – Moogles are Lazy

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ffxiv_dx11 2015-06-21 19-30-55-67

Due to the Independence Day holiday we opted to record this show a little early this week, and instead of spending Saturday night talking about games, we spent Friday night.  As a result there are several of us who were not quite to level 60 in Final Fantasy XIV but have since caught up and pushed through to the level cap.  However we spent a good deal of time not talking about FFXIV. Grace managed to finish the crazy attunement system in Wildstar and attended her very first raid.  She gives her opinion of the system and how it compares to WoW and FFXIV raiding.  Additionally we go down the rabbit hole that is the Four Job Fiesta and talk Final Fantasy V and the various group compositions fate has given us this year.  I apparently was one job off from the legendary group composition that the person who started the event go their first year:  Monk, Berserker, Beastmaster and Dancer.  Instead the gods saw fit to give me a Samurai so I could quite literally “pay to win”.

We purposefully saved our discussion of Heavensward to the end of the show because I knew that was the one thing we were all playing.  It is extremely difficult to discuss this game without going into spoilers, so there are some details that might be spoiled if you have not played up through the Aery dungeon yet.  The awkwardness of this show was the fact that Ashgar is quite a ways behind the rest of us, making it extremely difficult to add to discussions… because at least one point during the show he made a conjecture that we knew the truth about, but could not really go into it for fear of spoiling key plot points.  My theory is that once we have all finished the 3.0 story arc we will do yet another big “spoil everything” show, like we did for 2.55.  The best snippet for me was when Grace decided to talk about her new loathing for Moogles after completing the Churning Mists zone.  Moogles are in fact lazy bums.

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Zero to Hero

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Every soul on Evindra helped kill this thing and then complained there was no loot.

The past few weeks have been a bit of a WildStar whirlwind for me. I had been on a bit of a hiatus for the beginning of this year, playing some WoW and mainly Final Fantasy XIV instead. But like everyone else on my friends list, I heard the announcement that WildStar is headed to F2P this fall and came back to poke around again.

The timing of this was perfect since it matched up with the anniversary event. Hooray for free pets and toys and such! I even got to participate in the “special event,” pictured above. It was amazing to see so many players in one place together, but I will never be able to un-hear the sound of 500 medics all casting at once. I think my computer still has nightmares about it.

I’m really excited about the transition to F2P. From the look of it, Carbine is being pretty generous about what bits of the game will be “free.” Even though I haven’t been playing constantly, I have been subscribed via CREDD since launch, which means I hopefully have some extra goodies heading my way when the transition happens.

The best thing about the announcement is simply that it brought me back to this game that I love. I’m finally caught up on all the changes that were made while I was away, and invested in my character and the world again. I even got raid attuned, with a lot of help and peer pressure from my wonderful guild. I can’t wait to tell you all about what raiding is like in WildStar!

Source: Moonshine Mansion
Zero to Hero

 

AggroChat #62 – Flight and Chocobos

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I originally thought that when we set down to record this episode of AggroChat we would end up putting aside all pretense and simply talk about the Heavensward expansion for Final Fantasy XIV.  However what happened in reality is we ended up recording an extremely length show where we basically did that… AND a normal show as well.  While many or our weeks revolved around the launch of this new expansion…  we had to do something to bide our time until the Friday launch.  Grace has apparently been completely hooked on Marvel Super Heroes so we talked about that for awhile.  The other game she has been playing is Wildstar, so we spent a good deal of time chatting about how that game has been progressing.

In Final Fantasy XIV before the outage we managed to take down Shiva and Odin once again so we talked a bit about that.  Then myself, Tam and Kodra have been playing an awful lot of ArcheAge so we talk again about that and our progress so far.  Then finally when we start talking about Heavensward we get sidetracked on a lengthy debate about the merits of flight in MMOs and whether or not it is simply GM cheats.  Each of us brought our own perspectives to the conversation and quite honestly this could have been a show topic in itself.  Finally we talk about our experience so far with the Heavensward expansion to close out the show.  It is an extremely packed show, and clocks in just shy of two hours.

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