Blaugust

Shiphand Buddy: Infestation

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Blaugust 2015, Day 11

Welcome back to another episode of Shiphand Buddy! Today we’ll be trying our hand at space salvage and, of course, fighting weird space monsters.

Shiphand Buddy: Infestation

This green gas doesn’t look very good for your health.

What: Find the source of the infestation and get out alive with your salvage!

When: Available at level 17

Where: Galeras, Auroria

Gold Timers: Normal: None   ; Vet: 18:00

Gracie’s Run Time: Normal: 4:49   ; Vet: 6:55

Shiphand Buddy Says: I have seen an awful lot of this place, but I still really like it. It’s quick and easy! Take your time in the first room, kill the creatures and then seal the three vents. As you progress through the rest of the instance, remember that creatures can spawn from the round vents in the floor, as well as occasionally from cargo crates when you loot them.

If you proceed carefully in the next room it can make your life a lot easier. Clear the wandering patrol and mark the crate on the center platform. DO NOT go down the ramp yet. Mark the crate on the right, and walk out on the ledge there as far as you can. Do your best to aggro the mobs below you with any ranged attacks you have, then run back to the main upper platform to fight them. Be careful not to fall down onto the ramp! You can aggro the other pack either from the upper middle platform or by very carefully inching down the left ramp and attacking until you can just hit them with your longest range ability.

Why go through all this trouble? Once you move down the ramps an event will start with crew members being sucked out of hull breaches. You have a very short timer to find the breach and seal it before the crew and your gold medal get sucked off into space and lost forever, so clearing those creatures out before the event starts can make a huge difference. If you can’t do this, you’ll have to work on clearing them out in between the hull breaches.

I like to sit in the middle and spin my camera until I spot the next breach and then dash to seal it. If you have an addon that shows nameplates for interactive objects you can see all the possible breach locations and keep an eye on them. Any movement abilities you have will help a ton here as well. Once the event is complete make sure to tag the last crate in this room, up on top of some shipping containers. Be warned that more adds can spawn from the floor vents once the event is over.

After that the rest of the instance is a piece of cake. Make your way down the hall, killing creatures and tagging the last of the cargo before you get to the med bay. When you head toward the supplies in this room a short event begins. Kill a wave of infected crew, then a wave of 3 infection monsters. When they are near death they will run back to the middle and merge into a miniboss. It has a fair amount of health but otherwise isn’t too bad. Once you kill it you can finally loot those medical supplies. Note that there’s poison gas in the lower area during the event, if you are struggling to kill everything fast enough try pulling to the top of the stairs first.

Shiphand Buddy: Infestation

These blob monsters are pretty gross.

The lights will go out momentarily during the transition to the last stage of this shiphand. You will need to fight your way back up to where you started, killing blobmonsters and “saving” the crew along the way. Each time you use the medical supplies on a crew member they’ll explode into multiple little mobs, so be prepared. Once you’ve found them all and killed all the monsters you’re ready for the final showdown with a giant gross disease creature. Partway through the fight it will hit you with a blind attack. If you’re prepared you can interrupt right away to avoid taking unnecessary damage while you’re blind. Once it dies you’re done!

Differences between normal and vet: Normal mode has no cargo to collect and no event/miniboss in the med bay area.

Other Thoughts: This is usually considered the fastest shiphand if you just want to do some speed runs, but you’ll want some practice to get used to the hull breach section first.

Next up: Rage Logic!


#Blaugust Day 11: Whalers in the Sky

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Last night was my regular raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, led by Tamrielo. This is the more laid-back raid of our Free Company, so we tend to be a little behind the most current content. Up until last week we've been working on clearing out the remaining raid content from before the patch, the Coils of Bahamut. Last week we defeated Bahamut Prime, leaving us free this week to begin in on the Heavensward raids.

We started out by running the Alexander raids, which are lower difficulty raids designed to be doable by random groups. They definitely still require everybody to be paying attention, but there's a little room for error. I had only been in the first and second of the 4 wings before, so two of the bosses were entirely new to me. We took them down without to much difficulty, and by the end of that content a number of us walked away with new gear. I ended up with new boots, gloves, belt, and a ring.

Face away from the explosion for maximum cool points
After we finished up in Alexander, we moved on to the Limitless Blue where the flying whale primal Bismarck dwells, for the extreme version of his fight. For those not knowledgeable of Final Fantasy XIV, primals are the summons of previous Final Fantasy games, generally summoned by the prayers of various beastman tribes. Bismarck first showed up as a summon in Final Fantasy VI and is the patron of the birdlike Vanu Vanu in Final Fantasy XIV.


A number of our raiders had tried this fight a couple of weeks ago but hadn't been able to do damage fast enough to make it through. Last night it took us 3 tries to get the hang of it, but once we all understood the fight, we managed to down him without much difficulty and Tam walked away with a whale-themed two-handed sword to use in his Dark Knight job.

#Blaugust Day 11: Whalers in the Sky
He's much more impressive these days
After months of raiding near the top of our ability pre-patch, it's nice to once again be in the period where we're working our way up through the ranks to see how far we can get. More runs at Bismarck are likely in our future to get weapons for the rest of our raid; next up in difficulty is Ravana in Thok ast Thok. This is reportedly a fight demanding much more precision, so I imagine it'll take us a little longer than Bismarck did to get a handle on. I've been surprised before though.

Our Own Convention

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Noble Aspirations

This is potentially going to be one of the stranger morning blog posts I have made in awhile.  Yesterday during the midst of another conversation entirely I planted a seed, and got a significantly more favorable response than I had expected.  Essentially I have thought for awhile how awesome it would be to have some event that let all of the great people I know through gaming or blogging to meet up, hang out, and cause mischief.  This year it was my hope to be able to make Pax Prime since there are a significant number of people in the Seatle area now.  The problem being by the time I even knew the tickets had gone on sale, they were already completely sold out.  Our backup plan was to try and get AggroChat qualified for press passes, but we were summarily rejected without much notice as to why.  Every major convention has this same issue, with having way more demand than there are tickets available for folks to attend.  So this sent me down an alternate line of thinking…  maybe we just need to create our own convention.  I know that sounds crazy at first glance but bear with me for awhile.

My wife is heavily involved in the twitter math community, and five years ago they were lamenting how every single professional development workshop they have been to was essentially a waste of time.  One discussion lead to another, and the idea was mentioned that what they really needed was a way to get together so that they could share ideas.  From there they organized the very first Twitter Math Camp in St Louis, and it was a huge success.  That first year only around fifty teachers attended, but each additional year it has grown to this year in Los Angeles there were over 200 teachers.  So seeing this go from someones vague idea to fruition maybe gives me a different perspective than the average person when it comes to the thought of forming our own convention.  I mean ultimately that is how most gathering start, with a basic idea and then just branching out from there.

Our Own Convention

 

I loved Pax South, but not really because the convention itself was this magical place.  The floor was busy, and there were so many people wandering around that it became hell to find a quiet spot to yourself to think.  What made the convention awesome was getting to hang out with people that I had only ever talked to online.  When I realized this… I realized that I didn’t actually need a convention to have fun, but in truth could potentially have more fun if I just somehow managed to gather up a bunch of people in one place and time.  Even if we quite literally did nothing but hang out and play board games and talk about life, it would still end up being an amazing experience.  That said I do think we could convince enough people to show up to make it an interesting experience for all of us.  Think about the sort of things we go through with the Newbie Blogger Initiative each year, and ultimately how much we learn from one another.  It would be easy enough to throw together a series of panels discussing the finer points of various blogging skills that we have.  I mean it would be pretty awesome to record an impromptu live Podcast for example, or a technical discussion in how to get the most out of WordPress.  There are real things we could talk about, and with that many game bloggers in one spot we might even be able to talk some game companies into showing up as well.  Maybe I am brutally naive… but I think it is a thing that might be doable.

Location, Location, Location

I literally have thought about this for awhile now, and those thought processes were just made more concrete after returning from Pax.  I’ve long thought that the best place for a meetup would be in a central state.  Conventions have this problem of being super convenient for people living on one particular coast, but damned near impossible for anyone else to attend.  So after a lot of thinking basically I came up with two potential locations.

  • St Louis, Missouri
  • Chicago, Illinois

Both locations have strengths and weaknesses, but both are also fairly centrally located making it not too horrible from pretty much anywhere in the United States, and potentially even doable for Canadians.  St Louis is significantly easier for me personally… because I know the town decently well and have several friends in the area that I could potentially recruit to help.  Chicago on the other hand… other than flying through O’Hare I know nothing about it, and I really have zero support structure to help out with the planning and the details.  Its biggest strength however is O’Hare airport, because essentially it is a straight flight from any major airport cutting down the overall travel costs.  That said St Louis hotels, venue rentals, and pretty much everything else would be significantly cheaper which might offset the travel costs.  All of this said… they both have strengths and weaknesses, but as I said my personal leanings are towards St Louis simply for the familiarity point.

I guess the ultimate question is…  would some sort of convention/meetup be something that our community would even be interested in?  We would have to set a date well into the future and begin planning now to make it work, but before any of that… I need to know if people would actually come.  I think it could be a really awesome experience, and if nothing else let a whole bunch of people that have only ever communicated online hang out and get to know each other.  I also think there is a lot of cool stuff we could learn from each other, so I feel like it could be more than just a “gathering”.  Over the last several years we have gone from being a vague connection of island states, to being a serious and formidable community constantly welcoming new people.  Blaugust while stressful, is an amazing event and just one in a long line of events that we do each year.  While I jokingly referred to this as BlaugustCon… it is more than just that.  I think we could build something amazing in the real world in addition to all of what we are doing in the virtual world.  Like I said.. the real question is do people even want this?  I don’t often ask for feedback, but in this situation I absolutely need it.  Leave me a line and let me know your thoughts.

Silly Things

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Blaugust 2015, Day 10

Silly Things

He looks angry but he really just needs a hug.

I’ve been known to be a bit of a content locust, devouring new things quickly and completely. Sometimes I move on to new games afterwards, but often I stick around. It requires a bit of self-motivation to find your own fun when there’s no obvious goals sitting in front of you. In WildStar right now I’m not raiding doing much group content. Instead I have the goals of making as much money as I can in a casual way, and upgrading my gear in whatever slow manner I can without raiding. These go hand in hand when I see those drool-worthy ilevel 74 pistols sitting on the AH…

In FFXIV I’m at the stage where I can easily cap my raid-gear currency in a few days, and there’s little I need that can be obtained by pugging. I could just log in very rarely except for raid nights and still be making the exact same amount of progress. Instead, I’ve decided to pick back up where I left off on the relic weapon questline. This is a level 50 quest chain from before the expansion with about 8 different parts that starts you off with an ilevel 80 weapon and eventually progresses it up to 135. In some ways it reminds me of the legendary item quest chains in WoW from Pandaria and Draenor. The difference is that the end result of this chain is not really any better than what you could get from raiding, and it takes a pretty soul-crushing amount of grinding to get there. The quests also send you to a wide variety of different content, across every zone in the game and into most of the level 50 dungeons. It also asks you to dish out quite a bit of cash for vendor items and to either craft or purchase some high-level crafted items.

Before Heavensward released I was about halfway through. I set this goal aside when the expansion launched because there was so much new content to see. When things finally slowed down enough for me to return I was pleased to note that most of the quests had been altered to reduce the grind. I’m now on the next-to-last step, which requires 400,000g worth of vendor items, another 600-800,000g worth of crafted items, and multiple items only purchasable by spending level 50 PvE tokens. Oh yeah, it also requires item drops from 16 of the level 44-50 dungeons, and the drops are not guaranteed.

If you think it sound silly to go through all this effort for an item that was barely worth it when the content was new and is not even slightly useful now, well, yes it is. Sometimes we have to make our own fun in games when there are lulls between content. Sometimes the game puts a silly challenge in front of us. Right now I’m grateful to have something to do that keeps me active and engaged in FFXIV while I wait for new content and for my raid group to return from their end-of-summer travels.

These types of trials are also rites of passage that give a weird traumatic bonding experience. In late Wrath-era WoW I got my “The Insane” achievement, and part of what got me through it was the support of a guildie who had done it too, and the few other folks I’d eventually befriend just because I saw them working on the same tasks with me every day. So three cheers for silly goals that bring silly people together! And a Moonshine Mansion tip-o-the-hat to my FC-buddies Lonomonkey for inspiring me to go down this dark path in FFXIV, and Ash for keeping me company during the silliness! Hopefully I’ll be reporting on my success here soon, before a new level 60 version of this quest chain gets added to the game!