Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the raid reset night for Final Fantasy XIV and with it came a visit back to my main character over on Cactuar. It is funny… I don’t really mind playing a Roegadyn until I spend time on my Lalafell. I am pretty sure once we hit level 100 and our “dare” is over… I am going to Fantasia my Kraken character to some sort of a Lala. I am just used to the way that they move and their specific perspective on the world. I feel like a bit of a lumbering oaf as a Roe… which I already am in real life being 6’4″ and rather “lorge”. I think that more than anything has been why I have always played short characters in MMORPGs because I think on some level I was I had a bit less height to contend with. My anxiety was tweaked going into last night because it was a very long day… and I was not really sure I was up for raiding. However, once I pushed through it I had a phenomenal evening.
Most of the other Greysky folks can’t operate as early in the evening as we have been, because by 7 pm we had knocked out all four raids… after spending a bit of time on Kraken finishing out the Heavensward MSQ. We had four one-shots… that honestly were not even close to failing at any point. Two of the fights had some really slow dps, and one of the fights had a mentor who was insistent that they be the main tank… and kept taunting off me when I pulled aggro… but all in all everything went smoothly. Side note… it is really bad form to hard taunt a boss off of another tank, especially given that tank swaps are few and far between in the normal content. It is SUPER obvious when it happens… so this is not the way to earn my commendation. I got extremely lucky and got the three remaining pieces of my chest allowing me to turn it in, and then also managed to pick up another piece of jewelry. That gives me four pieces of gear from Arcadion and next week I will either try for boots and helm or start chipping away at legs.
Like I said above we wrapped up Heavensward by finishing out the final trial. It was way faster to get to this point than I expected. Now I think we are going to take a bit of a break from questing in order to hop over and do the Path of Exile League. However, we also opened up a ton of dungeons and trials, which will probably take a few nights to chew through. It has been so weird experiencing all of this content with eyes that understand where things are going. There are little throwaway lines here or there that wind up looping back around and getting picked up later. The other thing that I noticed is that FFXIV expansions have a pattern that I did not really identify until Dawntrail. Dawntrail is very much clearly two separate expansions… the quest for the Dawn Servant and then the nonsense that happens after that with a bit of a lull in between them. Heavensward very much follows this same pattern where you have an initial denouement… before things get crazy again and speed you toward the finale. Thinking back you can kind of see this same pattern play out over and over between the various content sequences.
There are various mentions of places that we will eventually visit. Lots of discussion of Ala Mhigo of course, but I found it interesting that Tataru specifically calls out that F’lhaminn is in Radz-at-Han… which comes into effect much much later when you do the dancer quests. Yoshi P and crew have stated that they did not have the 10-year plan in mind when they launched ARR, but they certainly could have fooled me. Things line up way too tightly for it to have been sheer happenstance. I’ve long thought this was just an example of Yoshi P being overly humble. It is this careful planning that made me fall in love with the game and that more than anything was one of the things we called out specifically in AggroChat #52 when we did a spoiler show about the post-ARR wrap-up and lead into Heavensward. That was definitely an interesting thing to listen to some 9 years after we first recorded it. Side note this was the very first show that Ace/Grace showed up on… who rapidly became one of our regular crew and someone I depend on very greatly to support my particular brand of nonsense. At this point, they are basically the sibling I never had.
Anyways! Expect more Path of Exile shenanigans in the coming days but I am pretty happy that we got to the end of Heavensward before that started.
The post Four Oneshot Fights appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! I am going to give you fair warning… this is a very Path of Exile episode. We pushed that topic to the very end of the show but once you hit it… it is pretty much an hour of talk about the upcoming Settlers of Kalguur League. We start off the show with some discussion about Last Epoch and the most recent market crash that banned exploiters… but left all the gold in the bloated market economy. From there we dive into Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and talk about the new Arcadion Raid. We then talk a bit more about Bel and Grace’s adventures in alting as they finish ARR and start into Heavensward. Finally, we do a dive into the massive meta-breaking changes coming with the Settlers of Kalgurr league in Path of Exile which drops on the 26th.
Hey Folks! Last night I did something… that I have not done since Heavensward. Yesterday was the opening day of the very first raid of Dawntrail, and Ace and I threw ourselves at the content. Sure we watched a few quick videos… for reference, I highly suggest the content from SamsonGrey because they are short and to the point. However, there is a big difference between watching a recap video of strategies and actually doing the fights. However more important was this is the first time I have thrown myself at the grist mill that was raiding with random people… as a Tank also potentially since Heavensward. I love to Tank but I have had this weird hang-up against tanking for strangers and while I have gotten over that for dungeons… effectively going into day-one raids when no one really understands the fights was a whole new pinnacle of experience.
Across the board the fights were phenomenal and I had a lot of fun learning them. The first encounter made me especially nervous because I hate “break the platform” mechanics in fights, but time and time again I wound up as the defacto main tank and managed to navigate us through all of the encounters. Unfortunately, that does not show in the comm department because I did not get a single one all night long. I am hoping they were tipping their healers and not just being jackasses and not throwing out comms period. Like it is okay not to commend someone if they just fucked up massively… I’ve done this before, but this nonsense of not throwing out any commendations is just a jerk move.
We one-shot the first encounter which felt really freaking great. Honey B. Lovely however the second encounter was easily the most difficult. I think we managed to get it on our third attempt. The third and fourth encounters both took two attempts. There was an asshole in the second encounter that was throwing out shade… but honestly… don’t do that shit on the first day a raid is released. Of course, it was a damned reaper and in my experience, they are the edgelords of the party so it isn’t like I was super shocked. Even with needing to take a few attempts per fight on average, the mechanics were super fun to play around with. I am not sure if we will ever find a static of chill folks to run with again, but I think it would be a lot of fun to tackle this content on savage.
My biggest goal for the entire night was to try and snag one of the accessory slot items. I had a level 99 ring because I had not managed to get one to drop from any of the level 100 dungeons. It was bugging me immensely that I had a single slot that was that low item level. For the entire evening, I managed to snag a 710 ring, two of the items that added up to a pair of 710 gloves. Then for my last piece of loot, I rolled on pretty much everything and got one of four items needed to get the 710 chestpiece. The highlight of the night loot-wise though is that I managed to pull the Black Cat Minion which is super adorable. It randomly runs off and pounces things when you are idle. You can see it beside me in the first screenshot of this blog post.
The highlight of the raid however is the addition of an announcer. I have to be honest, I was not sure how I would feel about the Arcadion as a whole. It is very much WWF/WWE-inspired and there is a running commentary as the fight is going on. There is some really cool tech where the commentary is based on actions that are happening in the fight. If you as the tank happen to soak a really big hit, the commentator will say something along the lines of “Oooo that was hard-hitting” or if one or more players die they will comment on that as well. There is another line about holding things together when you manage to stand everyone back up with rezzes. It makes the entire experience feel so dynamic and fun.
All in all, I am very much looking forward to throwing ourselves at this every week. Since I posted a picture of our alternate dare versions over on Kraken, I decided we needed to take a screenshot of our mains. I hopped up on these trashcans and Ace joined me… at which point we noticed there was a corpse sticking out of the open one. Man, it’s a shame when folks throwing away a perfectly good white boy. I’m having a blast still between doing more serious content on Cactuar and our bonanza of nonsense over on Kraken. After not really being wired for MMORPGs for a few years, it feels like I am having a massive resurgence.
Did you do the raid last night? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
The post The Arcadion Is Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! Since I spent all day yesterday talking about my Summoner, I figured this morning I would talk a bit about our progress on Kraken characters. Fair warning for this older content I am going to be pretty open with story spoilers as I talk through it. This is ten-year-old content so you had your chance to play through it. When last I talked about our adventures, we had finished Brayflox and were hot on the tale of a rumble with Titan. Fighting the giant rockboy was as always a fun experience, and even though it went super smoothly we had plenty of time to bask in the great music. This however led us through the Coerthas phase of the MSQ… which is a heck of a lot longer than I remembered it being. The next major destination was Stone Vigil and we mostly kept our heads down until we were able to get there.
I thought that maybe after returning to the game I would find the Ishgardians less insufferable given that I understand the people and their motivations a bit more now. This was not the case. Haurchefant is a great boy as always, but the rest of them can largely die in a big fire. Now that I have actually met Halone… I have so much less patience for their bullshit. The whole paranoia in dealing with the Dravinian threat is equally tiresome, especially after having spent much time hanging with Dragons at this point. Ishgard is so very in the wrong on most of these matters, and it only feels more obvious on a second play-through. The whole business with the Inquisitor and not being able to get into Stone Vigil was a pain in the ass and made me just want to murder everyone until they stopped annoying me.
Last night we pushed through and fought Garuda, and it is hilarious doing that fight in the four-player version. So many muscle memories came flying back to me, at which point I realized just how many times over the years I have done that fight. I remember feeling like it was a real challenge back in the day, but now she mostly just falls over. We wrapped this up by starting on our course to Castrum Centi in Mor Dhona and an attempt at saving our magical pals. It seems like the next big thing we are going to do is a raid on Castrum Meridianum…. many many quests from now. We are sort of in that final grind to finish out the original ARR MSQ. I’m honestly looking forward to doing the patch content because really that is the part of the game that sold me properly on Final Fantasy XIV as a story.
It has been wild seeing scenes that I had long forgotten. I can probably regurgitate the cutscenes of Praetorium like a 5th Grade Class drone through the pledge of allegiance, but there are many scenes I have only ever seen once. For example, I did not remember the whole bit where Baelsar indicated that he was going to get down and dirty with Livia when he ordered her to his room in an hour. The Garleans seem so freaking laughable at this point because I have been making them fall over time and time again for years as I leveled my characters through Main Story Roulette. I remember thinking they were freaking cool the first time I experienced all of these cutscenes. Even Darth Vader though would lose his novelty and fear factor if you made him fall over in minutes every single day for years. I still really want Square to release some of these outfits as cosmetics. I would kill entire zones just to get hold of Nero’s hammer as a Warrior weapon transmog.
Back on the other side of the fence over on Cactuar, I pushed my Summoner forward a bit in levels. I dinged level 96 and in theory, should be able to get another two levels tonight. If I grind really hard, I might be able to hit level 99 and equip the artifact set of gear which would be slick. I really need to clean out my Armoury Chest a bit in order to figure out what gear I actually need in there. Right now I have stuff strewn out between that and my inventory and am pretty sure I have broken a few of my gearsets for other jobs in the process. I’m basically living in Shaaloani now doing FATEs between queue pops of roulette. I’ve yet to get any of the bits required for the “Guinea Big” mount, but I want it badly. Its a fun zone to hang out regardless though because of the phenomenal soundtrack.
Anyways! At some point, I need to check out the new Last Epoch cycle, but I have been so focused on FFXIV that I have barely given it the time of day this week. In the coming days, I am going to get a bit more serious with my recruitment of folks to do some raiding in the game. Since Cactuar is sort of hell to travel over to, we might choose a neutral ground in order to meet up and do the content.
The post Ishgardians are Still Awful appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
