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What I’m Playing: August 16, 2015

August 16, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 16

THE BEST HAT

It feels like every week I’ve been doing this feature I’ve been playing fewer and fewer games. Here’s my rundown for the week:

Diablo 3: Barely touched this one at all. The end of the season is looming ever closer, and at this point I doubt I will care enough to finish leveling before August 23.

Final Fantasy V: I really want to complete the four job fiesta but I keep running into walls. The clock is ticking on this one too. Hopefully the charitable cause will motivate me to get this one done.

Final Fantasy XIV: Not a lot of new and exciting things happening here this week. Both of the groups I raid with are now at about the same place, having killed Bismark EX and the first 4 parts of Alexander. I’ve still got another week to go before my Wednesday group is back up to full strength, so I feel like I’m in a bit of a holding pattern. I can’t wait to start trying Ravana EX with both groups.

WildStar: I did some more raiding this week, and had a great time! I’ve also started working on PvP contracts just to change things up. Expect a post about that soon! This week I also spent literally all my platinum in order to upgrade my pistols to ilevel 74 ones from the auction house. No regrets, those things are amazing!

Twine: Ok this isn’t so much playing a game as messing around with a game-creation engine. I got an idea in my head for a game and started poking at Twine to see if I could turn it into a reality. I’m not sure anything will ever come of it, but it has been really fun learning and trying to make things work!

A Quiet Night

August 12, 2015 by Belghast

Second Time Just as Sweet

Every now and then things get left on the cutting room floor for one reason or another. For example I really wanted to make my post about the possibility of making our own convention… but I had lots of other things to talk about as well. In Final Fantasy I am presenting sitting in this interesting position being a part of two very different static raid groups. Last week in the Wednesday night group we managed to get Bismarck Extreme, and I was absolutely over the moon about it. This had been one of those challenges that we had struggled with over the course of a few weeks, namely in getting enough geared people online at the same time to take it down. That has been the biggest challenge for Wednesday nights honestly is getting people to commit to regular attendance. With my original raid group on Monday nights, attendance was never the issue. The struggle there was mostly gearing, or at least the fact that we did not have two geared tanks for awhile. However that changed as soon as Ashgar got his Paladin to 60, and geared it in record time. Over all the gearing levels of Monday still lag behind Wednesday, but we found out this week that it apparently doesn’t really matter all that much.

Last Monday we finished up turn 13 of the Final Coil of Bahamut and started the first turn of Alexander Normal. This week I figured the plan was to run all four phases of Alexander normal, mostly to help folks get some gear pieces. I did not realize that we had intended to do attempts on Bismarck at the end of the night. After struggling so much to get through that fight on the Wednesday group, I honestly expected us to walk away with a lot of experience but no kill under our belts. I was absolutely wrong, and I am shocked at just how amazing getting a first Bismarck kill felt with my second raid team. In the past in World of Warcraft, the first kill of a boss is special, but additional kills feel significantly less so. I remember getting my first 10 man Arthas kill several months ahead of us getting it as a 25 man raid and that blunted the excitement considerable. I have to say getting through Bismarck Extreme a second time is just as sweet as it was the first time. My hope is that both groups can start doing this on a semi regular basis which will give me access to so many expanse totems. Now I guess I really do have to get serious about the Ravana Extreme fight.

A Quiet Night

I had every intent of coming home and working on getting my Alexander drops for the week, but that didn’t really pan out. I hit somewhat of an irrational low spot yesterday, and as a result I didn’t really feel like being around all that many people. As such I avoided logging into Final Fantasy XIV and instead played a few other games. Mylin started a discussion over twitter about the Everquest II Time Locked servers, which I guess was responding to some comments I had made earlier in the week. The problem being that I was spending the evening downstairs on my laptop, and I guess I had never actually installed Everquest II on it. There is a streaming client for these occasions, the problem is that the EQ2 streaming client is horrible. The performance halts every few minutes as the game downloads more assets, making the game experience nigh unplayable. I should have simply waited the thirty minutes to an hour that it would take to download the full thing… but I was being impatient. The end result was a frustrating stutter stop experience as I attempted to quest my way through Freeport. Honestly this is a dual problem for me, because no matter what I try the new Freeport always performs like shit. I really miss the old multi-zone Freeport because I never had these issues back then. Now I generally want to avoid going to that town like the plague. I noticed both the Neriak and Gorowyn ambassadors were offering me a switch in my allegiance, but I was uncertain if Gorowyn even existed in this version of the game.

Ultimately I need to do some reading because I will more than happily pop to the Darklight Woods starter experience if given an option. I consider it the absolute best starter zone in the game. I’ve burned through my stockpile of station cash and I feel made some awesome decisions. I ended up picking up a handful of the bags that are being offered since I did not really want to go tailor just to make bags, and I ended up picking up a set of shadowknighty looking cosmetic armor. I have long felt that if you look good you feel better about playing your character. Finally I spent the last of it picking up the tanky rhino mount, but I’ve never really cared for the way mounts look in this game… so I tend to have it permanently hidden. As a result I feel like a bard in that I am just running irrationally fast for no apparent reason. Mounts can make moving around cities awkward as you ultimately end up blocking some of your view as you try and get into buildings and such. I am still only level 11 because really… I had forgotten how slow progression used to go in this game before all of the assorted experience bonuses.

Saving Farmers

I could only handle the stutter and stop gameplay of the streaming client so long before I jettisoned Everquest II for favor of Wildstar. This is a game I want to devote more time to playing because I am really enjoying myself. It scratches the World of Warcraft style game itch pretty well, and playing the Exiles has this fun firefly vibe to it. Quite honestly I think had I started Exiles I probably would have stuck around longer than the initial month. I was not a huge fan of the Dominion, but the Chua made playing them tolerable for awhile. Personally I still think red versus blue faction divides are extremely dumb, and this game is just another reason. My friends wanted to play Dominion, so I joined them there and had a fairly miserable time being a cartoon bad guy. If I could have grouped with them on my Exile it would not have been a problem. Instead there was a faction wall, and I am pretty much universally against faction walls. The difference this time however is that no one I know actually plays Dominion on Entity. This is actually somewhat sad as I can log into my Chua and the Dominion capital city is an absolute ghost town. I roamed around for a good ten minutes one night before seeing a single other player, and when I finally did it was because there were a few people hanging out at the bank.

As of last night I dinged twenty two and finally can use a spiffy sword that I had been holding in my inventory for awhile. There is just something about a weapon upgrade that is special. I could be wearing ten levels lower of gear in every other slot, but if I have a current weapon… I feel good about my life. There were some oddities going on with the server, because it seems like the opening of the free to play beta made more people realized that the game still existed. I admit I am guilty of forgetting to log in. I get caught up in Final Fantasy XIV and doing Eorzean things, but I think I am going to make an effort to start logging in more. Since I have friends playing over there already it might be easier to remember. I am trying my best to push through the Galeras content as fast as I can because I am just ready to see new areas. I did move into the desert region of the zone so that was a bit of a welcome change, although as of last night I was back in rolling hills and farm lands. At some point I need to do the two dungeons I recently unlocked to see if I can get any spiffy upgrades. The highlight of the night however was getting to the next Shiphand mission, because so far those are my absolute favorite part of Wildstar.

On Dancing

August 11, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #10

Last night, our Monday raid beat up Bismarck (Extreme). It helped a lot to have Belghast, who cleared it with the Wednesday group last week, but it was still the first kill for 5 of us. Bismarck is one long DPS check, but more than that it’s the kind of “controlled chaos” fight that the Monday group excels at with AOEs flying everywhere and weather changes that have to be reacted to appropriately. Clearing this fight opens up our way to Thok ast Thok (Extreme) and the hardest current encounter in the game outside of Alexander (Savage).

1-2-3

As suits his music, Ravana asks you to dance. It’s the kind of intensely structured encounter where you need to know what’s coming, as reacting to it is generally not going to be fast enough; it’s kind of like Titan in this sense. In addition to his normal abilities, Ravana has a series of attacks called “Liberations” (Prelude to Liberation, Liberation, Swift Liberation, and Final Liberation). Each of these is a 15 second cast (he takes bonus damage while using these) that ends with a very choreographed attack pattern. These vary in difficulty from “You remember Ifrit EX, right?” to “What madman came up with this nonsense?”.

Fortunately, all is not lost, and Someone came up with these simple animations to show one way of dealing with what’s going on. I love it when players do awesome things like this, because trying to explain Final Liberation in just text requires a lot longer than the 54 seconds of this video. Understanding how and why it works that way isn’t really something you can get from the video, so there are some drawbacks there too.

Silly Things

August 10, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 10

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!