FFXIV – Page 47 – AggroChat

Bugs and Dragons

August 9, 2016 by Grace

Last night was our weekly foray into raiding in FFXIV. I admit I was dreading it a little bit, not because I don’t enjoy our raids, but simply because I’ve been so engrossed in Diablo 3 that I didn’t want to tear myself away. Luckily, only a few moments in raid reminded me how much I love FFXIV and my awesome raid team, and all thoughts of hunting demons were driven from my mind for a few hours.

We started the night working on Ravana EX, which we had attempted a little bit at the end of last week’s session. We had an amazing first pull that almost killed him, then a little bit of stumbling, and then finally we murdered the big bad bug. It was a classic first kill, with folks dead and the remaining people desperately trying to finish him off in the final seconds before he enraged. This win was so satisfying, because this is where we left off back before everyone wandered away from the game last time. I can’t wait to keep pushing our way through ever more ridiculous dances.

Speaking of ridiculous dances, after we murdered the bug we went all the way back to Final Coil so we could complete those fights for a few folks who had missed out on them last time around. Hardcore raiders who did these fights when they were current were probably weeping somewhere while we flailed our way through most of the fights without remembering the mechanics, trusting our unsynched gear and crying healers to carry the day. It was an absolute blast, and I was so glad that we managed to clear the whole thing last night, even if we did go over our raid time by a few minutes. It was totally worth it!

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.

What I’m Playing: August 7, 2016

August 7, 2016 by Grace

Hooray, I made it through the first week of Blaugust! WoW has definitely been my main focus, but some other games have still been on my radar too.

World of Warcraft: This is where I spent most of my time this week. I got my legendary mace on my forsaken priest, but otherwise have mostly been playing alliance side. It makes me frustrated and sad, because I just plain like the horde races and story better, but at this point absolutely all of my friends are playing alliance so there’s no escaping it. Once again I find myself really wishing WoW would just add cross faction play already, even if it were tied to battlenet friends or something. I already have prepared myself for the inevitable point in Legion where I get sick of being alliance and go back to level my horde mains all alone. I guess it is a good thing I like alting.

LFR gets a (mostly deserved) bad rap, but sometimes you luck out and it’s nothing but Gamon and rainbows as far as the eye can see.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a little LFR on my druid and wandering around on my baby spacegoat mage and enjoying it. I’ve been using the baby mage as a chance to really see the low-level alliance quests, and to knock out some of the individual zone loremaster achieves that I never did. I got the overall loremaster achievement and title back before Cataclysm, so there’s a lot of quests I’ve never seen before. See yesterday’s post from Felwood for just one example.

FFXIV: I want to be playing this more, but WoW is really taking up too much of my time and attention for me to bother. Over the past week I’ve logged in for raid and pretty much nothing else at all. Don’t get me wrong, raid time was amazing and probably more fun than all of the time I played WoW put together, but we only raid 2 hours a week. I had been hoping that raiding on a schedule again would reignite my drive to log in more and upgrade my gear and such but it didn’t work out that way.

WildStar: I’m going to come clean and admit I hadn’t logged in to WildStar in a couple months. That just felt wrong, so when WoW got hit by a DDoS attack a few evenings this week I logged back in to WildStar. I didn’t do anything new and exciting, just a couple of expeditions. It still felt amazing and comfortable, like nothing had changed. I will be trying to spend at least one night a week poking around in this game again, because it remains my favorite MMO of all time.

Diablo 3: Season 7 started on Friday! The response to this season seems to be very low compared to all of the previous ones, but I’ve still been playing and having a great time. On Friday I got to play with some friends that I haven’t hung out with in way too long, and had a blast leveling together. This season was the first time in a while that I didn’t get to 70 on the first night, but that was all on me because I decided to get some sleep instead. I hit 70 and completed the first 5 chapters of the season journey yesterday, which included the cosmetic rewards and the full free class set of gear (after chapter 4). Since that was my entire goal for this season, I don’t know if I will stay invested or not, especially with the pre-Legion WoW event coming on Tuesday. A lot of the goals for the stash tab this time around feel easier, but also grindier, and I’m guessing I’m not going to bother when there are new shiny things to distract me in other games.

We Killed Voltron

August 2, 2016 by Grace

Our group in FFXIV has been slowly working our way through raid content together. This week we finally got through the 8th boss of the Alexander raid. It is the kind of boss our team excels at, with enough chaos that everyone has to think on their feet. Also, as always, the music in that fight is just flat out amazing, blending together the other themes from Alexander but also managing to be its own unique sound. Basically I admitted that the first time through I was barely remembering to heal because I was too busy listening to the music.

That’s me, always super professional, but more importantly, super fashionable.

After that success we decided to finally go back to kill Ravana EX. Unfortunately for us, it had been so long that most of us forgot the very specific dance required on that fight, and since we had less than a half hour left in our raid time we didn’t manage to kill it. We did get far enough that I’m positive we’ll get it quickly next week.

I love that we got our raid group back together, and I love raiding in FFXIV more than any other MMO recently. Somehow I still can’t quite make myself get too invested in the game outside of raid time. One of my goals for this Blaugust is to spend more time in FFXIV outside of raids. At a minimum I still need to try Deep Dungeon, which all my friends are raving about. Maybe I can finally finish leveling my astrologian that way.