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.
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Good Morning Friends. It has been a few days since I last gave an update on our progress on the Dynamis server Kraken. Once again fair warning that I am going to talk about spoilers for ARR and Heavensward during this blog post, so be forewarned. The first thing that honestly shocks me is how fast we ripped through Heavensward. I remember it taking longer than this but on the 19th we wrapped up the ARR post-patch content and as of last night we are one trial away from finishing Heavensward. I am not sure if they reduced the number of MSQ quests in HW or not, but it certainly feels like it. It may simply be that back then we had to do a certain amount of side questing to maintain our level so we did not hit hard walls with the MSQ, and now you can do only the MSQ and still end up wildly overleveled. At the time of writing this blog post, I am sitting at level 76… which is 16 levels over the original Heavensward cap…. and nearing the Shadowbringers cap.
Watching the final events of ARR play out was a bit difficult to get through. Even knowing that everyone is essentially alright, it still hit me in the feels as I had to experience the “death” of the Scions and Nanamo all over again. Mostly I still feel anger that I have not been allowed to murderate Ilberd yet, and I am still supremely annoyed that we essentially have to accept Lolorito’s actions. I always dislike political machinations in video games, because we get enough of that bullshit in the real world. Everything should be a glorious trial by combat… like our amazing legal aptitude at least in the Ishgardian court of law. I will say that playing through all of that content in rapid succession… does not have anywhere near the impact as when we had to get the events doled out to us over time. Having time to dwell on what was happening… made everything feel that more dire. We were super active at the tail end of ARR and the beginning of HW, so I remember many conversations happening surrounding these events. At some point, I want to listen to our spoiler show that we recorded back in 2015.
We did take a break from the story for a bit and burned through all of the Extreme versions of the ARR trials, and then attempted to duo Binding Coil of Bahamut. Everything went pretty smoothly until we got up to Nael… which is going to require a bit more strategery or gear because we kept getting wrecked in the final phase. We did Garuda through the dungeon finder system and it was a bit of a mess… which prompted us to just duo the remaining Extremes. It is pretty cool that even without a multi-year jump on gearing we can realistically do the fights with a small group. None of them were even all that close, and we were pretty much able to soak almost all of the mechanics. Probably the toughest thing that we did legitimately during the ARR era was Chrysalis which took three attempts to get the DPS to finish the final phase.
I think the thing that shocked me the most about Heavensward is how long you could go between dungeons and how few trials there were. I am used to a cadence of dungeon then trial then dungeon then trial, as we have had for the last few expansions. The first dungeon of Heavensward isn’t even part of the MSQ, so is entirely missable at least until you want to fly. I thought the flow of the Aether Current was pretty great because if you followed the MSQ you would be able to get all of the exploration nodes as they were painfully obviously located next to an NPC. We eventually got into a cadence of finishing everything but the final quest based aether current and then upon finishing the last dungeon… being able to fly in that zone. Azys Lla is freaking miserable to traverse without flying…. essentially since you can’t really see where you are going until you remove the fog of war from the map.
Probably my highlight of Heavensward is doing Limitless Blue aka Bismarck which we took care of over lunch yesterday. This was legitimately one of my favorite primal fights because I liked all of the moving parts of it. I remember when we were learning this fight on Extreme the first few weeks after the expansion launch. All of those muscle memories came back… save for not remembering the lighting strike phase. We had all clumped up which meant that a ton of people took damage from a lightning strike at exactly the same time. It is just cool to fight a giant sky whale from the back of a rock… being towed by an airship. Ravana has the coolest music… but this fight has the coolest visuals.
Tonight we will knock out the final trail of the expansion and will have wrapped up Heavensward before the Path of Exile League starts on Friday. That will allow me to take a bit of a break to focus on leveling and gearing there before returning to Kraken to start the Heavensward post content. All in all, I am still having a freaking blast seeing this content for the first time. It is making me remember how much fun I had while leveling in SWTOR when I did so as a fixed duo of characters. Tag teaming the content with Ace has been so much fun and honestly extremely beneficial to my mental health and happiness. It has made me remember that maybe staying by myself and doing everything solo mode… is not really the best possible way to experience things. Ace has generally been way ahead of me, but we seem to alternate between one catching up and the other catching up so it has shaken out in the end allowing us to stay within a few hours of each other at all times.
I used to think that rolling an alt and restarting the MSQ was a fool’s errand… but if you can find a friend to do it with you, it is an amazing experience.
The post Cold Criminals 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.
Comparing the Noct Tanking Set from my Lalafell main and my Roegadyn alt
Good Morning Friends. I have to say I was overwhelmingly excited when I got to the point of the ARR MSQ when it started doling out the formerly Binding-Coil-era gear sets. For pretty much all of my time as a Lalafell I have used this set, dyed jet black, with the bunny kabuto for my signature look. So I was ecstatic to be able to have this appearance on my Roegadyn alt. Sure I could not wear the tanking skirt with it that comes from a level 80 dungeon, but I could get MOST of the way to replicating the appearance. I bounced around between all of the servers in Dynamis until I found the cheapest bunny kabuto for 160k and snapped it up to be able to compile the look. Then in all of my horror last night I realized… the proportions are all wrong on a Roegadyn. It just looks too bulky and my bunny ears are way the hell too small to really work in the same way. So alas… I wasted a bunch of money on something I am probably never actually going to wear until I fantasia again.
I guess I should once again give a fair warning that as I am talking through this ARR revisit, I am going to be talking about spoilers. Be warned if you have not made it this far into the game.Title Screen for Urth’s Fount the Odin Fight
We started off last night by running Snowcloak and then Odin which represented all of the new things that we had not run yet. Snowcloak was just as sleepy as it always is… and I maybe overpulled a few times leading Ace to have to scramble to keep my ass vertical. We pulled through it and it was a largely enjoyable experience. I still lament the loss of the proper version of the yeti fight where you throw snowballs at him. From there we ran Odin thinking it would be a long queue… but got in almost instantly. This fight is still exceptionally tough and we got some bad RNG on the first attempt and had to deal with a spear phase while he was casting his one-hit enrage attack. The second time though we managed to take him out right before the cast timer was finished. This fight is legitimately still probably more difficult than most of the ARR era Extremes.
Shiva Cutscene from Akh Afah Amphitheatre Hard
Knowing that Shiva was not too far off we put our heads down and quested along furiously until we unlocked Akh Afah Amphitheatre (Hard). It is sort of sad how stinking easy the ARR Hard versions are. When you have spent so much time farming the extremes to get mount drops for folks… the Hard versions just sort of feel like a cakewalk. I keep waiting for mechanics that never come, like I did not remember there was now ice floor phase in the Hard version, or at least not one we had gotten to yet. The music is still so freaking great and if you have not listened to it in a while, you own yourself to click through and do so right now. I have so much love for this era of the game because it represents the period of time when our little FC was the most active and dedicated. It was the era when we were actively fielding raids and hanging out with each other multiple times per week. While Ace and I have recaptured some of that in small bursts… I still miss all the rest of our team.
The Keeper of the Lake Entrance Unlocked in Mor Dhona
I stuck around last night and pushed through the story up until the point where Keeper of the Lake unlocked. I am very much looking forward to this dungeon because I can remember it being one of my favorites. It also has some freaking amazing music and a few really fun fights that make the player feel super cool for honestly dodging some rather simplistic mechanics by today’s standards. The story is heating up and honestly… I am starting to feel some “feelings” because I know what is about to happen in the next patch. It is hard to explain how emotionally it hit me to play through this content the first time. I was so oblivious to the catastrophe that was about to befall my character and my friends… but seeing it all again you can absolutely see the underpinnings of foreshadowing. A game had never quite doing anything like this before, not at least in the MMORPG space… so I was simply not prepared for the level of betrayal that was impending and as such did not heed the warnings.
The hardest part of this replay is having to run quests with Ilberd knowing what is about to happen. I so despise this person and everything that he and the Crystal Braves come to represent. I’m immensely bothered by what the hubris plays out in Alphinaud and I just want to shake some sense into his obliviousness. The writing was absolutely on the wall. I am seeing it now and it was clearly there for us… if we just chose to look at it. Last night seeing Ilberd say “you never betray your own” was just too fucking much. If I could change the course of the game I would… I would strike him down right now and suffer the consequences. I hate “Cold War” periods in video games… because I am a character of action, not politics. I was not designed for this, and quite honestly I think most of us are not equipped to handle it… which as a result is why this whole sequence managed to blindside so many. Unfortunately, this is a card that only works once… and every betrayal from this point forward has been spotted ahead of time because now we know it is possible… and now we are always on the lookout. Ilberd and crew shoot our faith… in a way that can never be regained.
Anyways… I am deeply looking forward to Heavensward because I want to hunt a Sky Whale. I’m probably looking forward to that fight than almost anything else at this point. Heavensward had some freaking amazing primal fights.
The post The Wrong Proportions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
