Final Fantasy XIV – Page 70

Communing with Fae

August 10, 2015 by Belghast

Freemium Magic

While I still have aspirations to cease the swiss army posts… I guess in reality I live a fairly swiss army life. This weekend was really no different, and the one hundred plus degree temperatures just caused us to spend more time than normal indoors. When this happens I start to get a little wanderlust at least from the standpoint of what games I am playing. As a result this weekend I played a mixture of Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars the Old Republic, Minecraft, and some Magic Duels. You can blame the podcast we recorded Saturday for the later, because both Thalen and Kodra talked about playing it. I have several assorted versions of the Duel of the Planeswalker magic game cluttering my steam account. I end up picking them up when they go on sale and then only ever playing them a few times. Ultimately part of the excitement of magic for me is playing with physical cards and opening physical packs. We have joked about it before but “that new pack smell” is really a thing, and it can be intoxicating. That little tingle of excitement as you rush through the “commons” to find out what rare you got in that pack is a thing I have repeated thousands of times over the years. So is the sinking feeling when I see that rare is a blue or a white… the two colors that I most have a negative reaction towards. The real life magic really really wants me to play White, because I have an insane number of rare angels… but all I ever really want is the dark and sinister Black cards.

Right now I am still about halfway through the unlocking story of the White deck of Gideon Jura. The game does a really cool job of telling you the story of how each of the planeswalkers found their spark, which according to Kodra is the central focus of the Origins story line. The only negative that I have so far is that you have to wade through a lot of tutorials before the game just lets you play. Normally I would say these could be skipped but the game rewards you in gold for watching them, and that is gold that you will need later for purchasing packs. Where this gets really frustrating is when a new card mechanic is introduced and it stops whatever duel you are in the middle of to show you a tutorial on how that mechanic works. I can absolutely see however how this would be beneficial to brand new players, and even for me there are card mechanics that are being called by names that I don’t recognize in spite of fully understanding the game play behind them. The other big frustration with the Duels client is the fact that it crashed on me, numerous times… so I am guessing they are still having some issues. From what I can tell you stay connected to their servers even though you are essentially playing a single player match, and if that server connection wavers your game cannot seem to recover gracefully. I figure this is going to be something I piddle with from time to time when I am not in the mood for other games.

Communing with Fae

As I wrote yesterday Arcanist has always been the class that I struggled the most in playing. For whatever reason I have caught the desire to play it, and I spent most of yesterday working my way through content doing a mix of low level roulette, Haukke Manor, and guildhests. As a result early yesterday evening I managed to push across the line and ding 30 while in one of those Haukke Manor runs. After that it was chasing down two different job quests and learning how to be both a Scholar and a Summoner. The thing that I did not initially realize was the fact that the two Carby summons ultimately become the Faerie summons. I guess this makes sense, as without them somehow overwriting those low level abilities there would be no way for the job to scale down and effectively heal low level content. The other thing that I was not really expecting was how “un-healer-like” low level instances ultimately felt. My first dungeon as a Scholar ended up being Halitali… where I have exactly one useful heal button. So instead I just made sure I was standing next to the tank and dotted everything up. I am not sure when the class feels more “healer-ly” but until then I am just pretending I am still playing an Arcanist.

The other shocker for me was just how relatively easy the Summoner job quest ended up being. As you can tell by the Summon III icon, I had to fight Ifrit and after fighting him in several different versions… I have to say it was way easier than I expected it to be. I cast dots on all of the things, and then eventually he fell over… which I am guessing is how summoners are supposed to play? This play style is just so weird to me because it feels oddly passive. Maybe a better way of putting it is it feels like I am playing a completely different game than the rest of the people in my group. Much of the time leveling to 30 was spent tabbing through targets, applying dots, and then tabbing back to the first one to reapply dots after I had finished one circuit of the mobs. This just doesn’t feel natural to me I guess because it feels like the sort of triage that I do as a healer… but to damage all the mobs rather than heal all the players. I guess the truth is that I have never really successfully played a damage over time class, and it almost makes me want to fire up and play my Warlock again to see if this new outlook makes that class more enjoyable. In any case I now have a Scholar so I can begin leveling that through the instant duty finder queue. I should try and catch up to Tzi and Rylacus and run up with them.

Spending Time with Carby

August 9, 2015 by Belghast

Sleep Hates Me

I am getting a fairly late start this morning because insomnia is a pain in the ass. Last night we recorded an episode of AggroChat like normal, and ran around two hours in total recording time. By the time I did my initial edit pass and exported the show to MP3, it was already midnight. I decided to save my progress and finish things up this morning instead, and my hope beyond hope was that I would get a good nights sleep. The problem being that the moment my head hit the pillow I was awake. I kept thinking that if I laid there long enough I would eventually drift off to sleep, but as 2 am came and passed I was really wishing I had just stayed up long enough to publish the post last night. This is the worst part about insomnia is not necessarily the inability to get back to sleep, but the feeling that you are wasting your time by TRYING to sleep. Had I gotten up I could have done any number of things until sleep finally claimed me… but the harder you attempt to sleep the harder it seems to be to finally have it happen.

I’ve struggled with bouts of insomnia most of my life, and figuring out how to function on a couple of hours of sleep is an unfortunate survival skill I have had to learn along the way. Thankfully this happened on a Saturday night… and not a Sunday night… because I have done the sleep walking my way through work because I couldn’t sleep thing and it sucks. The key fault yesterday was that I ended up taking a nap thinking that it would help me stay up and edit the podcast. My system is wired in such a way that if I get any additional sleep I am screwed. I can take a thirty minute cat nap, and it will completely upset the balance of things can cause my body to think it got a full nights sleep. Granted a “full night” for me is between five and six hours of sleep… and realistically anything more than that causes me to get groggy. Essentially I live my life in a permanent state of sleep deprivation, but unfortunately that seems to simply be the way I am wired to function. All of this aside the show was an extremely enjoyable one to record and we talked about a big umbrella of titles from Final Fantasy XIV, to Wildstar, to Sword Art Online… to the elephant in the room… the World of Warcraft Legion expansion announcement.

AggroChat 69 – Ahk Mourn and Key Limes

Content Density

I have this strong desire to level to the current cap in Wildstar, but the problem I ultimately have is this is an exceptionally content dense game. Normally speaking this is a good quality, but the problem is that I struggle to keep up with the quests before out leveling them entirely. In a game like Final Fantasy XIV it makes sense… so that you can save quests for other jobs, however in a game like Wildstar it just feels daunting when you realize that you are completing less than optimal quests just to dig down to the ones that matter again. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday playing around on my Human Warrior on Evinda yesterday, poking my way through the quests. Right now I am mostly focused on working through my path quests, but unfortunately I have only actually done about half of the ones available for the Galeras zone, and I am already feeling overwhelmed. I have to say this is not really my favorite area of the game, and I am more than ready to push past it… even though I know Whitevale is waiting on me. Whitevale more or less was the zone that killed my progress on my Chua Engineer, because the content was just so tightly packed.. and simply moving around became tedious.

As of yesterday I am sitting at level twenty, and I am considering just pushing through some dungeon runs rather than spending a bunch of more time questing. I had this overwhelming feeling yesterday that I spent a lot of time doing something… but whatever it was didn’t really accomplish much in the grand scheme of things. I did however set up a new outfit which I am pretty happy with. At some point I need to spend time searching the auctioneer for interesting appearances. Right now I don’t have any hats that I really like, so I am going with the cybernetic monocle as the best of the worst. This game so far is reminding me a little too much of Warcraft in the hat department, because I can’t really find any that I like. In World of Warcraft I habitually hit every single hat offering because they all looked stupid, and I am afraid that might also be my fate here. This is so strange since in Final Fantasy XIV I have dozens of hats that I love wearing… including the very awesome Bunny Samurai hat that I have been wearing most recently. Maybe I just have yet to find my way to the really cool threads yet. Right now I plan on leveling some more today and seeing if I can get a group going for a dungeon.

Spending Time with Carby

Arcanist has been the class that has eluded me the most in Final Fantasy XIV. I want to like it, because I adore running around with a giant sparkly carbuncle pet. The problem being it is a “finger wiggler” and quite possibly the “most” finger wiggly of all classes. I however thanks to the help of my AggroChat crew at least “get” how to play one. It is essentially put up dots on all of the things and check to see if it is dead yet. Generally speaking I pick something to play during our podcast and this week that honor fell to playing the Arcanist. I keep telling myself that if I can ever manage to get it to 30, then I will become a Scholar and life will be golden. I get to queue as a healer and see how the other side feels when it comes to dungeon healing, after playing a fair amount of White Mage. As of last night I am sitting at 26, and man does it feel like a really long ways to 30. The problem with dungeoning as an Arcanist is that it just feels so damned awkward. You have this strange mixed bag of tools, but only really end up using your dots and ruin as a spell of last resort. Occasionally I throw a heal if the tank is getting exceptionally low or if I am, but otherwise cycle through the adds… dotting each of them.. then returning to the first one and starting the process all over again (which is rarely needed because they are usually dead by then).

Essentially going forward it is my plan to run a low level roulette each day on the Arcanist because yesterday I managed to get a full level and a half out of it. Doing this should get me to thirty in good pace, and then I can figure out how to scholar heal! If nothing else now that I have gotten in my Carby plushes I have a minion Carby to follow me around. I have to admit that is part of my reluctance to level is the fact that I know going Summoner causes me to loose my Carbuncles. The Egis have grown on me, but they are in no way as cool as the Carbuncle. I can’t believe I am saying this… but I am actually jealous of Alphinaud and his Ruby, Onyx and Obsidian Carbuncles. Part of me hopes that they introduce a quest line that gives you these three Carbys as optional replacements for Garuda, Titan and Ifrit Egis. If they did that… I would absolutely have renewed vigor in my desire to become a summoner. As it stands now I feel like this is a class that has beaten me, and I want to push past any frustration and not let it win. If nothing else I do think the book casting animation looks pretty sweet… you know for a finger wiggler. Yeah… i’m going to go stab something with a sword or hit something with an axe now.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

August 2, 2015August 2, 2015 by Thalen

One of the things that continually impresses me about Final Fantasy XIV is that the developers are very good at learning from their mistakes. Sometimes systems don't work quite how they were intended to at first, but improvements get made and the game develops over time. One good example of this is cutscenes.

The storyline in FFXIV includes a lot of cutscenes throughout, many of which can be fairly long. All well and good, but at first those cutscenes would often be in the middle of dungeons. If not everyone in the dungeon wants to watch the cutscene, then you end up with some members of a group either having to wait for the others to finish, or running on ahead and starting fights without the person who was watching the cutscene. The very worst offenders were the final two 8 person trials in the initial story, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. It is entirely possible for a player to watch the cutscene triggered before a boss in one of those trials and find that by the time the cutscene is over the rest of the group has already defeated the boss and moved on without them.

In the content that was added in later patches however, mid-dungeon cutscenes are noticably rare. When they do exist they are usually very short. Cutscenes at the beginning of dungeons are usually quite short as well, with the long ones almost always placed at the end of dungeons where watching them won't hold the rest of your group up. The lesson was learned and adjustments were made to avoid repeating the mistake.

I've been working on my crafting jobs recently, and I've noticed the same sort of thing there, where choices appear to have been made to address weaknesses in the crafting system or to fix elements that don't have the expected effect.

Crafting in FFXIV is a mini-game that involves using various abilities to fill a progress bar while also trying to increase a quality bar as much as possible to improve your chance of producing a high quality verison of the item you're making. For final products a high quality item is noticeably better than the normal version, having higher stats across the board. You have a limited number of actions to do this with as well as a limited amount of crafting points to spend on your abilities. To complicate things even further, your craft has a material condition which can vary over the course of the craft, adding an element of randomness to the process.

In theory, one needs to pay attention to material condition and react differently depending on the current condition since it heavily affects the amount of quality added by abilities. In practice, at most points in the process changing which ability you use would result in wasting the effects of previously used abilities or using too many crafting points and running out too soon. Thus, condition ends up just being something you don't pay much attention to that occasionally greatly helps you or screws you over.

Blaugust Day 2: Never Make the Same Mistake Twice

In Heavensward, all the crafting jobs get a new ability at level 53, Precise Touch, which increases item quality. This ability is identical to the very first quality increase ability you receive, Basic Touch, with two differences. Precise Touch can only be used when material condition is Good or Excellent, and it adds a level of Inner Quiet to your Stack. Inner Quiet is a status you can stack that increases the effectiveness of all you quality increase abilities.

That's useful in and of itself, of course, but more importantly that stack can then be spent to fuel the ability Byregot's Blessing, which increases quality by an amount dependent on the size of the Inner Quiet stack.

What this means is that any time you would normally use Basic Touch, it is better to use Precise Touch if possible. Now you need to pay attention to material condition so you can use the better ability. It's not a huge change, but a small step to slightly more complex crafting. Of course, whether you think that's a good thing or not will depend on whether you view it as interesting complexity or not. I'm still not entirely sure on that point, but it's at least an attempt.