Final Fantasy XIV

We’ve Got Cows

November 25, 2015 by Belghast

Another Realm

I have briefly talked about this in the past, but I’ve lived in this strange place when it comes to World of Warcraft. Sure I played lots of Alliance because that was where most of my characters that I cared about existed… but I’ve always been one to bridge the gap. It was thanks to my involvement in the Argent Dawn server forums, and the later unofficial server forums that I created and hosted that I got to know tons of people on that side of the fence. For years I said I would level something on Horde to play with my “other” set of friends, but that never really panned out. During Wrath I ended up pushing a Deathknight to 80, but unfortunately the account it is on… is not the account I play most of the time. When it was announced that Scryers would be merging into Argent Dawn… I went somewhat crazy and created a full account worth of Horde characters because quite honestly… I had no clue how the merger would work. I did not know if all of the sudden there would just be this one amalgam server… and we would have 22 characters on it. The end result however is that both Argent Dawn and Scryers exist as distinct worlds… but everything from guilds to the zones themselves spans across the two realms allowing me to officially guild up with my old school Horde friends.

This has allowed me to do some utter madness… and ultimately have both a Horde and Alliance version of every single character. The big problem came with the fact that I had one of each on the Alliance that I did not want to lose access to. So now after some juggling Argent Dawn has become the server I play Alliance on and Scryers the server I play exclusively Horde. The only challenge is the fact that I had nothing leveled on Scryers, whereas on Argent Dawn as you can see above all but two of my characters are over level 90, and even then the lowest is 53 which is still a significant amount of levels. Prior to this week on Scryers I had managed to get an Orc Deathknight to 60, and a Tauren Paladin and Blood Elf Warrior to around 20. With the announcement of Legion came the pre-order process, which I went ahead and did giving me a boost to level 100. I was extremely torn on this one… do I take the boost and potentially get to do some stuff with my friends now… or do I level it the old fashioned way. Having not seen much of the Horde content, I actually do want to level there eventually.

Moo-Cow-Adin

Essentially I arrived at a thought process that is level the Blood Elf Warrior and Orc Deathknight legitimately… but boost the Tauren Paladin giving me access to do “big kid things” right away. I largely went with the Paladin because I really do enjoy both Protection and Retribution, but more importantly it gives me a character that I can in theory fill three different roles on. While I don’t really like healing as a Paladin, I have done it in the past and in a pinch I could do it again. I am however completely comfortable doing LFR and the likes as a Retribution Paladin allowing me to hopefully gear up both my Retribution set and eventually get a Protection set. The problem is… I knew if I was ever going to play the character for real I had to look cool doing it. This means I had to find something that I could enjoy to transmog into for the time being. My go to set for Paladins is the Tier 6 Lightbringer set, because it is relatively easy to farm. So last night I set off to go do Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, and finally Sunwell.

I am convinced that the game goes out of its way to screw with players trying to farm a full set of gear in a single attempt. It seems like there is always a single piece of gear that refuses to drop… and generally speaking it has been the helm token for me off Archimonde. This is extra insulting because as far as a raid goes… I HATE running Mount Hyjal. This is namely because you are a slave to the timers… and it seems to take significantly longer than most any other raid due to this aspect. Namely it is the Horde section of that raid that drives me insane… because I tend to play Melee focused characters, which makes knocking Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms out of the air a major pain in the ass. All told I was pretty happy with the results, and the only piece I did not manage to get were the legs from the Illidari Council fight… because for some reason it glitched and only gave me two pieces of loot including a single leg token. I have zero problem farming Black Temple to get the legs, and in the meantime I got a drop from Sunwell that will fill in well enough for the time being. At some point I need to get a better weapon, but for the moment I am rocking the big damned glowy orange axe from Black Temple, which makes me happy enough.

Onwards to Tanaan

My guild suggested that I spend some time digging into Tanaan Jungle to get some upgrades from the 640 set they start you out in after being boosted. I also really want to start the Legendary Ring quest, which I just picked up last night. From there I plan on throwing myself at the LFR and seeing if I can get some decent upgrades, and hoping to complete the ring quest along the way. It is really my hope that they upped the drop chances of those items out of Highmaul that are needed for the ring, because otherwise… this is going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience. I remember how long it took to get those on Belghast when we were actively raiding every week. In any case I seem to have sorted out how to actually play a Paladin again, and gearing my Moocow is pretty much my side gig from this point onwards. It is my hope to be able to get geared enough to actually join in some of the reindeer games happening on this side of the server. The only footnote there is that I really need not to raid actively, and I am hoping that won’t be a problem.

For a period of time I was really damned happy playing both Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I enjoyed the mix of the two games because they both scratched a distinct itch. World of Warcraft is this really enjoyable experience when played casually. I enjoy doing older content for transmog bits, or casually leveling alts… but when I was raiding both Warcraft and FFXIV… the differences just started frustrating me. Ultimately I prefer the FFXIV raid game better, because it feels like the boss encounters are simply messaged better. Granted if they just added telegraphs with clearly identified edges of effects like they have in both Wildstar and FFXIV it would go a long way to my enjoyment. Ultimately I think I simply got burnt out by trying to raid two different games at the same time… and ultimately ended up choosing the one that was causing me less frustration. So now… I am hoping to go back to playing both games casually… and in theory maybe starting to raid once again in FFXIV. We have started doing this Saturday thing again, where we do older content and it was a lot of fun this week. My hope this will ease me into doing more content in that game as well, and in the mean time I am planning on diving into LFR on the Paladin in WoW. Granted I won’t be doing any of it tonight… because this is the first of our Thanksgivings, and I also need to stage a proper Thanksgiving post for tomorrow.

Week in Gaming 11/22/2015

November 22, 2015 by Belghast

Missing Breakers

During this segment I generally run down the gaming I have done during the previous week, however this week I am going to regale you with a story from last night. As I have talked about a bit on my blog we are currently going through some minor home renovations. We seem to be nearing the end however, and other than a few minor problems that they are working on… things seem to largely be done. During part of this process we had a big extension cord coming out through the garage door so they could do work on the front of the house, and as part of their wrapping things up they asked me to go inside and raise the garage door so they could unplug it. When I got out to the garage however… the door would not open, and around about this same time I noticed that our freezer was off. Thus began the mission to try and sort out what breaker was flipped.

The breakers are in a horrible location in our house, which is on the garage wall… but someone in their infinite wisdom decided to build a table and attach it to the wall in front of the breaker box. When I say table… I mean it is a 4 foot deep and 8 foot across shelving unit made out of full sheets of plywood. Sure it is sturdy as hell but it is super awkward and fiddling with the breakers means I have to essentially crawl up onto the table. The problem being… none of the breakers were flipped which began a hunt through the house because the contractors were convinced that this could not be the ONLY breaker box on the house. Please note that at this point we have lived in the house going on eighteen years…. we were absolutely certain this was the only breaker box. Finally after running around and flipping the damned house main in the back yard… someone noticed that the outlet in the garage that the opener was plugged into… had a ground fault switch. We flipped that and magically everything started working again. So yeah… that was a fun way to spend a good chunk of my night.

This week finally saw my return to Final Fantasy XIV as it also announced the release of the 3.1 content. I talked about this a bit during the week, but it feels a little bittersweet. The content was really good, but also really really short. Usually we have some big boss fight as the pinnacle of the content patches, and this time around…. nothing. Sure there was a big fight but it wasn’t on the same level as a new Primal or an encounter like Gilgamesh. Also there is the fact that we still don’t have a new segment in the Hildebrand chain… or nothing to really replace the hole it has created in the content. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the Lords of Verminion minigame and as a result a bunch of other stuff slipped to the 3.15 patch later. I still have yet to do any of the dungeons, but hopefully I can get that going soonish.

The bulk of my final fantasy time consists of me logging in, and doing my Beast Tribe dailies for the new Vanu Vanu tribe along with some of the old world quests. What makes this pretty great is the fact that at the current level cap… all of the old world quests are super easy to do. So essentially my daily pecking order is… Vanu Vanu > Slyphs > Sahagin. Mostly I just want to be a tiny lalafell riding along on a giant goobue. Last night we also revived the tradition of doing stuff on Saturday nights as we ran bits of First and Second coil with the guild. I was not there for Turn 5 but I got pulled in on the second coil fun. We managed to get all the way up to turn 9, and put in a few attempts before Ashgar and I had to leave to prep for the podcast. My hope is we can get people in the habit of showing up on Saturday nights to do stuff like this and pony farming. That would go a long way towards revitalizing the Final Fantasy experience for me.

Destiny

I am continuing to play Destiny but a significantly reduced pace. Each Sunday afternoon we do a Star Wars pen and paper game, and right now Destiny seems to be my game of choice to play while doing that. It is something I can play on a machine that is not my main computer, and still be able to pay attention to what is going on in the roleplaying. Destiny is for the most part muscle reflexes at this point, so I am spending the time doing bounties and missions and such. I did however play quite a bit on Wednesday, or at least long enough to do my various weapon missions. I still very much love this game, but Fallout 4 has largely taken the place it held of the game I am spending most of my time playing. There are still a lot of things I want, but more than likely I am going to mostly do the Armsday/Xursday thing each week and then focus if there are objectives and goals that I really want to accomplish. There are a few interesting looking weapons this week that I am hoping turn out to be pretty awesome from the Gunsmith.

Fallout 4

I am still slowly wandering my way through the commonwealth. I am roughly sixty hours into the game and have yet to go to Diamond City. That said I have done a whole slew of side quests, but more often than not when I get one… I have already been to that location and cleared it out. When I went to help the Brotherhood of Steel for example… I had already completely cleared that location other than the areas that the Brotherhood ends up unlocking for you to go explore. As far as the Minutemen, I am tasked with taking back the castle, but the castle is a long ways off from where I am. Right now I am largely exploring the Cambridge area and delving into the ruined buildings that you find there. The hospital at Cambridge was one of the more interesting areas, so if you have not been there I highly suggest checking it out. There has been some crazy shit happening there… but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. At this point I am still largely using my crappy pipe gun, that has been upgraded as much as possible…. but that is largely because I have a truly silly amount of ammunition for it.

World of Warcraft

I am weak…. and nostalgia is strong. Over the last few weeks I knew deep down inside that I was fighting a losing battle. Finally yesterday I gave in and started playing my sub level 20 horde characters since I could do that for free. When Scryers and Argent Dawn merged, I ended up creating an entire accounts worth of Horde alts with the thought of playing with some of my Horde friends on the Argent Dawn server. I tried to create one of every race and class… and some of them I am probably going to simply re-roll. For my Warrior… I ended up going Blood Elf because I remember at launch Warrior was not an option for them. Also I have gotten kinda sick of playing Orcs, and my Deathknight is an Orc, and my Paladin is a Tauren. Maybe I am mellowing in my old age, but the whole “elf” thing is annoying me far less right now. Maybe it is the nostalgia of him wearing what is essentially a set of Wrath armor from Molten Core. In any case I am poking my head around World of Warcraft, and we will see how well that takes.

Be Nice to the People

November 20, 2015 by Belghast

Bad Luck

Be Nice to the People — This looks totally legit right?

Traditionally I do this Friday thing where I talk about one of the many “MMOs Worth Playing” but honestly…. today I am just not feeling it. I am feeling more annoyed and frustrated about MMOs than I am feeling the love right now, and in this current mindset it is probably best that I simply don’t talk about a game. The purpose of the column is to highlight a game and talk about the things I love about it, in the hopes that it might nudge people into giving it a try. In order to really do that I have to be feeling happy and enjoying the world around me… and right now I am kinda grumpy. Granted I am grumpy over a stupid reason. Right now I feel like I am one of a handful of people who didn’t get into the Overwatch beta weekend. I am largely annoyed by this, because I am in fact one of the people who went ahead and pre-ordered the game knowing eventually that I would want to play it. You would think… that if you have a bit single weekend only stress test that you might want to include the people who are already signed up to spend money on your game.

Maybe that is screwed up in my logic, but it seems to me that they should have pulled from the pool of sign ups first for this one in particular. I am not saying that about the normal always on Beta process… that one is completely luck of the draw. This one however… when you are testing a game for a short period of time… it might be cool to thank the folks who have already pressed that button and said “Yes, I want your game”. Frustrations aside, I am hoping all of my friends who are going to be playing it this weekend will enjoy themselves and have lots of things to talk about. Honestly this test will give me a better feeling of how I am going to like the game, since a lot of the AggroChat folks seemed to have gotten in. This is the hardest part about Betas is standing on the outside watching your friends have fun… and then trying really damned hard to be happy for them… and not sad that you got left out.

People Behind The Thing

It's okay to be sad/frustrated/upset with a thing, but never okay to attack the human being who's job is to represent that thing

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 19, 2015

So even though I am frustrated, I am directing my frustrations at an entity… the game Overwatch and or the company Blizzard behind it. I realize that that company is made up of people, and it has to be super tiring to hear people raging at them constantly. I realize over the years I have said some pretty caustic and even pyroclastic things about video games and or the companies behind them. At no point however did I aim that criticism at the people themselves. I never joined the chorus of “I Hate Ghostcrawler” nor will I join any other personally targeted witch hunt in the future. I can dislike a thing… but still have the utmost respect for the people for whom it is their job. Much of this week has felt like I have been attempting to give lessons in how to treat people with simple human dignity… and yesterday continued that trend. These companies have people working there, that go to work every single day hoping to do something cool… and often times get met with this constant wall of negativity. It is no wonder when someone reads one too many “fuck you” posts targeted at them that occasionally community staff snaps. Ultimately how good of a job, and how much satisfaction in it… would you have if someone stood over your desk heckling you the entire day?

Now you can take the path of “they willfully accepted the job”, but that too is utter bullshit. They probably took the job for the same reason that any one of us who are gaming addicts would jump at the chance to do the same thing. The folks that work at games companies do so because they love games with every fiber of their being, so much so that they are willing to sacrifice basic things like stability, and normal working hours… for the chance of being part of something they at least once felt was awesome. So if this week I happen to be complaining about Overwatch… I know that behind the scenes there is a crew of people who are working insane hours right now, and trying their damnedest to please as many people as they can… while at the same time desperately fighting to roll out the best possible product that they can make. I’ve been lucky to know enough people that work at enough companies to know that all of these fine people are grinding themselves into the ground all in the hopes of making each of us happy. So the next time you level an attack at a thing… please make sure it is targeted at the thing… and not the voice of the person hanging out in front of it for whom it is their job to represent said thing. I most definitely don’t believe that games should be above criticism… but I do believe that we shouldn’t be targeting our bile at a human being.

Hoping For a Great Friday

My hope is that I can go into this Friday and not see anything else that makes me sad about humanity. For those of you in the Overwatch beta weekend… have a blast, take lots of screenshots, record lots of video… because I expect some really amazing content as a result. For those of us watching from the sidelines… there are dozens of other things we should be doing. I personally am now 55 hours into Fallout 4… and have yet to make it to Diamond City. I’m also in a strange place when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV where I am logging in each day to do Beast Tribe dailies, but not finding much drive to do anything else. I am in that strange place where I took a long enough break from the game to where I am completely out of touch with what I was doing before I left, but have not been away long enough to make me super nostalgic enough to dive back in with vigor. I am also still fighting the urge to play World of Warcraft, and I am scared that sooner or later I will be giving into it… if for no reason other than to get it out of my system again. I am in a place where I want into the Legion beta more than any other beta in a long while, mostly because I hope beyond hope that Deathknights are fun again. The fact that I had to switch back to my warrior during Warlords honestly was a bit of bummer, and I would love to be a Worgen DK once more. Anyways… that was a long “outro” but hopefully you have a great weekend, and stay safe and happy and warm.

Underwhelmed

November 18, 2015 by Belghast

Mixed Emotions

One of the big problems with last week is that quite literally I had too many things I wanted to play. Not only did Fallout 4 release… and give me a franchise of shanty towns to look after…. we also had the launch of Final Fantasy XIV 3.1 patch. Now I have complained a bit that the lag between 3.0 and 3.1 was entirely too long. Basically from 2.1 onwards they kept a schedule along the lines of a major patch every 3 months and a minor patch every month. Instead this patch took about five months to release… and it was a long enough lag to get me completely out of the habit of logging in on a regular basis. That said I knew whenever 3.1 landed I would be back, albeit a bit rusty from lack of playing. Fallout however took precedence and over the last two nights I have finally consumed I believe all of the new quest content. Now we get to the mixed emotions part… because in one way the content was really damned good. It managed to hit us in the feels a few times and introduce a new to this game character… that we are VERY familiar with from Final Fantasy V thanks to Ashgar and his constant cheerleading for the Four Job Fiesta. The problem I am having is it did nothing really to re-ignite my desire to log in on a nightly basis.

The other big take away I had from the story content is it felt like a trickle compared to what we have seen in the past. I know at the very least the quest to unlock Void Ark was significantly shorter and less involved than the quest to unlock Crystal Tower. Similarly the main story line, lacked a big boss fight like they have in the past… because there was no introduction of a new primal. Also part of what I think is the feeling of it being small… is the fact that we did not get a Hildebrand story to go with it. So while I enjoyed the experience of the new quest content… I felt like it was over far too quickly, and took part of an evening to complete in total. That is including unlocking the new Vanu Vanu beast tribe quests and done two rounds of those. I don’t want to have this “let down” feeling but I can’t help it I guess. Maybe it is just that I had built up 3.1 as being this point of my grand return to this game… and like Tam has said in the past we simply lack the huge backlog of content to slowly work our way through that we had during 2.0. Maybe there has always been a very limited amount of content… and I just never actually caught up completely until this expansion.

The Dungeons

All of this said… I have yet to do the two new dungeons, and have yet to run Void Ark, so maybe my feelings will be different after seeing those. Dungeons have always been the lifeblood of the game for me, but I have simply not been sleeping well the last few nights, so I felt more than a little out of it. Also Tam spent time playing Lords of Verminion last night, and I am hoping he writes up a quick guide because what I saw of it… looked like madness, but a fun sort. Mostly I just need to get back into the habit of logging in on a regular basis. I was in last night at least long enough to run my Vanu Vanu dailies before disappearing back into the Commonwealth, and at a minimum I plan to be doing that each night. I want my flying snake and I want my sundrop dance. I spent some of my stockpiled MGP one one of the new dances there as well… the “Gold” dance, which looks hilarious when my Lalafell does it. I also need to get back in the swing of tanking, because I was a complete slacker when it came to esoterics gear, and I need an awful lot of it. I also need to start running Void Ark to get items to upgrade with.

Is it wrong that I feel a little disappointed though? Maybe it just feels like a let down after the amazing ride that Heavensward was, and maybe the patch content is on par with what they have done in the past. Final Fantasy XIV has always been this happy place, and logging into the free company brings that point home. It is amazing that the guild has managed to keep trucking on and being active in spite of a large chunk of us taking an extended break from the game. I was just so ready to hop back in the saddle and be wowed by the experience… and instead I feel a bit melancholy about it. It just feels like the team might be resting on their laurels a bit, and maybe spent too much time working on Verminion that would have been better suited putting in more content for the patch. It really bothers me that there is only two dungeons in this patch cycle, because the whole Fractal/Neverreap thing got super old… super fast. Having only two dungeons means there is the one you enjoy… and the one you don’t… and it always feels like the only thing you get is the one you don’t enjoy. For us it was non-stop back to back Neverreap, and my fear is that once we start the dungeon cycle one of them is absolutely going to be “That” dungeon for us again. It is funny how much of a difference that extra dungeon seems to make… but man it does. Maybe they will add another dungeon in with 3.15 which is supposedly right around the corner. My hope is that they will also be adding more Hildebrand content… with another boss fight, and potentially a new primal. Mostly I guess it just feels like we got half of a patch, which makes me a little sad after the length five month wait.