final fantasy – Page 3

AggroChat #165 – Bribery Still Works

May 21, 2019July 16, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, Thalen

This is one of the weirder shows we have recorded in a while in part because we went into it somewhat tentative as to whether or not we really had a full show. Instead we wound up recording for over two hours. We go through a lengthy discussion of Magic the Gathering in both the paper and online varieties. This includes some talk about the new expansion Hour of Devastation, but also some general discussion about the history of Magic as a whole. We get into another long discussion about Warframe and the upcoming “open world” area. Ashgar has been playing some Final Fantasy XII and we talk a bit about our experiences with the game. From there we travel into Final Fantasy XIV and talk about how we are experiencing this early drop off from Stormblood. Finally we wrap things up with a discussion about Warhammer 40,000 and how they seem to have finally decided to move the story forward.

Topics Discussed

Sealed Hour of Devastation
Magic the Gathering
Open World Warframe
Final Fantasy XII
Final Fantasy XIV
40k Moving the Story Forward

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Mobile Matters

July 13, 2017 by Belghast

For years I have said that I really did not think that gaming on my phone was really my “thing”. It was a platform that I largely felt didn’t quite fit my lifestyle, because in part I felt like I either had access to PC and Consoles… or simply didn’t have the ability to game period. Recently however I have been eating the hell out of those words. For the last week or so I have been getting used to a new phone, and at some point I will probably do a proper review of it. Functionally I could not bring myself to spend $800 to $1000 on a new phone… and my Samsung Galaxy s5 had lots of problems. This lead me to branch out and look into some other options… and I finally landed on the ZTE Axon 7 which is a very solid attempt at a Chinese flagship killer. When I finally do a proper review I will get around to more about that, however suffice to say I am enjoying it. There is a thing that happens with PC gamers… when we get new hardware. We go through this phase of installing everything that we have cared about in the past… and trying it out on the new setup to see what has and has not improved. With this new phone being so much more powerful than my previous one… I found myself going through this same routine and testing out things like the android Hearthstone client. When I say the previous phone had issues… it is because once upon a time I rooted my phone in an attempt to bypass the AT&T blockade against tethering/wifi hotspots on my current plan. I still have one of those ancient grandfathered in iPhone unlimited plans… and while they have raised the price there is no way in hell I am giving up $25 a month unlimited mobile data.

While the S5 is technically no longer rooted, I seem to have tripped some anti-tamper seal of a sort on the phone and it fails the Google Safetynet test that app manufacturers have started incorporating into their apps. This means that I was forced to stop playing Pokemon Go when they patched in this protection, and similarly have been unable to experience Fire Emblem Heroes, Mario Run or a whole slew of newer games that just do this check by default. The biggest problem with me and phone gaming in the past however was the battery life, and the way that a few minutes of Final Fantasy Record Keeper could shave off 25% of my battery before I even realized. With the new phone this seems to no longer be the issue that it once was… and either because the processor does not need to work nearly as hard… or the fact that I have a 3250 mAh battery (instead of 2800 mAh) I can functionally play games and still use my phone for everything else that I want to. As a result lately I have been heading to bed fairly early and then chilling out there and playing mobile games until sleep finally claims me. Similarly while I am out and about I am starting to play a lot more Pokemon Go, but have not really gone out on catching jaunts like I did around the release a year ago. I contemplated going out last night but it was still over 90 degrees outside after 9pm, so I figured I would leave that to a cooler evening.

The games that have seemed to clamp down the hardest on my attention however are Fire Emblem Heroes… which is a thoroughly charming tactics style combat game and of course Final Fantasy Record Keeper that I already played a significant amount of in the past. This is the point where I admit that I have never actually played a Fire Emblem game in the past, and while I am sure the actual games are not terribly similar to this mobile title… it does make me a hell of a lot more interested in them. The premise is largely nonsense… but it is the sort of nonsense that I find myself enjoying at the moment. The biggest problem with these games is that I really have no clue what I am doing on a regular basis… and not even sure what the best way to do anything in game is. I’ve been slowly working my way through the story in Fire Emblem, and in Record Keeper I noticed that they seemingly have gotten less sparing with handing you a bunch of characters. I worked my way through most of a Final Fantasy XIV themed event dungeon… and picked up Yshtola, Minfilia, Yda, Papalymo, and Cid… and started working my way through a similarly FFXII Zodiac Age themed one. Much like in Pokemon Go… the excitement for me is in the collection of new characters and not so much in the leveling and battle.

Lastly I have been slowly working my way through Final Fantasy V on the phone as an attempt to do things like play over my lunch break… which admittedly has not actually happened yet. I got completely wrecked last night by Garula, which means I am going to have to sort out a decent strategy for this one. Of course I am not playing the game legitimately… and instead am doing the Four Job Fiesta… which means I am attempting to take him down as a party of four Black Mages. Its time to go figure out some strategery so I can get past him and get my next set of jobs. I find the mobile FFV client a little wonky… and especially in mobiles where you need fine motor control… that is not a thing the touchpad really gives you. Getting through the poison plants at the top of the mountain was not really a thing… so I simply opted to walk through a couple and take antidotes. Regardless it works well enough for my needs and gives me a reasonable platform without really shackling me to a specific location for playing it. I kinda hope we eventually get a version on the switch through either virtual console… or a release of this mobile port to it. Whatever the case…. someone seems to have replaced me with a doppelganger that does not mind mobile gaming all the sudden.

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

Crazy Axe

June 26, 2017 by Belghast

As of last night I am now officially at the Stormblood level cap. That said I still have a bunch of content left to run because I know my MSQ is stalled behind at dungeon at the moment…. and then I also know from hearing folks talk about it that there is another trial of some sort after that. I was feeling a little too out of it to go seeking a dungeon group, so instead I focused on finishing the warrior quest line, which gave me a set of gear that I will probably never wear at least cosmetically… and this bizarre axe. As a whole though Stormblood provided me with lots of glamour fodder, including this chest piece that I have become rather fond of. I actually dinged 70 while running the second primal. I decided to do a trials roulette, and next thing I know I am zoning into that fight. The first pull went about as well as you would expect that a modern era primal fight would go. On the second pull however I took a moment to ask folks if there was anything about the fight that they didn’t understand, and answered a bunch of questions. As I was able to do I also hollered out when a few key mechanics were coming up to remind folks about them. Things went off the rails a bit during that second attempt but we managed to hold on and ultimately finished the fight.

The story as a whole has continued to be amazing, but I am finding myself at a loss for screenshots to put in my blog posts that are not insanely spoilery. I find myself trying to snap moments where nothing much is going on that won’t give away any major story beats. I find it interesting how generally speaking I am not that beholden to a story in other games… but in Final Fantasy XIV I am anxious to find out what is going on. I guess part of it is that in a single player story… the experience doesn’t feel real. What I mean by that is it is something that I experience and then once the story has reached its conclusion it is functionally over… at least for another several years until they release a sequel. In an MMO… story sets the stage for what is to come and gives us a glimpse in what we will be doing a few months down the road. The story feels more alive to me because I am going to be living it, and I am going to be adjusting to whatever changes it happens to bring to the stage for a long while. My friends and I are going to be fighting our way through the epic battles that are proposed each time the story leads us some place new. I guess this is why I get into the lore of Destiny as well, because even though the grimoire cards are a crummy system… they give us a glimpse at the future to come and let me start day dreaming about epic adventures that are just over the horizon.

Another thing that happened this weekend was the “launch” of Secret World Legends. Sure they are calling it a head start, but if you are letting in everyone who played the previous game… you are effectively launching it. More than anything I wanted to get in and make sure that all of my stuff transferred just fine, and more importantly that my lifetime subscription did in fact transfer over into lifetime patron status. For those who played the first game… I highly suggest you check out the page on the transfer system so you can claim anything that might be eligible for transfer. I’ve heard that this system is only going to be available through August 31st and there are a bunch of guidelines and fine print to follow to make sure everything copies just fine. I probably need to do some more fiddling to make sure that everything does in fact copy. I had a character of each faction so in theory it should have… but I probably need to go ahead and create those other faction characters so I can double check. The most important item was of course the Csicon alien smiley t-shirt… which I am rocking in the image above. So far I am digging the game changes, but unfortunately it just happened to launch at a really horrible time for me since I am so heavily engaged in Stormblood. I will continue to piddle around and experience the content, and it serves as an awesome “taking a break” game for me right now. We talk a bit about but Secret World Legends and Stormblood on this weekends podcast, which I am embedding below.