Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Tonight we assembled and thought we had nothing to talk about… but apparently we were super wrong. As is usually the case with us when we think we have nothing… we wind up recording a two hour show. While it doesn’t weigh in quite that long this week, it still is a pretty lengthy discussion about stuff and things… and sometimes gaming. We apparently have an awful lot to say about Final Fantasy XIV and the fact that Stormblood brings no new tanks into the fold. We also talk a bit about how tank design seems to always fit within the same small box and how they might benefit from branching out a bit. After this bulk of the discussion we weave through a whole bunch of other topics.
Topics: Final Fantasy XIV Alexander Raid, Fanfest Announcements, The Tank Shortage, Darkness Myth: Cthulhu Otome, Work Console, Shantae, Humble Freedom Bundle, Vampire Campaign
I’ve admittedly been pretty sporadic in my gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV since just shortly after the launch of Heavensward. For whatever reason the story this time never quite clicked in the same way that it did during A Realm Reborn. Additionally Alex never felt nearly as interesting as Coil… so it just felt like I was grasping at things to tie me to the game but struggling to find them. More than all of these I think the two dungeons per cycle business hurt the most, because it turned something that I used to love… Expert Roulette into a grind because there was always the dungeon you enjoyed… and the dungeon you disliked in every patch cycle. All of this said I have been poking my head in periodically and was at least aware of the mentor program. The idea being that Square would create a way to identify players who know lots about the game… which was an interesting theory. In practice it largely just means you have a Tank, DPS and Healer at the level cap. Also as I found out last night it apparently makes you feel like you need to run around barking orders and throwing shade on how bad you feel the rest of the party was doing. Even though I was attuned for it… I never actually ran the second of the 25 player raids called the Weeping City of Mhach. Collectively folks just call it the “Wiping City” and for good reason… because we died an awful lot but given that it was the first time myself or Grace had been in there… I thought we did largely okay.
The funniest part of the night was the Forgall fight… which involves becoming zombie but not going full zombie and avoiding some things while absolutely standing in others. In short it is the traditional insane dungeon fight that simply requires constant execution… and has mechanics that will straight wipe entire parties. It is a rarity that there are fights where you need to use the healer level three limit break… but during the course of this fight we used it at least twice… and there might have been a third time I didn’t realize. We were at a point where we had no tank and maybe three people total still up, and a bunch of us assumed we were wiping it out and running back. We were wrong… as the “Mentor” continued barking orders and telling people to rez this person or that person… during a contorted fight that felt like it took 20 minutes to finally beat. The truth is I had no clue what I was doing, but I finally got finished off by an actual fight mechanic as one of the attacks takes you to 1 hit point… and requires chain healing to keep the tank from instantly dying afterwards. We had maybe a single healer up at the time and I fell down hard… but just in time for another tank to get rezzed and pick it up. I feel like this was the sort of fight where we needed to play Yakety Sax … but slowed down to the point where it almost sounds like a funeral dirge.
The fight that I got the most enjoyment from however had to be Ozma… an encounter that I had heard about for awhile now. Largely I had heard about it being the group killer, in that it required a lot of moving parts that rarely got coordinated properly among the alliances. Thankfully I was on voice chat with my Free Company and they were able to give me enough of a heads up about what I should be doing. It also helps that early into the fight we lose the entire B alliance, giving me a run seeing the mechanics the first time and then allowing me to take that experience into the second smoother attempt. All in all we nailed it pretty well on the second go, and for the most part by the end of the encounter I learned everything that I needed to do to appropriately tank the fight. The reason we were running Wiping City however was to get me some gear… and unfortunately not a single tanky piece dropped. However I do feel confident enough to probably solo queue tank for the place and start soaking up more gear that way. The risk of playing FFXIV irregularly is that the game moves on without you… and I hit yet another wall with the latest patch. I was sitting at 220 from my last attempt to catch up… and this time around the first dungeon requires 230. There are of course a lot of more grindy ways to catch me up… but we were trying to take as many short cuts as possible.
Before disappearing and flaking out last time I had managed to put in some progress on the 235 weapon from Palace of the Dead and as I talked about yesterday our little run pushed me pretty far… but not quite over the tipping point. So last night once finishing the Wiping City, we broke up into a smaller group and did some Palace of the Dead and over the course of a few runs managed to get me to 39 weapon 32 armor. During all of the stuff I managed to accumulate enough Lore tombstones to upgrade my earrings to 230, and at some point during the evening Tam hooked me up with a set of 250 legs to replace my then lowest slot. I had enough cash accumulated to manage picking up the 250 ring as well since my next lowest slot was that. All together those four pieces of gear pushed me up to exactly 230 item level, and thus makes me viable for a lot more content including the dungeon that is blocking my quest progress. Unfortunately however I have had this patch cycle spoiled for me, because before I remembered to turn off player titles… I actually happened to be running Deep Dungeon with someone that was showing their new title off. Now I am not sure exactly how it is going to go down… but I know something is going to go down. Ultimately that is not necessarily going to ruin the impact, just a bit of a bummer to have it spoiled in a way that really should not have even been a thing. While I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as “caught up”, I am at least in a much better place than I was. I need to do a lot more palace of the dead so that I can pick up the next weapon… but that one requires 60 weapon/armor which is still a very very long ways away. My only revision of that content would be to make the end of sequence mini-boss drop one of whatever your lowest rank happens to be armor or weapon. Also of note… you can see that thanks to the new weapon I did some glamouring and am once more the Bunny Samurai.
It was a truly bizarre weekend for a whole lot of reasons. Primarily because whatever illness my wife had seemed to strike with a vengeance during the tail end of last week. As I said before I was originally planning on going to RiffTrax with work friends on Thursday night but by the time I left work I realized there was no way I could make it through an entire evening. Instead I begged off and went home and crashed on the sofa in my fuzzy blanket cocoon. By the time Friday came around I was really doing considerably worse and took a sick day… which in turn screwed up our evening plans. We were originally slotted to do this monthly family dinner thing, but we rescheduled it for next weekend because I was not sure how well I would be to drive. Instead I returned to the blanket cocoon once more and was as a result available for our normal Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear run. I wound up tanking it, with the stipulation being that I was not going to talk at all. In fact to prevent myself from doing this I muted my microphone…. which lead to a weird run since I am fairly vocal as we make it through the content. To make it even more odd, we were without the OTHER vocal leader Kylana which meant a whole slew of people had to step up to the plate and help make sure the run went smoothly. So seriously huge thanks to Mort, Phy, Beist, Bledd, and I am sure a whole slew of other people who also were chatty and helpful but I am not remembering at this very moment. It was once again a super clean run, and in the end I wound up swapping off for Erry for the final encounter since it generally requires a bit more vocal tank coordination.
Past that night I spent a lot of time piddling around in stuff by myself. Namely this meant an awful lot of Final Fantasy XV, and I think maybe just maybe I am finally to the point where I am willing to move on past “world 1”. As I said before there is a point where the game warns you that if you continue on you might not be able to return for awhile. I took this warning to heart given that I just came from playing Final Fantasy XIV where this sometimes means that a two and a half hour long cut scene is about to happen. Instead over the weekend I found out from some of the other folks playing it that at least in this case… the game is talking about a ten minute process and not a thirty hour long one. In past games these warnings often times meant that you would not be able to return until you found the airship, and I am pleased to find out that this is not the case. At this point though I am running out of things I can actually do in the starter world, and all of the hunts are of a significant level difference from my current level so I think the game is not so subtly telling me to move the hell on.
Another thing that took up some time this weekend is that I tore down a chunk of my office and set up my new Xbox One. For awhile now I have been interested in owning an Xbox One to be able to play the titles that don’t exist on the PS4. Similarly there is an entire group of friends that I have that are on the Xbox path, and I have not been able to play with them. Unfortunately there were really no titles that supported Xbox 360 crossplay with Xbox One, so as each of them has upgraded… my options similarly narrowed. While I have had this latent desire… I also just could not justify the street price for the console given that I am primarily a PC gamer first… and a Console gamer second. However on Black Friday I actually partook of a deal on Dell.com for an Xbox One, Extra Controller, Headset, and Five Games: Halo 5 Limited Edition, Farcry 4, Ryze Legendary Edition, Sunset Overdrive, and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes all for right at $200. For this I was willing to jump on it and the box arrived at my house Saturday during the day… and I wound up setting it up after editing the podcast on Sunday morning. There was another deal on Cyber Monday to pick up a copy of the Destiny Collection for the Xbox One for I believe $25 and I jumped on that too, so while I was installing other things… I ported over my Xbox 360 copy of Destiny. Firstly since I am largely a digital only gamer on PS4… I did not realize the whole download after installation was as much of a tedious chore as it actually was. Halo 5 took a good three hours worth of download time, which I found insane and shocking. Is this what disc copy gamers on the PS4 have to deal with as well? or is this largely just an Xbox One thing? In any case… I was kinda happy to see that my PS4 clan tag ported over to the Xbox One, and while I will still primarily be playing Destiny on PS4, I want to level something to hang with my friends playing on the Xbone.
I’ve decided to start linking the podcast on Monday mornings in what generally ends up being a weekend rundown post. Not that I think there is anyone who doesn’t have access to it… but just in case the youtube version embeds nicely. The other big take away from the weekend was all of the food that we cooked. We wound up having a weekend full of comfort food, cooked in the crock pot. So Friday night before going to bed I threw our breakfast casserole on to cook so that when we woke up Saturday morning it was ready. This dish consists of egg, cheese, potato, ham and sausage and it amazing. We wound up eating on it for breakfast and lunch on Sunday as well… and still have a bunch left over. My wife had the bright idea to turn it into a breakfast burrito with a little salsa. We also cooked our Chicken and Cheese Tortilla soup, which we only got two meals out of… well and an extra helping or two. Finally on Sunday we tried out this Orange Chicken thing… that is close but not quite there. It was good enough but it needs something to make it work properly… and I think I screwed it up by putting the rice directly in the sauce and letting it cook. I should have simply made a couple cups of rice and then ladled the sauce over it instead. In any case… my wife and I are both largely on the mend but we pretty much spent the entire weekend hibernating. We started taking some OTC meds when it initially hit and I think it helped out quite a bit.
Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tam talk mostly about Final Fantasy XV
Belghast laments the feeling of not exactly knowing what day it is… as we return from our Thanksgiving break to start the show once more. This week there really is only one game we could be talking about that that is Final Fantasy XV which has all of us playing it… in completely different styles. We try our best to talk about non spoilery elements of the game, and mostly talk about the look and feel and play style. Additionally we talk a bit about The Game Awards and some of the announcements and games footage that was shown there. Similarly we talk a bit about the Playstation Experience and a few of the games that were shown there as well. Finally we wrap up with some discussion about Moebius Final Fantasy and how it has become Tam’s new sleepytime game.
