MMO

On Dancing

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Blaugust Post #10

Last night, our Monday raid beat up Bismarck (Extreme). It helped a lot to have Belghast, who cleared it with the Wednesday group last week, but it was still the first kill for 5 of us. Bismarck is one long DPS check, but more than that it’s the kind of “controlled chaos” fight that the Monday group excels at with AOEs flying everywhere and weather changes that have to be reacted to appropriately. Clearing this fight opens up our way to Thok ast Thok (Extreme) and the hardest current encounter in the game outside of Alexander (Savage).

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As suits his music, Ravana asks you to dance. It’s the kind of intensely structured encounter where you need to know what’s coming, as reacting to it is generally not going to be fast enough; it’s kind of like Titan in this sense. In addition to his normal abilities, Ravana has a series of attacks called “Liberations” (Prelude to Liberation, Liberation, Swift Liberation, and Final Liberation). Each of these is a 15 second cast (he takes bonus damage while using these) that ends with a very choreographed attack pattern. These vary in difficulty from “You remember Ifrit EX, right?” to “What madman came up with this nonsense?”.

Fortunately, all is not lost, and Someone came up with these simple animations to show one way of dealing with what’s going on. I love it when players do awesome things like this, because trying to explain Final Liberation in just text requires a lot longer than the 54 seconds of this video. Understanding how and why it works that way isn’t really something you can get from the video, so there are some drawbacks there too.

Our Own Convention

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Noble Aspirations

This is potentially going to be one of the stranger morning blog posts I have made in awhile.  Yesterday during the midst of another conversation entirely I planted a seed, and got a significantly more favorable response than I had expected.  Essentially I have thought for awhile how awesome it would be to have some event that let all of the great people I know through gaming or blogging to meet up, hang out, and cause mischief.  This year it was my hope to be able to make Pax Prime since there are a significant number of people in the Seatle area now.  The problem being by the time I even knew the tickets had gone on sale, they were already completely sold out.  Our backup plan was to try and get AggroChat qualified for press passes, but we were summarily rejected without much notice as to why.  Every major convention has this same issue, with having way more demand than there are tickets available for folks to attend.  So this sent me down an alternate line of thinking…  maybe we just need to create our own convention.  I know that sounds crazy at first glance but bear with me for awhile.

My wife is heavily involved in the twitter math community, and five years ago they were lamenting how every single professional development workshop they have been to was essentially a waste of time.  One discussion lead to another, and the idea was mentioned that what they really needed was a way to get together so that they could share ideas.  From there they organized the very first Twitter Math Camp in St Louis, and it was a huge success.  That first year only around fifty teachers attended, but each additional year it has grown to this year in Los Angeles there were over 200 teachers.  So seeing this go from someones vague idea to fruition maybe gives me a different perspective than the average person when it comes to the thought of forming our own convention.  I mean ultimately that is how most gathering start, with a basic idea and then just branching out from there.

Our Own Convention

 

I loved Pax South, but not really because the convention itself was this magical place.  The floor was busy, and there were so many people wandering around that it became hell to find a quiet spot to yourself to think.  What made the convention awesome was getting to hang out with people that I had only ever talked to online.  When I realized this… I realized that I didn’t actually need a convention to have fun, but in truth could potentially have more fun if I just somehow managed to gather up a bunch of people in one place and time.  Even if we quite literally did nothing but hang out and play board games and talk about life, it would still end up being an amazing experience.  That said I do think we could convince enough people to show up to make it an interesting experience for all of us.  Think about the sort of things we go through with the Newbie Blogger Initiative each year, and ultimately how much we learn from one another.  It would be easy enough to throw together a series of panels discussing the finer points of various blogging skills that we have.  I mean it would be pretty awesome to record an impromptu live Podcast for example, or a technical discussion in how to get the most out of WordPress.  There are real things we could talk about, and with that many game bloggers in one spot we might even be able to talk some game companies into showing up as well.  Maybe I am brutally naive… but I think it is a thing that might be doable.

Location, Location, Location

I literally have thought about this for awhile now, and those thought processes were just made more concrete after returning from Pax.  I’ve long thought that the best place for a meetup would be in a central state.  Conventions have this problem of being super convenient for people living on one particular coast, but damned near impossible for anyone else to attend.  So after a lot of thinking basically I came up with two potential locations.

  • St Louis, Missouri
  • Chicago, Illinois

Both locations have strengths and weaknesses, but both are also fairly centrally located making it not too horrible from pretty much anywhere in the United States, and potentially even doable for Canadians.  St Louis is significantly easier for me personally… because I know the town decently well and have several friends in the area that I could potentially recruit to help.  Chicago on the other hand… other than flying through O’Hare I know nothing about it, and I really have zero support structure to help out with the planning and the details.  Its biggest strength however is O’Hare airport, because essentially it is a straight flight from any major airport cutting down the overall travel costs.  That said St Louis hotels, venue rentals, and pretty much everything else would be significantly cheaper which might offset the travel costs.  All of this said… they both have strengths and weaknesses, but as I said my personal leanings are towards St Louis simply for the familiarity point.

I guess the ultimate question is…  would some sort of convention/meetup be something that our community would even be interested in?  We would have to set a date well into the future and begin planning now to make it work, but before any of that… I need to know if people would actually come.  I think it could be a really awesome experience, and if nothing else let a whole bunch of people that have only ever communicated online hang out and get to know each other.  I also think there is a lot of cool stuff we could learn from each other, so I feel like it could be more than just a “gathering”.  Over the last several years we have gone from being a vague connection of island states, to being a serious and formidable community constantly welcoming new people.  Blaugust while stressful, is an amazing event and just one in a long line of events that we do each year.  While I jokingly referred to this as BlaugustCon… it is more than just that.  I think we could build something amazing in the real world in addition to all of what we are doing in the virtual world.  Like I said.. the real question is do people even want this?  I don’t often ask for feedback, but in this situation I absolutely need it.  Leave me a line and let me know your thoughts.

Communing with Fae

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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

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.

Communing with Fae

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

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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

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.