All posts by Ashgar

Gaming

On San Antonio

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As you may or may not be aware, I spent this past weekend at PAX South, with Belghast and Rae. I had a really fun time, and it was my first time seeing both of them in person, despite talking to them over the internet for years. They’re both awesome, and it made for a really fun day to wander around with them on Saturday.

This was the first annual PAX South, so my only point of comparison is PAX East in previous years. Compared to that, this show was a little smaller, and quite a bit more relaxed. Very few of the bigger publishers came at all, and Nintendo was the only representative of the Big 3 (And even then, they were only there to show off their New 3DS). As a result, the biggest booths belonged to Twitch and a pair of companies I’d never heard of before: Motiga and Greybox. Sadly, Greybox’s booth was incredibly crowded the entire time and so I didn’t get to see much of their games (Grey Goo and Dreadnought). Here are my highlights from the show:

A Gigantic Success

Gigantic is my game of the show, despite having to overcome some major obstacles: I knew nothing about it going in, I generally don’t like competitive shooters (I did have a small bit of enjoyment with Tribes a while back), and I’m already invested in a particular MOBA (League of Legends). Knowing nothing about it other than it controlled with WASD, I was seated in a group where 8 people had played before, and only Rae and I had not. After someone else on our team picked the minotaur-looking thing I was initially going to play, I opted for the dragon, and this turned out to be a great choice. Playing was a lot of fun, and it wasn’t until after we finished that I learned that it was Angry Joe on the other side of the table.

It turns out Gigantic isn’t entirely a shooter or a MOBA, but it does take elements from both.I think I have a lot more to say about this one than I’m willing to put in a PAX blurb, so look for that in the near future.

Charnok

This Feels Familiar

I’m not going to say Brawlhalla is Smash Brothers without Nintendo characters, but it would be hard to complete this paragraph without that statement. It’s a 2D Brawler in the Smash Bros. style with a few differences. For starters, the game revolves around the weapon system, where each character has a small selection of possible weapon pickups that they can get from picking up glowing swords scattered around the battlefield. Gnash, for example, can get either a hammer or a spear. Some characters have shared weapons, but they have a few unique moves with each. Another thing is that all of the characters have three jumps and Mega Man X-style wall sliding/jumping, so recovery is less emphasized and most KOs are going to be via a direct ejection. The primary thing it seems to have over Smash Bros is that it’s on the PC, so we’ll have to see if that’s enough.

Brawlhalla 1

More Strategic Than Pokémon

Moonrise is a game I find interesting, not only for the claims I heard from Jeff Strain at PAX, from whose words I took this section title. In all honestly Moonrise reminds me more of Jade Cocoon than Pokémon, given the limited set of elements and ability for your player character to actually fight. It departs from most creature battling games by being pseudo-real-time, with actions that take certain amounts of time to perform, ATB-style. This does open up the possibility of things like interrupts and forces you to make decisions faster, so we’ll see how it shakes out. It’s already out if you’re in Canada, Sweden, or Denmark and own an iPad. Hopefully it’ll come out elsewhere soon.

moonrise

Mark of Shame Award

I just feel the need to say that as the closest major Dev, Gearbox should have shown up with something awesome, and they barely came at all. Everything they had to say was part of a mini-panel, and since the panels were in their specific rooms and not on the schedule it was hard to plan around them. Other than the panel, they didn’t have anything really on display. When I even asked about Battleborn, they just told me to look at the website.

The runner-up for this one is Riot Games. I can see why they wouldn’t bring their big booth, but their panel left a lot to be desired. They originally had a pair of panels scheduled for Saturday, one in the afternoon and one in the late evening, with no indication of what they were going to show. By Saturday, the afternoon panel was announced as one on Champion Design, and the late panel was cancelled. The afternoon panel consisted of Ghostcrawler asking four other Riot employees champion design questions, followed by a Q&A. The minimalism of this panel (especially compared to other things Riot’s done in the past) makes me wonder if whatever they had planned on showing just wasn’t ready. I guess we’ll never know.

And the Rest

Hive Jump was on display, and it looks like it’s shaping up to be awesome. I backed it when it was on kickstarter, so that’s always nice to see. Faded is running a kickstarter right now, and looks like it might be cool if they can get a few things worked out. I also played a game called Pixel with some interesting ideas, although I’m not sure if it’s my sort of game.

Overall I found far more good than bad at the show, so I hope that future incarnations of it are successful. With there being 3 options for PAX in this country now, it’s my hope that more people get a chance to experience it. I’m off to go play more Citizens of Earth, so until next time.

Gaming, MMO

On Repeatability

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This is an expansion of some of my thoughts from the Podcast this past week, specifically regarding raiding in FFXIV. At this point I’m raiding one night a week, and would consider myself fairly casual, but the group I’m raiding with is awesome. After struggling with it for a few weeks, we cleared Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut in mid-December. I’ve since cleared it 3 more times, twice with the same group and once with another group from our server. Some spoilers for the fight follow, so if you want to go into it blind, you should stop reading. (Also, don’t go into it blind. It’s a long fight with lots of moving parts, there’s plenty to learn even if you know what to expect.)

Because Reasons

One of the things that distinguishes our raid group from many others is our continued tendency to ask why certain elements of strategies exist. When learning Turn 2, we experimented with killing different nodes to see what the options for clearing to ADS actually are. Killing a node removes that ability from ADS, but adds a buff. Rot passing is required (if you’re doing the fight traditionally) because killing the Quarantine Node (which grants ADS the Allagan Rot ability) grants an overwhelming haste buff which makes the fight unhealable. As a result of this asking why, we’ve gained a pretty good understanding of a decent number of mechanics in Turn 5.

There are an amazing number of mechanics that instantly kill you in this one, which is probably a part of why it takes so much to learn. The following things will kill you with no save if not handled properly:

  • Conflagration (Phase 2)
  • The wall of the arena (All phases, most relevant in Phase 3)
  • Twintania’s big attack (end of Phase 3)
  • Twister (Phase 4)
  • Dreadknight (Phase 4)
  • Hatch (Phase 5)

The only randomness in almost all of these is who is targeted, and almost all strategies aim to reduce or eliminate the effect of random chance in this. Regardless of who gets conflag, they always move to the same place. The “Divebomb dance” if done correctly allows everyone to dodge no matter who is targeted. (It has the added benefit of allowing people who don’t dodge well to not get flung into the wall.) You can’t tell who Twisters pick, so everyone moves. The threat of the dreadknight is reduced if no one (except the tank) is near the middle. Hatch can be completely eliminated as a threat if the off-tank takes every one in the final neurolink.

Perfect Practice

As a direct result of this, the ability for the fight to screw you via RNG is fairly low, and I’ve observed this for most of the fights I’ve done so far. Fights can be practiced, mistakes can be identified, and eventually, victory can be achieved. Even things that seem like they could be random (Titan jails 2 people) aren’t as random as they look (Titan always jails a healer and a DPS) and can be planned for. Some mistakes are more forgiving than in certain other games because all healers (and also summoners) can raise during battle.

At the same time, the required amount of personal responsibility for all players is far higher than many other games. Part of this is the 8-person group size for “hard” content, which means the loss of even one player means you just lost ~25% of the group’s DPS and might not make a DPS check because of it. Some fights (Titan, Leviathan, I’m looking at you) don’t allow for the element of recovery I mentioned earlier, because once you’re knocked off of the platform, you’re dead until the next attempt. I feel like these mostly balance each other out; random personal responsibility feels unfair (See: Teron Gorefiend in WoW’s Black Temple), but it doesn’t feel quite so bad here. Because fights really do play out the same way almost every time, it’s possible to reliably get farther with each attempt, and that’s something I didn’t feel like was always true in my previous raiding experience. Maybe my group really is just that awesome.

Gaming, MMO

On Tank Training

As those of you who pay attention on Twitter may have noted, I’ve been having some issues with the state of tanks in low-level instances in Fina Fantasy 14 lately. While I level my complaints directly at Riot Blade (and Gladiators in particular) that’s not really the core of the issue. MMOs are bad at teaching you how to play them, and for a role like a tank, that’s A Problem. Rather than continue to berate anonymous Gladiators for not knowing better, I’d just like to clear up a few things. While this post focuses on Gladiators/Paladins, some of it is also applicable to Marauders/Warriors as well. For a few reasons (*cough*) marauders tend not to have the same problems at low levels.

Maintaining Threat

While I’m not going to claim that it’s always easy (it’s not), tanking in FF14 isn’t terribly complicated. Your job in any given pull is to keep all of the enemies attacking you until all of them are dead, and also doing the best you can to keep yourself alive while doing this.The second part could be its own post, so I’ll stick to explaining the first. FF14, like many other MMOs at this point, uses a threat system (usually referred to in-game as “enmity”) to determine what enemies attack (most of the time). Tanks have abilities that are very good at generating threat, and using these liberally is one of the keys to being successful. To track you you’re doing, the party list and the enemy list both have different ways to display your current threat.

First, the enemy list tracks your threat status on all enemies, with green for low threat, yellow for medium, orange for high, flashing orange for a last chance warning, and red for when something has enough threat to attack you (aggro). (These are also all different shapes so they can be differentiated even with color blindness.) Tanks should strive to keep this as red as possible. The party list tracks who in your party has the most threat on your current target. Because the enemy list unfortunately doesn’t have a color for “about to lose aggro”, this is the only real way to see when someone else is getting dangerously high on threat. it can be helpful (especially if you have a Summoner or Black Mage in your party) to tab between enemies and see if any of them are doing unfortunate things.

party list enemy list

Why Riot Blade is a Trap

For Gladiators, the abilities that do bonus threat are (in the order you get them) Savage Blade, Flash, Shield Lob, Rage of Halone, and Circle of Scorn. That last one only comes in at 50 and isn’t really relevant to this discussion. The problem lies between the levels of 12 and 26, where you have access to Riot Blade but not Rage of Halone. This means that for damage, the ideal combo is Fast Blade->Riot Blade, and out in the world this is perfectly fine. However, Riot Blade wasn’t on that list I mentioned earlier, so in dungeons you’ll lose threat to the classes that do more damage than you (which is to say all of them) if you use that combo exclusively. Fast Blade->Savage Blade amplifies the bonus threat on savage Blade, and keeps things where they should be: attacking you. Riot Blade does have a use, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Riot Blade

Provoke and You

Provoke is a Gladiator ability earned at Level 22, and currently holds the spot of “most required cross-class skill in the game” for Warriors. (If you are playing a Warrior and you do not have this skill cross-classed, get those extra few levels of Gladiator right now.) It’s the game’s only true taunt, so it’s essential for tank swaps, and it can be helpful when you lose aggro on a particular enemy. However, Provoke works by giving you threat equal to whoever the current highest threat person is, plus one point. This means that unless you immediately take some other threat-causing action, you’ll lose the target immediately. It also means that if you pull with provoke, you have exactly one point of threat and any action taken by anyone else will pull off of you. Shield Lob does have bonus threat attached, and should be used for pulling whenever possible.*

*There are edge cases where provoke’s longer range allows it to be useful for pulling, usually to grab a patrolling enemy.

Mooglesguard

Savior of the Universe

Flash is essential for Gladiator tanking. It does no damage, but a lot of threat to all enemies near you; I guess they don’t like light shining in their eyes or something. The range is just barely longer than melee range, so don’t use it expecting to hit enemies halfway across the room (and if you use it running in you’ll probably hit nothing). Flash is your only tool to build threat on multiple enemies simultaneously between when you get it at level 8 and when you get Circle of Scorn at level 50. Even if you use high-threat attacks on your primary target, not using Flash will result in everything else running to murder your healer as soon as they heal you once. Using it once is frequently not enough, either. How many times you should use it and how frequently varies depending on your personal gear, how many enemies there are, how long they’re likely to live, and if anyone in your party is using AOE attacks (attacks that hit multiple targets). Belghast’s recommendation from today’s post is generally a good one: Pull with Shield Lob, Flash twice once things are near you, and Savage Blade combo until dead.

Since Flash does eat a decent chunk of your MP bar, the only acceptable use of Riot Blade in dungeons is to earn back the MP to use Flash more. It can be useful, particularly if you have DPS that are level synced from 50, to tank by spamming just Flash until you are out of MP and using the Riot Blade combo only when you can’t use Flash.

DODGE

Adventurer in Need

There are some additional nuances, but what’s here is enough to carry you through until you hit 50, provided you also remember not to stand in glowing red things. I hope this helps beginning Gladiators; If you are one of them and you’re in the low-level queue, I thank you for making the queue shorter for the rest of us.

Gaming

On Playing With Your Favorites, Part 2

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Knowing the details about all of the hidden stats in Pokémon is enough to get your foot in the door, but to do well you have to do a bit more than that. Understanding the state of the meta is important, and it’s one of the few things that Nintendo can’t streamline. Team construction is therefore one of the most important parts of the game.

Mind Reading, 101

Building a successful team usually starts with a goal. The ultimate goal is to reduce the HP of your opponent’s pokémon to zero while keeping them from doing the same to you, but how this is accomplished varies. A lot of people have a particular pokémon that they want to force through, and some interesting teams have been formed from oddball choices here. Since the introduction of Mega Evolution, many people build their team on allowing their chosen mega to beat their opponent. Se Jun Park’s Worlds Team was an example of this; it focused on getting Mega Gyarados strong, and disrupting its counters. Other teams have more tricky goals.

team
Once you have a goal, it’s important to consider obstacles to that goal, which is where the mind reading comes in. It’s impossible to completely predict everything that your opponents might bring, but it’s helpful to have an idea of what you might face. Nugget Bridge is one of the best ways to do this, as they like to keep track of usage statistics across major tournaments. The Pokémon Company also helps a bit, as they track a top 12 on the website and report on the moves and abilities of every pokémon on the ladder. Trying to bring an answer to everything at once is futile, but in broad classes it’s possible to make good preparations.

Mind Reading, 102

Once you have a team, and you’re relatively confident, you still have to actually play the game. One thing that requires adjusting is that (especially in singles) players switch pokémon fairly often, where the in-game trainers essentially never do. To go along with this, being aware of when your opponent is likely to switch and what they might switch to is essential, and learning to predict well is what makes the really good players great. There’s a very strong element of mindgames here. For example, Se Jun’s Pachirisu had Follow Me, a move that forces all opposing pokémon to choose it for attacks. But even the psychology of that is important:

Pachirisu is very good against Electric-types due to Volt Absorb, especially in the later stages of a game. Therefore, it dissuades my opponent from using those attacks in the first place, so I don’t actually have to use Follow Me very often. As such, I can use Nuzzle and Super Fang very often, which makes Pachirisu amazing in doubles.

Prediction is also required when switching. If you have your opponent in a very obvious bad matchup, you might want to think about what they might switch to in order to get out of it, and act accordingly. But if you out-predict yourself and they don’t switch, you might lose out on a potential KO on the thing you’re facing in the first place. It’s vital to balance options like this against each other. In a way, it’s a bit like fighting games, only turn-based.

Class Dismissed

That’s enough on this topic, I think. Now that you have enough knowledge to hurt yourself, I recommend heading over to Nugget Bridge if you want to know more, or get into this sort of thing yourself. My Friend Code is 4897-6120-6518, but don’t count on me for any battles at the moment. Regardless, feel free to add me (and let me know if you do). Good luck in your battles to come!

Gaming, MMO

On Au Ra

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The new race for Final Fantasy 14 has finally been announced. I’m personally choosing to treat this as FF14’s personal birthday gift to me, even though the timing is a bit off. The phrase “Don’t stop pretending you’re a dragon” (from the PS4 Conference abridged) has gotten a lot of use within our circle, and now FF14 is giving me another way to pretend.

au ra

Missing Something

I was torn on what race to initially play when we started playing FF14. I really liked the Galka in FF11, and my legacy character in FF14 was a Roegadyn. I initially passed on Roegadyn because male Miqo’te were added in 2.0, and unlike Galka, Roegadyn do not have tails. Turns out that’s important to me, as I used a Fantasia to change to Roegadyn last year, and changed back when I felt that I just liked my character less that way. I tend to like the big races however (I played mostly Tauren and Draenei in WoW) and as the second-shortest race Miqo’te are certainly not that.

Roegadyn Ash
One of the very few shots of Ash as a Roegadyn

Scales & Claws

The Au Ra appear to be almost exactly what I wanted. They’re dragon-people, with horns and tails and claws and scales, but with a basically human facial structure. That last part is probably important because of how much FF14 likes to use and abuse the fact that your character is a silent protagonist; it allows the player characters to remain expressive in recognizable ways. I’ve always taken a liking to the less-human race options in most games, because being a human is boring. The nature of the Final Fantasy 14 world means that actual non-humans aren’t likely to be an option soon or ever, but I’ll take what I can get. In addition to the horns and tails, Au Ra are a bit unusual in that they display more sexual dimorphism than the current races. I’m not sure this was entirely necessary (Female Roegadyn seem to be fairly well received), but I guess it might be a bit late to take back Yugiri’s appearance.

Fantasia

I find it somewhat interesting that character re-customization is just cheap enough that it’s a semi-common occurrence, but not cheap enough that people do it all the time. Also, after being subscribed for a month, you get one free Fantasia (which lets you change everything about your character except the name). Any additional ones are $10, with a bulk discount if you feel you really need that sort of thing. This is reasonable to me, and priced competitively with other games. (For reference, changes like this in WoW cost $15 if you don’t change races and $25 if you do, but a name change is included. Square charges an additional $10 for that, which is the same as a rename by itself costs in WoW.) When Heavensward comes out there are likely to be screenshots of Ash the Au Ra, and I’m looking forward to it.

Gaming

On Playing With Your Favorites

Pokémon is one of the most interesting game series in recent memory in terms of both depth and accessibility. Each game releases is really two games in one; the first is a relatively simple RPG where you level up, collect (usually) 8 badges, challenge the Pokémon League, and possibly save the world (or at least the local area) along the way. Behind that is a vastly more complex set of mechanics and features relating to breeding, raising, and capturing pokémon for the purposes of battling competitively. Game Freak somehow manages to cater to both aspects with nearly every release.

The most recent release is the second pair of games in Generation 6, Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby (OR/AS from here on out). Each generation so far has brought refinements on what came before, along with new pokémon and new areas to explore (or in some cases, areas to re-explore). There are currently 719 pokémon (with 2 unrevealed event legendaries) and 18 types across 6 regions, and not all are created equal. Variances in type combinations, movesets, abilities, and stats mean that some options tend to overshadow others. For example: why use Pikachu when Jolteon is faster, can hit harder, and has a generally more useful ability? Despite that point, you can beat the game with Pikachu. I feel like one of the great successes of Pokémon is that “because I like it” is perfectly viable for getting through the surface game. Playing against other people is a bit of a different story (but that didn’t prevent this year’s world champ from winning with a Pachirisu).

what-draco-meteor

The First Steps

At this point, making it through the game is relatively easy. Generation 5 introduced a catch-up experience mechanic, where experience was adjusted based on the relative levels of the pokémon involved in order to help keep the team relatively balanced. Gen 6 got rid of this, but revamped how the Exp Share item worked, causing it to distribute experience to your entire team whether or not they participated (which goes a long way in keeping your team relatively close in level). Grinding is therefore not terribly necessary, unless you do something like replace your entire team at once. I will admit that the type chart is still rather complicated, and having at least some knowledge of it is highly important, but learning the basic relationships mostly makes sense, and obscure ones don’t come up that often (I never remember what ghost or electricity resist, but ghost pokémon aren’t that common and electric pokémon tend to fall over in a stiff breeze). In gyms you usually can get some sort of type-related tip at the start, before you face specialists for that type.

The plot in most of the games is quite linear, with progress gated by badges. Figuring out where to go next is not usually a problem; it’s almost always the local gym or the next nearest city with a gym, and the plot usually tells you in great detail when it’s not either of those. Most of the non-remake games since Generation 4 have been trying to simplify travel too, usually by a reduction in required HMs. Black/White for example, only requires cut exactly once to beat the game. OR/AS reduces some of the backtracking that was a component of the originals by letting you automatically travel with some of the other characters to the next destination.

As far as what pokémon to use, nearly anything is viable. A well-balanced team will usually have more success because you can get more favorable type matchups, but this isn’t strictly necessary. An otherwise unfavorable type matchup can be overcome with levels, abilities, moves, or some combination of these. It’s important to remember that like most Nintendo games, it’s uncomplicated enough that children can pick up and beat the game.

basic pokémon

The next steps

When you beat the game, you might start wondering about battling other people, and the knowledge and effort involved in this process is anything but uncomplicated. In my opinion, this is where the refinements really show. I’m probably about to talk about some things that will seem nonsensical if you aren’t already somewhat familiar with Pokémon, but stick with it.

Effort Values (EVs) and Inherited Values (IVs) are numbers that affect a pokémon’s stats, and prior to generation 6 they were almost entirely invisible (IVs still pretty much are). As the name might imply, IVs are essentially a pokémon’s genes; they’re an unchangeable characteristic of a given pokémon and never change once it’s caught or received. Each pokémon has a value ranging from 0-31 for each stat providing a random stat bonus. This is one of several ways in which any two pokémon of a given species may have different stats. The only way to “improve” these is via breeding parents with good ones to make children with better ones. Prior to Gen 6, a max of 3 of these values (out of a total of 6) could be inherited, so the end result was still at least 50% completely random. Gen 6 allowed 5 of these values to be passed down if one of the parents is holding a particular item, making it far easier to get near-perfect pokémon. (Most pokémon only use one of the two attacking stats anyway, so 5 stats is sufficient.) EVs are different and are mostly earned by playing the game. Super Training was added to provide a way to raise these without battle, but more importantly you can see what your progress is in the super training readout, and reset them if you want to redo something. Prior to that, resetting them involved force-feeding a bunch of berries and there was no indication of how many it would take. (For the record, the expensive vitamins that claim to raise a pokémon’s stats raise their EVs.)

Other changes to breeding have also made the entire process generally more reliable. Pokémon have an increased chance to have the same ability as their mother (or the non-ditto when breeding with ditto) instead of the coin flip it used to be. It’s now possible to pass down a nature 100% of the time, instead of 50% of the time or not at all. It’s now possible to pass down egg moves from either parent (instead of just the male parent). While there are still random components involved (Nidoran family, I’m looking at you) it’s far less random and time-consuming each game to get “competitive-quality pokémon”.

selfish perception
This went on longer than originally intended, so more on this topic later. Until then, have fun!

Gaming

On Honorable Mentions

Recently, Aggrochat discussed our Games of the Year for 2014. It’s been an interesting year for game releases, but we still managed to find a large number of games to talk about. My personal top 5 for the year is Transistor, Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, Pokémon Omega Ruby/Alpha Spphire, Shovel Knight, and Infamous: Second Son, but I feel like there were some other games that came out this year that deserve recognition. Some of them got mentioned in the podcast (most notably Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Divinity: Original Sin, which I am not talking about because I haven’t played as much of them as I’d like), but here are 5 more games that were not mentioned in no particular order that make the GOTY Honorable Mentions list.

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS/Wii U

This one couldn’t make the main list because I haven’t given it as much time as I’d like. A lot of the annoyances in Brawl (like tripping) are gone, but the changes aren’t entirely favorable to the characters I played most in previous games (Marth & Pikachu). I find the game a bit awkward to play on the 3DS, but the Wii U version already feels like an old friend. The new characters are pretty cool, especially Bowser Jr. and Mega Man. I haven’t tried online play, but I hear that’s also much improved from Brawl. There are a lot of interesting new ideas (Great Cave Offensive, Crazy Orders, 8-player Smash) but some that fall flat (Smash Tour). Overall, I do think this is the best version of Smash Bros. to date, and it’s a welcome addition to the Wii U’s library.

Crimzon Clover: World Ignition

I wrote about this one already, but I think it’s the best scrolling shooter currently on Steam. This version of Crimzon Clover is a re-release of a game that technically came out in 2011, but the World Ignition release is the game’s first release in English, so it counts for this year. The variations between the modes and ship choices keep the gameplay interesting, and the difficulty levels mean that it can be played without getting your face immediately punched in. That said, it’s no walk in the park, and I’d have a hard time recommending it as someone’s first game in the genre. I do recommend it to anyone who likes flying small objects into showers of bullets while wielding overwhelming firepower.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call

I wrote about this one already, too. If Game of the Year were decided by how much time I played any given game this year, the winner would be Final Fantasy 14. The runner up would probably be Theatrhythm. I really love rhythm games, and I don’t think any other good ones came out this year. The RPG-structure and soundtrack for this one also increases its personal appeal. Playing along to things like “Torn From the Heavens” is awesome, and tracks like “Tempus Finis” make me look forward to Type-0 HD this upcoming year. I hope there’s a Theatrhythm Kingdom Hearts at some point in the future; Theatrhythm Dragon Quest was recently announced.

Mario Kart 8

Mario Kart 8 deserves recognition for a few reasons. It presents exactly what’s expected of a Mario Kart game (although it is thankfully a bit lighter on the Blue Shells than Mario Kart 7). It’s fun in local multiplayer and online, and it’s had one of the better DLC releases I’ve seen from any game in a while. It’s also worth noting that the game is really pretty with a lot of detail in both the courses and the racers (who interact with each other in small ways when close). The course selection (both new and retro) is pretty awesome, including one of my favorites from the DS game, Tick Tock Clock. The antigrav mechanics work well and change things up just enough to make it interesting.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

If you like South Park and Paper Mario-esque RPGs, you should play this game. It’s funny, inappropriate, and quite fun. It’s somewhat easy to forget about because it came out in March, but I found it entertaining all the way through. In addition to all of the things South Park normally makes fun of, it also likes to make fun of RPG and video game conventions while cheerfully making use of them. It picks up where the Black Friday episodes of South Park leave off, so watching those is recommended. It’s probably not as strong of an RPG mechanically as Divinity or Dragon Age, but I still haven’t beaten either of those, and Stick of Truth kept me going until the very end.

Farewell, 2014

It wasn’t the best year for AAA releases, but it wasn’t a bad year in games, all things considered. I hope some of the issues of this year stay in this year (which is just wishful thinking) but there are lessons to be learned going forward. Here’s hoping that 2015 doesn’t disappoint (and that Ori and the Blind Forest gets a solid release date).

Gaming, MMO

On Jumping Good

The developers of Final Fantasy 14 have been very slow to make balance changes. The last patch to make major balance changes before last week was in December of last year, with major Warrior buffs, Summoner nerfs, and quality of life improvements for just about everyone. With Ninjas coming in with patch 2.4, it became clear that there were some balance issues between them and the existing melee DPS Jobs. As I’ve mentioned earlier, Dragoons had a few issues with positional requirements and magic defense that Ninjas and Monks did not share. I expected the patch to address these, and maybe nerf Ninjas a bit. (Ninjas were balanced on the assumption that Ninjutsu is hard, and it sort of isn’t. More on that later.)

What actually happened was beyond the wildest dreams of every Dragoon player I know. Buffs were received in multiple places, addressing both survivability and damage. The required math to figure out where they ended up in relation to the other classes is beyond me, but I have my suspicions.

Potency ↑

A few abilities got flat damage increases. Full Thrust went up by 30 potency (and so Life Surge -> Full Thrust became better burst). Both dots (Phlebotomize and Chaos Thrust) went up by 5 potency per tick (for a total of 30 and 50). The direct damage portion of Chaos Thrust also went up by 50 when used from behind; I’m pretty sure at 600 total that’s the highest displayed potency on any single target ability across all classes.

Impulse Drive didn’t get a potency increase, but now has full potency from all sides of the enemy (which incidentally means that it’s the only offensive ability you should use other than heavy thrust before Level 26). To go along with this, the positional requirements on all combo steps have been essentially eliminated (Heavy Thrust and Chaos Thrust still do more damage from the side/rear), and combos can no longer be “missed” by positioning incorrectly.

Cooldown ↓

The Dragoon’s signature Jump ability had its cooldown reduced from 40 seconds to 30 seconds. In addition to the straight damage increase this represents, it also allows it to line up nicely with Power Surge. Life Surge’s cooldown also decreased.

As a related note, I personally think that the way Ninjutsu’s 20 second cooldown aligns nicely with the ninja’s ability set is why that class was not as hard to play as anticipated. A 1-minute long rotation of Huton, Suiton, and Raiton overlays over the “standard” rogue rotation in a mostly predictable way.

Survivability ↑

The most important change in this patch for Dragoon survivability is that the magic defense on their armor increased to be equal to the amount on comparable Ninja/Monk armor. This change alone means a lot for survivability in boss fights, and it allowed us to use Dragoons as fireball soaks in T5 this past week. In addition, the cooldown that melee like to use at the worst times, Blood for Blood, had the damage taken component reduced for Dragoons only. (Monks and Ninjas can continue to kill themselves with it.) Combined, these might mean that Dragoons survive the boss AOE they’ll inevitably get hit with.

The End of loldrg?

Dragoon is still the melee that is perceived as being the easiest to play, and playing either of the other two optimally requires running it up to 34 anyway (for the aforementioned Blood for Blood). Because of this, there are a lot of potential dragoons, and some of them are still… unfortunate. The past two weeks have taught me that while good dragoon players are amazing, bad dragoon players are still bad, and no amount of patching is likely to fix that.

Maybe next game, guys.

Gaming

On The Road

This is going to be an interesting week. I’m packing up and moving halfway across the country for the 3rd time in my life, so computer access for the next few days is likely to be hard to come by. As a result, portable games are going to be the way of things for a little while.

The Summoner’s Journey

All the talk about FFX-2 on the podcast actually got me playing FFX on the Vita. The game is a bit prettier than I remember (which is the entire point of an HD remake, I suppose) and still plays pretty well. The Expert Sphere Grid (which was not in the North American release of the original) actually does a lot to fix one of my major complaints about the game. For the vast majority of the main game, everyone is locked into their particular path on the Sphere grid in the normal version. Yuna will only get white magic and magic boosts, Wakka will get status effects and physical bonuses, Auron will get all of the ability breaks, and so on. If you want any character to branch out, they can’t do so until late in the game. The only exception is Kimahri, who starts in the middle and can pick someone else’s path early.

surprise
In the Expert grid, everyone starts much closer to the center (Kimahri still starts in the center) and can venture down the paths intended for the other characters almost immediately. Yuna is generally the biggest benefactor of this, since she can get either Lulu’s offense or Tidus’s support abilities, giving her something to do if no one needs healing right away. Wakka can enter Auron’s section and do something about his generally low strength. You can have someone other than Kimahri learn to steal long before you get Rikku in the party. The cost of all of this is slower progression in the things the game expects you to be able to do (if you branch out) and a lower theoretical stat maximum compared to the standard grid (which you don’t need to worry about at all unless you’re a crazy person). It’s a change I like, and we’ll see how far I get this time through the game before going to play its better sequel.

PING!

On other hardware, there’s Super Smash Bros. 4. I miss certain things about playing with the GameCube controller, but other than that I really like this version of Smash. The character roster is good, although I find myself mostly sticking to old standbys like Marth and Pikachu. I like most of the changes from Brawl, especially the lack of tripping and the changes to grabs (a brief cooldown on grabs renders chain-grabbing impossible).

Bowser Spin
Unfortunately, hotel internet means I won’t be playing this with anyone anytime soon. Smash Bros. is best with other people; I had a lot of fun with it at a family gathering early last month. If you also have the game and want to play it, let me know. My friend code is 4897-6120-6518.

Gaming, MMO

On Speculation

First things first, this post is inspired by Bel’s post this morning, and conversations we’ve previously had. I might be the friend he mentions who would drop everything for Blue Mage. With the announcement that Dark Knight is going to look more like the version from FFX-2 than the version from FF11, the doors are open for wild speculation on the other jobs. I have a few ideas of my own, but we’ll start with one already covered.

Berserker

In my opinion, this is a natural fit for a DPS job to go with the already-existing Marauder class. Marauders have almost everything needed to be a functional DPS class already. They have a long-duration DoT (although the potency is laughable), a slashing resistance debuff and a large DPS cooldown (which is even called “Berserk”) the only thing it lacks that the other melee DPS in the game have (including Ninja) is some form of gap closer, and all of these so far are Job abilities anyway. They’d likely have to give up the defenses of heavy armor in trade for proper DPS stats.

One of the reasons I think this would fit well is because the Warrior quests are all about not letting your rage overwhelm you, and gaining control over it. Berserker quests could provide an interesting counterpoint, displaying the power of what happens if you just let it all out. There are no actual hints of anything like this, so it’s just based on my wild speculation, but I’d like to see it.

Gambler/Trickster

There is already at least one NPC who is a master of illusion and strikes with cards. I don’t think a class focusing on such would be unreasonable, although this game doesn’t really need more DPS classes right now. With the Gold Saucer on the way, I think it would be nice to have a class using the traditional dice/cards/slots to do damage to enemies. It’s probably better for everyone involved if the number of negative effects associated with such a class were kept to a minimum, but purely positive things could still work (like Wakka’s attack reels, or Setzer’s dice).

To go along with this is the card-using trickster class from FF Tactics A2. This one lacked the random abilities, and had status abilities instead. They also had an abilities that did increased damage based on the number of statuses, similar to the ability Fester that summoners currently have. Since most of what this job did went to arcanists, it might not get reused.

Red Mage/Mystic Knight

One of the skills that I noticed early on that enemies use, but players can’t use in any way, it the en-[element] spells (like Enaero or Enthunder). These usually go to some sort of mystic knight class,but in FF11 they mostly went to the Red Mage along with a large assortment of other buffs and debuffs. Interestingly, I think this class would best fit into FF14 as a tank. Powerful defensive buffs could make up for potentially lighter armor, and weapon enchants could be switched around depending on situation, possibly for AOE, or increased survival, or other purposes.

Gun Mage

“But Ashgar, Gun Mage isn’t even a Final Fantasy class!” First, that’s incorrect. Second, as that game’s version of the Blue Mage, this would make me happy forever. As far as gun classes go, this one seems quite unlikely. Yoshi-P said that the gun class would be something that people didn’t expect (which immediately made people expect that it would be a healer), but I’m holding out hope for this.

I can dream, right?