Category Archives: MMO

MMO

On Stupid CNJ Tricks

I joked yesterday that Eorzea Roulette was like Russian Roulette, but instead of bullets you had Stone Vigil. (Stone Vigil isn’t actually that bad, I find Toto-Rak far more annoying to get randomed into.) As luck would have it when I went for my daily random on my Warrior, I got Stone Vigil. Stone vigil has some very annoying patrols, and some enemies that spawn directly on top of the group. Without prior knowledge of this (or if you’ve forgotten exactly where they are, like I did), it’s likely that some pulls are going to get very rough. Fortunately, the White Mage in the group was very good and used a tactic I’ve never seen before to help keep mobs under control. I’m going to share this (and some other tricks) that can be extremely helpful for a group.

1. Get Swiftcast

Swiftcast is a cross-class ability for CNJ/WHM (requires 26 Thaumaturge), but it’s probably the most important one you can get and has myriad uses. The first and most obvious is that at level 22 conjurers get a trait that allows Raise to be cast in combat, but the 8 second casting time makes that difficult. Swiftcast can make it instant. If you’re personally swarmed by enemies, Blizzard II (another cross-class skill, but you pick it up on the way to Swiftcast anyway) can be swiftcast for a pseudo-frost nova, Holy works even better for this when you get it. Swiftcasting cure spells seems like a good idea, but since most of them don’t have longer cast times than the GCD, you don’t save much time overall doing it. It does allow you to cast a cure spell while moving, which is useful in a number of situations.

2. Fluid Aura Tricks

When you get Fluid Aura at 15, it serves primarily as a tool to annoy your tank, or for survivability (and a bit of extra damage) when soloing. It also has use in getting a mob that the tank won’t pick up for whatever reason to leave you alone for a few seconds. (While I have done this, being on the other side of it is a bit frustrating. Give your tanks some opportunity to pick up mobs before resorting to this.) The clever use for it I saw yesterday was as a spell right before casting Repose, to take something completely out of the fight for 30+ seconds. (Repose can be recast, but it does have diminishing returns.)

3. Get Surecast

While far less important than Swiftcast, Surecast mostly has applications when the group is going to take predictable heavy AOE damage (Geocrush, Primal signature spells). Normally, these spells do enough damage to interrupt any cast in progress. Surecast can allow you to time a group spell to go off just after the damage lands without being interrupted. While this could also be accomplished with Swiftcast, this can be doubled up on (Surecast+heal -> Swiftcast+heal) for additional healing if necessary.

My White Mage is now 41, and healing isn’t my usual role, so I’m sure I still have a lot to learn. I still don’t have a DPS class higher than 35, but I have both tanks at the cap and a healer quickly approaching it. Maybe someday I’ll get a clue.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For an experience I can somewhat relate to, Isey wrote about tracking down pet skills.

Meta, MMO

On What’s In a Name

Names are Hard. I’ve been playing a series of Tabletop games, and it’s pretty much always the hardest part. My general online handle, HiddenWings, came about shortly after high school. It’s taken directly from a song title posted to an online music site that I’m surprised to see still exists. (When I found it, there was literally no artist name posted.) I’ve been using it since 2007 on forums, and since 2008 in games on PSN and Steam. It’s become my go-to default username ever since.

Even less creative is my go-to character name. Ashgar was a character in the GBA game Magi-Nation, and also a card in the related TCG (which I knew very little about at the time). In the game, Ashgar is the not-very-bright elder of Cald, the fire region. He does have in his possession a key that opens almost every door in the entire game; you have to steal it as part of the plot. (As a side note, there are severe penalties for not returning it before a certain point when he notices it’s missing.) The idea that “Ashgar’s Key” could open everything was fascinating to me, and so I remembered the name. It became the name of my horde-side druid in the summer of 2007, and since that was my first character to see serious play, the name stuck. When I transferred to Argent Dawn the name was taken, and so the name Ashfang came about.

Ashgar
Other names come from other places. When I need a full name (especially for a human), I tend to look up name meanings and pick something that has the right feeling, even if these names have completely different origins, or would be unlikely to occur together due to being popular in different parts of the world. Zane Dimetrius is from a variation on my actual name, and a surname meaning “Earth-lover”, an appropriate name for the earth mage that the name represented. Another example is Trevor Lowell, a name for a werewolf of sorts from nowhere special. This one’s a bit of a joke, as the names mean “big town” and “little wolf”. I liked that one enough that it became the name of my TSW character. As I play more things my stable of names slowly expands, but I’ll probably keep using a lot of the same ones whenever I can make similar characters.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. This post is inspired by Tyluroth’s post on his names from yesterday.

MMO

On A Slap In The Face

1 Comment

I had a different (and generally more accurate) title for this post earlier, but I like this one better. Today’s post is about the gradual nerfing of content over time, also known as “catering to the casuals”. I’m here to say that this is a Good Thing.

Final Fantasy XIV launched with some relatively difficult endgame content in the Hard Mode Primal fights and the Binding Coil of Bahamut (which actually remained unbeaten until the final boss was fixed in a minor patch). Three major patches later, these aren’t the most difficult or rewarding content in the game, but they’re still mechanically unchanged. What has changed is that wiping in these instances gives you a buff that increases your stats, stacking up to five times. Also, there are some alternative paths to gear so these don’t have to be a bottleneck anymore. The Hard Mode Primals are still specifically required for the Relic Quest, which is how you get your continually up-gradable relic weapon for each class.

ffxiv_08022014_170439

Bracing For Impact

Possibly because I’m convinced the player base in FF14 is from Bizzaro World, reaction to the nerfing of these instances has been mostly positive. They still require people to generally not stand in things, although it provides a bit of a buffer (Except on one fight in particular, because falling off of a small platform kills you no matter how much health you have). More importantly, all of the mechanics that would wipe the raid will still wipe the raid, so general knowledge and execution is still required. Usually (in other games), the reaction to something like this is a lot of whining that the people who beat it have their achievement invalidated, and that “casuals ruin everything”.

ffxiv_08022014_224530
As a filthy casual: I hope developers keep ignoring the people who say this. It’s nice not to see the people who are joining the game now not struggling for money (because earning it was extremely difficult) or levels (because simply keeping up with the story quest was problematic at times). There’s a lot of space between effortless and overly punitive, and games don’t need to always go toward the latter.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. I think I’m going to highlight a post per day, Thalen’s post about Marvel Heroes is today’s.

MMO

On the Fourteenth Final Fantasy

Since functionally quitting WoW during Cata, I’ve been a bit of an MMO nomad, wandering from game to game, looking at all of the shiny. Game companies have been more than happy to cater to this, offering plenty of new shininess at launch, and then eventually wearing out until I left. My relationship with all of these games isn’t the same, however. There are some games I’ll probably never go back to*, and some that I left on relatively good terms for some reason or another. Final Fantasy XIV is a game in the latter category. The group I was playing with gradually started playing it less and less, until eventually I stopped too. Also, FATE grinding was kind of terrible.Screenshot (118)

We Miss You!

Last weekend (Friday-Sunday) was a welcome back weekend, allowing previous players to log in without renewing their subscriptions. I patched the game up on Friday, even though I didn’t get a chance to play until Sunday due to the insanity that last weekend was. Apparently, Square has been quite busy since we left, and there’s a lot of content. The Duty Roulette (still the funniest and most accurate name for that concept I’ve seen) provides a way for players without pre-made groups to obtain decent rewards. Beast Tribe dailies provide other sources of XP and potential cosmetic rewards. There’s a really awesome bribe for tanks to do 8-man content (although it’s a bit grindy). In short, there are plenty of things to do, both with a group and without.
Sunset in Limsa

Instead of doing any of that, we ran an instance we were somewhat familiar with from before, Wanderer’s Palace. Just seeing this place again was enough to make me remember that I like playing this game. It’s WoW-style combat, but a bit more relaxed (mostly due to the much longer GCD). It doesn’t have my favorite character archetype, but it does have a pair of tank classes that I enjoy. It’s extremely pretty, and it’s one of the few games that I have a level-capped character in. Also, some of the music is awesome.

022 – Starlight and Sellswords by Final Fantasy 14 on Grooveshark

Happy Returns

I suppose you can congratulate Square Enix on a successful marketing promotion, because It got me to resubscribe to FF14. Unfortunately, the game to drop by the wayside here is WildStar, because not enough of the group I’m interested in playing with got into it. Once the new shininess wore off, I’m left with the same feeling I had before, that I want to like the game more than I actually do. Maybe they can have their chance to win me back later.

Gaming, MMO

On Everquest Next?

3 Comments

Almost a year ago, Sony Online Entertainment revealed their grand voxel-based, user-generated-content-driven, trinity-abolishing new MMO, going by the name of EverQuest Next. The reception was mixed, mostly because it looked to repeat problems in things I mentioned earlier. Also, people who liked the lore of Norrath weren’t exactly in favor of a reboot. They also announced their builder for EQ Next, called EQ Next Landmark at the same time.

Since then, it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows. Less than a month after SOE Live, layoffs were announced. EverQuest Next Landmark was supposed to enter alpha in December but was delayed until February. Shortly after that, it was stripped of its EverQuest Next branding entirely, and is now just Landmark. So what happened to EverQuest Next?
Kerra

Missing: Presumed Lost

I have a very strong suspicion that EverQuest Next in the previously demonstrated form is vaporware. E3 and PAX East have both come and gone with hardly a word. It’s scheduled to be talked about at this year’s SOE live in about a month, but more time is being given to Planetside 2 and Landmark than EQ Next. The Social Media accounts are still active, but I haven’t seen anything that comes close to “Gameplay” since last SOE Live.

What I hope is that they went back to the drawing board on some things. Roles (defined by class or not) are important, and I hope they don’t abandon them. Going with a Guild Wars 1-like ability system is a good thing in my opinion, but lessons should be taken to avoid the mistakes made by other games tweaking the formula. User Generated content is cool (and as seen in Neverwinter and Little Big Planet, can be quite impressive) but having professionally designed content is necessary to get people interested. A destructible world is cool, but not if it results in everyone but the first wave playing in rubble.

EverQuest Next looked like a potentially cool game with a lot of issues. I hope when it resurfaces it’s something I’m interested in, but it might just end up being a game that’s not for me.
orc art

Gaming, MMO

On Roles

5 Comments

I’ve noticed that whenever a game gets mentioned as a negative experience on Aggrochat, the game is usually Guild Wars 2. Occasionally it’ll be Champions instead, but these games share common issues. Both of these games suffer from group content being chaotic and uninteresting, because a group of players (in PVE) is not more than the sum of its parts.

The Problems

Both Guild Wars 2 and Champions forced players into moderately survivable builds for running around the world near their launches. For Guild Wars, this was a case of mob damage being incredibly high relative to health, so you needed to have a build capable of blocking/evading attacks or you were on the way to many deaths. Since dedicated healers didn’t exist, and defensive archetypes had no way to generate aggro, groups had neither. For Champions (which has more “traditional” mechanics), this was a case of over-tuning almost everything about the dame the day before launch, rendering completely offensive or defensive builds non-viable (unless you were spamming condemn). This meant that while tank and healer builds were supposed to exist, in practice they did not function.

In both examples, the group makeup for dungeons was 5 solo builds with maybe some attempt at support thrown in at the last minute. Also in both cases, provided you didn’t die too many times, the so-called “graveyard zerg” was a viable strategy. this led to an incredibly un-fun experience where the ideal strategy was throwing damage at bosses until they fell over, with some attempt to avoid or heal minor damage.

The Standard

The ideal thing to mention here would be Everquest (or if I felt like being a hipster, DikuMUD), but that’s before my time and so I’m going to respectfully acknowledge that and start with what I know. The first game I played that conformed to what is now the standard group makeup of 1 tank, 1 healer, and X DPS was World of Warcraft. I probably don’t have to explain how it works, but there’s generally one person trying to keep enemies under control by drawing their attacks, one person trying to heal any damage the group members take, and several people trying to do damage to the enemies without taking much damage themselves.

This is the standard for a reason. It gives everyone involved something specific to do, and people know what’s expected of them (roughly) from the outset. Despite many accusations of the aggro mechanic being “not realistic”, group setups like this mirror reality, with each person having a specialty, and all of them working together to accomplish a common goal in different ways. It’s not free of problems, with the usual accusations being that the number of DPS outnumbers healers and tanks massively, or that it isn’t fun to play a healer or tank. While I disagree with some parts of this, there are other options that can be explored.

The Standard, Reloaded

While I’m 100% certain that players don’t know what they want, enough people seem to want to abolish the trinity that it might be worth looking into deeper. The most superfluous role happens to be my favorite, but when it gets right down to it, Tanks don’t need to be “tanks” to do the job they’re there for, which is controlling the enemies. It’s not hard to imagine some sort of heavy-CC class filling in this role, although classes like that aren’t really designed because of balance issues. Such a class is either overly strong or worthless in PVP and high-level PVE, depending on how many of their tricks work on players or bosses. But a class that could stun groups of enemies or possibly move mobs at will would make a tank unnecessary. There is the risk that if they themselves don’t incur damage from this, they also make healers unnecessary.

A different approach to solving the same problem is to have a defender type character that has some sort of damage redirection. In this scenario, it matters less that this person has the attention of everything, and more that they’re keeping the amount of damage the group takes controlled. An example of this type appeared in WoW, as the Red Drake in Oculus.

Healers are a bit trickier, as I play one far less and don’t know what makes the archetype appealing to people who are naturally drawn to it. An example that has seen some success is a character focused on damage prevention, which I’m told was stronger than direct healing in the first Guild Wars. The problem with this is an inability (or decreased ability) to recover from mistakes.

Oculus provides another answer here with the Green Drake, a healer who siphoned health from enemies and transferred health to allies. When I was playing WoW, I found maintaining a balance like this and using my own health as a resource was far more interesting than any “normal” healer. Potential balance issues still exist, but I’d like to see a game try this as a mechanic for normal players (even though it’s kind of hard to avoid giving it a “blood mage” theme).

I don’t have good answers for DPS. It’s already the role with the largest number of character types and the largest general interest, so I’m not sure much needs changing.

The Conclusion

What I think we need isn’t an abolishing of roles, but more options for them. The Tank options in WoW amount to three options for “dude in full plate” and a bear, all of which are increasingly mechanically similar. Healers tend not to have more complicated mechanics than “cast spell, watch health bar go up”, with possibly a choice between “efficient spell” and “fast spell” depending on the situation. More variety is needed, not the complete destruction of the roles themselves.

Gaming, MMO

On DPET

Now that I’m getting more into WildStar, I started seeking more information about it, and I’ve found an annoyance with some of the class guides I’m seeing. I found a few that completely dismiss a number of skills that “don’t do enough damage”. Specifically DoT skills, like Annihilation, Devastator Probes and Ignite. These spells get ignored in favor of spells that cause big numbers, like Gamma Rays and Charged Shot. There are some problems with this approach, and I’ll be specifically focusing on Medic here. Spellslinger math gets weird because of their innate.

When I was playing an Affliction Warlock in World of Warcraft (this is back when Soul shards were items in your bag, and Siphon life was a spell that you could actually cast), I was introduced to the concept of Damage Per Execute Time (DPET), a metric used to determine if an ability is worth casting, or in what order to prioritize things in cases where multiple abilities come up at once. The basic idea is that you want to spend the most time casting the things that do the most damage, so you can use this metric to make that decision.

When looking at raw numbers, the Medic’s best skills in terms of DPET are Devastator Probes, Annihilation, Gamma Rays, Nullifier, and Quantum Cascade, in that order. Gamma Rays and Quantum Cascade have the additional consideration of their actuator cost, forcing you to (usually) use the very low DPET skill Discharge in order to continue to cast them, so this must be taken into consideration.

It’s not completely cut and dry, since AMPs and ability points can change this significantly. Also, because you have to decide which abilities you want to take, the total amount of damage an ability can do over a fight is also worth considering. I don’t have any great advice on how to set up a level 50 bar (except that it probably needs Paralytic Surge on it), but I’m just trying to fix the perception that the DoT skills are a “waste of a GCD”, when most of them do more damage than the medic’s premier single-target ability.

Fiesta Time


I managed to finish my playthrough of FF5 for the draft group (I was second to finish, behind Tam), but I’ve been a bit lazy about uploading the videos for it. This is just in time for the actual Fiesta, where my party is Knight/Berserker/White Mage/Berserker. Hopefully this goes smoothly; I think I have enough experience in the game to carry even this physical-heavy party through the whole thing.

MMO

On Second Opinions

If you’re heard prior week’s Aggrochats, you may have heard my opinions on WildStar, which (prior to launch) ranged from dislike to indifference. As of last weekend, my opinions have reversed pretty significantly, and I have to say that the game is quite fun to play. it’s not perfect, but I could see myself playing this game for a while.

The Problem

The primary problem with WildStar is that the early levels are terrible to anyone somewhat familiar with MMOs. On the Arkship and moving into the starting zones, you have very few abilities. (In all cases this is a spammable ability, a resource consumer or cooldown ability, and an interrupt of some kind.) I’ve mentioned that the default control scheme doesn’t completely mesh with the nature of the combat. Initial quests and challenges are fairly boring, with most of them being “go kill these things” without much window dressing. Enemy abilities are relatively simplistic, with at worst a cone or point-blank AOE to get out of/interrupt. Until you hit the real zones, enemies have little enough health that there isn’t much of a challenge. This state of affairs is what led to me being bored and quitting every singe time I picked up the game throughout beta. A friend on the 7-day trial is having the same experience.

A Break in the Clouds

The narrative I kept hearing was that the game got better at level randint(12,20), and for the most part that’s true. Around 12-13 you get access to the first shiphand mission, which is a small instance that scales for groups anywhere from 1-5 people (soloing this is somewhat difficult as a beginner). Mobs start to have more interesting mechanics around level 10, forcing you to pay more attention in fights. “Prime” enemies start appearing that provide a significant challenge for an individual player once you get out of the starter zones. Challenges get more varied and sometimes more interesting. (Quests mostly still don’t.) Crafting unlocks at 10, which is a giant black hole if you’re into the different mechanics of each profession. Housing unlocks at 14, and I’ll let Bel and Penny Arcade say all that’s necessary to say about that.

This seems appropriate.
This seems appropriate.

Decision Tree

All of the above got me a bit more into the game, but the key experience for me so far is the Adventure that unlocks at level 15, Riot in the Void. For those who are unaware, Adventures are instances for a full group (5 people) that involve some decision points, and can play out different ways depending on what the party chooses. I got a chance to experience this one twice over the past two days. The first time I was DPS (as a medic), none of us knew what we were doing, our tank got press-ganged into service, and it was a very hectic experience. I tried to take as much in as possible, and I learned some things for the next run. The next run, I was the healer, the tank was someone with a bit more experience and gear (Ok, it was Bel) and I got to see how things changed. The impact of the choices made in the instance is non-trivial. The first time, Esper-type enemies appeared after the first stage of the instance and proceeded to cause a lot of annoyance with their shields, knockdowns, and healing. The second time, we shut down the espers in the first stage (which was harder than the first stage task we had on the first run) which caused them to thankfully not appear anywhere else in the instance. However, because we didn’t shut down the cannons, we had cannons shooting at us during the final boss.

Image shamelessly stolen once again.
Image shamelessly stolen once again.

I didn’t expect this sort of experience in a level 15 instance, in what’s supposed to be the “introduction” to group content. If the rest of the content can maintain this level of quality, I’ll enjoy group content in this game a lot. In a way this would be the opposite of Guild Wars 2, in which our playgroup hit the first piece of group content, found it unfulfilling, and stopped playing the game almost entirely. This one looks like it may hold me for a while on the strength of the group content. It even got me to play a healer again.

MMO

On Launches

You would think that there would be some good solution by now for turning the servers on and letting people in to these online games. But time after time, games launch with troubles. All things considered, WildStar’s launch wasn’t really that bad, but it still creates a lot of frustration when everything doesn’t go smoothly.

First, they dramatically underestimated the number of players who would be interested in playing on a PVP server. As a result, all of the PVP servers at launch had queues, some of them several hours long. In addition, the number of English realms for EU was too low in general, so those also had long queues. More servers and free server transfers seem to have addressed the problem over the weekend, so it isn’t all bad.

Despite the complaints, it really isn’t all that bad. SWTOR had similar queue issues, but it’s a better illustration of a different problem. After launch, there were too many servers, leading to server merges and the general unhappiness that accompanies that. FF14 (Realm Reborn version) had numerous issues on launch, including not having queues (so you had to retry login until it worked) and during head start, having the instance servers (which were required for quest and character progression) frequently fail to work entirely. WildStar is at least ahead of both of these cases.

On the other end, ESO’s launch had fewer issues. Quest bugs were particularly bad during the first week, but at no point did I ever have trouble logging in to play. WoW’s original launch wasn’t great, but their expansion launches are pretty good at this point, even though the rush is usually at least the size of a typical MMO launch [citation needed]. TSW also managed to remain mostly functional (again with quest bugs) during its launch. I think the traditional servers are presenting scalability issues for games that use them, and something else (like TSW) might serve better in the long run.

Aggrochat and More

This week’s Aggrochat is out, and the usual cast is missing Rae, but joined by Tam. About halfway through we switch to discussing massive spoilers for Transistor, so I recommend stopping there if you haven’t finished it. (We don’t talk about anything else after.)

As an additional note, registration for the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta is now live, and you should sign up for this wonderful charity event. Ongoing documentation of my pre-fiesta run is here, on YouTube. If you are in Alliance of Awesome, you should take a look, as there is an extra bit of charity money riding on your registration. (If you’re not, you should still register, and then consider poking into what AoA is doing in various games.)

MMO

On Class Balance

3 Comments

Thanks to a few interesting experiences, I’m incredibly gun-shy about choosing classes in games now. Class balance is one of those things that will never make everyone happy, but still needs to be handled with utmost care to keep people from feeling useless. I’ve had a surprising amount of “feeling useless” in recent games, and I’m concerned that it’ll happen again when I pick classes in new games.

Use the force

My personal experience with this began in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I figured I’d play a Vanguard Trooper since I liked tanking, but I ended up being drawn to the Commando’s giant gun. I actually ended up as a healer in this game, because I enjoyed it, and it seemed rather effective in content up to the level cap. Unfortunately, the raid content demonstrated how wrong I was. The command lacked a good method of healing more than one target at a time, and this was its doom for “hard” content. There were several experiences where The healing team was Commando + Scoundrel or (heaven forbid) Commando + Commando where the run was going to become way more difficult just because we didn’t have a Sage. Sages had a ground-targeted dome of mass healing that trivialized certain encounters. Then, the first major balance patch came out and made commandos even worse in raiding, because they were “too good” in PVP. This heralded my exit from the game.

It was fun while it lasted.
It was fun while it lasted.

It’s a secret to everyone

A few months later, The Secret World caught my attention with its “unique” (read: ripped from Guild Wars) ability system. The Ability Wheel encouraged heavy investment into 2-3 weapon types, and I went with Fists (mostly claw and knuckle-type weapons) and Chaos (Green short-range magic), working my way into the Executioner deck. Again, this worked great up to the level cap, and even through elite instances, putting out more damage than any other options available to me. However, the Gatekeeper and Nightmare instances made it completely clear that the endgame was either go ranged or go home. While it’s technically possible to have all abilities at once, My character’s entire development up to that point was spent in things that turned out to not be viable in high-level content. Our group’s healer made similarly incorrect choices unknowingly, and that killed the game for us.

Hundreds of possibilities, 4 right answers.
Hundreds of possibilities, 4 right answers.

Written in the stars

I’m really hoping that my future endeavors turn out better than my past ones. I’m looking into WildStar, hoping that the class I pick doesn’t end up useless at whatever I decide to do with it. Finding this out at the level cap is absolutely crushing, and doubly so if it turns out nothing is being done about it. Final Fantasy 14 was almost like this, but they took steps to correct perceived and actual imbalances in their first major patch. WoW gets a lot of criticism for homogenizing classes, but they haven’t had any situations where a class or spec is completely non-viable (in PVE) since Burning Crusade. I’m really getting tired of making the wrong choice unknowingly, so I’d appreciate it if they would just mark them on the character creation screen next time.