Category Archives: Gaming

Job Training Part 2: The Squishy Casters

June 16, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

On to the mages! One thing to note here (because it comes up a few times) is that certain equipment boosts the damage of elemental spells by 50%. Fire/Blizzard/Thunder/Poison rods all boost the power of their matching element when equipped. Gaia Gear boosts Earth, Air Knives boost Wind, and the Sage’s Staff boosts Holy. The Magus Rod includes all of these except Holy. The only remaining element (Water) does not have a potential equipment boost.

WhmBlmTimSmn

White Mage

WHM In the fiesta, White Mage is all about delayed gratification. It does have healing, but one of the things you may learn during the fiesta is that healing is generally less important than making things dead faster so they stop hitting you. Their innate command is !White, which allows casting of white magic. The only other ability they learn is MP +10% when the job is mastered. White magic includes the healing you’d expect, but also a number of useful buffs and status spells. Protect, Shell, and Blink can help you live a little longer. Confuse and Silence can keep enemies from doing much. Near the end of the game, you get access to Holy, which is the strongest single-target damage spell in the game (when cast with the Sage’s Staff).

White Mages struggle a lot if you get them at the start. The Flail is hidden early in the Ship Graveyard and can help a bit. Also, most of the enemies in this area are damaged by Cure, so it’s not a bad spot if you feel like you do need some grinding. On bosses, don’t forget about Protect, and Magissa is vulnerable to Silence.
Blink allows the target it’s cast on to evade two physical attacks. Berserk causes enemies to only use physical attacks. This doesn’t work on most bosses, but it does work on Shinryu, one of the bonus bosses.
In addition to its expected effect of halving magic damage taken, Shell also halves the hit rate of any spell that doesn’t hit 100% of the time, which includes almost all status spells. In a lot of cases, this is more useful than the damage reduction,
In the event that you have White Mage and no other caster, Fork Tower can still be done without too much issue. Omniscient is vulnerable to Silence (and you can Dispel him to improve its hit rate), and your other damage sources can use the brief window this gives you to do damage. Repeat until dead.

Black Mage

BLM Black Mages cast the spells that make people fall down. They remain good at this throughout the entire game, but they see large power spikes whenever they get a new spell level (especially the -aga spells). Their innate command is !Black, and they have no innate passive. Their spell list includes 3 levels of Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder spells, along with Drain, Bio, and Flare to round out the damage dealing. They also have a few status spells (Sleep, Poison, Toad) and two ways to cause instant death (Death and Break). Mastering Black Mage earns you MP +30%. I suspect any non-mage job would get more MP from equipping !Black.

This introduces quite a bit of grinding to a game that normally doesn’t require much (if any), but if you really want, Black Mages can be your primary healers. Flame Rings can be purchased in Istory in World 1, or the Phantom Village in World 3; these cause you to absorb fire spells, making Fire, Fira, and Firaga reasonable substitutes for Cure, Cura, and Curaga. The problem is the price tag: 50k gil each. I recommend the wolves in the forest near Karnak for this money.
FF5 is not a game in which status spells are completely useless. Atomos, one of the more difficult bosses in the game for a lot of parties, can be put to sleep. Sleeping targets are not woken by spells, so this can make the fight pretty easy.
If you can get reflect on your party, casting a spell on your entire party will do more damage to a single enemy than casting on that target directly. This does inhibit healing with White or Black magic, however.
Against most targets, a boosted -aga level elemental spell will do more damage than Flare (which is non-elemental and can’t be boosted). The exception is against certain high-defense targets, since Flare ignores a large portion of magic defense.

Time Mage

TIM Time Mages illustrate that no matter what you’re doing, it’s always better to be able to do it faster. Their command is !Time, which allows casting of Time Magic. Mastering Time Mage grants Equip Rods, which also includes staves. Time Magic is mostly supportive, with a few damage spells thrown in. Haste and Slow are some of the most powerful spells in the game. The Gravity spells mostly don’t work on bosses, but can cripple random encounters. They can do passable damage eventually with Comet, and great damage at endgame with Meteor. Probably their best spell is Quick, which stops time and allows the caster to take 2 actions immediately.

It bears repeating that haste and slow are incredibly strong spells, when combined you’ll get about 4 actions for every turn the enemies take. The only time you don’t want to use Slow is when facing Exdeath in his castle, as he’ll counter with Haste on himself.
The spell Return, when cast in battle, resets time back to the start of the battle. This is useful if things start going sideways, but you can also use it to reset back attacks.
Quick is a good spell, but it’s also the second most expensive spell in the game at 77 MP per cast. Try not to overdo it.

Summoner

SMN Summoner has a lot of power and utility, but it’s locked up in sidequests. Their command ability is !Summon, which does what you’d expect. Mastering the job gets you !Call, which will use a random summon you’ve learned for no MP cost. The primary effect of most summons is damage, but there are some utility ones: Golem protects the party from physical damage, and Carbuncle casts reflect on all party members. Phoenix does a bit of damage, but also resurrects a party member with full HP and MP. The endgame dragons do quite a lot of damage, but Leviathan lags behind because there’s no way to boost the water element with items.

the first 3 summons are store-bought, the rest must be defeated in battle or otherwise acquired. Ifrit and Titan are encountered as part of the story, everything else requires seeking them out.
Some summons are missable: Shiva is in the basement of Castle Walse, Ramuh is in the forest near Istory, Catoblepas is in a forest surrounded by mountains in World 2, and Carbuncle is in Exdeath’s castle. Ramuh gives you a second chance in the final dungeon, but he’s not relevant anymore at that point.
Phoenix is an absolute pain to acquire (you have to climb the 30-floor Phoenix Tower) and costs 99 MP, but the fact that it restores a character to full HP/MP essentially renders your party immune to anything that doesn’t kill everyone at once.
Somewhat large Spoiler: Going to a particular location in World 3 gives you a familiar summon, who is wind-elemental. With an air knife, it does more damage than Leviathan, and almost as much as Bahamut, for a fraction of the MP cost.

Tomorrow: Some unfortunates (and also Mystic Knight). Hope to see you at the Fiesta next week!

Gaming

Job Training Part 1: Starting Physical Jobs

June 15, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

This week I’ll be going over the various jobs in FF5, and some things that might be helpful to know if you get them. I’ll be starting with the more physical classes available at the start. The fiesta starts roughly a week from today (sign up right here), and I’ll be going over all 20 jobs, so hopefully someone finds this helpful. If you do, go thank Kodra for the idea. I’ll be following one of the game’s conventions here: Abilities preceded by an exclamation point are command abilities, the others mentioned are passives.

KniMnkThfBlu

Knight

KNI Master of hitting things with swords, the Knight also has good defense. This is the only fiesta class that can equip Knightswords, which are the strongest weapons near the end of the game. Their innate command, !Guard reduces all physical damage the Knight takes to 0 for a turn. They also have the innate passive Cover, which causes them to take single-target physical attacks directed at low-health teammates. Their most notable other ability is Two-Handed, which allows you to hold a variety of weapons (swords, katanas, axes, and hammers) in two hands, which means you can’t use a shield but attack for roughly double damage. They also have the Equip abilities for shields, armor, and swords, which can be a nice boost for other classes.

If you never run from battle, Knights are the only class in the fiesta that can use the Brave Blade, the numerically strongest weapon outside of the bonus dungeon. It’s a long road, but the payoff can be very worth it.
!Guard makes knights immune to physical attacks. Cover causes them to take physical attacks for low-health party members. A knight and a trio of low-health allies can therefore be completely immune to physical attacks. Anything that’s berserked will just use physical attacks. Use your imagination here.
Two-handed is nice, but don’t forget you can use a shield when defense is more useful. The Aegis Shield grants immunity to petrification and has a 1/3 chance to block most magic attacks, and the (very late game) Genji Shield has 50% evasion by itself. Even if your knight has no use for these, other classes can benefit from Equip Shields.

Monk

MNK In the fiesta, Monk is most notable for tearing the early game to shreds, but falling behind as you get awesome weapons late in the game (unless you level a lot more than is usually necessary). Their innate command, !Kick, is the only one in the game that can’t be given to other jobs. It makes a physical attack on all enemies (ignoring row if you’re playing the mobile version). They have the innate passive of Counter, which causes them to sometimes attack enemies that hit them with physical attacks. Monks can also learn other commands: !Chakra gives a small heal that also cures poison and blind, and !Focus causes the character to charge for a turn before striking for double damage. Finishing off the class gives you a set of HP+ abilities, finishing with HP +30%. Monks already have a lot of HP, but this can be a big help to classes that have unfortunate HP situations, like Bard, Dancer, and Red Mage.

Don’t forget that !Chakra cures poison and blind. It’s nice to be able to clear blind and restore a bit of health in the same turn, since blind in FF5 pretty much makes physical classes entirely useless.
Monks hit twice, which means that enemies that counter will counter twice. Alternate solutions may be required for enemies that deal most of their damage via counters, like Garula. (Don’t forget that monks can Counter too!)
Late in the game, Monks can use the Kaiser Knuckles accessory, which brings their endgame damage up to respectable levels. You can get one of these in the Undersea Trench, and more as a drop from the Steel Fist enemies.
The monk passive Barehanded grants the unarmed damage of a monk, and it’s particularly useful on mage classes, to give them an early source of damage output. It doesn’t make them any less squishy, so keep an eye on their HP if you put them in the front row.

Thief

THF Thief isn’t the strongest class in the game, but it does have a lot going for it. Their most notable feature is their innate command, !Steal, which does what you’d expect. It’s useful for healing items, money-making, and access to a variety of equipment that’s difficult or impossible to get otherwise. They have multiple innate passives: Sprint speeds up movement, Vigilance entirely prevents back attacks, and Find Passages shows hidden passages. Their other learned commands are !Mug, which steals along with an attack, and !Flee, which will instantly run from any battle where you could run normally. Sadly there’s not much here for other classes, as you get the full benefits of all of the thief’s passives with a single thief in the party. The only exception is Artful Dodger, which can grant the thief’s agility (which is the highest in the game) to whoever you equip it on.

Poltergeists in the Fire-powered ship have Hi-Potions, well before you can buy them. this is conveniently right before a boss that’s extremely difficult for thieves. Stock up!
Elixirs are a rare steal from the Zu enemy, near Karnak. These are kind of annoying to stock up on, but it’s easier than most other methods of getting them.
Gilgamesh has 4 pieces of Genji Armor to steal (gloves on the boat, helm in the castle, shield and armor in the final dungeon). This is mostly only useful if you have a job that can wear heavy armor, but Blue Mages can use the shield.
The enemy Objet d’Art (found in the basement of Castle Bal) has the Twin Lance as a rare steal, and this is an absurdly powerful weapon for a Thief or Ninja at the point you can get it. It’s reasonably good through the rest of the game, but suffers versus enemies with high defense.

Blue Mage

BLU Blue Magic is one of the best all-around toolboxes in the game, with the obvious downside of having to learn your abilities from enemies. Their innate command is !Blue, which allows casting any blue magic learned by the party. Their innate passive is Learning. As long as a character with Learning is affected by a Blue Magic spell, it will be learned when you win the battle (the character in question does not need to be alive). The other blue magic abilities are !Check, which shows enemy HP, and !Scan, which also shows level, weaknesses, and any status effects. Notable Blue magic spells include the Aero series (damage spells), Vampire (hp absorb based on caster’s missing health), White Wind (party heal based on caster’s current health), Death Claw (reduces an enemy to single-digit HP and causes paralysis), and Level 5 Death (kills all enemies with a level divisible by 5). This is one of my favorite classes in the game.

Before you advance the plot near the start, there are 3 Blue magic spells available immediately: Moldwynds in the Wind Shrine have Aero, Black Goblins (also in the Wind Shrine) have Goblin Punch, and Steel Bats in the pirate cave have Vampire.
Goblin Punch is similar to attacking normally, except that it never misses and does full damage regardless of position. This mostly means that Blue Mages can still hit things while being back-row casters. As an added bonus, Goblin punch can be used with the Excalipoor to do damage based on its listed attack rating.
Learning defensive Blue Magics (most notably White Wind and Mighty Guard) requires some way to charm or confuse the enemies into casting them on you. The jobs that can do this reliably are are Bard, White Mage, Red Mage, and Beastmaster. Dancers have a 25% chance to use confusion when they use !Dance, and any class can do similarly with the Dancing Dagger.
Level 5 Death ignores immunity to death and can kill any non-undead enemy with a level divisible by 5. Notable bosses that fall into this category are Adamantoise, the launchers in the Soul Cannon fight, and the revived form of Archeoaevis. It’s also useful for gaining AP from the Objet d’Art enemies in the basement of Castle Bal.

Tomorrow I’ll be covering the squishy mages. As a reminder, more victories means more money for Child’s Play, so I hope this helps!

Gaming

On Getting the Party Started

June 10, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

It’s that time again.
Four Job Fiesta 2015
The Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta is an annual fundraising event that I covered in some detail last year. FF5 is one of my favorite games ever, so I’ve participated every year since 2010.In my attempts to get other people interested, I’ve had a few people ask me how the whole thing works. It is explained on the site, but it’s not exactly easy to find. With that in mind, here’s a guide for getting started.

Four Jobs

The major restriction placed on your party is that instead of having full access to all 20 jobs handed out through the story in FF5, you have access to 4 jobs which will be randomly determined by Gilgabot. These are handed out in a manner corresponding with plot elements in the first part of the game, namely visiting the elemental crystals. When you reach the Wind Crystal, which is normally where you get access to jobs in a normal run through of the game, you will have access to one job. Once you reach this point, you must have all of your characters in one of the jobs assigned to you and all of the jobs assigned to you represented in your party. At the start, this means that everyone will be in whatever job you got assigned, which is kind of a pain if you got White Mage.

Blue Mages
Each new Crystal will mean a new job for you. When you have 2 jobs, you can split them among your party in whatever way you like (3+1 or 2+2) , but you must use both of them. 3 jobs means that you get to choose which one is represented twice. By the time you have 4, you must have one of each job in the party at all times. That doesn’t mean that you have to always have a particular character as a particular job, but you can’t leave one out (unless you’re in one of the situations when your party is reduced to 3 people). A large part of the power of the job system in FF5 is giving abilities learned in one class to others, so switching classes around your party is highly encouraged.

#reg

It’s perfectly fine if you’re never played FF5 before to participate in the Fiesta. However, if it is your first time, I strongly suggest registering for a Normal run with no restrictions. This will give you one class picked from each set, where each set comes from one of the elemental crystals. I’m relatively certain that every possible party handed out with this method can beat the game, although they certainly aren’t all created equal.

jobs
If you’re a bit more adventurous, #reg750 will get you a team composed of mostly casters. #regNo750 will get you a team with no casters. Both of these are references to the price of elemental rods, useful weapons that boost the damage of their corresponding element in battle, but can be broken to cast a third-tier elemental spell (but only if your class can equip rods). #regRandom picks jobs slightly differently: instead of getting a new one from each set, every time you’re assigned a job one is chosen from the entire list you have available to you. This does mean you’re more likely to get classes from the beginning of the game. New this year is #regChaos, and deatils for how this works are scarce. It seems to be a selection of any of the 20 available jobs 4 times, handed out to you in whatever order Gilgabot thinks is most appropriate.

While a major part of this even is the fundraiser, don’t feel like you have to give something to participate. Plenty of people give based on the number of victors, so even playing through helps out. Like Bel mentioned, this is kind of a thing for me each year, so look for more in the very near future.

Gaming

On RNG

June 4, 2015 Ashgar 3 Comments

It’s interesting to see the level of randomness we’ll accept in our games. This post is somewhat inspired by the running jokes regarding the luck of Bel and Tam.

One of the complaints Tam and I shared about Darkest Dungeon was the tendency toward “cascading failure”. It was my experience that an enemy crit might lead to your entire team getting stressed, which might make one go crazy and start attacking a party member who would then get more stressed and go crazy, until your entire party is dead. This remains a problem even if the enemies aren’t much of a threat otherwise. Darkest dungeon revels in its randomness, and it was a bit much for me. I figured it would be a good opportunity to examine how other games use randomness.

Two Extremes

On one side, we have roguelikes. On the other hand, there are a lot of examples of games with no randomness whatsoever, like Super Mario Brothers. For the purposes of this conversation, I’m ignoring the second category, but there are a lot more of them than you might think at first. Most scrolling shooters, bullet hell or otherwise, have fixed patterns, with the only changes coming from reaction to the player’s position. Most platformers are similar, even modern ones like Rayman, Ori, and Super Meat Boy. (As an aside, Super Meat Boy is such a wonderful example of a lot of game concepts that I’m probably not going to stop comparing things to it until people no longer remember what it is.) Instead of talking about those, let’s start somewhere else familiar.

Ultimate Illusion

It’s not hard to see where the Final Fantasy series took its original inspiration from, and so it’s not a large surprise that it ended up with random elements to replace the dice rolling that tabletop RPGs use. As a result, there’s turn order, damage variance, spell effectiveness, enemy target selection, enemy attack selection, encounter rate, encounter type, and probably other things that I’m forgetting that are randomly determined. Even with all of this, Final Fantasy is not random enough that it feels unfair. You know that your fighter or monk is going to reliably do a certain amount of damage, enough to kill an enemy in X number of hits. You know that if you use fire spells on undead enemies, most of them will take more damage than usual. You can even have a good idea of how much damage enemies do, so you know when you need to heal. Even though there’s some amount of randomness inherent in all of these things, it isn’t overwhelming.

Genre-Defining

Roguelikes (so-named because of the game Rogue) feel like the above does not go far enough. Some of my favorite games fall into this category, like Risk of Rain, the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series, and Diablo (think about it). Hallmarks here include all of the above, plus random (or semi-random) level design, random items, and getting set back dramatically if you die. The goal in this is to ensure that every time you play the game it’s a little different. The large death penalty also encourages learning, instead of memorization; your growing skill as a player is supposed to be the driving factor behind making further progress. There are enough games calling themselves roguelikes with progression systems that this isn’t always true.

My problem with some games like this is that it’s possible to get an RNG overdose. Using Risk of Rain as an example, if you’re playing one of the close-range characters and don’t have a decent source of healing by about 20 minutes (on normal), you might be doomed due to circumstances that are mostly outside of your control. Likewise if you’re the commando (the character you start with) and haven’t found something that helps you deal with groups, you’re going to have a hard time. Roguelikes in general tend to be somewhat bad about this, it’s possible to have lost and not even know for a period of time. In Risk of Rain in particular, this time is unlikely to be longer than about 10 minutes. In Darkest Dungeon, it sometimes wasn’t as kind. (Ex: “You didn’t bring enough shovels, but you don’t know that yet!”) They also have the problem outlined in the opening, where defeat comes from a series of unlucky rolls in a very short amount of time.

Sliding Scale

This doesn’t seem like an easy problem to solve. In games of this style, things have to vary enough to be interesting, without screwing the player over completely. You might argue that “screwing the player over completely” is the point, but I don’t buy that, and that mentality is why most of these games struggle to expand their audience. I think one of the best solutions is the ability to choose how difficult the game is, but this isn’t perfect. Diablo doesn’t make you play on Hardcore mode, but it’s there as an option. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon only makes you start at square one (Level 1, no items) for the bonus dungeons.

I haven’t given up on roguelikes as a whole, and I’m always interested to see how the next one handles some of these issues. The fact that other people like even the games I think are too random proves that there’s an audience that enjoys that. Steam certainly has plenty to choose from.

Gaming, MMO

On Achievement

May 19, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

One of the things that came up in the podcast is my continuing progress through Final Fantasy 14’s Zodiac Weapon quest. About 2 hours before the podcast, I managed to get to the final stage before the relic weapon turns into something else, Sphairai Nexus. It’s been a long trip, and there’s still a decent amount of work to do before it’s “finished”.

Because It’s There

At this point in the game, there’s not much point in completing a zodiac weapon to actually use. The advice I give to players in our free company hitting level 60 is that you should get your relic weapon because the quest is kind of cool and because it represents probably the most convenient weapon you can get on hitting 50. Upgrading it once to the “Zenith” stage gives you an i90 weapon, and this is good enough to get you through to the next non-relic weapon upgrade. If you’re sane, it’s better to pretend that the questline doesn’t continue past this point.

After the Zenith stage, the relic quest starts going into the Saga of Zodiac Weapons, and the effort/reward ratio is a bit skewed toward effort. Nearly every patch that introduced a new tier of gear added a stage to the quest, and all of these are quite time-consuming (but mostly not terribly mechanically difficult). Most players doing this quest now (including myself) are doing it just to say that they have. There’s just something satisfying about having a goal and working toward it, regardless of the actual utility of this goal.

If you see this, you've gone too far. — If you see this, you’ve gone too far.

Not the First Time

Even in games that don’t have a real achievement system, I tend to find and make goals for myself. I notable example was in WoW, where I made a point of collecting keys. I played a druid, but I made up for a lack of lockpicking skills by carrying around every key I could get my hand on. This included the key to Tempest Keep, long after it became unnecessary, along with not-key keys like the Medallion of Karabor and the Drakefire Amulet. On a very related note, I was pretty pissed off when one of the Cataclysm patches removed 90% of the keys from the game.

For a while, if a key existed, I had it.

I did other insane things in WoW, although I never got a title for it. I was a holder of the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, even though it had absolutely no purpose to me. I managed to get the entire Feralheart Set, and wore it around town (and then used it as a transmog, once that became a thing that was possible). The relic weapon quest is just really another part of this, one more facet of my desire to achieve things because they’re there. I don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

Gaming

On Things Left Unfinish

May 16, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

This is a response to the second talkback topic for 2015’s Newbie Blogger Initiative.

There are really multiple parts to this, and I’d like to address them individually because I don’t see them as the same thing. The (somewhat loaded) question for this week is “Early Access and Kickstarter – Do you support unfinished games?”. As in a lot of things, the answer isn’t a simple yes or no.

Example A: Kickstarter

To date, I’ve backed a number of kickstarters, and only one has completely failed to deliver. Kickstarter is responsible for the watch I wear on a regular basis, and one of my favorite games of 2014. Kickstarter in some cases is a chance for products that wouldn’t normally see the light of day to get funding, usually because publishers aren’t willing to invest in those types of games anymore. (No one wants old-school RPGs or adventure games anymore, right?) In some cases there’s some publisher interest, and kickstarter serves as the proof that someone is willing to spend money on it. Either way, it’s a chance to quite literally vote with your dollar, even though sometimes people don’t keep their campaign promises.

That said, there are some major duds. There are a few examples of projects getting mismanaged so badly that the money runs out, and nothing gets made. Clang, Yogventures, and the Stomping Land all come to mind. In these cases, saying your paying for something “unfinished” is too kind. If I knew then what I know now about kickstarters likely to produce a quality product, I probably would not have backed Aura Tactics. Making games takes a fair bit of money, so you should be wary of campaigns not asking for a lot of it. Making games also takes a fair bit of experience, so you should look for some indication of this, either previous games shipped or a solid proof of concept. And finally, if anyone in the pitch has Molyneux Syndrome, you should probably steer clear.

Example B: Early Access

On the other hand, I pretty much universally distrust games in Early Access, and I’ve only paid for two directly (although I’ve gotten a few because of kickstarters). I also consider Founder’s Packs to fall into this category. In both cases a developer is asking for testers to give them money for an opportunity to see how the sausage is made. It turns out I’m okay not seeing how the sausage is made. Starbound is a nice example, I think I’ll like that game once it’s done, but I don’t have a whole lot of interest in playing all of the “incomplete” releases along the way. Jim Sterling has had a lot of success picking games from Early Access and telling you why you shouldn’t play them (there have been a few exceptions).

It seems like for every game like Warlocks, there are a bunch of other games trying to sell minimal effort projects that will never be “completed” on Early Access. Steam’s Early Access page currently only shows the best of these, filtering out games on some unknown criteria somehow. Steam currently has a bit of a curation problem, and while Early Access isn’t entirely to blame, it certainly isn’t helping.

Example C: MMOs

MMOs by their vary nature are unfinished games. No matter what the payment model is, there’s always an expectation of expanding content; the games that can’t do this are the ones that tend to fade away. We tend not to think of these as being unfinished, but several developers have mentioned that the real work on an MMO continues well past launch. In essence, they’re never finished (except in those few unfortunate cases where a game shuts down).

So going back to the original question, I absolutely support unfinished games. It’s just a question of how unfinished.

Gaming, MMO

On Giant Steps

May 12, 2015 Ashgar 2 Comments

It’s not exactly a secret that the most recent Trial in Final Fantasy 14, Steps of Faith, isn’t exactly popular. I think it would be a lie to say that this is because it requires coordination or punishes mistakes harshly, because there are actually a lot of trials (even ones required for the story) that do this, like Shiva or Ultros. Today’s patch, 2.57, brings some changes, mostly by reducing the damage that a lot of the hazards do and reducing the health of most enemies (including the main enemy, Vishap), which should make it a bit easier to finish the trial before you fail. What it doesn’t change is why I dislike the trial in the first place:

Even if you know you’ve failed, there’s no way to start over until all of the events “finish”.

Super Meat Boy Philosophy

If you’re not familiar with the platformer Super Meat Boy, it’s a game that’s filled with spikes and saws and missiles and other things that will kill you, and asks you to get to the goal as fast as possible without dying. You die in one hit, so it’s a pretty hard game. The thing that makes it playable at all is that there’s maybe two seconds between dying and restarting a level. (I mentioned this in the Darkest Dungeon podcast). As a result failure isn’t that big of a deal, because before you even have time to think about it you’re starting again.

Steps of Faith is not like that. It’s the only trial that doesn’t end if your entire group is dead, it has its own unique failure condition when the dragon makes it all the way to the end of the bridge. In addition, if you miss certain things (like the giant harpoons), your chances of victory are very low, and you still have to let the entire sequence play out. This results in the time it takes for a successful run to be comparable to the duration of the duty finder lockout for leaving (30 minutes), so people frequently leave when they get it via roulette. (I haven’t seen a case this bad since Oculus, which WoW eventually started bribing players into doing.)

Looking Forward

I don’t know if the nerfs are going to help this, but that’s really just a matter of magnitude. They may have reduced Vishap’s health to the point where you can beat on him the whole time and still win. I personally think the only required change would have been allowing the fight to reset if all party members were dead (or some other way to reset the fight). It’s a new day, and we have people in the Free Company approaching this fight again, so I suppose we’ll see in the future.

Gaming, Tabletop

On Abstraction

April 13, 2015 Ashgar 4 Comments

Shadowrun has done interesting things with hacking over the years. In the game I’m currently in, I am our decker, which is to say I’m called on whenever something needs to be hacked. Given the setting, having someone capable of doing this is almost required, although they don’t have to be a decker. Regardless, they’ll need access to the matrix (the internet, according to Shadowrun) and some way of doing things in a less-than-legitimate fashion.

The Way Things Were

In 4th edition, the section of the book that dealt with hacking was rather long and complex, and required a lot of knowledge of real-world networks to make any sense of. Actually using any of it in-game basically required the GM to be running two games at once, one for the hacker and one for everyone else. If complex enough, possibly the rest of the party could go out for lunch in the meantime. (As a side note, this is the real reason you never split the party.) The hacking in 4th was an attempt to make things “more realistic” but it wasn’t great for the pace of the game, or even really for good play.

The Way Things Are

5th decided to abandon that, and went for a system where hacking things depends on establishing marks which can be used to access/control/whatever a given matrix entity. It also established that the “inside” of a host should resemble the physical area, which means that if you need to provide on-the-fly support to a run, you can be presented in the same game space. This obviously has no relation to how actual networking works, but it’s a much better fit for the game system. If you also tack on things like an inability to do the required hacking ahead of time (because you can’t be logged in forever without consequence and marks fade when you log out) and the requirement to be somewhat physically close to whatever you’re hacking (because there are noise penalties for trying to hack a building from across town), suddenly the hacker is a member of the team again, and has to play the game along with everyone else.

“More Realistic”

That phrase I used seems to come up a lot, although usually in the context of video games and not Tabletop RPGs (although that might explain how it found its way into Shadowrun 4). It was the driving principle behind the failed Kickstarter, Clang. Yet when people get what they ask for, the result is often not what they expect.

When I was working at the MIT Game Lab (then called the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab), one of our projects looked at the (then relatively new) Wii Remote, to see what we could do in terms of using it as a motion control device. One of the first things we tried to simulate was the cracking of a whip. If you’ve ever done this in real life, you might know that it’s not quite as easy as it looks in media, and at first we attempted to require similar motions in the game we were building. We eventually found that this frustrated players, and eventually eased off and implemented a much simpler (but more intuitive) motion.

I think what’s desired isn’t to have more realism, but more believability. As long as this thing works this way, and always works this way, it doesn’t matter quite as much if reality doesn’t also work this way. Sometimes reality is boring, that’s why we play games in the first place.

Gaming, MMO

On Sword Oath

March 21, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

I’m already forgetting the lessons of Blaugust. I might be a bit busier than I was then, but I should keep in mind that I don’t need to write an entire book every time I hit post. With that in mind, here are a few things that came up this past week in FFXIV. While the game balance at 50 is generally somewhere between “good” and “excellent”, there are a few periods where skill order makes no sense whatsoever. Lancers, for example, do the most DPS between the levels of 12-25 by spamming Impulse Drive, and ignoring the 2-step combo that they have. The Black mage rotation doesn’t really make sense until you have both Fire III and Blizzard III, which isn’t until 38. But the worst case of this in my opinion is the Paladin.

Skill Order

When you get your Job Stone as a warrior, the skill you get at Level 30 is Defiance. It improves your survivability, helps you hold threat, and allows you to build stacks that you can’t spend for five more levels. Paladins instead get Sword Oath, which increases the auto-attack damage you do (admittedly by a decent amount). The skill they get that increases their threat and survivability (Shield Oath) is withheld until level 40. The level 35 skill is Cover, which does not assist in threat or survivability. This wouldn’t be such a big problem, except that dungeons at this point start getting quite a bit more challenging (Brayflox’s Longstop and The Sunken Temple of Qarn are a giant wake-up call) and all DPS jobs get a massive stat boost from their job stones (and some of them also get important damage skills at 30). Unfortunately, this means that Paladins are at a rather large disadvantage, and I know from enough times healing and tanking Brayflox that it isn’t just player perception.

Problem Resolution

All is not lost: Paladins are perfectly capable of doing the content in this level range, it just takes a bit more work. It comes down to two things, really: Cooldowns and Target Switching.

Paladins are blessed with an entire suite of damage reduction cooldowns, and they can even steal the Warrior’s best one at that level range. In addition, the pace of combat in FFXIV is such that you can use something with a cooldown of 90 seconds about every other fight if you want. My first instinct when I was playing was to save cooldowns for emergencies, but you will get some more suited to this purpose later. Things like Convalescence, Foresight, and Rampart are nice to use whenever they make the healer’s life easier. Making their life easier then makes your life easier.

This one was a bit unintuitive to me at first too, but it’s useful and nearly required in the 30s. The only Paladin Combo that matters 95% of the time (Fast Blade->Savage Blade->Rage of Halone) has a threat modifier on the second hit, and a larger threat modifier on the third hit. It can be extremely helpful when tanking multiple things to land the second or third hit on something that isn’t your primary target, because Flash starts to not be enough in some cases. (These cases are named Summoner and Black Mage) On the other hand, if you have a strong single-target DPS in the party (Monk, Dragoon, Ninja) you might lose aggro on the primary target if you switch, so know when not to. If your party contains a Summoner and a Dragoon, mark targets and hope.

At the end of the tunnel

At level 40, you finally get Shield Oath (and will forget to use it roughly once a day for the rest of your time playing this class). At 38, you get Sentinel, a cooldown actually worth saving for emergencies (which is why it’s not in my macro). The dark days of the 30s don’t last forever, and once you get through them you’ll (hopefully) know how to be a better tank with lessons that once again apply once you have to deal with the class that can cast Flare. Have fun!

Gaming, Tabletop

On Pink Mohawks

March 18, 2015 Ashgar 1 Comment

So as the D&D game is winding down (possibly involving both dungeons and actual dragons), I’m looking to the next thing that I’m likely to take part in, which is Shadowrun. For those who are unaware, Shadowrun is a cyberpunk setting that also happens to include magic and some “traditional fantasy races” although not in traditional roles, in some cases. For more info, play one of the recent Shadowrun Returns games.

The Shadowrun setting is a bit of a relic of the 80s, and has some weird things in it associated with that. Some of those have been touched on in later editions (4e and 5e decided that “everything is wireless”), but some have not. The New Age movement influenced the political landscape in Shadowrun, including a nation of hippie elves and Native Americans taking over most of the US. Megacorps are a product of the time the game was written (and the term itself is borrowed from William Gibson)*. Virtual reality did not quite take off like the writers expected**. The fall of the Soviet Union was unexpected, but the only effect in the setting is that the name is changed from USSR to “Russian Federation”***. In 2015, some of it is quite anachronistic for what’s supposed to be the future. On the other hand, they were prescient about a few things. The Internet wasn’t really a thing in the 80s, but it is in Shadowrun, and it absolutely is now. Everything having wireless capability can’t really be credited to the 80s (it was introduced in 4e, written in 2005). Drones that were part of Science Fiction in the 80s are a very real part of military technology now. Other things aren’t quite a reality, but we’re getting there, like cybernetics and brain interfaces.

*We can talk about Wal-Mart and GE and Google and Japan in general, but they aren’t quite there yet.

**We can talk about the current VR wave if you want, but I’m not yet convinced it’s going to go differently than the last few.

***This one I’m not going to talk about, sorry.

Black Trenchcoats

A major part of the way the game is assumed to go is that you are part of a team doing somewhat illegal things for a mysterious benefactor (called Mr. Johnson regardless of their actual name). Some players view this whole conceit more seriously than others, and the terms that have arisen to describe this are “Black Trenchcoat” and “Pink Mohawk”. The names play off of sterotypes: In a Black Trenchcoat game, everyone is wearing a black trenchcoat and trying not to attract attention and complete the mission, and so on. In a Pink Mohawk game, someone shows up with a Pink Mohawk, and everyone else is okay with that.

Personally I don’t see the distinction as quite so black and white, but that might be because I’m predisposed to the latter style anyway. Even if the tone of a game is entirely serious, I think things are more interesting with a bit of personality. Shadowrun mechanically encourages this somewhat with the addition of positive and negative qualities available during character creation. (For the curious, a pink mohawk would almost certainly fall under “Distinctive Style”, a negative quality worth 5 Karma.) Being serious, and competent and yes, even optimized doesn’t necessarily exclude having a bit of fun.

Interesting times

One of the best things to me in tabletop RPGs are what I’d like to call “Interesting Bad Ideas”. If everything goes as planned things can get boring (although a good GM won’t let this happen), and these provide nice hooks for things that are likely to be fun. While Kodra is usually a nice source of these in games we end up playing together, I’ve been known to make my fair share. Our previous D&D campaign was largely defined by a deal I attempted to make with a red dragon in the first session (It seemed like a good idea at the time). This is how we end up doing things like starting (and sometimes ending) wars and uncovering very odd artifacts and sometimes destroying large sections of the countryside and/or planets.

This Shadowrun campaign might be interesting, as there are two groups (one local to the GM and one through Roll20) running for similar goals. It’s yet to be seen if we’ll come into conflict, although I’m guessing we will, indirectly. My planned Shadowrun character is a bad idea personified (as well as the very incarnation of a running joke about a previous character of mine). Details of this aren’t exactly available to the rest of the party (the GM knows, of course), although a few of them would be able to quickly figure it out if they knew what to look for. From what I know so far of the other characters, I might not be the only one playing a disaster waiting to happen. It should be fun to see whose number comes up first.