1998: Fist of the Father

Final Fantasy XIV’s new raid dungeon Alexander launched earlier this week, and our regular raid group (with a few tweaks) took our first steps in there this evening.

I’d heard Alexander was significantly easier than The Binding Coil of Bahamut and was mildly concerned about this, but there are two things that set my mind at rest, having run through the first area now: 1) it’s not easy, though it’s straightforward enough once you know what to do, and 2) “Savage” mode is coming in a couple of weeks for the truly hardcore. (And it has different loot from the sound of things, too, unlike the Savage mode of Second Coil of Bahamut, which was largely a “bragging rights” sort of situation.)

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Alexander. The concept itself is pretty weird: an iron giant raises itself out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, but stops moving just as its hand grasps the bank. Through a convoluted series of interactions with the local goblins, you manage to find a way through the portal that is in its hand, and start working your way through in an attempt to find and destroy the core; the giant, it seems, is a Primal, and while it’s active, even if it’s not moving, it threatens to suck the very life out of the land.

Once inside you’re in a cool, mechanical and metal environment. It’s a big contrast from the previous raid dungeon, which made heavy use of the neon-glowing Allagan aesthetic, but since Heavensward as a whole has a lot of neon-glowing Allagan stuff just in its normal content, it seems the devs made the wise decision to not continue down this road with the new raid. Fine by me.

The bosses so far are appropriately steampunky in nature, and unlike Coil, which tends to be a short run to a single boss, the first level of Alexander features two bosses. The first is pretty much a pushover, but it’s fun that it’s more than just a single thing to fight. The main boss of the level, meanwhile, is a fairly involved fight that demands everyone knows what to do and performs their role appropriately. It’s a little more forgiving than Coil was — mistakes are less likely to immediately wipe the whole group, though they will put you all at a disadvantage — but still challenging. We managed to clear it within a couple of hours, though, and even went back in to go get some more loot for those who lost the rolls after we’d finished.

We’re hopefully going to jump in and see some more of it over in the weekend; I’m curious to see what mechanical mysteries the later levels have in store, and excited to be running with my regular group again.

1923: Target: Bahamut

After successfully clearing The Second Coil of Bahamut in Final Fantasy XIV a while back, our raid group is now on to the Final Coil of Bahamut — the last four encounters in this particular part of the story, and, like its predecessors, some of the toughest fights in the game.

Since we’re approaching the release of expansion pack Heavensward, which will feature an all-new raid set inside giant fortress/robot thing Alexander, The Final Coil of Bahamut has been “nerfed” slightly in order to allow a few more people to make it through. Specifically, the “Echo” bonus that was gradually introduced in previous Turns has been brought in, giving anyone who enters an immediate 10% boost to their maximum HP, damage dealt and healing.

This doesn’t make the encounters easy, by any means — although we’ve all cleared Turn 10 (aka The Final Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1) several times, today we had real difficulty with it for some reason. So after a while we gave up and took a look at Turn 11, which none of us had seen at all before.

For the unfamiliar, the Binding Coil of Bahamut storyline in Final Fantasy XIV is effectively a direct follow-up to how version 1.0 of the game ended — with “The Calamity”, which saw artificial moon Dalamud called down from the sky, only to burst open and reveal a very angry dragon god called Bahamut, who promptly proceeded to blow seven shades of shit out of Eorzea. Archon Louisoix — grandfather of Alphinaud and Alisae, the former of whom is a main character in A Realm Reborn’s main storyline and the latter of whom serves as the “protagonist” of sorts for the Binding Coil of Bahamut narrative — did something appropriately spectacular when all hope looked lost, leaving a number of adventurers temporarily trapped in limbo until they woke up five years later in an Eorzea that was in the process of being rebuilt. What happened to Bahamut? That’s the question that the Binding Coil of Bahamut sets out to answer, and you gradually discover bits and pieces about what really happened as you progress through it.

That’s not all, though. Although Final Fantasy XIV’s setting of Eorzea is very much “swords and magic” fantasy, with a hint of magical technology lifted pretty much directly from Final Fantasy VI, there’s also a hint of sci-fi in there. Like any good sprawling role-playing game worth its salt, Final Fantasy XIV has an ancient race of long-dead weirdos who left mysterious, technologically advanced relics all over the world. The background of said weirdos — known as the Allagans — runs as an interesting undercurrent to everything else that is going on, and is specifically explored through both the Crystal Tower and Binding Coil of Bahamut story arcs, with it being necessary to complete both to get the full picture — or at least, everything that has been revealed about them so far.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut is where some of the most interesting, exciting and surprising developments in this aspect of the game’s overall lore come, and it’s also home to some of the most spectacular visual settings in the whole game. By jumping head-first into the sci-fi angle, the Binding Coil of Bahamut is free to let loose with some enormously creative, absolutely massive environments that are quite unlike anything seen anywhere else in the game. Turn 11 in particular, which we saw for the first time tonight, is quite astonishing to behold, unfolding in and around an enormous scale model of the artificial moon Dalamud, and I understand that 12 and 13 are even more spectacular. I’m looking forward to it.

The thing I’m looking forward to most about this, though, is the fact that it represents the “true final boss” of the game as a whole as it exists today. And, while I haven’t spoiled myself on the encounters in Turn 12 and 13 as yet — though I can pretty much figure out who/what you’ll be fighting there — I have had a listen to the music. And it’s going to be quite the experience battling with this — the music from Turn 12 — in the background, I feel.

We have a big hydra… thing to flatten first, though, and we’re taking another pop at it tomorrow. Wish us luck!

1826: Nael Deus the Darnus Things

Sunday night is raid night!

Sunday nights are rapidly becoming a highlight of my gaming week. It’s the first time I’ve had a dedicated static raiding group to play an MMO with, and Final Fantasy XIV’s raids are one hell of a lot of fun if you’re with the right people — people who know their stuff, but who aren’t above having a bit of fun with the experience.

For those who are less up on the MMO lingo, a “raid” is differentiated from regular dungeons and other, more casual-friendly multiplayer content by virtue of its difficulty, which primarily comes from the need to be organised, communicate and take responsibility for the things you’re supposed to be responsible for. There’s little room to be “carried” in raids, particularly if you’re playing content that’s on the (relative) bleeding edge, though if you’re playing older stuff that people have since outgeared (and, in Final Fantasy XIV’s case, the raid itself has also been made easier over time, too) there’s a certain amount of margin for error.

Tonight our regular group tackled the final two Turns in the Second Coil of Bahamut, the second of three hardcore raids that are currently in Final Fantasy XIV. These raids are multi-part challenges that task eight players with working together coherently, and get consistently more challenging as you go through. The final Turn in each Coil is the most difficult by far, taking in very complicated mechanics and demanding that everyone is playing at absolute peak potential. A big stumbling block for a lot of players is Turn 5, the last Turn in the first Binding Coil of Bahamut, in which you take on the very angry dragon Twintania, but we successfully cleared that a while back without too much difficulty. The Second Coil of Bahamut is significantly more difficult throughout for the most part, but we’ve gradually worked our way through each Turn in… well, turn, and now we’ve arrived at the next big wall to scale: Turn 9 (also known as The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 4).

Turn 9 is the most complicated fight I’ve attempted in Final Fantasy XIV to date. It’s an incredibly daunting prospect, but it’s a good example of what raiding is all about. It’s not a fight you can just jump into and hope for the best; it’s a fight where you need to know what you’re doing, what you’re responsible for and how to deal with the various situations the encounter presents you with.

Turn 9 is so complicated because, like most fights in the game, it unfolds over the course of several discrete “phases”, but unlike many other fights in the game, each phase is completely different from the previous and would be mechanically complex enough to be a single conventional encounter in its own right. Tonight, we spent nearly an hour attempting it, and we managed to just about get our heads around the first phase after a bit of practice and a lot of initial bewilderment. There’s a hell of a lot going on, and it’s initially very difficult to work out what you might be doing wrong when everyone suddenly dies at a moment’s notice. As you try again and again, though, you start to notice things; you start to recognise patterns in the boss’s attacks, you start to be able to predict what’s coming next and you figure out the best way for you to successfully handle your own responsibilities, until eventually you reach a stage where you can effectively run it on autopilot.

This is the way to handle Turn 9. Because it’s so long and daunting, it’s not an encounter you can just give people a simple explanation of and plough through without any difficulty. Rather, it takes time to learn each phase and to perfect the way your own unique group composition handles it. Getting things right is exciting and enjoyable, and successfully reaching a milestone in the fight — like the changeover between phases — is cause for celebration.

This evening, we successfully cleared the first phase, which involves everything from trying not to get meteors dropped on your head while ensuring that they are dropped in helpful positions for later to getting zapped with a rather unpleasant Thermionic Beam. Oh, and the main tank (which, for part of our run, was me) keeps exploding throughout the fight, too, which is nice for them. It’s tense, and a lot of pressure on everyone, but it’s a huge amount of fun to challenge with people you’ve come to know, enjoy the company of and trust.

I’m really looking forward to our next attempt, when we’ll hopefully be able to survive for more than ten seconds when a bunch of nasty golems appear and try to kill us!

1729: Twintania’s Revenge

I cleared Turn 5 of The Binding Coil of Bahamut in Final Fantasy XIV once again this evening, adding another member to the roster of our group of (hopefully) regular raiders.

This time around, I decided that I was going to try and tank it. Although I have a level 50, well-geared Paladin class that I’m pretty confident in using for straightforward stuff like dungeons, complicated 8-player fights like Turn 5 have been something I’ve generally shied away from to date, unless I could rustle up a group of people I know and trust — and whom I don’t think will yell at me if I make mistakes.

I decided I wanted to give it a go this evening, however, if only to be able to help out other prospective Twintania-downers with more than one possible role in the future. And so I stepped up.

For those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV or MMOs in general, a couple of definitions are probably in order. Tanking is the role in a party that maintains the attention (“aggro” or “enmity”) of an enemy and takes the brunt of the damage while the rest of the group either stick them with the pointy end (melee DPS), throw pointy or flamey things at them (ranged DPS) or heal people as necessary. In 8-player battles such as Turn 5, you generally have a “main tank” (or MT) that maintains aggro on the boss for the majority of the time, and an “off tank” (or OT) that either has a different role to perform in the fight (as in the case of Turn 5) or alternates tanking the main baddie with the MT (a process called, unsurprisingly, “tank-swapping”).

Being an off tank doesn’t necessarily mean you have an easy job, though. In Turn 5, the off tank’s job is actually probably harder than the main tank’s, so I volunteered for the main tank role, while our other Paladin, who had previously main tanked Turn 5 on our previous clears, stepped into the off tank role to get some experience there.

The battle began. Jovayne, our off tank, started the fight, pulling Twintania and her three Scourge of Meracydia enemies to him and getting their attention. I then ran in behind him, used my Provoke ability on Twintania, then pulled her away from the main pack, as is the main tank’s job in this fight.

It’s at about this point you realise quite what a different affair tanking is to almost any other job on the battlefield. While if you’re playing something like Black Mage or Bard, you’re probably flinging things at the back of your foe, as a tank they are right in your face — and when it’s something as giant and threatening as Twintania, the experience is genuinely intimidating, particularly as you see your hit points fluctuating by frankly terrifying amounts with each hit you take, though.

You have to trust in the people with you, though; unlike a single-player game, you can’t do everything yourself in an MMO, and learning how to trust others is an important part of learning to play well. I’d take a lot of damage from Twintania’s powerful attacks, but I knew that the healers would be there to keep me safe. I’d make their job easier by making use of my defensive abilities, which reduced some of the incoming damage, but ultimately my life was in their hands.

The rest of the fight progressed slowly as, on the whole, the party was fairly inexperienced compared to the last time we cleared it. We did make steady progress, though, with the notorious “Divebombs” phase, during which Twintania swoops across the battlefield, dealing heavy damage and an enormous knockback to anyone she hits, proving most troublesome, as ever.

Mistakes were made by all — particularly me, since I was playing a role that is still relatively unfamiliar — but eventually we made it through together. When we successfully passed the second most difficult phase of the fight (known as “Twisters”, after the instant-death ability Twintania uses in this phase) and were into the home straight, it was a real, genuine, heart-in-mouth moment: just a video game, perhaps, but the feeling of genuine excitement of knowing that you are (probably) going to overcome one of that game’s toughest challenges is absolutely magical.

I was really happy after we finished, since successfully tanking it felt like a significant milestone in my development as a player. I’ve talked before about how I feel like I’m actually quite good at this game, in contrast to a lot of other things I play, and broadening my virtual skill set in this way is very satisfying and enjoyable indeed. Plus it makes me feel like I’m growing in confidence — not just as a player, but personally speaking, too. That’s pretty awesome, no?

1708: Playing on Home Turf

Regular readers of this blog will be well familiar with how much I enjoy Final Fantasy XIV (as does Andie now, too) and, for sure, I’ve had a blast since the game’s original beta sessions last year. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to run with the same people since I started playing — the Giant Bomb Free Company — and most of them have been playing fairly constantly since launch, so there are usually some familiar faces online at any given time, and other people come and go around that stable of predictable, reliable players.

The downside to the Free Company that I’m a member of is that the vast majority of people involved live in the States. This makes things a little difficult when I want to participate in things that practically necessitate forming a group yourself rather than relying on the game’s built-in “Duty Finder” matchmaking system. It hasn’t stopped me trying, of course — and I’m very pleased to have completed both The Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5 and Ramuh’s Extreme Mode incarnation with my friends in the Free Company — but since these attempts normally necessitate staying up until about 3am at the earliest in most cases, they’re not always practical, particularly now I have a proper job and consequently have to get up at some ungodly hour in the morning in order to arrive on time.

Enter our neighbours, then — yes, they’re actually our neighbours; their Free Company house is right across the street from ours — the free company Loose Cannons, more commonly known as LoCo. I’ve seen these guys around a bit over time, but didn’t really know them that well. They always seemed to be pleasant people, though, and they were always gracious enough to wave and greet me when I passed by them on my way to do something else.

After a while, a “linkshell” — essentially a custom chat channel, for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV parlance — was set up to allow Giant Bomb and LoCo to communicate with one another, since the Free Company chat channels are restricted to members only, and you can only be a member of one Free Company at once. You can have up to eight linkshells, though, so I happily accepted the invitation — though, being me, I was somewhat hesitant to muscle in on what I saw as already-established social groups, and thus remained rather quiet around the unfamiliar people.

The other night saw an encouraging milestone, though; it transpires that many of the members of LoCo operate in the same timezone as me, and moreover, that a lot of them are interested in taking on the game’s most challenging content, such as the aforementioned Binding Coil of Bahamut Turn 5, and the subsequent four-part raid the Second Coil of Bahamut. Since I’m also interested in challenging this content, but didn’t want to muscle in on the established, US-timezone groups that had already naturally formed in Giant Bomb, this has the potential to be an ideal situation for me.

I’ve never been a part of a “static” raiding group before and indeed have usually shied away from this sort of thing in MMOs because I doubt my own skills, usefulness and ability to commit to the group. As I wrote the other day, though, Final Fantasy XIV is one of a few games that I actually feel confident that I’m quite good at, and the prospect of not only challenging myself but developing some close friendships with others who enjoy the game in much the same way I do is very exciting to me. I’ve often mentioned how playing Final Fantasy XIV can be as much of a social activity as a video game, and having a regularly scheduled evening where a predictable, reliable group all shows up and we work our damnedest to try and take down Twintania, Rafflesia and whatever lies beyond that? Well, that’s something that I’m looking forward to a lot.

Is this how people on sports teams feel?