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Admin | March 15, 2012

Tales of Graces F

Yes!


Admin | March 11, 2012

FFXIV update #1: Current overview

Yeah, I picked up a copy of FFXIV to try it out for observing purposes to see what all changed during its release – now. The game was only 6 bucks so I thought why not, it includes 30 days free trial so that means I don’t have to pay any subscription fee for 30 days. Anyway

Story 7/10
Story revolves around you. It starts when you start working as recruit for these so called “Grand Company” You could see them more as a nation where you undertake missions. Eventually you can only join up with 1 grand company at a time which means you have to either choose between the 3 cities; Ul’dah, Gridania or Limsa. The story is pretty short you are able to complete the Grand Company storyline within a day or a few evening of playtime. The story does include cutscenes with fancy cutscenes where you also see your own character which did surprise me as many MMORPG if there were cutscenes it revolves in first person view most cases.

Gameplay 5.5/10
The gameplay has vastly improved, but it’s not quite there yet. There’s a few bad things I can mention about the gameplay that frustrates your experience playing FFXIV. When FFXIV made its debute on when the game was release it was a total wreck and Square-Enix has shown fair amount of attempts to fix and tweak this game with several patches. But this doesn’t change the facts there are many flaws in this game that ends up in frustration.

First I’m going to discuss the leveling system, there’s two ways to level you can solo your ways to 30 which becomes very boring quickly as you reach level 15-20 it becomes a very linear and painful grind that you want to avoid. Then you ask how do I level up? Just like its predecessor a way to level up is grouping up with other players, however in FFXIV these parties before level 30 they are hard to come by. Due to the rarity it becomes rather a chore to get to level 30 another way of leveling up is by doing levequests with 3-4 players.

Music 8/10
FFXI music was not composed by the Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, however they did a great job. In FFXIV the composer Nobuo Uematsu is back with fancy and neat tunes.
I think the music displays an excellent variety of classic to rock most instrument used (rock) guitar, piano and synthesizer. While some battle music can become annoying and linear at times, overall field music and dungeon music are done well.

I’ve been exping a bit and had a friend showing me around and stuff, I know a few people I met in FFXI that are currently playing FFXIV. Any other I got MRD 50 before patch 1.21 hit which introduced Artifiact armor. So far, I’m abit disappointed what MRD/WAR has to offer and I would like to see more Warrior like abilities that has been through the FF franchise such as Double Attack or Warrior’s Charge. The power where Warrior currently stands is underwhelming especially the advanced warrior class since changing from MRD to WAR makes you not being able to use several sub class abilities such as Lancer’s Meditate. Any other than that Lancers seems to be the top melee class as in currently. SE is pretty horrible at game design period, so they really need to fix up their class balance next coming patch hopefully. About the Warrior Artifact I think it looks ok, but it leans more towards BST than WAR. Asside of that I am working on getting LNC to 50, because DRG Artifact gear looks pretty awesome and it’s overall good melee class. Warrior will still be my favorite though. Hopefully I will be able to see some content endgame wise before my 30 days are up, and from there decide if I want to keep playing this game or not.


Click to enlarge.


Click to enlarge.

My speculations so far that FFXIV is not a successful MMORPG yet, but the improvements so far are significant to what it was when it made its debute on the release. Though, the game probably has only little endgame content. You can complete the main storyline by playing a few nights. Asside of crafting and leveling there’s not too much to do in the game, the Achievement system feels somehow copy/pasted from WoW, but doesn’t show as important role in FFXIV as it has in WoW. Another con is that its very hard to level pre-30 if you’re not someone that takes initiative you will find it very rare for a party invite to come by, if you are leveling solo past level 10-15 you will find this to go very painful and slow showing very little progress make in huge amount time you spent level grinding solo.

Pros+
o Amazing graphics
o Great story telling so far, with flashy cutscenes
o Artifact are here!
o Unique mechanics
o Continuously improvements

Cons-
o Too many graphic glitches, invisible walls, and cliffs you cannot drop down to becomes very frustrating at times.
o Only very few useful classes for endgame content that the game has.
o Leveling 15-30 becomes a chore due rarity finding parties.
o Very bad user interface interaction.

Rating: 6.0


Admin | February 15, 2012

FF11

Might try out the 99 cap.


Admin | February 14, 2012

WoW update #25: Orc Warrior

Blood and Thunder.


Admin | February 14, 2012

WoW update #24: Going Horde

Guess I’ll be going Horde afterall :D


Admin | February 04, 2012

Enjoying new upgraded PC!

Ever since I started dualmonitoring, my QuadCore PC has suffered drastic performance loss in WoW, I think its partly because of Cataclysm, because Blizzard sucks and uses really heavy textures. Anyway with my new CPU I don’t even lag in Stormwind anymore even during heavy crowed. Where my Q9550 had some difficulty with it. Q9550 is a fine CPU, i5 2500k can just handle things better. It’s really noticeable that my framerate went up with my new CPU, this would be a good during 25-man raids where my CPU Q9550 experienced some difficulty during heavy loading like Heroic Yor’ Sahj adds. Sometimes, I would end up with 5 FPS cause there are so many adds and so much AoE is happening.

I’m getting up to 50-80 FPS during crowed in Stormwind which is a big increase sometimes I would go below 30 on my Q9550.


Admin | February 04, 2012

New PC upgrades are here!

After 2.5 years old Q9550 and P5Q Deluxe pumping I felt it was time to upgrade my hardware. As I often multitask alot with two PC screens having a CPU with a little more power would be nice. I currently having two cases my other PC was in Cosmos and I’m building my new parts in Antec Nine Thousand reason for the this is I always felt the Antec was more functional than Cosmos cause HDD run a little hot and airflow in Antec case is better than the Cosmos despite it has more room.

Let’s take a close look on the hardware.

Boxed

Opened

That concludes my post, I still need to buy another CPU fan cause stock cooler sucks and will upgrade my GPU in the future.


So I recently failed my trial with Ninth Order and I’m not really butthurt about it I mean there’s plenty of guilds I could join. But I would like to discuss this blog entry about Ninth Order and how the raidleaders operate.

First thing I think the communication is not very good. Communication has always been an important role as a guildmaster, but also as an officer to a trial or member. Past guilds I have been over these 3.5 years I have met very great and understanding guildleaders. They were very communicative which is expected. However, Ninth Order I thought officers lacked this. If I take things back the guildmaster Lument of my previous guild Revived once made a post on his officer blog. I think Lument is a good example of a great guildmaster/raidleader. As a raidleader he’s very communicative, constructive continues giving feedback to trials and existing members/raiders. Top server guild or not this sort communication is a missing factor from becoming a good raidleader. I won’t go over detail on other guilds, but they were simular to Lument communicative wise.

Now, onto discussing why I was denied full raider position in Ninth Order. When I applied I was still in Revived with being 3/8H while Ninth Order was 4/8H at that time. When I applied my gear wasn’t in the best shape and I had around ilvl 390. Not to mention some really horrible itemization, further more I had also some pieces of LFR gear which is far behind from normal Dragon Soul gear. Most players in Ninth Order had 400-403~

Let’s see the amount of raiding I’ve done in Ninth Order:
Week 1: Spine, Madness
Week 2: H Morchok, H Yor’Sahj, 1.5h of progress on H Blackhorn then replaced, Spine Madness.
Week 3: H Morchok, H Zon’ozz, H Yor’sahj

As you can see only limited tries for me and I’ve only obtained two items during my time in Ninth Order. One of the is Gurthalak on my second week after H Blackhorn progression. My second item is the plate feet from H Zon’ozz. After obtaining those two my DPS did jump up, but I was still at ilvl 392 it seems leaders have failed to comprehend this or they were eyeballing. I had several horrible items including a 378 headpiece from Heroic dungeon. Moving on, my last attempt on Madness I was in the top 5 of Ninth Order DPS and on Yor’Sahj heroic I was placed third after acquiring atleast a good weapon. These two were accurate attempts that show least I can compete with better geared players and my DPS is for being “low” for my current gear.

I was bored these 3 weeks cause I had to sit 4 days out so I confronted a leader telling my thoughts how I was doing, and if it was possible to do more bosses on farm days if not what about when I become a raider? They didn’t say much only thing they said my DPS was low for their standards. This is hardly the case, because when I did H Blackhorn progression once I was underperforming due having a really horrible weapon. Next day an officer whispered me I did not pass my trial, because my DPS is below their standards. I didn’t feel like arguing, I was intelligent enough to know I would not win the argument and their mind is probably set and no officer or raidleader has every taken 1 minute of their time talking to me or giving any feedback whatsoever. So I thought myself a guild where leaders only shout on vent and being zero communicative or constructive is not really a guild I want to be part of anyway. They demoted me to Friend rank so I left instantly.

To summarize in short I’m a DPS warrior with ivl 392 at that time that that couldn’t compete in DPS cause there were DPS with 400-403 gear that obviously do more damage than me. I failed my trial, because my gear was not as high compared to others.

If a guild isn’t up to the job to gear someone up don’t waste your own and other people’s time by telling them to come over then deny them due too low dps for being undergeared. On another note I still needed some items for normal Dragon Soul so I joined a pug guild run for these two weeks and got pretty much what I was missing.

1) Ultraxion trinket
2) T13 head which I finally swap my Shoulders
3) Spine Shoulders
4) Heroic legs token

Which is basicly 5 very good upgrades replacing 378 items and LFR. Which brings my ilvl to 398. A good trinket was something I was really lacking. With my current gear my DPS has skyrocketed which allows me to pull some satisfying numbers and I am very confident right now when I join a 25-man heroic guild again I won’t be underperforming. It’s just funny the Ninth Order has failed to comprehend the difference between actual DPS and gear. And in two weeks of doing Dragon Soul without Ninth Order my performance has improve drastically compared 3 weeks in Ninth Order even benching on farm runs.

By this I would like to conclude my post regarding Ninth Order.


Admin | January 12, 2012

lolFFXI job adjustments & WoW

[dev1063] Job Adjustments: Warrior

* Warrior Job Adjustments
o Critical hit damage enhancement will be removed from the job ability “Blood Rage”

Previous effect: Enhances critical hit rate and critical hit damage for party members within area of effect.
New effect: Enhances critical hit rate for party members within area of effect.

o The TP critical hit rate bonus for the weapon skill Ukko’s Fury will be reduced.
*This is the same adjustment mentioned in [dev1064] Weapon Skill Adjusments.
 

  
*Adjustments and testing will be conducted in two phases.

* Phase one:
Balance adjustments (as above) introduced to test server, feedback collected.
 
* Phase two (introduction dependent on results of phase one testing):
Enhancement of job abilities Double Attack and Critical Attack Bonus.
Internal testing and balance adjustments to be followed by test server introduction and feedback collection.

 

Oh good fucking god, good thing I don’t play this fucking shitty game anymore, now that Tanaka is on the FFXI dev team again FFXI is gonna take its last several anal poundings.
Square-enix is more retarded than Tanaka when it comes to balancing fucking classes and they did it too fucking late to matter, no one gives a flying fuck or does Abyssea, Abyssea is where it actually mattered MNK and WAR being better than SAM. Now, with Voidwatch SAM is also shinning because its outside Abyssea so again this is a pretty pointless job adjustment.

On WoW related note I’ve been raiding 3/week now and my Warrior is getting geared nicely again, could use a better weapon, but 2/4 BiS heroic t13 so cannot complain!

3/8 Heroic and currently progressing on Heroic Hagara.

Wish I could play Alliance again, but cannot be bothered joining a new guild and starting over again.


Finally, due alot RL stuff I am finally back to WoW after being absent for 5 months. I must say I have missed this game alot, and happy I can play this game again. Hopefully Revived will accept me back as a raider, we’ll have to see about that as soon as I talk to someone about that. I am excited about the new upcoming patch which includes the Dragon Soul raid and finally the Deathwing encounter!

It is a shame I have missed the whole Firelands expansion, however with Firelands ending and with the upcoming new 5-man heroic dungeons this gives me a fresh start of raiding again. However, even if I had to play at heroic level in Firelands I felt confident that I could adapt to heroic raid level in a short time being. That’s not the case cause there’s only 1 week Firelands before patch 4.3 goes live.

Not having played 5 months has brought all my Add-ons outdated including TukUI. I felt it was time for a fresh new UI that’s why I have stept from TukUI to ElvUI. I like this UI abit better there’s some aditions to this UI (although it’s very simular to TukUI for most part) that TukUI lacks. They are both fine UIs this one is just a little easier to adjust.

For this week I have done some tier 11 raids as a warm-up being back, however hard to pug Firelands this late in the 4.2 patch since everyone requires an achievment. I’ve been running some heroics so I can cap Valor and some achievment points whoring gotta get those achievments!

That’s all folks!


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