FF14 beta

[Shrinweck]

The telegraphing attack hits you if you're still in the red zone when it disappears. The red only appears during the casting time and if you're in the AoE when the timer ends I guess the devs only think it's fair that the attack hits you since the actual attack animations would end up adding another .5-2 seconds to the casting time.

[Don]

It's not the animation time. You can clear the telegraph area well before the casting time is finished and still get hit, and it's in a rather predictable way so it's probably not lag. If you cast a spell and wait until around 0.2s left and start moving, the spell would still finish despite the fact you moved, which suggests there's that much difference between what your screen says and what registers to the server since moving normally should've canceled a spell immediately. Actually, if you look at it that way, it could be lag after all, but again this is very reproducible so if it's lag, then it is always lagged.

In practical terms this means you've to clear the telegraph area about 0.5s before the spell is done casting. This makes the reflex requirement of the game extremely high, and while it's not necessarily a bad thing (though I'd say the requirement are extremely unreasonable), the timing is misleading and makes you think it's lag.

[Shrinweck]

Yeah I guess I see what you mean and I agree about it. Clearly something needs to be tweaked... Either the tie needs to go to the player or they need to actually fix the issue.

I've been playing around with all the classes that interest me (I never got around to conjurer but it'll be nice to have something new to try in the future) and I guess I really have settled on monk. I had some fun with the marauder class but after getting to ~10 with both tanking classes I don't think I'll ever be comfortable enough to tank an instance with one. Thaumaturge was kind of neat and I could see going back to it some day, but it's really difficult to tag stuff in hectic fates with the 500 second cast time on the skills.

Side note: How the fuck are there still people in the world that don't understand that gold spammers are bots and crowding up the chat with complaints/insults targeted at them is literally accomplishing nothing but further making chat useless. I guess it's preferable to the 'WoW is the first MMO' troll comment that people always fall for.. and I certainly did the first time I saw it.

[Don]

THM have Scathe which is an instant nuke at around 20 or so and it's great for tagging FATEs. Before that you're kind of stuck, but you can try just spamming Blizzard 2 though sometimes you tag too fast and die when everything gets you too.

I'm seriously wondering if the servers are in Japan like they were in 1.0.

[Shrinweck]

Back to back to back mandatory story quest dungeons. Dear SquareEnix: Fuck you.

[Don]

The intention is obviously for you to actually experience those dungeons as opposed to never touching them while leveling up.

But in conjunction with the general lag in all telegraphed attacks, I'm not sure if this is a good idea. Are you at Brayflox's? That is a particularly demanding dungeon if your 2 DPS are melee. Aiatar is one of those 'reroll if you're melee', though I think the fight is actually well designed. It's just that the skill requirement for a melee is way too hard compared to a ranged DPS that just stands next to a wall and fire away, while a single mistake on a melee leads to a painful wipe.

[Don]

I saw a big thread on this with the videos explaining it and it makes sense. It says the movement/timing are all done on server side, so while it appears on your screen you've dodged an AE, what your screen says is not what actually what the server decides. So unless you live right next to where their datacenter is (in Canada), you will always have a lag. This is why the lag is always reproducible. You basically end up doing something like the half-circle spin rule in EQ, which is that if you can spin around half a circle with your keyboard and still beat the AE, only then can you be sure you actually dodged the AE. This was used when people played on 28.8K modem and lag was a very real concern and it works out spinning half a circle in place (takes about one second) is almost always enough to ensure your connection has caught up and only then can you be sure to resume whatever you're doing.

[Shrinweck]

Oh, yeah, de-sync. There's a thread that explains the ever loving shit out of it on the Path of Exile forums http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/419438

[Shrinweck]

So far I've also noticed a Breaking Bad ("Breaking Bud" FATE) reference as well. Most FATEs seem to be some kind of nerdy reference to a various degree. Cool stuff. What classes have you two been focusing on? I've been having trouble focusing on one (clearly). Now that I've given pugilist a go in instances I've kind of lost a bit of interest in taking it the entire distance to becoming a monk. The positional stuff is fun but because of the way things work out, you never get to take advantage of that while soloing and a great deal of the time in instances you don't even get a chance to do it then either half the time. I've gone back to liking the idea of archer/bard since I eventually get some support abilities down that path.

Due to constant (bad?) tanking my archer that I brought through the instances was constantly pulling agro even when the tank was focused and I gave him 5-10 seconds to build agro. At this point I've done six instances with eight tanks (two went LD) and only two of them could hold agro. None of them could hold agro away from my archer, the two that managed were with my pugilist. I realize that this is partially my fuck up for being 1337 (sarcasm) and I should have made allowances with my rotation, but clearly tanks need some kind of low level enmity boost. I quite liked SWTOR's handling of this with taunts that at least forced the enemy to attack the tank for a few seconds, allowing for agro juggling, a system I kind of like.

Don you mentioned weaving in that other short lived crafting thread.. and by god that is the most annoying crafting skill out of the bunch (I'm assuming, I haven't even tried cooking or alchemy). The amount of grinding of certain clothes is off the scale. The other armor crafting skills have similar requirements but at no points are you crafting 40 plates (it's varied among rings, rivets, etc.) as opposed to weaving where there's little variation. Kind of drove me mad at the time... You really have weaving done? Like you're level 50? That's impressive. I probably could have already come to this conclusion given your posting style, but you clearly have more patient than I.

Edited for spelling.. I'm a few drinks in.

[Don]

I'm Black Mage (Thumergust) at level 36. Aggro in this game isn't very hard if the tank has half a clue unless it's a fight with a lot of movement, like Aiatar.

My Weaver is 41 and my Carpenter is 47. I got like 3 other crafting class at 35. I made a detour for Carpenter because it's got the most useful cross level 50 skill.

Weaver is like starting a Megaman game doing Quick Man first. That said, the stuff from Weaving is very useful since it gives gathering and crafting armor, though farming the cloth is very difficult especially since velveteen, wool, and felt are not gathered but rather drops. You can take advantage of the crafting leves by just doing the leves that give you like 10 of the drops. You'll have to do the same with leather too unless you want to farm a ton of goat/boar/peiste leather.

Blacksmith is probably the easiest because it makes its own tool and its gathering tool (mining). That said it depends on a lot of other skills too for the leather, cloth, and even plates occasionally.

If you're not in a shortage of leves, just do crafting stuff and make sure you turn in HQ which gets you triple the XP. If number of leves is a concern, you want to do the stuff that requires you turning 3 in because they've a high chance of asking for 3 more of the same thing without using up a leve. Of course that's only usefu if you can easily make 3 more HQ of the said item, otherwise you're better off just doing the quest that requires 1 of something and try to HQ is. I've never seen the deliver 1 material stuff ever ask for more, though it can be pretty good XP too.

[Eric]

Gladiator/Healer/Miner mainly.

Although I only get to play 2-3 hours a day or so. Just beat Infrit, that was fun.

[Don]

Gladiator/Healer/Miner mainly.

Although I only get to play 2-3 hours a day or so. Just beat Infrit, that was fun.

I really hate how Ifrit's ground effects look almost exactly the same color as the volcanic rock on the ground. I guess it's meant to be part of the difficulty but on top of the server lag, it's awfully hard to see where any of the telegraphed areas are.

BTW I looked at the 1 star and 2 star crafting recipes, and looking at the market basically trying to HQ them with only one level 50 tradeskill is borderline impossible unless you're a Carpenter or a Weaver (starting with Careful Synthesis 2 or Byregot's Blessing is huge). You almost certainly need the Armorer's special to lower the level of the recipe too since I think they're 55/70 for those two tiers.

Did Titan for the 3rd time for people who needed it. This fight is much easier when you just stand in the middle and eat all his AEs, because a ranged DPS will almost never dodge any of his AE and at least you don't instantly die if you get hit by his KB while in the center of the room. This fight is unbelievably counter intuitive for ranged DPS. The further you're away from him, the harder the fight is even though there's no clue of any kind that'd tell you such. The fight is actually pretty trivial if you just have everyone surround him in the middle right under his foot and just pretend the AEs aren't there because you won't dodge them most of the time anyway.

Oh yeah, what server are you on? Character creation seems to be allowed on Midgarsormr again.

[Eric]

Ultros, I have a knack for finding the largest server in MMOs

No char creation here. *cackles*

[Shrinweck]

I gave (low level) tanking another try with my marauder and it turns out if you're not a blockhead it's quite easy. I'd really want to know what all these people were doing wrong in my other groups. The only thing I could tell off hand was one gladiator kept using flash BEFORE pulling/attacking groups. That's right, well out of its range lol. Hell, he was using flash outside of the range of those ranged pull skills.

I mean.. there are literally only 2-3 enmity causing skills out of like 5-6 at levels 15-20... What the fuck else are these people doing? Do they not understand skill combinations? I mean they literally LIGHT UP

[Eric]

It's not like tanking was hard in WoW at any point, you just always have people that don't know what they're doing.

[Shrinweck]

There should really be warnings in character creation denoting that a class shouldn't be chosen if it's your first rodeo.

[Don]

The tooltip for tanking ability needs to read like: "This ability causes extra enmity. This means you use it." As far as I can tell holding aggro is similar to WoW where you just hit whatever does extra aggro and everything that you manage to hit sticks to you unless they've a mechanism that'd make it hard/impossible to aggro, in that case you don't really care as a tank either.

[Eric]

I'm actually not sure if it's worth comboing into Enmity abilities, or just to use them raw.

[Shrinweck]

I figured something out going through one of the lowbie instances leveling up one of my classes... the bad players are typically on a PS3. There's just a certain lack of skill level in some of the players and a DEFINITE lack of MMORPG experience.

Also, yeah, Eric if you ever get any confirmation on comboing enmity abilities being worth it let me know. It's hard not to assume that more damage would further multiply the enmity being generated but that could easily be a false assumption.

Edit: Also it's bananas that this game still isn't officially for sale again yet. I was worried that spending $46 on a digital collector's edition (the only method I could find to buy the game from what seemed like a legit source) was going to be a waste of $16 because I'd probably be able to buy a $30 copy of the core game a couple days later... I'm glad I was wrong. Still not sure why they had it discounted... Maybe they were buying boxed copies and discounted it since they weren't also selling me the physical merchandise?

[Don]

I don't see the assumption that PS3 players are bad, but trying to play a MMORPG with a controller is probably like trying to play with one hand tied behind your back so obviously your ability will suffer considerably.

[Shrinweck]

That's what I'm saying - people who play on the PS3 don't have a wealth of experience with over a decade of MMORPGs. Also, yes, the controller, but I've heard that whatever control scheme they've managed on them is the best out of any MMORPG ever... but that's not saying much.

Games where every second counts anyone who isn't a surgeon with a PS3 controller is going to be worse than a mediocre player with a keyboard and mouse.

[Shrinweck]

I hate how if I have 3 days of stored bonus xp on a character that I can lose all of it in under a minute if I switch to a new low level class.. Translation: I hate how I'm stupid enough to have done this a second time. It should really translate to an amount of experience rather than a percentage of level.. or something. Anything is better than losing a full bar of rest experience at level one after killing 1-2 monsters.

[Eric]

I hate how if I have 3 days of stored bonus xp on a character that I can lose all of it in under a minute if I switch to a new low level class.. Translation: I hate how I'm stupid enough to have done this a second time. It should really translate to an amount of experience rather than a percentage of level.. or something. Anything is better than losing a full bar of rest experience at level one after killing 1-2 monsters.

[Don]

If it's a flat amount then you'd probably end up using 3 days of rest XP in 3 kills in a higher level class. It's a pretty dumb mechanism but I don't see anything clever they can do.

[Shrinweck]

I was thinking the amount you'd get per second/minute/whatever would scale up as you level, but I guess that it's actually covered by the 50% bonus you get for leveling alternate classes. I'll just have to remember do a dungeon to eat it up before I switch in the future.