April FFXIV Eorzea Adventures

Grover Eyeveen from Hyperion here! April has been a good month so far for me in Eorzea! Here's a quick rundown of my adventures!

I ran Titan Extreme with the free company, and we were shocked to see one of the new 2.2 variant mounts drop. I was lucky enough to win the roll and got a new mount! Its legs have rocks that float around them in orbit! It's really cool looking!

I was able to complete Leviathan and Moogle Extreme Modes! Leviathan is pretty scary, and my friend Naztear brought me along and helped me through it. Early on, I was getting hit by a lot of the dashes and got knocked off the boat a couple of times. I haven't really desired to go back since, but I did get lucky and won the wave shield from the 1-2 runs we won that night. Moogle EX I find to be easier and more fun, I am knowledgeable enough to get that on farm status and I went with a few pickup groups to do that, haven't seen any tanking ribbon drops from that, and I think I have a new method in order to teach Viva Eorzea how to do Moogle Extreme. Sorry, no pictures from that!

We got a free company estate! We settled for a Medium size in Ul'dah. Due to us getting it really late compared to other free companies on our server, we had to go for what was left medium size. Personally, I wanted a large house and the votes went to Gridania as a location. With the choices we had, not only we opted for one of the relatively empty wards, we went for functionality while we were at it. We were able to get a really nice cliffside view and right outside is the summoning bell and market boards. Score! Due to the emptiness of the zone, we don't have many FC neighbors and the lack of lag in the area is very nice.

Fat Chocobos and Moogle Minions were sent to Collector's Edition holders this last weekend. I think the Fat Chocobo is really cute looking and it even has its iconic theme from Final Fantasy IV! The wind-up minions are really cool too, they dance if they get near another person's Moogle Minion.

Last but not least, I completed Turn 5 in the Binding Coil of Bahamut!

I decided not to go with free company members or members from my static party, I opted to do this leading my own party finder group with my own set of separate expectations. I made a Party Finder in a much different tone than most, opting for making a party where a clear is not expected. I asked for people who are nice/understanding and willing to get on voice chat and talk strategy in extensive detail before even queuing to enter. I was up front with everyone, understanding when they messed up and why, and we were highly communicative and talkative during the run. It was really easy going and after 5-6 failed attempts of getting closer/minor messups, we were finally able to get it down. The Allagan Battleaxe and Aiming Pants dropped and I'm hoping to get two friends from my static the win on Monday so we can all move on to the Second Coil of Bahamut as a team.

That's about it for my Eorzean adventures for now!



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Halatali - Hard Mode Strategy

I wrote this up for Viva Eorzea. I did Halatali HM this morning. Here's how the bosses go.

Boss 1: Cyclops Boss

Avoid Swings/Swipes like Coincounter in Aurum Vale

When he prepares 1000 Tonze Swing (Super Move): (It takes up the whole arena) Hit the mammet contraption. The Mammet will spawn a blue protective circle, run into it to avoid damage.

Drops I've seen: 50 Mythology, Hardened Sap


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Treasure Box between Boss 1 and 2:

Dropped Darklight Earring of Healing

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Boss 2: Catoblepas

4 Panels. Designate each party member to one panel. Spawns orb (I'll talk about that later)

Spawns an eye add (literally on its eye) that does constant AoE pulse damage. You know this is coming when it says something along the lines of "The catoblepas eyes are turning yellow."

When eye add spawns, hit the orb on the panel you're assigned to to take a blindness effect, harder to hit mobs but pulse damage is reduced.

Titan-like plumes spawn on the battle field. Looks like a giant eye on the ground. At first only one spawns, near the end of fight, 3 of them spawn on battlefield. You have time to dodge it.

DD LB the second time he spawns an eye.

Drops: 30 Mythology, got Magician's jester hat (BLM/THM ilevel 70)

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Boss 3: Class Light Party: Healer, Archer, Gladiator Lancer

 We killed in order Healer >> Archer >> Lancer >> Gladiator

Lancer ignores any and all hate. Whoever it attacks, have them kite it.

Healer goes down pretty fast, same with Archer. Gladiator we got to 50% and then phase 2 of the fight happens.

Phase 2 - Beast add and Thaumaturge Lalafell

Kill the Gladiator and finish him off and then focus on Lalafell. The Lalafell will use a binding move, have the tank hold the beast away from the lalafell and hit the Scepter NPC that spawns to get rid of the binding move. Other party members will get stuck at times. Use the DD LB to finish off the Lalafell and then fight the beast down to claim victory.


Drops: 45 Soldiery, Potash






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I thought this was kind of funny

This was a message I received via Facebook. Name censored to protect the innocent.

I knew he meant well.

FFXIV Patch 2.2 hits this week

"Through the Maelstrom" patch for FFXIV comes out this week! It's a bit bittersweet that I feel that they're making some of the more difficult content easier a bit -too- early, but on the other hand I am excited for the additions that are coming. (Gilgamesh and Diabolos!)

Even with the limited play time I have these days, I am overall happy that I got to see and do 98-99% of the content, just wish there was more time to do the last 1-2% (Twintania!)

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #24

Hey all, back with the 24th development log! Have you guys been playing our new demo? If not, take a play and let us know what you think of the game! We also put up a list of current issues, so if there's something you found that hasn't been caught by us, let us know and we can get it fixed asap!

This is our new official company logo! Designed by Geno Quesada, a long time close friend of mine. I like it, because it's short and straight to the point. The design for the lettering kind of looks like our protective door in front of our small studio too. So I think it works perfectly!


Website:

We now have a company website! As well as a new logo! It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, until we get someone to do promotional work for us to populate the page with.

Check it out!


Selatria:

We have finally released the new demo for Chapter 1 this past Saturday. We have taken it down for 9 months or so, but we've made large changes to the structure and mechanics of dungeons, implemented a new monster art style developed by Jennifer Gilliland, and overhauled a lot of the game mechanics, including swapping out one boss in Chapter 1-5.

You can download the new demo here. (~353MB)

Aside from the terrain assets which may go into development depending on Kickstarter, the goal of
this demo (aside from previous releases) is to show how the game will look aesthetically as far as faces, voices, and monsters go.

We also took player feedback that we didn't explain status effect icons well enough, and Hannah Bottenberg worked on high-res versions of the icons for tutorials throughout the game's first dungeon.

Check out the new screenshots and new music!

ANTics:

Unfortunately, this will be our last development log where we showcase ANTics as the game is now in its polishing phase, and released games will not be covered in development logs! (Well, unless we plan on adding more to it later, who knows!)

We originally planned for ANTics to launch on Google Play on March 10th, but we had several setbacks. We wanted to polish some things on the game before we ultimately got it running, and there was a loading issue with one of the themes for the boss at the end. We're going to be meeting on Friday to get more of it completed.

   

Next week, we'll likely release a 5 level demo of ANTics to test on others' devices. After that, we will go through the feedback and then launch the game on Google Play and Amazon. 

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That's about it for now. Play Selatria and let us know what you think and look forward to ANTics!

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Producer Rant

I find it insulting that team members say they're not being adequately involved with the production of the game. Last week we've had to adjust percentages of the team based on the amount of contributions that person has made relative to others in the project since the conclusion of the Indiegogo campaign.

Those in the team that stopped sending in contributions or messaging regarding art assets in the project had their percentages decreased, those who continued to send in assets to the project had their percentage increase.

If we end up not using it, we scrap the assets and give them back to the user for their personal use. It's not anything complicated, it's not personal, we just want the game done as soon as we can.

We have gotten emails from some that say they weren't informed of what we need in the project, and I call 'bull' on that. I make it a point to release large-scale developer logs and post to hundreds of people announcing on a large scale of what we're doing and how we're progressing. I post on our Selatria Development Team on Facebook with updates to the project on a near-constant basis.

To say that they aren't kept up to date with the project is outright insulting in my opinion.

That's the end of that.

Transferring from Gen IV/V to Pokemon X

Today's the last day of my free trial for the Pokemon Bank/Transporter, so after work continues the long convoluted task of getting all my Pokemon from Pearl, SoulSilver, Black, and Black2 onto my X game!

Now I wish I could transfer from Pearl and SoulSilver straight to X, but nope they make you transfer them to Black/White first, which makes this needlessly difficult.

Not to mention that to transfer to the Bank from Black Version, they only look at Box #1, so there needs to be constant game switching to get all the desired Pokemon over.

tl;dr - I'm not paying $5 a year for this bank service, and transferring two generations worth of Pokemon is WAY more difficult than it needs to be!