Wipe

Our guild managed to finish Naxxaramas today. Raid composition changed quite a lot throughout, I was tanking on my paladin (hunter as usual gets no love) which is a change, because I usually heal our Naxx10s. So we managed to scrounge up some healers from Severance a Holy Paladin and Discipline priest and let me tell you they are excellent players. Our other tank was a warrior from our guild who plays on his druid more so we were lucky to chance upon him, our DPS was a mix of guild members and a pug or two. We managed to one shot the entire Construct Quarter, which apparently is considered to be the hardest, but then we proceeded to the Military Quarter and all went well until we hit the Four Horsemen and wipes ensued.

What irks me is that it was all silly mistakes, sometimes people would click "yes" on a ready check then ALT TAB in the middle of a fight. What the hell? That's among the most unprofessional play I've seen/heard of. Had a healer Divine Intervention a TANK, causing a wipe. Another time was when one of the people at the back didn't properly get the attention of Lady/Zelliek.

Anyway, once we DID manage to clear Four Horsemen we proceeded to the Spider Quarter which apart from my crappy tanking, we managed to one shot most of the bosses (we wiped on Anub'Rekan.... go ahead, laugh, all my fault there). We continued the run the next day with most of the raid intact, we one shot the Plague Quarter, wiped twice on Saphiron, first time the MT lagged as he pulled which was fair enough. Second time the decurses kinda died/dced and shit went flying about.

Once we managed to kill Saphiron (he hits like a brick btw, I had to MT him) we we did KT in two goes, first time half the DPS died to Void Zones and Frost Tombs for some reason, mostly due to bad positioning but the second time was all dandy.

Anyway, before playing Warcraft today I managed to sneak in twenty or so minutes of Final Fantasy 11 game play. You may recall I had problems with the registration key, I managed to fix that by getting another one on a friend's email account. I think the first time I signed up for the wrong trial region (US as opposed to UK). Though this was all in vain.

First, the launcher for Final Fantasy is awkward and totally unnecessary; its like Steam to Counter Strike except MUCH WORSE. When you get into the game, the graphics are alright for an old game; but that's talking about the 3d Modelling and such. Text and font are all gayed up and blurry. Some of you may think this is attributed to the screen resolution, partially that's true.

But that's only HALF the battle. One half of the battle is getting your system settings right, which requires you to quit Final Fantasy 11 and go to some 3rd party config in your start menu like Final Fantasy 7 or 8. Let me use this opportunity to say that, there is no fking easy way to find out how to change your keys, so if you're on a laptop don't touch this game.

Anyway, when you FINALLY get into the game and get the resolution and shit right, you can make a character. Now if when you set your configs you didn't set it to 'basic character creation' enjoy turning your head endlessly when making a character and choosing its face. My first character was a female Mithra, because I like cat-girls in Anime (I'm that dorky). Now I don't mind character's posing in character creation, but FF11 makes it just ridiculous, my character was literally bouncing around, showing all her regions to the camera angle making it an audacious ordeal just to make a character.

Once your character is made you can finally play the game, the first thing you'll notice is that there's a cutscene. Fair enough, WoW does too. The difference is that, these cutscenes give an insight into the story of the game... AND ARE UNSKIPPABLE/LONG. I had to make two characters, so going through this twice was not pretty. When you finally get into game, the dialogue window with NPC's, in my opinion, is horrible, it's intermingled with the chat box so you'll get whispers in between NPC lines and I had no clue how to scroll up to read old stuff.

Movement in FF11 is alright, it's just the fact that the camera angle makes it so much more difficult to control than WoW. It uses what seemed to be a fixed camera angle, so essentially you can run around with a booty shot of your character, which is not so pretty if you have a gorilla character.

At this point I gave up on the game, the controls were unintuitive, the UI was not user friendly, the in-game features such as party were longwinded and in general this game is for people who have shitloads of patience to stick with it and find out all its nooks and crannies.

14 day trial? Try 20 min trial for me.

Final Fantasy 11 SLASH Greatness

So I'd like to begin my blog with this: FINAL FANTASY 11 REGISTRATION IS GAY. I spent the better half of my morning today installing the UK 14 Day Trial along with a friend who shall be called Fungis. Now the funny thing with FF11 is that, it's surprisingly similar to WoW in terms of subscription. You pay for a registration code (if you aren't on trial for murder) and you plug that into the service to play. The difference is that FF11 has a LAUNCHER in which you plug this registration code in. What got me today is the fact that when I plugged it into the launcher it said "INVALID CODE." I checked I didn't have caps lock on (the thing capitalizes shit anyway) and I checked I had caps lock on too. Neither worked. Next I made sure I had copied the code down right, cause 99% of registration mishaps are usually there. Nothing wrong there. Next I tried copy pasting the code from my email and that didn't work. All this effort for a 14 day trial and this shit doesn't work. You'd think Square-Enix/PlayOnline would put more effort into their authentication.

In other news, I finally got my Nobles Deck in Warcraft so my Hunter of pure awesome will be getting Darkmoon Card: Greatness, +90 agi passively and then another 300 agi every 45 seconds (roughly, it hads a 35% proc change) for 15 seconds! The bad thing is that I had to rechant for hit, which is always a bitch. Gear wise alone I'm not hit capped so I have to talent into it using Focused Aim, nice free 3% hit there and the push back reduction is also pretty nifty for Malygos' vortex... if we ever did Eye of Eternity. Anyway, I digress.
The bad thing about talenting into hit is that you have three less talent points to put into god knows what, Scatter Shot/Survival Tactics? As well as the hit derived from the talents doesn't carry to your pet, which in my case, doesn't really matter. My pet dies 50% of boss fights, like Dance, Dance, Heiganlution!

The good thing about being SV is that you don't need to rely on your pet as much for DPS, it only adds about 300 DPS on a good day. Though my pet has sentimental value, Cakey, as he's called is a Frostsaber so he's white... and cake, especially Strawberry Cheesecake has alot of white. Speaking of which once when I rolled Alliance some comrades and I created a guild called Strawberry Cake. True story.
The bad thing about SV is that, I gain agro so fast it's not funny. One Naxx25 I had 29 'deaths' when the raid leader posted it up, since he was in a different group to me his recount considered my Feign Deaths as actual deaths, in reality I didn't die more than twice.