The Greatest Tales Ever Told

I wasn't really shooting for this, but I discovered it about a week ago when I got MIN up to 30.  Finally got around to finishing off this achievement for the Chronicler's Crown.  It looks pretty sweet too, always a tough choice between this or the Paragon's.

A Life of Adventure

I haven't written much on my time on FFXIV yet; I've been meaning to--and have a number of things to write about (opinions on the game, I'm now leading a successful, modestly large endgame Free Company with 3 groups at Turn 4 or higher in Coil, etc) but haven't really had the time.  I've got something worth documenting for today though so I'm gonna post this quick:

Completed A Life of Adventure and got my Paragon's Crown.

On tanking speculation in Final Fantasy XIV

This is meant to be a reply to this topic in the Wiping as Intended tanking forum, but they apparently haven't added me as a member yet so I can't post it directly there.  WaI is a guild/free company created by some guys I sort of knew in SWTOR that I'm joining at Callsign's behest as part of a compromise to get them to come to Behemoth.  Anyways, here goes:

This is going to come off as a bit ranty and maybe a little hostile but bear with me, I've got good intentions.

A lot of the "theorycrafting" that has been done here and everywhere else on the internet that I've seen so far (especially with regards to tanking in FFXIV, which I'm invested and have personal experience in) is basically full of shit.  By way of introduction let's start with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YzzZ99AoMU.  You want to know how I know it's complete bullshit right away?  Without any real evidence or supporting justifications, he claims that PLD is easier to play than WAR.  All you have to have done is played GLA and MRD in phase 4 to know that he already doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

Here's your GLA flowchart circa level 20:
Is there more than one enemy? => yes => Do you still have MP? => yes => Flash => Are you an idiot? => no => Flash again => Is one of the DPS attacking a target out of order or is the healer not playing somewhat conservatively? => yes => Sigh, Flash again => Now what? => Resume Fast Blade>Riot Blade>Flash until stuff dies
Is there more than one enemy? => yes => Do you still have MP? => no => You're doing it wrong, now hurry up and Fast Blade>Riot Blade => okay => Now use Flash
Is there more than one enemy? => no => Are you way ahead on threat? => yes => Fast Blade>Riot Blade
Is there more than one enemy? => no => Are you way ahead on threat? => no => Fast Blade>Savage Blade

Here's MRD:
Is there more than one enemy? => yes => Do you still have TP? => yes => Overpower
Is there more than one enemy? => yes => Do you still have TP? => no => You're shit outta luck, hope nobody's attacking mobs you don't have threat on => /panic
Is there more than one enemy? => no => Alternate Heavy Swing and Skull Sunder

Marauder "Bind All Keys to Overpower and Smash Keyboard" Tanking is hardly much of a challenge at 20.  Maybe it's trickier at 50 but clearly Mr. Happy doesn't fucking know about that either.

IRL I'm a pharmacist, and a large part of my job is dealing with medical research literature.  Distinguishing between quality research and research that has cut corners and used faulty methodology to reach a reasonable-sounding conclusion is a difficult skill to learn and practice.  The reason I bring this up is because I experience the same sort of frustration reading this thread and others and watching all the YouTube drivel on the subject that I get at the exact moment I realize a study has only been constructed to support alterior motives or agendas, support faulty per-ordained conclusions, to serve the zeal of its authors, or to make some chaps some cash down the line at the expense of the science of healthcare.  You look at something like Mr. Happy's video and it's instantly clear that he didn't make it with any consideration on whether his information was accurate or useful, it's there for clickbait, views, and subscriptions and it's really helping nobody.

There's something you all need to keep in mind.  There's no data.

No.

Data.

(Or maybe there is, but nobody seems to be keen on citing anything.)

We don't know how the environment will act at level 50, we don't have a clear picture of what stats or stat growth will look like, what items are available, the types of encounters that will be easy or difficult, how party sizes and composition will affect raid efficacy, etc, etc, etc.

Perhaps more importantly there's no tools yet with which to accurately collect data.  Plus, SE as an MMO developer has a long history of obfuscating the information you're given, which is why actual, verifiable numbers are even more important.  Anyone who has played FFXI probably has a pretty good idea what I'm talking about.  This isn't WoW where tooltips give you all the numbers and freely accommodate data parsing.  Early HNM through the first few years of FFXI were kind of magical in how much of an art there was to figuring out what works and the extent to which the game had to be brute forced to extract useful data.  I was still an officer in Memories of Xendor when Ginnai was developing the MoX parser for SWTOR and having actual data and numbers completely revolutionized the raiding scene for us.

Your heads are in the right place and it's a great showing of the passion with which you're all eagerly approaching XIV, but we have no numbers.  Making guesses and calling it theorycrafting when it's speculative at best is, well, a tad intellectually dishonest.

Update: I eventually posted an edited version of the above here.

Final Fantasy XI: Kurohyou, Jillia, Phoenix, TiamatsFangs

I have a lot I'd like to write about this post and I'm gonna take it from the top in just a moment, but before that I'd like to take a moment to explain that the title of the post is intentionally weird and I'll get to explaining it somewhere below (or in another post).  Jillia, if you somehow manage to find this, please, please, please send me an e-mail at spantera@gmail.com or find some way to get in contact with me.

A couple weeks back I came across a post on Facebook: one of my old friends from FFXI, Techno, talking to another old friend, Margulis, about the FFXIV beta.  I interjected to ask a couple questions about it since I was kind of in an MMO drought and I then went and signed up for the beta for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.  Last weekend I managed to snag a key from Alienware Arena's giveaway (and then later got a key direct from SE for this weekend) and got a chance to try it for a few hours and catch up with some old TF buddies that have been playing XIV.  The game itself is amusing, kinda eh but I'm really relishing the chance to nostalgia bomb with some old friends and familiar character/class styles (making up for lost Mithra time).

Oh, and I was seriously, seriously giddy to have auto-translate again.  That thing is so much fun.

When Final Fantasy XI first came out I was still in high school and didn't have the means to procure and subscribe to an MMO, but as a big Final Fantasy fan I vowed to myself that one day, one way or another I would find a way to play it.  About a year after I graduated I finally was in the right position to pick it up.  My senior year of high school I was really big into Tribes: Aerial Assault and by the time I got into FFXI I still was in touch with a few old clannies who were now playing it, and they managed to get me a friend code for Phoenix and I hopped on board their social linkshell.  I can't quite remember the name of it...

I was Kurohyou, a Hume male, beardy style.

That first LS (we'll call it LS1 for now) introduced me to the environment that would typify most of my FFXI tenure: bittersweet drama.  The distinguishing feature I'll always remember most was the Lexi/Talenar/Elvaan-PLD-guy-whose-name-I-forgot trio.  Lexi was the only female and WHM in the LS, which meant despite the fact that nearly everyone absolutely fucking despised her, they were obliged to kind of put up with her.  She was married to a guy called Talenar (a THF), and this almost wouldn't be worth mentioning except that she was near constantly hitting on and generally fawning over a second guy, the Elvaan-PLD-guy-whose-name-I-forgot.

My first main was WHM, entirely because I hoped to relieve Lexi's stranglehold as the group's only healer.

At some point, when I was doing the first level cap raising quest, on the part where you have to get THAT paper I had been struggling, stress-fully, to farm it all day.  At some point some friends from LS1 offered to help and somehow Lexi and co. came along.  I don't remember the details but for whatever reason Lexi's presence put me into an incredible, seeing-red fury.  I do recall she was bitching about having to come help me and this upset me greatly because by luck it happened to drop shortly after they all showed up.

Anyways, the only other notable thing I can remember about Lexi is that later a guy named Atistab (whose name I only remember because of the below image) and I became really good friends when we discovered we had a mutual hate for Lexi (who had been in his Dynamis LS for a long time).

There was a second LS I was in between LS1 and TiamatsFangs, all I remember is that the leader was a guy called Ninboy who was one of the few max level goldsmiths on the server.  And man, digging up that image I came across a number of interesting images from those days.

This is Astarael, a career BLM who was another of a constellation of old friends from my Tribes days.

There was some point when I was partying in Valkurm Dunes (would have been in the earliest area) when I joined a party with Jillia and Margulis (they were a couple at the time IIRC).  We had one member of our party who was pretty bad and the three of us were arguing with him which made us all fast friends, and from there I joined TiamatsFangs--a group that I've been involved with in varying degrees over the years but I've always maintained contact with at least a few of them as time has gone by.

Jillia and I were close friends.  I hesitate to say she was my closest friend ever because at the time I was still quite close friends with Brandon Seidler (whom I'd dragged into FFXI at some point).  I'm not too shy enough to not admit that I had a smouldering unrequited crush on her for quite a while as well, but I also don't mind saying that at the very least I loved her like a sister.

This was the picture she posted on the TiamatsFangs forums.  She was a PLD and an absolutely badass tank.  I'll come back to her because there's a baffling backstory that leads into the last time I left the game so we'll save that until then.

I'm actually going to cut this post short here and come back to things.  Topics for another post: Nikki/Moosey/Clashes, Aurawyn, Kiren, Arithia/Faux/Kazeryushin, Girr/Homer the Scammer/SWTOR follow-up, more Jillia, playing FFXIV.

Quick tl;dr on the post title/first paragraph: I lost contact with Jillia shortly after she quit to go to university and the combination of our close friendship and the really bizarre circumstances surrounding her exit from the game form a seriously haunting mystery that I hope-but-don't-expect might someday be resolved.  Got the idea earlier today that if I can get this post to pop up on Google or other search engines with the right combination of keywords she might stumble across it someday.

Edit: It's a number of weeks later now and I was cleaning out some tabs on my browser when I noticed this post pops up at the top of a Google search for "Final Fantasy XI Jillia Phoenix" and quick searches confirm that "Kurohyou Phoenix", "Jillia Phoenix", and multiple other permutations show this post at or very close to the top, so mission accomplished.  The TF gang and I (especially) would love to hear from you again if you're reading this, Jilli.