Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Besieged by lag

I logged in with no real plans until I noticed the level 5 Troll Mercenary advance & decided to hang out in Aht Urhgan, flag some quests & missions, and wait for the trolls. It didn't take long for the fun to begin, and I joined an alliance of three parties a bit before the gates were breached. All I can say is... besieged is

A. Complete chaos - This is liberating in a way because you can participate in any battle you choose, and mages are usually around buffing and healing random people. My Reraise scroll wasn't needed, so I don't plan on wasting Imperial Points on this next time. Besides, there's no risk in dying anyway, other than wasting time if no one decides to raise you.

B. An interesting way to skill up weapons and learn some of the more obscure BLU abilities such as Diamondhide (someone in our party actually picked this up during a battle). Skilling up on Besieged mobs does require massive amounts of accuracy, so it's not exactly the most efficient way to do it, but it's a nice diversion from the usual skillup grind for high-level players.

C. A technical nightmare - and I don't see how they will ever fix this. The game engine simply cannot handle 400+ people in a zone, 70% of whom eventually congregate on a single mob (the General). They can patch and tweak all they want... I just don't think Besieged will ever get better in this area. To make matters worse, the Xbox port isn't up to snuff for these events either. It already has framerate issues during normal gameplay and chugs considerably during Besieged... to the point where it can actually freeze, which it did for me right as the General was nearing the last 10% of his HP. So I didn't gain any Imperial Points this round >_<.

Once that was done, I went a little further with the Aht Urhgan missions and logged out when I completed mission 5. I'll try to finish these up tonight and move on to another diversion... possibly flagging some staging points or doing a few map quests.

2 comments:

wyred said...

I liked the 700 exp points you get from winning besieged.

These points cannot be converted to limit points so even if your exp is capped at lv75, you gain nothing except IS points.

So because of this, I don't feel any pain eating raise 1 in dynamis anymore~

And when I've capped the exp on my DRK75, I switch to my WHM42 and heal random people.

Paul Bauman said...

You know, I totally forgot about the EXP aspect of Besieged!

The first time I did the event was accidentally... zoning in order to use the warp Taru, only to find that he wasn't there and something was hitting me. When I died and got R1, I noticed I hadn't lost any EXP and was excited to continue doing the event.

I thought I'd try bringing out the NPC, just to see if I could. However, I had a Warp Cudgel equipped from the prior EXP session and used it accidentally instead of the Signal Pearl. Doh. I returned in time to help kill a couple of mobs before it was over and got something like 50 EXP, but plenty of Imperial Standing points.

And my Xbox froze up on the last one, so no EXP or Imperial Standing points there. -_-

I'll keep that in mind when I die in Dynamis though. It's a nice way to make up for some of those R1's. Well that and doing those Escort thingies Kiki and Halfirien keep doing (gotta look into those).