September 2013 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Sea of Spell Effects

September 30, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people of the interwebs. Yes that is right… the top greeting block is back with a vengeance. I had been trying to wean myself off of it, because really the top block and wrapping up blocks are both crutches. However this morning I feel all groggy and discombobulated and I am crawling back to the greeting block like a warm blanket of sanity. This morning I feel somewhat like Frankenstein as I move around the house through my routine much like a reanimated corpse. Additionally I have a cat that keeps trying to help me write this… and she really is not taking no for an answer.

Sea of Spell Effects

Essentially by resurrecting the greeting block, I am delaying the inevitable… which is that I don’t really have much to talk about this morning. It is not that I didn’t do a lot yesterday gaming wise, because I totally did. First off I got up, blogged, cleaned up the house, changed the ferret cage, ferret playpen, and scrounged for food… only finally then settling down to play some FFXIV… all before noon I might add. So I feel like my morning was super productive, and this honestly lead way into an afternoon of productivity in game as well. At the point at which I blogged yesterday morning, I had just hit 30 on my Archer and completed the Bard quest chain.

Yesterday I decided to continue working on my Bard because quite frankly… I have been enjoying it far more than I have my Dragoon. First off… for those not familiar with the FFXIV bard class… it is quite likely the least bardy of all bards I have ever played. It is essentially a bad-assed ranged class that just happens to have songs they can play every now and then to add a group buff. The way the songs work in FFXIV is they consume mana while they are up, in order to give your group some sort of a regeneration of defensive buff. The first of these makes you every healers best friend, because you can play mana song.

Since at any given time yesterday we essentially lacked the perfect combination of characters online to do much of anything productive… I ended up getting into FATE groups and leveling at a shocking pace. The second character really does go so much faster. I started the day at 30 in Costa Del Sol and ended the day at 40 in Coerthas Highlands… just about to switch over to Mor Dhona. Before I know it, I will be 45 and decked out in part of a suit of amazing gear. At this point since I am making a lot of progress, I figure I will finish leveling the bard before I play anything else. I was the second 50 in the guild, so I am essentially playing a waiting game as folks catch up.

My rush to level a DPS is in part because our most stable group of players that are online on the time seems to be two tanks, one dps and one healer. So with me being able to switch hit to a dps… this gives me a lot more flexibility for making a viable group happen. At many times last night, had I a DPS we could have gone off and run Aurum Vale for fun and profit. However instead there was no real viable way to make a two tank party work. Though…. quite frankly this is something we probably should try with one of the warriors just not throwing up defiance and pretending to dps. I wonder if the dpsy warrior will strip aggro even if they are not using defiance… I guess this is something we should try to see how well it works.

Free 85

I believe that tomorrow is the day that existing subscribers in Everquest 2 receive a free Heroic Character. Essentially a “Heroic Character” is something they are adding to the store that allows you to create an instant level 85 character with 280 aa points… the needed amount to start on the newest content in the game. For awhile they have offered 280 aa catch up baubles that came with the last expansion, but they are taking this one step further and letting you create a level 85 character from scratch, or take an existing character and level it up. At this point I am slightly torn on how I feel about this.

On one hand, there is no way in hell I will miss this opportunity to create something and apply some miracle grow for free. I figure I will use it to push my little Ratonga Swashbuckler up to 85, I had intended to use the 280 aa catch up bauble anyways on that character. I have always struggled to level any DPS characters in EQ2, so he was my attempt at doing that… since Swashbucklers tend to be a more sturdy dps. Even though I already have him at around level 55, I have stalled out because I simply hate not having flight. After a point you get tired of grinding tradeskills to 85 just so you can use wings on your characters. If they offered some form of a flight license on the store I would have snapped one up in a heartbeat.

The other hand I really dislike the way this feels. Essentially it feels as though they are saying that all content before level 85 is just not important anymore. They have made so many strides to improve the leveling process and while there are still some dead spots that never got reworked… the whole thing overall flows nicely. I just hate the whole leveling without flight thing. But as several friends pointed out… this is not really for me… someone who has time to level a character from 1-85. This is for my friends who have not been able to stick with any game that long… it lets them catch one character up to within a few levels of their friends and jump starts them into doing fun content already.

Try Before You Buy

I think the neatest thing that this is adding into the EQ2 experience is a “Try before you buy” concept. Essentially you will be able to create a new level 85 character, with gear and 100 AA points, and play them until level 86 to get a feel for whether or not you like the character. This is extremely key since so many EQ2 classes do not really come into their own until you have a bunch of levels behind you. For the most part all character play similarly from level 1-10 but it is not until the 40-50 range that most of them really come into their own as truly unique experiences. Being able to jump start a character and see if you like how they feel at level 85, should give players a better way of gauging if they like what their class will become.

There is nothing more frustrating than having spent many hours leveling a character that you ultimately decide you don’t really like. From what it sounds like in the FAQ you can play this character indefinitely until you hit 86… then it becomes progression locked. To prevent problems that this might cause, it is for the most part locked out of all public channels. It can’t sent tells, or trade, or do any of the things that might let a malicious player annoy others in the game world. Upon deciding to purchase the character you get a number of perks.

A set of Level 85 weapons
Level 85 jewelry
Level 85 armor
20 Food and Drink
Ammunition for Fighter and Scout Ranged Weapons
6 24-slot bags
Variety of Potions
A Pegasus Mount
Renaming potion for your character (Upgraded or Purchased Heroic Characters only), just in case!

Now comes the bad part… this process is rather pricey. To create a new 85 character or upgrade an existing one… it is 3500 station cash. While there are various dodges and ways to get station cash cheaper… at face value this is $35 of cold hard cash spent to instant level a character. Essentially I feel like this is going to completely destroy the current Grey Market of Power-levelers… and quite frankly this is probably going to have really positive effects on the community. Right now almost all of the major public dungeons are rife with characters zipping through the corridors and pulling everything in sight… making it extremely difficult to complete any quests. Each time I have had to do the Sanctum of the Scale it has been a mind numbingly frustrating process because I simply could not get the spawns I needed.

I guess if it is perfectly fine for World of Warcraft to give you a free level 80 character for coming back to the game… then I can’t really say much against being able to create a level 85 in EQ2. Both games are extremely aged, and anything that keeps players playing them… and allows their friends to play with them… is likely going to be a positive in the long run. Now I am just trying to decide if I want to level an Assassin or Ranger from scratch, or to boost up my little Swashbuckler. I want a viable dps class so I feel like I should probably do a bit of research to determine which class I should settle in on. Part of me wants to go in a completely different direction and level a warden, since I miss access to my melee warden from my second account.

Wrapping Up

It is that time again, and once more I have squandered a perfectly good blog post by talking about nothing. I have a lot of things to get done today, so here is hoping I can remain focused and power through them. Tonight I hope to get my Bard up to 45 so I can get the majority of my ancestral armor. At that point I can start helping out in various dungeons like Dzemael Darkhold, and eventually Aurum Vale. I hope you all have a great day, and it is the beginning of a really awesome week.

Zombie Infestations

September 29, 2013 by Belghast

Black Helicopters

This morning is a bizarre morning here in Tulsa. I woke up groggily to the sounds of my wife taking a shower, which was essentially a signal to myself that I needed to get up as well. So I rolled out of bed, showered, threw on some clothing and stepped outside with the purpose of getting some food. What greeted me was this eerie fogscape that felt like it was straight out of The Secret World. The sun was up already, which is usually the death of any fog in the area, but this fog seemed to be persisting.

By the time I had gotten to QuikTrip for my normal morning breakfast of a sausage roll… it almost seemed like it was getting worse. As I pulled in, I noticed that the building was ringed in Crows, with a little semi-circle of them gathered on the grass. This definitely did not help the odd feeling… and the last thing I wanted to do was go step into the middle of the semi-circle. Pretty sure if I had a Revenant would have spawned… and I had left my shotgun at home. So I made it home safely, and nothing really far from the norm happened… but the world definitely feels like it would be flooded with Draugr.

Zombie Infestations

Yesterday I played quite a bit more State of Decay, and since Marcus was in a tired state, I had to switch things up and break out Maya Torres. One of my biggest frustrations with this game and Dead Island as well is the whole “melee weapons break” construct. I have always been a melee centric player, and tend to gravitate playing someone I can beat shit down with. As a result when you throw me into an open world game… I tend to gravitate towards the melee weapons. One one exception to this is the fallout franchise… where I tend to stick with the combat shotgun indefinitely.

So as a result of this fetish of mine… my entire gaming experience seems to be a search for new melee weapons. This is not really kosher when it comes to the flow of State of Decay. Immediately you think… open world game… explore all the things and gather up the loot. While this is a viable play mechanic… the world is not a static thing. There is a whole meta game going on behind the scenes of trying to keep the morale of your survivors up and protect them from the badness outside the church gates. In my search for things to beat zombies with… I noticed a series of messages showing up announcing that such and such location was infested.

I didn’t think much about this at first… but the infestation kept spreading to a new location. Once there got to be three infestations up… my survivors started to lose morale. So I had to go on a mission of cleaning out each of the houses. This was not the easiest task in the world… because each and every one had a half dozen to a dozen zombies in it… and at least one or two of the red eyed “super” zombies. Each time I cleared out an infestation I got back the lost morale and then some.

I Do Bad Things

The coding of State of Decay is frustratingly brilliant at times. The rule we have learned from watching the various zombie movies… is that while zombie eyesight is pure shit… their hearing is pretty amazing. Gunshots draw more zombies to investigate the noise… and this mechanic annoyingly well. Essentially if you decide to go out guns a blazing… you will have to fight an endless string of zombies. I know eventually you can attach a muzzle suppressor to dampen the noise but I have yet to find one… or figure out how to do it. The above shot is the beginning of my foolish attempt to shred a horde of zombies.

During the gameplay there will be roaming hordes of zombies that will wander around town and have the potential of attacking your base. There was one heading up the road towards home… and I got radio’d about it while out and about. I finally managed to kill enough that I could run into the safety of the base…. which kept them from spawning more. Yes I know I am abusing the shit out of that mechanic… but I was running out of ammunition by the time I had taken down a handful of them. I got a huge morale bonus for taking out a zombie horde, but it greatly hurt my ammo stock and weapon durability doing it.

The biggest problem I have with gunplay in State of Decay… is that I still suck at aiming a weapon with a controller. I feel like I will be far more confident sniping zombies in the head… once the mouse and keyboard controls are available. Right now SoD PC is a direct port of the xbox version, and as a result there are some goofy graphical glitches at times and you have to rely entirely upon your controller. The gameplay mechanics work well for a controller, and the game performs a smooth 60 fps for me at max graphics.

Bard is Born

Yesterday I also played quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. Since I got my main to 50… and I am the second in the guild to do so… I figured I would work on my Bard a bit as the others caught up. I managed to take it from 26 to 33, and at level 30 I completed the sequence of quests to pick up the Bard job. The odd thing about it… there is very little change in the way the class feels between Archer and Bard. With the Warrior and the Dragoon… in both cases I picked up a massive quality of life ability, whereas with the bard you pick up an ability that makes you more attractive to other players…. but not much of anything you can really use yourself.

It feels as though the players have congealed at the upper levels, and as a result the lower level FATE grind spots have become more sane. I had quite a bit of fun in Costa Del Sol doing the various fates there and managed to get extremely good contribution which has pushed me up in level quite a bit. If I play this morning I will likely go back to Costa and work on getting to 35 so I can do Sunken Temple. I think we have a back of guild members that are at that level. I know Lethbridge still needs Haukke which I can do with him now… that was my ulterior motive for leveling yesterday.

Additionally I really need to work on my pugilist to get him caught up with archer. That way I can get rid of a ton of low level leather gear without fear of it being needed by someone else. The inventory management meta game has become a real thing for me, with both of my retainers almost completely full… and my gear store hovering around 20 per slot. I need to push up all my melee classes so that I can free up room by deconstructing it. I am still having quite a bit of fun with the game, but I am really hoping they open up some questing options in the upcoming patches.

Wrapping up

Well it is that time, and I need to wrap this up. I really need to clean the house because it is a pit… and I think it is adversely effecting the moods of both myself and my wife. Also it would be nice to start the work week with a clean house, and anything I do today will save me scrambling Monday night to gather the trash. I hope you all have had a great weekend, and I hope that the start of the week is equally great.

Darkside of Eorzea

September 28, 2013 by Belghast

Ancestral Armor

This morning is a relatively horrendous day here in Oklahoma. It has been alternating between no rain and torrential downpours and with both the temperature has dropped quite a bit. Enough so that I had to go put on socks and find a fuzzy blanket to crawl under. This is to be expected since this is of course the first weekend of the Tulsa State Fair. Essentially every year during the fair, the temperature drops from shorts weather to jacket weather in the matter of an afternoon. This is just the way the rhythm of nature goes here in Oklahoma.

Additionally today is the very first Tulsa Mini-Maker Faire. Yesterday was another first for Oklahoma… we had our first web development conference that I attended. We had representatives from WordPress, GitHub, Etsy, Mozilla and a cool local javascript games company. I only managed to attend the first half of the conference because we had a minor catastrohy at work that I had to come back and fix. However what I DID attend was pretty awesome and it is extremely cool that Tulsa has become the “cool” city in Oklahoma or at least the one with the thriving art and technology scene.

When I got home that night I started the grind to 50 on my Warrior in FFXIV. I say grind… because literally after 49 I had no quests left to do to get me any experience. I will address that problem a bit later, but first check out the awesome picture above. Upon reaching 50 I was able to do a rather difficult quest and claim the chest piece to match the rest of the gear I got at 45. Honestly it feels like cruel and unusual punishment to have to walk around for five levels looking like a clown… but I guess it is to make you appreciate the chest piece all the more when you finally get it.

Darkside of Eorzea

As I said above… I had NO quests at all available from the beginning of 49 until I dinged 50. This meant one thing… FATE grinding. Essentially this is how you have to level all characters past your first. Leve quests reward almost insignificant experience and actually killing mobs to level is grossly inefficient after about level 10. So the end result is players roaming around in large parties tackling FATEs in one of a handful of zones. The 45-50 FATE grind is out in Northern Thanalan and while there are multiple FATEs that spawn out there… everyone is essentially waiting on a specific one to spawn.

The above image is taken by a friend of mine from a Dark Devices fate group. It is the biggest piece of fuckery I have seen in a video game in a long while. Essentially DD as it is known, should be a really cool four part FATE, but players have figured out that they can delay the first part and instead grind a literally endless stream of instant spawn cultists. The result is that players will form up in full parties and AOE the shit out of everything that is spawning, soaking up xp from the kills for 14 of the 15 minute fate timer. At roughly 1-2 minutes from failing the FATE, a group of players usually breaks away and kills the 8 or so named mobs needed to close out the event.

The problem with this whole scenario is that firstly… it is a hack… the developers I am sure never expected players to abuse the fate in this way. Secondly the problem is it favors only classes that have a strong spammable AOE. So essentially any melee class is screwed because they simply cannot keep up with their one AOE attack (if they even have that) due to the TP restrictions. The Black Mage of course is the king of the fate with their endless spammable Ice based attacks. The problem is… last night we had roughly 100 players in the same space trying to fight over the same mobs.

If you are in the right group it can be as much of half a level… pending you get the majority of the spawns and get gold on all four fates. If you are NOT in the right group… or not in a party at all… it becomes this massively frustrating experience. Each time they patch, I hope and pray they break this fate so it is no longer the grindy bullshit that it is today. I wanted to hit 50, so I joined a group and rode along for the experience using whatever AOE I could throw out with overpower and occasionally a steel cyclone. Quite frankly… I would not have hit 50 last night had I not managed to get into two good groups for this fate.

Asian Grindfest

For as much positive vibes as I have thrown the direction of this game over the last few weeks, and all the efforts they have made to westernize it… there is still a pretty egregious Asian grindfest lurking below the covers. You essentially have just barely enough quests available to you as a player to level a single class from 1 to 50. In truth there were numerous spots where I had to resort to FATE grinding because the quests just were not enough to push me to the next level where I could continue the main storyline. Additionally I have run more than my fair share of dungeons along the way… so I do not believe a player could quest their way from 1 to 50 without some sort of augmentation.

The problem lies that one of the best aspects of this game is the ability to play multiple classes on the same character. This means that if you spend all your quests on one class to level it… you will be left with nothing but FATEs and Leves to level your other characters. Getting from 1-15 is relatively easy, you can hit 10 within 30 minutes and it takes about an hour more to get 10-15. The 15-20 and each additional 5 levels after that, the speed slows down massively. The only way to combat this is to grind FATEs. After about 20 doing leves offers you a truly insignificant amount of experience, and since those are limited on the total number you can have… it is almost not worth doing them.

I fear that players will be dropping off like flies unless Square can provide some other questing opportunities. They could do this one of many ways. Firstly I would uncap the Leves… these are extremely fun and it seems silly to limit players to only doing a handful of these a day. Next they need to increase both the xp and monetary rewards from them… because after about 25 both are grossly insufficient. Lastly they simply need more quests… there are far too few of them out in the world, and the xp gained from simply killing mobs outright is laughable. The only reason why dark devices works like it works… is you start getting 150% multiplier from every single kill your group gets…. and you literally get thousands of kills during that time.

The game is extremely good in some aspects, but in other aspects the design is a confusing mess. It feels at times like the designers really did not know what they were doing. There is still the problem of how a level 50 player will earn money. I see tons of money sinks… but zero money fountains. They need to get the 2.1 patch out as soon as possible so that they can address some of the gaping holes in their games design. Ultimately whether or not they fix this… will determine how long I play the game.

Wrapping Up

I think I am going to wrap the post up here… this is the first truly negative post I have made about FFXIV since the days when I was not really sure if I was getting into it or not. There are some glaring problems, so hopefully they will address them in the same way they have addressed the infrastructure issues. I can tell the game was not really made for a western sensibility, so here is hoping they will understand that the west is the key to their continued succeed as we have the larger number of wallets ready to give them subscription bankroll. Hoping that the day clears up soon and we can go out and do something. Hopefully your weekend is going awesome and not being rained out like ours.

Early Access Zombies

September 27, 2013 by Belghast

Minor Renovations

Awhile back I decided to change out the Raptr widget I had embedded in my sidebar that showed the last few things I had played, to something more manual. I have always loved the feeling of the Steam library grid view, with its cool little preview images. So for my “Now Playing” section I strived to create something similar feeling. I think for the most part it works, but it is now a much more manual process as I have to create an image and then add it to my sidebar. I feel however that the results are worth it.

I had been wanting to do something different with my blogroll for a bit, but I was not really sure what I wanted to do. I am a very visual person, and even though I read most of the blogs in my RSS reader, I still think of them based on their visual appearance. The idea I came up with was making similar preview images for all of the blogs on my blogroll to give potential readers a flavor of the blog before even clicking through. I still have several more blogs to add to it, but I think the end result is really nice. Once again it is a much more manual process as I have to take time to create an image for each blog before I add them.

Blogrolls are one of those things that people tend to ignore in their own blogs, but for me it is a resource for someone to find other good voices. As a result I like to take care in trying to make sure my blogroll represents what I am actually reading. When pouring over this small change I did notice that a large number of the blogs on my roll were just not posting anymore. As a result I have pruned the list quite a bit, and will add to it as I notice people starting back up. Additionally I added a new section for “Gamecasts” since it is a mix of video casts and podcasts. I still need to add quite a few things to this list but it is a solid start.

Console Diablo

Recently I downloaded Diablo 3 again and gave it a spin trying to get back into the game. While I found elements of it enjoyable I also remembered all the things that frustrated me about it. I have come to the point where I just cannot stand the “click to move” mechanic. It just “feels wrong” for lack of a better term. I think in many ways this is the one thing holding me back from truly loving league of legends… I just can’t stand the control mechanics. When I heard Diablo 3 was coming to the consoles, I was initially not all that excited… but the other day I noticed that a PS3 demo existed. I figured what the heck, no better way to test and see if I like it.

It appears that all of my problems with the game stemmed in some way from the horrendous control scheme. With a controller, the game felt fresh and new and extremely enjoyable. Granted I only played a little bit the other night, and only had access to the Barbarian, but I had a blast. It made me remember just how much fun I used to have with Diablo in the first place. I am not sure if I am quite ready to shell over 60 bucks for the game on the console… but I can see myself picking it up sooner or later.

What I really want however if for them to patch in controller support for the PC version. This is the version that has the characters I want to play, and the friends I want to play with. I have a perfectly amazing XBOX 360 controller hooked to my PC that I use with more console friendly games. Essentially everything about the game was better with a controller. It is like they took so much more thought and planning into the user interface design as a whole. So please Blizzard… patch in controller support at least when you release the expansion. It makes everything about your game feel better.

Early Access Zombies

Back on September 20th Undead Labs released their extremely awesome open world zombie survival game… State of Decay as part of the Steam Early Access program. I picked it up shortly after but did not really have a chance to play it until last night. If you remember when this came out on the XBLA I raved about it for a long while, but really have not played it as much as I would like. One of the problems I have playing consoles is that it disconnects me from my group of friends. There is a large circle of us that hang out on mumble every night, and I have yet to find a really viable option for hanging out and chatting on mumble while playing the consoles in the loft.

Last night I happily fired up Mumble and then popped into the game. It feels as though the overall gameplay experience has tightened quite a bit. The Early Access candidate is in essence a beta test, and Undead Labs wants to make sure players know this while playing the PC release. Currently the client only has support for a controller, but they plan on eventually adding in mouse and keyboard support. Quite honestly I would rather they do this than half ass it like some of the other console ports like Force Unleashed.

The game is super responsive, and I can run it comfortably on maximum resolution making the client look so much nicer than the XBOX 360 one I was used to. I really hope they add in multiplayer co-op. This game just screams for it, because exploring this world with your friends would be so much more enjoyable than doing so with what are essentially scripted bots. I have no idea how long the game will be in this “beta” state on the PC, but everything about the title is at least as good as the XBLA client. So I would not hesitate suggesting the game to anyone. If you like zombies and you like fallout style open world exploration… this game is for you.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to wrap this up and get up and around. I have a conference to attend today, and also need to make a trip to the cleaners… so I need to give myself as much wiggle room for finishing getting ready as I can. I hope you all have an excellent weekend. Ours looks like it is going to be super rainy. For those curious, my mom is recovering well and I am not sure if I mentioned this or not… but so is Lethbridge. Spoke with him last night and he is in a lot of pain after his surgery but doing okayish. He was in FFXIV for a bit last night playing the game one handed… which I guess is a good thing that a g600 can do.