March 2014 - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Great Landrun

March 27, 2014 by Belghast

Joining the Circus

I have decided, that after the day I had yesterday, I am going to run away and join the circus. Not that I particularly want to be a part of the circus, and especially not since clowns have always freaked me the hell out. It however seems like the proper thing to do when you’ve had a day as bad as the one I had yesterday. Lets scan back through the annals of time to September 11th 2012, and “the event”. I had just returned back to work from taking a few days off for the death of my Grandfather, when a gross overreaction to a security scan gone wrong changed my life for the worst.

Yesterday was my first day back after taking two days off for the death of my grandmother. As I was travelling in I got a text from my boss making sure that I would be there. When I got in, things were bad. Seems as though a security scan gone wrong had locked up and was not essentially DDoSing our websites. So I spent most of the morning dealing with trying to triage our servers as the scan completed. Finally someone had to go in and force cancel the scan because it seems like things had hung up completely. I ended up spending a good chunk of my afternoon dealing with the fallout. Then on top of that we had a major GIS system release, that kept me there until after 5:30. Which doesn’t seem very long until you realize that I generally work 7 to 4.

Basically I was already not in the best shape after losing my grandmother, and to walk back into this shit storm… was almost more than I could handle. However I managed to soldier through and do the stuff that needed to be done to get through the day. Apparently this is what happens when I lose a grandparent… the world plots to destroy me. I feel like it is appropriate still to run away and join the circus. That seems to be the thing you are supposed to do when you have had a phenomenally bad day like yesterday. The only problem is it might be difficult to find a circus with wi-fi, so I guess I will just limp through the rest of this week and try really hard to recuperate this weekend. To add some icing to this cake, it seems like we need to go refrigerator shopping. While most of the food is still freezing well enough, we have reached the point where Ice Cream is no longer “icy”, but instead more yogurt like consistency.

The Great Landrun

Yesterday afternoon Landmark reopened and we were greeted by a slew of new servers and some completely new island names. Gone was my beloved Liberation/Pingo so I knew I would have to venture out and find someplace new to call home. I spent a bit of time popping between the tier 1 zones until I settled upon Liberation/Shield. Originally I thought I would only be in game long enough to stake my claim and then run off and play some Diablo 3. I was apparently wrong. It turns out that this time around we had to gather up enough materials to be able to craft our very own claim flags. By the time I landed on the island I noticed that the claimable land was already shrinking… and while doing a lot of complaining over twitch… I proceeded to try and gather the mats to make my claim flag.

With the founders pick, it was actually rather simple. The claim flag requires 7 elemental iron, 10 heartwood, and 10 sapphire. Before I really knew what I was doing I had gathered up the iron and the heartwood and only needed to find some sapphire. However a short run from the portal spire I managed to find a patch and get more than enough gems to finish my flag. I zipped to the portal which now has not only a forge but a sawmill as well as a brand new mailbox. I was shocked and amazed that I was able to make a claim within visual distance of the spire on Liberation/Shield. I proceeded to faff around for the next thirty minutes clearing my claim to prepare to try and rebuild Belgarde Keep.

Grappling Hook Lust

After I ate some dinner I popped back in and started streaming again. Granted like usual I am in with my friends on mumble and we are not necessarily talking about Landmark. However before too long the all consuming mission of Rae and I was to get back our grappling hook. Being able to zip around the map rocks, and NOT having it made me sad. So I popped around the map looking for a machine capable of making the grappler. Turns out it is the outfitters workbench that can craft it, and just southeast of the portal in Liberation/Shield has a really great claim. Serac has apparently poured through the creation of some of the better machines, and will hopefully serve as a nice outpost close to me for building all the stuff I need to build.

While it took damned near all night to find 20 elemental tin… since surface tin seems to be a rarity, I did manage to cobble one together before I had to go to sleep. The only problem… I had forgotten just how bad the Bronze Grappling hook sucked. For starters the cord is insanely short, so you can only grapple very short distances. On top of that it has always felt like it is far more random in its hook points than the later ones. All of that said… any grappler is better than no grappler. At least now I can dig my way into a hole with impunity, knowing that I can zip back up to the surface just by hitting E.

If any of the SOE folk are reading this… you guys should totally sneak me a prime grappler code under the table. I still want to know how those things work as compared to the highest tier grappler I crafted in Alpha, which I believe was Viridium. Another really amazing addition this time is the mailbox I mentioned earlier. Throughout the night I mailed several sets of “claim flag mats” to various friends who did not have the luck to start the game with the Founders Pick. With the massive run on land going on, I wanted to make sure most of them had the chance to claim a decent space while they were still available. Now if you were an alpha player… you are on your own since it is relatively simple to gather up the materials after getting in and seeing just how common Iron, Heartwood and Sapphire really are.

The Crusades

March 26, 2014 by Belghast

The Morning After

Yesterday was a trying day to say the least. The funeral for my grandmother was at the odd hour of 9:30, and to add to that it was 35* outside which made me cling to my leather jacket like a life vest. The wind that was blowing made the graveside portion absolute torture. When we got back to the dinner afterwards, we huddled around the coffee pot trying to warm up. I feel like it has been too long since I had been to a catholic funeral, because after going to mostly protestant ones over the last few years… it felt very clinical and detached from my grandmother. I am sure she would have liked it, being the devout catholic that she was, and the priest… however hard he was to understand seemed to do his level best to give her a proper sendoff.

Normally I am used to absolutely losing my shit at some point during the funeral service as loved ones recount tales of the deceased. This didn’t happen, either in the losing my shit variety or the recounting tales variety. It was a mass, just like every other mass I have attended… with the exception that there was a casket at the front. Nothing about the service felt like we were honoring my grandmother… instead it just felt like we were obeying a ritual. It is sad she is gone, but the positive of it all is that I think it is going to help my generation… the cousins to reconnect. We stood around and visited for a couple of hours in the church hall after the service.

For whatever problems my moms generation has had with drama… that seems to be completely absent from my generation. It was good seeing my cousins and finding out that all but one are living in close enough vicinity to be able to get together for dinner. My wife is already scheming to have some sort of a cousins day out at the zoo.. in part because the children of my cousins don’t really know each other… and that is a damned shame. I remember similar outings to the kiddie park etc, that let my generation mingle and get to know each other. While I have never really fit into my family, it seems like none of my cousins have really felt like they fit in either. I guess it is time for us to create our own brand of family.

The Crusades

I have to say I love everything about the crusader. I somehow got left out of the Reaper of Souls beta shenanigans, so yesterday was quite literally the first time I had played one. I have always been drawn to “tanky” characters, or at the very least sword and board oriented ones. The crusader so far does not disappoint at all. I have only made it a little way through the play through and I am already digging the look and feel and style. My friends seem to have a problem with the male crusader voice acting, but I dig it so far. So right now I am completely torn, I want to play my crusader so much… but I also want to complete Act V. In part because I don’t want the internet to spoil my fun. I can only go so long without reading tweets about D3, and sooner or later someone is going to spoil the ending.

Granted Blizzard games are not exactly high fiction, but I am trying to keep whatever I can about the game secret for now. Which is extremely ironic, considering I live streamed the entire evenings play. So basically… if you care about spoilers don’t watch. It should be at least mildly entertaining as within moments of starting playing last night, I ended up with two other friends joining me in my mission. Whenever Rae is in the channel it is always entertaining. As the evening went on we ended up with Tib, Waren, Drathis and eventually Tam in the channel as well. Granted our trio never really changed during the course of the evening, but suffice as to say that we were all somehow playing Reaper of Souls.

So far I am really enjoying the new content. I don’t want to dig too deeply into it as to create my own spoilers but the maps are pretty vast, and extremely detailed. The thing that I am liking the most so far is how almost every single dungeon has some sort of new event. These were my favorite thing about Diablo 3, but they just felt like they were to sparse or random as to whether or not you would actually see one. The amount of creativity that went into designing this acts traps and events is pretty great. There is also an amazing sub theme going on, that will make Frank Herbert fans excited, but I won’t go into more detail than that. It is not exactly subtle, but fans of the Dune series will pick up on the references.

Bounty of Games

Right now my big hope is to be able to get through Act five this week, and hopefully have my monk to level 70 to show for it. The primary reason I am wanting to push through the content is that if my math is correct… Elder Scrolls Online head start begins this Sunday. Granted this is the five day launch for folks who preordered imperial edition through Zenimax… but that is precisely what I did. I have been really looking forward to this game and I am amped to finally get in and make some permanent decisions. Like I have said before, I have been in testing of this title for over a year at this point and have watched it grow from something good to something great. The only problem is… it is launching super close to Reaper of Souls. So while I don’t want to abandon playing a crusader… I know I will at least for the short term. I intend to be in and streaming ESO from day one as I wander around and adventure on my Imperial Sword and Shield Dragon Knight.

Ding 60… and 90

March 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Rosary

While I grew up catholic, it has literally been years since I had been to the crux of catholic existence… the rosary. Somehow my wife who was raised Baptist has never actually attended one at all in the over 16 years we’ve been married (or two decades we’ve been together). Under normal circumstances this would have been a disorienting experience, but last night it was made doubly so by a weird quirk of the modern church. It seems as though there is a massive priest shortage currently in the church. Quite simply put very few individuals enter the priesthood in America, and this is really no big surprise given the negative image of the church over numerous sex scandals. I am not adding commentary here, just stating the fact that there is a massive shortage of priests.

As a result since the retirement of the priest I grew up with, they briefly had a priest designed to “reinforce catholic doctrine”. Father had many quirks, one of them was a refusal to have “special offerings” for the various causes of the Catholic church. Apparently lately there have been no less than three passing of the plate for various causes, so I can see why he refused to do that crap. Anyways since the reformer priest, they have cycled through a series of priests, none of them native English speakers. Each one seemingly harder to understand than the last one. The catholic church is thriving in other parts of the world… just not here in America. So when you take what would have already been a confused experience and add in severe language issues… it was all my wife could do to keep from laughing.

For starters each time the priest would say a “Hail Mary”, he sounded like he was bored with the prayer. As a result he would begin running his words together and mumbling. So this produced all sorts of interesting things. After the Rosary I got together with my cousins and we all compared notes on what we heard. I personally thought he was saying something about a “Roma Tomato”, one of my cousins heard “Fruit of the Loom” and another something about “flushing the toilet”. It reminded me of a time when I was at my wife’s church, and the preacher had an extremely thick accent. We kept thinking he was talking about “Bastard’s For Christ” instead of what we found out later was “Ambassadors for Christ”. The problem is once you hear it… you can’t un-hear it… and while I knew by memory the words he was trying to say, I had no less trouble making them out.

So long as he was sticking to prayers I knew I was mostly okay, but there was a period where because of his respect for my grandmother… he went completely off script. The words I did manage to grasp, seemed to be meandering and completely off focus. He was talking about how some people live to be 100, and most people live to be 60. Which I thought was an odd statement considering the vast majority of the people in front of him… were well over 60. Thankfully all of us managed to make it through more or less with a straight face. The only thing I am certain of is that we have a new florist. The shop we used to use is no longer in business, so we tried the spouse of a person my wife teaches with. She did an amazing job and produced two gorgeous arrangements for a more than reasonable price. It’s always good to have a florist at the ready.

Ding 60… and 90

Yesterday during the day I spent a good chunk of my time streaming and playing World of Warcraft. With the release of Reaper of Souls last night at midnight, and the upcoming headstart of Elder Scrolls Online… I really wanted to get my mage to 60 so I could perform the boost. Going into the day I was sitting at 57 so just a stones throw away from the finish line. I spent most of that time chain running dungeons, and if you are phenomenally bored you can watch almost the entire adventure on my twitch stream. A few odd things happened along the way. Firstly I ran into a guild called Combat Wombats… which in itself is not that interesting. What I do find interesting is that they are apparently not connected at all to the guild by the same name run by several of my blogger friends. I threw out a few names, and the two members of the guild didn’t have a clue who I might be talking about.

Second interesting thing is that I reached a point of equilibrium where I maybe didn’t suck at magery as badly. In fact for quite a while running these dungeons I was pretty damned high on the damage meters and overall damage done. I felt like I had grasped the basics of playing frost and was ready to move on to bigger and better things. When I dinged 60 and took the boost to 90 I went from being confident to being completely confused. In the 30 levels that I skipped over, I had more than doubled the number of buttons I had to keep track of. Firstly I found it extremely disorienting to have my hotbars completely replaced without being prompted. At least when I took the jump to 80 from the scroll of resurrection, it asked me if I wanted to have them rearrange my hotbars.

After deconstructing them and trying to remember what I had on each of the buttons, I realized that I had way more buttons than places to put them. This is the problem with boosting. In those 30 levels the way a mage plays changes drastically, and I am sure this happens for all of the classes. So while I felt extremely comfortable playing a mage before the boost, afterwards I felt like I was a complete and total “nub” again. I scrounged around and found a complete set of timeless isle gear between the banks for a few characters. Complete in the pieces of armor, as I was missing 1 ring, a necklace and two trinkets. However this took my overall gear score to 491 which I felt was better than most of the boostards would be. As a test I decided to queue for the first stage of Throne of Thunder.

While I was not the lowest dps… I was really damned close. There is so much going on, that I felt completely lost in trying to figure out when I should do what. I like all the other boostards did things backwards. After realizing I was in over my head, I did a little bit of research and I think for the most part I have a grasp on what my priority should be for casting. At some point in the next few days I will try the next part of the LFR to see if my overall numbers improve. I would run a few heroics, but quite honestly… I find LFR to be far less confrontational when you are not sure about how you are doing. I can almost always do better than the worst player, so that gives me the leverage to learn on my feet rather than being called out in a 5 man group.

Pugs Aren’t All Bad

I had another interesting incident happen yesterday, that is making me feel like I need to re-evaluate my stance on pugging. Starting to think that maybe I should even start trying to tank them some more. In all of the dungeons I have run on my mage to get to 60, I had very few situations where things did not go well. More than that, I have had a few incidents happen where folks have been genuinely awesome. Yesterday in the middle of a Lower Blackrock Spire run, I ended up meeting a pretty awesome druid healer. Throughout the course of the run we chatted back and forth, and when for no apparent reason half of the party bailed on us, we hung out for a bit while waiting on the queue to fill. She said she was waiting around on a call from the vets, and was hoping to get a few dungeon runs in the meantime.

Since she was on a timeframe, I told her that she should drop group and should be able to get an instant queue. She thanked me, and we went on our way… thinking that I would never see this player again. Turns out there were really only a few people queuing at that time of the day, and when the queue popped I was in another LBRS group with the same healer. We had a really good druid tank to work with, but he admitted straight up that he didn’t know his way around the zone. So I helped shuttle him through the content, giving him a few tips on nasty pulls. We wiped a few times, but overall everyone stuck with it and we managed to complete the dungeon. Over the course of the run the healer talked about coming back to wow and wishing she could find a good guild to run with.

After the conclusion of the run I gave her the spiel on House Stalwart. Went over our three rules, and a bit of background information. Once again I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but within thirty minutes she had rolled a priest on Argent Dawn and pinged me for an invite. So as frustrating as pugs can be, I guess there are some genuinely nice players just trying to get through the game as well. I went into the dungeons not expecting anything more than experience, and ended up walking out with a new guild member. Considering just how many of my current guildies are people who I met through dungeon groups… I really should relax my anti-pug stance and give it a shot now and then. There are always going to be gems in the rough out there to be found.

Faffing the Steppes

March 24, 2014 by Belghast

Fitbit Logic

So this is the point where I am supposed to come up with something interesting to talk about for a blog post. I kinda over did it a bit yesterday with the double posting, but that family drama piece really needed out of my head. Once I finished posting it, we both dressed and went out into the world to run the errands that needed running. The fit bit does funny things to you. I find myself parking way the hell out in the middle of nowhere just to be able to get some extra steps in. This also permeated our grocery store trip. I am normally one of those people who goes exactly to the areas of the store for the items I need and then zips straight out. I used to be able to do the weekly shopping trip in about fifteen minutes.

However yesterday we purposefully meandered up and down every possible isle, not because we didn’t know exactly what we needed… but we were trying to milk the trip for as much walking as humanly possible. So we wandered up and down the isles, saving the frozen foods for last. Not unexpectedly we probably bought a lot more groceries than normal but we got our maximum amount of walking from the trip. It feels like cheating, since I am going out of my way to try and put in as many steps as possible into everything I do. However… I guess that was really the point of gamifying exercise. Funny thing is, last night at one point I got up to get a drink while watching the walking dead. When I got back I ended up pacing around for a bit while watching the television before sitting back down.

Faffing the Steppes

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVMost of yesterday was spent faffing about in World of Warcraft. With the impending launch of Reaper of Souls tomorrow, and the headstart for Elder Scrolls Online soon… I really want to get my mage to 60 so I can boost it. My gameplan in general has been to work on quests while not in a dungeon. But I am pretty much habitually queuing at every chance I get. This has been interesting to say the least. Normally speaking I can stomach pugs if I am not tanking, and for the most part this has been the same with playing a mage. The only problem I run into is when I have a tank that simply doesn’t know what they are doing. To make it worse, many of these tanks in question are not speaking English. I really question the logic behind blizzard lumping non-english and english speaking servers together.

Granted this happens with European servers in pretty much every single game. However speaking more than one language is a much more common occurrence there. While I can pick out a few words here and there of Spanish, I am by no means fluent enough to get my point across. At one point last night the tank in question skipped half of the zone. Since we were all leveling, and killing things means more experience… I didn’t really get the point. Since the tank was only speaking Portuguese I had no real way of conveying my questions. Maybe blizzard needs to look into embedding Google translate into their API, or maybe that is an add-on idea waiting to happen. There have been many games that have bridged the language gap very well with some auto translation. I think maybe it is time for Blizzard to look into doing the same.

Veronica Mars

I finally got around to watching the Veronica Mars movie this weekend, and I have to say I liked it quite a bit. I started watching the series on a random whim, and thought my wife might also enjoy it. So together we worked our way through the entirety of the series when it was on Netflix. It is one of those rare instances where a TV show appeals equally to both of us. Mostly for me… I like the title character. I love the random quirky smartassery that comes out of her mouth, and the creative solutions to awkward situations. I find it odd just how this show, much like Firefly has found such an active “life after death”. If nothing else this proves to me that Hollywood knows exactly jack shit about what people want. Kickstarter and similar community backing seems to be a way for the huddled masses that don’t fit into the neat bubble of “pop culture” to finally get the things they have always wanted.

I did not back the show, mostly because I was feeling more than a little bit of Kickstarter fatigue when it happened. Thankfully not everyone was me. When it came out I bought the $20 digital copy from Amazon, because I wanted to put my money where my mouth. The only problem with the digital offerings here is they are all pretty much heinous, and none of them are really compatible with my chosen method of watching television and movies. Namely I prefer to stream things to my television using Chromecast and Plex. Granted I could do the crappy tabcasting thing, which is fine for say a twitch stream, but ends up annoying me when trying to watch something more “long form”. As a result I went out an acquired a downloaded copy of the movie to back up the one I paid for. Dear Hollywood… your DRM is dumb for making me pirate the movie after paying legally for it. You are doing it wrong.

As far as the movie itself goes… I liked it a lot. I am not sure exactly how I can give it a proper review without absolutely giving everything away. The characters I liked from the television show that I cared about, all made cameo appearances even if they didn’t always factor heavily into the plot of the movie. The quality of acting and cinematography was great, especially considering this did not go through the traditional channels. That said however… the movie felt a bit off at times, or more so it just felt like I was watching an hour and a half long episode of the television show. The movie ends in a perfect place for them to pick up a sequel or even another television show. So here is hoping this is not the last we see of Veronica Mars.