November 2014 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Garrison Resource Drought

November 22, 2014 by Belghast

The Search for Food

This morning I really did not want to leave the bed. I was surrounded by warm and fuzzy cats, but as it got later both my wife and myself started to get hungry. My wife and I are both relatively intelligent individuals, and friends have postulated that we must have really interesting conversations. That is not entirely the case… here is a snippet from this morning

Wife:    I’m Hungry
Me:      Me too… I will go get breakfast.
Me:      I am leaving right now *staying there snuggled into covers*
Wife:   Are you there yet?
Me:      No… its a really long trip, will take awhile
Wife:    It will probably go quicker if you leave the house.
Me:      That is just a theory, there is no scientific evidence of that
Wife:   If we look at the evidence from the last fifteen years, leaving the house points to getting food.
Me:      Maybe the food just shows up on its own?
Me:      Lets test that theory.
Wife:    I’m Hungry

I did in fact have to leave the house to make food show up, but there is still no direct cause and effect evidence… other than the whole I gave someone money and they gave me food in return. How the food actually arrives at our house is a mystery because I don’t actually remember leaving the store or arriving home. I do however remember observing the feeding ritual of the cat gods upon arriving at home. Maybe the cat gods are somehow connected to the acquisition of our food…

Garrison Resource Drought

I may have made some poor choices as to the sustainability of my Garrison, as I have reached a point where I am struggling to get the resources needed to keep developing it. I finally managed to upgrade to the rank 3 Town Hall yesterday, giving me access to another small, medium and large plot. Unfortunately I lack the resources to actually fill them. Right now my Garrison has a t3 Town Hall, t2 Mines, t2 Engineer, t2 Enchanter, t2 Dwarven Bunker, t2 Inn, t1 Garden, t1 Storehouse, t1 Trading Post, and t1 Fishing Shack. I lack the pets to actually be able to get the Pet Menagerie but at some point I want to actually level some battle pets so I can get that. I have failed miserably at playing WoWKemon. It just feels so damned tedious to level your pets past a point. The one thing that would make everything better is if they would implement XP Sharing like they have in the actual Pokémon these days.

The problem I am running into however is that I am flat struggling to get the resources needed to keep developing my stuff. I have yet to plunk down a second large building, because I simply lack the resources to do so. Unfortunately as well… I have basically hit the point I am at by farming down the Garrison Resource caches in the various zones. Sure there are a few still out there but I have pretty well gathered all of the low hanging fruit. The Trading post should help out considerably but right now it keeps requesting herbs… and the only ones I can actually feed it are the ones coming from my Garrison. My hope is that soon it will want a mining resource, because I seem to have plenty of those. So I guess my question is… other than Follower missions and the slow and steady tick of resources… is there another in world renewable resource for Garrisons?

Dungeons for Gear

Last night in an attempt to get my last few points of gear needed to hit ilevel 615, and in an attempt to get Rylacus so he could actually do heroics… We ran several dungeons as a guild. I believe we ran three but at this point I have lost count. I know for certain we did the newest incarnation of Upper Blackrock Spire and we did one called the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds. I was actually pleasantly surprised at just how challenging the level 100 normal dungeons have turned out to be. Most of the mechanics are arguably pretty cheap, in that they stack dots on the players or drop damned near instant kill piles of stuff on the ground. All things considered however they were actually really fun. They are not nearly as good as the dungeon designs in Final Fantasy XIV, but I feel they are considerably better than the Pandaria dungeons at least. The reliance on crowd control reminds me more of the order of business during Wrath and Cataclysm, which is a good thing… just not something I am really used to.

It is my nature when I play a warrior to want to charge ahead into the next pack. Unfortunately I need to give my rogue time to sap things, and I need to get back into the habit of marking crowd control targets. The other thing I am struggling with is how loosey goosey mob movement is in World of Warcraft. In FFXIV mob placement is relatively predictable thing. The mobs move where I want them to… back in WoW I found it absolutely frustrating everytime Zul’jin would iceskate around me. I am going to have to relearn the tricks I have apparently forgotten for making mobs stop doing stupid shit. Moving him around felt like having a wobbly shopping cart tied to my waist that I was dragging around with me. All of this said I look forward to relearning the finer points of fighting with the system and getting it to do what I want it to do.

Drinking Water

This morning I woke up with a horrible cramp in my shin. At first I attempted to walk it out, but it didn’t seem like it was just going away. I have always struggled to some extent with dehydration, and muscle cramps are one of those early signs. So as such I got up and went to the kitchen, grabbed a huge 32 oz glass filled it at the tap and drank it all in one setting. Within a few moments the cramp seemed to be lessening so I went back to bed. At which point it struck me, just how lucky I am that I have really good tap water. In fact I greatly prefer our tap water to bottled water in almost every single case. Tulsa actually has award winningly good water, and as such we are pretty blessed. It never really hits me just how rare this is, until I go somewhere else and without thinking try and take a big drink of tap water.

So while it might sound odd to be thankful for it… I am extremely thankful I can turn on the tap and get something that actually tastes good. Speaking of which… I think I am going to go fix myself a large glass right now.

Gearing for Heroics

November 21, 2014 by Belghast

Stutter Gone

So as you know over the last several days I have been struggling with Dragon Age Inquisition. When I initially booted up the game the stuttering was so jarring that it would sound like a record skipping and freeze movement for a fraction of a section… just enough to bring you out of the game entirely mentally. Nvidia released and updated driver and this helped the stutter but it was still there, and still just as frustrating to try and play the game with. Since then I have tried what felt like every possible combination of settings, none of which removing the problem. That is except for one apparently. Last night I finally landed on the solution to the problem and the stutter is gone. For some reason my machine prefers to run games in windowed borderless, this has always been the answer to a performance boost. I thought I had tried this initially but apparently not… because the moment I shifted things into windowed borderless the hitching went completely away.

Now I feel like I can finally play the game in peace and actually experience it. Unfortunately last night I just was not in the mood for this sort of game and moved on to working on gearing my warrior in World of Warcraft. That said with the stutter gone the game is a much more enjoyable experience. There are times the game is absolutely beautiful to behold… I still feel like I need to spend some time tweaking the settings because I had fiddled with almost everything trying to get the game to function… and now I have a few strange choices picked here and there. The interface feels a bit cludgy for melee, so it is going to be one of the things that I have to get used to as I play the game. So far I am not a huge fan of my companions, and even Varrack a character I really enjoyed in Dragon Age 2 is getting on my nerves. I think maybe I just need to put this game aside and let the frustration from the back and forth with settings fade before I attempt to play it again.

Gearing for Heroics

Last night I had two goals… one of which fell by the wayside. I figured there was no real point in attempting the silver proving again until I actually had the gear level to matter. So as a result I crawled through the wowhead item listings and made an effort to complete every single quest in Nagrand that had even the slimmest chance of dropping something that would improve my ilevel. Additionally I poured the rare spawn and treasure drops to find anything that might give me a little boost. I also spent some time pouring over the auction house, which was as I would expect completely insanely overpriced for what was actually available. After hours of painstakingly trying to incrementally improve my gear score I was sitting at 609. One stinking point away from heroics.

My friend Damai asked me to do a weapon enchant for him, we ended up partied as he started pulling together a group to try and help Rylacus get some gear. A bit later I found myself tanking Skyreach since that had the lowest ilevel requirements, and the only one we were able to queue with Ry. It turns out there are two quartermasters in the Ashran Town Hall, each of which sell 615 trinkets, and both of which bumped me up just enough to get over the 610 heroic gear requirement. Running Skyreach however also allowed me to start my Legendary ring quest chain, rewarding me a 640 ilevel tanky ring that was almost twice as good as my previous best item. Now it is just down to me getting through my silver proving, so that I can be ready to tank heroics for the guild. I don’t have a lot of fear because I made it through seven of eight rounds last time, and it was really only because I got tunnel vision and stopped paying attention to my own health that I actually failed the first time. I have gotten quite a bit more gear since that point… so hopefully tonight I can knock that out first thing.

WoW Anniversary

This morning the WoW Anniversary content officially began, but if I am remembering correctly… the actual launch date was November 23rd. I remember being frustrated that it was right before the Thanksgiving Holiday… which would mean I would be tied up with family and such. A decade ago I had so many houses to visit on thanksgiving that it lent itself to being a a crazy all day occasion. We would start early in the morning and travel throughout the day, and then repeating the process to a lesser extent on Saturday. Its funny how things change in a decade, because now we only have a single house to go to, as everything is happening around the noon meal. When I logged in this morning I had a Molten Corgi pet waiting on me in my mailbox. I find it odd how Corgis have become such a video gaming mascot. The game Rift has at least half a dozen different Corgi pets in game for example.

The primary reason why I have been pushing to gear up so quickly… is that this coming Tuesday we are planning to run the Molten Core LFR as a guild, or as close to “as a guild” as we can realistically get for a 40 man. The LFR itself will have an ilevel requirement of 615 and completing the event will reward you a helm appropriate for your main spec so for plate it would be something resembling this one. Completing the event also earns you a Core Hound mount, which looks really cool. Then there are a few items that have a chance of dropping like a doodad that embues any weapon with the Flames of Ragnaros effect… at least cosmetically. I guess with this expansion they have made it so you can transmog over enchantment effects, which is cool because some enchants look way better than others. Basically I want to be able to participate in all of the Reindeer games… and Damai was gracious enough to move it to Tuesday after telling him that Monday was the FFXIV raid night.

Gladiator’s Resolve

This is absolutely the hardest part of any blog post this month, is to come up with something new that I have not already talked about on the preceding 20 days. As we near the end of the month I am pretty much going to be grasping at straws here, but I feel committed to carry out the experiment. Since this morning I am talking about World of Warcraft, I want to say how happy I am to have the Gladiator’s Resolve talent. Essentially for those who do not know what it does… it replaces battle stance for protection warriors, giving them a brand new gladiator stance. When in that stance you lose the innate survival and threat generation benefits of defensive stance… but gain a 20% damage increase. Essentially this makes you sword and board dps, and from what I have seen in my own tests I deal a TON of damage.

This is essentially what I have wanted the entire time I have played MMOs… to be able to effectively dps while using a sword and shield. I like the iconic look of the sword and board warrior, and while two handers are cool… they never really fit my personal style. I used to get frustrated that games would always make shields being entirely about defense… when in real life shields have always been extremely effective weapons. Now that I have this option… I actually want to try pvp in Ashran. In the past warrior pvp for me at least felt impotent, because I couldn’t be the badass heavily armored tank that I was in the dungeons. This one talent I think changes that. I am still extremely sturdy, and still have access to all of my protection trickery… but this time around I can simply deal some damage with my shield as well as my sword. So this morning I am thankful for someone finally giving me this talent, it makes me extremely happy.

Level 100

November 20, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling More Human

This morning I am still not feeling amazing, but I am doing sizably better than I was yesterday. At least I feel marginally human now instead of a walking malady. This is mostly due to my wife and her being able to tell me what to do… and actually have me do it. I have been feeling lousy for a bit over a week, and yesterday she exclaimed “you have to call the doctor” and then she relented and gave me a secondary line of action “or at least get some mucinex”. I called the doctors office and unsurprisingly (because I waited until like 9:30 to do so) they were already booked up for the day, and said that they would call me back if there were any openings. So in the meantime I got dressed and ready and went to Walgreens around the corner from the house. Mucinex is something that the doctor has suggested I take, so I was no stranger to it.

Actually there are many times I have had success taking a one two punch of Mucienx and Tylenol Cold and Flu to clear various issues up. It turns out that in the constantly rush to get more products to market, Mucinex has created just this thing. Granted you have to take it every four hours for optimal relief… but in any case the stuff is pretty miraculous. Within a few hours of taking it I was already feeling noticeably better and all the gunk in my chest clearing up. Granted it still has the nasty taste going down that Mucinex always does however the drug lives up to its claims, and I think I just found a new go to for these situations. This gentlemen is why we need wives… I was more than willing to muddle through without doing much to fix the root problem. My wife however got tired of me moping around and told me to do something about it. Apparently there are in fact times where I “don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain”.

Level 100

Yesterday I spoke about having a dilemma of whether or not to do Spires of Arak or just jump straight into Nagrand. Having done a little of both, I can clearly say that there are definitely some story elements and quests that make Spires of Arak worth the hassle. That said it is also the new Bladesedge Mountains, in that the terrain is a pain in the ass to move around and the quests are scattered all over the zone in small pockets. If you are wanting to jump straight into being dungeon ready however, I highly suggest going to Nagrand as soon as possible. While I was able to bump up my ilevel a bit in Spires, I did not actually hit the 600 normal mode dungeon target until I reached Nagrand and spent a bit of time questing there. As of last night I was able to push my ilevel to 603 inching me closer to the heroic starting point of 610. I completely bronze proving grounds and made it to round 7 of silver until I screwed up and did not actually pay attention to my own health. Hopefully tonight I can knock out silver proving grounds and maybe bump my ilevel a bit more with questing or dungeons.

Among the strangest quests that I completed was one for a little Goblin kid wanting you to retrieve his “treasure”. It turns out the kid is a perv and you are essentially recovering a calendar of goblin pin-up girls. I had to stop and take a screenshot when the big reveal happened. Sure I found it funny, but also at the same time super cringe worthy. I mean I get the humor in it, but just like the Granok bed in Wildstar… it feels a bit over the top for something so casually slipped in there. Throughout the night as various other members got to the quest you would see comments in guild chat like “Did I just retrieve a Goblin nudie mag?”. Yes… yes we did. What I found surprising is just how at home Nagrand still feels. This was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade, and for the most part they managed to get the look and feel just right… even without the floating rocks. Ultimately that has been the payoff with this expansion for me, being able to see things before everything fell apart. Burning Crusade was a really important expansion for me, and because of it I have so many fond memories that just keep getting refreshed as I do this content.

Nostalgia Bomb

I can’t really judge clearly how good the content in Warlords of Draenor actually is, because I cannot peel away the shiny coat of nostalgia long enough to actually evaluate it with a clear mind. We ultimate are an accumulation of our memories and emotions… and this expansion is managing to bring all of those down to bear upon me. Will the magic fade? Almost certainly it will, and probably quicker than it came on in the first place. At that point I will be able to see the flaws where they stand, but for the time being I am doing what I hope to do in any game… have fun. Ultimately this game was designed for me, and my play style specifically. There is tons of super dense content, and even though it is content with a little c… it is still cool objectives. There seems to be an endless array of little doodads to find in the world, and interesting named mobs to kill that drop interesting treasures. Thankfully I chose to level my disenchanter first, because this has been an amazing source of shards for my future enchanting endeavors.

Speaking of Enchanting… it seems exceptionally expensive this time around. Enchanting work orders give temporal shards… which you then turn around and use 10 of at a time to get a temporal crystal. I finally saved up enough daily tokens to purchase a “real” enchant, and I did so to grab the one that looks to be the new go to for tanking. As you can see it costs 15 Temporal Crystals and 10 Sorcerous Earth. Far as I know I have yet to actually get any Sorcerous Earth, but it seems to be a random drop when disenchanting or mining. Thankfully I do seem to be getting plenty of primal spirits that I can then trade for the materials I actually need with a vendor on my garrison. In any case folks will not be handing these enchants out willy nilly, because that is a lot of resources to pour into a single weapon enchant. For the time being I have the comparatively extremely cheap Mark of the Shattered Hand enchant, just to have something on my weapon.

Unfortunately engineering is an equally time consuming boondoggle, mostly because I was not really paying attention and didn’t realize that I had two daily cool downs this expansion instead of just the one. This means that I have gotten a slow start on getting my tanking helm. As of this morning I am 40 parts into my 100 total needed. That is in part because I only just started doing the more expensive 4 parts a day cooldown. I am running the maximum number of work orders allowable but unfortunately my engineer follower is not quite 100, so I can’t start getting double parts just yet. In any case it will still be awhile before I get my tanking helm, let along actually have the materials to seriously level engineering, though with the rank 2 mines I am starting to get enough spare bits to keep both cool downs and work orders in the black. I just forsee that I have a lot more daily cooldowns ahead of me before I can start doing interesting things with crafting.

Coffee

As a child one of the movies had a massive impact on me was Dune. I remember watching it in elementary school and being enthralled by the fact that the book was co complicated that it needed its own glossary of terms. I remember reading over the glossary, memorizing details of it… long before actually being able to struggle through the epic prose contained in the front part of the book. Since I watched the David Lynch movie first, before reading the book… I will always have certain visuals in my head associated with things. One of the things that stuck with me that was a complete fabrication of the Lynch movies… was the mantra that the Mentat Piter De Vries chants before taking Sapho juice.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

There is a little voice inside of me that says this every single time I drink a cup of coffee. I will always be enamored by the near instant quickening effect coffee has. I feel like a Mentat gaining focus when I sip a cup. Maybe this is the effect of the caffeine, or maybe this is just something I have built up for myself by making a little ritual of it in my head. In any case it is a magical thing. Energy drinks have a similar effect, because I think in part I have moved this same pseudo religious ritual over to them as well. Either by trick of my own mind, or by actual chemical effect… I am thankful that I live in a world where coffee exists and can do magical things.

Talador Completed

November 19, 2014 by Belghast

Frustrating Stutters

This morning I am feeling relatively miserable. In truth I have felt extremely lousy since mid way through last week. The hacking and coughing and clearing of my throat just wears me out, and as a result of all of it my lungs are extremely pissed off at me. That said since the weather outside is brutal with lows in the teens each morning… I am perfectly content to stay bundled up inside. Yesterday it was my hope that I would be playing Dragon Age Inquisition, but even with a driver update there are still some issues. The issue I am having is that the game will quite literally be running at a locked 60 frames per second… then all the sudden it will freeze for a moment causing everything to stutter including the audio… then resume back at 60 frames per second as though nothing happened. The game is still playable, but extremely annoying since this seems to happy about once a minute.

The most frustrating thing is that it doesn’t seem to be settings related. I have dialed down the game to extremely low settings and the hitching still occurs. This means that essentially I am not able to join in any reindeer games for the time being. My hope is that an early patch will either come out for the game, or another updated Nvidia driver that resolves the issue. If it is not fixed by this weekend however I am likely to just such it up and deal with the pauses. The game itself, what little I have seen of it… seems really cool. Overall it feels far more like Dragon Age 2 than it does Dragon Age: Origins… which itself is a mixed bag. I wish my character had been silent, because it doesn’t really feel like my character at all… when there is a voice talking instead of me. That is just one of my personal quirks however, but I figure most people prefer to have a voice acted character. Ultimately when I play games like this it is all about the big damned hero fantasy, and saving the kingdom… not the narrative of the actual characters.

Talador Completed

First off I have to say that I love this screenshot. It does not give away any details about the quest chains in Talador other than the fact that Blackhand is involved. However if you have completed the quest chains in the zone you know exactly what this screenshot is from. In any case I am happy that I managed to catch it at just the right moment. Yesterday I was contemplating just completely skipping the quests in Talador to move forward into Spires of Arak. My friend Rylacus begged me not to do this, because there was a moment in the game that I just had to see. Thankfully I followed his advice and man… that zone was freaking amazing. Granted there was a lot of faffing about in that zone unrelated to anything… but the four chapters were all excellent. Terran Gregory and team have don an amazing job with the cinematics in this expansion… and I am constantly floored at how nice everything looks. When one of these scenes cuts in… it manages to make me forget this is a decade old game.

Now I have another dilemma to decide. Once again I am at the breakpoint of a new zone, as last night I managed to ding 98. I have all of the precursors leading into Nagrand, or I could go start the Spires of Arak. In either case it will ding me, but Nagrand will actually give me gear that I need to get into normals and heroics. That said… so far each of the zones has provided important bits of the puzzle letting me understand more of the expansion as a whole. The Spires however are the zone that everyone seems to think drags a bit… and just in the look of it, it reminds me so much of Blades Edge mountains… which had massive pacing problems thanks to the horrible terrain. Part of me wants to jump straight to Nagrand, since it was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade. However the other part of me realizes that if I don’t do Spires of Arak while it is relevant… I will never likely go back and do it because the terrain looks frustrating. At this point I am just not sure which direction I am going to go… but in any case I am only two levels away from 100.

An Excellent Moment

I’ve talked at length about just how phenomenal the Final Fantasy XIV community is, but when I have concrete examples I still feel like I need to share them. Monday before our 8 man raids, I was attempting to cap out my poetics earned for the week, and as such decided to run a completely random expert roulette. Now I queued as DPS, and was shocked at just how fast the queue actually managed to go. We got into the instances and everyone said hello as is the FFXIV custom, and then some actual chatter started up. Things seemed to be going smoothly but within a few minutes the healer asked us if we were experiencing any lag. I was not but as the run progressed I started to see small bits of it with my actions. However I have totally seen times where even among our little circle of friends… one of us was experiencing some crushing lag.. and everyone else was just fine. During a pull the healer disconnected and the ninja and I managed to hold out just long enough after the tank died to finish off the pack.

Now were this any other online game, when the healer got back… they would have been chewed out by the players and called horrible for having a “bad” internet connection. I’ve seen that play out many times in the past in several different games. However in Final Fantasy XIV the healer came back, apologized and the general consensus of comments from the group was “stuff happens” and “thanks for trying”. As the run progressed the were several moments where the healer lagged out of disconnected, often times causing the tank to die. In every single time the tank took it with grace and thanks the healer for fighting through the issues so we could keep going. Upon completing the run everyone thanked the healer for valiantly “sticking it out” and I am certain that I was not the only person to give her my commendations. She sounded thoroughly frustrated by the events, but every player in the instance was supportive of her situation. What other game have you ever seen where that happens?

Awesome Boss

This morning I am thankful for an awesome boss. As I write this… I am feeling absolutely horrible, and have sent my boss an email saying that I would not be in today. That I would be taking the day and resting. I’ve had bosses in the past that would have had a problem with this, bosses that the only thing that mattered was that I was sitting at my desk during the hours of 8 to 5. I am very fortunate to have a boss that is more family than administration. Prior to this current environment it had been a very long time since I had anything resembling a work family. Maybe it was the fact that my first environment straight out of college was so close knit, but it essentially spoiled me for other places I worked. While I still feel close to a lot of the people I have worked with over the years… in part it was either through shared interests or shared struggle in horrible situations. This team that I am part of now… I feel like I belong to something bigger than myself and it is entirely thanks to the support of our boss.

Previously we were a group of self starters, and functioned well as independent islands more or less left along by every boss we had been under. Our current boss was a member of that team, and saw the disconnectedness of the group as a whole as something of a challenge. Over the last several years he has worked to bring us all closer together, and as such make us mesh more tightly. I know that I can go to any one of my team members with a problem and they will do everything in their power to fix it, and they know the same is true for me. Its the stupid little things like bringing a cake to our staff meeting on the months we have a birthday, or going out to see a movie together as an after hours team building activity. All of which by themselves are silly or minor… but adding up to be an awesome environment to work in. So I am thankful I have such a great environment to call my work home.