August 2015 - Page 2 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Drag Experience

August 27, 2015 by Belghast

Youtube Gaming

The big buzz worthy thing that is happening right now is that Google is rolling out its Youtube Gaming platform. It proudly announces that finally there is a youtube for gamers! Which causes me to pause and ask… wasn’t YouTube already for gamers? At least 90% of the content that I watch on YouTube tends to be video game related so… I think it was doing a fine job before. What gets slightly lost in the marketing spin however is that they are now offering twitch like streaming services. Which in itself is a big confusing because I have had the ability to stream to YouTube for roughly a year now. There was even a page in my channel settings that explained how to connect OBS to the YouTube RTMP servers. I guess the big difference is that people are starting to actually use it. I played around a bit watching various folks streaming and there were a few issues. The biggest thing I kept running into was the stream was hitching periodically. It also seemed that people were confused and simply unprepared to field YouTube chat. Also it feels strange that when I interact with other people I show up as “Tales of the Aggronaut” which is my YouTube channel and not “Belghast”. I am wondering if this is a setting somewhere I can configure, but thusfar I have not found it. In fact there seems to be really limited configuration options for channels in the first place, which means… I sure hope you had your YouTube channel set up how you wanted it before the gaming site imports it!

On some level I find this all interesting, but mostly in passing. I’ve recently switched from attempting to make Hitbox a thing, to giving up and just using Twitch because I simply got more random viewers. I felt like Hitbox was the superior service in every way, because the most crucial thing for me is minimal delay between your stream and the channel chat. It becomes so awkward to try and hold a conversation with someone who happens to be watching your stream where there is a lengthy delay. Twitch recently put in functionality to help alleviate some of this, and it works… sometimes. In order for me to even consider switching to YouTube, there would have to be a set up similar to Hitbox where there was little to no delay. The problem being that what I am hearing in practice is that the chat delay is often longer than that of Twitch currently. I guess at some point I will swap the configuration in OBS and give it a test to see how precisely it works. The other thing that concerns me is that from what I understand your stream gets backed up to your YouTube channel regardless. I liked being able to pick and choose what I exported from Twitch, keeping my YouTube channel as a cleaner version of whatever I happened to stream. What are your thoughts so far if you have tried it or watched someone else streaming on it?

Drag Experience

When Diablo 3 2.0 was released the AggroChat folks played it quite a bit. For the most part all of us had characters in the level 60ish range… that is except for Kodra. Kodra had not really played much Diablo 3, but we knew that the game granted some extreme experience to folks being drug along with you. Over the course of a few play sessions we managed to catch him up, but it was an exceptionally fraught experience for him. Last night after our Final Fantasy XIV raid, my good friend Grace asked if I wanted to tag along as she farmed in Diablo. She would get bonus loot and I would be able to soak in the lions share of experience. During the course of an hour and a half I went from level 40 on my Crusader to level 70 gaining about 5 paragon levels after that. I got to experience first hand the sort of game play Kodra did, and I have to say I understand why it frustrated him. I would have leveled so much faster… if I could stay alive. Grace was farming Torment V which meant if anything even glanced in my direction I exploded in a violent eruption of giblets. I was simply playing a different game than what she was… which was more akin to dodgeball. Carefully trying to stay in the part of the screen where the mobs were not spawning, and dodging projectiles as they came in.

The resulting experience however was just silly. There was no point in ever repairing my completely broken body, because I was leveling out of my gear too fast for it to matter. Finally when I hit 70 I was able to piece together enough gear to be “passable”. The biggest problem is just how behind the curve you end up being when you finally hit the level cap. While I could survive damage for a bit, I lacked any semblance of gear to be able to actually do Torment V style damage. We did manage to encounter a few bugs that kept us from getting loot. The saddest of these occasions was when some treasure goblins died just out of bounds and I was able to watch a dozen legendary patterns rotting in a place I could not loot from. However we also completed a number of bounties, and from those I got plenty of patterns as well. This allowed me at the end of the night to craft a few legendaries and a green chest piece and get my gear at least to a point where I could function. I am super thankful for the speed run, because this gives me something to dink around with until the new season starts Friday. Right now the game plan is to start a Female Warrior, since I love Sonya so much in Heroes of the Storm. The crusader is awesome, but I am not sure if I want to duplicate that experience again so quickly.

Too Much of a Good Thing

August 26, 2015 by Belghast

Viva Proactivity

Yesterday I suffered from a bit of a dilemma and could have used the assistance of Hermione and her time turner. Sometimes the stars align just perfectly, and a sequence of patches hit at precisely the same time. This happened once again yesterday with the Final Fantasy 3.0.7 patch and Diablo 3 2.3.0 patch. This also conflicts with the fact that lately I have been trying to make Tuesday my Wildstar night, as it is the raid night of my guild and I am sure to see lots of people on as a result. In truth at some point I would like to get into a rhythm of Tues/Thurs being Wildstar nights much the same way as they were previously World of Warcraft nights. As a result I game hopped a bit. First up I poked my head into Final Fantasy XIV but did not really stay very long. At first glance I didn’t really see the people that I needed to pull together a full guild group expert, so instead of hanging out and waiting I moved on to the next thing. I could have easily relied on the Duty Finder, but since my passions were already deeply split last night I figured I would not really press my luck.

I will be raiding tonight so I figured that I would get plenty of time to explore the changes, which mostly for me included the addition of a TP bar in the party interface. This could be a huge thing if it means that Bards, Machinists and Ninjas start proactively feeding their tank TP when they are starting to get low. I know when I play ninja I always find it hard to time when is the best use of Goad. Traditionally I try my best to time it so that I use it at the mid point in a fight, figuring by then especially if the tank is a warrior they will be struggling a bit. As a Bard I rarely if ever played Army’s Paeon unless specifically asked by a tank because there was no real viable way of knowing when best to time it. Mage’s Ballad on the other hand… I could time easily when I saw that both healers were starting to hurt for mana. As silly as it sounds I think the addition of the TP bar to the party interface is going to drastically change the way the game feels for tanks at least.

Whitevale is Huge

WildStar64 2015-08-26 06-09-41-33 — They keep threatening to hug me.

Last night I continued to chew away on Whitevale in Wildstar. I managed to ding 25 which technically would have been a historic level for me… if not for the kitty hoverboard and the snarflex. Those have given me a nice mount to use since the moment I started playing this character, and have honestly spoiled me more than a little bit. I am hoping that there will be similarly purchasable mounts from the in game store when the free to play conversion happens. That would honestly be the number one thing stopping me from alting in this game, is the thought that I will not have my stable of mounts to carry over with me. While I started upstairs last night, I ultimately crashed on the sofa working my way through the various quests in zone. I keep hearing that all of the zones after Whitevale get significantly better but this zone serves to be this endless and impassible white wasteland. I’ve remarked before that ultimately on my Chua Engineer it was the zone that stopped me in my tracks and kept me from progressing forward and I am remembering why now.

I am not entirely certain what it is about the zones design but something just feels bad about it. If you were to ask me what my favorite biome is… and I think I have answered this question as part of the Liebsters… I would probably say snowy zones. If I think back to all of my favorite zones in games, most of them are places like Iron Pine Peaks in Rift. The problem here is it feels like a white desert more than a snowy climate. Maybe it is the fact that the entire zone has a purplish/bluish overtone but there is just something off with the lighting. It has this feeling of vastness that makes me feel like I am making absolutely no progress. That said I have put a big dent in the zone and have whittled down the available quest hubs to only a few left. If I actually devote some time I think I can push through it in a few more hours. I am anxiously looking forward to putting it behind me and never returning again.

Insomnia and Demons

Diablo III 2015-08-25 23-38-00-77 — Big demon spider thing, going down!

I had every intent of just saying that last night was a Wildstar night and being done with it. I had patched up Diablo 3 earlier in the evening but had not actually popped in to check it out. When I wife decided it was bed time around 9 pm I attempted to lay down with her. Problem being my body intervened and decided that even though I was sleepy… I was not sleepy enough to actually sleep. I have this nasty habit of catching a second wind just as soon as my head hits the pillow. I waited around a bit, attempted to watch some television and lull myself to sleep… but that didn’t actually work. Instead I finally got up and decided to mindlessly kill demons until sleep claimed me. Now that Season 3 is over the pressure is mostly off, and my Crusader is just another normal character that I will eventually get to maximum level. Since it was a Seasonal character, I feel somehow obligated to continue the storyline that I started and I pushed through the never ending series of staircases to get to Azmodan. On Hard difficulty the game is still exceptionally easy, which is fine because I didn’t really want to think much last night.

The real question I guess is that in two days the fourth season starts. Will I finish the Crusader first or start a new character for the season? Honestly I am leaning towards making another Crusader for Season 4 because I really love some of the abilities. The other option is to make another warrior, because while I like my monk… I don’t think I like its game-play enough to run up another one. Crusader seems to hit all of the finer points I love about classes and gives me a highly tanky and defensive character with some ability to damage lots of things at the same time. I might end up making a female crusader just to keep from feeling like I have a duplicate character in my stable. The problem there is I am notoriously unmotivated to play female characters in games. I tend to project myself on every character that I play, and for whatever reason I struggle to get the same “this is me doing this thing” experience when I am playing a female character. Diablo on the other hand… there really isn’t much “you” in the characters that you create. You are playing a stock character and dressing them up in cool armor, but other than that there really is little “personal touch” to them.

Go Team Blaugust

August 25, 2015 by Belghast

Words of Encouragement

Hang in there #Blaugust-ians! If @belghast can do it every. single. day. we can do it for a month. At this point surely reading = writing 😉

— Ysharros (@ysharros) August 25, 2015

I woke up this morning to see the above tweet in my timeline… and it is absolutely true. There are days I still think I am the least likely herald of regular posting. Most of you only know me as the guy who posts every day, but in truth that only represents about half of my time blogging. Before that I was the most flaky and least prolific blogger out there. I would go through streaks of posting 10-20 posts in a given month… to having months where I only have one post at all. Between August 2012 and late April 2013 there was complete and total radio silence. It was by will alone that I set myself down the journey of posting something, no matter how stupid it is… every single day. Now several years later, there is part of me that still cannot fully comprehend the madness that I started, but I also have this strong drive to keep the ball from ever touching the ground.

While this might sound counter intuitive… for me at least regular posting is much easier than sporadic posting. Namely because of the pressure that I would put on myself. When I would go through a big lapse, I felt like I couldn’t just start writing again with a simple post. Instead I would have to write the most epic post ever to make up for the fact that I had been gone so long. I felt like I had to prove something to my readers, that I was somehow worthy of them leaving me in their RSS reader all this time. As time passed, the guilt that I felt grew and the measure of that “epic comeback post” kept growing as well ultimately leading me to wait longer before posting it. When I write something every day I am much more open with my readers. I talk about what is going on in my world, and how it is effecting me. I talk about what I am enjoying and what I am not enjoying, and the whole process ends up being much more fluid. So when I agree that if I can do it, you can to… because quite frankly all of you are far more talented than I am.

I started the Blaugust thing selfishly as a way of getting more content from the bloggers I care about. I never expect anyone to follow me in this “damned fool crusade”. Instead from the first year I had people coming out of the woodwork and signing up for the challenge. Even though I keep stats and assign awards… every single person who attempts this is a hero to me. They are actively doing something to keep pumping out more content into our community and that is huge. I can keep doing what I do because there are people like you out there sharing the journey with me. We are all in this together, and I know you can finish this month and get your name in the “winner” column. I believe in all of you fine Blaugustians, and even though the month is coming to an end… I will still be here in September and October to support you all. We are actively making this community we have stronger, and there is a certain magic in that. Now go write some kick ass posts!

Waltz of Doom

Last night we were able to pull together the raid without any real issue and set our sights on clearing Alexander Normal. It is amazing just how fast you can burn through all four wings when you have a team that works well together. Even though I am essentially done gearing out my Warrior with Alexander items, I am always down for helping a full guild group knock it out. It is extremely noticeable that our folks have been improving their gear because on turn one for example I think the bosses only actually made it up into the air twice. Similarly we pushed the living liquid boss into the final phase before the second hands phase. I know Kodra for example walked away with three pieces of gear that he had been building towards, and I think several others got pieces as well. I was pretty slackerly this past week and these were actually my first Alexander runs. I had every intention to work on getting the dragoon gear but this past week was just one where I was not in the mood to play any MMO at all. Instead I largely played single player experiences… or Diablo 3 AS a single player experience. I did not even cap Esoterics and for that I am feeling a little sorry. I could have easily had my chest piece this week, but I guess I will maybe wrap that up tonight.

After Alexander we put more attempts in on Ravana Extreme and I think we are getting to the point where we might be able to finish it up next week. We have now seen the entire fight and survived through the various phases, we just need to put the dance together and repeat it all successfully. The hard part is still the phase after the swords, which means we have to spread out so that only two people are in each corner. We didn’t quite do this and as a result we lost a handful of people. Luckily we had a healer limit break three available so we were able to essentially push the reset button and keep on trying. That is not exactly the way we want to beat it the first time, but if we have to I will take it. The fight is just so much more complicated than Bismarck Extreme was, and I am anxious to get it down and farmable so we can start clearing it and Bismarck in the same night. I want pretty weapons dammit! In all honesty I am pretty happy with my Esoterics axe for the time being, and my retainers are once again packed full of gear. However I will never turn down unique weapon graphics.

Seasons Change

August 24, 2015 by Belghast

Fear and a Little Loathing

The Full cast of Walking Dead spin-off Fear the Walking Dead

I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead and have been watching the show since the first episode. Well technically that is a bit of a fib, I intended to watch the show… but ultimately bought the first season boxed set and used it as a way to leap frog me into caring about the show in season two. I struggle to get into shows if I do not watch a deluge of episodes, because it takes a good four or five before I start to care about the characters. Zombies have always been that one movie monster that freaked me out, in part because other than twitter I am really not that connected to the media. So a movie opening like Dawn of the Dead where the entire world falls to shit while a couple is having an unplugged “date night” ends up resonating with me. It has never been so much about the zombies, but more about the hopelessness of it all. One bite or scratch and it is just over… and there are so many more of them than there are of you. The Walking Dead started several months after the fall of society, so when AMC announced that there would be a show set in Los Angeles during the fall.. I was on board with it from the start. As the summer drug on I looked forward to the premiere which was set for last night August 23rd.

Now that I have watched the first show… I am decidedly “meh” about the show right now. I guess part of it is that society is falling apart far slower than I had expected it to. Usually in the zombie movie genre the world changes over night, and in this case the show takes place during several days and even at the very end…. the world has not fully woken up to the danger. I expect that in episode two there will be a lot more action as people scurry about and attempt to get someplace safe. Quite honestly I cannot think of a worse place to be than in Los Angeles. The interesting thing about this show is we the viewers… know more about their world than the characters on screen do which causes a strange frustration. You want to take them by the shoulders and shake them and make them realize that the shit is going to hit the fan soon and they need to get the hell out of town. The other strange thing that is going on is that as I am watching I am trying to figure out which character is going to die first. There have been enough people introduced at this point as to assure that at least one of them will not survive the initial fall. I am taking a wait and see attitude on whether or not the show is going to “feel” better.

The Talking Dead set is part of the experience

One part that feels completely wrong however is the fact that there is no “Talking Dead” airing immediately after it. This has become part of the experience for me and my co-workers as we watch the show. It is like this grand after party where you watch other fans of the show hash out the details that were just seen. To be truthful the entire Walking Dead > Talking Dead > Walking Dead rebroadcast thing has become a Sunday ritual for me. I sit on the sofa with my laptop and periodically change the laundry while watching the first two shows, and then fold the laundry during the rebroadcast. So just having Fear the Walking Dead without the Nerdist and friends… left the whole experience feeling hollow. There was a Talking Dead show ahead of “Fear” but it was to show off previews of Season 6 starting in October. On that show he mentioned that there would be a special Talking Dead after the season finale, but I am really hoping that AMC fixes this for Season 2. There was a hashtag going around twitter last night saying as much, so hopefully someone is listening. Chris Hardwick is pivotal to my enjoyment of this series.

Seasons Change

Crusader season 3 character joins the stable of normal characters.

Last night was also the end of Season 3 and I had wondered ahead of time how exactly the transition would work. Starting about thirty minutes before the end of the season we started getting warnings piped across the server, and the strange thing is that when the season actually finished it did not disconnect us from the server. Being curious however I ended my game and went to start a new one and got a message telling me that the season was over. I killed the Diablo 3 client and started it right back up, and immediately my new character was sitting in list of available normal characters. When I logged in I had a bunch of mail messages waiting for me, and in each one was an item that had been in the bank for seasonal characters. So I have to say the transition went extremely smoothly. I knew that I would not hit 70 before the season ended, but I did make it to around 35 before it finished. When season four starts I will absolutely make a brand new character, and it honestly may end up being another Crusader. Right now I am pretty fond of the gameplay, and it mixes some of the things that I loved about the Warrior and Monk together into a more enjoyable package.

Right now I am using a combination of Slash for my main attack which hits multiple targets in an arc in front of me, and Sweep Attack for my secondary which does pretty much the same thing… but just deals a hell of a lot more damage. My favorite ability however is Falling Sword which is an almost Dragoon like jump attack that crashes down on a target location dealing a radius of damage around where you landed. I love the versatility of this ability, that I can use it as a strong AOE attack or just a way to move around the battlefield quickly. It is great for chasing down runners like Treasure Goblins. My original plan was to rush through normal mode and then start cranking up the difficulty, but I only actually made it to act three before things went offline. While I might have had every intent to rush through the levels, I still found myself unable to skip up that option dungeon here or ignore that unexplored bit of map there. In hindsight I should have cranked up the difficulty from the start and just played like normal. I was under the impression that adventure mode did not actually work until you had unlocked all of the story content, but maybe I was wrong there. I’ve honestly not really spent much time exploring the Reaper of Souls features, because my friends and I had a few weeks where we played Diablo 3 hard and heavy… then never touched it again. For the time being I am still focusing on my Crusader because I am having a lot of fun playing it, and it fits my current gaming attention span.