October 2016 - Tales of the Aggronaut

My Plaguelands Home

October 31, 2016 by Belghast

Over the last week I have gotten various questions from guildies that all essentially equate to “What is going on in the Western Plaguelands?” because apparently it has been noticed that I have been spending an inordinate amount of time there. I embarked upon a path to madness and have been working my way through it. Essentially I have been courting the Heart of Corruption alternate appearance for my Paladin. There was a time that I loved the Ashbringer weapon graphic… but that time was 2006 and my graphical fidelity standards were maybe a little more forgiving. What seemed like a really awesome looking graphic at the time just feels extremely dated and part of a design ethic that has changed as World of Warcraft has matured. This is all the more apparent when you look at just how damned amazing Truthguard or The Silver Hand are in comparison. Options were essentially to keep staring at the weapon I didn’t really like, transmog it to something that I did like… or set down a path to farming the modern and updated corrupted ashbringer appearance. Clearly I chose the most annoying of these… and as a result have been living at the Thondroril River as a result.

Once upon a time when the Corrupted Ashbringer was introduced with the original Naxxramas, there was a sequence of items and quest text that pointed at the possibility of somehow cleansing the weapon and turning it into the proper Ashbringer form. During the Naxxramas patch cycle this was thought to be the next Legendary weapon to be added to the game… during an era when we actually thought every class was going to get a legendary that they could use. It only took a decade to reach that point, with the Artifact weapons… but whatever we were impressionable youth (not really youth). Most of these fan theories revolved around the two copies of Nat Pagle’s Guide to Extreme Anglin… the one that was looted off players in Alterac Valley, and the copy found laying on the ground in Dire Maul. I likely would not have started down this path were it not for the fact that Ashgar had recently picked up the book on a trip to Dire Maul, and happened to have a copy laying around. His copy acquired I decided that I was going to do this thing… and queued up for Alterac Valley. I however had the presence of mind to check the auction house to see just how much the books were going for. The AV copy was hovering around 25,000 gold on my server, however I noticed there happened to be one sitting at 5,000 g that I leap on. It was well worth that amount to not have to deal with Alterac Valley, or more so the RNG of trying to loot a bunch of bodies… in AV.

Book in hand I went to my Class Hall and spoke with the NPC that starts the quest… of note… this is not a traditional quest. This is more in the lines of the original Everquest, where you have to know who you need to talk to, in order to progress to the next part. The NPC takes your two copies of the book and merges them together giving you one complete book, and suggests that Prince Tortheldrin in Dire Maul West might know something…. but is only willing to talk to someone who has slain Nefarian. After a quick jaunt into Blackwing Lair, I had obtained my Head of Nefarian and was off to Dire Maul to have a chat. From there he pointed me in the direction of another person, who currently resides at Chillwind Point who was also looking for the Corrupted Ashbringer, but failed to bring him the head of nef. From there I found out that there is apparently a slime in the Western Plaguelands that is the remains of the mage Timolain, so it was off to find that and get the next step. This part took me a week of checking in on the supposed spawn point… with this weekend representing my first real attempt at camping it. There was a point on Saturday where I missed the spawn by about 15 minutes… because when we got home from running errands I logged back in to see a bunch of paladins furiously fishing. During the podcast I managed to finally find a group up in the finder, and port onto a server that happened to have it up. Getting my kill and looting the Phylactery of the mage turned Lich… allowed me to find out that he threw the corrupted shard in the near by river.

The next part is as you might expect… for a quest involving Nat Pagle’s fishing guide. You have to now fish up the shard from the river… and this is the step that breaks most people. At count I have fished up a mixture of 1500 or so Mithril Head Trout and Bristle Whisker Catfish. I’ve heard tale of this taking as many as 8000 casts before folks got their Shard of Darkness, the component needed to finally turn in and get the hidden appearance. I spent most of Sunday fishing, when not needed for running mythics or other things. I hung out downstairs with the laptop and kept dropping lures in the river… having a brief moment of excitement when I clicked each one… only to be disappointed once again when I saw fish. For those that are interested in this madness there is a full guide found in the comments section on wowhead. Much like with the Warrior hidden appearance, there is a handy macro you can use to check your progress on the various steps of the quest.

/run local p,q,t=print,IsQuestFlaggedCompleted,tostring p('Talked to Prince Tortheldrin: '..t(q(43682)))p('Talked to Alexia/Bardu: '..t(q(43683)))p('Slime can drop Timolain: '..t(q(43684)))p('Shard can be fished up: '..t(q(43685)))

This will give you some peace of mind that you really did get flagged for each step of the quest before you actually sit down and fish for hours without actually finding anything. I have literally checked this macro a few times just to make sure that I still am eligible to fish up the shard out of paranoia. The awesome thing about this process is that you end up making friends with several of the other paladins doing the various camps. I ended up btag friending a horde paladin that happened to be hanging out for the bulk of the vigil so that we could chat back and forth while waiting on the slime spawn. He was super lucky in that he got his shard after only a few dozen casts. My luck however seems to have been spent completely on the two legendaries for Belghast, and I figure I will be one of those 10,000 casts to catch the shard people. In any case… this is what I have been doing in the Western Plaguelands… now leave me the hell alone I have some fishing to do!

Wandering Skyrim

October 28, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a strange night for me. Originally I had plans to get together with some of my friends and work on Karazhan attunements… of which I have not even started running the dungeons. However I had apparently forgotten that last night was the RiffTrax live show. By “live” I mean streamed to theaters around the country as the original show is going on in Nashville. This time around we got to see two shorts and the really bizarre feature film “Carnival of Souls”(which is apparently up on youtube in its entirety). The film is apparently by the same guy that did another RiffTrax classic… the “Shake Hands with Danger” PSA from Caterpillar. This literally is probably one of the more bizarre movies I have watched because really from the entire moment it started… it felt like this strange meandering film about nothing. The RiffTrax send-up however was great, the movie itself just ended with what was supposed to be a shocking reveal… but largely felt like maybe the director was the only one not in on the secret? In any case by the time I got out of there, and drove home I was a little out of it. I existed in that state of too tired to do anything serious, but not tired enough to actually head on to bed.

Instead I decided to install the Skyrim Special Edition and check it out. I have to give Bethesda a lot of credit for giving it out for free to anyone who already owned the original game and all of the expansions. The install was roughly 9 gig so I am guessing that the improvements were more or on the processing side of the equation rather than just pushing a lot of upgraded textures. Whatever the case the game looks gorgeous, if I had been thinking I would have installed the base game on this newer machine and done some side by side comparisons. It is enough of an upgrade to make me happy, and I am always willing to have a new excuse to roam around Skyrim being a murder hobo. Once again however I am torn between sword and shield and bow… ending up mixing between the two quite a bit based on the fight. As is always the case I had trouble staying to the actual missing and instead have already cleared out the first barrow while retrieving the golden claw. In theory I think I probably should have gone to Whiterun, but whatever the case I am wandering down my own path once again. The game doesn’t really feel that changed, more like you installed a graphical upgrade mod. Whatever the case it looks pretty, and runs well so that pretty much ticks off the boxes I needed. At some point I might check out the mods available, but for the time being I am largely running vanilla.

Archon’s Forge Love

October 27, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I am going to talk a little bit about my love of the Archon’s Forge area in Destiny, and we will see where things go from there. I know I have talked a bit about this in the past, but the Archon’s Forge for me personally alone is worth the price of the expansion. You have to understand that I love milling around in patrol zones, as in that is pretty much my default “I want to play some destiny” mode because it allows me to putter around. So far my favorite patrol zone to date has been the Dreadnaught, because in many ways it felt like an old school MMO dungeon. Back in the days of Everquest and Dark Age of Camleot, dungeons were these sprawling places with no clear path that you were supposed to travel. As a result the community developed designations to break apart an otherwise huge zone into “camps”. The Dreadnaught was similar, with various sections of the map labelled as you zoned into them, with the coolest area being the Court of Oryx. This was an area where you could summon groups of Hive and Taken in the form of mini-boss fights, with the chance of there being decent rewards at the end if you were the person that summoned it. What I liked about it was the fact that three or four players who were not actively grouping, could work together on a shared objective and get pretty reasonable rewards as a result.

Archon’s Forge is very similar but also manages to work in one of my OTHER favorite areas of Destiny… the Prison of Elders. The backstory behind the area is that this is the place where the Fallen come to prove their worth in combat. We as players collect Siva offerings, that you can get by doing various things including Public Events, Patrols and occasionally off Majors. It is a random chance sort of thing, but I wound up getting one pretty quickly. From there you go into the Archon’s Forge area, and there is a terminal that you use the offering on. These come in Green, Blue and Purple varieties which denote how difficult the mobs are that are going to spawn as a result. Unlike the Court of Oryx, the Archon’s Forge actually locks down while the event is going on, so you have to be fairly quick to duck inside in time to participate. Essentially you end up fighting waves of mobs, culminating in some sort of a boss like encounter… generally centered around a major or handful of majors. The two things of note that make this extremely awesome are that first… it seems to be equally rewarding for the players just hanging out and participating and those that are actually giving up the Siva offerings. Secondly it seems to be self perpetuating, in that the encounters themselves drop a fair number of new SIVA offerings… allowing you to pretty much keep the process going indefinitely so long as you have three or four people. Essentially everyone keeps key trading, summoning the next round to keep the loot machine rolling.

The other night after the Final Fantasy XIV raid, I poked my head into Destiny and then spent the next hour and a half at the forge doing short events. What is awesome about it is that not only is this a flood of greens and blues, but I managed to pick up eight legendary engrams during that time period. Additionally I’ve gotten several pieces of armor, ghost shells, artifacts and I am pretty sure at least one of my recent guns dropped in the forge because I have no recollection of getting it otherwise. The big loot comes from killing the mini-bosses and just appears in your inventory much like the end of strike/crucible items do. My only concern is that I believe there is a limit of 20 items in the mailbox… meaning I really need to head to orbit more often while doing the forge. I am probably loosing a ton of loot as a result. I also probably should strip down myself to only the items I need to participate to create more room for said loot, and spend time between matches deconstructing greens. In any case regardless of those logistics… this is one of my favorite places to hang out because it is so simple to just hop in and start doing stuff. I SHOULD be doing strikes… and I managed to finish one of those last night that I had two quests for. The problem is right now my Destiny time is pretty sporadic, and Archon’s Forge seems to fit the perfect amount of “engagement” for me.

Issues with Quick Join

October 26, 2016 by Belghast

The last several days I have spent a good chunk of my time idling on this riverbank out in the Western Plaguelands… while often roaming around a completely different Plaguelands over in Destiny. However that is not what I am going to talk about this morning, I simply needed a screenshot to post and grabbed this one. What I am going to talk about is the 7.1 patch in World of Warcraft, or at least a small part of it. I acknowledge ahead of time that this post is probably not going to make a lot of sense to many of you, because you have to really suffer with anxiety brain to get it. Yesterday as part of 7.1 a new feature called “Quick Join” was patched into the game. To quote the page announcing this feature on the World of Warcraft site…

So whether it’s your guildmate, your Battle.net friend, or your Real ID friend, you’ll be able to find each other and take part in a variety of game aspects without the need to ask the age old questions of– “What are you doing?” “Any room in your group?” “Can my other friend join?” You’ll just be able to see all of your friends, see what they’re up to, and ask to join with just a couple of clicks. It’s so easy, a drogbar can do it!

It is hard for me to adequately explain how much anxiety this causes me. In Diablo 3 there is a similar Quick Join feature that is designed to let you easily get into games with your friends. How it works in practice is that folks randomly join into your game usually without actually talking to you first. After the generally jarring experience this causes, I wound up going into the settings and flipping myself to private so that I would not show up in the Quick Join list. My fear with the World of Warcraft feature is that it would work like this, but I guess fortunately that is not the case. What it does instead is whenever you are queued for content, you show up in the Quick Join list allowing folks to request to join your queue. From there you have to accept or deny that request, so no ninja joining. Unfortunately it still makes me deal with the guilt of turning down friends, and the possible social ramifications. What I really wanted to see was a sort of “opt out” private mode built into the system, or maybe this would have been the perfect time to roll in the much requested “Appear Offline” or “Invisible” mode to Battle.net.

Anxiety Brain

I am generally a fairly gregarious person, and I try and go out of my way to welcome folks when playing the guild cruise director role. I am also known for driving a van full of candy… that gathers people up and convinces them to join whatever guild I happen to be a part of. This is absolutely one side of me and I love being that person whenever I can. That said there is another part of me that comes out when I am overly stressed or just simply worn out from having to “act normal” at work or day to day societal constraints. This part of me just needs to duck my head into my turtle shell and hide from the world… and these are the moments when Battle.net scares the shit out of me. I love having easy access to my friends, but sometimes I cannot handle appearing to follow basic social norms. There are times I need to fade into the background and pretend that the rest of the world exists. Essentially I need my alone time, and it is important for me to recharge my batteries so I have the strength to confront those times when I need to be around others. The thought that at any moment someone could ask to join me in whatever I happen to be doing… and that there is now a system to make that easier… is completely terrifying.

Yesterday a friend who I know was not getting this equated this to “you’d rather group with strangers?” and that is not entirely it either. There are times that I queue to be an anonymous blip in someone else’s radar so I don’t have to think… or be concerned about anyone other than myself. There are times where I simply need to complete an activity, and I am not necessarily up for the burden that comes from grouping with people I know. When I group with people I care about… I feel responsible for their safety, happiness and enjoyment. Maybe this is just the gut reaction from playing tanks all of these years, but I feel like when I am in group mode I need to be fully there for the folks who are with me. Essentially I have to psyche myself up to be able to take on this mantle of responsibility and do the things I need to do to make a group happen. Having that whole thing thrust upon me, is just jarring and abrupt… and how exactly do I explain to someone who I legitimately care for… why I am going to click that deny button?

Ultimately I am going to deny a lot of group invites that happen through this system, and I apologize ahead of time. Sometimes when you say “It’s not you, It’s me” it really means “nope it is absolutely you”. However this is not one of those cases because in all seriousness there are just times when I cannot handle being a responsible adult. In theory I could start deleting people from my Battle.net friends list until I only had the people who understood exactly what this means, but that is also a bad solution. I use that thing for grouping, and especially lately I have been pinging folks to try and find a fifth for mythics or keystones. My Battle.net list is largely there for cross realm grouping options, and I shouldn’t have to give that up just because I cannot handle the thought of getting randomly grouped with people when I am not prepared for it. Of note… this isn’t even an issue yet because all last night I didn’t see a single item show up on my quick join list. That unfortunately is not the way runaway anxiety works… instead I am stuck thinking through all of the possible things that COULD go wrong… before they actually have. There are so many times I get mired in the feedback loops of “what is the worst possible thing that could happen” and I am certain this is one of them. I just find it frustrating that after all these years of asking for an invisible mode we still don’t have it. I know all of this is “all in my head” but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less valid either.