November 2016 - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Waterless Thanksgiving

November 24, 2016 by Belghast

I realize it is late, but if I blog now it still counts right? Today was an extremely strange day, but I am now home and mostly happy and sane. This whole adventure started last night when we heard on the news that my home town was on the brink of being without water. The irony in that statement is that the town is named Nowata… and this is essentially a running punchline that I have had to hear my entire damned life. Tuesday morning an explosion rocked the Airosol chemical plant in Neodesha Kansas, roughly sixty miles from my home town. In the process of fighting the fire all sorts of strange chemicals ran off into the Verdigris river… that feeds the water supplies of a bunch of towns as it travels its way down and eventually joins up with the Arkansas river. Namely this meant that the town I grew up in had to shut off water at midnight last night to keep from getting any contaminants into the system. It was estimated by noon today that the taps would run dry as they only had about ten hours worth of water available in the tower. When I first heard that I thought… well I guess there goes the plans for Thanksgiving, because surely no one was going to attempt to hold a big meal without access to a bathroom. I would be wrong.

When I finally got a hold of my mom this morning she acted completely unfazed by the news, like it was silly for me to think that dinner might be off. She just said that she was telling people to make sure they used the bathroom before coming. She also said that we could always just go out behind a building… remember I come from fairly humble roots. My wife backed out because she needed to assist a friend of ours from trying to move out of her apartment, and in part because I don’t think she liked the concept of attempting Thanksgiving without running water. Thankfully as it turns out they had prepped pretty much all of the food minus the bird well ahead of time, so it was just a matter of cooking a small turkey this morning. All in all it went as pleasant as it could be given that it meant hanging out with my blatantly racist uncle and my sometimes extremely paranoid aunt. My conspiracy theorist uncle did not make it, so there is at least that. I love my parents dearly though and I appreciate the effort that my mom put into trying to make a proper Thanksgiving happen.

It has been rough the last few years because over time we have lost what I call our “anchor households” being those locations and individuals that glued the holidays together. One by one I lost my grandparents, and with the death of my wife’s step father… and her father and step mom turning snowbirds and RVing full time… we really don’t have much of an infrastructure for proper holiday observation. We are not the hosting type, because honestly we are the ones that start a timer from the moment we eat… because it starts ticking down until we have reached our fill of other human beings. It is hard being an introvert in a very extrovert-centric family. There were a whole slew of volatile topics discussed, but I essentially knew it was going to happen before hand so I had prepared myself for it. All things considered though, it wasn’t a bad afternoon and I wound up staying around four hours which is probably a new record for me. That was honestly the point where I decided… I should probably head towards someplace with indoor plumbing that worked.

The highlight of the day however was seeing the army of orange fuzzballs following my dad around when I went home to see the handiwork on his new porch. Also of note I saw two wild turkeys that have apparently been hanging around my folks house. The cats though were adorable as can be, and one decided it liked me… and hung out beside me on the porch. It of course screamed its little head off because my dad has gotten in the habit of feeding them wet catfood… and they apparently thought it was well past feeding time. I love my family, but I never really felt that connected to them. What I mean is to say that I never really fit in or seemed to think in the same way as they did. Going home and visiting them is draining, because I feel like I have to put on my “Mark” suit, meaning I shift into the person that they expect me to be without really meaning to. Being in my hometown always feels suffocating, because I have so much history there… and there are still a large number of people who remember me as something that I probably never was. All of this makes me appreciate the life I have built for myself, my amazing wife, my furkids… and the family that I chose. There are so many of you out there that may or may not actually read this… that I am thankful for having in my life. While there are so many of you that I will probably never actually meet in the flesh… it doesn’t make each and every one of you any less my family. I have a habit of adopting people… and I am thankful for each of you that I have in my life.

Unintended Stealth

November 23, 2016 by Belghast

I had every intent last night of going home and working on my Deathknight. This week the world boss is The Soultakers, which finally allows folks to unlock the hidden frost appearance. I had been enjoying my newly humanized Deathknight after years being a Worgen, but had largely been taking my time in pushing through the levels. However with the promise of an artifact appearance waiting on me, the goal was to get home and push as hard as I could to get to 110 before the week was finished. Recently they patched the game to make all artifact appearance drops from world bosses a 100% drop chance. Apparently however there is a giant asterisk looming behind that statement. What I am hearing now is that in order to get the appearance you have to be artifact knowledge rank four, which is completely impossible for me to actually obtain during this week, at least without the impending catch up mechanics. So instead I went upstairs to try and solve another issue. According to my friend Squirrel, apparently I have not been online on PSN in over thirty days… so after some back and forth we determined that I had apparently inadvertently set myself to appear offline. For awhile now I had seen a red X beside my portrait in the PS4 menu, but I always just assumed that meant I had a flaky connection. However apparently on my profile page I hit the wrong thing and flipped myself into some sort of stealth mode. After fixing that… I also started getting updates as to what my friends were doing, so when Squirrel joined a party I decided to hook my headset up and join as well.

The plan for the evening was supposedly a Hard Mode Wrath of the Machine, but due to the holiday messing with everyone’s raiding plans… it was just Squirrel, myself, Jex and Havel that were available. The original thought was that if we could somehow muster the folks that we would end up running a normal to show me the ropes. Instead we just ended up completing various crap that I had sitting undone. I am the worst at actually grinding through quests, and the Gjallarhorn was something I tried when I was sitting at 340ish and found maddening. There are wave and waves of exploding shanks that have this nasty way of sneaking up on you when you are least expecting. I would ultimately end up getting blown up and failing out… and unfortunately this is one of those quests where you have to complete a bunch of stuff if you die at any point. The goal originally was to pester someone to come help me, but I never got around to doing it. Last night they were willing to help and I was more than happy to knock a quest out of my inventory.

Similarly I had been sitting on the Thorn quest for at least a week now, having completed the last of the crucible kills during the recent Iron Banner. In order to do this one I needed a key, and had never actually finished the Sepiks Perfected strike quest… which rewarded a key. So next up my friends set about to helping me complete this quest. Unfortunately I have not actually spent any time with the gun, but seeing as I never got the year one variety I have always been curious just how it feels. There was a time where I used hand cannons above pretty much any gun, but the short range and ammo capacity nerfs have ended up with me favoring other things. If nothing else I might throw this up on my hunter and be the stereotype, even though this version of thorn is significantly defanged from the original.

Lastly when I opened the chest to pick up the Thorn, I managed to pull a pretty sweet new sniper with significantly higher light than the one I was using. I like the super high damage archetype of snipers, so this has already seen some use given that it is solar burn week. We attempted a random heroic after completing the Thorn quest but for whatever reason I failed to get credit from my Future War Cult quest. I am super thankful to all of the help that Squirrel and Jex were willing to dish out last night, and I really want to figure out a time when I can hang out properly and do more Destiny stuff. I knew I missed them, but I didn’t realize how much until the middle of last night hanging out killing baddies.

Fetching Cats

November 22, 2016 by Belghast

My evening playing catch with our youngest cat Kenzie… she loves her rubber bands pic.twitter.com/Bckn0nFg9V

— Bel 🆚 Hatred (@belghast) November 22, 2016

I am not entirely certain how well this video is going to come across on the blog, since I am just using the default twitter embed process. I’ve talked about playing fetch with my youngest cat Kenzie before. She loves rubber bands, and whenever she wants to play will bring one and drop it beside me. Traditionally this has meant tossing it around the room and her chasing after it. However over the weekend my wife went to a craft fair and picked me up a basic rubberband gun. Now at first the results were mixed, but I quickly realized it was because it moved quicker than she could actually track. So firing it across the room in the air meant she would just look at me confused a few times and then give up. However if I fire it across the floor so that it makes impact and slides the rest of the way… she is able to track that and bolts off after it. I decided to attempt to record this in the process and overall it turned out pretty well… including the batting of the gun to try and make me fire it. This was my evening… and when she would get tired she would bring it back… and then lay down on top of it. Later she would discover it again when she got up and the circus would continue.

As far as gaming went… it was another mixed bag of an evening. Firstly early in the evening before my wife got home I spent that time working on my Warlock and namely doing the Shiro and Tyra weekly quest. The idea being that if I keep doing those every week I am bound to get some interesting stuff from the load of legendary engrams that they ultimately provide. At this very moment I swap them all to the bank and then hop on my highest light character to open them. However before long that won’t matter quite so much given that the only sub 385 character I have right now is my Warlock. Today is the weekly reset, and from what it sounds like it is a really good week to farm packages. If nothing else this is going to be the week that I farm up all of the heroic strikes I need for Future War Cult quest. Small Arms and Solar Burn means you can farm heroics, and Mayhem Clash means you can finish games in 6 mins making it an insane Crucible farm week as well. Needless to say I am probably going to be playing Destiny tonight.

In World of Warcraft last night was our traditional Mythical Monday night… which is just a cute name for “oh shit we never did a mythic this week”. It seems like Monday is the night that I always end up doing a keystone just in time to get a free item today. This time around there was a double benefit, in that my friend Mor needed Black Rook Hold for the Karazhan attunement, and he also had a keystone for it. It is getting to the point where these runs are largely pretty smooth and we managed to complete in with enough time to spare that we got two chests at the end. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone managed to get any usable gear. Quite honestly it has been a really long time since I have gotten anything useful out of a Mythic, and largely they are just something I do… because of the fear of missing out on something from the chest. I enjoy them, and I am always happy to tank them pending I can dedicate 30 minutes of my time in one sitting. However I am not necessarily running them because I need them.

Lastly I finished the evening in Rift and managed to finish up Scatherran Forest. I got so into the game that I completely did not watch the time… and wound up finally heading to bed when my wife started to wake up from the sofa at 12:30. From there I had a pretty fitful night sleep wise, so it is definitely going to be an interesting day. That aside… Scatherran Forest was a great experience and the wrap up event was full of epic moments. At the end of the zone you wind up going into a mini solo dungeon of sorts, with I believe four boss encounters that you take on with two companions. As far as the story line and ramifications… they also felt pretty awesome. There were some definite feels caused by the ending… that were not entirely attributable to the late hour. I’ve now moved on to the Gedlo Badlands, with my general idea being to ping pong back and forth between the two as I work my way through the comet towards the Tower of Ahnket. I had my first real run in with Ahnket and it was interesting… definitely get a malevolent evil vibe… but also that of a cat playing with a toy which makes it all the more fitting to talk about this morning. I talked a bit during the day about Time to Kill issues… and apparently a good chunk of that was my own damned fault in that I forgot to slot any planar fragments. Once I did that… I noticed a significant boost in damage output, so if you are similarly struggling try that. So far my favorite thing about this expansion is largely just a side effect. I love that I am gaining planar levels insanely fast anytime I do pretty much anything… which is helping me flesh out those neglected trees.

A Good Weekend

November 21, 2016 by Belghast

This past week was the week of seemlingly smooth and fast clears. Wednesday night we worked on progression content, which mean’t that we spent the majority of the evening wiping to new and exciting things. However the end result of that evening was that we downed Odyn and made a decent amount of progress on Guarm. The only negative aspect of that is that it also means that none of us actually saw progress on the quest chain that haunts us. We kicked around the notion of having an Emerald Nightmare clear night, that I ultimately decided would be Friday. I set up a calendar invite and hoped, and then was pleasantly surprised at the number of folks that signed up. In fact we technically had more than our normal raid nights, and other than some starts and stops while waiting on folks or dealing with disconnections… it was a very smooth evening. So smooth in fact that I seriously wonder if we could have cleared the entire place in an hour. I mean because of the various time spent waiting… that was not a thing that happened however it seemed like we might have been on pace for it. That general smoothness continued on last night with Karazhan, but so did the whole waiting business. Thalen got sidelined with family stuff, and we had the option of either filling his slot or waiting. It turned out we ended up getting started roughly an hour and a half late, but once again things went amazingly smoothly. So much so that I think next week we are going to make a proper attempt at a Nightbane run. We would have one shot every boss… were it not for the fact that we tried some madness for an achievement on Medivh.

Another big part of my weekend was roaming around and exploring the Comet of Ahnket in the Rift Starfall Prophecy expansion. At this point I am sitting around 66 1/3 and feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the Scatherran Forest zone. Firstly I have to say this expansion is charming as hell so far, namely because of the two companions that follow you around at times… but also because it is a great example of environmental storytelling. Every area is packed full of little things to be scene and experienced much in the same way the zones are built in Guild Wars 2. Lots of things are happening in the background and all it takes is you sitting still long enough to experience them. The best of these vignettes has to be the hedgehogs who are stuck in a ball rolling… until one of them realizes that they can just let go of their feet to stop. Similarly there is this adorable sequence where you are playing hide and seek with baby unicorns, and you have to go out and find them so that you can lead them back home. The only negative so far is that I feel woefully undergeared for some of the content, and there is a bit of an uneven difficulty level happening. There was an area full of spiders… and they seemed literally twice as tough as any of the other equivalent level 66 mobs. I could take down entire packs of humanoids… but a single spider was a race to see if I could finish them off before they finished me off. Getting a second spider meant absolute certain death. All in all though I am really liking the expansion and it feels much more like Storm Legion did as far as content goes.

Finally I spent a good deal of time playing Destiny this weekend and was able to push my Titan to the 385 barrier. This is the point where you stop getting upgrades from legendary engrams, and are stuck relying on faction rewards that stop at 390… and exotic engrams that will take you all the way to 400. This means I am hoping tomorrow starts a small arms week for the heroic strike list because I absolutely need to spend some time farming. In theory I believe the Archon’s Forge will go up to 400 when it comes to end of event rewards, but not anything coming from an engram. I spent some time working on my Hunter and Warlock and getting both of them through the Rise of Iron story so I can have three sets of world bounties to work on each week. I realize they just reward engrams at this point… but if nothing else it can be infusion fodder to help work up additional weapons and armor. I need to find the free time to try and sign up for one of the machine raids so I can see the content and get some more tasty gear. However 385 is a completely respectable place to be, and in theory during the next iron banner I should be able to make a decent dent into pushing that number up into the 390s. It was a great weekend and especially considering we have a short week ahead of me.