July 2017 - Page 2 of 4 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Discarded Hulk

July 24, 2017 by Belghast

I know I have started out many a Monday post with something along the lines of it being a weird weekend, so I am going to refrain from doing so today. The odd factor comes from the fact that we were pretty busy… but also mostly busy around the house. I’ve talked about my wife who is a teacher several times in the past, but one of the side notes that you need to know is that teachers here in Oklahoma have very little support for all of the things that are required to make a classroom work. My wife for example gets a $25 credit… per school year to buy anything she needs for her classroom from what is in effect the school district storehouse. Most teachers don’t even get that… so we spend a lot of time doing things in an effort to augment her classroom experience. Anecdote aside… how this factors into our weekend is that for years we have had what is effectively a office work group printer that I happened to adopt when a workplace was sending it out to salvage. They were more than happy to have me truck it away… instead of having to pay some electronic recycling people to come and do the same thing. I was trying to figure out about when we got the Laserjet 5si… and to the best of my knowledge I would guess around 2005-2006 ish. The piece of this that you need to understand is that it was effectively a 23 inch by 23 inch by 23 inch cube that weighed about 150 lbs. It effectively sat in the corner of my office taking up tons of space… and any time there was a paper jam I had to try and balance the unit while turning it around because it was way too big to actually get to the back side without doing so. The other thing you need to know is… that there are several times a year where my wife will print up to a ream of paper worth of materials for her classroom in a single evening. So it is simply not cost effective to try and do that with a consumer grade laser printer.

This week the computer she had in her office finally gave up the ghost, which is not terribly surprising given that it was an ancient Gateway FX P6831 laptop circa 2008. So like always this lead us to craigslist to see what all was available in our area on the cheap. While we didn’t really find anything, given that our craigslist seems to be entirely made up of laptops and custom built rigs that someone overpaid for… and still thinks is extremely valuable. However in her travels she happened upon a reasonable looking printer that in theory could replace the mammoth beast and give us some more desk space. It turns out a company was surplussing all of their HP Laserjet P3005 printers and we were able to pick up a relatively low print volume printer for $40. This however left us with the daunting task of moving the beast downstairs… something that I am shocked I was able to do by myself years ago… I know at the time it involved using an office chair as a makeshift handtruck and then slowly lifting it a single stair at a time. Thankfully I am much older and wiser… and simply opted to remove the two addon printer trays, duplexer and toner cartridge which turned it into something that was way more manageable for us to get downstairs. This left me room to set up the new printer, and also coincidentally gave me room enough for the Canon Pixma MG3620 color printer that I picked up off Amazon for $30 a week or so back. Which means for the first time in probably a decade we have a reasonable color printing option. However the directions that came with the printer… were for a completely different model and it only took me a couple of hours of trying to set things up in vain for me to realize this fact and to grab the correct directions from the Canon website. Unlike past wireless printers… you cannot apparently set it up over USB and then set its wireless credentials… you instead need to do some bullshit mobile phone set up process. However once I got the correct directions it went pretty smoothly.

This was just one vignette of the random stuff we did this weekend, and most of it isn’t really worthy of writing about. However now we have the mammoth printer sitting in our living room because the person who had said they wanted it… backed out when they realized just how damned big it was. Thinking about sitting it out on the porch one day and posting a “free” craigslist post to see if anyone will come get it. I would love to give it to a school or a church or a non-profit agency because it still prints insanely well… and the toner has gotten to the point where you can get it for like $20 in the secondary market and it will print something along the lines of 60,000 copies off that single toner. Until then however the cats think they have a new toy and one of them has taken to periodically laying on it. As far as gaming goes… I largely played Diablo 3 and with significant help from friends am nearing the point where I get my pet in the seasons journey. Right now I am on a more annoying objective step which involves running bounties until I get five jewelry patterns, which will then unlock the last few pieces of the Rathma necromancer set. After a few seasons of playing Demon Hunters…. everything feels slow… but the Necro in particular feels extremely slow when pushing Rifts and Greater Rifts. Getting the two piece weapon set has greatly improved this but it still feels slower than I am used to even when being drug behind a much much higher leveled friend. All in all though the Necromancer is still insanely fun, but as we talked about this weekend… I am curious how many previously devoted Witch Doctor players have made the swap to Necromancer permanently.

Four Necros

July 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the beginning of a brand new season in Diablo 3, and once again Grace and myself did our hang out and level new characters thing. Traditionally these season opens happen on a Friday night, so there is always the ability to stay up until we hit the level cap. Granted that has not actually happened in awhile with us usually crashing somewhere in range of 60. Yesterday was a bit of a weird situation with the season open happening on a “School Night” as it were, which curbed our play session around 10 pm my time. I finally called it because I was starting to drift off at the keyboard and when I did none of the other three players seemed to complain much about it. I’ve been on this odd kick of going to bed around 10/10:30 which is significantly earlier than my traditional midnight. Maybe my age is finally catching up with me? Whatever the case… we managed to hit somewhere in the range of 47 before calling it a night.

Considering this is the first season post Rise of the Necromancer… you can probably already imagine that we were a party of four… and an army of dozens and dozens of undead following us around. Can I just tell you how glorious it is to see four Necros doing their Necro thing? We ran a bunch of Neph Rifts as is the traditional best leveling practice… and we got some insane spawns out of the gate that wound up boosting our characters significantly in the few hours we actually played. There was one relatively small rift map that literally had almost nothing but yellow and blue packs which mean’t we had summoned the guardian well before we were actually prepared for it. Necromancers have a really weird power curve in that they still start out a little weak, at least when it comes to raw damage output. That Rift Guardian took forever for us to whittle down with our undergeared level 5 selves… but within a few levels we were easily breaking apart and churning through a full round of bounties solo style. At the point I left the seasonal content last night, I had reached effectively the same build of abilities that I was using on my level 70 necromancer.

Left Click – Bone Spike (Path of Bones)
Right Click – Blood Rush (Transfusion)
1 – Revive (Purgatory)
2 – Command Skeletons (Frenzy)
3 – Command Golem (Bone Golem)
4 – Skeletal Mage (Skeleton Archer)
Fueled By Death Passive
Commander of the Risen Dead Passive
Extended Servitude Passive

Path of Bones is my favorite builder in part because I can sit back a long ways from the targets and still be gaining essense while my bone army chews stuff apart. Transfuion is largely as a reasonable way of getting back some health while also providing an escape mechanism. There is rarely a time when I would need to use it… that I am not going to at least pass through a few enemies during the travel time. Bone Golem just makes for a really nice AOE damage dealer… and it was hilarious when the four of us needed to do a boss and unleashed that all at the same time. Revive becomes the bread and butter way of getting extra attackers and quickly becomes more useful than the meat firework option that is corpse explosion. What I like about purgatory is that it means I can keep recycling targets because when your revives die they turn back into corpses. Functionally what I do is play with Flesh Golem up until the point I get this ability and then thankfully you can switch over to Bone Golem without losing a source of corpses. The necromancer is insanely fun and if you have not played it yet, I highly suggest checking it out.

Destiny 2 Beta Impressions

July 19, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday around noon was the official launch of Destiny 2 Beta on the PS4. I personally got my hands on it around 6 pm after doing various things that needed to be done and taking my wife out to eat. To call this a Beta however feels like a little bit of a misnomer because in truth we are getting out hands on essentially the same demo that was available to press at e3. With that comes a greatly limited subset of options that you can take part in. Functionally right now there are three things available to players: The first story mission, the Inverted Spire strike, and one play mode of the crucible. I didn’t get a ton of screenshots because I was actively playing, but I did decide to stream and ultimately record me in game from the moment I started up Destiny 2 to the moment I logged out feeling like I had “beat” the demo. If you are really curious you can check out my Mixer VOD that runs for a little over an hour. I opted to go for a silent stream because I was largely just recording this for my own benefit.

This game is going to catch so much flak for being “Destiny 1.5” and I can see that. In every meaningful way this is Destiny. The characters perform as smoothly as the original, and the gunplay feels just as good. Those who played a significant amount of time with the first game… might have a little bit of an adjustment period because there are subtle differences everywhere. This is not simply a “HD Remaster” of the original game… but you can feel that it is in fact a brand new game that has tried extremely hard to capture everything that was great about the first one. The titan jump feels slightly different, and everything from the pulse rifle to the hand canon are recognizable… but feel different enough to know at a base level that you are playing something different. The first story mission is excellent and does an amazing job of providing you a feel for the game and its play… as well as giving you a rich narrative ride through parts of the tower you have never seen before. It takes everything that was learned through the Taken King and Rise of Iron and distills it down into the purest form. You are killing Cabal but you are doing it with a constant purpose of trying to save those you can… with enough nostalgic elements to make it feel like your home is falling apart… not just some random structure being blown to pieces. The mission also does a great job of weaving in single player and multi player elements… with the central section being a sort of defend the tower mode as you and lots of other players fight back against the Cabal along side Zavala. That is another huge part of this experience… you are interacting with characters that you already know like Zavala, Cayde-6 and Ikora Rey. They have personality and treat you in a manner befitting someone who has been leading all of these strike missions for all of these years. Hell you even get some interesting interactions with Lord Shax and Amanda Holliday.

The Strike is similarly awesome, and I can see myself running it over and over as part of the strike list. There were a few annoying jumping puzzle style elements… namely that giant grinder that we have seen multiple times in trailers and such. You find yourself trying to navigate through an area while avoiding the spinning wheels of doom. There is a similar mechanic in the first story mission where you have to avoid certain death while destroying objectives, and made me question my choice of the control jump instead of the height jump. The only weirdness about all of this is… it felt like grenade and super both charged super slow. Maybe I am just used to running around with my Armamentarium and rocking two grenade charges… but it always felt like when I needed a grenade the most it was still on cooldown. The super when available however was glorious. Last night I focused on the Sentinel Titan… and I got to run around bashing things with my shield. I never figured out how to throw it… but doing the equivalent of the old striker titan shoulder charge with a void shield was amazingly fun. While sunbreaker is supposedly back for Destiny 2… I can absolutely see me maining Sentinel. The thing that surprised me the most is the fact that I didn’t really seem to use the portable shield capability that often. It was useful for setting up essentially a gun nest, but for the most part I just ducked in and out of cover like I always did.

The only negative of the night was the crucible. I am just not a fan of the changes they made. For starters they have reduced the number of people in standard crucible matches from 6 vs 6 to 4 vs 4. As a result they have created a series of much smaller maps with much tighter choke points. What this does is make it feel much more frenetic in a style of game-play that I equate with Call of Duty. Crucible always felt like a thinking mans game… where it was as much about how you moved and when you chose to fire or not fire… rather than just charging forward into the fray every few seconds. It could be my experiences were deeply colored by the fact that in both occasions I ended up on a team of randoms fighting against a team of people sharing the same clan tag. Functionally all I know is that the changes did not feel as good as the original crucible does, and as a very casual player of the crucible it is not really something I look forward to participating in. Which leads us to the other problem of the night… I am more or less a Patrol player. If you believe Destiny Tracker I spend something like 70% of my time playing Patrol missions where I wander around aimlessly and kill things in the open world. As such with this demo “my Destiny” was not open for business yet and after doing the story mission, the strike, and a few round of crucible I considered myself largely done for the night. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy myself… it just felt like a very shallow experience without the open world content and without character progression. I am sure I will boot it up a few more times… but this did nothing to really satiate my desire for the actual game.

Bizarre Obsession

July 17, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we recorded somewhat of a mega show of AggroChat. We originally sat down thinking we might not have a complete show… and then recorded for two hours and wound up dropping a few topics to try and manage the show length. There were a whole slew of topics but one of which is one that I did not expect to blow up to the level at which it did. Kodra has been talking magic for a year or so in his adventures in doing drafts through Magic Online for each of the expansion releases that have happened. Lately however I have found myself obsessing about the game even though I have not regularly played it since the tempest cycle. Magic the Gathering will always have this nostalgic characteristic for me because I have had a lot of really good times playing it. The problem is… once I entered the adult world I stopped having a regular stream people to play with. I’ve never really gotten involved with a local shop doing the Friday night magic thing, because in truth people just don’t play Magic the Gathering the way I want to play it. The prevalence of NetDecking and combo magic turned things into a weird cold war… where you either needed to be playing whatever the new hotness needed to be… or at least come up with a way to counteract that new hotness. When I last stopped playing… the format of choice was called “Type II” and I believe this translates to the “Standard” in the current naming of formats. So when I left during the Tempest cycle it was all about the combo to beat… and either scrambling to get the cards… or scrambling to get something to beat it.

The style of Magic the Gathering I enjoyed was back when you never quite knew what you might be encountering in a players deck. Maybe it just took my area while to get super competitive, but in early tournament play I only ever once encountered the “power nine” but instead came up against a lot of seemingly fun to play themed decks. For me a lot of my decks centered around some card that I wanted to play with… and then blunting the negative effects of that card. So say I wanted to play with the Lord of the Pitt, I would run some token creatures that I could just keep churning out to feed to it rather than pay the 7 life upkeep. If I wanted to play with Leviathan I would run Icy Manipulator and Twiddle to keep from having to pay the two island tax to untap it each round, then figure out some way to retrieve islands from the graveyard every so often. It was fun trying to figure out a way to counteract what was not good about the cards and then figure out how to make them work well enough to be playable. Some of the most fun I ever had was in college the magic store I used to hang out in had a deep common bin… and we would end up building these $5 decks out of the archives and then pit them against each other. I guess the modern equivalent to this would be pauper, but even then… that format takes itself way more seriously than I wish I could when it comes to MTG. I’ve been trying to sort out a way to play the game how I want to play it… but also find some people to play with.

The biggest problem right now is availability of people. There are enough folks who have played MTG at one point in their lives to maybe create a lunch time group at work. The problem there I am not not sure what sort of format would work best. I am leaning towards something janky along the lines of Pauper Commander… without the commanders. Where you functionally construct a deck of common cards without the ability to repeat any cards. I would functionally need to probably fund a lot of the commons given that there are simply not enough in any one set to make up a deck of entirely common cards. I think a format like that however might bring back the random weirdness that I miss from playing Magic. There were moments where you would sit down and encounter something you never expected to see… and it would be interesting to figure out how to adjust to that and find a way to either defeat it or work around it. In truth I love common cards, because they tend to be the unappreciated workhorses of magic. It always bugs me a bit when people just dismiss them and toss them aside like garbage… when you cannot really make ANY deck without relying on a whole slew of them to serve as the glue between those higher dollar cards. I have no clue how this will end but thusfar it has simply been a case of be re-familiarizing myself with Magic the Gathering and trying to figure out if this is really something I want to jump back into.