Thankfulness

I have this horrible habit of starting things and then just letting them sorta die.  One of those things was the whole “Month of Thankfulness” that I did back in 2014.  The idea was simple enough and it effectively meant that at the bottom of every post I made a little note about something I was thankful for.  In theory I should have been doing this every year since during the month of November leading up to Thanksgiving.  That however never actually happened and I finally jog my memory about a week into the month and think to myself that if I didn’t actually start on time… then it isn’t really worth doing.  That is not to say that I am not extremely thankful for a bunch of things in my life.  The weird thing about depression is that your brain can contain all of this self loathing at the same time as a whole lot of gratitude towards other people.  However the hell this works I figured that I would make a post on thankfulness on this Thanksgiving Eve here in the USA before I troddle off to work.  In theory I should have taken today off but my work schedule has been crazy.

My Wife

I feel like I can’t really start off a post like this without taking some time to acknowledge how awesome my wife is.  We are an odd pair that on paper doesn’t seem to work that well given that we are both into some very different things.  However her strengths are my weaknesses and as a team we compliment each other in so many ways.  Each of us is stronger as part of the whole than we are individually.  More than that she “gets” me, and even though she doesn’t necessarily get any of the many things that I am super obsessive about…  she understands that they are important to me and as a result supports them.  She isn’t a “gamer”, even though she spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad or phone but gets that all of these related hobbies are at the core of my being.  She has patiently dealt with so many “just a second” moments that turned into thirty to forty minutes and generally taken it in stride.  For the last few years she has sacrificed several of her very limited stock of yearly personal days, just to travel with me to San Antonio for Pax South because she knows it is a big deal to me.  It is impossible to grab words that do justice out of the air how awesome she is and how much I love her.  I am thankful I met her so many years ago and exceedingly thankful for the last twenty one years.

AggroChat

In truth it is less about the AggroChat podcast and more a short hand for a very tight knit inner circle of friends that also happens to involve all of the members of the podcast.  I have this habit of collecting people and over the years much like a hermit crab I have taken a shell encrusted with so many awesome friends along with me on my journey through life.  We often talk about having a surrogate family through our online interactions, but in this case I legitimately mean it.  These people are my family and fate willing will grow old with as we talk on a daily basis about all sorts of important and completely frivolous topics.  Its been weird to watch how this dynamic has shifted and changed as we all aged from being largely a group of people who met during vanilla warcraft progression raiding, and then saw that relationship morph into something else as time moved on.  Others are significantly newer but no less precious, and even though I occasionally go into turtle mode…  and disappear for awhile, I always make a return when it is safe to poke my head out of my shell.  These are my people and I am so happy I found them.

Twitter

Twitter can be a horrible place, and in this year of presidential proclamations occurring in 140 characters…  it seems odd to be thankful for it as a medium.  The thing is…  “my” twitter is a different place and while I see the echos of the larger events going on around me… it is largely the eye of the hurricane filled with a bunch of people who are also taking shelter there.  I originally started my twitter account around the release of this blog back in 2009 and in many ways the original intent was to have a way to communicate with the other bloggers.  We’ve tried so many different platforms to carve out a sense of community, but the only one that continues to stand after shrugging off so many is twitter.  It is that common ground that still contains all of the voices that I want to keep track of on a regular basis.  There are so many people that are so much better at doing this thing than I am, and I love being surrounded by them.  Lately though I go for periods where I just lurk, followed by a bunch of random commentary and I am sure this gets annoying at times.  So additionally I am thankful to all of the people who tolerate my nonsense in this already cluttered medium.  If we are “mutuals” this thanks goes out to you because you make my life richer because of your interactions.

Work

I talk sometimes about how stressful my work is, and it absolutely is there is no discounting that fact.  That said I have some pretty awesome people that I work with on a daily basis and I could not keep doing what I do without them.  While this year saw some significant changes in many directions and saw Rae who previously was on the AggroChat podcast finding another gig…  the folks that remain are pure gold.  We do this performance review process each year, and yesterday I met with each of my direct reports as I completed theirs.  I was struck by just how lucky I am to work with the people that I do.  I’ve always been great at compartmentalizing when it comes to work, and so long as my little silo was doing okay…  I could deal with the rest of the ship being torn to bits.  I have a really great silo to keep my eyes focused on from my upper management all the way to my staff, and especially the various peers that I work with on a daily basis.  There is a sense of dedication to getting things done whatever it takes and I appreciate that, especially when I am going into the first holiday season in a really long time that I have not taken any significant time off for.  Camaraderie through shared struggle is a powerful force and I am thankful for those who fight for me as I fight for them.

My Readers

At this point there are so many things that I should be putting on this list, but I wanted to keep it fairly brief.  I do however want to close out with one more bit of thankfulness.  I am thankful for each and every one of you out there that regularly or just occasionally reads this blog or consumes anything else that I toss out into the world.  For me my blog is as much therapy as it is anything else.  Sitting down each morning and siphoning thoughts from my brain and committing them into text format helps me clear the slate.  If something was bothering me it often makes its way onto the virtual page and as a result I can begin the “getting over it” process.  I often times write like I am not actually talking to anyone other than myself, and as a result I am always sorta shocked when I find out that someone actually read the words that I cast into the void.  Please do not mistake this shock for a lack of gratitude, but instead it is surprise that anything I said was really worth consuming in the first place.  There are so many of you who have been with me in this journey for years, and I don’t always take the time to recognize the other people standing on the deck of this ship beside me.  Thank you so much and lets commence with the exploration of new and interesting worlds!

Punitive Shades and Iron Banner

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The 13th anniversary event is going on right now in World of Warcraft and I have been largely disconnected from me.  For whatever reason I am focused on leveling my Orc Warrior above pretty much all else.  This is often the case when I return to WoW after being gone for a bit, I have to ease my way back into playing my bigger characters.  This year each character gets a package that contains 200 timewalking tokens and the quest vendor also sells a bunch of items.  One is the Corgi from past events and another are these crazy sunglasses that my Orc Warrior is modelling above.  These seemed like a fun item until last night I happened to catch wind of something through twitter.

Why would you create an item that is only transmoggable during the yearly anniversary event?  I mean I guess in theory they did give every character 200 tokens so they can fall back on the reasoning that we aren’t out any of our time to get the apparently disposable item.  The transmog system in general has never quite set right with me because it seems overly complicated rather than simply just letting you swap any graphic with any other graphic.  However the fact that there are timed transmogs only makes me more grumpy with it.  I just hate the whole concept of time limited items in general because I realize these are supposed to make me want to collect them all before the time runs out.  Instead what they do is make me just not want to even try and save myself the general disappointment by not participating.  In the case of the  shades, I put them on the Warrior for fun but I am not deeply connected with them.  However it does seem oddly punitive to the players who have designed entire transmog outfits around them.  This is just part of the Blizzard school of design where we can’t have anything that is universally good.  Every nice thing seems to be required to have a negative that comes with it, and that ethos will always be an axe I have to grind with this game.

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My means of taking screenshots in Destiny 2 seems to have crapped out this morning.  It’s probably nothing a reboot won’t fix but I don’t exactly have time to do that when I am trying to churn out a blog post on the off chance that there might be queued updates to run.  Instead you are going to get the Iron Banner screenshot from the PS4 that I took when the event was last available.  Tonight I will begin the process of trying to get a set of gear on my Titan once more, because I really love the Iron Banner gear this time around.  I have the full set on my PS4 Titan and I love it so much for many reasons… not the least of which is it has a decent stat package.  Additionally I am all about trying to get back a few of the weapons that I really enjoyed using… namely the Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle.  There are daily milestones and my goal is to attempt to complete them on each of my characters.  I am still frustrated that the Iron Banner is not a means of gaining power level the way it used to be in Destiny 1, but it is still a good source of cool gear and I am just going to focus on that aspect.

Memory is Fleeting

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With all of the recent talk about the World of Warcraft classic server, I have found myself contemplating a lot of things about the game.  We recorded a podcast episode where we basically spent the entire time trying to determine just how vanilla classic would end up being.  The other side effect of all of this is that I seem to be playing my horde warrior over on scryers quite a bit more than usual.  Now if you were to ask me to rank the current expansions to the game that ranking would look a little something like this…

  1. Wrath of the Lich King
  2. The Burning Crusade
  3. Legion
  4. Vanilla
  5. Mists of Pandaria
  6. Warlords of Draenor
  7. Cataclysm

Notice that number one and number two are the second and third expansion, and that weirdly enough I rank Legion above Vanilla.  What you are seeing is that my memory of these expansions and the nostalgia that colors them does not adequately represent the experience of actually playing through them.  I’ve recently leveled through the Burning Crusade content in a fashion given that you end up dinging your way out of it long before you actually finish much of it.  I did do Hellfire Peninsula in its entirety, the majority of Terrokar and a good chunk of Nagrand.  I left the Cataclysm tainted Vanilla lands at 58 and similarly left the Outland at 68 and as a result have spent the last four levels completing pieces of Borean Tundra.  The reality I am straddled with is that the zone design of the first two expansions is simply not good.  I mean at the time it was released it was world better than anything Vanilla had given us and as a result felt like a breath of fresh air, however when you stack it up against modern zone design from say Legion…  it is objectively not as well designed.

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What I mean by this is that the quests don’t flow cleanly from hub to hub and instead it forces you to do a lot of travel time back and forth between a hub and its related spokes.  All the while I was leveling through Outland and so far in Northrend it feels like I am spending a lot of time needlessly travelling between two destinations and this might have been the initial intent.  However after seeing modern quest design it feels like I somehow failed and allowed my quests to get out of sync.  If you fight your way through a micro dungeon with quest A you often find that upon turning in you now have another quest requiring you to go back there.  It is maddening to have to wade through an army of minions to kill a boss that you were already next to and sometimes even killed while completing the first quest.  The other that adds to this feeling of tedium is the mob density and having no real way to get in and out of these destinations without a heavy body count.  Thankfully on my warrior racking up a heavy body count is fun, but on other more fiddly classes this causes the leveling experience to grind to a halt.  The truth is it will probably have taken me twice as long to level through Outland and Northrend as it will have to push through the next three expansions.

As games mature their design ethic shifts significantly and we forget what it was actually like to play these games at the time.  When it comes to Classic World of Warcraft for Project 99 in Everquest… what we are chasing is a feeling not an actual honest moment in history.  I think when players say that they want to play Vanilla again…  they want to return to a time when not everything was mapped out quite so clearly and they had a sense of accomplishment and discovery each time they looted a kobold (and the game subsequently froze).  This is why World of Warcraft Classic is going to be the challenge it will be.  That experience means different thing to different players, and none of the calculations that a game company can make actually take the social component into play.  When I think of Vanilla or Burning Crusade or even Wrath, those memories involve very specific sets of individuals that no longer play the game and I might not even have contact with.  For Vanilla it was the Late Night Raiders, and Burning Crusade it was No Such Raid and when Wrath launched we were excited to be the Duranub Raiding Company.  Three non-guild based raids dominate those feelings and memories and the simple fact that I went through three separate raid groups tells you that there is no way to actually ever join those broken pieces back together again.  All of this said I will have characters on the Classic server, and I will see how this experience actually shakes out in the end.  I just feel like it is going to be exceedingly difficult to please even a fraction of the player base because we all want something different.

Xur Week Ten: 11/17/17

Destiny 2

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This week we have a phenomenal week for Xur at least as far as I am concerned.  He brought a bundle full of goodies that I either had never gotten to drop or did not yet have on the PC.  As a result this week is an extremely expensive week for me personally.  As is always the case he can be located on the Flashpoint location and in this case that is Titan.  You can find him in the rig section in a building devoid of enemy spawns.  That said be careful because they will absolutely stand at the doorway and shoot you while you are hanging out and doing your business with your face tentacled friend.  You might need to do a little pre-clear before you duck inside.  Let’s get on with the goodness.

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Hard Light as a gun has always been in the marginal category as far as usefulness goes.  It was never a bad weapon but it also never really stood out in the pack.  The year two Hard Light feels better across the board but still is far from the best Auto Rifle that you could be using in your energy slot.  That said the it is still a really interesting weapon because of its ability to shoot around corners and the fact that it lacks damage fall off.  That is however a deceptive thing to say given the way Hard Light works in that it fires a volley of projectiles that go bouncing around as they hit surfaces, meaning you can in theory “curve the bullet” and fire around corners.  While the gun doesn’t have damage fall off there is absolutely accuracy falloff the further from your target you get because you increase the likelihood that it will encounter something else and cause the trajectory of the original round to shift.  All of this is still in the fun and interesting but not amazing category until you bring into play another intrinsic ability of the weapon, and that is to shift the elemental damage type by swapping around your perks.  This isn’t near as handy as the playstation exclusive sniper rifle that has a keybind allowing you to do it on the fly… but it does serve as an excellent prism/match game weapon that can shift to whatever element you happen to be lacking.  If you do not already have this it is well worth the pick up and I know I personally am definitely going to be grabbing this for the PC since I’ve yet to get it to drop otherwise.

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The Synthoceps are another fun and interesting item, but maybe not best in slot at anything.  If you are a Titan you probably like punching things…  and these gauntlets improve the way you punch things.  The exotic perk Biotic Enhancements increases your melee range and improves melee damage when surrounded.  That last bit can be a slight improvement if you only have a few targets around you to a massive improvement when you are fighting packs of things like thralls.  If you combine this with something like the striker melee build…  you can do a number of very interesting things and cause massive amounts of damage as a melee titan.  Similarly this would benefit the sentinel spec path that causes you to regain health on melee kill, but not nearly as much given that spec cannot really chain melee abilities in the same fashion as Striker.  This is an item that I had yet to get so I am definitely picking it up for the unlock, and more than likely going to try out a striker melee build around it.

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Do you really still want to punch all the things even as a Warlock?  Karnstein Armlets are a set of exotic gloves that are effectively all about punching things as a warlock.  They have a built in version of the devour perk, though as I understand it significantly weaker that causes you to gain health recovery on melee attacks.  Note that it says attacks and not kills so in theory just punching things are going to help slowly regenerate your health.  While doing this punch happy life you are also slowly increasing the regeneration of your melee, grenade and class ability.  I am absolutely certain there is a build out there that could make the most of this… and I feel like double dipping with devour is maybe a great option.  Sometimes you look an an item and think to yourself…  I can build something around this and that is definitely the case with these gauntlets.  If nothing else I wanted to pick them up simply because I did not have the unlock in my collection.

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The Lucky Raspberry is a returning item from Destiny 1 that more or less kept the same ability.  Probability Matrix the exotic perk causes your arc bolt grenades to chain significantly further than in their default state.  Additionally dealing damage with your arc grenade has a chance of recharging your grenade.  This means that if you drop your arc grenades in a large pack of mobs, it is extremely likely you are going to get a proc and return your full grenade charge.  This makes this item a beast for doing something like the Nightfall on the weeks where every kill counts towards gaining back time on the clock because you can wait until arc burn and become a mad bomber dropping grenades everywhere.  The rest of the time however you are probably not going to see enough mobs tightly clumped to really make this worth using.  Occasionally in the team shot environment of the crucible you can drop one and take out an entire team…  but that is going to be the exception rather than the rule.  Still a very interesting chest to pick up and at least add it to your collection.

Destiny 1

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Xur had a similarly interesting day in Destiny 1 as he brought a couple of my favorite items.  Firstly the Armamentarium is the chest piece that I want back for my Titan more than anything because it simply gives you a second grenade charge.  Right now I am so enamored with striker titan largely because it is the only spec I can have this functionality back.  Similarly once I found the Bones of Eao I never looked back because it started enabling me to quad jump as a Hunter, a piece of utility that beat out every other possible exotic that I might want in that slot.  The Warlock helm is largely forgettable because it is their version of the Alpha Lupi chest that Hunters and Titans have…  but Xur did bring the Universal Remote which is the very odd primary slot shotgun.  Lots of stuff worth picking up if you don’t already have them… and I would say for Titan and Hunter these are absolute must haves.  Enough so that I am legitimately considering grinding out the strange coins so I have them on my Xbox One account.  Here is the full run down of what he is selling.

  • Legacy Chest Engram – 29 Strange Coins
  • The Armamentarium – Titan Chest – 13 Strange Coins
  • Bones of Eao – Hunter Boots – 13 Strange Coins
  • Light Beyond Nemesis – Warlock Helm – 13 Strange Coins
  • Universal Remote – Primary Shotgun – 17 Strange Coins
  • Dragon’s Breath and Tigershark Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust
  • Nemesis Star and Meteorite Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust