April 2018 - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

SOS Failures

April 24, 2018 by Belghast

The thing about SOS Roulette is that sometimes you win big… other times you fail miserably. Last night was more in the fail miserably column as I decided to attempt to farm some of the gems I need to create the full Kulve Taroth set of gear. That means I will need a Kulve Taroth Gem, a Val Hazaak Gem, a Xeno’jiiva Gem and a Nergigante Gem. As a result I spent most of the night joining in on Nergi and Hazaak fights without much luck. The truth is these are not the best things to queue into because the elder dragons represent a steep climb in difficulty. More often than not last night we carted out of the fight with someone taking a faint and finishing things out without getting any measurable loot.

The night did however make me realize how desperately I need one more Miasma gem so I can become immune to Effluvial build up and just wreck that fight without much issue. The truth is Hazaak is way easier than I remembered him being, which seems to be a common theme I am feeling as I go back and redo these fights. The truth is I have mostly been in a mindset of fighting tempered or similar things over the last few weeks and as a result all of those high rank “tough” fights feel a lot easier as a result. The truth is I should just be doing these solo where I can predict what is going to happen better…. but that just always feels so lonely. I admit most of the time I do the SOS Roulette thing just because it feels like I am doing things with people… without the need for actual human interaction. I realize I am not normal.

I did manage to get in a really good run of Kulve Taroth where I walked away with two decent items that represent weapons I had not really gotten before. First up is the Taroth “Blitz” Erupter which appears to be pattered off of the Deviljho Light Bowgun… and I have no clue at all if it is even a reasonable weapon but it does give me at least a Rank 7 one to play with. Next up you have the above image of the Taroth Buster “Water” which lets me start playing around with Gunlance, another weapon I have not so much as even equipped. I think more than anything that is what this event represents for me… a way to get a bunch of decent versions of weapons to start playing with and testing out. Sure I could have crafted likely better versions of all of these things… but I feel like I sorta need to know what types of weapons I like before I sink a lot of resources into them.

I think tonight I might start getting used to soloing things again, either that or see what Ashgar is up to because I know he needs Nergi parts as well. I need to get serious about trying to farm that last Kulve gem because when the event is over my opportunity closes there. Shiana has somehow managed to get four of the gems already so has enough to craft both the alpha and beta sets. For me… I am mostly just focused on crafting a single set and unfortunately I only have one gold ticket waiting in the wings to fill out whatever gem I have the hardest time getting. I think I blew my luck the other night when I managed to carve a Wyvern Gem and then get two more from the end of mission loot window…. for a total of three that night.

Mixed Gaming Weekend

April 23, 2018 by Belghast

Everquest is a game known in part for it’s interesting factions and your ability to not only completely wreck them… but in some cases improve ones that started out bad in the first place. My High Elf Ranger for example was friendly with Paineel, and my friend had an Iksar Monk that was completely at home in Rivervale thanks to hours and hours of clearing Runnyeye. The factions have interesting names too like “HighHold Citizens” or the “Deepwater Knights” and are fairly granular in that you might be perfectly fine in most of a zone but one specific area will attack you on sight because you wrecked your faction. I had a weird dream last night that there was a law firm that acted as a mediator to help you repair your damaged factions. I don’t remember exactly I was there or what faction it was that I had offended, but I remember being across a giant board room from some NPCs that just kept chanting “You’ve ruined your own lands, you’ll not ruin mine!”. I eventually was able to appease them slightly with an assortment of bear pelts, slashed deathfist belts and bone chips… which only makes sense in Everquest.

The primary thing that I played this weekend was our April AggroChat game of the month… Night in the Woods. I don’t want to talk too much about this other than it being really good and I highly suggest playing it yourself. That said the suggestion is with a tiny bit of reservation because I found it a deeply emotional experience. There are things in the game that pattern my own choices in life and others that were the road not taken. I am mostly saving the ammunition for the podcast next week, but I have some feels about this game and its characters and small town life in general.

I also played a bit of Defiance 2050 this weekend… and I have to say I am deeply confused by this title. Maybe I completely misunderstood what this game was supposed to be. I had gotten the impression that it would be a game where a bunch of time had passed since the original game and that the world had drastically changed. So as a result I was deeply confused when I followed a sequence of events in Mount Tam that if I am not completely mistaken are pretty much exactly what happens in the base game. So I am not exactly sure what is up with this one, because it seems like the same game with no changes that I could see? I did not play for terribly long but was extremely confused the entire time because I kept expecting something new. Yes I realized that I just used confused three times in rapid succession… but I am trying to drive that emotion home here.

The other bits of my weekend that I did not specifically call out here were spent in Monster Hunter World working on the weekly objectives… namely hunting Black Diablos and doing 9 Star missions. Here you can see me hanging out with T’Challa who I did not realize was into Monster Hunter World… after taking down Xeno’jiiva. Things I learned this weekend… my fear of Diablos is largely unwarranted because waiting this late into the game to really start farming it… means it is way easier than my memory would tell me. The last time I had fought a Diablos was the one needed to clear the main story step. I have avoided these like the plague because that fight… was pure hell at the time. Now I seem to be able to take them down pretty easily and I did four of the weekly event quest involving taking down both a normal Diablos and a Black Diablos. As far as the 9 Star quests… I SOS Rouletted them which involved two Xeno’jiiva fights, a double tempered bazel fight, and a tempered rathalos/hard tobi fight.

I did also spend a few attempts on Kulve Taroth and figured out that you can filter your session by folks doing the encounter. I’ve been kicked a few times… the first because I am guessing they wanted a fixed party comp and I snagged the last slot they were saving for someone else. The group disbanded and was locked when it was reposted. The other time I am guessing that it was for simply being a longsword player because that seems to be the weapon type that everyone bags on as this games “Dragoon”. I mean it isn’t wrong… I take a lot of damage and do plenty of stupid things but more often than not I also break big parts off things with spirit helm breaker. Other than that I wound up getting into a few really good and chill groups and got more weapons… sadly no more oranges but I did get a couple of decent purples. I have this interesting collection of death shots and in this one I think I died to a magma splash, either that or someone else fainted and this was my final action shot. I have a few really good ones from my many attempts at Nergigante as well because the scene at the end of the encounter always seems really interesting to me… so more often than not I take a quick snap. All in all it was a pretty good weekend and I am really looking forward to next weeks AggroChat so I can get all of these thoughts related to Night in the Woods out of my head.

Gold Dust Woman

April 20, 2018 by Belghast

Right now in Monster Hunter World there is a brand new type of event happening called a Siege. The idea is that an entire 18 player session is working towards one objective… taking down a Zorah Magdaros style massive elder dragon. In order to start the process you need to find a gold pile somewhere out in the wilds. By default this should be somewhere near the start of any of the outdoor zones. In talking to the AggroChat crew last night I was told to do an investigation… which absolutely worked… but I believe that Tam originally intended to tell me to do an Expedition which according to Ash also works. The pile will be very obvious and very out of place and by looting it you will then have a quest as soon as you zone into Astera. From there the quest takes place in the Gathering Hub and will show up as a unique quest type called Siege at the bottom of the quest givers list.

From there you join a party in progress or start your own. There is no SOS Roulette for this so my standard practice of joining a clan session to hang out only really works if you are all focused on doing the event. The AggroChat crew apparently did this with only four players on Wednesday night when it opened, but I largely just kept joining public sessions until I found one with players actively doing the quest. For the most part every instance I joined had two active groups so a total of eight players chipping away at the progress meter for the event. Functionally all groups are working in their own separate instances with progress made each time you meet a milestone… like knocking off a specific part of the body.

There are functionally four phases that I am aware of in the fight. In the first phase Kulve Taroth moves around the zone completely oblivious to the players allowing you to hit it with canon fire perched atop cliffs much like the Zorah Magdaros fight. During the second phase she is still covered in the gold plating but begins to take notice of your actions and will actively but very slowly attack you. During the forth phase she enters a room where there are some magma eruptions that heat the gold up making her go significantly faster as well as allowing for better damage to knock parts off. During the final phase she goes into a room where magma is dripping down from the ceiling and all of her armor is knocked off making her extremely fast and very Nergigante like in damage when she hits you.

Ultimately the goal is to survive until one of two things happens… either she gets bored and wanders off “leaving the area” which counts as success weirdly enough. The other option is that through the actions of all teams that her horns are broken… which allows the team that broke them the ability to carve them for all sorts of tasty loot. The other thing that makes this fight extremely interesting is that she is constantly dropping parts on the ground so you have to juggle fighting with looting on a regular basis. Additionally there is a tribe Gajalaka that will constantly be getting in the way, throwing things at you, knocking you down… so you will be dealing with this in additional to avoiding very wide sweeping attacks. You can take them out however and the ones with gold shielding on their back drop Kulve Taroth bits… and the others have a reasonable chance to do the same.

This is a massive time sink, given that it often takes a full instance two or three attempts to take down the dragon. What makes it worth it however is the interesting semi-randomized loot drops that introduce the relic system that has existed in other games. While you are in the fight picking up drops, there is a chance that you can get a relic weapon. These then are appraised at the quest giver after you have exited the instance in a fashion similar to decorations. Last night I ran three complete Kulve Taroth fights and walked away at the end of the night with 22 blue rank 6 weapons, 5 purple rank 7 weapons and 3 orange rank 8 weapons. The above screenshot is an amalgam of all of the best items that I got from the fights. Apparently that Insect Glaive is good enough to make Tam our resident Glaive master general drool a bit over it.

What I am more interested in however is the fact that this is giving me an infusion of weapons that I might have not actually tried on my own. The truth is I have played with a very small subset of weapons in the game and there are others like lance that I have wanted to try… but had no clue which one to work towards. Last night I got myself a reasonable sleep lance to start taking down things like everyone’s favorite target dummy… Great Jagras. More than this, it is giving me a smattering of different elemental damage types which gives me more leverage when we start looking at other fights in the game. The other big thing I am working towards is being able to craft a full set of the Kulve armor because it too is really nice… but will involve a lot of elder dragon farming since each piece requires a gem.

Lastly there is both new layered armor and palico gear associated with this quest and I am wearing two pieces of the set… shoulders and waist in the above screenshot. Kenzie my palico is wearing the full set of her gear. This is crafted by combining Bushi Tickets that drop upon turning in the Kulve Taroth quest when your instance had defeated it and combining them with a bunch of varied monster parts. I am working towards the Bushi Homare set which involves a bunch of elder dragon bits… whereas the Bushi Sabi set has a broken down battle worn appearance and requires a bunch of parts from alternate high rank mobs like Black Diablos. All in all I love the feel of this event because it is essentially Monster Hunter World doing a raid. I’ve been extremely impressed with the sort of things they are continuing to patch into this game giving us reasons to keep coming back and interacting with content. The event itself runs for a few weeks and I can already tell I will be spending at least some time each night farming Kulve Taroth for interesting weapon options.

Unintended Night

April 19, 2018 by Belghast

What I was supposed to be playing last night is World of Warcraft as Wednesday is our normal mythical nonsense night. Unfortunately we were down two people already and I myself wasn’t really in the mood to do it either. I’ve been dealing with some stuff and yesterday was a bit of a bad mental health day. When those situations happen I tend to turtle up somewhere quiet and hang out by myself until whatever it is has passed. World of Warcraft is such an inherently social game that even the act of logging in ends up prompting a bunch of people to poke me and say hello… and it feels bad to ignore them when I need to ignore them.

Sure there is now “Appear Offline” mode but even then that is not a perfect scenario. For me at least there are a handful of people that I am generally okay with interacting with, because they know the drill. They understand deeply because they go through their own periods of turtle time, and as a result there is no need to attempt to keep up appearances as it were. However if you are in Offline mode and you reach out to one of those people who are on the closest rings of your monkeysphere… they cannot respond. You will be able to send them messages all day long but they will always get the offline message when attempting to respond back to you. As a result when I am feeling like this I just avoid WoW like the plague because it isn’t worth the hassle.

What I wanted to be doing was to sit on the couch and play some Everquest while watching some more Mighty Boosh streamed through the television. Unfortunately they seem to have had a rather traumatic maintenance yesterday. The servers went down at 5:00 am EDT on the 18th and did not come back apparently until 2:30 am EDT on the 19th. I have no clue at all what was going on… but I kept trying to fire up the launcher and getting the maintenance message. I have been enjoying myself a shocking amount in Everquest, but I realize that I am riding the drug that is nostalgia. I am not sure how long that drug will last but for the moment I am riding its high.

What I did instead was play a lot of MTG Arena as I got it set up on my laptop. Yesterday Scopique wrote an interesting response to my post about Arena… or at least one that mentioned it because it wasn’t exactly a direct response. The funny thing is I wouldn’t necessarily call myself much of a competitive gamer. I traditionally shy away from player versus player situations, but games like MTG Arena or the Crucible in Destiny don’t seem to bother me that much and I am not entirely certain why. I stumbled across a post from Tobold who very much did not enjoy his time with Arena, but for the moment I don’t mind at all that it is largely just a stripped down 1v1 client. I think ultimately if you are going into Arena expecting Duels of the Planeswalkers or MTG Duels either one… you are going to be sorely disappointed.

Arena is simply a Magic the Gathering Online that isn’t horrible. Sure MTGO is serviceable but nothing about it is really intuitive and it feels like you are jumping through a lot of hoops to make anything work. MTGO was absolutely less cludgy than the days of trying to arrange a game on IRC and then getting both parties to fire up and connect to each other through the Apprentice application. However card gaming on a PC has changed drastically since then and Hearthstone more or less has led that charge. Arena is that Hearthstone-esc interface for the far more seasons and complicated game of Magic the Gathering, and the thing is… it works amazingly well.

There have been a few times I have been bit by the game trying to move forward without me… but in the grand scheme of things it seems to do 99.9% of the right things at the right time. The other moments don’t bother me too much because I am not placing a lot of my personal ego into whether or not I am winning. I am simply enjoying playing cards and occasionally I do really well. I do feel like Tobold’s comment of not feeling like he could be competitive with the decks presented was a bit nonsense given that I have been entirely playing the stock Golgari Exploration deck. I felt like I was able to pick it up and start winning matches almost immediately… and sure as my rank has risen I am winning less matches but even that doesn’t bother me much. I am still winning more than enough to complete daily quests getting me packs and gold… to buy more packs. All in all I feel like Arena is going to shape up to be a very solid version of Magic the Gathering Online… but we need to stop the comparisons there for our own sanity.