April 2018 - Page 3 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

MTG Arena Beta

April 18, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was of course the ninth anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog… and Wizards of the Coast got me a present. Roughly halfway through the day I checked my mail and noticed that I got an email from WotC inviting me to the closed beta of Arena… their attempt at making a modern Magic the Gathering client. The truth is Hearthstone has been eating their lunch for several years now due to its extreme accessibility. It also does the dual whammy of giving both a nostalgia buzz for magic the gathering and collectible card games in general… while delivering a fatal blow of world of warcraft nostalgia at the same time. It’s a good game… and honestly lately I have been playing quite a bit of the warrior rush deck, but even that said… it is no Magic the Gathering. There is just something about this game that causes me to follow the community and buy cards… even though I don’t get to play that often.

The biggest problem for me is that I don’t really have a LGS or Local Gaming Store to be spending my time at. I live out in the burbs and the closest thing to me is on the opposite end of Tulsa from where I live… making it not exactly convenient to go to in the evenings and play cards. Where a game like Hearthstone or Arena comes in is it allows me to get that fix… without the need to actually get hands on other players. That said I am working on fostering a little community at work for lunch time gaming and am building up some balanced decks to sort of make an easy drop in and play environment. All of that said… it is just so much easier to get online at the end of a day and get my gaming fix rather than trying to coordinate with other human beings.

When you start up the Arena client you are given a handful of packs to start crafting your own decks with. This assortment essentially encompassed the last two blocks of play… Rivals of Ixalan, Ixalan, Hour of Devastation and Amonkhet. I got a handful of decent cards and could have probably crafted together a serviceable deck from them. I personally like these two blocks of play theme wise and together they give quite a bit of reasonable synergy. I believe the plan going forward is to largely limit Arena to standard sets by default… which seems a little if that were the case why Kaladesh and Aether Revolt are not included. It was my understanding that when the Kaladesh block cycles out the Amonkhet block will as well in Q4 2018. Quite frankly I struggle keeping these things in my head as to which sets are in and which sets are out because it doesn’t seem anywhere near as clear as it used to be. I apparently am not the only person to think this because there is literally a website called What is In Standard.

One thing that is going to be a challenge to get used to is that the pack structure is vastly different from live paper magic. When you open a pack you get a grand total of 8 cards instead of 15 cards… which I hope means they are going to charge a reduced price for the packs when the whole buying packs for money thing is eventually introduced. You get a single rare/mythic, two uncommons, and five commons. If you already have more than a play set of a card they replace it instead with a token as you can see underneath Samut in the above picture. These can then be spent to fill out missing holes in your collection trading a rare for a rare or a mythic for a mythic. At first I could not understand why I kept getting them since at this point in my head… I had only opened a handful of packs.

Also in your collection are a wide variety of deck archetypes built and ready to go. Personally I have been shifting back and forth between Golgari Exploration for which Green/Black has always been my preferred color set, and Legion of Dusk which similarly is heavy black and vampire themed enough to ignore the fact that I am using white mana. I love the exploration mechanic and when it compounds with cards that do stuff when any card explores. This means you can get some really big critters on the board that escalate rapidly. Ultimately in a perfect situation I want a foul orchard out on turn one, Wildgrowth Walker on turn two, and then some combination of creatures that explore like Seeker’s Squire or Ixalli’s Diviner to pump up the Walker and start my assault proper. What that works it is beautiful… when it doesn’t there seem to be enough alternate paths to victory to hang in for a very long time.

For the most part the client itself plays exactly like you would expect a magic client to play. It does a lot of things for you, like if you have no plays it goes ahead and skips to the next turn which is likely going to throw you off at first. There is a way to flip the client into a more granular level having you verify each and every trigger that happens… which would be important for more technical decks. I do feel like the timeout is maybe a little bit long given how many phases you have to get through… there have been times that matches have taken forever because the other player was just slow at evaluating their options… or potentially just doing something else at the same time. Unlike the Duels of the Planeswalkers clients I never felt like it was rushing me through things and causing me to lose card play opportunities. It seems to have some intelligence built into the client and stalls anytime it thinks you might have a play option, and so far it has not missed a time when I needed to play a card in response to something.

After each victory you are awarded a single random card, and there are various quests that you can be working on while playing matches. For example you can see in the bar that I am at 8 wins of 10 needed for my next pack of Rivals of Ixalan. The pack quests seem to come at 5 victories, 10 victories and 15 victories… and not sure if that trend continues on every 5 victories or if you are limited to 3 packs per week. Similarly there are quests that I had already completed like Kill 13 of your opponents creatures or cast 13 white or blue spells, each of those rewarding 250 gold. The in game pack purchasing mechanism allows you to buy a pack every 1000 gold, so essentially after doing four of these quests you can get some more cards. I am assuming this gold currency will also eventually be used for drafting which sadly is not in yet… but I believe they have talked about wanting that game play mode exists.

The only real thing you need to know is the fact that I set up my account around 6:30 last night and the next thing I knew… it was 9:30. The game is extremely good and brought back all of the right nostalgia beats for sitting around playing magic the gathering and trying to figure out how to dig yourself out of a card draw hole. There are times when things go extremely well… then there are other times like the above match when things go south really quickly. I just could not get the exploration cards I needed to power up my front line and managed to keep the other player long enough to get a recursive combo on the ground. As a result they manages to gain up 183 life before finally finishing me off in a single round. I could have conceded at any point, but I wanted to see how big they could manage to get their health pool. Even in a horrible loss condition… I was entertained. I look forward to seeing how this product evolves over time and I am likely going to start streaming it on occasion so you can laugh at me as I make obvious mistakes.

Aggronaut Ninth Anniversary

April 17, 2018 by Belghast

These posts are always really weird to sit down and write, because how exactly do you summarize something you have done this long. Back in 2009 when the blog formally started I was helping to lead a raid in World of Warcraft as a Warrior Tank… and quite possibly in the worst job I have ever been in. I didn’t feel needed or respected at work, and this blog… and all of my guild/raid-leaderly duties were essentially my way of dealing with the maelstrom of chaos happening in the workplace. As my work condition has improved my game environment has also changed… and it seems like the more responsibility that I take on in my work and home environments…. the less I actually want in my gaming ones. Liore and I used to joke about starting and old folks home for old raid leaders, but there are times that it feels like I am absolutely a candidate. These days I feel like I almost actively avoid the concept of raiding in the first place.

I realize this is probably an odd start to an anniversary post, but after going back and crawling through the last year of blog posts… I am realizing that this is the first year when I did not have some form of active raid going on. Sure we attempted to get something started in Final Fantasy XIV around the Stormblood launch… and in Destiny 2 but neither of those really stuck that well and developed into a proper regular raid night. Instead I have largely opted for solo play on a broader scale this year than I have in the past. June saw the advent of the Robosquid Armada… something we are loosely continuing with our Mythical Nonsense nights… but that represents probably the most serious content that I attempted in this past year. I am not sure if this is sign that I have changed in what I am wanting out of games… or if this was just a situation where no one actually wanted wear that raid leader hat permanently.

In the past year I also experienced a work transition, but it was one of those things that I largely just eased into. For years I have been the unofficial leader of the development team at work, starting with a sort of “team lead” title that didn’t actually exist but very much was the role of assigning projects and figuring out our workload. Around the beginning of this past year I was given the formal title of Supervisor… and then last December my actual manager retired creating a vacancy that I moved into. Now I managed not only the development team, but also data analysis and gis… giving me fifteen other lives to watch after on a daily basis. In many ways it sort of feels like going back to raid leadership… but this time in the real world where I am sorta tanking for these people by dealing with the nonsense and meetings that are required to get forward movement. Guild and Raid Leadership is not exactly one of those things that I would put on a resume… but I will say that the experience does completely equate.

On the home front we are still in the same location we have been since 1999 and we experienced no major upheavals in the occupancy of our home. We still have three cats: Allie, Kenzie and Mollie and one ferret: Shiloh. There was a period of a few weeks when we thought a dog had adopted us… but luckily we found its home because we are just not really dog people. Mollie is still skittish as hell, but has reached a point where she is my buddy instead of running from me whenever I entered the room. She more or less was found as a kitten and grew up in a dog shelter for the first part of her life and wound up scarred from the experience. Now she sorta follows me through the house as I do things… letting me know she wants attention at various points along the route. Kenzie is just as crazy as ever and is currently sleeping on the desk beside me. Allie is still doing okay… but she is definitely entering the autumn years of her life and we are just trying to make her as comfortable as we can for as long as we can. Shiloh is a sweetheart and gets lots of attention anytime she is awake… but ferrets sleep an awful lot of the time which means I tend to give her lots of loving before work, when I get home from work, and before I go to bed… because that seems to fit her sleep schedule.

The other day Tobold wrote a post talking about the decline of his own blog, and while I am not trying to do the same… it is noticeable the slow and steady bleed of readers. I think this is far less a case of people simply getting tired of my nonsense and more a case that tastes are changing. Personally I don’t have near the time I used to for keeping up with blog reading. There used to be a morning routine that I had without fail… and now I never know who is going to ambush me on the way to my desk with some hot button issue that needs immediate attention. Looking my analytics, it appears like my readership dropped by about eight percent… which sounds bad but between the 15/16 year and the 16/17 year I lost sixty four percent of my readers. It maybe seems weird to be happy that the bleed has at least been partially bandaged but the truth is… what keeps me doing this on a daily basis is so much more than simple need to see the numbers go up. I have talked about this before… but I think blogging for me is a form of therapy.

I feel like the “death of blogging” as it has been touted so many times is just a shift in tastes. Folks are turning to YouTube for their gaming information whereas they used to bond with a forum or gaming blog in the past. This sucks for those of us who prefer to read their information rather than have to watch a five minute video to get thirty seconds of information. I first started encountering this myself when I would start playing a newer game… and find it completely impossible to find any sort of a blogging community that I should be reading. When I started playing Destiny heavily… I found I had to trade blogging voices like Syp, Rowan, Liore, Syl and Grace for Youtubers like Mesa Sean, My Name is Byf, Holtzmann and Arekkz. As the gaming tastes have shifted so have the communities and maybe you can find a Reddit for a game like Destiny 2, The Division or Monster Hunter World… but you aren’t actually likely to find a proper blog for them. The truth is the era of YouTube might also be coming to a close as a lot of folks are preferring to just interact directly with the personalities they are entangling themselves with direction over Twitch.

The trend seems to be moving towards more and more access to the person making the content, and while I dabble in streaming and have been adopted by the very amazing Moogle’s Pom stream team… it is still very much an ill fitting glove for me. Blogging is about opening yourself up to the world with a comfortable distance from the reader. Sure I sit down each morning and write my thoughts for you… but I am not having to interact with you directly as you read them. Comments exist and so does pinging me over twitter… but there is a layer of separation between what I am doing and what you are doing that makes the experience feel more cozy to me. When I have encountered a reader before in a game or something like that… I never quite know what to do, how to interact with them. The same is true on streams… interacting real-time with people is fine so long as those people already exist in my monkey-sphere of people I am prepared to interact with. When someone new enters the room I never know how quite to do things… that they might also find entertaining.

As far as gaming goes this past year… I did a quick run through of what I seemed to be playing the most for each of the months since the last Anniversary…

April 2017 – Star Wars the Old Republic
May 2017 – World of Warcraft
June 2017 – Final Fantasy XIV
July 2017 – Final Fantasy XIV
August 2017 – Guild Wars 2
September 2017 – Destiny 2 (PS4)
October 2017 – Destiny 2 (PC)
November 2017 – Destiny 2 (PC)
December 2017 – World of Warcraft
January 2018 – World of Warcraft
February 2018 – Monster Hunter World
March 2018 – Monster Hunter World
April 2018 – Project Gorgon

Not shockingly I tend to be extremely MMO-Centric in my gaming habits. I tend to have some primary game that is my central focus at any given time and then a bunch of other games that I am also sorta playing. Weirdly enough I spend so much more time playing an MMO solo… than I ever do actually playing solo story games. I think the core reason behind that is two fold… firstly I don’t like when games end. I find the ending of the game to be the most sad time because it is over. MMOs never end… so I can never need to worry about running out of ways to interact with that world. Secondly I find single player story driven games to be a very lonely experience. Even if I am not interacting with other people… I like knowing they are out there and changing my gameplay in sublte and interesting ways. Just seeing chat scroll by in the background makes me feel like I am part of something bigger than the tiny window into the world I have carved out for myself. In theory streaming single player games can provide a similarly multiplayer experience… but I never know how to handle that. I don’t like reading out all of the text outload… and it feels weird to pause what I am doing to read text as it scrolls by on screen while there are other people “in the room”.

I realize this is a bit of an odd anniversary post but it is what happened to come out of my mind this morning as I sat down to type it up. One thing that I completely have not addressed is the amazing artwork that I have above at the top of this post. That is of course by the very awesome AmmosArt who is more or less the official unofficial artist of all of my en-devours. Since I am a member of the Moogle’s Pom community, I wanted a few streamer moogles to use for decoration elements… and having seen her moogles before I knew it would work out swimmingly. I have not actually used them in the method that I was intending yet… but regardless they are amazing and I thought I would use this opportunity to share them with the world. It’s time for me to wrap this up and head to work, but I wanted to close with one last thing. Rather you are a regular who reads my post religiously, or a random drive by… thanks for nine years of this interesting experiment. I do this each day… because in some way I am having an open dialog with each of you and the fact that you are out there somewhere is very important to that formula.

Boosh and Barroth

April 16, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as gaming goals go. Saturday I largely roamed around aimlessly in Everquest while hanging out with my wife downstairs watching various stuff on the television. Then at some point before the podcast I headed upstairs to see if I could knock out the megaman event. This entails fighting the most laughably small Odogoron you have ever seen… and one that is slightly larger than normal. In truth I am not completely sure it is larger than normal… or if it just seems massive compared to the tiny tiny one you fight first. Ultimately you need to get five tickets to get your full palico armor and I managed to finish mine up in three events… with the last one dropping three event tickets… something I was not sure could actually happen.

After the Podcast Thalen and I wound up hanging out and working on our Ryu costumes, which entails doing a challenge arena where you fight a massive Barroth. This thing is so large that really your only option is to wail away on the legs until it falls over…. then start scoring hits on other parts of the body. This event scores event tickets based on how fast you get the kill… if I am remembering right getting it in less than 5 minutes nets you a gold and three tickets, less than 9 minutes a silver and 2 tickets, and finally finishing at all before the 50 minute timer is up earns you bronze and a single ticket. You need seven tickets in total so we wound up running it four times in a row allowing us to craft the Ryu suit… that in all honesty we will probably never actually wear.

When Thalen and I both got on I created an open chat channel and we both joined the Greysky Armanda clan session, and at some point during our Barroth nonsense our good friend Shiana joined us in both. Thalen and I were talking for a bit about both needing Kirin and what sort of gear we were prepping for the fight. It was around about this point that Shiana offered to help us get some attempts in seeing as he was in the 90s rank wise himself. Granted this is like at 11 pm we are starting this madness… but my desire to kill the stupid unicorn was greater than my desire for sleep. So we continued forth with me wearing my mostly Xeno’jiiva set that nets 40 lightning resist with a veggie platter buff. In truth with multiple people the fight already seemed way easier because I was not having to spend my entire time trying to shed aggro from the lunatic horse.

One by one we each got carted… with me taking the last hit and closing out our first attempt somewhere around the 25 minute mark. On our second attempt we managed to get feline insurance, and in truth only managed to get carted the one time if I am remembering correctly. We had better luck as far as where exactly Kirin decided to fight us, shifting back and forth between two relatively open areas. When we managed to whittle it down to enough hitpoints to make it run back to it’s “nest” we barrel bombed it into oblivion then threw on our thunderproof mantles and proceeded to wale away on it. All the while this was going on… I was still very much on edge… afraid something would go terribly wrong and we would fail the fight once again. So when I saw the above screenshot… crediting a kill for Kirin I was ecstatic… making getting to sleep when I finally crawled into bed a little after midnight a bit harder than normal.

Sunday I spent the day swapping laundry and hanging out upstairs playing Monster Hunter while watching The Mighty Boosh on my second monitor. I am not exactly sure what prompted me, but for some reason I fired up Hulu to see what was available and it suggested to me this show. Now I had watched most of it some time ago when reruns were being played as part of the adult swim block late at night. This was back during my wow raiding days… and many of the sayings from the “Old Gregg” episode became constant quotation fodder during fights… especially “Fuzzy Little Man Peach”. So yesterday I hung out watching the Hulu feed of the episodes while doing random nonsense in Monster Hunter World. It was a day truly well spent.

I’ve been slowly adding weapons to my repertoire and then learning how to use them. It seems extremely bizarre but I have been crafting purple and orange versions of weapons that I have maybe never actually used… because I figure as I learn them I at least have an “end game” version to get used to rather than mess with all of the steps in between. For the moment I have solid versions of Charge Blade, Switch Axe, Great Sword and of course the Longsword of which I have developed quite the collection. One of the weapons that I have kept wanting to try is the Dual Blades which seem really cool when I see someone using them, but for whatever reason I have never actually tried.

I really really like the look of the Sin dual Chain Kama looking weapons, and thanks to farming the Odogoron quest I managed to get not only one but two gems. This allowed me to craft the weapon and the complete set of Alpha Odog gear to go with it. Sure it might seem weird that I have a full set of gear largely because I think its cool looking… but whatever. Now I am setting my sights on getting the Zorah blast lance… before giving that weapon a go. Sure I could just go into the training room… but as I keep being reminded I am the patron saint of bad decisions and that simply would not be my way.

Another project for this weekend was finishing farming the Anjanath claws needed to upgrade my weapon I can’t pronounce into the final form of said weapon I can’t pronounce. I then took the firey axe and shield out on a few test runs having really great luck with it. It could use a few more ranks of handicraft to give me more time in the blue zone, because it takes an awful lot of sharpness loss as you use it… but it also dishes out a lot of damage and is crazy fun to use. I am sure there are probably better options for sword and shield, but I like this one and it at least gives me an end game suitable weapon in that category. All in all it was a pretty great weekend… apart from one incident… but that is a tale for another day.

Everquest For Reasons

April 13, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did some nonsense “for science” or mostly to refresh my mind so that I was no longer talking completely out of my arse about Everquest. Prior to last night the last time I had played was apparently in 2013 if my screenshot archive was to be believed. So not exactly the most up to date information about the game considering it is still receiving updates and tweaks. Prior to starting up… or more correctly as the game downloaded I watched a video from Cohh to sort of re-familiarize myself with the game. This video included a link to Brewall’s Everquest Maps pack… which I then installed to have slightly better guidance than the default options.

The game presented a series of servers… some of which were flagged as preferred… something I am not completely certain what it actually means. However it did get me to end up rolling on Vox instead of one of the classic servers that slowly got joined over the years. This is technically a newer account than the one that I had while playing the original Everquest, but it is the one that I have the vast majority of my EQ2 characters on… so if I am going to sub somewhere it would be here. On my older account however my characters are spread between Veeshan and Xegony… neither of which sounded like an amazing option for starting fresh so I just went with Vox the new standard ruleset server that was being presented in the preferred list.

Originally I created a Gnome Shadowknight… but the fact that I could not change the color of the eyebrows from grey to something else caused me to ultimately delete that character and roll something completely different. This time around I went with a Troll which was a more min-maxery choice given that the latent regeneration has always been a little broken. Essentially there are three races that are large enough to be able to Slam… or essentially shield bash without the requirement of having a shield. So you if you play a Troll, Ogre or Barbarian you can interrupt casting while using a two handed weapon… which always seemed to fit the feel of a Shadowknight better than sword and shield. Yes these are things that I was somehow able to dredge up from the past and summon forth to advise my judgement.

The user interface still makes me deeply frustrated because it is sort of a much worse version of Everquest 2… and I have never thought the EQ2 interface was that brilliant. After about thirty minutes of tweaking I managed to get things moved in a way that didn’t make me quite so frustrated… though still not entirely happy. The hardest part was the mouse but after tweaking both the X and Y sensitivity I managed to get mouse look feeling a bit more normal. The next step was trying to figure out how to get tab targeting to work properly which lead me out onto the forums to sort out which of the keybinds would actually do what I wanted it to do. It turned out that basically I wanted to bind two things to tab… nearest npc and cycle extended targets… which combined sorta give me the style of tab targeting I am used to which is target the nearest thing or cycle through the things I am currently engaged with.

Over the course of the evening things started feeling significantly better as I got adjusted to this window on time. The combat is still largely non-interactive at low levels for a melee character and it was not long before I set up my old “Taunt and Slam” macro so that I could have a single button to train both abilities up with. Originally I had lumped Sense Heading in there but it seems that you maybe no longer need to train that like you did before. Most combat involved me pulling with my single spell Spike of Disease then starting up the auto attack and hitting my single ability button anytime taunt or bash/slam were up. It was not glamorous… but also pretty chill to hang out downstairs while watching television.

Unfortunately as of writing this… I am finding out that they apparently moved the spells so you start to get something new every level instead of not giving Shadowknights much of anything until around level 10. So I just bought Sense the Dead, Locate Corpse, Invisibility vs Undead, Disease Cloud and Siphon Strength which should serve to make combat significantly more interesting. The other thing that makes this entire experience more reasonable is the introduction of mercenaries… so I am running around with I believe a Human Cleric allowing me to do my tanky nonsense almost indefinitely receiving the occasional heal to keep me alive and functional.

All in all it is not a bad experience so I do need to back pedal a bit regarding some of my comments the other day when talking about Project Gorgon. That said I do think the interface for Gorgon is leaps and bounds ahead of this one, and it is probably the single most frustrating part of the experience for me. I feel like I will spend some time soon trying to clean the interface up a bit or seeing if I can hide some of the interface elements to reduce the size of everything. I am linking in a picture from Project Gorgon for reference… as there is just way less stuff on the screen but providing most of the same information that the Everquest screen does. Regardless it was interesting enough for me to get to level 8 and it is highly likely that I will keep leveling for a bit just to see how the experience expands once I leave the newbie cave.