MMORPG Archives - Page 110 of 365 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Captain K

November 12, 2018 by Belghast

I am all over the map right now when it comes to video games. I am in this weird holding pattern where I am playing a ton of different games, but none of them for terribly long in a single sitting. I also managed to garbage out my left pinky this weekend which is making typing surprisingly painful. Right now my average night involves at least one Kulve Taroth match in Monster Hunter World, and then flipping over Destiny 2 to try and score another powerful/prime engram for the evening. From there I bounce all over the place… lately that has included some time spent in The Division which actually lead me to hit the level cap of 30 and start unlocking end game activities. One of the things that I loved about this game was just how detailed its world was, in that it felt like a real place that I was going to visit. Yes I realize it was patterned off of New York… but I have supposedly visited New York in a bunch of different games and this was the first time it really felt like an actual place. The game looks gorgeous at 4k… but then again so far MOST games look gorgeous at 4k.

I poked my head into Neverwinter as well this weekend and finally claimed my Purple Owlbear mount from Twitch. This game has a lot of positive things going on, but it is an inventory management nightmare… which ultimately prompted my little burst of posts on twitter. Inventory Management is just not something that is fun… and out of the tons of favorites I only got one person who chimed in stating that they actually like cleaning their inventory. There are games where having a nonsense inventory is enough to make me log right back out, and many times… I feel this way about Neverwinter. Side note another game that I often feel this way about is Everquest II because so much of what ends up dropping is not terribly useful, and when you can have bags that are getting close to 100 slots each… you can carry around a lot of junk. I think the theory is that people get excited when they see loot… but that excitement quickly passes when you realize that 99.9% of the stuff that drops is useless crap.

Which leads me to Path of Exile… a game where the common practice is to install a loot filter so you just don’t see the useless shit you shouldn’t be looting in the first place. I am using the NeverSink filter, largely because it seemed to be the one that was most widely recommended. I will say however… it does greatly improve the experience… even though that I still feel like inventory space is a nightmare in this game. I spent way more time this weekend playing POE than I expected, and I will say that the game has gotten significantly more enjoyable once I crossed the line into Act II. Unfortunately I didn’t take many screenshots this weekend… especially now that I apparently unleashed an ancient evil and blotted out the sun. POE comes in both Grim and Dark flavors… but apparently I shifted into Grim Dark mode. The other issue that I have with POE is that my character looks stupid… which I realize is fixable if I drop a bunch of money on the cosmetic shop. Right now I am wearing a leather diaper, plate booties, a metal old-timey football helmet… while wielding a camp axe and a cabinet door for a shield. This is not a good look on anyone… and no matter how much gear I swap out I seemingly cannot get rid of the diaper.

Lastly I am still spending quite a bit of time before falling asleep each night playing various mobile games and one of the ones that I am finding myself enjoying in spite of it not making any sense… is Lineage II Revolution. During the podcast I talked a bit about this and apparently I completely missed the whole cookie clicker like games thing. Games that play themselves are apparently a genre… and this one is weirdly enjoyable. What I found odd though is once I hooked up ADB to play the game mirrored on PC from my phone… it had built in support for WASD so in theory… this game was designed for a PC interface? I am legitimately wondering about trying this through an emulator like Memu and mapping it in a fashion to allow for keyboard and mouse play. At the moment you can do that… but it means you are clicking buttons on the screen instead of having things bound to mouse buttons/keys. It is weirdly entertaining… but it isn’t like I can actually suggest it as a “good” game. It is pretty and some stuff is happening on screen but I am largely just letting it play itself since mobile controls are garbage. Maybe that is the way these games are getting around that fact… letting the game navigate for you and then just hit attacks periodically in a sort of on rails shooter type experience.

Kulve Farming

November 7, 2018 by Belghast

This morning we return you to your regularly scheduled posts, instead of whatever yesterday’s post happened to be. I started typing in Google Docs… and it just sort of kept going on and on. Yesterday was of course election day, and a lot of my staging a post ahead of time was due to the fact that I was trying to get in and out of the polls in the morning quickly. As far as gaming goes I am still very much all over the place. Right now as it stands Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World tend to be the staples that I play at least some of every single night. Over in Monster Hunter this largely involves getting into a Kulve Taroth group and trying to farm weapons and tickets for the layered armor set. At this point I still have a ton of pieces left to collect but this is way more of a goal for me than collecting gear, given that I already have enough glimstones for a full set of crafted gear. I am simply missing the various elder dragon gems needed to craft most of the pieces. That however can be done after the event.

As far as weapons go… I have been nowhere near as lucky as I was on the Playstation 4 version. I have literal pages of blue weapons which are fine… and can provide a specific element if I need one. However the above image shows off some of the weapons I thought were generally worth keeping around for the long haul. Probably the weapon that interests me the most right now is the Taroth Blaze “Numb” because it has nonsense Affinity, plus a Defense bonus… plus 450 Paralysis… and from the look of it it might have some white sharpness if I equip handicraft items. The other item that I am probably going to wind up using is the Taroth Sword “Mire” just because there are occasionally fights where decent water elemental damage are useful. I think the Sleep daggers might be useful to play with given how fast you can build up elements with that weapon type. The Water damage Lance is decent, especially with the level three gem on it. One positive is it does give me a Charge blade to play with… which is not a weapon type I have crafted any or messed with on the PC.

Another game that I have been poking my head into is The Division, largely because I wanted to see what it looked like on the new graphics card. However I noticed that I am really damned close to level 30 which I believe is the level cap. I really want to see what the game becomes when I finally reach that plateau and somewhere along the line I picked up a handful of set pieces ready to be equipped at that level. For now I am casually roaming around and killing stuff out in the world, and I find that relaxing and enjoyable. Previously I was focused on TRYING to level… and getting frustrated that it was going so slowly. Now I am just sort of running amok in the town and not paying attention to anything past that. It seems to be working and I have been spending a few hours here and there on it.

With the Diablo kerfuffle, I have also been exploring some other ARPGs just in case Diablo 4 really isn’t in the cards… or at least to have options to tide me over until it releases in a few years. The most obvious game directly competing with the Diablo franchise is Path of Exile, but I have never really been able to get into it. Coming back however it does feel considerably better, apart from the fact that you are given showers of loot… most of it not useful… and nowhere near enough inventory space to ferry it back to town. As such the loot itself feels a little frustrating, as does combat at time since it seems to vacillate back and forth between “nothing is attacking me” and “an entire screen of things is overwhelming me”. Right now however the biggest problem with the game… happens to be its community. In trying to settle in I started looking up the answers to a handful of questions and for the most part the community answer seems to be some derivation of “go back to diablo noob”. That is not helpful, nor is it making people want to stick around for very long. It has really interesting mechanics but a much slower pace, which can be both positive and negative. The lack of a forward walk button without giving up an ability slot… is also a little frustrating.

The game that appears to be more my speed when it comes to methadone for Diablo 4… is Torchlight II which admittedly is an aging game at this point. However it is also serving to prepare me for Torchlight Frontiers which looks extremely interesting and fun. Hey Perfect World folks… if any of you happen to be reading my blog… hook me up with a key? I love the setting of Torchlight, for example last night I was going through this awesome clockwork dungeon and since I play an engineer it felt really cool to be busting up mechs with a giant hammer. This also has the shower you with loot, most of it useless problem… but at the very least you can keep sending your pet back to town to sell it. This is another high point for this game is it allows me to run around with a Ferret friend. Super glad I installed it and definitely enjoying poking around in it again… even though I am largely confused as to where I left off in the story the last time I was playing.

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.

Glutton Axe

October 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and spent a good deal of it playing Monster Hunter World. I allowed myself to get distracted by seeking out a weapon that was shockingly easy to craft. Essentially I had been trying to determine which of the switch axes I would go after first. The clear obvious choice is the Diablos one… the problem there is I really don’t want to go right back to grinding Diablos nonstop to get the parts I would need for it… which are again are Majestic and Black Spiral Horns. Instead I decided to set my sights considerably lower, on something I could probably farm up in my sleep.

The Jagras line doesn’t exactly have a ton of amazing weapons, but in the switch axe department it is a pretty reasonable option. Its low point is it is only a Rank 6 weapon, but based on its stats it should probably be Rank 7? It has hidden elemental sleep, and when transformed into sword mode has exhaust damage. If I remember correct that means that when hitting the head the exhaust damage can KO the monster. All that it really required me to do was kill a nonsensical number of Great Jagras… since that isn’t exactly a monster I hunt on the regular. However with minimal farming I managed to get the switch axe crafted and play around a bit with it. It will at least hold me over until something awesome drops from Kulve Taroth at some point.

The other mission is still very much active however, and I did kill several Rathian yesterday, enough to I believe get all of the Spikes that I needed. Now I just have to wait for a Rathian Ruby to drop before crafting that final Gunlance. As Ashgar posted yesterday, I do probably intend to make the Zorah Magdaros one as well, since I have already crafted the first version of it. I believe I just need another Zorah Gem before being able to craft the Rank 8 version. That would give me Long 4 and Normal 4 to play with and get used to both. Then again I hope I get a decent Wide 4 weapon to drop during Kulve Taroth. I fully expect to be farming the hell out of that event when it finally goes live. I think hammer is going to be a much better option to breaking things than Longsword was on the console.