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Week In Gaming 10/25/2015

October 25, 2015 by Belghast

The Sickly Bel

This week was an odd one in that I managed to catch some flu-like chest crud. I felt pretty awful most of last weekend, and then struggled to exist Monday and ended up coming home halfway through Tuesday. I chained Wednesday as well, and found myself in that place where I wanted to play something… but anything seemed to require too much concentration. This was after all the week I had early access to Star Wars Fallen Empire, and I did exactly none of the content. I poked my head in a few times to attempt to play my Sith Sorcerer and failed miserably at it. I have a few comments to make about my experiences, but the majority of my gaming time was spent playing Destiny. Apparently that game is largely muscle memory, and I can play it without having to think too much about it.

SWTOR: Fallen Empire

As I said in the intro, this week was the early launch of Fallen Empire the massively game changing expansion for Star Wars the Old Republic… and I barely touched it. I did pop in enough to get sorted out how some of the new systems work. Namely the way companions now exist as being independent of the abilities they use. This means if you no longer have to deal with companions you cannot stand just because they fill the role you want. As a result I swapped to using Andronikos Revel on my Sorcerer, because he loves it when I shock the shit out of NPCs that are not giving me my way. Similarly I would probably never run with a companion that is not Vette on my Sith Warrior, or always run with Kira Carsen on my Jedi Guardian. There is seriously nothing cooler than running around with Kira and feeling like a Jedi strike force, and having her also be a healer… just icing on the cake. As you can tell this is a super important change for me, and I am damned happy to see it go in.

Other than that the other big change for me is the fact that the NPCs are actually labelled as to what type of quest they give you. For example in the above image you can clearly see that this NPC is going to give you the Belsavis planetary quest. This makes it easy to ignore things like the non-soloable heroic quests or flashpoint quests you are not quite ready for… to keep them from cluttering your logs. The other big thing that I noticed was the way that the level scaling works. It seems like when you land on a planet you are scaled to the maximum level for that area, somewhat like Final Fantasy XIV scales dungeons. This means you can overlevel content… but just barely making it a bit easier if you wait for awhile to do a quest rather than doing it when it is on level. However there is never a point where content ever becomes useless to you, which means you can easily go back and farm early content if you are struggling a bit to progress forward. The loss of 12x class experience however means that pretty much to stay current you are always going to have to do your class quests as well as the main planetary story arc. In any case I think the expansion content is going to be enjoyable… if I ever actually play it.

All-Saints Wake

I don’t have a lot to talk about when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV this week, but I did poke my head back in for a few hours. This week was the release of the All-Saints Wake event that serves as Halloween for the game. As we talked about last night, holidays in Final Fantasy XIV are largely the tale of incompetent villains and in this case it is a repeat appearance of the Impresario the mastermind behind the Continental Circus. Over the years we have learned that this is really a group of voidsent that are trying to cause mayhem each year, and we the player finds new ways to thwart them. As cute as the story line is… the reason why you do holidays in games is to get stuff. This year we get the purple outfit that my character is showing off above, a new Pumpkin Butler minion, and for the first time this year an actual mount. We get to ride around Eorzea on a flying broom… that actually does fly if you have unlocked flight in a given zone. The thing I love about Final Fantasy XIV holiday events is that they are adorable, provide awesome rewards… and end up taking only a few minutes to complete rather than being a grindy mess that brings out the worst in players. If you are subbed you should definitely check it out, because while the quest is more enjoyable if you have done the previous years… it is still fairly easy to follow without that ancestral knowledge.

Devilian

I have some issues with this game, but since I am now in alpha/beta/whatever phase it is and the NDA has dropped I thought I would talk a bit about it this morning. My number one issue is the gender locked classes and the fact that they have very specific styles to them. The Berserker is a guts clone, the Shadow Hunter is a bare chested Bishi-elven alucard like character, the Evoker is spilling out of her dress, and the Cannoneer is a Loli. Out of those options… there is exactly one I can stomach playing as, which is the Berserker. The thing is…. all of these design decisions unfortunately have nothing to do with Trion Worlds which is the company bringing the game to non-Korean markets. As fraught as the classes are… the game is actually rather enjoyable once you get past its slightly odd control scheme. By all looks it is a Diablo clone, but it controls vastly different… and honestly reminds me a bit more of the way skill shots in League of Legends feel. You use your mouse for character facing and then use your number keys to fire off abilities. You can bind an attack to your left mouse button, and I am probably going to do that with my basic attack to make it feel more Diablo-like. What I have seen of the combat is kinda interesting, and the dungeons are really enjoyable. I am just struggling to get past the art direction decisions, because honestly… they make me really sad. This could be a really great game, if it didn’t have gender locked classes and the art design did not seem to be from a thirteen year olds “tee hee hee boobs” mindset. It will be interesting to see if I am still piddling with it by the time the next beta comes around or if I have decided that the game is simply “not for me”.

Destiny

Magical glow of an Exotic Engram… only to be dashed moments later when you find out its a damned helmet.

This week has been almost entirely devoted to Destiny. As I said before this was the game that I could play without having to apply much thought to it. A good chunk of the week was spent working on my Hunter who is now I believe 270ish light level, and all of the way through the TKK content. I cheated a bit and jump started the character to level 25 using the item I got from purchasing the Taken King. I have to say if they want to sell something on the cash shop… I would absolutely buy a second one of these. Going from 25 to 40 was not that bad, but I am just not looking forward to taking my Warlock from 1-25 to get there. This week has also been the resurgence of my appreciation of Auto Rifles. I completely the third Gunsmith faction quest and it ended up giving me an exotic rifle called the Fabian Strategy. This thing is just a blast to use and I love the way it sounds and feels as I rip through mobs. This has also caused me to dust off the auto rifles I had in my vault and I found a few others that I really like, one of which my hunter is currently using.

The other key activity for this week has been running level 36 strikes in an effort to get exotic engrams with three of coins. I found out today that I could be just doing level 20s, but honestly I kinda enjoy the slight effort the 36s provide. They go so much quicker than the heroics, but don’t feel like I am simply steamrolling them in quite the way that the level 20s do. Essentially my pattern has been to run strikes using coins until I get an exotic, then take a break for a bit and do something else. I am also attempting to keep both characters up to date on bounties each day, and my regular farming runs on the dreadnought manage to pay off big time… as I had more than enough Hadium Flakes to get my Hunter his sword almost immediately. The big chore is still trying to increase my light levels, and the most 290 grind is extremely slow. That said it still feels enjoyable because I am seeing a ton of drops in the process. Even though half of the things are going to turn out to be something I cannot use… it still feels good to see drops. Its like the game is giving me hope… even though moments later it is just going to dash them once again when I find out the exotic is another damned helmet.

Legacy Lacking

October 19, 2015 by Belghast

Fine with Failure

I have come to accept the fact that there is no way in hell I am going to manage to finish all of the class story lines before tomorrow, when Knights of the Fallen Empire launches. I allowed myself to get massively distracted by Destiny, and for the most part I am okay with this. Last night I hit the start of Act 3 on my Sith Sorcerer and I should be able to wrap that up tonight if I am lucky. That leaves only the agent to play, and as a friend suggested last night… it might be interesting to see what leveling is like post KotFE. In truth while I am excited for this expansion, I am not just rushing headlong into the content. I still have yet to complete Shadows of Revan on any of my characters, and while my Jedi Guardian is sitting at 57… I have no real desire to rush through that. Honestly at this point I might ding the new level cap before I even set foot into the new chapters content. I want to play, but I am not feeling like I have to rush ahead, since really I am not trying to keep up with anyone. That normally is why I push so hard at the beginning of an expansion, is that I feel like I am obligated to grind my way to the top of the heap so I will be available for tanking as we level. That ended up in a small bit of burnout recently with Heavensward, so with SWTOR since I am now enjoying it again… I want to futz around a bit.

My biggest complaint about this game is shared with party based role-playing games in general. Nothing frustrates me more than anything, when the game forces me to take a specific character on a mission. This happened last night with Talos, and while I like the companion just fine… a healer and a dps/healer grouped together is not exactly the best mix in the world. I had to stop what I was doing in the middle of this mission, go back to the fleet, upgrade my mods and only then was I able to keep myself alive during a section where I am essentially soloing while Talos fiddles with something in a tomb. I tend to get really connected to a specific group of characters, and when the game forces me to mix that up I get frustrated. I am one of those people that plays Dragon Age with the same party every time, and never switches to use any of the others except begrudgingly when the game makes me do it. I like building a small tight knit team and then using everyone else for crew missions. The worst moment in Dragon Age was the bit where you have to split up and use all of your companions… only half of which had anything other than their starting gear. I had to load back in from a previous save and go out of my way to figure out how best to gear them all. It was pretty much the opposite of fun, and that is how I feel in SWTOR when I am forced to use a specific companion pairing for a specific mission.

The Distraction

The reason why I am mostly okay with not hitting my goal is because I have been having a silly amount of fun playing Destiny. Over the weekend I spent some more time working on my Hunter, which I hope to also get to 40 at some point soonish. After playing around a bit on the Warlock, I decided to use my boost to level 25 on the Hunter instead… because Blade Dancer seems like a really fun spec. I also just like the look and feel of the hunter better than the warlock, and it makes me a bit jealous that my Titan doesn’t have a knife to stab things with instead of just punch them. At this point I am level 30, and considering starting the Taken King content proper soonish if for no reason other than to unlock the Dreadnought for patrols. Ultimately I want to be able to get all of my characters up there in level so that I can share the benefit of having multiple near cap characters. A lot of the cooldowns can go faster if you can swap an item back and forth between your characters. The Agonarch runes can gain one charge per day per character, so if you bank the item you can pop on another character and gain another charge… ultimately getting special event access faster.

I am still very much in the slogging phase of the game, and I have been hovering around the 290 mark for over a week now. Ultimately my only way out is to start chain running Heroic Strikes, but I just have not been able to bring myself to do that. I am having fun with the game, and I am afraid pushing that hard is going to ultimately break it for me. When I start to resent the RNG, or resent the other players… I know my fun time with Destiny will be over. So I am sitting in this realm of finding enjoyment in the little moment to moment gameplay and trying to ignore the larger picture almost entirely. There is part of me that would love to see the raid… but a whole other part of me that doesn’t want to take that hit of heroine. I know what I am like when I start chasing raid drops… I approach them with a single minded determination and focus that ultimately leads to me being completely hollow as a result. I obsess over gearing… and grind myself into the ground destroying whatever enjoyment I had for the game in the process. I tried really hard not to do this with Heavensward, and in part it is why I have been taking this break and playing other games in the process. My hope is that by the time we end up going back to Final Fantasy XIV it will feel fresh and enjoyable again with the launch of the 3.1 patch. Similarly though I am trying to keep Destiny and SWTOR as enjoyable as I can for the time being… and it seems like not caring too much about reaching a particular destination is my way for doing that.

Week in Gaming 10/18/2015

October 18, 2015 by Belghast

One Track Mind

This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!

Rift – Primal Urges

This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.

I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.

Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens

Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.

Destiny – Struggling for Exotics

I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.

The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.

Titan Mitsurugi

October 14, 2015 by Belghast

Plans Change

Opening the very disappointing Chest of Yuul

I had every intent last night of coming home and working on Star Wars the Old Republic, but instead I spent almost my entire evening futzing around in Destiny. I did at least manage to get into SWTOR long enough to re-gear my Sith Sorcerer and claim Treek from my collection vault. So in theory I should be ready to go with a new tank for future shenanigans. What happened last night is ultimately what has happened so many nights lately, that I start working on this bounty or that quest and end up spending the entire evening there. Towards the beginning of the night I decided to step foot into my very first heroic strike. I have to say it honestly went pretty smoothly, and I lucked out that I managed to get one that I had at least done on normal mode. The second strike I got however… was not so smooth. It ended with me being the last person remaining in the strike after the other two guardians gave up. I was slowly working my way through the mobs, but quite honestly it was going to take forever… so I also gave up and left. For some reason they were trying to rush ahead and skip mobs that only served to destroy us as a result when several different groups of mobs came tracking us down at once. A few carefully timed supers whittled down the mess but we still had the final area with five ultras up, and I simply did not have enough ammo to make it through all of that by myself.

In my travels last night I ended up picking up a Key of Yuul, and as I have gotten these various chest keys I have made an effort to try and track down the location. This one is a pain in the ass and is located near the Court of Oryx on the Dreadnought. The problem with it is, that you have to use a series of those invisible platforms to get up to the ledge that the chest is on. I suck at jumping puzzles and as a result I was cursing while trying to do it. As always the chest itself was disappointing, only giving me some materials and some court of oryx tokens. I did however manage to get several legendary items from rare engrams. One of which is the above Fusion Rifle, which has a name that is a bit of an inside joke for anyone who has watched the abridged PlayStation 4 reveal video. Panta Rhei is actually a latest generation rendering system… but in the video the joke is made that it is like a Manta Ray with Pants. I have to think that someone created this gun as a nod to that joke. In truth it is pretty fun to use, and is significantly more enjoyable than the fusion rifle I had. I seem to have incredible luck getting legendary items from rare engrams, because it seems like at least once a night one of them yield something nice. Granted a lot of it just ends up being disenchant fodder, but those are still tasty tasty legendary marks right?

Sword Titan

One of the things you have to realize about me… is that I am bad at actually following content in Destiny. Hell it took me until a few weeks ago when we took Carthuun through it to actually do the Dark Below and House of Wolves content. Similarly I have done shit for making progress on any of the dozens of quests I have. Well in truth that isn’t exactly true, but apparently I was simply focusing on the wrong quests. Last night when Carth logged in he helped me get my act together on the sword quest and as a result show me his Hadium Flake farming route. I have to say… I was skeptical at first but in about thirty minutes of running around we gathered up the fifteen flakes I needed to get my sword. I think I may actually be able to eventually farm the amount needed to get get Touch of Malice the Exotic Scout Rifle. The thing I need to sort out is how to find Calcified Fragments, because I have only actually gotten two of them, and the part of the quest that seems insurmountable is that I will need 45 of them. Mostly I think I just need to do some research because there has to be a similar route to find them.

The most exciting thing that dropped last night was during our manic chest farming route, I managed to get rare ship blueprints. Once I turned in back at the tower it ended up giving me the ship above. I still think I like my teal/grey kestrel better, but I figure I will use this for a bit until I get sick of it then swap back. Ships seem to be one of the harder to get of the cosmetic items available, and I guess I can see why since they are basically the thing that you see when you load into a strike with random players. If you have a really cool looking ship, it is bragging rights of sorts. I’ve seen some really badass looking ones, and I have no clue how to get half of them. The thing about Destiny is that I am making really slow progress, but still having a blast. I had a friend last night send me a message to ask if I wanted to do a Nightfall… and I am not even vaguely close to well enough geared for that. Unlike a traditional MMO though I feel zero rush to get geared to do stuff. At some point I need to grab Carthuun and Euron and do a night full of nothing but heroic strikes but I am really hoping to do this over the weekend, when I have a chance to buy some more three of coins. I want exotics, and I want them pretty bad… but not bad enough to grind my face off to get them.