archeage Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

It’s Finally Here!

June 19, 2015 by Belghast

Birthdays are Weird

Having a birthday and being an active member of social media… is a strange thing. Yesterday I was completely overwhelmed by the number of birthday wishes that came flooding through. I tried to respond to all of them and thank each person individually… but I am almost certain I missed a few people in the furious scroll. I have to say how special all of you guys made me feel yesterday, and more importantly how loved. It made an otherwise stressful day seem more manageable. I had taken the day off from work, but also my wife was to be flying in mid day. I talked about this a bit yesterday but she was off grading AP exams again, and we were both concerned that she would get delayed by the weather. Technically this did happen but she was lucky enough to make the connecting flight in Dallas and got home on time. However about the time I picked her up is when the worst of the weather starting hitting. I am not used to this whole gale force winds and pouring rain thing, so I have a whole new appreciation for the folks that are used to riding out tropical storms.

We made it home safely however and eventually changed into dry clothing. We grabbed a whataburger on the way home, and almost immediately after eating my wife was conked out on the sofa snuggling with all three cats. I put Venture Brothers on Hulu and broadcast it to the television via chromecast and continued my leveling in ArcheAge. The more I delve into this game the more it reminds me of older games. I absolutely found a Kithicor Forest last night, and for those who are not familiar with that name… it was a forest in Everquest where during the day relatively harmless and non-aggressive mobs spawned, but at night large amounts of max level undead spawned and roamed. In this case in ArcheAge I happened to find a rice paddy that by day had some crocodiles but nothing major, however when the sun sets, a whole slew of skeletons spawned in. While they were not max level they were however damned near instant spawn making it extremely easy to get overwhelmed. I am still very much enjoying this game and even though Heavensward is happening I still plan on poking my head back in every now and then.

Sleep Won

I had all the intention in the world to get up this morning at 4 am and begin playing Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward as soon as the servers came online. However when it came around to last night, and heading to sleep around 9 pm, I opted that I should just sleep in. Systems are always glitchy when they first come online, and instead I got up around 6:30 and after getting out and getting breakfast started streaming around 7 am. I have to say so far everything has been going pretty smoothly all things considering. I had to fight the login boss about five times, but eventually I got to the character load screen and managed to do the introduction quests that got me into Ishgard and house Fortempts. I have to say the new city is gorgeous, but confusing as hell to navigate. This one has tons of ups and downs and it seems like the quest you need to get to is always on the wrong level of the zone.

With this said it is going to take a significant amount of time before I can navigate it near as well as I can any of the existing cities. However I would put it along the lines of Limsa Lominsa as far as frustration taken to learn the layout. I had similar issues rolling a Marauder and starting there originally. As far as the expansion it seems to have completely cured the DPS queues, with everyone rolling Dark Knights. Apparently folks are reveling in the fact that they can now instantly queue as any dps class, and I have to admit it is giving me pause and making me want to level my ninja a bit. Instead I am forged ahead with my plan to level the warrior first. I have to say I am impressed with the difficulty of the mobs. The early quests in Ishgard reward level 115 gear and I am rolling into the expansion with 127 combined ilevel. Things hit hard, and take a long time to take down… so I cannot imagine coming straight to Ishgard after leveling through the original storyline. I guess in a way this might be why they are forcing people to defeat 2.55, because in order to do that… you have to have gotten your ilevel up significantly.

It’s Finally Here!

Right now in Coerthas Western Highlands, the fates are rolling nonstop, and I have to admit a big part of me wants to take advantage of this while I can. As a warrior I can pretty much cheese my contribution and get gold rating almost 100% of the time. Earlier on the stream I rolled up on a FATE that was 90% complete and managed to generate enough threat to get to gold before it despawned. Right now it feels amazing to see that experience bar moving again and so far I am really happy with my choice. As far as what the future will bring… I just want to play the game 🙂 I am not in a massive rush to get to 60, but I also want to be able to experience the dungeons with my friends. Here is hoping that I can unlock the first dungeon before too much long and check it out before the end of the day. In the mean time I am going to cut this blog post short and wish you all a great day… I know I will be having one as I explore Heavensward.

Delving the Sewers

June 14, 2015 by Belghast

Bloody Happy Place

Last night we were down a handful of people with Thalen and Grace being gone, but by that same token it is mostly a cast of original AggroChat folks. Kodra is back from his traveling and it was awesome to get to spend the night hanging out with him again. We have all been spending quite a bit of time in ArcheAge as we have been taking a break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the launch of Heavensward. We talk about our further impressions of the game, and Kodra talks about his since he quite literally just started today. From there we talk about our expectations for the coming launch of Heavensward and how Ashgar and I apparently have enough faith in the release of this expansion to have taken the day off work. From there we meander into talk about the upcoming Four Job Fiesta, and how all of our listeners should really take Ashgar’s money, since he has put up $5 for every AggroChat listener to defeat the game during the event. There was talk of Wildstar and Tam injuring himself, but we had a grand time just chatting about the games we had been playing.

As promised in the show I also posted a picture of the absolutely amazing Fred from Scooby Doo cosplay by Kodra over on AggroChat so you should totally check that out. The title of the show comes from the fact that I am apparently a sick and twisted bastard. One of the happiest moments I have in video games is when I am zoned out and just mindlessly slaughtering stuff for loot and prizes. This is the reason why I have always been able to grind up levels in video games so effectively and why I so insanely over leveled the various JRPGs I have played. Last night while recording the podcast I found myself cheerfully wrecking undead for a good hour of the time we recorded. I slip into this mode from time to time and just got lost in the motion of combat, and as a result I end up over leveled almost all of the time. It is a happy place… just a very bloody happy place.

Beach Racing

ArcheAge is this collection of really strange systems, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface of figuring them out. Yesterday my friends and I took a trip to Mirage Island, which is this strange second life esc showroom allowing you to buy crafting patterns for all sorts of random stuff. The awesome thing about it however is that you can test drive most of them. So Tamrielo and I went off on a tour of the island on the roadsters. The only problem you have a very limited around of time to use it…. and we did not realize that before running off out into the ocean. There is a giant track around the island… and part of it is a sandbar that cuts out into the middle of hte ocean. The problem is…. this island is really freaking huge. I crashed out of the game that apparently dropped me out of Mirage Island, but poor Tam I don’t think he made it around the sandbar before it despawned the roadster. Luckily we had mounts so at least we didn’t have to walk back home if we got stranded.

The biggest problem I am having with ArcheAge is it seems like there are dozens of currencies that I am accumulating but I have no clue where to spend them. I thought maybe Mirage Island would give me some idea, but I didn’t really find any traditional vendors. Some of the kiosks required various currencies that I had not found yet, but I didn’t find any that took any of the ones I actually had. The takeaway is that ArcheAge is a really strange game. I am still liking it but I don’t feel any closer to actually understanding it. The system I want to try and figure out how is that supposedly you can tame named bosses in the world and turn them into combat pets. There is a tiger in one of the zones I have encountered and I am kinda hoping I can figure out how to trap it. I remember in alpha I got some sort of a fox pet as a drop and it was insanely fun to run around with. Not that it was sturdy enough to tank for me, but it did add some additional damage. Who doesn’t like additional damage right?

Delving the Sewers

A few days ago I stumbled into the first dungeon of the game in the sewers under the City of Towers. I managed to sneak my way through the dungeon, carefully pulling mobs and cleared my way to the first boss… only to get my face rocked. However the trash leading up to that boss dropped some really nice items. Since I have massively out leveled my friends I figured I would revisit the dungeon when some of them got closer to my level. So last night after the podcast we thought we would give the place another shot. Unfortunately after getting Kodra and Tam out there, it looks like the 3 man dungeon had a minimum level requirement of 18. So at this point I was sitting at 27, and Tam at 20… so we decided to try and work our way through it. The first room or so was pretty easy because both of us are dual wielding blenders. The first boss however…. ended up to be just as much of a challenge with the two of us as it was solo. We managed to make it through it however with both of us extremely low in health.

The second boss was significantly easier mechanically, but involved me running around like a madman and kiting him for a bit while Tam finished him off. Then we got to the final boss… and quite frankly it rocked our worlds. It took lots of rethinking the situation and a series of I think ten attempts before we finally just barely managed to defeat the encounter. Quite honestly I have no clue how someone would manage to do this dungeon at 18 with three people, when we technically over leveled the hell out of it. This makes me super anxious however to try the next dungeon, because it was an awesome challenge. The dungeon design like much of the game reminds me of an older era of MMOs. There were moments when I was taken back to the mob density and layout of the dungeons in Dark Age of Camelot. We had to very carefully pick our way through the targets and use line of sight to pull things back in order to make sure we only got the one target we needed. The game is far better than I gave it credit for… and I am hoping to piddle around on the side for awhile.

Last Raid

June 12, 2015 by Belghast

Make Numbers Go Bigger

Yesterday morning before I left the house I tried an experiment. I placed three large chicken breasts cut into strips, some diced carrots, some diced potatoes, some hot curry bullion and chicken broth in the crock pot. I figured I was either going to end up with chicken curry or a colossal mess. The truth ended up a little between, when the end result was significantly soupier than I expected. In theory I could have cooked it on high for a few hours with the crock pot lid off and probably done just fine, but instead I had a bag of frozen noodles in the freezer and dumped those in to make what ultimately was curried chicken noodle soup. It was “odd” but I have to say once I added some salt, pepper and sriracha it was rather tasty. So for the next few days I will be eating on the leftovers that are so neatly packed away into some giant tubs from Ikea. Sometimes these experiments work out, other times not so much, but this is pretty much my preferred method of cooking… dump a bunch of ingredients together and see what happens.

Another experiment is going on right now on the Steam page as they have officially launched their summer sale. For those who have not experienced the summer steam sale, it is pretty much Christmas for gamers. During the sale you can see normally $40 games going for $4 and other ludicrous things. With the Steam sale there is always some sort of mini-game that happens in the background, that involves collecting cards or voting on this or that item. This time around it is quite literally a game that you play… essentially by afking. I think this might be a commentary on a whole series of games that have showed up on steam recently that involve sitting at your keyboard and clicking on things to make the numbers go bigger. This is essentially what happens with the new Steam Monsters game, either you afk and let your auto cannon do the work for you.. or you click until your heart is content and reduce the health of monsters ultimately clearing waves. The game I have been in has been going on since yesterday and at the time of writing this we are on level 237 of a seemingly endless wave of monsters. I have no clue what the point of the game is other than to make the numbers go bigger, but I am participating to find out.

Buffalo Farming

One of the things I am enjoying the most about ArcheAge is how I feel this sense of accomplishment after only playing a short period of time. Right now I am averaging one to two hours a night at most, but still feeling like I am making forward progress. The big change last night is I opted to drop Shadowplay from my Darkrunner build and pick up Occultism turning me into Bloodreaver. In truth I really was not using much of anything from the Shadowplay tree, and the Occultism tree will eventually support the AOE that I am dealing through Battlerage. For the moment I am planning on doing an AOE damage and CC build that should be solid as I move forward. I think one of the things I dig the most is just how easy it is to change things around. I can go to a Skills trainer or any graveyard and swap my trees around as needed to support the kind of game play that I am needing for a given moment. The only negative is that each time I do this I need to spend some time catching up that tree.

So last night I spent a good deal of time killing random stuff. I wandered down into a mine filled with Kobolds which also provided me an ample supply of ore to mine. For the moment I have not touched any of the crafting in the game, but I am instead stockpiling resources. At some point I will probably work on weapon-smithing, or whatever the games equivalent is. In any case I assume a stockpile of ore is going to go a long ways into whatever I need to do to make the crafting numbers go bigger. At this point I am level 18 and I think significantly higher than the rest of my friends playing the game. I kind the actual combat enjoyable, so I always end up killing way more stuff to complete a given quest… and this game seems to reward farming mobs over and over. As the title says, I was hanging out in this field killing the water buffalos over and over because it was enjoyable to leap at my target and whirl around like mad with my two swords. I have no clue what group content looks like in this game but as Kodra starts a character this weekend hopefully we can start working on groupy bits.

Last Raid

Last night was the final raid night for me for the near future. As I have said before I am going on a bit of a sabbatical from the game, so that I can fully enjoy the launch of Heavensward. I don’t plan on doing anything drastic like cancelling my account, and I will probably poke my head back in around the launch of 6.2 but the future of me and raiding is a bit uncertain at the moment. Quite frankly right now I need a break. I have enjoyed a lot of my time raiding, but the slog through Blackrock Foundry has taken its toll on many of us. As a result our raid group as a whole is taking at minimum a two week break starting today, and last night our raid lead cancelled all of the reoccurring raids off the in game calendar. So there was a sense of finality in last nights events that probably the rest of the raid did not have. I have called this subsection the way I did because really my future in WoW raiding is uncertain. I would like to think once things have calmed down I will pick back up and work my way back into the raid group, but honestly that is at least a month away and I cannot determine how I will feel at this point.

The big positive is that we managed to take down three heroic bosses, which should get most of us the ability to start getting mythic loot boxes from our Garrison. The negative is that we downed Gruul and once again he refused to drop the upgraded version of my sword. More than any expansion I have felt like I have had to fight tooth and nail to get the meager upgrades I have gotten. There has never been another time in another game where my fate was determined more by the cruel mistress of RNG than in Warlords. I have sat and watched as I have won enough rings and cloaks to outfit an army… but have struggled to get weapon and shield upgrades. I guess on the positive I did manage to get my four piece bonus faster than a lot of people, but by the same token that four piece bonus is so good for Gladiator that it has been its own albatross around my neck. I have functionally better items for every single slot that I have a set piece, but I need that bonus so badly. It reminds me of how overpowered the tier 2 hunter eight piece bonus was, and how no one was willing to give it up once they got it. So for the time being… I am bidding Warcraft farewell and packing it neatly in a box to be unpacked at a later date.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

June 11, 2015 by Belghast

Flight in Draenor

This mornings post is going to be a little odd, because I have already written it once before. I sat down at the keyboard like normal this morning and started banging out a post, and within a paragraph of finishing it and hitting publish… we had a power outage. Unfortunately I was composing on my local machine, and also unfortunately it seems that LiveWriter only recovers if it crashes… and not the entire computer powering off. As a result I am composing a second post… in which I am going to attempt to say all the sage things I said before. This experiment is likely going to fail miserably. In my original post I got a little salty over the announcement yesterday that Blizzard was adding in a meta-achievement that would allow you to unlock flight in Draenor for all of your 90+ characters. The problem being I was grumpy for a silly reason, and now upon rewriting this post I have realized that. Sure it felt good to rant a bit, but overall it was largely meaningless.

What I do feel like yesterday’s announcement signals is that Warlords of Draenor has been a testament to the fact that Blizzard does not understand its core demographic at all. As a friend said last night, Flight is a Genie that you cannot put back in the bottle. Once it was given to the players they will always crave its freedom. While I personally agreed with the decision to take flight away, and supported the supposed line in the sand they drew, it seems like the villagers with pitchforks storming the ramparts made Blizzard change their mind. Warlords as a whole has been a bit of a comedy of errors, with extremely good aspects like the raid encounters… and extremely bad aspects like the facebook game style garrisons and the demolition of crafting. Ultimately my frustration with the flight move is it seems so rushed, and that they simply drew a card from the Final Fantasy XIV deck on how to deal with it. Last October Square announced that they would add flight, but through a system that forced the player to explore a zone and learn how to harness the winds. This meta-achievement seems like a rushed clone of that concept, and while it made me grumpy at first… I realize that every single game draws upon the best parts of every game before it. I guess next week when Heavensward head start begins we can determine if it really was the good idea that Square hopes it is.

Clockwork Mayhem

I spent a good chunk of my night playing ArcheAge and I have to say the more I play Kitty Belghast the more I enjoy him. Technically I am not Belghast at all… because apparently someone on Tahyang has my name. To make matters worse they made an Elf Archer… which is pretty close to being the “anti-belghast”. However I am getting by just fine with Belgrave the Nuian and Belglaive the Firran. I finished up my questing in the mines and have moved now into a junkyard of clockwork machines. I am really enjoying my Darkrunner build, because it just feels awesome to rush headlong into things with two swords drawn. Everything was going well until I stumbled onto a quest to kill 20 discarded clockworks. As I wandered through the junkyard I found them sitting there in several clumps of smaller mobs surrounded by an aggressive Harani. At first I thought these were like the other packs of mobs I had encountered, so I pulled and popped my AOEs… only to get murdered in the most horrible fashion.

It turns out that when ArcheAge says something is an “Elite” quest it means it. It also turns out that these are part of the Clockwork Rebellion event, which is the mirror of the Oblivion Rift event I had done before on the Nuian side. These are absolutely scaled for groups to complete them, but instead being the stubborn fool that I am, I tried to solo it. What I like the most is the fact that this game allowed me to do just this. Through careful pulls I was able to peel smaller chunks of the large packs off and take care of them in multiple passes. I found that I could take three or four of the little robots if I absolutely had to, and then would need to regenerate my health and mana back before trying another pass. In doing this I whittled down the quest until I was able to complete it and get an achievement for doing so. I have to say this sort of careful and methodical gameplay was extremely rewarding, and reminds me of an older era of gaming. My hope is that once Kodra gets the ability to play ArcheAge that he too will find the game he had been looking for with Pathfinder Online. In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun being kitty bel.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Several weeks ago I had ordered the Final Fantasy XIV Art Book from the Square Enix store, and last night when I got home it was sitting there waiting on my doorstep. The coolest part so far is the fact that it has almost all of the weapon and armor designs from the game, and shows the production art behind them. What makes that even more awesome is that each one of them has a sentence or two of notes below that explains some of their ideas that went into the design. If it is a weapon with animated parts it explains how the weapon bits actually move and function together and the idea behind them. If that was not cool enough it also included a tiny Enterprise minion that also has an even tinier Cid sitting on the deck. I am thinking this is the ideal minion to run around with as a Lalafell, because Tiny Cid actually makes me feel big.

I had logged out of ArcheAge and into Final Fantasy XIV last night because in theory it was the night our second static runs. Whenever my schedule works with it, I try and offer my services to make sure it can fill. Last night however after sitting around and waiting for a bit we were standing there with four people. The leader called the raid, and we instead shifted focus to running Art the bear tank from our WoW raid through some instances. The most frustrating part about leveling a DPS right now is the fact that the queues are so ridiculously long. As I have been leveling my Ninja lately my average wait time is around 40 minutes. So we built a free company group and I got the job of tanking. I tanked Copperbell as a Warrior, and Halatali as a Paladin and enjoyed both of them. I like tanking lower level content in part because it makes me realize just how limited my toolbox used to be, and how hard it was to actually hold aggro on mobs. Was a fun night all around, and I actually look forward to doing more of this as I work on leveling my Dark Knight eventually.