argent dawn Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Hellfire and Horde

November 30, 2015 by Belghast

Adulting Sucks

This morning I am sitting here trying to eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee… and this Monday guy keeps pestering me and trying to make me adult. Really freaking annoying. This weekend was a tale of my wife and I avoiding adulting.. so much so that finally yesterday we had to get out and do things in the world. Essentially yesterday was the day of doing all of the things we put off the rest of the break. In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t too bad, but the world was cold and rainy… and when I first set foot outside yesterday morning my first instinct was to rush back inside and swear off breakfast. Then my tummy kicked in and told me that it was hungry, and it was also sick of the options we had available in the house. So I ventured out and got breakfast, and realized that I could in fact survive outside of my house shaped bubble with its blanket cocoon. You can tell the hibernation instinct is strong… because we bought the fixings for a bunch of various crock pot meals… so we don’t have to leave the house at all once we make it in from work.

Unexpected Activity

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing things to get gear for Belgrace my newly 100 Tauren Paladin. When you boost a character they end up giving you a full set of green 640 gear, which is a significant increase over the sort of gear you end up with by natively leveling. Also apart from having to get silver in the proving grounds… you are level appropriate for heroics and the first two LFR raids. I however had pretty crappy luck in Blackrock Foundry with getting upgrades, but I did have a fair amount of luck picking up Baleful drops in the Tanaan Jungle campaign area. So last night I was sitting at 656 with a decent purple weapon… that was sadly as good if not better than Belghast’s alliance side. I had settled down into my blanket cocoon on the sofa prepping to watch my Sunday evening television binge of Once Upon a Time > Walking Dead > Into the Badlands > Talking Dead when I got a random invite from my friend Nubzy.

I knew that they raided on Sunday nights, but I had no clue they planned on dragging me into Hellfire Citadel. I had told her that I was working on gearing and that I had managed to get to 656, but that did not necessarily mean I was expecting to raid. They were resetting the instance apparently and were grabbing a ton of other people into what was their largest raid group to date of around sixteen people. Brerhoof has always been awesome, and he set to making me some upgrades for my remaining 640 green slots. So before I had even really set foot into the dungeon Brer handed me Gauntlets, Pants and Boots that were significant upgrades. Then off the very first drop I managed to pick up Shell-Resistant Stompers and luckily I had not bound the boots yet so I equipped the drop and holding onto the BOEs for the time being. Either I will get an upgrade for them, or pass them on to the next guildie that needs them. The night as a whole saw me getting a bunch of really nice upgrades… in addition to the boots I picked up a Helm of Precognition, an Warlord’s Unseeing Eye for offspec… and most importantly a 690 weapon upgrade Fel-Burning Blade.

Old School Feels

While the gear upgrades were awesome… the real take away from the night was just how much fun I had. The horde guild is named Facepull, and that should tell you something about the attitude and demeanor. More than anything running with them… reminded me of the nights raiding with Duranub before Cataclysm. It was an old school kind of fun, and even when we did something stupid… no one really got pissy about it. We just kept pushing forward and making progress. For having a bit of a strange balance we did really well making it up to Gorefiend before hitting a bit of a wall. At that point we had a few members of the raid have to leave… one of which was a healer leaving us with a fairly unbalanced party. The big surprise of the evening is I guess I did not realize that Nubzy was now one of the tanks. I guess I knew her most as a Shadow Priest, so I guess in the back of my head I just assumed she was booming it up on her Druid. Right now the plan is to gear out my offspec for tanking, but if we continue to need healing… I might change those plans at some point.

Paladin is the only class I have really successfully healed on… but that was back during Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King. I know Paladin healing is far less whack-a-mole than it was… and for some people that is probably a good thing. For me that really has no healing instincts left anymore from my Everquest days… that is definitely a bad thing. The only sort of healer I am is really the “mash button faster for more heals” kind. Granted I did level as a healer in SWTOR on my Scoundrel, but good at healing companions is one thing… good at healing people is a completely different one. In Final Fantasy XIV I kinda fail at my Scholar and I am not exactly the sort of healer you really want on my White Mage either. In any case I had a lot of fun, and the Sunday evening thing is something I could potentially get used to. They don’t start until almost 8pm EST, which by that time I am always downstairs watching television anyways. I managed to dps just fine while watching my shows last night, so in theory this is a decent fit. I have to say I could get used to this raiding as a cow thing… and the group of people seemed pretty damned cool as well.

We’ve Got Cows

November 25, 2015 by Belghast

Another Realm

I have briefly talked about this in the past, but I’ve lived in this strange place when it comes to World of Warcraft. Sure I played lots of Alliance because that was where most of my characters that I cared about existed… but I’ve always been one to bridge the gap. It was thanks to my involvement in the Argent Dawn server forums, and the later unofficial server forums that I created and hosted that I got to know tons of people on that side of the fence. For years I said I would level something on Horde to play with my “other” set of friends, but that never really panned out. During Wrath I ended up pushing a Deathknight to 80, but unfortunately the account it is on… is not the account I play most of the time. When it was announced that Scryers would be merging into Argent Dawn… I went somewhat crazy and created a full account worth of Horde characters because quite honestly… I had no clue how the merger would work. I did not know if all of the sudden there would just be this one amalgam server… and we would have 22 characters on it. The end result however is that both Argent Dawn and Scryers exist as distinct worlds… but everything from guilds to the zones themselves spans across the two realms allowing me to officially guild up with my old school Horde friends.

This has allowed me to do some utter madness… and ultimately have both a Horde and Alliance version of every single character. The big problem came with the fact that I had one of each on the Alliance that I did not want to lose access to. So now after some juggling Argent Dawn has become the server I play Alliance on and Scryers the server I play exclusively Horde. The only challenge is the fact that I had nothing leveled on Scryers, whereas on Argent Dawn as you can see above all but two of my characters are over level 90, and even then the lowest is 53 which is still a significant amount of levels. Prior to this week on Scryers I had managed to get an Orc Deathknight to 60, and a Tauren Paladin and Blood Elf Warrior to around 20. With the announcement of Legion came the pre-order process, which I went ahead and did giving me a boost to level 100. I was extremely torn on this one… do I take the boost and potentially get to do some stuff with my friends now… or do I level it the old fashioned way. Having not seen much of the Horde content, I actually do want to level there eventually.

Moo-Cow-Adin

Essentially I arrived at a thought process that is level the Blood Elf Warrior and Orc Deathknight legitimately… but boost the Tauren Paladin giving me access to do “big kid things” right away. I largely went with the Paladin because I really do enjoy both Protection and Retribution, but more importantly it gives me a character that I can in theory fill three different roles on. While I don’t really like healing as a Paladin, I have done it in the past and in a pinch I could do it again. I am however completely comfortable doing LFR and the likes as a Retribution Paladin allowing me to hopefully gear up both my Retribution set and eventually get a Protection set. The problem is… I knew if I was ever going to play the character for real I had to look cool doing it. This means I had to find something that I could enjoy to transmog into for the time being. My go to set for Paladins is the Tier 6 Lightbringer set, because it is relatively easy to farm. So last night I set off to go do Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, and finally Sunwell.

I am convinced that the game goes out of its way to screw with players trying to farm a full set of gear in a single attempt. It seems like there is always a single piece of gear that refuses to drop… and generally speaking it has been the helm token for me off Archimonde. This is extra insulting because as far as a raid goes… I HATE running Mount Hyjal. This is namely because you are a slave to the timers… and it seems to take significantly longer than most any other raid due to this aspect. Namely it is the Horde section of that raid that drives me insane… because I tend to play Melee focused characters, which makes knocking Gargoyles and Frost Wyrms out of the air a major pain in the ass. All told I was pretty happy with the results, and the only piece I did not manage to get were the legs from the Illidari Council fight… because for some reason it glitched and only gave me two pieces of loot including a single leg token. I have zero problem farming Black Temple to get the legs, and in the meantime I got a drop from Sunwell that will fill in well enough for the time being. At some point I need to get a better weapon, but for the moment I am rocking the big damned glowy orange axe from Black Temple, which makes me happy enough.

Onwards to Tanaan

My guild suggested that I spend some time digging into Tanaan Jungle to get some upgrades from the 640 set they start you out in after being boosted. I also really want to start the Legendary Ring quest, which I just picked up last night. From there I plan on throwing myself at the LFR and seeing if I can get some decent upgrades, and hoping to complete the ring quest along the way. It is really my hope that they upped the drop chances of those items out of Highmaul that are needed for the ring, because otherwise… this is going to be a thoroughly frustrating experience. I remember how long it took to get those on Belghast when we were actively raiding every week. In any case I seem to have sorted out how to actually play a Paladin again, and gearing my Moocow is pretty much my side gig from this point onwards. It is my hope to be able to get geared enough to actually join in some of the reindeer games happening on this side of the server. The only footnote there is that I really need not to raid actively, and I am hoping that won’t be a problem.

For a period of time I was really damned happy playing both Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I enjoyed the mix of the two games because they both scratched a distinct itch. World of Warcraft is this really enjoyable experience when played casually. I enjoy doing older content for transmog bits, or casually leveling alts… but when I was raiding both Warcraft and FFXIV… the differences just started frustrating me. Ultimately I prefer the FFXIV raid game better, because it feels like the boss encounters are simply messaged better. Granted if they just added telegraphs with clearly identified edges of effects like they have in both Wildstar and FFXIV it would go a long way to my enjoyment. Ultimately I think I simply got burnt out by trying to raid two different games at the same time… and ultimately ended up choosing the one that was causing me less frustration. So now… I am hoping to go back to playing both games casually… and in theory maybe starting to raid once again in FFXIV. We have started doing this Saturday thing again, where we do older content and it was a lot of fun this week. My hope this will ease me into doing more content in that game as well, and in the mean time I am planning on diving into LFR on the Paladin in WoW. Granted I won’t be doing any of it tonight… because this is the first of our Thanksgivings, and I also need to stage a proper Thanksgiving post for tomorrow.

Night of Primals

May 6, 2015 by Belghast

Juggling Games

One of the challenges for me during the Newbie Blogger Initiative is determining which days I should make NBI related posts and which days I should do my traditional thing. It is a bit of a juggling act because I want to keep pumping out articles in support of the initiative but I also don’t want my blog to stop being… well “my blog”. As always I am juggling a silly amount of games. Right now as it stands I raid Tuesday and Thursday in World of Warcraft, Monday and Saturday in Final Fantasy XIV and for the time being I am also filling in on Wednesday nights with another free company static group. I would not mind staying with them indefinitely but I would love to get to a point where I am more optional than the current tank role that I am playing. Finally on Friday nights I have been trying to join in the festivities with the Black Dagger Society as I play some Wildstar. Other than this I am also trying to juggle playing Marvel Heroes and some Rift… and needless to say I feel like there is always something I want to be playing.

Last night was a WoW night and we once again stepped into Blackrock Foundry. I did not place the sign above but I was wondering if it was going to foretell my evening. At the beginning it did seem like maybe it was prophecy, because we had a rough start. We wiped several times on heroic and tempers were flaring a bit. Our raid leader made the right call and took us back outside flipping the difficulty to normal. From there the night got significantly better. I was once again being frustrated by Flamebender Kagraz not dropping pants or a sword for me, but that has now been par for the course so I really wasn’t that upset. Last week we made serious progress on Furnace encounter so I was extremely happy when our raid lead said we were heading that direction. Apparently we had not forgotten the progress we made because in a single attempt we downed our first new boss since March 19th. While heroic difficulty is where we will find upgrades, there is a huge part of me that wants to be able to say we cleared at least normal difficulty before the 6.2 patch. We are now two bosses away from being able to say that.

Night of Primals

One of the things our Monday night group has decided to do is to spend no more than two nights in a row on any one encounter. It has felt like we have ground our faces against turn nine for awhile now, so it is refreshing to get to see something else. Monday night was our first “off night” in this rotation and we opted to get the folks that missed Leviathan Extreme their kill. This fight went smoothly and by the numbers and other than some of the folks who were new to the fight struggling to stay on deck, we were able to make some serious progress. I want to say it was on attempt four that we managed to push through and defeat Levi Ex unlocking Ramuh for a large number of the folks, and getting a nifty summoner book. From there we moved on to Odin as our group had not actually downed it before. We made one night of attempts but then got enthralled by the push for Turn 9 never to return. We shifted things around a bit this time and had me tanking it and Ashgar dpsing, hoping that my insane health pool would help soak the horrible Sangital attack.

The assumption seemed to be correct as it would take me down to around half health instead of almost killing me. The thing is… we have gained a lot of gear since when we last tried this fight so I am pretty sure Ashgar as a Paladin would have been fine as well. We managed to take out Odin and get a piece of the armor set. I believe it was the gloves, but I really want to take this guy down more because I need to be a Lala-Odin. From here we opted to take on Titan Extreme in part because it was standing in the way of us working in Ifrit Extreme and finishing the first set. When we downed Titan before we were missing a significant number of the folks that we had on last night. This fight has been the bane of our existence for awhile because it is precisely the kind of fight we are generally bad at. If a fight requires us to adjust to conditions on the ground, then bam we are on top of that. If it is a fight that requires us to do the exact same thing over and over with laser precision… went tend to fail. Fortunately we managed to catch up to speed quickly and on I believe our fourth attempt we downed Titan once more keying a whole new batch of players for Ifrit. It was one of the most enjoyable nights of raiding I have had in any game, because each of the primal encounters were so drastically different.

The Old Blood

This game I honestly forgot was releasing yesterday, that is until in the middle of the raid I had someone message me over the steam client asking me if I was having trouble with the game. After the raid I opted to boot it up and give it a look see. I have agreed to play this game in part to let Kodra know if I think he would be interested in it. He and I both loved Wolfenstein: New Order… but completely different reasons. I loved the game because it felt like a throw back to the 90s shooter era, and he loved it for the complex character interaction and development. It was awesome that the game supported both things so completely, and by the looks of “The Old Blood” it seemed like the 90s shooter part. Essentially this game is a loving reworking of the classic Escape from Castle Wolfenstein game that I spent so many hours playing during High School. If it is nothing more than Machine Games redoing that game… I would be completely fine with this.

While I have only played a few minutes of the game right now, I have to say I am amped about it. The game is just as gorgeous as New Order, and seems to have the exact same kind of dialog between characters. The problem being that I have a feeling there is a much smaller cast given that the entire game takes place inside of Castle Wolfenstein. This next bit is going to include spoilers because the introduction is pretty short, but still extremely fun. Essentially the start of the game centers around this plan between you and a British agent to sneak inside Castle Wolfenstein and steal the blueprints to Deathshead’s compound… aka that thing you are storming at the beginning of New Order. The problem being that when you get into the offices of occultist Helga Von Schabbs, the plans are missing. There is nothing in the safe in the wall, and you and Wesley quickly draw unwanted attention and a firefight ensues. While trying to make your escape you are captured by Rudi Jager and thrown in the cell that you in theory begin the original Wolfenstein in. From there you have to escape the castle… and quite honestly I did not make it much further. The game is rather short, supposedly only two chapters, but for the price that seems more than reasonable. I think I am going to love this game, but I still question if there is enough story in it to appease Kodra.

Enjoying Wildstar

May 3, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 55 – Calling All Bloggers

This week I start off the show, and even title it with a pretty massive plug for the Newbie Blogger Initiative. What is the NBI you ask? Well this is the time of the year when Veteran bloggers support new folks wanting to get started in this madness. This year we are making an extra special push to try and help new podcasters, youtubers, and streamers along with the bloggers. Additionally I myself am making a special push to try to rekindle the fire in some of our wayward bloggers who are no longer as regular as they used to be. The entire month of May is dedicated to helping folks get started and find their niche, and since most of the AggroChat crew have participated in the past, it is time to get the word out.

As far as the rest of the show we had myself, Tam, Ashgar, Kodra and Grace. As always we spent a good deal of time talking Final Fantasy XIV since we are all still heavily playing it. Right now Greysky Armada our Free Company is back holding the bronze medal again for being the third most active Free Company on our server Cactuar. This week also saw myself and Grace spending some more time playing some more Wildstar. The Black Dagger Society the guild I am connected to has been having a guild night on Fridays and as such I have started joining in the festivities. Additionally there was talk of Marvel Heroes, Diablo 3, Ashgar returning to his Gameboy Advance roots, Tam winning his first Infinity tournament since the move, and similarly Kodra beating VVVVVV for the first time in his new place. Since this month is devoted to Shadowrun for the Gameclub we are also starting to play some of this. It was a fun show in spite of being in that pre-E3 gaming doldrum.

Making Progress

I’ve been down a bit on raiding lately in my posts so I wanted to take a moment to give a bit of an update of sorts. The Tuesday before last was very seriously one of the worst nights of raiding I have had in a very long time. It really made me question if I wanted to keep trying to raid in World of Warcraft, and I posted this long discussion about it. It seems like I actually gave voice to some of the same feelings that many of our raid had been having, but for whatever reason had not actually talked about. As a result a dialog has started among some of the members, and I have to say I think things are starting to improve. Tuesday this week was still a pretty rough night, but it felt at least somewhat better. Thursday however on the other hand felt really good. We were a much trimmed down group due to some absences but I also felt like we were working better as a team. We lowered the bar slightly and worked on normal content again, clearing everything we had ever cleared before in a single night and putting in some serious work on the forge encounter.

If we had another hour of attempts I feel like we probably could have downed the encounter. Things were flowing so much better than they ever had before. We were getting through to the second phase, and then approaching it with a sense of direction and purpose. We were alternating between burning down the Elementalists and focusing down the waves of adds. We managed to push through to the final phase, and if we were at our full numbers we might have been able to defeat it. I think we learned a lot of good lessons that we can hopefully apply this Tuesday. The thing is… I am feeling something that I have not felt in a very long time… the desire to get back in there and give it another shot. I am actually looking forward to raiding in World of Warcraft this week, and that is a pretty awesome thing. Maybe just maybe we can make the changes necessary in the raid to make it a better experience for all of us. At this point I am glad I said something, and started the discussion. I guess the truth is if you are not having a good time, chances are you aren’t the only one.

Enjoying Wildstar

Similarly this week I have been enjoying quite a bit of Wildstar. I am still taking it nice and slow, but at this point I am level 16 with just a short ways to go to 17. I have officially finished the Algoroc zone and will be moving into the next area. The Black Dagger Society has been awesome to me, and I am super thankful to Chestnut and Chaide for giving me a friendly home to hang my hat in. It turns out that Friday nights are somewhat of a guild night for grouping, and they have been working on lower level content. Currently I do not have any other commitments Friday nights, so I am going to try and make that my Wildstar day. This week they ran me through the earliest Protostar dungeon, and it does a pretty great job of teaching you what you need to do to succeed in a Wildstar instance. Honestly I wish that this would have been the first dungeon when we were playing at launch, because I feel like it would have cleared up a lot of the frustrations had by many players.

The group we went into Wildstar with was made up of some pretty disparate points of view and skill levels. For some the extremely frenetic pace of the dungeons was a point of frustration especially as we were trying to learn “on the fly” all of the various things we were supposed to be doing. This dungeon eases the player in teaching them the various mechanics and then building upon them as the phases go, finally culminating in a boss fight that is fairly representative of what I saw in the “real” dungeons. While the dungeon is essentially a giant tutorial, it is still extremely fun and when a random stranger asked me if I wanted to join them… I happily ran it again. The other big switch I have made is previously I was focusing entirely on tanking as the warrior and now I am starting to build out my dps abilities as well. In most games I level as tanky as much as anything else in an effort to be as survivable as I can be for fighting the named encounters. In this game I feel almost more survivable playing DPS as I do as a tank. Essentially the amount of damage I deal more than makes up for the extra damage I might be receiving. I am still pleasantly surprised that I am enjoying Wildstar as much as I actually am. Pretty happy I decided to give it another shot.