Monday LFR

A Good Show

I have not been in the habit of linking AggroChat in my blog lately, but I am going to do it this morning.  It took for freaking ever for the YouTube version of the podcast to finally upload yesterday, but I feel like this weeks show ended up really good.  There were a bunch of topics that branched out but the big one and the one I chose the name the episode was over a discussion about Otome.  A friend of mine Pizza Maid and her equally awesome named friend Sushi Geisha have this podcast called Heroines of the Cherry Blossom, where they talk about Otome games.  This was not a term that even exists in my vocabulary before this week, when they referenced our Hatoful Boyfriend episode on the podcast.  Essentially the side discussion that spawned was about how Tam was impressed with the quality of the writing of these various relatively low budget dating sims that he played in preparation for our Hatoful Boyfriend show.  The general consensus was that we would all like to see this deeply nuanced writing make its way into more mainstream titles as well.

Another interesting side discussion centered around the point in which we all tune out when it comes to an open world or sandbox game experience.  For each of us there seems to be a point where we are just “done” with the game even if we are not truly finished with all of the content.  For me personally I am never really “done” but I reach this point where I have to take a break and play something else for awhile.  But then by the time I return to the game I rarely remember what I was doing at that point and end up having to restart the game…   usually going in a slightly different direction than the original play through.  I know this past week with my focus on trying to chew through the quest content…  I am enjoying Fallout 4 significantly less than when I was just wandering aimlessly.  For others on the podcast they found themselves HAVING to focus on the story, to keep from losing interest.  In any case… we recorded a really content dense episode… which then surprised when editing that it ended up being a fairly short episode at only an hour and fifteen minutes.

Monday Night LFR

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I find myself once again in the unfortunate position of needing to run LFR on a Monday night.  The last chance crew in any MMO seems to always be the worst crew… and unfortunately due to the push in Fallout 4 I didn’t get any of this done earlier in the week.  There are a bunch of reasons why I am pushing last minute raids, but not the least of which is…  I am still trying to build out a tank set on the Cow.  There was a point in last nights raid where they absolutely would have used me in a tanking capacity had I a set of gear.  The problem is largely that I have plenty of armor… but since the Cow was a boosted character… I only went into level 100 with a single set of gear.  Normally as I level up, I pick up both a mix of two-handers for dps… and sword and board options for tanking, but I have had zero luck in getting anything I could use for tanking.  So I quite literally have a full set of gear that would be viable…  minus the sword and shield.  So tonight part of the plan is to run through Blackrock Foundry since it mostly features gear lower than what I need… and set the loot preference to protection, hoping that maybe just maybe I end up with a one handed weapon of some sort and a shield.  I technically have a 650 shield banked that would work well enough for the time being.

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On the other side of the fence I am still using the 670 Blackrock Foundry normal mode weapon that I have for ages… because I never could get any of the heroic bosses we were downing to drop me a weapon.  Similarly I have opened dozens of Garrison boxes… all with zero luck in finding a damned weapon to use.  So in addition to running Blackrock, I also really need to run  through Hellfire Citadel LFR on Belghast.  While I feel like BRF is probably going to go smoothly simply because most people have the gear for it…  I have a feeling that Monday night Hellfire is going to be pure hell.  The only thing that I maybe have gone on my side… is that there are generally more active alliance players on my battlegroup than there are horde, and I can definitely see that still is the case in the difference in my queue times between the two.  At very least I am going to struggle through the first few rounds of the raid because that seems to have the best chance of dropping me a weapon.  I have a pretty decent shield now, so really all I need is that main hand.  I even went so far as to purchase a Baleful Armament with some of my excess stones…  and only managed to get a 650.  In theory if I save up for a bit I could maybe manage to push that to a 695.  The other option is to have my blacksmith start trying to craft me one, but given the silly amount of materials it would take to make that happen…  I am hoping I simply have some decent luck this Wednesday during the raid.

Last Raid

Make Numbers Go Bigger

SteamSaleAFKGaming 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

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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

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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.

Blackhand Down

Gliders Away

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Whatever has a hold of me allergy wise is driving me insane.  I struggled my way to work yesterday only to be not so subtly asked to go home by my boss.  Apparently I sounded fairly horrible.  So I headed to the house and took a breathing treatment and attempted to be productive remotely.  Last night I took several Benadryl before heading to bed so I am hoping that helped get me over whatever hump I was struggling with.  This morning my head feels a lot clearer, but that might all change the moment I open the front door and are exposed to the world again.  My friends have joked that I need a bubble… and there are days that I agree with them.  To make matters worse we are under an Ozone alert day meaning that the air quality levels are already going to be horrible today.  There is a whole list of things that we are not supposed to do during an Ozone alert day, but the show must go on.

Yesterday I was a little bit spread out in what I ended up playing.  It was of course my World of Warcraft raid night, and at least on some level I was excited about getting in and getting more attempts in on Blackhand.  I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around on Cat Belghast in ArcheAge and honestly the more I play that side of the fence the more charming I find it.  I am naturally drawn the Nuians simply because it is the race I can create the closest facsimile of “Belghast” proper in.  However it is pretty much a bland European fantasy world, with the same vistas and characters we have encountered in essentially every MMO.  What makes Haranya interesting is they combine the tribal Firran with the Harani that are essentially steampunk engineers.  Quite honestly the Harani remind me of the Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X, and doing quests just seem more interesting than the Nuia side of the house.  I know Ashgar has a preference towards the cat people, and I guess I am developing that as well.  In any case I am really enjoying my time spent piddling around in ArcheAge.

Blackhand Down

Wow-64 2015-06-09 22-10-57-40 Last week on Thursday we had made a significant amount of progress on Blackhand.  On our best attempt we managed to get hit to 11%, so it was my hope that after some time away from the fight we could pop back in and pick up where we left off.  What made last Thursday challenging was that we were extremely short on melee so the walls were going down very slowly.  Last night we had some of our normal melee which made that part easier, but we were also down two of our main healers which added its own challenges.  However right out of the gate we managed to push to phase three like it was easy and at least match that 11% progress.  The rest of the night was spent fine tuning things and on our very last attempt of the night our raid leader managed to bring in a additional healer which seemed to push us over the top.  Unfortunately I spent the tail end of that fight in the lava as I managed to get clipped by one of the smashes while trying to execute spam Blackhand.

It feels extremely good to have defeated this raid tier, especially since Heavensward is right around the corner.  This was functionally my last week of raiding in World of Warcraft before going on a bit of a sabbatical.  I had hopes that we would be able to down him at least by Thursday, but now we are in the interesting position of not really knowing what to do with ourselves.  I guess Thursday if we have the people we will venture back into Heroic and see what mischief we can get up to there.  I know several of us are a single kill away from being able to get Mythic gear out of our Garrison loot boxes.  So in theory it would be nice to knock that kill out as well.  Similarly it has been talked about maybe just having a Heroes of the Storm night instead, since several of  the raid are also playing that game.  In any case it feels like I managed to squeak by another milestone fight before the buzzer.  So that is two raid Warlords raid tiers I have managed to defeat in this expansion and I am pretty happy with that.

Closure

Wow-64 2015-06-09 17-09-25-10 Even thought I am not enjoying World of Warcraft fight now as much as I had hoped I absolutely loved getting to raid with the guild again.  Coming back I was in an odd situation where I simply did not know many of the folks that had joined the guild I founded in my absence.  I am so happy to have been welcomed back with open arms and been allowed to get to know so many of them.  I am not saying I am “done” with World of Warcraft, but if I was I would be able to end on a happy note.  In a months time I might be raring to go and begin raiding again and pushing forward into Hellfire Citadel.  Right now however I just know that I need a break from this game.  I don’t want to try and split my attention between the new and shiny Heavensward content and Warcraft that feels very much like a worn in shoe.  It is comfortable, but as you walk down the street you happen to notice every blemish and scuff and remind yourself that you really should buy a new pair of shoes.  I am just thankful for the most part that people seem to “get” why I am taking a break.

I talked with Rylacus the man who wears the crown these days and explained it as this.  If I was forced to play Warcraft, when there was another game I would rather be playing… it would ultimately lead to me quitting the game again.  I think instead of I just back away for awhile, and let myself get Heavensward out of my system…  or at least to a manageable level I will once again be able to juggle multiple games.  The only problem I see is that there are a lot more people than just me that are in desperate need of a break.  Yesterday it was revealed that once again World of Warcraft is timing their next infusion of crack with the launch of a major game.  It seems that the 6.2 patch is going to land right around the time Heavensward officially launches.  The current rumor is June 23rd, and for some that might be just enough to keep them from straying.  For me personally, my heart already belongs to Final Fantasy XIV… I just spend time in Warcraft so that I can hang out with the friends that are still there.

Bad Medicine

A Good Nights Sleep

Monday night I did not sleep well at all.  I was up late futzing and waiting on a print job for my wife, that ultimately ended up printing the wrong thing.  As a result neither of us got to bed until after midnight.  After that I don’t think either of us really got solid sleep, and next thing we knew it the alarm was going off at 5:30.  As a result I spent most of yesterday sleep walking through it.  There are just some hazes that not even caffeine can clear, and this is only compounded by the fact that my allergies are still killing me.  Even the smallest task seemed like a struggle, and last nights raid was pure hell to suffer through…  in part because of my present state of mind.  I realistically should have just bowed out and headed to bed, but that didn’t happen.

I did however managed to get to sleep around 10:30 and last night was probably the most luminously glorious night of sleep I have had in a long time.  Granted I woke up before the alarm by about twenty minutes…  but I did the correct thing and just got on up instead of trying to struggle for those last few minutes of sleep.  The end result is I feel more human than I have in a long time.  Who knew I needed this sleep thing after all?  Now if only I didn’t have to go to work I could actually enjoy my day.  Today in particular is going to be a strange one as I have to go to lunch with a vendor.  Working lunches make me grumpy, especially since during this one we will be grilling the vendor for information.  At least maybe I get a free meal out of the deal.

Rough Raiding

Wow-64 2015-04-21 20-48-48-06 Last night I was not in the right frame of mind for raiding.  That is the simple fact but the end results of the night didn’t really help either.  As a whole the night felt like we were beating our heads against a wall.  We had fourteen people, two healers and opted to run Blackrock Foundry Heroic.  I am not the raid leader so I am sure there was a reason, but it felt like we were just setting ourselves up for failure.  We managed to eek out a victory on Hans and Franz with that configuration.  Then we lost one healer and gained a different healer, and someone healing in their off set.  We pushed forward and managed to down Beastlord Darmac in this fashion, before heading on to do some attempts on Flambender Ka’graz.  There we made some swaps to the layout that seem like they might have worked, but it required a lot more work adjusting on the tanking side, so overall it was a wash and we wiped horribly.

This stagnation and continued throwing ourselves against heroic when it seems like on some level we are just not ready for it is completely destroying any desire I have to log in.  I am not sure what is going wrong honestly.  I am not sure if our tanks are undergeared, or if our healers are undergeared… or if the dps are just taking too much “could be avoided” damage making the healers heal someone other than the tanks.  All I know is that we are having to battle rez tanks constantly, and as a matter of course which makes all of our attempts sloppier than they should be.  Our Tuesday WoW raid is generally bad at adjusting to the conditions on the ground which is maddening to me, because this is precisely the strength of the Monday night Final Fantasy XIV raid.  If things don’t go according to plan we seem to lose our shit completely, and end up flailing wildly…  or standing in shit and dying.  So I am not sure if we just have a massive case of tunnel vision or if there is some gearing problem at hand.  I know for me personally I am still wearing 640 pants because nothing better will drop.

Bad Medicine

Wow-64 2015-04-10 06-18-41-75 The problem is right now I am right back in that old familiar place.  I dread logging into World of Warcraft Tuesday and Thursday to get a raid invite.  I’ve reached that point where I am just frustrated with the whole raiding in wow experience.  I have been here so many times before, and I am not quite sure how to fix it.  I feel committed to “take my medicine” and log in for the sake of my friends, but I question…  are any of us actually having any fun right now?  Monday was one of the funniest nights of raiding I have ever experienced, and we spent it wiping like nubs to turn 9 after having taken a month off of it.  So it obviously is not progression that ultimately dictates how I feel about a raid… it is the attitude of the raiders and the atmosphere of the raid.  We spent Monday laughing and joking, and at the same time we made some serious progress.  That is when I love to raid, when it feels like we are pulling together as a team even if we are wiping horribly.

The Tuesday/Thursday night raids just feel broken.  They have about as much mirth as the waiting room of a battered women’s shelter.  I log in and join the raid and I feel worse, because there is an unspoken tension going on.  No one talks anymore, because key players in the raid are easily distracted by chatter.  What is frustrating is, this is not the raid I joined.  This is not the raid I saw at the end of Siege of Orgrimmar, or even during High Maul.  That raid was excited about the prospects of this expansion, and enjoyed their evenings spent together.  This raid just feels stressed and burnt out… and I have no clue how to rehabilitate it.  I wish I did know honestly, because I miss that raid that existed before we set foot into Blackrock Foundry.  That is a raid I enjoyed spending two nights a week with.  This one…  I just end up zoning out and waiting for the night to be over.