bounties

Fetching Cats

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I am not entirely certain how well this video is going to come across on the blog, since I am just using the default twitter embed process.  I’ve talked about playing fetch with my youngest cat Kenzie before.  She loves rubber bands, and whenever she wants to play will bring one and drop it beside me.  Traditionally this has meant tossing it around the room and her chasing after it.  However over the weekend my wife went to a craft fair and picked me up a basic rubberband gun.  Now at first the results were mixed, but I quickly realized it was because it moved quicker than she could actually track.  So firing it across the room in the air meant she would just look at me confused a few times and then give up.  However if I fire it across the floor so that it makes impact and slides the rest of the way…  she is able to track that and bolts off after it.  I decided to attempt to record this in the process and overall it turned out pretty well… including the batting of the gun to try and make me fire it.  This was my evening… and when she would get tired she would bring it back… and then lay down on top of it.  Later she would discover it again when she got up and the circus would continue.

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As far as gaming went… it was another mixed bag of an evening.  Firstly early in the evening before my wife got home I spent that time working on my Warlock and namely doing the Shiro and Tyra weekly quest.  The idea being that if I keep doing those every week I am bound to get some interesting stuff from the load of legendary engrams that they ultimately provide.  At this very moment I swap them all to the bank and then hop on my highest light character to open them.  However before long that won’t matter quite so much given that the only sub 385 character I have right now is my Warlock.  Today is the weekly  reset, and from what it sounds like it is a really good week to farm packages.  If nothing else this is going to be the week that I farm up all of the heroic strikes I need for Future War Cult quest.  Small Arms and Solar Burn means you can farm heroics, and Mayhem Clash means you can finish games in 6 mins making it an insane Crucible farm week as well.  Needless to say I am probably going to be playing Destiny tonight.

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In World of Warcraft last night was our traditional Mythical Monday night…  which is just a cute name for “oh shit we never did a mythic this week”.  It seems like Monday is the night that I always end up doing a keystone just in time to get a free item today.  This time around there was a double benefit, in that my friend Mor needed Black Rook Hold for the Karazhan attunement, and he also had a keystone for it.  It is getting to the point where these runs are largely pretty smooth and we managed to complete in with enough time to spare that we got two chests at the end.  Unfortunately I don’t think anyone managed to get any usable gear.  Quite honestly it has been a really long time since I have gotten anything useful out of a Mythic, and largely they are just something I do… because of the fear of missing out on something from the chest.  I enjoy them, and I am always happy to tank them pending I can dedicate 30 minutes of my time in one sitting.  However I am not necessarily running them because I need them.

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Lastly I finished the evening in Rift and managed to finish up Scatherran Forest.  I got so into the game that I completely did not watch the time… and wound up finally heading to bed when my wife started to wake up from the sofa at 12:30.  From there I had a pretty fitful night sleep wise, so it is definitely going to be an interesting day.  That aside…  Scatherran Forest was a great experience and the wrap up event was full of epic moments.  At the end of the zone you wind up going into a mini solo dungeon of sorts, with I believe four boss encounters that you take on with two companions.  As far as the story line and ramifications… they also felt pretty awesome.  There were some definite feels caused by the ending… that were not entirely attributable to the late hour.  I’ve now moved on to the Gedlo Badlands, with my general idea being to ping pong back and forth between the two as I work my way through the comet towards the Tower of Ahnket.  I had my first real run in with Ahnket and it was interesting…  definitely get a malevolent evil vibe…  but also that of a cat playing with a toy which makes it all the more fitting to talk about this morning.  I  talked a bit during the day about Time to Kill issues… and apparently a good chunk of that was my own damned fault in that I forgot to slot any planar fragments.  Once I did that… I noticed a significant boost in damage output, so if you are similarly struggling try that.  So far my favorite thing about this expansion is largely just a side effect.  I love that I am gaining planar levels insanely fast anytime I do pretty much anything… which is helping me flesh out those neglected trees.

Iron Banana

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Iron Banner

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The strange thing about this week is that we just finished one Kings Fall raid on Monday night, only to start a brand new one fresh last night.  It gave a certain Deja Vu feeling to the whole doing Oryx fight, especially given that it was so damned hard fought on Monday night.  However I will talk about that a little later.  First I want to talk about what seems to be me going completely off my rocker.  If we had talked months ago I would have told you I was a Diehard Carebear, and that if pressed I could probably shoot rainbows out of my belly in a pretty mean Carebear Stare.  Over the last few months however something has happened and I have come to realize that I actually do enjoy doing PVP in limited situations.  Those limited situations appear to largely be “Destiny” and “The Crucible”.  I am not exactly sure what makes this game different… it could be that there are relevant items that I can be earning that help me in PVE content, or it could be that it simply feels like there is no negative to doing it.  Whatever the case doing the Crucible is one of those activities that I mix in when I want to do something… but don’t want to do bounties or be bothered with grouping up for a strike.  The other interesting thing is… that I don’t really mind that I am ultimately bad at the content.

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Now I have heard stories of much toxicity from the Xbox Live community, and folks leaving crucible matches only to have nastygrams waiting for them from other players complaining about their performance and questioning their parentage.  So far the PSN community has been pretty chill about such things, and nobody actually uses the voice chat for public groups either.  The end result is that I can just zone out and play some Crucible without fear of retribution, and this zero pressure setting has made me actually enjoy it quite a bit.  So much so that while I know this is far from the first Iron Banner… it is the first one that I actually care about and will be trying to rank up to level five during.  Largely I am looking at it as a way of maybe getting some infusion fodder, and maybe just maybe a decent legendary hand cannon or machine gun out of the process.  As of last night I am closing in on Rank 2, and have managed to complete several of the pieces of the bounties that I never expected to….  like getting highest score among all the players in a match.  I’ve been warned that I should hold onto my brown weekly bounties until later in the week to turn in, because I guess they become worth more points as the weekend goes on.  I am however trying to complete the three dailies each night, and in theory when I get home from work tonight I should be able to knock those out and put in a bit more work towards the weeklies.

Melting Ogres

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Like I mentioned at the top of the post, it was a little strange stepping back foot inside Kings Fall given that we just finished Oryx the previous night.  Before the start of a new raid I end up with quite a bit of anxiety that is not fully alleviated until we get past both the ships and the piston wall jumping puzzles.  I am just bad at both of them, and end up falling so damned often that I feel like a moron.  I had a significant better run last Tuesday, and was back to my fumbling prime last night.  That said in both cases I was not the last person through either puzzle, so I guess I don’t feel too awfully bad about my performance.  For months I have listened to folks in the Destiny community complain about the RNG in the Kings Fall raid and how it never seems to actually give them any upgrades.  I feel like I have crested the new and shiny portion of the raid and am entering the valley of slow and prodding forward movement.  Which is to be expected given that at least armor wise I have every available drop… but still have a bunch of weapons I have yet to see.  The odd thing there is that I have gotten two of the pulse rifles, and two of the auto rifles…  but the rest of the primary weapon types I have not seen yet.  Given that last night was only my fourth trip to the raid… I feel like I have plenty of time.

War Numen’s Chest – 304
War Numen’s Fist – 303
Anguish of Drystan – 306
Suros Regime – 290
Thunderlord – 310

Of the drops that I did manage to get… the only piece of armor that I might use is the chest piece and even then only because it has intellect on it.  The fist and auto rifle will absolutely be used as infusion fodder to push something else up.  The Suros Regime will replace the 280 one that I picked up off Xur some time ago, and the 310 Thunderlord will replace my previous 290 dropped version.  One of the things that I am coming to realize quickly is that apparently my first two times into the raid were flukes.  Granted all of the encounters still for the most part melt before us… but those first two Oryx kills seemed effortless.  They just worked flawlessly without much issue and while they still took a couple of attempts…  they only took a couple of attempts.  Monday and last night both seemed like a battle of wills as we kept plugging away at the fight, only to be waylay’d by this quirky bit or that.  I am not sure if I would truly elevate the problems we were having to the glitch tier, but definitely things felt like a battle and not like a loot pinata.  We managed to get Oryx on what we had deemed was the “last try” because several of us needed to go to bed, and even then we failed at doing the challenge mode variant…  finally deciding to go ahead and finish up “as is” just to get the kill in.  Supposedly I can walk in and do challenge mode at some point during the week and still get the bonus chest.  In any case… content lag or not… I am loving this game more than pretty much anything else right now and looking forward to the big April patch.