dwarf Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Revisiting Old Ideas

June 28, 2016 by Belghast

ArcheAge Resurgence

I have been on quite the Trion Worlds games kick lately after coming back to Rift, and that has how officially spilled over into ArcheAge as well. ArcheAge and I have a bit of a torrid past, or at least it was not a game that I really latched onto from the moment I first played it. In fact in those early Alpha and eventual Beta days… the game had a less than stellar community. That however has changed with time and a significant amount of effort by Trion staff, and the community that exists today is pretty great. I blame Kiwi entirely for me starting to poke my head back into the game, and right now I am largely focused on leveling. Right now I am playing a Firran Bloodreaver on Tahyang server, however as soon as the 3.0 patch lands I will largely be restarting as a Dwarf which will place me on the Nuia faction instead of Haranya. Because of the lag between the South Korean and American versions of this game, we have known that Dwarves and Warborn would be something that would more than likely eventually cross between versions… so I have been patiently waiting. Of the starter races the Firrans were by far my favorite… but if you put Dwarves in the game there is zero contest. So I will have to bid a farewell to the crazy oriental steampunk land that I have grown up in on my cat, and get used to a more european fantasy setting once again. Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.

I believe the level cap is somewhere in the 50s, so I still have a good ways to go since I am sitting at only 36 and that leveling in general does not go terribly quickly in this game. It seems like my return was well timed, given that they gave me some sort of a welcome back package. It included a quest that opens every 24 hours for various rewards, and a bunch of tokens that can be spent on Mirage Island, but I have not ventured back out there to see what all I can purchase with them. At this point I am sorta waiting until I hit the level cap before being too tempted by the shiny baubles. The game has so many little systems and currencies and things that can be done… but I feel like I would need to do a bunch of research to even begin to start taking advantage of half of it. That is why in the meantime I am largely focusing on the leveling game, because combat is something that I understand… and honestly enjoy quite a lot after settling on the Bloodreaver class that is a mixture of Battlerage, Occultism and Auramancy. One of the big concerns I can remember having about this game is the fairly open PVP system, but for the last several zones I have been in “High Tension” zones and really have remained largely uninterrupted in my pursuit of leveling. The ArcheAge community staff deserves some pretty major Kudos for turning the course around in this game, and fostering what appears to be a real sense of community in its players. Looking forward to delving further into it the longer I stick around.

Working on Something

Last night was largely devoted to helping a friend of mine get to level 40 in Destiny and through the Taken King storyline missions. However after I logged out of that game I poked my head back into Rift. I worry that maybe folks reading this blog are getting tired of me talking about the game, but then again I am certain they also felt that way about Destiny, The Division and Diablo 3… or any of the other games I have latched onto and obsessed over. The weird thing about Rift is how much it has felt like “coming home”. What you have to understand is that there has never been a period of time where I did not log into Rift, but for a good chunk of it I was honestly confused by the options. What I mean by that is there are just so many different things that you can do in this game, and I felt like I was missing any real sense of bearing. I would log into the game… see my insanely full bags, see the fact that I was nowhere near the level cap and struggle to sort out exactly what I wanted to do with myself. Then like a sad little puppy I would log right back out feeling confused and frustrated because I had the desire to play… but somehow lacked the force to break the inertia of standing around in the Tempest Bay Canals district. Granted right now… I still spend a good deal of my time in that location… however current it is out of a sense of feeling like I belong there, and not out of a sense of being trapped there. I go out into the world and explore all manner of new stuff, but I wind up returning back to my home base in the crafting area.

A little over five years ago when Rift launched I did a series of posts called “Why You Should Be Playing Rift”. The purpose of these posts was extremely misguided, and was my way of rebelling against “the man” at that time… aka trying to convert the folks still playing World of Warcraft to being Rift players. It worked for some, and others it just caused them to delete my blog from their blog roll, and un-follow me over on social media. The other day I started thinking about these posts and what I was trying to do with them, and decided that it might be interesting to revisit that concept. However instead of writing them in spite, as a way of trying to show the world what they were missing… the idea this time is for me to tell you all what I see in the game. Rift is like that friend in high school that you have maybe drifted apart from… but when you get back together it is like no time has passed. Except in this case your friend has quietly evolved and developed a bunch of cool new things they know how to do. Rift has remained trucking along in the background, seemingly ignored by a lot of the MMORPG players as a phase they maybe went through at some point. It is a game that seems to keep figuring out new quality of life tweaks to make the game more enjoyable. However it is also a game with a bunch of scary looking monetization methods that I think frighten too many players, and keep them from spending more time and getting to know the game the way I do. So while I am adopting the same sort of name that I had the first time… as a sort of revisiting effort, the purpose is completely different this time. My goal is to show you my readers why I feel the way I feel about various aspects of this game. I am still working on the first part, but hopefully soon it will make its way to the front page and kick off the sequence properly. More than anything I guess I wanted to warn my long time readers, that you are going to likely be reading a lot more of Rift and ArcheAge content in the near future.

Shamen and Pax South

January 10, 2016 by Belghast

Prepping for Pax South

Tis the beginning of the year, and we are now roughly three weeks away from Pax South, and I have to say…. I am a bit concerned. It is going to be an awesome time no matter what because right now I know of like a dozen friends that are going to be there… so going to have plenty of people to hang out with. What concerns me though is it seems like Pax South as a whole is a much less hopping place. By this time last year, all three days of the show were down to “low” rating, and Saturday and the Three Day Passes had been sold out for a very long time. Additionally they had already posted a picture of the convention floor and who was going to be inhabiting what booth space. As far as the passes, Saturday was still available on Friday… and just looking at the schedule there don’t seem to be as many “big name” presentations as there were last year. Last year after all we had the world announcement of Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns happening, as well as I believe the first real information about Sid Meier’s Starships. Now… what I see instead is very light on the game content and very heavy on the youtube and stream celebrities.

All of this said I am going to have the best time this year…. because what made last year so much fun was running around with Ashgar and Rae. This time around I will be running around with Ashgar, Rae, Thalen, Dallian, Damai, Lonrem, Helkim, Paragon, Tick, Rylacus, and hell probably several others that I am failing to rattle off on the top of my head. It is the people that make the place awesome, and it is my hope to meet up with as many people as I can over the two days I am going to be there. So if you are planning on going to Pax South please let me know. I did a poor job of actually connecting with people last year and I hope to fix that. The other thing that is going to make this year awesome is that I am no longer going to have to worry about somehow abandoning my wife. Last year she went running around during the day, utilizing the hotels shuttle service, and by all accounts had a lot of fun, or at least enough fun to want to come back again this year.

The problem being that I always felt guilty for leaving her at the hotel and felt the strong pull to rush home at night so we could go out to dinner and such. This time around we are also bringing one of her friends so she now also has someone to run around with and wander San Antonio. What is hilarious is… she feels like I am being awesome, and I think its awesome because I will feel less guilty all the time. This also means I will probably experience a lot of the nighttime content of Pax and go to the concerts and such, and maybe some of the after parties. Granted on Saturday night I don’t want to be out too late… given that I will be driving the eight or nine hours home on Sunday. In any case…. if you read the blog or you listen to AggroChat, drop me a line and it is my hope to catch up with as many people during that weekend as I can. I will be getting into the hotel room late Thursday night, and I am staying about six miles away from the convention center out by the airport… in part because we had a great experience there last year…. and the whole free shuttle service to various destinations thing was awesome for my wife. So yesterday we did a bit of juggling to change our arrangements, and now have a double suite so it should be awesome. There was talk last night about maybe trying to get in together and see Force Awakens as a group while down there… since supposedly there is a theater a few blocks away.

Shamanism

One of the things I am really enjoying about World of Warcraft right now is the ability to fly. I realize that I was heavily in the “no flight in draenor” camp, and for the most part I still am. That said… having it makes everything so damned much easier, and questing through the zones is greatly improved. I feel like WoW content however desperately needs the grounding of players at the beginning of an expansion to keep folks from just blowing through everything instantly. In the past once you had a single character at the new level cap you could purchase flight for your other characters, and that was a great option…. but an extremely expensive one. I think personally I like the Draenor Pathfinder option because even though it was a pain in the butt to complete… now that I have done it the benefit can be used by every single character on my account. As a whole I am a huge fan of account wide unlocks and they actually make it far more likely for me to play other characters. In Final Fantasy XIV everything that I have exists on a single character, and as a result I am completely disincentive from trying any more characters. Same goes for games like Rift that while I have alts… I always tend to play the same main character because he has the best toys.

I feel like playing an Enhancement Shaman is a little broken…. in a good way. After having leveled several other characters, this one seems to be the easiest. I can just straight up shred most mobs without my totems, or heroism…. but then I always have those things waiting in reserve for big mobs and elites. The speed of killing things is just so damned fast, and since I have crafters that can feed me gear…. walking around with a pair of level 630 blue weapons really makes a huge difference. I still don’t fully understand why the crafted blacksmith weapons start at 630 unlike the 640 that all of the other gear seems to start at, but in any case I am fine with it…. it is a huge dps boost over the weapons I am getting in the zones. The thing that I cannot wait for in WoW however is the new transmogging system. WoWhead, being the awesome folks they always are has put up a preview system to show you all of the transmog gear your characters are going to get granted from quest completion. I am really really hoping that the new system is account wide like Diablo 3, because there are certain characters like this shaman that simply don’t have a lot of cool gear to work with yet. I guess I should farm more old world content to get him a decent set to run around in.

Steampunk Primalist

October 13, 2015 by Belghast

Primal Goodness

Want a #RIFT Wilds Pack? Grab a code from the image we're about to tweet, and enter it in at https://t.co/FtVqj5OrAq

— RIFT (@Riftgame) October 12, 2015

It was honestly a sheer miracle that I made it through yesterday. As the day went on, it felt like my estimate of three hours of sleep was a bit too high. Luckily around 3 pm I managed to catch a second wind which made the whole “driving home” thing significantly safer for everyone on the road. My general goal was to stay awake long enough to be able to head to bed naturally around 9 pm thinking that maybe just maybe it would fix the problems and give me a good nights sleep. For the most part it seems to have worked and while I am a bit groggier than normal this morning, I am feeling significantly “better”. In my stupor yesterday however I managed to have an insane bit of luck. I happened to be watching my twitter feed at just the right moment, when Rift tweeted that they were just about to give out some Wilds Packs. They posted a photo with I believe six different codes on it, and I picked the smallest one… and started typing. Apparently my fingers were fast enough because much to my shock I saw a note in my transaction history that said the Wilds Pack was added to my account. Also much to my shock… I thought this was the basic pack that just included the new primalist class only, but instead it was apparently the $100 pack that includes a ton of other goodies as well including an insane dinosaur mount.

I think maybe that I violated the intentions of the class when it came to outfitting him. I rolled a dwarf, thinking that a dwarf with a big hammer/axe/thing would be kind amazing. Then when it came to actually setting up the wardrobe and picking a mount to use… things happened. Now I have my goggle wearing, leather clad, aetherbiker Dwarven Primalist. I played a little bit but very quickly realized that maybe when I am half awake is not the best possible time to play anything that requires a significant amount of reading. I did play enough to decide upon the Berserker prebuilt class for the time being. I considered going Titan which was the tanky build listed, but for the time being I think I am just going to be a pewpew hammer swinging dps. The starter primalist weapon looks kinda amazing, and honestly one of the big things that I look forward about playing him is that I will actually collect all of the low level gear appearances as I get stuff to drop for me. That was the negative about going into a major change like the wardrobe system with a high level character… that ultimately I was well past the gearing phase and all that I would end up physically seeing was new gear. Playing a low level character again will see me coming across all of that gear that I had and sold, or at least that is the hopes. However this is a journey for another day, one when I am not struggling to exist.

Questing Guardian

One of the negatives about playing Destiny as primarily an MMO player is that there are certain traits that carry over into the MMOFPS title. Namely that you actually find yourself caring about having quests hanging around in your quest log. Since the whole reading and making sense of things part of my brain was largely malfunctioning, I thought I would instead venture into Destiny and work one some of the things that have been looming over my head. Namely the “High-Value Targets” quest. On paper it sounds simple enough, that you need to defeat several of these High-Value targets… 3 in the Cosmodrome, 3 on the Moon, 3 on Venus, 3 on Mars, and 3 on the Dreadnaught. The problem being that in order to qualify as a high-value target, it has to be one of those special patrol missions that ask you to go kill a given mob somewhere in the patrol zone that is marked with a red star. To make matters more interesting… I learned that these only come from special patrol beacons that are also marked with a star. Theses seem to be largely rare and absolute luck of the draw if you will see them. So as a result I managed to complete the Cosmodrome and Dreadnaught quickly… but struggled with having not found a single high value target patrol on Venus or Mars.

So last night I spent pretty much the entire night wandering around various planets looking for star beacons, and when I did not find them… running as many patrols as I could in the hopes of making them spawn. At about 9:30 last night, moments before we were heading to bed… I managed to complete the quest. Additionally I also managed to complete Taken Assault: Mars which gave me enough Queen’s Wrath faction to finally start opening up bounties on the Reef. This also opened up The Wolves of Mars quest chain for Variks which involves doing a bunch of shit involving the Fallen. From what I have heard this will reward a Boolean Gemini at the end of it… which in truth will probably be a Year One variant… but if it works like Last Word did, it also opened up the Year Two blueprint for me. So in theory I can save up my marks and purchase the 280 version as well. In any case I had a lot of fun last night faffing about working through the various quests and bounties. There is something relaxing and mindless about wandering around and taking things out with an assortment of really fun to use weapons. The other big progress I made is I collected enough data using a shotgun, so I am now on the step where I need to disassemble a bunch of blue or better ones. I had a handful stowed away just for this occasion but it was nowhere near enough. As a result I will be farming engrams in the hopes of getting more, and in theory I need to just start running strikes. I did however manage to make it to 287 light when wearing my “best” gear, which is slow but palpable progress.

Death to Darkspawn

October 6, 2014 by Belghast

Lost in a World

One of the aspects of a good game that I have always been amazed by is just how lost you can become existing in that world. With the upcoming release of Dragon Age: Inquisition mid month, several of us have started re-playing origins in an attempt to get a new save file to import into Inquisition. I realize that the process for importing works a little differently than it has in previous Bioware games, and is done through an intermediary program called Dragon Age Keep that also allows you to choose the decisions you would have liked to have had from previous games. However with some experience with the Mass Effect 3 “comic book” tool, it tended to also make a lot of really horrible decisions for me. One of the most enjoyable experiences I have had with a game was playing through the entire Mass Effect series in sequence over the course of a Christmas break… so while the games in the Dragon Age series do not connect as tightly, I am hoping it will still be very rewarding.

Over the weekend I said that I had decided to start the “least” Belghast character possible for this play through. That I guess is not correct… the least recognizable character would have been me starting an Elven Mage. We all know that one is never going to happen, as I tend to be allergic to playing finger wigglers. Instead I basically picked something other than the high born warrior I always tend to play, and in this case that was a Dwarven Casteless Rogue. I love the Dwarves of the Dragon Age series, and having my very first play through be the Noble rogue pretty much ruined every other introduction storyline for me. That said the Casteless introduction is pretty great as well, and especially after having played through many of them… you see hints of the other introductions as you play. Like I know the events that are going on with the noble houses, and while they are only loosely alluded to in the casteless introduction… they are still very much there and very much the way they play out as a noble. I like thinking that there is a fixed story arc with multiple windows out onto it.

Death to Darkspawn

This game has always hit every trigger for me… in a good way. I love dark ominous demon filled landscapes where I am the only person with the tools to dispatch them. I love the political infighting and backstabbing and the identification of a truly wicked person that I can focus my anger and rage towards. But I also like that apart from that central story arc, nothing is really certain and the game doesn’t judge you much for dabbling in the grey areas. It is an absolute feat that this game manages to make me NOT side with the mage haters. Given my feelings towards finger wigglers, it would make sense that I would want to help the Templars eradicate the “Mage Threat”, but instead each and every play through I cannot bring myself to go against the Circle Mages. Maybe it is because I like the character of Wynne too much, or maybe they just manage to create a narrative that makes me actually care about magic users.

Granted personally I greatly prefer the side of the Apostates, and generally their cause is one that I can get behind whole heartedly. I am a huge fan of Morrigan, but I have found her character to be extremely polarizing even among my close friends. She is dark and brutal and abrasive… but I always enjoy listening to her quips. One of the things I am doing this time around that I have not in previous plays is varying my group composition based on what I know my intended action will be. Generally speaking if you make Morrigan happy…. you won’t make Alistair and Leliana happy for example. So I hedge my bets and end up simply not bringing the person that I know I will end up pissing off. It is a strange line to walk but at this point I have some duplication of most of the roles I might need. There are certain characters that I just absolutely cannot stand… I am looking at you Zevran. Though this time around I am finding myself softening to that character, especially after seeing him in Dragon Age II.

Slowly Progressing

I am taking my sweet time moving through the game. At this point I am just shy of 20 hours spent and have saved the Circle of Mages as well as Redcliffe Castle. I am however trying really hard to do every single side quest in a given area. This means that while I can just blow through Lothering… I am trying to do all of the little side missions which end up dragging out that area considerably longer than you might think. In a way I am treating this as though it were my last time playing Dragon Age ever. I realize that is likely not going to be the case, but I guess I am trying to make every choice count since I will ultimately be importing this game into Awakenings and Dragon Age II before finally importing the entire mess into Dragon Age Inquisition next month. On this play through I am more acutely aware that I am building a world around me, a series of consequences that lead to other consequences later down the line.

This is a strangely different feeling than when you do the same process in the Mass Effect series. There you are living the legacy of one person, your version of Shepard… and it is a direct lineage from game to game. The choices you make on one game, are effect the relationships you have in the next game because you were the person that made them both times. Here you are setting up a conflict that spans multiple generations, and while you are creating ripples it is somewhat uncertain how the final events will play out. It is also playing through a game knowing the beginning and the ending but having the steps between be rather fluid and changing. This will make my fifth play through of Dragon Age Origin since release, and I am still finding little details that I don’t remember from previous plays. That and the fact that I am not bored with the game, really are a testament to just how good the writing is.

Sneaking into Denerim

Right now I am tempted to save my game and then make a run at getting to Denerim before completing any other areas. I would really like to resolve the whole Urn of Sacred Ashes business before moving too much further in the storyline. I have also never actually gone to Denerim this early in the storyline before. I have no clue what the rammifications of doing that are, but I already have several quest chains that take me there. So I think that might be the order for tonight, to create a good clearly labeled save game so I can roll back if I am not happy with the consequences started by my actions. That is one of the things that is interesting about Dragon Age is just how unforgiving it is when it comes to your choices. It is super easy to close off a quest chain to you by picking the wrong answer… and there will never be another way to get that option back. In some of the later Bioware games they have given us the ability to escape out of a dialog tree, but this being a fairly early one has really strictly binding choices. As such it is making me super careful about what I end up choosing.

If it has been awhile since you last played Dragon Age then I highly suggest you dust off your copy and give it a proper play again. I am currently playing the “Ultimate” edition that comes preloaded with all of the DLC… and there was quite a lot of it. I’ve found this game plays significantly better through Origin than it does through Steam, as anytime I have tried to play through Steam I have issues with it not recognizing my DLC as being “genuine” and the official Bioware answer to this is to hack the save game file to turn off the protection bit. I would rather just play the game without doing all of that so I am using Origin and overall the experience is not too horrible. I have to say that Origin as a whole has gotten considerably better since its launch, and right now the only problem I really have with it… is that it is not steam. I still to some extent resent having to have a separate launcher just for Bioware games but the experience is worth it so for the time being I just deal with the frustration. Thankfully Ubisoft is taking steps to move towards better integration with steam so that the entire process will be transparent to the users. Unfortunately with the rather public falling out between EA and Valve… I doubt that will actually ever happen. In any case… I am having a blast with Dragon Age and look forward to completing it.

#DragonAge