heroic Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Curve Beating

December 22, 2016 by Belghast

I can in all honesty say I did not really expect to be placing this clipping of a screenshot on my blog. When we cleared Normal Emerald Nightmare… I was pleased as hell. When we turned around and cleared Normal Trial of Valor… I was ecstatic. When we started work on Heroic Emerald Nightmare… I figured that it would give us a challenge right up until the point that Nighthold Normal was released and that we would ultimately switch gears. I mean Nighthold is supposedly slotted for January 17th… which is only 26 days away depending on how you count today. We however started making some significant progress in Heroic Emerald Nightmare… and in truth I didn’t really dare to hope we would manage to get through it yet. We have several friends who are raiding mythics in a much more serious capacity than our guild raid. The awesome thing is… we are apparently the sort of raid that they still enjoy coming along on because of the interaction between all of the members. So in part I chocked our Heroic victories up to the number of “ringer” dps we ended up bringing in as a result. Last night we were extremely short on numbers and missing most of this overpowered dps that we had so often been bringing. I had resigned myself to hopefully repeating our previous progress, and just enjoying the process.

Now is the point where I tell you… that I can not possibly be prouder of my guild. Instead of struggling with the absence of some mythic ringers… we instead continued to perform at an admirable level as we not only defeated… but one shot several of the bosses we have never attempted. We had some early struggles as we essentially got back in the swing of the raid… for me not being able to make the last two Friday nights I felt more than a little rusty. However by the time we reached “Spiderbirb” we were trucking along nicely and managed the first new one shot of the evening. Similarly we seemingly rolled over Ilgynoth… or at least pulled out a victory doing the fight in a single burn phase. From there we worked on Cenarius and once again managed to pull out a victory in a single attempt, which lead us to only having Xavius to work on. This was sitting at 9 pm my time… and I thought to myself that we were in a good position to get a bunch of attempts in… giving us at least 30 minutes before the official end of the raid. I also thought that with it being the holidays… we might be able to extend a bit to get the kill if needed. It turns out we didn’t need all of that time on attempts, because we had a very close first shot and managed to pull out the victory on attempt two giving us still about fifteen minutes to spare before our official ending time. It was a really great night, and I am amped about our prospects going into Nighthold. We will for the first time this expansion be starting new content on exactly the week it comes out, which is a bit of a point of pride for me. I love feeling like we can be casual, but still extremely successful.

By the time the raid was over I realized that I had not actually spent any time with the Luna that evening. So I took her into my office to chill out and get some attention while I opted to play some Destiny. At this point I am 399 light… and have limited my list of needs down to replacing my 394 Ghost Shell, 399 boots, and 399 Heavy Weapon. I had a moment of extreme excitement at one point in the evening when I got an exotic heavy engram… which decoded at 399 instead of the 400 I have been getting from the SRL event. Before long I was joined by my friend Grace and we hung out doing some racing. She was working on one of the quest steps where you had to get ten races where you place in the top three… and I maybe just maybe played a little aggressively with the other drivers. There was at least one time when I happened to ram into the person who was closing in on her then third place slot. Who knew you could tank with a speeder bike? In truth I had seen a few clans doing this over my time racing… where they were essentially clearing the way for their friend to come in and snatch the first place position so I considered it completely fair game. That said she managed to pull out a few come from behind second place victories like the one I decided to screenshot here. The bonus of the entire night was that in both cases we improved our light levels… and simply hanging out and chatting made the whole racing thing go significantly faster.

I have honestly had some extremely good luck during the SRL with crucible weapon drops. Last night was apparently no different as I managed to pick up a really nice version of the NL Shadow 701X. Firstly it has triple tap which is a stat I love for boss encounters… or anything else I am pretty certain to land three precision shots in rapid succession. To crank up the stability is Hand-laid stock… which ultimately reduces the range but I can live with that at 47. Finally hidden hand helps with triple tap in making it slightly easier to get those precision shots… so all in all the weapon has some really nice synergy. The only negative is this is a scout rifle… and I don’t really tend to use a lot of scout rifles. This lives in the Mida Multi-Tool family, and actually has a higher rate of fire… which makes it feel extremely spammy. Now if I could have replaced Hidden Hand with Full Auto… this would have been just about my favorite scout rifle. In any case this is definitely something worth holding onto and other than my Hand of Judgement from Challenge of Elders… I didn’t really have that many legendary scout rifles that I enjoyed using. In any case that still gives me a good roll for Eyasluna, and god rolls for Hopscotch Pilgrim and potentially NL Shadow 701X coming from SRL so far.

Helya Defeated

December 8, 2016 by Belghast

In the past I have talked about our youngest cat Kenzie and her proclivity for playing fetch with rubber bands. Well the game has changed… and it has shifted from being one of those “once in awhile” things to an all the time thing. We will often times wake up with a rubber band beside us in bed and her expectantly prancing back and forth next to it waiting for us to throw it. This morning for example as I got up, showered, and got dressed I threw the rubber band a couple dozen times. Sometimes she would shift things up and bring the rubber band back to my wife instead of me… but nonetheless it was certainly clear that it was fetch time. I am wondering however if I can also change the game… and teach her how to fetch things like balls. The first cat that would play fetch that I had ever seen was Dee Dee the now fat and sassy cat that a neighbor of ours has. She however tended to favor these foam balls that you could get from PetSmart. We tried this with several of our cats but it never really took… however now that the fetching behavior has firmly planted itself in Kenzie I am wondering if we can also teach her to fetch balls.

We had a pretty great raid night as far as raid nights go. Some time ago we shifted into having a progression night which is Wednesday and a farm night which is Friday. On the farm night we attempt to clear Emerald Nightmare normal as fast as we can, and on the progression night we have been working on Trial of Valor with the initial hopes of being able to clear it in time for the launch of Nighthold. However with the 7.1.5 patch being pushed back… it seems like we have all the time in the world for that goal. Last week we managed to get our first Guarm kill and we were able to repeat that feat this week… however it took a few tries. The part I am proudest of however is the fact that we managed to defeat Odyn this week as a one shot, which given how many moving parts there are on that fight…. I am pleased and amazed and even phase three felt pretty solid. I think folks finally started dropping things where they should be dropped which allowed the tanks a lot more flexibility of placing Odyn where he needs to be during that final burn. As far as Helya goes… it still feels like a mess but the attempt where we managed to push her into phase 3 with most of the raid up… we also managed to kill her. I was recording last night while we raided so was able to pull screenshots of the exact moment she went down and in truth… the raid as a whole was still in a pretty decent position.

Since we still had a lot of night left to go we went over into the Emerald Nightmare and started working on heroic bosses. Previously we had made a few attempts on Nythendra and more or less had the correct positioning and such down. We lost a handful of people between the zone switch because they needed to go for early work and such, and we adjusted a little bit. The shocking thing is… in theory we made a one shot as we were sorta in a slow wiping state when the boss finally went down. As you can see in the screen shot my entire team was dead, and I had just literally blown up from the rot debuff when the boss went down. It was messy… but I will take it because she dropped the best possible loot. She dropped me an exact upgrade, stat for stat… simply the heroic version of the Insect-Etched Chestplate that I was already wearing. From the previous encounters of the night I got a few pieces of loot… that I am unfortunately going to have to do some simulation to determine if they are truly upgrades or not.

There was a bit of back and forth to determine what exactly was our next encounter to attempt. Some folks were leaning towards Ursoc, but even on normal that is a healing battle to try and keep the tanks alive. Emerald Dragons however seemed to be a little more attempt-able for the next step… and did not actually introduce any new mechanics. So we set forth to take down the dragons that used to give us nature resist gear back in the day. All in all it went pretty smoothly with the first pull almost netting us a kill. We reached a point where normally we thought we could simply burn them down without doing a tank swap… and because we didn’t swap it stunned the entire raid. Still kicking myself a little bit about that judgement call, because while I asked the raid… it was ultimately myself and Art that decided not to swap. We did however come back and get the kill almost immediately after. There was a vote to see if we wanted to keep moving… but we were already sitting at our normal raid end time and considering that I didn’t get much sleep last night I voted against it. I like the way our raid does this thing… in that if we want to extend and make attempts on a boss after our normal raid end… we simply throw up a readycheck and if anyone… or at least a significant unrecoverable portion says no we stop. I have to say this whole recording thing is handy as hell because it was super easy for me to pull screenshots of the moment of death this morning.

Spindle Envy

November 3, 2015 by Belghast

Game of the Month

This month for AggroChat Game Club we decided to do something a little different. This was the brain child of Tam, who wished we had the time to really dig in and explore a much larger game. If you’ve noticed we tend to pick relatively short games for the Game Club because it gives us a shot in hell of beating it before the end of the month and we record the show. We also tend to pick relatively cheap games, making it easier for all of us to pick the title up… which a lot of times limits us to Indie titles. Instead this month we are digging wholeheartedly into post apocalyptic Boston… in Fallout 4. Since we are hitting that time of the year when people start to have conflicts, and we have decided to make Fallout span two months. So the plan is to have it be both the game of the month for November and December, with a bit of a preview show at the end of November to talk about our progress so far. Then around Christmas a tell all show talking about our feelings about the game and more importantly our experiences. This is the sort of game where everyone who sits down in front of it will have slightly different experiences, and at least to some extent I plan on trying to keep a running journal of what all I find in the wastes.

Fallout and I go far back, and I can honestly say I have been a huge fan of the series since its launch. I remember going to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy for the PC shortly after it launched, and pretty much losing all sense of time playing it. I wish I could say that I went as far back as Wasteland, but alas I did not. I remember the game, I remember people talking about it… but when it existed I simply did not have a computer. Fallout is one of those games that changed the way I felt about PC gaming in general. In the years prior to it, I was pretty much heavily a Super Nintendo gamer… thinking that Final Fantasy and the JRPG thing was the superior gaming experience. Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment… changed all of that and I started moving heavily away from the consoles and focusing almost entirely on PC RPGs and eventually allowing myself to get sucked into the MMO world. So it is with zero hyperbole that say that Fallout shaped the way I feel about gaming, so when a new one releases… I end up almost vibrating with excitement. I realize in the coming months I am pretty much going to be dead to the world apart from poking my head into the occasional game here or there. For at least the first several weeks my blog is pretty much going to be entirely devoted to my travels in post apocalyptic Massachusetts. I am hoping that you will join me in this adventure, and we will sort out how best to convey your experiences so we can talk about them on the podcast as well.

Lost to Light

Yesterday the mission in Destiny called “Lost to Light” was the daily heroic, and as a result that meant Black Spindle the exotic sniper rifle was once again available. I had plotted and schemed all day long about this being the night we would actually go do this. I was so phenomenally wrong…. but we at least made an attempt. I grabbed Carthuun and Squirrel Pope and we made a valiant attempt. Earlier in the day Squirrel had actually managed to get through the quest with a group, and while we didn’t succeed we didn’t do that horrible in the grand scheme of things. Basically I think we are still slightly too low light, but that seems to be the general problem… because I have no clue how to get over 300 reliably other than run the raid. Everything was going pretty smoothly, we destroyed the Ogre which started the sequence where we run through the hive fortress and branch off to go up onto the Ketch instead. Once on the Ketch we did fairly well for the most part, other than the room with all the snipers. It took us a lot longer in that room than it probably should have, which made everything feel that much more stressful. We were sitting roughly at the 5 minute mark when we set foot into the final room to fight the taken version of Taniks. From there… things just went bad… we died a lot… we failed to knock out one of the blights in the far back of the room… and we simply were not doing enough damage to the boss fast enough.

From there we decided to lick our wounds and head into Nightfall, because according to Squirrel it would be far easier than what we just went through. I am not disappointed mind you in our progress… it at least gives us a goal to work towards. Nightfall had a few frustrating moments but we took it nice and slow after the rushed experience of trying to clear to and defeat Taniks in ten minutes. When we finally downed Alak-Hul I got lucky enough for him to drop his unique helmet, which I am now rocking after some fiddling with it. I really love collecting these unique items, like the arms with the chain fist from the bond brothers strike. For the Nightfall itself I was awarded a 4th Horseman, which sadly I already had… so it pretty much immediately became an exotic shard which is never a bad thing. I’ve talked about this before but as far as shotguns go… I just cannot think of a situation where I would want 4th Horseman over Invective. From there we attempted to run a few heroics… which we got through the first one without issue… then during the second one Carth disconnected. He has been having some internet issues lately… and I forgot to set the group to “locked” so the game filled for us… and we ended up finishing the restorative mind with a stranger. All in all… which we had some frustrations it was still a really fun night, and I am hoping to be able to get in again tonight and do some more fun stuff.

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.