mage Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Flamereaving

March 6, 2024 by Belghast

While I am still very much pushing my main Belgrevious the Echo Warpath Void Knight to 100, every so often I need a break. Lately, I have been tinkering with a Spellblade Mage, specifically one focused on Flame Reave, Firebrand, and Flame Ward. My friend Tam had talked at length about how much he was enjoying the Spellbade mastery and how specifically it was playing into his core fantasy of a melee mage. So I decided to give it a shot and ran up BelSpellReave to play with this. I believe he shifted his damage to Lightning, but for me setting things on fire will always be my happy place. I have to say I have gotten much faster at the campaign for Last Epoch and I think probably in total it took me around five hours to level from beginning a character to defeating Majasa and entering the Monolith. This is much faster than I am at getting through the Path of Exile campaign, and I am not even using any of the skips available in Last Epoch.

I have to admit when the concept of “Melee Mage” came up, it wasn’t necessarily this. Generally speaking, I expected to be swinging a weapon that was enchanted with magic… almost a Lightsaber for lack of a better description. What the Spellblade is doing instead is casting a very short-range blade-like spell that extends out in front of them. Essentially you have Flamebrand shown above or Shatter Strike that creates a weird strike that sort of wraps around your character. Mana Strike is the one that feels the closest to what I would have expected a Spellblade to feel like, but it feels super weak and is a default mage thing, not something attached to the specialization. It does not live up to my mental picture of what caster melee would look like, but I can roll with pretty much anything given that I am forced into the role of a caster in most of the characters I play in Path of Exile.

What is however a lot of fun is Flame Reave. By default, it is a cone that shoots out in front of you, but with the addition of the unique Sunwreath, it changes to a ring of fire that shoots out from your character. With points in the tree, you can make this ring return to your character causing it to deal another pulse of damage as it shrinks back down. It feels really good running around the map, gathering up a ton of mobs, and then firing off a few Flame Reaves to clean them up. The problem with this however is that I am constantly out of mana because I think in total I can shoot off four of these before it entirely drains my mana pool. This is one of the core problems I have with the design of Last Epoch… is that there does not seem to be a way to properly “fix” your mana problems. In Path of Exile, you can take actions that will make it so you effectively have an unlimited mana pool and never have to stop your most fun abilities. I’ve yet to truly figure out how to do this with most abilities in Last Epoch.

I realize that a lot of my current woes can almost directly be traced to the fact that my gear is a complete mess. Predictive loot is awesome for leveling a character and finding things that you can actually use… but it royally sucks for leveling alts that are of different base classes. I am wearing almost entirely a bunch of not-exactly ideal unique items because that is what I have in droves laying around that I can throw on a character. I am just now starting to get decent mage drops and I figure as I keep swapping out more of these items the character will perform significantly better. Uniques are a great boost in power while leveling… but that starts to become a hindrance as you near the end of the campaign and actually need some mana and survivability.

I absolutely skyrocketed through the campaign but hit a bit of a wall when I reached Majasa for the first time. She was simply dealing more damage to me faster than I could generate ward. I have really bad health and cannot seem to generate ward fast enough to make up for that fact. I was able to rip through Monoliths without problems and put on a few more levels and then finally came back and killed her at level 60 with fewer problems. In those few levels, I had done some swapping around of gear and talent points to try and focus more on survival and less on wholesale murder. That is one huge positive of the Spellblade though. It can certainly do a proper murder and has zero issues shredding bosses. If I can ever solve my ward woes and mana malfunctions… it will be a pretty dang fun build.

I’ve been through so many phases with this character in the last two days since starting it. I’ve fallen in love with the clear speed while doing the campaign, been frustrated with how weak the survival feels, and then reached a place of acceptance that it is never going to feel as sturdy as my Void Knight but certainly has faster-killing potential. Would I play one of these again? Probably not… or at least not without learning some significant lessons on how to fix some of its problems. I’ve never played a ward character before, and I essentially need to learn how to make them feel good. I also need to swap out almost all of my uniques for properly rolled exalted gear… which is simply going to take time in the monolith. It will be a pet project for when I get tired of spinning and winning.

Primalist is Strong

February 13, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of this weekend playing some more of the Last Epoch Beta, largely because it is too much of a pain in the butt to switch back to the normal client on a whim. Entering the Beta required me to input a key and patch my client, which means I cannot easily play the normal game without reversing that process. I have to admit I vastly prefer when a game has a separate test client on Steam as New World did, but I am rolling with it for now. We talked about this game a bit on the podcast. Still, considering I had reached the beginnings of the endgame on the Necromancer, I opted to try out a few other classes rather than grind away and risk burning myself on the game before the multiplayer launch.

As a further sign of my growth as a human being… I opted to give the finger-wiggliest of classes a shot. Mage is actually pretty fun and I leaned in heavily to the lightning bolt that you start the game with. After a good number of upgrades I eventually wound up with a fairly wicked chain lightning attack and arced from enemy to enemy across the field. My core problem with the class however is that at least out of the box it felt exceptionally squishy. I’m wondering if some of the subclasses fix this, but it felt like I needed to zip around the field kiting mobs to keep from getting overwhelmed. I mean that is fine given that is how I expect a pure spellcaster-type class to feel, but it also wasn’t necessarily my jam.

The Primalist however was absolutely my sort of gameplay. What I found in this class is the Diablo III Barbarian-style gameplay that I had been missing with the Sentinel. Essentially I built into a design that focused on dual-wielding axes and running around with a retinue of animal friends. I focused my points on Leap and Swipe giving me good movement around the battle and a powerful area of effect main attack that causes lightning to course through the attackers and spawns little claw totems for added damage. Combine that with some heavy health regen on hit and kill and my Raptor, Wolf, and Crow dealing additional damage along with me make it seem like an extremely strong pure melee option.

Helping this build are some neat uniques that I picked up along the way. First up is a pair of axes called Taste of Blood that makes it so that I cause bleeding on my targets and then additional hits cause those bleeds to tick down even faster. Then there is the chest I found last night called the Doublet of Onos Tull, which gives my minions a chance to create bleeds and increases the duration of those bleeds. These combine to make it so that I am dealing a lot of damage over time to my targets which really helps to whittle down boss encounters. Uniques in Last Epoch often seem to have way less of a downside than I am used to from Path of Exile.

I have to admit the Primalist is giving the Necromancer a serious run for its money when it comes to what I want to play when the multiplayer patch goes live. For the moment I have specialized on Beastmaster, but I could see serious reasons for going druid eventually since that is the mastery path that gives you access to the Werebear. For the moment however, I am more than happy to run around with my pack of animal companions while shredding things with a big cleaving attack. Rift had a warrior pet class that involved running around with a giant cat pet while decimating things with a two-hander and honestly… that is the feeling I am getting for this character so far.

March 9th can’t get here soon enough when I can sorta take off the training wheels and pour some serious focus into this game. It is impressive how far this game has come since the first few times I played it and ultimately turned my nose up in disgust. What I saw of the endgame systems over the weekend, makes me think that this will be capable of holding my attention for awhile.

Spending Time with Carby

August 9, 2015 by Belghast

Sleep Hates Me

I am getting a fairly late start this morning because insomnia is a pain in the ass. Last night we recorded an episode of AggroChat like normal, and ran around two hours in total recording time. By the time I did my initial edit pass and exported the show to MP3, it was already midnight. I decided to save my progress and finish things up this morning instead, and my hope beyond hope was that I would get a good nights sleep. The problem being that the moment my head hit the pillow I was awake. I kept thinking that if I laid there long enough I would eventually drift off to sleep, but as 2 am came and passed I was really wishing I had just stayed up long enough to publish the post last night. This is the worst part about insomnia is not necessarily the inability to get back to sleep, but the feeling that you are wasting your time by TRYING to sleep. Had I gotten up I could have done any number of things until sleep finally claimed me… but the harder you attempt to sleep the harder it seems to be to finally have it happen.

I’ve struggled with bouts of insomnia most of my life, and figuring out how to function on a couple of hours of sleep is an unfortunate survival skill I have had to learn along the way. Thankfully this happened on a Saturday night… and not a Sunday night… because I have done the sleep walking my way through work because I couldn’t sleep thing and it sucks. The key fault yesterday was that I ended up taking a nap thinking that it would help me stay up and edit the podcast. My system is wired in such a way that if I get any additional sleep I am screwed. I can take a thirty minute cat nap, and it will completely upset the balance of things can cause my body to think it got a full nights sleep. Granted a “full night” for me is between five and six hours of sleep… and realistically anything more than that causes me to get groggy. Essentially I live my life in a permanent state of sleep deprivation, but unfortunately that seems to simply be the way I am wired to function. All of this aside the show was an extremely enjoyable one to record and we talked about a big umbrella of titles from Final Fantasy XIV, to Wildstar, to Sword Art Online… to the elephant in the room… the World of Warcraft Legion expansion announcement.

AggroChat 69 – Ahk Mourn and Key Limes

Content Density

I have this strong desire to level to the current cap in Wildstar, but the problem I ultimately have is this is an exceptionally content dense game. Normally speaking this is a good quality, but the problem is that I struggle to keep up with the quests before out leveling them entirely. In a game like Final Fantasy XIV it makes sense… so that you can save quests for other jobs, however in a game like Wildstar it just feels daunting when you realize that you are completing less than optimal quests just to dig down to the ones that matter again. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday playing around on my Human Warrior on Evinda yesterday, poking my way through the quests. Right now I am mostly focused on working through my path quests, but unfortunately I have only actually done about half of the ones available for the Galeras zone, and I am already feeling overwhelmed. I have to say this is not really my favorite area of the game, and I am more than ready to push past it… even though I know Whitevale is waiting on me. Whitevale more or less was the zone that killed my progress on my Chua Engineer, because the content was just so tightly packed.. and simply moving around became tedious.

As of yesterday I am sitting at level twenty, and I am considering just pushing through some dungeon runs rather than spending a bunch of more time questing. I had this overwhelming feeling yesterday that I spent a lot of time doing something… but whatever it was didn’t really accomplish much in the grand scheme of things. I did however set up a new outfit which I am pretty happy with. At some point I need to spend time searching the auctioneer for interesting appearances. Right now I don’t have any hats that I really like, so I am going with the cybernetic monocle as the best of the worst. This game so far is reminding me a little too much of Warcraft in the hat department, because I can’t really find any that I like. In World of Warcraft I habitually hit every single hat offering because they all looked stupid, and I am afraid that might also be my fate here. This is so strange since in Final Fantasy XIV I have dozens of hats that I love wearing… including the very awesome Bunny Samurai hat that I have been wearing most recently. Maybe I just have yet to find my way to the really cool threads yet. Right now I plan on leveling some more today and seeing if I can get a group going for a dungeon.

Spending Time with Carby

Arcanist has been the class that has eluded me the most in Final Fantasy XIV. I want to like it, because I adore running around with a giant sparkly carbuncle pet. The problem being it is a “finger wiggler” and quite possibly the “most” finger wiggly of all classes. I however thanks to the help of my AggroChat crew at least “get” how to play one. It is essentially put up dots on all of the things and check to see if it is dead yet. Generally speaking I pick something to play during our podcast and this week that honor fell to playing the Arcanist. I keep telling myself that if I can ever manage to get it to 30, then I will become a Scholar and life will be golden. I get to queue as a healer and see how the other side feels when it comes to dungeon healing, after playing a fair amount of White Mage. As of last night I am sitting at 26, and man does it feel like a really long ways to 30. The problem with dungeoning as an Arcanist is that it just feels so damned awkward. You have this strange mixed bag of tools, but only really end up using your dots and ruin as a spell of last resort. Occasionally I throw a heal if the tank is getting exceptionally low or if I am, but otherwise cycle through the adds… dotting each of them.. then returning to the first one and starting the process all over again (which is rarely needed because they are usually dead by then).

Essentially going forward it is my plan to run a low level roulette each day on the Arcanist because yesterday I managed to get a full level and a half out of it. Doing this should get me to thirty in good pace, and then I can figure out how to scholar heal! If nothing else now that I have gotten in my Carby plushes I have a minion Carby to follow me around. I have to admit that is part of my reluctance to level is the fact that I know going Summoner causes me to loose my Carbuncles. The Egis have grown on me, but they are in no way as cool as the Carbuncle. I can’t believe I am saying this… but I am actually jealous of Alphinaud and his Ruby, Onyx and Obsidian Carbuncles. Part of me hopes that they introduce a quest line that gives you these three Carbys as optional replacements for Garuda, Titan and Ifrit Egis. If they did that… I would absolutely have renewed vigor in my desire to become a summoner. As it stands now I feel like this is a class that has beaten me, and I want to push past any frustration and not let it win. If nothing else I do think the book casting animation looks pretty sweet… you know for a finger wiggler. Yeah… i’m going to go stab something with a sword or hit something with an axe now.

Hearthstone

October 18, 2013 by Belghast

Battle of Cards

I am getting around super late this morning to make a blog post. On a whim I decided to take Friday off, since for my wife it was her fall break. I figured the two of us could hang out around the house or do whatever. Then over night I noticed a rather frantic message from my boss. It seems like after 5 his boss had requested something by noon today… that would involve a lot of feedback and information from us worker bees. So as a result I got up around 8 am, got dressed, went out and grabbed breakfast and have been remote into work for the last hour working on the list of information. As a result… my normal early morning post is delayed.

Yesterday I was extremely pumped to get home, because over night I seemed to have received an email from Blizzard saying that my account had finally been flagged for the Hearthstone beta process. Since everyone and their brother is live streaming this on Twitch… I am assuming there is no actual NDA going on… or at least not one currently enforced. So as a result I snapped multiple pictures last night as I played and will be weaving them in here and there. I have to admit I went into this a bit skeptical… not really sure if I would like it or not. From the video I had seen, everything about the game feels rushed much like a LFG dungeon group. Even though you rarely think more than one round ahead… there is still a lot of strategy going on.

The Education

Day[9] has a really good series of videos walking through his first experience with the game, and I highly suggest you watch it if you are curious about how you get into the game. Basically Blizzard has done an amazing job of user education, in that to get started in the game you HAVE to play through a tutorial. Fortunately it does a really good job of slowly introducing you into the various mechanics, and as a result you can pick up the strategy of the game extremely quickly. You play through a series of NPC card fights…starting with Hogger and finishing with an Azerothian Super Villain that I won’t spoil for now.

Once you have finished with the tutorial it has taught you basically everything there is to know about the Mage deck. Essentially the decks are all themed after one of the World of Warcraft classes. I notice that Deathknight is conspicuously absent… so they must be intending to add that in as an expansion opportunity. For those who are familiar with the Duel of the Planeswalkers series of MTG games for consoles and steam… you will be used to the way you progress from here. Now you can take your mage deck and challenge the other classes, by defeating them you unlock the ability to play as that class.

The Sticky-ness

The biggest surprise for me is just how sticky this game was. I got home around 5 pm and started playing around 5:30. I ended up playing this game without pause until around 9:30.. and only then because some guild members needed me to tank a FFXIV dungeon run. I have to say that is fairly unheard of for me, when it comes to card games. I have copies of all of the Duel of the Planeswalker games that have been released, but have maybe logged 50 hours total among ALL of them. There was just something about the physical card game experience that never quite translated to the online version.

Last night over the course of the evening, I managed to unlock all of the different class decks. At various points through the evening I was rewarded with either gold or actual packs of cards. The game uses a quest like system to give you little goals to work towards. If you look above you can see that in the screenshot I have 2 of the 3 wins needed to earn 10 gold. There was another quest I had to level one of the classes to 10, and in doing so I unlocked a pack of cards. Essentially it seems like there are two kinds of cards you can get… Basic cards that are unlocked through completing quests and scenarios and leveling… and Expert cards that are unlocked through either purchasing or winning packs of cards.

The Money

Since this game is free to play, you have to be asking yourself… where do they make money. Well like always with any card game it is in the packs. I took a screenshot of the current store interface. You will notice that the packs that be bought with either in game gold currency that you earn by completing achievements or be purchased with real world currency. You can purchase a single pack with 100 gold, 2 packs for $2.99 ($1.49 each), 7 packs for $9.99 ($1.42 each), 15 packs for $19.99 ($1.32 each) or 40 packs for $49.99 ($1.24 each). So as you can see in buying in bulk like you would expect you keep getting more and more of a discount on the per pack price.

Through the course of play last night I earned 5 packs of cards either through a combination of gold or actually winning the packs outright. I have to say the sound design and animation are amazing… and really capture the same excitement of opening a real pack of cards. You can double click the pack to open it… or for a more tactile experience drag it open. Similarly all five cards in a pack come flying out onto the screen… but do so face down. This allows you to flip them over one by one similar to sifting through a physical pack of cards. They know their audience well and have put in a number of tactile hooks to increase the sense of suspense to see if you have something good or not.

Versus Players

Currently you have the option of playing progressively harder NPC decks, or setting out and playing some physical players. Quite honestly I have found playing players a bit easier than playing the expert decks. There are two PVP modes of play… the first of which is simply building a custom deck and then taking it on the road to fight against other players. The second of which is the Arena, which serves as this games “draft” mode, giving both a more random experience but also potentially a more balanced one.

I am not sure if this regenerates but you get at least one free Arena token, after that it appears to either cost 150 in game gold or $1.99 to unlock additional tokens. In the Arena you choose a class and then are presented with a series of three cards. The card you keep goes into your arena deck, and the other two are discarded. This continues on until you have chosen 30 cards for your deck. An Arena deck lasts until you have lost three times. At the end of the match you are rewarded based on how well you did. For me I got 2 sacks of gold 2 packs of cards and a rare paladin card for playing. I won three times and lost three times.

The interesting thing about the Arena is the fact that you don’t have to play it all in one sitting. So long as you have not lost your three matches you can continue playing arena. There is some bar of gems that fills up each time you win, but I am not 100% certain how that works. You might get punted out of the Arena if you win too often as well. Last night I played through a single arena match and then was off playing custom games with players. My little hunter deck seems to be doing pretty well, so I will likely return to doing some of that today. I have to say I am very pleasantly surprised in just how good of a game Hearthstone is.