magic Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Communing with Fae

August 10, 2015 by Belghast

Freemium Magic

While I still have aspirations to cease the swiss army posts… I guess in reality I live a fairly swiss army life. This weekend was really no different, and the one hundred plus degree temperatures just caused us to spend more time than normal indoors. When this happens I start to get a little wanderlust at least from the standpoint of what games I am playing. As a result this weekend I played a mixture of Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars the Old Republic, Minecraft, and some Magic Duels. You can blame the podcast we recorded Saturday for the later, because both Thalen and Kodra talked about playing it. I have several assorted versions of the Duel of the Planeswalker magic game cluttering my steam account. I end up picking them up when they go on sale and then only ever playing them a few times. Ultimately part of the excitement of magic for me is playing with physical cards and opening physical packs. We have joked about it before but “that new pack smell” is really a thing, and it can be intoxicating. That little tingle of excitement as you rush through the “commons” to find out what rare you got in that pack is a thing I have repeated thousands of times over the years. So is the sinking feeling when I see that rare is a blue or a white… the two colors that I most have a negative reaction towards. The real life magic really really wants me to play White, because I have an insane number of rare angels… but all I ever really want is the dark and sinister Black cards.

Right now I am still about halfway through the unlocking story of the White deck of Gideon Jura. The game does a really cool job of telling you the story of how each of the planeswalkers found their spark, which according to Kodra is the central focus of the Origins story line. The only negative that I have so far is that you have to wade through a lot of tutorials before the game just lets you play. Normally I would say these could be skipped but the game rewards you in gold for watching them, and that is gold that you will need later for purchasing packs. Where this gets really frustrating is when a new card mechanic is introduced and it stops whatever duel you are in the middle of to show you a tutorial on how that mechanic works. I can absolutely see however how this would be beneficial to brand new players, and even for me there are card mechanics that are being called by names that I don’t recognize in spite of fully understanding the game play behind them. The other big frustration with the Duels client is the fact that it crashed on me, numerous times… so I am guessing they are still having some issues. From what I can tell you stay connected to their servers even though you are essentially playing a single player match, and if that server connection wavers your game cannot seem to recover gracefully. I figure this is going to be something I piddle with from time to time when I am not in the mood for other games.

Communing with Fae

As I wrote yesterday Arcanist has always been the class that I struggled the most in playing. For whatever reason I have caught the desire to play it, and I spent most of yesterday working my way through content doing a mix of low level roulette, Haukke Manor, and guildhests. As a result early yesterday evening I managed to push across the line and ding 30 while in one of those Haukke Manor runs. After that it was chasing down two different job quests and learning how to be both a Scholar and a Summoner. The thing that I did not initially realize was the fact that the two Carby summons ultimately become the Faerie summons. I guess this makes sense, as without them somehow overwriting those low level abilities there would be no way for the job to scale down and effectively heal low level content. The other thing that I was not really expecting was how “un-healer-like” low level instances ultimately felt. My first dungeon as a Scholar ended up being Halitali… where I have exactly one useful heal button. So instead I just made sure I was standing next to the tank and dotted everything up. I am not sure when the class feels more “healer-ly” but until then I am just pretending I am still playing an Arcanist.

The other shocker for me was just how relatively easy the Summoner job quest ended up being. As you can tell by the Summon III icon, I had to fight Ifrit and after fighting him in several different versions… I have to say it was way easier than I expected it to be. I cast dots on all of the things, and then eventually he fell over… which I am guessing is how summoners are supposed to play? This play style is just so weird to me because it feels oddly passive. Maybe a better way of putting it is it feels like I am playing a completely different game than the rest of the people in my group. Much of the time leveling to 30 was spent tabbing through targets, applying dots, and then tabbing back to the first one to reapply dots after I had finished one circuit of the mobs. This just doesn’t feel natural to me I guess because it feels like the sort of triage that I do as a healer… but to damage all the mobs rather than heal all the players. I guess the truth is that I have never really successfully played a damage over time class, and it almost makes me want to fire up and play my Warlock again to see if this new outlook makes that class more enjoyable. In any case I now have a Scholar so I can begin leveling that through the instant duty finder queue. I should try and catch up to Tzi and Rylacus and run up with them.

Moon Raider

July 22, 2014 by Belghast

Edition Madness

I feel like the colorful descriptors that companies tack onto iterative versions of games has hit an all time low. Since the 80s we have been forced to play a progressively extreme number of versions of a game. During the 90s the Street Fighter franchise for example proved to us all of the ways it could not actually count to 3. We’ve suffered through Super, Hyper, Ultra, Zero, Alpha, Game of the Year, Ultimate, Legendary and innumerable other hardcore and extreme versions of the games we love. This morning as I idly checked Steam I spotted something that made my eye stop dead over it. We really have a game that is a “Velvet Edition”? What is next suede or cordura?

I keep thinking maybe this is a translation error somehow, but “Samten” doesn’t really sound much better. Maybe it is me, and I just have a negative connotation towards the word velvet, and maybe it is completely normal for someone to use that word in place of say “deluxe”. This is just a first for me, and I think maybe this whole descriptor thing has gone a bit far if we have arrived at fabrics now. I mean even though “game of the year” bundles are completely inappropriately named, considering very few of them have actually won a “game of the year” award… at least for awhile they were something standardized. I personally would rather they go with something like “complete edition” considering that is what we are talking about… the version that includes all the damned DLC in one place. Though I guess game companies would probably frown on admitting they have been rationing game content to us for years.

Moon Raider

We had a few errands to run last night, and by the time I got home I was not sure what exactly to play for the evening. Since this weekends podcast, Kodra has been urging me to finish up Wolfenstein so he could have someone to talk about it with. So I opted to work on that, and while I did not quite make it through the game I figure I am pretty close to the ending. I suffered a series of technical difficulties where I would crash out and have to load back in restarting me at the previous save point. When this happened the last time I figured I would call it a night, as it seemed like I was probably going to have to repeat a significant chunk of the previous level. It seems to be related to when I go into a cutscene and then come back out of it.

It is really hard to find screenshots that I can show off that don’t really give away anything major about the game. Well other than the fact that you get to experience Nazi’s on the moon… but that doesn’t really give much away plot wise. I feel like that is the aspect of the game I enjoy the most is seeing how this alternate reality evolved without the influence of the United States. So much of everything we experience today is because of the global export of American goods and American values. As a culture we have had a death grip on the entertainment industry and the internet as well… and as a result everything that comes from other countries often feels like an odd remix of something we would see in the United States. So to see this reality that evolved entirely in a different direction is interesting to me. I applaud the level designers because all of the little details feel like they come from a completely different place.

This game is definitely going to warrant a second play through, because there is a single decision that you make early on that causes the game to go in different enough directions that from that point on the chapters of the game branch depending on your choice made. It seems that Kodra and I picked completely different routes, and I think it will be interesting to talk about the differences between them. I don’t feel like this is probably a discussion we can really have on AggroChat because it would be impossible to do this in a way that is not spoilerific. I really hope all of you took advantage of the QuakeCon pricing and picked up this awesome game when it was essentially half price. I have a feeling that this game is going to experience quite a bit of third party modding, and I hope that sooner or later they bring out a multiplayer addon. One of the more enjoyable game play and narrative experiences I have had in awhile.

Sparse Next Few Days

The next few days are going to be interesting for me. Today is technically my last day at work this week, but just because I am off does not mean I won’t actually be working harder. My wife is part of a crew putting on a mathematics conference here in town, and I have opted to take off from work to help her with it. I know Wednesday for example I will be operating an impromptu shuttle service, and then the other days I will likely be filling in a tech support role and general “gopher”. With all of these constraints it will be interesting to see what I end up blogging about, as I doubt I will be playing that many games.

That said it sounds like at least one of the conference attendees is a Magic the Gathering fan, so I will be bringing up a box of decks just in case that happens. Speaking of Magic… I really have no clue what Wizards of the Coast was thinking when they came up with the 2015 product designs. Once upon a time the off brand products that you can get in your grocery store that are branded as Always Save or Best Choice or even Sam’s Choice were simply called “Generic”. They featured white labels with start sans-serif writing on them, similar to government commodities. So I cannot look at this magic the gathering set without thinking “oh its generic magic”. I feel like we arrived at this point out of some sort of hipster minimalist design ethic… but yeah it is just not working for me. I guess they have used every other color of the rainbow lately for the primary theme of a set… so sooner or later they were going to get around to white.

It will be interesting to see how the next few days shake out. Likely you will be getting some more personal posts. Right now the plan is to take my laptop and work on editing my NaNoWriMo novel between times I am needed. The only problem with this is that the guest wifi at the school is horrible. My phone will allow me to tether to it, but not sure how much I can do that without AT&T getting pissy with me. We are grandfathered in on one of the unlimited plans, and I don’t really want to do much to jeopardize that. The positive is that the Galaxy S5 shipped with unlocked tethering software, and it is not like I had to do anything to get it up and running. I just expect that all of the websites I would want to look at would be blocked without it.

#Wolfenstein #MagicTheGathering

Let There Be Rangers

May 23, 2014 by Belghast

Dabbling with Danger

At work there are a bunch of us who have at one point or another played Magic: The Gathering. I don’t play the game regularly, because I simply do not have the time to commit to going to a shop regularly to play. However I still love playing the game, and it is wrapped up in so much nostalgia for me. My first starter deck was from unlimited, and I dabbled a bit here and there through Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and started getting serious about the time revised came out. I played super actively until the launch of Ice Age and then for one reason or another got out of it. At that point I was really into the World of Darkness games, and was doing far more pen and paper than magic… also I started college and seemed to have far less disposable money.

I flirted with the game again my Senior year, because there was this great culture at the local game shop. I came in at the tail end of Mirage, played through Visions and was super involved with Weatherlight… probably my favorite expansion to date. When I left college I also left the community I liked hanging out with an playing magic regularly, so I stopped playing again. Since then I have picked up the occasional pack of cards to see what was new, but never really got involved with the game again. That was until I found out that we had a bunch of former magic players at work, and I thought it would be awesome to foster a sort of lunchtime M:TG group. Yesterday I got to break this awesome reaper miniature again, as I tutored my friend Rae through her first game of Magic. This could end in madness, but my hopes is that we can just develop a casual magic culture to hang out and enjoy.

The Ancient Library

Last night while waiting on the pizza to arrive and Elder Scrolls Online to patch, I decided to attempt to play some more Final Fantasy 5. I had a near mishap where I thought for a moment I had lost my saved game and had to revert back to a period of time when I was still in white mage hell. However that was not the case, and I managed to restore back and get to where I should have been. I kinda went crazy at one point and ground my way to 19… which means that in order to be safe for the Ancient Library I needed to be at least 21. So most of the time waiting on the Pizza was spent grinding aimlessly trying to get the last two levels so I could start my quest proper. You might ask why I need to be 21?

If you enter the Library of Ancients, there are various creatures that can cast the dreaded Level 5 Death spell. This will target any character with a level that is a multiple of 5, aka ending in 5 or 0 and pretty much instant kill them. This means in order to be safe you have to enter the library at something OTHER than that. Now if you have a Blue Mage, you want to de-synchronize your party so that you have exactly one party member at a “5” level so you can learn it. Both fortunately and unfortunately I do not have one so I just needed to be safe as I finished the library. The above monster is Byblos the guardian of the library, and I found him pretty easy considering I had ground to a much higher level than you normally need for the encounter. Most people natively get here around 15, so at 21 I was significantly higher.

Goodbye Ship, Hello Chocobo

Final Fantasy 5 is a story about destroying modes of transportation and then curiously finding a new one to replace them. After the library you find new information that allows the fire-powered-ship to start moving again without the power of the fire crystal. Unfortunately as you move to your next destination you encounter an earthquake and the fire-powered-ship gets sucked into a giant whirlpool. Conveniently you just happen to be on an island that just happens to have a Black Chocobo Forest. I know from lore that these are Black Chocobo, but I will be damned if this one is not pink… so you pilot your Pink Chocobo around the world visiting all the destinations that you missed and picking up any gear or spells that you might need.

Let There Be Rangers

The big takeaway from the encounter with the Pink Chocobo, is that it had the last two fire crystal jobs stuck in its gullet. One of which was the Ranger job that I had been waiting patiently for. This means from this point out I must have a White Mage, Mystic Knight and Ranger in the party at all times. I opted to shift Faris and Galuf to rangers in order to teach them the Rapid Fire ability as soon as I could. Basically you enter a period where you can reach most of the world so it is a great time to finish up anything you left unfinished. I headed up to Istory and went ahead and defeated Ramuh for example. Since I do not have a summoner in my party, this was a completely optional step… but Ramuh is generally my favorite of the espers so I figured I would go ahead and fight him.

Once finished messing around the room I proceeded with opening the way to the Tower of Ruin. The desert area is one of my least favorite, mostly because the sandworm fight is a pain in the butt. Considering my party composition, it was not really technically difficult, just annoying in that the Sandworm jumps between one of three holes on the screen. You don’t target the worm itself, but instead the hole it came out of, this means that more often than not you can target a hole and it might have moved before the attack lands. With the white mage, I was able to heal through anything the worm could throw at me, and it was simply a matter of wearing it down. Mostly this just meant that my rangers could not benefit from their !Aim ability, as it took way too long for it to actually resolve the damage.

Airship Go!

Once you complete the Tower of Ruin you get rewarded with access to the airship, and find out that your fire-powered-ship didn’t get destroyed, but instead fell into a chamber underneath crescent isle. Now you have this really awesome base that you can launch either the fire-powered-ship or airship out of. You end up faffing about running several mini missions all in the effort of trying to teach your airship how to flight higher to reach the earth shrine that has been elevated up into the air by the power of yet another crystal draining… and ultimately crystal destroying machine. We are nearing the sequence of events that I hate each time I play this game.

The Earth Shrine is guarded by four missile launchers and the extremely frustrating boss Soul Cannon. This is the point at which I stopped playing for the night. I made an attempt at the missile launcher fights, and while I managed to get through one of them… I didn’t back out and save like I should have. The big problem with the fights are the “rocket punch” attacks that cause your characters to go confused, and the Rocket Launcher that is an insanely nasty percentage based attack. Thing is if I can get enough time to Spellblade, the Rocket Launchers drop fast but I seem to spend my entire time trying to heal up and un-confuse my party. If I am struggling with the Rocket Launchers I have having trouble fathoming just how bad the Soul Cannon encounter will be. I am thinking this might be time to grind again and get a level advantage.

Being 22 has allowed me to just steamroll the encounters leading up to this one, but that level gap has closed on me. So I am thinking I will spend some time over the weekend watching TV and grinding away to build back up a buffer. Additionally I would really like it if most of my characters had Rapidfire as an option for the Soul Cannon encounter. I think I got through it during last years Four Job Fiesta by double casting lightning attacks, so if I can get two Mystic Knights with Rapidfire I might be able to do the same kind of trickery. Spellblade is a super powerful ability, but it sucks in that it takes one turn to cast in which you essentially do nothing. The Soul Cannon sequence is one of the big hurdles that most players get hung up on, so I don’t feel too bad that I am having to rethink my strategy before moving forward. I am sure with the Black Mage/Red Mage combo Kodra was able to just absolutely destroy it. What I really need is a bunch of Ribbons, but I think at this point in the game I only have access to the one I have.

#FF5 #FinalFantasy #MagicTheGathering #MTG

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.