molten core Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Alas Troll Side

February 17, 2016 by Belghast

Changed Plans

Yesterday morning I had every intent of coming home last night and pretty much playing Street Fighter V the entire evening. During the day I did a bit of googling and found out that Game Stop apparently carries the Hori Fight Commander 4 controller for use with PS3/PS4/PC. The Game Stop website indicated that a store not terribly far from where I work had “limited” stock so I decided to pop by over lunch. I’ve been bitten by the whole limited stock thing before, but since this was a wild goose chase anyway… I didn’t really mind it much. The last time I was in a Game Stop was to snap up $5 physical copies of Wildstar to convert into play time and digital goodies. When I got there, it took me a bit to locate the controller… and they did in fact only have one. The goofy thing however is that it was being closed out for $20 unlike the almost $50 price tag on Amazon. This seems like some horrible timing, considering that Street Fighter V was just released… and that folks will be seeking out fight pads…. but whatever… their loss and my benefit. I have to comment that this controller is really damned comfortable… way more so than the default PS4 controller when it comes to dpad and face button feel. If you can find one anywhere near as cheaply as I picked mine up… I highly suggest grabbing it.

When I got home from work I hooked up the new controller and booted into the game, where I honestly was undecided what exactly to do. The game reports cross console play, but as of yet I have yet to find anything even closely resembling a friends list. There is the ability to create a custom lobby of sorts… and in theory that might be the compromise. I know you set up a Capcom ID when you first boot the game, and if anyone needs mine it is once again “belghast” but you will have to be smarter than me in figuring out how to actually friend someone because I could not. For the most part I started working my way through the story mode, which unlocks alternate costumes and color schemes for the various characters. I made it roughly halfway through this when my wife got home from work with a friend of ours… and the three of us decided that the priority was to go find food. After eating silly amounts of Mexican food, I never quite made it back upstairs once we got home. So in theory I will pick up tonight when I first get home and continue unlocking the various story modes. All in all I like what I have seen of the game… which admittedly is not a lot. The game feels more deliberate and less twitchy than many of the other Street Fighter entries, so if you are someone who cut your teeth on Marvel Vs Capcom… you might find the game a little sluggish. For me who started on the original Street Fighter, the less frenetic pace is a big plus.

The Mission

Last night once I got back from eating…. I was a man on a mission. The mission was actually something that evolved over the course of the day, but the goal was pretty simple. Help Grace catch up and level her druid on Argent Dawn. Originally my thought was…. lots and lots of Hellfire Ramparts because well… when I was dual boxing WoW this was pretty much the go to instance for me when it came to pouring on some quick levels. So the first step was to hop on my Mage and port her little druid to Pandaria so she could bind someplace with portals. From there we met up in Shattrath and I flew her on my Obsidian Nightwing over to Hellfire. The only problem… at level 50 she could not zone in… and this is the point at which I remembered that World of Warcraft instances have level caps. So we ported to Stormwind since apparently they closed off the Dark Portal… because our original thought was Sunken Temple. From there we flew over to Blackrock Depths because in theory she should have been able to pick up several of the quests. We proceeded to lay waste to the Dark Iron empire, and through the course of that one instance she managed to pick up three levels. When we got down to the Molten Core gate, on a whim we tried to zone in…. and sure enough she was able to. Thinking “surely a raid gives good experience” we proceeded to lay waste to the entire place, and I did some of my most careful pre-clearing of a zone ever… shockingly she did not die once. Bad news however… she made like 2/3rds of a level in there but did manage to pick up some “moggy bits”.

From there we did in fact head towards Sunken Temple… which is now a completely nerfed joke. Firstly we completely missed the entrance because apparently at some point they moved it up near the top of the sunken pyramid instead of deep down inside the base. We did two clears of the place, and I would say that both times it took well less than ten minutes to clear the entire place. They apparently jettisoned “Troll side” of Sunken Temple and all that is actually there is the Green Dragon Flight stuff upstairs. We also noticed that none of the events actually required you to do anything… like I remember summoning Hakkar required you to drag snakes into the braziers or something of that sort… but this was a simple “click the pile summon a boss” scenario. From there we flew over to Lower Blackrock Spire thinking she was right about the appropriate level, and on our first clear…. I screwed up and forgot to grab the pike… meaning we couldn’t actually summon the optional boss. So we went out, reset and I managed to get that sequence of events right the second time. All in all the night took a little less than three hours, and we got the druid a total of seven levels. In theory… dungeon finder might have gone quicker. I have another theory, that is my Panda Monk is just slightly lower level now than her Druid… so I am wondering if we would be better served with me going Tanky and her going Healy and getting pretty much instant queues all the way to 100. Regardless it was a fun night… there is something relaxing about curb stomping old content and venturing back down nostalgic avenues.

Looking For Molten Core

November 26, 2014 by Belghast

Rose Colored Lenses

I have talked about this before, but many of my beliefs about World of Warcraft are in truth a product of the fact that I started raiding during the period that everyone refers to as “Vanilla”. The above screenshot is of our raid group the Late Night Raiders taking down Golemagg. In fact if I am placing this picture correctly, this is moments before I won the Giantstalker chest piece. There is so much nostalgia wrapped up in Molten Core for me, so much so that I pretty regularly returned there over the years to solo it just for that shot of nostalgia straight in the veins. While it used to take three hours of my Sunday night, to clear this place in full… it was worth every moment of it.

You would think that with all of this experience rooted in 40 man raiding and nostalgia about it… you would think I looked forward to a return to it. You would in fact be completely wrong. In many ways 40 man raiding was like a family trip, and you either bonded during it or learned to hate one another. There are folks that I raided with that I talk to on a daily basis and have become part of my extended family. There are additionally folks that I raided with that I would prefer never knowing they still existed, let along ever wanting to see them again. 40 man raids were this strange construct where 25 people who were paying attention, carried the 15 that were not to victory. It was a place of great victory, but also a place of great resentment, and I am more than happy to see that era of raiding dead and buried.

Looking For Molten Core

I have long held the belief that the people who have been clamoring over the years for a return to 40 man raiding, never actually raided in a 40 man environment. Either that or they did it once or twice with a really successful group that had everything “on farm” but never experienced the crushing defeat of having forty people doing something really stupid. I am struggling to find the exact tweet, but someone summed it up like this. Folks begged for 40 man raiding, and Blizzard did not want to return to it. As a result they gave us a 40 man raid, and made it LFR so we too would remember just how horrible it was. Last night as a guild we queued with roughly 25 members, hoping that if we brought all of the tanks, most of the DPS and a handful of heals… we would be able to turn what is normally sheer chaos into something functional. For the most part it worked, and in roughly two hours time we cleared all of the core. We had a few issues, like players pulling for us… which was pretty awesome because we had more than enough people to rapidfire kick them from the raid group.

The disturbing thing about the experience however was how much it felt EXACTLY like the actual thing. The experience of 25 people that know what they are doing, dragging along a bunch of people who are actively working against the strategy of the raid… that happened every single week. The problem with 40 man raiding was that almost no one had a stable of enough people to make sure it happened without fail every single week. As a result you had this grey area of folks that knew someone in the raid and could be pulled in when we were short. The truth is we were always short something, and always breaking in someone new that had never seen the content. LFR is pretty much the perfect representation of that shit storm of chaos, and to continue what the tweet said… whoever thought of making Molten Core an LFR needs a raise… and then a swift punch in the crotch. Thankfully my hope is that this will dispel the myth that 40 man raiding was somehow more epic and meaningful, because the way it feels in LFR is exactly how it felt actually living it.

Lava Puppy Mount

Wow-64 2014-11-25 22-13-53-11

All of the above said, it was still a fairly enjoyable night and it was fun showing people who had never actually run Molten Core “for real” the ropes. It was shocking just how fast the various things came back. Also it was shocking just how well they replicated the feel of the original. There is some trash that happens immediately following Garr and before Geddon that has been lovingly referred to as “pain packs”. Thing is… they are still just as painful. The moment I pulled one, folks were simply not ready for the amount of torture that was about to be dished out, and both me and the other tanks simply evaporated wiping the raid. We had to adjust our strategy a bit, but it was a reminded of just how deadly that place was. There were things I remembered exactly how to handle, and then there were fights that I did not remember at all… like Shazzrah. Apparently as Rylacus said that was a fight where the melee didn’t actually engage the boss, so that is likely why I don’t remember much about it.

There were so many “greatest hits” of dumb things done in the core last night. Some jackass warlock tricked half a dozen people into peering through the crack behind Golemagg to try and see Ragnaros. Someone fell off the bridge and aggro’d Golemagg as we were clearing the trash. It was shocking just how stealthy a big damned core hound can be, because they almost always add to packs at exactly the wrong time. Fortunately however the other super common thing of getting knocked off the bridge near Lucifron by a Lava Surger didn’t actually happen. Neither did the ever so fun experience of having a lava spawn constantly duplicate to the point of overwhelming the raid. As such I am thinking that more than likely some of the really heinous effects were toned down for LFR. For example there were no longer 8 flame walker priests with Sulfuron Harbinger, but we still did the “Drag one out and kill it” method. For the most part all of the bosses went extremely smoothly, but it was the trash that took the longest amount of time… and caused the most deaths.

Death of 40 Man Raiding

This morning I am supremely thankful that I have now finished the Molten Core LFR, and that I have a very awesome Core Hound mount to show for it. I am also at the same time extremely happy that 40 man raiding is a thing of the past. I realize that Wildstar attempted to revive this concept, but I really feel that this was a massive mistake. That is just too many people to have to be responsible for as a raid leader, and too large of a pool of players to constantly have to keep refilling. While I will still solo Molten Core for fun, when I get the twinge of nostalgia… I have no desire to ever return to the way it actually felt. Same goes for any of the other 40 man content we did. I am thankful that I got to experience them when they were legitimately rough experiences, but I am also thankful that the era is long past. My hope is that 40 man LFR will let the folks who have always pined for this era to realize that it was not actually a magical time.. instead it was something we slogged through because it was all we knew. While we may have “raided uphill both ways in the snow”… I most definitely know we are better off not having to do it.

Carried to Greatness

August 8, 2014 by Belghast

Some days are harder

There are some days where the magic just doesn’t seem to want to happen, even when you feel like you have a lot to say. This morning I have been sitting around for the last twelve minutes doing everything I could to avoid opening LiveWriter and begin banging away on the keyboard. Sometimes it happens and this is perfectly okay. Yesterday there was a series of tweets that I was party to about what happens when you decide you want to go in a different direction than you started. You would be shocked and amazed at just how many times I start in one direction and then decide that it is not in fact what I want to say. There have been so many paragraphs sacrificed on the altar of mood swings, and I am here to tell you that this is perfectly okay.

In fact I would go so far as to say this is entirely expected as part of the daily writing ritual. There are going to be days you struggle to find meaning from your cluttered mind, and it is completely fine for you to jettison one idea in favor of another. Please do not ever feel obligated to complete a thought. Just because you get two sentences down on the page, does not mean you have to follow up with the rest of a paragraph. If you can have sketches in the margin of a notebook, you can surely also have room for the same thing to be happening with your writing. There are so many things that Blaugust is “about” but one of them definitely is about being comfortable with your own words, and knowing when they work and when they do not. Not everything you write has to be a masterpiece, and some things are destined only to be pushed out the airlock.

Carried to Greatness

One of the things I have been avoiding doing since coming back to the game is wrapping up my Relic weapon quest in Final Fantasy XIV. Before we left we had completely a number of the steps as a group. I went through the extreme cost of getting the base weapon, and getting the two materia fused to it. Then as a guild we conquered both the Chimera and the Hydra. Finally I was up to the three Hard Mode primal fights of Ifrit, Garuda and Titan in that order. A week or so ago I managed to get through Ifrit but I figured that was a fluke considering just how easy of a fight it is. I also had intimate knowledge of that fight considering we had legitimately downed him as a guild. The only problem is when we did it as a guild, I was using my bard job and not my warrior one… and did not get credit for it.

Garuda scares the shit out of me. This was a hard fight for us to learn as a four man team at level, so I could not image just how frustrating and painful it would be as a tank. I watched as my guildies that were not tanks queued for it and got it taken care of without issue, but still I was pretty gunshy. Had it not been for Ashgar queuing up as a tank last night and talking about just how easy the encounter was… I likely would still be waiting. Sure enough upon queuing I ended up getting dumped into a group with lots of folks that were in raid gear, and essentially I became the groups mascot. Before I knew it we had downed Garuda and I was moving on to the next step in the quest chain that involved a good deal of running around. All of my nerves were literally for nothing because at this point in the game… folks have progressed so far past the hurdle that was hard mode Garuda that it became manageable without really knowing the fight myself.

Titan on the other hand was still a challenge. Once again I was the mascot of the group and really served to give no benefit other than miniscule dps. The problem with titan is there is so much that goes on between the attacks that knock you off the platform, the attacks that can one shot you, and the crazy exploding rocks that can make you into a venn diagram. It took my team three tries to get through the encounter, and with each wipe we gained a stack of echo… which works much the same as the determination buff in World of Warcraft. After all of the nervousness I was sitting there with all the components I needed to finish my Bravura. While this is no longer the be all end all weapon… it still feels like a big deal to me. I honestly questioned if I would ever complete it, so now I am absolutely pumped to be holding it in my hands. I still need to farm a few more “bookrocks” before I can upgrade it to the next step, but hopefully I will get those tonight.

Nostalgia Crit 9999

Gearing Up to Celebrate 10 Years of World of Warcraft

Something I have been meaning to talk about for a few days is the recent announcement of the World of Warcraft 10th anniversary events. Firstly lets get the fact that they are announcing them in August when the anniversary is not until the tail end of November out of the way. I guess they need some good news to be honest considering how most of the community expected to be playing Warlords by now. For those who have not followed the information they are doing a number of interesting things for the anniversary. For starters anyone who logs in during the event is going to get a new pet in honor of it… the Molten Corgi. When I first heard about the pet I honestly thought I had misheard some bit of information and it was related to Rift instead. It feels weird to have two different MMOs obsessed with the adorable stub legged puppies. That said it is exactly that… adorable and fiery and sufficiently epic to announce the 10th year of a game.

Keeping with the theme they are bringing back Molten Core, and making it a max level dungeon… and making it a special 40 man LFR. Anyone who manages to make it to the end of the dungeon will earn a special Core Hound mount. I have not heard if this is going to be complete-able with a guild group or not, or if this is going to only be an LFR thing. I honesty feel like LFR is a decent simulacrum for the way actual 40 man raiding felt. The amount of random fuckery that went on during most 40 man raids as 20 people carried 20 warm bodies to victory, seems like it could only be simulated by the LFR system. It makes me wonder what all sorts of callbacks will they have. Will there be a new version of Thurderfury for example? The updated Quelserrar for example was something I hotly sought after, because I loved the look of that blade.

If all of this were not enough they are bringing back the one and only time that world PVP actually worked… Southshore vs Tarren Mill. They are apparently creating a special 100 vs 100 battleground to play out the epic battle of town versus town that used to play out on a nightly basis. This is seriously the only time in WoW history that I actually willfully participated in PVP, and so many friendships grew out of it that I still keep in touch with today. This era of wow was one of those lightning in a bottle moments, and I can’t even remember why it stopped. I am sure it was in reaction to something that blizzard did to screw with the mix, but I remember by the time Ahn’qiraj rolled around no one was actually doing this fight any longer. Maybe the battlegrounds were the nail in the coffin? At this point I honestly cannot remember.

All of this sounds awesome and is loaded with so much nostalgia it is like a sucker punch to the veteran players face. The problem is… we remember these events from the past of WoW as being so much more epic and enjoyable than they actually were. For years we have viewed the early days of wow through rose colored lenses of a time when “things were right and good”. When in reality they really were not that great. The amount of lag that happened in Southshore for example made most of the deaths absolutely random. The amount of drama and bullshit that accompanied Molten Core and the loss of three hours of your life every week to run it was equally insane. These are not exactly moments to be heralded as the way things ought to be. They were us making the best out of a bad situation and enjoying what game play we could find where we could find it.

I came in late to Molten Core after my raid had already broken its back doing the hard work to get it on farm status. I was carried to my full set of Giantstalker, and then proceeded to run the dungeon every single week until pretty much the end of Vanilla. I still have large sections of the pulls in that place memorized, as I geared up first my hunter, then my paladin and my warrior running the place for various people who needed able bodied fill-ins. None of my “good memories” of this time in Vanilla have anything to do with the actual places we were running. It was the people I happened to be running them with. You cannot reassemble the raid I cleared Molten Core with, or the social channel that we ran Southshore versus Tarren MIll out of. Those players have all scattered to the wind and a bunch of random socially inept strangers are a piss poor substitute.

Liore made a post earlier this week about that you can’t go back home, and it is true. While everything about this event is laced with the drug that is nostalgia… none of it is real. How we feel about that time in World of Warcraft is an accumulation of everything that was happening at the time. It was the people and the places and the fact that there was literally nothing else to do at the time, because WoW was the only game on the market that offered anything vaguely close to this. No amount of wishing is going to actually turn back the clock and recapture the joy and experiences you had back then. Don’t get me wrong… I will probably log in during the event to get my shiny trinkets… but I go into it knowing this is a pale comparison to the way things actually were. There is no such thing as going home, because both you and the place you are going have changed in the process of getting away from it.

Writing Prompts

Now for a few more writing prompts. I wondered if this would end up being useful but based on the fact that a handful of people have been drawing from them I guess it is a worthwhile cause. Today’s prompts are all laced with the venom that is nostalgia.

What period in a game or game do you wish you could return to? What is that thing that is now gone that you wish you could be playing again?
We all accidentally get rid of something that we end up wanting later on. What have you deleted/disenchanted/sold that you later kicked yourself for doing?
We have all left something unfinished in our effort to move on to something new. What achievement have you never completed that you always wished in the back of your head you had?

#Blaugust #FFXIV #WoW