oregorger Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Melusine Down

February 10, 2015 by Belghast

I’m an Adjective?

There are just some days that it hits me how surreal my life can be. I seem to be having one of those days. I talked a bit about being called a “Cult Leader” last night, but apparently somewhere along the line I have become an adjective as well? If I would say I am most known for anything it would be that I blog each and every morning regardless if I have anything of any real gravity to talk about. If you follow Jaedia and Simcha you would have found out that this is apparently now termed the “Bel Method” because both of them have been dabbling with it of late. I didn’t even know I had a method to be honest… I just do this thing that involves blogging before I am actually awake. I am pretty sure people were rambling aimlessly long before I showed up, and will continue to do it long after I am gone. Though I do admit I got a great chuckle when I read that I have transcended humanity and now have become a “thing”.

@fynralyl that's the server the #BelEffect is happening on anyway. @belghast

— Sig (@Sigtric) February 7, 2015

Which makes it all the more humorous when the other day, I was mentioned in a conversation I was not really even participating in yet. My good friend Fynralyl mentioned on twitter that she was downloading Final Fantasy XIV, and before I even had a chance another friend… who is not even playing the game chimed in with our server information. To make it even more humorous Sigtric said the above quote, that the “#BelEffect” was going on. I am now an effect? I mean I realize my penchant for gathering people up and trying to get them all in the same place is rather notorious… but has it really become an effect to be monitored? Like I said before… it is really surreal to be referred to in adjective form. I am attempting to take it all in stride, as a sign of affection… but it is supremely strange. Now I am oddly cautious to see what other characteristic I have becomes a “thing”, is my traditional “Hey Folks” greeting now going to become canonized as well?

Melusine Down

Last night was of course our regularly scheduled raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We unfortunately are starting to have a good problem happen… that quite often on Monday nights we have more than enough people to do our eight man. As a result since Paragon missed the last one, Cav offered to sit out and with that we zoned into Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. This was our second week of attempts on this encounter, and last week we managed to figure out most of the bits so it was just down to refinement and polish. We were teaching Paragon the fight from scratch, but he was a pretty quick study and before long we were back to where we left off last week. This fight is largely about managing adds, either in the form of the Renauds that need to be frozen with cursed voice or the Lamias that need to be burned down as soon as possible to lower overall raid damage. On top of all of these things… there is just a phenomenal amount of damage going out. There were so many times I was praying for my next cooldown so that I could survive just a little bit longer.

The turning point in our fight was honestly when we wiped because all of the Renaud that were frozen woke up at the same time. Prior to that the attempt was extremely smooth, and then we watched as the giants ran around wiping the raid. From that point on we started trying to manage just how many of them we had up at a once, and I started trying to do a better job of centering myself with the wall of them. These two tweaks lead to me getting frozen significantly less, and the wall of adds being more manageable as a whole. It was I believe one attempt after we started this strategy that we managed to get her down, and clear Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. Once again Ashgar remembered to tell folks to pose before we opened the chests, and I am super glad that he did… because this really is the best kill shot yet. I remembered to be centered in the photo rather than on one of the edges. We went into Turn 8 shortly after and only stayed long enough to get an idea of how the room works. Hopefully we can all watch some videos this week and make a good solid attempt next.

I Hate Oregorger

Yesterday I stumbled onto a blog post over on AskMrRobot showing how wipes on Oregorger compare to the raids average ilevel. I know we are still fairly low ilevel wise as a raid, I personally am only around 660 because we jumped straight from 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic to doing normal mode Blackrock Foundry. I am wondering if that is the answer to dealing with the bullshit randomness of his hunger phase is to simply out gear it. Last Thursday when we were doing attempts on Oregorger we were following the exact pattern that everyone agrees upon is the best way to beat the fight. In fact multiple times during the night we stopped, rewatched videos to double check that we were not doing anything wrong… and still we kept dying to the damage of the phase. Either we were not fast enough on killing the crates, or simply lacked the gear to soak the damage. In any case the charge above would seem to agree that maybe Oregorger is simply a “gearing” thing. Had we entered Blackrock wearing full heroic gear… maybe it just would not have even been an issue.

In any case my hope is that by some sheer miracle of luck that we can down him because I want so bad to have this fight on farm status. I feel like both Gruul and the Hans’gar/Franzor encounter are likely on farm status after last week. I am wondering if there is something else that is low hanging fruit we can pick up while waiting on our gear level to raise before wrecking Oregorger. From what I understand the other boss we can try is Beastlord Darmac since Blackrock Foundry employs a “wing” strategy to its layout. Whatever we end up doing, I am looking forward to getting in tonight and smashing more Iron Horde faces. While much of the shiny of this expansion has faded for me, I am finding that the raiding is keeping me engaged and interested. While I may only be logging in to fiddle with my Garrison on nights other than the raid… I am still very much enjoying each and every boss fight.

AggroChat Game Club

February 6, 2015 by Belghast

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger. This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design. The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them. What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight. After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked. In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others. The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution. The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path… something went wrong. It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong. If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly. Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design. They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it… but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes. The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid. I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern. That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something… not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter. The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school… and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”. But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense. The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move. At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles. The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room. The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern. There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern. Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring. There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground. The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still. This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in. Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness… but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly. I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play. As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops… one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title. As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog… but not listen to our podcast. One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month. Then during the last show of that month we dive into the game completely with no concern about spoilers. The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points. During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one. As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it. To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us! I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing. So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments. We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast. The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them. Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment. For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play. We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list. Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Pirate Gruul

February 4, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Monster

Yesterday I realized I had a bit of a problem. For some time I have been an Energy Drink junkie, but things have gotten a bit out of control. Yesterday morning I drank what I am hoping will be my last monster for awhile. I realized over the weekend that on some days, especially during the weekend I was drinking four to five of them per day. It wasn’t because I needed one, or was even tired… but simply because it was a handy pre-packaged size to carry with me upstairs. White literally I was drinking energy drinks because I was being too damned lazy to fix anything else for me to drink. I cleaned up my office a bit this morning, and nestled in amongst my coffee cup are tons of monster cans that were scattered throughout my office. Granted the “Super Rooster Booster Lite” can is actually my wife’s… but we won’t worry about that. Essentially I realized that no good can come of drinking that many energy drinks, so I have by will alone decided to dial back.

This means more than likely over the next couple of days I will be grumpy as shit. I have been mainlining a lot of caffeine and now I am cutting that consumption WAY back. Granted I am largely switching back to Coffee, and going to be drinking that at any point I would normally reach for an energy drink. I think I am going to need a bigger mug. I noticed this problem during Pax South when my overarching goal each morning was to get to a gas station and purchase an energy drink so I could feel like I was able to start my day. This ended up with me going to a pretty sketchy gas station to find my morning fix. We had been buying Monster at Sam’s Club and in truth I was going through a flat of 24 each week. It is not so much that I am worried about the caffeine… its all the other stuff in monster to make it zero calorie and still effective that concerns me to be honest. It will take me a bit to adjust but I am hoping I will feel better as a result in the long run.

Pirate Gruul

Last night was the opening of Blackrock Foundry in World of Warcraft, but thankfully unlike the night Highmaul opened… the servers were actually rather playable. In fact I would say that other than the fact that we were delving into new content… things were exactly like normal. I had been concerned that some jackass out there would decide to start up yet another DDoS against a game company, but thankfully that was not the case. Firstly I have to say… Blizzard has found yet more ways to create annoying trash. From mobs that drop whirling axes, to gorgers that drop acid puddles and come in packs of a dozen or so… the trash is full of new ways to frustrate the raid. The biggest frustration of the night however was simply getting to the raid. There are no flight paths really close to it, or at least not nearly as close as you could get in Highmaul. The best route I was able to come up with was to fly into Everbloom Wilds… and then jump over the mountain to get to Grimrail Depot… and then walk the bridges around the corner to finally get to Blackrock Foundry. I am one of those players who supports the notion of not having flying mounts… but crap at least give us decent flight paths to get somewhat close to our destination. As I was reminded by a friend… the run really is something akin to the bullshit we had to deal with back during the Blackwing Lair and Molten Core days.

The raid is laid out in a hub and spoke design allowing you to reach multiple wings from the entrance area. We opted to start on the Slagworks wing, which includes alternate universe Gruul, Oregorger and the Blast Furnace encounter. Alternate reality Gruul is apparently a pirate, because he has a giant hook for an arm this time around. Those silly Iron Horde and their lopping off appendages to graft impractical metal ones in their places… one might almost think we are playing Warhammer 40k for a moment… and that the Iron Horde are Chaos Marines. Gruul was a modified version of his previous self, and thankfully enough of us remembered the way Shatter worked to adequately explain it. On our second pull we managed to take him down… albeit a bit rougher than any of us would have liked. I spent a roll token and came up with two items out of the deal… namely getting the item I needed the most… a new sword, as well as a slight bracer upgrade. You can see a picture of the rather badass looking sword above… I think I am going to leave it exactly as it is.. without actually transmogging it to anything.

From there we cleared down to Oregorger and spent the rest of the night working on him. The fight is comprised of two phases. The first involves melee stacking and avoiding bombs he places, while the range avoid puddles of death. We managed to get that part of the fight down solidly and could reliably push him into the second phase each attempt. The problem is that during the second phase utter chaos reigns and we all die slowly, or some of us… not so slowly. You can somewhat get a grasp of this from the above picture, but Oregorgers room is one big Pacman style maze. During the second phase he wanders around in search of Ore to gobble up, and in doing so spins down hallways crushing anyone that gets in his path. I can survive a single one of these rolls… but there is constant AOE damage going on while doing this. Our goal as players is to break all of the crates of ore in the room, giving him nothing to gobble up, which ends up transitioning us to the next phase. The problem is we almost all die during the Pacman phase right now. We are going to have to sift through the logs and see if there is any sort of pattern to his movement, because right now it seems random. All in all, one boss down and progress on a second… seems like a successful first night of Blackrock Foundry.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Yesterday was the last day for the Joystiq network, including the two sites I particularly cared about WoW Insider and Massively. It looks however that someone managed to feign death a hunter… because moments after the final posts were posted… someone cast mass resurrection. Firstly it looks like Joystiq is being gobbled up by Engadget one of the few AOL blogs that did not get the axe, so the name at least will live on as their new gaming section. I have no idea if this means that any of the Joystiq staff go to keep their jobs or not… but in any case the name still exists in one form or another. The two sites I do really care about however, are striking out on their own and becoming as someone put it “indie” sites, or actually just multi-author blogs. Blizzard Watch is the new face of WoW Insider, featuring several of the same crew resurrecting a new twitter, blog and starting a Patreon to fund the site. At the time of writing this, the Patreon is just shy of $10,000 a month which is pretty insane for less than 24 hours passing since it started.

On the other side Massively has resurrected as Massively OP, creating the mascot of MO the shield wielding warrior. While they do not have the blog up and running yet, they do have a placeholder site at massivelyop.com. You can check out their exploits at the twitter account, facebook account, and even a new twitch stream. In theory over the next couple of weeks we will see a new website appear that represents the sort of content Massively has always created in the past. In both cases I wish them all the luck in the world. The amount of support that the community has shown at the potential loss of these two sites has been pretty phenomenal. I joked the other day with my “Save Ferris” title, but it seems similar. Everyone has shifted what they are doing to being concerned about keeping these sites afloat. My hope is that the supporters will stay supporters six months down the road… and that MMO players won’t be as fickle as they seem to be with the games they choose to play.