ps4 Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Boosh and Barroth

April 16, 2018 by Belghast

It was a pretty great weekend as far as gaming goals go. Saturday I largely roamed around aimlessly in Everquest while hanging out with my wife downstairs watching various stuff on the television. Then at some point before the podcast I headed upstairs to see if I could knock out the megaman event. This entails fighting the most laughably small Odogoron you have ever seen… and one that is slightly larger than normal. In truth I am not completely sure it is larger than normal… or if it just seems massive compared to the tiny tiny one you fight first. Ultimately you need to get five tickets to get your full palico armor and I managed to finish mine up in three events… with the last one dropping three event tickets… something I was not sure could actually happen.

After the Podcast Thalen and I wound up hanging out and working on our Ryu costumes, which entails doing a challenge arena where you fight a massive Barroth. This thing is so large that really your only option is to wail away on the legs until it falls over…. then start scoring hits on other parts of the body. This event scores event tickets based on how fast you get the kill… if I am remembering right getting it in less than 5 minutes nets you a gold and three tickets, less than 9 minutes a silver and 2 tickets, and finally finishing at all before the 50 minute timer is up earns you bronze and a single ticket. You need seven tickets in total so we wound up running it four times in a row allowing us to craft the Ryu suit… that in all honesty we will probably never actually wear.

When Thalen and I both got on I created an open chat channel and we both joined the Greysky Armanda clan session, and at some point during our Barroth nonsense our good friend Shiana joined us in both. Thalen and I were talking for a bit about both needing Kirin and what sort of gear we were prepping for the fight. It was around about this point that Shiana offered to help us get some attempts in seeing as he was in the 90s rank wise himself. Granted this is like at 11 pm we are starting this madness… but my desire to kill the stupid unicorn was greater than my desire for sleep. So we continued forth with me wearing my mostly Xeno’jiiva set that nets 40 lightning resist with a veggie platter buff. In truth with multiple people the fight already seemed way easier because I was not having to spend my entire time trying to shed aggro from the lunatic horse.

One by one we each got carted… with me taking the last hit and closing out our first attempt somewhere around the 25 minute mark. On our second attempt we managed to get feline insurance, and in truth only managed to get carted the one time if I am remembering correctly. We had better luck as far as where exactly Kirin decided to fight us, shifting back and forth between two relatively open areas. When we managed to whittle it down to enough hitpoints to make it run back to it’s “nest” we barrel bombed it into oblivion then threw on our thunderproof mantles and proceeded to wale away on it. All the while this was going on… I was still very much on edge… afraid something would go terribly wrong and we would fail the fight once again. So when I saw the above screenshot… crediting a kill for Kirin I was ecstatic… making getting to sleep when I finally crawled into bed a little after midnight a bit harder than normal.

Sunday I spent the day swapping laundry and hanging out upstairs playing Monster Hunter while watching The Mighty Boosh on my second monitor. I am not exactly sure what prompted me, but for some reason I fired up Hulu to see what was available and it suggested to me this show. Now I had watched most of it some time ago when reruns were being played as part of the adult swim block late at night. This was back during my wow raiding days… and many of the sayings from the “Old Gregg” episode became constant quotation fodder during fights… especially “Fuzzy Little Man Peach”. So yesterday I hung out watching the Hulu feed of the episodes while doing random nonsense in Monster Hunter World. It was a day truly well spent.

I’ve been slowly adding weapons to my repertoire and then learning how to use them. It seems extremely bizarre but I have been crafting purple and orange versions of weapons that I have maybe never actually used… because I figure as I learn them I at least have an “end game” version to get used to rather than mess with all of the steps in between. For the moment I have solid versions of Charge Blade, Switch Axe, Great Sword and of course the Longsword of which I have developed quite the collection. One of the weapons that I have kept wanting to try is the Dual Blades which seem really cool when I see someone using them, but for whatever reason I have never actually tried.

I really really like the look of the Sin dual Chain Kama looking weapons, and thanks to farming the Odogoron quest I managed to get not only one but two gems. This allowed me to craft the weapon and the complete set of Alpha Odog gear to go with it. Sure it might seem weird that I have a full set of gear largely because I think its cool looking… but whatever. Now I am setting my sights on getting the Zorah blast lance… before giving that weapon a go. Sure I could just go into the training room… but as I keep being reminded I am the patron saint of bad decisions and that simply would not be my way.

Another project for this weekend was finishing farming the Anjanath claws needed to upgrade my weapon I can’t pronounce into the final form of said weapon I can’t pronounce. I then took the firey axe and shield out on a few test runs having really great luck with it. It could use a few more ranks of handicraft to give me more time in the blue zone, because it takes an awful lot of sharpness loss as you use it… but it also dishes out a lot of damage and is crazy fun to use. I am sure there are probably better options for sword and shield, but I like this one and it at least gives me an end game suitable weapon in that category. All in all it was a pretty great weekend… apart from one incident… but that is a tale for another day.

Lantern Light

January 25, 2018 by Belghast

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had originally intended. The initial goal I had in mind was to go home and attempt to pull myself back into a mindset where I could play Final Fantasy XIV. Instead I hit a few detours along the way the first of which being that shortly after I had finished doing all of the stuff that I need to do when I first get home… the power went out. Now I realize this is mostly an irrational fear, but the first thing that always goes through my head is… did you pay the bill? I am not sure exactly why I have this fear because we have never actually been disconnected from any utility, but it is still something that happens. I was already in my “not suitable for public” clothing, but I did stumble outside long enough to notice that all of my neighbors were also lumbering around by flashlight. I called in the outage and reported it through the menu driven system and then spent the next little bit trying to sort out how to see reported outages without logging into the damned electric company page with an account that I didn’t have. There is a local facebook group that serves as the closest thing we have to a city wide “water cooler” and my second place was to go check there knowing that there would already be a thread of a hundred or so posts about whatever was going on. The lights went out around 6 pm and if the group was to be believed the estimated time for the fix was 11:30 pm… which meant it was about to be a really long night living by lantern light. It was around this time that I remembered I had the Switch and grabbed it from my office settling into the sofa to play some games. I had played some Super Mario Odyssey and was about ten minutes into the Octopath Traveler demo when the power was magically restored at roughly 8 pm.

From there I did all of those things I had been avoiding… like opening the fridge to get a drink and settled down to play some Final Fantasy XIV. Upon logging in I got greeted by friends… roamed around Limsa Lominsa and then promptly logged out because I just did not have it in me to do the group activities I need to do in order to make any semblance of forward momentum. Instead I popped into Elder Scrolls Online and continued work on Stonefalls. This zone is like a giant immovable object for me and the sooner I get on the other side of it the better. It has singlehandedly killed every attempt at playing an Ebonheart Pact character because even though it has gone through a ton of changes since alpha… it still is not what I would call a good zone. The weird shape and geometry of the zone makes everything a bigger chore than it should be. Objectives that might look really close on the map instead require you to backtrack half the way across the zone to find the proper entrance into the region you need to go. All of this is just the functional reasons… but there is also the fact that it is bleak. The quake color palette and the constant smokey haze and falling ash make it not exactly the most visually exciting place to be. I did however feel like I made a bunch of progress in the zone last night and checked off a bunch of areas. I am not even sure where I am in the zones main story quest, and if I could change one thing about Elder Scrolls online I would make it so that those primary quests required to move to the next area were somehow highlighted differently in a FFXIV style manner.

The other thing on my radar is that at the time of taking this screenshot we were roughly 17 hours away from unlocking Monster Hunter World on the PS4. Granted I have no actual intent of staying up until midnight to play this game, but I do plan on playing Friday night. This is going to be my first real attempt at playing a Monster Hunter title while it is in the public zeitgeist and I am hoping that by doing so… I will be able to grok what the fuck is going on. I’ve attempted the PS Vita version and purchase Generations for the 3DS… but largely chocked up a lot of my problems to the fact that I am just not much of a handheld gamer. World however is coming to the PS4 which will allow me to play it on this nifty 43 inch 4k television (even though I don’t have a pro and can’t do the higher resolutions really) and my hope is it will be a much more compelling experience. I’ve always thought this was the sort of game I could get into if I had the proper introduction, because the core loop of grind random stuff to make yourself stronger to take down big bad monsters is one that I can likely get behind. I am hoping I can rely on those who have come before like Ashgar and Stormrazor to get me over the adjustment hump. I am also super excited that Arekkz is devoting a series of videos to easing beginners in. I most definitely need the assistance. Needless to say I will be on the PS4 giving it a whirl tomorrow.

First Week on PC

October 30, 2017 by Belghast

This is one of those mornings when I am not even sure where to start the post. It is like I have all of these disconnected thoughts in my head and am having a very hard time wrangling them together into something that follows any manner of logical progression. Destiny 2 released on the PC last Tuesday and since then I have played a significant amount of it, only really taking a single night off to go do something else. According to WastedOnDestiny.com I’ve played 32 hours of the game since release… which is officially more than I played Destiny 1 on the Xbox One. On the PS4 I managed to make it to 267 in that very first week, and on PC I managed to break the 265 cap and push on to 271 which makes me happy. I am nowhere near as lucky as my friend Raz was… who is sitting at something crazy like 282. There are ways to do this… but they involve madness and way more grinding than I was able to get in this week or really wanted to do. Additionally I started working on secondary characters and managed to push the Hunter to 18 while recording the podcast… and finished leveling it to 20 and making it through all but the final quest last night. I also started up my Warlock and got her to level 8, which was mostly about getting my 5000 clan xp to help level Greysky Armada. We managed to hit rank 3 which is extremely awesome and is largely made possible by the fact that myself and Wolfy started leveling the clan a bit on PS4 before the release of PC.

On Friday night we decided to give the Nightfall a go, which in truth I was uncertain about given that I only actually completed the Nightfall once on the PS4 side… and even then it was a bit of a pain in the ass. I also remembered us being significantly higher than the 250ish we were when we tried it. Together Tamrielo, RustySpork and I managed to get the boss down with about 3 minutes left on the clock, which is not good enough for the rat king… but makes me happy nonetheless. Yesterday afternoon I gave it another attempt with Mor and Grace and once again finished… but just barely with me taking down the boss via a couple of pulse grenades and auto rifle fire at about the 1 second left on the clock mark. Mor was just barely at the 240ish requirement for zoning in, so I feel like in the future so long as we are bringing in 260s we should be fine for this. This week also was a bit of an aberration in that it was extremely easy to cheese the objectives because of the modifier giving us insane grenade and melee regeneration. Striker Titan with double grenades meant I could clean out a bunch of adds almost as fast as I could throw them. They still hit insanely hard though and I just don’t have the recovery yet that I really should for doing harder content. This largely comes from just wearing a bunch of scraps instead of something resembling a full set of gear. I am really hoping in a few weeks I can get the full set of Titan Iron Banner gear again because it makes for a really excellent base for shenanigans.

I would have finished the Hunter but instead I took a lengthy break Sunday afternoon and worked on doing the weekly milestones on the PS4 side of the pond. I have to say after playing so much PC… the console version just feels sluggish and odd. Everything seems to move more slowly, which makes the crucible much easier… but everything else feel really odd. Not only was the visual fidelity much lower than even my laptop running at greatly downgraded settings… but just the movement speed of my character felt slower. I noticed this when doing some of the intro missions where you are limping through the city… on the console there was a specific point I could make it to before my character was forced to pause for a moment. On the PC I could make it considerably past that point before I was forcibly halted, so my running theory is that the PC version just has faster movement speeds. Weirdness aside I did manage to get used to the controller again and finish up Clan XP, Call to Arms and Flashpoint milestones which were enough to finish pushing me to 305. I feel much better hibernating the character now that it is sitting at the level cap rather than being just slightly under it. I will probably keep logging in at least once a week to finish off these easy milestones however because I feel like I need to keep contributing some Clan XP to TQMB in addition to all the work I am doing PC side with GREY. Eventually once I have gotten my PC characters to a more manageable state I am sure I will start doing those three main milestones on six characters… 3 on PC and 3 on PS4. It takes me roughly an hour to do all of the things needed to earn those three luminous engrams, and after a point that becomes my routine of logging in a new character each night and getting their progress.

I am absolutely loving playing the game on PC because it fits my play style considerably better. With the console it forced me to be in the room I have my PS4 set up in, but with PC I can either be playing it on my gaming desktop or downstairs on my laptop. The laptop doesn’t run it perfectly and I am having to throttle it down to 720 p and a few other considerations… but it runs well enough for me to be able to do almost anything I might need to do. For something like a Nightfall where there is a timer on the line I wouldn’t want to push it… but It is more than fine for some strikes or crucible. My activity of choice however is still doing public events and random token farming through chests and patrols. My goal for tonight is to attempt to push the hunter through the various things needed to unlock her three easy luminous engrams, and then to maybe get her through the Nightfall. From there my goal by next weeks reset is to have my Warlock finished off so I can start triple dipping on the powerful rewards front. While it has been a pure joy starting over on the PC… I do still want to arrive back at where I left off… and hopefully in a much faster time frame than the seven weeks it took to get me there on console. I am booned by the fact that the game seems to have traction among the AggroChat crew and with that means that there is likely going to be raiding before too much longer. I am assuming the raid will open up tomorrow much like it did on the console side, and then I am assuming next week we will have faction rally once more. Destiny 2 on PC is pretty much everything I had hoped it would be.

Xur Week Seven: 10/27/17

October 27, 2017 by Belghast

Xur Destiny 2

This week Xur is located on Io in the Giant’s Scar area. He is off to the left side of that area inside of a cave. If you turn around and face away from Xur you should also find one of the region chests if you have not actually looted it. This week is important because it is the first time Xur is available for PC players, and I have in fact double checked that the inventory on console and pc is exactly the same. I however took my screenshots console side because I am still in the process of leveling all the things on PC and only have the Titan to 20… and even then I am not all of the way through the main story quest. I noticed that the exotics were showing as level 19 and 254 instead of the 270 I was expecting, so wondering if finishing the game is a trigger for that shift to level 20 items. I throw this out there just for folks to be careful when you spend your oh so precious legendary shards this week on the PC side of things. Xur will be available until the weekly reset instead of disappearing sometime during the night on Saturday, so you have plenty of time to grind out more shards or get through the story.

This week for the weapon we have D.A.R.C.I. or as I have referred to this every time I have decrypted it from an engram… infusion fuel. What makes this weapon interesting is that while aiming you can view the health and other information about your target through your scope with the Personal Assistant perk. This blends with the target acquired perk that causes you to have better target acquisition and precision damage while the Personal Assistant perk is in action. My general problem with the weapon however is that I just don’t like medium impact snipers. This weapon has 55 impact and the snipers I tend to use personally are in the 70-90 range. Now is the point where I start speaking out of my depth, but I always feel like this medium impact variety has to be targeted at the crucible right? It has really high stability and handling which should in theory make scoping in on your target extremely snappy. I just have zero interest in using a sniper rifle in PVP, and if I am going to use one in PVE I want it to pack a bigger punch. PC players it will probably still be worth a pick up for the power level bump if nothing else.

As far as armor goes this is a really phenomenal week and includes sort of a greatest hits collection of universally useful items. Actium War Rig is one of the options that you can get on Titan, and if you are an auto rifle fan like me… it is probably going to be what you end up using. The Auto-Loading Link perk causes ammo to loaded into your magazine when you stop firing the weapon at a tick rate of roughly one second. What this means is if you are burst firing your weapon you can greatly extend the amount of time you can put off reloading giving you way more time to mop up enemies. This works extremely well with weapons that have the rampage perk because you can keep rolling between targets without having to take the time to wait for reload, just allowing the weapon to tick once between bursts of fire. Definitely going to pick this up for the power level and to have a more current version of this item rather than the level 105 item the game gives you.

Warlocks have a similarly universally good item in the form of the Eye of Another World helmet. Similarly this is an item you can pick up on Titan and the cerebral uplink perk causes you to highlight priority targets but also improves the regeneration speed of grenade, melee and rift abilities. Its rare that an item just makes everything universally work better, but that is in fact the mission of this helm. Once again I highly suggest picking this up for the power level if nothing else, but for anyone who chose poorly on Titan… then here is a nice second chance to get that item.

I’ve talked about this item before and I am not really sure what else I can add. Knucklehead Radar is one of my favorite pieces of gear from Destiny 1 and I am super happy that it returned to Destiny 2. The upgraded sensor pack causes radar tracking to be active while you aim down sights on every weapon. This is just universally useful and is a crutch that I am not willing to give up while playing my hunter. I used the hell out of the Memory of Gheleon artifact in Destiny 1 year 3… and similarly I love this item. Again if nothing else this is a good level boost for those PC players who are just now getting started. I hope to be able to gather enough legendary shards before Xur leaves on Tuesday to purchase each of these items and have them ready for when I start leveling the Hunter and Warlock.

Xur Destiny 1

As has been the case the last few weeks, I am also doing the information about Xur in Destiny 1 lest we not all abandon the players who are still enjoying that game. You can find Xur in the tower next to Lord Shaxx. This week he brought something interesting… the Jade Rabbit which was previously an exclusive for the PS4 players. I had heard that the embargo had been lifted on selling the PS4 exclusive items, but I am guessing this is hard proof. Here is a quick rundown of what he has brought for us this week.