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Week in Gaming 10/18/2015

October 18, 2015 by Belghast

One Track Mind

This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!

Rift – Primal Urges

This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.

I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.

Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens

Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.

Destiny – Struggling for Exotics

I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.

The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.

Titan Mitsurugi

October 14, 2015 by Belghast

Plans Change

Opening the very disappointing Chest of Yuul

I had every intent last night of coming home and working on Star Wars the Old Republic, but instead I spent almost my entire evening futzing around in Destiny. I did at least manage to get into SWTOR long enough to re-gear my Sith Sorcerer and claim Treek from my collection vault. So in theory I should be ready to go with a new tank for future shenanigans. What happened last night is ultimately what has happened so many nights lately, that I start working on this bounty or that quest and end up spending the entire evening there. Towards the beginning of the night I decided to step foot into my very first heroic strike. I have to say it honestly went pretty smoothly, and I lucked out that I managed to get one that I had at least done on normal mode. The second strike I got however… was not so smooth. It ended with me being the last person remaining in the strike after the other two guardians gave up. I was slowly working my way through the mobs, but quite honestly it was going to take forever… so I also gave up and left. For some reason they were trying to rush ahead and skip mobs that only served to destroy us as a result when several different groups of mobs came tracking us down at once. A few carefully timed supers whittled down the mess but we still had the final area with five ultras up, and I simply did not have enough ammo to make it through all of that by myself.

In my travels last night I ended up picking up a Key of Yuul, and as I have gotten these various chest keys I have made an effort to try and track down the location. This one is a pain in the ass and is located near the Court of Oryx on the Dreadnought. The problem with it is, that you have to use a series of those invisible platforms to get up to the ledge that the chest is on. I suck at jumping puzzles and as a result I was cursing while trying to do it. As always the chest itself was disappointing, only giving me some materials and some court of oryx tokens. I did however manage to get several legendary items from rare engrams. One of which is the above Fusion Rifle, which has a name that is a bit of an inside joke for anyone who has watched the abridged PlayStation 4 reveal video. Panta Rhei is actually a latest generation rendering system… but in the video the joke is made that it is like a Manta Ray with Pants. I have to think that someone created this gun as a nod to that joke. In truth it is pretty fun to use, and is significantly more enjoyable than the fusion rifle I had. I seem to have incredible luck getting legendary items from rare engrams, because it seems like at least once a night one of them yield something nice. Granted a lot of it just ends up being disenchant fodder, but those are still tasty tasty legendary marks right?

Sword Titan

One of the things you have to realize about me… is that I am bad at actually following content in Destiny. Hell it took me until a few weeks ago when we took Carthuun through it to actually do the Dark Below and House of Wolves content. Similarly I have done shit for making progress on any of the dozens of quests I have. Well in truth that isn’t exactly true, but apparently I was simply focusing on the wrong quests. Last night when Carth logged in he helped me get my act together on the sword quest and as a result show me his Hadium Flake farming route. I have to say… I was skeptical at first but in about thirty minutes of running around we gathered up the fifteen flakes I needed to get my sword. I think I may actually be able to eventually farm the amount needed to get get Touch of Malice the Exotic Scout Rifle. The thing I need to sort out is how to find Calcified Fragments, because I have only actually gotten two of them, and the part of the quest that seems insurmountable is that I will need 45 of them. Mostly I think I just need to do some research because there has to be a similar route to find them.

The most exciting thing that dropped last night was during our manic chest farming route, I managed to get rare ship blueprints. Once I turned in back at the tower it ended up giving me the ship above. I still think I like my teal/grey kestrel better, but I figure I will use this for a bit until I get sick of it then swap back. Ships seem to be one of the harder to get of the cosmetic items available, and I guess I can see why since they are basically the thing that you see when you load into a strike with random players. If you have a really cool looking ship, it is bragging rights of sorts. I’ve seen some really badass looking ones, and I have no clue how to get half of them. The thing about Destiny is that I am making really slow progress, but still having a blast. I had a friend last night send me a message to ask if I wanted to do a Nightfall… and I am not even vaguely close to well enough geared for that. Unlike a traditional MMO though I feel zero rush to get geared to do stuff. At some point I need to grab Carthuun and Euron and do a night full of nothing but heroic strikes but I am really hoping to do this over the weekend, when I have a chance to buy some more three of coins. I want exotics, and I want them pretty bad… but not bad enough to grind my face off to get them.

Sith Sorcery

October 12, 2015 by Belghast

Double Fist Caffeine

This morning I cannot guarantee how intelligible my post might be. Granted every morning I could and probably should give that disclaimer, but this morning in particular it is well deserved. I had another one of my trademark nights of insomnia, and quite honestly I am not really sure when I finally fell asleep. At the earliest it was sometime after 1 am, and I have no clue how much additional tossing and turning time was added onto that. That is the worst part about not being able to see anything without your glasses, that not being able to see the clock means you are constantly estimating upwards on a night like last night. Based on my motor skills, I am guessing I probably got around three hours of sleep. The worst thing about nights like last night is the growing sense of dread and anxiety when you realize that what little rest you might have gotten is drifting away from you. The alarm going off is a fixed point that there is no negation with. As a result I am essentially double fishing caffeine with both a big mug of coffee and a monster zero as a chaser. I might even go down and fix another cup of coffee just to give myself that much more of a fighting chance of functioning today.

The problem is nights like last night get no easier as the years go by. Its just that the stakes get higher, and I find myself struggling to bounce back from them even more than I used to. In the past I would take a nap and life would be peachy, the sleep debt would be repaid and I would move on with my life. Now… there is a lingering disconnected state that continues on for essentially the rest of the week. Which means I will continue to need an ever increasing amount of caffeine in order to continue functioning like a normal human being. Not that any of this is really interesting, but it is what is happening in my world this morning and as a result is what is getting written about. Once upon a time I attempted a sleep study… but I am not going back through that again. I went in for insomnia… and the doctor was damned certain I had sleep apnea. Those are two vastly different things… my problem is not that I am sleeping too much or too sleepy… my problem is that I cannot shut my brain off to go to sleep. As a result I am kinda gunshy about trying to resolve these issues.

Sith Sorcery

One of the things about this recent tour through the Star Wars the Old Republic class stories, is the fact that none of these characters are freshly rolled. At some point over the last four years I have created each of these characters and made decisions that I might not have wanted to make. Namely when I rolled a Sith Inquisitor for some reason I decided going Sorcerer was the best possible idea, instead of the more comfortable melee options. In all honestly the class itself is enjoyable and I am having a blast shocking the shit out of things, but the problem is… my tanky companion feels extremely squishy right now. I am not sure if this is a side effect of Khem Val in particular, or if it is more the fact that I am not quite so grossly over leveled on this play through. Tattooine was an extremely short planet, and as a result I am not pretty much sitting at exactly the level of my next quest. I am also a few levels from my traditional mod swapping point, so my gear is getting a bit dated. In fact as I am sitting here sorting this out in my head… I should have swapped gear a level of go if I am going by my normal pattern which in itself might account for the extremely squishy nature. Basically I have been upgrading every other set of mods… so I am using level 21 mods, and was shooting for level 33 to upgrade… when in reality I should have upgraded at 29.

The other thing I am considering is a swap over to using Treek instead of Khem Val. Not sure why but the Jedi style tank companions in this game just feel squishy compared to the trooper style ones. Bowdaar felt similar, when I have tried to use him in the past. Treek on the other hand seems to have this amazingly useful arsenal of attacks as well as a really nice AOE stun effect that helps to reduce her damage intake. Additionally Treek doesn’t actually give a shit what I do, and is not constantly judging my power… or sizing me up to potentially eat at a later date. As well as playing a finger wiggler, the big departure with this character is that I was using it to shoot for my first Dark Five character. I won’t like, taking the force lightning [shock] options in dialog trees is kinda fun. I do however feel a bit more disconnected from this play experience than others. Especially with the Bounty Hunter, I could see a lot of myself in those dialog options, and in the Inquisitor it feels like the class is nothing like me at all. I would never be cruel just for the sake of doing it, but in order to max out my dark side points… that is pretty much what I am constantly doing. It feels like this is going to be a bit of a slog to get through, but I am making decent progress. As of last night I am level 30 and on Alderaan, and should be wrapping up the first chapter shortly. I am sensing a pretty big conflict coming up, and will be interesting to get through it.

Week in Gaming 10/11/2015

October 11, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Week

I am sitting here this morning with my writing buddy beside me. I’ve shown pictures of Allie in the past as she sits on the blanket that I have folded beside my keyboard, and once again this morning she is there purring quietly. She really is the mascot of the week I have had, because honestly other than a bit of an emotional roller coaster surrounding The Beginner’s Guide, I would say that the week as a whole has been one of contentment. I managed to accomplish quite a bit in my quest to push through all of the stories I had not seen in SWTOR, as well as made small bits of progress in Destiny. At work things seem to be largely calmed down, or at least to a manageable madness. More than anything I think it was taking Tuesday off that helped reorient my world to a much better state of mind.

Star Wars the Old Republic

This week was an insanely productive one when it came to Star Wars the Old Republic. As of last Saturday night during the podcast I managed to wrap up the Smuggler storyline, and picked up work on the Sith Warrior. With Tuesday essentially being a day where I did nothing but play SWTOR, I managed to finish up the Sith Warrior. I’ve talked about this already but I have to say at the time the Sith Warrior was one of the most gratifying experiences when it comes to giving you the control to settle all of your vendettas in one ending. Every person that you want to seek your revenge on is laid out in such a way as that you can, and the final events are so damned satisfying. Having played both Sith Warrior and Jedi Guardian… I have to say I am a bigger fan of the Warrior experience namely because it is deeply personal… and not simply the overarching events of the game as a whole.

From there I picked up on my Bounty Hunter, largely because I needed a palate cleanser from playing a force user… and having just wrapped up Smuggler I was not quite ready for another cunning class. I fully expected to not be terribly into the Bounty Hunter experience, largely because I didn’t really enjoy Trooper that much. However I am coming to realize most of my problems with the trooper was the fact that it was my third class within a few months of the launch of games to push to 50… and at that point I was simply bored to tears of all the repeated planet story content. The Bounty Hunter is quite literally the most reasonable person on the imperial side. The game gives you the ability to play the consummate business man, and that is absolutely the path I took. I killed no one for free, and kept my collateral damage to a minimum. As a result people were constantly surprised that no, I was not in fact going to kill them. Generally speaking I almost always took the option to freeze them in carbonite and return them to the client fully intact. I am guessing that quite honestly, Bounty Hunter is probably going to go down as my favorite game play experience in SWTOR.

Destiny

My progression in Destiny has slowed down considerably, with the bulk of my forward movement coming from Armsday packages and any time I level up a faction like the Gunsmith or the Cryptarch. While I am playing the game of equipping my best gear before I decrypt any engrams, I am still ending up with low level blues most of the time that I turn into crafting materials. I’ve developed the nasty habit of buying shaders, emblems, and ships…. and as a result I am generally running low on Glimmer most of the time. I really need to try using some of those glimmer items that increase the drop rates while I work on bounties. My latest toy that I am enjoying playing with is the scout rifle above that came from a package when I leveled up Dead Orbit faction. I had not really played with a scout rifle much since coming back and had forgotten that it was essentially a high payload sniper rifle. Realistically I am to the point where if I want to progress I need to be running Heroic Strikes, and I simply have not messed with getting friends together yet in order to do that. Still having a lot of fun, but trying to keep it super casual so I don’t burn myself out and get bored with it.

Battlefront

Another game this week that I have spent some time with is Star Wars Battlefront. I pre-ordered this game through PlayStation network the moment it was announced because I am super nostalgic about the lineage of Star Wars shooters. This weekend they allowed players to download and play for free in the beta, and I have to say my feelings about it are extremely mixed. The game does an excellent job of giving you the fantasy fulfillment of playing a soldier in the Star Wars universe. Past that however… I think it suffers from the fact that I have been playing so much Destiny lately. The game handles significantly worse in the moment to moment gameplay that Destiny does. The guns feel worse, the movement feels worse, the cover mechanics… feel worse. I think if I spent enough time I could get used to it and even come to like it, but right now I am struggling with the feeling of “I would rather just play destiny”.

The Beginner’s Guide

I’ve said everything I could really ever want to say in my deeply personal post on the game from last week. Last night on AggroChat I to some extent reprised those thoughts in a much more condensed manner. The take away for me is really this. If you are not in an extremely stable position in your life, and if you are at all struggling with your own emotions… don’t play this game. Essentially there are two possible reactions… either you are going to think it is complete bullshit and it won’t effect you in any way. Or it is going to act as a mirror to show you all of your fears and anxieties about yourself. It quite literally took me a few days to recover from the experience of just watching a play through of this game, and not actually playing it myself. I am not unhappy that I went through it, but it is also not the sort of experience that I would suggest lightly to anyone. I know that sounds weird and arcane… but this game does strange things to you. This is honestly the closest thing I have seen to a real life “The Ring”, in that this game will ultimately leave you slightly changed as a result… and not always in a good way.