Farewell to Coldharbor

Cleaning Day

Good morning you happy people…  I am being forcibly cheery because my body doesn’t seem to want to fully function this morning and I am falling back on the whole “fake it until you make it” methodology.  May is a horrible time for me for so many reasons.  Firstly the world seems to come alive and fill the air full of pollen and seed pods and all the wonderful things that make life happen.  As a result my body tries to kill me as my allergies come into full swing.  Additionally with our constant regiment of walking… you would think that at some point I would stop being sore, however that doesn’t seem to be the case.  I hit 10,000 steps again yesterday and this morning it feels like every inch of my body hurts.  Being fat sucks, but at least I am a much healthier fat that I used to be.

One of the other huge negatives about May is the fact that it is also when the end of the school year happens.  Any spouses of educators will agree with me that the two worst times of the year to be their spouse…  is the beginning and end of the school year.  My wife no matter how much I love her… has been an spastic little monkey in a frantic rush to finish all the things that have to be finished.  As a result she is prone to fits of irrationality at 10 pm at night when things are not going like she wants them to, and not much help in taking care of the household chores.  Also as a result, I’ve kind of said screw it myself… and our house is a pit right now.  So today will be devoted to the cleaning of all the things and trying to get more domicile into a more livable state.  Mostly it has been my inner sanctum that has been bothering me…  I have been stepping over Amazon boxes for weeks that need to be broken down and taken to the recycling bin.  We are considering joining in with a neighbor in a few weeks for a garage sale so some consideration needs to be made about what to actually sell.

Farewell to Coldharbor

eso 2014-05-23 18-39-52-795 Last night my wife was working late yet again, which has been a regular occurrence for most of the month on Friday nights.  She had intended to get home earlyish and we had planned to go for our nightly walk and then walk over to Taco Bueno on the way home.  At some point during the evening she messaged me saying that she would be working late and to go ahead and eat without her, but at that point I was so heavily into the storyline of Coldharbor that I figured I would just wait.  I’ve been Veteran Rank 1 for most of a week now, and have simply not spent enough time in game to push through the main storyline in Cold Harbor which supposedly unlocked access to moving into the Aldmeri Dominion content.  Last night I did just that, by finishing not only the end of the main Cold Harbor story but also finishing up the level 50 harborage quest that gets unlocked immediately after that.

eso 2014-05-23 19-34-45-037 I have to say the “end of the game” is equal parts beautiful and epic, and I am trying really hard not to give any unintentional spoilers for those who have not arrived there yet.  I figure Coldharbor screenshots all look blue and brutal, so I am trying to pick ones that don’t exactly give away major plot points.  There are some interesting choices that happen as you play through the zone, and the game seems to revel in making you choose between bad options.  There is a point where you have to pick between a rogues gallery of formerly vanquished enemies, and I am guessing your options are limited if you did not actually finish the quests in the zones they are involved with.  I feel like I made the right choice…  but you never really know.  I still was dealing with a bad bad person, but overall it did not come back to bite me in the butt like I thought it might.

eso 2014-05-23 17-07-31-593 While I have finished the story, I will still be spending quite a bit more time in Coldharbor as I finish the parts of it I skipped while rushing through the storyline.  After a point you get tired of everything being blue, purple and grey.  I needed to have the ability to move on, especially since I wasn’t really seeing much veteran experience before the Craglorn patch.  It seems as though they shifted things around so you could get veteran experience in Coldharbor.  I have technically been to Craglorn, but only long enough to zone in and get the wayshrine.  I saw mostly Veteran Rank 10 players there, so I figure I have a very long time to go before I am adequate to kill much of anything there.  At this point I have a purple VR1 sword and shield, and a full VR1 blue set of armor, so I am doing okay in the Aldmeri Dominion content.  Though even with all of that, getting jumped by too many mobs at once becomes a fight for my life in a way that never happened in Coldharbor.  I approve of the ratcheting up of difficulty, and it should be fun experiencing the Aldmeri content.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #ColdHarbor #Daggerfall #Aldmeri

Evil Genius

Best Laid Plans

eso 2014-05-19 06-11-58-918 This weekend I accomplished very little of what I had planned, but I did log into a nice surprise over in Elder Scrolls Online this morning.  One of the cooler things about crafting are the tradeskill apprentices… I am using the EQ2 term, because quite frankly I can’t remember the in game name for them in ESO.  Once a day they send you a care package of goodies along with a great note about what they had to go through to obtain it.  The notes alone are worth the skill points, because some of them are absolutely hilarious.  When I opened my care package this morning I noticed that I got a Tempering Alloy, which is the metal temper used to take a purple item to a orange quality one or a legendary.  This is still one of the best aspects of the game, the ability to upgrade an item to whatever tier you might want.

Granted this is my first legendary temper, and I am sure it probably takes six or so to get 100% chance of upgrade, but I will squirrel this one away until I manage to get more.  I had grand plans of dinging 50 and completing Coldharbor, and while I made progress on both fronts… it simply did not happen this weekend.  I blame Ashgar for distracting me with his Final Fantasy 5 draft idea.  I would love to say I will ding tonight, because I am maybe 1/5th of a level away from 50.  I have a few rather epic quests that I am currently on that I want to see the completion of.  Mostly right now I am suffering from too many things I want to play, and too little time to play them.  I might have to start bringing my laptop to work and getting in some playtime over lunch again.

Yesterday was somewhat fragmented, in that we had to attend a wedding that evening.  I have to say it is one of the more interesting weddings I have been to.  The pair are both former students of my wife, and the mother of the bride is another teacher.  I knew absolutely no one there, so the entire occasion felt extremely awkward.  However it was made significantly less awkward for me when the bride started walking down the isle to a full orchestral version of the Legend of Zelda Fairy Fountain theme.  So obviously at least one of the pair was a serious gamer, and in theory they both were, but it made a fairly nice processional theme.  At the end of the wedding they queued up the Imperial March, so I feel like I could get along really well with the pair.

Evil Genius

WildStar64 2014-05-14 06-15-15-469 One thing that I did accomplish this weekend was to play through the rest of the Crimson Isle campaign in Wildstar.  My hope was to play the engineer enough to determine if this was a class I could get into, and as the gameplay progressed I enjoyed it more than the Warrior.  I know without a doubt that I enjoy the Chua far more than I did the Cassian so in theory I guess I have my race and class.  I am still not terribly sold on the game, but it is starting to grow on me.  Surprising enough I found that I really enjoyed the explorer path.  Normally I am not one for jumping puzzles but these felt okay to me.  I am sure late in the game they will be as insane as some of the things I did to get SWTOR Holocrons, but even though those were painful… I enjoyed doing them.  They gave me something to look forward to in every zone, so I am hoping the explorer path will do the same thing for me here.

Soldier path seems an absolute natural fit for me, but all of the “holdouts” felt extremely forced in that it did not feel like there was a lore reason for starting a ruckus at a specific location.  Whereas with the explorer path in Crimson Isle you are helping the Chua scientists place monitoring stations high on the rock cliffs, and this felt cool to me.  So far the thing I dig about the Engineer is that it is very much a “kill them all” class as well.  You can circle strafe around gathering mobs up and shotgun blasting them down with impunity, or at least that is what it feels like right now.  I am sure as the gameplay moves on, there are far more consequences to this gameplay style but I can see it might be fun to tank an instance this way.

Mystic Knights

VisualBoyAdvanceM 2014-05-19 06-09-36-587 Yesterday I officially progressed through the roughest part of the game for starting as White Mage.  How I did it… is that I basically ground out enough levels to make it easier on myself.  Getting to the Water Crystal was a challenge but when I did, the entire game got that much easier.  Now I have a party full of Mystic Knights, which while not the best thing in the game are certainly far more offensive than the White Mage.  Mystic Knight is a class I have never played in previous plays through the game, and I am kinda digging the way spellblade works so far.  It gives me access to elemental attacks, without having to have a true spellcaster.  Supposedly the Rapid Fire combo with Spellblade is a super powerful way of delivering elemental attacks later in the game.

I streamed for quite a bit yesterday afternoon as I pushed through the water temple sequence and gained the Mystic Knight.  Last night I did not stream since I was mostly hanging out on the couch watching my sequence of Sunday night television shows.  I found that watching tv is the ideal time to grind out levels, and that is why I am level 19 currently and have just now finished the fire crystal / karnak castle sequence.  I think I did mostly okay in Karnak Castle and got all of the big name items, that I may or may not need later.  The only thing I missed was the Main Guache, but since I have no use for daggers with my fixed party comp, I did not worry about that too much.  I did pick up Esuna, Ribbon and Elven Mantle so should be fine moving forward.  At this point  I will have to consult a guide because I cannot remember for the life of me what comes next.  I know that I do not get my ranger job until a bit later, so that is really what I need to do next.

Too Themepark

Crazy Fox-Wolf-Thingy

ARCHEAGE 2014-05-12 16-43-17-70 I find myself enjoying ArcheAge far more than I had really expected to.  I have not really even gotten to the “open world” aspect of the game, but I find the questing and combat systems really enjoyable.  At some point I managed to pick up the animal to the side of me that is some sort of a fox-wolf-thingy.  I am not sure if it was from a quest or if I looted it from a mob, but in any case I have a pet now.  My friend Errn informed me that this is my battle pet, but I had reasoned that much by noticing that it was fighting for other players.  Thing is… when I got it, it was already like level 30.  This means the thing probably kicks more ass than I do to be honest.  One of the weird things about the game is that you can either have a mount or a pet out, but not both.

As a result I tend to run around with my battle pet out, and then use the glider poorly to manage to get around quickly.  I really have no clue what I am doing when it comes to the glider.  No matter how I try and control the thing, it seems like I am just falling through the air gracefully.  I’ve watched various streamers be able to control where they want it to go, and I am completely in awe of their skill.  Right now the closest I can get is to hover over the area I want to go and then fold up the glider by hitting R, causing me to plummet through the air.  Obviously this works grand if you are close to the ground, but not so much when you have leapt off of a huge cliff with it.  In the later case, I end up cursing the screen as I seem to flail around in midair on the glider.

I feel bad that I have almost entirely ignored anything going on with any of the quests.  Since all of the cinematic are in Korean still I just end up skipping thing, which has lead me to feel like the quest dialog itself is completely meaningless as well.  So I have zero clue what is going on in the world other than I am helping a series of villages defend against all sorts of things, and I am perfectly fine with that.  The more killing I get to do in the course of the leveling the better, and right now I am really enjoying the “Over Achieve” and “Hidden Quest” options gained by going on a murderous rampage.  While I seem to be swapping out gear pretty frequently, it doesn’t really feel like I am progressing my character along that easily.  I’ve yet to figure out the rhyme or reason behind getting skill points, but I could really use a lot more of them.

Too Themepark

WildStar64 2014-05-12 22-29-17-945 Firstly I don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression from this title.  I love Themepark MMOs, for what they give me…  a carefully curated trip through an interesting world.  I find that I enjoy both Sandbox and Themepark MMOs equally, at least generally speaking.  However there is just something about Wildstar that maybe takes it a step too far.  While playing this game, I literally feel like I am at Six Flags with so many things fighting desperately for my attention.  When I walk into an area that I just explored and hear the “Challenge!” sounder it reminds me too much of a midway barker trying to get my attention.  I’ve compared the visuals of the game to the Vegas Strip before, but really it reminds me a lot more of an actual real world Themepark.  Everything is bright and polished to a shine, with every single inch of space covered with something designed to get my eye to look there.  The above screenshot is of one of the rare sparse moments, and when the game is like this… I actually enjoy it.  However I had to wait for a few minutes to take this shot for various mobs and players to move out of the way.

I am basically in the same place I have been for a couple of months.  I recorded the above video on March 13th and I have had zero forward momentum since then.  I’ve gotten on each beta weekend so far to play for a bit, but just found the overall experience lacking.  There is a lot about the game that I think I would like, but something just doesn’t sit right with me each time I sit down to play it.  The last game I felt this conflicted about was Guild Wars 2, and the end result of that experience is a game that even though I have free access to play it… I never have any desire to do so.  With Wildstar I put in my pre-order in part to lock in my goodies for if I ever decided that I DID want to play it.  Each day I consider cancelling it, because I am just not “feeling” this title.  It isn’t the setting or the races or the goofy character models, but something more deeply set into the game itself.  The funny thing is, I have been back playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and enjoying the hell out of it…  but Wildstar that is a very similar experience just feels really odd to me.  Time will tell if I shun the internet zeitgeist and sit out of this one.

Blue Water Land

Screenshot_20140513_061222 I am still working my way through Coldharbor in Elder Scrolls Online, and last night I hit 48.  The quests out here feel more epic than the ones leading up to them, in part because everything in Coldharbor seems to be absolutely dripping in lore.  One of my joys in any Elder Scrolls title has been killing the various Daedra, and here I have an entire zone full of almost nothing but them.  What is interesting is finding all of the inhabitants of the zone that have been tricked into the service of Molag Bal in one fashion or another.  Last night I had a really cool moment where I helped out some Argonians and their Hist tree, and another where I gained the trust of a feral pack of Bosmer.  This section of the game feels very much like Mass Effect 3, where I am wandering around this zone building an army to fight the daedric prince.

I am trying to decide if I am going to hold out with my level 44 gear until I ding 50.  I have a really good daedric shield that just dropped, as well as my prismatic weapon that I am unlikely to replace until I leave cold harbor.  Wondering if I can limp along until 50 and then craft an entire set of nice gear then.  As of the close of the night I managed to make it roughly halfway to 49, and I still have large swaths of Coldharbor that have been completely unexplored.  Still very much loving the experience of the game, but I am definitely finding that I need breaks from playing it.  The gameplay towards the end of the game gets really intense, and if I am not feeling 100% I end up taking a lot of un-needed deaths.  As a result I have been perforating my long play sessions with trips into ArcheAge, SWTOR and now a little bit of Wildstar.  So far I really seem to be enjoying this mix.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #ArcheAge #WildStar #Themepark

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

Graduation Day

ducks I just thought I would start the post off with a picture of two ducks.  These are the ducks that we encounter quite often on our evening stroll around the neighborhood.  I guess they have decided that we are not really a threat, because shortly after snapping this photo the male duck decided to come up close enough to almost touch.  Granted he might have just been putting some distance between me and his mate, but I would like to think we are a recognized thing by now.  Now that you’ve had a lovely vignette, let me tell you about my day.  My nephew graduated from college today, and being the loving family we are… we attended.  This was an experience in both vertigo and insanely uncomfortable seating.  For starters the basketball stadium it was held in had some of the steepest seating I had ever experienced.  When they asked us to stand for the singing of the national anthem… I literally felt like I was going to topple over the “cliff” and down into the stands below me.

All in all it wasn’t really a bad day, but it was most definitely a tiring one.  I did however manage to top 10,000 steps on the fitbit, instead of my usual 8,000 to 9,000.  This was in part because we parked four blocks away from the stadium and walked it rather than fighting for parking.  The whole side effect of today and what will inevitably happen tomorrow is that I simply do not have the “oomph” to stay up late enough tonight to do a Steampowered Sunday.  In fact as early as we are going in the morning to see my mother, I won’t really have a chance to write a blog post in the morning either.  As a result I am writing this one Saturday night, and will publish it in the morning.  I hate when I have to “cheat” like this, but it is far better to do that than to miss posting something at all.

Podcast That Almost Wasn’t

robins This morning I talked about the little family of robins, that had nested in the white rock.  When I came home tonight there were two chicks poking their heads out of the nest until I got close enough to investigate.  They instinctively ducked down to try and remain hidden but I was able to get my phone up enough to snap the photo on the side.  I feel like each of these photos is somehow softening the blow of what I am about to say.  This week you damned near did not get a podcast.  Admittedly this is one part miscommunication and one part poor planning on my side.  It was Friday during the day when I realized that I would not be home in time to record the podcast.  Originally for some reason my wife and I thought my nephews graduation was early in the day.  However upon further investigation Friday, we realized that it was at 4 pm in the afternoon.  That meant in a best case scenario figuring 2 hours for the graduation, an hour for anything after the graduation, and another 2 hours drive to get back home… this put me being back around 9 pm, and hour after we normally record.

To make things more interesting it seemed as thought both Ashgar and Kodra were not able to record at all this weekend.  Ashgar had a similar situation to me and when I spoke with him Friday it was from an airport as he was flying home for his sisters graduation.  Kodra on the other hand, I am not really sure what was going on, but he was neither available Friday or Saturday evenings.  He would potentially be available very late on Sunday, but that didn’t really give me much time to get things posted, since I normally post our new episodes Sunday.  After some scrambling, it seemed as though Tam was also not available.  As the day went on Rae and I discussed whether or not we even wanted to record with two people down.  I was of the opinion that we would just take the week off, but I guess Rae was really gung ho about going forward.  She thought in a worse case scenario it would just be the two of us and we would do a relatively short podcast.

Doctor Hannah to the Rescue

While my wife and I were walking Friday night, Rae was able to get ahold of a good friend of ours Dallian and he was able to fill in for us.  I had long thought that Dal might be a really good fit for the show, and him being able to do it on such short notice was almost serendipitous.  So we almost did not record the show, but in truth it ended up being one of the more enjoyable ones to make.  We talk about a number of gaming topics from Wildstar, to ArcheAge and the obligatory Elder Scrolls Online discussion.  We also dip our toes into the world of comic books and Magic: The Gathering and Dallian tells us the riveting tale of how he created the @Doctor_Hannah twitter account.  Hopefully the amount of fun we had recording this one translates to our listeners.

Hopefully next week things will be at least partially back to normal.  We should have Ashgar and Kodra back, but I believe Rae may not be available.  Dallian is coming into town to visit us, and either we will have both Rae and Dallian or neither of them.  In any case next week should be interesting as well.  At this point I am going to close off this post and crash, as I need to get up super early to make my Mothers Day visitations.  I want to wish all the Mother’s out there a very happy day, and I will see you all Monday morning for another early morning post.

#AggroChat #Podcast #ESO #Wildstar #ArcheAge