teso Archives - Page 3 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

April 2, 2014 by Belghast

Wabbajack or Bust!

One of the last big decision points we had to make was picking our PVP campaign. Essentially how Cyrodil works is that there are these campaign groups that are functionally like “servers” in that it represents one constant group of players from all three sides during a 90 day “season”. These sides fight for control of Cyrodil and attempt to crown an emperor by holding all of the barrier keeps surrounding the White Gold Tower. Each of these campaign groups is named after a weapon from elder scrolls lore. Currently the most populated is “Auriel’s Bow” which is benefiting from “first in the list” syndrome… where people simply click the first option and go with it. Oddly enough “Dawnbreaker” is another really high pop server, because for whatever reason a ton of serious Aldmeri Dominion pvpers decided to set up camp there.

As explained in my first video of the night, we have put our heads together and reasoned Wabbajack to be a good place to be. For those who are not TES lore junkies or who have not played Oblivion or Skyrim… Wabbajack is the weapon of the mad god Sheogorath. You are just as likely to zap your foe as to turn them into a bunny… or even rain down cheese from the heavens. More importantly however it seems like quite a few of the more organized Daggerfall folks have chosen the server for their own, so I believe it will be a place where we might have a fighting chance against the Aldmeri and Ebonheart hordes. We chose Daggerfall expecting it to be less populated, and as a result have an easier time getting into Cyrodil instances. Unfortunately as the video states Slurms has ended up on Auriel’s Bow for the time being, but we are hoping he will get the ability to swap to us for free.

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

Last night my friends and I… or at least a slightly different group of friends… decided to go back into Spindleclutch in the hopes of completing the quest that had apparently bugged out the previous night. The primary difference this time around was that we had two dps, a healer and a tank… the traditional dungeon makeup. To complicate things, we had a player healing who had literally not had a healing staff in his inventory until a guild member crafted and mailed him one on the way to the dungeon. So needless to say we had a few issues we needed to work out. Overall we managed to make it through the dungeon, but at times it was through sheer force of will. The above stream video documents our journey through the depths of spider hell.

For not having played a healer in ESO before, especially a night blade healer… Kodra did a remarkable solo healing the dungeon. Essentially we are realizing that the night before we simply brute forced a lot of the encounters with pure healing throughput in the fact that we had two healers who had rolled and were leveling AS healers. This run through the dungeon was very similar to our first run through the dungeon almost a year ago. There were many packs of mobs that flat out murdered us… especially once we got into the “corrupted” section of the dungeon. Some of the group tactics were a nightmare and it was all I could do to try and juggle everything and also somehow manage to keep up enough stamina to be able to block power attacks. At this point I am realizing I need way more stamina, and plan on dumping the next several skillups into that trait.

While there was quite a bit of faffing about before the dungeon, in trying to get over to Spindleclutch and get everyone zoned into it… I think we managed to run the place in roughly 45 minutes which is not too bad. One of the things that would have really helped out quite a bit is the addition of crowd control. I’ve considered spending a point and picking up dark talons, as being able to lock down a large group and at least keep it off the cloth wearers would have been extremely beneficial. The other cool thing is that I somehow managed to get several viewers during the dungeon, one of which even congratulated us on our victory. I am so used to no one watching my streams that it was rather odd knowing I had an audience that was not a guild member and likely not also in the same mumble channel as me.

Tonight there are already tentative plans to step back foot in the dungeon and see what trouble we can get into. At this point I seem to be the only tank in the level range of the dungeon, and while I do not mind being the token tank… there is only so much spelunking that I can take in a night. My wife and I have made plans to start trying to walk around 10 pm, and this means I need to make sure I am not engaged in something around that time of the evening. So essentially it cuts one potential dungeon run out for the night. I am sure in the next few days we will have more tanks entering the level range to take the pressure off me. My hope is that soon we can have multiple spindle groups going at the same time.

Feed your Claim

Just a really quick and friendly reminder… if you are like me and now completely enthralled by Elder Scrolls Online… don’t forget to log into Landmark periodically and feed your claim some copper. The upkeep mechanic while not extremely brutal, is there and constant and could involve the repossession of your claim. Since several of us managed to get in early enough to grab some pretty choice spots… I would hate to see any of us lose them to forgetting to feed the upkeep bank. Currently you can have roughly 5 days worth of resources stacked up in your claim bank. Every two to three days just to be certain, I have been logging in and depositing additional copper ore into the bank to keep it “topped off”. I really wish I could farm up enough to keep it healthy for a month or so, but I can see their desire to limit it to a small amount so that players are constantly having to log in.

Spindleclutch Age

April 1, 2014 by Belghast

Tax Time

Last night my wife and I had agreed to get our taxes done. Normally we do this over spring break but various reasons, one of which was a death in the family caused this to not happen. Tax time is one of those things that causes undue stress in me. While the only time we had to pay federal is when I was doing a lot of contract work, I still live in fear of someone having screwed something up. The IRS are a truly humorless group, and I always picture the agents from the matrix when I think of them. They would give zero shit that someone in HR screwed up our withholdings.

As a result we end up procrastinating until we reach the point where it is either April or almost April and we are pushed into action to finally deal with it. Last night once again we were relieved when it was finished. For once we somehow dodged the bullet of having to pay state taxes, and are getting a small refund back from there. We ended up doing just fine, and like every year we ask ourselves why we were so frightened of the process. In part I guess it is because there is some magic number we are supposed to have paid in taxes for the year, and I feel like it is pulled out of thin air. That it doesn’t really feel like it is based on anything we have control over. I guess I just hate the fact that some agency has complete and total control over our fate.

Hail Yes

While we were out and about we needed to run a few errands, one of which was a trip by Target. I pretty much avoid Wal-mart like the plague… not for some higher social justice reasoning, but instead because it is nearly impossible to get out of there in under an hours time. They have 50 cash registers and maybe 3 open at any given time. The addition of self checkout has improved this a bit, but still it ends up severely damaging my cool having to deal with the store. So I generally opt for a trip to Target and the Grocery store separately to make up for that one Wal-mart trip. I did see a rather sad sight while at Target, they had a big stack of copies of Defiance that they had on clearance for $13 a pop. I considered picking one up for the 360, but then remembered that I am far less likely to play anything if it is on a console.

As we were leaving the store, the wind smelled like rain and there was a massive storm front rolling in from the north. My wife turned to me and said… in true Oklahoma fashion “It looks like it is about to rain.” Granted we had a conversation earlier that there was no chance of rain listed in the forecast. As we walked to the car I replied “nope, it’s going to hail” as I saw little pieces of ice bouncing off the pavement. So yeah… bright and sunshiny out one moment, dropping ice on my head the next… you have to love Oklahoma weather. Another thing of note… getting hit in the head by hail hurts like a mother. In fact right now I am remembering that we still have our stuff from target out in my wife’s car… because when we got to the house it was still pelting ice at us and we opted NOT to carry it in.

Limbscather

Just north of the city of Daggerfall in Glenumbra is a skull and crossbones symbol on the map. When you see one of these it marks the location of a “world boss”. This one in particular is limbscather, a named lurcher/treant thing. At level 7 he is damned near impossible to solo as is the case with most world bosses. You can tell a world boss by the special unit frame and the number of red dots to either side represent just how difficult the encounter is. In theory you can solo most single dot encounters, as you get to double dots it starts to get rougher and then finally the triple dot encounters will damned near always kill you. When I first logged in I was milling around finishing up some quests, when guild members talked about pulling together a limbscather group.

One of the things I am always down for is killing world bosses, regardless of how much lower level they are. In part because you are almost always guaranteed a filled soul gem from killing them. Additionally sometimes they drop really nice blue loot for the level. Even if you can’t use it, you can always deconstruct it for the chance of getting a blue temper to upgrade your gear later. That is one of the things I love about the system, that you can take temper from one item to upgrade the quality of another item later. We killed him a few times before we all got bored of it and moved on. A few people managed to pick up the blue staff he drops, which I mistakenly thought was a healing staff… but is apparently a frost staff.

Spindleclutch Age

The overarching goal of the evening for me was to be able to get to the level that I could reliably tank Spindleclutch, the very first dungeon in the Daggerfall Covenant. Almost a year ago we tried the dungeon in beta and had never managed to pull together a group since. At that time it was a truly brutal experience, so we wanted to make sure we were at least level 12 before zoning in this time around. Thankfully in the months between the dungeon got a good tuning pass, either that or we were simply more prepared for what came with it. Back when we ran it that first time, the first pull of the dungeon managed to wipe us without mercy. This time around it went much smoother and while we got a lot more mobs than you would in a World of Warcraft style dungoen, we were able to manage it.

The interesting thing about an Elder Scrolls Dungeon, is that tanking in them is far less like a WoW style dungeon, where you gather everything up and hold onto it while the party burns it down, but instead more like tanking in a MOBA. As a Dragon Knight Sword and Board tank I have various tools at my disposal to temporarily taunt a mob onto me, through either the ransack morph or fiery grip. As a result I spend most of the fights trying to temporarily distract the encounters and get them to focus on me just long enough for the damage to get them low enough to be able to finish them off. The result is that players need to focus fire specific mob types to make sure they go down first, in order to survive the fight. The various encounters are really good at employing group tactics, and at one point last night we had two healers healing each other.

There were definitely times however when I was needed to truly “tank” a mob, and I was able to do this fairly well. While the game does not have a traditional aggro table, there were plenty of things I could do to either knock down the boss, taunt it, or yank it across the room to keep it from tearing apart my team mates. I would not say that the game necessarily has a strict alignment to the holy trinity, and we entered the dungeon with a sub optimal group… namely two healers, a dps and a tank. However the extra healing seemed to make up for the fact that we were really low on damage. I think you could probably run the dungeon without a tank but instead just have to rely more on knockdowns and snares to burn down the encounter before it killed you. I really enjoyed the dungeon in beta for all its brutality, but I have to say I enjoy the better tuned encounters a heck of a lot more.

My absolute favorite feature however has to be the way dungeon loot works. Just like every other mob in the game, each player gets a personalized roll on the loot table. However unlike the world bosses, every bit of this loot is tradable. So this meant after each boss we killed, there was much swapping of gear around to make sure the item went to someone who could use it. I wound up walking out of there with two blue tanky rings, tam got a damned nice blue two handed axe, rae a mana regen neck I believe (after I had to toin coss to decide who got it…. seriously where is the effing /roll command people), and I believe Damai walked with something but I cannot be sure. I am anxious to do the dungeon again tonight if we can muster the people. The quest bugged a little bit when trying to complete the dungeon, so we still do not have full credit for the place.

If you have a fear of spiders… Spindleclutch is going to be a rather terrifying experience. I don’t necessarily like spiders having grown up in a house with brown recluse… but I managed to get through without much issue. Also there is this area, where you have to cross a broken down bridge held together only by spider webs, that did kinda tweak my vertigo a bit. The dungeon looked absolutely amazing and it had a fun design that was not as on rails as Warcraft, but still funneled you towards the destination. The only negative is that the experience while good was not great, but that is to be expected. I think had we been able to complete the quest it would have been really good. They had to nerf dungeon experience, in part because testers were living in them during the beta weekends. I remember one group that ran Spindleclutch from level 10 to level 30. Hopefully as we get more people into the level range we can get a bunch more guild dungeon runs going.

The Dragon Knight Comes

March 31, 2014 by Belghast

The morning after

Yesterday was a really exciting day, and today I am in somewhat of a stupor from all the festivities. As I talked about in my last couple of posts, yesterday was the beginning of the Elder Scrolls Online five day headstart. Thing is this is definitely not my first game launch, in fact there is rarely a game launch that I do not participate in… but this one just feels more personal. I’ve known various people that have worked for various game companies, but this one is just different. Elder Scrolls is a monumental franchise for me, and I started my fandom back with Daggerfall. However never before has one of the people who I hang out with on an almost nightly basis… part of the creation of something I love.

So more than anything I wanted this launch to go smoothly, for the health of the guild and the health of the game in general. The launch of a new guild in a new game is an extremely stressful time for me. Trying to get all the people going in the right direction is a challenge but more or less things seem to have gone extremely smoothly. We’ve only had a few people who did not heed my bajillion posts about faction, and ended up rolling the wrong one. I feel bad that they essentially have to start over now, but by being the wrong faction they will never be able to group with the rest of the guild. This is one of the few confusing points, in that characters can live in multiple guilds… but functionally you can only group with your own faction.

The Dragon Knight Comes

It’s odd for me to try and be objective about a game launch, when I have been playing the game in one form of another for over a year now. The fact that I have played as much of it as I have, and that I still want to participate says as much as anything I could. I’ve spent a lot of time in the “3 month mmo club”, but for whatever reason this is different. Since I have reported so many things and watched them get fixed in subsequent builds, it feels as though I have more at stake here than I have in the past. As of logging out last night I was just a little shy of dinging 11. Honestly getting to level 8 or so is really easy, but from there on it slows down considerably. Additionally for most of the day yesterday I was trying to stay in lock step with my friend Audrae.

The problem is I am fundamentally bad at questing as a group. I am all about doing hard objectives with friends, but the piddly little things, it is rough to stay in step. At one point yesterday I had to take an extended break, and I laid down for a bit. When I came back we had no Rae, so I am guessing she fell asleep as well. I piddled around after that, did a few things, grouped a bit and killed a world named mob as well as ran some other friends through Bad Mans Hollow. At this point I am feeling very tanky, and my survival is probably as good as it has ever been in ESO.

Once I leave Glenumbra I will finally set out into mostly untested territory. The characters that I have made it past the first real zone on were all Ebonheart, so for the most part Daggerfall Covenant will be fresh. Towards the end of beta I purposefully tried to test only the early content, as to keep the later stuff fresh for me. It was wierd, that so many people struggled to figure out what path they were going to take, or how they would create their character. For the most part i have created “Belghast Sternblade” the Dragon Knight over a dozen times scattered among various beta tests. It was the one character that really spoke to me, so I kept returning to playing it over and over… never tiring of the game play.

Guild is Hopping

I will admit, when the betas opened up a bit more and folks started breaking out some negativity regarding the game… I was a bit concerned to say the least. There is a fairly significant threshold of 50 members of the guild in order to open up the Guild Store. There was a time where I wondered if we would actually be able to hit that in House Stalwart, but apparently those fears were completely unfounded. As of this morning I am looking at the guild roster and we have 65 accounts in the guild. The place is absolutely hopping and at this hour of the morning there are already a half dozen people in and playing. Apparently all the work trying to make sure this was happening paid off, and I am starting to think about the various things we will be able to do if we even maintain half of these members at veteran levels.

Thing is… this is just the Imperial Edition and folks who ordered direction through Zenimax. There will be another batch of players starting Tuesday, and another batch starting on the 4th again that didn’t pre-order for whatever reason. As a result I still expect the guild to grow significantly. When all is said and done we might be sitting around 100 members, which would make this one of our largest game launches in House Stalwart history. The thing that is helping this time around is the Alliance of Awesome. This has helped to funnel so many new and good people into Stalwart for the beginning of this game. At this point I am going to have to start figuring out what the final guild infrastructure is going to look like, and who I will tag to be officers. I tend to treat each game as a unique animal, and just because someone is an officer in one game does not immediately mean they will be in another.

Since we have a blended “family” going on right now, I also feel it is crucial to reach out and tag people from all the various camps, as well as the traditional stalwart folk. So far I have to say everything seems to be blending nicely. I was talking yesterday that while a lot of us know each other from twitter, this was the first time we had really been in the same guild. I am thankful that everything has gone so smoothly. For at time yesterday we had a dozen or more people hanging out in the “Bel is streaming” channel on mumble, and later today I should be posting the various stream segments up on youtube and adding them to the Elder Scrolls Online playlist. However in the mean time you can go to my twitch streams past broadcasts tab to see them all. All in all I think it was a very successful launch day, and one of the more successful ones I have experienced. The real tests will be as they start adding more players.

Elder Scrolls Launch Day

March 30, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sabbatical

Normally this morning you would have been reading about my misadventures playing a new to me game from my steam backlog. However we are taking a week off from that feature, mainly because I knew I would be busy this morning with something else. However we will get to that later, and the reasons why I got up at 5 am this morning to be prepared for it. Instead today we are going to talk about a few games and the highlight of my day yesterday. For awhile now I have been doing the “Bel Faffs About” thing where I stream a game as I play it, and invite people into my “Bel is Streaming” mumble channel. The usual suspects are my guildies who come online and are entertaining so that I don’t have to.

Yesterday I got to hang out with some of my favorite people from twitter, namely @Gypsy_Syl, @NexusRangers, @GameByNight and after awhile the very awesome @TipaDaKnife. I got to hang out the longest with Syl and it was a blast. The only problem is I am so used to listening to her talk about video game music thanks to the amazing Battlebards podcast… it was a little weird to be talking about anything else. Everyone was great and it made for a fun afternoon, even though after getting up at 4 am I was quite a little slap happy as the night went on.

Mithril or Bust

Yesterday we played a lot of Landmark as we hung out, and the missions of the day were really two fold. Firstly I wanted to try and finish my work on gathering the resources for the Mithril pick. Currently this is the highest in progression you can go as far as mining, and thanks to the changes they made to the Founders Pick being able to harvest ANY tree… there is not a resource mining or wood that I cannot consume. The other mission was to be able to craft the rest of the basic machines for my claim so that others can use them. One of the odd things that was different from alpha is that there are both public and private machines. The private machines are labelled as “Refining stations” and allow you to work resources at a progressively better rate, returning more finished materials than went into creating them.

For some time now I have felt a little bit bad for grabbing such prime real estate, but not having done anything on it but clear the ground. In the above screenshot you can see the foundation for Belgarde Keep from the spire, so it really is a very short run away. The problem is as I progress through the crafting tiers I am in constant need of stone. Yesterday at one point I decided to dig down in the desert for as long as I could and harvest as much stone as I could. Unfortunately that happened to be exactly the same time @GameByNight decided to use the “teleport to friend” option. I had been down there long enough that the ground above me was respawning leaving us essentially trapped underground. Thankfully the evac to safety option works remarkably well.

What you are seeing in the pictures represents roughly 350,000 stone worth of building. I managed to gather 200k doing my “big dig” and poured another bit into it over the course of several trips. Sometime soon I will have to do another one my grand harvesting missions and try and make some more progress. Essentially I am building a greatly scaled up version of the building I created in alpha. I am changing up the design significantly but not the overall building type. I like big open air temple like spaces. Essentially I am building much the same type of structures that I used to build in Minecraft. The smooth tool and the ability to craft curved shapes is nice, but I really prefer straight and chiseled edges.

Elder Scrolls Launch Day

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVLast night I went to bed seriously early for me, after having gotten up at 4 am the day before. I had heard rumor that the servers would be opening this morning for the Elder Scrolls Online slightly early, but was not certain that was going to be the case. I ended up waking up about 4:45 and by the time I made coffee and got upstairs, there were a few other guildies also sitting on mumble waiting for things to open. Sure enough a little bit after 5 am CST I was able to log in and create Belghast Sternblade for real. Thing is… it did not take me terribly long on the character creator because I have created this character literally a dozen times now throughout a years worth of testing. I am a simple person, and tend to create the same basic character in each game that I play. So I managed to get in extremely quickly and create the guild long before anyone else logged in.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVSince early this morning I have been hanging out in the “Bel is Streaming” channel as lots of other people have popped in to join me. Honestly far too many to list here, but it has prove to be a really enjoyable and entertaining day. I will be exporting the stream to youtube eventually but here I am posting the various twitch links. If nothing else they are fun to open up and listen into our conversation in the background like it was a podcast. I am for the most part live streaming all day long. While this is a headstart, this is one of the smoothest launches I have participated in. THis folks is why they had us stress test the hell out of stuff during the weekend betas, and every indication shows that they learned a lot of information. The mega server tech seems to be holding up and scaling well.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVRight now I am having a blast, so if you have access to the House Stalwart mumble server, pop by and say hi. I plan on going right back to the game, that is open in the background and continuing my odyssey. However I wanted to take a moment and make my post before it got any later in the day. Hopefully you all are having as great of a weekend as I am.