wildstar Archives - Page 5 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Storm Surge

June 5, 2015 by Belghast

Wall Jumping

World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week. What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games. I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night. I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me. It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit. I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man. Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand. I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have. This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two. Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going. This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group. In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns. We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart. On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop. After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun. Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game. Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold. Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him. The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing. Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy. The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots. Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold. Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together. This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together. Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet. I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play. Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya… it was time to log out for the raid. Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid. Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing. It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it. I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point. I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week. Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight. I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior. There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet. I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active. They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people. This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there. They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them. Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window. There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat. I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.

Last Best Hope

May 29, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff #7 – Late Night with Jaedia

I have been pretty horrible about keeping any semblance of a schedule with the Bel Folks Stuff podcast. Some months I release early in the month, and others I barely squeak out an episode before the month finishes. This month is definitely the later as with other events going on I struggled to find a good time for me to record this bonus podcast. I am extremely thankful that when I found a time my good friend Jaedia was gracious enough to make it work. What makes it even more special is the fact that Jae is recording rather late in the evening. It seems she doesn’t actually sleep, and might be some kind of new fangled android or something? Joking aside we had a lovely conversation about all sorts of random things.

Since both of us have suffered with depression and anxiety for years, we touch a bit on that. We also of course talk about gaming and what we have been up to lately. We also get into the rules of how long you have to live in Wales before you have to start calling yourself “Welsh”. Jae is recently married so we talk a bit about the transition from living together to being “married” that we both went through. Jae at one point had five different blogs so we talk about the depths of her insanity and ability to compartmentalize. We also talk about the happy medium we have found with being a general interest blogger. It was a fun show to record and I hope a fun show to listen to as a result.

[Download Episode Here]

Last Best Hope

Almost since launch folks have been foretelling the Doom of Wildstar, and not for lack of good reason. The game had extremely anemic launch numbers, and as was announced during the latest NC Soft earnings report its box sales had trickled to a slow drip. The current rumor mill of Wildstar going free to play was really spurred on by the announcement of their Mystery Box promotion. So yesterday when they announced that the game would be shifting to a free to play model, this should have surprised no one… not even the most die hard of pro-subscription Wildstar fans. While some Wildstar players are tending to wallow in the doom and gloom that comes with these sort of statements, I tend to view this as a potential new lease on life. For whatever reason gamers appetite for a monthly subscription is next to non-existent. Even World of Warcraft recently introduced the Token system allowing players to convert in game gold for subscription time much in a similar way to Eve Online does. This leaves the last pure bastion of the subscription game being Final Fantasy XIV… and I would not be shocked if we see them implementing some sort of gil to token system eventually.

I am not saying the age of the subscription is over, but I think the age of subscription being the only option just might be. I personally prefer to pay a single monthly fee for “all you can eat” buffet access to the game. Some players prefer to try and play the game for free regardless of the restrictions. Others prefer to purchase features “À la carte” and quite frankly I think in the current gaming economy a game needs to support all three models in order for it to gain permanent traction. Wildstar I feel suffered from the same issues that Elder Scrolls Online did… namely that it launched during an exceptionally tight window of viability. Too many things were being released during too short of a window and it caused the players to flit gleefully between everything that was coming out. I know I personally left Elder Scrolls Online to play Wildstar and left Wildstar to play Warlords of Draenor. Sure I set down permanent roots in Final Fantasy XIV during that time as well… but most players do not do a great job of juggling more than one game at a time.

Free to Play is Not Doom

More games have converted to the Free to Play model than I care to keep track of, and in no case has it really signaled a lasting doom for the community. If anything the opposite is true as a flood of new players come rushing into the community over a few months. When a game releases as free to play it becomes the shiny new thing in the view finder of the player base, and for a period of time everything old is new again. This is likely the phase of doom that most players are dreading, because it means that there will be more than a few “how I mine for fish” folks flooding into your gated community. The thing is… this too shall pass. Not all of these new people will stick around and find footing in the game, and often times the most heinous of players tend to be the most fickle as well. Within six months you will have a more stable population filled with the people who really do intend to set down roots in your community and stick around awhile. Many of those players will probably even convert to subscriptions, but simply didn’t want feeling like that was their only option.

The free to play model is ultimately a good thing for many games because if nothing else it lowers the barrier of entry for new players. This makes it that much easier for you to be able to recruit people into the game to join you. I know with Final Fantasy XIV once they opened the fourteen day trial accounts, it became all that much easier to get my friends to give the game a “second glance”. This also means that probably every player that played at launch is going to fire the game back up and revisit their characters. I personally found the game greatly improved when coming back recently and rerolling as an Exile. I don’t regret my decision to come back, nor do I regret snapping up cheap boxed copies of the game for months of gametime and bonus items. The game is really rather good, and my hope is that with me stepping out of World of Warcraft for awhile I can devote more time to playing it. If you find yourself in a situation where you are surrounded by “doom and gloom” folks, my suggestion is that maybe you find a more friendly place to hang out. Over the long haul this will be a good thing for a game that was so desperately trying to avoid falling into a death spiral.

Enjoying Wildstar

May 3, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 55 – Calling All Bloggers

This week I start off the show, and even title it with a pretty massive plug for the Newbie Blogger Initiative. What is the NBI you ask? Well this is the time of the year when Veteran bloggers support new folks wanting to get started in this madness. This year we are making an extra special push to try and help new podcasters, youtubers, and streamers along with the bloggers. Additionally I myself am making a special push to try to rekindle the fire in some of our wayward bloggers who are no longer as regular as they used to be. The entire month of May is dedicated to helping folks get started and find their niche, and since most of the AggroChat crew have participated in the past, it is time to get the word out.

As far as the rest of the show we had myself, Tam, Ashgar, Kodra and Grace. As always we spent a good deal of time talking Final Fantasy XIV since we are all still heavily playing it. Right now Greysky Armada our Free Company is back holding the bronze medal again for being the third most active Free Company on our server Cactuar. This week also saw myself and Grace spending some more time playing some more Wildstar. The Black Dagger Society the guild I am connected to has been having a guild night on Fridays and as such I have started joining in the festivities. Additionally there was talk of Marvel Heroes, Diablo 3, Ashgar returning to his Gameboy Advance roots, Tam winning his first Infinity tournament since the move, and similarly Kodra beating VVVVVV for the first time in his new place. Since this month is devoted to Shadowrun for the Gameclub we are also starting to play some of this. It was a fun show in spite of being in that pre-E3 gaming doldrum.

Making Progress

I’ve been down a bit on raiding lately in my posts so I wanted to take a moment to give a bit of an update of sorts. The Tuesday before last was very seriously one of the worst nights of raiding I have had in a very long time. It really made me question if I wanted to keep trying to raid in World of Warcraft, and I posted this long discussion about it. It seems like I actually gave voice to some of the same feelings that many of our raid had been having, but for whatever reason had not actually talked about. As a result a dialog has started among some of the members, and I have to say I think things are starting to improve. Tuesday this week was still a pretty rough night, but it felt at least somewhat better. Thursday however on the other hand felt really good. We were a much trimmed down group due to some absences but I also felt like we were working better as a team. We lowered the bar slightly and worked on normal content again, clearing everything we had ever cleared before in a single night and putting in some serious work on the forge encounter.

If we had another hour of attempts I feel like we probably could have downed the encounter. Things were flowing so much better than they ever had before. We were getting through to the second phase, and then approaching it with a sense of direction and purpose. We were alternating between burning down the Elementalists and focusing down the waves of adds. We managed to push through to the final phase, and if we were at our full numbers we might have been able to defeat it. I think we learned a lot of good lessons that we can hopefully apply this Tuesday. The thing is… I am feeling something that I have not felt in a very long time… the desire to get back in there and give it another shot. I am actually looking forward to raiding in World of Warcraft this week, and that is a pretty awesome thing. Maybe just maybe we can make the changes necessary in the raid to make it a better experience for all of us. At this point I am glad I said something, and started the discussion. I guess the truth is if you are not having a good time, chances are you aren’t the only one.

Enjoying Wildstar

Similarly this week I have been enjoying quite a bit of Wildstar. I am still taking it nice and slow, but at this point I am level 16 with just a short ways to go to 17. I have officially finished the Algoroc zone and will be moving into the next area. The Black Dagger Society has been awesome to me, and I am super thankful to Chestnut and Chaide for giving me a friendly home to hang my hat in. It turns out that Friday nights are somewhat of a guild night for grouping, and they have been working on lower level content. Currently I do not have any other commitments Friday nights, so I am going to try and make that my Wildstar day. This week they ran me through the earliest Protostar dungeon, and it does a pretty great job of teaching you what you need to do to succeed in a Wildstar instance. Honestly I wish that this would have been the first dungeon when we were playing at launch, because I feel like it would have cleared up a lot of the frustrations had by many players.

The group we went into Wildstar with was made up of some pretty disparate points of view and skill levels. For some the extremely frenetic pace of the dungeons was a point of frustration especially as we were trying to learn “on the fly” all of the various things we were supposed to be doing. This dungeon eases the player in teaching them the various mechanics and then building upon them as the phases go, finally culminating in a boss fight that is fairly representative of what I saw in the “real” dungeons. While the dungeon is essentially a giant tutorial, it is still extremely fun and when a random stranger asked me if I wanted to join them… I happily ran it again. The other big switch I have made is previously I was focusing entirely on tanking as the warrior and now I am starting to build out my dps abilities as well. In most games I level as tanky as much as anything else in an effort to be as survivable as I can be for fighting the named encounters. In this game I feel almost more survivable playing DPS as I do as a tank. Essentially the amount of damage I deal more than makes up for the extra damage I might be receiving. I am still pleasantly surprised that I am enjoying Wildstar as much as I actually am. Pretty happy I decided to give it another shot.

Wrong About Wildstar

April 23, 2015 by Belghast

More Initiates

For as frustrated as yesterdays post was, today’s is all the more hopeful. Lately on Wednesday nights I have been assisting a fledgling second static group in our free company out. While it still struggles to get a full eight people, we are making some progress. As more people level to the cap, more people will be available to join in the raiding fun and hopefully this will smooth the process out significantly. For the last few weeks we have been working on Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, aka the first major hurdle and the gateway to the second coil. Last week we made decent progress but were still struggling to get through the dive bomb phase. That phase seems to be the biggest frustration with the fight, and once you figure out the timing the rest goes smoothly. While I barded it up last week, this week I tanked it because that was the role that was needed. Since my health was significantly higher than Damai we swapped roles and I took the Twintania role and he adjusted quickly to dealing with the adds.

Now our first group of the night was less than successful because we ended up having to pug in half of the players. The positive was that we noticed that the people screwing up were not our own people. As the evening went on more people got in game and we were able to fill out the rest of the slots with some other seasoned veterans. From here I think it took four attempts before we downed the 5th turn and keyed a whole new group of players for the second coil. This is awesome for a bunch of reasons… because firstly it means that second team is progressing nicely apart from issues getting people online at the right time. Secondly however it also means we can start drawing on the pool of players available for Monday night turn 9 attempts as well. I know Grace is itching to see t9, so hopefully this will smooth out some of our own attendance irregularities. It is almost summer after all and with summer comes folks going off and doing summer things.

Wrong about Wildstar

This morning I am questioning if I have been wrong about Wildstar thus far in feeling that the game was just not for me. Granted we gave it a good shot and played this game at launch but it felt like something was off. Now coming back and playing it again I am really enjoying myself, but there are a large number of details that are significantly different that I think are effecting my enjoyment. When the initial video was released talking about the Exiles and Dominion, I naturally felt an immediate affinity with the Exiles… the problem being most of my friends had that same immediate attraction to the Dominion. I struggled with this choice until I found the Chua and for the most part enjoyed my time playing an Engineer. The problem being… I just did not enjoy that style of tanking. What I should have played was a Warrior, like I did every time I actually enjoyed myself during the beta. So this time around I am playing a Human Warrior and enjoying smashing faces and jumping around like mad. The Exile side has this whole “Firefly” vibe that works for me, whereas the Dominion feel more like playing the Empire from Star Wars. Both are interesting but at this point in my life… I feel more kinship with the rebels.

The other thing that is helping significantly is due to the whole promotion I have a hover board starting at level 1, which makes roaming around the zones so much more enjoyable. Additionally thanks to the promotion I have some spending money from selling extra items on the open market. Knowing my character is set for awhile on upgrades and spending money makes all the difference in the world. Finally the pace I am playing with makes a huge difference. Wildstar is the sort of game where piddling around feels more enjoyable than focused leveling. I am stopping to smell the roses, and boulders, and landmines… well you get the idea. Additionally I went the Soldier path, meaning I get to smash more things in the face and while I enjoyed Explorer… smashing things in the face is just more my style. At launch I had this overwhelming feeling of a need to keep up with everyone else, so that I would be viable for dungeon running. This time since I am playing all by myself for the most part… I am taking my time and poking through the content at my own speed. All of which adds up to a completely different experience for me. All of this proves that the circumstances you go into a game greatly colors your end experience. So far I am enjoying playing this game as a secondary “cooling down” from the action type game.

Wrong about Marvel Heroes

Another game that I have recently picked up that I am more than willing to admit I was wrong about is Marvel Heroes. I have avoided this game like the plague because of a whole slew of reasons. Firstly at its core it is a Diablo clone and while there is nothing wrong with that… click to move and attack games and I generally do not get along that well. Thanks to League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm I have learned to tolerate them… but my preferred means of control will always be WASD. Secondly everything surrounding this game gave the impression that it was a free to play money grab of the worst type. I played a tiny bit of this game in beta and was not terribly excited about any of the heroes I was able to play, so I filed this away in the “not for me” bin as well. The thing is over time I have continued to watch people I know and love and respect playing this game as seriously as they have played any traditional MMO. When I see something like this I start to wonder, what are they seeing it in that I am not. I’ve had these same feelings surrounding games that I just did not previously understand like Guild Wars 2, and after finally hitting my stride in that game I figured I might as well give Heroes a shot too.

Sunday I ended up playing this game for awhile, and wound up playing it for I think five hours without really meaning to. I feel like the piece of the equation that I was missing to really enjoy it, comes from the fact that I did not even realize I was in need of that Super Hero MMO fix. I happily played City of Heroes for about six months before moving on to World of Warcraft. When Champions Online launched I was extremely excited about that game… until the first patch wound up killing the combination of abilities I wanted to play with. With the launch of DC Universe Online that was yet another game I really enjoyed, but struggled to get traction in for reason I still don’t know to this day. Marvel Super Heroes seems to be just a bout the right amount of depth for me to consume as far as super hero content goes, and the ability to swap between heroes freely helps significantly. Right now I am focusing on Captain America but by the same token I have gotten rather fond of Gambit and Deadpool. All of which I really want to play more of, and ultimately this seems like the perfect sort of game to play downstairs on my laptop while watching television and movies. In fact I am hoping to do just that this weekend, and see what mischief I can get into with my shield bashing self.