May 2013 - Page 8 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Sixty Candles

May 4, 2013 by Belghast

This is another one of those mornings where I am struggling to write. I know I have a lot of things to do today, but just am having trouble getting started. It is a cold, dreary and rainy morning, and that definitely does not help the sluggishness. I’ve been out already, gotten breakfast and filled up the gas tank on my wife’s car but as I sit here to write the words are now flowing as well as they usually do.

Gameplan Changed

Last night I had all these plans of riding along on the Hellbug raids in search of a purple mount, but that didn’t actually happen. Instead I wound up getting distracted once more by carnage quests, and as I saw my experience bar moving I decided I would push for level 60. I am normally one of those people that levels extremely quickly. In fact I used to pride myself that in WoW I could take a character from 1-85 in 7 days.

So as a result the fact that I still did not have a max level character almost six months after the release of Storm Legion was a bit of a point of embarrassment. I hit a massive wall along the process however, and the crap spec that I thought was decent… presented an impassible barrier as I tried to grind through the content. Every few weeks I would fire the game up, and try again knowing I was only three levels from the cap. I should have sought help, but I had been hearing the same grindy comments from others and assumed that was just the master plan.

Sixty Candles

Thanks to a post from Wilhelm, I finally got out of the funk and found some specs that actually worked. As a result the game has been a blast for me. Last night I finally dinged 60 and it was a complete accident. Over in Kingsward I found this really great sequence of quests that started at the Academy, and culminated in a siege on the tower of dawn. The whole feeling of taking back a part of the world for the royal family was amazing. I don’t want to give away more spoilers than that, but as a whole it ranks up with some of the most epic quest chains I have experienced in any game.

The other night in Empyrean Core I had gathered up a few items for level 60, and the quest chain at Dawn Tower provided a really nice blue sword. So after completing that I set out to explore Ashora. I had been out there before, during some guild event that involved doing an invasion out there, so I had at least one of the ports. The zone is pretty awesome looking, but also would have been super dangerous if I had explored it before now. I was originally going to work on the quests, but just ended up wandering around and exploring the map for most of the evening.

Money or Mount

Now I am not sure what my next goal is. Ultimately there are really two competing goals. Firstly I feel like to be anything but a detriment to world events… I need to get the 130% speed mount. In order to get that I need to gather up 300 plat. Considering I am one of those players who is habitually poor in every single game, this is a pretty insurmountable obstacle. I cannot even fathom having enough money to be able to purchase the 1000 plat 150% mount.

So the ultimate question is, do I begin actively searching for Hellbug rift raids, knowing that they will be annoyed by the fact that I am slow… or do I grind out the 300 plat and buy my mount first. I have no clue how long the Hellbug rifts will be active, but knowing Trion it will likely be at least a month. The only problem is, I have yet to unlock any daily quests, so I have no clue exactly HOW I will get the money. Money is just not a thing I worry much about in MMOs. It is odd, in the real world I am completely financially stable, but in games my characters are habitually broke. This feels somehow backwards from most MMO stereotypes.

Oh well I need to finish this up so we can go out and do things. Though honestly I am not sure exactly what we will be doing as rainy and icky as it is out there. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you have a great Saturday and an awesome weekend in general. I have a server move to do at 10 pm tonight, but I will likely be gaming before and after it. Figure I am going to have to take a nap today for optimal clarity of thought during the downtime.

Specimen Captured

May 3, 2013May 3, 2013 by Belghast

This is day eight of my experiment, and this is the first day I really don’t know what to write about. I knew this day would come sooner or later, as writers block is almost always the headsman’s axe for my blog. I think it could be a bunch of separate things happening all at once. Firstly it has gone from sunny and 80* here in Oklahoma, to dark, dreary and 35*. On top of this, I have a big server move scheduled for 10pm Saturday evening that I am fairly nervous about.

Hellbug Rally

Pretty much my overarching mission for the day was to try and get one of the Hellbugs before the crossover event disappeared. For those who are not familiar with them, the Hellbug is one of the archetypal creatures in the new Trion Worlds and SyFy game/show combo… Defiance. They remind me of a cacodemon from Doom… with legs. Right now in rift, there seems to be a one in five shot of any spawning fire rift being a “Invasive Species” Hellbug rift. Granted this is completely through incidental observance and is “not a real number”.

The big problem I have had is that I have no clue where the best place is to FIND Hellbug rifts . Wednesday night I devoted a bit of time to farming Fire rifts, and never even saw a single one. Thursday at lunch and early evening, I ping ponged between the level 50 top end zones, namely Shimmersand and managed to see three… and in most cases those were just as they were closing.

ARAM Strikes Back

After a few hours of this, mumble was filling up and I needed a break from the skull drudgery of killing closing “not hellbug rifts”. When we had four people online, I got coaxed into doing an ARAM map over in League of Legends. I had initially thought that Tam was going to queue us up for another 2v2 battle… but much to my surprise we were going out into the main queue. We picked up a 5th random, with whom I traded Jayce for Volibear that apparently we were both more comfortable with… and we proceeded into the map.

The takeaway is that I still suck at League of Legends. I had a good time and it was a close map but honestly there is still so much of the time I am running around not really knowing quite what to do. Playing a full on melee support character against a bunch of ranged characters is one of those situations. I like everything about Voli, but he is definitely a “set someone else up for the kill” character. I never could seem to get in sync with the other players on the map.

After that we played a couple of Summoners Rift maps, mostly to get various friends their kill of the day bonus. On the first I played Darius, who is still brutal and awesome to play. On the second I played my current favorite, Wukong and did sizably worse. I played a bit too aggressive a bit too early and wound up underfed for most of the map. After that I was just playing catch up trying to eat all the minions I could. I still have not gotten terribly good at “last hitting” and ended up with way too many minions wasted.

Specimen Captured

After those last few maps, I decided I would head back downstairs and work towards my goal of capturing the illusive Hellbug. Shortly after logging into my account on my laptop, I noticed a player asking for more for a Hellbug Raid group. I figured… sure what the hell, it is not like I had been having much luck on my own. I made my way to City Core, and after a few minutes received a player summon directly into the heart of an Invasive Species rift.

The cool thing about the Raid, is that they seemed to have found a pattern where one had not existed before. We systematically crossed the zone hitting various Fire rifts, with about every third one seeming to be a Hellbug rift. It all felt very reminiscent of trying to spawn the “Ancient Cyclops” in South Ro… but the raid leader seemed to know what he was doing. At the very least it did not involve killing every other mummy or some nonsense like that.

It was round about my fifth Hellbug rift that two things happened. Firstly upon closing my Fifth Rift I got an achievement: When Worlds Collide which apparently happens after reaching the final stage of five of these new rifts. Additionally the achievement nets you the very cool <Ark Hunter> title. Upon receiving my loot, I also noticed that I had acquired a Skittering Hellbug (rifthead does to appear to have parsed yet). Based on discussions with some of my G+ Rift friends, I got extremely lucky to get the mount this soon.

Based on the write-up over on Rift Scene that I linked the other day, it appears that Skittering Hellbug and Skritt pet are the green quality items and red in appearance, Gulanite Hellbug and Burple are the blue quality items and purple in appearance, and finally Toxic Hellbug is the purple quality item and green in appearance. I have no clue if there is also a Toxic Hellbug pet as well, especially since Rifthead lacks any of these items right now. The Toxic Hellbug is rare enough, that in the rift raid, and tempest bay I have yet to see one.

Hellbug of a Different Color

I had quite a lot of fun once I managed to get into a viable rolling raid. I hope to join up again tonight and try my luck at getting one of the other colors and at least one of the companions. While I doubt if a hellbug would ever replace my Snogs, I am a total sucker for pets and mounts. Additionally, I really need to make my way back out to Ember Isle, especially now that it is no longer as heavily farmed and see if I can find any of the other rares.

While I didn’t much feel like writing, I guess I was able to force myself through the process and write anyway. I guess I can throw writing in the same bin with “parties”, in that they greatly stress me out and I try and avoid them… but if I actually attend I usually have a good time. I’ve been enjoying writing to you, my mythical audience. It is always interesting writing something, knowing it is going to go out into public… but also knowing that it is highly unlikely to actually garner any comments.

If you’ve made it this far… I hope you all have a great day, and I hope it is followed by an even better start of the weekend. I have no clue what we are going to be doing, but based on the pile of laundry and the state of our house it will involve some cleaning. I know at some point soon I have to get cable run to a couple of rooms, which will involve making sure nothing is in the way. It has been interesting getting past the initial seven days… I have no clue how long I will actually be able to keep this going.

Breaching the Core

May 2, 2013May 2, 2013 by Belghast

One of the pains of living in Oklahoma is the shifting weather patterns. Last night when I went to bed it was roughly 80* and this morning as I am waking up it is 45*. At this point I wish it would just pick a season and go with it, because flipping back and forth between heat and air conditioning is a pain in the butt. Despite the weather annoyances, yesterday went pretty awesome for me. I had two fairly huge meetings, both of which went extremely well, and the roadmap I had slaved over was well accepted.

Hellbugs on my yard

Yesterday it was announced in the patch notes that a new kind of Fire Rift was opening up in Telara. These “Invasive Species” rifts have a chance of dropping either the hellbug mount pictured above, or a hellbug companion pet. Rift Scene has a good writeup by Cupcakes about the event, and last night I started to see players on these new mounts showing up in Tempest Bay. It was late in the night and I honestly forgot to take a screenshot, so I am doing something I dislike doing and linking to the Rift Scene image for reference… hopefully I have given sufficient credit.

I spent the better part of the evening roaming around trying to find one of these Hellbug rifts. After roaming around Morban, Kingsward, and eventually several old world areas I came up completely empty handed. Going to need to do some research to see where they are more likely to spawn. I really want either the purple one, or the super rare green one. While I played enough defiance to know it was not really a game for me, I am all about cross overs and new mounts.

A.R.A.M.

I popped onto mumble, and after a bit of chatting with my friends and listening to their banter about League of Legends, I allowed myself to get drawn in for a quick map. I was reintroduced to the concept of A.R.A.M. aka All Random All Murderbridge. We had done this the night before, but I didn’t realize it was an actual “thing”. Apparently the Howling Abyss really wants me to play Nunu, because once again I got him assigned to me as my random champion.

I promise Nunu is not like the only champion I have unlocked. The game should have been able to pick from Alistair, Annie, Ashe, Darius, Garen, Graves, Jayce, Kennen, Olaf, Shen, Tristana, Udyr or Wukong… but instead in both cases it picked Nunu which is part of the weeks free rotation. Apparently it thinks I need more Yeti in my life. Moaning aside, I have to say I am finally feeling like I am getting used to him.

Once again ARAM assigned us one champion that we were familiar with and one that we were not per team. So it essentially ended up with Tam playing Morgana vs Rae playing Nidalee… and then Drathis trying to play Alistair vs me trying to play Nunu. It was a really good match and we had a “no towers down” stalemate at midbridge for most of the map.

Tam and I actually managed to make a break, get a 15 minute into the game double kill, and drop two towers. Then all hell broke loose as my shitty DSL internet connection fell apart. My ping climbed up to 500, then 1500, then 3500 and disconnected me from the game. At which point we never really recovered. In true sportsmanlike tradition, Drathis and Rae asked if they should hang back until my connection stabilized but we urged them onwards… since a map against friends is a map against friends.

Breaching the Core

I wrote about this the other day, but over the weekend Plasmodia and I had talked about trying to pull together some groups on Wednesday nights. We had set a startup time of 9pm Central, and after my one ARAM map it was getting close to the meet up time. We managed to pull together a really solid core of a team, and they were totally willing to run non-elite dungeons so my nub arse could join in. We ended up with Plasmodia tanking, Marklaar running support, me dpsing, and Aleriase healing. This left us only needing a single dps, so the queue times were near instantaneous.

We got assigned Empyrean Core, which a few of us had never seen before. The zone itself was amazingly beautiful, full of super intricate widgets and bobbles. The thing that really surprised me however was just how challenging the dungeon still was. Previously the Elites were super hard, but the normal dungeons were a bit faceroll-y once you actually managed to hit cap. Last night I was the only under level player, and it each of the boss rights were still rather challenging.

We ended up doing two runs last night, and getting assigned Empyrean Core both times (apparently this is a problem in Rift). I had a complete and total blast, and hanging out with the Alea Iacta Est rift contingency was awesome. Aleriase mentioned that they had been trying to start doing group nights both Tuesday and Wednesday, so I am completely down with doing more of this in the future. I am not sure if we will regenerate the numbers needed to raid, but any kind of grouping with friends is always a positive.

Dungeoneering Challenge

I had almost forgotten just how much I have missed running challenging content with friends. I have been in a real lull of good group content of late. The last time I feel like I was truly challenged in a dungeon was back in The Secret World, running the Nightmare mode content with the friends I have been playing League with. The content was brutal, we had to constantly think on our feet, but the adjustment process was a blast.

I had hoped that with Pandaria we would at least have a period of time when heroic content was an actual challenge. But from the first night, we essentially steamrolled the dungeons we ran in greens and a smattering of quested blues. I think in part that is a good reason why I got bored of WoW so quickly this time around. WoW for whatever reason has forgotten how to be challenging, without resorting to random or downright “Cheap Shot” tactics. Random chance that a mob kills you outright, or does something so horrible you just can’t recover is not challenging, it is just annoying.

If I can actually muster a regular group in Rift, I can see myself sticking around for awhile. In these games I am happiest when the groups come easily, and we can go off and smash baddies together each night. I get bored and slog down when the grouping stops, and my only option becomes pugging. So much of the grouping experience… are the people you experience it with. In most cases, I would rather not play a game at all than to deal with pugs.

Tiny Two-hander

Last night gathered up some much needed gear for 60 through the various dungeon runs. One of the few pieces that I could actually equip now, is a Protector’s Sword of Slaying pictured above. This was a pretty massive upgrade over the two level 58 green one-handers I was using, but as you can see above, the scale feels a wee bit small for a Bahmi. Maybe I am just used to the final fantasy-esc big dude with an even bigger sword trope that wow ran with, but it is just too “normal” for me to feel epic about it.

I will say though it has been fun trying to two-hander. I’ve always gravitated towards dual wield, and in the original rift game what kind of weapons you wielded really mattered for your soul. As such I always gravitated towards paragon heavy souls, which were the dual wield tree. I had not however played around with a two-hander since they made it no longer matter what weapon you were wielding with which soul. That alone has been fun and well worth any wipes that happened in the core.

I am really hoping that over the next few days, I can use this sword as a dowsing rod to help me find some of those hellbug rifts. I would really love to have one of those mounts, and I have missed out on so many other cool mounts thanks to my bad luck and my wanderlust. I am super grateful to my guildies for pulling together the groups last night. I had a blast and look forward to doing it again.

I see my time is running short, and my coffee has run out. If you’ve made it down this far in the post… I wish you the best of days. I will have to pull my coat back out of the closet as I go off to work, but I am hoping that by the weekend it will be warm again. Hopefully it is pleasant wherever you are.

Wukong is super annoying

May 1, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday more than mildly sucked. While I was blogging in the morning, just after posting it… I managed to stub my toe hard enough on something sharp under my desk… that it caused a chunk of my toenail to chip off and a little bout of excessive bleeding. After that my stomach pretty much bothered me all day long, and I tagged out of work around noon. I worked remotely the rest of the day trying to catch up and prepare for big releases on Thursday and Saturday.

Escapist Thwarted

All of this, combined with trying to come up with a new way to circumvent my ninja ferret caused me to get a later than normal start on evening relaxation time. On the ferret note, our current solution seems to be working… and I am breathing at least a minor sigh of relief. We have a drop ceiling in our kitchen, circa 1980, with those massive semi-opaque sheets of plastic covering fluorescent lighting. Over the years the 1980s plastic has fallen apart, and we have had to replace them on a piecemeal basis.

We had just finished doing this, and still had the leftover bits in the kitchen when a stroke of brilliance hit. Basically Miss Bellatrix is getting out by climbing the corner with the litter box. We surmised that if she did not have a foothold, she couldn’t get out. So essentially we have taken two sheets of this plastic covering and clipped it onto the wire with binder clips from the backside, so that it presents a sheer face for her to try and climb.

Based on last night, and the fact we left her out over night as an experiment… and she is still pouncing around the playpen this morning… I would say the experiment worked. The funny thing is, I think she just tries to escape out of boredom. She sleeps far less than the other two ferrets, and when she has gotten out she tried to crawl up into bed with us.

My theory was that she was bored and looking for someone to play with… she often tries to wake the other two ferrets up to play. So the whole escape thing is kind of adorable… but something we had to nip in the bud, because our house is just too dangerous for her. We have an open living room, that spans 2 stories, and a second floor balcony that overlooks it. It is just too likely that she will wander up there and try and take a swan dive off.

Freljord Rising

Yesterday was a big day for new content releases. In Everquest 2 you had the Game Update 66 launch, and with it the launch of the Cobalt Scar area. Neverwinter Online of course launched to the public, and has been riddled with issues at least with the patcher. Early in the evening I decided to fire up the client and log in, and was greeted by a roughly 8000 player queue. So it appears that the launch is at least popular, but then again most MMO launches are.

The content launch I ended up playing last night however is League of Legends and its patch 3.6. The big event with the patch is a massive re-ordering of the champion lore in Freljord and the release of a brand new champion… Lissandra The Ice Witch. I would highly suggest watching the above video if you are interested, but the basics are that the Freljord is now divided into three warring clans: The Avarosans lead by Ashe, The Winter’s Claw lead by Sejuani and the Frostguard lead by Lissandra.

With the focus on Freljord and its lore, this week all of the free rotation champions are somehow connected to this effort. With it, there is a much more sweeping sale going on in the store, with ALL Freljord champions costing both reduced RP and IP. Additionally there are some nifty new skins available, my personal favorite is Runeguard Volibear. I already really liked playing Voli, but this skin just makes him look even more badass.

Sucking Less

It was pretty late by the time I had gotten around to actually doing much of anything, and since I had not played League for roughly a week… I decided to join in the festivities there. While waiting on our group to filter into mumble, we decided to do a little 2 v 2 “Murder Bridge” aka Howling Abyss. To be extra griefy… Tam decided to set us up for a random champions match. By the artwork above you can see that I got stuck with NuNu. What essentially happened is two players got champions they were familiar and decent with, and two completely random picks they had never played.

Making it even more hilarious was the fact that we ended up with four melee champions. The teams broke down like this: Myself playing Nunu and Drathis playing Tryndamere against Tam playing Warwick and Ashgar playing Udyr. My big takeaway from playing Nunu is that his frostbolt is without a doubt one of the most griefy pokes I have seen in the game, especially on a map that includes nothing but melee that have no solid ways of closing the gap.

We lost rather spectacularly in part because Drathis ended up spending most of the map pretty underfed, which as a carry caused him never quite to reach his potential. Also… Ashgar is really really good at Udyr, a champion he was super familiar with and rather skilled. It was hilarious for Tam and I however, because really Nunu and Warwick are much much not our kind of champions… much laughing ensued.

Wukong is super annoying

After our quick murder bridge, we somehow jumped from four players online to eight and decided to do a 4v4 Summoners Rift. After the ickyness of playing Nunu, a champion that I absolutely hate when playing against him… I decided to climb back into the warmth of what has become my favorite champion… Wukong. When playing against each other, it is always interesting. Some of us, Rae especially, seem to have a problem killing friends, and you can almost hear her audibly cringe each time she does it. Others like Ashgar and I seem to set up and develop a friendly rivalry, which unfortunately causes us to deathmatch more than we should.

Another thing I am learning, is that apparently I am super annoying playing Wukong. Ashgar and I both ended up as solo tops, which pitted Wukong against Fizz… both of which are super bursty and super pouncy champions. For the most part we traded blows back and forth, but once I had gotten fed I seemed to start winning these little battles. Apparently my Ultimate ability is super overpowered, and after a few interludes where I went through the jungle to help out in another lane… it seemed my dear friends started hunting for me.

At one point they boxed me in, as two came down from base and the other two came from the river and completely wrecked me. It is funny to listen to your friends reacting to the decoy ability, and finding out that it is not the real you they just killed. I have to say if I were up against Wukong I would probably focus fire him as well. The game felt like a tale of two games, the first when I was super fed and able to pick off players with impunity, and the second when said players realized what was going on and started gunning for me.

Champion Testing

After the mega 4v4 battle, we had a few more players filter off and we fired up a Summoner’s Rift vs bots to test out various champions folks had wanted to play. I got to play Olaf, which I played extremely differently than I expected… but was really enjoyable nonetheless. In addition, I finally got to play Mordekaiser, which is NOT as fun as he looks… and most definitely not a “Belghast” champion. I think I could get used to him, but I feel like I need to do a lot of reading first.

Was a fun evening all around, and I got to play several characters that I had never played before. I am of mixed opinions on my Nunu experience, I was told by my friends that I played him pretty effectively, but overall it just felt so odd to me. He also feels like one of the most griefy champions I have seen, with the frost ball and his ultimate… so many ways to slow the player and do large amounts of damage to them in the process. I could see maybe picking him up and trying him again.

If you aren’t regularly playing, I highly suggest you hop in during the Freljord launch event. There is a much better assortment of killer champions in the free rotation this week than normal. Or at least, there are more champions I was wanting to play, and most of them on a significant sale. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you guys continue having an awesome week. Today is a super stressful day for me, delivering my mobile web roadmap, so hopefully that will go well. More than anything, I think the document is designed to be big, and sit on a table during the meeting saying “look we thought about this shit”.