June 2014 - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fires of Kel Vorath

June 18, 2014 by Belghast

The Vanishing

There are things that happened yesterday, that I feel like I want to talk about… but at the same time I probably shouldn’t. Suffice to say a good friend of mine pulled the ripcord yesterday and jettisoned out of the internet briefly. I kept trying to figure out if it was something I did or said, but it seems like there were just larger things happening that I will never fully understand. While it was happening though I was supremely confused and depressed to be watching it going on… and felt rather helpless to stop it. I have a bad habit of trying to internalize these things, and trying to figure out how exactly I had failed the person. Luckily for us at least, the person seems to be reversing course a bit… and since friends are friends I am ready to welcome them back with open arms regardless.

A few weeks ago I was moved to send out a blanket tweet and I honestly don’t even remember why at the moment. While I don’t remember what started it, the sentiment is very heart felt. Each and every one of you makes my life better in some way. We might grouse and bicker and have bad days, but at the end of the day I am better off because each of you exists out there and has touched me in some way. We use the word “community” a lot, but in many ways it doesn’t really sum it up. You guys are my family, and not the uncle that you never see and always thought was kind of weird… but the ones you wish you saw more often. As an adult, your friends are the family you choose to associate with. I don’t draw lines between real life and online… because the effect is real either way. So I just wanted to start my blog post this morning in trying to remind you all what you mean to me.

Fires of Kel Vorath

The better part of last night I spent trying to finish out the Auroria zone in Wildstar. The further into that zone you get, the more intense the questing becomes. The other night I ran the Ruins of Kel Vorath dungeon with some guildies, and last night I finally reached that area in zone. It is absolutely massive and everything seems to exist on this grand epic scale. The only thing I can really equate it to is doing the quests outside of Dire Maul in World of Warcraft, but imagine that Dire Maul was maybe four to five times bigger. Almost an hour of that time was spent doing a single zone event quest as I helped the dominion retake Kel Vorath. The rewards were minimal but the experience gain was phenominal. At the beginning of the night I was level 22 and now I am level 24 and about halfway into it.

I came into Wildstar expecting fun mechanics and a really enjoyable world to wander around in and explore. I had zero expectations of epic story so I am really pleasantly surprised to find it. I have no clue how much of the zone I have left. Right now I am hung up on a main story quest because I cannot for the life of me find the mob I am supposed to be killing. The indicator is on my map, and I have wandered around the entire area without finding any place that lets me go underground where the indicator seems to point me. Unfortunately the game is just new enough that there really are not many guides out there that I can even lean on as a crutch. So if I ever manage to find Kaarg the Divine… then I imagine I will be wrapping up the zone in rapid succession. I have the quest leading me out of Auroria to speak to someone at Palerock Post, so I think I am as “done” as it comes other than this one straggler.

PVPness

I don’t have any proper screenshots from last night, so instead here is a shot of me standing on this giant gun. Zelibeli decided to schedule a PVP night last night, and in an attempt to spur it on I showed up and participated. Several of my friends had a pen and paper game going on, so I knew attendance would be at least somewhat limited. I am supposed to be participating in the game, but for one reason or another I have not actually made it to a single meeting. So I figured it was just fine if I didn’t make this one either. We actually had five people ready to go for PVP, the only problem was that we were not complimentary levels. This might be an oversight on their part, but for whatever reason it does not seem like you can mentor down to the lowest player and queue together for PVP. Maybe this is their way of trying to prevent “smurfing”, but in any case it also meant that we all needed to swap to alts to make this work.

I grabbed my level eight warrior, because quite literally… that is the only character I have other than my engineer that has finished the “ship” starter area. First thing I have to say is that I suck horribly at pvp, and as a result I tend to actively avoid it. That said PVP in this game is much like PVP was in Warhammer Online… as in it is a phenominal way to level a character. I went into the night about halfway through level either, and exited the night almost level eleven. We ran maybe five matches, towards the end we were starting to get the swing of things. We were playing Walatiki Temple, which in many ways is like a remix of Warsong Gultch. Instead of being a pure capture the flag scenario, it is a “collect the things” one. In that you capture these Moodie Masks that spawn in the center of the zone and take them back to your base.

The catch is that you can also capture masks from your base. So in theory you have to guard the middle objective and your own base to be able to win it. We were doing a fair job of limiting the hemorrhaging towards the end of the night until someone started shooting off his mouth about how dumb we were for guarding the masks at home… causing the entire team to get distracted and fumble. People really are the worst part of PVP, and I wish in many ways there was NO chat in the battleground. If they simply had a smart ping system like league of legends has, I think most of the chat could simply disappear. The challenge we had last night is that ultimately we ended up against other premades, and quite simply we were not exactly “premade” quality.

In World of Warcraft, if you queued as a five man you got matched against other groups that queued as a five man. From the way that we got trounced I am guessing that the Exile players were a combination of two five man premades. They each worked flawlessly to whittle down our defenses and at the same time keep pushing forwards and taking masks. All of this said… I really was surprised just how much I enjoyed myself, and bolstered by just how little the rest of the AofA folks cared about winning. We were there to play the game and play it as well as we could while we could. With that sort of attitude I can totally see this becoming a regular thing. I like playing anything… and so long as folks keep a good attitude about it I can deal with losing all night long if we do. The big positive is that win or lose you still get a ton of experience and a satchel of goods, so I came out way ahead at the end of the night.

#Wildstar #WalatikiTemple #Auroria #FiresOfKelVorath

Ruins of Kel Voreth

June 17, 2014 by Belghast

One More Day

Tomorrow has a fairly significant sequence of events happening. Firstly my wife is flying back into town from the first conference of the summer, and secondly she is doing so on my birthday. Currently I care far more about the first part of that statement than the second. These conferences are always rough especially when they straddle my birthday. There have been times in the past when I was all alone for the occasion and it is really hard to keep from disconnecting from the world. However tomorrow when I ding 38 I will have my wife back home, and I hope her trip is safe and expedient. The flight back home from this event in past years has been riddled with downtime and layovers… and I hope she actually arrives on time this year.

As far as the birthday part of tomorrow, I really have no clue what I will be doing. I took the day off from work mostly because she would be flying in and I would need to get to the airport and pick her up without really knowing an exact time based on past years experience. I figure I will likely either play Wildstar or something on the PS4 while waiting. Past that I have no real big plans, as I won’t likely get together with family until the weekend. I always have a sort of contest to see which automated bot wishes me a happy birthday first. So I am curious who will win that race this year. Its funny when we live in a time when that is a “thing” and I take a perverse sense of pleasure in it.

I just hope that I will be breathing tomorrow. For the last several days my allergies have been going haywire and this morning it finally hit my lungs. I woke up today struggling to breathe, and am contemplating taking a breathing treatment. If it stays too bad even after the treatment I am not sure if I will be able to go to work in this condition. Having asthma and allergies is a blast… and right now the cottonwood is blowing hard outside. I wish I could find wherever the cottonwood tree is and remove it… because it seriously makes my life miserable every year. However I guess were it not for the cottonwood… the would be something else to take its place in the making my life miserable department.

Buying Rapidfire

As of yesterday morning I was sitting outside the Fire Powered Ship sequence that ultimately leads to the fire crystal. I had been assigned the Geomancer for my fire job, and having had it in the past… I knew I really wanted no part of it. As a result I ended up using Gilgabot’s Job Fair to buy my way to freedom. If you end up with an assignment that you really do not like for whatever reason, you can donate more money to charity to “buy” the class you really wanted. As a result I ended up picking up the ranger for my fire crystal, though it might have been interesting to see what it would be like with a ninja instead. The ranger gives me access to rapidfire, probably the most overpowered melee-friendly secondary ability in the game. With the knight it will likely be an i-win button against a few of the later fights.

Last night I played through the Fire Powered Ship, collapsing Karnak Castle and the Ancient Library in rapid succession. I continued on to Jachol and Cresent Island and now have officially gained my Ranger crystal. Tonight I will play through the Ancient Desert which should be interesting to say the least. Not sure if I will steam roll the sandworm or get steamrolled to be honest. I would really like to get through Soul Cannon tonight if I can and pick up my earth crystal. I went ahead and requested this yesterday when I picked up the fire crystal just so I would know whether or not I wanted to buy my way to freedom again. I was given the Dragoon which honestly I am fine with. I’ve always loved the dragoon in the Final Fantasy games that have had them, so actually looking forward to finishing with it. Maybe it is that I have just recently played through this much of the game already during our draft game, but it seems like it is going so much faster for me.

Ruins of Kel Voreth

Last night at some point during the night I had muted Teamspeak, and not realized it. So while I had wondered why everyone was being quiet I didn’t really think much about it until Tam messaged me asking what I was up to. I guess they were pulling together a dungeon run, and while I had considered going to sleep… I opted to stay and dps the run since Shandrah would be tanking. I have to say the Wildstar dungeon experience is kinda amazing. I know I have said this about other games, but Wildstar dungeons really do feel like World of Warcraft raids. We would have likely wiped over and over were it not for the fact that Shanbot has been running the dungeons with pugs since she often plays during a west coast timeframe host often. As a result she knew exactly what to do on each of the boss strategies, and we managed to make it through the instance without much in the way of wipes.

As the dungeon went on the encounters ramped up significantly. One of the things i liked was that there seemed to be a bit of randomness to the dungeon itself. One of my friends mentioned that when they had been in the dungeon the quests they were given were completely different. The final encounter was something that could only be described as “Bullet Hell MMO”. As a fan of the Bullet Hell shooter, I found the encounter really interesting. We wiped the first time because it had bugged out and we managed to get phases one and two happening at the same time. Without this bug occurring the encounter was actually rather manageable. I am honestly amazed that any pugs are able to get through this dungeon, let alone do so in a timely manner. Now I find myself really looking forward to running it again.

The big change for me last night was that I had literally just finished setting up a DPS build in my second slot. I had been slogging through content since about level 20 as a full tank, and honestly I thought I might have an easier time dpsing my way through the encounters. It was fortuitous that at that moment almost exactly, Tam got ahold of me to dps the dungeon. Now I feel like I have both hotbars set up and ready to go if I need to do this again. I really liked dpsing as an engineer and might have to install damage meters just to see if I am even vaguely close to the other dps in performance. I feel like I am lagging behind, but maybe that is just because I am not used to doing it. A lot of the engineer dps abilities are tightly targeted and it is hard trying to lay them down in a way that the mobs won’t move out of them until the effect fades. I look forward to giving it another try another night… and increasing my performance.

Wildstar PVP

Tonight ZeliBeli has scheduled a PVP night in Wildstar, so I will be doing that along with some FF5. If you are on Evindra Dominion you should totally check out the anook event if you are interested. I have not even touched PVP so far in the game, so I look forward to getting my feet wet with friends. As it stands right now, since tomorrow is my Birthday I do not have a Elder Scrolls Online night scheduled, because really I have no clue what tomorrow evening might bring. Here is hoping that my wife is back home and that all of her flights were successful. In the meantime, going to beat things up with the guildies in Walatiki Temple.

#Wildstar #FF5 #FourJobFiesta #RuinsofKelVoreth

The Devil’s Lair

June 16, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Decisions

I am still feeling pretty lousy from this allergy induced stupor, so last night I just was not really feeling Wildstar and interacting with other human beings. I ended up logging out about 9:30 and attempting to lay down. I hung out in bed for awhile snuggling with our cats but sleep just refused to take me. So as a result I ended up getting back up and decided I would begin my four job fiesta run. My intent was just to go through the process of backing up my savegame files from the previous draft run we were doing, and simply start the game going… maybe get to the first crystal. Next thing I know it is midnight and I am moments away from getting the fire crystal.

Now however I am paying the price because I feel nice and groggy to add to my allergy induced stupor. It is funny how a game you have played so many times can be so enthralling. So far I am off to a pretty good start. My first job was the Knight which lead to a really easy start to the game and me just being able to roll over the top of almost every encounter thanks to the power of “Two Handed”. The second pick from Gilgobot was the Red Mage, which still worked okay since I did not have either the black or white mage in the first round. Also the Red Mage can totally use a Two-Hander if equipped with that ability, so still pretty much rolling over the top of everything without having to cast any magic at all.

Since I am just a little ways from getting the fire crystal I went ahead and requested my fire job. Now is when things start to fall apart. I wound up with the Geomancer, which is one of my least favorite classes. This means I do have a use for bells… but I’ve always felt the geomancer was somewhat of a useless pick. Basically I have a couple of options… I can either deal with it and struggle through or I can donate money to Four Job Fiesta to buy my way out of geomancer hell. I have yet to decide what to do, and ultimately this is why I chose to request my job a little early so I could mull it over. Basically I have to make a decision before I collect the fire job crystals with which way I am going to go. I would have far rather had ninja or ranger, but then again I would have rather had mystic knight than red mage. but more than happy to roll with the punches there.

Destiny Group Play

Yesterday afternoon after I had finished editing the podcast and writing my morning blog post that almost turned into an afternoon one, I opted to do some Destiny with Tamrielo and Ashgar. At this point Tam and I were both completely sold on the game, but Ash however was not really feeling the game. While I was finishing up my blog post, Ash and tam ran through the first mission in good time and the three of us entered the “Explore Cosmodrome” map point which was a free roaming version of the Old Russia area you visit in the first static mission. We wandered around out there for some time getting both Tam and I to level 7 and Ashgar to level 6. The mobs we encountered ranged from level 2 near the entrance to the area, to level 4 in the instanced areas… and finally level 8 or 9 deep in the zone.

I had the forethought to set this up and stream while we ran around. The interesting thing about the playstation party communication is that apparently it ONLY records my voice. This leads for some odd one sided conversation going on as you watch the video. After having a blast running around in a free form area, we decided to take it to the next level and do what is in essence their first dungeon set in the same basic area. I have to say the concept works… like the boss fights in Borderlands 2 were interesting, but they never really reminded me of the level of complexity found in an MMO boss fight. Destiny seems to bridge that gap and provided us with a number of extremely challenging encounters. The first one was a sort of “hold this spot” fight where we were flooded with really horrible things in the room with us.

The Devil’s Lair

The first encounter essentially involved setting off one of our ghosts to work on scanning an objective, while it does this we have to hold the position. During this time we encountered a brand new mob type that we had not seen to that point called a “Stealth Vandal”. These are the sniper type mobs but they spawn in stealthed and remain so until they actually strike. Now their form of stealth is not truly hidden, but they blend in with the background “predator” like. It took us several tries to get a feel for how the encounter worked and manage to place each of us strategically around the room. Even after doing so it still involved a lot of running around chaotically looking for a safe bit of cover to attack from. Every so often one of us would have to stay alive long enough for another one to spawn back in. This becomes a crucial skill since when the last player dies… the entire team respawns back at the checkpoint and you have to redo the encounter from the start.

The second encounter was the one we had been waiting for. Periodically when in the open world version of the zone these group encounters spawn in. One of them is this insane walking tank that has a blast attack that you simply cannot hide from effectively. If you are on the other side of the wall when it goes off, it will still very much one shot you. The idea behind the encounter is that you have to take out a piece of leg armor, which causes it to fall down temporarily and expose a weak point behind the red cockpit looking shell. You can only whittle down so much health during each one of these phases. So the biggest problem we ran into during the fight is that we simply ran out of ammunition. Every so often another drop ship lands, and periodically it spawns the little drones… all of which are decent sources of ammunition. But this also forces one to make a suicidal run dangerously close to the walking tank to be able to gather it up effectively.

I wish I had thought to fire up the stream before going into the mission, because I swear we were fighting the tank for a good thirty minutes. Once we got to the other side of it, things started to get super creepy. You walk through an area littered with hundreds and hundreds of bones strewn everywhere. I started to wonder if I accidentally teleported into a Doom game, but I have to say I am loving the atmosphere so far. I really have no clue what exactly the “Fallen” are yet, but they seem to be some sort of incectoid baddies similar to the Prothean/Collectors from Mass Effect. Honestly there can be parallels made between those two games in many ways, as the atmosphere often feels like you would imagine Mass Effect would feel if the Reapers came and decimated the planet. So far I am hooked, and looking forward to getting to play more of it. Right now we have managed to hit the cap allowed in this first alpha test, which sucks a bit because each of us have gear that will never be equippable as we cannot get higher than level 8. That said it was a really good time, and I hope to play some of the other classes to see if I like them better.

Wildstar

My plan is tonight to play Wildstar, and work on finishing Auroria on my Engineer. Right now I have reached a point where I am just tired of that zone and want to move on. The southern area of the zone is extremely nasty, and I feel like I am almost underleveled to be able to complete it successfully. I am wondering if I need to go back and finish some of the challenges that I didn’t quite make to see if I can finish off 22. I am also considering making myself a secondary hotbar setup with non-tanky abilities to see how much more smoothly questing goes. Right now my biggest problem is that it takes forever for me to kill anything, and while I can stay alive for a really long time… that time is not infinite. I feel like I am high center right now on my engineer, so I need to do something to get back into the swing of playing it.

#Destiny #DevilsLair #FourJobFiesta #FinalFantasyV

Manifest Destiny

June 15, 2014 by Belghast

The Doldrum

Last Tuesday my wife flew off to her first conference of the year, and for the most part I had been unaffected by this. Sure I’ve missed having her around, but during the work week my time is so metered that I barely notice that I exist, let alone another person. However the first Saturday is always the day it really hits me. It doesn’t help that we are struggling with record pollen counts and the cottonwood is blowing with a vengeance that means I cannot breathe at all… and feel generally shitty. As a result I have completely fallen off the walking wagon, I am sure Monday I will get back into the swing of things, but the last several days I have walked a rather pitiful amount.

Right now I feel very lonely, and as a result have been forcing myself to hang out on Teamspeak as much as possible. For the most part the whole dumping of mumble thing has gone relatively smoothly. The folks I chat with on a nightly basis have just transitioned cleanly, leaving only a few stragglers on mumble. I am looking forward to Wednesday when she flies back into town, and in the meantime I am trying to busy myself and surround myself with as many friends as possible. My natural instinct is to “turtle” and pull my head up inside my shell, never to be heard from again. But I know based on past experience that is exactly the wrong reaction to feeling a bit depressed. I just have to get through a few more days for this current salvo.

Manifest Destiny

Literally within moments of posting yesterdays blog entry, I had a friend of mine hook me up with a Destiny alpha code. I love our community so damned much, and I am not sure if this person wants to be named by name… but yeah thanks so much. After a 6.9 gig download that went remarkably faster than I expected and next thing I knew I was logging in and creating a new character. My instinct was to go human, but for whatever reason they do not have any facial hair options. I cannot create a “proper” Belghast without a beard, so instead I choose to go their robot option called the Exo, which had some really slick configuration choices. The other racial option was some sort of tank grown looking protohuman called an Awoken that seems to be based on vampires/ghosts/elves in appearance. If you are familiar with Defiance, they feel a lot like the Castithans.

So this won’t be the only comparison I make the Defiance, because really so far Destiny feels like Defiance done better. I feel like Defiance was an MMO with Shooter elements, whereas Destiny is a Shooter with MMO elements. Subtle difference there, but being a really solid shooter first… and gear swapping mmo second seems to make all the difference in the world. Defiance was a cool idea, but the moment to moment gameplay felt unexciting, because it lived halfway between two worlds. Everything about the shooter elements of Destiny is solid, and while I fail miserably at playing console shooters… I was able to pick up the controls quickly and felt like I had more control that I normally do with a gamepad. Right now I am somewhat hooked, and hope to get in and play with some friends and explore the ruins together.

I still do not know quite how to hook up a mic and get it working, but I streamed most of my gameplay yesterday to twitch and then dumped it to my youtube channel like I normally do.` In the beginning I was super uncertain of the controls, but by the end of my play session I was starting to feel far more confident with aiming the dual analog sticks. Destiny is a title that I went from mildly interested in, to really looking forward to the release. I fully expect to pre-order this title and play it when it launches in September. I chose to play the Titan which is the closest thing they have to a tank in the game. I’ve you’ve played Mass Effect, it feels really similar to the paragon, in that you have a mix of ranged weapons with super powerful melee attacks. I would like to see how this plays with a group, because I kept encountering things I definitely could not take by myself. At this point I’ve beaten the first “on-rails” mission and opened up the more open world missions. Look forward to playing this a lot more over the next months.

Dances with Orcs

While I was piddling around and streaming things, I also spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Warlords of Draenor. I figured since I have been granted the ability to play the Alpha, I should probably be testing it. Also in a way I am playing it in memory of River, since he was so amped about being invited to the alpha. The game is trying super hard to be modern and relevant, but under the covers it still feels like a ten year old game. I am still working my way through the quests which have the added benefit of building my Garrison. Yesterday I completed a sequence of quests to unlock the Alchemy Hut and in theory the ability to run alchemy crafting missions. I have not however gotten enough Draenor era herbs of the right kind to be able to complete this.

Something I am highly enjoying is the fact that while I am out in the world, I am constantly gathering new followers for my Garrison. Some of them are even call backs to the TBC era Draenor. If you are like me and completed the netherwing dailies to get those mounts, you will remember the fel orc that buzzes past the tower constantly… Mulverick!!!! Well one of the early quests involves rescuing him from an Ogre strong hold. When you do he agrees to join your garrison as a follower. While I spent most of my time playing alliance, I am really hoping when that content opens up that we see similar nostalgic references. Ultimately that is going to be the hook for people if they can manage to wield it correctly. Nostalgia is a pain, and even as jaded as I currently am about the experience… this game can still manage to hit me in the feels occasionally.

So while streaming yesterday, some random stranger in the channel suggested that I run the first instance… and while I had nothing better to do, I figured sure… what the hell. So I joined a group in progress that had cleared to the first boss of Bloodmaul Slag Mines and apparently lost their tank. It got off to a bit of a rocky start as as soon as I pulled the boss I disconnected from the server. Warlords of Draenor is very much an alpha, and as such I have had more than my fair share of issues staying connected. However once I got back in the run went relatively smoothly from that point on with zero deaths. I still am not sure how I feel about the current state of Deathknight Tanking. The rotation feels off with large empty spaces where I can really do nothing at all. I am slowly moving things around, using soul reaper a lot more and using death siphon each time it is up… and things are starting to feel a bit better. I will continue to test and see if I can hit on the magic feel good spot for the class, but in its current state… I am considering going back to warrior tanking.

AggroChat Talks E3 2014

This week we were without Kodra and Ashgar because of various real world commitments, so once again we grabbed Dallian and Tam and talked about the various things that happened during this years E3 show. I have to say I thought this years show was strong enough that I actually went out and bought a playstation four at least in part to what I was seeing. We talk about so many different things that it ends up being a bit more disjuncted than normal, but overall upon listening to it and editing all morning… I think it is a pretty strong show. You can hear our take on what is coming down the pipe gamewise. Right now the game I am looking forward to the most is No Man’s Sky, and we talk at length about it. I would be curious to find out what you thought of this years showing as well.

Four Job Fiesta 2014

One last quick blurb… this years Four Job Fiesta is now open! I have officially registered by not started. It looks like this year I will be starting as a Knight, which should be pretty simple. If you are interested at all in Final Fantasy… or better yet are interested in making money for a great charity… you should totally sign up and play along with us. I will likely be streaming good chunks of my gameplay. I am pretty much forced to play this because Ashgar holds a gun to our heads and makes us sign up each year. We love him dearly and do not want to face his wrath. But really it is a pretty fun time, and there is a lot of community spirit going on as folks complete the game. Here is hoping I do not get stalled and actually finish this year.

#FFV #FourJobFiesta #AggroChat #WarlordsofDraenor #Destiny