August 2014 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Crafting Gae Bolg

August 11, 2014 by Belghast

Deep Cleaning

With the return to school rapidly approaching, this weekend we engaged in what has become a ritual of ours… the semi annual back to school deep cleaning. With all of the travel over the last several summers our lives have become about trying to just keep moving forward. As a result the house keeping falls a bit by the wayside. I am adept at picking up and vacuuming but when it comes to actually deep cleaning a room, I lack the attention to detail that my wife has. So yesterday we decided that we would devote a good chunk of the morning to getting a bunch of things done that needed to be done. The above image is part of the load we ended up taking to goodwill that had been sitting around our house as clutter.

For me I mostly did the brute force cleaning, and the gathering and relocation of objects. Once the brute force pass was done my wife would come in and do the fine detail work with chemicals and such since my lungs can’t really handle that sort of thing. We worked together as a team and the house looks great as a result. We still have a bit more laundry to finish up tonight, but overall the house is ready to go into the school year. Personally I don’t so much care, but the cluttered house is a major stressor for my wife, and anything I can do to help her transition back into the school year to go more smoothly I am willing to do. Over the next few days I know she will have several other things that need to get created or shopping trips that need be made all in the name of “back to school”.

This time of year is almost like Christmas for a teacher, but for whatever reason this year the back to school sections of stores have been pretty puny. My wife as going through her past blog posts from previous years, and during this time she was constantly finding neat things to use in her classroom. This year there has been nothing. We did make a mad dash out to Office Depot yesterday afternoon to pretend we didn’t know each other and buy two separate bundles of 3 magnetic white board erasers each. Once upon a time Office Depot used to let teachers buy more than the limit of sale items like that, but as a whole that store has really gone to shit. If it was not the option we happened to have in town, we would likely never actually go to it. They used to be extremely supportive of educators, but lately they have really screwed with their appreciation programs to the point where it simply isn’t worth the hassle and instead we just go to staples when given the option.

Errands for a Smith

My gaming yesterday was largely about trying to play catch up and get attunements knocked out of the way. For the last couple of nights I had been hoping to catch up with Warenwolf so that he could attune the needed Materia to both my Lancer and Archer weapons for their respective relics. The relic weapon quest is something akin to the epic weapon quest from Everquest and Everquest 2, the primary difference being that now you can complete most of it through the duty finder. The first step in the process is to craft a base weapon that Geralt the smith will improve into the relic weapon. There are several ways you can go about this, the intended way is to farm Wanderers Palace for an item component, and then have a crafter of that type take it and some rare metals to craft together a weapon for you. The more realistic way is to simply watch the market boards for someone who has already crafted it.

After dumping all of my free money into the guild house, I had to play catch up and finally Friday evening I managed to get enough gil together to be able to purchase the base weapon. The biggest frustration I had is that you do not need a high quality weapon, as the conversion to the relic weapon will ultimately destroy the base item in the process. However there seemed to be nothing on the market but high quality weapons, which demand a premium. The next step is to take this weapon and fuse two materia of a specific type to it. After that you bring it back to Geralt and he begins sending you on various other tasks. The first of which is to defeat the Dhorne Chimaera in Coethas Highlands. Both myself and Rae were working through this quest at the same time so we tag teamed all of the steps.

The Chimaera went pretty smoothly and was much easier than I remembered when we did it as a guild. We turned in once again at the smith and he sent us into Amdapor Keep to retrieve some rare tome. This group was a bit of a frustration as it was lead by a gladiator who had apparently not tanked the zone since release. Once upon a time you could rush to the first bosses gate and skip all of the trash in the process. He tried this twice and we failed twice, and then from that point on he was pissy the entire run. This guy really is one of the first jerks that I have encountered in the game so far, however we kept our heads down and finished the dungeon without much issue. After a quick turn in at the smith again we were off into Coerthas Highlands to “temper” the unfinished weapon through combat where you have to kill eight of three different types of mobs.

Crafting Gae Bolg

ffxiv 2014-08-10 21-32-31-504

After the weapon tempering phase it is on to do yet another world boss battle, this time Hydra which is located in as a sub dungeon in Halatali. This fight went far faster and easier than I remembered as well so I was starting to feel excited that we might just wrap this up in a single night. After turning in again it begins the hardest part of the quest where you have to defeat each of the hard mode primal encounters starting with Ifrit. Rae and I were up to the challenge so we queued together and hoped for a quick run. It turns out that when you queue as two dps it actually goes pretty quickly since the game tends to favor prebuilt chunks of parties over singlets. When I was running these as my Warrior it felt like I was absolutely carried to my Bravura weapon. It might be a side effect of the fact that Sunday is rarely a great day for random grouping, or we might just have gotten unlucky but each and every primal fight we encountered last night was a struggle to get through.

Ifrit for the most part went smoothly enough, taking us a couple of attempts to get him down. Garuda on the other hand was a nightmare. We had a pair of tanks that didn’t really know what they were doing and they were from the same guild. The better geared of the two tanks was oddly enough less experienced. It turns out that for roughly 200 hunt emblems you can get a full level 90 set of relic lookalike gear, and that is what both of these guys were wearing. We wiped mercilessly and this scholar in the group was getting pretty pissy. I mean I get being frustrated, but instead of trying to teach the players what needed to happen in the encounter they just wanted to rant and rage. Rae stepped up to the plate and explained the encounters and after we got a three stack of the echo buff we managed to push through it.

Titan is without a doubt the most difficult of the hard mode primal encounters, and this time it was no different. Once again we did not experience the carry factor that I had when I was running up my warrior. Everyone in the party seemed to be similarly or lesser geared than the two of us. Lots of bad things kept happening including the second healer just standing in stuff constantly and dying early. On the attempt where we beat it, all of us died to various effects and a group of four players… a Scholar, a Monk, a Gladiator and a Warrior managed to push Titan down the last quarter of his health winning us the battle. I wish I could have given each and every one of them a player commendation because wow… they really were badasses.

Thankfully during this entire process I managed to get enough “bookrocks” to not only craft the weapon Gae Bolg but immediately turn around and upgrade it to the ilevel 90 version as well. Early in the day I had decided to queue for one of the hardmodes and while we made it through just fine… I felt like I was pulling down the party because my Dragoon did not have his relic weapon. Now that I have it I feel like I can queue for the harder dungeons with more confidence. As part of the whole running around yesterday, both Rae and I attuned ourselves for Crystal Tower, which is as Tam explained it “Baby’s First Raid”. I am hoping to run that tonight and maybe get some more upgrades, but thanks to the spiffy weapon I picked up I am no longer quite so worried about dragging down the team.

#FFXIV #Relic

Amazing Neighbors

August 10, 2014 by Belghast

10 Years 10 Questions AggroChat Edition

Last night was another Saturday evening which means we recorded another episode of AggroChat. This week we were joined by Rae, Ashgar, Kodra and Tam who will hopefully be becoming a much more regular member of the cast. As per my post yesterday morning, my good friend Godmother is working on a thing for the 10th Anniversary of World of Warcraft. Last night we decided to skip our normal podcast and instead took up the Alternative Chat 10 Years 10 Questions survey. As a result we ran a bit longer than our normal cast, but since we will be without Kodra next week we wanted to push through all ten questions. I have to say I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and even though I know a lot of the information we talked about… I still found out a few interesting things in the process. I am hoping that we gave Godmother some usable content.

I am really happy she is doing this and I look forward to reading and listening to the end result. I believe she has a master plan of doing a documentary podcast about all of this stuff and our responses. While all of us are not really current WoW players, we all owe so much to the game including our friendships. None of us would have known each other without this game and that is pretty crucial to all of us at this point. As Kodra says during the cast, we have a lot of love for each other and it is entirely thanks to this game that we may or may not want to play anymore. I figure that even among the former players we all have to give the game props for giving us so much in the process.

Amazing Neighbors

I have to say that our trip through Final Fantasy XIV just keeps getting more charming. In the 2.1 patch shortly after we quit they put in housing wards. In these semi-instanced wards you have various plots of land that you can purchase for an exorbitant amount of money. The interesting thing about this is that they become a sort of player made town as they have market boards, summoning bells and vendors on top of all of the player housing. I wrote about this some time ago but we found an amazing plot of land in a very heavily built up ward in the Limsa Lominsa area called the Mists. Just like we apparently lucked out on picking the right server we also apparently lucked out and picked one of the coolest wards. Within moments of us plunking down our house we had neighbors welcoming us to the area.

Friday night however something even cooler happened. It turns out that the other residents of the ward decided to create a neighborhood based linkshell. Now we are constantly chatting and getting to know the other awesome members of our ward including the massive guild that lives up the hill from us. It has been awesome to get to know everyone. The above screenshot is me and a member of that guild randomly breaking out into the Manderville dance while standing around at the market board. I took a bunch of screenshots because we were almost perfectly synchronized and it ended up pretty awesome to watch. The little things like this in this game just make me so happy.

It is almost as though we stepped through a time machine and found the server community that assholes forgot. Even as we have moved into harder content, the folks are still extremely chill and willing to work with the people who don’t know the fights. The end result is that even when I have good reason to gripe at someone for failing miserably to do something… I find myself NOT saying anything, or instead being supportive because I just don’t want to do anything to damage this amazing environment. The way people interact with each other reminds me of those early days of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot… when individual player reputations still mattered and everyone held other players up to higher standards. I am so amazingly happy I decided to re-up Final Fantasy XIV.

Hard Modes with Friends

Last night after the podcast we all decided to stick around and work on some hard modes. I have to say we all kinda dreaded just how hard these might be, but in reality at the 55-60 overall gear score we were sitting out they were difficult but also very manageable. I don’t want to get too much into the various strategies because one of the biggest joys for me is figuring these things out completely cold. However I have to say I really enjoyed myself, and we managed to run Hard Mode Copperbell Mines and Hard Mode Brayfloxs Longstop. In both cases the fights were challenging but after a bit of thinking on our feet we managed to push through and succeed. I look forward to doing the other hardmodes because they were really rather awesome.

What makes them so cool is that unlike World of Warcraft heroics… these are entirely new dungeons. When you step foot into Copperbell MInes for example, there are giant holes in the wall where the mobs from the first version popped out, as well as things like a broken elevator that are the results of your last trip there. To make things even cooler the dungeon music has been changed slightly as well and is more akin to the heavy metal themes to the various primal fights. The zone I absolutely cannot wait to do is Hard Mode Haukke Manor since the original version is this awesome Castlevania like romp through a Haunted Mansion. The hard mode version absolutely has to be amazing, so maybe later this evening we can get that going. For the time being I am absolutely eating up every moment of this game, and I still have a long list of things that I want to be doing.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

10 Years :: 10 Questions

August 9, 2014 by Belghast

Mission for Godmother

This mornings post is going to be a little bit different than my normal fare. One of the Blaugust bloggers the acclaimed Godmother of Faff posted a challenge of her own. On her blog Alternative Chat she is wanting anyone who has played World of Warcraft at any point during the ten years it has been in progress to take a quick survery. Being a blogger… this screamed a blog post to me. I will of course post my responses into her handy google form after I have finished this process, but I wanted to share my responses with the world as well. There is hardly any gamer that has not been touched in some way by Blizzard and the World of Warcraft… so I highly suggest you all participate in the event as well.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I was indoctrinated into the world of MMO gaming during Everquest, and from that point onwards I was always on the look out for the next awesome game. I spent three years in EQ, another three in DAoC, a year in Horizons and was playing City of Heroes when I first got my taste of beta. I admit when I first heard about World of Warcraft, I wondered how in the hell they would have enough storyline to make a game out of that. I remembered Blizzard mostly as a company that made awesome games, but with only enough storyline to keep them from absolutely falling apart. I just couldn’t imagine something as detailed as say an Everquest coming out of that company. Then I got my first taste of the game and I was hooked.

World of Warcraft was so evolutionarily better than anything out at the time. It was a pulling together of all of the best characteristics of all of the games I had played to date and melding it together with this awesome cohesive narrative. I had some bad experiences with the Everquest guild I was in, and the leader being extremely domineering, so I knew going into a new game that everyone was excited about like WoW… I didn’t want that to happen again. I figured the only way I could stop it from happening was to accept the mantle of leadership myself. Roughly a year before the game actually released we started a forum, pulling together the small pools of players that we had played with in all of the games along the way, and through it House Stalwart was born. At launch we had around fifty players, and it continues to be a large multi-gaming guild to this day.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

My first character was my paladin Exeter, who began his life as a dwarf. I had fallen in love with the Paladin in beta, and especially the synergy between my Paladin and the Priest my friend had been playing. The problem is by the time release came around they gutted the extremely enjoyable strike system and replaced it with the extremely cludgy seal system. I gave it the good college try and so long as I was leveling with my friends I did just fine. The problem is my ability to solo was dismal, and I felt like I was getting pulled into another “forced grouping” situation like Everquest. Then tragedy struck… there was a death in the family and I was absent from the game for a good time. When I came back all of my friends were a good 10 to 20 levels higher than me, and I knew there was no hope of catching up on the paladin.

I ended up rolling a new character a Dwarven Hunter Lodin, and with him I was able to solo until my heart was content and catch up to my friends. He was the main I never intended to have, and while fun ranged dps was never really my cup of tea. The problem is that some of my good friends had formed a raid group on our server, and they needed another hunter. From the moment I started raiding as a hunter, I felt obligated to STAY a hunter since they were going to the efforts of gearing me up. I played all of Vanilla as a survival hunter rocking the dragonbreath hand cannon for my main weapon. Belghast was not actually born until I decided that I wanted to be the best tank I could be… and rolled a warrior to level with my friends priest. But that is a story for another day.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

In truth when House Stalwart first launched we made a failed attempt to play both factions. We had House Stalwart of Argent Dawn on the Alliance side, and we had the Burning Claw of Silverhand on the Horde side. We split between the two roleplaying servers that existed at launch. For the first few months everything was fine. We pretty regularly alternated between the two sides, but the problem is as we got deeper into our characters we self sorted. A small faction of our guild preferred to play horde and the vast majority preferred the alliance. For me I have always been partial to dwarves, so it was an easy pick for which side to go on.

Because of this however I don’t really feel like I have massive faction loyalty, and ultimately would rather the factions simply not exist. Having a wall between the players feels like a poor design choice, and one that keeps getting repeated out in other games. I’ve always preferred how Everquest series handles faction, in that it is a personal choice and determines what areas you can go into… but not who you can associate with. As far as my not really playing horde regularly since… I guess I have gotten used to the easy life of the alliance. PVP only happens if you go and look for it, and since I am by nature a massive carebear I like this aspect of my faction. Additionally I have never really enjoyed playing “Monstrous Humanoids” to borrow the Dungeons and Dragons term. I would rather be a valiant knight in shining armor than a noble savage.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

I have a whole string of memorable moments, but probably the one that will always stand out for me is the first time we killed Sindragosa in Icecrown CItadel. This was a fight that we absolutely struggled with for weeks. The raid I was helping to lead at the time, Duranub Raiding Company was aptly named. We were in fact a durable pack of nubs… which is a phrase that ties back to an even earlier raid group the Late Night Raiders. We were one of those groups that struggled to get down the basics of an encounter… then all the sudden the moment you beat it you never wipe on it again. Same was the case with Sindragosa, we struggled to deal with people getting frozen and people breaking them out. On the time we actually downed her one of our best hunters Thalen, landed the killing blow mere seconds before getting put into an iceblock himself. So the boss was down and there were 25 little icicles spread throughout the room. The above image is my “artists recreation” of the fight.

All of the most memorable moments I have from the game came either through raiding or through dungeon runs, and I have come to the realization that they have little to do with the actual game itself. Sure the game provided me a backdrop to do interesting things with other people, but it was the interaction with said people that made it interesting. From the raid singing the “Crotch Pocket” jingle anytime Furnace Master Ignis shoved someone into his belt mounted crucible, or the struggles with “OmNomNomITron” and our shouting of “KIds!” anytime the plague one would spawn adds. It was the people that made everything interesting and all of the memorable moments I have are something you can never actually get back. They were awesome but they were fleeting and you can make new memories, but you can never fully relive the old ones.

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

My favorite aspect of World of Warcraft or any MMO for that matter are the dungeons. I love delving into ancient ruins with friends in the search for fabled treasures. For starters I have a massive bloodlust when it comes to gaming, and I will go out of my way to kill mobs. In a given night there are lots of moments where my friends will ask “Where is Bel?” and sure enough I will be a ways off killing something that we didn’t actually need to kill. So I love running dungeons with friends and during the era of WoW before the dungeon finder I used to build groups regularly from random strangers on the server. This was the primary way I met new people to join our raid and often times my guild.

The problem is with the dungeon finder the dungeons changed into something that I didn’t like very much at all. It all became about getting through them as quickly as possible and avoiding as much content as you could to rush to the end boss and “Finish”. This mentality just seemed like a travesty to me, because for me the dungeon itself was the reward and the time spent with new and interesting people in it. Unfortunately this dungeon mentality has infected so many other game communities that if you log in and run a dungeon in say Rift, they have the same expectations. While there are a few games like FFXIV that seem to have been forgotten by time and have really charming dungeon running cultures, my biggest fear is that WoW opened a Pandora’s box and ruined dungeon running in the process.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

There are a few areas of the game that I never skip, for example if I have the opportunity I will always level through Duskwood. Yes it is a frustratingly laid out zone, but I love the vibe of it. If there is a zone in a game that has werewolves, vampires or zombies… chances are I will deviate my leveling path to make sure I go through there. The problem with Duskwood however is Elwynn Forest and Westfall have so many issues. On a role-playing server, Goldshire is still ERP central… so I have long since stopped leveling any character in Elwynn. Westfall got considerably better in Cataclysm but is still a fairly boring slog in a pretty ugly zone. So generally speaking if I am working on a new character I will make a beeline to Duskwood around 20… complete the zone and then run the hell away and get back out of the human areas.

As far as areas I return to, I admit that I return to past raids often. Even though I spent three hours of every sunday for years in first Molen Core and then later Kharazan… I still enjoy soloing both zones. I am also extremely partial to the Black Temple, as I love the look and feel of the encounters. Basically if it is a raid and I can potentially solo it, I will likely do it on a semi regular basis. In a way I know I am wallowing in the nostalgia of the good times I had in that place, so once again it is less about the place itself and more about the experiences I had there. Each time I take down Nefarian for example I remember one of our paladins screaming “Use the Fucking Force” over teamspeak as all the healy paladins cast holy wrath. I have so much nostalgia tied to so many zones at this point, that revisiting any of them is enjoyable.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I am am really hoping you mean how long we have played the game in time, not actual /played hours. Firstly it will take forever for me to compile a list of just how many hours I have played this game spread out among my army of alts. Secondly I really don’t want to confront just how big that number will be. Suffice to say I have 7 level 90 characters, 2 85+, 4 80+, 2 70+ and enough 10-30 characters scattered on so many different servers that I have long since hit my 50 character limit and have to delete something to roll anything new. Belgrave became my “main” while we were starting Crusaders Coliseum 25 and I just looked and his /played is 86 days so I cannot fathom just how many physical years I have spent when you add everything up.

As far as how long have I played… I was in beta before the launch of World of Warcraft and House Stalwart was a day one guild. I played pretty solidly until Cataclysm when I feel out of love with the game in a big way and wandered off into Rift and then a string of other games. It seems like I renew interest in the game a few times a year now. I came back at the tail end of Cataclysm and stayed for the first few months of Pandaria, long enough to raid a little bit. Then most recently I came back for about six months and raided a bit of Throne of Thunder/Siege of Orgrimmar. At which point I took back the crown of my guild and have at the very least kept my account active from that point onwards. I love the guild and the people in it, and I am always willing to log in and check in on things even though I am maybe only playing once or twice a month. It is easy to quit the game, but it is extremely hard to quit the people playing it.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

I freely admit that most of the time I do not. There are two distinct kinds of questing for me… busy work and epic quest chains. The busy work like Kill X things, deliver this to that, retrieve this doodad… I really don’t pay attention to at all. In general I try to skim every quest I get to see if it is going to be an interesting one or not. If something catches my eye in this skimming process I go ahead and read the entire thing. I have gotten really spoiled by modern games with voice acted content. I will stop and listen to every last acted word when a quest is delivered like that, however if you are giving me a wall of text I skim it for the relevant bits and then move on. The primary time I end up reading every last line is when you get one of those quests that doesn’t work the way you think it should.

If you can believe it I am actually better about reading quest text today than I used to be. During the early days of WoW I would far rather grind mobs than do quests at all. This was the side effect from coming through a long line of games where the quests didn’t really matter. Everquest was a massive misnaming of that game, because in reality you never encountered quest unless you dug for them by “hailhumping” every mob in a zone until one of them responded with a keyword that signaled there was a quest. Instead I preferred to just go out and slaughter entire zones rather than hunt for the one clue that started a quest that was more than likely just a “bring me X things” that you got from killing mobs anyways. It also depends on the game, in a game like The Secret World I read every last bit because I know not doing so will come around to bite me in the end.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

I am sitting here trying to think of something, but really nothing major comes to mind. I know there have been times where I wished things had ended better with various people regarding the games. When you lead a guild and lead a raid there is always drama surrounding it. There are various events brought on by the game, and raiding that I wished would have maybe ended on better terms. However I don’t really dwell on them enough to consider them regrets. For the most part everything I have experienced through games, has lead me to be the gamer and blogger I am today. I tend to focus on the journey and not the goals. Sure there are little baubles and trinkets along the way that I kinda wish I had gotten, but for the most part I can always go back and obtain them later.

The only thing I really wish I had done was complete my shadowmourne. I am up to the part where I need to collect the various bits from the different encounters in Icecrown, but I have never actually gone back and made an effort to do it after the close of Wrath. Ultimately it just didn’t seem important enough to hassle a bunch of people into doing. It is not the sort of thing I really dwell upon but it would have been nice to complete that legendary eventually. I would still love to see a set of bindings drop for Thunderfury, but that is less about me or more about me wanting to make sure SOMEONE from LNR gets some. We raided Molten Core every single week for two years and never saw so much as a single binding drop.

10. What effects has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

Other than it making my wife occasionally grump and want to pull the plug from the back of my PC, I have to say overall the experience has been a positive one. There are so many friends that I would not have today were it not for this game. My blog for example started entirely out of a love of World of Warcraft and over time morphed into a love of all gaming. My twitter community, my blogger friends, the massive group of people that makes up House Stalwart and even the Blaugust event that is going on right now and is so amazingly successful… none of this would have happened were it not for World of Warcraft and the connections I made while playing it. As a result, even if I fall out of love with the game, I have to respect the effect it has had on my life and the great lives I have met in the process.

Carried to Greatness

August 8, 2014 by Belghast

Some days are harder

There are some days where the magic just doesn’t seem to want to happen, even when you feel like you have a lot to say. This morning I have been sitting around for the last twelve minutes doing everything I could to avoid opening LiveWriter and begin banging away on the keyboard. Sometimes it happens and this is perfectly okay. Yesterday there was a series of tweets that I was party to about what happens when you decide you want to go in a different direction than you started. You would be shocked and amazed at just how many times I start in one direction and then decide that it is not in fact what I want to say. There have been so many paragraphs sacrificed on the altar of mood swings, and I am here to tell you that this is perfectly okay.

In fact I would go so far as to say this is entirely expected as part of the daily writing ritual. There are going to be days you struggle to find meaning from your cluttered mind, and it is completely fine for you to jettison one idea in favor of another. Please do not ever feel obligated to complete a thought. Just because you get two sentences down on the page, does not mean you have to follow up with the rest of a paragraph. If you can have sketches in the margin of a notebook, you can surely also have room for the same thing to be happening with your writing. There are so many things that Blaugust is “about” but one of them definitely is about being comfortable with your own words, and knowing when they work and when they do not. Not everything you write has to be a masterpiece, and some things are destined only to be pushed out the airlock.

Carried to Greatness

One of the things I have been avoiding doing since coming back to the game is wrapping up my Relic weapon quest in Final Fantasy XIV. Before we left we had completely a number of the steps as a group. I went through the extreme cost of getting the base weapon, and getting the two materia fused to it. Then as a guild we conquered both the Chimera and the Hydra. Finally I was up to the three Hard Mode primal fights of Ifrit, Garuda and Titan in that order. A week or so ago I managed to get through Ifrit but I figured that was a fluke considering just how easy of a fight it is. I also had intimate knowledge of that fight considering we had legitimately downed him as a guild. The only problem is when we did it as a guild, I was using my bard job and not my warrior one… and did not get credit for it.

Garuda scares the shit out of me. This was a hard fight for us to learn as a four man team at level, so I could not image just how frustrating and painful it would be as a tank. I watched as my guildies that were not tanks queued for it and got it taken care of without issue, but still I was pretty gunshy. Had it not been for Ashgar queuing up as a tank last night and talking about just how easy the encounter was… I likely would still be waiting. Sure enough upon queuing I ended up getting dumped into a group with lots of folks that were in raid gear, and essentially I became the groups mascot. Before I knew it we had downed Garuda and I was moving on to the next step in the quest chain that involved a good deal of running around. All of my nerves were literally for nothing because at this point in the game… folks have progressed so far past the hurdle that was hard mode Garuda that it became manageable without really knowing the fight myself.

Titan on the other hand was still a challenge. Once again I was the mascot of the group and really served to give no benefit other than miniscule dps. The problem with titan is there is so much that goes on between the attacks that knock you off the platform, the attacks that can one shot you, and the crazy exploding rocks that can make you into a venn diagram. It took my team three tries to get through the encounter, and with each wipe we gained a stack of echo… which works much the same as the determination buff in World of Warcraft. After all of the nervousness I was sitting there with all the components I needed to finish my Bravura. While this is no longer the be all end all weapon… it still feels like a big deal to me. I honestly questioned if I would ever complete it, so now I am absolutely pumped to be holding it in my hands. I still need to farm a few more “bookrocks” before I can upgrade it to the next step, but hopefully I will get those tonight.

Nostalgia Crit 9999

Gearing Up to Celebrate 10 Years of World of Warcraft

Something I have been meaning to talk about for a few days is the recent announcement of the World of Warcraft 10th anniversary events. Firstly lets get the fact that they are announcing them in August when the anniversary is not until the tail end of November out of the way. I guess they need some good news to be honest considering how most of the community expected to be playing Warlords by now. For those who have not followed the information they are doing a number of interesting things for the anniversary. For starters anyone who logs in during the event is going to get a new pet in honor of it… the Molten Corgi. When I first heard about the pet I honestly thought I had misheard some bit of information and it was related to Rift instead. It feels weird to have two different MMOs obsessed with the adorable stub legged puppies. That said it is exactly that… adorable and fiery and sufficiently epic to announce the 10th year of a game.

Keeping with the theme they are bringing back Molten Core, and making it a max level dungeon… and making it a special 40 man LFR. Anyone who manages to make it to the end of the dungeon will earn a special Core Hound mount. I have not heard if this is going to be complete-able with a guild group or not, or if this is going to only be an LFR thing. I honesty feel like LFR is a decent simulacrum for the way actual 40 man raiding felt. The amount of random fuckery that went on during most 40 man raids as 20 people carried 20 warm bodies to victory, seems like it could only be simulated by the LFR system. It makes me wonder what all sorts of callbacks will they have. Will there be a new version of Thurderfury for example? The updated Quelserrar for example was something I hotly sought after, because I loved the look of that blade.

If all of this were not enough they are bringing back the one and only time that world PVP actually worked… Southshore vs Tarren Mill. They are apparently creating a special 100 vs 100 battleground to play out the epic battle of town versus town that used to play out on a nightly basis. This is seriously the only time in WoW history that I actually willfully participated in PVP, and so many friendships grew out of it that I still keep in touch with today. This era of wow was one of those lightning in a bottle moments, and I can’t even remember why it stopped. I am sure it was in reaction to something that blizzard did to screw with the mix, but I remember by the time Ahn’qiraj rolled around no one was actually doing this fight any longer. Maybe the battlegrounds were the nail in the coffin? At this point I honestly cannot remember.

All of this sounds awesome and is loaded with so much nostalgia it is like a sucker punch to the veteran players face. The problem is… we remember these events from the past of WoW as being so much more epic and enjoyable than they actually were. For years we have viewed the early days of wow through rose colored lenses of a time when “things were right and good”. When in reality they really were not that great. The amount of lag that happened in Southshore for example made most of the deaths absolutely random. The amount of drama and bullshit that accompanied Molten Core and the loss of three hours of your life every week to run it was equally insane. These are not exactly moments to be heralded as the way things ought to be. They were us making the best out of a bad situation and enjoying what game play we could find where we could find it.

I came in late to Molten Core after my raid had already broken its back doing the hard work to get it on farm status. I was carried to my full set of Giantstalker, and then proceeded to run the dungeon every single week until pretty much the end of Vanilla. I still have large sections of the pulls in that place memorized, as I geared up first my hunter, then my paladin and my warrior running the place for various people who needed able bodied fill-ins. None of my “good memories” of this time in Vanilla have anything to do with the actual places we were running. It was the people I happened to be running them with. You cannot reassemble the raid I cleared Molten Core with, or the social channel that we ran Southshore versus Tarren MIll out of. Those players have all scattered to the wind and a bunch of random socially inept strangers are a piss poor substitute.

Liore made a post earlier this week about that you can’t go back home, and it is true. While everything about this event is laced with the drug that is nostalgia… none of it is real. How we feel about that time in World of Warcraft is an accumulation of everything that was happening at the time. It was the people and the places and the fact that there was literally nothing else to do at the time, because WoW was the only game on the market that offered anything vaguely close to this. No amount of wishing is going to actually turn back the clock and recapture the joy and experiences you had back then. Don’t get me wrong… I will probably log in during the event to get my shiny trinkets… but I go into it knowing this is a pale comparison to the way things actually were. There is no such thing as going home, because both you and the place you are going have changed in the process of getting away from it.

Writing Prompts

Now for a few more writing prompts. I wondered if this would end up being useful but based on the fact that a handful of people have been drawing from them I guess it is a worthwhile cause. Today’s prompts are all laced with the venom that is nostalgia.

What period in a game or game do you wish you could return to? What is that thing that is now gone that you wish you could be playing again?
We all accidentally get rid of something that we end up wanting later on. What have you deleted/disenchanted/sold that you later kicked yourself for doing?
We have all left something unfinished in our effort to move on to something new. What achievement have you never completed that you always wished in the back of your head you had?

#Blaugust #FFXIV #WoW