December 2014 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Ranged State of Mind

December 23, 2014 by Belghast

Schedule Conflicts

The strangest thing about being on a lengthy break is just how contorted your schedule ends up getting. In part I guess I need the normal weekly rhythm to make me feel like the world is right. Last night for example we had a raid in Final Fantasy XIV, but since I did not go to work that day I almost completely forgot that it was a thing. Similarly I am going to struggle to remember that I have a raid tonight in World of Warcraft because of the same exact problem. There is a primus song that gives us the wisdom “Weekends don’t mean quite so much when you’re unemployed, cept for the fact you get to hang out with your workin friends”. The same can essentially be said for week days too when you are on vacation, as everything feels like some extremely extended weekend.

This morning for example we almost completely forgot about setting the trash out to the curb. In fact were it not for my wife reminding me we probably would have been screwed. For some reason I ended up sleeping in until almost 9:30 this morning, which is why this post is getting out the door so late. I feel there needs to be a term for this, since we have “Jet Lag” for when you cross multiple time zones… we need “Holiday Lag” or something similar for when your days no longer have the same meaning that they used to. I am not really complaining mind you, since I am not at work and getting to lounge comfortably in my fuzzy pants at 11 am. Things could be considerably worse, but man it is strange to get used to.

One More Bard

I had to share this photo today. Once again it is me and the amazing Ayla and Joren Noye, dancing around in our holiday best. I have actually glamoured my bard gear to look like last years holiday set since it kinda reminds me of Link from the original Legend of Zelda when you have the red armor right before you take on death mountain. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel that goofy things like this happen in our housing neighborhood. What is even more awesome is that Ayla and Joren are going to go through the new Eternal Bonding ceremony on New Years day, and I was invited… as well as anyone from the free company. It should be awesome to see and I think we get a pet for participating. At some point I need to make my way into game and work out what I am going to wear for an outfit. I do have the tuxedo somewhere, but I kinda want to create my own custom spin on it. Wondering what the Tuxedo jacket looks like with the Soldiery Kilt.

We lacked the numbers last night to do anything of major significance… so instead we decided to run a Syrcus Tower as a FC. I wanted to run as my bard since that is the character that needs gear… and since there are always more bards in a full party I wanted to be able to roll need. This however gave us the three bards in our party once we randomed in a couple of players. We kinda wrecked the damage on everything, and our group was always the first to finish whatever adds we had spawned on us. This was true even on Zande when the non-FC bard managed to get locked out of the final fight. Our comets were still the first to go down in every round, and we ended up helping the others dps theirs down as well. Sadly no bard gear dropped, but it was a fun and fast run without any of the normal bullshit that happens in Syrcus.

Ranged State of Mind

In truth I have been playing my Bard quite a bit, and the nostalgia of Warlords of Draenor has even lead me to break back out Lodin my Hunter in World of Warcraft. There is a strange sense of nostalgia playing him, because in truth I have not taken playing him seriously since vanilla. I’ve talked about it before but Lodin was the raid main I never intended to play, and as such as soon as I got to Burning Crusade he was quickly abandoned. Since I have brought back Belghast my Warrior out of retirement… it feels like it is also fitting to dust off Lodin. Right now he is 89 and sitting in Townlong Steppes, so my hope is to finish leveling him to 90… equip the set of Timeless Isle gear I have waiting on him to make the first little bit of Draenor easier… and then work on leveling him to 100 next. My enjoyment of him as a whole improved exponentially when I got Arcturis the spirit beast bear my last time playing him. I’ve always liked running around with a dwarf and a bear… and Arcturis is really an amazing creature.

I think part of what excites me about playing a Hunter again is the introduction of the Lone Wolf talent. I have always hated having a pet while dungeoning or raiding. They always seem to do exactly the thing I don’t want them to do at the moment. As such I’ve always personally found that raiding with something that you don’t have direct control over a liability. That said I love having a tanky pet while leveling and farming, because at that point it is like having a two player party… just one that you are controlling both halves of. The Lone Wolf talent seems to be the best of both worlds… it lets me dungeon and raid as a pure marksman without the need to fiddle with pet mechanics, but also wander around the world as an amazingly efficient team. Much the same was as Gladiator made me way more interested in Warriors… Lone Wolf does the same for me and hunters. Now I just want to get leveled up so I can see if it is as enjoyable as I think it will be.

Garrison Leveling

December 22, 2014 by Belghast

Carabiner Failure

Several years ago I picked up a cheapy Carabiner in a hardware store and started using it as a key chain. I liked it because I could hang my keys on my pocket or anything else for that matter when I had my hands full, and that I could easily separate out my house keys, and both sets of our car keys as needed. The spring in the original one got loose and I replaced it with the black one that I have currently. Over the last few months I had a few incidents where a key fell off in my pocket but I didn’t think much about it, that is until this weekend. Saturday we took my Mother in Law to Joplin and we spent pretty much the entire day running around town. Joplin is roughly two hours away for us, and it is just different enough from the normal pace to make it interesting. While in Joplin we hit a bunch of different stores and even spent time in the mall, so it was an absolutely packed and busy day.

When we were walking out to the car at Sams Club our final stop… my heart sank as I realized that my keychain “felt funny”. Sure enough I was missing the key to my Jeep, but the problem is I had no clue where it might have slipped off. We looked around the parking lot and didn’t see it at all. We traced our footsteps back to the store we were in before Sams thinking it might have fallen off there in the parking lot also. Essentially we had no luck, and were about to simply chock it up to being a $150 mistake… given that is roughly what it takes to get a new key made for my jeep given it is one of those combo keys with the remote built in. Yesterday while running errands my wife called around to the various stores we had been to, to see if anyone had turned in a key. Sure enough at Sams they had a grungy key matching the description of mine.

Yesterday was an extremely strange day. I had been up until 2 am the previous night working on the podcast, and then was up at 8 am that morning working on it again. After errands my wife went off with her sister to visit her mother again… and we had tentatively made plans to go today to Joplin. I was living in this strange zone of sleep deprivation, where things seemed like good ideas. So in my lack of wisdom… I decided to drive by myself the two hours to Joplin and two hours back… on what was one of the dreariest days imaginable. I have to say it was a rough trip, but I made pretty good time and acquired the key that was in fact mine. I finally crashed last night around 9 am… and then was back up this morning at 4:30 because my wife was upstairs watching Law and Order…. and I kept hearing the “Doink Doink” sound. Pretty much as soon as I finish writing this post I am laying back down, however I did manage to get back my keys which is pretty awesome.

Garrison Leveling

Since the launch of Warlords of Draenor I have managed to level two of my stable of characters to 100, but even more than that I have managed to push up most of my level 90s to at least 91 while unlocking their Garrisons. As such this has allowed me to flip through them each day running missions and doing crafting content, giving me access once more to having all available tradeskills. I thought nothing much about this until the other day when my Paladin dinged 93 from completing follower missions. I guess I knew I had been gaining experience from my Garrison, but I did not really think about it being much if anything. Turns out that you could in theory level your alts entirely through doing Garrison content. In fact I am managing to keep a stockpile of gear to level into on my paladin at least, so if you had the patience of a saint you could in theory gear a character to epics doing nothing but daily quests.

There is just something strange about that thought process, considering it is just about the most passive way to level that I could imagine. That said you are managing to get a bunch of incidental experience each time you clear out your mine, or harvest your herb garden. By the same token each follower mission rewards you similar experience to actually completing a quest. I just find it so strange that Blizzard decided to implement this system, because it seems like such a departure form the way things have worked in the past. Granted I expect fully to actually level my alts for real in the near future, but it is nice that I am slowly creeping forward on each of them as I swap between them each day queuing more work orders, and follower missions.

New Class Footage

I have not talked much about Final Fantasy XIV since monday’s post, but there has been a bunch of news floating around the interwebs as this weekend was the Fan Festival in Tokyo. It seems at this point all of the new classes have been revealed. We have known about the Dark Knight for some time, and I fully plan on switching to that as my main job when it is released. On top of that we now know that the healer is going to be the Astrologian, which looks to be some sort of healer that heals through the use of Tarot cards. The gun class is in fact one that Yoshi P had hinted at some time ago as being one of his favorites, the Machinist. In both cases they look pretty slick and have a lot of people excited about them. The Machinist feels like it is going to be a slow firing blunderbuss type class which may or may not be all that enjoyable to play… seems like the cooldowns on attacks might be frustrating.

The most important thing to me is that they finally showed off some footage of each of the classes. The Dark Knight looks like everything I possibly hoped it would be. Ashgar and I joked that while it makes me very happy… it is likely going to make Tam very sad… since he seems to really dislike random spikey bits on things. That said I personally find it amazing, and the animations may just top Warrior, although I have yet to see anything that really tops Steel Cyclone. I love the way two handed classes feel in FFXIV, because there is a certain heft to the movements, like the weapon is extremely heavy and difficulty to wield. I feel like the Dark Knight is going to let me live out my “Tiny Odin” fantasies even more than I can now as a Warrior. I really look forward to seeing more information about the actual attacks that these classes can do, but I am sold… and am more than ready to throw my money at the screen.

Twenty Legs

December 21, 2014 by Belghast

Double Feature

Last night was both amazing and horrible at the same time, for so many different reasons. Since it is holiday season our ability to record AggroChat is going to become increasingly strained. In fact last night both Rae and Tam were recording on location at their respective parents houses. For some time we had been kicking around the idea of having a “Game of the Year” podcast. The problem with this concept is it would require us all to actually agree on what we felt was our game of the year. While there is a lot of overlap in our tastes, there is also an extreme amount of divergence. The end result had us recording our “Games of the Year” podcast, in which each of us picked five games we felt were significant to us in the past year, and then we as a group talked about all of them.

The end result is that between last night and this morning I had over three hours worth of recorded audio to sift through. Thankfully we totally did this on purpose as it allows me to split this one episode into two still significant episodes worth of discussion. As such I have released part one today, and I will release part two next Sunday, giving everyone a much needed break from recording to go hang out with family and friends and not care about being home by 9pm on a Saturday night to strap into a chair and record a podcast. The other side effect of this whole thing is that I was up until 2 am last night, and then back up this morning at 8 am to finish editing. I quite literally just finished editing everything and uploading the first part when I sat down to write this post. It is going to be a really long day.

Shrine to Geeks

The reason why it is going to be a really long day, is that yesterday was ALSO a really long day. I got up fairly early, and as my wife was getting dressed and ready knocked out yesterdays rather frantic blog post. Then from that point until I literally sat down to record AggroChat last night, I was either driving or shopping. We took my mother in law with us to Joplin Mo, because one it is a really cool town and two it is not terribly far from where she lives. We had a whole bunch of things that we wanted to do, but one of them was to go to the Mall. It really is borderline suicidal to go to any Mall on the weekend before Christmas, and by the time I got out of there I was absolutely done with humanity for the day. One of the cool things about the Joplin Mall is that several years ago Vintage Stock went in and created this insane flagship store.

Now I have talked about Vintage Stock before, but it is really hard to grasp the scale of this place until you are actually in it. Imagine going to a Wal-mart, where everything in the store somehow pertained to geekdom. The amount of consoles, comics, rpgs, videos, puzzles, books, board games, and action figures is really hard to grasp. I tried to snap a picture to show you folks the scale of this place but it extends out on either side from the vantage point I took up. Hopefully at least you can get the idea. On a normal day it is absolute sensory overload… but yesterday with all the people packed in… it was a bit too much for me to handle. Thankfully we make it to Joplin fairly often so even though I did not really get to enjoy the bounty that is this store… there will always be another trip to explore it under more calm circumstances.

Twenty Legs

One of the regular themes of my blog is that we like to go to Flea Markets and junk stores. One of my favorite activities here is to take photos of the random strange things I happen to find. Sometimes you find an item that creates far more questions than you could ever possibly answer. For example the above photo is a box of 20 Furniture legs… for $5.95. While I am not really sure what the going rate for disembodied furniture is, that seems like not too bad of a deal. The problem is… why do they have a box of 20 furniture legs… and better yet who is going to come along and NEED a box of 20 furniture legs. I have a feeling these are the sort of thing that are extremely specific to the piece they came off of, so unless you happen to need exactly these legs for your furniture… you probably have no interesting in this box. Better question is why would someone purchase furniture without the legs in order to need said box of 20 legs.

There were a ton of strange and cool things to be found. For example I thought this Igloo style R2-D2 cooler was pretty awesome. The inside of it was roughly the same size as one of those large drink cooler that sports teams use to dump Gatorade on their unsuspecting coaches. While it was pretty great… it was not $75 worth of great. Had it been somewhere in the $20-$40 range I probably would have snapped it up, because seriously when the hell else am I going to find an awesome R2-D2 cooler. Then there is the just straight up bizarre collectables. The above photo is this group of mannequins dressed up in various outfits. For starters… I struggle to wrap my mind around why these were created in the first place. Secondly I also struggle to imagine who decided it was a good idea to purchase them. Thirdly… I find it even stranger that someone thought that selling them as another really good idea. I picture somewhere someone has a whole set of these disembodied figures in various bright outfits, because while I snapped a picture of four standing side by side, there were probably a dozen different ones in the booth. Since they appear to be missing legs… wondering if I can somehow reunite them with the furniture legs above.

Finally I always end up finding things that make me feel extremely old. I guess that ultimately is the sign of aging, when a good chunk of the things found in a flea market are things from your childhood. On the right we have the infamous Kraco Stereo Cassette Adaptor for your 8-Track tape player. This was awesome for vehicles that had an 8-track deck in an era that rapidly adopted the Cassette tape instead. I say infamous because it had a notorious reputation for completely eating tapes. I remember using this to survive a family trip to Colorado with my cousins, and as we went across country… it slowly mangled a Phil Collins tape until it was completely unrecognizable. Ultimately mangled or not… we considered the ability to actually play tapes in the massive conversion van worth the risk. I posted about this on twitter yesterday and it turns out a lot of other folks that follow me also had mixed memories of this device. In any case seeing it hanging there in relatively good packaged condition brought back a ton of memories.

World Without Levels

December 20, 2014 by Belghast

Holiday Hassles

Today is going to be an extremely quick blogpost because I am pretty much under the gun. Were I a proper and responsible adult I would have posted something last night. However when I got home from work I was completely drained and while I hung out and played games for a bit… I also crashed significantly earlier than even my wife did. Today is going to be an extremely day as we are officially beginning our Christmas shopping. This is actually pretty good for us because in general we are those folks wandering around on Christmas Eve trying to find those last few gifts. I like getting stuff just as much as the next person, but I really wish there was a way to turn Christmas into Thanksgiving 2.0. The gift giving just seems to get in the way of what should be an otherwise amazing holiday.

There is the pressure to get something awesome for people who have literally not seen since last Christmas. Then you end up with the gift of shame… the gift card because really you have no clue at all what this person might want. Instead if it were just Thanksgiving 2.0… we would share a meal together, and a conversation and not be constantly dreading the impending gift exchange awkwardness. Personally I am one of those people that if I wanted it at all, I probably already bought it, and my wife is the same way. So I feel like we are both exceptionally hard to buy for… so mostly people just don’t try and we ultimately end up exchanging cash, either in gift card form or actual crisp bills. Which brings me back to… what exactly was the point? A nice meal, a conversation… those are the things that are really valuable.\

World Without Levels

Yesterday a couple of my friends spun topics off of yesterdays post. Lord Tridus commented that games should “Flatten or wipe out the level curve entirely and content now becomes scaled on gear”. As Rowan stated in his follow up post, this system already exists and is alive and well in The Secret World. The problem that I see with that system however is that you still have leveling in the form of total Ability Points gained, which are then used to purchase ability unlocks. In theory it works, but the problem with the system is it becomes increasingly difficult to “restart” and try and go down a completely different path. Ultimately this became a wall for many of my friends because the classes we wanted to play… ended up being ultimately completely unviable when we reached the endgame aka “Nightmare” content.

Without a way to completely reset your character we had no way of really retooling after spending all of this time leveling ourselves into a corner. Actually I experienced the same problem with playing Champions Online. If you failed to follow the magical golden functional path, that game became an unplayable mess with you reaching a point very early on when you simply could not do the content you needed to. The part of this equation that I feel has not been solved is how to grant abilities in a way that is not grindy. I personally find The Secret World somewhat frustrating when I think about grinding out enough ability points to earn all of the abilities. I spent probably hundreds of hours killing vampires in one of the higher level zones doing essentially just this… that and farming gear to be broken down into crafting materials. I just don’t see that as being the answer to the level problem either.

New Ability Gains

Ultimately the problem that remains is we need a new an interesting way of gaining abilities. I think maybe Guild Wars 2 at least had part of this equation right, in that the equipping of gear SHOULD be what unlocks your abilities. The component I would change to this equation however is that they “Teach” you abilities instead of only give you abilities while the item is equipped. This completely changes what is considered a valuable item. Sure a sword might not have as good of stats as the one you are currently wielding but if it gives you a new “Life Drain” ability that can be learned while completing content with it equipped… that would make it worth keeping until at least you had learned that ability. Random loot becomes interesting again because it might have an ability that you have not yet unlocked.

Ultimately this sort of system only works if you also have a limited amount of slots for you to put abilities in. I think this is pretty much going to be the rule going forward that you should have no more than one hotbar worth of abilities at any given time. This does two things for your game… firstly it makes it significantly easier for a new player to get into the game because they only have to learn so many keys to press at a given time. Secondly it allows your game to be ported to a console significantly easier due to the limited number of button press combinations available. The importance of making abilities in such a way so that no one ability is that much better than everything else is also key, that way there is a significant opportunity cost to each choice. In any case… I feel like a game without levels can work, but you also have to take away the ability grinds. To me at least, learning a new ability from an item, feels significantly less grindy than simply racking up a currency that you then spend to unlock things. I would love to hear other players thoughts on this concept as well.