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

L is for Loot Piñata

December 11, 2014 by Belghast

Kinder Gentler LFR

Last night we opted to enter the “Looking For Raid” version of Highmaul as a guild, similar to how we did Molten Core, since that made the entire experience so much less chaotic. We brought with us both tanks and a couple of healers, and since we have done the fights on normal now figured we would be able to push through any issues we came along. Oddly enough the LFR tool did not make one of us the leader of the group even through we accounted for 15 of the 25 slots. Instead it chose this shaman healer who’s name was some combination of “Faceroll” and “Ballerina” that I am sure he thought was exceedingly clever when he created the character. I say “he” because the actions and commentary felt like a “dudebro” playing the character.

Moments after we started clearing he started barking orders generally starting off with “alright you fuckfaces”. Moments later however he was gone from the raid. The beautiful thing about doing LFR as a guild is that you can pretty much rapid-fire vote kick someone and have more than enough votes for it to succeed. After that was over, the rest of the run went exceptionally smoothly. I kinda dig being able to act as a force of good in looking for group, getting rid of the toxic players when we see them. What I find amazing is just how willing people were to work within the parameters we set for them. We treated LFR like it was an actual raid, with marking locations to stand in and this made the entire experience go solidly and by the numbers.

L is for Loot Piñata

Maybe it is because we have done the normal version of this place, but god Looking for Raid seemed simple. As in it felt like you could straight up ignore every tactic and just keep mashing buttons until the bosses fell down. All told the actual combat time of the raid took maybe 20 minutes for three bosses. I saw plenty of people looting goodies, so hopefully lots of folks got nice stuff. The only problem I see is that there is little to no reason to do heroics right now. Sure you get 50 Garrison resources for your first heroic of the day, and a bag of gold, but it feels like they really have taken away all of the reason to actually group up for heroics once you are over ilevel 630. Previously all serious players had to do a handful of heroics a week to make sure they were capping out Valor points, but with that gone there is little to no reason to draw well geared players into the fray.

Quite honestly you can hit the LFR requirement of 615 relatively easily through doing the quests in Nagrand with a Dwarven Bunker giving you increased chance of getting blue and purple upgrades. As such I cannot see any reason at all for folks to actually do the heroic grind once the rest of Highmaul has been released. Unless the next part significantly ramps up the difficulty, this is going to be essentially Timeless Isle 2.0 in the form of a raid. Granted I don’t much care about people getting easy gear, in fact I am looking forward to it as I try and gear my army of alts. I loved the Timeless Isle for the ease of catching characters up. That said the heroic experience in this expansion is really good, and while difficult is fun to do with your friends. Maybe they are expecting heroics to be a guild only thing? I have a feeling we are going to see a pass that maybe starts adding in some reasons for doing things, because it feels like they completely ignored the reward part of “risk vs reward”.

Social Engineering

The problem that I can see is soon the queues for heroics will be insanely long, because Blizzard seems to be fundamentally bad at social engineering. I say this because I am playing another game that is exceptionally good at social engineering and making players WANT to run older content. Final Fantasy XIV has this long quest chain that involves giving players non-raiding ways to upgrade their main weapon. It starts with the Relic weapon, and each upgrade bumps up its ilevel and its stats. The most famous bout of social engineering comes into play when you reach the Atma farming step, which involves you going back to every zone in the game and running FATEs until an “Atma of the” item drops. The reason why this is most definitely social engineering is that they purposefully kept the ATMAs from dropping in the zones that were already natural FATE running hotbeds of activity. Thing is it works… there are now players in most every zone running FATEs as they work on the Atma weapon step for their characters.

Similarly they created the Nexus step that involves farming “light” from various activities like doing Hard Modes, Experts, and related large group activity. Additionally they created the concept of “bonus light” which targets certain encounters that have especially long queue times. When one of these bonuses is in place all these players come from out of the woodwork and start running it, I happened into Hard Mode Garuda during one of these periods and it was insane to see just how fast that encounter evaporated. Now with the latest step it involves running various hard mode dungeons until you get a specific item to drop, thus getting tanks and healers…. and everyone else to start queuing for these encounters. I realize that I am being engineered, but I don’t care because it works. It keeps the game thriving and vibrant and keeps the overall queue times low enough to allow me to do whatever content I need to do at the time. I never feel like I am being exploited, because they managed to have just enough of a reward to make the risk worthwhile.

Brackenspore Boogey

December 10, 2014 by Belghast

The Reluctant Tank

Last night was an extremely interesting night, for many reasons. The first of which is that it was my first night raiding Highmaul in any capacity. The Argent Dawn server was completely unstable for various reasons, primarily because the Chicago data center itself seemed to be unstable. Then last Thursday I had plans which kept me away from the raid where they downed Kargath and Butcher for the first time. Last night I had every intent of trying out my Gladiator dps chops, and had been researching the fights as a dps. Then something happened… our main tank got stuck at work and was not going to be there at all. While I was not even aware that technically I was part of the tanking team, I got drafted to tank the instance I would assume because of my years of experience. While I didn’t know all of the fights, I did rely heavily on over a decade of experience and we seemed to do fine.

Thankfully I also had a really seasoned co-tank to work with, that while he too was not exactly solid on some of the mechanics… was more than willing to try anything I suggested. As the night went on it started to feel more and more natural, with me pivoting into the lead role. I really hope that I did not absolutely steamroll the tank, but I figured he was used to playing the second tank role in his previous configuration, so it might be less stressful for him to stay in that role. Whatever the case it seemed to work really well, and I am happy to say that we stormed in and one shot both Kargath and the Butcher extremely quickly. I had hoped to get more loot out of the dungeon to help augment my gear, but alas I spent three roll tokens and only walked out with twi pieces of gear.

Brackenspore Boogey

We spent most of the night last night working on Brackenspore, an encounter that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. It very much feels like the “this is the end of the easy bosses” encounter that has so many moving parts. Quite honestly we don’t quite have a lot of mechanics down pat, but hopefully having seen the fight we can do some research before Thursday. The biggest problem as a tank is we never quite found the sweet spot to do the tank transition. The boss does some really horrible mechanics, firstly there is a stacking nature dot on the active tank called Rot. Ideally the tank should not have more than four stacks of this at any time. However there is another horrible mechanic called Necrotic Breath that is a frontal cone and causes anyone in said cone to take 22k damage and have a debuff that reduces healing by 99%. To make things more frustrating there is an add, with a lot of health… that is essentially a second boss. It casts an ability called Decay periodically which needs to be interrupted or else it deals 80k nature damage to the entire raid.

If all of this were not enough… there is a mechanic on the fight called Creeping Moss that is essentially a fungal creep that if unchecked will cover the entire room. Anything standing in the creep increases their damage dealt by 50% and causes them to regenerate 2% health every 2 seconds. As such the mobs need to be pulled out of this at all costs, and you end up having to devote to dps to run about the room with a flame thrower destroying the creep to keep it at bay. To make matters even worse… there are good and bad mushrooms that spawn around the room. You have to move the boss away from the bad mushrooms, but attempt to position them close to the good ones… which are then used to counteract Infesting Spores that stacks nature damage on the raid. We are still very much getting the swing of the fight, and figuring out all of the levers to flip and widgets to prod. I think on our best attempt we got him down to 70%, but hopefully a lot of research AFTER having made an attempt will cement the mechanics in our heads.

DPS Check Passed

After doing some attempts on Brackenspore, the raid leader decided we needed to swap up for a bit and try something else. As a result we rolled over to Tectus that apparently the group had made attempts on last Thursday. This is one of those infamous Blizzard dps check fights, with a relatively short enrage timer and several “get out of the stupid” mechanics causing the raid to move around while pushing dps as hard as possible on the boss. I did not actually get a picture of the boss itself, because it went pretty quickly. The trash directly before the boss is in essense “the boss”. You have these three small rock elementals… and by small I mean five times as large as a player model that you have to burn through… from their rubble arises Tectus the actual boss. While fighting Tectus you are constantly having to move out of these swirling patches on the ground that ultimately spawn spires of earth that knock the players back and deal damage to them. Additionally there are patches of fire that appear that you need to move out of, so lots of stuff going on… that needs to be avoided.

This goes into overdrive because when you dps down the biggest version of Tectus, two medium sized versions spawn at the same time. One tank takes one, the other tank takes and holds the other. When the party dpses down a medium mob, four small mobs spawn. In theory the offtank takes medium tectus and one small tectus… whereas the other tank takes three small ones. This becomes extremely hectic because they are super hard to target at this point. In theory the dps burns down all of the little spawns… and then breaks the other medium causing four more smalls to spawn. The roughest phase is when we have five mob up, four smalls and one medium. During this phase each of the mobs spawns circles on the ground, making it sheer madness to try and find safe places to stand. Once you burn through the smalls things calm down for a few until we get another batch of smalls. This is out and out a dps race, and we downed the boss last night with I think 15 seconds left to spare.

Back in the Saddle

While I am actively raiding in FFXIV, there is just something more hectic about World of Warcraft raiding. I think that technically speaking Final Fantasy XIV is probably more challenging, but the sedate pace caused by the longer global cooldown… makes it feel more sane and rational. World of Warcraft on the other hand is a pure adrenaline rush when it goes well, and there are few things more exciting than getting a new boss down. Granted I did not quite have the same payoff as my other raiders, because that was my first night there. I am however pretty damned proud that I picked up tanking on a character I have not tanked on since downing the Lich King… and was not a liability. I guess playing a class is something you never quite forget, regardless of how many changes have been made. I did manage to pick up a few really nice upgrades as a result of my three roll tokens spent.

I swear that the game is conspiring against me actually ever wearing my engineering goggles, because the molten core helm was technically better… and then this helm dropped last night which is even better than the first goggle upgrade. On Butcher he dropped a really nice pair of gauntlets for me that replaced my warforged heroics rather nicely. This combined with the chestpiece I crafted for myself has taken me to ilevel 637 which is not too shabby overall. Tonight we are going into LFR as a guild, and hopefully I can pick up another item or two there as well. I am not going to waste any coins as I would rather prefer to save those for normal or heroic mode gear. Supposedly at the beginning of Thursday night we are going to give Heroic Kargath a shot, which should be really damned fun. I was surprised to find out that each mode has its own unique lockout, so hopefully we can start doing on heroic the mobs we have on farm on normal. Was a great night, and happy to be back raiding.

Bel’s Magical Van

December 9, 2014 by Belghast

A Very Bloggy Xmas Day 9

Roughly a month ago my good friend Syl came to me with the idea of her Bloggy Xmas event. I took a stab at a logo, and she finished it off to what we have above. From there I was essentially drafted into the process, and was certain I would be slotted for one of the days. It seems that fate determined that mine would be today. The idea behind the countdown was to have an advent calendar of sorts leading up to Christmas, and apparently in her country it is tradition for all of the little villages to decorate their windows taking on one of the days. I have struggled with what exactly to do for this, but it seems like most of the other participants have decorated their blog with a somewhat personal story. As such I am guessing that is the direction I am taking as well.

Bel’s Magical Van

For quite literally over a decade now, I have had friends that have joked about me and my white panel van full of candy. Because how else could I seem to keep recruiting people into whatever mad adventure I have planned. In fact the guild that I founded is based upon this concept of never openly recruiting… but always recruiting. I have always had this irrational desire to try and collect as many awesome people around me as I can, and as I play games or socialize online… I am always looking for more people to stuff in my van and whisk away into my extended family. That is ultimately what I am building, a big network of extended family for me to play games with, and all joking aside it really isn’t something that I do intentionally. I have this overriding sense that everyone deserves a good home, and when I see someone without one… I tend to try and adopt the strays. I mean there is a reason why until this weekend we had four rescue cats and two rescue ferrets… I have a hard time saying no when any thing needs a good home.

If you want to find the reasons behind why I am the way I am you have to scroll back through my history to my childhood. I was the single child of two very loving parents, or as we in the united states call it an “only child”. To make matters worse we lived out in the country, or at least too far from city to make meeting up with friends a practical occasion. I didn’t have the normal cadre of neighbor kids to run around with, and being a sickly child I spend most of afternoons with Mr Rogers, Electric Company and the Sesame Street gang. I got exceptionally good at entertaining myself a trait that I am thankful for today, but I also longed to have other people to play with. I was more or less raised by my grandmother, as she was my babysitter and companion during my formative years. While she was awesome, she was also busy with the chores around the farm. I can pretty much guarantee however that it is her that taught me to love games. Her default “Idle animation” was sitting at the table playing solitaire, and we also played together absolutely insane amounts of trouble and candy land.

Wanting a Tribe

I remember the most exciting times for me were the times when my cousins would come to visit and I was suddenly surrounded by other kids my age. I remember wanting a baby brother or sister so bad, so I could have someone to play with whenever. I would have been an awesome brother… well pending they were willing to submit to playing whatever game I wanted to play. During my elementary and middle school years, I pretty much spent my weekends “grouped up” with friends at either their house or mine. Instead of one best friend I had two, and it pretty much stayed that way until high school. I’ve always had this strange dichotomy inside of me… I want to be surrounded by people… but when I have them I never quite know what to do with them. I’ve used the term “alone in a crowd” before to describe how it feels. Engaging at the level that I want to engage takes a lot out of me, so I have to take these periods to essentially hibernate and draw strength to engage again.

I’ve always built “tribes” for as long as I can remember. I never just played with one other person… I tried to assemble groups of people to play with. I had an unusual upbringing for being a pretty hardcore geek. The traditional American experience for a 30-40 year old geek is that of being the misfit and being picked on. Since my parents friends kids ended up growing up to become the popular kids, and also as a side effect of growing up in a very small town… I was given a lot more acceptance that I likely would have gotten anywhere else in the world. Folks took my quirks as just “me being me” and pretty much left me alone, and I guess it doesn’t hurt that I am 6’4” and no one really seemed to want to mess with me. In High School I kinda gathered up misfits that needed a home around me, the folks that WERE picked on mercilessly. By my association with them it extended them a small bubble of protection… and I guess I became a tank for the first time. It taught me that I actually liked protecting people, I liked feeling like I was helping my friends.

A Digital Family

When I entered the internet age, all of these instincts and traits that I picked up along the way followed me as well. I found it hard to think of the people I was interacting with as “just pixels”, and in fact I am fundamentally opposed to that line of thinking. When you encounter another person, they have hopes, dreams and aspirations… and we have all arrived online for different reasons. I started sifting through the folks I encountered and trying to keep “the good ones”. When I found someone that needed a home, and wanted to participate in a larger community… I started trying to stuff them in my pocket and carry them with me from that point on. It wasn’t long before I had amassed this large network of people that I wanted to stay in touch with for as long as I could. In my own family, I have never really felt like they understood me. They are extremely loving and nurturing, but I have never fit the mold that they seemed to want to press me into. What I realized years ago is that online I was assembling my own family, the one that does fully understand me… and appreciates the nuance of my character. At this point I have encountered quite literally multiple thousands of other players… and from those I have adopted a fraction… but still a large enough group that this community of contacts is also literally thousands of players. With the transient nature of the internet, folks come and go, but the memories they leave behind is nonetheless important. I feel like it is my job to act as the glue, to try and bind this digital family together. The problem is I am never quite satisfied, and keep meeting awesome and interesting people along the way. I will continue trying to stuff these people into my van and adopt them into my family. I’ve been called many things in my pursuit… the Cruise Director, a Bus Driver, an Ombudsman, I even had one former guildie refer to me as the “Prom Queen” because everyone seemed to know me. At the end of the day I just want to surround myself in a blanket of awesome people to share my game time with, and I feel like that job will never be finished. If you need a good home, and are community minded… chances are I will try and adopt you too.

Reconciling Deathknight

December 8, 2014 by Belghast

The Anger Phase

This morning I am feeling completely out of it. I struggled to get to sleep last night, and ultimately wound up taking some melatonin against my better judgment. For most of yesterday I’ve felt like I was coming down with something, and this morning my lungs feel lousy. It might be the strange weather we have been having, or might be an extension of the emotional weekend I have had, but in any case I am just drained… which is a pretty horrible way to start a day. As such this morning is a morning where I am doubling up and having both coffee and an energy drink, hoping that ultimately one of the two will do the trick. Right now I am playing this fun little game that is composing with my eyes closed at the keyboard. As such I have no idea what sorts of typos will creep into this post.

I want to thank all of the people who took a moment out of their day yesterday to send me condolences. It means a lot, and while I have not yet responded to each and every one… they all were very helpful as the day went on. For whatever reason I mostly felt angry yesterday, and lots of little things kept me in a perpetual state of grumpy. In a strange turn of events, it feels like the cats have been a lot more chill with each other, or maybe it is just that they sense that something is wrong. They have pretty much swarmed me, where I would either have no cats or all three cats at once. I honestly feel like cats can sense distress in their owners and will try to comfort them in their own way. I am still very much in distress but I guess it is getting better. My wife and I remarked that this is the first time in literally years that we have not had a sick animal that we had to treat for something. It is a really strange feeling, but is also guilty as I feel a bit of a relief.

Serious Piddling

One of my side projects, the last few times I have returned to World of Warcraft has been to slowly chip away at getting my paladin a set of Judgment gear. I am one of those oh so cliché people that firmly believe that Judgment is quite possibly the best gear set that blizzard has created to date. My paladin is old enough to have the Blue Judgment look alike set that came from the opening of Naxxramas 2.0 at the tail end of Burning Crusade, and I went through the trouble of farming up the Purple Judgment set from the BC era heroics on both my Paladin and my Deathknight. The problem is that each time I went into BWL my paladin could not quite solo Razorgore, which in itself is a strange fight to solo anyway. The equation has two components, firstly that you are geared enough to be able to survive the constant assault of the npcs attacking you as you control the orb, and secondly that your stats are good enough to pump up Razorgore to a point of surviving the assault that ultimately turns on him after you break the first channel.

Last expansion my tanking set was good enough on the Deathknight that I could accomplish this rather easily, but as far as the Paladin goes… my focus was on Retribution so I didn’t quite have the appropriate gear to pull it off. At 92 however with my focus being leveling tanky… it worked like a charm and I was able to get through all of the eggs while Razorgore was still at like 75% health. This was the only real hurdle to soloing the raid, and with that now easy it became simple enough to push my way through. Positive is that I got the last of my judgment drops from BWL… the negative is that I still need the pants from Molten Core. When pushing my way through the core like I have so many times before… wouldn’t you know that a binding dropped. The entire time my raid ran Molten Core we never saw a binding… and in all the hundreds of times I have solo’d the raid myself… I have never seen one either. Now however I will be adding this to my weekly raid soloing rotation as I chase the OTHER binding from Garr.

Reconciling Deathknight

A huge part of my feelings about Warlords of Draenor as an expansion is how badly I did not like the feel of Blood Deathknights when I played them in alpha. I could not quite put my finger on it, but they simply felt “wrong”. To have the class I had been completely devoted to feel crappy going into an expansion, made me not really interested in the expansion at all. While I have had this grand renaissance of playing a Warrior, I still miss my Deathknight, and with the need of his inscription abilities… I have started working my way through my issues with the class. I guess at this point it is starting to finally feel “normal” again, and at this point I am staring down the barrel of 93. There is still quite a bit of stuff that I need to wrap up in Shadowmoon Valley, and as such I am in no real rush to leave it. I would really like to be able to hit 98 before sitting foot in the Spires of Arak allowing me to completely skip that zone, so I will be milking as much from the zones leading up to that as possible.

Granted at this point I have not tried to tank anything as a Deathknight, but instead just using it as a grossly overpowered leveling spec. I started off trying to do two handed frost, but quickly decided I needed the survive that blood grants me. Frost was awesome for bursting things down, but when it came to soloing elites… it struggled. Blood on the other hand has allowed me to power through pretty much anything I come up against just like blood always has. I am still getting used to the strangeness of blood boil being part of my normal rotation instead of an ability that I used whenever to spread my diseases. Also still getting used to the loss of Rune Strike, and using Deathcoil as my runic power dump. It still gives the Deathknight more of a casterly feel than I really care for, but like I said it is starting to feel “normal” again. I guess I just needed to spend some time powering through the frustration.