The Luckiest Hunter

On Nightmares

Last night my wife and I apparently had fitful dreams.  This morning she got up first and I had somewhat woken up by the time she returned to bed.  She said she had nightmares, and at first I said I did to, but the more I thought about it…  the more I questioned if I had a nightmare at all.  What constitutes a Nightmare?  Is it that you are dreaming about otherwise scary situations…  or is it really about a loss of control.  If it is the later then I most definitely did not have a nightmare, and quite honestly rarely have nightmares.  This morning  dreamt about a cult that had been abducting young girls, and when I attempted to get the police involved they didn’t believe me.  So in true action movie fashion I took it upon myself to go track down their lair and try and rescue them.

Turned out the lair was in an abandoned cave system, maybe a mine.  I worked my way through the various guards until I was in this big room and could see two people talking.  The first of which I recognized as the actor Jason Alexander from Seinfeld fame.  The other was like gargantuan man I somehow knew was known as the “ugly man” from a circus sideshow. He stood about eight foot tall and was covered in these disfiguring growths.  Jason was yelling at him, to make sure no one got past him, and if they did there would be consequences.  The big man was cowering… well at least as much as you can cower when you are eight foot tall.  So I waited until Jason had left the room before stepping out into the shadows.  I simply asked him his name.. too which he replied “no one ever asks my name… It’s Bob”.

I essentially reasoned with the gentle giant that what was going to happen was probably really bad and that Jason needed to be stopped.  He agreed, and I snuck into the other room… originally planning on whacking him on the head with a baseball bat to disable him.  But it turned out that it did not work as planned because he had some sort of metal plate in his head.  Jason went to pick up a double barrel shotgun and while loading it I escaped to the earlier room… where Bob handed me what looked like an elephant gun.  I drew a target on Jason and fired… taking him down…  and saving the day.  Sure there were tense moments…  but during the dream there was never a situation where I felt out of control.  So I guess the question is… was that even a nightmare?  If you are wondering “Why Jason Alexander?”  well best as I can tell is due to this super creepy episode of Criminal Minds where he plays this mastermind character…  which is where the above image comes from.

AggroChat #39 – Pokemon, RNG and Roguevania

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat actually getting an earlier start than normal.  Problem being that we were down two people.  Rae had apparently fallen asleep on the couch and was not around, and Tam after moving three timezones apparently forgot how they work.  We might have to sort out a better time to record in the coming weeks since there is now a three hour difference between various members of our cast.  Something that I think is only going to get worse when another individual that seems likely to move out to Seatle does so.  Last night it felt like one of those episodes where we didn’t have much to talk about going into it, but as the night went on we managed to gather up enough words and phrases to build a show out of it.

We covered a lot of topics from Steam being an excellent source for games that would have never likely seen the light of day, like the Japanese indie game scene, to discussing the raid fight style in FFXIV and contrasting it against World of Warcraft raiding.  It always feels like we don’t talk about a lot of individual games but as I edited the podcast I kept a list jotting down the titles.  Over the course of the evening we talked about Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, Rogue Legacy, Valdis Story, ittle Dew, World of Warcraft, Aquasphere and Adventure of Link and probably a handful mixed inbetween.  It ended up being a good show, albeit a significantly shorter one considering we only had three people to discuss with rather than our normal five.  This is the first show in a long time we have actually managed to constrain to roughly an hour.

The Luckiest Hunter

During each game and each expansion… there is one of my characters that seems to be lucky.  Granted according to Tam each and every one of my characters is lucky, but I think that has more to do with his phenomenal bad luck more than my good luck.  For Pandaria my lucky character seemed to be my druid.  Everytime I set foot in any LFR or Raid… he seemed to get drops.  This expansion it is looking to be Lodin, my hunter because yesterday in LFR I managed to get five drops with no roll tokens used… meaning I got a drop out of all but two of the bosses.  I walked away with helm, bracers, gloves, boot, and a ring.  When you add to the three crafted pieces I already had… I am sitting at roughly 627.  I have yet to do any dungeons, so at some point I will finish the epic ring quest and get that which should help the ilevel significantly.  I have once again completely skipped the heroic gearing step.

Mostly I have been doing this to prove a point.  Heroics right now are not worth doing other than for achievements and the occasional Inn Quest.  The daily heroic is worth a small bit of gold…  the most you can possibly get is 200g and 50 Garrison resources.  I can get both of those easier by simply running high level garrison missions, or using the various buildings in my garrison.  In the past there was a clear reason to be running heroic content, in that you needed to run them to cap Valor that you then spent on upgrades.  That system seems to be completely absent in Draenor, and as such there simply isn’t the same impetus to keep running heroics over and over.  In fact as I have proven on two different characters you can pretty much skip them entirely and go straight into LFR and get your gear that way.  I hope in 6.1 they give us further reason to want to run heroics, because right now the risk vs reward equation is completely broken.