January 2015 - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Versatility Sucks

January 7, 2015 by Belghast

Ko’ragh Down!

With the holidays and the revolving door of people, it feels like this week is the first “real” week of tries we have been able to put on Ko’ragh. This time we went into it with a lot of proper research and managed to carve out a strategy. This involved a lot of things, not the least of which was me glyphing Mocking Banner so that it functions as a misdirect and our rogue and hunter standing by to do the same. Essentially Mocking Banner was available every other add phase it worked out, and it seemed to do miracle work of absolutely gluing the adds to our tank letting us burn them down faster. The off phases when it was on cooldown went nice and smooth as our rogue and hunter worked together to pick the adds up. We had a Deathknight available last night, but we wanted to sort out a method that did not rely on her since she is not an “every week” person in our raid and sometimes has scheduling conflicts.

It was amazing how different this set of attempts felt from the very start. The first handful of tries we had made on him before felt like this chaotic mess. This time around everything felt smooth and focused and while it took us a couple of attempts to work through the various issues… we straight wrecked the boss in a method that felt extremely repeatable. Additionally the entire raid as a whole felt better… even Tectus which is generally the most chaotic mess ever for us felt nice and smooth. I am really damned proud of the progress we have made as a raid. We have never been “cutting edge progression” but it feels nice to be doing well within the current tier with us sitting at 6/7 Normal and 2/7 Heroic. Thursday night the goal is to get in and get us a few heroic kills, and maybe test the waters to see where we are on the DPS check that is Butcher. Then hopefully we get some good solid attempts on Imperator Mar’gok.

Versatility Sucks

Yesterday twitter was a hotbed of long running conversations for me and various groups of people. One of these conversations was with my friend Talarian about stat distribution on the items in Draenor. As a Gladiator I have been focused on two things above all else… Bonus Armor and Crit because both of these feed the goofy chain reaction that is the gladiator warrior. In general Gladiators get 1.5 times the Attack Power from Bonus Armor per point of itemization than we do from Strength. This makes it our number one stat for literally anything… because per point we are getting one and a half times the benefit. The prime example of this is when you look at the Draenic Strength Potion and the Draenic Armor Potion. When I pop a strength potion I get 1000 attack power during the course of its buff, when I pop the armor potion which feels counter intuitive… I gain 1500 attack power. So yesterday I was complaining about getting items with the “wrong stats”.

Talarian chimed in with a well written post where he mathed things out and came up with the conclusion that relative ilevel is far more important than having an item with the “perfect” stat combination. While I agree with this in theory… it is nonetheless frustrating when you have to trade in an item with the perfect stat package with a “bigger” item with a rather shitty one. I feel like Blizzard goes through these phases where they want to make “stats interesting” but I feel like their game design simply does not support this. Raid encounters are in essence more about “throughput” than making “interesting choices”. So long as they keep making “DPS Check” encounters, that is literally the only thing we are going to care about, and we want whatever stat package gives us the most performance. In these scenarios stats like Versatility lose out, because would you rather have the stat that passively and opaquely “makes things better” or would you rather have that stat that cascades a chain reaction of your abilities making your class “feel” better.

Right now Versatility feels like a failed experiment, because it is this phantom stat that “makes everything better”. If we look at the definition on the wiki: Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example. All of this sounds amazing… but the problem is it is also boring. When I stack crit it directly effects my chances of abilities interacting with each other, since a Crit X gives me a free Y and a Crit Y gives me a free Z… essentially my class FEELS better to play. When I stack Versatility the benefits are largely transparent and feel something akin to “Mastery 2.0” but somehow more boring.

Thank You for Blogging

While I am in this mode of reacting to conversations from twitter… I have to single one out that happened with the Godmother of Faff herself… AlternativeChat. This comment itself is buried in part of a larger conversation about the effect of when we refer to someone on our blogs. But it underlines a problem all bloggers have. None of us think what we are doing is as meaningful and important as others seem to. I am singling out AlternativeChat here because she has been a good friend for some time, and been every so gracious to follow me down a number of whims. All of this said and all history aside… when I wanted to have her on my Bel Folks Stuff podcast, I was quite literally afraid that she was going to say no. I feel like the tiniest of ants compared to her when it comes to my impact on the blogosphere and my reach within our shared community. Thankfully she graciously accepted and out of it came a really wonderful conversational podcast.

What I find hard to fathom is that I am sure there are people in the community that look at me the same way as I looked at AlternativeChat. I feel like I do nothing important, I just do my thing but it is the act of me doing my thing that is the important thing. There was a further discussion yesterday about numbers and statistics and all of that sort of thing. In truth at the end of the day I would feel just as happy if I had 50 readers as if I had 500 readers. All that really matters is that there is someone out there listening and reading and caring enough about me to keep doing it on a regular basis. This is not a business for me, this is an act of love and caring… and all I am looking for is people to share that with. So if you are out there blogging, I want to thank you deeply for doing whatever it is you do. At the end of the day you can’t read a person daily without caring about the individual on the other side of the screen. As far as the readers… I want to thank you all the most because you make doing this crazy thing each morning worthwhile because I know I am not alone.

Ramurai and Coils

January 6, 2015 by Belghast

Tales of the Ramurai

Last night did not end up quite like I had expected it to when I got off work. Originally I was slotted to do an impromptu podcast recording, so I rushed around and ordered from a pizza place… scarfed my food and then due to technical difficulties that was cancelled. After doing my “Wizard Chores” I settled into Final Fantasy XIV as Monday is our habitual raid night there. Over the last week or so there has been a new event that has started up and I decided to see if I could finish it. Heavensturn for the most part is a New Years festival where each year you celebrate something relating to the Chinese Zodiac animal of that year. While technically the Chinese Zodiac doesn’t actually start until February, this coming year is the year of the Ram, and as such everything in this years Heavensturn relates that. While I spent time for awhile this year being a Bunny samurai… last night I became a Ramurai… which admittedly sounds like Scooby Doo.

Final Fantasy holiday events tend to revolve around being unwittingly drawn into the plan of a horrible cartoon villain that by the end of the event is thwarted. This event is no different really, but the sequences of the holiday involve going around the world and helping people with the power of your ram friend. When it jumps around it has the power to put people to sleep, and sooth their pain… which is adorable and funny at the same time. For completing the sequence of quests you get four different versions of the “Ram Samurai” hat plain, white, red and black as well as your very own pet Ram that will travel with you. All told given all the running around and cut scenes it maybe took me an hours worth of time. The quest starts in Limsa Lominsa near the Aftcastle and that is where the event vendor is as well.

Binding the Fifth Coil

We are still in a strange place with our raid, in that Tam has moved across country and doesn’t quite have his stuff yet. Yesterday he had internet, but still none of his furniture including his computer had arrived on site. While we managed to limp along with him attempting to raid on his surface tablet… that is a less than ideal setup. So instead last night he troddled off to a friends house where they have furniture and such… and we pulled together a raid with a handful of new people. Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut is much like the old school raiding was during Vanilla and Burning Crusade. You have to defeat it to progress forward into the newer content. As such any people that we might possibly consider swapping in as we start work on the second coil of bahamut… must have beaten the first coil to do so. Alamaria Kilah and Curious Cat have both been ready for raiding for a bit… or at least “geared enough” so we opted last night to swap them in and get them the unlock.

I have to say I have been impressed at how quickly we are teaching the fight now to new folks. Last night was our third turn five kill, and while each week there are a few attempts where we work out the kinks it all comes together rather quickly. I have a feeling that we will be doing this semi-regularly as new folks come on board that need keying. Additionally there are many of us who would love to have a weapon from first coil and so far it has dropped 2 books and a bow. I did however manage to pick up the helmet to match my Allagan armor set. So now dressing as “Tiny Sauron” is totally an option. At some point I would love to finish getting the rest of the pieces of that set because it is pretty damned badass looking. All in all however it was a really fun raid night that came together a bit slower than normal… but finished just as successfully. Hopefully next week Tam has his house in order and we can start in on Turn 6 properly. Cylladora has done a bit of recon work in sorting out how the later turns work, so hopefully we can get through to 8 before hitting a serious road block.

Ko’ragh on Notice

The last two weeks of raiding in World of Warcraft have been a bit of a mixed bag. While last week we managed to down another heroic boss for the first time… we also struggled a bit more than we normally do on any of the encounters. With the holidays we were missing key people during each attempt it felt like, and hopefully this week we will have our full raiding compliment. Additionally it feels like maybe we have a firm handle on Ko’ragh finally because by god… I want to kill that filthy ogre. I am so ready to move on to Imperator Mar’gok even though that fight looks like it is going to be a pain in the butt. Generally speaking we are pretty good at “avoid the stuff” fights and a large portion of that fight feels like it is “avoiding stuff”. Both Ko’ragh and Mar’gok have some key upgrades for many of our raiders that should allow us to push through the tail end of the Heroic as well.

One of the things I find interesting with raids is how that each one is unique and has unique challenges. Some people have steamrolled Ko’ragh because apparently the easy way to deal with the adds is to have a Deathknight AOE Deathgrip them into place. The problem with that is that we do not have a Deathknight tank, nor a Deathknight anything every single week. As such I think we are going to try to do some Mocking Banner chicanery to get them all gathered up, but we have yet to sort out which version we need of that. If I glyph my banner it acts like a misdirect, which means I likely need to create a macro to misdirect my focus. Unglyphed however I get all the hatred and will have to be healed /blow all my defensive cooldowns to survive it. In any case the banner lasts 30 seconds… which should be more than enough time to gather up all the adds from both waves. Hoping that this makes the fight go more smoothly because our problem is in dealing with the adds, not in dealing with the other mechanics.

Wizard Chores

January 5, 2015 by Belghast

Back to Work

Last night I think I caught up completely on my sleep that had been missed from the previous days. As a pre-emptive strike I took some Melatonin about 7:30 last night, which put me in the mood for bed around 9 pm. Apparently I slept like a rock not really waking up until after midnight, and only then for a drink. I woke up a few times in between but I have to say it was probably the most solidly I have slept in ages. Here is hoping that this extra sleep helps me through today because I have a feeling it is going to be a rough one. I absolutely love the period of time between Christmas and New Years. I’ve been with my current job long enough to need to “burn down” my vacation a few times a year to keep from losing any. So I decided that the perfect solution was to take off the few break times my teacher wife gets, so we can actually spend them together.

As such I generally take off starting that Friday before the week of Christmas and going back the Monday after New Years. The problem is… two weeks off is a really long time, and I am completely out of “work mode” at the moment. I have tons of stuff to do upon coming back, but for the life of me I can’t really remember any of it. I am sure this morning as I sift through a mountain of emails it will all come crashing down on my shoulders. It will be an interesting time because not only am I going back to a New Year… but also going back to new leadership of my department. Time to scurry around and get prepared for all the stuff that is going to happen in the coming months. Since I did not get a text, call or email asking for help… I have to home that means everything went smoothly while I was gone.

Wizard Chores

Doing your Garrison dailies has become collectively known as “Wizard Chores” and the problem with that is I have no frame of reference for WHY… other than maybe the Sorcerers’ Apprentice? The earliest mention I could find is during a Reddit thread, but pretty much since release a handful of my guildies have been calling it that. While I have embraced the term, I always find it odd… considering I don’t really play that many “Wizard” type characters. Yesterday I mentioned that I was finally about to start my Garrison dailies on twitter, which is a long drawn out process of swapping between alts for awhile. I’ve heard folks refer to this process as the “Garri-go-round” which is also fitting, because it sees everyone in the guild logging in all their alts to make sure everything gets harvested and looted. In the middle of all of this, I had a friend on twitter ask just how much time it takes. Well honestly… not as much as you might think.

My main Belghast, has a tier 3 everything in his Garrison except for the Fishing Shack… and that is largely because I have done next to no fishing in Draenor and have yet to unlock the tier 3 blueprint. Without a doubt he is my longest “Wizard Chore” of the day, but even then I would say if I am focused I get done in 5 to 10 minutes and if I get distracted maybe 15 minutes? Now I currently have seven characters with their Tier 2 Garrison, and I believe at last count I had 5 mines and 3 herb gardens in total. So you take that 5 to 10 minutes per character and multiply it by seven alts… and you start to get some actual time. I would guess on a daily basis it takes me about an hour or so of fiddling with characters before I finally settle on the one I am going to play.

Feeling Productive

The process does require some jumping through hoops but overall I feel far more productive at the end of it than I ever did doing daily quests. I think the fastest I ever managed to get a SINGLE faction worth of Dailies down was 30 minutes per character, and that was during Burning Crusade doing the Isle of Quel’danas dailies. With more modern dailies there was seriously no way in hell I was going to do more than one characters worth per day… and maybe just maybe on the weekends I would do ALL of my characters. With the Garrison it feels natural that you tend to your base before going out into the world, because that is exactly what the Garrison feels like… your home in Draenor. With Belghast I have a Bank, Guild Bank, Void Storage, Transmogrifier, and eventually if I can get the rest of the parts an Auctioneer. I have everything I need in one place without having to deal with the fact that someone thought it was an awesome idea to set on the mailbox with their Corehound mount. Fiddling with the bits of my Garrison make me feel balanced and ready to go out into the larger world and encounter people once more.

The thing is… Garrison save me so much time. At least once a week I would go into a farming frenzy that would take several hours worth of mining, herbing, and skinning to be able to support another weeks worth of daily tradeskill cooldowns. I have one of every kind of tradeskiller in my menagerie of alts, and at this point I have all of them but my tailor with a garrison… something I really need to remedy. Other than farming leather as a consequence of playing my hunter… I do absolutely ZERO farming of resources per week. I have enough gardens to keep myself supplied in pots and flasks as well as being able to dump resources into the trading post whenever I need to. I have more than enough ore to be able to craft a True Iron effigy of myself and then have plenty left over to create effigies of all of my other characters… because seriously you get a lot of ore. Basically this hour long daily routine keeps the wheels of my alt machine whirring smoothly.

The Savage Blood Problem

The biggest problem with this whole smoothly running crafting machine… is the fact that EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER needs Savage Blood. It doesn’t matter what your tradeskill is, or if it even makes sense to be using blood with it… to upgrade your gear you are going to need 15 of these things at a time. The problem is that there is a single way to get Savage Blood as drops… and that is through the use of a single garrison building… and only at tier 3. Of course you can turn in 750 Primal Spirits to get your 15, and that is precisely why I do my Mine and my Herb Garden every single day… because both generally yield quite a few. But still at best I am yielding a single Savage Blood per character every other week. My friend pegged my problem with the Barn when she referred to it as the slaughter house. The Barn just isn’t something enjoy doing, and trapping animals… just somehow feels wrong to me.

Granted I am out in the world on a daily basis killing critters of all sorts. But then I feel like I am actually using the resources from those critters properly. When I kill a beast on my leatherworkers, I can use all of the resources from it. When I trap an animal… it just sits there helplessly as two hicks banter back and forth… all the while a blood animation spurts out of the trap to really drive home what a horrible human being you are for doing it. I have built barns on most of my alts, but I just can’t ever seem to bring myself to use them. Maybe once I get the tier 3 one.. the lure of Savage Blood will be too great for me to avoid doing it, but man it is not something I care about at all. It feels like a pretty crappy choice that if you did not build a barn, and you do not trap lots of animals… you are basically screwing yourself out of upgraded gear. I feel like they need to make a chance of getting savage blood from ALL of the buildings, much like there is a chance of getting Apexis Crystals. If they fix that then I will have very few complaints about the Garrison system… other than the fact that there is no Stable Master for my hunter.

Land of the Lost and Found

January 4, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #38 – New Year, New Season

I have to say it has felt a little strange to take an entire week off from recording AggroChat. Before Christmas we recorded roughly three hours of audio, that then got edited down into two episodes. As such we took last Saturday off, and it felt a bit odd coming back and recording this week. When you are on break you live in this strange time where the days don’t really have the same meaning that they do normally. I found it funny that mid day yesterday Tam asked what we were going to talk about last night… because we never really have a plan. In truth since he has been moving across country over the break, he didn’t get in much play time at anything… so questioned if he had anything to add to the conversation. However like always once the conversation started we seemed to be able to come up with plenty to talk about.

The funniest theme of last night was that apparently Kodra played nothing but sad games over the break. So each game he talked about… Tam gave it a rating of like 6 Sads out of 10. Not unsurprising Ashgar played a lot of Pokemon as did Tam and I. There was much Final Fantasy XIV to be had, and I talked about my conversion to a semi serious raider again in World of Warcraft. Once again we ran significantly longer than normal, but I think in part that is because the mega 3 hour show threw our timing off. After editing it clocks in around an hour and a half, and I think there is some really good conversation in there. Of course there are still some references that no one but the five of us will ever really get… but when I realize one of these has happened I try and make some measure of explanation. This is what happens when you get long time friends in a room and have a conversation.

Land of the Lost and Found

One of my downtime activities while recording our podcast has been going out to the Isle of Giants in Pandaria and farming dinosaur bones. At this point I have 7007 of the needed 9999 to get the Bone-White Primal Raptor. For weeks after dinging 100, it was just me out there dinking away at killing the dinosaurs. However it seems as though everyone else in the world has gotten that idea. While wandering around last night I was fighting for spawns with no less than a dozen other farmers after dinosaur bones. I opted to bring my hunter, who is a leatherworker… because I always feel like it is a sin to let so much leather go to waste. With all the competition for spawns… I spent more time running around and skinning the corpses than actually killing anything for dinosaur bones. Now for a public service announcement: There is a special place in hell for people who kill skinnable/herbable/mineable/engineerable mobs but do not completely loot the corpse, don’t be one of those people.

While wandering around and farming I picked up the Ancient Tome of Dinomancy and immediately turned around and tamed a Direhorn. I got a green one of course… because the green ones are always the coolest regardless of whatever the thing happens to be. I think “Cera” will end up replacing “Daedalus” as my current tanky pet, because it just feels awesome to be running around with a Direhorn. I went through a phase where I tamed a Devilsaur from Ungoro crater and ran around with it… but this feels much more my style. It feels like the perfect pet for a dwarven hunter. While I was wandering around last night waiting on the podcast to finish edits, I also picked up a Hydra from Spires of Arak, which I think is going to replace my spirit beast as my current dps pet of choice as well. Not sure why, be it nostalgia or what but I am kinda getting into this whole hunter thing again. Yesterday I streamed some faffing about trying to farm a set of tier 6 gear for transmog purposes… and man… farming stuff as a hunter is easy.

Another Rough Night

I had all intent upon getting a good nights sleep last night. However various factors conspired against me, not the least of which was that we ran so late last night recording… which ultimately pushed my editing session further and further back. I wrapped up my edits about 1 am last night and went to bed. The problem being that we also had a massive wind storm last night. So everytime I almost got to sleep, the wind would pick back up and cause all sorts of horrible and catastrophic sounding noises outside. By the sound of it you would have thought that the very side of our house was being peeled away. In all honesty I have no clue what half of the sounds were, but this morning when I ran to get breakfast everything looked “normal” and by normal I mean our back gate is still screwed up. I am guessing much of the noise was that banging open and shut.

What made matters worse is the storm seemed to stir all of our animals into a frenzy… all except for Chloe which seems to do nothing but her very best impersonation of a dust mop. Kenzie the kitten and Allie the “older but still has moments of kitten “ cat kept going tearing through the house as they chased each other, either that or were running from some imaginary force. At one point during the night I heard a loud crash, that I had to get up and investigate. Mind you that this happened about 3 am… after finally getting to sleep. Far as I can tell they knocked over some stuff in my wife’s office, but nothing nearly as tragic as it sounded. I finally woke up this morning about 9:30, and at which point I figured I really should get up and around. Now I am in somewhat of a daze and finding it extremely hard to focus on writing anything. It is going to be a long day, but hopefully tonight I can get some sleep and maybe not have an absolutely horrible first day back from the break.