December 2015 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

Housing and Horde

December 14, 2015 by Belghast

Worth It

One of the major stresses this year has been our house, and it has been several phases. First there was the stress when we realized that the leak in the bedroom and the kitchen were due to the garbaged out wood siding. Then there was the stress of trying to pick the right company and the right product. Then of course the stress of waiting for them to finally get started… we signed a contract in July and they didn’t actually start on anything until October. Which lead to here was the stress of having strangers at our house over the course of three weeks, and quite literally just showing up to do the work with little notice. Finally there is the stress looming over our heads of just how much it cost us, and trying to sort out how we are going to go about paying it all off. However this weekend… I can finally say that it was probably worth it. Once again we had a torrent of rain and even though we are still gun shy and kept checking the former leaks… everything continued to perform like a champ.

Where the real “worth it” bit comes in though is the fact that we had a cold front blow in yesterday and as the day went on the house continued to hold its temperature to the point that even at 11pm it had not dropped enough to actually trigger the heater coming on. The house is so much more insulated now and it is funny just how much of a difference that makes. Previously our upstairs was painfully oppressive to be in during the winter months because the heater would be nearly constantly going, just to make it so that the downstairs was somewhere close to livable. Now there are still variations between the two floors, but they are pretty minor. The place it is most noticeable is in the Bedroom where it has always been the coldest room in the house. While it is still not the warmest, it is largely comfortable in the mornings when I wake up… instead of having to make a mad dash to the shower to get some heat in me again. So I have to say all in all… while it was stressful and involved a bit of financial pain… in the long run it is going to be well worth it.

Maybe I Should Heal

One of the things I am thankful for is the fact that my Sunday night raid… is pretty chill. Sure Drewie loses his shit when he doesn’t get a token drop, which is absolutely hilarious… but overall people are more than happy to just show up… do the things that need to be done and walk away with loot. My opinion right now is pretty high of the population horde side in general. People seem really nice… like almost scary nice for being World of Warcraft. I mean I would expect Nubzy and Facepull to be nice… or she would beat them into submission, but what I am talking about is horde players on our battle group in general. The amount of random help that I have gotten out in the world, be it a buff or a heal… or simply a friendly wave has been pretty great. Contrast this with my experience lately on Alliance which consists mostly of entitled ranting in dungeons, or the battleground that is tradechat. I guess I can just see why folks can favor this side of the fence.

My problem in general with horde however is that other than the Tauren… I just don’t really like the racial options. I’ve never been a “monstrous humanoid” type player to borrow the Dungeons and Dragons term. I will say had the Horde gotten the Dark Iron Dwarves as a racial option… I would have converted years ago. I think in order to play Horde for long I am going to have to get used to playing female characters… because while I really like Female Trolls and Undead… I hate the male counter parts because of the hunch. Similarly I think Female Orcs look way cooler than their male equivalents…. though I have to admit in the above photo Khariss looks badass in his Tier 5 set. Mostly I am happy that Sunday nights is more than willing to let me pew pew pew or eventually move into a tanking role, because those are the things I care about. However apparently I should have been a healer. Since moving to the horde side I have been invited to no less than four different Heroic Hellfire Citadel groups… pending I had a healing spec. Everquest scarred me for life when it comes to healing… and from that point on… I have never really considered it a viable option for me to enjoy playing a game. I wasn’t horrible at it… I just get insanely bored not hitting things in the face with a weapon.

More Stuff Than Time

We’ve talked about this on the podcast some, but I think a large chunk of the magic of Final Fantasy XIV was simply the fact that we had so much content left to do. As we whittled our way through it over the past year and a half, we eventually caught up to the point where we are now current with each additional patch. That means once again we are waiting for content to get delivered, rather than having a huge backlog that we could be working through. I think the reason why World of Warcraft is so compelling to me once again is that… right now I have this huge backlog of content to work through. I am absolutely the “master of my domain” when it comes to the Alliance side of the house. I have one of every crafter, and I can push up any character I choose… it is just the matter of dedicating the time to it. Instead on the Horde side I have nothing… well apart from a super supportive guild. I am once again behind the curve and this has put the game in entirely new perspective for me. I want to build my legacy on this side of the fence, and eventually reach a point of self sufficiency just like I have with my army of Alliance alts.

The problem is however that there are simply more things that I need/want to be doing than there are hours in the day. Part of me keeps thinking… I will dedicated this day to working on alts, or this day to farming old content…. and instead I just end up working on content in Tanaan or trying to farm Valor to push up gear a little bit more. All of it gives me this feeling that there is more to do than I could ever possibly do… and it is the same contented feeling that I had in Final Fantasy XIV. When I have left World of Warcraft in the past, it is always because of the same thing. I start poking holes in the game because I have quite literally run out of things I want to be doing. Now I feel like I have this mission, and plenty of things that I want to be doing… and all it really took to reinvigorate me… was abandoning a decade worth of work. I guess in a way this is like all of those times when I have stopped one Minecraft game, just to start a new one… because the old one had gotten stale. The awesome thing about this is… that I still have every bit of work that I did over that decade… just waiting on me anytime I want to visit it. Which in truth I am regularly on my Alliance characters, I am just focused on catching up on the Horde side.

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Long Live Fabian Strategy

December 12, 2015 by Belghast

Where is Xur

For the last month or so I have not really been that heavily engaged in Destiny. In fact I have flat out missed the opportunity to pick up a few decent items from Xur and Armsday as a result. In fact there was a Suros Pulse Rifle a few weeks back with Full Auto that I am really wishing I had managed to get in on while it was available. As a result the last few weeks I have started at least logging into the WhereIsXur.com website to at least see what he is still Friday mornings. This week I noticed he was selling the Monte Carlo, a year one juggernaut of a weapon… and I believe it was a PlayStation Exclusive until year two. I have heard so many other auto rifles compared to this one, that I have always wanted to use it… if for no reason other than having a proper frame of reference. The challenge however is that I only had 8 strange coins… and purchasing any weapon is 23 strange coins. This meant that at some point this weekend I would have to do some grinding.

So last night I set out to grind a little on my Titan and my Hunter for the hopes of getting there without a ton of issue. One awesome thing however when I logged in is that apparently if you are signed up for the destiny email letter you get an in game package of strange coins for every character. Or at least I got three separate allotments of three strange coins, which immediately greatly helped out my mission. Also while grinding I got the amazing ship that you see above. I am not sure why but collecting emblems and ships makes me happy, especially now that with the kiosk you can give them to any of your characters without much issue. I am not sure about the paint job, but I have wanted a ship of this style for awhile. I’ve been relatively lucky so far with picking up ships from the Dreadnaught chests, and I believe this is like my fourth one. After a bit of grinding and doing quests… and not managing to get any strange coins I went with a different avenue. I noticed that both the Hunter and the Titan were not too terribly far off from the next rank of their faction… so I spent some motes of light to get a package with guaranteed 4 strange coins each.

The Monte Carlo

I ended up transferring all of the coins over to my hunter and giving him the Monte Carlo. It might seem odd, but I felt kinda bad about robbing the “good” Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle from that character earlier, and still had not found another Auto Rifle that really made me happy for that character. I am attributing feelings… to the characters I am playing… which is strange as hell but whatever… it is I guess a me thing. I spent a bit roaming around the Dreadnaught shooting things, and I have to say… I love this style of Auto Rifle. It reminds me about a lot of the things I liked about that Zarinaea-D, high rate of fire and good stability… and not amazing impact but not nearly as low as some of the other high rate of fire weapons. I’ve not really had time to finish leveling this weapon, but the whole dealing damage reduces melee cooldown thing is nice especially in a closer quarters fight. The increased hip fire accuracy thing is largely useful for me… because there is rarely a situation where I am not aiming down the sights… even if for just doing some quick sighting. Other than that… probably going Send It to increase range and accuracy, and then Aggressive Ballistics.

I am really liking this weapon because it feels good, and significantly different from most of the Auto Rifles that I have been using. Especially since Auto Rifles have improved in the recent patch… I am really thinking this is going to end up being the trademark weapon for my hunter. I would absolutely steal it for my Titan main… but I have a new main crush as far as weapons go for him that I will get into shortly. So if you have the coins laying around… or even if you don’t and you think you can get the coins together before Xur disappearing late tonight I would highly suggest picking it up. It is a solid weapon all around, and seems like it would be a work horse for both PVP and PVE content. The main difference is I am highly likely to go High Caliber rounds at some point, because I really love it when a weapon can stagger. I have a bad habit of wanting to run up on a target rather than running away… and this play style absolutely fits the titan… but does not at all really fit the hunter other than if you plan on knifing them.

Fabian Strategy

I have honestly liked the Fabian Strategy since the moment I first used it. This is the Titan exclusive exotic weapon that you get from the Gunsmith quests at I believe Rank 3. From the start it felt like a Titan weapon, with its strange battering ram/shield thing on the front, and as I have said before… a lot of my enjoyment of games is the way they feel moment to moment. The problem with the weapon as a whole is however, that as every guide will tell you… this weapon was a casualty of the early balancing changes in the game. The thing that sets the Fabian Strategy apart from just a decent legendary auto rifle… is the Front Lines perk which states that “the weapon has increased handling, stability and rate of fire when enemies are close”. This was such a negligible change that most people simply thought the weapon was broken. Instead it is much more likely that they just thought the weapon was overpowered and nerfed it into oblivion in Taken King testing. This gun in the hands of a pre-nerf Sunbreaker, would have essentially meant that they would be unstoppable killing machines. But it turns out… that the sunbreaker on its own… did a pretty good job of being that anyway.

With the latest patch, they finally “fixed” this gun and I have to say I am freaking in love with it. This gun plays to all of my bad habits… and rewards me for them. Crowd Control… kills with this weapon grant bonus damage for a short time, combined with Life Support… mean that by picking off smaller mobs while engaged you can increase your survival quite a bit. What this feels like in practice is more like a life drain ability in say a MOBA… where you can take out little minions to help increase your sustain. This allows me to do stupid things and charge the enemy…. which procs Front Lines. It is hard to describe quite what the difference is, but when the perk kicks in it literally feels like you just doubled your rate of fire. I am sure that is not quite what is happening, but in any case… the difference is noticeable and the weapon becomes this machine gun of doom while the proc is happening. Combine this with the fact that the weapon has always done a decent job of staggering mobs… earlier when taking these screenshots I staggered an Ogre with it. It finally feels like the archetypal “Titan” weapon that it is supposed to be. This thing is going to be fun in strikes, which I hope to be able to do a little later today. I am extremely happy with this patch so far, especially since I have spent a lot more time playing a defender titan than I have a sunbreaker lately.