April 2016 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blog Unbroken

April 14, 2016 by Belghast

Technological Betrayal

Yesterday was a really rough day. It was the sort of day that makes you question why exactly you do anything. It started yesterday with WordPress indicating that I should really patch my blog to the latest version. These are the sort of warnings that I take heed, given that generally speaking the way you end up with a hacked blog is by not patching constantly. Everything seemed completely normal, and I started soldiering on with my morning post. About 90% of the way through the morning post I noticed that I was having some odd issues with the wysiwyg editor, so I decided to save a draft and reload. Upon hitting that save draft button, it cleared everything I had just written giving me a painfully blank screen. This is what ultimately lead me to post my blog broken post, because I ran out of time to write something, and I was testing to see if it was only the save draft functionality or if it was the actual publish functionality as well. So I rattled off a post really quickly, hit publish and boom… it posted only a title with no content which told me more than I knew before. It seemed like something that was interacting with the editor was causing problems. This second time around I had the presence of mind to write my post in google docs, so I was able to log in through the WordPress.com interface and try making the post there, which is ultimately what added text to my post.

After a bunch of fiddling and turning things off I found that apparently the Twitch Embed Suite that I had used for awhile to embed my twitch stream into a page on my blog, was causing all sorts of issues. So after disabling that I managed to make an update to the post, which is giving me hope this morning that all of this typing is not in vain. I’ve also already saved a draft successfully so we are in a much better place than we were yesterday morning. Unfortunately these problems didn’t stop with the blog yesterday, and my entire morning at work was spent chasing down insane issue after insane issue. One of which had been plaguing me for a few days now and over the course of six and a half hours working on the problem and trying everything I could think of it solve it… I finally remembered that about six years ago we had something similar happen and I followed down a hunch of what had caused that issue. The issue with problem solving is that often times I need to let a problem percolate in my brain for awhile before the answer presents itself… which is not exactly conducive to fixing something rapidly. So by the time I had fixed this huge issue, and a few others… it felt like I had run some sort of a mental marathon. The day improved after that… well that is until I found out that the daily heroic in Destiny was once again Lost to Light… the mission that can in theory reward the Black Spindle.

Lost to Light Sucks

Mostly I am just sick of trying for a Black Spindle. Through the grace of my friends Squirrel and Jex, I have likely put in more than twenty attempts at this thing over the course of several different occasions with no luck in walking away with one. On our best attempt we were one or two mobs away from completing when the timer ran out. Last night Squirrel was available as always and willing to help, but we struggled to find a second and Jex was nowhere to be found. So as a result I ended up trying with an old World of Warcraft friend and his co-worker. I was feeling pretty good when I heard that the two of them duoing it somehow managed to make it to the final room with a couple of minutes to spare. I thought surely with a third person in the mix that would make all the difference in the world. Unfortunately we could get to the final room with about six minutes left and from there everything seemed to break down when it came to juggling clearing the adds and also working on whittling down the boss. The closest we have ever gotten was the bubble in the middle method where we took down the boss with sword attacks and then worked on clearing the room. This time around we largely got corralled in the center corridor “safe spot” and anytime we attempted to poke our heads out either ate a sniper shot or a taken centurion ball attack. In any case this is another week without getting a spindle, and honestly I am not sure how much more I am even going to attempt it. I get my hopes up and then when I fail to get it again I just end up feeling like shit.

Now other than this little hiccup the patch has been excellent. Yesterday I had written a huge post talking about all of the things I was enjoying in the patch, but sadly that bit of prose is lost to the sands of time… or at least wherever the internet garbage collector deposits things. Suffice to say that I am enjoying the update and that it has lit a fire under my ass to go out and do things. It is not entirely as magical as I would have hoped because the confusing text blurb I have talked about before from the Bungie website was exactly that… confusing. Originally the statement had said something to the effect that engrams would now decode to at least your current converted light level. What that really means in practice is EXOTIC engrams will now decode to at least your current converted light level. I am still getting a ton of trash blues and purples, but I don’t really mind them that much because I no longer have to go through a complicated process to decide if I should break it down immediately or if I should save it for infusion fodder. The math is simply… is it higher than the light level of the gear I want to be using? If so eat it and bump up an item… if not deconstruct and get tasty materials. The awesome thing about this is that it is letting me dip into my bank and dust off items that I never actually used because the light was simply too low. For example I found this amazing Byronic Hero which is an extremely high impact hand cannon with a decent magazine size. It has triple tap, hand loaded and hidden hand giving me decent stability, better than average range… and great target acquisition with the ability to get a bonus round if I precision shot multiple times in a row.

Treasure Room Raiding

The other thing that needs to be talked about is Prison of Elders. When Destiny launched, I played for a few months and then got frustrated with my inability to improve my light level and moved on to something else. I did not return until after the launch of the Taken King, which means I largely missed both House of Wolves and the Dark Below and never actually played the original Prison of Elders. Now my friend Squirrel runs this every single week, and has for a very long time… but tends to run them on Sunday which was a lousy time for me to be doing much of anything. So when we set foot in there a few nights ago it was completely fresh and new to me… and I loved every moment of it. For years I have wanted an MMO to give me a dungeon that is a sequence of random encounters pulled from a larger pool of encounters… and that is pretty much precisely what Prison of Elders is. The first four rounds of the match take place on various battlefields themed after either the Fallen, Vex, Cabal or Hive and in new incarnation apparently each one of these has the chance of spawning in as a Taken version. The fifth round is a boss encounter and will take place on the battleground that links up to the type of mob you are facing. In the couple of outings so far I have only seen the giant Vex Minotaur and the Cabal Primus, but I believe there a bunch of options that you can end up with, as well as some new Taken versions. Your reward at the end is a trip down to the treasure room where you get to open three chests and each time through I have gotten at least one legendary engram for my troubles.

The other thing of note has been the introduction of loot boxes, for purchase from the in game shop or from doing activities. It seems like you earn a loot box for doing each type of activity per week, meaning that your first crucible match of the week, your first prison of elders/heroic of the week… and I am guessing your first raid of the week earns you a loot box. I also ended up opening several of the boxes with silver and managed to get a full set of the Taken themed gear as well as a full set of the Spectrum gear that allows you to change the color of its glow. I thought I was just super lucky, until I found out that most of my friends got nothing but Titan armor regardless of who they opened them on. There are angry threads all over the place right now talking about how crappy the randomizer is on these boxes, and folks have posted pictures of their inventory full of nine copies of exactly the same item. I guess in the grand scheme of things I lucked out because I got all of the armor I would want, as well as a white tron themed sparrow, and a really damned cool ship. Unfortunately it was not the taken themed ship that I really wanted… but I am happy enough to use it for the time being and will simply hope that my future weekly boxes end up giving me the other. In any case… I am really happy with the patch and have been slowly getting enough higher level engrams to start upgrading my gear a little at a time. I went into the patch sitting at 309 and can now hit 312 which while not a huge difference is enough to keep me engaged.

Broken Blog

April 13, 2016April 13, 2016 by Belghast

Bad Morning

This morning is already not off to the most amazing start. I had a blog post roughly one paragraph from posting and for whatever reason things went south. This morning I patched WordPress and with it a number of plugins… including the text editor that I use to edit my blog posts. I am guessing something went south in the process, because it just ate a blog post. As a result you are going to get a very shallow shell of the post that I was going to make, because I am running out of time. Yesterday itself was a rough day for me, because it seems like I picked up some sort of a stomach bug. As the day went on I was running a low grade fever, alternating between chilling and smothering… and suffering from what I can only term as “intestinal panic” in polite company. I managed to make through a super important meeting that I had scheduled last week… and that could dictate the success or failure of a big project at work. However after that I went home and spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa, consuming Gatorade and not trusting myself with anything more substantial than saltine crackers. It was not exactly a joyous occasion, however as the afternoon turned into evening I managed to feel a bit better and eventually filtered upstairs to check out the Destiny patch.

The most vexing problem this morning however is that my blog seems to keep clearing out my posts. What makes this all the more frustrating is that I am only a few weeks away from hitting three years of posting every single day… and my blog appears to be broken. Anyways this is somewhat of a half assed post but I am going to continue trying to make it until it finally takes. Hopefully by tomorrow morning I will have sorted out what caused my blog to break and will be able to make a proper post. If this worked… I had to go through WordPress.com to post on my blog… which is just not sustainable for the future. Testing something really quickly to see if I sorted out what plugin was causing the issue… if you see this message I apparently did.

All Hail Patch Day

April 12, 2016 by Belghast

Light be Praised

Today is the most magical of all days… patch day in Destiny. There have been times in the past when something so cool was being released that I have been giddy about the patch, and today is definitely one of those days. If you have not been following Destiny since the original launch, I have to say you have been missing something. This is one of those games that a lot of people wrote off completely after being frustrated with the original release. To be truthful even among the AggroChat folks… even though I talk about Destiny constantly… there are a handful of people that were burned so bad on this game that they never want to play it again. This is however a huge unfortunate thing since Taken King was for Destiny what the 2.0 patch was for Diablo 3. It was that period of time where so many things were just “made better”, because in many ways it was the start of Bungie realizing that a somewhat adversarial loot policy was a bad idea. That said there was still quite a bit of grind in Taken King, but it was the sort of grind that never made me feel like it was utterly hopeless. I could go out, get a bunch of engrams… and maybe just maybe one of them would be worth using to help infuse up all of the 280 weapons that I had sitting in my vault. The infusion system was so much better than hoping for a drop… and then not being able to use it because it didn’t have enough light on it like happened so often in Year One.

That said the infusion system was still a pain in the ass. I had my vault lined with 285 items that I could use as stepping stones to get those 280 arms day and vendor drops up to decent levels of light to make them usable in most activities. Last night I cleared every last bit of that out of my vault, because with today’s patch infusion will be 1 to 1. Meaning that if I get a 280 weapon, I can drop a 310 item into it and it becomes 310… no fiddling or calculations required. With today’s patch the light level is also being increased… to 335, with pretty much all of the “end game” activities from Iron Banner to Court of Oryx to the existing raid being able to drop high light level items. There is a part of the patch preview on the Bungie site that is a bit ambiguous talking about engrams now decoding to a minimum of whatever your equipped light level is. If that is the case I will sing the praises of this game from the rooftops because I have a vault full of weapons I would LOVE to use… but they are simply too low of light level to be viable. While I didn’t start saving nearly as far back as my friend Squirrel did (simply for lack of bank space) I did start saving pretty much every engram I have gotten in the last few days. The hope is that tonight when I log in I can start decoding them and hopefully get some really nice upgrades to my overall light levels.

Hope of Stability

As is often the case on various game subreddits, some user has created a really excellent list of all of the content that players might need to know about coming back to the game. While I fully expect there to be a deluge of returning players, this really is the ideal time to reinstall the game and start once more. This patch packed some pretty massive quality of life issues, and if the grind bothered you before… that should be significantly lessened now. As far as how I spent my last night before the patch… we were attempting to play clean up on the stranded Kings Fall raid from Tuesday. I’m part of the group formerly known as the Rookie Raid, that has now been renamed to the Squirrel Squad. Though based on the folks that sign up instantly… I was going to suggest Jexy Squirrelghast for the unofficial name. While I still very much feel like a rookie, I guess I have picked up more information than I realize. Granted I still suck horribly at the jumping puzzles and more than likely always will. I died so many times to the wall last night it wasn’t even funny. That said I wasn’t the last person to get to the chest, nor the last person to get up through the rock pillar vertical puzzle either. As far as the stranded raid… well we spent most of our time attempting to get the Warpriest challenge mode, and as a result we simply ran out of time to move on beyond it. We wound up simply killing the Warpriest in non-challenge mode, which I felt was at least in part my fault… given that it was my first time doing platforms.

Last night we more or less cruised along nicely thought Golgoroth, and Sisters… only to run into some logistical first timer issues on Oryx. The fight has a lot of things to take in and we straight up got robbed of at least one kill when half of the orbs didn’t detonate even when players were standing on them. The raid ended in frustration, because we simply ran out of time and available resources to keep pushing. I greatly appreciate all the non-rookies that stuck in and pushed forward trying to get Nidrew his first kill, and it is my hope that tonight the servers will be stable enough for us to give a good push at trying to get that kill this evening. Part of the becoming “Squirrel Squad” is that we moved the start time back to 8pm CST giving us an extra hour worth of attempts on stuff to hopefully get the clear. That 9pm start just guaranteed that by the time we hit Oryx we were all a little loopy and out of it. The only gotcha tonight is that given my history of big landmark patches in the various MMORPGs I have played… I totally do not expect the servers to actually be playable tonight. I will be totally fine with just doing small activities roaming around this evening, and maybe taking in some Court of Oryx. However I am still holding out hope that we might be able to do the 320 version of the Kings Fall raid tonight, and get folks some new and shiny upgrades.

Good TV Bad TV

April 11, 2016 by Belghast

Fear Season 2

Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead. I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since. Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work. This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with. So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise. That said… season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least. It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to. I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise. As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like… are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand… the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.

The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb. Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous. They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous. It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned. It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background. I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet. Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously. I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t. I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights. That said… so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.

Daredevil Season 2

As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two. While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable. This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics. Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one. I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect. There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers. The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon. From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it. While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.

The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher. “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled… that is until Rick himself started to fill that role. Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher, and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series. As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil… so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin. I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate. As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept. The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand. Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast. So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction. Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.