April 2016 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Secret Stash

April 10, 2016 by Belghast

Comfort Gaming

One of the things I always have trouble sorting out, is what game I plan on playing during the AggroChat podcast. Now there are casts that have a strict no gaming rule while talking, but I honestly think that would damage some of the discussion. Essentially we are hitting record on conversations that naturally happened already on our voice chat server. Part of that equation is the fact that we are talking while gaming, and for the last couple of weeks the game of choice has been Diablo 3. I think partially it is that I know the season is coming to an end, and as a result it is fresh in my mind again. The ultimate irony however is that I am not playing seasonal characters at all. While recording two shows ago I ended up pushing my non-seasonal monk to 70 and last night I started working on trying to get my non-seasonal warrior from 60 to 70. That would leave only my Wizard as being sub max level, which honestly…. I am considering giving another chance. I am not a huge fan of finger wigglers… but after running with a lot of wizards over these last couple of seasons… I have to say I see the charm. They can simply melt anything that they come up against, and there actually is a semi melee range option that I would probably be able to stomach.

The other thing that I tried my hand at this week was Path of Exile. I find it shocking that the game has been out this long and I have yet to even really give it a shot. The talent screen honestly scared me off a bit because it looked as complicated as the final fantasy x sphere grid. However for some time my friend Carthuun has been talking it up, pretty much anytime we brought up Diablo 3. It is entertaining and I feel like I could play it happily, but I have to say I was somewhat shocked how relatively difficult that it starts. I mean it is not super hard, but you can’t simply mow through the mobs in quite the manner that you do in Diablo 3. All this really means is it makes me realize just how watered down the latest Diablo installment really was. The only disappointment was that there didn’t seem to be any sort of a real “knight” light character with a sword and shield in the manner of the Crusader in D3. I ended up choosing the big brute character, and at some point I will probably try and go sword and shield. I am not sure exactly how I am building the character yet because I have yet to get terribly far.

Pre-Patch Farming

The majority of yesterdays game time was spent running around in The Division and attempting to farm crafting components. At the current moment I have a decent stash of materials, or at least am in a better position than I was before I knew the crafting changes were coming down. I am not super pumped about the patch, because it feels like it is taking the game in a less player friendly direction. However that said I am still slowly making progress towards the level cap. While running around yesterday I managed to ding 24, and encountered some areas that I had not seen yet. The strangest of course was this marijuana farm that was nestled deep inside a building. As the day goes on today my goal is to continue trying to level because I would really love to be able to participate in some of the big activities, but I am absolutely certain I will not hit the cap before the patch. I am somewhat frustrated that it sounds like gearing is going to be harder for me, than it was for the folks who rushed the leveling process. That however always seems to be the case… the first few you get to cap get easy epics, and those who level slowly have to struggle through the throttled drop rates.

Sword Logic

April 9, 2016 by Belghast

Conversions Away

Last night I had every intent of logging into The Division and playing it all night long. If nothing else I knew I needed to pop in long enough to convert all of my materials to orange or blue quality. This Tuesday there is a pretty horrible nerf coming down the pipe in crafting. In the case of high end crafting it is more than doubling the amount of materials needed to craft something through the form of an extremely lossy conversion of materials. Right now it takes 5 greens to make 1 blue, and 5 blues to make 1 orange crafting material. Which has always felt like a pretty fair method. However after the patch it will take 10 green mats to make a single blue, and 15 blues to make a single orange. To make matters worse they are also nerfing the amount of materials you get off of deconstruction which right now usually yields two materials… but after the patch it will more consistently yield a single material. Essentially all of the love I have for Destiny and the quality of life improvements… I am feeling the opposite for Division and what seems to be some very unfair changes for the casual player. As a result I highly suggest you get into the game and convert everything you have up to the highest tier of material you can make.

Unfortunately there is no batch conversion option so you will be holding space bar and hitting escape a bunch to burn through your materials. It took me about twenty minutes to convert everything up because I really did have a lot of materials. I need to focus on farming some more weapon nodes this weekend so that I can hopefully convert up at least enough to get 10 for one weapon. Right now high end craftables take 8 orange mats, and after the patch they are going to require 10. I didn’t notice any mentioned nerfs to the world nodes, so I am wondering if these changes are designed to get players to prioritize going after them instead of simply killing a bunch of stuff to deconstruct. In any case I know today/tonight I plan on farming as many nodes as I can get my hands on with the hopes of converting it all upwards into shiny orange materials. In the process of screwing around yesterday I did manage to complete a mission and hit 23 so at some point I really need to make the final push to 30 so I can join in all the fun end game “reindeer games”.

Unintended Exotics

As unexcited as I am about The Division patch…. I am insanely so about the Destiny patch. Yesterday I was super pumped to see what the next Playstation exclusives would look like, namely I really really want that new exotic sniper because it has an almost Tex Mechanica vibe. I also think the new Jovian Guard armor set is probably the coolest Titan armor to date, so I will absolutely be farming up a set of it, which should go a lot more smoothly given that I can infuse things much easier. On the infusion department there is some conflicting information up on the Bungie site, but it makes it sound like we will no longer get engrams to decode to less light than our converted light total. Meaning that if you are 309 light when you decode you should get items of level 309 or higher. What is confusing is this seems like a massive change, but one that I really welcome. I am sick of getting 260 blues and 270 purples from engrams. I’ve been holding onto a vault full of interesting weapons, that just need to be infused to use… so I am amped that this might mean that process becomes super simple. At some point before Tuesday I really need to sort through my vault and deconstruct all of the lower level items that I was holding onto as stepping stones for leveling higher stuff from 280 and beyond.

I didn’t intend to play Destiny last night, but at some point during the evening I flipped over to the clan messaging app and saw that my friend Jex was trying to get ahold of me. Now I have needed to finish up the Exotic sword quest for some time, but I wasn’t really pushing the issue. It turns out that Jex and Squirrel were looking for something to do last night, and thought that it would be the perfect time to work on that quest for me. The sunless cell is probably my least favorite strike because I don’t like the whole “not being able to see” aspect, and the exploding thralls coming out in close proximity. That said the worst part about it last night was the anxiety of not wanting to screw up the pattern. You have to bleed down the main boss to where you can finish him off in a hit or two… and then drop the warden of your elemental type and then within 30 seconds finish off the boss to complete the quest. The problem being that the flame sword warden is apparently the most annoying because he could almost one shot all of us.. and we were well above the suggested 300 light. We managed to do it in a single attempt, but with a lot of resurrections in the process. Afterwards we popped over to the dreadnaught and did some Court of Oryx, with the goal of finishing some antiquated runes so we would each have a stack to go through with the patch on Tuesday. I know personally I have six, but it sounded like Squirrel had a full stack of them. The hope is that we can farm up one or more of those 335 artifacts to boost our light level before the raid that same night. In any case I am super grateful for the group, and my shiny new exotic 310 sword.

Chasing Happy

April 8, 2016 by Belghast

Obliviously Chill

This week has been an interesting one so far. I’ve been trying to take these mood enhancers that I had fallen out of the habit of taking on a daily basis. According to my wife it makes a huge difference when I am taking them, versus when I am not. However on Wednesday night they caused me to more or less forget that I had a raid to attend. I was sitting there happily on the sofa watching Daredevil Season 2 and screwing around in Destiny through the official remote play application… and next thing I know around 9pm I check into Slack and realize that I had completely blown off the Wednesday night WoW Raid thing. Thankfully they were able to make it work without me, which is awesome… but I was otherwise completely oblivious to having anything going on that night. Like in the back of my head there was a vague feeling that I was supposed to be doing something, but I was so chill that apparently I never actually acted upon that thought. I partially blame Daredevil because really, this season so far has been enthralling. I only started watching it Wednesday night because our cable box was uncooperative, and I couldn’t seem to get anything else up on the screen.

I’ve been feeling generally disconnected from the world, and my hope is that the happy pills will help to curb that instinct and allow me to actually participate in it again. I’m not even certain what caused me to stop taking them, other than one day I simply forgot… and the next day I forgot… and so on until I was out of the habit. I’ve had quite a bit of work stress lately, combined with the stress of all of the home renovation “change” has kinda pushed me into another funk. After a sequence of bad mental health days, I came to the realization that I really should be taking them again. When I am not doing great, I tend to throw up this wall and paint a happy face on it… then duck behind it hoping the world will go away. I realize this is largely a defense mechanism, but it feels so much safer behind the wall than out in front of it interacting openly. Everything feels like it is buzzing past so fast that I can’t really grasp what is going on, or who is attempting to interact. So when I am sitting in this mode I spend a lot of time staring at things, without actually understanding what I am looking at or how it actually relates to me. One of the things I have tried to do with this blog is be pretty open about whatever is going on with me… even if it is the not so great stuff.

Warlock vs Oryx

Through the course of playing Destiny I managed to push all three classes to 40, but some of them get a lot less use. Namely my Warlock has kinda become the unloved child of the bunch, because no matter how much I try… I never can seem to get the hang of their damned jump. It always feels like a much less useful version of the Titan jump. Hunter makes perfect sense… they have triple or quadruple jump depending on if you have the Bones of Eao equipped. Warlock jump however never seems to do the thing I want it to do when I want it to do it. However lately thanks to the magic of the Remote Play application I have been poking around on that character, because in the grand scheme of things… it has the least impact on my other activities. The problem is that I really have not done much questing. I ground my way to 40 through the various patrol missions and had not even completed the Taken King content. So last night I decided to pick up where I had left off in that quest chain, which turns out about four quests from the end of it. This was a big nuisance since anytime I got one of those ever so lucrative “Patrol the Dreadnaught” bounties, I couldn’t actually do that… and would end up having to complete a story mission to get kill credit. Over the course of the night however I managed to finish the main story arc of the Taken King and it is ridiculously easy when you are sitting at 292 light.

Also while doing stuff on the Warlock, I decided to go ahead and do the Stormcaller quest chain so that I could unlock that class. I have to say having done all of them now, this one was probably my favorite. I loved the whole “taming the storm” aspect of the quest because it really seems to it the class as a whole. Now unfortunately I need to just do a bunch of leveling to top off my various subclasses. I have all three maxed on the Titan, but for the others… I have Nightstalker on the Hunter maxed, and absolutely none of the Warlock classes maxed with Sunsinger being the closest since I figured the whole self rez thing would be the most needed like a Titan bubble. I wish there were versions of the mark/bond/cloak that increased leveling for classes other than the ones added with Taken King. Even if you had to do some sort of a quest to earn them, it would be a welcome addition for anyone trying to top off all three classes. The only problem with running Strikes/Crucible to level is that I feel like I am not entirely effective because I am missing large chunks of my abilities. So instead I just end up running bounties and screwing around in the patrol missions which seems like the slowest way to level sub classes. However all of this is great “playing from the couch on the remote play app” fodder so it will probably see a lot more screen time than it previously did. Before the ability to reliably play remotely, the only time I was really playing Destiny was to go do group activities. Now I can do a lot of solo questing from the comfort of the living room and it is making me play catch up on all of those things I largely ignored.

DAW2016 Coming Soon

April 7, 2016 by Belghast

One of the truths of the gamer blogger community that you will realize if you hang around for very long, is that we really like having events. There is the Newbie Blogger Initiative that runs during may, and for some reason a few years back I started Blaugust or at least popularized it. Another one of these events that has happened on a yearly basis is the “Developer Appreciation Week”. As far as I can tell the practice was envisioned by the blogger formerly known as Scarybooster. Back in 2010 he envisioned a week where bloggers posted one or many posts talking about the developers, companies and folks in the games industry that we really appreciate. Unfortunately the Scarybooster blog has been deleted for some time, so the early posts announcing this event are also gone with it. Thankfully through the magic of the internet archive you can still see some of those first posts. With the absence of a Scarybooster blogging presence, the week itself also was a little forgotten this year. Traditionally this happens during the last year of March, and since that seemed to be a crazy time for a lot of us… I suggested we simply reschedule the week for the tail end of April. The theory there is that all of this blogging excitement just might also drum up some excitement for the Newbie Blogger Initiative that will be happening in some form during the month of May.

The concept is simple. During the week of April 24th through April 30th, make one or more posts talking about your love and or appreciation of someone or some group from the games industry responsible for making those games that we love. The concept however is important. The good folks in the games industry enter it because they love video games, and often times have a life long goal of ending up there. The industry itself is a really rough one, and we can all see how caustic the communities can be when they turn against a game or an individual. This has been all the more evident in the last few years with the various “crusades” against this or that that have cycled through the gaming world. I think it is important that we set aside this week to lower our pitchforks, and set down our causes… and marvel in the reality that these folks do for a living what many of us wish that we could. The folks that make are games are not huge monolithic corporations that poop out games… they are folks that had a dream and are fighting really hard to see that dream realized. I maybe have a slightly different spin on things since over the years I have had a lot of friends join the industry… and many of them leave after a few years because it is honestly a largely unappreciated one. It is time for us bloggers to step in and show them some of the love we feel deep down in our hearts beneath the rants and the criticism.

So I ask you all to join me in Developer Appreciation Week. Lets continue this tradition that Scarybooster started long ago. Lets tell all those folks in the industry that we still care, even though we often times have some very serious complaints. At this point I am not sure yet if I will be posting something related to DAW 2016 every day of the week, but even if you only make a single post… it will be appreciated. For those wondering what others have written in the past, I happened to be doing the Blog Bonanza at MMOGames this time last year and wrote up a summary post of the various things folks said during the week. Unfortunately #DAW2016 and every other combination of hashtag I could think of is being used by Dyslexia and Dementia and several other causes… so what really matters I guess is the blog posts.