June 2016 - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

High Center

June 14, 2016 by Belghast

Gear Barrier

For months I struggled to find meaning in MMORPGs and wrote about my feelings a little over a month ago. Then something changed, and I am not exactly sure how or when it did. Now I am suddenly finding myself caring an awful lot… and even more than that thinking about what I am going to be doing that evening. The only problem is… I have found myself struggling nonetheless. Life was going rather peachy in Final Fantasy XIV that is… until I started trying to catch up in the patch content. Last week they released 3.3 patch content and I happily quested my way through both the tail end of 3.2 and 3.3 until I hit a road block. That road block being that in order to do the first dungeon introduced by the new content… I have to be sitting at 200 item level. Now when I took a break several months ago I was sitting at 190 item level and that was just about as good as was humanly possible to get at the time, or more so as good as you could get without the really painful grind. Upon coming back I have been having a blast farming ponies with the guild and slowly working my way through the relic weapon quest. I’ve also attempted to keep running experts but failed miserably at doing them on a regular basis.

The end result is that I have managed to pull my item level up to 195 but 200 still feels like it is a very very long ways off. One of the problems is in the past when they have introduced a new item cap like this to continue the quest, the previous set of dungeons provided gear that was of sufficient level to breach it. However the last set of dungeons in this case only dropped 195 level gear, which were upgrades in a few slots but in no way good enough to bring me up to fighting levels. The answer of course is to run Void Ark over and over until my eyes bleed, however I find myself struggling to do that when I don’t have anyone else to run it with. Tuesday is the night we run group content as a free company, and on that night the guild is active as can be. The only problem is the rest of the week it is a ghost town. So I struggle to push myself to do activities with strangers, which is going to be a common theme in this post. My entire time in MMO gaming I have always had this wonderful social support structure, from the moment I set foot in Everquest to modern times. If I needed something done there was always a ready supply of friends that I could pester to come do it with me. When I am missing that I am finding that I don’t exactly know how to function.

Social Barrier

This brings us to game two that I am struggling with. Over the weekend in a fit of nostalgia and such I dove head first into Rift and am having a really great time. I’ve started participating in the Rift discord community, and picked the brains of several friends as to all of the things that I should be doing now that I am back. The item that kept getting mentioned is that I really should start working on the weekly quests out in the Planetouched Wilds area. So being a dutiful follower of instructions I wound my way through the quest content and hit a big stubborn wall. There was a quest on top of Lantern Hook that involved killing a bunch of mobs essentially before they killed me, and quite frankly I was overwhelmed. I tried it in a few different specs before eventually asking for some help. The only problem is by that time in the Discord community, everyone was busy doing their own thing and not watching chat… so I got nothing but crickets. The challenge with Rift is that it is not that I have minimal social structure in that game like the way I do in Final Fantasy XIV… it is that I suddenly have none at all. Over the years all of that structure has eroded to where I am left with just one single channel that once or twice a night has another person in it with me. The majority of the time when I say hello to said other person in the channel I get no response telling me… that it probably scrolled by so fast on their screen that they didn’t even notice it.

Rift does a great job of providing a ton of things that I could be doing solo, but unfortunately there are still times where I absolutely need other people to do content. What I ultimately did was start watching the level 65 channel until I saw someone that seemed nice enough and that was playing on the same server as me. I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone and asked them for help… to which I was shot down. However I politely thanked them anyways, and about thirty minutes later while I was still sitting there struggling to figure out a way to do the quest by myself… I got a message from them again saying that they were finished with their raid and that they could come help me. So massive thanks to Domasca from Faeblight for assisting with the quest and pushing me past that obstacle. I continued on about my business and finished another set of quests only to return back to Lantern Hook to be handed yet another quest that I had no way of soloing. It was at this point I gave up for the night and went to bed, frustrated. Basically I am already standing on a precipice with this game and have a handful of choices in front of me. Either I can start rebuilding my social network within Rift a single player at a time, and in doing so force myself into anxiety ridden territory. I can research specs and try and find that one magical spec that lets me solo silly hard content like I have done in the past. Then of course there is always the option to just quit the game again… which is the one that I am trying to avoid as hard as I can. Rift is this wonderful throwback to an era in MMO gaming that I miss greatly… the only problem is that era is one when you needed lots and lots of active friends to support you through all the random things you needed to accomplish. So in truth… I need to figure out how to meet new people in this extremely well established and already stratified community.

Goal Accomplished

June 13, 2016 by Belghast

Memories of Other Times

This weekend saw me succumbing to nostalgia, but not in the method you might think. With all the talk of the Warcraft movie, one would assume that I spent my entire weekend playing that game. However instead I wound up spending nearly the entire weekend playing the game that ultimately first took me away from World of Warcraft in a significant way. There were some events that happened this past week, and I ended up finding out that a friend of mine had passed away suddenly. That friend is someone I first met during the launch of Rift when they were part of the community team, and from that point on we kept in contact through the other games we both moved to. Of note… I am never too far from Rift, and I am rarely more than a patch behind when I inevitably fire up Glyph to peek my head in. I’ve subscribed to the game more time than I have not since it launched back in 2011, and I’ve watched the game evolved through expansions and the shift to free to play and have remained one of the few of my friends that carries a heavy torch for the game. The problem being that in order to do a lot of the things I want to do with the game… I need a body of active players. While we have had several resurgences into playing Rift, the last of which seeing the forming of House Stalwart on Faeblight during July or 2013. The only problem being this lasted a few blissful months and then once again we were all fading away from the game to play other things… myself included.

Something shifted as well with the way content was structured in the old world versus content in both Storm Legion and Nightmare Tide. In the original game I managed to level three classes to 50 happily before finally running out of steam. In Storm Legion I managed to push my warrior up to 60, and a significant time later managed to barely push up my rogue up just before the release of Nightmare Tide. The latest expansion however… for whatever reason I just hit high center and never quite managed to near the level cap. When I logged in this weekend I was sitting at level 62 and had been there for quite awhile. There was something about the way the zones were designed, that firstly greatly increased my inborn tendency to wander off aimlessly. This exacerbated another problem that I have had in the newer content… and that is I seem to be able to completely lose the quest chains in the mix and fail to follow them ultimately finding out I am entire zones behind in trying to follow any semblance of a leveling path. So instead I would wander about and grind mobs, mostly doing carnage quests… which are these kill X quests that appear in the wild as you well… will mobs. This is an extremely slow way to level and after a few hours of doing this… and not really seeing the level bar move terribly much I would wander away like a bored child into some other game.

Instant Adventures

Now a little over a year after the launch of the game, the good folks at Trion introduced a system called Instant Adventures. This was single-handedly the best re-purposing of content I have experienced in a game. There are a number of things that happen while you quest your way through a zone, and instant adventures is essentially taking all of these tasks and placing them end to end… and aiding the flow by offering the occasional teleport to the next area and the next set of objectives. The result is this mindless train that you can hop on and just focus on the mission at hand, and in the process getting a bunch of planar currency and the occasional gear filled chest in the process. I’ve always found these an extremely fun way to level at low levels, because you can just literally hit a button and start getting fed small bite sized objectives to focus on, which is the perfect manner to grind alts. The only negative however is that the gear chests are nowhere near as plentiful as they come be… and you often times wind up significantly behind the curve in equip-able items. Over the weekend while recording the AggroChat podcast for example I started a character on the EU server Zaviel and started leveling through Instant Adventure. I shot up the twenty in no time flat… however I am still largely wearing sub level 10 gear other than a handful of really amazing items that I happened to went through the adventures. That said… this is a fun way to level a character and so long as you are riding the train the gear disparities are largely not that bit of an issue thanks to a bit of a bolstering system in place.

Last year they extended this Instant Adventure system to raids, and released Hammerknell as what they called an “Intrepid Adventure”. The result is something halfway between World of Warcraft LFR, and an Instant Adventure that involves going through the raid and its trash packs… that have been chopped up and fed back to you in neat bite sized chunks. The thing that I find interesting is just how many mechanics have managed to make it into the Intrepid adventures, and that the saving grace seems to be that you can simply zerg your way back to the boss after every death instead of needing to wait for a rez. Roughly a month ago they released the second raid as an intrepid adventure based on the Mind of Madness raid. While I had a blast doing Hammerknell on a whim a year ago, I never wound up sticking around for long. This time around however I had a mission in mind… figure out a way to level from 62 to 65. I’ve felt like a failure for quite a while that I never managed to hit the level cap this time around. So Friday night when I hopped into game I headed straight for the queue for Mind of Madness and found myself enjoying both the content I was participating in and the speed at which I found myself leveling. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I wound up sitting in one spot for a couple of hours and finally convinced myself to use some of those patron boosts that I had been sitting on for ages. Sure enough when you add in a +160% experience boost to the already good experience of Intrepid Adventures… the levels quite literally fly by. Sunday morning about noon I found myself with a newly minted level 65 character…. wearing a mismash of gear I picked up through the weekly patron crates… but somehow managing to qualify for expert dungeons.

Expert Grind

Now at some point during the weekend I had installed a dps meter because I was curious if I was actually doing okay… or if I was somehow struggling. When it comes to Intrepid adventures I seemed to be doing just fine with my dps usually running around third place or at least within a contentious pack hanging around that spot. I leveled for the most part with a high survival dps build 44 warlord, 32 champion, 0 paragon. This worked great for uptime and the ability to never need to really heal myself, however apparently it is a less than amazing build when it comes to running “end game” content. Being dumb however I just hit the queue button and hoped everything would be just fine. The end result was myself lagging so far behind the rest of the dps that I got called out on it almost immediately. We wiped over and over because we lacked the dps to tackle the encounters the manner in which folks in experts apparently are used to running them… namely in an ignore all mechanics push the boss as fast as you can and always get the speed run bonus manner. I dropped from the party and wished them luck… and in truth in spite of calling me out on the dps they managed to do so in a far more polite manner than would have happened in other communities. From there I went back to the drawing board and found my way once again to the warrior guides section of the Rift forums. Here I cobbled together a 61 Paragon 10 Warlord build that seemed to work okay… out in the world I can burst down most things before they really have a chance to damage me, but if you put me in an extended fight or a multi target fight I struggle. So I will probably continue to swap between it and my “Solo” build just for my own sanity.

The result was immediate and evident that the bulk of my problems in experts were spec. Granted I still grossly under gear the tier 3 raiders that are regularly running experts these days, however this time around I was able to out dps the tanks and healers. Over the course of yesterday I ran five for six experts and managed to cobble together some upgrades. I am still wearing several pieces of otherwise crap gear… but my hope is through running a bunch of experts I will either be able to mitigate that through spending currency or through getting lucky drops. In my very first expert I managed to complete I ended up getting a really nice purple two-handed axe so it seems like the loot gods have been smiling on me. This is not at all how I intended to spend my weekend, but I enjoyed it greatly regardless. Coming back to Rift felt like going to lunch with an old friend that you had not seen in a long time. I am not sure how long I will be around, especially given that there are other things in other games that I also want to accomplish. However for the time being I am really enjoying myself in my renewed resurgence in the game. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Bahmi and it feels good to be flexing those muscles once more. With the multi-core support the game runs amazingly well on my laptop, but unfortunately still struggles quite a bit on my AMD based desktop. The guild in Faeblight is empty, and I was alone for almost the entire weekend so that alone makes me wonder if this is sustainable. However I have the Rift discord channel to keep me company, and if I wind up staying I might end up needing to move Belghast elsewhere to find the support of a more active guild. Regardless it was an enjoyable weekend and I managed to mark one goal that had been bugging me for quite some time off that list in the back of my head.

For Azeroth

June 9, 2016June 9, 2016 by Belghast

maxresdefault I am sitting down to write this Thursday night after having just come from watching the Warcraft movie. Firstly let me state that I am going to do my best to keep this spoiler free, even though in truth the story that the film is based on is now multiple decades old. I attended the movie with quite possibly the perfect person I could have in the grand scheme of things. I went with my friend Vernie, or at least that is the character folks would know him by. On November 24th of 2004 the two of us farmed our little asses off to be able to purchase the guild charter for House Stalwart, a guild that still stands living and breathing today. I have to admit I went into watching this movie with a lot of conflicting emotions. A lot of time has passed since those heady days over ten years ago, and my feelings for Warcraft and the franchise as a whole have evolved over the years. I also had a bit of trepidation going into the picture seeing as I have seen many fondly remembered franchises end up marred by the churning machine that is Hollywood. I wanted to believe that this movie could do at least an adequate job of encompassing my memories and feelings and placing them on the big screen. When I found out that my local theater was showing the film on Thursday night, I purchased two tickets without even checking with Vernie first to see if he was interested. Thankfully he was, but otherwise I would have gone by myself because I had to know one way or another what the film ultimately would be.

Firstly I have to say that overall I am very pleased with the film. This is not a film that is going to win Oscars, but nor do I think that every film should be that. I grew up during the 80s, in an era when it was perfectly okay to make an exciting science fiction or fantasy adventure film without trying to aspire to pretense. I could sit here and knit pick little details, and complain about minor flaws… but instead I decided to embrace the joy of seeing this setting that I have spent so much of my time involved with spread out on the screen before me. If you have ever loved Warcraft, then there is likely magic to be found in this film for you. There was something uniquely mesmerizing as I saw setting after setting that I recognized immediately from my years playing the games. There is a moment early in the film where you see Dun Morogh and Iron Forge, and having spent the early years of my life in this game as a Dwarf there was this excited little child deep inside of me that stirred free from years of being jaded. Moment by moment the characters on screen appeared in settings that were as familiar to me as my own bedroom. There is a certain loving craft that understood the parts that needed to be there, and those that could be enriched and improved without losing the feeling of the original setting.

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Then there are the characters, ones that came largely from a time before the current fidelity of World of Warcraft. We know them largely from lore that has been written in the years since the release of Orcs and Humans and Tides of Darkness. While I said earlier that none of the performances are likely to win Oscars… that is not to say that each of them did not play their parts perfectly. Medivh was immediately recognizable as Medivh for example, and Durotan worked perfectly especially with the renewed focus on that character that Warlords of Draenor brought. There was not a single role that I felt was miscast or failed to hold up to the jumbled memories I have of the lore and setting of the early games. I have to say that of all the characters, the one I came to like the most has to be Khadgar, which is shocking considering I am not much for finger wigglers… and Warlords made me largely think he was an ass. The character I most closely related to of course was Anduin Lothar, but given my proclivity for warriors this should surprise no one. The real breakout for me however has to be a tie between Garona and Draka , but I can’t really go into my reasoning for either without dipping into spoiler territory. Suffice to say that for the story that is being told, I thought each and every actor did a great job delivering their role.

Now for a bit of a warning. For the lore purists out there, you need to go into this accepting that the movie is going to paint a slightly different picture than the one you know from the background of the game. Lets face it… the early years of the Warcraft franchise were a bit of a mess, with a combination of “wouldn’t it be cool” stacked onto layers of “this is awesome” to weave together a passable story. The Chronicles series of books have been a method of trying to clear up the tangled bits of maladjusted lore and set straight the canon once and for all. As a result the story of the movies is likely going to be the new canon of how the events of the first games will be set in stone from this point on. The sequence of events made more sense that some of the existing lore so I am completely fine with this. However for those who have to be tyrannically pure to the original source material… you are going to find certain aspects of this movie frustrating. I highly suggest you approach the movie with an open mind like I did, and allow yourself to simply get sucked along in the currents of nostalgia for a time when Warcraft inspired greatness in us all. I’ve never felt a lot of faction pride, but I have to say there was something that swelled inside of me when I heard the lines “For Azeroth! For the Alliance!”. Thanks to Duncan Jones and everyone at Blizzard for getting the movie right, and making something we can all ultimately be proud of. Not everyone is going to get this movie, but it wasn’t for “everyone”. This is a movie for the long time fans of the Warcraft franchise and I am hopeful this will be a long running series of movies, spreading the giant screen with the characters I have loved.

Rise of Iron

June 9, 2016 by Belghast

Lords of Iron Return

Apparently last night while I was completely oblivious, the trailer for the new Destiny expansion… Rise of Iron leaked out on the internet. All of these leaks of course beg the question… if everything comes out before E3… then why the hell have E3 in the first place? You can watch the entire leaked trailer here, that was apparently ripped from a Snapchat advertisement of some sort. I used VLC Media Player to snap a few pictures from the trailer for use in this blog post. Firstly I am a little disappointed that it seems like we won’t actually be travelling to a new planet or moon. As was originally suggested by many of the youtubers based on the leaked image from around a month ago… this does in fact deal with the twilight gap wall area. It seems like it was repaired at one point and the wall has once again been breached. In the meantime apparently a giant army of mutated Fallen have been amassing on the other side, and we as players are going to help quell this threat. Now the first thing that really stands out is that these fallen seem to have a “taken” like thing going on… but instead of black and white and shaky… it is all dark red and pixelated. Which makes me wonder if the virus is somehow like a digital version of the sword logic that has corrupted so many other things in the Destiny universe?

Regardless… I am pretty damned ready to say goodbye to the taken invasions, and I guess I can accept if that now means we are going to start getting Fallen ones instead. I would have rather seen them spend more time fleshing out the Cabal, but since the Vex and Hive have seen their day in the sun… I guess it is perfectly okay for the Fallen to get theirs. However it seems like we have already spent so much time fighting the Fallen since they literally appear in one form or another on every planet. While they are not extremely active on Mars, there is a spot in the Rubicon wastes where they show themselves for a quest. I guess considering that they are a race that was once chosen by the Traveler as well, it would make sense why they are constantly scavenging in its wake. The other thing that I find interesting is it seems like they have somehow compromised some of the areas that Rasputin might have controlled. There is definitely a Warmind-esc look to some of the areas that they have shown… but again they contain the same dark red contagion look. All of this makes me wonder if… this is really just some sort of an infection that Rasputin has been fighting off.. and it is also why considering his obvious power that he really doesn’t end up lending us all that much help. Maybe he has been busy with whatever is happening in the above screenshot. I would say maybe this was an unknown Warmind, but I think lore wise there is only one per planet.

Gjallahorn is Back

The most controversial point of the trailer however will be the announcement of “Iron Gjallarhorn”. This rocket launcher was the be all end all weapon from year one, and was as beloved as it is reviled. Unfortunately I didn’t play enough in year one to actually use one. In fact the ONLY exotic I managed to get in year one was The Last Word, and I think the game just gave me that one because it felt sorry for me. I am absolutely a year two baby when it comes to this game, and while I played at launch… I only played for a few months before fading into the background and finding something else to do. I’m not a huge fan of rocket launchers, but I have always though that at least on looks the Gjallarhorn looks amazing. Now I seriously doubt they will be bringing back the weapon with the power levels that it apparently had in year one… but just the fact that it is coming back at all makes me extremely happy. I want to be able to use this and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe this will be the rocket launcher to change my tune and make me love rocket launchers?

The controversy that is waiting in the wings however is that this is that getting Gjallarhorn is a pre-order bonus for the Rise of Iron expansion. I personally don’t have a problem with it, because I was going to pre-order the expansion regardless. I like having the peace of mind that the game is there waiting for me whenever I want to participate. This is a side effect of living through an era when copies of games were actually sometimes difficult to get. I remember having to go from store to store to try and find several games in the past, and had that happen as recently as the launch of TERA. The other big benefit in a pre-order is it often comes with the option to pre-load the content so literally at midnight you can pop in and start playing. Granted my ability to stay up for midnight launches is not what it used to be… and I often times only make it through character creation before crashing. What is going to cause the drama in the coming days is the insinuation that this might be your ONLY way to get Gjallarhorn. It is my hope that Bungie is just giving us access to the weapon ahead of time, and that it will exist in the normal exotic rotation from engrams, or at the very least a similarly complete-able quest once the expansion launches. Gjallarhorn is this iconic weapon, that even people who have never played Destiny have often times heard of it. When you have something like that… it just doesn’t seem fair to wall that up behind a pre-order bonus. So hopefully during the E3 presentation they will do some massive clarification on that point.

At least with the September 20th date… we won’t have all that long to wait until we get to experience it all for ourselves.