October 2016 - Page 5 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Finally Grasp It

October 7, 2016 by Belghast

For several weeks now Tam has been wanting to get those of us together that have Guild Wars 2 and try some of the group content. However the launch of World of Warcraft Legion put a pretty serious brake on that concept. We agreed that last night was a decent night for myself, Tam, Thalen, Kodra and Ashgar so we set forth with the plan of getting together and running something as a group. While we didn’t exactly get that entire team together we did venture forth into Fractals, which are dungeons of a sort, but the closest thing I can really relate them to is the Pandaria Heroic Scenarios. You are dropped on a map and that map has certain objectives that it is leading you towards. However as we found out last night there are several things that exist just off the beaten path, like a champion dragon of sorts that we managed to take down. In total we ran three of them, and we spent a good deal of that time wiping as we adjusted our strategy to be able to take certain encounters down. Throughout the night I flirted with several weapon combos… but wound up right back at Greatsword and Hammer as a warrior. However after the fractals I spent some time playing sword and shield again and found it greatly improved over what I remember from alpha/beta.

Ultimately what it really reminds me of the most are the encounters in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Those were a fairly unique blend of exploration, reasoning, problem solving… and finally a heavy dose of surviving combat. The problem there however is this was rendered in relatively low fidelity, and it felt cumbersome to have to comply with the various rules of the actual pen and paper game system. Admittedly Guild Wars 2 is also fairly fiddly, with a bunch of sliders that you can tweak on your character to build for very specific purposes… however it feels like it does a much better job at the sort of experience that DDO was trying to go for. Fractals feel like bite sized adventures… more than just on rails dungeon crawls. If we can actually get the proper group size on at some point, we need to give dungeons a proper attempt as well because it feels like there are actual tanky characters now. We did some messing about with a training bot system inside the fractal hub, and quickly found out that apparently I have way more survival than either of my companions. This is even more noticeable when we actually started to do harder content, because I could stay in and take those hits longer allowing them to hang out on the boundary and deal damage or reflect effects. In group play it suddenly felt like we each had a clear role to play, and not quite the zergy mess that I remember from the launch of the game.

This is really the first time in a very long time I can legitimately say I enjoyed playing Guild Wars 2. It was extremely fun for group play, and that suddenly makes all of the more casual exploratory bits of the game more enjoyable because I know that it is all leading to something. One of my key problems with Guild Wars 2 has been a feeling that I had capped out and was not really going to improve my gear in any reasonable fashion. That changed the moment I set foot into the fractals hub and saw all of the “better than exotic” items that were available on the vendors there. Additionally I used some of those laurels that I had been getting, and not really knowing what to do with them… to purchase a nice neck piece. Ultimately I feel like I finally “get” why people enjoy this game, and while I doubt it will ever supplant a more traditional MMO for me… it doesn’t really have to. The set up of Guild Wars 2 makes it extremely to drop into game with my friends and have a night of play, much along the lines of how non-mmorpgs work. After seeing that I could in fact be a tank in this game… it makes me feel significantly better about playing warrior, and makes me want to try out some of the other weapon combinations that I long abandoned. I still have problems with the game in a few spots, but I think I have largely reached a point of peace finally after all this time. I can stop trying to solve this puzzle, because I finally grasp what folks see in it.

Raiding Upkeep

October 6, 2016 by Belghast

I would like the guild bank to be able to help out, but because we use Personal Loot now, we have no enchant mats or raid BOEs to sell.

— Rangari Lae (@Laeleiweyn) October 6, 2016

This is not exactly a topic I planned on talking about this morning, but in truth it is a pretty fresh one for me as well. This morning while doing my early morning trying to find excuses not to start blogging thing… I encountered this topic come across my feed. The interesting thing about it is that I am currently living on both sides of this statement. Firstly… I have lived most of warcraft life in a perpetual state of poverty. For years I dealt with tanking repair bills, and even then never really got used to using the whole making gold off the auction house thing. My preferred method of earning gold is laying waste to zones… but that has never really been that lucrative. By now any profits that I gained from the era of hot and cold running garrison gold is disappearing rapidly. On the other side of this coin I am part of the leadership of a fledgling raid, and our folks… myself included are running into the same lack of ability to really afford the normal trappings of raiding. For now we have been eating up the stock of Warlords era flasks… just to feel like we are doing something, but those are not that useful with the mudflation of this expansion. Right now in theory every raider needs cloak, ring and neck enchants, gems, flasks, and if we want to get really serious about things two potions per attempt. At this very moment the prices for these items on my server are kinda madness.

Good Ring Enchants – 10,000 g (each)
Good Neck Enchant – 25,000 g
Good Cloak Enchant – 2000 g
Primary Stat Gem – 25,000 g
Secondary Stat Gems – 2,000 g (each)
Flask – 2,000 g (each)
Potion – 1,000 g (each)

So to walk into a raid night as good as you can possibly be, carrying a single stack of potions you are well over the 100,000 gold mark. I have long since ceased to have that sort of money, and am presenting sitting around the 17,000 gold mark on my Main, with a few other characters that I could potentially steal gold from in the 20,000 range. In theory I should be selling enchants to make money, but getting the materials has been its own challenge. With everything functioning off of personal loot, the only way I get materials is if something is simply not an upgrade for me. Now my guild is pretty awesome because it has been tradition lately in runs that they trade over anything that cannot be used for me to disenchant. The challenge there however is that I have gotten enough materials so far to do one and a half neck enchant. The material cost for everything is just insane right now, and as a result… since we are not really a progression raid we have not pushed the point. I personally have gems and enchants on everything, and have been using last generation flasks just to feel like I am doing something. I am passing out as many ring enchants as I can since that represents the cheapest thing I can do, but even then… a single ring enchant is 10 dust, which represents me eating 3-4 green pieces of gear or shattering 3 blue crystals. My stock of materials is pretty much spent at this point, and I have only outfitted a handful of people in enchants.

We are in a similar boat with wishing the raid bank could be chipping in more. We just are not getting enough of anything to be able to pass it around freely so right now… folks are largely dipping into whatever profession they have on their alts. Traditionally when a new expansion launches I play through whatever characters interest me, leveling alts as a method of relaxation. This time around… I am absolutely leveling whichever alt has the profession I am finding myself really needing. I pushed up Exeter my Paladin because I felt like I needed a miner to feed engineering on my main… however I am wishing I had instead pushed up either my gemcrafter or my alchemist. Presently I have been working up the alchemist, but so far it feels like there are just so many other things that I need to be doing, especially considering we are under a world quest faction bonus event. More important than that… I through some strange string of luck have managed to get two legendaries already… so I absolutely need to have that 15,000 order resources ready and waiting in a few days for me to start researching that final trait that will allow me to equip both of them. Ultimately it feels like there is simply too much to do right now, to shift into the mode of trying to find ways to make money to be able to afford your raiding upkeep.

@belghast @Laeleiweyn This is why Blizzard introduced the Token system.

— Alternative Chat (@AlternativeChat) October 6, 2016

The real challenge is of course this is the sort of expansion that brings back folks from the mists of time. We have had so many people renew their accounts that have not touched the game since Cataclysm, or at least since Pandaria. The problem is these folks did not have a pile of gold built up from the era of free garrison money. I admittedly did not milk that as much as I should have because I was off playing other things. Alt proposed that if it is that important that we have the Token system, but that seems horrible. Not that she said it, because I don’t necessarily think she was being completely serious, but that it is something to consider. The problem with this theory however is that right now those tokens are only going to get a player about 35,000 gold which seems insanely low when confronted with the price of things. That would be able to afford you a neck enchant and a single ring enchant at the prices things are going for your $20. My personal theory is that all of the crafting materials are purposefully painful, as a way to soak up all of the excess gold that is floating around on the server from the garrisons mistake. Then at some point in the near future, be it 7.1 or a hotfix… across the board crafting materials are going to be reduced making literally everything easier to create. As a long time enchanter, I have seen this happen so many times over the expansions where enchants are mindboggling insane at the launch and then are later tempered considerably.

Where the real pain is happening is that those of us who did play Warlords are going through a bit of whiplash. Tradeskills in general have gone from a complete polar shift, going from being extremely casual and something that everyone can do… to being something extremely difficult to even get materials for. As an example… even after crafting goblin gliders for basically anyone in the guild who wanted them this expansion… I am sitting on a stockpile of over 2000 True Iron Ore on Belghast. Comparatively I have less than 300 Leystone Ore so far… and that is from both my miner actively mining anything I come across in the world, and my main running the salvage armor shoulder enchant. This post might be coming off as complaining at the current state of things, but in reality I am mostly okay with it. That said I have just had to come to realize that we are not going to have a raid of fully flasked players every single week. If I cannot bring myself to spend that kind of gold just for the privilege of raiding casually… I am certainly not going to expect anyone else to do it. Similarly I also remember a time before flasks in raids was an expected thing at casual levels. Hell our progression vanilla raid maybe had a flask on the tank, or on a handful of overachievers… but the other 34 of us seemed to get along just fine taking bosses down without consumables. I realize fights are scaled completely differently now… but my ultimate hope is that consumables become an edge that players can use if they choose to afford it, but less of a hard requirement. I realize this is going to mean we are progressing slowly, and I am largely okay with that… given that I am raiding this expansion to hang out with my friends more than anything.

Learning from Destiny: Loot Scaling

October 5, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I was a bad human being. It was a pretty rough day at work because of reasons that I can’t really go into. So when I got home I decided to boot up Destiny and check out the newest running of the Iron Banner event. Quite literally the next thing I know it, it was almost 11 pm and I had spent the entire evening playing the game. This would have been no big deal were it not for the fact that Tuesday nights are a night set aside generally for Final Fantasy XIV and raiding there. I will have to send out my apologies later, but this is a testament to just how fun this “looter shooter” still is. For those who are uninitiated… the Iron Banner is a PVP event, and one that I participate in freely and actually look forward to. The reason behind this is that there is exclusive loot each time it runs from an awesome set of Iron Wolves themed gear and weapons. During year two this was an amazing way to get increases in your overall light levels, and with year three the gear that is available is completely new and fresh. Generally speaking each month the event brings two pieces of armor and two weapons, and this time around we have arms, class items, shotgun and auto rifle. These items can be gained through rewards at the end of the match, or by ranking up with the Iron Banner faction and purchasing specific rolls of each off the new leader of the Iron Banner… Lady Efrideet. This time around the daily quests reward loot instead of just getting packages at rank 3 and rank 5, and I managed to complete two armor packages and two weapons packages. I also managed to get to almost rank 4 in faction in the first night, which tells me that they are trying really hard to make this event feel like less of a grind. As far as drops… I got one awful roll on the Auto Rifle, and four pairs of the gauntlets… most of which are going to be used as infusion fuel for my Hunter and Warlock whenever I get around to playing them.

Distant Cousins

For lack of a better term, Bungie and Blizzard are cousins because they exist as part of the same larger company of Activision Blizzard. In fact it is rumored that during the planning for Taken King, Bungie had a sit down with the developers from Diablo 3 to talk about the lessons learned in crafting the “Loot 2.0” patch. Now it took a lot of tweaking but I feel like Bungie finally landed on a version of that formula that works for them. There are similar references in World of Warcraft Legion that draw ties back to Destiny, the most obvious is the above NPC in Dalaran that is named after the weekly NPC that shows up bringing awesome things and trading them for strange coins. However it feels like there are still a lot of lessons that the World of Warcraft team could learn from the things that Destiny is doing right. The games are designed very differently, but Destiny seems to have accomplished the holy grail of modern MMOs… being able to create static content that players will be willing to repeat over and over. The majority of the strike and crucible playlists are all pretty well worn at this point, but the way rewards are handed out makes a huge difference in the willingness of players to keep pushing forward and attacking the content.

Predictable Upgrades

Warcraft Legion is an expansion full of variable loot tables that shift and change through the use of the Warforging and Titanforging systems. This was a definite good step forward, because it gives a slightly glimmer of hope that something interesting might come from the forty ninth time you are running Eye of Azshara to help a guildie through it. The problem however is that it still feels like that glimmer of hope is an extremely tiny one. Lets take the Looking For Raid system for example to throw some numbers at. The baseline for all loot in that “raid” is 835, and more than likely if you defeat the personal loot boss… the item you are going to walk away with is that low item level. The zone as a whole has a maximum possible light level of 870, meaning that there is an extremely slim chance of still getting something useful from there if you run it on your main. Right now in Belghast I am sitting at 854 item level, and that means that most of the content that I run in the game other than normal or high mode raids, is not going to produce me any upgrades. However in the back of my head I know that it is theoretically possible, and I am having a hard time reconciling what is likely to happen with what might possibly happen. I mean I did manage to get a SECOND legendary last night off of an emissary chest… so I have more luck than I should have at times.

In World of Warcraft we have “Item Levels” but Destiny has essentially the same concept called “Light Levels”. Getting higher light means you perform better, just like getting higher item levels in theory means you have the potential to perform better. How Bungie handled this problem of potential for drop versus actual level dropping is that they started creating items based on the players current stats. So if I get a weapon in the game to drop from a package or decoding from an engram… its light level is set based on my current converted light level. Right now I am sitting at 351 light in Destiny, and I have a handful of items that are over that level but that is my average. When I get a new item it means that item will be 351 light or better, generally within a range of 5 light, so up to 356 in this case. Legendary engrams and item drops currently seem to have a cap around 385 in game, so I will continue to be able to keep leap frogging my way through light levels by consistently receiving upgrades each time something new drops. World of Warcraft loot should work like this, meaning that each time I do a quest out in the world…. the item of the level rewarded should be based on what my current item level is. I’ve had friends who have received up to 870 items from World Quests, so it does not seem unreasonable that any loot I get from doing them… should be at a minimum whatever my current average item level is.

In order to really make this feel right, I think World of Warcraft would also have to move away from the current tiered system of item levels. Right now if we go back to the example of LFR, an item when it drops can be 835, 840, 845, 850, 855, 860, 865, or 870. Each time some combination of stats and “forged” suffix changes and tweaks up the stats and item level. It just feels like it would simply be cleaner for the purpose of giving players a constant but incremental flow of new gear… for each item to just have a variable level. So you could then get an item that was 844 or 858 depending upon what your current item level happened to be. The items we know are simply mathematical equations, with this or that stat scaling based on the item level. So in theory it should be just as easy to show you an item that was 862 as one that is 860, but the constant progression of slow bites of the apple as you keep improving your stats for me at least would feel better than running a bunch of content and seeing nothing but disenchant fodder as a result. This hit home especially hard as I have been trying to run mythic and heroics with friends to get them geared up… and so often when the personal loot boss finally submits… the end product is not an upgrade at all. As a result we have started trying to stack armor types, so that in theory at least SOMEONE in the party could benefit from the item. There are honestly a lot more lessons that I feel like Blizzard and the WoW team could learn from the way Destiny works, and I might elaborate on them in additional posts… but this loot post was a good starting place.

Over the Moon

October 4, 2016 by Belghast

The Great Escape

Over the last several months we have been trying desperately to make the extremely adorable Luna… a part of our family. Unfortunately things are not working amazingly well… because it feels like for every step forward we take a half dozen steps backwards. You ever seen one of those acts that juggles plates… well I have three plates precariously trying to hurdle themselves at the floor. If I can keep one cat happy… it seems like the others are in a total sense of disarray. In theory we probably should have said a month ago that this was not going to work out, and tried to take her back to the rescue shelter that we got her from. However she is such a remarkable cat… when none of the other cats are around. The positive is that it has been at least a week since a major fight, but we have been keeping Luna carefully sequestered from Kenzie and Allie. One of the ideas we had over the weekend was to install a baby gate. We of course knew that we would need a really tall one, so after a little searching we found one that was 36 inches tall and that once installed had a door in it that swung open to let us in and out of it. At first she hopped up on a little table and bounded over the gate… which required me to now move said gate out to the garage. After that however things seemed to be working pretty well.

The gate let the other cats stare in at her, and more importantly smell her in a setting that they were very familiar with… namely the bedroom where they already slept regularly. There was a little hissing back and forth but no charging. Luna is basically Belghast in Cat form… and whenever she is threatened she charges at danger much like my warrior character. Which is the huge problem we are having. Instead of a lot of hissing going on back and forth… and then cats going off to their corner to sulk for a bit like we have dealt with in previous interactions between foreign cats, we have charging. When I mean charging I mean running and jumping on the other cat and rolling around like mad around the house until momentum finally breaks them free charging. The positive there is that it has been awhile since this actually happened, but that is largely only because we are keeping them separated. Luna has been kept in my wife’s office which we set up to be a cat suite, with food, water and a litter box. The problem is… Luna really wants to roam freely because she likes the bedroom which is shared territory. So the theory was when I got home I would move her to the bedroom and let her chill under the bed. She is pretty good at meowing at me when she needs to go upstairs, at which time I carry her up on my shoulder and let her get food, water and more importantly use the bathroom.

This state of equilibrium seemed to be working. The other two cats were calming down, and starting to get back into their normal routines… although Kenzie has regressed a bit. All of this however was the case until last night when Luna apparently figured out how to dead jump over the gate. So the reality of this situation is that the gate does a great job of keeping the other two cats out of the bedroom, who are both fat and lazy… but that doesn’t really solve the problem at hand. The amount of stress that this whole situation has caused me is pretty intense, given that it feels like my home is in a constant state of chaos. I don’t handle chaos for extended periods of time very well. I am trying to do whatever I can to stabilize it, but it feels like when I get one plate spinning… two other plates try and topple. Much of our strategy has been that I hang with Kenzie and Allie and my wife hangs with Luna… which works great during the weekend when we are both off but does not work at all during the work week when our get home times are so drastically varied. Mostly at this point we feel extremely invested in the situation and it would break our hearts if we have to say goodbye, but I am rapidly running out of ideas. We have tried so many things, and so far none of them are really working. I keep hoping that time is the key and that things will calm down eventually when they realize that they have more in common than they have different. Personality wise the three of them should be getting along amazingly well. Luna is almost perfectly situated halfway between the personalities of Allie and Kenzie. If we can just get her past the initial attack instinct when she is afraid we might make progress.