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

Warlock Banana

December 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night did not go exactly as expected, but I am pretty pleased with the results anyways. Last night was a good night, and it started from the moment I got home and got a bunch of things accomplished while waiting on the rice cooker. After a furious round of chores, my wife and I sat down to eat and then I was off to play some PS4. With my leg in its current mauled state it hurts to sit on the couch given that in order to use my laptop I need to use the recliner. This ends up putting pressure on the four wounds and while I can take it for a few minutes… it doesn’t exactly make for comfortable gaming. As a result I am largely upstairs right now, and other than being isolated from my wife it does give me access to my gaming consoles and my legit gaming desktop. The original goal for last night was going to involve running around and doing stuff with some friends in Destiny, but while waiting for that to happen I decided to start doing Iron Banner on my Warlock. I had not actually touched the Banner on either the Warlock or the Hunter during Year 3, and as a result I had the Lady Efrideet quests to complete which also reward some gear. I managed to exit the week long even with my Titan main at 393, Warlock caught up to 391 and my Hunter lagging a bit out of disuse at 389.

I’ve tried a whole slew of weapons and honestly nothing makes me nearly as happy as my Year 2 Iron Banner Auto Rifle… the Haakon’s Hatchet. So for the most part playing on my Warlock meant swapping this over via Destiny Item Manager. For those who are not using this I highly suggest installing the chrome plugin, because it greatly improves the utility of being able to swap gear while playing the game. Essentially I swapped my Auto Rifle and my Gjallarhorn over and was off to the races. There is a part of me that is sad that this Auto Rifle just simply doesn’t exist any more. I wish there was something you could do, like a weekly bounty for Lord Saladin that rewarded the year two weapons… just a random draw at the huge vat of available options. Range Finder is one of those perks on a weapon that I feel like gets overlooked a lot, but given the normal crap range on this weapon… with that perk it allows me to melt targets an entire map away it seems. Counter Balance and Perfect Balance on the same weapon always makes it feel great and I think a huge part of why I keep favoring this weapon… is that I have used it so much that I can predict exactly how it is going to behave in pretty much every situation.

Throughout the course of the evening I managed to go from Rank 0 to Rank 5 and complete all four of the bounties on my Warlock along with the three one time Lady Efrideet quests. That meant I saw an awful lot of gear as a result. Most of it was largely “more of the same” but I am picking out a few items to talk about. Firstly I am not a huge fan of Sidearms, but I am trying to learn how to use them. They play this interesting role of operating somewhere just outside of shotgun range but largely something you swap to when you empty your primary. Normally speaking I would just infuse this into a weapon I am more familiar with but for the moment I am holding onto it largely because I think the perk package looks interesting. With Hand Loaded and Range Finder… this means my side arm is going to have a massive operating range, and with Quickdraw I will be able to swap to it extremely quickly. Combine this with the already insane Stability and Rate of Fire on the weapon… and it might be useful if I can learn to use it well.

One of the strange things about Iron Banner is that your drops seem to be extremely character dependent. For example this time around the drops that were available were Class Items, Helms, Artifacts, Ghost Shells, Scout Rifles, and Fusion Rifles. On my Titan I got Fusion Rifles almost exclusively, save for a single Distant Star Scout Rifle drop. On my Warlock… the Scout Rifles were raining down upon me. I still think that more than likely I am going to be using the vendor roll which includes Full Auto… giving me a crazy high power auto rifle hybrid thing. However I did manage to get a few other interesting rolls, including the one above that I thought were worth talking about. Firstly to spec this out I would end up taking Braced Frame… which I really don’t like doing because it reduces the magazine size. For the second pick I would ultimately take High Caliber Rounds to give some stagger and a bit more impact, and lastly would probably go for Firefly… just because right now I don’t have a decent scout rifle with that on it. For the un-initiated Firefly makes it so that when you kill a with a headshot… it causes it to explode dealing damage to all other mobs around it. Firefly does a really great job at helping with wave clear and it is just fun to watch all of these things explode. All in all it was a pretty great week in the Banana, and I am hoping the next time it comes around I can maybe push my army of characters up to 400ish.

Literal Ankle Biter

December 12, 2016 by Belghast

This was a bit of an odd weekend. Lets get the bad out of the way. For several months we have been trying to figure out how to get Luna to a point where she does not attack the other two cats on sight. We’ve kept her sequestered in my wife’s office and each night I grab her and we hang out in my office while I play games. She almost always ends up snuggled on my desk, and in truth is just about the sweetest cat ever… when not around our other two. This is an important distinction before I tell you this next bit… because she is adorable and cuddly… when she is by herself. In my infinite lack of wisdom I decided that I wanted to make one last attempt to socialize them since she had seemingly bonded with me so tightly after our many many weeks of chilling in my office. We locked our eldest cat up in the bedroom and brought Luna out, at first carrying her and holding her on the sofa. Before long thought she wanted to explore… and for the most part our youngest and her were not interacting at all. However there came a point where we were moments away from a cat fight, and I tried to gather Luna up and carry her off to my office. She struggled to try and get away but I got her up to the office without much issue. I turned to shut the door and I felt this searing pain on my leg around my lower calf. She had bit me… and now I was left with the decision of how the hell to get out of my office without letting her out so she could go after Kenzie.

I snuck out and by the time I got downstairs I was bleeding pretty badly. There are five marks… so I am guessing one is maybe a claw mark or she drug off of me and raked me with her fang again. Two of them are about a half inch in length and pretty deep… and two others are deep puncture wounds where she chomped down hard on my leg. It hurts quite a bit to walk and just generally exist in the world right now, but I don’t think there is any real damage. After going through the crap with my wife when she got bitten we are being extra cautious, and using the super duper antibiotic creme that they gave us back then. Walking is not comfortable and today is going to be interesting. I had to venture out to get more extra large band-aids, because in theory you can hit all of the spots with two of the largest size. After getting bandaged up I went back upstairs where she seemed as freaked as I was by the event. She sat on the floor in the back of my office up against the accordion closet door for a long while looking freaked. Eventually I peeked down underneath the desk towards where she was at and said “it’s okay, I’m not mad” and almost instantly her demeanor changed and she bounded over and hopped up on the desk laying down beside me. The thing that is breaking my heart is that I now know that this is probably never going to get any better, and we really do need to find her a new home. Unfortunately the friend that we thought was going to take her… had her landlord say no. It was in their contract that they could have pets if landlord approved… but I am guessing the asshole is biased against cats, because he assumed they were talking a dog.

Other than the cat thing…. and hurting… I streamed a lot of Iron Banner. I think it was Friday night at some point that I managed to hit Rank 5 with the Banana, and from that point on it was just gravy as far as loot went. I guess in theory I should have been swapping to the Warlock or Hunter to get them to Rank 5 but instead I simply made a poor attempt at farming some more gear to increase my light levels. This last 10 points is going to be slow as hell, but I entered the weekend at 390 and exit at 392 which I guess is reasonable. According to beam I have now streamed seven hours of game play, which I guess isn’t a bad start for my first week. Now a good chunk of that on Sunday at least was to an empty audience, but I entertained myself and have a bunch of footage to sift through. There was one Iron Banner match where for whatever reason I started humming the Super Mario Brothers theme song inserting “Nope” instead of some of the notes. All in all I think I like Rift for an Iron Banner match type, but like I said before I struggled a bit at first because the game play feels so vastly different from anything I had been used to. The best item I got all weekend is still the above Branded Lord with Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery and Range Finder… which I now have fully leveled and am almost using exclusively.

Lastly I played some “Let It Die” as evidenced by the first screenshot in the post today, and streamed it as well… except for whatever reason my audio was being overpowered completely by the game audio. I will have to fiddle with that and adjust it some. This game is just strange as hell, and I guess in many ways it feels a little Dark Soulsian, in that the mobs that you encounter are somewhat brutally powerful at times. There will be times that you get stunlocked to the point where you simply cannot do anything to deal with the encounters other than die. The strangest part so far is the types of weapons you encounter… hot irons, router drills, hammers… firework launchers. As you ascend the Tower of Barbs you encounter all sorts of monsters that should be in a silent hill game with bizarre implements that are trying to kill you, all the while you are using a zombie corpse thing as your avatar. You start out buck naked each time and have to scrounge up armor and weapons to be able to survive for terribly long in the tower. This is of course a “free to play” game and where the money aspect comes in is that in order to resurrect yourself using “death insurance” you need to spend a rainbow skull currency, that the game gives you a handful of to start out. However in the brief period of time I played yesterday I wound up using two of them before realizing… that in truth I had not really made any actual progress and should stop doing that. I’ve not quite figured out what the point is yet… as far as how you actually improve your character. I thought after I cleared a level I would be taken back to the lobby… but apparently I have to do that manually so I essentially lost all progress on that character and had to grab a fresh corpse to start the climb all over again. It has some deep rogue like elements, all the while mixing in bizarre Neo Tokyo and Silent Hill tropes…. with a dash of Dark Soulsian difficulty. Given that several of those checkboxes are things that Kodra likes, I think he maybe should try this game out. What I am wanting to know is if you can play it multiplayer, because this would probably be super enjoyable with friends.

Four Years of Thought

December 9, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of an odd video this morning, and largely one without any screenshots. There has been a side project that I have been working on for some reason. Like I am not purposefully being vague, but more that I am not entirely certain why I started down this path or what exactly has kept me going. In theory it is going to lead to some sort of a year end post, but I am still working out the details there. The important part is that this side project has caused me to go back through every post between 2013 and 2016… aka the period where my blog has actually been prolific. For reference… there are a little shy of 1500 posts on this blog, and all but about a hundred of those have occurred during the window above. It is really when I started doing the daily posting thing, that my blog became of any actual relevance… and even then I have backed off that significantly with only doing week day posts. The strange thing about this process is that you can learn an awful lot about yourself when you sift through roughly four years worth of posts… or in truth 45 months. It was bizarre seeing how I have changed and how my thoughts have evolved during that period. I’ve always prided myself in being someone in a constant state of flux… picking up new ideas, evaluating them and then either keeping my old one… or jettisoning it in favor of the new information. This is extremely evident when you look at that first year versus what I am currently writing.

The weirdest take away that I was not expecting… is that I am simply not interacting with other bloggers as much as I used to be. At face value that seems odd because I am actually talking to other bloggers on a daily basis be it through social media, a private chat network like slack/discord or now the brand new Imzy forum. What I mean instead is that there is not quite the blog to blog exchange of ideas that there once was. While going through my posts I noticed that so often there was another blog post that would ultimately spawn me to talk about the same issue, or a tweet that kicked off an idea. That just isn’t happening nearly as much as it once did, and I think that is a multi fold issue. Firstly I am much more sluggish in reading blog posts than I used to be, thanks to trying to write a blog post column… and as a result ballooning my RSS feed to include over six hundred gaming blogs. However the other thing going on is that it feels like as a broad community we are simply not creating the same gaming think pieces that we once did. We are no longer dragging out mechanics and tropes and investigating what works or does not work about them. That is not to say that some people are not doing this… but it feels like less of the community is and as a result the constant flow of ideas is not really there.

The other thing that I noticed is how much of a chilling effect Gamer Gate had on our community as a whole. There are a whole lot of folks who simply left the game blogging community during that time and have never really returned. Some of my most constant collaborators from the past… simply don’t blog about games anymore. Even more however seemed to greatly reduce their regular posting around that time. It is as though we all got afraid to talk to one another, at least in a public venue like our blogs. Now that same discourse is happening, but it is playing out through walled gardens like slack and discord, and not out there in the open for anyone to spawn an additional topic off of. I know that personally I am significantly more guarded for fear of a wave of horribleness washing over my blog and sweeping me out to sea. The fear of this wave however has eroded more of the community than the wave probably could have itself. The new normal after these events seems to be that we largely have kept our thoughts to ourselves, or shifted our attention to other communities to talk about. Movies and Media for example seems to be a popular offshoot from our community for example.

I am not really presenting any remedy here, but just mourning the way the community felt… and how it influenced my blog. I’ve always been a bit of an island here on the Aggronaut, but in the past I would take in ideas from outside myself… sift through them and present them in my own way, and I just find myself not doing that nearly as much as I once did. I think there is a general feeling that something is missing however, because of the rapid effect that a random twitter storm ended up spawning the Imzy forum. I think there is a general sense that something changed, without a real understanding of how to get back to normal afterwards. I might just be talking out of my ass here, but I have definitely felt it and for the last year and some change I have largely felt “off balance”. It is only recently that the clouds have felt like they have tangibly parted for me… and that I can once again see any glimmer of the sun. The past year and a half has been a time when we are constantly barraged with a shit storm of forces well beyond our control, and I honestly felt battered by it to the point of not being able to think much past the current week. Things are not better, in fact things seem to be getting worse… but in many ways it feels like I maybe have my “sea legs” and have figured out how to return to some sense of stability. I am attempting to stream again… and I am contemplating trying to reboot “Bel Folks Stuff”.

Literally everything in this post might just be a “from my perspective” sort of thing. Maybe it is just me who has been in an odd place, and have detached from the community. My entire life I have alternated between periods of engagement and periods of retraction when things got too chaotic. I tend to think of these as “turtling” when I pull my head back up inside of my shell. The past year has felt like one long turtle period, where I was constantly in hiding from whatever perceived thing was chasing me. All of that said… it still feels like our community has also retracted during that same period. Folks are largely doing their own thing now and I think in a large part it has been our way of forward momentum. I guess I am ready to poke my head back out and return to what used to be “normal”. I am wondering if others are feeling the same thing. I am not happy with myself, and have not been for a very long time… but that too can change. I realize this is a bit of an odd morning post, but it largely has some things that I have been mulling over and wanted to throw out there. Reading four years of your own writing can make you extremely introspective… and in truth I wouldn’t suggest doing it. That said I still think the project I am currently working on is going to be interesting at least.

Helya Defeated

December 8, 2016 by Belghast

In the past I have talked about our youngest cat Kenzie and her proclivity for playing fetch with rubber bands. Well the game has changed… and it has shifted from being one of those “once in awhile” things to an all the time thing. We will often times wake up with a rubber band beside us in bed and her expectantly prancing back and forth next to it waiting for us to throw it. This morning for example as I got up, showered, and got dressed I threw the rubber band a couple dozen times. Sometimes she would shift things up and bring the rubber band back to my wife instead of me… but nonetheless it was certainly clear that it was fetch time. I am wondering however if I can also change the game… and teach her how to fetch things like balls. The first cat that would play fetch that I had ever seen was Dee Dee the now fat and sassy cat that a neighbor of ours has. She however tended to favor these foam balls that you could get from PetSmart. We tried this with several of our cats but it never really took… however now that the fetching behavior has firmly planted itself in Kenzie I am wondering if we can also teach her to fetch balls.

We had a pretty great raid night as far as raid nights go. Some time ago we shifted into having a progression night which is Wednesday and a farm night which is Friday. On the farm night we attempt to clear Emerald Nightmare normal as fast as we can, and on the progression night we have been working on Trial of Valor with the initial hopes of being able to clear it in time for the launch of Nighthold. However with the 7.1.5 patch being pushed back… it seems like we have all the time in the world for that goal. Last week we managed to get our first Guarm kill and we were able to repeat that feat this week… however it took a few tries. The part I am proudest of however is the fact that we managed to defeat Odyn this week as a one shot, which given how many moving parts there are on that fight…. I am pleased and amazed and even phase three felt pretty solid. I think folks finally started dropping things where they should be dropped which allowed the tanks a lot more flexibility of placing Odyn where he needs to be during that final burn. As far as Helya goes… it still feels like a mess but the attempt where we managed to push her into phase 3 with most of the raid up… we also managed to kill her. I was recording last night while we raided so was able to pull screenshots of the exact moment she went down and in truth… the raid as a whole was still in a pretty decent position.

Since we still had a lot of night left to go we went over into the Emerald Nightmare and started working on heroic bosses. Previously we had made a few attempts on Nythendra and more or less had the correct positioning and such down. We lost a handful of people between the zone switch because they needed to go for early work and such, and we adjusted a little bit. The shocking thing is… in theory we made a one shot as we were sorta in a slow wiping state when the boss finally went down. As you can see in the screen shot my entire team was dead, and I had just literally blown up from the rot debuff when the boss went down. It was messy… but I will take it because she dropped the best possible loot. She dropped me an exact upgrade, stat for stat… simply the heroic version of the Insect-Etched Chestplate that I was already wearing. From the previous encounters of the night I got a few pieces of loot… that I am unfortunately going to have to do some simulation to determine if they are truly upgrades or not.

There was a bit of back and forth to determine what exactly was our next encounter to attempt. Some folks were leaning towards Ursoc, but even on normal that is a healing battle to try and keep the tanks alive. Emerald Dragons however seemed to be a little more attempt-able for the next step… and did not actually introduce any new mechanics. So we set forth to take down the dragons that used to give us nature resist gear back in the day. All in all it went pretty smoothly with the first pull almost netting us a kill. We reached a point where normally we thought we could simply burn them down without doing a tank swap… and because we didn’t swap it stunned the entire raid. Still kicking myself a little bit about that judgement call, because while I asked the raid… it was ultimately myself and Art that decided not to swap. We did however come back and get the kill almost immediately after. There was a vote to see if we wanted to keep moving… but we were already sitting at our normal raid end time and considering that I didn’t get much sleep last night I voted against it. I like the way our raid does this thing… in that if we want to extend and make attempts on a boss after our normal raid end… we simply throw up a readycheck and if anyone… or at least a significant unrecoverable portion says no we stop. I have to say this whole recording thing is handy as hell because it was super easy for me to pull screenshots of the moment of death this morning.