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

Derpy Banana

December 7, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I moved a little bit out of my comfort zone and decided to do what I had hoped to do some time ago… and test Beam.pro. Firstly you have to understand that I have gone around and around with streaming services because none of them really seemed to fit me. Twitch is the ten ton juggernaut in the room, and in a way that generally makes all other services irrelevant. That said… I feel like it is a generally inferior experience for both the viewer and the streamer. The lag delay between video stream and chat is horrendous and it pretty much makes any attempt at having a conversation with someone watching you impossible. Hitbox seemed really cool other than some weird issues I had regularly with stream quality. It however had little to no lag between video stream and chat and made it super easy to have conversations over. They also seemed to have way better back end tools to support the day to day management of your stream and syndicating it to various social media platforms when you go live. Beam however entered the ring some time ago, or at least came into my general consciousness when my friend Maeka decided to switch over to streaming on it exclusively.

Destiny_20161207062529 — Braced Frame – Snapshot – Range Finder

So Beam represents a more twitch like experience in quality, but with far better chat delay and an interesting reward model for viewers and streamers. Watching streams earns folks sparks, that can then be spent on either unlocking features for your own channel… or spending those sparks on other streamers who often offer weird things like sound boards for you to play with. I admit the gamification aspect of the streaming interested me, and I find myself way more connected to the concept of letting a stream run while I am doing other things because I know that eventually it is going to benefit me. For example… something I have always wanted was the ability to create an AggroChat team, and that functionality apparently unlocks when I hit 5000 sparks… to which I am sitting at roughly 2000 currently after a few days of usage. Over the weekend I got my setup rearranged and organized so that things were going through the appropriate devices, thinking that sometime in the future I might maybe start streaming again. However a thread on the That Gaming Forum Imzy was the catalyst needed to go ahead and push me across the line to trying to stream something properly. When I got home last night I quickly assembled a fresh OBS install and pulled in the artwork I had from the previous attempts and before long I was up and running.

Destiny_20161207062455 — Perfect Balance – Snapshot – Headseeker

The end result is me playing some of the absolute worst Iron Banner ever, but you can check out the VOD here on Beam. I spent way more time turning my head to the left and checking chat than I did actually playing the game. This is compounded by the fact that before last night I had played a half dozen Rift matches period, and it is a vastly different style of gameplay than I am used to in the Crucible. Generally speaking I am used to the “rush to the choke point” style of game play that comes from Control or Supremacy, and in trying to play Rift that way… I died a lot. Later on in the night after I chilled the hell out and started taking things more slowly… I started doing better but unfortunately this was LONG after I ended my stream. I was still recording, however when I configured OBS I ended up accepting the default flv format… which Adobe Premiere seems not to know what to do with. So I am either going to have to find a plugin that lets me import them… or find something to convert that to a format so I can actually properly edit it. I did get one really solid match recorded, and I would like to edit that up and post it on my youtube channel at some point.

Perfect Balance - Extended Mag - Zen Moment — Perfect Balance – Extended Mag – Zen Moment

One of the big positives about Beam is that they are now owned by Microsoft which in theory means they are going to get more support. The negative there is that Microsoft has a long and storied history of abandoning products… zune anyone? However the killer feature seems to be that it integrates perfectly with the Xbox One… which also adds to a little platform bias. Most of the streams I have watched were streamed from an Xbone… so it confused my viewers when I said I was playing Destiny on the PS4. Ultimately I have a pretty cool setup that I am happy with in that in my office I have my desktop beside what is essentially a console gaming area. In a storage cabinet beneath my 48 inch television I have a PS4, PS3, Xbox 360 and now Xbox One all connected through an HDMI switch that then goes through a splitter before going into an Elgato HD that I picked up off craigslist for around $35 used. That then feeds into my PC and is served up by OBS using the Elgato streaming tools. So that means quite literally anything I can connect to my television through HDMI can then end up getting streamed out. At one point I had my WiiU connected here, but I took that downstairs so I could hang out in bed and play on the weird remote device. Also Nintendo has some pretty draconian practices surrounding streaming and youtube videos so I figured it was probably a good idea NOT to do that.

At one point I drew up this diagram quickly to show how my set up works. The key element there is the splitter and you can read more about that in a previous post I made back in June 2014 when I got the setup running. As far as Iron Banner itself… I have interspersed some of my best rolls from the night in amongst the paragraphs. In total I am sitting 3/4 of the way through Rank 3 and have picked up 3 fusion rifles, 1 scout rifle, 1 pulse rifle, 2 legs, and a helm… that I then bought the 100% roll from Lady Efrideet and infused that into it. I feel like I made a decent start to getting to Rank 5 and I finally grasped the unique rhythm of the game mode as I went through the night. I suddenly stopped being the lowest person on the team to vying for the top spot once again. I am not terribly great at crucible but I am generally not as bad as I am in the stream test. However that wasn’t really the purpose of the stream… it was to test out Beam.pro and I think so far I am saying it passes with flying colors. I accepted the absolute default settings and it performed admirably. Now is the time for me to actually set my channel up properly and try and sort out how precisely is the best way to use the service.

Favorite Addons

December 6, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I decided to sit down and write up a post I had been meaning to for awhile. Lately I have been having a significant number of friends returning to World of Warcraft, and among the first questions is always… what Addons do I need? This is as always a personal preference question, but I thought I would take a moment to talk about some of the addons I use and why. I will be snagging screenshots from curse for the purpose of representing the addon given that it is always a pain in the butt to find circumstances that show them off properly.

One real quick note… I use the Curse client to update my addons and generally I find it the best possible option. I highly suggest you check it out.

ArkInventory

This is probably the number one addon that I simply cannot function without. At face value it takes all of your bags and presents them in a single window pane, and does the same for pretty much any bag like structure like your bank. What sets this one apart from everything else that essentially does the same thing, is that you can configure virtual bags. This allows you to sort all of your trade goods, or filter your gear in a way so that the highest item level items appear at the bottom of the bag. I also use this as a way of finding what I have gotten that has dropped that is BoE because it appears in a different virtual bag. Configuration has gotten a bit more cumbersome since it first was released but it is well worth the time.

Download Here

Can I Mog It?

We all know the real end game is looking cool on your characters, and with the release of the Legion pre-expansion patch we got a brand new overhauled Transmog system. I rejoiced at the thought of being able to finally reclaim all of that bank and void storage space that I simply used to keep cosmetic gear around for the purpose of transmogging. However I was a little gunshy about simply just selling it… and the default Blizzard interface made it a little cumbersome to see if you did in fact have an item appearance. This is when “Can I Mog It?” comes to the rescue showing you at a glance on the item tooltip if you have already collected the appearance or if you should send the item to an alt of a specific class or armor type. For me this little peace of mind was super important before I actually started liquidating all of those hard fought appearance items.

Download Here

TransmogTokens

If you are anything like me… you are farming old world content to try and get new transmog options. Look I may or may not care more about this system than pretty much anything else in World of Warcraft. As a result you end up with a ton of the various tier tokens that you may or may not remember if you actually have the appearance for. This addon does two important things… firstly it shows you how many appearances you have yet to collect that are unlocked with the token. Secondly it shows you who you actually turn the token in to… which is often times even more important because I don’t always remember which tier turned in at which location because… there have been a lot of raids I have done in World of Warcraft.

Download Here

NomiCakes

Nomi is horrible. NomiCakes makes dealing with him significantly less horrible. What this addon does is simply tell you how many more recipes you can learn with a given consumable. That way you don’t waste resources on something you don’t actually care about. Granted at this point I have not learned everything that is available from any given food item… but at some point I hope to and NomiCakes is going to be there to remind me when that glorious day finally arrives.

Download Here

GTFO

This addon doesn’t really need a screenshot because… it isn’t really a screenshot sort of thing. If you raid… get GTFO simple as that. The addon does one thing and does it amazingly well.. and that is play a god awful klaxon noise that you want to stop at all costs… any time you are standing in something bad that deals environmental damage. It is super simple, requires zero configuration and will immediately improve your awareness of bad… because you really don’t want to ever hear that noise again. I especially love this as a tank because sometimes the boss is partially obscuring things that I shouldn’t be standing in… and this addon tells me that I need to move or make my healers hate me.

Download Here

Loot Toasts

I love this addon and I am not entirely certain if I can explain why. Largely I go on murderous rampages rather often, and I have definitely been the sort of person that ends up with a world BOE epic in their bag…. and didn’t even realize it. I also sometimes go on farming trips, where I need a specific amount of this or that material… and don’t want to keep having to check my bags to see if I can stop yet. In both cases Loot Toasts helps me to keep an eye on what I just looted. Essentially it allows you to have an area of the screen where things pop up briefly for items you have looted. If it is something that stacks, it shows you both how many you just looted and how many you happen to have in your bags with you. The tooltip is colored based on the rarity of the item so it is pretty easy to see out of the corner of your eye that you might have just gotten something interesting.

Download Here

World Quest Tracker

World Quests are amazing, and pretty much in my experience the best possible way to gear your alts without tons of effort. On the mobile app you are treated with this great view that summarizes what World Quests are available and what the rewards are… so if you are like me and mostly interested in the ones that drop gear, you can find them quickly. The only negative is that logging into the mobile client, logs you out of the game. What World Quest Tracker does is give you an in game interface to see the same sort of information, as well as adding in hooks for things like TomTom to give you waypoints to find where the quests start. You have all sorts of filtering options that allow you to show say only Order Resources quests, or only quests that will help you complete a certain Emissary quest. To make things even better… when you are on the flight map you can see all of the available World Quests so it makes picking the nearest flight path an ease. I could not seriously imagine existing in Legion without this addon… much in the same way as Master Plan seemed to be a requirement for functioning in Warlords.

Download Here

Saved Instances

One of the big challenges this expansion is the fact that Mythic Dungeons are essentially the new Heroic Dungeons, and that they come with a bizarre weekly lockout timer. I always struggle with remembering who is locked to which zones, and while I can simply hit /raidinfo to see this information… I found that I didn’t quite have the all in one interface that I really wanted. Saved Instances is a widget that is added to your map border that gives you a quick chart of who has a lockout to which content. I find this especially handy for farming old world content and raids, when I am trying for mounts or pets. It will also keep track of the reroll tokens and who has used them… and who has yet to redeem them for the week.

Download Here

Enemy Grid

One of my favorite things about tanking in Final Fantasy XIV was the way that they chose to display threat. It not only gave me an awareness of all of the targets in play, but gave me a quick at a glance view of which ones I had aggro on. In the past I used a custom them for Tidy Plates to do this same sort of thing, but in coming back to World of Warcraft I happened across Enemy Grid. It gives you a quick list of all of the available targets and if grays out the ones that you do not currently have aggro on. Simple and easy and something I have gotten used to having in my arsenal of information.

Download Here

The Boring Stuff

This is by now means a complete list of my addons, but more a list of the ones that I find particularly interesting. My base UI is cobbled together from a bunch of addons that I have used for as long as I can remember, and it creates an interface that I am comfortable and familiar with. I don’t generally go for the whole minimalist thing… and my UI is way more busy than most people would like… however it works for me and is what I am comfortable with. Here is a run down of some of the things that I didn’t talk about that I am simply too used to now to give up.

Weekend Hibernation

December 5, 2016 by Belghast

It was a truly bizarre weekend for a whole lot of reasons. Primarily because whatever illness my wife had seemed to strike with a vengeance during the tail end of last week. As I said before I was originally planning on going to RiffTrax with work friends on Thursday night but by the time I left work I realized there was no way I could make it through an entire evening. Instead I begged off and went home and crashed on the sofa in my fuzzy blanket cocoon. By the time Friday came around I was really doing considerably worse and took a sick day… which in turn screwed up our evening plans. We were originally slotted to do this monthly family dinner thing, but we rescheduled it for next weekend because I was not sure how well I would be to drive. Instead I returned to the blanket cocoon once more and was as a result available for our normal Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear run. I wound up tanking it, with the stipulation being that I was not going to talk at all. In fact to prevent myself from doing this I muted my microphone…. which lead to a weird run since I am fairly vocal as we make it through the content. To make it even more odd, we were without the OTHER vocal leader Kylana which meant a whole slew of people had to step up to the plate and help make sure the run went smoothly. So seriously huge thanks to Mort, Phy, Beist, Bledd, and I am sure a whole slew of other people who also were chatty and helpful but I am not remembering at this very moment. It was once again a super clean run, and in the end I wound up swapping off for Erry for the final encounter since it generally requires a bit more vocal tank coordination.

Past that night I spent a lot of time piddling around in stuff by myself. Namely this meant an awful lot of Final Fantasy XV, and I think maybe just maybe I am finally to the point where I am willing to move on past “world 1”. As I said before there is a point where the game warns you that if you continue on you might not be able to return for awhile. I took this warning to heart given that I just came from playing Final Fantasy XIV where this sometimes means that a two and a half hour long cut scene is about to happen. Instead over the weekend I found out from some of the other folks playing it that at least in this case… the game is talking about a ten minute process and not a thirty hour long one. In past games these warnings often times meant that you would not be able to return until you found the airship, and I am pleased to find out that this is not the case. At this point though I am running out of things I can actually do in the starter world, and all of the hunts are of a significant level difference from my current level so I think the game is not so subtly telling me to move the hell on.

Another thing that took up some time this weekend is that I tore down a chunk of my office and set up my new Xbox One. For awhile now I have been interested in owning an Xbox One to be able to play the titles that don’t exist on the PS4. Similarly there is an entire group of friends that I have that are on the Xbox path, and I have not been able to play with them. Unfortunately there were really no titles that supported Xbox 360 crossplay with Xbox One, so as each of them has upgraded… my options similarly narrowed. While I have had this latent desire… I also just could not justify the street price for the console given that I am primarily a PC gamer first… and a Console gamer second. However on Black Friday I actually partook of a deal on Dell.com for an Xbox One, Extra Controller, Headset, and Five Games: Halo 5 Limited Edition, Farcry 4, Ryze Legendary Edition, Sunset Overdrive, and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes all for right at $200. For this I was willing to jump on it and the box arrived at my house Saturday during the day… and I wound up setting it up after editing the podcast on Sunday morning. There was another deal on Cyber Monday to pick up a copy of the Destiny Collection for the Xbox One for I believe $25 and I jumped on that too, so while I was installing other things… I ported over my Xbox 360 copy of Destiny. Firstly since I am largely a digital only gamer on PS4… I did not realize the whole download after installation was as much of a tedious chore as it actually was. Halo 5 took a good three hours worth of download time, which I found insane and shocking. Is this what disc copy gamers on the PS4 have to deal with as well? or is this largely just an Xbox One thing? In any case… I was kinda happy to see that my PS4 clan tag ported over to the Xbox One, and while I will still primarily be playing Destiny on PS4, I want to level something to hang with my friends playing on the Xbone.

I’ve decided to start linking the podcast on Monday mornings in what generally ends up being a weekend rundown post. Not that I think there is anyone who doesn’t have access to it… but just in case the youtube version embeds nicely. The other big take away from the weekend was all of the food that we cooked. We wound up having a weekend full of comfort food, cooked in the crock pot. So Friday night before going to bed I threw our breakfast casserole on to cook so that when we woke up Saturday morning it was ready. This dish consists of egg, cheese, potato, ham and sausage and it amazing. We wound up eating on it for breakfast and lunch on Sunday as well… and still have a bunch left over. My wife had the bright idea to turn it into a breakfast burrito with a little salsa. We also cooked our Chicken and Cheese Tortilla soup, which we only got two meals out of… well and an extra helping or two. Finally on Sunday we tried out this Orange Chicken thing… that is close but not quite there. It was good enough but it needs something to make it work properly… and I think I screwed it up by putting the rice directly in the sauce and letting it cook. I should have simply made a couple cups of rice and then ladled the sauce over it instead. In any case… my wife and I are both largely on the mend but we pretty much spent the entire weekend hibernating. We started taking some OTC meds when it initially hit and I think it helped out quite a bit.

Awards Show and Timewalking

December 2, 2016 by Belghast

This morning I am having a minor case of the deads. I seem to have gotten whatever respiratory crud happens to be going around. Yesterday morning I was largely doing okay… but then as the day went on I felt worse and worse to the point of begging out of Rifftrax last night. Thankfully they were able to use my ticket for someone else, but it bums me out that I missed it. However from the sound of it the double feature… would have completely wrecked me. They apparently showed two complete movies rather than a short and a movie, and they didn’t actually leave the theater until 10:15 last night from a 7 pm show. Instead I stayed snuggled up on the couch and had some left over crockpot Tikka Masala for dinner. The bulk of the evening was spend winding my way through some horrible timewalking pugs. The piece of this that I realized is simply that folks do not seem to remember the Cataclysm content nearly as well as the other content… or at least Cata still requires you to do actual mechanics to keep from wiping. As a result I spend another large part of the night running back from wipes and trying to explain to people what went wrong. I should be tanking… but I wanted to shun all responsibility and just dps. The part I didn’t realize is that in my sub 810 form… I would also end up being the carry that did twice as much damage as the others in a lot of the groups. By the end of the night however I managed to pull my overall item level up to around 817, which now unlocked as of this morning some of the 830 world quest rewards. In theory that is going to be how I gear my Deathknight, but logging in… doing the Emissary chest and then knocking out any items that look useful.

The other activity last night was a vague attempt at watching The Game Awards. At some point this seems to have turned into a real awards show, when the first few years sorta felt like trying to make “fetch happen”. Somewhere along the line it actually became “a thing” and now has significant support from companies. It was largely something I was doing because I was bummed at missing RiffTrax and happened to see it scroll across my twitter. The part I was not expecting was the fact that apparently… folks are using this as another opportunity to announce and or show off upcoming games. There is a post in me somewhere about the never ending chain of promotional opportunities that game developers have right now. For years it was the CES and that was literally the only place we got information. Then E3 and Gamescom became significant players… and that was the moment when we found out literally everything that was to know about the upcoming games. Now we technically have five different PAX shows, and a plethora of other events like the Playstation Experience that is happening this weekend… and individual company based shows like FFXIV Fan Festival and Blizzcon. It seems like at any given point we are a week away from a potential cache of big announcements… and we as fans expect something important at each and every one of these. It is almost as though we are expecting executives at EA or Ubisoft to be prepparing their “Thanksgiving game”, or their “Presidents Day” game to announce at any moment. I don’t want to go on about this much longer… but I blame the constant deluge of things just on the horizon for constantly distracting us from the games we actually have installed and should be playing. Saying that… here are some things that distracted me from games I should be playing.

We finally got some really good footage of Andromeda that goes into more detail about how the actual game is going to function and play in its final version. Firstly I have to say I am super excited to see this because I like Mass Effect best when it is allowing me to play Star Trek Away Team. Of the previous games… my favorite is Mass Effect 2 because it was one the one that allowed me the most freedom to pop around the galaxy doing tiny interesting vignettes. The part I am hoping is that the moment to moment gameplay is going to be able to keep my attention. There was just something about the way that Inquisition performed that was a turn off… and then you take the fact that I am now forced to play a faction that I would rather be cheerfully slaughtering… and it was a recipe for a game that never quite clicked with me. Andromeda however feels like it is going to be something I can sink my teeth into… especially if it allows me to constantly be recruiting new and interesting people to join my core team. Also jump packs… are awesome.

Watching this trailer made me realize that no one has really done a good Monster Hunter style game for the PC platform. I am sure in the comments someone is going to point out one that I missed, but Monster Hunter fills this weird niche between traditional RPG and Diablo. Since this is being billed as an Action RPG I am hoping that maybe it falls along those lines. What I don’t want this to be is another asymmetric team versus monster game like Evolve. I have zero interest in that. Like if it is possible for interest to go into the negatives… then asymmetrical multiplayer falls into that category. It is being billed however as a Free to Play take on Monster Hunter by ex Riot and Bioware devs. On that billing alone… I am super interested.

If naked stranded on a beach crying Norman Reedus was not strange enough… we get another trailer for Death Stranding. Last I heard they had not actually even picked an engine yet, so I am finding it really hard to take anything I see on this game seriously at this point. That said I am really liking the direction of this trailer. I love the weird washed out post apocalyptic marsh thing going on… and I like the skele-zombie troopers thing and the Cthuloid tanks. This feels like it is going to be creepy in all the right ways and we need more Cthulhu in our lives… or at least ones that play on modern platforms after the frustration that was Dark Corners of the Earth recently. I am entranced and willing to throw money at the screen for this one, even if I don’t know specifically why I am. Guillermo del Toro makes the best monsters, and I was just commenting the other day about how badly I would love to see another Hellboy movie. Maybe this creations in this game can satiate the desire, because if nothing else it has me now following his twitter that is full of awesome monstrous stuff.