April 2017 - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Mechanics Defeated

April 12, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not ultimately end up like I thought it would, for many reasons. Firstly this weekend we had a death in the family… but man is it harder to explain than that. When you grow up in a small town, families that are connected to each other through a marriage end up mingling an awful lot. Because of kids birthday parties and school events, you are constantly encountering this whole other family that is not actually related to you. So when I say a death in the family, it was not actually my or my wife’s family, but instead the father of a brother in law in wife’s side. So when it happened we made a trip up to Friday night to attempt to offer support, and do our normal thing of bringing paper goods since during a death in the family a household goes through way more of everything. The funeral itself is today, and because of the weird familial restrictions of bereavement leave policy I don’t get a day off. Last night was the viewing, which is sort of like a wake but not actually a wake… and I did not think we were going to go. However when I got off from work my wife indicated that we probably should at least make a showing. I thought this largely meant that I would be gone from our normal Tuesday night FFXIV shenanigans. It was roughly an hour drive either direction, and then by the time we went to the event and ate dinner I fully expected to be about an hour late for fun time.

However we opted to pick up some food and eat it while travelling… I would explain what we got but it probably would not make sense to anyone who did not grow up in a tiny town. I also apparently drove like a bat out of hell, because I made it home and was only about fifteen minutes late… with folks still trying to pull the group together. With me it meant we had seven people available to do stuff… and in some quirk of bravado we decided to pug that 8th layer and keep working on “Mechanics: The Fight” or Thordan Ex. We got a Dragoon that said they had run the fight on a healer before… and we proceeded to start attempting to make progress. A few seconds into the fight and the Dragoon was already dead. During that first attempt I think they were rezzed four different times… and more than likely through the entire sequence of the attempts averaged around three deaths per outing. As if summoned by our tears… Kodra showed up and we rejoiced and disbanded our party finder group to bring him in. The hilarious part about this is that we all started talking about how much we had gotten used to having a good Dragoon. Then a few seconds into the first attempt… Kodra died in EXACTLY the same manner as our pug dragoon.

We rebounding from this and started making proper attempts. The night was mildly stressful because we once again had a slightly different line up than normal. Muspel was filling one of the slots, and his only level 60 and geared character is his warrior. That mean’t Ashgar was not tanking along side me and instead running DPS on his monk. This is not normally a big deal other than the fact that every attempt I have been in the offtank role, and last night was my first night actually tanking the main boss. It took some adjustment, namely during the dragons eye phase to know that I had to actually step through the boss to make sure I was clear of the effect. Similarly there was a dance of times I needed to stack up… and then hurriedly run the hell out before he cast a frontal cleave. I am pretty sure I killed someone at least once during one of these interchanges, or when having to run across the Arena to place to boss so that the dragon eye and boss were in the same orientation. However on what would have been our last attempt due to the timer, we brought all of these elements together and managed to get our very first Thordan Ex kill. Now to move on to the Warring Triad Extremes, but hopefully we can keep popping Thordan each week so we don’t actually forget the dance.

Doom Therapy

April 11, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was a bit of a frustrating day. For some reason lately there has been this common theme for me at work. That is getting pulled into projects that I have never touched before, and don’t even know the history of… as a sort of troubleshooter in chief. I apparently have this ability to break through the layers of urban legends and get at the heart of problems. Largely this all centers on my ability to ask “why are you doing it that way?”… regardless of who happens to be in the room. I am not mean spirited about it, but in truth what I am trying to do is separate out what is needed and adds value to the process and what is just extra steps that were put in for no apparent reason. I mean I have worked in environments where I did not have access to the appropriate permissions, and in those environments you sort of make things work however you can. A prime example is a process that I a digging into right now that involves going for seven hops between what is essentially an FTP drop directory and the actual directory the software loads data from. I’m trying to peel back the layers of tradition and determine does each of these steps actually do something other than just adding more steps where a file can possibly get corrupted. Also in this case the file crosses the operating system boundary at least four times which in itself is sort of problematic.

There are days when I have had my fill of madness and simply need to watch the world burn. Instead of ACTUALLY watching the world burn… I have a more healthy outlet in the form of video games. The genre of choice during these days is some form of a shooter, and last night on a whim I decided to boot up the modern incarnation of Doom. Now I have not spent nearly as much time in this game as it deserves, largely because it ran less than amazing on my previous system. I mean it was workable but for a game that demands such fast paced action… my old AMD FX-6300 process wasn’t really doing the job. Now that I have this spiffy x99 i7 system it runs extremely smooth in both normal and vulcan modes. In theory I should probably put this game on the SSD because it has quite possibly one of the slowest boot sequences that I have seen from any game. Whatever the case it absolutely filled my need especially when it comes to “glory kills”, which allows you to rip the heads/arms/various other body parts off of demons when they are low health. When you are deeply frustrated… it helps a little bit to inflict massive amounts of digital carnage.

After about an hour of “Doom Therapy” I was more than ready to strap back into the environmental suit and go exploring in Mass Effect Andromeda. Last night I arrived at “Not-Tatooine” the obligatory desert world in the Andromeda galaxy. I think there is some unwritten rule that if you have an ice wasteland planet… you must then have a desert wasteland planet to balance things out. The positive is that “Not-Tatooine” is way easier to traverse than “Not-Hoth” due to the lack of giant ice crevices that go on forever. There are however giant sinkholes that seem to go on forever, but these seem easier to see than the crevices were. One of the things that you have to know about me is… that essentially roads and paths in videos games don’t exist and I will try my damnedest to figure out how to wall hack my way into a place rather than trying to sort out which direction the game is intending me to approach. This absolutely wrecks a lot of scripting that intends on players to arrive from a specific vector… and sometimes causes some hilarious moments of me unintentionally “sneaking” up behind guards. As a result when you apply this instinct to Andromeda it means that I spend a not insignificant amount of time forcing my nomad to climb sheer rock faces by abusing boosts.

The sad moment of last night unfortunately was when I decided that I should probably abandon my N7 tier 5 gear for something tier 6… and as a result I wound up putting on a full set of initiative spearhead armor. It has some perfectly reasonable if generic stats… but the key problem is that it just doesn’t look as cool. I have yet to find a set of “new” gear that really looks cool… and have been relying on the Quarian themed armor that I got with the collectors edition and the various N7 armor sets that I have been able to scrounge up. Apparently the Initiative only got to take the ugly armors with them to Andromeda… because all of the cool armor was needed to fight the Collectors and or the Reapers. I have a massive influx of research points because quite honestly… none of the Helius cluster gear looks very cool. I’ve never touched any of the Kett weaponry largely because they are ugly as sin, and while the Angaran weapons look a little better…. they are nowhere near as cool as the good old standbys from the Milky Way. The look and feel of a weapon to me are as important as the function. In theory what I should do is hang out next to one of the forward supply points and keep swapping weapons until I have tried out everything in my inventory before returning to my practice of mass deconstructing everything. The inventory upgrades have given me some breathing room to be able to hold onto some extra items.

Nomad Valet Service

April 10, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a fun one, and not because I did anything special… but more for the absence of anything planned. Saturday we got up fairly early, and ran errands. I had been putting off going to the eye glasses place since getting my prescription, and I guess I was doing so for good reason. Bifocals are extremely expensive. I priced out a set of daily wear and a set of sunglasses and it was going to be almost $800. That is just straight up ludicrous for eyewear… but it is a carnival of errors that adds up in a final price. I have an insanely strong prescription which generally means I need some of those double super bonus lenses with all of the bells and whistles to keep the thickness down. Then when you combine that with the fact that this time around they were going to be adding bifocals and a prism… shit got crazy really fast. Instead I opted to wait… since my Optometrist said I was really on the borderline as to whether or not they would actually benefit me. So I opted to think about it… and wound up just ordering more single vision glasses for the moment from Zenni optical. I have a feeling that I am going to have enough trouble getting adjusted to the prism… that I am not sure if I want to further complicate things with bifocal lenses this time. However I guess when it comes time to renew I will be going for the vision insurance since that at least will hopefully dent that blow.

As far as the rest of the weekend… we cleaned the house like mad when we got home from errands and this largely freed me up to be able to just chill the hell out upstairs with a cat on either side playing some Andromeda. I have to say I love that I ultimately have two cats on my desk most of the time… I have blankets on either side of the keyboard and it isn’t super long before I have attract both Allie our eldest cat, and Kenzie our middle cat. Hell right now as I am writing this post at 6 in the morning… I already have Allie crashed out on the blanket to the right of my keyboard. She will probably sit there in that state for a bit longer until she decides it is time for food and starts prancing back and forth in front of my keyboard. As far as gaming went… I am so deep into Andromeda at this point. All told I am nearly 70 hours into the game and I have been stalling moving the main story forward until I can complete all of the side stuff. As I learn more about the universe… I am starting to feel like maybe this is a better game than the original trilogy. I know that is going to be a controversial statement. I will however add the qualifier of “for me” to the statement, because personally the original trilogy hit a high point with the second game and Andromeda is really structured in a similar fashion. It involves going off on small missions with your team to effect the world in subtle ways. The game play itself feels like this amalgam of Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, namely the way that KOTOR used to let you roam around planets in what felt like at the time a free manner.

This free roaming nature is for good and bad… like the fact that I never seem to park my Nomad in a reasonable way as I hurriedly hit the E button as I roll up on the next combat vignette. In this case I literally had to jump and try and hit E to re-enter in order to get back in after finishing the remnant site. Side note the N7 armor is still probably the coolest design in Mass Effect, and the Andromeda logo especially will never be quite as cool as it. At this point I am I believe level 43, and I think in truth the game probably expected me to be done with it ages ago. There is a lot of sadness about to happen however, because with the deluxe edition I got a set of really awesome Pathfinder weapons. I’ve become very close with my Pathfinder Auto Rifle, and every time I leveled into a new bracket the next pattern was magically available for development. This has been the biggest resource sink for me as I made one of these each time it was possible. However it seems like you stop getting patterns at Tier 5… and I am not really looking forward to the prospect of trying to find a new auto rifle crush. I am hoping that one of these patches fixes this and lets me keep making my little Pathfinder auto rifle friends. For the moment I am going to be getting my hands on other types of rifles and trying out which seems to fit best for that archetype. In a way it reminded me of the way that Red Death feels in Destiny… and while this game calls it an auto rifle… by Destiny terms it would be a pulse rifle. Whatever the case I am slowing wrapping up some of the loyalty missions because before I start moving the priority ops again I want to make sure I have access to all of the toys.

The weirdest part about this play through is that I am playing in a fashion that I never really thought I would. For the most part I have maxed out a number of the weapon abilities and all of the passive benefit traits. From there I am largely playing a “pet class” for lack of a better term. I am using the turret which I find insanely handy, and my common MO is to open the door to a base… chunk a turret in and then back out to safety as I let it soften the defenses before ducking back in and mopping up. In addition to the turret I am regularly using the hacked observer that PeeBee gives you access to, and letting it loose to run amok. These two things often times distract the enemy and I can pick them off with headshots from either the auto rifle if medium range, or sniper rifle if extreme ranges. For up close and personal action… I have shockwave with the knock back that can clear out a bunch of things rushing at me. In truth it is more of a jack of all trades build than any deep synergy between abilities… but it is also tailored to some of the things that I like from other games. In the Borderlands series I have almost exclusively played whatever character could use auto rifles and turrets. While I like getting up close and personal in most games… in shooters I tend to relish hanging out in that medium range with the ability to duck behind cover. Lately however I have gotten into using my Asari sword to slice and dice Kett in close quarters… so maybe that medium range thing is shifting. Whatever the case… I spent so much time with Andromeda this weekend and the game just keeps getting better as I get further into it. While the game might have started out awkwardly… it really feels like it is going to finish in style.

Boosts and Buffs

April 7, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve officially reached the point in the Diablo 3 season where I can straight up wreck at least early torment content, which means… I can boost my friends. Last night I snagged Byx, Ammo and Sol and drug them through a few Nephilim rifts until they came out level 70s on the other side. In truth I am rather horrible at boosting people… I tend to overclear because my tank instincts kick in and I desperately want to protect my fledgling charges. So that means that the individual Rifts probably take way longer than they should. However it also means if you are being boosted by me… you are not only walking away with levels but also with a sizable amount of cash and gems. Sadly the loot is functionally meaningless until you hit 70. However since Byx was way ahead of the rest of the crew I am pretty certain she walked with some decent loot as well. The funny thing with writing about how much I was not feeling this season… is that it actually made me really want to play. The moment I posted the blog post I logged in and did a solo greater rift before heading into work that day, and each night since I have at least spent a little bit of time playing. After the boostery, I connected with Grace and we did a couple of rounds of bounties since we were both in desperate need of the crafting materials. I technically have everything that I need gear wise apart from one legendary gem, and a single ring…. but everything could be improved by getting some ancients which have been in short supply thus far.

After playing some Diablo 3 on the laptop, I decided to go upstairs and check out the latest patch for Mass Effect Andromeda. All in all there have been a lot of subtle improvements to the way that the character models look. In truth I think there are a bunch of improvements to the game in general because the worlds just feel better looking. This might of course be the placebo effect, and because they said they patched…. it is making my brain desperately want to see the improvements. However at the very least my Ryder and all of the characters I am interacting with seem more normal looking. The Botox face is largely gone… and the fully open surprise eyes seems to be gone as well. I am pretty pleased with the results because this little bit of window dressing has fixed a lot of my gripes about the game. On the other side of the equation on non-cosmetic changes… the general inventory increases are also amazing. I feel like I am no longer needing to deconstruct items in the middle of a planet rather than waiting for me to be back on my ship. Similarly the ability to tab out of the flight animations while in a solar system makes that just work better, and I am wondering if there is some option I can check in the settings to default to disabled so I don’t need to hit tab.

I put a few hours in last night and in truth probably played about thirty minutes longer than I should have… for my sanity… and my sleep patterns. I really like this game and It definitely is up in the game of the year territory for me. The problem there is… so is Zelda Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn… and all of those were released in the first quarter of the year. I guess in a way I am extremely thankful for all of these games, because with the way the real world is turning out… this seems to be the golden age of escapism. It is comforting to be able to lose yourself in a deep and rich game, and completely forget that the world is apparently on fire and someone replaced the fire extinguisher with a can of easy cheese. There are just so damned many quests that I have picked up and that are littering my inventory that I need to spend one entire night trying to burn those down before I move forward. I will probably always be grossly over-leveled for the content as a result… but whatever I have my trust Rank V Pioneer Gun. I just gotta say that once I stumbled onto the weapons provided by the DLC… or more so I stumbled onto how to GET the DLC items… I fell in love with the Auto Rifle. Yes I keep giving mine bizarre names because I’ve had to craft each after the first one…. but whatever it is a freaking awesome gun. More importantly… Ashgar can be happy that I have finally moved on past the Avenger.