Month: December 2017

Conflicted Feels

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This weekend we ended up recording a full on spoilers Last Jedi show because it seemed to be a reasonable thing to do.  Functionally all of the AggroChat crew had already seen the movie and were ready to start talking about it.  In this discussion however I seemed to be the odd man out in the way I feel about the movie.  In truth I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it on Thursday night when I saw it, and as I saw it Saturday with my wife I started to get more critical of it.  When we walked out of the theater my wife was similarly not sure how she felt about the movie, and then as we were walking to the car said she was a little disappointed.  The problem is that seed grows over time and there are certain things in the movie that really bother me.  It has a film with a lot of really awesome moments, knitted together by a bunch of other stuff that I am not really sure how to think about it.  Essentially I am at a place where I feel like this is the weakest of the modern Star Wars movies and I place it firmly behind Empire Strikes Back, Force Awakens, Rogue One and A New Hope.  There are individual moments however that could easily elevate the movie above all of those…  were the rest of the film that strong as well.  I remember thinking Thursday night…  that the movie seemed really long but I mostly chocked that up to being after midnight when we got out of the theater.  When we watched it as a matinee on Saturday morning however…  it felt somehow longer.  My biggest frustration is that the movie really answers none of the questions I had in a satisfying manner, but I won’t go further than that.  If you want to hear the whole spoilery conversation check out the podcast episode because I elaborate on a lot of things there…  and end up being the single person who seems to feel this way out of the crew.  I want so bad to love this movie…  but I am just struggling with it much the same way as I did the prequels.  I was born and bred with Star Wars in my veins…  seeing the first movie as a toddler in the theater…  but I am struggling hard to maintain that hype and love.

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While sitting around questioning how I felt about the direction of the Star Wars franchise…  I spent a significant amount of time playing World of Warcraft.  The irony here is that Warcraft is another franchise I often have deep problems with but keep returning because there is a nostalgic core there that I still love.  Belghast the Female Orc Warrior on Scryers dinged 110 last weekend and since then I have been focusing on gearing up.  This largely has meant a lot of running world quests and more specifically unlocking a good deal of the content on Argus.  In the last week and some change I have managed to raise my item level to 896 which means that I can run the LFR version of Antorus.  In addition to this I have mostly just been focusing on slowly raising my level by knocking out the world quests that give me things that are useful.  Additionally I am trying to burn through all of the Argus quests that I come across in the hopes of gathering enough of <insert newest currency name here> to be able to purchase 910 items.  Luckily the world quest drops seem to be scaling quite a bit as I ratchet my level up there and as a result I am creeping closer and closer to 900.  The biggest challenge right now is the fact that I have yet to see any Legendary items in spite of doing a bunch of stuff that could in theory get me one.  Either they have greatly nerfed the drop rate…  or I am just super unlucky.  In truth what I need to focus on is finishing my Order Hall campaign, because the fact that I have not done so is starting to hold me back in a bunch of ways.  I think tonight pending I feel like doing group content… I will sit down and force my way through it because I know there are still a bunch of missions that I need to run.  Essentially I need to finish Valsharah and do some dungeons before I can get to the next set of order hall quests.

 

In Porg We Trust

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This morning I do not have a whole lot to say because yesterday I got home at midnight.  I had a work dinner thing and then afterwards several of us went to see Star Wars The Last Jedi.  It is still way in the “too soon” territory for really talking about this movie at length.  I was weirdly not super hyped about this movie before its release.  Like I always knew it was on the horizon and that I would eventually go to see it over the Christmas break, but I wasn’t clamoring to see it the way I had been the previous movies.  More than anything I think I just lucked into seeing it on opening night…  which is confusing because technically tonight is the opening night but Thursday is now the universal pre-opening night?  I am more into world building than I am into individual stories, and unfortunately after the movie I feel just as clueless about a lot of things as I did going into it.  That said it was a fun experience and I look forward to watching it again.  In theory I will be taking my wife to a matinee tomorrow morning, since she could not attend last night.  We also did not have the most ideal seats given that we were on the front row staring up at the movie, so there is some aspect of scaling and grandeur that I likely lost.  The big takeaway from the movie is that the porgs are in fact every bit as adorable as they seem in the pre-launch hype.  I feel like there isn’t enough love for the crystalline fox things, because they were pretty great as well.  As far as characters go…  all of our favorites from Force Awakens improved over the course of the movie…  and I am completely in love with Rose.  I thought for certain we were going in for a Empire Strikes back sort of movie…  but in truth it ended in a very different manner making me extremely interested in where we are going for episode nine.  All in all I had a great time and will likely see it multiple times while it is still in the theaters.

Clipped Wings

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Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing some Destiny 2…  but instead I logged into World of Warcraft to “check what gear was up on world quests” and never really logged back out.  I’m still very much stuck in “must complete the emissary caches” mode and as a result I had one in Argus for the Argussian Reach faction that I lacked enough quests to complete.  As a result I started unlocking more of the planet until I finally got enough to finish it out.  This however was super time consuming because doing anything on Argus feels needlessly tedious due to the packed base pop and terrain that goes out of its way to keep you from going from point a to b.  For my troubles I got a big fat nothing… or in truth a little bit of gold that feels insanely lackluster given the amount of effort I went through to be able to complete it.  So the real question I ask to you more seasoned players that did not take a massive break after Nighthold…  did they just fucking nerf emissary caches into the ground?  In the past these used to be a significant source of gear upgrades, and also used to drop legendaries like candy.  At this point I have no legendaries and have not seen a single piece of gear from the six caches I have turned in since starting up playing again.  Is this just a bad streak or did they simply remove any reasonable rewards from these things?

I’ve managed to move the needle a little further forward and am sitting at 884 and I think 15 concordance on my two primary weapons.  I still have Tomb of Sargeras LFR to do this week but in truth it seems like grinding Argus is going to be my best bet for gear level movement.  The only problem there is that I hate Argus and want to nuke the planet from orbit.  I mean in all reality it isn’t that bad but it just feels shitty to return to land mounts again after being able to fly literally everywhere else.  The base pop reminds me of a lot of what it feels like to roam around in a Rift zone where everything is super aggro and ready to reach out and thump you if you get too close.  The main difference is that at least in World of Warcraft it is completely reasonable for me to round up 30 mobs and grind them down….  because I did this thing today out of laziness and not wanting to stop.  The only really works if you can keep healing yourself like the protection warrior can, but nonetheless it is a viable option.  In Rift if I had more than a couple of mobs I would have fallen over, which makes the game feel super tedious to play.  If I apply myself and gobble up every quest I can do on Argus each day… I may be able to purchase a single piece of 910 gear which is a slow way to upgrade but potentially preferable to hoping for lucky double platnium bonus warforged gear from LFR.

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Towards the end of the evening while rewatching Force Awakens I did wind up grinding a bit in Destiny 2 and managed to complete the Mercury Flashpoint.  When I turned in with Cayde-6 I managed to get my very first Masterwork item…  and I maybe just almost accidentally called it Warforged.  The positive it is at least an Auto Rifle which is something I will use.  Grace said last night that when she got her first… it was a sidearm…  which is something that no sane and rational person would ever want to use.  I was absolutely certain that the game would give me a sniper rifle or something else that I generally loathe.  Then again if that were the case the decision to shard it and get crafting materials would have been simple…  in this case I have the strong desire to start using it even though Solemn Hymn isn’t exactly one of my favorite weapons.  As far as the perk on mine, it gives a small range boost which is reasonable enough for the moment.  Were it a warforged Better Devils I might work on trying to get the best possible roll, but for now I am okay with a ranged boost.  I have a late night tonight because Star Wars…  but I might be able to hop on when I get home and give it a proper testing.

Rogue Tanks

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Yesterday another big update happened to Destiny 2 that added Masterwork level weapons.  These are special versions of the existing legendaries that include a single stat boost and the ability for the weapon to generate orbs of light.  In theory these can come from anything that rewards legendaries already, but after spending down my stock of tokens I did not actually see any.  Granted I have not actually started doing my weekly powerful engram grind activities, so I might wind up with one through that system.  That said I think the more important update is the fact that every vendor sells a full set of their unique set of armor that unlocks as you turn in packages.  Additionally they have one weapon for sale that is available for a combination of legendary shards and faction tokens.  This means that eventually there will be a week where Lord Shaxx sells the Better Devils or Zavala here sells the Curtain Call.  Basically this is another way of mitigating bad luck in the RNG systems, and I for one am super happy to see it.  I love package loot but it can be frustrating when you keep turning them in and never get the item you are actually after.  Additionally this can generate buzz for players to go back into the game when there is a week with a really great item up for sale.

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Unfortunately I did not spend much time in Destiny 2 last night because I started the evening in World of Warcraft.  By the time I finished doing the few World Quests that had interesting rewards my friend Cuppy popped online and we decided to run a bunch of heroics together.  Heroics always felt easier than they probably should be, but at the way the power levels are now…  they are insanely easy.  For the first Heroic we opted to run Eye of Azshara where a rogue ran off from the group and solo’d more content than the rest of us managed to kill.  He killed the first boss before we could even get to it.  In the second dungeon I am pretty sure it look less than five minutes to do a full clear, and by the time we finally landed on Blackrook and Darkheart Thicket…  we got something resembling a reasonable group and still had zero issue pulling multiple packs and burning things down.  It was one insanely fun night and once again…  zero drama.  All of the groups were chill and once I figured out I had to use /I instead of /P we actually had a lot of people responding and being rather friendly. I guess I need to run some content Alliance side to see if this really is a difference between the factions or if everyone has just reached a point where they are no longer asshats?  Additionally as is usually the case with my blog… as soon as I complain about something karma steps in to invalidate my comments.  Last night I not only picked up a Trinket, but also got the rest of the relic slots that I had been missing.  As a result that takes my overall gear level to 874 which isn’t too shabby for dinging halfway through Sunday.