April 2018 - Page 5 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Rocket-Swords and Pig-Bees

April 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I spent some time in Monster Hunter World because the Spring Blossom festival launched about halfway through my evening offering up a ton of things to do. It is this weird blended festival that includes a ton of repeat chances to get items that were offered before as well as several new items including the Greatsword I am rocking in this image and the Megaman/Rockman Pallico Armor that I will ultimately have to get my hands on. I will talk more about the Greatsword a little further down the list… but first I want to talk about how generally happy I am with the pacing of events in this game. It feels like every single week there is a reason for me to log in and do content, and while I am largely stalled out at 49 behind Tempered Kirin there seems to still be a constant deluge of things to do. Granted I have pulled back my playtime a bit given my recent infatuation with Project Gorgon and the return to doing stuff with people in World of Warcraft… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am completely disconnected.

I really love the flow of this game because it feels like I can log in any night and feel like I have interesting options to do. There are also things on the horizon that I have to look forward to, like the Devil May Cry collaboration that brings a brand new Charge Blade into the mix. This week however was all about the new fan designed Greatsword and helping me to fill in a weapon slot that I really had not put any effort into. While I don’t think they necessarily have the intention of giving us an event weapon for every slot… so far I have gotten a really nice Bow and a really nice Greatsword with what felt like minimal effort when it comes to farming all of the missing bits I need to get from point a to point b in the crafting tree. Sure the Greatsword and Bow both require a Wyvern Gem which is annoying to farm… but that is one part out of a whole list of parts that might be a pain to get. I wound up using the Gold Wyverian print I had laying around to craft the Greatsword last night.

Like I said before I was ultimately missing a decent Greatsword from my weapon lineup, and while it is an extremely cumbersome weapon… it is one I want to learn how to use because it seems very much a “me” weapon. In order to get this weapon you need to start running the low rank 5 star quest… Every Hunter’s Dream. This involves taking down a Paolumu and a Rathalos… which enter the fight staggered a bit so you can get a significant amount of damage in on the Lumu before having to deal with the poison and fire asshole. I ran the first one of these solo and then grouped up with Thalen who also happened to be on to get the last few kills. I think in total it took us four attempts to get the five Master Craftsman’s Blueprints needed to craft both steps of the weapon. As far as the other items needed… here is a list form breakout even though I crudely photo-shopped it all together above.

Master Craftsman’s Blueprint – 5 – Event Only Item
Dragonite Ore – 7 – I believe any zone after Low Rank Coral Highlands but not 100% sure
Paolumu Webbing – 2 – Low Rank Paolumu
Rathalos Marrow – 2 – Low Rank Rathalos – Green First Wyverian Print
Elder Dragon Blood – 2 – Kill an Elder Dragon – Nergigante, Vaal Hazak, Kushala Daora, Teostra, Xeno’jiiva
Firecell Stone – 2 – Found in Elder’s Recess
Wyvern Gem – 1 – Most High Rank Paolumu, Tobi-Kadachi, Lavasioth, Jyuratodus, Barroth, Radobaan, Diablos
40,000 Zenny – yeah…. you are going to want to farm some cash

I have not really done anything serious with this weapon… but in theory were I to use it regularly I would wear my fire longsword set of gear… make sure I have some Handicraft and figure out a decent item to wear that gives me the hidden elemental damage. 510 is a lot of fire damage to leave sitting on the table with this weapon, so I need to sort out a decent item to slot to give me that back since I am no longer regularly wearing the Zorah Magdaros gloves. I did a few minor quests last night with the weapon and really dig it… even though it is just about the slowest thing in the world. I had already started getting into the practice of sheathing my longsword anytime I was going to be moving for awhile just because the draw attack is really nice. This training has served me pretty well for the greatsword given that you cannot move at more than a snails pace with it drawn.

If you are interested in the timing of everything going on you can check out the official Capcom PDF of events… or better yet check out this site called 28 Games Later that has a really nice full breakout of everything.

Nonsense Managed

April 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the first occurrence of our mythical nonsense group and it almost didn’t happen. We had planned on running from 7 pm to 9 pm Central time… so that it wasn’t too ungodly late for our East Coast contingency. However the entire thing almost failed to happen. At go time we had two of our players that were unable to get in due to some bug that seemed to be only effecting certain servers. Grace and I were both logging in characters from Eonar and Byx on Chromaggus also managed to get in just fine. However Maryalee on Wyrmrest Accord and Nayukhuut on Moonguard both were encountering the issue shown in the above screenshot with their server showing us as “Incompatible”.

The funny thing is that when this first started happening I was able to log into my characters on those servers just fine. However after closing WoW and relaunching… the Battle.net patcher updated the game and then suddenly I also got the issue. Since Blizzard CS said they were working on it… we decided to push ahead and attempt a Mythic 0 with three players. We originally were planning on doing Maw of the Souls… which I keep wanting to call Maw of the Damned because Death Knight weapon. I swapped over to Blood Tanking spec and we gave it an attempt that honestly went pretty smoothly especially considering I have not actually tanked a dungeon this expansion as Death Knight.

About halfway through our Maw run the other two players managed to get into the game and after we finished up the run we had some options on how to proceed with our madness. We sat down and assessed the keys we had available to us…

Mythic 2 – Seat of the Triumvirate
Mythic 2 – Cathedral of Eternal Night
Mythic 2 – Blackrook Hold

Quite honestly I am not that familiar with Cathedral having only run it a few times… and I am not sure if I have ever run Seat of the Triumvirate at all. While Blackrook Hold is not exactly my favorite dungeon it seemed like the more realistic choice and quite honestly the easier one. However that also set us down the path of only getting one of the keys upgraded each time. We pushed forward and knocked out the Dungeon in completely reasonable time.

My key upgraded to Mythic 5 Upper Karazhan… which made me immediately think… “why the fuck is this a mythic dungeon?”. However we managed to largely steamroll the entire dungeon other than the final boss who is just an asshole. Thankfully in spite of my death we moved forward and the remaining folks managed to get the kill moving us forward again. I remember Karazhan being a boar to get through when we were trying to run it to get to the bonus boss… but now it seems like it is probably a completely reasonable thing to do in a timely manner. I think the fact that everyone has Concordance now… pushes up the gear levels to the point where you can just take a lot of abuse making all of the mechanics easier.

The next key target was Mythic 7 Neltharion’s Lair… which generally speaking is a fairly easy dungeon to run. The problem we encountered however is the pair of affixes we were dealing with… and the fact that we are all used to trying to skip content in the dungeon… meant we struggled quite a bit. Firstly we had the Teeming Affix meaning that several of the packs are larger… which in this dungeon means a pack of three mobs normally sometimes becomes a pack of six mobs. This also screws with the aggro radius of packs and things we used to be able to sneak around we had to on directly. Secondly we had the Quake Affix meaning that every so often every member of the party was dealt a radius of quake damage… which if stacked means you take damage from everyone.

Considering we had a party with three melee characters and a fourth in the form of our healer that occasionally would go hit things… Quake damage became a problem. We almost made the timer… like had everything gone perfectly on the final fight we would have. However we wound up being about a minute short after the run back from a death on the final boss. I am not sure if this means we will all start with Mythic 6 keys next week or if the fact that we completed a Mythic 7 dungeon means we start there. Whatever the case we should have five new options for next Wednesday night to keep moving forward. We are entering the territory where we can no longer faceroll the mythics so we will have to start getting some strategy on… and maybe flasking.

Whatever the case I had a heck of a lot of fun running around with this team and look forward to next week. Having been out of the mythic game for so long… we made way more progress than I originally thought we would in a single night so I am super happy about that.

Mythical Nonsense Tonight

April 4, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, but in theory mythical nonsense begins tonight. We’ve gathered up a group of players who are willing to join in this madness and set our sights on getting our first key through the easiest and coolest of the mythics… Maw of the Damned. From there we will shift around and try and determine what our next target is based on the keys that we get. In theory we are going to run until 10 pm central or wherever there is a breaking off point somewhere close to that. The idea being that we run for a few hours and see how many we can knock out… and keep upgrading keys until we get to at least Mythic +15 so that we can walk away with shiny artifact appearances or something like that. I have no clue how far we will get tonight, and I have no clue how long this journey is actually going to take… however we have a list of adventurers ready to go.

MaryaleeScarlet – Protection Paladin – Tank
DiscGrace – Mistweaver Monk – Healing
MissByx – Fury Warrior – Melee DPS
Nayukhuut – Frost Mage – Ranged DPS
Belgrok – Unholy Deathknight – Plays With Dead Things

In theory I need to try and get an Argus kill in tonight before go time since I failed miserably at playing WoW last night. With the teacher strike going on the evenings have been weird for lack of a better term. I didn’t want to get into anything serious until my wife got home… and yes while LFR is LFR… the Argus section of that raid is a serious time commitment at the least. Then after my wife got home we largely talked about the nonsense the State Legislators did during the day… like shutting off the water to give themselves an excuse to go home early for the day and avoid the teachers. My hope is tonight I can pop in for a bit, get an Argus kill so I can walk into Mythical Nonsense ™ with a second legendary and slightly higher item level.

I would totally stream this… but a few of the folks I am running with have already objected to that notion when someone brought it up on twitter. So I will just have to report in on our progress tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun, especially since two of the people I will be running with… I have never run with before. Byx and Grace however… have gone through many iterations of my nonsense over the years so they are largely immune to it. So I will ultimately have to break Maryalee and Nayakhuut into the fact that I have no clue what I am doing 99.9% of the time and that tanks make the most annoying DPS. It should be hilarious… or at least entertaining for all.

Unintentional Spiderman

April 3, 2018 by Belghast

I had every intent of doing some World of Warcraft faction farming last night, but I ultimately did not really follow up on those plans. When I got home we wound up running a couple of errands and going out to eat, and by the time we made it home I largely planted myself on the sofa and roamed around Project Gorgon some more. Yesterday I looked like I was wearing some urine soaked bandages… and today I am essentially the stuff of nightmare as some sort of living web creature. The armor designs in this game are “interesting” but I have seen some completely reasonable options that give me hope that maybe just maybe I won’t look like an experiment for the entire time playing.

A couple of things have transpired since last playing. Firstly I realized that psychology is a combat skill, and apparently pairs extremely nicely with swords… also freeing up my second hand for a shield while using it instead of needing to hold a bow. I kept getting gear with both swords and psychology on it… and never could figure out how to level it. I thought that it would involve talking to people since everything in this game seems to have a skill but after a trip to the wiki I realized that I needed to be assigning it to my secondary attack. After doing so… I started questioning the parentage of my enemies and applying damaging taunts that seem to debuff them making the sword hits a little easier.

The other thing that transpired is that I took a trip back to the starter island after figuring out which sequence of prompts would get me to that location. This allowed me to do the hangout I missed… get my louse comb and finally remove the lice debuff that I picked up by fighting a mangy wolf somewhere along the lines. This also allowed me to venture down into the starter dungeon, defeat the monster that the game gives you tons of warning about… and find a back way out of the dungeon because apparently previously I didn’t go down anywhere near deep enough. It turns out there are two ways off the starter island… one of which is through a series of spider infested tunnels that ultimately leads to a place called Serbule Hills.

Of course this zone connects directly with Serbule proper which allowed me to get back to town and do some turn ins… all without needing to take the return trip from the island. The only problem with this concept is that the route does not go the other way quite so easily because there is a wall in the dungeon that requires someone from the Anagoge Island side to open it. However while sitting there inside the dungeon the door was opening constantly so in practice you should be able to use this route to get back to the island if you ever need to. As far as Serbule Hills… I personally found it way greener pastures than Serbule proper with a seemingly higher mob density and way more interesting camps to hunt.

I was introduced to the games version of the Froglok… the Ranalon. They are a race of fish creatures that don’t necessarily want open war… but absolutely have no interest in peace as they attempt to displace all of the other races. They have these one eyed flying manta ray looking creatures called the Scray that they treat like guard dogs, and I now have quests to kill plenty of both. Over in Serbule Hills I was also able to finish a bunch of quests that I picked up in Serbule Keep but struggled to find the appropriate spawns for like Deer and Tigers that actually drop eyeballs. I see in my near future a bunch of time exploring this zone which is honestly a short jaunt away from the Keep and my normal hunting grounds.