September 2018 - Page 2 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tam Stole My Luck

September 24, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was the beginning of the 15th season in Diablo 3 and like usual Grace and myself decided to do the thing that we do roughly every three months… and start new seasonal characters. I went with the Demon Hunter because the Unhallowed Essence set is in theory one of the really fun ones… pending I can actually assemble all of the parts of it. Grace went with the Necro because I believe this time is Rathma’s which is another pretty fun set… pending you assemble all of the pieces of it. For most of the season she was way stronger than I was as we ran through the content, but there will be a point where that balance starts to shift the other way. The problem is I have not hit it yet and am struggling a bit with pushing content. I found getting the Greater Rift 20, the last thing I needed for my cosmetic items and last of the Haedrig’s Gift items… but be extremely painful.

This season I seem to have had really bad luck, essentially having NONE of the items I need for my build apart from the Hellfire Amulet. Legendaries seem to be extremely stingy this time around, and often times as I am leveling I start getting some of the drops needed to toss into the cube. That didn’t happen. In theory I am going to start grinding some T1 rifts to try and assemble the rest of the set. I am convinced that Tam stole my luck, because I didn’t even get a single item of my class set to upgrade to Ancient. At a bare minimum however I now have my pet and portrait frame and anything after this is gravy.

In World of Warcraft I mostly spent time this weekend over on the Alliance side leveling my Paladin. Paladins right now seem just as overpowered as Demon Hunters and I have been breezing through content pulling tons of things in a path of destruction… and in truth consecration ends up pulling way more than I had intended most of the time. Originally when I took a stab at playing the Death Knight I had started Stormsong Valley and could not be bothered with that storyline of missing ships. This time around I decided to start Drustvar and its awesome cultist nonsense… and so far I have been enjoying the storytelling way more than a tale of political intrigue. I like big bombastic storylines, like the whole fighting old gods with ghost dinosaurs thing that is going on over on the Horde Side, so Drustvar seems more of that fit.

The only negative is it means at some point I will have to return to the more subtle political intrigue storyline and hopefully I am invested enough in my character at that point to carry me on. I figured the Paladin gave me a lot of options for running stuff… but the truth is I will probably just tank or dps… and it is highly unlikely that I ever heal. While I technically got the healing Artifact weapon, I am not sure if I ever had it equipped. All in all though… just not loving the Alliance content anywhere near as much as I did the Horde. However I will say so far… the War Campaign stuff seems cooler on the Alliance side… even though it feels weird to be retracing steps I know as horde quests. I did not realize that I would be effectively sharing the same space… like Anyport for example in my world is very much a Horde town… but it is seemingly also open to Alliance? Also finding it weird that I am seeing way more Orange names while I am leveling than Blue ones. Maybe there was an initial push of alliance players… or maybe the AIE presence on our shared shard greatly pushes the balance to Horde.

Lastly we recorded another podcast this weekend as is the usual, and this time around we talked a lot about the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise… and the fact that I think of it as Warrior is telling to the last time I actually played one. We also had this unintended deep dive into Hollow Knight after some conversation about Hyperlight Drifter sort of jarred it loose. We are trying really hard to bring the shows in around an hour in length and as such they sort of feel better than they used to. We are trying to limit the number of topics… which has this side effect of causing topics to roll forward to other weeks. The Dragon Quest topic for example had rolled twice before we finally talked about it. I am thinking the Trello system that we are using for show notes seems to work pretty well, as we can drop things into the queue throughout the week easily. Regardless… if you tried listening to us when we often times recorded two to three hour long shows…. you might give it a shot again.

Distraction

September 21, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was super negative, and I apologize for being down a bit. I am dealing with some mental stuff and fighting through it, but it has colored my world view decidedly darker for the moment. Yesterday over on Mastodon, someone commented that it sounded like I simply wasn’t having fun anymore. To some extend I have been having less fun, but I feel like MMOs in general require a lot of grind to get to the fun parts. Right or wrong that is just sort of the nature of the beast and something I accept as part of the package deal. My hope is always that the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable, but even when it isn’t the hope is that there is a lot of enjoyment beyond the grind.

It was around this time that I came up with a reasonable analogy to explain MMOs. Say you are a person that is really into knocking down dominoes and watching them fall into intricate patterns. In that hobby it would often time take days to painstakingly set up the tiny little slabs, and then eventually when you are finished you get to start the chain reaction causing them to do all sorts of awesome things… for a few minutes. Hours upon hours worth of work… for a very short payoff. This is what playing an MMO feels like most of the time… a lot of painstaking work managing factions and consumables and all of the assorted trappings that come with doing endgame stuff… all to have a few minutes of joy every week.

All of the faction work leads to something… but that something is often times short and sweet and leaves you wanting more of that awesome endorphin hit that it gave you. However for the moment I am distracted by the fact that Brewfest is happening and with it comes the Coren Direbrew event. Sadly the trinkets that are provided this year are only 335, when I was hoping they would be something more sustainable like 340-345. Regardless it is a thing that gives a much needed slot and my hope is to farm up a set on the Warrior and maybe get the Warlock leveled enough to get some as well. Additionally there is a pet that I have never picked up before that I hope to get the tokens for.

After that will be the Halloween event, and another grind to chase… since I have never managed to get the mount to drop and am only slightly bitter about it. The positive is that it seems like all levels can participate in the Coren Direbrew event, so my hope is that similarly all levels can participate in the Halloween one as well. That means if I so choose to do this nonsense… I could run around thirty characters through the event every day… with thirty shots at the mount each day. On the Brewfest side I have the Kodo and Ram and am not sure if other mounts drop but I think I am in good territory. Whatever the case this adds up to a large package of distraction that may or may not keep me entertained until the 8.1 patch releases and we can see if anything feels better in the world.

The Grind Feels Bad

September 20, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few days I have trying to sort out something about Battle for Azeroth, namely why World Quests feel so generally awful in this expansion. What I have come up with is a few points, but they all largely center around it being a system that was developed for a different expansion cycle and then not retooled enough to make it function in the same role in this expansion. For starters World Quests are generally an excellent source of gearing, and in this first days after dinging 120 it very much played that role, giving me access to better and better items until eventually hitting the world quest soft cap of around 330… with dungeon quests being able to drop up to 340. The highest actual quest drop I have seen for a green is 273, so that gives you 57 levels worth of gear before the system ultimately peters out. Honestly that seems like a reasonable gap in itemization, and I augmented it with the occasional heroic or mythic drop to speed my process up.

I think the crux of the issue with World Quests is we are no longer chasing anything that actually matters. In Legion we were chasing a slew of Legendary items that could drop from literally anything, and I have seen them drop from random boss based World Quests. So for me at least it felt like every single World Quest that I completed was one additional chance that I had to get the chase items of the expansion… a Legendary item. Additionally Emissary quests rewarded a chest upon turn in, that often times had a piece of gear that was very useful in that gearing phase… but most of my alts got their very first Legendary this way as well. So again doing the Emissary each day was some thing I looked forward to, because it gave me rep, some sort of a reward, a chest that contained gear… and once again the ever important seemingly elevated chance at seeing orange text scroll across my screen.

The other thing that is missing is a grind that feels like it matters. Artifact Power good or bad felt important for a very long time… even towards the very end as we were unlocking those traits that just sorta made everything get better… the effect was noticeable. I felt like I was tangibly better after spending that point… but also the acquisition of artifact power felt more even handed. As it stands right now… I can clear both Zandalar and Kul’Tiras of every single available quest during an evening and I won’t have made a single dent in the amount of Artifact Power required to get one more item on the MacGuffin necklace that they gave me that I am supposed to care about. The ramshackle manner in which we are given traits that are to be unlocked by necklace level… makes the entire system something very hard to deeply care about. I got an item… the item is higher level… I guess I will use it in spite of not being able to unlock any of the traits because they are arbitrarily placed through some progression system that I think at one point was supposed to be important but just now seems like numbers pulled out of the ether to keep us grinding.

Basically put… all of this feels deeply unsatisfying and makes me start questioning what exactly the point of us logging in every night to do emissary quests actually is? The answer to that is… faction. Faction is the fire in which we burn. At least in my case the faction I care the most about right now is the Honorbound because it gates my progress towards unlocking the Mag’har. Similarly I am certain that faction will also be the thing that gates our access to the Zandalari and Kul’Tirans respectively. In both cases if I could give Blizzard a sum of money to pay for my time spent… and either instantly gain the faction needed or just simply pay to unlock the race… I would happily do so because the grind that ultimately bars content is completely joyless. In Legion we gained faction as a side effect of the chase for bigger and better things. The Artifact weapons felt like a fitting reward for gaining Artifact Power… and the Emissary chests gave us a shot at getting the real power items of the expansion the Legendaries. It was a chase I was capable of doing and ignoring the fact that I am every so slightly moving the bar up.

Effectively in order for a grind to feel good… you have to have enough things distracting you from the fact that you are grinding. Every 10 to 20 minutes there needs to be enough of an endorphin hit to make you feel like you just accomplished something, and Battle for Azeroth seems to lack this when it comes to what I would refer to as the maintenance grind. Sure Warfronts were fun because they gave me a shiny purple item every 15 to 20 minutes… but World Questing, the thing that should be there as a daily pursuit is just a bunch of stuff that I will throw into the grinder or an insignificant amount of gold or artifact power to make up for my time spent. 115 gold for example… the highest paying World Quest that I have available to me on the above map is a completely meaningless and insignificant sum of money. In order for gold to be a reward from doing a world quest I feel like it at bare minimum needs to be a range that goes from roughly 500 to 2500. Similarly Artifact power at this point already requires 2500 or more in a single hit to make the bar noticeably move.

Ultimately what happened last night is I logged in… did my Emissary quest… felt horrible about the rewards… then logged over to the other faction in an attempt to play an Alliance character. Which again I bounced out of pretty early on because in the back of my head was a little voice asking me… do I really want to do this grind all over again on another character on another faction? The grind is just not fun, and I hope they do something to make it feel better in the next patch. In the meantime I logged over to Destiny 2 which has its own grind problems and found myself having a good deal more fun because… once again every 10-20 minutes I got the little hit of endorphin from something interesting dropping on the ground.

Warning Signs

September 19, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the first night since the launch of Battle for Azeroth where I didn’t feel like I had a purpose in playing. What I mean by that in large part is there was nothing readily achievable that I could be doing that would further the state of my gear. This is a thing I go through with MMORPGs is that so long as I am making the numbers go higher I feel happy and filled with purpose, but once that elevator reaches the top floor I start flailing listlessly. Having gone through this so many times in the past, this is the beginning warning sign of me starting the check out process. Effectively at this point I need to find something to anchor me to the game and rapidly or I will drift away into the ether with the first shiny bauble that crosses my path.

Last week I was anchored with a constant feeling that I needed to be getting Mythics done so I could chase a fabled piece of 370 gear. Before that on an almost daily basis I was swapping things out for items of better quality, which felt interesting and exciting. As it stands now I have a few options each week to help me move that needle forward… and it feels horrible when they reward gold or artifact power instead of a piece of loot. I’ve not done LFR for the week but thanks to Warfronts and the cavalcade of guaranteed loot every twenty minutes… they have no shine this expansion because I have already upgraded every slot above the bare minimum level that drops there.

I got double artifact power off of the Warfronts world boss in Arathi basin, and gold off the World boss that opened up with the reset yesterday. I am basically left with two options… find a time when I can raid, or dig in harder with alts. We are trying to make Wednesday nights at 7 pm CST until 10-11 CST work but we are probably still short a handful of people in necessary roles. Ashgar my traditional co-tank is still very much in the leveling process because his attention is split between lots of different games right now. We could do higher and higher mythics to try and get gear but pulling those together has been a challenge. I should have spent my time last night running Mythics to help gear up Morgull, but instead I sorta did a lot of nothing.

As far as alting goes…. I really want to unlock the Mag’har because I want to start a red shaman. The only problem there is the faction grind feels horrible… with no real way of making daily progress other than doing literally every single quest available on Kul’Tiras. I did that last night, and was bored out of my mind the entire time because at this point… I have done this several times without it feeling like I am making forward momentum at all. The grind doesn’t feel good this expansion, and quite honestly…. the only time faction grinding DID feel good was during the era of faction based tabards that you could wear and gain faction for doing other activities. At a minimum I could equip a tabard and queue for heroic after heroic giving me a constant drip of faction and a bunch of loot to show for it.

Ultimately I think I will pour more of my attention into the Warlock and see if I can stave off the desire to bounce until we can manage to pull together a raid group.