September 2019 - Page 2 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Generous Benefactor

September 25, 2019 by Belghast

I am now the proud owner of a Blue Skeletal Horse, that I did not earn at all. I feel weird in saying that, but last night I was beginning my farming runs when I got a message from a friend. They asked how far away I was from my mount and when I told them they said there would be a message in game coming shortly. I didn’t ask them for it and they were very specific in saying that it was a gift and not a loan, but I still feel fairly indebted. I am not sure if I can fully express how grateful I am that I can stop trying to get to a specific amount of gold, because for me at least that is very much not my focus in an MMORPG.

I plan on paying it back, but I think probably the best way for me to do this is to finish the leveling process and be geared and ready for when they need something in the future. I want to be a functional dungeon and raid tank, and now I also very much feel “unstuck” because I would have avoided doing anything until I managed to get the amount of gold needed to get off high center and move on with my life. The biggest challenge now however is that while I have been all over the world in my quest for a farm spot, I have spent zero time actually focused on doing any of the content.

For now I think my main focus will be on the Badlands and completing a bunch of the quests there that will eventually lead their way into Uldaman, which I believe is the next real target for our dungeoning aggression. There are a few quests that start out in the zone, and one in particular that is a chain that comes drop a dropped item. So my focus tonight is probably going to be on tracking that down and doing whatever quests I can come across along the way. The parking brake is being lowered and I am going back into leveling mode again.

I did spend a little bit of time last night on Belgrave my Hunter as well. I am not usually big on playing female characters, but generally speaking if I am going to play an Orc or a Troll I am going to play the ones that aren’t hunched over. The real truth is that I wish both factions could play together. The current events happening in game are teasing that maybe just maybe this could be a thing. I would be all too happy to be running around on a Human or a Dwarf with my Orc or Undead friends. In the meantime however I am enjoying the process of seeing the game through Horde eyes, because really I did not see much of this side of the world back in vanilla. I think the highest characters I had back then were in the mid twenties.

Finding a Good Farm

September 24, 2019 by Belghast

I make poor choices. In theory there is a lot of things that I should have been doing up to this point that I have not. Tam for example trained only the bare minimum of abilities the entire time during playing his rogue. I could have probably done this as well given that there is a very slim number of abilities that I actually use. As a Warrior I mostly only care about tanking… and when I am not tanking I only care about being able to burn through mobs as efficiently as possible without having to completely shift things up. That means I spend most of my time in either Defensive or Arms, and instead of 2 Handers I am more or less dual wielding. This would rule out a whole bunch of abilities that I would never use… but I did not do this thing.

For further bad ideas… for some reason I decided this weekend to burn up fishing from scratch and got it to around 130 before wandering off aimlessly. That means I did in fact spend the money on getting the book that takes me to 225. Why did I do this? Quite honestly I don’t know but I got a Big Iron Fishing pole and decided that I wanted to use it. That time could have been better spent probably doing literally anything else that could have earned me gold. Instead I wound up spending it… and making more bad decisions. That said you apparently catch enough fish going from 1 to 130 to be able to cook your way up to 150 skill. I may or may not have power leveled cooking on my Hunter who is just barely 10.

So here I am at level 40 with a need for 100 gold… which is a truly staggering amount of gold at this level. As it stands I am sitting around halfway through and am entirely focused on procurement of more gold. The challenge here is that everywhere I go to attempt to get the gold.. I am finding isn’t working anywhere near as well as I thought it would. I’ve wandered around aimlessly and while I made about 5 gold last night off my schemes the wanderlust is definitely cutting into the grind time. Dungeoning is an option, but the problem with dungeoning is that I am also increasing my level at the same time which isn’t exactly something I am amped to do for the moment.

So I thought I would take a few moments this morning and talk about what makes a good grind spot. Because I am still hunting for my own sweet spot after trying a bunch of things that I hazily remember as being good ideas. Ultimately there are a bunch of variables that you want to keep in mind as you approach trying to find an ideal location to hunker down and camp.

Near a Vendor – In theory you need to make sure whatever camp spot you are going after is within a short distance of some sort of vendor that you can sell at. Inventory is a premium and you are going to need to eventually empty your bags out.
Green – You need to kill really fast to be able to efficiently grind and as a result you need to make sure the mobs you are fighting can barely fight back. This means you more than likely want to find some area that is green to almost grey to you. It means your time to kill will be really high and your need to drink/eat will be less.
Non-Communal – You want to find something that doesn’t call for help. Ultimately you are setting up a machine and you want a fast but steady pace to mobs. If you can AOE grind then more than likely this goes out the window but you are looking for some place that won’t overwhelm you.
Non-Runners – In a similar boat you more than likely want something that isn’t going to run because you waste time chasing them down. If you have Wing Clip or Hamstring this becomes less of a problem but you still have to make sure you have that debuff on them before they start to run.
Valuable Vendorables – You are looking for something that drops something of value often. That value can be entirely negotiable but ultimately you are going to make most of your money from something you can quickly dump on a vendor and get back to farming.
Tradeskill Friendly – Look for something that you can increase the value of with some quick tradeskilling. Skinning/Leatherworking is the king of this because you can easily convert a lot of leathers to something that can be dumped on a vendor quickly for a profit. Similarly cloth can be upsized a bit into bandages for a few copper profit per bandage.
Cash Drops A Plus – If you are fighting something that drops cash it helps to make up the doldrums when the thing you are fighting isn’t dropping anything worth selling. Pure cash drop farming however is a really slow way of getting money. They need to be dropping something else be it cloth or vendor greys.
High Density – You need a lot of mobs in a very small area to keep you from having to run around a lot. Running around is time when you are not earning money, so you need to find something you can be constantly killing until your bags fill up.
Privacy – The biggest part of all of this is you need to find an area that is relatively unknown, because you don’t want competition in your farming. You need to be able to run your loop and fill your bags in peace, which tends to be the problem with valuable farm spots. Every single farm that I remember from Vanilla is way over-camped right now, because we all need that 40 gold. This is forcing me to branch out and try and find more creative options.

I’ve yet to find my perfect location, but I will eventually find a spot that ticks most of those boxes. I thought however I would throw out some of the things for you to think about as you try and nestle into your own farm spot. The grind is one of the more tedious parts of the game, and the amount of gold that you need to come up with is really a struggle at this level. However I am roughly halfway there. This is more or less my focus for the time being, and for now I am going to just keep my head down and go at it.

Adorable Zelda

September 23, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend various things happened, but one of them was that I played the first game that was not World of Warcraft Classic since the launch of aforementioned game. Friday two games of note came out, but the one I spent the most time playing was The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening. One thing that is important to know about me is that I love Zelda games, but more importantly I love the pre-n64 style of Zelda games. So while I am a huge fan of Breath of the Wild, I honestly had more fun playing A Link Between Worlds.

I purchased a Gameboy in 1989, and quite honestly it was more novelty than something I actually played on a regular basis. It was something we brought on trips or would occasionally link up with friends, but considering it had no backlight it made it extremely difficult to play at times when playing a game might be super convenient. If it was light enough to see I was way more likely to be doodling in the backseat of the car on a drawing tablet than to actually be playing the Gameboy. I got my Super Nintendo in 1990 and by the time Link’s Awakening came out in 1993 I was a Sophmore in High School and could give a shit about anything on the awkward to play Gameboy at that point. I did not have a renaissance of the Gameboy until 1994 with the release of the Super Gameboy, but for whatever reason mostly fixated on Metroid and never went back to play this game.

As a result I went into this experience knowing next to nothing about the game apart from the fact that it was supposedly wildly different than the traditional Zelda narrative and was still exceptionally well received. This could have meant a few things, because Majora’s Mask is wildly different than the traditional Zelda narrative and I am not at all a big fan of that game. Minish Cap on the other hand is also wildly different than the traditional Zelda narrative… and I instead loved every minute of that game. What I did know however is that the game feels like it borrows from A Link to the Past and managed to make a Gameboy game that looked very much like that.

What I was not expecting however was a game that was a way harder start than pretty much any other Zelda game out there. There is a whole trading quest system that exists and I found myself trying to figure out how to trade this for that, and what the hell to do with the thing that I just received in return. I also spent time playing around with the fishing system which is absolutely adorable… as is pretty much everything else to do with this game. As a whole this very much feels like a game where they just went hog wild with the systems development and also a game where they played with a bunch of interesting concepts… like the fact that apparently Hyrule and the Mushroom kingdom are not part of the same tapestry.

There were a lot of times I spent with the “beep beeps” as I call them, which apparently caused Tam to lose his shit and laugh the other night when I said it… but at the same time immediately knew what I was talking about. It is that moment when you are down to half a heart and the game is playing a constant and annoying health warning sound going “beep beep… beep beep” over and over and over. Thankfully while some of the concepts are mechanically harder than most Zelda games they are seemingly fairly generous with mobs dropping hearts when you actually need one.

I’ve not made it super far into the game, and have pretty much beat the first dungeon boss and started the second area. I do find it super interesting that this is a Zelda game that includes a vertical element with one of the first abilities that you pick up being a feather that lets you jump. It took some getting used to in order to sort out how best to jump across objectives, which lead to me falling in several pits along the way.

Can we just talk for a moment about how adorable the Great Fairy is? I love this art style and honestly would love to see other games in the Zelda series redone in this style. It really fits the feel of this setting, and quite honestly it makes me wish I had a version of the original game remade in this fashion. It also just makes me wish that I had all of the games that came out on the mobile platforms available and playable on the switch. I’m not much of a handheld gamer, but I do like the switch as a platform and its ability to shift back and forth between the two modes of handheld or docked.

This seems well worth picking up, especially if you are like me and somehow skipped this entry in the series. It feels vastly different than any other Zelda game I have played, but also that is perfectly okay. It feels like a game where they experimented with a bunch of big ideas that somehow managed to work perfectly. Additionally it has a really great soundtrack, which makes me want to go back and see how the chiptune versions sounded.

AggroChat #269 – Friction and Friends

September 22, 2019 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

HONK!!!!! So tonight we have some topics that have bumped around a bit. Namely talking about Accessibility versus Friction in Game Design concepts. This is very much on our minds now as a lot of things we thought we didn’t like, end up being what is providing the cohesion needed to keep moving forward in World of Warcraft classic. This however ends up creating a bunch of problems namely it is a real challenge to stay up to date with your friends so that you can keep doing content together. We talk about some systems that work and Tams disdain for mentoring systems. Finally we dig into Magic the Gathering and talk about Kodras most recent dive into Standard and some of the upcoming mechanics that will be arriving soon with Throne of Eldraine.

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