Aggrochat Archives - Page 82 of 103 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Enjoying Wildstar

May 3, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 55 – Calling All Bloggers

This week I start off the show, and even title it with a pretty massive plug for the Newbie Blogger Initiative. What is the NBI you ask? Well this is the time of the year when Veteran bloggers support new folks wanting to get started in this madness. This year we are making an extra special push to try and help new podcasters, youtubers, and streamers along with the bloggers. Additionally I myself am making a special push to try to rekindle the fire in some of our wayward bloggers who are no longer as regular as they used to be. The entire month of May is dedicated to helping folks get started and find their niche, and since most of the AggroChat crew have participated in the past, it is time to get the word out.

As far as the rest of the show we had myself, Tam, Ashgar, Kodra and Grace. As always we spent a good deal of time talking Final Fantasy XIV since we are all still heavily playing it. Right now Greysky Armada our Free Company is back holding the bronze medal again for being the third most active Free Company on our server Cactuar. This week also saw myself and Grace spending some more time playing some more Wildstar. The Black Dagger Society the guild I am connected to has been having a guild night on Fridays and as such I have started joining in the festivities. Additionally there was talk of Marvel Heroes, Diablo 3, Ashgar returning to his Gameboy Advance roots, Tam winning his first Infinity tournament since the move, and similarly Kodra beating VVVVVV for the first time in his new place. Since this month is devoted to Shadowrun for the Gameclub we are also starting to play some of this. It was a fun show in spite of being in that pre-E3 gaming doldrum.

Making Progress

I’ve been down a bit on raiding lately in my posts so I wanted to take a moment to give a bit of an update of sorts. The Tuesday before last was very seriously one of the worst nights of raiding I have had in a very long time. It really made me question if I wanted to keep trying to raid in World of Warcraft, and I posted this long discussion about it. It seems like I actually gave voice to some of the same feelings that many of our raid had been having, but for whatever reason had not actually talked about. As a result a dialog has started among some of the members, and I have to say I think things are starting to improve. Tuesday this week was still a pretty rough night, but it felt at least somewhat better. Thursday however on the other hand felt really good. We were a much trimmed down group due to some absences but I also felt like we were working better as a team. We lowered the bar slightly and worked on normal content again, clearing everything we had ever cleared before in a single night and putting in some serious work on the forge encounter.

If we had another hour of attempts I feel like we probably could have downed the encounter. Things were flowing so much better than they ever had before. We were getting through to the second phase, and then approaching it with a sense of direction and purpose. We were alternating between burning down the Elementalists and focusing down the waves of adds. We managed to push through to the final phase, and if we were at our full numbers we might have been able to defeat it. I think we learned a lot of good lessons that we can hopefully apply this Tuesday. The thing is… I am feeling something that I have not felt in a very long time… the desire to get back in there and give it another shot. I am actually looking forward to raiding in World of Warcraft this week, and that is a pretty awesome thing. Maybe just maybe we can make the changes necessary in the raid to make it a better experience for all of us. At this point I am glad I said something, and started the discussion. I guess the truth is if you are not having a good time, chances are you aren’t the only one.

Enjoying Wildstar

Similarly this week I have been enjoying quite a bit of Wildstar. I am still taking it nice and slow, but at this point I am level 16 with just a short ways to go to 17. I have officially finished the Algoroc zone and will be moving into the next area. The Black Dagger Society has been awesome to me, and I am super thankful to Chestnut and Chaide for giving me a friendly home to hang my hat in. It turns out that Friday nights are somewhat of a guild night for grouping, and they have been working on lower level content. Currently I do not have any other commitments Friday nights, so I am going to try and make that my Wildstar day. This week they ran me through the earliest Protostar dungeon, and it does a pretty great job of teaching you what you need to do to succeed in a Wildstar instance. Honestly I wish that this would have been the first dungeon when we were playing at launch, because I feel like it would have cleared up a lot of the frustrations had by many players.

The group we went into Wildstar with was made up of some pretty disparate points of view and skill levels. For some the extremely frenetic pace of the dungeons was a point of frustration especially as we were trying to learn “on the fly” all of the various things we were supposed to be doing. This dungeon eases the player in teaching them the various mechanics and then building upon them as the phases go, finally culminating in a boss fight that is fairly representative of what I saw in the “real” dungeons. While the dungeon is essentially a giant tutorial, it is still extremely fun and when a random stranger asked me if I wanted to join them… I happily ran it again. The other big switch I have made is previously I was focusing entirely on tanking as the warrior and now I am starting to build out my dps abilities as well. In most games I level as tanky as much as anything else in an effort to be as survivable as I can be for fighting the named encounters. In this game I feel almost more survivable playing DPS as I do as a tank. Essentially the amount of damage I deal more than makes up for the extra damage I might be receiving. I am still pleasantly surprised that I am enjoying Wildstar as much as I actually am. Pretty happy I decided to give it another shot.

Grand Experiment – Year Two

April 26, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 54 – Darkest Dungeon Show

This evening we held the third episode of the AggroChat Game Club where we talk about my pick the early access rogue-like Darkest Dungeon. I personally chose this game because so many of my friends had been talking about it, and purposefully delayed playing it in the thoughts of this eventually becoming an AggroChat title. The result is that each of us played the game slightly different, and walked away with a very different perspective and feeling about the game. Some of us loved it, but even among those that loved it… we brought with it a completely different outlook and as such a different reaction. Of course some of us absolutely hated the game, enough to actually Alt-F4 out of the window.

The end result however is what I feel like our most successful game club title to date, because it certainly spurred on some conversation. Next months title is announced towards the end of the broadcast and I am sure it will be an equally interesting discussion. As for my own feelings… I really enjoyed the game, but it seems like I might be the most heartless bastard on the planet when it comes to how I treated my dungeoneers. Some of my co-hosts developed bonds to their spelunkers and for me… they were just fodder to be thrown at the problem like minions in a Dungeon Keeper game. Of all the games we have played for the game club so far this is the one that I am most likely to visit and keep playing, but I might be waiting until it exits early access. There are certain things in the game that I don’t know if they are broken or simply that they have not been finished yet.

Grand Experiment – Year Two

Two years ago today I set about to change the nature of my blog and embarked upon what I termed the “Grand Experiment” which was more than anything blogging every single day no matter if I had a thought in my mind worth writing down on paper. Now 730 posts later I continue to question what I was thinking when I started down this road. The end result has been an interesting ride to say the least. What has happened more than anything during these last two years is that I have gotten closer with the community of my fellow bloggers. This has been more important than anything else to me, and it is through all of the various events like the upcoming Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015 that it is happened. So while I question if I did anything that really mattered over these last two years, I am thankful for every single reader and peer that I now have. There are lots of bloggers that write daily, and they have not made a big deal about it… but for me this was huge. If you scan back through my blog there are several six month long lapses in content… and very rarely did I actually make it through a month without having a week with zero posts.

It has been so much more than just writing a blog for me personally. I have allowed myself to open up more about myself and my life than I ever had to date online. I’ve talked about my personal struggles, and shared with you my excitement and joy. I’ve let you all into my life, and while I still for the most part am scant on the details… you are seeing the impression of something very real that is happening. I figured out early into this process that there would be days when I simply don’t have anything game related to talk about. There would be days that I would have something on my chest that I needed to get out there, right or wrong… and I am thankful that you all have supported me. I’ve been told that for many people my blog post is now part of their morning ritual, and if they get to work… and don’t see one they start to worry if something happened to me. The first day I was late with a post and I had a deluge of people pinging me over twitter and IM to make sure I was okay… was absolutely overwhelming.

Year Three

So tomorrow I begin the third year of this journey. There are days I question myself why I am doing this… what exactly I am trying to prove. The thing is I don’t really have an answer for either of those things. I enjoy this connection that I have to my readers, no matter how ephemeral it might be. There are days that I am doing this as therapy, other days doing it to share my excitement that I might burst if I don’t get it out onto the page… and in other days… the days I cannot seem to find the words, I am struggling forward for you. I feel like we have this contract, that I will write and you will read and together we will have this connection. I don’t want to be the one to sever that connection. I don’t want to be the one who lets down my end of this contract. So I will keep living and experiencing and doing my hack job of sharing that experience with you. This time next year I have no clue what I might be talking about… but I hope to still be talking and looking forward to our next journey.

Now I ask something of you. Since we have been sharing these moments each morning for some time… tell me about what you have done over these two years. Granted a lot of you have blogs of your own and they are in my RSS reader that I consume at irregular intervals like drinking from a giant firehose of words. But some of you out there have been with me this entire trip, and have never commented. I would love to hear from some of you, and let me know how your life has changed over these last two years. I might not even know you yet, but I would like to. What major changes has my readership gone through while I have been on this journey. I’ve upset a few people along the way, some of which have blocked me out of their lives… but I have gained several orders of magnitude more friends along the journey. That is the really important thing to me… all of the friends I have to show for my trip, and that I still keep in contact with on a weekly basis. You are the ones that give me the drive to keep moving forward, and hopefully this next year will be a fun trip shared together.

Six Years of Aggronaut

April 19, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #53 – Get Hyped

This week we are without Tamrielo and Rae for various reasons, but joining us once again are the ever amazing Grace and Thalen. For awhile I thought we would be missing Kodra, but he shows amazing determination and podcasted anyways. This is the week that he moved across country from Atlanta area to Seattle, and thanks to the magic of living in the same apartment complex as Tam, was able to “borrow a cup of internet” and a chair and pretty much everything else needed to make the podcast function. This weeks episode is called “Get Hyped” because we spend a lot of time getting hyped about various things we are excited about.

During the course of the episode we talk about so many board games in the wake of International Tabletop Day. This discussion managed to make a very sleeply Kodra awake enough to continue podcasting. We also talk about how amazing the new Netflix Original Daredevil series is. We talk about the Star Wars The Force Awakens trailer that was released, and cannot get through a single podcast without talking about the new tidbits of information floating about regarding the Heavensward expansion that is looming ever closer. I talk about the new Wildstar promotion asking players to buy up “dead stock” and get rewarded heavily for it. Some see it as an act of desperation but personally I see it as an act of sheer genius. I also go on at length about how great the new Wardrobe system is in Rift. It was a super fun podcast to record, and as such we ran fairly late.

Six Years of Aggronaut

This week a fairly important anniversary slipped by without me realizing it. The funny thing is that I even went so far as to make a Google reminder on my phone… but then Friday ended up being an exceptionally busy day and I just plain “forgot”. Friday April 17th was the sixth anniversary of my blog. On April 17th of 2009 I made my first post on this blog, and it was a rather simple “Hello World”, but still it was the beginning of something that would ultimately be my obsession for a large chunk of these six years. Now a much more important anniversary is coming up at the end of the month, when I mark two years of daily posting. Tales of the Aggronaut was not by any means my first blog, but it was the one that I stuck with. It began its life as a World of Warcraft blog, and ultimately turned into a Rift blog… and then when I realized I could not sustain it as a single game blog became what you know and hopefully love today. Throughout all of it however it has more than anything been a blog about me, and surprisingly does an excellent job of tracking what I happen to be thinking and feeling at a given time through my reaction to things happening in the games I love.

According to Google Analytics I have had almost 100,000 readers during the time I have been writing this blog. This is the more important stat for me, because it means I have reached almost 100,000 people in one way or another. Granted these statistics don’t reflect the folks who choose to read my blog over RSS, but more than anything I wanted to come clean about my numbers for various reasons. We are heading towards the Newbie Blogger Initiative and I always get the impression that people seem to think I have this wildly popular blog. I have had some insane bumps like the one from WoW Insider that skews all of my statistics. On that day I had over 6000 readers in a single day, but that was during a different time in MMO gaming. On a good day once you combine both RSS and traditional analytics I maybe have 500 readers. So while I will never be the media celebrity that some of my friends seem to think I am… I am thankful for each and every person who feels connected enough to me to read me on a regular basis. Sure I write this blog as a form of self therapy at times… but in truth it is my amazing readers that keep me going on mornings that I simply do not feel like writing anything. Thank you all for your attention, and I hope I can still live up to whatever expectations you might have of me for the next six years.

Piddling in Wildstar

I admit I have allowed myself to get pulled in by the latest Wildstar promotion. It all started as a way of doing some research for a story I was writing for MMOGames. However in the rush to find copies of Wildstar to see how many were actually out there in the wild… I ended up picking a few up myself. Now above you can see me proudly sporting the Marauder outfit and riding my Glitterkitty hoverboard. While I loved playing Chua I never really felt all that at home with the Dominion. I remember watching the original trailer to Wildstar and felt an immediate kinship to the Exiles. However most of my friends at launch wanted to play Dominion so I went along with it. That said by the time I left after my initial months I was too annoyed with the game to make a faction swap feasible. There was just something I didn’t really like about Wildstar and I never really could put my finger on it.

Coming back I am actually enjoying myself quite a bit, but I have not hit the Whitevale wall yet that I did previously. Also I feel like as much as I enjoyed having two robot buddies following me around at all times… the Engineer was really just not my type of character. This time around I am focusing on a tanky warrior, and having a significant bit more fun doing it. I can’t say I will play for a super long time but I have hooked up with Chestnut and Chaide and am hanging my hat with the Black Dagger Society. There is rarely a time when I am just playing one game, so I feel like this might be enjoyable to revisit every now and then. For me I generally have a base of operations in one game… and that game is Final Fantasy XIV and then I venture out into other titles as well. Since World of Warcraft is no longer holding my attention I have been spending more time in Wildstar and Rift for those “off nights”.

Dark Knights and Brayflox

April 12, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 52 – FFXIV Story Spoiler Show

Since August 2013 Final Fantasy XIV has been a fairly significant part of our lives. While we had a break in there, we have been in place for at least the last eight months soaking up every ounce of content that Square Enix can throw at us. Throughout this game the story of the game has been a constant topic of conversation among the aggrochat crew and friends. Each time a new tidbit of story was released it would start rampant speculation as to where the story might be going. As we made our way through the current patches content, I think it is safe to say that none of us could have guessed how this would have ended.

As the credits rolled on the conclusion of the 2.0 storyline… the first reaction is that you absolutey have to talk to someone about it. This week we do a complete no holds barred spoiler filled romp through the Final Fantasy XIV storyline to date, talking about its conclusion and some of the elements from previous patches that might play into the future of the Heavensward expansion. If you have not reached the climax of this story arc, then I highly suggest you file this show away and return to it later. During most shows we try really hard not to directly spoil any content, and we will be returning to that next week. This week… we need to get this out of our systems, and if you have finished the storyline, chances are you do too.

Dark Knights and Brayflox

We talk about this a bit at the end of the show but yesterday they had a big live letter at like 3 in the morning my time, going over more details about the Heavensward expansion including some concrete details about the new jobs and how they would be starting. For some time they had said that they would not be starting at level 1, and that they did not have classes backing up the jobs. We speculated what that meant, and started to wonder if this would mean like other jobs they would start at level 30. Sure enough as per the slide above this has now been confirmed that new jobs will in fact start at 30, which means these new classes will be cutting their teeth on the likes of Brayflox. Another interesting tidbit is that apparently in order to experience these new jobs, or the new Heavensward content… you are going to have to have completed the main story through the conclusion in 2.55.

This is quite honestly a shocking devotion to their storyline and one that I stand behind whole heartedly. One of the things that frustrated me about the Warlords of Draenor launch is the fact that it felt like they were essentially abolishing everything from the previous expansions from both a class standpoint by giving everyone a free level 90, and from a crafting standpoint in that you can level from 1 to max level through the garrison system. Sure this is going to create a barrier between new players and the content that players are now playing… but I have a feeling that Square Enix like always is going to find a way to make the old world content relevant. One of the slide bullet points that I have not been able to find much explanation about says something to the effect of “2.0 content adjustments”. So I hope this does in fact mean that we will have reasons to keep returning to older stuff.

Decisions Decisions

One of the slides that I saw that made me the happiest was that there are apparently eight new dungeons with the launch of the content. Now I have no clue how many of these will be “leveling” dungeons and how many will be “end game” dungeons. We also know that the expansion will be launching with the Alexander raid, and two primal encounters Ravana and Bismark. I know that over the course of 2.0 they introduced something like 18 new dungeons and I believe 16 trials. So I feel like eight dungeons is a pretty good place to be launching considering how much content gets added over time. Right now I am finding myself pretty torn in that I am not sure which direction I really want to take. I have waned to play a Dark Knight since the moment my friends first started trying to convince me to play Final Fantasy XIV. Now that I have it however… I am just thinking about much much fun I have running content as a warrior.

I know without a doubt that I will have both at 60 and well geared, but I am not really certain which one I am going to push up first. So quite honestly right now… a lot of this is going to depend on how much enjoyment I get out of the Dark Knight once early release starts. I doubt we are going to get any sort of a test realm to play with them on. I wish that were the case because I feel like Dark Knight is eight going to be a class I immediately love, or a class that I can’t really stand to play. The whole spell tank thing can go in either direction, but if it ends up being more akin to the Shadowknight or the Deathknight… then I am all a bout it. If the end result feels very casterly… then I will most likely just stick to smashing things with my axe. Basically I feel like either this is going to be the class that I have always wanted to play… or the class that Tam has always wanted to play. However I feel like one of us is going to end up disappointed.