Aggrochat Archives - Page 90 of 103 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Opening the Mines

November 30, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #33 – Crafting, Puzzles and Raven

Last night we had a special guest on AggroChat that may turn into a more permanent addition, but for not we are playing that by ear. Raven is a friend that I initially met through Twitter but we all have become close to through our time spent in Final Fantasy XIV. She has been awesome with offering to fill in with her characters whenever we happen to need them for our guilds semi-regular shenanigans. With Rae’s recent absence from the show I had been kicking around the idea of bringing on another person, and thankfully Raven showed some interest in doing it. Hopefully she had as much fun as the rest of us did, and she brought some interesting takes on the topics we discussed.

Last night was a massive meandering show where we talked about some of our favorite puzzle games at length even dredging things up like Tetris Attack. We talked about the Road Not Taken, which is quite possibly the most depressing puzzle rpg ever. We talk Super Smash brothers, and do a horrible job at trying to guess Ashgar’s favorite character. We talk about Kodra’s experience playing Dragon Age Origins and how he is ultimately playing a completely different game than I ever managed to play. We fall into a giant Final Fantasy XIV crafting discussion, since Raven is the pocket expert on the topic. Finally I discuss my frustrations with Molten Core 40 man LFR from this past Tuesday and how it really does make players not ever want to do 40 man again.

As I am writing this post I am still editing away on the episode or more so the audio is rendering. We ran really long, but at this point I am not quite sure how long. We might have ultimately recorded our very first two hour long episode… this may or may not be a good thing. I think everything flowed extremely naturally with our newest guest host, so hopefully that can be a thing that happens more often. Even if not I am extremely grateful for Raven filling in and offering her views on the completely unprepared list of topics. Our complete and total lack of organization would throw some people off, but she took to it like a champ.

Opening the Mines

My initial goal upon reaching level 100 was to be able to get geared for the impending opening of the first raid, that happens this Tuesday. As such for the better part of a week I have been well over the 630 required cap to get into raiding. Additionally I have been helping out various players that needed another dps or tank for doing their own heroic gearing. Now however I am taking a bit of a step back and working on some of my alts. Right now my goal is to get each of them to the level where they get their Tier 2 Town Hall and with it a mine and a profession hub. Since I have an army of level 90 characters, this is going to take awhile but it should allow other tradeskill materials to start flowing in naturally on all of my characters. As such I worked up Exeter my blacksmith and miner first with the hopes of eventually using him to fuel some of my gear on my warrior. That said by the time I get around to making that gear I might already have epics in those slots. In any case I now have his T2 Town Hall and T2 Mine so he is finally self sufficient in the creation of truesteel ingots.

Next I am opting to work on my leatherworker/skinner Worgen Druid Belgarou. I noticed that most of the smithing patterns also require leather, so as such I need someone that can bring it back in large quantities. Last night while recording the podcast I worked on getting the druid through the opening sequence at the dark portal, and now I am working through the various early areas of Shadowmoon Valley. Unfortunately this character does not have an heirloom weapon, and the lower attack damage is noticeable. My hope is that I can limp by with enough gear gained through the various treasure hunts in the zone. I am also having to relearn how to play a feral druid… which feels a bit strange these days. It feels like I only really have one attack button, and a bunch of optional attacks. That said I should probably research that class further, because my survival seems to be lacking at times.

Exciting Guests All Around

Now comes the time to be extremely vague. This morning I am recording the next episode of Bel Folks Stuff, and for those who have not been listening to them.. it is where I grab a personality in our community and talk to them about the various things that are important to them. Previously I have had Gypsy Syl and Rowan Blaze on… and this guest is going to be just as awesome. The thing is I am honestly a bit nervous about it. Syl and Rowan I have gamed with or at the very least hung out on voice chat with… so were both super familiar to me. This guest is someone I have the utmost of admiration for… but have never actually cross paths with in any games. I am sure it will end up being fine, as when I close the office door and go into serious recording mode… I seem to never have a shortage of anything to talk about. That said I think you guys will be absolutely pumped over who I have for a guest this time.

Similarly my hope is to turn this episode around much more quickly than the previous ones. I sat on the recording with Rowan for a good month, and as such it ended up kinda bizarre as we talked about a few issues… that were resolved or at least changed during Blizzcon. Right now I am tentatively planning on having this third episode of Bel Folks Stuff out if at all possible by this coming Friday. That should give me time to edit and fiddle and get things ready for the public, but hopefully still keep it from sounding outdated like the one with Rowan did. I don’t have that huge of an installed listener base yet, but this is mostly something I am doing for my own sake and enjoyment rather than for any sort of internet fame. Then again all of the things I do are mostly for my own entertainment.

The Month is Over

This morning I am thankful that the month is done. This was hands down one of the hardest challenges I have done on my blog. There were so many mornings that I was completely finished with the post and starting at the above logo not sure what to write about under it. The first few days were rather easy, but after that I kept struggling to find something else to say… that also somehow related back to my post. I think I mostly succeeded but there are times when it really is difficult to count your blessings. I think I wrote some really solid blurbs during the month, some of which that maybe even surprised me a bit. That said I am more than happy to close the book on this little chapter and move on to the next thing whatever it might be. Thanks for riding along with me on this journey.

Things Did For Loot

November 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #32 – Azeroth, Mordor and Beyond

Normally Sunday mornings I talk about the happenings from the night before when we record our weekly episode of AggroChat. However yesterday it just didn’t really fit the theme of the post, so I opted to push off advertising it on my blog until this morning. We recorded for roughly two hours, but thankfully after I edited it was condensed to only an hour and twenty minutes… which is far more reasonable. It is always strange when we go into a show with what we feel like is not a lot to talk about… and then a show happens and it ends up being a length one. I feel like some of those are the most natural because the conversation just went where it needed to go without our direction.

We talked about a dizzying range of games from Shadows of Mordor and Tam and Kodras views on the game. They both still say it is very much a “bel game” and at this point I am planning on picking it up hopefully when it goes on sale during the Steam Christmas Sale. It does look really interesting, and I like the seeming focus on mechanics rather than story. We once again delve into a discussion about 4X games namely Beyond Civilization, Civilization 5 and Endless Legend. Similarly there is a length discussion about our feelings surrounding Dragon Age Inquisition and Kodra has finally made some progress in Dragon Age Origins. Finally I talk at length about my experiences returning to World of Warcraft as I gush about finally having a strong female in World of Warcraft that is not also moments away from being turned into a raid boss. Seriously if you have not followed the Yrel character you should check her out.

Things Did For Loot

My focus this weekend entirely was getting geared up enough to be able to do Molten Core on Tuesday night with the guild. Since this is a 40 man looking for group experience… and various members of them guild have said it took upwards of three hours to complete… we are wanting to try and pull in as many people as possible Tuesday night so we can hopefully carry the random players to a rapid victory. The only problem is that in order to join in the fun, you have to have 615 ilevel. Unless you had some extreme luck with item upgrades in Nagrand, it is not exactly easy to hit that kind of level without a lot of dungeoning. Arria and several others kept telling me that I needed to PVP in order to get my ilevel up high enough to run Molten Core, but at first I rejected this notion entirely. However after a period of time without a guild group online that I thought we could make dungeoning work… I resorted to queuing for battlegrounds.

Over the course of the weekend I ran enough battlegrounds to be able to purchase a neckpiece and bracers at roughly 1250 honor each. I have to say… I actually enjoyed myself, and it shocks me just as much to be able to say those words. Remember I have gone on length diatribes about how faction based combat destroys a sense of community. The thing is… battlegrounds are not open world pvp and I did not enjoy Ashran the open world pvp zone at all. The strange thing is that I have quite literally not PVP’d in World of Warcraft since Burning Crusade other than once or twice here needed for some holiday achievement. Once upon a time I was part of an Arena team if you can believe that, with the sole purpose of gearing my paladin in some healing gear. It is strange how cyclical things are… in Burning Crusade PVP gear was extremely useful for PVE purposes… and now in Warlords the exact same thing has happened. I guess I don’t mind PVP so much when I know there is a loot piñata at the end of my efforts.

Heroic-palooza

Between the two pieces of PVP gear I was able to bump my ilevel up high enough to be able to do Molten Core. However yesterday I spent most of the day running Heroics with the guild. The strange thing is that I tagged along as dps. It feels so strange that sword and board gladiator is actually viable dps, and for most of the runs I was competitive with the person sitting in first place on the meters. The awesome thing about this is that the gear needed to tank and needed to Gladiator dps are essentially the game. Bonus Armor it turns out is just as much of a DPS boost for Gladiator as it is survival for Defensive. All of this makes me wonder if we will see a resurgence of viable specs to allow tanks to tank as Arms or Fury like they used to back in Vanilla WoW. In any case I ran Bloodmaul Slag Mines, Grimrail Depot, Auchindoun, The Everbloom and Skyreach and between them I managed to get several upgrades.

I feel like I need to take a moment to praise Blizzard for the changes to the way that personal loot works. I made a comment the other day on twitter when they removed personal loot as the default for pugs, that going back to need before green only really helped the trolls. It turns out that they just felt they needed to tweak personal loot a bit before returning it to the dungeons, which ultimately they hotfixed back in within a days time. The new version is extremely awesome, because no matter how bad your luck is early in the dungeon… the final boss will always drop an item for your spec. Mostly what makes the system great is there are no more instances of unusable loot. Granted what you get may not actually be an upgrade, but we did several runs with nothing but plate wearers… and no leather rotted in the dungeon.

Finally a Worthy Helm

Over the course of the weekend I went from 609 ilevel to a respectable 623 and I feel that I am fully ready for Molten Core tomorrow. I am not sure if I will be called on to tank or to dps, but in either scenario I feel comfortable thanks to the fact that Gladiator dps is esentially just tanking without the taunts. One of the things that I have tried to be religious about is doing my crafting and resource workorders in my Garrison. The primary one is the Gearspring Parts needed for engineering, or in truth every single tradeskill that makes things seems to have a limited resource that can be sped up significantly through the use of your Garrison. This expansion has returned to having an exceptionally useful helm gained through engineering, and this time it is upgradeable three steps to make it competitive with raid gear.

This morning I managed to collect the last of the 100 Gearspring Parts needed to craft it, and finally I have a helmet that is worth of displaying helm. Traditionally I run around sans helmet, because in truth World of Warcraft has pretty much nothing but ugly helms. These goggles however are fantastic, and I am proud to let my engineer flag fly high. Unfortunately I am going to have to figure out a way to get savage blood, which I am afraid that I do not have a source of it in that I did not build the barn. Since it is a tradeable resource my hope is that I will be able to obtain it through an alt. Honestly my biggest hope is that eventually they add it to the primal spirit vendor at a significant loss, so that I can use my stockpile of those. In any case I feel like I am fully ready for the rigors of raiding, but still have plenty of upgrades that I can get from heroics.

My Routine

There are mornings I have an idea immediately and others that I struggle to find purpose in my writing. There is something about being under pressure to write a post each morning that makes it work for me. I’ve long found that on the weekends I dawdle considerably more and struggle to get a post out. Whereas in the morning as I am drinking my morning coffee if I just start writing a post materializes before I really know fully what I am going to write about. As such for this mornings thankfulness post, I am thankful for my routine. I am thankful that I embarked upon this journey over a year ago, and thankful that I realized that the morning would actually be a viable time for me to write. Writing a post feels like I am starting the day having already accomplished something, which in turn I feel makes the day as a whole a better one. May each of you also find the routine that works for you.

Holiday Countdown

November 10, 2014 by Belghast

Gone Viral

Yesterday did not go as planned in any sense of the word. Well to be honest the morning went pretty smoothly and I had a rather relaxing go at piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV while doing laundry. However that all changed mid afternoon as we started battling a virus infection on my wife’s laptop. The night before she had some weirdness going on with several DllHost.exe in memory consuming lots of system resources. She rebooted and it seemed to go away at least temporarily. However yesterday morning the virus scanner picked something up and deleted it… which seemed to only cause things to escalate from there. She started getting errors in Powershell which to the best of my knowledge we never actually installed on her system.

It seems as though a new strain of something called Trojan.Poweliks had gone out into the wild on the 8th and she had the bad luck to hit the wrong site and the wrong time and contract it. For a bit we thought maybe it had been stopped, as the virus scanner found several items and correctly identified them as Poweliks. Strange thing is that this only seemed to piss off the system, as constantly more things were popping up with the same infection. Finally around 10pm we decided to just wipe the system taking the “nuke it from orbit” approach. So that is precisely what I did after watching Walking Dead. At least this solves one problem… as that laptop had a 32bit version of Windows 7 on it… which prevented us from giving her some more ram. Problem solved.

Dragoon Legs

Since the 2.4 patch release I have been on an insatiable quest to finish out the level 100 Dragoon set from Syrcus Tower. Sure I could get better items from the soldiery vendor, but at this point it is a matter of principle. I have gathered up every item but one, the legs that drop from Amon the next to last boss. At this point I can run Syrcus Tower in my sleep, as I have quite literally been in there three to five times a night. I have seen the legs drop exactly three times… each of those times I had the misfortune of being in the same dungeon with another dragoon. Each time I lost, one of them by a single point on the roll. Essentially these legs have become the bane of my existence… but I am not giving up, not by a long shot. I know that the moment I switch classes and start running Syrcus as my bard… the legs will drop on the very first time and go uncontested to another Dragoon.

One of the interesting options you have as part of the Duty Roulette is that you can check the “join party in progress” check box… meaning in theory you could get dumped into a partially cleared instance. I actually managed to luck out twice with this… the second time they were on Zande the final boss in the raid. Now when you join it dumps you at the beginning of the instance and you have to take a teleporter that brings you relatively close to the boss that the group is working on. Apparently they pulled before I could get there so the above picture is me dancing the Manderville as the final meteor plummets towards the party. The funny thing is that I still got to roll on all of the items that dropped even though I got locked out of the encounter. While I didn’t win anything… this was the easiest 15 poetics and 20 soldiery I have ever earned.

Holiday Countdown

xmascountdown

It feels like this has been the year of gaming blogosphere events. The first was the always awesome Newbie Blogger Initiative, then I had my own super successful Blaugust, and Izlain just wrapped up Bragtoberfest, and now the ever amazing MMO Gypsy is wanting to create a virtual advent calendar. It seems there is tradition in her area of the world of the “Advent Window” where each member of a town or village decorates their home to represent a day of the advent season, the days leading up to Christmas Day. In a way we are a virtual village, with our blogs representing our homes and the town being made up of the gaming blogosphere as a whole. The idea that she talks about in her blog is that for each of us to create a post on an assigned day highlighting all of the positive things about the gaming community.

If you have a blog and are interested in participating, you can sign up by either leaving a comment in the post announcing it, or dropping Syl a line on twitter. I have been informed that since I helped with the logo, that I had no choice but to participate. Of course I would have signed up anyways, but I will just let Syl think she has some serious pull to order me around like that. I think it is going to be a really interesting event, and hopefully we can come up with some way of visualizing the days of the month to carry out the window on the world feel. All of the specifics about the topic, title, how you get your day assigned can be found in the original post. We have had so much negativity this year in the broader gaming community, and as such it is up to us the gaming bloggers to show that there are still positive voices in our world.

Gaming Blogosphere

While it was not my original intent, I am ending up making thankfulness posts that ultimately relate to the topic I just posted. Similarly this morning I am extremely thankful to be a member of the Gaming Blogosphere. That term in itself is a fairly ephemeral thing, because it means so many different things to so many different people. Ultimately it was the Blog Azeroth folks that gave me the spark to start Aggronaut.com so many years ago. Like so many Tales of the Aggronaut started as a single focus blog, with my intent being focused on World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking. However this shifted focus to being a general tanking blog, with some raid leadership topics… and then ultimately abandoning being World of Warcraft focused at all. At each step of my journey I have had supportive voices cheering me on from the community, and were it not for them I likely would have fallen completely into obscurity.

For a long time it felt as though we didn’t have a very strong sense of community out here in the “not entirely devoted to World of Warcraft” blog space. However the events I talked about in this post have helped to create a much more cohesive sense of community. This combined with the fact that this year we launched The Gaming and Entertainment Network has given me a deeper sense of belonging to something larger than just myself. I am deeply thankful for the other bloggers that I interact with on a near daily basis, and thankful that they have for some reason accepted me into their good graces. You have been a supportive voice when I desperately needed one, and I am so thankful to have all of you.

So Many Feels

November 9, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode #30

I still cannot fathom that we have made it thirty episodes into our podcast and are still apparently going strong. Technically it is 31 weeks since we started this adventure, because we missed one week for various sundry reasons. What shocks me the most is that we still have listeners and that it seems like we keep picking up new ones along the way. I feel Sally Field screaming “You Like Me, You Really Like Me!” but in this case its the Us that is liked not necessarily me. AggroChat is really about pushing record on the type of conversations we have always had over voice chat on a near nightly basis. We are unscripted and unprepared and yet still seem to never had a drought of things to discuss.

This week we go through a whirlwind of topics including: Magic the Gathering Online, Infinity Minatures Game, Dawngate being cancelled, Blizzcon, Overwatch, and the constant frustration over Gnomes being the butt of every joke. I think we were all caught off guard by the news surrounding Overwatch. If you remember several weeks back we speculated as to what might be announced, and while we brought up an FPS we just as quickly dismissed that ideal. The FPS genre is pretty stagnant so I didn’t see much room where Blizzard could improve upon it. Here is hoping this is not the case because the gameplay footage I have seen has me absolutely intrigued. Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was my favorite competitive shooter, and here is hoping that they bring this same level of detail and strategy to the maps. Also hoping that by some token I can manage to score a beta invite.

So Many Feels

If you recall yesterday I talked about the “Blizzcon Spirit” and how that this year I had not really felt it. Well last night it struck with a vengeance. My friend Syl mentioned the Looking For Group documentary and how good it was over twitter. I had already planned on watching it at some point, because I am a sucker for documentaries… especially fan produced ones. I have to say it is so amazingly good, and I am glad that something like that exists. The negative is I am absolutely overwhelmed with feels about Blizzard, World of Warcraft and the community surrounding it. Had it not been super late last night I probably would have logged into the game the moment the documentary had finished if for no reason other than to visit my characters. The documentary is like some crazy aphrodisiac that makes you love World of Warcraft again. One viewing and you will be wanting to scream “For The Alliance!” or horde if that is your persuasion.

Then the reality sets in… that all the same problems I have had with the game, and the players and just years of history… are all still there. If I could return to a snapshot in time, when we were still raiding Icecrown Citadel as the Duranub Raiding Compny… I would do it in a heartbeat. If I could return to a period in time when we were fighting to clear Ahn’Qiraj as the Late Night Raiders… I would also do that in a heartbeat. The problem is there are these epic vignettes of time where it would be amazing to return to and experience all the love and wonderment that existed in that little vacuum. Sad thing is none of those things exist… time happened, years of guild, server and raid drama happened. Folks don’t just stand still in one place, they evolve and move on with their lives.

Glory Days Revisited

When I log back into World of Warcraft amped up on Nostalgia… I feel just like that once upon a time Quarterback reliving their big homecoming win. That world that was meaningful to me and the people that I fought to protect and keep moving towards a goal… just don’t exist any longer, or at least they don’t exist in the same combination that they once did. I have tried to return to the game on two different times and rally the troops to rekindle the spirit that once made my guild a great place to be. Each time I end up frustrated that no one is wanting to work towards those ends with me. People are happy to exist in the comfortable place they have carved out once the epic nature of the game died away. The glory days really can’t be relived, at least not in the same way.

So here I stand wondering what exactly I will do. I know there is no going back, but part of me wishes there was. I have a paid subscription through December, and a fully paid expansion because they allowed me to order it a year ago when I was actually amped up about World of Warcraft once more. I have no idea if I will attempt to log in come release day, and start playing through the new content. One of the things about being open to change, means you can’t fully predict what you will do when a different set of stimulus is applied. I think my time leading the Warcraft House Stalwart is over, and it is time for them to find new leadership that can make them great again. That doesn’t preclude me from occasionally playing the role of war hero and popping my head in from time to time.

Feels

Since this post is in large part about feelings, and me struggling with them… I thought it was fitting to state that while often times frustrating… I am glad that I have them. It would suck to go through life with the inability to surrender to your emotions and get caught up in a moment. While society has attempted to teach me that it is somehow “unmanly” to feel emotion, and moreso be swayed by them… for whatever reason this indoctrination never actually took. I feel no shame in choking back tears during certain moments of a lot of movies. There is that moment where you just can’t help yourself, and that story of whatever you are watching has peeled back your layers of defense and landed a blow to your inner core. I embrace that I can empathize with people I have never met, and care even more deeply about them that they will likely ever realize. While it is often cool to be aloof and uncaring about things… I like to care, I like to know I am making a difference. So today I am thankful that I was raised with compassion and the ability to grant that same compassion to others.