Aggrochat Archives - Page 91 of 106 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Priestcraft

January 12, 2015 by Belghast

Podcasting Weekend

This weekend was a little bit crazy in that I recorded podcasts both Saturday and Sunday. In theory had things not fallen through I would have actually recorded a third one Friday. Podcasting is one of those things that is both soothing and stressful at the same time. I like having conversations and hitting the record button, but the follow up that results in editing what I just recorded… that can be the stressful part. I feel like Podcasting is very much a labor of love, that you either get or you don’t get. I would be curious to find out how many avid podcasters are also avid listeners of talk radio in one form of another. I personally have my car tuned to NPR pretty much 24/7 and donate each year during their big fund drive. I see the shows that I record as a bit of a logical extension of that.

The strange thing about once you start podcasting… is that it seems like you could end up recording on someone’s show every single day if you really wanted to. I’ve had to turn down several “gigs” because I felt like I was just spreading myself too thin. In fact this is one of the things that I talked about last night when recording the Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Petter Mårtensson. Ultimately I would love to be able to say yes to every single offer I got to co-host or guest host a new thing. I am in love with the idea that I am in essence making radio on subjects that are important to me. For the time being I am going to stick with weekly AggroChat, monthly Bel Folks Stuff and then guesting as the opportunities present themselves. I don’t think I have the energy or bandwidth to ever try and add a third permanent or semi permanent show to the lineup.

Priestcraft

My primary goal for this week was to be able to push my hunter Lodin to 100 and run LFR before the reset. This was achieved Friday and I was able to knock out the LFR Saturday morning to some pretty phenomenal success as I wrote about in yesterdays blog post. After completing that mission my goals shifted to a new target. There are two classes that I never though I would have at high levels.. the first of which is the Mage and as such I used my Warlords free 90 to get one. The second class however is the Priest, and when I came back to World of Warcraft at the tail end of Cataclysm… I had been gone long enough to qualify for a free level 80. This character I decided to make my tailor, and during Pandaria I managed to get it to 85 where it pretty much sat as a tradeskill alt parked in the Dwarven quarter of Stormwind. With the garrison system, currently the only craft that I do no have access to is tailoring, so I set my mind to fixing that.

As a result Saturday and Sunday I spent my time in game, apart from that doing my “Wizard Chores” working on my priest. I started off leveling as Discipline, because the last time I played the game this felt like the “survival” option for leveling. Things died relatively quickly and I didn’t spend all of my time healing myself back up after every fight. Shadow for whatever reason had never actually worked for me. Upon coming back however I found leveling as Discipline to be pure pain. I managed to get from 85 to 87 before I finally said screw it and decided to give Shadow a try again. Whatever changes and tweaks they have made, seem to have greatly improved shadows survival and I managed to knock out 87 through 88 in no time. So before I went to sleep last night, I had dinged 100 and equipped the set of Timeless Isle items that I had sitting in my bank. It is shocking just how many of these tokens I still have laying around, more than enough for all of my alts.

Pandaria Frustrations

The recent leveling excursions on both Lodin my hunter and Belglorian my priest have made me realize just how much I did not enjoy Pandaria as far as expansions go. Mind you it is not worth $60 to me to be able to skip it, but I am definitely finding myself taking the shortest possible path to get there. Right now my leveling process goes a little something like this. I try and milk as much leveling time out of Jade Forrest as I can get, because overall I like that zone about the best of anything to offer in Pandaria. My ultimate goal is to get to 87 through whatever means possible, and in theory most of the time I can hit that well before I leave Jade Forrest, worst case I have to do the quests leading up to Halfhill with Chen and LiLi to get there. Upon dinging 87 I ignore whatever quest line I happen to be on and make a beeline for the Path of a Hundred Steps, and take the quests there that lead you into Kun Lai Summit.

From this point on I am only in a zone as long as is required to unlock the quest that takes me to the next zone. So in Kun Lai I complete Binan village, Westwind Rest, Shado-Pan Fallback… which then gives me access to Winter’s Blossom granted me the quest chain that starts Townlong Steppes. In Townlong I don’t have an exact path really, I am essentially just waiting for the flight path to the Serpent Spine to open up as that grants access to the quest chain leading to the Dreadwastes. Generally speaking this means I will need to complete Gao-Ran Battlefront and Rensai’s Watchpost quests in Townlong before moving into the Dreadwastes. The goal of this path is to keep moving every time you can go into an area with quests for higher level mobs. Higher level quests mean better gear, better experience and a shorter amount of time in that zone before moving on. You have to essentially throw out all ideas of being a completionist with this method.

Granted this is something I only do to steamroll up alts to the level cap. When I am working on my main or characters in general that I deeply care about… I end up doing everything and prodding my way through zones. At this point however I have leveled so many characters through Pandaria that I just want to rip the bandaid off as fast as possible and move on to quest content that I am not bored with yet. In theory I will have to do Pandaria two more times on my alliance characters, and an unknown number of times on Horde characters if I actually get around to leveling some. I am not sure what it was about Pandaria that made me dislike it, but I have similar feelings about the Cataclysm. Draenor on the other hand has been awesome. I can choose to be a completionist and move my way through the content more methodically, or I can jump every two levels to a new zone to maximize my experience gain. There is no need to try and complete X number of hubs to unlock the hubs in the new zone. I feel like Cataclysm and Pandaria were both failed experiments in “quest gating” content, and my hope is that Draenor will become the new norm for future expansions of being less particular about completing certain quests before moving on.

The Luckiest Hunter

January 11, 2015 by Belghast

On Nightmares

Last night my wife and I apparently had fitful dreams. This morning she got up first and I had somewhat woken up by the time she returned to bed. She said she had nightmares, and at first I said I did to, but the more I thought about it… the more I questioned if I had a nightmare at all. What constitutes a Nightmare? Is it that you are dreaming about otherwise scary situations… or is it really about a loss of control. If it is the later then I most definitely did not have a nightmare, and quite honestly rarely have nightmares. This morning dreamt about a cult that had been abducting young girls, and when I attempted to get the police involved they didn’t believe me. So in true action movie fashion I took it upon myself to go track down their lair and try and rescue them.

Turned out the lair was in an abandoned cave system, maybe a mine. I worked my way through the various guards until I was in this big room and could see two people talking. The first of which I recognized as the actor Jason Alexander from Seinfeld fame. The other was like gargantuan man I somehow knew was known as the “ugly man” from a circus sideshow. He stood about eight foot tall and was covered in these disfiguring growths. Jason was yelling at him, to make sure no one got past him, and if they did there would be consequences. The big man was cowering… well at least as much as you can cower when you are eight foot tall. So I waited until Jason had left the room before stepping out into the shadows. I simply asked him his name.. too which he replied “no one ever asks my name… It’s Bob”.

I essentially reasoned with the gentle giant that what was going to happen was probably really bad and that Jason needed to be stopped. He agreed, and I snuck into the other room… originally planning on whacking him on the head with a baseball bat to disable him. But it turned out that it did not work as planned because he had some sort of metal plate in his head. Jason went to pick up a double barrel shotgun and while loading it I escaped to the earlier room… where Bob handed me what looked like an elephant gun. I drew a target on Jason and fired… taking him down… and saving the day. Sure there were tense moments… but during the dream there was never a situation where I felt out of control. So I guess the question is… was that even a nightmare? If you are wondering “Why Jason Alexander?” well best as I can tell is due to this super creepy episode of Criminal Minds where he plays this mastermind character… which is where the above image comes from.

AggroChat #39 – Pokemon, RNG and Roguevania

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat actually getting an earlier start than normal. Problem being that we were down two people. Rae had apparently fallen asleep on the couch and was not around, and Tam after moving three timezones apparently forgot how they work. We might have to sort out a better time to record in the coming weeks since there is now a three hour difference between various members of our cast. Something that I think is only going to get worse when another individual that seems likely to move out to Seatle does so. Last night it felt like one of those episodes where we didn’t have much to talk about going into it, but as the night went on we managed to gather up enough words and phrases to build a show out of it.

We covered a lot of topics from Steam being an excellent source for games that would have never likely seen the light of day, like the Japanese indie game scene, to discussing the raid fight style in FFXIV and contrasting it against World of Warcraft raiding. It always feels like we don’t talk about a lot of individual games but as I edited the podcast I kept a list jotting down the titles. Over the course of the evening we talked about Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, Rogue Legacy, Valdis Story, ittle Dew, World of Warcraft, Aquasphere and Adventure of Link and probably a handful mixed inbetween. It ended up being a good show, albeit a significantly shorter one considering we only had three people to discuss with rather than our normal five. This is the first show in a long time we have actually managed to constrain to roughly an hour.

The Luckiest Hunter

During each game and each expansion… there is one of my characters that seems to be lucky. Granted according to Tam each and every one of my characters is lucky, but I think that has more to do with his phenomenal bad luck more than my good luck. For Pandaria my lucky character seemed to be my druid. Everytime I set foot in any LFR or Raid… he seemed to get drops. This expansion it is looking to be Lodin, my hunter because yesterday in LFR I managed to get five drops with no roll tokens used… meaning I got a drop out of all but two of the bosses. I walked away with helm, bracers, gloves, boot, and a ring. When you add to the three crafted pieces I already had… I am sitting at roughly 627. I have yet to do any dungeons, so at some point I will finish the epic ring quest and get that which should help the ilevel significantly. I have once again completely skipped the heroic gearing step.

Mostly I have been doing this to prove a point. Heroics right now are not worth doing other than for achievements and the occasional Inn Quest. The daily heroic is worth a small bit of gold… the most you can possibly get is 200g and 50 Garrison resources. I can get both of those easier by simply running high level garrison missions, or using the various buildings in my garrison. In the past there was a clear reason to be running heroic content, in that you needed to run them to cap Valor that you then spent on upgrades. That system seems to be completely absent in Draenor, and as such there simply isn’t the same impetus to keep running heroics over and over. In fact as I have proven on two different characters you can pretty much skip them entirely and go straight into LFR and get your gear that way. I hope in 6.1 they give us further reason to want to run heroics, because right now the risk vs reward equation is completely broken.

Land of the Lost and Found

January 4, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #38 – New Year, New Season

I have to say it has felt a little strange to take an entire week off from recording AggroChat. Before Christmas we recorded roughly three hours of audio, that then got edited down into two episodes. As such we took last Saturday off, and it felt a bit odd coming back and recording this week. When you are on break you live in this strange time where the days don’t really have the same meaning that they do normally. I found it funny that mid day yesterday Tam asked what we were going to talk about last night… because we never really have a plan. In truth since he has been moving across country over the break, he didn’t get in much play time at anything… so questioned if he had anything to add to the conversation. However like always once the conversation started we seemed to be able to come up with plenty to talk about.

The funniest theme of last night was that apparently Kodra played nothing but sad games over the break. So each game he talked about… Tam gave it a rating of like 6 Sads out of 10. Not unsurprising Ashgar played a lot of Pokemon as did Tam and I. There was much Final Fantasy XIV to be had, and I talked about my conversion to a semi serious raider again in World of Warcraft. Once again we ran significantly longer than normal, but I think in part that is because the mega 3 hour show threw our timing off. After editing it clocks in around an hour and a half, and I think there is some really good conversation in there. Of course there are still some references that no one but the five of us will ever really get… but when I realize one of these has happened I try and make some measure of explanation. This is what happens when you get long time friends in a room and have a conversation.

Land of the Lost and Found

One of my downtime activities while recording our podcast has been going out to the Isle of Giants in Pandaria and farming dinosaur bones. At this point I have 7007 of the needed 9999 to get the Bone-White Primal Raptor. For weeks after dinging 100, it was just me out there dinking away at killing the dinosaurs. However it seems as though everyone else in the world has gotten that idea. While wandering around last night I was fighting for spawns with no less than a dozen other farmers after dinosaur bones. I opted to bring my hunter, who is a leatherworker… because I always feel like it is a sin to let so much leather go to waste. With all the competition for spawns… I spent more time running around and skinning the corpses than actually killing anything for dinosaur bones. Now for a public service announcement: There is a special place in hell for people who kill skinnable/herbable/mineable/engineerable mobs but do not completely loot the corpse, don’t be one of those people.

While wandering around and farming I picked up the Ancient Tome of Dinomancy and immediately turned around and tamed a Direhorn. I got a green one of course… because the green ones are always the coolest regardless of whatever the thing happens to be. I think “Cera” will end up replacing “Daedalus” as my current tanky pet, because it just feels awesome to be running around with a Direhorn. I went through a phase where I tamed a Devilsaur from Ungoro crater and ran around with it… but this feels much more my style. It feels like the perfect pet for a dwarven hunter. While I was wandering around last night waiting on the podcast to finish edits, I also picked up a Hydra from Spires of Arak, which I think is going to replace my spirit beast as my current dps pet of choice as well. Not sure why, be it nostalgia or what but I am kinda getting into this whole hunter thing again. Yesterday I streamed some faffing about trying to farm a set of tier 6 gear for transmog purposes… and man… farming stuff as a hunter is easy.

Another Rough Night

I had all intent upon getting a good nights sleep last night. However various factors conspired against me, not the least of which was that we ran so late last night recording… which ultimately pushed my editing session further and further back. I wrapped up my edits about 1 am last night and went to bed. The problem being that we also had a massive wind storm last night. So everytime I almost got to sleep, the wind would pick back up and cause all sorts of horrible and catastrophic sounding noises outside. By the sound of it you would have thought that the very side of our house was being peeled away. In all honesty I have no clue what half of the sounds were, but this morning when I ran to get breakfast everything looked “normal” and by normal I mean our back gate is still screwed up. I am guessing much of the noise was that banging open and shut.

What made matters worse is the storm seemed to stir all of our animals into a frenzy… all except for Chloe which seems to do nothing but her very best impersonation of a dust mop. Kenzie the kitten and Allie the “older but still has moments of kitten “ cat kept going tearing through the house as they chased each other, either that or were running from some imaginary force. At one point during the night I heard a loud crash, that I had to get up and investigate. Mind you that this happened about 3 am… after finally getting to sleep. Far as I can tell they knocked over some stuff in my wife’s office, but nothing nearly as tragic as it sounded. I finally woke up this morning about 9:30, and at which point I figured I really should get up and around. Now I am in somewhat of a daze and finding it extremely hard to focus on writing anything. It is going to be a long day, but hopefully tonight I can get some sleep and maybe not have an absolutely horrible first day back from the break.

The Beginner Hall

January 3, 2015 by Belghast

Impending Naptime

Last night was a really rough night, in that I had a pretty major bout of insomina. I started trying to go to bed around 11:30 and ultimately failed. I suppose I could have sat in bed playing some Pokemon but instead I got up, took some Melatonin and waited for it to actually kick in. Problem is by 2 am it still had not really happened. During that entire time I bounced around the internet reading various bits of stuff. Mostly I was purposefully trying to stay out of any game for fear of it making it even worse… as a few nights I got I totally inadvertedly got drawn into Super Time Force for an hour. I remember as a kid my mother used to always say “be careful not to get your days and nights mixed up”, well with two days left to go until I have to report back to work… it feels like I have done precisely that. Granted I have been trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour most nights, and get up on at least my normal weekend hours. That said I have a feeling that Monday morning is going to be pure hell.

None of this would really matter were it not for the fact that tonight we start recording the new season of AggroChat, which means I will be up super late. Generally speaking after we record the episode I edit it and post it all that night. The nights where I do not do all of this and push off some of it until the morning just feel crappy. That entire Sunday I feel like I am somehow “off” because I can’t really begin my day proper until I have edited and uploaded the AggroChat episode. In any case… I have a feeling there will be a mid day nap in my future. Here is hoping that it doesn’t make the entire process worse, because generally if I take a nap… It means I don’t sleep right that night. I have this strange relationship with sleep, where my body seems not to want to partake of it. Generally speaking I get by on four to six hours of sleep, and then get a wee bit more on the weekends. My only hope is tonight to maybe take the melatonin before we start the podcast, so that maybe just maybe it will kick in about the time I finish edits.

The Beginner Hall

Last night Stargrace pinged me over twitter to get an invite into our Final Fantasy XIV free company. I was busy farming Dragon Soul so I in turn pinged Ashgar who managed to get her invited. This morning she posted an interesting article about how no game actually does a very good job welcoming players back to the game. This is absolutely true, and pretty much any time I return to an MMO I end up having to start a new level 1 character so I can see how the game plays now, as opposed to how it played however long ago it was when I last played. Games with a ton of content make this an even more difficult proposal because how can you soak up dozens of patches worth of content quickly enough to know what you need to do to play the game optimally at that moment. What I find funny is that Final Fantasy XIV does not do a better job of this… when every single Final Fantasy game I have ever played has a construct designed almost entirely to do this. The Beginner’s Hall has appeared in almost all of the games and generally is in whatever the first major town you encounter. It is completely skippable, and I almost always do so… but it does a great job of telling the player what they should be doing through a sequence of short in game conversations.

I feel like MMOs need this as well, and similarly it could be disguised as a real institution in the game world. In Stormwind it could easily be called a “War College” and feature individuals to explain what the current trends in how your class performs, what features have been added into the game in the last several patches, and some background information about what the current major story arc happens to be. All of which could be contextual based on where you were quest and level wise, and give a player someplace in the game world to keep returning to in order to get a “briefing” on what is happening in the world. It could explain important things like, how does one find the portals to the new content… or what the requirements for raiding are and how to improve your gear score enough to be able to meet said requirements. There are few things more staggering than returning to a game months if not years after you last played it. Everytime I go back to Everquest II for example… I cannot play my main, until I have spent some time working on a character with less going on. Having a construct in game designed to ease a returning player back in, might just make the returning process a bit more enjoyable.

Transmog Addict

One of the interesting things about playing Lodin my hunter is that I have not really played him on a regular basis since Vanilla. This means I last played him in a world before Transmogrification, and while I have a full set of Giantstalker, and my Dragon Hand Cannon for nostalgia reasons… his banks are not as loaded as the rest of my characters with interesting options. As such it has been my new mission to correct this problem. I learned long ago that if my characters look awesome… they feel awesome to play. As such I am one of those players that is constantly swapping up what my appearance looks like gear wise. While I like how Lodin looks just fine currently…. there are so many interesting ranged weapons that have appeared since he was last an active character. I must get my hands on them so that I can swap them out at will. There are two weapons from the Black Temple that I have set my sights on… the Rifle of the Stoic Guardian and the Black Bow of the Betrayer.

Yesterday I was lamenting over twitter what keeps me from streaming very much… that little voice in my head that tells me no one is actually watching. Streaming is an odd thing to me… because in truth I really don’t watch may streamers unless on the rare occasion one of my friends happens to be streaming. For me it is about sharing my life with the people who read my blog and follow my social feeds. Its me saying “this is what I am doing, and I am letting you into my life as I am doing it”. In a way it turns a solitary thing like farming raid content… into a more social one. One of my goals for the year is to stream more often, and originally my intent was going to be to stream my raids. The problem there is that we have a few raid members with very sensitive jobs who did not want their commentary broadcast to the world. Since that is out the window… I am thinking about streaming some of my farming of old content. I have so much nostalgia about the older raids, and I do it in part because it is one of the more enjoyable ways for me to get transmoggy bits…and walk out with a little pocket money in the process.