Aggrochat

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

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AggroChat Episode 35

Last night we recorded our 35th episode of AggroChat, featuring myself, Ashgar, Tamrielo and Kodra.  Last night the show became mostly about raids and raiding.  I am not sure if this started with our progress in Final Fantasy XIV working on Turn 5 of Binding Coil of Bahamut or if this began with Tam talking about the new “It’s A Wipe” game from steam.  It’s A Wipe is essentially a raid simulator in that you are the raid leader of a group of players trying to make it through progression content.  Having lived this world… the more we talked about this game the more it seems like the creators of the game were raid leaders themselves at some point.  When Tam got into the section talking about the descriptions of the various players and their traits…  I could seriously associated names to each of the people he was talking about because we had those exact personalities in our own raids.

From there we wound our way through lots of digital card gaming with Kodra, as he talked about the new Hex and Hearthstone expansions.  Tam talked about the sweeping changes to the Infinity miniatures game and the ramifications it is having on the various factions.  Finally we delve into my relapse into raiding.  This past week I raided Monday in Final Fantasy XIV, Tuesday doing Highmaul progression content in World of Warcraft, Wednesday a casual foray into LFR with the guild, and Thursday Highmaul progression again.  All total that was four nights of raiding… and I was having an absolute blast.  As Kodra pointed out, I am raiding as much as I ever did in Late Night Raiders… just doing it in a more piecemeal and casual fashion.  I am really enjoying splitting time between Final Fantasty XIV and WoW and seeing how each game does raiding.

Stupid Zeppelin Tricks

Wow-64 2014-12-13 19-01-17-902 A few hours before the raid my friend Kinral mentioned that he had an impending invasion in his garrison.  I volunteered to do one as I had not gotten one done for the week.  In theory you can do as many invasions as you like, but as far as I know you can only receive rewards from one a week.  Additionally there is an achievement for having done all of the available factions, so I have been looking to spend my weekly garrison fight on a new faction.  Kinral thankfully had the Shadowmoon Clan, which is the one you fight during your “trial” garrison invasion.  We got all prepared to do this, teleported to his Garrison…  but for some reason he could not accept the quest.  So we ran out to the edge of the phasing and waiting as he logged in and out and fiddled with various bits to try and get the quest to show up.  While doing this Odie and I did what any bored players do…  start breaking out the Paper Zeppelins.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson… firstly that you can outrun the paper zeppelins.  More importantly however that you can keep throwing more Zeppelins at the player and end up with an army of them following them.  The above photo only shows four, but I did managed to get all five chasing him at one point.  After some more figurations… we found out that Kinral had not upgraded his Garrison to the Tier 3 Town Hall…  which is really strange because when I teleported to his Garrison… I saw the Tier 3 castle layout.  He upgraded really quickly and we were able to do the invasion.  We were roughly 50 away from getting gold, and none of us got anything tangible from our loot bags.  So here is hoping that next week I can manage to get in on one of the gold invasions and get something cool from it.  I mostly just want to get gold so I can prove to myself that I can do it.

The Final Stretch

WoWScrnShot_121414_003037 While I am about to talk about Belgrave and my progress leveling… I had to share the above screenshot just because I thought it was pretty amazing.  I spent a good deal of time yesterday while recording the podcast faffing about in Pandaria, either farming Dinosaur bones for the 9999 mount or trying to get Zandalari Warbringer kills.  During one of the long stretches flying across the continent I noticed I flying against the moon and snapped a screenshot.  I really really love the Grinning Reaper Ebola charity mount, and especially when it is flying… because it seems so improbable.  Anyways onwards to Belgrave… last night I managed to hit 99 so I am in the final stretch towards 100.  Unfortunately he is not having the best luck in the world.  I keep completing these quests, and almost every time I am walking away with the default green reward instead of an upgraded version.  While Cuppy chimed in yesterday telling me that it was in fact possible to hit 615 without the Dwarven Bunker…  I think maybe she also had a significant amount of luck going into it too.  I plan on completing Nagrand and seeing where I am at the end of it… but I have a feeling I am going to be significantly shy of 615.

I have to say when you are used to getting upgrades from quest rewards…  you die a little inside each time you get a green.  Similarly not a single on of the lootables scattered around the zone have become upgrades either.  At some point I am going to make an attempt on the 620 sword on top of Oshugun.  Here is hoping that ends up purple, because it if does I will be set for awhile.  One of my big frustrations with Blizzards design through the years is their seeming inability to ever put a full set of gear in an area.  Since Nagrand is a gearing up zone basically…  would it not have been better for them to have enough treasures in the zone to make a full set of gear?  Better yet…  why is there not a blue set of Smithed gear that the player can wear while trying to gear up?  I feel like gear in general has been a frustrating point this expansion, especially considering most heroic gear has a chance of dropping from any boss in any dungeon… making it feel extremely generic.  I feel like Blizzard tried to do a lot of things with this expansion, but most of them are not working as intended.

AggroChat Episode 34

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Bad Name Great Cat

lilshitgametime This is going to be a really rough post to get through, so I am sitting here avoiding writing.  That said I need to actually get through this, otherwise I will sit here staring at the empty page all day.  Yesterday started off fairly normally, I got up, got showered and went out for breakfast like I have for years.  The problem is what happened during the middle of the day pretty much broke my heart.  Fifteen years ago this past Thanksgiving weekend, the above cat entered our lives as we rescued her from the cold of my parents barn.  There is some confusion about her name, because I originally named her Sasha having always liked the name.  My wife however had a living terror of a student named Sasha in her class that year…  so the name actually stuck.  The only people who ever called her that were the veterinarian and my mother.  When we got her, she was tiny and into everything like kittens always are… there was a common refrain of “you little shit” as we cleaned up one mess she made after another.  Well the name stuck and she was forever called “Little Shit” from that point on.

conkedwithcats She never would have guessed her name was a bad thing however because we said it with the utmost love.  She was my baby girl, but she spent as much time being my wife’s baby as she did mine.  There were so many nights I fell asleep with her purring loudly on our pillows.  She had the most amazing purr that you could literally hear like three rooms away.  For most of her life she always wanted to be somewhere near us, as evidenced by the two pictures above.  In fact I always tried to make sure she had room to lay down either at my feet or on the sofa near me.  You don’t realize how much you have changed your life to fit someone else.  She had all sorts of quirks, like while we were getting ready in the morning she would hop in the shower first and get a drink of water while the shower was running.  Actually that was only one of two ways she was willing to get a drink, the other being from a bright red cup we left on the bathroom floor.  There were many times in the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of that cup banging around, letting me know that I needed to get up and fill it up for her.

Some Rough Times

lilshit We have had two boy cats that had thyroid issues, so we were well aware of the tell tale signs.  A bit over two years ago we started seeing them in her, so we got her into the vet and had been treating her with a topical cream that I had to smear into her ear morning and night.  She was an absolute trooper and stayed still as I “greased” her ears as I referred to it.  About one in three cats experience some digestive problems associated with thyroid disease, so when she started having issues with inappropriate elimination… we thought it was all tied to the issues as a whole.  It became a nightly task for me to come up and pick up the messes left by her during the day.  Frustrating as it might have been, she was worth every bit of the effort.  Over the last two weeks however it had gotten noticeably worse.  She was spending pretty much all of her time sleeping on the couch, and then barely making it off the couch before having to go potty.  Yesterday afternoon we took her into the vet to see if maybe we needed to tweak the dose of thyroid medicine again.

Little shit had always been a waddly cat with a huge belly, and we always attributed it to her just being built “stocky” she reminded us of one of those strong country women, that while they might not win a beautify competition had the sheer presence to get job on the farm done.  As she lost weight her belly became more distended, which again we attributed to her odd body shape.  However upon seeing it the vet was immediately concerned.  Upon taking some X-Rays the news was pretty grim.  There was a massive growth in her stomach region pushing in on her bowels and likely causing pain to eat and got to the bathroom as well.  With her age there was nothing really surgery wise that they would recommend as the likelihood of recovery was pretty slim.  We were left with the extremely hard choice of either taking her home and waiting for her to get worse and die, or letting her go.  She had always been a very clean girl, with extremely preferences in her potty habits.  She hated a dirty litter box, and there were certain kinds of litter that she absolutely refused to use.  I could tell the last year was rough on her, because when she was force to used to bathroom in a bad place there was a look of panic on her face.  With the extreme increase over the last two weeks it felt like we were not terribly far from her messing herself in her sleep, and that is something she would not have wanted to happen.

kitties_sunning So we made the decision that seemed like it was going to be the best for her.  She had struggled with many things over the last few years.  She was struggling to move around the house, and we had to install pet stairs on the sofa for her to get up and down easily.  She had not slept with us for about a month, spending nearly 24 hours a day sleeping in my chair on the sofa, snuggled into blankets that I am sure smelled like me.  When we tried carrying her to bed, she would last for a bit but ultimately hop down and return to the sofa.  Cats do an amazing job of hiding what ails them… and I think she was trying to keep away from us from showing how much she hurt.  I wish I could have fixed her, made it all better…  but I couldn’t this time.  Truth is she has probably always had this mass in her belly, and we always thought it was just her unique shape.  This might have been the first time she ever had an x-ray… and unfortunately it happened far too late.  I wish I could go back in time and have caught this earlier, but I am not really sure how we could have known.  All I know is that I lost one of my best friends, and one of the sweetest animals we will likely ever have.  Yesterday it felt like my world was falling apart, and I am still not sure if the gravity has really hit me.  Laying down last night, as I called for the cats to come to bed… I had to stop myself from yelling for Little Shit.  We will miss you baby girl.

AggroChat Episode #34

I am so thankful to the awesome people that I record with.  During the day yesterday I was not sure if I could go on that night and record a podcast.  Then something happened over twitter.  Someone mentioned me stating that they had found the podcast that day and was really enjoying it.  Turns out they listened from show 33 to 24… so some 14 hours of our podcast in a row.  I have to say hearing that greatly improved my day and gave me that push to keep going last night.  I just was not sure if I could be my normally jolly self, and carry the show…  so Kodra stepped up and did an excellent job as master of ceremonies.  Actually he did a phenomenal job matching pretty much everything that I normally do and then adding his own flourish.

There was much discussion of Final Fantasy XIV as usual with Raven talking about completing her second Novus weapon and beginning a second Nexus grind, and several of us talking about our victory over Ultros and solid attempts on Tier 5 in Binding Coil of Bahamut.  I talk World of Warcraft raiding, and looking forward to beginning the Highmaul Raid after missing Thursday and my raids first two boss kills.  We talk Heroes of the Storm, since this week they finally saw fit to give Rae an invite.  That game is exceptionally fun and better suited for a more casual gamer than League of Legends is.  Over the course of the week we have played quite a bit of it and talk about our personal hero preferences and playstyles.  Kodra runs a much tighter ship than I seem to, because we actually clocked in at just barely over an hour once editing was finished.  Extra special thanks to Kodra for steering the ship while I couldn’t quite muster the oomph to do so.

Opening the Mines

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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

Wow-64 2014-11-29 19-24-38-79 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

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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

WoWScrnShot_112214_172004 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

Wow-64 2014-11-23 13-11-44-29 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

Wow-64 2014-11-24 06-17-17-22 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.