AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 81 of 108

A Boy and his Ship

September 14, 2015 by Belghast

Healers Not Required

I have a distinctive grumpy this morning. For starters it is raining and storming… and I cannot pull the covers over my head and allow myself to be lulled back to sleep by the rhythmic noise. Secondly I was up far later than I expected last night. but that in itself wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. However roughly 45 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, our kitten using some of her newly discovered jumping abilities caused an avalanche to occur sending a ton of crap falling off of a high perch. Instead of just accepting my fate and getting on up, I did the futile thing and attempted to go back to sleep. So I am going through that sluggish phase when you have attempted to get sleep… but didn’t get enough of it. As such my mental processing is a bit sluggish, but the show must go on. Coffee is being consumed, and hopefully that will fix all the wrongs in the world… or at least lessen them. As to last night… I was up late in part due to a bout of insomnia and in part due to doing things with friends. I wrote the other day about my process of working through the HK-47 storyline, and over the weekend Tam managed to get caught up to the same place I was. As I was folding laundry last night, I got a text asking if I was around but I didn’t actually see it until I was headed upstairs to wait out my insomnia.

There are a whole lot of faffing about that you have to do, which involves going to planets and scanning for HK-47 parts. After that however you have two dungeons… the first one being a normal mode False Emperor and the second being a hard mode Maelstrom Prison. We managed to get four warm bodies, which included a tank and three dps… but unfortunately our only healing option had to go to bed early. Since all of us were between 56 and 57 in level we assumed we would be able to do the normal mode dungeon without much issue. While I managed to get a little low a few places, False Emperor went off without a hitch and we even managed to get a few cool cosmetic pieces. Still feeling brave we decided to go ahead and attempt Hard Mode Maelstrom Prison without a healer… and while I took a few deaths due to my own stupidity… we managed to make it through that dungeon as well. So in theory… we can likely run any of the older content without heals. The cool thing is that while we were running the place we managed to get housing items to drop… which makes the place far more interesting for repeated running. I think tonight I can run the last part of the HK-47 chain, which is a return to the Heroic 2 dungeon from the very first of it. I simply did not have the oomph to remain awake last night and push through it.

A Boy and his Ship

I spent most of yesterday chasing Skavak across Coruscant on my Chiss Scoundrel. I am having quite a bit of fun playing the smuggler right now, and it is really the only class that I did not spend a significant amount of time playing during release. Before leaving the game I had managed to get the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Trooper all to level cap, and had several failed starts and playing the smuggler. This time around I decided to go for the “sawbones” spec, which now does more than it previously did. The Scoundrel subclass was a confusing mess because I personally struggled trying to figure out what abilities I should be using. Previously you got this mix of melee focused and ranged abilities… and it seemed like a horrible idea to be a melee healer in this game. Instead they have taken out all but the crowd control melee abilities and give Sawbones a focus on ranged damage to mix in with their healing. This combined with switching to Treek as my tank over Corso Riggs has ended up making for a much more enjoyable experience. Towards evening I blasted out of the space port on Coruscant headed for the wasteland of Taris.

Now that I have dinged 21, I spent some of my hard earned commendations and kitted out both my armor and that of Treek in full level 21 modifications. I am pretty damned happy that I have orange sets of gear for both, and my theory is that I will upgrade at the end of each planet, hoping to soak up enough commendations while on the planet to be able to kit out my gear each time. The truth is with the experience bonus I am well ahead of the curve. Taris for example is originally intended for level 16-20 players… and I didn’t even make it onto the planet until 21. My hope is this is going to allow me to be able to complete some of the heroic four content, and get more commendations that way. In theory I think the heroics are daily quests, and I could keep going back to Coruscant to do those in order to soak up a few additional commendations. In any case I am really enjoying myself, and this has been a welcome diversion. My hope is that we can muster some grouping again over the next few days and explore some of the flashpoints that we never saw. While this is a long shot, it would be kinda cool to be able to see some of the operations as well. Tonight however… we are going to work on taking down Ravana Extreme.

Something New

Yesterday I decided to try something slightly new, and failed a little bit along the way. I had noticed that many podcasts actually uploaded their shows to YouTube, by simply throwing up a static image with the audio running behind it. I figured this couldn’t hurt, and for some people YouTube might be a more comfortable experience than having to set up podcast software. The first attempt however lacked any audio at all. I was using Adobe Premiere for the first time, and as a result ended up exporting in some strange format that was a combination of a video file and a waveform audio file as well. Windows seemed to know what to do with the file, and when I tested it… it appeared to play just fine. However upon uploading it… I got a really long still image with zero sound kinda defeating the purpose. The second export however made it just fine, and we now have our first YouTube show up. We’ve already gotten a few views so we will see how this compares to the podcast. It might also make an easier format for folks to comment on. Let me know what you think. I doubt we will ever do a video show like Cat Context and The MMO Show… but for the time being it gets our show in another medium.

Week In Gaming 9/13/2015

September 13, 2015 by Belghast

Very Rough Week

As you could probably tell from some of the subtext of my posts this week… it was a pretty rough one for me emotionally. Work is still being stressful, but honestly that really had nothing to do with this one. For our country September 11th has some pretty tragic context, but for me it has completely different issues. Firstly September 11th was the birthday of my grandmother, and she would have been 90 this year. I miss her an awful lot, and there are days where it is just rough to think about her. Her birthday always brings back memories of her, which are honestly all good… but there is a bittersweet melancholy associated with it. She essentially raised me during the first years of my life, because she was my constant babysitter and companion. She is also the one member of my family that really seemed to appreciate my wife being a member of the family. If that were not enough to get me down in the dumps… this week also marks the anniversary of a pretty horrible period of my life. In September of 2012 I lost my Grandfather, and the day after the funeral… September 11th… a pretty horrific event happened at my work place. It quite literally with zero hyperbole ushered in the worst six months of my life. Someone screwed up, and screwed up badly… and I had to deal with the fallout and recovery. So each time this day comes I get a little gun shy. So this past Friday I was crawling in my skin as I waited for they day to end.

Demon Huntering

As far as gaming this week, I had a pretty cloistered time of it. I am still very much in my “hiding out” mentality, and I guess in part I think it was just me waiting for this week to pass me by, dreading Friday. I spent some time working on my Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and I think when I last played I was about halfway through 69. At some point soon I hope to pop back in and finish leveling him to 70. I also spent some time farming away on Rifts, Greater Rifts and Bounties attempting to get blood shards… which I then disappointingly spent trying to get class set pieces. I have been stuck at 3 of 4 pieces of the set I am going after on my Barbarian for a few weeks now. I am not sure but Diablo might have worked its way out of my system for a bit. I finished off the seasonal stuff, but as of last night Grace on the podcast talked about additional seasonal rewards. I am just not sure if I will be willing to do any of the crazy things that are required to get them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

The big event of this week was that I apparently have fallen into a Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole. I have played this game off and on since release, but this is really the first time I have felt I was actually back in the swing of things. I’ve played alts a lot in the past, but this is the first time I have actually continued the storyline on my Jedi Guardian main. As of last night I finished Makeb and am working through the precursor content leading up to Shadow of Revan. My plan is to finish the story content before the drop of Fallen Empire next month. Additionally I am taking advantage of the insane twelve times experience bonus. Last night during the podcast I started working on my Chiss Smuggler and I have to say… having access to Treek as a tanky companion makes that experience so much better. Seriously… I hate Corso Riggs so much… and was completely stalled out trying to play a smuggler because he annoyed me so much. Treek is simply a better tank.. in that she jumps AT the mobs instead of grappling them back to me. Who though a tank companion pulling back to the healer was a good idea? Anyways as soon as I wrap this post I intend to go downstairs and play some more Smuggler… that was how much I was into it last night. I may or may not have stayed up until 1:30 in the morning playing.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am very much in a lull right now with Final Fantasy XIV. I talked about this a bit on the podcast, but it is strange… that even while in this lull I still consider it my home base of operations. I figure when 3.1 lands which should be soonish… everyone will be invigorated once more and we will return to logging in every single night. In the mean time I am playing a lot of other games as not to force myself. I am still raiding on Monday and Wednesday nights, and this week we managed to get a few more people through Bismarck Extreme. I really want to defeat Ravana Extreme before the new content lands, but one of the big problems we are having is… that honestly it just feels like there isn’t much content for us to be doing. When we returned to Final Fantasy XIV July 2013 we had a years worth of content to explore since we had last played. While we managed to slowly whittle our way through all of it… it gave us tons of small goals to work towards. In Heavensward there really does not seem to be the much for us to work towards. We can clear Alexander Normal in our sleep, and are pretty successful with Bismarck Extreme. We are working on Ravana Extreme and I believe it is in our sights… but Savage Alexander just isn’t a realistic goal, namely because I can’t bring myself to do the gear grinding that it would require to really be viable there. I am well enough geared to do all of the content I feel like I could do… and I just don’t have the drive to push towards that bleeding edge. So instead I play other games and wait for another content drop.

AggroChat 74 – Force Binds Us

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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Week In Gaming 8/30/2015

August 30, 2015 by Belghast

Stressed but Still Here

This week turned out to be a shockingly stressful one, but thankfully all of said stress happened at work… and I could more or less leave it there as well. There has been a twinge of sadness as well because months ago I had hoped to be able to attend Pax Prime and get to hang out with friends there. However that didn’t quite work out, and since I lacked tickets to go there… because AggroChat was not apparently qualified as a media outlet, I stopped pushing quite so hard. The beginning of the school year is especially rough on my wife, and it would have been even more stressful to be travelling during this time. As such I am doubting that Pax Prime will ever really be in my cards unless for some reason they decide to move it either earlier or later in the year. I will always have Pax South however, and I fully intend to go this coming year. I am going to be trying to talk as many people into attending as I can, and hopefully can organize a meetup or something while there. There were plenty of people at Pax South last year but I was completely overwhelmed by it being my first real convention, and the internet was pretty horrible… so I missed most of them. Anyways… on with what is I hope becoming a Sunday tradition, where I review the games I played over the past week.

Final Fantasy XIV

Currently “The Rising” event is going on in Final Fantasy XIV that marks the yearly anniversary festival. This year the quest that goes along with it is one of the most touching quests I have experienced in a game before. I don’t want to spoil too many details about it, but suffice to say there is a little bit of fourth wall breaching going on. Diehard Final Fantasy XIV fans have this hero worship for Naoki Yoshida and the rest of the team, and it is absolutely well earned. It feels like there is very much a symbiotic relationship going on there, and they understand fully just how important the loyal fans are to the continued success of the title. The game is in this interesting place where it is extremely humbled by the fact that it launched in 2010 and failed to capture hearts and minds. They are putting everything into the game and leaving nothing on the table, and it shows. Other than the anniversary event we worked on Ravana Extreme attempts, and I have every hope that we will be able to down him this coming Monday. Past that I have honestly been taking a bit of a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least not really logging in every day.

Diablo 3

If you are wondering where the bulk of my game time was spent, you can look no further than Diablo 3. I am not sure if it was my time playing Hellgate London, or the fact that I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized there was such a thing as a “season”. Whatever the combination I have been pumped to be playing Diablo 3 again and have been spending a lot of time with my friend Grace was we worked on pushing up our seasonal characters. At the beginning of the week I managed to get my Crusader from last season to 70 with the help of Grace and her crazy torment farming ways. Then Friday when the new season opened I started work immediately on a female Barbarian. As of last night I am now level 60 and making the final push to 70. That is really what I intend to spend most of my time today working on, and hopefully by tonight I will be sitting at 70 and starting to work on gearing up for doing torment and beyond. I am having a blast, and I am not sure whatever mental block cleared that has allowed me to get involved once more with the click to attack madness.

Wildstar

I can’t say that I have made stellar progress since last week, but I am continuing with my new tradition of trying to play Wildstar Tuesday nights. At this point I am level 25 still in Whitevale but I think maybe I can see the end of the zone. My hope is to move on past it this week and hopefully into something less desolate. I feel about Whitevale the way I feel about most desert zones in MMOs. I have come to realization this week that it is never the biome necessarily that I like or dislike, but instead the zone design. I was warned that Malgrave is coming up, and a desert… but from what I have seen of the imagery inside it seems like something I will enjoy. I want to devote more time to this game, but for now I am going to settle with making it a Tuesday night thing.

Hearthstone

The game that I played that shocked me the most this week was Hearthstone. I have not really spent much time playing it since release, and with the addition of a new expansion of cards I decided to poke my head in. This is where I found a brand new game mode called Tavern Brawl. Apparently you have a different weekly challenge, and this week was essentially playing with a randomized deck. I played hunter and had a good amount of success. Playing with a random assortment of cards, including many of the brand new Grand Tournament cards gave me a nostalgic feeling much like the early days of Magic the Gathering. I used to love the days when I was limited based on the cards I physically owned and as a result made some odd decks to try and weave in my favorite elements. In truth I would probably play Hearthstone more often if this random brawl option thing was a fixed item. I know this coming week there will be a completely different Tavern Brawl, but I will likely poke my head in to see what it is and give it a shot. This might breathe new life into the game for me, and for that I am kinda pumped.

Fallout Shelter

My week in review would not be complete without at least talking a bit about Fallout Shelter. Now I have been technically playing this game for awhile now but since I do not regularly use my iPad, the sessions were limited and I went weeks between opening the app. With the release of Fallout Shelter for android I have been playing it far more often on my phone, and it has now become my default “moment of downtime” game as I check in on my little post apocalyptic ant farm. All things said I learned a lot of lessons playing it on the iPad that I have now applied to this new vault. Where Vault 999 was a relative failure, Vault 861 is pretty damned idyllic. Through a bit of luck of drops, and some careful planning I have managed to create a pretty safe environment that can absolutely shred raider attacks. I had a random person show up at the vault that was fairly warriorly, and once I equipped her with power armor and a plasma pistol she has been roaming the wastes dispensing justice. At the same time she has become a major source of income and the gear she brings back I am slowly outfitting all of my settlers in. I have jokingly started calling the restaurant on the first floor Cafe Death, because the raiders always go there…. only to get shredded by all of my shotgun toting vault dwellers. The only thing that I feel bad about is that I essentially have one couple that is slowly populating my vault. I have left them in the room for weeks now and they have half a dozen offspring roaming around as a result.

Hatoful Boyfriend

The last game that I played a significant amount of this week was of course Hatoful Boyfriend, and last night we recorded the AggroChat game club show for it. This was Grace’s pick and I think a lot of us went into this assuming that we would end up hating the game. We were mostly wrong as the vast majority of us had lots of good things to say about the game. To make it even crazier this is the first game that the majority of us have actually played through more than one… but given that an individual play session tends to only be around the hour long mark that makes sense. If you want to hear our length discussion about dating “Birbs” after the apocalypse you should totally listen into the show.

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Week in Gaming 8/23/2015

August 23, 2015 by Belghast

Stealing Ideas

This morning I am absolutely stealing an idea from Grace who happened to post something today called “What I’m Playing”. Sunday is traditionally a rough day for me as far as posting goes. One of two things has happened, either I have stayed up way late on Saturday night to finish editing and posting the AggroChat podcast, or I am rushing around Sunday morning to finish it. This ends up making the morning feel like a big hassle either way, as my body thinks I just went through this epic struggle to get our podcast posted. My brain is telling me… isn’t that enough? Do I really have to make a blog post too? At which point I tell my brain to shut the hell up and stop being so whiny, and btw give me a topic to write about while you are at it. So now I am latching onto this week in review post idea like a life raft and just going with that.

Final Fantasy XIV

A subtitle for this week could easily be called “failing to accomplish goals” because there is a lot of that going around. Monday night we made solid attempts on Ravana Extreme, and Wednesday we didn’t quite have the people to pull anything together. Other than that I have honestly been pretty scarce in game. I get like this after finishing a grind to accomplish one of my goals, and for awhile now I had been grinding in so many different ways to gear both the Warrior and the Dragoon. I had all intention of capping Esoterics this week, but as of last night I just have seventy five. I could spend my day grinding to play catch up… but I highly doubt that is going to happen. Hopefully we can return to our normally scheduled Final Fantasy XIV play schedule next week.

Wildstar

I am still very much playing Wildstar, but similarly to Final Fantasy XIV I didn’t really spend much time actually playing it this week. I made a minor dent on Whitevale on Tuesday, but I spent more time talking about Wildstar with friends this week than actually playing it. I am not really sure what was up this week but I was overly tired pretty much every day. We had one horrible night where the storms woke me up and I never could get back to sleep fully, and I think this lack of sleep pretty much pushed the rest of the week out of whack. Each night I felt like I lacked the mental fortitude to concentrate on an MMO, so ultimately just ended up playing something else. I want to continue my climb on the Warrior because I am finding the game more enjoyable than I did at launch, and am actually really looking forward to the free to play drop.

Dragon Age Inquisition

I spent an awful lot of time playing this game over the week, but my overarching goal was less about actually playing and more about figuring out how to play it from my laptop. I maybe obsess about stupid shit sometimes. As you can see from the screenshot I finally left the Hinterlands! I am actually enjoying the game quite a bit now, but for whatever reason I am not finding it nearly as “sticky” as the previous Dragon Age games. In Origin and even in 2 I had these moments where every fiber of my being just wanted to see what happened next. It was like turning the pages of a really good novel, and this game doesn’t have that same feel. It very much feels like I am playing levels in a video game and I find I care less about the story than I have in previous games. That is not to say the game is not enjoyable, because I am absolutely having fun… but it is just a different sort of fun.

Diablo III

I apparently worked the Hellgate London out of my system, but instead it has given me a desire to play Diablo III. For most of the week this has been my go to game, as it has just the right amount of friction for my mental state. I don’t have to think about it much, I can just push buttons and kill things… and that works. In the continued theme of setting myself up for failure, I apparently decided that creating a Season 3 character from scratch was apparently a brilliant idea. Now in order to get any of the Seasonal rewards I need to get a character to 70… before 5 pm PST tonight. This is not a thing that is going to happen since I am just now sitting at 27 as the above screenshot shows the ding. The positive is… I am actually really enjoying playing the Crusader. I figure when Season 4 starts I will make another seasonal character and see what I can make it to with a full three months or so of playtime available.

Hatoful Boyfriend

I curse everyone involved for introducing this game into my life. It is so damned crazy, but I can’t seem to stop myself from playing it. At this point I have now seen six different endings for the game. From what I can tell I have yet to actually scratch the surface, but at least I feel like i have a lot to talk about for the upcoming show. I imagine that I will play it some more and go for a few more endings. The ending that I have not seen is the supposed “bad ending”, which I guess means you have to play the game without much thought taking random birds to do things. At this point I have taken the approach of setting my sights on a specific bird during each play session. I have a few more left to do that with, so that is probably going to be my focus in the sessions between now and the aggrochat show.

Heavensward Mega Episode

For awhile now the AggroChat crew has deliberately put off talking about the events of Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward in an attempt to allow folks to catch up on the content. However this week the gloves are coming off and we are dipping into a full spoiler episode where we hash out the events that have occured since the 2.55 patch show. We trace the steps of our characters from setting foot into Ishgard to the final conflict of the expansion, with as much details as we can think about in between. This is a roughly two hour long show because of the truly large amount of content to go over. We considered chopping this into two halves, but figured we would release it uncut. We talk about our favorite characters, our most emotional moments and what we are looking forward to with future content patches.

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