Blaugust Archives - Page 24 of 38 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Blaugust and Nephalem

August 31, 2015 by Belghast

Last Day of Blaugust

As the subheading says, it is in fact the last day of Blaugust and as such very soon I am going to begin tabulating the results. It has been an interesting month, but also a very quick one. It seems like just yesterday I was kicking off this challenge, and now we are staring at the finish line. It has also been interesting just how many people have participated in one way or another. Even if you did something as simple as retweet a Blaugust post, you are part of this and I thank you. In truth I was not really sure how the turn out for year two would end up looking. The biggest surprise honestly was just how many year one folks came back for this year. You’d think that they would have learned better by the time the second event rolled around. As I sift through the results it is going to be interesting to see just how many folks have completed both years at this point.

The big take away this year is that we have already reached a point where we are just too big to be planned somewhat “on the fly”. Up until July I was still questioning if I would actually go through with a second Blaugust. I was somewhat shocked at the number of people who were looking forward to it. So I pulled things together and we ended up with this year, that went significantly more smoothly than the first. As a result I think for the 2016 Blaugust I will be starting to pull things together about four months in advance. Folks offering to sponsor prizes was a brand new concept to me, and this year we had Anook and KingsIsle Entertainment both chipping in prizes. I greatly appreciate them both, but I am hoping if I start the wheels moving several months ahead I will be able to get a few more people to come on board. It would be awesome to get some game keys donated for a sort of “Blaugust Game Club” like our AggroChat Game Club. Where every Blaugust writer has the opportunity to play a specific game and write about it, because it is super interesting when you collect a bunch of opinions on the same title. I realize we are just how wrapping up, and folks are I am sure sick of it for the time being… but I am already thinking about how to make next year better.

Nephalem Ascended

Friday night when I got home from eating with friends I started a brand new Female Barbarian, and as of last around 8 pm I managed to hit 70 securing at least some of the Season 4 rewards. While I managed to get drug along for a handful of levels, this is still the fastest and most dedicated I have ever leveled in Diablo. In part a huge chunk of it has been that I have largely been leveling with my friend Grace, who keeps pushing me to go do content rather than just piddling around like I normally do. Pushing is the wrong word because she was not even insistent… she just gave me a reason to keep grouping up and doing interesting things. The other big change this season is that I pretty much completely ignored the story line. In Season 3 I attempted to level my way through the story, which is apparently the worst possible way to level these days. Instead I largely started adventure mode from the moment I created the character, and the result is as I leveled I tended to always have legendary weapons that I could craft for my character.

One of the big changes that came with Season 4 was the introduction of the “Season Journey” interface that serves as a way of unlocking the various rewards. Just for hitting level 70 on a seasonal character I unlocked the transmogrification pieces, but in order to get the Portrait Frame and the Pet I have to complete all four Chapters of the Season Journey. As of last night I have completed the first three and they were honestly all pretty easy. The final element that I needed was to defeat one of the major bosses on Master difficulty or harder. Since Belial is the fastest to get to on Adventure mode I popped over there and took him out with relative ease. Now I have to do some of the more grindy things like taking out each of the key masters on Torment difficulty. I also need to finally use the Kanai cube to extract a Legendary power, but I am trying to sort out what sort of power I want to keep. Honestly I feel like I need to read up on how exactly that process works before making any decisions surrounding getting powers from it. I know that once you do this you can choose at least one power as a permanent buff, and I have a few that are really nice.

I really did not spend much time playing Reaper of Souls, and as such I had never actually done a Rift of any sort until this weekend. Grace on the other hand is an expert at such things and as a result I spent some of my “post 70” time last night with her working on Rifts and then the Greater Rifts that follow. I have to say they are crazy amounts of fun, and I am trying to sort out how best to use my legendary gems. Right now I have two of them, and I need to run more Greater Rifts to power up the second one. The first one is now at level 6, but once again I think I need to do some research in how best to utilize them. The game is so much more intricate than I remember it being, and in truth I have never played Diablo 3 seriously. I am having a blast so I guess that is really all that matters. My hope is that tonight our Final Fantasy XIV raid can down Ravana Extreme… but after that… I hope to put in big ole dent in some of these Chapter IV objectives.

Go Team Blaugust

August 25, 2015 by Belghast

Words of Encouragement

Hang in there #Blaugust-ians! If @belghast can do it every. single. day. we can do it for a month. At this point surely reading = writing 😉

— Ysharros (@ysharros) August 25, 2015

I woke up this morning to see the above tweet in my timeline… and it is absolutely true. There are days I still think I am the least likely herald of regular posting. Most of you only know me as the guy who posts every day, but in truth that only represents about half of my time blogging. Before that I was the most flaky and least prolific blogger out there. I would go through streaks of posting 10-20 posts in a given month… to having months where I only have one post at all. Between August 2012 and late April 2013 there was complete and total radio silence. It was by will alone that I set myself down the journey of posting something, no matter how stupid it is… every single day. Now several years later, there is part of me that still cannot fully comprehend the madness that I started, but I also have this strong drive to keep the ball from ever touching the ground.

While this might sound counter intuitive… for me at least regular posting is much easier than sporadic posting. Namely because of the pressure that I would put on myself. When I would go through a big lapse, I felt like I couldn’t just start writing again with a simple post. Instead I would have to write the most epic post ever to make up for the fact that I had been gone so long. I felt like I had to prove something to my readers, that I was somehow worthy of them leaving me in their RSS reader all this time. As time passed, the guilt that I felt grew and the measure of that “epic comeback post” kept growing as well ultimately leading me to wait longer before posting it. When I write something every day I am much more open with my readers. I talk about what is going on in my world, and how it is effecting me. I talk about what I am enjoying and what I am not enjoying, and the whole process ends up being much more fluid. So when I agree that if I can do it, you can to… because quite frankly all of you are far more talented than I am.

I started the Blaugust thing selfishly as a way of getting more content from the bloggers I care about. I never expect anyone to follow me in this “damned fool crusade”. Instead from the first year I had people coming out of the woodwork and signing up for the challenge. Even though I keep stats and assign awards… every single person who attempts this is a hero to me. They are actively doing something to keep pumping out more content into our community and that is huge. I can keep doing what I do because there are people like you out there sharing the journey with me. We are all in this together, and I know you can finish this month and get your name in the “winner” column. I believe in all of you fine Blaugustians, and even though the month is coming to an end… I will still be here in September and October to support you all. We are actively making this community we have stronger, and there is a certain magic in that. Now go write some kick ass posts!

Waltz of Doom

Last night we were able to pull together the raid without any real issue and set our sights on clearing Alexander Normal. It is amazing just how fast you can burn through all four wings when you have a team that works well together. Even though I am essentially done gearing out my Warrior with Alexander items, I am always down for helping a full guild group knock it out. It is extremely noticeable that our folks have been improving their gear because on turn one for example I think the bosses only actually made it up into the air twice. Similarly we pushed the living liquid boss into the final phase before the second hands phase. I know Kodra for example walked away with three pieces of gear that he had been building towards, and I think several others got pieces as well. I was pretty slackerly this past week and these were actually my first Alexander runs. I had every intention to work on getting the dragoon gear but this past week was just one where I was not in the mood to play any MMO at all. Instead I largely played single player experiences… or Diablo 3 AS a single player experience. I did not even cap Esoterics and for that I am feeling a little sorry. I could have easily had my chest piece this week, but I guess I will maybe wrap that up tonight.

After Alexander we put more attempts in on Ravana Extreme and I think we are getting to the point where we might be able to finish it up next week. We have now seen the entire fight and survived through the various phases, we just need to put the dance together and repeat it all successfully. The hard part is still the phase after the swords, which means we have to spread out so that only two people are in each corner. We didn’t quite do this and as a result we lost a handful of people. Luckily we had a healer limit break three available so we were able to essentially push the reset button and keep on trying. That is not exactly the way we want to beat it the first time, but if we have to I will take it. The fight is just so much more complicated than Bismarck Extreme was, and I am anxious to get it down and farmable so we can start clearing it and Bismarck in the same night. I want pretty weapons dammit! In all honesty I am pretty happy with my Esoterics axe for the time being, and my retainers are once again packed full of gear. However I will never turn down unique weapon graphics.

KingsIsle Blaugust Prizes

August 20, 2015 by Belghast

KingsIsle is Awesome

Some of you may know KingsIsle games as the creator of the wildly popular Wizard 101, Pirate 101 and the upcoming mobile monster destruction game Rise and Destroy. For those who do not they occupy a unique niche in the MMO industry. They create these awesomely rich cartoon worlds populated with tons of content, and all of aimed at being appropriate for pretty much all ages to play. I’ve not spent a ton of time playing these games but on a whim one weekend some of the AggroChat folks spent it rolling brand new characters in Wizard 101 and wandering around together. The game just exudes charm and I had enough fun that weekend that I decided to spend a little money on the game even though I really didn’t intend to keep playing it regularly. I’ve always heard they have an amazing community, and that KingsIsle in general does a lot to try and foster this. However I was pleasantly shocked when I was contacted by a representative from KingsIsle yesterday and handed some prizes for our Blaugust event. They handed me several codes for special bundles in both Wizard 101 and Pirate 101, each bundle having a retail price of between $29 and $39 bucks. That is absolutely awesome, and I actually spent a bit more time playing my Wizard 101 character yesterday. For those curious, I dug up the release videos for each of the trailers. I have yet to decide how I will reward these but it is awesome to have more options in the prize pool. If you interact with any of the KingsIsle employees, seriously give them a huge thank you!

Grand Tourney Gauntlet Bundle for Wizard 101

HooDoo Bundle for Pirate 101

Exhaustion Hits

Last night is traditionally the raid night for my second static group in Final Fantasy XIV. However we were missing a significant number of the key players, namely our second healer and tank. For a bit we considered other options, and were on the verge of just running an expert for the day and calling it good. Problem being as I sat there at the keyboard waiting for things to happen I kept dozing off while leaning forward, literally waking up when my head banged my boom microphone. So instead of doing Final Fantasy XIV shenanigans I retired to the couch to peacefully doze in and out of consciousness while waiting on my wife to get home. I didn’t really want to go to bed for real yet, because once I conk out I am often times dead to the world… and I wanted to make sure she made it home safely and didn’t have car trouble or anything out of the ordinary like that. Before the attempt at raiding, and a small bit afterwards I continued playing some Diablo 3. The game worked mostly because I had no one relying on me, and quite frankly I was playing on normal level which means I can doze off for a second here and there and suffer zero consequences from it. After I beat the normal storyline and unlock the content I will end up dialing up the difficulty as I attempt to level to 70 before the 23rd.

This is really a stupid mission I have set out on… largely because I really need to be in Final Fantasy XIV instead capping esoterics for the week. The interesting thing about Season play in Diablo 3 though is it feels like they have ratcheted up the drop rates of everything. While my profile has not updated to show it yet… at level 13 my crusader already has three legendary drops… including Genzaniku the awesome axe that summons a spirit to fight for you. When I entered into this seasonal thing I fully expected to lose my character at the end of the season… because I didn’t actually do any research before saying “sure” and clicking on the seasonal button. I guess however everything you earn in season just rolls over into your normal characters at the end of a season which is pretty frickin cool. So even if I don’t make any real progress in season 3, I will absolutely be starting a fresh season 4 character to play as well. I guess in the coming days I will be popping into Final Fantasy XIV to get in an expert or two and then popping into Diablo 3 because it makes an excellent way to wind down for the evening. I mostly enjoy soloing over there, but I am always looking for people to chat with while I am doing it. I finally got around to adding my friend Byx last night to battle.net and I know there are tons of other people that I should as well. I am finding that I am really enjoying the crusader, but in truth all of the classes I have played so far have been enjoyable in one way or another. I just find it so bizarre that at this point, World of Warcraft is probably my least favorite Blizzard game.

Ravana Attempts

August 18, 2015 by Belghast

Unbreaking Google+

Last night I had a message from a long time friend of mine, asking me why I was no longer posting my daily posts on Google+ to which I kinda gave a head tilt and went “huh”? I had certainly seen my posts making their way to G+ anytime I checked my messages over there. Then I took a closer look and saw that they all said “shared only with you” which kinda defeats the purpose of syndicating posts in the first place. It turns out that nothing I have posted since July 28th has made it to G+ which is more than mildly frustrating. I un-linked my account from Jetpack Publicize and relinked it a few times, but I never saw the prompt that I once saw asking me to select what type of sharing level for my posts. So I took to the search engine to try and figure out what was happening. Sure enough it seems like Google did something to change its policies with what level of access external apps have access to your account. You apparently need to go into Settings > Manage Apps & Activities and then find the WordPress app or whatever else you are using for syndication. This will allow you to edit the permissions for how it will be sharing to your feed, and like I said before apparently the new default is “Only You”.

After posting about this last night it seems that this pretty much happened for everyone universally. I thought I would take a quick moment and at least explain how to fix it. As far as syndicating my posts… I tend to take the approach of broadcast what I write pretty much everywhere. Each of the social networks kinda has its own vibe and while I greatly prefer using Twitter, there are folks that read my content that equally greatly prefer G+ or Facebook or even Tumblr. My goal has always been to deliver my content as in as painless of a manner as possible for folks to read. I personally am not a huge fan of Facebook, and in fact I went through the crazy process of deleting my personal account once upon a time because it annoyed me. However when I started blogging I signed up for an account just for the purpose of reblogging my content because I know there are people who do prefer to use Facebook. Granted it might get annoying as shit if you follow me on multiple platforms to constantly see duplicate postings, but I guess that is a chance I am willing to take because I don’t want anyone to feel excluded or left out of the process. Maybe this is strange but my daily posting thing… feels like all of us are taking a journey together and I don’t want to leave anyone behind.

Ravana Attempts

As is always the case last night was we gathered up the Monday team and did some eight player content in Final Fantasy XIV. We started the evening by burning through all four parts of Alexander Normal for the folks who are not running it and capping out early like I am. At this point my Warrior is sitting at level 190 and I have everything I can get out of Alexander other than the chest piece. So as of today I will be largely running the place to help out the gear on my Dragoon. At some point I hope to get the chest piece but largely for cosmetic reasons because the Alexander gear set looks amazing. Last week we managed to burn down Bismarck Extreme and now both the Monday and Wednesday teams are keyed for the next primal encounter. As such instead of beating the sky whale again we decided to make attempts on Ravana Extreme. Now going into this place we had heard horror stories about how rough the encounter was and how it was another Titan Extreme where you had to move exactly at the right time and keep repeating a pattern. Honestly I didn’t see that at all. Instead I saw an encounter with a repeatable pattern but significantly more wiggle room to adjust as we went.

We made some serious progress last night, and I think more than likely we will be able to defeat him next week. Each attempt we kept creeping closer to the goal, and essentially what is going to be the make or break moment is dealing with the Final Liberation phase. If we can learn that particular dance we will have the encounter, and it honestly did not feel like we were too terribly far off from that process last night. Granted at this point we are significantly better geared than the first groups that attempted the fight, but my hope is that we can get in and start farming this guy so that folks can get the really awesome weapons. In truth I hope that we can farm both primals because there are absolutely weapons that come from both of them that I would like to see. We had the two handed sword drop from Bismarck last Monday and it looked amazing. It is the stupid things like getting glamour items that motivate me, and at some point I want to organize 2.0 extreme primal farming runs so that we can start to get folks their ponies. As it stands we only have a couple of ponies in the guild, and I think my Leviathan pony was the first. We need to figure out a method because really I would like to make sure everyone gets at least ONE primal pony before other people roll on it. Granted eventually it would be awesome to have people get a full set, but I would be happy with having everyone with just one as a starter.

Entering Whitevale

This morning I am having one of those mornings when I am easily distracted. The cats are tearing through the house chasing each other like they have gone mad. There is a dog barking and it sounds like it is coming from my back yard… even though it is really across the green belt. I keep flipping over to twitter, and having to force myself to put my fingers back on my keyboard and type in my WordPress window. Largely since this is Blaugust I wanted to include this little tidbit because it absolutely happens to me too. There are days when you cannot keep your train of thought, and I have learned to just go with it. Start writing the things that seem most natural and eventually somehow you will get back on track. Last night was one of those nights for me as well, and I flipped back and forth between games quite a bit as the evening wore on. Before the raid I spent time over in Wildstar with the purpose of trying to “finish Galeras”, which is a bit of a daunting task because there are a silly number of quests in that zone and many of them you will never actually find unless you go wandering around aimlessly. Bit by bit however I explored the regions of the map that had yet to be explored and I am now relatively confident that I have at least gotten most of the quests out of the way.

That now means the moment I have been dreading is upon me… and I had to take the flight out to Whitevale. I guess in part the reason why I have been avoiding doing this is that Whitevale ultimately was the zone that broke me when I played the game at launch. I am not sure entirely what it is about the place, but it felt like moving slowly through molasses. I think in part it was due to the fact that Dominion side there simply were never that many players in the zone, meaning that I could never get a group to do any of the group objectives, and the mob density meant that it was super hard to move anywhere without having to fight a dozen mobs. The zone also seemed to have a higher concentration of the challenger and superior difficulty mobs than the other zones. It seemed like I could not move anywhere without seeing one of those horrible flashing red shielded mob types that I had to try and chew through in vain. As a result I have honestly been scared of getting to this zone because it was my fear that once again it would break me. I have actually been enjoying the content so far, and finding playing the game refreshing. So hopefully maybe I can make my way through Whitevale because supposedly everything on the other side of it… is significantly better.