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Wukong is super annoying

May 1, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday more than mildly sucked. While I was blogging in the morning, just after posting it… I managed to stub my toe hard enough on something sharp under my desk… that it caused a chunk of my toenail to chip off and a little bout of excessive bleeding. After that my stomach pretty much bothered me all day long, and I tagged out of work around noon. I worked remotely the rest of the day trying to catch up and prepare for big releases on Thursday and Saturday.

Escapist Thwarted

All of this, combined with trying to come up with a new way to circumvent my ninja ferret caused me to get a later than normal start on evening relaxation time. On the ferret note, our current solution seems to be working… and I am breathing at least a minor sigh of relief. We have a drop ceiling in our kitchen, circa 1980, with those massive semi-opaque sheets of plastic covering fluorescent lighting. Over the years the 1980s plastic has fallen apart, and we have had to replace them on a piecemeal basis.

We had just finished doing this, and still had the leftover bits in the kitchen when a stroke of brilliance hit. Basically Miss Bellatrix is getting out by climbing the corner with the litter box. We surmised that if she did not have a foothold, she couldn’t get out. So essentially we have taken two sheets of this plastic covering and clipped it onto the wire with binder clips from the backside, so that it presents a sheer face for her to try and climb.

Based on last night, and the fact we left her out over night as an experiment… and she is still pouncing around the playpen this morning… I would say the experiment worked. The funny thing is, I think she just tries to escape out of boredom. She sleeps far less than the other two ferrets, and when she has gotten out she tried to crawl up into bed with us.

My theory was that she was bored and looking for someone to play with… she often tries to wake the other two ferrets up to play. So the whole escape thing is kind of adorable… but something we had to nip in the bud, because our house is just too dangerous for her. We have an open living room, that spans 2 stories, and a second floor balcony that overlooks it. It is just too likely that she will wander up there and try and take a swan dive off.

Freljord Rising

Yesterday was a big day for new content releases. In Everquest 2 you had the Game Update 66 launch, and with it the launch of the Cobalt Scar area. Neverwinter Online of course launched to the public, and has been riddled with issues at least with the patcher. Early in the evening I decided to fire up the client and log in, and was greeted by a roughly 8000 player queue. So it appears that the launch is at least popular, but then again most MMO launches are.

The content launch I ended up playing last night however is League of Legends and its patch 3.6. The big event with the patch is a massive re-ordering of the champion lore in Freljord and the release of a brand new champion… Lissandra The Ice Witch. I would highly suggest watching the above video if you are interested, but the basics are that the Freljord is now divided into three warring clans: The Avarosans lead by Ashe, The Winter’s Claw lead by Sejuani and the Frostguard lead by Lissandra.

With the focus on Freljord and its lore, this week all of the free rotation champions are somehow connected to this effort. With it, there is a much more sweeping sale going on in the store, with ALL Freljord champions costing both reduced RP and IP. Additionally there are some nifty new skins available, my personal favorite is Runeguard Volibear. I already really liked playing Voli, but this skin just makes him look even more badass.

Sucking Less

It was pretty late by the time I had gotten around to actually doing much of anything, and since I had not played League for roughly a week… I decided to join in the festivities there. While waiting on our group to filter into mumble, we decided to do a little 2 v 2 “Murder Bridge” aka Howling Abyss. To be extra griefy… Tam decided to set us up for a random champions match. By the artwork above you can see that I got stuck with NuNu. What essentially happened is two players got champions they were familiar and decent with, and two completely random picks they had never played.

Making it even more hilarious was the fact that we ended up with four melee champions. The teams broke down like this: Myself playing Nunu and Drathis playing Tryndamere against Tam playing Warwick and Ashgar playing Udyr. My big takeaway from playing Nunu is that his frostbolt is without a doubt one of the most griefy pokes I have seen in the game, especially on a map that includes nothing but melee that have no solid ways of closing the gap.

We lost rather spectacularly in part because Drathis ended up spending most of the map pretty underfed, which as a carry caused him never quite to reach his potential. Also… Ashgar is really really good at Udyr, a champion he was super familiar with and rather skilled. It was hilarious for Tam and I however, because really Nunu and Warwick are much much not our kind of champions… much laughing ensued.

Wukong is super annoying

After our quick murder bridge, we somehow jumped from four players online to eight and decided to do a 4v4 Summoners Rift. After the ickyness of playing Nunu, a champion that I absolutely hate when playing against him… I decided to climb back into the warmth of what has become my favorite champion… Wukong. When playing against each other, it is always interesting. Some of us, Rae especially, seem to have a problem killing friends, and you can almost hear her audibly cringe each time she does it. Others like Ashgar and I seem to set up and develop a friendly rivalry, which unfortunately causes us to deathmatch more than we should.

Another thing I am learning, is that apparently I am super annoying playing Wukong. Ashgar and I both ended up as solo tops, which pitted Wukong against Fizz… both of which are super bursty and super pouncy champions. For the most part we traded blows back and forth, but once I had gotten fed I seemed to start winning these little battles. Apparently my Ultimate ability is super overpowered, and after a few interludes where I went through the jungle to help out in another lane… it seemed my dear friends started hunting for me.

At one point they boxed me in, as two came down from base and the other two came from the river and completely wrecked me. It is funny to listen to your friends reacting to the decoy ability, and finding out that it is not the real you they just killed. I have to say if I were up against Wukong I would probably focus fire him as well. The game felt like a tale of two games, the first when I was super fed and able to pick off players with impunity, and the second when said players realized what was going on and started gunning for me.

Champion Testing

After the mega 4v4 battle, we had a few more players filter off and we fired up a Summoner’s Rift vs bots to test out various champions folks had wanted to play. I got to play Olaf, which I played extremely differently than I expected… but was really enjoyable nonetheless. In addition, I finally got to play Mordekaiser, which is NOT as fun as he looks… and most definitely not a “Belghast” champion. I think I could get used to him, but I feel like I need to do a lot of reading first.

Was a fun evening all around, and I got to play several characters that I had never played before. I am of mixed opinions on my Nunu experience, I was told by my friends that I played him pretty effectively, but overall it just felt so odd to me. He also feels like one of the most griefy champions I have seen, with the frost ball and his ultimate… so many ways to slow the player and do large amounts of damage to them in the process. I could see maybe picking him up and trying him again.

If you aren’t regularly playing, I highly suggest you hop in during the Freljord launch event. There is a much better assortment of killer champions in the free rotation this week than normal. Or at least, there are more champions I was wanting to play, and most of them on a significant sale. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I hope you guys continue having an awesome week. Today is a super stressful day for me, delivering my mobile web roadmap, so hopefully that will go well. More than anything, I think the document is designed to be big, and sit on a table during the meeting saying “look we thought about this shit”.

With More Spikey Bits

April 30, 2013 by Belghast

Having one of those mornings where I am just struggling to get going. Here is hoping that the blessing of caffeine will kick me out of my slumber. This is now day five of the experiment, and today is the first day I considered blowing off the post. It is not that I have nothing to say, but more than right now I am exhausted and my brain seems to be misbehaving. I had another one of my bouts of insomnia, coupled with the fact that it was a bit warm last night.

The Desert of Flames

Yesterday at lunch, Lethbridge and I had another one of our gamer lunches, where we take our laptops to an empty conference room and chill out playing games for a bit. Since I normally need to relax during the time, I tend to pick a game that calms me. Yesterday like most days, I chose to play Everquest 2. It did not hurt that this is also what Leth was playing as well. EQ2 is one of those games that I will likely always play, if not for the massive amount of content… but at least for the fact that Norrath is a world I am deeply connected to.

There are essentially three settings that I have massive amounts of nostalgia towards. Norrath is probably the first and foremost, because of my time spent playing and idolizing Everquest. Tamriel is probably in the number two slot, because I have rabidly consumed and spent thousands of hours at this point playing the various Elder Scrolls Titles. Lastly, as much as I may or not want it… I have a ton of nostalgia for Azeroth. You can’t essentially live in a game world for the better part of a decade without missing it pretty often.

Tiny Elvis

You have likely noticed that I tend to gravitate heavily towards “core” grouping classes, especially of the tank spectrum. This is the time of character I feel most natural playing, but it is also the type of character that has the most responsibilities to a given guild or group. With currently nomadic game existence, I wouldn’t want anyone to try and count on me as the cornerstone of any group. As a result I decided to try and roll a pure dps over in Everquest 2.

I spent yesterdays lunch working on Belgrifter, my little Ratonga Swashbuckler. While definitely in the pure dps camp, the Swashbuckler has some of the survival that I crave in any character. I’ve been progressing quickly through the content, and currently am working through the Sinking Sands area. I am extremely nostalgic about the Desert of Flames content, mostly because I spent so much time in both South Ro and Oasis of Marr on Exeteroth my EQ1 cleric. So many hours were spent killing crocs… and later spent killing sand giants as revenge for all the times they killed me.

For a trip down memory lane, above is a shot of my dwarf cleric, in Oasis of Marr… the area now contained within Sinking Sands taking down I believe my first sand giant. My Rygorr armor was pretty spiffy, my guild jokingly called me “Tiny Elvis” because of the bedazzled nature of the gear. I sadly do not remember the shield or mace at this point… but I had not started raiding hate yet, because I was not a giant purple blob swinging a Dark Ember. Anyways… needless to say I have a lot of memories of that region… and still cannot help taking down the giants in zone.

The Great Escape

It took me a bit to get settled down last night and capable of gaming. We have this amazingly smart ferret, that has turned into a ninja like escape artist. She keeps finding ways of scaling the walls of the two linked playpens and hopping out. We have tried every solution we have seen online, and a few we came up with ourselves. We had tried splitting black drainage pipe and putting it over the top so she could not get to the top of the cage and pull herself over. Turns out after a little bit, she figured out to crawl up into the pipe itself and then get over to the top.

Last night involved creating a shelf of sorts to cover the corner she normally gets out on. After an our of bending metal flashing, carefully crimping and coating all edges in duct tape, and finally plugging all the wholes from which I was bleeding things to “Metal cuts” (papercuts you are nothing to me now)… I finally had this spiffy little shelf that fit down nicely onto the corner of the cage. I secured in in place to the wire with binder clips, and proceeded into the kitchen to make myself some dinner.

By the time I had assembled a plate, and walked back into the room… maybe 5 minutes tops… she had already figured out how to get on top of the shelf. Smartest ferret ever… also potentially the most frustrating. I hate that we essentially have to leave her in the cage all the time right now, until we figure out a way to keep her from escaping. Tonight we will be attempting to deploy a new ruse… coating the corner of the cage she uses to get out in plexiglass… so she cannot climb there.

Spikey Bits on his Spikey Bits

After this little back and forth with the ferret mastermind… I needed to kill lots of things to vent my frustrations. Roaming around in an MMO laying waste to entire segments of a continent… is a thing I do. I had also logged out at roughly 60% through my level, and really wanted to push further towards 59. While roaming around doing my thing I stumbled across the guy above. This little beauty goes by lXxalgol the Lurking Horror, and while the lurking part is a little ambiguous… they definitely got the horror bit down pat. I thought for a second I was playing Warhammer again, and had just stumbled onto a Chaos War Machine.

I posted on G+ last night about this guy, saying I lacked the crazy to attack me. I was wrong. Seriously… I cannot find a mob like this and NOT try him at least. I figured it would end in tears, but before giving it any further thought I hit my charge key and gave it a shot. Surprising enough, he was not nearly as bad as I expected… granted I had remembered to put my buffs on at this point. Overall however he was quite manageable, and I killed him before I had dropped below half health… which for a 59 elite at 58 player level… seemed good.

The funny thing is, he dropped nothing but coin. This combined with the fact that his respawn is insanely fast, as over the course of the evening I killed him five times… leads me to believe that he is somehow tied to a quest or other objective. I was able to turn up no details on either Rifthead, or the various wikis, apart from a stubbed out entry for the guy. If anyone out there knows what he is for, and how I can start this magical mission… please let me know! I feel like I need to kill him with a purpose!

Rift World Problems

I have come to the realization that I have a problem with Carnage Quests. No, this is going to go in the opposite direction you are probably thinking. It has been well established that I like killing things in video games… and am extremely prone of fits of mindless bloodlust as I ping pong across the map. Carnage Quests are like crack for me… they give my bloodlust a purpose. I take forever to move out of a zone, because I keep finding new mobs that have new carnage quests… and then find myself not being able to leave an area until I have killed 16 Rabid Wombats.

This has lead to an additional problem. I have entirely too much leather… far more than I could ever use, and far more than I could likely ever need. I literally have hundreds and hundreds of Storm Legion era leather… and the problem is… I cannot stop myself from skinning the corpses. Too many years of playing a leatherworker in wow, have ingrained me that leaving an un-skinned corpse is a cardinal sin. I even find myself going around and cleaning up the handiwork of others. I hate using the auction house, but if you are over on Deepwood and find yourself in need of leather… look me up.

Coffee and Rambling

Well it looks like I have squandered yet another morning drinking my coffee and rambling about the games I play. This is now day five of my little experiment, and so far has been the day I least wanted to blog. I managed to find focus and keep pushing forward, in spite of the fact my head is pounding and I just want to go back to sleep. Since comments are kinda a thing of the past, and all my readers are picking up my posts via RSS… I feel like I am rambling into the void most of the time. That is perfectly fine, since right now I am mostly doing this for myself. If you’ve managed to make it this far in the post, I wish you the best of days… hopefully mine will suck slightly less than yesterday.

Oh… as a footnote… I managed to ding 59 in Rift. So one more level to go, and then I can stop feeling like a such a failure!

That Rift Moment

April 29, 2013 by Belghast

Yesterday was a fairly stark contrast to Saturday, but a pretty welcome one. After milling around the house and blogging, and my wife doing the same we decided to embark upon a journey to Joplin. We didn’t really make it out of the house until around noon, but by then the 50* temperature had warmed into the high 60s making my choice to wear shorts more justified.

Cameras at the ready

We brought with us our cameras, but they did not leave the car for the most part. We roamed around for a few hours but didn’t really find much of anything up there that “inspired” us. It had been a few months since our last trip to Joplin, so we had plenty of things to do as we ran around town. But for whatever reason, each time we talked about stopping and roaming around, we were both decidedly meh on the topic.

I feel like at some point we need to take a trip to a nature preserve or something of the sort. That seems to be what both of us are leaning heavily towards wanting to shoot now. The recent round of thunderstorms has finally caused Oklahoma to green up, and I think both of us want to take pictures of that before summer starts to brown it again. We have a list of places that we have talked about, but honestly we need to just do it. Our problem yesterday was that our default weekend shoes are sandals, which are not exactly conducive to stomping through the weeds.

Return to Moriban

When we finally made it home for the evening I contemplated jumping back into the Neverwinter, but all day I had thought about how much fun I was having with the new build in Rift. I am super glad that I did, because a short while after logging in one of my favorite people showed up. Plasmodia is like this friendly mad scientist, and one of my highlights of playing Rift with Machiavelli’s Cats. Her and her husband Marklaar were both super awesome people to hang out with, and apparently had missed me.

So over the course of last night I hung out and chatted, and generally did not pay much attention to what I was doing. This is a good thing when a game supports this. I happily ground my way through packs of mobs, loosely following whatever objective was highlighted on my minimap. I generally tend to play really poorly when I am chatting with someone, as a result I used to run laps in Dalaran while I had to talk to someone for any length of time.

That “Rift” Moment

I am no stranger to doing stupid things, but at one point last night it was getting a bit excessive. I was absolutely getting my ass handed to me, enough that I was starting to question this new miracle spec I had stumbled into. It was round about this point that I remembered… I have experienced this before. Sure enough I looked up at my buff bar and noticed that not single one of my 9 buffs was currently active. Upon cycling through the buffs it was like I was a whole new person once more.

I would love to say, that this was the first time I had encountered this problem. However anytime I go back to Rift for awhile, I ultimately end up running around like a buffless noob. I’ve heard that there are mods that will remind you that you are “naked”, so I guess it might be time for me to investigate one of those. Overall though I had a blast just hanging out and chatting, and while I was on guild chat seemed to liven up.

Small Group of Friends

I had noticed that Alea Iacta Est Rift was certainly more quiet than I remember, and last night talking to Plas I found out the reasons. Turns out that a good chunk of the AIE/Cats folks wandered off into Defiance and are happily shooting mutants there. Luckily I was able to play enough of it during Alpha and Beta to realize that it really was not the game for me. As much as I love the concept of a Science Fiction MMO, the result never ends up being something I really enjoy… at least for any length of time.

Another issue that is going on right now is that it seems the officery types are AWOL as well. I have a feeling that some of the Defiance folks will be burning out on the game, as a good number of individuals on my twitter and google plus feed already have. My hope is that some activity in Rift will draw them back. Plas and I plotted to start doing Wednesday night dungeon groups, and I believe we will be having the first of these this week. Right now that is likely going to be me, Plas and her hubby Mark and then anyone else we can tempt from the guild. If you play on Deepwood and are super good natured, and friendly to absolute nubitude… look me up.

Beauty of Dawn

Beauty of Dawn – Malukah – Elder Scrolls Online

So in a completely different direction, I had to post this. I seriously cannot go a single day without listening to it. This is Beauty of Dawn, a song by the already famous Malukah that apparently she teamed up with Zenimax Online Studios to create. From my understanding, she wrote this song after an extended play test of Elder Scrolls Online. Whatever the inspiration, it is completely amazing and so rich and evocative. The song just feels laced with lore, and hopefully when the game releases we will understand all the things she is talking about.

If you could not tell, I am kinda a huge fan of the Elder Scrolls Setting. I first got into them with Daggerfall, and have been a rabid consumer of all things Tamriel ever since. There have been so many times while playing Oblivion and Skyrim, that I thought to myself… man this would be really amazing if I could just play this with my friends. My hope is that Elder Scrolls Online ends up being just that… Skyrim with friends. I realize there are certain MMO trappings that you have to have to make the genre survive, but so long as the core gameplay translates I will be happy.

This is day four of my experiment, and if you have made it this far I want to thank you for reading. The daily posting thing is still not extremely comfortable, but I look forward to doing it each morning. I find sitting down and rattling out my thoughts relaxing. Hopefully over time, it will even be useful to the community… though I sincerely doubt that. This is going to be an insanely busy week at work, so I think I will need this little morning sanctuary to keep me sane. Hope you guys have an awesome day, and awesome week if you don’t check back in before then.

Loot Box Strikes Back

April 28, 2013 by Belghast

Here we go with day three of the experiment. I just got out of the house, picked up breakfast and now I am settling in to a blog post. Yesterday was pretty pitiful as days go, in that it either rained or was dreary all day. Was the type of day that just makes you want to lay down on the couch and take a nap… which my wife did in fact do at one point. I on the other hand rotated between my laptop downstairs and my gaming rig upstairs playing pretty much non-stop games.

The Waiting Game

If you read my posts yesterday, you will at least know that I played a good deal of Neverwinter. However the game did not open up to us folks unwilling to pay the “Drizzt Tax” until later in the day. So for a good couple hours in the morning I was back in Rift smashing through baddies. I am still completely taken aback by how big of a difference the spec change made. Previously I was a Paladin/Warlord/Paragon spec weighted in that order, and the PkuDude99 spec is mostly Warlord with some Champion and Paragon as a zero point tree.

I have always leaned on Paladin like a crutch, because it offered so many cool things… like some measure of healing and stuns. However it seems like Paladin has either been nerfed into oblivion since I last played… or is not working as intended. I had a lot of the same talents already in Warlord, so in essence all the spec does is drop paladin and swap in the Champion DPS tree. That change basically took the game from borderline unplayable, to extremely fun.

I’ve always loved Trion, and to some extent I have kept my account open as a way of supporting the company. Since release two years ago, there has maybe been a 3 month stretch where I did not have an active account. I really believe in them as a company, because they have done some truly amazing things. However showing up and playing every now and then, without following every single patch note leads to the ability to create some potentially broken characters.

I almost feel like the spec system is too complicated, but in the end right now for this very moment, and for as long as PkuDude99 keeps the forum thread updated… I am happy. I’m roughly halfway through 58 now, so at some point on the horizon I will have to begin shopping for a dps spec as well. As much as I love to tank, I really don’t like doing so for pugs. So I am resigned to play DPS roles at least until Alea Iacta Est picks up again, and we can get some guild groups going.

Neverwinter is coming

So yesterday I broke the pattern and posted a big massive review post about Neverwinter Online. I had a few friends asking me my take on the game, so I spent a few hours compiling the post and threw it up there. As a result I have robbed myself of a lot of what I had to say about the game for todays post. I am still apparently enjoying myself since I pretty much played the game from noon yesterday till around midnight. I can’t remember if I managed to ding 16 before I logged last night, but if not I am pretty close.

I managed to find my happy slaughtery spot last night in the tower district. I wandered around there aimlessly not paying attention to my quests, charging into packs of orcs and ogres with glee. When I can ignore the objectives of a game, and just play it… this tells me it is succeeding at bringing me into its mechanics. From my level I would say it has succeeded… since my friends who were doing the same content are only 12. That accounts for a large number of ogre kills along the way.

Loot Box Strikes Back

Yesterday in my review I talked about the cash shop system, and the loot boxes. By level 9 I had seen my very first one, and when they drop they are rather hard to miss… as a huge glitzy gold treasure chest appears on the ground. By the time I had hit 15, I had gotten 13 of these loot boxes. So like I always do, I bent under the curiosity of what magical stuff might be in them. The above image is of an epic quality companion that I was able to pull from the boxes. So far it is pretty awesome, and does this fire AOE dive bomb attack on the mobs.

The other ones I have opened have mostly just had runestone/enchantment bundles, so that appears to be the common loot. Like I said yesterday, the system is pretty nice in that you are always going to be getting 10 trade bars regardless that can eventually be saved up for the more desirable items. I want to say the cheapest of these items was around 150 bars, so in opening 15 boxes you would at least be guaranteed the ability to purchase that.

Farmville with Swords

So while the lockbox system does not seem terribly egregious yet, the crafting system more than makes up for it. They apparently expect us to be crafting while at the grocery store, shopping mall and work, since they have given us a web interface, and no actual way to craft while in game. This would be great other than the fact that it completely relies on materials you acquire as drops, or purchase from an in game reagent vendor. The first thing I had to do, upon connecting to the web interface was to log in and immediately stock up on the various vendor bought reagents.

Basically the system revolves around training hirelings to do your work for you. You have miners and various sundry artisans that will toil away on items for your needs. The biggest problem I saw, was that nothing they could actually make was of any use to me. This is a huge pet peeve of mine with crafting systems in general, I should be able to craft gear for myself as I level through them. This one appears to be exclusively relegated to something you will use to make gear for your alts later on, because even if I had started doing this immediately… the “white” gear that you can make would be useless next to the “green” drops I was getting.

Time Sinks

The other component that is fairly egregious to me, is the fact that it is ungodly time consuming. Not as in you sitting at the keyboard mashing buttons, but you setting something up to go and it literally taking several hours to complete. This is going to be how they get us to buy lots and lots of Astral Diamonds. You will be seeing the window above a lot if you intend to craft much. Last night before going to bed, I had set the system to hire an additional miner. The game UI said it would take 17 hours to finish, yes that is in fact seventeen real hours. This morning when taking these screenshots, I still had over 7 hours left, but could rush the order for only 39,691 Astral Diamonds.

This logic permeates the game as a whole, with so many functions like leveling up your companions, tied to real world timers. I believe there is also a timer associated with instance queues, that can be bypassed by just spending some astral diamonds. I am not 100% certain about this, but I do know on my map there are several timers constantly in motion. Every time I have seen a timer in the game so far there has been some way to speed it up by spending Astral Diamonds. Usually the timers start out minimal, like the first time I leveled one of my companions it was only a couple of minutes. Now it is 15-20 minutes each time I need to send my companion off to train.

I realize that the game needs to make money in order to support itself. I have ranted at length before about “digital freeloaders” expecting to be able to play these games without ever dropping a dime on them. However I just wish they would disguise it a bit more. Playing Neverwinter at times, feels like a trip to Disney World, where everything is happy and shiny… but has a hidden price associated with it. I guess this is the ultimate evolution of the term “Amusement Park” gaming. I just wish the entire process didn’t have to feel quite so dirty.

The Sun is Coming Out

I’m hoping as the day goes on it will warm up outside. Right now as I have just spent an hour and a half writing this up, it feels like it is starting to. When I went out to get breakfast it was nice and sunny out already, but still 50 degrees. It is my hope that we can get out and around today, maybe take some photos but at the very least go do something. I never thought I would said that I want to do something other than gaming, but since becoming more active… I start to get twitchy when I sit in one spot too long.

If you’ve managed to make it this far in the post… I wish you the best of days, and hopefully you can get whatever you intended to get done this weekend. My hope is that we go wandering and find something interesting to look at in the process. Have a great day.