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Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

March 7, 2025August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

Rift

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

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At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

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After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

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In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.

Weekend Rusty

August 6, 2016 by Belghast

Demon-Huntering

I promise that I had every intention of getting up this morning and writing a blog post immediately following breakfast. However the world had other plans… or more truthfully my friends Grace and Sol had other plans. Last night was the beginning of the Diablo 3 Season 7, but unlike so many other season starts I had other plans. Firstly yesterday was the birthday of my amazing wife, and I ended up taking off a half day to go out to lunch and then to a movie. We saw Ghostbusters, and I have things to say about that movie but it is probably going to be a discussion for another day. After that we came home briefly where my folks came over and brought a cake, and then it was off to a semi-monthly dinner with some of my wife’s siblings. By the time we got home it was after nine and after sitting down to start working on a character I found that I was fading extremely fast. So I only managed to make it to around level 25 before crashing, and during all of this… I forgot to take any screenshots for the blog. As a result I popped in early this morning with the purpose of taking a few screenshots and logging right back out. However this is the one where Grace and Sol invited me to a group… and when I joined and explained that I was only online to take a screenshot or two… they both “noped” and proceeded to drag me up in levels a bit.

As a result I am getting a late start to this whole weekend posting thing, which is not terribly surprising given that I have always had trouble staying on focus during the weekends. Something about getting up and milling around the house causes the morning to lack a clear sense of purpose. I think the key to the week days functioning at all is the fact that I get up and take a shower the moment I crawl out of bed, which serves to wake me up completely. This whole leisurely getting up, having breakfast, and nestling into the couch with my laptop business is a recipe for slacking off. Regardless I am blogging now because Grace decided to go out for coffee giving me a nice break in the leveling process to knock out this post. Firstly I am not nearly as pumped about D3 this season as I was in previous seasons. Right now there is just too much stuff going on that I want to be participating in. Namely at the moment my seeming fresh re-addiction to World of Warcraft. Tuesday we can start rolling Demon Hunters, and I figure that will pretty much be the end of my Diablo 3 season experience. Additionally I still have my Warlock that I am enjoying leveling, and I want to continue pushing it to 100 as soon as possible. At the moment I am knee deep in Talador around level 94, but once again I am doing the method of leveling where I jump zones as soon as possible so as soon as I hit 96 I will be shifting to Spires of Arak.

This feels very much like a scattered post and I guess in a way it is. I am so very not used to doing this weekend blogging thing. This is the first weekend post I have made since breaking my streak of blogging every single day in May. These couple of months have been more than enough to push me out of the habit. In truth I think I enjoy not blogging on the weekend because there is nothing really hanging over me. That isn’t strictly true I guess because I still end up having to edit and get posted the AggroChat episode each Sunday morning, but that at least gives me Saturday to be relatively carefree. From a standpoint of our lifestyle it has been pretty huge as well because it means that my wife and I can get up and around and go out and do things, without having to wait for the inspiration to hit me… and a blog post to mysteriously appear on the page and get posted. So while I am doing this for Blaugust I absolutely expect to return to posting week days once the month of August is over. I am a prime example of trying to find a livable schedule to blog on, and this is a huge part of why I decided to do the more chill version of the initiative. Sure we can push ourselves to come up with thirty one blog posts, and it is an interesting exercise… but if the end result is resentment towards your blog or blaugust in general then I think the overall mission of promoting blogging on a schedule has failed. For the time being however I am returning to my games and calling this post to a close.

Petulence

August 4, 2016 by Belghast

World Go Boom

For the last several nights there has apparently been a shit storm happening on the Blizzard network, or more likely the networks they use as a backhaul. The frustrating thing about a DDoS attack is that at least on some level, if it is a large enough one there isn’t a whole lot you can do other than triage. Most successful attacks don’t actually target the servers of company, but instead the connections just upstream of the data center. If you can somehow manage to get that provider to start blocking the ip ranges that are attacking you… and most of the time they are not nice clean IP ranges, but instead random rootkit/malware infected bot machines… the attack often times moves upstream again making the effect inconvenience even more companies. The real problem in this whole situation is that bot networks are dirt cheap to use, because virus infections of all those folks who only use the internet for “the facebooks” are prevalent. The rumor has it that this particular bot attack is spawned by some of the players who were recently banned from Overwatch for hacks and cheats. Now as is shockingly commonly the way among spoiled internet brats, they are throwing a massive tantrum in the form of an attack directed at Blizzard and their customers.

Now for the most part the last couple of nights have been chill for me personally. It seemed as though initially so long as you were not running raid content and as a result switching server clusters… you really didn’t encounter much issue. I for example happily leveled my way through Pandaria, and it was not until about 8pm last night that I started to encounter issues. I have to admit it was a little nostalgic seeing the “World Server is Down” message, because it had been so long since that was a regular occurrence on the Argent Dawn server. Because we were the first Role-playing server sorted alphabetically in the list, we became the target of a lot of protests and down right petulance from players simply wanting to wreck our fun time. More often than not it was spawned by a similar set of spoiled internet brats, namely in the form of players on the PVP server Blackrock. Any time their server would go down they would come over and flood our server with level 1 Gnomes “protesting” and as a result bringing our server down as well. Those same players would likely be the type that are currently DDoSing the network, but back then that sort of attack was not really possible. I am sure there were plenty of otherwise good people who got swept up in the madness, just like what happened during the “warrior protests” that also targeted our server. However the bulk were likely simply lashing out at the “lol arpee” server because we made an easy target.

Storming Draenor

The servers however eventually recovered and as a result I was able to say goodbye to Pandaria and move on towards Draenor. I spent a silly amount of gold last night upgrading all of the caster heirlooms I have to level 100, so that I could use them on my Warlock, Mage and Priest… all of which have yet to push through to level 100. It seemed like gold well spent given that I would likely be playing all of them shortly. In the grand scheme of things, percentage wise it was not that big of a hit to the total amount of cash that I had laying around. Additionally questing through the Draenor content is going to make back a good chunk of it given that I will be selling my gear instead of wearing it. If I find myself desperate for money there are lots of characters that I have not touched tons of quest content on. In any case I picked up Grimoire of Supremacy that lets me swap my Felguard for a permanent Infernal which seems pretty awesome. I think running around with an infernal is the ultimate player fantasy for a lot of folks that end up going Demonology, and I remember how much fun it was when I helped my friends complete that quest in Felwood to get their first. The only negative is… that it seems to have removed my ability to summon these various demons as their short term “fire totem” like variety that was a decent dps boost. I have a feeling that while fun for running around, that I might eventually swap back to using one of the other talents. I managed to stay awake long enough to get through the Tanaan Jungle intro quest, and am now in the process of setting up my garrison. I am hoping that tonight I can make a serious dent in the leveling process, and maybe move into Gorgrond. Mostly I am making the big push, because I know that Friday night will begin another Diablo 3 season, and I will begin switching time with that game.