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Week In Gaming 12/20/2015

December 20, 2015 by Belghast

The Week of Star Wars

This week was all about either waiting for Force Awakens or riding the high after seeing it. Some other stuff happened in the middle, like on Tuesday I went yet again to RiffTrax with some co-workers and had a blast. This time around was Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny, and apparently it was a slightly new version where they include the story of Jack and the Beanstalk instead of apparently Thumbelina. I have to take their word for it, because I did not manage to catch the previous version. However coming up is a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers, which is one of the Riffs that happened before we started doing this as pseudo team building. In truth it has very little to do with building morale… and more to do with the fact that we just share a similar sense of humor. So I am looking forward to that in mid January. The only negative with this week however is that quite literally I did not actually get to spend any length of time with my wife until Friday. On the nights I had free she was up at school doing prep work for the end of the semester and the rest of the nights I had something going on. I am really looking forward to the break however… because we tentatively have planned a movie marathon for Christmas day. My wife has not seen the original Star Wars films since the theatrical release of the special editions in college. So right now the plan is to marathon through all of them and take her to see Force Awakens afterwards.

Whole Lotta Nope

There has been a lot of buzz about Black Desert Online, and largely the thing that everyone seems to talk about is just how detailed the character creation system is. You certainly can create a bunch of really pretty characters, but for me at least that is where the game starts to fall apart. I had largely avoided this game, because I didn’t like the concept of having classes tied to gender and to some extent “race” or what passes for race in the game. So to play the berserker type class, you have to play this mammoth Giant race of a character. My trip through Nopeland started however when I tried to install the game. I had all sorts of issues just getting the installer going, and when I finally got it loaded it booted up and sat on a black screen for fifteen minutes or so before finally loading into the game. The interface itself… feels cheaply made and I am really not sure how to quantify it other than that. Once you get into the game… you have an action MMO driven off of left and right mouse buttons. I tooled around the starter area and honestly… I just didn’t like what I was feeling. It does a thing… that many other games have done better. Sure the character creator allows you to pretty much live any possible player fantasy as far as looks go… but the game itself didn’t feel that fun. So at this point I have already uninstalled it, and will throw this game is the same bin I tossed TERA. Extremely pretty, but didn’t feel like I wanted it to feel.

Mount Chase

I am not really sure how I allow myself to get drawn back into holiday events, but right now there is one happening in World of Warcraft that has a chance of dropping a Yeti mount. Since the very first Winter Veil event, I have had an affinity with the Yeti, and used to save my charges of my mechanical Yeti each year so I could play with it off and on. Similarly when they added the first mechanical yeti battle pet… I had to have it. So it is no surprise that I am finding myself doing Holiday dailies each day in a vague attempt to get a Yeti mount from one of the Savage Gift satchels. I am going to be pissed as hell if I do not manage to get one this year. Essentially each day has the same basic flow, where I start with Belghast and cycle through all of my characters that can do the holiday quests… mailing all of the tokens to Belgrace on the horde side and then purchasing four savage gifts… only to be disappointed moments later when none of them yield the mount. I have managed to pick up the pet, so that at least is a positive. Of all of the holiday mounts I have chased over the years… I have very few of them. The king of all teases has to be the Headless Horseman mount, that I always make attempts on… only to be disappointed when I have zero luck getting it. The love rocket is another one, but that one I really don’t have much desire to get… other than for completion purposes.

Proper Tankadin

This week a lot of my focus has been on the MooCowAdin, largely because he is the one opening all the Savage Gifts. The root of my focus however has been to get a good weapon, which I FINALLY have in the form of the sword above. It is a blue baleful that has been upgraded to 705 via the 20,000 apexis crystal token and two valor upgrades. Finally I now feel like a proper tank, and am finally what I would consider a viable option for the Sunday night raid. As a result I have been doing most of my daily quests in tanky form to get used to doing all the tankadin things. I have to say I am absolutely in love with Light’s Hammer. It is like the best possible version of Death and Decay… it slows and deals damage to enemies… and heals allies at the same time. Who could ask for more?

The Orclock

My downtime character is still Belghula the Orc Warlock. I am enjoying leveling by dotting everything up and running around like mad until it dies. Thanks to Tam for teaching me the ways of playing a damage over time class 🙂 At some point I need to start with the dungeons… but right now I am sitting just shy of 20. The Northern Barrens are getting a little stale, so I am hoping that soon I will get the quest starter to jump to the next zone. I’ve not really made it terribly far in the horde side quest chains, so I am kinda amped to see the later areas. I am also working on leveling Tailoring so I have a bag maker, and enchanting so I have the ability to do enchants. The next character I run up will absolutely be a herbalist/apothecary so that I can hopefully at some point make my own raid potions. That has been the hardest reality check for me… the concept of starting over with a fresh stable of characters and no infrastructure. I guess that is a slight lie, because the guild horde side keeps shoving stuff into my hands and seems more than happy to support me… but I am very much a person who prefers being able to support myself. So I need to knock out some more characters so I can start to do that. I am going tailor first because the biggest problem I have right now is the lack of a bag maker to feed my alts.

Santa and Grumplings

December 19, 2015 by Belghast

Santa Lives

Force Awakens has been my Christmas Miracle…. its like I am a kid that believes in Santa Claus all over again 🙂

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) December 18, 2015

I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night. One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia. Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about. Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else. I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation. My mother on the other hand… that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them. My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world. The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love. For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.

Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again. Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club. Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th. I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting. Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie. I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming. In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them. For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.

The “A” Team

I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years… shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be. I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens. The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is… it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with. Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team. These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching. While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about. While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.

There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies. The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product. Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies… it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did. So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises. There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again. Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical… was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades. Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars. To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.

Grumplings

The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns. In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids… you get a Grumpling pet. Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow. I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings. Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount. I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount. So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Kindle Arrives

December 8, 2015 by Belghast

A New Toy

Sunday I wrote a bit about my troubles with Amazon and shipping recently, and I guess maybe that complaining worked. Not only did I get additional prime subscription time added to my account to appease me, but yesterday mid day my new Amazon Fire 7 inch tablet showed up. As a result I spent a good deal of last night fiddling with it, and I figured I would write a little bit about it as a result. The tablet I am talking about is the one that has been widely advertised as being sold in six packs…. and singles go for only $49.99 so that the marketing can say “under $50 dollars”. Over the recent holiday consumer madness… they were selling the tablet for $34.99 which finally got me to jump on buying one just to see what it is like. I already have owned several android tablets, and even got a used ipad 2 since my wife loved hers so much. After all of that I had pretty much decided I simply was not a “tablet” person. If I have time to use a tablet… I am probably at home and could just play on my PC, PS4, Vita, PS3… you are getting the idea. What I lacked though was a really good device to read on… because the iPad and Android tablets were just too bulk to use in bed comfortably without nodding off every so often and whacking myself in the face.

The first shocker is the size, because really when you think about it… 7 inches sounds like a large size. The tablet as a whole feels more like a large phone… so something along the lines of a Samsung Note and less like a tablet. The build quality is solid, and the device feels nice in your hand… but the plastic back makes it feel a little on the cheap side. Then again this is a tablet that I just paid $34 for… and in the past that would have gotten me some shanzhai reject and not a perfectly viable device. There are some caveats to know going into it. Firstly there is no Google Play store on the device by default, and in theory it is set up in a way to keep directing you at the Amazon ecosystem for music, movies and everything else related. This is good in one aspect, especially if you are a Prime user… since well it has one of the better interfaces for actually watching the free streaming with Prime. The whole lack of Google Play would have potentially been a deal breaker since, as someone already embedded in the Android world… I already own pretty much all of the apps I need to function there and have zero interest in repurchasing them from Amazon. Thankfully I did a bit of research before jumping into this device and apparently it is a relatively trivial experience to load the Play store, it simply involves loading four different android apps on your device in a specific order. Luckily however the above video shows you the appropriate order and provides what seems to be a clean link to the downloads. I personally just downloaded them from my device to save having to try and swap them over through a computer.

It Plays Hearthstone

The other thing that I would really like to do with a tablet is to be able to quickly get into Hearthstone and play it from bed. Previously most of my Android devices simply performed like crap in Hearthstone, with the best possible version being on my Samsung Galaxy S5… and even then it was super sluggish. This device however, took a bit of time initially to boot into Hearthstone and sign into Battle.net the first time, but from that point on I have been able to get in and doing stuff pretty quickly. The interface ends up being a little small, so things like the settings gear can be a bit awkward to click on at first, but the base interface of the game performed smoothly. I played a few games last night, and experienced real issues, and even as multiple effects were firing on screen I didn’t see any noticeable lag. So for my purposes the device passes with flying colors when it comes to gaming. At some point I will throw other games on it and test those out as well, but since I was mostly concerned about running what is normally a fairly intensive mobile game like Hearthstone… that is what I went with first. Please excuse the kinda crappy photo but I wanted to take a photo of me running hearthstone ON the device… which meant taking a photo with my phone since I have not figured out how to do a screenshot on Kindle Fire OS yet and the normal methods from my phone did not work at all.

As far as the other purpose of the device, it also passes with flying colors. Any device can read a book, so that wasn’t really what I was concerned about… so instead I booted into my Marvel Unlimited account and attempted to read some comics. I wanted to see if a full comic page was readable with the small screen size and my less than perfect eyes. I have to say I was pretty happy with the end results, and the slightly strange format as you might expect fits a page size perfectly. Laying in bed last night I read around a dozen or so comics and my eyes never felt like they were being strained. The only time things got awkward is when I needed to read a double panel spread, at which point I had to mostly zoom in and move around the screen to read the panels. These were still awkward as shit on my full sized iPad, so I am not really too shocked about this. These are one of those things that only really works well in a physical book. The next step will be to load the puppy up with books, since right now our Amazon account is loaded up with quite literally thousands of books that I have zero interest in… since my wife and her mother are the primary users of that account. In the past I always preferred reading through Aldiko so I will have to install that and test it out as well. All told though… I am really happy with my $34 purchase… which after using some built up Discover cash back bonus… ended up covering the entire cost.

Best Laid Plans

Last night I had every plan of running a bunch of LFR in the hopes of getting a main hand weapon. However in the middle of piddling around in Tanaan jungle I got a Baleful Armament to drop for me. Unfortunately… it turned into the lowest possible version I could get. That said it is better than nothing and matches the 650 shield that I have as well. I am at the very least “viable” as a tank, though I need to do some stuff to set up my bars. It is my hope that at some point I will get a decent sword and shield to drop in normal that I will roll offspec on. In the meantime I need to get used to tanking as a Paladin, and this at least gives me the ability to run the daily heroic relatively easily for Valor. As to how much pug tanking I will be doing… that is an entirely different question. The main problem with last night however… is that I did not really sleep well Sunday night. So by the time I spent awhile fiddling with the Kindle, my wife suggested that it was bedtime… and for once I agreed. Admittedly I went to bed and continued to play with the Kindle, but sitting on the couch was invoking the most furious of yawns. At the very least tonight I want to run the Black Gate on both characters, in the hopes that Tuesday night LFR is still the best possible time to run it. In theory I should probably do the entire LFR on Belghast in the hopes of getting an upgraded weapon before the Wednesday night normal raid with Jed and crew.