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Cat Bel and Snowlion

June 9, 2015 by Belghast

Alone and Awake

This morning I am doing everything a bit discombobulated. I ended up taking a massive name yesterday, and as a result took some melatonin to force myself to get to sleep at a decent hour. The end result is me waking up at 4:30 instead of 5:30… so I am just going to roll with it. Today is the first morning I am getting ready by myself, and that is always a strange prospect. We are now entering the season when my wife travels to go to conferences, and this time she will return in a little over a week on my birthday. It is always strange to go through this each year, and as normal as it is I never seem to get used to it. Technically yesterday was my first day without her, but since my allergies were trying to kill me, my focus was on simply surviving the day and less on living in it. The allergies seem to be improved, but then again I am not actually out in the world yet.

Yesterday however I was struggling to breathe from the moment I woke up so that at least is not happening. You’d think that staying home all day would have been an excellent opportunity for some gaming, but alas I actually tried to do some work. Around noon I was feeling worse and opted to lay down for a nap… and wound up sleeping until 4 pm. So I am guessing that maybe there was more at work than just the allergies. I am not a big nap taker because generally it means I cannot sleep that night, and even when I do take a nap it is rarely longer than an hour. So for me to sleep that long probably means I needed it. The end result today however is that my time scale for everything is a little off. As again I am mostly just going to roll with it and see if I can function normally today just offset by an hour.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

So as it turns out you apparently do only get two character slots in ArcheAge regardless of what the tooltip says. Thanks to everyone for helping explain this one, because even Trion support seems not to know. As of the conversation I had two nights ago they thought I should have at least gotten four. So I purchased a third slot and moved on with the creation of my own Cat Belghast also known as Belglaive on the Tahyang server. I have to admit, that at first I thought I was not going to like this whole cat man thing, but the longer I play the character the more I am actually enjoying. I will admit part of the enjoyment is the snowlion mount I get to ride on. If you thought carrying a foal around on your back was adorable… just wait until that is a lion cub. One of the first quests is to go out into a field and cheer up a forlorn lion cub… and absolute adorableness ensues. The animations are a little strange to get used to, like for example when I do a charge attack instead of sliding into the target with my shoulder I seem to leap into the target feet first, which is a little disjointed.

I also opted to go for a completely different path. Always in the past I had chosen to go Battlerage and Defense, but instead I am mixing things up and going Battlerage, Shadowplay and Auramancy which is apparently the “Dark Runner” class. I felt the more feral nature of the Firran character called for something more vicious and less tanky. For the time being I am going down the path of Dual Wield which is giving everything a really awesome feel. Right now I charge in, whirlwind, and then hit my normal attacks and things seem to just evaporate. I just got a new attack from the Shadowplay tree but honestly I rarely have time to hit it, things are simply dying that fast. Now I at least feel comfortable that I have something on both sides of the fence whichever direction we plan on going as a group. I think the last thing said was that we would let Kodra decide which direction he wanted to play. I feel comfortable on either side now, but I will say my leaning is still towards the side that will eventually get dwarves.

Ice-skating with Primals

One of the things that has been noticed with our group is that we start out extremely solidly on a fight and then deteriorate over the night. This means our first or second attempt will almost always be the best of the evening, and then maybe just maybe we pull things out by the skin of our teeth at the end of the evening. As a result Tam wanted to try something slightly different last night and we went into turn nine for a half dozen or so attempts before moving on to something else for the evening. Sure enough we had some of our best attempts early on and then got significantly worse from there. When we hit that point where we were just making stupid mistakes we opted to shift focus and go make attempts on Shiva Extreme. This is the last of the primals that we have not attempted and beaten on Extreme mode. I have to say I was not really fully prepared for how annoying this fight ended up being. I’ve said before that there are two types of fights in Final Fantasy XIV. The first is one where you have to learn a dance and repeat that dance over and over until you win. The second type is where you adjust to things that are happening and move around to account for this fact.

We are extremely good at the second type, and tend to defeat those encounters quickly. However when a fight requires us to memorize a pattern and execute said pattern over and over… we tend to struggle there a bit. Last night however I feel proud of the progress we made. We were consistently getting Shiva into the 30% range for most of the night, we just need to get better at two things really. The first thing… we are really bad at moving behind her and stacking tight enough for the bow attack which does a 270 degree arc attack in front of her that will oneshot everyone including the tank. When she hit me with it, the attack dealt 18,000 hit points… which even for my silly warrior health pool was way too many. The other thing is that we need to get better at dodging circles. These come in the form of hailstorm that causes the group to spread out and not overlap, and later in the form of circles on the ground. Between these effects and the bow… that pretty much accounted for all of our party deaths. If we can figure out how to stay alive through all of that mess we will easily defeat her.

World Boss Train

June 7, 2015 by Belghast

Wandering around Wildstar

Yesterday I had every intent to work on either leveling my Rogue or to work on getting poetics in Final Fantasy XIV. However recently I have had a resurgence of friends checking out Wildstar again so I opted to boot that up after finishing yesterdays blog post. To set the stage some of my friends from the FFXIV Free Company also lead quite possibly the largest guild on the Entity server. To call this guild “active”, is like calling the national debt “a large number.” This is a double edges sword because so often I feel like I am struggling to keep up with the activity going on in game. Wildstar is already an extremely busy game for me, and to have guild chat scrolling by like mad, as well as the assorted circles I am in is a bit of a sensory overload. So it is sheer luck that I happened to be paying attention to guild chat at just the right time yesterday.

One of my guildies was gathering up a group to take down Grendelus the Guardian, the world boss of Celestion. Now at this point I had not actually been to Celestion but they were awesome and willing to wait for me to find my way out there. Thankfully I was right next to the gates to Thayd and could hop across the city and get into Celestion in nothing flat. Firstly I want to say that when I saw Grendelus was only level 11 I was thinking this was going to be more of a token fight than a serious one. Those assumptions were completely wrong, because even at level 18 Grendelus was serious business. In fact we had a few level 50s with us in our group taking him down and it still took roughly fifteen minutes from the time we pulled to the moment we managed to down him. I remember world bosses existing and that folks banded together to fight them at launch, but I never actually managed to participate in one. I do however remember trying to take on King Honeygrave with a group of friends not really understanding that he was designed as a raid encounter.

World Boss Train

As it turns out that these world bosses are needed as part of the super complex raid attunement system in Wildstar. It also turns out that apparently even though I am level 18, when I participate in one of them I am getting credit that will eventually work in my favor when it finally comes time to do the attunements proper. I guess when you hit maximum level you get retroactive credit for all of the world bosses you have killed, or at least that is what my guild seemed to insinuate. Firstly I have to say how impressed I am with the way that the Black Dagger Society rolls into zones. Last night I managed to hook up with what was essentially a guild World Boss train, and they openly offer anyone in zone that wants to tag along a spot in the raid group. In fact they were more than willing to wait for people running in from Thayd to get there before starting. There is this infectious spirit about them that is really enjoyable to be around.

So while I didn’t get much actual leveling done yesterday, I did manage to knock four raid bosses off the list. I had been kind of shy about offering my help when things were going on in guild, but as I am starting to get to know the members better I am feeling more open about stepping up to the challenge. I’ve had moments of people jokingly asking if I was “THE Belghast”, and more people seem to know me than I know them… but overall I am slowly working my way into meeting all of the folks in the guild. It seems like a really great place to hang my hat, and had I NOT joined I have a feeling that Chestnut would have been a really sad panda. I am hoping with me dialing back World of Warcraft, that I can actually participate in more events that are going on there. The guild has a whole has these big events on a somewhat regular basis, so my hope is that I can get in on some of them in the coming weeks.

AggroChat 60 – Second Chances

Tonight on AggroChat we have Belghast, Tamrielo, Thalen and Grace. This week Kodra is off playing a rather convincing Fred from Scrooby Doo at Origins, and Ashgar disappeared mysteriously moments before the recording… and we are hoping everything is okay. The rest of us talked about some recent experiences giving games a second glance. The first game on that list is Wildstar and both Belghast and Grace have spent a significant amount of time back in the game. It has been amazing just what an embattled and often times struggling team has managed to accomplish. Similarly Tamrielo and Thalen have been checking out ArcheAge to find that community is much improved. Tam talks at length about what he likes about the design of the game, and how it manages to do a better job at being Rift.

Since Ashgar was missing we felt the need to give a huge plug to the Four Job Fiesta program and talk at length about how exactly it works. For Ashgar the “fiesta” is like a religion, and each June we know that sooner or later we are going to be hit up to join it again. This year he has pledged $10 for each AggroChat host that manages to beat the game and $5 for each AggroChat listener that beats the game and includes @AggroChat twitter handle on their victory shot. We talk about a number of other games including Lego Worlds, World of Warcraft, Shadowrun Returns and of course our getting prepared for the launch of the Heavensward expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. It is a big show chock full of lots of interesting discussions that we hope you will enjoy. “Please look forward to it.”

Faction of Last Resort

June 6, 2015 by Belghast

Racial Enemies

Some mornings the inspiration for a blog post takes longer than others. This morning I have been faffing about on the web and on twitter desperately searching for inspiration. Then a brief interaction with the amazing @HeyHeatherBee spawned a topic that started spinning in my head. She was talking about taking the Horde decal off of her car because she had switched over to Alliance and I simply chimed in with the fact that I largely play Alliance because they have Dwarves. However I have always secretly had a desire for the Horde to get Dark Iron Dwarves as a playable race so that I would finally have a race that I enjoyed playing on that side of the fence. This was just enough to plant the seed of an idea for a post. I have long secretly wished that the “enemy” faction that each race has throughout their storyline, would actually be aligned with the opposite player faction.

What I mean by this is that in each racial story there are a number of “enemy” factions that get set up as sock puppet bad guys, but for the most part carry over through the entire main story. This to some extent breaks apart when you get out of the original races. Draenei and Blood Elves are set up as foils for each other, and Goblins are set up as their own worst enemy, and the Undead as the antagonist for the Worgen. These expansions aside there is a nice clean “racial enemy” for each other race in the game. Here is just a quick rundown of what we have to work with.

Humans – Defias Brotherhood
Dwarves – Dark Iron Clan
Night Elves – Satyr and Naga
Gnomes – Leper Gnomes
Orcs – Dark Horde/Blackrock Clan
Tauren – Grimtotems
Trolls – All Trolls that are not Revantusk, Zandalari or Dark Spear
Undead – Scarlet Crusade and Scourge

More Player Races

So the idea is what if all of these third party enemy factions were somehow swayed by their hatred of the group they oppose the most… to join the opposite faction. What if the Grimtotems decided that the best way to kill the Taurens is to join the Alliance, and similarly if the Leper Gnomes and Dark Iron and Defias cut deals with the Horde. That would allow for the creation of characters of essentially any race on either side of the Red/Blue boundary. The biggest problem I have with the horde in all honesty is that I don’t really like playing “monstrous humanoids” to borrow the term from Dungeons and Dragons. Worgen are probably the one exception to that rule… but that only exists because I have a love of all things Werewolf. Had they made them cat people… I probably wouldn’t have had the same attraction to them.

There are a lot of problems however with this idea. First with the Trolls, when I say all other trolls are their enemies… I mean all of the other troll tribes other than the three that I mentioned. The problem there is that ALL of those tribes hate everyone else on the face of Azeroth that is not also a Troll. I cannot see them aligning with anyone. Similar the “Dark Horde” pretty much hates anyone that is not Blackrock Clan, and have been doing their best to exterminate anyone that gets within their vicinity for a decade. Same goes for the undead as far as the Scourge goes, then the Scarlet Crusade has already been aligned with the Alliance in a few examples, but their batshit crazy zealotry makes them pretty much the enemy of everyone. So that already whittles down the list to a point where it just isn’t realizing to introduce all races to both Horde and Alliance.

Faction of Last Resort

So in a conversation with Jaedia she planted another seed in my head… what if instead of joining the Horde or Alliance, that these enemy groups became a third faction. Alternative Chat has long championed the cause of a neutral faction, but I think this would end up being a literal third group to act as a foil to both the Horde and Alliance. When you rule out the groupings that simply do not work you end up with a list that looks a little something like this.

Defias Brotherhood
Dark Iron Clan
Satyr
Naga
Leper Gnomes
Grimtotems

There are currently six unique races in a faction, with Pandaren making up the seventh race that can choose their own side. This list that I whittled down to fits that pattern, and looks like a pretty damned fun faction to play. You might ask about the Satyr and the Naga, but in theory they are both races that player characters have reasoned with in the past during quests. Both of them are essentially two different variants of “corrupted night elves”. Finally having both in a faction gives players a really unique reason to decide to go for that third faction. Players have been begging for both as playable races for years.

The combination makes no less sense than the original Horde does. I still cannot figure out how the Tauren ended up throwing in with the rest of the races that make up the Horde. Similarly the Undead seem to be thrown in there “by default” and have no real connection back to the group as a whole, and are lead by Sylvanas who is always off doing her own thing anyways. My theory is these races decided to join together because they were consistently losing their battle with whatever force they happened to be engaged in. This ends up being the “Faction of Last Resort” as it were, and of course there would be natural tensions between the members. Mostly I feel like it is time to revive some of these classic themes that they let die in the expansions. The Defias Brotherhood for example was one of the best quest sequences that we have seen in game, and it is a shame that it essentially dies at the Deadmines. I doubt Blizzard would ever do something like this, but wouldn’t it be cool if they did. Would also finally give them three faction combat in player versus player.

Storm Surge

June 5, 2015 by Belghast

Wall Jumping

World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week. What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games. I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night. I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me. It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit. I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man. Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand. I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have. This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two. Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going. This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group. In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns. We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart. On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop. After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun. Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game. Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold. Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him. The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing. Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy. The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots. Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold. Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together. This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together. Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet. I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play. Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya… it was time to log out for the raid. Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid. Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing. It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it. I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point. I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week. Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight. I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior. There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet. I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active. They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people. This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there. They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them. Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window. There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat. I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.