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Twitter GOTY “Poll”

April 26, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was a bit of a rough night, because we had a massive storm blow through. A side effect of the storm was the fact that about 11:30 my wife woke up on the couch because something dripped on her foot. In the middle of our living room, dripping from one of the beams was a slow trickle of water. At that point there really isn’t much to do other than put down a towel and a bucket and hope it stops. However that sort of ruined any thoughts of a really solid nights sleep. This morning I had originally intended on writing about a rather hamfisted absurdist article that is making its way through my twitter circle, but in truth I am simply going to not deal with that today. It reminded me of conversations that myself and Tamrielo have on a regular basis… but I also wanted to approach the topic with more grace than I probably have in me right now. So instead I am going to answer a twitter poll in blog form.

TWITTER POLL: Quote this tweet with your GOTY for each year for the last five years, 2012 to 2016.

— Alex Carlson (@PostMesmeric) April 25, 2017

While technically not a poll, it is definitely a thing that I thought looked interesting so this morning instead of tearing into discussions that I don’t really want to get into… I started thinking back upon various years and trying to determine the games that mattered the most to me during that time. Also I may or may not be applying a little “in retrospect” to a few of these choices, but that is also ultimately my prerogative. I limited myself to only picking games released during a specific calendar year, but in many cases the true impact the game had happened much later.

2012: The Secret World

I really cannot say enough good about this game… from the perspective of someone just starting out playing it. I’ve said an awful lot about this game over the years in three pages worth of blog posts… and probably some others that I failed to categorize correctly. This often makes my “best games I am not playing” list whenever I compile one. Functionally there are two vastly different game experiences… the leveling game when you are digging through the story and trying to solve the mysteries of the world… and the end game where you lose all creative freedom that you had while leveling. The first game is phenomenal and something that I feel everyone should experience at least once. The later… is ultimately what caused us to quit and keeps me from reattaching to the game for any length of time. However that said the ride is well worth it, and the game has some of the more interesting dungeons in MMOdom… until you reach nightmare levels where everything sort of falls apart. I am really looking forward to the re-release of the game under the Secret World Legends name… and hoping beyond hope that they can give me an experience to latch onto with both hands.

Aggronaut Posts about The Secret World

2013: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

The impact this game has had on me and my friends is immeasurable. Largely because it gave us a common ground in the form of an MMO experience that we all care about. More than anything however it knows how to tell story in and interesting and serialized fashion, where the story arc from one expansion sets up the key players for the next. This is also the only MMO that has ever sufficiently pulled off a surprise plot twist, and has done so many times…. and been willing to assault structures that I assumed were fixed and sacred to the game itself. From August onwards in 2013… my life pretty much belonged to Final Fantasy XIV until we slowly petered out when we ran out of things we were capable of doing. However we came back and had a renaissance with the game that has continued to the present times with this still being the game we can all sort of agree on.

Aggronaut Posts about Final Fantasy XIV

2014: Destiny

This is another game that realized its ultimate impact on me long after the year it actually released in. Destiny is a really important game to me for a whole lot of reasons. Firstly it has amazing moment to moment gameplay and it is hands down the best feeling shooter I have ever played. From the moment I heard about the world and the setting I was completely sold… and in truth this is the game that pushed me to buy my way into the current console generation. I got my PS4 console the week the first PlayStation exclusive alpha was happening, and the little I played of it hooked me extremely hard on the concept. Year one had a lot of problems, and I sort of picked at it like you might pick at the remains of a meal you know you are done with… but just keep nibbling on. I did return to paying regularly towards the tail end of the first year, so that I was primed and ready for the launch of The Taken King. From Year Two on however I have been a dedicated acolyte of the world, and own it for both PS4 and Xbox One… and am contemplating making the leap to PC version with the launch of Destiny 2. The game still has some narrative problems, but it does not stop me one bit from enjoying it.

Aggronaut Posts about Destiny

2015: Fallout 4

I love Fallout as a franchise. I still remember saving up the cash to buy the first one when we were in college, and I was completely hooked. I am not old school enough to remember Wasteland fondly, but I have always been a fan of the whole post apocalyptic nukepunk genre. So while I am listing this as my game for 2015… it is a hype cycle that began long before and continues long after. This is still the game I boot up when I am in a specific mood. Similarly I have played Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas countless times, and Fallout 4 simply replaces those in succession. This game is proof to me at least that I care far more about systems, and gameplay… than I really do about the main narrative in a game. In fact the only reason why I probably beat this game is because we chose this as our November/December AggroChat game club game for the tail end of 2015. I would probably still be avoiding the main story… and still off on my own having adventures in my head…. which is in truth my preferred method of playing a game. Just talking about the game has given me this huge urge to boot it up… right now… which would be a horrible idea considering I have to go to work.

Aggronaut Posts about Fallout 4

2016: World of Warcraft: Legion

I have to give a lot of credit here to World of Warcraft and the rebirth of the game that happened with the launch of the Legion expansion. They took a game I thought I no longer really cared about, and was legitimately done caring about…. and turned it into an experience that I rabidly played. I even managed to return to raiding and didn’t check out this time until we were a few bosses into Nighthold… which is in truth way longer than I lasted in Draenor. I’ve reached this point where I am not really playing the game or following it now… but the transformation that took place should nonetheless be honored. They tried a whole bunch of new ideas that they admittedly borrowed from other games… but wove it together in a fashion that felt new and fresh. Similarly I feel like it has to be said that they have done and continue to do a great job of managing patch cycles. They finally broke the “three and done” mold that had happened with Pandaria and Draenor and by all accounts are still releasing interesting content. I know at some point I will return and at the very least finish out the Legion flight meta achievement, but for the time being I am simply not forcing myself to play a game I am not super into. Legion however is probably going to go down in history for me as their best expansion… toppling what was previously my current favorite Wrath of the Lich King.

Aggronaut Posts about World of Warcraft

So now that I have given you mine… what are yours? Feel free to post them in the comments section here… or join in the twitter poll. I am curious to hear everyone’s thoughts.

Be The Battery

February 10, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was a little more bleak than they usually are, and the bizarro thing is… I think writing it helped a lot. It helped putting the frustrations and dread into a single post and sending it out into the world. Its almost as if typing the words lessened the hold the malaise had on me. Then again the activities of last night helped quite a bit as well. However I will get to that shortly. First off I want to show off my home in Elder Scrolls Online. I went back and forth on a few different homes before finally settling on Mournoth Keep in the Halcyon Lake area of Bangkorai. I remember being extremely fond of the main campaign in Bangkorai so that fit for me as well as the fact that since I chose Daggerfall Covenant as my original faction… I wanted something to call home in the same area. In truth I have not done much with it since getting it, largely because I have not had much luck in getting pattern or furniture drops. I am being told that looting furniture seems to be the best way to do that. In theory I could resort to stealing, or instead just fine one of the many towns controlled by enemies and run amok looting there. I have a feeling through with the focus on housing there is going to be a lot of competition for lootables.

Now on to the events of last night and how they seem to have turned around my spirit. For awhile now Squirrel, Jex and myself have had an informal Thursday night thing where we go off and do small group content in Destiny together. Originally this was the night when we took on the Challenge of Elders, but more recently we have been running all three of our characters through the weekly nightfall. I have yet to get an icebreaker, so I largely think they are humoring me until I actually get one. Whatever the case it is a lot of fun, but due to the bizarre schedule since coming back from PAX it had been a few weeks since we last did one of these nights. In truth I had not actually played Destiny since probably January 19th now that I am thinking about it. I was extremely rusty, and by the sheer number of times that they had to rez me it showed… but regardless I think we all had a lot of fun. This week the Nightfall is Dust Palace which is something that has been in the rotation since year one… and that everyone has memorized at this point. As a result we were able to run through three characters worth of Nightfalls in way less than an hours time. During the Nightfall runs they asked me where I was on progress on the quest line to unlock the Outbreak Prime weapon, which requires you to group together in a fire team with a Titan, Warlock and Hunter to make forward momentum.

The truth is I had not really made it terribly far other than picking up the occasional progress from our Thursday night runs when the stars happened to be aligned and we wound up choosing to play different classes on a given run. Like they often do… they set out to change that and we ran a sequence of Archon’s Forge to finish out the step I happened to be on since those apparently count as “public events”. It was around this point that we realized that we did not have three characters with the devices needed to do the decoding step of the quest chain. There is a phase that needs to be completed in a social area where a titan, warlock and hunter input a sequence on this item that drops from the quest chain. If all three sequences are correct you can click through and get to the next step. After a little shuffling we realized that Jex’s warlock had already completed the quest, and Squirrel’s hunter was on the step I had just completed. So we continued on to catch Squirrel up in the process and ran a sequence of three heroic strikes, and then three public events to get us all on the same stage of the quest. After that back to the social area to complete the matrix and move on to the next step.

It felt like the night was still relatively young, so instead of hanging it up for the evening we pushed on into the next quest which involved collecting a bunch of SIVA tech by killing splicers. This also required us to run the Sepiks Perfected strike, which we knocked out in short order by simply doing the 320 light version. From there it was back into Archon’s Forge to complete three events, and farm up the rest of our SIVA Tech fragments. All of which went extremely quickly and before we had finished the three events, we had gotten 100% of our fragments. Watching those things scroll by 2 at a time on the right side of the screen was madness as we tore apart the forge event. Finally it was another trip back to a social space, this time to solve a four by five matrix. It took a half dozen attempts but we finally got the right numbers on all three of us, allowing us to move to the final step. Now both Squirrel on his hunter and myself on my Titan are on the step that requires us to simply kill any three bosses in the Wrath of the Machine raid. Then I will have my very own Outbreak Prime pulse rifle, and can do silly damage to SIVA targets with my nanites. All it all it was exactly the sort of concentrated fun that I needed to pull me out of my funk, and even though I am staring down the barrel of what will almost certainly be an extremely stressful day… I suddenly found a new packet of spoons with which to confront it.

Flawless Royal Warlock

January 10, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I had every intent of attempting to get a Nightfall going. As a result when I first got home from work I grabbed some food and popped upstairs to fiddle about on my warlock. It is odd how my order of enjoyment has shifted when it comes to my alts. Nothing is ever going to dislodge Titan as my primary class in Destiny, but the other two appear to be in a state of flux. Originally speaking my secondary character was always my Hunter, and my Warlock generally sat in this realm of just one or two steps removed from “afterthought”. However with Rise of Iron and even some of the late Taken King content… that sort of shifted around and I tend to enjoy my time spent on the Warlock far more than the Hunter. I think part of it is that the movement options for the Hunter seem awesome at face value… but double jump just feels more limited than either the Titan or Warlock jumps. Admittedly I have constant issues with the Warlock jump because it essentially works backwards of that of the Titan. However in both cases it feels like I can get where I am needing to go more easily than trying to time a bunch of jumps in order to get up to anyplace high. On the Hunter I feel like there is never a situation where I do not want to be using the Bones of Eao… so much so that I question if it would not simply be better for the class if that Exotic were phased out and that function just defaulted. I still wish there were artifacts that allowed you to switch which jump your class had… because in truth I would still give everyone the Titan jump if given the chance.

Now I said I had every intent of running a Nightfall last night, but instead when my wife managed to make it home I popped back downstairs to fix her some dinner. After doing so however instead of filtering back up to my office, I decided to chill downstairs on the sofa with her… which mean’t no PS4. I realize I am one of the only people on the planet for which “sofa gaming” does not mean a console, but I have all of my consoles hooked up next to my gaming PC in my office so I can capture from them easily… and also that is where the Television that I can dominate lives. Before long I was on the laptop and playing some more Diablo, and eventually connected with some friends chain running Rifts for fun and profit. All in all it was a really good night for me and progression, because firstly… managed to get all of my gems to “Flawless Royal” level. Additionally I managed to knock out a few more items from my set build namely that I now have the right armor and “weapon” in my cube. I am now down to a place where the only things I am missing are my jewelry… but these are also some of the more expensive items to buy from Kadala. There is a more powerful Legacy of Nightmares build that I am working towards, largely because I have never actually tried doing a build using that pair of rings. The game apparently wants me to try it however since I wound up with an Ancient version of one of the rings last night. However I am in the very awkward place of needing Justice Lantern, both pieces of the Endless Walk jewelry set, and the ever present Convention of Elements in the cube. On a positive note last night I managed to pick up a pair of Nemesis Bracers which I can swap with my Heart of Iron in the cube to make farming runs go more smoothly. Additionally I managed to get all three of my primary build gems over level 25 so they finally start doing interesting things. All of these things combined seem to now allow me to pretty easily farm Torment X content, which means that 7/10 of the next Seasonal step is knocked out… with the only truly heinous thing left being mastering the set dungeon. For that I am largely going to need to tweak my build because I don’t actually use consecrate anymore, although it is definitely worth trying given how bed of nails works with it.

Tonight however… will most definitely be a night for Destiny because in theory it should be easier to get two characters through Nightmares on reset day 🙂

Exotic Towels

January 6, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is a truly bizarre morning because we went to sleep not even thinking about snow… and then it apparently happened over night. I live in a town on the northern border of Tulsa, and I say apparently because there is zero snow on the ground here. However there was enough in Tulsa proper and the southern communities for the public school system, including the town my wife teaches in to call a snow day. She is super pumped because it means she has a day to try and play catch up, and me… I have a weird commute ahead of me because I know at some point on my drive in things will go from peaceful and snow free… to a winter wasteland. I promise I did not intend to write three days in a row about Destiny, however that is ultimately what is happening. Since the launch of the dawning I have not touched any of the supposedly lucrative bounties from Commander Zavala, which are in theory the only way you can currently get the Icebreaker. Now before I took a break Squirrel, Jex and I had this tradition of running through some content on Thursday nights given that it was a big empty space in our calendars. Originally the tradition was to run as many characters through the Challenge of Elders as we could in an evening, but last night we rebooted it for the purpose of running a Nightfall.

From there we chain ran six heroic strikes in a row, because we were already considering doing it… and I have been sitting on the Champion of the Cult quest for ages. This is a quest you get when you reach level 25 with any of the given factions, and it rewards an exotic version of your class item. For Titans this ends up being a rather ornate looking towel… and I still question the good folks at Bungie for thinking that a flag football towel was a great idea for a glass item especially when Hunters get amazing and iconic looking cloaks. In order to finish the quest you have to do content while decked out in your factions gear… wearing a shader, emblem and class item for that faction. The quest ultimately requires you to do the following…

Slay 500 Minions of the Darkness
Complete 10 Heroic Strikes
Slay 250 Crucible Foes
Win 10 Crucible Matches

Now this used to be considerably easier because folks were constantly chain running heroic strikes. However with the changes to the system that essentially make them mini nightfalls… folks are just not running them as often which meant that if I was ever going to get through this step I was probably going to need a group of friends to do it with. However since I had already done the more annoying part which involved Crucible wins and kills… there was zero chance that I was going to actually abandon the quest. So for months it has been sitting in my progress tracker taunting me, until my good friends Jex and Squirrel helped me knock it out by chain running six heroics in a row.

Now earlier I mentioned that the weekly bounty from Commander Zavala was supposedly the only way to get an Icebreaker currently. Unfortunately however this week was not my week, and instead of getting an exotic I wound up with a relatively decent version of the Shadow Price legendary auto rifle. Now I had been sitting on one of these in the bank that I was using on my warlock, and it falls into the medium rate of fire/medium category. The biggest problem with this archetype is the fact that it generally has a low magazine size… for example this weapon has one of only 25 which is really too small for most Auto Rifle friendly activities. This roll however is good enough that it bears further notice since in the first slot I have Range Finder which greatly boosts the range while aiming down the sight… something I am never not going to do. In the second column I can choose between Perfect Balance or Hand-laid Stock to give it extra stability…. and after playing around last night I think I prefer Perfect Balance. Finally in the last column I have Third Eye, which is a way for me to break my dependence on my crutch… the Memory of Gheleon and equip my far better itemized artifact from Year 2 Kings Fall raid. Once you get used to having tracking all the time while aiming your primary… it is really really hard to go back to NOT having it. I still do not think this is going to come close to replacing my beloved Range Finder/Perfect Balance/Counterbalance Year 2 Haakon’s Hatchet… but it will make a decent primary to swap over to my Warlock and Hunter alts. The real take away of the evening however is that I had a blast… and I am hoping we can get back in the habit of doing the Thursday night shenanigans.