Warframe Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Squirrelghast

January 21, 2016 by Belghast

Flak Cannon Time

When it comes to playing Warframe I have quite literally spent almost 99% of my time playing the game…. in a full or partial group. This greatly colors my feelings about the game, and in truth it has allowed me to play in a super inefficient manner. Last night we had several group missions and then when Tam went to class and Ashgar went to bed… it just kinda broke up and never reformed in spite of us having several people there. Instead of grouping I opted to start working on some of the missions I had not actually unlocked, and I have to say… I am pretty bad at this game. At the very least my chosen play style is not exactly a solo friendly play style. When I am playing my Excalibur with a Bow…. it works great, because I can sneak around and get a bunch of stealth kills. However last night I was trying to level my Atlas with a Braton… and the ability to stealth kill anything was non-existent. In truth I feel like most of the problem is the fact that I have yet to really sort out how I want to mod anything. At some point I need to spend an entire evening leveling mods, and deciding which ones work best with which weapons.

On the positive side of things, I did manage to finish up all of the sub components of the Rhino Prime and now simply have to wait the 72 hours crafting time to get it. I also managed to finish up the Drakgoon Flak Cannon last night, so I spent some time playing with that as well. I keep calling it a Flak Cannon because it very much reminds me of the Flak Cannon from Quake 3. At close range it can be fired like a shotgun, but if you charge up the attack it can be fired from a much longer range and still be effective. I am digging it quite a bit… and managed to have quite a bit of good luck with it running some missions. I still think that the Strun is probably a better choice for a charge in and sword damage playstyle like I tend to favor, which is something that Ashgar suggested. For the time being I am having a blast with this weapon…. and yes that pun was intended. The other thing I did last night was start building a Boltor rifle, to see if I like that as was suggested to me by Scarybooster. I mean in theory I could have gone shopping for a Boltor prime, but I happened to have all of the crafting mats available to make one without really dipping low in anything. I guess tonight I will give it a shot and see what I think about it.

Blade and Soul

Right now the new hotness at least among the blogosphere seems to be Blade and Soul, which just launched this week. In fact at this moment it seems like unless you are paying for the game, it is highly unlikely that you are going to actually get to play it. My twitter timeline has been full of folks posting pictures of the insane queue times just trying to log in. The other big problem that I have seen is that it seems like no one is actually playing on the same server. I did a few quick queries and it seemed like everyone I know is playing on completely different servers. I had no real interest in this game prior to launch, and honestly…. there isn’t much about it after launch that interests me. That said…. since it is a freemium game I have this overwhelming desire to at least give it a shot. I have to admit I have some pretty severe biases against Korean MMO art styles. There is just something about the art aesthetic that annoys me… the cloyingly pretty men, and the insane “Jessica Rabbit” style women… its just not my thing.

The positive is that there is a Lalafell like race in Blade and Soul so I decided to try and focus instead on the maximum cuteness potential of that. The problem there is… it just isn’t as good as a Lalafell. I created what I am dubbing Squirrelghast on the Old Man Cho server…. simply because I liked the name. At some point if I end up liking the game I will try and sort out another server to roll on that actually has people I know. The only negative is that I have yet to get any further than character creation because I end up getting dumped into a massive queue… and decided that I would simply rather play Warframe or Diablo 3. It is my hope that over the weekend I will be able to get in and give the game a proper try. The only thing I really know about it from clips is that it seems to be an MMO about the whole flying wire “crouching tiger hidden dragon” style of combat. These movies never really appealed to me either, because they just felt so over the top silly to see someone calmly flying across the screen. I’ve heard however that the localization job that Carbine did on this title was really damned good, and much like Final Fantasy XIV they slipped in a ton of cultural references. If for no reason other than that… I kinda want to play it. I really love the folks at Carbine and they seem to do a great job with the games under their care, so it is my hope that I will be charmed enough by the localization effort to overlook all the things I don’t care for.

Rhino Prime Incoming

January 20, 2016 by Belghast

Secondary Market

Once again last night I spent most of it running around with friends in Warframe. At the moment this seems to be the new hotness among the AggroChat podcast crew, and I guess in part I am going to ride the bubble as long as it lasts. I know like many games this one is likely to burst at some point, when either we enter the endgame grind…. or one of us tries to do something that the game doesn’t really allow for. However in the meantime I am enjoying my space ninja action, and spent most of last night leveling “stuff”. Another really important thing that I discovered yesterday was the trade market. Now Tam and Ashgar had both been talking about the deals that they had been getting in trades with players, and I never really spent much time thinking about it… that is until I realized that I was quickly becoming the only player without a prime frame. In many ways the prime frames are just flat out better than a normal frame, and since I had already been laboring towards trying to get a Rhino, I thought maybe I would check out the potential of just bumping that up to prime.

Within a few minutes I was able to find a Prime frame for considerably cheaper than the price of the base Rhino frame on the game store. So I guess in truth if you are willing to spend ANY money on the game at all… you can pick up some bargains. I know some of our crew have picked up really nice weapons… and managed to get some freebie mods thrown in to fill out the rest of the trade window. So for me in particular… last night was all about farming up the rest of the components I needed to craft my Rhino Prime over night. Unfortunately when I checked in this morning I still have a few hours left to go on the build, and then 72 hours after that before I actually get to drive my frame around. In the meantime however… I need to sort out exactly what I want to use for weapons on my stompy mech. I love my excalibur, but there are just times where it does not seem well suited for some activities. Mostly I feel like I need to have a solid backup for when running around like mad and slashing things with a sword is not necessarily the best idea.

Atlas Rising

The other big activity of the night was to begin work on my Atlas frame, that I had picked up some time ago… but never spent much time working on. For the time being I have it decked out in a Braton, those starter fist weapons, and a Lex pistol…. all pretty much for the purpose of leveling them since we were running low level content. Early in the evening we were trying to make it through Phobos, and we ended up struggling quite a bit… so it forced us all to switch back to our “main” frames for the purpose of finishing up that planet. However after that we shifted to doing low level defense runs which are pretty amazing for leveling stuff. By the end of the evening Altas was hovering around 14 with the weapons I think in the 16-18 range. The big draw right now of Atlas is the rock shield ability that I can also push forward as a ball of stone to bowl over enemies. This was absolutely amazing for “wave clear” when the Grineer were stacked up in neat little columns. Nothing yet has beaten the pure joy of hitting the giant “Nope!” button that is Excalibur’s Radial Blind, but this comes close.

I absolutely feel like an earthbender though, and there are several of the abilities I have yet to even play with… like the ability to summon rock golems to fight by my side. The other takeaway of the night is just how damned awesome the Braton is. I was looking for a good light machine gun, to give me that almost destiny like feel… and that really does it. I also plan on building a Latron soon, because several other members of my team have had good luck with that. From the sounds of it… the Braton is more of an Auto Rifle in Destiny terms, and the Latron would be something more like the Scout Rifle. Both are weapons that I really enjoy, but for vastly different purposes. The only thing I wish this game supported was the changing of loadouts while in a mission. Because sometimes you hit situations where your weapons are just ineffective and it would greatly improve the experience to be able to swap things up planet side. Maybe there is a way and I just have not found it, but in any case… because I don’t think I can do it… it makes me pick more generalized builds so that if my primary is ineffective, then my secondary will work as a backup. Regardless… I am still very much enjoying myself and looking forward to getting to play with a Prime frame.

Banking and Bosses

January 18, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Morning

Trying to knock out a really quick blog post, because if I don’t right now I am not entirely certain when I will get the chance. Both my wife and I are off today for the holiday, and as a result we have tried to schedule as much as humanly possible to do today. Largely this means finally getting in to talk to the bank about refinancing our loan. Adulting is frustrating and horrible… and hopefully it will go smoother than I have made it out to be in my head. In a perfect scenario we will be able to do this without much hassle. In theory it should only really be a case of someone from the bank coming to look over the house and appraise it, and after the recent renovations that should go a hell of a lot more smoothly. I mean we have a relatively new roof and very new siding, so the house has looked better than it has in years. All of that said… there is still so much anxiety for me anytime you are dealing with finances and banks and such.

After that I have this feeling that we are going to run around looking at dish washers. For whatever reason… it is suddenly a big deal to my wife that we have a non-functional dish washer. Don’t get me wrong I understand, I hate washing the dishes but for reasons entirely different from probably hers. When you are 6’4″ they simply do not make a sink that is comfortable to stand at, and by the time I finish washing dishes my back is killing me from stooping over the sink. Why it is suddenly a crisis is the part that I am not quite understanding, because the thing has been dead for several years now. All of that said… if she wants a new dishwasher we are getting a new dishwasher. I know she has looked at a couple of them, and I know she wants my input… but basically whatever one she wants I am completely happy with. I just hope this one I can actually figure out how to use…. because the last one… every time I seemed to run a load of dishes something horrible went wrong.

Boss Farming

It was fairly late by the time I finally filtered downstairs and got set down, and by then a bunch of my friends were in Warframe so I decided to join them. We spent the next hour and some change farming a boss mission trying to get myself and Thalen the last pieces of the Mag Warframe that we needed. Unfortunately… we didn’t have much luck. It seems that through killing planetary bosses you have a chance of getting parts to drop to a specific type of warframe. The boss in question was at the end of Mars, and drops all three parts of the Mag frame. I am not really sure why we cared so much about it, other than the fact that we both had all but one part… and it was the same part we were missing. I am in that same position with Rhino, and that is a mech I am far more likely to use. But whatever the case we were wrapped up in the moment of killing stuff for loot, and I have to say… we walked away with a bunch of awesome stuff.

If nothing else… it was a great source of the various crafting materials needed to create mechs. There is a single piece that I am missing for a couple of helmets that I will need to track down at some point. I also had plenty of materials to craft a bunch of weapons, including two new swords, a new bow, and a set of fists for me to use on my Rhino frame. Right now I am really liking the moment to moment feel of this game, and it seems to be the ideal drop in and hang out type co-operative experience. The question will be how long it takes for one of us to get super serious about the game, because this feels like the sort of game that is fun to play casually… but deeply frustrating to play seriously. There is one mission type that I absolutely hate, and that is the sneak up and capture the target type mission. I never can seem to get in close enough to them to keep from triggering them to make a run for the escape vessel. Then when they start running… I am simply not fast enough to take them down before they get away. There is one mission that I tried four or five times yesterday and never seemed to be able to finish successfully. Other than that mild frustration… I am enjoying pretty much every other mission type I have done.

Week in Gaming 1/17/2016

January 17, 2016 by Belghast

It has been awhile since I have done one of these, and of the various failed columns that I have tried over the years…. I think this one is the best for me personally. Sunday is a rough day in general, in part because I wake up and have to finish up AggroChat and get it out to the various locations. As a result it helps to have a fairly formulaic option I can lean on when I am not feeling super inspired. As a result I am leaning once again on the Week in Gaming series just to talk about a bunch of stuff I played this week.

Pax South Hype!

I am starting to get super excited for Pax South. Last year I had various companies ask me for a business card, and I was somewhat kicking myself for not having any. I mean I guess part of me never really thought that having a business card for a blog and podcast was a good idea. This year however I have gotten my ass in order and if everything works as intended the cards will arrive at the beginning of next week. I only ordered 250 because I could not in any circumstance think of a reason why I would need that many. The design was done by Rae and was originally intended to be our Pax Prime cards, but since we were denied media access to that convention they never actually got made. I resurrected the idea because I thought it was pretty slick. In the original design each of the hosts has their own color, and given that I love green I latched onto that one. As far as a back design I went with something simple because I felt like it needed something on the back…. and in truth that is the crux of our thing… daily posts, weekly cast. If you are also going to be at Pax South let me know, I would love to meet up with everyone that I can while I am there.

Undertale

I have some mixed feelings about Undertale so far. On one level I really like the game and it feels like something that is going to be an interesting experience. The negative is I absolutely HATE the combat system. I hate mini-games, and while I was corrected last night on the podcast…. I am sorry but that isn’t a real combat system. Part of me just wants to run away from every single fight so that I don’t have to do it. I mean granted I was using arrow keys and maybe that makes it worse than it actually is, but I just hate the concept of breaking out of an otherwise fun old school RPG style game…. and having to deal with move the heart to avoid shit. For now I have essentially abandoned the game, in the hopes that some distance will in fact make the heart grow fond. Essentially I love everything else about the game… other than the combat system. This might be one of those games that is more enjoyable to watch.

Victor Vran

I’ve already talked about this game quite a bit throughout the week but I feel like it still deserves additional mention. The only negative about this game is that I started playing it essentially the week before a bunch of other things that I wanted to play happened. My hope is that once the recent infatuation with Warframe and Diablo 3 Season 5 have calmed down, I can return to this and play my way through the main story some more. I really want to see what multiplayer feels like in the end game experience. Playing it was fine for me… but essentially locked the other players that I was dragging along with me… out of some of the experience of interacting with the voice floating around in your head. If you are not partaking of the Diablo 3 Season 5 madness…. and still want a ARPG fix… I highly suggest you check it out.

Warframe

This game…. is so good and I am kinda kicking myself for never really giving it a proper attempt at playing. I have downloaded this game numerous times in the past on the PC, PS3 and PS4 when I saw other folks in my various social media timelines talking about it… but never actually tried it. I guess in my head I had this absolutely misrepresented as to what sort of game it was. With a super generic name like Warframe… I kept getting it jumbled up with the other game Warface. Warface being a super generic Call of Duty/Counterstrike style PVP shooter. So in my head I equated Warframe to a PVP experience… not this deeply nuanced cooperative PVE experience. There are so many aspects of this game that remind me of an MMO, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. The game as a whole feels like this amalgam of Destiny, Phantasy Star Online and Tribes. If that combination sounds like something you would be interesting, I highly suggest you check it out. I think I was largely luckier than most in that one of the freebie mechs, the Excalibur is right down my alley. I am slashing everything with my space ninja ways, and really enjoying myself. For those curious, I have pretty much set down roots on the PC, and while I might give it a shot later on the PS4, I have no real intention of moving at the moment as the AggroChat crew seem to all be playing it.

Diablo 3

The floodgates for Diablo 3 Season 5 opened on Friday at 7pm and from that point until 10:30 or so my time I was running around in a group leveling like mad. At this point I have managed to get to 68, which puts me behind the curve of folks like Grace that are 70 with over 150 paragon levels. That however is fine by me, because I am just happy I am almost to the cap with at least one character. I am going to be interested in seeing what the various challenges are that unlock the various seasonal rewards. What makes the season play so addictive to me is the fact that it mimics a MMO launch. Everyone on your friends list for a period of time is playing Diablo 3 and excited about it, as though they were playing a brand new game. So you have a few weeks of focused play, and then don’t feel guilty at all when you shift back to playing other games until the launch of the next season. This focused excitement is really fun to experience, and this is technically my third season so far. There is part of me that wishes I had gotten on board with the concept earlier. My goal today is to finish up my Crusader and then probably focus on some more Warframe. Hopefully all of you readers out there have had an equally fun week, and Pax South seriously could not get here soon enough.