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Blog Unbroken

April 14, 2016 by Belghast

Technological Betrayal

Yesterday was a really rough day. It was the sort of day that makes you question why exactly you do anything. It started yesterday with WordPress indicating that I should really patch my blog to the latest version. These are the sort of warnings that I take heed, given that generally speaking the way you end up with a hacked blog is by not patching constantly. Everything seemed completely normal, and I started soldiering on with my morning post. About 90% of the way through the morning post I noticed that I was having some odd issues with the wysiwyg editor, so I decided to save a draft and reload. Upon hitting that save draft button, it cleared everything I had just written giving me a painfully blank screen. This is what ultimately lead me to post my blog broken post, because I ran out of time to write something, and I was testing to see if it was only the save draft functionality or if it was the actual publish functionality as well. So I rattled off a post really quickly, hit publish and boom… it posted only a title with no content which told me more than I knew before. It seemed like something that was interacting with the editor was causing problems. This second time around I had the presence of mind to write my post in google docs, so I was able to log in through the WordPress.com interface and try making the post there, which is ultimately what added text to my post.

After a bunch of fiddling and turning things off I found that apparently the Twitch Embed Suite that I had used for awhile to embed my twitch stream into a page on my blog, was causing all sorts of issues. So after disabling that I managed to make an update to the post, which is giving me hope this morning that all of this typing is not in vain. I’ve also already saved a draft successfully so we are in a much better place than we were yesterday morning. Unfortunately these problems didn’t stop with the blog yesterday, and my entire morning at work was spent chasing down insane issue after insane issue. One of which had been plaguing me for a few days now and over the course of six and a half hours working on the problem and trying everything I could think of it solve it… I finally remembered that about six years ago we had something similar happen and I followed down a hunch of what had caused that issue. The issue with problem solving is that often times I need to let a problem percolate in my brain for awhile before the answer presents itself… which is not exactly conducive to fixing something rapidly. So by the time I had fixed this huge issue, and a few others… it felt like I had run some sort of a mental marathon. The day improved after that… well that is until I found out that the daily heroic in Destiny was once again Lost to Light… the mission that can in theory reward the Black Spindle.

Lost to Light Sucks

Mostly I am just sick of trying for a Black Spindle. Through the grace of my friends Squirrel and Jex, I have likely put in more than twenty attempts at this thing over the course of several different occasions with no luck in walking away with one. On our best attempt we were one or two mobs away from completing when the timer ran out. Last night Squirrel was available as always and willing to help, but we struggled to find a second and Jex was nowhere to be found. So as a result I ended up trying with an old World of Warcraft friend and his co-worker. I was feeling pretty good when I heard that the two of them duoing it somehow managed to make it to the final room with a couple of minutes to spare. I thought surely with a third person in the mix that would make all the difference in the world. Unfortunately we could get to the final room with about six minutes left and from there everything seemed to break down when it came to juggling clearing the adds and also working on whittling down the boss. The closest we have ever gotten was the bubble in the middle method where we took down the boss with sword attacks and then worked on clearing the room. This time around we largely got corralled in the center corridor “safe spot” and anytime we attempted to poke our heads out either ate a sniper shot or a taken centurion ball attack. In any case this is another week without getting a spindle, and honestly I am not sure how much more I am even going to attempt it. I get my hopes up and then when I fail to get it again I just end up feeling like shit.

Now other than this little hiccup the patch has been excellent. Yesterday I had written a huge post talking about all of the things I was enjoying in the patch, but sadly that bit of prose is lost to the sands of time… or at least wherever the internet garbage collector deposits things. Suffice to say that I am enjoying the update and that it has lit a fire under my ass to go out and do things. It is not entirely as magical as I would have hoped because the confusing text blurb I have talked about before from the Bungie website was exactly that… confusing. Originally the statement had said something to the effect that engrams would now decode to at least your current converted light level. What that really means in practice is EXOTIC engrams will now decode to at least your current converted light level. I am still getting a ton of trash blues and purples, but I don’t really mind them that much because I no longer have to go through a complicated process to decide if I should break it down immediately or if I should save it for infusion fodder. The math is simply… is it higher than the light level of the gear I want to be using? If so eat it and bump up an item… if not deconstruct and get tasty materials. The awesome thing about this is that it is letting me dip into my bank and dust off items that I never actually used because the light was simply too low. For example I found this amazing Byronic Hero which is an extremely high impact hand cannon with a decent magazine size. It has triple tap, hand loaded and hidden hand giving me decent stability, better than average range… and great target acquisition with the ability to get a bonus round if I precision shot multiple times in a row.

Treasure Room Raiding

The other thing that needs to be talked about is Prison of Elders. When Destiny launched, I played for a few months and then got frustrated with my inability to improve my light level and moved on to something else. I did not return until after the launch of the Taken King, which means I largely missed both House of Wolves and the Dark Below and never actually played the original Prison of Elders. Now my friend Squirrel runs this every single week, and has for a very long time… but tends to run them on Sunday which was a lousy time for me to be doing much of anything. So when we set foot in there a few nights ago it was completely fresh and new to me… and I loved every moment of it. For years I have wanted an MMO to give me a dungeon that is a sequence of random encounters pulled from a larger pool of encounters… and that is pretty much precisely what Prison of Elders is. The first four rounds of the match take place on various battlefields themed after either the Fallen, Vex, Cabal or Hive and in new incarnation apparently each one of these has the chance of spawning in as a Taken version. The fifth round is a boss encounter and will take place on the battleground that links up to the type of mob you are facing. In the couple of outings so far I have only seen the giant Vex Minotaur and the Cabal Primus, but I believe there a bunch of options that you can end up with, as well as some new Taken versions. Your reward at the end is a trip down to the treasure room where you get to open three chests and each time through I have gotten at least one legendary engram for my troubles.

The other thing of note has been the introduction of loot boxes, for purchase from the in game shop or from doing activities. It seems like you earn a loot box for doing each type of activity per week, meaning that your first crucible match of the week, your first prison of elders/heroic of the week… and I am guessing your first raid of the week earns you a loot box. I also ended up opening several of the boxes with silver and managed to get a full set of the Taken themed gear as well as a full set of the Spectrum gear that allows you to change the color of its glow. I thought I was just super lucky, until I found out that most of my friends got nothing but Titan armor regardless of who they opened them on. There are angry threads all over the place right now talking about how crappy the randomizer is on these boxes, and folks have posted pictures of their inventory full of nine copies of exactly the same item. I guess in the grand scheme of things I lucked out because I got all of the armor I would want, as well as a white tron themed sparrow, and a really damned cool ship. Unfortunately it was not the taken themed ship that I really wanted… but I am happy enough to use it for the time being and will simply hope that my future weekly boxes end up giving me the other. In any case… I am really happy with the patch and have been slowly getting enough higher level engrams to start upgrading my gear a little at a time. I went into the patch sitting at 309 and can now hit 312 which while not a huge difference is enough to keep me engaged.

All Hail Patch Day

April 12, 2016 by Belghast

Light be Praised

Today is the most magical of all days… patch day in Destiny. There have been times in the past when something so cool was being released that I have been giddy about the patch, and today is definitely one of those days. If you have not been following Destiny since the original launch, I have to say you have been missing something. This is one of those games that a lot of people wrote off completely after being frustrated with the original release. To be truthful even among the AggroChat folks… even though I talk about Destiny constantly… there are a handful of people that were burned so bad on this game that they never want to play it again. This is however a huge unfortunate thing since Taken King was for Destiny what the 2.0 patch was for Diablo 3. It was that period of time where so many things were just “made better”, because in many ways it was the start of Bungie realizing that a somewhat adversarial loot policy was a bad idea. That said there was still quite a bit of grind in Taken King, but it was the sort of grind that never made me feel like it was utterly hopeless. I could go out, get a bunch of engrams… and maybe just maybe one of them would be worth using to help infuse up all of the 280 weapons that I had sitting in my vault. The infusion system was so much better than hoping for a drop… and then not being able to use it because it didn’t have enough light on it like happened so often in Year One.

That said the infusion system was still a pain in the ass. I had my vault lined with 285 items that I could use as stepping stones to get those 280 arms day and vendor drops up to decent levels of light to make them usable in most activities. Last night I cleared every last bit of that out of my vault, because with today’s patch infusion will be 1 to 1. Meaning that if I get a 280 weapon, I can drop a 310 item into it and it becomes 310… no fiddling or calculations required. With today’s patch the light level is also being increased… to 335, with pretty much all of the “end game” activities from Iron Banner to Court of Oryx to the existing raid being able to drop high light level items. There is a part of the patch preview on the Bungie site that is a bit ambiguous talking about engrams now decoding to a minimum of whatever your equipped light level is. If that is the case I will sing the praises of this game from the rooftops because I have a vault full of weapons I would LOVE to use… but they are simply too low of light level to be viable. While I didn’t start saving nearly as far back as my friend Squirrel did (simply for lack of bank space) I did start saving pretty much every engram I have gotten in the last few days. The hope is that tonight when I log in I can start decoding them and hopefully get some really nice upgrades to my overall light levels.

Hope of Stability

As is often the case on various game subreddits, some user has created a really excellent list of all of the content that players might need to know about coming back to the game. While I fully expect there to be a deluge of returning players, this really is the ideal time to reinstall the game and start once more. This patch packed some pretty massive quality of life issues, and if the grind bothered you before… that should be significantly lessened now. As far as how I spent my last night before the patch… we were attempting to play clean up on the stranded Kings Fall raid from Tuesday. I’m part of the group formerly known as the Rookie Raid, that has now been renamed to the Squirrel Squad. Though based on the folks that sign up instantly… I was going to suggest Jexy Squirrelghast for the unofficial name. While I still very much feel like a rookie, I guess I have picked up more information than I realize. Granted I still suck horribly at the jumping puzzles and more than likely always will. I died so many times to the wall last night it wasn’t even funny. That said I wasn’t the last person to get to the chest, nor the last person to get up through the rock pillar vertical puzzle either. As far as the stranded raid… well we spent most of our time attempting to get the Warpriest challenge mode, and as a result we simply ran out of time to move on beyond it. We wound up simply killing the Warpriest in non-challenge mode, which I felt was at least in part my fault… given that it was my first time doing platforms.

Last night we more or less cruised along nicely thought Golgoroth, and Sisters… only to run into some logistical first timer issues on Oryx. The fight has a lot of things to take in and we straight up got robbed of at least one kill when half of the orbs didn’t detonate even when players were standing on them. The raid ended in frustration, because we simply ran out of time and available resources to keep pushing. I greatly appreciate all the non-rookies that stuck in and pushed forward trying to get Nidrew his first kill, and it is my hope that tonight the servers will be stable enough for us to give a good push at trying to get that kill this evening. Part of the becoming “Squirrel Squad” is that we moved the start time back to 8pm CST giving us an extra hour worth of attempts on stuff to hopefully get the clear. That 9pm start just guaranteed that by the time we hit Oryx we were all a little loopy and out of it. The only gotcha tonight is that given my history of big landmark patches in the various MMORPGs I have played… I totally do not expect the servers to actually be playable tonight. I will be totally fine with just doing small activities roaming around this evening, and maybe taking in some Court of Oryx. However I am still holding out hope that we might be able to do the 320 version of the Kings Fall raid tonight, and get folks some new and shiny upgrades.

The Secret Stash

April 10, 2016 by Belghast

Comfort Gaming

One of the things I always have trouble sorting out, is what game I plan on playing during the AggroChat podcast. Now there are casts that have a strict no gaming rule while talking, but I honestly think that would damage some of the discussion. Essentially we are hitting record on conversations that naturally happened already on our voice chat server. Part of that equation is the fact that we are talking while gaming, and for the last couple of weeks the game of choice has been Diablo 3. I think partially it is that I know the season is coming to an end, and as a result it is fresh in my mind again. The ultimate irony however is that I am not playing seasonal characters at all. While recording two shows ago I ended up pushing my non-seasonal monk to 70 and last night I started working on trying to get my non-seasonal warrior from 60 to 70. That would leave only my Wizard as being sub max level, which honestly…. I am considering giving another chance. I am not a huge fan of finger wigglers… but after running with a lot of wizards over these last couple of seasons… I have to say I see the charm. They can simply melt anything that they come up against, and there actually is a semi melee range option that I would probably be able to stomach.

The other thing that I tried my hand at this week was Path of Exile. I find it shocking that the game has been out this long and I have yet to even really give it a shot. The talent screen honestly scared me off a bit because it looked as complicated as the final fantasy x sphere grid. However for some time my friend Carthuun has been talking it up, pretty much anytime we brought up Diablo 3. It is entertaining and I feel like I could play it happily, but I have to say I was somewhat shocked how relatively difficult that it starts. I mean it is not super hard, but you can’t simply mow through the mobs in quite the manner that you do in Diablo 3. All this really means is it makes me realize just how watered down the latest Diablo installment really was. The only disappointment was that there didn’t seem to be any sort of a real “knight” light character with a sword and shield in the manner of the Crusader in D3. I ended up choosing the big brute character, and at some point I will probably try and go sword and shield. I am not sure exactly how I am building the character yet because I have yet to get terribly far.

Pre-Patch Farming

The majority of yesterdays game time was spent running around in The Division and attempting to farm crafting components. At the current moment I have a decent stash of materials, or at least am in a better position than I was before I knew the crafting changes were coming down. I am not super pumped about the patch, because it feels like it is taking the game in a less player friendly direction. However that said I am still slowly making progress towards the level cap. While running around yesterday I managed to ding 24, and encountered some areas that I had not seen yet. The strangest of course was this marijuana farm that was nestled deep inside a building. As the day goes on today my goal is to continue trying to level because I would really love to be able to participate in some of the big activities, but I am absolutely certain I will not hit the cap before the patch. I am somewhat frustrated that it sounds like gearing is going to be harder for me, than it was for the folks who rushed the leveling process. That however always seems to be the case… the first few you get to cap get easy epics, and those who level slowly have to struggle through the throttled drop rates.

Chasing Happy

April 8, 2016 by Belghast

Obliviously Chill

This week has been an interesting one so far. I’ve been trying to take these mood enhancers that I had fallen out of the habit of taking on a daily basis. According to my wife it makes a huge difference when I am taking them, versus when I am not. However on Wednesday night they caused me to more or less forget that I had a raid to attend. I was sitting there happily on the sofa watching Daredevil Season 2 and screwing around in Destiny through the official remote play application… and next thing I know around 9pm I check into Slack and realize that I had completely blown off the Wednesday night WoW Raid thing. Thankfully they were able to make it work without me, which is awesome… but I was otherwise completely oblivious to having anything going on that night. Like in the back of my head there was a vague feeling that I was supposed to be doing something, but I was so chill that apparently I never actually acted upon that thought. I partially blame Daredevil because really, this season so far has been enthralling. I only started watching it Wednesday night because our cable box was uncooperative, and I couldn’t seem to get anything else up on the screen.

I’ve been feeling generally disconnected from the world, and my hope is that the happy pills will help to curb that instinct and allow me to actually participate in it again. I’m not even certain what caused me to stop taking them, other than one day I simply forgot… and the next day I forgot… and so on until I was out of the habit. I’ve had quite a bit of work stress lately, combined with the stress of all of the home renovation “change” has kinda pushed me into another funk. After a sequence of bad mental health days, I came to the realization that I really should be taking them again. When I am not doing great, I tend to throw up this wall and paint a happy face on it… then duck behind it hoping the world will go away. I realize this is largely a defense mechanism, but it feels so much safer behind the wall than out in front of it interacting openly. Everything feels like it is buzzing past so fast that I can’t really grasp what is going on, or who is attempting to interact. So when I am sitting in this mode I spend a lot of time staring at things, without actually understanding what I am looking at or how it actually relates to me. One of the things I have tried to do with this blog is be pretty open about whatever is going on with me… even if it is the not so great stuff.

Warlock vs Oryx

Through the course of playing Destiny I managed to push all three classes to 40, but some of them get a lot less use. Namely my Warlock has kinda become the unloved child of the bunch, because no matter how much I try… I never can seem to get the hang of their damned jump. It always feels like a much less useful version of the Titan jump. Hunter makes perfect sense… they have triple or quadruple jump depending on if you have the Bones of Eao equipped. Warlock jump however never seems to do the thing I want it to do when I want it to do it. However lately thanks to the magic of the Remote Play application I have been poking around on that character, because in the grand scheme of things… it has the least impact on my other activities. The problem is that I really have not done much questing. I ground my way to 40 through the various patrol missions and had not even completed the Taken King content. So last night I decided to pick up where I had left off in that quest chain, which turns out about four quests from the end of it. This was a big nuisance since anytime I got one of those ever so lucrative “Patrol the Dreadnaught” bounties, I couldn’t actually do that… and would end up having to complete a story mission to get kill credit. Over the course of the night however I managed to finish the main story arc of the Taken King and it is ridiculously easy when you are sitting at 292 light.

Also while doing stuff on the Warlock, I decided to go ahead and do the Stormcaller quest chain so that I could unlock that class. I have to say having done all of them now, this one was probably my favorite. I loved the whole “taming the storm” aspect of the quest because it really seems to it the class as a whole. Now unfortunately I need to just do a bunch of leveling to top off my various subclasses. I have all three maxed on the Titan, but for the others… I have Nightstalker on the Hunter maxed, and absolutely none of the Warlock classes maxed with Sunsinger being the closest since I figured the whole self rez thing would be the most needed like a Titan bubble. I wish there were versions of the mark/bond/cloak that increased leveling for classes other than the ones added with Taken King. Even if you had to do some sort of a quest to earn them, it would be a welcome addition for anyone trying to top off all three classes. The only problem with running Strikes/Crucible to level is that I feel like I am not entirely effective because I am missing large chunks of my abilities. So instead I just end up running bounties and screwing around in the patrol missions which seems like the slowest way to level sub classes. However all of this is great “playing from the couch on the remote play app” fodder so it will probably see a lot more screen time than it previously did. Before the ability to reliably play remotely, the only time I was really playing Destiny was to go do group activities. Now I can do a lot of solo questing from the comfort of the living room and it is making me play catch up on all of those things I largely ignored.