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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.

Week in Gaming 11/22/2015

November 22, 2015 by Belghast

Missing Breakers

During this segment I generally run down the gaming I have done during the previous week, however this week I am going to regale you with a story from last night. As I have talked about a bit on my blog we are currently going through some minor home renovations. We seem to be nearing the end however, and other than a few minor problems that they are working on… things seem to largely be done. During part of this process we had a big extension cord coming out through the garage door so they could do work on the front of the house, and as part of their wrapping things up they asked me to go inside and raise the garage door so they could unplug it. When I got out to the garage however… the door would not open, and around about this same time I noticed that our freezer was off. Thus began the mission to try and sort out what breaker was flipped.

The breakers are in a horrible location in our house, which is on the garage wall… but someone in their infinite wisdom decided to build a table and attach it to the wall in front of the breaker box. When I say table… I mean it is a 4 foot deep and 8 foot across shelving unit made out of full sheets of plywood. Sure it is sturdy as hell but it is super awkward and fiddling with the breakers means I have to essentially crawl up onto the table. The problem being… none of the breakers were flipped which began a hunt through the house because the contractors were convinced that this could not be the ONLY breaker box on the house. Please note that at this point we have lived in the house going on eighteen years…. we were absolutely certain this was the only breaker box. Finally after running around and flipping the damned house main in the back yard… someone noticed that the outlet in the garage that the opener was plugged into… had a ground fault switch. We flipped that and magically everything started working again. So yeah… that was a fun way to spend a good chunk of my night.

Final Fantasy XIV

This week finally saw my return to Final Fantasy XIV as it also announced the release of the 3.1 content. I talked about this a bit during the week, but it feels a little bittersweet. The content was really good, but also really really short. Usually we have some big boss fight as the pinnacle of the content patches, and this time around…. nothing. Sure there was a big fight but it wasn’t on the same level as a new Primal or an encounter like Gilgamesh. Also there is the fact that we still don’t have a new segment in the Hildebrand chain… or nothing to really replace the hole it has created in the content. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the Lords of Verminion minigame and as a result a bunch of other stuff slipped to the 3.15 patch later. I still have yet to do any of the dungeons, but hopefully I can get that going soonish.

The bulk of my final fantasy time consists of me logging in, and doing my Beast Tribe dailies for the new Vanu Vanu tribe along with some of the old world quests. What makes this pretty great is the fact that at the current level cap… all of the old world quests are super easy to do. So essentially my daily pecking order is… Vanu Vanu > Slyphs > Sahagin. Mostly I just want to be a tiny lalafell riding along on a giant goobue. Last night we also revived the tradition of doing stuff on Saturday nights as we ran bits of First and Second coil with the guild. I was not there for Turn 5 but I got pulled in on the second coil fun. We managed to get all the way up to turn 9, and put in a few attempts before Ashgar and I had to leave to prep for the podcast. My hope is we can get people in the habit of showing up on Saturday nights to do stuff like this and pony farming. That would go a long way towards revitalizing the Final Fantasy experience for me.

Destiny

I am continuing to play Destiny but a significantly reduced pace. Each Sunday afternoon we do a Star Wars pen and paper game, and right now Destiny seems to be my game of choice to play while doing that. It is something I can play on a machine that is not my main computer, and still be able to pay attention to what is going on in the roleplaying. Destiny is for the most part muscle reflexes at this point, so I am spending the time doing bounties and missions and such. I did however play quite a bit on Wednesday, or at least long enough to do my various weapon missions. I still very much love this game, but Fallout 4 has largely taken the place it held of the game I am spending most of my time playing. There are still a lot of things I want, but more than likely I am going to mostly do the Armsday/Xursday thing each week and then focus if there are objectives and goals that I really want to accomplish. There are a few interesting looking weapons this week that I am hoping turn out to be pretty awesome from the Gunsmith.

Fallout 4

I am still slowly wandering my way through the commonwealth. I am roughly sixty hours into the game and have yet to go to Diamond City. That said I have done a whole slew of side quests, but more often than not when I get one… I have already been to that location and cleared it out. When I went to help the Brotherhood of Steel for example… I had already completely cleared that location other than the areas that the Brotherhood ends up unlocking for you to go explore. As far as the Minutemen, I am tasked with taking back the castle, but the castle is a long ways off from where I am. Right now I am largely exploring the Cambridge area and delving into the ruined buildings that you find there. The hospital at Cambridge was one of the more interesting areas, so if you have not been there I highly suggest checking it out. There has been some crazy shit happening there… but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. At this point I am still largely using my crappy pipe gun, that has been upgraded as much as possible…. but that is largely because I have a truly silly amount of ammunition for it.

World of Warcraft

I am weak…. and nostalgia is strong. Over the last few weeks I knew deep down inside that I was fighting a losing battle. Finally yesterday I gave in and started playing my sub level 20 horde characters since I could do that for free. When Scryers and Argent Dawn merged, I ended up creating an entire accounts worth of Horde alts with the thought of playing with some of my Horde friends on the Argent Dawn server. I tried to create one of every race and class… and some of them I am probably going to simply re-roll. For my Warrior… I ended up going Blood Elf because I remember at launch Warrior was not an option for them. Also I have gotten kinda sick of playing Orcs, and my Deathknight is an Orc, and my Paladin is a Tauren. Maybe I am mellowing in my old age, but the whole “elf” thing is annoying me far less right now. Maybe it is the nostalgia of him wearing what is essentially a set of Wrath armor from Molten Core. In any case I am poking my head around World of Warcraft, and we will see how well that takes.

Fighting Nostalgia

November 9, 2015 by Belghast

The Afterglow

You know… Blizzard would probably win back a lot of players if they activated every single account for the two weeks following Blizzcon

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) November 7, 2015

During the midst of the BlizzCon festivities I tweeted the above statement… and at the time I thought this would be a brilliant idea. BlizzCon brings up feelings in me at least that I didn’t even realize were still there about a game I have not been actively playing for six months. So yeah… it seemed like if they would just automagically make it so everyone can log in and play during BlizzCon and the two weeks after… they would probably re-hook a lot of players on the game or at least get them to stick around for a few months. The problem being… two weeks is probably long enough to make someone come to their senses. I phrase it like that because I am going through a bout of momentary insanity myself. Every instinct in my body tells me that I really want to play some World of Warcraft, which is odd because nothing really seemed that amazing while the presentations were going on. There is just something about the BlizzCon buzz that is real and tangible and makes you want to sift through your past characters and revisit old haunts that you had long forgotten.

I am having these desires to log in and run Icecrown Citadel or Naxxramas… or even Ulduar. Basically this is 100% nostalgia attacking me and making me want to go experience what I considered to be the best era of the game. I am fighting the urge with every fiber of my being because I know as soon as Tuesday happens… I will be devoting my life to Fallout… and thinking “Warcraft who?”. I know I could log in and play sub level 20 characters, and I have considered that… but have not been certain if that would make the desire better or just worse. The problem is… I don’t REALLY want to play World of Warcraft… I want to play the game circa 2009 when we were still in love with the Wrath of the Lich King patch cycle. Some of the Legion content seems like it could be really cool, and I do hope with every fiber of my being I somehow find my way into Beta, but I know all that waits for me on the live game is the same stuff that lead me to finally cancel my account again. Yes I am rationalizing the hell out of this because I am just trying to hold out until I am safely in a Vault Wednesday.

Closer to Sleeper

The above image was me yesterday morning while I wrapped up the AggroChat podcast and made my own blog post, waiting and hoping and praying to see a Warsat drop. Part of the time I spent trying to make Destiny Event Tracker work… which it does… but it feels like there is a paragraph of explanation text that needs to go with it that simply does not exist. It seems like this is a timer that shows when an event MAY spawn, and some of the spawn zones are not exactly active. For example I really do think that the Warsat simply no longer drops in Skywatch because of all of the other events that are happening there now. I waited that timer out for a significant amount of time and never saw one. However once I switched over to checking the Mothyard on earth, aka the location in the above image… I quickly got a Warsat and was able to move on. Similarly quickly I was able to get both the Mars and Moon Warsat drops which were pretty much accurate according to the timers listed above. That only left the archives mission on Venus, which I know I MUST have done at some point…. but damned if I can remember doing it at any point in the past. Maybe there is a special version if you are on the sleeper stimulant quest chain, but I do not remember something quite like that.

I have now finished powering up the Ikelos core, and have turned it in to the Gunsmith. In theory tomorrow with the reset he should offer me a new quest to go do a 280 light version of the Saber-2 strike. If I can cobble together a group for that, I should be able to loot the sleeper stimulant frame, which at least based on what I am reading will turn in at the Gunsmith for my finished 290 Sleeper Stimulant heavy pulse rifle. This will be the first of the exotic weapon quests that I have really completed… not counting the one you get from the gunsmith at rank 4. It definitely feels less arbitrary than the exotic bounties used to in year one. In all of the bounties I completed I only ever got the bounty for the last word. This at least gives me a ladder that I can climb, with more importantly a starting rung of that ladder that is clear…. well clear based on using external sources. I am not sure how the hell people figured these things out the first time… it seems like pure madness since the game doesn’t really give you much information to go on. I guess Bungie is accounting for the fact that the internet and YouTube is pretty much ubiquitous and someone somewhere would upload a video on how to do pretty much everything you can think of. I still at some point need to get the Cult Ghost from Paradox so I can eventually get No Time to Explain. Since my hunter is my Future War Cult devotee, I am thinking maybe I should try for it on them because at this point they should have all of the faction needed to complete the quest.

Week In Gaming 11/8/2015

November 8, 2015 by Belghast

Reapers Attack

Yesterday was N7 day and what I can only imagine as reapers… continued to dismantle my house. What I mean by that is that this week contractors have been working on siding our house and other little home improvement things. Friday during the day and all day Saturday I have had to listen to them tearing parts of the exterior of my house off, and sawing bits to put back in their place. I have a headache that is completely insane and I think its simply from all the noise over the last few days. Another thing that happened yesterday was the ExtraLife Marathon, and at one point we had these grand plans to try and do it as AggroChat. I am extremely glad those plans fell through because with the contractors traipsing in and out of my house there would have simply been no way I could have done that yesterday. I did however get to hang out a bit with Liore on her stream, and my hope was that anyone who would have supported me would end up supporting her. Last I heard she raised something like $2200 which is pretty damned awesome!

Seeking Stimulant

This week once again has been largely devoted to me playing Destiny. As I had hoped it does in fact seem like the Sleeper Stimulant quest is going to be reappearing about once a month. I managed to complete the First Firewall and the follow up Shadow Call missions that are the ones that were time sensitive. Shadow Call in itself was pretty damned insane because it is a mission where you have to reach the top of a tower in three minutes. This tower is full of tons of Taken Fallen mobs, and essentially you don’t have time to fight ANY of it. You need to run past as best you can, and the only thing I ultimately took out were the blight orbs that robbed me of my ability to jump. When you get to the top you have to take down three Wizards all within the original time limit. It took me about eight tries to get to the top of the tower… but when I finally did I was able to take down the mobs without much issue. Now I am just left with the task of gathering up all of the elements required to recharge the Ikelos fusion core. The problem I am having is of course the Warsats… I spent most of last night waiting on Earth in the supposed area where the Warsat spawns. I waited through three different blights and did not see any Warsats at all during that process, so I am wondering if for some reason they have moved where the Warsat drops. I am getting conflicting reports of it happening in the Mothyards and Skywatch… which while next to each other are only connected by a series of tunnels that makes them hard to move between.

The other big thing I worked on this week was my Warlock, and I have managed to get him up to level 30. Doing the level 20 strikes I thought initially would be a great way to level, but for some reason I seem to only get the Omniguul one which is freaking annoying. I have a few more of those Red Bull experience stimulant things… and I plan on chain running some strikes with them up in the hopes of maximizing the experience gain. I still need to finish up the Black Garden quest, because ultimately when I am on I spend more time faffing about in patrol missions than I actually do in directed combat. I have a slew of quests that the various folks on the tower have given me as well that I should probably finish up. I am not sure what I have this drive to get the Warlock to 40 and geared, but in theory I guess I just want one of each. In an MMO it always bugs me when I get exclusive gear for a specific class but cant use it… and that has always been my strongest drive to level said class… because I knew I had it waiting on me when I got to level. I have most of a level 40 gear set waiting in my bank, and I am amped to be able to get the Warlock up to use it.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Another side project this week has been to go through and play the original Halo: Combat Evolved, or at least start it. The original Xbox and honestly the GameCube as well are like the biggest voids in my gaming history. They happened at a time when I was largely in an Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot shaped hole. As a result I never got to play Halo other than the pretty lousy PC port, and I never really caught back up when I finally got an Xbox 360. In my travels I have picked up copies of the Anniversary edition of Halo for 360, as well as 2, 3, and 4 and plan on playing through them at some point. What ended up peaking my interests is the fact that apparently on of the elder races in Halo were the Ecumene, which during the Book of Sorrows in Destiny you find out was a race destroyed by the Hive. So in theory at least it seems like the Destiny universe is the “future” of the Halo universe, or at least Halo is a universe that exists before the coming of the Traveler and the dawning of the golden age. I am not exactly sure why I am so fascinated with the lore of Destiny, but I guess in a way it reminds me a lot of the universe of Dune. Super complex… but you also have to dig hard to find that connective tissue that brings everything together.

I have to say that so far Combat Evolved holds up pretty solidly. My only real complaint is that I cannot actually remap my controls. You can choose from one of many presets, but you can’t actually swap around the buttons. If I had my druthers I would map things to match Destiny more closely… but I did manage to find a set that is “close enough” for me not to instinctively do anything stupid. I am mostly wanting to know the story of the Halo universe, so that I can maybe glean more information about the Destiny universe. Also I seem to be on an FPS kick so playing another one just seems to be in the cards. I am honestly considering playing Fallout 4 on the PC with an Xbox 360 controller just to continue this pattern. I do at some point need to get back into the swing of playing FPS on PC with the mouse and keyboard because I absolutely intend to play Overwatch that way.

Heroes of the Storm

As I mentioned briefly above… I ended up playing a bunch of matches with Liore and Elly yesterday during their Extra Life stream. It had been a really really long time since I had played any Heroes, more than likely not much since the game officially launched awhile back and reset. They have really added a bunch of nifty stuff, and I noticed that one of my previously “cool” but largely just a recolor skins.. has turned into this elaborate Diablo Tyrael thing which I absolutely approve of. Unfortunately while playing I just saw a bunch of skins that I really want to get… like Marshall Raynor… and Judgement Uther. Later last night I poked my head in again, this time alone and noticed that I had more than enough gold to purchase Uther, which is one of those characters that I have enjoyed on free weeks, but never actually picked up. I have also heard that Rehgar is equally enjoyable in the melee support role, but not really played him either. I ended up winning a game as Uther which completed a quest. I guess at some point they backed away from the concept that you could not complete quests in bots only games, which makes me happy because I can actually pop in and get stuff done on days that I don’t feel like dealing with other players. This is still a really fun game, and probably the only MOBA that I would actually play by myself and solo queue. Funny how making chat option improves my experience, the only negative is that you always seem to have one player that is off by themselves and not really paying attention to what the team is doing.

Rift

I also popped my head into Rift for a bit while we podcast last night, and continued to work on my primalist. At this point I am level 14 and I feel like I am starting to wind down the content in Silverwood. I guess I am just a die hard Defiant… because I just don’t have near as much fun when I am playing Guardian side. I liked the idea of a Dwarven Primalist, but man do I wish I had the option of choosing to play the Defiant content instead. I mean I know you can race change, but it simply was not worth it for me to roll a Defiant and then race change to Dwarf. I just kinda wish that races were independent of the path you choose to take faction wise… since the faction as fiction patch made all of that really a personal preference not a hard line. I mean Freemarch has all sorts of awesome Undead that you get to fight… and what does Silverwood have? Goblins… Fae… and more Elves… just not nearly as cool on the “fun to slaughter” meter. Complaints aside I am continuing to progress but not really playing that often. This is one of those games that I keep returning to when I want some low key activity, and I don’t feel like I have time to get into something more serious. I guess I play Rift much the same way as a lot of people play Guild Wars 2. Get in, do a few things… and get right back out.