MMORPG Archives - Page 105 of 365 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Thorns and Rebirth

May 20, 2019May 20, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was the beginning of Season 17 of Diablo 3, and after largely taking off the previous one we were back in the saddle again. I started the season on PC and hope at some point to start playing it on the Switch as well at least far enough to get the various season rewards. To the best of my knowledge this is the first season to double back and start repeating, as I had all of the cosmetics that were handed out this time around. This is both a positive and a negative in that I will be able to pick up the things that I have missed in the past, but it also will lower my overall drive to play a given season if I know I won’t be getting anything brand new.

I am amped for this season however because it allows me to return to my favorite build in Diablo 3… the “stop hitting yourself” crusader. Generally speaking I pick which class I play in a given season based on which class sets are available through Haedrig’s Gift, and this season the one available for Crusaders is Invoker… aka the Thorns build. The inner tank in me just really loves running around and watching the monsters explode when they try and hit me, and apparently everyone is pushing this one up high on their tier lists for long term clearing. Which makes me really want to try and get a bonus stash tab and the cosmic effect bat wings this season. I had a lot of fun this weekend playing around with Diablo 3 and I just wish that my schedule would have synchronized better with my friends because apart from the Friday night push and while recording on Saturday… I never quite managed to group up again. I did however finish chapter 4 and get the full set of Invoker… and am now working on the Slayer chapter.

Also the “Decades Behind” thing is starting to gather steam and I am shocked that for the most part the AggroChat crew seems really interested in it… or at the very least it is a thing that they feel like they are insane enough to do. With that however I decided that maybe I should see if I can get used to playing an Undead Warrior… given that raiding Horde side means you don’t have Fear Ward and having an extra fear break would potentially be worth it. It is weird that I am now thinking in terms of optimization for something that I have literally “been there and done that” for… which is going to make the whole raiding experience feel weird. I know these bosses and the strats to take them down… I know the drop tables and which gear I should seek out. I feel like Classic WoW is going to be a master class in optimization as much as anything else in trying to seek out the items you need. Like for example… I want to tank every single Warlock when they get their Felsteed… because that boss can drop one of the best +defense guns in the game at the time of Vanilla. All of this shit is coming back and my memory is on fire with all of the things I used to do to make things functional. This is going to be a really interesting ride.

Lastly this morning is the first post from a brand new web host. Over the weekend I uprooted both Aggronaut.com and AggroChat.com and moved them over to a brand new location. For the most part things seem to be going smoothly, apart from a few hiccups here and there. Aggronaut seems to be having more problems than AggroChat but that is largely because I am needing to undo the various customization I made to make it work on the previous host. Like this morning I could not get image uploads to work, but I ironed that out in short order. It was a sequence of events that made me to abandon ship. Firstly I was paying way more than I would need to make… but you can never underestimate the power of my laziness when it comes to avoiding paying money for something. Next there was the problem where at some point automatic upgrades broke completely… which was a big boost for moving but again something I was willing to deal with for the short term.

The final straw however is that the host itself has been wildly unstable… I use a cloud app called Uptime Robot to track if my sites are up or down. The above spam is from my inbox and the messages showing my site is going unresponsive on a pretty regular basis. This finally was enough of a kick to get me to go off and find better options. As it stands I am in the process of moving things over one by one but with AggroChat and Aggronaut both moved that really is the bulk of the work. It took forever to transfer the 77,000 files for AggroChat and the 25,000 files for Aggronaut… which is bizarre considering that the bigger of the two sites is roughly half the age of the other one. I think I have an addon gone awry on AggroChat that we use to cache copies of posts from all of the AggroChat crew’s personal sites. Every so often it will go on a binge and add the same post over and over… and apparently this has happened more times than I realized.

Whatever the case I am on new ground now, and if things continue to go as smoothly as they have I will probably write a proper review of the service during Blaugust. That is right folks… I have not forgotten about Blaugust and will begin talking about this years running shortly over on the Discord.

Body Pulling

May 17, 2019 by Belghast

I spent my might roaming around in Mulgore some more and knocking out the various newbie quests from Bloodhoof Village at my own prodding pace that very much fits the animation cycle of the Tauren Male. So the weird thing about World of Warcraft Classic is that I know there is no capturing the feeling of roaming around in Azeroth for the first time back in 2004. I was 28 at the time and the launch of the game was a magical moment that happened to enrapture all of my friends that were MMO inclined at the same time. It was a weird amalgam of people I knew in real life, folks I met through Everquest, the few of us that played Dark Age of Camleot together, a bunch of people that we picked up from City of Heroes and some that came from the larger community of Horizon: Empire of Istaria (now just called Istaria). Everyone was going to be playing the same game at the same time and it was freaking awesome… the only hitch was that the game was divided into two halves and some of us were dedicated to playing Horde and others playing Alliance. I wound up joining the Alliance group and let the horde side of me largely atrophy, but from the beginning I found this to be a very artificial choice as I have never really bought into the faction war storyline.

I cannot fully explain why I am enjoying myself in World of Warcraft right now. I most definitely do not enjoy the current state of Battle for Azeroth, but for some reason playing Classic Beta feels more simple and pure. I am roaming around, surviving on nothing… getting legitimately excited any time I see a copper node or get some linen drops because it means I can advance my crafting. I got a bag drop during the first part of the newbie zone and was absolutely excited to see it… and still several levels later I am hoping to see another one drop. Everything feels to be boiled down to is purest form, of do some quests… kill some monsters… actually read some quest text because otherwise I cannot remember for the life of me where anything is located. I am present in the world because I keep my head on a swivel because one bad pull… one add at the wrong time… and I end up doing a corpse run.

The truth is that I have probably died more in the last two nights than I have died in the entire time questing since the release of Wrath of the Lich King. I am of course not counting raid and dungeon deaths because those are rather “accident prone” settings, but just in over world questing… most of the time I manage to level my way through almost the entirety of the expansion content before I actually take a death. In Classic I sorta wish that I had been keeping a death count… because seriously I have been dying a lot as I have had to adjust to the realities that we dealt with in Vanilla. I am having to re-learn the dark art of slow body pulling camps… and dragging them back at a safe distance while watching for any roamers. I am having to keep track of the spawn times and as I clear keep moving to what is now guaranteed to be a safe spot for awhile. All of these were skills that I went into World of Warcraft with having developed them in the precursor MMOs… but that have completely atrophied over time.

During Battle for Azeroth I played a Tank Demon Hunter… and on that character if I was not pulling entire camps at a time I was legitimately playing the game wrong. If I move forward to Classic however… if I get more than one mob at a time… I am straight up going to die. There is no safety net for me to fall back on… no Ignore Pain that I can lean on heavily to bring my health back up to full. The in combat regeneration rate is prodigiously slow meaning that I basically cannot do anything to better my situation apart from a healing potion during the fight… and even then that is just a temporary salve to a likely inevitable end. There is a part of me that thought I wouldn’t be as into this as I apparently am. That said I am having a blast and while I know there is no recapturing the things that made World of Warcraft Vanilla special… I am finding that it also still strangely works for me.

All of that said… I am contemplating some nonsense. I want to build a casual Dungeon and eventual Raid guild in World of Warcraft Classic when it releases in August. I realize the futility of naming something when I cannot actually register the guild… but I want to go with Decades Behind because there is a story there. Back during Wrath of the Lich King a bunch of us on the Argent Dawn Forums started a guild called Years Behind when patch 3.2.0 introduced the ability to lock your level at a specific level. I rolled a Gnome Warrior and for a short period of time we ran a bunch of the Vanilla raid content while artificially level locked down to 60. This was fun… but also not exactly true given that most of us were equipping Burning Crusade greens rather than relying on what was actually available back during Vanilla. With the advent of Classic I want to try and do something similar… and given that it has been over a decade since the launch of World of Warcraft I opted to update this name. In the months between now and the release I figure we will sort out information. Right now however I am targeting the Horde for two reasons. First… Grace is a die-hard Horde player and is super sad anytime she is playing something else… and in order to make this work I am absolutely going to need her. Secondly… I remember several bosses that Horde had a way easier time fighting than Alliance (and of course some that horde struggled with as well). The big one… was that there just wasn’t a viable way to take down the Ooze in AQ40 as Alliance. Additionally Horde has bloodlust… and I am stacking the deck as best I can.

I will of course be providing updates as I know more information about all of this.

Unexpected Installables

May 19, 2019May 16, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I started the evening as I have done several recently… spending a chunk of time playing Rage 2. However at some point I needed to get up and around and when I finally got sat back down at the laptop on the sofa… I decided to check to see if I happened to make it into World of Warcraft Classic Beta. I can’t even pinpoint where I heard the news, but at some point yesterday I heard that Beta invites would be going out. I did not notice that I had gotten an email but I opted to just check the launcher, and sure enough… nestled beside PTR in the list was “Beta: WoW Classic”. I installed the game and popped in to see what all had changed since the BlizzCon demo.

Side note… at some point during the evening I did in fact receive an email titled “Belghast – You’re Invited to the World of Warcraft Classic Beta Test” and I clipped part of the email above… which is obviously formatted for mobile devices. Like I said however my account had received the entitlement long before I got an email, so I feel like your best option if you are curious is to see if it shows up in the drop down of selectable World of Warcraft accounts. There are rumors that you have to have an active subscription to get access to it… which checks as even though I am not playing the game I never went through the process of cancelling my subscription. I also purchased BlizzCon access last year… so it might also be tied to that for all I know. Whatever the case I have access and I spent some time playing last night.

Ultimately I created what was literally my very first World of Warcraft character. I made a Tauren Warrior back in one of the beta phases in 2004, and since my good friend Grace is excited about Classic and has way stronger Horde loyalty than I do Alliance loyalty I opted to give it a shot last night. First take away… Mulgore is way more peaceful than I remember and it was super chill running around as a big damned cow warrior bopping things with a big hammer. Eventually I managed to get a axe and shield set up going, and since I leveled the original Belghast as prot I am expecting to level in Classic as prot for old times sake.

There was a weird sense of coming home to roaming around in the world. One of the things I love about limited access alphas and betas in World of Warcraft… is that the community is generally speaking non-toxic. I spent a good chunk of the night chatting away with random people in general about what we remembered about the early days of Warcraft. It is weird but I have sorta missed feeling like I had a community that is worth communicating with. Sure there are excellent people in a good number of the games… but in the post Dungeon Finder reality no one talks to anyone else. This means that general channels are left to the devices of the people who just want to make trouble for others, and a secret to my sanity for years has been disabling them entirely. I’ve missed an era when it was okay to hang out and chat in a public space, and if nothing else that was refreshing about the Classic Beta.

The other big takeaway from the night is that they seem to have toned down the game a bit from the Classic Demo from BlizzCon. The only death I took during the night is when I charged in to attack a mob that I did not properly “con” first… and wound up fighting a level 9 swoop and level 6. This probably would have been fine had another level 9 wolf not jumped in to help out the birb. My goal for the night was to get to the point where I had tradeskills trained, and I now do in fact have both Mining and Smithing after a quick jaunt to Thunderbluff. My best drop so far is the 4 slot black bag… and I remember back in the day I used to farm the newbie zone until I had gathered four of these before moving onwards. Hell when Classic launches I might actually do this so that I don’t feel like I am behind the curve the entire time. As far as tradeskills… I figured Blacksmithing was going to give me the best bang for the buck as a Warrior in that it will let me craft all of my gear for the most part.

The joys of looking like you dressed yourself for the very first time. I guess however that is part of the charm of starting over and returning to vanilla. Getting excited over a grey item dropping for a slot I currently had nothing equipped in is an experience that I have not had for a very long time. I remember banking shoulder items back in the day just so when my friends got to that point I could hand them one and fill a slot that greys start dropping well before anything reasonable does. I look forward to running Ragefire Chasm and Deadmines legitimately. I do not however look forward to trying to make the run to Deadmines as a Horde player. I keep reminding myself that this is patch 1.12 and not patch 1.0… and in theory Meeting stones exist? I am not sure at what point they put in the teleports that allow Horde to get to Deadmines easily however. Ultimately it feels sufficiently vanilla to trigger my nostalgia and doesn’t feel quite as purposefully punishing as the BlizzCon demo did. I am happy for the moment if for no reason other than I was not expecting to do this last night at all… nor was I expecting to spend the night chatting with strangers. Good start so far!

Iceborne Frustration

May 10, 2019 by Belghast

Yesterday we were treated to the very awesome gameplay reveal trailer for Monster Hunter World: Iceborne which will serve as both a DLC to the base Monster Hunter World Game and a stand alone game that gives you all of the content contained in both. This is probably a really good call given that Capcom is used to releasing brand new full games anytime they update the Monster Hunter content, and it would have been sorta sad to start over from scratch were that the option. However for anyone who was not hooked the first time around it gives them an easy vehicle for catching up and getting everything. Monster Hunter is a franchise that became near and dear to my heart thanks to World and I have gone back and spent time playing the older titles since finally getting indoctrinated into the flow of the game.

Unfortunately this awesome trailer came with a heap of disappointment in the form of an announcement that while the game would be released on September 6th for console players… that there was no definite date for the second class citizens of the Monster Hunter universe… us PC players. This has been a constant point of frustration during my experience with Monster Hunter World in the fact that the PC release trailed the console release by some seven months. As a result every bit of post release content has been similarly delayed by several months on the PC making us the bastard children of Capcom… never quite having all of the nice things our console brethren had. It was my hope that when Iceborne released that all of this would be a bad memory. That finally a brand new DLC would set straight the records and allow us both to be up to date with the most current content. Instead I find out that Iceborne for Steam doesn’t have a release date but instead a very vague “Winter”… which is similar to the very vague “Spring” the wound up being August for the initial release of the game.

So now I am left with a decision of… do I give in and play the game on consoles initially and then later pick it up for my platform of choice… or do I miss out on all of the fun when it is fresh and bitterly wait to get our turn. I initially played Monster Hunter World on the PS4 but ultimately found the PC experience to be far superior for my specific brand of tastes. There is never going to be a point where I prefer a console over the PC… because console gaming just rarely fits my specific lifestyle. With PC gaming I can play upstairs or downstairs or even remote in via Parsec from my chrome book at work and have a reasonable gaming experience. With PS4 I am stuck to playing upstairs in my office as I generally do not have control of the television in the livingroom… or get to use the cludgy PS4 remote play app which lags constantly unlike my beloved Parsec. Essentially the console experience is never a comfortable one for me and it also forces me to go back to using a controller when I have gotten so comfortable with the keyboard and mouse gameplay.

I am super excited about this expansion but now… all of that excitement is tinged with a bitter aftertaste. For the initial release of Monster Hunter World I swallowed the frustration of the PC release happening so late and chocked it up to this team not being used to releasing on that platform. However it feels inexcusable for that same thing to keep happening as we enter the long tailed life of this product. There is no reason why they should be leaving one of their platforms out of the release… especially when they are still releasing on Xbox which had the smallest user base and absolutely no Japanese presence. In the same announcement they credit their financial success in part to the PC release and it expanding their users… but now they are completely leaving them out of the fun. This feels really bad Capcom.

Part of me knows I will not have the resolve to keep from playing it when it launches on console, in part because very few of my friends followed me when I made the leap to PC. My daydream would be for them to offer interoperability between the console and PC players… but it is still sad that it is a dream that will never happen. I was deeply looking forward to this release, but the entire time I kept thinking in the back of my head “please don’t fuck me Capcom”… and unfortunately they did. I am saddened by the news greatly, but… it still really is an awesome trailer.