I spent the majority of this weekend in World of Warcraft Retail. I am not exactly sure what prompted this, but I needed something somewhat mindless and grindy. I’ve been in a bit of a weird mental state of late and I always find working away on characters in WoW to be relaxing. I can put something on YouTube or an Audiobook and level away happily, pushing my mind somewhere outside of myself for awhile. A few months back I had been on this kick of trying to level one of everything to 120 before the release of Shadowlands. The next in line was my Monk but I stalled out in the Cataclysm levels after having ground up something like seven characters to 120 in a row.
Yesterday afternoon I managed to push the monk across the line and ding 120. This was not the easiest of characters to level, because there were quite a few points where it seemed weaker than I would have expected the Windwalker to be. The biggest problem I encountered was that the healing of the spheres that you spawn randomly doesn’t seem to make up for the incoming damage. I contemplated swapping over to Brewmaster Monk but managed to stick things out but that last level was a pain in the butt. Really it just seemed like certain mob types dealt way more damage than I could keep up with.
Now I am going through the very familiar long grind, of cherry picking which daily quests reward item level upgrades all with the goal of getting up to somewhere in the vicinity of 430. At this point I managed to push up to the neighborhood of 358 so I am slowly making progress. What is ultimately the problem is the lack of ring, trinket and weapon slots. The first thing I did upon dinging 120 was to purchase a full set of benthic gear, which sorta begins the process and is a seed for getting the world quests up into reasonable levels. I’ve already replaced a number of pieces, which always feels a little bad but I know it is just part of the process.
I’ve already picked out the next character I intend to level, which is my Maghar Shaman. For now I have decided to go elemental, because this is not really something I have ever spent much time with in the past. I’ve spent lots of time leveling enhancement, and I figured it might be an enjoyable break. That leaves Rogue and Priest that are still low levels, but if I can somehow manage to push all of these up I will have a full stable of 120s going into Shadowlands. The next trick would be pushing up some of their tradeskills, though the segmentation mostly makes that useless.
Finally there was one other thing that I was not expecting that happened this weekend. I managed to get a slot in the Perky Pugs lead Friendship Dragon. I had more or less resigned myself that it was not a thing that was going to happen this time. However Saturday night shortly after we had wrapped up the podcast I got pinged to join what was one of the last few runs of the 12 hour N’zoth-a-thon in which the horde team managed to get 455 people their mounts. The really cool thing however is that they managed to raise $10,425 for RAINN at the time of posting this. Still super humbled and shook that I managed to get in and get a purple dargon.
I spent most of last night playing around on my Monk in World of Warcraft. I am still in a somewhat weird headspace and decided to hang out on the sofa and snuggle with the cats instead of doing anything more serious. One of the challenges of being a gamer like I am that hops around through a bunch of games is that you end up losing touch with a lot of friends along the way. Gamer friends right or wrong and largely bound together by the mutual love and adoration of a specific game. When you are not playing that game together, you often end up struggling to find things to relate to because that social lubricant in the form of the shared gaming interest is gone from the equation.
Sure you can build lasting friendships that are based on firmer stuff, but those take time and as someone who has formed guilds and raids for decades I have a truly ridiculous number of “surface friendships”. What I mean by that is that you are close within the context of a specific medium, sorta like the friends you might make at a workplace and then never see again once either of you have moved on from that environment. The thing is every so often something reminds you of one of those folks that were lost in the shuffle, and you start to get some pangs of regret that you couldn’t find a way for that friendship to stay evergreen.
At some point last night I was searching for something in gmail, and because I never seem to actually delete anything I stumbled across a conversation thread between me and one of these friends. There used to be a time when my means of contact with a whole slew of people was through trading long form emails. The entire thing was peppered with in jokes, because we had this running gag where we both claimed that they hated me… since they constantly avoided my recruitment pitch to join House Stalwart. This is someone that I raided in Vanilla with and then fairly frequently communicated off and on until I ultimately left the game in Cataclysm, and again pretty frequently when we were both playing SWTOR.
It is weird how ephemeral friendships can be at times. We were obviously close because reading back through this ancient gaming history there were all of the markers of a shared language. However its probably been a decade now since we were in regular contact. A lot of stuff happens in a decade, but as I sat there in World of Warcraft I decided to dust off my Battle.net friends list, something I almost NEVER pay any attention to these days and sure enough they happened to be also playing at the same time. The problem with getting out of contact with someone is that the longer it goes the harder it becomes to fire off that opening salvo of conversation. Not knowing what to say I just went with the sheepish “Heya :)”.
What followed was a solid hour and a half of catching up about this or that and while yeah a gulf of time had passed, it was still pretty easy to fall back into holding a conversation. I am exceptionally bad at staying in contact with people once whatever shared medium we had is gone. I need to reach out more and try and catch up with more of these people lost to the turning of the tides. The challenge however is that there is no going back really. I’m not the person I was when I was leading House Stalwart and actively recruiting for raids. Mentally I have to realize that this person in question is not the exactly skittish warlock that I knew from so long ago. Time passes and people change and some of those folks that you were once “drift compatible” with are probably not going to be.
The thing is, I need to learn to get over the fear of reaching out and finding out. I have this list of friends in Battle.net for a reason, I guess at some point I should start poking additional people on it to see how they are doing. Right now I find myself in the awkward position of being without a permanent game home, and I tend to flit around madly between a bunch of side projects in different games. It is super hard to build a stable support structure when you yourself cannot seem to commit to any specific medium. Facepull is a delightful home in World of Warcraft, and I adore them all given our long shared history. However there are a bunch of voices out there that I would love to hear from again if only to have a single day of catching up before fading into the mists once again.
The funny thing is… there are still a handful of friends that I communicate with mostly through email. Back during the days when everyone was using a single messaging platform, it was a bit easier. I could fire up Google Talk or AOL Instant Messenger and get immediate access to a whole list of people. I still have a fully populated friends list in Google Hangouts, but the only people I ever seem to talk to are Vernie and my Wife. AOL Instant Messenger was the platform I was way more prolific on… but it of course is lost to time. So as a result of all of this email just sorta became the easiest default middle ground. My friend Cylladora and I go through this pattern where completely from out of nowhere we will exchange an email and then go months again without communication.
Being an old gamer means you have a lot of old gamer friends out there somewhere. It would probably be good for my mental state to occasionally reach out to a lot of them and at least get into the pattern of talking once or twice a year.
I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.
It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.
To Those Remaining
Destiny 2 – PC
Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.
Diablo III – PC and Switch
Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.
To the New and Returning
Guild Wars 2 – PC
So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.
Phantasy Star Online 2 – PC
I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.
Torchlight III – PC
I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.
To Those Departing
Animal Crossing: New Horizon – Switch
Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.
Atom RPG – PC
You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.
Wolcen – PC
I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.
Summary
During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.
Birthdays are always a weird time for me, because they seem like they should be these important occasions in your life… but in reality it is just another Thursday. Traditionally I take today off, and as a result you don’t get a post because I go into “vacation mode”. However with the whole Covid 19 situation and the fact that I am still working remotely, combined with some stuff going on at work that I don’t feel like I can miss.. you are getting me in the flesh today. I had a subtle realization this morning and I thought I would share it with you, my friends and readers.
I have been writing to you through this blog for a quarter of my life. Back in April Tales of the Aggronaut turned 11, and as of this morning I myself turn 44. It is weird when numbers line up like that, but in truth I am not sure if I could have found a better group of companions to listen to me as I ramble on about nonsense. Thanks for being there on this journey, even if it has been in passive lurker mode. I do appreciate however each time someone comments about something going on in my life because I feel significantly less alone in the world.
Once upon a time I was one of those kids who made zines, and I was especially prolific during the fighting game heyday. I would print them up at home and then go pass them out at the various arcades I visited, because they also sorta served as a general guide for new players when something like Mortal Kombat II was booming. Admittedly there was a lot of rumor filtered in with the truth, but for the most part they were a guide to how to do all of those things like Friendships and Babalities, allowing new players to stop getting dunked on with a simple guide to all of the abilities. Writing my blog post each morning is sorta like trying to hand you a zine, and even the folks who didn’t want to take it… I appreciated them not throwing it away while I was still watching.
There are still several events happening in the winding down of what would have normally been E3 week. Today at 6 pm my time I should be able to tune in and watch the EA Play Live show, at which point I am hoping EA continues its path towards being a less horrible company. I mean to be truthful we have some pretty solid evidence that something has changed there recently. For starters instead of nuking it into oblivion, they are rebuilding Anthem and going to give it a second chance. A few weeks ago they put all of their games back on Steam, and even though they still require the presence of Origin… that is a start. Lastly we have the evidence of Jedi Fallen Order being a phenomenal game that exists without any micro transactions in spite of EA’s once stance of cramming them into every game. I am willing to give the company an olive branch, and also I am wondering if it is only Americans that personify companies like this.
Last night I played some Destiny, and I admit I am feeling a little rudderless. I am not exactly sure what I want to be doing or how I should be doing it. In theory I should be focusing the various avenues to get powerful or pinnacle gear, but this season doesn’t really seem to have a clear path forward. At the very least I am not exactly sure what I should be doing to level up the magical engram box for the Drifter. The acquisition of that level up currency seems significantly slower than any of the other similar seasonal mechanics. I feel like we are missing something like the Vex event to pour our energy into, because the planetary events are just painful to try and get started. I think right now everyone is focused on the next easiest way to get engrams… grinding Nightmare Hunts.
I’m also still playing a significant amount of Phantasy Star Online 2, but I gotta admit things have slowed to a crawl there as well. I’m level 68 and about halfway through it, and in truth what I really need to find is a group to grind advance quests with. The challenge there is that my natural play group that is associated with AggroChat podcast is time shifted from me. Kodra, Tam and Thalen are all getting on about the same time that I am logging out for the night. Ash is an option but I think he is back engaged with Guild Wars 2, and Grace never really attached to PSO2. In theory I should be running with Pizzamaid and friends but I am not exactly sure if those times line up either. Essentially it leaves me in a state of limbo where I spend most of my time soloing.
I realize this post turned weird all the sudden. I guess birthdays become a time for introspection. I hope the day goes smoothly, because there are significant landmines in front of me to cross. The day could go south really fast if a few things go the wrong way. Regardless thanks for hanging out with me all of these years and listening while I talk some nonsense. I write like I am talking to myself, but as I have said many times before I do greatly appreciate knowing there are real people out there reading what I write.
