MMORPG Archives - Page 146 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Hunts, Singletons and Dragalias

October 1, 2018 by Belghast

I was all over the place this weekend as far as gaming time spent. I would say that largely this was the weekend that I did not play World of Warcraft… but that isn’t entirely true. I logged in every day and did my Emissary quest, and then last night while watching Fear the Walking Dead season finale I was piddling around on my Draenei Paladin. Past that however I didn’t end up doing much in the game I had until now been almost exclusively playing. This weekend saw a major resurgence of Monster Hunter World, in part because they are just about to release the Wyvern Ignition blade quest to the PC crew and I want it. In fact the Fall Festival event has a bunch of the quests all lumped together at once and I plan on trying to pick them up as well. That means unfortunately I have to be able to get my way to High Rank, which also means I am going to need to play in a more focused manner than I am used to.

Weirdly enough I have found myself lately favoring the Hammer instead of the Long Sword. While I am still maintaining a collection of swords and effectively keeping both weapons up to date… I am finding that there are just some monsters that become easy to farm with the hammer. Namely Radobaan is nonsense easy with a hammer, and the stupid spin attack off of a surface is amazing in a whole lot of situations. Right now I am largely sticking to the Iron line of hammers because it allows me to craft them fairly easily… and also sets me up for a Nergi hammer at some point. I am up to the point in the quest chain where I need to hunt a Rathalos and a Diablos… which will be challenging I am sure but also doable given I have beaten both of them multiple times. Diablos should be considerably easier with a hammer than I am used to with Longsword. The other weapon that I want to craft at some point in the switch axe, which is something I played with and enjoyed at high level but never really messed with at the lower levels. If I am remembering correctly… Zorah Magdaros is immediately following the quest chain I am on and then I will be moving into High Rank territory. If I put my mind to it I should be able to wrap that up before the event starts I believe Thursday or Friday.

The other game that I have been playing a shocking amount of lately is Magic the Gathering Arena. On September 27th they launched the Open Beta and with it in theory the last of the card resets. Since then I have started tinkering with decks and have a few reasonable options…. but honestly mostly find myself playing Stompy Green/Steel Leaf Champion or my Mono Black Burn deck. The first I am still tuning but the Mono Black Burn is still performing like a champ, but since it was built before the advent of Guilds of Ravnica it could probably be greatly improved with a few cards that are now available and with splashing another color. Assassin’s Trophy is still the champion of the new expansion so far, but I am also loving a bunch of cards like the Nullhide Feerox and as far as one drops go… I love Pelt Collector that increases in potency as you start summoning bigger creatures.

They had a freebie event this weekend that allowed you to create a singleton deck and so long as you got a single win… you got an uncommon or better card. This netted me several mythics and rares, but also served to keep me engaged and grinding. Unfortunately they allowed Rat Colony decks… which by rules can have any number of copies of the card rat colony… so essentially when you get matched up with one of those you might as well concede out because there is no way your janky singleton mess can keep up with it. I also had a large number of wins under questionable terms this weekend… namely there were several times when I got an awful lot of damage out of Llanowar Elves. I am not exactly proud of this moment when I enchanted one with Blanchwood Armor to ultimately win the game. Guilds of Ravnica sealed was a heck of a lot of fun and I went 3/3 with my deck… the prime problem being that my love of black and green keep me from drafting pretty much anything else. It isn’t that I cannot see the good in other colors… its just that my brain values those colors over pretty much anything else. I am in fact Golgari at heart.

In the “Game I didn’t expect to play” category… I was somehow busy enough during the tail end of the week to completely miss Dragalia Lost becoming a thing. As such on the podcast I was introduced to the game when all of the other members of the show were talking about it… then was super slow getting the podcast out because I kept spacing out while playing it Sunday morning. It is an awful lot of fun, but I am struggling with the same problem I have with other mobile games in thinking “this would be so much better if it were not a mobile game”. I think I largely just hate touch screen interfaces, and while this game is an awful lot of fun… the clunky nature of having to drag your finger around the screen makes it feel extremely awkward. If this were on the switch I would be completely hooked, but on a phone… you still have that barrier that I don’t like playing on my phone. The other problem I am encountering is it completely shreds my battery, so I guess I need to tweak down the settings to try and come up with a flavor that looks less pretty but doesn’t decimate my charge.

Lastly we have the podcast itself, that I named Gacha of Mana since Dragalia Lost reminded me so much of Secret of Mana. You have a brash guy, a blond girl, and some sort of a sprite thing that provides a lot of the comic relief. Anyways during the show we talk about Spiderman PS4, Magic the Gathering Arena Open Beta, Celeste, Dragalia Lost… and then a conversation about how the grind in Battle for Azeroth just feels lousy. The last part is largely why I had a weekend without much Warcrafting, as I am trying to limit my exposure to maybe extend the amount of time it takes me to angrily quit. I need to spend some time tonight doing Mythics, but in truth I have reached a point where that doesn’t even matter that much to me given it will be a box of disappointment on Tuesday.

Exploration and Magic

September 28, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was one of those nights where I was driven by a purpose… one that was over relatively quickly. For the last month in Elder Scrolls Online there has been a Summerset expansion themed event where they have been challenging users to go out and get the Summerset Pathfinder achievement. For doing this the community could earn rewards… first a pet, then a mount and finally a nonsense house. It was the nonsense house that really drew me out of the woodwork and while I feel bad that I did not participate until we had hit 100%… I still wanted to get on and do the thing before the event expired which is I believe at some point today. I have no clue when I will actually get my baubles but regardless I did the thing and saw the really pretty land mass known as Summerset in the process.

Now I am going to go back to not questing there until I managed to make it there organically. I am really stubbon and weird about wanting to do content in the correct order… and even in systems that claim not to have a correct order… I try and determine the optimal order. For example in World of Warcraft Legion… the correct starting zone was Azsuna because that was the zone that had the first tier of profession quests (minus mining which was weirdly in Highmountain). So I always started characters there in order to get them access to tradeskills as quickly as possible. Similarly I could play the Star Wars the Old Republic content in any order I choose… yet I did the leg work to research the order in which it was released and have played through it in that fashion. This is effectively what I am doing in Elder Scrolls Online as well… because I am odd.

The other thing that I played a significant amount of last night was Magic Arena which as of yesterday went into Open Beta. Now several of us have been playing the Alpha and Closed Beta for awhile now, and are sorta sad to see our stockpile of cards go away. They did a big wipe of everything between the Alpha/Closed Beta phases and in theory will not do another wipe period (unless there is some catastrophic issue that comes up between now and release). I had enough gems that I managed to purchase my way back into my favorite deck so far… which is Mono Black Creature Burn. This is by no means my creation, but I do plan on spending some time tweaking it eventually, and maybe even trying to build in for paper magic as well. It only has a value of about $15 in physical cards so it is a pretty great entry level option that can be pretty brutal. I’ve never run up against anyone playing something similar, and I think the way it works catches a lot of players off guard because it does a lot of things that deal damage to the player but mean me in the process… allowing me to break out a Chainer’s Torment pretty early for a massive creature in the process at a stage of the game that they can’t really handle a 12/12.

That said it is completely weak to any sort of creature removal and you can chump block it for days… but the deck also has a bunch of flyers to get in and plink away at anyone with an army of ground creatures. If you end up with a board stall… there are cards like Fell Specter, Vampire Neonate and Vampire Sovereign that can hit the opponent directly without actually attacking. It has a good deal of hard creature removal, so you can sort of selectively remove their big bruiser. It doesn’t have any ramp to speak of with a bunch of one drops that deal significant damage quickly like Viscious Conquistador... that deals a point of damage to the opponent just by tapping them regardless of how combat resolves… it can add up fast. However in the above game the opponent lost because they got mana screwed… not because of some skill I had.

If you have ever played Magic the Gathering in the past, I highly suggest you check out Arena. Hearthstone is cool… but it isn’t Magic. This is finally Magic the Gathering for the Hearthstone world and does an amazing job of delivering fast and fun gameplay. You start off with a selection of Mono Color themed decks, and then each day there are quests allowing you to earn additional multi color decks… like today I picked up Chaos and Mayhem which is a themed Black/Red deck from the looks of it revolving around Rekindling Phoenix. I am hoping this means I will also get back my beloved Explore matters deck… either that or I will get the tokens needed to build it. One of the key differences between Magic Arena and Hearthstone is you get tokens that are good for one card of a specific rarity, instead of having a crafting system. In some ways this is awesome, because you can swap a mythic placeholder for any mythic of your choice… but there is no way to break down the cards you have no interest in to fuel the ones you do. Basically it is a trade off but the placeholder tokens seem to still be pretty prevalent. This makes getting a Mythic Placeholder feel awesome, because you know you can trade it for the card you actually wanted to pull from that pack.

Lastly it was requested that I get pictures of outdoor cat… this is from this morning when I went out to feed and he was so much more interested in nomming the food than getting his picture taken.

This is from awhile back when you can actually see a little bit of face to go with the gratuitous munching. It is a sweet baby, but unfortunately we are full up on cats… and another family has pseudo claimed him as theirs. If they do not however let him come inside as it starts to get colder we may have to change that stance and at a bare minimum let him become garage cat… since our girls likely would not take kindly to his presence.

Badluck Coins and Locks

September 26, 2018 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those mornings where I may or may not actually ever get around to a point. I am feeling extremely blah about writing a post because quite frankly it feels like I don’t have an awful lot that is positive to talk about. Right now I am in this World of Warcraft cycle, but I am not exactly feeling like I should be. There are just a lot of aspects of Battle for Azeroth that feel bad and I am not entirely certain why. Some of it might be of my own making, and other aspects might be that I have simply moved past this game and am unwilling to admit it. The whole maining Horde thing has been a challenge on a whole lot of fronts, not the least of which has been that the vast majority of my contacts are still on the Alliance side. Similarly I feel like I am starting from scratch, with a handful of characters instead of one of every class leveled to at least 100, so it feels extremely awkward.

The other challenge is I am just not a great fit for the raiding options that I have available to me. Sunday night is a bad time for me to set aside four hours worth of time to be dedicated to raiding. I mean I knew that going into this expansion but I thought maybe I could make it work, when really the one raid I attended felt awful from a time management standpoint. Sunday night is the night we do all of the things that we forgot to do over the weekend, and I am simply not adult enough to make sure I have everything done that needed to be done. Similarly my wife is in a mad scramble to print things and plan lessons and such… and if there is even the slightest technical problem my entire night is shot trying to troubleshoot why the fuck every machine but hers will print to the printer. I fucking hate printers… they are the worst thing ever created. I’ve seriously done some voodoo shit when it comes to trying to make her devices recognize the printer… things I am not proud of. I contemplated sacrificing a chicken once… and we don’t even have one.

The other problem I am struggling with in WoW is that so many things just feel awful. Like for example… I was slightly looking forward to my Mythic+ chest… and that excitement died 5 minutes after logging in when I saw that I got a cloak significantly lower than the one I am currently wearing. Similarly I zoomed over for a shot at loot from the Weekly World Boss… and got a pittance of gold for my troubles. We are in the wrong phase of the Warfront cycle so we don’t have access to push a button and get instant loot… and I’ve already killed the Warfront Boss so that is done for the time being as well. There is a weekly quest to grind timewalking dungeons… or a supposed box of Uldir loot… but I am sure it will be one of the slots I already have 370 gear in and feel completely useless.

The thing is I don’t mind RNG… because in the past I have ground my face off pushing myself to run things over and over until the item I wanted dropped. That is a perfectly reasonable cycle that I am willing to do. However when I am given a single chance each week at getting something interesting… and those options wind up with an insignificant amount of gold or artifact power it feels horrible. Sure I can buy two expensive as fuck second chance tokens that are also not guaranteed, that end up making you feel like a complete fool when that 5000 gold you just spent ended up giving you 200 artifact power. The fact that I am not actively raiding… leaves me in this sort of unmoored state where I have no viable means of making the number go up… which is the point where I start to check out.

It is moments like this that I marvel at just how well the systems in Final Fantasy XIV work… and why I cannot figure out why that game just doesn’t grab me anymore. Were the weekly boss a Final Fantasy encounter… you would be able to run it as many times as you liked, but only receive one piece of loot for the week. I loved the whole concept of being locked from receiving further loot from an instance once you received a piece of gear, because it allowed you to choose when to spend your lockout. You could run one of the 25 player semi-raid instances over and over until you got that chest piece that you really desperately needed. It gave you some measure of control over how you geared and with what items… instead of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Similarly Final Fantasy XIV also has a second chance currency that you accumulate over time by doing stuff, that allows you to buy the items you are needing as well. Gold and Artifact Power feel horrible reward wise… and there is nothing they can ever do to really fix that. However if you downed a boss that say rewarded 10 badluck coins normally… but if you failed to get a drop you were instead given a little gold and maybe 20 badluck coins as a consolation prize for spending your lockout… that would feel decent. I would know in the back of my head that maybe I lost the roll today, but in a few weeks time I will be able to save up all of those badluck coins to purchase something equivalent to the items I wanted before anyways.

Ultimately this also feeds into another discussion point from last night on the AggroChat show slack… gear feels largely unexciting as well. There used to be items that were worth grinding for that felt interesting and unique. For example… I ate, breathed and slept Mechanar in Burning Crusade when I found out there was a weapon as cool as The Sun Eater in that dungeon. With a single shot at it per day… I forced group after group to follow me in there for yet another shot at it and it took what felt like months for it to actually drop. When I got it… it was an amazing feeling because I could finally wield this amazing weapon that I had been fighting so hard to get. It looked glorious but also felt like it was really viable and quite honestly held me until I got a drop from Serpentshrine Caverns some 15+ months after the release of Burning Crusade.

Now when we get gear we are getting Raid Axe #3 colored Blue, or Raid Sword #1 colored Red… the gear lacks any sense of originality and is largely just an accumulation of stats that either are or are not whatever the hell your class optimally wants. It feels like a handful of numbers that you punch into a calculation and not a physical tangible item that you seek after. There are very few instances where you want an item… because it looks amazing… because it is only place where that sort of item drops… and because it is the going to hold you for awhile when you ultimately get it. Now every piece of gear feels completely disposable and unworthy of the effort that it requires to get it.

Basically I am just in this cycle where a whole bunch of things that never bothered me… are now bothering me. I want to finish the Alliance storyline on the Paladin so I have at least seen that. However if I am not attached to a raid group in a tanking role by the time I finish that process… I am likely done with Battle for Azeroth for the time being. It is unhealthy to get angry at a video game, and even though mine isn’t so much anger… but more disappointment… that also isn’t exactly healthy either.

Tam Stole My Luck

September 24, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was the beginning of the 15th season in Diablo 3 and like usual Grace and myself decided to do the thing that we do roughly every three months… and start new seasonal characters. I went with the Demon Hunter because the Unhallowed Essence set is in theory one of the really fun ones… pending I can actually assemble all of the parts of it. Grace went with the Necro because I believe this time is Rathma’s which is another pretty fun set… pending you assemble all of the pieces of it. For most of the season she was way stronger than I was as we ran through the content, but there will be a point where that balance starts to shift the other way. The problem is I have not hit it yet and am struggling a bit with pushing content. I found getting the Greater Rift 20, the last thing I needed for my cosmetic items and last of the Haedrig’s Gift items… but be extremely painful.

This season I seem to have had really bad luck, essentially having NONE of the items I need for my build apart from the Hellfire Amulet. Legendaries seem to be extremely stingy this time around, and often times as I am leveling I start getting some of the drops needed to toss into the cube. That didn’t happen. In theory I am going to start grinding some T1 rifts to try and assemble the rest of the set. I am convinced that Tam stole my luck, because I didn’t even get a single item of my class set to upgrade to Ancient. At a bare minimum however I now have my pet and portrait frame and anything after this is gravy.

In World of Warcraft I mostly spent time this weekend over on the Alliance side leveling my Paladin. Paladins right now seem just as overpowered as Demon Hunters and I have been breezing through content pulling tons of things in a path of destruction… and in truth consecration ends up pulling way more than I had intended most of the time. Originally when I took a stab at playing the Death Knight I had started Stormsong Valley and could not be bothered with that storyline of missing ships. This time around I decided to start Drustvar and its awesome cultist nonsense… and so far I have been enjoying the storytelling way more than a tale of political intrigue. I like big bombastic storylines, like the whole fighting old gods with ghost dinosaurs thing that is going on over on the Horde Side, so Drustvar seems more of that fit.

The only negative is it means at some point I will have to return to the more subtle political intrigue storyline and hopefully I am invested enough in my character at that point to carry me on. I figured the Paladin gave me a lot of options for running stuff… but the truth is I will probably just tank or dps… and it is highly unlikely that I ever heal. While I technically got the healing Artifact weapon, I am not sure if I ever had it equipped. All in all though… just not loving the Alliance content anywhere near as much as I did the Horde. However I will say so far… the War Campaign stuff seems cooler on the Alliance side… even though it feels weird to be retracing steps I know as horde quests. I did not realize that I would be effectively sharing the same space… like Anyport for example in my world is very much a Horde town… but it is seemingly also open to Alliance? Also finding it weird that I am seeing way more Orange names while I am leveling than Blue ones. Maybe there was an initial push of alliance players… or maybe the AIE presence on our shared shard greatly pushes the balance to Horde.

Lastly we recorded another podcast this weekend as is the usual, and this time around we talked a lot about the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise… and the fact that I think of it as Warrior is telling to the last time I actually played one. We also had this unintended deep dive into Hollow Knight after some conversation about Hyperlight Drifter sort of jarred it loose. We are trying really hard to bring the shows in around an hour in length and as such they sort of feel better than they used to. We are trying to limit the number of topics… which has this side effect of causing topics to roll forward to other weeks. The Dragon Quest topic for example had rolled twice before we finally talked about it. I am thinking the Trello system that we are using for show notes seems to work pretty well, as we can drop things into the queue throughout the week easily. Regardless… if you tried listening to us when we often times recorded two to three hour long shows…. you might give it a shot again.