MMORPG Archives - Page 158 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Elves I Don’t Hate

May 16, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I pulled an example from World of Warcraft and after doing so I realized that I never actually talked about the character that was hiding underneath the fold of the Destiny 2 image. I am extremely late to the party when it comes to Allied races, the Horde races were super easy to unlock but the Alliance ones required a level of commitment that I was simply not willing to offer them. They were one of those things that I worked on off and on as I had time or wanted something mindless to do while watching television or a movie. It was a few weeks back when I realized that I was actually getting pretty close to exalted with both of the factions required to unlock them. Even then I largely failed at doing the quests on a daily basis because I really am not a huge fan of Argus.

Nevertheless I managed to push across the finish line and unlock them both a few weekends back and as a result I have been poking around on a brand new Void Elf hunter during the AggroChat podcasts. I’ve found it super relaxing to just roam around and take things down at low levels and for whatever reason Void Elves don’t trigger that “I hate elves” instinct that I have built up over all of these years. In part I think they mostly register as Drow to me, which is something I occasionally played in D&D or the games like Everquest that had decent implementations of them. Honestly it weirdly makes me want to go back and farm the single piece of Dragonstalker that I am missing, because in all of my years of running Blackwing Lair… I never got the boots to drop off Broodlord Lashlayer. The only thing keeping me from soloing it each week is the fact that I really hate doing the Razorgore event.

I realize that I recently started a Tauren Hunter, but the whole being assigned a pet at the start of the game thing still seems a little weird. On the Tauren your start with a Plainstrider which isn’t really my sort of pet, but even then I kept using it for a significant amount of time before taming anything else to replace it. As Void Elf though you start with Voidstalker… that is both my kind of pet and also extremely cool looking. I’ve found myself with zero drive to go out and tame something else, but that might change as I am now interesting Stranglethorn Vale. I might grab something rare if I happen across it but for now I am more than happy to run around with my void pal… even though I have yet to give her a proper name.

It is weird to me that I have lost any forward momentum in World of Warcraft thanks to Battle For Azeroth and the direction they are taking the game. However I still enjoy dinking around on low level characters because to me that is the purest version of the “WoW Experience”. BfA really has been a let down as far as the information coming out about it. Additionally my time playing beta… hasn’t really done anything to hook me on the direction the game is going. For years I thought that maybe Metzen was what was holding the game back… but now I wonder if he was a force of stability keeping the game from dropping off a cliff. Note I loved Legion “for the most part” but the one bit that I could push right into the sea was the factional nonsense that happens in Stormheim. Battle For Azeroth feels like an entire game made out of those factional nonsense moments and I am not really looking forward to it.

Moms and Minor Gaming

May 14, 2018 by Belghast

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This weekend was largely not about gaming, as is often the case when a major holiday is occurring. In past years we have done the divide and conquer thing when it comes to Mother’s Day festivities, with me getting up super early to go to Mass with my mother and then my wife sleeping in and going to lunch with her mom. However with the amount of work that my wife has been having to do lately trying to prep her kids for the impending AP Exam… after missing two weeks of instruction time due to the walkout… she is more than a little sleep deprived. I was legitimately concerned about her making it home safely if she was on the road for long periods of time alone.

As a result we crammed everything into one day and left the house around 6 am… getting home around 6 pm. However in the middle of all of that I believe there were sufficient moms day festivities for all involved. It did however lead to a really tiring Sunday experience given that we had lots of driving perforated by various other awkward moments like my wife’s sister referring to the litter box as a “poop bed” or her inviting an aunt that neither my wife or I can stand to lunch with us. Later in the evening there was plenty of awkwardness as my wife’s brother and father got into some political diatribe that was just flat out factually incorrect and also highly racist. We made it home in one piece and still have most of our sanity intact… but I did have a rather fitful night of sleep.

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As far as gaming goes I spent some of my time Saturday working on the weekly quests in Monster Hunter World. I am down to just needing three arena challenges and I am hoping I can connect with someone before the reset happens to do some. I can technically solo them, but I really really do not like soloing them. I solo’d the Pink Rathian arena challenge with longsword and that one in particular is really annoying because you do not have the full compliment of healing items. I pulled out a victory, but it took a long time and I wound up taking three of my eight deaths in the process. I am one item away from having enough of the event only Sakura items… but am nowhere near able to craft the set because of general lack of coins.

I wish you could roulette your way into the Arena Challenges because I really am not a huge fan of playing solo in Monster Hunter World. Now that PizzaMaid is easing her way back into the game I might try and snag her for some shenanigans, because most everyone else I know that is still active gets online way later than I do. Grace unfortunately bounced off the game as did Mor and while Thalen and I share a timezone… he is always around significantly later because baby happens. If it does not look like I will have folks to do this with I will ultimately try and solo my way through it, because I know without a doubt I can do it… I just won’t really enjoy it. I also ran quite a few tempered roulettes just for the sake of fun and managed to get a couple of decent decorations from it.

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Over in Destiny 2 I am still roaming around but have made all of the movement I can essentially before the reset. I am still too low level to get into heroic strikes which is unfortunate given that I need to run several of them to move forward a quest line that I am currently on… that I am assuming is related to the sleeper simulant. The highlight of the weekend however was getting the Armamentarium again, which allows me to run around with dual grenades in both void and solar specs. Unfortunately however it does not give me THREE grenades in arc striker spec. This would have been a completely awesome item if it were able to do that… now I am wondering if it is as good as my auto-rifle reloading chest but largely running around with it for sheer nostalgia sake.

I am still largely on the fence with this expansion and am contemplating taking Squirrel up on the offer to get the raid in. I still have yet to defeat Gaul in the raid even though I have a stack of tokens from our attempts. Folks bounced faster than we had time to progress our way through it, and while I would love to resurrect a Greysky raid I somehow doubt that will ever really be a thing again. There just are not enough people active and playing, and part of me is contemplating just pushing the Greysky leadership off on my secondary PS4 account and moving my main back to Tequila Mockingbird so I at least have an active clan of folks to play with. My main PS4 account never left and has always been in TQMB… that is unless they punted me for inactivity.

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I am still enjoying the mechanical loop of Destiny 2 again… but I am also feeling somewhat listless as I don’t have a major goal apart from making my light higher. I managed to level the Hunter to 30 this weekend but have yet to really touch any of the story content. I like that Warmind seems to not be connected to having finished Curse of Osiris or versa vicea. I need to push the Warlock up via event quests so I can at least start doing the milestones on each of them each week to slowly push up my weapon light level that way.

Bad Magic

May 8, 2018 by Belghast

Once again I did nonsense to finish out my weekly limited bounties in Monster Hunter World. The problem is my currently play times seem to be diametrically opposed to the play times of my friends who are currently playing the game. Most nights I start playing early in the evening… around 6 pm cst and am logging out around 9 pm when folks start to show up. As a result I have gotten used to doing things is really silly ways involving a bunch of random players. This weeks was weirdly harder than the 9 star quest in part because at the end of the day… people will likely always be farming Xeno’jiiva for parts and that quest is really hard to fail.

The 8 Star quest however is more or less Nergigante, Vaal Hazak, Teostra, Kushala Daora, and Kirin. All six of those have a pretty high threshold for failure so I feel like more often than not players are just doing them solo… something that I weirdly don’t enjoy that much. So instead I check the SoS Roulette and see what is available and ultimately managed to get all of them done with random players. The easiest was weirdly enough Kirin… which considering how big of a pain in the butt the tempered version was seemed like it would have been the hardest. The most challenging is generally Nergigante because if you get players who legitimately need to fight him… they are more often than not simply unprepared for how much harder he is going to hit them than what they are used to.

The truth is I need to start farming Nergi for parts because there are several weapons I would love to be able to make that require copious amounts of bits. Last night I managed to craft the first version of the Nergi Sword and Shield, because in truth that is probably the weapon I am most comfortable with if I don’t have my longsword. I spent some time earlier in the week playing with Gun Lance because also as part of the weeklies I needed to kill a bunch of Fanged Wyvern… which mean’t I could kill that green punching bag Great Jagras over and over. I think its a weapon I could get used to with time, and I managed to pick up a couple of reasonable options during the Kulve Taroth event. Still very much in love with this game and hoping they give us some more surprise events soon… because I can sorta see an end to what I actually deeply want to be farming.

The rest of my evening last night was spent poking around with my Fauxlgari Exploratic deck which is a tweaked version of Golgari Exploration… one of the stock decks that come with MTG Arena. It is not the most successful thing in the world for me, but I enjoy playing it and if it is not going my way pretty early on I concede out to move on to the next battle. If everything goes as planned you end up with a few really powerful creatures that keep growing each round, combined with Lurking Chupacabra that you can use to start taking out critters on your opponents side. It isn’t perfect and I am sure I should tune it some more. Right now I feel like I am playing with way too much land because I have had moments where all I am drawing is land for way too many rounds in a row. Regardless I find the whole experience of playing it enjoyable and I can lose hours just plinking away at other players.

I think that ultimately is going to the role MTG Arena plays for me… just letting me play magic when I want to play it. For whatever reason MTG Duels and the year branded Planeswalker games always felt really limited in the types of magic I wanted to play. They were shadowboxed in on a specific number of sets and as a result it felt more limited than what we already have in Arena. I like just sitting down and playing, regardless of the win condition. Sure it gets frustrating when you go on a losing streak when you are one win away from being done for the day… but even then the simple playing of cards makes me happy. It is something I have missed more than I realized… simply because I don’t have access to a lot of MTG players right now. I play to have fun and my version of fun is not exactly drift compatible with the meta. I enjoy bad magic.

Rudderless

May 4, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was largely spent cleaning up quests that I have had in my log for a long while over in Monster Hunter World. Since the Kulve event is over… I feel like I don’t have as much of a pressing goal as I previously did. I could of course just farm things like Nergigante for parts that I need to make awesome weapons, but the Kulve event sorta robbed me of a bit of the drive there. Apart from the bow… I have a reasonable weapon option of every type right now. Sure there are things I want to make but the need isn’t there in the same way that it once was given that I have a box full of decent options. At this point I am hunter rank 70 and the meter is climbing extremely slowly on doing normal stuff. In theory I should be engaging in a bunch of tempered fights but I really don’t like soloing in Monster Hunter World that much, and I also didn’t much feel like SOS Roulette last night… so was stuck just wandering around and knocking out things that have been sitting in my log for awhile.

Monster Hunter World has more or less become my MMO of choice right now, and as a result it is making every other MMO feel really weird to play. I’ve largely been checked out of Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, and the Battle for Azeroth changes are making me not that keen on World of Warcraft. I have the desire to play Elder Scrolls Online… but I find myself lacking the focus since that is a game that requires all of my attention. I realize this is an odd thing to say given that Monster Hunter World is way more reactionary than ESO is… but I also have to play MHW upstairs and with Elder Scrolls I can chill out downstairs with the laptop while watching television. I find my mind wandering or paying too close attention to something that is on television and end up in a horrible spot in Tamriel. The other game that is sorta calling my name at this very moment is Star Wars the Old Republic because I really would love to play through the rest of the content I have missed. I have not done any of Knights of the Eternal Throne, in fact the first quest of that expansion is sitting waiting there on my Jedi Knight for me to pick up and start playing.

Lately I have been trying to ease my way back into Destiny 2 given that the new expansion lands on Tuesday. The moment to moment PVE gameplay is still every bit as fun as it ever was… but my current problem with this game is actually a silly one. I have been out of inventory space for a very long time and the pain of having to juggle items between characters or dismantle things immediately upon getting them wears me out. When I have an MMO and my bags are a mess or I am lacking enough bag space in general… I find myself extremely demotivated to play it. This is in part what is going wrong with Project Gorgon at this very moment… I have next to no bag space and as a result I am constantly having to play the inventory management game which is the exact opposite of fun. The expansion is adding another 100 slots and supposedly some of the kiosks we used to have back in Destiny 1 so we will see how this improves my opinion of the game by not having to care quite so closely about what was in each inventory slot. In theory I would love to push my Warlock and Hunter through Curse of Osiris… because that is a sign of just how hard I stalled out on this game. The expansion landed and I only managed to get one character through before legitimately giving up and moving on to other things.

I’m in a really weird space with gaming in general right now and it seems like I spend more time getting ready to play a game… than actually sitting down and playing a game. There is an intangible wanderlust that has effected me and I am not sure what the cure is. It is almost as though I am too stressed on a daily basis to actually sit down and enjoy the things I am supposed to enjoy. I’ve been through these periods in the past and sadly it has also cut off any desire I had to stream or be engaged with other people in any way. It has been a rough several weeks and I have a feeling that at some point it has to let up… and the clouds will part once more and I will feel like a human being. Apologies to anyone who is attempting to interact with me right now because I am sure the experience is lacking.