MMORPG Archives - Page 184 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Finally Flying

May 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was an interesting night filled with running a bunch of the world quests out in Broken Shore in an attempt to get the faction needed to finish getting Legionfall over the revered mark. However after doing everything that was available, and the daily goblin treasure quest… I found myself still just shy of the finish line. I needed just shy of 400 faction, and after taking a break to get some food I roamed around aimlessly trying to sort out what if anything I should be doing. It was around then that I got pinged by a friend of mine and asked if I was up for tanking some mythic dungeons. Last week was the “run 4 mythics and get a chest” quest in Dalaran, and I had not touched it myself because I didn’t think I would have any semblance of a regular group. However when one reached out to me at around 8:30 I took the opportunity.

All told we ran Mythic Halls of Valor zero to get some keystones, and it also happened to be a world quest for a significant chunk of artifact power. We then ran a Mythic Maw of Souls because it is super fast and I believe we had a 3 keystone for it. From there I pestered the group to run Cathedral of Eternal Night, because I still had a quest for it and had never actually seen it. It was around this time that I shifted from tank to dps as someone who had tanked the place before took over. I am far from a reasonable dps, but I did okayish in the grand scheme of things… or at least well enough to get us through the dungeon. Finally I shifted back to tanking as we did a Mythic 3 Darkheart Thicket because it was either that… Eye of Azshara or Vault of the Wardens. We all sort of thought that Darkheart would be the fastest. We managed to three chest the dungeons, which largely meant we walked away with some extra artifact power.

After finishing the dungeon runs and turning in the quest I managed to cross the finish line with the faction I needed. So as a result I can now finally fly in the Broken Isles. The challenge now is… am I functionally done again with World of Warcraft for awhile? This was really the driving force for me returning was to finish off flight. I mean Friday was fun enough that I will try and start making that on a regular basis. However I am not sure how much I care to actually be logging in each day and doing stuff. I am sitting at 890 item level… and in truth if I am going to be dps I should get some more legendaries. The problem there is that the mathematics are stacked against me… since I have 4 tanking legendaries already. The thought of trying to get 2 more dps legendaries seems daunting. One of my legendaries is not a net dps gain… but it does at least give me some added survival because it heals me each time I spend rage. In theory I should at least keep doing the daily faction chests because I got most of my legendary drops from them.

Fel Knight

May 15, 2017 by Belghast

Things happened this weekend and apparently I am playing World of Warcraft again. Even though this has nothing to do with her directly… I am going to blame Grace for planting the seed in my head that the game is much better once you unlock flight. Next I am going to blame MMO Champion for having a tool at the top of their home page that showed me that I was literally only a reputation grind away from flying in Broken Isles. The power of the thing things combined seemingly turned my “someday” into “do this thing now”. There was a lot of bonus extra credit for folks like Erry and Mort telling me that they missed me, and that I should really show up on raid nights again. As a result I spent my weekend mostly playing World of Warcraft with brief flurries of Destiny and Star Wars the Old Republic. Maybe I just needed some comfort gaming, or maybe things really were the sequence of the events above. Whatever the case I largely enjoyed myself… but not in that “ahhhh… I’m Home” sort of way and more “this is perfectly okay”. I think I would enjoy myself quite a bit more on Alts since really I am too well geared to get much use out of the Broken Isles content.

Probably the highlight of the weekend was raiding with my guild again on Friday. Traditionally Wednesday night is the super serious raiding time, and Friday is the blow off “lets do farm content” night. In truth I don’t so much care about the blow off aspect, and more about the attitude of the two different outings. Raiding stopped being fun for me when everyone got really serious Wednesday nights and stopped having fun. Maybe I just hit a bad patch there, but when the tension in palpable and everyone is super concerned about squeaking that last bit of dps out of their spec… that isn’t really enjoyable for me. What is however is running around like a bunch of nubs and face-rolling content for the fun of it. That is my jam and I have to admit I had an awful lot of fun Friday. I had reached this point where once again I felt like raiding probably “wasn’t for me” but if I can repeat the sort of environment again I could be down with doing this on a weekly basis. I managed to stay alive the entire night… until we got to Gul’dan. My eyes glazed over five minutes into a fifteen minute explanation of the fight and I am sure I died to something stupid and easily avoidable. Regardless I managed to exit the night with a couple of tier pieces, so life was pretty damned peachy.

The other big thing that I did this weekend was play catch up on a ton of content that I had not touched in ages. Withered training was one of those things that I just never really cared about… but I now have a quest to do X number of world quests in Suramar and as a result I am looking for quests to do that are not super annoying. The above haul involved unlocking a bunch of shit that I had never unlocked before, and in theory I will really be able to steamroll the place next time. My biggest frustration with withered training has nothing to do with the training itself… and more to do with the fact that it is still annoying to get Ancient Mana. Sure it is easy enough if you are out running around in Suramar to get it as a drip feed while you do other things… but to purposefully try and seek it out is really freaking annoying. I mean I know there is the Vineyards trick, but every time I go there the lootables seem to be farmed down pretty heavily. The real win of the weekend through is that I am roughly 1600 reputation away from being able to fly. The question is if I will actually stick around after achieving this goal.

Two Years Behind

May 12, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I had zero intent to sit down in the morning and start writing about level scaling systems. Sometimes posts just happen. However after writing it one of my friends mentioned a key point. There should functionally be a way to flip off level scaling if you absolutely positively want to just go wreck things. The prime example of this would be if you just want to farm up a bunch of low level materials quickly. I remember when I was leveling any of my various tailors up in World of Warcraft, I would simply find a dungeon in the level range and mercilessly wreck it for the sole purpose of getting as much cloth in as short of a time as I could. This would have been completely maddening were I not greatly over leveling the content. Once again I think we can look to Final Fantasy XIV as a good example here because some time ago they added in the ability to queue for content “undersized”, which functionally turns off the level synchronization process allowing you to just wreck the content if you so choose. However I still think I would prefer it if MMO worlds scaled by default, and then simply allowed folks to disable that option if they so choose.

I’ve said recently that I really love returning to an MMO after some time has passed and be confronted with potentially years of content to go off and experience. The thing is this also has an extremely negative side to it. Right now I am in this weird place where I am super into content that happened two years ago. There is something to be said about experiencing things at the same time as your friends, because it allows you to have conversations about what is going on. This has been one of the best parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that each time they give us a slow drip of story content we all consume it then can talk about the revelations that are contained within. This allows us to have moments of theory crafting and speculation… knowing that at some point in the future we will be able to resolve what is actually going on. With Star Wars the Old Republic and the Knights of the Fallen Empire content… generally speaking either folks played through this content two years ago when it released… or will likely never play through it.

That puts me in such a weird places because I have all these thoughts and feelings about the game and what it is doing… but I don’t exactly feel right talking about them on my blog. Knights of the Fallen Empire has some pretty big revelations that would be better experienced than told about. This is one of those times when everything about it is extremely heavy on the spoiler front. Each time new revelations come to light… I wish there was a group of people that I could talk through them with. Basically this is one of those times when I wish I had played through the chapter based content as it was being released rather than this current Netflix style binge sequence that I am going through. I have a feeling that Guild Wars 2 and its living story content is much the same… likely best experienced as it is being released a little bit at a time. This also makes me really want to get caught up so that I can at least join the discussion happening with the Eternal Throne content. However I am also extremely cautious of looking up too much information for fear of getting these plot twists completely ruined for me.

On the positive front I have stumbled across a really awesome YouTube channel that has helped me get back into the game and the modern concepts. Swtorista has this awesome Star Wars the Academy series that breaks down a bunch of topics like “What to do at Level 70” or how the Galactic Command system works. The best videos though are a sequence on the best looking craftable armors for each class, since we all know the true end game of an MMO is looking awesome. Through her videos thought I have been able to catch up pretty easily without risking spoilers too badly. Side note… there is a special place in hell for folks who put obvious spoilers in YouTube video titles… as I already have apparently one of the Iokath revelations spoiled because of this. For those interested I am largely playing Belghast my Jedi Knight on Ebon Hawk at least while I do all of the chapter based content. I have a large stable of character spread between the two factions and they are either in House Stalwart on Sith side, or Einherjar on Republic side. If you are also playing feel free to ping me and say hi.

Empires Fall

May 10, 2017 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those “Bel is very late to the party” sort of posts but bear with me. Additional upfront warnings… I am entering a territory with this post that might have some minor spoilers. For a long while I have avoided Knights of the Fallen Empire because I knew it made some significant changes that you simply could not step back. As a result in my best Mass Effect fashion… I attempted to wring as much joy from the “old world” as I could and made sure that I saw all of the story content before moving forward. Last night however I finally reached that point where I was at least reasonably comfortable taking the plunge and moving forward into the modern era of SWTOR. Having said that… there are a bunch of things I am extremely glad that I completed before doing so. Firstly I am happy that I managed to see the main story arc for each of the classes. Secondly I am happy that I took the time to progress every single companion and see all of their personal story before moving forward. Additionally as far as I am concerned it is extremely important to do both Shadows of Revan and Rise of the Emperor (Ziost) before starting the Fallen Empire content. I mean in theory you can just jump ahead to the modern era at any point you like, but if you want to have completed all of your story elements… you need to do class story to completion, Revan and Ziost.

Functionally Shadows of Revan and Rise of the Emperor are the unlabeled opening acts of the Fallen Empire campaign, and as a result I am extremely glad that I completed both of them. Now the other big piece of warning that I had been given was that anything you want to do with your companions… you need to do before entering “chapters” mode. This is because in truth you may or may not ever see them again. I personally don’t have a list of which companions are findable in the game, and which are just gone indefinitely… but I have heard that some fan favorites are absolutely missing in action. Once you enter Chapters the game is functionally changed, and you are sort of along for the ride. It was that point that really concerned me and kept me from taking the leap for a very long time. I had built up this comfortable stable of characters that I liked using, and enjoyed my jetting around the galaxy life style. Once I started Chapter 1… literally all of that changed and I began playing a very different game. That said… I think it might be a better game.

If Star Wars the Old Republic was functionally World of Warcraft in space… then Fallen Empire is Knights of the Old Republic 3. The game feels like it shifts from being a traditional check all of the boxes MMORPG… to being a much more story focused RPG that just happens to have other people playing it at the same time. At this point I am still wrapping things up in Chapter VI and hope to keep moving forward tonight, but I’ve found myself in a situation that feels very familiar to anyone who has played KOTOR 1 or 2. In that fashion I think its best to think of Fallen Empire and I assumed Eternal Throne as a sequel to Star Wars the Old Republic. You are playing the same character, and you have all of the items you have built up along your first journey, but you are functionally playing a completely different game. Maybe it is more of a new game plus mode than anything, as you shift your focus from the traditional tropes of an MMO, to starting over again. It feels much the same as Mass Effect 2 did after the original, where you are set down in a world that is familiar, but the cast of characters has changed slightly… and you have to rebuild your legacy.

I will likely continue to report in as I travel through the new content, but so far I have to say I am hooked. There are a lot of events that happen in rapid succession, but functionally when you regain full control of your character five years have passed and the future is uncertain. You are presented with a new cast of characters… some of which are familiar and others brand new. That said the cast of characters are interesting and I immediately felt right at home… in spite of no longer having my original team of companions. I can see the potential for setting forth in a matter that cuts across the various class stories and potentially introduces me to characters from them all. The other weird thing about this setting is that I am finding myself turning from pure Jedi… to more of a balanced user. I am giving myself permission to take more dark side choices when I feel like it suits my purpose better. I am going to save the people that need saving… and I am absolutely going to take a lightsaber to the folks who deserve killing. I am no longer the Jedi Battlemaster and am now instead known as the Outlander, and with that comes a change in focus. Belghast is going to be a lot darker than before… and that is going to be okay. I feel like this character is the vanguard of all of the characters I have played, and as a result sort of adopting my favorite traits from each of the class storylines. In wild space, Sith and Jedi don’t matter anymore… but instead what matters is freeing the galaxy of this new threat.