MMORPG Archives - Page 196 of 398 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Weasel Town

November 18, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I was having one of those nights where I needed to just blend into the background, and largely avoid human contact. That said I needed to schedule an invite for a potential Emerald Nightmare raid tonight, and finish up my Emissary quests that I had hanging out there. However before long I had done just that and was off to Rift to explore some more of the Starfall Prophecy expansion. This is the point where I am at a bit of a disadvantage because I never got the opportunity to play through the Comet of Ahnket 10 player raid instance, and learn more about the story of what is going on here. From what I have been able to glean, Ahnket is this sentient creation engine of sorts that seems hellbent on destroying Telara. I am sure at this point Captain Cursor is cringing like mad and will pop in and correct me, but like I said having not played that raid I only have impressions to go on. This expansion we take the fight to the comet, which has grown into a landmass. It seems like every time Ahnket crashes through a plane on the way to Telara it picks up a chunk of that world and carries it with it. At this point the comet has traveled through the planes of Fire and Nature and as a result we have two new zones themed after each, and a fifth zone that seems to be a place where everything clashes in conflict. We as ascended are sent here to try and stop Ahnket once and for all and help the friendly folk who have gotten uprooted as a result of the comet passing near their homes. All of this is irrelevant however because all I really want to do is hang out with this lovely bunch of weasels.

The other thing that has changed is this time around we have companions that tend to roam around with us as we complete the quest content pretty regularly. Firstly there is Shyla Starhearth that you might recognize as being the formerly half naked lady hanging out in the throne room of Sanctum for the Guardians in the room. This time around she managed to find some proper armor and is apparently now a super tanky badass. Next up we have Tasuil the Dragon, that we last saw in the Dendrome… and has shrunk down a bit to make adventuring with a little easier. At some point in the quest line you find someone who can Corgify him at which point he is both hilarious and adorable. Then during my current sequence of quests I also have Windflower the babby Unicorn hanging out with me. So I am hanging with a Corgi, a Unicorn, and a heavily armored elf lady… who could ask for more? It seems like with the impending doom the Guardians and the Defiant have set aside their grudges because in the new hub town you can also find Asha Catari leading the offensive, which makes my little Defiant heart crackle to life. I apologize for the image quality in the above two shots, but at some point during the evening I transitioned from my desktop upstairs to hanging out on the sofa with my laptop… that cannot run the game in nearly the same graphical fidelity.

In truth I feel like I have not experienced enough of the new content to give it a proper review at this time. Overall I like it considerably more than I liked Nightmare Tides, but I think that is because this content brings back familiar landscapes. Goboro Reef was just a completely foreign and alien looking zone, with its angry technicolor vibrancy. These zones are similar to what I have been seeing in the game since launch, just subtle variations on the planar themes. Of not I have only actually ventured very far into Scatherran Forest, as you are presented with two possible choices at first… and I could have similarly gone down the Gedlo Badlands path if I wanted to see a lot of fire themed landscapes. Even then I feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of the zones, and in the few hours I played I pushed about halfway through my first level. The leveling is slow, but it feels not quite as slow as it did during Nightmare Tides which is definitely a good thing. As far as crafting and such… I have only barely scratched the surface because I am competing with everyone out there for ore pops. If anything that would be my one complaint so far that the spawn rates maybe need to adjust up a bit to deal with the influx of players. Completing any of the “kill x” style quests seem to require either a lot of luck or patience. The best part so far however has been the music, which is more technological in nature… and it comes with an amazing remixed version of the main Rift theme. If you have been a long time fan of the franchise, I feel like this expansion is already well worth checking out. That said expect it to still feel more like Storm Legion or Nightmare Tides than the original content.

Trials of Valor

November 17, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a raid night… and I failed to take any screenshots so you are stuck with an image of me in the order hall. After having cleared Emerald Nightmare a few weeks it was decided that we would instead poke our heads into the Trial of Valor. The goal set out by the raid leader for our group was to attempt to stay current with normal mode progression, so instead of spending several weeks farming Emerald Nightmare it seemed reasonable to just jump straight into the Trial content which has a much higher item level. That was a big part of the decision factor in that the baseline for gear is 850… and literally everyone in the raid last night has 850 or better. All of that said though… there are several of us who still want to keep clearing the Nightmare in the hopes of getting specific items or for no reason other than the try and complete that Balance of Power meta achievement step. So I think in the coming days/weeks we are going to try and sort out a secondary night with a clear purpose of farming the raid. I mean back in the day we used to have a Molten Core night even though we were actively progressing in Blackwing Lair…. and for that matter also had a Zul’Gurub Night. Karazhan is somewhat taking the place of ZG however as far as gear progression goes, but still I want to finish out some quests.

As far as the raid itself, it went fairly well but it is a big of a punch in the gut going from killing eight bosses in a single night to struggling to kill one. All in all it took us around six attempts to work out the mechanics for Odyn and largely sort out how not to have the tanks die during the final phase. The fight reminded me so much of Binding Coil Turn 9 in FFXIV, in that the really rough part was at the very end… but you had to wade through a bunch of mechanics that were more tedious than difficult to get there. This is very much a learn the mechanics fight and less a gear check in the traditional sense of damage output. For some however it is likely a bit of a survival check in that even if you are doing mostly everything as intended you are still going to take the occasional damage that becomes hard to control. We however pushed through and got a kill… and by kill I mean we pushed Odyn to 10% where he once again congratulated us on our performance. What is it about this guy wanting us to beat him up… is this a fetish? In any case a lot of gear dropped, but I got double gold both off him… and off the world boss that I attempted right before the raid. That leaves me with a single roll token for the week that I am going to need to use judiciously and determine what exactly I want to spend it on. Largely nothing from mythic+ is really worth it apart from the occasional trinket.

We put in several attempts on Guarm and that fight feels like a pretty hard gear wall the way that Patchwerk used to be. It has a very short enrage timer, and a oneshot kill mechanic that you need to avoid… while juggling even distribution of the colored debuffs. So there is a lot more going on than there was with Patchwerk, but it is no less of a hard dps race trying to kill him before he enrages and kills us. Last night was largely Art and I figuring out the tanking, and placement… and learning how to avoid the charge attack and get through it without taking much in the way of damage. It also very much felt like the healers were desperately trying to sort out all of the details because there were so many times where I was painfully low and straight up out of cooldowns to mitigate that fact. A little gear, damage output optimization, and some practice and I am absolutely certain that we will get that fight to farm status before long. We also have an alternate path open to us of trying to push through Heroic Emerald Nightmare, but with a brand new raid open that hasn’t seemed that compelling. In truth I hope we get to a point where we can easily clear Trial of Valor and then go back and worth on Heroics all in the same night. Of note however… “ToV” will always be Temple of Veeshan to me and never Trials of Valor.

Karazhan Clear

November 14, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely because of the extended holiday granted by veterans day. It is also odd because it felt strange to go so long without a post after the recent outage in my blog. Most everything is working as intended, but for whatever reason on the new hardware there is an artificially low upload limit which is causing me to have to shrink my images for a bit until I have that sorted out. In truth I doubt most people will really notice that much given that my theme tended to scale them down a bit anyways. The only real annoyance is I actually have to play which images I am going to use and shrink them down beforehand. As far as gaming went I was all over the place… playing copious amounts of Destiny, World of Warcraft and even a little Guild Wars 2. I also started Diablo II the December game of the month, in honor of the 20th anniversary. The strangest thing about going back and playing that game is… just how amazingly well it still holds up. Maybe I am viewing it through the haze of nostalgia… but other than some dodgy animations it mostly just “works”. Sure I miss some of the more interesting abilities that Diablo 3 added in, but it is also making me appreciate the game we have more. So instead of going on about a whole slew of topics, I am largely going to focus in on World of Warcraft. Firstly on a crazy whim I decided to de-Worganize Belgrave my Deathknight. He started out as a human and the more I played him in Worgen form the more I was annoyed at how small in general two-handers look on that model. Both my Artifacts for Blood and Unholy felt like I was swinging a one-hander which just felt “wrong”. Along with this shift however I managed to get into the groove of the Deathknight and in theory that is probably going to be my next 110. While I need the rogue and the alchemy it provides… I just struggle to get into a would be stealthy class.

The core of this mornings post however is about Karazhan. We managed to miss the first week because we were juggling trying to get attuned, with raiding and all sorts of other things… that by the time Sunday rolled around we didn’t have a permanent 5th player. After we snagged Kylana we went in on week two and managed to make a significant amount of progress getting six of the eight bosses. We made an attempt to pull together last Monday but scheduling conflicted with us as it was Ashgar’s On Call week. From there we largely plotted our revenge throughout the week and in truth I was more amped about popping into Kara than I was about our super smooth clear of Emerald Nightmare. I’ve talked before about that this is essentially what World of Warcraft was missing for me… a tight group experience for a fixed limited number of players. After Zul’Aman there really didn’t seem to exist a similar experience, and while 10 player raiding was essentially that… it just felt different. Raiding feels like raiding no matter how many people you bring, and while I probably had more fun during wrath in the 10 player group… it didn’t feel significantly different than the 25 player version I was already running regularly. Doing both 10 and 25 watered down the experience, so that by the time we killed the Lich King on 25… it felt like old hat already since we had done it months earlier in the as a 10. It also served to make me that much more frustrated when players seemed to struggle to grasp the mechanics… since they were exactly like the version I already knew like the back of my hand.

What Karazhan provides more than anything else… is a unique experience that fits within certain confines. This week we managed to clear significantly faster, but still a little bit behind the time we would need for a Nightbane run. By the time we hit Opera we still had around two minutes and thirty seconds on the timer… but the RP dialog before the event actually starts ate up roughly a minute of that time. Essentially if we are going to do this we need to be chain pulling the place, and at some point I hope to get there. For the time being however we have been working on getting stable kills. Moroes was still a pain in the ass that we BARELY pushed across the finish line… but a oneshot is a oneshot so we were happy with that. We struggled a bit on a few other fights but at the 1 hour mark we were sitting halfway through the raid. We made it up to the Mana Devourer and took a handful of tries before we managed to defeat it and start moving onto the final boss. I am not going to lie here… it took us a solid hour of attempts on Viz’aduum the Watcher because that fight is less about damage output… and more about trying to time all of these stupid things from happening at the worst possible time…. while avoiding as much damage as is humanly possible. This is absolutely the sort of fight where you can just end up getting screwed by RNG, and it reminds me of the stark difference between FFXIV raid design and WoW raid design. The encounter as a whole has as many moving parts as Coil Turn 9 for example… but it is far more RNG dependent and far less successfully messaged. However all of that said… we managed to finally get a good attempt where the stars shined upon us and managed to get our guilds very first clear of Karazhan. Now just to speed up the process and get us a Nightbane as well.

Rainbow Tentacles

November 11, 2016 by Belghast

This morning is a getting to a bit of a late start because reasons. Firstly I am off for Veterans day, and I want to take a brief moment to thank those who fought to protect our country. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, my wife’s step-dad fought as part of the Chosin Few in Korea, and various sundry other family members have been in the military during peace and war time. If you see anyone out and about, take a moment to thank them for their service. The little things like that, feel all the more important during these last few days because of the sequence of events that has happened from essentially Tuesday onwards. As for me… its been a weird series of days. Firstly I just couldn’t put myself in the mindset of being able to write a blog post, so instead you got an intermission. I genuinely expected to pick up Thursday morning and begin blogging as normal once again. However fate seemed to conspire against me because in the middle of the crushing depression that I was going through Tuesday… my blog disappeared off the face of the internet. It seems my web host had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure, and that since I had yet to migrate to newer harder… partially my own fault… the site went down until it could get moved completely. The positive is that I seem to have lost nothing in the process other than I am sure readers who probably thought I was going dark… given the post that I had left that morning. It feels odd to have taken a somewhat forced break… and then be back just for Friday before taking the weekend off.

As far as my own mental state… I have to say raiding with the guild on Wednesday helped it immensely. For some reason it has become what seems like a new tradition to paint me with the rainbow generator before battles. Here we are waiting on the Xavius fight to begin… and I am glowing with really strange rainbow tentacles as I tend to think of them. I always feel like I am straight out of whimsyshire. On a more serious note though… I could not be more proud of my guild and the raid attached to it. The position I have assumed in the world is vastly different, because I am not leading the guild… and to some extent that still feels odd. Kylana assumed the reins after Rylacus went into Final Fantasy XIV… and I have to say that while Ry and I were essentially the same sort of leader… Kylana is way better than I have ever been at the day to day administrata. That is really the place where he shines, and doing things like making sure everyone gets guild rank promotions on time… without having to be pestered about it a dozen times. As for me… I pretty much live in this position of guild mascot. Folks still ask me to do responsible adult style things, but mostly I try to defer to the judgement of Ky. I am still very much the chief recruiter and tour guide, but it feels okay to not be the king.

As for raiding… there are certain fights where I am taking a much bigger role at least in communicating the mechanics. I’ve started barking orders on Iggy and it seems to go more smoothly when I let folks know what they should be fighting and when… and roughly how much time we have left to burn. As far as Emerald Nightmare in general… other than us tanks completely screwing up Ursoc… we had probably the smoothest night we have ever had and made a really quick work of the entire instance. We had enough time to put in about thirty minutes of attempts on Heroic Nythendra… which is way rougher than the original. I remember rolling into Emerald Nightmare for the first time and feeling amazing when we oneshot her… only to feel frustration again when we struggled with SpiderBirb. Ultimately more than anything I feel happy we have made progress. It feels like we started as a disconnected group of folks that sometimes ran dungeons together… and have exited a highly functional team. I mean I had worked in the past a few times with Art, when I had to fill in tanking during our Warlords raid… but he is a super dependaeble tanking partner. Of course I also love tanking beside Ashgar who fills in when Art has not been able to make it.

As far as other matters go… I am trying my best to focus on the positive things in life for awhile. This is not me burying my head in the sand, but me trying to return to a sense of normality for my own mental health. I am just as confused and frustrated as anyone by the recent turn of events, but I also know that there is very little that is directly in my realm of control. So I am going to focus on the things I do control, and try my best to get happy again. For those of you who are reading this… thanks so much for sticking by me throughout the years. You all mean so much to me.