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Santa and Grumplings

December 19, 2015 by Belghast

Santa Lives

Force Awakens has been my Christmas Miracle…. its like I am a kid that believes in Santa Claus all over again 🙂

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) December 18, 2015

I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night. One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia. Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about. Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else. I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation. My mother on the other hand… that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them. My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world. The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love. For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.

Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again. Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club. Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th. I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting. Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie. I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming. In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them. For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.

The “A” Team

I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years… shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be. I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens. The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is… it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with. Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team. These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching. While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about. While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.

There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies. The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product. Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies… it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did. So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises. There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again. Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical… was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades. Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars. To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.

Grumplings

The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns. In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids… you get a Grumpling pet. Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow. I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings. Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount. I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount. So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.

Many Demons

December 16, 2015 by Belghast

Allergy to Advertising

Yesterday in my travels I listened to a piece on NPR talking about the habits of TV binge watchers and advertising. Apparently a study has found that binge watchers are far less susceptible to advertisements than your average viewer. They went into some reasons behind this… but I think as a whole we have just learned how to ignore advertising. William Gibson is the oracle of our age, because he consistently predicts a thing being a thing… before it actually happens. I remember in the book Pattern Recognition he introduced us to a person who is so allergic to branding and advertising that they would get the branding ground off the buttons in their jeans. I feel like I am nowhere near this, but instead I am in this realm where advertising just really doesn’t work that well for me. When I see the same ad over and over… especially if it feels like they are targeting me for some reason… I find myself less and less likely to use whatever product that is. There was a time when I actually like several post cereals for example… but after watching commercials for honey bunches of oats between shows on Hulu I have nothing but a negative reaction when I see anything with the Post brand on it.

As far as advertising in general, I’ve gotten adept at ignoring it. If I am going to be serious about a website I tend to snap it into my RSS reader, which also tends to trim most of the advertisements. From a side effect it also cuts down on the exposure to Malware, since a large number of attacks on end user machines come in through infected ad providers. While I might trust the hell out of a website, I don’t trust the advertising services that are well known cesspools of Malvertisements. With Television however…. there is very rarely a time where I will be watching a show without also doing something else at the same time. So I might be playing an MMO or fiddling around with this or that project… which means when an ad comes on the screen it gives me liberty to look down at my device. I am vaguely listening, but only well enough to be able to identify when the ad has finished and the television show has started again. Mostly I really don’t enjoy being advertised to. I am not bought into the fantasy that they are trying to create that is supposed to tell me that my life will be better with this product. Instead I prefer to just do my own research when I find that I need something. There is never a moment when I purchase something, that I have not already googled it, youtubed it, and tried to find multiple seemingly trustworthy sources of information on how said product works. That said… I realize I am probably a huge aberration, but I would have to think its an aberration that is growing more and more common.

OrcLock Instead

Last night most of the evening was spent going to RiffTrax where I saw Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny…. which is every bit as horrific as you might have imagined. Well the movie was horrific… the riffing over top of the movie was absolutely glorious. I would say this batch of shorts and the final movie… was quite possibly the best RiffTrax I have seen. They are doing a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers early into January so I think we are going to rally the troops and go see it as well, since it was one of the ones they did before we started making this a regular outing. When I got home however I spent some time piddling around and on a whim decided to roll a Female Orc Warlock rather than flipping over and playing my Dwarflock like I had talked about. Essentially I am enjoying my time Horde side quite a bit, and I am feeling the need to develop a stable of characters. I also really really need access to an enchanter and a potion maker, and there is no better way to do that than to make my own. So in theory Belghula… because I am running out of ideas for Belg names… is more than likely going to be a Tailor / Enchanter… since having access to crafted gear is always a useful thing.

This is I guess going to be an experiment in just how long I manage to stick with a female character. This is a thing I don’t do terribly well, and mostly its because… I tend to keep creating versions of myself when I make characters. At some point I need to do a supercut of my characters, but you will see there is a very specific pattern to them. They all have beards of some sort… and if there is a game that doesn’t allow beards… then honestly I don’t tend to stick around terribly long in it. After that I tend to have long hair drawn back into a ponytail… or if nothing else just long hair in general, and said hair is generally black or as dark of a brown as I can get it. Essentially that character ends up being the idealized version of how I guess I wish I looked… or at least my ultimate version of myself. Maybe I just really like the whole Adrian Paul Highlander thing… because my Secret World character looks quite a bit like he did in the Highlander Television series. In any case… I never seem to be able to fully immerse myself in a female character, because it pulls me out of the whole “this is me in game form” aspect. That said, when it comes to horde in particular… I think the female characters look badass and less sexualized than the alliance versions. I also like the female Orcs, Trolls and Undead far more than I like the Male counter parts. As a result I am going to give this a try, and hopefully it works… because seriously this Orclock looks awesome already.

Devilian Finally

Devilian 2015-12-16 06-18-17-03

While I played quite a bit of Devilian in the various phases of alpha/beta/whatever… I had yet to actually install the game proper since its launch. So last night when I got home… while I was dinking around on the Orclock I had it installing in the background. I crashed pretty hard around 10pm but I managed to get in this morning and get a character created. As a result I created Belghast the Berserker on Ravan… because if you give me a server name that even vaguely sounds like Revan… I am going to play on it. I am looking forward to seeing what the game is like after the handful of polish passes the late betas gave it. If nothing else it should at least partially scratch my Diabloesc itch for awhile. I have significant issues still with the fact that the classes are gender locked, but this is not really a Trion Worlds thing. That is one of the frustrating things about playing a game that has been localized like this… is that you end up knowing that most of the things that might frustrated you… the company you actually have access to, can’t do a damned thing about it. So as a result I am going to enjoy what is there, and try really hard not to worry about the stuff that isn’t.

I joined a Discord server yesterday being run by Zoltariel and having a bunch of the Trion folks on it as well. So I started chatting like I normally do, to which point I was treated to a length rant about how essentially anyone playing a Berserker is a “casual” and that how no one would ever invite them to a group. I am paraphrasing because this was a rant that took place over the course of twenty or so lines, but the gist was that Berserkers and melee in general had problems dealing with late game mechanics. The thing is… I enjoy melee. If you give me the option between a bunch of characters, I will always without a doubt play a melee… and problem even further play a tank. Since Devilian is the sort of game that doesn’t have a tank… then I am likely to play as much of a high survival melee as I can because I like being able to live through stupid things. Melee is what makes me happy, and even if it is absolutely empirically worse than every other class in a game…. I am still going to play it because it is the player fantasy that I enjoy. So I killed the chat channel when I quoted Tommy Lee Jones from the Fugitive after Harrison Ford just gave an impassioned plea about how he did not in fact kill his wife… “I Don’t Care”. Not everyone plays a game to win… some of us play them to have fun doing the playing.

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

Housing and Horde

December 14, 2015 by Belghast

Worth It

One of the major stresses this year has been our house, and it has been several phases. First there was the stress when we realized that the leak in the bedroom and the kitchen were due to the garbaged out wood siding. Then there was the stress of trying to pick the right company and the right product. Then of course the stress of waiting for them to finally get started… we signed a contract in July and they didn’t actually start on anything until October. Which lead to here was the stress of having strangers at our house over the course of three weeks, and quite literally just showing up to do the work with little notice. Finally there is the stress looming over our heads of just how much it cost us, and trying to sort out how we are going to go about paying it all off. However this weekend… I can finally say that it was probably worth it. Once again we had a torrent of rain and even though we are still gun shy and kept checking the former leaks… everything continued to perform like a champ.

Where the real “worth it” bit comes in though is the fact that we had a cold front blow in yesterday and as the day went on the house continued to hold its temperature to the point that even at 11pm it had not dropped enough to actually trigger the heater coming on. The house is so much more insulated now and it is funny just how much of a difference that makes. Previously our upstairs was painfully oppressive to be in during the winter months because the heater would be nearly constantly going, just to make it so that the downstairs was somewhere close to livable. Now there are still variations between the two floors, but they are pretty minor. The place it is most noticeable is in the Bedroom where it has always been the coldest room in the house. While it is still not the warmest, it is largely comfortable in the mornings when I wake up… instead of having to make a mad dash to the shower to get some heat in me again. So I have to say all in all… while it was stressful and involved a bit of financial pain… in the long run it is going to be well worth it.

Maybe I Should Heal

One of the things I am thankful for is the fact that my Sunday night raid… is pretty chill. Sure Drewie loses his shit when he doesn’t get a token drop, which is absolutely hilarious… but overall people are more than happy to just show up… do the things that need to be done and walk away with loot. My opinion right now is pretty high of the population horde side in general. People seem really nice… like almost scary nice for being World of Warcraft. I mean I would expect Nubzy and Facepull to be nice… or she would beat them into submission, but what I am talking about is horde players on our battle group in general. The amount of random help that I have gotten out in the world, be it a buff or a heal… or simply a friendly wave has been pretty great. Contrast this with my experience lately on Alliance which consists mostly of entitled ranting in dungeons, or the battleground that is tradechat. I guess I can just see why folks can favor this side of the fence.

My problem in general with horde however is that other than the Tauren… I just don’t really like the racial options. I’ve never been a “monstrous humanoid” type player to borrow the Dungeons and Dragons term. I will say had the Horde gotten the Dark Iron Dwarves as a racial option… I would have converted years ago. I think in order to play Horde for long I am going to have to get used to playing female characters… because while I really like Female Trolls and Undead… I hate the male counter parts because of the hunch. Similarly I think Female Orcs look way cooler than their male equivalents…. though I have to admit in the above photo Khariss looks badass in his Tier 5 set. Mostly I am happy that Sunday nights is more than willing to let me pew pew pew or eventually move into a tanking role, because those are the things I care about. However apparently I should have been a healer. Since moving to the horde side I have been invited to no less than four different Heroic Hellfire Citadel groups… pending I had a healing spec. Everquest scarred me for life when it comes to healing… and from that point on… I have never really considered it a viable option for me to enjoy playing a game. I wasn’t horrible at it… I just get insanely bored not hitting things in the face with a weapon.

More Stuff Than Time

We’ve talked about this on the podcast some, but I think a large chunk of the magic of Final Fantasy XIV was simply the fact that we had so much content left to do. As we whittled our way through it over the past year and a half, we eventually caught up to the point where we are now current with each additional patch. That means once again we are waiting for content to get delivered, rather than having a huge backlog that we could be working through. I think the reason why World of Warcraft is so compelling to me once again is that… right now I have this huge backlog of content to work through. I am absolutely the “master of my domain” when it comes to the Alliance side of the house. I have one of every crafter, and I can push up any character I choose… it is just the matter of dedicating the time to it. Instead on the Horde side I have nothing… well apart from a super supportive guild. I am once again behind the curve and this has put the game in entirely new perspective for me. I want to build my legacy on this side of the fence, and eventually reach a point of self sufficiency just like I have with my army of Alliance alts.

The problem is however that there are simply more things that I need/want to be doing than there are hours in the day. Part of me keeps thinking… I will dedicated this day to working on alts, or this day to farming old content…. and instead I just end up working on content in Tanaan or trying to farm Valor to push up gear a little bit more. All of it gives me this feeling that there is more to do than I could ever possibly do… and it is the same contented feeling that I had in Final Fantasy XIV. When I have left World of Warcraft in the past, it is always because of the same thing. I start poking holes in the game because I have quite literally run out of things I want to be doing. Now I feel like I have this mission, and plenty of things that I want to be doing… and all it really took to reinvigorate me… was abandoning a decade worth of work. I guess in a way this is like all of those times when I have stopped one Minecraft game, just to start a new one… because the old one had gotten stale. The awesome thing about this is… that I still have every bit of work that I did over that decade… just waiting on me anytime I want to visit it. Which in truth I am regularly on my Alliance characters, I am just focused on catching up on the Horde side.