Wildstar Archives - Page 8 of 16 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Stormtalon’s Lair

June 26, 2014 by Belghast

Sleeping Soundly

When my wife travels I always have trouble sleeping. You get so damned used to having another person laying in bed beside you, that something just feels off. The cats try really hard to make up for the fact that there is another person missing from the bed, but it doesn’t quite work the same. When my wife is gone I end up with one cat pushed up against my face on my pillow… another one burrowed against me on the side my wife would normally be, and a third pretending the bed is lava by standing elevated on my legs. The end result feels like I am trapped in place for fear of upsetting some crazy version of kitty jenga.

Last night however I picked my wife up from her latest trip, which should be the last of the season. So when I hit the sack around 10:30 I conked out soundly and sleep that way for the majority of the night. Its funny how amazing a good nights sleep feels when you haven’t been getting them. I am still a bit groggy, but things feel like they just function better. I should try getting this sleep thing more often. By the time I finish this Monster Zero Ultra I should be feeling right as rain. However it will never cease to amaze me what an effect having my wife home can have on me and my overall happiness and well being.

Nipplegate

So yesterday blizzard released the images of the new Male Human model as part of the reworking coming with Warlords of Draenor. Overall I have to say they seem to have done a pretty good job of translating the original look to a more high fidelity version. It has been compared to Gaston from Beauty and the Beast as well as the “Human” Shrek from the second movie. I can definitely see the human shrek thing, but overall it doesn’t really bother me. Belghast is a human male warrior, and I can see being just fine with the look and feel of the new model once you slap some facial hair on it. The only thing I don’t get are the nipples. What the hell is going on with those… like I sincerely hope this is a texture mapping issue deforming them and not the intended final look. They remind me somewhat of a pair of pepperoni slices glued to the canned ham like pectoral muscles.

It makes me wonder if the Dwarven male had the same issue, but we just didn’t notice because there was always a beard covering them up. So I did some digging and the emotes manage to allow us to see the nipples on the Dwarven model. Maybe it is just that they are smaller scale but they look less like something pasted onto the chest. Yes I realize the irony here in pointing all of this out… because this is precisely the same sort of thing that women have had to go through every time a game releases a female model of anything. Hell Wildstar as much as I love it… I am convinced the animators have never actually seen a female form, because the proportions for the waists especially are anatomically impossible. Anyways… twitter is freaking out. Since I don’t tend to run around shirtless in an MMO, at the end of the day it doesn’t really effect me much.

Stormtalon’s Lair

At this point we had run Ruins of Kel Vorath a few times, but there is a completely different level 20 dungeon that we had yet to touch. So last night we managed to pull together a workable team and run Stormtalon’s Lair. After the mess that was the last time I tried to tank one of these things wearing something other than tank gear, I opted to craft a bunch of new gear and augment it with a few careful auction house purchases. The end result was that I had what felt like enough support power to do the job, and sure enough I had none of the threat issues that I had the last time. It seems like if you are in tank gear, you will do just fine controlling the mobs in an instance, which is somewhat of a cool thing. For awhile we had heard this dungeon was considerably harder than Kel Vorath, and by the difficulty we had with the first boss and some of the trash mobs I would have agreed with those people.

However once we got used to the trash, it felt far more manageable than that of Kel Vorath. While there were quite a few annoying things they did, there seemed to be far fewer of the “Random group wiping” type effects. The first boss honestly was probably the hardest boss in the instance for us. We managed to down the second boss in one try and the final boss I think took us two, and we finished it up with only three people standing. As far as a dungeon to run multiple times… I would honestly far rather do Stormtalon now that I am used to it. I don’t really want to give away any of the fight mechanics, because for us at least that is one of the most enjoyable things about going into a new MMO is hitting the fights completely cold and trying to figure out the mechanics on the fly.

That said we did encounter an optional boss that completely beat our spirit down. We made five or six attempts and never could quite land on the right strategy for dealing with it. During the encounter he summons some adds, and if I try and tank both the boss and the adds I get absolutely wrecked. I am wondering if this is going to be one of those situations where I have to kite the boss around while everyone burns the adds. The problem is… the adds don’t go down terribly easily, and he summons more waves rapidly. While we don’t have the answer yet, I look forward to going back in another night and trying to figure the encounter out. Right now I am loving the feeling of the boss mechanics in these dungeons, because whoever did their encounter design is really doing some interesting stuff.

For the longest time I have wished there was such a thing as 5 man raiding, and really the type of mechanics we are seeing are the level that normally accompany raid encounters. I would say that the 5 man normal dungeons here are at least as difficult as LFR is in WoW. I can see these encounters being an absolute nightmare to try and PUG your way through them. There are moments where the entire group has to pay attention and do something or they die in almost every boss fight I have come up against. While World of Warcraft tended to recycle boss mechanics from one expansion in the next expansions dungeon content… this is something wholly different. It is introducing a raid level of responsibility into encounters that I have not seen before. The existence of Interrupt armor is going to be the death of many a PUG group.

#WoW #Warcraft #Nipplegate #Wildstar #StormtalonsLair

Pairing Down

June 24, 2014 by Belghast

The Struggle

One of the biggest challenges about this whole “blog every day” concept is that some mornings there is just nothing at all in my head to talk about. When I am sick like I was yesterday, I tend to turtle and pull my head up inside my shell, disconnecting me from the interwebs and all of you fine people. Unfortunately when my biggest source of inspiration is gone, I can get a little bit of writers block. It is mornings like this that I feel outline the importance of just allowing yourself to write whatever happens to pop into your head. It might not be epic and exciting, but it is staying true to the mission as a whole. Unfortunately we are well based the NBI 2014 initiative, otherwise I would spin this into some sort of an inspirational post about struggling through.

This is not a slight in any way to the previous NBI groups, but I have been really impressed with just how tenacious the Class of 2014 has been. Generally speaking there is a significant drop off the month after the initiative as folks take a massive breather after having survived being the focus of so many folks attention. When the spotlight fades a bit, it is rough to keep posting when you inevitably notice fewer people are reading. However this group either is blissfully oblivious to the existence of blog statistics, or they really are writing for themselves, because they seem to still be going strong. A few of the “newbies” are among the most prolific posters in my blog reader, and I am amped to still see them enjoying the whole experience.

Pairing Down

WoWScrnShot_061314_062051 Right now I have come to realize that I am playing entirely too many MMOs to feel like I am making any significant progress in any of them. Over the last two months I’ve played Warlords of Draenor, Rift, ArcheAge, Wildstar, Star Wars the Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, Defiance, Everquest II, Landmark, The Secret World, Diablo 3, Lego Minifigures Online and Trove. While I embrace the whole polygamerous thing, I think even for me this is a bit too much especially when you throw in League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm on top of those… and occasionally some Hex and Hearthstone. Mostly I think I need to drop some of the games that feel similar to me from the rotation, or at least games that scratch the same itch.

I feel like I have to keep testing Warlords of Draenor in part out of remembrance for River, and him being so damned excited to have gotten into the alpha process. While I won’t be playing with the same wide eyed amusement that he would have, I am trying my best to enjoy the experience in his honor. However I can safely say that I will not be playing the actual live World of Warcraft anytime in the near future. I think maybe WoW has run its course with me for awhile, and Wildstar has stepped in to take its place in my heart without me really wanting it to. Wildstar really is a much better version of WoW, and I am just embracing that fact. As a result Rift and SWTOR are also losing out, because to me they still fill the same “wow-like” niche. As a result I won’t be renewing my patron account in Rift.

The Non-WoW Itch

It was fun trying to get into Defiance, but the problem is I got into the Destiny alpha… and it was pretty much everything I had hoped Defiance would be. So I won’t be spending much more time trying to get into that game when I know there is something I will like much better coming later this year. ArcheAge I want to like, but it has without a doubt the worst community of griefers I have experienced anywhere. So unless Trion comes out and announces there will be a co-op server… it is pretty much a nonstarter for me and no sense really spending much more time on it. Landmark on the other hand has an amazing community, but right now there just isn’t much game there for me to play. They have built this amazing crafting sandbox, but without combat it isn’t all that interesting to me past the initial build phase. They have added caves so I figure at some point I will poke my head back in, but exploration without combat just sounds boring to me. I’ve officially allowed my claim to be repossessed at this point.

I still have a special place in my heart for Everquest II, and I can’t say I won’t return to it in the future… but for now I think there are just too many other options. EQ2 was one of those games where I hated the combat system but loved everything else about it. Wildstar with its systems within systems is really filling the niche that EQ2 always did, which might be why it is feeling so sticky considering it is replacing both EQ2 and WoW for me. The Secret World is one of those games I love to remember fondly, but never seem to have a desire to log into on a regular basis. I know there is a bunch of storyline that I have yet to participate in, and I keep thinking that some weekend I will play through all of it. That weekend just has yet to arrive, and lately the only time I seem to log in is when I get new hardware and want to test how it performs.

The Also Rans

Diablo 3 is enjoyable, and at some point I would really like to get a crusader to 70… hell I would like to get my monk to 70. I just struggle to find any drive to play it when my own personal internet zeitgeist… aka the folks I hang out on voice chat nightly, are not also playing it. It was really fun up until the release of Elder Scrolls Online and then boom we all vacated the premises. For the time being I am pretty much crossing it off my list until there is another upwelling of desire among my friends to play it. Trove is similarly really fun, but without a lot of people that I know playing it on a regular basis I have fallen back out of love with it. I will likely continue to poke my head into the game irregularly but when I do play… so much has changed that the experience feels very off-putting. The game is in a pretty much constant state of flux, which is awesome if you are devoted to this game, but confusing if you are a “sometimes” player like me. League of Legends will be a permanent fixture in my gaming rotation so long as I have friends who are devoted to playing it. I don’t necessarily love the game, but I enjoy playing with my friends. I personally like Heroes of the Storm so much better, but the problem is with it being in a limited release “technical alpha” state there just are not enough people around regularly to play with. The MOBA genre is really only fun for me if I am playing with a group of friends, and in this scenario League wins out every time. That is not to say that I won’t keep poking my head into Heroes especially as they add new waves of players. As far as Hearthstone and Hex… I am back playing Magic the Gathering in real life with friends at lunch time… so the draw of these games is minimal right now.

Those Who Made the Cut

So after spending all of this time culling games for this or that reason, I figure I should talk about the games I am deciding to keep in the rotation. Warlords of Draenor I am actually enjoying when I do manage to get in and play it. So yes I am partially doing it in honor of River, and his desire to be in the Alpha, but there is something charming about the new content. I don’t feel like it will be enough to keep me in WoW, but for the time being I am enjoying it while I can. Wildstar has pretty much filled the corner of my heart that desire to play a theme park MMO, and it really is the most glorious theme park of experiences once you give yourself over to it. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface on what it has to offer, and I am intrigued at the schedule they have put out before us. I really like that they are choosing to put in “hardmode” single and small group content before augmenting the raid game. That says a lot that they understand that they need to focus on both going forward to keep players.

I still feel like I have so much more that I want to do in Elder Scrolls Online. I want to finish the Aldmeri Dominion content and see the Ebonheart Content, as well as spend time exploring Craglorn. I love this game even though I am not playing it much, and I can’t see dropping it from the rotation anytime soon. I realize that not many players feel the same way about the game as I do, but really for me it is like the best possible version of Skyrim. I have been out so long at this point that I feel like I am going to be extremely rusty. There game has problems, namely it is awkward as hell to do anything as a group other than Cyrodil. They really need to fix this, and I hope that the good folks at Zenimax are looking into things like mentoring. Right now it is a really awesome single player experience, but gets cludgy when you start adding in more people. That said it still does have amazing dungeon design, and there are so many of them that I have yet to experience.

Last but not least is a game that has come in and taken my heart by storm. Lego Minifigures Online is absolutely adorable and I love everything about this game. Last night this was the only thing I actually played, and grouped up with Rae she managed to catch me up almost to her level in experience. Right now we have a vastly different set of mini figures, and it is really enjoyable to group together. We have both opted to get memberships, and the pocket dungeons are awesome… some of them ending up extremely challenging like the Dragon’s Lair dungeon with I think five different boss fights in it. I’ve already gotten more than my moneys worth of enjoyment out of it, so this is definitely going to be in my weekly rotation for a long while. It basically scratches the itch that Diablo 3 did, and cashes in on my absolute love of all things Lego.

So there you have it, going forward I am mostly going to be focused on Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online and Lego Minifigures Online. I of course reserve the right to change my mind and undo all of these in the blink of an eye. That said I do have a ton of single player games that I want to play through, and both the PS3 and PS4 ready to stream content. I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Assassin’s Creed 4 for example… and I am absolutely horrible at it, but enjoying myself quite a bit. As far as online games, I am going to try and limit myself to just these games above for the time being. I know in September I will be digging into Destiny and playing that online with friends quite a bit, but it doesn’t directly conflict with the types of games I chose above. Maybe with this abbreviated list, I won’t constantly feel overwhelmed when I sit down at night and try and figure what exactly I am going to do.`

Crimzon CLover World Ignition

June 22, 2014 by Belghast

Technical Difficulties

Last night was probably the roughest time I have had editing the AggroChat podcast in the eleven episodes we have been running. Mostly this centers around us trying to change the way we record the show. Since its inception we have been recording it on the House Stalwart mumble server in a private and locked down channel. This worked pretty well and produced the first ten episodes without much issue. However on July 19th that server will be going away and as a guild we will be permanently switching to the Alliance of Awesome Teamspeak server. In theory Teamspeak does the same type of things that mumble does, so I thought we could simply record our channel without much issue. Turns out that was not quite the case.

Mostly we had a lot of issues with Kodra coming through either garbled or not at all when he was holding down his push to talk key. Apparently on his end it was me that was coming through like this. Oddly enough Ashgar and Rae didn’t seem to have any problems at all. It might be something we can fiddle with codec wise to make it work better, but honestly after the trouble I had with last nights podcast I am just of the opinion that we not try and record on teamspeak again. We have access to a more private mumble server, and I am guessing from now on we will just use that one instead. A lot of folks have suggested skype, but none of us are really skype users… so that would take its own trial and error to figure out how to really use it.

Last night we finished recording around 9:30 and I started editing by 10 pm. I did not actually finish editing the podcast until well after 12:30. The hard part was trying to glue together enough audio out of the garbled sections to make sense of what was being said. I’ve listened to most of it while I was editing and I think the end result works. However if you hear something that doesn’t quite make sense… it was probably me trying to make the of a corrupted segment of speech. While I don’t think the show was our weakest, it definitely made for some strained recording time since we kept having to redo segments that did not transmit. Hopefully what did make it through is enjoyable.

Fly That Geek Flag High

In this weeks episode we have the original cast reunited again. Ashgar is back from doing whatever it was that Ashgar was doing the week before, and Kodra is back from the awesome gaming convention Origins. As we had talked two weeks ago, Kodra gave us a run down of what exactly he did at Origins. This leads to a little discussion about something that is unfortunate in the gaming and geek communities… geek on geek shaming. Apparently Kodra catches some crap from the Magic the Gathering gamers for his choice of playing the My Little Pony card game. But hey we pretty much support all potential diversions here on AggroChat.

Additionally we talk about the Warlords of Draenor expansion and my experiences so far with the Alpha. We also talk at length about the Wildstar patch schedule and our hopes that they are actually able to maintain it. Join us for these topics along with a bunch of other ones that just get slipped in here and there was we go. Since neither Ash or Kodra were here to talk E3 2014, we do a bit of a callback there as well to talk about a few things that make people excited. Remember to let your geek flag fly high, but remember to respect everyone else’s choice of flag as well.

Crimzon Clover World Ignition

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get enough time to really give this game a proper playing. My friend Ashgar and I seem to be the only folks in our immediate circle of friends that really appreciate the “bullet hell” shooter. So when a new one comes out, he sometimes throws it on my game pile because he knows I will actually play it with him. The latest one of these is a random gifting of Crimzon Clover, and if you want to see a more logical and proper write-up about the game check out Ash’s blog. The other night when he was working on his indepth reviews of the game I took a break from Four Job Fiesta and Wildstar to play Crimzon Clover with him. I say play it with him… but mostly we just happened to be on voice chat at the same time while both of us are in game. It sadly does not support internet multiplayer gaming.

The game actually does a fair bit of bait and switch. When I booted it up and started playing the other night I originally thought it was going to be a “Shmup” and not really a “Bullet Hell” shooter. This however changes quickly as it somewhat eases you into the game play as you get used to the movement controls and various attacks. By the time you reach the first boss however things have escalated to the point where you are dodging the attacks like crazy. The game itself is extremely clean and the controls responsive. This is the sort of game where you just hold down the fire button at all times and spend the rest of your time looking for the only safe spot on the screen. I question in this genre why the fire isn’t just toggled on and left on, since there is never really a point at which you don’t want to be holding it down.

As is often the case with this type of game you end up with the choice between different ships. Type-I tends to be the most baseline and the easiest to control, whereas Type-II and Type-III give you a benefit in one area but make another area variable through the play session. I started off trying Type-II but quickly fell back on going with the tried and true “default option”. Ash actually managed to beat the game, but I only made it through boss number four before deciding my fingers were too sore to continue onwards. Apparently in order to truly beat the game, you have to make it through without hitting continue. If you do that you get a different ending and I believe a different boss encounter. This also seems to be a theme with a lot of these very serious games. I remember in the BlazBlue games there were “good” endings and “bad” endings depending on how you did in the earlier content leading up to the final encounter.

I have to say this game is a really good entry into the genre, and combined with Danmaku Unlimited 2 gives some seriously good options for Bullet Hell shooters on steam right now. I am happy that this genre is alive and well and did not die with the death of arcades. This specific title is interesting in that it is what they call a Doujin or essentially the Japanese version of an Independent PC game. This appears to be another thing that steam is doing right, in that it is giving these games a market in the united states. Recettear is another one of these Doujin games and it has been wildly popular and also likely would never have been seen here without steam. If you dig the Bullet Hell shooter genre, this is one of the more pristine examples I have seen in a long while. You should totally check it out because right now during the steam sale you can pick it up for only $7. This game is more than worth that money even if you only slightly like shooters.

Working as a Group

June 21, 2014 by Belghast

Different Expectations

Lately there has been some discontent in the guild, and it has made me painfully aware that different people are looking for vastly different things. There is no right or wrong answer here, but simply a case of wildly different expectations of what they have come to expect out of a guild and MMO relationship. I am not speaking for the guild or anyone in it in making this post, but I thought it might be useful for me to outline how I personally view a guild. Like I said just because I see something this way doesn’t mean there are not a wide variety of other opinions on what is proper and good in guild etiquette. However I’ve learned the fastest way to resolve any rough spots is to simply outline what you are expecting out of an arrangement.

Each of us comes to MMO gaming and guilds from a different set of past experiences. While some of these overlap many times they do not, and that is where the misunderstandings stem from. Massively Multiplayer games are not this monolithic experience, regardless of how we might think of them as such. For me I come from a raider background, and even though I am mostly “casual” these days it still colors everything about my gaming experience. Some players approach a guild from a PVP standpoint and then get frustrated when not everyone embraces the aspect of the game they enjoy the most. Similarly role-players could feel left out in the cold when the guild as whole does not share their interest for deep personal character development. While we might all think we play exactly the same game… that is almost never the case.

Working as a Group

I love doing big epic things with my guildies like raids or dungeons or even some pvp encounters. The problem is… that while I love grouping up for these few cases… I don’t ever want to quest with another person. I did Star Wars the Old Republic as a dedicated Duo… and found the experience to be both rewarding on one hand, but deeply claustrophobic on another. I’ve always found the group leveling experience, and especially the group questing experience to be extremely chafing. Someone is always a quest ahead of the group and someone is always one or two quests behind. There is a constant awkward struggle to try and keep this many armed abomination moving forward efficiently. As a result my preference will always be to quest alone, and have my personal time.

That is not to say I am not willing to group up at a moments notice… but I want there to be a “purpose”. If you need help killing this or that objective, or if there is an over world dungeon that you just can’t quite survive by yourself… those are awesome times to group. That said I like there to be a fixed duration of the grouping and a fixed goal in mind. I am a truly horrible group mate, because I will wander off on my own constantly. I’ve spent so much of my gaming time with other people depending on me for this or that, and when I level it is my time where I get to not give a shit about the needs or wants of others. When we are in a dungeon and I am tanking however… I am all about the needs of the group and the goal of getting us through the dungeon successfully.

The Reality Check

For most of my gaming experience I figured most players felt like I did, and preferred to quest alone. However over the last few weeks I’ve come to the realization that there is a specific group of player that wants to literally be grouped up 24/7 and working together towards everything. I think this is both noble and cool to have a leveling buddy like that… but I want no part of it at all. What is cool is that there are enough of these folks that they should be able to form their own little “band of brothers” and conquer the world together, but they lack the spark to do just that. I guess in part I didn’t even realize players wanted this since the ability to solo at all for me at least feels like a hard fought battle. In the early generations of MMO games, grouping was required to do anything at all, and it often meant a multiple hour long commitment.

I cut my teeth playing Everquest, and as a Dwarven Cleric… trying to solo anything was an act of futility and my nights were often dictated by whoever happened to be tanking for the group. I felt helpless and completely out of control, being forced to depend on someone else for my fun. It was a feeling I did not like one bit. So when I entered more modern games, I would pick whatever archetype could solo well and be relatively self sufficient. Thankfully these were almost always tanks, since they mostly had the survival ability to take whatever the game threw at them. So I decided that I actually liked being able to solo on one hand, and being the cornerstone of a group on the other. The further into management I have gotten in my real life, the more I have craved my “solo” time in MMOs, where I can just do whatever the hell I want to do without having to worry about the needs and wants of the many.

Role of a Guild

So I am sure at this point you are asking yourself… why do I focus so much on the importance of guild and community. Well honestly the guild gives a foundation and friendly faces that I see on a daily basis. It gives me the sense that even though I am off on my own doing whatever I want to do… that I am working together with others towards a common goal of progressing the guild. It is both friendly chat group and a constant source of inspiration and support when you need it. Additionally it gives you access to a lot of really great people when it does come time to group up and do something meaningful in an MMO. The guild shines when it comes time to run an Ship quest, Adventure, Dungeon or PVP match. The other night we had a grand night of doing pvp and it was extremely fun… even though I traditionally shy away from player versus player gameplay.

I’ve always seen my role as a community organizer to be that of laying the ground work and collecting the awesome people all in one place, so that they too can take fate into their own hands and do cool stuff together if they choose to. There lies the problem however, is that so many players want to sit back and have a “Cruise Director” plan events for them to attend. I on the other hand counter that it is the responsibility of each player to take responsibility for their own fun. If you want to do something, do it and convince people to come along with you. I’ve posted a few times about what I term the art of Groupcraft, but I will link it here again. One of the most empowering things you can do for yourself is to learn how to be confident in the assembly of a team that will work.

There are absolutely more successful ways of pulling together a group and making something happen when you want it to. Essentially in my experience you have to talk to people directly to get them to actually notice that you are trying to do a thing. This is much easier on voice chat, since you get the immediate feedback, however I did this same thing for years without the advent of voice chat. The critical knowledge however is what exactly you need to be successful. If you are a tank, then you need to find a healer and a few dps. In order to find the healer, you have to know what classes CAN heal and who in the guild falls within those search parameters. Basically for me a good guild is a friendly group of people that you like chatting with, but also a way to ease the finding of people to do something with. A hand crafted guild group will always be more enjoyable than a PUG, and usually more successful.

Just My Point of View

WildStar64 2014-06-20 22-30-01-908 Please note, like I said before this is just my point of view on the subject and what I am looking for out of a guild and the people in it. This is not some maxim that I will not cross, because lord knows I am liable to turn around this afternoon and end up grouped with someone for a long period of time and enjoy myself. These are just my tendencies and I thought it might be useful to open a dialog about what folks are expecting, by outlining what I am actually expecting. The Alliance of Awesome has been an interesting experiment because it is this big glorious amalgam of a bunch of different communities with their own rich traditions. House Stalwart had a shared guild culture that had been built up over the course of a decade, and it was pretty much expected that everyone in the guild felt the same way.

Going forward into this new experiment, we can no longer afford to expect that. Each of us comes from potentially different backgrounds with some shared and some disparate experiences. We have to come up with a brand new cultural norm as a result. I don’t feel this is the time for anyone to throw their hands up and walk away in a huff because they did not get whatever it was they were looking for. Instead it is time for folks to talk clearly about what exactly they are expecting out of this larger relationship. I think we are on the precipice of having something truly amazing, that we can all benefit from. We just need to take the time not to nurture it as it grows. I would not have poured so much effort into it so far, if I didn’t think it could be great for everyone involved.