World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 92 of 139

Rough Raid Night

February 11, 2015 by Belghast

An Innocent Start

Most strange happenings on the internet begin with a rather innocuous start. I was discussing handwriting with @tsundereikemen and I decided to create a hand written note to show off my rather messy all caps writing. Then I happened to go directly into a meeting for roughly an hour. When I got out.. my twitter feed had completely blown up with people returning my greeting in their own hand written style. Yesterday I joked about Sigtric coining the hashtag “BelEffect” so he was immediate to point out that it was happening again. Of course I had to share this sudden madness with the world, because folks had no idea what I was talking about. I lost a few followers in my flurry of re-tweets, but screw it this was worth it. The “happening” was enough happiness to buffer any frustrations for the rest of the day.

The awesome thing is… I posted a second note some time later to adequately explain my feelings about the whole event… and it started up again adding several more notes to the mix. This silly thing is the reason why my twitter feed is so damned great. You guys can somehow manage to take a boring work day and turn it into a magical experience by tweeting a bunch of hand written notes. I always love seeing someone’s handwriting no matter how unkempt it might be… because embedded in those strokes and swooshes are a persons personality. So thank you all for participating in this little experiment… it was neither original nor that unique, but it was most definitely not something I expected to start yesterday. If you want to check out all of the images, I will be attempting to insert a gallery below.

Rough Raid Night

Not all raid nights can be amazing… in fact every now and then you can have a down right shitty one. Last night was one of these nights, and that is just something that is going to happen now and then. It seems like half of the world is sick with something right now, and last night it claimed two of our primary healers. This put us going into the night at a pretty big handicap, one that we never quite made up for. Ithato is freaking awesome for stepping in and trying to hold things together, and he fought valiantly. The problem is it just wasn’t quite enough. He was not quite as geared as the healers we lost, and had not been raiding with us all this time… so was having to learn the boss strategies on the fly. On top of these, the raid itself was just not quite what it should have been. I feel like the evidence was the fact that Teamspeak was deathly silent, which is not a usual thing. When we are doing well we are chatty and happy and picking on Rylacus, but last night… no one was talking at all.

We started off trying Gruul but after a half dozen wipes realized we didn’t quite have what it took last night to down it. From there we moved back to Highmaul Heroic, and managed to down Kargath and Butcher before hitting a similar wall on Brakenspore. We finally called the night, hoping to regroup on Thursday and see what we can do. If the gods bless us, we will have back the two healers that were absent and hopefully be back in fighting form. If not… it isn’t the end of the world if we can’t quite progress for a week. We are not exactly the most cutting edge and serious of group, and I think every now and then it is a good thing for us to be reminded of that. The health and well being of our players is worth more than our forward momentum, and I am thankful we have a raid leader that sees that… instead of angrily grinding us into the ground. I love my raid, even when we “wipe like nubs”.

Hunting Pearls

Since the raid was a wash, I opted to log into Final Fantasy XIV and work on my weekly Crystal Tower quest. With this last patch and the entrance of the World of Darkness casual raid, they introduced a quest to do all three dungeons and collect pearls and turn them back in at a quest giver in Mor Dhona. Since I had a bit of time I queued up for Labyrinth of the Ancients and was pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it went. Normally there are wipes around every corner, but I guess at this point folks are trying to complete the quest, and as such are far over geared for the place. I lost every roll on any of the cosmetic gear, but was in and out of the raid quickly enough for me to contemplate running Syrcus Tower as well. Unfortunately it did not go quite as smoothly as Labyrinth, and we suffered some pretty massive wipe fests. That said folks silently struggled through and we managed to clear it still within thirty minutes of starting.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your take… I had completely World of Darkness collecting its pearl on Monday night, but not running the other other two. As a result I was able to turn in the quest and get my Carboncoat. This allows you to “un-weather” any of the Poetics accessories turning them into ilvl 130 items. Unfortunately I am not sure how to get Carbontwine the item needed to do the same for the Ironworks armor pieces, other than the extremely grindy method of turning in 6 Unstained Mark Logs. I think I will likely wait for 2.55 since it is more than likely that they will let World of Darkness start dropping both Carboncoat and Carbontwine just like Syrcus Tower drops Oil of Time and Sands of Time. It is unlikely that we will be raiding anything bleeding edge enough for me to need to be level 130 geared. In any case my running around in Final Fantasy XIV while chatting with the Free Company made the evening seem a tad bit less dismal, which I guess is what ultimately mattered. Hopefully we will regroup on Thursday and kick some ass to make up for the rather crummy Tuesday.

Melusine Down

February 10, 2015 by Belghast

I’m an Adjective?

There are just some days that it hits me how surreal my life can be. I seem to be having one of those days. I talked a bit about being called a “Cult Leader” last night, but apparently somewhere along the line I have become an adjective as well? If I would say I am most known for anything it would be that I blog each and every morning regardless if I have anything of any real gravity to talk about. If you follow Jaedia and Simcha you would have found out that this is apparently now termed the “Bel Method” because both of them have been dabbling with it of late. I didn’t even know I had a method to be honest… I just do this thing that involves blogging before I am actually awake. I am pretty sure people were rambling aimlessly long before I showed up, and will continue to do it long after I am gone. Though I do admit I got a great chuckle when I read that I have transcended humanity and now have become a “thing”.

@fynralyl that's the server the #BelEffect is happening on anyway. @belghast

— Sig (@Sigtric) February 7, 2015

Which makes it all the more humorous when the other day, I was mentioned in a conversation I was not really even participating in yet. My good friend Fynralyl mentioned on twitter that she was downloading Final Fantasy XIV, and before I even had a chance another friend… who is not even playing the game chimed in with our server information. To make it even more humorous Sigtric said the above quote, that the “#BelEffect” was going on. I am now an effect? I mean I realize my penchant for gathering people up and trying to get them all in the same place is rather notorious… but has it really become an effect to be monitored? Like I said before… it is really surreal to be referred to in adjective form. I am attempting to take it all in stride, as a sign of affection… but it is supremely strange. Now I am oddly cautious to see what other characteristic I have becomes a “thing”, is my traditional “Hey Folks” greeting now going to become canonized as well?

Melusine Down

Last night was of course our regularly scheduled raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We unfortunately are starting to have a good problem happen… that quite often on Monday nights we have more than enough people to do our eight man. As a result since Paragon missed the last one, Cav offered to sit out and with that we zoned into Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. This was our second week of attempts on this encounter, and last week we managed to figure out most of the bits so it was just down to refinement and polish. We were teaching Paragon the fight from scratch, but he was a pretty quick study and before long we were back to where we left off last week. This fight is largely about managing adds, either in the form of the Renauds that need to be frozen with cursed voice or the Lamias that need to be burned down as soon as possible to lower overall raid damage. On top of all of these things… there is just a phenomenal amount of damage going out. There were so many times I was praying for my next cooldown so that I could survive just a little bit longer.

The turning point in our fight was honestly when we wiped because all of the Renaud that were frozen woke up at the same time. Prior to that the attempt was extremely smooth, and then we watched as the giants ran around wiping the raid. From that point on we started trying to manage just how many of them we had up at a once, and I started trying to do a better job of centering myself with the wall of them. These two tweaks lead to me getting frozen significantly less, and the wall of adds being more manageable as a whole. It was I believe one attempt after we started this strategy that we managed to get her down, and clear Turn 7 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut. Once again Ashgar remembered to tell folks to pose before we opened the chests, and I am super glad that he did… because this really is the best kill shot yet. I remembered to be centered in the photo rather than on one of the edges. We went into Turn 8 shortly after and only stayed long enough to get an idea of how the room works. Hopefully we can all watch some videos this week and make a good solid attempt next.

I Hate Oregorger

Yesterday I stumbled onto a blog post over on AskMrRobot showing how wipes on Oregorger compare to the raids average ilevel. I know we are still fairly low ilevel wise as a raid, I personally am only around 660 because we jumped straight from 7/7 normal and 5/7 heroic to doing normal mode Blackrock Foundry. I am wondering if that is the answer to dealing with the bullshit randomness of his hunger phase is to simply out gear it. Last Thursday when we were doing attempts on Oregorger we were following the exact pattern that everyone agrees upon is the best way to beat the fight. In fact multiple times during the night we stopped, rewatched videos to double check that we were not doing anything wrong… and still we kept dying to the damage of the phase. Either we were not fast enough on killing the crates, or simply lacked the gear to soak the damage. In any case the charge above would seem to agree that maybe Oregorger is simply a “gearing” thing. Had we entered Blackrock wearing full heroic gear… maybe it just would not have even been an issue.

In any case my hope is that by some sheer miracle of luck that we can down him because I want so bad to have this fight on farm status. I feel like both Gruul and the Hans’gar/Franzor encounter are likely on farm status after last week. I am wondering if there is something else that is low hanging fruit we can pick up while waiting on our gear level to raise before wrecking Oregorger. From what I understand the other boss we can try is Beastlord Darmac since Blackrock Foundry employs a “wing” strategy to its layout. Whatever we end up doing, I am looking forward to getting in tonight and smashing more Iron Horde faces. While much of the shiny of this expansion has faded for me, I am finding that the raiding is keeping me engaged and interested. While I may only be logging in to fiddle with my Garrison on nights other than the raid… I am still very much enjoying each and every boss fight.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

February 8, 2015 by Belghast

Banquets and No Caffeine

This has been a strange week for me, for several reasons but not the least of which has been my mission to try and stop energy drinks cold turkey. I have been less functional than I normally am, but I am hoping that at some point I will crest and things will start to get more normal. This morning seems to be the worst of it, or what I am hoping is the worst of it. When I went out for my normal early morning breakfast run, I was so damned tempted to buy a monster. Fortunately I stuck to my guns and just picked up a Dr Pepper instead. I think what has made the last two days so awful is that for one reason or another I have not been fixing coffee in the morning as per my usual routine. As such this morning I woke up with the worst splitting headache I have had in years, which I can only attribute to not having nearly enough caffeine in my system to sustain me.

Yesterday itself was a bit of an odd one as well. The bulk of the day was spent piddling around online and doing laundry other than my brief period of time recording Battle Bards. The highlight of the day was pretty much hanging out and talking with Syl and Jae for several hours. The low point was the fact that in the evening I had to go to an employee banquet. In the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal, and this was I think the fourth or fifth one I have gone to. The problem is… they are largely long drawn out awards shows with the exact same meal from year to year. The positive of this however is the fact that there is really great cheesecake. The negative is, most of the food tastes like it has been sitting out for hours. This years frustration is that they never came around with coffee after dinner, so I am not sure exactly what was up with the wait staff this year. They acted disorganized, when in the past they have always been a picture of lightning precision.

Tiny Curry and Space Piracy

The problem with having a banquet to go to meant that we would be getting home way later than normal. I gave my aggrochat crew a heads up, but Kodra sadly was just too sick to stay on and record. As a result we recorded the show with a very sleepy me, Ashgar, Rae and Tam. Granted Tam was probably not all that sleepy considering it wasn’t all that late for his newly pacific time zone self. For me we didn’t get started recording until 10 pm… and that meant 11 pm for Ashgar who got progressively less communicative as the show went on. Moments before we were about to hit record… Tam completely blew my mind. I’ve embedded the video above… the man in the videos hobby apparently is to make actual food… with doll sized utensils and then record it for YouTube. I had no real words for what I was seeing. As you are watching it… remember that he is putting this much effort into what is essentially a single spoon full of food.

When we finally recovered from that… we had a relatively normal show talking about Final Fantasy XIV and our defeat of Turn 6 and work on Turn 7 of Binding Coil of Bahamut. I break the pattern and discuss my experiences in Blackrock Foundry last week, and start a discussion about randomness in encounters and why it is both a good and frustrating thing. From there we delve into Tam’s faffing about in Elite: Dangerous. This reprises a conversation we have had before about his ultimate concept for a space game, where we all exist on the same ship, but can play vastly different roles. We decided in this grand space adventure he would be Wash, I would be Mal, and Rae of course would be Kaylee. I would love to have a game where pilot Tam could drop me off on a planet to explore while providing cover fire… then help me evac with all of loot I found, taking it to a near black market and unloading our spoils. Towards the end of the show we get into a discussion of the North American League Championship Series and how watching it has changed for Rae, Tam and Ashgar now that they also have a Fantasy League going on. It was a fun hour of conversation, albeit a very sleepy one.

I’ve Been Doing It Wrong

One of the more interesting tidbits that came out of last nights podcast is that apparently I have been playing Arcanist wrong all of this time. More so than that I have apparently been playing damage over time classes wrong in every game I have tried playing them. There have been few things I have hated more than playing a DoT heavy class, because the gameplay always felt slow and boring. What I had been doing all of these years was something relatively simple… I would send my pet to the target, apply my dots, and then use whatever weak nuke I happened to have to burn it down. I commented last night that I would rather level another Conjurer than play Arcanist. To which Tam was absolutely shocked… and he started to explain how he leveled where he ran around willy nilly and dotted everything in site up, letting Carbie fight to hold aggro while chain pulling everything. I tried this, in the middle of the podcast and damned if it did not work miraculously.

Truth is I simply do not think like a “finger wiggler” as I have always called them. I want to clash face to face with the mobs and burn them down one by one while holding aggro on everything else. That is my comfort zone, what I am used to, and the gameplay I always seem to return to. Arcanist and other dot classes apparently need to be played in a style that I had never thought about. Simply dotting up everything in sight and waiting for the dots to kill them while attacking other things. As Tam said, it is apparently easier to kill ten things at once than one thing… now knowing this I managed to get from 18 to 20 Arcanist with extreme ease in the amount of time it took to finish the podcast. This is just such a foreign concept to me, that it is taking awhile for me to grasp. So far it is working… maybe I will in fact have a Summoner/Scholar, the class that I never thought I would end up getting to max level.

AggroChat Game Club

February 6, 2015 by Belghast

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger. This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design. The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them. What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight. After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked. In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others. The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution. The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path… something went wrong. It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong. If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly. Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design. They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it… but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes. The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid. I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern. That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something… not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter. The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school… and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”. But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense. The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move. At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles. The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room. The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern. There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern. Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring. There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground. The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still. This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in. Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness… but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly. I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play. As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops… one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title. As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog… but not listen to our podcast. One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month. Then during the last show of that month we dive into the game completely with no concern about spoilers. The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points. During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one. As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it. To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us! I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing. So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments. We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast. The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them. Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment. For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play. We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list. Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download