Games Archives - Page 385 of 687 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Clipped Wings

December 14, 2017 by Belghast

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Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing some Destiny 2… but instead I logged into World of Warcraft to “check what gear was up on world quests” and never really logged back out. I’m still very much stuck in “must complete the emissary caches” mode and as a result I had one in Argus for the Argussian Reach faction that I lacked enough quests to complete. As a result I started unlocking more of the planet until I finally got enough to finish it out. This however was super time consuming because doing anything on Argus feels needlessly tedious due to the packed base pop and terrain that goes out of its way to keep you from going from point a to b. For my troubles I got a big fat nothing… or in truth a little bit of gold that feels insanely lackluster given the amount of effort I went through to be able to complete it. So the real question I ask to you more seasoned players that did not take a massive break after Nighthold… did they just fucking nerf emissary caches into the ground? In the past these used to be a significant source of gear upgrades, and also used to drop legendaries like candy. At this point I have no legendaries and have not seen a single piece of gear from the six caches I have turned in since starting up playing again. Is this just a bad streak or did they simply remove any reasonable rewards from these things?

I’ve managed to move the needle a little further forward and am sitting at 884 and I think 15 concordance on my two primary weapons. I still have Tomb of Sargeras LFR to do this week but in truth it seems like grinding Argus is going to be my best bet for gear level movement. The only problem there is that I hate Argus and want to nuke the planet from orbit. I mean in all reality it isn’t that bad but it just feels shitty to return to land mounts again after being able to fly literally everywhere else. The base pop reminds me of a lot of what it feels like to roam around in a Rift zone where everything is super aggro and ready to reach out and thump you if you get too close. The main difference is that at least in World of Warcraft it is completely reasonable for me to round up 30 mobs and grind them down…. because I did this thing today out of laziness and not wanting to stop. The only really works if you can keep healing yourself like the protection warrior can, but nonetheless it is a viable option. In Rift if I had more than a couple of mobs I would have fallen over, which makes the game feel super tedious to play. If I apply myself and gobble up every quest I can do on Argus each day… I may be able to purchase a single piece of 910 gear which is a slow way to upgrade but potentially preferable to hoping for lucky double platnium bonus warforged gear from LFR.

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Towards the end of the evening while rewatching Force Awakens I did wind up grinding a bit in Destiny 2 and managed to complete the Mercury Flashpoint. When I turned in with Cayde-6 I managed to get my very first Masterwork item… and I maybe just almost accidentally called it Warforged. The positive it is at least an Auto Rifle which is something I will use. Grace said last night that when she got her first… it was a sidearm… which is something that no sane and rational person would ever want to use. I was absolutely certain that the game would give me a sniper rifle or something else that I generally loathe. Then again if that were the case the decision to shard it and get crafting materials would have been simple… in this case I have the strong desire to start using it even though Solemn Hymn isn’t exactly one of my favorite weapons. As far as the perk on mine, it gives a small range boost which is reasonable enough for the moment. Were it a warforged Better Devils I might work on trying to get the best possible roll, but for now I am okay with a ranged boost. I have a late night tonight because Star Wars… but I might be able to hop on when I get home and give it a proper testing.

Deceiver’s Fall

December 12, 2017 by Belghast

What a difference a night makes. I’ve been continuing to work on my Orc Warrior was for the foreseeable future it is likely going to be my World of Warcraft main. Sure I will continue to visit Belghast and unpack him from mothballs but I’ve never really given Horde a proper chance. I am also playing way more casually as a Hordie than I traditionally do as Alliance, which seems to help my general enjoyment of the game. I know were I to start playing on Alliance again as a regular thing… I would be back in the raid before I knew it and being way more serious about the game than I really want to. Sure on Horde side there are raid options but they tend to be super casual about that sort of thing, and also tend to cram it all into a single night win or lose. I’ve been focusing more on Fury given that I doubt I will actually be tanking much other than the occasional run with friends. I got pinged by my good friend Cuppy last night as I was starting to wind down for the evening and it turns out she is a healer, and roughly the same gear level so I foresee some dungeon running in our future. As of this morning I am sitting at 866 with the only thing holding me back still a 800 heirloom trinket. I looked at the auction house options for that last night and there is no way I can justify darkmoon trinket prices just to get a very temporary boost in level.

My focus for the night was getting through as much Looking for Raid content as I possibly could given my item level. I started the night cherry picking world quests focusing on only the quests that had the potential for gear level increases. This managed to push me up to the 660 item level breaking point and as a result could start doing the Tomb of Sargeras LFR, thinking in theory that I might get reasonable gear from it. Unfortunately the luck was not on my side and I wound up walking away empty on most fights. I did however pick up a warforged breastplate and a set of gauntlets at least making the night somewhat profitable. I need to ultimately sort out re-roll tokens because I walked in without any. In the past there was some sort of a catch up mechanic allowing you to get more of the older tier of token, and I will have to figure out if that exists here or not. I had never done any of the Tomb of Sargeras so it was at the very least cool to see it. I am certain that the LFR fights don’t actually represent the real fights that well but still interesting and enjoyable. The main thing I have noticed about being horde side is that LFR seems way less toxic than it is over on Alliance. People seem to just keep their heads down and do the content without need for much bullshit, and I can respect that greatly. Maybe I just had a lucky night, but whatever the case I approve.

Against the Legion Again

December 11, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a majority comfort gaming weekend, and as a result I spent a good deal of my time working on the Orc Warrior. Sure I played some Destiny 2 and probably have some things to say about the Curse of Osiris DLC but I will save additional commentary for another day. I did manage to unlock prophecy weapons and grind out two of them in the periods of time when I was not actually playing World of Warcraft. Most of the weekend was spent leveling and I managed to ding 110 Sunday afternoon. From there I spent the rest of my time unlocking all of the stuff required to start doing world quests in Broken Isles and Argus all for the purpose of attempting to gear. After essentially an evening of cherry picking quests and doing the three emmisary caches available to me… I managed to push my level up to 846. I still have a ton of dungeons to run for the purpose of unlocking my class hall, but I do have through Nighthold LFR open to me and I am considering running that tonight for the purpose of trying to fill out some of the slots that are not amazing. Right now I still have one heirloom trinket left and that is severely dragging my average down. The other big problem I am having is that I have horrible relics and that is mostly a case of being unlock in the randomized item quests available in the world. Lastly my Helm is pretty horrible, but I could spend a little gold to bring it up a bit because its from the class hall.

It feels so odd to be doing the legion questing thing all over again on a brand new character, and I am not necessarily looking forward to doing all of Suramar or the Broken Isles storylines. That said if I keep poking around on this character I likely will just for the sake of things to do between the gear based world questing. It is going to be weird having both an Alliance and Horde main that are warriors, but then again there isn’t another class that I like anywhere near as well as them. I need to start doing a daily drive by at the deathwing alternate appearance as well. I am hoping the unlocks I did on my other Warrior will count towards that weapon appearance, but I am somehow doubting if they actually will or not. It would have been awesome if I just got them handed to me when I dinged on a second warrior, because some of these alternate appearances are worse than others. Like there is no way in hell I want to do the Corrupted Ashbringer appearance ever again… and sadly my next highest horde character is my 100 Tauren Paladin. I am thinking I probably won’t play that character until the expansion lands and just try and brush off all of the artifact madness from this expansion. In theory I should be focusing all of the classes I never leveled and working on trying to get them a class mount. Instead I am running up a duplicate class that I already have reasonable geared on the other side of the fence and cursing the fact that the faction wall exists in the first place. All of that said though… I do find the design of Legion and the micro-goals spread across my map a really relaxing way of spending an afternoon.

Schmoradric Cube

December 7, 2017 by Belghast

This mornings post flavored non-post is brought to you by my favorite item in Destiny 2… the Schmoradric Cube. This is one of the items that you get in place of actual loot occasionally in one of Cayde-6’s treasure map chests. These appear to be more interesting than they were… but I am still not entirely certain if they are worth the price tag. Last night I looted the majority of them in a single sitting without doing my previously back to orbit thing to make sure I didn’t hit the empty chest bug. Each one rewarded three to four EDZ tokens and a couple of blues and at least one of the “fake” cash items that you can take back to Cayde and sell. One of the chests rewarded me with a legendary engram and another with an emblem that I did not have. This is nothing like that one week when I got four legendary engrams, an exotic and a faction exclusive weapon… but it does feel like you are at least getting something rather than the big fat nothing I occasionally got before. So if you were one of those folks that decided they simply were no longer worth your time… they at least feel interesting now. The real highlight of the night though was getting back the Wolf emblem above, which was a favorite of mine from Destiny 1.

The other positive from last night is that for the most part I am certain that the power mode setting is what was causing my insane freezing. I talked a bit about this yesterday but for whatever reason during the Fall Creators update to Windows 10, it reset my power settings to power saving mode. The behavior I kept seeing is that every 10 to 15 minutes Destiny 2 would lock along with anything else going on on my system while the audio continued to play. After scouring the forums I finally found a post on Tom’s Hardware when I started looking for issues related to the Fall Creators update but not necessarily Destiny 2. Throughout the night I played some crucible and a lot of planetary stuff and never once encountered a lockout except for occasionally some respawn lag which was something that occasionally happened even during the best of times. So in theory I cam considering this “fixed” as I was able to watch videos on YouTube (or in truth listen to them) while grinding out the Crucible Call to Arms last night. Past that though… I had one of those nights where nothing went right and it was not until 9 pm that I finally got settled into a computer and playing something. Tonight is more or less also going to be a non-gaming night because I am going with some friends to go see the Disaster Artist… the same crew that I watched the RiffTrax version of The Room with. It should be amazing, but it also means I won’t get home until significantly later than normal.