Games Archives - Page 386 of 690 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bad Concierge

January 10, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I failed miserably at making any sort of a post. In truth by the time I had realized I had not logged in and created a blog post it was mid afternoon… and figured I might as well just call it a day off. First off this morning I feel like I probably need to update considering my Monday post. I saw a Doctor Monday afternoon but good or bad the pain had subsided by that point. The pain in whole lasted roughly 3 1/2 to 4 hours and without it being “acute” the only way they really had to diagnose things was some scans. Their advice to me is that if the pain comes back at all… go to the Emergency Room immediately. Based on my description they thought it might have been either a kidney stone or my appendix… since I still have one of those so in both cases something dangerous if I allow it to go unchecked. While I was there however they also told me I had a pretty significant sinus infection and prescribed a round of antibiotics to help clear that up. I had been coughing up a storm the last few weeks and apparently I actually had an infection to back that up. The doctor suggested that I not return to work until Wednesday, to keep down the odds of me infecting someone else… which I guess makes sense given this is a sort of work based free clinic thing that I went to. So for the bulk of yesterday I chilled out while something cooked in the crockpot and piddled around in World of Warcraft while consuming Netflix/Amazon shows.

One of my favorite things about ElvUi is the AFK screen thing. Not sure why it makes me happy to see it pop up and I have a directory littered with screenshots of my character sitting down while dancing on the side. At this point I am level 52 on my newish Tauren Hunter and spending time in the greater Gadgetzan area. In truth last night before logging for the evening I got the precursor quest to take me to Ungoro crater, so I will likely be heading there shortly. Being fully decked out in Heirlooms makes the leveling experience really odd given that things rarely last long enough for my pet to even reach the target, let alone need any form of “tanking”. This means that I am largely running a pet for the flavor of it rather than for the functionality. Traditionally when I need a pet to be a barrier between me and the target I tend to favor bears… however for the moment I am running around with a golden brown Owl I picked up somewhere in Feralas that I named Bubo. The hunter is ridiculously relaxing which has been exactly the sort of thing I have been looking for lately. One of the things I enjoy about hanging out in Facepull on the Horde side is that I can be a fly on the wall mostly, that interacts every so often but also has the room to simply not interact at all if the spirit doesn’t move me to communication.

I ended up going off on a twitter tear yesterday talking about guild leadership and being the person in the background that makes sure things are happening. When I first started leading guilds… I was very young and lacked any sort of responsibility apart from just showing up at work and making sure I was getting my tasks accomplished. In fact when House Stalwart hit its stride about a year into the release of the game… I was in quite possibly the worst job I have ever been in. I had a horrible boss and felt like I had no control over my work environment, and as a result having a smooth running community to come home to and spend my evenings with was almost refreshing. During this time my home life was in a bit of a disarray due to the large number of deaths that were occurring in the family, and Stalwart wound up being my stability that I so desperately needed. As we entered Wrath of the Lich King I changed jobs and wound up in a much better place where I had a support structure and actually started taking on more responsibilities. As such I found myself starting to back away from the same sort of things that I did during Vanilla and Burning Crusade and begin placing myself in more of a distant advisory role. By the time Cataclysm launched I had moved up to being a Team Lead, and was responsible with juggling planning and task assignment, and similarly I found myself completely checking out of the guild leadership role and even going so far as to quit World of Warcraft when Rift released. During that time I have shifted from Team Lead, to assumed supervisor, to actual supervisor… to now interim manager of three groups. While I have kept trying to be the social glue for guilds… by the time I get home I just have no social capital left to make things happen.

The truth is that every guild you have ever been in that felt active… had one or more people behind the scenes making sure that things were going smoothly. I used to have a motto among our officers that I wanted our actions felt but not necessarily seen, and so long as I had the focus it worked smoothly. From Cataclysm on Stalwart has changed hands numerous times and as a result has kept going forward without me. While now it takes a more raiding focus, it is still functional and still doing things. However if you take away the people who are actively moving the ball forward… you end up with 30 people sitting in guild chat and nothing happening. That has been the problem with so many of these guilds that I have formed as new games come out.. I don’t have the drive to be the cruise director anymore… and while I gather up the people I don’t have the strength to actually do things with other people. This was extremely noticed in the recent foray into Destiny 2 where I spent 99.9% of my time soloing, all the while people around me were trying to make things happen. Guilds work when they have a concierge making sure needs are being met and I just cannot fill that position anymore. I have transitioned to being one of the players that just wants to log in and have a good evening escaping whatever stresses piled up during the day. The key difference for me at least is that I do most of this through solo play and am completely happy to piddle along with alts. There are times that I miss big group activities… like I wish we had beat Calus in Destiny 2, or I wish we had made a bigger push into Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. Then I sit back and think about the frustrations of having to remember to log in on time with all of the materials needed for raiding on a specific night of the week… and I question if I could ever go back to that. So yes… I play tons of MMOs as single player games and am mostly okay with that, and yes I realize I am doing it wrong. I do like knowing people are out there in spite of me not being capable of actually interacting some evenings, so I will always seek out potential communities because someday… maybe… I might shift back out of whatever turtle mode I have been in for the last year.

Poorly Dressed Hunter

January 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night on a whim after running my Emmisary quests on Horde side I decided to start playing something else. For a long time I have had a level 20 Forsaken Hunter, but I have this major problem playing anything with the “horde hunch”. While I realize that is eventually going to be optionally not a thing… there is also the major problem I have with the Forsaken in that they cannot wear anything but trashed out armor. If I could be an upright walking normal armor wearing Forsaken… that would probably cause me to re-evaluate a lot of my choices in life. However I can’t and I doubt they will ever taken away the iconic exposed bone thing from them so… until that date that is likely never going to happen I am probably going to bounce the fuck off playing one. I wound up deleting my old hunter and re-rolling as a Tauren, which coincidentally was my very first World of Warcraft character back in beta. I got into closed beta shortly after the Tauren starting zone opened and primarily played a Warrior and a Hunter for most of my testing time. That combined with the fact that Mulgore looks not dissimilar from the corner of Oklahoma I live in… has always sorta made that experience feel homey.

The only problem is… first I forgot that my mail armor was a mishmash of nonsense that I got through the Wintergrasp PVP heirloom vendor… combined with the shaman shoulders because apparently at some point I bought those? As a result I am the most disturbing ahn’qiraj era fury warrior looking character to exist. The problem there is that I forgot that I could not ride a mount until 20… which means I won’t have access to my Yak and a transmog vendor to remedy this until then. For now… I just look like a mess roaming around with an awesome purple birb. There is something extremely relaxing about the leveling process and if I actually want to do that in earnest I am left with two options: Roll Horde or Roll Alliance on server other than Argent Dawn. If you notice in the above image… every single Alliance character I have is over level 100, which means I would ultimately have to grind nothing but Legion content and quite frankly that doesn’t sound that fun or relaxing in the least.

Horde side however I have lots and lots of room for expansion and as a result I am experiencing a bit of a renaissance of “monstrous humanoids”. I am however catching shit now from my Alliance guild as every so often tells show up in my timeline saying things like “we miss you”. While I seem to have switched relgion for the moment I am sure at some point in the near future I will play alliance again. I am neither red nor blue but have always been purple, because purple is a great color and also blends the fact that since day one… I have played a little bit on both sides of the fence. The fact that there still is a fence at all infuriates me, which is why I am not nearly as amped as I probably should be about this upcoming expansion. I have different pools of friends that prefer to play one side or the other and as a result I will always be split between the two. It is my hope that I can get a few more characters up before the expansion hits so I have a pretty even stable of characters on either side of the fence. Similarly I will probably start pushing up some of my Alliance characters as well… but there is only so much Legion grinding that one can take. Side note… I have the best Tauren Hunter Bel-Themed name ever… Belgrazer.

Double Agent

January 3, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve reached this sorta happy place with World of Warcraft where I find myself alternating back and forth between it and Destiny 2 for how I spend most of my evenings. Over the last month or so I had spent most of my pushing up my Orc Warrioress, and have now reached the point where I can no longer easily push her power level up by just doing World Quests. As a result this caused a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas break and lead me to pick another of my various horde characters to start working on. Having not actually pushed up a Demon Hunter… and Legion being the expansion all about Illidari… I figured it was high time to actually do this thing. I started out leveling as Havoc like I had before on the Alliance side but promptly swapped over to Vengeance when I started missing tank survival. It turns out that I really like Vengeance as a spec and you get to do a bunch of fun things… sadly at the cost of your charge around the map ability. The way shorter cooldown version of Heroic Leap in the form of Infernal Strike however makes up for the lack of the less predictable movement ability. If nothing else the build allows me to do most of the World Questing with impunity and at some point I will actually try some dungeon tanking.

For the moment however when it comes to LFR, Heroics or Timewalking… I have been swapping back to Havoc and just noobing it up. This is the point where I have to step back from some of the commentary I made while leveling the warrior. I was shocked and amazed at how chill the horde side of the house had been during my experiences… but once I donned the mantle of the demon hunter… and potentially as a side effect of the long holiday break… all of the asshats seemed to come out of the woodwork. Monday night I chain ran my five timewalking dungeons in a row… and all of the cool demeanor that I had originally attributed to the horde side melted away. It became a night of gripes and wipes as I limped through my five instances and then walked away praising some dark god that my sanity was still intact. I am still not entirely certain why my recent change in religion of sorts and swap to the horde, but I would have to think a lot of it has to do with simply wanting to hang out with my friends in Facepull. As a result it has been this super chill place to hang out and have occasional comments about the game and life in general. On a day by day basis I am feeling way less of a double agent and more leaning towards the Horde. For years I never could seem to get into characters on that side of the fence and the only reason why I had a max level character during Warlords was because I boosted, this time around however I have the same number of Alliance characters as I do Horde and I am already plotting the next thing to level. Side note… Blood Elf demon hunters look way cooler than the damned floppy eared Night Elf equivalent.

Radiolarian Paradox

December 28, 2017 by Belghast

The world is a really weird place and I sometimes have trouble reconciling just how random it is. Yesterday after legitimate decades of not being in contact… I had a friend I grew up with reach out via the email address on this blog. As the day went on we chatted and for the most part found out that we are still drift compatible. We fell out of contact for reasons that quite honestly I have probably talked about on this blog at some point without assigning names or faces to the situation. However I always sorta hoped at some point he would find his way back into my monkeysphere and that seems to have actually occurred. It is super weird to get back in touch with someone who hasn’t been around for the last two decades. Like for example he knows my wife, but at the time we were last in regular contact we were dating and not married. In that time I have shifted through many jobs and titles and positions… and had the birth of the blog and podcast and my attempts at writing for a gaming site and then determining that wasn’t really for me. So much life has happened for both of us and it is weird trying to slip back into a friendship from so many years ago. Regardless it was a really cool happening to close out 2017, a year that has been generally crummy in so many other ways.

Lately I have fallen into a pattern with my evenings where I spend a little time in World of Warcraft knocking out the daily emissary chest and doing any world quests that have interesting rewards. Then I usually end up swapping over to Destiny 2 and doing whatever package schematic is available that day to get more Dawning rewards for free. I’ve talked about it at length in another post, but the Dawning being a largely cash shop holiday has been immensely frustrating for me. This was an event that I was so into when it happened in Destiny 1 in part because it brought back the sparrow racing league and ushered in the beginning of strike scoring. As it stands now I cannot seem to bring myself to run strikes of any form because they largely feel pointless. The bane of my existence at the moment is the Advanced Paradox Amplifier needed to get several of the prophecy weapon unlocks. These come from Strikes, Heroic Adventures and Crucible matches… and come extremely sparingly at that. I have been mostly grinding them out by chaining the new mayhem mode crucible matches and unfortunately most of the time you wind up with a single Paradox Amplifier per match… that you then need to turn in ten of to get the advanced variety. Unfortunately both the Strikes and Heroic Adventures award with the same frequency meaning that you can either do two things that take a significant amount of time… or grind your face off in PVP. I feel like part of me is completely dead inside from all of the crucible I have done lately, because I really don’t enjoy it… but I want the items that I can potentially get from doing it.

What makes this so painful is that Radiolarian Cultures seem to drop like candy from every public event or chest you open. I can spend 30 minutes and roam around opening chests on a planet and get more than enough to do several weapons, and then I am stuck grinding for legitimately hours to get a single blue quality advanced Paradox Amplifier. Throwing another thing into the mix I apparently need Fossilized Hermaion Blossoms which drop in Nightfalls. I need two of these so does this mean I will have to complete two Nightfalls in order to get this step done, or does this simply mean that they drop two at a time? The prophecy weapon grinds are largely frustrating because there is no real casual activity on the Paradox side of the equation. Had they said… you could do strikes, crucible matches or lost sectors… that would have been something that I could piddle around on my own happily doing for hours. Instead strikes feel too long and unrewarding, crucible matches are mind numbing, and the heroic adventure mechanism is just generally unfun especially since they included another god forsaken timer. At this point I have completed Hand Cannon, Pulse Rifle, SMG, and Sword… and now seemingly am working on the Saint-14 shotgun. I need to chain run a bunch of strikes over the next few days so I can get the currency to purchase Curtain Call from Zavala before the weapons swap again next Wednesday. I am in this weird place with Destiny 2, where I keep playing because I love the moment to moment gunplay… but keep getting frustrated by the myopic design.