Games Archives - Page 434 of 691 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Curve Beating

December 22, 2016 by Belghast

I can in all honesty say I did not really expect to be placing this clipping of a screenshot on my blog. When we cleared Normal Emerald Nightmare… I was pleased as hell. When we turned around and cleared Normal Trial of Valor… I was ecstatic. When we started work on Heroic Emerald Nightmare… I figured that it would give us a challenge right up until the point that Nighthold Normal was released and that we would ultimately switch gears. I mean Nighthold is supposedly slotted for January 17th… which is only 26 days away depending on how you count today. We however started making some significant progress in Heroic Emerald Nightmare… and in truth I didn’t really dare to hope we would manage to get through it yet. We have several friends who are raiding mythics in a much more serious capacity than our guild raid. The awesome thing is… we are apparently the sort of raid that they still enjoy coming along on because of the interaction between all of the members. So in part I chocked our Heroic victories up to the number of “ringer” dps we ended up bringing in as a result. Last night we were extremely short on numbers and missing most of this overpowered dps that we had so often been bringing. I had resigned myself to hopefully repeating our previous progress, and just enjoying the process.

Now is the point where I tell you… that I can not possibly be prouder of my guild. Instead of struggling with the absence of some mythic ringers… we instead continued to perform at an admirable level as we not only defeated… but one shot several of the bosses we have never attempted. We had some early struggles as we essentially got back in the swing of the raid… for me not being able to make the last two Friday nights I felt more than a little rusty. However by the time we reached “Spiderbirb” we were trucking along nicely and managed the first new one shot of the evening. Similarly we seemingly rolled over Ilgynoth… or at least pulled out a victory doing the fight in a single burn phase. From there we worked on Cenarius and once again managed to pull out a victory in a single attempt, which lead us to only having Xavius to work on. This was sitting at 9 pm my time… and I thought to myself that we were in a good position to get a bunch of attempts in… giving us at least 30 minutes before the official end of the raid. I also thought that with it being the holidays… we might be able to extend a bit to get the kill if needed. It turns out we didn’t need all of that time on attempts, because we had a very close first shot and managed to pull out the victory on attempt two giving us still about fifteen minutes to spare before our official ending time. It was a really great night, and I am amped about our prospects going into Nighthold. We will for the first time this expansion be starting new content on exactly the week it comes out, which is a bit of a point of pride for me. I love feeling like we can be casual, but still extremely successful.

By the time the raid was over I realized that I had not actually spent any time with the Luna that evening. So I took her into my office to chill out and get some attention while I opted to play some Destiny. At this point I am 399 light… and have limited my list of needs down to replacing my 394 Ghost Shell, 399 boots, and 399 Heavy Weapon. I had a moment of extreme excitement at one point in the evening when I got an exotic heavy engram… which decoded at 399 instead of the 400 I have been getting from the SRL event. Before long I was joined by my friend Grace and we hung out doing some racing. She was working on one of the quest steps where you had to get ten races where you place in the top three… and I maybe just maybe played a little aggressively with the other drivers. There was at least one time when I happened to ram into the person who was closing in on her then third place slot. Who knew you could tank with a speeder bike? In truth I had seen a few clans doing this over my time racing… where they were essentially clearing the way for their friend to come in and snatch the first place position so I considered it completely fair game. That said she managed to pull out a few come from behind second place victories like the one I decided to screenshot here. The bonus of the entire night was that in both cases we improved our light levels… and simply hanging out and chatting made the whole racing thing go significantly faster.

I have honestly had some extremely good luck during the SRL with crucible weapon drops. Last night was apparently no different as I managed to pick up a really nice version of the NL Shadow 701X. Firstly it has triple tap which is a stat I love for boss encounters… or anything else I am pretty certain to land three precision shots in rapid succession. To crank up the stability is Hand-laid stock… which ultimately reduces the range but I can live with that at 47. Finally hidden hand helps with triple tap in making it slightly easier to get those precision shots… so all in all the weapon has some really nice synergy. The only negative is this is a scout rifle… and I don’t really tend to use a lot of scout rifles. This lives in the Mida Multi-Tool family, and actually has a higher rate of fire… which makes it feel extremely spammy. Now if I could have replaced Hidden Hand with Full Auto… this would have been just about my favorite scout rifle. In any case this is definitely something worth holding onto and other than my Hand of Judgement from Challenge of Elders… I didn’t really have that many legendary scout rifles that I enjoyed using. In any case that still gives me a good roll for Eyasluna, and god rolls for Hopscotch Pilgrim and potentially NL Shadow 701X coming from SRL so far.

Hopscotch Pilgrim

December 21, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday was a pretty great day. I am still pestering the folks that I tagged in the Icecrown Challenge tweet to do their Icecrown runs… and last night I managed to get Nik to do his. I kinda feel bad though because apparently he never actually raided during Wrath. That means he had no clue where to go and what to do… and we failed miserably at trying to direct him while streaming. The biggest problem came with the boat… because he somehow failed to take down the boat before the cannons froze. There is no quick and easy way to reset the boat as far as we could figure out… so he had to simply wait for our ship to die a horrible death and end the encounter. The end result is that it took him around 50 minutes to complete the raid… and I feel zero sorry since he was one of the ones egging me on to take on Dreamwalker as a warrior if I remember correctly. Thankfully the British pound has recovered a bit… so that is 40 of his currency for charity. That in itself was its own hassle because I had to give him my address for him to be able to make the payment… it seems like the charity website has no clue what to do with a UK zip code. I want to thank Nik for being such a good sport about this and helping out a good cause.

While attempting to help Nik out… I was in Destiny playing Space Diablo. I spent a good chunk of the night farming Archon’s Forge because prior to last night my two lowest items were my Artifact and my Ghost Shell. Since the forge has a chance of dropping level 400 on both I spent most of the night there and didn’t even notice when I actually got the Artifact. Of note… check those blues over carefully because apparently instead of getting a legendary artifact I got a blue one at light 400 and was this close to deconstructing it. I had zero luck with the Ghost Shell, but did manage to get a 400 titan’s mark while grinding away. I also picked up a But Not Forgotten with a reasonable roll… but unfortunately I am just not a huge fan of that archetype… and prefer my Devil’s Dawn or my trusty 1000 Yard Stare that I have had since the moment I hit 40. In any case I made a lot of forward momentum and while the above image doesn’t quite show it… I am sitting at 398.5. Right now my sub 400 items are Ghost at 394, Heavy at 397, Helm at 398, Chest at 399 and Boots at 399. Every single one of those slots can be obtained during the SRL event… I just need to get lucky.

My lucky draw of the night has to be my Hopscotch Pilgrim… a weapon that gets an awful lot of shade from the community right now because Bungie changed up its Archetype significantly in Year 3. It went from being a high impact Pulse Rifle to being a medium impact variant like the Apple of Discord, Herja-D or The Villainy in the 66 rate of fire, 14 impact category. This causes folks to kick and scream and declare their favorite weapon dead… but honestly… for me personally I am loving it. For whatever reason… I never seem to like the “in meta” weapons and prefer the ones sitting just outside of the bubble of what the community has declared as “good”. For example I swear by my Year 2 Haakon’s Hatchet that sits somewhere between a high and a low impact auto rifle, but has stat and perk package that just “feels right” to me. After a few hours of playing with the Hopscotch Pilgrim last night… I feel like I have finally found my equivalent to the Hatchet in Pulse Rifle format. This roll in particular has Counter Balance, Perfect Balance and Glass Half Full. That means I am going to have to get used to simply not spamming reload like I am used to so that I can get those bonus damage late magazine shots. If nothing else… the SRL has provided a couple of really good feeling weapons.

I am going to be really sad when this event ends. There is something relaxing about coming home and racing speeder bikes. I uploaded this image because I am kinda proud of this victory. It was a come behind after a few remote play lag spikes caused me to take a few bad turns…. and at the end of the match I hit one more gate than the person in the lead and zoomed past him at the very last minute to take first. Racing with the lag built into Remote Play… has made me much better when I am actually upstairs playing on the physical PS4. I has taught me to predict the track a bit more… and race a little more proactive rather than reactive to the terrain. Also it is teaching me to exploit the shit out of the short cuts that are built into the map to catch up and make up for the fact that remote play occasionally lags out and causes me to miss something. I mean I wouldn’t want to do crucible in this fashion…. but for simply farming loot like I have been it is a good option. It lets me chill on the sofa and make attempt after attempt for those pieces I am needing. At least at 398.5 I am pretty consistently getting 400 items whenever something finally drops. I am spending Three of Coins like it is going out of style… just hoping for the right slots to drop.

Shaders and Eyasluna

December 20, 2016 by Belghast

We have one week down officially for the Sparrow Racing League… and I have to say I am still having a blast. There is just something about this game mode that makes me happy… and the bounty of rewards available only serves to sweeten the pot. It seems that when SRL goes away officially… it will still be available through the private match list so there is even talk of organizing an unofficial league of sorts to race during the off time. There is just so much to like about this event that it hard to place my finger on what exactly makes it special. You have entire sets of gear up for grabs, with light levels up to 400. I have to admit a lot of my drive to keep on racing is for the glimmer of a chance at finding some light 400 items. So far I have gotten one, that I ultimately infused into my best fusion rifle that I am not pretty partial to. A good amount of my gear is sitting at 399 light with my two severe hold outs being my artifact at 393 and ghost shell at 394. There are technically ghosts available through the SRL but I have not personally seen one. As far as the Artifact I guess my option there is probably doing some Court of Oryx because I have heard they drop there up to light 400.

Probably my personal favorite thing about the event is the availability of all of these interesting shaders. You can check my twitter feed for a shot of one I found last night called “Ghast” which given my name seems a little fitting. The above shader is my current favorite called Krokos which is mostly white with purple accents… that just happens to look really cool with the PS4 exclusive Jovian armor set. There are fourteen shaders up for grabs… and I have managed go get thirteen of them with the last one tied to the record book achievements. According to Destiny Tracker I have raced 68 times and played a total of 7 hours 38 minutes of the Sparrow Racing League… which is pretty much entirely this year given that for whatever reason I only raced last year on my Hunter and Warlock. Generally speaking I do a few runs to clear up the bounties and then retire downstairs to racing through the remote client, because really… me winning or losing doesn’t much matter when I am largely in it for the possibility of maybe just maybe hitting 400 light level. The goofy part is that even with the input lag caused by remote play… I still generally end up finishing in the top three and have even managed to win a few maps in this fashion.

The other huge perk of the SRL is that it levels your crucible rep while at the same time giving you access to some older legacy crucible weapons. Of these the one I have been wanting since initially coming back to Destiny during Taken King is the Eyasluna. This weapon is essentially a legendary version of the Hawkmoon, a personal favorite of mine in the exotic hand cannon category. Over time I strayed away from Hand Cannons due to the ammo issues, but have recently started getting used to them again and even bought the vendor Palindrome last time I was capped on Legendary Marks. When I saw this weapon was on the list of available items… it has been my hope to see it show up on my end of match rewards list and finally last night it did. I am not really sure what a god roll looks like on this weapon, but I can make the one I got work with Triple Tap, Braced Frame and Grenadier. While this is going to drop me down to 9 instead of 10 shots in the magazine… it gives me 5 points from maxed stability which should make it insanely easy to headshot with. The range of 38 is pretty solid for a Hand Cannon as well and the 81 impact is nothing to complain about. I spent some time running around with it last night… and I think I am going to like it.

If you were not around for the Sparrow Racing League last year, I highly suggest you get in on the Dawning event while it is available. We still have two more full weeks of racing… but at some point soon I am going to have to care about the other side of this event… which is the strike list scoring if I hope to complete my record book. Playing SRL really has made me realize how much I miss games like Wipeout, and the fact that we will at least get to play this game type in private matches going forward gives me some solace. The only thing that worries me is that a lot of my enjoyment right now absolutely comes from the fact that I have a shot at interesting rewards at the end of the match. With this carrot removed… will I care about it nearly as much? As a final side note…. I have to thank Playstation support for taking care of my issues yesterday quickly. It took some doing… but I finally managed to find the correct link to get some resolution with. Within a few minutes and a few questions answered… they reset my compromised account back to the original email address and I was able to get in and take control once more. Additionally when I got home I added the two factor authentication… which I did not even know they offered until yesterday. I guess when they introduced it they didn’t make much of an announcement. In any case… after talking to some folks who got compromised there was a pattern to these attacks.

They transferred 50 of whatever the local currency was to the wallet… for me it was Dollars for others it was Pounds Sterling or Euros.
They changed the Sign-In email for the account… which frustratingly invalidates the links being sent out in email that allows you to quickly contest these actions
They created a sub account and set it up with unlimited purchasing rights.

What they were planning on doing from there is unknown because I think I maybe got things stopped in time to be able to find out. I had already put in a Paypal dispute, and Sony asked me to cancel that and they refunded the $50 taken from within their system. They were quick to point out that they had no legal requirement to do this… since all sales are final… and that they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts as a one time exception. Whatever makes me feel better at the end of the night, because in the end I got my money back without having to claw it back through paypal. The gotcha however is that instead of refunding it to the bank… they just placed it in my PSN wallet, which in truth I guess is fine given that I was going to pre-purchase Horizon Zero Dawn at some point anyways. It was a frustrating start to the morning, but in the grand scheme of things everything seems to be restored to normal. The only thing that I am going to do as a follow up is to get them to completely remove the sub account. For now I have changed its password and decimated it through parental controls so it really can’t do anything.

Icecrown Challenge

December 16, 2016 by Belghast

The world is a truly bizarre place sometimes. There are a lot of folks that make up my twitter timeline that I know… but only in a slantwise way. I recognize them, and am even happy to see posts show up as my feed scrolls by, but I really don’t know much about them. ArcaneRatsel is one of those folks, and I largely followed her because she does amazing things for the Warcraft community as a whole. She was part of an expansion of my timeline as I attempted to follow more positive Warcraft folks. For example she did this crazy thing where she essentially created faction logos for anyone who was interested…. and as a result created a truly silly number of them. She is also involved in the Running of the Gnomes that supports Cleveland Clinic, Running of the Trolls that supports the Trevor Project, and now the Icecrown Challenge that supports the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. To say she is a “good egg” is a big understatement… but again this is largely someone I only knew existed in passing and occasionally but rarely ended up in the same conversation with. So yesterday all started with a really simple thing… she said she was passing through my state to visit family. It is not like Oklahoma is a popular destination spot, so generally when I see that I comment and welcome whoever it is to the state.

After a handful of back and forths… the conversation quickly moved to DMs… because in the oddest of coincidences apparently we grew up in the exact same town of 2500 people. There is a little less than a ten year difference between us in ages, so we are for all purposes of different generations. It is not like we should have had a lot of overlap… but we absolutely did. My Mother was a teacher at the High School for decades… and it turns out her Mom was as well. In fact her Mom was my Freshman English teacher, and for a period of time went to the same church as I did. Through either the church thing or the teacher thing… I know I wound up in their home multiple times throughout my “growing up” period, and as we found out last night my dad who was an armchair professional photographer took portrait photos at least once. If you were to do an “as the crow flies” we grew up less than a mile apart, in fact from my house you could look out over the pasture and see hers. Ultimately… the world is a really strange place sometimes and what seems like massive distances can be shortened in an instant. I mean after all my wife and I grew up thirty minutes apart, and were in turn introduced by a mutual friend in Belgium. It is also weird how someone who is a complete and total stranger can suddenly become of much more significance from a single thread of connection.

Now when I first saw the Icecrown Challenge I was thinking… “Bel you should do this thing, because you clear Icecrown weekly anyways”. Now that I have some connection to at least one of the folks responsible for running the event… it was simply something I couldn’t NOT do. So last night I set my stream up and streamed my adventure across Icecrown… with a lot of help from my audience. By help I mean absolutely throwing a monkey wrench in the proceedings. I was all set to try and clear as fast as possible, but things happened along the way. You can watch the entire stream as a Beam VOD, but suffice to say… I am not taking full responsibility for some of the madness. I’ve been interspersing some of the wing boss kill times throughout this post that I lifted from my recording. I am just going to lay them out here to see if you can find the problem…

Professor Putricide – 11:11
Blood Queen Lana’thel – 14:46
Sindragosa – 26:56

It took me 3 minutes and 35 seconds to clear from Putricide to the Blood Queen, and based on some probably wrong math…. 12 minutes and 10 seconds to get to Sindragosa. The majority of that time was spent on attempting to do the Dreamwalker fight. My viewers told me with the utmost confidence that I could absolutely heal the dragon to full with a single bandage, and I am sure that is absolutely the case…. but not on heroic where she is constantly taking damage over time. So I wasted a good ten minutes and a I think eight bandages trying to make this work… only to get instantly interrupted when I started challenging the heal. So essentially all of the time I had made up to this point was completely blown and I ultimately had to jump in a portal to reset the encounter. Now were I choosing to run it on my Paladin, life would have been dandy. I know that I can heal her to full with a few flash of lights and move on with my life. In fact that was a large chunk of the reason why I used to always run this place weekly as a paladin. However last night I had to simply move on with my Warrior.

After the huge ball of frustration that was Dreamwalker… I finally looted Arthas and paused my timer at 31 minutes and 49 seconds. As per are the rules of the Icecrown Challenge… I then turned around and donated $31.49 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Additionally as part of the rules of the contest… I challenged Mort, Ashgar, and Thalen to also take the contest and make their own donations. The donation drive runs for I believe a month and officially started 12/13. Right now they have roughly $400 in donations and I feel like we can get this higher. Even if you are not directly challenged, you can totally start your own branch of the tree like I did. I would love to see this trickle through all of the little offshoots of the community… because lets face it… running Icecrown is fun. While I might grouse a little bit about losing ten minutes… that “wasted” time just meant I donated a little bit more money towards a really good cause.