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The City of Crows

April 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays. Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts. However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom. So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it. Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day. I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later. The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way. I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties. In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts. I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel. One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form. Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday. I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai. Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here. The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons. If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra. If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture. There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes… but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r. Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for. I am however happy enough to be moving on. The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again. Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things. This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore. I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable. In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here. The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location. It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine. This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place. If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled. If you are into mages and such you should really like this place. In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals. You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive. From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind. The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms. The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear. The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game. First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system. It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it. Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking. To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up. So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would. Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business. As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24. Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie. I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely. This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear. At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly. Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be. It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting. If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level. If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy. You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai

Grand Anniversary

April 27, 2014 by Belghast

No Free Lunch

Last night was Saturday night, and that means we recorded another episode of the Tales of the Aggronaut podcast… AggroChat! We had a few odd things going on last night. Firstly Rae was off travelling in world visiting her longtime friends Ahi and Bez. This means she was completely unavailable. Additionally Kodra was travelling, and connected in from crappy hotel wifi in San Francisco… leading him to be a little bit robotty. However we pushed through all of this and picked up a 4th player in the form of our good friend Tam. He had been talked about plenty of times on the podcast already, and it only seemed fitting to have him sub in. Super thankful for him to be willing to do it in a pinch. We talked about all manner of things including Hex Closed Beta, ArcheAge and the concept of selling entry into the beta process, and our ideal scenarios as far as character building and abilities in MMOs go.

We are going to have to find a way to stay more on topic, because each episode has increased every so slightly in length. The first one was right at an hour, the second an hour and fifteen minutes, and this one roughly an hour and thirty minutes. We could have formal topics that we push through, but I personally like the meandering format, because it means it is more like the natural conversations we already have. I wish I had kept rolling because moments after I cut the podcast off we had a pretty epic conversation about how Lucasfilm is disavowing the entire Expanded Universe concept… and while we will miss some things maybe it isn’t so much of a bad idea. There were some really odd fan service things about the Expanded Universe that don’t really hold up story wise.

Steampowered Sunday #11

When Elder Scrolls Online released on a Sunday, it pretty much put a severe halt to my blog series known as Steampowered Sunday where I take some time and play a game from my backlog of titles. Last night during the podcast we were talking about a game that Ashgar had been playing this week that fell firmly into the Bullet Hell genre. Kodra seemed to think this was madness, and having been a big fan of Ikaruga I totally understood the draw. There was a time period when I used to play lots of bullet hell shooters and pre-hell shooters. Gradius, Darius Twin, Raiden Trad… all games I remember fondly. I was never particularly good at them, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. I remember playing 1942 on the nintendo for hour upon hour trying to make my way through all the stages.

At some point I just stopped playing them. I think it was during the death of the dreamcast, but when I bought my PS2 I just simply stopped picking up the games anymore. While I have Gradius 5 on my PS2, I guess my tastes in games changed a bit. This honestly more than anything represents a period of time when I stopped playing consoles very much and started consuming games almost exclusively on the PC. Every now and then I would flirt with a new shooter like the ever amazing Jamestown, but I never really got heavily into it again. Last night in an attempt to cold boot this series again, Ashgar griefed me by gifting me a copy of a really rather awesome bullet hell shooter on steam. At face value Danmaku Unlimited 2 reminds me of a less technical cousin to Ikaruga. The soundtrack is in part what makes the gameplay, and helps you do what is needed to make it through the levels. The secret to a bullet hell is to zone out and focus only on the pattern and not so much about the rest of the noise on screen. Only a few things can actually hurt you, so you focus in on those things.

The hilarity of my play through is that after years of not playing these games my reflexes that had built up are completely gone. In addition I am playing this game roughly thirty minutes after waking up. So yeah I do pretty bad. Ashgar tried to make me feel better by saying that I did significantly better than he did the first time. Essentially the gameplay video is roughly seventeen minutes and the point at which I ran out of lives to keep going. I made it to about the mid point of stage four. All in all I think I did a pretty good job. The awesome thing about the game is it is really cheap. So for the price you cannot beat this kind of bullet hell goodness. I feel like there is a lot of customization in the way you set up the game. I went with pretty generic options and was playing on easy, so I think there is a lot more depth to be had there if I dig into it. Probably going to stream some more of me trying to play it later. In any case… I have successfully rebooted the Steampowered Sunday feature. Long live me playing through my steam backlog!

Grand Anniversary

Last but definitely not least… today is the one year anniversary of the Grand Experiment… my attempt to blog something each and every day. This means as of today I have made a post every single day for a year. That is a pretty significant feat and I am really damned proud of myself for sticking with it. At this point I figure I am going to try and make it another whole year without letting the beat drop. It hasn’t been the most easy thing to do, but I want to take a moment to thank my wife who has been extremely supportive in this adventure. There have been days where I might not have made it through the post without her just assuming that it was going to happen and giving me time and space to do so. Additionally I want to thank my friends who have supported me in this madness and my readers. There have been moments when I felt alone in my mission, and was surprised at how many of you have reached out your arms to help me along the way. Somehow I have gone from being the least regular of bloggers… to the most regular, and it is a pretty insane transition. I feel like I have grown a lot in the past year, and I thank you all for helping me with it.

Point Paralysis

April 24, 2014April 24, 2014 by Belghast

Maybe I didn’t suck

For whatever reason this morning I am absolutely struggling to remain conscious. I feel like maybe I drifted into the “too much sleep” territory last night. We ended up with a heavily altered game play, in that when my wife got home last night we ended up taking our evening walk and combining it with some extra steps to go walk to eat dinner. This was awesome in that it meant that my playtime was not perforated last night by going out to walk, but I seem to have squandered the benefit by going to bed early. For whatever reason around 9 pm I got irrationally tired and after dealing with a few chores crashed out on the bed with two cats snuggled up beside me. Normally I get pretty much the same 6 hours of sleep every night, but last night I got a little closer to 8 hours and I feel groggy as hell.

Awesome thing happened yesterday, in that the podcast I was a guest on over the weekend published the episode. I feel humbled that I was offered to join in the fun, and the end result was really nice. I listened to it yesterday after getting out of our weekly staff meeting, and I have to say I was a bit scared to do so. I was worried that maybe I would have come off like an ass or something, but overall it seemed to flow really nicely. Every now and then podcasts will have a guest on that is abrupt and disruptive… and I am always afraid I will be that guy. Each podcast has a certain feel to it, and I was hoping that I was staying true to that. It is still really damned weird to hear my own voice, but after doing this streaming thing and our own podcast I am starting to get used to it finally.

Point Paralysis

Yesterday one of my guildies and fellow bloggers Werit posted a piece on something I think all of us have felt, that he calls “Skill Point Paralysis”. One of the big features of Elder Scrolls Online is that the game is not so much about how you play the game but how you choose to build your character. You can be damned near anything you can imagine within the frame work of the game. You want to play a spell slinging rogue, or a tanky archer? Sure you can build both of those in damned near any “class” as well. The problem is without a reasonable undo system, it gives a false sense of importance on every single skill point. It is a bit like playing a chess match and being afraid to make a move for fear it was the wrong one. I have had the benefit of playing this same character over a dozen times throughout the various beta test phases. Over that time I have refined exactly what I want to do, but still I will find myself with four points pooled up and not really sure where to spend them.

So I thought I would spend a few minutes this morning talking about the type of decisions I make. Essentially I tend to divide things up in my head into three categories: Active Attacks, Passive Buffs, and Utility. At the end of the day I can only have five active attacks on my bar at any given time, so as a result I tend to discount the value of choosing one of these. Also picking up a new active attack means I need to devote some time into raising it and unlocking the morph. After a point new abilities are not really as useful as old abilities until you can morph them. So that means I need to be committed to a new ability choice if I want to go down that path. I will occasionally pick up an ability if it sounds interesting, but if you notice in the above screenshot I have Power Bash at level 1… in part because I have not really used it much in combat.

Utility abilities are a special kind of actives, and I generally limit myself to only having one of these on my bar at a time. Sometimes these are survival cooldowns, self heals or group buffs… but most of the time I classify things into this category that are only “situationally good”. For example I love beyond love the Silver Bolts ability. However it is only really worth putting on my bar if I know I will be fighting Daedra or Undead… or now that I have the fighters guild rank 7 passive Werewolves. If it is an ability that I will use only 20% of the time, I greatly devalue picking that with my skill points. Sometimes however these abilities are useful for things other than their original intent. Even if you are fighting something other than the mob types mentioned above… Silver Bolts still becomes a pretty potent weaponless ranged attack if your character happens to be lacking one of those.

Always On is Awesome

The final category is where I tend to spend MOST of my points. If you look at the above screenshot I have every single passive ability that I can currently get in the sword and board tree. Similarly if you would look at my Heavy Armor and Imperial Racial trees their passives would be completely filled as well. If I have a useful passive to buy, I will almost always choose that over something else. Passives do not require me to change my play style to incorporate them in, nor do they require me to level them to make them truly useful. Instead they are a single pick that makes my character immediately and permanently better. In a game I will always favor something that gives me a permanent boost over something that gives me a situationally better boost. I like “always on” things, because if I can be awesome all of the time, it is better to me than being awesome some of the time.

Finally I have limited myself to a single tradeskill for the time being. Until the points begin to flow like honey later as I wander around the world collecting them… I have narrowed my focus to two weapons (sword and shield and two handed), three class trees (because really you want to cherry pick abilities between them), one armor type (heavy is the only choice I ever seem to make), racial tree, and a single tradeskill (blacksmithing). Now I will occasionally pick up some especially valuable picks like Soul Lock from the World tree, that gives you a chance to fill soul stones each time you kill a mob. Overall I have narrowed my focus to a specific set of abilities. The big thing I see players doing that gets them in trouble is trying to tackle more than one weapon at a time early on. I did not pick up a second weapon until 20 or so, well after I had the ability to hot swap between them. Trying to spread yourself too thin is something that will ultimately lead to making the game harder than it really needs to be.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #SkillPoints

The Impossible Plateau

April 23, 2014 by Belghast

Forced Fasting

This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it. In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee. I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible. I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part… but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt. I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that. I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time? What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me. The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass. If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick. We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished. So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning. I still think this entire process is bullshit. I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance? My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so. There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there. During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably. I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one. Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers. First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim. She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well. Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things. That is pretty much the subtext of my streams… me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning. Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses. Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use. Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go. I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops. Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear. Not sure if this is really worth it however. Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then. The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers. I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly. The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum. I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night. Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night. As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming. I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general. Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about. While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube… I really don’t watch twitch much at all. Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed. Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream… but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams. I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own. They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me. I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture. Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me. I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game. Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer. The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me. Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there. Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great. I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative. That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube. I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt. For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much. If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome… if they don’t… equally awesome. I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona. I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check. At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment. I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.