Sandbox Archives - Page 21 of 30 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Wild Podcast Appears!

April 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of AggroChat

This mornings blog post is going to be heavily related to what we did yesterday. Firstly… I have long thought that some of the conversations we had on the House Stalwart mumble sounded pretty damned close to many of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. While I did not think we would ever be as polished as Alternative Chat, or as awesomely thematically focused as the Battle Bards… I thought our people had something interesting to add to the mix. This is happening super fast to be honest, but that is probably a good thing. I was afraid that this would end up being yet another idea we had, that we never quite capitalized on.

We first talked about doing this on April 9th, and here it is the 13th and we have our first show up. I am sure at this point it is somewhat awkward of a recording but we will get better. Additionally at some point I will lean how the hell to use audacity and make a better sounding introduction. We have a super ghetto libsyn page up right now, and that will also be changing hopefully over the coming weeks. Rae is working on some really awesome chibi versions of the co-hosts and she would likely kill me if I posted the pencil versions before she has time to pretty them up. If you guys did not know it was Rae that drew the original Belghast chibi that adorns this blog, so the new ones are truly awesome. Since libsyn needed a 1400×1400 square image I threw together a truly obnoxious placeholder image.

A Wild Podcast Appears!

As I alluded to above… last night at 8pm EST we did our very first recording. It was a little awkward starting out, but as the night went on things felt more natural. There was a point at the end where I finally looked at the clock and noticed we had been rambling on for an hour and decided to cut things off. In truth we hang out on mumble damned near every night, so I knew that once we got over the hump of doing this “for real” things would begin to flow again. We covered a pretty wide gamut of topics from ESO Craglorn Adventure Zone, to Heroes of the Storm, to My Little Pony Card game and many many stops in-between. I will leave it up to you guys to determine if it is a worthy pursuit. I am pretty happy with the way things turned out, for it being our very first podcast… and none of us really know what the hell we are doing. Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the end result.

Right now we are very much in a “finding our format” mode. Functionally we have been keeping things really simple. We all share access to a google doc that is a running show topics of sorts. In this first episode we barely scratched the surface of all the things we ended up brainstorming. Mostly I would like to see us keep things pretty lose, but we might start doing a section for news after the what we are playing bit. While the “what everyone is playing” thing is pretty generic, it seems to work really well to break the ice and get things rolling. I’ve seen numerous podcasts and video casts do that one… so I felt not shame in blatantly stealing it.

Rivenspire is Serious Business

Yesterday morning pretty early I finished up the content in Stormhaven and moved up into the Rivenspire area. The transition between Glenumbra and Stormhaven was pretty extreme, but there seems to be an equally steep divide between Stormhaven and Rivenspire. Single pulls are pretty much a thing of the past, and it is very unlikely that I now find smaller than a three pull when I am running around. As a result of this and a result of the fact that I have a really awesome onehander right now… I am back to mostly playing as sword and shield instead of two hander. I am still really enjoying the content, and if you played through SWTOR at all… Rivenspire feels a lot like Alderaan.

You have these competing families vying for control of the land, with one of them having gone completely off the deep end. Additionally there is a very “Castlevania” feel to the zone, which tells me as I get deeper in I will like the content even more. Few things make me happier than slaying Werewolves and Vampires…. and the zone also has a pretty heavy contingent of Daedra to boot. In fact one of the public dungeons I ventured into thinking I could solo it… and ended up getting bailed out by my friend Warenwolf. It easily had to have a dozen different bosses in it including the ones associated with the quest chain. It is truly insane the amount of loot you get in a group public dungeon like that. We both had to resort to “mail banking” where we mail the items to a friend and they return it back to us later.

Tag Team Farming

While recording the podcast last night, Rae and I spend most of it faffing about in Landmark. The thing that has had me high center in my building project is a complete and total lack of stone. My structure is almost entirely made of stone and it took over 200,000 to get to the point at which it is today. Last night I went out into the desert and dug down, as underneath sand is generally a solid bed of stone as far as you can possibly dig. Before I knew it Rae had joined me and we were carving out a massive swath of stone beneath the ground. While recording we managed to harvest up over 300,000 and as a result I went back and added in floors/ceilings to my stone superstructure. This makes me happy as I was getting tired of seeing the grass growing up in the middle of my keep. From here I am not quite sure where I am going next but I have a few ideas.

If you are in game you should totally swing by Liberation/Levee and check out Rae’s adjoining claims. They are located on a hill southeast of the spire, and the low settings I have to run the game on for my laptop to not completely die… are not doing it justice. She has this really awesome garden area, and then down the hill she has a guest house. Her main house is carved out of the hillside and a subterranean area. If you are in need of a crafting hub she also has pretty much all of the machines. She has another super secret project, but I won’t be showing it since i think she is going to try and enter it in the “Landmark’s Landmarks” contest. Here is hoping she does well because it is looking really cool.

Elder Dungeons

April 10, 2014 by Belghast

H1Z1 Preview

Yesterday was the big reveal of the new SOE game H1Z1. While it should surprise no one… this is a zombie survival MMO. With the name there is literally nothing else that it could have been. Right now the details are pretty sketchy, but details are being collected on the official reddit. It really looks like it is going to take what Rust and DayZ are doing, to the next level and make it massive and persistent. While all of this intrigues me… I think it is pretty much in the “not for me” camp. I am amped about exploring a zombie filled world, and building bases with my friends to protect against the hordes. Dealing with additional players in a PVP scenario in that same world… pretty much destroys my enjoyment. Ultimately I am all about community and working together, and unless there is some unofficial co-operative server there really isn’t much pull for me.

I played quite a bit of the DayZ mod for Arma 2, but the thing that ultimately stopped me from playing it more was the fact that I didn’t need to worry about the zombies, but instead worry about getting sniped from a massive distance by other players. I realize that it is more realistic to have players be fighting other players for survival, but in these games there are often times far more players in the world than zombies. I feel like ultimately what I am looking for is State of Decay co-operative mode… which sadly is not in the cards. I want to explore a purely PVE world with my friends, and scavenge from potentially NPC factions. I guess the proof will be in the pudding and how things are set up. What would really kill the game for me is if other players can loot your corpse, similar to DayZ.

So long as if I die to players I get to keep my progression and my inventory, I might be okay with this. The other big concern is, that Smedley already talks about players coming along and burning down the bases of other players. As a kid I loved to build with blocks, but it would piss me off when another kid would come along and knock down my intricate structure. That is precisely what it feels like to me, when you have a base building game… that allows other players to come destroy yours. Some time ago Smedley said there was another game on the horizon that SWG players would love. I keep wondering if this is it, because it is supposed to have the whole player created town aspect. Knowing what I know about the SWG community however, I don’t really see them being terribly enthralled by this.

The Evil Within

A game I have been watching with some interest for some time is The Evil Within. Essentially it brings the world famous Shinji Mikami, creator of Resident Evil. During the early days of the playstation, I absolutely ate up survival horror titles. I played the shit out of Resident Evil, its sequel, Parasite Eve, and even Dino Crisis. However for me the genre reached its peak with the release of the original Silent Hill. There was something so perfect about that game and the way it blended between the relatively sedate “normal” world, and the absolutely twisted “nightmare” world. The game absolutely blew me away from the opening chords of its theme song. As the Resident Evil series wore on, it became ever repetitive and boring, as you rehashed the same old t-virus saga again and again.

What The Evil Within does is pair the mind of Shinji Mikami with the publishing might of Bethesda Softworks. Now granted this is not the same team that brought us the Elder Scrolls, or even Fallout… but so far they have managed to prove that when one of the Zenimax studios creates a title… I am ultimately going to be interested in it. The above trailer is brand new for Pax and I have to say I am super interested. It feels far more like Silent Hill than Resident Evil, and this is an awesome thing to me. I want another game where I wander around a nightmarish landscape that I can’t quite wrap my head around. The title is slotted to ship at the end of August, and I am super excited about it. If you loved the original Silent Hill as much as I did, I figure you have reason to be excited as well. If nothing else the trailer is really freakin cool.

Elder Dungeons

I finally put my finger on what exactly I am loving about the dungeons in Elder Scrolls Online. In many ways it feels like a return to the dungeons of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. World of Warcraft did something to MMOs that has seemed unrepairable until now. It was really the first game to begin to treat dungeons as though they were wholly separate from the rest of the world. It walled the dungeons off in instances, filled them with special dungeon mobs, and applied abilities to them that you would see in no place OTHER than a dungeon. The dungeon became its own unique game, that required a completely different set of skills than play out in the world did. Every game since the launch of World of Warcraft has taken this lead and filled their dungeons with “elites” that for the most part require players to focus fire them down, since an individual player could not possibly solo one at level.

This was not always the case, dungeons used to be filled with the same kinds of mobs you might encounter out in the “real” world, just in larger numbers and higher frequency. So stepping into Elder Scrolls Online, I admit I was freaked out when we first encountered and 8 to 10 mob pull. I am only now realizing that this is essentially the same 8 to 10 mobs you would encounter while roaming around the world. What makes this challenging and not just “trash packs” is the fact that these mobs fight smarter. From the moment you step into the dungeon, you encounter “group tactics”. Healers will heal the lowest target, including other healers… Necromancers will raise the dead, melee will go after your squishiest party members. The mobs are treating you like dungeon encounters, and trying to take you down as a team.

What makes this so refreshing is that these tactics are not solely reserved for “dungeons” but the same kind of thing you start encountering as the game ramps up difficulty. In Stormhaven it is getting rare that I am not involved in three or more mobs at a time. Almost always this will include a healer of some sort, a “tank” of some sort and a “dps” of some sort. The first time a mob tried to kite me, it was a really cool moment. Why this is great is because Elder Scrolls is somehow managing to teach players the skills that they will need for later content, in the content they are actually playing. So while yes, there is a massive learning curve… I feel like we will not have the same problems we have with the PUG scene in World of Warcraft in the eventual Elder Scrolls Online end game. If you can make it through the veteran content, you likely can make it through any of the content in the game.

It is refreshing to have a game that does not try to coddle the player. Shit happens, and if you do not react appropriately to it… you get punished and punished hard. The game is not some brutal Dark Souls type experience, it plays fair and within a set of established rules… but even after playing it as long as I have… I still die, and die often. I really look forward to the adventure zone combat, because it feels like it is going to be something akin to the old Everquest planes. I loved breaking the plane of hate and the plane of fear, both of which were unforgiving and brutal… but also immensely rewarding. While Craglorn sounds like it is much more structured than the planes were, it feels like it might offer a similar style of gameplay. It will be a long while before I am Veteran Rank 10, but hopefully when I get there we will be able to wander about the zone finding adventure.

#H1Z1 #TheEvilWithin #CragLorn #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline

Savior of Glenumbra

April 5, 2014 by Belghast

Awkward Ex-Coworkers

We are having some minor issues with my wife’s vehicle, so as a result I had to get up crazy early yesterday morning to drive her into work. Crazy early because I still wanted to be able to blog like normal, and she generally leaves when I am about halfway done with my morning post. As a result it made the entire day feel sluggish. After work we made plans to go eat at one of my favorite restaurants near her workplace so I could get cheese tots and spicy chicken. The above shot is what the dish looks like… I snapped a photo some time ago to brag on her for bringing it home to me one night. We hung out and ate with another teacher friend of hers and it was a pretty awesome time… until something happened to taint it.

We had been there for a little bit, and our order had not arrived when I noticed someone walk in that looked vaguely familiar. While trying to place him I saw his wife walk in and immediately the combination of the two faces together snapped in my memory. These were some ex-coworkers and while they were nice enough… they came from a period of time when I was at the worst place I have ever worked. To make it worse they are both extremely good friends with what I considered to be the boss from hell. So it is not exactly the situation where I want to go over and “catch up”. Thankfully they were with what looked like parents and too busy with their own conversations to notice me much.

I hate that anyone associated with that workplace is immediately flagged as an enemy in my head, and I am not really sure how to get past it. Every place I have ever worked I have been the group rockstar, and the current environment is no less true… although in my present situation we have three rockstars working on the same team. This workplace however, from day one there was nothing I could ever do right. The boss would loosely stub things out in a project website, with roughly a single sentence describing what needed to be done.

If I asked questions as to what the hell he meant by that… I would catch hell for not taking initiative. If I figured things out on my own, and just got the job done… I would catch hell for not doing it exactly like he wanted it to be done. There was seriously a no win situation, and the two people that walked in represented that time period in my life. Every time I see someone associated with that period I just want to scream how much of an asshole that guy was and how he made my life complete and total crap. But instead I smile and nod and try my damnedest to ignore them and hope they walk away.

Savior of Glenumbra

Last night we got home fairly late from meeting the friend for dinner, so by the time I made it upstairs it was almost eight. At that point folks had already paired up into dungeon runs, so I opted to simply focus on finishing up the rest of Glenumbra. I feel like I am moving super slow, because I simply cannot chew through the Elder Scrolls content as fast as others seem to be able to. I have friends who have been “finished” with Glenumbra for some time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they are nowhere near 100% on the zone… and quite truthfully as much time as I have spent there I seriously doubt I have gotten everything either. I do have all of the icons on the map turned from black to white, and have gotten 100% of the skyshards… so I feel like it is “good enough” for me to move on. Last night after finishing Crosswych I got the “Savior of Glenumbra” achievement.

I have to say… Stormhaven means serious business. I managed to get to level 18 in Glenumbra before moving on, but when I moved into Stormhaven that is supposed to be a 15+ zone I noticed everything hit considerably harder. Granted this could be in part to the fact that I am still mostly wearing level 14 gear, since I need High Iron which cannot be found in Glenumbra. More so I think that they have just ratcheted up the difficulty. Instead of fighting random bandits, you are now fighting random daedra. While they might not have the hitpoint pool… Clanfear are Clanfear… they all seem to be just as hard to kill. The new zone is just as lovely, if not slightly more damaged by the conflict. The screenshots are from the first town, which is a lovely little port just a ways inside of the zone line. I look forward to meandering my way across the zone like I did in glenumbra.

I swear this game was designed specifically for me, because it is littered with things to find and interesting things to kill. I love that crafting can be leveled without having ever crafted a single item. I am constantly bringing back bags full of gear that I got from killing baddies, and through doing nothing but deconstruction I have managed to get Woodworking to 10, and Clothing to 9. While I have been making plenty of blacksmithing items, I still have gotten most of my levels from deconstructing “found” things. This is the only game system I have ever played that supported leveling crafting through mass slaughter. I have to say I love it though, it lets me play the game the way I want to play it, and limit my time hovering over the forge.

Visiting a Friend

This morning I saw a tweet from Scopique thanking me for reminding him to feed his claim in Landmark… which in turn reminded me to log in and feed my own. As much as it might annoy me that we can only store five days worth of copper in our claim banks, it is in the very least forcing me to log in every few days to make sure I have it fully stocked. Right now I am in a weird place with my own claim. I need to go on another massive stone harvesting run, but I have not been able to bring myself to do so… because I would rather be playing Elder Scrolls Online. For a few days however my friend Syl has said that I should pop by her claim and see the progress. As a result I ended up with a pretty cool screenshot of the pair of us overlooking her claim.

I hope she won’t be cross with me for posting a picture of her Inn “in progress”. I have to say the interior is coming along extremely well. I love the fireplace and the basin, and on a rack behind me is a really cool lance that she made from scratch. I love the way the house is wrapped around the tree. Makes me realize just how much work I need to do on my own. I am really good at roughing out massive structures, but I always lack the drive to go back in later and do the fine detail work. She however seems to excel at it, putting the finishing touches on rooms as she builds them. Super impressed with what she has done so far, and hopefully at some point this weekend I will get the drive to log in and go on another massive stone farming expedition. If nothing else was cool to pop over and see her claim for a bit before logging to work on this here blog post. Is that blogception?

#ElderScrollsOnline #Landmark #Glenumbra #Stormhaven #ESO

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

April 2, 2014 by Belghast

Wabbajack or Bust!

One of the last big decision points we had to make was picking our PVP campaign. Essentially how Cyrodil works is that there are these campaign groups that are functionally like “servers” in that it represents one constant group of players from all three sides during a 90 day “season”. These sides fight for control of Cyrodil and attempt to crown an emperor by holding all of the barrier keeps surrounding the White Gold Tower. Each of these campaign groups is named after a weapon from elder scrolls lore. Currently the most populated is “Auriel’s Bow” which is benefiting from “first in the list” syndrome… where people simply click the first option and go with it. Oddly enough “Dawnbreaker” is another really high pop server, because for whatever reason a ton of serious Aldmeri Dominion pvpers decided to set up camp there.

As explained in my first video of the night, we have put our heads together and reasoned Wabbajack to be a good place to be. For those who are not TES lore junkies or who have not played Oblivion or Skyrim… Wabbajack is the weapon of the mad god Sheogorath. You are just as likely to zap your foe as to turn them into a bunny… or even rain down cheese from the heavens. More importantly however it seems like quite a few of the more organized Daggerfall folks have chosen the server for their own, so I believe it will be a place where we might have a fighting chance against the Aldmeri and Ebonheart hordes. We chose Daggerfall expecting it to be less populated, and as a result have an easier time getting into Cyrodil instances. Unfortunately as the video states Slurms has ended up on Auriel’s Bow for the time being, but we are hoping he will get the ability to swap to us for free.

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

Last night my friends and I… or at least a slightly different group of friends… decided to go back into Spindleclutch in the hopes of completing the quest that had apparently bugged out the previous night. The primary difference this time around was that we had two dps, a healer and a tank… the traditional dungeon makeup. To complicate things, we had a player healing who had literally not had a healing staff in his inventory until a guild member crafted and mailed him one on the way to the dungeon. So needless to say we had a few issues we needed to work out. Overall we managed to make it through the dungeon, but at times it was through sheer force of will. The above stream video documents our journey through the depths of spider hell.

For not having played a healer in ESO before, especially a night blade healer… Kodra did a remarkable solo healing the dungeon. Essentially we are realizing that the night before we simply brute forced a lot of the encounters with pure healing throughput in the fact that we had two healers who had rolled and were leveling AS healers. This run through the dungeon was very similar to our first run through the dungeon almost a year ago. There were many packs of mobs that flat out murdered us… especially once we got into the “corrupted” section of the dungeon. Some of the group tactics were a nightmare and it was all I could do to try and juggle everything and also somehow manage to keep up enough stamina to be able to block power attacks. At this point I am realizing I need way more stamina, and plan on dumping the next several skillups into that trait.

While there was quite a bit of faffing about before the dungeon, in trying to get over to Spindleclutch and get everyone zoned into it… I think we managed to run the place in roughly 45 minutes which is not too bad. One of the things that would have really helped out quite a bit is the addition of crowd control. I’ve considered spending a point and picking up dark talons, as being able to lock down a large group and at least keep it off the cloth wearers would have been extremely beneficial. The other cool thing is that I somehow managed to get several viewers during the dungeon, one of which even congratulated us on our victory. I am so used to no one watching my streams that it was rather odd knowing I had an audience that was not a guild member and likely not also in the same mumble channel as me.

Tonight there are already tentative plans to step back foot in the dungeon and see what trouble we can get into. At this point I seem to be the only tank in the level range of the dungeon, and while I do not mind being the token tank… there is only so much spelunking that I can take in a night. My wife and I have made plans to start trying to walk around 10 pm, and this means I need to make sure I am not engaged in something around that time of the evening. So essentially it cuts one potential dungeon run out for the night. I am sure in the next few days we will have more tanks entering the level range to take the pressure off me. My hope is that soon we can have multiple spindle groups going at the same time.

Feed your Claim

Just a really quick and friendly reminder… if you are like me and now completely enthralled by Elder Scrolls Online… don’t forget to log into Landmark periodically and feed your claim some copper. The upkeep mechanic while not extremely brutal, is there and constant and could involve the repossession of your claim. Since several of us managed to get in early enough to grab some pretty choice spots… I would hate to see any of us lose them to forgetting to feed the upkeep bank. Currently you can have roughly 5 days worth of resources stacked up in your claim bank. Every two to three days just to be certain, I have been logging in and depositing additional copper ore into the bank to keep it “topped off”. I really wish I could farm up enough to keep it healthy for a month or so, but I can see their desire to limit it to a small amount so that players are constantly having to log in.