Lego Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Pugilism

September 3, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land… I am somewhat awake and once again sitting at the keyboard in the morning. I know that over the holiday weekend I was a slacker and ended up logging late in the day for two days… but now it is time to return to reality and as such the morning posts begin once more. All in all it was a pretty good Labor Day weekend, we ran out and did quite a few things and I managed to get in a decent amount of playtime in on various games. I even managed to hit the suggested point in the NDA title, so I call the weekend as a whole a success.

Another Cool Find

Yesterday my wife went shopping with her mother and sister and I pretty much stuck around the house doing laundry, changing the ferret cage, and playing a lot of Final Fantasy. Right now there is a lot of closeout going on at the various Wal-mart locations around us, and she said she would check the ones in Joplin if they ended up there. I had honestly pretty much forgotten about it when I got a series of texts asking about various sets. I still think it is so damned cool that she is more than willing to feed my addiction to all things Lego.

At the first store there were many sets that I already had, and one that I had picked up at our store… but in amongst the various heavily marked down boxes was a gem. The Gungan Sub is a set I have thought was cool for some time, but it had an $80 pricetag that like all the bigger sets makes me not willing to pick them up. However yesterday she found it for only $40 so it was a definite buy especially considering this one is another out of print set from 2012.

This apparently is a re-release of a model by the same name that came out in 1999 for the release of the Phantom Menace. It looks like the model has been improved in every way, and in addition there is the first Queen Amidala minifig which is pretty sweet looking. Of course in the travels my wife found lots of stuff for herself, including a bunch of scarves that were on clearance and a few tops. It sounds like she had a good time hanging with her family, but I still think it is awesome that she thought to check the Legos and actually found some.

Pugilism

Now that I managed to get to 30 on my main class and pick up the Warrior job I have backed down a bit from pushing through the levels. One of the frustrations with specialization is that you can no longer access all of the cross class abilities. So by switching into Warrior I lost access to all the nifty toys I had from my Lancer sub class. As it stands currently, Warriors only have access to cross class abilities from the Gladiator and Pugilist classes. Since there are quite a few good low hanging fruit in the Pugilism tree, I decided to swap over and run up a few levels there.

I have to say I enjoy the way pugilist feels. In many ways it reminds me of the way the martial arts hero felt in City of Heroes. You have lots of awesome kicks and punches and a really interesting combo system. Basically how combos work in this game is that when you hit an ability, it will highlight the next ability in sequence… and if you press it you get some special added effect. The problem is if you miss the second attack, it is a lost opportunity.

With the Pugilist, each attack applies a short term buff to your character, and this buff is what controls the ability to proceed through to the next attack. This means even if you fail to hit the target with the second attack, there is always a chance to pull out a second attempt at the attack and proceed down the combo tree. Additionally they get a third step in their combo building process amazingly fast, within the first few levels. This makes the class design feel extremely responsive early on in the leveling process.

Right now my goal is to hit level 12, which will give me access to a few really nice cross class abilities. First we have Featherfoot, which increases evasion by 25% for 15 seconds. Next we have Second Wind, that is a variable heal that builds off attack power. Lastly we have Internal Release, which increases Critical Rate by 30% for 15 seconds. I have heard that the Marauder ability Berserk which increases attack power by 50%, will greatly buff Second Wind. While Berserk keeps you from using special attacks for 30 seconds after its duration… it could be a handy combo in a clutch situation where you are tanking and need a large heal NOW.

Primetime Patching

At the point of posting about the prime time patch, I had not really don’t the time conversion myself. Essentially the “Wednesday patch” is actually a Tuesday evening patch for the United States. I feel as though a million oceanic players are reveling in the frustration saying “see what it feels like”. The maintenance period is essentially 7 pm to 1 am central time, so pretty much encompasses the entire playable time period I would normally be in a game. All will be forgiven if this fixes the issues and we can finally stop the “1017 shuffle”.

I heard an interesting theory about what is happening to the servers and why they cannot support any more players. The theory states that it is not actually a problem with the individual shards themselves, but a problem with not having enough resources on the “instancing server”. The game makes constant use of throwing players into instanced scenes in the game as you complete some of the games more epic quest moments. This additionally is supposedly the same server that is used by every dungeon in the game. The majority of player disconnects involve going into or coming out of an instanced area.

The theory further poses that it is this instance infrastructure that was just too small to support the current deluge of players. This server was supposedly scaled for around 100,000 concurrent players, whereas we have well over that on a given basis. This is also why in the final beta test, before they imposed the caps… the main issue at hand was the complete and total failure of the instance system halting players from progressing in their quests. If this is in fact the case they may literally be able to throw servers at the problem…and after this maintenance all may be resolved. I really hope this ends up the case… because the game is far better than its shitty infrastructure shows.

Wrapping Up

Well it is time for me to take the trash out, feed the cats and get on the road. I hope you have a great short week ahead of you. My hope is that no real crisis arise and I can get some things knocked off my extremely long list. More than likely tonight I will be back in Rift, as I am sure the guild thinks I have fallen off the face of the earth. Looking forward to trying to get some more dungeons going this Wednesday for guild night. Crossing my fingers that the maintenance fixes everything, and I will be able to play FFXIV at will, and not feel like I need to play it whenever I can actually connect to the game servers.

Awesome Wife

August 31, 2013 by Belghast

Good evening my dear readers… I am writing this far later in the day than normal… but there was good reason. Essentially today we greatly varied our normal weekend routine. Towards the end of the week my wife suggested we go to Muskogee today, and I suggested that we just get up early, shower and eat breakfast on the road. It has been in the hundreds temperature wise in Oklahoma this week, so I thought it would be better to get up there and back before it heated up too badly. Instead we ended up spending the entire day there, but we found a lot of spiffy things.

Awesome Wife

A few weeks back I wrote about my wife and how amazing she was when she spontaneously got me a huge haul of Legos when she went off on a shopping excursion with some of her friends. Well today was the last day of the big sale that she found them on… and she wanted to know if I wanted to make a trip up to see if there was anything else I wanted. Firstly I thought it was amazing that she was offering to make a trip to Muskogee just to go Lego shopping for me… but it gets better. When she was there early, she had told me that the place was not air conditioned and that if we ever made a trip back… that we would want to go early in the day.

As a result that is what is leading me to blog so late, as we pretty much were on the road as soon as we woke up this morning with no real time for me to knock out a morning post. During the day she was there she had texted me pictures of the various sets she found, but I really did not get a good feeling for what the store was like. We made a trip to the one in west Tulsa, and everything there was pretty much in neat and organized rows like a closeout store. Additionally that store was air conditioned… so I really could not grasp just how hot and oppressive the Muskogee store would be.

Above and Beyond

The above picture is of what I would consider the most organized section of Sooner Surplus. The various toys were scattered around throughout the store over the course of six different isles. In each isle there were legos mixed in, crammed back behind… above and under all the rest of the toys. Essentially Sooner Surplus is what appears to be a store that buys items that the stores like Wal-mart write off as a loss. The end result is a complete mishmash of everything you could imagine. All of it in new or like new state… sometimes with dented packages but everything around sixty percent of retail prices. For example the TIE Fighter she got me last time retails for $55 and the pricetag at the store was $35.

Until August 31st… aka today all of the toys, Legos included were an additional 20% off the already 60% pricetag. So first off I was completely floored that she thought about the Legos in the first place… but as I rummaged through the shelves today I finally grasped just how amazing she really was. The various sets the gathered up last time… came from about 12 different places in the store… some of them buried behind piles of other toys. So not only was she thinking about me when she saw the Legos… she went through a massive amount of physical effort to FIND all the sets in the first place. All of this in during an Oklahoma afternoon, in a metal building with no air-conditioning that seems to heat up like an oven really quickly.

A Real Trooper

So after picking me out almost $100 in Lego sets last time… she was more than willing to bring me back today and let me pick through the sets myself. This time around we got a lot of the larger sets. Granted in the above picture, one of the sets came from closeout in our Wal-Mart… but she still was amazing about letting me pick that one up as well. The Goblin King set above, was roughly $60 before the 20% discount… and it originally retailed in the store for over $100 by itself. The monster train set was roughly $40 and retailed for over $80 in the store. So all in all I found a ton of really good bigger sets for super cheap even before the discount… but knowing that we got an additional 20% off of everything was a huge push to pick them up.

The Optimus Prime set is Kree-o but everything I have seen shows that they are completely compatible with Lego. It originally retailed for $80 and before the 20% discount the above set was $20. Granted I don’t think the Kree-o product line has gone over as well as Hasbro could have hoped, but it still looks awesome, and had a ton of pieces. The set I had gotten from Wal-mart before was also originally in the $100 range, but we picked it up I think for $45. Essentially all told between the set from Wal-mart and the finds today at Sooner Surplus… my wife was a real trooper about me spending another $200 on Legos.

While we were there we found a few more sets for my niece and nephew. The big thing we were excited about is that we found another three sets from the Lego Friends line for her… and then got a really cool bigger dump truck set for him. Granted this pales in comparison to what I walked away with, but I am sure they will be happy when we give them to them. We went by the Wal-mart in Muskogee later and they had quite a few sets on clearance as well. I passed on a Hobbit Attack of the Wargs set for $20 without looking it up. Later on I realized that the set was a $50 set normally. My wife being awesome as always… encouraged me to get it… but i felt bad since I had already spent so much earlier.

Things People Pawn

We have always been huge fans of Pawn Shops. Essentially if I can get a price break by buying something second hand… I will always do it. Just with the Legos we are always looking for a good deal, and namely we frequently them fairly often looking for Camera lenses for our Canon Digital SLRs. We had never actually been to the Cash America in Muskogee, but on the last trip my wife actually found where it was located. So after getting out of Sooner Surplus we wound our way over there to check it out. It was extremely nice inside and the service staff there were extremely friendly.

That has always been the bane of our existence as pawn shops go. We go there to buy things, and it always seems like we have pure hell trying to get anyone to wait on us. The workers in pawn shops are usually either ignoring the customers or too busy with the folks there to pawn things. It always rubs me the wrong way since in essense we are there to give them money, not ask for it. Anyways the folks at this shop were the exact opposite super friendly. My wife looked at some of the rings and I roamed around the store for a bit. I cracked up when I saw the above items. I guess people will pawn damned near anything. I never thought of a generic coffee pot, a igloo water jug, and a toaster oven as high dollar items.

Further Excursions

Another place we have to go whenever we are in Muskogee or honestly any town that has one is Hastings. For those not familiar with it, it is this odd bookstore/movie/comic/toys/music/electronics store chain. They generally have prices that range on the high end, but when they put things on sale, or have used merchandise it is generally a really good deal. Since for the most part we have moved to digital books… I don’t so much buy books there any more, but I love looking through their random geeky kitsch. One of my favorite things in Borderlands 2… is anything produced by Jacobs manufacturing. I kind of have a fetish for the whole steam punk look of their weapons. One of my favorite places in the game is when you run across a non-functioning CL4P-TP model styled by Jacobs.

One the shelves at Hastings I stumbled onto exactly that… a Jacobs model “Clap-Trap”. I thought it was extremely cool… just not the $20 price tag worth of cool. Sure it would have looked awesome adorning my desk at work. But that seemed a bit much for a random action figure. I had seen several versions of the figure before, but always in the blue or yellow variant. I didn’t even know that the Jacobs model existed. I might have gone for it… but the paint job was not nearly as cool as it was in game. The wood grain looked extremely flat and was mostly just solid fields of brown. So while super cool… it would never look as cool as the awesome one from in game.

Pretty much the rest of the day was spent ping ponging around Muskogee. We went out to the Mall and hit several clothing stores looking for stuff for my wife. Additionally we had trips to Ross and Cato and found a handful of things. That has been the real challenge this year starting back to school is that since we have both lost quite a bit of weight (55 lbs for me and 45 lbs for my wife) a lot of her professional attire was just too big to remain looking professional. The frustrating thing is she seems to be in an odd spot where clothing is hard to find… most likely because so many people are currently in that size range. So as a result we have picked up separates wherever we could find them.

Wrapping Up

It was a fun day, and while it was hot as hell out there it was well worth the trip. I am so thankful I have such an awesome spouse… that while she may not fully understand my obsessions… she at least understands what is important to me and indulges my eccentricities. Quite honestly it is a two way street, as I have gone down so many roads that lead to one of her little obsessions as well. I guess at the end of the day that is why we work well together. Anyways… I hope you all have a great weekend, and apologies again for getting this post out so late.

Lego Episode

August 18, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out in digital land… I Belghast am doing my best to try and be noble and bloggified this morning… but seeming to fail miserably. If you have not figured out by now… this top paragraph is really just me psyching myself up to write. Think of it as the wind-up to a pitch, and while I do divulge important bits of information from time to time… mostly it is just my way of easing into writing about “things”. This morning I am still drinking a cup of coffee, so who knows what adventures my mind will go on throughout the course of the day.

Lego Friends

So a few weeks back my niece wanted Legos for her birthday. This was one of my happiest moments as an uncle, and I spoiled her fairly rotten. I may or may not have bought like $80 in Legos for her… because by god I am going to support the notion of my niece being into “building things”. I have to say I was extremely disappointed in what I was able to find however. It seems like all of the Lego City products have essentially nothing but male minifigures. On a completely seperate row… were the Lego Friends toys… and scattered in among those were an assortment of “real” Lego sets with female characters. So I ended up getting her a pink bucket with a girl minifig, a blue bucket with a boy minifig… and this princess horse grooming set because the minifig in that one looked a lot like her.

I was woefully sadden later to find out that she used some of her own money to buy a bunch of the Lego Friends sets. Feminist Frequency released a video on the Lego Friends and for the most part I agreed… that they were an un-needed aberration in Legoland. I had no clue why they existed in the first place. I could not understand why they did not just release a series of Lego city sets with female heroines. But yesterday I think I finally grok exactly what the Lego Friends do that the minifigures do not.

We spent most of our day yesterday either preparing for or spending time with family. We had a surprise get together for my wife’s fathers birthday, and this was the first time I had seen my niece in awhile. During my wife’s insane Lego find she found 3 sets for my niece. One Lego friends set, and two normal lego sets but with gender neutral themes and including girl minifigs. Thing is… when we gave them to her… she was excited about all the sets for different reasons… but she was especially excited about the Lego Friends set… because it she did not already have “Andrea”. I never once thought about the fact that the Lego friends might have names.

So I started listening to how she talked about Lego friends… and it finally made sense. She cares about the different characters and their personalities much the same way as a little girl assigns attributes to each of the members of the Barbie universe. The catch is that instead of teaching copious consumption… in that you need to buy Barbie all these things… like a dream house and a car… it is letting her BUILD things for her new imaginary friends. She talked about that she is building a house for all her lego friends… which is going completely off the map since none of the sets we have gotten for her so far was anything resembling a house. Essentially from my standpoint Lego Friends are “working as intended”.

She is having all sorts of imaginative play… but she is building various aspects of the universe inhabited by these five named minifigures. So I no longer feel like a horrible person for buying into this “Friends” franchise. She is building and creating and imaging all sorts of new experience for her “dolls” and it seems like it is the best of both the Lego and Barbie experience. She is having aspirational play imaging herself as a vet or a doctor or a home builder… but doing so in a way that she is actually making the things happen by building them… rather than waiting on another trip to the store to acquire another item. Here is hoping that she continues to build and create… and we will do our best to keep supplying a fresh set of bricks to incorporate into her little world.

Heroica

Part of the whole going to see family thing, involves going to a small town about an hour from Tulsa. With it being back to school time, my wife wanted to stop and see if they had any different school supplies… or more importantly ones on clearance at the small town Wal-mart. While we did not really find much in the way of school supplies they had a bunch of Lego stuff on clearance. I have seen the various Lego board games for awhile, but never actually picked them up. I have heard they were an awesome source for relatively rare pieces, but they were always way too expensive for me to just pick up on a lark to part out. I found these two Heroica sets for less than twenty bucks combined so I figured it was well worth that.

It got me to thinking… wouldn’t it be cool to run a D&D or similar pen and paper campaign using the Lego board games as a mapping system? I saw a picture from G+ the other day of a dad teaching his kids D&D using minifigures to represent their characters. It seems like father of the year material there, but wouldn’t it be cool if you also built the dungeon they were exploring out of Lego? Granted it would involve kitbashing a TON of these sets to find enough pieces to be able to do it… but it seems like a noble undertaking. Sadly I don’t really have enough friends nearby to really support a D&D campaign. When we do pen and paper we tend to do it as a google hangout… and I think the tactile experience of Lego everything… would be lost horribly over a camera.

Nipple Chests

When I finally got back home from our family outing excursions… I sat down on the couch just absolutely drained. I initially fired up Rift, but I just was not feeling up to grinding my harvest skills any further. Granted I know I could have played something else… but I am somewhat obsessed with getting my Cleric to a level at which he can do Storm Legion content. I logged into Mumble and everyone there was playing Final Fantasy XIV… so I figured… what the hell… might as well join them. The game is growing on me, I will admit… but I am just not sure to what extent. There are still so many things that bother me about the game in general.

If my character looks awesome… I feel awesome while playing it. This is why I am such a huge proponent of cosmetic gear systems. If I can set my appearance and always look amazing… I will feel happy while playing that character. Final Fantasy XIV has way too much of the bullshit you see in the above picture. Wearing a “nipple chest” and powder blue assless chaps does not make me feel heroic in ANY way. I just feel like a walking punchline to a horrible joke. This shit might fly in Japan… but I just feel like a moron walking around like this. Sadly earlier my character looked amazing… I had a really slick looking set of gear… that fit the way my character plays… but since FFXIV has no cosmetic system to speak off… I am stuck looking like an abomination if I want to wear the most effective gear.

There is definitely something charming about the gameplay however. It feels like a much better version of World of Warcraft. The world looks nicer, the character models themselves are awesome… and the way combat chains off other abilities is a huge step forward from the WoW model. The world seems fairly intricate as well, with lots of little things to explore and find. I am still experience the whole things named nonsensically aspect… like what the hell is a Guildleve or a Levemete in the first place? It feels like when Americans try and make ethnic sounding names that end up just being gibberish. The whole game could do with a better cultural pass to change the names of things into something that makes sense. As a result I can never remember what anything is called and just end up making names up for them.

I figure I will play the rest of the weekend and see where I feel about the game at the end of it. It is more enjoyable than TERA or Dragons Prophet for example… so were this a free to play game it would be a no-brainer as to whether or not I would be occasionally playing it. But the whole subscription thing is still a sticking point for me. I keep hoping that it will miraculously get better. One of the things I want to try out is the jobs system. I need to get up to around 15 to fully unlock the airship system be able to travel to the towns that have the guilds I want to pick up. I think I am more than likely going to switch to pugilist or lancer first after getting Maurader to 15.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to ramble on about meaningless stuff for another hour. I hope you all have a great weekend. I am guessing I will be splitting my Sunday between FFXIV and Rift. I might even go upstairs and build some more Lego sets since that seems to be on my brain. I still feel like I am potentially coming down with something… and as of this morning my wife seems similarly effected. Here is hoping it just ends up as allergies and nothing more serious.

Folklore Roulette

August 11, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning my loyal readers… or at least I think I have some loyal readers. Over the last week or so I have done a quite a few thematic posts spurred on by the announcement of EQ Next. Today is going to be a bit of a throwback to my “what Bel did” posts. Yesterday was a busy day but also a pretty relaxing one. We got out early and ran a bunch of errands including a haircut for me. I was getting rather shaggy… I was to the point where I could theoretically ponytail it up… just a horrible one.

Lego Maniac

When we finally got home and settled in I engaged in something I had been planning for awhile. When we set up the game loft, the intent was to also make it a place for me to build with my Legos that I have been amassing. So as a result there is a fold out table underneath the loveseat and finally yesterday I gave this concept a trial run, Over the last several months I had accumulated a large number of sets that I had yet to build, and this was only compounded by the awesome haul that my wife found last week. It had become a running joke that I collected Legos but never actually built them… so I intended to rectify that.

My grand scheme is to eventually come up with a storage system so that I can sort out the Lego bits into component types. But I have not settled on the best and most efficient means to do that. However in the meantime I would like to build every set I have at least once as it was intended. The entertainment center upstairs has been rather barren so it will serve as my showcase for built sets. The above picture shows a wide assortment of things I put together yesterday.

In the picture is a Captain America set, a Ninjago one, The Gandalf arrives set from Lord of the Rings, a couple of Star Wars sets including an Ewok Attack one… and two different Harry Potter sets. I barely scratched the surface of the unbuilt sets I have accumulated over the last little bit. Essentially anytime I find a set on sale for a price I am willing to pay I snap it up. Building anything with Legos makes me immensely happy. It is like returning to a simpler time. I can remember building by myself or with my cousins and creating grand machinations, and I guess to some extent I am capturing a small piece of that. Not sure if I will return to builder mode today or not, but I had a blast doing it yesterday.

Folklore Roulette

So as I built away with the Legos I decided to fire up Netflix on my PS3 and watch something. Hemlock Grove has been sitting in my recommendations for some time, so I figured what the heck. I like werewolves, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse was hands down my favorite of the World of Darkness games… so I would at least give it a shot. After watching nine episodes I can say that I really like the show… but I am not really sure why. It kinda has a twin peaks meets world of darkness feel to it. The biggest thing I realized immediately is just how under-billed calling it a “Werewolf” show is. There is a lot going on in thee town of Hemlock Grove.

Essentially you are presented an odd hodgepodge of Slavic folklore traditions mixed with some Reanimator style science-horror. You have psychic vampires, demons, possible alien hybrids, Romani seers, some crazy demonic wolf terrorizing the town… and of course a noble werewolf trying to reluctantly protect all of it. The demon wolf very much feels like a Black Spiral Dancer from White Wolf, at least the description we have been given of what a “Vargwolf” is.

I want to maybe finish out the series today, because seriously there is a lot of crazy shit going on in this little town… and I feel that sooner or later it is all going to come to a catastrophic end. If you have ever been a fan of the World of Darkness series of games, I would highly suggest checking it out. The acting is very good and at some times there are parts that remind me a little bit of American Horror Story season one. It of course has the requisite HBO style gratuitous tits and ass thing going on… so be warned if you have little or sensitive eyes in the room. I am not really sure when this became a requirement for “edgy” television but I wish it would work its way out.

Festival of Unity

One of the coolest things about playing Everquest 2 on Antonia Bayle has always been the massive player run events. Today is kicking one of the largest yearly events called the “Festival of Unity”. It starts this afternoon at 3pm EDT at the Qeynos Claymore in Antonica. You can check out the full information about the festival here on their homepage. Also Stargrace did a nice write-up about the festival over on MMOQuests. I am not sure yet if I will be attending it, but even if I do not I think it is an extremely cool concept. Antonia Bayle has by far the coolest community I have ever experienced on a Role Playing server, and I am always happy to get the word out when an event is going on.

Wrapping Up

Today’s post feels a little bit shorter than normal, but I am out of meaningful things to say. Hopefully you have a great rest of the weekend. My wife has gotten roped into assisting a friend with her wedding planning, so more or less I will be holding down the fort alone today. Going to have to start up laundry and the sort soon. Speaking of fortifications… thankful that so far I seem to have thwarted our escape artist ferret. She is sleeping peacefully in the playpen and has not found a way to climb out since yesterday. Here is hoping that the ramparts hold.