Marvel Heroes Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Wrong About Wildstar

April 23, 2015 by Belghast

More Initiates

For as frustrated as yesterdays post was, today’s is all the more hopeful. Lately on Wednesday nights I have been assisting a fledgling second static group in our free company out. While it still struggles to get a full eight people, we are making some progress. As more people level to the cap, more people will be available to join in the raiding fun and hopefully this will smooth the process out significantly. For the last few weeks we have been working on Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, aka the first major hurdle and the gateway to the second coil. Last week we made decent progress but were still struggling to get through the dive bomb phase. That phase seems to be the biggest frustration with the fight, and once you figure out the timing the rest goes smoothly. While I barded it up last week, this week I tanked it because that was the role that was needed. Since my health was significantly higher than Damai we swapped roles and I took the Twintania role and he adjusted quickly to dealing with the adds.

Now our first group of the night was less than successful because we ended up having to pug in half of the players. The positive was that we noticed that the people screwing up were not our own people. As the evening went on more people got in game and we were able to fill out the rest of the slots with some other seasoned veterans. From here I think it took four attempts before we downed the 5th turn and keyed a whole new group of players for the second coil. This is awesome for a bunch of reasons… because firstly it means that second team is progressing nicely apart from issues getting people online at the right time. Secondly however it also means we can start drawing on the pool of players available for Monday night turn 9 attempts as well. I know Grace is itching to see t9, so hopefully this will smooth out some of our own attendance irregularities. It is almost summer after all and with summer comes folks going off and doing summer things.

Wrong about Wildstar

This morning I am questioning if I have been wrong about Wildstar thus far in feeling that the game was just not for me. Granted we gave it a good shot and played this game at launch but it felt like something was off. Now coming back and playing it again I am really enjoying myself, but there are a large number of details that are significantly different that I think are effecting my enjoyment. When the initial video was released talking about the Exiles and Dominion, I naturally felt an immediate affinity with the Exiles… the problem being most of my friends had that same immediate attraction to the Dominion. I struggled with this choice until I found the Chua and for the most part enjoyed my time playing an Engineer. The problem being… I just did not enjoy that style of tanking. What I should have played was a Warrior, like I did every time I actually enjoyed myself during the beta. So this time around I am playing a Human Warrior and enjoying smashing faces and jumping around like mad. The Exile side has this whole “Firefly” vibe that works for me, whereas the Dominion feel more like playing the Empire from Star Wars. Both are interesting but at this point in my life… I feel more kinship with the rebels.

The other thing that is helping significantly is due to the whole promotion I have a hover board starting at level 1, which makes roaming around the zones so much more enjoyable. Additionally thanks to the promotion I have some spending money from selling extra items on the open market. Knowing my character is set for awhile on upgrades and spending money makes all the difference in the world. Finally the pace I am playing with makes a huge difference. Wildstar is the sort of game where piddling around feels more enjoyable than focused leveling. I am stopping to smell the roses, and boulders, and landmines… well you get the idea. Additionally I went the Soldier path, meaning I get to smash more things in the face and while I enjoyed Explorer… smashing things in the face is just more my style. At launch I had this overwhelming feeling of a need to keep up with everyone else, so that I would be viable for dungeon running. This time since I am playing all by myself for the most part… I am taking my time and poking through the content at my own speed. All of which adds up to a completely different experience for me. All of this proves that the circumstances you go into a game greatly colors your end experience. So far I am enjoying playing this game as a secondary “cooling down” from the action type game.

Wrong about Marvel Heroes

Another game that I have recently picked up that I am more than willing to admit I was wrong about is Marvel Heroes. I have avoided this game like the plague because of a whole slew of reasons. Firstly at its core it is a Diablo clone and while there is nothing wrong with that… click to move and attack games and I generally do not get along that well. Thanks to League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm I have learned to tolerate them… but my preferred means of control will always be WASD. Secondly everything surrounding this game gave the impression that it was a free to play money grab of the worst type. I played a tiny bit of this game in beta and was not terribly excited about any of the heroes I was able to play, so I filed this away in the “not for me” bin as well. The thing is over time I have continued to watch people I know and love and respect playing this game as seriously as they have played any traditional MMO. When I see something like this I start to wonder, what are they seeing it in that I am not. I’ve had these same feelings surrounding games that I just did not previously understand like Guild Wars 2, and after finally hitting my stride in that game I figured I might as well give Heroes a shot too.

Sunday I ended up playing this game for awhile, and wound up playing it for I think five hours without really meaning to. I feel like the piece of the equation that I was missing to really enjoy it, comes from the fact that I did not even realize I was in need of that Super Hero MMO fix. I happily played City of Heroes for about six months before moving on to World of Warcraft. When Champions Online launched I was extremely excited about that game… until the first patch wound up killing the combination of abilities I wanted to play with. With the launch of DC Universe Online that was yet another game I really enjoyed, but struggled to get traction in for reason I still don’t know to this day. Marvel Super Heroes seems to be just a bout the right amount of depth for me to consume as far as super hero content goes, and the ability to swap between heroes freely helps significantly. Right now I am focusing on Captain America but by the same token I have gotten rather fond of Gambit and Deadpool. All of which I really want to play more of, and ultimately this seems like the perfect sort of game to play downstairs on my laptop while watching television and movies. In fact I am hoping to do just that this weekend, and see what mischief I can get into with my shield bashing self.

Juggling Games

April 21, 2015 by Belghast

Naeling It

The Monday night raid group has had quite the sequence of strange weeks since patch 2.55 went into the game. Either we were lacking the right people, or enough people at all to do turn 9. As a result after what seems like a month we did our first night of second coil attempts. We were all exceptionally rusty going in, but the spirits were extremely high. At times I would say our spirits were too high, because holy shit were we slap happy. I was one of the worse so it is not like I can really complain much. The positive take away is that we managed to get further than we had ever gotten before last night, and were starting to work on the fire/lightning phase of the fight. On our best attempt we got Nael to 30% which feels like progress. Essentially once we learn the phase four dance, we just have to keep that up until the boss is dead.

The only regret I have right now is choosing to get my 1300 poetics weapon on my warrior. I was torn, he is absolutely my main and I intend not tanking as often as I can. The problem is on Nael the fight we are struggling with I am having to dragoon it up. That dps boost would really help, but what is done is done… just kinda kicking myself for not picking a dragoon weapon first. That said since 126 is more than geared enough for anything we are doing… I am considering focusing on getting a 1300 weapon for the dragoon now before I pick up any more poetics gear for the warrior. He still needs a chest piece and a belt, which I was going to start building towards the chest next. However since that is still going to take a significant amount of time… I might work on getting that weapon instead. I really wish that today’s 2.56 patch would have uncapped poetics… because man do I need a lot of them.

Cap and Storm

Last night after the raiding shenanigans Thalen mentioned that at one point he had created a House Stalwart super group in Marvel Heroes as a way of stopping the random guild invites. So I popped over into game and got invites. From this point we grouped up for a bit until he needed to head to bed. I have to say that I thought Captain America’s charge in and shield whirl thing was good AOE… until I ran around a bit with Storm. While I got to tank bosses, pretty much all of the trash in the entire zone died horribly to a cloud of whirling winds. That said I am really enjoying the fact that I can tank almost any world boss without much issue by keeping my my defensive buffs. I noticed last night that there was a difficulty slider so at some point I want to play with that. There are times this feels a lot like diablo on “normal” and I am wondering if there is a “hard” setting that I really should be playing.

Quite honestly I have not been even vaguely close to death other than last night when I was tanking Gorgon. There I simply used the occasional med pack and made it through that fight without much issue. The only reason why it was dicey at all was because I was essentially soloing him, which is probably something I should not be able to do at this point. As of last night I am sitting at level 15 and still really enjoying the game. I think this is going to be my go to for mindless fun, and I swear there are so many times the zone layout reminds me of City of Heroes. I guess that might be because when I played that game I kept my camera zoomed out as far as it would go, which made it feel a bit like an over the top game. The competition for spawns is a bit annoying near the entrance of a zone… but if you wander off by yourself you pretty much get the place to yourself. When I hit the island of Madripoor it felt like the pack thinned out significantly, so I am guessing most people don’t make it out of the level 10 range before moving on.

Juggling Games

The problem with juggling multiple games is that one of them always ends up falling through the cracks. Right now I wish I had the time to devote to working on my character in Wildstar and trying to hit 65 in Rift. Instead I am logging in a few times a day in Rift to run minions… and just not logging in at all in Wildstar. Honestly my playtime is really spastic right now, because I have a bunch of things that I am trying to do each day. In Final Fantasy XIV I am playing the mini cactpot each day and trying to stockpile as much MGP as I can. Then while in game I run at least one daily expert so that I can cap my poetics each week. I am also logging into World of Warcraft in the morning and at night to run my Garrison missions in the hopes of getting those ever illusive raid gear crates. I am not 100% sure how they work, other than the fact that they show up every two weeks, so I keep clearing out other missions in hopes of making room for them when they show up.

Something new added to the rotation is logging into Marvel Heroes to get my log in reward. Similarly I am logging into Final Fantasy Record Keeper for the same reason, and to get my daily item chest. Record Keeper is one of those games I mostly play while my wife is shopping or I am out eating, waiting on food to arrive at the table. It is a moment of boredom game more than anything else, but that said I am really enjoying it. It is scratching an itch that I had not quite found from a mobile game. Realistically I should be trying to log into Wildstar each day so that I can do a boom box, but I have been failing miserably at that one. The funny thing is that I am spending a lot of time in a lot of different games but not really playing any of them. Finally after doing my routine I figure out which game I am actually going to play and run off playing that one. Most of the time that is Final Fantasy XIV but over the last few nights I have been playing a significant amount of Marvel Heroes. Basically… right now I am all over the place.

Frosty Machine

April 20, 2015 by Belghast

Craigslist Fails Me

I have had a strange relationship with Craigslist over the last few years. Sometimes it is the source of truly amazing things… other times the source of nothing but frustration. When it comes to buying laptops for example I have had a high rate of people flaking out on me and simply not showing up with the merchandise. When it comes to console systems however I have a pretty damned stellar experience getting a PS4 for $200 and a Vita for $100 for example. Hell right now I am typing on a $150 Logitech G710+ Keyboard that I got for $40… so generally I have some phenomenally good luck there. I’ve always felt like if I can keep from taking the initial depreciation hit on an item… I might as well do it. I have no problem with second hand goods, and while I don’t get to pepper the internet with unboxing videos… but I think we are both better off for that.

Several months back I found a Power Color r9 290x for over half off the price it should have been for the card. I figured it was worth the shot because that was way more video card than I would normally allow myself to buy. The problem with buying something like a video card is… there really is no way of knowing if the card is good. It could be burnt to a crisp and unless there are visible signs of damage there is no way of knowing. When it came time to meet the guy, he said that he replaced the card for a dual Titan Black setup… so that seemed legit at least as to why he would be getting rid of an otherwise solid card. I take the card home and install it and it caused my machine to reboot after a few minutes of running any game. When I started watching the temperature on a monitoring app it would just start climbing, and no amount of manual fan control would bring down the temp. The card would overheat and freak out my system.

Frosty Machine

At the time I was a bit forlorn but didn’t give up heart. I ordered a few things to increase the amount of cooling in my case and there they sat in the floor of my office for months. Part of me didn’t want to install them because deep down I think I knew that I essentially got ripped off on the first card. This weekend I tore apart my machine and installed all of the extra cooling and I have to say the processor now runs at a frosty 21* C with a recorded maximum of 28* C during gaming load. I am pretty happy with that but after installing the R9 290X it went through the same cycle as before. Load up any game and a few minutes later my system is rebooting. Chances are the guy was using it for bitcoin mining, which quite literally burns out a video card. I point blank asked him if that was the case he and said no… but people sometimes lie.

To get a good after market cooler to slap on the card it would end up costing me around $100 for one that fit this particular card… and it just didn’t think it was prudent to throw more money at it when the end result might be the same. I have mostly stuck with GeForce cards because quite honestly they are what I know. I know how they perform, I know how to tweak the settings. This was a brief foray into the concept of owning a Radeon but I am now retreating back into the realm of things I understand. I ordered a MSI GTX 960 card over the weekend and hopefully if everything works out as planned it will be here Tuesday. While this is not the screaming card the r9 290x should have been… it is at least stable, reliable and a significant upgrade over the 750 ti I currently have. I just want games to run without much futzing, and this card should allow me to do that. Also due to a promotion I apparently get a copy of Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt to play around with on it, a game I likely would have picked up anyways.

Most Improved

Marvel Heroes is one of those games that I have avoided like the plague for reasons I don’t fully understand. I played a tiny bit of it in beta and was not extremely impressed. However over time it has racked up a wide array of “most improved” titles from the various gaming sites. I always thought this was a funny concept to be touting… but in truth it is really well deserved. Earlier in the week I had decided to install the game through steam, because I kept seeing friends of mine playing it. I figured I would give it a shot and check it out to see how enjoyable it actually was. The end result was me spending three hours straight playing it last night without really realizing it. The game has the super hero feel down perfectly, and it actually does a better Diablo than Diablo at this point. When you start you are given a choice of several heroes, and after reading the descriptions of each of them… it seemed like Captain America fit my desired mode of play the best.

The irony of this is that other than enjoying the movies, I have never really been that big of a fan of Captain America. At the very least it was not a comic I ever read or spent much time on other than his involvement with the Avengers. Character wise however he is just about perfect a mix of a solid melee, solid ranged, and lots of defensive cooldowns. I guess you would assume that a character with a shield as a weapon would end up feeling pretty tanky right? My favorite thing about him is the shield throw and the ability to use it similar to Sivir in League of Legends to sweep the room and take out a bunch of bad guys. At this point I think I am level 11 and am actively looking forward to playing more of it. There are times it feels so much like a top down City of Heroes, so maybe this is the game that is going to finally give me my superhero mmo fix. I’ve heard the end game can get pretty grindy… but then again so does Diablo, so I guess it makes sense. In any case I threw some money their way for the X-Force pack through steam and look forward to trying all of those characters as well.