Rift Archives - Page 4 of 43 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Seasonal Bits

October 21, 2016 by Belghast

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me. Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely. For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters. Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies. I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar. The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny. From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV… while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there. This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves. Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory. This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along. Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool. I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection. I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes. The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well. Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution. That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being. I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image. This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post. I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning… which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it. DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result. I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb. Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog. In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season. I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

March 7, 2025August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

Rift

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.

Starfall Prophecy

August 5, 2016 by Belghast

Expansion Teaser

For a little bit now there have been rumors about the impending announcement of Rift 4.0, namely due to some data-mined zone names floating around. Nightmare Tide and I had a bit of a rocky start and it was only recently that I managed to level through the content and hit the level cap. Originally I thought that this expansion might be based on the Plane of Fire, given a few of the leaked zone names. However it seems like this expansion ties directly into the last raid of Nightmare Tides the Comet of Ahnket. Based on the teaser information on the Starfall Prophecy promotion page, it seems as though the Comet Ahnket has been picking up bits and pieces of the planes as it hurdles towards Telara, and as a result this inhabitable world has been created that we now need to go to in order to find a way to stop it. This combined with some of the artwork shown on the site makes it seem like this expansion will be an amalgam of elements, or at least Life and Fire.

I have to say some of the new assets that are seen on the site are really damned cool. Prime example is that I have zero clue what sort of machine this thing is, other than it seems to be themed with a similar face to the Comet of Ahnket content. It looks amazing and I will be more than happy to fight it, and I am hoping that this is some sort of zone event boss. Mostly it seems like this expansion is going to be a huge world with lots and places to explore. I think one of my big issues with Nightmare Tide is that in the grand scheme of things… the color palette was extremely difficult to get used to. It isn’t nature to see a landscape of violent purples and oranges everywhere, and trying to read that as something to roam around in. While places like Goboro Reef eventually grew on me with time, it was a long adjustment period. This on the other hand seems more familiar, like the same sort of zone treatment we saw in Storm Legion, but this time instead for a much more fire influenced setting rather than death. Between now and launch however I either need to actually find a group to do Comet of Ahnket raid, or watch a play-through so I can soak up some of the information about what is happening there. One of the things I love about Rift raids is that they are so full of story, that plays out around you as you move through it. Unfortunately there is not a “Chronicle of Ahnket” or Intrepid Adventure for it… so that means I will actually have to try and find a pick up group to see the story-line.

New Features

On the promotion website it lists a whole slew of stuff under the title of “Claim the Power of Ahnket”, and some of them are pretty interesting sounding.

Increased Level Cap: 70
Legendary Powers
New Zones
New Dungeons
New Raid
Planar Assault Adventures
Fortress Sieges
Looking For Raid
Individual Reward System
Active Upgrades
Eternal Item Rarity
Planar Fragments

These all sound interesting, but we don’t really have a ton of information to go on yet. It is my hope that between now and the expansion release, they start showing off various features of the expansion during the Friday streams. Unfortunately I have other plans today, and the time shift means that it is happening while I will be in the middle of a family dinner. However I am fully expecting this weeks stream to be epic, showcasing a lot of new features but in limited detail. Of the above list the two that stand out the most are “Looking For Raid” and “Individual Reward System”. Now these have caused drama in games that implemented them, but I have to say after having lived with them for awhile… I’ve become a fan. There was a time when I was strictly against the whole content of LFR, and probably said some things against it. That was also a version of me that had a dedicated raid team, and access to the best gear said raiding could provide. The current version of me however just wants to experience the content and play all of these various games that I want to play. For example in Rift I don’t really have a large group of friends who happen to be playing the game, or at the very least not in the density that I have elsewhere. As a result it is extremely hard for me to figure out how to get anything started, and I would absolutely lean on LFR like a crutch the same way I do currently on the Intrepid Adventure system. Because of this.. the Individual Reward system only makes sense, that way you are not trying to roll against other players but are instead getting your own personalized loot.

The other things on that list that really interest me are Planar Assault Adventures and Fortress Sieges. The Planar Assault Adventures sounds like absolutely something that would be down my alley, and I am hoping these are somewhat like chronicles in that they can be completed solo or with a group either one. I mean I know nothing about it other than the name, but they give me ideas about leading a strike team of NPCs into various planar tears to complete objectives and get back out. Hopefully the reality is even half as cool as my imagined version sounds. Fortress Sieges on the other hand seem like they might be able to go one of two ways. If they are a PVE siege of a fortified position held by Planar forces, essentially a Planar Stronghold taken to the next level… then they sound completely amazing. The other direction I could see something named like that going is some sort of open world pvp objective, and that is the point where they would lose me. I have enjoyed world objective pvp in the past, but generally speaking when a game does this… it almost always degrades into deathmatching and ganking rather than focusing on objectives. Essentially right now I know next to nothing other than a bunch of names, but regardless I am extremely excited about the prospects of what this expansion might bring. As you can see from the above image.. I have already proudly put in my pre-order and am now riding around on my very awesome drake mount.

Kittens and Gaming

July 5, 2016 by Belghast

Tiny Babby

It was a good weekend, if not a very rainy one as a whole. This made for an extremely humid evening last night for fireworks and festivities. Our plans largely backfired because in the past we have been able to see the fireworks from the comfort of our back yard. This time around however they apparently switched locations, and the bulk of the fireworks were hidden behind a stand of trees. All of that aside however the highlight of my weekend was the little guy that I am feeding above. Now to clear up some confusion… we did not adopt him but did however drive like an hour and some change to go up and see him. My Mother-In-Law found this little guy abandoned, but I am a bit fuzzy on the details. All I know is zero sign of mother and probably about a week old when she found him. She has been nursing him with a bottle as pictured, and at this point we think he is somewhere between two and three weeks old. Completely sweetheart who seemed to really like my beard. He would curl up under it and start kneading the underside of my chin. My wife took lots of pictures of me feeding him… as to why it ended up with me feeding him that is anyones guess. He seemed to take the bottle better from me, and growing up we had barn kitties… who sometimes were not that keen on being a proper momma. So I remember occasionally having to nurse a litter by hand so I guess that muscle memory just kicked in. We have no plans to adopt this little guy because he seems to be in just fine hands already. Though I will admit… it was hard not to try and take him home with us.

Forty Five

I spent a good deal of my weekend playing ArcheAge and as of last night I am level forty five. This means that for the last two zones I have been leveling exclusively in the mixed faction regions that are more or less open PVP. This was a huge point of anxiety around launch that ultimately I could not hit the level cap without venturing out into zones where folks could gank me. As it turns out… everyone seems to have something better to do with their time. I’ve spent many an hour out in the mixed zones and while I have seen a ton of “red” players not a single one has bothered me. Granted that might be simply because I am higher level than they were, or it might also be that they are focused on more important things. So essentially I have leveled the same as I did before, and enjoyed questing… with just the slightest awareness in the back of my head that I am not entirely safe. Largely I just shifted to a point of view where if I am going to go afk… I go find a Nui shrine to do so near because of the peace aura surrounding them. As far as leveling goes… I am slightly ahead of the curve more than likely thanks to the Patron buffs. I am largely ignoring crafting and spending a meager pittance of labor points on opening lootbags and gear, which has kept me outfitted and is a shocking amount of experience. I tend to let the bags collect while I am working on a quest hub, and then before moving to the next open them all and stash the crafting materials in the warehouse before moving on. I had honestly wondered if I would hit a wall when I moved into the open pvp zones, but so far the game is just as fun as it was beforehand and I am moving along smoothly.

Taming Familiars

Another game that I have been poking around in is Riders of Icarus after talking about it over the week with the AggroChat crew. The character on the right is my Beserker, and the character on the left is Tamrielo’s rogue of some sort. It is shocking how when left to our own devices… we end up creating pretty similar looking characters. In both cases we even purposefully decided to go with a hairstyle that is unlike what we normally choose… yet we still seemed to have chosen the exact same alternate appearance. The game as a whole is doing some interesting things, with the central feature that makes it special being that you can go around taming mounts and combat pets. Unfortunately unlike ArcheAge you cannot have both a mount and a combat pet at the same time… or at least I couldn’t figure out how to make that work. There are certain aspects of the game that remind me of a whole slew of other games, but more than anything they seem to be focused on the player fantasy of mounted combat… namely mounted aerial combat with a crossbow or lance. This so far is the least enjoyable part of the game for me, because well… so far I suck horribly fighting in the air because it feels like I lose all situational awareness and often back into another mob while dancing around the one I am currently fighting.

Last night I managed to get to some sort of a proper dungeon and was pleased to see that you could complete it in a solo fashion, or with a full group. The feel of the zone is extremely similar to Ragefire Chasm in World of Warcraft, but nonetheless fun and interesting. I am wondering if on higher difficulties you have more than the single boss at the end of the cavern which is the golem pictured above. I’ve played this game quite a bit and I am still not sure if I like it or not. I think I might need to play the Guardian tank class a bit to see if that is maybe more my speed, because generally speaking I enjoy playing dps… but my heart is never really in it. The game can be set up to run in a traditional action bar combat method or through left/right mouse button action combat style. What I find personally works best is a bit of a hybrid between the two… namely setting the game into Action Mode but also using hotbar combat. The biggest challenge for me right now is the fact that all of my attacks are fairly slow… and animation locked so dodging and avoiding attacks becomes a challenge. I am enjoying the game enough to keep playing, but just not sure if it is different enough from the other games I am playing to keep my attention for the long haul. If you are out there playing Riders of Icarus feel free to throw Belghast a friend invite.

Crafting Away

As for Rift I am stuck in a bit of a holding pattern for the moment. Each night I focus largely on completing all of the daily crafting quests for the various purple, blue and green currencies. However I guess I have reached a point where I should probably venture into the world for real. Over the weekend I managed to cap both the purple and blue currencies, and even though I spent them down a bit… that tells me that maybe I have focused too intently on this one aspect of the game. I’ve been making almost nightly trips out into Goboro Reef… that I found out from Captain Cursor I have been calling by the wrong name all of this time. The zone was one that I did not really like a first, but for Karthite and Sarleaf farming I find it extremely relaxing. At some point I need to just break the pattern and focus on pushing my way further into the Planetouched Wilds. Either that or start up with the running of experts again, because I am still far from ideally geared. However I am not sure if Experts or Intrepid Adventures are the better option at the moment. I am really looking forward to the change to the Warlord soul that is up on the PTS, because I have always enjoyed playing it… at least significantly more so than the Paragon soul that I am currently using. I always liked the rhythm of landing Piercing Thrust after a combo point dump attack. It feels good to see a single attack deal that sort of damage, and supposedly the PTS changes restore the soul to general viability, which I am absolutely looking forward to.