World Of Warcraft Archives - Page 91 of 139

Hards for Cards

February 26, 2015 by Belghast

Feeling Mostly Human

I guess for better or worse the second day of medication trick worked again. Round about the time I took my fourth dose of prednisone I started feeling more or less human again. Today I am feeling significantly better, but I am going to try not to push myself terribly hard. The goal will be to simply take things slow and do what I can. I got out long enough to go to the grocery store yesterday, as my wife suggested I get some vitamin C in me… and simply walking around long enough to gather up a few items damned near killed me. So here is hoping I can successfully navigate my way to work and back home again.

I want to take a moment real quick to thank all the folks who have been constantly checking on me. I log in each morning to a barrage of “feeling any better yet?” and I have to say it makes me feel really damned lucky to have some awesome friends. This has legitimately been the worst I have felt in a really long time. Largely I have kept people in the loop so they don’t expect miracles from me during this period of time. I missed the raid on Monday completely, and barely made Tuesdays. Time will tell if I make it through today with enough energy to be able to make the one tonight. Largely I figure there is nothing I do in any of them that could not be missed for a week if I absolutely had to. Mostly right now I am dreading going back to work after being away for a day and a half. But I will struggle through with at least a feigned smile.

Hards for Cards

We have decided to copyright the term “Hards for Cards” because while it sounds a little rude… it accurately describes what we largely did last night. There are many ways to earn triple triad cards. The two primary ways revolve around either repeatedly dueling NPCs hoping to get lucky, or repeatedly running dungeon and raid content… also hoping to get lucky. I have to say though, given the two options I would far rather run the dungeons and raids, because at least then I am also gaining tomestones. I started off solo queuing for Trial Roulette, giving me a random assortment of whatever trials that folks seemed to be running. For the most part all of the primal trials have a chance of dropping their Triple Triad card equivalent. Before long we had a small team of us running Trials, and towards the end of the evening a full eight man. Through all of the content I ran last night I managed to get the Ultros/Typhon card and the Good King Moggle Mog card… which are both far better cards than anything I had managed to earn through an NPC Triple Triad duel.

The other big accomplishment last night was through through an influx of tomestones from all the random trials… I was able to purchase the 110 weapon for my last 50. Granted I have a slew of classes that I have yet to level to 50, but as of now I have 110 weapons for WAR, BRD, DRG, WHM and as of last night PLD. This also means that since all of my gear is currently WAR/PLD that both of my tanks are sitting at ilevel 116 which makes me pretty pleased. I am not sure how much action my paladin is going to actually get however, since I have a definite preference towards the warrior style of tanking… but I would like to at least bring it out of mothballs now and then for duty roulette. I really need to psyche myself up to tank more for the duty finder. The community is pretty great most of the time, and there is really nothing but my own anxiety keeping me from doing it. I just greatly prefer tanking for friends… and last night I tanked several instances and really enjoyed myself. I just need to push myself to do it more with strangers, considering I would definitely not mind the constant gil bonus for queuing as a tank.

The Little Things

I have essentially bankrupted myself in World of Warcraft purchasing all of the heirloom items that I had access to, but had yet to pick up. The majority can be purchased in the museum in Ironforge, however a handful can still only be purchased on the guild vendor. Thankfully these have all had their cost lowered to the 500g for the level 60 step. In the course of picking up the last few items I noticed a doodad for sale on the vendor that I had not seen before. The item was called “Garrison Guild Banners” and did precisely what the name said. I think this is probably a testament to just how few heroics I actually ran in this expansion given that apparently you get one from an achievement earned by completing all of the heroic dungeons. I am guessing it is upper blackrock spire that I never actually completed. The item was cheap, 100g but man has it added a lot of enjoyment to my garrison.

Another little thing I can check off my list is that I finally have the level 2 Menagerie unlocked. I was never one of those people that really had much issue with the fact that the Pet Menagerie was essentially a dead spot in my Garrison. I simply never had leveled a pet to 25, and as a result was not able to participate in the quest used to unlock the Menagerie in the first place. I always felt kind of bad that as much as I like mini-pets… that I had not really spent much time playing WoW Pokemon. However with the 6.1 patch they introduced a simple quest that allows you to earn an Ultimate Battle-Training Stone… which in essence boosts one pet from level whatever to level 25 the current cap. This is available to every level 100 character you have with a tier 3 Garrison, so I managed to build a team of three level 25 pets shortly after logging in on Tuesday.

I did no research at all, and instead went with three of my favorite pets… which is a fact that I am sure will make my life more difficult. I went with the Terrible Turnip largely because its special ability should make the capture of pets more easy… which is the main reason why I wanted a level 25 pet in the first place. After that I chose to level my next two favorite pets… Mini Thor from the Starcraft II Collectors edition, and Murkalot which was a Blizzcon bonus item. Currently the team makes me happy… but I doubt I will be wrecking much face anytime soon. If nothing else they should allow me to power level additional 25s with greater ease. With my heirlooms, and my new pet army… I am poised to start working on my Horde alts. So that is likely going to be one of my many downtime activities in the near future. In the meantime… keep being awesome readers, and I will see you all tomorrow!

#FFXIV #WoW #TripleTriad

Triple Triad Anyone?

February 25, 2015 by Belghast

Miserable Defined

I am getting my morning post out extremely late today, because I have been attempting to sleep. Since last Thursday I have been fighting something and going into crazy coughing fits. Finally yesterday I went to the doctor and it turns out it is a bad case of bronchitis they are worried may turn into pneumonia. As such I am resting as much as I can, but I am in this odd state of limbo. They gave me a Z-Pack of antibiotics and some prednisone, but there are times the cure feels worse than the problem. I grew up a sick kid, and constantly taking doses of prednisone to get over whatever issue I happened to have at the moment. I am not sure if this is an all people thing or just the way my body metabolizes the drug, but it puts me in this state of being ravenously hungry, unable to sleep, and alternating between freezing cold and burning hot.

My blog post is happening so late because I thought I would try and get as much sleep as I could this morning. Unfortunately the moment after I got to bed in earnest… I went into the regular course of coughing fits. I really need to find a way to sleep standing up comfortably. I’ve never been one of those people that could actually sleep in a recliner, though as I type this I am at least attempting to rest on the sofa. I am hoping today is the day when things start to turn around. Generally speaking the second day on prednisone starts with you feeling considerably worse and then by that evening life is starting to get better again. In the mean time my kitten is being adorable beside me on the sofa and keeping my company.

Triple Triad Anyone?

Yesterday was an insanely huge day for MMO patches. In Final Fantasy XIV 2.51 was patched in unleashing upon the world the greatest time sink ever… Triple Triad. When Final Fantasy XIV came out, it was during the heyday of collectible card gaming. So I was floored when I saw that they had their own deviously simple card game inside of a game. I remember farming monsters to get gold, to buy better cards… to ultimately get a better deck so I could duel NPCs… and win better cards. It was one giant feedback loop that kept me enthralled for months as I tried to collect all of the cards in the game. I was so into this game that I tracked down physical cards and purchased a handful of extremely expensive for the time imported packs. Nowadays single packs are selling on ebay for upwards of $60… I think maybe I paid like $5 a pack at the time… which I thought was highway robbery. Now I can play the game inside of another game I already love… and so far I have not really left the Golden Saucer other than to duel npcs out in the world.

Though honestly… as amazing as the Manderville Golden Saucer is… who would want to go anywhere else? I know there is more to this patch than this one attraction but I feel like this is the part that I have been waiting on since it was first announced. I puttered around trying out each of the minigames, and so far the one that is easiest to increase your Manderville Gold Points, the currency needed by all Golden Saucer games, is the strength tester. It costs a single MGP to play, and if you can press the hammer at exactly the right moment you can get 5 MGP in return. This will take forever, but should be able potential way to earn enough money safely if you so choose. Triple Triad on the other hand has significantly better payouts, so my hope is that I can build a good enough deck to regularly dual the King and win. There are already videos online with some strategies for winning against the king with the default deck. Right now however my priority as always will be to win more cards.. because that is the part of the game that is interesting to me.

Heirlooms for Everyone

Not to be outshined, yesterday was also the release date of the 6.1 patch in World of Warcraft. With it came a number of quality of life changes like the brand new heirloom system. One of the coolest things about it, was the fact that any heirlooms that you owned, got bumped up to level 90 preemptively. For the most part heirlooms seem to be around 500g for the level 60 version, 1500g or so for the upgrade to 90, and then 5000g or so for the upgrade to level 100. All of which seem really reasonable to me. The best feature is that you can have the same heirloom on as many characters as you like. As such my army of horde alts are now fully kitted out in heirloom gear for at least level 60. To make the process a little easier they introduced a new currency called Misprinted Draenic Coins that actually give us a proper reason to do a daily heroic! You can turn these in for the items used to upgrade your heirlooms.

In other news, last night I limped through the raid even though I likely should have done so. I performed pretty shitty all night long, but I did well enough to keep from screwing anyone else up. We started the night with Gruul, moved to Hans and Franz and then Darmac before starting in work once more on Oregorger. We finally either reached a point in gear where we could handle the damage and healing, or we simply got better at moving… but whatever it was we managed to finally defeat Oregorger removing what had become a physical and mental wall. The other night when we tried Kagraz it seemed like we could get that fight down without much more effort. Similarly I think we will be preparing to play with trains and Operator Thogar. My hope is that we can get back our momentum and get closer to clearing the instance on normal at least. My hope is that soon we will give at least Gruul a poke on heroic. We have that fight pretty well under control, so I can’t see as how we should not be clearing the first bosses of each wing on heroic before too much longer. In the meantime I am hoping my medication kicks and I can return to live as normal… because being sick sucks.

Flamebending for Fun

February 18, 2015 by Belghast

Serious Time with Bel

This morning I am going to break from my normally positive fluffy posts to talk about something fairly serious. Hopefully you will bear with me, because it is a topic I believe strongly about. A few days ago my good friend Jaedia crafted an excellent post talking about her frustrations and outright anger with sexual objectification especially in video game culture. This sparked an interesting discussion among both the women and men on my twitter feed, and I personally ended up rebroadcasting it twice for emphasis. Over the years I have watched as my female friends have had to constantly battle everything from largely harmless statements to the downright creepy and dangerous. What happens time and time again is there is this thread where folks are discussing a specific topic… and then out of the blue some guy will make a comment inappropriately off topic. Then almost by queue it happened to this very discussion.

I’ve decided to mosaic the information about the person and the participants in the discussion to attempt their anonymity. Granted you can scroll through my feed and likely find out who this is about, but in truth I don’t think the guy in question meant any real harm by it. The problem is it was just tragically timed, and interrupting a conversation about objectification. Essentially he was being the poster child of this thing that everyone was talking about being frustrated about… IN the discussion about it. When I called him out on it, he immediately got defensive which is exactly the wrong action to take. If someone calls you out on something in regards to something that is making another person uncomfortable… your reaction should be to re-evaluate this action you just took, not to mount a defense against the “slander”.

After a mountain of back and forth, of Jae and I trying to explain what exactly the transgression was, we get down to the real root of the problem. He quite literally did not care what the conversation was about, and instead felt the need to chime in with his comment. There is this ingrained feeling of the divine right to pass judgment on the appearance of others, made worse by the thought that they should do it against the context of the current conversation. The comment that was made was completely harmless and in the right context would have been perfectly acceptable. However I have seen this play out time and time again… Female friend posts a serious topic, and guys below comment about how pretty she is. Do you not realize just how creepy that seems? The guy in question apparently did not, and he spent awhile raging that we were picking on him for having a penis, completely missing the point. My hope is that by posting about this others might think twice before they interrupt the context of a conversation to essentially objectify the speaker with something completely off topic.

Flamebending for Fun

Last week was a rough week for our raid. We had several people out with the death flu and as a result quite literally half of our healing corp was absent. Early in the day on Thursday it sounded like we were not actually going to raid. After talking to our raid lead, he told me not to worry about rushing home… and instead went out to eat with my wife and ran a few errands. When I got home they were knee deep in Highmaul and I am uncertain what the final results of it were. As a result of not raiding since last Tuesday I was looking forward to hopefully getting back into Blackrock Foundry and making some forward momentum. We started the evening by taking down Hans and Franz. There are a lot of moving parts in that fight, and some RNG elements… but ultimately on our third attempt we got our second kill in the books. My luck with loot in Blackrock was not going to hold however, as I walked away with double gold.

The rest of the evening we spent working on the boss directly after Hans and Franz… Flamebender Ka’graz. She essentially is a blademaster, and as we know blademasters are good at two things… fire based attacks and spinning weapons. There are a bunch of things going on in the fight, the first is dealing with the placement of her flame slash attacks, which draw giant lines from the boss to the edge of the room and will target players outside of melee range. The next problem child is two flame wolves that act much the same as Corehounds in that you have to dps them down within a few minutes of each other, otherwise they will re-ignite the other hound. The last really frustrating attack is that she does a massive room wide fire AOE that players need to stack up for and heal through. We managed to make some solid progress on her, but for whatever reason could not seem to get all the moving parts together. On our best try we managed to get her down to around 30% I believe, but the healing on this fight and the placement of objects ends up with us slowly bleeding players until we simply do not have enough to finish the battle. My hope is with some more research we can come in Thursday and wreck her.

Attempting Neverwinter

If you remember a few days ago I had a post talking about the three games that I would like to revisit. One of them was Neverwinter by Cryptic now Perfect World, so after the raid I fired it up rather than what has become my more recent winding down game… Guild Wars 2. All told I played around 45 minutes of the game, and it was roughly how I remembered it. There are positives about it and negatives… the most glaring is this feeling that everything you actually want is somehow locked behind a confusing two tier currency system. You have Astral Diamonds and you have Zen… and the two do very similar functions. The problem is it feels absolutely arbitrary which currency is used for which thing. Since I was a preorder I got a large quantity of Astral Diamonds, but it seems like the main function of them is to speed up tasks like training your companion. All of the useful unlocks and content walls seem to be purchased with Zen. That whole mess pretty much guarantees that I would never play this game seriously.

What I was surprised by was how fun the actual dungeons were. Granted I didn’t run a “real” five man dungeon last night, but I did do one of the many lairs that the storyline weaves you in and out of. The one I completed was some sort of orc barracks, and considerably larger than the ones I remember. There were no less than three boss fights, and several hidden treasure chests. The only thing that I really disliked about the gameplay was the fact that health did not regenerate. It was something that I could get used to, but it is just so against the norm of the games I play normally. In fact I stood around waiting for awhile waiting before I realized that my health was not coming back at all… at which point I remembered that I had to use health pots. Mechanically the game is interesting, but I still have the same opinion. Elder Scrolls online just does the action combat style better. That said there is a wealth of player generated content, so more than likely I will be spending my time exploring that.

Doubling Down

February 12, 2015 by Belghast

Still Frustrated

Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it. I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning. At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go. As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope. While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go. Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are. In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next. For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark… but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world. Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”. It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words. If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list… so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem. I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow. I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either. I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well. I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change… but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play. I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case. I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over. There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past. I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features. I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse. When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways. We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre. We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet. Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place. I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better. I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem. How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released? I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game. This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits. The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already. The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events. I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world. Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere? Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential. Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home. I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV. For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha. I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul. Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different. That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons. It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally. I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking. The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight. If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along. I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often. I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night. While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.