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Predictions and Dots

December 17, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Predictions

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status. All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today. The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater… in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie. If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day. At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be. For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%. I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot. That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not. So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions. Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck. I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers… but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory. There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character. So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie. It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money. It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han… will transfer to his daughter. My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive… only to kill him off again. This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on. For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe… their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side. Now I simply do not know. I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke. I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts. There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead. I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie. That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought… and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett? I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one. My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid. I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow. I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics. I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times… could just literally be latent force sensitivity. I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie. I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels. I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today… in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off. It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening… Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill. So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests. The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity. I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it… it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped. Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge… because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters. The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens. If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia… you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount… which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock. Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up. The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content. Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing. Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling. If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks. I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons… but always struggled with getting into the spirit. However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes. So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working. I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.

Week in Gaming 12/13/2015

December 13, 2015 by Belghast

Blogging is Hard

I’ve been in a bit of a relative funk this week, and found it extremely hard to get started writing most mornings. It is like for whatever reason my will to put fingers to keyboard and make important sounding things happen… has been drained out of me. At this point we are a few months away from going three whole years worth of blog posts, and I guess in a way it is having its toll on me. At this point I have far more regular readers than I have ever had at any other point in the blogs history, and that is freaking awesome. The fact that I have so many supportive people with my back… is ultimately the thing that keeps me moving forward on days like today. We recorded this insanely huge podcast last night where we took the normal crew of myself, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen… and included some other friends InkyBrushes, Nephsys and Pizzmaid. Sadly we were missing Ash but he had his own version of a really rough week. Combined we focused a single topic… and recorded for over two hours… which compressed down to just under it. The problem being… by the time I did even the most basic editing pass… it was around one in the morning.

I’ve been fighting what I think is largely sleep deprivation most of the week, and it has ended up with me falling asleep as early as 8 pm on a couple of the nights. Well granted I went to bed at 8pm… and read comics on my new kindle but still I ended up drifting off to sleep about 30 minutes to an hour later. I have been getting a lot of use out of my Marvel Unlimited account, and largely using it to read the backlog of awesome Star Wars comics. At first I went through what was available of the modern series, namely Star Wars and the Vader series. I started on the Princess Leia series but struggled with it, mostly because I simply was not a huge fan of the art style. Recently though I have been running back through and reading the Knights of the Old Republic series from the start. I am maybe a dozen episodes in at this point and I am loving it… this totally feels like I am consuming comics in the same way I binge Netflix shows. I just wish the lag between print and them showing up on Marvel Unlimited was not quite so great. The latest issues of the modern Star Wars comic to show up are from August of this year, but what I am really hoping is that they release the issues on a semi-monthly basis just with that lag. I can totally deal with reading comics late… I just want to be able to read them with a certain regularity.

World of Shipyards

This week has largely been about reconciling my differences with the Shipyard system. I commented last week that they were essentially a worst possible version of the Garrison system…. and in many ways I don’t have a significant change in that opinion. What did change however is that I realized that after so many of you told me about it… the Garrison addon I was already using had built in functionality to automate a good deal of the shipyard bullshittery as well. The end result is that I have somehow managed to learn to live with the Shipyards and they have rewarded me well for my blind submission. At this point between the three characters that have them… I have earned a hippo mount, a bunch of hellfire citadel gear caches, and more left sharks than I could ever have a use for… I seriously have three sitting in the inventory of my MooCowAdin. The problem with all of this of course is the fact that I now need to feed the beast that is the shipyard, and the only reliable way of doing this… is schlepping out to Tanaan jungle and completing the daily mission. Now some of my characters have been stockpiling oil from Garrison missions for along time now and won’t really have this problem… but Belghast is constantly struggling to pay his daily upkeep.

Other than this I have been slowly inching up my gear levels on Belghast and Belgrace, and attempting to run the Timewalking event on my alts… that can actually benefit from the 660-675 gear that they can drop. The funniest part of the week however has been learning that I don’t simply remember the BC era content as being significantly rougher… that it actually really is. PUG groups are simply not prepared for mobs that crowd control and fear the hell out of players… and are in no way ready for just how hard everything hits. There have been more wipes from the party finder than I have had in ages… and I am really enjoying every minute of it. The alliance side… has been a colossal mess of chain group joins and splits until finally we push through the dungeon. Horde side on the other hand.. people just buckle down and pick themselves up after a wipe and keep pushing forward. I guess when you have to wait through a thirty minute dps queue… you are significantly less likely to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble. Alliance will always be my first home because that is where my army of alts lives… but I have to say Horde is growing on me really quickly.

Fabian Strategy Lives

I know I spent a good deal of my post yesterday gushing about the new and revised Fabian Strategy… but seriously I am in love with this gun. It had been roughly a month since I had seriously spent much time in Destiny, and yesterday I poked my head back in. Apart from being woefully out of practice, I am still amazed at just how fun the moment to moment play is in this game. I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to play Battlefront, and the gameplay just doesn’t hold a candle to just how good Destiny feels. Now that I have this weapon that allows me to abuse all of my instincts, I can see myself really settling on it as my main gun. Now I have said that numerous times… and I know I said it recently with the Xhalo Supercell… but seriously…. this gun is amazing. I will always be a Titan at heart, because I want to play like a tank in most games. This gun makes me FEEL like a tank, because the chance of regeneration upon kill ends up firing a lot more frequently than I think most people realize. There have been several strikes that I survived entirely because of this weapon constantly triggering my shield regeneration. It is my goal this week to pop in periodically, and not go quite so long between play sessions.

Long Live Fabian Strategy

December 12, 2015 by Belghast

Where is Xur

For the last month or so I have not really been that heavily engaged in Destiny. In fact I have flat out missed the opportunity to pick up a few decent items from Xur and Armsday as a result. In fact there was a Suros Pulse Rifle a few weeks back with Full Auto that I am really wishing I had managed to get in on while it was available. As a result the last few weeks I have started at least logging into the WhereIsXur.com website to at least see what he is still Friday mornings. This week I noticed he was selling the Monte Carlo, a year one juggernaut of a weapon… and I believe it was a PlayStation Exclusive until year two. I have heard so many other auto rifles compared to this one, that I have always wanted to use it… if for no reason other than having a proper frame of reference. The challenge however is that I only had 8 strange coins… and purchasing any weapon is 23 strange coins. This meant that at some point this weekend I would have to do some grinding.

So last night I set out to grind a little on my Titan and my Hunter for the hopes of getting there without a ton of issue. One awesome thing however when I logged in is that apparently if you are signed up for the destiny email letter you get an in game package of strange coins for every character. Or at least I got three separate allotments of three strange coins, which immediately greatly helped out my mission. Also while grinding I got the amazing ship that you see above. I am not sure why but collecting emblems and ships makes me happy, especially now that with the kiosk you can give them to any of your characters without much issue. I am not sure about the paint job, but I have wanted a ship of this style for awhile. I’ve been relatively lucky so far with picking up ships from the Dreadnaught chests, and I believe this is like my fourth one. After a bit of grinding and doing quests… and not managing to get any strange coins I went with a different avenue. I noticed that both the Hunter and the Titan were not too terribly far off from the next rank of their faction… so I spent some motes of light to get a package with guaranteed 4 strange coins each.

The Monte Carlo

I ended up transferring all of the coins over to my hunter and giving him the Monte Carlo. It might seem odd, but I felt kinda bad about robbing the “good” Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle from that character earlier, and still had not found another Auto Rifle that really made me happy for that character. I am attributing feelings… to the characters I am playing… which is strange as hell but whatever… it is I guess a me thing. I spent a bit roaming around the Dreadnaught shooting things, and I have to say… I love this style of Auto Rifle. It reminds me about a lot of the things I liked about that Zarinaea-D, high rate of fire and good stability… and not amazing impact but not nearly as low as some of the other high rate of fire weapons. I’ve not really had time to finish leveling this weapon, but the whole dealing damage reduces melee cooldown thing is nice especially in a closer quarters fight. The increased hip fire accuracy thing is largely useful for me… because there is rarely a situation where I am not aiming down the sights… even if for just doing some quick sighting. Other than that… probably going Send It to increase range and accuracy, and then Aggressive Ballistics.

I am really liking this weapon because it feels good, and significantly different from most of the Auto Rifles that I have been using. Especially since Auto Rifles have improved in the recent patch… I am really thinking this is going to end up being the trademark weapon for my hunter. I would absolutely steal it for my Titan main… but I have a new main crush as far as weapons go for him that I will get into shortly. So if you have the coins laying around… or even if you don’t and you think you can get the coins together before Xur disappearing late tonight I would highly suggest picking it up. It is a solid weapon all around, and seems like it would be a work horse for both PVP and PVE content. The main difference is I am highly likely to go High Caliber rounds at some point, because I really love it when a weapon can stagger. I have a bad habit of wanting to run up on a target rather than running away… and this play style absolutely fits the titan… but does not at all really fit the hunter other than if you plan on knifing them.

Fabian Strategy

I have honestly liked the Fabian Strategy since the moment I first used it. This is the Titan exclusive exotic weapon that you get from the Gunsmith quests at I believe Rank 3. From the start it felt like a Titan weapon, with its strange battering ram/shield thing on the front, and as I have said before… a lot of my enjoyment of games is the way they feel moment to moment. The problem with the weapon as a whole is however, that as every guide will tell you… this weapon was a casualty of the early balancing changes in the game. The thing that sets the Fabian Strategy apart from just a decent legendary auto rifle… is the Front Lines perk which states that “the weapon has increased handling, stability and rate of fire when enemies are close”. This was such a negligible change that most people simply thought the weapon was broken. Instead it is much more likely that they just thought the weapon was overpowered and nerfed it into oblivion in Taken King testing. This gun in the hands of a pre-nerf Sunbreaker, would have essentially meant that they would be unstoppable killing machines. But it turns out… that the sunbreaker on its own… did a pretty good job of being that anyway.

With the latest patch, they finally “fixed” this gun and I have to say I am freaking in love with it. This gun plays to all of my bad habits… and rewards me for them. Crowd Control… kills with this weapon grant bonus damage for a short time, combined with Life Support… mean that by picking off smaller mobs while engaged you can increase your survival quite a bit. What this feels like in practice is more like a life drain ability in say a MOBA… where you can take out little minions to help increase your sustain. This allows me to do stupid things and charge the enemy…. which procs Front Lines. It is hard to describe quite what the difference is, but when the perk kicks in it literally feels like you just doubled your rate of fire. I am sure that is not quite what is happening, but in any case… the difference is noticeable and the weapon becomes this machine gun of doom while the proc is happening. Combine this with the fact that the weapon has always done a decent job of staggering mobs… earlier when taking these screenshots I staggered an Ogre with it. It finally feels like the archetypal “Titan” weapon that it is supposed to be. This thing is going to be fun in strikes, which I hope to be able to do a little later today. I am extremely happy with this patch so far, especially since I have spent a lot more time playing a defender titan than I have a sunbreaker lately.

Valor and Bribery

December 11, 2015 by Belghast

Valor in Name Only

Wow-64 2015-12-11 06-19-54-04

One of the big struggles I have had coming back is wrapping my head around the current state of Valor currency. There are many times in playing World of Warcraft where actually having a large volume of ancestral knowledge about the game… makes it a severe detriment. One of the big things that interested me in WoW was the fact that they were supposedly resurrecting the concept of Valor points earned from doing things. In the past this was important because ultimately you were able to purchase raid quality gear, and they served as a sort of “bad luck token” as my friend Rylacus and I thought of them. While they always sort of half assed the implementation, it did provide you with a bit of a way to offset your bad loot roll luck, by purchasing much needed tokens from saving up valor for several weeks. Granted it could have been a better system all along had they just offered all of the drops from raid bosses, on a vendor somewhere for varying prices to denote the importance of the drop. There were expansions where this token was done extremely well, and others where all you could purchase were a sequence of frustrating “offbrand” items that were never quite as good as the ones that came from the raid.

However as a raider… I always appreciated the fact that there was generally some upgrade path that I could take without relying purely on my luck. It never bothered me that those “damned dirty casuals” were able to get the same gear I could from out of the raid. In fact I liked the fact that there were many paths to end game viability, and I always thought this was one of the things that World of Warcraft struggled with. Apexis was supposed to be the solution to all of our gearing problems, or at least it seemed like that was intended to be the case. The problem is that the items purchaseable from Apexis crystals were significantly worse in every possible way for certain specs. Maybe this was just something that I experienced in playing Gladiator, one of the Warlords expansions special snowflake classes… but none of the gear from the Apexis vendor was in any way viable. As a result I simply ignored most of it and stockpiled my tokens hoping that at some point they would be useful. Now we zoom ahead to this patch cycle, and I am raiding on both my Alliance and Horde characters… so I kept thinking that surely I would be swimming in Valor by now.

Currency of Bribery

It turns out that is absolutely not the case, and the new version of Valor while similar in some fashions… has some fairly stark differences. In the past the best method of Valor acquisition was simply doing the raid every week. Each boss downed gave you a bit of Valor which added up quickly… and often times capped you without much effort. Now however the priority is massively different, and it feels like they are doing something that Square Enix is the master of. Bribing players to do community focused content. I finally looked up what actually awards Valor and it was a surprisingly small list of things.

100 Valor of the first Heroic of the day.
300 Valor for per mythic dungeon each week.
500 Valor for completing the weekly bonus quest.
150 Valor for completing each wing of Hellfire Citadel on LFR.
75 Valor for completing each wing of Highmaul and Blackrock on LFR.

So essentially this is no longer the currency of raiding and has instead become the currency to bribe players to participate in group content through the party finder. I am not sore about this or anything, because it makes sense. If you want to fix the queues… you need to get people into the system and what better way to do that then dangling something over their heads.

The only slight problem I have with it is that in theory they should have just introduced a brand new currency. Valor has a very specific meaning to me, as being the highest tier of raid currency. Justice points similarly has a very specific meaning to me… with them being the lower tier of activity currency. For me at least there has been a significant amount of cognitive dissonance in trying to adjust to Valor simply being this upgrade only currency. There is no gear purchasable with Valor, and instead everything you can purchase still relies on Apexis crystals… a currency that I am pretty certain will ONLY exist while we are on Draenor since lore wise they simply would not make sense anywhere else in the setting. What makes this doubly confusing is that we still have two different PVP currencies, being Honor and Conquest… and they still function in the same roles as Justice and Valor once did. Honor being the generic activity currency, and Conquest being the rationed and limited… and therefor more powerful currency. It just feels like they uprooted Justice and Valor for no reason… especially if they are going to further confuse things by introducing it in a completely watered down version later.

Late to the Party

I realize I am bringing this up a month late, and as such my discussion loses a lot of its validity in the eyes of many people. When patch 6.2.3 initially was released… I was fighting the desire to come back to the game. Then upon returning, it took me awhile to get adjusted to everything that happened in 6.2 let along the new patch content. So as often I am lagging behind. Largely I am not really that frustrated, but mostly pointing out my thoughts on the matter. As always I get to this point where I feel like a tweak here or a tweak there would greatly improve the game play experience. Where I am standing now however is that I feel like even though I really have no more upgrades available, in order to be the best player I can be… I really need to be running LFR every single week on every character that is available. If I do this however I am absolutely certain to burn out and be discarding this game into the waste bin once again. As awesome as I think Hellfire Citadel is as an actual and genuine raid… it is equally horrible in the LFR experience. So I am at this wall of… do I just accept that I won’t be progressing as quickly as I could be… or do I keep throwing myself against some content that I am not enjoying that much. I have to say… I am actually finding myself missing daily quests that I could do for Valor points.