Tales of the Aggronaut

Icecrown Pre-Patch Event

November 11, 2020 by Belghast

I am currently going through a period with an overwhelming number of options for me to spend my time with. Right now I have the following things competing for my time…

Watch Dogs Legion
World of Warcraft Shadowlands Prepatch Event
Genshin Impact 1.1
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Destiny 2 Beyond Light
PlayStation 5 (soonish hopefully)

I’ve been trying to prioritize the things that are going to go away or the things that have a specific timer to them. That means that Watch Dogs and Valhalla are probably low on the priority scale since I can at any point play them. Shadowlands Prepatch lasts until the 23rd so I am absolutely wanting to spend some time with it. Destiny 2 has weekly event timers so I am also wanting to spend some time there. Genshin Impact… at a minimum I spend enough time to do my dailies and slowly progress my adventure rank.

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time in Icecrown farming the cycle of world bosses that spawn roughly every 15 minutes. If you are going to do this thing then I highly suggest installing RareScanner. Once you have seen a single spawn, it will begin working its way through the sequence of possible spawns and not only indicate which one is currently active but point you towards the next one in sequence. You have a shot at loot off each boss once per day and from the moment it spawns there seems to be a 2 minute timer before it actually becomes active. Depending on the size of your server you may or may not have sufficient time to fly to it and get a tag in before it dies.

As a result my pattern tended to be to fly to the location the next boss spawns, and then alt tab and do something else for awhile. RareScanner will give you an audible alert when the encounter spawns in and you have roughly two minutes to flip back over and prepare to fight. Each encounter has a chance of dropping some 110 gear and also drops a 25-40 of a currency that can be turned in to a repeatable quest vendor for the Argent Seals that are used as the main currency of the event. This means on average of every 5 bosses you can get enough to purchase a piece of ilvl 100 gear that costs 15 of the Argent currency. I think it would have been better were there not the need to exchange currencies, but this fits with Blizzards design ethic that we can’t have anything nice without it also being somewhat awful in the process.

I’ve been using the event to gear up my Paladin, which I plan on maining for Shadowlands. I hit a string of luck and managed to pull a one handed mace and shield which is awesome given that I tend to level as prot, as well as a random ring. I am not really sure how much more I will farm these bosses once I have gained enough currency to finish buying a set of the ilvl 100 gear. I wish there were items available for every slot, but once again… that would be universally good and there has to be something awful about everything released. I could in theory luck out and get jewelry off the World Bosses but I feel like hoping for specific drops is a dark path of madness. There are several 2handers available, and I would love to have one of those as well just to be able to Ret if I so choose.

If you are seeking information about the event as a whole, then I highly suggest you check out the WoWHead for the Death Rising event in specific. The drop tables seem to be a little off because yesterday my friend Stargrace managed to pull an item that was not showing up as the available options. However it was on the loot table of the ORIGINAL encounter that these bosses are patterned off of. Basically they took the bosses from Icecrown and the 3 dungeons that released along side it and scattered them throughout the zone. In theory I am guessing that means anything that they could drop previously has a ilevel 110 version available. I think everyone is chasing the 34 slot bag, which I am guessing is what is going to be craftable as the high end bag for Shadowlands.

As far as Destiny… I feel like I didn’t get far enough into it last night to really write a proper post about it. So expect to see my commentary on it tomorrow.

The Traveler and The Darkness

November 10, 2020 by Belghast

Last night I spent my evening with so many other players, hanging out in a new social space in Destiny 2 and watching a pulsating orb in the sky. My timeline was filled with pictures of the Traveler and various subtle changes as we counted down towards an undetermined event. When the almighty was shot down, something similar happened as folks watched it blow up and crash in very slow motion. Similarly I think we all sort of expected the traveler to subtly change as it began to heal itself. That however was not exactly the case, and what happened was considerably more interesting.

The first challenge however was trying to get through the login queue. I started this nonsense considerably later than most folks, and as a result I had to push through a queue of other 10,000 players. I had been watching Aztecross, because I did not really plan on joining in the reindeer games yesterday. I was not there for the explosion of the Almighty, and instead watched one of the many recordings that had been posted around and sped up so you could see the whole event that took place over a number of hours in a few minutes. I am not exactly sure what it was about last night however that made me want to log in and experience it for myself.

When you logged in there was a new mission called The Last City in the Tower where the Halloween events previously showed up. When you queued for the mission you were dropped down to a copy of The Last City that you’ve experienced in a few other events and you slowly make your way to a door leading to a brand new social area. There were a bunch of rumors scattered around about needing to do something while you were in that area, but it seemed like it was mostly just a vantage point to watch the world burn… or in our case the Traveler attempt to heal itself.

At various points during the night there were a number of subtle changings taking place. The random debris started to order itself into rings. There were lightning flashes taking place between the main body of the traveler and the larger chunks that had been floating around. Just ahead of 9 pm CST something started to happen and both Eris Morn and our own Ghost started talking to us. The surface of the Traveler began to pulse and shimmer as though suddenly liquid and waves of light started to cause a shimmering heat island effect in the area from which we were watching. You can somewhat see this happening if you look at the building on the right side of the above screenshot.

My good friend Jaz Squirrel recorded the event on their widescreen set up so you can experience the final moments of Destiny 2 before things changed. For those who don’t wish to watch it in video form… as we watched the traveler continue to pulsate brighter and brighter this is what played out between Eris Morn and your Ghost.

Eris Morn: Something is coming, I can feel it…
Eris Morn: It is drawing power. Could it be enough to drive the Darkness away from us?
Your Ghost: Every fireteam has returned to the City. Even the Hunters. They’re wit the people, keeping them safe.
Your Ghost: Well, the last time this happened… the world ended.
Your Ghost: I’m not worried. I’m not.
Eris Morn: It is reforming. Healing its wounds.
Eris Morn: This will not be the end. It will be an escalation.

When the sequence completed, the Traveler grew so bright that our visuals went completely white, upon which we were left with a cinematic. The Traveler fully healed radiating light to push back against the Darkness that now swallows the entire left side of the director map. In one swoop Io, Mars, Mercury and Titan are gone from us.

For those with particularly long memories with this Franchise, this visual might seem similar. In fact during the very intro video of Destiny 1, we saw a similar representation of how the Darkness came and engulfed the solar system. It seems that not only has the Darkness arrived, but we are once again being thrust into a new apocalypses of a sort. This time however the Darkness has reached out to us and has been courting all of the races that were once the chosen of the Traveler. The events of the last several seasons have lead us to question as to whether or not the Traveler is actually the benevolent force that we think it. It has also lead us to question if the Darkness is in fact evil, or has just been wielded to ill intent by our enemies such as the Vex and the Hive.

When the cinematic finished we were left with a very ominous server offline message. “The Light cannot save you. Seek us out on Europa.” So that is precisely what we will do when the servers come back online today. We will seek our fortune on Europa and begin the next chapter of Destiny.

BFA is Faster than Timewalking

November 9, 2020 by Belghast

When I am in deeply stressful situations, I find myself leaning on the old and familiar. In this case it is in the form of World of Warcraft and leveling characters. I didn’t get a massive amount of time this weekend to play, but when I did I spent it methodically leveling my Alliance characters that have long been neglected since the early beginning of Legion. Legion was the expansion when I more or less switched sides and as a result I only had a handful of characters at the level cap. Since I finished off my Hordelings last week, that cleared the way for me to really focus on my oldest characters.

Prior to this weekend the only character I had at max level was Exeter my Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I pushed my Warrior, Death Knight, Demon Hunter and Hunter all to the level cap and am now working on my Warlock. Prior to the launch of Legion I abused that launch event and the invasions that came with it to push everything Alliance side up to level 100, which translates across to 40 in the level squish. So this means that most of my characters need ten levels in order to finish them off… which is shockingly easy to do especially in the Battle for Azeroth content.

That is one takeaway from the weekend, that the BFA content goes so much faster than trying to do the Timewalking content through Chromie. My Demon Hunter went that route and I chose to level in Outland, and it took considerably longer than any of my characters I opted for the modern zones. I am not sure if the quests are just more spread out or if it is that each individual quests rewards more experience. Whatever the case for the sake of speed I am probably going to stick to Kul Tiras for the moment. Why exactly am I doing this nonsense you might ask? I have no clue other than it gives me a good excuse not to think about other things.

As far as my Mom and Dad, I think things are going fairly well or at least as “well” as could be expected. I was up yesterday afternoon after editing the two podcasts, and attached some things to my dad’s walker in an attempt to help him navigate things a bit more easily. What he really wanted was the ability to make a cup of coffee on his own and the cup holder should in theory allow for that. he also needed some way to carry things back and forth across the house so I added a wire basket… with zip ties of course. It is surprisingly sturdy however and I think it will function in the manner he needs it to.

Thankfully in both the case of my Mom and Dad they have some more local support lined up. It would take me about an hour to get there were I not speeding, and instead they have a network of contacts that are local that they can reach out to for assistance. A friend of the family is going to be by every day this week, they are signed up for meals on wheels and home health will be there daily to work with dad. For now I think we are good… which eases my mind a little bit as I have to go back to work this week and can’t be there every day. I honestly think as good as dad is moving around, that he will probably switch over to a cane before the end of the week.

AggroChat #321 – Bring Back Lumpy

November 8, 2020 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Huge apologies for last week, but we realized entirely too late that our show recording would in fact fall on Halloween and we would be down to like two people. As a result we took the week off and now return with one of those shows that just has a random assemblage of topics. We talk a little bit about N7 Day actually having announcements and the impending re-release of the Mass Effect Trilogy that is likely to disappoint. We talk about the Star Wars Christmas special and the plans to make a brand new version which will as a result immediately become the best version. We talk a very brief bit about the Mandalorian in a relatively spoiler free manner. Bel talks a bit about the new guidance from Blizzard making key broadcasting software a bannable offense and putting an end to a specific kind of multi-boxing. Tam talks about Knights and Bikes as it is this mashup of Night in the Woods and Castle Crashers. We talk about the early days of the internet and Hypnospace Outlaw that attempts to revisit a twisted version of that. From there we end up on this side topic about GameFaqs and the early days of printing off long form Ascii guides. We wrap up with some talk about Disco Elysium and playing Mario Kart when there are skill gaps.