Tales of the Aggronaut

Capped for A Day

December 3, 2018 by Belghast

Morning folks… I am struggling today. Both in the waking up department because there is simply not enough coffee in the world… and in the illness department because I seem to be coming down with whatever the hell is going around the office. I’ve yet to decide if I can make it to work today, so we will see what happens between now and finishing this post but I am taking a breathing treatment as I type. As far as the weekend I did a bunch of assorted gaming because that seems to be how I roll right now. Instead of focusing hard on one thing I seem to be splitting my time between a bunch of things, and as a result I spent a good deal of time making tiny images and updated my “Recently Playing” sidebar. It mostly follows the post I made last week with the major exception of me apparently forgetting to include Elder Scrolls Online which I still dip my toes into occasionally.

In the Destiny 2 front I spent a good deal of the weekend knocking out anything that could get me a Powerful/Prime Engram and wouldn’t you know it… I reached 600 light the current cap. This is a cap that I will enjoy for another whole day…. because when the black armor DLC releases on December 4th the cap is going up to 650. The truth is I am fine with this.. because the last cap was quite the stretch to get to from the levels I was sitting at when Curse of Osiris released, which is unfortunately the last time I really seriously played the game. Sure I got in and did the Warmind story content and a little bit of planetary stuff but I really was not pushing myself to cap out at that point. Additionally Forsaken made it way easier for someone to play casually and reach the cap, so I am looking forward to Black Armory and some of the new open world “Forge” content as I have always dug things like the Blind Well or Archon’s Forge and Court of Oryx from Destiny 1. I need to get serious about trying to wrangle folks for the purpose of having a raid night… Squirrel keeps volunteering himself but at my count that still leaves us down four people. So if you are interested in that sort of nonsense on the PC platform drop me a line.

Since this is the first post of December I thought I would talk a bit about InPiPoMo which just finished. For years I had not joined in because I largely considered my blog cheating given the nonsense number of screenshots that I post. I apparently have a problem because the goal was to hit 50 “pictures” during the month of November to parallel NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word count goal… since a “Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. During the month without really attempting to do so I posted 93 screenshots if my quick count was correct, so yeah… that is a thing I do. Like this morning I had a screenshot of Diablo 3 on the Switch that I wanted to post but nowhere really to post it so I sort of shimmed it into this paragraph. Huge thanks to Chestnut for keeping this going this year and you should totally check out her blog Gamer Girl Confessions.

Over in Monster Hunter World the Winter Star festival is going on and with it a set of gear that you can farm. For both PC and Console players this also means that almost every event that has ever been active is active once again allowing you to farm anything you might have missed. That list is considerably smaller for PC players unfortunately, but it does let you get things like the Wyvern Ignition Great Sword and cosmetic nonsense like the Wiggler head. From what I can tell the only event that is not active is the Code Red event tied to the Devil May Cry cross over potentially because it just ended right before this event. You can however farm Kulve Taroth again until your heart is content. There is a set of lackluster armor that you can craft, or you can do what I did and cash in your tickets towards the layered armor set so you can make ANY gear look like Santa Claus. I plan on farming up enough tickets to also be able to purchase the super adorable Snowman Palico outfit… or Snow Woman in the case of Kenzie who regardless of the game is canonically female.

I’ve talked about how awesome the screenshots are at the end of fights, because they always capture you doing something interesting. In this case it is me dodge rolling out of the way of a line of lightning while everyone else is apparently downhill engaged with the monster. When you hit Hunter Rank 49, in order to make forward momentum you have to face this monster in particular… Tempered Kirin. It took me forever to manage to get this on the console and in truth it was probably only because I was getting carried super hard by Shiana that Ashgar and I wound up getting it at the same time. On the PC I’ve been dipping my toes into these waters for awhile now, and I have reached the point where it is not me that is fainting and causing us to fail… but regardless still end up failing out most of the time. Monster Hunter does this thing where the screen freezes and it can mean either you beat the encounter or someone other than you got carted and caused the whole group to fail. When the screen froze at this point… I just assumed we failed it… but in truth it turns out with one life left to go we managed to take down Tempered Kirin. I will probably NEVER fight this again… that is unless someone who has recently started the PC winds up needing help to get through it. Super happy to be moving again on the other side… which caused me to instantly shoot up to 58.

I also spent a good chunk of the weekend fiddling around in Final Fantasy XIV… which frustratingly has started doing this thing where it does not exit cleanly and strands a black fullscreen window that seemingly has the power to block task manager. This is really only a problem for me personally… since I have been streaming every bit of gaming recently from gaming desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs. When this happens I have to go upstairs and fiddling with it in order to restore functionality, which can be a bit maddening considering how regularly I am hopping games in a given evening. Regardless I have reached my first wall gear wise in the Main Story Quest and it requires me to get to 335 I believe which means I either need to buy my way out of that hole or start doing enough content to farm up some gear. I am probably going with the later given that I never was rich in Final Fantasy XIV terms. In the meantime however I have decided to revisit my old friend the Palace of the Dead to push my Dark Knight up high enough to be able to do the Heaven on High content the rest of the way to 70. Probably a significant amount of my time will be spent catching up classes so that they are ready when Shadowbringer releases tentatively next summer.

All Things Geekery is a great podcast by my friends Detached and Victus that among other topics tends to be a great source of Destiny 2 related conversations. They have been doing this thing recently where they highlight a member of the community at the beginning of their show, which I thought was a really great idea when they started this concept with the very amazing Chestnut. However I am now starting to question their mental state because apparently they saw fit to include me in this construct as well. This week I apparently am leading off the show, but really you should probably just fast forward past that and listen to their interesting discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2… a game I am super interested in but waiting to see if it releases on the PC given that is my platform of choice and I have a bad habit of rebuying games for it. You can find the podcast at…

Finally there is of course the podcast we recorded this weekend where we talk about Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World Winter Star event, what happens when MMORPGs close down, Tetris in Virtual Reality and a few other topics shimmed in between. I tend to be really bad about promoting the thing that I actually do, so I should get in the habit of talking about it more on this blog so there is some cross pollination. I am still shocked anyone reads this thing… let alone listens to me ramble on the other thing. At this point I have decided to stay home and crash this morning because I had very few things on my calendar for today. If I had a packed day of meetings I might have struggled through it and probably infected the rest of the office. Now I am going to get in some fuzzy pants and forget the world exists.

Bright Engrams Revisited

November 30, 2018 by Belghast

Over the last few nights I have been super engaged with the start of the new Destiny 2 season. One of the things I dig so much about it is how I can focus in on a different activity each night and vary up what I am doing… but still enjoy whatever it is that I am doing. I am not so much into the Crucible so I have not touched that this week yet, but one night I focused on the Planetary Flashpoint, another I really focused on Gambit, and last night for example I mostly focused on completing stuff in the Dreaming City including a bunch of Blind Well. At some point I am sure I will at least do 3 strikes and 3 heroic story missions to get the powerful engrams included. The only complaint I have to be honest is the fact that I keep getting Helmets instead of pieces of 600 gear that I actually still need for a given slot.

One of the things that came up in my little social community was some comments about loot boxes and how a friend of mine did not like the Destiny 2 implementation. On one level yeah… it is less than optimal, but after living with it for awhile and having them tweak the formula… I no longer feel it is anywhere near as heinous as some of the loot box schemes I have seen. What changed is there are a bunch of tweaks that were made, not the least of which is the fact that once you have earned an item you can always go into your collections tab. This is any weapons that are static rolls, so basically anything pre-forsaken… any ghosts, sparrows, ships, shaders, etc so essentially anything has less need for permanence which is making me way more liberal at scrapping things. As a result I almost always have a decent balance of Dust… which you can see in the above picture is like 6044. This morning I opened one of the Bright Engrams and got a skin for one of the Titan exotics, 3 shaders, and a bounty note. The skin could be scrapped but I have not collected it yet so that was not going to happen, the shaders scrap at around 10 dust per… and the bounty note is turned in for Tess Everis specific bounties that reward glimmer and dust.

Essentially I feel like the game is giving us a bunch of options to get cash shop goods without spending any real world money. There is always the problem that everything coming from a Bright Engram is super random… but that is mitigated by the fact that each week during a given season Tess is offering a bunch of items for direct purchase. Last week they had a ton of the exotic items but this week it looks like they are mostly selling legendary stuff… 2 emotes, 2 sparrows, 2 ships, 1 ghost shell, one armor piece and a couple of the exotic weapon skins. Basically this helps to mitigate the randomness of the engrams and allows you to just straight out buy the item you were wanting. Unfortunately this also means you need to be logging in each week to check out and see if Tess is selling that one thing you really wanted.

In a night of casual play I tend to get one or two engrams as the bar feels like it fills way faster than it used to. You can see in the above shot that I am pretty damned close to getting one, and that happened to be the one I opened this morning and screenshot its contents. One night this week I got 3, and last weekend there was a really heavy play day that I got four of them in a single day. Essentially I am saying that they are way more generous with said loot baubles, at least compared to how it felt when the game initially launched. This isn’t a “Belghast Luck” thing because experience game is experience gain for everyone, and sure maybe the fact that the first engram I opened this season gave me the sweet ghost rider sparrow… is luck. Anyways I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the cash shop in Destiny 2 and how it has gone from really horrible… to completely manageable. Having a cash shop in a game is always going to incur some problems, but the tweaks they have made since launch have turned this one into a completely manageable situation. The biggest change for me personally was when I realized I could re-buy shaders… which has made me way more cool with scrapping them knowing that if I really want a specific color I can buy it again.

Wildstar Thoughts

November 29, 2018 by Belghast

I am having one of those mornings when I am not entirely certain I have thoughts that are worth sharing. However because of the ritual that I have built up for myself I am going to share something anyway. I consistently have a chorus of “no one wants to hear about that” running through my head as I write most of my posts. I think that is in part why I struggle so hard when someone says something nice to me about my blog or any of the other things I do. I feel like I really have no clue what I am doing and even more so why anyone would care about it. I am super appreciative that people do seem to care, but I feel like one of these days everyone is going to pull back the curtain and realize what a boring person I am. Worse I have an unshakable fear that I am a fraud and that some terribly clever person is going to write a lengthy essay on medium pointing out this fact and cause you all to hate me. Medium feels like it is a site entirely about writing lengthy essays about exposing harsh truths about the things we love.

Sometimes I start writing and things just veer wildly off course, and I have a feeling that is precisely what is happening this morning. Yesterday afternoon at 2pm pst Wildstar went dark as a game and I have some weird feelings about it. This was not an important game to me personally, in fact I struggled to figure out why everyone liked it so much. That said I realize that it was a very important game for an awful lot of the people who I care about in my life. This is in part why I kept trying to unlock the puzzle about what made it feel good to play. Probably the happiest I was with the game was when I was playing my Chua Engineer and even then… largely because of the adorable bot army that I drug along with me. The core problem there is… that the vast majority of the friends I had playing the game on the regular were Exiles not Dominion. Sure this eventually changed so that you could cross faction until your heart was content… but I think by then it was too far past that golden time in which a game really has to hook me on its charm.

There was something about the game that caused me to struggle with it. There was a certain sensory overload that I felt each time I played, with too many things going on with the UI and the telegraphs that just left my eyes feeling immensely tired after playing it for a short period of time. I realize this is weird given that I have always been one of those people who prefers to have a massive number of UI elements on screen in World of Warcraft, but the combination of this and the action combat proved to be more than I could handle most of the time. I am regretful that I never managed to make it to the level cap or really experience any of the endgame content. I had multiple characters largely fall off the face of the leveling curve in Whitevale… and I am not entirely certain what specifically about that zone caused me to lose all forward momentum.

All of that said I have to tell you that Wildstar had quite possibly the best housing system I have seen in a game, namely the way you could set up your little pocket dimension to be whatever you wanted it to be… along with interesting minigames to play. It also had an excellent cosmetic gear and dye pot system that I hope going forward more games pay attention to. It was a game that gave its players so many nice systems, and I think that is in part why it had a generally thriving social structure. There are a good number of people that I met through the game that have become fixtures of my Twitter feed in a daily basis, and I am thankful that I got to meet all of them. Said feed was completely breaking my heart as I watched so many emotional posts scrolling by in the last hours of the game before they finally shut things down. I think what probably makes this worse… is the fact that Wildstar lasted far longer than anyone actually expected it would given NC Soft’s track record of shuttering still relatively popular franchises.

At this point however I am not entirely certain which is worse. Watching a game get shuttered, or having a game purchased by a company that you are almost certain is going to do bad things to the game. I watched Hellgate London be bastardized by Hanbitsoft and then get regurgitated back onto Steam in a form that is at times barely recognizable to the original. Recently Trion Worlds was purchased by a company that has games in its stable with literally temporary inventory bags that expire after seven days. So I have nothing but the worst fears about how Rift is going to change under their stewardship. So I am not sure if it is worse to see a game completely close its doors, or to watch it flop around in a zombie state for awhile muddying your memories of it. As I have said before when this sort of thing happens… these MMO games that we love are fleeting. Grab on with both hands and enjoy them while you still can, because eventually… they are likely going to shut their doors either replaced by something shiny and new or because the players disappeared over time. In the case of Wildstar we can only hope that a Server Emulator is far enough along to be able to create a fan run server like the thriving Star Wars Galaxies community or the Age of Reckoning Warhammer Online community.

Season of the Forge

November 28, 2018 by Belghast

For the last few days I have been on the cusp of coming down with something I think, but the problem is my schedule does not really allow me to take a day off right now to recuperate. If I were to take off right now, deadlines would suffer… so as a result I have been taking some over the counter stuff to try and limp along until I can collapse. Last night however I probably should not have taken that NyQuil, because this morning… I am groggy as hell. Last night however was the beginning of the 5th season of Destiny 2 and it seems like they are mixing things up a bit. For the last few seasons in Diablo 3 there has been an overarching theme to a new season… and it seems like maybe Bungie is borrowing this concept. The latest “This Week At Bungie” blog post goes into more detail about this, but there is a fairly packed roadmap content wise that we can look forward to.

As far as last night… I focused on starting the Pinnacle Weapon quests that I actually feel like I have a shot at getting before the end of the season.

Pinnacle Weapons are more or less a unique weapon that you can grind for during the season. There is one tied to Vanguard Strikes, another tied to the Gambit event, and another tied to how far progressed you make it rank wise in the Crucible. Given that I love Autorifles because I am a noob… I decided to spend a good deal of last night working on trying to get the Gambit based weapon called Breakneck. I think in part I just like the old world feel of the weapons that The Drifter offers. As you can see you need to play a minimum of 40 matches of Gambit, and also do a bunch of other things in the process. Now my hope is that by the time I have played my 40… I will have long since completed the other objectives. My goal is to play a handful of rounds of Gambit and run a few Strikes every night to begin whittling away at this objective over time. The truth is that will probably hold for a bit and then I will spend a weekend grinding nothing but that activity so I can get the weapon.

With a new season, comes a new set of cash shop engrams… and throughout the night last night I unlocked four of these… one of which happening to give me this sweet Ghostrider themed sparrow. I also pulled an exotic ship that is themed after Warmind/SIVA but it isn’t anywhere near as cool looking. This however immediately became my new main sparrow as I ride around on flaming nonsense. All it is missing is a bunch of skulls. I really like the Scorn as a faction, and I love how all of their tech seems even more improvised than even that of the Fallen. All in all it was a good night and a largely quiet one as I slowly whittled away at collecting powerful and prime engrams. I have finally reached the point where I am pretty regularly getting 600 light items… so my hope is in the next few days to be able to hit that item cap before Black Armory bumps it up by 50 again. It really is a great time to be playing Destiny 2.

If you prefer to consume this information from a Bungie Vidoc… they also have you taken care of as a nice one released yesterday attempting to differentiate between the content players will be getting for free and the content locked behind the Annual Pass.