Tales of the Aggronaut

Powerleveling Gun

November 27, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did not join in FFXIV Eureka shenanigans, largely because I was not feeling terribly sociable. This is was and will probably continue to be a trying week, as is often the case when we come back from a significant break. In my case I was out five days, and while I spent a good chunk of the first day at the hospital… it was still enough time to get thoroughly out of the habit of going to work on a regular basis. Instead I spent my night roaming around in Destiny 2 and doing puttering sort of activities, in part because I had knocked down the vast majority of the major stuff over the weekend. The thing I did not realize however is that yesterday was also the final day of the season, and I am a little bummed out that this was apparently the first season that Greysky Armada will not have maxed out guild rank… and will not be earning the banner pole. I myself have done next to nothing to contribute to this, so in the grand scheme of things I am okay with this… just a little sad.

Instead of doing things on my Titan main, I opted to instead piddle around on my Hunter who has not really been dusted off since the launch of Curse of Osiris. It is really weird to have the start of three different content blocks… Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken all on the director map. I play this game incorrectly… and what I mean by that is my preference is to level to the new numerical cap before starting any of the story driven content. My thought process is something like this… if I grind the levels on something like strikes or heroic public events… I can use the story as a light leveling experience, meaning anything I happen to get along the way is actually useful gear instead of something that I immediately relegate to the shard bin. This may or may not be worthwhile but it is the pattern that I find myself falling into over and over again.

Traditionally I have focused on doing nothing but Titan public events, since by the time you down one of them there is often times another one just about to spawn on the other half of that relatively small map. With the advent of planetary bounties, I have started focusing on those instead and knocking out a full round of the planets that I have access to. Each time you turn in one of the bounties it appears to be a significant jump in experience and as a result I am sitting at level 37 out of 50… and wondering if the Black Armory is going to bump up both Light Level cap and Level Cap. Grinding in Destiny is my jam, and I find it extremely peaceful to roam around and knock out patrols and public events.

This process has been bolstered by the fact that apparently the gun I ground for during the Halloween event, may not have a minimum level cap to equip or at least it is equipable at my lowest level which is 30. I was swapping gear around through DIM… and if you don’t know about Destiny Item Manager you should totally stop what you are doing and check it out. Without really realizing what I was doing I swapped my 600 item level Horror Story over to my Hunter… and it equipped without issue. This means that immediately I started getting gear that is way higher than I probably should at the equivalent level. Sure some of it isn’t necessarily usable due to level restrictions… but some of it is and as such this weapon that is an arguably worse version of the Origin Story… serves as a light level booster. Similarly I tried it out on my 289 Light Level Warlock… and once again I could equip it just fine.

With the opening of a brand new season…. I will likely be putting the Huntress to bed once again, however the sheer fact that I am interested in playing my alts tells you a lot about the improvement to the current state of Destiny 2. When the PS4 version released I ground up all three of my classes to 305 light, and used them as a sort of spring board each week to help me level up my weapons… which in turn then drug up the level of my armor. With the PC release… I only had the oomph to get the three characters leveled… but never spent time gearing them other than the Titan. I lost steam… and Curse of Osiris did not really help that, and at which point I seemingly became a player that only really played my main. Now I am back in the mood to fiddle with the other classes and see what sorts of trouble I can get up to with them as well. Essentially the desire to play is greater once more than the total package of content available to me on any one character… which is saying an awful lot given that there are so many opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams.

Like I have said before… Destiny 2 is in its best state ever, and one that I feel probably rivals the state of Destiny 1 during Year 3 (and honestly the current state since it has largely been frozen in time). If you have access to the game I highly suggest checking it out again. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to holler at me through one of the many channels folks have to holler at me through.

Regularly Playing: Late November 2018

November 26, 2018 by Belghast

One of the constants of Tales of the Aggronaut is my sheer inability to keep any form of a series going for any length of time. There is a thing that I used to do semi-monthly where I trued up the regularly playing widget on my blog’s sidebar and talked a bit about the games that I have actually been playing. I would talk about the things that I was adding to the list, the things that I was for whatever reason still playing… and then talked about the things I was removing from the list and a bit about why. Unfortunately based on a quick search of my blog… this is not something that I have done since August of 2017. A lot has changed since then and a lot of games have come up and gone away, and quite frankly I am not sure how valid any sort of a comparison might be. However I wanted to get this started again. So from now on I expect to be updating these towards the end of the month rather than at the beginning of a new month. I’ve also decided to start including the platform I am playing on, since in a few cases that actually does matter a lot.

Destiny 2 – PC

I’ve been having a bit of a renaissance with Destiny 2 and I spent the vast majority of the weekend hanging out downstairs and playing it while remoted into my desktop upstairs. My nonsense Parsec setup is amazing, and this really has become my default gameplay method most of the time. I mean who doesn’t want to play sitting on the sofa, wrapped up in fuzzy blankets… with two cats snuggling into them? I got the Trinity Ghoul to drop after completing Ikora Rey’s bounty objective, and it is awesome… unfortunately I will probably never actually use it. The fact that we can only use one exotic weapon pretty much means that choice is always going to go to the Thunderlord. If they introduce some legendary HMGs into the game again… that decision might shift… but for now it feels damned good to have access to one again. For the most part I am spending my time knocking out various things that award Powerful/Prime engrams, and other than that I started leveling the Hunter last night while watching Walking Dead. The game really is in the best state it has been in period… and I am probably counting all of the awesome stuff that was available during Year 3 of Destiny 1. If you are not playing this game you owe it to yourself to check it out again.

Monster Hunter World – PC

The other primary game that I am spending most of my time playing is Monster Hunter World on the PC. This game is so much more enjoyable with a mouse and keyboard, and I have recently been grinding away for the Dante weapon and armor set that came in with the Devil May Cry cross over event. I also had no clue how often I use the term grinding… until this weekend when a Chinese Cutting Wheel and Grinder company reached out to me to see if I wanted to do a paid product placement. It is weird how things like that happen… how the gaming sphere takes a perfectly normal and reasonable word and shifts it into something else. I still have yet to get over the level 49 hump that is Tempered Kirin… but I figure in the coming week I might start devoting some of my play time towards doing that. I would really like to be uncapped again by the time the Winter Festival starts up, so that all of the time spent doing those events can bolster my hunting rank. The highlight of the weekend was the Code Red match when three of us were using Kulve Taroth Paralysis weapons… and it was shocking just how often we had the mob locked down tight… even Teostra.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

Somewhat shocking to me… I am apparently back playing Final Fantasy XIV regularly after my extremely long absence? The last update from August 2017 was just about when I started to peel away from Stormblood, because that was also the month that I played a significant amount of Guild Wars 2… enough to probably consider it my main game back then. In the year and some change that has passed since that post… I really have not spent all that much time playing the game. I came back a few times attempting to get caught up with the main story quest, only to stall out in this place or another. However lately it has felt really good to roam around and play something like this, especially when paired with my more action oriented main squeezes of Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World. I can only take so much of that in a single setting and need to retreat back into something slower paced… and for now at least hotbar combat works nicely for that.

Diablo 3 – Switch

Another game that I have been enjoying the hell out of is Diablo 3 on the Nintendo Switch. It is a really great platform for the game and I had never really given the console version any serious play prior to this. My only gripe is the way it requires connectivity to play seasonal characters. Essentially if you want to play these in a disconnected state, you need to have the forethought to start up a game before you leave the safety of WiFi… and then place your switch into Airplane Mode. From there the game will allow you to continue playing your seasonal character, and eventually synchronize everything when you get connected once again. This is somewhat maddening, but at least I have the ability to tether to my phone if for some reason I did not think ahead to do this thing before I left the house. I am spending a lot of my “while trying to fall asleep” time playing Diablo 3.

Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee – Switch

While I did not play much of it this weekend, I am still very much enthralled with Let’s Go Pokemon. When I last played I had just beaten the third gym and was grinding my way towards the next one. However when I get back into game I want to do some backtracking and train my Eevee with some of the silly named abilities that the mentor is offering. Based on Ashgar’s suggestions, these are apparently really good moves. This is the biggest problem that I have with Pokemon games in general, is that I never know what moves I should be allowing it to learn and what ones I should be ignoring. As a result I tend to largely favor straight damage attacks and ignore the more fiddly nonsense of raising and lowering accuracy and such. Pokemon is a game about collecting cute pets for me… and the combat nonsense is largely just something I have to deal with in order to collect said cute pets.

Fallout 76 – PC

This game is still very much on the list but I have not devoted near enough time to it. Largely this requires me to be upstairs… and since I have been spending most of my time downstairs it just isn’t getting played. I’ve also been dealing with a lot of stress and that makes me turtle and avoid doing any manner of group activity that requires voice communication. This is coupled with the fact that I don’t really have a great comms set up downstairs, and as a result simply avoid joining voice servers. I could of course go into “listen only” mode but that doesn’t really work in situations where the in game chat is not amazing. I did spend some time this weekend hanging out with Rae and walking her through the finer points of Monster Hunter World… or at least answering a bunch of the questions anyone has starting that game. I know Tam, Kodra, Shiana and Waren have been having a massively fun time running around in a big group… and as cool as that sounds… I just can’t bring myself to be that interactive. I am hoping when the private servers release that there will be a second awakening of this game and I can hop on the bandwagon at that point. In the meantime however I am playing a very quiet and crafting-centric version of the game as I expand my nifty roadside base.

Hellgate London – PC (Steam)

As generally “not good” as the Steam version of this game is… I find myself still regularly booting it up and playing around with it. I did however dig out my copy of Hellgate London on DVD, and plan on going through the nonsense to install it and get set up to use the London 2038 emulator servers to see just how well that version of the game plays. In the mean time however… it is still Hellgate London, no matter how cludgy it might be and I love this game. I am guessing this would be on my list of guilty pleasure games that no one else really understands… like Vagrant Story… or Simon’s Quest. Remember kids… Excessive game play may affect your lifestyle.

Dragalia Lost – Android

While this is not necessarily an every day thing anymore… I am still very much playing Dragalia Lost on a regular basis. At this very moment there is a special summon event going on, and I seem to have missed the guaranteed five star adventurer summon… and currently it is a wyrmprint. No one gives a shit about wyrmprints… so I will wait to use mine until the five star dragons kick in at the end of the cycle. The current event is somewhat enjoyable, but I do greatly prefer the cycles where we have a raid open and a new character that we can gain faction with. So far it seems to alternate back and forth between kill a boss and get bonus loot… and earn a new character and do a raid. Since this is a wind event and that tends to be the crew that is the least used overall… I am using it to work up their levels and have largely coalesced on using Melody the Samurai Maid as my main for the event. Admittedly I mostly like her because it reminds me of my friend PizzaMaid… only because she is a maid that kicks lots of ass as well.

Pokemon Go – Android

With the connectivity between Let’s Go and Pokemon Go… it has also spurred me to be a lot more active in this game as well. I don’t have an awful lot to say about it other than the fact that I am regularly checking what “Mons” might be around when I am out about in the world. The fact that I got a Google Wear watch has also increased this experience because I am now getting credit via Google Fit for the time when I don’t have the app open. As a result I am hatching a lot more eggs than I did previously, since it seemed inconvenient to keep the app open all of the time. Mobile games are generally a massive drain on the battery, and none are harder on it than Dragalia and Pokemon Go… so as a result I tend to play them sparingly when I am at fear of running down my battery and without a way to charge it again.

Walking Dead Our World – Android

This game is barely holding in there and since being punted from the clan I was in… a lot of my reason for playing on a nightly basis has disappeared. It was enjoyable to feel like my little bits of play were adding up to larger objectives, but without that incentive… I am just not motivated to play that often. The game has a problem of not making it really reasonable to acquire better characters or weapons. 99.9% of the activities you do will give you white cards, which might as well go straight into the dumpster. The only things worth using really are purple or orange the highest tiers, and they have tied a number of objectives to doing things with specific legendary weapons making it really hard to knock those out each week. They really want you to spend money on the game, and I feel like I am just not getting enough joy out of the game to do so. I’ve lucked my way into a few items and they were running a special where Legendary Morgan and Rick were super cheap to purchase with one of the in game grindable currencies. I fully expect however that by the time I do my next update this game will be on the outs.

There are other games that I might boot up here or there but for the most part this is the crux of games that I am playing regularly as the title of the post suggests. What are you my wonderful readers playing lately?

Thanksgiving Ramble

November 22, 2018 by Belghast

This morning’s post is going to be fairly rambly… so just letting my brain go where it takes me.

For anyone who might be curious, as far as we can tell everything went well yesterday. Mother-in-law made it through the biopsy just fine and while she was a little out of it from the after effects of the anesthesia, but someone hung out with her last night to make sure all was right. We expect to see her today, but so far everything seems okay. The doctor made a comment that it did not look cancerous, but it will be awhile before we hear anything official back. However I want to thank everyone that reached out to me about it yesterday, I greatly appreciate it.

For those of us in the United States it is Thanksgiving, which in itself is a holiday with a shady past. However I do like the general concept of taking a day out to spend time with those you care about, share a nice meal, and remember all of those things that you are thankful for. A few years back I did this thing that I called a Month of Thankfulness, and tacked a paragraph or two onto the tail end of my blog post every morning. I had all intention of rebooting it this year, but as November 1st ticked around… It just did not happen. Given how busy and frustrating this month has been for me personally… it was probably a good idea.

Firstly I want to say that I am exceedingly blessed or lucky depending upon your point of view. I am constantly humbled by the fact that I got where I am today because of the help of countless individuals along the way who gave me the time of day and decided to take an interest in me as a human being. I’m not a very competitive individual, and I think I am proof that you don’t necessarily have to be to get ahead in the world. In fact I think collaboration and helping others is just as valid a means of forward momentum… as trampling others with your ambition.

That said I also feel like it is my responsibility to help out others as much as I can. Leading guilds and building communities was always my way of making this happen, and more recently that skill set has been applied to managing a team of fifteen individuals with all of their different needs. This is one of those moments where I wish gaming were more accepted, but as someone in management… I can tell you that everything you learn as a guild and raid leader is completely applicable to leading individuals in the workplace. Getting folks to band together to kill an imaginary monster is no less valid than trying to get them to finish a project by the deadline.

I’m very lucky that I have a partner in this journey that while she may not be into all of the things that I am… still considers them completely valid. She has her things and I support her in them, and she supports me in mine. I am also very lucky in that we have a comfortable life where we can both be doing our own things at the same time… but also feel like we are spending time together. That interaction though can easily transition into one of our many jaunts out into the world to go wandering and looking for interesting things. We’ve been together for over two decades at this point, and I cannot fathom existing without my navigator.

I am also extremely thankful to the AggroChat podcast crew and the assorted friends of the podcast we have gathered over the years. This group has become a family that I care about deeply, and even if we don’t happen to be playing the same game at the same time… is a place that I can easily settle into and that accepts me for my transient ways. While I have struggled at times with the constraints of recording a weekly podcast, there is no group of people I would rather be doing it with. I love all of my co-hosts so much, and if tomorrow we decided to stop it all… none of that would change.

I am extremely thankful to the folks who hang around and comment on my blog and who make up the greater blogging community that participate in events like Blaugust. You are all an inspiration to me each time I venture and and visit your blogs. The fact that I have a community is a good part of the reason why I keep talking. So often when you have a blog it feels like you are shouting into the void, and while I honestly find it easier to write like I am talking to myself… it is nice knowing that there is actually someone out there. We’ve shared so many events through this blog, and as I have said so many things… it is part confession, part exposition and part therapy. Thanks for being willing to keep reading my nonsense.

I think one of the hallmarks of my generation… is the fact that we have very permeable lines as to what constitutes family. For my mom, it is very much a case of blood is stronger than anything else, but weirdly I never latched onto that notion. I consider anyone who I care about and who is there for me… to be family. The news has been making a big deal about “Friendsgiving” this year, but in truth I would never refer to it as such. My friends are just as much my family as the one I was born into.

Maybe it is a side effect of not really having ever seen eye to eye with much of my family, or the fact that as my grandparents passed away… all of those formal holiday structures faded with them. Today I am going to be spending time with an assemblage of my parents and friends of the family, and it feels no less valid to me personally than we used to have to squeeze twenty people around a dining room table that only got the leaves put it in once a year. It will be a blend of my family, my wife’s family, and a few people that we wanted to make sure had a gathering to go to. The thing is… I think the most important part of Thanksgiving is the symbolic act of sharing a meal with the ones you love.

I am going to go ahead and wrap this post up because otherwise I will have written another four page epic… that on one actually wants to read. I hope all of you out there have a very Happy Thanksgiving… and even if you are not in the United States… take some time over the next few days to share a meal with some of the people that are important to you in life. That is the root of why I care about Thanksgiving, and it is that moment and tradition that I am thankful for among so many other things.

Lurk Longsword

November 21, 2018 by Belghast

This morning is a little bit odd given that I am not at work, but also had to get up at 5:30 like normal. I guess I technically didn’t but I still have things that need to get done. My mother in law is going into the hospital today for a lung biopsy, so I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, prayers or just general good vibes channeled her direction. Our hope is of course that it isn’t anything serious, but just the act of taking a biopsy from your lungs is fairly serious. A few days ago I wrote about how hardcore mobile gamers can be, and I guess further evidence proves that even more true. Yesterday I booted up Walking Dead Our World while waiting on a meeting just to check and see what objectives I should be focused on… and found that I had been kicked from the group that I wrote about. It seems as thought a group leader can see various stats about the players, and it appears that it is common place to purge anyone not killing at least 200 walkers a day.

I am WAY more casual than that… and I had apparently somehow avoided notice for a few weeks before the hammer dropped down upon me. I don’t even really know the people in the clan, but it was surprising how much it generally bummed me out. I’ve since joined another group, but I have to say… the drive to play is largely gone. Previously I felt like I was working towards something with a bunch of other players, but now I mostly just don’t care as I have to get acclimatized to another group of randos. I’ve contemplated forming my own group and calling it something along the lines as “Casual AF” and just seeing what sort of players I get to join. The clan size is limited to 25 players, so if you are in a group of high achievers I totally get why they might want to punt casuals. The objectives are things like kill 300 armored walkers with a specific character, and in a given encounter you might come across two of them… meaning at that rate you would have to take out 150 of these randomly occurring encounters to get the objective. The game is balanced for hardcore players, so also maybe not balanced for me personally. It was interesting while it lasted.

One of the things I love about the Kulve Taroth event is the random weapons that you end up walking away with. Generally speaking there are a few gems scattered in amongst the dross… and one of them is this longsword. The base damage is a little low, but it makes up for it in the utility of having a longsword with fairly reasonable paralysis on it. Ultimately I have been using this a lot as I have been taking on the Devil May Cry event quest where you fight four different monsters, and this ends up giving a fairly early proc of paralysis to help out the burn phase. It also works shockingly well on Kulve Taroth itself, which is goofy given how damned big that is to see it paralyzed. It does allow for a lot of good burn time whenever it happens which makes me heavily favor the weapon, and if I shifted out my item build a bit I could get quite a bit of white sharpness on it.

I also spent a good deal of time last night playing Final Fantasy XIV and managed to get off high center in the quest chain. There was a very specific quest that I was struggling with, that involved killing a bunch of mech suits that cast self destruct. This stupid thing took me roughly four attempts to finally get through it, and is one of those fights where the NPCs are vulnerable to death… and if they die you instant fail. I finally figured out exactly what I was supposed to be doing and on the last attempt it felt way less arbitrary. I will say this is one of the frustrations at times with Final Fantasy XIV… is that for all of the really good visual messaging… there are at times in the solo quests that they don’t give you much of an explanation of what you are supposed to be doing. My hope however is that this gets me unstuck and I can continue questing my way through all of the Main Story Quest content that I had missed.