Tales of the Aggronaut

Badluck Coins and Locks

September 26, 2018 by Belghast

This is going to be one of those mornings where I may or may not actually ever get around to a point. I am feeling extremely blah about writing a post because quite frankly it feels like I don’t have an awful lot that is positive to talk about. Right now I am in this World of Warcraft cycle, but I am not exactly feeling like I should be. There are just a lot of aspects of Battle for Azeroth that feel bad and I am not entirely certain why. Some of it might be of my own making, and other aspects might be that I have simply moved past this game and am unwilling to admit it. The whole maining Horde thing has been a challenge on a whole lot of fronts, not the least of which has been that the vast majority of my contacts are still on the Alliance side. Similarly I feel like I am starting from scratch, with a handful of characters instead of one of every class leveled to at least 100, so it feels extremely awkward.

The other challenge is I am just not a great fit for the raiding options that I have available to me. Sunday night is a bad time for me to set aside four hours worth of time to be dedicated to raiding. I mean I knew that going into this expansion but I thought maybe I could make it work, when really the one raid I attended felt awful from a time management standpoint. Sunday night is the night we do all of the things that we forgot to do over the weekend, and I am simply not adult enough to make sure I have everything done that needed to be done. Similarly my wife is in a mad scramble to print things and plan lessons and such… and if there is even the slightest technical problem my entire night is shot trying to troubleshoot why the fuck every machine but hers will print to the printer. I fucking hate printers… they are the worst thing ever created. I’ve seriously done some voodoo shit when it comes to trying to make her devices recognize the printer… things I am not proud of. I contemplated sacrificing a chicken once… and we don’t even have one.

The other problem I am struggling with in WoW is that so many things just feel awful. Like for example… I was slightly looking forward to my Mythic+ chest… and that excitement died 5 minutes after logging in when I saw that I got a cloak significantly lower than the one I am currently wearing. Similarly I zoomed over for a shot at loot from the Weekly World Boss… and got a pittance of gold for my troubles. We are in the wrong phase of the Warfront cycle so we don’t have access to push a button and get instant loot… and I’ve already killed the Warfront Boss so that is done for the time being as well. There is a weekly quest to grind timewalking dungeons… or a supposed box of Uldir loot… but I am sure it will be one of the slots I already have 370 gear in and feel completely useless.

The thing is I don’t mind RNG… because in the past I have ground my face off pushing myself to run things over and over until the item I wanted dropped. That is a perfectly reasonable cycle that I am willing to do. However when I am given a single chance each week at getting something interesting… and those options wind up with an insignificant amount of gold or artifact power it feels horrible. Sure I can buy two expensive as fuck second chance tokens that are also not guaranteed, that end up making you feel like a complete fool when that 5000 gold you just spent ended up giving you 200 artifact power. The fact that I am not actively raiding… leaves me in this sort of unmoored state where I have no viable means of making the number go up… which is the point where I start to check out.

It is moments like this that I marvel at just how well the systems in Final Fantasy XIV work… and why I cannot figure out why that game just doesn’t grab me anymore. Were the weekly boss a Final Fantasy encounter… you would be able to run it as many times as you liked, but only receive one piece of loot for the week. I loved the whole concept of being locked from receiving further loot from an instance once you received a piece of gear, because it allowed you to choose when to spend your lockout. You could run one of the 25 player semi-raid instances over and over until you got that chest piece that you really desperately needed. It gave you some measure of control over how you geared and with what items… instead of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Similarly Final Fantasy XIV also has a second chance currency that you accumulate over time by doing stuff, that allows you to buy the items you are needing as well. Gold and Artifact Power feel horrible reward wise… and there is nothing they can ever do to really fix that. However if you downed a boss that say rewarded 10 badluck coins normally… but if you failed to get a drop you were instead given a little gold and maybe 20 badluck coins as a consolation prize for spending your lockout… that would feel decent. I would know in the back of my head that maybe I lost the roll today, but in a few weeks time I will be able to save up all of those badluck coins to purchase something equivalent to the items I wanted before anyways.

Ultimately this also feeds into another discussion point from last night on the AggroChat show slack… gear feels largely unexciting as well. There used to be items that were worth grinding for that felt interesting and unique. For example… I ate, breathed and slept Mechanar in Burning Crusade when I found out there was a weapon as cool as The Sun Eater in that dungeon. With a single shot at it per day… I forced group after group to follow me in there for yet another shot at it and it took what felt like months for it to actually drop. When I got it… it was an amazing feeling because I could finally wield this amazing weapon that I had been fighting so hard to get. It looked glorious but also felt like it was really viable and quite honestly held me until I got a drop from Serpentshrine Caverns some 15+ months after the release of Burning Crusade.

Now when we get gear we are getting Raid Axe #3 colored Blue, or Raid Sword #1 colored Red… the gear lacks any sense of originality and is largely just an accumulation of stats that either are or are not whatever the hell your class optimally wants. It feels like a handful of numbers that you punch into a calculation and not a physical tangible item that you seek after. There are very few instances where you want an item… because it looks amazing… because it is only place where that sort of item drops… and because it is the going to hold you for awhile when you ultimately get it. Now every piece of gear feels completely disposable and unworthy of the effort that it requires to get it.

Basically I am just in this cycle where a whole bunch of things that never bothered me… are now bothering me. I want to finish the Alliance storyline on the Paladin so I have at least seen that. However if I am not attached to a raid group in a tanking role by the time I finish that process… I am likely done with Battle for Azeroth for the time being. It is unhealthy to get angry at a video game, and even though mine isn’t so much anger… but more disappointment… that also isn’t exactly healthy either.

Yoinking Yang

September 25, 2018 by Belghast

It is always staggering how much difference a few pieces of gear make in Diablo 3. I went from being unable to really function… to being able to push Torment X without much issue. I could potentially go higher but I have not really pushed myself. As of this morning I did a solo 40 just to verify that I was wrecking things as fast as I thought I was… and of course upgrade that blood shard capacity. Last night after a mythic+ in World of Warcraft I dropped back over into Diablo 3 and with a whole lot of Grace’s help started running content to attempt to get drops. Over the course of numerous rifts and greater rifts I managed to start piecing together the set that I should be using to make the Unhallowed Essence build work.

This is where I am at as of this morning, with everything acquired minus Wraps of Clarity and the Focus ring. From there I need one of those doodads that adds a slot to a weapon… and to reroll a bunch of my gear for more optimal stats. Then of course there is the game of trying to swap out your normal items with better ancient versions. Regardless however I am functioning so much better than I was and can finally stand on my own two feet again. I was in this awkward spot for too long where I could survive the higher torments… but just couldn’t kill anything fast enough. That all changed once I got a handful of items and started finally being able to keep up with Grace and her Necro pushing machine. The funny thing is… she STILL doesn’t have the ring she needs to make her set completely work… and I have somehow managed to get almost nothing but ring drops myself.

Another thing of note that I thought I would talk about this morning is my plans for Fallout 76. My good friend Shiana pinged me last night about what I was planning for Fallout and also for Anthem. He knows me too well, in that he didn’t phrase the question as to IF I was playing… just where I was playing. As it stands right now I plan on doing both on the PC since that is the more comfortable platform for me personally. As far as Fallout 76, when they announced that you could run a private server… I set my mind on trying to acquire one of these. My hope is that TypeFrag will offer one since I like their group funding model that allows people to chip in if they so choose to the server rental fees. We use that for the Teamspeak server that we use for recording AggroChat, and it is nice mostly because it means I am not footing the entire bill on my own.

Regardless of who is paying I plan on having a server with as close to a PVE ruleset as the game allows me. It will be a nice chill carebear haven with as many of the toxic influences filtered out as possible. Basically I think this game is going to be amazingly fun pending you can gather up the right mindset of players that are willing to work together and build interesting communities. The nukes will of course exist, but the hope is that we nuke areas of high mob population and not players… and sorta treat it like a raid zone since it will cause interesting stuff to spawn in from what I have read. If you want a chill place to play Fallout 76 and are cool with a no PVP ruleset, then this oasis may be the place for you.

Tam Stole My Luck

September 24, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was the beginning of the 15th season in Diablo 3 and like usual Grace and myself decided to do the thing that we do roughly every three months… and start new seasonal characters. I went with the Demon Hunter because the Unhallowed Essence set is in theory one of the really fun ones… pending I can actually assemble all of the parts of it. Grace went with the Necro because I believe this time is Rathma’s which is another pretty fun set… pending you assemble all of the pieces of it. For most of the season she was way stronger than I was as we ran through the content, but there will be a point where that balance starts to shift the other way. The problem is I have not hit it yet and am struggling a bit with pushing content. I found getting the Greater Rift 20, the last thing I needed for my cosmetic items and last of the Haedrig’s Gift items… but be extremely painful.

This season I seem to have had really bad luck, essentially having NONE of the items I need for my build apart from the Hellfire Amulet. Legendaries seem to be extremely stingy this time around, and often times as I am leveling I start getting some of the drops needed to toss into the cube. That didn’t happen. In theory I am going to start grinding some T1 rifts to try and assemble the rest of the set. I am convinced that Tam stole my luck, because I didn’t even get a single item of my class set to upgrade to Ancient. At a bare minimum however I now have my pet and portrait frame and anything after this is gravy.

In World of Warcraft I mostly spent time this weekend over on the Alliance side leveling my Paladin. Paladins right now seem just as overpowered as Demon Hunters and I have been breezing through content pulling tons of things in a path of destruction… and in truth consecration ends up pulling way more than I had intended most of the time. Originally when I took a stab at playing the Death Knight I had started Stormsong Valley and could not be bothered with that storyline of missing ships. This time around I decided to start Drustvar and its awesome cultist nonsense… and so far I have been enjoying the storytelling way more than a tale of political intrigue. I like big bombastic storylines, like the whole fighting old gods with ghost dinosaurs thing that is going on over on the Horde Side, so Drustvar seems more of that fit.

The only negative is it means at some point I will have to return to the more subtle political intrigue storyline and hopefully I am invested enough in my character at that point to carry me on. I figured the Paladin gave me a lot of options for running stuff… but the truth is I will probably just tank or dps… and it is highly unlikely that I ever heal. While I technically got the healing Artifact weapon, I am not sure if I ever had it equipped. All in all though… just not loving the Alliance content anywhere near as much as I did the Horde. However I will say so far… the War Campaign stuff seems cooler on the Alliance side… even though it feels weird to be retracing steps I know as horde quests. I did not realize that I would be effectively sharing the same space… like Anyport for example in my world is very much a Horde town… but it is seemingly also open to Alliance? Also finding it weird that I am seeing way more Orange names while I am leveling than Blue ones. Maybe there was an initial push of alliance players… or maybe the AIE presence on our shared shard greatly pushes the balance to Horde.

Lastly we recorded another podcast this weekend as is the usual, and this time around we talked a lot about the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise… and the fact that I think of it as Warrior is telling to the last time I actually played one. We also had this unintended deep dive into Hollow Knight after some conversation about Hyperlight Drifter sort of jarred it loose. We are trying really hard to bring the shows in around an hour in length and as such they sort of feel better than they used to. We are trying to limit the number of topics… which has this side effect of causing topics to roll forward to other weeks. The Dragon Quest topic for example had rolled twice before we finally talked about it. I am thinking the Trello system that we are using for show notes seems to work pretty well, as we can drop things into the queue throughout the week easily. Regardless… if you tried listening to us when we often times recorded two to three hour long shows…. you might give it a shot again.

Distraction

September 21, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterdays post was super negative, and I apologize for being down a bit. I am dealing with some mental stuff and fighting through it, but it has colored my world view decidedly darker for the moment. Yesterday over on Mastodon, someone commented that it sounded like I simply wasn’t having fun anymore. To some extend I have been having less fun, but I feel like MMOs in general require a lot of grind to get to the fun parts. Right or wrong that is just sort of the nature of the beast and something I accept as part of the package deal. My hope is always that the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable, but even when it isn’t the hope is that there is a lot of enjoyment beyond the grind.

It was around this time that I came up with a reasonable analogy to explain MMOs. Say you are a person that is really into knocking down dominoes and watching them fall into intricate patterns. In that hobby it would often time take days to painstakingly set up the tiny little slabs, and then eventually when you are finished you get to start the chain reaction causing them to do all sorts of awesome things… for a few minutes. Hours upon hours worth of work… for a very short payoff. This is what playing an MMO feels like most of the time… a lot of painstaking work managing factions and consumables and all of the assorted trappings that come with doing endgame stuff… all to have a few minutes of joy every week.

All of the faction work leads to something… but that something is often times short and sweet and leaves you wanting more of that awesome endorphin hit that it gave you. However for the moment I am distracted by the fact that Brewfest is happening and with it comes the Coren Direbrew event. Sadly the trinkets that are provided this year are only 335, when I was hoping they would be something more sustainable like 340-345. Regardless it is a thing that gives a much needed slot and my hope is to farm up a set on the Warrior and maybe get the Warlock leveled enough to get some as well. Additionally there is a pet that I have never picked up before that I hope to get the tokens for.

After that will be the Halloween event, and another grind to chase… since I have never managed to get the mount to drop and am only slightly bitter about it. The positive is that it seems like all levels can participate in the Coren Direbrew event, so my hope is that similarly all levels can participate in the Halloween one as well. That means if I so choose to do this nonsense… I could run around thirty characters through the event every day… with thirty shots at the mount each day. On the Brewfest side I have the Kodo and Ram and am not sure if other mounts drop but I think I am in good territory. Whatever the case this adds up to a large package of distraction that may or may not keep me entertained until the 8.1 patch releases and we can see if anything feels better in the world.