Tales of the Aggronaut

Still Mostly Alive

January 8, 2018 by Belghast

Apologies for the super late post this morning, but it’s been an ordeal to get to this point. I woke up about 3:30 last night with the most excruciating pain I think I have ever experienced. It was this pain that was super hard to place because it seemed to be everywhere. It sort of radiated from just below my bellybutton, around the right side of me and also had this sorta lower back pain thing going on. I spent a good deal of the early morning hours trying to find a way to lay that was less painful than the others without much luck. Finally after getting up and showering the pain started to lesson enough that I could crash and attempt to get some rest. At this moment there are occasional twinges of pain but nothing like it was this morning. I went back and forth about going to the emergency room, because I hate dealing with that nonsense. Instead I took the day off work and have a doctors appointment at 2:10 that will hopefully get me to the bottom of whatever is going on. Anyways as a result you are getting a very late and very non-gaming post. This is in part because really it was a pretty gaming light weekend.

On Saturday I went up to my home town and helped my parents move a bunch of stuff and hang a television on the wall. I think when I first started to notice the abdominal pain I thought maybe I had just pulled something moving in directions my body is not used to moving in. Saturday night I felt completely out of it, like I was a little guy in my brain piloting my body badly sort of out of it. Sunday we had to get up and around and go to a family thing… that turned out to be its own nightmare. There are three people on my wife’s side of the family that I really do not like being around and all three of them were at this party. By the time I got home I was once again out of it and spent the evening watching black mirror. I remember some minor abdominal discomfort when I first went to bed but I guess as the night went on it just kept getting worse until it finally woke me up. Here is hoping that the doctor might have some ideas for what is going on. I’m in this state where I am almost afraid to eat or drink anything because I have no clue what might make it worse… and the last thing I ever want to feel again is that pain.

I mostly wanted to make a post because I didn’t want folks to be concerned about me… even though I guess in theory there was reason to be concerned. I hope the start of your week is going better than the start of mine.

Poorly Dressed Hunter

January 5, 2018 by Belghast

Last night on a whim after running my Emmisary quests on Horde side I decided to start playing something else. For a long time I have had a level 20 Forsaken Hunter, but I have this major problem playing anything with the “horde hunch”. While I realize that is eventually going to be optionally not a thing… there is also the major problem I have with the Forsaken in that they cannot wear anything but trashed out armor. If I could be an upright walking normal armor wearing Forsaken… that would probably cause me to re-evaluate a lot of my choices in life. However I can’t and I doubt they will ever taken away the iconic exposed bone thing from them so… until that date that is likely never going to happen I am probably going to bounce the fuck off playing one. I wound up deleting my old hunter and re-rolling as a Tauren, which coincidentally was my very first World of Warcraft character back in beta. I got into closed beta shortly after the Tauren starting zone opened and primarily played a Warrior and a Hunter for most of my testing time. That combined with the fact that Mulgore looks not dissimilar from the corner of Oklahoma I live in… has always sorta made that experience feel homey.

The only problem is… first I forgot that my mail armor was a mishmash of nonsense that I got through the Wintergrasp PVP heirloom vendor… combined with the shaman shoulders because apparently at some point I bought those? As a result I am the most disturbing ahn’qiraj era fury warrior looking character to exist. The problem there is that I forgot that I could not ride a mount until 20… which means I won’t have access to my Yak and a transmog vendor to remedy this until then. For now… I just look like a mess roaming around with an awesome purple birb. There is something extremely relaxing about the leveling process and if I actually want to do that in earnest I am left with two options: Roll Horde or Roll Alliance on server other than Argent Dawn. If you notice in the above image… every single Alliance character I have is over level 100, which means I would ultimately have to grind nothing but Legion content and quite frankly that doesn’t sound that fun or relaxing in the least.

Horde side however I have lots and lots of room for expansion and as a result I am experiencing a bit of a renaissance of “monstrous humanoids”. I am however catching shit now from my Alliance guild as every so often tells show up in my timeline saying things like “we miss you”. While I seem to have switched relgion for the moment I am sure at some point in the near future I will play alliance again. I am neither red nor blue but have always been purple, because purple is a great color and also blends the fact that since day one… I have played a little bit on both sides of the fence. The fact that there still is a fence at all infuriates me, which is why I am not nearly as amped as I probably should be about this upcoming expansion. I have different pools of friends that prefer to play one side or the other and as a result I will always be split between the two. It is my hope that I can get a few more characters up before the expansion hits so I have a pretty even stable of characters on either side of the fence. Similarly I will probably start pushing up some of my Alliance characters as well… but there is only so much Legion grinding that one can take. Side note… I have the best Tauren Hunter Bel-Themed name ever… Belgrazer.

Squandered Post

January 4, 2018 by Belghast

Pay no attention to the lack of a proper blog post this morning. I’ve squandered what is normally my writing time watching a video of Adam Savage recreate the futuristic binoculars from Blade Runner 2049. I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning because in truth I didn’t do much in the way of gaming. I logged into both the Warrior and Demon Hunter horde side and did some emissary work and then logged into Destiny 2 only to log right back out. Since I got only a couple of hours of good sleep last night I was ending up crashing pretty hard starting around 7:30-8 ish last night. My focus for the night however was to attempt to get some sleep rather than do a lot of epic gaming. My hope for tonight is to get in and do some Destiny 2 and at a very least knock out some of my weekly milestones. I also still have a bunch of work to do on the Demon Hunter in trying to finish its class hall. Additionally I only actually have one mount from the whole order hall madness thing. I should in theory do some more. Right now as it stands I have Warrior, Death Knight and Paladin to 110 on Alliance side and Warrior, Demon Hunter and Death Knight to 110 Horde side. I would really like to get the 3 other mounts that I have easily available between the two sides. I also at some point think I am going to push up my Warlock because it is something I enjoy but have no real clue how to actually play.

I am still very much getting used to the new routine that comes with managing three groups of people, and expect me to have a lot of adjustment time and probably low quality posts in the meantime. I love you all and I hope you will bear with me through this madness.

Double Agent

January 3, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve reached this sorta happy place with World of Warcraft where I find myself alternating back and forth between it and Destiny 2 for how I spend most of my evenings. Over the last month or so I had spent most of my pushing up my Orc Warrioress, and have now reached the point where I can no longer easily push her power level up by just doing World Quests. As a result this caused a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas break and lead me to pick another of my various horde characters to start working on. Having not actually pushed up a Demon Hunter… and Legion being the expansion all about Illidari… I figured it was high time to actually do this thing. I started out leveling as Havoc like I had before on the Alliance side but promptly swapped over to Vengeance when I started missing tank survival. It turns out that I really like Vengeance as a spec and you get to do a bunch of fun things… sadly at the cost of your charge around the map ability. The way shorter cooldown version of Heroic Leap in the form of Infernal Strike however makes up for the lack of the less predictable movement ability. If nothing else the build allows me to do most of the World Questing with impunity and at some point I will actually try some dungeon tanking.

For the moment however when it comes to LFR, Heroics or Timewalking… I have been swapping back to Havoc and just noobing it up. This is the point where I have to step back from some of the commentary I made while leveling the warrior. I was shocked and amazed at how chill the horde side of the house had been during my experiences… but once I donned the mantle of the demon hunter… and potentially as a side effect of the long holiday break… all of the asshats seemed to come out of the woodwork. Monday night I chain ran my five timewalking dungeons in a row… and all of the cool demeanor that I had originally attributed to the horde side melted away. It became a night of gripes and wipes as I limped through my five instances and then walked away praising some dark god that my sanity was still intact. I am still not entirely certain why my recent change in religion of sorts and swap to the horde, but I would have to think a lot of it has to do with simply wanting to hang out with my friends in Facepull. As a result it has been this super chill place to hang out and have occasional comments about the game and life in general. On a day by day basis I am feeling way less of a double agent and more leaning towards the Horde. For years I never could seem to get into characters on that side of the fence and the only reason why I had a max level character during Warlords was because I boosted, this time around however I have the same number of Alliance characters as I do Horde and I am already plotting the next thing to level. Side note… Blood Elf demon hunters look way cooler than the damned floppy eared Night Elf equivalent.