Tales of the Aggronaut

For Azeroth

November 7, 2017 by Belghast

My biggest fear about BlizzCon would be if they crank up the big dumb red vs blue narrative and give us an expansion all about faction war

— Bel 🆚 Comic Sans! (@belghast) November 3, 2017

So last weekend was BlizzCon and over the last few days I have been dealing with the announcements made there. On the morning before the festivities started… I threw out a flurry of tweets of things that I would have liked to have seen, and then one that was my nightmare scenario. Essentially… the nightmare scenario is what happened. As a result I’ve spent the last few days going through the stages of denial and have finally reached a point where I can talk about it. World of Warcraft for me is a story about being artificially cut off from a chunk of my friends regardless of the decisions I make. When the game released in 2004 we had a group of players that wanted to play Alliance and a group that wanted to play Horde, and while we attempted playing both sides after a point folks wound up greatly preferring one over the other. This was a completely foreign concept to me and felt just wrong to have choosing a side mean you were also saying goodbye to a chunk of your friends in the process. Everquest had factions but they were all personal choices, and even Dark Age of Camelot had Gaheris the Co-Op server that let us all play what we wanted together without the artificially faction boundaries.

For the last thirteen years I have carried a torch in hopes that maybe just maybe the two sides would get their shit together and realize that there is way more at stake than their own petty grievances. We have come so close so many times as we worked together with the other side to tackle the big bads of the world, but always we are artificially drawn back in to the big dumb red versus blue narrative. Battle for Azeroth is doubling down on this tired formula and apparently that is what the player base wants. I have no real faction pride because neither faction has actually done anything that I am proud of. Sure the cinematic they released for this game is epic, and there are moments I feel shivers of excitement from each side. I am just wired to be nostalgic about all of this even though it signals the death of the dream I have held for so long. The faction wall will never fall, and my friends list will always be artificially segregated. We could do so much more if we were allowed to work together, and bring our Tauren and Orc friends along with our Dwarf and Worgen friends to do awesome things. I guess that thing that frustrates me is just how tragic and pointless it always is… all it would take is some communication between the sides and we would stop killing each other and start killing things that deserve to be killed. Fuck “For the Horde” and fuck “For the Alliance”… it should be “For Azeroth”… because the planet is dying while we are fighting .

All of this said… there are a lot of things that they are talking about that do excite me, but it has been a lot of soak given the first massive blow. I love the concept of Allied races because it gives the players something that we have requested for so long… sub races. From the moment I first knew that the Dark Iron Dwarves were a thing… I wanted to play one. The only only problem is that in my perfect scenario they would have been on the Horde. In truth in my perfect scenario all of the sub races that we are getting… would have gone to the other faction. I want to see High Mountain Tauren fighting along side the Alliance and Dwarven fighting along side the Horde. I want to break down the barriers between the two factions and blend them all up together to where your faction choices are just that… choices and not something you are locked into. Basically I am down for anything that degrades the barrier between the camps of players and lets us all do things together. Unfortunately I am having to come to the realization that it will probably never happen, but in the meantime I guess I am going to be leveling a bunch of new characters to take advantage of the new races.

The biggest obstacle between me and playing the horde was the fact that I didn’t like most of the races. The reason why I didn’t like the races was the bestial hunch that the male versions of each seemed to be permanently stuck in. Apparently there is a posture system that is coming that will allow us to go to the barber shop in game and change this… and in truth that breathes new life into all of these races that I refused to play. In theory if I can get an upright Orc like the modern Thrall model… it is going to feel awesome. Similarly Trolls and Undead become perfectly viable options for me to play. The number one problem I have with Worgen is that they too suffer from this forced lurch, and I am wondering if maybe just maybe that might be a thing of the past as well. I love my Horde family, but what always ends up being a problem is the fact that I have years worth of characters on the Alliance side and a handful of false starts on the Horde. I like being self sufficient, and only on one side do I have an army of alts that can craft anything that I could ever want. In theory if I enjoy the races more… I could start working on the same on Horde side. The draw to either side is the people who play there… not the story. I am just frustrated that it seems like I will always have to choose one path over the other when I really want to do both at the same time.

Weekend Warlock

November 6, 2017 by Belghast

I had every intent of writing a post on the Battle for Azeroth announcement from Blizzcon but I still feel like I am percolating my heads into something that is more intelligible than a rant. Instead I am going to focus on my weekend spent in Destiny, which saw me finishing off leveling my Warlock and getting it properly geared. I am half convinced that there is some sort of shared internal item level spread across all of your characters, because every time I have managed to push up my third character… its initial reward cycle has been insane causing it to leap ahead of the others. This was definitely the case with the Warlock who is now sitting at 294 as compared to 291 that I can manage to hit on either my Titan or Hunter. At this point I am fairly happy with the cobbled together gear that I have on the warlock because it gives me a stat spread that I like… 3 mobility, 5 resilience, and 7 recovery. I managed to get the Nightfall done so far on both the Titan and the Warlock and am hoping that maybe I can find some folks to do it with on the Hunter this evening. There is also talk about stepping foot into the raid again as well, which I am hoping we can pull off without going too late into the night. Having half of our normal crew on Pacific time and the other half on Eastern/Central time is a pain in the ass for timing any sort of activities.

As far as the raid goes we managed to get through the bathers event and made some pretty decent progress on the doggos. Functionally I think that encounter is going to come down to simply executing everything we have done over the course of a few attempts… in a single go. I like the raid so far because it feels very much like Final Fantasy XIV… in that it is a dance and once learned you can execute it pretty rapidly. I have a feeling that at some point we will be bringing four seasoned players and two learners and getting more people in the clan some experience. Fore the moment however we are shifting bits and pieces of the same handful of people trying to push through and learn it all. I mean there are raid guides out there that we could be following, but it feels more significant when we sort out things on our own. If we do make it back tonight I feel like we are probably going to make it through the pleasure gardens… which if my math is right means we have one more encounter before we actually face Calus. In theory if things go well we might be able to actually clear the raid next week. Its funny how much of a driving force it is for me to unlock the engram for the rest of the clan.

Next week is the start of the faction rally, and I am assuming that I will do what I did last go round and support a single faction on each character. That also means I am likely going to match up the factions with the gear that I would like to see them wearing. The only bad thing about that is the fact that New Monarchy has the coolest looking gear for multiple classes. I feel like probably the Hunter set is the best looking so I will be repping them on that character. Which means I am probably going to go Dead Orbit with the Titan and Future War Cult with the Warlock because I am most likely to wear the respective armor sets. The real goal for me however is to play just as much as it takes to unlock all 12 dropped weapons and a full set of gear for the Hunter. Past that anything else is gravy, and I am pretty happy with the gear I currently have assembled on the titan and warlock. The hunter is going to get a lot of play time if for no reason other than the fact that the New Monarchy shaders are the ones I am most likely to use for weapons. Basically we have yet another extremely busy week ahead of us in Destiny 2. The icing on the top is the fact that Greysky Armada should easily hit rank 6 next week.

Xur Week Eight: 11/3/17

November 3, 2017 by Belghast

Xur this week is located in the European Dead Zone near the Winding Cove drop zone. He is located on top of a hill that has an actual path to get up there… but I never can seem to find it… so I end up hopping up the rocks. In some ways this is a disappointing week and in other ways… for Titans at least it is a potentially exciting one. This represents the first week I have been able to do the entire screenshot thing on the PC as I now have Titan, Hunter and Warlock up to the appropriate levels to get the items at the 270 maximum level. Lets get on with the items he brought for us.

Destiny 2

This weapon is a little disappointing because it is one of the items you can get from the quest at the end of Io. Additionally it seems to be an acquired taste. Some folks absolutely love this thing… and others completely hate it. It is essentially a pulse rifle that doesn’t fire like a pulse rifle, and in order to get the most out of it you sort of have to line your shots up like you were using a scout rifle. That said it does seem to be considerably more reliable on the PC than it ever was on console. If you can learn to use it you can shred things, but it takes a lot of getting used to.

Mask of the Quiet One has become this defacto crucible relic of choice for a lot of Titans. The perks do a few things… one of which is actually important and the other not so much. The lesser of the perks is that Void Ability kills grant health regeneration, which rewards a chunk of health back to your bar when you kill a target with any of your void abilities. This is useful for Sentinel Titans but fails to trigger on shield slams making it a little fiddly. The perk everyone cares about however is that when you are damaged you gain melee, grenade and class ability energy. Again this is rewarded as just a chunk of your energy bar and why this is so insanely popular in the crucible is the fact that you are ALWAYS getting damaged. Just the act of running around while trying to avoid taking damage… ends up seeing you take plenty of damage to make this item useful. I picked it up because I do not already have a copy on PC side, and is well worth hanging on to just in case you find it useful.

We’ve seen Nezarec’s Sin before from Xur and again it is a mid range item that to some extent gets out shined by several other Warlock exotics. The perk Abyssal Extractors activates on void damage and causes you to gain a tiny sliver of energy back to grenade, melee and class ability. This is interesting because the item says void damage and not void ability kills meaning you can proc it off of an energy or power weapon if you are carrying one of that type. The biggest problem with the item is that the tick rate of this ability really is not that fast, and for me at least gets outshined by Eye of Another World which grants 10% increase to your recharge rates for doing nothing. The only way Nezarec’s Sin would be useful is if you are really married to the voidwalker spec, and even then… you are probably going to be better off just going with the Eye still. It is worth getting the item for unlock purposes only.

Do you love the Crucible? Do you really like using Tripmine grenades? If you answered yes to both then these might be the right exotics for you. If not then they might still be worth just getting the unlock because they look awesome. These are essentially a worse version of gauntlets of the same name from Destiny 1. I say they are a worse version because the old ones used to give you an extra tripmine grenade charge, making it extremely useful for trapping up multiple spots in an area. In Destiny 2 they lost the extra charge and instead gained additional duration which is nowhere near as sexy. The other interesting benefit is that they now highlight targets damaged in your grenade blast, making it easier to see which players may or may not have been weakened and giving you the ability to track them through walls if you are going to chase them down. This is a situationally good item for players who really like the crucible and really like trip mines… if you are neither or these things then you can pretty comfortably pass them up. They are still largely worth the unlock slot to me however.

Destiny 1

In Destiny 1 this week Xur is located at the big gate near the speaker in the Tower. Once again he is offering the formerly exclusive Jade Rabbit scout rifle giving a weird second chance for Xbox One users to get this up. I am sincerely hoping that this is not going to be what he brings every week from now on since Destiny 1 has gone into maintenance mode. Of the items available Twilight Garrison is especially interesting because it gives Titans the ability to do a midair dodge attack.

Legacy Special Weapon Engram – 31 Strange Coins
Twilight Garrison – Titan Chest – 13 Strange Coins
Don’t Touch Me – Hunter Arms – 13 Strange Coins
Alchemist’s Rainment – Warlock Chest – 13 Strange Coins
Jade Rabbit – Scout Rifle – 23 Strange Coins
Invective with Storm’s Reproach Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust
Zhalo Supercell with Shock Hazard Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust

Stopping Bathers

November 2, 2017 by Belghast

I stayed up way the hell too late last night and I am going to pay for it today. Funny how knowing this is going to happen, doesn’t actually prevent it from happening over and over again. Yesterday was the day that the Leviathan raid opened for PC players and in a very impromptu manner we scraped together a raid out of six people who were 270 or better geared that happened to be around. The group we went in with: Tamrielo, Thalen, Phorsaken, Lleandryn, Muspel and of course me. So 1 Titan, 2 Hunters, and 3 Warlocks… what is with our clan and the proclivity for the “caster” archetype? We are odd ducks when it comes to raid content. In this era of Fat Boss and MTQ Capture… generally speaking we prefer to go in completely blind. While I have seen random tidbits here and there about the Leviathan raid… I had purposefully avoided any strategies in the thought that maybe just maybe Destiny 2 on PC might gain some traction and I could get folks interested in attempting the raid. We fairly quickly sorted out the banner mechanic for the first area, and then proceeded with attempting to learn the Royal Baths encounter. The biggest problem facing us last night was the fact we did not start until it was already very late for us East and Central players. We did however work on a seeming answer to how to get through the encounter, and in theory it will just involve us properly executing on the plan… something I was not capable of doing last night after about 11 pm.

As far as the night as a whole… there were many attempts made at the Nightfall. This one is considerably worse than last week mostly because of the prism modifier and always seeming to be dead when I could be doing the maximum amount of damage to things. For the first two attempts I was running a less than successful combination of dual auto rifles, and wound up swapping things up a bit to the Manannan Void Scout Rifle as my energy weapon and Merciless as my fire Power Weapon. The challenge I kept having was in sections where I really could not get close to the targets and they were hanging back at a range where the autos were just not that effective. We managed to get the kill and the items gained from the Nightfall and the first chest of the raid managed to push me up to 287 power level. I am thinking that it might be time to start doing the various exotic quests so that I can push up weapons from infusing the items I am going to get. I will absolutely funnel the MIDA Multi Tool into my Manannan and the Mini Tool into my Antiope-D. So technically we have not actually cleared much in the raid, but we have a game plan and the intent to come back Friday night and give it another shot. I at least hope that our gameplan is in fact the one that is going to work going forward, because we managed to get to a burn phase… just got killed by the adds while trying to do this thing. Hopefully we can smooth out the rough spots and get a win, and move forward in the Leviathan. Side note… please do not post strategies because I know the desire to say “you only need to do this” is going to be strong. We legitimately prefer to figure this shit out on our own. It is always a challenge to find a team willing to wipe for science.