Tales of the Aggronaut

Clever Dragons

November 15, 2016 by Belghast

Iron Banner just concluded yesterday, and I spent a good deal of time playing it this go round. I’ve never had any luck in trying to get a decent Grasp of Malok, so when the rank five roll of Clever Dragon featured Counter Balance, Perfect Balance and Snapshot… I knew I was ultimately going to grind until I got there. With the Rise of Iron it brought a number of changes to “Iron Banana”, namely since Lord Saladin is nor our “faction leader” of a sort… the reigns of the tournament were passed to Lady Efrideet. The primary change that happened is the fact that instead of three weekly bounties, and three daily bounties… we are given four weekly bounties. Previously you got a crappy blue item at Rank 3 with Iron Banner and an item package at Rank 5. This time around two of these new bounties reward armor packages, and the other two reward weapons… and you still get some sort of a big package upon hitting Rank 5. So the total loot payout of participating in the event is significantly more than it used to be. That said I find it MUCH harder to get to Rank 5, given that I don’t have something I can be working on every day to give me a much needed boost. In Iron Banner you only gain ranks if you are winning, and especially trying to queue during the day on Friday… I hit some significant losing streaks. Now there is a built in system that gives you a sort of consolation prize coin upon a loss… and these stack to five, with a boost to your rank granted when you finally turn around and win. However there was at least one point on Friday that I lost eight games in a row… so it just become frustrating as I kept getting thrown up against premades.

Now the positive of the event is that I got tons of loot, and also managed to complete both the void damage portion of the thorn quest, and the crucible kills portion of my Future War Cult exotic class item quest. I spent a significant amount of time running around shooting people into the face with the above Shotgun. I’ve had the Party Crasher +1 for awhile now and I consider it to be as close to a god roll as I will ever likely see with Full Auto, Final Round and Rifled Barrel to help boost the range a bit. Traditionally I use my Invective when doing crucible, but at the moment I am simply not willing to waste an exotic shard on anything until I get significantly closer to the item cap. I went on a mission to try and get a decent legendary shotgun during Taken King and in my very first round of attempting to grind the Crucible I managed to pull this guy in the end of match rewards and have been loving it ever since. I am sure a god roll Matador could pry it from my hands but for the moment I am super happy with it.

The other weapon that I used a significant amount of the time especially to get those void kills is Saladin’s Vigil. Now this is something I picked up last Iron Banner from one of the loot bounties, and I felt like I got a completely reasonable roll on it. I am not even sure what a “god roll” would look like, but mine has Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery, and Performance Bonus…. with that last perk actually extending the usefulness of the weapon as it materializes ammo out of thin air. With a really low charge rate and almost maxed impact and reasonable range… this is essentially the first fusion rifle that is not Sleeper Simulant that I really find myself enjoying using. I got many a kill by this one and leading the charge as I expected something to duck around the corner. Fusion Rifles can be extremely frustrating in the crucible because they are very much a “whelp I’m dead” weapon when you intercept a bolt.

Lastly the weapon I cannot stop using… literally ever is this Haakon’s Hatchet that was a vendor roll during the Taken King. I realize that the “doctrine of spamming” archetype is still pretty potent in the meta, but no matter how many versions of that archetype I get… I never can seem to do shit with them. I currently have a potentially viable Hex Caster ARC and an Unbent Tree… but I cannot ever bring myself to level them and have not deemed them worthy of motes of light. The weapon I continue to go back to however is this Hatchet with Ranger Finder, Counter Balance and Perfect Balance. This is as close to my perfect weapon as I will likely ever find, because not only do I love the appearance… but I can also draw a bead on enemy players with in and chew them up. What I love the most about the weapon is the fact that it is just as viable for me in Crucible situations as it is doing literally anything PVE… namely the Archon’s Forge. The magazine is big enough that I can often take down an entire wave of mobs in the forge without a reload.

I’ve tried so many different primary weapons… for example I managed to pull the above Shadow Price that while it does not have the perfect roll has something I can work with. With Rodeo and Perfect Balance it becomes usable… and while Icarus is generally a worthless perk I can make it work since I jump around a lot. This gun works well in any PVE situation, but it is completely useless in the Crucible, at least with the roll package that I wound up getting. I have a copy of The Continental that seems similarly reasonable, but nothing can quite match up to the “perfect for me” stat package of the Hatchet. I still want to try and find one of the Doctrine archetype weapons with Counterbalance and Perfect Balance to see if it suddenly becomes this magical weapon that folks talk about. However for the time being I will keep using Hatchet and be happy to have it. I am hoping however that after all the time I spent trying to get it… that I find that sweet spot with the Clever Dragon and it becomes my new favorite Pulse Rifle.

Karazhan Clear

November 14, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely because of the extended holiday granted by veterans day. It is also odd because it felt strange to go so long without a post after the recent outage in my blog. Most everything is working as intended, but for whatever reason on the new hardware there is an artificially low upload limit which is causing me to have to shrink my images for a bit until I have that sorted out. In truth I doubt most people will really notice that much given that my theme tended to scale them down a bit anyways. The only real annoyance is I actually have to play which images I am going to use and shrink them down beforehand. As far as gaming went I was all over the place… playing copious amounts of Destiny, World of Warcraft and even a little Guild Wars 2. I also started Diablo II the December game of the month, in honor of the 20th anniversary. The strangest thing about going back and playing that game is… just how amazingly well it still holds up. Maybe I am viewing it through the haze of nostalgia… but other than some dodgy animations it mostly just “works”. Sure I miss some of the more interesting abilities that Diablo 3 added in, but it is also making me appreciate the game we have more. So instead of going on about a whole slew of topics, I am largely going to focus in on World of Warcraft. Firstly on a crazy whim I decided to de-Worganize Belgrave my Deathknight. He started out as a human and the more I played him in Worgen form the more I was annoyed at how small in general two-handers look on that model. Both my Artifacts for Blood and Unholy felt like I was swinging a one-hander which just felt “wrong”. Along with this shift however I managed to get into the groove of the Deathknight and in theory that is probably going to be my next 110. While I need the rogue and the alchemy it provides… I just struggle to get into a would be stealthy class.

The core of this mornings post however is about Karazhan. We managed to miss the first week because we were juggling trying to get attuned, with raiding and all sorts of other things… that by the time Sunday rolled around we didn’t have a permanent 5th player. After we snagged Kylana we went in on week two and managed to make a significant amount of progress getting six of the eight bosses. We made an attempt to pull together last Monday but scheduling conflicted with us as it was Ashgar’s On Call week. From there we largely plotted our revenge throughout the week and in truth I was more amped about popping into Kara than I was about our super smooth clear of Emerald Nightmare. I’ve talked before about that this is essentially what World of Warcraft was missing for me… a tight group experience for a fixed limited number of players. After Zul’Aman there really didn’t seem to exist a similar experience, and while 10 player raiding was essentially that… it just felt different. Raiding feels like raiding no matter how many people you bring, and while I probably had more fun during wrath in the 10 player group… it didn’t feel significantly different than the 25 player version I was already running regularly. Doing both 10 and 25 watered down the experience, so that by the time we killed the Lich King on 25… it felt like old hat already since we had done it months earlier in the as a 10. It also served to make me that much more frustrated when players seemed to struggle to grasp the mechanics… since they were exactly like the version I already knew like the back of my hand.

What Karazhan provides more than anything else… is a unique experience that fits within certain confines. This week we managed to clear significantly faster, but still a little bit behind the time we would need for a Nightbane run. By the time we hit Opera we still had around two minutes and thirty seconds on the timer… but the RP dialog before the event actually starts ate up roughly a minute of that time. Essentially if we are going to do this we need to be chain pulling the place, and at some point I hope to get there. For the time being however we have been working on getting stable kills. Moroes was still a pain in the ass that we BARELY pushed across the finish line… but a oneshot is a oneshot so we were happy with that. We struggled a bit on a few other fights but at the 1 hour mark we were sitting halfway through the raid. We made it up to the Mana Devourer and took a handful of tries before we managed to defeat it and start moving onto the final boss. I am not going to lie here… it took us a solid hour of attempts on Viz’aduum the Watcher because that fight is less about damage output… and more about trying to time all of these stupid things from happening at the worst possible time…. while avoiding as much damage as is humanly possible. This is absolutely the sort of fight where you can just end up getting screwed by RNG, and it reminds me of the stark difference between FFXIV raid design and WoW raid design. The encounter as a whole has as many moving parts as Coil Turn 9 for example… but it is far more RNG dependent and far less successfully messaged. However all of that said… we managed to finally get a good attempt where the stars shined upon us and managed to get our guilds very first clear of Karazhan. Now just to speed up the process and get us a Nightbane as well.

Rainbow Tentacles

November 11, 2016 by Belghast

This morning is a getting to a bit of a late start because reasons. Firstly I am off for Veterans day, and I want to take a brief moment to thank those who fought to protect our country. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, my wife’s step-dad fought as part of the Chosin Few in Korea, and various sundry other family members have been in the military during peace and war time. If you see anyone out and about, take a moment to thank them for their service. The little things like that, feel all the more important during these last few days because of the sequence of events that has happened from essentially Tuesday onwards. As for me… its been a weird series of days. Firstly I just couldn’t put myself in the mindset of being able to write a blog post, so instead you got an intermission. I genuinely expected to pick up Thursday morning and begin blogging as normal once again. However fate seemed to conspire against me because in the middle of the crushing depression that I was going through Tuesday… my blog disappeared off the face of the internet. It seems my web host had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure, and that since I had yet to migrate to newer harder… partially my own fault… the site went down until it could get moved completely. The positive is that I seem to have lost nothing in the process other than I am sure readers who probably thought I was going dark… given the post that I had left that morning. It feels odd to have taken a somewhat forced break… and then be back just for Friday before taking the weekend off.

As far as my own mental state… I have to say raiding with the guild on Wednesday helped it immensely. For some reason it has become what seems like a new tradition to paint me with the rainbow generator before battles. Here we are waiting on the Xavius fight to begin… and I am glowing with really strange rainbow tentacles as I tend to think of them. I always feel like I am straight out of whimsyshire. On a more serious note though… I could not be more proud of my guild and the raid attached to it. The position I have assumed in the world is vastly different, because I am not leading the guild… and to some extent that still feels odd. Kylana assumed the reins after Rylacus went into Final Fantasy XIV… and I have to say that while Ry and I were essentially the same sort of leader… Kylana is way better than I have ever been at the day to day administrata. That is really the place where he shines, and doing things like making sure everyone gets guild rank promotions on time… without having to be pestered about it a dozen times. As for me… I pretty much live in this position of guild mascot. Folks still ask me to do responsible adult style things, but mostly I try to defer to the judgement of Ky. I am still very much the chief recruiter and tour guide, but it feels okay to not be the king.

As for raiding… there are certain fights where I am taking a much bigger role at least in communicating the mechanics. I’ve started barking orders on Iggy and it seems to go more smoothly when I let folks know what they should be fighting and when… and roughly how much time we have left to burn. As far as Emerald Nightmare in general… other than us tanks completely screwing up Ursoc… we had probably the smoothest night we have ever had and made a really quick work of the entire instance. We had enough time to put in about thirty minutes of attempts on Heroic Nythendra… which is way rougher than the original. I remember rolling into Emerald Nightmare for the first time and feeling amazing when we oneshot her… only to feel frustration again when we struggled with SpiderBirb. Ultimately more than anything I feel happy we have made progress. It feels like we started as a disconnected group of folks that sometimes ran dungeons together… and have exited a highly functional team. I mean I had worked in the past a few times with Art, when I had to fill in tanking during our Warlords raid… but he is a super dependaeble tanking partner. Of course I also love tanking beside Ashgar who fills in when Art has not been able to make it.

As far as other matters go… I am trying my best to focus on the positive things in life for awhile. This is not me burying my head in the sand, but me trying to return to a sense of normality for my own mental health. I am just as confused and frustrated as anyone by the recent turn of events, but I also know that there is very little that is directly in my realm of control. So I am going to focus on the things I do control, and try my best to get happy again. For those of you who are reading this… thanks so much for sticking by me throughout the years. You all mean so much to me.

Intermission

November 9, 2016 by Belghast

I have been sitting here at my desk trying to figure out how to muster the strength to make a blog post. When I write I do so from a generally good place, and try and harness hope and a sense of wonder about the things that matter to me. This morning I just can’t do that. I cannot seem to fake my way into thinking that everything is okay. Everything is not okay. My heart is broken after last night, and I just can’t have any joy to pour into this today. I am not going to go on at length about this, because I generally try and keep my actual blog a relatively politics and religion free zone. Suffice to say I do not live in the country that I imagined I did. I apologize to my readers for falling down on the job, but you really don’t want me trying to write in this current mindset. I am hoping beyond hope that I find a silver lining in this, because right now the future seems extremely bleak. I used to comfort myself with the belief that sanity would prevail, but I just don’t have that luxury anymore.