Tales of the Aggronaut

Other Worlds

September 13, 2016 by Belghast

Last night marked my return to the Monday night raid thing in Final Fantasy XIV, that I had not been able to attend the last few weeks for one reason or another. I know most of my blog coverage lately has been about Legion, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for lots of other games. The intention was to pull together last night and do a lot of raidy bits, but I kinda ruined that. I’ve written about the struggles to get Luna integrated with our household and the other two cats. Things are still not going well, and I am not sure if they ever will at this point. She simply hates other cats, and I cannot seem to get her from charging the other cats when she sees them. This is a sort of behavior I have never seen in any of the other cats we have had throughout the years. It has gotten so bad that the only real way we can stop her is by dousing her with a spray bottle. Which seems to do NOTHING for the long term effect and only distracts her for the moment… because seconds later she is charging once again. So the only other option is to keep her shut up in my wife’s office… which is a somewhat shitty life. Now we are on that hard precipice of trying to decide what is best for her and what is best for our other two cats. We have some options, but one of them is of course to return her to the organization we adopted her from. I’ve never really felt as much as a failure as I do right now because we have tried so many things… including the extremely expensive pheromone night light things. In any case… Tam really likes to just queue the group instead of doing a ready check, and there was a period of time where I was away from the screen dealing with cats. The end result of too many of these premature queues unfortunately is that I locked the entire group out, at which point we dissolved instead of waiting thirty minutes for it to clear. We did however at least get a single kill in before that happened, and knocked out some needed content for one of the guildies.

The other game I have been occasionally poking my head into is Guild Wars 2. I have a really fraught relationship with this game, but it has been something that I have patched up multiple times and attempted to play. I say attempted, because no matter how many times I try there is just something that never quite clicks with me. I made it to about 65 on my own recognizance… and then got boosted due to the daily login system the rest of the way to 80. While I have tried a bunch of different classes… it feels like the one I still like the most is Warrior in spite of how lousy melee generally feels in this game. During a recent sale I managed to pick up Heart of Thorns for $18… and I figured it was well worth giving it a try for that price. With that came with a boost to 80, but I have not figured out what class I actually want to use it on. During Pax South 2015 when they announced the expansion… I thought Revenant was going to be the class for me. However the boost allows you a “try before you buy” sort of functionality… and in practice the class just doesn’t feel like anything I am interested in. It is this strange amalgam between WoW Shaman, Deathknight, and Rogue and in a way that just doesn’t exactly feel like something I want to play. During the boost it hands you a hammer and a pair of swords, but I am wondering if maybe one of the other weapon combos feels better since as warrior I only really like greatsword and hammer. In any case I popped in last night for a bit and started actually trying to move my original story forward… I stalled out around 60 and just never tried to pick it back up. Maybe the story will hook me into the game in a way that the gameplay never actually did.

Breaking Silence

September 12, 2016 by Belghast

After the challenges of last week, this past weekend was largely a time to chill out and relax. On the “paw” front I am pleased to announce that the round of IV antibiotics seemed to work pretty well given that the swelling is largely down as is the redness. There is one spot that is a bit troubling, but we are watching it. I am guessing that the location went a little deeper than the rest and as such might take a little longer to recover. There is always the fear that the bite penetrated a tendon or something else, but we will continue to watch it as it hopefully heals. On the gaming front… I had all of these grand ideas about running nonstop dungeons, but what happened in reality is that I wound up chilling with the wife downstairs and watching various stuff on the television. It felt like it would be an invasion of the peace and quiet to get on voice chat and start talking “strategery” and such. What happened instead is that I queued up a few times as a pug dps, and spent time working on older stuff in the meantime while waiting on that lengthy queue to pop. Of note on the Ruin server group, the queue time for a DPS is about 45 minutes, which means I had plenty of time to work on other objectives while waiting on the queue to pop. I spent some time in Warlords farming spawns attempting to get my Shatari Defense reputation up… because I am admittedly a bit jealous of Grace and her amazing fire mammoth mount that she keeps running around on. The only problem there is it seems with the opening of Tanaan Jungle at least one of the farm spots has been nerfed into the ground… and Shattrath city has spawns really far apart making it hard to gather things up and AOE them down with whirlwind spam.

Another queue I wound up spending on the Isle of Giants in Pandaria where I learned a few key things. Firstly once again it is hard to gather everything up and AOE it down… because my aggro radius is minuscule now with the dinosaurs. Second I can apparently now easily solo Oondasta as Fury, so that is going to go on the mount farming list. The white raptor mount has been something I have worked on for awhile, and yesterday I ground out the last 2000 bones roughly. The queue popped before I could actually turn in, so I had to finish things up after the dungeon. The real takeaway from the weekend however is… my theory of treating World of Warcraft like Final Fantasy XIV seems to largely be working. Upon entering a dungeon, be it as tank or as dps… I do my customary “Hey Folks” which seems to unjam the conversation mechanism. Then throughout the dungeon folks tend to be willing to talk, but if I don’t say anything… it seems like folks are willing to just ride along in silence because there has always been the wowism that silence is preferable to dealing with assholes. The thing is… I think we can do better and a lot of the negative opinion folks have of this community is due to the fact that folks are willing to either put up with bullshit in dungeons because they want it to be over and don’t want to have to deal with another 45 minute queue. I am not sure if it is going to help, but I am absolutely making an effort to talk to people be it in my Class Hall fielding questions like I did yesterday… or running a dungeon, or even out in the world while doing an objective. I think most of us just simply assumed that no one was willing to have conversation, and I am trying to flip that assumption on its head.

The other big thing from the weekend is that I started work on my second character. Some time ago I started Exeter my Paladin off by getting Lightbringer. However after swapping Belghast to tanking, I am finding it way easier to quest like a madman in that mode. So as soon as I hit 102 I did the quest chain to pick up the second artifact, and had been holding artifact power items in reserve for awhile. Unlike Belghast I have a clear path that I am planning on working towards first, which I guess makes the experience feel more purposeful. On the Warrior protection tree there were so many cool things that I wanted, but none of them seemed to be clearly better than any of the others. Paladin it feels like there is one right choice for survival, and I am going in that direction first. Largely I devoted the time spent during the podcast to working on this guy, and by the end of the night I had hit 102 and was off into tanky land. I apparently also unlocked one of the appearances so I quickly swapped to the purple look and used it as an excuse to rock my purple judgement set. The one set that I wish existed in game is the yellow judgement set that you see one of the NPCs wearing. As it stands I have normal, Blue from the opening of Wrath event, and purple from the BC era heroics. This really is the best looking tier set in the game, and I wish more recolored sets would show up in dungeons, which reminds me… at some point I really need to work on farming up the turquoise wrath set. In any cases it was a good weekend and fairly relaxing, but it is my hope that with the week I will be back doing dungeons with friends again. I am now up to 823 item level on Belghast, which means I need to be hitting up those heroics.

Hand Update

September 9, 2016 by Belghast

This isn’t going to be a terribly amazing blog post this morning, but I still feel like I need to put one up. Yesterday did not involve an awful lot of gaming, though I did manage to move the needle forward a little bit on the Warrior class hall quest. Largely I was in a holding pattern waiting for my wife to get home from work, so we could decide what we needed to do about her hand. During the course of the day it had gotten worse. When she went to urgent care on Wednesday night, they drew a margin around the red area. They said that if it crossed that boundary, she really needed to get to the emergency room and get some IV delivered antibiotics. Well during the course of the day yesterday it crossed that line… and then the school nurse drew a new line… and by the time she got home from work it had crossed that boundary as well in several places. Neither one of us really like going to the doctor, but my wife specifically abhors it. So to contemplate going to the emergency room was almost a bridge too far for her. Thankfully we live in a smallish suburb with an ER that isn’t too heinous, but I assumed as the night went on it would get considerably more busy.

The long story short is that they did in fact hook her up to an IV and let a bag of some sort of high powered antibiotic drip into her for about thirty minutes. As of this morning there was really no noticeable change, but they did also tell us that the redness wasn’t really the big warning sign. If she started having shooting pain up her arm, or red streaks traveling in that direction… then it needed to be taken seriously. The worst part of this whole thing however is now my wife not only has one hand that is partially functional but the other one is going to be bruised up more than likely from the IV and also not completely functional. The other worst part is that by the time we got out of the hospital at 9 pm last night we were both starving, and decided that since they took a lot of blood work that we would have some red meat. The frustration of the whole situation is knowing that what you are going for isn’t that critical, but that it is also literally the only way to get IV antibiotics. I have no clue why urgent care places can’t do that sort of thing, because it seemed silly to actually have to go to a hospital.

In any case… by the time I got upstairs I was zoning out pretty hard and ultimately went to bed around 10:30. I would have gone earlier but I was trying to allow Luna some snuggle time with mommy before carrying her upstairs to sequester her up in the office over night. I hate that my wife is having to go through this, especially considering like a week and a half before I had the exact same thing happen to me… and my cat bite healed just fine. I guess after a couple decades of having cats, it was bound to happen to one of us. I just wish it had happened to me, because I am used to being malfunctioning.

Battered Paw

September 8, 2016 by Belghast

The last twenty four hours has been interesting for a few reasons… most of them not terribly good. A few days back I introduced you to Luna, and to say her integration into our family has not been going swimmingly is an understatement. She is quite possibly one of the sweetest cats we have encountered… when it is human to cat interactions. However as she has gotten more comfortable in the house, she has also become less tolerate and more willing to straight up fight our other two cats. We are trying to work through this, but occasionally one of us has to try and break up a fight. Yesterday my wife attempted to break up one of those fights by trying to remove our youngest from the situation. In a highly stressed and freaked out state Kenzie bit the shit out of her hand. Now this same sequence of events had happened a few weeks earlier to me… but this time Luna bit me. For me everything seemed to be fine once I stopped the bleeding because four puncture wounds can really produce a lot of blood. For my wife however she is having some adverse effects… namely that her hand is swollen, red and fevered. Yesterday after work she went to an urgent care place here in town, and they too were concerned giving her a shot of antibiotics, and a ten day course. They also drew a boundary around the effected area saying, if the redness breaks this line… to get to the emergency room because my wife will need a course of IV antibiotics.

Needless to say I am now doing a lot of things for her, given that it is painful to grip anything in her primary hand. I’ve latched a couple of bras and opened a lot of pill bottles and pretty much anything else that requires grip strength. I would post a picture of her poor battered “paw” but honestly I am not sure the comfort level folks have with seeing injuries. When I posted my knee, it looked questionable but there were no open wounds. This on the other hand feels like it would cross some invisible internet line. Needless to say it looks bad, and thanks to the irregular line around it… and the swollen nature of the area… it kinda reminds me of a jellyfish. On the Luna front, what is ultimately happening is that we have built her a little suite of sorts in my wife’s office with litter, food and water and some comfy places to chill. She is ultimately staying there when we go to bed around midnight, and then getting back out when we are physically home and able to intervene if needed. The problem with this is that when I let her out each night she is starved for attention, and it just makes me feel horrible for doing it. That said I don’t want either side of this squabble to injure themselves further. Both Luna and Kenzie/Allie have several battle scars already from the past scuffles. Nothing yet that needs a trip to the vet thankfully, but still I don’t want to encourage more unsupervised “encounters”. Additionally when we are at home we try and make sure there is one of us on each floor of the house… so that there are clear safe zones that they can stay away from each other. I just am not sure how we get past this current situation and get to one where they at least tolerate being in the same room… if not hopefully someday are friends.

As far as the game goes, last night was a night of doing so many World Quests. Early in the evening I unlocked a set of quests… the first was to do 30 World Quests, and the second was to collect 30 Demonic Runes. Somehow I managed to actually complete both of these last night during my extended play session. With my wife in her current injured state I purposefully tried not to get into anything that I could not also get out of rapidly. There are so many little things that she just needs help with at the moment, and I didn’t want to inconvenience her or my party by getting into group content. So I spent the majority of the night running around doing these little vignettes of action, and I guess I caught it at exactly the right time… because when I finished the first round there were a handful of new ones up popping which allowed me to complete the 30 in total. This is not the sort of thing I will do often, as in try and do “all the quests” but it was fun to do it at least once. One of the things that I like the most about World Quests is that I don’t have to worry about collecting a quest… and if I get interrupted having it stranded in my quest log that I will then have to abandon to pick up something else of importance. I get to enjoy the action while it is happening and then forget about it if I need to get pulled away. The real shocker of the night however was that I did one of the PVP quests… admittedly without really intending to. I was bouncing around the map and noticed that there was a nearby quest with good rewards…. and it was only after I had killed a few mobs did I realize that I was now apparently flagged. It took a lot of deaths… not to PVP but just to the density of the mobs, but I managed to complete it and get my shiny bauble. All in all it seems like these are a way more reasonable and enjoyable form of potential PVP for me… it is doing an objective that has a clear reward at the end… rather than just killing players for the sake of killing players.