Tales of the Aggronaut

Operation Hey Folks

September 16, 2016 by Belghast

For the last week and some change, I have been running at least one dungeon a night. Often time I am queuing with less than a full party. This is a situation that generally causes me great anxiety, because I like going into a group knowing that folks I know… outnumber the folks I don’t know. I said awhile back that I have been trying to force myself to be more cordial in dungeons. As a result I have adopted my common “Hey Folks” and “How Goes?” greetings. My friend Grace that I am often dungeoning with has been doing the same. Mostly we had a discussion awhile back about how this is the common expected behavior in Final Fantasy XIV, and that maybe if we attempted to treat World of Warcraft the same we might get similar results. Folks in FFXIV are largely charming and willing to help you sort out mechanics that you might not understand, all just because you spoke up and said you were new to a dungeon. My experience in the past of WoW has not been nearly that charitable, but I was willing to give it a shot either way. The awesome thing about going in with the majority of a party… it means the moment someone resorts to toxic behavior you can punt them quickly. All in all I have to say I continue to be pleased at just how well this is going, even in Heroics. If you present a friendly face, more often than not it has been met with a similarly friendly response.

Last night we had someone drop shortly after introductions… which I am hoping was just a case of them getting disconnected or being needed elsewhere. However others in the party not only were cheery but performed admirably. At the end of the dungeon run we took time to praise the Deathknight for example who did an amazing job of pull casters into the group, and pulled off a clutch rez when our healer inadvertently stood in some “bad”. All of this is really making me wish that World of Warcraft would adopt a commendation system similar to Final Fantasy XIV. I think a lot of that culture is based on the fact that at the end of a dungeon run, each player gets a single commendation that they can give to someone in their party. There is the additional caveat that you cannot give commendations to members of your own guild, meaning you have to be giving random strangers these nods. To make it something that folks are actually interested in receiving there are a number of achievements based on the number of commendations you have, and some of the rewards are things like mounts, titles and cosmetic items. Basically the system would port perfectly to World of Warcraft random dungeons, and give some additional reinforcement of good behavior. Last night for example I greatly wished I had the ability to heap tangible praise on this Deathknight for doing a pretty amazing job all around. Even the mage that ultimately replaced the dropped Demon Hunter, was deserving of commendations because for the most part everyone “mechanic’d” like a pro.

Other than dungeons, last night I spent most of my time attempting to catch up in Suramar. I had been lagging behind horribly in the questing there, namely when it comes to unlocking things in the actual city proper. I am not a huge fan of stealth mechanics, and it is foreign to me to attempt to sneak around. A huge part of me wants to simply fight my way from one side of the city to the other… but the sheer mob density here makes that not really a viable option. Similarly I don’t believe a lot of the quests are actually open to you unless you are wearing the illusion. As Tam and I have commented… Suramar is like being a High Elf Enchanter in Neriak… for those who ever had that experience in the original Everquest. The illusion works most of the time, but occasionally there is someone all to happy to murder you. As you progress however you start to build little enclaves where you are more or less free to roam safely. Last nights grind was focused on getting far enough in to be able to start unlocking some of the lucrative world quests, one of which yesterday was an epic trinket. Before I went to bed last night I managed to unlock the dinosaur quest… which is truly amazing and with it the trinket world quest. Nothing quite as fun as riding along on the back of a devilsaur and gobbling up demons and evil elves.

Accidentally Epic’d

September 15, 2016 by Belghast

I figured this screenshot was appropriate this morning because this if anything else is how I feel. Ragweed is my direst of dire enemies. It has always been a problem for me and continues to be this day. I feel like I am a bit of a walking zombie and I didn’t really know completely why until I watched the forecast this morning. Sure enough ragweed pollen is spiking like mad right now, which explains the constant congestion, watery eyes… and general inability to breathe. On a day like today all I really want to do is to either go back to bed and hide from the world, or snuggle up in a cocoon on the sofa playing video games. The problem with this plan however is that our human resources department is being super bizarre with sick leave. I have almost 400 hours of sick time built up over the years… yet they tend to freak out any time someone actually uses some. What is the point of giving us sick leave… especially in the hundreds of hours territory while being stingy with actually getting to use it. So instead of chilling out on a day like today when I am not really a fully functional human being… I am going to shamble in my undead state to the office and mash keys with confused fingers.

One the WoW front however, as of last night I am missing one ring and a belt from being completely purple once more. The strange thing about this process has been that I didn’t really do anything super intentional to get there. Through unlocking my class hall, completely its mission… and then spending order resources to upgrade items all the way to 840 I got a big chunk of the way there. From there it has simply been doing any items that were upgrades each day from the world quests. The end result has been the least grindy gearing process I have ever gone through. I just played the game and did the things I enjoyed and before I knew it I was sitting there at 838, a reasonable level to do just about anything available in the game right now. The truth is I have only actually run two dungeons in heroic, and while I have done a slew of normal dungeons they were always for some other purpose than just grinding. Either I needed something for a quest or a friend of mine did… and we ventured forth and had a grand romp inside. It has been amazing just how painless and seamless this entire gearing process has felt. For a long time I have given credit to the way the catch up mechanics felt in Final Fantasy XIV, but even there you had to have a focus on actually running content to get gear. This time around it feels like I just did the things I would have done normally… and accidentally got epic’d.

Short and Long Game

September 14, 2016 by Belghast

Last night is a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me. When I first got home I piddled around for a bit doing the few world quests that actually had upgrades for me. I managed to pull out another 835 trinket, and a 830 Iron Relic which combined with a 830 necklace that I got much later in the evening takes my overall item level to 834. For the most part every single night I am doing two things. Firstly I am knocking out the four quests that are required to get me the emissary chest with whatever faction is highlighted. After that I check World Quest Tracker to see which rewards might be upgrades, because as my gear level has gone up… the sorts of rewards available to me has also increased. For example when I checked a few minutes ago before sitting down to write this blog post I had an epic chestpiece somewhere in Azuna with roughly 20 hours left on it. For those not familiar with the addon, it gives players a similar view to the mobile app in game and allows for the tracking of individual world quests. This is super handy because when you are tracking one… it then also shows up on your flight map so you can see pretty easily which location is the closest to the quest you are trying to finish. It also color codes the quests so you can see which ones are expiring soon. This way if you are trying to complete every possible quest, you can make sure you get those with a short timer on them done so you don’t risk them expiring.

After hopping on voice chat we organized into a group, because in part we were looking for something to do with Tam who has been working on a Monk healer. I needed a quest for enchanting from Halls of Valor… because even though I have done this place five times now the staggering of quests meant I kept needing something from it. The positive is that we could run a dungeon with him… the negative is that because of his “just boosted” gear score we had to zone in manually. What was awesome about the run last night though is that Grace has done quite a bit of healing on the Monk, so Tam and her talks about which abilities work for which fights as we went through the dungeon. By the end Tam was Mistwalkering like a pro, and I went from having to largely keep myself alive with Ignore Pain to not really even getting close to dying at all. The other thing we noticed is just how ridiculous the range on the Monk healing statue is. It seems to be most of an instance worth of distance… and I am not entirely certain that when it finally stopped healing… that it was due to range and not due to line of sight. We finished the dungeon successfully and it broke up the logjam that seemed to be my enchanting progression. After completing that one quest I got four other quests that unlocked a series of endgame neck enchants. Grace and I were talking a bit about this problem last night, that while I really enjoy the quests… it is going to make tradeskilling on alts a pure nightmare.

After the dungeon run, the group broke up as Mor and Ashgar needed to go off to bed… or whatever it was that they actually did. From there Grace and I decided to work on some of the Gold Dragon Wardens quests. These show up on your map with the traditional elite boss seal around them, and represent tougher group content. Sometimes these are reasonable to solo… other times they simply hit too hard or have too much life to be reasonable. While they are not often soloable, they generally speaking can be duo’d with my protection warrior and her mage. I can keep myself alive mostly long enough for her to burn it down and more often than not when we actually get to a given location… there is already a group starting the fight that we just hop in on. So I started the post with a statement about last night being a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me, and all of these examples are why. I started off the evening soloing, then pulled together a group and ran a dungeon… then continued the grouping in a much smaller scale with tracking down a bunch of elite world quests. I went from solo, to group, to duoing… all in the same night and it felt seamless and largely effortless to find some objective that felt valuable to do in all of those cases. Eventually I am sure raiding will be added in to that mix giving me a whole new level of things to do with friends, all the while constantly feeling like I am moving the needle forward. Legion is doing an excellent job of giving me small term gains, but still keeping extremely long term goals present and making me feel like I am constantly inching forward towards them. Now I just want them to keep this up for the rest of the expansion and continue this feeling into the next.

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.