Tales of the Aggronaut

We Are Prepared

August 10, 2016 by Belghast

Unplanned Plans

Last night did not go as I actually thought it would. Yesterday was the patch that allowed folks like me who purchased the digital pre-order of Legion to roll Demon Hunters. Firstly I want to take a step back and acknowledge just how damned brilliant this idea is. Sure there were demon hunters everywhere yesterday, but the total number running through the intro quests felt reasonable. I realize they have gotten much better at instancing since the days of the Death Knight and Wrath of the Lich King… but still it seems rather smart to forcibly split up the population into waves. There are still lots of folks who prefer to do physical copies of games, especially one with a long tradition of having awesome physical copies. I guess the hope is that by letting some folks into the content early, that will mean that there won’t be quite the launch day crush on this single zone. Now stepping forward again, I had planned on playing a completely different Demon Hunter last night… as I continued working on my seasonal character in Diablo 3. This was largely due to the fact that I fully expected the servers to be burning down around me, and the game to be essentially in an unplayable state with Demon Hunters, Broken Shore and the Legion Zone Invasions all starting last night. I got home relatively early, and while waiting on pizza to arrive I thought I would pop in and at least create a character. For whatever reason when I boosted the Mage I just picked a name from the stable of names I have used in other games. Even though it made zero sense… I named said mage Belglaive… a name that would later be ideal for my Demon Hunter. As a result I also did a little renaming yesterday to shift my Mage to be Belglacial since I highly favor frost spec… which freed up the name for my demonic Night Elf. The other name in the running of course was the one I used on the beta server “Belblight”.

What happened in reality is that both myself and Grace spent the rest of the night playing World of Warcraft and participating in the zone invasions. I casually quested my way through the Demon Hunter starter content while eating dinner and then after getting dumped into Stormwind I was given the quest to do a Legion event. For those who have not done them yet, it seems like Blizzard has learned a lot from the past events. The ones that stick out in my mind the most is the Undead Invasion event that happened just ahead of the launch of the original Naxxramas and the release of Wrath of the Lich King. In those events items spawned in a handful of zones, and it was a mad dash for players to scramble over to the area to get enough completion on it to be able to qualify for loot. I ground these hard enough to get a set of gear for pretty much all of the armor types… sadly the leather set is stranded forever on another battle.net account but I still regularly wear the plate set that largely looks like a blue and brown judgement recolor. The problem with the event however was the fact that you were in constant competition with other players for spawns, and that it also caused you to camp zones until you got everything you needed. I spent so many hours out in Azshara… the good version not the one the version the Goblins later wrecked.

Maybe Space Goats Weren’t Unreasonable

What happens in the Legion Invasion event however is that at any given time there will be two “hot zones” in the world where invasions are happening. When I started playing last night those were Tanaris around Gadgetzan and Northern Barrens around The Crossroads. The part that I did not quite catch onto however is that each character can complete both of the active zones, and does not need to wait for the event to “start”. What happens instead is the moment you cross the zone boundary, you are stuck in an instanced version that is currently in phase one of the event. It seems as though all you really need to do is to be in zone as each of the phases shifts, and I am uncertain how much actual participation you need to do. There have been many times I was still flying to my destination when the event transitioned into Phase 2 and I have still managed to get full credit every time. Upon completing Phase Two you receive a Small Legion Chest and upon completing the Final Phase you receive a Large Legion Chest. From each of these a handful of things can drop, but the bulk are item level 700 weapons and armor, as well as some of the currency of the event Nethershards. It also seems like any time you take one of the “bosses” of the event that spawn and are marked with a Skull, you receive somewhere between 5 and 10 Nethershards per kill. In theory if you are wanting to maximize your earning, you would probably want to roll around as a team and focus entirely on killing the skulls as soon as they spawn. The only problem there is that they have mechanics… one of which was an version of old school Kazzak that essentially becomes invulnerable when he kills ten players. All of these Shards can be turned in for goodies including a Pet, full appearance sets, and individual weapons at the Captive Wyrmtongue <Reluctant ‘Quartermaster’> that can be found in Stormwind, Orgrimmar and occasionally out in the field as well. I know for example he spawns in Tanaris near Gadgetzan during that invasion.

Now quite possibly the coolest part of this event is that it appears to be level agnostic. To test this theory Grace grabbed her level sixty mage and brought it over to Tanaris where she was able to complete the event, with every mob appearing to her as though it were around her level range. When she opened the chests instead of rewarding item level 700 gear, it gave her gear appropriate for her level. That means players who are not even at the current level cap are going to be able to participate in this invasion, unlike the pre-launch events in the past. The best part is that it seemed to “just work” and if this is an example of how well their new tech works to auto level players to the content… I am pretty impressed. I know all of the zones in Legion function in this manner, and that you can start in pretty much any place while leveling through and complete the content in your own order. It is my ultimate hope that maybe just maybe this tech eventually trickles down to the older zones. Now the possible negative here is that I still love being able to solo raid content… so the hope is that maybe they can come up with some version of the “unsynched” style of play that we can do in Final Fantasy XIV. In any case it was a fun night of swapping alts and then flying across great stretches of the contents trying to reach where the legion invasions were happening. The two “hot zones” swap out every four hours, and largely right now I am looking at them as a good way of playing catch up on the gear for my characters. Only one of my characters is in the 700s item level wise, so pretty much everything I pick up from this event is an upgrade. Right now I am largely focused on getting the Warlock and the Demon Hunter geared out… because I have this feeling that they are rapidly going to become my alts of choice.

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

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At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

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After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

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In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.

Palladium Find

August 8, 2016 by Belghast

Unsorted Madness

After sitting at home due to the outside generally being rainy and icky Saturday, we ventured forth yesterday out into the extremely muggy world left behind. I managed to wrap up the podcast and get a blog post made all well before my wife made it home from church. By the time she got home I was essentially ready to go do whatever she might need to do. When she told me that she wanted to go to Gardener’s I admittedly had some mixed emotions. For the uninitiated Gardner’s Used Books is this massive place here in Tulsa It takes up the entirety of an extremely deep strip mall and almost every inch of it is covered in bookcases and or collectibles. The problem being that they are also notorious for reorganizing trying to fit new stuff in the store, which means that often times you have to spend thirty minutes roaming the store trying to find it again. The biggest problem I have had recently with Gardner’s is that their stock seems to be aging horribly. When I go to a book store I almost always make a beeline to the pen and paper gaming section, and then from there I wander out into other things. This section at Gardner’s had been shrinking and it felt like slowly, bit by bit we were just picking through the bones of a carcass that had been there since the early 90s. The thing you have to understand about this store is that it is essentially designed to be run at a loss. The Gardener’s “real” business is a Tax Service, and a really damned good one. It has been rumored for years that the family owns several buildings just like this one full of books, that were bought in bulk to dilute the profits to whatever level they needed for tax benefits. Over the last year or so they have been opening up one of these buildings located behind the main store on the weekends, and letting folks sift through the new arrivals. The above image is a single quadrant of this second building… and what you are looking at is completely unsorted books.

So you might see a Chilton manual to a 85 Chevy Pickup, next to a Danielle Steel, sitting beside an oddity like the book in the photo above. “The Ewoks Join the Fight” was part of a series of books that included a record that went with them. The idea was for you to read along with the narration, but the narration itself was this amazing radio play style thing. I loved these as a kid and had them for several different franchises… and I think I even remember there being a set for the Gremlins movie. Now the part I am not remembering is if they came from a restaurant as a limited time giveaway, or if this was something that I ended up getting from the scholastic books catalog. Regardless they were cool and it was a trip down memory lane to see one half buried in a pile of unrelated books. We came with a purpose in mind of trying to find pre-calc books for my wife, who now has that as a prep this year. So as I started going through the piles I started pulling books out because you could walk past the same table three times and see slightly different things each time. Unfortunately nothing I pulled really interested her, but she did find a seemingly nice book on forensics. The challenge of this Gardner’s Annex is the fact that there did not appear to be any air conditioning. We went extremely early in the morning, and it was already getting a little muggy in there. I would hate to go there in the full on Oklahoma summer heat, considering it is basically a giant metal building. The coolest thing in the annex however was this really neat full sized Han Solo in Carbonite sculpture that was hanging on one of the walls. I am not sure exactly where it came from, or if it was an official prop for maybe the re-releases of the original movies back during the mid 90s. Whatever the case I wanted to take it home with me, but like so many of the bigger things they have… like the life sized Hulk statue… it didn’t have a price tag on it.

When we made it over to the main building, I have to say I got more than a little excited. One of the things that I “collect” for lack of a better word to describe it… are Palladium games books. I have talked about this a bit in the past, and it seems like folks tend to either gravitate towards GURPS or Palladium when it comes to a “universal” system for gaming. Later Wizards tried to do this with the d20 system, but the idea is that you have one set of rules that cover lots and lots of different genres. As someone who used to love genre bending in gaming… it would allow you to give players the leeway to play quite literally anything they wanted to in almost any setting. The downside is there are only so many character backstories that can make this work apart from a “band of adventurers” or “mercenaries”. For a period of time Palladium books released a quarterly “magazine” for lack of a better term, filled with various bits of information related to all of the different systems called Rifter. They originally sold for between $10 and $15 in game stores, but over the years I have picked them up whenever I happened to find them cheaply. Sometimes they have really good stuff in them, other times not so much. It seems as though someone had just unloaded a stack of them on Gardner’s sixteen in total. The negative being that they were mostly priced around $6 a piece, which is fine if I only found them one at a time… but more than I would want to pay for a large bulk lot of them. After my wife didn’t find much of anything she wanted from the main store, I decided to see if they could make me a deal on the entire bundle. I had it in my head that I would be willing to pay around $50 for them all… and when the guy said he would sell them to me for $45 I had to stifle the excitement. There are some huge gaping holes in the numbering… and apparently they released physical copies of this up through the 40s so it is far from a complete set. However I have a lot more of them than I did before hand so life is pretty good. I’ve not really done much more than thumb through them, but if nothing else they always have really cool artwork.

Who You Gonna Call

August 7, 2016 by Belghast

Ghostbusters Reboot

This morning I am sitting down to write that immediately feels like a dangerous post. The internet has been charged with drama over the release of the Ghostbusters movie this summer. From the moment I saw the trailer I knew that for better or worse I was going to see it. The Ghostbusters franchise was a significant part of my childhood, and I even had a poorly recorded bootleg copy of the movie that I wore out from watching it over and over as a child. I was just the right age for the phenomena and it was only multiplied by the fact that my cousins were also extremely into the movie franchise. We had so many quotes from the movie memorized, and even today when delivering bad news I sometimes say “tell them about the twinkie” and this past week I absolutely said “cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria” when describing a catastrophe at work. To say this movie has left its imprint on me is a bit of an understatement. All of this said, please do not expect me to devolve into a post about how Paul Feig has stolen my childhood. My childhood is perfectly fine and intact… and the reason why I know this is that Hollywood keeps mining it to make a quick buck. My childhood was so damned awesome that even today I can walk down the toy aisle and damned near every toy I encounter has its roots in said childhood. My childhood is safely guarded by the warm memories that made me a geek in the first place, and continue to interest me in new and quirky movies, games and comics.

Friday was my wife’s Birthday and at the suggestion of my boss I took the afternoon off, and we wound up eating a late lunch and then going to a matinee of new Ghostbusters movie with a friend of ours. Then as fate would have it, yesterday was this nasty rainy day that caused us to hibernate on the couch… and while there VH1 happened to be playing both of the original Ghostbusters movies. So as a result I feel like I have both franchises fresh in my memory, and less cluttered by the detail changing dusts of time. The problem I am having personally is that the new Ghostbusters reboot was in essence two different experiences for me. The first experience is the phenomenal comedic performances of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth. The second experience was an otherwise forgettable plot line and a more annoying than sister primary villain. Because of the first part it feels like the movie works well enough and becomes a fun romp through ghost filled New York. The second part however annoys me because the cast deserved a much better movie than the one that they got. So when asked if I like the movie I am torn… I have to say yes because it was well worth watching, but there is always going to be a bit of an asterisk behind that yes because the plot structure and story were not that great.

The primary point of frustration is that this is a movie without a build up. What I mean by that is we know immediately who the bad guy is and what he is ultimately doing. His little mantra of”Charge the lines, create the vortex, break the barriers.” pretty much explains the entire plot of the movie and we hear it extremely early. There is no suspense or real explanation of what the hell his trash sculptures were or how exactly they worked other than that they emitted pretty purple light and exploded. The other problem I had with Rowan is that essentially he was every cruel nerd throwback pulled straight from a subreddit. He was picked on so now he just wants to watch the world burn… that is the entire motivation for his character. In contrast the whole plot of the original Ghostbusters involved this creepy as fuck Ivo Shandor that we know next to nothing about other than the fact that he build a weird structure designed entirely to act as a conduit for the spiritual world. So when the movie uncovers this it feels like they are digging down and uncovering a secret truth that has been hidden under our noses, rather than just following the trail of a mad bomber. Even the second Ghostbusters in spite of all of its problems, provides a sufficiently steeped in history antagonist for us to learn more about as the movie goes along. Rowan on the other hand feels like a sort of shorthand for generic internet bad guy, almost the emoji version of a proper antagonist.

All of this said Kate McKinnon makes the movie. Jillian Holtzmann is phenomenal and I cannot wait to see all of the amazing cosplay she is going to inspire at Pax South this year. Her character was nothing like what I expected, and I was extremely pleasantly surprised. The only frustration that my wife had was the fact that it seemed like she pulled gadgets out of thin air. The movie did a really poor job of showing that time was passing, and it felt like every time we made it back to base she had a half dozen new toys for the team to play with. I would like to think that maybe all of these devices already existed and simply lacked the final polish to hand out… much like the shotgun that Gilbert tried to use but Holtzmann told her it was not quite ready. Essentially the thing with this movie is that regardless of the shortcomings of the story itself… the cast of characters makes up for it and keeps it an interesting experience. I don’t necessarily think this is movie greatness in the making, but the cast saves what is an otherwise forgettable movie. Having watched all three movies in a forty eight hour period… it unfortunately does nothing to dethrone the original Ghostbusters for me. However I would say that I like the 2016 reboot considerably more than I like Ghostbusters 2… and that is not to say that I don’t actually enjoy the second Ghostbusters outing. I mean after all I break out the line “Everything you are doing is bad. I want you to know this.” on a regular basis at work, even if no one has a damned clue where that line comes from.

I guess my big frustration with the reboot is that it didn’t actually need to be one. What I mean by that is that the cast of characters are of the appropriate age to have been children when the original adventures of the Ghostbusters happened. In those movies… the relationship between the Ghostbusters and public was tentative at best. The movies see them jailed and committed to a mental institution for trying to save the city. There is absolutely nothing unrealistic in thinking that after saving the city and causing the statute of liberty to walk through downtown… that they once again would be swept under the rug by a government that really does not want them to exist. There are so many ways that they could have set up the new team of Ghostbusters to carry on the torch of the original team without making them part of the original team. So I would have liked to see this movie be Ghostbusters III or at least directly connected to the original franchise other than the fact that it includes the actors in cameos. One of the things I love about the Star Trek reboot universe is that it is deeply connected to the original Star Trek universe, and is treated as an alternate reality where certain key events happened differently. I would have been perfectly okay with that happening as well, but it will always bother me that the movie could have been so much cooler than it ended up being. Part of me really hopes that the movie does well enough in the box office, especially in the foreign box office that it will warrant a sequel. This cast deserves a much better movie than this one, because they shine like diamonds in the mess that is the rest of the movie. So while I have complaints, it still is well worth seeing while it is still available in theaters. I fully expect to pick up a copy of the movie when it officially releases because I think it will be one of those “better on repeated viewings” experiences as you are allowed to soak in the comedic genius of some of the interactions.