Tales of the Aggronaut

Dankest Dungeon

July 22, 2016 by Belghast

Palace of the Dead

Last night I was not terribly certain what I would be doing with myself. For the last several days I have been heavily focused on transmoggy things over in World of Warcraft, but on the same day that patch was released the newest patch landed in Final Fantasy XIV. Before I left work I saw Tam ask if anyone would be interested in taking a trip into the Palace of the Dead… or as he has begun referring to it the “Dankest Dungeon”. This had been something on my radar for a long awhile, with the theory being that you had a brand new leveling path for alts. I have an army of alts and honestly you can only manage so much FATE grinding before you need some other path. It seems like everyone on my server has gotten the same idea, because apparently to queue for the dungeon you have to be standing in Quarrymill. I snapped this photo last night but if you looked in any direction you would have seen pretty much the same density of players. In many ways this reminded me of the wall Revenant’s Toll felt on raid reset day. Neph wanted to play her Dark Knight, Tam his Black Mage, and Thalen his Machinist… which left me needing to do the team focused thing and play a healer. Anyone who knows me very well will know I am not really the best healer in the world. The irony there is that I started my MMO career in Everquest as a cleric… the go to healer for any serious content. I also feel that experience pretty much generated a massive mental block against ever wanting to do it again.

Now I have had a White Mage for a good while, and actually enjoyed myself leveling that. However for whatever reason the Scholar class has never really clicked with me. Before the launch of Heavensward I managed to get Arcanist to 30 and actually claim both the Scholar and Summoner jobs but pretty much stalled out shortly thereafter. I felt like I sucked at the class and simply stopped queuing for dungeons, because for ever Tam Tara there would be five Brayflox that I struggled to deal with. The interesting thing about the deep dungeon is how it has its own parallel leveling system, and how it apparently invents things that simply don’t exist. For example when you go in as a job… you don’t exactly get the path that you took to get to your level. For example I had Eos and Selene really quickly rather than my Carbunkle friends, which is I guess the same thing that happens when you get leveled down in a dungeon. On the other side of the equation, Kodra commented about having a serious challenge dealing with trying to function in the dungeon as an Arcanist without the Scholar job. Arcanists play this strange role of not quite but almost healer, that I remember struggling with when I ran dungeons… because I was also note quite a dps. The early levels seem to heavily favor dps, with the last set that we completed before I was literally falling asleep at the keyboard… needing us to actually do proper group tactics to get through.

Weapons of Light

So as you move through the dungeon there are chests that you open that do a bunch of different things. Firstly you get a shared group inventory that contains these items called Pomanders. These cause various effects both to buff your party, and to counter act the negative effects of the dungeon. For example there is one that shows the entire map so you can navigate to only the rooms that contain chests, or another that will disable all traps in a floor. There are still others that are designed to counter act very specific negative effects gained from certain encounters, like Pox that stops all health regeneration. This one is particularly nasty if placed on the tank… which it was for a significant period of time last night. The natural instinct for me is to clear every room, but you are timed from the moment you set foot inside and have sixty minutes to clear ten floors. At first this seems like an easy task, as we quickly breezed through the early levels. However once we got onto the third set of floors that timer started to make a big difference, and in theory you are given roughly six minutes per floor. As a result we started pulling the levels in a minimal clear fashion with our dps fanning out at times to scout ahead and try and determine which path we should go down as a group. The name of the game is finding the blue and silver chests that contain “gear” upgrades… and by that I mean +1 to your arms and armor score which serve as the gear for the dungeon.

The most interesting thing about the experience is how you gain your abilities during the normal arc that occurs as you level up. However for whatever reason I thought I would hit a ceiling and simply stop getting abilities when I hit level 31 which is what would have happened were I running dungeons. Instead I continued to move forward and am now in my 50s gaining heavensward scholar abilities that are unlocked through quests. So in theory this is a crash course in how to play your class… long before you actually get the abilities. As to whether or not this worked… I started out the dungeon run extremely rough and almost all of the healing was coming from Selene the murder fairy. As we moved forward I started to get the hang of it, and was using adlo like a mad man followed up with some direct healing. People died, a bunch… or at least more than I am happy with… and we ended up wiping on a really bad luck trap spawn. However as the night progressed I started feeling significantly more comfortable healing as a scholar. In theory I would feel much better stepping into a dungeon now than I did before last night. All in all I got roughly three levels which is a slightly faster progression rate than running dungeons, but not the sort of speed that is going to lead to a lot of chain power leveling. I had a lot of fun and just wished that we had been able to start earlier in the evening so that I could see the end of the dungeon. I definitely want to do this again soon.

Confronting Change

July 21, 2016 by Belghast

Hotbar Construction

Yesterday was at least in part a continuation of the previous day. When I got home we ate some dinner and I plopped down in my comfy chair and began continuing to sort through my gear, getting almost all of the way through my characters last night. Early in the evening Grace and I had talked about running some older content for transmoggy bits, so I had a clear target timeframe in mind. In the meantime I had to somehow make sense of my hotbars and decide what the hell I was going to play that evening. Since I really only care deeply about plate graphics usually I knew it was more than likely going to be Warrior, Deathknight or Paladin. As a result I devoted a bit of time to each of them, and tried to make something functional for the purpose of running content. Of the three the most immediately recognizable was the warrior with the only thing really dropping off of my hotbar being Heroic Strike. There were various other tweaks as well but nothing that I could not adjust to rapidly, and within a few minutes I felt like my old self again. The biggest hitch being the significant change to the thunderstrike sound and animation. It is those moments when I realize how much I ultimately play by sound, and use audio queues to know if an ability actually fired or not. The animation is also extremely different being more of an earthquake than a shock of lightning… which I can only assume is part of their “aligning of class fantasies” business. More than likely we lost our lightning because they decided that only Shaman can have lightning effects or something along those lines.

The paladin was also a similar easy adjustment period, and I fell into that routine rather easy. I also love the fact that Paladins now have a movement speed buff similar to that of the Crusader in Diablo 3 which I have played the last few seasons. I may or may not have spent a good deal of time charging around my garrison. The big challenge however was that of the Deathknight, and I still have not quite figured out how I am supposed to be playing it. Compared to the other two tanks it just feels like a wet paper bag when it comes to survival. I straight up got wrecked by the dungeon tank dummy in the garrison and had similar problems in Legion beta. So far I have been able to breeze through the artifact weapon class every single time… but with the Deathknight. While doing that quest I wound up dying roughly five or six times before I was finally able to limp through it. The whole reason why I always gravitated towards the Deathknight was their ability to solo and their ability to quest rapidly. I am not discounting the fact that I probably am missing some key element that makes the class manageable, but whatever is wrong… it is a little maddening. I was truly hoping this would be the expansion where I could feel comfortable returning to being blood again. As it stands… for tanking main I am pretty much staying Warrior because it feels comfortable and like I have the ability to actually take some damage, and at the same time still have a lot of movement in the form of the new combo intercept/charge and heroic leap.

Collecting Appearances

I thought I would include this gem of an image as a clear understanding of why we need a good cosmetic system in this game. As I sifted through my various alts I encountered a whole bunch of reasons, but this one from Earthen Ring takes the cake. As far as the actual collection of appearances we ended up running a few panda raids… or at least tried to because one of the bosses on Heart of Fear kept resetting, and neither of us seemed to have Throne of Thunder unlocked. We did however successfully get through Mogu’shan Vaults and then finished off the night with a quick run through Black Temple where we honestly got more awesome greens than purples. I was making an attempt at getting the second warglaive for my warrior. Earlier in the evening I ran my warrior through MC at least up until the binding dropping mobs… only to get the same binding I had already to drop. I had a similar lack of luck in Black Temple, but there were a handful of plate appearance pieces that I had apparently never picked up along the way. Grace made out like a bandit in Pandaria, but seemed to get minimal drops once we finished the night up in the BC era content.

Right now my biggest frustration is with the whole collection of appearances being locked to armor type. As a result anything that was leather or mail pretty much went to waste, well other than selling it for gold. This is a similar problem to the one I have with the cata era cloth drop rate changes. There are certain characters I play just to have a complete stable of classes, and then there are other characters that I actually enjoy farming content on. My tailor is a Shadow/Disc Priest and that is the character I will probably never actually farm older content on because I don’t get along very well with finger wigglers. Similarly I gravitate towards plate wearers for the characters I actually repeatedly run content on, and it would be amazing if I could just pick up those items and commit them to my appearance library rather than being grumpy as I watch cool stuff going to waste. I can totally see making appearance follow class lines in parties to keep people from rolling on everything. However when you are out soloing it would be amazing if you actually got to collect those appearances. However the end result is likely going to be that I find a farmer of every armor class and wind up running a lot more old world content. Maybe that was their intention all along? Force you to dust off those alts and actually play them?

Low Sodium

This is one of those patches that I have seen a lot more salt over than previous ones. I am not sure if the World of Warcraft community is just more dramatic than it used to be, or if the changes really are that frustrating. I mean on some level I get it, because I quite literally had to rethink the way I play every character I have tried so far. All of the rules of how classes interacted changed, and for the players that tried to do a lot of things for utility purposes… I fear their gameplay is forever going to be changed. For me… I have a full stable of alts and if for some reason I don’t like the way one feels this time I can shift focus to another one and be equally happy. However for the player that spent over a decade playing this one class a certain way… the changes could be traumatic. I fully support complaining about World of Warcraft, because god knows I have done plenty of it over the years. I fully support the notion of feeling like your voice needs to be heard. However after doing both of those… you are ultimately left with a decision point of either adjusting to the changes or quitting the game and trying one of dozens of other good MMORPGs. Change has right or wrong been a constant in World of Warcraft, and if you are not willing to reinvent yourself every few years than chances are you are going to wind up bitter and frustrated.

This moment happened for me during Cataclysm, and several times since I have decided that I am simply no longer having fun with the game. Each time it happens I have tried to be more chill about it, to the point where when I quit these days it is not a huge ordeal. So if you are finding yourself having one of these moments over the Legion changes, take a bit of advice from someone who has been there so many times. Firstly it is completely okay to quit the game. The game will still be there, and you can absolutely return at a later date if you rethink your decision. I quit “permanently” at the beginning Cataclysm, around the end of Cataclysm, the beginning of Pandaria, the middle of Pandaria, the end of Pandaria, the beginning of Warlords, and then I’ve been more or quite often less active for the last six months. There are other amazing games you could be playing and would likely have a much better time doing so, at least until the present bitterness fades. If you need some suggestions hit me up sometime and I can probably rattle you off a dozen based on your previous Warcraft preferences. Essentially what I am saying is as someone who has been there… doing that is so much better than flailing impotently in the hopes that someone will notice your pain and rollback all of the offending changes. Sometimes it is better to walk away and return later… rather than napalming the community.

Playing Dress-Up

July 20, 2016 by Belghast

Quest for Bank Space

Be warned, I am really not sure how much this mornings post is actually going to be a proper topic… and how much it is just going to be show and tell. Essentially last night was spent sifting through so many characters on so many different servers to unlock all of the appearances I seem to have available to me. From there I started cleaning out the banks one at a time starting with Belghast my Warrior and for the time being my main. This was shockingly hard work, and I ended up installing an addon to help give me some confidence to actually go through with getting rid of an item. What I really wanted was a clear thumbs up or thumbs down on every single item much like Rift has stating that “you have this appearance”. Caerdon Wardrobe works at least in a way that is most critical, but still I really wanted to see that message for every soul bound item “just to make sure”. What the addon does do that is useful is for non-soulbound items it tells you that either you don’t have the appearance, or you have collected the appearance from another item. As far as the soulbounds… I just took the plunge and accepted that over a decades worth of accumulated stuff really was in fact added to my account appearance collection. This admittedly was a hard step, and one made no simpler by the fact that apparently Ark Inventory changed greatly… and with every character I logged in I had to do a bit of remapping of some of the styles to get things to load correctly. So I spent the night with Grace as moral support trudging through my bank… while the rest of the AggroChat crew listened in while playing Final Fantasy XIV thinking we were absolutely insane.

Honestly Tam thought this was some sort of limited time event… but I somehow doubt that the rest of the crew takes appearance items nearly as serious as Grace and I do. I mean Tam always has a spiffy glamour in FFXIV but he only has the one glamour and is not constantly rat-holing appearance items just in case someday he MIGHT want to use one for an outfit. I have joked and said that wardrobes are the true end game… but I am being serious. I have been more motivated in games when there is a cool piece of armor or a weapon on the line, than literally anything else you can dangle in front of me like a carrot. As a result one of my favorite activities has been doing old raid content and collecting nifty appearance items to line my vaults for another day. The problem being that quite literally on my Warrior I had seven inventory slots, zero bank slots, and zero void storage slots. Every last corner of that storage was filled with weapons and armor that I under no circumstances would be willing to part with. So a whole lot of my simply not playing the game… is because I had no room to keep accumulating items. Last night had been a long time coming, and was a bit of a purge of my digital hording of stuff. So in many ways selling all of those items was a liberating experience… but also one that terrified me at the thought that maybe just maybe the system would fuck up and I would end up losing everything. Of note… I got every single fashionista achievement other than the shirt one from logging in my first character. As the night went on the shirt achievement happened slowly while logging in a long list of alts that have otherwise been abandoned to the sands of time.

Show and Tell

Essentially the order of operations went a little something like this. I first logged in every single character on my account… which includes numerous characters on other servers that I have only ever played once or twice. From there I focused in on chewing through my mains… where I decided to sell off any gear that was not the current “best in bag” for my current spec. I figure with the expansion only a few weeks away, I was going to be just fine being confined to a single spec per character for that moment. I burned through my salvage crates and learned the appearances I did not already have… and mailed the extras off to Grace for her to sift through as well. Of note she is doing the same thing, but I just realized that it might not work as well as I thought it would… given that I think you can only learn an appearance on a character of that armor type. We will sort out the details of that later though. Then I started tearing into the bank, offloading anything that did not have a nifty and unique use effect and selling it. The only real speedbump here is the fact that a lot of the Naxxramas and Ulduar era class gear can’t be sold… so I will have to manually delete that at a later date. The final thing I did before logging out of any character… was to set my talents and give my character an outfit for the occasion. The rest of this post is ultimately going to be me posting pictures and talking about the outfits.

Belghast – Warrior

This is my “Ready for the Legion” outfit, rocking the Illidari tabard and shield, and using the red/fel green version of the Icecrown Deathknight look-a-like armor. As to whether or not this will remain my main for the coming expansion has yet to be seen, but for the time being I think I look awesome.

Belgrave – Death Knight

Character number two on the list was my Deathknight, and also the point at which I learned that I can apparently now transmog legendary weapons? I wanted to go with something fiery looking to match the Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros legendary weapon. So I ended up landing on the black hand armor set from the garrison appearance vendor. To go with it is one of the trading card game tabards, the Flame one to be specific.

Lodin – Hunter

When this game launched I tried to make Melee Hunter a thing, and wound up tanking a bunch of the instances with a combination of myself and my gorilla pet. Now that Survival is the honest and true melee spec… of course I am going to freaking use it. As a result I wanted to come up with an outfit that worked with the new PVP gear I picked up. This is one of those situations where it “sorta matches” or at least well enough to make me happy in combat, however as I look at it now I am starting to pick it apart a bit. I am going to be “happy enough” for the time being.

Exeter – Paladin

I tried a bunch of different things before finally settling on this outfit. I wanted something purple for my paladin, but didn’t want to use the purple judgement set that I have often used in the past. So I started with the purple tone deathknight icecrown set, and started shifting around bits until I was happy. Once again I am using one of the card game tabards, this time the purple Tabard of the Arcane. The end result is almost my favorite of the night… which is ultimately the next one.

Tallow – Shaman

When Cataclysm introduced the ability for Dwarves to be shaman… I immediately race changed my then Draenei Shaman to be a proper Wildhammer Dwarf. Ironically I also then turned my Dwarf Paladin into a Draenei one… but that is a different story. I have always been enthralled with the whole idea of the Wildhammer Clan, and for this transmog I wanted something that felt almost wildhammery but still looked nice and armored. So I ended up shifting to using one of the Warlords leveling sets… that I just happened to have the perfect set of hammers to go with. I then decided to go with the Fel Goggles to bring out the Fel coloring of the hammers. This was the last one I did last night before crashing but is hands down my favorite so far. So that was ultimately my night, and tonight I will hopefully do the rest of this server.

Everything Must Go!

July 19, 2016 by Belghast

Rushed Raiding

Last night was the second running of our reconstituted Monday night group, but unfortunately this time around we were missing a Thalen. So instead of working through the content we planned on doing with was Ravana Extreme, we opted to start work on the second part of Alexander. We had seven folks gathered up so we figured grabbing a single pug wouldn’t hurt at all. We also decided to be up front with the pug, in that they were hanging out with a group of learners. The most awesome of possible circumstances happened in that the game ended up giving us someone on our own server. As a result we met a new friend Lux Tenebrae who happened to join up as a semi-permanent 8th last night. We like to go into fights fairly blind, and then adjust and shift until we have a grasp on the movie parts. So both of the Alexanders that we completed last night took more than one attempt, but at the same time it feels like we have a firm enough grasp on the fights to be able to come in next week and completely wreck them. The fights themselves were extremely fun, and pretty much anything with the Alex background music is going to rate high on my radar. We had to cut things short however because last night began the maintenance period that will eventually get us patch 3.35 which for all intents and purposes is the “Deep Dungeon” patch. I think every single one of us is looking forward to this as a way of leveling our army of alts.

However once we got out of the raid we had roughly thirty minutes left before the servers reset. At the not so subtle nudging of Neph we pulled together an expert group and decided to go for it. By the time we got zoned in we had less than thirty minutes to go and Hullbreaker Hard set out before us. We had an early wipe due to hubris and standing in stuff, but we recovered quickly and made it through the zone in a good clip. When we pulled the final boss we had two minutes left on the official clock from the set time of the maintenance period. The thing is we continued on fighting after time was at least in theory up. Then something strange happened… firstly Kodra got disconnected, but we were able to finish the boss without him. We got our loot and zoned out… and then both Tam and I got disconnected at exactly the same moment. Then moments later Neph did as well. So it seems like quite literally they were flushing connections one at a time as they cycled through the server preparing to shut it down. The positive is that three of us managed to get credit for the expert… the negative is that Kodra did not but I am sure we will all be willing to make it up to him later. This was one of the funnest dungeons I have fun in a long while because we were really pushing ourselves trying to beat the timer… which while we didn’t quite make it we came really damned close.

Farewell to Gold Farms

The other part of the evening was spent going from character to character and purchasing Smuggled Sack of Gold over and over until I completely depleted my garrison resources. Yesterday was essentially liquidation night of everything from my garrison that might sell for a decent bit of gold. I also went to Wrath era Dalaran and checked the various PVP vendors to see if any of that gear was something I might want for transmog purposes given that with today’s patch all of that is getting shifted away from gold to honor based purchases. On a handful of my characters this also meant scrapping lumber yards to build trading posts… just to liquidate their resources for cash. The whole process was an extremely fun atmosphere because quite literally everyone else in the guild was pretty much doing the same. In a shared chat earlier in the day macros had been posted to speed up the process and there we sat spamming away purchasing gold bags and opening them at the same time. In many ways it felt like we were all saying goodbye to what ended up being a frustrating expansion, and more than that… saying goodbye to our daily garrison chores. Today the first of the Legion pre-patches go live and with it a removal of pretty much all of the ways to make gold from the garrison. This is a bit of a double edged sword because even someone like me, was able to compile a decent amount of gold just by logging in periodically and opening bags of gold from my garrison missions.

That said not a single moment of doing this really felt fun. It was a chore for me because I felt like if I was not cycling through all eleven characters on Argent Dawn I was essentially “leaving money on the table”. So doing my Garrison chores mean spending thirty minutes to an hour doing nothing but interacting with NPCs and queuing missions all before doing anything fun or interesting. So removing the gold from Garrisons will always be removing any leverage it had over me to actually do the crap contained within those instanced walls. What gets replaced instead is the every so much more exciting mission of farming all of the transmog bits from all of the old world dungeons and raids. Most of my characters have a fat stack of salvage crates waiting to be opened in the hopes of gathering up new appearances to unlock for the system. I still think overall the transmog changes are a bit of a half assed system compared to what other games have, but it is a far better system than World of Warcraft currently has. Tonight will more than likely be spent going character by character and checking things into the transmog system and getting rid of everything that is literally clogging my bank, void storage and inventory. I started a bit of this last night in selling off any non cosmetic gear that was for alternate specs other than whatever I considered my “main” role on a character. Getting things in the Transmog system however will pretty much clear up the rest of the space and allow me to actually start saving more interesting items.