Tales of the Aggronaut

Goal Accomplished

June 13, 2016 by Belghast

Memories of Other Times

This weekend saw me succumbing to nostalgia, but not in the method you might think. With all the talk of the Warcraft movie, one would assume that I spent my entire weekend playing that game. However instead I wound up spending nearly the entire weekend playing the game that ultimately first took me away from World of Warcraft in a significant way. There were some events that happened this past week, and I ended up finding out that a friend of mine had passed away suddenly. That friend is someone I first met during the launch of Rift when they were part of the community team, and from that point on we kept in contact through the other games we both moved to. Of note… I am never too far from Rift, and I am rarely more than a patch behind when I inevitably fire up Glyph to peek my head in. I’ve subscribed to the game more time than I have not since it launched back in 2011, and I’ve watched the game evolved through expansions and the shift to free to play and have remained one of the few of my friends that carries a heavy torch for the game. The problem being that in order to do a lot of the things I want to do with the game… I need a body of active players. While we have had several resurgences into playing Rift, the last of which seeing the forming of House Stalwart on Faeblight during July or 2013. The only problem being this lasted a few blissful months and then once again we were all fading away from the game to play other things… myself included.

Something shifted as well with the way content was structured in the old world versus content in both Storm Legion and Nightmare Tide. In the original game I managed to level three classes to 50 happily before finally running out of steam. In Storm Legion I managed to push my warrior up to 60, and a significant time later managed to barely push up my rogue up just before the release of Nightmare Tide. The latest expansion however… for whatever reason I just hit high center and never quite managed to near the level cap. When I logged in this weekend I was sitting at level 62 and had been there for quite awhile. There was something about the way the zones were designed, that firstly greatly increased my inborn tendency to wander off aimlessly. This exacerbated another problem that I have had in the newer content… and that is I seem to be able to completely lose the quest chains in the mix and fail to follow them ultimately finding out I am entire zones behind in trying to follow any semblance of a leveling path. So instead I would wander about and grind mobs, mostly doing carnage quests… which are these kill X quests that appear in the wild as you well… will mobs. This is an extremely slow way to level and after a few hours of doing this… and not really seeing the level bar move terribly much I would wander away like a bored child into some other game.

Instant Adventures

Now a little over a year after the launch of the game, the good folks at Trion introduced a system called Instant Adventures. This was single-handedly the best re-purposing of content I have experienced in a game. There are a number of things that happen while you quest your way through a zone, and instant adventures is essentially taking all of these tasks and placing them end to end… and aiding the flow by offering the occasional teleport to the next area and the next set of objectives. The result is this mindless train that you can hop on and just focus on the mission at hand, and in the process getting a bunch of planar currency and the occasional gear filled chest in the process. I’ve always found these an extremely fun way to level at low levels, because you can just literally hit a button and start getting fed small bite sized objectives to focus on, which is the perfect manner to grind alts. The only negative however is that the gear chests are nowhere near as plentiful as they come be… and you often times wind up significantly behind the curve in equip-able items. Over the weekend while recording the AggroChat podcast for example I started a character on the EU server Zaviel and started leveling through Instant Adventure. I shot up the twenty in no time flat… however I am still largely wearing sub level 10 gear other than a handful of really amazing items that I happened to went through the adventures. That said… this is a fun way to level a character and so long as you are riding the train the gear disparities are largely not that bit of an issue thanks to a bit of a bolstering system in place.

Last year they extended this Instant Adventure system to raids, and released Hammerknell as what they called an “Intrepid Adventure”. The result is something halfway between World of Warcraft LFR, and an Instant Adventure that involves going through the raid and its trash packs… that have been chopped up and fed back to you in neat bite sized chunks. The thing that I find interesting is just how many mechanics have managed to make it into the Intrepid adventures, and that the saving grace seems to be that you can simply zerg your way back to the boss after every death instead of needing to wait for a rez. Roughly a month ago they released the second raid as an intrepid adventure based on the Mind of Madness raid. While I had a blast doing Hammerknell on a whim a year ago, I never wound up sticking around for long. This time around however I had a mission in mind… figure out a way to level from 62 to 65. I’ve felt like a failure for quite a while that I never managed to hit the level cap this time around. So Friday night when I hopped into game I headed straight for the queue for Mind of Madness and found myself enjoying both the content I was participating in and the speed at which I found myself leveling. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I wound up sitting in one spot for a couple of hours and finally convinced myself to use some of those patron boosts that I had been sitting on for ages. Sure enough when you add in a +160% experience boost to the already good experience of Intrepid Adventures… the levels quite literally fly by. Sunday morning about noon I found myself with a newly minted level 65 character…. wearing a mismash of gear I picked up through the weekly patron crates… but somehow managing to qualify for expert dungeons.

Expert Grind

Now at some point during the weekend I had installed a dps meter because I was curious if I was actually doing okay… or if I was somehow struggling. When it comes to Intrepid adventures I seemed to be doing just fine with my dps usually running around third place or at least within a contentious pack hanging around that spot. I leveled for the most part with a high survival dps build 44 warlord, 32 champion, 0 paragon. This worked great for uptime and the ability to never need to really heal myself, however apparently it is a less than amazing build when it comes to running “end game” content. Being dumb however I just hit the queue button and hoped everything would be just fine. The end result was myself lagging so far behind the rest of the dps that I got called out on it almost immediately. We wiped over and over because we lacked the dps to tackle the encounters the manner in which folks in experts apparently are used to running them… namely in an ignore all mechanics push the boss as fast as you can and always get the speed run bonus manner. I dropped from the party and wished them luck… and in truth in spite of calling me out on the dps they managed to do so in a far more polite manner than would have happened in other communities. From there I went back to the drawing board and found my way once again to the warrior guides section of the Rift forums. Here I cobbled together a 61 Paragon 10 Warlord build that seemed to work okay… out in the world I can burst down most things before they really have a chance to damage me, but if you put me in an extended fight or a multi target fight I struggle. So I will probably continue to swap between it and my “Solo” build just for my own sanity.

The result was immediate and evident that the bulk of my problems in experts were spec. Granted I still grossly under gear the tier 3 raiders that are regularly running experts these days, however this time around I was able to out dps the tanks and healers. Over the course of yesterday I ran five for six experts and managed to cobble together some upgrades. I am still wearing several pieces of otherwise crap gear… but my hope is through running a bunch of experts I will either be able to mitigate that through spending currency or through getting lucky drops. In my very first expert I managed to complete I ended up getting a really nice purple two-handed axe so it seems like the loot gods have been smiling on me. This is not at all how I intended to spend my weekend, but I enjoyed it greatly regardless. Coming back to Rift felt like going to lunch with an old friend that you had not seen in a long time. I am not sure how long I will be around, especially given that there are other things in other games that I also want to accomplish. However for the time being I am really enjoying myself in my renewed resurgence in the game. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Bahmi and it feels good to be flexing those muscles once more. With the multi-core support the game runs amazingly well on my laptop, but unfortunately still struggles quite a bit on my AMD based desktop. The guild in Faeblight is empty, and I was alone for almost the entire weekend so that alone makes me wonder if this is sustainable. However I have the Rift discord channel to keep me company, and if I wind up staying I might end up needing to move Belghast elsewhere to find the support of a more active guild. Regardless it was an enjoyable weekend and I managed to mark one goal that had been bugging me for quite some time off that list in the back of my head.

For Azeroth

June 9, 2016June 9, 2016 by Belghast

maxresdefault I am sitting down to write this Thursday night after having just come from watching the Warcraft movie. Firstly let me state that I am going to do my best to keep this spoiler free, even though in truth the story that the film is based on is now multiple decades old. I attended the movie with quite possibly the perfect person I could have in the grand scheme of things. I went with my friend Vernie, or at least that is the character folks would know him by. On November 24th of 2004 the two of us farmed our little asses off to be able to purchase the guild charter for House Stalwart, a guild that still stands living and breathing today. I have to admit I went into watching this movie with a lot of conflicting emotions. A lot of time has passed since those heady days over ten years ago, and my feelings for Warcraft and the franchise as a whole have evolved over the years. I also had a bit of trepidation going into the picture seeing as I have seen many fondly remembered franchises end up marred by the churning machine that is Hollywood. I wanted to believe that this movie could do at least an adequate job of encompassing my memories and feelings and placing them on the big screen. When I found out that my local theater was showing the film on Thursday night, I purchased two tickets without even checking with Vernie first to see if he was interested. Thankfully he was, but otherwise I would have gone by myself because I had to know one way or another what the film ultimately would be.

Firstly I have to say that overall I am very pleased with the film. This is not a film that is going to win Oscars, but nor do I think that every film should be that. I grew up during the 80s, in an era when it was perfectly okay to make an exciting science fiction or fantasy adventure film without trying to aspire to pretense. I could sit here and knit pick little details, and complain about minor flaws… but instead I decided to embrace the joy of seeing this setting that I have spent so much of my time involved with spread out on the screen before me. If you have ever loved Warcraft, then there is likely magic to be found in this film for you. There was something uniquely mesmerizing as I saw setting after setting that I recognized immediately from my years playing the games. There is a moment early in the film where you see Dun Morogh and Iron Forge, and having spent the early years of my life in this game as a Dwarf there was this excited little child deep inside of me that stirred free from years of being jaded. Moment by moment the characters on screen appeared in settings that were as familiar to me as my own bedroom. There is a certain loving craft that understood the parts that needed to be there, and those that could be enriched and improved without losing the feeling of the original setting.

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Then there are the characters, ones that came largely from a time before the current fidelity of World of Warcraft. We know them largely from lore that has been written in the years since the release of Orcs and Humans and Tides of Darkness. While I said earlier that none of the performances are likely to win Oscars… that is not to say that each of them did not play their parts perfectly. Medivh was immediately recognizable as Medivh for example, and Durotan worked perfectly especially with the renewed focus on that character that Warlords of Draenor brought. There was not a single role that I felt was miscast or failed to hold up to the jumbled memories I have of the lore and setting of the early games. I have to say that of all the characters, the one I came to like the most has to be Khadgar, which is shocking considering I am not much for finger wigglers… and Warlords made me largely think he was an ass. The character I most closely related to of course was Anduin Lothar, but given my proclivity for warriors this should surprise no one. The real breakout for me however has to be a tie between Garona and Draka , but I can’t really go into my reasoning for either without dipping into spoiler territory. Suffice to say that for the story that is being told, I thought each and every actor did a great job delivering their role.

Now for a bit of a warning. For the lore purists out there, you need to go into this accepting that the movie is going to paint a slightly different picture than the one you know from the background of the game. Lets face it… the early years of the Warcraft franchise were a bit of a mess, with a combination of “wouldn’t it be cool” stacked onto layers of “this is awesome” to weave together a passable story. The Chronicles series of books have been a method of trying to clear up the tangled bits of maladjusted lore and set straight the canon once and for all. As a result the story of the movies is likely going to be the new canon of how the events of the first games will be set in stone from this point on. The sequence of events made more sense that some of the existing lore so I am completely fine with this. However for those who have to be tyrannically pure to the original source material… you are going to find certain aspects of this movie frustrating. I highly suggest you approach the movie with an open mind like I did, and allow yourself to simply get sucked along in the currents of nostalgia for a time when Warcraft inspired greatness in us all. I’ve never felt a lot of faction pride, but I have to say there was something that swelled inside of me when I heard the lines “For Azeroth! For the Alliance!”. Thanks to Duncan Jones and everyone at Blizzard for getting the movie right, and making something we can all ultimately be proud of. Not everyone is going to get this movie, but it wasn’t for “everyone”. This is a movie for the long time fans of the Warcraft franchise and I am hopeful this will be a long running series of movies, spreading the giant screen with the characters I have loved.

Rise of Iron

June 9, 2016 by Belghast

Lords of Iron Return

Apparently last night while I was completely oblivious, the trailer for the new Destiny expansion… Rise of Iron leaked out on the internet. All of these leaks of course beg the question… if everything comes out before E3… then why the hell have E3 in the first place? You can watch the entire leaked trailer here, that was apparently ripped from a Snapchat advertisement of some sort. I used VLC Media Player to snap a few pictures from the trailer for use in this blog post. Firstly I am a little disappointed that it seems like we won’t actually be travelling to a new planet or moon. As was originally suggested by many of the youtubers based on the leaked image from around a month ago… this does in fact deal with the twilight gap wall area. It seems like it was repaired at one point and the wall has once again been breached. In the meantime apparently a giant army of mutated Fallen have been amassing on the other side, and we as players are going to help quell this threat. Now the first thing that really stands out is that these fallen seem to have a “taken” like thing going on… but instead of black and white and shaky… it is all dark red and pixelated. Which makes me wonder if the virus is somehow like a digital version of the sword logic that has corrupted so many other things in the Destiny universe?

Regardless… I am pretty damned ready to say goodbye to the taken invasions, and I guess I can accept if that now means we are going to start getting Fallen ones instead. I would have rather seen them spend more time fleshing out the Cabal, but since the Vex and Hive have seen their day in the sun… I guess it is perfectly okay for the Fallen to get theirs. However it seems like we have already spent so much time fighting the Fallen since they literally appear in one form or another on every planet. While they are not extremely active on Mars, there is a spot in the Rubicon wastes where they show themselves for a quest. I guess considering that they are a race that was once chosen by the Traveler as well, it would make sense why they are constantly scavenging in its wake. The other thing that I find interesting is it seems like they have somehow compromised some of the areas that Rasputin might have controlled. There is definitely a Warmind-esc look to some of the areas that they have shown… but again they contain the same dark red contagion look. All of this makes me wonder if… this is really just some sort of an infection that Rasputin has been fighting off.. and it is also why considering his obvious power that he really doesn’t end up lending us all that much help. Maybe he has been busy with whatever is happening in the above screenshot. I would say maybe this was an unknown Warmind, but I think lore wise there is only one per planet.

Gjallahorn is Back

The most controversial point of the trailer however will be the announcement of “Iron Gjallarhorn”. This rocket launcher was the be all end all weapon from year one, and was as beloved as it is reviled. Unfortunately I didn’t play enough in year one to actually use one. In fact the ONLY exotic I managed to get in year one was The Last Word, and I think the game just gave me that one because it felt sorry for me. I am absolutely a year two baby when it comes to this game, and while I played at launch… I only played for a few months before fading into the background and finding something else to do. I’m not a huge fan of rocket launchers, but I have always though that at least on looks the Gjallarhorn looks amazing. Now I seriously doubt they will be bringing back the weapon with the power levels that it apparently had in year one… but just the fact that it is coming back at all makes me extremely happy. I want to be able to use this and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe this will be the rocket launcher to change my tune and make me love rocket launchers?

The controversy that is waiting in the wings however is that this is that getting Gjallarhorn is a pre-order bonus for the Rise of Iron expansion. I personally don’t have a problem with it, because I was going to pre-order the expansion regardless. I like having the peace of mind that the game is there waiting for me whenever I want to participate. This is a side effect of living through an era when copies of games were actually sometimes difficult to get. I remember having to go from store to store to try and find several games in the past, and had that happen as recently as the launch of TERA. The other big benefit in a pre-order is it often comes with the option to pre-load the content so literally at midnight you can pop in and start playing. Granted my ability to stay up for midnight launches is not what it used to be… and I often times only make it through character creation before crashing. What is going to cause the drama in the coming days is the insinuation that this might be your ONLY way to get Gjallarhorn. It is my hope that Bungie is just giving us access to the weapon ahead of time, and that it will exist in the normal exotic rotation from engrams, or at the very least a similarly complete-able quest once the expansion launches. Gjallarhorn is this iconic weapon, that even people who have never played Destiny have often times heard of it. When you have something like that… it just doesn’t seem fair to wall that up behind a pre-order bonus. So hopefully during the E3 presentation they will do some massive clarification on that point.

At least with the September 20th date… we won’t have all that long to wait until we get to experience it all for ourselves.

Why Not Try Pax South?

June 8, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of a frivolous topic, but I am writing it the night before posting. Tomorrow I have to be up well before dawn to take my wife to the airport. As a result I searched my thoughts for something worth writing about and landed on this discussion. Today the PAX West tickets went on sale… or PAX Prime for those not yet with the program… or just plain old PAX for those who have been living under a rock and missed the slow invasion of the show across the country and world. These notoriously sell out almost instantly, and unless you happen to be watching the site at the exact second it goes live, there is no way you are likely getting tickets. I have two friends who tried today… one of which practically lives for PAX… and while they both made it into the queue within a very short amount of time, but the time I actually arrived at a screen which allowed them to purchase anything… Sunday tickets were almost gone and Monday was in low availability. This is kinda insane given that they have expanded the show to a fourth day and seemingly keep expanding it. The problem is that more people want to go than are tickets available. I am sure a good number of the tickets get snatched up by speculators, and others are buying trying to get as many as their friends in as they can. I even found out that apparently folks have written scripts that are supposed to get them in the queue the second the page is published.

This same sort of madness goes on with Blizzcon but is magnified by the fact that they do several small batches of ticket sales, each of them selling out in a matter of minutes. Whereas with Pax West there is a nearly instant queue, and it simply takes awhile for those folks to filter through it to the other end. Still it seems that you had to get into the queue with the first few minutes to guarantee that you had any tickets to purchase. This presents a huge problem for folks attending, because at least for me a huge part of why I am interested in PAX at all is to use it as a destination to meet up with friends from the internet that I may never actually see otherwise. Just watching the reactions from folks attending both PAX and Blizzcon this seems to be the general consensus and the challenge is that it is nearly impossible to insure that all of your friends can actually attend. I know among my friends they had a complicated system of trying to make sure they could cover all of the people needed for Blizzcon with everyone trying to fight through the queue, and talking over chat to arrange who was buying tickets for whom when someone actually made it through the queue. Watching my friends today it seems like that is just about the only way to actually guarantee attending PAX West as well.

What I am presenting with this mornings post is another alternative. If PAX Prime is not your native PAX location… meaning it is further than reasonable driving distance away from you… might I suggest the alternative of PAX South? Granted it happened in January and is still over six months away… but I’ve been attending since its inception and I have to say it is a pretty great place to be. This past year we had something like fifteen people running around in different numbers taking in all that the convention had to offer. While I failed miserably at spending time with most of the people due to the sheer number, it was nonetheless awesome to get to see and hang out with everyone. PAX South has this super chill vibe to it and has a lot of positives going for it, that might not be the case with West or even East. The show is still very much in fledgling status, but the attendance was up quite a bit last year and expanded to a whole new area of the convention center in order to accommodate a significantly harder tabletop section. While the show was missing several of the headliners that were there the first year… such as Bioware or Gearbox… the indie section seemed to expand massively. What I liked about it was that I could pretty much lay hands on any of the devs attending, and get to talk to them face to face about the game they were showing off. Several of them were extremely excited to be talking about this labor of love that they had been working on so long.

I’ve always gotten the impression that at the larger conventions, unless you are wearing a media badge it can be really hard to actually get face time with the various exhibitors. That seems insanely easy to do at South. It also seemed like it was extremely easy to talk to the various streamers and gaming personalities. While that is not really my corner of the world, I spotted several dozen streamers that I recognized mingling out in the floor or tucked away in a corner always willing to stop and chat with fans. This was absolutely the case the first year as well, because one of the members of my party wound up getting a bunch of autographs from several of the personalities. It is my hope that the 2017 show can somehow pull together the best of the two years. Year one had some bigger names, but year two had way more stuff… and significantly more people in attendance. If this year they can convince several of the larger companies to show products, as well as keep the attendance on an upward trajectory I think there are going to be awesome things in the future. My goal as always will be to meet and hang out with as many people as I can from my extended circles.

I know how frustrating it can be to not get tickets for that event you wanted. I after all tried to get Pax Prime tickets last year, and after the frustrating debacle that it ultimately was didn’t even try this year. South is my home PAX, and is a roughly nine hour drive for me. I will likely attend it every year so long as they keep having them. I’ve gotten the impression that there are others like me that consider it their PAX. However for those really just wanting the PAX experience, without the hassle and overpriced after market tickets… I highly suggest you give PAX South a go. I will continue to trumpet it as the year goes on… or at least until they have sold out the passes. Throughout this post I have linked to a series of YouTube videos put out about the South show, as I am sure a way to try and drum up interest. I know this will be the last year in Penny Arcade’s contract with the Henry B. Gonzalez convention center. I think there is enough interest in the con to warrant it continuing in one form or another, but it might end up moving to another city. I’ve greatly enjoyed both years, and while I would love to have it in Dallas or Austin… just because they are significantly closer drives, I am more than willing to make the lengthy trek to San Antonio. Essentially if you failed to get into West/Prime… South might just be the convention you are looking for.