Tales of the Aggronaut

Tricksy Shotgunner

May 26, 2016 by Belghast

Surprise Banner

This weekend as I have said before I will be going to visit friends in St Louis, or more literally Lake St Louis. As a result we will be taking the weekend off from the podcast, and I will be taking the weekend completely off from my blog. I am not sure if I will be making a post Monday or not… because in theory if things work as intended we should be back Sunday night. One of the things I was mildly relieved about was the fact that I would not be missing an Iron Banner. There is a nasty bug going on right now that happens in a certain circumstance… which primarily involves the rocket launcher from the raid… if it happened to roll with the Clown Cartridge perk. It combined with Cocoon meant that you could have limitless regenerating ammunition and be able to fire rockets long before the heavy ammunition showed up in crucible matches. As a result they completely cancelled Trials of Osiris, and looked like they were going to cancel this months Iron Banner. However yesterday unexpectedly Lord Saladin showed up at the tower, and just like that Iron Banner was on for the month of May.

I know without a doubt that there is no way I can manage to get three characters through to rank 5 this time around because I will be out of town for most of it. However I decided to focus on my hunter that is my second highest light character. The hope being that somewhere in this process I get some decent infusion fodder if nothing else. This go around the weapons are the Fusion Rifle and Sidearm… neither of which I am actually interested in. As far as armor we have Chest and Arms again, both of which are pieces that my Hunter has. In theory I should probably be doing this on the Warlock because he could use both of them. I did however manage to ALMOST hit Rank 3 last night on the Hunter and knocked out some of the harder achievements like “top score” for a match. It was a lot of fun, and a whole bunch of that I chock up to the Lord of Wolves Shotgun. I had not really fallen in love with this weapon, but I had moved it to the hunter at one point because it was 335 light and I needed something to get my light levels up.

What makes this weapon awesome is that it works unlike pretty much any other shotgun. Firing it feels more like a pulse rifle, and at least now… no one seems to be expecting it. So many times I managed to pick people off just outside of normal shotgun range with a single burst to the head. While it doesn’t hit quite as hard as a traditional shotgun… it still hits plenty hard and the perfect balance perk seems to help quite a bit with the otherwise nasty recoil. This feels like one of those meta breaking weapons, that will probably only work well against untrained players. There are plenty of ways to counter it… and lord knows last night several people figured it out. However for guarding flags… this combined with Trip Mines seemed to be super effective. Hunters are just brutal in any of the PVP modes, and that throwing knife… so much fun to use, so much cursing when it is used against you. I am certain that I pissed off a handful of people during the night, because there was this one guy that seemed to make it his personal mission to seek me out and kill me… not always effectively which probably only added to the frustration. Its my hope that maybe I can push to Rank 5 tonight and then maybe try pushing the Warlock when I get back from my trip.

Goal Failing

As stupid as it might sound… this is the thing that I have missed the most from Final Fantasy XIV. The whole standing around and interacting while in the at the Free Company thing. Unfortunately this is also something that doesn’t really happen that often. It feels like with Heavensward there are not as many reason to keep returning to the Free Company house as there used to be. Also the FC is going through that pre-patch doldrums with not that many people being on within a given night, unless that night is Tuesday. I have been trying to clear my schedule so that I can participate in Tuesday night shenanigans and this week was no exception. For whatever reason however we struggled quite a bit, and in part I think that was because we were way short of a standard 8 player group. Towards the end we were down to five players… 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 dps which for most of the classic Extreme Primals was doable but considerably more difficult. As a tank I had to start dealing with mechanics that I usually never see like weight of the world. The other bummer was that through all of this struggle… we didn’t see any pony drops… and no real interesting weapons either.

As far as failing at my goal… it was my intention to get in every night and run at least one expert. The problem being… nobody has been around and my desire to solo queue is minimal. It is one of those hurdles that I need to push myself over, because I realize that it is not terribly likely that I will run into one of the “git gud” idiots. Most of the community is pretty damned chill, but there is a small fraction that feels just as toxic as any other. It was one of these people that halted another friends queue frenzy, and I guess I am afraid I will bump into one of those and have my happy reunion with this game halted. If you can bring two players into a four player group… you can mitigate a lot of frustration and if nothing else kick the offending party. However I wish I had a regular group of people to queue with for nothing more than a single expert, because god knows I need the currency to buy upgrades.

NBI 2016 Soon!

May 25, 2016 by Belghast

NBI2016

This is apparently the year of us getting our acts together a month late. The whole Developer Appreciation Week thing… was supposed to happen in March but instead we did it in April. Similarly the Newbie Blogger Initiative generally kicks off in May, but instead this year we are shifting it over to June. Honestly June probably makes a lot more sense, especially for those folks with families because May means the insanity that comes with the end of the school year. This years event is being marshaled by Doone of XP Chronicles and will contain a lot of the features that we have seen from past years. However you might be asking yourself… why NBI? Well to be honest, it is this incubator to help bloggers get started. We all make the same sort of blog posts we make every year, but what it does a great job of is breaking down the barriers between those who used to only be readers, and are now starting out on their own. Bloggers are this well that needs to be replenished every so often, because so many folks set out with good intentions and for whatever reason end up leaving the community. Even us grizzled veterans need a fresh infusion of spirit every now and then to keep going, and in many ways this yearly event does that. We begin to remember why we started our own blogs and why we got into this mess in the first place. The biggest take away for me however… is that we have this long list of bloggers who have participated and are still actively blogging today.

Here is a big ole dump of some of the blogs that were once in a Newbie Blogger Initiative Class and are still active…

I feel like I probably missed a whole batch of blogs in there somewhere while crawling through my back posts about the Newbie Blogger Initiative, but regardless you can see this process has an effect on our community. I support this notion largely because when I started blogging I had something like this to help me out too. The “Blog Azeroth” forums were a similar incubator of excellent blogs related to the game World of Warcraft, and through them I found the support structure I needed to take my first steps into this world. Now a bit over seven years later I am still blogging… and until recently doing it every day. As a blogger you are going to need a community to bounce ideas off of, and if nothing else to tell you that you are doing an excellent job. It can be extremely draining to sit down at a screen and unburden your soul in post form. The other bloggers that I interact with on a daily basis, are my support structure and they can be yours too.

So You Want to Be a Blogger

You won’t likely find fame or fortune, but you will find is a great outlet for all of those thoughts that keep collecting dust in your brain. I personally started out as one of those folks that rabidly posted on game forums. I would create great walls of text about the things that I was passionate about. I never really thought about creating a blog until I read one that made me realize… this is the sort of stuff I already write on a regular basis. You’d think it would be simple as that, but in truth it is a lot easier to post a comment on someone else’s site than to create one of your own. That is why we are here to help. During the month of June the good sponsor bloggers in the NBI are going to be helping you out with writing prompts, and events that cause you to come up with content to post. Folks like me will be mining our brains trying to come up with posts that might be helpful about the technology behind blogging, and that sort of thing. All you need to do is…

decide where you are going to blog
come up with a catchy name
create social media accounts on every platform
set a posting schedule
come up with cute artwork
take lots of screenshots

wait… I’ve overwhelmed you. The truth is there are more aspects of blogging than could ever be dumped into a single post, but what we are really offering you is a hand up. It is hard breaking into any community, and it is hard doing anything for the first time. It is my hope that we can serve as Sherpas to climb this Everest. What you can do is check out the various resources, and from there we can get you started in the right direction.

As always if there is anything particular I can help with as you start your journey, post a comment and I will help as best I can.

Bunny Returns

May 24, 2016 by Belghast

Samurai For Hire

Another happening over the weekend is that I appear to have fallen back into the habit of logging into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis. It had been roughly six months since I was last regularly playing the game, and in that time I went from being just about as well geared as you could be… to being woefully and insanely behind the curve. So much so that the gear coming out of the expert roulette is often times an upgrade over the piece I was wearing. The positive however is that the game does a pretty damned good job of helping you catch up, and I now have a huge amount of content I could be running. I’ve been trying to do an expert a day to get back into the swing of things, but I still greatly prefer to wait and do said expert with friends. The other interesting sequence events is something that I talked about on the AggroChat podcast this weekend. Not long ago I had returned to World of Warcraft and was attempting to be part of a raid group run by some friends of mine. So much so that I even managed to recruit a bunch of other friends who were not actively raiding. All of this sounded amazing on paper, until we actually sat down and started raiding. From the first outing… I kept wondering what I was doing wrong because it just didn’t feel all that fun.

What was happening was this was my first time tanking in Warlords of Draenor other than a times where I had to fill in without notice. It just didn’t feel the way I remembered tanking in World of Warcraft to feel. Even more so I had started wondering if I just wasn’t really a tank at heart anymore. I spent the majority of Warlords as a DPS, and I really enjoyed doing that… even though I never really hard the drive to put up big numbers. In fact while we were raiding Blackhand, I even went so far as to uninstall my DPS meters because I didn’t want to be bothered with the guilt of not topping the meters. Ironically not having meters made my performance go up significantly. All of this said I started to wonder if I just was not a tank main at heart anymore. I developed this mental block against tanking, and started looking for ways to avoid it. Then last Tuesday I participated in the Pony farm night, and the only gear set I was certain of happened to be my tank set. My hope was that muscle memory would take over and it did… and ultimately I had a blast tanking again.

The Feel Matters

The reality is that I still very much like tanking… its just that I don’t enjoy taking in World of Warcraft. In part I think it is because I have gotten used to a game where the fights are messaged extremely clearly. In Final Fantasy XIV there is never a question of “did I move far enough out” of this or that effect because there is a clear line on the ground showing you the effected radius. In World of Warcraft there is never really this line because the areas of effect generally extend out quite a bit further than the graphic being drawn, meaning that as a tank you are constantly second guessing. WoW also still feels very “mash a bunch of buttons and pray” at least while playing a Warrior, whereas FFXIV feels more deliberate and purposeful. Maybe its just that I fell into bad habits over the years, and cannot seem to break myself of them. Whatever the case I have been having a blast tanking in FFXIV and am thinking that while I will probably level tanks in WoW… I won’t return to actively filling that roll in group content anytime soon. It just doesn’t feel right anymore, however if you need an Expert tank in FFXIV I am your man!

Also as you can see from the above image… I have started down the path of madness that is the relic 2.0 weapon… or 3.0 depending on how you want to count it. As a result I spent a good deal of my weekend running FATEs and have suddenly remembered…. that I actually LOVE doing FATEs. I checked and I am actually dangerously close to the 3000 FATEs achievement, which should tell you something. This step in the weapon is reminiscent of the Atma step in the previous weapon, but it feels a lot less egregious. You need to get three of each elemental drop… however the drop rate of each individual crystal seems significantly higher than Atmas. At this point I have 3 earth, 3 ice, and 1 fire… and have been spending time out in Churning Mists as of last night not having any luck getting a single one yet. I did however decide this was a perfect opportunity to do something I had been considering for a long while. As of last night I am not longer an Immortal Flame but now a proud member of the Maelstrom. I’ve made decent progress already in pushing up my rank and I believe I am currently sitting at the 5000 seal step. However doing doing these FATEs for the weapon the grand company seals seem to be coming insanely fast. Hopefully before long I will be sitting at max rank yet again. The only negative is… all of that awesome Immortal Flames gear is now essentially dead to my alts… until I repurchase the Maelstrom equivalents.

Questionable Tolerances

May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 by Belghast

Incomplete Saturday

Morning Folks… it’s been a bit since we talked. Well in truth its been two days… but it feels like it has been much longer. Now is the time for me to see if I remember how to write a blog post. In truth this was an odd weekend for me, and in ways that I didn’t quite expect. For three plus years now my mornings have centered around writing a blog post. So when I suddenly removed it from the equation… the morning felt somehow without meaning. What I mean by that is all of Saturday it felt like something was missing, and in a way that I find it hard to articulate. You know that feeling in the back of your head when you know that you forgot something… but can’t quite figure it out. It was something along those lines, with the key difference being I knew precisely what was different. However I survived and managed not to write a single word… though I did find myself significantly more active on twitter, slack and discord than I normally am on the weekends. I guess if I am not dumping out things in long post form, they ultimately make their way out regardless into tweets and such?

Sunday however was delightful, and I felt zero remorse for not making a blog post. I think a huge part of this comes from the fact that I already scurry around like mad on Sunday mornings making sure that everything is done for the latest AggroChat episode. After waging that battle I found myself struggling to try and find the desire to write a blog post. Honestly had I done nothing but cut out Sundays… I think in the grand scheme of things my quality of life would have improved massively. As far as the streak… it is not good and broken and I no longer have it looming over my head. That said… I do feel a minor bit of lament over having done it. Once a streak is over… it is over. Now I could start anew and begin working to beat three years… but I doubt that is going to happen. I also doubt that I am going to permanently take off weekends from this point on. In the back of my head how, weekends are optional time… and if I happen to have a post I want to make awesome, but I won’t necessarily feel pressured either way.

Table Saga

One of the constant topics of discussion for the last few weeks has been the backyard and whether or not we wanted to replace the table and chairs we had back there. I know it is heady stuff and of extreme interest to you all. The set that we currently have was handed down to us by some of our neighbors and while perfectly cromulent… it is not exactly the easiest thing to sit at for long periods of time. At the beginning of the season we picked up a set of Adirondack chairs that sit up straight rather than being permanently stuck in an awkward partially reclining position. The idea was that we would get some sort of new table to go with these chairs that would work at their height level. Further idea being that we could eat at the table or at the very least comfortably use a laptop or something while hanging out in the backyard. Something you should know at this point is that we do the majority of our grocery shopping at ALDI these days. Another thing you should know is that ALDI has some truly bizarre shit at times… not the least of which last week was a garden table that fit pretty much the dimensions we were looking for. Even better is that it was just shy of $50, which moved it into serious contention.

With our neighbors out of town this weekend, we borrowed their pickup truck and used it to go pick up a table and haul it back home. There was of course going to be “some assembly required” but after having seen IKEA directions we figured “how bad could it be”? Now I love ALDI, but apparently there are some minor issues with construction tolerances when you are only paying $50 for a large garden table. The first challenge was the fact that some of the screws seemed too large for the holes that they were supposed to go into. The end result involved me essentially using the screw and truly silly amounts of torque to try and “drill” the hole larger with little metal shavings coming off of the metal piece I was screwing into. I had to torque hard enough that apparently I ripped a chunk out of my finger in the process and had to take a quick break to apply a band-aid to stop said bleeding. That hurdle solved we moved onto the problem of one of the six holes that the metal braces went into was not lining up… and not even vaguely close. The end result there was to use a screwdriver to sort of bend the holes until we managed to get them to line up enough to slide the bolt through. The resulting table seems nice and sturdy but what we originally thought was going to be fifteen minutes of our time… wound up taking close to two hours.

Another quick note… the photos attached to this post were taken while sitting on the back patio and watching birds come visit the bush across from where we sit. This whole bird watching thing has turned into a bit of a thing for me while we are back there. I don’t really know what any of the birds are other than the obvious Bluejay, Cardinal or Robin. They are adorable however as they hop around the branches looking for nom noms. They can completely decimate a full feeder worth of bird seed in no time flat, and as a result I have started limiting myself to feeding every other day. When I do this they tend to do a pretty damned good job of cleaning up anything that happened to fall on the ground between feedings. The other interesting thing that I have learned is that sunflower seed hulls break down into compost extremely quickly for some reason. I realize this is not exactly the most exciting post to make as my return from the weekend break, but screw it… its my blog and my birbs!