Long Live Fabian Strategy

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Where is Xur

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For the last month or so I have not really been that heavily engaged in Destiny.  In fact I have flat out missed the opportunity to pick up a few decent items from Xur and Armsday as a result.  In fact there was a Suros Pulse Rifle a few weeks back with Full Auto that I am really wishing I had managed to get in on while it was available.  As a result the last few weeks I have started at least logging into the WhereIsXur.com website to at least  see what he is still Friday mornings.  This week I noticed he was selling the Monte Carlo, a year one juggernaut of a weapon… and I believe it was a PlayStation Exclusive until year two.  I have heard so many other auto rifles compared to this one, that I have always wanted to use it… if for no reason other than having a proper frame of reference.  The challenge however is that I only had 8 strange coins…  and purchasing any weapon is 23 strange coins.  This meant that at some point this weekend I would have to do some grinding.

So last night I set out to grind a little on my Titan and my Hunter for the hopes of getting there without a ton of issue.  One awesome thing however when I logged in is that apparently if you are signed up for the destiny email letter you get an in game package of strange coins for every character.  Or at least I got three separate allotments of three strange coins, which immediately greatly helped out my  mission.  Also while grinding I got the amazing ship that you see above.  I am not sure why but collecting emblems and ships makes me happy, especially now that with the kiosk you can give them to any of your characters without much issue.  I am not sure about the paint job, but I have wanted a ship of this style for awhile.  I’ve been relatively lucky so far with picking up ships from the Dreadnaught chests, and I believe this is like my fourth one.  After a bit of grinding and doing quests… and not managing to get any strange coins I went with a different avenue.  I noticed that both the Hunter and the Titan were not too terribly far off from the next rank of their faction… so I spent some motes of light to get a package with guaranteed 4 strange coins each.

The Monte Carlo

I ended up transferring all of the coins over to my hunter and giving him the Monte Carlo.  It might seem odd, but I felt kinda bad about robbing the “good” Zarinaea-D Auto Rifle from that character earlier, and still had not found another Auto Rifle that really made me happy for that character.  I am attributing feelings… to the characters I am playing… which is strange as hell but whatever… it is I guess a me thing.  I spent a bit roaming around the Dreadnaught shooting things, and I have to say… I love this style of Auto Rifle.  It reminds me about a lot of the things I liked about that Zarinaea-D, high rate of fire and good stability… and not amazing impact but not nearly as low as some of the other high rate of fire weapons.  I’ve not really had time to finish leveling this weapon, but the whole dealing damage reduces melee cooldown thing is nice especially in a closer quarters fight.  The increased hip fire accuracy thing is largely useful for me… because there is rarely a situation where I am not aiming down the sights…  even if for just doing some quick sighting.  Other than that…  probably going Send It to increase range and accuracy, and then Aggressive Ballistics.

I am really liking this weapon because it feels good, and significantly different from most of the Auto Rifles that I have been using.  Especially since Auto Rifles have improved in the recent patch…  I am really thinking this is going to end up being the trademark weapon for my hunter.  I would absolutely steal it for my Titan main…  but I have a new main crush as far as weapons go for him that I will get into shortly.   So if you have the coins laying around… or even if you don’t and you think you can get the coins together before Xur disappearing late tonight I would highly suggest picking it up.  It is a solid weapon all around, and seems like it would be a work horse for both PVP and PVE content.  The main difference is I am highly likely to go High Caliber rounds at some point, because I really love it when a weapon can stagger.  I have a bad habit of wanting to run up on a target rather than running away… and this play style absolutely fits the titan… but does not at all really fit the hunter other than if you plan on knifing them.

Fabian Strategy

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I have honestly liked the Fabian Strategy since the moment I first used it.  This is the Titan exclusive exotic weapon that you get from the Gunsmith quests at I believe Rank 3.  From the start it felt like a Titan weapon, with its strange battering ram/shield thing on the front, and as I have said before…  a lot of my enjoyment of games is the way they feel moment to moment.  The problem with the weapon as a whole is however, that as every guide will tell you…  this weapon was a casualty of the early balancing changes in the game.  The thing that sets the Fabian Strategy apart from just a decent legendary auto rifle… is the Front Lines perk which states that “the weapon has increased handling, stability and rate of fire when enemies are close”.  This was such a negligible change that most people simply thought the weapon was broken.  Instead it is much more likely that they just thought the weapon was overpowered and nerfed it into oblivion in Taken King testing.  This gun in the hands of a pre-nerf Sunbreaker, would have essentially meant that they would be unstoppable killing machines.  But it turns out… that the sunbreaker on its own… did a pretty good job of being that anyway.

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With the latest patch, they finally “fixed” this gun and I have to say I am freaking in love with it.  This gun plays to all of my bad habits… and rewards me for them.  Crowd Control… kills with this weapon grant bonus damage for a short time, combined with Life Support…  mean that by picking off smaller mobs while engaged you can increase your survival quite a bit.  What this feels like in practice is more like a life drain ability in say a MOBA… where you can take out little minions to help increase your sustain.  This allows me to do stupid things and charge the enemy….  which procs Front Lines.  It is hard to describe quite what the difference is, but when the perk kicks in it literally feels like you just doubled your rate of fire.  I am sure that is not quite what is happening, but in any case… the difference is noticeable and the weapon becomes this machine gun of doom while the proc is happening.  Combine this with the fact that the weapon has always done a decent job of staggering mobs…  earlier when taking these screenshots I staggered an Ogre with it.  It finally feels like the archetypal “Titan” weapon that it is supposed to be.  This thing is going to be fun in strikes, which I hope to be able to do a little later today.  I am extremely happy with this patch so far, especially since I have spent a lot more time playing a defender titan than I have a sunbreaker lately.

 

Valor and Bribery

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Valor in Name Only

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One of the big struggles I have had coming back is wrapping my head around the current state of Valor currency.  There are many times in playing World of Warcraft where actually having a large volume of ancestral knowledge about the game…  makes it a severe detriment.  One of the big things that interested me in WoW was the fact that they were supposedly resurrecting the concept of Valor points earned from doing things.  In the past this was important because ultimately you were able to purchase raid quality gear, and they served as a sort of “bad luck token” as my friend Rylacus and I thought of them.  While they always sort of half assed the implementation, it did provide you with a bit of a way to offset your bad loot roll luck, by purchasing much needed tokens from saving up valor for several weeks.  Granted it could have been a better system all along had they just offered all of the drops from raid bosses, on a vendor somewhere for varying prices to denote the importance of the drop.  There were expansions where this token was done extremely well, and others where all you could purchase were a sequence of frustrating “offbrand” items that were never quite as good as the ones that came from the raid.

However as a raider… I always appreciated the fact that there was generally some upgrade path that I could take without relying purely on my luck.  It never bothered me that those “damned dirty casuals” were able to get the same gear I could from out of the raid.  In fact I liked the fact that there were many paths to end game viability, and I always thought this was one of the things that World of Warcraft struggled with.  Apexis was supposed to be the solution to all of our gearing problems, or at least it seemed like that was intended to be the case.  The problem is that the items purchaseable from Apexis crystals were significantly worse in every possible way for certain specs.  Maybe this was just something that I experienced in playing Gladiator, one of the Warlords expansions special snowflake classes… but none of the gear from the Apexis vendor was in any way viable.  As a result I simply ignored most of it and stockpiled my tokens hoping that at some point they would be useful.  Now we zoom ahead to this patch cycle, and I am raiding on both my Alliance and Horde characters…  so I kept thinking that surely I would be swimming in Valor by now.

Currency of Bribery

It turns out that is absolutely not the case, and the new version of Valor while similar in some fashions… has some fairly stark differences.  In the past the best method of Valor acquisition was simply doing the raid every week.  Each boss downed gave you a bit of Valor which added up quickly… and often times capped you without much effort.  Now however the priority is massively different, and it feels like they are doing something that Square Enix is the master of.  Bribing players to do community focused content.  I finally looked up what actually awards Valor and it was a surprisingly small list of things.

  • 100 Valor of the first Heroic of the day.
  • 300 Valor for per mythic dungeon each week.
  • 500 Valor for completing the weekly bonus quest.
  • 150 Valor for completing each wing of Hellfire Citadel on LFR.
  • 75 Valor for completing each wing of Highmaul and Blackrock on LFR.

So essentially this is no longer the currency of raiding and has instead become the currency to bribe players to participate in group content through the party finder.  I am not sore about this or anything, because it makes sense.  If you want to fix the queues… you need to get people into the system and what better way to do that then dangling something over their heads.

The only slight problem I have with it is that in theory they should have just introduced a brand new currency.  Valor has a very specific meaning to me, as being the highest tier of raid currency.  Justice points similarly has a very specific meaning to me… with them being the lower tier of activity currency.  For me at least there has been a significant amount of cognitive dissonance in trying to adjust to Valor simply being this upgrade only currency.  There is no gear purchasable with Valor, and instead everything you can purchase still relies on Apexis crystals… a currency that I am pretty certain will ONLY exist while we are on Draenor since lore wise they simply would not make sense anywhere else in the setting.  What makes this doubly confusing is that we still have two different PVP currencies, being Honor and Conquest… and they still function in the same roles as Justice and Valor once did.  Honor being the generic activity currency, and Conquest being the rationed and limited… and therefor more powerful currency.  It just feels like they uprooted Justice and Valor for no reason… especially if they are going to further confuse things by introducing it in a completely watered down version later.

Late to the Party

I realize I am bringing this up a month late, and as such my discussion loses a lot of its validity in the eyes of many people.  When patch 6.2.3 initially was released… I was fighting the desire to come back to the game.  Then upon returning, it took me awhile to get adjusted to everything that happened in 6.2 let along the new patch content.  So as often I am lagging behind.  Largely I am not really that frustrated, but mostly pointing out my thoughts on the matter.   As always I get to this point where I feel like a tweak here or a tweak there would greatly improve the game play experience.  Where I am standing now however is that I feel like even though I really have no more upgrades available, in order to be the best player I can be… I really need to be running LFR every single week on every character that is available.  If I do this however I am absolutely certain to burn out and be discarding this game into the waste bin once again.  As awesome as I think Hellfire Citadel is as an actual and genuine raid… it is equally horrible in the LFR experience.  So I am at this wall of… do I just accept that I won’t be progressing as quickly as I could be… or do I keep throwing myself against some content that I am not enjoying that much.  I have to say…  I am actually finding myself missing daily quests that I could do for Valor points.

A Whole New Shield

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A New Shield

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It is officially Christmas time , as last night I ordered Pepperollies for the first time of the season.  One of the local pizza chains has this thing that only exists during the holiday season, that consists of pepperoni, cheese, pizza sauce, rolled up in a crust and cut into little disks…  then brushed with garlic butter and baked.  They are so amazingly good that we have even tried to make our own version when we get the craving… and it isn’t the holiday block.  I ordered dinner originally thinking that it would feed both my wife and I, but I completely forgot she had a Chanukah dinner at a friends house.  So that means we have plenty of leftovers for tonight I guess.  The primary reason why I was ordering something in rather than trying to fix something at the house… is that Wednesday nights I have started participating in an alliance side raid with some twitter folk which starts at 7 pm my time.  I figure there will be a time where I cannot make this raid, but for the time being I am riding along for the fun.  Unlike the Sunday horde side raid, they run on personal loot… so everything is left up to pure dumb luck as to whether or not I walk away with anything other than gold.

The exciting part of the night is that I managed to get a shield to drop off the very first boss.  Swords and shields are hands down the most important gear slot for me personally… and I have stuck away in my bank/void bank every single mainhand/shield combination I have ever tanked with for any significant length of time.  Since I managed to upgrade my weapon to 695 over the week…  I still had a 670 shield, so getting the Smoldercore Bulwark to drop was a really exciting moment for me.  I spent a few strategic tokens here and there, and picked up another few items… like the Stamped Felsteel Chestplate but I really cannot afford to break the four piece set.   So the only other piece of gear that I will actually use was a new cloak…  which is funny considering I have gotten pretty much nothing but cloaks from my garrison loot boxes.  The Drape of Gluttony itself is pretty much ideally itemized with both Bonus Armor and Crit on it.  Part of me wants to continue raiding Alliance side if for no reason other than it is quite literally the swan song of me as a Gladiator dps.  The spec is so amazingly fun…  but is absolutely not going to be around any longer after the expansion.  It was my one time to be a special snowflake… and I kinda want to soak up as much of it as I can while it is still a thing.

On Timewalking

After finishing the raid last night I popped over Horde side to piddle around and try my hand at a random Timewalking dungeon.  This week/weekend is the Cataclysm Timewalking event, and with it comes a bunch of level boosted cataclysm dungeon gear that has been brought up to 675.  At least in theory that is what it is supposed to be… the problem is I’ve had some add on bugging out on me that keeps me from seeing the actual item level of an item.  It appears that TipTac the addon I have used for years to relocate the tooltip pop up window to some standard location in my layout, has some old calculations going on… making it so items show up as their base level not the boosted level.  This has also made it so that my weapons for example, will always show up as the pre upgraded version.  While I will miss having that addon… I won’t miss seeing all the timewalking gear as level 115.  So if you are also having this issue…  kill TipTac.  Unfortunately I’ve reached a point on both of my main characters where the timewalking gear isn’t really an upgrade, so instead I am mostly running it for the Timewarped Badges.  And with those… I am mostly only interested in the pets and mounts… and the random chance of getting the Infinite Timereaver dropped mount.

If nothing else it is still fun to run these older dungeons and see them still function as relevant content.  The only problem with this is that in truth… these dungeons are a lot tougher than the equivalent dungeons would be in Warlords.  There are several rooms in Shattered Halls that will still gleefully murder you if you pull too much.  With the Burning Crusade zones specifically… this was the era of mob crowd control… and they love to fear and incapacitate players left and right.  So last night I ran one of these dungeons completely random, and then another two with my guildies.  I would have loved to have done more…  but it was almost midnight… and I had to function  today.  There is this strange nostalgia about the whole places…  and unlike revamped versions of places…  it feels the same.  I guess it is my hope that they will stop redoing old dungeons… in favor of just adding them to a Timewalking event… either that or making Timewalking a permanent feature for certain dungeons.  In truth I would love for EVERY dungeon out there to be able to scale to the highest level cap.  I love the idea of evergreen content… even though very few games do it well.  It is my hope to get in tonight and run several more of these, potentially on both sides of the fence… since I have plenty of Alliance alts that could benefit from the gear.

 

 

Sleepy Raiding

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Bleary Eyed

For whatever reason this week has been significantly more difficult than most.  I’ve been struggling with maintaining consciousness, and by that I mean it feels like I have just been dragging my way along through slowly drying concrete.  I am not sure if this is still a side effect of letting me get completely out of my sleep schedule  over the Thanksgiving break… or instead just that I slept horribly on Sunday night.  It might also be that I seem to be fighting some cold like crap that just doesn’t seem to want to let go of me.  Whatever the case, I’ve been tired enough to sleep at 8pm most nights, and generally finally give into its sirens call around 10pm.  Since getting the new Kindle I end up reading for a bit until my eyes are too tired to keep propped open, and then finally I sleep.  From everything I can tell I am sleeping extremely soundly because I when I finally wake up it feels like I’ve slept the entire night through.  The only problem is I have been waking up 20-30 minutes ahead of the alarm clock.  I know I should just get on up… but its cold out in the real world and the bed is so comfy.

I keep thinking at some point I will have repaid whatever sleep debt I have built up, but then again…  I’ve never slept the supposedly needed 8 hours a night.  Maybe I have decades worth of lost sleep waiting to be repaid and it is finally catching up with me.  Whatever the case, I am struggling…  which means that when I am actually online I tend to be wandering around aimlessly.  Over the last several nights I have missed message after message in game by friends, and I always feel horrible when it happens.  Sometimes it is simply the scroll of combat, other times I am alt tabbed out looking at something else.  In any case right now in this current daze I am struggling to keep moving forward, let alone be functional when it comes to interacting with others.  I seriously feel like I could take the day off… and sleep literally all day right now.  Unfortunately I am not sure if that would do me a world of good… or simply make this whole situation worse.

Heading for Burnout

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Last night one of my friends commented that I was probably heading for a burnout by trying to raid on both Horde and Alliance…  and there is at least part of me that absolutely believes her.  While I intend on making the Wednesday night raid tonight, I know at some point there is going to be a place where I simply cannot make both raids each week.  In truth I have been feeling the desire and need to go off and level something new, instead of doing nothing but level capped content.  Right now however it seems like all I have time for is to attempt running LFR on Belghast and Belgrace… and that simply doesn’t leave much time left for the rest of the activities.  At least on Belghast I managed to pick up a 695 warforged baleful weapon, which gives me something decent to move forward with.  On the cow I have a 690 two hander that has been valor upgraded twice, so once again a completely viable weapon.  There are technically slots where LFR gear would potentially be an upgrade, but I am starting to question the logic of running it just for those handful of potential upgrades.  I need to run Highmaul on the Cow for abbrogator stones, and Hellfire on Belghast for tomes…  but past that I think I am going to cut out the rest of the LFR unless I am literally gearing a new character.

Looking for Raid is cool in the aspect of being on demand raiding with zero commitment.  The problem being… it always feels like slamming your face against a wall even when it goes smoothly.  Highmaul was really fun to LFR because it went so quickly, and you could pretty much ignore all of the mechanics.  Hellfire however… the bosses just feel like drudgery when doing it with a group of randoms.  Don’t get me wrong I love the feel of that place when I am running with players that are going to do the things they need to do to make it through the fights.  But both Hellfire and Blackrock are both “real enough” to make them frustrating when folks are attempting to faceroll them.  I seriously have yet to get a group that has a shot in hell of doing Archimonde.  Generally speaking I get grouped into a raid that has already failed a few times… as a replacement, and we then wipe five or six times… and ultimately end up leaving because over half the raid abandons ship.  I really think that the perfect LFR fight takes no longer than five minutes to kill, because that seems to be the absolute upperbound of PUG attention.

Timewalking

I noticed this morning that the Burning Crusade era Timewalking event has started, and I have to say… I am kinda amped.  Granted I would have rather they simply made Timewalking a permanent part of the game, but I left the game before it actually went in.  So I am hoping to be able to do several of the dungeons to get the feel of how they work.  I have a whole bunch of nostalgia about the Burning Crusade dungeon running experience, and the thought of getting modern versions of the items I used to love… seems pretty awesome.  Then again at the 675 ilevel cap… the items will pretty much just go in the transmog bin.  I am not sure which side of the fence I will focus on, but whatever the case I just want to see some of the dungeons.  Similarly I really want to experience the Mythic dungeon content, but in order to do that I really want to find a group to go in with.  That does not seem like something that would be fun in any fashion to pug.  Mostly…  I am hoping I get over whatever thing I am going through, and can remain awake enough to function at a high level in content.  Today already seems like a pretty sleepy day… so I am not holding out much hope.  I guess my general answer is to feed myself enough caffeine until I begin to function appropriately.