Loving Fabian Strategy

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Nightstalker or Not

Over the last few days I have been irrationally sick.  The part of this that sucks is the fact that Knights of the Fallen Empire has been released… and I have honestly barely spent any time in SWTOR.  I keep going in there and attempting to play, but the whole standard questing construct is just something I cannot handle right now.  If it involves reading or honestly paying attention too closely to anything…  it is pretty much ruled out in my current state.  The funny thing is that playing Destiny works just fine.  I guess that is because most of that game I have committed to muscle memory, and while I may not be able to aim as straight or move as fast…  I can still function pretty well on auto pilot.  As a result I have been working on my second character, the Hunter.  By working I mean… I consumed my “free level 25 token” and pushed it from 25 to 40.  I still have yet to beat the actual quest content, but I have been having a blast doing patrol missions and completing bounties.  Right now I am mostly focused on Nightstalker but there are some quirks about the class I really do not like.  As awesome as Shadowshot is… it just isn’t in the same class of abilities as Hammer of Sol or Fist of Havoc.  It requires you to follow up with something else to take down the target rather than simply evaporating them.

Additionally my biggest problem with the class is that it seems to have shitty grenades.  I am so used to throwing grenades constantly as a Titan… especially as a Sunbreaker with their amazing sticky grenades…  and the options I have so far for Nightstalker just seem rather crappy.  I need to branch out and try some of the other classes, because honestly I was enjoying Bladedancer quite a bit before I completed the quest that unlocked Nightstalker and decided to go that direction.  Both the the Shadowshot and Arc Blade supers though are far more fiddly than I am used to as a Titan which is all about smashing or exploding things.  At some point I plan on leveling my Warlock as well so I can see what that side of the house looks like also.  So far though I just can’t get into the Warlock as much as I can the Hunter and Titan.  I guess it is my whole allergy to magic getting in the way again.  While technically it is just as strong as the Titan… it FEELS weaker since it isn’t nearly as armor bound.  Then there is the melee attack… the Titan Punch and the Hunter Stab… both feel amazing and visceral whereas the Warlock Palm Explosion thing just feels wrong.  I realize the whole battle caster thing is a fantasy fulfillment for some people…. but it just isn’t for me.

A “Lousy” Gun

Another accomplishment is that I finally hit rank three with the Gunsmith which started my next “back in the saddle” quest, this time involving Auto Rifles.  It was kinda cool since I am on a bit of an auto rifle kick lately.  That is the strange thing about Destiny… is that I will get a new weapon… that causes me to re-evaluate my feelings about an entire sub class of weapons.  I spent a lot of time on the Hunter using an Auto Rifle largely because that is what I happened to have laying around in my vault.  Then when I got to 40 I handed the hunter a bunch of past armsday orders… which included a pretty nice Hakke Auto Rifle that I never really gave much attention to. The faction three Gunsmith quest involves killing 100 mobs with an Auto Rifle while you have a telemetry device active… aka a class item with the auto rifle leveling boost.  After that you dismantle four blue auto rifles or two purple ones, and bam you complete the quest and are handed apparently a Titan exclusive Auto Rifle called the Fabian Strategy.  Honestly the gun has some strange things about it… and the fact that it is locked into iron sights mode at first seemed like a massive detriment.

Then I actually used it… I took it to the dreadnought and into a few strikes and I have to say I fell in love with the gun.  Now every guide maker is going to tell you just how bad this gun is.  In fact Briar Rabbit devoted an episode of Shard It or Keep It to the weapon… and the only real positives he was able to come up with was that it felt cool and looked unique.  I guess for me that is enough, because the way this gun handles as compared to most auto rifles just is… “different” and I am having trouble quantifying that.  It feels like you can just chew through damned near anything, and it does just enough impact to push back anything yellow or lower.  Granted it sometimes takes all forty eight rounds in the magazine… but I have shredded those crazy buffed imperial centurions on during the skyburners event with this thing like it was nothing.  The big thing for me… and why I am now using it is strikes is the the combination of Crowd Control and Life Support.  There were several times where I went into a pack of mobs at low health and exited moments later with full health just from the kill triggered regeneration.  This weapon makes me FEEL like the unstoppable Titan I am supposed to be.  Folks are going to tell you that this weapon is not worth an exotic slot… and I get that… because the special perk of the gun doesn’t seem to do all that much.  That said I love the look and the feel and am probably going to start gearing for auto rifle perks just because of this gun.

Future Disappointment

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Future Is Disappointing

BackToTheFuture2

I am home sick today fighting some sort of flu like chest crud, and as a result I am taking a bit longer than normal to knock out a blog post.  It will soon be evident that today you will be unable to escape the fact that this is “back to the future day”, or at least the day that Marty McFly supposedly went forward in time to.  While I have a heaping helping of nostalgia about Back to the Future in general, I have to say the future is always a bit of a disappointment.  If you asked my thirteen year old self, what the future would be like…  he probably would have bought into the fantasy of Back to the Future 2.  At the very least I expected to have flying cars, and to have colonized the moon…  but what happened instead was potentially stranger and more interesting.  Futurism is almost always inherently wrong.  We envision the future as delivered by the things we can dream about today.  As new technologies evolve they shape that vision, and we are historically bad at guessing what trends will look like in five years…  let alone ten… or in the case of this vision of the future twenty six years.  Something odd happens when you place a goal on the horizon…  people tend to start working towards that.  So in a swell of nostalgia… we have actually seen hoverboards, self lacing shoes, and even the goofy pepsi bottle…  because this movie TOLD us to make it.

This happens all the time and more often than not we don’t even notice.  The bright colorful ubiquitous Verbatim 3.5″ floppy disks I am sure look like they do, because almost the exact same thing existed on Star Trek as a means of reading and writing data.  Similarly the iPad looks an awful lot like the handheld LCARS tablet device carried on Star Trek the Next Generation.  The internet as we know it… seems to have patterned itself off of the futurism of William Gibson.  The reason why this happens is that technologists are generally geeks… and geeks love geek culture.  Even if you don’t mean to… we are all subconsciously influenced by the things we love.  The problem is…  in the case of Back to the Future…  none of the technologies that have showed up are really “true”.  They are media stunts that have been created to prove that it “could” be done, but not necessarily something that is a widely accepted and adopted technology.  The flying car for example, for the majority of my life has always been ten years away.  The problem is that ten year mark never actually arrives… and my big concern is that we just are not investing enough in the future as a whole.  Our space program is in shambles, and the corporate sector is constantly focusing on what brings them profits six months down the road instead of six years.  It feels like we have stagnated, and most of what we are getting as far as innovations go are just constant iterations on the same ideas.  This makes me concerned that the future will never actually arrive… or at least when it gets here it will be Shadowrun instead of Star Trek.

The Height Poll

heightpoll

If you follow me on twitter… or any other network that my twitter re-syndicates to… you may have noticed a poll that I sent out yesterday.  Some people called it the strangest gaming poll they have seen… and I feel like maybe I need to supply some explanation.  I am tall in real life… sitting around six foot four inches.  This is tall enough that you realize that the world was not built for someone of your height.  I am constantly banging my head on ceiling fans, the occasional low door frame, and have to be super careful when getting in and out of cars.  As a result when I play games… especially MMORPGs I tend to play significantly shorter races.  My first character in Everquest was a Dwarf, and I have had an affinity for little races including my current Lalafell in Final Fantasy XIV.  In a conversation with another friend I found out that she was short… and had a similar experience…  preferring to play taller races.  So that got me thinking… which lead to the poll wondering if this is common place or if we are outliers.  I thank everyone that voted in the poll, because it produced the image you see above.  If anyone else wants to join in the question you can either click the link above or the image to launch into the strawpoll.

One thing I left off the poll is the folks who are medium height and prefer to also play medium height characters.  I am assuming that a lot of those people voted “no real preference”, but in truth I was mostly interested in the relation between the extremes.  It turns out that I am apparently not the normal, at least in terms of this question.  Based on the poll it seems like the majority of players either have no real preference or prefer to stick with their same height regardless of the games they are playing.  Only a few of each type preferred to play the opposite of whatever they are in real life.  I guess that says a lot of things, and mostly that people tend to be happy with themselves.  For me at least when I play a character in a game I tend to create a revised version of myself, where I fix the things that I dislike about myself… creating a “Ultimate Belghast”.  I guess if I were being completely honest with myself… were I to “fix” my height I would not actually go “short” but instead trend towards medium.  For a man it seems like six feet tall is about the sweet spot… the point at which the entire world seems to be built around that height.  I’d never have to worry about leaning down in hotel showers so that the shower head can hit me… never have to worry about banging my head on things…  and wouldn’t have to constantly search for “tall” sizes.  Four inches doesn’t seem like much of a difference but in terms of functioning in the world it really is.  Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting poll question and it was awesome that folks were willing to take it.

Gaming Muggles

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Non-Gaming Spouse

Last night I kinda barged into an interesting conversation on twitter between some of my fellow TGENerates.  This morning I thought I would write a bit about it, in a very non-standard blog post for me.  While I don’t refer to her as a Gaming Muggle…  I guess that would probably be a potential term for my own spouse.  She doesn’t identify with the term gamer, even though she owned an Atari, a Nintendo, and currently plays more mobile games than I will likely ever play in my life.  However because she tends to play spider solitaire or sudoku…  she doesn’t consider it gaming.  The truth is gaming left her when it went three dimensional, and what I mean by that is… she is capable of dealing with two dimensional planes and moving objects across them.  However since her eyes never fused completely, she struggles with depth perception type tasks… especially in the virtual world where there are far less visual queues so to where an object is in relation to other objects.  So I can remember her happily playing Tetris Attack in my college apartment, but once we moved to the Nintendo 64…  that era was pretty much dead to her.  My wife however is absolutely a geek, and we actually met due to our at the time shared IRC addiction.  We were introduced by a man in Belgium, even though we grew up thirty minutes apart.

I will admit I have always been more than a little jealous of “gamer couples”, and seeing them in the various games I have played exploring these virtual worlds together.  That said I know in the case of my wife and I we would probably just drive each other insane.  We are both extremely good at the things we do… we just get to the same conclusion in vastly different ways.  For example when we clean the house we tend to divide and conquer, each taking specific rooms.  The reason being if we are trying to clean the same room at the same time we just end up getting in each others way.  My fear is that in gaming the same would be true, with her taking one path, and me taking another…  but ultimately ending up in the same location at the end.  She has this inborn sense of direction that I have always coveted, because I have to navigate based on landmarks… and get completely lost when those landmarks are missing or have changed.  I can enter a subdivision and within minutes have no clue which direction I am going anymore… and somehow she can magically tell me exactly what our heading is at any point during the trip.  So I think she would honestly probably be far better at navigation than I would even in the virtual space.

Keeping Grounded

Over the years I have come to realize that having a non-gaming spouse is actually a big benefit for me personally.  Everquest was essentially my first MMO, and it bit hold of me hard.  Essentially the ability to explore a fantasy world was the sort of thing I had always craved, and giving me an always on persistent world to do it in…  was absolute crack.  The truth is that for most people that got really hooked on that game… it was in fact like a drug.  There were more than a few people that I know that changed almost everything about their lives to adjust to doing things in Everquest.  The ones who had it worse in a way were the ones with spouses also addicted to that game.  I watched my friends alienate other friends, blow off jobs, and ultimately destroy relationships because of it.  While playing I watched more than one marriage disintegrate, as some folks simply forgot to keep checking into the world.  Bills may or may not have gotten paid, kids and animals may or may not have gotten fed.  There was a bit of a dark underbelly to that game, and as a result it made me realize how lucky I am to have someone to forcibly pull me out of some of those mires.

To answer Liore’s question…  how does one balance?  Well having that person that isn’t doing the thing that you are doing… helps me at least realize that there is a world other than the games I happen to be playing.  It isn’t exactly easy sometimes, especially considering that the reason why I game as much as I do is because my spouse is often busy with her own work.  My wife is a rockstar teacher and because of that ends up spending upwards of eighty hours a week working on this or that item for her classroom.  She takes it all super seriously, and because of that they have piled on so many extra duties.  So there are a lot of times where I am busy with a game, and she is busy with lesson plans… and we are in completely different rooms conversing over instant messenger.  It works… because we know we are in this together.  The relationship is in the little things, and the fact that for the most part we “get” each other.  I made the comment last night that “marriage is a strange thing…  you never really know what is going to work… until it does” and that really is the case.  I don’t know how or why it works… but it does and we have been together nineteen years… and married seventeen.

Complimentary Differences

I think the reason why we work is because on some levels we are completely and utterly different people.  There are times it feels like the only thing we share in common, is our love for each other.  I love Horror and Science Fiction movies… and she loves Home Improvement Television and Crime Dramas.  She is very religious… and I am pretty deeply anti-religion in general.  But the strange thing is…  or differences make us stronger as a whole.  We are unlike most couples in that from the moment we go together we were pretty much a team.  Hell in college we pooled all of our resources into a joint bank account and pretty much supported each other, and I know married couples that have never had a joint bank account in their lives.  This common sense of struggle together means that pretty much everything is tackled as a team.  So if I don’t know how to do something, and she does… and then sometimes she doesn’t know how to do something, I do…  we have a wider range of skills that make it easier to tackle things.  I think the fundamental truth is that we have faith in each other, to do the things that we know we can’t ourselves.

What also makes it work is that for the most part we “get” and respect the things we choose to do.  While I may not understand the concepts my wife is teaching… because Math has always been my weakest area…  I get why she needs resources that her school cannot provide her, and never begrudge getting those items regardless of cost.  Similarly my wife doesn’t necessarily understand why I love Star Wars or Lego.. or the countless game franchises I do… but she is constantly on the look out for things she knows I will like.  The other day she found me an awesome R2-D2 skull cap that I plan on rocking this winter when it gets cold.  She has also come home with Legos that she happens to find on sale somewhere, thinking I would like them.  Similarly I am constantly searching for whatever things she is into, and have gone to silly lengths to track down whatever it is that she is hunting for.  So while I might have a “muggle” wife…  she certainly knows the important bits, and at the same time reminds me that there is a world just outside our door as well.

Legacy Lacking

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Fine with Failure

swtor 2015-10-19 06-11-27-01

I have come to accept the fact that there is no way in hell I am going to manage to finish all of the class story lines before tomorrow, when Knights of the Fallen Empire launches.  I allowed myself to get massively distracted by Destiny, and for the most part I am okay with this.  Last night I hit the start of Act 3 on my Sith Sorcerer and I should be able to wrap that up tonight if I am lucky.  That leaves only the agent to play, and as a friend suggested last night… it might be interesting to see what leveling is like post KotFE.  In truth while I am excited for this expansion, I am not just rushing headlong into the content.  I still have yet to complete Shadows of Revan on any of my characters, and while my Jedi Guardian is sitting at 57…  I have no real desire to rush through that.  Honestly at this point I might ding the new level cap before I even set foot into the new chapters content.  I want to play, but I am not feeling like I have to rush ahead, since really I am not trying to keep up with anyone.  That normally is why I push so hard at the beginning of an expansion, is that I feel like I am obligated to grind my way to the top of the heap so I will be available for tanking as we level.  That ended up in a small bit of burnout recently with Heavensward, so with SWTOR since I am now enjoying it again… I want to futz around a bit.

My biggest complaint about this game is shared with party based role-playing games in general.  Nothing frustrates me more than anything, when the game forces me to take a specific character on a mission.  This happened last night with Talos, and while I like the companion just fine…  a healer and a dps/healer grouped together is not exactly the best mix in the world.  I had to stop what I was doing in the middle of this mission, go back to the fleet, upgrade my mods and only then was I able to keep myself alive during a section where I am essentially soloing while Talos fiddles with something in a tomb.  I tend to get really connected to a specific group of characters, and when the game forces me to mix that up I get frustrated.  I am one of those people that plays Dragon Age with the same party every time, and never switches to use any of the others except begrudgingly when the game makes me do it.  I like building a small tight knit team and then using everyone else for crew missions.  The worst moment in Dragon Age was the bit where you have to split up and use all of your companions…  only half of which had anything other than their starting gear.  I had to load back in from a previous save and go out of my way to figure out how best to gear them all.  It was pretty much the opposite of fun, and that is how I feel in SWTOR when I am forced to use a specific companion pairing for a specific mission.

The Distraction

The reason why I am mostly okay with not hitting my goal is because I have been having a silly amount of fun playing Destiny.  Over the weekend I spent some more time working on my Hunter, which I hope to also get to 40 at some point soonish. After playing around a bit on the Warlock, I decided to use my boost to level 25 on the Hunter instead… because Blade Dancer seems like a really fun spec.  I also just like the look and feel of the hunter better than the warlock, and it makes me a bit jealous that my Titan doesn’t have a knife to stab things with instead of just punch them.  At this point I am level 30, and considering starting the Taken King content proper soonish if for no reason other than to unlock the Dreadnought for patrols.  Ultimately I want to be able to get all of my characters up there in level so that I can share the benefit of having multiple near cap characters.  A lot of the cooldowns can go faster if you can swap an item back and forth between your characters.  The Agonarch runes can gain one charge per day per character, so if you bank the item you can pop on another character and gain another charge… ultimately getting special event access faster.

I am still very much in the slogging phase of the game, and I have been hovering around the 290 mark for over a week now.  Ultimately my only way out is to start chain running Heroic Strikes, but I just have not been able to bring myself to do that.  I am having fun with the game, and I am afraid pushing that hard is going to ultimately break it for me.  When I start to resent the RNG, or resent the other players…  I know my fun time with Destiny will be over.  So I am sitting in this realm of finding enjoyment in the little moment to moment gameplay and trying to ignore the larger picture almost entirely.  There is part of me that would love to see the raid…  but a whole other part of me that doesn’t want to take that hit of heroine.  I know what I am like when I start chasing raid drops… I approach them with a single minded determination and focus that ultimately leads to me being completely hollow as a result.  I obsess over gearing… and grind myself into the ground destroying whatever enjoyment I had for the game in the process.  I tried really hard not to do this with Heavensward, and in part it is why I have been taking this break and playing other games in the process.  My hope is that by the time we end up going back to Final Fantasy XIV it will feel fresh and enjoyable again with the launch of the 3.1 patch.  Similarly though I am trying to keep Destiny and SWTOR as enjoyable as I can for the time being…  and it seems like not caring too much about reaching a particular destination is my way for doing that.