Tales of the Aggronaut

Hammerknell and Keywardens

September 4, 2015 by Belghast

Nightmare Larva

I had a strangely disconnected evening last night essentially happened in two distinct parts. My great niece was in town doing a track meet, and we had arranged to meet up with the family for dinner. Initially I thought I would get home and we would essentially leave right away. That wasn’t quite the case and we ultimately did not walk to dinner until around 7ish, which left me with a fair amount of time to kill. I have once again been feeling the Rift itch lately, as I go through every few weeks. The shiny new mount that I talked about yesterday may or may not have been the catalyst. So I poked around Meridian for a bit and ultimately decided to do an Instant Adventure. For those not familiar with the concept, Rift has this really cool thing where you hit a button and get thrown together with a raid group of people and teleported to a specific area of the world. There you complete a series of objectives, and get teleported to a new place where the process starts over again. Each time you complete a segment you are rewarded loot just like in a Rift, except this time they are generally caches of gear for your class.

Last night I noticed there was a new option called “Intrepid Adventures”. I say this is a new option, but I really mean it was new to me… because I had not noticed it before. That said I have not really run any instant adventures since the launch of Nightmare Tide. What it appears to be is a Instant Adventure style tour of raid encounters. I got teleported into the caverns under Hammerknell, where I fought all sorts of tougher but still manageable monsters leading up to several “boss” fights. I have to say it gives a nice flavor to leveling especially as I have not actually seen any of the raids since Vanilla. I had a lot of fun and will probably use this option when I return to leveling again. I am right now about halfway through 62 and the grind to 65 has been slower going than I had hoped. I honestly have problems with the layout of content since vanilla, or more so I just liked the feel of leveling in Vanilla better. This is of course personal preference, and since Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides feel really similar… I am guessing they have done the market research that tells them that the Rift demographic wants that style of content. Anyways… I have contemplated trying to set up at least one night a week to play Rift. The problem there is that I am not sure there are enough nights in the week to go around for all of the games I want to be regularly playing.

Hunting Keywardens

When I got home from dinner however it was all about Diablo 3. Before dinner I had managed to pop in shortly and get my good friend Neph invited to our Stalwart Diablo clan that makes finding folks to group with significantly easier. My friend Shandrah popped on and started the leveling trail for Neph, Damai and Ashgar which was a full group so I happily worked on Season IV objectives. Right now I am working on the fourth and final chapter of objectives, and I spent most of the night tracking down the various Key Wardens which I had to defeat on Torment I or better. After a significant rearrange of my abilities I am finding that Torment I is actually fairly easy. I am essentially doing a variation of the classic “spin to win” Whirlwind build. I am using Frenzy with the added fury bonus of Berserk as my builder, for the purpose of being able to build fury as fast as humanly possible so I can spend the most time in whirlwind. From there I use Whirlwind with Blood Funnel which heals me every time I crit, which is often. From there I have Overpower with Killing Spree, Threating Shout with Falter, Ignore pain with Ignorance is Bliss, and Wrath of the Berserker with Insanity. For passives I take Boon of Bul-Kathos, Rampage, Ruthless and Weapons Master.

The end result is a built that can chew thing mobs pretty effectively, but the most important part is that it has really solid “sustain” which seems to be the most important thing as a melee character. None of my gear is ideal at the moment, and I am not using the right legendary procs because I simply haven’t gotten them to drop. That said it is a good start and better than the previously build I was working with. I am still relatively new to the whole Rifts and Greater Rifts thing, and at this point I have two objectives standing in the way of my spiffy portrait and pet. One of which is “Reach Greater Rift Level 10 Solo” which I find really confusing. Last night I attempted to do this one and completed a Greater Rift… albeit without getting the bonus. But I am not sure if this means that I need to complete the rift with the bonus or if I physically need to manage to get to dungeon level 10 within the Rift. The last one however will take some doing considering I am in a mishmash of gear right now, and it is to have a level 70 legendary equipped in every slot. I have been spending my blood shards on gear slots that I am currently missing in the hopes of slowly knocking this achievement out. In any case… I am close and I am having a blast just killing stuff for loot and paragon levels!

Bel VS Mobile Gaming

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

The Eureka Moment

I just had a moment of realization while checking on the progress of Vault 816… I am not a mobile gamer. While I really enjoy the idea of playing Fallout Shelter, I always have the same thought I have with any mobile game. “Man I wish I could play this on my desktop or through a web browser.” There are games that I enjoy the idea of playing… like Fallout Shelter, Alphabear, Dragon Coins, or Final Fantasy Record Keeper. The problem is I get frustrated by the imprecise controls. Using your finger to move objects around the screen feels so much more cludgy than doing it with a nice tight mouse pointer. Granted if I were a smaller person I would probably not be having any of these issues.

Sausage-Like Fingers

I am 6’4” and have huge hands… I can palm a basketball. Attached to these huge hands are useless sausage-like fingers that have the fine motor skills of sleepy toddler. The more I think about it… this fact has gotten in the way of my enjoyment of almost every mobile game I have played. At first I thought the bulk of my problems would be resolved were I simply playing on a larger device. However as I graduated from my iPhone 3s to a Samsung Galaxy S2 to a Samsung Galaxy S5… each time the screen size increased sizably but the difficulty never went away. When I finally got my own iPad I still felt like throwing it across the room anytime I was asked to do anything that required a modicum of detailed movement.

I realize there is such a thing as a stylus, but then I am having to fiddle with an awkward device on top of an already awkward control scheme. The problem is… there really are games that I want to enjoy on mobile devices. Fallout Shelter for example takes two things that I have loved in the past… the Fallout Franchise, and Sim Tower like gameplay. During my pre-college and college years I spent silly amounts of my free time playing both of these games. I spent enough time playing Sim Tower to be able to build freaking airports at the top of my towers. I have played each of the Fallout franchise games multiple times, and even though I rarely play the original… I feel like I could pretty safely pick it right back up and meld into the nostalgia nicely. So I am the core demographic of this game… except for the whole control scheme problem.

I honestly have no clue why I felt like I needed to write this post, other than having my own little Eureka moment. For the longest time I thought my dislike of mobile gaming was more about the game experiences that you have on a mobile device. Now I realize that is wrong… there are plenty of “gamerly” experiences available. My problem is that I struggle to get any sense of control while playing a mobile game. Finger based movement against a slick screen always feels chaotic to me. It reminds me of how frustrated I get when trying to use a trackball. I guess I am just accustomed to the mouse, keyboard and controller… and when it finally comes down to relying on my own digits to make things work… I find the experience frustrating. I am wondering if anyone else out there with sausage-like fingers suffers from this same issue? We should totally form a support group or something.

Needing Purpose

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

Of Bad Ass Mounts

This morning I suffered some pretty major technical difficulties on the blog. Several months back I had a nasty DDoS attack against my blog from as far as I can tell some nasty video game extremists. It happened the day after I made a post, so I have always linked the two. As a result my ISP threw in a few rules to block access to the guts of my wordpress installation from anyone but me. This morning apparently in the middle of writing a post my IP address changed on me, and I immediately lost access to do any of the things that wordpress does through Ajax… which is apparently nearly everything. My good friend Hiawani however once again is to the rescue and he got me fixed in a matter of moments. I love this man so much, and in truth he is the only reason why I have stayed with my web host for as long as I have. In the coming weeks I need to actually get off my ass and allow them to migrate me to a different server. I mostly wanted to get through August before that happened, because I did not want any potential interruptions during Blaugust.

What you are seeing above however is a bad ass mount I just got in Rift. It is slowly creeping up on Extra Life time, and yesterday I finally went through the paces and created the AggroChat team. Last year we had tag teamed this even through the Alliance of Awesome group, and it was fun… but this year we kinda wanted to do it as AggroChat since we are a fairly large ensemble cast. If we managed to pull in all of the folks who have appeared on the show with any sense of regularity we should be able to get more than enough people to cover all the slots. All of this was pushed into motion however when Liore posted a link saying she was giving away the 4th Anniversary Arclight mount that she got from Pax. She was going to give the mount to the next donation she got on her own Extra Life page. Now while I am doing my own thing, I try and help others out as well, and over an hour had passed since she had posted the link so I figured I was out of luck. Turns out that nope… apparently folks were either feeling stingy yesterday afternoon or I am just lucky because I now have a really amazing mount in Rift. I buzzed around on it for a good hour last night not doing a damned thing other than riding… it is pretty amazing. Absolutely my favorite of the various Arclight rider designs.

Back to Eorzea

The last couple of weeks I have been on a fairly extended vacation as I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and played lots of other games. Normally I would have been back on Monday but due to Pax that raid didn’t actually happen. Similarly we were down a significant number of people for last nights raid, but instead we opted to help a guild member through Alexander. She had managed to do the first turn only, and we helped her get through the last three. I know at the very least she got a ring from it, but I am hoping she managed to gather up some various bits as well. While waiting around on the raid however I spent time hanging out with guildie Tatafelo Rurufelo, who was doing his best warrior of light dark knight bad ass pose. My biggest problem right now is I am just feeling absolutely no drive to accomplish something. I should be out grinding Esoterics, but I am happy enough with my gear levels… and that is frustrating. I should be striving to get better, but instead I would rather just pop into another game like Diablo and grind there.

I feel like 3.1 is going to jump start my enjoyment of the game, because I am so tired of Neverreap. My biggest concern is that the next set only includes two dungeons… so will we be right back into the situation of always getting one of those two dungeons? My hope is that they make expert roulette be a combination of the first two plus the new two… giving us a pool of four dungeons. One of the biggest selling factors to me to date has been that we got three new dungeons each patch cycle. Them trimming it back to two per patch cycle kinda concerns me a little. Are we just going to see less content as a whole throughout Heavensward? Is this evidence that they are starting to work on a new expansion to follow Heavensward? Listening to Soken this weekend at Pax, it seems like “Hellsward” as they call it took a lot out of the team, so it might simply be that they need a smaller patch to recuperate from the grind that was getting Heavensward out the door. I guess only time will tell if we see a similarly small patch come 3.2. For the time being… I just need to find a new goal in game.

Blaugust Results

September 2, 2015September 2, 2015 by Belghast

A Phenomenal Blaugust

The time has come and as I said in my original post this year, I would tabulate the results and post them on September 2nd. This month really was an absolute deluge of content, and there is really no other way to say about it. I know I personally struggled to keep up with it all. I have to say however one of the best moments for me was reading the many “last posts” of the challengers. They all seemed to have a theme of “this is what blaugust taught me” or “I am proud of myself that I survived”. Reading each of those was so amazing. As I remarked yesterday I feel like the bulk of the community is not quite sure if they want to give me a hug… or flip me the bird. It is interesting being both Hero and Villain at the same time. After reading the posts… I can be perfectly fine with either distinction because the end result was pretty awesome.

This year we had far greater participation, and I am still completely floored by it. In 2014 we had 52 folks participating, and of those 28 managed to “win” the challenge of posting something every single day. One of my frustrations however is that because of the way I was running the contest, it kept someone from joining late, playing catch up, and being eligible for the final prizes. This year I changed the guidelines to something I am much more happy with, which is simply getting thirty one posts during the month of August. We had a grand total of 88 folks who signed up and participated in the challenge, posting at least one blog post. From there I made a separate distinction to give folks some credit who at least made it to the half way mark with fifteen posts and in that group we had 76. The most impressive thing however is that we had 56 people who managed to complete thirty one posts during the month of August. For added benefit I also kept track of who happened to participate last year as well, and we had 24 who were returning. Without further stalling… here are the lists!

The Challengers

The thought of posting something every single day for a month is a scary prospect, so simply signing your name on the dotted line and participating is pretty awesome in my book. This list is folks that joined the Blaugust initiative and posted at least one blog post during the month of August. Some of them however got really damned close to the halfway point. So lets take a moment to recognize them. You have all earned the right to use this badge in whatever fashion you like! It is available in a full resolution version and a sized down version ideal for sidebars.

Of this batch, there is a group that I want to give special recognition to. These are folks that participated for the second year, and for them I have special versions of the badge also available in full resolution and sized down versions.

The Survivors

This year I made a special distinction for all of the folks that managed to make it through at least fifteen blog posts during the month of August. We had some folks in the group that barely crossed the line, and others that damned near hit the final mark. There were several that managed to hit fifteen only to decide that this daily blogging thing really was not for them. In any case posting essentially “every other day” for a month is quite the feat as well, and I wanted to acknowledge this separately. I’ve dubbed this group the survivors, and they have earned the right to use this badge and title in whatever form they wish. Once again it is available in both full resolution and scaled down versions.

Once again I wanted to recognize the folks who managed to “survive” the challenge this year that also participated last year, so we have a special badge for them available in full and scaled resolutions.

The Conquerors

I hate the term “winner” for a challenge like this, because it doesn’t really encompass the purpose. Just the simple fact that you signed up and made an effort to be more active and create more content makes you a winner in my book. So when I was looking for a new term, I decided to go with Conqueror, because really every person on this next list did just that. They conquered fear, they conquered apathy, they conquered doubt, and they conquered Blaugust. I am so irrationally proud of every person on this list that I struggle to put it adequately into words. Once again they have a badge available in both full and scaled resolutions.

Once again we have a special group of Conquerors that returned from winning the previous year, to kick this one in the face. I find it pretty awesome that 13 of the 28 “winners” from 2014 returned. I feel like I also need to give special recognition to the Mystical Mesmer who managed to complete Blaugust on two completely different blogs this year. If that is not a microphone drop… I am not sure what is. Regardless this group also has their own special veteran badge in full and scaled resolutions.

The Prizes

So now that all of the acknowledgement is out of the way… lets talk prizes. Since not everyone that crosses the finish line can actually win the grand prize, we have to unfortunately rely on random chance. Last year I struggled with figuring out a good way to do this, and as a result this year I just wrote my own damned dice roller. This allowed me to type in the number of folks who managed to get thirty one posts during the month of August, hit the big Roll the Dice button and get an output stream with one result per line perfect for pasting into a spreadsheet. I sorted the thirty one club alphabetically and then pasted all of my results in a new column. If you are curious what the final numbers looked like, I am working off of this spreadsheet as a award prizes.

There was a slight monkey wrench thrown in my original plans as to how to give out awards. This was a good monkey wrench in the form of a bunch of prizes from Kings Isle entertainment. This actually gave me more “big prizes” to spread around which was really awesome as they gave me three prize packs from Wizard 101 and three from Pirate 101. Sometimes random chance is serendipitous. I had said from the very beginning that I would purchase a steam game for whoever managed to get the grand prize. It turns out… today is the birthday of this years winner. The dice were in the favor of Paeroka from Nerdy Bookahs. For winning the random number generator she got a Steam game of her choice… and she chose Valhalla Hills. Additionally since Kings Isle was so damned cool to chip in prizes, I also gave her one of the Wizard 101 and Pirate 101 packs.

That left me four more codes to hand out… so starting last night I messaged folks and had them give me their preference of Wizard 101 or Pirate 101. The next four in line were…

@knifesedgegames – Wizard 101 Code
@BaneFalcon – Pirate 101 Code
@Hidden_Wings – Wizard 101 Code
@Jasyla_ – Pirate 101 Code

The Prize Closet

Since we had so damned many people manage to complete the challenge, I am going to try and give out as many prizes as I can. I have a stack of various game codes largely left over from humble bundles gone by. I have a spreadsheet that I am starting to circulate down the list of folks who managed to “conquer” Blaugust. I may not have enough codes to get through everyone, but I am going to try! So expect in the next few days to get a private message from me with a link, asking you to tag one of them items with your name. This was a pretty crazy month, and I want to thank all of you for participating. Next year I am going to start planning significantly ahead of time and am hoping to get more game companies to chip in goodies for the prize vault. I know at this point you are saying “What about Anook?”. Lonrem was up late last night tabulating the results, and since that prize is based on community participation on Anook I will be letting them make their own announcement. I am really happy that they have been so supportive of us essentially taking over a chunk of their website during the month of August. Blaugust will return next year and hopefully be even bigger than before!