Tales of the Aggronaut

Building a Better Wardrobe

April 16, 2015 by Belghast

Allergy Apocalypse

I have been more than a bit out of it over the last few days. Here in Oklahoma every allergy index be it mold spore or tree pollen has been through the roof. This means that I have been living in a permanent daze. The frustrating thing is that sooner or later it starts to piss off my Asthma and over the last few days that has finally happened. It is extremely hard to keep a constant thread going in my head when I am in this situation so I want to thank you all for bearing with me. I am sure I will be making the occasional unintelligible statement. I promise the things I say make sense in my head, but often times there is a translation layer that gets obliterated by the allergen haze. The frustrating thing is I am quite literally taking as much as I possibly can to combat it. I am not really sure why things are so bad this year, but even people who do not normally have problems are struggling.

So for the time being I am going to keep pushing forward and trying to write posts that make sense. Sometimes this will work, other times it will very much not work. Unfortunately this same stupor has been extending to my gaming. All night on Tuesday night I felt like I was disconnected from reality, and it was significantly more than just being in a funk with Warcraft. My reflexes are much slower than normal, and I get frustrated with myself when I don’t perform at the level I have come to expect. My instinct is to hide away for awhile and simply not group with other people, but I am going to try and fight that since my guildies are extremely understanding individuals. Hopefully this will pass soon, and I will start to feel like a human being once more. In the mean time… this really sucks.

Building a Better Wardrobe

Yesterday I vented some of my frustrations about the reported 6.2 content patch in World of Warcraft. The bulk of my frustrations centered around the timewalking system, and how I expected it to finally be a mentoring system. I was reminded in the comments however that there is another game out there with an extremely robust mentoring system. So as a result I patched up Rift yesterday and poked my head around it once more. It turns out that yesterday just happened to be the day the latest patch dropped. Among other things this introduced an extremely robust wardrobe system, one that I would honestly call the best available currently. If you have read my blog for any length of time you will know just how important cosmetic systems are to me. I like swapping the appearance of my gear, and I tend to collect looks to reuse later. In fact my bank in most games is full of items that I thought might be interesting to use eventually.

What makes the system so awesome is that as you are out in the world each time you pick up a new item you collect its appearance. Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3 have similar systems, but what sets the Rift model ahead of these two is the fact that you can swap your items around freely without a currency or token expense. Another nice feature is that in Rift you have forty wardrobe slots that can be unlocked allowing you to create a vast array of interesting looks. While the wardrobe system had that functionality before, what it adds is the ability to also control the dye options at the outfit level. It seems like I got a basic set of dye colors with the ability to unlock more. Also an improvement is the removal of the item appearance system and inclusion of it into the wardrobe system. Instead of having to use a bauble to change the look of your weapon you now just item slots that allow you to pick from the weapon graphics that you know. To make all of this more awesome, the unlocks happen at a region level meaning you have access account wide across all of your characters on that server region.

Freeing Bank Space

Since I had collected weapons and armor that I happened to like the appearance of over the course of my time leveling in Rift, I had stacks of the stuff in my bank. With the addition of this new wardrobe system it meant that every last bit of it could be removed either through selling it or what I ended up doing… salvaging it for crafting materials. The problem with the implementation of this system coming so late is that I have gotten rid of so much already. The cool thing is that I am a high level crafter for pretty much every armor type, so at some point I want to burn through some of my old materials crafting sets of stuff just to get the appearance unlock. This seems like potentially the easiest and least expensive way to get lots of unlocks quickly. For the time being I have enough items to give me a wide range of options to swap back and forth between. I especially like having access to some of the gear sets I purchased for my rogue, letting me mix things up a bit with the heavy plate gear my warrior wears.

Admittedly one of the biggest things that keeps me from playing Rift is the fact that my inventory is out of control. I cannot bring myself to get rid of anything… and thanks to the Minion system I am absolutely swimming in dimension items. The vast majority of the items in my bank are somehow related to the dimension system. At some point I need to actually start working on a zone. For the time being I have a Stoneflask Tavern instance loaded with lots of other big objects that I have picked up along the way. Right now I have something like six additional buildings that I picked up along the way and added to the instance. The problem is it makes no sense currently, and I will need to spend some time making it make sense. I really like the large prefab buildings, because it gives you a lot of space while only consuming a single dimension item slot. I keep thinking this is going to be a weekend project, of working on my dimension… but that never actually happens. In fact Rift as a whole has been one of those games that I wanted to return to, but find myself just not logging into it. There is so much interesting stuff going on, I just wish it grabbed my attention more often.

Timewalking Frustrations

April 15, 2015 by Belghast

6.2 Disappointment

This week we have had a pretty massive information dump about the 6.2 PTR patch information. I have to say overall I am fairly disappointed, not necessarily in what is contained within the patch, but that everything about it feels like an “end of expansion” content patch. The patch information is super spoilerific, but it seems as though the Burning Crusade is now invading Tanaan Jungle. Soon the gates will open revealing a zone besieged by fel magics, that culminate in the Hellfire Citadel raid zone. All of that sounds pretty badass, but the problem is it also sounds like the end of an expansion scenario. If 6.2 is on the PTR that means more than likely we are a little over a month from seeing this content in game. Which would probably place it landing at the beginning of June. We have no new expansion announcement, which means that more than likely they will be announcing it in November at Blizzcon.

The problem there is that unless they launch immediately following Blizzcon, we will be looking at another Siege of Orgrimmar style content lag. I feel like if they announce at Blizzcon the earliest an expansion would be launched is Spring 2016. The best case scenario I can think of in my mind places a new expansion in our hands in March 2016 which would be a nine month content lag. While that is nothing near as bad as the sixteen month lag at the end of Pandaria, it is still not amazing. Sure they would I guess shoehorn another minor content tier like Ruby Sanctum, but I don’t think that will really make anyone happy. Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe they have an even more epic conclusion of this expansion planned. This Siege on Hellfire Citadel however just feels like the last grand hurray for the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Which leaves the question in my mind of… what next?

Timewalking Frustrations

The absolute largest disappointment coming from this however relates to the Timewalking system. This was hinted at quite some time ago in an interview that something was in the worlks called Timewalking mode, and my mind was set ablaze. My grand crusade has been for years that World of Warcraft needs a mentoring system, that allows higher level players to scale down to the level of lower level players… and do content with them “for real”. When this new game system was hinted at, I was absolutely giddy because this meant finally after all these years WoW was getting mentoring. This has probably been the biggest reveal as part of the 6.2 informational dump, and I have to say I am really frustrated with the result. I am going to full quote a section of the announcement below.

In Patch 6.2, we’re introducing seven different weekend events that will run from noon Friday through noon Monday every week. Two of those events will be Timewalking weekends, in which you’ll be able to queue up for a randomly selected old-school dungeon with a new sort of “heroic” difficulty: When you Timewalk these dungeons, you’ll find that your character’s power and gear has been scaled down to a fraction of what they normally are. For the first time in years, some dungeons you outgrew long ago will once more put your skills to the test.

So instead of a robust mentoring system, we are apparently going to get a weekend gimmick. If I am reading this statement correctly it sounds like these are going to be limited time events that will happen twice. Maybe this is going to be like the pvp weekend construct, and simply rotate through seven different events, or maybe there are literally only going to be seven events ever. Right now we don’t really know, but regardless of the situation it feels like a complete waste of resources to put these in as limited time events. I was hoping for and expecting a robust mentoring system, but instead I am getting a carnival ride. I really don’t know why I set myself up for these disappointments, because traditionally my hopes are dashed on a regular basis when it comes to this game. I still have so much hope and can imagine a game that is so much better than what we actually have to play, but we never seem to get there.

Cycling Down

I am more than willing to admit that some of my frustrations might just be me. I have reached that point with World of Warcraft that I often do… where I am simply not enjoying the game. In previous trips back to the game I would have left it months ago. I pushed three characters to level 100 and everyone to within Garrison levels… and simply lacked the drive to push any further. The moment to moment gameplay was extremely fun while leveling, but the non-raid end game content has felt like I had no real purpose. So instead I log in an hour before raid on Tuesday, so that I can get my extra roll tokens, and make sure I have potions and flasks. Occasionally I half heartedly log in to run Garrison missions on my main, just for the hopes of those raid loot boxes every other week. I feel like I am spending the absolute bare minimum of time in this game, and so long as we were progressing smoothly in the raid it felt like it was time well spent.

Unfortunately we are not progressing smoothly. We will have a good night, and then it feels like we regress five steps the next one. I am tied to this game because I am actively raiding in it, but I have to say I am starting to question why I am even doing that. When raid voice chat is full of frustrated and stressed out voices… it pretty much destroys the enjoyment for me. I am all about joking and having a good time… and kicking ass while doing it. When we stop being able to have that relaxed raid dynamic, and still be high functioning my will to care drains from me. Ultimately I came back to the game riding a wave of nostalgia. I stayed because I was raiding and getting to hang out with a handful of friends that I missed. When even Rylacus, the life of the party, is starting to sound stressed and worn down… I question why we are doing any of this? I am sure I will chill out in the coming days, but seeing the 6.2 content, and our current raid struggles… it is making me question why I am still playing.

Dances with Fish

April 14, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Insanity

So this happened yesterday… and I am completely floored by it. Firstly I thought last weeks 6th place was pure insanity, but to see us jump to third place in guild activity in a weeks time is just surreal. For those wondering this is gauge is based on guild activity, or moreso the guild going out into the world and doing stuff. This means we are leveling, crafting, doing fates, running dungeons, in apparently huge portions. But to think we are the third most active guild on the server just seems so strange. Anecdotally I did notice a few weeks back that regardless of what crystal I teleported to, there seemed to be some [GREY] members nearby so I knew we were getting pretty huge, but I guess this simply quantifies that.

The thing is I still feel like this has very little to do with me, and more to do with getting a critical mass of people in the same place for a long period of time. We have been growing extremely fast, but at the same time very organically. I invite someone, who has fun and invites their friends… and then they go off and want to invite their friends and so forth. This all just seems to have snowballed into the amazing situation that we currently have on Cactuar. It is a combination of a great game with great people, and the end product is this upwelling of awesome. Last night Tam our fearless leader ran some numbers. We currently have 135 members of Greysky Armada, and of those 89 have been online within the last two weeks… and even more impressively 63 had been online in the last 24 hours. We have a really huge active population of players… and it is pretty damned awesome.

Turn Five Revisited

We have been struggling a bit to get our turn nine ship righted, as it seems each week we have been down some people required to make that happen. Last night we opted that rather than standing around waiting and hoping for an 8th to show up… that we would do something more proactive and key another guild member by running them through turn five. I still find t5 an extremely enjoyable fight, and it was a little challenging given that some of us were playing different roles. We had to give up Kodra’s insane dps in favor of him picking up the mantle of the Paladin tank. He did a great job at interpreting all the random commentary I said by not really understanding fully the job that Ashgar does on a regular basis. Ash just takes care of so many details that it took us a bit to replicate all of them with someone else. The funny thing is at this point in our gear level… the dive bomb phase seems to be far more forgivable. I think we managed to defeat the turn on the 5th or 6th try… but most of the attempts were really us trying to adjust to the twister phase.

While the first coil is not exactly a great way to get people gear, they do have some nice looking items in there. Last night I managed to get some achievement for defeating turn five multiple times in a row. Ashgar has always been super awesome about letting me pick up the various pieces of plate gear that drop in there because I liked the look of it. After the raid last night I went rifling through my inventory and realized that I had all of the cosmetic slots. As such I opted to pick up a brand new glamour to show off my Heavy Allagan gear. Now the weapon from t5 doesn’t really go with this set of gear, so I opted to use the 110 weapon instead. I am sure I will get tired of it eventually, or I will complete some other set of gear that I want to use… but for the time being I am pretty happy with looking like I spent a lot of time grinding the early coils.

Dances with Fish

We took long enough last night to defeat turn five that we didn’t really have enough time to start in on turn nine. Instead we opted to set our sights on the lord of the whorl, Leviathan extreme. We had made attempts on this in the past but struggled a bit at the time, so never really came back and revisited it. However in the meantime I have run a lot of Leviathan hard mode for various guild members as they needed it for their storyline. Each time I have pretended that I was doing it on extreme, and have gotten significantly better at avoiding “stuff”. The challenge for extreme mode is that during the middle of the fight Leviathan knocks the barriers off the platform you are fighting him from. This means that if you are not careful and do not adjust to his deck slams… you will slide directly off the platform and into the water… where you will be unrecoverable just like on Titan. All of this pretending to not have rails seems to actually have made the real thing significantly easier, because for the most part we were not dying to folks sliding off the platform.

On our best attempt we managed to get Leviathan down to 24% and largely we were dying to either insane amounts of damage… or the horrible add that fears players off the platform. Mostly the timing of the stuns is a bit odd there, and Kodra was doing this for the first time. After looking at a quick guide this morning it looks like we need to start stun locking that add around 70% health. Essentially if you see a castbar at all.. it is apparently already too late. There will be nothing you can do to stop the fear effects from going off. I feel like on this fight I have the easy job which is just soak up a lot of damage and be ready with cooldowns if it looks like I am taking a burst of damage. The offtank does pretty much everything else… stun the adds, pick up the adds, tank the four blue balls of doom etc. Thought I feel like given a solid night of attempts that were not abbreviated… we can totally do this fight.

Tanking for Strangers

April 13, 2015 by Belghast

FitBit is Awesome

It is so rarely that you get to brag on a company so I thought I would take a moment to do so on my blog this morning. My wife and I have had our FitBit flex trackers for a little over a year now, in fact when we looked it up it has been a few weeks over a year. Mine is still trucking along happily, however recently my wife’s started developing some issues. Namely it stopped vibrating, which was not a big deal other than the fact that there was no haptic feedback when you put the device to sleep or when you hit your milestone. This weekend however she started having some significant problems with the battery. She had charged it fully, and during the course of Saturday the battery drained completely. This was the second time that it had prematurely drained the battery, so with that and the vibration motor issues… we just assumed the device was shot.

We had gotten a good year of use out of it, and figured at this point it was out of warranty and we would simply just have to buy a new one. She shot an email to customer support, and then when she got home yesterday decided to give the support hotline a call. Now this is either really awesome or creepy depending upon your perspective, but the technician on the phone could see various markers like that at the beginning of the day the battery usage on her fitbit was at 90% and drained completely during the course of the day. We were correct in that the fitbit was out of warranty, but the tech no the phone said that it would not be a big deal. They are now sending her a brand new fitbit and even checked to see if she needed a new band. They didn’t have to by the letter of the law, but it is really awesome that they went ahead and took care of the issue.

Tanking for Strangers

One of the things that I have struggled with in Final Fantasy XIV is capping poetics each week. Now there is a rather easy way to do this, and that is running a random expert every single day. The problem being that I was only actually doing these when I could muster a full guild group. In spite of how wonderful the average community member is on Cactuar and the Aether data center, I still have this hang up about tanking for strangers. This week however I forced myself to push aside this mental block, and I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised with just how enjoyable it has been. Admittedly this all started for a strange reason, largely that I happened to miss the boat one night on the “guild group”. I had logged in five minutes after the group formed, so I simply opted to queue as a tank instead by myself. The result was that the run went quickly and I actually beat the guild group out of the expert. Then another night, I missed the boat again because I spoke up on teamspeak… but not in free company chat and my comment got missed in the shuffle. So once again I queued and made really good time through the instance.

These two events acted as a bit of a catalyst that set the chain of actions in motion, that have now lead me to queue almost every night and tank for at least one random stranger. Before I do so I still ask if anyone wants to do an expert, but if I get no response I know that I can safely queue without much issue. This ability to cap without much grinding has made other aspects of the game more enjoyable. As a result I am more likely to offer to tank those low level instances when the guild needs it, because I know I am not quite so “under the gun” on the weekend to hit my 450 poetics cap. I can’t say I am necessarily completely over my mental block about pug tanking, but I am definitely doing better. Additionally I am really enjoying that extra 4500 gil from pretty much always getting the tank in need bonus. Now if this trend continues I can see myself starting to queue for coil turn four… and attempting to push towards the 200 victory bear mount. On Wednesday night we ended up queuing for turn four and overall it went really smoothly.

Dusting Off Books

Because of this practice of capping poetics over the last few weeks I am just about to reach one of my goals. With the release of patch 2.55 they introduced a way for us to be able to get the Encrypted Tomestone needed for my Ironworks Magitek Axe. All that was really stopping me from getting one was 1300 tomestones of poetics, which feels like a rather daunting task, but in reality is simply hitting the cap three weeks in a row. It is my hope that between Tuesday and Thursday I can get the last few tomestones I need, and get my axe. The awesome thing about it is that when I do finally get it I should be able to shift it to the Augmented version giving me a level 130 weapon. The negative here is that I absolutely hate the appearance of the Ironworks axe… so more than likely I will still be rocking my Malignant Mogaxe pictured above. I’ve not been as happy with a weapon in a very long time as I have been with that one.

Now the strange thing this weekend is even though I am inching closer to the 130 weapon… I ended up dusting off my Animus weapon books and started down that path once more. I have no clue WHY I am doing this, but I apparently am nonetheless. I think in part the dungeons were a hold up when I was unwilling to queue for them by myself. In fact I had a book finished save for a single dungeon run for a very long time, and I finished that book up this weekend starting another. Essentially I am rolling in soldiery right now, and I need to use it. Now that I have two classes with 110 weapons simply waiting for me to level them… I am feeling like maybe that isn’t the best use of my tomestones. Instead I might as well venture down the path of madness that Ashgar has been blazing and start working on finishing up Animus and preparing for the impact that is the Novus step. If nothing else it should consume all of my available soldiery for awhile, which is a good thing I guess.