Tales of the Aggronaut

MooCowadin

March 2, 2015 by Belghast

Bel Folks Stuff 5 – Evening with Qelric

We are going to put on our timey wimey stuff hats and pretend that this show is being released during the month of February, as it was originally intended. When I record a Bel Folks Stuff I tend to give the victim as much time as possible. So I approached Qelric back in January to talk about this show… and she every so graciously accepted. The problem is that life happened in the time between, with her getting an absolutely horrible case of chicken pox towards the beginning of the month, and me dealing this this insane bronchitis mess towards the end. The result is we recorded the “February” episode in March… and that I supposed is just fine so long as it came out in any form.

Qelric is quite literally one of the only youtubers I watch with any regularity because she brings to her craft a style that you don’t generally see on youtube any more. She presents extremely content dense videos in a news like format, making them far easier for me to digest without the rambling exposition. If you are not familiar with your videos, I highly suggest you check them out. On top of this however Q is just a downright interesting person, and we have interacted for what feels like years. I had a delightful afternoon/evening sitting down to record this episode. Before we knew it a couple of hours had passed and we had a mammoth hour and a half long show. The awesome thing is… even after the mic stopped recording we wound up talking for another thirty or forty minutes. I love it when the conversation is natural and flowing. Hopefully you will all enjoy this as much as I did recording it.

[download the podcast]

Moocowadin

Yesterday was a surprisingly busy day, with dealing with the publishing of two different podcasts and a normal blog post. As a result especially while waiting for Qelric to get online, I wanted to play something but did not want to get too terribly engaging. With the introduction of the Heirloom system and the 6.1 patch, it has greatly increased my desire to alt. My number one frustration while trying to level a character is trying to make sure I have level equivalent gear. I realize that gear is never as important as I seem to make it, but I like to have at least as good of a weapon as possible while pushing through the levels. Now previously I had some heirlooms, but I had to choose which character would get to use them. Even with the ability to send them cross realm, it became a mess trying to track who had what and I was constantly afraid I would end up losing heirlooms in the mail… because I have done this before. The new system however is pretty much ideal for me, since I can generate copies of heirlooms on any and all characters.

When The Scryers server merged with Argent Dawn I set about creating eleven place holder horde characters, since I did not know how the actual merger would work. It makes me extremely happy that I can have 11 Alliance characters on Argent Dawn and 11 Horde characters on The Scryers… and use them to play with my AD Horde friends. I have always been one of those players that tried to span the faction divide whenever I could and through various community efforts I developed just as many bonds on the red side as the blue. I always feel like a louse however for never really spending much time leveling a character on the “other” side. As a result I started working on Belgrace my Moocowadin yesterday while waiting for Qelric and while recording the podcast. As of this morning I am now level 18 and starting the Ratchet area. It is insane just how fast the levels come when you are completely kitted out in heirlooms. The only slot that I do not have is the ring, and I am simply not a good enough fisherman to get that.

A Confidence Boost

Over the last few weeks since the launch of the Final Fantasy XIV 2.5 patch I have greatly tapered off the amount of time I am spending in World of Warcraft. It has become a Tuesday/Thursday experience for me largely which means simply showing up in time to raid. Now granted I am logging in periodically throughout the week to run garrison missions but in the grand scheme of things that takes ten minutes or so at a time, and I am really not online that long. I’ve felt kinda horrible because one of my long time friends has been slowing improving her ilevel gear wise on her priest. Every so often she would give me an update and yesterday she told me she had hit ilvl 626. I knew the answer before I asked it, but I asked her if she had managed to do any LFR yet? As I suspected she said no, that she was wary of raiding… and didn’t think she was ready for it. I hopped on Lodin my hunter, that could still use gear from Highmaul LFR and offered to queue with her for moral support.

Finni had raided before during the early days of World of Warcraft, and as such the bulk of her experience dated from the 40 man era. So when she thinks “raid” she equates it to super serious business. Fortunately and unfortunately at times… Looking for Raid is anything but serious business. Within what felt like fifteen minutes of queuing we were through the first section, and she got a much needed confidence boost… and thankfully a little bit of gear. I remember the first time I queued for Looking for Raid upon coming back during Pandaria. I was scared as hell because the concept of a raid for me too was “serious business” time. Thankfully we have this wonderful system that allows players without the time to dedicate to at least be able to get in and see the fights in one form or another. She ended up walking with a few upgrades, and I did as well… and can now queue Blackrock Foundry on my hunter. I think we both benefited from yesterday equally, because it seems like she won’t be quite so frightened of the LFR queue.

#WoW #Paladin #BelFolkStuff

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Year Behind and Loving It

March 1, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat 46 – Hards for Cards Extreme

Last night we once more recorded an episode of AggroChat and this time as one might expect our episode was almost entirely about Final Fantasy XIV patch 2.51. The patch introduced so much casual content to the game it is just silly. The primary addiction for our free company however has been the search for Triple Triad cards. While for some this has meant the constant dueling of NPCs to win specific cards, for me it has been doing hard content in the hopes that maybe just maybe it would drop a card. Yesterday Tam did some quick math and realized that over the course of the week I had completed more than 90 hard mode trials. Each of these trials rewards 5 poetics, and I capped almost exclusively through chain running them to get various primal cards. There are still a ton more that I need but so far I have managed to gather up Ifrit, Garuda, Gilgamesh/Enkidu, Ultros/Typhon and Good King Moggle Mog.

What I find amazing about this patch is the way that each of us has reacted to it slightly differently. Some of us have spent time racing Chocobos, others playing the catcpot lottery, and even others doing the various GATE events scattered throughout the golden saucer. Last nights show was overwhelmingly about our love of Final Fantasy XIV, but we did manage to slide a few other topics in. Tam and Kodra talk Elite: Dangerous and their recent missions to go asteroid mining. Kodra talks a new game that he has started called Deer God, and how it is not quite ready for primetime… but still charming. It was a fun show to record, and it is rare that all five of us are so completely enthralled with the same content at the same time.

Year Behind and Loving It

One of the things that made last nights show so damned entertaining to record, is we were essentially basking in the afterglow of a big raid win. Saturday night for a couple of hours before the podcast we have been doing this impromptu raid thing as a way of allowing some of the folks that cannot make our normal Monday night raid get some action. We alternate between doing serious content, and doing whatever eight man content one of our free company mates needs to get them off center. So as such last night we started off with the Chrysalis, the 8 man trial added with the last bit of storyline. It took us a bit to learn this fight but I was really pleased to see we could step in after a week and essentially down it in our first attempt. There was a bit of an intermission as we had to let Warenwolf catch up on the cinematic, but after that we set our focus on Titan Extreme.

For awhile we have had the awesomely named “Quake me up before you O’Ghomoro” sitting in our quest logs taunting us. This has been one of those things that I think all of us wanted to put behind us… but quite frankly Titan Extreme is one of the most demanding fights I have experienced in awhile. It requires the entire raid to move with confidence and precision, and there is a really slim margin of forgiveness. As we talked about on the Podcast it also does something really interesting, in that it makes you relearn your instincts. We died so many times because it is my tank instinct to run back in after a knockback and turn the boss. However in this fight there are reasons why that is the wrong decision, and it took awhile last night for me to get past that urge. Sure it is a year late in us beating this content, but damned does it not feel amazing that we did it… and that content that is over a year old is still relevant.

Faffing with the Mandervilles

This has become my new favorite screenshot, that I took on a whim the other night in the Manderville Golden Saucer. Before last nights raid, I opted to glamour my axe to the very awesome and very fitting Malignant Mogaxe. Most of the Good King Moggle Mog weapons have a bit of a silly side to them, but this one is just a very brutal looking axe with a Moogle pattern inlaid into the blade. It happens to match colorwise with my hair and my current chest piece nicely. This has been the best part about chain running Hard Mode Trials is the fact that I am picking up so many of the awesome primal weapons for Glamour purposes. I talked about this a bit last night, but since I have 5 level 50 classes… I have taken to collecting my Triple Triad Cards through running content because it kills two birds with one stone. There is always the chance of getting the cards that I want to drop, but at the same time all the while I am trying to get it I am stockpiling tomestones of soldiery that I can then use to buy gear for my army of classes.

Over the course of the weekend I managed to get Warrior and Paladin to 116, Dragoon to 110, White Mage to 100… and now I just need to catch up my Bard that is still sitting at 95. While it might seem tedious to run the same primal fights over and over… for me I guess it is much the same as soloing old school raid content in World of Warcraft. The fights and zones just feel epic, and I am happy to repeat them over and over. That has been one of the best things about having a fresh influx of new players… I am able to play “big kid” and run the old content with people seeing it for the first time. There is nothing quite like re-running content that never actually gets truly trivial. What I like the best is the fact that my chosen way of playing the game… is not the only one. Each of my free company mates has figured out their own particular style of play… and all see to be happy doing it. Nothing quite like being in a group where everyone seems to be happy.

Fighting Fate

February 28, 2015 by Belghast

Smoothies for Everyone

Every so often either my wife or I will get an idea in our heads and ultimately it leads to the other person either embracing it… or getting so sick of hearing about it that we simply give in. Several years ago I got it stuck in my head that I really wanted a juicer. I did copious amounts of research and finally ended up with a rather expensive model by Breville as it was the highest rated. After attempting to make juice a few times… I deemed it simply was not worth the effort and the colossal mess that went into the process. When you watch a juicer commercial they always seem to produce the prettiest almost Technicolor juice you could ever imagine. In reality what you produce is a lot of various shades of brown, and while it tasted just fine… you had to pour a lot of fruit into even a single glass. Ultimately the juicer is being loved by a far more sensible family right now, and I gave up on the notion… happy to see it getting some use.

So when my wife decided that she wanted a Nutribullet because one of her coworkers used it… I thought we were just about to walk down this same path. Surprisingly this I guess is a “juice” maker that we can exist with because it is so damned simple. We picked it up on Thursday and over the last few days we have been making all sorts of concoctions. My wife has been hitting pinterest and finding various recipes, and me… well I have just been trying to perfect a breakfast shake that combines my morning coffee with enough nutrients to keep me going until lunch. The trick seems to be to make my coffee the night before and set it in the fridge so that it blends better. Right now I am mixing in a banana, some peanut butter, some nutella, coffee and some honey to sweeten it all. I think I am pretty close, but I think the secret will be to fix my coffee like I normally would before setting it in the fridge. In any case the resulting smoothie is shockingly filling. Other than that I have been fixing a wide array of orange juice based drinks when I feel hungry. If nothing else this is already far more of a success than the juicer ever was.

Fighting Fate

Since I have been sick so much lately and realistically it has been too cold to do much of anything at all… I have spent a lot of time on the couch watching television. By watching television I mean either watching shows steaming over the network or on demand cable. I really don’t spend too much time passively watching live broadcast television other than adult swim. Over this period I have caught up with Scorpion, watched Halt and Catch Fire season 1, and finally got around to watching the last season of boardwalk empire. I might be going into some spoiler territory here so if you have not watched the show you might want to skip ahead to the next segment. For me this show has been about my love of Steve Buscemi, and without him I likely would not have ever watched it. I mean I have enjoyed watching “gangland” movies in the past, but I am not really the godfather type. What made this series so interesting for me was the fact that they took this favorite character actor of mine… and crafted a complex character that only he could bring to life.

Nucky Thompson is at the same moment repulsive and endearing… and you are never quite certain which side of him you are going to get. He is one of the more brilliantly flawed characters I have seen on either the small or large screen in a long while. Sitting down to watch the show from the first moment… you get an impression that none of this is going to end well. All the while you watch however you find yourself secretly rooting for Nucky to finally reach whatever pinnacle he is trying to reach, and that he can finally find some happiness. So as I sat down to watch this final season, I ultimately knew that all gangland themes end in death and destruction. To the last moment however I wanted Nucky to find a way to trick fate, and sidestep his own demise. The way that they brought this chapter to a close was so perfect, so touching, and at the same time so satisfyingly “just”. If you have not watched Boardwalk Empire… and ignored my warnings about spoilers… I still suggest you go watch the show. The end result of the experience is overwhelmingly positive and something I would suggest to almost anyone.

Primal Payouts

One of the awesome things about having so many people around lately in the Free Company is the fact that we can actually pull together impromptu group content. Last night on a whim when we realized we had eight geared 50s on at once… we opted to give Odin a shot. While the ilevel requirement is something small… it is a trap. This is probably the most difficult and chaotic fight we have experienced in awhile. The healing and dps requirements just seemed brutal, and we did not even make it to what is termed the “heal check” of the encounter. As the night went on we got better at the “dance” of moving in and out of the circles of death, and given more time I think we could have probably beaten him. This is a single tank fight, and our combination of players last night ended up giving us two dragoons and three bards…. which was a strange combination of abilities. I could have potentially gone bard and had more dps time on the boss, as he is constantly spawning circles on to of him that have to be moved out of… or you essentially die. Additionally we will probably do this fight in the future using a Warrior tanking it rather than a Paladin because of the insane amount of damage… and simply needing the larger health pool to soak it.

Other than that I spent most of my night running random primals in one form or another. The chant of “Hards for Cards!” is still alive and well in the guild. Over he course of the night I managed to pick up both the Ifrit Triple Triad card and the Gilgamesh and Enkidu Triple Triad cards. The big bonus of running all of these hard mode primals is the fact that I am also collecting so many of the cool weapons that they can drop. My ninja is going to be set when I finish leveling it as far as cosmetic weapons go. Right now I am focusing Garuda who has yet to drop me a card, but we did as a guild get a few more people flagged for Titan Extreme by killing Garuda Extreme. I am super happy with the current state of how the guild and the game are going for us. We keep getting a slow trickle of new players, which keeps giving us a reason to revisit older content. This is the thing that I wish World of Warcraft could figure out. Running old content, and making it still be relevant helps to bond players to the guild as a whole. Final Fantasy XIV does so much right to get the social aspect of an MMO perfectly, that I just wish the other games I played made half that effort.

#FFXIV

Fun With Trains

February 27, 2015 by Belghast

Bel’s Blog Bonanza – February 27, 2015

For those not familiar with it, I write a bi-weekly column on MMOGames.com and they made the huge mistake of letting me name it myself. As such I gave it the completely bombastic title of “Bel’s Blog Bonanza” and every other week I give a run down to the best of my ability of the current hot topics circulating through the gaming blogosphere. This week I talk about the echo effects of the rather brutal interview of Peter Molyneux by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. This had many responses out in the community, and I picked a few of the ones I felt represented the various feelings the best. Additionally the Crowfall Kickstarter has been huge on the blogging front with an absolutely overwhelming number of posts contemplating what everything means thusfar.

This week has also been huge as far as game patches went with the two remaining subscription juggernauts of Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft both releasing a significant patch on Tuesday. From the Final Fantasy XIV side from we had a large number of posts talking about their experiences with the Manderville Golden Saucer and related items that came into the game this week. On the World of Warcraft front we had quite a few reactions to the various features that were put in with the first patch of the expansion. While the viewpoints of FFXIV 2.51 seemed overwhelmingly positive, the reactions from the World of Warcraft players were a little bit more mixed… which I assume is what you would expect from having a much more mature community. The honeymoon was over long ago and now folks are viewing the game through less than rose colored lenses. In any case check out the post and let me know what you think of the column.

Fun With Trains

Last night I finally started to feel like I was getting back into the swing of things. Yesterday as a whole I felt considerably better than I had since last Thursday. With it being a raid night, and we had cleared all of the encounters we had worked on during my medicated stupor on Tuesday… this meant that last night was entirely a learning night. Some people get depressed at the concept of constant wiping, but for me it feels cool because we are getting to try new things. Last night we set our sights on Operator Thogar, which for those who are unfamiliar with Blackrock is the “Train Boss”. His room is essentially a train depot with four different tracks. At various points during the fight a train will come barreling through the room and if you are on the wrong track at the wrong time… it will flat out one shot you. For me as a bit of an abomination as Gladiator DPS… it will take me down very close to death but not actually kill me.

As you move through the encounter some trains will simply buzz through, and others will stop and drop off adds. Among the types that drop adds there are ones filled with simply mindless trash mobs, and others filled with what we have termed “specialists”. It is these specialist trains that cause the problems and quite simply last night we were not getting them down fast enough… while at the same time dodging trains. It seemed like melee had the dance down pretty well, which is generally the case since melee is used to constantly moving. We just need our ranged and healers to get used to the rhythm of the fight to be able to time when they can cast and when they have to be moving. Basically we died constantly at this same point… where we have a pack of specialists and we did not get them down with enough time to move to the far edges of the room and split up. I feel like this is a critical juncture and once we nail that we will have the encounter.

Killing the Flamebender

Generally speaking if we do not make serious progress on our first few attempts, it is almost better to switch targets and let folks digest the mechanics for a week. When we come back the following week there is absolutely a marked improvement. Since this is the case with our raid, our leader called the halt on the Orc Trainmaster and we went back to working on Flamebender Ka’graz. If you remember we actually made some solid progress on her awhile back getting her down into the 30% range if I am remembering correct, so I knew going into the night that more than likely this was going to be a fight we could fine tune and get through. Once again this is a fight with a lot of moving parts. Players have to avoid lines of fire that get drawn on the floor as she targets a ranged dps and attacks them. This means the melee spend most of their time shifting around trying to keep from standing in these.

The crucial part of the fight seems to be dealing with the two lava wolf spawns. This was the point at which we spent the most effort improving last night. We shifted around trying several different combinations and finally landing on actively calling which target which group of players should be attacking. Like I said last time these work like Corehounds and if they are not brought down at the same time… they both re-ignite. The other big thing we tweaked was where the group collapsed, attempting to do so in the center of the room rather up within melee range of where the boss is tanked by default. I think the combination of both of these was what actually allowed us to get through that second flame puppy phase with essentially a full compliment of players. From there it was just repetition of the things we were already good at doing… and when the third dog phase happened we were able to ignore them and finish off the last 3% of the boss. As is rare for us we actually managed to get everyone to stand still long enough to take a kill shot.