Tales of the Aggronaut

Priestcraft

January 12, 2015 by Belghast

Podcasting Weekend

This weekend was a little bit crazy in that I recorded podcasts both Saturday and Sunday. In theory had things not fallen through I would have actually recorded a third one Friday. Podcasting is one of those things that is both soothing and stressful at the same time. I like having conversations and hitting the record button, but the follow up that results in editing what I just recorded… that can be the stressful part. I feel like Podcasting is very much a labor of love, that you either get or you don’t get. I would be curious to find out how many avid podcasters are also avid listeners of talk radio in one form of another. I personally have my car tuned to NPR pretty much 24/7 and donate each year during their big fund drive. I see the shows that I record as a bit of a logical extension of that.

The strange thing about once you start podcasting… is that it seems like you could end up recording on someone’s show every single day if you really wanted to. I’ve had to turn down several “gigs” because I felt like I was just spreading myself too thin. In fact this is one of the things that I talked about last night when recording the Bel Folks Stuff podcast with Petter Mårtensson. Ultimately I would love to be able to say yes to every single offer I got to co-host or guest host a new thing. I am in love with the idea that I am in essence making radio on subjects that are important to me. For the time being I am going to stick with weekly AggroChat, monthly Bel Folks Stuff and then guesting as the opportunities present themselves. I don’t think I have the energy or bandwidth to ever try and add a third permanent or semi permanent show to the lineup.

Priestcraft

My primary goal for this week was to be able to push my hunter Lodin to 100 and run LFR before the reset. This was achieved Friday and I was able to knock out the LFR Saturday morning to some pretty phenomenal success as I wrote about in yesterdays blog post. After completing that mission my goals shifted to a new target. There are two classes that I never though I would have at high levels.. the first of which is the Mage and as such I used my Warlords free 90 to get one. The second class however is the Priest, and when I came back to World of Warcraft at the tail end of Cataclysm… I had been gone long enough to qualify for a free level 80. This character I decided to make my tailor, and during Pandaria I managed to get it to 85 where it pretty much sat as a tradeskill alt parked in the Dwarven quarter of Stormwind. With the garrison system, currently the only craft that I do no have access to is tailoring, so I set my mind to fixing that.

As a result Saturday and Sunday I spent my time in game, apart from that doing my “Wizard Chores” working on my priest. I started off leveling as Discipline, because the last time I played the game this felt like the “survival” option for leveling. Things died relatively quickly and I didn’t spend all of my time healing myself back up after every fight. Shadow for whatever reason had never actually worked for me. Upon coming back however I found leveling as Discipline to be pure pain. I managed to get from 85 to 87 before I finally said screw it and decided to give Shadow a try again. Whatever changes and tweaks they have made, seem to have greatly improved shadows survival and I managed to knock out 87 through 88 in no time. So before I went to sleep last night, I had dinged 100 and equipped the set of Timeless Isle items that I had sitting in my bank. It is shocking just how many of these tokens I still have laying around, more than enough for all of my alts.

Pandaria Frustrations

The recent leveling excursions on both Lodin my hunter and Belglorian my priest have made me realize just how much I did not enjoy Pandaria as far as expansions go. Mind you it is not worth $60 to me to be able to skip it, but I am definitely finding myself taking the shortest possible path to get there. Right now my leveling process goes a little something like this. I try and milk as much leveling time out of Jade Forrest as I can get, because overall I like that zone about the best of anything to offer in Pandaria. My ultimate goal is to get to 87 through whatever means possible, and in theory most of the time I can hit that well before I leave Jade Forrest, worst case I have to do the quests leading up to Halfhill with Chen and LiLi to get there. Upon dinging 87 I ignore whatever quest line I happen to be on and make a beeline for the Path of a Hundred Steps, and take the quests there that lead you into Kun Lai Summit.

From this point on I am only in a zone as long as is required to unlock the quest that takes me to the next zone. So in Kun Lai I complete Binan village, Westwind Rest, Shado-Pan Fallback… which then gives me access to Winter’s Blossom granted me the quest chain that starts Townlong Steppes. In Townlong I don’t have an exact path really, I am essentially just waiting for the flight path to the Serpent Spine to open up as that grants access to the quest chain leading to the Dreadwastes. Generally speaking this means I will need to complete Gao-Ran Battlefront and Rensai’s Watchpost quests in Townlong before moving into the Dreadwastes. The goal of this path is to keep moving every time you can go into an area with quests for higher level mobs. Higher level quests mean better gear, better experience and a shorter amount of time in that zone before moving on. You have to essentially throw out all ideas of being a completionist with this method.

Granted this is something I only do to steamroll up alts to the level cap. When I am working on my main or characters in general that I deeply care about… I end up doing everything and prodding my way through zones. At this point however I have leveled so many characters through Pandaria that I just want to rip the bandaid off as fast as possible and move on to quest content that I am not bored with yet. In theory I will have to do Pandaria two more times on my alliance characters, and an unknown number of times on Horde characters if I actually get around to leveling some. I am not sure what it was about Pandaria that made me dislike it, but I have similar feelings about the Cataclysm. Draenor on the other hand has been awesome. I can choose to be a completionist and move my way through the content more methodically, or I can jump every two levels to a new zone to maximize my experience gain. There is no need to try and complete X number of hubs to unlock the hubs in the new zone. I feel like Cataclysm and Pandaria were both failed experiments in “quest gating” content, and my hope is that Draenor will become the new norm for future expansions of being less particular about completing certain quests before moving on.

The Luckiest Hunter

January 11, 2015 by Belghast

On Nightmares

Last night my wife and I apparently had fitful dreams. This morning she got up first and I had somewhat woken up by the time she returned to bed. She said she had nightmares, and at first I said I did to, but the more I thought about it… the more I questioned if I had a nightmare at all. What constitutes a Nightmare? Is it that you are dreaming about otherwise scary situations… or is it really about a loss of control. If it is the later then I most definitely did not have a nightmare, and quite honestly rarely have nightmares. This morning dreamt about a cult that had been abducting young girls, and when I attempted to get the police involved they didn’t believe me. So in true action movie fashion I took it upon myself to go track down their lair and try and rescue them.

Turned out the lair was in an abandoned cave system, maybe a mine. I worked my way through the various guards until I was in this big room and could see two people talking. The first of which I recognized as the actor Jason Alexander from Seinfeld fame. The other was like gargantuan man I somehow knew was known as the “ugly man” from a circus sideshow. He stood about eight foot tall and was covered in these disfiguring growths. Jason was yelling at him, to make sure no one got past him, and if they did there would be consequences. The big man was cowering… well at least as much as you can cower when you are eight foot tall. So I waited until Jason had left the room before stepping out into the shadows. I simply asked him his name.. too which he replied “no one ever asks my name… It’s Bob”.

I essentially reasoned with the gentle giant that what was going to happen was probably really bad and that Jason needed to be stopped. He agreed, and I snuck into the other room… originally planning on whacking him on the head with a baseball bat to disable him. But it turned out that it did not work as planned because he had some sort of metal plate in his head. Jason went to pick up a double barrel shotgun and while loading it I escaped to the earlier room… where Bob handed me what looked like an elephant gun. I drew a target on Jason and fired… taking him down… and saving the day. Sure there were tense moments… but during the dream there was never a situation where I felt out of control. So I guess the question is… was that even a nightmare? If you are wondering “Why Jason Alexander?” well best as I can tell is due to this super creepy episode of Criminal Minds where he plays this mastermind character… which is where the above image comes from.

AggroChat #39 – Pokemon, RNG and Roguevania

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat actually getting an earlier start than normal. Problem being that we were down two people. Rae had apparently fallen asleep on the couch and was not around, and Tam after moving three timezones apparently forgot how they work. We might have to sort out a better time to record in the coming weeks since there is now a three hour difference between various members of our cast. Something that I think is only going to get worse when another individual that seems likely to move out to Seatle does so. Last night it felt like one of those episodes where we didn’t have much to talk about going into it, but as the night went on we managed to gather up enough words and phrases to build a show out of it.

We covered a lot of topics from Steam being an excellent source for games that would have never likely seen the light of day, like the Japanese indie game scene, to discussing the raid fight style in FFXIV and contrasting it against World of Warcraft raiding. It always feels like we don’t talk about a lot of individual games but as I edited the podcast I kept a list jotting down the titles. Over the course of the evening we talked about Final Fantasy XIV, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby, Rogue Legacy, Valdis Story, ittle Dew, World of Warcraft, Aquasphere and Adventure of Link and probably a handful mixed inbetween. It ended up being a good show, albeit a significantly shorter one considering we only had three people to discuss with rather than our normal five. This is the first show in a long time we have actually managed to constrain to roughly an hour.

The Luckiest Hunter

During each game and each expansion… there is one of my characters that seems to be lucky. Granted according to Tam each and every one of my characters is lucky, but I think that has more to do with his phenomenal bad luck more than my good luck. For Pandaria my lucky character seemed to be my druid. Everytime I set foot in any LFR or Raid… he seemed to get drops. This expansion it is looking to be Lodin, my hunter because yesterday in LFR I managed to get five drops with no roll tokens used… meaning I got a drop out of all but two of the bosses. I walked away with helm, bracers, gloves, boot, and a ring. When you add to the three crafted pieces I already had… I am sitting at roughly 627. I have yet to do any dungeons, so at some point I will finish the epic ring quest and get that which should help the ilevel significantly. I have once again completely skipped the heroic gearing step.

Mostly I have been doing this to prove a point. Heroics right now are not worth doing other than for achievements and the occasional Inn Quest. The daily heroic is worth a small bit of gold… the most you can possibly get is 200g and 50 Garrison resources. I can get both of those easier by simply running high level garrison missions, or using the various buildings in my garrison. In the past there was a clear reason to be running heroic content, in that you needed to run them to cap Valor that you then spent on upgrades. That system seems to be completely absent in Draenor, and as such there simply isn’t the same impetus to keep running heroics over and over. In fact as I have proven on two different characters you can pretty much skip them entirely and go straight into LFR and get your gear that way. I hope in 6.1 they give us further reason to want to run heroics, because right now the risk vs reward equation is completely broken.

Art of Quietly Leaving

January 10, 2015 by Belghast

My Happy Place

Events over the last few days have made me realize how happy my world generally is. I’ve managed to curate and carve up social media into being a place where mostly I find friendly faces staring back at me. That does not mean that we always agree or always get along swimmingly, but as I said yesterday it is a place that causes me much more joy than it does frustration. What has lead me to this realization is watching a small bit of strife happening… but as an echo. That is to say I am not actually seeing it in my own thread, but instead hinted at in the comments and tweets of the friends who do frequent mine.

First off… it sucks when someone or something is making you unhappy. That said I would like to remind everyone this morning that social media exists for our own personal enjoyment. Just because someone wants to interact with you, doesn’t mean you have an obligation to interact back especially if that person is trying to bait you into a larger fight. While I wish the block button was a more powerful tool, with its continued use folks eventually get the message that you are not going to play in their games. I’ve seen the adverse effect of a lot of “Sea-Lioning” and sooner or later said folks get tired of creating puppet twitter accounts only to be blocked. I hate when I have to block someone, but ultimately my social bubble is about my happiness and not your enjoyment, and I feel if more people understood that the “twitters” would be a happier place.

Art of Quietly Leaving

A good chunk of the most recent strife that I have seen in echo.. is that a number of high profile individuals are leaving World of Warcraft, and in theory trying to burn down the house on their way out. The “I don’t enjoy this, so I will make sure no one else does” instinct runs deep in human beings, and god knows I have been guilty of this so many times. It is something you have to struggle with. This blog has been devoted to so many posts that have a shared theme that could be summed up as “WoW Failed Me”. Over the last year and a half since I started the daily blogging challenge thing… I have worked on trying to make myself into a much more positive human being. Part of this has involved letting go of the emotion out of my choices, and trying to present a much more amiable view of the world. Sure games have frustrated me, and I have been disappointed so many times… but I try my best to post my critique in a far less ranty manner than I might have the desire to.

Burning down the house on the way out, only serves to cause chaos and strife in your community… and makes sure that it is going to be much harder to eat crow later when you return. I have said I was done with World of Warcraft so many times at this point. I seriously could not count the number of times but the most recent was mere weeks before I started playing Warlords of Draenor (though at this moment I am struggling to find the reference). The heart wants what it wants, and you never know when it is going to drag you kicking and screaming in a direction you have no intent of going. I was doing perfectly fine until I watched the damned Blizzard World of Warcraft anniversary documentary. I was assaulted with a sneak attack of feels and wound up saying “I would play only to see molten core” and that wound up turning into “I guess I am back now” before I realized it. Even for the first few weeks of playing Warlords I was adamant that I “was not back” to the point of refusing to take back the crown to the guild I started back in 2004.

Put Joy in Enjoyment

The problem with World of Warcraft is for many of us it is like a relationship in itself. It is the bad breakup or the ex that betrayed us. We are bitter and confused as to why things changed and are left asking ourselves “was it me?”. Please take the advise of someone who has quit and restarted various MMO games more times than I can count. Yes it very much is you. Sure the game is in a constant state of flux, but so are we. The situation that leads us to play changes over time. Years ago I started guild and raid leadership because I really felt like I had no control over my own life. I was in a pretty horrible job, with the most petty boss I have ever experienced. I felt like I had no control over my own fate, and as such built my own realm where I was the one in control. I had an awesome guild and it was everything that my job was not. When I left that job and found a happier one, all of the reasons why I needed to be the leader melted away, leaving me only with the stress and burden of being the one everyone looked up to.

My situation had changed, and as a result the way I related to the game had changed. Chances are if you are leaving Draenor for this or that reason… your situation has changed as well. These sort of things happen without us realizing it, and in ways that surprise us. I’ve changed the way I approach these games, and while I still love the community aspect and I love raiding as part of a team. I am also willing to walk away when something isn’t as enjoyable as it once was to me. There is no reason to keep playing a game you are not enjoying. The best revenge of the “game that wronged you” is going off and finding one that does bring you happiness. Yes everything I am saying sounds suspiciously like relationship advise… but in truth it is because for some of us this game has been a ten year long relationship. Whatever you do… don’t break everything you can on your way out the door. Be the adult in this relationship and leave quietly and on good terms, because as evidenced by my revolving door of video games.. you never know when you are going to want to come back.

Does Threat Make Sense?

January 9, 2015 by Belghast

Threat Mechanics

Yesterday on twitter I got pulled into a conversation about threat mechanics and whether or not the concept is intuitive to players. The whole thing started with a comment by my friend Ashgar about the Guardian ability Riot Blade in Final Fantasy XIV. You get this ability at level 12, before you really grasp how your class mechanics work. So many Guardians make the mistake of thinking it is an upgrade to their Savage Blade ability because it technically has higher potency and as such deals more damage. The problem is… Savage Blade deals silly amounts to threat generation or enmity in FFXIV terms, and Riot Blade does not deal any at all. As a result brand new Gladiators start doing the Riot Blade combo to regenerate their mana, and at that point stop holding threat on the encounters… and similarly stop doing their job which is to tank.

The root of our discussion was that we wished that Final Fantasy XIV had chosen to give Riot Blade to players later in the game. The big problem is that by the time you are able to run your first dungeons around level 16, Riot Blade is still the newest thing players have in their toolbox. But this is also why healing for a new Gladiator becomes one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Final Fantasy XIV has a really interesting threat meter mechanic in the form of a series of gems that change color based on how much threat you have on a given mob. We jokingly refer to this as “playing Bejeweled” and you know that it is going to be a rough run when after casting your first heal… everything turns orange to you, aggros you, and you start “heal tanking”. Some Gladiators listen, and you can get them to adapt their ways… namely pull with shield throw, flash twice, and savage blade combo until dead. Other Gladiators refuse to listen and start trying to blame other players.

Does Threat Make Sense?

It was round or about this point that another friend of mine chimed into the conversation to drag us off in a completely different direction. My friend Talarian asked if we thought “threat” in general was a concept that players understood. His concept was that dealing damage and healing made obvious sense to a player, since both of those things existed in real life. But the concept of a tank, or the concept of threat generation abilities don’t have real world equivalents. To some extent I agree that threat generation is a bit more nebulous than damage or healing, but I totally think “threat” exists in the real world. As we go through our daily routines the “monkey brain” deep inside of us is constant assessing the world around us. Whether we want to or not, there is a calculation constantly ticking “is this a threat to me”? It doesn’t matter if you are walking down a dark alley or if you are trying to navigate the corporate hierarchy… we are constantly assessing threat to our well being or our interests.

I see the role of threat generation as being a master of influencing others to view you as being the primary threat. As such it has always made sense to me, be it storming into a room and like a action hero taunting the enemy “Hey Asshole! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size!” or simply taking aggressive actions to make someone take notice of what you are doing… the concept of forcing someone to deal with you makes sense to me. I think it is human nature to attack the most dangerous target first. We like getting the most struggle out of the way, so that we can focus on the targets of less threat later. While the wizard in the back of the room might be the real threat… that heavily armored guy that is coming straight for your with a big damned weapon drawn… is not exactly someone you can ignore and “feels” at the time to be the more immediate threat. Maybe that is precisely it, managing a sense of immediate harm and forcing encounters to deal with you because of your actions.

We Naturally Recognize Threat

One of the prime examples that I can give as to why “threat generation” works against players is when you are fighting a boss. When you do a lot of Looking For Raid in World of Warcraft, you notice there are certain tendencies in players. The first major tendency is to dog pile on whatever the biggest toughest looking mob there is. It does not matter if you said in raid chat to attack the mage first, or painted a skull over its head… there are still going to be a significant number of players attacking the big guy with the sword and shield. It is human nature to want to take down the big guy, and we tend to get tunnel vision and focus entirely on that mission if we are not careful. There are so many times that there is a side mechanic going on that is the REAL threat to the players… but especially as you get close to victory folks start ignoring the important things mashing their buttons harder trying to kill that big thing they were attacking. That big boss… has essentially effectively taunted the players into attacking him because of his imposing nature and perceived threat.

Sure games have created this artificial construct of abilities dealing X amount of threat per strike, but still at its core threat is a thing that players inherently understand whether or not they realize it. Some games have made some interesting choices around threat, by turning it into a target lock where mobs can taunt the players too… and you cannot target anything else for the requisite 6 seconds. Other games have chosen to make taunt work in PVP encounters by debuffing the damage you deal to anyone OTHER than the tank by a massive amount. Still others have relied on creating the role of tanking other players through careful use of stuns, slows, and pull effects to act as a physical obstacle that the players have to deal with in order to get to their target. All of which are tanking, and all of which are essentially “threat generation”. Sure some games have this as a mechanical number that needs to get bigger, but it exists in every game regardless of the mechanic or not. We might not know to call it threat, but I feel like by nature we understand that some things are of more danger to us than others. As such I don’t feel like threat has ever been a foreign concept to players.