Tales of the Aggronaut

A Calling Card

February 7, 2015 by Belghast

Out of Order

This morning is an odd one for me, in part because there is a natural order to my weekends. Generally speaking I get up, get dressed, go find some food… bring it up and spent the next period of time working on my daily blog post. This morning however things are a bit off, because my mother in law will be coming around noon, and in the week since coming back from Pax South our house has gotten a bit disordered. So as a result I gobbled my breakfast and set forth to clean on the house. Generally speaking I do the grunt cleaning, picking things up, straightening, throwing out trash… and my wife comes back through with more surgical precision considering she sees dirt that I don’t. Together we can get our house in manageable order in under an hour generally speaking.

The other awesome and scary thing that is happening this morning is that I will be sitting in on the recording of an episode of battle bards. I’ve been a long time supporter of the show, having listened to I believe every episode. I too am a huge fan of game music, and tend to spend most of my days listening to soundtracks looping in the background. So I am pleased to be able to share some of my favorite tracks along a theme… that I am not going to give away. As a result of this I ended up spending my normal writing time while eating… going back over my notes about the various tracks we will be reviewing. I admit now that it is the actual day we are recording I am a bit nervous. Normally when I guest on a podcast it is no big deal… because I am being myself. This time it feels like we have a higher purpose, and while I have some formal musical training… that feels like a lifetime ago. So hopefully I don’t make a complete ass of myself.

A Calling Card

Over the last few weeks I have been working on a little side project. I originally started thinking about it while at Pax South and it just took a bit to finally pull the technical bits together. I’ve owned the domain Belghast.com for some time but I never did much with it. The idea was always to create a site that somewhat combined all of the different things that I do. At this point I am all over social media, have two podcasts, a daily blog, a youtube channel, and hitbox stream… in addition to the stuff I am starting to do for MMOGames.com. When I was having to pull together the information to hand off to the community folks at each of the game companies during pax… I realized just how spread out everything is. It would be so much more simple if I could just say… go to Belghast.com and that will link you to all of the projects that I do. So I guess in the idea is part calling card, and part resume.

The hard part was figuring out how to do what I wanted to do. In the end I found a plug-in that would allow me to syndicate posts from damned near anything with an RSS feed. Honestly the plug-in is a bit scary, and likely designed for some really nefarious site cloning purposes. It was however the only thing I could find to do exactly what I wanted it to do. Thankfully all the functionality I need is in the free version, because the paid version is like $15 a month. Essentially I am just excerpting my posts on Aggronaut, AggroChat, Bel Folks Stuff and MMOGames but the plug-in was designed to copy the entire post, images and all. I still plan on writing and podcasting in all the same places… just plan on having the other site to connect all the dots. I like the banner, because it finally gives me a reason to use the “real life” chibi that Rae did for me. Not completely sold on the theme, but for now it works. I might do something more custom later.

At Peace with GW2

I’ve had a very checkered past with the Guild Wars franchise. I was not a huge fan of the original, largely because I had no ability to jump… and Ruined Ascalon was so damned ugly. Then you zoom forward and the manifesto trailer was released… and everything it said I thought I wanted. When I managed to get into the Alpha program through a friend, I was more excited for any Alpha I had been to that point. When I actually got my hands on it… I had this overwhelming “I don’t get it” feeling. In fact there was a three hundred page thread on the forums essentially saying the same thing. I felt that all criticism of the game approach was being ignored, and as a result it was the only Alpha program I have ever resigned from. Then we scan forward to launch, and everyone I know is excited about the game. I obviously lost access to the test servers, but did manage to get into the open beta phase. I got in and the game was not as bad as I had remembered it, and I had lots of friends playing it with me… so I ended up buying the game. A few weeks in however I was hit by the same sense of pointlessness, like nothing I was doing in the world mattered. The final nail in the coffin was how bad the dungeon running experience felt, when that was the majority of what I spent time with friends doing.

I had not really followed the game from that point on, other than to use it as my whipping boy for what happens when grouping is done badly. Then we move forward to Pax South. I had been asked to sit in on the panel to see what they had to say, so I dutifully did so. Maybe it was the excitement of the crowd, or the well crafted sales pitch… but when I got back to Texas I reinstalled the game and I have been poking around. I can’t say that the game has changed drastically, but I think maybe I have in the intervening years. At this point I am 59 on my Warrior, and have been running around aimlessly completing the objectives on the map. I have to say I am really enjoying myself. It is a vastly different experience than any of the games I am playing, a much more disposable experience… but that is okay. There is some serious depth to this game, but it isn’t the same sort of depth that you see in a traditional MMO. I find myself actually looking forward to the Heart of Thorns expansion. This game has become my cooling down experience after raid nights. I pop it open, running around for a bit and finish a few objectives… feeling like i have accomplished something without spending a lot of time. That seems to be where this game excels, giving you bite sized moment to moment experiences that feel like they are building to something larger. I have to say… and I realize how much crow I have to eat… but I am enjoying myself in ways I never expected to.

AggroChat Game Club

February 6, 2015 by Belghast

Failure to Random

Last night was our second night of raiding in Blackrock Foundry, and our second night of attempts on Oregorger. This boss has become the pinnacle of everything I love and hate about Blizzard raid encounter design. The thing I love is the fact that it is a really inventive fight that lets us play pacman as we gobble up crates of ore throughout the arena before Oregorger can get to them. What I hate about it is the fact that there are some serious RNG elements to the fight. After our first night of attempts the raid lead and others poured over the logs, and did some serious research finally finding a video showing how the process worked. In theory Oregorger will always choose to go a direction where there a boxes So the theory goes that if you clear boxes in a certain order he will favor a specific path over others. The problem in practice is even then… there is still a large amount of RNG into the encounter as to which specific direction he will turn and charge.

You can watch the video we stumbled onto purporting to have the solution. The problem is no matter how many times we watched the video, no closely we aspired to follow the golden path… something went wrong. It is moments like this that I get frustrated since really I have no clue what is going wrong. If we can ever figure out the magic behind the box phase we will down this fight because we are now doing the first phase flawlessly, or what appears to be flawlessly. Largely this has always been one of the problems with World of Warcraft raid design. They tend to view “random” as a positive thing, and to some extent I get it… but don’t make these random occurrences raid wipes. The Oregorger encounter is long enough as it is… to have a single mechanic take out half of your raid. I guess I find myself preferring the Final Fantasy XIV raid design ethic of extremely difficult… but follows a predictable pattern. That way when you fail you know it is because you didn’t do something… not because the random element decided to screw you over this try.

Hans and Franz

When we took our break half way through the raid, we opted to switch gears and shift to the Hans and Franz encounter. The mob names are Hans’gar and Franzok, and I find it absolutely hilarious that they a reference a skit that came out when I was in elementary school… and large swaths of our raid was not even alive when it was a “thing”. But I am told apparently there is a State Farm commercial bringing the characters back… so I guess it makes sense. The encounter is in a room filled with conveyor belts with thin strips between them that don’t move. At the start of the fight the belts are off, but when it enters the environmental damage phase they turn on making it harder to avoid the obstacles. The first phase is avoiding the “pop tarts” as they have become referred to by the raid… which are these molten metal slabs that come into the room. The second phase of the environmental damage is avoiding the metal stampers, that come down from the ceiling in a certain pattern. There seemed to be four turns of a specific pattern before the encounter picked a new pattern. Granted it could potentially pick the same pattern twice in a row for eight turns.

There was also a tank swap mechanic happening, but as DPS I never quite grasped what was actually occurring. There was a point in the fight where a specific tank in the rotation needed to have an external damage cooldown cast on him while being slammed to the ground. The rest of the fight was simply avoiding damage that could be avoided, and pouring damage into the boss during the few times when they were standing still. This meant that you wanted to make sure you blew your dps cooldowns and took your second potion during one of the windows where you could stand on the non-moving sections and pour damage in. Everything about this fight is like a better designed Oregorger, and what I mean by that is… there is still a fun quirky mechanic, there is still an element of randomness… but the randomness is predictable and something you can adjust for quickly. I will admit on the first pull seeing everything play out felt like madness, but it was simply to adjust after that to match the pattern in play. As a result we downed Hans and Frans last night and I managed to pick up two more drops… one of which again I won’t be using.

AggroChat Game Club

I figure at this point… the statute of limitations on the podcast we announced our first AggroChat Game Club title. As a result I am going to talk about it today for anyone who happens to read my blog… but not listen to our podcast. One of the ideas we kicked around for awhile was to have a single title that all of us played during the course of a month. Then during the last show of that month we dive into the game completely with no concern about spoilers. The idea is for us to talk everything about that game, what we liked, what we didn’t like and how we felt about the major plot points. During Episode 41, we deliberated about a long list of games and finally decided to go with a consensus title for the very first one. As such we chose Citizens of Earth by Atlus, and over the course of this month all five of the AggroChat members are going to be playing it. To make things even more interesting… this is a title that is available on Steam, 3DS and Vita and in actuality we have folks playing each of these versions.

What I want from you… is to play along with us! I thought it would be fun if we also collected some of the best comments sent into us by listeners to the podcast that are also playing. So pick up the game on whatever platform you choose, play the game, and then send in your comments. We will try and pick out several of the comments we receive about the game and mention them while recording our podcast. The show in which we are recording is February 28th, so please try and have the comments to us by the 26th to make sure we have time to read them. Each of us are already knee deep in the game, and I look forward to this little experiment. For those wondering… all of the titles mentioned during AggroChat #41 that did not receive a “hard veto”, are still technically in play. We are sorting out how this club will work from this point on, but more than likely we will be round robin picking future titles from that same list. Hopefully you will join in the fun, and don’t forget to let us know what you think.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Unlikely White Mage

February 5, 2015 by Belghast

Agendas

Yesterday a good friend and I were having a conversation and she said a certain phrase I have heard over and over before. “Everybody has an agenda”, which is something I have just taken at face value in the past. But this lead me down a line of thought that I had not actually travelled before. If everyone out there has an agenda… and this is pretty much just accepted common knowledge… then what does the world think my agenda is? I am out and about in the community on a daily basis interacting and mingling… but I wonder how many people think I have some grand ulterior motive? This lead me to assess what my actual Agenda is, and the only thing I could come up with is something along these lines.

I am a very simple monkey. My world pretty much revolves around making new friends and trying to recruit them into my zany extended family

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) February 4, 2015

To which I was immediately accused of being a cult leader… but really isn’t every good group at least slightly cult like? While I won’t be trying to convince everyone to wear matching tracksuits so that we can ride a comet… I am trying to convince people that it is cool to hang out with friends and share these games we way with one another. I feel like all of this starts with the fact that I grew up the only child of extremely busy parents. I am exceptionally good at entertaining myself, but I always felt jealous of the kids that had close neighbors, or siblings to play with. These days I try and surround myself with as many awesome people as I can find, and build a giant extended family of sorts. Being the whirling dervish of social media interaction that I am sometimes… folks could get the wrong impression that I am “up to something”. However in truth, I am just looking to hang out with interesting people. I approach every interaction like this person could be a new life long friend, rather than someone who could bury a dagger in my back.

Unlikely White Mage

Last night I had but one mission to accomplish. Upon logging out Tuesday evening, I was sitting roughly one third of the way into 49. White Mage has been the hardest class for me to level in Final Fantasy XIV in part because it is the least like the sort of character I normally play. I set down the path of leveling a Conjurer so that I could become a Paladin, and then just kept up with the process thinking that I had 2 tanks, 1 ranged dps, 1 melee dps… and the only thing I was really missing role-wise was a healer. Originally I simply kept leveling Conjurer so that I could get to level 34 and get Stoneskin… which is extremely useful for soloing as a Paladin. From there I figured I was close enough that I would go ahead and push for 50. Additionally over the course of running so many dungeons and casual raids in this game, I had accumulated quite a bit of healer gear simply by greeding on it. The final incentive came when I needed to spend down some of my soldiery tokens and opted to go ahead and purchase the level 110 White Mage weapon pictured in the image above.

As a result of all of this I got on last night, ran a guildhest, and two low level duty roulettes and finally reached my level. After sifting through my bags I managed to equip enough gear to get me to level 85, which is not too shabby gear wise. The hardest part of course was figuring out what my White Mage outfit would end up looking like. I finally settled on the Loyalist Bilaud dyed Morbal Green, with gloves, pants and boots from the Acolyte set and the awesome shades Cylladora made for me ages ago. I felt like I needed to go with something non-traditional since the white mage 110 weapon is a giant war mace… and I happen to like it. The end result is my take on a final fantasy battle priest, which is fitting considering I seem to spend as much time casting Stone II as I do healing. Largely I am just happy this push is over, because leveling as a Conjurer/White Mage is slow going. Chewing through every mob simply takes more time that I am used to from playing anything else. My only suggestion for future CNJ/WHM players… run it up first before you realize just how slow it kills things.

Ninja or Monk

At this point I am not sure what my next Final Fantasy XIV project will be. Right now my Rogue is 15 and my Monk is 33. Both classes are extremely fun to play, but I think I will probably spend more time at max level playing the Monk than I ever would the ninja. The Mudra system seems interesting, but it also seems like something that is extremely fiddly and likely to just piss me off… especially combined with just how “weak” survival wise the ninja ends up feeling. Mostly I am biased against Ninjas after spending so much time running raids and dungeons with random ones. Ninjas seem to either take no damage at all… or all of the damage at once. Healing Ninjas as my White Mage has been the bane of my existence over the last few weeks, and I really don’t relish putting anyone through that.

So you would think the decision is all wrapped up and I would be leveling Monk right? Well not quite that easy. Up until this point I had felt like the pugilist/monk play style was far less interesting than say a Dragoon, which is the reason why it has been lagging so far behind my other melee classes. On top of this… almost all of their gear sets look silly to me. If I played a monk, I would ultimately be stuck wearing the Infantry set for the rest of his life, because I really have not cared for any of the other sets I have seen. There is a set from Labyrinth of Ancients that looks amazing, but it is also one of the most hotly contested item sets in the game. Last night I ran a guildhest with an adorable Lalafell ninja… which got me thinking that since my goal in playing a Lalafell is to be adorable all the time… maybe Ninja is in my future. I guess time will tell which one I actually start playing. In any case I would love to finish out my Disciple of War classes so I can clean all of that gear out of my banks. Months ago I said I would like to hit 50 on all classes before the expansion, and with my raid schedule in World of Warcraft that is never going to happen. Maybe I will set that goal a bit lower and target finishing out all of the Disciple of War classes before the expansion.

Pirate Gruul

February 4, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Monster

Yesterday I realized I had a bit of a problem. For some time I have been an Energy Drink junkie, but things have gotten a bit out of control. Yesterday morning I drank what I am hoping will be my last monster for awhile. I realized over the weekend that on some days, especially during the weekend I was drinking four to five of them per day. It wasn’t because I needed one, or was even tired… but simply because it was a handy pre-packaged size to carry with me upstairs. White literally I was drinking energy drinks because I was being too damned lazy to fix anything else for me to drink. I cleaned up my office a bit this morning, and nestled in amongst my coffee cup are tons of monster cans that were scattered throughout my office. Granted the “Super Rooster Booster Lite” can is actually my wife’s… but we won’t worry about that. Essentially I realized that no good can come of drinking that many energy drinks, so I have by will alone decided to dial back.

This means more than likely over the next couple of days I will be grumpy as shit. I have been mainlining a lot of caffeine and now I am cutting that consumption WAY back. Granted I am largely switching back to Coffee, and going to be drinking that at any point I would normally reach for an energy drink. I think I am going to need a bigger mug. I noticed this problem during Pax South when my overarching goal each morning was to get to a gas station and purchase an energy drink so I could feel like I was able to start my day. This ended up with me going to a pretty sketchy gas station to find my morning fix. We had been buying Monster at Sam’s Club and in truth I was going through a flat of 24 each week. It is not so much that I am worried about the caffeine… its all the other stuff in monster to make it zero calorie and still effective that concerns me to be honest. It will take me a bit to adjust but I am hoping I will feel better as a result in the long run.

Pirate Gruul

Last night was the opening of Blackrock Foundry in World of Warcraft, but thankfully unlike the night Highmaul opened… the servers were actually rather playable. In fact I would say that other than the fact that we were delving into new content… things were exactly like normal. I had been concerned that some jackass out there would decide to start up yet another DDoS against a game company, but thankfully that was not the case. Firstly I have to say… Blizzard has found yet more ways to create annoying trash. From mobs that drop whirling axes, to gorgers that drop acid puddles and come in packs of a dozen or so… the trash is full of new ways to frustrate the raid. The biggest frustration of the night however was simply getting to the raid. There are no flight paths really close to it, or at least not nearly as close as you could get in Highmaul. The best route I was able to come up with was to fly into Everbloom Wilds… and then jump over the mountain to get to Grimrail Depot… and then walk the bridges around the corner to finally get to Blackrock Foundry. I am one of those players who supports the notion of not having flying mounts… but crap at least give us decent flight paths to get somewhat close to our destination. As I was reminded by a friend… the run really is something akin to the bullshit we had to deal with back during the Blackwing Lair and Molten Core days.

The raid is laid out in a hub and spoke design allowing you to reach multiple wings from the entrance area. We opted to start on the Slagworks wing, which includes alternate universe Gruul, Oregorger and the Blast Furnace encounter. Alternate reality Gruul is apparently a pirate, because he has a giant hook for an arm this time around. Those silly Iron Horde and their lopping off appendages to graft impractical metal ones in their places… one might almost think we are playing Warhammer 40k for a moment… and that the Iron Horde are Chaos Marines. Gruul was a modified version of his previous self, and thankfully enough of us remembered the way Shatter worked to adequately explain it. On our second pull we managed to take him down… albeit a bit rougher than any of us would have liked. I spent a roll token and came up with two items out of the deal… namely getting the item I needed the most… a new sword, as well as a slight bracer upgrade. You can see a picture of the rather badass looking sword above… I think I am going to leave it exactly as it is.. without actually transmogging it to anything.

From there we cleared down to Oregorger and spent the rest of the night working on him. The fight is comprised of two phases. The first involves melee stacking and avoiding bombs he places, while the range avoid puddles of death. We managed to get that part of the fight down solidly and could reliably push him into the second phase each attempt. The problem is that during the second phase utter chaos reigns and we all die slowly, or some of us… not so slowly. You can somewhat get a grasp of this from the above picture, but Oregorgers room is one big Pacman style maze. During the second phase he wanders around in search of Ore to gobble up, and in doing so spins down hallways crushing anyone that gets in his path. I can survive a single one of these rolls… but there is constant AOE damage going on while doing this. Our goal as players is to break all of the crates of ore in the room, giving him nothing to gobble up, which ends up transitioning us to the next phase. The problem is we almost all die during the Pacman phase right now. We are going to have to sift through the logs and see if there is any sort of pattern to his movement, because right now it seems random. All in all, one boss down and progress on a second… seems like a successful first night of Blackrock Foundry.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Yesterday was the last day for the Joystiq network, including the two sites I particularly cared about WoW Insider and Massively. It looks however that someone managed to feign death a hunter… because moments after the final posts were posted… someone cast mass resurrection. Firstly it looks like Joystiq is being gobbled up by Engadget one of the few AOL blogs that did not get the axe, so the name at least will live on as their new gaming section. I have no idea if this means that any of the Joystiq staff go to keep their jobs or not… but in any case the name still exists in one form or another. The two sites I do really care about however, are striking out on their own and becoming as someone put it “indie” sites, or actually just multi-author blogs. Blizzard Watch is the new face of WoW Insider, featuring several of the same crew resurrecting a new twitter, blog and starting a Patreon to fund the site. At the time of writing this, the Patreon is just shy of $10,000 a month which is pretty insane for less than 24 hours passing since it started.

On the other side Massively has resurrected as Massively OP, creating the mascot of MO the shield wielding warrior. While they do not have the blog up and running yet, they do have a placeholder site at massivelyop.com. You can check out their exploits at the twitter account, facebook account, and even a new twitch stream. In theory over the next couple of weeks we will see a new website appear that represents the sort of content Massively has always created in the past. In both cases I wish them all the luck in the world. The amount of support that the community has shown at the potential loss of these two sites has been pretty phenomenal. I joked the other day with my “Save Ferris” title, but it seems similar. Everyone has shifted what they are doing to being concerned about keeping these sites afloat. My hope is that the supporters will stay supporters six months down the road… and that MMO players won’t be as fickle as they seem to be with the games they choose to play.