Tales of the Aggronaut

Wizard Chores

January 5, 2015 by Belghast

Back to Work

Last night I think I caught up completely on my sleep that had been missed from the previous days. As a pre-emptive strike I took some Melatonin about 7:30 last night, which put me in the mood for bed around 9 pm. Apparently I slept like a rock not really waking up until after midnight, and only then for a drink. I woke up a few times in between but I have to say it was probably the most solidly I have slept in ages. Here is hoping that this extra sleep helps me through today because I have a feeling it is going to be a rough one. I absolutely love the period of time between Christmas and New Years. I’ve been with my current job long enough to need to “burn down” my vacation a few times a year to keep from losing any. So I decided that the perfect solution was to take off the few break times my teacher wife gets, so we can actually spend them together.

As such I generally take off starting that Friday before the week of Christmas and going back the Monday after New Years. The problem is… two weeks off is a really long time, and I am completely out of “work mode” at the moment. I have tons of stuff to do upon coming back, but for the life of me I can’t really remember any of it. I am sure this morning as I sift through a mountain of emails it will all come crashing down on my shoulders. It will be an interesting time because not only am I going back to a New Year… but also going back to new leadership of my department. Time to scurry around and get prepared for all the stuff that is going to happen in the coming months. Since I did not get a text, call or email asking for help… I have to home that means everything went smoothly while I was gone.

Wizard Chores

Doing your Garrison dailies has become collectively known as “Wizard Chores” and the problem with that is I have no frame of reference for WHY… other than maybe the Sorcerers’ Apprentice? The earliest mention I could find is during a Reddit thread, but pretty much since release a handful of my guildies have been calling it that. While I have embraced the term, I always find it odd… considering I don’t really play that many “Wizard” type characters. Yesterday I mentioned that I was finally about to start my Garrison dailies on twitter, which is a long drawn out process of swapping between alts for awhile. I’ve heard folks refer to this process as the “Garri-go-round” which is also fitting, because it sees everyone in the guild logging in all their alts to make sure everything gets harvested and looted. In the middle of all of this, I had a friend on twitter ask just how much time it takes. Well honestly… not as much as you might think.

My main Belghast, has a tier 3 everything in his Garrison except for the Fishing Shack… and that is largely because I have done next to no fishing in Draenor and have yet to unlock the tier 3 blueprint. Without a doubt he is my longest “Wizard Chore” of the day, but even then I would say if I am focused I get done in 5 to 10 minutes and if I get distracted maybe 15 minutes? Now I currently have seven characters with their Tier 2 Garrison, and I believe at last count I had 5 mines and 3 herb gardens in total. So you take that 5 to 10 minutes per character and multiply it by seven alts… and you start to get some actual time. I would guess on a daily basis it takes me about an hour or so of fiddling with characters before I finally settle on the one I am going to play.

Feeling Productive

The process does require some jumping through hoops but overall I feel far more productive at the end of it than I ever did doing daily quests. I think the fastest I ever managed to get a SINGLE faction worth of Dailies down was 30 minutes per character, and that was during Burning Crusade doing the Isle of Quel’danas dailies. With more modern dailies there was seriously no way in hell I was going to do more than one characters worth per day… and maybe just maybe on the weekends I would do ALL of my characters. With the Garrison it feels natural that you tend to your base before going out into the world, because that is exactly what the Garrison feels like… your home in Draenor. With Belghast I have a Bank, Guild Bank, Void Storage, Transmogrifier, and eventually if I can get the rest of the parts an Auctioneer. I have everything I need in one place without having to deal with the fact that someone thought it was an awesome idea to set on the mailbox with their Corehound mount. Fiddling with the bits of my Garrison make me feel balanced and ready to go out into the larger world and encounter people once more.

The thing is… Garrison save me so much time. At least once a week I would go into a farming frenzy that would take several hours worth of mining, herbing, and skinning to be able to support another weeks worth of daily tradeskill cooldowns. I have one of every kind of tradeskiller in my menagerie of alts, and at this point I have all of them but my tailor with a garrison… something I really need to remedy. Other than farming leather as a consequence of playing my hunter… I do absolutely ZERO farming of resources per week. I have enough gardens to keep myself supplied in pots and flasks as well as being able to dump resources into the trading post whenever I need to. I have more than enough ore to be able to craft a True Iron effigy of myself and then have plenty left over to create effigies of all of my other characters… because seriously you get a lot of ore. Basically this hour long daily routine keeps the wheels of my alt machine whirring smoothly.

The Savage Blood Problem

The biggest problem with this whole smoothly running crafting machine… is the fact that EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER needs Savage Blood. It doesn’t matter what your tradeskill is, or if it even makes sense to be using blood with it… to upgrade your gear you are going to need 15 of these things at a time. The problem is that there is a single way to get Savage Blood as drops… and that is through the use of a single garrison building… and only at tier 3. Of course you can turn in 750 Primal Spirits to get your 15, and that is precisely why I do my Mine and my Herb Garden every single day… because both generally yield quite a few. But still at best I am yielding a single Savage Blood per character every other week. My friend pegged my problem with the Barn when she referred to it as the slaughter house. The Barn just isn’t something enjoy doing, and trapping animals… just somehow feels wrong to me.

Granted I am out in the world on a daily basis killing critters of all sorts. But then I feel like I am actually using the resources from those critters properly. When I kill a beast on my leatherworkers, I can use all of the resources from it. When I trap an animal… it just sits there helplessly as two hicks banter back and forth… all the while a blood animation spurts out of the trap to really drive home what a horrible human being you are for doing it. I have built barns on most of my alts, but I just can’t ever seem to bring myself to use them. Maybe once I get the tier 3 one.. the lure of Savage Blood will be too great for me to avoid doing it, but man it is not something I care about at all. It feels like a pretty crappy choice that if you did not build a barn, and you do not trap lots of animals… you are basically screwing yourself out of upgraded gear. I feel like they need to make a chance of getting savage blood from ALL of the buildings, much like there is a chance of getting Apexis Crystals. If they fix that then I will have very few complaints about the Garrison system… other than the fact that there is no Stable Master for my hunter.

Land of the Lost and Found

January 4, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #38 – New Year, New Season

I have to say it has felt a little strange to take an entire week off from recording AggroChat. Before Christmas we recorded roughly three hours of audio, that then got edited down into two episodes. As such we took last Saturday off, and it felt a bit odd coming back and recording this week. When you are on break you live in this strange time where the days don’t really have the same meaning that they do normally. I found it funny that mid day yesterday Tam asked what we were going to talk about last night… because we never really have a plan. In truth since he has been moving across country over the break, he didn’t get in much play time at anything… so questioned if he had anything to add to the conversation. However like always once the conversation started we seemed to be able to come up with plenty to talk about.

The funniest theme of last night was that apparently Kodra played nothing but sad games over the break. So each game he talked about… Tam gave it a rating of like 6 Sads out of 10. Not unsurprising Ashgar played a lot of Pokemon as did Tam and I. There was much Final Fantasy XIV to be had, and I talked about my conversion to a semi serious raider again in World of Warcraft. Once again we ran significantly longer than normal, but I think in part that is because the mega 3 hour show threw our timing off. After editing it clocks in around an hour and a half, and I think there is some really good conversation in there. Of course there are still some references that no one but the five of us will ever really get… but when I realize one of these has happened I try and make some measure of explanation. This is what happens when you get long time friends in a room and have a conversation.

Land of the Lost and Found

One of my downtime activities while recording our podcast has been going out to the Isle of Giants in Pandaria and farming dinosaur bones. At this point I have 7007 of the needed 9999 to get the Bone-White Primal Raptor. For weeks after dinging 100, it was just me out there dinking away at killing the dinosaurs. However it seems as though everyone else in the world has gotten that idea. While wandering around last night I was fighting for spawns with no less than a dozen other farmers after dinosaur bones. I opted to bring my hunter, who is a leatherworker… because I always feel like it is a sin to let so much leather go to waste. With all the competition for spawns… I spent more time running around and skinning the corpses than actually killing anything for dinosaur bones. Now for a public service announcement: There is a special place in hell for people who kill skinnable/herbable/mineable/engineerable mobs but do not completely loot the corpse, don’t be one of those people.

While wandering around and farming I picked up the Ancient Tome of Dinomancy and immediately turned around and tamed a Direhorn. I got a green one of course… because the green ones are always the coolest regardless of whatever the thing happens to be. I think “Cera” will end up replacing “Daedalus” as my current tanky pet, because it just feels awesome to be running around with a Direhorn. I went through a phase where I tamed a Devilsaur from Ungoro crater and ran around with it… but this feels much more my style. It feels like the perfect pet for a dwarven hunter. While I was wandering around last night waiting on the podcast to finish edits, I also picked up a Hydra from Spires of Arak, which I think is going to replace my spirit beast as my current dps pet of choice as well. Not sure why, be it nostalgia or what but I am kinda getting into this whole hunter thing again. Yesterday I streamed some faffing about trying to farm a set of tier 6 gear for transmog purposes… and man… farming stuff as a hunter is easy.

Another Rough Night

I had all intent upon getting a good nights sleep last night. However various factors conspired against me, not the least of which was that we ran so late last night recording… which ultimately pushed my editing session further and further back. I wrapped up my edits about 1 am last night and went to bed. The problem being that we also had a massive wind storm last night. So everytime I almost got to sleep, the wind would pick back up and cause all sorts of horrible and catastrophic sounding noises outside. By the sound of it you would have thought that the very side of our house was being peeled away. In all honesty I have no clue what half of the sounds were, but this morning when I ran to get breakfast everything looked “normal” and by normal I mean our back gate is still screwed up. I am guessing much of the noise was that banging open and shut.

What made matters worse is the storm seemed to stir all of our animals into a frenzy… all except for Chloe which seems to do nothing but her very best impersonation of a dust mop. Kenzie the kitten and Allie the “older but still has moments of kitten “ cat kept going tearing through the house as they chased each other, either that or were running from some imaginary force. At one point during the night I heard a loud crash, that I had to get up and investigate. Mind you that this happened about 3 am… after finally getting to sleep. Far as I can tell they knocked over some stuff in my wife’s office, but nothing nearly as tragic as it sounded. I finally woke up this morning about 9:30, and at which point I figured I really should get up and around. Now I am in somewhat of a daze and finding it extremely hard to focus on writing anything. It is going to be a long day, but hopefully tonight I can get some sleep and maybe not have an absolutely horrible first day back from the break.

The Beginner Hall

January 3, 2015 by Belghast

Impending Naptime

Last night was a really rough night, in that I had a pretty major bout of insomina. I started trying to go to bed around 11:30 and ultimately failed. I suppose I could have sat in bed playing some Pokemon but instead I got up, took some Melatonin and waited for it to actually kick in. Problem is by 2 am it still had not really happened. During that entire time I bounced around the internet reading various bits of stuff. Mostly I was purposefully trying to stay out of any game for fear of it making it even worse… as a few nights I got I totally inadvertedly got drawn into Super Time Force for an hour. I remember as a kid my mother used to always say “be careful not to get your days and nights mixed up”, well with two days left to go until I have to report back to work… it feels like I have done precisely that. Granted I have been trying to go to bed at a reasonable hour most nights, and get up on at least my normal weekend hours. That said I have a feeling that Monday morning is going to be pure hell.

None of this would really matter were it not for the fact that tonight we start recording the new season of AggroChat, which means I will be up super late. Generally speaking after we record the episode I edit it and post it all that night. The nights where I do not do all of this and push off some of it until the morning just feel crappy. That entire Sunday I feel like I am somehow “off” because I can’t really begin my day proper until I have edited and uploaded the AggroChat episode. In any case… I have a feeling there will be a mid day nap in my future. Here is hoping that it doesn’t make the entire process worse, because generally if I take a nap… It means I don’t sleep right that night. I have this strange relationship with sleep, where my body seems not to want to partake of it. Generally speaking I get by on four to six hours of sleep, and then get a wee bit more on the weekends. My only hope is tonight to maybe take the melatonin before we start the podcast, so that maybe just maybe it will kick in about the time I finish edits.

The Beginner Hall

Last night Stargrace pinged me over twitter to get an invite into our Final Fantasy XIV free company. I was busy farming Dragon Soul so I in turn pinged Ashgar who managed to get her invited. This morning she posted an interesting article about how no game actually does a very good job welcoming players back to the game. This is absolutely true, and pretty much any time I return to an MMO I end up having to start a new level 1 character so I can see how the game plays now, as opposed to how it played however long ago it was when I last played. Games with a ton of content make this an even more difficult proposal because how can you soak up dozens of patches worth of content quickly enough to know what you need to do to play the game optimally at that moment. What I find funny is that Final Fantasy XIV does not do a better job of this… when every single Final Fantasy game I have ever played has a construct designed almost entirely to do this. The Beginner’s Hall has appeared in almost all of the games and generally is in whatever the first major town you encounter. It is completely skippable, and I almost always do so… but it does a great job of telling the player what they should be doing through a sequence of short in game conversations.

I feel like MMOs need this as well, and similarly it could be disguised as a real institution in the game world. In Stormwind it could easily be called a “War College” and feature individuals to explain what the current trends in how your class performs, what features have been added into the game in the last several patches, and some background information about what the current major story arc happens to be. All of which could be contextual based on where you were quest and level wise, and give a player someplace in the game world to keep returning to in order to get a “briefing” on what is happening in the world. It could explain important things like, how does one find the portals to the new content… or what the requirements for raiding are and how to improve your gear score enough to be able to meet said requirements. There are few things more staggering than returning to a game months if not years after you last played it. Everytime I go back to Everquest II for example… I cannot play my main, until I have spent some time working on a character with less going on. Having a construct in game designed to ease a returning player back in, might just make the returning process a bit more enjoyable.

Transmog Addict

One of the interesting things about playing Lodin my hunter is that I have not really played him on a regular basis since Vanilla. This means I last played him in a world before Transmogrification, and while I have a full set of Giantstalker, and my Dragon Hand Cannon for nostalgia reasons… his banks are not as loaded as the rest of my characters with interesting options. As such it has been my new mission to correct this problem. I learned long ago that if my characters look awesome… they feel awesome to play. As such I am one of those players that is constantly swapping up what my appearance looks like gear wise. While I like how Lodin looks just fine currently…. there are so many interesting ranged weapons that have appeared since he was last an active character. I must get my hands on them so that I can swap them out at will. There are two weapons from the Black Temple that I have set my sights on… the Rifle of the Stoic Guardian and the Black Bow of the Betrayer.

Yesterday I was lamenting over twitter what keeps me from streaming very much… that little voice in my head that tells me no one is actually watching. Streaming is an odd thing to me… because in truth I really don’t watch may streamers unless on the rare occasion one of my friends happens to be streaming. For me it is about sharing my life with the people who read my blog and follow my social feeds. Its me saying “this is what I am doing, and I am letting you into my life as I am doing it”. In a way it turns a solitary thing like farming raid content… into a more social one. One of my goals for the year is to stream more often, and originally my intent was going to be to stream my raids. The problem there is that we have a few raid members with very sensitive jobs who did not want their commentary broadcast to the world. Since that is out the window… I am thinking about streaming some of my farming of old content. I have so much nostalgia about the older raids, and I do it in part because it is one of the more enjoyable ways for me to get transmoggy bits…and walk out with a little pocket money in the process.

Heroic Ogron

January 2, 2015 by Belghast

Bonding of House Noye

When the 2.45 patch went into Final Fantasy XIV they added a nifty new feature called the Eternal Bond ceremony. This allows players in game to get hitched in an instanced ceremony that they can invite all of their friends to. I’ve talked about my friends Ayla and Joren Noye before, and they’ve made several appearances in photos at least on this blog. So I was pumped when I received an in game mail message with a bunch if invites to their Eternal bonding ceremony. For some reason I had it stuck in my head that it was at 5 pm my time, but when I logged in about 4 pm to prepare for the festivities I noticed the invite said 7 pm instead. My heart sunk as I realized that it was going to conflict with my raid group in World of Warcraft. Since neither were on, I sent my apologies and the spare invites back to them just in case they needed to hand out more copies.

Thankfully Rae and Ashgar attended the ceremony from our free company, and Ash took lots of photos. I have to say Squeenix did a really good job with this ceremony design. I’ve seen similar “wedding” features built into other games but the look of this one is really magical. I feel horrible that I missed it, but at least I was able to see it thanks to all the awesome screenshots. I will have to give my apologies in person to Ayla and Joren… but I think they actually read this blog as well. So I am sorry that I missed the proceedings but it looked beautiful. You both are really awesome individuals and are part of what make FFXIV a fun place to be. Thanks for including me in the proceedings, just sucks that I could not attend.

Heroic Ogron

In general this week of raiding has been a rough one. All things considered we honestly probably should have just taken the week off. That said we did manage to make significant progress. While we struggled Tuesday night, we managed to get all of the bosses down that we had downed previously, opening up last night for trying something new all night long. Since our DPS has increased significantly we set our sights on the Twin Ogron encounter, which other than the RNG elements is apparently not that much more difficult than Kargath. RNG is specifically the problem… there were a few times where I took deaths to a horrible venn diagram of fire.. or the shield charge would go in the wrong direction. All of these are in part because we were missing key individuals that normally play specific roles in this fight… but we struggled through and managed.

After what felt like a dozen or so attempts we had that click moment when everything seemed to go perfectly. The biggest frustration with the fight is always the fire. While there are ways to mitigate the horribleness of the RNG by placing the bosses where we place them… this still doesn’t take care of things 100% of the time. The axes still go down in strange places, and the flames can pin players into a corner. The problem is on heroic… the fire is really really bad. There was one point where I ended up having to take a double stack… popped enraged regeneration, shield wall, and last stand and STILL ended up dying to the fire. I feel like this is going to be one of those fights that is never quite on “Farm” status, at least not on heroic. Too much can go wrong in too short a period of time… dealing way the hell too much damage. That said for a very rough week I am damned proud of the team for downing yet another heroic boss.

A Day of Huntering

Other than raiding the majority of my day was spent playing Lodin my hunter, and working my way through the quest content. This time around I had some very specific goals. When I leveled my Deathknight I jumped every two levels to the next zone. This time I am doing something similar, expect in two key zones… firstly I wanted to make sure I had gained enough faction in Talador to get to Revered with the Exarch. Now that I am moving into Spires of Arak, my goal there is also spend enough time to be able to hit Revered with the Arrakoa. This way I can go to Ashran and purchase two trinkets to bring my overall gearscore up a bit. This was something that I could not do on my Deathknight and ultimately I had to get trinkets from my Garrison to bring up my ilevel. Remember my entire goal here is to be able to hit 615 as soon as I can so that I can queue for LFR and start getting access to easy epics.

The only real problem with skipping content is that you are also skipping followers that you can use in your garrison. Lodin thankfully has quite a few, and it will be a bit before I build a barracks… so for the time being I can only have 20. Thankfully there are a couple of easy ones like Tormack and Blook that I can pick up along the way. So far I am really enjoying playing Lodin but it is very hard to stay focused. Every time I turn around I am killing beasts to farm leather… which I can ultimately do for hours. This is a very faffy character, so it is hard to stay on task and keep pushing the questlines forward. I guess that is in part why this character has appealed so much to me while playing around on break. Since my life very much right now is all about faffing around… it seems like the ideal pairing. My hope is over the next couple of days I will manage to push through to 100 and finish the character off. It will be nice to have access to a hunter since they are still doing so much damage.