Tales of the Aggronaut

Old Friends

December 28, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #37 – Games of the Year: Part Two

Last night I uploaded the second half of our Games of the Year broadcast, finishing out our pseudo countdown with the game that four of us voted for. However while that might have been the game of the year through consensus, it just did not feel quite right to declare an official game of the year for a podcast with so many disparate voices. As a result each of us gave our own game of the year, and you will have to listen through the podcast to see what my pick wound up being. I have to say we had an interesting round of discussions about this one and I hope we end up doing this as a yearly thing. With the end of the year closes what I am calling “Season 1” of the podcast. I only started classifying things by season because there was a place for that in the ID tag within Audacity, and I figured what the hell… might as well.

With the new year will bring a new season, and at this point I am not quite sure what it will look like. Right now we have a cast made of of myself, Ashgar, Kodra, Rae, Raven and Tamrielo but I sincerely doubt that most shows will have all six of us. That seems like a rather large group to podcast with, but hopefully we can muster four to five of us on any given night. The biggest regret for season one is that we had Tam has a pretty constant part of the show but we never actually updated the logo to include his chibi… even though he has had one for quite awhile. Ultimately I figure we should get Rae to draw up a Raven chibi as well just to have it at the ready. I would love to revamp our homepage a bit to have bios about each of the podcasters. I would also love to bring back in Dallian on occasion, who filled in quite regularly as this podcast was getting off the ground but we have not had to tag in for awhile. Hopefully you enjoy this second part of our Games of the Year show.

Old Friends

Yesterday I had an excellent surprise when I saw what character a good friend of mine was playing. She has favored the horde for some time, and when her guild over on another server went belly up I sponsored hr membership to the guild horde side that I have my alts in the Bloodmoon Chosen. While it sucked to have her over on the other side of the faction wall, it made me happy that she at least had a good home. Yesterday however on a whim it seems she decided to play her hunter AIlah. The above picture is of me and Ailah waiting for the Naxxramas 1.0 raid to start one night, to my left is Saracell another good friend, and hanging out in the background I realized was Vexa. The Late Night Raiders Hunters were an especially close knit family, and there is not a single one of them that I still do not talk to regularly. Ailah however was one of the founding members of House Stalwart, and for the most part my right hand woman back then when it came to guild organizational things.

Like happens so many times she became the mommy of two awesome boys, and lost a good chunk of her disposable play time. I always enjoy seeing her on when she has the time to play, especially now that she seems to be interested in her hunter again. Thankfully I had been playing Lodin my hunter, so that I could give some basic knowledge about how hunters work these days. It seemed like she had not actually been touched since vanilla because she was wearing all of the same gear we raided in… for the most part everything you see in this picture. I hooked her up with a crafted set of gear that will hopefully ease her transition into Northrend, and some quick advise with at least how I have my bars, talents and glyphs set up. Thankfully huntering is super easy so I am sure she has picked it up quickly. I have to say it was an awesome surprise to see an old friend show up like that, and hopefully she will be around more often. I doubt she will ever have time for raiding and such, but will be nice to run the occasional dungeon together.

Bad At Casters

I have traditionally been horrible at playing casters, that said the warlock feels familiar enough hat this point that it would likely be my caster of choice. While I knew I would never end up leveling a mage, so I used my free boost to 90… the Warlock on the other hand I actually enjoy leveling. He has been sitting at level 75 for quite some time however, so when Ailah started working on the Northrend content I grabbed him to hang out with her for a bit, since he was the only character in the level range. It took me a bit to get used to the controls again, because warlocking feels nothing like huntering, and that is the pet class I have been playing most recently. The only problem with leveling these days is that you really don’t need to use any of your abilities, since things die so quickly. I still have yet to figure out how the whole demonic transformation business works and how best to trigger it. I know it is a thing I can do every so often, but the mechanics behind it are still pretty opaque since things die so insanely quickly.

At some point I really want to finish leveling my Warlock to at least 90. I feel like it might be a caster I would actually enjoy playing, since the Mage is most definitely not that. My biggest problem with the mage is how weak it feels. I hate playing classes that cannot take a hit, so this is why I tend to play Discipline priest over shadow… because the shielding ability gives that class some serious survival. Similarly I like Demonology Warlock because the pet is nice and sturdy and can keep me alive through almost anything. When I say I hate “finger wigglers”, I guess you can more correctly narrow it down to me simply hating the “glass cannon” archetype. I favor survival over damage any day, which might be why I almost always level in tank mode regardless of the class. That is one thing I would love to see them add to the warlock, a caster tank mode since they get called on to tank things already in certain circumstances.

Serial Entertainment

December 27, 2014 by Belghast

Altism Required

Yesterday I made statement on twitter about how much I appreciated how good the overall pacing of Warlords of Draenor has been. This is especially evident as I quite literally played my 7th character through the Tanaan Jungle sequence, and I am still not bored with it. The pacing of the content has these moments where you are “called to action” and moments allowing you to chill out and faff about for awhile. Granted the entire system is riddled with moments of faff, but I enjoyed the fact that these were built in when following the main story arc as well. Most of my friends agreed with me, but one in particular chimed in stating that they had run out of things to do in the expansion. It seems they don’t play alts, and don’t consider playing alts to be “content”. I can totally get where they are coming from, because if I only played a single character I would be bored as hell already. I feel however that alting is the only way an MMO becomes playable past that originally one to three month burst.

We as a whole are content locusts. We swoop in and gorge ourselves on the content and then get frustrated when the companies cannot churn out enough content to satiate our voracious appetites. I’ve heard reports that the folks building SWTOR truly believed they had six months worth of content ready for the players at launch… and it took me exactly two weeks to have played through all it on my first character, and I felt like I kept a rather sedate pace. The sad truth of MMO gaming is that no company will ever be able to churn out content fast enough for the most dedicated of players. Guild Wars 2 has come the closest with their living story campaign, but all of that was essentially disposable content that evaporated when the next chunk went in. I feel like Alting and ease of alting is really the only salvation for keeping players in a game for more than a few months.

Serial Entertainment

I feel like the issue with MMO content is that we tend to view things in terms of an expansion rather than a constant gradual progression. The expansion cycle for the most part needs to be abolished, and instead steal something that tell tale games does exceptionally well. I feel like episodic gaming might hold the key to salvation for the MMO genre. What players really want is something new and exciting to do every month, and major progression of the main story every few months. Right now there is exactly on game giving us this, and that is Final Fantasy XIV. More or less since launch it has released a major patch every three months and a minor patch every month. This has not been an exact thing but it has worked out to be roughly those intervals. Essentially there is always something major looming on the horizon for players to “please look forward to”. Then in the meantime there are little quality of life things going on so that it feels like you are still moving forward even if you are not quite to the next major mile marker.

The thing is… even in Final Fantasy XIV Alting is a big part of the game play. They however disguise this fact with the job system. The problem with Alting in most games is that when you are playing your alts you have essentially been forced to abandon all progress made on your main character. I feel like Blizzard realized this was a problem early on, and started making various things account wide like mounts and pets. The problem is their model simply was not designed for everything to be handled at an account based level. Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand was designed from the ground up to be a single character game. With that one character you can learn every single job out there and every profession as well. This gives that one character infinite replayability. Want to be a healer… then switch to your healer job, need to tank… switch to your tank job.

Same Problem Exists

Where the job system breaks down however is similarly… there just is not enough quest content to go around. You have enough quests to get one, maybe two jobs to 50 before you have exhausted all that is available to you. They are constantly putting in new storyline for the level 50 characters to play through, but there is nothing new available for players to level new jobs with. There are of course job related quests every 5 levels… but the time between is spent grinding in one way or another. Essentially to level jobs once you have finished with your quests you are left with either chain running dungeons, grinding fates or grinding levequests. All of which are tolerable, but none of which are actually all that enjoyable. So we are back to the classic MMO conundrum of needing more quest content than is available, the problem specifically being here that we need low to mid level quests.

So while I feel like treating an MMO as though it were a television show is a good idea… the problem is that you not only need to expand the top end content… you also need to keep adding stuff for players to do in the middle. Alts are not a perfect solution, but they are the solution that seems to work for me in order to keep me engaged with a game. Ultimately there is a point where I feel like I have leveled everything that I care to level… but that buys me more time in the game than I would were I simply sticking to a single character. I always have these grand sweeping ideas like that I want to level “one of everything” but I never quite make that goal. Ultimately there are some things that I just don’t enjoy… as evidenced by my string of casters never actually making it to the level cap. I don’t consider alting “content” persay, but it is a patch that keeps me engaged in the world and I am willing to employ it as a way of staving off boredom.

Lodin Lives

December 26, 2014 by Belghast

Tradition to Skip

As completely charming as Christmas Eve ended up being… yesterday ended up being very strange. Granted the entire day wasn’t that odd, given that we got up super early to drive an hour to open presents with our great niece and nephew. When trying to determine what we would get them for Christmas, my wife and I talked about our favorite parts of Christmas morning. In both cases we remembered being super excited about what all had been crammed into our stockings. I remember pulling out one magical thing after another that Santa had left for me. So instead of a big gift, we opted to make them custom stockings jammed full of little treasures. The funny thing is that the item that seemed the biggest hit was this little wall clinger octopus that we both remembered from our childhood. You threw it up on a slick surface and it wriggled down slowly. My nephew spent the better part of the morning throwing it up on the sliding glass door and watching as it jiggled its way down the door.

So I have to say that part of the morning was absolutely adorable, but from there we took a detour into strange land. We went to Christmas lunch with a branch of the family that we don’t spend a ton of time with. In part this was a good excuse to see the brand new child of our niece, and deliver our baby gift to them. When we first accepted the invitation we had no really planned on doing the early morning thing, so we thought it might be the only time we would see my wife’s mother. Honestly “our” family was kooky but just fine, it was when a bunch of people that must have been neighbors showed up that things cranked up to 11 on the strangeometer. This large bear of a woman came in and upon seeing the baby asked the following question verbatim… “you feeding that baby titty milk?”. My wife and I turned to look at each other… surely we did not actually hear what we thought we heard, but sure enough yup that is precisely what she said.

Moments later another woman came crawling in on the floor. At first I had zero clue why this woman was butt scooting across the floor, but a bit later we found out that she had a wheel chair, but she just didn’t like to use it. Thankfully at this point we had eaten, and we figured it was safe to slowly make our escape. The new additions to the group all seemed exceedingly sauced, and reeked of booze. I still don’t have a firm understanding in my head of who exactly they were, but in any case they made our normally insane family look normal for a moment or two. So while this year has been a year of creating new traditions… I am not sure if that is one we will keep. I really enjoyed the early morning with the kids, because Christmas needs kids to rekindle the magic each year, but I think we will skip the lunch.

Rejiggered Gladiator

Overall I have been pretty disappointed with my raid performance as a Gladiator, so over the last few days I have set about to tweak some things. The largest change is that I am giving up on the Heavy Repercussions talent. In order to make that talent work, you absolutely have to get 2 Shield Slams in during a Shield Charge buff. I found it frustrating to try and cram them in, and often times fate conspired against me to only actually get one in. In many ways it reminded me of just how unforgiving the Unholy Deathknight rotation was back during the Icecrown days, and if you missed the timing your dps went to shit. Now I am moving to what seems to be the more reliable and more common Unyielding Strikes talent, and as such I have to rejigger my priorities a bit. Additionally I fiddled with my glyphs and talents a bit after looking at some warriors that were parsing well in Highmaul.

Noxxic has been a bit wonky in the past with some of their guides, but based on the high parses I have seen they seem to match up pretty closely. I seemed to be taking a lot of the “wrong” talents, the biggest of which was I was previously taking Bladestorm which seems to have limited use in raiding, but instead should have been taking Bloodbath which is a 1 minute cooldown damage cooldown, something that protection is sorely missing. Even though I have already run LFR, I am more than likely going to run the first part today so I can see what my damage looks like against The Butcher fight. My hope is that all of the tweaks I made will give me a more stable damage curve, and keep me from lagging behind the way I have been in overall raid damage.

Lodin Lives

Those who have been reading my blog awhile will know the tale of Lodin the Hunter, the character that I never actually intended to be my raiding main back in Vanilla. Well with the recent round of hunter changes I have once again become interested in playing him, and quite honestly have been really enjoying it. Last night I entered Draenor on Lodin and for the first time since Burning Crusade he is actually caught up and doing relevant content. I never actually managed to level him to 70 back then, and during Pandaria managed to catch him up from 68 to 85, then finally with the launch of Draenor pushed him up to 90. I used my spare engineering bits to knock him out a pretty sweet epic rifle that I am looking forward to him being able to use when he dings 91. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time over this break hanging out on my laptop, and the hunter play style fits that perfectly.

Last night before the melatonin finally kicked in I managed to make it roughly halfway through the introduction sequence in Tanaan Jungle, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post and do my “Wizard Chores” as my guildies call the Garrison dailies… I am going to start working on him again. I seriously would not mind him being my 3rd 100 of the expansion. It feels fitting considering I am back playing Belghast, that I also dust off Lodin. Since this is by nature a nostalgia ridden expansion, it only seems right to wallow in said nostalgia with some of my oldest characters. I look forward to LFR with the Lone Wolf talent, but in the mean time I want to catch more awesome pets because lord knows Draenor has some awesome looking ones. I am shocked an amazed that I am still having as much fun playing Warlords as I am, so hopefully it continues to last.

Making New Traditions

December 25, 2014December 24, 2014 by Belghast

A Rough Year

I went into this holiday season expecting it to be one of the worst ones. Over the years one by one the traditions that came with Thanksgiving and Christmas had faded away. Each time a grandparent, sibling or parent passed away we lost a location to go to. While when we first got married we used to complain about the sheer number of houses we had to try and hit each year during the holiday season, it is significantly worse when you realize there is no one left to serve as an anchor and hold folks together. There was a time when we would hit three houses on Christmas Eve and three to four houses on Christmas Day, the entire process leaving us drained and grumpy.

This year my Grandmother passed away, the last of these houses left so as we looked forward to the holiday season it was seeming extremely bleak. It has been hard to watch these households just evaporate once the matriarch passed away. It makes me feel like a real ass every time I rolled my eyes or sighed a bit too loudly at the thought of having the run the gauntlet of houses. Ultimately Christmas is a time to spend with your family, and as your family shrinks the holiday feels less meaningful. Thankfully I am pleased to say that so far the holiday season this year has been excellent.

Making New Traditions

If nothing else this year has been one of forging new bonds and making new traditions. I know I wrote over Thanksgiving about the excellent dinner we had with my cousin, since neither of us really had a place to go for the big meal. My hope is we can make that a bit of a tradition, though I hate the thought of having to ask her to host every year. In any case we took what we thought was going to be an extremely depressing thanksgiving and turned it into one of the best in recent memory. Similarly tonight we participated in what I hope will be another new tradition. For years since the passing of my Grandmother and Grandfather on my Dad’s side we have talked about trying to get together for the holidays, but for one reason or another it never quite happened. Tonight however we had a Christmas gathering not unlike the ones we had so many Christmas mornings.

The awesome thing about it, is that it was a more evolved tradition, in that it became far less about the gift exchange and more about the sharing of conversation and company. Essentially it is the sort of thing that I wished Christmas always could have been. Everyone was genuinely glad to be there, and interested in what everyone else was doing and had done since the last time we were together. There were no awkward interactions, or confusion, just family getting together to spend time with one another. I hope we can do this every year, because I think it worked extremely well. On an awesome side note we got to finally meet my cousins long-term girlfriend and she seemed really awesome. It is also my hope that we can all stay in closer contact this coming year than we have in the past. If nothing else however we had a really great evening together.

A Very Merry Christmas

I am writing this Christmas eve, so some of the wording might come off a little odd, especially since it is still my intent to post it in the morning before we start travelling to go to more new family traditions. I just wanted to take a moment to express how much I appreciate you my readers. It is a strange thing that I do on a daily basis, because most of the time I am talking to myself. Other times I am keenly aware that I have people watching and listening to what I am saying. This is one of those times. I hope you find in this Holiday whatever you were looking for. Be that time with family, or some really awesome food… or even some much needed solitude. The holiday in many ways is a thing that recharges our batteries for the coming year, and I hope you all get that much needed charge from it. You fine folks keep me doing this on a daily basis, and without you reading it… I fear my blog would be a pretty boring place.

As you stare down the barrel of 2015 I hope you all find peace going into a whole new year. My holiday full of new traditions I think is going to do just that for me. I’ve had a lot of unresolved anxiety about my relationship with my family, and how precisely I fit into it. I’ve spent a lot of my time feeling like maybe they really just didn’t “get” me… but I guess at the end of the day that isn’t really the important part. The key is that they keep trying to understand me, and keep caring enough to ask how I am doing and what I am interest in. May each of you find your own place in the world that fits you. My readers, my guildies, my twitteratti… you are all my extended family. So a very Merry Christmas to all of my family out there, and I will talk to you again before New Years to wish you one of those as well.