Tales of the Aggronaut

Angriest Red Ball Revisited

November 25, 2014 by Belghast

Bridge Refresher Course

With all my recent posts about World of Warcraft, you would think that I had switched allegiance entirely, but this is not the truth by any means. Right now it is new and shiny and I am attempting to claw my way to a reasonable foothold of raid preparedness. That said I am still very much playing Final Fantasy XIV, and for the last few weeks we have been pulling together “raid” content on Monday nights. We really want to see the new Ultros fight, but unfortunately Thalen still had yet to do Battle at Big Bridge, so last night we started the evening off knocking that out of the way. It made a rather nice high point to start the evening on since that fight is so amazing. The majority of us are Final Fantasy V fans, so seeing the fight is like watching the bridge fight play out in that game.

The strange thing is that as many times as we had run it, I had never actually tanked it. Not that there is actually anything to tanking the fight. For the tank at least it is as tank and spank as they really come in Final Fantasy XIV. The only challenge was the various adds between the two phases of the boss, and even then it is was only because we have some extremely overgeared dps for the fight that just melted them. While I attempted to hold aggro it was pretty much futile. In any case it knocked that out of the way so that hopefully this week the folks that needed it can catch up on the Hildebrand storyline and get ready for Ultros. I would really rather do that fight for the first time as a guild, so we can have the experience of figuring out the content on the fly.

Angriest Red Ball Revisited

Turn Five of Binding Coil of Bahamut has been looming over our group for some time. I have to admit there has been a sense of fear about it, because in truth it has been content than killed many a static raid team on our server. It is the notorious gatekeeper to turn 2, and there are many folks that have cleared one through four never to actually manage to get in a turn five kill. The fight itself just has this insane array of mechanics that are almost impossible to memorize before going into the fight. Since it had been months for us clearing the first four turns we opted to start with those as a fresher course. Overall it went nice and smooth and we burned through the first few coil instances getting the folks who had not been there realm exploration achievements. I managed to get the Heavy Allagan chestpiece to go with my other two pieces of Allagan gear.

When we downed turn four after a few baubles here and there we decided to use that momentum and push us forward into a couple of attempts at Twintainia the boss of turn five. There is a lot of stuff to focus on during this fight. However we did manage to get to roughly the halfway point in the fight after a couple of attempts. I mark this as pretty damned good progress, and a pretty good night overall for us to down Big Bridge, four turns of coil and make that much progress on five. I feel like as a whole we have way more confidence in regards to our success chances at turn five. It is no longer this looming and scary target that we have not actually experienced. Folks talk about it with so much frustration and reverence, but I feel like we can totally down this. Now after seeing the fight I also feel like I have a far better point of reference for doing my own research in the coming week.

Up Too Late

After our evening of raiding in Final Fantasy XIV, I popped out and got into World of Warcraft in an attempt to find a group to run Auchindoun with. Much like there was a legendary cloak chain in Pandaria, there is a legendary ring one in Warlords. The first phase is actually relatively simple and only actually requires that you run Skyreach and loot and item off the final boss. This nets the player a really nice ilevel 640 ring for there troubles, which is a much needed gear level boost for getting into content. The next steps require you to clear four heroic dungeons, gather up a silly amount of apexis crystals and then complete a solo event of sorts. Last night I was up to the final step in this sequence which requires a trip into Auchindoun to loot an item off the final boss. However there was another player that required one more “core” the step before Auchindoun, so I agreed to run that heroic first before we ran the one I actually needed so that both of us knocked out the final step at the same time.

The end result was that I ran two heroics back to back and did not actually make it to bed until almost 1 am. The other result however is that other than 100 apexis crystals and a solo event, I am really super close to the next step in the ring quest chain. As a result in theory I should be able to knock out the 680 ring before we step foot into Molten Core as a guild tonight. I am really looking at venturing forth into Molten Core, it has been years since I last experienced the raid “for real”. I remember there was a time where a “good clear” took about three hours of my life. I am hoping we can manage to do it in a far shorter time. That said I have prepared myself for the potential of it taking that long if not longer. I know we are going to try and go into it with as many tanks and healers as we can so that we can potentially control the pace of the run. If everyone other than a handful of dps are with us on voice chat… hopefully things will go more smoothly. In any case hopefully at the end of the night I will have a spiffy mount.

Furry Children

I’ve always had a soft spot for animals. In this age of global strife and suffering, I’ve become rather accustomed to it… but the moment that Sarah MacLachlan animal charity video plays on the television… and it is like a sucker punch to the gut. There has never been a time when we have not had several furry children, and each of them is unique and special. This morning I am thankful for all of them that have shared our life. Presently we have four cats, which I think officially qualifies us for “crazy cat lady” status. Our eldest came home with me years ago on a Thanksgiving day, so this time of year is all the more important to me. She is getting up there in age and has many issues but I am so thankful for each year we have with her. In addition to our cats we also have two amazing ferrets, that are both as sweet as can be and are always clamoring for our attention. They both know exactly what it takes to get daddy to play with them, and they are the source of many delays while getting ready in the morning. Animals enrich our lives in ways that I cannot fully account for, and this morning and every morning I am thankful to have them.

Things Did For Loot

November 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #32 – Azeroth, Mordor and Beyond

Normally Sunday mornings I talk about the happenings from the night before when we record our weekly episode of AggroChat. However yesterday it just didn’t really fit the theme of the post, so I opted to push off advertising it on my blog until this morning. We recorded for roughly two hours, but thankfully after I edited it was condensed to only an hour and twenty minutes… which is far more reasonable. It is always strange when we go into a show with what we feel like is not a lot to talk about… and then a show happens and it ends up being a length one. I feel like some of those are the most natural because the conversation just went where it needed to go without our direction.

We talked about a dizzying range of games from Shadows of Mordor and Tam and Kodras views on the game. They both still say it is very much a “bel game” and at this point I am planning on picking it up hopefully when it goes on sale during the Steam Christmas Sale. It does look really interesting, and I like the seeming focus on mechanics rather than story. We once again delve into a discussion about 4X games namely Beyond Civilization, Civilization 5 and Endless Legend. Similarly there is a length discussion about our feelings surrounding Dragon Age Inquisition and Kodra has finally made some progress in Dragon Age Origins. Finally I talk at length about my experiences returning to World of Warcraft as I gush about finally having a strong female in World of Warcraft that is not also moments away from being turned into a raid boss. Seriously if you have not followed the Yrel character you should check her out.

Things Did For Loot

My focus this weekend entirely was getting geared up enough to be able to do Molten Core on Tuesday night with the guild. Since this is a 40 man looking for group experience… and various members of them guild have said it took upwards of three hours to complete… we are wanting to try and pull in as many people as possible Tuesday night so we can hopefully carry the random players to a rapid victory. The only problem is that in order to join in the fun, you have to have 615 ilevel. Unless you had some extreme luck with item upgrades in Nagrand, it is not exactly easy to hit that kind of level without a lot of dungeoning. Arria and several others kept telling me that I needed to PVP in order to get my ilevel up high enough to run Molten Core, but at first I rejected this notion entirely. However after a period of time without a guild group online that I thought we could make dungeoning work… I resorted to queuing for battlegrounds.

Over the course of the weekend I ran enough battlegrounds to be able to purchase a neckpiece and bracers at roughly 1250 honor each. I have to say… I actually enjoyed myself, and it shocks me just as much to be able to say those words. Remember I have gone on length diatribes about how faction based combat destroys a sense of community. The thing is… battlegrounds are not open world pvp and I did not enjoy Ashran the open world pvp zone at all. The strange thing is that I have quite literally not PVP’d in World of Warcraft since Burning Crusade other than once or twice here needed for some holiday achievement. Once upon a time I was part of an Arena team if you can believe that, with the sole purpose of gearing my paladin in some healing gear. It is strange how cyclical things are… in Burning Crusade PVP gear was extremely useful for PVE purposes… and now in Warlords the exact same thing has happened. I guess I don’t mind PVP so much when I know there is a loot piñata at the end of my efforts.

Heroic-palooza

Between the two pieces of PVP gear I was able to bump my ilevel up high enough to be able to do Molten Core. However yesterday I spent most of the day running Heroics with the guild. The strange thing is that I tagged along as dps. It feels so strange that sword and board gladiator is actually viable dps, and for most of the runs I was competitive with the person sitting in first place on the meters. The awesome thing about this is that the gear needed to tank and needed to Gladiator dps are essentially the game. Bonus Armor it turns out is just as much of a DPS boost for Gladiator as it is survival for Defensive. All of this makes me wonder if we will see a resurgence of viable specs to allow tanks to tank as Arms or Fury like they used to back in Vanilla WoW. In any case I ran Bloodmaul Slag Mines, Grimrail Depot, Auchindoun, The Everbloom and Skyreach and between them I managed to get several upgrades.

I feel like I need to take a moment to praise Blizzard for the changes to the way that personal loot works. I made a comment the other day on twitter when they removed personal loot as the default for pugs, that going back to need before green only really helped the trolls. It turns out that they just felt they needed to tweak personal loot a bit before returning it to the dungeons, which ultimately they hotfixed back in within a days time. The new version is extremely awesome, because no matter how bad your luck is early in the dungeon… the final boss will always drop an item for your spec. Mostly what makes the system great is there are no more instances of unusable loot. Granted what you get may not actually be an upgrade, but we did several runs with nothing but plate wearers… and no leather rotted in the dungeon.

Finally a Worthy Helm

Over the course of the weekend I went from 609 ilevel to a respectable 623 and I feel that I am fully ready for Molten Core tomorrow. I am not sure if I will be called on to tank or to dps, but in either scenario I feel comfortable thanks to the fact that Gladiator dps is esentially just tanking without the taunts. One of the things that I have tried to be religious about is doing my crafting and resource workorders in my Garrison. The primary one is the Gearspring Parts needed for engineering, or in truth every single tradeskill that makes things seems to have a limited resource that can be sped up significantly through the use of your Garrison. This expansion has returned to having an exceptionally useful helm gained through engineering, and this time it is upgradeable three steps to make it competitive with raid gear.

This morning I managed to collect the last of the 100 Gearspring Parts needed to craft it, and finally I have a helmet that is worth of displaying helm. Traditionally I run around sans helmet, because in truth World of Warcraft has pretty much nothing but ugly helms. These goggles however are fantastic, and I am proud to let my engineer flag fly high. Unfortunately I am going to have to figure out a way to get savage blood, which I am afraid that I do not have a source of it in that I did not build the barn. Since it is a tradeable resource my hope is that I will be able to obtain it through an alt. Honestly my biggest hope is that eventually they add it to the primal spirit vendor at a significant loss, so that I can use my stockpile of those. In any case I feel like I am fully ready for the rigors of raiding, but still have plenty of upgrades that I can get from heroics.

My Routine

There are mornings I have an idea immediately and others that I struggle to find purpose in my writing. There is something about being under pressure to write a post each morning that makes it work for me. I’ve long found that on the weekends I dawdle considerably more and struggle to get a post out. Whereas in the morning as I am drinking my morning coffee if I just start writing a post materializes before I really know fully what I am going to write about. As such for this mornings thankfulness post, I am thankful for my routine. I am thankful that I embarked upon this journey over a year ago, and thankful that I realized that the morning would actually be a viable time for me to write. Writing a post feels like I am starting the day having already accomplished something, which in turn I feel makes the day as a whole a better one. May each of you also find the routine that works for you.

Happy 10th Anniversary

November 23, 2014 by Belghast

My WoW Story

Ten years ago today I started playing World of Warcraft. In truth that is a bit of a misnomer since I technically started as of ten years ago 11 pm last night. When World of Warcraft launched there was so much excitement surrounding it. This was not my first MMO by any means and I had already played significant amounts of time of both Everquest (roughly 3 years), Dark Age of Camelot (roughly 2 years), Horizon (6 months) and City of Heroes (6 months). Between those four games I had already amassed a large group of friends that all intended to play Warcraft at the launch. That is the hard thing to explain these days, but World of Warcraft was this one game that every single player that played it… wanted to play more of. I remember getting into one of the stress test betas, and that one weekend of playing the game completely destroyed my enjoyment of City of Heroes. Just a few hours of play showed me that these games I already loved could be so much more.

When it came time for the game to launch, the GameStop in town was having a launch party. I originally intended to get in line with the rest of the folks and wait it out. This was in the days before I actually preordered games. To some extent I liked the thrill of the chase, of having to go out and forage for whatever new game release was the new hotness. So World of Warcraft was no different, and I had intended on just picking up a copy like always. When I go there that night… the line wrapped around from Gamestop and all the way down the shopping center to Panera Bread and around the corner… so half a shopping center for the sleepy little hamlet I lived in. I was showing up moments before the game was set to go on sale… so I would have been waiting behind hundreds of other players waiting for the game.

Wal-Mart to the Rescue

On a wild hunch I decided to pop into the Wal-mart just down the shopping center instead. Sure enough when I got back to electronics I saw a pristine display full of copies of World of Warcraft. I noticed that a handful of players were doing exactly the same thing as me. So there I had my game in hand ready to head out, and by the time I got to the parking lot I noticed that not even a quarter of the line had been served at GameStop yet. I found out later that they sold out, and did not have enough copies to serve the demand. That in itself become a running theme, as you quite literally could not find copies of the game anywhere after those first days. I remember spending my lunch hours going out to stores that I had not checked to see if I could scrounge up a copy for this or that guild member who had yet been able to get in. It was probably a good three months before copies actually became obtainable, and unfortunately a good month before the game was really playable.

I remember spending the next day with my friend and co-worker Vernie leveling a night elf character that I had no intent of ever playing. We sold every item that dropped all of the purpose of getting that single gold needed to buy a guild charter. At that time it seemed like an insurmountable amount of money. By mid-day on the first day we managed to get the money and got all of our friends to create level 1 Gnomes or Dwarves and collected signatures in Coldridge Valley. By noon House Stalwart was born on Argent Dawn and at launch we had around fifty people that we knew from a combination of the other games we had played in it. Shortly thereafter we got a charter started on Silverhand and the Burning Scar was born there as well. Our original plan was to Alliance on Argent Dawn and Horde on Silverhand… the two role-playing servers that were available at launch. Over time and the inability to get logged into the game… folks self sorted into playing the faction they liked the most, and the vast majority of us ended up in House Stalwart and the Alliance faction.

The Hunter Phase

My intent was to play a tanky paladin, because I had so much fun playing one with my friend in beta. I would debuff the target against holy damage, and then he would come in and smite the hell out of them. It made an amazing synergy and was absolutely fun to level together. The problem being when I installed the game and created Exeter for the first time… that was the moment I realized they played a last minute bait and switch. While I was not on voice chat at the time… this predates those days… I quite literally said a verbal “What the eff” when I wandered around Coldridge Valley I could not figure out what the hell the seal system was doing. This was strike one against the class. Strike two was that not long after the launch of the game I had a pretty traumatic death in the family that ended up with me being completely gone for a long period of time. When I got back everyone had shot ahead of me in level, and quite frankly the paladin just could not solo easily at that point in the game.

As a result I ended up rolling a Dwarven Hunter, Lodin because they could solo phenomenally well and it would allow me to catch up to my friends. I am just not by nature a hunter, and there is a whole series of time I attempted to play a melee hunter through the use of the survival tree. Yes I was one of those guys, but it worked well enough to level my way to 60. Which for reference took me about six months to get there finally. During Cataclysm I leveled a Worgen Druid from 1 to 85 in less than seven days of actual time, so a lot has changed in both the game and proclivity for grinding up alts. One of my friends who started in House Stalwart went on to found one of the most prosperous non-guild raids on the server… the Late Night Raiders. He happened to be in need of a hunter to replace one, and I happened to be interested in raiding having done some of it in Everquest. As I started getting geared, I felt obligated to play Lodin as my main and keep it in tip top shape for the sake of the raid. The problem is I never really felt like a hunter, in spite of just how amazing the LNR hunter crew was. Many of those folks I still talk to on a weekly basis, and even the ones I don’t… it is always a happy occasion when I see them.

Birth of Belghast

The problem is that the hunter just didn’t fit my personality, and I had intended on playing a tank when I started World of Warcraft. Originally the intent was to play Exeter my paladin as defensive, but there were just too many problems at that time with the whole “Seal of Rage” debacle as a way of holding aggro. A good friend of mine had expressed interest in leveling a priests, and I had wanted to level a warrior… so we decided to go for it and Belghast was born. The character Belghast originally came form when we were playing Dark Age of Camelot. He was my Celt Champion and I played the role of dps and occasional off tank. It felt fitting to recycle the character name, and since Human warriors had both mace and sword specialization I made the choice for aggro generation reasons. Leveling as a team was awesome, I learned to trust my healer because it allowed me to focus entirely on making things mad at me. I looked up to the LNR tanks at the time, especially my friends Rakrul and Giulietta and I feel like I learned tanking from the best.

It was not long before I was tanking regularly the LNR “fun” raids like Zul Gurub and AQ20. When The Burning Crusade expansion launched, I took it as my opportunity to switch to the role I felt more natural playing. The gear reset was a point of frustration with many in our raid, but for me it was a golden opportunity to switch focus to Belghast and not be years behind the curve. Switch focus I did, and I got a reputation for being willing to tank for almost anyone that I knew. I spent my evenings helping folks get the bits and baubles they needed to gear up, and eventually lead a Karazhan run. While LNR was a casualty of the expansion, I moved into a tanking role with No Such Raid another non-guild based raid on our server. When it eventually died as well I helped to found the Duranub Raiding Company that stuck around through both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, ultimately dying off when the changes coming with Cataclysm shifted the focus away from non-guild raiding.

A Fitting End

So there is something fitting that I am back playing World of Warcraft again, and playing Belghast once again. When I first set foot on Draenor, it was this grand opportunity to finally be a “real tank”, and as I set foot on Draenor again I am feeling overcome with nostalgia. While I doubt I will be a raid main tank again, I have been enjoying relearning how to tank in World of Warcraft. There was a time at which I knew all the tricks to keep mobs from doing stupid things, and much of that knowledge has faded away. However as I enter the phase of tanking Heroics I am looking forward to relearning it all. There is something sublime about returning to the warrior after tossing him aside with the release of Cataclysm. Cata was the expansion that killed World of Warcraft for me, and since then I have played for a few months at a time before fading away again. Maybe playing the character that my name comes from… will ultimately be a source of revival.

World of Warcraft

For those who might ultimately find this post through means other than my regular readers… during the month of November I have been posting something I am thankful for each day. Today I have to say that I am very thankful that World of Warcraft exists, because through it I have met so many awesome people. If I think about it, there are so many people that I love having in my life that I never would have met were it not for this game. So many of those people I talk to on a daily basis, and if not daily… weekly or monthly. My life had been enriched by hundreds upon hundreds of people that I have encountered through this game. While I have had a complicated relationship with it… going through periods of love and periods of hatred… it is much like a family member now, and I am thankful that it has existed and continues to thrive in its own way.

If you really think about it, this blog would not exist were it not for World of Warcraft. It originally started as a Warrior Tanking blog devoted to my thoughts about tanking and raiding and over the years has morphed into a blog a bout “me”. Similarly all of the people that I podcast with weekly, I would never have known were it not for World of Warcraft. Kodra and Tam were both members of the Late Night Raiders, Ashgar I met as a friend of theirs… ultimately through World of Warcraft, and Rae while she is now a co-worker of mine… I originally met her through raiding. These are all folks that are extremely important in my life and every single one of them ties a lineage back to this one game. To take a step further, I likely would have never joined twitter, or google plus, or any of the other social connections I have now… were it not for this game and the blog that I created about it. I feel like this one game has acted as a fulcrum to enable so many awesome people to meet other awesome people, and if nothing else you have to give your utmost respect to that. Thank you Blizzard for creating World of Warcraft.

Garrison Resource Drought

November 22, 2014 by Belghast

The Search for Food

This morning I really did not want to leave the bed. I was surrounded by warm and fuzzy cats, but as it got later both my wife and myself started to get hungry. My wife and I are both relatively intelligent individuals, and friends have postulated that we must have really interesting conversations. That is not entirely the case… here is a snippet from this morning

Wife:    I’m Hungry
Me:      Me too… I will go get breakfast.
Me:      I am leaving right now *staying there snuggled into covers*
Wife:   Are you there yet?
Me:      No… its a really long trip, will take awhile
Wife:    It will probably go quicker if you leave the house.
Me:      That is just a theory, there is no scientific evidence of that
Wife:   If we look at the evidence from the last fifteen years, leaving the house points to getting food.
Me:      Maybe the food just shows up on its own?
Me:      Lets test that theory.
Wife:    I’m Hungry

I did in fact have to leave the house to make food show up, but there is still no direct cause and effect evidence… other than the whole I gave someone money and they gave me food in return. How the food actually arrives at our house is a mystery because I don’t actually remember leaving the store or arriving home. I do however remember observing the feeding ritual of the cat gods upon arriving at home. Maybe the cat gods are somehow connected to the acquisition of our food…

Garrison Resource Drought

I may have made some poor choices as to the sustainability of my Garrison, as I have reached a point where I am struggling to get the resources needed to keep developing it. I finally managed to upgrade to the rank 3 Town Hall yesterday, giving me access to another small, medium and large plot. Unfortunately I lack the resources to actually fill them. Right now my Garrison has a t3 Town Hall, t2 Mines, t2 Engineer, t2 Enchanter, t2 Dwarven Bunker, t2 Inn, t1 Garden, t1 Storehouse, t1 Trading Post, and t1 Fishing Shack. I lack the pets to actually be able to get the Pet Menagerie but at some point I want to actually level some battle pets so I can get that. I have failed miserably at playing WoWKemon. It just feels so damned tedious to level your pets past a point. The one thing that would make everything better is if they would implement XP Sharing like they have in the actual Pokémon these days.

The problem I am running into however is that I am flat struggling to get the resources needed to keep developing my stuff. I have yet to plunk down a second large building, because I simply lack the resources to do so. Unfortunately as well… I have basically hit the point I am at by farming down the Garrison Resource caches in the various zones. Sure there are a few still out there but I have pretty well gathered all of the low hanging fruit. The Trading post should help out considerably but right now it keeps requesting herbs… and the only ones I can actually feed it are the ones coming from my Garrison. My hope is that soon it will want a mining resource, because I seem to have plenty of those. So I guess my question is… other than Follower missions and the slow and steady tick of resources… is there another in world renewable resource for Garrisons?

Dungeons for Gear

Last night in an attempt to get my last few points of gear needed to hit ilevel 615, and in an attempt to get Rylacus so he could actually do heroics… We ran several dungeons as a guild. I believe we ran three but at this point I have lost count. I know for certain we did the newest incarnation of Upper Blackrock Spire and we did one called the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds. I was actually pleasantly surprised at just how challenging the level 100 normal dungeons have turned out to be. Most of the mechanics are arguably pretty cheap, in that they stack dots on the players or drop damned near instant kill piles of stuff on the ground. All things considered however they were actually really fun. They are not nearly as good as the dungeon designs in Final Fantasy XIV, but I feel they are considerably better than the Pandaria dungeons at least. The reliance on crowd control reminds me more of the order of business during Wrath and Cataclysm, which is a good thing… just not something I am really used to.

It is my nature when I play a warrior to want to charge ahead into the next pack. Unfortunately I need to give my rogue time to sap things, and I need to get back into the habit of marking crowd control targets. The other thing I am struggling with is how loosey goosey mob movement is in World of Warcraft. In FFXIV mob placement is relatively predictable thing. The mobs move where I want them to… back in WoW I found it absolutely frustrating everytime Zul’jin would iceskate around me. I am going to have to relearn the tricks I have apparently forgotten for making mobs stop doing stupid shit. Moving him around felt like having a wobbly shopping cart tied to my waist that I was dragging around with me. All of this said I look forward to relearning the finer points of fighting with the system and getting it to do what I want it to do.

Drinking Water

This morning I woke up with a horrible cramp in my shin. At first I attempted to walk it out, but it didn’t seem like it was just going away. I have always struggled to some extent with dehydration, and muscle cramps are one of those early signs. So as such I got up and went to the kitchen, grabbed a huge 32 oz glass filled it at the tap and drank it all in one setting. Within a few moments the cramp seemed to be lessening so I went back to bed. At which point it struck me, just how lucky I am that I have really good tap water. In fact I greatly prefer our tap water to bottled water in almost every single case. Tulsa actually has award winningly good water, and as such we are pretty blessed. It never really hits me just how rare this is, until I go somewhere else and without thinking try and take a big drink of tap water.

So while it might sound odd to be thankful for it… I am extremely thankful I can turn on the tap and get something that actually tastes good. Speaking of which… I think I am going to go fix myself a large glass right now.