Tales of the Aggronaut

Heroes of the Storm

March 17, 2014 by Belghast

Odd Weekend

With all the excitement of the weekend, yesterday I needed to just recharge a bit and do a bunch of stuff around the house… namely lots of laundry. My wife got up early yesterday morning, as she had planned a trip to Dallas for the day with friends, so this left me completely up to my own devices all day long. I ended up sleeping in until around 9:30 at which point I did my FTL Steampowered Sunday play, and the subsequent blog post. Then it was lots and lots of laundry for several hours. I feel like I might be coming down with something, so I really wasn’t much more useful than that.

On the Grandmother front, she is doing as well as could be expected. She woke up yesterday for a bit before they sedated her again. Her kidney functions have not returned, but she was severely dehydrated. They have a nephrologist coming into the hospital today that is going to look at her and see what they can do to stimulate activity. Once the kidneys start working again they will be much closer to “in the clear”. Mostly they think she just needs to rest and let the body do its natural recovery. She is a really tough woman, so I have faith that she is going to pull through this. Her vitals all look okayish and seem to be improving by the day. so here is hoping time is really all she needs.

As far as the sick cat, she seems to be doing much better. She was extremely needy of attention yesterday, and her appetite seems to have returned. For the majority of the week she had not eaten much of anything, so yesterday whenever she acted hungry I was opening a cat of food for her. I think she ended up eating five different times yesterday. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the course of this ordeal so while I will taper back her feeding eventually… for now I am just happy she is eating. She demanded attention, which is good… because while she was sick she was pretty scarce. Preferring to just lay down on the couch by herself instead of wherever we happened to be in the house.

Elder Scrolls Final Beta Weekend

Since this past weekend is the final beta weekend before launch in a few weeks, and since we had been given leave to stream whatever we wanted… I did as much playing and streaming as I could fit in. All told I think I streamed a little bit over four hours, split up between four different videos. Most of the time was spent faffing about on my Orsimer Dragon Knight in the Daggerfall covenant area. I closed the weekend sitting a little bit away from thirteen. However because of the absolutely illogical pattern I followed I know I missed a good number of the quests from the first area of Glenumbra. I would love to say that the beta weekend was completely smooth, but it seemed as though a lot of the systems were bugged out. Dark Anchors for example seemed to spawn, and then just stay active even after the forces had been defeated and a player got credit for destroying them.

One of the systems that was completely new to me, were the Dark Fissures. These are essentially mini versions of the Dark Anchors and can just spawn almost anywhere around the map. Think of these as “soloable” Rifts. I say soloable in quotes because really unless you are prepared to take on boss level monsters they will be pretty freakin hard. I defeated two of these and did so just barely. If you go into them make sure you have your health potions hotkeyed and ready to go. The awesome thing about the Dark Fissures is that they seem to drop really awesome stuff. The final one I closed out yesterday evening dropped a level 12 blue fire staff, which I am sure would have been awesome… had I used staves. If the beta weekend were going longer I would have tried to find that a good home.

Heroes of the Storm

I know I mentioned this the other day, but I am still pretty pumped that I am in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the really cool things about it is that it is completely sans-NDA. This means that I can stream the hell out of the game, and I intend to. I recorded a few videos over the weekend, the first of which was just me playing around in practice mode working on the weekly quests for getting victories with heroes from each of the franchises. The second video however I dipped my toes into cooperative mode fighting bots with other players. I have to say I found the jump in AI to be quite extremely between practice mode and cooperative. I earned enough gold through the various quests to purchase two of the cheaper heroes Muridan and Raynor. At some point I hope to pick up Falstad, because while he is in the free to play rotation currently… I am sure this will change similar to how it does in League of Legends.

Right now I am enjoying the game far more than I ever did League. Basically it has all of the aspects of league that I really enjoyed… namely fighting people with awesome champions, and none of the aspects that I didn’t like. League build path was always an enigma to me, and I tended to play champions that I could use the same build on over and over. League gameplay is far more nuanced, but Blizzard has done for League what they did for the MMO genre. Streamlined, simplified, polished and created something that the masses can latch onto. Instead of a huge list of items for you to purchase, you build your character by making a few simple choices. In the beginning at least all of these are either or choices like “survival” or “damage”. Over the course of the map this ends up building a semi-custom champion.

However once you reach level 8, they open up these choices significantly. While playing Muridan yesterday there was one of these levels where I had five different choices for how I wanted to proceed. Each choice causes you to give up other options with no real way of getting those back. For me… a player that found the item buying system of League completely unfathomable this works so much better. For a player who wants a deeply nuanced and unique approach to each match… they are probably still going to favor League. The champions as a whole feel more well rounded than League champions, in that they have a wider “kit” of abilities and the option to choose between two different “R” attacks really seems to help this.

The place where the game really shines is in their map creation. At their core, each of the maps is essentially “Summoner’s Rift”. That said each of the maps has a unique sub game to them, while League tries to do this with the various map types… it simply does not work as well as it does here. For example in the map shown above Blackheart’s Bay… you have a really awesome coastal city/pirate theme going on. When one team collects enough doubloons they can turn them in to call in a bombardment from the pirates on the enemy team. In one map the mini game is all about controlling two shrines which allow you to waken the Dragon Knight. When you do so the player transforms into this unstoppable juggernaut perfect for diving straight into towers and destroying the enemy resources. I have only played the game a little bit, but I have to say I am deeply hooked.

Gamer Hangout

Another odd happening this weekend is that I ended up participating in Beau Hindman’s Gamer Hangout show. I’ve been friends with the members for some time, and there was a week where they had asked me to join in the show… but I until recently I simply did not have a camera. Now you will be able to see the WHY I didn’t have a camera. I have always been pretty closed with separating the real me from the gamer me… so it took quite a bit of courage to appear on camera like this. I am always far more comfortable behind the scenes than being out front and animated. What was cool about the show is that in essence they based this week on one of my blog posts.

It just happened to be where I was available to join in and chat about it. While most of us only actually got through two different games on our list, we somehow managed to talk over an hour about them. They have apparently extended an open invitation for me to participate more in the future, so I guess that means I did not completely make an ass of myself. My office is a pit, and if I do this more often I think I would want to rearrange things some… however that involves me cleaning and moving and not sure how likely that is to happen. It was really enjoyable, and the other folks were great. Was very much an odd end to an odd weekend. I just wish that youtube would not have picked a thumbnail of me talking for the video.

FTL: Faster Than Light

March 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #9

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV

This week I am doing something a little differently with my Steampowered Sunday post. Since streaming is new and shiny… and as a result I am doing a ton of it… I decided to livestream my playtime in FTL. This was after all the game you chose for me to play this week. Previously I had done a few things wrong with my voting. Firstly I made the link super hard to see at the bottom of my post. Secondly I gave you guys like ten choices to choose from, which ended up with a bunch of widely dispersed results. This go around I opted to have you all choose from the three that did not win last week, but had the highest number of votes. You all apparently wanted me to play FTL, because it managed to net 53% of the vote.

Steep Learning Curve

Like most of the games I play for Steampowered Sunday, I went into FTL with absolutely no information. This is one of those titles that was insanely popular in the internet zeitgeist a few months back. I picked it up on a steam sale but never actually got around to playing it. As a result it sat there sadly in my steam library until you guys resurrected it. This is one of those games that is really hard to go into cold. I liken it to trying to play Minecraft for the first time without any guides. So I had no clue how to do anything in the game, and ended up dying horribly to the first encounter I happened across. I thought my weapons would fire themselves I guess. It was not honestly until my third ship that I managed to glean that you could toggle on and off your weapons with the number keys, and fire them that way as well.

Similarly it took me a bit to understand that moving your crew around the ship would help to put out fires, fight boarding parties and repair damaged systems. Essentially playing FTL you die a lot, and hopefully you learned something from the death that you can carry forward into the next ship. That said sometimes you just get fucked by random chance. In the above screenshot I happened to wander into a star system with active solar flares. Just like in Star Trek episodes… solar flares are murder on your shields. Had I happened across the system with no hostiles I could have potentially pooled my resources in the shield room and kept myself repaired long enough to jump out. That said I had a pretty nasty fight with a mantis drone and by the time that was finished my system was a mess. I fought the death of my ship in vain as the solar flares slowly destroyed me.

Belghast Gameplay Not Suggested

I really do one thing in video games… I run in guns-a-blazing and hope for the best. In an FPS I am the king of the spray and pray arsenal. In an MMO I am the guy that habitually charges everything. It is the thing I do. This is very much not the way you want to play FTL, unless you like resetting constantly. If you wander into a system and encounter an “advanced tactical drone” chances are you should really not screw with that. I had that happen, and it started neutral to me… but moments after attacking it, it had disabled all of my ships systems and I was left to sit and watch as all things blew up around me. I feel like that is the real lesson of FTL… stuff happens, often times bad… so hope you can learn from it and not be dumb in the next iteration. The game is pretty brutal about punishing you for your bad decisions, and that is okay… because it tends to be brutal about everything.

I feel like there are so many things I am still missing about success. While playing one of my friends told me over twitch chat that I could vent the compartment to space to put out fires. Which is awesome… except I couldn’t seem to do that when I had attackers in a compartment. The learning curve is exceedingly steep and unforgiving. Much like that first time I played Minecraft, I feel like I need to spend an entire afternoon wandering around a wiki somewhere to figure out what exactly I was doing wrong. I feel like there is a “oh! That is what Coal looks like” moment waiting to happen.

Deathcab for Cutie and Starships

One of the things I enjoyed the most about the game is the soundtrack. It is this really pleasant postal service/deathcab type soundtrack that makes you not care so much that the world is burning down around you. This is one of those moments when I happened to get trapped behind enemy lines and had to fight a far more advanced ship than I had. Notice how they pretty much disabled everything I had and are essentially unharmed. I feel like this is where tactics come in, which is never a strong suit of mine. I tend to be a “shoot first, ask questions never” type player… and this is going to be something I have to get over if I ever want to succeed at FTL for more than a few minutes. Tactics matter a lot, and one of the things I learned early on is… if they have drones, for the love of god kill the drones.

Right now I am really bad at deciding what thing to attack first. I tend to have the best luck destroying ships by killing their engines. That said I feel like i would have a lot more success disabling their weapons, then shields, then engines. When they are charging the engines to escape it seems like a single shot to the engine can slow them down enough to kill them before they jump. So I know this is a good theory, but getting me to do that when everything is burning on my ship seems to be the problem. To quote Wash… “Oh god, Oh God, We’re Gonna Die”. I have trouble keeping focused when my cute little people are dying horribly fighting fires. In the immortal words of my friend Vexa… “Fire is pretty much the worst.”

More Play Warranted

I feel like I am fundamentally bad at this game. That said I feel like this is an okay thing. Much like MInecraft, one of the simple joys is rolling the dice and seeing what combination of events you happen to get this time. I felt completely fine resetting and starting over from scratch. In many ways this reminds me of an early Shareware title called EGA Trek that I used to play the hell out of. The gameplay basically was the same, it involved warping around the galaxy looking for trouble. I played this game for hours upon hours… rolling the dice and seeing what trouble I could get myself into. Combat was very similar, and I would not be shocked at all if the FTL folks had played this game at one point or another. Granted FTL is all of this in much higher detail, but the same pure fun is there. Sometimes it is just fun to die over and over horribly. May the “SS Were Gonna Die” continue to fly onwards.

Mystery Game Time

I’ve decided to shift things up a bit, and start giving away random games instead of a specific title per week. This weeks winner will be contacted today and given a copy of Brutal Legend. However this coming week I will be grabbing something from the stack of mostly indie games that I have laying around. If you win, and it is a title you already have… share the love and give it to a friend that doesn’t already have the game. Another thing I am doing is leaving the two losing titles on the list, and replacing FTL with a brand new title… this week Evoland enters the ring. This way I actually have a shot of playing through the games that were the losers of previous weeks. As always to take the survey click the big bright button below.

More Than Just Bandaids

March 15, 2014 by Belghast

Lack of Sleep

This morning is likely going to be a deeply personal blog post. Yesterday was a pretty horrible day, for many reasons… most of which did not make it into yesterdays post. For starters like I said yesterday I only managed to get about two hours of sleep thanks to a massive panic attack over the health of one of our cats. She is the closest thing I will probably ever have to a daughter, and she’s been with us since 1999. Turns out I was partially right to be concerned, and partially just being a nervous parent. I went to the vets about 11 am yesterday and they gave her some more meds, this time a steroid and she seems to be improving.

However while I was at the Vet I got a text from my mom. It seems like she found my grandmother on the floor completely unresponsive. At that point they thought she had really bad pneumonia, and rushed her to Nowata General Hospital in the town I grew up. Something of not… Nowata General is a bandaid station and nothing more really. Its great if you need stitches, or are dehydrated and need fluids… but they lack the kind of equipment a modern hospital should have. At that time the paramedics that came to get her thought she likely was just really dehydrated and she could come around with some IV fluids.

Black 3 Red 4

Since I was already off work because of the sick animal I hopped in my jeep and drove the hour to my home town. When I got there… grandma was not the grandma I would recognize. Firstly she was struggling to breathe and was breathing in a very panicked fashion. Here eyes were wide and pupils dilated… and she wasn’t really responding to us. Instead she kept saying things like “yeah a black one”, “black three”, “I think red four”, “red twelve”. We immediately thought she was playing solitaire in her mind, since she does this and has always done this for hours. She didn’t really recognize who I was, or that I was there… when I tried to tell her she would say things like “yes he’s my grandson”.

She acted like she could not see the world around her. Finally after a time I realized after a time what she was doing when she started to say “black T” or “big black E”. She was reading an eye chart. During the day Thursday she had a really busy day with my mother. They went to the eye doctor and out shopping, and I think she was in a way having a dream while awake about going to visit the eye doctor. When we told her that the eye exam was over she responded “good” and closed her eyes and went to sleep for awhile. If I didn’t know better she was having some sort of a nightmare, but one while her eyes were wide open.

Moments of Lucidity

When she woke back up about twenty minutes later she was lucid again. She knew who I was and talked to me a little bit. What makes this whole thing all the more difficult is the fact that she has really poor hearing, even with her hearing aides. So something just feels wrong about “gently screaming” at your grandmother that you love her. The thing we noticed is that she seemed to be unable to recognize anyone directly in front of her. If I sat off to the side she could register who I was immediately, and throughout most of the afternoon she grabbed hold of my hand for dear life and squeezed it tight. However when the nurse or doctor was standing directly in front of her, she could not see them or make out any details.

For being a bandaid station, I have to say the nurses at the hospital were extremely good with her. One in particular worked with her and helped her transition from bed to chair to bed again. She would say “now give me a big hug” and would help lift her across so gently. Thing is I sympathized for Grandma, because I know how panic inducing simply not being able to breathe can be. On an absolutely perfectly day she is about 50% lung capacity thanks to pretty bad COPD, but yesterday she had to be down significantly further. She kept wanting to sit up and lean forward, and having done that myself so many times I knew how much better it felt to breathe like that. So I would sit there holding her hand, trying to let her lean against me or at least be there to try and keep her from falling.

More Than Just Bandaids

It was about 5pm that the doctor decided that she needed something far more than what they could offer there. Something was wrong with her that kept causing her to snap in and out of lucidity. At this point she had gone back to reading the eye chart, and not really responding well to anyone in the room. Thing is the hospital did not have a CT Scan or even a respirator, so they really needed to transition her to Jane Phillips hospital in Bartlesville. I am wondering how things would have gone had she just been taken there in the first place. No offense to the local hospital but there is never a situation where I would have ever asked a family member to be taken there. Essentially that hospital is equipped with exactly the same kinds of things that a modern ambulance is… and nothing more.

They got her situated in ICU where at least she has around the clock monitoring for her vitals. The other hospital was primitive enough that she was not even hooked up to any form of a monitor. They had to come in with a little cart and take her vitals periodically. She seemed to calm a bit, and they cranked up her oxygen significantly. I talked to her for a bit, and she recognized who I was, and who else was in the room with me. My mother arrived at the hospital again from taking my aunt to dialysis, so I decided that was a point for me to transition away. I wanted to make sure there was someone there lucid enough to respond to the doctors when they talked to us. At this point I was getting near a place where I was not sure if I could safely drive home if I stayed much longer. So I said my goodbyes and stopped off at QuikTrip to get an energy drink.

Ten Hours of Sleep

When I got home I picked up some food from Arby’s, and immediately after eating I gathered up Little Shit and went to bed. She snuggled into me and I was asleep before I knew it. At one point I woke up because my wife was changing the ferret cage, and needed help with our oldest ferret… who is really barely hanging on in the world. So I remember helping her clip his nails but I went back to sleep and don’t remember much more after that. According to fitbit I got a little over ten hours of sleep last night. I can’t say I feel completely rested, but I am in a much better state than I was. I had grand plans for this weekend, but pretty much they are all out the window at this point.

I just got off the phone with my mother and it seems that my grandma took a turn for the worse last night. They have now put her on a ventilator but as she improved over the night they are tapering it back. I think she said it is now down to 40% and when they reach 30% they can consider pulling it back out. Right now she is not responsive, but her vitals look good otherwise. If I had to guess she is just flat out exhausted from fighting. She had a busy thursday, far busier than normal… then all day yesterday she struggled to breathe, and for a woman that normally goes to sleep 3 or 4 different times a day… she is just past the point of going. I know at some point we will head back to bartlesville and visit, but I need a little bit of downtime before having to deal with my family again.

My Family

Throughout the day yesterday it was the best I could do to tune my aunt out. She was trying to put grandma in the grave even when she was being perfectly lucid. She is one of those people that knows everything and always has an answer to whatever the problem… and the answer is generally some tinfoil hat theory. Needless to say in general I am not comfortable around my family. My grandmother is the exception. Even from a young age she got me on a level that no one else in my family has ever been able to.

From infancy until elementary she was my babysitter, and I was there every single day. So her house has always been as much of a home as my own. Seeing her struggle like this is rough on me, but even when she is not lucid… she is still there as she grips my hand tight. So at some point we will go back and participate in the vigil. Right now I need a few minutes to myself before going back to the madness that is my family. I want to thank my internet family yesterday for showing support. It really meant a lot to me. Your friends are the family you choose.

Technically Alpha

March 14, 2014 by Belghast

I Need an Off Switch

There are times I absolutely hate that my wife can sleep through almost anything, and get to sleep so easily. There is this thing she does that drives me insane, where right before sleep she winds up my brain by revealing some tidbit of knowledge that my mind takes the next hour and a half to digest before it allows me to go to sleep. Over the week we have had a really sick cat, and are treating her for her hyperthyroidism with a cream that I have to rub into her ear twice daily. She is getting better, but doing so very very slowly, so I had planned on calling the vet this morning to see if she needs to be seen again. Moments before my wife went into her nightly coma, she dropped the bombshell that she is not sure that “Little Shit” has been peeing.

Not only did this wake me up, but I went into a full blown panic attack playing the “what if her kidneys are shutting down game”. There was absolutely nothing I could do to calm down and I was up half the night literally… I finally laid down around 2:00 and drifted off to sleep about thirty minutes later when “little shit” decided to join us in bed. Her constant purring I guess clamed me down, because she “seemed fine”. This morning one crisis was adverted when I saw her pee in a place she isn’t supposed to, and another one started when she vomited and there were little red spots in the mixture that looked suspiciously like blood. All the while I am envious of the fact that my wife can sleep on command, and I end up fighting incessantly to get the few hours a night I end up getting. There was one night this week, that I thought was a “normal sleep” and my fitbit told me I had 32 periods of restlessness throughout the course of the evening.

Woah We’re Halfway There

I guess that is a bit misleading since dinging level 30 is by no means halfway to 60 effort wise… but it is at least numerically! Once again I engaged in leveling my Night Elf Mage while hanging out with friends on mumble. These are starting to feel a bit like impromptu podcasts, since we end up talking about the days gaming news and various sundry bits of geeky information. We seem to talk about everything other than the game I happen to be playing at the moment I am streaming. Originally my intent was to stream some Landmark last night, however the servers did not come back up until the wee hours in the morning. I know this because I also streamed some of that during my panic attack state to try and calm the hell down.

All in all as much as I hate to admit it, I am starting to like playing a mage. I am beginning to feel more useful in dungeons now that I have some semblance of an AOE in the form of Cone of Cold. It is still not my preferred method of game play, but I am not absolutely disliking the experience of pushing this character to 60. Yesterday the Godmother of Faff herself, @AlternativeChat posted about a new contest of sorts. The idea is with all the boosting going on, to level your way to 90 proudly with purpose. While I am fully in support of this notion, I am not sure if I qualify for it.

I currently have 6 90s, 2 85+, 2 70+, and my baby mage that my intent was to push to 60 and boost the rest of the way to 90. I feel like I have experienced the leveling content in World of Warcraft more times than most players. So I don’t really feel any shame in using my free boost to jump the character class I am least likely to play to the finish line. However I do feel that most of the folks who have never had a 90, and are using their boost to get there are missing something in the process. Some of the quests you have to struggle through along the way become a shared cultural experience. As much as I hate the “poop” quests of Burning Crusade, I like that I did them and shared in the same frustration as other players. Maybe that is an odd thing to say, but there are very few moments that all players have experienced. Anyways… you should definitely check out the post that sparked this discussion.

Like There is No Tomorrow

Also on the docket of last nights streaming, I decided to take a break from the mage after dinging 30 and play some Wildstar. In truth, once again I checked to see if the Landmark servers were back up yet… and since they were not, I opted to play the thing with the most current NDA drop. I have to say there are certain aspects of the game that are growing on me. The “soldier” archetype and the quests associated have definitely nailed my personal style of game play. Namely… explore the world and kill everything that gets in my path. Once again the “impromptu podcast” aspect of my streams continued as we discussed lots of gaming tidbits. I have literally considered stripping the audio from these videos and stitch them together into a podcast.

This is what nights on mumble are usually like, as we discuss more than just what we happen to be playing at any given time. I still am not really used to hearing my own voice yet, but I will get over that. As far as Wildstar goes… I cover this in the video, but after this weekend the Beta is significantly changing. Up until this point I have had essentially 24/7 access to the servers, and feel like I have generally squandered that by not playing. Once this change occurs I am honestly not sure what kind of access I will have. I know preordering gives you something, but I do not believe that we will keep fulltime access unless we have a 32+ character when the transition happens. Additionally I think those players will be unable to progress past level 17. The whole scenario is rather complicated, and I am not sure yet if I really grasp it. As the thread says, the only sign of a successful compromise is that no one is happy.

No Sleep Til… Landmark!

I had attempted to sleep for about thirty minutes, and then I realized that I was on the verge of going full blown panic attack… I opted to get up for a bit to try and calm myself with the dulcet tones of gaming. Generally speaking in the past when I have needed to relax like this I would play Minecraft, and since Landmark is my new Minecraft… I was thankful the servers were back online. I figured while I was running around anyways, I might as well stream some of it. I didn’t broadcast the fact I was doing so, because really I did not intend to be entertaining or talkative. What the video does show however is the inside of my claim and my latest project… completely redoing the dungeon. I have to admit at this point… it had been a few weeks since I had played Landmark.

Essentially I had gone high center on some of the crafting requirements. In order for me to get better machines and better tools it involved absolutely silly amounts of Burled Wood farming. For those of you who need a refresher, Burled Wood was a rare drop from almost any tree. You originally needed 100 to make a single Burled Wood plank, and then most of these extremely high end crafting machines and tools required 50 or more of these planks. This was one of the worst RNG grinds you could imagine. I simply reached a point where I could not bring myself to chop down the number of trees that it would need to get the things crafted that I wanted crafted.

Thankfully in yesterdays patch they completely turned this mechanic up on end. Now when chopping down trees they drop a single guaranteed “Heartwood” drop, with a rare chance of dropping more than one at a time. These are now the items needed to craft machinery and tools, and Burled Wood has been relegated to a “lesser” and also more reliable drop crafting material off of certain trees. What this means is if you need 27 Heartwood, you know that you will have to farm a maximum of 27 trees to craft that item. Even if you need 90 Heartwood… still having a fixed point that you have to farm is so much better than relying entirely on luck to get the drops you need to complete your projects. Thank you so much for taking this one back to the drawing board.

Technically Alpha

Another very exciting thing happened yesterday… I received an invite to the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the more interesting tidbits about this, is that there is apparently no NDA. We can blog about it, stream it… do whatever we want, with the caveat that we treat it like the alpha that it is. I am perfectly fine with this notion because I have been looking forward to “HotS” as it is lovingly referred to… for some time. Essentially Heroes seems to be set up to fix one of the problems I have with League of Legends. I am all about team play, and when I am playing as a team I only really care about the end objective… our win. When I play shooters I tend to be heavily objective and role based shooters that focus on the win condition and not individual player stats.

So much of the way game play works in League seems to be counter intuitive to playing as a team. Progression is almost solely based on personal performance, not performance of the team. One of the most frustrating mechanics I have experienced is that of “last hitting”, and this concept is entirely gone from Heroes of the Storm. Granted I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with the game play… since I did not realize I even HAD access to the Alpha until about 1 am in the full force of my panic attack. I think I made it about halfway through the tutorial before I made another futile attempt to sleep. So far everything feels like I expect it to, and the tutorial character of Raynor was rather fun to play. I look forward to cracking this open and experiencing the content for real over the weekend. I hope to stream some of it, but with the last beta weekend going on in Elder Scrolls Online… not sure how much of that will actually happen.