aggrochat Archives - Page 16 of 35 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Weekend Hibernation

December 5, 2016 by Belghast

It was a truly bizarre weekend for a whole lot of reasons. Primarily because whatever illness my wife had seemed to strike with a vengeance during the tail end of last week. As I said before I was originally planning on going to RiffTrax with work friends on Thursday night but by the time I left work I realized there was no way I could make it through an entire evening. Instead I begged off and went home and crashed on the sofa in my fuzzy blanket cocoon. By the time Friday came around I was really doing considerably worse and took a sick day… which in turn screwed up our evening plans. We were originally slotted to do this monthly family dinner thing, but we rescheduled it for next weekend because I was not sure how well I would be to drive. Instead I returned to the blanket cocoon once more and was as a result available for our normal Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear run. I wound up tanking it, with the stipulation being that I was not going to talk at all. In fact to prevent myself from doing this I muted my microphone…. which lead to a weird run since I am fairly vocal as we make it through the content. To make it even more odd, we were without the OTHER vocal leader Kylana which meant a whole slew of people had to step up to the plate and help make sure the run went smoothly. So seriously huge thanks to Mort, Phy, Beist, Bledd, and I am sure a whole slew of other people who also were chatty and helpful but I am not remembering at this very moment. It was once again a super clean run, and in the end I wound up swapping off for Erry for the final encounter since it generally requires a bit more vocal tank coordination.

Past that night I spent a lot of time piddling around in stuff by myself. Namely this meant an awful lot of Final Fantasy XV, and I think maybe just maybe I am finally to the point where I am willing to move on past “world 1”. As I said before there is a point where the game warns you that if you continue on you might not be able to return for awhile. I took this warning to heart given that I just came from playing Final Fantasy XIV where this sometimes means that a two and a half hour long cut scene is about to happen. Instead over the weekend I found out from some of the other folks playing it that at least in this case… the game is talking about a ten minute process and not a thirty hour long one. In past games these warnings often times meant that you would not be able to return until you found the airship, and I am pleased to find out that this is not the case. At this point though I am running out of things I can actually do in the starter world, and all of the hunts are of a significant level difference from my current level so I think the game is not so subtly telling me to move the hell on.

Another thing that took up some time this weekend is that I tore down a chunk of my office and set up my new Xbox One. For awhile now I have been interested in owning an Xbox One to be able to play the titles that don’t exist on the PS4. Similarly there is an entire group of friends that I have that are on the Xbox path, and I have not been able to play with them. Unfortunately there were really no titles that supported Xbox 360 crossplay with Xbox One, so as each of them has upgraded… my options similarly narrowed. While I have had this latent desire… I also just could not justify the street price for the console given that I am primarily a PC gamer first… and a Console gamer second. However on Black Friday I actually partook of a deal on Dell.com for an Xbox One, Extra Controller, Headset, and Five Games: Halo 5 Limited Edition, Farcry 4, Ryze Legendary Edition, Sunset Overdrive, and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes all for right at $200. For this I was willing to jump on it and the box arrived at my house Saturday during the day… and I wound up setting it up after editing the podcast on Sunday morning. There was another deal on Cyber Monday to pick up a copy of the Destiny Collection for the Xbox One for I believe $25 and I jumped on that too, so while I was installing other things… I ported over my Xbox 360 copy of Destiny. Firstly since I am largely a digital only gamer on PS4… I did not realize the whole download after installation was as much of a tedious chore as it actually was. Halo 5 took a good three hours worth of download time, which I found insane and shocking. Is this what disc copy gamers on the PS4 have to deal with as well? or is this largely just an Xbox One thing? In any case… I was kinda happy to see that my PS4 clan tag ported over to the Xbox One, and while I will still primarily be playing Destiny on PS4, I want to level something to hang with my friends playing on the Xbone.

I’ve decided to start linking the podcast on Monday mornings in what generally ends up being a weekend rundown post. Not that I think there is anyone who doesn’t have access to it… but just in case the youtube version embeds nicely. The other big take away from the weekend was all of the food that we cooked. We wound up having a weekend full of comfort food, cooked in the crock pot. So Friday night before going to bed I threw our breakfast casserole on to cook so that when we woke up Saturday morning it was ready. This dish consists of egg, cheese, potato, ham and sausage and it amazing. We wound up eating on it for breakfast and lunch on Sunday as well… and still have a bunch left over. My wife had the bright idea to turn it into a breakfast burrito with a little salsa. We also cooked our Chicken and Cheese Tortilla soup, which we only got two meals out of… well and an extra helping or two. Finally on Sunday we tried out this Orange Chicken thing… that is close but not quite there. It was good enough but it needs something to make it work properly… and I think I screwed it up by putting the rice directly in the sauce and letting it cook. I should have simply made a couple cups of rice and then ladled the sauce over it instead. In any case… my wife and I are both largely on the mend but we pretty much spent the entire weekend hibernating. We started taking some OTC meds when it initially hit and I think it helped out quite a bit.

Kodra the Prodigy

September 23, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I had what is going to go down for awhile as one of my strangest dreams. The root of it was a roadtrip, that apparently myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew were taking across country. I have no clue at all where we were going, or what we were actually doing. However we were in a road trip in a car that was probably too small to fit all of us… but those are the sort of details that dreams just handwave away. What I do know for certain is that at some point we stopped at a roadside diner, and while milling around and waiting for everyone to finish going to the restroom I noticed this little girl had a cool vintage metroid championship t-shirt. I commented that I liked her shirt and she showed it to me proudly… and that is when I noticed that emblazoned across it in a fuchsia with purple shadow version of the Metroid logo was the name “Kodra”. Round about this time in the dream Kodra comes out of the bathroom and I point out the t-shirt and he is super nonchalant about it. This is the point where we learn that apparently he was a child prodigy at video games… and “he doesn’t like to talk about that time”. We also find out that apparently there is this entire internet sub culture that has been trying to find out what happened to Kodra after the championship… which in itself is funny given that he goes by that game on our podcast. It is around this point that the dream starts to break down like every dream does, especially given that I am not sure the timing works. Kodra is quite a bit younger than I am, so not sure what age he would have been when Metroid was even a thing. In any case… it was one of those strange dreams that I had to commit to paper as it were.

As far as “me”, I am doing mostly better… or at least on the road to better. I feel bad about the weird state of yesterdays post, but I just didn’t have any proper fuel to cobble together a post. I have been stressed beyond belief for reasons I can’t get into. Just know that for the most part those events have passed and I think I am on the other side of them. Cryptic as hell I know but that is about all I can really say. I have not been feeling great, but I think it is just a side effect of the stress. Last night I wound up going to bed before 10 pm, and then woke up about midnight feeling like I had slept an entire night. My body does strange things when it comes to sleep, but thankfully I was able to mostly get right back to sleep. As far as gaming goes last night, I managed to exist in the “organized gameplay” world just long enough to drag some friends into Heroic Darkheart Thicket for the World Quest that rewarded an 850 wrist. This was unfortunately good enough that it was worth breaking up my four piece world quest set to partake of the level difference. After that and finishing up my emissary quest for the day I flipped over to my paladin and continued questing out in Highmountain for a bit. So far leveling as a tankadin is pretty chill and relaxing, and while I would rather run around Justicar Julia Celeste, I have to say Vindicator Boros is growing on me. It is kinda fun to run around and be Super Draenei Tankbros. I contemplated actually transmogging to some of the gear he is wearing to make it even seem more legit, since I think I have a lot of that stuff from the Draenor expansion. However my purple judgement set matches the purple tone artifact so well… that I am leaving it be for the time being. Over the night Tam managed to ding 110 so my hope for tonight is to grab him and smuggle him into a heroic to hopefully get some gear.

Magical Moose

February 14, 2016 by Belghast

Luck and Friendship

Over in World of Warcraft, there has been an item that has lovingly started to be referred to as the Friendship Moose…. and there are good reasons behind it. The mount itself is pretty damned majestic, and makes me feel like Santa Claus when I ride it. It comes from getting the Ahead of the Curve achievement for Heroic Archimonde…. well in truth Archi drops a quest but same basic difference. The reason why it has become known as the friendship moose is the fact that there have been an extremely large number of people in the WoW Community who are going out of their way to try and get people the mount. To the best of my knowledge it was originally @Thomicks that started the #FriendshipMoose hashtag, and then it kinda just went out of control from there. I know @Zelse007 for example has been really knocking these out and as of last night he has gotten 639 Folks their moose. I won’t lie that the thought of getting a spiffy mount is partially what drove me back into raiding in World of Warcraft recently, but more than anything it was to be able to hang out with Horde friends that I had never really raided with. Quite honestly I never expected to get the Reins of the Grove Warden.

The thing is… I have some really amazing friends. Earlier in the week I was pinged by Damai to see if I wanted to join in with his raid for a farm run. The plan was to clear a bunch of bosses on Thursday and then pop in really quickly early in the evening on Saturday and take down Archimonde. Generally speaking I cannot participate in this raid because it happens to coincide almost exactly with our podcast recording session. However this time they planned on being in and out of the raid roughly two hours before our podcast was set to go. I ultimately had to beg off on Thursday, because I kept going into uncontrollable coughing fits, but I was however able to attend yesterday…. which was good enough to get me a moose. I was carried extremely hard last night, the above image is of me being the only dead member of the raid…. from when I tried to run my fixate to the edge and happened to run right in between two folks firing their lasers. Not only did I walk away with a moose but I also picked up a couple of sweet upgrades, one of which is REALLY amazing for my special snowflake Gladiator spec [ Worldbreaker’s Resolve, World Ender’s Gorget]. I gotta say I am happy beyond reason… because I absolutely thought this was far beyond my reach. I want to give a special shout out to Damai, Errya, Pugnodeum, and the rest of the Praetorian Guard crew for dragging my but along.

No AggroChat

So now that the warm and fuzzy bits are out of the way… I have to tell you that right now I am feeling like a complete and total failure. Sure being the only person to die on Archimonde should have done that already, but this is something different. We’ve been recording AggroChat for a little over two years now I believe, and during that time we have missed two episodes. This week being the second episode, and for the most part…. this time is completely because of me. While raiding last night, I was on listen only mode because I quite honestly had no voice to talk with. Throughout the day yesterday, as it went on my voice kept getting weaker and weaker until the point where I simply became a squeaky whisper. On top of this… Tam is out of pocket this week, Grace is out of pocket this week… and yesterday was Kodra’s birthday… leaving it up to Thalen and Ashgar to hold up an entire show. As a result throughout the day we simply decided to call it, and I really hate the fact that it was my fault for doing just that. This crud that I have picked up is driving me insane… I am so ready to be “better” but as the weeks go by it keeps dragging on.

I know last week when I went ahead and recorded… it was probably a bit of a set back. Because prior to last weeks show I was feeling a bit better…. and then afterwards I was pretty much dead to the world for a few days. What is killing me the most is that when I am in this condition I just don’t want to do much of anything. As a result I have been focused heavily on Elder Scrolls Online, which is a game that I am largely playing by myself. Sure there are a handful of awesome people playing with me like Ammo and Sol, but even then my interaction is mostly that of answering the sort of questions that new players have…. and not so much active grouping. I can zone out and zone into the storyline… and as a result I am probably enjoying it more than I have since I first played alpha. Part of me wants to at least push through the rest of the Aldmeri Dominion content before resigning the game to the back burner again. Another big thing that I want to do at some point is pick up where I left off in SWTOR, and play through the Reven content that I never actually got around to doing. I have this feeling at least in the near future that I am going to be focused on story games, less than I am going to be on raiding and grouping activities. The Final Fantasy XIV 3.2 patch might change that, and in part I hope it does…. because I would love to feel the drive to play that game again. However in the meantime I am going to quietly be piddling over here without my voice.

Monday LFR

December 7, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Show

I have not been in the habit of linking AggroChat in my blog lately, but I am going to do it this morning. It took for freaking ever for the YouTube version of the podcast to finally upload yesterday, but I feel like this weeks show ended up really good. There were a bunch of topics that branched out but the big one and the one I chose the name the episode was over a discussion about Otome. A friend of mine Pizza Maid and her equally awesome named friend Sushi Geisha have this podcast called Heroines of the Cherry Blossom, where they talk about Otome games. This was not a term that even exists in my vocabulary before this week, when they referenced our Hatoful Boyfriend episode on the podcast. Essentially the side discussion that spawned was about how Tam was impressed with the quality of the writing of these various relatively low budget dating sims that he played in preparation for our Hatoful Boyfriend show. The general consensus was that we would all like to see this deeply nuanced writing make its way into more mainstream titles as well.

Another interesting side discussion centered around the point in which we all tune out when it comes to an open world or sandbox game experience. For each of us there seems to be a point where we are just “done” with the game even if we are not truly finished with all of the content. For me personally I am never really “done” but I reach this point where I have to take a break and play something else for awhile. But then by the time I return to the game I rarely remember what I was doing at that point and end up having to restart the game… usually going in a slightly different direction than the original play through. I know this past week with my focus on trying to chew through the quest content… I am enjoying Fallout 4 significantly less than when I was just wandering aimlessly. For others on the podcast they found themselves HAVING to focus on the story, to keep from losing interest. In any case… we recorded a really content dense episode… which then surprised when editing that it ended up being a fairly short episode at only an hour and fifteen minutes.

Monday Night LFR

I find myself once again in the unfortunate position of needing to run LFR on a Monday night. The last chance crew in any MMO seems to always be the worst crew… and unfortunately due to the push in Fallout 4 I didn’t get any of this done earlier in the week. There are a bunch of reasons why I am pushing last minute raids, but not the least of which is… I am still trying to build out a tank set on the Cow. There was a point in last nights raid where they absolutely would have used me in a tanking capacity had I a set of gear. The problem is largely that I have plenty of armor… but since the Cow was a boosted character… I only went into level 100 with a single set of gear. Normally as I level up, I pick up both a mix of two-handers for dps… and sword and board options for tanking, but I have had zero luck in getting anything I could use for tanking. So I quite literally have a full set of gear that would be viable… minus the sword and shield. So tonight part of the plan is to run through Blackrock Foundry since it mostly features gear lower than what I need… and set the loot preference to protection, hoping that maybe just maybe I end up with a one handed weapon of some sort and a shield. I technically have a 650 shield banked that would work well enough for the time being.

On the other side of the fence I am still using the 670 Blackrock Foundry normal mode weapon that I have for ages… because I never could get any of the heroic bosses we were downing to drop me a weapon. Similarly I have opened dozens of Garrison boxes… all with zero luck in finding a damned weapon to use. So in addition to running Blackrock, I also really need to run through Hellfire Citadel LFR on Belghast. While I feel like BRF is probably going to go smoothly simply because most people have the gear for it… I have a feeling that Monday night Hellfire is going to be pure hell. The only thing that I maybe have gone on my side… is that there are generally more active alliance players on my battlegroup than there are horde, and I can definitely see that still is the case in the difference in my queue times between the two. At very least I am going to struggle through the first few rounds of the raid because that seems to have the best chance of dropping me a weapon. I have a pretty decent shield now, so really all I need is that main hand. I even went so far as to purchase a Baleful Armament with some of my excess stones… and only managed to get a 650. In theory if I save up for a bit I could maybe manage to push that to a 695. The other option is to have my blacksmith start trying to craft me one, but given the silly amount of materials it would take to make that happen… I am hoping I simply have some decent luck this Wednesday during the raid.