aggrochat Archives - Page 17 of 35 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Villainy

November 2, 2015 by Belghast

Extra-Life : Support Liore!

We started out this year with every intention of doing Extra-Life as AggroChat. However somewhere in the middle of all of this good intention… life happened. At this point we have done nothing to prepare for Extra-Life and done absolutely no fundraising. This means… that AggroChat is not in fact doing Extra-Life this year but will be taking a rain check in the hopes of rebooting this initiative next year. In the meantime… I highly suggest you support the person I am supporting for Extra-Life. We have joked for awhile that AggroChat and Cat Context are similar enough that we should start having special “AggroCats” episodes where we jumble the cast together. I feel like the podcast would end up feeling pretty similar. Liore and Cat Context were so much inspiration when we decided to start AggroChat… so backing Liore in her Extra-Life is kinda like backing us! In truth if not for Cat Context there would likely not be an AggroChat because that podcast taught me that it is perfectly okay to do a podcast with natural conversation instead of show notes and such!

It is my hope that even though I am not doing Extra-Life I can pop by on Liore’s stream and hang out a bit while she does her thing. We even talked about potentially playing something that is all multiplayery that we can hang out and chat while doing. I love the concept of this event, because it proves that gamers can in fact put their hearts in the right place and do amazing things for the world. It is not in fact all about teabagging… and I was honestly shocked that was still a thing when I encountered it recently in Destiny. Like people did that in the Quake 3 engine days… and I figured surely by now people had gotten over that “phase”. I got off track… anyways I highly suggest you pop by the donation page and throw a few bucks towards the cause. I will be tuning in for as much of Liore’s stream as I can, so it should be a good time!

Favorite Weapons

Yesterday I decided to do a new sort of video for me, where I go into it with a specific topic… you know like most youtube videos in existence. Generally speaking YouTube is just this place where I dump backup copies of whatever I have streamed, and not something I really do intentionally. This time around I wanted to talk a bit about the weapons I am currently using in Destiny and what I like about each of them. So during the course of the video I go through my current arsenal:

Zhalo Supercell – Auto-Rifle
Hakke Zarinaea-D – Auto-Rifle
Suros DIS-43 – Scout Rifle
Suros Hawksaw – Pulse Rifle
Invective – Shotgun

I cannot fully put into words how excited I am that Xur had a Zhalo Supercell on Friday. Other than No Time to Explain exotic… this was the weapon I wanted most. This gun is so much fun, and more importantly it does a bunch of interesting things. Namely it seems to be able to reach around shielded mobs when it procs. So if you are fighting a Hive Knight or Cabal Phalanx… the procced lightning damage will still damage them even if they have the shield up. This means this is my go to weapon for most strikes because it will simply decimate so many mobs… and can drop the shield of annoying mobs like Knights, Captains and Harpies that have those Arc Shields. I am really hoping that everyone who wants one of these got it this past weekend, because even though it is only 280 I was able to pour enough stuff into it to make it reasonable for most things. Largely right now what I am lacking is weapon parts… and decent high level weapons to feed into my legendary weapons of choice. I wish I knew the secret to getting decent drops… because I am equipping every last ounce of light I can before I start decoding, and still habitually ending up with 260-280 items that are utterly useless to me.

New Weapon

Traditionally my Hunter has used the hand-me-downs from my Titan as far as weapons go. Then if I ended up really liking a weapon… I would end up stealing it from the hunter and giving it to my Titan instead. I think the above weapon is the first time I am not going to do that. On my Titan I already have a really capable Pulse Rifle in the form of a Hawksaw, that nicely rounds out my weapon arsenal. If you want to hear more about it, I go into it in detail in my video above. The other day I managed to rank up with Future War Cult that my Hunter reps… and the package handed me one of their weapons called the Villainy. I didn’t think much about it and ultimately it took me awhile to get around to testing it out. Yesterday during our Star Wars pen and paper session I spent a good deal of time running around in Destiny on my hunter and chewing through the backlog of bounties. During most of that time I used this weapon, and I have to say… I am liking it.

If you look at the two weapons… Hawksaw and Villainy they stack up pretty closely… but I have to say in almost every possible way the Villainy is just better. It has significantly more impact, more range, more stability… similarly reload. The more I look at it verses the Armory profiles for each weapon… I am guessing I simply just got a really ideal roll on my Villainy. This is one of the things I like about this game that would end up driving others absolutely insane. I like that two different weapons from the same family can vary so much, because it makes you feel like this weapon or that weapon are more “yours” because they may not be exactly the same as anyone else’s version of it. My specific Villainy has Partial Refund, Perfect Balance, and Third Eye… and it is an absolute amazing weapon to use. Part of me is hoping to get another one just to see how different they might feel. All I know for certain is that for the time being… this weapon is the go to for my hunter. I also posted a picture of my hunter above just because he looks kinda bad ass right now. I am hoping to get more pieces of the Neuroghast set… because seriously… that name is fitting for me, and it looks pretty amazing.

Day of Destiny

October 5, 2015 by Belghast

So Much Fireteam

Pause in loading gave a rare screenshot opportunity.

It seems my recent Destiny addiction has rekindled the fires in a handful of my friends. As a result over the weekend I spent most of it in a Fireteam with Damai attempting to help level our friend Carthuun represented above by his PSN name Saldonas. Saturday night my wife was freezing, so I got drafted into going to bed the moment our podcast broke up to provide “warmth”. As a result I had to spend a good chunk of Sunday morning editing the podcast, creating the YouTube version, blogging about it and broadcasting it to the world. After that I of course has to throw out my own Aggronaut post… which means that I was fairly late getting started on playing anything. By the time I logged into Destiny Damai and Carth had a fireteam going and were working on the last few missions of the original storyline. From there we pushed through The Dark Below and House of Wolves expansion content as a group, which honestly had been a bullet point that I wanted to get through at some point. The problem is with so much new and exciting stuff to do and gear to get… I never quite got around to making the time for it. However with Carth leveling for the first time… all of the items you get through those storyline elements were actually relevant. I finally st0pped grouping around 7pm when my wife got back home, and I went off to fix dinner for the two of us. At that point I think Carthuun was sitting around the level 25 mark which is not too shabby for a day of grouping.

The big thing that I sorted was how to use PS4 party chat comfortably. I have a Logitech G430 sitting relatively unused because after swapping to using a Blue Yeti microphone on my machine upstairs, I swapped to simply using a pair of Behringer HPS3000 studio headphones. The sound output was better and they are nowhere near as heavy as the Logitech pair because they don’t need an attached boom mic. Ages ago I ordered a few pairs of adapters that take a standard headset and converts it down to the single jack style input that modern phones and the PS4 controller uses. Yesterday I took the time to dig out my G430 and one of those adapters and after some fiddling and piping all of the game audio through the headset… I finally arrived at something that was fairly comfortable to use. I don’t seem to mind the fact that playstation chat is mono audio… when I have the rest of the game audio coming through my headphones as well. Additionally having something other than my dedicated PS4 headset… makes them far more comfortable to use for several hours on end. Also this finally allows me to crank up the game audio without frustrating my wife, who has on occasion asked me to turn it down when a really crazy moment happens and the audio is booming. Now that it is sorted I feel more comfortable using a headset with the console, and am also more likely to just hang out in party chat for awhile. I am wondering what the upper bound on a party group is, and if you can have more than just the three fire team members.

Swapping Companions

When I got downstairs last night to prepare for the season finale of Fear the Walking Dead, I of course booted up and started playing Star Wars the Old Republic. Now that I have finished with my smuggler, I am picking up where I left off on my Sith Warrior. Through the course of the evening I worked my way through the rest of the Nar Shadda storyline and just now starting on Tattooine. I have to say it is very nice to finally have all four buffs after beating one of each base class. I am a bit saddened however that I am finally reaching the stage of the game where it feels like having a healer is a very useful thing. This means relegating Vette to crafting and spending the majority of my time with Malavai Quinn. In the grand scheme of things I have no problem with Malavai, because he seems like the honorable Imperial Soldier type. The problem being that I just like running around with Vette, because I always loved Mission Vao, and honestly for me… she was always Mission 2.0 rather than her own character. Instead she will farm up companion gifts… that I will ultimately give to her later… which seems a little strange?

Basically if I have a shot in hell of getting the special legacy unlock thing for beating all of the stories, that means I have to play through the rest of Sith Warrior, Imperial Agent, Bounty Hunter, and Sith Inquisitor all before the end of the month. I am seriously doubting I will be able to do it, but…. that said if I ONLY focus on the story missions I might be able to make it. When you only focus on the class story the early planets at least go extremely quickly and you stay at a decent level. I might need to spend some cartel coins however to unlock more mod gear to throw on my characters. The plan I arrived at on my smuggler of upgrading my armor every other planet seemed to work pretty well and I would really like to do that with my Sith characters. The problem being the game is not extremely forthcoming with armor options. There are sets available for pretty much any level range on the Cartel Market, but each of them cost a fair amount of coin. So I guess we shall see what ultimately happens. I guess if I got desperate I could make them wear the free moddable flight suits they give you, but that is not exactly a great option. I might use the imperial pilot suit for Malavai Quinn however.

YouTube AggroChat

The funny thing about AggroChat is that in the grand scheme of things… we don’t actually get that many listeners… or at least not enough listeners to go through the trouble of some of the things that I do. For example… our YouTube videos maybe get a dozen views a piece. That said I like doing them, and I am not sure why. I guess they are just far easier to link to someone when they ask you about the show than linking the actual podcast page. Also I like embedding a youtube video far more than I liked embedding the Libsyn player. I feel like I could probably do better about advertising our show. I tend to do it in a rather haphazard fashion, because I feel rushed to get each show out the door and ready. By the time I finish editing, uploading, and doing all the other things… I reach this point where I just want to be done with it for another week. It is not necessarily the most enjoyable period of my week. I love making the show, but the tedium that comes from doing all the fiddly bits to make it happen… gets annoying. So I reach this point where I just want to hurl it out into the world and hope someone finds it interesting. The hardest part is it feels like we don’t have a lot of feedback. Podcast listeners tend to listen silently, and while we have a few people that comment here and there… you don’t get the sort of commentary that you do when you have a blog. There are weeks however like this week, where I feel like we got into some extremely interesting conversations, and it is well worth listening. I love the folks I podcast with, because ultimately they are the folks that I hang out with on a daily basis.

Pax South Excitement

September 17, 2015 by Belghast

Excitement Grows

Last year Pax South was quite literally the first gaming convention I had ever been too. Granted I have been to comic conventions and scifi fan conventions over the years… but never a gaming one. I didn’t really know what to expect but Liore gave me some advice… that as soon as you get in the doors the anxiety fades away because you realize that these are “your people”. I didn’t really believe her until the convention was actually underway… and absolutely I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be just fine. I never strike up conversations with strangers, yet I found myself idling chatting with people while standing in the queue room like a pro. There was just this aura of acceptance that I felt, when quite literally anything anyone was into was awesome. The only problem was that it was quite literally an overload on my senses and while I technically knew a bunch of people at the convention, I only actually managed to meet up with the AggroChat folks that I had planned on meeting up with… and Lonrem from Anook. Well I guess that is not entirely true because that Friday I had a bunch of press meetups scheduled to talk with various game devs. At the end of the two days I attended, I was worn out beyond belief… but I was pretty damned happy with my experience. I had originally decided to try and attend as many local conventions as I could… but ultimately that fell through for one reason or another.

After having done a Pax I realized that the highlight for me was not necessarily the show, but getting to hang out with people that I do not normally get to hang out with. It felt like this giant summer camp for gamers and geeks… and it was fairly magical. With this in mind I set my sights on Pax Prime… but nothing really went as I had hoped there. Firstly I missed out on getting tickets, and second we were not accepted for press passes. Then thirdly… August is a really bad time for me. My wife is a school teacher and Pax Prime happens exactly at the beginning of our School year here in Oklahoma. It would have been extremely rough on my wife for me to have been away during those first weeks of school, when she ends up having to rely on me the most because she is simply stressed beyond the point of coping. So while I was sad that I didn’t get to attend, I still had hopes that I could con more people into joining me at Pax South this year. Since I know what is important to me now… I know what to focus on, and that is planning on meeting up with people. The problem we ran into was that on the convention floor the cell service was complete crap. So my theory is that we will need to figure out meet up points ahead of time this year, rather than trying to rely on some sort of impromptu thing.

More People More Fun

The above picture was hands down the highlight of my Pax experience, not because I we were playing Gigantic really, but more than the three of us were playing together. The gravy on top is just the fact that we happened to be beating a YouTube celebrity in the process. Now we zoom forward to yesterday… they opened the flood gates and started taking sales for the 2016 Pax South in San Antonio Texas. This time I managed to get in on the three day passes, which there are actually still a few left. As of right now I know that myself, Rae, her brother, Ashgar, Thalen, Dallian, Lonrem, and Helkim are confirmed going… or at the very least have their tickets in hand. I am sure in the coming weeks I am going to start hearing of more people going, and I plan on starting up something to keep track of who is going and on what days so that maybe we can meet up and hang out. I need to start doing some research into what eating options are there in the Riverwalk area, because I absolutely do not want to try and go to that Chillis again out of desperation and hunger. I am also hoping we can maybe coordinate hotels, because I really liked the one I stayed in last year… but it was out by the airport. However if there are many of us it would not be an issue at all to carpool into the convention each day. I feel like I have the whole parking situation under control after having done it last year. I have to say I am extremely excited, and hoping this one is going to be bigger and better than last year. I mean this is the only Pax that does not sell out in a matter of minutes… so honestly I am fine with that. The concept of trying to get tickets to any other Pax seems like a stressful situation. I realize it is still months away, but I want to try and make the best of this coming years show.

Week In Gaming 9/13/2015

September 13, 2015 by Belghast

Very Rough Week

As you could probably tell from some of the subtext of my posts this week… it was a pretty rough one for me emotionally. Work is still being stressful, but honestly that really had nothing to do with this one. For our country September 11th has some pretty tragic context, but for me it has completely different issues. Firstly September 11th was the birthday of my grandmother, and she would have been 90 this year. I miss her an awful lot, and there are days where it is just rough to think about her. Her birthday always brings back memories of her, which are honestly all good… but there is a bittersweet melancholy associated with it. She essentially raised me during the first years of my life, because she was my constant babysitter and companion. She is also the one member of my family that really seemed to appreciate my wife being a member of the family. If that were not enough to get me down in the dumps… this week also marks the anniversary of a pretty horrible period of my life. In September of 2012 I lost my Grandfather, and the day after the funeral… September 11th… a pretty horrific event happened at my work place. It quite literally with zero hyperbole ushered in the worst six months of my life. Someone screwed up, and screwed up badly… and I had to deal with the fallout and recovery. So each time this day comes I get a little gun shy. So this past Friday I was crawling in my skin as I waited for they day to end.

Demon Huntering

As far as gaming this week, I had a pretty cloistered time of it. I am still very much in my “hiding out” mentality, and I guess in part I think it was just me waiting for this week to pass me by, dreading Friday. I spent some time working on my Demon Hunter in Diablo 3 and I think when I last played I was about halfway through 69. At some point soon I hope to pop back in and finish leveling him to 70. I also spent some time farming away on Rifts, Greater Rifts and Bounties attempting to get blood shards… which I then disappointingly spent trying to get class set pieces. I have been stuck at 3 of 4 pieces of the set I am going after on my Barbarian for a few weeks now. I am not sure but Diablo might have worked its way out of my system for a bit. I finished off the seasonal stuff, but as of last night Grace on the podcast talked about additional seasonal rewards. I am just not sure if I will be willing to do any of the crazy things that are required to get them.

Star Wars the Old Republic

The big event of this week was that I apparently have fallen into a Star Wars the Old Republic shaped hole. I have played this game off and on since release, but this is really the first time I have felt I was actually back in the swing of things. I’ve played alts a lot in the past, but this is the first time I have actually continued the storyline on my Jedi Guardian main. As of last night I finished Makeb and am working through the precursor content leading up to Shadow of Revan. My plan is to finish the story content before the drop of Fallen Empire next month. Additionally I am taking advantage of the insane twelve times experience bonus. Last night during the podcast I started working on my Chiss Smuggler and I have to say… having access to Treek as a tanky companion makes that experience so much better. Seriously… I hate Corso Riggs so much… and was completely stalled out trying to play a smuggler because he annoyed me so much. Treek is simply a better tank.. in that she jumps AT the mobs instead of grappling them back to me. Who though a tank companion pulling back to the healer was a good idea? Anyways as soon as I wrap this post I intend to go downstairs and play some more Smuggler… that was how much I was into it last night. I may or may not have stayed up until 1:30 in the morning playing.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am very much in a lull right now with Final Fantasy XIV. I talked about this a bit on the podcast, but it is strange… that even while in this lull I still consider it my home base of operations. I figure when 3.1 lands which should be soonish… everyone will be invigorated once more and we will return to logging in every single night. In the mean time I am playing a lot of other games as not to force myself. I am still raiding on Monday and Wednesday nights, and this week we managed to get a few more people through Bismarck Extreme. I really want to defeat Ravana Extreme before the new content lands, but one of the big problems we are having is… that honestly it just feels like there isn’t much content for us to be doing. When we returned to Final Fantasy XIV July 2013 we had a years worth of content to explore since we had last played. While we managed to slowly whittle our way through all of it… it gave us tons of small goals to work towards. In Heavensward there really does not seem to be the much for us to work towards. We can clear Alexander Normal in our sleep, and are pretty successful with Bismarck Extreme. We are working on Ravana Extreme and I believe it is in our sights… but Savage Alexander just isn’t a realistic goal, namely because I can’t bring myself to do the gear grinding that it would require to really be viable there. I am well enough geared to do all of the content I feel like I could do… and I just don’t have the drive to push towards that bleeding edge. So instead I play other games and wait for another content drop.

AggroChat 74 – Force Binds Us

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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