cactuar Archives - Page 4 of 14 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Hell Levels

July 1, 2015 by Belghast

Playing with Forge

Last night I spent a good chunk of time playing with Forge.gg and in doing so I forgot the problem from before… that it ultimately broadcast all of the audio from teamspeak. However I did manage to pull a few nifty clips from one of the dungeon runs. The problem being I have no clue how exactly to embed them in a site. There are a bunch of features that I would love to see added to forge, namely the ability to easily get an embeddable snippet. Similarly I would love to see a feature like Twitch and Hitbox have to export the video to youtube. The big take away from last night is that I need to sort out how to extract teamspeak audio from my stream. This has been on my ToDo list for some time but I have yet to actually sit down and do anything about it. Which is somewhat unfortunate since I have several different tools installed right now that can essentially do the same thing. I started working through a tutorial for something called Breakaway Audio this morning, but have been running into issues… namely Teamspeak doesn’t seem to recognize the channel I set up for it.

Ultimately it would be awesome to solve this issue because I think I would end up streaming quite a bit more. The big thing for me is that I have to choose between being sociable with my friends on teamspeak… or streaming what I am doing. However if I solve this issue… in truth I am probably not going to mess with Forge that much, and simply just use Twitch. The always on functionality is cool… but I have to disable FRAPs to make it work which takes away my primary means for collecting screenshots from games. Generally speaking I disable whatever screenshot functionality exists in a game, and then use FRAPs to collect the screenshots in a generic “gameshots” folks, giving me a quick place to look for something I want each morning when I work on my blog post. To get Forge to work however I have to completely exit out of this software and it did not seem to work with DxTory either which has always been my fallback general screenshoting software. I still feel like maybe Forge isn’t a great fit for me, but I see a lot of people using it and enjoying it.

Hell Levels

Once upon a time in Everquest there was the concept of a “Hell Level” meaning that there were certain levels that were far more difficult to get than others. While back then these were literal mathematical break points where the experience needed was greater than the previous levels or the levels after. However this term has continued on into MMORPGs as a frustrating patch in the leveling curve. Right now it feels like 58 is a Hell Level because I very quickly hit another level wall, and really did not have much in the way of experience between it and the last one. So I am currently running around in the Dravianian Hinterlands doing quests, in an attempt to make up the difference. The problem being at this point I have yet to even reach the halfway point through level 58. I am pretty sure that the folks that are sixty in the guild have simply chain run dungeons.

I could do that, but in truth I would rather just wait until people in the guild actually need runs. Like last night I helped a guildie through The Vault, which is where all the forge.gg clips came from. There is just something more satisfying for me to be tanking for friends. I ultimately have this protective nature when it comes to my friends and family, and this makes tanking feel more “real” I guess for lack of a better word. The community in Final Fantasy XIV is awesome, and I have seen nothing bad to speak of with the influx of people for Heavensward. I absolutely could queue for dungeons and be just fine, because at this point I know the fights well enough to be able to explain them to anyone. The problem being when I am tanking for strangers, I feel like I have to put on the mask of “super tank” and be bigger and better in everything I do. I feel like I am on stage in a way, but with my friends I can just chill and I don’t stress quite so much when aggro twitches or I am slow to turn the mobs. I know no matter what I do in the dungeon they are still going to love me when the dungeon is finished.

Viva La Fake Friday

Today is my “Friday” for this week! This is because here in the United States most of us are getting off Friday for the Independence Day holiday. I opted to also take Thursday because we have things we are going to be doing over the break. For whatever reason my family growing up always did some project over the fourth, and recently I started talking about wanting to rearrange my office to be a better set up for gaming and streaming. My wife jumped on this and said we could do a lot of the little things we had been wanting to do over the extended break. This escalated quickly and now we are having a small dumpster delivered in our front yard on Friday. As a result I am going to be flipping a lot of my posting, meaning I will be writing posts each night and working on stuff around the house during the days. The first of these is likely to begin tonight, but to you the reader… it will appear just like any morning post.

I always feel the need to be honest with my readers about my schedule, because I guess to me staging content ahead of time… feels like it breaks the nature of my whole experiment. The original idea was that I would post something every morning without fail, and for the most part I have done this. Just sometimes the writing actually occurs the night before. I hope I survive the next few days because the whirlwind of change is about to suck me in. My hope is that when I exit on the other side I will have a much better space to do my PC gaming in, and if I can also sort out my audio issues… my hope is to also begin streaming a hell of a lot more. The next few days however might be a lot less talk of gaming… and a lot more talk of my failings at doing home improvement stuff.

http://d1z9pxh2awza6s.cloudfront.net/videos/KGlowRjb/video.mp4?14357519896531435751993371

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Content Walls

June 25, 2015 by Belghast

A Different Dark Knight

So here is the point where I admit that I have never actually played any of the recent crop of Batman games. I own I believe all of them other than the latest one that just came out, because I keep thinking that they are games that I would really enjoy, but for whatever reason like so many games in my Steam backlog I never end up playing them. With all of the hype surrounding Batman Arkham Knight lately I have had this massive desire to delve into these games and see exactly what they are made of. Last night was an odd night in that I got home relatively early, but knew I would have to leave and go pick my wife up as she was getting in from our last trip of the summer. I knew I had an hour or so to kill so I opted to delve into this game and see how far I could get. So far there is a lot to like but some things that are a little bit maddening at times as well. Combat seems to take place in a three dimensional “final fight” style manner. NPC bad guys approach you in waves and you can beat on them to turn them away from your position.

The problem I have however is that the game employs a “bullet time” mechanic that I seem to have no real control over. Sure it looks cool to zoom in as your fist cracks against the jaw of a bad guy, but it is jarring in the same way that slow motion kills in Fallout 3 were. It pulls you out of the action and forces the entire world to slow down for a moment before unfreezing and expecting you to pick up combat where you left off. Hopefully this is something I will just get used to, as I didn’t make it terribly far into the game last night. I have to say the storyline and the plot are compelling enough to make me want to keep playing. I’ve always been a fan of Batman, and the dynamic between him and joker have been the stuff that has driven me to read more Batman comics than I can recall. Harley Quinn is another of my favorite characters in the universe, and she seems sufficient so far… but really I have not gotten to interact with her terribly much. Yes I realize at this point that this game is pretty “ancient” but I am going to enjoy it nonetheless.

Content Walls

I am still very much loving Heavensward but I wanted to take a moment to talk about my biggest frustration with the game so far. This game has some phenomenal story that makes you want to push forward so that you can see what happens next. The problem is quite frequently you hit a wall where you must be the next level in order to continue the quest chain. The red quest icon taunts you until you have managed to push through that next level… only to grant you access to a few more steps of story before locking you out again. I realize as I leveled my way through the original story in A Realm Reborn I experienced this… but it has been almost two years so I guess my memories had faded. Partially I think this is the fault of the way that I am currently playing the game, where I mostly focus on the Main Story, hoping to leave a lot of the side questing for secondary classes to get some experience off of. Unfortunately I think the designers intended you to do all of the new quests that open up in each area to help you push forward into the next content goal.

Thankfully I have dungeons to augment my leveling process, and since everyone seems to be comfortable asking me to tank for them… I am getting quite a lot of access to running these dungeons with my free company. The only problem being that I never know exactly how I want to level when I am left to my own devices… and have run out of story. I absolutely love FATEs but the problem being that they simply do not seem to be worth the effort. We have a running theory that they have watered down the FATE experience in an effort to force players to complete their main story content, rather than simply FATE grind their way through the levels. The whole FATE grinding to the end thing happened a lot in A Realm Reborn, and I could see them wanting to maybe nip that in the bud at least for the early players. The problem being that side quests, really don’t reward that much experience either. I’ve recently unlocked the second their of Clan Hunts, so I will have to see if they reward significantly more experience than the first tier that unlocks at 53. As it stands right now… I am hoping the first major patch gives FATEs a significant tweak as far as XP goes so I can return to doing those for my alts.

In That Old Place

This coming Tuesday in theory marks the end of our World of Warcraft raids break, and as I find myself moving closer to that date I realize… I am just not ready to resume raiding. In fact I am not really ready to play World of Warcraft right now on any level. So for the time being I will not be rejoining them in raiding, and more than likely won’t be playing at all for some time. I feel like my primary issue right now is there really isn’t anything other than the raiding tying me to the game. Sure I had some fun faffing about trying to farm mounts or doing old raid content for cosmetic gear… but that ultimately has a limit to just how long I can do that without something else keeping me rooted in the game experience. I’ve explored the new areas, and pushed three characters to the level cap in Warlords of Draenor. While the content was extremely fun to level through that first, second and even to some extent third time… the whole experience feels extremely disposable because it is also exactly the same each time you do it.

In many ways this expansion reminds me of the way I felt after leveling my third character in Star Wars the Old Republic. While the individual class quests there were excellent, it was all the other content that I kept having to repeat that ultimately wrecked my enjoyment of the experience. I thought walking into Draenor I would be awash with nostalgia about how much I enjoyed The Burning Crusade… and to some extent that worked for a month or so. The problem is it is like going back to your High school twenty years after you graduated… while some of the aspects are similar it is still very much a brand new place that does not synchronize with your memories of it. The reboot timeline just feels wrong, and with this patch and the reintroduction of Hellfire Citadel, I just find myself not caring anymore. Arthas and Illidan were bad guys I could really get behind taking down… a constant parade of grim dark future orcs… not so much. I made the mistake yesterday of checking my account to see when it would renew, and when I saw September I went ahead and cancelled it. I figure if the game has not grabbed my attention and made me want to play again in that time… it will just quietly close the door on another chapter of my own personal Warcraft timeline.

Lord of the Hive

June 22, 2015 by Belghast

Fears for Launch

All in all it was a pretty great head start weekend, but there was one big problem that I fear is only going to get worse as we move forward to the official launch tomorrow. Right now the initial datacenter login procedure is having some major issues. What is happening is that several of the highest population servers are all on the Aether data center that I also happen to play on. When you attempt to connect to that data center, if it cannot find a slot the client times out… throws a nasty error and exits. This is like the worst possible way to handle this error, and my hope is that we see a patch soon at that at least takes you back to the start screen allowing you to attempt to connect again. Normally speaking it takes a half dozen tries to get past this screen before getting into the login server queue… at which point you have won and get to play the game. Last night I opted to switch machines and got stuck behind the login issues for roughly fifteen tries before being able to make it into the game. If we are running into these problems on a Sunday evening… I feel like life is going to be unbearable come Tuesday for the official launch of the game.

I love Square but sometimes they just make horrible design decisions when it comes to infrastructure. The way the client works is that you log in on the launcher, and then it launches the game passing in an encrypted token with your authentication information. As a result if anything goes wrong with the client, it essentially crashes back to desktop and to the launcher forcing you to log in again. If you have the mobile authenticator this means entering another one time password and beginning the entire process over again. If you remember the above image from the original launch of the game… and all the infrastructure issues we had to deal with. They all came from the fact that they launched the game without any form of a queue system. The positive is that they have fixed that issue and for the most part the game has been stable if you can get past the Data Center gates. I had some initial lag on the first day, but after that the game has been flawless… once you get logged into it. My hope is that with the launch of the game we see a small patch that changes how the client works, in that it no longer drops back to desktop on timeout errors, but instead allows you to attempt a reconnection.

Lord of the Hive

Yesterday was a big day of taking on new content, and potentially there will be some story spoilers here, so apologies ahead of time. When I wrote my last blog post I mentioned that I had unlocked the first trial and yesterday after dropping my wife off for her next trip I managed to attempt it. Ravana the Lord of the Hive appears pretty quickly through the story as being the primal associated with the Gnath, an insectoid beast tribe from the Dravinian Forelands. Instead of waiting around for a full guild group, I queued for it and managed to get a group relatively easily. In the group was a paladin tank that had apparently done the fight a few times, and helped us through the various pit falls. It was decided that I would end up tanking, since the Paladin was wearing mostly strength gear and since Ravana hits extremely hard. This fight like so many other primals has a hard wipe mechanic that if you do not dps down the adds fast enough a saber falls to the ground. Towards the end of the add phase he sucks the entire group up into a whirlwind and they take damage for each saber that is left on the ground in this fashion… in my experience more than one… maybe two is a full raid wipe.

Now with the Free Company I have, my point of view on dps is a bit skewed. Most of us rolled into this expansion in most of a full set of level 130 gear, and most of our dps do silly amounts of damage. We were flat out failing at the dps check mechanic, so I suggested that I go into my new deliverance stance and help with the adds. That seemed to make all the difference in the world as I was able to shred the adds pretty quickly in my new pseudo dps stance. We made it through the encounter, but took long enough to get a limit break three, and another limit break two… and the group was getting precariously close to a second “saber” phase. I didn’t realize our dps was that low, and honestly I walked out of the fight thinking it was just “that hard”. Later in the evening yesterday we walked into the encounter with seven of eight members of the group being from our free company. We did not manage to get a limit break three at all before he died, and during the add phase he didn’t even get a single saber to hit the ground. With that sort of dps… the fight was actually really easy, but I still am concerned about what the fight will be like on extreme mode.

Sohm Al

The second bit of content that I got to experience new yesterday was the dungeon of Sohm Al. You reach it very shortly after finishing the first trial encounter, and it happens to act as a gate keeper for your final Aether Current that you get upon completing the quest. Thankfully as soon as I got there in the content I had healers and dps ready to go with me, so I was able to get a full guild group for my first experience in there. I have to say I am really liking the dungeon design so far, in that they are extremely fun experiences to go through. They remind me very much of the last set of dungeons that they released as far as difficulty level. Additionally so far they seem to be dropping some interesting looking gear, that I hope to collect a full set of. The tanky set that comes from Sohm Al looks like the armor that the Lucia wears, so it might be my next appearance set that I wear for a bit. The new crafted gear that you get from quests however appears to be influenced from the Varlet set that comes from the previous 2.55 expert dungeons. I’ve expanded the number of retainers that I have once more, and now I am feeling less constrained about the awesome things that I am collecting.

When the game released originally I did what I always do in MMOs and tried to complete every single quest objective that it places in front of me. The problem being that in Final Fantasy XIV there are a fixed number of quests available for ALL of your jobs. This meant that after my very first job… I was forced to grind them up using FATEs and dungeons with zero quest support. This time around they seem to be flooding us with quests, but I am tackling them in a very methodical method. Essentially I am following the main storyline until I reach a level gate, meaning that I have to have progressed another level to get the next step. At this point I go back and start working my way through the side quests looking for any that unlock Aether Currents, and after I have completed those, I start doing a bare minimum needed to get to the next level threshold. The goal is that I save plenty of side quests for when I start working on my dragoon, and hopefully that eases that process at least a little bit. Last night I hit another level gate in the story content, but thankfully I have maybe an eighth of a level to go before hitting 55 and progressing again. I am not sure if we are going to raid tonight or not, but in any case my hope is to push through to the next level and continue the story, because it is getting really damned good.

Storm Surge

June 5, 2015 by Belghast

Wall Jumping

World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week. What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games. I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night. I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me. It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit. I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man. Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand. I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have. This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two. Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going. This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group. In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns. We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart. On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop. After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun. Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game. Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold. Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him. The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing. Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy. The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots. Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold. Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together. This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together. Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet. I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play. Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya… it was time to log out for the raid. Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid. Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing. It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it. I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point. I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week. Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight. I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior. There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet. I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active. They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people. This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”. Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there. They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them. Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window. There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat. I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.