chua Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lazy Sunday

Yesterday we pretty much had the textbook definition of a “Lazy Sunday”. After getting almost 13,000 steps on Saturday, I only managed to hit 3,500 yesterday. We had rain to deal with off and on all day, and pretty much opted to stay indoors and vegetate. I think given how hard we have pushed we both could use a day off. Also my wife has been out of school for a week but never really gotten a single day to just recuperate. To make matters worse Tuesday she is flying out for the first of many conferences she will attend this summer. As such it also begins the part of the summer that I hate the most… trying to get used to being alone and then simultaneously get used to being not alone.

I am probably odd that it takes time for me to ease into any change in my environment. I have always been someone who could adapt to rapid and momentary interruptions extremely well. I remain calm under pressure, and get hyper focused on fixing whatever issue is at hand. Ironically I am extremely horrible at dealing with sustained change. When my world is thrown upside down but not immediately righted… I am not a happy camper. I have these little rituals, like this morning blogging thing… that when I do not get to observe them… nothing else is really right the rest of the day. So you can imagine how much turmoil the summer brings me since I tend to have a wife one week and then she is gone the next… and this lasts for at least the month of June but often times some of other months as well.

Easily it takes me a good three days to adjust to any change, sometimes longer. So if she is gone a week 3 days of that will be with me in personal turmoil as I adjust to her being gone. Then when she comes back there will be another three days of me adjusting to the fact that it is no longer just me and the cats in the house. I feel like I deal with all of this fairly well considering, but there are generally some severe low points while she is not around. Thankfully this year she will be travelling back on my Birthday, because in past years she has been gone for it… making it all that more of a depressing occasion. The week days are pretty easy thankfully because the routine of work keeps me pretty busy, and then at night I end up gaming the night away. The weekends on the other hand are pretty rough to be all by myself in the house. Hopefully this year will be a bit easier since I will still need to maintain the routine of walking every night.

Inappropriate Bed Time

Among my friends I have developed a reputation for having unnaturally good luck when it comes to drops and getting the random number generator to perform for me. One of the nifty things that I added to my house is the Moonshiners Cabin. Once every thirty minutes you can play a mini-game to brew a batch of moonshine. So far this is one of my favorite housing mini-games because really… it takes zero skill, just the ability to do a few tasks quickly. If you complete the game you get to roll for 150 reknown, a Neon Beer sign pictured above, one of 5 random dye colors, or the penultimate reward a purple quality “Granok Four Poster Bed”. The bed is also pictured above, but given my odd lighting in the house I am not sure if you can really see it in all its glory. It is a rather large bed decorated with so many odd things. Let me run them down really quickly… a pair of steer horns, a target riddled with bullet holes, a pink heart pillow, a camo pillow, a tiger striped pillow, stage lighting, a camera pointing at the headboard, an LCD monitor showing the beds headboard, and a clothes line with a bra and a pair of tube socks.

I am pretty sure the owner before me was rigging the bed to film porn, but I am not 100% sure. Maybe they were just part of some elaborate sleep study. In any fashion it totally fits the motif of my house which is “Intergalactic Airstream Trailer”. Essentially I want to be that crazy Chua in a teardrop trailer lost somewhere deep in the woods. Right now I am sharing my house with my pet carrots, and I intend to add as many adorable plushies as I happen to find to the house just to crank up the uneasiness factor. I am decorating the house as a “Chua Unhinged”…. which in reality is pretty much every chua everywhere. I was too cheap to buy a proper divider, so I am just using a forest of Elden Holograms to provide a visual divider between the living room and the bedroom. In the bedroom you have the creepy bed, a Chua regeneration chamber, a Chua mechanical arm… that holds a really huge missile. All things that any proper marginally insane Chua would need on a daily basis.

The thing that still has me over the moon about the Wildstar housing system is that so much of it is “functional”. I love Rift and EQ2 for having super detailed cosmetic housing systems… and to be honest in both cases the systems are generally more detailed in what you can do with them. The trump card that Wildstar plays is that they have given you a reason other than for bragging rights to have a cool home. So many of the things that you place in your home can be interacted with and used. For example this is a shot of my friend Tam’s house and he has a crafting table, that works just as well as the crafting tables in any of the cities. Since we are neighbors I can pop over and use it at any time, as well as mine his ore for him… with him getting the lions share of the reward from doing so. They have managed to create housing that not only is interesting and functional… but that also still has deep social ties.

Thirty Minutes Too Late

Throughout most of the weekend my friends and I had been missing each other online for the purpose of running the first Adventure. We often had four within the right level range but not quite five. I am prone to fits of walking away from the screen without warning, and at one point last night I did just this to cook dinner. When I got back in they were about halfway through running the adventure without me. This is no biggy, because I am sure I will get in on another run… but the worst part is I think I am the only one of us who is actually building fully tanky. I feel sorry for Rae because she got drafted into tanking as a Stalker with no tanking gear and no experience using any of the tanking abilities for her class. I stole the above photo from Scopique… and I am assuming at some point today he will have a rundown on his blog.

It sounded like they had a fairly rough time, but everyone soldiered through… no pun intended. I am curious if the engineer tricks will make it easier or not. One of the things I am really digging is that the engineer has a lot of active mitigation. There is this death and decay like mechanic that I drop called Unsteady Miasma. Firstly it deals AOE damage to the group in a 5 meter circle, but the important thing is it gives up to five mobs a debuff called blunder. When that procs it causes their chance to be deflected to increase by 28% at the current tier. As a result this causes me to deflect a not insignificant number of their attacks once you factor in my own deflection bonuses. This is the sort of thing that you want to keep up all of the time, and when I started doing so I noticed my ability to solo 3 man bosses increased massively.

At this point I figure I am about halfway through Auroria, and roughly halfway to level 21. My intermediate goal for the weekend was to hit 20, and I did so just barely. One of the cool things about adventures is that if you are over the suggested level it mentors the party down. This means at least to some extent the content stays evergreen. I am doing a really poor job of following the quest chains, and as a result I have stuff scattered all over the map that is incomplete. Deredune was pretty straight forward, but I was subjected to more than a few “whats over here” moments… and when I got to Auroria the gloves came off completely. I have followed so many wild goose chases in search of ore or an explorer quest item. I feel like I am doing a really poor job of progressing considering I am already starting to lag behind some of the guild members. That said… as busy as I was last week I didn’t really feel like I got to play much.

Wildstar Adventures

Tonight is going to be a busy night to say the least. We will have to do the traditional mad dash around the house to gather up items and pack my wife for her trip. So I am really not sure how much time I will really get to play. However if I do manage to get a solid block of time before or after my walk… I want to run the first Adventure. So this is my goal, I just have no clue at all if I will accomplish it.

#Wildstar #Housing

Insanity Continues

This morning we woke up a little bit before our alarm normally goes off, and instead of getting up and starting the morning process… I opted to simply lay there in bed waiting for it to go off. When I got up moments later to turn off my 25 year old alarm clock, I heard a loud boom and saw a flash of lights out the window. Upon further investigation there was a fire truck pulling into our neighborhood. The rain had been coming down for awhile, so I found some shoes and wandered out to see what the commotion was. There across the street from our house, the neighbors jeep wrangler was on fire with flames shooting high out of the engine compartment. At this point I am trying to figure out what exactly happened in my head, because far as I know Jeeps just don’t spontaneously combust.

I would have tried to snap a photo but I figured that would be extremely crass… and also with the rain coming down I didn’t want to endanger my phone. So many things about this weekend have been absolutely bizarre. There was a point yesterday that while driving around we stopped at an intersection. Normally in Tulsa we have a lot of panhandlers that work intersections, but I was not prepared for what I saw when I looked to my left. There standing on the corner was a man in a Leatherface mask from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a suit with a cup out taking money. I am not sure if his shtick was working but he definitely seemed to be freaking lots of motorists out in the process. I am wondering what exactly was up with this weekend, because so many strange and unusual things happened. Is there some weird alignment of the magnetic forces going on or something… because at this point I am almost expecting a plane engine to come crashing through my roof or something.

Coconut Hunt

Over Mother’s Day weekend we happened to pop into a Walgreens for something on our way out of town and my wife found these Margaritaville drink packets in Pina Colada flavor. Since my wife’s mother loves Pina Colada we picked some up, and it turns out they are pretty amazing. They taste as close as you can get to the actual thing without having the alcohol in them. A few days passed and we went right back to the same store and they had none of them. At which point we checked the other stores in our suburb and were only able to find a few boxes. These went far quicker than I had expected, and that lead to our mission from yesterday. It turns out that by our estimation roughly 20% of all Walgreens seem to have gotten this product in. We went out yesterday running from store to store hunting for the illusive product. All told we managed to gather up 16 packages of them.

That means we are okay for 96 bottles of water before we have to go on another hunt. I feel somewhat like I am in a zombie movie foraging for supplies. I would think this was absolutely insane, but I might have to start doing the same thing. I have a similar obsession with this Cherry Pomegranate drink mix that seems to have gone out of production. The grocery store around the corner from me used to stock it, and now Dollar General seems to get it in as a seasonal item. So I figure at some point soon I will be making my own trip from store to store looking for it. In both cases we have been unable to find it online to just buy in bulk. I guess in the case of the Pina Colada that is not entirely true. You can get it online for $2.35 a box… whereas in the store it is $1 a box. For the time being I figure we will continue foraging, but what concerns us is that my wife’s sister stopped at every Walgreens from South Carolina to Oklahoma and only found 8 boxes.

Laugh it up Fur Ball

I did not expect to like Wildstar very much based on my frustrating experiences in Beta, but what can I say… it has grown on me. I am finally starting to feel like I grasp the interface and especially the mapping system. I would still like to see the ability to set a waypoint similar to other games and have a little thing blink on the side of the mini-map for which direction to go. I still don’t really care for the giant temporary arrow thing… but I am getting used to using it. My army of bots delights me constantly, as does my chosen character. I feel like I tried to make as close to the traditional “Belghast” appearance as I could with a fuzzy rat thing. It is the animations and movement that makes me happy. I streamed for a bit yesterday, and you can see me constantly bouncing and double jumping around.

I have to admit… double jump is a big part of my enjoyment. It is my firm belief that every game is better with double jump. I guess this is helped by the fact that I chose the Explorer path, which is essentially the “I like jumping puzzles” path. Thankfully you get path abilities like “Safe Fall” that have already come in extremely handy as I bound off the edge of things. The other thing I am loving is the fact that I seem to be able to solo a lot of the group content with my robot armada. Sure it takes a lot of concentration, and careful use of cooldowns and stuns… but I’ve managed to solo almost all of the 2+ boss type encounters. Bascially I need to come up with a verbiage to describe them… because right now I am calling them “Angry Skulls” and “Angry Skulls with Horns”.

As much as I might not want to… I really do enjoy the over the top nature of this game. There is absolutely nothing subtle about any of it… and I feel like starting in Crimson Isle and then moving to Deredune has made all the difference in the world for me. I rolled a new Chua Spellslinger and I plan on taking it the Levithan Bay to Ellevar route to see if it is somehow better now that I grasp the game concepts a little bit better. It might simply be that I have gotten used to the visual bombardment that is Wildstar. Compared to Elder Scrolls Online it still feels like trying to make sense of the Las Vegas Strip… but I am finding it enjoyable nonetheless. I can see why people are so fanatical about this game already, because it is very much like a “better” World of Warcraft. I remember being just as fanatical with Rift proposed being the same kind of thing. Basically the real challenge is going to be getting players to stick around for more than 1-3 months, but that seems to be the same struggle everyone is dealing with. For the time being I am switching back and forth between this and ESO, and trying to mix in as many other titles as I can in the process.

#Wildstar