druid Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Leveling Game

July 27, 2016 by Belghast

Buckling Some Swash

Since the 7.0.3 patch landed in World of Warcraft, I have been more than a little obsessed with relearning classes given the significant changes to the bevy of talent trees. On my rogue I have more or less always been combat, other than a brief flirtation with subtlety during vanilla thanks to knowing a few insane “sub” rogues. If one thing should be certain by now is that I am not a huge fan of stealth mechanics, and my ideal “rogue” is that of a pirate or swashbuckler rather than assassin or thief. As a result it feels like Outlaw the rebranded combat is essentially tailor made for me. The spec itself is made up largely of huge sword slash moves and pistol shots, making it feel a lot to me like the Witch Hunter from Warhammer Online. The core of the gameplay focuses around either a melee slash builder or short range pistol shot builder, coupled with a slashing combo dump and a long range combo dump that also happens to stun the target… but is on a rather long cooldown. Other than these there is an additional combo dump called Roll the Bones which gives your character one or more buffs from a list of available buffs. For those who raided during Wrath of the Lich King, it reminds me quite a bit of the way Deathbringer’s Will felt. Completely unpredictable but when the buff is up it always does something interesting. When the patch landed my rogue was sitting at level 91 and had barely seen anything past the Garrison. As of yesterday I dinged 100 and have begun gearing him to at least do some basic content like LFR.

Not to be undone by the new school rogue experience, I opted to start working on my druid again which I generally play as feral. Feral mostly feels the same as it always has, which now represents the way combat rogue largely previously felt. In some ways I am grateful that it didn’t change a whole lot, but in other ways I admit I am a little disappointed. So many classes with Outlaw Rogue and Survival Hunter feel new and different and shiny… that the ones like Feral Druid and Protection Warrior that stayed largely the same feel a little diminished. Belgarou had been my character of choice for leveling during the AggroChat podcast for awhile now, and I had made slow and prodding progress. However last night I made a serious push and went from just shy of 96 to 100 in a single evening. Traditionally when I level characters I follow a basic pattern which will make completionists cringe. I tend to say in Shadowmoon Valley until 92, and then immediately drop those quests and swap to Gorgrond until 94. From Gorgrond I jump to Terrokar, and then again to Spires of Arak at 96. Finally I reach Nagrand at 98 and continue there until I ding, with the theory that spending the maximum amount of time in that zone will mean I will have the best gear to start angling for the 620 item level that unlocks that first LFR. The end result is a quick succession of zones each one giving me the maximum experience for my level and getting me to the level cap as soon as possible.

The Stable Fills

I am by no means the fastest at leveling characters, but I am doing largely okay when I can actually stick with a game for any given period of time. At this point I have eight level 100s, but that is nothing even vaguely close to the number that Grace has and hers span multiple servers. In theory the next closest to 100 would be Belglorian my priest, but honestly I am not super enthused about leveling it. At some point I want to try out the new Shadow with its Old God based lore, but I am in no real rush. I mean it would be awesome to have my tailor at max level when Legion lands, but I am thinking it might be too “finger wiggly” for me at the moment. There is of course my monk who is still sitting at level 53, but that means a return to more leather. I am kinda getting tired of wearing leather, since I just finished off my rogue and druid back to back. Also there is the problem that for whatever reason I have never been able to get into the flow of a monk. I really enjoy playing pugilist in Final Fantasy XIV, and I had a Monk in Everquest II… but for whatever reason the World of Warcraft version doesn’t feel as interesting. For me at least it feels very much like another dual wielding class, since I went the dpsy version. Brewmaster tanking felt odd, and “Fistweaving” I have heard is no longer a thing… so more than likely that means I will always be a sorta rogue on that class.

As a result it seems like my next leveling target is going to be the Warlock, because it is just finger wiggly enough for me to be able to enjoy it. Additionally all that time I spent leveling my Arcanist in Final Fantasy XIV has taught me a greater respect for damage over time classes. Generally speaking I have always been a demonology player, because I like running around with giant demon pets. However I might branch out a bit and try something new, it all depends on if I can get the swing of the new changes. In any case I am not exactly sure why I have been on this marathon leveling session, but I am mostly just going with the flow. I think part of it is also my attempt to catch them all as far as appearances go. I have added so many items to my wardrobe that it isn’t even funny. The hope is that in doing this push I will get at least one leather and one cloth class that I actually enjoy playing, that I can run old world content with for those cloth and leather pieces that I seem to be missing. I have a huge stash of plate and chain, because those are all classes that I play pretty frequently. The worst seems to be the finger wigglers, so I am hoping that I can make the Warlock into a soloing beast to farm up awesome transmog sets with. In any case… this has been my recent obsession and I thought I would share it with you.

Flowers for Garou

May 16, 2016 by Belghast

More Flora

It feels really strange to follow up yesterdays post. Those were a bunch of things that I felt like I needed to get out there, and to be honest about the doubt that I had been struggling with. As it stands right now I am for certain taking a break over Memorial Day weekend rather than either pre-writing posts or arranging for guest posts. I am also contemplating starting to make weekends optional. Sunday is really the day that becomes madness for me because I am also scurrying around that morning trying to wrap up the various stuff required for posting an episode of aggrochat. As far as this weekend, it was honestly one without a ton of gaming. Instead I spent a large amount of time hanging out in the backyard. Scope creep is a term we use in development when a project has gone beyond its boundaries in the number of features the user is requesting. Our backyard has long since entered scope creep territory and that’s okay. The original goal was just to make it more livable, and this has involved a whole sequence of smaller steps leading up to where we are today. Once again I took a panorama of the progress, and you can see the larger version here.

We have now kept the original batch of flowers alive and actually thriving for two weeks now… so of course we doubled down on the proposition. We spent a bit of Saturday afternoon tracking down more of the shepherds hooks so that we could have matching ones to the ones we had picked up at ALDI a few weeks back. The other night while walking with a friend, my wife saw a hanging basket at a near by pop up nursery that she really liked. We also happened to have a coupon from that same pop-up that if we spent $20 we could get a free hanging basket, so the end result is us adopting the purple, yellow and white hanging baskets and adding them to my “flower babies” as I have taken to calling them. The only big things left are to wait on the grass to finish filling in where the weed treatments left barren patches… and so far it has started. Then there is of course the idea kicking around about replacing the table we have with something that sits a little lower to the ground and that we could use our pseudo-Adirondack chairs with. Then I am contemplating getting another of the umbrellas we found on sale to go in a post on the far deck side of the pool to add a little shade there from within the pool. Like I said…. scope creep abounds.

The most interesting piece of scope creep over the last week however is the fact that we have entered the realm of bird stewardship. I’ve not been able to take a great shot of them but we have soooo many birds. In the panoramic shot you can see on the right side that I have a feeder hanging in among the tree that is really an overgrown hedge. I’ve begun feeding fairly regularly, a first a blend from the Audubon soceity and later a bulk blend we got from Sam’s that fairly closely matched the nutritional mix of the first one. Sunday morning while watering the flowers I filled the feeder up to roughly the halfway mark because it was ultimately what was left in the 40 pound bag after dumping the rest into a tightly sealed container. This was at roughly 9 am… by the time we were out in the yard after my wife got home from church around 11 am… the feeder was completely empty again. There have been times I have counted a dozen tiny sparrows feeding at the same time, with a bunch of cardinals, bluejays, and various sundry other birds that I cannot yet identify roaming around. We have a couple that look like doves of some sort, and another couple that look like pidgeons. Basically the entire time we have lived here I have wanted birds to hang out in the backyard and in the evenings I have been able to watch the baby sparrows hop and play around on the deck. Unfortunately they are all pretty skittish at the moment, except for the Robins… they seem more than happy to roam within close distance of us looking for worms. In any case… this is the non-gaming activity that is taking up a good chunk of my time. On the weekends and evenings we tend to eat outdoors hanging out in our rockers watching the flora and fauna. Yup… I am officially old, but not minding a minute of it.

Surprising Whim

Most of my weekend gaming was spent in Diablo 3, doing various things… and largely without purpose. I managed to get my stash tab on Friday, and from this point on everything else is gravy in Season 6. For awhile now even before the season, Diablo was the game I played when I didn’t know what else to play… and I spent a huge chunk of the weekend not knowing what else to play. Normally Destiny would fill this niche but I didn’t really want to hang out upstairs when the couch was so damned comfy. During the weekend I found out that my good friends Chestnut and Chaide from Wildstar have decided to re-up World of Warcraft, and the glory that is our collective community managed to recruit them to hang out on Argent Dawn Alliance with us. I ended up logging in to do some invites last night and wound up sticking around and playing my Druid. There was a part of me that thought… wouldn’t it be glorious if I could somehow ride into Legion with a full army of level 100 characters. The actual leveling game of World of Warcraft is something that I have enjoyed greatly… it is just the Garrison busywork that ends up getting me down and making me no longer want to play.

So the idea is simple… if I can focus heavily on leveling and or gearing my characters I might be able to get back into the game for a bit. While watching my Sunday night shows, I managed to push from 91 to 93 and make a big dent in Shadowmoon Valley. Normally speaking I take this abbreviated path around Draenor, jumping each time a new zone opens up to me. This time around however I think I am going to just focus on the questing, because that is the thing that seems to be able to hold my focus even when the rush to end game doesn’t. I mean with this character I am not pushing to get anywhere, and Hellfire Citadel feels stifling at the moment so I am in no rush to get back there with LFR. As it stands I have my Druid, Priest, Rogue, Mage, Warlock and Monk to level… and I am sure that this current burst of interest in World of Warcraft won’t probably sustain my way through all of them, but I might be able to at least springboard this into a renewed interest in MMOs as a whole. The absolute hardest for me is going to be the Mage because… really I could care less about finger wigglers and the least is always the pure finger wigglers. I can pretend the Discipline Priest is a cloth tank, and I can focus on the awesome demon pets on the Warlock. However with that mage… all I am left with is the fact that I am slinging spells which never really feels amazing. Anyways who knows how long I will be around for, but I enjoyed myself last night.

Winter and Yeti

December 28, 2015 by Belghast

Winter Arrives at Casa Belghast

So something I am realizing yet again is how badly I need a schedule to function. During the work week, I am on super tight time constraints. I get up at 5:30, make coffee, pack my wife’s lunch, and then am usually upstairs sitting at my keyboard by just a little after 6. Then I bang out a blog post, feed the animals… play with the ferrets because they are begging to be picked up… and then am out the door at around 7 am. On the weekends however…. and on this holiday break… I am completely all over the place with my blogging. When I know there is no real time constraints… I feel free to screw around in the morning. I’ve been reading twitter and blogs for the last two hours… and finally it is getting to the point where it is kinda embarrassing that it is 11:30 and I have yet to produce a blog post. While I complain about stress, I am also apparently one of those people who thinks most clearly when the shit is hitting the fan… or at least I am bumping up against a deadline. It is like my creativity flows more freely when I know there is something riding on the line. I know that at pretty much I can start writing and come up with a post… and because of that… it means when there is no deadline I keep putting it off. I am the king of procrastination… and among the list of things that need to do today is book my hotel room for Pax South… which is only a few weeks away.

As you can see in the above image, Winter has finally arrived in Casa del Belghast. For most of the Christmas break so far it has been windy as hell, but still pretty warm. On Saturday, it started raining, but between the showers… it was still nice and warm outside. The thermostat started to turn down yesterday, and overnight the constant rain turned to ice, and eventually as of this morning snow. The Monday morning commute was apparently hell, based on conversations with the folks holding down the fort. This is one of those moments when I am damned happy that I still have essentially another week to go before I have to worry about it, and by then I am hoping that we have returned to the balmy conditions we have been in recently. I am perfectly fine with not having a “real winter” here in Oklahoma, because our normal Ice Storms suck. If we got fluffy and happy snow like the rest of the world seems to, I would be perfectly fine with winter. Instead we get ice… and lots of it… that usually starts out as sleet and then eventually becomes glaze ice that freezes to anything it hits… high means power lines. Why the hell we have above ground powerlines still boggles me… because the ice can snap the aerials like very brittle twigs. Thankfully from what it seems, this is going to be our major day of ice and snow… and then it will warm back up shortly after.

Mission Yeti: Accomplished

I told Lodur last night, that he would have to hold down the fort without me… because I am officially out of the Team 360 No Mount business. I’ve talked over the last few days of my Christmas gift that required a little work. A really good friend of mine read my commentary about the struggle to get the holiday Yeti mount, and when she managed to get two of them… pinged me that she had a gift for me. The gotcha of course was that it was on a server that I have zero characters, so I rolled a level 1 druid and have been leveling like crazy over the last few days. It took me roughly two days of marathoning Star Wars movies to go from 1 to 40 and last night I wrapped it up getting the final two thirds of a level in Feralas. I stopped what I was doing as soon as I dinged and made my way to Orgrimmar to learn Journeyman Riding, and of course learn the mount. From there I fiddled around and got to an interesting vantage point to take a few screenshots. I am super happy to have the mount, but also really enjoyed the “Catte Durid” leveling process. The only problem is… that this character is now stranded on a server that I am not sure if I will play much on.

I talked a bit about the general toxic environment I encountered while leveling the character, which does not give me warm fuzzies about staying there. That said this is the only server that my friend really has characters on. The frustrating part is that to move a character it is $25 each, which seems like a lot of money when you are looking at an army of alts. Considering that at this point moving a character is a scripted process, and requires zero manual intervention… the game as a whole would be a happier place if they just adopted the Rift system of server transfers. In that game you can move one character per week for free, pending that character is in good standing and above the level of 15. That means over time you can move servers with your characters, and sure you have to wait a week per… but it lets you get out of bad situations without being taxed into oblivion for doing it. There are many times that players end up getting stuck on a server that they literally do not know anyone playing the game anymore. So it seems like insult to the injury of losing their friends…. to ask them to cough up another $25 per character to move off of the bad environment. Sure you can always group with Battle.net but there is something you miss by not having access to the friendly green spam of guild chat… and all the while I was leveling this druid… I felt the pangs of not having access to my friends. At some point I will likely delete the druid I have on The Scryers and move this character to that server, but in the meantime it will serve as a sort of hiding out alt… which is largely why I have not mentioned the server name yet.

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015

December 27, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Lagged

There are some mornings when trying to think is a struggle… this is one of those mornings. Last night I suffered from a pretty bad bout of insomnia, and instead of just sitting in bed and hoping for sleep to find me… I got up and played PS4. At which point I realized it was 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to try and sort out how to sleep. The day as a whole today is rainy and nasty and the antithesis of just how delightful the holiday was here in Oklahoma. On Christmas day I was running around in a short sleeved shirt, and were it not for the wind I wouldn’t have needed my hoodie. We were warned however that just after the holiday the temperature would drop, and from the sounds of it the panhandle of the state is now getting lots of ice. Thusfar it has been only rain…. but so much of it that sitting upstairs in my office it actually drowned out the sound of all of the various machines whirring away. I finally got up around 8:30 and attempted to start the day, but the problem being… that I have largely just been staring at the screen unable to get a post started. Then suddenly I remembered…. it’s Sunday… the day I have a crutch to fall back on in the form of the week in review posts. So I am hobbling along on this crutch for all that is sacred in the world… otherwise I have no clue what I would write about.

Return of Destiny

I guess Bungie got the message that it sucks when Xur does not have a weapon option during the Friday festivities. The last four or five weeks he has brought some new weapon each time…. and this week was no different with the newly Year-2-ized version of the MIDA Multitool. During this month he has also brought the Monte Carlo, Hardlight, and Telesto. The only problem here is Friday I have to make a decision… do I care enough about getting this weapon to grind out the 23 strange coins needed to purchase it. The Monte Carlo was a no brainer, because I have heard so many good things about this gun… that I just had to play with one myself. Telesto was similarly a no brainer, because I have gotten two of these to drop… so had no need for it. MIDA and Hardlight however I was left with the decision if it was really worth the needed grinding to pick it up. With the Hardlight I decided… that I already have a lot of Auto Rifles that I really like… between my love of the Zarinaea-D, Zhalo Supercell, Monte Carlo and the newly improved Fabian Strategy… I had no real use for a new Auto Rifle to add to the mix. For the MIDA however I crowd sourced my opinion and got messages back from Sig and Squirrel both saying to pick it up… that it was both amazing in PVE and PVP. So far I am liking it, but I am having to get used to using a Scout Rifle again. I have largely just been using Auto and Pulse Rifles for awhile now, so it is taking some adjusting. The truth is… for the most part there are very few weapons that I don’t like in Destiny.

Last night while dealing with Insomnia I decided to cast aside the Hunter and Titan briefly and instead focus on the Warlock who still need to hit the level cap of 40. I realize I could be leveling through doing the Taken King content, but instead I just ended up clearing out my bounty log. I am finally reaching the point where my Stranger’s Rifle is beginning to show its age, as I finally got some weapon drops that are technically higher than it is. The problem is… I am so damned used to using the Stranger’s Rifle… and the whole fully automatic pulse rifle thing is so overpowered… that I am probably going to keep at it until I hit 40, or at least until I get a purple weapon to replace it with. In the meantime I am left with the decision… do I grind my way to 40 like I am doing in a super chill and enjoyable way… or do I actually start with the quests. On my Hunter I largely waited to do quests until I was at the level cap, so I could revel in the sweet sweet engram drops that seem to happen like candy during missions. I still have all of the House of Wolves and Dark Beyond quests as well… and those in theory won’t be nearly as beneficial gear wise. So I might just start on doing those and see how close to 40 I can get.

Another thing I did this week was get my Ace of Spades exotic on the hunter. I am currently on the First Curse of the step of the Gunsmith quest on my Titan… and I have to say I am simply not looking forward to doing all of the bullshit you have to do to get it. The only problem with Ace of Spades is just how crap hand cannons seem to be right now. I am not sure which I dislike more… the absolute potato range of them… or just how small the magazine and ammunition pool is in general with them. I run out of ammunition while using a hand cannon faster than almost anything else… and I never seem to get enough normal ammo drops to be able to use these in strikes. So instead every now and then I break them out while doing bounties when things don’t matter quite so much. The positive of Ace of Spades however is that it just look bad ass. So in theory it might get some use, but not really likely given all of the other exotics that I have and legendaries that are also equally well stated.

World of Warcraft

Wow-64 2015-12-27 11-00-22-52 — Catte Druid in the Forest

The other day I posted about my mission that level a Cat Druid to 40 all so that I could leave the 360NoMount club… and add the Christmas Yeti mount to my collection. It has been two days and I am now getting close to the goal. As of last night when I finally reached the point where I thought it was probably time to attempt going to sleep… I was roughly 2/3rds of a level from 40 and was just now starting Feralas. It has been a fun ride pushing up a new Cow Druid, and went a lot faster than I might had expected. I took a slightly different route than I did with my Warlock and the end result feels like I got a lot more straight forward Kill Ten type quests which I can burn through insanely quickly. The other thing that helped is the fact that my druid is a skinner… and I was constantly jumping random leather bearing animals along the way to level that. Back the in the day all of the leveling guides used to tell you to always be engaged in killing something… like if there was a mob on your way to your objective to always kill it no matter what. Having done that on the Druid and not so much on the Warlock… I have to say that yes in fact that is the superior way to level especially with all of the experience boosted heirlooms that I am wearing. The question is… now that I have almost achieved my goal… do I hit 40 and quit… or do I keep pushing up the druid. I am not a big fan of the server cluster I am on, and the people seem to be insanely rude compared to Argent Dawn so at some point I may transfer the druid over once I finish it. I realize I can cross realm group… but man… some of the stuff I have encountered here I have never run into on AD. That is saying a lot given that I used to always think of Argent Dawn as a pretty horrific place.

Wow-64 2015-12-27 11-02-16-81 — Me and my Blueberry

The other activity that I spent time this week doing was leveling my Warlock. Basically playing her was my reward for completing my holiday dailies… and in part the only reason why I made so much progress on the druid so quickly, is that I completely started ignoring that holiday dailies existed. At some point I need to go through all of my characters and loot the presents in Orgrimmar and Ironforge before they poof, but I think once I get to 40 on the druid I am going to switch back to playing the Warlock. It is funny how isolating it can be playing on a different server even though you have access to BNet and your friends list. Facepull is just friendly and somewhat active green spam and I love having it around. It is my hope that at some point soon we will get the rumored battlenet channels, which will hopefully let us have guild like chat spanning across multiple games. If there was an addon that existed that gave me access to slack while playing World of Warcraft… I would be in a perfect place.