elder scrolls Archives - Page 13 of 19

Wandering Osage County

April 6, 2014 by Belghast

Fridge Frenzy

I don’t really deal with change well, even if it is a positive one. As a result this morning I am a bundle of nerves and will maintain that state until the big event of the day is over. As the title might suggest, we are getting a new fridge today. We reached a point of equilibrium in determining that it had to happen immediately if not sooner. For awhile the freezer was not cold enough to keep ice cream, but cold enough for pretty much everything else. As a result we had been trying to eat up as much stuff from the freezer as we could to make the inevitable cleanout that much easier. I believe it was Thursday at lunch, I went home to take a breathing treatment… and since I was already home decided to fix some taquitos to help empty that box out.

I pulled them out of the package and they felt cold but definitely not frozen. This is the point at which I should have said to myself… self don’t eat this. However I am dumb… and this little warning klaxon never chimed in my head. As a result I got insanely sick starting about thirty minutes after finishing them off. Basically our food in our freezer was starting to go bad, rather than just not be fully frozen. As a result this morning we got up early… which 6 am is super early for me on a Sunday, and cleaned the house in preparation for the refrigerator to arrive sometime between the hours of 8 am and noon. The picture to the side is one I was able to find on the web of the fridge we ended up going with. We have a friend that works for Lowes and it seems as though he was able to hook us up with his employee discount. We purposefully wanted something simple… because generally speaking simple lasts.

The previous fridge we had was a wedding present, and we’ve had it happily chugging away for sixteen years. It was as bare bones as you can get, and it worked well for a long time. This one is not quite so bare bones, but has something we’ve always wanted… ice and water in the door. However my wife purposefully wanted one with separate slots for ice and water, again trying to keep the mechanism behind each as simple as possible. At this point we are just praying that one it does in fact fit the hole in our kitchen, and two the water line that exists works and everything hooks up nicely. Until those things happen… I will be a bundle of nerves.

Wandering Osage County

Yesterday it was absolutely gorgeous out, and as such my wife and I both had a serious case of wanderlust. There were certain things that needed to get taken care of, namely dropping her car off to get an oil change. The funny thing about having a FitBit is that it changes your behaviors in an effort to get more steps in. As a result we drove the car around to the Hibdon Tires location around the corner from our house, and walked back home through our neighborhood. We gathered up our cameras and were on the road after a pitstop a nearby QuikTrip. At first we had no real idea where we were going, then like so many of our other trips… this one started with a simple question. What happens if you go past Skiatook on highway 20. We could have looked on a map sure, but since we had never really been past the statuary on Skiatook’s main strip… we opted to just drive over there and see.

For a long while there is absolutely nothing, then all the sudden you arrive at Skiatook lake. Now we knew this existed, because you hear about it on the news, but I always expected it to be rather small. Instead you have a pretty huge lake, with what seems like a focus on fishing. There are lots of areas where there are submerged trees that would make for amazing bass fishing. There were a few boats in places that I wondered how in the hell they navigated around to that area. I am sure it was extremely careful use of a trolling motor and a lot of patience. We continued on past Skiatook lake, because again the road was way too nice for it not to go someplace. As a result we ended up in Hominy. Now mind you… in 1999 we lived in a town next door to Hominy, so this was not the first time we had been there. In fact we had a friend that lived there, and got our very first ferret as a rescue from the town.

Hominy was not completely foreign territory, but we had not really explored it in ages. We saw the semi-renovated train depot that now serves as the chamber of commerce and parked my jeep there. Like most small towns in Oklahoma, Hominy is visibly struggling to keep business. However they seem to have more pride than most. Instead of letting buildings set vacant and become a danger, some local artist had taken to painting murals to cover up the empty glass windows. Most of them are devoted to patriotic themes, and there is a store front “branded” for each of the branches of the armed forces as well as the coast and national guards. In addition there seems to be an Native American artist in the town who is similarly painting murals on the sides of buildings. While nice, this is not the sort of stuff that interests me. I love taking pictures of broken down buildings and urban decay.

The people in the town were super nice, and we ended up having conversations with a few strangers. There was this really nice lady that runs the Napa auto parts store that gave us the lay of the land. We also carried on a conversation with the guy that runs the nearby cafe, and watched him precariously teetering on a ladder… in a fashion that the ladder was not really designed to be used. He had just moved into the cafe had was putting up a new sign that would be easily seen from a tall hanging post. The town had a lot of potential, with these little areas where they had torn out a dilapidated building… that could be turned into nice little courtyards for outdoor dining, or even parks. In any case Hominy was a nice and safe place to wander around for awhile, and no one seemed to find it terribly odd that we were walking the town on foot with camera equipment.

You can see the full album full of photos I took in Hominy here.

Clearance Lego Find

I love summertime for the insane clearance deals you can find at various stores. Namely each and every Wal-mart seems to have complete autonomy on what they actually put on clearance. As a result if you are willing to hit multiples of them, you can find some pretty amazing stuff. From Hominy the easiest way to get back to the Tulsa area is to go through Cleveland… another town we were familiar with due to friends living there. While Hominy is pretty much your standard small town, Cleveland is pretty much just a bedroom community for Tulsa. That said they do have a newish Wal-mart, and at that point I was desperately in need of a bathroom. The prospect of clearance Legos was just a nice fringe benefit.

Just like it is up to each Wal-mart to determine what goes on sale, it is up to each to determine where exactly in the store it will be located. Some stores dedicate an isle or two to clearance, others jam it out in their garden centers, and the worst just mark down items on the shelf mixed in with normal priced stuff. Cleveland Wal-mart had one of the better setups that I have seen mostly in small town stores. They had two full isles dedicated to a mixed jumble of non-clothing clearance items mixed from around the store. This place seriously was the Lego motherlode. The above sets were originally $55 to $65 dollars, and I picked them up for $30 to $35 dollars. This is where I love having a smart phone. I end up looking up the sets and then determining if it is good enough of a deal for me to pick them up.

They had some of the really huge sets on clearance too, but even though the set might have been $90 originally… it sitting there for $70 is still a good chunk of change and not really worth it for me. Similarly there are times where the smaller sets are just not good enough for the price. THey had a Star Wars lego set, that was some sort of a probe droid. The only reason why I would have really wanted it were for the unique Jedi minifigs. But the realist in me had to think that really… the probe droid was made almost entirely out of otherwise not so cool pieces. So while you got a few nice minifigs, you also got a bunch of junk that you would likely never use again for another building. I am super happy with the sets I managed to pick up, and I am at least halfway to having all three TMNT minifigs. The other really awesome thing is that I didn’t even notice until I got home that the Star Wars set comes with Cad Bane… who is awesome.

Ding Twenty

Finally after all of this excitement I managed to get home and actually sit down to play. At this point I have played 46 hours of game time on my Dragon Knight since launch. I feel as though every level has been an accomplishment. At this point I am twenty, and I am pretty damned proud of that fact. Twenty feels like an actual accomplishment, instead of something you manage to get on your very first day of gameplay. One of the things that Elder Scrolls Online has managed to do… is to bring back a sense of accomplishment with each and every ding. In many ways so much of the game feels like a throwback to an earlier time when each and every thing was hard fought. When you step into a public dungeon, you can feel the Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest roots. This is the concept I wish I could convey properly to people, because I Think a lot more people would enjoy the game if they saw just how deep and nuanced it is.

The big event of the night is that we pulled together a group and delved into the Wayrest Sewers dungeon. So far other than the fact that it takes place in a sewer… and that you are slopping around in a lot of rat filled muck… I have to say this was my favorite to date. It feels in many ways like the Deadmines of this game, in that there is a really nice fight the rebels style storyline going through it. I won’t go into much detail, because I don’t want to spoil the storyline, but the quest reward at the end is a really nice heavy armor chest piece. Additionally a spiffy ring and sword dropped that I managed to talk my healer out of. That has been my favorite thing about these dungeons, is that folks are more than willing to swap gear around to whoever needs it. Like I managed to get a really amazing two hander, that I happily swapped over to Waren who is currently using that as his main weapon choice. As of today… we are exactly a week into the game, and I have to say I am still loving every minute of it.

#Lego #Photography #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #RealLife

Savior of Glenumbra

April 5, 2014 by Belghast

Awkward Ex-Coworkers

We are having some minor issues with my wife’s vehicle, so as a result I had to get up crazy early yesterday morning to drive her into work. Crazy early because I still wanted to be able to blog like normal, and she generally leaves when I am about halfway done with my morning post. As a result it made the entire day feel sluggish. After work we made plans to go eat at one of my favorite restaurants near her workplace so I could get cheese tots and spicy chicken. The above shot is what the dish looks like… I snapped a photo some time ago to brag on her for bringing it home to me one night. We hung out and ate with another teacher friend of hers and it was a pretty awesome time… until something happened to taint it.

We had been there for a little bit, and our order had not arrived when I noticed someone walk in that looked vaguely familiar. While trying to place him I saw his wife walk in and immediately the combination of the two faces together snapped in my memory. These were some ex-coworkers and while they were nice enough… they came from a period of time when I was at the worst place I have ever worked. To make it worse they are both extremely good friends with what I considered to be the boss from hell. So it is not exactly the situation where I want to go over and “catch up”. Thankfully they were with what looked like parents and too busy with their own conversations to notice me much.

I hate that anyone associated with that workplace is immediately flagged as an enemy in my head, and I am not really sure how to get past it. Every place I have ever worked I have been the group rockstar, and the current environment is no less true… although in my present situation we have three rockstars working on the same team. This workplace however, from day one there was nothing I could ever do right. The boss would loosely stub things out in a project website, with roughly a single sentence describing what needed to be done.

If I asked questions as to what the hell he meant by that… I would catch hell for not taking initiative. If I figured things out on my own, and just got the job done… I would catch hell for not doing it exactly like he wanted it to be done. There was seriously a no win situation, and the two people that walked in represented that time period in my life. Every time I see someone associated with that period I just want to scream how much of an asshole that guy was and how he made my life complete and total crap. But instead I smile and nod and try my damnedest to ignore them and hope they walk away.

Savior of Glenumbra

Last night we got home fairly late from meeting the friend for dinner, so by the time I made it upstairs it was almost eight. At that point folks had already paired up into dungeon runs, so I opted to simply focus on finishing up the rest of Glenumbra. I feel like I am moving super slow, because I simply cannot chew through the Elder Scrolls content as fast as others seem to be able to. I have friends who have been “finished” with Glenumbra for some time, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they are nowhere near 100% on the zone… and quite truthfully as much time as I have spent there I seriously doubt I have gotten everything either. I do have all of the icons on the map turned from black to white, and have gotten 100% of the skyshards… so I feel like it is “good enough” for me to move on. Last night after finishing Crosswych I got the “Savior of Glenumbra” achievement.

I have to say… Stormhaven means serious business. I managed to get to level 18 in Glenumbra before moving on, but when I moved into Stormhaven that is supposed to be a 15+ zone I noticed everything hit considerably harder. Granted this could be in part to the fact that I am still mostly wearing level 14 gear, since I need High Iron which cannot be found in Glenumbra. More so I think that they have just ratcheted up the difficulty. Instead of fighting random bandits, you are now fighting random daedra. While they might not have the hitpoint pool… Clanfear are Clanfear… they all seem to be just as hard to kill. The new zone is just as lovely, if not slightly more damaged by the conflict. The screenshots are from the first town, which is a lovely little port just a ways inside of the zone line. I look forward to meandering my way across the zone like I did in glenumbra.

I swear this game was designed specifically for me, because it is littered with things to find and interesting things to kill. I love that crafting can be leveled without having ever crafted a single item. I am constantly bringing back bags full of gear that I got from killing baddies, and through doing nothing but deconstruction I have managed to get Woodworking to 10, and Clothing to 9. While I have been making plenty of blacksmithing items, I still have gotten most of my levels from deconstructing “found” things. This is the only game system I have ever played that supported leveling crafting through mass slaughter. I have to say I love it though, it lets me play the game the way I want to play it, and limit my time hovering over the forge.

Visiting a Friend

This morning I saw a tweet from Scopique thanking me for reminding him to feed his claim in Landmark… which in turn reminded me to log in and feed my own. As much as it might annoy me that we can only store five days worth of copper in our claim banks, it is in the very least forcing me to log in every few days to make sure I have it fully stocked. Right now I am in a weird place with my own claim. I need to go on another massive stone harvesting run, but I have not been able to bring myself to do so… because I would rather be playing Elder Scrolls Online. For a few days however my friend Syl has said that I should pop by her claim and see the progress. As a result I ended up with a pretty cool screenshot of the pair of us overlooking her claim.

I hope she won’t be cross with me for posting a picture of her Inn “in progress”. I have to say the interior is coming along extremely well. I love the fireplace and the basin, and on a rack behind me is a really cool lance that she made from scratch. I love the way the house is wrapped around the tree. Makes me realize just how much work I need to do on my own. I am really good at roughing out massive structures, but I always lack the drive to go back in later and do the fine detail work. She however seems to excel at it, putting the finishing touches on rooms as she builds them. Super impressed with what she has done so far, and hopefully at some point this weekend I will get the drive to log in and go on another massive stone farming expedition. If nothing else was cool to pop over and see her claim for a bit before logging to work on this here blog post. Is that blogception?

#ElderScrollsOnline #Landmark #Glenumbra #Stormhaven #ESO

Banished Cells and Fungal Grotto

April 3, 2014 by Belghast

Life in Tornado Alley

A few days at it was 40* out, and now it is 72* this early in the morning. While yes I live in Oklahoma, where the weather pattern can change in the blink of an eye. However even for us this seems a bit abrupt. It seems that Tornado season has snuck up on us. Over the next several evenings we have a chance of a Tornado each and every night. The high today is supposed to get up to 83* and it reminds me all too much of last year. When we jumped from temperatures in the 40s to temperatures in the 90s over a few weeks. It seems like we are getting less and less of a “spring” to enjoy. Thankfully nothing has really materialized yet out of the Tornado threat, but we still have several more nights of watching the local station to make sure nothing is going on.

Today is the day we purchase our new refrigerator. We ended up deciding on a side by side, because it gives us more freezer space. We eat an inordinate amount of frozen foods, and really don’t keep much in the fridge side apart from leftovers. Additionally I have always wanted ice and water in the door. Growing up we never had a fridge that was not the traditional over/under kind, and I coveted going to friends houses where they had cold water “on tap”. We’ve spent most of the week eating up anything from our freezer to attempt to make the transition that will likely occur this weekend “easier”. We waited this long primarily because we have a friend who works at the appliance store, and they are starting a 10% off sale today. It will be nice to just have this over with and have a new and fully functional fridge in its place.

Banished Cells and Fungal Grotto

In MMO gaming there is what is “doable” and then there is what is “optimal”. Folks have relied on the Holy Trinity mixture of 1 healer, 1 tank and 2-3 dps for years as the “optimal” build. However in Elder Scrolls Online the lines get blurred a bit. So far we have made two healers, a tank and a dps work fairly well, and struggled a bit with the 1/1/2 combination that would seem optimal. To mix things up a bit we decided to try running a few dungeons with 2 tanks, 1 healer, 1 dps. It was somewhat painful, but once Kodra and I got the hang of working together it actually went pretty smoothly. I feel like in Elder Scrolls there is not really a viable option that does not include healing… however there are several different ways to build a high survival dps. Similarly I think someone with crowd control would be able to make up for there being a tank.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVThe next mixture I would like to see is now that several of us are 15 and can do weapon swaps… to throw on a two hander or dual wield and run the dungeons to see if we can get by without a “true” tank. Another interesting thing we figured out is that apparently after running Spindleclutch, we had access to all three dungeons via the waystone network. So as a result we ended up running the Banished Cells in the above video, and Fungal Grotto in the below video. I am not sure what was going on with either Twitch or OBS for for whatever reason both of the videos exported to youtube SUPER jerky. If you watch the twitch version it seems to be just fine, so I might try deleting the youtube version and re-exporting.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVOne of the interesting things we learned is along the same lines as what I was talking about yesterday regarding splitting the pulls. It seems like the mobs in these dungeons fight in “Kung-Fu Movie Mode” of sorts, in that when you pull one, a number of them will engage you, but not ALL of the pack. The others will sit back and cheer on the ones fighting, but if you engage them… they will engage you back. This means that things like charge and dragon’s leap are really bad ideas in the Elder Scrolls Dungeon infrastructure. As a result we changed up our methods and started pulling with me yanking a single mob out with fiery grip. Then working on the fly to lock down whatever happens to come with the pull.

After figuring this out… Fungal Grotto went remarkably smooth as did a Spindleclutch run that we did afterwards. I think we finally figured out the “plan” of the dungeons, and it is pretty damned awesome. I like that the mobs seem to interact, and while you may aggro an entire pack… they won’t necessarily all come at once leading you to have significantly longer and more endurance sapping fights than short term brute force ones. We managed to make it through a lot of those huge pulls, because we had more healing than we needed. Now that we know the “real” way to run the dungeons, I feel like we could mix up the group make up quite a bit and come up with lots of potentially winning combinations.

Amazing Soundtrack

Another really awesome thing from yesterday is that the Elder Scrolls Online soundtrack is now available for purchase. At first I was a bit pissy when I found out that neither the collectors edition or digital deluxe editions included the soundtrack. However upon seeing it, I am guessing a big part of the reason why is just how big the soundtrack is. Right now you can get it for $8.99 on Amazon and it is a whopping 47 tracks. I guess if you are so included you can pay what seems to be the iTunes tax and get it for $16 bucks there as well. Apparently it is also up on the Google play store for $9.49, and as such available through their Google Music streaming service if you are so inclined. Whatever your venue of choice… I highly suggest you grab this.

Elder Scrolls Online is a gorgeous game, and similarly has an amazing soundtrack… however in the game you are under a constant state of sensory overload. Listening to the soundtrack I was in awe of just how great some of the tracks were, that I knew i had heard snippets of in game… but simply was not able to fully appreciate. I am hoping that the Battle Bards do an upcoming episode on the soundtrack, as with 47 different tracks… there really is something for everyone on it. I don’t care… I am definitely a fan boy here, but that is perfectly okay. This is now pretty much on my permanent “coding” and “writing” music selection. Over the years I have found myself listening to more and more game/movie soundtracks and less and less traditional music. I feel like it is easier to zone into whatever I am doing when the track is primarily instrumental.

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

April 2, 2014 by Belghast

Wabbajack or Bust!

One of the last big decision points we had to make was picking our PVP campaign. Essentially how Cyrodil works is that there are these campaign groups that are functionally like “servers” in that it represents one constant group of players from all three sides during a 90 day “season”. These sides fight for control of Cyrodil and attempt to crown an emperor by holding all of the barrier keeps surrounding the White Gold Tower. Each of these campaign groups is named after a weapon from elder scrolls lore. Currently the most populated is “Auriel’s Bow” which is benefiting from “first in the list” syndrome… where people simply click the first option and go with it. Oddly enough “Dawnbreaker” is another really high pop server, because for whatever reason a ton of serious Aldmeri Dominion pvpers decided to set up camp there.

As explained in my first video of the night, we have put our heads together and reasoned Wabbajack to be a good place to be. For those who are not TES lore junkies or who have not played Oblivion or Skyrim… Wabbajack is the weapon of the mad god Sheogorath. You are just as likely to zap your foe as to turn them into a bunny… or even rain down cheese from the heavens. More importantly however it seems like quite a few of the more organized Daggerfall folks have chosen the server for their own, so I believe it will be a place where we might have a fighting chance against the Aldmeri and Ebonheart hordes. We chose Daggerfall expecting it to be less populated, and as a result have an easier time getting into Cyrodil instances. Unfortunately as the video states Slurms has ended up on Auriel’s Bow for the time being, but we are hoping he will get the ability to swap to us for free.

Spindleclutch’s Revenge

Last night my friends and I… or at least a slightly different group of friends… decided to go back into Spindleclutch in the hopes of completing the quest that had apparently bugged out the previous night. The primary difference this time around was that we had two dps, a healer and a tank… the traditional dungeon makeup. To complicate things, we had a player healing who had literally not had a healing staff in his inventory until a guild member crafted and mailed him one on the way to the dungeon. So needless to say we had a few issues we needed to work out. Overall we managed to make it through the dungeon, but at times it was through sheer force of will. The above stream video documents our journey through the depths of spider hell.

For not having played a healer in ESO before, especially a night blade healer… Kodra did a remarkable solo healing the dungeon. Essentially we are realizing that the night before we simply brute forced a lot of the encounters with pure healing throughput in the fact that we had two healers who had rolled and were leveling AS healers. This run through the dungeon was very similar to our first run through the dungeon almost a year ago. There were many packs of mobs that flat out murdered us… especially once we got into the “corrupted” section of the dungeon. Some of the group tactics were a nightmare and it was all I could do to try and juggle everything and also somehow manage to keep up enough stamina to be able to block power attacks. At this point I am realizing I need way more stamina, and plan on dumping the next several skillups into that trait.

While there was quite a bit of faffing about before the dungeon, in trying to get over to Spindleclutch and get everyone zoned into it… I think we managed to run the place in roughly 45 minutes which is not too bad. One of the things that would have really helped out quite a bit is the addition of crowd control. I’ve considered spending a point and picking up dark talons, as being able to lock down a large group and at least keep it off the cloth wearers would have been extremely beneficial. The other cool thing is that I somehow managed to get several viewers during the dungeon, one of which even congratulated us on our victory. I am so used to no one watching my streams that it was rather odd knowing I had an audience that was not a guild member and likely not also in the same mumble channel as me.

Tonight there are already tentative plans to step back foot in the dungeon and see what trouble we can get into. At this point I seem to be the only tank in the level range of the dungeon, and while I do not mind being the token tank… there is only so much spelunking that I can take in a night. My wife and I have made plans to start trying to walk around 10 pm, and this means I need to make sure I am not engaged in something around that time of the evening. So essentially it cuts one potential dungeon run out for the night. I am sure in the next few days we will have more tanks entering the level range to take the pressure off me. My hope is that soon we can have multiple spindle groups going at the same time.

Feed your Claim

Just a really quick and friendly reminder… if you are like me and now completely enthralled by Elder Scrolls Online… don’t forget to log into Landmark periodically and feed your claim some copper. The upkeep mechanic while not extremely brutal, is there and constant and could involve the repossession of your claim. Since several of us managed to get in early enough to grab some pretty choice spots… I would hate to see any of us lose them to forgetting to feed the upkeep bank. Currently you can have roughly 5 days worth of resources stacked up in your claim bank. Every two to three days just to be certain, I have been logging in and depositing additional copper ore into the bank to keep it “topped off”. I really wish I could farm up enough to keep it healthy for a month or so, but I can see their desire to limit it to a small amount so that players are constantly having to log in.