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Wrong About Wildstar

April 23, 2015 by Belghast

More Initiates

For as frustrated as yesterdays post was, today’s is all the more hopeful. Lately on Wednesday nights I have been assisting a fledgling second static group in our free company out. While it still struggles to get a full eight people, we are making some progress. As more people level to the cap, more people will be available to join in the raiding fun and hopefully this will smooth the process out significantly. For the last few weeks we have been working on Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, aka the first major hurdle and the gateway to the second coil. Last week we made decent progress but were still struggling to get through the dive bomb phase. That phase seems to be the biggest frustration with the fight, and once you figure out the timing the rest goes smoothly. While I barded it up last week, this week I tanked it because that was the role that was needed. Since my health was significantly higher than Damai we swapped roles and I took the Twintania role and he adjusted quickly to dealing with the adds.

Now our first group of the night was less than successful because we ended up having to pug in half of the players. The positive was that we noticed that the people screwing up were not our own people. As the evening went on more people got in game and we were able to fill out the rest of the slots with some other seasoned veterans. From here I think it took four attempts before we downed the 5th turn and keyed a whole new group of players for the second coil. This is awesome for a bunch of reasons… because firstly it means that second team is progressing nicely apart from issues getting people online at the right time. Secondly however it also means we can start drawing on the pool of players available for Monday night turn 9 attempts as well. I know Grace is itching to see t9, so hopefully this will smooth out some of our own attendance irregularities. It is almost summer after all and with summer comes folks going off and doing summer things.

Wrong about Wildstar

This morning I am questioning if I have been wrong about Wildstar thus far in feeling that the game was just not for me. Granted we gave it a good shot and played this game at launch but it felt like something was off. Now coming back and playing it again I am really enjoying myself, but there are a large number of details that are significantly different that I think are effecting my enjoyment. When the initial video was released talking about the Exiles and Dominion, I naturally felt an immediate affinity with the Exiles… the problem being most of my friends had that same immediate attraction to the Dominion. I struggled with this choice until I found the Chua and for the most part enjoyed my time playing an Engineer. The problem being… I just did not enjoy that style of tanking. What I should have played was a Warrior, like I did every time I actually enjoyed myself during the beta. So this time around I am playing a Human Warrior and enjoying smashing faces and jumping around like mad. The Exile side has this whole “Firefly” vibe that works for me, whereas the Dominion feel more like playing the Empire from Star Wars. Both are interesting but at this point in my life… I feel more kinship with the rebels.

The other thing that is helping significantly is due to the whole promotion I have a hover board starting at level 1, which makes roaming around the zones so much more enjoyable. Additionally thanks to the promotion I have some spending money from selling extra items on the open market. Knowing my character is set for awhile on upgrades and spending money makes all the difference in the world. Finally the pace I am playing with makes a huge difference. Wildstar is the sort of game where piddling around feels more enjoyable than focused leveling. I am stopping to smell the roses, and boulders, and landmines… well you get the idea. Additionally I went the Soldier path, meaning I get to smash more things in the face and while I enjoyed Explorer… smashing things in the face is just more my style. At launch I had this overwhelming feeling of a need to keep up with everyone else, so that I would be viable for dungeon running. This time since I am playing all by myself for the most part… I am taking my time and poking through the content at my own speed. All of which adds up to a completely different experience for me. All of this proves that the circumstances you go into a game greatly colors your end experience. So far I am enjoying playing this game as a secondary “cooling down” from the action type game.

Wrong about Marvel Heroes

Another game that I have recently picked up that I am more than willing to admit I was wrong about is Marvel Heroes. I have avoided this game like the plague because of a whole slew of reasons. Firstly at its core it is a Diablo clone and while there is nothing wrong with that… click to move and attack games and I generally do not get along that well. Thanks to League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm I have learned to tolerate them… but my preferred means of control will always be WASD. Secondly everything surrounding this game gave the impression that it was a free to play money grab of the worst type. I played a tiny bit of this game in beta and was not terribly excited about any of the heroes I was able to play, so I filed this away in the “not for me” bin as well. The thing is over time I have continued to watch people I know and love and respect playing this game as seriously as they have played any traditional MMO. When I see something like this I start to wonder, what are they seeing it in that I am not. I’ve had these same feelings surrounding games that I just did not previously understand like Guild Wars 2, and after finally hitting my stride in that game I figured I might as well give Heroes a shot too.

Sunday I ended up playing this game for awhile, and wound up playing it for I think five hours without really meaning to. I feel like the piece of the equation that I was missing to really enjoy it, comes from the fact that I did not even realize I was in need of that Super Hero MMO fix. I happily played City of Heroes for about six months before moving on to World of Warcraft. When Champions Online launched I was extremely excited about that game… until the first patch wound up killing the combination of abilities I wanted to play with. With the launch of DC Universe Online that was yet another game I really enjoyed, but struggled to get traction in for reason I still don’t know to this day. Marvel Super Heroes seems to be just a bout the right amount of depth for me to consume as far as super hero content goes, and the ability to swap between heroes freely helps significantly. Right now I am focusing on Captain America but by the same token I have gotten rather fond of Gambit and Deadpool. All of which I really want to play more of, and ultimately this seems like the perfect sort of game to play downstairs on my laptop while watching television and movies. In fact I am hoping to do just that this weekend, and see what mischief I can get into with my shield bashing self.

Juggling Games

April 21, 2015 by Belghast

Naeling It

The Monday night raid group has had quite the sequence of strange weeks since patch 2.55 went into the game. Either we were lacking the right people, or enough people at all to do turn 9. As a result after what seems like a month we did our first night of second coil attempts. We were all exceptionally rusty going in, but the spirits were extremely high. At times I would say our spirits were too high, because holy shit were we slap happy. I was one of the worse so it is not like I can really complain much. The positive take away is that we managed to get further than we had ever gotten before last night, and were starting to work on the fire/lightning phase of the fight. On our best attempt we got Nael to 30% which feels like progress. Essentially once we learn the phase four dance, we just have to keep that up until the boss is dead.

The only regret I have right now is choosing to get my 1300 poetics weapon on my warrior. I was torn, he is absolutely my main and I intend not tanking as often as I can. The problem is on Nael the fight we are struggling with I am having to dragoon it up. That dps boost would really help, but what is done is done… just kinda kicking myself for not picking a dragoon weapon first. That said since 126 is more than geared enough for anything we are doing… I am considering focusing on getting a 1300 weapon for the dragoon now before I pick up any more poetics gear for the warrior. He still needs a chest piece and a belt, which I was going to start building towards the chest next. However since that is still going to take a significant amount of time… I might work on getting that weapon instead. I really wish that today’s 2.56 patch would have uncapped poetics… because man do I need a lot of them.

Cap and Storm

Last night after the raiding shenanigans Thalen mentioned that at one point he had created a House Stalwart super group in Marvel Heroes as a way of stopping the random guild invites. So I popped over into game and got invites. From this point we grouped up for a bit until he needed to head to bed. I have to say that I thought Captain America’s charge in and shield whirl thing was good AOE… until I ran around a bit with Storm. While I got to tank bosses, pretty much all of the trash in the entire zone died horribly to a cloud of whirling winds. That said I am really enjoying the fact that I can tank almost any world boss without much issue by keeping my my defensive buffs. I noticed last night that there was a difficulty slider so at some point I want to play with that. There are times this feels a lot like diablo on “normal” and I am wondering if there is a “hard” setting that I really should be playing.

Quite honestly I have not been even vaguely close to death other than last night when I was tanking Gorgon. There I simply used the occasional med pack and made it through that fight without much issue. The only reason why it was dicey at all was because I was essentially soloing him, which is probably something I should not be able to do at this point. As of last night I am sitting at level 15 and still really enjoying the game. I think this is going to be my go to for mindless fun, and I swear there are so many times the zone layout reminds me of City of Heroes. I guess that might be because when I played that game I kept my camera zoomed out as far as it would go, which made it feel a bit like an over the top game. The competition for spawns is a bit annoying near the entrance of a zone… but if you wander off by yourself you pretty much get the place to yourself. When I hit the island of Madripoor it felt like the pack thinned out significantly, so I am guessing most people don’t make it out of the level 10 range before moving on.

Juggling Games

The problem with juggling multiple games is that one of them always ends up falling through the cracks. Right now I wish I had the time to devote to working on my character in Wildstar and trying to hit 65 in Rift. Instead I am logging in a few times a day in Rift to run minions… and just not logging in at all in Wildstar. Honestly my playtime is really spastic right now, because I have a bunch of things that I am trying to do each day. In Final Fantasy XIV I am playing the mini cactpot each day and trying to stockpile as much MGP as I can. Then while in game I run at least one daily expert so that I can cap my poetics each week. I am also logging into World of Warcraft in the morning and at night to run my Garrison missions in the hopes of getting those ever illusive raid gear crates. I am not 100% sure how they work, other than the fact that they show up every two weeks, so I keep clearing out other missions in hopes of making room for them when they show up.

Something new added to the rotation is logging into Marvel Heroes to get my log in reward. Similarly I am logging into Final Fantasy Record Keeper for the same reason, and to get my daily item chest. Record Keeper is one of those games I mostly play while my wife is shopping or I am out eating, waiting on food to arrive at the table. It is a moment of boredom game more than anything else, but that said I am really enjoying it. It is scratching an itch that I had not quite found from a mobile game. Realistically I should be trying to log into Wildstar each day so that I can do a boom box, but I have been failing miserably at that one. The funny thing is that I am spending a lot of time in a lot of different games but not really playing any of them. Finally after doing my routine I figure out which game I am actually going to play and run off playing that one. Most of the time that is Final Fantasy XIV but over the last few nights I have been playing a significant amount of Marvel Heroes. Basically… right now I am all over the place.

Six Years of Aggronaut

April 19, 2015 by Belghast

AggroChat #53 – Get Hyped

This week we are without Tamrielo and Rae for various reasons, but joining us once again are the ever amazing Grace and Thalen. For awhile I thought we would be missing Kodra, but he shows amazing determination and podcasted anyways. This is the week that he moved across country from Atlanta area to Seattle, and thanks to the magic of living in the same apartment complex as Tam, was able to “borrow a cup of internet” and a chair and pretty much everything else needed to make the podcast function. This weeks episode is called “Get Hyped” because we spend a lot of time getting hyped about various things we are excited about.

During the course of the episode we talk about so many board games in the wake of International Tabletop Day. This discussion managed to make a very sleeply Kodra awake enough to continue podcasting. We also talk about how amazing the new Netflix Original Daredevil series is. We talk about the Star Wars The Force Awakens trailer that was released, and cannot get through a single podcast without talking about the new tidbits of information floating about regarding the Heavensward expansion that is looming ever closer. I talk about the new Wildstar promotion asking players to buy up “dead stock” and get rewarded heavily for it. Some see it as an act of desperation but personally I see it as an act of sheer genius. I also go on at length about how great the new Wardrobe system is in Rift. It was a super fun podcast to record, and as such we ran fairly late.

Six Years of Aggronaut

This week a fairly important anniversary slipped by without me realizing it. The funny thing is that I even went so far as to make a Google reminder on my phone… but then Friday ended up being an exceptionally busy day and I just plain “forgot”. Friday April 17th was the sixth anniversary of my blog. On April 17th of 2009 I made my first post on this blog, and it was a rather simple “Hello World”, but still it was the beginning of something that would ultimately be my obsession for a large chunk of these six years. Now a much more important anniversary is coming up at the end of the month, when I mark two years of daily posting. Tales of the Aggronaut was not by any means my first blog, but it was the one that I stuck with. It began its life as a World of Warcraft blog, and ultimately turned into a Rift blog… and then when I realized I could not sustain it as a single game blog became what you know and hopefully love today. Throughout all of it however it has more than anything been a blog about me, and surprisingly does an excellent job of tracking what I happen to be thinking and feeling at a given time through my reaction to things happening in the games I love.

According to Google Analytics I have had almost 100,000 readers during the time I have been writing this blog. This is the more important stat for me, because it means I have reached almost 100,000 people in one way or another. Granted these statistics don’t reflect the folks who choose to read my blog over RSS, but more than anything I wanted to come clean about my numbers for various reasons. We are heading towards the Newbie Blogger Initiative and I always get the impression that people seem to think I have this wildly popular blog. I have had some insane bumps like the one from WoW Insider that skews all of my statistics. On that day I had over 6000 readers in a single day, but that was during a different time in MMO gaming. On a good day once you combine both RSS and traditional analytics I maybe have 500 readers. So while I will never be the media celebrity that some of my friends seem to think I am… I am thankful for each and every person who feels connected enough to me to read me on a regular basis. Sure I write this blog as a form of self therapy at times… but in truth it is my amazing readers that keep me going on mornings that I simply do not feel like writing anything. Thank you all for your attention, and I hope I can still live up to whatever expectations you might have of me for the next six years.

Piddling in Wildstar

I admit I have allowed myself to get pulled in by the latest Wildstar promotion. It all started as a way of doing some research for a story I was writing for MMOGames. However in the rush to find copies of Wildstar to see how many were actually out there in the wild… I ended up picking a few up myself. Now above you can see me proudly sporting the Marauder outfit and riding my Glitterkitty hoverboard. While I loved playing Chua I never really felt all that at home with the Dominion. I remember watching the original trailer to Wildstar and felt an immediate kinship to the Exiles. However most of my friends at launch wanted to play Dominion so I went along with it. That said by the time I left after my initial months I was too annoyed with the game to make a faction swap feasible. There was just something I didn’t really like about Wildstar and I never really could put my finger on it.

Coming back I am actually enjoying myself quite a bit, but I have not hit the Whitevale wall yet that I did previously. Also I feel like as much as I enjoyed having two robot buddies following me around at all times… the Engineer was really just not my type of character. This time around I am focusing on a tanky warrior, and having a significant bit more fun doing it. I can’t say I will play for a super long time but I have hooked up with Chestnut and Chaide and am hanging my hat with the Black Dagger Society. There is rarely a time when I am just playing one game, so I feel like this might be enjoyable to revisit every now and then. For me I generally have a base of operations in one game… and that game is Final Fantasy XIV and then I venture out into other titles as well. Since World of Warcraft is no longer holding my attention I have been spending more time in Wildstar and Rift for those “off nights”.

Dances with Fish

April 14, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Insanity

So this happened yesterday… and I am completely floored by it. Firstly I thought last weeks 6th place was pure insanity, but to see us jump to third place in guild activity in a weeks time is just surreal. For those wondering this is gauge is based on guild activity, or moreso the guild going out into the world and doing stuff. This means we are leveling, crafting, doing fates, running dungeons, in apparently huge portions. But to think we are the third most active guild on the server just seems so strange. Anecdotally I did notice a few weeks back that regardless of what crystal I teleported to, there seemed to be some [GREY] members nearby so I knew we were getting pretty huge, but I guess this simply quantifies that.

The thing is I still feel like this has very little to do with me, and more to do with getting a critical mass of people in the same place for a long period of time. We have been growing extremely fast, but at the same time very organically. I invite someone, who has fun and invites their friends… and then they go off and want to invite their friends and so forth. This all just seems to have snowballed into the amazing situation that we currently have on Cactuar. It is a combination of a great game with great people, and the end product is this upwelling of awesome. Last night Tam our fearless leader ran some numbers. We currently have 135 members of Greysky Armada, and of those 89 have been online within the last two weeks… and even more impressively 63 had been online in the last 24 hours. We have a really huge active population of players… and it is pretty damned awesome.

Turn Five Revisited

We have been struggling a bit to get our turn nine ship righted, as it seems each week we have been down some people required to make that happen. Last night we opted that rather than standing around waiting and hoping for an 8th to show up… that we would do something more proactive and key another guild member by running them through turn five. I still find t5 an extremely enjoyable fight, and it was a little challenging given that some of us were playing different roles. We had to give up Kodra’s insane dps in favor of him picking up the mantle of the Paladin tank. He did a great job at interpreting all the random commentary I said by not really understanding fully the job that Ashgar does on a regular basis. Ash just takes care of so many details that it took us a bit to replicate all of them with someone else. The funny thing is at this point in our gear level… the dive bomb phase seems to be far more forgivable. I think we managed to defeat the turn on the 5th or 6th try… but most of the attempts were really us trying to adjust to the twister phase.

While the first coil is not exactly a great way to get people gear, they do have some nice looking items in there. Last night I managed to get some achievement for defeating turn five multiple times in a row. Ashgar has always been super awesome about letting me pick up the various pieces of plate gear that drop in there because I liked the look of it. After the raid last night I went rifling through my inventory and realized that I had all of the cosmetic slots. As such I opted to pick up a brand new glamour to show off my Heavy Allagan gear. Now the weapon from t5 doesn’t really go with this set of gear, so I opted to use the 110 weapon instead. I am sure I will get tired of it eventually, or I will complete some other set of gear that I want to use… but for the time being I am pretty happy with looking like I spent a lot of time grinding the early coils.

Dances with Fish

We took long enough last night to defeat turn five that we didn’t really have enough time to start in on turn nine. Instead we opted to set our sights on the lord of the whorl, Leviathan extreme. We had made attempts on this in the past but struggled a bit at the time, so never really came back and revisited it. However in the meantime I have run a lot of Leviathan hard mode for various guild members as they needed it for their storyline. Each time I have pretended that I was doing it on extreme, and have gotten significantly better at avoiding “stuff”. The challenge for extreme mode is that during the middle of the fight Leviathan knocks the barriers off the platform you are fighting him from. This means that if you are not careful and do not adjust to his deck slams… you will slide directly off the platform and into the water… where you will be unrecoverable just like on Titan. All of this pretending to not have rails seems to actually have made the real thing significantly easier, because for the most part we were not dying to folks sliding off the platform.

On our best attempt we managed to get Leviathan down to 24% and largely we were dying to either insane amounts of damage… or the horrible add that fears players off the platform. Mostly the timing of the stuns is a bit odd there, and Kodra was doing this for the first time. After looking at a quick guide this morning it looks like we need to start stun locking that add around 70% health. Essentially if you see a castbar at all.. it is apparently already too late. There will be nothing you can do to stop the fear effects from going off. I feel like on this fight I have the easy job which is just soak up a lot of damage and be ready with cooldowns if it looks like I am taking a burst of damage. The offtank does pretty much everything else… stun the adds, pick up the adds, tank the four blue balls of doom etc. Thought I feel like given a solid night of attempts that were not abbreviated… we can totally do this fight.