Guild Wars 2 Archives - Page 29 of 32 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Level Scaling Tech

May 11, 2017 by Belghast

I am in this place with SWTOR Knights of the Fallen Empire where I am honestly not sure what more I can say without my blog turning into a massive spoiler fest. There are a lot of events going on and many of them have surprised me. This is a little shocking given that I consume a lot of gaming media and that KotFE has been technically out since October 2015. I am not sure if I purposefully ignored SWTOR articles… or if I just didn’t come across that many. Whatever the case essentially everything from Shadows of Revan onward has been a completely new story experience for me without me knowing any of the elements ahead of time. So while I recognized characters like Theron Shan or Lana Beniko… I knew nothing about them going into this recent binge of playing the game. We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but returning to an MMO and seeing years worth of content laid out in front of you is a pretty great thing. Especially in a situation like SWTOR where they have a reasonable level scaling system.

Yesterday Syp posted something over on his personal blog Bio Break talking about level scaling systems. His specific discussion centered around whether or not level scaling systems were good for games, which was brought on by his recent journeys in LOTRO. Over time my own feelings about the systems have changed. You can scan through the backlog of this blog and find me talking about Mentoring systems, where games allow high level player A to drop down to the level of player B and run content with them. This seemed to me like the most elegant solution to the problem of being able to run content with your friends. That was until I encountered Guild Wars 2, and the fact that no matter where you go your character is scaled down to the level of the world. The concept of evergreen content is a big one for me… because I like when a game expands over time rather than contracts. While Guild Wars 2 is not the best example of this… because of the fact that there is plenty of content that you will never be able to play again in that game… it did make me appreciate level scaling as a replacement for mentoring.

The only problem there is that when the world is constantly the same level as you, it robs you of one of the quintessential MMO experiences of leveling up and becoming more powerful. The world always feels the same to you, because you are functionally always the same relative ability levels to it as you level. In situations like that the levels themselves feel like a completely extraneous concept. Why even have a number that goes up if the world is always going to be functionally the same difficulty. When we started playing Final Fantasy XIV they had an extremely elegant solution for this in the form of their dungeon finder. Each dungeon had a functional level range from the moment you first were able to zone in… to the moment that it considered was the upper bound of levels. So if the average mob level in an area was 35, then functionally the maximum level the game would allow you to be was 40, scaling everyone over that level down to that point. The only negative here is that this ONLY applies to dungeons, and in truth it would have been interesting to see this same sort of system just work out in the world as a whole.

That I guess is functionally what is going on in Star Wars the Old Republic, and I am loving it. Each piece of content be it planet, flashpoint, or something else… has a functional level range attached to it. Once again it is functionally along the lines of being five or so levels over whatever the maximum level of encounter for that area. Then the game rewards you as though you were fighting something your own level in terms of both experience and loot drops. This means that you can go anywhere and do anything without feeling like you are getting nothing from it. At launch this was absolutely a problem with SWTOR and it was extremely easy to out level an area, and reach a point where the experience gain was no longer worth the time you spent on a planet. This was especially true as I remember on Tatooine which in itself was a huge planet with lots of side content. By the time I “did everything” I ended up several levels ahead of the curve and functionally kept getting more and more over-leveled as I went through the rest of the planets.

Now there is a certain measure of freedom in being able to just go and do the content without having to worry about level… and in many cases gear. While leveling my Imperial Agent, there were a few points where I went 10 levels without upgrading any of my gear… and really did not notice a significant amount of power drop off. Then again I did exit the class storyline at level 58… so there was some significant over-leveling going on there that might have been easing the transition. The thing with this system is however that while you are gaining power and you FEEL powerful… there is never a point where you are just waltzing through field of enemies gently tapping them and watching them explode. When you run someone through a low level dungeon in World of Warcraft for example on your level capped main… you can functionally breathe on mobs and they impale themselves in a shower of loot. SWTOR feels like a happy medium, of letting your power level increase without completely trivializing the game. Sure most of the time I am not actually afraid of death, but I still feel heroic doing content… because I am having to use my abilities to take things down rather than a single auto swing. As a result I have somewhat shifted my focus from user driven mentoring systems… to seeing more games adopt this sort of level scaling. The best part about Legion honestly was the way that content has scaled to the player while leveling through it, and if only Blizzard had applied this tech to the world as a whole… it would be a much more enjoyable experience. I like knowing that I can revisit those areas that I enjoyed so much in the past, and still having an interesting time.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.

Breaking Routine

October 17, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely when it came to Sunday morning. Generally speaking I have the process of finishing up an AggroChat episode down to a fairly regimented process. Saturday night before I crash I try to do what I call the initial edit, which is most of the actual edit work. Then Sunday morning I write the small bit of copy, and upload and syndicate the podcast to the various sources where it gets put. However this week was the first week doing all of this on the new machine… and I was not prepared. For starters we recorded a really long show mostly about the Final Fantasy XIV 3.4 main story quest. We did not unfortunately ONLY talk about that, and that meant we had almost three hours of recorded audio to process… and didn’t actually finish things up until around midnight my time. Instead of staying up further, I decided to crash and deal with it in the morning. Then Sunday it was a carnival of errors, as the version of audacity on my new machine was apparently slightly newer than the version I had been using which means a lot of the filters had different options… or at least were arranged in different ways. Additionally there was the process of trying to find all of my source files off of the old machine, which is thankfully still accessible over the network.

The worst part of it however was the changes to the Truncate Silence filter…. which is a crutch we lean on heavily for AggroChat. We are fairly pensive folk, and as a result there are a lot of lengthy pauses in conversation. With truncate silence that 3 hours of audio becomes 2 hours… but on my first attempt it maybe clipped a little more than actual silence. For whatever reason it was clipping the hell out of anytime Kodra talked, giving his speech a record skipping characteristic. However this is not something I realized until I was just about to upload the files to our host. Thankfully I caught it in time and was able to redo that portion, lowering the granularity of the filter. This mean’t what is normally a couple hour process… ate up I think four hours in total. Admittedly I was piddling around in Guild Wars 2 during much of it, so there were probably moments when I didn’t notice a filter had finished here or there. The positive however is that every filter applied went massively faster than on the previous AMD FX-6300 based processor. That was really my hope with the new i7 based system, is that it would be able to chew through rendering tasks far more successfully. As with any system there is going to be an adjustment and moving in period, and I am hoping that now that I have finished a single podcast on this machine additional ones will be much quicker.

As far as the weekend itself went, I was all over the place. I played a significant amount of Destiny, completing a bunch of bounties and discovering the Archon’s Forge… or more so how easy it was to get a pick up group. Much the same way as the court of Oryx, you seem to be able to just show up and folks will either be doing it… or quickly swarm when they think anyone else is. I also played a lot of World of Warcraft, completely a few mythic dungeons as well as successfully completing my first Mythic+ keystone. I’m looking forward to seeing that upgraded loot in the weekly order hall chest. In addition to that I completed the five time-walking dungeons on both Belghast and Exeter, and on the later I used it as a way to gear him up. I am now sitting over the 825 cap needed to get into LFR so my hope is tonight I will be able to run the two parts available and potentially get more upgrades that way. Generally speaking on Belghast the 835 rewards are not super enticing, but I still ran it this week for the purpose of getting some rune stones. I also need to do a bunch of fishing, as I now have the pattern to turn the 300 versatility food that I spent a chunk of the weekend crafting… into a 375 version. I am only using this stuff for raiding and mythic+ attempts, as I keep a bank full of Faronar Fizz for other stuff.

The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am actually finding myself legitimately enjoying Guild Wars 2. Recently it had been a game that I was dipping my toes into for the sake of my friends that were also playing it. However before the podcast we ran several of the story mode dungeons and they were pretty enjoyable. Enough so that when I sat down to decide which game I would play during the podcast, I decided to go ahead and stay with Guild Wars 2. That means that I spent the next three hours roaming aimlessly completing little objectives here and there, and mostly finding my way to the next story mode dungeon. The post 80/ Heart of Thorns mastery leveling is pretty slow. In all of that time I only managed to get about half of a mastery level… and then I ended up wasting a bunch of experience because I didn’t notice I needed to click through and train it. I am pretty not sure what my purpose in game is, but I am still fairly dead set on the warrior… and more importantly hammer warrior. That makes me the make shift tank for the group, and I have been using rifle lately as my dps weapon because it allows me to have something that I can hit things with at range. At some point I want to pick back up where I left off in attempting to level armor smithing, but right now my craft window looks somewhat like madness to me. All in all I feel like I have come to terms with the game in accepting what it is… and more importantly what it is not.

Finally Grasp It

October 7, 2016 by Belghast

For several weeks now Tam has been wanting to get those of us together that have Guild Wars 2 and try some of the group content. However the launch of World of Warcraft Legion put a pretty serious brake on that concept. We agreed that last night was a decent night for myself, Tam, Thalen, Kodra and Ashgar so we set forth with the plan of getting together and running something as a group. While we didn’t exactly get that entire team together we did venture forth into Fractals, which are dungeons of a sort, but the closest thing I can really relate them to is the Pandaria Heroic Scenarios. You are dropped on a map and that map has certain objectives that it is leading you towards. However as we found out last night there are several things that exist just off the beaten path, like a champion dragon of sorts that we managed to take down. In total we ran three of them, and we spent a good deal of that time wiping as we adjusted our strategy to be able to take certain encounters down. Throughout the night I flirted with several weapon combos… but wound up right back at Greatsword and Hammer as a warrior. However after the fractals I spent some time playing sword and shield again and found it greatly improved over what I remember from alpha/beta.

Ultimately what it really reminds me of the most are the encounters in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Those were a fairly unique blend of exploration, reasoning, problem solving… and finally a heavy dose of surviving combat. The problem there however is this was rendered in relatively low fidelity, and it felt cumbersome to have to comply with the various rules of the actual pen and paper game system. Admittedly Guild Wars 2 is also fairly fiddly, with a bunch of sliders that you can tweak on your character to build for very specific purposes… however it feels like it does a much better job at the sort of experience that DDO was trying to go for. Fractals feel like bite sized adventures… more than just on rails dungeon crawls. If we can actually get the proper group size on at some point, we need to give dungeons a proper attempt as well because it feels like there are actual tanky characters now. We did some messing about with a training bot system inside the fractal hub, and quickly found out that apparently I have way more survival than either of my companions. This is even more noticeable when we actually started to do harder content, because I could stay in and take those hits longer allowing them to hang out on the boundary and deal damage or reflect effects. In group play it suddenly felt like we each had a clear role to play, and not quite the zergy mess that I remember from the launch of the game.

This is really the first time in a very long time I can legitimately say I enjoyed playing Guild Wars 2. It was extremely fun for group play, and that suddenly makes all of the more casual exploratory bits of the game more enjoyable because I know that it is all leading to something. One of my key problems with Guild Wars 2 has been a feeling that I had capped out and was not really going to improve my gear in any reasonable fashion. That changed the moment I set foot into the fractals hub and saw all of the “better than exotic” items that were available on the vendors there. Additionally I used some of those laurels that I had been getting, and not really knowing what to do with them… to purchase a nice neck piece. Ultimately I feel like I finally “get” why people enjoy this game, and while I doubt it will ever supplant a more traditional MMO for me… it doesn’t really have to. The set up of Guild Wars 2 makes it extremely to drop into game with my friends and have a night of play, much along the lines of how non-mmorpgs work. After seeing that I could in fact be a tank in this game… it makes me feel significantly better about playing warrior, and makes me want to try out some of the other weapon combinations that I long abandoned. I still have problems with the game in a few spots, but I think I have largely reached a point of peace finally after all this time. I can stop trying to solve this puzzle, because I finally grasp what folks see in it.