house stalwart Archives - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Richer Than You Think

December 19, 2013 by Belghast

A Patch Awoken

Monday evening the Final Fantasy XIV servers were down to deliver the brand new 2.1 patch. This is the one that everyone had been waiting for, that was supposed to deliver a ton of new content. At one point I was anxiously looking forward to this update, because it held the promise of player housing as well as new dungeons to run to collect what we lovingly refer to as “bookrocks” aka Tomestones. Now that the patch is live, I find that I can’t seem to be bothered to actually patch the game up. Tuesday and Wednesday night I spent a bit of time hanging out in mumble with my friends who are still playing it, and they seem extremely excited about it overall. The video below shows all the reported changes, and I will admit it seems pretty staggering.

However several of these things seemed to be tarnished by somewhat bad design. The biggest of these that I have heard of is the housing system. Currently it is oppressively expensive, the day it was released I saw a tweet (that I seem to be unable to find at this moment) stating that they gained the first million gil towards their house… only 99 more to go. That apparently is cheap… here is a listing of the housing prices on the various servers. We are in group three, on Cactuar so right now it would cost 125 million gil to purchase the largest home… aka the one suitable for a guild house. Considering prior to 2.1 there really was no way to make money at 50 other than crafting… this seems insane. The highest I have ever gotten with my character was 200,000 gil, and repair bills and components for my artifact weapon whittled that down to around 75,000 gil the last I checked in on the game.

Supposedly they have added in a bunch of new ways to earn money, which I guess is a positive. However it does seem silly to roll out such an expansive and impressive system… that no one can actually use on day one. Supposedly over time the housing prices will fall, but that still puts the large house at 100 million gil at the absolute cheapest possible price. Listening to my friends, they seem to be enjoying the new content. The new dungeon Pharos Sirius seems to be genuinely difficult and to the best of my knowledge they have not beat the final encounter. That was one of the interesting things about FFXIV dungeons, is that they had a 2 hour timer to get through them. I feel like I should be excited about the prospects of the patch, but I just fine myself not caring at all. Whatever magic I felt towards FFXIV seems to be gone for me, in the same way it has flickered away for so many other games.

Richer Than You Think

This morning I achieved a personal goal… too bad it comes 2 expansions too late to be terribly impressive. I have never been extremely successful at making money in MMOs. I guess in the grand scheme of things it just has never really been a priority. As a result I have always thought that I was broke, or at did not have a ton of liquid assets in game. While I am still not anywhere near some of my guild members, I am was apparently doing better than I ever thought. Awhile back I installed Titan Panel again, to help organize a lot of my informational gadgets in one place. In trying to keep track where I was with all of my tokens I installed a Currency addon. Interesting thing about it… is that it started to keep track of all of the money spread across all of my characters.

As of last night it showed that I had 25,000 gold distributed among all of my alts… five of which are 90 and in various stages of “raid ready”. No character had more than 5,000 gold on them specifically, but spread out among all of the characters it added up. Because of this I decided to realize something that had long been a goal for me. With Wrath of the Lich king they added what has been ubiquitously referred to as the “Repair Mount”. Since I do a lot of random killing out in the world, and solo farming of dungeons/raids… I find myself constantly searching for a repair vendor. So many times I have thought to myself “man it would be awesome to have that mount”, but even with faction and guild discounts it was still 14,000 gold… which seemed like an insane amount.

I never would have purchased this back in the days before account-wide mounts… but the idea that I just gave every single alt the ability to repair whenever they hell they felt like it? Sure 14,000 seemed like a reasonable price, especially considering I have branched out onto a second account of characters. So this morning before sitting down to write my blog entry I shifted back and forth between all of my characters and began pooling my money on Belgrave to make the purchase. I knew for certain he was exalted with Kirin Tor, the faction the mount vendor is sold on. I have to say… I am freaked out a little that I just spent all that gold on a single mount, but within a few days that will pass and I will be happy with my decision. There really is very little I want to purchase in the game at this point that my army of alt crafters cannot eventually make. So I figure thanks to the mount I will be able to farm up more goodies to fill the coffers again.

Lucky Streak

Most of the yesterday evening I spent working my way through Siege of Orgrimmar. The first section of the dungeon went extremely smoothly and the loot gods seemed to be smiling upon me. I managed to get a usable drop off three of the four bosses there. Of course the first drop of the evening was a neckpiece… after purchasing the one with honor last night. That seems like it is always the way however… when you upgrade a piece, you end up getting a better one almost instantly. The second part of Siege however went extremely slowly as I had to complete it in two passes. I was on the second boss of the first pass when my wife came home last night and needed my assistance. After killing Iron Juggernaut I bailed from the LFR and did what she needed for a bit.

After coming back that meant sitting through another 30-60 minute queue and repeating the first two encounters without loot. However that second run went far more smoothly than the first, and we had no wipes at all until folks lost focus during the Nazgrim fight. That is not the type of fight that you can “burn down at the end”, since the not dealing with the adds means he very rapidly heals back all of the damage you are dealing to him. During the second attempt however, folks stayed focused on the adds and we managed to defeat him in near record time. My hope is tonight to come back and finish out the last two parts. At 11pm I attempted to queue for the third, and it looked like roughly an hour queue so I gave up and went to bed. Still no love for a weapon, but this next segment has the chance of dropping a weapon I believe. So between it and my nightly habit of running a Heroic Scenario… I might have a chance.

Unicorns!

December 17, 2013 by Belghast

Unicorns!

Quick… type Unicorns if you want to live! I had to share this picture as it was pretty much my favorite thing from yesterday. Typing of the Dead was one of the most quirky Dreamcast games I owned, so I was super shocked to see that there was a newer version available on steam. I have no real interest in playing it to be honest, but this image particularly caused me several chuckles throughout the day. I am using it this morning as a crutch to get me started typing. So far this morning I have overslept, and since I really did not do a whole lot of gaming last night, I feel fairly empty of ideas.

My last night was spent with my wife, taking her shopping. I feel overall it is a noble if not maddening pursuit, but since she would be in teacher conferences tonight and Wednesday night… I figured it was a needed one. At least I got a good meal out of the ordeal. She has decided she wants to look more “put together”, and stop wearing so many neutral colors. As an art major, I keep getting called in to coordinate color palettes for her. If left to her own devices she tends to try and match everything, instead of pick a simple but coordinated group of colors. Hopefully overtime she will pick up what I am doing and I will no longer be quite so needed in the process. However for now I am her shopping buddy… but in truth I always really have been.

The Quest For Weapons

I really like my dwarfy elemental shaman, and I pretty much play him whenever I have the chance. Right now I am on a mad quest to get him a couple of decent weapons. He currently is using two matched blue weapons, and I have been pestering the guild to run nightly heroic scenarios on the hopes that I will actually luck out like I did on the paladin. I feel like even one weapon swapped would be enough to get me into Siege of Orgrimmar LFR, which is ultimately my goal. The problem that I have mentioned before is that there are really no good weapons you can get for characters. The weapons out on the Timeless Isle are 20,000 timeless coins for a onehander, which involves quite a significant amount of grinding. The problem with them is that they are only 476 ilevel which is not really that much better than heroic blue/crafted 463.

I might be insane, but I really do not see that it is worth the copious amount of grinding that it would take to knock one of these weapons out… to wind up slightly better but still very much undergeared to do the latest content. Another option generally are the 502 living steel weapons that are remakes of the weapon specialist items from burning crusade. Two problems here, firstly they take a month of Living Steel transmutes to get. Secondly there is nothing agility based that a shaman can use, the only agility weapon is a sword. Lastly there is the option that I have been avoiding like the plague, PVP.

PVP Gear without PVPing

I am not a PVP player at all, and I believe the last time I did any PVP was Baradin’s Hold. Even then it was an extreme rarity that I participated in that unless I also had a bunch of guild members backing me up. PVP is the worst sort of treadmill to me, and each time I do it I feel like a hamster as I quickly run back from the grave yard only to be sent back again. There may be a loophole I can exploit however. It seems you can convert 375 justice points into 250 honor through a vendor. So that means I need to get 2625 justice points per weapon that I can comfortably grind out in heroics. That would get me a 498 Axe or more likely the Fist weapon, as I seem to prefer those on my shaman.

This is something I can likely do, as I can probably even convince guild members to “roflstomp” some heroics with me to fill the guild bank with money. We did some the other night to bump me across the threshold of being able to buy the heirloom axe for my orc warrior. This seems to be the stopping place for all of the alts in the guild, we simply cannot get decent weapons. I could probably even organize some group effort of running heroics to get people the pvp weapons. The stats are not ideal, as it has that nasty resilience stat on them… but overall just the damage alone makes it worth it. They would be more than viable for Siege and would let people get their weapons up enough to do quite a lot of other things. Granted these are not as good as the 516 ilevel weapons from heroic scenarios… however it is something you can actually work towards without having to rely entirely on that mean on random number generator.

Faffing Overload

December 16, 2013 by Belghast

Holy Faffing

I had every intent Sunday to work on the various characters that I needed to run through LFR, however when other opportunities were presented I seized hold with both hands. A few members of the guild were running instances for transmog outfits, so I joined in the fun. The likelihood that I will play my little disc priest was just massively improved. Of all the priest sets, my favorite is absolution the Tier 6 outfit from Black Temple/Hyjal. Since I was the only cloth wearer along and the only other person on my class set did not need it… I managed to soak up an entire set of Absolution gear in the run. I also managed to get a pretty spiffy staff, that I remember all the priests desperately wanted back in the day.

I of course had to transmog to the gear immediately, even though I am only 80 and wearing a mishmash of quested greens. My hope is I can maintain the outfit as I level through all of the cataclysm content. I am sure there is a crafted set that will likely hold me much like the crafted gear has on my rogue. Belglorian my priest is also my tailor so hopefully he can take care of that as I level. I hope to get this character up to Pandaria level since I am stalled out 5 points away from maximum.

Twilight Faffing

While we were out and about our monk healer mentioned that he had a severe absence of flying mounts. Immediately we all thought about the three drakes achievement for Sartharion with its guaranteed mount drop. So very shortly we wandered our way over to Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight and formed up a quick group to do 10 man three drakes. It was insane just how fast we were able to kill it at level 90. It was pretty easy to do at 85, but Sarth just absolutely exploded with our current epic gear. We all passed on the mount drop, and let the healer pick it up unattested.

However since we all had an army of alts, we figured we would swap around a bit and go ahead and knock out the 25 man version as well. Several of us were missing that mount, so the monk healer said for us to roll on it as well. While not as much of a cakewalk as the first one, especially since we were all on alts… it was still rather easy. As you can tell by the image I am now the proud owner of a new twilight drake mount. For whatever reason I never managed to get this one in all the times we did three drakes after Icecrown raids during Wrath, so I was happy to knock out yet another mount.

Utgarde Faffing

We did a quick heroic Ruby Sanctum since one of the folks had a quest still active from the Wrath era, and with that most of us had hit our instance lock. I however still had one more to go before I hit it, so I logged back over to my Paladin who I had logged out at Wyrmrest. Since I was so close, I decided to fly over to Utgarde Pinnacle on a whim. I have run this place on heroic so many times chasing the mount, but each and every time I have walked away empty handed. Yesterday however, I was completely shocked to see a brand new Blue Protodrake mount in my loot window. I have always liked running the zone, and to some extent I am a bit sad I have no real reason to ever return.

While I cannot get the black or plagued protodrakes, this completes the set other than the Time-lost protodrake. I simply do not think I have the patience for that camp. Each time I am in Northrend I buzz through Storm Peaks just in case it is up, but so far all I have seen is the place holder and the time-lost corpse a few times. Similarly I make a trip to Deepholme every now and then and fly the circuit, but again I don’t really expect to ever find that stone drake up either. Both camps are extremely tedious things and I simply do not want the mount bad enough to go through it. I figure I will get my share of camping done when I start collecting spirit beasts on my hunter.

Faffing Overload

One of my really good friends Ashgar came back to the game this weekend, and similar to what I do he spent a lot of time running old raid content for fun. We had talked about going and doing Blackwing Lair earlier in the day, but it never really materialized until shortly after I had gotten the blue protodrake above. He was struggling to solo Razorgore, and I knew I very much could not do it on my paladin… but there were two items I really wanted desperately from there. The first is the Untamed Blade, that I am now modeling in the above screenshot. The second is a proper set of Judgment. While I love the blue/brown set from the opening of Northrend event, simply because it is super rare… I have always wanted a set of the red/gold judgment, that matches the untamed blade. To me that is the archetypal paladin look, and I will not be completely happy until I at least have that as an option.

Needless to say I managed to get the Untamed Blade, but over the course of the dungeon only a single piece of judgment gear dropped. We did however see every single pet, so at this point I am only missing Broodlord Lashlayer, as I managed to pick up mini Razorgore and mini Chromaggus. After we made quick work of Blackwing Lair we decided to wander over to AQ40, since thanks to Twin Emperors it is annoying to solo. There we did not have quite as much luck, but I did manage to pick up the mini Skeram pet, and Ashgar managed to get one of the other ones along the way. The highlight of the run for me however is that moments from joining up the Red Qiraji Resonating Crystal dropped.

The various colors of Resonating Crystals were a source of so much drama for our raid back in the day. We formed “teams” based on the color of mount we managed to get to drop. This was egged on by the fact that one of the raid leaders was strongly opposed to any color that was not “gold”, and as such tried to get as many people on his team as possible. My hunter was a member of this strike team… and we vehemently argued when someone called us “yellow”. The above screenshot was from the first time we saw a Red mount. Prior to that moment the mount war had reached a fever pitch, with various people not willing to accept the “wrong” color of mount. After a point the raid leader just started force-looting people various colors just so they would stop slowing down the raid.

However the moment we all saw the “red one” the mount war dissolved just as fast as it had begun. No one cared about the green, blue or “gold” teams… we were all somehow lacking because we were not riding around on a red mount. During our entire time raiding Ahn’qiraj I think we only actually saw two red mounts drop. The screenshot above was from the night we first saw it… we all lined up to pay homage to the new “red leader”. Lleandryn will always have the distinction of being the man who brought an end to the “mount wars”. I joke about it these days, but very seriously… the animosity over the color of mount we were using had really reached a point of ridiculousness. Lots of hurt feelings were happening over having the wrong color, so the fact that the Red mount “saved” us made looting one yesterday all the sweeter. Now if only blizzard would stop being a pain in the ass and let us ride them everywhere.

Without Burdens

December 15, 2013 by Belghast

Of Holiday Parties

This morning I am slowly eating my oatmeal and trying to make my head stop throbbing. I feel like I have a “hangover” but I didn’t even drink last night. I think this means I am now officially “old”. Last night was the Christmas party for my group at work. I think I said it yesterday, but we are the only group that actually likes each other enough to hold a party. It has been years since I have felt the way about a group of people that I do about these people. Quite honestly I probably never have felt exactly the same, but my very first work environment was a similar “family” feel.

The highlight of the evening was dirty santa, which for folks who do not know what that means. Gift exchange with the ability to steal from others. The best gift was… a large thing of crown royal, a pair of captain america underoos, and a package of fake moustaches. I cannot and nor do I really want to picture the scenario that was planned with that combination of items… but it was needless to say hillarious. Even better… someone had inadvertedly brought a Captain America mask and shield… the underoos were donated to the winner for the full effect. I brought some legos, and they were hotly contested… as were the call of duty mega blocks that were brought.

Probably the coolest item of the night was one I ended up winning initially but then was quickly stolen from me. The “Boozequet” was a floral bouquet made up of individual shots. The creator had hot glued the individually sealed shot drinks onto floral wire and then arranged all of them in a bouquet. Extremely clever, I told the creator that she should market it and I am sure during this time of the year she would get a lot of business. She even made a cute little “drunk santa” tub for the base of the arrangement. The whole night was pretty amazing. I go through this “I don’t want to go” phase right before any party, because my body rejects being around lots of people. However when I actually do go I have a blast.’

Without Burdens

I really do not have a lot of gaming news today. When you have a big event going on in the evening the entirety of the day tends to be dominated by planning and preparing for it. My day yesterday was either planning or waiting to play for the holiday party. As a result I didn’t get into anything that I could not rapidly exit if needed. That meant my only real options were LFR. After some moving stuff around I managed to get my ilevel high enough to queue for Vale of the Eternal Spring, the first section of Siege of Orgrimmar. In fact currently I am sitting at 502 with a 450 ring still equipped that I have not been able to replace. I am proud of myself because I got there on this alt without “actual raiding” and without leaning on Burden of Eternity gear at all.

Why does this matter? Well a Burden of Eternity is one of those things from the timeless isle that is either a super rare drop, or super costly (50,000 timeless coins). When you apply it to the gear tokens that drop from the island it transforms what would have been a 496 ilevel item to a 535 ilevel item. The problem is, just like the normal tokens there is no control whatsoever on what stat package you will get. This creates a lot of odd situations like tanking items with no avoidance stats on them. I personally find the burden gear to be a bit of a crutch, and what I mean by that is… I cannot seem to make my brain ignore the fact that it is higher ilevel and instead evaluate the stats of an item. Many 502 items will be better for your character than these 535 items just because of the particular stat distribution and the inclusion of gem slots.

Having these extremely high ilevel but not very optimized items just confuses the mix for me. I have or have had quite a few of these on Belgrave my main, and in each case I find it really hard to make myself abandon them for a better itemized but lower ilevel item. This is the double edged sword of ilevel after all… the number does not adequately represent how well a player is geared. I could have a bunch of extremely high ilevel items equipped that are functionally useless for my class. On my shaman I admit that I equipped a healing trinket that I got from a random loot bag… just to get my ilevel up high enough to be able to run Vale of the Eternal spring. I am sure there are lots of other people out there doing the same. I like the feeling of seeing my gear score going up incrementally, but I feel like as a gauge of quality it has never really been valid.

A Quiet Day

This has to be the slowest I have taken to eat my oatmeal in the morning. I blame the multiple directions my head seems to be spinning right now. As a result of my present state… I am hoping for an extremely quiet day. Far as I know we don’t really have much of anything to do today, so my hope is that other than doing laundry I can pretty much sit on my comfy couch and relax. Said relaxation is probably going to involve a lot of LFR for a shot at shiny shiny loot drops. Now that my paladin can queue for Siege I want to get him all the way through to Downfall. I also should run my shaman, dk and druid through as well. Who knows how much I will actually get accomplished but needless to say I will be enjoying my day today.