knight Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.

Its A Voxel World

Yesterday something pretty awesome happened… Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly. I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave. You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed. This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace. I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it. I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it. I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all. That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove. The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along. Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta. Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go. Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox. I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class. For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight. The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth. From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect. The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken. Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage. I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face. For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default. For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations. The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage. The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily. Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time. The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is. Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort. This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort. Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over… so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently. In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way. The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back. Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes. The first involves triggering an event. These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen. When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears. The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts. We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges. The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset. The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion. So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game. You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote. One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone. This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world. I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes. So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point. This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world. This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality. I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”. This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it. This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them. This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds. While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along. You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways. There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.