MMO Archives - Page 224 of 438 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tiny Wings

June 16, 2017 by Belghast

This is likely going to be a super short post because reasons. Last night was an interesting shift from my personal status quo because I guest hosted on the For the Lore podcast. They were recording their yearly E3 multi-episode and for also reasons… @Samodean was forced to miss. So as a result @ZenBuddhist pinged me over twitter to see if I was willing to join him and @LodurZJ as an alternate. In the past I have always really enjoyed guesting on other podcasts in part because it lets me see how exactly everyone else is doing this recording thing. AggroChat as a whole is largely done almost by accident, and it is sometimes nice to see how those who have a clear purpose actually piece together things. It had also been entirely too long since I had done this sort of thing. The only gotcha was their normal recording time is about 1 hour sooner than I could realistically get to the screen and settled in for the night. Thankfully they pushed it back a little bit and I was able to join in. Hopefully once again I did not make too much of an ass of myself. I am not exactly sure what their release schedule is, because in truth the only release schedule I know is our own. However in the near future you should be able to catch me on the first of a two part episode covering E3 2017 on the For the Lore site.

In other news… Stormblood has officially begun… or at least the head start for those who pre-purchased the game. This expansion had some fairly sweeping changes, and when I first logged in it felt like my hotbars were on fire. Many of the buttons that I had slotted were replaced by a shared pool of role specific abilities. So that mean’t things like provoke and stun now exist in that shared tree from which I was able to slot 5 abilities in total. This is ultimately going to lead to some interesting choices because unlike before with cross class abilities… there were way more than five choices from that pool that I wanted access to. I have a feeling we are going to be swapping up to attempt to tailor for specific fights. For example I now seem to have an AOE taunt… which isn’t that important for leveling… but I could absolutely see needing that on specific fights or if you were taking over the add tank on a specific encounter. For the most part Warrior feels the same with the big change being that we lost the 5 stack resource… that I never can remember the name of and instead get the beast gauge. This swap has a bunch of positive benefits to the class as a whole. For example there were many fights where I would need to hold back using Inner Beast for specific mechanics… but this meant there was the opportunity cost of being capped out at 5 stacks of the buff. Now I have a gauge that goes from 10-100… or functionally 10 stacks of my resource meaning that even while holding back an Inner Beast I can also keep building up at least one more attack in reserve. The other amazing quality of life change is I am not sure if this meter actually decays over time… I have been able to hold onto beast charges for way longer than I could have the equivalent stacks before.

The negative of the launch so far is that the Duty instance system seems to be toast. That means there is a point in the main story quest where you simply cannot proceed past. The folks that habitually skip cut scenes seem to be far worse off because it seems to keep them in a bit of a locked state where they can’t interact with NPCs at all. As a pretty rabid cut scene watcher… I did not have this problem but I did absolutely hit the wall already. There are some that are raging against the machine in chat, and others that keep telling them to calm down. There are of course new Jobs to work on and other things to occupy time until this gets fixed. I am absolutely certain someone somewhere is having a really bad day and working as hard as they can to remedy this. In truth we don’t even know if this is a development thing, but could instead be an infrastructure issue with the hosting environment. Whatever the case… folks are getting stalled out but that sort of goes hand in hand with the release of anything. All in all I am happy that my character largely is going to make the transition without massive horrible feeling changes, and that we get to explore a new part of the world. For the moment I am not bothering to glamour back my helm… and apparently have tiny floppy wings instead of bunny ears.

RoboSquids Vs Stockade

June 14, 2017 by Belghast

I am taking a break from my regular E3 regurgitation and commentary… to talk about what might be the last ride of the RoboSquids for awhile. This coming Friday is the launch of Stormblood and with it a lot of us will be working on leveling and get settled into that game. As a result our time for screwing around on low level characters in World of Warcraft is going to be limited. As a result we decided to tackle the one that we had all been dreading… the Stormwind Stockades. Now normally folks just queue up for this dungeon and ignore the fact that like Ragefire… the dungeon entrance is embedded in a faction capitol. To recap our rules…

Level lock at the minimum level for each dungeon
Use whatever means necessary in-between levels
Attempt all raids even if we superfail
Must compete all dungeons at level before moving on
No heirlooms in dungeons
Must get to the dungeon naturally and zone in
Gear cannot be solved by money
Blue quality or higher gear can only come from questing, robo-squid group random drops, or bosses at or below our level lock

I emphasized the rule that is the problem here. At level 20 we had to make our way into Stormwind and get to the zone in for the stockades on our own. There were four of us… myself, Grace, Mor and Ashgar. Like with the Deadmines we ultimately chose to enter through the Grom’gol airship and then run up to Stormwind from there. Two of us chose to take the land route of… Stranglethorn > Duskwood > Westfall > Elwynn and then go through the front door. Myself and Grace chose to hop on our water striders and try and make it up the coast and then enter through the docks… thinking that might end up missing some of the guard density. My ultimate goal was to get to Lions Rest which is the shrine that was erected to replace the big empty area that was formerly the park. My thought was that potentially this had fewer guards and I could then get closer to the dungeon entrance and potentially rez hop my way in.

The funny thing about this entire trip is that I had no clue that the graveyard assigned to horde players… is the Eastvale Logging Camp. I posted a screenshot for reference, each time we died we had to run where my arrow is currently all the way to wherever the hell we died in Stormwind. Simply running across Elwynn forest each time ate a bunch of time. While we were doing this run I decided to start streaming it… and looking back it took roughly 50 minutes for all four of us to make our way into the instance area. We started a race of sorts as we tried to rez our way across Stormwind… and without really meaning to I won. I had an absolute lucky break in that I could rez up on a significantly higher vertical surface and bypass a lot of the dock area. Similarly I also had a lucky rez around the Lion’s Rest area and was able to get into the instance area in about 35 minutes. Grace who also took the dock route joined me at about 44 minutes and then Mor not that long after… and Ashgar having the roughest time getting inside. Ash however took one for the team early on as he attempted to use the spirit healer at the instance hoping to hop back up right there. However whatever faction code is in place caused him to resurrect back at the Eastvale Logging Camp. The funniest part of the night however was the fact that it took us 50 minutes to run there… and 10 minutes to actually do the instance.

After finishing up the Stockades we decided to go ahead and make the push to Blackfathom Deeps. The ultimate goal would have been to go ahead and finish up the level 20 dungeons and allow us to start leveling towards the next cap of 24. However moments after all four of us zoned into the instance… we got disconnected. Last night the servers as a whole had a significant issue, where folks either could not log in, could not see their characters… or simply could not finish loading into the game. Just about when we were going to give up I managed to log into the dungeon… and shortly after Grace and Mor were as well. Ash unfortunately was stuck in a disconnect loop, so we opted to start clearing trash hoping he could eventually make it in. We had cleared to the first boss and were starting to clear the way to the second boss… when Grace disconnected. What was worrisome was the fact that she no longer was responding on Discord as well, meaning whatever issue was happening was on her end… not the server. At this we finally decided that the world was trying to tell us something, and that we should just call it for the night. The frustrating part however is by the time Grace got back in moments later… it seems like the servers as a whole had stabilized. We are not really sure how we are going to do the RoboSquid content going forward, but we might need to set up an almost raid night happening once a week or something. At this point we have run…

Ragefire Chasm
The Deadmines
Wailing Caverns
Shadowfang Keep
Stormwind Stockade

Five dungeons down… only One Hundred Fifty Nine instances left to go…

Mixed Results

June 8, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday I spoke about an idea we had of trying to level lock and run dungeons “legitimately” and as a result slowly work our way through the content as a trio. I personally went with a Brewmaster Monk, a class I have never really devoted much time to playing. Grace similarly fell into a familiar role of healing, rolling a Mistweaver Monk. That left Mor with rolling an Assassination Rogue to be our damage dealer. We went into this experiment quite honestly expecting to largely face roll Ragefire Chasm. What happened instead was absolutely not anything even vaguely close to facerolling. From the first pull we knew we were in for some work, given that firstly… we were in an assemblage of whatever gear we happened to scrape together making our way to 15. Secondly we were going in as a trio instead of a full five player group. All in all given how much we underestimated the content… I feel largely okay about the evening. We struggled our way through the dungeon, boss after boss until we sat stalled at the final encounter. Lava Guard Gordoth has this ability called Seismic Slam, that deals damage to all players within 25 yards of the boss. There is no cast bar or from what I can tell any real way to mitigate this. The challenge simply put is the fact that this ability was a oneshot, and we could see no real way of avoiding it.

The problem here is that we are quickly realizing that the content is seemingly scaled for players in Heirlooms… and not necessarily gear that you happen to get organically. When I am in my full heirloom set of gear like pictured above I am sitting somewhere in the vicinity of 1600 health. When wearing completely legit questing gear… I am sitting somewhere around 500 health. Quite simply put we were running into a hard gear wall that we need to scale somehow. Because we are insane however… we are planning on attempting to throw a rope over the ramparts and scale that wall anyways. The first challenge is to decide what the actual firm guidelines are for this project. Right now we have a handful of rules written in a spreadsheet where we are attempting to keep track of the item levels for each dungeon. The rules to date look a little something like this.

Level lock at the minimum level for each dungeon
Use whatever means necessary during the in-between levels
Must complete all dungeons at level before moving on
No heirlooms in dungeons
Must get to the dungeon naturally and zone in
Attempt all raids even if we super fail

What we failed to address however is what exactly is fair game for gearing ourselves to be able to complete the content. There are a bunch of options that I see and they all sorta have their own pluses and minuses.

Continue Questing While Level Locked

This one is pretty straight forward. Stay level locked and just keep working on quests, with the thought process that eventually you would get good enough gear to be able to complete the content. The positive here is that it is entirely organic… at least in a fashion, the the negative is you are functionally making the next level grind a bit harder given that you will need to do more grinding and have fewer quests to rely on. That said we have already agreed that leveling between dungeon locks in heirlooms is completely fair game.

Auction House

Another thing we need to identify is if we are willing to allow purchasing items from the Auction House. My gut feeling here is no, especially given that we are currently in the twink PVP bracket and some of the decent options are going for as much as 300,000 gold. It always just feels wrong to buy our way to success in the dungeons.

Pre-Farming Gear

Another option is to simply run our alts through the dungeon and farm up a bunch of greens then trade them around. If I remember correctly Deadmines drops greens like candy and they should in theory be in the appropriate level range. I am mostly torn on this one because this is my gut reaction on how to solve a gearing problem… just throw a bunch of greens at it. However this also maybe tarnishes the legitimacy of the runs. Similarly we could simply take turns running each others characters through a zone… but that actually feels significantly worse to me given that you are able to pick up boss loot as well as an assortment of random greens that could have dropped anywhere in that level range.

Battlegrounds

Grace and I actually tested this one out and in the grand scheme of things this seems like a reasonable option to get an assortment of greens. The one match we played we both got really nice at level cap greens that were sizable upgrades over our questing look. The negative is that for Grace at least it did not seem to respect her loot spec choice and she continued to get agility gear instead of intellect gear. Additionally as stated this is the twink bracket which means it isn’t exactly the fairest fights in the world. However wearing heirlooms seemed to put us on a fairly even footing with the twinklords.

Crafted Gear

The potentially best option is to get a bunch of gear crafted that the characters can wear and start with that as a baseline. The challenge and frustration here is that Blizzard is generally lousy at crafted gear. It is nearly impossible to create a full set of gear at any given level, so you still wind up wearing a mishmash of items level 5 to 15 in order to finish enough pieces to get a reasonable set of anything.

Random Dungeon Bags

We have all but agreed this one is out of the picture because the gear that comes from the random bags you get at the end of dungeon finder dungeons… is scaled pretty similar to heirlooms. That means we will once again gear way past what our ultimately target goal is. We are looking to make the dungeons a challenge, but somehow find a happy medium where they are also not impossible like Ragefire appeared to be tonight. We’ve just reached the point where we need to hash out these ideas and potentially come up with others, and lay down some additional ground rules on how we want to gear these characters. Best to decide it now because we are going to have a lot of gearing in our future. The awesome thing about this however is that it is making us appreciate greens that we have been thoughtlessly vendoring for years.

RoboSquid Armada

June 7, 2017 by Belghast

Myself and a few friends may be deciding to engage in some madness. The idea spawned out of a discussion about how World of Warcraft would be a more enjoyable leveling experience if it featured the same style of instance level scaling that Final Fantasy XIV does. For those not familiar, in FFXIV you have a set of levels for a given dungeon much the same as you do in World of Warcraft. For example Deadmines is generally thought of as a level 15-16 dungeon… so in this case if it were FFXIV you would zone in and be downscaled to the level of the zone regardless if you are level 25 or level 60. The other feature of the level scaling is that you are limited to using abilities that exist within that level range… which in itself can be slightly annoying because you might need to do some hotbar swapping. The experience feels good however and you get to run the dungeons with your friends without necessarily feeling like you are powering them through the content. For years I have beat the drum of the need for “mentoring” in World of Warcraft, where you can voluntarily drop your level to that of a friend. While we absolutely know that the level scaling tech could do this… thanks to the Legion zones and Invasion event… it seems like the Blizz crew simply doesn’t want to add this feature. So we decided to take things into our own hands.

Years ago they put in a functionality of being able to lock your level and effectively turn off experience gain. For the most part this was entirely intended to be used by the thriving “twink” PVP scene that flourished during Vanilla and the Burning Crusade expansions. However some time ago we also used this for the purpose of raiding and I was a tank in a guild called “Years Behind” that attempted to raid all of the vanilla content with level locked 60s. That derailed a small bit because there was a significant amount of gear that you could equip at 60… but effectively came from the BC expansion, meaning some of those greens straight up wrecked hard fought purples from the raid content. Regardless it was a lot of fun to experience the raid content the way it was meant to be experienced, rather than steamrolling it with a bunch of wildly overleveled characters. The only negative with level locking is that it is a bit cost prohibitive… in that it costs 10 gold every time you want to lock your level… and another 10 gold every time you want to unlock it. As a result in order to complete this project we decided that we would need a benefactor… namely the already well geared characters of myself and Grace. With all of this in mind… last night we set forth to create a brand new set of low level horde characters. I myself am playing Belgwyb… a Female Orc Monk with the bluish skintone… in a slantwise honorific of the best Grand Company leader ever… Meylwyb Bloefhiswyn. Grace created another Monk but I believe she is going healy, whereas I am of course intending to go tanky. Finally Mor rolled an undead rogue, which gives us some semblance of proper dps.

The idea is a simple but also probably a slightly insane one. We level to 15… then lock our level and attempt to run Ragefire Chasm and Deadmines. If we cannot for some reason complete a dungeon during a fixed level range… we unlock and begin leveling again only to lock later and try again. The goal being to get through all of the dungeons in the game… especially the vanilla era ones with appropriately leveled and geared characters. The catch is that we are not using heirlooms at all. That is for a few reasons… firstly the xp gain boost would make like madness in trying to control our levels and secondly… using heirlooms is the equivalent of using blue or purple gear all of the time while leveling greatly reducing the difficulty of all encounters. The other constraint we are placing upon ourselves is that we must run to the dungeon and be able to zone in naturally. This means for Deadmines we are in fact going to have to do the Gromgol run up to Westfall through a bunch of really nasty stuff that can and probably will straight up wreck us. I am going to try and convince my companions to let me stream these adventures because I have a feeling they are going to be memorable. The fact that we are trying things at the right level is increased in difficulty by the fact that there are just three of us doing this, and not a full team of five. Our first step is to hit 15 however we want… and then we begin the dungeon crawl. I of course will be sharing our adventures… good or bad here on the blog. We formed a guild last night for this process… and named it the RoboSquid Armada because that is apparently what happens when you get the three of us together and tell us to name something.