MMO Archives - Page 234 of 442 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Unlikely Agent

April 25, 2017 by Belghast

This is absolutely one of those mornings where I am staring blankly at WordPress sort of hoping that a blog post materializes in front of my eyes. I have this fitful relationship with sleep. It is something I crave but something I can never quite get at normal levels. I mean I have my own normal, which is four to six hours of sleep a night. If I get over that I tend to get groggy… which is what happens to be going on this morning. Sunday night I had a horrid bout of insomnia, which when combined with the fact that our middle cat was being insane… meant I probably got two hours of real sleep. So by the time I hit 9 pm last night I was conking out at the keyboard, and decided to put the house to bed and crash. That means I managed to get roughly eight hours of sleep… and my body is confused as hell. Its like… what was this thing, I think I like it… lets do nothing but that from now on! Hence the sitting in my office chair in a dark room, with a cat laying on the desk beside me… staring blankly into oblivion.

Before the impending crash however I spent a good deal more time with Star Wars the Old Republic working through the Imperial Agent story. I mean there is a good reason why I saved this one for last… because in truth this has always been the class that I had zero interest in. I am not a stealthy person… nor am I necessarily a normally deceitful person. So the idea of flying around the galaxy and crushing rebellions through unsavory means did not exactly sound that fun to me. In true Bioware style however… it is allowing me to play a fairly atypical Agent that regularly talks back to his handlers. In truth I am trying to play it much like a smuggler that somehow got drafted into imperial service, and and for this reason I am not using any of the traditional imperial garb, but instead decided it was a great time to break out the Nico Okarr duster.

I am occasionally breaking out the HK-55 helm when I want to feel more bounty hunter than smuggler. I did most of Hutta in this fashion because I felt like anyone called the “Red Blade” simply would not do to be wearing Imperial Garb. All of these mental adjustments are helping me to enjoy the story as I am sort of re-purposing what is happening into the narrative that I would rather be playing. The positive is that apparently Kaliyo is eating it all up, given that she apparently likes violence against those who deserve it… and general smartassery the rest of the time. Because of my general stance of only harming the wicked… I am playing a fairly “grey” character, sitting on straight up neutral currently. This is an interesting departure from the “did you say force lightning” options of the Sith Inquisitor. At the point I crashed for the night I had just started Imperial Balmorra, which is probably my least favorite planet. However just focusing on the class and planetary stories means I tend to get off the various planets pretty quickly, but at the same time feel like I see the entire place through the new classes eyes.

Pretentious Magitek

April 20, 2017 by Belghast

This morning my cats are being little butts. The normally sweet one is prancing back and forth on the keyboard… and the one that is normally a butt just wants me to keep flinging a rubber band for her to chase. None of this is really conducive to sitting down and writing a proper blog post. The sweet one has now taken to sitting on the cabinet to the left of the computer and staring… occasionally meowing. She is likely afraid that she will waste away to nothingness in the time it takes me to write a post, and believes that I really should stop doing whatever it is humans do and go feed her. On top of this I am having some hardware issues… with a box that is not connected to this one but it is frustrating me to the point where I am constantly reaching over to the other keyboard and fiddling with stuff. This also is not super great for writing a fully functional blog post. However I still need to somehow push forward and come up with some form of brilliance… even if that is dollar store brilliance that is on clearance for only 50 cents.

Last night I did not really do much in the way of gaming. I finally finished watching the last episode of Iron Fist, and while doing so I worked on my baby machinist. I managed to get back over the 60 barrier and turned my weapon red in the Palace of the Dead… which makes no difference when it comes to the speed of leveling but feels like it does significantly for your ability to burn things down quickly. I hit a string of parties with a tank and three dps…. and all things considered they tend to go pretty smoothly. The only rough spots are when the group decides to fan out and split down different pathways. In theory this is not a horrible way to approach the dungeon as a whole, but if anyone ends up pulling a mimic it is a certainty that someone will get pox. As I have spent more time in the dungeon, my focus has shifted to trying to avoid pox at all costs… at least until we have a pomander of purity waiting to be used. Most of my wipes in Palace of the Dead have revolved around a bad pull combined with folks having pox. The absolute worst moments are when a tank attempts to tank…. without having a healer. I mean I get it… as a tank our instinct is to run in and gather everything up. However that is just not really a viable option for running Palace of the Dead unless you have a pocket healer going in there with you.

Another thing that has happened that I have not really talked about is that I crossed the 500 commendation barrier and now have my giant pretentious golden magitek armor. I admit I was a little disappointed when I found out that the tune it plays is exactly the same as the normal magitek armor. The weird thing about the commendation system is that it pushes me to be friendly even if I am not really feeling like doing so. I tend to open every dungeon with a “hey folks” and close every dungeon with something along the lines of “thanks for the run, have a good one”. I am not sure if this matters but I usually can at least steal a single commendation from each run. Now my friends who random queue more often have been at the 500 mark for a very long time… I largely pushed through the last 150 or so while dungeon the deep dungeon. It feels like “strategic niceness” is a thing, and I feel sorta dirty admitting that sometimes I am just doing it for the sweet sweet comms. The only problem is… even after having gotten the mount I am still keeping up the practice. I think at some point it just began to feel normal to greet people when you join a dungeon and thank them when you finish… so while this largely started out as a way to leech commendations from folks it has apparently become a ritual now for me. This in part is why I wish other games would implement something like the commendations system. I’ve noticed that while a lot of groups are completely silent… that practice of the greeting at the beginning breaks the ice enough to get people discussing things if we run into problems. Folks seem far less likely to sit on a mimic chest and try and solo it down for example, when they have talked at the start of a run. It is like the act of a simple greeting makes it perfectly okay to say other things later, and while I tend to zone out… it is nice to have the occasional line of dialog flying by in party.

Chasing Aloy

April 19, 2017 by Belghast

It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.

The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.

Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was as the post title might give away… a really good night. Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds. The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead. The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests… which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems. There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest. This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players. Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us… but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos. Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to. The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad. While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot… I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights. Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence. I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks. It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do. All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun… except for maybe that middle section. There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four. I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content. That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood… the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content. I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content. Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior. Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell. The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice. That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people… so many other options open up.