MMO Archives - Page 239 of 438 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Weekend Hibernation

December 5, 2016 by Belghast

It was a truly bizarre weekend for a whole lot of reasons. Primarily because whatever illness my wife had seemed to strike with a vengeance during the tail end of last week. As I said before I was originally planning on going to RiffTrax with work friends on Thursday night but by the time I left work I realized there was no way I could make it through an entire evening. Instead I begged off and went home and crashed on the sofa in my fuzzy blanket cocoon. By the time Friday came around I was really doing considerably worse and took a sick day… which in turn screwed up our evening plans. We were originally slotted to do this monthly family dinner thing, but we rescheduled it for next weekend because I was not sure how well I would be to drive. Instead I returned to the blanket cocoon once more and was as a result available for our normal Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear run. I wound up tanking it, with the stipulation being that I was not going to talk at all. In fact to prevent myself from doing this I muted my microphone…. which lead to a weird run since I am fairly vocal as we make it through the content. To make it even more odd, we were without the OTHER vocal leader Kylana which meant a whole slew of people had to step up to the plate and help make sure the run went smoothly. So seriously huge thanks to Mort, Phy, Beist, Bledd, and I am sure a whole slew of other people who also were chatty and helpful but I am not remembering at this very moment. It was once again a super clean run, and in the end I wound up swapping off for Erry for the final encounter since it generally requires a bit more vocal tank coordination.

Past that night I spent a lot of time piddling around in stuff by myself. Namely this meant an awful lot of Final Fantasy XV, and I think maybe just maybe I am finally to the point where I am willing to move on past “world 1”. As I said before there is a point where the game warns you that if you continue on you might not be able to return for awhile. I took this warning to heart given that I just came from playing Final Fantasy XIV where this sometimes means that a two and a half hour long cut scene is about to happen. Instead over the weekend I found out from some of the other folks playing it that at least in this case… the game is talking about a ten minute process and not a thirty hour long one. In past games these warnings often times meant that you would not be able to return until you found the airship, and I am pleased to find out that this is not the case. At this point though I am running out of things I can actually do in the starter world, and all of the hunts are of a significant level difference from my current level so I think the game is not so subtly telling me to move the hell on.

Another thing that took up some time this weekend is that I tore down a chunk of my office and set up my new Xbox One. For awhile now I have been interested in owning an Xbox One to be able to play the titles that don’t exist on the PS4. Similarly there is an entire group of friends that I have that are on the Xbox path, and I have not been able to play with them. Unfortunately there were really no titles that supported Xbox 360 crossplay with Xbox One, so as each of them has upgraded… my options similarly narrowed. While I have had this latent desire… I also just could not justify the street price for the console given that I am primarily a PC gamer first… and a Console gamer second. However on Black Friday I actually partook of a deal on Dell.com for an Xbox One, Extra Controller, Headset, and Five Games: Halo 5 Limited Edition, Farcry 4, Ryze Legendary Edition, Sunset Overdrive, and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes all for right at $200. For this I was willing to jump on it and the box arrived at my house Saturday during the day… and I wound up setting it up after editing the podcast on Sunday morning. There was another deal on Cyber Monday to pick up a copy of the Destiny Collection for the Xbox One for I believe $25 and I jumped on that too, so while I was installing other things… I ported over my Xbox 360 copy of Destiny. Firstly since I am largely a digital only gamer on PS4… I did not realize the whole download after installation was as much of a tedious chore as it actually was. Halo 5 took a good three hours worth of download time, which I found insane and shocking. Is this what disc copy gamers on the PS4 have to deal with as well? or is this largely just an Xbox One thing? In any case… I was kinda happy to see that my PS4 clan tag ported over to the Xbox One, and while I will still primarily be playing Destiny on PS4, I want to level something to hang with my friends playing on the Xbone.

I’ve decided to start linking the podcast on Monday mornings in what generally ends up being a weekend rundown post. Not that I think there is anyone who doesn’t have access to it… but just in case the youtube version embeds nicely. The other big take away from the weekend was all of the food that we cooked. We wound up having a weekend full of comfort food, cooked in the crock pot. So Friday night before going to bed I threw our breakfast casserole on to cook so that when we woke up Saturday morning it was ready. This dish consists of egg, cheese, potato, ham and sausage and it amazing. We wound up eating on it for breakfast and lunch on Sunday as well… and still have a bunch left over. My wife had the bright idea to turn it into a breakfast burrito with a little salsa. We also cooked our Chicken and Cheese Tortilla soup, which we only got two meals out of… well and an extra helping or two. Finally on Sunday we tried out this Orange Chicken thing… that is close but not quite there. It was good enough but it needs something to make it work properly… and I think I screwed it up by putting the rice directly in the sauce and letting it cook. I should have simply made a couple cups of rice and then ladled the sauce over it instead. In any case… my wife and I are both largely on the mend but we pretty much spent the entire weekend hibernating. We started taking some OTC meds when it initially hit and I think it helped out quite a bit.

Darth Scrapheap

December 1, 2016 by Belghast

If appearance systems are the “true” endgame… them I am woefully losing right now. Last night I managed to push my Deathknight across the line and ding 110, to which I immediately abandoned all attempts at questing and instead focused on World Quests. For those who do not know when you hit 110 all you need do is walk over to Khadgar and you can start up the madness on your alts without needing to do the faction grind. Now I look like a random assemblage of crap… or very much like a raiding dps warrior did in vanilla. I know that helm is supposed to be menacing and Deathknighty… but it just keeps reminding me of a lizard or turtle… or something similar. After a round of “complete the gear quests” I am sitting at 795 and I absolutely plan on exploiting the hell out of the Timewalking dungeons this weekend to help push that higher. As much as I wanted to like the Paladin… it was mostly just a choice to push up so that I could have a miner to feed my engineering. Similarly I started the Rogue with the thought of pushing up a Herbalist/Alchemist but stalled out because Rogues are squishy and annoying. Instead I started working on my Deathknight because deep down inside I still have a lot of love for the character… the fringe benefit however is that now I have a reasonable Herbalist as well to at the very least feed my Seed-Battered Fish Plate habit.

In other news we had a pretty good night of raiding with us coming in and killing Odyn once again after a weird off week thanks in large part to Thanksgiving. It still took a few tries and there are a lot of fiddly bits we can improve on to make it less horrible at the end. From there we had a crazy pull that never ended because we did not learn our lesson properly and or they said they patched something they didn’t actually patch. From there we set up and changed a few things on Guarm and had an amazingly smooth one shot… which is pretty damned awesome considering this was only our second night of attempts. We then continued on to Helya and by the end of the we were pushing her into phase three and phase two was seeming less suicidal. All in all I will count that as significant progress, the only negative being there just aren’t that many gearing options yet from this raid. I am super bummed that I am going to have to miss our now “a thing” Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear this week. I have a family thing that happens once a month, and this just happens to be that Friday. Thankfully I think we have more than enough reasonable tanking options to make something work in my absence. I am just bummed at losing a shot at maybe just maybe getting those last three corrupted essences.

I also played a significant amount of Final Fantasy XV, and I have decided it is far less a boy band simulator and more Final Fantasy Entourage. All of that said… I still like it quite a bit and it is absolutely priceless when Prompto sometimes hums the class FF battle victory theme after you finish a combat engagement. Right now I am heavily engaged in a life of murder-hobo-ry as I am roaming the country side looking for baddies to vanquish and looting interesting cooking materials. The key take away from yesterday however is that I gave the official Sony PS4 Remote Play a shot and man… have they seemingly improved it greatly. Sure there are still moments when it wigs the hell out and you are best to simply hold still until it stops struggling. Those however are few and far between and for the most part the end result is an extremely smooth play experience. For reference my PS4 is hard wired into my router, and I was connecting into it from my laptop over the wireless network. I did some tests in Destiny to see if this was simply a “good enough for an RPG” thing or if it really was reasonable for playing other games. I could notice a little bit of controller lag while running and doing some patrols… but it was more than reasonable enough for me to play. I am not sure if I would be willing to go into the Crucible or something extremely difficult, but I had a good enough time killing random splicers in the Plaguelands remotely. In truth it is “good enough” for 90% of the stuff I do in Destiny and I would absolutely be willing to try something like farming Archon’s Forge while remoted in through the laptop. It is definitely good enough for Final Fantasy XV which greatly increase the range of play options I have… and I am going to want to test this theory out on the Vita pretty soon. I still think the performance of the unofficial “Twisted” Remote Play was better… but he has just been unable to keep it updated to function on the latest version of the PS4 firmware… and the bonus features of playing with a keyboard, mouse and xbox 360 controller simply are not worth being behind in the firmware version especially given that it will bar you from accessing the PSN store. I am super happy though to see that Sony seems to continue to improve performance.

Space Diablo

November 29, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a good night. It was a fairly crappy day at work because we were still dealing with the ramifications of events that happened over the break. Nothing says excitement like an 8 am conference call. That said I had an amazing bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting on me when I got home. Sunday during the day we made a batch of soup in the crock pot, and for whatever reason soup is all the more amazing on day two. This time around I added a little shredded cheese to it and it was insanely good and the perfect thing to at least in part make me forget the day that lead up to it. As far as my evening the bulk of it was spent hanging out with Grace and Mor in Destiny. While I consider myself still very much a fledgling player, they are more so… and as a result it was kinda fun just to ride along as Mor experienced all of the content for the very first time. The big take away from the night however is that the year one strike bosses are still insane bullet sponges. I kinda find it sad that they never went back and updates these strikes, when much better year two versions exist. The walker in the Devil’s Lair normal difficulty strike… is quite possibly the hardest strike boss ever… or at the very least the one that takes the most time to bring down. I solo walkers out in the patrol zones for fun… and this one just would not die.

Mor calls the game “Space Diablo” and it is fitting because really in the end we are all after tasty loot. Since I had already done most of this content before a bunch of times, I opted to play my Warlock which is generally my least progressed character. On the Stormcaller spec for example I only had the base abilities unlocked that you exit the mission with. By the end of the night however I had a significant amount unlocked, and gear wise my Warlock has suddenly pulled out ahead of my Hunter. The thing with Warlock is that I like literally everything about it… except the jump. Squirrel will probably fight me on this one, but it just feels wrong. It doesn’t work the way I want it to work… and in truth if I could just give my Warlock the Titan jump… everything would be peachy. Then again I would give literally every class the Titan jump, and part of me hopes that they introduce a second round of artifacts that do just this… allow you to customize each character by giving them a different class jump. I don’t think that is likely ever going to happen, so in the meantime I will have to console myself with having permatracking thanks to Memory of Gheleon on every character. If nothing else that artifact is amazing for finding chests… which considering just how many there are in the plaguelands greatly increase how much glimmer I am getting.

Once things wound down in Destiny, I disappeared downstairs and worked on my Deathknight for awhile. Sunday with the start and stop nature of work, I didn’t get terribly far in knocking out some of my dungeon quests. In fact there was a point where I had queued for a dungeon, and shortly after the second boss had to drop group to hop on a work conference call. Were it a guild group this probably would not have been a show stopper given that I could alt tab back and forth as needed, however I excused myself from the PUG and became resigned to not actually finishing up Stormheim. So last night I started off by running Halls of Valor, which went extremely quickly and allowed me to move on in good conscience to Highmountain. Right now I am largely just focusing on the main story of the zone and ignoring any offshoots for the moment, because it already seems like I am going to ding 110 well before wrapping everything up. At the moment I am sitting at 60% into 108, and have just started the quests in High Mountain meaning I have most of an entire zone to level through. I will absolutely ding before leaving this zone, and then I can begin the slow process of gearing through World Quests. I have to say that I love Frost Deathknight for both a leveling and dungeon running spec, and it is going to dethrone my Paladin as my primary alt.

All of this said… I am not likely to work on my Deathknight tonight because I have a date with Final Fantasy. I am too old to stay up and play at the official launch of a game but instead have it sitting waiting for me on my PS4 for when I get home.

Working Weekend

November 28, 2016 by Belghast

Well this morning is not getting off to a glorious start. File this under the category of more issues with web hosting. I seem to be unable to upload any new files to any of my blogs. Some sort of permission issue, and unfortunately not one that I can remedy myself with the level of access that I have. We had an issue over the weekend where my sites got peppered with a bunch of bad files that were being used to send spam mail. As a result I think the web host maybe locked things down a little too tight. I spent the bulk of my Saturday morning going directory by directory and deleting this fishy files that had gotten uploaded through some exploit somewhere along the line. However in the meantime I can’t upload any new images… which kinda derails the whole process of blogging for me. Instead of writing a proper post I have spent the last forty five minutes trying to resolve the issue on my own with zero luck.

As far as gaming this weekend I was all over the place. I played some Rift and made it to level 67 in the Gedlo Badlands, and also partook of the weekend mount sale to pick up a couple of the previously lockbox only mounts including the back warmech thing. Early in the week I had set my goals on leveling the Deathknight in World of Warcraft to 110. Then I found out that the frost hidden appearance that drops from this weeks world boss… also requires Artifact Knowledge 4, which was not something I could hope to finish during the timeframe. That said I still have been having an awful lot of fun on the Deathknight and even casually playing without a serious push… I managed to get him to just shy of 108. In Destiny I worked on getting all three of my characters through the various weekly quests available from Shiro in the Iron Temple. I now have all three classes at 385 or above with my Titan being the highest at 387. Other than that I started Dishonored 2 and am struggling to get into it. I am not sure what it is about the setting but it is far less interesting to me than Dunwall. I am not terribly far in so I am going to continue giving it a shot until hopefully it clicks.

Other than all of this… my weekend was perforated by a lot of things happening at work that I ultimately had to log in and deal with. A prime example is that I had been trying to finish a dungeon needed by my Deathknight when I had to drop the dungeon finder group… and hop on a conference call for an hour to try and sort out what was happening. The problem with being salary… and not having an official on-call rotation is that it means you are always on call. We sorted it out but it was a something looming over my head because you are never quite certain when you are really “out” for the day. I thought I put things to bed at 11 am… and I kept getting pulled back in until around 7 pm my time. Something similar happened on Saturday as well, and I had to stop what I was doing and drive back to the house just to get in for thirty minutes to fix something. As a result it felt like this really strange pseudo working weekend, and with us skipping the recording of AggroChat something felt off the entire time. It is funny now our rituals ground us… and now badly I needed mine to make the weekend feel normal. Raiding Karazhan I guess however helped to serve as a great cap to the weekend, seeing as we once again had a pretty smooth clear.