MMO Archives - Page 265 of 442 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Goal Accomplished

June 13, 2016 by Belghast

Memories of Other Times

This weekend saw me succumbing to nostalgia, but not in the method you might think. With all the talk of the Warcraft movie, one would assume that I spent my entire weekend playing that game. However instead I wound up spending nearly the entire weekend playing the game that ultimately first took me away from World of Warcraft in a significant way. There were some events that happened this past week, and I ended up finding out that a friend of mine had passed away suddenly. That friend is someone I first met during the launch of Rift when they were part of the community team, and from that point on we kept in contact through the other games we both moved to. Of note… I am never too far from Rift, and I am rarely more than a patch behind when I inevitably fire up Glyph to peek my head in. I’ve subscribed to the game more time than I have not since it launched back in 2011, and I’ve watched the game evolved through expansions and the shift to free to play and have remained one of the few of my friends that carries a heavy torch for the game. The problem being that in order to do a lot of the things I want to do with the game… I need a body of active players. While we have had several resurgences into playing Rift, the last of which seeing the forming of House Stalwart on Faeblight during July or 2013. The only problem being this lasted a few blissful months and then once again we were all fading away from the game to play other things… myself included.

Something shifted as well with the way content was structured in the old world versus content in both Storm Legion and Nightmare Tide. In the original game I managed to level three classes to 50 happily before finally running out of steam. In Storm Legion I managed to push my warrior up to 60, and a significant time later managed to barely push up my rogue up just before the release of Nightmare Tide. The latest expansion however… for whatever reason I just hit high center and never quite managed to near the level cap. When I logged in this weekend I was sitting at level 62 and had been there for quite awhile. There was something about the way the zones were designed, that firstly greatly increased my inborn tendency to wander off aimlessly. This exacerbated another problem that I have had in the newer content… and that is I seem to be able to completely lose the quest chains in the mix and fail to follow them ultimately finding out I am entire zones behind in trying to follow any semblance of a leveling path. So instead I would wander about and grind mobs, mostly doing carnage quests… which are these kill X quests that appear in the wild as you well… will mobs. This is an extremely slow way to level and after a few hours of doing this… and not really seeing the level bar move terribly much I would wander away like a bored child into some other game.

Instant Adventures

Now a little over a year after the launch of the game, the good folks at Trion introduced a system called Instant Adventures. This was single-handedly the best re-purposing of content I have experienced in a game. There are a number of things that happen while you quest your way through a zone, and instant adventures is essentially taking all of these tasks and placing them end to end… and aiding the flow by offering the occasional teleport to the next area and the next set of objectives. The result is this mindless train that you can hop on and just focus on the mission at hand, and in the process getting a bunch of planar currency and the occasional gear filled chest in the process. I’ve always found these an extremely fun way to level at low levels, because you can just literally hit a button and start getting fed small bite sized objectives to focus on, which is the perfect manner to grind alts. The only negative however is that the gear chests are nowhere near as plentiful as they come be… and you often times wind up significantly behind the curve in equip-able items. Over the weekend while recording the AggroChat podcast for example I started a character on the EU server Zaviel and started leveling through Instant Adventure. I shot up the twenty in no time flat… however I am still largely wearing sub level 10 gear other than a handful of really amazing items that I happened to went through the adventures. That said… this is a fun way to level a character and so long as you are riding the train the gear disparities are largely not that bit of an issue thanks to a bit of a bolstering system in place.

Last year they extended this Instant Adventure system to raids, and released Hammerknell as what they called an “Intrepid Adventure”. The result is something halfway between World of Warcraft LFR, and an Instant Adventure that involves going through the raid and its trash packs… that have been chopped up and fed back to you in neat bite sized chunks. The thing that I find interesting is just how many mechanics have managed to make it into the Intrepid adventures, and that the saving grace seems to be that you can simply zerg your way back to the boss after every death instead of needing to wait for a rez. Roughly a month ago they released the second raid as an intrepid adventure based on the Mind of Madness raid. While I had a blast doing Hammerknell on a whim a year ago, I never wound up sticking around for long. This time around however I had a mission in mind… figure out a way to level from 62 to 65. I’ve felt like a failure for quite a while that I never managed to hit the level cap this time around. So Friday night when I hopped into game I headed straight for the queue for Mind of Madness and found myself enjoying both the content I was participating in and the speed at which I found myself leveling. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I wound up sitting in one spot for a couple of hours and finally convinced myself to use some of those patron boosts that I had been sitting on for ages. Sure enough when you add in a +160% experience boost to the already good experience of Intrepid Adventures… the levels quite literally fly by. Sunday morning about noon I found myself with a newly minted level 65 character…. wearing a mismash of gear I picked up through the weekly patron crates… but somehow managing to qualify for expert dungeons.

Expert Grind

Now at some point during the weekend I had installed a dps meter because I was curious if I was actually doing okay… or if I was somehow struggling. When it comes to Intrepid adventures I seemed to be doing just fine with my dps usually running around third place or at least within a contentious pack hanging around that spot. I leveled for the most part with a high survival dps build 44 warlord, 32 champion, 0 paragon. This worked great for uptime and the ability to never need to really heal myself, however apparently it is a less than amazing build when it comes to running “end game” content. Being dumb however I just hit the queue button and hoped everything would be just fine. The end result was myself lagging so far behind the rest of the dps that I got called out on it almost immediately. We wiped over and over because we lacked the dps to tackle the encounters the manner in which folks in experts apparently are used to running them… namely in an ignore all mechanics push the boss as fast as you can and always get the speed run bonus manner. I dropped from the party and wished them luck… and in truth in spite of calling me out on the dps they managed to do so in a far more polite manner than would have happened in other communities. From there I went back to the drawing board and found my way once again to the warrior guides section of the Rift forums. Here I cobbled together a 61 Paragon 10 Warlord build that seemed to work okay… out in the world I can burst down most things before they really have a chance to damage me, but if you put me in an extended fight or a multi target fight I struggle. So I will probably continue to swap between it and my “Solo” build just for my own sanity.

The result was immediate and evident that the bulk of my problems in experts were spec. Granted I still grossly under gear the tier 3 raiders that are regularly running experts these days, however this time around I was able to out dps the tanks and healers. Over the course of yesterday I ran five for six experts and managed to cobble together some upgrades. I am still wearing several pieces of otherwise crap gear… but my hope is through running a bunch of experts I will either be able to mitigate that through spending currency or through getting lucky drops. In my very first expert I managed to complete I ended up getting a really nice purple two-handed axe so it seems like the loot gods have been smiling on me. This is not at all how I intended to spend my weekend, but I enjoyed it greatly regardless. Coming back to Rift felt like going to lunch with an old friend that you had not seen in a long time. I am not sure how long I will be around, especially given that there are other things in other games that I also want to accomplish. However for the time being I am really enjoying myself in my renewed resurgence in the game. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Bahmi and it feels good to be flexing those muscles once more. With the multi-core support the game runs amazingly well on my laptop, but unfortunately still struggles quite a bit on my AMD based desktop. The guild in Faeblight is empty, and I was alone for almost the entire weekend so that alone makes me wonder if this is sustainable. However I have the Rift discord channel to keep me company, and if I wind up staying I might end up needing to move Belghast elsewhere to find the support of a more active guild. Regardless it was an enjoyable weekend and I managed to mark one goal that had been bugging me for quite some time off that list in the back of my head.

Tiny Featherballs

June 3, 2016 by Belghast

Babby Birbs

Right now the highlight of our backyard adventures is the fact that my wife found a nest full of babies. I am guessing these are “Babby” Robins, largely because anytime I got near the nest a Robin would make a horrible racket I assume trying to drive me away. The cute little things have been trained well because they went from happily playing around with each other to being completely still the moment I got anywhere near them. I am guessing that is a defense mechanism to freeze up completely as to keep motion from attracting a predator. They are freaking adorable and they are in a location where we can pretty easily watch them as they do their stuff. There is a leaf in the way so I had to get pretty close to get this clear of a shot, but as far as seeing their general well being we can track that from the comfort of our patio. I am absolutely certain there are more babies out there, but I am guessing this might be the only group that is actually inhabiting one of our bushes… that they probably mistook for a tree considering how overgrown they were. It makes me wonder if there have been Robins nesting in it all this time. I know last hear there was a group of Robins that nested in a gap in the stonework on the side of our house near the garage. Unfortunately a huge windstorm came up and the next morning I found that nest on the ground with both eggs cracked open. I am kinda worried about how precarious this nest looks, but I guess since they have already hatched and are already fat little feather balls… hopefully they could function if something happened to the nest.

I talked yesterday about the batch of flowers that I thought were the first fatality of the backyard. Sure enough all of the red flowers died out, and the white ones looked pretty sickly for a bit. However yesterday after finally getting some solid sun, the white ones seem to be pulling out just fine. It is my hope that now that we have freed up most of the space from the dead plant, that the white flower will go ahead and fill that space in. I snapped this photo largely because of the droplets of water on the pedal. All of the other flowers seem to be thriving which is awesome, especially after getting some tasty sunlight. Honestly I wonder if the red one struggled not because of the watering situation but due to the fact that we went several days without much direct sunlight. In any case the backyard is just as peaceful and relaxing as ever… with the slight problem of it being insanely muggy. The pool however seems to have finally warmed up so I am looking forward to using it in the near future. I had stuff to do last night or I would have potentially taken a dip.

Challenge of Thursday

On Thursday nights I have a standing date with Jex and Squirrel to do some Challenge of Elders, and often times a Nightfall. Now the entire idea behind this is just to make sure that no matter what we get at least one set of characters through the Challenge of Elders that week. Often times folks start running these like mad on Tuesday nights, a night where I already have a commitment in the form of the FFXIV Pony Farm/Raid night. So that means I miss out on a bunch of the easy clan pick up group action. Now most weeks I slide into another Clan group without problem, but we simply set aside this night as a way of making sure that we get at least one set of drops from the challenge. I look forward to the night because I greatly enjoy hanging out with Squirrel and Jex, because the two of them are the folks that revitalized Destiny for me and introduced me to the amazing Axioma clan. Last night we got started a little earlier which means we also had time to squeeze in a Nightfall afterwards. This weeks Challenge included a score bonus for super abilities, so a couple of us were rocking the Bad Juju as a way of feeding our super/orb generation machine. One of the rounds we managed to score around 50,000 points which I am pretty damned proud of. Unfortunately we still were just shy of the 90,000 armor score, which allowed us to have one match where we broke out our Sleeper Stimulants and just tore down the bosses.

Aegis of the Reef

Darkblade Helm

As far as drops worth mentioning… I picked up a 330 Aegis of the Reef, which is the Taken themed Pulse rifle. So far I have to say I am in love with this thing and it dropped with a solid set of perks. In the first slot it came with Send It and Reinforced Barrel… which since the gun already has decent stock stability I have chosen Send It. In the second tier it came with Full Auto, which is an interesting perk to get on an already stable pulse rifle, but unfortunately you can really burn through your ammo reserves quickly. In the last slot it has a very interesting situational case of Third Eye and Life Support, letting me swap between the two based on what I need worse. For the time being I am rocking Third Eye because I love having radar up all of the time. When we got around to running the Nightfall I managed to pick up a second Darkblade Helm, this one sitting at 335 with almost exactly the same stat package as my original one that was only sitting at 305. It was a straight upgrade and I guess I will wear it for awhile to get it nice and upgraded as an option. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed running around with this helmet just because it looks cool. All in all it was a pretty great night, and through all of our shenanigans I managed to gain rank from Variks, Vanguard, Future War Cult and the Cryptarch netting me a bunch of random infusables and legendary marks.

Farewell Flower

June 2, 2016 by Belghast

First Casualty

One of my big concerns about our trip last weekend was not so much the long lag in blog posts… but the lack of ability to take care of my “flower babies”. I have become oddly emotionally invested in the lives of our flowers, and while our animals are super hardy and resilient… flowers seem to constantly teeter on the brink of death. Some of our more thirsty flowers I had been watering morning and evening just to make sure they were nice and happy, and unfortunately it is an insane request to ask someone else to do that. So we left Friday hoping everything would be fine, and my flowers would survive until I got back. For the most part things are fine but we have a few of these “c word I cannot pronounce” plants… I think it is something like Catharanthus. We got them as hanging plants… and the purple/pink mixture and yellow/orange mixtures are still thriving. However over our disappearance the red/white mixture started to struggle. In fact the entire red plant withered and died, and in truth given how happy the others seem to be I don’t feel like I can really blame it on the care.

The plant probably would have struggled even if I was there babying it along. However it still is a little sad to see it… and while we removed as much of the dead plant as we could… and by dead I mean spaghetti brittle stems… the white half of the planting seems to be struggling as well. My hope was that by removing the dead plant it would give the thriving plant more room to spread out. The other awkward problem we are having is… it is raining constantly and it is hard striking a balance of when we should and should not water ourselves…. and when the rain water is good enough. I realize the plantings that we have currently are annuals and at some point they will all die out, but I am not looking forward to seeing it. Of the two of us… I am definitely the nurturer, and I just want to take care of the flowers so that they live forever. Even thought I know that is not something that is actually going to happen. The other flowers are lovely however, and if the white half of the planting does die as well we will likely replace it with something else in that planter.

Senor Sabotender

As far as gaming goes, last night I split time between Destiny and Final Fantasy XIV. I feel like I am still getting into the swing of things after returning from our trip, and as a result I have wound up getting super tired significantly earlier than normal. I am sure the extra sleep isn’t hurting me either, so I am largely indulging in the earlier bedtime. As far as Destiny goes I spent a bit of time piddling around on my Hunter and running strikes to knock out some quests. On both the Warlock and Hunter I have really done very little of the post level cap missions that the game throws at you, and as a result I don’t have legendary artifacts on either of them. This is the single slot that is dragging down my gear score the most, so I attempted to solo some Court of Oryx. Unfortunately I kept getting the twins, which for whatever reason is very hard for me to solo as a hunter. I initially summoned thinking that folks were actively running court, however as soon as I popped the coin I saw the familiar animation of them going to orbit. I did however knock out several strikes towards the “run 5 strikes” quest.

As far as FFXIV goes I decided I should probably spend my evening working on the current event that is going on in the Gold Saucer. There is a murder mystery that ends up rewarding you an /eureka emote that makes you look like the stereotypical MMO quest giver with an exclamation mark over your head. Instead of showing you this emote however I am showing a picture of Memusu Tsuuma who I happened to log into the game the other night standing right beside. I love seeing orange names while I am out running around, though so many of them I cannot remember exactly where I knew them from. That was not the cause with Memu however, how I have absolutely abducted into all of my regular multi-game shenanigans. Something I noticed about hanging out in gold saucer…. random people come up to me and give me a hug. I am guessing it is the Bunny Samurai thing, which has become sort of my trademark look. As far as the questing went, it took a long time to gather up all of the evidence needed for the mystery… but thankfully the game will tell you when you have found all ten of the items with a little message saying that you cannot find anything else of use. Now I just need to devote some time to finishing out the 3.2 story line to be ready for when 3.3 lands on supposedly the 7th.

Letter to New Bloggers

June 1, 2016June 1, 2016 by Belghast

A Newbie Month

This is one of those mornings where I apparently forgot to set my alarm clock and am damned thankful that apparently I only woke up thirty minutes late. So everything feels rushed and it is not exactly the proper mood for a contemplative post. Today marks a few things… firstly it is my mothers birthday and I have already remembered to send her a text so she would have a message waiting on her when she wakes up. I will of course follow up later with a proper phone call… but I wanted to get that early strike in there first. Secondly this is the beginning of the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative month. This is something I have participated in since 2013, and feel a sense of obligation each year to do so again. The problem is that after all these years I am questioning if I have any fresh wisdom to give out to the participants. Blogging is one of those things that while we can commune as a group… there comes a point where you are sitting in front of the tyranny of the blank page and only you can push through it. We all have mornings when thinking let alone blogging is a difficulty, and for me this is one of them. However as per my own statement… I am going to push through and make something happen.

So You Want to Blog

It seems like almost every year I start the proceedings off with something along the lines of that paragraph. The truth is, only you can really look inside of yourself and see if there is a blog there waiting to spring forth into the world. For me personally… I guess I was always a blogger and just never quite realized it. I was extremely prone to posting “big damned walls of text” in on any subject I happened to be passionate about. Early on the topic of choice were the White Wolf World of Darkness role-playing books or the Palladium system. Later it became games as I even started writing reviews of Saturn and Playstation games for a small emulation and general gaming website. I really came into my own when it came to MMOs and I haunted the forums of pretty much all of the games I played be it Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes or eventually World of Warcraft. I had this burning drive to talk about the things I was interested in and to share my ideas, and while a lot of my topics were fostering the community… a lot of them were just talking about my experiences.

On the forums for the server I used to play on… I became one of the white hats that regular rode in to chastise the evil doers, but at the same time freely shared game advice if I had any to give. If you have ever found yourself doing these things… chances are you really do have a blog inside of you waiting to get out. Now the real challenge is trying to direct that unfocused information into a meaningful form. Many bloggers will tell you that the secret to success is to pick a niche and stick with it… and become the be all end all site to go to for that subject. That is probably some absolute truth, but it is also something I was never terribly good at. This blog after all launched as a “Warrior Tanking Blog” just about as niche as you can possibly get… but the problem is I felt like a fraud doing that. I was no real expert in being a warrior, nor was I an expert in tanking. Both were things that largely came naturally to me, and it was baffling for me to try and explain what was largely pure instinct. So I took a step back and decided to refocus on Raiding… until I realized that I wasn’t a particularly brilliant raider either. We did what we did to win and at our own pace, which isn’t exactly a sterling example of the craft. As a result I kept setting up branding and then knocking them down… until I finally wound up with this simply being “my blog” without any other pretense, because “bel saying things” was a focus that I could actually stick with.

You’ll Need a Name

Ultimately where I am going with this… is that you are going to need a name to call your blog. Some people have created perfectly brilliant names… that they quickly outgrow when they go through a similar digression like my own blog did. I am lucky that “Tales of the Aggronaut” was fairly generic and that I could keep adapting it pretty easily to whatever I happened to be doing. Aggronaut was my attempt at a clever name for a tank… and since I rarely don’t tank at least a little it has continued to work. Other folks have created a perfectly lovely name for say a Warlock blog… only to find out later that playing a Warlock is not their primary calling in life and as a result they have to come up with something else. Ultimately my advice I guess would be to come up with something that represents you the writer, and not necessarily the subject. Clever names are awesome, but only so long as they actually are something that you feel comfortable sitting down and writing posts behind. There are an awful lot of famous blogs out there… with completely boring or descriptive names.

I think most people envision brilliant branding of their website from the starting gate, but in truth you are probably better of just picking some minimal window dressing until you get a feel for where exactly you are going. I maybe jumped into this whole concept with two feet hitting the ground in that I bought my domain name and had it completely set up and ready to go before I wrote a single post. I guess that makes sense given that I write code for a living, but in truth you don’t need to do any of this quite yet. Your best option is to simply lean on good ole WordPress.com or Blogger.com rather than to try and do the self hosting thing right out of the gate. I lean heavily towards WordPress simply because you have a lot more options for if you decide to transition to self hosted at a later date. Technically you can do the same thing with Blogger but the process is less seamless and from what I have read in “how to” articles way more hassle than the other option. There is of course Tumblr as an option, but you are exposing yourself to a way more problematic community right out of the gate than I would suggest for any fledgling blogger.

You’ll Need Readers

Now for the hard part… you’ve named yourself and set up a site… now you need to hang out yours “open for business” sign and wait. This is the part of the equation that can drive you completely insane when you realize that no one is actually reading what you are writing. This is going to happen to everyone, but the positive of starting a blog during this month means that the other bloggers are going to at least help try and get you started. Self promotion is one of those things that I am particularly bad at. In theory you want to put your blog in front of as many eyeballs as you can, which means syndicating it to pretty much all of the available options. I syndicate my posts each day to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Plus… and this is essentially like casting a net out into the water. If you get a nibble more than likely folks will add your blog to their RSS feed and be done with it… and then you have a potential reader for life. That is unless you do something so horrific as to cause them to go through the effort of actually removing a blog. For me at least… once a blog makes it to my RSS feed I am pretty much going to read them forever.

The problem is… your stats will always seem insignificant. You can drive yourself completely mad looking at them for too long when you watch as this post that you spent five minutes on got ten times the readers than that gem you spent several days on. Amassing regular readers is a bit of a waiting game, but I will say that there are a few factors that seem to factor in. Firstly you need to have some sort of a schedule. Since taking my recent breaks my readership has gone to shit, but previously when I was doing the post every single day thing I had a fairly steady stream of readers each and every day. Secondly you have to give them something interesting to read, and this can come from several different directions. My personal theory is that if someone is going to read you for long one of two things are going to be happening. Either you are posting such a wealth of information about a very specific subject as to turn yourself into the “resource” for that community, or they are sticking around because they care about you as a person. I’ve tended to focus on the second part of that statement, and as a result have shared some super personal information with my readers. It sometimes works, but ultimately you are going to have to figure out the points that work for you. The problem with giving blogging advice is no two blogs are the same… nor do they even have the same goals. We can throw information at you, but you will have to figure out which bits are relevant to you.

I wish you luck and look forward to reading your blog

Bel