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Predictions and Dots

December 17, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Predictions

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status. All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today. The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater… in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie. If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day. At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be. For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%. I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot. That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not. So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions. Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck. I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers… but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory. There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character. So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie. It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money. It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han… will transfer to his daughter. My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive… only to kill him off again. This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on. For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe… their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side. Now I simply do not know. I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke. I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts. There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead. I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie. That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought… and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett? I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one. My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid. I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow. I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics. I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times… could just literally be latent force sensitivity. I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie. I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels. I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today… in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off. It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening… Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill. So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests. The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity. I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it… it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped. Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge… because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters. The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens. If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia… you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount… which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock. Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up. The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content. Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing. Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling. If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks. I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons… but always struggled with getting into the spirit. However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes. So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working. I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.

Many Demons

December 16, 2015 by Belghast

Allergy to Advertising

Yesterday in my travels I listened to a piece on NPR talking about the habits of TV binge watchers and advertising. Apparently a study has found that binge watchers are far less susceptible to advertisements than your average viewer. They went into some reasons behind this… but I think as a whole we have just learned how to ignore advertising. William Gibson is the oracle of our age, because he consistently predicts a thing being a thing… before it actually happens. I remember in the book Pattern Recognition he introduced us to a person who is so allergic to branding and advertising that they would get the branding ground off the buttons in their jeans. I feel like I am nowhere near this, but instead I am in this realm where advertising just really doesn’t work that well for me. When I see the same ad over and over… especially if it feels like they are targeting me for some reason… I find myself less and less likely to use whatever product that is. There was a time when I actually like several post cereals for example… but after watching commercials for honey bunches of oats between shows on Hulu I have nothing but a negative reaction when I see anything with the Post brand on it.

As far as advertising in general, I’ve gotten adept at ignoring it. If I am going to be serious about a website I tend to snap it into my RSS reader, which also tends to trim most of the advertisements. From a side effect it also cuts down on the exposure to Malware, since a large number of attacks on end user machines come in through infected ad providers. While I might trust the hell out of a website, I don’t trust the advertising services that are well known cesspools of Malvertisements. With Television however…. there is very rarely a time where I will be watching a show without also doing something else at the same time. So I might be playing an MMO or fiddling around with this or that project… which means when an ad comes on the screen it gives me liberty to look down at my device. I am vaguely listening, but only well enough to be able to identify when the ad has finished and the television show has started again. Mostly I really don’t enjoy being advertised to. I am not bought into the fantasy that they are trying to create that is supposed to tell me that my life will be better with this product. Instead I prefer to just do my own research when I find that I need something. There is never a moment when I purchase something, that I have not already googled it, youtubed it, and tried to find multiple seemingly trustworthy sources of information on how said product works. That said… I realize I am probably a huge aberration, but I would have to think its an aberration that is growing more and more common.

OrcLock Instead

Last night most of the evening was spent going to RiffTrax where I saw Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny…. which is every bit as horrific as you might have imagined. Well the movie was horrific… the riffing over top of the movie was absolutely glorious. I would say this batch of shorts and the final movie… was quite possibly the best RiffTrax I have seen. They are doing a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers early into January so I think we are going to rally the troops and go see it as well, since it was one of the ones they did before we started making this a regular outing. When I got home however I spent some time piddling around and on a whim decided to roll a Female Orc Warlock rather than flipping over and playing my Dwarflock like I had talked about. Essentially I am enjoying my time Horde side quite a bit, and I am feeling the need to develop a stable of characters. I also really really need access to an enchanter and a potion maker, and there is no better way to do that than to make my own. So in theory Belghula… because I am running out of ideas for Belg names… is more than likely going to be a Tailor / Enchanter… since having access to crafted gear is always a useful thing.

This is I guess going to be an experiment in just how long I manage to stick with a female character. This is a thing I don’t do terribly well, and mostly its because… I tend to keep creating versions of myself when I make characters. At some point I need to do a supercut of my characters, but you will see there is a very specific pattern to them. They all have beards of some sort… and if there is a game that doesn’t allow beards… then honestly I don’t tend to stick around terribly long in it. After that I tend to have long hair drawn back into a ponytail… or if nothing else just long hair in general, and said hair is generally black or as dark of a brown as I can get it. Essentially that character ends up being the idealized version of how I guess I wish I looked… or at least my ultimate version of myself. Maybe I just really like the whole Adrian Paul Highlander thing… because my Secret World character looks quite a bit like he did in the Highlander Television series. In any case… I never seem to be able to fully immerse myself in a female character, because it pulls me out of the whole “this is me in game form” aspect. That said, when it comes to horde in particular… I think the female characters look badass and less sexualized than the alliance versions. I also like the female Orcs, Trolls and Undead far more than I like the Male counter parts. As a result I am going to give this a try, and hopefully it works… because seriously this Orclock looks awesome already.

Devilian Finally

Devilian 2015-12-16 06-18-17-03

While I played quite a bit of Devilian in the various phases of alpha/beta/whatever… I had yet to actually install the game proper since its launch. So last night when I got home… while I was dinking around on the Orclock I had it installing in the background. I crashed pretty hard around 10pm but I managed to get in this morning and get a character created. As a result I created Belghast the Berserker on Ravan… because if you give me a server name that even vaguely sounds like Revan… I am going to play on it. I am looking forward to seeing what the game is like after the handful of polish passes the late betas gave it. If nothing else it should at least partially scratch my Diabloesc itch for awhile. I have significant issues still with the fact that the classes are gender locked, but this is not really a Trion Worlds thing. That is one of the frustrating things about playing a game that has been localized like this… is that you end up knowing that most of the things that might frustrated you… the company you actually have access to, can’t do a damned thing about it. So as a result I am going to enjoy what is there, and try really hard not to worry about the stuff that isn’t.

I joined a Discord server yesterday being run by Zoltariel and having a bunch of the Trion folks on it as well. So I started chatting like I normally do, to which point I was treated to a length rant about how essentially anyone playing a Berserker is a “casual” and that how no one would ever invite them to a group. I am paraphrasing because this was a rant that took place over the course of twenty or so lines, but the gist was that Berserkers and melee in general had problems dealing with late game mechanics. The thing is… I enjoy melee. If you give me the option between a bunch of characters, I will always without a doubt play a melee… and problem even further play a tank. Since Devilian is the sort of game that doesn’t have a tank… then I am likely to play as much of a high survival melee as I can because I like being able to live through stupid things. Melee is what makes me happy, and even if it is absolutely empirically worse than every other class in a game…. I am still going to play it because it is the player fantasy that I enjoy. So I killed the chat channel when I quoted Tommy Lee Jones from the Fugitive after Harrison Ford just gave an impassioned plea about how he did not in fact kill his wife… “I Don’t Care”. Not everyone plays a game to win… some of us play them to have fun doing the playing.

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.

Housing and Horde

December 14, 2015 by Belghast

Worth It

One of the major stresses this year has been our house, and it has been several phases. First there was the stress when we realized that the leak in the bedroom and the kitchen were due to the garbaged out wood siding. Then there was the stress of trying to pick the right company and the right product. Then of course the stress of waiting for them to finally get started… we signed a contract in July and they didn’t actually start on anything until October. Which lead to here was the stress of having strangers at our house over the course of three weeks, and quite literally just showing up to do the work with little notice. Finally there is the stress looming over our heads of just how much it cost us, and trying to sort out how we are going to go about paying it all off. However this weekend… I can finally say that it was probably worth it. Once again we had a torrent of rain and even though we are still gun shy and kept checking the former leaks… everything continued to perform like a champ.

Where the real “worth it” bit comes in though is the fact that we had a cold front blow in yesterday and as the day went on the house continued to hold its temperature to the point that even at 11pm it had not dropped enough to actually trigger the heater coming on. The house is so much more insulated now and it is funny just how much of a difference that makes. Previously our upstairs was painfully oppressive to be in during the winter months because the heater would be nearly constantly going, just to make it so that the downstairs was somewhere close to livable. Now there are still variations between the two floors, but they are pretty minor. The place it is most noticeable is in the Bedroom where it has always been the coldest room in the house. While it is still not the warmest, it is largely comfortable in the mornings when I wake up… instead of having to make a mad dash to the shower to get some heat in me again. So I have to say all in all… while it was stressful and involved a bit of financial pain… in the long run it is going to be well worth it.

Maybe I Should Heal

One of the things I am thankful for is the fact that my Sunday night raid… is pretty chill. Sure Drewie loses his shit when he doesn’t get a token drop, which is absolutely hilarious… but overall people are more than happy to just show up… do the things that need to be done and walk away with loot. My opinion right now is pretty high of the population horde side in general. People seem really nice… like almost scary nice for being World of Warcraft. I mean I would expect Nubzy and Facepull to be nice… or she would beat them into submission, but what I am talking about is horde players on our battle group in general. The amount of random help that I have gotten out in the world, be it a buff or a heal… or simply a friendly wave has been pretty great. Contrast this with my experience lately on Alliance which consists mostly of entitled ranting in dungeons, or the battleground that is tradechat. I guess I can just see why folks can favor this side of the fence.

My problem in general with horde however is that other than the Tauren… I just don’t really like the racial options. I’ve never been a “monstrous humanoid” type player to borrow the Dungeons and Dragons term. I will say had the Horde gotten the Dark Iron Dwarves as a racial option… I would have converted years ago. I think in order to play Horde for long I am going to have to get used to playing female characters… because while I really like Female Trolls and Undead… I hate the male counter parts because of the hunch. Similarly I think Female Orcs look way cooler than their male equivalents…. though I have to admit in the above photo Khariss looks badass in his Tier 5 set. Mostly I am happy that Sunday nights is more than willing to let me pew pew pew or eventually move into a tanking role, because those are the things I care about. However apparently I should have been a healer. Since moving to the horde side I have been invited to no less than four different Heroic Hellfire Citadel groups… pending I had a healing spec. Everquest scarred me for life when it comes to healing… and from that point on… I have never really considered it a viable option for me to enjoy playing a game. I wasn’t horrible at it… I just get insanely bored not hitting things in the face with a weapon.

More Stuff Than Time

We’ve talked about this on the podcast some, but I think a large chunk of the magic of Final Fantasy XIV was simply the fact that we had so much content left to do. As we whittled our way through it over the past year and a half, we eventually caught up to the point where we are now current with each additional patch. That means once again we are waiting for content to get delivered, rather than having a huge backlog that we could be working through. I think the reason why World of Warcraft is so compelling to me once again is that… right now I have this huge backlog of content to work through. I am absolutely the “master of my domain” when it comes to the Alliance side of the house. I have one of every crafter, and I can push up any character I choose… it is just the matter of dedicating the time to it. Instead on the Horde side I have nothing… well apart from a super supportive guild. I am once again behind the curve and this has put the game in entirely new perspective for me. I want to build my legacy on this side of the fence, and eventually reach a point of self sufficiency just like I have with my army of Alliance alts.

The problem is however that there are simply more things that I need/want to be doing than there are hours in the day. Part of me keeps thinking… I will dedicated this day to working on alts, or this day to farming old content…. and instead I just end up working on content in Tanaan or trying to farm Valor to push up gear a little bit more. All of it gives me this feeling that there is more to do than I could ever possibly do… and it is the same contented feeling that I had in Final Fantasy XIV. When I have left World of Warcraft in the past, it is always because of the same thing. I start poking holes in the game because I have quite literally run out of things I want to be doing. Now I feel like I have this mission, and plenty of things that I want to be doing… and all it really took to reinvigorate me… was abandoning a decade worth of work. I guess in a way this is like all of those times when I have stopped one Minecraft game, just to start a new one… because the old one had gotten stale. The awesome thing about this is… that I still have every bit of work that I did over that decade… just waiting on me anytime I want to visit it. Which in truth I am regularly on my Alliance characters, I am just focused on catching up on the Horde side.