MMO Archives - Page 352 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Honeymoon Over

December 4, 2014 by Belghast

Old Familiar Beast

It feels very much like the honeymoon is now over as far as my return to World of Warcraft. Each time I have come back there has been something that ultimately drove me back away. When I came back before the launch of Pandaria, it was the “failed state” feel of the guild and how the once shared guild ethics seemed to have vanished. When I left last April, it was in part due to the fact that two factions of the guild quite literally hated each other, and it caused this giant rift right down the middle. Last night it felt like a brand new yet very familiar Maelstrom was opening, and I essentially supported it. One of the ideological things I have fought for years was the creation of a “Raider” rank in the guild, that granted special access to the guild banks. I hate the concept of a rank that can in any way be used to say that “this person” is better than “that person”. The problem is as a former raid leader myself I can see that it is entirely logistically needed.

Last night I helped to set one of these ranks up, and immediately after doing it I started to question my sanity. This only served to be reinforced later as a new acquisition to the guild started asking questions about how to get into the raid. This is going to be something that comes up over and over, especially now that there is a very noticeable raid rank. The problem is don’t have any good answers to give them. There is no path to follow to get into raiding, because House Stalwart is not a raid guild. Maybe it is moot at this point but I keep saying that over and over. I never wanted it to become “just another raid guild” because it used to be more than just a group of folks who mutually benefited from one another. It used to be this awesome extended family, and while pockets of that still exist… it feels like that era is just gone.

Honeymoon Over

All of this was compounded by the fact that at the very same time there was an incident that happened over voice chat, about someone potentially being muted that reminded me all too clearly of why I have left in the past. I have always despised the concept of the haves and have nots. I’ve always been someone who cared more about attitude and personality than skill, but by the same token this is what has held me back in my own raiding endeavors. If you want to be successful you do have to erect some barriers saying you have to be this tall to ride this ride. I just can’t bring myself to be the person to do that. I’ve never been able to decide that this group of friends is more important to our success than this group of friends. I just want everyone to get along and treat each other with some basic human dignity, but that always seems to be impossible. So last night underscored for me with a big bold line that if House Stalwart is going to be successful moving forward, I need to make sure I never permanently take back the crown. If I do I will started trying to make the guild a much more egalitarian place again, and tie a boat anchor around what was successful last expansion.

That said things are not as dire as I might make them out to be. The same raiders that need to be super serious to break the raid, are the ones that were grabbing anyone and their brother trying to make sure they got heirloom weapons for leveling. So while the bar has to be set pretty high to make sure things are successful, I have a feeling that once the current tier of raid content gets on farm status… those same barriers will start to break down as we have folks that can carry the others to victory. I just know that the guild was more successful than it has probably ever been during Pandaria as far as raid content clearing, and I need to stay out of the way of whatever mojo is required to return us to that status. I know that is going to involve a lot of things that fundamentally make me uncomfortable as a human being. I do however have faith that the raid core knows what it is doing, but I also feel like our fearless raid leader is stressed beyond boundaries. We have some fundamental problems… like too many melee and tanks… and far too few ranged and healers… but I feel like that will all be sorted as things move forward.

Sit Down, Shut Up, Enjoy the Ride

If I am going to stay in World of Warcraft for this expansion I am going to have to make some fundamental changes in who I am as a player. Right now I feel too much responsibility for the happiness of others in the House Stalwart World of Warcraft guild. It has been my baby for years, and I have nurtured it as such during all of that time… constantly trying to keep an influx of new and awesome people flowing through its doors. The thing is… before the launch of Warlords of Draenor I freely gave up the crown, as I have done multiple times since Cataclysm. I need to realize this means I am no longer in charge, and also by the same token no longer responsible for whatever happens in guild. Last night Rylacus passed the crown to me, but also gave me a speech that he really thinks it is best if I give it right back. Ry doesn’t care a bout the power, he just wants to keep me in game and happy as long as he can, because he knows each time I start taking responsibility for the happenings of all of these people… I burn out and run away screaming into the night. I need to also allow myself to be absolved of the guilt that comes from giving up that crown.

There is a thing I do really well, and that thing is acting as the guild cheerleader and chief recruiter. I am always going to be trying to find awesome and interesting people to draft into my family, because ultimately that is precisely what a guild is to me… a big extended and sometimes contorted family. It is joked that I have a white panel van full of candy, and drive around abducting people into our guilds… and more or less that is precisely what I do. I have always done it for World of Warcraft, and I currently do it for Final Fantasy XIV… for a guild there that I have NEVER been the leader of. I feel like I never much cared about actually directing the people once I got them, my focus has always been on the acquisition of more of them… hoping that the rest would sort itself out in the meantime. The problem is… just because I am friends with two people… doesn’t mean that they will be friends. Basically at this point if I am going to be happy in World of Warcraft, I need to be the friendly voice in guild chat and let other people worry about the minutiae. I hope that House Stalwart can remain mostly the same place it has been since launch, but I expect we are going to go through some rough times until folks realize fully… that this is not a raid guild, and raid membership is not guaranteed.

Tower Diving Time

December 3, 2014 by Belghast

Server Go Boom

Last night was the launch of Highmaul in World of Warcraft, or at least it should have been. For the majority of the night we tried in vain to log into Argent Dawn. While a handful of us made it to the character select screen, even fewer of us made it in game. Those in game however could not actually play the game, as the world was just fundamentally broken… mobs un-lootable or not spawning at all. All of the problems seemed to be related to the Chicago data center, where the Ruin battle group that Argent Dawn is attached to is located. Lately there has been a lot of talk of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks going on against the various MMO providers, but this is a nebulous concept that most people struggle to really understand. Thankfully there is a site like IPViking that can visualize this traffic in a way that it makes sense. Watching their attack map is like watching missile launches in some war game simulation… both terrifying and mesmerizing at the same time. The above image sadly is not from last night, but just one they have as an example on their website.

During the launch of Warlords of Draenor, there were very clear attacks against Blizzard. Last night however I did not actually see attacks targeting blizzard, but instead attack after attack targeting the St Louis area. I could only assume that the attacks are associated in some way to the things surrounding Ferguson in the St Louis metro area. This however speaks to the way the internet actually works, instead of the way that we all assume it works. The hard facts are there are a limited number of pathways across the United States, and if an attack is blocking traffic from reaching the Chicago data center, it is effectively also blocking anyone from reaching those servers. I ran a traceroute last night and from Tulsa area my packets went to Dallas before going over to the AT&T network somewhere in the vicinity of Wichita before the packets just died. I can only assume that the packets kept getting lose in the maelstrom of attacks between me and the Chicago data center.

Tower Diving Time

After a point I gave up on trying to get into anything within World of Warcraft, and wandered between a couple of games. My original intent was to do some Syrcus Tower on my Bard job, but when I got into Final Fantasy XIV the dps queue for Syrcus was reporting 30 minutes… which is significantly longer than I have ever actually seen it. So I abandoned that notion and instead decided to play some Heroes of the Storm. My good friend Rae finally managed to get her invite from Blizzard and apparently spent the better part of last night playing it as well. I had a strong feeling that she would like the game, based on her seeming love of League of Legends. For me it is a much stronger game because I like its focus on the team win, and not so much on individual performance. That said Rae was still constantly checking the meters during the matches, which I can only hope will be something that fades over time as those League tendencies potentially fall away.

I had really not played it much since the game reset that happened awhile back, wiping out our progress. As such I had completed the tutorial but was still sitting at level 1, having not actually played any real matches to level up with. Thanks to the +50% xp friend bonus, I managed to level up last night to five, and unlock many of the features of the game. I’ve noticed that they have front loaded a lot of the stuff so that you get the interesting items sooner. At level 5 it feels like I have all of the tools needed to really play the character how I would want to. I am a huge fan of Muradin and in all the times playing the game, that has been the character that most fits what I want to play. That said I am also rather fond of Raynor and Tyrael… and if I am going to play a support you can’t beat Uther. I think the main reason why I like Muradin is his Avatar ability that causes him to grow in size and become extremely sturdy, allowing me to tower dive obstacles if I really need to, or survive team fights. With passive health regeneration he has some serious sustain, and most of the time I never actually needed to return to base.

Bloggy XMAS Countdown

I feel bad that I did not advertise this sooner, but there is an event that I am going to be part of that is happening in the blogosphere. The awesome Syl of MMO Gypsy had this idea of creating a virtual advent calendar of sorts within the blogging community. Apparently in her country it is custom to decorate the various shops and houses around town to represent a day of the advent. As such she has created this truly awesome Advent Calendar of gaming blogs. I am currently scheduled to be one of the posters for 12/9 and I will begin prepping for that soon. The problem is I am still not quite sure what I am going to talk about. I have a few ideas, but we will just have to see how that sorts out. In the meantime this is day three of the postings and I highly suggest you go back to the first and read your way forward. I thank Syl for coming up with the idea and making it happen, and once again there has been this massive outpouring of support which is truly awesome.

Dance Dance Deathwing

December 1, 2014 by Belghast

Return of the Dailies

One of the constants in World of Warcraft since I believe the Burning Crusade expansion… is the construct of the daily quest. It has taken many forms over the years, but the crux of all of them is that it is something that you will be greatly benefited by if you do it every single day. This expansion seems to have abandoned some of the more heinous faction grind dailies, but fear not the idea is alive and well. This time however it has taken up residence in your Garrison, with the buildings that you built dictating what kind of daily quests you get. Many of these are daily resource gathering, and as such I have started attempting to do these every morning before I blog. Right now with two characters it seems to take me about fifteen minutes to do all of the gathering and making sure the various work order queues are full. By the time you extend that over all eleven of my Alliance faction characters however you are still going to take up a pretty large chunk of the day doing nothing but fiddling with bits and bobs in your garrison.

The most lucrative and I feel likely the most important daily is the one gained from the scout in your town hall. This rewards between 800 and 1000 apexis crystals which are essentially this expansions version of “justice points”. They can be spent on various bits of gear, which then can be upgraded through several tiers that I believe tops out at 665. Thankfully most days there is someone asking in guild to form up a group and we go do it together. However yesterday my timing was off completely, and as such I resorted to the open party finder. The nice thing about the assaults on the various locations is that they can be completed in a raid, and as such this allows you to use the raid finder to get a group rather quickly. Yesterday from the moment I finally got a group to accept me (it took several before one did) to the moment I completed the quest was about fifteen minutes or running around in a large circle at the Iron Docks pits. Which in the grand scheme of things really is not too terrible for 1000 apexis crystals.

The Firelands

Yesterday I continued my tour of older raids, attempting to solo my way through all of the content. Firelands is a raid that I never actually set foot in before, largely because it happened while I was gone from the game. I quit World of Warcraft initially with the launch of Rift, and at that point my raid was working on Cho’gall in Bastion and had just downed Maloriak in Descent. So there were two raids I never actually got to see in Cataclysm, both of which I was a little apprehensive to try and solo. Black Temple for example I have run so many times, including when the content was legitimate… that I know the place like the back of my hand. These new raids I figured I would learn as I go. To be truthful there really wasn’t much of anything in the raid that gave me issues, and like often is the case… steamrolling it often rewards you several achievements. The most interesting of the fights was probably Beth’tilac.

I had no clue what I was doing, but apparently did things optimally as I got an achievement for never letting any of the spiders hit the ground before killing her. I have to say I am so thankful for spammable heroic throw. While under normal circumstances it does not deal that much damage, it does at least give me an option for ranged dps as a warrior, and I have been using it liberally while soloing this old content. This is definitely a raid I plan on soloing weekly because not only is there some cool transmoggy bits, but also a few mounts that can drop that look extremely sweet. Additionally killing anything in the zone gives Avengers of Hyjal rep… and Belghast has always been the character I was proudest of having some strange Exalted reps on.

The Dragon Soul

The other raid that I tackled yesterday was Dragon Soul, the end of the expansion raid and one littered with tons of lore and cinematics. Once again I went into this raid completely fresh with no prior knowledge of it, and as such I took a few deaths here and there to things I needed to deal with. Most of the content was really straight forward, but I hit an absolute roadblock on the Spine of Deathwing encounter. In fact I had to actually take a break and do some research on how to actually do that fight. I can see why this encounter was the bane of so many raid groups, in fact I know a handful that actually broke up as a result of not being able to finish it. That said ultimately I figured out a solid way to solo it. For those unfamiliar with the fight when you land on his back you are on a section where 4 corruptions, these giant fiery tentacle things have spawned. Two things happen when you take one down that are important. Firstly a Hideous Amalgamation spawns, which will be important later… then a fiery spot appears on the ground that you can stand in to root you to Deathwing’s back as corrupted blood spawn from each of the open wounds.

The key feature of the fight is that Deathwing will try and roll you off of his back. In order to keep this from happening you need to have a fiery tentacle buff that shows that you are tethered to his back. When he rolls all of the Hideous Amalgamations fly off, which for the first few times is something that you want to happen… after a bit however you are going to want to halt that process. Ultimately what I did was stand on one side of Deathwing in a fire spot rooting me to his back until 10 blood had spawned. You technically only need 9, but I found it worked smoother if I had a spare. When each blood dies it spawns a fire patch on the ground… and ultimately you need to drag a Hideous Amalgamation through 9 of these until he grows in size. So when I first land on his back I hill 3 Corruptions, leaving one up until I have gathered up the 10 bloods… I take them out in one shot and then kite the Amalgamation through the fire until it grows… kill it next to the back plate… which allows you to kill an exposed tendon holding it to Deathwing’s back and move on to the next section.

Dance Dance Deathwing

The challenge is to “dance” back and forth on his back so that he doesn’t actually roll all the while you are kiting and dpsing down the add. Because if he rolls it resets the entire process knocking the amalgamation off his back. So ultimately I would stand in the fire, collect 10 bloods… then kite over to the last corruption… hit thunderclap which is enough damage to take out all of the bloods and the corruption. This spawns the amalgamation and I move immediate to the other side allowing him to go through it… and keeping deathwing from rolling. Then finally kite back while killing the Amalgamtion, let it explode and knock the plate loose. At which point I stand in the fire again rooting me to his back, and dps down the tendon holding the plate onto the back. After you have taken down one section the next areas go faster because you have more holes in the back.. and therefore are generating a lot more corrupted blood each round.

This step in the fight literally took me a dozen or so deaths before I got the pattern down well enough to be able to make it through the entirety of the fight without either not getting knocked off, or not allowing a fully loaded amalgamation to get knocked off. I feel like now that I know the fight I can pretty much repeat it whenever I need to, but in any case it was an interesting thing to learn how to solo. For the entirety of the weekends raid running, the only fight that managed to get the best of me was Nefarian 2.0. Even then i am thinking I might be able to do something to mitigate the insane amounts of damage I was taking. So I have not given up on that one, because I really really want to farm up a Reclaimed Ashkandi. I did apparently manage to get an extremely rare flying mount Experiment 12-B when I took out Ultraxion. Given the comments from folks in guild, apparently I spent all of my good luck on getting that to drop. Most of them never saw it the entire time they ran Dragon Soul. In any case it was a fun weekend, I am likely going to start farming these various raids each week.

Craigslist Saga

November 29, 2014 by Belghast

Thanksgiving Revisited

For years we have had a second tradition surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday. My wife’s father and step mother are snow birds, and for those not familiar with the term, it means they travel south for the winter. Namely they have been living full time out of their RV for over the last decade, and when it starts to get cold they pull up and roll out. As tradition this has been a few weeks after Thanksgiving, so we started having a combined Thanksgiving and Christmas celebration with them on the Saturday immediately following Thanksgiving. Once upon a time this was a massive potluck dinner, and then some years in the past we have had BBQ and smoked bologna, essentially something different than the traditional holiday faire.

However a few years ago we decided as a group that what we were actually eating was not terribly important, but instead the fact that we were getting together. My wife’s dad and step mom are getting up there in age, and even if we brought all of the food… there was still a considerable amount of set up time on getting the rest of everything ready. As such we have just started meeting at the local Pizza Hut, that has a big banquet room that we can get for such occasions. This allows us each to order our own meal… and I tend to have boneless wings and fries myself, but still hang out and chat and do all of the actually important parts of a Thanksgiving meal. As such I am trying to knock out a blog post this morning so we can get ready and get on the road before too much longer.

Craigslist Saga

If you have read my blog often at all you will know that I have a proclivity for trying to purchase things from the local Craigslist whenever possible. I absolutely detest being the person who takes the initial depreciation hit on an item. So if I can find a reasonably priced and not too heavily worn item from Craigslist… I will happily do so every time. Some examples are that I got my Chromebook that I have used the hell out of from Craigslist for $100, and I quite literally use it every single day at work for note taking. I also got a PS Vita for $100 and a PS4 for $250 both of which have performed admirably. To be truthful the desktop I am writing this on right now, also came from Craigslist and I have been exceptionally happy with it overall. The only downfall is that the GeForce 750ti I have in it is underperforming on a handful of newer games like Dragon Age: Inquisition.

As such I had been passively watching video card prices over the last few weeks, in anticipation for a potential drop in prices during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday madness. At the same time I never actually expected to find something off Craigslist but last Wednesday there was a post for exactly the card I had been looking at. After buying nothing but GeForce cards for the last several years, I was interested in trying an AMD Radeon because at least on paper it seems like you can get far more bang for your buck. I had been looking at the r9 290 because it seemed like a good price point for the performance. However on Craigslist I found listed a r9 290X 4 Gig card, something that is normally around $400 for $150. At first I was hesitant since that seemed like too little money for that kind of card.

After talking with the guy for a bit, he simply upgraded out of it and is now running a pair of GeForce Titan Black cards… which are like $1000 a piece. Basically the guy has way more money for these sort of shenanigans than I could ever dream of. Yesterday afternoon I met the guy to pick up the card. I am sure he thought I was insane as I “smelled” the card but really there is only so much you can do to determine if a card is healthy. When a card has overheated past a certain point the PCB smells strange, and the fan itself seemed to move freely without seizing, and none of the chips on the bottom side looked damaged in any way. So I parted with my $150 thinking it was a gamble, but one that might pay off extremely well.

I get home and everything seems to be going swimmingly, the card fits perfectly, and I have just the right connectors for it and plenty of clearance for the fan itself. I had checked online and saw lots of people talking about how hot the powercolor r9 290X was running, but was not entirely prepared for the reality. Under relatively light strain playing World of Warcraft it was sitting in the 90c range and finally tripped the heat sensors and rebooted. There is some strangeness with the fan controller, as it seemed to not be performing well enough by default. After some reading however it seems like I have too small of a power supply to really support the card. The literature from Powercolor says that it requires a minimum of a 750w PSU, and I just have a 600w so that could be causing some of the low fan performance issues. In any case there are some things I can do to try and get better air flowing to the card, but in the meantime until I test these theories I am back to the tried and true 750ti. I don’t think it is a complete bust, because the card seemed to be performing really well… it just ran insanely hot. A lot of folks online have stated that you really need an aftermarket cooler for this card, but not really sure I want to resort to that yet.

No Luck with Nefarian

Last night I continued my trip through the previous expansions raids with a trip into Blackwing Descent and Bastion of Twilight . These were the raids that I was actively raiding when I left WoW for the first time. We had cleared up to Cho’Gall in Bastion and were working on Maloriak in Descent when I decided to quit the game. As such my knowledge of the instances is rather incomplete. I was able to limp my way through most of it soloing the encounters after figuring out the trick to Chimeraeon. When it came to the final battle with Onyxia and Nefarian, I hit an impassible wall. When Nefarian floods the room with lava, I seem to take entirely too much damage to survive through a combination of his shadowflares and the lava. I’ve duoed this fight with a healer before and it went well enough because we could each take a platform, and then the healer could keep me alive as I swam to the third platform. However doing all of this by myself just did not seem feasible.

Bastion of Twilight on the other hand was a complete and total Roflstomp, and I managed to pick up a BOE transmoggy bit for my priest or warlock. Additionally I managed to pick up a fairly wicked looking axe… Shalug’doom the Axe of Unmaking. This causes other issues however because I am quickly running out of bank space to keep all these awesome transmoggy bits. I feel like we desperately need the Diablo 3 system for transmogs, where if you get an item you learn its appearance and then can apply that appearance to any other item without having to hold onto that item forever. It has been long rumored that they were working on it for World of Warcraft, but at this point I need it like yesterday. Another interesting thing of note… it seems like all of the sets of gear you could previously buy with Justice and Valor points… have been converted to gold. So you can just walk straight into Icecrown Citadel for example and buy an entire set of Tier 10. You can go to Stormwind/Orgrimmar and buy MOST of a full set of the first two tiers of Cataclysm gear as well.

This Blog

This morning I thought I would take a moment to talk about this blog, and why I am thankful that it exists. I’ve always been a fairly verbose person, and I used to use the various gaming forums as my outlet for this desire to write about the things I care about. I was a regular on the Argent Dawn forums in World of Warcraft, and previously was active on various EQ and DAoC forums as well. I had always attempted to adopt the personality of a “white hat” the folks trying to build consensus and put a positive spin on things rather than attack other players. In 2009 I was introduced to the World of Warcraft blog community, and thanks to the support of Blog Azeroth… I created a blog of my own. Originally Tales of the Aggronaut was intended to be nothing but a Warrior tanking blog, but that didn’t last terribly long before I was talking about my raid and my guild, and my frustration with the game.

I went through some pretty massive lapses in posting, and each time that happened it was because I was too frustrated with something going on to actually put it into words. I didn’t think folks wanted to hear about me, and my hopes and fears… so I simply stopped writing for periods of time. In April of 2013 I embarked on a “Grand Experiment” as I have called it. My goal was to blog every single day, regardless if I actually “had a post in me”. It has been through this that my blog has really helped me. By necessity, Tales of the Aggronaut stopped being about “things” and started being about me as a person and as a gamer. It is also through this that writing every single day about my thoughts regarding the world has been extremely therapeutic. I’ve tried really hard to keep a mostly positive outlook on everything that is going on, and the constant reinforcement each morning has helped me the person behind the screen to remain far more positive about the world as a whole. For that and for my readers I am thankful.