MMO Archives - Page 355 of 431 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Level 100

November 20, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling More Human

This morning I am still not feeling amazing, but I am doing sizably better than I was yesterday. At least I feel marginally human now instead of a walking malady. This is mostly due to my wife and her being able to tell me what to do… and actually have me do it. I have been feeling lousy for a bit over a week, and yesterday she exclaimed “you have to call the doctor” and then she relented and gave me a secondary line of action “or at least get some mucinex”. I called the doctors office and unsurprisingly (because I waited until like 9:30 to do so) they were already booked up for the day, and said that they would call me back if there were any openings. So in the meantime I got dressed and ready and went to Walgreens around the corner from the house. Mucinex is something that the doctor has suggested I take, so I was no stranger to it.

Actually there are many times I have had success taking a one two punch of Mucienx and Tylenol Cold and Flu to clear various issues up. It turns out that in the constantly rush to get more products to market, Mucinex has created just this thing. Granted you have to take it every four hours for optimal relief… but in any case the stuff is pretty miraculous. Within a few hours of taking it I was already feeling noticeably better and all the gunk in my chest clearing up. Granted it still has the nasty taste going down that Mucinex always does however the drug lives up to its claims, and I think I just found a new go to for these situations. This gentlemen is why we need wives… I was more than willing to muddle through without doing much to fix the root problem. My wife however got tired of me moping around and told me to do something about it. Apparently there are in fact times where I “don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain”.

Level 100

Yesterday I spoke about having a dilemma of whether or not to do Spires of Arak or just jump straight into Nagrand. Having done a little of both, I can clearly say that there are definitely some story elements and quests that make Spires of Arak worth the hassle. That said it is also the new Bladesedge Mountains, in that the terrain is a pain in the ass to move around and the quests are scattered all over the zone in small pockets. If you are wanting to jump straight into being dungeon ready however, I highly suggest going to Nagrand as soon as possible. While I was able to bump up my ilevel a bit in Spires, I did not actually hit the 600 normal mode dungeon target until I reached Nagrand and spent a bit of time questing there. As of last night I was able to push my ilevel to 603 inching me closer to the heroic starting point of 610. I completely bronze proving grounds and made it to round 7 of silver until I screwed up and did not actually pay attention to my own health. Hopefully tonight I can knock out silver proving grounds and maybe bump my ilevel a bit more with questing or dungeons.

Among the strangest quests that I completed was one for a little Goblin kid wanting you to retrieve his “treasure”. It turns out the kid is a perv and you are essentially recovering a calendar of goblin pin-up girls. I had to stop and take a screenshot when the big reveal happened. Sure I found it funny, but also at the same time super cringe worthy. I mean I get the humor in it, but just like the Granok bed in Wildstar… it feels a bit over the top for something so casually slipped in there. Throughout the night as various other members got to the quest you would see comments in guild chat like “Did I just retrieve a Goblin nudie mag?”. Yes… yes we did. What I found surprising is just how at home Nagrand still feels. This was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade, and for the most part they managed to get the look and feel just right… even without the floating rocks. Ultimately that has been the payoff with this expansion for me, being able to see things before everything fell apart. Burning Crusade was a really important expansion for me, and because of it I have so many fond memories that just keep getting refreshed as I do this content.

Nostalgia Bomb

I can’t really judge clearly how good the content in Warlords of Draenor actually is, because I cannot peel away the shiny coat of nostalgia long enough to actually evaluate it with a clear mind. We ultimate are an accumulation of our memories and emotions… and this expansion is managing to bring all of those down to bear upon me. Will the magic fade? Almost certainly it will, and probably quicker than it came on in the first place. At that point I will be able to see the flaws where they stand, but for the time being I am doing what I hope to do in any game… have fun. Ultimately this game was designed for me, and my play style specifically. There is tons of super dense content, and even though it is content with a little c… it is still cool objectives. There seems to be an endless array of little doodads to find in the world, and interesting named mobs to kill that drop interesting treasures. Thankfully I chose to level my disenchanter first, because this has been an amazing source of shards for my future enchanting endeavors.

Speaking of Enchanting… it seems exceptionally expensive this time around. Enchanting work orders give temporal shards… which you then turn around and use 10 of at a time to get a temporal crystal. I finally saved up enough daily tokens to purchase a “real” enchant, and I did so to grab the one that looks to be the new go to for tanking. As you can see it costs 15 Temporal Crystals and 10 Sorcerous Earth. Far as I know I have yet to actually get any Sorcerous Earth, but it seems to be a random drop when disenchanting or mining. Thankfully I do seem to be getting plenty of primal spirits that I can then trade for the materials I actually need with a vendor on my garrison. In any case folks will not be handing these enchants out willy nilly, because that is a lot of resources to pour into a single weapon enchant. For the time being I have the comparatively extremely cheap Mark of the Shattered Hand enchant, just to have something on my weapon.

Unfortunately engineering is an equally time consuming boondoggle, mostly because I was not really paying attention and didn’t realize that I had two daily cool downs this expansion instead of just the one. This means that I have gotten a slow start on getting my tanking helm. As of this morning I am 40 parts into my 100 total needed. That is in part because I only just started doing the more expensive 4 parts a day cooldown. I am running the maximum number of work orders allowable but unfortunately my engineer follower is not quite 100, so I can’t start getting double parts just yet. In any case it will still be awhile before I get my tanking helm, let along actually have the materials to seriously level engineering, though with the rank 2 mines I am starting to get enough spare bits to keep both cool downs and work orders in the black. I just forsee that I have a lot more daily cooldowns ahead of me before I can start doing interesting things with crafting.

Coffee

As a child one of the movies had a massive impact on me was Dune. I remember watching it in elementary school and being enthralled by the fact that the book was co complicated that it needed its own glossary of terms. I remember reading over the glossary, memorizing details of it… long before actually being able to struggle through the epic prose contained in the front part of the book. Since I watched the David Lynch movie first, before reading the book… I will always have certain visuals in my head associated with things. One of the things that stuck with me that was a complete fabrication of the Lynch movies… was the mantra that the Mentat Piter De Vries chants before taking Sapho juice.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

There is a little voice inside of me that says this every single time I drink a cup of coffee. I will always be enamored by the near instant quickening effect coffee has. I feel like a Mentat gaining focus when I sip a cup. Maybe this is the effect of the caffeine, or maybe this is just something I have built up for myself by making a little ritual of it in my head. In any case it is a magical thing. Energy drinks have a similar effect, because I think in part I have moved this same pseudo religious ritual over to them as well. Either by trick of my own mind, or by actual chemical effect… I am thankful that I live in a world where coffee exists and can do magical things.

Talador Completed

November 19, 2014 by Belghast

Frustrating Stutters

This morning I am feeling relatively miserable. In truth I have felt extremely lousy since mid way through last week. The hacking and coughing and clearing of my throat just wears me out, and as a result of all of it my lungs are extremely pissed off at me. That said since the weather outside is brutal with lows in the teens each morning… I am perfectly content to stay bundled up inside. Yesterday it was my hope that I would be playing Dragon Age Inquisition, but even with a driver update there are still some issues. The issue I am having is that the game will quite literally be running at a locked 60 frames per second… then all the sudden it will freeze for a moment causing everything to stutter including the audio… then resume back at 60 frames per second as though nothing happened. The game is still playable, but extremely annoying since this seems to happy about once a minute.

The most frustrating thing is that it doesn’t seem to be settings related. I have dialed down the game to extremely low settings and the hitching still occurs. This means that essentially I am not able to join in any reindeer games for the time being. My hope is that an early patch will either come out for the game, or another updated Nvidia driver that resolves the issue. If it is not fixed by this weekend however I am likely to just such it up and deal with the pauses. The game itself, what little I have seen of it… seems really cool. Overall it feels far more like Dragon Age 2 than it does Dragon Age: Origins… which itself is a mixed bag. I wish my character had been silent, because it doesn’t really feel like my character at all… when there is a voice talking instead of me. That is just one of my personal quirks however, but I figure most people prefer to have a voice acted character. Ultimately when I play games like this it is all about the big damned hero fantasy, and saving the kingdom… not the narrative of the actual characters.

Talador Completed

First off I have to say that I love this screenshot. It does not give away any details about the quest chains in Talador other than the fact that Blackhand is involved. However if you have completed the quest chains in the zone you know exactly what this screenshot is from. In any case I am happy that I managed to catch it at just the right moment. Yesterday I was contemplating just completely skipping the quests in Talador to move forward into Spires of Arak. My friend Rylacus begged me not to do this, because there was a moment in the game that I just had to see. Thankfully I followed his advice and man… that zone was freaking amazing. Granted there was a lot of faffing about in that zone unrelated to anything… but the four chapters were all excellent. Terran Gregory and team have don an amazing job with the cinematics in this expansion… and I am constantly floored at how nice everything looks. When one of these scenes cuts in… it manages to make me forget this is a decade old game.

Now I have another dilemma to decide. Once again I am at the breakpoint of a new zone, as last night I managed to ding 98. I have all of the precursors leading into Nagrand, or I could go start the Spires of Arak. In either case it will ding me, but Nagrand will actually give me gear that I need to get into normals and heroics. That said… so far each of the zones has provided important bits of the puzzle letting me understand more of the expansion as a whole. The Spires however are the zone that everyone seems to think drags a bit… and just in the look of it, it reminds me so much of Blades Edge mountains… which had massive pacing problems thanks to the horrible terrain. Part of me wants to jump straight to Nagrand, since it was my favorite zone in Burning Crusade. However the other part of me realizes that if I don’t do Spires of Arak while it is relevant… I will never likely go back and do it because the terrain looks frustrating. At this point I am just not sure which direction I am going to go… but in any case I am only two levels away from 100.

An Excellent Moment

I’ve talked at length about just how phenomenal the Final Fantasy XIV community is, but when I have concrete examples I still feel like I need to share them. Monday before our 8 man raids, I was attempting to cap out my poetics earned for the week, and as such decided to run a completely random expert roulette. Now I queued as DPS, and was shocked at just how fast the queue actually managed to go. We got into the instances and everyone said hello as is the FFXIV custom, and then some actual chatter started up. Things seemed to be going smoothly but within a few minutes the healer asked us if we were experiencing any lag. I was not but as the run progressed I started to see small bits of it with my actions. However I have totally seen times where even among our little circle of friends… one of us was experiencing some crushing lag.. and everyone else was just fine. During a pull the healer disconnected and the ninja and I managed to hold out just long enough after the tank died to finish off the pack.

Now were this any other online game, when the healer got back… they would have been chewed out by the players and called horrible for having a “bad” internet connection. I’ve seen that play out many times in the past in several different games. However in Final Fantasy XIV the healer came back, apologized and the general consensus of comments from the group was “stuff happens” and “thanks for trying”. As the run progressed the were several moments where the healer lagged out of disconnected, often times causing the tank to die. In every single time the tank took it with grace and thanks the healer for fighting through the issues so we could keep going. Upon completing the run everyone thanked the healer for valiantly “sticking it out” and I am certain that I was not the only person to give her my commendations. She sounded thoroughly frustrated by the events, but every player in the instance was supportive of her situation. What other game have you ever seen where that happens?

Awesome Boss

This morning I am thankful for an awesome boss. As I write this… I am feeling absolutely horrible, and have sent my boss an email saying that I would not be in today. That I would be taking the day and resting. I’ve had bosses in the past that would have had a problem with this, bosses that the only thing that mattered was that I was sitting at my desk during the hours of 8 to 5. I am very fortunate to have a boss that is more family than administration. Prior to this current environment it had been a very long time since I had anything resembling a work family. Maybe it was the fact that my first environment straight out of college was so close knit, but it essentially spoiled me for other places I worked. While I still feel close to a lot of the people I have worked with over the years… in part it was either through shared interests or shared struggle in horrible situations. This team that I am part of now… I feel like I belong to something bigger than myself and it is entirely thanks to the support of our boss.

Previously we were a group of self starters, and functioned well as independent islands more or less left along by every boss we had been under. Our current boss was a member of that team, and saw the disconnectedness of the group as a whole as something of a challenge. Over the last several years he has worked to bring us all closer together, and as such make us mesh more tightly. I know that I can go to any one of my team members with a problem and they will do everything in their power to fix it, and they know the same is true for me. Its the stupid little things like bringing a cake to our staff meeting on the months we have a birthday, or going out to see a movie together as an after hours team building activity. All of which by themselves are silly or minor… but adding up to be an awesome environment to work in. So I am thankful I have such a great environment to call my work home.

A Tale of Three Games

November 18, 2014 by Belghast

Cold Snap

Our Final Fantasy XIV group has ended up taking about a month long break following the launch of the 2.4 patch. For various reasons we have not rallied the troops on Tuesday nights, and as such we have opted to move our group content night. Tuesday has turned out to be just as bad a day to do anything serious as it was in every other MMO. For some reason it seems that Final Fantasy XIV patches more often than not late Monday night leading into Tuesday morning. This means along with the normal weekly reset we are often times dealing with marginally unstable servers. Since Monday tends to be a night where most folks focus on getting the last poetics needed to cap for the week, we figured it was also a relatively low volume raid night. So going forward we are going to try and pull together 8 man group content Monday nights with whomever we can muster at the time.

Often times who we have available will dictate what we can do. Last night we started off with Shiva Hard Mode, since most of us had not actually completed it. I have to say the fight was rather enjoyable, and it was kinda like a strange mishmash of titan and ifrit. It took us a couple of tries to see all the mechanics and then we straight stomped her. Granted this is just a hard mode and we are used to mostly attempting extremes. After that we went back and did Garuda Extreme again, because there was at least one member of the party who had not completed it. Traditionally we would be working on Titan Extreme, but it was good to go back and see that we could in fact repeat our victory. Granted it had been well over a month since we had last done the fight, and as such all of us were a bit rusty. However after a few wipes we nailed it like we actually knew what we were doing. Hopefully by next week everyone will have unlocked Ultros so we can take that on as a group, and this should have keyed most everyone for Garuda… so we can make attempts on Titan Extreme again.

To Skip or Not to Skip

After our group broke apart in Final Fantasy XIV I opted to poke my head into World of Warcraft and see what mayhem I could cause. I apparently was significantly closer to 96 than I realized, because upon entering the game and beginning work again on the Gorgrond content… I dinged within doing a few of the bonus areas. I still have a handful of bonus content areas to complete, but now this gives me a dilemma. I am at an ideal point to transition to the new zone that unlocked at 96… Spires of Arak. The problem being I have yet to do anything at all in Talador other than set up my garrison outpost. It looks like a really cool zone… but I am wondering if doing it will basically screw me for getting into normal mode dungeons. The problem that I ran into with Pandaria is that I leveled significantly quicker than the content would normally allow… and this means that I ended up needing to skip entire zones in the process. Normally I would keep plugging on, but I would really like to be available for at least a normal mode tank when I reach 100. The gear level that I came into the expansion with is just not going to hold long enough for me to do meaningful content.

It was my experience in Pandaria that if you could get into Townlong Steppes and Dreadwastes at the level cap to enter them… you could end up getting enough gear upgrades from questing that you were more than ready to set foot into normals… and quite possibly you were within an upgrade or two away from being able to do heroics. I guess in theory I could keep plugging away at Talador and simply finish all the content in the game before worrying about doing dungeons. Ultimately I do want to finish the content, because this expansion actually has a storyline that I care about for once. I guess my only desire to rush to 100 is so that I can get in on the initial wave of folks needing to run dungeons. While tanking for strangers was not as bad of an experience as I had expected… I feel like once everyone hits cap that experience will degrade significantly. Ultimately I will need to make a decision and move forward. Right now I am leaning heavily towards just skipping Talador entirely for the moment and diving into the Spire of Arak for maximum upgrade potential.

A Tale of Three Games

At midnight of last night another game launched that will be fighting for my attention, or significantly earlier than midnight if you know how to use a VPN to cause yourself to show up as another region. This once again is proof positive that region lockouts are dumb, because they are so painfully easy to circumvent if you really want to. I however did not care enough to do this, and my Monday night was already pretty full so I just waited until 11pm my time to get in and play the game. Dragon Age: Inquisition is a game with so many hopes wrapped up in it, that can either be booned or bashed within the first few hours of game play. Will this game return to Dragon Age: Origin style game play, or will it be more akin to Dragon Age 2. Quite honestly I don’t have an answer for you yet because I just have not seen enough of the game.

I am however already questioning my choices, and thinking that maybe I should not have gone sword and board tanky. The game unfortunately gives you a tank for your very first character, and while I have not even completely the introduction… I am already having flashbacks of trying to make two tanks work to keep Alistair in my party. The description mentions having proficiency with a two hander as well, so hopefully one of us can equip one of those and be done with it. Quite honestly the game felt a little sluggish, but I think maybe I had something installing in the background when I made my attempt to play it. For whatever reason it seemed to run silky smooth.. and then absolutely thrash the hard drive every so often without much rhyme or reason as to why. My hope was that it was just a background process thing… and not the game doing something dumb like trying to dial into the dragon age servers periodically. The game took a significant time to load… which I do think we can probably blame on busy servers as everyone was trying to launch the client at exactly midnight. Hopefully as the week goes on, I will have more to report on it… other than it exists.

My Cousin

No matter how smoothly this Thanksgiving goes… it was going to be a rough one regardless. This is going to be the first dinner without my grandmother, who has been such a fixed point and an anchor in our family. She represents that last in a long line of degrading family events that pretty much means all of the normality that I grew up with as far as family and holidays goes is gone. When my grandmother on my fathers side passed away, those meals just stopped in any semblance of order. We would say that we would try and get together, but ultimately we each made a quick visit in private to my grandfather… and that reason for maybe passing each other in the drive way even left when he passed away. Similarly with my wife’s family… when he step dad passed away the era of having big family meals went away… and folks opted to break apart into much smaller units. The last bastion of the big family get together was my Grandmother on my mothers side… and this past year she passed away. Predictably holiday plans have been non functional.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, because it is one of the last pure ones. Sure the day after thanksgiving is this black mass to consumerism… but thanksgiving day itself has remained relatively pristine. It was a day about getting together and having a meal with your family, and that mission was just simple enough to stay pretty true to its original goal. There is something about sharing a meal with friends and family that is just special to me… and for years I tried to convince my family to turn Christmas into Thanksgiving 2.0… where we just got together and shared conversation and food… and forgot the presents. My grandmothers house was this focal point of all of the family activity. She was such a strong matriarch and she is as much a reason for why I am the person I am… as anyone in my life is. I spent the majority of my childhood at her house, with her as my companion and friend. So this Thanksgiving was always going to be a hard one, no matter what happened.

The interesting thing that I have noted as we have gone through a series of recent funerals is how well my generation seems to get along with one another. When my grandmother passed away, I stayed long after most of the folks had left just talking to my cousins. My generation just does not fit into our family as a whole… we went out into the world and for the most part all did something with our lives beyond the boundaries of the small town my family hails from. The other day my wife was lamenting how strange Thanksgiving would be without my grandmother on facebook, and at this one of my cousins announced that she was intending to invite us to have the meal with them. Apparently she had gone through the same malaise and similarly they had a few deaths in their family that pretty much ended up with the holiday decimated. So as such here we go trying to start our own new traditions. Hopefully Thanksgiving will go smoothly, but in any case it will be better than spending it without family.

Yrel Is Awesome

November 17, 2014 by Belghast

The Weather Outside…

This morning I am going to try really hard to keep my blog post somewhat brief because I have weather to deal with outside. Throughout the day yesterday it kept snowing and while the ground temperature was too warm to cause it to stick permanently to the ground, it has managed to coat every other surface… like our vehicles. So before this morning is up, after I finish up my blog post I am going to have to go out there and deal with the mess. I am not looking forward to it, because last I checked the temperature and the wind were both still insane. As a denizen of Oklahoma I find it far easier to deal with warm temperatures in excess of 110 than freezing temperatures. So yesterday when it was in the 20s with an insane windchill… I was not a happy camper.

In fact I got out yesterday morning to get breakfast, and then did not leave the house at all once the weather started in more insanely. I had a grand old time hibernating either in my office under a blanket or downstairs on the new laptop… under and even larger fuzzier blanket. This combined with the fact that I seemed to have at least one cat on me at any given time kept me fairly toasty warm, or at least toasty in the ways that counted. Unfortunately today I will have to brave the cold and head out into the world. I am absolutely not looking forward to the commute now that there is “ice” on the road ways… because even the potential mention of it causes folks to drive insane. The biggest thing I am not looking forward to is waiting on my jeep to thaw out this morning and melt some of the snow.

Yrel Is Awesome

So far one of my favorite parts about the Warlords of Draenor expansion is the character of Yrel. In part because she evolves along with your hero through the course of the game. For an alliance player she is the person driving the narrative forward, and many times your partner in the thick of the battle. What makes the character interesting is you watch her evolve over the course of the content from a very frightened Draenei who does not believe in herself and her abilities. Over the course of the storyline there is a key moment where you try and bolster her spirit, and from that point onwards she evolves. With each trip into battle she becomes more and more of a badass. So while in the above screenshot she looks a bit doe eyed… that quickly changes into a woman of determination and strength.

I don’t think the experience of exploring Draenor would be nearly as interesting to me were it not constantly moved forward by interactions with Yrel. When the early cinematics were released I assumed this game from an alliance players perspective would be all about Maraad and his returning to his home land. While I like the character of Maraad just fine, I feel like they made the right choice to switch focus and center the story on the much more interesting Yrel. The thing the Warcraft universe needs more than anything are some strong female characters that play center stage, and not supporting characters. Yrel so far does a really good job of being that sort of character. Terran Gregory and team have done an amazing job with the in game cinematics, in making this entire experience feel so much more movie like.

Taking it Slow

At this point I am trying to stop and smell the roses whenever I have the chance. While the list of level 100 characters keeps increasing in guild, and the call of high level content is there… I am trying to take it slowly. That said the game seems to be conspiring against me, in that I am level 95 and have yet to make it out of Gorgrond. There are just so many things to see and do in the landscape and my compulsion to completely every quest, kill every rare mob and gather every treasure… is ending up leveling me more swiftly than I had expected. I remember having the same basic feeling when I was leveling in Pandaria the first time as well. The only negative is that my desire not to skip content means I am going to have to do a lot of questing at maximum level to attempt to gear myself. The problem I ran into with Pandaria is that in order to get into the dungeons you really needed that quest gear from Townlong Steppes and Dreadwastes. At this point I will ding 100 well before I have set foot in any of the later zones, so I am likely setting myself up for the same issues.

Thanks to Final Fantasy XIV… I did something I never thought I would do in World of Warcraft. Yesterday afternoon I queued as a tank for a random dungeon… in fact I ran two of them back to back. Overall the experience was not nearly as bad as I would have expected it. Sure I had one jackass in the first run that laughed at us as we wiped to something… but the majority of the time it went nice and smoothly. Equally shocking was the fact that apparently Warrior tanking is a muscle memory task because I could still do it instinctively. Granted I set up my hot bars much the same way as I have always set them up for years. My fingers seemed to know precisely what to do at the right time, and honestly I found it an easier experience than tanking with a Deathknight. It felt natural, and as the dungeons ran on I started doing things a lot more confidently. Maybe the warrior tank inside of me really still is there, and was just waiting to come out again. I look forward to ping ponging around dungeons with charge as the role begins to feel more natural. Essentially Belghast Warrior tanking is open for business… and if you need a tank holler.

House Stalwart

This morning I am thankful that House Stalwart in World of Warcraft on the Argent Dawn server… continues to exist in spite of me. While I founded the guild back in 2004, it has been years since I have controlled the destiny of this plucky guild. In fact there are many times that I have actively tried to recruit players away from World of Warcraft into other games. In spite of my constant attempts and my white panel van full of candy… the guild still exists as strong as it ever was. Over the last few nights we have had almost 30 people online, which is pretty damned good for a guild in a game that had been in a state of decline. While I set the motions into action that started the guild and gathered people there… it is the people themselves that keep it going. Every so often I will take back the reigns of the guild, and do a few tweaks here and there, but largely it is the people themselves that have kept the ship moving forward.

I also want to thank my good friend Rylacus. He claims that he is just a “Bel Proxy”, but he has been all too gracious about wearing the crown when I am not around. He provides the guild a sense of stability that I have not been able to since the launch of Cataclysm. He is as much guild mascot as he is guild leader, and I appreciate the effort he has put into it. He is also really damned good at denying my candy, as I have only ever gotten him to follow me into one other game. He is all about his characters in World of Warcraft and the progress he has made with them. Since both he and his kids play the game, he is as firmly rooted in it as anyone I know. He still keeps trying to give me back the crown, but his willingness to wear it means so much to me. He keeps things moving forward and makes sure the train never completely derails. It has taken me awhile to reach a point of accepting that the House Stalwart that exists today is not the House Stalwart I created… but is in no way less awesome or less interesting. The guild has evolved beyond being a cult of personality dedicated to its leader, and has become a chain reaction that sustains itself. I am thankful to no longer be needed to keep the fire going.