MMO Archives - Page 358 of 437 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Icecrown Revisited

November 28, 2014 by Belghast

The Force Awakens

While I was getting up and around this morning apparently this was released. For months and months there have been all manner of fake trailers floating around the internet, but finally today they release a real teaser trailer. I am guessing this is perfectly timed for the thanksgiving/black friday movie theater rush… as all these people realize they are tired of seeing each other and being in the same house. I have had mixed emotions with the prospect of more movies. For starters I really did not like the “prequels” that much. They were cool in the aspect that we got to see a lot of nifty things that were previously only written about, and even more things were flat out invented for the screen. But the movie stories themselves were just not that good, and the whole “jesus christ jedistar” sub plot seemed silly. Disney however is well known for protecting the hell out of their licenses and their future marketability… so when they bought out lucasfilm I started to worry a little less.

Then they announced the director was going to be J.J. Abrams, and I started to get a little more hopeful. For those unaware he is the man behind Lost, Fringe and the Star Trek reboots. The later of which is what is causing issues for the Star Wars purists. Granted I have never been a massive fan of Star Trek, it was always one of those things I watched because there simply was not enough science fiction programming on television during my formative years to be picky. Essentially I’ve never felt the Star Trek setting was believable, in that we could never actually join under one banner as a planet, and more importantly could not actually go out into the stars and be a mediator. We are entirely too divisive as a species for that ever to really work. Star Wars on the other hand was this beautifully chaotic universe where everything is pretty much in a constant state of “effed up”. This was believable to me as a kid, and it featured the Jedi… which is pretty much the pinnacle of my knight in shining armor complex.

The thing is I feel like the Star Wars universe could use a bit of a reboot after the horribleness that was the prequels. That said I don’t think that Disney is going to allow JJ to completely blow away a couple of decades worth of source material… that is highly profitable for the notalgia peddlers. What I think we will see is more of a reimagining of some of the constructs. You can see this in the form of the trailer. The X-Wing series fighters feel leaner and more aerodynamic, the Storm Trooper armor feels smoother, and the Dark Jedi lightsaber feels more brutal in the form of some crazy claymore looking thing. I am looking forward to seeing more details leak out about this film, but I am frustrated that we will have wade through over a year of hype before actually getting to see it.

Icecrown Revisited

Last night after a series of heroics I decided to continue my path of clearing old raids for fun. At first I picked up where I left off last night and did the Mount Hyjal raid in the Caverns of Time. This was easy before, but has gotten progressively easier considering I now have a spammable throw attack as a warrior that stacks deep wounds on the target. Generally speaking the first hit takes them down in health with the deep wounds dot eventually finishing them off. Since I also know where the mobs spawn, the first 16 waves went extremely quickly because I could simply stand on the spawn and thunderclap each new wave as it came into the world. The horde base however is still frustrating with constantly having to run back into the base to take down flyers. That said the entire raid maybe took 30 minutes to actually complete.

From there I used my engineer hacks and teleported straight to Icecrown with my original intent being to run Icecrown Citadel. That said I had forgotten that the engineer port takes you directly above the Crusaders Coliseum, so for shits and giggles I decided to run that place on heroic difficulty. Overall it was still rather easy with the only annoyances being the PVP battle, and having to take mobs in reverse the normal order… aka burn everything but the tree druid… and then the tree druid. Anubarak was still a bit of a challenge because he deals a lot of damage still while siphoning your health. Thankfully I was able to shield wall up, and reduce the incoming damage enough to take him down.

Storming the Castle

From there I moved onto Icecrown proper, but since the Belghast character had not actually cleared normal 25 man Icecrown… I had to set down the raid difficulty. Hopefully next week I will make an attempt on heroic and see if it goes as smoothly. The two points I was most concerned with were the Airship battle, and Dreamwalker. Airship turned out not to be a big deal at all, as the scaling in damage meant I could take down the airship before I actually needed to jump across. In fact the mage spawned like normal… and I jetpacked across… only to be standing on the wrong boat as it went down. Fortunately I guess at some point they implemented a teleport that takes you back to your boat, so I was able to get back there without taking a death.

Dreamwalker on the other hand was a completely different problem. For those not familiar with the raid, this is a goofy fight that works backwards from almost every other encounter. This is the moment the healers shine, because they essentially are your “DPS”. Dreamwalker is a dragon that starts at 50% health and during the course of the battle you have to heal her up to full. The problem being… I am not a healer, nor do I really have any heals at all. I feel like this is the sort of thing a paladin tank could handle without much issue. I made a valiant attempt at using bandages to heal up the dragon… and in truth there is a point during the add rotation where you can get an entire bandage applied. Had I brought enough bandages I could have probably solo’d this one without much issue.

However there is a way to glitch out the fight, that I am not sure if it is intentional or not. The fight involves the spawning of these portals to the emerald dream. From there your healing is greatly increased but the fight will reset if there is no one in the “real world” with the encounter. So I learned that if I take a portal, it will glitch the fight, reset it and open both the door at the front of the room, and the door to Sindragosa. So essentially I was able to simply skip the other problem fight for soloing, which allowed me to unlock access to the Lich King. I have a feeling that none of these encounters will be quite so easy on heroic mode, but for the Lich King proper I was pretty much able to ignore all of the fight mechanics and burn him directly while standing in the crap that used to oneshot players. My passive healing abilities as prot warrior seemed to counteract any damage I was actually taking. The concerns about not being able to solo old raids for fun after the stat squish… seems to have been unfounded.

The Internet

I am in the age group that folks refer to as the “internet pioneers” the generation for which the internet became an ever increasing reality. I was in High School when things started changing, and during our college years we latched onto each new piece of technology with both hands. The problem is that everything has become so common place that we stop to appreciate just how magical this grand interconnectedness really is. It is because of the internet that I am here talking to you every day, and because of it that I get to hang out with people from around the world in a nightly basis. It is because of the internet that I met my wife, and we ultimately married, and because of it that I have my job as a web developer. On a day like today, when the stores are absolutely insane… it is because of the internet that I can stay within the warm comfort of my own home and shop the exact same deals online, and likely have them on my doorstep tomorrow if I really wanted to.

The real reason I am thankful for the internet is it allows someone like me who has issues dealing with people on a regular basis… to live a very rich and relatively normal life. Dealing with folks in person wears me out in ways that I will never be able to full explain. Up close and personal interaction just drains me… and while I loved every minute of Thanksgiving yesterday… I was more than ready to go home and not see anyone for awhile. The internet however acts as a bridge allowing me to be still social but in a way that is far more comfortable to me personally. For all of this and more… I am thankful we have an internet, and it is populated with just as many awesome people as it is horrible ones. I’ve made it my mission to try and gather up as many of the awesome ones as I can.