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Point Paralysis

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Maybe I didn’t suck

For whatever reason this morning I am absolutely struggling to remain conscious.  I feel like maybe I drifted into the “too much sleep” territory last night.  We ended up with a heavily altered game play, in that when my wife got home last night we ended up taking our evening walk and combining it with some extra steps to go walk to eat dinner.  This was awesome in that it meant that my playtime was not perforated last night by going out to walk, but I seem to have squandered the benefit by going to bed early.  For whatever reason around 9 pm I got irrationally tired and after dealing with a few chores crashed out on the bed with two cats snuggled up beside me.  Normally I get pretty much the same 6 hours of sleep every night, but last night I got a little closer to 8 hours and I feel groggy as hell.

Awesome thing happened yesterday, in that the podcast I was a guest on over the weekend published the episode.  I feel humbled that I was offered to join in the fun, and the end result was really nice.  I listened to it yesterday after getting out of our weekly staff meeting, and I have to say I was a bit scared to do so.  I was worried that maybe I would have come off like an ass or something, but overall it seemed to flow really nicely.  Every now and then podcasts will have a guest on that is abrupt and disruptive… and I am always afraid I will be that guy.  Each podcast has a certain feel to it, and I was hoping that I was staying true to that.  It is still really damned weird to hear my own voice, but after doing this streaming thing and our own podcast I am starting to get used to it finally.

Point Paralysis

Screenshot_20140424_062015 Yesterday one of my guildies and fellow bloggers Werit posted a piece on something I think all of us have felt, that he calls “Skill Point Paralysis”.  One of the big features of Elder Scrolls Online is that the game is not so much about how you play the game but how you choose to build your character.  You can be damned near anything you can imagine within the frame work of the game.  You want to play a spell slinging rogue, or a tanky archer?  Sure you can build both of those in damned near any “class” as well.  The problem is without a reasonable undo system, it gives a false sense of importance on every single skill point.  It is a bit like playing a chess match and being afraid to make a move for fear it was the wrong one.  I have had the benefit of playing this same character over a dozen times throughout the various beta test phases.  Over that time I have refined exactly what I want to do, but still I will find myself with four points pooled up and not really sure where to spend them.

So I thought I would spend a few minutes this morning talking about the type of decisions I make.  Essentially I tend to divide things up in my head into three categories:  Active Attacks, Passive Buffs, and Utility.  At the end of the day I can only have five active attacks on my bar at any given time, so as a result I tend to discount the value of choosing one of these.  Also picking up a new active attack means I need to devote some time into raising it and unlocking the morph.  After a point new abilities are not really as useful as old abilities until you can morph them.  So that means I need to be committed to a new ability choice if I want to go down that path.  I will occasionally pick up an ability if it sounds interesting, but if you notice in the above screenshot I have Power Bash at level 1… in part because I have not really used it much in combat.

Utility abilities are a special kind of actives, and I generally limit myself to only having one of these on my bar at a time.  Sometimes these are survival cooldowns, self heals or group buffs… but most of the time I classify things into this category that are only “situationally good”.  For example I love beyond love the Silver Bolts ability.  However it is only really worth putting on my bar if I know I will be fighting Daedra or Undead… or now that I have the fighters guild rank 7 passive Werewolves.  If it is an ability that I will use only 20% of the time, I greatly devalue picking that with my skill points.  Sometimes however these abilities are useful for things other than their original intent.  Even if you are fighting something other than the mob types mentioned above… Silver Bolts still becomes a pretty potent weaponless ranged attack if your character happens to be lacking one of those.

Always On is Awesome

The final category is where I tend to spend MOST of my points.  If you look at the above screenshot I have every single passive ability that I can currently get in the sword and board tree.  Similarly if you would look at my Heavy Armor and Imperial Racial trees their passives would be completely filled as well.  If I have a useful passive to buy, I will almost always choose that over something else.  Passives do not require me to change my play style to incorporate them in, nor do they require me to level them to make them truly useful.  Instead they are a single pick that makes my character immediately and permanently better.  In a game I will always favor something that gives me a permanent boost over something that gives me a situationally better boost.  I like “always on” things, because if I can be awesome all of the time, it is better to me than being awesome some of the time.

Finally I have limited myself to a single tradeskill for the time being.  Until the points begin to flow like honey later as I wander around the world collecting them…  I have narrowed my focus to two weapons (sword and shield and two handed), three class trees (because really you want to cherry pick abilities between them), one armor type (heavy is the only choice I ever seem to make), racial tree, and a single tradeskill (blacksmithing).  Now I will occasionally pick up some especially valuable picks like Soul Lock from the World tree, that gives you a chance to fill soul stones each time you kill a mob.  Overall I  have narrowed my focus to a specific set of abilities.  The big thing I see players doing that gets them in trouble is trying to tackle more than one weapon at a time early on.  I did not pick up a second weapon until 20 or so, well after I had the ability to hot swap between them.  Trying to spread yourself too thin is something that will ultimately lead to making the game harder than it really needs to be.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #SkillPoints

The Impossible Plateau

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Forced Fasting

Screenshot_20140422_193251 This blog post is going to suck, I just wanted to get that out of the way now so you can avoid reading it.  In the mornings I muster the “oomph” to blog by channeling the dark arcane magic of coffee.  I am completely un-caffeinated today and it is horrible.  I am having to fast this morning as part of some blood work, and I have no problem with the not eating part…  but no coffee is hitting a little below the belt.  I totally imagine that once I have had my blood drawn I am going to go to the nearest QuikTrip and like try and drink straight from the coffee pot or something like that.  I’ve never really understood the purpose of fasting before blood work, since don’t you really want to see the persons stats how they actually are all the time?  What is the point of having this fasted idealistic state, when you know the person is going to screw everything up with caffeine anyways.

As part of our insurance plan at work, we are having to submit to a “biometric screening”, which seems really damned Orwellian to me.  The last few years I had been a conscientious objector to the process and as a result paid a significantly higher insurance premium, but this year that reached a critical mass.  If you do not take the screening your monthly insurance rates are literally over double what they would be if you submitted to the finger prick.  We did not find that out until after all of the normal screening sessions were finished.  So now I have to go to some massive last call session this morning.  I still think this entire process is bullshit.  I’m curious, are any of you having to do this for your work insurance?  My working theory is still that our HR department is incompetent and just simply cannot negotiate for new insurance plans worth a shit.

The Impossible Plateau

Last night I decided to faff about again in Alik’r and start the stream going while I did so.  There is a spot on the map that seems like it should have something cool at it, but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get up there.  During a good chunk of the video I am trying to get up to the place and failing miserably.  I go for a really long swim, which I am sure was boring for everyone watching… and by everyone I mean no one.  Actually to be truthful over the course of the video I did manage to pick up two viewers.  First I was joined by ShinyWhip who apparently was bored and was willing to watch me go for a swim.  She got to watch me fail miserably at trying to solo a world boss as well.  Eventually I was joined by my guildie Saia who also got to watch me fail at a few things.  That is pretty much the subtext of my streams…  me failing at playing video games.

At some point I had to go afk for an extended period of time and I cut off the stream after returning.  Later in the evening I attempted a public dungeon with Warenwolf but we seemed to be missing a lot of the bosses.  Turning in the quest from inside gave us credit for the place, but I have never seen a public dungeon without a slew of optional bosses. In grand total I think we found three, and none of them actually seemed to drop anything of use.  Honestly I have been on a bad streak as far as bosses go.  I am reaching a point where the greens I craft seem to be significantly better than the blues I am getting as drops.  Crafting in this game is extremely overpowered, and I now have enough skill points dumped into blacksmithing that I have a pretty great chance of getting a temper off anything I deconstruct.

I dinged 38 last night, so In theory I could craft up an entirely new set of gear.  Not sure if this is really worth it however.  Thinking I am going to try and limp on with the 36 set I have until I ding 40, and then craft all new gear then.  The problem with crafting sets of gear is that it is a serious drain on your available tempers.  I am really not sure how many I have, but I don’t think I have near enough to be throwing them away randomly.  The big frustration so far with Alik’r is that I am still mostly finding Orichalcum.  I thought by now that I would be swimming in a sea of Dwarven Ore, but so far it has been extremely rare… which means I may not even have enough ingots to craft a full set of anything right now.

On Streaming

I am really bad about not touching social media or my RSS feed on the weekend, and as a result I usually have a significant backlog that starts sometime on Friday night.  Since I was off for Good Friday this past week, it mean this void started on a Thursday night.  As a result I missed this post by Scopique on his thoughts about streaming.  I am honestly not sure how I feel about streaming in general.  Twitch is one of those weird things that I am not really sure what to do about.  While I have a twitch channel and I stream somewhat regularly, and then dump said videos on Youtube…  I really don’t watch twitch much at all.  Well there was that period of time when all of us were watching Twitch Plays Pokemon… but that was more of the “trainwreck you just can’t help but watch” thing than something I genuinely enjoyed.  Generally speaking the only time I watch anything on twitch is when there is some presentation relating to a game I am playing.

As a result I feel kinda bad that I am streaming and love it when people watch my stream…  but I don’t ever actually end up watching anyone elses streams.  I feel like that is a big reason why my stream and youtube channel will never really be successful on their own.  They will always be attached to my blog, since the blog is what is really important to me.  I don’t fully get the twitch or youtube cultures, and in order to get either to really work it feels like you need to fully immerse yourself into said culture.  Right now I am streaming mostly because going back and listening to the things that my friends and I say on my stream entertains me.  I say all sorts of stuff and fifteen minutes later I cannot remember what the hell I just said, so it cracks me up the random stuff that comes out of my mouth while I game.  Ultimately I stream for the same reason I blog, because for whatever reason I find it entertaining and fun, and would probably be doing both even if I never had a single reader or viewer.  The stream however is just not something I think of as meaningful or permanent… it is very much a throwaway experience to me.  Entertaining for the moment it is happening, but not something to really ponder once the stream has been turned off.

That is not to say that there are not some absolutely amazing and entertaining folks out there.  Qelric for example does amazing videos, and her production value is just great.  I tend to watch whatever videos come down the pipe from her, because I find them equally entertaining and informative.  That said I have never really gotten into the “let’s play” culture on YouTube.  I tried doing some of it with my series on Trove… and really I just didn’t like the way it felt.  For a period of time I was trying to get people to do the like and subscribe thing… before I realized that I just didn’t really care much.  If people watch my YouTube channel and like my videos… awesome…  if they don’t… equally awesome.  I think the big difference is I am not trying to make a career out of being an internet persona.  I don’t need viewers or clicks or likes or whatever to get a pay check.  At the end of the day my blogging and my faffing about in streams and videos… is just something I do for entertainment.  I respect the folks who are trying to make this work as a career but I don’t think I could ever deal with the inherent instability that is trying to make a living off the whims of others.

Easy Targets

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Heartfelt Thanks

I want to lead off this morning by thanking everyone that responded yesterday to wish me well on my five year blogoversary.  It still seems a bit strange that I have been doing this that long, well technically I have been doing “this” the whole daily blogging thing only a year.  All the support you guys have given me has been awesome.  I greatly appreciate you all in so many ways.  I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing, but I just keep doing it anyways.  At this point the blogging thing is so ingrained in me that I think I would continue to post daily even if I had nothing to talk about.  Thankfully I always seem to be able to at least incoherently ramble, and that tends to fill a page faster than anything.

While we are on the topic of blogging and thanks, I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I have touched on this a few times over the last few weeks, but it is approaching quickly.  May First is the official launch of the 2014 edition of the Newbie Blogger initiative, whether you are a veteran blogger or someone who has always wanted to create a blog… we need you.  This year proves to be a really interesting run as things are changing up quite a bit.  There are awards with prizes attached to them for various things.  Additionally we will have a return of the Syl’s ever fun NBI Poetry slam, as well as some event nights.  Right now a massive hearthstone battle royale has been confirmed, and you can check up the sign up information here.  There is also a great idea for a League of Legends night, that I hope gets enough support to make as well.

The thing about blogging is for every one of us that are blogging daily, there are another batch that have either abandoned their blog or are sitting by the sidelines trying to muster the nerve to start blogging.  I was one of those people five years ago, and a similar community got me started.  I implore you to embrace this opportunity and either reignite your blogging passion or light a brand new spark.  Folks are constantly saying that blogging is dead as a medium, but each of us that do so regularly are thumbing our noses at this concept.  We need fresh blood to keep this gaming blogosphere alive and healthy and events like NBI shine a bright light on new talent.  This will be my third year supporting the effort, and I look forward to seeing a new crop of bloggers step up and do a better job than I ever could do.

Lost in the Desert

Since I had not streamed on twitch in a few days I decided last night I would fire it up while I wandered around in the desert.  Alik’r is an interesting zone and almost feels like two zones.  There was a series of frenetic feeling quests in the town of Sentinel as you saved it from a zombie invasion.  All the while doing so there was a call to purpose, a feeling that you had to keep moving or something horrible would happen.  Now that I am out in the desert proper, the feeling of the zone has changed again.  Now as I sift through the dunes looking for various points of interest, the feeling seems to be much more relaxed and similar to the way Stros M’kai felt.  This is good and bad, good in that I feel like I can take my time through the content… and bad in that I am horribly prone to completely lose focus.

One of the things I am really loving are the creatures out here.  The game does a really good job of disguising the fact that you are often fighting the same damned creatures over and over.  The first time I really noticed this was in beta and playing the different starter zone experiences.  In Ebonheart you had the fiery Shalk, Aldmeri you had Thunderbugs, and in Daggerfall you had Assassin Bugs.  They were all essentially the same mob, but each performed slightly differently in the kinds of attacks they would do.  In the desert of Alik’r I noticed that Dunerippers were essentially crocodiles but vastly different in appearance.  They shared quite a bit of similarity in the base model and the sweep attacks, but also incorporated the mudcrab dig attack and a model swap.  Noticed the same thing happening with the Jackals, that look extremely different from wolves but behave almost exactly the same.

All of this give a feeling that the world is related, and that the various creatures of Tamriel evolved from the same core at some point.  I think that is the thing I love more than anything else, that everything in Elder Scrolls Online has a certain “sameness” to it.  It all feels like it is part of the same world.  While a Dwemer ruin in Skyrim might look vastly different from one in the Alik’r desert… they all feel like they were from the same race.  This adherence to a “racial stylebook” makes the game feel amazing.  One of my big fears with Elder Scrolls Online and the announcement of the three factions is that they would somehow destroy the natural diversity of the Elder Scrolls setting.  However thankfully you are just as likely to find a Dunmer or Argonian NPC in the desert as you are to find a Redguard in Riften.  The game has managed to maintain the jumbled mess that is the Elder Scrolls setting.

Easy Targets

After awhile hanging out in mumble by myself I was joined by the illustrious Zelibeli and Jabberant, who decided they were on their way out to Cyrodil.  This was to be Zeli’s first foray into the frontiers, so I decided to halt my questing and tag along.  I warned them that I sucked horribly at PVP, but still managed to love Cyrodil.  In every conceivable way it is the Dark Age of Camelot frontiers.  You have three different realms that border the region, with lots of objectives scattered around the map.  Just like Dark Age of Camelot there are also numerous other things to do out there than just PVP.  We attempted to meet up with one of the bigger conflicts at first, but ended up getting completely rolled by a veteran three player a few times.  One of the interesting things about Cyrodil is that it instant levels you to 50 for the purpose of the content.  The only problem is it bolsters you to the BASE stats of a 50… not a 50 with full gear.  This means that a bolstered character will always be significantly weaker than a true 50… and even weaker still than a veteran rank player.

In large scale siege warfare this really doesn’t matter much since it is mostly a numbers game.  In one on one combat… the difference is extremely noticeable.  I felt like I simply could not deal enough damage to the veteran rank 3 player.  While I out survived both Zeli and Jabb this was simply to my tanky nature more than anything else, and still even after having fought two other players the guy completely wrecked me.  As a result we ended up varying our goals and we set our sights on a skyshard.  One of the add-ons I have apparently shows the locations of all of the skyshards in Cyrodil, so I figured this would be a valuable excursion.  So we made our way to this tower guarded by goblins, with the skyshard very clearly at the top.  It took a few tries to finally reach the goal, as the moment we reached the tower initially we got attacked by several folks from Ebonheart also after the same goal.

Screenshot_20140421_211127

One of the cool things is there at the tower we picked up a quest to deliver a doctors bag to a town there in Cyrodil.  We did not do this however as the town in question was deep within currently Ebonheart held territory.  That seems like a grand mission for another night.  After a lot of faffing about we ended up picking up another guildie, Barose and heading to a dungeon.  I think it is really awesome that there are full dungeons scattered around the map in Cyrodil.  This one was a really nifty vampire dungeon and I ended up getting so much loot that I had to “mail bank” a ton of it to Rae.  Apparently I ended up sending her 9 emails full of it before the night was up.  The PVP dungeons seem to drop loot as though they were a group dungeon, but overall seemed easier in scale.  I am guessing they are rewarding us for the risk of doing PVE content in a PVP zone, where any group of players could hop into the dungeon and slaughter us in the process.

Overall it was a really great night and there is talk of trying to create some sort of formalized guild Cyrodil night.  If nothing else last night proved that there is plenty to do in Cyrodil even if you do not necessarily engage in siege warfare.  While I am not opposed to defending a keep or claiming one for our guild, I also want to explore all of the other dungeons out there and collect more skyshards.  For the longest time I had a point where I simply did not know where to spend points, but having leveled up a lot of abilities I seem to once again have more opportunities to spend them than points to spend.  I had a great time and I hope Zeli and Jabb both did as well.  Was really fun just hanging out and being horrible at PVP together.  You should totally join us the next time.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Cyrodil #PVP #NewbieBloggerInitiative

Five Year Blogoversary

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Something Profound

fivecake I feel like this morning I should post something deeply profound since as of this morning it means I have been doing this blog thing for five years.  Technically my first post was on the 17th, but it was really just a test to make sure the site was functional.  My very first “real” post was on April 21st 2009 contemplating the ramifications of what “dual spec” would do to our raid.  I have changed a lot in these five years, and while I wish I had posted more regularly early on, I do like the fact that you can see this evolution in game play and attitude over the years.  The original intent of this blog was to be a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog hence the title.

But looking back that idea didn’t seem to last more than a few posts before it started to morph into a blog about my adventures in raiding.  At that point I was in my “wannabe hardcore” mode, and in this fashion being plugged into the blog scene was probably more of a detriment to my enjoyment than a boon to my happiness.  I saw people doing really awesome things, and our little rag tag mostly casual raid just couldn’t keep up.  I am not super proud of some of the angry posts I made to that effect as we struggled to clear content in Wrath of the Lich King.  There are many times I wish I could just jettison the first couple of years worth of posts, because I really don’t know that version of me any more.

Personal Growth

Every so often through the back log of posts I stumble upon one that I had forgotten about and that I really am still proud to have written.  The biggest takeaway for me over these five years is that I have become much more comfortable in my own skin.  When I started writing for my blog, I tried to be this thing that I thought everyone wanted me to be.  The flawless leader, the archetype, the figurehead that did no wrong and always had the right words to say to fix the problems.  The longer it ran the more I realized I was not that person.  I was just as full of self doubt and confusion as the next player, and that they didn’t follow me because I knew all the answers…  they followed me because I cared enough to try.

So now I can look back at the first four years of my blog as me trying to “find my voice”, but I don’t really think I found it until I embarked upon my “Grand Experiment”.  There is something about having to write a post each and every morning that forces you to open up and be honest.  There comes a point where you just run out of spackle and polish to keep up your persona.  I would like to hope that by the time I entered into the idea, the “persona” of me was dwindling and I was left with just the real version…  but I can even see that over the course of this last year of daily posts I became far more honest with my public.  I still enter into each posting expecting no one to actually read it, and in that there is a comfort level that allows me to say some things that I might not say otherwise.

So while today is pretty cool that the blog itself has been around for five years now, I feel like the upcoming anniversary of the grand experiment is far more important.  That was really the moment when I decided a true direction for my blog, and in the last year I feel so blessed in the connections I have made during it.  The funny thing is… even after five years of doing this, I feel like I don’t really “know” anything about this trade.  I tend to just push forward with what seems to work, and figure out the rest of the details as I go.  As I enter into my third year of the Newbie Blogger Initiative… I really don’t feel like I am worthy of the title of “Mentor”, because I am still very much figuring things out for myself.

Breaching the Spotlight

I’ve always been one of those people who has preferred to be behind the scenes, and while I like knowing that people are actually reading what I write, I’ve tried to avoid stepping out into the spotlight.  Part of this comes from the whole “not really comfortable in my own skin” aspect of things.  I’m a big guy, and I probably always will be, but over the last year my wife and I have embarked upon a personal journey that has lead to both of us losing well over seventy pounds.  So while I am not going to be taking any “selfies” any time soon, I am feeling a lot more confident about myself as a result.  As such I am forcing myself to do things that I would have avoided before.

This started with my game streaming over on Twitch, and while I choose not to display my webcam on the stream… it is a start.  While streaming I started joining mumble and letting anyone pop in to chat, and I realized that I might have something interesting on my hands.  In listening to the old streams it really started to sound like a sort of impromptu podcast.  Out of this I talked to a few of my friends that I have talked with nightly in twitch for years, and we started a podcast.  Sunday we recorded our second episode and I am pretty happy with how things are turning out.  I made an attempt to go on camera with the Gamer Hangout vidcast but honestly the “in front of the camera” thing was just a bit too much for my anxiety.

Yesterday I got the opportunity to branch out from my comfort zone again, and while I was extremely nervous going into it… and likely drove my wife insane starting an hour or so before it was supposed to happen… it seemed to go off without a hitch.  I was invited to guest host MMORPG.com Game On podcast with Liore and Syeric.  The episode we recorded last night will not be posted until this coming Wednesday, but I am excited and scared to see how it turned out.  The multiplaying podcast did not happen this week, but I may end up getting rescheduled on this weeks show.  While it may not seem like a big leap for me to go from doing my own podcast, to joining in on others… it really is.  What has made Aggrochat so easy for me is we are just recording the same kinds of conversations we have had for years.

Aggrochat Chibis

belghast_shieldhat Rae is probably going to kill me for posting this, but meh she will get over it.  It feels fitting to show this off today, since five years ago she made the Belghast in Zul’Aman gear chibi that I still use for everything.  Right now everything we have for AggroChat is very much in a placeholder state.  We wanted to get podcasting before we lost our nerve, and did not want to wait for all the infrastructure to be in place.  One of the things she has been working on are Chibis for each of the podcasters so we can have a nifty chibi-fied logo version of ourselves.  Over the weekend she sent me what looks to be a final or near final version of my chibi.  I am absolutely in love with it, and can’t wait to see what the final version of all of them looks like put together.  Once she is finished with everything I am probably going to be updating the masthead to include this guy as well.  I want to thank all of you who have read my blog during the last five years.  You’ve made this a very interesting journey, and I can only hope I have to “oomph” to make it another five years.