MMORPG Archives - Page 382 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Sneaky McSneakybits

January 29, 2014 by Belghast

Persistent Stuff

It has been quite a while since I last talked about Trove on my blog. For a bit I had been recording regular segments of me exploring the world, then after roughly six of them I just stopped. Namely this coincides with me getting super into World of Warcraft raiding for a bit. I however have continued to explore the game each time they add a new build. At this point it is hard to remember exactly what the state of the game was when I last talked about it. Currently we have fully persistent cornerstones, and you can see mine on the right-hand side of the image above. It is still very much a work in progress, but essentially I was trying to maximize the space available and still look like something I could pick out at a distance as “mine”.

Currently there are four levels above ground and two below ground, the first of which below has my workbench and block transmuter thingy. One of the cool things that they added in within the last few patches is the ability for your crafting inventory to survive between server resets. This means I finally have a real reason to mass harvest materials for use later, since I am not constantly losing everything each time a patch goes in. My biggest wish however is that we could craft some weapons to replace the starter crap. Each time the server resets I rush around trying to get decent enough weapons to leave the first tier zones. In this present patch it feels like maybe they nerfed the drop rates a bit, as I slaughter a few dozen ladybugs and bees this morning and have gotten nothing at all but cubits… the crafting currency.

Another cool thing they are doing is replacing the in game weapon drops with ones created by players. When you get an item, it now says who the weapon was created by. It was pretty cool the other night when I got a nifty rapier drop and noticed it was created by a friend of mine CaptainCursor. Since the community is relatively small at present, this adds a whole new level to the game since you are constantly running into things created by names you recognize. You can check out the latest patch notes over on the Trove reddit.

Sneaky McSneakybits

Yeah I have no clue why I named this subsection and the blog post this… brain does things sometimes. Last night my most important mission was to finish leveling my rogue to 60, and consume all of the various loot boxes I had gathered up along the way. At some point they made it so that you are guaranteed a lockbox of some sort from your weekly patron gift. Since my warrior Belghast is already fairly well geared, or at least well enough to begin raiding… I figured I would stockpile them to give my rogue a quick gear boost upon dinging. Turns out it worked pretty well at doing just that. Between the lockboxes and about 50 plat in select purchases I was able to get well past the 300 hit requirement for expert dungeons. I did not however get to run one as we spent a good chunk of the evening out and about last night.

In theory the queue should go pretty fast since I am equally comfortable Barding it up as support or going dps as either my Marksman spec or my Nightblade primary dps one. Going back and playing rift has made me realize just how much I love the Rift Rogue and truly dislike playing a WoW Rogue. While I got Gloam to 90, and I am extremely happy I did so that I could do the living steel transmutes I needed to craft my Sky Golem… I really don’t think he is going to get much play. Quite simply put… Belgarou my feral druid is a better rogue than my rogue is… or is at least a more interesting one. I have just come to realize I don’t really like the way rogues in wow play. Not sure what it is about the play style but it just isn’t for me anymore, especially now that I feel other classes like Retribution Paladin do the rogue combo point thing better.

Ultimately my key frustration with WoW rogues is that combo points are built in the target instead of a buff that stacks on the rogue itself. Warhammer Online got this right initially with the Witchhunter class, which was by all purposes a “better” rogue. I realize at this point the combo points on target thing is tradition, but it simply does not work that well. While saying the Rift rogue is better, is a bit disingenuous since it is essentially a wow rogue, hunter, druid, and a few other classes that don’t exist in wow rolled into one. I think the main reason why it “works” better is that the combo point mechanism is on the rogue, not the mob. This adds a bunch of interesting gameplay elements like building your combo points on the boss, and then using your combo dump to execute weaker encounters. It is just at this point that the WoW rogue seems so much less interesting than the other “Rogue like” combo point classes.

Onyxia Mount Patrol

After the time in Trove and Rift, I settled in for a little bit of Tuesday raid reset madness over in World of Warcraft. For better or worse, there are several raids that I solo each week on multiple characters for an attempt at the various pets, tansmoggy bits, and every elusive mounts. The start of each week tends to be me making the trek out to Dustwallow Marsh to beat up on Onyxia. First off I have to bitch a little bit, because post Cataclysm they have made it a royal pain in the ass to get to Onyxia for Alliance players. The fastest route I have figured out is fly straight south out of Stormwind, hop the boat at Booty Bay, and then fly to Dustwallow from there. All of that involves flying across several zones and hoping that you happen to arrive at Booty Bay just in time to land on the boat.

Of course like normal she didn’t drop me a mount, or anything else of interest for that matter but at this point I can easily solo her as Retribution Paladin and Frost Deathknight, so I do this little interchange twice a week. I need to cycle through some of my other characters and see if I can build a spec for them that can bring her out of the air in phase two. I might be able to gather up enough timeless isle gear to make a passable Boomkin spec on my druid, and I think in theory I could probably do it on as Enhancement Shaman. I do not think however that my Rogue or Warrior will be of much use in my quest for her mount. I need to check with my friend Rylacus and see if he has any master tips for dropping her out of the air. The one time I tried to do the fight as a Blood DK it literally took 30 minutes for my diseases/icy touch/deathcoil to do enough damage to get her back on the ground.

The highlight of the evening in WoW however was me flying over to Ahn’Qiraj on a whim. Turns out that I now have enough physical damage to solo the Twin Emperors fight. This had long been a stumbling block for me when it came to soloing AQ40. The other big hurdle was viscidious, however since I dual wield frost… I simply switched my razorice enchanted one-hander to my main hand and that seemed to do the trick for shattering him. Past that howling blast was more than enough frost damage to freeze the big blob. I am still missing two pets from this place, so I can see adding it to the weekly faff farming rotation. I did not really have time to do my BWL run on my paladin, I am still missing a few pieces of judgement… so I am sure over the next few days I will be getting that in. Since the eggs are a pain in the ass on anyone other than my Deathknight, I generally grab a random person from the guild who needs transmoggy bits before venturing into the dungeon. My hope is to find a time when Scarybooster can be online, and drag his butt through with them.

Kickstarting Regrets

January 28, 2014 by Belghast

Patron Buffs

Last night I just was not feeling the raid thing. Monday nights are traditionally the open flex night in House Stalwart, but that night has always been an optional evening since it is not really attached to any specific raid group. As such I decided to mill around over in Rift and work on my rogue. Earlier in the day I had complained about how slow the 56-60 game was. To be truthful Storm Legion as a whole is much more sluggish and prodding than the old world content, and by the time you reach 56 it slows down again. Thankfully @gamer_lady came to the rescue by reminding me that there are patron buffs.

I think I began the night around halfway into 58 and wound up ending the night 15% away from 60. The buffs make a massive difference in the speed at which you level, especially with quest turn-ins. I hit a sequence in Argent Domain with tons of quest turn-ins and saw my xp just skyrocket. Tonight if I get back into Rift I will likely finish off the push to 60, and hopefully be able to open all the various lockboxes I have saved up for his ding. Additionally I am pretty close to finishing off runecrafting, so here is hoping the greens I currently have in my bags are enough to carry me over that finish line. I think runecrafting was the last of the trade skills that I had no maxed out, or at least I vaguely remember finishing off artificer the last time I played seriously.

Kickstarting Regrets

The theme that I keep seeing repeated out on kickstarter is that designers are using it as a way to work through their past regrets. Each time a game fails to grab market share there are a myriad of reasons why it happens. However in the case of recent kickstarter campaigns it feels like each designer has their own internal reason why they feel a project failed. In the case of Camelot Unchained, it seems like Mark Jacobs feels that Warhammer online failed because it simply was not pvp enough. So as a result Unchained is being designed to be this love letter to PVP in all its glory. I am sure there is a niche that wants to do nothing but pvp, but in my experience the only aspect of Warhammer I really liked at all…. was the PVE content. So I wish Jacobs luck on his journey because he is building a game I simply am not interested in.

Similarly in the past weeks Brad McQuaid started his kickstarter for Pantheon: The Fallen. The pitch so far seems eerily familiar to the one I can remember hearing for Vanguard. Hardcore game with mandatory group centric game play, and some really complex systems to add depth to the world. It seems like McQuaid’s regret is that Vanguard was not hardcore enough, and definitely in the post Sigil games era it became much more casual and solo friendly. The thing is… the Vanguard he proposed really failed to get serious market approval, and SOE watered it down to try and find a market for it. I realize this might be “too soon” since SOE just announced they were cutting Vanguard from their lineup… and honestly that depresses me quite a bit… but it is very obvious that McQuaid has a very different reason in his head for why that game didn’t meet expectations.

Wish Them Well

This is not to say that I don’t think both Pantheon and Camelot Unchained will not be modest successes. In both cases they are feeding to a relatively underserved sub-demographic of gamers. The problem is… that really is a niche within a niche within a niche and I feel has some pretty slim market potential. As romantic as I feel the vision of Pantheon is, I know personally I simply cannot play that sort of a game. I need a game where I can find a group quickly and one that I can also have meaningful solo game play and progression. Gone are the days when I could sit for five hours in the plane of hate camping an epic mob with friends.

My blocks of time are more in half hours and hours at a time these days, and at any given time I might need to be pulled away from the screen. As a result I have to play games that do not penalize me for this. So while I am nostalgic for the days of sitting outside Karnor’s Castle and forming groups… I also remember the hours upon hours I sat around doing absolutely nothing because I did not have said group. Granted this is me projecting a lot of my own thoughts on these games, and very little information is really available about them. However the pitch just does not sound like something I can really participate in.

Ultimately I hope all of these new MMOs succeed, and even though games like Wildstar are strictly in the “not for me” column… we need more MMO success than failure if we hope to keep our favorite genre alive. Additionally there needs to be a great adjustment for what exactly “success” means. If 100,000 players keeps the game running and turns a minor profit… then man that sounds like success to me. World of Warcraft skewed our reality, and just with my opinions of the community… it is time for a reset. No game has been as successful as WoW has been, so it is clearly an outlier and not the mold by which all games need to measure up. Until that sort of baseline adjustment happens… all new games will end up being judged as failures.

Stalwart Ebonheart

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 by Belghast

Small World After All

Yesterday I had a pretty interesting chain of events happen, that have left me all warm and fuzzy. At some point yesterday I tweeted a general complaint about how steam seems to be incapable of flagging on a machine level that we have already installed the various pre-requisites like DirectX. This tweet seemed to develop a life of it’s own as it got re-tweeted around a bit and favorited. Most of the people were extremely familiar to me, but one of the folks retweeting was completely new. In my current mode of trying to reach out more to help foster the community I followed Maevrim.

It turns out the two of us have been running in the same circles for years spanning two different games and two different servers. For the bulk of her time playing World of Warcraft, it seems as though she was in the guild Gnomes Will Eat You on Argent Dawn… a guild House Stalwart folk are very familiar with. During the old days our two guilds did quite a bit together, and these days my raid has the very amazing Frosti… that has a sort of dual citizenship with characters in both House Stalwart and Gnomes Will Eat You. Turns out she also plays on Faeblight where the House Stalwart Rift branch is located.

To make things even more awesome, she is looking for a new guild home. Of course my guildmasterly ninja instincts started kicking in and I have been trying to welcome her into the Stalwart fold. Its true… we are kind of like a cult but I promise that our koolaid isn’t poisoned much. Scan a few hours later, turns out she was on a podcast and I somehow got mentioned. Now I seem to have missed the reference or it was said before or after the started recording. But all of this makes me realize just how small and relatively tight knit a community we have. Like I said the other day, it is all a matter of perspective. We might think we are alone in the void, but then something happens to make us realize just how connected we are as a whole.

Stalwart Ebonheart

Since April 4th 2014 will be here before we know it, I figure it is time to start planning for the House Stalwart Ebonheart Pact branch in Elder Scrolls Online. For some time I have known that I would be playing this game at release, and my hope is to successfully weave in time of both it and World of Warcraft. The goal is to play a few nights a week, because really I am a sucker for anything Elder Scrolls… and you would have to cause a real cataclysm to keep me away from it. For a long time I have also known I would be aligning with the Ebonheart Pact, in part because my three favorite races are the Nord, Dunmer and Argonians. After an impromptu poll of the folks who signed up on the brief Tamriel Foundry site we had… it seems like that is the case for most of the guild.

Since House Stalwart has always been a social guild… and more family than anything else… I thought I would open things up this time to my blogger family as well. I know Maric and some of the Mercy Corps folks will be joining Stalwart in this endeavor, and my hope is to gather up as many good people as I can before the launch. I am sure a good chunk of the current and former Stalwart members will be joining us as well. Basically all sociable folks are welcome spending they are agreeable to the standard House Stalwart Three Tenets. While I founded House Stalwart in World of Warcraft, the ethos that I helped foster has spanned so many games and will likely move into even more in the future. My hope is that we will keep creating a connection that transcends the games we happen to be playing at the time.

If this type of environment sounds like a good fit for you, then please follow this link to our forums. I created a brand new forum thread this morning, trying to gauge how many people we will have at launch. If you have any issues setting up a forum account either drop me a line here, or ping me over twitter and I will see what I can do to assist you. Also of note, we are primarily a Eastern Standard/Central Standard time zone guild, but have members with a pretty wide variety of playtimes.

Nightblade Finishing School

This weekend I also dipped my feet back into Rift spending a bit of time Saturday and Sunday working on my Nightblade. I am not sure if I will ever make a third level 60, but I really do want to finish my rogue off who is currently sitting and 70% through 58. While I enjoy the Storm Legion content on one level, on another it feels extremely grindy. As such during the course of leveling Belghast to 60 I stalled out no less than four times. Similarly Belgrave has stalled out quite a few in the process of getting this far along. Maybe I am just spoiled by the brisk pace of leveling in games like World of Warcraft or even Final Fantasty XIV… but getting through Storm Legion feels like an absolute chore. I do however really want to spend some time pushing through it.

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time doing Instant Adventures and they made the process feel a little less painful. At some point I also want to spend some time in dungeons… but for whatever reason I seem to always get Stormbreaker Protocol… which for those not familiar with it is the Rift version of Oculus. Essentially it is that one dungeon that makes almost the entire party disappear. I feel like I really need to get adjusted to the Rift controls a bit more before stepping foot into a dungeon, though honestly I was killing things in Argent Domain last night as efficiently as I ever was. More than anything with the impending release of 2.6, I want to dust off my Rift account and finally push the Nightblade across the finish line.

Precious Underwear

January 25, 2014 by Belghast

Spicy Chicken and Tots

During the school year I am pretty much the cook, the maid, the laundry service, and of course the pet care. My wife is extremely hardcore about her job, and as an educator spends a good 70-80 hours a week doing work for the classroom. I have far more disposable time so as a result I pick up 99% of the household chores. I am not saying I am Martha Stewart and keep a perfect household, but the shit that has to get done gets done. Any time I don’t have to worry about one of those chores I am ecstatic. Last night my loving wife went to meet some friends at a local chain called Ron’s. While there she picked me up a takeout order of one of my favorite meals ever… spicy chicken and cheese tots.

I bragged on her on both G+ and Twitter last night, but it means a lot to me… so I am leading off tonight’s blog post as well. While it drove me into a food coma and I was pretty much useless for the tail end of the raid last night… it was absolutely amazing. Additionally it gave me a much appreciated break from trying to figure out what in the hell we were going to have that night for dinner. More than anything I think that is what is worth raving about. The figuring out things and being a responsible adult all the time… wears you down. As she commented her “credit card cooks well”.

The Wi-Fi MIracle Redux

Speaking of last nights raid… leading off with a really cool screenshot we took all decked out in our Sky Golem mounts. I had no clue that damned near all of the raid had one. Granted this section really has nothing to do with the raid, but it is entirely too cool of a screenshot not to use it. Today was a weird day, as I said over twitter I did not go through my normal morning routine and as a result you are getting a post a lot closer to 8 pm than early morning like normal. Essentially last week I mentioned that we had promised to come up this weekend and attempt to fixorate my mother-in-laws Wi-Fi connection and install the printer we got her for Christmas. So with these things looming on the horizon the goal was to get up there and get them done as early in the day as possible.

Over the week I ordered a Cisco RE1000 Wireless repeater thinking it would do the trick to help piggy back the signal across the large gap between the two houses. In theory yes it does in fact work, and I was able to get the wireless printer configured as a result. In practice however it is so insanely slow I am not sure anyone will be able to tolerate it. On the positive side we have gotten her in the practice of surfing on the laptop out in the addon with a straighter shot to the original wifi access point. Out there the speed doesn’t seem half bad, in the rest of the house it is slower than dial-up. I went to download a printer driver and it was going to take over three hours for a 100 mb file.

Precious Underwear

My hope is that once we get electric run to the RV pad we have placed between the two houses, I can install an additional repeater in our RV, which will hopefully complete the piggyback chain, or at least speed it up. For the meantime however she can check her ever so important facebook, and she seemed mostly happy. We ate lunch and then wandered along our way to run more errands. My wife this year is teaching a forensics class along with a science teacher. Like always we end up footing the bill for most of the materials for the various labs that she leads. One of the things that she will be doing a lot of in the forensics class is finger printing, which requires a really fine brush.

During the 80s there was this magical device called the Static Duster. For the most part microfiber has replaced it, but somewhere along the line my wife found a very small one, about the size of a makeup brush. Now we both know we have seen a place that sold them recently in a dollar section. So today we spent most of the day running to every dollar store we could think of. We sadly came up completely empty, but when we went to Family Dollar we saw a truly bizarre sight that made the trip worth while. Down the men’s underwear isle, every single package of briefs and socks had antitheft devices attached to them. Do people really steal that many pairs of underwear to warrant this? If you notice, it is not just on the package but also there is one attached to each pair in the pack. They apparently take their underwear security seriously.

Da na na na na na na na na na na na na…

So here we are in the same place as we were this morning… with only one of these magical static brushes, and ten lab groups that need them. The last place we can really think to look is the Wal-mart dollar section, but quite frankly after all the running around today neither one of us really had the stomach for a trip there. There is no such thing as a quick trip to Wal-mart, and just in setting foot there you have to deal with so many frustrating people. I may be a good guy and run out there tomorrow while she is working on lesson plans. Hopefully she won’t hold her breath, because that is a serious act of commitment… however she did bring me spicy chicken.

If you recall back to the junking episodes over Christmas break, one of the things I had been looking for were some awesome coffee mugs… more importantly awesomely geeky ones. The last place we went tonight before picking up some food and heading home was Ross. A few weeks ago my wife had found a pair of pants there… and for whatever reason she did not pick them up. So of course when we went tonight they were nowhere to be found. I have to get her in the habit of buying the thing she wants when she sees it instead of waiting around.

However while I roamed aimlessly around the store looking for something to entertain me, I noticed these two coffee mugs. The first is a really awesome classic batman mug, with the symbol on the opposite side, and the other is a really huge mug with a skull on it. Pretty much to me putting a skull on anything makes it awesome. My wife however does not understand this, and keeps balking every time she finds a scarf or other garment of women’s clothing with a skull on it. Quite simply put…. skulls make everything better and this mug is no exception. Now I have six mugs that I like, and will be proud to use. So despite a relatively frustrating day, that involved absolutely nothing I wanted to do in the first place… it ended on a high note that involved geeky mugs and a really amazing smoked chicken salad.