MMORPG Archives - Page 384 of 410 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Booster Gold

March 11, 2014 by Belghast

King of Mondays

As I said yesterday, I struggled with the time change like I normally do. As a result this tends to be the worst Monday of the year. Of course that would be the Monday my wife’s sister decides we need to go out to eat. By the time we finished work both of us simply wanted to go home and crash. However we felt obligated to go act normal and attempt to enjoy dinner. Thing is we don’t get to see my wife’s sister that often. She works this really odd job where she cleans nuclear power plants when they go into shutdown periodically. So as a result she and her husband drag their RV all around the country, and it can literally be years before we see them again.

So I did my best to pretend to be normal and pleasant, when all I really wanted to do was go home… climb upstairs to my office and decompress. Since the night was already pretty much shot we decided to run a few errands when we got back to town. Dinner was at least relatively enjoyable, and by the time we arrived home I had gotten a bit of a second wind. Over the years we have been to three different Ruby Tuesdays. One in our town that just closed this past week, one in Joplin MO and another one in Upstate NY. It seems like they were doing it wrong. The one we ate at last night was really rather nice, and had free biscuits and salad bar. Maybe the one in my town would have survived if they also had this.

Watching Me Sleep

I’m a fat man, and I will likely always be fat. I have reached a point of acceptance with that. However my wife and I have been trying to be “less” fat. Over the course of the last year I lost 70 lbs, and my wife has lost an amount that I have not kept up with as closely… but as much if not more than I did. She looks absolutely great, and I pretty much still look like myself. We have done pretty well with diet and while I have fallen off the wagon a bit in keeping track of my food intake… I have managed to remain the same weight… so the habits seem to have stuck. One of the things we both struggle with is exercise. So for awhile now we have kicked around the idea of getting a Fitbit. Yesterday we picked up a couple and now I am under constant surveillance.

One of the interesting features is that it keeps track of your sleep patterns. When it comes time to go to bed, you rapidly tap your bracelet until it buzzes and it knows you are going into sleep mode. I have often wondered why I feel like shit after getting what seems to be an otherwise good nights sleep. Apparently last night for example I woke up ten different times through the night. Some of these I remember, but the majority I do not. This also explains why the covers on my side of the bed are always fubar. Granted last night it was a bit odd trying to sleep in what is essentially a watch band, but I will get used to it.

Booster Gold

The big news yesterday that I have somehow neglected to talk about until just now… is that while I was off at lunch running errands, it seems that Warlords of Draenor preorders went live. Granted this weekend there was a leak of a boost to 90 trailer video. So we mostly assumed that at some point this week the preorders would go live, as well as the boost to 90. The other thing that caused quite a bit of a ruckus was that a “release date” has been entered into the systems for 12/20/2014. However minutes later Blizzard came out saying that this was not the final launch date, but that the game would be launching sometime during the Fall. So that begs the question… what exactly does “Fall” mean. Some are saying September, and at last years Blizzcon they stated that we would be playing Warlords by the time the next Blizzcon rolled around.

My friends have suggested that we are likely going to see a significantly truncated beta cycle, but even at that… it would be nice if that actually started. I would feel significantly better about the projected launch if I knew that friends and family alpha was at least going on. Not that I am expecting to be in it mind you, but just knowing it is happening is a good sign. Now that I have a free boost to 90 that came with my preorder, I am not exactly in a huge rush to use it. For some time now I had planned to use it to boost up a mage to 90. I figured this was the one class that I was least likely to level on my own. I had been playing my little Warlock, and even streamed the hell out of it on Sunday. Demonology is essentially the “faff about while your demon kills things” spec, and I was perfectly okay with this.

However it is starting to seem like Frost is the “faff about while your elemental kills things” spec. At one point last night I ended up having to afk in a cave to take care of something… and I fully expected to log back in dead and have to run back to my corpse. Turns out my elemental killed everything that got anywhere near me. I am sure this will not last for long, but it was entertaining to watch for a few minutes before I took back control of my character. At this point my plan is to level the mage to 60 and then boost him to 90 with the doodad. Essentially my logic is this… I would far rather level to 60 in the cataclysm old world content, which I enjoy… than level three tradeskills all the way to 600. If you boost a 60+ character you get your primary and secondary tradeskill to 600 as well as First Aid. So last night I proceeded to strip my warlock of all of his heirlooms and am now in serious mage leveling mode.

Another Experiment

Yesterday I talked about my experiment over the weekend with streaming through FFSplit to my Twitch.tv channel. It seemed to work pretty well, and the overall video quality was acceptable. Now it is time to take it to the next level… the one where I actually unmute my microphone. To go a step further, I have created a channel on our guilds mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming” and my hope is to coax my friends to join me in the channel and be entertaining… so I don’t have to. I can’t say I will have the most exciting stream in the world, and I don’t even hope to do it as well as the Qelric… but it might be fun. I decided to name this endevour “Bel Faffs About!” in honor of the Godmother of Faff who raised the consciousness of all things faffing over the last year. My plan is to post on twitter anytime I am streaming something, and just let the chips fall where they may. I’ve heard rumor that this weekend is another big ESO beta event, and if that is the case I will stream it as much of the weekend as I can. In the meantime, expect me leveling my mage to 60 and playing some Diablo 3.

Faffing in the Fjord

March 10, 2014 by Belghast

Losing Time

It seems that no matter what I do to prepare for it, Daylight Savings time still kicks my ass every year. This go round I purposefully started trying to get more sleep from about Thursday onwards, in an attempt to get used to the earlier bedtime. Saturday night I even started referring to things based on EST instead of my normal CST time… to attempt to trick my brain into thinking that was normal. So last night… I hoped above hope that my brain would be able to power down and go to sleep at a decent hour. But instead there I lay in bed trying to get to sleep. I ended up taking some nyquil and playing Bravely Default in bed until I fell asleep.

I am sure Daylight Savings time made sense when we were primarily an agrarian society, however I have no clue why it still exists. Why do we as a country do this to ourselves each and every year. To be honest I do like having a lot more sunshine in the evenings, but since that is the case why not stay offset an hour permanently instead of shifting back in the winter? I mean the days are so short that it really doesn’t matter at all in November if we offset back or not. For whatever reasons even falling back and gaining the hour still seems to screw with my internal systems. I realize that bitching about it will do exactly nothing… but it makes me feel better.

Faffing in the Fjord

So yesterday thanks to the time drain I was feeling a little bit out of sorts. I got up like I do every Sunday morning and played through my Steampowered Sunday game pick for a few hours, then wrote my review of sorts over it. This week was of course Brutal Legend, and if you were interested in winning your own copy… make sure you click the extremely obnoxious vote here button at the bottom of the review. Once I got finished up with all of that silliness I began the massive chore of laundry for the week. Actually in truth it had been a few weeks since we had done laundry, so I knew I needed something that I could walk away from and check on the loads periodically. Generally speaking solo leveling fits the bill perfectly. I am not sure exactly why, but I decided to fiddle with FFSplit and try and figure out this live streaming business.

Normally speaking I always end up leveling my characters through Northrend in Borean Tundra. While it is extremely boring and grindy, it just seems quicker. The zone itself is laid out in more of a hub and spoke pattern and you can progress your way through the zone without a ton of travel time. However since I had not done so in a really long time… I opted to move my little dwarven Warlock to Howling Fjord. A few hubs into the zone I remembered why I stopped doing this… so much travel time. I figured I would share my pain by streaming it so the world could see. The above video is not terribly interesting, but is me spending my afternoon… or at least roughly two hours of it going through the paces of leveling a warlock in Howling Fjord. You can watch me playing video games badly!

More than anything I used this as a way to test how well streaming directly to Twitch.tv works, and then using that to upload to Youtube. So far so good, but I kept my microphone muted during this trial. I was feeling fairly antisocial, but at some point soon I hope to livecast something meaningful. I still need to figure out a good size to put my postage stamp video feed into the stream. At this point I am juggling back and forth between 320 wide and 240 wide, but before I do this for real I want to pretty up my twitch stream a bit with some artwork. Right now this is just stock FFsplit with no real alterations. However credit goes to Scopique, who told me this would be a much easier way to record videos… it just took me months and months to actually fiddle with it.

Belazon Lives!

The other big thing to come from this weekend is that I managed to push my Barbarian to 60 in Diablo 3. The irony of this is thanks to a certain drop, I have completely shifted focus in the way I play it. Previously I had been all about dual wield and cleave, using rend to soak back up some health. However it was either Friday or Saturday night that I got a truly amazing drop that caused me to completely change my build for it. I ended up getting the level 59 version of the “Three Hundredth Spear” to drop, which buffs my throwing damage by 55% and my ancient spear damage by 59%. So as a result I completely rearranged my abilities to be able to use this and now I am more of a hoplite build with spear and shield. Funny how my pure melee class ended up turning into a ranged.

Overall it works extremely well, and I can throw out some truly silly damage on a boss fight. At one point Saturday the trio shown above were working our way through the various bosses in the game, letting Ashgar get the achievement for killing them all wearing nothing but blues. At this point I was using the Boulder Toss rune for Ancient Spear, and it was insane to watch the bosses health move significantly each time a boulder landed. The only problem with this rune is that it changes the functionality of ancient spear significantly. The thing I like the most about it is that it acts almost like a League of Legends skill shot, in that if you can line up a bunch of mobs in a “wave” you can burn through them quickly as your ancient spear will hit each of them in a row.

I was never really a big fan of the Amazon in Diablo 2, but so far my Belazon build seems to be pretty enjoyable. While on a “role”-bending trick, I decided to start a baby mage and attempt to go for the melee mage build. While functional, it just doesn’t feel like a class I would really enjoy. I don’t really like feeling like a glass cannon, and apart from a few shield abilities the class has really weak survival. In my few minutes of playing with my friend Tibuant, I died several times… when I have maybe died twice in total on my Barbarian. I think it might be a class that is enjoyable to solo on, because many of my deaths were simply because Tib and I were not really in sync while playing. He would be off in one direction and I would be off in another, which always ended up with me getting swarmed. I think until the Crusader actually gets unlocked I will mostly piddle around on my Monk and Barbarian attempting to get paragon levels.

Savior of the Heavens

March 7, 2014 by Belghast

War of Guilds

A few days ago on a whim I decided to reinstall Guild Wars 2 and patch it up, which is not an insignificant process at this point. Last night before getting into anything else I decided to give it a spin. I have done this a number of times since launch, with essentially the same results. After a few minutes of running around I decided that I still don’t like the game. I figured this post is relevant with all of my recent Elder Scrolls fanboyism… that yes it is perfectly okay for you not to like a game. Guild Wars 2 is one of those titles that I want to like, because so many people have so many great moments with the game. However for whatever reason I just cannot see the magic in it that others can.

Guild Wars 2 stands alone as the only alpha program I have ever resigned from. I just did not like what the game was, and how it deviated from all of things I had read into their manifesto about the game. When it came close to release I got into beta and had a marginal amount of fun, and with it launching in a relative dead spot I decided to take the plunge and try it. On the initial play through I managed to make it through to about level 40 before running out of care to continue pushing forward. This is round and about the place most of us dropped out of it. Largely it was the chaos that is GW2 group combat that soured the milk for me.

All of that said… I want to see the magic that others see in this game. So every few months I patch it up and give it another try. I have always prided myself in being able to see the good in something despite its flaws, and as a result it drives me absolutely insane that I cannot grasp why people love this game. I don’t want the game to change to fit my desires, so after a bit of playtime every few months we agree to disagree and I end up uninstalling it again. Other than the chaotic game play, there is just something about the game that feels largely pointless… and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I love faffing about as much as the next person, and I do so happily in many other games… but there is just something about this games style of faffing that seems hollow.

I am not going to rage against this game and bash it for being bad… because it very obviously is NOT bad if so many people seem to be enjoying themselves. It is just not a game for me. I don’t pretend to believe that I could have built it better, nor would I even know where to start to make it feel more like a game I would want to play. So I guess in writing this… I want to show that it is perfectly okay to not like the game that everyone else likes. In doing so you can not like it, but also not seek to spoil the fun of those who really do enjoy it. There are a long list of games that I just don’t “grok” for one reason or another, but it is okay. They exist, and people like them… and it is just fine for me not to.

Savior of the Heavens

Last night I finished my play through of Diablo 3 this time on Hard mode. I am not sure why, but for whatever reason I prefer to level my characters linearly. I know I can jump around a bit after beating the game ages ago on my Monk, but it seems pleasing to see the story play out in front of me as I trudge through it. Last night I played with a handful of friends, and managed to get a few nice legendary drops. Traditionally I have stuck with dual wield, because in general I prefer that in most games. However last night I managed to get an early 50s version of the Zweihander and it good enough to get me to abandon my dual wielding ways… at least temporarily.

I am pretty sure at some point I flipped a slider and the game decided I needed “more spikey bits”, as I now am this bladed lord of death. The appearance is growing on me, and when you see it in small form on screen I look a bit like I imagined the Shrike looking from the Hyperion series. Upon defeating Diablo I promptly restarted the game, this time bumping the difficulty up to expert. As a result I have had to tweak my build a bit to add in a bit more survival. It is not quite as faceroll as it was during my run through Hard. Mostly I am noticing that my healbot spec Templar is starting to struggle to keep up, or at least allowing me to drop quite a bit before topping me back off. Wondering if this will change as I upgrade his gear a bit. I have been trying to keep it upgraded, mostly with my handmedowns.

At the close of the night I managed to ding 56, so hopefully tonight I should be able to finish off my push to get this character to 60. At this point, I can’t really see playing up another character until the crusader. I am sure the Witchdoctor, Demon Hunter and Wizard are cool in their own way… but each of them is very much a ranged/finger wiggler class. They are just not the type of character I enjoy playing. I realize you can tweak them a bit to make them play in different ways, but at the core they will still be more glass cannonish than I care to play. I enjoy tanks and tanky dps… and I feel like the Barbarian, Monk and Crusader fit that bill just fine. If I continue to struggle a bit I might switch to a sword/board build on my Barbarian as I have done in the past. For the time being it is working, but I am having to finally start using my heal pots on elites and champions.

Steampowered Sunday Bioshock Contest

Just a quick reminder that I am running a contest of sorts to let you guys pick what I will be playing this Sunday for my Steampowered Sunday feature. The idea behind Steampowered Sunday is to get me to install and play a game from my steam backlog. Then I will write about the game play experience. Sometimes it is extremely glowing, other times not so much. This week I decided to mix things up a bit and post a google form that allows you guys to vote on which title I will be playing the following week. I have had a handful of votes to date, but I am really hoping for more. As of this morning it looks like if nothing changes I will be playing Alan Wake. Tomorrow when I blog I will be tabulating the results and declaring a winning game.

Additionally to make this more interesting, I have decided to use this as a way to get rid of some of the duplicates I have in steam and have gotten through the various indie bundles. This week I will be giving away a copy of the original Bioshock for Steam. So when you vote, make sure you let me know if you want to be entered in the running for the copy of Bioshock. If so make sure you include your steam id in the form. Saturday morning when I blog I will be picking a winner for this as well and sending off the free game. So get out there and vote… and decide my Steampowered Sunday Fate.

Vote Here!

Ninja Grouping

March 6, 2014 by Belghast

Content Void

This morning I am completely struggling to find purpose in writing. I suppose I could try and counter point Scree’s post about my post yesterday. But honestly I don’t really feel the need, as he didn’t really shoot down any of the points I had made, but instead provided his own points for why he won’t be playing ESO and moreover why he feels like it never should have been made. They are some pretty drastic points, but they are his points and he has every right to his own opinion. Additionally each and every one of you have the undeniable right not to buy Elder Scrolls Online and not to love it. But again yesterdays post was spawned out of what I felt were some factual inaccuracies about a few points. However after reading his post this morning it also feels a lot like “I really hate this game, and here is why you should too.”

I feel like that is the problem with the community right now. We have so much hatred but very little genuine love for anything anymore. Where is that child like sense of wonder that we can roam around and exist in fully fleshed out 3D worlds? If gaming doesn’t give you that, then really what is the point of playing? There are still moments in each and every game I play where I am wrapped up in awe of some moment that just happened that I was not expecting. It might be something cool over the horizon or it might be some interesting turn of a phrase. I play these games and I write about them because I love them… not because I hate them. Even when something frustrates me to the point of spawning a rant, like I have done so many times about World of Warcraft… it comes from a place of disappointment for not being as good as it could be.

I love the games industry for all of its flaws, and I love all the ways it manages to keep me enthralled and entertained and waiting for the next thing to happen. From the moment I first got a controller in my hand this has been my story, and my “thing”. While sometimes it is pen and paper or miniatures or even card games… I am in love with games at the root of my being. So when I see someone take a crap on something and exclaim that it doesn’t deserve to exist… it depresses me that we have come to a point where that is an accepted stance. All ideas even if you do not like them, deserve their moment in the sun. Yeah I realize this top of today’s post is the equivalent of me responding with a “Carebear Stare” to a rather targeted attack… but fuck it, that’s how I roll.

Ninja Grouping

Last night I really did not do a lot of gaming, which is in part why I am bereft of content this morning to talk about. Over the last few days I have felt pretty crappy, so I am taking the initiative to try and improve things a bit. Namely I am going to try going cold turkey on energy drinks… because while they help wake my sleepy butt up… they also tend to cause me to crash pretty damned hard later. I had gotten to the point where I was starting to drink four or so a day… and that is a bit too much. So last night I went to bed around 8:30 and crashed after a few minutes of playing bravely default. Thankfully I was able to sleep all night long, but partially that was nyquil assisted. The last two nights I have woken up at 4:30 am and 3:30 am… so I was running on a serious sleep deficit.

What little I did play last night was Diablo 3. One of the aspects of the game that I absolutely adore is just how easy and seamless it is to group up with your friends. While the above image is old… because I didn’t think to take any new ones… my friend Rae ninja grouped with me while I was working on the beginning of Act 3. We did about five levels in a really short period of time and had I stuck around any longer I would have suggested popping out and bumping up the difficulty to expert. Hard really is the new normal, and none of us play the game on anything lower than that now even solo. When you add in additional people, it feels like the scaling just isn’t quite enough to compensate for the new gear fountain so we end up bumping the difficulty up a ways.

Rae managed to pull a couple of legendaries during our time grouping, but after getting three in a row last night I think the loot gods were frowning on me. For the most part I got no upgrades, but I am wearing a really nice green suit of crafted gear, so it might be a long while before I upgrade out of Aughild’s Victory. At the close of the night I was just a stones throw away from 50, which means I should be able to push through to 60 on my next big play session. I am really surprised at just how much crusader specific gear I have been getting. I even managed to get a crusader only legendary flail the other night. My only worry is that the Reaper of Souls launch is pretty much happening at the same time the head start for Elder Scrolls is, so I am not sure how much time I will really devote to leveling a crusader until I have hit a lull in ESO.

Plea for Larger Battle.net Friend List

For the love of god… can we please get a significantly larger friends list for battle.net? At this point I am actively or at least semi-actively playing three different blizzard titles. I have friends scattered between them all, some of them playing multiples, some of them playing only one. I am the guild leader of a wow guild with over 900 characters, and have a big twitter/social media community that I want to be able to play with and communicate with while in game. The current size of I believe 200… is just too damned small. It has become a weekly thing to try and prune out people that I have not played with in awhile to be able to accept friend invites from new people. I hate doing this… this goes against every instinct in me to “delete” people that I care about.

At this point we have had multiple upgrades to the battle.net infrastructure… so can we please get a significant increase in the number of people we add? Bumping it up to 1000 seems like a safe place to be, even 500 would be significantly better than where we are currently. I am sure someone is going to post and ask me if I really need that many people… yes… yes I do. Sure I might not talk to each and every person every day, but I am constantly pinging someone I have not talked to for awhile and we end up spending the evening catching up. Gaming for me is a social thing, and anything that helps me in that mission is a good idea. One of my favorite features of Rift is the fact that I can take my entire twitter feed with me. So please Battle.net do something to help out the people for whom 200 is just too small.