MMORPG Archives - Page 389 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Caroling in Ulduar

December 21, 2013 by Belghast

Tis the Season

It is that time of the year when we naturally reflect upon what was good and not so good from the previous year. I myself am planning a post like this in the not so distant future. However this blurb is not about that at all. Yesterday the amazing Queen of Faff, Alternative Chat posted her very on audible review of the previous year. It is most definitely worth a listen, but then again everything she does is worth a listen. I have to say that while I knew of her before this year, it was a few months ago that I first listened to her podcast. I have to say I am truly thankful for discovering it, because now along with several other podcasts I look forward to hearing each episode.

She brings a deeply thought out quality to the air that reminds me in many ways of NPR. I am very much an NPR junkie so I think this soft spoken and rehearsed manner suits me very well. In the podcast she has declared that 2014 will be the “Year of Faff”, and I wholly support this notion. Before her I tended to view “faffing about” as a generally negative thing. Now I have embraced my inner faffitude and find myself doing odd little things on a regular basis. I look forward to seeing what directionless madness comes form this new venture.

Caroling in Ulduar

Early in the week my good friend Rylacus, and the warden of House Stalwart while I was away… asked me if I would be willing to do an Ulduar run. He needed a single meta achievement to get his 25 man proto drake. I told him initially that I was not sure if I would be around, but if I was most certainly I would help out. I have had both the 10 and 25 man versions of the drake for quite some time, but as I know the achievements pretty well I am always willing to help out. Since last night ushered in yet another icebound weekend here in Oklahoma, I was most definitely available for faffing about in Ulduar.

My only requirement was that we try and get EVERYONE that came along their drakes. No one seemed to mind and as a result we filled the ranks with tons of folks hopefully seeking their own. Additionally we managed to knock out Algalon, who’s room is pictured above. Most of the achievements quite honestly were pretty easy at 90, or at least easy if you knew what you were needing to do. Yog’Saron of course takes a few tries mainly to remember exactly what we need to do. The three of us that went into the portal went insane because we could not remember how to exit. We then proceeded to murder everyone else in the raid.

After that little set back we pushed forward and got him on the next try earning everyone on their drakes. Currently the only really annoying meta achievement is the “kill 25 dwarves with razorscale” one. Initially we had this idea of just gathering up all of the dwarves and letting Razorscale enrage… theoretically killing them all. This would in theory kill us all, but we should have also gotten the achievement at the same time. Two things we found out… firstly the enraged flame breath is still not enough to kill a dwarf that is sitting at full health. Secondly we can easily survive the enraged form and ended up going four rounds after that in order to get all the dwarves.

Desperately Seeking Weapon

While I managed to walk away with some really cool transmoggy bits and two pieces of the tier 8 set, I did not further my overarching mission of finding some weapons for my shaman. Granted I didn’t really expect to do so in Ulduar, but the Heroic Scenario that we ran beforehand proved both painful and fruitless. My hope is today that I can finish running Siege of Orgrimmar and that the loot gods will smile on me and let me win the axe that can drop in the final part. If this continues to prove futile I may just run Throne of Thunder as well. I need to farm up the magical happy luck coins so I can turn them into extra roll chances for Siege, but I do not have the stockpile on my Shaman that I have on my other characters. Other than this… I am going to try my best to stay warm and hopefully continue having power since the entire world outside is coated in an inch of ice.

What About Wildstar?

December 20, 2013 by Belghast

4.4.14

It as been roughly ten days since Zenimax announced the official PC/Mac release date of Elder Scrolls Online. In doing so they either knowingly or unknowingly threw down the gauntlet to the other developers with their own tentative release dates. The success and fail of an MMO has become so much more than whether or not it is a good game, but instead how distracted the gaming populous is at any given moment. I remember a time in the not too distant past where major PC releases were truly few and far between. However it currently seems like there is always something bigger looming on the near horizon. Like it or not every single one of these releases is competing for the same relatively small pool of players, subscribers, and even money in general.

Yesterday Massively voted The Elder Scrolls Online… the MMO most likely to flop in the coming year. While I personally think this is deeply cynical and maybe even more than a tiny bit inflammatory, I think more than anything it is short sighted. Quite frankly the success and failure of Elder Scrolls Online has nothing to do with the PC gamer, and that is more than a tiny bit humbling. We will no longer be the king makers for these online games. With ESO and games like it, that torch is being passed from PC Gaming to the much larger pool of console gamers. I have to say the console market is rabidly waiting for a new Elder Scrolls Experience, and especially a multiplayer one at that . I think it might be a bitter pill to swallow to realize that the success and failure of these titles may very well be out of the hands of the “PC Gaming Master Race”.

3.25.14

Being the master tacticians that they are, yesterday Blizzard announced the release date for the Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls expansion. With this they are releasing roughly four weeks ahead of Elder Scrolls Online, and as a result giving themselves plenty of time with the sole attention of the PC Gaming market. Similarly however they are also hungrily eyeing the console market, and you can bet that they will be timing the release of the PS3/PS4/Xbox360/XBone release against the June release of Elder Scrolls Online to the next gen consoles. I feel like a four week buffer is more than safe and should play well to the gamers that may not have the ability to purchase every title they want. I know I am personally amped about this version of the game, because it fixes a lot of the loot problems I had with the initial release. Additionally I am holding out hope beyond hope that they manage to roll in the console “controller” features as well.

There is no way to look at this release date as anything other than business strategy. Elder Scrolls started this ball in motion, and now each game company will have to decide when the most opportune time is to deploy their own “forces” on the game board. While the Diablo 3 demographic is not exactly the same as the Elder Scrolls demographic… there is more than enough overlap to have caused issues for either game. As a result two major juggernauts have been placed on the “game board” and as a result the new year is less open than it was. Now the launches of so many titles will have be strategized to figure out when the most opportune time to release will be.

Warlords of Draenor

Since the title Blizzard announced was the release of Diablo 3 for the tail end of the first quarter, my assumption is that Warlord of Draenor was simply not close enough to ready to be able to launch against Elder Scrolls Online. As a result I am guessing this means that WoD will be another last quarter of 2014 release much like a few other World of Warcraft expansion launches. If this is the case that bookends the year up pretty nicely. Diablo 3 first quarter, Elder Scrolls Online second quarter and Warlords of Draenor closing out the year. You can already see the 2014 release calendar starting to tighten a bit and this will make it increasingly difficult for game companies to find a “clear window” to release against. I personally thought I had written off the WoW franchise completely, but nostalgic can be a pain sometimes.

As a result I imagine there will be a lot of players that either intentionally or un-intentionally come back for the release of Warlords. The lifespan of a WoW expansion rush seems to be roughly three months, so an end of the year release will also make the 2015 schedule some what slippery as well. The problem is there are lots more pieces to be placed on the board. Games like Titanfall and Destiny will also be chipping away at the pool of players that would h

ave normally played an MMO. Additionally we still have EQ Landmark and EQ Next that have not committed to any release schedule and will likely be just as large of a force on the Calendar as the games that have already been confirmed.

What About Wildstar?

I will be the first to admit… I am actually not that excited about Wildstar at all. By all rights I should be, but for whatever reason there I have not followed it. I do however have a lot of friends who have, and as a result I want it to be a success for their sake as much as anything else. Up until this point we have heard a tentative “spring 2014” release. As I have just outlined however the “spring” timeframe is extremely packed as it is. Wildstar is in a really precarious place right now, and I do not envy them. They are launching a new MMO, with a subscription model into a world that seems to have fallen out of love with subscriptions. Additionally it is an unproven IP, and there are additional issues on selling a new player on “the vision” for this world. Finally it is releasing against some really powerful forces.

The safe bet will be to release Wildstar in the July/August timeframe. As much as I myself hate it, the players who are likely to leave a game will have done so by the time three months have passed. July would be the beginning of a window where generally the “locusts”, a group I have been a member of so many times in the past… will have consumed what there is to consume with ESO and be looking for a new target to move to. Plotting a course for this opening in the schedule seems like the safe choice for them. However all it would take to make this more treacherous, is for the other pieces that are unplaced to fall into this window. Releasing against EQ Landmark would be enough to make the fate of Wildstar uncertain, and we have yet to even discuss the potential for the upcoming and as of yet unnamed Rift expansion.

My money is still on Wildstar penciling in a July release date, and EQ Next as a game being a spring of 2015 release. I just don’t see Carbine being confident enough to release Wildstar without a good opening in the schedule. They are in a much more tentative position than Zenimax, since the entirety of their fate rests upon the shoulders of the PC Gaming market. Elder Scrolls Online could realistically release against another big game, since they will be gaining a bunch of “new to genre” players coming in from the console market. Additionally they have a well established and well loved IP… and even if folks are not completely sold on the game… they are likely to at least dip their toes in the water for awhile. I find myself caring far more about the people at the companies… than the companies and games themselves. With several friends in the “industry” I honestly hope that they can stack the schedule in a way so that all of these titles fine at least limited success. If we see another crop of relative failures, I think this year might be the last hurrah of the triple A MMO market.

Richer Than You Think

December 19, 2013 by Belghast

A Patch Awoken

Monday evening the Final Fantasy XIV servers were down to deliver the brand new 2.1 patch. This is the one that everyone had been waiting for, that was supposed to deliver a ton of new content. At one point I was anxiously looking forward to this update, because it held the promise of player housing as well as new dungeons to run to collect what we lovingly refer to as “bookrocks” aka Tomestones. Now that the patch is live, I find that I can’t seem to be bothered to actually patch the game up. Tuesday and Wednesday night I spent a bit of time hanging out in mumble with my friends who are still playing it, and they seem extremely excited about it overall. The video below shows all the reported changes, and I will admit it seems pretty staggering.

However several of these things seemed to be tarnished by somewhat bad design. The biggest of these that I have heard of is the housing system. Currently it is oppressively expensive, the day it was released I saw a tweet (that I seem to be unable to find at this moment) stating that they gained the first million gil towards their house… only 99 more to go. That apparently is cheap… here is a listing of the housing prices on the various servers. We are in group three, on Cactuar so right now it would cost 125 million gil to purchase the largest home… aka the one suitable for a guild house. Considering prior to 2.1 there really was no way to make money at 50 other than crafting… this seems insane. The highest I have ever gotten with my character was 200,000 gil, and repair bills and components for my artifact weapon whittled that down to around 75,000 gil the last I checked in on the game.

Supposedly they have added in a bunch of new ways to earn money, which I guess is a positive. However it does seem silly to roll out such an expansive and impressive system… that no one can actually use on day one. Supposedly over time the housing prices will fall, but that still puts the large house at 100 million gil at the absolute cheapest possible price. Listening to my friends, they seem to be enjoying the new content. The new dungeon Pharos Sirius seems to be genuinely difficult and to the best of my knowledge they have not beat the final encounter. That was one of the interesting things about FFXIV dungeons, is that they had a 2 hour timer to get through them. I feel like I should be excited about the prospects of the patch, but I just fine myself not caring at all. Whatever magic I felt towards FFXIV seems to be gone for me, in the same way it has flickered away for so many other games.

Richer Than You Think

This morning I achieved a personal goal… too bad it comes 2 expansions too late to be terribly impressive. I have never been extremely successful at making money in MMOs. I guess in the grand scheme of things it just has never really been a priority. As a result I have always thought that I was broke, or at did not have a ton of liquid assets in game. While I am still not anywhere near some of my guild members, I am was apparently doing better than I ever thought. Awhile back I installed Titan Panel again, to help organize a lot of my informational gadgets in one place. In trying to keep track where I was with all of my tokens I installed a Currency addon. Interesting thing about it… is that it started to keep track of all of the money spread across all of my characters.

As of last night it showed that I had 25,000 gold distributed among all of my alts… five of which are 90 and in various stages of “raid ready”. No character had more than 5,000 gold on them specifically, but spread out among all of the characters it added up. Because of this I decided to realize something that had long been a goal for me. With Wrath of the Lich king they added what has been ubiquitously referred to as the “Repair Mount”. Since I do a lot of random killing out in the world, and solo farming of dungeons/raids… I find myself constantly searching for a repair vendor. So many times I have thought to myself “man it would be awesome to have that mount”, but even with faction and guild discounts it was still 14,000 gold… which seemed like an insane amount.

I never would have purchased this back in the days before account-wide mounts… but the idea that I just gave every single alt the ability to repair whenever they hell they felt like it? Sure 14,000 seemed like a reasonable price, especially considering I have branched out onto a second account of characters. So this morning before sitting down to write my blog entry I shifted back and forth between all of my characters and began pooling my money on Belgrave to make the purchase. I knew for certain he was exalted with Kirin Tor, the faction the mount vendor is sold on. I have to say… I am freaked out a little that I just spent all that gold on a single mount, but within a few days that will pass and I will be happy with my decision. There really is very little I want to purchase in the game at this point that my army of alt crafters cannot eventually make. So I figure thanks to the mount I will be able to farm up more goodies to fill the coffers again.

Lucky Streak

Most of the yesterday evening I spent working my way through Siege of Orgrimmar. The first section of the dungeon went extremely smoothly and the loot gods seemed to be smiling upon me. I managed to get a usable drop off three of the four bosses there. Of course the first drop of the evening was a neckpiece… after purchasing the one with honor last night. That seems like it is always the way however… when you upgrade a piece, you end up getting a better one almost instantly. The second part of Siege however went extremely slowly as I had to complete it in two passes. I was on the second boss of the first pass when my wife came home last night and needed my assistance. After killing Iron Juggernaut I bailed from the LFR and did what she needed for a bit.

After coming back that meant sitting through another 30-60 minute queue and repeating the first two encounters without loot. However that second run went far more smoothly than the first, and we had no wipes at all until folks lost focus during the Nazgrim fight. That is not the type of fight that you can “burn down at the end”, since the not dealing with the adds means he very rapidly heals back all of the damage you are dealing to him. During the second attempt however, folks stayed focused on the adds and we managed to defeat him in near record time. My hope is tonight to come back and finish out the last two parts. At 11pm I attempted to queue for the third, and it looked like roughly an hour queue so I gave up and went to bed. Still no love for a weapon, but this next segment has the chance of dropping a weapon I believe. So between it and my nightly habit of running a Heroic Scenario… I might have a chance.

Hole In Itemization

December 18, 2013 by Belghast

Just Too Good to be True

I set out on a mission to attempt to earn a 498 pvp weapon last night through the justice point to honor conversion. For the most part it went easy enough, and while there were plenty of mouthy folks in LFG the instance runs themselves were smooth enough. I just kept my mouth shut and did my job as dps and pushed through it. It is amazing how much it defuses a troll when no one at all in the party responds. They make a few comments then quiet down themselves because no one is feeding them ammo. For awhile last night I was thinking that this was really going to be an awesome way to earn starter weapons. Unfortunately like so many great ideas this one had a massive flaw, that comes from the fact that I do not PVP… nor I understand how the PVP systems in any game work.

First flaw in the plan was the listed conversion rate was not 375 Justice Points to 250 Honor, but instead 500 Justice Points to 250 Honor. This was manageable but basically meant that you had to earn 3500 JP to be able to get a weapon. I did that last night without any real issue in a matter of hours. Second flaw… and this one is the fatal one. Apparently in order to purchase weapons with honor points, you have to have PVPed enough during the current season to earn 7500 honor. Since I have not PVPed at all on any of my characters during this expansion, let alone the current season I simply cannot purchase weapons. I have no desire to PVP enough to gain 7500 honor, which would be roughly 30 battleground wins. In fact that sounds like just about the worst possible way to spend my time I could imagine.

Jewelry Is Nice

Since I had already taken the hit converting 3500 Justice to 1750 honor… I really had no desire to take the hit again and convert 1750 honor back to 875 Justice. Other than weapons I have had a few glaring holes in my gear. I was still using a crafted 450 necklace and a 450 ring. While the weapons all require honor earned during the season to purchase, the gear however does not appear to have a similar requirement. As a result I picked out a fairly decent neckpiece from the vendor for I believe 1250 honor. This got me one step closer to my overall goal of being able to queue for Siege of Orgrimmar.

At this point I flew out to the Shadowpan Assault quartermaster in Townlong. Sure enough they had a decent ring as well. After plugging these two holes in my itemization and after picking up a slightly better weapon in the heroics I ran to get the stockpile of honor, I am now finally able to queue for Siege of Orgrimmar. While I didn’t necessarily get what I wanted out of the nights activity… I actually still got what I needed. Maybe the rolling stones were right all along.

Hole In Itemization

So after all of this, I return to the original thought process that there is a massive whole in itemization, at least from the standard late expansion “catch players up” mentality. I got into a bit of a discussion of an aspect of this yesterday over on Twitter. In previous expansions, there existed higher tiers of heroic level content. The prime example of this was Trial of the Champion that helped catch players up in gear, both on normal and heroic modes. Then later in the expansion you had the three instance story arc of Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection that ratcheted up the difficulty level as well as the rewards. I can remember Halls of Reflection heroic still being a significant challenge in Icecrown raid gear.

While I love the concept of the Timeless Isle, and the whole explore to find nifty things ideas… they are quite literally giving us epics in the process. This is extremely friendly to altaholics like myself, and has allowed me to gear out an army of 90s… but I feel little to know sense of accomplishment from doing so. The Wrath era sequence was probably my ideal for gearing. It felt significant gearing from heroic, to the trial 5 man and then finally being able to queue for the Icecrown 5 mans. Additionally the gearing seemed far more complete, since each 5 man tier dropped a complete set of gear including workable weapons.

Now it feels very much like, “Gratz on 90, here is your epic gear” but while you can queue for these raids… without having a way to get a decent weapon you become an instant drain on any group that ends up getting you. There are weapons you can get on the Timeless Isle, but like I said yesterday they are cost prohibitive (20,000 coins for a one-hander, 40,000 for a two-hander) and at 476 they are simply not worth the effort and do not provide enough of a bump over 463 crafted/heroic weapons to make it worth your time. Now that I can queue for Siege however I will hopefully get lucky enough to pick up a weapon that way. Additionally I will continue to run my nightly Heroic Scenario, as the potential 516 weapon would be well worth the time spent. Additionally these scenarios when run with a guild group put money in the guild coffers and count towards the weekly.

Crafting Hates Enhancement

My general theory is that this glaring hole was intentional… and by making it they did not want to devalue completely the 502 crafted weapons. I have my own opinions on the whole “crafting should be best” line of thinking, but I can see why they would want this. The problem however with this line of thinking is that there are simply not weapons available for every itemization. For enhance… they tend to favor slow weapons… so that rules out the daggers. That leaves Fist, Mace and Axe that are all usually 2.6 speed. In the 502 weapon itemization there is not a Fist, Mace or Axe that is agility based. The “rogue” weapon that is craft-able is a sword, which shaman simply cannot use.

I know in the past this has happened with Druids and other “weird hybrid classes”, but the fact that other players can nod and say “I know that feel bro” doesn’t really make it any better to try and work around. At this point I will start queuing my way through Siege LFR each week and hopefully in the process I will luck my way into a weapon. If not hopefully one of my nightly guild heroic scenarios will pay off and I will get one or more 516 random stat weapons. No matter which path I take however, my shamans fate is now in the hands of the random loot gods, which is never really a fun place to be.