MMORPG Archives - Page 393 of 408 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Goodbye Cataclysm

January 14, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling Human

This morning is the first day in a long while that I have felt pretty decent. I went to bed around 9:30, but had to get right back up shortly after and deal with one of our ferrets. Our “old man” had made a horrendous mess of himself and as a result we decided there was more there than could be cleaned up with wet wipes. As a result we gave him an impromptu bath and then made sure to get some nutrients down him. We really need to talk to the vet about him, because at this point I am not really sure how good of quality of life he is really having. One of his two back legs just simply doesn’t work right most of the time. He will be just fine one moment, and then the next he will be tripping all over himself. Which is something we went through with his brother bandit when he got insulinoma… for which there really is no course of treatment in a ferret that old.

Even with the last minute excitement last night, I did still manage to make it to bed before 10 and slept through the entire night. I woke up a few minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning, so I got a wee bit of a head start on the day. Right now I am feeling rather chipper, but I am sure that will be quelled as I actually get to work and see whatever stacked up yesterday while I was gone. I am looking forward to feeling human again, so here is hoping it lasts. Since I’ve gone over 48 hours without developing a fever, I am assuming that I am not contagious. My wife went to work yesterday and came home completely drained, so I am figuring that will also be the case for me. As a result I really don’t have much plans for doing anything when I get home but crashing.

Goodbye Cataclysm

I really did not do much of any consequence last night. It came time for our Monday night flex raid and I just was not capable of concentrating. Instead I continued to piddle around on Belglorian my Discipline Priest. I have decided that the thing I enjoy about Discipline is that they are kind of the “tanks” of cloth wearers. So long as I keep my shield up on myself, I can survive damned near anything and eventually win the fight…. albeit extremely slowly. The thing I did not realize however was just how much splash healing I was throwing around. One of the early Pandaria quests involves reviving a bunch of pilots that crashed landed in amongst a bunch of orcs. As I was working on killing the orcs I kept noticing that I was getting credit for reviving pilots.

I thought that maybe the quest was bugged and I was getting credit for another player reviving them in the vicinity. As I got closer to one and started nuking away with smite I noticed that I kept healing the NPCs. I am sure this will sound insane to most people but you have to understand… my priest was my free level 80 character I made when I accepted a scroll of resurrection. I am the future of our game… a high level player with no real clues about how the class works. Initially I had planned on leveling as shadow, but when a friend told me about the sheer survive of Discipline I made the switch without much effort put into researching the spec. It was one of those things that just worked, and the gameplay seemed extremely simple.

The problem with being handed all of these tools is I have no clue what half of them do, especially the passives. Sure I see pretty little icons proc at the top of my screen but I am far too busy killing things to actually hover over them and see what just happened. Now I had the common sense to at least research spell rotation and things like that before sitting down and building my hotbars, you can guarantee that not every instant 90 will do the same. Anyways enough of that old soap box, but I am the prime example of what happens when you hand someone a nearly fully leveled character.

Imperial Silk

I will admit that I had no real plans to ever level a priest, and since I got a free level 80… I decided to make it a priest since that was the least likely for me to ever level. One of the gaps that I decided to fill with this instant 80… was a Tailor. So for while some time I was a level 80 priest sitting in Stormwind with capped out tailoring, and no real way to make the ever so spiffy imperial silk. Sure I could have had someone summon me over to the Silken Fields, but that just seemed too cheesy even for me. As a result I decided to level the priest so I could legitimately start making bags for my army of alts. Funny thing is that somewhere along the way I actually started enjoying playing the class… even though I am probably playing it wrong. I like smiting things down while laughing off the damage I am taking with my shields.

Speaking of army of alts… I have to say having one of every crafting profession comes in really damned handy. The moment I dinged 85… I went through a flurry of activity logging in and out various characters. When I finished I had a complete set of Pandaria level armor, a new staff, and a new cloak… and as soon as I get to 87 I will make a new trinket. I’ve decided to level up alchemy on this guy as well, so at some point I will feed him a bunch of herbs which should allow him to equip the alchemy trinket as well. Mostly I am doing this so that I can have an elixir master as well as my transmute master. I technically have a third alchemist, but I am not sure if it is worth having a potion master as well. The only thing I can see myself making a lot of that might be worth it is Luck Potions. Depending on how I feel tonight, I might farm up materials for a push through alchemy at all levels.

Forced Convalescence

January 13, 2014 by Belghast

Remnants of Flu

I have to say I feel horrible. Saturday morning my wife was diagnosed with the flu, and at some point after that I started getting symptoms myself. As a result I started my own dose of Tamiflu as well to try and keep things from developing into the full blown flu. I think more or less I am keeping from falling deep into the recesses of fludom. I am not running a fever, but I generally don’t run a fever ever. I do however have full body aches and lots of coughing. My wife has been trying to get me to sleep as much as I can, but that ends up causing more issues like not being able to sleep at night.

I did however take some Nyquil and it allowed me to sleep some, and I managed to stay in bed until after 9 am this morning. Which is why you are getting my traditional post considerably later than normal. At this point I am not really sure what I am going to talk about this morning since in my convalescence I really have not done anything terribly exciting. I am expecting to be back at work tomorrow, since I doubt if I am contagious since it doesn’t seem like I have developed the full blown thing… just some kind of touch of it. I guess I am just left with the whole feeling miserable thing.

Forced Convalescence

One of the cool doodads that I picked up over the break is a Google Chromecast. Previously we had been a Roku household and both the living room and the bedroom televisions had the original Roku model hooked to them. While there was nothing wrong with these models, and we had gotten more than our fair share of use from them… over time they began to feel a little clunky. When Chromecast added support for Plex I started seriously plotting the move to the nifty $35 Google Dongle. After about a week of using the one in the livingroom, I popped back out to best buy and picked up a second dongle for the bedroom TV. Luckily at that point I seemed to catch a sale on them and snagged the second for only $29.

What is cool about it is that streaming to the Chromecast seems to work equally well from my Toshiba Android tablet and my wife’s iPad 2. So she has been using it to stream exercise videos in the bedroom, and in my forced state of convalescence I have been using it to stream Lost Girl over Netflix. I have to say that show is far better than I ever expected it to be. Lost Girl was always a show I caught a few minutes of before watching Being Human. After spending some time with it over the last couple days I have to say I am enjoying it quite a bit. The characters are really engaging and I love Kenzi to pieces.

Disciple of Discipline

The other thing I have been doing during my upright periods, is working on leveling my priest. So far I have taken my shortcut through cataclysm. Essentially I start in hyjal and do the first few quest chains in deepholme until I ding 83. At that point I switch to Uldum and quest along until I hit 84… immediately switching to Twilight Highlands which usually dings 85 before I have gotten very far into it. Sure it is pure hell on quest completion, but usually my goal is to get the hell out of Cataclysm as quickly as possible. Burning Crusade used to be the content I avoided like the plague, but quite honestly I find it more enjoyable than I do the Cata content. Ultimately my goal is to get to Pandaria as fast as I can, because other than a few bum quest chains I greatly prefer that content.

Additionally I am still working on the Netherwing faction on Belgrave. Right now I am roughly halfway to revered so it feels like I am actually making progress. Yesterday I stumbled my way through all of the flight quests out there, which are admittedly ridiculously easy now since it seems near impossible for one of the NPCs to actually knock you off your mount these days. I figure at this point I have a few more weeks of daily quests and then I will be the proud owner of a new batch of netherwing mounts. Right now I would trade all the progress in for just feeling better. On that note I think I am going to cut this off and go be comatose a bit longer.

Comfort Gaming

January 11, 2014 by Belghast

Tamiflu Chasers

Over the last several days I have talked about my own respiratory misery. My focus over this time had been on somehow surviving through to Friday and not making a complete and total ass of myself during my presentation. It seems that I was at least somewhat successful in that mission, however during all of this time I seem to have neglected the fact that my wife had been getting progressively worse. It reached a head last night when at bedtime she was running a 101* temperature. This morning she teetered back and forth on whether or not we should go to urgent care.

For those not familiar with the absolutely fucked up medical system here in the United States… Urgent Care is this weird beast that sits somewhere between your doctors office and the actual emergency room. The idea is to create a construct that allows you to get after hours emergency style treatment for non-life-threatening ailments. In the master plan the insurance providers tend to treat these like doctors office visits, and as such you only have to pay one neat co-pay. The problem is… they are insanely deluged with patients. Our local Urgent Care place opens at 9 am on Saturday, and we were there mere moments after opening… and the waiting room was already completely filled.

I dropped my wife off at her suggestion, and ran around running errands in the meantime. We are both a bit concerned that I will catch something since firstly… I was born with a naturally weakened immune system, and secondly… that my lungs are already in a pretty severely compromised state. I felt like an ass for her waiting alone, but she and I texted back and forth throughout the morning. At roughly 10:30 I picked her up and she was brandishing a prescription for tamiflu. She was in fact diagnosed with the real life full blown Flu, and unfortunately despite my yearly flu shot this puts me in a pretty bad place for likely catching it from her.

As a result I am in the process this morning of trying to get ahold of my own primary care physician to attempt to procure a preventative prescription for tamiflu as well. Needless to say my morning did not go anywhere near planned and as a result I am finally sitting down to write a blog post. With all the excitement I don’t really have a whole lot to say. Or at least nothing more exciting than what has already transpired.

Comfort Gaming

One of the best things I have discovered in the past year is the Alternative Chat podcast. If you are not in fact already an avid listener you should make steps to rectify that. In the latest episode the Godmother of Faff mentions a term that is so uniquely perfect, that I am shocked I had never heard it used before now. “Comfort Gaming” is a concept that is very near and dear to my heart, but I never really had an adequate term for it. There are so many gaming experiences that I can return to time and time again when I am in the need of some solace. Here in Oklahoma we are big on “comfort food” with our heaping piles of mashed potatoes and white gravy and our chicken fried steak. This same concept applied to gaming also makes sense.

I guess in a way WoW is my comfort gaming. I spent so much time trying to move past the game, but in fighting it I was denying the fact that I really did enjoy it and the people who play it. Sure there are so many games out there that do one thing or another so much better than the World of Warcraft. Games like Rift are pinnacles of technical brilliance with their deep systems within systems. However something just gets lost in the translation at times, and in all of my years of wandering between games I have found another game that fullfilled so many of the little high points I have looked for in a single package. Playing wow, questing, farming, exploring, collecting transmoggy bits, soloing old world content… all feels comfy.

Crawling back into the game this time was like breaking out that worn out pair of jeans that just feels amazing. There is nothing new under the sun in wow, and it is not exactly a pinnacle of innovation… but what you have here is a really great mix of fun ways to spend your time. I created my WoW Bucket list as a way to have something to fall back on when I got bored. Thing is with the great number of people I have assembled in my guild… I have yet to really get bored enough to search on the list for some purpose. Purpose seems to find me constantly in either helping someone else out or getting a wild whim that I want to follow.

So as I embrace the year of faff, I am also embracing “comfort gaming”. WoW is by no means the only comfort game I have. I find myself able to crawl back into the Fallout or Elder Scrolls worlds and get lost for an entire afternoon at a time. Similarly I am deeply looking forward to the release of Elder Scrolls Online… because that universe is one I supremely love. However saying that, I have no real intent to abandon the World of Warcraft. It scratches an itch for me, and in part is that way because of the amazing people that are playing it. While I could never play a game only for the people… the mixture of absolute fun activities and amazing folks makes the game as sticky as ever for me.

Bad Luck Tokens

January 9, 2014 by Belghast

Feel Bad Inc

This morning I am feeling like absolute crap. Last night was one of those nights where I just could not get into playing anything. I cycled through a bunch of different games, none of them holding my attention enough to keep up with it for long. I am not sure if I am actually “sick” or just that my lungs are not in the best shape. On the lung front it seems to be several things adding up at once. Firstly it is breathing all of this cold dry air coming with the recent cold snap. Secondly everyone seems to be smoking in the parking garage… which if I smoked I likely would as well… but this creates a hanging cloud of death that I have to walk through every morning. Smoke is a nuisance to most people but to a severe asthmatic it keeps me from breathing. Each time I get a whiff of it, I can literally feel my lungs tightening.

Lastly the other night we were trying to clean up a mess and I had to help my wife empty the vacuum bin. The dust managed to get clogged up and she had to work really hard with it to free the jam. As a result this plume of dust came up from the container and while I tried my best not to breathe… I ended up breathing some in anyways. As a result this triple whammy has lead to my lungs trying to close shop on me. Severe Asthma sucks, it really does. While it is better than it has been in years, there is always a chain of events that brings me to my knees and simply unable to function. What sucks about it the most is that Friday I have a huge presentation to give, so I have to somehow manage to get better enough to be clear and understandable without gasping for air.

Bad Luck Tokens

One of the things that happens for everyone at least one time during raiding is that the loot gods frown upon you… for an extended period of time. For me lately this has been in the form of zero weapon drops for my various alts. Yesterday at one point I was talking to a good friend of mine and he said he had been waiting on a trinket to drop for three months. Similarly I can remember running Karazhan for almost a year and never once seeing the necklace of Maiden of Virtue. During the middle of our discussion a “wouldn’t it be cool” thing happened. I do not believe that it is the intent of any game designer for RNG to wreck gear progression. No one in their right mind would ever intend players to simply not ever get the items they need.

The idea arose… that what would happen if you got bad luck tokens. This of course is just a name we came up for them, but you could call them any spiffy thing you want. The idea is that if you entered a dungeon and got no loot drops that you would end up with a special token, potentially mailed to you after the dungeon run. If you save up enough of these… and it would be a large quantity like 50 or so you could turn in your tokens to a special vendor for any one piece of gear “within reason”. Of course this would be standard drops, and nothing akin to a legendary or anything of the sort… though my old world raid would have disagreed with you considering we ran Molten Core for damned near three years never seeing a single binding.

The basic idea is to create a route to the item even if your luck is absolutely horrible. That through sheer diligence and determination you could still get it. Granted the details are a bit fuzzy, but back in the day we used to have a thing called the “bitterness pool”, I am not really remembering the full details to be honest because this was something we did back in vanilla. Essentially each player hunting for something rare would chip in some gold every week. At the end of the raid week anyone who did not get their declared item to drop would get a share of the pot. If you did get your drop your money went to soothe the pains of those who didn’t. It was funny and some people made quite a bit of money from the pool… especially those seeking the Drake Fang Talisman. But at the end of the day the pool got them no closer to getting what they actually wanted… that elusive item.

Late to the Party

When it comes to killing things… I seem to be able to do that for hours upon end without ever really getting bored of it. However when it comes to daily quests or similar reputation farming activities… I usually can’t seem to make myself do it. During Burning Crusade I successfully farmed up a bunch of factions, but one of the ones that had always eluded me was the Netherwing. There was just so much competition for the eggs, and at the time I simply could not be bothered to give up large blocks of my time working on it. Last night however… I really didn’t feel like doing much of anything, so as a result this seemed like a useful thing I could be working towards. The problem with Belghast, the character I was originally working on this with is that he was not a harvester, and being able to harvest the herbs and mine the ore was a quick and easy way to get a faction boost.

Last night I managed to go from neutral to friendly and put a decent dent in that. I need to do some more research to see if there is an easy faction guide to pushing through this. I mostly just want the netherdrake mounts for the total count, since there are a lot of them that you can get. I have never really been a fan of the look of them, and as a result that is partially what kept me from farming up the faction. Oddly enough I did Skyguard, which has the even weirder manta ray thing mount… but I proudly rode that all through BC. Additionally I need to see if there is an addon of mapnotes for the various egg spawn locations. That seems like it will be the fastest route to the faction, to keep doing the egg turn ins. Hopefully I will have the patience to keep doing this even when I am not feeling like crap.