raid Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

For The Cat

July 25, 2024 by Belghast

Hey Folks! Last night was a bit of an odd night. We got started a bit later than normal and I also did not sleep for shit Tuesday night… which put me in a bit of a funk. I came close to just begging off of shenanigans but I am very glad that I did not. Going into last night we had seven dungeons to run and Alexander… which I honestly had forgotten about. I am glad that Ace kept that in mind because quite honestly that was probably my favorite bit of the evening. We attempted to legitimately queue for Alexander but given we are on Dynamis… the queue was not moving at all and I did not really want to force an entire group of mentors to do it with us. So instead we duo’d the content which was a heck of a lot of fun. We greeded everything and I know I walked away with enough bits to get to pieces of gear, not sure what Ace managed to pull.

Alexander was the very first raid that I was there to participate in on day one. As a result, it means a heck of a lot to me, and experiencing it again on brand new characters was amazing. The best part of this place is the music. It is just so damned good and honestly… the fights are pretty amazing as well. It was this wild trip down memory lane that was priceless. We cleared the first four parts of Alexander and unlocked the second part… which I think leaves us three dungeons to potentially run tonight. Friday night I will be mainlining Path of Exile, so before we ultimately take a break in this journey we are absolutely going out on a bang. The top shelf absolute bestest part though… the cat that lives on top of the Illuminati leader’s hat. On some level, I had completely forgotten about that.

Before all of this though we churned through Neverreap, Fractal Continuum, Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum, and Pharo Sirius Hard. Yet again we encountered another Reaper who could not stand still and kept standing in front of the boss while ping-ponging around the fights. I have been told by my reaper compatriots on Mastodon that this is not normal behavior but… I keep encountering it over and over. Like I am used to Bards and Machinists going willy-nilly because they don’t have to stay still while attacking but Reapers seem like this game’s Demon Hunter. I remember really hating Neverreap when it first came out and I am not even sure why. There are a few pulls that are bigger than normal, but between my cooldowns and Ace’s expert healing, it was no big deal at all.

This entire experience of going back and seeing things with fresh but wisened eyes continues to be so much fun. If you have a friend that you could convince to participate in this sort of nonsense, then I highly recommend it. Honestly, even if you just want to solo your way through Eorzea, it is probably a great experience. For years I have thought Alting in FFXIV made zero sense because nothing was account-wide and you would be essentially resetting all of the progress you had made to that point. In fact I absolutely remember chiding Ace about it once before when they created an alt because I could not see giving up my stable of high-level jobs or any of the kitsch that I had unlocked along the way. I was wrong… I was so very wrong. It is worth it for the experience of getting to pretend you are seeing it all for the first time again.

Legitimately… the last decade has been extremely rough. I’ve aged far more than ten years… and chipped away bits and pieces of my mental fortitude and well-being. However, going through this experience has honestly been healing. I had convinced myself that there were all of these things that I just couldn’t do anymore… that I was not equipped to do anymore. I am sure this sounds somewhat dumb… but mental barriers are real things and they are hard to push past. I feel younger today thanks to the nonsense we have been getting up to than I have in a very long time. I also feel more equipped to capture the joy in day-to-day life than I have been in quite a while. I am not saying that playing an MMORPG is the key to happiness… but doing so with a close friend sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyways! Tomorrow I will probably be on my Path of Exile nonsense but I am looking forward to one more night of doing fun content before we take a bit of a break.

Accidental Orc

November 13, 2017 by Belghast

Firstly I feel like I need to lead this post with a tweet from one of my friends that I received last night.

Didn't you just tweet about cancelling your WoW sub? Or are you just playing until it runs out?

— Jeff Rimer (@Jeff_Rimer) November 13, 2017

I did in fact do this thing. To be more specific I went on a spree of mass cancelling my MMO accounts in early October. I went so far as to actually uninstall many of the games, which is apparently the surest sign that you are just about to decide that you are going to want to play again. Thankfully I have super fast internet and downloading World of Warcraft really is not that big of a deal anymore. I am not exactly sure how to explain this one other than the fact that I have been playing on and off with a friend in Destiny 2… that I first knew through my horde guild in World of Warcraft. I guess in theory this made me nostalgic about that guild and planted the idea in my head that I really should level my warrior over there. When you combine that with the weekend we had which was dreary and overcast… and my desire to just hang out on the couch in a blanket cocoon and do some comfort gaming and apparently all of that translates into playing World of Warcraft.

The biggest challenge however is the fact that in the process of uninstalling everything I also nuked my addons. Playing WoW with the stock interface is just not a tenable solution. My previous UI was cobbled together out of several dozen separate addon packs that I had to use the Curse Client now re-branded as Twitch to maintain. I did not want to go through that again so I took this as the perfect opportunity to try ElvUi that everyone has been raving about for years. It took some getting used to because the set up process was nothing like I was used to. However I decided to embrace the difference and by the end of the weekend I had gotten used to it mostly. The thing that likely won me over however was the AFK screen where the camera spins around you and your character dances in the corner. They didn’t need to do this thing… but the world is better for them doing it. Essentially over the last few days I have chilled on the couch and leveled from 30ish to 61 as of this morning. I am now knee deep in the Burning Crusade expansion content and having a weird nostalgic trip down memory lane. I have zero clue how long I will be playing or even how often but for the moment I am enjoying myself.

In Destiny 2 news I can now hit 302 on my Titan and in theory would love to either get in a raid tonight or at least the Nightfall on my Hunter and Warlock to potentially get some additional item level movement. The biggest problem that is effecting me in Destiny is the fact that I just am not a night owl right now… and that a good chunk of our clan are now on the west coast meaning they are two hours behind me. One of two things is going to have to happen, either we break into a early evening and late night raid, or we start actually declaring some night of the week to be raid night. Thus far everything has sorta been on the spur of the moment with whoever happens to be around, and sure that is fun… but also impossible to plan around. Last night for example they were wanting to pull together the raid while I was watching Walking Dead, which is literally the only television show I watch all week long. Other nights the potential start time would mean I would be up until midnight which is just not viable during the work week anymore. Had I planned for this and maybe taken a cat nap when I got home then it might be doable, but impromptu raiding just isn’t working for me right now. I want to raid and I want to get through the content but I just need some structure to it. Hopefully with the reset we can do a better job of planning raid nights. In theory I am going to try and get one going earlier in the evening tonight so I can at least get some tokens this week.

Destiny Roegadame

September 25, 2017 by Belghast

I had this post that I was contemplating making this morning, but I’ve decided that maybe today is not the right day. I woke up with a headache that sort of feels like my brain case is trying to split in two… so it maybe isn’t the best time to be getting into subjects that require a delicate touch. So instead this morning you are going to get to see some of what I did this weekend over in Destiny 2. Firstly you get a shot of my current Warlock outfit… I am in the one in gold and black with the crazy horns. Now it was announced last week that they nerfed the luminous engrams for multiple characters of the same class. I am beginning to think that maybe they also nerfed said rewards for ANY characters. I spent a good deal of time on the Warlock completing the few “easy” engrams… namely the Weekly Flashpoint (Titan), Clan Experience Reward and Call to Arms Milestone. The last two line up neatly because you get a predictable 500 xp per crucible match, which helps to chew away at that 5000 xp needed to get the Clan reward. I held all of the engrams until I had completed all three and then equipped my strongest power gear and turned them in one at a time so I could in theory adjust as needed. Now when I do this on my Titan I usually see a significant jump in power… and when I turned in on the Warlock they all for the most part dropped at the same light level as me or maybe one higher. Ultimately I am not sure if doing multiple luminous engrams per week is really worth it… but if I can get my Hunter through the main story in time I might try at least one of hers to see if I get the same results.

That brings me to the fact that I started my hunter this weekend, and wound up deleting my Destiny 1 character and re-rolling as a Female Awoken. Some interesting things to note… that even though I deleted my character I got specific story hits as though I was a legacy character. I am guessing those flags are set at an account level and not a character by character level, so I still got referenced based on my past deeds even though I ultimately deleted my previous hunter. My Titan being Exo is really the important part of the equation, and the fact that my other two characters were Exos… was largely due to the fact that there are no beards in Destiny. Since Hunter is such a nimble and graceful class, I always thought in the back of my head that I probably should have rolled a female character… and in part I am just correcting that original error. As far as rolling Awoken… this is the closest I can get in Destiny to having a Roegadame… which is always the correct choice if you have it.

This is ultimately a test run for how I am likely going to level when the PC release happens. I quested my way through the European Dead Zone to unlock Titan, and did the first quest there which unlocks the planet as a whole. From there I ran public events until I reached 20, which for the first 10 levels took a single event per ding… and afterwards took roughly 2 per. So if I functionally get to titan around level 5 that means within 25 public events I should be sitting at the level cap. The reasoning behind this is that you get an awful lot of random gear drops while doing the story content. Now the specific rewards like Exotics have power limits and will not float up as your level increases… but all of these random drops absolutely will. There is a significant part of the leveling process that is going to involve grinding something until you hit 260 light… the cap that you can get to with blue items. From there you will need a stockpile of faction rewards to get to 265… and in this case I had a fat stack of Titan tokens to turn in when I got there artificially by equipping the chest I had purchase from Xur and all of my Titan’s weapons. I started the Hunter around 11 am yesterday afternoon and wound up dinging 20 around 5 pm… with time between to do laundry and cook and random tasks like that. Now I just need to finish out the main story, which in theory I should be able to do tonight.

When I logged my character in earlier to take a few screenshots I noticed that my Clan has defeated the Raid. When this happens everyone in the clan gets a specific engram that is a level 10-15 version of one of the raid weapons. I just so happened to have a base 290 pulse rifle sitting in my bank that I sacrificed for science… and infused to bring the weapon up to usable levels. All in all I like this pulse rifle quite a bit, and while it is going to take some getting used to the action and the sounds it seems to be really solid. The important thing however is that I am super proud of my clan for defeating the angry penis head… which if you have seen Emperor Calus… it is a fairly apt description that I sadly cannot claim as my own. I am not sure which team specifically got the kill, but awesome work because I know it took a lot of people over the course of two weeks to really nail this all down and get the fight across the finish line. Now the rest of us casuals have some shiny baubles as a result. I think tonight I will be working on the Hunter main story so that I can at least test the flashpoint engram to see what sort of levels I get it to decode at.

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.