Rift Archives - Page 3 of 20 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Weasel Town

November 18, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I was having one of those nights where I needed to just blend into the background, and largely avoid human contact. That said I needed to schedule an invite for a potential Emerald Nightmare raid tonight, and finish up my Emissary quests that I had hanging out there. However before long I had done just that and was off to Rift to explore some more of the Starfall Prophecy expansion. This is the point where I am at a bit of a disadvantage because I never got the opportunity to play through the Comet of Ahnket 10 player raid instance, and learn more about the story of what is going on here. From what I have been able to glean, Ahnket is this sentient creation engine of sorts that seems hellbent on destroying Telara. I am sure at this point Captain Cursor is cringing like mad and will pop in and correct me, but like I said having not played that raid I only have impressions to go on. This expansion we take the fight to the comet, which has grown into a landmass. It seems like every time Ahnket crashes through a plane on the way to Telara it picks up a chunk of that world and carries it with it. At this point the comet has traveled through the planes of Fire and Nature and as a result we have two new zones themed after each, and a fifth zone that seems to be a place where everything clashes in conflict. We as ascended are sent here to try and stop Ahnket once and for all and help the friendly folk who have gotten uprooted as a result of the comet passing near their homes. All of this is irrelevant however because all I really want to do is hang out with this lovely bunch of weasels.

The other thing that has changed is this time around we have companions that tend to roam around with us as we complete the quest content pretty regularly. Firstly there is Shyla Starhearth that you might recognize as being the formerly half naked lady hanging out in the throne room of Sanctum for the Guardians in the room. This time around she managed to find some proper armor and is apparently now a super tanky badass. Next up we have Tasuil the Dragon, that we last saw in the Dendrome… and has shrunk down a bit to make adventuring with a little easier. At some point in the quest line you find someone who can Corgify him at which point he is both hilarious and adorable. Then during my current sequence of quests I also have Windflower the babby Unicorn hanging out with me. So I am hanging with a Corgi, a Unicorn, and a heavily armored elf lady… who could ask for more? It seems like with the impending doom the Guardians and the Defiant have set aside their grudges because in the new hub town you can also find Asha Catari leading the offensive, which makes my little Defiant heart crackle to life. I apologize for the image quality in the above two shots, but at some point during the evening I transitioned from my desktop upstairs to hanging out on the sofa with my laptop… that cannot run the game in nearly the same graphical fidelity.

In truth I feel like I have not experienced enough of the new content to give it a proper review at this time. Overall I like it considerably more than I liked Nightmare Tides, but I think that is because this content brings back familiar landscapes. Goboro Reef was just a completely foreign and alien looking zone, with its angry technicolor vibrancy. These zones are similar to what I have been seeing in the game since launch, just subtle variations on the planar themes. Of not I have only actually ventured very far into Scatherran Forest, as you are presented with two possible choices at first… and I could have similarly gone down the Gedlo Badlands path if I wanted to see a lot of fire themed landscapes. Even then I feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of the zones, and in the few hours I played I pushed about halfway through my first level. The leveling is slow, but it feels not quite as slow as it did during Nightmare Tides which is definitely a good thing. As far as crafting and such… I have only barely scratched the surface because I am competing with everyone out there for ore pops. If anything that would be my one complaint so far that the spawn rates maybe need to adjust up a bit to deal with the influx of players. Completing any of the “kill x” style quests seem to require either a lot of luck or patience. The best part so far however has been the music, which is more technological in nature… and it comes with an amazing remixed version of the main Rift theme. If you have been a long time fan of the franchise, I feel like this expansion is already well worth checking out. That said expect it to still feel more like Storm Legion or Nightmare Tides than the original content.

Seasonal Bits

October 21, 2016 by Belghast

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me. Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely. For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters. Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies. I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar. The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny. From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV… while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there. This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves. Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory. This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along. Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool. I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection. I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes. The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well. Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution. That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being. I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image. This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post. I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning… which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it. DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result. I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb. Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog. In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season. I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Game Changer

August 16, 2016 by Belghast

In Another Castle

Last night was my raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, but before hand my key focus was trying to get my Mage to 100. I am not exactly sure what has lit a fire under me, but I am on this mission to have at least one server full with level 100 characters. As you can see in the above image, I am actually extremely close to getting there. Now granted I have the OTHER side of my linked server to start working on… but Belgaoh my Monk remains the only sub-100 character I have on Argent Dawn. The only problem there is he is SIGNIFICANTLY behind the curve sitting at only level 53 right now. I keep thinking that if I can get on at the right time, and have at least one easy to get to invasion event I will be able to push him through to 60 so that he can fly, which is going to be the key to getting more events on him. As of yesterday I thought I was nearing the end of the gear grind and even created a spreadsheet as an attempt to track progress in outfitting my characters in level 700 gear. The take away from that process seemed like I was going to spend the next several days working on my leather wearers to catch them up in progression.

Then this happened. I opened I believe 34 chests that I had gathered up on the mage in leveling from 90 to 100, and out of those chests seven different items came up as warforged. Apparently yesterday during the day at some point they patched in the ability for chests to spawn warforged gear, meaning that all of those characters I thought I had finished with really have only scratched the surface. I still think however my core mission is to get all of my characters outfitted in at least 700 gear, and if some of them get more trips to the candy shop in the hopes of finding warforged… then that is fine too. Ultimately I realize that all of this gear is going to be replaced within the first few minutes of questing in the Broken Isles. However for the time being I think this is probably a brilliant idea. The longer they can keep players actively participating in this event the better, because for the time being it is an amazing source of leveling and gear for everyone involved. I somehow doubt I will be able to get my monk all of the way to 100 in the short time available without focusing ENTIRELY on the monk, but I am definitely going to ride the elevator for as long as I can.

End of Expansion

One of the things I am realizing is that I apparently love the end of expansions. Cataclysm was the expansion that broke me and my desire to be playing World of Warcraft, causing me to fade away and go play other games. However I remember clearly that towards the end of the expansion I came back and really enjoyed myself. There was so much to be doing, and everyone had a great casual attitude about it all. For me personally I knew that nothing I was doing really mattered in the grand scheme of things, because as soon as Pandaria was released every last piece of gear I gathered would be replaced with greens. So in this low pressure environment I allowed myself to piddle around without purpose and had a complete blast. Similarly I remember coming back at the end of Pandaria and having the same fun experience, running around aimlessly on the timeless isle and doing all the little things that were fun but served no major purpose. Here I find myself once again in a similar pattern with Draenor, and I feel completely in my zone. The problem is that I wish I knew how to bottle this feeling and keep it alive during the rest of the expansion.

I am not sure how to take the joy that I feel at the end of an expansion when I am unfettered by expectations and pressures…. and keep that alive during the rest of the game. There is a switch that flips in my brain when an expansion launches that says “okay Bel, you need to be useful… go grind your face off”. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off completely because I think that is the thing that keeps getting in my way when it comes to enjoying an MMO for the long haul. I essentially burn myself out, over and over… game after game… by focusing on some lofty goal that I cannot accomplish without significant help from others. I end up ignoring the goals that are entirely up to me to complete, and those are probably the things that I technically enjoy more. I have had a blast alting my way to 100 over the last few weeks and bringing my own personal army up to snuff. As I look towards Legion, and Starfall Prophecy and whatever the Final Fantasy XIV expansion ends up being… I need to figure out how to keep this magic from the end of an expansion alive every single day I play the game.

Palladium Find

August 8, 2016 by Belghast

Unsorted Madness

After sitting at home due to the outside generally being rainy and icky Saturday, we ventured forth yesterday out into the extremely muggy world left behind. I managed to wrap up the podcast and get a blog post made all well before my wife made it home from church. By the time she got home I was essentially ready to go do whatever she might need to do. When she told me that she wanted to go to Gardener’s I admittedly had some mixed emotions. For the uninitiated Gardner’s Used Books is this massive place here in Tulsa It takes up the entirety of an extremely deep strip mall and almost every inch of it is covered in bookcases and or collectibles. The problem being that they are also notorious for reorganizing trying to fit new stuff in the store, which means that often times you have to spend thirty minutes roaming the store trying to find it again. The biggest problem I have had recently with Gardner’s is that their stock seems to be aging horribly. When I go to a book store I almost always make a beeline to the pen and paper gaming section, and then from there I wander out into other things. This section at Gardner’s had been shrinking and it felt like slowly, bit by bit we were just picking through the bones of a carcass that had been there since the early 90s. The thing you have to understand about this store is that it is essentially designed to be run at a loss. The Gardener’s “real” business is a Tax Service, and a really damned good one. It has been rumored for years that the family owns several buildings just like this one full of books, that were bought in bulk to dilute the profits to whatever level they needed for tax benefits. Over the last year or so they have been opening up one of these buildings located behind the main store on the weekends, and letting folks sift through the new arrivals. The above image is a single quadrant of this second building… and what you are looking at is completely unsorted books.

So you might see a Chilton manual to a 85 Chevy Pickup, next to a Danielle Steel, sitting beside an oddity like the book in the photo above. “The Ewoks Join the Fight” was part of a series of books that included a record that went with them. The idea was for you to read along with the narration, but the narration itself was this amazing radio play style thing. I loved these as a kid and had them for several different franchises… and I think I even remember there being a set for the Gremlins movie. Now the part I am not remembering is if they came from a restaurant as a limited time giveaway, or if this was something that I ended up getting from the scholastic books catalog. Regardless they were cool and it was a trip down memory lane to see one half buried in a pile of unrelated books. We came with a purpose in mind of trying to find pre-calc books for my wife, who now has that as a prep this year. So as I started going through the piles I started pulling books out because you could walk past the same table three times and see slightly different things each time. Unfortunately nothing I pulled really interested her, but she did find a seemingly nice book on forensics. The challenge of this Gardner’s Annex is the fact that there did not appear to be any air conditioning. We went extremely early in the morning, and it was already getting a little muggy in there. I would hate to go there in the full on Oklahoma summer heat, considering it is basically a giant metal building. The coolest thing in the annex however was this really neat full sized Han Solo in Carbonite sculpture that was hanging on one of the walls. I am not sure exactly where it came from, or if it was an official prop for maybe the re-releases of the original movies back during the mid 90s. Whatever the case I wanted to take it home with me, but like so many of the bigger things they have… like the life sized Hulk statue… it didn’t have a price tag on it.

When we made it over to the main building, I have to say I got more than a little excited. One of the things that I “collect” for lack of a better word to describe it… are Palladium games books. I have talked about this a bit in the past, and it seems like folks tend to either gravitate towards GURPS or Palladium when it comes to a “universal” system for gaming. Later Wizards tried to do this with the d20 system, but the idea is that you have one set of rules that cover lots and lots of different genres. As someone who used to love genre bending in gaming… it would allow you to give players the leeway to play quite literally anything they wanted to in almost any setting. The downside is there are only so many character backstories that can make this work apart from a “band of adventurers” or “mercenaries”. For a period of time Palladium books released a quarterly “magazine” for lack of a better term, filled with various bits of information related to all of the different systems called Rifter. They originally sold for between $10 and $15 in game stores, but over the years I have picked them up whenever I happened to find them cheaply. Sometimes they have really good stuff in them, other times not so much. It seems as though someone had just unloaded a stack of them on Gardner’s sixteen in total. The negative being that they were mostly priced around $6 a piece, which is fine if I only found them one at a time… but more than I would want to pay for a large bulk lot of them. After my wife didn’t find much of anything she wanted from the main store, I decided to see if they could make me a deal on the entire bundle. I had it in my head that I would be willing to pay around $50 for them all… and when the guy said he would sell them to me for $45 I had to stifle the excitement. There are some huge gaping holes in the numbering… and apparently they released physical copies of this up through the 40s so it is far from a complete set. However I have a lot more of them than I did before hand so life is pretty good. I’ve not really done much more than thumb through them, but if nothing else they always have really cool artwork.