warlock Archives - Page 7 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Pushing Away

December 22, 2015 by Belghast

Lamentation

doing this thing… where I am sifting through my blog to see what games I played in what months… I feel like I've lost my way this year

— Frosty Belghast (@belghast) December 21, 2015

I posted the above statement, but I didn’t really have the strength to go into more detail last night. Essentially I have been sifting through my blog in an attempt to summarize the year… which is one of those things that you feel like you SHOULD do at the end of a given year. There are so many end of year traditions going on in the blogosphere, and I guess in some what I felt like I needed to do something. The problem with this notion is it seems like the person that existed in the first half of the year, was one hell of a lot happier than the person for the last half of the year. In January I had just attended my first gaming convention, and was super excited about Final Fantasy XIV and the raid… and still pretty damned excited about the progress being made in World of Warcraft. I was somehow juggling as many as four nights of raiding a week, streaming pretty regularly, along with a new column on MMOGames and a second podcast in the form of Bel Folks Stuff. Now zooming back to today, both the FFXIV and WoW raids are dead in the water… and I have backed almost completely out of MMOGames and essentially killed off the Bel Folks Stuff podcast… and it has been several months since I have even vaguely attempted to stream anything.

I know at some point I just got overwhelmed and started locking up… and I guess I never quite unlocked. I am still in trauma mode where I am moving from day to day on mostly muscle memory. There are a lot of things that I just don’t do anymore, not the least of which is read blogs on a regular basis. During the “Bonanza” column I was reading roughly 450 blogs and every post on them all in preparation for my weekly column highlighting the posts contained within. Once I handed that column off to another blogger… I quite literally stopped reading blogs all together for awhile. I had turned this thing that I got a lot of enjoyment out of into a job, and that is the sure fire way to make me stop wanting to do something. I now read blogs… but do so extremely infrequently… and feel like a complete failure for allowing myself to get to that state. I think as a result my own blog has suffered, because so often there would be a topic going around the blogosphere… and reading the thoughts of another friend would end up sparking me to write my own take on it. Now I sit down each morning and struggle to come up with anything to write about at all.

Cessation

There have been several points this year where I have contemplated just stopping all of it. I’ve considered backing out of the podcast, and stopping with the daily posting. It feels like I have been pushing away from all of the things I have cared about, one by one… and each time I do it I just feel more of a failure for doing so. I have been struggling greatly with just existing, let alone being happy and excited and engaging. What makes this even harder is looking back and seeing that apparently I had whatever magical sauce there is at the beginning of the year, but it is almost completely gone now. The frustrating part about it is… I am not sure how to get it back. I realize I have to start putting myself out there, a little bit at a time… but even the thought of logging into voice chat on a nightly basis feels like the biggest possible hill to climb. It has been at least three months since I have regularly logged into voice chat on a nightly basis, and maybe that is a good first step. The problem being that the games that I am playing right now and not the games that the rest of the AggroChat and Stalwart crews are playing. I really am enjoying World of Warcraft again, but even when I am logged in it feels like I am completely disconnected from everyone in it.

There were moments last night where I was asked to help out a few friends, and it felt like it took all of the effort in the world to accept. I spent time with Giulietta doing the Pit daily quest, and I need to do this more often since I too need a bunch of them to complete the flying requirement. I had fun while doing it, but it always requires so much effort to get over that hurdle to put myself out there… and actually do something with another human being. Similarly I forced myself to go do stuff with Finni/Qav when I was hordeside because I knew once I got started I would enjoy myself, but it is entirely too easy to stay mired in my own oblivious world. I realize what I am describing is depression, and I have battled it my entire life. I am going through what I would term as a “down cycle” but this one seems to have been going on longer than most. Generally I go through a few weeks of retreat and then that energizes me to the point of being able to engage again. This time… it just seems to keep dragging on and no amount of “fake it until you make it” is working this time. There just seems to always bee some external stress force bearing down on me, and I am hoping that being off for the Christmas break will help some of this.

Ashenvale

As far as gaming goes… I feel like I had a night without a lot of progress. The focus of my evening was largely the holiday event, where I complete all of the daily quests on the four characters that can do them… mail all of the tokens to Belgrace… and then become crushed when I realize that yet again I have no mounts. Lodur and I decided that we are going to create #Team360NoMount and the only requirement is that RNG and Blizzard hates you too. I have this lengthy history of not getting holiday mounts to drop. I have the two from Brew Fest, but other than that I have a perfect record of always participating… but never getting the mount. The sorest point for me is always going to be the Headless Horseman mount, because it is probably the one I want the most… but will never actually see. I do admit though that this years Yeti mount is going to be a close second in the amount of pining I will do if I don’t get it to drop. There are few cooler things than riding around on the back of a big damned Yeti.

As far as actual game progress I managed to push my Warlock to 21 and am now sitting in Ashenvale. I took the start quest from the adventure guide, and happily cancelled all of the quests from the Northern Barrens. I am wondering just how long I will actually be questing in Ashenvale before I do the same and move on to whatever zone comes after it. The biggest positive of this of course is the fact that I can actually summon my Vendor Mammoth and sell things whenever I feel like it. This is the toughest part of the sub 20 game in World of Warcraft, is being so insanely used to summoning a vendor whenever you want… but suddenly not having that ability. I swear that mount is the single best item I have ever purchased in this game. If I can ever get the cash to purchase the Yak from Pandaria, I am sure I will say the same about it…. since being able to Transmog my gear is just about of equal importance to me. If I could summon a transmog vendor at any time I would never look fugly again! Other than that I managed to knock out a few parts of the Hellfire LFR on the Cow, but didn’t really get anything worth writing home about other than a few more runes and some gold thanks to queuing as a partial group.

Predictions and Dots

December 17, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Predictions

It is in fact the day… and I have reached full on Kermit Flail status. All day yesterday my brain kept going “Star Wars! Star Wars! Star Wars!” and I have zero clue how I am going to be a reasonably functional human being today. The tickets are for 7 pm tonight at my local generally no frills theater… in 2D… which is honestly the way I would prefer to watch this movie. If it can blow me away without any frills, then it will have been a good day. At this point I am largely in a Star Wars information black out other than occasionally checking what the Rotten Tomatoes “freshness” score happens to be. For most of yesterday it was around the 98% but right now it is sitting at 95%. I am super thankful that Google shows the score without having to actually click through into the site, because really I am trying to avoid knowing much of anything about the actual plot. That said… when the Legion announcement happened in WoW I did a few predictions that morning, some of which were serious… others very much not. So I thought it might be fun to do my Star Wars: Force Awakens predictions. Please note that any alignment between these and actual plot points is pure coincidence and based on sheer dumb luck. I promise I know nothing… and these are not spoilers… but “wouldn’t it be cools”.

Rey – I think it is probably a given at this point that Rey is the child of Luke and Han that somehow got stranded on Jakku, or at least that is my working theory. There was a shot of Rey and Chewie flying the Millennium Falcon which kinda lead me down this line of thinking.
Han – Harrison Ford has long said that the only way he would ever return to the Star Wars franchise is if they were going to kill off his character. So I think without a doubt Han Solo will die in this movie. It will be an even bigger shock to me if he doesn’t… because I guess at the end of the day that means that Harrison Ford REALLY likes printing money. It would be cool if he got used to the fandom, and approached it with less disdain… but I am not holding my breath.
Chewie – I think if and when Han dies… the Life Debt that Chewie owes Han… will transfer to his daughter. My biggest fear is that they jettisoned the Expanded Universe just so that Chewie would be alive… only to kill him off again. This movie should be all about passing the torch to the next generation… but you still need some aspect of the current generation to make that work, and I think Chewie continuing on would be a good callback.
Kylo Ren – This one… I am torn on. For the longest period of time I thought maybe this was also Han and Leia’s kid… if for no reason other than in the Expanded Universe… their son did in fact turn to the Dark Side. Now I simply do not know. I have a feeling he ties into the Skywalker lineage somehow… but at this point it makes me wonder if he will end up being Luke’s son.
Luke – One of the big mysteries is what exactly is up with Luke. I think this one goes one of two ways… either he has turned to the Dark Side himself and becomes the new big baddie … the power behind the throne of sorts. There are problems with this however… because if that were the case why would Kylo be on this hunt to collect all of these artifacts of Darth Vader… why wouldn’t he just worship the new embodiment of the Dark Side instead. I think more likely he is going to play the role of Obi Wan from the first movie… where he has isolated himself from the world and we go on a hunt to find him, where he is slightly mad in an almost Jorus C’Baoth style.
Poe Dameron – I think a safe bet would be he somehow ties lineage back to a member of the Rogue Squadron that we will come to know during the Rogue Squadron breakout movie. That said I am going to go down my “wouldn’t it be cool” line of thought… and say… wouldn’t it be awesome if he turned out to be the child of Boba Fett? I mean he bears a vague resemblance to both Jango and Boba as seen in the prequels, and I mean… vague… because its not like Boba looked exactly like Jango.
Finn – I really have no real guesses on this one. My fear is that they will go with the simple answer and make him Lando’s kid. I would love to think that he is tied into the original cast somehow. I know in theory he could be the child of Han Solo and Sana Solo which was introduced as Han’s wife in the comics. I’ve long thought that Han himself was a force sensitive… because his unnatural luck at times… could just literally be latent force sensitivity. I think Finn is going to play into the main story line in an important way, and we know he at least ends up wielding a light saber… so could he be also of the Skywalker lineage somehow?

Whatever the case any of these things might be… I am just hoping that I really and truly love the movie. I need this to be awesome… because I am still so disappointed in the prequels. I am even wearing my special Star Wars vans today… in hopes that tonight will be a truly awesome experience.

Warlocking

In theory Wednesday night is the night that I raid with Jed and crew, but I needed the night off. It has been a pretty crazy week, and with something scheduled almost evening… Wednesday night was really the only night I truly had to sit at home at chill. So instead of raiding I ended up working on the new holiday quests. The positive is that there is now a whole sequence of Winters Veil quests that start from your Garrison, the negative is that one of them is horrifically bugged and largely impossible to complete if you wish to retain your sanity. I guess in theory if you caught the quest during off hours you would do just fine, but since this is the sort of thing you want to do on every character that can possibly do it… it means that the area is pretty much constantly camped. Realistically they should have had the Alliance event happen in Shadowmoon Valley and the Horde event happen in Frostfire Ridge… because simply getting there is a bit of a pain in the ass for my Alliance characters. The worst part about the new quests is that Christmas has now also become a mount chase… with these chests purchasable from the vendor in your garrison for essentially one days worth of tokens. If you are insanely lucky like apparently Jaedia… you can end up getting the Minion of Grumpus mount… which I will be shooting for during this event.

After fiddling with holiday bits, I relaxed to an evening of working on my new Orc Warlock. Essentially I am leveling just like I would an arcanist, which means running around like mad and dotting things up. The end result seems to be a pretty rapid fire way to level… and I am already out leveling the content. Granted I am fully decked out in heirlooms which is in part what is making that be a thing. Mostly I am just trying to push my way into “dungeon” levels as fast as I can so that hopefully I can be queued for a dungeon the entire time I am leveling. If nothing else I am enjoying myself which is a first when it comes to Warlocks. I’ve always been interested in the class… because demons… but always struggled with getting into the spirit. However during the AggroChat podcast and through playing Final Fantasy XIV… I am learning that I basically tried playing all dot based classes wrong, and that the answer is in fact to run around like mad, dotting everything up and watching it just die before my eyes. So upon leveling this Warlock that is absolutely my new MO, and so far … it seems to be working. I needed a chill out class to play and this one is fitting the bill.

Many Demons

December 16, 2015 by Belghast

Allergy to Advertising

Yesterday in my travels I listened to a piece on NPR talking about the habits of TV binge watchers and advertising. Apparently a study has found that binge watchers are far less susceptible to advertisements than your average viewer. They went into some reasons behind this… but I think as a whole we have just learned how to ignore advertising. William Gibson is the oracle of our age, because he consistently predicts a thing being a thing… before it actually happens. I remember in the book Pattern Recognition he introduced us to a person who is so allergic to branding and advertising that they would get the branding ground off the buttons in their jeans. I feel like I am nowhere near this, but instead I am in this realm where advertising just really doesn’t work that well for me. When I see the same ad over and over… especially if it feels like they are targeting me for some reason… I find myself less and less likely to use whatever product that is. There was a time when I actually like several post cereals for example… but after watching commercials for honey bunches of oats between shows on Hulu I have nothing but a negative reaction when I see anything with the Post brand on it.

As far as advertising in general, I’ve gotten adept at ignoring it. If I am going to be serious about a website I tend to snap it into my RSS reader, which also tends to trim most of the advertisements. From a side effect it also cuts down on the exposure to Malware, since a large number of attacks on end user machines come in through infected ad providers. While I might trust the hell out of a website, I don’t trust the advertising services that are well known cesspools of Malvertisements. With Television however…. there is very rarely a time where I will be watching a show without also doing something else at the same time. So I might be playing an MMO or fiddling around with this or that project… which means when an ad comes on the screen it gives me liberty to look down at my device. I am vaguely listening, but only well enough to be able to identify when the ad has finished and the television show has started again. Mostly I really don’t enjoy being advertised to. I am not bought into the fantasy that they are trying to create that is supposed to tell me that my life will be better with this product. Instead I prefer to just do my own research when I find that I need something. There is never a moment when I purchase something, that I have not already googled it, youtubed it, and tried to find multiple seemingly trustworthy sources of information on how said product works. That said… I realize I am probably a huge aberration, but I would have to think its an aberration that is growing more and more common.

OrcLock Instead

Last night most of the evening was spent going to RiffTrax where I saw Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny…. which is every bit as horrific as you might have imagined. Well the movie was horrific… the riffing over top of the movie was absolutely glorious. I would say this batch of shorts and the final movie… was quite possibly the best RiffTrax I have seen. They are doing a rebroadcast of Starship Troopers early into January so I think we are going to rally the troops and go see it as well, since it was one of the ones they did before we started making this a regular outing. When I got home however I spent some time piddling around and on a whim decided to roll a Female Orc Warlock rather than flipping over and playing my Dwarflock like I had talked about. Essentially I am enjoying my time Horde side quite a bit, and I am feeling the need to develop a stable of characters. I also really really need access to an enchanter and a potion maker, and there is no better way to do that than to make my own. So in theory Belghula… because I am running out of ideas for Belg names… is more than likely going to be a Tailor / Enchanter… since having access to crafted gear is always a useful thing.

This is I guess going to be an experiment in just how long I manage to stick with a female character. This is a thing I don’t do terribly well, and mostly its because… I tend to keep creating versions of myself when I make characters. At some point I need to do a supercut of my characters, but you will see there is a very specific pattern to them. They all have beards of some sort… and if there is a game that doesn’t allow beards… then honestly I don’t tend to stick around terribly long in it. After that I tend to have long hair drawn back into a ponytail… or if nothing else just long hair in general, and said hair is generally black or as dark of a brown as I can get it. Essentially that character ends up being the idealized version of how I guess I wish I looked… or at least my ultimate version of myself. Maybe I just really like the whole Adrian Paul Highlander thing… because my Secret World character looks quite a bit like he did in the Highlander Television series. In any case… I never seem to be able to fully immerse myself in a female character, because it pulls me out of the whole “this is me in game form” aspect. That said, when it comes to horde in particular… I think the female characters look badass and less sexualized than the alliance versions. I also like the female Orcs, Trolls and Undead far more than I like the Male counter parts. As a result I am going to give this a try, and hopefully it works… because seriously this Orclock looks awesome already.

Devilian Finally

Devilian 2015-12-16 06-18-17-03

While I played quite a bit of Devilian in the various phases of alpha/beta/whatever… I had yet to actually install the game proper since its launch. So last night when I got home… while I was dinking around on the Orclock I had it installing in the background. I crashed pretty hard around 10pm but I managed to get in this morning and get a character created. As a result I created Belghast the Berserker on Ravan… because if you give me a server name that even vaguely sounds like Revan… I am going to play on it. I am looking forward to seeing what the game is like after the handful of polish passes the late betas gave it. If nothing else it should at least partially scratch my Diabloesc itch for awhile. I have significant issues still with the fact that the classes are gender locked, but this is not really a Trion Worlds thing. That is one of the frustrating things about playing a game that has been localized like this… is that you end up knowing that most of the things that might frustrated you… the company you actually have access to, can’t do a damned thing about it. So as a result I am going to enjoy what is there, and try really hard not to worry about the stuff that isn’t.

I joined a Discord server yesterday being run by Zoltariel and having a bunch of the Trion folks on it as well. So I started chatting like I normally do, to which point I was treated to a length rant about how essentially anyone playing a Berserker is a “casual” and that how no one would ever invite them to a group. I am paraphrasing because this was a rant that took place over the course of twenty or so lines, but the gist was that Berserkers and melee in general had problems dealing with late game mechanics. The thing is… I enjoy melee. If you give me the option between a bunch of characters, I will always without a doubt play a melee… and problem even further play a tank. Since Devilian is the sort of game that doesn’t have a tank… then I am likely to play as much of a high survival melee as I can because I like being able to live through stupid things. Melee is what makes me happy, and even if it is absolutely empirically worse than every other class in a game…. I am still going to play it because it is the player fantasy that I enjoy. So I killed the chat channel when I quoted Tommy Lee Jones from the Fugitive after Harrison Ford just gave an impassioned plea about how he did not in fact kill his wife… “I Don’t Care”. Not everyone plays a game to win… some of us play them to have fun doing the playing.

Setting Priorities

December 15, 2015 by Belghast

Return of the Deathknight

I’ve already talked at length about how we know without a doubt that Gladiator will be dying with the launch of Legion. As a result this will greatly hamper my enjoyment as a Warrior since in truth I have never really liked Fury or Arms that much. Sure I could go back to tanking full time… and that would be pretty awesome… but my prospects for returning to a main tanking role are not entirely that great. I mostly shifted to DPS so that if I missed a night… it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Missing a night as one of the primary tanks however… that is a big deal and causes great hardship on whatever raid you are part of. That said… everything I am hearing about Blood Deathknights is telling me that they are returning to the awesome feel they had before Warlords turned them into finger wigglers. I mean there are lots of people that don’t get my complaints about the class… but having a lot of caster animation abilities in your standard rotation ended up making them feel less of a big sturdy melee class. I mean I play Blood when I need to survive, especially while questing on Tanaan but I pretty much hate every moment of it. The class has always been tied to that spec for me.. and even before it became the main tanking tree… I was a blood Death Knight.

Granted there were times I flirted with Unholy for DPS, and Dual Wield Frost for Tanking…. but in each of those times… Blood was still my other spec, the one I never got rid of because it just felt awesome. With it returning to glory, I have to say I am kinda excited about dusting off Belgrave again. The problem being as you can see above… he is wearing this horrible mishmash of whatever gear I happened to find along the way. So one of my goals over the coming weeks is to get him as geared out as I can given the meager scraps he has access to through Hellfire LFR, Kazzak, and Tanaan jungle drops. I figure whatever effort I put into gearing him now… will only serve to make him easier to level in Legion. I am still not giving up hope completely on getting in Alpha, because there is honestly just a bunch of stuff that I want to test out. However in the meantime there is a bunch I can do to improve his status in life, and some of that might even mean pugging a normal Hellfire raid at some point. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, but if nothing else… I want to get to a point where I could survive tanking a Mythic Dungeon.

The Hunter

The second goal is to find some time and get Lodin my hunter through the Shipyard quest and unlock that part of the garrison. There is an absolute certainty that when Legion comes out… I will be switching him to Survival hunter and never looking back. My main character in Everquest was a cleric, but my primary alt… was a Ranger… a dual wielding melee ranger. So when World of Warcraft was released, I absolutely tried to make Hunter into a melee ranger class. I’ve posted plenty of screen shots of me “tanking” early dungeons as a Hunter, and to be honest… when I found out that the class was never going to be viable as melee… I lost interest in it as my main. Other circumstances however lead me to raid as it in Vanilla… which by default turned it into my raid main. However from the moment I had to abandon survival and hitting things with big two handed weapons… the class just wasn’t for me. Now I have played it off and on since then, and I really enjoy Beast Mastery and the aspect of taming interesting creatures to fight for me. But the player fantasy of being a badass ranged character… has never been one that I shared. In preparation for my eventual spear wielding days as Survival, I want to spend some time gearing up Lodin and getting him ready for the expansion. Right now he has a pitiful smattering of gear out of gear from Highmaul, augmented with a handful of Baleful shipyard drops. It is my hope to get him into fighting shape soon, or enough of a shape to be able to survive farming Tanaan. Right now however… he is sub 640… which greatly limits my options.

The Dwarflock

The other character that has been calling my name lately is my Dwarf Warlock Belganon. He is currently somewhere in Northrend in the mid 70s, and represents one of only two characters Alliance side that are sub level 90 and that do not already have a Garrison. It is my hope to push him up, because of all of the finger wigglers… the one I am most likely to play is the Warlock. I feel like the lessons that I learned playing an Arcanist/Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely make me a better warlock player. I’ve always leaned heavily towards Demonology… because just like Beast Mastery…. they have the really awesome pets. Especially now that all of the Warlock pets have been updated with higher quality Warlords/Legion era models, I think its time to revisit the class and see if it works for me. I will never likely main a caster of any sort, but from time to time I have fun playing them. If I can manage to get this guy up… that just leaves the Monk… which I have admittedly struggled with. In both cases I am kinda hoping to be able to dungeon most of my way to maximum level.