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

Week in Gaming 11/1/2015

November 1, 2015 by Belghast

Goodbye Summer

This is the week where we finally started to see some colder temperatures. Its funny that this has been the case for the last few years… that October for the most part has still be warm and sunny and if we still had our pool open… we probably could have swam in it all month long. We still have yet to see a freeze but this past week it was regularly in the 40s, when the week before it pretty much never dropped much down past the 70s other than the early morning. As a result this means our hibernation instincts are starting to kick into overdrive. We recorded the AggroChat podcast Friday night, which left us with all of Saturday to do whatever we wanted. The end result… is that we pretty much just stayed inside apart from a mad dash out of the house around 4 pm to run a few errands. I am perfectly fine with a weekend like this… my wife however has some inborn instinct that tells her that we if did nothing over a weekend… that the weekend is somehow a failure. Me… I see those as the most wonderful weekends ever.

Destiny

I had all of these plans to play some themed games for Halloween… but those plans pretty much died yesterday. Instead I ended up working on my Warlock and getting it to 21 from about level 8. I have to say the Warlock is growing on me over time… and I really really like Nova Bomb as a super goes. It is this awesome mix of the way the Havoc Fist super and Shadowshot super feel, where I can deliver death from above… but at a target instead of jumping down in the middle of everything. Having played all three classes… I have to say they have done an excellent job of giving them all something really neat and special about them that makes it rewarding to play. The hardest thing for me so far however has been adjusting to the Warlock jump. It just works so different than all of the others… and while I am starting to get the hang of it… I still have zero desire to do any of the platforming encounters with it. We will see when I get to the dreadnaught if I can figure out how to do the various chasm jumps with it. Hunter is simple… double jump, and Titan is similarly simple… you just have to sort out when you want to hover over your target before you land. Warlock… is just fiddly and annoying and I never can seem to do the sort of jump I need when I need it.

The secret of my success honestly was getting high enough level to where I could break out my Stranger’s Rifle and I plan on riding that puppy up as long as I can. That weapon is just so damned amazing… and I am ultimately going to have to sort out the process for getting the modern version of it. Sadly I don’t have much faction with Future War Cult, which is ultimately required to get the No Time to Explain exotic. As it stands right now my hunter is running up Future War Cult faction, but since I don’t play him nearly as much as I do my Titan it is lagging behind. I did manage to get my hunter up to 285 light, and I can now consistently him 297 light on my Titan. Getting 300 and beyond items just seems to be the problem, and I still decode so many 260ish items that are just trash. While I don’t mind so much if they are weapons… since I am consistently struggling to keep enough weapon parts on all three of my characters… but armor… I have more than enough to share. I want to take a moment to talk about how much I love the Bungie.net website for swapping stuff between my characters, and the fact that you can do it in the middle of a game play session. This is a really amazing feature.. and I have heard there are chrome plugins that streamline this process considerably.

For the last several weeks I have been on this mission to grind as many strikes as possible to get Exotic Engrams… and there was a method behind my madness. There was one weapon in this game that I wanted more than anything else… and that was.. the Zhalo Supercell. From the moment I saw it in a video, I loved the look of it as some sort of futuristic AK-47/Bolt Action Hybrid thing. What I loved more about it was the functionality of being able to chain lightning to all of the mobs around your target. The only problem being… I never seem to get weapon engrams. I get Helms and Gloves… and the occasional Chestpiece… but have pure hell getting any sort of weapon to drop. So you can imagine my excitement this Friday when Xur had none other than the Xhalo Supercell available. The only negative of course is that all Xur weapons start at 280 instead of the 290 that they are usually dropping for me as. I have managed to pour enough stuff into it to get it to 287 which will have to do for the time being. I love this gun, and more importantly I love the way it rips through mobs that always frustrated me. I’ve noticed when the lightning procs… it can hit Phalanx and Knights even if their shields are up which makes this gun freaking amazing. When I wrap up my post this morning I think I am going to stream/record for a bit and talk about some of my favorite weapons currently.

Another huge positive from this week is that one of the Armsday orders was the above Suros DIS-43 Scout Rifle. One of the rolls available had full auto… which makes this gun freaking amazing. It has good impact, solid range and really great stability which makes it pretty much the perfect scout rifle for me. This has now completely replaced Hung Jury in my current weapon load out. My Hung Jury essentially has maxed range which is nice… because I can use it much in the same way as I would a sniper rifle, but the Suros DIS-43 is just a much better all around weapon. I noticed it was available for Armsday orders again this week, and I put in for another one… so hoping that I can end up getting a third one for my Warlock. I have two of these now and they are just excellent. Hoping that everyone managed to get in on the full auto version from this past week because man… I am really enjoying it. My only problem with Suros weapons… is that I really don’t like the Red and White paint job. So this is another case that I would love to be able to repaint my weapons… like if I could put a Dead Orbit paint scheme on this thing… it would be perfect.

Secrets of Grindea

Another title that I played this week was Secrets of Grindea to get prepared for the Friday night podcast. I of course talked about this at length on the podcast, but this is a game where I went through a few different phases with it. At first… it didn’t really grab me. This was my pick for the month, and I largely picked it because some of the game footage I saw reminded me of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Secret of Mana. The early gameplay however… is kinda boring, and the first “boss battle” on the bridge felt a little uninspired. That was quickly followed up by the Giga Slime boss… which was absolutely brutal to do as a melee character. So I have to admit that knocked a lot of wind out of my sails as far as this game went. I did however manage to pick it back up this week and saw the game that I had not quite gotten to yet.

All I can say is… boy was I wrong to doubt this game. The quests are cute, and a parody of traditional RPG tropes…. without being cruel or slapstick about it. It is kinda a sly nod and wink to the fans of this genre… saying “we know” rather than trying to rub your face in it. We talked about this on the podcast, but this is essentially the game I had wished Citizens of Earth was. It is well written, has some interesting and often times hilarious characters, and presents a world for the grown up fans of the original Zelda games… not necessarily the same audience those games were targetting. The boss fights are really challenging, but each of them have a trick or a pattern that once you figure it out it becomes doable. That said I do think this game might have significantly more challenging encounters than Zelda did, because the above Hydra was essentially the point where the game broke me. After talking with my friends on the podcast… there was essentially a pattern that I was missing that hopefully means I can get in and wreck it now. There was not a single boss that did not take me multiple attempts… other that the first bridge encounter mind you. The game does a great job of check-pointing your progress so you start pretty close to where you died allowing you to get right back into the action and try again. Even though this is early access… I highly suggest checking it out… though admittedly you might just wait for the final version.

Devilian

The other game that I spent some time playing is Devilian, that was having another beta test weekend. I still have issues with the game, at least in the style of the character classes… and their gender locked nature. That said I do actually enjoy playing it, and I think it is a cool take on a normally Diablo clone environment. It feels like something different, and I find it significantly more challenging already than anything I saw in Diablo. Diablo gameplay felt “cheap” at times… where bosses would just straight oneshot you if you were unlucky or lacked the armor/skills to deflect the blows. This game requires you to react a lot more quickly to things happening and dodge out of the way of incoming damage. I’ve already encountered a boss that I just cannot currently beat, and I am hoping to come back to it once I have picked up a few more levels. I have this feeling that the boss is designed for multiple players to take him down… because he is right there out in the open rather than hidden behind a bunch of mobs.

The game is really damned pretty, and I will give it marks too for running extremely smoothly. I am still getting used to its somewhat quirky control scheme, but it makes sense. If I were in the permanent test group I would probably be playing this more regularly but with only having weekends to play it… it somewhat disincentives my time spent. My ultimate hope is that Trion has more control over this one than they do over ArchAge and that maybe just maybe they can get some of the changes in that will make the game more enjoyable. Like for example the game is desperately in need of some inventory management tools… like sort and compact. It feels so odd to be playing a game without those things at this point. I doubt the whole Gender locked classes thing will ever be solved, because that will mean a TON of art and animation work to get there. In truth, as I look at the other classes… it is highly unlikely that I would play any of them other than the berserker in the first place. I am just not much for ranged classes… and I have zero desire to play a character with a habitually open shirt. In truth I wish there was some sort of a “tanky” character like the Crusader in Diablo 3. That would probably ultimately be the class for me.

Old Friends

December 28, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #37 – Games of the Year: Part Two

Last night I uploaded the second half of our Games of the Year broadcast, finishing out our pseudo countdown with the game that four of us voted for. However while that might have been the game of the year through consensus, it just did not feel quite right to declare an official game of the year for a podcast with so many disparate voices. As a result each of us gave our own game of the year, and you will have to listen through the podcast to see what my pick wound up being. I have to say we had an interesting round of discussions about this one and I hope we end up doing this as a yearly thing. With the end of the year closes what I am calling “Season 1” of the podcast. I only started classifying things by season because there was a place for that in the ID tag within Audacity, and I figured what the hell… might as well.

With the new year will bring a new season, and at this point I am not quite sure what it will look like. Right now we have a cast made of of myself, Ashgar, Kodra, Rae, Raven and Tamrielo but I sincerely doubt that most shows will have all six of us. That seems like a rather large group to podcast with, but hopefully we can muster four to five of us on any given night. The biggest regret for season one is that we had Tam has a pretty constant part of the show but we never actually updated the logo to include his chibi… even though he has had one for quite awhile. Ultimately I figure we should get Rae to draw up a Raven chibi as well just to have it at the ready. I would love to revamp our homepage a bit to have bios about each of the podcasters. I would also love to bring back in Dallian on occasion, who filled in quite regularly as this podcast was getting off the ground but we have not had to tag in for awhile. Hopefully you enjoy this second part of our Games of the Year show.

Old Friends

Yesterday I had an excellent surprise when I saw what character a good friend of mine was playing. She has favored the horde for some time, and when her guild over on another server went belly up I sponsored hr membership to the guild horde side that I have my alts in the Bloodmoon Chosen. While it sucked to have her over on the other side of the faction wall, it made me happy that she at least had a good home. Yesterday however on a whim it seems she decided to play her hunter AIlah. The above picture is of me and Ailah waiting for the Naxxramas 1.0 raid to start one night, to my left is Saracell another good friend, and hanging out in the background I realized was Vexa. The Late Night Raiders Hunters were an especially close knit family, and there is not a single one of them that I still do not talk to regularly. Ailah however was one of the founding members of House Stalwart, and for the most part my right hand woman back then when it came to guild organizational things.

Like happens so many times she became the mommy of two awesome boys, and lost a good chunk of her disposable play time. I always enjoy seeing her on when she has the time to play, especially now that she seems to be interested in her hunter again. Thankfully I had been playing Lodin my hunter, so that I could give some basic knowledge about how hunters work these days. It seemed like she had not actually been touched since vanilla because she was wearing all of the same gear we raided in… for the most part everything you see in this picture. I hooked her up with a crafted set of gear that will hopefully ease her transition into Northrend, and some quick advise with at least how I have my bars, talents and glyphs set up. Thankfully huntering is super easy so I am sure she has picked it up quickly. I have to say it was an awesome surprise to see an old friend show up like that, and hopefully she will be around more often. I doubt she will ever have time for raiding and such, but will be nice to run the occasional dungeon together.

Bad At Casters

I have traditionally been horrible at playing casters, that said the warlock feels familiar enough hat this point that it would likely be my caster of choice. While I knew I would never end up leveling a mage, so I used my free boost to 90… the Warlock on the other hand I actually enjoy leveling. He has been sitting at level 75 for quite some time however, so when Ailah started working on the Northrend content I grabbed him to hang out with her for a bit, since he was the only character in the level range. It took me a bit to get used to the controls again, because warlocking feels nothing like huntering, and that is the pet class I have been playing most recently. The only problem with leveling these days is that you really don’t need to use any of your abilities, since things die so quickly. I still have yet to figure out how the whole demonic transformation business works and how best to trigger it. I know it is a thing I can do every so often, but the mechanics behind it are still pretty opaque since things die so insanely quickly.

At some point I really want to finish leveling my Warlock to at least 90. I feel like it might be a caster I would actually enjoy playing, since the Mage is most definitely not that. My biggest problem with the mage is how weak it feels. I hate playing classes that cannot take a hit, so this is why I tend to play Discipline priest over shadow… because the shielding ability gives that class some serious survival. Similarly I like Demonology Warlock because the pet is nice and sturdy and can keep me alive through almost anything. When I say I hate “finger wigglers”, I guess you can more correctly narrow it down to me simply hating the “glass cannon” archetype. I favor survival over damage any day, which might be why I almost always level in tank mode regardless of the class. That is one thing I would love to see them add to the warlock, a caster tank mode since they get called on to tank things already in certain circumstances.

Faffing in the Fjord

March 10, 2014 by Belghast

Losing Time

It seems that no matter what I do to prepare for it, Daylight Savings time still kicks my ass every year. This go round I purposefully started trying to get more sleep from about Thursday onwards, in an attempt to get used to the earlier bedtime. Saturday night I even started referring to things based on EST instead of my normal CST time… to attempt to trick my brain into thinking that was normal. So last night… I hoped above hope that my brain would be able to power down and go to sleep at a decent hour. But instead there I lay in bed trying to get to sleep. I ended up taking some nyquil and playing Bravely Default in bed until I fell asleep.

I am sure Daylight Savings time made sense when we were primarily an agrarian society, however I have no clue why it still exists. Why do we as a country do this to ourselves each and every year. To be honest I do like having a lot more sunshine in the evenings, but since that is the case why not stay offset an hour permanently instead of shifting back in the winter? I mean the days are so short that it really doesn’t matter at all in November if we offset back or not. For whatever reasons even falling back and gaining the hour still seems to screw with my internal systems. I realize that bitching about it will do exactly nothing… but it makes me feel better.

Faffing in the Fjord

So yesterday thanks to the time drain I was feeling a little bit out of sorts. I got up like I do every Sunday morning and played through my Steampowered Sunday game pick for a few hours, then wrote my review of sorts over it. This week was of course Brutal Legend, and if you were interested in winning your own copy… make sure you click the extremely obnoxious vote here button at the bottom of the review. Once I got finished up with all of that silliness I began the massive chore of laundry for the week. Actually in truth it had been a few weeks since we had done laundry, so I knew I needed something that I could walk away from and check on the loads periodically. Generally speaking solo leveling fits the bill perfectly. I am not sure exactly why, but I decided to fiddle with FFSplit and try and figure out this live streaming business.

Normally speaking I always end up leveling my characters through Northrend in Borean Tundra. While it is extremely boring and grindy, it just seems quicker. The zone itself is laid out in more of a hub and spoke pattern and you can progress your way through the zone without a ton of travel time. However since I had not done so in a really long time… I opted to move my little dwarven Warlock to Howling Fjord. A few hubs into the zone I remembered why I stopped doing this… so much travel time. I figured I would share my pain by streaming it so the world could see. The above video is not terribly interesting, but is me spending my afternoon… or at least roughly two hours of it going through the paces of leveling a warlock in Howling Fjord. You can watch me playing video games badly!

More than anything I used this as a way to test how well streaming directly to Twitch.tv works, and then using that to upload to Youtube. So far so good, but I kept my microphone muted during this trial. I was feeling fairly antisocial, but at some point soon I hope to livecast something meaningful. I still need to figure out a good size to put my postage stamp video feed into the stream. At this point I am juggling back and forth between 320 wide and 240 wide, but before I do this for real I want to pretty up my twitch stream a bit with some artwork. Right now this is just stock FFsplit with no real alterations. However credit goes to Scopique, who told me this would be a much easier way to record videos… it just took me months and months to actually fiddle with it.

Belazon Lives!

The other big thing to come from this weekend is that I managed to push my Barbarian to 60 in Diablo 3. The irony of this is thanks to a certain drop, I have completely shifted focus in the way I play it. Previously I had been all about dual wield and cleave, using rend to soak back up some health. However it was either Friday or Saturday night that I got a truly amazing drop that caused me to completely change my build for it. I ended up getting the level 59 version of the “Three Hundredth Spear” to drop, which buffs my throwing damage by 55% and my ancient spear damage by 59%. So as a result I completely rearranged my abilities to be able to use this and now I am more of a hoplite build with spear and shield. Funny how my pure melee class ended up turning into a ranged.

Overall it works extremely well, and I can throw out some truly silly damage on a boss fight. At one point Saturday the trio shown above were working our way through the various bosses in the game, letting Ashgar get the achievement for killing them all wearing nothing but blues. At this point I was using the Boulder Toss rune for Ancient Spear, and it was insane to watch the bosses health move significantly each time a boulder landed. The only problem with this rune is that it changes the functionality of ancient spear significantly. The thing I like the most about it is that it acts almost like a League of Legends skill shot, in that if you can line up a bunch of mobs in a “wave” you can burn through them quickly as your ancient spear will hit each of them in a row.

I was never really a big fan of the Amazon in Diablo 2, but so far my Belazon build seems to be pretty enjoyable. While on a “role”-bending trick, I decided to start a baby mage and attempt to go for the melee mage build. While functional, it just doesn’t feel like a class I would really enjoy. I don’t really like feeling like a glass cannon, and apart from a few shield abilities the class has really weak survival. In my few minutes of playing with my friend Tibuant, I died several times… when I have maybe died twice in total on my Barbarian. I think it might be a class that is enjoyable to solo on, because many of my deaths were simply because Tib and I were not really in sync while playing. He would be off in one direction and I would be off in another, which always ended up with me getting swarmed. I think until the Crusader actually gets unlocked I will mostly piddle around on my Monk and Barbarian attempting to get paragon levels.

Hearthstone

October 18, 2013 by Belghast

Battle of Cards

I am getting around super late this morning to make a blog post. On a whim I decided to take Friday off, since for my wife it was her fall break. I figured the two of us could hang out around the house or do whatever. Then over night I noticed a rather frantic message from my boss. It seems like after 5 his boss had requested something by noon today… that would involve a lot of feedback and information from us worker bees. So as a result I got up around 8 am, got dressed, went out and grabbed breakfast and have been remote into work for the last hour working on the list of information. As a result… my normal early morning post is delayed.

Yesterday I was extremely pumped to get home, because over night I seemed to have received an email from Blizzard saying that my account had finally been flagged for the Hearthstone beta process. Since everyone and their brother is live streaming this on Twitch… I am assuming there is no actual NDA going on… or at least not one currently enforced. So as a result I snapped multiple pictures last night as I played and will be weaving them in here and there. I have to admit I went into this a bit skeptical… not really sure if I would like it or not. From the video I had seen, everything about the game feels rushed much like a LFG dungeon group. Even though you rarely think more than one round ahead… there is still a lot of strategy going on.

The Education

Day[9] has a really good series of videos walking through his first experience with the game, and I highly suggest you watch it if you are curious about how you get into the game. Basically Blizzard has done an amazing job of user education, in that to get started in the game you HAVE to play through a tutorial. Fortunately it does a really good job of slowly introducing you into the various mechanics, and as a result you can pick up the strategy of the game extremely quickly. You play through a series of NPC card fights…starting with Hogger and finishing with an Azerothian Super Villain that I won’t spoil for now.

Once you have finished with the tutorial it has taught you basically everything there is to know about the Mage deck. Essentially the decks are all themed after one of the World of Warcraft classes. I notice that Deathknight is conspicuously absent… so they must be intending to add that in as an expansion opportunity. For those who are familiar with the Duel of the Planeswalkers series of MTG games for consoles and steam… you will be used to the way you progress from here. Now you can take your mage deck and challenge the other classes, by defeating them you unlock the ability to play as that class.

The Sticky-ness

The biggest surprise for me is just how sticky this game was. I got home around 5 pm and started playing around 5:30. I ended up playing this game without pause until around 9:30.. and only then because some guild members needed me to tank a FFXIV dungeon run. I have to say that is fairly unheard of for me, when it comes to card games. I have copies of all of the Duel of the Planeswalker games that have been released, but have maybe logged 50 hours total among ALL of them. There was just something about the physical card game experience that never quite translated to the online version.

Last night over the course of the evening, I managed to unlock all of the different class decks. At various points through the evening I was rewarded with either gold or actual packs of cards. The game uses a quest like system to give you little goals to work towards. If you look above you can see that in the screenshot I have 2 of the 3 wins needed to earn 10 gold. There was another quest I had to level one of the classes to 10, and in doing so I unlocked a pack of cards. Essentially it seems like there are two kinds of cards you can get… Basic cards that are unlocked through completing quests and scenarios and leveling… and Expert cards that are unlocked through either purchasing or winning packs of cards.

The Money

Since this game is free to play, you have to be asking yourself… where do they make money. Well like always with any card game it is in the packs. I took a screenshot of the current store interface. You will notice that the packs that be bought with either in game gold currency that you earn by completing achievements or be purchased with real world currency. You can purchase a single pack with 100 gold, 2 packs for $2.99 ($1.49 each), 7 packs for $9.99 ($1.42 each), 15 packs for $19.99 ($1.32 each) or 40 packs for $49.99 ($1.24 each). So as you can see in buying in bulk like you would expect you keep getting more and more of a discount on the per pack price.

Through the course of play last night I earned 5 packs of cards either through a combination of gold or actually winning the packs outright. I have to say the sound design and animation are amazing… and really capture the same excitement of opening a real pack of cards. You can double click the pack to open it… or for a more tactile experience drag it open. Similarly all five cards in a pack come flying out onto the screen… but do so face down. This allows you to flip them over one by one similar to sifting through a physical pack of cards. They know their audience well and have put in a number of tactile hooks to increase the sense of suspense to see if you have something good or not.

Versus Players

Currently you have the option of playing progressively harder NPC decks, or setting out and playing some physical players. Quite honestly I have found playing players a bit easier than playing the expert decks. There are two PVP modes of play… the first of which is simply building a custom deck and then taking it on the road to fight against other players. The second of which is the Arena, which serves as this games “draft” mode, giving both a more random experience but also potentially a more balanced one.

I am not sure if this regenerates but you get at least one free Arena token, after that it appears to either cost 150 in game gold or $1.99 to unlock additional tokens. In the Arena you choose a class and then are presented with a series of three cards. The card you keep goes into your arena deck, and the other two are discarded. This continues on until you have chosen 30 cards for your deck. An Arena deck lasts until you have lost three times. At the end of the match you are rewarded based on how well you did. For me I got 2 sacks of gold 2 packs of cards and a rare paladin card for playing. I won three times and lost three times.

The interesting thing about the Arena is the fact that you don’t have to play it all in one sitting. So long as you have not lost your three matches you can continue playing arena. There is some bar of gems that fills up each time you win, but I am not 100% certain how that works. You might get punted out of the Arena if you win too often as well. Last night I played through a single arena match and then was off playing custom games with players. My little hunter deck seems to be doing pretty well, so I will likely return to doing some of that today. I have to say I am very pleasantly surprised in just how good of a game Hearthstone is.