warrior Archives - Page 8 of 18 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Snipers and Hellboars

November 16, 2017 by Belghast

One of the core problems with Destiny 2 is that progression is all about luck. What I mean by that is especially as you wind down towards the end of the power curve, everything lives or dies upon what you happen to pull from your powerful engrams each week. Once upon a time SquirrelPope told me that he started getting random world 300 blues when he hit 299.5 on his base light level. I’m at 299.8 at this point and have yet to see one and nor have I actually seen any of the supposed vendor engrams that go as high as 300. At this point on my Titan I need a chest and a class item to hit 305, which admittedly is way sooner than it happened during the console release. That said everything is luck of the draw for me and this week my luck was just about as bad as I could possibly get. In total I got six sniper rifles among the nine powerful gear packages that I have opened on my characters. Sniper rifle being the only weapon that I consider utterly useless because I have yet to find one that is even close to being worthy of that power slot. Grenade Launcher is traditionally a stinker as far as slots go, but even there I have Berenger’s Memory and Play of the Game that I like using. If I absolutely had to use a sniper… so far the only one that seems even viable is Gentleman Vagabond from crucible packages but even then… there are so many other good weapons that I could be using in that slot.

#Destiny2 PSA: You are likely using Scorch Canons wrong. After firing hold trigger down. After 4 seconds scorch round will double in size. Release for massive explosion. Conserves ammo, does more damage than spamming.

— Bel 🆚 Slug Emperor (@belghast) November 15, 2017

I tweeted this comment out last night and I thought I would post it on my blog as well this morning. I promise I meant this to be helpful and not ragey, but it does frustrate me when I see players effectively wasting the scorch cannon rounds spamming the crap out of them. I admit that I did not know this was even possible until I got to run the Wrath of the Machine raid in Destiny year three, so I went that long effectively using them wrong myself. The scorch cannon at face value looks like a rocket launcher with a lot of ammo, but it is way more than that even though the bosses that use it never actually use them to their full power either. With Titan being the weekly flashpoint planet, you are going to encounter a lot of scorch cannons considering 2 of the 3 available events on that planet involve Fallen Walkers. The weapon has a somewhat hidden alternate fire that involves holding down the trigger after you have fired the round and letting the munition grow in size before releasing and letting it explode. You are going to have an auditory and visual queue to this and while you can continue to let this go and keep gaining strength as Squirrel pointed out last night, my personal experience is that the 4 second rule seems to be the most efficient for killing those walker tanks. What I do is fire a round and then duck behind cover while holding the trigger allowing the munition to grow in size and about 4 seconds into holding it visually doubles in size. At this point I let it go and let the damage get dealt while lining up a shot for another round. Basically doing this will burn your target faster and easier I might add than spamming rounds and also give you more than enough ammo to take out both tanks with a single Scorch Cannon. The AOE explosion is also fun for dealing with waves of yellow bar captains and such, but unfortunately this is a tidbit of ancestral knowledge that has not yet circulated through most of the population given that I see most players wasting these weapons. As a result I just wanted to toss this thought out there and hopefully it sticks.

As far as last night goes however… after my crushing disappointment of being in sniper rifle hell… I decided to chill out on the sofa with my new favorite orc. At this point I am just shy of level 64 and am still in the Hellfire area cleaning up the quests. In theory I should be able to completely skip Zangarmarsh and go to Terrokar, doing the every other zone leapfrog across Outland much like I have done with Legion content. There is something extremely relaxing about Warrioring it up and all the while chatting occasionally with the Facepull crew horde side. Mostly World of Warcraft is serving as this super relaxing comfort gaming time for me, and with work being as stressful as it has been lately I guess I am finding I need it. Right now it is looking like I won’t really get to take much time off for the holidays other than the default days they give us off. I have too many deadlines crashing in together at the same time, and this is also throwing a massive monkey wrench in my traditional Pax South plans. Right now unless something massively changes I will not be attending this year which is a bit of a bummer considering I’ve gone every year since its inception so far. It also means I will miss out on meeting up with friends and hanging out… and the biggest bummer of all is that I just found out my friend Cuppy is on a panel this year. I would have loved to have seen that, but then again I am absolutely horrible at actually attending panels at Pax. I tend to miss them while wandering around doing other things. Even if not for Pax I am hoping to make it back to Austin as some point in the future.

Crazy Axe

June 26, 2017 by Belghast

As of last night I am now officially at the Stormblood level cap. That said I still have a bunch of content left to run because I know my MSQ is stalled behind at dungeon at the moment…. and then I also know from hearing folks talk about it that there is another trial of some sort after that. I was feeling a little too out of it to go seeking a dungeon group, so instead I focused on finishing the warrior quest line, which gave me a set of gear that I will probably never wear at least cosmetically… and this bizarre axe. As a whole though Stormblood provided me with lots of glamour fodder, including this chest piece that I have become rather fond of. I actually dinged 70 while running the second primal. I decided to do a trials roulette, and next thing I know I am zoning into that fight. The first pull went about as well as you would expect that a modern era primal fight would go. On the second pull however I took a moment to ask folks if there was anything about the fight that they didn’t understand, and answered a bunch of questions. As I was able to do I also hollered out when a few key mechanics were coming up to remind folks about them. Things went off the rails a bit during that second attempt but we managed to hold on and ultimately finished the fight.

The story as a whole has continued to be amazing, but I am finding myself at a loss for screenshots to put in my blog posts that are not insanely spoilery. I find myself trying to snap moments where nothing much is going on that won’t give away any major story beats. I find it interesting how generally speaking I am not that beholden to a story in other games… but in Final Fantasy XIV I am anxious to find out what is going on. I guess part of it is that in a single player story… the experience doesn’t feel real. What I mean by that is it is something that I experience and then once the story has reached its conclusion it is functionally over… at least for another several years until they release a sequel. In an MMO… story sets the stage for what is to come and gives us a glimpse in what we will be doing a few months down the road. The story feels more alive to me because I am going to be living it, and I am going to be adjusting to whatever changes it happens to bring to the stage for a long while. My friends and I are going to be fighting our way through the epic battles that are proposed each time the story leads us some place new. I guess this is why I get into the lore of Destiny as well, because even though the grimoire cards are a crummy system… they give us a glimpse at the future to come and let me start day dreaming about epic adventures that are just over the horizon.

Another thing that happened this weekend was the “launch” of Secret World Legends. Sure they are calling it a head start, but if you are letting in everyone who played the previous game… you are effectively launching it. More than anything I wanted to get in and make sure that all of my stuff transferred just fine, and more importantly that my lifetime subscription did in fact transfer over into lifetime patron status. For those who played the first game… I highly suggest you check out the page on the transfer system so you can claim anything that might be eligible for transfer. I’ve heard that this system is only going to be available through August 31st and there are a bunch of guidelines and fine print to follow to make sure everything copies just fine. I probably need to do some more fiddling to make sure that everything does in fact copy. I had a character of each faction so in theory it should have… but I probably need to go ahead and create those other faction characters so I can double check. The most important item was of course the Csicon alien smiley t-shirt… which I am rocking in the image above. So far I am digging the game changes, but unfortunately it just happened to launch at a really horrible time for me since I am so heavily engaged in Stormblood. I will continue to piddle around and experience the content, and it serves as an awesome “taking a break” game for me right now. We talk a bit about but Secret World Legends and Stormblood on this weekends podcast, which I am embedding below.

Breaking Silence

September 12, 2016 by Belghast

After the challenges of last week, this past weekend was largely a time to chill out and relax. On the “paw” front I am pleased to announce that the round of IV antibiotics seemed to work pretty well given that the swelling is largely down as is the redness. There is one spot that is a bit troubling, but we are watching it. I am guessing that the location went a little deeper than the rest and as such might take a little longer to recover. There is always the fear that the bite penetrated a tendon or something else, but we will continue to watch it as it hopefully heals. On the gaming front… I had all of these grand ideas about running nonstop dungeons, but what happened in reality is that I wound up chilling with the wife downstairs and watching various stuff on the television. It felt like it would be an invasion of the peace and quiet to get on voice chat and start talking “strategery” and such. What happened instead is that I queued up a few times as a pug dps, and spent time working on older stuff in the meantime while waiting on that lengthy queue to pop. Of note on the Ruin server group, the queue time for a DPS is about 45 minutes, which means I had plenty of time to work on other objectives while waiting on the queue to pop. I spent some time in Warlords farming spawns attempting to get my Shatari Defense reputation up… because I am admittedly a bit jealous of Grace and her amazing fire mammoth mount that she keeps running around on. The only problem there is it seems with the opening of Tanaan Jungle at least one of the farm spots has been nerfed into the ground… and Shattrath city has spawns really far apart making it hard to gather things up and AOE them down with whirlwind spam.

Another queue I wound up spending on the Isle of Giants in Pandaria where I learned a few key things. Firstly once again it is hard to gather everything up and AOE it down… because my aggro radius is minuscule now with the dinosaurs. Second I can apparently now easily solo Oondasta as Fury, so that is going to go on the mount farming list. The white raptor mount has been something I have worked on for awhile, and yesterday I ground out the last 2000 bones roughly. The queue popped before I could actually turn in, so I had to finish things up after the dungeon. The real takeaway from the weekend however is… my theory of treating World of Warcraft like Final Fantasy XIV seems to largely be working. Upon entering a dungeon, be it as tank or as dps… I do my customary “Hey Folks” which seems to unjam the conversation mechanism. Then throughout the dungeon folks tend to be willing to talk, but if I don’t say anything… it seems like folks are willing to just ride along in silence because there has always been the wowism that silence is preferable to dealing with assholes. The thing is… I think we can do better and a lot of the negative opinion folks have of this community is due to the fact that folks are willing to either put up with bullshit in dungeons because they want it to be over and don’t want to have to deal with another 45 minute queue. I am not sure if it is going to help, but I am absolutely making an effort to talk to people be it in my Class Hall fielding questions like I did yesterday… or running a dungeon, or even out in the world while doing an objective. I think most of us just simply assumed that no one was willing to have conversation, and I am trying to flip that assumption on its head.

The other big thing from the weekend is that I started work on my second character. Some time ago I started Exeter my Paladin off by getting Lightbringer. However after swapping Belghast to tanking, I am finding it way easier to quest like a madman in that mode. So as soon as I hit 102 I did the quest chain to pick up the second artifact, and had been holding artifact power items in reserve for awhile. Unlike Belghast I have a clear path that I am planning on working towards first, which I guess makes the experience feel more purposeful. On the Warrior protection tree there were so many cool things that I wanted, but none of them seemed to be clearly better than any of the others. Paladin it feels like there is one right choice for survival, and I am going in that direction first. Largely I devoted the time spent during the podcast to working on this guy, and by the end of the night I had hit 102 and was off into tanky land. I apparently also unlocked one of the appearances so I quickly swapped to the purple look and used it as an excuse to rock my purple judgement set. The one set that I wish existed in game is the yellow judgement set that you see one of the NPCs wearing. As it stands I have normal, Blue from the opening of Wrath event, and purple from the BC era heroics. This really is the best looking tier set in the game, and I wish more recolored sets would show up in dungeons, which reminds me… at some point I really need to work on farming up the turquoise wrath set. In any cases it was a good weekend and fairly relaxing, but it is my hope that with the week I will be back doing dungeons with friends again. I am now up to 823 item level on Belghast, which means I need to be hitting up those heroics.

Battered Paw

September 8, 2016 by Belghast

The last twenty four hours has been interesting for a few reasons… most of them not terribly good. A few days back I introduced you to Luna, and to say her integration into our family has not been going swimmingly is an understatement. She is quite possibly one of the sweetest cats we have encountered… when it is human to cat interactions. However as she has gotten more comfortable in the house, she has also become less tolerate and more willing to straight up fight our other two cats. We are trying to work through this, but occasionally one of us has to try and break up a fight. Yesterday my wife attempted to break up one of those fights by trying to remove our youngest from the situation. In a highly stressed and freaked out state Kenzie bit the shit out of her hand. Now this same sequence of events had happened a few weeks earlier to me… but this time Luna bit me. For me everything seemed to be fine once I stopped the bleeding because four puncture wounds can really produce a lot of blood. For my wife however she is having some adverse effects… namely that her hand is swollen, red and fevered. Yesterday after work she went to an urgent care place here in town, and they too were concerned giving her a shot of antibiotics, and a ten day course. They also drew a boundary around the effected area saying, if the redness breaks this line… to get to the emergency room because my wife will need a course of IV antibiotics.

Needless to say I am now doing a lot of things for her, given that it is painful to grip anything in her primary hand. I’ve latched a couple of bras and opened a lot of pill bottles and pretty much anything else that requires grip strength. I would post a picture of her poor battered “paw” but honestly I am not sure the comfort level folks have with seeing injuries. When I posted my knee, it looked questionable but there were no open wounds. This on the other hand feels like it would cross some invisible internet line. Needless to say it looks bad, and thanks to the irregular line around it… and the swollen nature of the area… it kinda reminds me of a jellyfish. On the Luna front, what is ultimately happening is that we have built her a little suite of sorts in my wife’s office with litter, food and water and some comfy places to chill. She is ultimately staying there when we go to bed around midnight, and then getting back out when we are physically home and able to intervene if needed. The problem with this is that when I let her out each night she is starved for attention, and it just makes me feel horrible for doing it. That said I don’t want either side of this squabble to injure themselves further. Both Luna and Kenzie/Allie have several battle scars already from the past scuffles. Nothing yet that needs a trip to the vet thankfully, but still I don’t want to encourage more unsupervised “encounters”. Additionally when we are at home we try and make sure there is one of us on each floor of the house… so that there are clear safe zones that they can stay away from each other. I just am not sure how we get past this current situation and get to one where they at least tolerate being in the same room… if not hopefully someday are friends.

As far as the game goes, last night was a night of doing so many World Quests. Early in the evening I unlocked a set of quests… the first was to do 30 World Quests, and the second was to collect 30 Demonic Runes. Somehow I managed to actually complete both of these last night during my extended play session. With my wife in her current injured state I purposefully tried not to get into anything that I could not also get out of rapidly. There are so many little things that she just needs help with at the moment, and I didn’t want to inconvenience her or my party by getting into group content. So I spent the majority of the night running around doing these little vignettes of action, and I guess I caught it at exactly the right time… because when I finished the first round there were a handful of new ones up popping which allowed me to complete the 30 in total. This is not the sort of thing I will do often, as in try and do “all the quests” but it was fun to do it at least once. One of the things that I like the most about World Quests is that I don’t have to worry about collecting a quest… and if I get interrupted having it stranded in my quest log that I will then have to abandon to pick up something else of importance. I get to enjoy the action while it is happening and then forget about it if I need to get pulled away. The real shocker of the night however was that I did one of the PVP quests… admittedly without really intending to. I was bouncing around the map and noticed that there was a nearby quest with good rewards…. and it was only after I had killed a few mobs did I realize that I was now apparently flagged. It took a lot of deaths… not to PVP but just to the density of the mobs, but I managed to complete it and get my shiny bauble. All in all it seems like these are a way more reasonable and enjoyable form of potential PVP for me… it is doing an objective that has a clear reward at the end… rather than just killing players for the sake of killing players.