World of Warcraft Archives - Page 64 of 108

Triple Triad Anyone?

February 25, 2015 by Belghast

Miserable Defined

I am getting my morning post out extremely late today, because I have been attempting to sleep. Since last Thursday I have been fighting something and going into crazy coughing fits. Finally yesterday I went to the doctor and it turns out it is a bad case of bronchitis they are worried may turn into pneumonia. As such I am resting as much as I can, but I am in this odd state of limbo. They gave me a Z-Pack of antibiotics and some prednisone, but there are times the cure feels worse than the problem. I grew up a sick kid, and constantly taking doses of prednisone to get over whatever issue I happened to have at the moment. I am not sure if this is an all people thing or just the way my body metabolizes the drug, but it puts me in this state of being ravenously hungry, unable to sleep, and alternating between freezing cold and burning hot.

My blog post is happening so late because I thought I would try and get as much sleep as I could this morning. Unfortunately the moment after I got to bed in earnest… I went into the regular course of coughing fits. I really need to find a way to sleep standing up comfortably. I’ve never been one of those people that could actually sleep in a recliner, though as I type this I am at least attempting to rest on the sofa. I am hoping today is the day when things start to turn around. Generally speaking the second day on prednisone starts with you feeling considerably worse and then by that evening life is starting to get better again. In the mean time my kitten is being adorable beside me on the sofa and keeping my company.

Triple Triad Anyone?

Yesterday was an insanely huge day for MMO patches. In Final Fantasy XIV 2.51 was patched in unleashing upon the world the greatest time sink ever… Triple Triad. When Final Fantasy XIV came out, it was during the heyday of collectible card gaming. So I was floored when I saw that they had their own deviously simple card game inside of a game. I remember farming monsters to get gold, to buy better cards… to ultimately get a better deck so I could duel NPCs… and win better cards. It was one giant feedback loop that kept me enthralled for months as I tried to collect all of the cards in the game. I was so into this game that I tracked down physical cards and purchased a handful of extremely expensive for the time imported packs. Nowadays single packs are selling on ebay for upwards of $60… I think maybe I paid like $5 a pack at the time… which I thought was highway robbery. Now I can play the game inside of another game I already love… and so far I have not really left the Golden Saucer other than to duel npcs out in the world.

Though honestly… as amazing as the Manderville Golden Saucer is… who would want to go anywhere else? I know there is more to this patch than this one attraction but I feel like this is the part that I have been waiting on since it was first announced. I puttered around trying out each of the minigames, and so far the one that is easiest to increase your Manderville Gold Points, the currency needed by all Golden Saucer games, is the strength tester. It costs a single MGP to play, and if you can press the hammer at exactly the right moment you can get 5 MGP in return. This will take forever, but should be able potential way to earn enough money safely if you so choose. Triple Triad on the other hand has significantly better payouts, so my hope is that I can build a good enough deck to regularly dual the King and win. There are already videos online with some strategies for winning against the king with the default deck. Right now however my priority as always will be to win more cards.. because that is the part of the game that is interesting to me.

Heirlooms for Everyone

Not to be outshined, yesterday was also the release date of the 6.1 patch in World of Warcraft. With it came a number of quality of life changes like the brand new heirloom system. One of the coolest things about it, was the fact that any heirlooms that you owned, got bumped up to level 90 preemptively. For the most part heirlooms seem to be around 500g for the level 60 version, 1500g or so for the upgrade to 90, and then 5000g or so for the upgrade to level 100. All of which seem really reasonable to me. The best feature is that you can have the same heirloom on as many characters as you like. As such my army of horde alts are now fully kitted out in heirloom gear for at least level 60. To make the process a little easier they introduced a new currency called Misprinted Draenic Coins that actually give us a proper reason to do a daily heroic! You can turn these in for the items used to upgrade your heirlooms.

In other news, last night I limped through the raid even though I likely should have done so. I performed pretty shitty all night long, but I did well enough to keep from screwing anyone else up. We started the night with Gruul, moved to Hans and Franz and then Darmac before starting in work once more on Oregorger. We finally either reached a point in gear where we could handle the damage and healing, or we simply got better at moving… but whatever it was we managed to finally defeat Oregorger removing what had become a physical and mental wall. The other night when we tried Kagraz it seemed like we could get that fight down without much more effort. Similarly I think we will be preparing to play with trains and Operator Thogar. My hope is that we can get back our momentum and get closer to clearing the instance on normal at least. My hope is that soon we will give at least Gruul a poke on heroic. We have that fight pretty well under control, so I can’t see as how we should not be clearing the first bosses of each wing on heroic before too much longer. In the meantime I am hoping my medication kicks and I can return to live as normal… because being sick sucks.

Flamebending for Fun

February 18, 2015 by Belghast

Serious Time with Bel

This morning I am going to break from my normally positive fluffy posts to talk about something fairly serious. Hopefully you will bear with me, because it is a topic I believe strongly about. A few days ago my good friend Jaedia crafted an excellent post talking about her frustrations and outright anger with sexual objectification especially in video game culture. This sparked an interesting discussion among both the women and men on my twitter feed, and I personally ended up rebroadcasting it twice for emphasis. Over the years I have watched as my female friends have had to constantly battle everything from largely harmless statements to the downright creepy and dangerous. What happens time and time again is there is this thread where folks are discussing a specific topic… and then out of the blue some guy will make a comment inappropriately off topic. Then almost by queue it happened to this very discussion.

I’ve decided to mosaic the information about the person and the participants in the discussion to attempt their anonymity. Granted you can scroll through my feed and likely find out who this is about, but in truth I don’t think the guy in question meant any real harm by it. The problem is it was just tragically timed, and interrupting a conversation about objectification. Essentially he was being the poster child of this thing that everyone was talking about being frustrated about… IN the discussion about it. When I called him out on it, he immediately got defensive which is exactly the wrong action to take. If someone calls you out on something in regards to something that is making another person uncomfortable… your reaction should be to re-evaluate this action you just took, not to mount a defense against the “slander”.

After a mountain of back and forth, of Jae and I trying to explain what exactly the transgression was, we get down to the real root of the problem. He quite literally did not care what the conversation was about, and instead felt the need to chime in with his comment. There is this ingrained feeling of the divine right to pass judgment on the appearance of others, made worse by the thought that they should do it against the context of the current conversation. The comment that was made was completely harmless and in the right context would have been perfectly acceptable. However I have seen this play out time and time again… Female friend posts a serious topic, and guys below comment about how pretty she is. Do you not realize just how creepy that seems? The guy in question apparently did not, and he spent awhile raging that we were picking on him for having a penis, completely missing the point. My hope is that by posting about this others might think twice before they interrupt the context of a conversation to essentially objectify the speaker with something completely off topic.

Flamebending for Fun

Last week was a rough week for our raid. We had several people out with the death flu and as a result quite literally half of our healing corp was absent. Early in the day on Thursday it sounded like we were not actually going to raid. After talking to our raid lead, he told me not to worry about rushing home… and instead went out to eat with my wife and ran a few errands. When I got home they were knee deep in Highmaul and I am uncertain what the final results of it were. As a result of not raiding since last Tuesday I was looking forward to hopefully getting back into Blackrock Foundry and making some forward momentum. We started the evening by taking down Hans and Franz. There are a lot of moving parts in that fight, and some RNG elements… but ultimately on our third attempt we got our second kill in the books. My luck with loot in Blackrock was not going to hold however, as I walked away with double gold.

The rest of the evening we spent working on the boss directly after Hans and Franz… Flamebender Ka’graz. She essentially is a blademaster, and as we know blademasters are good at two things… fire based attacks and spinning weapons. There are a bunch of things going on in the fight, the first is dealing with the placement of her flame slash attacks, which draw giant lines from the boss to the edge of the room and will target players outside of melee range. The next problem child is two flame wolves that act much the same as Corehounds in that you have to dps them down within a few minutes of each other, otherwise they will re-ignite the other hound. The last really frustrating attack is that she does a massive room wide fire AOE that players need to stack up for and heal through. We managed to make some solid progress on her, but for whatever reason could not seem to get all the moving parts together. On our best try we managed to get her down to around 30% I believe, but the healing on this fight and the placement of objects ends up with us slowly bleeding players until we simply do not have enough to finish the battle. My hope is with some more research we can come in Thursday and wreck her.

Attempting Neverwinter

If you remember a few days ago I had a post talking about the three games that I would like to revisit. One of them was Neverwinter by Cryptic now Perfect World, so after the raid I fired it up rather than what has become my more recent winding down game… Guild Wars 2. All told I played around 45 minutes of the game, and it was roughly how I remembered it. There are positives about it and negatives… the most glaring is this feeling that everything you actually want is somehow locked behind a confusing two tier currency system. You have Astral Diamonds and you have Zen… and the two do very similar functions. The problem is it feels absolutely arbitrary which currency is used for which thing. Since I was a preorder I got a large quantity of Astral Diamonds, but it seems like the main function of them is to speed up tasks like training your companion. All of the useful unlocks and content walls seem to be purchased with Zen. That whole mess pretty much guarantees that I would never play this game seriously.

What I was surprised by was how fun the actual dungeons were. Granted I didn’t run a “real” five man dungeon last night, but I did do one of the many lairs that the storyline weaves you in and out of. The one I completed was some sort of orc barracks, and considerably larger than the ones I remember. There were no less than three boss fights, and several hidden treasure chests. The only thing that I really disliked about the gameplay was the fact that health did not regenerate. It was something that I could get used to, but it is just so against the norm of the games I play normally. In fact I stood around waiting for awhile waiting before I realized that my health was not coming back at all… at which point I remembered that I had to use health pots. Mechanically the game is interesting, but I still have the same opinion. Elder Scrolls online just does the action combat style better. That said there is a wealth of player generated content, so more than likely I will be spending my time exploring that.

Doubling Down

February 12, 2015 by Belghast

Still Frustrated

Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it. I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning. At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go. As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope. While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go. Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are. In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next. For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark… but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world. Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”. It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words. If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list… so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem. I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow. I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either. I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well. I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change… but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play. I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case. I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over. There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past. I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features. I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse. When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways. We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre. We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet. Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place. I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better. I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem. How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released? I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game. This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits. The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already. The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events. I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world. Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere? Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential. Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home. I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV. For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha. I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul. Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different. That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons. It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally. I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking. The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight. If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along. I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often. I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night. While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.

Rough Raid Night

February 11, 2015 by Belghast

An Innocent Start

Most strange happenings on the internet begin with a rather innocuous start. I was discussing handwriting with @tsundereikemen and I decided to create a hand written note to show off my rather messy all caps writing. Then I happened to go directly into a meeting for roughly an hour. When I got out.. my twitter feed had completely blown up with people returning my greeting in their own hand written style. Yesterday I joked about Sigtric coining the hashtag “BelEffect” so he was immediate to point out that it was happening again. Of course I had to share this sudden madness with the world, because folks had no idea what I was talking about. I lost a few followers in my flurry of re-tweets, but screw it this was worth it. The “happening” was enough happiness to buffer any frustrations for the rest of the day.

The awesome thing is… I posted a second note some time later to adequately explain my feelings about the whole event… and it started up again adding several more notes to the mix. This silly thing is the reason why my twitter feed is so damned great. You guys can somehow manage to take a boring work day and turn it into a magical experience by tweeting a bunch of hand written notes. I always love seeing someone’s handwriting no matter how unkempt it might be… because embedded in those strokes and swooshes are a persons personality. So thank you all for participating in this little experiment… it was neither original nor that unique, but it was most definitely not something I expected to start yesterday. If you want to check out all of the images, I will be attempting to insert a gallery below.

Rough Raid Night

Not all raid nights can be amazing… in fact every now and then you can have a down right shitty one. Last night was one of these nights, and that is just something that is going to happen now and then. It seems like half of the world is sick with something right now, and last night it claimed two of our primary healers. This put us going into the night at a pretty big handicap, one that we never quite made up for. Ithato is freaking awesome for stepping in and trying to hold things together, and he fought valiantly. The problem is it just wasn’t quite enough. He was not quite as geared as the healers we lost, and had not been raiding with us all this time… so was having to learn the boss strategies on the fly. On top of these, the raid itself was just not quite what it should have been. I feel like the evidence was the fact that Teamspeak was deathly silent, which is not a usual thing. When we are doing well we are chatty and happy and picking on Rylacus, but last night… no one was talking at all.

We started off trying Gruul but after a half dozen wipes realized we didn’t quite have what it took last night to down it. From there we moved back to Highmaul Heroic, and managed to down Kargath and Butcher before hitting a similar wall on Brakenspore. We finally called the night, hoping to regroup on Thursday and see what we can do. If the gods bless us, we will have back the two healers that were absent and hopefully be back in fighting form. If not… it isn’t the end of the world if we can’t quite progress for a week. We are not exactly the most cutting edge and serious of group, and I think every now and then it is a good thing for us to be reminded of that. The health and well being of our players is worth more than our forward momentum, and I am thankful we have a raid leader that sees that… instead of angrily grinding us into the ground. I love my raid, even when we “wipe like nubs”.

Hunting Pearls

Since the raid was a wash, I opted to log into Final Fantasy XIV and work on my weekly Crystal Tower quest. With this last patch and the entrance of the World of Darkness casual raid, they introduced a quest to do all three dungeons and collect pearls and turn them back in at a quest giver in Mor Dhona. Since I had a bit of time I queued up for Labyrinth of the Ancients and was pleasantly surprised at just how smoothly it went. Normally there are wipes around every corner, but I guess at this point folks are trying to complete the quest, and as such are far over geared for the place. I lost every roll on any of the cosmetic gear, but was in and out of the raid quickly enough for me to contemplate running Syrcus Tower as well. Unfortunately it did not go quite as smoothly as Labyrinth, and we suffered some pretty massive wipe fests. That said folks silently struggled through and we managed to clear it still within thirty minutes of starting.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your take… I had completely World of Darkness collecting its pearl on Monday night, but not running the other other two. As a result I was able to turn in the quest and get my Carboncoat. This allows you to “un-weather” any of the Poetics accessories turning them into ilvl 130 items. Unfortunately I am not sure how to get Carbontwine the item needed to do the same for the Ironworks armor pieces, other than the extremely grindy method of turning in 6 Unstained Mark Logs. I think I will likely wait for 2.55 since it is more than likely that they will let World of Darkness start dropping both Carboncoat and Carbontwine just like Syrcus Tower drops Oil of Time and Sands of Time. It is unlikely that we will be raiding anything bleeding edge enough for me to need to be level 130 geared. In any case my running around in Final Fantasy XIV while chatting with the Free Company made the evening seem a tad bit less dismal, which I guess is what ultimately mattered. Hopefully we will regroup on Thursday and kick some ass to make up for the rather crummy Tuesday.