World of Warcraft Archives - Page 71 of 108

Wishes for the Next Year

December 31, 2014 by Belghast

Failed Futurism

Over the last few days I have made a few posts recounting some of the positives and negatives of the last year. Today I want to place my eyes forward towards the next year and what I hope it might bring. One of the problems with futurism is that generally speaking it is always going to be wrong. 2015 was the year that Marty McFly went forward to in Back to the Future 2, and that movie made a ton of guesses about what the future would look like, most of them being completely wrong. That said we are at least getting a form of a hoverboard next year, granted we will have to pave the streets in conductive metal for it to actually work properly however. The thing I find funny is how no work of futurism ever seems to get just how incrementally fashion evolves, because I doubt any of us are going to start wearing chokers made of bullets or a darth vader breastplate. Instead of futurism I am going to focus on my hopes for the year to come.

Gamers Stop Being Assholes

While yesterday I spent my post reveling in just how awesome my gaming community was over the past year, the larger community has not really been an awesome place to be. Our very small niche of a community has figured out more or less how to exist in a relative state of harmony. Outside the gated community however, things are pretty much in a constant state of martial law. My hope is that this year gamers can figure out that it is cool to have lots of people playing in their sandbox, that may or may not look the same or want the same thing as them. Diversity only serves to make things more interesting, because really as we learned during the 90s… just how many doom clones can we really stomach? At the very least I would love that gamers would stop endangering the lives of others with their misguided crusades. We are all here, we all play games… lets enjoy that fact and quit trying to claim this person or that person isn’t as much of a “real” gamer as you are.

More so than all of this… I would really love it if my natural instinct when confronted with having to play with a group of strangers is not to clench my sphincter and prepare for the worst. I would love to be able to approach grouping with random players the way that I used to before I started turning off every public channel in any game I was playing. There is a great post from Liore summing up a lot of these feelings of dread. Mostly I feel like a lot of gamers have forgotten why we started playing games in the first place… not for the competition, or not to be the best at something… but because we used to honestly have fun doing it. I have tried really hard to embrace this spirit of fun and positivity, but you can only be told “you fucking suck” so many times by a random stranger before you stop trying to interact with anyone that is not already connected to you. I’ve branched out and made a lot of friends, more than I can possibly list… but for the most part when I play a new game, I shut off all the public channels and hang out with people I already knew before going into it. This year… I would love this to change.

Settling Down for Awhile

For years I have been searching for something, a magical spark that seems to have been missing for me in MMO games. Over the last several years I have tried extremely hard to make this game or that game my new home. I tried to make Rift work, and tried to forcibly bring all of my friends along on that journey with me. I tried to do the same with Final Fantasy XIV, and Wildstar, and Star Wars the Old Republic, and The Elder Scrolls Online. In order for that spark to exist two things need to be there… firstly there needs to be tons of things for me to do, and an insane amount of goals and sub goals to keep my mind busy and engaged. Secondly there needs to be a solid and thriving community to keep me engaged socially. This past year I found that spark, but in two different places… both of which appeal to slightly different sides of me. As a result I am splitting time between raiding in Final Fantasy XIV on Mondays and World of Warcraft on Tuesdays and Thursdays… and occasionally Wednesday fun runs.

So far this mix works extremely well for me. There are things I like about both games, and I like the freedom of being able to flip back and forth between them at will. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time in Azeroth, but I think that is a counter reaction to the fact that I spent the last three months exclusively engaged in Eorzea. I feel no less connected to one when I am spending time in the other. I am playing both games and I am happy to be doing it. My hope for this year is that by the time we reach next December that I will still be playing both games happily. I am in amazing raid groups in both, and the content is keeping me engaged in ways that I feel like only one game would not be able to satisfy. I have a feeling that when new content is released in one, I will shift to mostly playing it… and versa vicea. My hope is that I have found a combination that works for me… and I can settle down for a long while here. I’ve gotten tired of the constant game jumping and want some stability for awhile.

Personal Projects

2014 saw me getting involved in a bunch of projects other than the Tales of the Aggronaut blog. I kept up my rigor of daily posts and in April I celebrated both my 5th anniversary as a blog, and my first year of daily posting. This coming April I will be able to celebrate a second year of daily posting and another year as a blog. My hope is throughout all of 2015 I will be able to keep up this daily posting thing. This past year also saw the launch of the AggroChat podcast along with my friends Rae, Ashgar, Kodra, Tamrielo and sometimes participants Dallian and Raven. Over the course of the first season we recorded 37 episodes of Aggrochat, and I think that is pretty damned solid. We made it over a lot of the awkward hurdles, especially considering I knew absolutely nothing about making a podcast before we started. Those first few episodes are mighty painful to listen to at this point, and I am sure after another year the entire first season will feel the same. We are anything but professional, but we have a large enough following that I feel like we must be doing something right.

This year also saw me start a fledgling experimental podcast called “Bel Folks Stuff”. So far three folks have been gracious enough to have a conversation about “stuff” with me, and I am thinking overall it works pretty well. The podcast has a much smaller footprint as a whole, but I am okay with that. In January I have another individual lined up for another conversation, and hopefully another in February. Basically this is just an excuse to have a conversation with friends and push the record button while doing so. Other than this there is another thing looming on the horizon that should be exciting for 2015, but I don’t really want to talk about it much until I am ready to announce it. Essentially my hope is that 2015 will be as awesome of a year for my side projects as this year has been. I could not do this without all the awesome people supporting me, and the constant help of my friends who always seem to be willing to follow me down whatever rabbit hole I fall into. Thanks to you all for taking this journey with me… I may not know what the next day will bring… but I know I will always have you along with 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.

Serial Entertainment

December 27, 2014 by Belghast

Altism Required

Yesterday I made statement on twitter about how much I appreciated how good the overall pacing of Warlords of Draenor has been. This is especially evident as I quite literally played my 7th character through the Tanaan Jungle sequence, and I am still not bored with it. The pacing of the content has these moments where you are “called to action” and moments allowing you to chill out and faff about for awhile. Granted the entire system is riddled with moments of faff, but I enjoyed the fact that these were built in when following the main story arc as well. Most of my friends agreed with me, but one in particular chimed in stating that they had run out of things to do in the expansion. It seems they don’t play alts, and don’t consider playing alts to be “content”. I can totally get where they are coming from, because if I only played a single character I would be bored as hell already. I feel however that alting is the only way an MMO becomes playable past that originally one to three month burst.

We as a whole are content locusts. We swoop in and gorge ourselves on the content and then get frustrated when the companies cannot churn out enough content to satiate our voracious appetites. I’ve heard reports that the folks building SWTOR truly believed they had six months worth of content ready for the players at launch… and it took me exactly two weeks to have played through all it on my first character, and I felt like I kept a rather sedate pace. The sad truth of MMO gaming is that no company will ever be able to churn out content fast enough for the most dedicated of players. Guild Wars 2 has come the closest with their living story campaign, but all of that was essentially disposable content that evaporated when the next chunk went in. I feel like Alting and ease of alting is really the only salvation for keeping players in a game for more than a few months.

Serial Entertainment

I feel like the issue with MMO content is that we tend to view things in terms of an expansion rather than a constant gradual progression. The expansion cycle for the most part needs to be abolished, and instead steal something that tell tale games does exceptionally well. I feel like episodic gaming might hold the key to salvation for the MMO genre. What players really want is something new and exciting to do every month, and major progression of the main story every few months. Right now there is exactly on game giving us this, and that is Final Fantasy XIV. More or less since launch it has released a major patch every three months and a minor patch every month. This has not been an exact thing but it has worked out to be roughly those intervals. Essentially there is always something major looming on the horizon for players to “please look forward to”. Then in the meantime there are little quality of life things going on so that it feels like you are still moving forward even if you are not quite to the next major mile marker.

The thing is… even in Final Fantasy XIV Alting is a big part of the game play. They however disguise this fact with the job system. The problem with Alting in most games is that when you are playing your alts you have essentially been forced to abandon all progress made on your main character. I feel like Blizzard realized this was a problem early on, and started making various things account wide like mounts and pets. The problem is their model simply was not designed for everything to be handled at an account based level. Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand was designed from the ground up to be a single character game. With that one character you can learn every single job out there and every profession as well. This gives that one character infinite replayability. Want to be a healer… then switch to your healer job, need to tank… switch to your tank job.

Same Problem Exists

Where the job system breaks down however is similarly… there just is not enough quest content to go around. You have enough quests to get one, maybe two jobs to 50 before you have exhausted all that is available to you. They are constantly putting in new storyline for the level 50 characters to play through, but there is nothing new available for players to level new jobs with. There are of course job related quests every 5 levels… but the time between is spent grinding in one way or another. Essentially to level jobs once you have finished with your quests you are left with either chain running dungeons, grinding fates or grinding levequests. All of which are tolerable, but none of which are actually all that enjoyable. So we are back to the classic MMO conundrum of needing more quest content than is available, the problem specifically being here that we need low to mid level quests.

So while I feel like treating an MMO as though it were a television show is a good idea… the problem is that you not only need to expand the top end content… you also need to keep adding stuff for players to do in the middle. Alts are not a perfect solution, but they are the solution that seems to work for me in order to keep me engaged with a game. Ultimately there is a point where I feel like I have leveled everything that I care to level… but that buys me more time in the game than I would were I simply sticking to a single character. I always have these grand sweeping ideas like that I want to level “one of everything” but I never quite make that goal. Ultimately there are some things that I just don’t enjoy… as evidenced by my string of casters never actually making it to the level cap. I don’t consider alting “content” persay, but it is a patch that keeps me engaged in the world and I am willing to employ it as a way of staving off boredom.

Lodin Lives

December 26, 2014 by Belghast

Tradition to Skip

As completely charming as Christmas Eve ended up being… yesterday ended up being very strange. Granted the entire day wasn’t that odd, given that we got up super early to drive an hour to open presents with our great niece and nephew. When trying to determine what we would get them for Christmas, my wife and I talked about our favorite parts of Christmas morning. In both cases we remembered being super excited about what all had been crammed into our stockings. I remember pulling out one magical thing after another that Santa had left for me. So instead of a big gift, we opted to make them custom stockings jammed full of little treasures. The funny thing is that the item that seemed the biggest hit was this little wall clinger octopus that we both remembered from our childhood. You threw it up on a slick surface and it wriggled down slowly. My nephew spent the better part of the morning throwing it up on the sliding glass door and watching as it jiggled its way down the door.

So I have to say that part of the morning was absolutely adorable, but from there we took a detour into strange land. We went to Christmas lunch with a branch of the family that we don’t spend a ton of time with. In part this was a good excuse to see the brand new child of our niece, and deliver our baby gift to them. When we first accepted the invitation we had no really planned on doing the early morning thing, so we thought it might be the only time we would see my wife’s mother. Honestly “our” family was kooky but just fine, it was when a bunch of people that must have been neighbors showed up that things cranked up to 11 on the strangeometer. This large bear of a woman came in and upon seeing the baby asked the following question verbatim… “you feeding that baby titty milk?”. My wife and I turned to look at each other… surely we did not actually hear what we thought we heard, but sure enough yup that is precisely what she said.

Moments later another woman came crawling in on the floor. At first I had zero clue why this woman was butt scooting across the floor, but a bit later we found out that she had a wheel chair, but she just didn’t like to use it. Thankfully at this point we had eaten, and we figured it was safe to slowly make our escape. The new additions to the group all seemed exceedingly sauced, and reeked of booze. I still don’t have a firm understanding in my head of who exactly they were, but in any case they made our normally insane family look normal for a moment or two. So while this year has been a year of creating new traditions… I am not sure if that is one we will keep. I really enjoyed the early morning with the kids, because Christmas needs kids to rekindle the magic each year, but I think we will skip the lunch.

Rejiggered Gladiator

Overall I have been pretty disappointed with my raid performance as a Gladiator, so over the last few days I have set about to tweak some things. The largest change is that I am giving up on the Heavy Repercussions talent. In order to make that talent work, you absolutely have to get 2 Shield Slams in during a Shield Charge buff. I found it frustrating to try and cram them in, and often times fate conspired against me to only actually get one in. In many ways it reminded me of just how unforgiving the Unholy Deathknight rotation was back during the Icecrown days, and if you missed the timing your dps went to shit. Now I am moving to what seems to be the more reliable and more common Unyielding Strikes talent, and as such I have to rejigger my priorities a bit. Additionally I fiddled with my glyphs and talents a bit after looking at some warriors that were parsing well in Highmaul.

Noxxic has been a bit wonky in the past with some of their guides, but based on the high parses I have seen they seem to match up pretty closely. I seemed to be taking a lot of the “wrong” talents, the biggest of which was I was previously taking Bladestorm which seems to have limited use in raiding, but instead should have been taking Bloodbath which is a 1 minute cooldown damage cooldown, something that protection is sorely missing. Even though I have already run LFR, I am more than likely going to run the first part today so I can see what my damage looks like against The Butcher fight. My hope is that all of the tweaks I made will give me a more stable damage curve, and keep me from lagging behind the way I have been in overall raid damage.

Lodin Lives

Those who have been reading my blog awhile will know the tale of Lodin the Hunter, the character that I never actually intended to be my raiding main back in Vanilla. Well with the recent round of hunter changes I have once again become interested in playing him, and quite honestly have been really enjoying it. Last night I entered Draenor on Lodin and for the first time since Burning Crusade he is actually caught up and doing relevant content. I never actually managed to level him to 70 back then, and during Pandaria managed to catch him up from 68 to 85, then finally with the launch of Draenor pushed him up to 90. I used my spare engineering bits to knock him out a pretty sweet epic rifle that I am looking forward to him being able to use when he dings 91. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time over this break hanging out on my laptop, and the hunter play style fits that perfectly.

Last night before the melatonin finally kicked in I managed to make it roughly halfway through the introduction sequence in Tanaan Jungle, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post and do my “Wizard Chores” as my guildies call the Garrison dailies… I am going to start working on him again. I seriously would not mind him being my 3rd 100 of the expansion. It feels fitting considering I am back playing Belghast, that I also dust off Lodin. Since this is by nature a nostalgia ridden expansion, it only seems right to wallow in said nostalgia with some of my oldest characters. I look forward to LFR with the Lone Wolf talent, but in the mean time I want to catch more awesome pets because lord knows Draenor has some awesome looking ones. I am shocked an amazed that I am still having as much fun playing Warlords as I am, so hopefully it continues to last.