World of Warcraft Archives - Page 88 of 108

World Without Warcraft

April 20, 2014 by Belghast

Replace all the Tech

Yesterday was a really odd day for my wife and I in that it seemed to end with some results that we never really planned ahead of time. The key focus of the day was to get out and move around so that hopefully we could get some steps in. It is funny how the fitbit has gamified our lives, in that both of us want those extra steps whenever we can. So when we went to a shopping center we parked purposefully way the hell out in the boondocks so that we would have to walk extra steps to get to our destination. Thing is I find myself doing this little tweak almost everywhere. It feels like cheating, but I guess in the long run it will be far better for my health to force myself to walk more. The fact that I get “acheesements” for doing so just reinforces the behavior.

I wish we had gotten the fitbits a year ago when we first heard about them, because it makes me wonder where we could be today if we had. One of the various errands we had to run was going to Sams Club to pick up a few things. They have these amazing apples, and I was getting low on oatmeal. Now that we have one around the corner from my house I tend to go there quite often. We actually got our fitbits at Sams because they were significantly cheaper than anywhere else, even considering internet pricing without the shipping. Turns out we need to shop there more often for tech, because we noticed they had the Samsung Galaxy s5 in stock and at a pretty massive savings. Currently to get one through AT&T the carrier we use is $250 a 2 year contract, through Best Buy it was $199 with the same contract, but Sams had the price down to $160.

After we walked around the store for a bit and thought about it, we decided to upgrade our phones. My wife decided she would rather have the maroon s4 instead of the s5. So for about the same amount that we would have spent to upgrade one phone through AT&T we upgraded both. The best part is that the mobile tech managed to keep our original phone plan. We have been grandfathered into the AT&T unlimited data plan for years, and if we ever lost it… we would jump providers in a heartbeat. So really in the grand scheme of things it is beneficial for them if they want to keep us as customers… to keep moving that plan down the road. We are not massive data users, but I just like knowing I don’t have to ever think about that.

Now I am coming from the Galaxy S2 that I have had for over three years now, but so far I am liking the S5 quite a bit. It has a lot of features that I had been missing like the extended bluetooth support that allows me to sync my fitbit directly with the phone. Additionally it works with chromecast allowing me to use my phone as a remote control for plex and other chromecast apps. We spent a good chunk of time after getting the phones trying to set them back up again for usage. The battery life overall seems much better than that of my s2, which is odd considering how much larger the screen and everything else is about the phone. I have not even attempted to play with the camera yet, but I have heard it is a big jump forward. The oddest thing about yesterday is using our phones without our contacts… since apparently most of them were stored on the sim card and not in google contacts. Sams did not have a data transfer cable, so I guess that is the one negative about using them to swap phones out.

Chromebook Time

Have I ever mentioned that my wife is amazing? I believe I have in the past but here is yet another instance of this. I am a habitual craigsist shopper but I go in slumps. I will furiously check it daily for something and then ignore the fact it exists for months. My wife on the other hand tends to do so pretty regularly, and if she knows I am looking for something keeps an eye out. For awhile now I have been interested in a Chromebook because for me it seems like the perfect note taking machine. I religiously use chrome already and pretty much use nothing but google docs as it stands. I wrote my entire nanowrimo novel last year in google docs… and I still need to edit that. Basically I needed a machine that I could take with me into meetings at work and take copious notes and then have easy access to them later to mail to my boss or anyone else who so needed them. The chromebook really seems like the ideal solution for this, but I balked at paying full price for one… since really I was only going to use it for a super limited purpose.

At the suggestion of friends I had mostly been looking for an Acer Chromebook instead of one of the Samsung models. Yesterday my wife asked me “what brand chromebook were you looking for?” which generally means she’s found something on Craigslist. Sure enough there was an Acer c710 Chromebook for sale that looked to be in pretty good shape for $150. I hem hawed around a bit and thought about it, and decided that still I did not want to pay that much. So instead we counter offered $100 and figured that would be the end of it. After awhile the guy responded back that he would take $120, which was better but was not exactly an immediate purchase type situation. We were heading on our way to our favorite Indian restaurant for a late lunch/early dinner so we told him we would think it over and get back with him.

I realize it was only $20 but it seemed like a significant difference at the time. Mostly because I feel like in buying a chromebook I am only going to use it for the most basic of things. I already have a really nice full fledged gaming laptop, and this is really just for carrying with me to meetings or any place I need to show off something on the web. My wife’s school system is getting chromebooks for her students, so there was also the side benefit of giving her a machine to play with in seeing precisely what she can do with it. After thirty minutes or so of discussion we decided to just pass, and tell the guy we really didn’t want to spend more than $100 on it. Apparently he was wanting to sell it and we were the only decent offer all weekend, so we shifted gears and went all the way across town to meet the guy.

The funny thing is, the kid grew up in the very small town my wife hails from, so any question about reputability was out the window there. We’ve dealt with some pretty sketchy people over the years of using craigslist and sometimes you just get a bad feeling about things. Anyone who is willing to admit that they are from a town of 3,000 is obviously not looking to do something untoward. I actually used it last night while podcasting to bring up our show notes, and so far it seems pretty much what I expected. Chromebooks are really just a machine that runs nothing but a chrome web browser. Anything that would work in chrome seems to work great on the chromebook, for my needs it seems like it is going to be perfect.

World Without Warcraft

Last night we recorded our second broadcast of the Aggrochat podcast. I am shocked, amazed and absolutely humbled that people seem to have listened to the first one. At last check we were around two hundred downloads, and for our first effort that seems insane. Last night we followed the same basic format we set up with the first show, and ended up getting caught up in a quagmire of a topic. There was a thread on twitter during the week where someone made the statement that they thought the gaming world would have been better off without World of Warcraft. We spent the majority of the hour and fifteen minute run time of this episode discussing what that world would be like, and what things simply would not exist without WoW. Between the four of us we managed to take a bunch of different angles and the end result was this nostalgia filled romp through MMO gaming.

#AggroChat #GalaxyS5 #ChromeBook #WorldOfWarcraft #Podcast

Bloodlust Pays Off

April 9, 2014 by Belghast

What’s Wrong with TSW?

There are a couple of really interesting posts by Sypster and Rowanblaze that talk about the problems with The Secret World combat system. Mostly Syp’s post is him trying to articulate the way he feels about it, and then Rowan breaks down those points and tries to speak to each. Combined they provide a really nice bookend and are extremely worth reading. It is really nice to see someone try and put into words what is wrong with the combat other than “it’s clunky”. I have my own love/hate relationship with the combat in The Secret World. For the good I love how flexible the character build system is especially at lower levels, but there seems to be a point where all of that breaks down.

Like always, my little circle of regularly group mates rushed headlong into the content of The Secret World, and were starting in on Nightmare content only a few weeks after launch. For the most part we found normal and elite content in The Secret World to be overly easy. However facing nightmare content felt like slamming our faces into a brick wall at 60 miles per hour. The transition was brutal and unforgiving and seemingly unfairly stacked against melee players. I had managed to stubbornly limp my way through the Gatekeeper encounter with my Shotgun/Blades build, but when it came to nightmares I abandoned it quickly in favor of a pure ranged Shotgun/Pistol build.

The game went from being super forgiving and open to any build you could dream up, to being extremely punishing and narrow focused over night. So yes while the combat is essentially an overly repetitive use of “wow rogue” tactics over and over until you finish the battle, it was the fact that playing melee was a detriment to my groups survival that ultimately did the game in for me. We all return to the game to play the new content every now and then, but Nightmares were the point at which the game stopped being fun for many of us. Our creative builds that were super personalized were force culled into the few builds that “worked well” for nightmare level content.

Bloodlust Pays Off

Last night I had every intention of just quietly questing away in Elder Scrolls Online. However I logged in to a message from my friend Tam, wanting to know if I was down for running some dungeons. What can I say… I am a sucker for spelunking my way through bad guys. At the beginning of the night we were trying to figure out why I was a level ahead of them with the “dungeon” faction… aka the Undaunted. We ended up sifting through our achievements and found that I had already hit the “kill 1000 monsters in dungeons” achievement and they had not. I may or may not have issues with bloodlust, and as a result I have been tanking pretty much any dungeon someone asked me to. We started off the night with Wayrest Sewers again, and honestly I was expecting a rough time. However I found that I was able to split the packs much the same as I did the very first time I had run the dungeon.

I am guessing maybe in the previous group I had someone “helping” me by pulling something other than the one I was yanking with my chain. This is a super important point that needs to be addressed, and while I covered it in my tanking post… I figure it bears underlining here. When you are running these dungeons, let your tank pull and do not touch ANYTHING until you see the mobs run up at the group. The way combat packs work in Elder Scrolls Online is that all of the mobs in a pack will aggro you, but not all of them will actually engage you in combat. Touching them, means they will be doing so and you can quickly get overwhelmed. Let the tank pull and watch to see what actually starts attacking you. Then do not touch the ones that are just standing around cheering on the fighters.

I was not feeling like streaming last night, but I wish I had been… because after finishing off Wayrest Sewers we also ran the other two dungeons in the level 20 range. Darkshade Caverns and Elden Hollow were both really awesome. However in the case of Darkshade Caverns there is a bit of a surprise involved with running the dungeon that I really don’t want to spoil. Darkshade had some of the coolest fights to date, and I look forward to running it again. The loot seems to be improving as well as we go up. Granted it is still fully luck based, but several of us managed to pull out blue set pieces from the dungeon, as well as the normal unique loot drops. The lighting and effects in the dungeons are just superb. Final Fantasy XIV had some really amazing dungeon encounters, but I have to say so far at least Elder Scrolls Online trumps them.

Oddly Oblivious

I guess right now I am simply preoccupied with Elder Scrolls Online, but right now I am pretty oblivious to the news coming out about Warlords of Draenor. I still very much care what happens there, because even though we have this insane guild right now in ESO, there are still a batch of diehard Stalwarts that will likely never leave WoW. I want the expansion to be awesome for them as much as anything else. I have to say that the new Draenei female is nice… but not really the night and day difference that you see with the Vanilla model makeovers. I guess the Draenei and Bloodelves were in a better state already than the previous models, so they were not quite so primitive looking.

I have been phenomenally bad at keeping up with my RSS feed since coming back from my grandmothers funeral. I guess I rushed headlong into ESO, and have simply not come up for air. Things have just been going so well over there that I have not needed additional diversions. I am still listening however, and occasionally things creep into my consciousness about Warlords. Story from yesterday was that MMO Champion got DDoS’d for not giving credit to the folks running the private servers where he collected the alpha zone screenshots. Now all of those shots are down from the site, with a disclaimer saying that Blizzard had asked them to take them down. While I can’t confirm anything about the DDoS, I am guessing the image take down is more related to that instead.

At this point I will be far more interested when someone I know actually gets into Alpha or Beta. The rumors that I am hearing about the garrison sound intriguing and a fun minigame to keep me engaged in the expansion content long after I have finished leveling. My real hope however was that the garrison would be shared among all of your characters. I have an army of tradeskillers, and it would be nice to have access to ANY of their trades, from ANY of my characters. It feels like Blizzard is always one step away from making something really awesome. For whatever reason they always stop just short of what I would like to see from them. Hopefully we will continue to get more official news, since really at this stage in the alpha… anything that gets datamined is mostly bullshit and likely to change before beta.

#ElderScrollsOnline #TheSecretWorld #WoW #TSW #ESO

Growing Stronger

April 7, 2014 by Belghast

It Fit… Barely

Yesterday was crazy busy but we got up and around and dealt with all of the things that needed to be dealt with. If you remember yesterday morning I was blogging in a lull between the flurry of activity, and waiting on the folks from Lowes to deliver the new fridge and haul away the old one. We had measured the slot in the wall and the unit in store what felt like a dozen times, and we thought it was going to fit, but just barely so. Turns out yes, we were in fact right, and as you can see from the picture to the right it is a snug fit up against the cabinet above the fridge. Granted this cabinet now becomes completely useless since the only person who can reach it is me… and the stuff that generally got stored up there was for my wife.

It is so tight of a fit that the fridge scraped the top left side of the fridge every so slightly as it was sliding into place. The only problem with the installation is that the hookups we have for the in door water… are from 1980. Meaning the equipment they sent out was completely inadequate to connect it. However it turns that what we have is bad practice anyways… and that you can get much purer water these days. So we are going to call the plumber and have them swap out our connection for something that will take the 10 foot braided cable that they brought with the unit. We have lived for over sixteen years without ice and water in the door… we can live a little while longer. We have been dealing with some issues with the washing machine that we will have them look at the way it is hooked up as well at the same time.

This means however that we are going to need to clean more. Recently we went through our dishes and pots and pans and gave damned near everything we had to the neighbor kid that roomed with us last summer. He got a place of his own, and for years I had been wanting to just get rid of all of that and buy back our pots and pans a single pan at a time. Really there are very few things that I actually need to cook, and I have a really nice deep skillet that I tend to cook everything in already. This way I can buy only the things I specifically need, and of much higher quality than we had back during our college days. The pots and pans we had were the kind you get an entire set of for 15/20 bucks.

They exceeded their lifespan, and all of them were scratched and marred from years of cooking. I figure they are good enough to make spaghetti in for a bachelor pad of a bunch of guys. If we apply that same logic to the rest of our cabinets we should be able to pair everything down nicely. We have stuff that we have never used in all the years we’ve lived in this house. Which tells me it is high time to donate it someplace and get it out of the house. The only real negative is, this means another weekend is going to be taken up by this sort of stuff rather than gaming. This is the unfortunate truth of the summer, we end up either doing little projects… or leaving the house to go wandering about. In either case… not a lot of gaming happens, and similarly I am not sure when I will return to regular Steampowered Sunday posts.

Growing Stronger

This weekend we somehow hit 103 members in the Elder Scrolls division of House Stalwart. One of the things over the years that we have tried to do is grow organically through friends/family and word of mouth. This allowed us to continue growing with tight knit individuals and a shared ethic. The launch of Elder Scrolls has seen our largest guild ever to date. Granted in World of Warcraft we have 265 accounts in the guild, but that since the launch of the game in 2004. At the very least this is our larges game launch. Both Rift and SWTOR I thought we were doing pretty damned well, but in both cases the guilds were only around 40-50 players.

What I find staggering is that we just keep growing. I have half a dozen players already waiting in the queue for me to talk to them about the guild and make sure they are a good fit for our guild ethics. This seems to be one of those games where each person is roping several of their real life friends into playing it. In some ways it reminds me a bit of the way World of Warcraft was at launch, and I am really hoping that reference is not a curse. So far things are going extremely well, and I have to say were it not for the Alliance of Awesome we would still be that 40-50 member guild. I feel like so much of this growth has nothing at all to do with me, and I am okay with that.

So far everyone seems to be getting along just fine. Folks are either swapping stuff freely by dumping it in the guild bank, or posting things on the guild store. In either case everything seems to be peaceful and drama free. Guild chat is constant and lively even at 6:40 in the morning when we have seven people online. I feel like there is a certain contingency of us that log in each morning before work, and I am guilty of specifically that this morning. The real challenge of course is going to be what we look like in three months. However I feel like I will still be chewing away on veteran rank 1 content at that point. So far I am loving the quests and loving the dungeons. Over the last few days I have not been streaming, in part because of how busy my life has been. Hoping tonight I can get back in the swing of things and stream some more, maybe even a Wayrest Sewers dungeon run.

The Big Alpha

The rest of the gaming world that is not obsessing over finding the next skyshard has been obsessing over the slow trickle of news coming out about Warlord of Draenor. With the launch of Elder Scrolls Online, I made a statement over twitter that I thought they would announce the start of Alpha on launch day. I was partially right… it was leaked and verified that the alpha was starting on 4/4 but the official patch notes did not post until 4/5. There is a lot there to talk about, and this was likely a brilliant move by Blizzard to keep themselves in the news cycle competing against the good news coming from the Elder Scrolls Online launch. I would love to be able to say that I will ignore WoD and still be happily playing Elder Scrolls Online at the end of the year when Warlords is likely to launch. I probably will be be honest, but I am also not a “one game guy” any longer. I know I will pop back in and play some Warlords because it lets me hang out with the OTHER half of House Stalwart… the folks that are diehard WoW players.

I can already tell this is going to be a bad expansion for me. Don’t get me wrong… I am amped to return to Draenor and see it in the “un-screwed” state. The problem is that from the weapon art leaks, I basically get to choose from two different kinds of weapons. Either bedazzled with crystals and jewels… or primitive as hell with horns and shit lashed on for no apparent reason. Neither are really things I go for in the weapon department. My absolute favorite sort is the Death Knight starter weapon, and a close second is Ashkandir… so I like well defined and crafted blades. Neither the Draenei or the Orc art styles are really something I have ever liked, so I feel like this expansion is going to involve me constantly transmogging away the offending graphics. Then again… I guess that is why we have the transmog system. I had just hoped to add some nifty new graphics to this mix.

Right now I am just glad that I am not in the Alpha, because I would not wanting to be trying to split time between Elder Scrolls Online and something else. I am thankful that I am wrapped up and enthralled in ESO, because otherwise I would be like the folks waiting with baited breath for the next MMO-Champion data mine extravaganza. That said I am periodically checking the site and seeing things like the weapon graphics, so I am still interested. Warlords of Draenor can stay comfortably “in the future” for me for the time being. I will always have amazing folks like the Godmother of Faff to keep me informed with what is going on. The only thing that I regret right now is not spending more time in Landmark. That game totally deserves more of my attention.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #HouseStalwart #WoW #WarlordsofDraenor

Ding 60… and 90

March 25, 2014 by Belghast

The Rosary

While I grew up catholic, it has literally been years since I had been to the crux of catholic existence… the rosary. Somehow my wife who was raised Baptist has never actually attended one at all in the over 16 years we’ve been married (or two decades we’ve been together). Under normal circumstances this would have been a disorienting experience, but last night it was made doubly so by a weird quirk of the modern church. It seems as though there is a massive priest shortage currently in the church. Quite simply put very few individuals enter the priesthood in America, and this is really no big surprise given the negative image of the church over numerous sex scandals. I am not adding commentary here, just stating the fact that there is a massive shortage of priests.

As a result since the retirement of the priest I grew up with, they briefly had a priest designed to “reinforce catholic doctrine”. Father had many quirks, one of them was a refusal to have “special offerings” for the various causes of the Catholic church. Apparently lately there have been no less than three passing of the plate for various causes, so I can see why he refused to do that crap. Anyways since the reformer priest, they have cycled through a series of priests, none of them native English speakers. Each one seemingly harder to understand than the last one. The catholic church is thriving in other parts of the world… just not here in America. So when you take what would have already been a confused experience and add in severe language issues… it was all my wife could do to keep from laughing.

For starters each time the priest would say a “Hail Mary”, he sounded like he was bored with the prayer. As a result he would begin running his words together and mumbling. So this produced all sorts of interesting things. After the Rosary I got together with my cousins and we all compared notes on what we heard. I personally thought he was saying something about a “Roma Tomato”, one of my cousins heard “Fruit of the Loom” and another something about “flushing the toilet”. It reminded me of a time when I was at my wife’s church, and the preacher had an extremely thick accent. We kept thinking he was talking about “Bastard’s For Christ” instead of what we found out later was “Ambassadors for Christ”. The problem is once you hear it… you can’t un-hear it… and while I knew by memory the words he was trying to say, I had no less trouble making them out.

So long as he was sticking to prayers I knew I was mostly okay, but there was a period where because of his respect for my grandmother… he went completely off script. The words I did manage to grasp, seemed to be meandering and completely off focus. He was talking about how some people live to be 100, and most people live to be 60. Which I thought was an odd statement considering the vast majority of the people in front of him… were well over 60. Thankfully all of us managed to make it through more or less with a straight face. The only thing I am certain of is that we have a new florist. The shop we used to use is no longer in business, so we tried the spouse of a person my wife teaches with. She did an amazing job and produced two gorgeous arrangements for a more than reasonable price. It’s always good to have a florist at the ready.

Ding 60… and 90

Yesterday during the day I spent a good chunk of my time streaming and playing World of Warcraft. With the release of Reaper of Souls last night at midnight, and the upcoming headstart of Elder Scrolls Online… I really wanted to get my mage to 60 so I could perform the boost. Going into the day I was sitting at 57 so just a stones throw away from the finish line. I spent most of that time chain running dungeons, and if you are phenomenally bored you can watch almost the entire adventure on my twitch stream. A few odd things happened along the way. Firstly I ran into a guild called Combat Wombats… which in itself is not that interesting. What I do find interesting is that they are apparently not connected at all to the guild by the same name run by several of my blogger friends. I threw out a few names, and the two members of the guild didn’t have a clue who I might be talking about.

Second interesting thing is that I reached a point of equilibrium where I maybe didn’t suck at magery as badly. In fact for quite a while running these dungeons I was pretty damned high on the damage meters and overall damage done. I felt like I had grasped the basics of playing frost and was ready to move on to bigger and better things. When I dinged 60 and took the boost to 90 I went from being confident to being completely confused. In the 30 levels that I skipped over, I had more than doubled the number of buttons I had to keep track of. Firstly I found it extremely disorienting to have my hotbars completely replaced without being prompted. At least when I took the jump to 80 from the scroll of resurrection, it asked me if I wanted to have them rearrange my hotbars.

After deconstructing them and trying to remember what I had on each of the buttons, I realized that I had way more buttons than places to put them. This is the problem with boosting. In those 30 levels the way a mage plays changes drastically, and I am sure this happens for all of the classes. So while I felt extremely comfortable playing a mage before the boost, afterwards I felt like I was a complete and total “nub” again. I scrounged around and found a complete set of timeless isle gear between the banks for a few characters. Complete in the pieces of armor, as I was missing 1 ring, a necklace and two trinkets. However this took my overall gear score to 491 which I felt was better than most of the boostards would be. As a test I decided to queue for the first stage of Throne of Thunder.

While I was not the lowest dps… I was really damned close. There is so much going on, that I felt completely lost in trying to figure out when I should do what. I like all the other boostards did things backwards. After realizing I was in over my head, I did a little bit of research and I think for the most part I have a grasp on what my priority should be for casting. At some point in the next few days I will try the next part of the LFR to see if my overall numbers improve. I would run a few heroics, but quite honestly… I find LFR to be far less confrontational when you are not sure about how you are doing. I can almost always do better than the worst player, so that gives me the leverage to learn on my feet rather than being called out in a 5 man group.

Pugs Aren’t All Bad

I had another interesting incident happen yesterday, that is making me feel like I need to re-evaluate my stance on pugging. Starting to think that maybe I should even start trying to tank them some more. In all of the dungeons I have run on my mage to get to 60, I had very few situations where things did not go well. More than that, I have had a few incidents happen where folks have been genuinely awesome. Yesterday in the middle of a Lower Blackrock Spire run, I ended up meeting a pretty awesome druid healer. Throughout the course of the run we chatted back and forth, and when for no apparent reason half of the party bailed on us, we hung out for a bit while waiting on the queue to fill. She said she was waiting around on a call from the vets, and was hoping to get a few dungeon runs in the meantime.

Since she was on a timeframe, I told her that she should drop group and should be able to get an instant queue. She thanked me, and we went on our way… thinking that I would never see this player again. Turns out there were really only a few people queuing at that time of the day, and when the queue popped I was in another LBRS group with the same healer. We had a really good druid tank to work with, but he admitted straight up that he didn’t know his way around the zone. So I helped shuttle him through the content, giving him a few tips on nasty pulls. We wiped a few times, but overall everyone stuck with it and we managed to complete the dungeon. Over the course of the run the healer talked about coming back to wow and wishing she could find a good guild to run with.

After the conclusion of the run I gave her the spiel on House Stalwart. Went over our three rules, and a bit of background information. Once again I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but within thirty minutes she had rolled a priest on Argent Dawn and pinged me for an invite. So as frustrating as pugs can be, I guess there are some genuinely nice players just trying to get through the game as well. I went into the dungeons not expecting anything more than experience, and ended up walking out with a new guild member. Considering just how many of my current guildies are people who I met through dungeon groups… I really should relax my anti-pug stance and give it a shot now and then. There are always going to be gems in the rough out there to be found.