World of Warcraft Archives - Page 90 of 108

Technically Alpha

March 14, 2014 by Belghast

I Need an Off Switch

There are times I absolutely hate that my wife can sleep through almost anything, and get to sleep so easily. There is this thing she does that drives me insane, where right before sleep she winds up my brain by revealing some tidbit of knowledge that my mind takes the next hour and a half to digest before it allows me to go to sleep. Over the week we have had a really sick cat, and are treating her for her hyperthyroidism with a cream that I have to rub into her ear twice daily. She is getting better, but doing so very very slowly, so I had planned on calling the vet this morning to see if she needs to be seen again. Moments before my wife went into her nightly coma, she dropped the bombshell that she is not sure that “Little Shit” has been peeing.

Not only did this wake me up, but I went into a full blown panic attack playing the “what if her kidneys are shutting down game”. There was absolutely nothing I could do to calm down and I was up half the night literally… I finally laid down around 2:00 and drifted off to sleep about thirty minutes later when “little shit” decided to join us in bed. Her constant purring I guess clamed me down, because she “seemed fine”. This morning one crisis was adverted when I saw her pee in a place she isn’t supposed to, and another one started when she vomited and there were little red spots in the mixture that looked suspiciously like blood. All the while I am envious of the fact that my wife can sleep on command, and I end up fighting incessantly to get the few hours a night I end up getting. There was one night this week, that I thought was a “normal sleep” and my fitbit told me I had 32 periods of restlessness throughout the course of the evening.

Woah We’re Halfway There

I guess that is a bit misleading since dinging level 30 is by no means halfway to 60 effort wise… but it is at least numerically! Once again I engaged in leveling my Night Elf Mage while hanging out with friends on mumble. These are starting to feel a bit like impromptu podcasts, since we end up talking about the days gaming news and various sundry bits of geeky information. We seem to talk about everything other than the game I happen to be playing at the moment I am streaming. Originally my intent was to stream some Landmark last night, however the servers did not come back up until the wee hours in the morning. I know this because I also streamed some of that during my panic attack state to try and calm the hell down.

All in all as much as I hate to admit it, I am starting to like playing a mage. I am beginning to feel more useful in dungeons now that I have some semblance of an AOE in the form of Cone of Cold. It is still not my preferred method of game play, but I am not absolutely disliking the experience of pushing this character to 60. Yesterday the Godmother of Faff herself, @AlternativeChat posted about a new contest of sorts. The idea is with all the boosting going on, to level your way to 90 proudly with purpose. While I am fully in support of this notion, I am not sure if I qualify for it.

I currently have 6 90s, 2 85+, 2 70+, and my baby mage that my intent was to push to 60 and boost the rest of the way to 90. I feel like I have experienced the leveling content in World of Warcraft more times than most players. So I don’t really feel any shame in using my free boost to jump the character class I am least likely to play to the finish line. However I do feel that most of the folks who have never had a 90, and are using their boost to get there are missing something in the process. Some of the quests you have to struggle through along the way become a shared cultural experience. As much as I hate the “poop” quests of Burning Crusade, I like that I did them and shared in the same frustration as other players. Maybe that is an odd thing to say, but there are very few moments that all players have experienced. Anyways… you should definitely check out the post that sparked this discussion.

Like There is No Tomorrow

Also on the docket of last nights streaming, I decided to take a break from the mage after dinging 30 and play some Wildstar. In truth, once again I checked to see if the Landmark servers were back up yet… and since they were not, I opted to play the thing with the most current NDA drop. I have to say there are certain aspects of the game that are growing on me. The “soldier” archetype and the quests associated have definitely nailed my personal style of game play. Namely… explore the world and kill everything that gets in my path. Once again the “impromptu podcast” aspect of my streams continued as we discussed lots of gaming tidbits. I have literally considered stripping the audio from these videos and stitch them together into a podcast.

This is what nights on mumble are usually like, as we discuss more than just what we happen to be playing at any given time. I still am not really used to hearing my own voice yet, but I will get over that. As far as Wildstar goes… I cover this in the video, but after this weekend the Beta is significantly changing. Up until this point I have had essentially 24/7 access to the servers, and feel like I have generally squandered that by not playing. Once this change occurs I am honestly not sure what kind of access I will have. I know preordering gives you something, but I do not believe that we will keep fulltime access unless we have a 32+ character when the transition happens. Additionally I think those players will be unable to progress past level 17. The whole scenario is rather complicated, and I am not sure yet if I really grasp it. As the thread says, the only sign of a successful compromise is that no one is happy.

No Sleep Til… Landmark!

I had attempted to sleep for about thirty minutes, and then I realized that I was on the verge of going full blown panic attack… I opted to get up for a bit to try and calm myself with the dulcet tones of gaming. Generally speaking in the past when I have needed to relax like this I would play Minecraft, and since Landmark is my new Minecraft… I was thankful the servers were back online. I figured while I was running around anyways, I might as well stream some of it. I didn’t broadcast the fact I was doing so, because really I did not intend to be entertaining or talkative. What the video does show however is the inside of my claim and my latest project… completely redoing the dungeon. I have to admit at this point… it had been a few weeks since I had played Landmark.

Essentially I had gone high center on some of the crafting requirements. In order for me to get better machines and better tools it involved absolutely silly amounts of Burled Wood farming. For those of you who need a refresher, Burled Wood was a rare drop from almost any tree. You originally needed 100 to make a single Burled Wood plank, and then most of these extremely high end crafting machines and tools required 50 or more of these planks. This was one of the worst RNG grinds you could imagine. I simply reached a point where I could not bring myself to chop down the number of trees that it would need to get the things crafted that I wanted crafted.

Thankfully in yesterdays patch they completely turned this mechanic up on end. Now when chopping down trees they drop a single guaranteed “Heartwood” drop, with a rare chance of dropping more than one at a time. These are now the items needed to craft machinery and tools, and Burled Wood has been relegated to a “lesser” and also more reliable drop crafting material off of certain trees. What this means is if you need 27 Heartwood, you know that you will have to farm a maximum of 27 trees to craft that item. Even if you need 90 Heartwood… still having a fixed point that you have to farm is so much better than relying entirely on luck to get the drops you need to complete your projects. Thank you so much for taking this one back to the drawing board.

Technically Alpha

Another very exciting thing happened yesterday… I received an invite to the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the more interesting tidbits about this, is that there is apparently no NDA. We can blog about it, stream it… do whatever we want, with the caveat that we treat it like the alpha that it is. I am perfectly fine with this notion because I have been looking forward to “HotS” as it is lovingly referred to… for some time. Essentially Heroes seems to be set up to fix one of the problems I have with League of Legends. I am all about team play, and when I am playing as a team I only really care about the end objective… our win. When I play shooters I tend to be heavily objective and role based shooters that focus on the win condition and not individual player stats.

So much of the way game play works in League seems to be counter intuitive to playing as a team. Progression is almost solely based on personal performance, not performance of the team. One of the most frustrating mechanics I have experienced is that of “last hitting”, and this concept is entirely gone from Heroes of the Storm. Granted I don’t have a lot of first hand experience with the game play… since I did not realize I even HAD access to the Alpha until about 1 am in the full force of my panic attack. I think I made it about halfway through the tutorial before I made another futile attempt to sleep. So far everything feels like I expect it to, and the tutorial character of Raynor was rather fun to play. I look forward to cracking this open and experiencing the content for real over the weekend. I hope to stream some of it, but with the last beta weekend going on in Elder Scrolls Online… not sure how much of that will actually happen.

Being Bad at Mage

March 12, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This coming weekend that leads into Spring Break here in the United States, represents the last public beta weekend before the 4/4/2014 launch of the game. Now the beta client you will be getting to play has a significant number of changes in it. For point of reference the one that was used during the last public beta weekend was from early December, and lacked a ton of the polish changes that have gone in since. As a result even if you had completely written off the game based on past public beta experiences… you really owe it to yourself to patch the game up and give it another go this weekend. While December doesn’t really seem that long ago, what has happened between now and then is what I like to refer to as a “hallelujah” build… aka the one that fixes so many bugs and makes the game feel nice and tight and polished.

So many of the quests that have been perennially bugged out during the beta weekends should now be fixed and working smoothly. In many cases this involved subtle tweaks to the flow of the quest to make it work more reliably. Additionally this build is the one that introduces mob collision and the ability to skip the starter island. The mob collision seems to fix some of the complaints about “floaty combat” that players have made, and the combat animations themselves have tightened up considerably as well. There are still a number of features missing that are in the private test build, but overall I think players will have a more enjoyable experience. The game is very much an Elder Scrolls experience, but unfortunately if you were hoping it would morph into a standard MMO interface… that has not and likely will not happen.

Another cool thing about this weekend is with my dabbling in twitch streaming with my “Bel Faffs About” series, I recieved an email from support saying that I could stream the entire weekend if I wanted to. Granted we likely have quite a bit of things to do over the weekend, and Saturday since it is going to be nice out we hope to go out and do some photography. However as much of the weekend as I can, I will be streaming out my gameplay. I am not sure at this point if I will be starting a fresh character, or picking up where I left off on my Orsimer Dragon Knight from the previous beta. For those who have not already tested the content, they are asking each of us to start a new character and test the new starter experience sans islands. It works pretty well but is considerably more difficult since at the level you fight some of the encounters, you really don’t have a full set of gear yet.

Technicolor Voxels

I am still very much learning this streaming thing… and I feel like I still have so much more to learn. I was having some issues with FFSplit, namely in the inability to stream Trove. So after a suggestion or two from friends I loaded up Open Broadcaster Software overall I like the way it is set up, and it seems more intuitive to me. However it has copious amounts of settings, and I made the mistake of just accepting the defaults. The above video is passable at times, but pixellated as all get out anytime there is action going on. After some tweaking I improved the results with the WoW stream later in the evening. Additionally I am noticing that I really need to drop the volume of the game by about half so that I am not fighting to speak over it. I was honestly being fairly quiet last night… and I need not to do that.

It had been awhile since I had patched up Trove and played around on the server. With all the excitement over “pretty voxels” and Landmark… my enthrallment with Trove’s simplicity fell by the wayside. This is one of those games where if you stop playing for a bit, you are absolutely shocked at just how much has been done the next time you play. One of the coolest things from the above video is when I find a tree fort in a higher tier zone, and go hunting for the mushroom king that rules it. Last time I played they did not have real “dungeon bosses”, and they actually do hurt significantly. I cheat quite a bit in that the community chest was stocked full of rainbow weapons. However in my travels last night I did manage to pick up an upgrade that looks like the gun from Portal.

The gunslinger class is extremely fun, and it feels more responsive at times than the Knight does. Granted the Knight was their “first class”, so I figure at some point down the line they will apply a round of tweaks to make it feel more unique. If you watch through the video, you can tell I am heavily addicted to using the “rocket jump” attack, that shoots your character up into the air. I am one of those players that jumps constantly, so this only adds to my enjoyment when I can hurdle over big obstacles. One of the things I never could find however was the snow biome full of robots. I am wondering if they made robot parts significantly harder to farm, by only making them drop off punch bots and the dungeon boss robots. I will try doing another stream soonish with fixed settings to make sure the pixelization is gone completely.

Being Bad at Mage

So as I said above, by the time I got around to streaming World of Warcraft last night, I had tweaked my settings significantly. While the gameplay in WoW never includes the kind of spastic jumping that Trove does, it seems to be smoother and not pixellated. I continued my quest to push my Mage to 60. Night Elf Mage is pretty much the least possible “Belghast” character in existence. I have always had a problem with Night Elves, and I do not do amazingly well at “Finger Wigglers” as I call them. That said I have this silly idea that I want to get one of every class to the level cap, and I figured the only way I would actually do this is by using my free boost to 90 on a Mage. Traditionally the characters I was least interested in playing were the Mage and the Priest. When I accepted a scroll of resurrection some time ago, I made an instant 80 priest. So that just left the mage, that I have never really managed to level past about 20.

Firstly I am fundamentally bad at playing a Mage. I know this. I had been using Frostfire bolt all this time… because it was “the prettiest”. Really though the animation does look amazing as compared to the stock Frostbolt… so that meant it had to be better right? Wrong… apparently it is a spell that no self respecting frost mage would ever cast except in the rare case of a mob being frost immune. Last night oddly enough I had one of the best mages I have never known watching the stream. Helkim was commenting over twitter, since I fail at using Twitch chat and gave me the realization that I should never press frostfire bolt again. Sure enough my damage went up to respectable levels in dungeons… viva la shorter cast time!

Towards the end of the video someone took the bait. I made this channel on our guild Mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming”, and since my friend Drathis has no self preservation instinct… he decided to join me. Within a few minutes several other friends had popped into the channel, and I think before too much longer we had all pretty much forgotten I was streaming. As a result you guys get a glimpse into what our mumble sounds like on an almost nightly basis. This might be confusing to the listeners because we end up often times playing completely different games, and there will be cross conversations going on about each. Everyone else in the channel that was not me, was playing Diablo 3 torment mode I believe. If I did not have this burning desire to get my mage to 60… I would likely be doing the same. Basically I decided that I would far rather level a character to 60, than level tradeskills to 600.

Booster Gold

March 11, 2014 by Belghast

King of Mondays

As I said yesterday, I struggled with the time change like I normally do. As a result this tends to be the worst Monday of the year. Of course that would be the Monday my wife’s sister decides we need to go out to eat. By the time we finished work both of us simply wanted to go home and crash. However we felt obligated to go act normal and attempt to enjoy dinner. Thing is we don’t get to see my wife’s sister that often. She works this really odd job where she cleans nuclear power plants when they go into shutdown periodically. So as a result she and her husband drag their RV all around the country, and it can literally be years before we see them again.

So I did my best to pretend to be normal and pleasant, when all I really wanted to do was go home… climb upstairs to my office and decompress. Since the night was already pretty much shot we decided to run a few errands when we got back to town. Dinner was at least relatively enjoyable, and by the time we arrived home I had gotten a bit of a second wind. Over the years we have been to three different Ruby Tuesdays. One in our town that just closed this past week, one in Joplin MO and another one in Upstate NY. It seems like they were doing it wrong. The one we ate at last night was really rather nice, and had free biscuits and salad bar. Maybe the one in my town would have survived if they also had this.

Watching Me Sleep

I’m a fat man, and I will likely always be fat. I have reached a point of acceptance with that. However my wife and I have been trying to be “less” fat. Over the course of the last year I lost 70 lbs, and my wife has lost an amount that I have not kept up with as closely… but as much if not more than I did. She looks absolutely great, and I pretty much still look like myself. We have done pretty well with diet and while I have fallen off the wagon a bit in keeping track of my food intake… I have managed to remain the same weight… so the habits seem to have stuck. One of the things we both struggle with is exercise. So for awhile now we have kicked around the idea of getting a Fitbit. Yesterday we picked up a couple and now I am under constant surveillance.

One of the interesting features is that it keeps track of your sleep patterns. When it comes time to go to bed, you rapidly tap your bracelet until it buzzes and it knows you are going into sleep mode. I have often wondered why I feel like shit after getting what seems to be an otherwise good nights sleep. Apparently last night for example I woke up ten different times through the night. Some of these I remember, but the majority I do not. This also explains why the covers on my side of the bed are always fubar. Granted last night it was a bit odd trying to sleep in what is essentially a watch band, but I will get used to it.

Booster Gold

The big news yesterday that I have somehow neglected to talk about until just now… is that while I was off at lunch running errands, it seems that Warlords of Draenor preorders went live. Granted this weekend there was a leak of a boost to 90 trailer video. So we mostly assumed that at some point this week the preorders would go live, as well as the boost to 90. The other thing that caused quite a bit of a ruckus was that a “release date” has been entered into the systems for 12/20/2014. However minutes later Blizzard came out saying that this was not the final launch date, but that the game would be launching sometime during the Fall. So that begs the question… what exactly does “Fall” mean. Some are saying September, and at last years Blizzcon they stated that we would be playing Warlords by the time the next Blizzcon rolled around.

My friends have suggested that we are likely going to see a significantly truncated beta cycle, but even at that… it would be nice if that actually started. I would feel significantly better about the projected launch if I knew that friends and family alpha was at least going on. Not that I am expecting to be in it mind you, but just knowing it is happening is a good sign. Now that I have a free boost to 90 that came with my preorder, I am not exactly in a huge rush to use it. For some time now I had planned to use it to boost up a mage to 90. I figured this was the one class that I was least likely to level on my own. I had been playing my little Warlock, and even streamed the hell out of it on Sunday. Demonology is essentially the “faff about while your demon kills things” spec, and I was perfectly okay with this.

However it is starting to seem like Frost is the “faff about while your elemental kills things” spec. At one point last night I ended up having to afk in a cave to take care of something… and I fully expected to log back in dead and have to run back to my corpse. Turns out my elemental killed everything that got anywhere near me. I am sure this will not last for long, but it was entertaining to watch for a few minutes before I took back control of my character. At this point my plan is to level the mage to 60 and then boost him to 90 with the doodad. Essentially my logic is this… I would far rather level to 60 in the cataclysm old world content, which I enjoy… than level three tradeskills all the way to 600. If you boost a 60+ character you get your primary and secondary tradeskill to 600 as well as First Aid. So last night I proceeded to strip my warlock of all of his heirlooms and am now in serious mage leveling mode.

Another Experiment

Yesterday I talked about my experiment over the weekend with streaming through FFSplit to my Twitch.tv channel. It seemed to work pretty well, and the overall video quality was acceptable. Now it is time to take it to the next level… the one where I actually unmute my microphone. To go a step further, I have created a channel on our guilds mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming” and my hope is to coax my friends to join me in the channel and be entertaining… so I don’t have to. I can’t say I will have the most exciting stream in the world, and I don’t even hope to do it as well as the Qelric… but it might be fun. I decided to name this endevour “Bel Faffs About!” in honor of the Godmother of Faff who raised the consciousness of all things faffing over the last year. My plan is to post on twitter anytime I am streaming something, and just let the chips fall where they may. I’ve heard rumor that this weekend is another big ESO beta event, and if that is the case I will stream it as much of the weekend as I can. In the meantime, expect me leveling my mage to 60 and playing some Diablo 3.

Faffing in the Fjord

March 10, 2014 by Belghast

Losing Time

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

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

Faffing in the Fjord

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

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

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

Belazon Lives!

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

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

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