World of Warcraft Archives - Page 95 of 109

Stalwart Ebonheart

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 by Belghast

Small World After All

Yesterday I had a pretty interesting chain of events happen, that have left me all warm and fuzzy. At some point yesterday I tweeted a general complaint about how steam seems to be incapable of flagging on a machine level that we have already installed the various pre-requisites like DirectX. This tweet seemed to develop a life of it’s own as it got re-tweeted around a bit and favorited. Most of the people were extremely familiar to me, but one of the folks retweeting was completely new. In my current mode of trying to reach out more to help foster the community I followed Maevrim.

It turns out the two of us have been running in the same circles for years spanning two different games and two different servers. For the bulk of her time playing World of Warcraft, it seems as though she was in the guild Gnomes Will Eat You on Argent Dawn… a guild House Stalwart folk are very familiar with. During the old days our two guilds did quite a bit together, and these days my raid has the very amazing Frosti… that has a sort of dual citizenship with characters in both House Stalwart and Gnomes Will Eat You. Turns out she also plays on Faeblight where the House Stalwart Rift branch is located.

To make things even more awesome, she is looking for a new guild home. Of course my guildmasterly ninja instincts started kicking in and I have been trying to welcome her into the Stalwart fold. Its true… we are kind of like a cult but I promise that our koolaid isn’t poisoned much. Scan a few hours later, turns out she was on a podcast and I somehow got mentioned. Now I seem to have missed the reference or it was said before or after the started recording. But all of this makes me realize just how small and relatively tight knit a community we have. Like I said the other day, it is all a matter of perspective. We might think we are alone in the void, but then something happens to make us realize just how connected we are as a whole.

Stalwart Ebonheart

Since April 4th 2014 will be here before we know it, I figure it is time to start planning for the House Stalwart Ebonheart Pact branch in Elder Scrolls Online. For some time I have known that I would be playing this game at release, and my hope is to successfully weave in time of both it and World of Warcraft. The goal is to play a few nights a week, because really I am a sucker for anything Elder Scrolls… and you would have to cause a real cataclysm to keep me away from it. For a long time I have also known I would be aligning with the Ebonheart Pact, in part because my three favorite races are the Nord, Dunmer and Argonians. After an impromptu poll of the folks who signed up on the brief Tamriel Foundry site we had… it seems like that is the case for most of the guild.

Since House Stalwart has always been a social guild… and more family than anything else… I thought I would open things up this time to my blogger family as well. I know Maric and some of the Mercy Corps folks will be joining Stalwart in this endeavor, and my hope is to gather up as many good people as I can before the launch. I am sure a good chunk of the current and former Stalwart members will be joining us as well. Basically all sociable folks are welcome spending they are agreeable to the standard House Stalwart Three Tenets. While I founded House Stalwart in World of Warcraft, the ethos that I helped foster has spanned so many games and will likely move into even more in the future. My hope is that we will keep creating a connection that transcends the games we happen to be playing at the time.

If this type of environment sounds like a good fit for you, then please follow this link to our forums. I created a brand new forum thread this morning, trying to gauge how many people we will have at launch. If you have any issues setting up a forum account either drop me a line here, or ping me over twitter and I will see what I can do to assist you. Also of note, we are primarily a Eastern Standard/Central Standard time zone guild, but have members with a pretty wide variety of playtimes.

Nightblade Finishing School

This weekend I also dipped my feet back into Rift spending a bit of time Saturday and Sunday working on my Nightblade. I am not sure if I will ever make a third level 60, but I really do want to finish my rogue off who is currently sitting and 70% through 58. While I enjoy the Storm Legion content on one level, on another it feels extremely grindy. As such during the course of leveling Belghast to 60 I stalled out no less than four times. Similarly Belgrave has stalled out quite a few in the process of getting this far along. Maybe I am just spoiled by the brisk pace of leveling in games like World of Warcraft or even Final Fantasty XIV… but getting through Storm Legion feels like an absolute chore. I do however really want to spend some time pushing through it.

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time doing Instant Adventures and they made the process feel a little less painful. At some point I also want to spend some time in dungeons… but for whatever reason I seem to always get Stormbreaker Protocol… which for those not familiar with it is the Rift version of Oculus. Essentially it is that one dungeon that makes almost the entire party disappear. I feel like I really need to get adjusted to the Rift controls a bit more before stepping foot into a dungeon, though honestly I was killing things in Argent Domain last night as efficiently as I ever was. More than anything with the impending release of 2.6, I want to dust off my Rift account and finally push the Nightblade across the finish line.

Veritech Pilots Unite!

January 24, 2014 by Belghast

Profundity is Gone

For those that followed me during the recent couple day bump of new readers… I am rarely as cogent or pointed as those topics come off as. Most of the time the Tales the Aggronaut spins are yarns of faffing about and doing scattered things in the games I play. That is not to say that I won’t again be overcome with feels and post something dreadfully important, but most of the time I just ramble on about whatever is in my mind. This is the side effect of my whole “blog every morning” crusade I embarked upon nearly a year ago. So if you have a limited appetite for game ramblings, I apologize ahead of time.

My office right now is like a magma chamber, and I am not really sure how long I can keep up this mornings post before I wither and melt away. The heating and air system in our house is pretty horrific, and for some reason there are two heat vents in my very small office. As much as I have tried to block them off completely… the heat continues to radiate through the wall. So the rushed feeling I am having is likely going to cause this to be one of my extra “special” mornings. Right now all I can say is thank god it is the weekend… and even though I have to pull a wi-fi miracle out of my hat tomorrow… I am ready to be done with work for the week.

Veritech Pilots Unite!

One of the side projects that has been underway for roughly a month is the coordinating of my crafting cooldowns each day in order to eventually produce the amazing Sky Golem mount. I realize I am way behind the times in getting it crafted, but hell it is news to me. Last night I managed to make the last two components and then went on an absolutely giddy flight around the Vale. I loves it so much in all of its mechanical glory. I feel like a Veritech pilot from Macross/Robotech. For the next few weeks every single character of mine will be zipping around on this goblin machination. Then I am sure like always I will get bored and pick a new mount for a few weeks.

I have already set my sights on the next big crafting project. I am a horrible engineer… or at least I have traditionally been a very poor one. I never raised the bankroll to get my chopper back in Wrath, and during the expansions after I simply lost sight on it as a goal. Now my intent is to farm up everything I can farm and then raise the required monetary commitment to craft one of these puppies. Not that I think I will ever actually use it… I have so many cool ground mounts like the Fiery Warhorse’s Reins or Rein’s of the Swift Spectral Tiger that I am always anxious to break out when I am in a flight limited area. I feel like getting a chopper is just one of those things I want to do moreso than really have a reason to do.

Blackwing Descent

Finally on the silly activities front, several of us were hanging out on mumble last night. The question was posed… how many people would it take to clear the old raids, namely Blackwing Descent. I surmised that we could probably limp by on three, 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 dps. Next thing I know we are on our way to blackrock mountain and giving it a try. Thing is… I remember nothing about this raid at all really. Granted while we were doing it several things came back, but I had literally not see any content past the first two bosses. I left WoW shortly after the launch of Cataclysm and at that point we had only managed to down Magmaw and Omnomitron (yes I know that isn’t the name). So for the most part it was a completely new place for me.

We of course entered for the purest of faffing reasons… the druid in our party wanted these shoulders for transmog. I myself would not have minded getting an Ashkandi 2.0 to drop, simply because the fidelity of the weapon is so much higher than the one I keep in my bank for transmoggy goodness. All in all the run went pretty smoothly. We struggled a few times, including several attempts at Chimaeron just trying to figure out how to work the fight mechanics. For whatever reason my purgatory talent seemed to be glitching out the key fight mechanic, so I popped outside real quick and summoned my vendor mount and changed that talent.

The trippy fight honestly was Nefarian because I was the only one to survive the initial flood everything in lava phase. So for the most part I solo’d a good chunk of that fight, namely the swimming around the room in lava killing the guys on the platforms phase. Then the monk healer and I duo’d the final kite him around the room phase. Since it was a 10 man fight, we only had one battle rez, and as such it seemed like a better idea to rez the healer than the druid dps. It was a fun night and I could see myself doing it again. I am really hoping that we can mostly trio the rest of the content. Funny enough we managed to get an achievement during the process without really intending to. I really want to go off and do firelands so I can hopefully get my druid friend his fire kitty.

Blogs Are Not Community

January 22, 2014 by Belghast

Social Gaming

I am breaking my own rules a little bit with this mornings post. Generally speaking I sit down at the keyboard and write something fresh each morning, in the 30-45 minutes I have before I need to leave for work. There have been times in the past when I have broken this rule due to me needing to leave for work early the next day. Today however I feel that this topic needs a bit more care and feeding than my half awake brain can really muster. As such I am getting started on this topic the night before my intended date of posting. I am sure that sounds just as contorted as it did to me as I wrote it… but bear with me.

Today I spent a few minutes sifting through my Twitter list, and pruning folks who either are not active any longer, or that have never really engaged with me in the past. I may have accidentally pruned someone that does not fall into that category in the process, and if so I will go ahead and apologize now. If this happened and we talk regularly I will definitely want to correct that mistake. Essentially I view the people I converse with in games and online as more than “just pixels”. I think this is the side effect of growing up an only child, that I have a deep yearning for being people… despite also having an introverted streak in real life. So as I approach people, I see them as not someone from whom I can benefit… but instead a potential life long friend waiting to be discovered.

Blogs Are Not Community

This viewpoint towards social media and other gamers has caused me more than a bit of heartburn during my almost five years of blogging. As I pruned my twitter list today, I noticed that a number of people that I thought I had made a connection with along the way no longer followed me. There is a time that this would have absolutely devastated me, but over time I have gotten used to a sad fact of the gaming blogosphere. While at times we think of ourselves as a community, in truth we are more like a collection of independent nation states. While we may make occasional alliances, and share resources… these alignments are all too temporary and fleeting.

This is not to say that I have not met some really amazing people that I will hopefully be lifelong friends with, but over the years a handful of folks I trusted ended up stabbing me in the back. I have come to accept that unlike my guild, these are not always people that I can rely to always be there for me. My craving this permanent connection is likely a side effect of the amazing guild I have been a part of since 2004, and the similarly amazing community that got me started in blogging in the first place. I have given credit to Blog Azeroth and the Twisted Nether Blogcast in the past, but had this extremely nurturing community not existed, I likely would not have set down roots in the blogosphere at all.

Blog Azeroth

I’ve always enjoyed writing and found it extremely therapeutic, but the BA folks offered me support and fertile environment. There are several truly amazing and completely selfless people out there. I’ve talked a lot about how amazing @RowanBlaze of I Have Touched the Sky is… and I cannot highlight this fact enough. However I have to take a moment to talk about @Fimlys of Twisted Nether Blogcast. This man has made a career of highlighting the amazing work going on in the World of Warcraft blogging and podcasting community. Similarly from the Blog Azeroth roots I met so many amazing people like Stop, Triz, Rev, Linedan, Llanion and so many others that I may have met initially through BA that I now associate with other things. So these forces combined gave me a somewhat unrealistic viewpoint of what I felt being a gaming blogger was all about.

When I made the decision to leave World of Warcraft and venture off into other games, I was simply unprepared how tentative this “community” of friends I had built really was. I joined Twitter initially as a way to hang out with other blogger types, and within a few weeks I had amassed a large group of people that I chatted back and forth with regularly. However as soon as I stepped forth outside of the WoW Bubble I found that a good chunk of those people disappeared. Since I was posting content not related to WoW, they were simply no longer interested in me and my non-wow discussion. I tried to make connections within the more game-agnostic circles, but set forth with the false notion that it would be just as easy as it had been within WoW circles.

Cold Outside

It is funny how a one game can instantly bring people together. If you meet anyone in real life, and find out that you both play WoW… regardless of the Horde/Alliance divide… you are pretty much instant friends. You both share this large shared set of experiences to draw upon, and it gives you immediate common ground. Going out into the outer reaches of the mmo landscape, was tantamount to leaving civilization behind. I expected to find the same kind of fast friends I had experienced before, and instead had some pretty harsh reality checks. Like I said, I go into almost every encounter with a new person open minded and entirely too trusting for my own good. This is likely a side effect of growing up here in Oklahoma, but I generally expect the best from people.

The problem with the non-wow MMO blogosphere is that there is no common point of reference that we all have. Sure I would imagine that most of us have WoW in common, but each of us exited that experience with a kaleidoscope of different experiences not all of which something you want to build a friendship on top of. If you go a little further back there is likely a common thread of Everquest, however not everyone views those days with the same rose colored lenses. So instead of immediate bonds over shared experience, what I found instead were a bunch of wholly independent personalities, not all of which were that open to new people operating in their shared space.

Lessons Learned

I had a bunch of bad experiences early on, and it has made me a bit more guarded. I still try and be as open as I can be, but at the same time realize that I am “just pixels” to a fair number of the people I meet along the way. This has made me cherish all the more the people I do feel genuinely care about my well being along the way. I want to thank @Sypster for creating the Newbie Blogger Initiative and @ModeratePeril and @TRRedSkies for carrying the torch forward this year. You three and everyone who has participated in the initiative in any way are selflessly trying to create the same kind of nurturing environment that lead me to start blogging. The problem is, that once the initiative is over we all fail pretty miserably at keeping the ties we created going. I’ve picked up several of the new bloggers on Twitter, but I could be doing so much more as well.

I think all of this comes down to the fact that once you leave the rather large and protective WoW-based blogging bubble… the community is somewhat flawed. We lack a single focus, a single rallying cry to unite behind. For a long time there has been a zeitgeist of players rushing to whatever happens to be the newest thing. So for a short period of time, we have a rallying call, a thing everything wants to talk about. When the magic fades from whatever shiny new toy we have, we are left again with a bunch of separate islands floating in the same stream. I can wish things were different all I like, but I know at the end of the day I have a very few individuals that I can really count as true and long lasting friends. Overtime I have learned to accept this and just expect folks to drift apart and forget or be forgotten.

What Was the Point?

Quite honestly… I am not really sure what I was trying to say before I started down this path. I still find it disappointing when someone decides they no longer want to interact. I know for example one individual who has followed and un-followed me at least a dozen times by now. I feel like I am the same person I was the day I began blogging, or at least I am at my core. I have always tried to be myself and be open to meeting new people, and hopefully integrating them into my own personal monkeysphere. If you want to interact with me, and do so in a way that does not stress me out… then I want you in my sphere. Chances are I am also going to try and adopt you into my guild family… it is a thing I do.

This year I really want to surround myself by more positive influences, and be willing to accept that there are going to be some negative ones I need to let go of. I cannot make everyone happy, and I am sure I will annoy the hell out of a good number of people along the way. My hope though is somewhere between I will keep finding a lot of loyal and true friends along the way. I also hope that by some small way I can do my part in trying to fix what is broken with our “community”. I am not really big on making new years resolutions, but if I did make one it would be to continue staying positive and try my best to find the good in people. Here is hoping that some folks will stick around long enough to find the good in me as well.

Factoid February

I have to credit @TheChindividual for the name, who is as a matter of fact one of this years crop of Newbie Blogger Initiative graduates. This February I am going to do something to put more of myself out there in front of everyone freely. During the twenty eight days this year I am going to start off each mornings post with a true factoid about myself. @Ithato had a great idea of posting two falsehoods and one truth… and as much as I like that, I think it defeats the purpose of baring my soul for all the world to see. So I have a few days before this starts, and I am going to begin jotting down things… hoping by the time I need them to have all twenty eight ready to go. Hopefully at least someone out there will get some enjoyment about my little tidbits.

On Wings of Nether

January 21, 2014 by Belghast

Low Graphical Fidelity

Since this is a patch day that happened to start super early… aka 5 am my time… and I don’t wake up until 5:30 I will not be having any screenshots that are not recycled or otherwise blatantly borrowed. Since I was off yesterday I simply did not think ahead. For me at least it feels like Monday… even though it really is legitimately Tuesday. Maybe this is the way my Aussie friends feel since they perpetually live in the future. Today’s post is going to involve a whole lot of faffitude, so be prepared.

For those who have not been following the news of all that is faffing about… you have potentially mentioned that @AlternativeChat has declared that 2014 is the “Year of Faff”. Tales of the Aggronaut is one of the many blogs that now proudly sport the badge on our sidebars. While I am proudly participating, for me at least 2013 will be the year of Faff in that it was the year that the Godmother of Faff brought the term front and center in the collective consciousness that is the “blogosphere”.

Faff is a term that has been in my vocabulary for some time, and not always in an extremely positive context. When my friends and I had to jump through a whole bunch of meaningless hoops to accomplish something it would often be described as a “whole lot of faffing about”. What has changed during 2013 and the start of 2014 is that “Faff” has become a proper destination for the evening. Realizing this has added greatly to the overall enjoyment of games like World of Warcraft that are so chock full of fluff that you cannot go more than a few in game feet without encountering something that could be worth achievement points or something that you have yet to collect. If for no other reason, I salute @AlternativeChat for realigning our vocabulary and taking what used to be a negative and turning it very much into a positive.

On Wings of Nether

Over the last few weeks I have been working feverishly each night on completing my Netherwing Dailies. As I have said before for whatever reason, during the Burning Crusade this is a grind I never participated in. In truth more than anything it is likely thanks to the fact that during Burning Crusade I lived in a perpetual state of broke. As a raid tank, pretty much every spare gold I had went to my volumes of repair bills. These repair bills have decreased greatly over the last few expansions, but back then it was not unheard of that I would rack up 100-200g in repairs a night, and in BC money that was quite the little fortune. As a result I never really had the money to get my epic flight training, which was required to start the Netherwing quests in the first place.

To be truthful, I likely never would have gotten it were not for a contrived scheme to get me my epic training. A friend of mine started a guild lottery, where we would send him raw materials and he would turn around and auction house the materials and pool it up to fund epic flying mounts for people. The first one apparently was universally rigged, as everyone colluded behind the scenes to give it to me. Thankfully through this welfare flying program we managed to buy at least a half dozen epic flying mounts, and I believe the final number was a bit closer to ten. However this was pretty late in the expansion and I never ended up going out and starting this grind. In part I was a bit slowed by the fact that my main at the time had no harvesting skill, and as such had no daily quest for turning in that.

War Bear Time

Needless to say yesterday mid evening I managed to finish out exalted and got the On Wings of Nether achievement. You get one mount free for completing the achievement, but I quickly flew out to Shadowmoon Valley and snatched up the other 5 for what now seems like the extremely cheap price of 180g. This puts me I think a a half dozen mounts away from We’re Going to Need More Saddles. There are so many farmed mounts that I am lacking, that I need to just buckle down and start farming away. Over the course of the weekend however I did manage to get one of these mounts that have elluded me.

Back in Burning Crusade we farmed more Karazhan than I really care to think about, but after we had used up all of the Medivh goodness, we set our sites on the newly released Zul’Aman. Over the course of the expansion we got better and better at this dungeon, but never quite had the gear and strategy needed to get through a successful bear mount run. We got really close a few times… I remember one time we were less than a minute away from the mount. Something would always go wrong and fate conspired to keep me from my prize. During Wrath of the Lich King, I really have no clue why but I never went back and attempted getting the mount.

When they redid the dungeon during Cataclysm, I was unfortunately not playing the game… so I completely missed my chance to get the mount legitimately again. For fear that they might eventually simply do away with the mount I decided that I needed to set my sights on this mount and just get it over with. I realize there are subtle differences between the mount you earned at 70 and the mount you can get today… but I don’t really care. It is a big freaking bear with horns and spikey bits. I will likely be proudly riding this mount around for awhile, as it has officially offset my Spectral Tiger as my normal mount of choice. Now I just need to pick a new victim, and start working towards farming up that mount. Starting to thing the Barons Charger is a likely candidate.