youtube Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Leaping Doggos

May 22, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.

When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.

Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.

I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.

Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.

I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.

Deeply Enjoying Explosions

May 11, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Welcome back to more of my Path of Exile nonsense. Hopefully, you enjoyed the brief intermission of cats, but unfortunately, I am still knee-deep in this season and have more things to say about it. Crucible as a whole has been a bit of a weird experience because the season mechanic is a bit of a dud. Sure you can do some wild things with the talent trees on weapons and shields, but you either need deep pockets to outright buy finished weapons from the trade league or an unlimited amount of time and patience to sift through the piles of utter crap trees to craft one that is even halfway decent.

This is a video from Spicy Sushi… which is an hour and six-minute long highlight reel of an over ten-hour long stream where he attempted to craft a mirror tier Elemental Bow by combining various Crucible Trees to get a perfect path of five nodes. Of note… a good chunk of this stream features someone else leveling bows looking for the nodes he needs and then feeding them to him directly… and then later outright buying bows from the trade league that has the stats he is needing when that person goes to bed. The sheer amount of work required to force your way into a perfect crucible tree is completely unfathomable and during ALL of that time… there is still no real loot to speak of associated with the Crucible mechanic encounters. So it is not shocking that most players are just hard “hoping” out of the content and instead focusing on what is maybe the best “standard” league state that the game has had so far.

For my part, I am loving where things are going with my Explosive Arrow Champion build. I’ve said this a few times in various conversations, but had I experienced the level of enjoyment that I am having now back in Sentinel League, it might have been this class that I bonded with as the best league starter rather than Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Nothing will ever be as “tanky” as my Juggernaut, but that strength comes with the weakness of being relatively slow to progress through similarly tanky content. I now fully understand why Zizaran was such a huge fan of this build, because once crafted correctly it really is an extremely tanky feeling character… with the caveat being tanky for DPS purposes and not the Juggernaut style of “I can just stand in everything”. I still need to be cautious and dodge mechanics that I don’t need to take. I also need to spend some time sorting out what I want as my pantheon tree… because I’ve not even devoted any effort to that. I would also like to figure out a way to become ailment immune at some point… but for now, I can rip through T16 maps and happily farm up sulphite for my delving expeditions on the Juggernaut.

When I recorded the last video with my EA Champion, there were some heavy caveats to that video. Firstly the character was effectively three days old and as such was only level 78 and had not a single gem leveled all the way to 20 or higher. Secondly being 78 means I was missing a ton of passive nodes, and when I built the character I tended to lean more heavily toward defensive ability rather than DPS ability just to make the leveling process easier. The end result was a competent character at T16 maps but a bit of a slow one. Last night I recorded an update video showing off what it feels like today now that I have recolored my bow, swapped out for some awakened gems, and also put on thirteen levels worth of passive points. The difference is quite remarkable and as I invest more points into a cluster jewel setup I think it is only going to get better over time.

More specifically the Large and Medium Clusters that I am going for should provide me the following traits.

Tempered Arrowheads
- Bow Skills have +6% to Damage Over Time Multiplier
- Bow Skills have 10% increased Skill Effect Duration
- 10% increased Duration of Ailments inflicted while wielding a Bow
Calamitous
- 10% chance to Freeze, Shock, and Ignite
- 30% increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills
- 15% increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments
Martial Prowess
- 20% increased Attack Damage
- 6% increased Attack Speed
- 15% increased Global Accuracy Rating
- 20% increased Damage with Ailments from Attack Skills
Blowback
- 10% chance to Ignite
- Ignites you inflict deal Damage 8% faster
Cooked Alive
- 15% chance to Ignite
- Enemies Ignited by you have -5% to Fire Resistance

Currently, I have the first three online in my build and they are active in the video above. The next passive point will allow me to slot my medium cluster jewel and then the next several after that should give me Blowback and Cooked Alive. I have no clue if I am reading Path of Building correctly, but it seems like this is easily my highest-damage build so far. In the grand scheme of things, EA Champ seems to be a happy medium between the feel of my Toxic Rain Pathfinder and my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. If I devoted the resources to scaling either of those they could easily do a good deal more damage than they currently do… but I am able to deal that level of damage while also feeling extremely sturdy.

As happy as I am with the current state of the Path of Exile sandbox… I think I still want to see where exactly Diablo IV is at. This weekend there is a big “Sever Slam” event where they are trying to stress test the servers and show off some of the changes that they made in the game since the last round of beta. For me… this is going to essentially be the last chance of this game to really grab me. I did not really enjoy my time playing the open beta, and my hope is that the gameplay feels a bit more punchy and fast-paced than it did the last time around. I am not holding my breath, but this weekend I am going to be at least giving it a shot. Since I played Barbarian and Necromancer last go-round, I will probably play the same two classes so I can compare and contrast how it feels.

Tomorrow I am taking the day off, not necessarily for D4 but because my wife has the day off. I am still not sure if I will feel the desire to blog in the morning… so if this is the last you hear from me this week I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and a wonderful mothers day.

Week In Gaming 11/15/2015

November 15, 2015 by Belghast

Two Times the Monday

I’ve mentioned this before, but this week we got off in the middle of it for Veterans Day. While I completely support this holiday, I question the good of cutting a week down the middle. What it basically created for me at least was a whole lot of time I seemed to be occupying space in a chair but not getting much accomplished… because individuals smarter than me ended up taking either the entire front half of the week off… or the entire back half of the week off. Those people apparently did not coordinate well, which meant there was a skeleton crew on board and few of the people you actually needed to talk about this item or that available and ready to discuss. My hope is this coming week we can make up ground for all of the perceived lost time from this fractured week. On the gaming front though… this was a week entirely about Fallout 4. However while prepping the AggroChat episode I watched another sequence play out on twitter that I am going to get into towards the end of the post.

Irrational Desire

I am admitting here again that I am still struggling with an irrational desire to log in and play World of Warcraft. I think part of it is simply because I know that as much as I loved Gladiator… it will be going away in the coming expansion. Part of me wants to spend some more time playing as a DPS sword and board warrior while it still exists. Then the rational mind kicks and tells me that there is still nothing really there for you. The raid is gone, the guild is mostly gone… there just isn’t an infrastructure to return to. Similarly I realize that other than faffing about and running old content… there is nothing much there that I would really want to do. This reached its peak over the weekend while I was anxiously wanting to play Fallout 4, but not able to do it yet without VPN hackery. The problem is even though I am wallowing fully in the goodness that is post apocalyptic Boston…. there is still a bit of nostalgia tugging at my coat tails telling me that I would really like to log into World of Warcraft still. I have a slew of new content to go experience in Final Fantasy XIV as well, so hopefully between it and Fallout 4… I will slowly quell this desire. I am still really damned interested in seeing how Legion feels, so not giving up hopes on maybe being able to wrangle a beta invite somewhere… but unfortunately I think my past points of access are no longer available. If I had them I would have definitely tried to exercise one for access to Overwatch.

Viva New Vegas

Monday night I got so low that I booted back up Fallout New Vegas and spent a good deal of time wandering around there. I only managed to get as far as the Vikki and Vance casino before finally attempting to get Fallout 4 going. I have to say… it might be nostalgia talking… but I still absolutely love this game. I even popped in for a bit this morning to get this screenshot… and there is absolutely a direct lineage between Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4. The world feels the same… albeit considerably prettier in the newest incarnation. I guess this is why in part folks who hated Fallout… still hate it… and the folks that loved it… are having some of the best times of their life. New Vegas really raised the bar for the way the world felt, and it seems like Bethesda rose to the occasion and answered this narrative call. That said… there is a part of me that kinda hopes that we end up with a DC Metro and New Vegas reboot using the Fallout 4 engine… much the same way as we have one of those under works for Morrowind and Oblivion using the Skyrim engine. I would love to be able to roam around these areas with the fidelity that the new engine provides. Even then… I could still see myself returning to New Vegas time and time again… and loving every moment of it.

Critical Mass

The bulk of my week has been spent wandering around the Massachusetts area in the new Fallout 4 on the PC. Firstly I have to say… I am pleased and amazed at just how good this game looks and how well it runs on my fairly aging hardware. The game auto selected Ultra for me, and I have been playing on that since… with limited hick-ups. The game runs between 50-60 fps at all times and just works flawlessly. Folks are reporting all sorts of bugs… and honestly I haven’t really seen them other than the usual floating objects type issues when you are dealing with a complex open world game. For example… if you remove a table out front under a vase… there is a chance the vase will just hang there indefinitely rather than fall to the ground. This sort of stuff does not bother me at all, and I come to expect it when a game has physics and the ability to place objects. That said there are apparently a number of the traditional day one Bethesda bugs but I am happy to say that I have not encountered any of them… game breaking or not. Maybe I am simply lucky, or maybe I just have not gotten far enough into the game to experience them.

According to steam I am roughly 50 hours into the game… the problem with that is that I accidentally left it running one day while at work… so you can discount about eight hours of that time as that event happening. The rest of the time however is absolutely real… and I have built up at least partially every settlement that I have come across. That is the part of the game that is the real hook for me… especially now that I have trade routes going between the towns. I’ve said this before, but my big take away from why this game is more enjoyable than the previous incarnations is that it feels like I am actively making the world a better place. In other Fallout games… you were the good guy, simply because you were killing off all of the bad guys in the world. There was very little you could do to actually improve the lot of the other denizens of the wastes other than the occasional donation of money or fresh water. In this game… from the very beginning you are actively improving segments of the world and making it a decent place to live in. Sure the world is dangerous… but you are making it far less so for a group of settlers. That right there is the hook, and when I am out in the wastes… every hotplate and desk fan… excites me because I can go back and build something really cool with the parts.

Streaming and Games

While prepping this post today I watched a little exchange on twitter. Essentially one of my friends challenged streamers to do more with the games they are streaming. That it would be nice to have streamers take a mostly educational stance on either showing other gamers how to do something… or working through problems. While I think that might be pretty cool, the truth is that is not at all why game companies seek out streamers. I am going to give an analogy that is going to be a bit long winded, but stay with me. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, and in this part of the land there are few things more important than High School sports. I have my own damage thanks to this fact, and having no interest in sports at all… but that is a tale for another day. In a small town the team is the center of pride for the community… and while high school athletics has the possibility of making money for a district… in a small town it is mostly a giant hole that you pour money down. So when it came to maintaining facilities, it was always a struggle… and knowing this soft drink companies would often times ride in on a white horse to save the day.

There was not a small town anywhere near me that did not have either a big Pepsi logo or a big Coca-Cola logo on their score board. Of note I have no clue who’s scoreboard this one actually is, but I am just using it to illustrate my point. They would offer to sponsor the scoreboard, make sure the school district had a free supply of cups, lids and straws… brand new pop machines… and a discounted rate on the soda itself just so long as they would sign an exclusive contract with the brand and only allow their products to be sold at school events. The schools needed the goods they were offering… and could make money selling the product which then would end up supporting the school. Pepsi got advertising out of the deal and more than likely converted a good segment of the townsfolk into loyal Pepsi or Coke drinkers for life. My small town had Pepsi and it is probably no small coincidence that I grew up in a household that drank Pepsi and still drink predominately Pepsi products. The indoctrination works, and goes back for generations… so much so that when a school changes affiliation there is often times an uproar in the community.

But What about Streaming?

So you are asking yourself… Bel… you just told us an elaborate story… but you said it was about streaming? This is precisely what is happening with game companies and streamers. There is a natural symbiosis at work. The gamers need a fresh supply of whatever happens to be the hotly contested games to stream, in order to keep the eyeballs on their channel, and the companies need to have their games placed strategically on as many channels with as many eyeballs as possible. So even if there is no payola happening under the table… the streamers are actively promoting the products of these games companies. In fact there is a not so subtle desire on the part of the streamers to keep from burning any bridges with a company… because that could very well mean that they would lose their privileged access to new releases. On the part of the company… all they really want out of the deal is for this streamer to look like they are having a really good time playing their product, that way someone leaves the channel and gets convinced to subscribe or pre-order because it looked so appealing.

Sure it would make sense for them to serve a greater educational purpose… but honestly… the big popular streams aren’t doing this. The popular streamers are entertainers first and foremost. They are selling themselves playing this game more than the game itself. They build up loyal followings because the people are interested in the person, not so much what they are doing. The advertising still works however because it is subtle. They might have their back wall decorated in products of the company they are streaming for, or be wearing branded merchandise that the company provided… or even giving away items for the game on their streams. While all of these seems fairly natural and filters into our subconscious as benign… it is absolutely planned branding and ultimately we are the dollars that the companies and the streamers are trying to get. Once upon a time… game companies cared deeply about what the blogosphere was saying about their game. That time unfortunately is over, and over the last few months I have come to realize something. Blogging is not dead by any means… and nor is Podcasting really… but in the gaming sphere neither are they growing. Once you leave the land of MMO gaming… you are hard pressed to find ANY blogs devoted to games.

For example I have crawled the internet trying to find a source of news and information about Destiny other than Reddit. There is simply no one out there blogging on a regular basis and producing content explaining how the finer points of the game work. There are however hundreds of YouTube channels and streamers devoted to this niche. There are almost no blogs devoted to Call of Duty, but similarly there are thousands of channels devoted to it. While blogging was the comfort zone of my generation that grew up reading game forums… and podcasting is the natural extension of that… the next generation no longer really cares about it. They are completely connected to YouTube and Twitch as their game information sources, and as a result… I feel like the bloggers really don’t have much sway. I am not trying to do this as a living, so in the grand scheme of thing it doesn’t matter too much other than the fact that I don’t have much of a shot in hell of getting into this exclusive alpha or that limited beta. The companies know exactly what they are doing… and quite simply they are playing the numbers. They are putting their product in front of as many eyeballs as they can, and doing so in the medium that has the largest majority of those eyeballs… Twitch and YouTube.

Media Consumption 10/17/2015

October 17, 2015 by Belghast

Television Lite Week

This week has been one that has seen me absolutely consumed with Destiny on the PlayStation 4, and as such I have simply not spent much time watching television. I have however watched quite an excessive amount of YouTube videos, namely as I try to find information about Destiny. There is this shift that is happening where certain games with certain audiences… simply do not have information blog posts about them. I’ve gotten spoiled in a world with Dulfy.net and WoWHead.com in that I expect pretty much every game I have to have this quality of resources. Instead for many games lately all I am ever able to find is YouTube videos on a given subject. I am sorry to all the YouTubers out there… but I am of a generation where I feel like a video is the least useful way to disseminate information. I will take a written explanation and some good screenshots any day over a lengthy video walk through. At some point in the near future I hope to take some of these things that I found frustrating and attempt to write some blog posts outlining how to do this thing or that thing in Destiny. Granted that is not to say there are not a lot of really good Destiny YouTube channels… but I would still rather have an informational post.

Destiny Lore

The first time around when the AggroChat crew played Destiny… we joked that it was a game almost entirely devoid of story. That apparently is not the case… they just go to strange lengths to hide it from you. The story of the game is told through a series of grimoire cards, item descriptions, quest text, and hinted at in cinematic scenes. In fact there is actually apparently a TON of information about the characters in the game, their background, how they arrived at the tower… and all sorts of legends from the golden age, the city age, and the now tower age. In my search for information about Destiny I happened to stumble across a really awesome YouTube channel called Myelin Game… which is not to be confused with long time friend Mylin1. The channel is chock full of videos where Myelin digs into the lore of Destiny and connects the dots, weaving all of the known information… and speculated information into a narrative around a certain subject. I linked the Black Garden video since the game does a pretty poor job to explain what the hell it actually is… but I also highly suggest the trilogy of videos talking about thorn, last word, and first curse. I have always guessed there was this rich story somewhere behind Destiny… because the dots connected too neatly at times not to be well planned, but now that I am starting to learn some of the actual story I am loving it. I still feel it is a strange choice to make players dig for this knowledge, rather than letting you experience chunks of it through the story. The Fallen King expansion does a much better job of being more forthcoming with information… and it gives characters that previously did not have much of a personality… plenty of chance to show it off. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to these lore videos while doing other things and I highly recommend them.

Star Wars Minute

Another thing that I stumbled across this week is Star Wars Minute, which is a great YouTube channel that takes segments of the Star Wars universe and condenses them into roughly one minute long narrative explanations. Much like the Destiny Lore, this feels as much podcast as it does YouTube video because the narrative explanation is the important part… and the images going along with it are nice to have but not 100% necessary. I ended up finding this as I started doing some googling related to the Star Wars universe, namely for the upcoming pen and paper game that should have its first session tomorrow. The funny thing about this is how much of the universe I already had a full grasp on but have no clue why. I guess even though I have been a sleeper Star Wars fanboy since the prequels… I was still subconsciously hungry for knowledge about this favorite of universes. Star Wars Minute is great to play in the background as you do something else and they release three new episodes a week, so there is a silly amount of content available already.

Arrow Season 3

Be warned I am going to go into some serious spoilers here, so if you have not watched Arrow Season 3 or if you intend to at a later date… you might want to skip this section. Here is the point at which I get really frustrated with this show. Generally speaking I am all for a television show deviating from the source material to make the universe work better for the TV audience. For example most of the Batman movies have worked really well… and they are essentially a condensed soup version of the batman universe… gathering up all the good bits and trying to weave a story out of them. You have a very limited amount of time on television, and what might work fine to slowly build over the course of several years of a comic run… needs to happen in an under two hour long movie. Television shows have a bit more leverage when it comes to pacing something out, and this is also cool. The thing that apparently pisses me off though… is when you take actions attributed to one character and apply them to a completely different character.

What I mean is that this story line that has played out throughout the season around R’as al Ghul didn’t happen to Green Arrow… ever. Essentially this is a Batman storyline, and all of the events that are playing out happened at one time or another to Batman. This caused me to think about Arrow the television show in a different light and realize that essentially… they have been turning Arrow into Batman this entire time. Maybe it is because Batman has been tagged as a “film” universe and is not available to be done in a Television version that they feel the need to create someone that is Batman-like. Green Arrow was admittedly a comic that I did not really follow. I mean I knew that him calling his sister Speedy when that was the character that would ultimately become Arsenal was wrong… and I knew a few other points seemed less than correct. However I lived in this world of relatively little knowledge about the show so I was able to pretty much ignore any differences… until they started stepping foot into the Batman universe. THAT is a universe I know considerably more about, and after a whole lot of research and the council of Thalen… I pretty much determined that nope… Green Arrow has never really interacted much with R’as al Ghul at all. So I am sitting here two episodes away from the end of the season… questioning if I care to finish watching it.

Walking Dead Season 6 Premiere

Thank god Walking Dead is back. “Fear The” was such a pale imitation of Walking Dead, and I am exceptionally happy that they chose to back up the start of Season Six to the end of the first season of Fear. I do have to say though that it makes me extremely happy that Talking Dead has been pulled in officially for Fear as well, because for me at least that has become so much of that experience. This is one hell of a first episode, and I really liked the way they handled Flashbacks in this episode by making them Black and White. That is always the challenge with a show, how to visually tell the watcher that the events they are seeing are not happening in real time but instead an imagined replay. When you are dealing with older characters and younger characters, it works naturally… but when you are dealing with only a few hours or days passing… it becomes much more challenging. So the choice of black and white gave a nice clear demarcation point between the two time-frames. As to the rest of the episode… Rae sent me a text as the show as going on that simply said “Nosh Pit”.

The premise of the show has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg style plot devices I have seen in awhile. To figure out a way to draw the walkers out of the pit and along a fixed path to get them away from Alexandria. The parallels to herding cattle… was extremely strong in this episode. They even managed to draw them down a chute just like you do cattle for a period of time… and then cleared out the farm supply store just to make sure nothing would spook them and draw their attention away… kinda like you do cattle. The slightest noise can distract cattle and get them to move in a different direction, and that apparently is the case with walkers. The thing is… going into this episode… you knew something was going to go wrong. There were scenes in the Season 6 preview show of Walkers in Alexandria or at least the hint of that happening. This show is really good about misleading us, for example the above poster would seem like we are heading towards some central conflict between Morgan and Rick… and in truth… it seems like Morgan instead manages to back Rick down from the ledge a bit.

As far as the walkers… when they are nearing the clear zone… someone sets off a horn in Alexandria, causing the mega horde to turn that direction. So the question is… who did it. At work the popular theory for awhile has been that Enid is a spy from the Wolves, and that the scenes of her in the car with the walker outside… hint that she set off the horn. My personal theory is it is Father Gabriel once again trying to destroy everything around him. He wanted to go out on the mission to herd the walkers, but Rick shut him down immediately. My theory is he is vindictive, and after being shut down by Andrea as well… he is still on some mission to destroy this community and in the process allow himself to be kill in some sort of twisted act of contrition for letting his parishioners die. In truth it could be the wolves themselves, who have been watching everything happening and see this as their opportunity to let the zombies batter down the defense of Alexandria and allow them to come in after they are done… and loot the resources. If nothing else this episode explained why Alexandria had been left fairly unscathed… because the giant pit of zombies had been drawing in more zombies and keeping them away from the town. It is going to be interesting to see how the next few episodes play out, and who we lose in the process.