April 2016 – Page 6

Rising Light

April 15, 2016 by Belghast

Unintended Kings Fall

The original plan for last night was to chill on the sofa and play some Ratchet and Clank over the PC Remote Play application. However as the day went on yesterday I noticed that there was a new raid scheduled for last night that my good friend Sagacyte would be attending. Since the Tuesday night Rookie Raid… now called the Squirrel Squad didn’t make due to the patch and too much newness for folks to be exploring, I thought it might be a good idea to pop in and at least get some boss kills for the week so I had a shot at loot. Things went pretty well overall, but I think I blew all of my jumping skill early on. I managed to make it through the ship puzzle without falling and even make it over onto the ledge that leads up to the chest. However by the time I got to the wall puzzle, I was apparently out of juice because I fell so many times trying to get over to the exotic chest. There was one jump where I kept bouncing off the damned wall. The jumping is the only thing that I dread each week when I run Kings Fall, and while I seem to be improving… there are times where it feels like I can simply do no right and either land too hard, or can’t quite get over the gap. In any case I eventually gave up and headed to the end of the puzzle and managed to do that without much issue. It was just the ledges leading up to that chest that I seemed to be having problems with.

As far as the raid itself things went really smoothly other than that time that I got torn during sisters… and had no clue what platform I was supposed to start from. Now I know however that you apparently look up and find the orb and then start counterclockwise to it. While we wiped on that round we managed to pick it up and wreck them on the next. Probably the best moment however was one-shotting Oryx doing it the challenge mode, especially considering how much issue we had with him in the previous few weeks. I failed to get back from the exploding balls in time, but we still managed to get the kill. The best best part however was getting a bunch of loot that were upgrades, and finally getting a Red Death. Smite of Merain has been my go to weapon for awhile now, and I ended up picking up a 318 version of exactly the same roll. Getting Red Death however was the icing on the cake since that was one of those exotics that I had been hoping to see. All in all the run went really well, and while Squirrel keeps trying to tell me that I am no longer a Rookie, I still very much feel like one. I know the fights, but I still feel like there is a certain amount of skill that I am lacking. The fight I feel the most comfortable on is Oryx oddly enough, because I really like the bubble titan duty there. Above is a gallery of all of the nifty things I picked up throughout the evening of playing.

Rapid Increases

The thing that has felt insane for me is how I floundered at sub 300 light level for the better part of a year, and over the last two months I have shot up to as of last night 318. I guess it is like any game, that if you have access to raiding your gear levels increase rapidly. Early in the evening I spent some time with Broken and Squirrel running the Challenge of Elders, which was one of the new pieces that went in with the patch. The idea is that once a week you grab a scorecard from Variks, and then there are two challenges that need to be completed. The first is to finish the three round Challenge of Elders while earning at least 30,000 total team score. We failed barely to get this on our first go, but on the second and third attempts we blew the score completely out of the water. The second challenge is to get a weekly total accumulated score of 90,000 which we easily hit within three outings in the area. Each match rewarded some decent infusion fodder, and at the end we managed to score a guaranteed weapon for the single match objective, and a guaranteed armor piece for the cumulative challenge. Unfortunately the roll on the helm and machine gun that I got were kinda crap, but they did serve nicely as infusion fodder taking my Iron Companion helm and my Bretomart’s Stand to 318. I have to say the Challenge of Elders was really damned fun, and I look forward to doing this one at least once a week.

Quite honestly all of the Prison of Elders content has been great, and it is the sort of thing that I am not really going to turn down if anyone is looking to run it. Squirrel mentioned that he plans on running Prison of Elders quite literally all day Sunday and that doesn’t seem like a horrible idea. I am wanting to see how doable the level 41 version of the event is to complete with total strangers. I am assuming that you can queue for a group like you can for a strike, and after experiencing it… it seems like it would be doable with strangers. As far as for farming gear this seems like a decent way to go since every match I ended up walking away with at least one if not two legendary engrams with a chance of one of the special legendaries to drop. Honestly the thing I am enjoying the most about this patch is it feels like I have lots of different ways that I can be increasing my light level. I’ve run a handful of crucible matches and each time I managed to get something at the end. The getting nothing problem seems to have either been fixed or greatly reduced, because now the consolation prize seems to be coins or a few motes… and the best option is some infusion fodder. Either way I am down with it, and will probably try and use crucible to farm a few more motes before Xur disappears this week. I need to replenish my stock of three of coins.

Blog Unbroken

April 14, 2016 by Belghast

Technological Betrayal

Yesterday was a really rough day. It was the sort of day that makes you question why exactly you do anything. It started yesterday with WordPress indicating that I should really patch my blog to the latest version. These are the sort of warnings that I take heed, given that generally speaking the way you end up with a hacked blog is by not patching constantly. Everything seemed completely normal, and I started soldiering on with my morning post. About 90% of the way through the morning post I noticed that I was having some odd issues with the wysiwyg editor, so I decided to save a draft and reload. Upon hitting that save draft button, it cleared everything I had just written giving me a painfully blank screen. This is what ultimately lead me to post my blog broken post, because I ran out of time to write something, and I was testing to see if it was only the save draft functionality or if it was the actual publish functionality as well. So I rattled off a post really quickly, hit publish and boom… it posted only a title with no content which told me more than I knew before. It seemed like something that was interacting with the editor was causing problems. This second time around I had the presence of mind to write my post in google docs, so I was able to log in through the WordPress.com interface and try making the post there, which is ultimately what added text to my post.

After a bunch of fiddling and turning things off I found that apparently the Twitch Embed Suite that I had used for awhile to embed my twitch stream into a page on my blog, was causing all sorts of issues. So after disabling that I managed to make an update to the post, which is giving me hope this morning that all of this typing is not in vain. I’ve also already saved a draft successfully so we are in a much better place than we were yesterday morning. Unfortunately these problems didn’t stop with the blog yesterday, and my entire morning at work was spent chasing down insane issue after insane issue. One of which had been plaguing me for a few days now and over the course of six and a half hours working on the problem and trying everything I could think of it solve it… I finally remembered that about six years ago we had something similar happen and I followed down a hunch of what had caused that issue. The issue with problem solving is that often times I need to let a problem percolate in my brain for awhile before the answer presents itself… which is not exactly conducive to fixing something rapidly. So by the time I had fixed this huge issue, and a few others… it felt like I had run some sort of a mental marathon. The day improved after that… well that is until I found out that the daily heroic in Destiny was once again Lost to Light… the mission that can in theory reward the Black Spindle.

Lost to Light Sucks

Mostly I am just sick of trying for a Black Spindle. Through the grace of my friends Squirrel and Jex, I have likely put in more than twenty attempts at this thing over the course of several different occasions with no luck in walking away with one. On our best attempt we were one or two mobs away from completing when the timer ran out. Last night Squirrel was available as always and willing to help, but we struggled to find a second and Jex was nowhere to be found. So as a result I ended up trying with an old World of Warcraft friend and his co-worker. I was feeling pretty good when I heard that the two of them duoing it somehow managed to make it to the final room with a couple of minutes to spare. I thought surely with a third person in the mix that would make all the difference in the world. Unfortunately we could get to the final room with about six minutes left and from there everything seemed to break down when it came to juggling clearing the adds and also working on whittling down the boss. The closest we have ever gotten was the bubble in the middle method where we took down the boss with sword attacks and then worked on clearing the room. This time around we largely got corralled in the center corridor “safe spot” and anytime we attempted to poke our heads out either ate a sniper shot or a taken centurion ball attack. In any case this is another week without getting a spindle, and honestly I am not sure how much more I am even going to attempt it. I get my hopes up and then when I fail to get it again I just end up feeling like shit.

Now other than this little hiccup the patch has been excellent. Yesterday I had written a huge post talking about all of the things I was enjoying in the patch, but sadly that bit of prose is lost to the sands of time… or at least wherever the internet garbage collector deposits things. Suffice to say that I am enjoying the update and that it has lit a fire under my ass to go out and do things. It is not entirely as magical as I would have hoped because the confusing text blurb I have talked about before from the Bungie website was exactly that… confusing. Originally the statement had said something to the effect that engrams would now decode to at least your current converted light level. What that really means in practice is EXOTIC engrams will now decode to at least your current converted light level. I am still getting a ton of trash blues and purples, but I don’t really mind them that much because I no longer have to go through a complicated process to decide if I should break it down immediately or if I should save it for infusion fodder. The math is simply… is it higher than the light level of the gear I want to be using? If so eat it and bump up an item… if not deconstruct and get tasty materials. The awesome thing about this is that it is letting me dip into my bank and dust off items that I never actually used because the light was simply too low. For example I found this amazing Byronic Hero which is an extremely high impact hand cannon with a decent magazine size. It has triple tap, hand loaded and hidden hand giving me decent stability, better than average range… and great target acquisition with the ability to get a bonus round if I precision shot multiple times in a row.

Treasure Room Raiding

The other thing that needs to be talked about is Prison of Elders. When Destiny launched, I played for a few months and then got frustrated with my inability to improve my light level and moved on to something else. I did not return until after the launch of the Taken King, which means I largely missed both House of Wolves and the Dark Below and never actually played the original Prison of Elders. Now my friend Squirrel runs this every single week, and has for a very long time… but tends to run them on Sunday which was a lousy time for me to be doing much of anything. So when we set foot in there a few nights ago it was completely fresh and new to me… and I loved every moment of it. For years I have wanted an MMO to give me a dungeon that is a sequence of random encounters pulled from a larger pool of encounters… and that is pretty much precisely what Prison of Elders is. The first four rounds of the match take place on various battlefields themed after either the Fallen, Vex, Cabal or Hive and in new incarnation apparently each one of these has the chance of spawning in as a Taken version. The fifth round is a boss encounter and will take place on the battleground that links up to the type of mob you are facing. In the couple of outings so far I have only seen the giant Vex Minotaur and the Cabal Primus, but I believe there a bunch of options that you can end up with, as well as some new Taken versions. Your reward at the end is a trip down to the treasure room where you get to open three chests and each time through I have gotten at least one legendary engram for my troubles.

The other thing of note has been the introduction of loot boxes, for purchase from the in game shop or from doing activities. It seems like you earn a loot box for doing each type of activity per week, meaning that your first crucible match of the week, your first prison of elders/heroic of the week… and I am guessing your first raid of the week earns you a loot box. I also ended up opening several of the boxes with silver and managed to get a full set of the Taken themed gear as well as a full set of the Spectrum gear that allows you to change the color of its glow. I thought I was just super lucky, until I found out that most of my friends got nothing but Titan armor regardless of who they opened them on. There are angry threads all over the place right now talking about how crappy the randomizer is on these boxes, and folks have posted pictures of their inventory full of nine copies of exactly the same item. I guess in the grand scheme of things I lucked out because I got all of the armor I would want, as well as a white tron themed sparrow, and a really damned cool ship. Unfortunately it was not the taken themed ship that I really wanted… but I am happy enough to use it for the time being and will simply hope that my future weekly boxes end up giving me the other. In any case… I am really happy with the patch and have been slowly getting enough higher level engrams to start upgrading my gear a little at a time. I went into the patch sitting at 309 and can now hit 312 which while not a huge difference is enough to keep me engaged.

Chipping a tiny hole in the faction wall

April 13, 2016 by Grace

The first dev connect for WildStar has ended and the results are in. Here’s what Pappy has to say about the changes coming for factions in WildStar:

We will be dropping the Content Finder faction barrier.

We will be allowing players of both factions to communicate openly with each other. There will no longer be a faction filter in chat.

The faction barrier for open world grouping, housing, social systems, and guilds (which includes Arena teams and Warparties) will stay in place for now.

Well that’s very disappointing. Depending on where you sit on the faction issue, you can find reason for complaint here, or reason for hope. My opinion is that I would have liked to see the faction wall go completely out the window. I want to be able to play with my friends on either faction without having to reroll a new character, and I want to be able to inhabit social spaces with them without restrictions. Unfortunately these changes do none of that. Let’s see what we are getting out of this.

1: Dropping the content finder faction barrier. I understand this choice. Queues can be long, and this will help shorten them. I do think it will feel incredibly weird to be randomly dropped into a group with the other faction but know that there’s no way to reconnect socially with those folks once the run is over (see point #3 below). It may feel a bit jarring to end up in a mixed group if you are a strong advocate of the faction wall, and it is almost made worse by the fact that there’s no lore or social context at all for this. Basically the only place in the game where mixed groups can happen is in a random group setting.

2: Removal of faction filter from chat. This is such a non-issue for me I don’t even know what to say about it. There’s been chat mods and even workarounds in the built-in systems that have allowed cross faction chat since launch. The people who really wanted this already have it, and the people really don’t want it are going to be annoyed at having it forced on them when they’ve chosen to avoid it up to now. It should make coordinating world boss groups easier at least since everyone will be able to understand each other.

3: No changes to open world grouping and social systems. Well shit. This is what I really was hoping for, and now it feels like xmas is canceled. I wanted changes that would let me play with my friends no matter what faction. I was hoping to be able to check out the other faction’s housing, or to convince my dommie friends to join my awesome guild. The housing thing especially frustrates me since it seems like it would be straightforward to add an “Exiles only” toggle to the housing settings to appease folks who don’t want dommies stepping on their lawns or in their private RP areas. Housing is such a bastion of community and creativity which absolutely does not follow strict faction, lore, or even genre restrictions, so it makes me sad to see it stay closed off.

I have spoken with some faction purist folks who are upset about these changes because they wanted the walls to stay in place as-is. I almost feel like this result is bad for both of us. For them, they can be randomly placed into groups with the opposite faction with no context and no way to avoid it. For me, the only faction crossover is happening in a place that I don’t spend any time, since I usually run group content with friends not random pugs. I really think opening up the social systems would have been much more preferable. Those who want to play with their friends or meet new ones while questing or grouping in the world could do so, while the faction purists could choose to keep their guilds and personal social spaces to one faction only. There would be no forced grouping with the other faction. I believe enough in the lore team of WildStar to give us interesting reasons why this could work, and I believe enough in the player base that they could continue to create social spaces and events that make them happy.

I hope that this is not the final word on this issue. These dev connects are an interesting way to gather feedback, but I hope there continues to be a dialog even after the decisions are made. One of WildStar’s greatest strengths is the way the devs interact with the players, long may this continue.

P.S. Don’t forget to check in on the new dev connect, they’re asking for feedback on race/class combos!

Broken Blog

April 13, 2016 by Belghast

Bad Morning

This morning is already not off to the most amazing start. I had a blog post roughly one paragraph from posting and for whatever reason things went south. This morning I patched WordPress and with it a number of plugins… including the text editor that I use to edit my blog posts. I am guessing something went south in the process, because it just ate a blog post. As a result you are going to get a very shallow shell of the post that I was going to make, because I am running out of time. Yesterday itself was a rough day for me, because it seems like I picked up some sort of a stomach bug. As the day went on I was running a low grade fever, alternating between chilling and smothering… and suffering from what I can only term as “intestinal panic” in polite company. I managed to make through a super important meeting that I had scheduled last week… and that could dictate the success or failure of a big project at work. However after that I went home and spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa, consuming Gatorade and not trusting myself with anything more substantial than saltine crackers. It was not exactly a joyous occasion, however as the afternoon turned into evening I managed to feel a bit better and eventually filtered upstairs to check out the Destiny patch.

The most vexing problem this morning however is that my blog seems to keep clearing out my posts. What makes this all the more frustrating is that I am only a few weeks away from hitting three years of posting every single day… and my blog appears to be broken. Anyways this is somewhat of a half assed post but I am going to continue trying to make it until it finally takes. Hopefully by tomorrow morning I will have sorted out what caused my blog to break and will be able to make a proper post. If this worked… I had to go through WordPress.com to post on my blog… which is just not sustainable for the future. Testing something really quickly to see if I sorted out what plugin was causing the issue… if you see this message I apparently did.