September 2016 – Page 2

Arbitrary Gates

September 28, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked about my feelings regarding Destiny and the Rise of Iron Expansion. However I could have just as easily have talked about my insane good luck. What I mean by that is to the best of my knowledge I am the only person to get one of the new legendaries in my guild, or at the very least only one in as far as the guild activity log on the armory scrolls back. I managed to pick this up Monday night during a Mythic Maw of Souls… and I am still insanely pumped about it. The Thundergod’s Vigor works nicely for me… considering how damned much I love to thunderclap. Similarly I really need to get better about using Demoralizing Shout at opportune times… so Thunderclapping my way to more casts of it also seems awesome. Then again there is the simple fact that all legendaries seem to drop at 895 item level, which serves as a nice boost for me in that department as well. Then there is also the added benefit of it being an item from Diablo 3 which only adds to the coolness factor as far as I am concerned. What I was not however expecting is that it apparently sends out an alert to the entire guild when a legendary drops… which is in part what makes me think that I might legitimately be the only person in guild with one so far. I feel extremely lucky, but at the same time sort of sad that these are not dropping for everyone.

A huge chunk of what makes Legion interesting to me is the interaction of these legendary items with the rotations of the characters. That is the part that I love about Diablo 3, the way a certain item you pick up can completely change how your character functions. It was my hope that the new legendary system would add some of this element to World of Warcraft, and at least it seems it might. However if they remain super rare items that you may or may not see ever during your play of the game… it takes one of the cooler items and locks it away behind at gate that few players are ever going to breach. For as awesome as Legion has been, there are a lot of items that just feel odd. For example last night I participated in the first of the LFR content associated with Emerald Nightmare. I went into it expecting that nothing that dropped would actually be an upgrade for me, but I was however hoping to maybe complete a quest or two. Now my friend Grace said she was able to complete her skinning quest without issue, however for me… I was not able to loot the item needed for In Nightmares. Which seems a bit crappy, and has caused Blizzard CS to come out and state that this is “working as intended”. However it feels like a massive let down to those hoping to complete the Balance of Power quest line and get that item appearance… but that cannot realistically do anything other than LFR.

Granted I am not necessarily in that category, because we have a raid group that is planning on working on this stuff tonight in fact. It just feels like an arbitrary bar given that for many of us at least we have been working towards that item appearance since the moment we knew it was a thing. Hell I am even considering pushing my way through some of the PVP objectives just to unlock those appearances and that feels significantly more casual friendly than this one does. I mean I guess in some way it makes sense, there are large groups of players that seem to want some visual representation that they are “better” than other players. At the very least this seems to be a vocal group on the forums and twitter, and represented the large chunk of the opposition to the Friendship Moose community and the practice of dragging friends through getting their special mounts. It is my only hope that we can do some of this for my own guild once we have the bosses needed for the Balance of Power quest line on farm and can realistically pull random people in to get quest steps unlocked. Arbitrary gating of content and sitting it up on a shelf just too high for players to ever reach… is one of the things that frustrates me about the MMO design. LFR used to be this happy medium that let people see the storyline, and complete quests associated with taking out these bosses but I guess with Legion that is changing. While so much of Legion has been this great step forward, this feels like a stumble backwards.

Arbitrary Gates

September 28, 2016 by Belghast

Rise of Iron

September 27, 2016 by Belghast

On September 20th the Rise of Iron expansion launched for Destiny, and considering just how damned engaged I am currently with World of Warcraft Legion, the truth is that I had not really spent much time playing the game until this weekend. On Saturday when we recorded the podcast, I noted some of the issues I was seeing about what seemed to be recycled sections of the Cosmodrome for the purpose of building the Plaguelands area. There is one entire section that was essentially the same, but with added snow, ice and SIVA/Splicer destruction marks. What I am realizing after spending some time with the game is that this is absolutely on purpose. The current cosmodrome and the plaguelands overlap slightly, and it seems as though this area got repeated as a way of explaining to the player visually how the two zones fit together. After spending a significant amount more time roaming about, I can verify that the plaguelands are massive and extremely unique in geography apart from this one region. It is really hard trying to make something feel completely new, when essentially you are having to build it out of the same visual language that the first zone of the game used several years ago. So while much of what you end up seeing looks extremely familiar, there are some really interesting things going on, like exploring the heavily skewed wastes of capsized shipping freighters for example.

The dreadnaught very much felt like you were invading a dark and foreboding foreign space. Everything about that dungeon felt like a dungeon crawl, as you explored the nooks and crannies gleaning secrets from every corner. The plaguelands are much the same, but this time around it is a sprawling outdoor space, and part of the cognitive dissonance is that at least on some level I keep remembering that I am exploring the same cosmodrome complex that I have known for years. It feels as though I simply got to open a door to a new area that I never saw before… and essentially because of the recycling of that first area that is precisely what happened. The only disappointment is that the new story elements were pretty short, and while retaking Felwinter Peak was an awesome sequence of quests, and shutting down the SIVA replication chamber was one of the more epic fights in the game… it all felt extremely brief. The truth is the amount of content contained within Rise of Iron feels like a DLC addon… and not an “expansion” in the terms I am used to think of it from my MMO roots. The level cap does not change, and while all of the light levels increase greatly… the process starts to stall out heavily just five points from the 335 cap I was already sitting at on my characters. All of this said I still have yet to really scratch the surface of the content, but it just does not feel like quite the same transition as Year 1 to Year 2. I guess in many ways Rise of Iron didn’t have quite so many wrongs to right, and as such didn’t need to be quite the overhaul that Taken King was.

Ultimately I am enjoying myself, in spite of the fact that the gearing this time around feels significantly more grindy. The biggest part of this is the fact that it seems like blue engrams have a hard cap of 340 light. I spent a good deal of last night when I couldn’t get to sleep running around and doing content out in the world, and with that gathered up a dozen or so blue engrams. Apart from the ones that upgraded into Legendary, or turned into Strange Coins… every single one came out at exactly 340 light which only serves to be armor materials or weapon parts. With Rise of Iron, Blue is the new Green… which makes the fact that I am getting a constant string of 190ish light Greens simply tedious. Something just feels wrong with the engram system this time around, because nothing shy of a Legendary seems to make a difference. That means that the real way to move that needle forward is to either grind out faction packages or do heroic strikes… something I have not really dared to do just yet given the highly interrupted playtime I have gotten so far. When I do open a faction package however the fact that you can choose between an Armor, Weapon or Chroma package is a welcome change. It is my understanding that the faction packages have a similar hard cap to Blues, which winds up getting you to 365 leaving raid gear and exotics your only way to push up to the new 385 light cap. All of this would feel a bit frustrating… were it not for the fact that the moment to moment gameplay feels so damned good. The biggest problem I have however is the fact that my favorite weapon is an exotic… which means I need a constant flow of infusion fodder to keep moving it forward.

Since I am also an avid Destiny lore hound… I have to say this expansion is great for many reasons in that it fleshes out a lot of bits of the overall story that were left alone. Unfortunately most of this happens in more grimoire cards, which are only hinted at in the actual spoken dialog. For the last two years we have participated in the Iron Banner, as Lord Saladin arrives at the Tower looking for a new generation of Iron Lords. Now we finally get to learn about the names we have heard during that time like Jolder or Timur. This is the story of what happened to the Iron Lords and once again the story of the hubris of humanity as it tried to exploit the resources of the traveler. While I completed the main storyline rather quickly, I still have a bunch of quests that are slowly playing their way out as I have yet to take on the raid, or do any of the new strikes. I have a feeling that these will ultimately lead to unlocking the various new quest exotics, and I am hoping giving me more bits of the story. All in all it seems well worth the $30, but the truth is… you are just paying the upkeep cost on being able to keep current with the game. The game is once again falling into the spot of giving me something that I can do quickly, without getting to engaged in content that will be hard for me to pull myself away from. Are you playing the expansion? What are your thoughts?

A Busy Weekend

September 26, 2016 by Belghast

Mondays are always a challenge. I realize that is the understatement of the year but there is just something extra heinous about trying to revive your week day routines after happily nuking them from orbit over the course of Friday and Saturday night. Sunday night is always the roughest night of the week to get to sleep, because my body is not quite ready to relinquish the last vestiges of true freedom. Similarly since giving up the whole weekend blogging thing for lent…. or whatever I did to actually give it up… rebooting that process each Monday morning is an equal challenge. This morning for example I have logged in to “check on” several things, all the while happily avoiding actually sitting down to put thought on paper or at least virtual paper. This weekend was an odd one, but a good one. It started off Friday night with House Stalwart my guild throwing together an impromptu raid into the Emerald Nightmare. We did not really have a lot of time, since it was literally thrown together over the course of that evening, but we did manage to go in and one shot the first boss. From there we started work on the spider boss, but given its moving parts I am wondering if that was the best choice. In truth ALL of the next bosses seem to have their own madness going on and with it a challenge or two that will force us to shift and adjust to the fight. We managed to get spider to phase two, which isn’t much of a challenge but at least I can claim it was progress.

Another thing we attempted this weekend was our very first Mythic+ dungeon… because well Grace and I had keys burning a hole in our pockets. However after attempt number one, I think we are going to wait to do number two… until we know the dungeons better. Mythic Plus Halls of Valor… also happened to be the very first Halls of Valor Mythic run for most of us. As a result we were less than efficient at a number of the fights and failed to get the timer. That said given the number of wipes we had I think we did fairly well in that our timer ran out around the time we crossed the glowing bridge of nonsense. So while we failed… we at least failed in style? The truth is all of us just need a lot more normal mythic runs before we start burning any more keys. None of us have any of the magical legendary drops that our UI tells us we can currently equip one of…. but I hear they absolutely maybe sometimes sorta drop in mythics. We were maybe unprepared given that we were also dragging Ashgar into his first mythic ever… and we went for a timed one. The truth is I think we just wanted to know what the challenge looked like so we could prepare for it. I know personally I find it hard to wrap my head around what is needed until I have failed for a bit at doing something. Similarly we had to fail at the spider boss for me to be able to wrap my head around the videos that I will ultimately watch before we make another attempt on Wednesday.

Finally I made a significant push on Exeter my Paladin, who is now 108 and about halfway through it. Not shockingly I ended up dropping Retribution around 102 and have been leveling as a Protection Paladin the rest of the way. This has allowed me to do things like tank for friends when they need to run lower level instances. We pulled together an Eye of Azshara for Thalen over the weekend… and I happened to need it as well. Now I have several more dungeons waiting in the wings for me to do that I may or may not wait for friends to get to as well. Now that I am so close to 110 I sort of want to push across the finish line so I can start doing world quests and such on this character too. Similarly I want to get in some Coren Direbrew runs for trinkets before those things go away. So at a minimum I am probably going to finish out the rest of 108 because 109 allows me to start queuing. I still think that is a major missed opportunity, in that they should have allowed the Direbrew event to scale with players. At this moment I have finished Azsuna and Highmountain and have just trudged through the faction bullshit in Stormheim. The first part of that zone feels so unlike the rest of this expansion, I can only hope in the future they are going to realize that this game feels so much better when you give us an interesting place to explore with its own story… and quit trying to force everything into a dated red versus blue narrative.