November 2016 – Page 3

Unintended Stealth

November 23, 2016 by Belghast

I had every intent last night of going home and working on my Deathknight. This week the world boss is The Soultakers, which finally allows folks to unlock the hidden frost appearance. I had been enjoying my newly humanized Deathknight after years being a Worgen, but had largely been taking my time in pushing through the levels. However with the promise of an artifact appearance waiting on me, the goal was to get home and push as hard as I could to get to 110 before the week was finished. Recently they patched the game to make all artifact appearance drops from world bosses a 100% drop chance. Apparently however there is a giant asterisk looming behind that statement. What I am hearing now is that in order to get the appearance you have to be artifact knowledge rank four, which is completely impossible for me to actually obtain during this week, at least without the impending catch up mechanics. So instead I went upstairs to try and solve another issue. According to my friend Squirrel, apparently I have not been online on PSN in over thirty days… so after some back and forth we determined that I had apparently inadvertently set myself to appear offline. For awhile now I had seen a red X beside my portrait in the PS4 menu, but I always just assumed that meant I had a flaky connection. However apparently on my profile page I hit the wrong thing and flipped myself into some sort of stealth mode. After fixing that… I also started getting updates as to what my friends were doing, so when Squirrel joined a party I decided to hook my headset up and join as well.

The plan for the evening was supposedly a Hard Mode Wrath of the Machine, but due to the holiday messing with everyone’s raiding plans… it was just Squirrel, myself, Jex and Havel that were available. The original thought was that if we could somehow muster the folks that we would end up running a normal to show me the ropes. Instead we just ended up completing various crap that I had sitting undone. I am the worst at actually grinding through quests, and the Gjallarhorn was something I tried when I was sitting at 340ish and found maddening. There are wave and waves of exploding shanks that have this nasty way of sneaking up on you when you are least expecting. I would ultimately end up getting blown up and failing out… and unfortunately this is one of those quests where you have to complete a bunch of stuff if you die at any point. The goal originally was to pester someone to come help me, but I never got around to doing it. Last night they were willing to help and I was more than happy to knock a quest out of my inventory.

Similarly I had been sitting on the Thorn quest for at least a week now, having completed the last of the crucible kills during the recent Iron Banner. In order to do this one I needed a key, and had never actually finished the Sepiks Perfected strike quest… which rewarded a key. So next up my friends set about to helping me complete this quest. Unfortunately I have not actually spent any time with the gun, but seeing as I never got the year one variety I have always been curious just how it feels. There was a time where I used hand cannons above pretty much any gun, but the short range and ammo capacity nerfs have ended up with me favoring other things. If nothing else I might throw this up on my hunter and be the stereotype, even though this version of thorn is significantly defanged from the original.

Lastly when I opened the chest to pick up the Thorn, I managed to pull a pretty sweet new sniper with significantly higher light than the one I was using. I like the super high damage archetype of snipers, so this has already seen some use given that it is solar burn week. We attempted a random heroic after completing the Thorn quest but for whatever reason I failed to get credit from my Future War Cult quest. I am super thankful to all of the help that Squirrel and Jex were willing to dish out last night, and I really want to figure out a time when I can hang out properly and do more Destiny stuff. I knew I missed them, but I didn’t realize how much until the middle of last night hanging out killing baddies.

An Alt Problem

November 22, 2016 by Grace

It is no secret around this blog that I have a serious case of alt-itis. In a lot of ways I envy folks that have one fixed character in an MMO and can focus all their time and energy into making that character the best it can possibly be. I sometimes try to do that, but far too often I get curious about how other classes feel to play, or even just want to replay the leveling content from a slightly different perspective. This has led over the years to a truly massive stable of alts in many games. The closest I’ve come to a single focused character is in FFXIV, where at least you can try every class on the same character. Even there, I have a couple low level alts bouncing around because I wanted to see the main story over again.

In WoW, which I’ve been playing for almost 10 years now, I have a giant pile of alts spread across factions and servers. This problem was exacerbated by the pre-Legion invasion event, which let me level quite a few more all the way up to 100. Horde side I’ve got 2 priests, 3 hunters, 2 druids, pally, mage, lock, shaman, DK, rogue all in the mid-90s or higher. Alliance side is also looking crowded, with priest, pally, druid, demon hunter, 2 mages, 2 hunters, 2 monks all 100+, with a warrior, priest, and a DK in the mid 70s as well. I’m probably still forgetting someone. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, it is. Believe me, I’m incredibly glad that garrisons are no longer the gold making machines they once were, because in Warlords I spent all my time swapping between alts and doing chores instead of enjoying the game.

In Legion I’ve been a bit slower dealing with all these alts, and my usual mode of operations feels much less satisfying than it used to. Part of the reason I like having so many alts is to be self-sufficient with professions. Legion’s profession system is so painful that there’s much less incentive for using alts this way now. Heck, even my “main” still hasn’t maxed out her jewelcrafting. Once I got to the point where the only skillups to be found were not 100% chance from rank 3 necklaces that cost at least 4-6 blue quality gems to craft and sell on the AH for less than 1 cut gem I threw up my hands in disgust. I’ll get to the skill cap in about 3 months worth of Darkmoon Faire rather than waste my time and gold right now.

My other alts are in similar positions. I’ve got 2 monks, a mage and a druid all at 110 and none of them have a maxed profession. It just doesn’t feel worth it for the effort involved. I’m slowly working my way through the profession quest lines at least, and I do like that there is a bit more flavor injected into professions this expansion. The forced dungeons and the usual trap of being able to craft things that are expensive to make and useless to you by the time your skill is high enough to craft them are a huge turn-off though. I’d like to be able to make my own enchants and flasks, but the highest rank recipes are still pretty far out of reach on characters that I don’t want to be playing more than my main. At least I can do some gathering, and so far sending mats to my guildies in exchange for goods and services seems to be the way to go.

Leveling alts is extremely fast this expansion, but there’s not much payoff once you get to the level cap. I applaud the huge amount of “stuff to do” in Legion, it is definitely the most engaging expansion for me since Wrath. That same wealth of stuff to do makes alts overwhelming. I’ve obviously reached the point here a couple months in where I want to be branching out a bit with different classes and professions but it doesn’t feel good right now to do so. I’m still in love with this expansion, but it is not conducive to my alt-loving playstyle.

On Video Editing

August 11, 2018November 21, 2016 by Ashgar

If you missed it, an earworm was inflicted on the Aggrochat crew a little while ago and refuses to go away. The song in question is a remix of Boney M.’s Rasputin, as seen in the following video:

Beyond being super catchy, this is actually a surprising feat of video editing The original song has nothing to do with Rasputin, or Russia, or funk. Love the Way You Move is about ~136 BPM and the music video for it is 3:40 long. The remixed song is closer to 150 BPM, and is also 3:40. But the music video has a lot of parts that match the beat, so just playing one over the other wouldn’t look very good.

As a result, the final version does quite a bit of audio and video editing. The most notable part is that any beat-matched sections are sped up to match the new tempo. This includes the working with tools near the beginning and all dance sequences (including the flashing siren near the end). The tradeoff for this is that most parts that didn’t need to match the beat were slowed down. This means the introduction, most of the middle section, and Putin’s arrival. In order to make this work, a little bit of audio editing was also necessary. Love the Way You Move has a 16-bar chorus, the chorus of Rasputin is only 8 bars. In order to make the end section fit, an extra repetition was added in.

I just thought this was interesting to note.

A Good Weekend

November 21, 2016 by Belghast

This past week was the week of seemlingly smooth and fast clears. Wednesday night we worked on progression content, which mean’t that we spent the majority of the evening wiping to new and exciting things. However the end result of that evening was that we downed Odyn and made a decent amount of progress on Guarm. The only negative aspect of that is that it also means that none of us actually saw progress on the quest chain that haunts us. We kicked around the notion of having an Emerald Nightmare clear night, that I ultimately decided would be Friday. I set up a calendar invite and hoped, and then was pleasantly surprised at the number of folks that signed up. In fact we technically had more than our normal raid nights, and other than some starts and stops while waiting on folks or dealing with disconnections… it was a very smooth evening. So smooth in fact that I seriously wonder if we could have cleared the entire place in an hour. I mean because of the various time spent waiting… that was not a thing that happened however it seemed like we might have been on pace for it. That general smoothness continued on last night with Karazhan, but so did the whole waiting business. Thalen got sidelined with family stuff, and we had the option of either filling his slot or waiting. It turned out we ended up getting started roughly an hour and a half late, but once again things went amazingly smoothly. So much so that I think next week we are going to make a proper attempt at a Nightbane run. We would have one shot every boss… were it not for the fact that we tried some madness for an achievement on Medivh.

Another big part of my weekend was roaming around and exploring the Comet of Ahnket in the Rift Starfall Prophecy expansion. At this point I am sitting around 66 1/3 and feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the Scatherran Forest zone. Firstly I have to say this expansion is charming as hell so far, namely because of the two companions that follow you around at times… but also because it is a great example of environmental storytelling. Every area is packed full of little things to be scene and experienced much in the same way the zones are built in Guild Wars 2. Lots of things are happening in the background and all it takes is you sitting still long enough to experience them. The best of these vignettes has to be the hedgehogs who are stuck in a ball rolling… until one of them realizes that they can just let go of their feet to stop. Similarly there is this adorable sequence where you are playing hide and seek with baby unicorns, and you have to go out and find them so that you can lead them back home. The only negative so far is that I feel woefully undergeared for some of the content, and there is a bit of an uneven difficulty level happening. There was an area full of spiders… and they seemed literally twice as tough as any of the other equivalent level 66 mobs. I could take down entire packs of humanoids… but a single spider was a race to see if I could finish them off before they finished me off. Getting a second spider meant absolute certain death. All in all though I am really liking the expansion and it feels much more like Storm Legion did as far as content goes.

Finally I spent a good deal of time playing Destiny this weekend and was able to push my Titan to the 385 barrier. This is the point where you stop getting upgrades from legendary engrams, and are stuck relying on faction rewards that stop at 390… and exotic engrams that will take you all the way to 400. This means I am hoping tomorrow starts a small arms week for the heroic strike list because I absolutely need to spend some time farming. In theory I believe the Archon’s Forge will go up to 400 when it comes to end of event rewards, but not anything coming from an engram. I spent some time working on my Hunter and Warlock and getting both of them through the Rise of Iron story so I can have three sets of world bounties to work on each week. I realize they just reward engrams at this point… but if nothing else it can be infusion fodder to help work up additional weapons and armor. I need to find the free time to try and sign up for one of the machine raids so I can see the content and get some more tasty gear. However 385 is a completely respectable place to be, and in theory during the next iron banner I should be able to make a decent dent into pushing that number up into the 390s. It was a great weekend and especially considering we have a short week ahead of me.