Keeping it Together

Keeping it Together

Oh look, another Karazhan post! I was struggling mightily last week under the combined weight of the election results and some personal and familial medical issues. I missed our guild’s weekly raid night as a result, which made me feel even worse, more isolated from my friends and stressed out about things I couldn’t change. Luckily I got to dive into Kara twice this week to help take my mind off of my real world woes. On Saturday I went on my mage with a mix of alts and mains just to see how far we could get. The answer was that we cleared Opera and got some attempts in on Maiden. It was a bit rough, and makes me incredibly glad that Blizz will be releasing a less highly-tuned heroic version of the instance. I had a great time working through the fights with my friends, but with our gear mix it will probably be a long time before we can forge all the way through to the end.Keeping it Together

Sunday night however was our fixed Kara group night. We didn’t try to extend the lockout from last week, but instead started over from the beginning using what we had learned to aim for a smooth run. And it was far smoother than last time. For one thing, we didn’t get lost so much this time! We 1-shot a few of the fights that gave us trouble last week, including the dreaded Moroes. As the night went on and we started getting into the 2nd half of the instance I was feeling sick and exhausted and unfortunately it started to show. We wiped on Shade and had some unnecessary deaths, but we worked through them. We killed the Mana Devourer with just a couple attempts since we got our strategy sorted out between last week and this week. The whole 2nd half of the dungeon is incredibly well made and interesting, both to look at and mechanically. There’s even a nod to the old chess event.Keeping it Together

The last boss was a nightmare of RNG and insta-kill mechanics. Some of the fights in new Kara, like Moroes and Shade, feel like huge healing checks with a frantic healing pace and a drained mana bar at the end. This horrible beholder-like boss, on the other hand, had very little I could actually heal through and was much more dependent on everyone not screwing up. We did eventually manage to kill him, but only after many many wipes, most of which were caused by me being too tired to focus on the boss’ positioning of disintegrate and dispelling and healing horrible balls of doom and not standing in barrage nonsense. I’m hoping next week I can redeem myself with a smoother run.

I stand by my evaluation last week though, new Kara is an incredibly well made instance and a hugely fun time with a solid group of well-geared friends. I can’t wait to get good enough to make a run at Nightbane and his fancy mount someday. Thank you to my Kara groups this weekend for giving me a great distraction and making me laugh when I desperately needed it.


Keeping it Together

Karazhan Clear

Karazhan Clear

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely because of the extended holiday granted by veterans day.  It is also odd because it felt strange to go so long without a post after the recent outage in my blog.  Most everything is working as intended, but for whatever reason on the new hardware there is an artificially low upload limit which is causing me to have to shrink my images for a bit until I have that sorted out.  In truth I doubt most people will really notice that much given that my theme tended to scale them down a bit anyways.  The only real annoyance is I actually have to play which images I am going to use and shrink them down beforehand.  As far as gaming went I was all over the place… playing copious amounts of Destiny, World of Warcraft and even a little Guild Wars 2.  I also started Diablo II the December game of the month, in honor of the 20th anniversary.  The strangest thing about going back and playing that game is… just how amazingly well it still holds up.  Maybe I am viewing it through the haze of nostalgia… but other than some dodgy animations it mostly just “works”.  Sure I miss some of the more interesting abilities that Diablo 3 added in, but it is also making me appreciate the game we have more.  So instead of going on about a whole slew of topics, I am largely going to focus in on World of Warcraft.  Firstly on a crazy whim I decided to de-Worganize Belgrave my Deathknight.  He started out as a human and the more I played him in Worgen form the more I was annoyed at how small in general two-handers look on that model.  Both my Artifacts for Blood and Unholy felt like I was swinging a one-hander which just felt “wrong”.  Along with this shift however I managed to get into the groove of the Deathknight and in theory that is probably going to be my next 110.  While I need the rogue and the alchemy it provides…  I just struggle to get into a would be stealthy class.

Karazhan Clear

The core of this mornings post however is about Karazhan.  We managed to miss the first week because we were juggling trying to get attuned, with raiding and all sorts of other things… that by the time Sunday rolled around we didn’t have a permanent 5th player.  After we snagged Kylana we went in on week two and managed to make a significant amount of progress getting six of the eight bosses.  We made an attempt to pull together last Monday but scheduling conflicted with us as it was Ashgar’s On Call week.  From there we largely plotted our revenge throughout the week and in truth I was more amped about popping into Kara than I was about our super smooth clear of Emerald Nightmare.  I’ve talked before about that this is essentially what World of Warcraft was missing for me…  a tight group experience for a fixed limited number of players.  After Zul’Aman there really didn’t seem to exist a similar experience, and while 10 player raiding was essentially that… it just felt different.  Raiding feels like raiding no matter how many people you bring, and while I probably had more fun during wrath in the 10 player group…  it didn’t feel significantly different than the 25 player version I was already running regularly.  Doing both 10 and 25 watered down the experience, so that by the time we killed the Lich King on 25… it felt like old hat already since we had done it months earlier in the as a 10.  It also served to make me that much more frustrated when players seemed to struggle to grasp the mechanics… since they were exactly like the version I already knew like the back of my hand.

Karazhan Clear

What Karazhan provides more than anything else… is a unique experience that fits within certain confines.  This week we managed to clear significantly faster, but still a little bit behind the time we would need for a Nightbane run.  By the time we hit Opera we still had around two minutes and thirty seconds on the timer…  but the RP dialog before the event actually starts ate up roughly a minute of that time.  Essentially if we are going to do this we need to be chain pulling the place, and at some point I hope to get there.  For the time being however we have been working on getting stable kills.  Moroes was still a pain in the ass that we BARELY pushed across the finish line…  but a oneshot is a oneshot so we were happy with that.  We struggled a bit on a few other fights but at the 1 hour mark we were sitting halfway through the raid.  We made it up to the Mana Devourer and took a handful of tries before we managed to defeat it and start moving onto the final boss.  I am not going to lie here… it took us a solid hour of attempts on Viz’aduum the Watcher because that fight is less about damage output… and more about trying to time all of these stupid things from happening at the worst possible time…. while avoiding as much damage as is humanly possible.  This is absolutely the sort of fight where you can just end up getting screwed by RNG, and it reminds me of the stark difference between FFXIV raid design and WoW raid design.  The encounter as a whole has as many moving parts as Coil Turn 9 for example… but it is far more RNG dependent and far less successfully messaged.  However all of that said… we managed to finally get a good attempt where the stars shined upon us and managed to get our guilds very first clear of Karazhan.  Now just to speed up the process and get us a Nightbane as well.

AggroChat #132 – The Cthulhu Game Show

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen talk Blizzcon news, Guild Wars 2, and Dungeons and Dragons stuff

aggrochat132_720

Tonight is the tale of a game that we put off recording the show for weeks in the hopes of clearing up some technical difficulties.  So while we do talk about Cthulhu, the show morphs into a general discussion about the preservation of video games, and what happens to these older titles that don’t quite function as intended on modern platforms.  Additionally we talk a bit about emulation and how it might be the saving grace for especially the early cd based systems.  We talk about this weird time in early FPS games where folks were willing to take chances and make something not entirely in the Call of Duty model.  Given that this is the second of those games we have made a game club title…  it seems like there was something interesting happening that it would be awesome to see again.

Topics Discussed – Technical Difficulties – Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth – Early FPS Titles – Early CD Rom games – Games Preservation – Emulation – December Game – Diablo II

Rainbow Tentacles

This morning is a getting to a bit of a late start because reasons.  Firstly I am off for Veterans day, and I want to take a brief moment to thank those who fought to protect our country.  Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, my wife’s step-dad fought as part of the Chosin Few in Korea, and various sundry other family members have been in the military during peace and war time.  If you see anyone out and about, take a moment to thank them for their service.  The little things like that, feel all the more important during these last few days because of the sequence of events that has happened from essentially Tuesday onwards.  As for me… its been a weird series of days.  Firstly I just couldn’t put myself in the mindset of being able to write a blog post, so instead you got an intermission.  I genuinely expected to pick up Thursday morning and begin blogging as normal once again.  However fate seemed to conspire against me because in the middle of the crushing depression that I was going through Tuesday…  my blog disappeared off the face of the internet.  It seems my web host had some sort of catastrophic hardware failure, and that since I had yet to migrate to newer harder…  partially my own fault…  the site went down until it could get moved completely.  The positive is that I seem to have lost nothing in the process other than I am sure readers who probably thought I was going dark… given the post that I had left that morning.  It feels odd to have taken a somewhat forced break… and then be back just for Friday before taking the weekend off.

Rainbow Tentacles

As far as my own mental state… I have to say raiding with the guild on Wednesday helped it immensely.  For some reason it has become what seems like a new tradition to paint me with the rainbow generator before battles.  Here we are waiting on the Xavius fight to begin… and I am glowing with really strange rainbow tentacles as I tend to think of them.  I always feel like I am straight out of whimsyshire.  On a more serious note though… I could not be more proud of my guild and the raid attached to it.  The position I have assumed in the world is vastly different, because I am not leading the guild… and to some extent that still feels odd.  Kylana assumed the reins after Rylacus went into Final Fantasy XIV… and I have to say that while Ry and I were essentially the same sort of leader…  Kylana is way better than I have ever been at the day to day administrata.  That is really the place where he shines, and doing things like making sure everyone gets guild rank promotions on time… without having to be pestered about it a dozen times.  As for me…  I pretty much live in this position of guild mascot.  Folks still ask me to do responsible adult style things, but mostly I try to defer to the judgement of Ky.  I am still very much the chief recruiter and tour guide, but it feels okay to not be the king.

As for raiding…  there are certain fights where I am taking a much bigger role at least in communicating the mechanics.  I’ve started barking orders on Iggy and it seems to go more smoothly when I let folks know what they should be fighting and when… and roughly how much time we have left to burn.  As far as Emerald Nightmare in general… other than us tanks completely screwing up Ursoc…  we had probably the smoothest night we have ever had and made a really quick work of the entire instance.  We had enough time to put in about thirty minutes of attempts on Heroic Nythendra…  which is way rougher than the original.  I remember rolling into Emerald Nightmare for the first time and feeling amazing when we oneshot her…  only to feel frustration again when we struggled with SpiderBirb.  Ultimately more than anything I feel happy we have made progress.  It feels like we started as a disconnected group of folks that sometimes ran dungeons together… and have exited a highly functional team.  I mean I had worked in the past a few times with Art, when I had to fill in tanking during our Warlords raid… but he is a super dependaeble tanking partner.  Of course I also love tanking beside Ashgar who fills in when Art has not been able to make it.

As far as other matters go… I am trying my best to focus on the positive things in life for awhile.  This is not me burying my head in the sand, but me trying to return to a sense of normality for my own mental health.  I am just as confused and frustrated as anyone by the recent turn of events, but I also know that there is very little that is directly in my realm of control.  So I am going to focus on the things I do control, and try my best to get happy again.  For those of you who are reading this… thanks so much for sticking by me throughout the years.  You all mean so much to me.