Comfort Gaming Marathon

I had a pretty busy weekend with various real life events and crises taking up a lot of my time and energy. That meant that when I got time for gaming I really needed it to be quiet and relaxing time. Often that means Diablo 3, but since everything I need for the season means pushing really high rifts or doing speed runs, I opted for a change of pace. My WoW subscription is still active, since I was trying to finish the achievement that unlocks flying for the Legion expansion zones.

I actually had forgotten that I unlocked flying at the end of last week, and then immediately logged off because I was pretty sick of WoW. Since that was the last major goal I had in-game, and because I wanted something low-key to do, I gave myself permission to not care even a little bit about gear or raids or anything difficult. Instead, I decided to work on my mostly-abandoned Horde characters. I’ve been in Alliance guilds since Pandaria, but Horde is where my heart is, and where my biggest stable of high level characters is too. Of the 9 characters on my Horde server that were 100 at the end of WoD, only my priest had been leveled in Legion, and this made me pretty sad. So I decided to fix it.

First I logged into that priest, who was 110 and had finished the class hall story but not done anything else, and got her up to date with artifact knowledge and the broken shore story. Since gearing up and raiding were unappealing to me, I stopped there and swapped to my paladin. She was in Dalaran and had picked up her first weapon, so I could start straight into questing. Flying makes a huge difference. I appreciate that having control over your movement lets the developers tell you stories and craft more specific experiences, but once I’ve gone through that on one character I really enjoy the freedom of flying. I thought Highmountain would be the most noticeable place where it would make a difference but honestly it felt amazing in every zone. Even more so when I wanted to dart off and grab a gathering node every once in a while. Flying let me pick and choose my questing experience, doing what I enjoyed and mostly skipping the bits I knew would frustrate me. It also let me grab a bunch of treasure chests for artifact power and class resources along the way.

Flying, and switching my focus to alts, transformed WoW from a painful slog into some seriously comfortable comfort gaming. By the end of the weekend my pally was 110. After yesterday I’ve unlocked the broken shore and her class hall quest line is just waiting on a few follower missions to progress. I was expecting to struggle with world quests when I hit 110 because my gear is terrible and I still haven’t unlocked my 3rd weapon relic slot, but surprisingly things went pretty smoothly. I leveled entirely as Retribution, something I have never done since that character was created 10 years ago. It still isn’t my favorite spec, but since I don’t plan on doing any group activities with her it seemed like the most reasonable thing to focus on.

Normally a big reason I like having so many alts is crafting, but since Legion’s take on professions is so painfully awful I don’t know how much I will focus on that. I did her mining quests as they came up, and the few engineering quests so far have not been prohibitive. My priest still has alchemy and tailoring quests sitting in her log for months because I didn’t feel like running dungeons to complete them, so I’m not optimistic about making much more progress on that front. Instead I’m already trying to figure out which alt to work on next. Normally that would be my druid, but since I already have an Alliance druid at 110 I may focus on warlock instead. I got my affliction weapon last night so I’m ready to start leveling.

I’m happy I’m getting more mileage than I expected out of my one month’s return to WoW.


Comfort Gaming Marathon

Unlikely Agent

Unlikely Agent

This is absolutely one of those mornings where I am staring blankly at WordPress sort of hoping that a blog post materializes in front of my eyes.  I have this fitful relationship with sleep.  It is something I crave but something I can never quite get at normal levels.  I mean I have my own normal, which is four to six hours of sleep a night.  If I get over that I tend to get groggy…  which is what happens to be going on this morning.  Sunday night I had a horrid bout of insomnia, which when combined with the fact that our middle cat was being insane…  meant I probably got two hours of real sleep.  So by the time I hit 9 pm last night I was conking out at the keyboard, and decided to put the house to bed and crash.  That means I managed to get roughly eight hours of sleep… and my body is confused as hell.  Its like… what was this thing, I think I like it…  lets do nothing but that from now on!  Hence the sitting in my office chair in a dark room, with a cat laying on the desk beside me…  staring blankly into oblivion.

Unlikely Agent

Before the impending crash however I spent a good deal more time with Star Wars the Old Republic working through the Imperial Agent story.  I mean there is a good reason why I saved this one for last… because in truth this has always been the class that I had zero interest in.  I am not a stealthy person…  nor am I necessarily a normally deceitful person.  So the idea of flying around the galaxy and crushing rebellions through unsavory means did not exactly sound that fun to me.  In true Bioware style however…  it is allowing me to play a fairly atypical Agent that regularly talks back to his handlers.  In truth I am trying to play it much like a smuggler that somehow got drafted into imperial service, and and for this reason I am not using any of the traditional imperial garb, but instead decided it was a great time to break out the Nico Okarr duster.

I am occasionally breaking out the HK-55 helm when I want to feel more bounty hunter than smuggler.  I did most of Hutta in this fashion because I felt like anyone called the “Red Blade” simply would not do to be wearing Imperial Garb.  All of these mental adjustments are helping me to enjoy the story as I am sort of re-purposing what is happening into the narrative that I would rather be playing.  The positive is that apparently Kaliyo is eating it all up, given that she apparently likes violence against those who deserve it… and general smartassery the rest of the time.  Because of my general stance of only harming the wicked…  I am playing a fairly “grey” character, sitting on straight up neutral currently.  This is an interesting departure from the “did you say force lightning” options of the Sith Inquisitor.  At the point I crashed for the night I had just started Imperial Balmorra, which is probably my least favorite planet.  However just focusing on the class and planetary stories means I tend to get off the various planets pretty quickly, but at the same time feel like I see the entire place through the new classes eyes.

Touch of Darkness

Touch of Darkness

I am deeply susceptible to fits of nostalgia, this is a known quantity if you have spent any time at all reading my blog.  One of the ways this regularly manifests itself is with a constant sequence of abrupt returns to games that I thought I had packed neatly away.  Without fail it seems like the moment I finally get around to uninstalling a given game…  that is ultimately the one I am going to be poking my head in next.  There are a few times of the year when I feel excessive “Star Wars Patriotism” for lack of a better term.  Obviously whenever a new movie releases that is an extreme time of loving all things Star Wars.  Similarly the made up internet holiday of “May the Forth” and “Revenge of the Fifth” have some effect but they are largely just contact highs brought on by the extreme amount of tweets I am going to read with pictures from the universe.  The one that apparently worked this time however was the Celebration Weekend, which I have several folks in my social feeds that attend.  However the absolute tipping point for me was setting a tiny adorable Jyn Erso delivering Deathstar Plans to every Leia cosplayer she came across.  When you combine this with the fact that I am kinda in a high point with Bioware right now after wrapping up Andromeda…  the two combined turned into me reinstalling SWTOR and picking up where I left off.  Ironically I had literally just uninstalled the SWTOR client from my laptop a few weeks back to free up some space.

Touch of Darkness

Around the launch of Force Awakens, myself and a few others of our crew had a short renaissance with Star Wars the Old Republic.  At that point I went on a bit of a bender trying to see all of the class story lines, and when eventually faded away from the game I was pretty near the end of the Sith Inquisitor content.  So instead of going out and experiencing the new content on my Jedi Knight main…  I wound up settling right back into the comfortable groove of running around and being a largely dark side Sith Sorcerer.  Its funny how each class really seems to dictate if I can go full Dark Side or not.  With the Jedi Knight, if you go Dark Side you just end up being the biggest asshole on the planet.  With the Inquisitor however, choosing those Dark Side options just feels right most of the time, especially when it allows me to use force lightning as the answer to any question.  One of my favorite sequences involved needed to smuggle someone off of a planet… and using Force Persuade to get past some guards…  and then Force Persuading my Ally when he asked how I did that.  However as I got later in the content, there were several moments where I just could not be cruel to those who didn’t deserve it.  Functionally if someone was loyal to me…  I would even go so far as to take a light side option to save them.

Touch of Darkness

When we last played the game it was during the twelve times story mission multiplier, meaning you could get through the game just by focusing on nothing but the main story.  Now instead the game highlights anything that is part of the main planetary story arc, and all of your class quests in purple…  and in theory it seems like just by focusing on those you can accomplish much of the same thing.  However it also seems like every last drop of experience has been increased, because when I hopped back in the game all I was missing was Corellia and the final show down between Republic and the Sith.  During the course of wrapping up the tiny bit I had remaining on Voss… and doing all of Corellia…  I wound up almost 56 before finally finishing the story.  So while the game is no longer quite the elevator to the top that it once was…  it still seems to go insanely fast.  I started an Imperial Agent last night after wrapping up the Inquisitor… and made it to 12 before leaving Hutta, doing nothing but focus firing the purple quest elements.  Functionally it is the Agent that is the last bit needed before having completed all 8 class stories, and it is also the least “Belghast” of all possible class stories.  So far it is interesting, and I opted to go Sniper instead of going healer once again on another smuggler type class.  I am not entirely certain if I will regret this or not, but I was somehow shocked to see that apparently at some point they did away with commendations, and all of the mod components are purchasable with credits.

Touch of Darkness

I am not entirely certain how long this whim is going to last, but for the time being…  I am enjoying myself and I guess that is all that really matters.  In the short term I will be playing a lot more Belgeist to see if I can actually manage to finish out the Agent story this time and get the achievement for having finished all eight classes.  I am not sure why this matters to me so much, but it is really similar to Elder Scrolls Online, and not wanting to do any of the “expansion” content without having finished all three realms of the original content.  I am in a similar holding pattern with not wanting to start any of the Fallen Empire content without having done all eight of the original story lines.  Fortunately it feels like the SWTOR goal is a hell of a lot closer than the Elder Scrolls Online goal given that I have yet to wrap the second realm there and have an entire third realm to go.  One of the awesome things about being woefully behind in several of these games… is the fact that I can always return whenever I feel like it….  and it seems like I have mountains of content waiting on me to sift through at my pace.  This is also why I tend to bounce pretty hard off of the games that have limited time content that functionally means if I am not playing it as my primary game… I will never get to experience it.  Whatever the case I enjoyed my weekend of comfort gaming, and time will tell how long it lasts.

AggroChat #153 – Incoming Tank Shortage

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo

aggrochat153_720

One of the things that gets edited down before you get your hands on the podcast is any long gaps between topics.  This week we were seemingly a little bit out of it, and the pauses were significant.  When I sat down to start editing I had 2 hours and 15 minutes worth of recorded audio, and after doing my normal compression pass…  we are down to just a little over 1 hour and 30 minutes.  The result was a pretty wide gamut of topics that we discussed, and between the pauses some of the more interesting conversation about a few things that we had never quite delved into.  Among the topics a lengthy discussion about what is wrong with Warhammer games as a whole, and our fears regarding what is absolutely going to be a crushing tank shortage with Stormblood.

Topics Discussed:  

  • Star Wars the Old Republic
  • Skyforge PC
  • Bomberman Creepy Characters
  • Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap
  • Hollow Knight
  • Eternal Crusade
  • Warhammer 40,000
  • Games Workshop
  • Pips are Important
  • People Don’t Understand NDAs
  • Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood
  • Tank Shortage
  • Dark Souls III
  • Variable Difficulty in Games
  • Persona 5