Accidental Orc

Accidental Orc

Firstly I feel like I need to lead this post with a tweet from one of my friends that I received last night.

I did in fact do this thing.  To be more specific I went on a spree of mass cancelling my MMO accounts in early October.  I went so far as to actually uninstall many of the games, which is apparently the surest sign that you are just about to decide that you are going to want to play again.  Thankfully I have super fast internet and downloading World of Warcraft really is not that big of a deal anymore.  I am not exactly sure how to explain this one other than the fact that I have been playing on and off with a friend in Destiny 2…  that I first knew through my horde guild in World of Warcraft.  I guess in theory this made me nostalgic about that guild and planted the idea in my head that I really should level my warrior over there.  When you combine that with the weekend we had which was dreary and overcast…  and my desire to just hang out on the couch in a blanket cocoon and do some comfort gaming and apparently all of that translates into playing World of Warcraft.

Accidental Orc

The biggest challenge however is the fact that in the process of uninstalling everything I also nuked my addons.  Playing WoW with the stock interface is just not a tenable solution.  My previous UI was cobbled together out of several dozen separate addon packs that I had to use the Curse Client now re-branded as Twitch to maintain.  I did not want to go through that again so I took this as the perfect opportunity to try ElvUi that everyone has been raving about for years.  It took some getting used to because the set up process was nothing like I was used to.  However I decided to embrace the difference and by the end of the weekend I had gotten used to it mostly.  The thing that likely won me over however was the AFK screen where the camera spins around you and your character dances in the corner.  They didn’t need to do this thing…  but the world is better for them doing it.  Essentially over the last few days I have chilled on the couch and leveled from 30ish to 61 as of this morning.  I am now knee deep in the Burning Crusade expansion content and having a weird nostalgic trip down memory lane.  I have zero clue how long I will be playing or even how often but for the moment I am enjoying myself.

Accidental Orc

In Destiny 2 news I can now hit 302 on my Titan and in theory would love to either get in a raid tonight or at least the Nightfall on my Hunter and Warlock to potentially get some additional item level movement.  The biggest problem that is effecting me in Destiny is the fact that I just am not a night owl right now…  and that a good chunk of our clan are now on the west coast meaning they are two hours behind me.  One of two things is going to have to happen, either we break into a early evening and late night raid, or we start actually declaring some night of the week to be raid night.  Thus far everything has sorta been on the spur of the moment with whoever happens to be around, and sure that is fun…  but also impossible to plan around.  Last night for example they were wanting to pull together the raid while I was watching Walking Dead, which is literally the only television show I watch all week long.  Other nights the potential start time would mean I would be up until midnight which is just not viable during the work week anymore.  Had I planned for this and maybe taken a cat nap when I got home then it might be doable, but impromptu raiding just isn’t working for me right now.  I want to raid and I want to get through the content but I just need some structure to it.  Hopefully with the reset we can do a better job of planning raid nights.  In theory I am going to try and get one going earlier in the evening tonight so I can at least get some tokens this week.

AggroChat #181 – How Vanilla Is Classic?

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat181_720

This week we are back recording a traditional show, and as is often the case when we do a game of the month show…  stuff happens that we don’t end up talking about.  In this case BlizzCon happened and the announcement of both a new World of Warcraft expansion and the concept of “Classic” servers.  Now I originally thought we would talk about this just a little bit before moving on to other topics… and instead we recorded damned near an entire show about it.  We also talk a little bit about Wolfenstein 2 New Colossus or at least up to the point where Thalen and Kodra have currently progressed.  From there we talk a bit about Destiny 2 and our experiences in the Leviathan raid.  We discuss the faction rally that is currently going on which leads to a super in the weeds discussion about various weapons.  Finally we wrap things up with Millennium Blades a card game about collectible cards games…  that lampoons every part of the process.

Topics Discussed

  • BlizzCon 2017
    • Diablo 3 – The Forgotten Game
    • Battle For Azeroth
    • World of Warcraft Classic Servers
    • Remembering Vanilla
  • Wolfenstein 2 – New Colossus
  • Destiny 2
    • Leviathan Raid
    • Faction Rally
    • Weapon Discussions
  • Millennium Blades Card Game

 

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

Destiny 2

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

It’s that time again folks…  time to go traipsing through otherwise dangerous areas in search of Xur.  I am very quickly going to run out of original things to say since the limited pool of exotics seems to be generating a bunch of repeat weeks.  This was a huge problem with Destiny 1 as well and made worse by the fact that they do not seem to put the exotics on a rotation of any sort.  There were several that we never actually saw sold by Xur in Destiny 1 and thusfar there is a whole slew that we have yet to see sold by him in Destiny 2.  You can find Xur in the Watcher’s Grave area of Nessus where he is up in a tree.  You can either hop up on the ledge and hop across or run a narrow path up the side of the tree.   He brought a few gems so lets check out his stock.

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

There are two exotic grenade launchers…  one of which is good and the other is likely the worst weapon in the game.  Thankfully the Prospector is the good one and probably well worth picking up.  It is a bit of a weird weapon to get used to because of the Excavation exotic perk, which keeps your grenades from detonating while you are holding down the fire trigger.  This has a bizarre interaction with the fact that this weapon has auto fire…  allowing you to pump out an entire magazine of eight grenades without actually detonating them and then detonating them all at once.  The only problem with this is that these are not sticky grenades so there is a bit of bounce when you fire them out without instantly detonating them.  The blast radius is rather small as well which again leads this to be a weird option because each grenade is not going to damage a very large area.  As a result this is really good when you can fire them down into some sort of enclosed area and then detonate all of them at once for a massive explosion.  More often than not I simply use this as a decent single fire grenade launcher which gives me more predictable results.  If you are wanting a work horse rather than a gimmick…  I highly suggest checking out Berenger’s Memory or Play of the Game legendary grenade launchers instead.

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

I actually had yet to get an insurmountable skullfort on the PC side yet so I was happy to see this item show up.  This is one of those situationally good items that allows for a slightly degenerate build.  The primary interaction is between Transfusion Matrix the exotic perk and Code of the Earthshaker path for the striker titan.  The perk causes kills with arc melee abilities to trigger health regeneration…  which is actually the reversal trait from Code of the Juggernaut.  This becomes a great farming build because Seismic Strike and the AOE damage it deals…  means you are going to be getting back lots of melee energy from the second part of this perk, allowing you to maintain damned near 100% up time.  On the battlefield what this means is that you can zoom around slamming into things rather than actually firing any weapons.  There are a few things that you could do to improve the reliability like slotting two arc melee recharge time mods, but when it works… it is insanely fun.  This is mostly a PVE build concept and every time I have tried to shoulder charge in the crucible I have paid a hefty price for it.

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

I’ve talked about this item at length several different times, so I am not sure what else I can really add.  The Eye of Another World is one of those items that passively all of your abilities work better.  This is the sort of set it and forget it always on item that I tend to favor,  because it requires zero attention to detail.  Unless you are going for a specific gimmick build… this is probably your best all purpose warlock item.  If you don’t already have it I highly suggest picking it up.  If you want more dialog from me on this check out one of the many other Xur posts where I have talked about it.

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

Similarly the Foetracer is a generally good item and I have started running it lately because it tends to help finish off mobs in Nightfalls.  Relentless Tracker perk visually marks your enemies after targeting them for a short period of time and causes you to deal extra damage when they reach low health.  That last bit helps and it is just enough of a change to make killing things seem faster which is always the name of the game in a Nightfall.  I do however miss my constant tracking radar while using this item, but I am trying really hard to learn to live without it.  Again I highly suggest picking this up, and also once again I have talked at length about this item in the past in any one of the many other times Xur has offered it.

Destiny 1

Xur Week Nine: 11/10/17

This week in Destiny 1 Xur is located in the Tower directly across from Lord Shaxx.  He finally restocked his inventory and is no longer bringing the Jade Rabbit, so hopefully you Xbox players picked that up while it was still available.  Interestingly Xur in Destiny 1 seems to be taking a queue from his personal in Destiny 2 because they both brought the Insurmountable Skullfort.  Let’s check out his items this week.

  • Legacy Arm Engram – 29 Strange Coins
  • An Insurmountable Skullfort – Titan Helm – 13 Strange Coins
  • Radiant Dance Machines – Hunter Boots – 13 Strange Coins
  • Claws of Ahamkara – Warlock Arms – 13 Strange Coins
  • The Last Word – Hand Cannon – 23 Strange Coins
  • Dragon’s Breath and Tigershark Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust
  • Zhalo Supercell with Not A Toy Ornament – 30 Strange Coins 25 Silver Dust

Destiny 2 Settling In

Destiny 2 has been out for a few weeks now, and I’ve been happily playing at least a little bit every day. When I was preparing for the launch, I suspected that either I would be super hooked and play obsessively like my friend Belghast, or I would play hard for a short while and then bounce. What actually happened is much more interesting.

Destiny 2 is pretty great at encouraging moderate daily play. Every day there are goals that move your character forward in small doses. there are also weekly tasks with more substantial rewards, and you can usually find some overlap with the daily goals for efficiency’s sake. Sure, you can keep grinding reputation tokens and grind for the rare exotic engram from any activity at any time, but if you complete your main tasks for the week you’ve gotten most of what you are going to get without extreme luck.

What all this means for me is that I play every day, but usually stop working on my main after I’ve accomplished my daily goals or gotten one of my weekly “powerful engrams”. After that I feel free to play alts, play other games, or just do something else in general. It feels strangely healthy.

That said, I have still been playing a bunch. I even got to see part of the raid last week. I was pretty nervous because I’m not great at shooters and I worried about being able to hold my own, but it seems like I did okay. I never raided at all in the original Destiny, and I had trouble wrapping my head around what a raid in a FPS game would even look like. The encounters were more interesting than I expected, and I had a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to getting back in there this weekend.

So that’s my status with D2 at the moment. I’m enjoying it but I’m not obsessively spending every free moment with it. Hopefully that will continue for a long time.


Destiny 2 Settling In