May 2018 – Page 5

Moms and Minor Gaming

May 14, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was largely not about gaming, as is often the case when a major holiday is occurring. In past years we have done the divide and conquer thing when it comes to Mother’s Day festivities, with me getting up super early to go to Mass with my mother and then my wife sleeping in and going to lunch with her mom. However with the amount of work that my wife has been having to do lately trying to prep her kids for the impending AP Exam… after missing two weeks of instruction time due to the walkout… she is more than a little sleep deprived. I was legitimately concerned about her making it home safely if she was on the road for long periods of time alone.

As a result we crammed everything into one day and left the house around 6 am… getting home around 6 pm. However in the middle of all of that I believe there were sufficient moms day festivities for all involved. It did however lead to a really tiring Sunday experience given that we had lots of driving perforated by various other awkward moments like my wife’s sister referring to the litter box as a “poop bed” or her inviting an aunt that neither my wife or I can stand to lunch with us. Later in the evening there was plenty of awkwardness as my wife’s brother and father got into some political diatribe that was just flat out factually incorrect and also highly racist. We made it home in one piece and still have most of our sanity intact… but I did have a rather fitful night of sleep.

As far as gaming goes I spent some of my time Saturday working on the weekly quests in Monster Hunter World. I am down to just needing three arena challenges and I am hoping I can connect with someone before the reset happens to do some. I can technically solo them, but I really really do not like soloing them. I solo’d the Pink Rathian arena challenge with longsword and that one in particular is really annoying because you do not have the full compliment of healing items. I pulled out a victory, but it took a long time and I wound up taking three of my eight deaths in the process. I am one item away from having enough of the event only Sakura items… but am nowhere near able to craft the set because of general lack of coins.

I wish you could roulette your way into the Arena Challenges because I really am not a huge fan of playing solo in Monster Hunter World. Now that PizzaMaid is easing her way back into the game I might try and snag her for some shenanigans, because most everyone else I know that is still active gets online way later than I do. Grace unfortunately bounced off the game as did Mor and while Thalen and I share a timezone… he is always around significantly later because baby happens. If it does not look like I will have folks to do this with I will ultimately try and solo my way through it, because I know without a doubt I can do it… I just won’t really enjoy it. I also ran quite a few tempered roulettes just for the sake of fun and managed to get a couple of decent decorations from it.

Over in Destiny 2 I am still roaming around but have made all of the movement I can essentially before the reset. I am still too low level to get into heroic strikes which is unfortunate given that I need to run several of them to move forward a quest line that I am currently on… that I am assuming is related to the sleeper simulant. The highlight of the weekend however was getting the Armamentarium again, which allows me to run around with dual grenades in both void and solar specs. Unfortunately however it does not give me THREE grenades in arc striker spec. This would have been a completely awesome item if it were able to do that… now I am wondering if it is as good as my auto-rifle reloading chest but largely running around with it for sheer nostalgia sake.

I am still largely on the fence with this expansion and am contemplating taking Squirrel up on the offer to get the raid in. I still have yet to defeat Gaul in the raid even though I have a stack of tokens from our attempts. Folks bounced faster than we had time to progress our way through it, and while I would love to resurrect a Greysky raid I somehow doubt that will ever really be a thing again. There just are not enough people active and playing, and part of me is contemplating just pushing the Greysky leadership off on my secondary PS4 account and moving my main back to Tequila Mockingbird so I at least have an active clan of folks to play with. My main PS4 account never left and has always been in TQMB… that is unless they punted me for inactivity.

I am still enjoying the mechanical loop of Destiny 2 again… but I am also feeling somewhat listless as I don’t have a major goal apart from making my light higher. I managed to level the Hunter to 30 this weekend but have yet to really touch any of the story content. I like that Warmind seems to not be connected to having finished Curse of Osiris or versa vicea. I need to push the Warlock up via event quests so I can at least start doing the milestones on each of them each week to slowly push up my weapon light level that way.

AggroChat #203 – Warmind Whisperer

May 21, 2019May 12, 2018 by AggroChat

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

Tonight we are down a Thalen because storms cause power outages. Among the topics discussed is the new Destiny 2 expansion called Warmind. Belghast has spent a significant amount of time with it and has things to say. From there Tam goes into his experiences with Battletech and why maybe being absolutely completely true to pen and paper sometimes has issues. Ash talks about Pillars of Eternity 2… and how he has yet to actually play it but has spent a lot of time digging around in the JSON code. Finally we wrap things up with a discussion of Magic the Gathering Commander… and how to build a deck designed not to win but instead to do interesting things and subvert the flow of the game.

Topics Discussed:

Destiny 2: Warmind
Battletech
Pillars of Eternity 2
Magic the Gathering – Commander

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Cheesy Achievement

May 11, 2018 by Grace

There’s this long-term goal I’ve been working on for a while now. It started a bit by accident, then when I fully realized it was possible I started actively pursuing it. It is one of the Legion meta-achievements, and even rewards a fancy new mount for completing it! I’m talking about “Free for All, More for Me” PvP achieve. It requires you to do each of the four free-for-all PvP world quests in Legion 20 times each.

If you know me at all, you might guess that doing FFA PvP is near the bottom of my list of “things I want to do, ever”. It’s somewhere above “have spinal surgery” but still well below “clean the litter box when my cat is sick”. I dislike PvP, and those quests seem to bring out the worst in people. However, I have a backup plan. Many of the class halls have an option that lets you auto-complete one world quest ever 18 hours. I have alts of many classes. You might see where this is going.

I started out haphazardly completing these quests on multiple alts whenever I remembered to do it. Then I discovered that the achievement is not account-wide. That meant that doing 20 darkbrul arenas on my mage didn’t count toward the progress on my pally, who had completed more of the quests overall. Oh well. It didn’t make the process any more difficult, it just slowed me down some.

Anyway this week I finally completed it. Darkbrul was the one that took the longest, mostly because of the way the quest timing works out. That one is more likely to be up early in the morning in my time zone, rather than in the evenings when I usually play. It doesn’t help that the PvP quests get overwritten by the invasion events when they are up, which has also messed up the timing for me. Lately I’ve been checking the Legion app in the morning before work, and if it is up I’ll go complete it.

I have this weird sense of satisfaction about getting this achievement in this incredibly cheesy way. Take that, developers who tried to encourage world PvP! Now I can go back to using my free WQ completion for more useful things, like honor tokens and armor appearances I am still missing!

More Warmind Impressions

May 11, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to hit the first soft cap of 345 through doing some of the content that happens immediately following the completion of the main story. I am still a bit dismayed at how short it ended up being. The core problem with the experience is there was a disconnect between how the NPCs were acting and the events that were actually occurring. What I mean by that is when we took down Ghaul… he had done enough to interfere with our lives to make us really hate him by the time we reached the point of final confrontation. With Warmind… they end up treating the Worm God we are fighting with similar contempt… even though we only found out one exists on Mars a few minutes earlier. Sure I get the fact that the Worm Gods are one of the galaxies great sources of evil and they were key in creating the Hive in the first place. I’ve read the Book of Sorrows and understand that all… but the average player has not.

The average player would be going into that scene wondering what in the hell a Worm God is and why these two NPCs seem so freaked about it. The problem being that the game didn’t really give us enough run up to reach this supposedly epic conclusion. It feels a lot like the campaign in Rise of Iron where you have some epic things going on… but nowhere enough lead up to make them feel like that epic nature is earned. Sure taking down a giant SIVA enfused Iron Lord was a slick final fight just like taking down a Worm God was a slick final fight… but in both cases it felt like we lacked significant reason for what we were doing. I mean the “Guardian” is the Deus Ex Machina to fix all problems much like the Warrior of Light is in Final Fantasy XIV. The problem is it feels like that role is earned in FFXIV whereas we sorta just magically are able to best everything in Destiny without really knowing why we are so much better than apparently every other Guardian out there.

Tam and I get into these discussions a lot and he is usually the one raising these points. The funny thing is they generally revolve on why he quit playing a game, and for me this is an annoyance but by no means a game breaker. I feel like there is a magic formula that keeps me engaged in a game. First you have to have a core mechanical loop that I enjoy, for example in Destiny I love the gun play and the movement which makes me feel awesome as I traverse this beautifully rendered world. The second point of that magical formula is that there has to be something in the game that I want to do. There needs to be some objective out there that drives me forward and keeps me engaged with the game when the shiny newness of the mechanical loop wears off.

Please note what I said there… something I want to do. For example in a game like World of Warcraft there can never be a possible way that I would ever run out of things to do and content I have not actually seen. Similarly in Final Fantasy XIV there is just too much content to ever find a true end to it. The problem is in both of those games I have rather regularly reached a point where there is simply nothing left that I care to do. Either the content left involves something I don’t much enjoy like Player versus Player interactions or it feels like it has more stick than carrot attached to it. I reached this point after Trials of Osiris in Destiny 2 where the mechanical loop simply was not enough and the repetitive and unrewarding nature of the Infinite Forest made it so that I just didn’t feel like logging in anymore.

While Warmind is an extremely short expansion… it feels like it might be a fairly intricate one. What I mean by that is there are already a bunch of post credits items that the game is asking me to do that spawn new opportunities to go off on adventures. I am sure there will be an end to this, but in some ways it reminds me of the style of interaction that happened on the Dreadnaught in The Taken King. There are puzzles to be solved and items to interact with in ways that I have not quite figured out. There were weapons to collect that are associated with questing, and others that folks don’t even know how they work as of yet. There are drops that can be used to improve most of the exotic weapons, and in it a bunch of interesting ways to feel like I keep moving forward.

On the other end however the new grind is real. After hitting 345 and finally accepting my Milestones for the week… each one of those rewarded a 351 item… 6 levels of movement off the base whereas before we were regularly getting upwards of 15 levels of movement from the same milestones. This means that journey to 385 is going to be an extremely long one when you have a very finite number of weekly options to give any sense of movement. This means that if I find myself engaged in this game again I will by nature need to push the Hunter and the Warlock through Curse of Osiris so that I can have three sets of weekly upgrade options instead of one. Sure the armor won’t swap over but those weapons can keep pushing up slowly over the course of multiple characters.

The game needed something and in truth at this point I am not sure if this is what that need was. The problem with Destiny 2 is that on paper it looks like the sequel I wanted for Destiny. However in practice it has always felt lacking in part because it felt like we sacrificed so much cool stuff from the first one to get this as a result. Nothing I have seen from this game justifies the reasons why we had to reset back to ground zero. I know they felt like they wanted a fresh start, to shed any bad blood from the first title. However I feel like that plan backfired horribly. I’m interested to see where they can go with Warmind and if they can give us justification going forward to buy the “Comet” expansion that has been looming on the horizon and leaked via the Canadian Walmart website. The one act that would go a long ways to building good will for me personally… would be to port the old patrol zones to Destiny 2 and make it feel like we didn’t abandon half the world to get this game.