Month: July 2018

AggroChat #213 – Night Mother’s Embrace

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast and Tamrielo

aggrochat213

Tonight we are down a few people… in fact half of them. So you have to deal with the remainder that is left after you take away a Kodra, Thalen and Grace. For those who are caught up with their critical AggroMath skills… you are left with a Bel, a Tam and an Ash. Three individuals who have mostly been playing Elder Scrolls Online and as a result you get to listen to us gush about our most recent experiences… including Bel’s Cross-Tamriel murder spree for a creepy dark god. Additionally you get to listen to Ash and Tam talk a bit more about Age of Sigmar and the interesting army choices where we all lose money for Ash not collecting Lizardmen.

Topics Discussed

  • Elder Scrolls Online
  • Age of Sigmar

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Blade of Woe

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First off with some business to attend to that is Blaugust related.  The very awesome Chestnut has been maintaining a twitter list of all of the folks participating in Blaugust 2018 that are on that platform.  Next up I was asked to participate in a couple of blogs, one with recording a promo that they could edit in and another actually sitting down and talking a bit about the event.  Those have both made their way into production as it were, and first off you have my promo that appears near the tail end of Geek to Geek Podcast with Void and Beej.  Next up I recorded a bit with Syp at the tail end of the Massively OP Podcast, but in both of these cases you should totally listen to the entire show because they are excellent.  I always enjoy the conversations that happen between Void and Beej and then  Syp and Bree as well so two shows always worth listening to.

Over the last few days I have not done the whole morning Blaugust updates in part because the sign ups had slowed down a bit.  However with the spots on the two podcasts we seem to have had an influx of new folks.  On the sheet I ask where folks heard about Blaugust, and so far one of my happiest moments is when I get a submission that says something other than the equivalent of “Bel Told Me” because that means we are spreading out and expanding our reach.  At this point we have 48 blogs signed up to participate and we still have some time before the festivities actually start…  I am cheating a bit with that number because technically one has not signed up but I know it is incoming.  If you are wanting a list of all of the participants and mentors I am keeping a google sheet with only the relevant information in it for folks to use on blogrolls and the like.

New Mentors

New Participants

As always though there is plenty of time to get started.  Pop over and fill out the sign up sheet to get registered, and then pop by the Discord to hang out with other Blaugustans.

Blade of Woe

In gaming news, last night I started the Dark Brotherhood series of quests and so far they are pretty freaking cool.  This was always one of my favorite guilds in the Elder Scrolls games because I like the whole Sithis and the Night Mother thing going on as well as the fact that in spite of being a bunch of blood thirsty killers…  there is this interesting family dynamic happening.  This sanctuary is no different and there are some really cool things happening from the sounds of it, and I am interested to see how the events fold out this time.  The Dark Brotherhood quest lines tend to go in a specific direction…  as do the Thieves Guild to be honest.  The Elder Scrolls Online Thieves Guild was in fact a traditional Elder Scrolls Thieves Guild story…  so I have certain expectations of how things are about to go here as well.

I am not very far into the quest line and have only done a few contracts, but I am absolutely and completely down with how Blade of Woe has been implemented in this game.  I like that it just gives me an assassination ability instead of making me wield a freaking dagger.  I am not a stealthy character, but the truth is…  Dark Brotherhood is probably going to make me one because I am not sure how long I can pay the upkeep of constantly having a couple thousand gold in bounties on my head.  Now the first trait in the DB skill line seems to reduce the amount of bounty gained when someone witnesses a murder…  but regardless I need to be at least a little stealthy in my hits.

Blade of Woe

I do not really like forced stealth mechanics, and my brand is more about charging into battle in a nonsensical manner and as a tank gathering up all that enemy hate.  This is not conducive to the Thieves Guild, but you can absolutely go in that direction with the Dark Brotherhood.  If you want to complete a mission by making sure there is 100% body count… then by all means that is a thing that can happen.  However it becomes painfully obvious that every one of those kills is going to cost you in the long run, with a very tangible bounty associated with it.  I came out of one mission with roughly 5500 gold in bounty on my head…  and while I could have waited awhile for that to drop I made my way to the nearest outlaws refuge and took care of it rather than be hassled by the guards.

Now that I have gotten slightly better at using Blade of Woe I am doing a better job of getting those kills in unnoticed and as a result reducing that gold footprint.  This game is teaching me to be stealthy and while it is weird for me to say it…  I am actually enjoying it more than I have in pretty much any other game.  I was extremely proud of myself the first time I got into a building unnoticed and back out without having to use one of the magical stealth baskets.  The mission I ran at the beginning of the night involved roaming around a palace and it mostly felt easy to go where I needed to go because I am starting to develop the reflexes needed to sneak about.  There is a certain muscle memory that I am developing that I have never really had in the past.  In other Elder Scrolls Games the only reason why I ever used sneak…  was to land a bow shot with the damage multiplier.  This time it feels like it allows me to move around freely and avoid entanglements I might not want to deal with.  All in all… still having a blast even though I was initially grumpy with the forced stealth.

Understanding Hew’s Bane

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Understanding Hew’s Bane

I’ve officially hit my first snag in Elder Scrolls Online since getting over the Stonefalls hump… and to be honest it is mostly my own damned fault.  I have been playing through the expansion content in the order it was released, which means after the amazing experience of Orsinium I immediately started work on the Thieves Guild content.  I approached it as though it were a fully realized expansion area, and I think this is where the issues arose.  I have been at times frustrated when it did not seem clear where the next quest in the sequence was after completing the previous one.  I thought this was just a quirk of the design and part and parcel with playing through what is effectively a clandestine group.  I would come back to base and there would be one or more notes for me to read, which would ultimately lead me to the next destination.

Now this has worked more or less because my play time has been limited the last few days, meaning I am not making a ton of progress in any given night.  I have also been doing the daily quests that involve recovering some artifact in a very tomb raider style, or stealthing your way through a dungeon to collect some items and then getting back out before the timer runs out.  Apparently the fact that I am doing this… and my recent slow progression has been masking something that I did not grasp at the first.  The Thieves Guild is not DLC content in the way Orsinium was where it is a self contained storyline and a bunch of supporting quests that ultimately weave themselves together into a fully realized brand new zone.  It is adding another guild to the game… much like the Mages Guild or the Fighters Guild…  and as a result it requires you to progress to a certain rank for you to get the next bit of quest.

Understanding Hew’s Bane

Last night was the first night that my sequence of running missions and daily content did not push me far enough to hit the next rank… and as a result unlock the next bit of the main story.  As a result I am starting to really rethink my process of playing through the content and it makes me feel like I should really be starting the Dark Brotherhood content as well.  Since that is also a new guild being added to the game, it is likely going to roll out its story in a very similar fashion meaning there might be lags between batches of content.  So I feel like tonight I will do my batch of things that I can do in Abah’s Landing and then move forward to the Dark Brotherhood content and see how far it will take me.  Ultimately if I hit stopping places in both guilds then there is always the Imperial City for me to give a shot, as I spent the other night roaming around Cyrodil trying to collect some of the Skyshards I was missing from there.

In truth as far as pure story content goes I guess the proper order would be… the first three faction chapters of the game based on your starting faction, then Orsinium, then Morrowind and finally Summerset.  I am not really sure how the Clockwork City works into the sequence of events.  I believe it is an offshoot from Morrowind and considering I don’t specifically have a quest starter for it yet, I may need to be progressed to a certain point before being able to start it.  Ultimately I should have been working on Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood while I was wrapping up Ebonheart Pact…  but I guess I will know this in the future as I alt.  Consider the Champion Point system, alting seems way more viable than I had originally thought.  There is also tons of content that we have not seen related to the dungeons, so we might need to set up a more formal dungeon night to start working through that.

Launches and Lurching

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Launches and Lurching

Initially I had planned last night on poking my head in on various characters within Azeroth but like many I was greeted with a lot of this screen when I first got home.  It seemed like a combination of a couple of things… first being that there were apparently some rather nasty DDoS attacks going on with the hosting providers… and secondly this was a major patch in WoW.  I mean I’ve been going through this cycle since 2004 and this is far from the first time a major patch rendered the game unplayable for one reason or another.  Just the simple onslaught of a bunch of players coming back to do like I was planning is enough to take down servers.  I have no idea when it was fixed and when the servers came back up…  because I did what I have learned I need to do to keep from getting ragey…  I moved on to playing something else.

Though that said I heard that the community was particularly toxic to the BlizzardCS account last night.  There were apparently people calling for the firing of employees and all of that nonsense…  while those of us who have been through far worse launches sit back and eat our popcorn.  I think the reality is that Blizzard has spoiled us of late with a string of relatively smooth major patch cycles.  So as a result when folks see what I would consider a normal MMO patch rollout…  they lose their shit.  There have been times when I too was losing my shit… particularly during the relaunch of A Realm Reborn when you had to effectively stay logged in if you hoped to play the game at all.  In this scenario however I happily wandered off to play Elder Scrolls Online after a few rounds of attempts.

Launches and Lurching

So I have been working my way through the ESO content as it was originally released and after finishing Orsinium… that lead me down the path of the Thieve’s Guild.  Now I had accidentally already done the intro quest to this content because I quite legitimately thought it was just another quest in Windhelm.  That is one of the challenges you have coming back this far behind the curve is there are quests everywhere… and a good deal of them are trying to lead you off to start expansions and DLC without ever fully announcing that is their intent.  Sure I probably could have looked it up in the quest journal, but for the most part I find myself not using that at all while playing Elder Scrolls Online.

One of the challenges with Thieves Guild is the fact that it is more or less a stealthy expansion, and I Belghast…  am not a stealthy person.  I am one of those charge into the fight and taunt all the things type person…  and the thought of sneaking around in full plate seems hilarious to me.  That said I have tried my best to embrace this game play style because the content essentially forces you to do so.  Getting detected in a good deal of the missions means that you are going to get swarmed by city guards that you have no way of actually soloing.  Now thankfully it employs the Assassins Creed “instant hiding container” sort of thing, which allows you to evade attention at just the right moment.  Now unfortunately if you already have guard aggro you are going to have to wait a bit until the “heat meter” dies down before popping out and continuing the mission.

Launches and Lurching

Now it is not like I have never done a thieves guild in the past Elder Scrolls Online games…  in fact to my knowledge I have done them all since Oblivion.  The problem is in those older games there was always a path of “kill all the things” that got you through the quest as opposed to constantly sneaking your butt around.  For the most part however I have managed to do the quests as intended part from a few times when I killed someone instead of just not doing that.  While the gameplay is not my favorite thing in the world, I have to give the game credit for completely hooking me with the storyline.  This is in fact an Elder Scrolls Thieves Guild story…  which quite honestly tend to be some of the better written and more interesting guilds out there.

I am completely hooked on the characters and the story as it is deciphering due to my interactions.  It is part pirates, part heist, part Indiana Jones and a whole of fighting back against an oppressive evil empire…  all of which make for a really interesting sequence.  The way it plays out is interesting as well as there is no one constant thread that you follow but instead a sequence of what seems to be disconnected actions that ultimately weave their way into a main story quest.  I get the impression that I am reaching about the halfway point in the story as there was a major revelation last night, that seems like it will begin the end phase where I start narrowing down and working to righting the great wrong done to the guild.  I am completely hooked…  in spite of needing to creep about unbenefiting a warrior of my stature.