Thalen – Page 33 – AggroChat

AggroChat #119 – Still Not Prepared

May 21, 2019August 14, 2016 by AggroChat

Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam, and Thalen talk World of Warcraft Legion event, Starbound, No Man’s Sky and Final Fantasy XV

This week we inadvertently have a show about things that are not quite prepared in one way or another. First up we talk about our frustrations with the Broke Shore cinematics for both the Alliance and Horde in World of Warcraft. We also talk about the positive things that this event is bringing, but mostly frustrations about the turn in the story. We talk about the fraught PC launch of No Man’s Sky and how Belghast is the only member of our crew able to actually get it running on his machine. However since he could we talk at length about his experiences. All of the NMS talk got Kodra amped to play some Starbound on our private server. We talk a little bit of Diablo Season 7 and how we were not quite prepared for it with everything else going on… so we ended up rolling an army of demon hunters for speed clearing. Finally we talk about how Final Fantasy XV seems to be delayed once more, as details have been leaked on how to update the date on the big retail standees. So much not preparedness to go around, caused us to record an extremely long show.

Things we discussed: Frustrations with Broken Shore Cinematics – WoW Legion Event – Legion expansion in general – Starbound Launch – No Man’s Sky PC Frustrations – First Several Hours with the Game – Diablo Season 7 Launch – Final Fantasy XV and VIII

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Raid Kills Bugs Dead #Blaugust2016

August 9, 2016 by Thalen

Last night was our regular raid night once again in Final Fantasy XIV. We had made some attempts on Ravana last week, but didn't quite take him down. It's a fairly complicated and movement intensive fights with a number of mechanics where you have to get hit once and only once by a particular attack. There are two different attacks Ravana has where he flys around diving on members of the raid. The attack is unavoidable when he's targeting you, but it applies a debuff that makes you extremely vulnerable to damage so you have to move quickly after being hit so that you aren't struck when he dives at the next person. Even being overgeared a bit for this content, the damage that does will kill anybody easily.

After a few tries we managed to get the dancing mostly figured out and made it all the way to the enrage mechanic. Our next try we took him down, though it was a close thing. Belghast managed to fall off the platform with Ravana at about 7% health, leaving us with only one tank in a fight that requires tank swapping. Ravana started charging one of his liberation maneuvers, and we knew we knew that we had to take him down before he finished or we would quickly lose our remaining tank and wipe. The cast bar was over 90% full when the achievement for a successful kill popped up.

Tamrielo got a book that looks like a butterfly

After that we headed off to the Final Coil of Bahamut since two of our raid members hadn't been with us when we beat it shortly after Heavensward launched (no, we never completed the Final Coil when it was current content. We're neither that good or that crazy.) It's been over a year since we'd been in there and I didn't remember the first couple of fights at all. The mechanics came back to us once we engaged though, and thanks to severely outgearing and outleveling the fights, we made it through. It still took a few wipes though. Mechanics in FFXIV are serious business.

Apart from that, I've played a little more Diablo 3, finishing up the Slayer portion of the season journey. The next stage, Champion, will require a good bit of grinding as it asks you to level up multiple Legendary gems. I'm successfully soloing level 40 Greater Rifts at this point, which is better than I made it up to last season on a Crusader, so I don't feel like that should be much of a trouble. What would really help would be to get lucky and find some Ancient legendaries. Last season I found three pretty early on and they made a big difference. Failing that, I need to push up my gems, find a better quiver and ring, and get to where I can comfortably handle Torment X. Should be doable.

Extra Spicy #Blaugust 2016

August 8, 2016 by Thalen

I'm intending to start my examination of my D&D collection up again for Mondays, but that requires some research and such that I haven't been able to do yet for the upcoming item. So instead, a little more talk about Diablo 3.

I've wrapped up the 4th chapter of the season now, so I've got all 6 pieces of the free set. The 6 piece bonus gives a very large bonus to Multi-shot (which I've already been using) and Vengeance based on how much Discipline you currently have. I also came across a crossbow that reduces the cooldown on Vengeance by a whole lot, so I threw that in the Kanai Cube and replaced the Rapid Fire buff I had been using. Rapid Fire didn't seem to be scaling very well in any case, and I was already mostly using Evading Shot and Multi-shot as my main damaging abilities in any case.

Such lovely crits

With just that boost from my set and those couple of new legendaries my damage output went up by more than a factor of 10. I went from running at Torment IV straight to Torment VIII without stopping in between, and I might have been able to go to IX and still be okay. Now it's time to get down to the business of running more Greater Rifts to level my legendary gems and continuing on through the next stage of the journey.

Seasoned #Blaugust2016

August 8, 2016August 7, 2016 by Thalen

First off, it seems like something went wonky with my feed so my post yesterday didn't get picked up by my Twitter account. The twitterfeed integration is kind of slow at the best of times, but this time it just didn't work at all. No idea why, hopefully it'll work today. In any case, if you're coming here via Twitter, yes there was post yesterday, it's over here. What time I got to spend gaming this weekend was mostly spent in Diablo 3, since the latest season started the other day. Season 6 was the first one I'd participated in (apart from a sad Barbarian back in Season 4 that made it all the way to level 4). I tried out Crusader that time, so this time around I decided to give Demon Hunter a try. Pretty early on I found a legendary quiver that removes the chaneling cost from the Rapid Fire ability, so that became my main damage dealer supported with turrets and Multi-shot.

Fighting giant spiders, like you do

By the time I logged off Saturday night I had made it through the the first chapter of the season journey and was just shy of level 70. Today I've finished that level off and completed the second and third chapters, getting me 4 of the 6 pieces of the Unhallowed Essence set armor. That means I've got a set bonus that gives me a damage boost as long as I don't let things get too close, which works just fine with my typical method of play for ranged classes. I've gone heavy on the cold damage runes for my chosen skills, which means most of them slow or freeze enemies, plus I found a legendary ring that applies a fear debuff reasonably often. I'm up to Torment III difficulty at this point, and it's working fairly well. I did get reminded this evening of one of the things that really annoys me about Diablo 3, latency. For most of the weekend everything's been fine, but tonight while running a rift I started getting some terrible latency. In a game that's predominantly about avoiding various ground effects and pink murder balls that's not good at all. In any case, I've made a decent bit of progress and will hopefully be able to finish up the initial season journey pretty soon. It'd be nice if I could make it far enough to unlock the stash tab this time around; we'll see if I can stick with that long.