I spent the majority of this weekend in World of Warcraft Retail. I am not exactly sure what prompted this, but I needed something somewhat mindless and grindy. I’ve been in a bit of a weird mental state of late and I always find working away on characters in WoW to be relaxing. I can put something on YouTube or an Audiobook and level away happily, pushing my mind somewhere outside of myself for awhile. A few months back I had been on this kick of trying to level one of everything to 120 before the release of Shadowlands. The next in line was my Monk but I stalled out in the Cataclysm levels after having ground up something like seven characters to 120 in a row.
Yesterday afternoon I managed to push the monk across the line and ding 120. This was not the easiest of characters to level, because there were quite a few points where it seemed weaker than I would have expected the Windwalker to be. The biggest problem I encountered was that the healing of the spheres that you spawn randomly doesn’t seem to make up for the incoming damage. I contemplated swapping over to Brewmaster Monk but managed to stick things out but that last level was a pain in the butt. Really it just seemed like certain mob types dealt way more damage than I could keep up with.
Now I am going through the very familiar long grind, of cherry picking which daily quests reward item level upgrades all with the goal of getting up to somewhere in the vicinity of 430. At this point I managed to push up to the neighborhood of 358 so I am slowly making progress. What is ultimately the problem is the lack of ring, trinket and weapon slots. The first thing I did upon dinging 120 was to purchase a full set of benthic gear, which sorta begins the process and is a seed for getting the world quests up into reasonable levels. I’ve already replaced a number of pieces, which always feels a little bad but I know it is just part of the process.
I’ve already picked out the next character I intend to level, which is my Maghar Shaman. For now I have decided to go elemental, because this is not really something I have ever spent much time with in the past. I’ve spent lots of time leveling enhancement, and I figured it might be an enjoyable break. That leaves Rogue and Priest that are still low levels, but if I can somehow manage to push all of these up I will have a full stable of 120s going into Shadowlands. The next trick would be pushing up some of their tradeskills, though the segmentation mostly makes that useless.
Finally there was one other thing that I was not expecting that happened this weekend. I managed to get a slot in the Perky Pugs lead Friendship Dragon. I had more or less resigned myself that it was not a thing that was going to happen this time. However Saturday night shortly after we had wrapped up the podcast I got pinged to join what was one of the last few runs of the 12 hour N’zoth-a-thon in which the horde team managed to get 455 people their mounts. The really cool thing however is that they managed to raise $10,425 for RAINN at the time of posting this. Still super humbled and shook that I managed to get in and get a purple dargon.
The post Monk Ascension appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Bel starts the show off with a discussion about the challenges of playing classic games on modern televisions and how his journey has led him down a rabbit hole that ended up with the Retro Freak. From there we talk about what happens when the expectations of gamers leads to toxic expectations. Namely this came into scope over the last few weeks with the reaction to two recent Nintendo Directs. From there we drive into a discussion about making your own goals in a game and how Tam has found that effective in Guild Wars 2. This leads to a discussion about when games bribe you to behave a certain way. Finally we close the show out with Kodra talking about making meta events happen, and oftentimes folks are willing to flock to a zone if you manage to do all the early phases.
I spent most of last night playing around on my Monk in World of Warcraft. I am still in a somewhat weird headspace and decided to hang out on the sofa and snuggle with the cats instead of doing anything more serious. One of the challenges of being a gamer like I am that hops around through a bunch of games is that you end up losing touch with a lot of friends along the way. Gamer friends right or wrong and largely bound together by the mutual love and adoration of a specific game. When you are not playing that game together, you often end up struggling to find things to relate to because that social lubricant in the form of the shared gaming interest is gone from the equation.
Sure you can build lasting friendships that are based on firmer stuff, but those take time and as someone who has formed guilds and raids for decades I have a truly ridiculous number of “surface friendships”. What I mean by that is that you are close within the context of a specific medium, sorta like the friends you might make at a workplace and then never see again once either of you have moved on from that environment. The thing is every so often something reminds you of one of those folks that were lost in the shuffle, and you start to get some pangs of regret that you couldn’t find a way for that friendship to stay evergreen.
At some point last night I was searching for something in gmail, and because I never seem to actually delete anything I stumbled across a conversation thread between me and one of these friends. There used to be a time when my means of contact with a whole slew of people was through trading long form emails. The entire thing was peppered with in jokes, because we had this running gag where we both claimed that they hated me… since they constantly avoided my recruitment pitch to join House Stalwart. This is someone that I raided in Vanilla with and then fairly frequently communicated off and on until I ultimately left the game in Cataclysm, and again pretty frequently when we were both playing SWTOR.
It is weird how ephemeral friendships can be at times. We were obviously close because reading back through this ancient gaming history there were all of the markers of a shared language. However its probably been a decade now since we were in regular contact. A lot of stuff happens in a decade, but as I sat there in World of Warcraft I decided to dust off my Battle.net friends list, something I almost NEVER pay any attention to these days and sure enough they happened to be also playing at the same time. The problem with getting out of contact with someone is that the longer it goes the harder it becomes to fire off that opening salvo of conversation. Not knowing what to say I just went with the sheepish “Heya :)”.
What followed was a solid hour and a half of catching up about this or that and while yeah a gulf of time had passed, it was still pretty easy to fall back into holding a conversation. I am exceptionally bad at staying in contact with people once whatever shared medium we had is gone. I need to reach out more and try and catch up with more of these people lost to the turning of the tides. The challenge however is that there is no going back really. I’m not the person I was when I was leading House Stalwart and actively recruiting for raids. Mentally I have to realize that this person in question is not the exactly skittish warlock that I knew from so long ago. Time passes and people change and some of those folks that you were once “drift compatible” with are probably not going to be.
The thing is, I need to learn to get over the fear of reaching out and finding out. I have this list of friends in Battle.net for a reason, I guess at some point I should start poking additional people on it to see how they are doing. Right now I find myself in the awkward position of being without a permanent game home, and I tend to flit around madly between a bunch of side projects in different games. It is super hard to build a stable support structure when you yourself cannot seem to commit to any specific medium. Facepull is a delightful home in World of Warcraft, and I adore them all given our long shared history. However there are a bunch of voices out there that I would love to hear from again if only to have a single day of catching up before fading into the mists once again.
The funny thing is… there are still a handful of friends that I communicate with mostly through email. Back during the days when everyone was using a single messaging platform, it was a bit easier. I could fire up Google Talk or AOL Instant Messenger and get immediate access to a whole list of people. I still have a fully populated friends list in Google Hangouts, but the only people I ever seem to talk to are Vernie and my Wife. AOL Instant Messenger was the platform I was way more prolific on… but it of course is lost to time. So as a result of all of this email just sorta became the easiest default middle ground. My friend Cylladora and I go through this pattern where completely from out of nowhere we will exchange an email and then go months again without communication.
Being an old gamer means you have a lot of old gamer friends out there somewhere. It would probably be good for my mental state to occasionally reach out to a lot of them and at least get into the pattern of talking once or twice a year.
The post Missing Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
For years I have complained about doing escort missions in MMORPGs. They generally involve taking some hapless character along a fixed path as they aggro every single thing in sight. I have long wished I could literally just pick the NPC up and carry them along to the goal to hopefully get it over with quicker. I’ve now played Death Stranding and can without a doubt tell you that having to carry an NPC to the destination is not better, and also apparently humans are really hard to balance on your back. You might be wondering also how in the hell did we get into this situation and I will explain.
One of the things that porters occasionally carry is the bodies of the dead to the nearest incinerator to prevent a “void out” when they go necrotic as they attempt to pass over to the other side. You have to understand that the world of Death Stranding is extremely dangerous and unforgiving, and most of the individuals in this world live in a bunker or vault and have never gone outside for any length of time. So there have been a few cases where some NPC needs to move to another location and asks you to carry them on your back like you would a body. In this case I had to carry a fairly important story NPC effectively the entire length of what was the currently discovered world at the time. It took a good chunk of last night and the entire time I was having to adjust for her listing to one side or the other.
In this case it was an NPC that I have come to really like over the course of our interactions, so as a result I felt like I needed to be super careful as we traversed the landscape. Every time she would shift on my back I felt bad that I was not more careful transporting my “cargo”. Another thing that I love about this game is the random holograms that players have access to, which ultimately break up the wastes. It was really cool to see a Tallneck looming out over the horizon, because it is literally the same size as one in Horizon Zero Dawn making for this massive hologram. I’ve seen a few other HZD cross overs, so I am guessing this is all due to the fact that both games use the same engine, so Kojima more than likely spent a lot of time working with the Guerilla Games team.
If I am correct, I think I am at roughly the halfway point of the game. My goal is to try and finish things up to a reasonable level of satisfaction before the launch of Horizon Zero Dawn on August 7th. That gives me roughly 15 days worth of play time to push across the finish line. I feel like this is a game that I most definitely want to finish, especially given that there is supposedly a 15th chapter that is open ended allowing you to play around in the final state of the world. I always hate it when the continued play option for a game is to effectively “roll back” the world to the moments before the final conflict. Those are the games that I often times never quite finish because I know poking around in the world after that will feel fairly unsatisfying.
On the me front, I am doing better. Taking yesterday off was a pretty good idea even though I hate not actually blogging for a given day. You need to give yourself room to make these decisions every now and then, because in my case it gave me another day to clear my headspace a bit. My wife is healing nicely from the accident, and me… yesterday day was really bad but I am dealing with it. It is like every so often I kinda have to mentally bandage myself up a bit. I have all of today and half a day tomorrow and then it is my weekend which should help a bit. As always thanks for the kind words I received, they do help and they do mean a lot but I mostly share my struggle for anyone out there who might also be struggling.
So I did not get 31 people for the promptapalooza, but I have decided I am going to try and make it work nonetheless. I got pretty close and as a result I will just stub in myself for several days in order to make it work. Tomorrow afternoon since I am off work I will be pulling it all together, creating the list of prompts, the tentative posting calendar, and contacting everyone to try and link topic prompts to people. This is way less lead time than I would have liked, but I should have been more vocal about it. I’ve been in a really bad headspace this month so trying to deal with this has added a lot of stress to my plate as well. For those who have no clue what I am talking about, check out this original post that sorta outlines the idea. There is still time to sign up.
The post Humans are Not Well Balanced appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
