deathknight – AggroChat

AggroChat #159 – Alt Madness

May 21, 2019June 4, 2017 by AggroChat

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

This week we once again have Grace as a medical issue has kept her away a few weeks. Tonight we have a relatively short show, at least as far as AggroChat shows go. Thalen has reached the point where he is doing The Taken King and talks about the shock that happened when suddenly Cayde-6 developed a personality… and is in fact Robot Mal. We get on a tagent talking about the changings coming soon in Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood, and our thoughts about what might be tweaked during the expansion. Grace and Bel talk a bit about their recent alt madness in World of Warcraft, and specifically how Bel has leveled and geared a character in a single week. Kodra talks a bit about Elder Scrolls Legends and why he likes it much better than Hearthstone. Finally we talk a little bit about the recent phone game craze that is Magikarp Jump.

Topics Discussed:

Destiny: Personality Changes in Taken King
Stormblood Changes
World of Warcraft
Deathknight Madness
Elder Scrolls Legends
Magikarp Jump

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Catch Up Mechanics

June 1, 2017 by Belghast

wowscrnshot_060117_063047

Last week I talked about it feeling like it was the end of the expansion in World of Warcraft, and in part that was due to the way that I am playing the game and focusing on alts. However there is apparently another key way things are starting to feel like the end of the expansion, and that is catch up mechanics. Now yesterday I posted about pushing through and dinging 110 the Legion expansion level cap on my Orc Deathknight. I managed to find a couple of lucky grabs on the auction house including 3 cheap pieces of demonsteel at 835 item level and a cloak at 870 item level. Other than those items however I managed to scrape together what is a reasonable item level to start going and doing stuff… in a single nights time between a combination of world quests, legion invasions, and opening the broken shore. When I first saw the Dauntless items I found them a little underwelming… but that was on my already 890 main character. The fact that you can start picking up 850+ items for 400 nethershards… when I walked into the Broken Shore with roughly 4000 of them… allowed me to really flesh out those missing gear slots. The only negative there is that the rings and trinkets are both “Unique Equipped” which were sadly the two slots I needed the most. Thankfully during the invasion event last night I managed to pick up a second ring at 840, taking my item level to the point where I could apparently start queuing for Looking for Raid.

Now I am not sure what the item level breaks are for the various LFR segments… but I was honestly shocked to find out that I could queue for Nighthold without having done anything in Emerald Nightmare or Trials of Valor. Before heading to bed I did the first part of Nighthold and picked up an 860 necklace and an 860 artifact. So other than a few strategic grabs from the auction house… I managed to pick up everything else I needed to gear a character in a single night. I am now sitting at 846 item level… and will probably finish doing the rest of LFR tonight hoping to pick up a few more pieces. I also need to start running dungeons so that I can complete the Death Knight Order Hall sequence… and during the day today the final missions that I need to run should be finished. I guess while sitting on a higher level character I didn’t notice just how quick the item level ramps up, but while out roaming the world on a brand new character it is extremely noticeable. It definitely seems the end of expansion catch up mechanics are in full effect, as the game attempts to usher you closer and closer to that 900ish item level. I still have yet to get a Legendary, but in truth I have only been trying to two nights now. I also need to research how exactly to get the alternate artifact appearances, because while I am not expecting to go crazy and start farming for them like I did on my Warrior and Paladin… I do however don’t want to miss easy opportunities when they come up.

The other interesting thing I am noticing… is that playing Horde on a server cluster where the Alliance greatly out numbers you… leads to some interesting interactions with other players of the same faction. The two items I got from LFR I was functionally handed by other players who were offering them to me. Also while out in the world on Broken Shore especially… the horde seems to do the same sort of thing that I do in open world zones on my warrior. That is help random players. There are a lot of cases where I was straight getting wrecked and another player ran up and started attacking the same mobs to help me push through them faster. Up to this point I really haven’t had much in the way of communication, so maybe I am just reading intent into their actions where it really isn’t there. Just saying so far it has not been a horrible experience, and at least the public channels are not clogged with madness the way they are Alliance side. I still have a significant problem with the Horde in general… not from a factional standpoint but from the standpoint that “bestial humanoid” is not really the sort of thing that I flock to in games. However Orc seems to be a happy medium for me, and I’ve come to this realization pretty much any time I play one. Every other Horde race and I have significant issues. The Tauren are just too big and feel lumbering and slow. The undead and trolls… I cannot get past the hunched posture… or the tusks… or the missing bits of armor. Bloodelves have the problem of being the most elvish elves ever… and if you have been around my blog for long you know my distaste for all things elf. The goblins in theory are an option…. but they sorta end up being played for comic relief much in the same way that gnomes do that that annoys me. The Horde really missed their opportunity to make a lifetime member of me when they failed to somehow recruit the Dark Iron Dwarves. For the moment however I am largely okay with being a blue green guy with a Mowhawk and Mutton Chops.

Deathlord Rises

May 30, 2017 by Belghast

For those not in the United States… apologies for taking yesterday off from the blog. I had an insanely busy weekend, and it was about half way through yesterday that I finally realized that it was in fact a Monday… and not a Sunday. Extended holiday weekends always feel a little odd, because it just seemed like I had two different Saturdays. One of the Saturdays we went to Oklahoma City in a whirlwind trip to hit the three Half Priced Books they have… in an attempt to get there and back before the tornadic storms hit that evening. Thankfully for the most part all we got was some rain… and not the grapefruit sized hail that they had been warning us about. Then Saturday number two… aka Sunday… we spent the day deep cleaning the house and working in the backyard. I once again have flower babies, that are going to need to be watered in a few minutes whenever I finish this post. I am going to give them some time to acclimatize to the back yard before taking any photos. Additionally right now our pool is a lovely shade of green because we are fighting an algae bloom… so hoping that clears up as well before I snap some photos. Then of course yesterday was me hanging out and doing nearly two weeks worth of laundry… because we were lazy as hell last weekend. I wound up going to sleep around 9:30 last night instead of the usual midnight… because maybe the crazy weekend was catching up with me.

In gaming news… I played a silly amount of World of Warcraft. Like I am not really certain what is going on but much like Grace I find myself in a mini renaissance with the game. It is funny how when I didn’t have flight I didn’t think I really missed it. I have always been one of those people who espouse the philosophy that not having flying during the early days of an expansion is a better thing. It forces us to get down in the weeds and not to skip quite as much content. That said… it is funny just how much more enjoyable the game has been since I could zip around wherever I wanted to go. I had zero desire to play alts prior to getting the Legion Pathfinder achievement and flight… and suddenly afterwards its like the skies have opened to a whole new day. I had mentioned before that I am now working on my first 100+ hordie and choosing to do it on this low population server that Grace has the majority of her horde characters on. That in itself has been an interesting experience. The challenges have been that there simply are not that many people out in the world so when you encounter something you cannot solo… it might be a bit before another player happens to wander along. The benefit however is that there are always plenty of ore nodes to mine and I figure when I start Broken Shore I will have zero issue finding treasure chests. I figure if I am going to stick around for long… I will have to at least level my tanking weapon so I can solo things a bit easier.

For the moment however I am loving being an Unholy Death Knight. Last night I managed to get about halfway to 109, which I hope means that I can push across the finish line to 110 tonight and begin properly gearing my character. I am completely caught up in the Order Hall quest line, and to the point where I have to be 110 to get the next step. I am sorta fast tracking my way through Stormheim at the moment, and if need be I will do the same in High Mountain. Years ago I compiled a list of the order in which you should do SWTOR planets and bonus series in order to get the most bang for your buck… and if I am going to do more alts I feel like I need to come up with the same sort of thing for classes and the order hall campaign. Grace has a good idea in that she waits to do the order hall dungeon steps until she has opened up that zones quest as well. Had I done this… that would have meant starting Highmountain First and not Azsuna like I usually do. As I have a mountain of alts still to level it would be nice to have some sort of a guide to go off of… and most of this information is available through a series of other sites… but not really written out as plainly as I would have liked. So that might be a little bit of homework going forward. I know that when Stormblood hits I am going to lose a lot of my gusto in World of Warcraft, so I guess in a way I am trying to get the most out of this moment.

Side Note: You should totally check out our AggroChat where we talk about the May game of the month Wolfenstein New Order

Treadblades and Grenades

May 22, 2017 by Belghast

A good chunk of this weekend was about me riding the high that was the Destiny 2 gameplay reveal panel. I wrote about my feelings Friday, but I am still extremely hyped. What I find interesting is that there are some hardcore Destiny players that walked away disillusioned by the announcement. For me I largely wanted them to take the same Destiny mechanics that I love and apply them to a much more open world. From the sounds of it that is precisely what we are getting. However it seems like the competitive PVP scene walked away frustrated, because they were expecting ladder brackets and things like that to support their specific play style. While I love the Crucible, I am anything but serious when I play it… and as a result I largely am okay with a more casual PVP focus. What is funny about this is that it is the same community that got super frustrated when they were only being matched against similarly skilled players, and have been the biggest proponents of moving away from skill based matchmaking. I can at least see one of their complaints, which is largely that they were expecting the game to move to a server/client structure rather than the peer to peer setup that we have today. I feel like the currently crucible matchmaking algorithm does a decent job of weeding out the “redbars”, and it has been a really long time since I have been in a match with more than one of them. That could however be based on the fact that I am living in the center of the United States and have solid pings to either coast though.

What all the Destiny love created however is a strong desire to play the game I currently have my hands on. Over the weekend I spent a good deal of time upstairs playing around, and picked back up my Xbox One character since it allowed me to experience the full circuit of Destiny emotions. All of my PSN characters are comfortably at 400 light, and all I am really doing there is upgrading additional gear to that level. So there is a missing chunk of the experience… the brief joy of seeing a higher light level item that you can then use to infuse into your gear. So as a result I opted to spend most of the weekend playing my now 378 Titan. On PSN however I did spend a bit of time working on achievements, and that meant a lot of chain running of SIVA Crisis Strikes for the purpose of trying to get super kills. This also meant rocking my Bad Juju, because for me at least it seems to be a much better super energy magnet than the Zhalo Supercell. I think right now I am 5 super streaks away from finishing up one book, and then I can start in earnest on the modern Age of Triumph book. I am still a little bummed that they came out and dashed my hopes of “cross save” functionality between the various client versions. I would have happily purchased Destiny 2 for all available platforms if this actually happened.

On the World of Warcraft front, I indulged in something I had been wanting to for awhile. With the recent spike in token prices I opted to purchase one and it sold for roughly 130,000 gold. I then took that gold and purchased the Champion’s Treadblade… which I always thought was a way cooler design than the Warlord’s Deathwheel. This also jarred me off center in being less of a lazy engineer. I never actually got around to crafting the original Mekgineer’s Chopper. It was one of those things I always intended to do… but never wanted to spend the money on. functionally no matter how much faction discount you have the end result is always going to be 12,000 gold worth of parts. I used this influx of cash from the token however to serve as a reason to go ahead and finish this off. I happened to have pretty much everything else needed to craft it laying around on various alts, so it was simply a matter of flying out to Storm Peaks and buying the few vendor items.

The last major event of the weekend is that I finally decided what to use my character boost on. I have not really touched much of anything this expansion on the Horde side. My friend Grace has reverted back to her Horde ways, and as a result I figured I should probably have at least one character that I like to be able to play with her. As a result I took the Deathknight that I rolled on her server and boosted it to 100, and started leveling it last night. The thing that I didn’t realize about the 100 boost… is just how lousy the gear is that they give you. I remember I started Legion sitting in mostly 710 gear on my characters from the pre-launch invasion events. My newly boosted Unholy Deathknight was equipped in a full set of 640 gear… which if I remember correctly was the required level to queue for heroics in Warlords of Draenor. As a result this is the first character I have taken to the Broken Shores invasion scenario that I actually had trouble surviving. I died about four times during this invasion… but that also could simply be because this late in the expansion there was only one other player actually doing it. Whatever the case I clawed my way up from the frustrating gear level and am making progress in Azsuna.