Patch – AggroChat

AggroChat #171 – A Pig Hat

May 21, 2019September 3, 2017 by AggroChat

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

This weekend we talk about a whole slew of topics that have gathered over the past week. We talk about Pax West and Gamescom and how the hype and announcements surrounding them seem to not be keeping up with past years. We talk about Thalen’s descent into Guild Wars 2 and a whole slew of topics related to it. We talk about arriving on Argus in the 7.3 World of Warcraft patch. We talk about the recent Destiny 2 PC Beta experience and how it cemented the decision to play on the PC for most of us. We talk about the Kung Fu MMO of a sort Absolver. We talk about the Ashes Rise of the Phoenixborn card game, which leads to some discussion about Magic the Gathering Commander and Star Wars Destiny. Finally we wrap up with a discussion on mobile gaming and some more talk about Legendary Game of Heroes… and a little bit of pining for Glitch.

Topics Discussed

Games Cons: Lack of Hype
Guild Wars 2 Things
WoW patch 7.3
Destiny 2 PC
Absolver
Ashes Rise of the Phoenixborn
Magic the Gathering Commander
Star Wars Destiny
Mobile Games
Legendary: Game of Heroes
Glitch

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Blog Unbroken

April 14, 2016 by Belghast

Technological Betrayal

Yesterday was a really rough day. It was the sort of day that makes you question why exactly you do anything. It started yesterday with WordPress indicating that I should really patch my blog to the latest version. These are the sort of warnings that I take heed, given that generally speaking the way you end up with a hacked blog is by not patching constantly. Everything seemed completely normal, and I started soldiering on with my morning post. About 90% of the way through the morning post I noticed that I was having some odd issues with the wysiwyg editor, so I decided to save a draft and reload. Upon hitting that save draft button, it cleared everything I had just written giving me a painfully blank screen. This is what ultimately lead me to post my blog broken post, because I ran out of time to write something, and I was testing to see if it was only the save draft functionality or if it was the actual publish functionality as well. So I rattled off a post really quickly, hit publish and boom… it posted only a title with no content which told me more than I knew before. It seemed like something that was interacting with the editor was causing problems. This second time around I had the presence of mind to write my post in google docs, so I was able to log in through the WordPress.com interface and try making the post there, which is ultimately what added text to my post.

After a bunch of fiddling and turning things off I found that apparently the Twitch Embed Suite that I had used for awhile to embed my twitch stream into a page on my blog, was causing all sorts of issues. So after disabling that I managed to make an update to the post, which is giving me hope this morning that all of this typing is not in vain. I’ve also already saved a draft successfully so we are in a much better place than we were yesterday morning. Unfortunately these problems didn’t stop with the blog yesterday, and my entire morning at work was spent chasing down insane issue after insane issue. One of which had been plaguing me for a few days now and over the course of six and a half hours working on the problem and trying everything I could think of it solve it… I finally remembered that about six years ago we had something similar happen and I followed down a hunch of what had caused that issue. The issue with problem solving is that often times I need to let a problem percolate in my brain for awhile before the answer presents itself… which is not exactly conducive to fixing something rapidly. So by the time I had fixed this huge issue, and a few others… it felt like I had run some sort of a mental marathon. The day improved after that… well that is until I found out that the daily heroic in Destiny was once again Lost to Light… the mission that can in theory reward the Black Spindle.

Lost to Light Sucks

Mostly I am just sick of trying for a Black Spindle. Through the grace of my friends Squirrel and Jex, I have likely put in more than twenty attempts at this thing over the course of several different occasions with no luck in walking away with one. On our best attempt we were one or two mobs away from completing when the timer ran out. Last night Squirrel was available as always and willing to help, but we struggled to find a second and Jex was nowhere to be found. So as a result I ended up trying with an old World of Warcraft friend and his co-worker. I was feeling pretty good when I heard that the two of them duoing it somehow managed to make it to the final room with a couple of minutes to spare. I thought surely with a third person in the mix that would make all the difference in the world. Unfortunately we could get to the final room with about six minutes left and from there everything seemed to break down when it came to juggling clearing the adds and also working on whittling down the boss. The closest we have ever gotten was the bubble in the middle method where we took down the boss with sword attacks and then worked on clearing the room. This time around we largely got corralled in the center corridor “safe spot” and anytime we attempted to poke our heads out either ate a sniper shot or a taken centurion ball attack. In any case this is another week without getting a spindle, and honestly I am not sure how much more I am even going to attempt it. I get my hopes up and then when I fail to get it again I just end up feeling like shit.

Now other than this little hiccup the patch has been excellent. Yesterday I had written a huge post talking about all of the things I was enjoying in the patch, but sadly that bit of prose is lost to the sands of time… or at least wherever the internet garbage collector deposits things. Suffice to say that I am enjoying the update and that it has lit a fire under my ass to go out and do things. It is not entirely as magical as I would have hoped because the confusing text blurb I have talked about before from the Bungie website was exactly that… confusing. Originally the statement had said something to the effect that engrams would now decode to at least your current converted light level. What that really means in practice is EXOTIC engrams will now decode to at least your current converted light level. I am still getting a ton of trash blues and purples, but I don’t really mind them that much because I no longer have to go through a complicated process to decide if I should break it down immediately or if I should save it for infusion fodder. The math is simply… is it higher than the light level of the gear I want to be using? If so eat it and bump up an item… if not deconstruct and get tasty materials. The awesome thing about this is that it is letting me dip into my bank and dust off items that I never actually used because the light was simply too low. For example I found this amazing Byronic Hero which is an extremely high impact hand cannon with a decent magazine size. It has triple tap, hand loaded and hidden hand giving me decent stability, better than average range… and great target acquisition with the ability to get a bonus round if I precision shot multiple times in a row.

Treasure Room Raiding

The other thing that needs to be talked about is Prison of Elders. When Destiny launched, I played for a few months and then got frustrated with my inability to improve my light level and moved on to something else. I did not return until after the launch of the Taken King, which means I largely missed both House of Wolves and the Dark Below and never actually played the original Prison of Elders. Now my friend Squirrel runs this every single week, and has for a very long time… but tends to run them on Sunday which was a lousy time for me to be doing much of anything. So when we set foot in there a few nights ago it was completely fresh and new to me… and I loved every moment of it. For years I have wanted an MMO to give me a dungeon that is a sequence of random encounters pulled from a larger pool of encounters… and that is pretty much precisely what Prison of Elders is. The first four rounds of the match take place on various battlefields themed after either the Fallen, Vex, Cabal or Hive and in new incarnation apparently each one of these has the chance of spawning in as a Taken version. The fifth round is a boss encounter and will take place on the battleground that links up to the type of mob you are facing. In the couple of outings so far I have only seen the giant Vex Minotaur and the Cabal Primus, but I believe there a bunch of options that you can end up with, as well as some new Taken versions. Your reward at the end is a trip down to the treasure room where you get to open three chests and each time through I have gotten at least one legendary engram for my troubles.

The other thing of note has been the introduction of loot boxes, for purchase from the in game shop or from doing activities. It seems like you earn a loot box for doing each type of activity per week, meaning that your first crucible match of the week, your first prison of elders/heroic of the week… and I am guessing your first raid of the week earns you a loot box. I also ended up opening several of the boxes with silver and managed to get a full set of the Taken themed gear as well as a full set of the Spectrum gear that allows you to change the color of its glow. I thought I was just super lucky, until I found out that most of my friends got nothing but Titan armor regardless of who they opened them on. There are angry threads all over the place right now talking about how crappy the randomizer is on these boxes, and folks have posted pictures of their inventory full of nine copies of exactly the same item. I guess in the grand scheme of things I lucked out because I got all of the armor I would want, as well as a white tron themed sparrow, and a really damned cool ship. Unfortunately it was not the taken themed ship that I really wanted… but I am happy enough to use it for the time being and will simply hope that my future weekly boxes end up giving me the other. In any case… I am really happy with the patch and have been slowly getting enough higher level engrams to start upgrading my gear a little at a time. I went into the patch sitting at 309 and can now hit 312 which while not a huge difference is enough to keep me engaged.

All Hail Patch Day

April 12, 2016 by Belghast

Light be Praised

Today is the most magical of all days… patch day in Destiny. There have been times in the past when something so cool was being released that I have been giddy about the patch, and today is definitely one of those days. If you have not been following Destiny since the original launch, I have to say you have been missing something. This is one of those games that a lot of people wrote off completely after being frustrated with the original release. To be truthful even among the AggroChat folks… even though I talk about Destiny constantly… there are a handful of people that were burned so bad on this game that they never want to play it again. This is however a huge unfortunate thing since Taken King was for Destiny what the 2.0 patch was for Diablo 3. It was that period of time where so many things were just “made better”, because in many ways it was the start of Bungie realizing that a somewhat adversarial loot policy was a bad idea. That said there was still quite a bit of grind in Taken King, but it was the sort of grind that never made me feel like it was utterly hopeless. I could go out, get a bunch of engrams… and maybe just maybe one of them would be worth using to help infuse up all of the 280 weapons that I had sitting in my vault. The infusion system was so much better than hoping for a drop… and then not being able to use it because it didn’t have enough light on it like happened so often in Year One.

That said the infusion system was still a pain in the ass. I had my vault lined with 285 items that I could use as stepping stones to get those 280 arms day and vendor drops up to decent levels of light to make them usable in most activities. Last night I cleared every last bit of that out of my vault, because with today’s patch infusion will be 1 to 1. Meaning that if I get a 280 weapon, I can drop a 310 item into it and it becomes 310… no fiddling or calculations required. With today’s patch the light level is also being increased… to 335, with pretty much all of the “end game” activities from Iron Banner to Court of Oryx to the existing raid being able to drop high light level items. There is a part of the patch preview on the Bungie site that is a bit ambiguous talking about engrams now decoding to a minimum of whatever your equipped light level is. If that is the case I will sing the praises of this game from the rooftops because I have a vault full of weapons I would LOVE to use… but they are simply too low of light level to be viable. While I didn’t start saving nearly as far back as my friend Squirrel did (simply for lack of bank space) I did start saving pretty much every engram I have gotten in the last few days. The hope is that tonight when I log in I can start decoding them and hopefully get some really nice upgrades to my overall light levels.

Hope of Stability

As is often the case on various game subreddits, some user has created a really excellent list of all of the content that players might need to know about coming back to the game. While I fully expect there to be a deluge of returning players, this really is the ideal time to reinstall the game and start once more. This patch packed some pretty massive quality of life issues, and if the grind bothered you before… that should be significantly lessened now. As far as how I spent my last night before the patch… we were attempting to play clean up on the stranded Kings Fall raid from Tuesday. I’m part of the group formerly known as the Rookie Raid, that has now been renamed to the Squirrel Squad. Though based on the folks that sign up instantly… I was going to suggest Jexy Squirrelghast for the unofficial name. While I still very much feel like a rookie, I guess I have picked up more information than I realize. Granted I still suck horribly at the jumping puzzles and more than likely always will. I died so many times to the wall last night it wasn’t even funny. That said I wasn’t the last person to get to the chest, nor the last person to get up through the rock pillar vertical puzzle either. As far as the stranded raid… well we spent most of our time attempting to get the Warpriest challenge mode, and as a result we simply ran out of time to move on beyond it. We wound up simply killing the Warpriest in non-challenge mode, which I felt was at least in part my fault… given that it was my first time doing platforms.

Last night we more or less cruised along nicely thought Golgoroth, and Sisters… only to run into some logistical first timer issues on Oryx. The fight has a lot of things to take in and we straight up got robbed of at least one kill when half of the orbs didn’t detonate even when players were standing on them. The raid ended in frustration, because we simply ran out of time and available resources to keep pushing. I greatly appreciate all the non-rookies that stuck in and pushed forward trying to get Nidrew his first kill, and it is my hope that tonight the servers will be stable enough for us to give a good push at trying to get that kill this evening. Part of the becoming “Squirrel Squad” is that we moved the start time back to 8pm CST giving us an extra hour worth of attempts on stuff to hopefully get the clear. That 9pm start just guaranteed that by the time we hit Oryx we were all a little loopy and out of it. The only gotcha tonight is that given my history of big landmark patches in the various MMORPGs I have played… I totally do not expect the servers to actually be playable tonight. I will be totally fine with just doing small activities roaming around this evening, and maybe taking in some Court of Oryx. However I am still holding out hope that we might be able to do the 320 version of the Kings Fall raid tonight, and get folks some new and shiny upgrades.

Underwhelmed

November 18, 2015 by Belghast

Mixed Emotions

One of the big problems with last week is that quite literally I had too many things I wanted to play. Not only did Fallout 4 release… and give me a franchise of shanty towns to look after…. we also had the launch of Final Fantasy XIV 3.1 patch. Now I have complained a bit that the lag between 3.0 and 3.1 was entirely too long. Basically from 2.1 onwards they kept a schedule along the lines of a major patch every 3 months and a minor patch every month. Instead this patch took about five months to release… and it was a long enough lag to get me completely out of the habit of logging in on a regular basis. That said I knew whenever 3.1 landed I would be back, albeit a bit rusty from lack of playing. Fallout however took precedence and over the last two nights I have finally consumed I believe all of the new quest content. Now we get to the mixed emotions part… because in one way the content was really damned good. It managed to hit us in the feels a few times and introduce a new to this game character… that we are VERY familiar with from Final Fantasy V thanks to Ashgar and his constant cheerleading for the Four Job Fiesta. The problem I am having is it did nothing really to re-ignite my desire to log in on a nightly basis.

The other big take away I had from the story content is it felt like a trickle compared to what we have seen in the past. I know at the very least the quest to unlock Void Ark was significantly shorter and less involved than the quest to unlock Crystal Tower. Similarly the main story line, lacked a big boss fight like they have in the past… because there was no introduction of a new primal. Also part of what I think is the feeling of it being small… is the fact that we did not get a Hildebrand story to go with it. So while I enjoyed the experience of the new quest content… I felt like it was over far too quickly, and took part of an evening to complete in total. That is including unlocking the new Vanu Vanu beast tribe quests and done two rounds of those. I don’t want to have this “let down” feeling but I can’t help it I guess. Maybe it is just that I had built up 3.1 as being this point of my grand return to this game… and like Tam has said in the past we simply lack the huge backlog of content to slowly work our way through that we had during 2.0. Maybe there has always been a very limited amount of content… and I just never actually caught up completely until this expansion.

The Dungeons

All of this said… I have yet to do the two new dungeons, and have yet to run Void Ark, so maybe my feelings will be different after seeing those. Dungeons have always been the lifeblood of the game for me, but I have simply not been sleeping well the last few nights, so I felt more than a little out of it. Also Tam spent time playing Lords of Verminion last night, and I am hoping he writes up a quick guide because what I saw of it… looked like madness, but a fun sort. Mostly I just need to get back into the habit of logging in on a regular basis. I was in last night at least long enough to run my Vanu Vanu dailies before disappearing back into the Commonwealth, and at a minimum I plan to be doing that each night. I want my flying snake and I want my sundrop dance. I spent some of my stockpiled MGP one one of the new dances there as well… the “Gold” dance, which looks hilarious when my Lalafell does it. I also need to get back in the swing of tanking, because I was a complete slacker when it came to esoterics gear, and I need an awful lot of it. I also need to start running Void Ark to get items to upgrade with.

Is it wrong that I feel a little disappointed though? Maybe it just feels like a let down after the amazing ride that Heavensward was, and maybe the patch content is on par with what they have done in the past. Final Fantasy XIV has always been this happy place, and logging into the free company brings that point home. It is amazing that the guild has managed to keep trucking on and being active in spite of a large chunk of us taking an extended break from the game. I was just so ready to hop back in the saddle and be wowed by the experience… and instead I feel a bit melancholy about it. It just feels like the team might be resting on their laurels a bit, and maybe spent too much time working on Verminion that would have been better suited putting in more content for the patch. It really bothers me that there is only two dungeons in this patch cycle, because the whole Fractal/Neverreap thing got super old… super fast. Having only two dungeons means there is the one you enjoy… and the one you don’t… and it always feels like the only thing you get is the one you don’t enjoy. For us it was non-stop back to back Neverreap, and my fear is that once we start the dungeon cycle one of them is absolutely going to be “That” dungeon for us again. It is funny how much of a difference that extra dungeon seems to make… but man it does. Maybe they will add another dungeon in with 3.15 which is supposedly right around the corner. My hope is that they will also be adding more Hildebrand content… with another boss fight, and potentially a new primal. Mostly I guess it just feels like we got half of a patch, which makes me a little sad after the length five month wait.