April 2016 – Page 10

Iron Banner Results

April 4, 2016 by Belghast

Evaluating Guardians

I spent quite a bit of time this weekend looking at this screen or one very similar. As I stated the other day, this is my first time really doing the Iron Banner weekend content, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. The only sadness that I feel is that it seems like I am deeply leaning into the game as many of my clan mates are leaning out. I did however get to run a few matches with the Axioma clan crew, but unfortunately I had someone come to the door and had to run quickly to go answer it leaving them somewhat stranded with some dead weight. The biggest take away from the weekend is that I am not nearly as bad at PVP as I always thought I was. There were several maps where I lead the score count, which is a pretty cool feeling. I rarely if ever however have the best KDR. I am super objective based and there are many times I will bum rush an objective just to keep the opposite team from having time to secure it. It feels like maybe the rest of the folks in Iron Banner are not necessarily doing this. I saw an awful lot of deathmatching in areas that were nowhere near objectives and since the name of the game was control… it felt like I spent a lot of time trying to make up for team mates that clearly had no interest in actually playing the “game”.

As the weekend went on I felt like I learned a lot. I fell for far fewer “traps” where people were trying to bait me into attacking and ending up getting picked off easily. I also started to learn the maps significantly better. There are still a few that are the bane of my existence… namely the Firebase Delphi, and the Dreadnaught map are ones that no matter how many times I play them I just feel like I struggle. Then there are maps like Widows Court and Bannerfall that I always seem to do really well on, but I guess this makes sense as there were always maps I did better on in Enemy Territory or Soldier of Fortune 2. I mention those games because in many ways playing Crucible and Iron Banner reminds me of all the time I spent playing shooters during the late 90s and early 2000s… and it has been shocking how fast certain aspects of it has begun to feel “natural”. I’ve been wondering if I had done myself a disservice all of these years by not playing PVP in MMOs and now I am starting to realize that it is just a different experience. MMO PVP just does not feel anywhere near as fluid as Destiny, and because of that I am doubting if I will feel anywhere near as good. That said I do absolutely intend to take some time and give World of Warcraft battlegrounds and Rift PVP another chance.

Spoils of War

Yesterday afternoon I managed to hit rank 5 with the Iron Banner and in doing so got quite the cache of goodies. I of course bought the cosmetic rewards first… because I kinda have a thing for emblems and shaders. Based on all the various emblems that I saw during the event, I am wondering if they alternate between designs or something? As far as the shaders go both were thoroughly obnoxious and I doubt I will use either, but I still had to pick them up regardless. The weapon I was most interested in this go round was Finnala’s Peril the Hand Cannon because I am really hoping that with the April changes we see some quality of life improvements to that type of weapon in general. Though if there is any evidence by the number of times I was killed by a Hand Cannon this weekend, I would say they are mostly doing okay. Other than that I have always liked the look of the Iron Banner Titan gear, so any of that I could pick up would make me happy. At some point I would absolutely love to be rocking a full set of the gear so that I look like the tank that I always thought I was. I still have one full day to try and get some drops, and I have a feeling that tonight I will be upstairs on the PS4 doing just that.

The gallery shows off some of the drops I managed to get through the weekend. In total I have gotten three different versions of the chest piece, and the one that I am showing off in the above image is not actually the highest level version I got. I am now trying to level up a 309 light version to be my primary chest piece. Similarly I have seen I believe three of the Hand Cannon drops but sadly most of them are pretty crappy stat wise. I did manage to get one that was worth holding onto, but hopefully tonight I might see some with better rolls. From my Rank 5 package I managed to get a really awesome 312 helmet and a 310 Ghost Shell… then about fifteen minutes later got a 320 version of the same shell. So all in all I managed to get at least three pieces of gear that I will be holding onto and making part of my permanent set. As far as purchases, I picked up the Iron Camelot shoulders, and Bretomart’s Stand Machine Gun. I kinda went back and forth on the Machine Gun as to whether or not to purchase it. Comparing it to the Legendary machine gun that I had been using, I actually thought it was a little better and have now infused it up to usable levels. I gotta say I really enjoyed Iron Banner this week and I have a feeling that I will be trying to do this next time it comes around. Sure it took up a lot of my time, but I really enjoyed that time spent. I can also already tell that once Iron Banner is over… I will be back to playing a lot of Crucible.

So Much Cheese Pizza

April 3, 2016 by Belghast

April Fools On Me

Yesterday morning began with a really interesting turn of events. I got up, got dressed, went out to get breakfast… and as is often the case when I finally got set down I opened email to see if there was anything important for me to deal with. In my inbox was an order receipt from Domino’s Pizza… which at first in my sleepy state didn’t seem all of that odd. Then it dawned on me… that it has been weeks since we last ordered anything from Domino’s so I opened it to figure out what was going on. Much to my shock… it was a very real looking order statement for some $600 worth of stuff… ordered at 1:30 in the morning and to be delivered to my address at 11 am Saturday. The list goes something like this…

25 Large Hand Tossed Cheese Pizzas
13 2-Liters of Coke
3 Stuffed Cheesy Bread with Bacon and Jalapeno
25 Side Marinara Dipping Cups
6 Side Garlic Dipping Cups
6 Side Ranch Dipping Cups
25 Side Blue Cheese Dipping Cups
25 Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes
25 Side Icing Dipping Cups
1 Sweet BBQ Bacon Specialty Chicken

It seemed like someone had gotten into my account on Dominos.com and placed an order, using an old credit card that was on file there that expired sometime in 2015. At 8 in the morning on a Saturday neither the local Domino’s or the corporate Call Center were open, so I instead called my credit card company who assured me that they denied the order. So for a little bit I went on about my business yesterday morning with the intention of calling the local office around 10:30 when they opened to make sure they realized it was a fraudulent order. I had been in the backyard spraying weed killer for a bit, when I went back inside and realized I had a few missed calls. Apparently the manager of the location had physically come by the house to verify that the order was legit before processing it. His workers however apparently thought nothing of it, and were just about to start in making the pizzas. I mean who orders 25 cheese pizzas? I am not sure if this was a targeted attack on me in particular, or if this was just some sort of scripted attack, whatever the case it made for an interesting morning… and a very interesting story.

Day of Chores

Yesterday as a whole was a day filled with doing stuff around the house. I got to play exactly one match of Iron Banner yesterday before shutting back down to run some errands. It was largely a day for doing a bunch of stuff that had been needing to be done for a bit. One of the major goals of the day was to get the new wireless multi-function printer hooked up, and working with all of our devices. Other than taking a bit to install drivers on each machine this actually went pretty smoothly. There is some strangeness with Google Cloud Printing, in that the printer must be owned by one google account, and then shared to other Google accounts. But I have to credit my wife with figuring that bit out. It is kinda cool being able to print from a chromebook finally, or print from chrome itself anywhere and have it come out on the printer at home. I could see that useful sometimes, especially for printing order receipts. The next mission was to try and figure out why our high volume printer just stopped working last week. When I went to investigate whether the Parallel to USB cable was still hooked in tightly… the entire thing fell apart in my hand. Not sure what happened but it seems like I simply need a new one of those.

As far as today my goal is to play some more Iron Banner because I really want to be able to hit rank 5 and maybe see some of the weapons as drops. I am not sure that any of the rolls available on Lord Saladin are really worth purchasing, but in theory if I got some better perks it would be well worth my time. I still need to get several heavy kills to complete the weekly bounties. I am holding onto all of the brown bounties because I have been told that they greatly increase in value as the event comes to a close. We have the usual laundry and cleaning to do, but my hope is that unlike yesterday… today can be largely a day of gaming and chilling out. Yesterday was a really strange day, but other than the pizza thing a good one. I was super excited that for the most part AggroChat went off without a hitch. We recorded a fairly long show about a bunch of interesting things, and there was zero occurrence of chipmunk Belghast.

AggroChat #101 – Unicorns and Predictability

May 21, 2019April 3, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo talk about stuff and are not chipmunks!

This week we seem to have worked out the technical difficulties we had last week, and I regret to inform you that Chipmunk Belghast has left the building. Episodes 99 and 100 both had their issues and I believe those are finally behind us. Tonight we talk about both the esoteric and the tangible and lead off with a discussion about Randomized Loot versus Predictable loot… and apparently Belghast really enjoys chasing unicorns. From there we dive into a conversation about the insane grind at was getting the extra bank tab in Diablo 3 Season 5. We press forward into a discussion about Belghast aparently deciding he really likes good PVP and Grace talking about the divisiveness of the latest Wildstar world event. Kodra restarts Dark Souls and with Tam they contrast it with Bloodbourne. We talk about the latest craze that seems to be Nintendo discovering there is an internet and mobile gaming with Miitomo. Finally we talk about Adeptcon and the new Infinity Rule Book, and the Shadows Over Innistrad Magic the Gathering Expansion.

All the Topics!

Unicorns
Random Loot Drops
Predictable Loot Drops
Diablo 3 Season 5 Grind
Destny Crucible and Iron Banner
Wildstar Arcterra World Event
Dark Souls
Bloodbourne
Miitomo
New Infinity Rules Book
Shadows Over Innistrad
Magic the Gathering
Pauper Format

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Chasing Unicorns

April 2, 2016 by Belghast

Random Number Generators

For a bit now I have been trying to sort out why Destiny as a game is so damned appealing to me, and more so why it isn’t appealing to a lot of the AggroChat folks. While I am still very much enthralled by the game, the rest of the crew seems to be having that same experience with Warframe. While there are absolutely aspects of that game that I enjoy, as a whole I just find the experience less interesting. So while trying to reason out one day what the difference was… other than he design aspect and third person view. Then it finally hit me… that I really find the whole modding system in that game far less interesting than the random item rolls in Destiny. In theory Warframe is predictable and you can build each weapon to function exactly like you want it to, through the application of very specific mods. Once you have those mods and have leveled them you can then apply them to any weapon you can equip, allowing you to have a very predictable experience. The problem is I think it is that predictability that I find boring.

I’ve come to realize that I really do love chasing unicorns. What I mean by that is that for as long as I have played MMOs I have been enthralled by the random number generator aspect of loot. From the early days of Everquest, to Dark Age of Camelot and their completely random drops that came with Shrouded Isles… to even modern World of Warcraft with its chance of dropping Warforged items… I love the possibility of getting something truly amazing to drop for me. I think in many ways this is why I am so susceptible to grinding, because I know every single thing that I kill has an admittedly slim chance of dropping something truly magical like a BOE world epic. So when I play a game like Destiny I love knowing that the weapon I just got to drop for me, is a fairly unique package of stats… with randomized perks. I also love knowing that somewhere out there is a “God Roll” just perfect for my playstyle.

Imperfect Items

However the thing I appreciate the most is how I honestly enjoy using “imperfect” drops. Because while they may not work exactly the way I want them to work, there is always a way to make them function, and in doing so they give me a window into different play styles. Like I love the Rodeo perk on almost anything, but there are lots of weapons that I use without it and in each of them it has just made that gun feel more unique in the way it handles and the ways I can use it. So I love seeing what some might call a bad roll, and then trying to make it work for me. This keeps the game fresh and keeps me constantly falling in love with new weapons until I find something else that catches my attention. Through the course of playing Destiny I have played with so many different guns, and each of them had their own unique style and feel… and often times I get nostalgic when I dust them off in the bank and take them out to do bounties again. The Zarinaea-D for example I have used so many times, and each time I pick it up I get warm fuzzies over the way it handles and the way the gun sounds and looks.

The problem is I just don’t feel that in Warframe. Weapons have stats and then those stats are augmented by mods… that themselves are always going to be the same as they level up. Tam and I talked about this at length one day, and for him that is the perfect scenario… because it makes him feel like he is never using something inferior. For me however I actually kinda like knowing that there is always a slightly better version out there somewhere. I am admittedly focused on loot when I play any game, and when I reach a point of having the “best in slot” I get bored and the game starts to stagnate for me. I like situations where there are lots of “potentially right” answers to a problem, and that I can choose whichever option feels the best. Right now this is one of the problems I am having with The Division is that while I enjoy the game… the loot feels realy boring, or at least it doesn’t seem to be doing anything interesting to my game play. I’ve not picked up a weapon that completely changed how I approach combat, and that forces me to focus on this aspect or that rather than continuing to do the same thing I always seem to be doing. In the meantime however I will keep chasing those unicorns and looking for that really awesome item to drop just around the corner.