April 2016 – Page 7

Past and Future of World of Warcraft

April 12, 2016 by Grace

There’s been a bit of fuss recently with the closure of a “vanilla” WoW server, and it has me thinking about the pull between nostalgia and progress. Now, for the record, I believe that Blizzard is 100% within their rights to force the closure of any 3rd party WoW server of any flavor. It is their IP, it is their game, they’re right to protect it. However, I’m also in the camp that would absolutely love to see them launch a legacy server or three. Full disclosure: I’ve played briefly on a vanilla server a few years back, during WoW’s Cataclysm expansion. I had never even played WoW during vanilla, I didn’t get sucked in until the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The vanilla server still called to me because I wanted to see for myself what things were like back then, and because it conveniently erased all of the changes that were making me outright hate the game in its current state. It was a very different game at a very different pace, and I could have happily kept playing it indefinitely if the nagging understanding that I was walking in a moral gray area at best hadn’t driven me back to the straight and narrow. The fact that my chosen vanilla server has long since been closed down tells me I did the right thing by stopping.

I hold out hope that Blizzard might one day launch legacy servers the same way I still hold out hope that they’ll institute an invisible mode for battle.net. They obviously think both those things are not in their best interests or they’d have implemented them by now, but a girl can dream. Ironically, I think that having legacy servers might actually let people enjoy the current offerings more. There have been almost too many quality of life changes to the game to count, and running around questing on foot until level 40 with no heirlooms or dungeon finder might put some things in perspective. I also think that during the flatly awful lulls in content it would be nice to be able to travel back to a simpler time and be a tourist still in WoW, still giving Blizzard money but experiencing something a little different for a few months instead of quitting the game completely.

Looking forward towards Legion I don’t see a lot to excite me, and I do see a few things that turn me off. I feel like I am drifting farther away from WoW’s target demographic, and maybe that’s ok but it still makes me feel a little sad. I also look at the game itself and it is showing its age more and more. The older zones look pretty awful and that’s fine on a nostalgia server but a harder sell for an actively updating game. Each expansion works a little magic and brings a partial facelift but even the newest zones don’t hold a candle to the graphics of more modern MMOs in my opinion. After all this contemplation I find myself strangely yearning for the change that relegates all of WoW to “legacy” status, a fresh clean 2.0 with modern sensibilities and graphics. Maybe if that happens Blizz will finally open a vanilla WoW server.

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.

Good TV Bad TV

April 11, 2016 by Belghast

Fear Season 2

Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead. I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since. Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work. This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with. So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise. That said… season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least. It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to. I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise. As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like… are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand… the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.

The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb. Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous. They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous. It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned. It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background. I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet. Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously. I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t. I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights. That said… so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.

Daredevil Season 2

As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two. While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable. This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics. Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one. I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect. There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers. The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon. From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it. While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.

The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher. “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled… that is until Rick himself started to fill that role. Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher, and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series. As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil… so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin. I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate. As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept. The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand. Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast. So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction. Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.

The Secret Stash

April 10, 2016 by Belghast

Comfort Gaming

One of the things I always have trouble sorting out, is what game I plan on playing during the AggroChat podcast. Now there are casts that have a strict no gaming rule while talking, but I honestly think that would damage some of the discussion. Essentially we are hitting record on conversations that naturally happened already on our voice chat server. Part of that equation is the fact that we are talking while gaming, and for the last couple of weeks the game of choice has been Diablo 3. I think partially it is that I know the season is coming to an end, and as a result it is fresh in my mind again. The ultimate irony however is that I am not playing seasonal characters at all. While recording two shows ago I ended up pushing my non-seasonal monk to 70 and last night I started working on trying to get my non-seasonal warrior from 60 to 70. That would leave only my Wizard as being sub max level, which honestly…. I am considering giving another chance. I am not a huge fan of finger wigglers… but after running with a lot of wizards over these last couple of seasons… I have to say I see the charm. They can simply melt anything that they come up against, and there actually is a semi melee range option that I would probably be able to stomach.

The other thing that I tried my hand at this week was Path of Exile. I find it shocking that the game has been out this long and I have yet to even really give it a shot. The talent screen honestly scared me off a bit because it looked as complicated as the final fantasy x sphere grid. However for some time my friend Carthuun has been talking it up, pretty much anytime we brought up Diablo 3. It is entertaining and I feel like I could play it happily, but I have to say I was somewhat shocked how relatively difficult that it starts. I mean it is not super hard, but you can’t simply mow through the mobs in quite the manner that you do in Diablo 3. All this really means is it makes me realize just how watered down the latest Diablo installment really was. The only disappointment was that there didn’t seem to be any sort of a real “knight” light character with a sword and shield in the manner of the Crusader in D3. I ended up choosing the big brute character, and at some point I will probably try and go sword and shield. I am not sure exactly how I am building the character yet because I have yet to get terribly far.

Pre-Patch Farming

The majority of yesterdays game time was spent running around in The Division and attempting to farm crafting components. At the current moment I have a decent stash of materials, or at least am in a better position than I was before I knew the crafting changes were coming down. I am not super pumped about the patch, because it feels like it is taking the game in a less player friendly direction. However that said I am still slowly making progress towards the level cap. While running around yesterday I managed to ding 24, and encountered some areas that I had not seen yet. The strangest of course was this marijuana farm that was nestled deep inside a building. As the day goes on today my goal is to continue trying to level because I would really love to be able to participate in some of the big activities, but I am absolutely certain I will not hit the cap before the patch. I am somewhat frustrated that it sounds like gearing is going to be harder for me, than it was for the folks who rushed the leveling process. That however always seems to be the case… the first few you get to cap get easy epics, and those who level slowly have to struggle through the throttled drop rates.