Month: April 2016

AggroChat #102 – Rogue One Love

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Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Inky, Tamrielo, and Thalen talk about stuff!

AggroChat102_720

Tonight we welcome back to the show Inky, and talk a bunch of topics.  Tam discusses his experiences playing the latest XCom and how each of the AggroChat facsimiles fared throughout the missions.  Inky talks about playing the beta of the upcoming Fallout 4 survival mode.  We delve into a discussion about Funko Pops, Disney Infinity and Amiibo.  Belghast talks about the upcoming patches for The Division and Destiny and the positive and negative of each.  We all share the love of the new Rogue One trailer, and how it makes is happy to be Star Wars fans.  Finally Inky talks about a game has has been playing Submerged, which is something in the “walking simulator” genre.

 

This Weeks Topics

  • XCOM
  • Fallout 4 Survival Mode
  • Funko Toys
  • Disney Infinity
  • Amiibo
  • Division / Destiny Patches
  • Rogue One Trailer
  • Submerged

 

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Sword Logic

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Conversions Away

Sword Logic

Last night I had every intent of logging into The Division and playing it all night long.  If nothing else I knew I needed to pop in long enough to convert all of my materials to orange or blue quality.  This Tuesday there is a pretty horrible nerf coming down the pipe in crafting.  In the case of high end crafting it is more than doubling the amount of materials needed to craft something through the form of an extremely lossy conversion of materials.  Right now it takes 5 greens to make 1 blue, and 5 blues to make 1 orange crafting material.  Which has always felt like a pretty fair method.  However after the patch it will take 10 green mats to make a single blue, and 15 blues to make a single orange.  To make matters worse they are also nerfing the amount of materials you get off of deconstruction which right now usually yields two materials…  but after the patch it will more consistently yield a single material.  Essentially all of the love I have for Destiny and the quality of life improvements…  I am feeling the opposite for Division and what seems to be some very unfair changes for the casual player.  As a result I highly suggest you get into the game and convert everything you have up to the highest tier of material you can make.

Unfortunately there is no batch conversion option so you will be holding space bar and hitting escape a bunch to burn through your materials.  It took me about twenty minutes to convert everything up because I really did have a lot of materials.  I need to focus on farming some more weapon nodes this weekend so that I can hopefully convert up at least enough to get 10 for one weapon.  Right now high end craftables take 8 orange mats, and after the patch they are going to require 10.  I didn’t notice any mentioned nerfs to the world nodes, so I am wondering if these changes are designed to get players to prioritize going after them instead of simply killing a bunch of stuff to deconstruct.  In any case I know today/tonight I plan on farming as many nodes as I can get my hands on with the hopes of converting it all upwards into shiny orange materials.  In the process of screwing around yesterday I did manage to complete a mission and hit 23 so at some point I really need to make the final push to 30 so I can join in all the fun end game “reindeer games”.

Unintended Exotics

Sword Logic

As unexcited as I am about The Division patch…. I am insanely so about the Destiny patch.  Yesterday I was super pumped to see what the next Playstation exclusives would look like, namely I really really want that new exotic sniper because it has an almost Tex Mechanica vibe.  I also think the new Jovian Guard armor set is probably the coolest Titan armor to date, so I will absolutely be farming up a set of it, which should go a lot more smoothly given that I can infuse things much easier.  On the infusion department there is some conflicting information up on the Bungie site, but it makes it sound like we will no longer get engrams to decode to less light than our converted light total.  Meaning that if you are 309 light when you decode you should get items of level 309 or higher.  What is confusing is this seems like a massive change, but one that I really welcome.  I am sick of getting 260 blues and 270 purples from engrams.  I’ve been holding onto a vault full of interesting weapons, that just need to be infused to use…  so I am amped that this might mean that process becomes super simple.  At some point before Tuesday I really need to sort through my vault and deconstruct all of the lower level items that I was holding onto as stepping stones for leveling higher stuff from 280 and beyond.

I didn’t intend to play Destiny last night, but at some point during the evening I flipped over to the clan messaging app and saw that my friend Jex was trying to get ahold of me.  Now I have needed to finish up the Exotic sword quest for some time, but I wasn’t really pushing the issue.  It turns out that Jex and Squirrel were looking for something to do last night, and thought that it would be the perfect time to work on that quest for me.  The sunless cell is probably my least favorite strike because I don’t like the whole “not being able to see” aspect, and the exploding thralls coming out in close proximity.  That said the worst part about it last night was the anxiety of not wanting to screw up the pattern.  You have to bleed down the main boss to where you can finish him off in a hit or two… and then drop the warden of your elemental type and then within 30 seconds finish off the boss to complete the quest.  The problem being that the flame sword warden is apparently the most annoying because he could almost one shot all of us.. and we were well above the suggested 300 light.  We managed to do it in a single attempt, but with a lot of resurrections in the process.  Afterwards we popped over to the dreadnaught and did some Court of Oryx, with the goal of finishing some antiquated runes so we would each have a stack to go through with the patch on Tuesday.  I know personally I have six, but it sounded like Squirrel had a full stack of them.  The hope is that we can farm up one or more of those 335 artifacts to boost our light level before the raid that same night.  In any case I am super grateful for the group, and my shiny new exotic 310 sword.

 

 

Sword Logic

by

Conversions Away

Sword Logic

Last night I had every intent of logging into The Division and playing it all night long.  If nothing else I knew I needed to pop in long enough to convert all of my materials to orange or blue quality.  This Tuesday there is a pretty horrible nerf coming down the pipe in crafting.  In the case of high end crafting it is more than doubling the amount of materials needed to craft something through the form of an extremely lossy conversion of materials.  Right now it takes 5 greens to make 1 blue, and 5 blues to make 1 orange crafting material.  Which has always felt like a pretty fair method.  However after the patch it will take 10 green mats to make a single blue, and 15 blues to make a single orange.  To make matters worse they are also nerfing the amount of materials you get off of deconstruction which right now usually yields two materials…  but after the patch it will more consistently yield a single material.  Essentially all of the love I have for Destiny and the quality of life improvements…  I am feeling the opposite for Division and what seems to be some very unfair changes for the casual player.  As a result I highly suggest you get into the game and convert everything you have up to the highest tier of material you can make.

Unfortunately there is no batch conversion option so you will be holding space bar and hitting escape a bunch to burn through your materials.  It took me about twenty minutes to convert everything up because I really did have a lot of materials.  I need to focus on farming some more weapon nodes this weekend so that I can hopefully convert up at least enough to get 10 for one weapon.  Right now high end craftables take 8 orange mats, and after the patch they are going to require 10.  I didn’t notice any mentioned nerfs to the world nodes, so I am wondering if these changes are designed to get players to prioritize going after them instead of simply killing a bunch of stuff to deconstruct.  In any case I know today/tonight I plan on farming as many nodes as I can get my hands on with the hopes of converting it all upwards into shiny orange materials.  In the process of screwing around yesterday I did manage to complete a mission and hit 23 so at some point I really need to make the final push to 30 so I can join in all the fun end game “reindeer games”.

Unintended Exotics

Sword Logic

As unexcited as I am about The Division patch…. I am insanely so about the Destiny patch.  Yesterday I was super pumped to see what the next Playstation exclusives would look like, namely I really really want that new exotic sniper because it has an almost Tex Mechanica vibe.  I also think the new Jovian Guard armor set is probably the coolest Titan armor to date, so I will absolutely be farming up a set of it, which should go a lot more smoothly given that I can infuse things much easier.  On the infusion department there is some conflicting information up on the Bungie site, but it makes it sound like we will no longer get engrams to decode to less light than our converted light total.  Meaning that if you are 309 light when you decode you should get items of level 309 or higher.  What is confusing is this seems like a massive change, but one that I really welcome.  I am sick of getting 260 blues and 270 purples from engrams.  I’ve been holding onto a vault full of interesting weapons, that just need to be infused to use…  so I am amped that this might mean that process becomes super simple.  At some point before Tuesday I really need to sort through my vault and deconstruct all of the lower level items that I was holding onto as stepping stones for leveling higher stuff from 280 and beyond.

I didn’t intend to play Destiny last night, but at some point during the evening I flipped over to the clan messaging app and saw that my friend Jex was trying to get ahold of me.  Now I have needed to finish up the Exotic sword quest for some time, but I wasn’t really pushing the issue.  It turns out that Jex and Squirrel were looking for something to do last night, and thought that it would be the perfect time to work on that quest for me.  The sunless cell is probably my least favorite strike because I don’t like the whole “not being able to see” aspect, and the exploding thralls coming out in close proximity.  That said the worst part about it last night was the anxiety of not wanting to screw up the pattern.  You have to bleed down the main boss to where you can finish him off in a hit or two… and then drop the warden of your elemental type and then within 30 seconds finish off the boss to complete the quest.  The problem being that the flame sword warden is apparently the most annoying because he could almost one shot all of us.. and we were well above the suggested 300 light.  We managed to do it in a single attempt, but with a lot of resurrections in the process.  Afterwards we popped over to the dreadnaught and did some Court of Oryx, with the goal of finishing some antiquated runes so we would each have a stack to go through with the patch on Tuesday.  I know personally I have six, but it sounded like Squirrel had a full stack of them.  The hope is that we can farm up one or more of those 335 artifacts to boost our light level before the raid that same night.  In any case I am super grateful for the group, and my shiny new exotic 310 sword.

 

 

Chasing Happy

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Obliviously Chill

Chasing Happy

This week has been an interesting one so far.  I’ve been trying to take these mood enhancers that I had fallen out of the habit of taking on a daily basis.  According to my wife it makes a huge difference when I am taking them, versus when I am not.  However on Wednesday night they caused me to more or less forget that I had a raid to attend.  I was sitting there happily on the sofa watching Daredevil Season 2 and screwing around in Destiny through the official remote play application… and next thing I know around 9pm I check into Slack and realize that I had completely blown off the Wednesday night WoW Raid thing.  Thankfully they were able to make it work without me, which is awesome…  but I was otherwise completely oblivious to having anything going on that night.  Like in the back of my head there was a vague feeling that I was supposed to be doing something, but I was so chill that apparently I never actually acted upon that thought.  I partially blame Daredevil because really, this season so far has been enthralling.  I only started watching it Wednesday night because our cable box was uncooperative, and I couldn’t seem to get anything else up on the screen.

I’ve been feeling generally disconnected from the world, and my hope is that the happy pills will help to curb that instinct and allow me to actually participate in it again.  I’m not even certain what caused me to stop taking them, other than one day I simply forgot… and the next day I forgot… and so on until I was out of the habit.  I’ve had quite a bit of work stress lately, combined with the stress of all of the home renovation “change” has kinda pushed me into another funk.  After a sequence of bad mental health days, I came to the realization that I really should be taking them again.  When I am not doing great, I tend to throw up this wall and paint a happy face on it… then duck behind it hoping the world will go away.  I realize this is largely a defense mechanism, but it feels so much safer behind the wall than out in front of it interacting openly.  Everything feels like it is buzzing past so fast that I can’t really grasp what is going on, or who is attempting to interact.  So when I am sitting in this mode I spend a lot of time staring at things, without actually understanding what I am looking at or how it actually relates to me.  One of the things I have tried to do with this blog is be pretty open about whatever is going on with me…  even if it is the not so great stuff.

Warlock vs Oryx

Chasing Happy

Through the course of playing Destiny I managed to push all three classes to 40, but some of them get a lot less use.  Namely my Warlock has kinda become the unloved child of the bunch, because no matter how much I try… I never can seem to get the hang of their damned jump.  It always feels like a much less useful version of the Titan jump.  Hunter makes perfect sense… they have triple or quadruple jump depending on if you have the Bones of Eao equipped.  Warlock jump however never seems to do the thing I want it to do when I want it to do it.  However lately thanks to the magic of the Remote Play application I have been poking around on that character, because in the grand scheme of things… it has the least impact on my other activities.  The problem is that I really have not done much questing.  I ground my way to 40 through the various patrol missions and had not even completed the Taken King content.  So last night I decided to pick up where I had left off in that quest chain, which turns out about four quests from the end of it.  This was a big nuisance since anytime I got one of those ever so lucrative “Patrol the Dreadnaught” bounties, I couldn’t actually do that… and would end up having to complete a story mission to get kill credit.  Over the course of the night however I managed to finish the main story arc of the Taken King and it is ridiculously easy when you are sitting at 292 light.

Chasing Happy

Also while doing stuff on the Warlock, I decided to go ahead and do the Stormcaller quest chain so that I could unlock that class.  I have to say having done all of them now, this one was probably my favorite.  I loved the whole “taming the storm” aspect of the quest because it really seems to it the class as a whole.  Now unfortunately I need to just do a bunch of leveling to top off my various subclasses.  I have all three maxed on the Titan, but for the others… I have Nightstalker on the Hunter maxed, and absolutely none of the Warlock classes maxed with Sunsinger being the closest since I figured the whole self rez thing would be the most needed like a Titan bubble.  I wish there were versions of the mark/bond/cloak that increased leveling for classes other than the ones added with Taken King.  Even if you had to do some sort of a quest to earn them, it would be a welcome addition for anyone trying to top off all three classes.  The only problem with running Strikes/Crucible to level is that I feel like I am not entirely effective because I am missing large chunks of my abilities.  So instead I just end up running bounties and screwing around in the patrol missions which seems like the slowest way to level sub classes.  However all of this is great “playing from the couch on the remote play app” fodder so it will probably see a lot more screen time than it previously did.  Before the ability to reliably play remotely, the only time I was really playing Destiny was to go do group activities.  Now I can do a lot of solo questing from the comfort of the living room and it is making me play catch up on all of those things I largely ignored.