Month: November 2016

Family We Choose

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Family We Choose

On a day that could wind up being absolutely horrible for the future of our country, I find it important to talk about something good to offset the bad vibes.  If you really want to read an excellent worded post on the election, then I suggest you go read the heartfelt post by my friend Rowanblaze.  Past that my only admonishment to you is to get out and vote, because not voting is functionally the same thing as voting against your beliefs.  So now that I have said that… onward with the feel good piece.  For the most part I have resigned myself to being an MMO Gamer, because even though there are a plethora of single player games that I would love to be playing…  I always find them lacking when it comes to the human interaction that I crave.  Sure I occasionally hole up in skyrim or minecraft or some equally engrossing game to hide out from the world, but there will always be a point where I stick my head up and want to interact again.  Ultimately it is the people that really matter to me when it comes to gaming, and one of the interesting trappings that comes with the MMO is that you end up getting intimately aware of the folks you are playing with.  There are people that I am still in contact with that I played Diablo and Starcraft with in College, and even more that I met playing my first real MMO experience Everquest.

The group that has seemed to have the most permanence however are the folks I have raided with.  There is a core group of people that transitioned long ago from acquaintance, to guildie, to friend and eventually wound up in the inner most circle of family.  This is a group of people that I quite literally talk to every single day, even if none of us happen to be playing the same game at the same time.  The core of this group represents what is remaining intact from the very first raid group I was ever part of.  There are other members of course that I stay in contact regularly but, there is a smaller group that held together far more firmly.  Of the six regular members of AggroChat myself, Tamrielo, Kodra and Thalen all come from the same non-guild raiding community that sprung up on the Argent Dawn server in World of Warcraft.  Now Thalen is a bit of an edge case since he was technically in a competing raid… but there was a bunch of cross over between those two groups with various members of our group the Late Night Raiders, filling in with Last Horse the group he was part of and versa vice.  Ashgar is similarly linked to Tam and Kodra from their post LNR raiding, and to me starting at a time in history that I can’t even remember at this point.  Right now it honestly feels like Ashgar has just sort of always been there in my life.  Similarly I cannot tell you exactly when Grace joined our merry band, because once she arrived she also felt like she had always been there too.

Some time ago Tam came to me and asked if I thought folks would be cool with him commissioning portraits.  The catch was that these would be portraits not necessarily of a given character, or a given person… but this strange amalgam of how we represented ourselves and to some extent his mental image of us.  I of course thought this was an awesome idea, but then months passed and I had not heard anything about it.  I had no clue who he had commissioned and if it actually was still a thing, so I largely filed it away in the back of my brain as a “cool idea”.  Recently I myself decided that I wanted to commission our good friend Ammo to pick back up this project and at least do some matching portraits of the current Aggrochat cast and our regular alternates.  Ammo told me she was excited about the idea, but that she was working on another big commission so it might be awhile before she could get around to it.  Little did I know that the commission in question was the one I had heard so many months ago.  Tam made a huge production of the unveiling yesterday, and gathered us all together at the time to announce it.  To be truthful I am not sure any of us had a real clue what was going on, until we were presented with the above image.  For point of reference…  the above image left to right is Ashgar, Neph, Vexa, Grace, Gabri, Kodra, Tam, Me, Toadchild, Inky, Helkim, Sol and scouting ahead is Thalen.

Family We Choose

What is so phenomenal about this project is the sheer amount of tiny details that went into each and every portrait.  From the moment it was unveiled yesterday afternoon, I literally just kept pouring over the details and finding little things.  For example on Gabri the Cooking Mage’s Whisk Staff… there are all these tiny carrots at the bottom.  Ashgar similarly is this perfect amalgam of all of these things that we think of when it comes to him… the Earth Mage magic nature… with the shape shifting feral druid spirit behind him that he is just about to shift into.  The one that I cannot get over is the portrait of me however.  It is this juxtaposition of big dark heavily armored axe wielding warrior…  with the whole friend of the woodland creatures thing.  We decided that it is now canon that the woodland creatures helped me put on the armor in the same manner as Cinderella.  The birbs however have a second meaning in that they are all bluebirds…. the symbol of twitter which my friends are constantly poking fun at me over.  There is even the detail of the belt… because we have had all of these conversations about how I really liked the 90’s comic book style of having way too many belts on EVERYTHING.  I am sure to strangers, this is just a well rendered image… but to those of us in it… it absolutely captures the soul of every single person.  The only way this would have ever worked is because Tam supplied a ton of details… but also that Ammo knows each of us extremely well so was able to fuse the things he was telling her with the things she just inherently knew.  When it happened last night… I literally had the sudden desire to run around outside making random strangers look at just how awesome it was.  So there was no way we were getting past today’s post without talking about it.  I am so completely enamored with each and every portrait, that all I can really think to do is just say thanks to Tam and Ammo for making it happen.

Curiouser and Curiouser

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Curiouser and Curiouser

This weekend I dove down a rabbit hole of nostalgia and it was magical. Ever since even the hints of a new Karazhan started to surface, long before Legion was released, I started to get a bit hyped. Once Legion launched and I saw how good of a job they’d done with the Broken Isles, I got even more hyped about the new Kara. I dared to hope that it would do justice to the original. You see, I started playing World of Warcraft near the start of The Burning Crusade, its first expansion. Karazhan will always hold a special place in my heart because it was the very first raid I ever set foot in. I made some great friends, and got completely hooked on raiding. By the end of that expansion I had healed, dps’d, and yes, even tanked my way through Kara many times. The raid was oozing with character and charm, a fully realized haunted mage tower big enough to get lost in for hours.

The new Kara is the same, but different. I mean this in the best possible way. It certainly still is big enough to get lost in, as we proved immediately, getting lost on our way to the first boss. The first half of the instance is essentially the same old space we knew and loved. Even the bosses are all reprisals of the originals, and they are just as brutal to learn as the originals were. We one shot the first boss, the Opera event (it was “Westfall Story”), but most of the night was spent learning fights, picking ourselves off the floor and throwing ourselves at bosses until we won. The Moroes fight in particular was just completely brutal from a healing perspective. It was also really fun, because it was every bit as satisfying to kill that boss as any raid boss. Curiouser and Curiouser

In fact the whole take home message of our first night in Karazhan was that this truly does feel like a 5-person raid rather than a mythic dungeon. The scale of the place is still epic, the fights are punishing, and it doesn’t just feel like a rehashed, slightly harder version of something we’ve already done. Even though that’s exactly what it is. Kudos to the devs for pulling this off spectacularly. The vague ingrained wisdom we all had from clearing the original Kara served us pretty well, but things were also different enough to offer some great surprises. It has been a very long time since I laughed as hard on the way back from a wipe as I did last night, and that alone was worth the price of admission.

After the first 5 bosses, the instance switches to some new sections. There were a lot of surprised and pleased reactions. I don’t want to completely describe the whole thing, because if you get a chance to experience it for yourself you absolutely should. We spent over 4 hours in there, and managed to kill 6/8 bosses and get some solid attempts in on the 7th. That’s definitely on par with a raid, rather than a dungeon.  I absolutely can’t wait to get back in and see the rest of it, and to do it again next week now that we vaguely know what we’re doing.

Blizz took a big chance re-working such a beloved instance, and it paid off hugely here. I’m also glad to hear the news from Blizzcon that they’ll eventually be releasing a non-mythic version of new Kara so even more people can experience it. I had an absolute blast, even if some of the fights made me cry a bit as the healer. It was a pitch-perfect nostalgia bomb and I hope it inspires even more people to fall in love with the magic that is Karazhan.


Curiouser and Curiouser

AggroChat vs Karazhan

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AggroChat vs Karazhan

For much of the last two weeks Karazhan has dominated my gaming life in one way or another.  Initially it was trying to get all of the mythics run needed for attunement, and trying to coordinate between the four fixed members of Team AggroChat that are still playing the game.  When the Karazhan raid was first announced we knew that the four of us…  Ashgar, Grace, Thalen and Myself would want to run it together if for no reason other than providing lots to talk about on the podcast.  Unfortunately that first week after the patch launched was insane and it ended up with several of us disconnected in the progression through the four Mythics.  As a result it took us a bit to get through all of them, and we had to grab more people at various points in the process…  and I am just realizing that I really should check to make sure they did in fact make it through the attunement process and if not help them out.  The goal was to try and get into Kara that first Sunday.  For almost two years I ran Karazhan every single Sunday and we used it as a way to pull up new characters and gear alts.  It seemed extremely fitting that we would be doing the new incarnation of Karazhan as a Sunday thing as well.  While we managed to get all four of us across the finish line, and attuned and ready to go…  we couldn’t find anyone that was not already locked to kara, or did not already have plans to run it elsewhere.  So we wound up running a Mythic Plus for the keystone and gave up on running the raid on the first week.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

Somewhere along the way this week, we found out that Kylana had not yet run the dungeon… and also had no plans on any sort of a static group.  We had checked with a few other people that had scheduling conflicts, but thankfully he was able to commit to the Sunday thing and from that point on… I simply didn’t think much about it other than knowing in the back of my head that I would finally get to experience the raid.  The only negative is that I never really use the calendar invite system in World of Warcraft, and since I am used to seeing in game time converted to my local time thanks to Titan Bar… I scheduled the raid thinking it was at 8 pm my time and that everyone else’s calendars would adjust accordingly.  However apparently that is a feature that I only dreamed up in my head, and I did in fact schedule the raid for 8 pm server, so an hour earlier than I had intended.  The truth is that this worked out just fine and I happened to be sitting at the keyboard ready to go an hour ahead of when I had intended.  Now in the days leading up to our run we had been hearing from guildies how rough the raid was, but in truth I think they were treating it as though it were another Mythic dungeon.  I fully expected to zone in and have to learn as we went, while clearing a brand new raid… rather than simply roflstomping our way through yet another mythic.  However the discussion of difficulty did prompt me to make sure I had plenty of food for buffs and flasks to get through the content.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

In so many ways the zone feels just like Karazhan used to feel.  What I mean there is that while it is functionally different in places… it is just as rough to get through as it was those first times.  I remember spending weeks working on various encounters, and being extremely proud the first time we downed Maiden of Virtue for example.  I am similarly proud of us for doing the same thing last night, as it took several tries for us to figure out the mechanics since we essentially went into this without planning.  I realize this is something that would frustrate most people, but over the years of raiding together in various games… we’ve developed a taste for going into encounters completely raw and then learning as we go and adjusting.  Tamrielo would have been proud because for the most part we talked Kylana into following us down this pathway to madness as well.  All in all we managed to drop Opera: Westfall Story, Maiden of Virtue, Moroes, Attumen, Curator, and Shade of Medivh.  We finished the night working on Mana Devourer but simply ran out of time for more attempts.  We ran from 8pm EST to Midnight EST, and I am certain that much of that will be sped up significantly next week.  We are talking about trying to pull things together tonight and give another poke and clearing the zone completely since we literally just have two bosses left.  It is going to be a long time before we can clear this fast enough to get Nightbane as the 9th optional boss.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

I have to say this is honestly some of the most fun I have had in World of Warcraft… since most likely I worked my way through the original Karazhan.  I am really hoping that this is not a one off encounter, and that we might see a revitalization of smaller scale raiding.  I realized a lot of that went by the wayside when Blizzard introduced the 10 player raid size, but really something has been missing since that point.  Karazhan, Zul’Gurub, AQ20, and Zul’Aman all held a niche that progression content never really did, and I am really hoping that this new 5 player raid content is going to bring that back.  After spending a night with my friends doing Kara, it definitely feels like it is…  I just want to make sure that this is not simply a fluke.  What I liked the most about this is that in truth we all had to perform to our best to make it through these fights.  Moroes was every bit of the challenge that it once was, and we just barely limped across the finish line on that fight.  In truth I am trying to figure out how we can do better next time, because garrote is just as brutal as we remembered it being.  The truth is that none of us really got much in the way of upgrades from any of the encounters, but the encounters themselves were reward enough.  That said I would not look down upon getting something awesome from one of the two bosses we have yet to defeat.  This raid… and the news from Blizzcon honestly have me more excited about the World of Warcraft franchise than I have been in years.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

by

AggroChat vs Karazhan

For much of the last two weeks Karazhan has dominated my gaming life in one way or another.  Initially it was trying to get all of the mythics run needed for attunement, and trying to coordinate between the four fixed members of Team AggroChat that are still playing the game.  When the Karazhan raid was first announced we knew that the four of us…  Ashgar, Grace, Thalen and Myself would want to run it together if for no reason other than providing lots to talk about on the podcast.  Unfortunately that first week after the patch launched was insane and it ended up with several of us disconnected in the progression through the four Mythics.  As a result it took us a bit to get through all of them, and we had to grab more people at various points in the process…  and I am just realizing that I really should check to make sure they did in fact make it through the attunement process and if not help them out.  The goal was to try and get into Kara that first Sunday.  For almost two years I ran Karazhan every single Sunday and we used it as a way to pull up new characters and gear alts.  It seemed extremely fitting that we would be doing the new incarnation of Karazhan as a Sunday thing as well.  While we managed to get all four of us across the finish line, and attuned and ready to go…  we couldn’t find anyone that was not already locked to kara, or did not already have plans to run it elsewhere.  So we wound up running a Mythic Plus for the keystone and gave up on running the raid on the first week.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

Somewhere along the way this week, we found out that Kylana had not yet run the dungeon… and also had no plans on any sort of a static group.  We had checked with a few other people that had scheduling conflicts, but thankfully he was able to commit to the Sunday thing and from that point on… I simply didn’t think much about it other than knowing in the back of my head that I would finally get to experience the raid.  The only negative is that I never really use the calendar invite system in World of Warcraft, and since I am used to seeing in game time converted to my local time thanks to Titan Bar… I scheduled the raid thinking it was at 8 pm my time and that everyone else’s calendars would adjust accordingly.  However apparently that is a feature that I only dreamed up in my head, and I did in fact schedule the raid for 8 pm server, so an hour earlier than I had intended.  The truth is that this worked out just fine and I happened to be sitting at the keyboard ready to go an hour ahead of when I had intended.  Now in the days leading up to our run we had been hearing from guildies how rough the raid was, but in truth I think they were treating it as though it were another Mythic dungeon.  I fully expected to zone in and have to learn as we went, while clearing a brand new raid… rather than simply roflstomping our way through yet another mythic.  However the discussion of difficulty did prompt me to make sure I had plenty of food for buffs and flasks to get through the content.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

In so many ways the zone feels just like Karazhan used to feel.  What I mean there is that while it is functionally different in places… it is just as rough to get through as it was those first times.  I remember spending weeks working on various encounters, and being extremely proud the first time we downed Maiden of Virtue for example.  I am similarly proud of us for doing the same thing last night, as it took several tries for us to figure out the mechanics since we essentially went into this without planning.  I realize this is something that would frustrate most people, but over the years of raiding together in various games… we’ve developed a taste for going into encounters completely raw and then learning as we go and adjusting.  Tamrielo would have been proud because for the most part we talked Kylana into following us down this pathway to madness as well.  All in all we managed to drop Opera: Westfall Story, Maiden of Virtue, Moroes, Attumen, Curator, and Shade of Medivh.  We finished the night working on Mana Devourer but simply ran out of time for more attempts.  We ran from 8pm EST to Midnight EST, and I am certain that much of that will be sped up significantly next week.  We are talking about trying to pull things together tonight and give another poke and clearing the zone completely since we literally just have two bosses left.  It is going to be a long time before we can clear this fast enough to get Nightbane as the 9th optional boss.

AggroChat vs Karazhan

I have to say this is honestly some of the most fun I have had in World of Warcraft… since most likely I worked my way through the original Karazhan.  I am really hoping that this is not a one off encounter, and that we might see a revitalization of smaller scale raiding.  I realized a lot of that went by the wayside when Blizzard introduced the 10 player raid size, but really something has been missing since that point.  Karazhan, Zul’Gurub, AQ20, and Zul’Aman all held a niche that progression content never really did, and I am really hoping that this new 5 player raid content is going to bring that back.  After spending a night with my friends doing Kara, it definitely feels like it is…  I just want to make sure that this is not simply a fluke.  What I liked the most about this is that in truth we all had to perform to our best to make it through these fights.  Moroes was every bit of the challenge that it once was, and we just barely limped across the finish line on that fight.  In truth I am trying to figure out how we can do better next time, because garrote is just as brutal as we remembered it being.  The truth is that none of us really got much in the way of upgrades from any of the encounters, but the encounters themselves were reward enough.  That said I would not look down upon getting something awesome from one of the two bosses we have yet to defeat.  This raid… and the news from Blizzcon honestly have me more excited about the World of Warcraft franchise than I have been in years.