June 2018 – Page 3

forty two

June 19, 2018 by Belghast

First I feel like I need to start this mornings post off with a discussion of how completely overwhelmed I am by the birthday wishes yesterday. We were travelling and each time we stopped I furiously tried to catch up with personal thanks to everyone who sent me something. I completely missed Facebook unfortunately because I refuse to install the Facebook app on my phone and wound up doing a sort blanket thanks over there when I got home. Twitter however is my social media of choice and I tried my best to keep up throughout the day. I think I successfully thanked each and every one of you… but given how fast everything was scrolling there is a high chance that I missed someone. If I did I am truly sorry because I am super thankful for all of the awesome friends I have.

For the last several years my wife and I have been doing this little mini vacation to the Kansas City metro. As the rockstar teacher she is, she signs up to grade the AP Statistics exams… and for the last several years has been a table leader that is responsible for making sure that all of the essay questions get graded effectively the same way by all teachers. For those who are having trouble picturing this… imagine a convention center filled with tables full of teachers… all of them grading essays for eight hours a day in a sort of weird factory type environment. That is what my wife has been doing for the last week and some change.

Instead of having the AP Board fly her back home I have been driving up on the day she gets released and picking her up. Then we run around Kansas City that night and the next morning and drive back to Tulsa. Because we are lame we mostly just hit a bunch of the Half Priced Books stores there and usually the Microcenter since we don’t have one in Tulsa and pretty much anything else that happens to suit our fancy in the journey. That means as the birthday wishes are rolling in we are usually moving from location to location with me trying to catch up as we go.

I tend to tweet out random things I encounter… like yesterday I made a joke about these being apparently the Amiibos that did not sell, given they were at a Five Below in Olathe KS. Later I found out that no… these are fairly rare and were Amazon exclusives and who knows how they ended up in the secondary market. I wished I had picked up a couple because various folks like Pizzamaid really want the Palutena one. You can find a bunch of odd things that show up at Five Below, which is a discount chain that I wish we had in my area. The Below part is generally a lie because I’ve seen very few things there that are cheaper than $5.

Another weird thing I stumbled across in my journey was this controller at Microcenter. There was no way I was going to pay the $70 price tag but I did snap a photo because I thought it was interesting. Once I got back to civilization I looked it up and apparently it is the Emio 5-in-1 switch controller, but based on the reviews from Amazon it is not a phenomenal product. Apparently the Switch 5.0 update completely broke this controller like it did so many third party peripherals, but it was an interesting idea with swappable button layouts for the different Nintendo control schemes it is trying to emulate.

Anyways this is one of those rambling nothing posts. I feel like I should suddenly feel wiser today given that I am not forty two and apparently the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Unfortunately I don’t feel much different apart from the fact I woke up this morning with an insane headache. I remember as a kid anytime I would go through growth spurts my joints would hurt. I wonder if headaches are just a sign of your mind going through a growth spurt too. Personally I like that thought better than the alternative explanations.

AggroChat #208 – E3 2018 Show

May 21, 2019June 16, 2018 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start out with a list of topics to discuss… and never quite make it past E3 2018. This was one packed year with a bunch of interesting titles announced. We talk about most of the shows and some of the titles that interested each of us the most. We jump around a lot so it is more of a free form discussion rather than anything structured. This means we occasionally jump off and talk about things that are not necessarily E3 related.

Topics Discussed

E3 2018
Many titles
Very announcements
Wow
Yes I did just do that

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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First allied alt leveled!

June 16, 2018 by Grace

Working on this nightborne mage has been on my goal list for a couple months. I finally finished leveling her this week. Once you get to 90, the rest of the levels just fly. I wish the whole process had been like that. I got her to 100 mostly collecting treasures and doing the occasional WoD “world quest”. From 100 – 110 I relied on invasions and one zone worth of questing. I don’t know why they decided to make the leveling so uneven, but 20 – 80 and 80 – 110 feel like completely different games.

So now I have another 110 mage. The problem I have with her is that she’s too much fun! I want to try to get at least one more alt leveled before BfA gets here, but I’m not excited enough about any of them to push them through. Frost mage is a good fit for my play style and “class fantasy” enjoyment, plus she’s been surprisingly survivable, even on Argus. I even ran part of Antorus with her. My dps was terrible, but then again, my gear was the minimum to get in the door. At least I wasn’t bad enough to get booted after a wipe (several others were kicked that run).

If I want to make my goal I need to set her aside and choose between my highmountain monk, lightforged pally, or velf priest. I love the look of the velf the most, but priest always feels like a dead weight to level. I still sort-of consider my disc priest my main, but I don’t like the way the spec plays right now. On the other hand, I enjoy the monk playstyle quite a bit, but I already have 3 max-level monks sitting around. The pally is just a giant question mark. My belf pally was my first real main, waaay back in TBC. Since then I’ve always leveled her with each expansion, but I’ve never done enough to really understand the class and how it has evolved. Basically I have no idea what I’m doing on a pally these days, and no sense of whether I would enjoy it or not.

So those are my options for my next alt to level. I would flip a coin, but I can’t seem to find one with 3 sides. Which one would you choose?

Upcoming Lapse

June 15, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t really have much of a proper post to make today, but I did want to give my readers a heads up that it is highly unlikely that I make a post before next Tuesday. Nothing bad is happening, it just won’t be reasonable for me to be posting much. This makes it all the more inexcusable that I don’t really have much to say today. I’ve been playing a lot of The Division and have managed to get back into the swing of things after the gear swaps I talked about last night. Unfortunately I am having hell taking screenshots right now because both Fraps and the Nvidia Experience based fall back seem to not be picking up and taking the shots. I am not exactly sure what is up but whatever the case I’ve been going into gaming sessions thinking I was taking a bunch of captures but not ending up with anything in the end.

The one new thing I have been playing around with is Survival mode, which was suggested to me by a lot of people. The premise is you are trying to get to the dark zone in order to extract some cure that was found for the small pox based super bug that started the whole problem in the first place. This in itself would probably be reasonable but there is a massive blizzard hitting New York and upon approach your Helicopter crashes… puncturing your hazmat suit and leaving you stranded with only a pistol. Essentially as you roam around you are fighting two problems… the extreme cold and the fact that you have been infected and are trying to stave it off. Either of those things can straight up kill you.

For the cold you wind up moving from building to building or fire barrel to fire barrel trying to stay warm while wandering out in a whiteout blizzard. For the infection you can pick up medication periodically and use it to pause the timer that is ticking down. On top of this… you lost your filter in the crash and need to gather up enough materials to craft a new one in order to move into the dark zone, get the cure and successfully extract. If you choose to queue into a PVP session you are also up against other players who are trying to compete for the same resources and the same eventual cure. To spice things up… you will also encounter the various factions from the game roaming the streets that will of course start firing on you the moment you come in range.

There are a number of things that you can do to improve your odds, because you drop in with a base set of green gear. Drops occasionally upgrade your weapons or your armor, but everything is limited to this one survival session starting you back at square one. The cosmetic clothing increases your survival against the cold letting you stay out longer before needing to run back and warm up somewhere. The entire process is really interesting because it is basically this intense survival game in the middle of an MMO complete with hunger and thirst meters that you need to keep an eye on. Basically the entire world is dead set against you and you need to keep moving, keep searching and keep looting to gather enough resources to be able to survive for a long periods of time as you attempt to cross New York, get into the Dark Zone and retrieve your cure.

From what I understand there are also a number of other gameplay modes that show up once you reach thirty… and as I am sitting at 28 I am feeling close enough to the finish line to try and push through this. Super thanks to everyone who tipped me off to Survival since there were several of you. I linked a guide video since I didn’t have much in the way of screenshots.