Belghast

Goodbye Maxis

I technically entered the PC gaming world significantly later than many of my peers.  My family did not get a PC Compatible until 1992 when we took home a 386×16 from Sears and Roebuck with a colossal two full megs of ram.  The very first game that I purchased for it was a copy of Sim City.  There was just something about the idea of building my own town that appealed to me.  Everything about the game was a bit cludgy including the black text on red note card that served as copy protection… but quite honestly I did not care.  I was getting to build a world on screen and my enjoyment soared once I learned that I could put in a cheat and simply build freely without rules.  That right there was the great possibility for Sim City, that you could color outside the lines and create some really interesting stuff in the process.

Yesterday the news broke that Electronic Arts has shuttered the Maxis Emeryville studio that was the birthplace of the various Sim franchise games that we all loved.  I will admit that the last version of Sim City was the only version that I did not purchase at release.  Quite honestly I still have not purchased it, because it felt too icky.  Initially I set back watching as friends got frustrated with the online only functionality, and ultimately had my nose turned up at the Sims-like piecemeal DLC bonanza that started.  What made Sim City so great was that it was this toolbox for us to design our own cities of the future…  but when you start attaching real world price tags to those cities, it just feels wrong.  Electronic Arts clearly knows what they are doing, as they still manage to turn a profit in spite of all the various heinous activities they have done in the past.  I just find it deeply saddening that yet another “classic” studio has in essence been destroyed by them.  They now get to party with the other dead studios like Origin Systems, Westwood, Bullfrog… and I feel like I am missing a few names from the list.

Capping Poetics

Right now I am on a bit of a mission in Final Fantasy XIV.  With the current access to both Carboncoat and Carbontwine through the weekly quest, I have been trying to do everything I can to get my poetics gear quickly.  I freely admit I was doing fairly good at making sure I hit the poetics cap every single week, until the launch of Warlords of Draenor.  After that I fell off the deep end and only really returned to playing Final Fantasy XIV on a nightly basis after the 2.5 patch.  As such my poetics gear is woefully behind where it should be had I been as diligent as I could have been.  Thankfully this just means that I am essentially in the same boat as the rest of our free company.  So now I am trying to at the very least get in a single expert roulette each day.  Last night I spent my night running several different kinds of roulettes to try and make up for lost time seeing as I didn’t actually get any on Tuesday.

One would think that doing the highest level repeatable content in the game would mean that I would run into some assholes.  I know Kodra ran into a single elitist player from the Death and Taxes guild the other night, but in truth most of my interactions have been largely positive.  In Keeper of the Lake that run went as smoothly as I could have possibly imagined, with players actively conversing and talking about what needs to be done.  Then I got Snowcloak and the moment we zoned in, a player said that it was their first time there.  As such I took up the role of giving them the information that they need to be able to complete the fights successfully.  We had a single wipe from the tank over pulling, but no one got grumpy and we just kept pushing forward.  It is nights like last night that make me realize what a rare community Final Fantasy XIV really has.

Multigaming

The other day we came to the realization that our Free Company has been back playing Final Fantasy XIV for around seven months.  I think I already commented on this being some what of a record for us, with quite honestly our group rarely sticking in one place for more than a couple of months at a time.  We are very rarely one month players, but by the same token when a new game comes out we rarely make it past the three month marker.  In truth Final Fantasy XIV represents one of the longest uninterrupted stretches of playing any game ever for me.  I played World of Warcraft for about seven years without pause, Everquest for 3, and Dark Age of Camelot for 2.  As such Final Fantasy XIV sits as fourth place already in this hierarchy of longevity.  I think the reason why it is working so well this time is the fact that I am still playing other games at the same time, and because of this Final Fantasy XIV feels like a constantly fresh experience.

For years I have been enthralled by the schedule that Sypster keeps with his gaming, because he is the only person that I know who has quite literally a specific game that he plays on a given day of the week.  The other day I realized that maybe this is precisely why this current volley of gaming has been so successful.  I have a very distinct schedule, I just didn’t realize it until I started thinking about my various in game commitments.  On Tuesday and Thursday for example I am raiding in World of Warcraft, so as such I tend to devote those days entirely to that game regardless of what else I might be playing.  Monday and recently Saturday before we record our podcast we have been raiding in Final Fantasy XIV so those days naturally become something that I log in and devote my entire energy to that game.  Everything else is pretty variable, but I tend to mix in at least a little Guild Wars 2 daily so I can get the login bonuses, and lately quite a bit of Sky Saga.  So ultimately my schedule seems to have enough structure to keep me focused, but enough freedom to know that I am only a few days away from having a more freeform night of gaming.  It seems to work for me, and I am hoping that means I have finally stabilized in my gaming habits… as quite honestly I had gotten tired of jumping from game to game every two to three months.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Multigaming

Master Shake

A few days ago I talked about our purchase of the Nutribullet blender, and starting down the path to madness that is mixing various combinations of things.  Since that moment I have worked towards building the perfect “breakfast shake” that combines giving me enough nutrients to last until lunch, and the consumption of my morning coffee into one activity.  I’ve ventured down several paths until eventually finding the one that seems to make me happy.  Since various readers expressed an interest in my recipe when I finally landed on the one that I like… I thought I would actually snap some photos as I made this mornings shake to show the whole thing off.  I went back and forth with the ingredients but finally landed on a combination that I like.

The Ingredient List

• Cottage Cheese – 4 tbsp
• Banana – 1 whole sliced can be frozen
• PB2 Powder – 2 tbsp
• Coffee – 12 oz cold made to taste night before
• Cinnamon Brown Sugar Belvita – 1 pkg ( 4 crackers )
• Honey – 1 tsp

Now to talk a little bit about the various things I finally included in the finished “shake”.  First off we have the base of Cottage Cheese because it is low fat and relatively high in protein as well as calcium.  When thoroughly blended it has an almost cream cheese characteristic which is great.  Most of my recipes include a banana because it adds a good amount of bulk to the mix, and it is chock full of all sorts of stuff including tons of potassium.  If you add it in frozen you get a much thicker mixture.  Belvita biscuits were one of the last additions to this concoction, and in truth they are mostly in there for the fiber… and to give the shake staying power so I am not hungry until lunch.  I think in theory any “biscuit” would probably work as well for those without Belvita.

I experimented with adding peanut butter and nutella, but all of those mixes frustrated me.  Instead I started using a peanut butter powder which adds the flavoring of peanut without the oil and such.  The most important thing is the coffee obviously, and I make this every night as part of my “shutting down the house” ritual.  I tried various things, but ultimately I found it works best if I fix the coffee like I would normally drink it.  Finally I add a teaspoon of honey just to add a bit more sweetness and balance things out.  The end result is pretty great and is this mix of a bunch of great breakfast flavors.  It still very much has a coffee drink taste, but also is extremely filling.  All of the ingredients pretty much get disintegrated in the process leaving only this thick milkshake consistency.  If you give this a shot, let me know what you think.

Check Yourself

A few weeks back our raid leader had outlawed “toys” in the raid, namely after a few incidents with the appearance swapping item… and a poorly placed sandbox tiger during the Oregorger encounter.  One of the toys that I feel like leaders all across the game will be outlawing is the S.E.L.F.I.E. camera.  That said I decided to hop up on a box and take a picture of our raid waiting for the last few people to zone in.  So while I practiced safe screenshotting…  apparently others have not been quite so cautious.  In fact the very popular WarcraftLogs.com website that our own raid uses for log parsing has added special support to make sure raid leaders are certain who cast that selfie and when.  So while cute I do hope all of my readers exercise appropriate caution, when attempting to sneak one in.  I of course was being super obvious, since hopping up on a box before the raid.

After we got started last night we had quite a great evening.  We cleared the five bosses that we have defeated before, and put some attempts in on Heroic Gruul.  Oregorger felt surprisingly manageable after spending so much time bashing our head against it.  I think more than anything it was a mental block for our raid, and now that we have cleared it I feel like we can probably finish clearing up the rest of the wings in short order.  We saved the progression bosses for Thursday which tends to be our more serious night.  I feel like I really should at least do the LFR version of these fights between now and then to understand the layout of each of the rooms.  The most frustrating part about LFR right now is the fact that there are zero upgrades for me, and since you can only gain the legendary currency once per boss per week…  there isn’t much incentive there either.

Gladiator Changes

One of the things that has kept me engaged this expansion is just how much I love the  Gladiator spec.  It is essentially that thing I have always wanted to do in a game…  dps with a sword and shield.  Everything about the spec seems ideally suited for my personal sentiments.  That said I knew it was a bit of an odd duck specialization wise, and I have had to seek out specific gear with specific stats to make it work well.  Up until 6.1 everything seemed awesome, and I felt very competitive, sitting in the top five on almost every fight.  Last week I was rather sick, but this week…  I finally noticed how much less damage I seemed to be doing relative to what I could push before the patch.  Now on AOE fights… I am still insane with the amount of AOE bleed and cleave goodness at my disposal.  However on largely single target fights it seems like I have lost a few thousand dps.

My theory is that before the patch I was attempting to shed all of the haste I could from gear and buffing my crit in its place.  Post patch…  we now apparently want to shoot for 700 haste.  So I have a feeling that I will need to rifle through my bank and re-itemize myself.  Thankfully I don’t think I have gotten rid of any items unless they were stat for stat increases.  I am hoping that after some tweaks I can make this work, because honestly a huge chunk of my enjoyment of raiding right now… comes from being able to gladiator.  I hate the way fury feels, and honestly always have.  Arms is traditionally an under performing spec, but if I can get my hands on a Blackrock era 2 hander I might give that a shot.  In any case I will need to spend some time sifting through the changes and adjusting, because I am not quite ready to give up on the dream of sword and board dps.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Check Yourself