Belghast

Horrible Night

Last night was supposed to be our guild attempt on Turn 9 again in Final Fantasy XIV.  I logged in ready to go, and then all hell broke loose.  We had two servers go down at work, and I spent my night working with a coworker trying to bring them back online.  While all this was happening, the guild rightfully filled my spot and the show went on without me.  It sounds like maybe they got through another phase but I was not paying that close of attention to what was going on in Teamspeak.  I spent most of the night watching those servers, trying to make sure that they were not going to go down again.  I got a 9:30 pm call from my boss which freaked me out, because my mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that something had happened again.  Turns out he was just returning my call from earlier in the evening that apparently he missed.

The problem is as stressful as my actual evening went… it apparently spilled over into my dreams.  In my dream I was interviewing Robert Downey Jr. and he was extremely agitated.  He was pacing around the room, and I kept trying to the bottom of why.  Suddenly he got mad with me and transformed into the Ironman suit from his briefcase.  He fired a shot at me, and I responded by turning into the X-O Manowar suit.  We battled back and forth in this conference room.  One of his repulsor beams blew a hole in the wall and outside I could see the Ultramarines fighting some sort of giant Kaiju.  Finally they defeated it and stormed into the building to assist me.  Moments from capturing Robert Downey Jr. turned Ironman…  I apparently woke up.  It was a strange night.

Capping Poetics

While semi-afk and working on servers I happened to notice movement in my game screen.  It turns out the entire guild was swarmed around me trying to lure me back from wherever I happened to be.  Unfortunately it didn’t work and it took another thirty minutes or so before things were finally restored.  Since I missed the boat for raid time… and quite honestly I didn’t feel like I should get involved in something that serious I opted to run hardmodes for poetics.  I went into the night sitting around 200 poetics of the 450 cap.  Through a series of hard modes, trials and a random expert with guildies when the raid was over I managed to get within a single point of capping.  This meant I was within a single trial of cap, so I stayed up and did just that… managing to get the most frustrating Ifrit Hard mode I have ever experienced.  The tank failed to have shield oath up, which meant that the white mage quite literally tanked Ifrit for most of the kill.

If nothing else capping poetics was a bit of a silver lining to an otherwise shitty night.  Right now I am very much in this mode of trying to cap every week so I can finish gearing out my main the Warrior.  As far as pieces to purchase, I need a couple of pieces of jewelry, the belt and the chest piece… and then a bunch of weeks to past to get the necessary carboncoat and carbontwine to upgrade them to 130.  In any case there is still a lot of upgrades ahead of me, and my hope is to get to as much 130 gear as I can before the release of the 2.55 patch which is supposedly March 31st.  That seems really damned soon considering we just recently had the Golden Saucer patch, but I guess they are wanting to give players time with that patch to finish things up before June 19th and the Heavensward headstart.  I guess now that I think about that, it is only giving players a month with 2.55 which makes sense as something that they would want to do.

Guar Wrangler

After the night that I had I should have just gone straight to bed.  The problem is I was still very much still “worked up” over the events.  I likely could not have slept if I had tried, so throughout the night I had been patching up Elder Scrolls Online, and decided to pop my head in.  It turns out that they flipped the switch for Tamriel Unlimited a bit early, and folks were able to log in and play last night.  Overall the transition seemed smooth enough, and all of my pets and such got sucked into the new collections system.  Similarly I was granted 4500 crowns to spend on the in game shop, and with that I picked up the stealth armor pack that had this very cool covenant armor set, and the guar that I am riding on.  I also picked up the Wildhelm dog pet, because he looked adorable.

As far as the game itself, I had been popping my head in Tamriel once or twice a week for awhile now.  After the change I didn’t really detect anything to strange other than the fact that I now had a champion point to spend, and had to respec my character completely.  That was the hardest part, trying to decide and remember what I had before.  I feel like I probably ended up with a similar build to before… but I can’t be too certain.  I am still heavily sword and shield dragon knight, and that seems effective.  I wandered around and managed to take out a world mini-boss at some ghost pirate camp without much issue, so I am happy with the results.  I look forward to getting more time to explore the Aldmeri Dominion now that the champion system feels like I am actually making forward momentum again.  Now I just have to live with the consequences of having limited sleep.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Guar Wrangler

Tired of Selfies

This weekend while out running around in Joplin I kept myself entertained thanks to my twitter feed.  Among the constant stream of updates was a series of posts from Alternative Chat, where she attempted to tell a story through twitter and succeeded beautifully.  The only problem is that in the weeks since the release of 6.1 I have developed a knee jerk negative reaction to seeing a wow selfie posted in my twitter feed.  It was a real struggle for me to look past the medium of the pictures to peer at the underlying story.  Largely my problem with selfies is that they are this distorted caricature of what our avatars actually look like.  The angles are all distorted, and it is impossible to control your facial expressions as they go through a series of seemingly random contortions.  Like I had said before I thought that with time folks would get bored with them, and move on… but as the weeks continue it only seems to be more prevalent.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying, because I still love taking photos of my characters.  I just prefer the picture above to the selfie I lead off the first paragraph with.  There is just something much more visually appealing to being able to see more of your character than simply your face, torso and part of your arms.  The biggest problem I have with selfies is the fact that it becomes hard to take in the entire picture.  During Alt’s twitter story, it was as much about the places she was at rather than her character.  I struggled to see enough of the elements in the background to immediately indentify where she was actually standing to take the picture.  I realize that for the purpose of that story it was in an almost travelogue format, but the times when she broke from it and took a traditional screenshot were my favorite segments of the story.  Not that I expect this to change anyone’s practices, but I am just saying now that I have a major preference towards traditional screenshots as compared to the distorted version that is a selfie.

Warrior Milestone

This weekend I did not manage to get nearly as much playtime in as I had hoped.  Saturday we spent pretty much the entire day until about thirty minutes before podcast time running around.  We ended up having to go visit my Mother-In-Law and made a day trip of it meandering our way there and to Joplin through a series of small towns.  My wife and I both have this thing where we like to go hunting for interesting items on clearance, and I have managed to pick up quite a few awesome Lego sets for less than of their original price.  This weekend however, I found a ton of sets… but nothing that I really could not live without.  Ultimately my vice is Star Wars and Space/Futuristic themed sets.  My most recent find was three of the sets from the “Agents” line at a local target for slightly less than half off the original price.  Needless to say I did not really get much play time in Saturday.  Sunday until 4pm I ended up helping my wife with a few things around the house, namely putting together a large cubical storage unit and a smaller bakers rack unit for our closet.

So by the time I finally got logged in downstairs and was able to play Final Fantasy XIV I felt under the gun to help make up some ground.  At this point I am sitting at 254 poetics out of 450 for the week… and all I have is tonight to somehow manage to cap.  I don’t have a feeling that I am going to make it, because we have a raid.  However when I get home from work I am going to try my damnedest to get it through a combination of duty roulettes.  I did however manage to run through the three Crystal Tower instances and get another Carbontwine allowing me to upgrade my Helm from 120 to 130.  Similarly I managed to get enough Poetics to buy another piece of jewelry, so that I could use one of the Carboncoats I had laying around.  This took me to 120 ilevel which for me at least is somewhat of a mental milestone.  There is something about breaking another 10s barrier in my gear score.  I am now sitting at just over 11,000 hit points, which is only going to serve to make my healers complain more strongly about my health pool when I am fully buffed.  It makes me feel useful though the more gear that I can manage to pile on.

Foraging Slowly

One of my hopes this weekend was to spend a good deal of time on the sofa watching television and working on my Botany.  This never actually happened, for various reasons.  I spent a bit of time  yesterday morning watching a movie and importing by hand 48 episodes of Aggrochat into the new Aggrochat.com website.  I did however manage to work on botany some during the recording of this weeks AggroChat, and at this point I am level 16.  The brute force leveling is finally starting to slow down, but I keep telling myself that every level that I can gain in this fashion is going to let my level allowance build back up so I can push through the levels more quickly later.  When I pushed mining I managed to drop down to 30 leves left, and over the last few days it has managed to regenerate back up to 65, so when it caps I will begin pushing Botany a bit harder.

I had honestly wondered about stopping Botany for a bit to get fishing up to 15 as well.  That way I can start getting rid of all of this gathering gear that I have clogging my banks.  Since I only have Fishing and Botany left, my hope is that I can maybe stair step them both up together pushing it up 5 levels at a time so I can shed a bunch of gathering gear in the process.  That really seems to be the ideal way to level classes in general.  I have four retainers and they are all full of gear that I think I will use at some point.  I turned in a bunch of the Syrcus Tower dragoon gear last night for company seals,  and I need to really spend an afternoon identifying the stuff that I want to keep and sorting it out from the stuff I don’t want to keep.  All of the Scylla’s healing gear for example is prime territory for giving away… considering I am slowly replacing it with soldiery items to help burn down my tomestones.  Honestly as soon as I have Soldiery equivalents all of the gear from Syrcus Tower is suspect because I consider every single set “ugly”.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Warrior Milestone

AggroChat #48 – Ori and the Sad Sads

Last night we embarked upon another journey through that weekly tradition we call the AggroChat podcast.  Things are a little different sounding this week because I finally got a proper microphone.  Positive is I can have my fan on me while we record without it picking that up… however it seems to pick up my mouse clicks like insanely bad.  Last night we dedicated the show to the ultimate Pi day, and Kodra was celebrating with a bunch of tiny pies.  The first game we talked about in depth is Ori and the Blind Forest which is so many sads out of sad.  The game is a gloriously animated and beautifully done…. but has the saddest intro I have ever experienced in any game.  We talk about how the hopeful tone of the rest of the game, doesn’t really fit with the intro sequence.  From Ori we move into the pitfalls of the Final Fantasy XIV crafting system, and why all of us are trying to become Omni crafters for the sake of our free company Airship.  This makes Tam exceptionally sad because all he really wants to be is a good goldsmith.

I talk about my guilds progress in Blackrock Foundry and some of the drama that happened as a result of us needing to pair down our dps in order to conquer the content.  Most of the guilds I know have been struggling with keeping enough healers this expansion, and because we are habitually short that limits the number of dps we can realistically bring on fights.  Since we are getting into harder content we had to bench a few people, and one of them took offense enough to rather dramatically guild quit during the middle of the raid.  Tam went into a interesting discussion about the new Infinity rules and how they will change the way gameplay happens, by shifting focus away from combat to instead be focused on objective completion.  Finally I talk at length about my experiences playing the Steam beta of Moonrise…  but I will go into that in more detail below.

AggroChat Dot Com

A few weeks ago I had a bit of a brain storm…  or at least a slight drizzle.  The revolved around the idea of trying to apply to get press passes for the AggroChat folks to Pax Prime.  It made me realize that between all of us that do this podcast on a weekly basis there is quite a lot of content that we are producing on a regular basis.  I write Tales of the Aggronaut daily, Tam writes Digital Initiative, Ashgar writes Ash’s Adventures, Kodra the Keen Gamer, and Rae does Little Rae of Sun.  What if we pulled all of this content together in one place, and then augmented it with some of our other friends that maybe don’t want to take the time to maintain a full blog of their own, but have the occasional post in them.  The end result is AggroChat.com and while it is not finished and still very much a work in progress, I feel like it is “done enough” to start talking about it.  Right now the big daunting task that is ahead of me this morning is pulling together all of the content from AggroChat into the site.  This means manually creating entries for all 48 of our episodes so far, but it is well worth it to make sure everything works correctly.

There are a few outstanding issues, like why exactly Ash’s preview images are broken.  Other than that I think things have come together rather nicely.  I still need to do a “real” logo for the site pulling together the awesome Chibi versions of ourselves that Rae created, and I still need to get bio information from all of our bloggers for the individual author pages.  However I am pretty pleased with how things are shaping up.  The color scheme was intentionally obnoxious in some what of an honorific of Kodra… who we honestly thought was color blind for the first several years of gaming with him.  He puts together some pretty outrageous color schemes, and I figured because of this our website needed to be equally insane.  Let us know what you think of the site so far.  Hopefully more bloggers will be coming on board the site within the next few days as I sort things out.  My hope is that this will push all of us to create more interesting content.

Cleansing Lunari

One of the games I talked about a little bit in my day one PAX South wrap up post was Moonrise by Undead Labs.  I had a lot of fun playing the game and being shown the ropes by Richard Foge, even though he kicked my ass in PVP numerous times.  So as exciting as this game was, because it reminded me so much of Jade Cocoon…  it really fell in the realm of “not the key demographic”.  I am not really much of a mobile gamer, while I own tablets and numerous handheld systems…  I don’t game on them very often.  In fact right now I think the only mobile game I have installed on my phone is Final Fantasy Dimensions.  As one of the few people on the planet that do not have an iPad the game fell in that category of “really excited to see it” but probably not for me.  All of this was until the other night when I happened to click through to a twitch stream posted by the Undead Labs account.  It turns out the game is coming to Steam Early Access soon, and this immediately changed my perspective on it.  To make things even cooler I managed to score a closed beta key, and have been playing quite a bit of the game since.

I have a more proper preview post in the moderation queue on MMOGames.com, which should be releasing Monday or Tuesday, but I wanted to take a few minutes this morning to talk about this game and why you should be excited about it.  First off the game is a really enjoyable art style that reminds me so much of Free Realms.  I have always liked that sort of “realistic cartoony” feel to games where I can create something funky without it feeling like I am no longer actually connected to reality.  The game centers around the event called the Moonrise which normally happens for only a few days, causing normally peaceful “Solari” to turn into ravening corrupted “Lunari”.  The problem is this Moonrise has been lasting far longer than normal and seems to only be growing in strength.  You play the role of a game keeper like Warden, and your job is to go around the countryside cleansing the Lunari of their sickness by engaging them in battle.

Immediately the game has some characteristics that feel very Pokemon like in that you are sending your pets out to do battle with other creatures.  Where this whole equation gets turned on its head is the fact that it is happening in real time, and you are battling with up to two Solari at a time… out of a stable of six that you have “at the ready”.  So if this were not frenetic enough, you also have the ability to do battle yourself, with your warden earning various abilities as you level up.  When it comes to Warden vs Warden combat, you have two win conditions.  Either you can knock out all of the enemy Solari… or you can instead use abilities that focus the enemy Warden directly.  When I fought Foge at Pax South I seemed to do just fine at whittling down his Solari, but he would do a better job at focusing me directly and knocking me out as a Warden.  The game itself is extremely enjoyable with a combination of lobby areas with open hunting zones and dungeons to explore and treasures to find.  When this goes to open access I highly suggest you check it out, and I am sure over the next few weeks I will be posting more about it.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Cleansing Lunari

There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia.  I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper.  Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

Ignorance is Bliss

I’ve told bits and pieces of my time in Dark Age of Camleot in the past, but today I thought I would delve further into what was ultimately the second MMO I played.  I remember being in the beta process and thinking that the game seemed so much more advanced than Everquest that I had been used to.  However I did not really play the game seriously until the launch of Gaheris the co-operative server.  Most people think fondly upon Dark Age of Camelot of the realm versus realm combat, for me however it was all of the interesting PVE things that I did with my friends.  At that time we had an extremely small and close knit guild called the Whispers of Legend.  In fact the only real remnant of that guild is a posting on Zam’s for an item I submitted under our guild name.  One of the best things about Gaheris was that we could literally play any class in the game together, and explore any realm freely.

Our motley group consisted of a Dwarf Warrior as the main tank, me on my Celt Champion as dps and off tank, a Lurikeen Enchanter providing dps and crowd control and a Celt Bard being dual boxed by our warrior providing all of the healing and song twisting.  Much later on I picked up a second account and ran my very own bard, but much of the content that we experienced we did as a trio, with my friend Shadoes playing both the role of main tank and main healer.  This game was also the very first appearance of me using the name Belghast, so even if I could never actually return to playing it… it will always hold a special place in my heart.  There were so many times we ventured someplace we should not have been only to end up trying to fight our way back to our tombstones, more than anything to prove to ourselves that we could do it.  It was a different time in online gaming, when more often than not we were playing with people we were able to lay our physical hands on in the real world.  On average the three of us would get home from work, and log directly into Dark Age of Camelot for that nights adventure.

The Tower Guardian

The adventure that most stands out in my mind was our finding of the Tower Guardian.  When the Shrouded Isles expansion hit we spent a good deal of our time wandering around its wilderness looking for interesting things.  With that expansion a number of named encounters were introduced and spread through out the world.  So it became our mission to try and find all of them… and farm them for every last bit of loot.  In fact the item that I talked about submitting… I am pretty sure came from one of these such trips.  One night while wandering the Dales of Devwy we stumbled upon this giant clockwork golem looking creature that towered over even the trees.  I think at the time it conned purple to our group, but we decided to give it a shot anyways considering the area around it was difficult but easily huntable.  While it took several attempts we managed to down it and got some really nice loot.  So we proceeded to farm it, each time getting better at the process until we had it down to a science.

A few days later we happened to be in a local game shop, that had several folks that played Dark Age of Camelot far more seriously than we did.  We were talking about our fun farming the golem, and the shop keeper had a somewhat stunned look on his face.  I turns out that apparently this encounter was designed for a raid to take it down, and while it took upwards of thirty minutes for us to actually defeat it… we managed to do it with four characters, two of which were being played by the same person.  While games have evolved to have hard requirements on what you need to bring to be successful, I have never forgot the lessons that we learned playing this game.  That while you might not have the optimal grouping, you can sometimes persevere through sheer force of will.  There have been many times I’ve tried to do things in an unorthodox way, but no game has rewarded it quite as much as Dark Age of Camelot did.

Sometimes We Failed

I won’t lie and say that things always worked out in our favor.  In fact I have quite a number of  screenshots like one above, with us dead in fairly horrible places.  However we always seemed to manage to pick ourselves back up and keep trying long after others had given up.  This trip down memory lane would not be complete without a photo of Shard our Dwarven Warrior main tank.  The thing I find so odd about this game is that our experiences and our memories are so vastly different from most players that wax nostalgic about it.  This was not a pvp game for me, but instead a game that let me explore freely every corner of three vastly different and exception realms.  This was the game that really cemented in my mind how poor of a design decision that hard faction walls really were.  Dark Age of Camelot went from being a lackluster experience, to one of the most memorable with the simple addition of the co-operative play server.

Do you have any memorable stories of games that you and your friends maybe played in a less than suggested style?  I would be curious to hear some of your stories of times you entered something vastly unprepared but managed to pull out a victory nonetheless.  One of my fondest memories from World of Warcraft for example was the time we took nothing but hunters into Upper Blackrock Spire and timed our aimed shots on the same target, just watching it explode before our eyes.  It was like we were a walking firing squad, slowly mowing down our targets or burning it down while one of us kited the pack.  Sometimes unconventional play can be extremely rewarding.  For years I’ve found myself getting caught up in trying to do things the right way for the sake of speed and efficiency.  Sometimes however you just have to break the rules and play games in a manner no one in their right mind ever planned.  I freely admit that I still wish there wa such a thing as a melee hunter.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Tower Guardan