Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 652

Trials of Valor

November 17, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a raid night… and I failed to take any screenshots so you are stuck with an image of me in the order hall. After having cleared Emerald Nightmare a few weeks it was decided that we would instead poke our heads into the Trial of Valor. The goal set out by the raid leader for our group was to attempt to stay current with normal mode progression, so instead of spending several weeks farming Emerald Nightmare it seemed reasonable to just jump straight into the Trial content which has a much higher item level. That was a big part of the decision factor in that the baseline for gear is 850… and literally everyone in the raid last night has 850 or better. All of that said though… there are several of us who still want to keep clearing the Nightmare in the hopes of getting specific items or for no reason other than the try and complete that Balance of Power meta achievement step. So I think in the coming days/weeks we are going to try and sort out a secondary night with a clear purpose of farming the raid. I mean back in the day we used to have a Molten Core night even though we were actively progressing in Blackwing Lair…. and for that matter also had a Zul’Gurub Night. Karazhan is somewhat taking the place of ZG however as far as gear progression goes, but still I want to finish out some quests.

As far as the raid itself, it went fairly well but it is a big of a punch in the gut going from killing eight bosses in a single night to struggling to kill one. All in all it took us around six attempts to work out the mechanics for Odyn and largely sort out how not to have the tanks die during the final phase. The fight reminded me so much of Binding Coil Turn 9 in FFXIV, in that the really rough part was at the very end… but you had to wade through a bunch of mechanics that were more tedious than difficult to get there. This is very much a learn the mechanics fight and less a gear check in the traditional sense of damage output. For some however it is likely a bit of a survival check in that even if you are doing mostly everything as intended you are still going to take the occasional damage that becomes hard to control. We however pushed through and got a kill… and by kill I mean we pushed Odyn to 10% where he once again congratulated us on our performance. What is it about this guy wanting us to beat him up… is this a fetish? In any case a lot of gear dropped, but I got double gold both off him… and off the world boss that I attempted right before the raid. That leaves me with a single roll token for the week that I am going to need to use judiciously and determine what exactly I want to spend it on. Largely nothing from mythic+ is really worth it apart from the occasional trinket.

We put in several attempts on Guarm and that fight feels like a pretty hard gear wall the way that Patchwerk used to be. It has a very short enrage timer, and a oneshot kill mechanic that you need to avoid… while juggling even distribution of the colored debuffs. So there is a lot more going on than there was with Patchwerk, but it is no less of a hard dps race trying to kill him before he enrages and kills us. Last night was largely Art and I figuring out the tanking, and placement… and learning how to avoid the charge attack and get through it without taking much in the way of damage. It also very much felt like the healers were desperately trying to sort out all of the details because there were so many times where I was painfully low and straight up out of cooldowns to mitigate that fact. A little gear, damage output optimization, and some practice and I am absolutely certain that we will get that fight to farm status before long. We also have an alternate path open to us of trying to push through Heroic Emerald Nightmare, but with a brand new raid open that hasn’t seemed that compelling. In truth I hope we get to a point where we can easily clear Trial of Valor and then go back and worth on Heroics all in the same night. Of note however… “ToV” will always be Temple of Veeshan to me and never Trials of Valor.

Fragmented

November 16, 2016 by Belghast

This topic is not necessarily going to be Destiny related, but I didn’t want it to be a huge wall of text without something pretty to look at. This is a screenshot I took the other night while doing Iron Banner, and you are treated to a planetary screen when you travel between two areas on the same planet. This for example is travelling from one crucible arena on Mercury to another one, something I had never seen before. In any case, that is not what is important today, but instead a discussion that was had yesterday… or at least as functional of a discussion as can be facilitated over twitter. Twitter is a service that is great for drive by commentary, and less for actual deep discussion. There were a handful of us bemoaning which social networks work well and which do not work so well for gaming circles. Which started a thread where we talked about missing forums, which is to say that I don’t think any of us actually miss the forum construct. Instead I think we miss the era in which forums were king. In the time before Facebook, the only reliable means of keeping in touch with your gaming buddies were forums… and I had a string of them over the years. For me they carried me through Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons, City of Heroes… and things didn’t start to change significantly until well into World of Warcraft. Sure we had email, or instant messenger… in even in a few cases private IRC servers… but gaming forums served as this cultural common ground for discussing what was going on in your game of choice or quite literally any off topic subject. Hell it was on a gaming forum that I had my first friend come out to me, and forever changed my perspective on the gay rights movement.

The problem started when the social networks proper started springing up. It became harder and harder to get anyone to log into that forum on a regular basis when they were already used to checking myspace or friendster, or eventually facebook and twitter. During this era however it wasn’t just guild or personal forums that thrived, but also individual company run gaming forums. I remember being deeply connected to the Argent Dawn forums in World of Warcraft, and there are so many people that I still count as great friends today that I met through them. It gave me a window into the other side of the server, and the awesome Horde players that we had as well as the Alliance. In fact this is probably the point where I started championing the cause of tearing down the faction wall because I wanted to play with all of my friends at the same time. During late Wrath of the Lich King and early Cataclysm, Blizzard made a number of significant policy changes… or more so began to crack down on some truly silly things on the forums. It is probably not in small part that this also represents the time in which I began to detach from the game because these forums gave us all a common ground to discuss issues at a server level, rather than just focused entirely on our own internal guild politics. Without the forums as a anchor the game felt so much less important and more inexplicably empty. For a period of time I even ran an unofficial server forum, but the madness of trying to monitor and moderate that became an insane struggle when the damage had already been done.

Over the years it became progressively harder to get players interested in checking the forum, so that after Elder Scrolls Online I simply gave up on trying to make them work. Now there are simply too many locations available to try and sort out where we should check for information. Each group of friends tends to favor a different platform, which means I simply do a bad job of keeping track of any of them. The fragmentation of gaming communities has reached a critical mass, and each individual site hopes to be this island in itself. What I need instead is some service that freely glues all of the information together and lets me view it in the portal of my choice. Right now I am actively trying to keep tabs on the following…

Twitter
Facebook
Google Plus
Band
Over Half Dozen Slacks
Over Two Dozen Discords
Anook
Player.me
Steam
Reddit
Imzy
A Few Actual Forums

Then there are also services that I don’t actively use… but still have accounts on like Ello and Raptr that I never really found a good use for. Then there are even stranger more diffuse communities on YouTube and Twitch that I still on occasion dip a toe into. Basically just like the MMO gaming world has fragmented from a time when there were essentially two to three active games at a time… the community itself has exploded into a million tiny niches. I guess I simply miss the era when it felt like we were all looking at the same things, and reading the same commentary. Forums served this key role in the development of me as a blogger, and I feel like most of us started our careers as “wall of text” posters somewhere out there. I was known for extremely long winded discussions where I essentially worked out my own thoughts in text form much like I do on a daily basis here. The end result of yesterdays discussion was to plant another flag in the ground, and create another place to have discussion. I don’t mean it to sound like that is a bad thing, I just hope that it is something I can remember to check in on because there are so many other places to be checking in on as well. I am not even going to go into the madness of the blogs I read or the fact that I am trying to keep tabs on around three dozen reddits. I am old… and this is just a post of me saying that I miss things being simpler.

Clever Dragons

November 15, 2016 by Belghast

Iron Banner just concluded yesterday, and I spent a good deal of time playing it this go round. I’ve never had any luck in trying to get a decent Grasp of Malok, so when the rank five roll of Clever Dragon featured Counter Balance, Perfect Balance and Snapshot… I knew I was ultimately going to grind until I got there. With the Rise of Iron it brought a number of changes to “Iron Banana”, namely since Lord Saladin is nor our “faction leader” of a sort… the reigns of the tournament were passed to Lady Efrideet. The primary change that happened is the fact that instead of three weekly bounties, and three daily bounties… we are given four weekly bounties. Previously you got a crappy blue item at Rank 3 with Iron Banner and an item package at Rank 5. This time around two of these new bounties reward armor packages, and the other two reward weapons… and you still get some sort of a big package upon hitting Rank 5. So the total loot payout of participating in the event is significantly more than it used to be. That said I find it MUCH harder to get to Rank 5, given that I don’t have something I can be working on every day to give me a much needed boost. In Iron Banner you only gain ranks if you are winning, and especially trying to queue during the day on Friday… I hit some significant losing streaks. Now there is a built in system that gives you a sort of consolation prize coin upon a loss… and these stack to five, with a boost to your rank granted when you finally turn around and win. However there was at least one point on Friday that I lost eight games in a row… so it just become frustrating as I kept getting thrown up against premades.

Now the positive of the event is that I got tons of loot, and also managed to complete both the void damage portion of the thorn quest, and the crucible kills portion of my Future War Cult exotic class item quest. I spent a significant amount of time running around shooting people into the face with the above Shotgun. I’ve had the Party Crasher +1 for awhile now and I consider it to be as close to a god roll as I will ever likely see with Full Auto, Final Round and Rifled Barrel to help boost the range a bit. Traditionally I use my Invective when doing crucible, but at the moment I am simply not willing to waste an exotic shard on anything until I get significantly closer to the item cap. I went on a mission to try and get a decent legendary shotgun during Taken King and in my very first round of attempting to grind the Crucible I managed to pull this guy in the end of match rewards and have been loving it ever since. I am sure a god roll Matador could pry it from my hands but for the moment I am super happy with it.

The other weapon that I used a significant amount of the time especially to get those void kills is Saladin’s Vigil. Now this is something I picked up last Iron Banner from one of the loot bounties, and I felt like I got a completely reasonable roll on it. I am not even sure what a “god roll” would look like, but mine has Hammer Forged, Enhanced Battery, and Performance Bonus…. with that last perk actually extending the usefulness of the weapon as it materializes ammo out of thin air. With a really low charge rate and almost maxed impact and reasonable range… this is essentially the first fusion rifle that is not Sleeper Simulant that I really find myself enjoying using. I got many a kill by this one and leading the charge as I expected something to duck around the corner. Fusion Rifles can be extremely frustrating in the crucible because they are very much a “whelp I’m dead” weapon when you intercept a bolt.

Lastly the weapon I cannot stop using… literally ever is this Haakon’s Hatchet that was a vendor roll during the Taken King. I realize that the “doctrine of spamming” archetype is still pretty potent in the meta, but no matter how many versions of that archetype I get… I never can seem to do shit with them. I currently have a potentially viable Hex Caster ARC and an Unbent Tree… but I cannot ever bring myself to level them and have not deemed them worthy of motes of light. The weapon I continue to go back to however is this Hatchet with Ranger Finder, Counter Balance and Perfect Balance. This is as close to my perfect weapon as I will likely ever find, because not only do I love the appearance… but I can also draw a bead on enemy players with in and chew them up. What I love the most about the weapon is the fact that it is just as viable for me in Crucible situations as it is doing literally anything PVE… namely the Archon’s Forge. The magazine is big enough that I can often take down an entire wave of mobs in the forge without a reload.

I’ve tried so many different primary weapons… for example I managed to pull the above Shadow Price that while it does not have the perfect roll has something I can work with. With Rodeo and Perfect Balance it becomes usable… and while Icarus is generally a worthless perk I can make it work since I jump around a lot. This gun works well in any PVE situation, but it is completely useless in the Crucible, at least with the roll package that I wound up getting. I have a copy of The Continental that seems similarly reasonable, but nothing can quite match up to the “perfect for me” stat package of the Hatchet. I still want to try and find one of the Doctrine archetype weapons with Counterbalance and Perfect Balance to see if it suddenly becomes this magical weapon that folks talk about. However for the time being I will keep using Hatchet and be happy to have it. I am hoping however that after all the time I spent trying to get it… that I find that sweet spot with the Clever Dragon and it becomes my new favorite Pulse Rifle.

Karazhan Clear

November 14, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, namely because of the extended holiday granted by veterans day. It is also odd because it felt strange to go so long without a post after the recent outage in my blog. Most everything is working as intended, but for whatever reason on the new hardware there is an artificially low upload limit which is causing me to have to shrink my images for a bit until I have that sorted out. In truth I doubt most people will really notice that much given that my theme tended to scale them down a bit anyways. The only real annoyance is I actually have to play which images I am going to use and shrink them down beforehand. As far as gaming went I was all over the place… playing copious amounts of Destiny, World of Warcraft and even a little Guild Wars 2. I also started Diablo II the December game of the month, in honor of the 20th anniversary. The strangest thing about going back and playing that game is… just how amazingly well it still holds up. Maybe I am viewing it through the haze of nostalgia… but other than some dodgy animations it mostly just “works”. Sure I miss some of the more interesting abilities that Diablo 3 added in, but it is also making me appreciate the game we have more. So instead of going on about a whole slew of topics, I am largely going to focus in on World of Warcraft. Firstly on a crazy whim I decided to de-Worganize Belgrave my Deathknight. He started out as a human and the more I played him in Worgen form the more I was annoyed at how small in general two-handers look on that model. Both my Artifacts for Blood and Unholy felt like I was swinging a one-hander which just felt “wrong”. Along with this shift however I managed to get into the groove of the Deathknight and in theory that is probably going to be my next 110. While I need the rogue and the alchemy it provides… I just struggle to get into a would be stealthy class.

The core of this mornings post however is about Karazhan. We managed to miss the first week because we were juggling trying to get attuned, with raiding and all sorts of other things… that by the time Sunday rolled around we didn’t have a permanent 5th player. After we snagged Kylana we went in on week two and managed to make a significant amount of progress getting six of the eight bosses. We made an attempt to pull together last Monday but scheduling conflicted with us as it was Ashgar’s On Call week. From there we largely plotted our revenge throughout the week and in truth I was more amped about popping into Kara than I was about our super smooth clear of Emerald Nightmare. I’ve talked before about that this is essentially what World of Warcraft was missing for me… a tight group experience for a fixed limited number of players. After Zul’Aman there really didn’t seem to exist a similar experience, and while 10 player raiding was essentially that… it just felt different. Raiding feels like raiding no matter how many people you bring, and while I probably had more fun during wrath in the 10 player group… it didn’t feel significantly different than the 25 player version I was already running regularly. Doing both 10 and 25 watered down the experience, so that by the time we killed the Lich King on 25… it felt like old hat already since we had done it months earlier in the as a 10. It also served to make me that much more frustrated when players seemed to struggle to grasp the mechanics… since they were exactly like the version I already knew like the back of my hand.

What Karazhan provides more than anything else… is a unique experience that fits within certain confines. This week we managed to clear significantly faster, but still a little bit behind the time we would need for a Nightbane run. By the time we hit Opera we still had around two minutes and thirty seconds on the timer… but the RP dialog before the event actually starts ate up roughly a minute of that time. Essentially if we are going to do this we need to be chain pulling the place, and at some point I hope to get there. For the time being however we have been working on getting stable kills. Moroes was still a pain in the ass that we BARELY pushed across the finish line… but a oneshot is a oneshot so we were happy with that. We struggled a bit on a few other fights but at the 1 hour mark we were sitting halfway through the raid. We made it up to the Mana Devourer and took a handful of tries before we managed to defeat it and start moving onto the final boss. I am not going to lie here… it took us a solid hour of attempts on Viz’aduum the Watcher because that fight is less about damage output… and more about trying to time all of these stupid things from happening at the worst possible time…. while avoiding as much damage as is humanly possible. This is absolutely the sort of fight where you can just end up getting screwed by RNG, and it reminds me of the stark difference between FFXIV raid design and WoW raid design. The encounter as a whole has as many moving parts as Coil Turn 9 for example… but it is far more RNG dependent and far less successfully messaged. However all of that said… we managed to finally get a good attempt where the stars shined upon us and managed to get our guilds very first clear of Karazhan. Now just to speed up the process and get us a Nightbane as well.