Tales of the Aggronaut

Alone and Awake

This morning I am doing everything a bit discombobulated.  I ended up taking a massive name yesterday, and as a result took some melatonin to force myself to get to sleep at a decent hour.  The end result is me waking up at 4:30 instead of 5:30…  so I am just going to roll with it.  Today is the first morning I am getting ready by myself, and that is always a strange prospect.  We are now entering the season when my wife travels to go to conferences, and this time she will return in a little over a week on my birthday.  It is always strange to go through this each year, and as normal as it is I never seem to get used to it.  Technically yesterday was my first day without her, but since my allergies were trying to kill me, my focus was on simply surviving the day and less on living in it.  The allergies seem to be improved, but then again I am not actually out in the world yet.

Yesterday however I was struggling to breathe from the moment I woke up so that at least is not happening.  You’d think that staying home all day would have been an excellent opportunity for some gaming, but alas I actually tried to do some work.  Around noon I was feeling worse and opted to lay down for a nap… and wound up sleeping until 4 pm.  So I am guessing that maybe there was more at work than just the allergies.  I am not a big nap taker because generally it means I cannot sleep that night, and even when I do take a nap it is rarely longer than an hour.  So for me to sleep that long probably means I needed it.  The end result today however is that my time scale for everything is a little off.  As again I am mostly just going to roll with it and see if I can function normally today just offset by an hour.

Cat Bel and Snowlion

So as it turns out you apparently do only get two character slots in ArcheAge regardless of what the tooltip says.  Thanks to everyone for helping explain this one, because even Trion support seems not to know.  As of the conversation I had two nights ago they thought I should have at least gotten four.  So I purchased a third slot and moved on with the creation of my own Cat Belghast also known as Belglaive on the Tahyang server.  I have to admit, that at first I thought I was not going to like this whole cat man thing, but the longer I play the character the more I am actually enjoying.  I will admit part of the enjoyment is the snowlion mount I get to ride on.  If you thought carrying a foal around on your back was adorable… just wait until that is a lion cub.  One of the first quests is to go out into a field and cheer up a forlorn lion cub… and absolute adorableness ensues.   The animations are a little strange to get used to, like for example when I do a charge attack instead of sliding into the target with my shoulder I seem to leap into the target feet first, which is a little disjointed.

I also opted to go for a completely different path.  Always in the past I had chosen to go Battlerage and Defense, but instead I am mixing things up and going Battlerage, Shadowplay and Auramancy which is apparently the “Dark Runner” class.  I felt the more feral nature of the Firran character called for something more vicious and less tanky.   For the time being I am going down the path of Dual Wield which is giving everything a really awesome feel.  Right now I charge in, whirlwind, and then hit my normal attacks and things seem to just evaporate.  I just got a new attack from the Shadowplay tree but honestly I rarely have time to hit it, things are simply dying that fast.  Now I at least feel comfortable that I have something on both sides of the fence whichever direction we plan on going as a group.  I think the last thing said was that we would let Kodra decide which direction he wanted to play.  I feel comfortable on either side now, but I will say my leaning is still towards the side that will eventually get dwarves.

Ice-skating with Primals

One of the things that has been noticed with our group is that we start out extremely solidly on a fight and then deteriorate over the night.  This means our first or second attempt will almost always be the best of the evening, and then maybe just maybe we pull things out by the skin of our teeth at the end of the evening.  As a result Tam wanted to try something slightly different last night and we went into turn nine for a half dozen or so attempts before moving on to something else for the evening.  Sure enough we had some of our best attempts early on and then got significantly worse from there.  When we hit that point where we were just making stupid mistakes we opted to shift focus and go make attempts on Shiva Extreme.  This is the last of the primals that we have not attempted and beaten on Extreme mode.  I have to say I was not really fully prepared for how annoying this fight ended up being.  I’ve said before that there are two types of fights in Final Fantasy XIV.  The first is one where you have to learn a dance and repeat that dance over and over until you win.  The second type is where you adjust to things that are happening and move around to account for this fact.

We are extremely good at the second type, and tend to defeat those encounters quickly.  However when a fight requires us to memorize a pattern and execute said pattern over and over…  we tend to struggle there a bit.  Last night however I feel proud of the progress we made.  We were consistently getting Shiva into the 30% range for most of the night, we just need to get better at two things really.  The first thing… we are really bad at moving behind her and stacking tight enough for the bow attack which does a 270 degree arc attack in front of her that will oneshot everyone including the tank.  When she hit me with it, the attack dealt 18,000 hit points… which even for my  silly warrior health pool was way too many.  The other thing is that we need to get better at dodging circles.  These come in the form of hailstorm that causes the group to spread out and not overlap, and later in the form of circles on the ground.  Between these effects and the bow… that pretty much accounted for all of our party deaths.  If we can figure out how to stay alive through all of that mess we will easily defeat her.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Cat Bel and Snowlion

Boating to Freedom

Over the last few days I have been all over the place as far as my game playing has gone.  Saturday night while recording the podcast I worked on my Rogue in Final Fantasy XIV, and Sunday morning I spent a good deal of time playing Wildstar.  However after talking about ArcheAge at length during the podcast I spent Sunday afternoon and evening working on leveling a brand new character on the server the rest of the AggroChat folks have been playing on.  Our show ended up unintentionally talking about how games change and giving them a second chance.  If you have been reading my blog for very long you will know I did not exactly give ArcheAge a glowing review at launch.  In truth the game was rather good, but the community that had arrayed around it was among the most toxic I had experienced.

The moment that sticks out the most in my memory is still crystal clear.  There is a moment in the early human storyline where you are asked to cross a bay in a rowboat.  Now around the time the game launched high level players were hanging out in the middle of this area with their huge boats, trying to capsize and subsequently drown anyone trying to cross this bay.  It took every bit of maneuvering to make it across the bay, as I watched many other players sent to the bottom.  Up returning and starting my level process again I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at just how chill the community has become.  For all I know they might be off in some far corner of the world being assholes to each other, but at the very least no one seems to be getting their jollies out of griefing new players.

Good Game in Disguise

In all the time I spent watching chat this weekend, I have to say that similarly the general banter has improved as well.  The awesome about about this is that I can finally focus on the fact that the game underlying all of those layers of frustration is actually rather good.  We talk about this at length on the podcast, but in many ways this is the game Rift should have been, or at least by that I mean that the skill trees seem to work so much better.  The key problem with Rift skill trees is that there are a lot of different flavors of the same ability, that can then be arrayed in a macro to simply push one after another.  The skill trees in ArcheAge have very little if any duplication between them.  In Rift the warrior tree for example have essentially the same basic attack, and same combo point dump.  This is required since any tree could be used as the starting point for a given spec.

In ArcheAge however there are trees that have basic attacks, and those are the only ones that the game will let you start with.  From there however the sky is the limit and it will allow you to mix in any combination of three trees.  The coolest part to me is that each combination has a fixed class name.  In the past I had tried Doomlord and Paladin, but this time while leveling I decided to go with Auramancy for my third tree.  The end result is this awesome mix of debuffing and magical shielding that I think will end up in being an extremely strong tank.  Right now I seem to be having an extremely easy time taking tearing through the content and just managed to ding fifteen.  Now this is in theory my third time leveling through the content so I am sure part of the ease comes from remembering what I need to do in various situations, but overall it does feel like maybe I am taking less damage at least in part due to the debuff I can throw out during every combat encounter.

Waiting for Heavensward

The main question is how long we will stay, and if we will manage to make it into the open pvp areas.  Who knows, I do know that in a week and a half we will have Heavensward to pull us away.  In the meantime it seems like most people are at least taking a minor break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the big launch.  I have the days surrounding the launch off work, so I am more than likely going to be pushing it pretty hard.  Right now it is my intent to level my Warrior first, and then after getting it to 60 switch focus to playing Dark Knight.  I really do love my Warrior and the more I have played it recently, the more I realize just how happy I am with that class.  Everything about its tanking style “feels” right to me, and as exciting as the new and shiny Dark Knight might be, I have a feeling that I am always going to be a Warrior tank.  Who knows, it might launch and I might think it is the most amazing thing I have ever seen.  But in reality I keep expecting to keep swinging the big axe.

In the meantime however I am having a blast piddling around in both Wildstar and ArcheAge and exploring these two games that I am giving a second chance.  There is a significant problem however with my ArcheAge account so I am hoping the good support folks at Trion can get that taken care of shortly.  I have two characters on my account, but I am supposed to be able to create up to six.  All of the character slots are grayed out, and I cannot even connect to servers other than the two that I am already on.  So in theory something must be jacked up with my account.  Now considering my account is extremely old, and I have been playing for a very long time… it makes me wonder if something is related to the age of the account dating back to alpha.  Makes me wonder if it is somehow counting characters I made on test servers?  I spoke with a nice GM yesterday and he escalated it, so hopefully it will get addressed soon.  Right now we are largely torn between which faction to level on… but at the moment I am limited to only the one since I cannot roll any new characters.  So I am curious, what are you doing to ease the tension while waiting on Heavensward?

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Good Game in Disguise

Wandering around Wildstar

Yesterday I had every intent to work on either leveling my Rogue or to work on getting poetics in Final Fantasy XIV.  However recently I have had a resurgence of friends checking out Wildstar again so I opted to boot that up after finishing yesterdays blog post.  To set the stage some of my friends from the FFXIV Free Company also lead quite possibly the largest guild on the Entity server.  To call this guild “active”, is like calling the national debt “a large number.”  This is a double edges sword because so often I feel like I am struggling to keep up with the activity going on in game.  Wildstar is already an extremely busy game for me, and to have guild chat scrolling by like mad, as well as the assorted circles I am in is a bit of a sensory overload.  So it is sheer luck that I happened to be paying attention to guild chat at just the right time yesterday.

One of my guildies was gathering up a group to take down Grendelus the Guardian, the world boss of Celestion.  Now at this point I had not actually been to Celestion but they were awesome and willing to wait for me to find my way out there.  Thankfully I was right next to the gates to Thayd and could hop across the city and get into Celestion in nothing flat.  Firstly I want to say that when I saw Grendelus was only level 11 I was thinking this was going to be more of a token fight than a serious one.  Those assumptions were completely wrong, because even at level 18 Grendelus was serious business.  In fact we had a few level 50s with us in our group taking him down and it still took roughly fifteen minutes from the time we pulled to the moment we managed to down him.  I remember world bosses existing and that folks banded together to fight them at launch, but I never actually managed to participate in one.  I do however remember trying to take on King Honeygrave with a group of friends not really understanding that he was designed as a raid encounter.

World Boss Train

As it turns out that these world bosses are needed as part of the super complex raid attunement system in Wildstar.  It also turns out that apparently even though I am level 18, when I participate in one of them I am getting credit that will eventually work in my favor when it finally comes time to do the attunements proper.  I guess when you hit maximum level you get retroactive credit for all of the world bosses you have killed, or at least that is what my guild seemed to insinuate.  Firstly I have to say how impressed I am with the way that the Black Dagger Society rolls into zones.  Last night I managed to hook up with what was essentially a guild World Boss train, and they openly offer anyone in zone that wants to tag along a spot in the raid group.  In fact they were more than willing to wait for people running in from Thayd to get there before starting.  There is this infectious spirit about them that is really enjoyable to be around.

So while I didn’t get much actual leveling done yesterday, I did manage to knock four raid bosses off the list.  I had been kind of shy about offering my help when things were going on in guild, but as I am starting to get to know the members better I am feeling more open about stepping up to the challenge.  I’ve had moments of people jokingly asking if I was “THE Belghast”, and more people seem to know me than I know them…  but overall I am slowly working my way into meeting all of the folks in the guild.  It seems like a really great place to hang my hat, and had I NOT joined I have a feeling that Chestnut would have been a really sad panda.  I am hoping with me dialing back World of Warcraft, that I can actually participate in more events that are going on there.  The guild has a whole has these big events on a somewhat regular basis, so my hope is that I can get in on some of them in the coming weeks.

AggroChat 60 – Second Chances

Tonight on AggroChat we have Belghast, Tamrielo, Thalen and Grace. This week Kodra is off playing a rather convincing Fred from Scrooby Doo at Origins, and Ashgar disappeared mysteriously moments before the recording… and we are hoping everything is okay. The rest of us talked about some recent experiences giving games a second glance. The first game on that list is Wildstar and both Belghast and Grace have spent a significant amount of time back in the game. It has been amazing just what an embattled and often times struggling team has managed to accomplish. Similarly Tamrielo and Thalen have been checking out ArcheAge to find that community is much improved. Tam talks at length about what he likes about the design of the game, and how it manages to do a better job at being Rift.

Since Ashgar was missing we felt the need to give a huge plug to the Four Job Fiesta program and talk at length about how exactly it works. For Ashgar the “fiesta” is like a religion, and each June we know that sooner or later we are going to be hit up to join it again. This year he has pledged $10 for each AggroChat host that manages to beat the game and $5 for each AggroChat listener that beats the game and includes @AggroChat twitter handle on their victory shot. We talk about a number of other games including Lego Worlds, World of Warcraft, Shadowrun Returns and of course our getting prepared for the launch of the Heavensward expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. It is a big show chock full of lots of interesting discussions that we hope you will enjoy. “Please look forward to it.”

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
World Boss Train

Racial Enemies

Some mornings the inspiration for a blog post takes longer than others.  This morning I have been faffing about on the web and on twitter desperately searching for inspiration.  Then a brief interaction with the amazing @HeyHeatherBee spawned a topic that started spinning in my head.  She was talking about taking the Horde decal off of her car because she had switched over to Alliance and I simply chimed in with the fact that I largely play Alliance because they have Dwarves.  However I have always secretly had a desire for the Horde to get Dark Iron Dwarves as a playable race so that I would finally have a race that I enjoyed playing on that side of the fence.  This was just enough to plant the seed of an idea for a post.  I have long secretly wished that the “enemy” faction that each race has throughout their storyline, would actually be aligned with the opposite player faction.

What I mean by this is that in each racial story there are a number of “enemy” factions that get set up as sock puppet bad guys, but for the most part carry over through the entire main story.  This to some extent breaks apart when you get out of the original races.  Draenei and Blood Elves are set up as foils for each other, and Goblins are set up as their own worst enemy, and the Undead as the antagonist for the Worgen.  These expansions aside there is a nice clean “racial enemy” for each other race in the game.  Here is just a quick rundown of what we have to work with.

• Humans – Defias Brotherhood
• Dwarves – Dark Iron Clan
• Night Elves – Satyr and Naga
• Gnomes – Leper Gnomes
• Orcs – Dark Horde/Blackrock Clan
• Tauren – Grimtotems
• Trolls – All Trolls that are not Revantusk, Zandalari or Dark Spear
• Undead – Scarlet Crusade and Scourge

More Player Races

So the idea is what if all of these third party enemy factions were somehow swayed by their hatred of the group they oppose the most… to join the opposite faction.  What if the Grimtotems decided that the best way to kill the Taurens is to join the Alliance, and similarly if the Leper Gnomes and Dark Iron and Defias cut deals with the Horde.  That would allow for the creation of characters of essentially any race on either side of the Red/Blue boundary.  The biggest problem I have with the horde in all honesty is that I don’t really like playing “monstrous humanoids” to borrow the term from Dungeons and Dragons.  Worgen are probably the one exception to that rule… but that only exists because I have a love of all things Werewolf.  Had they made them cat people… I probably wouldn’t have had the same attraction to them.

There are a lot of problems however with this idea.  First with the Trolls, when I say all other trolls are their enemies… I mean all of the other troll tribes other than the three that I mentioned.  The problem there is that ALL of those tribes hate everyone else on the face of Azeroth that is not also a Troll.  I cannot see them aligning with anyone.  Similar the “Dark Horde” pretty much hates anyone that is not Blackrock Clan, and have been doing their best to exterminate anyone that gets within their vicinity for a decade.  Same goes for the undead as far as the Scourge goes, then the Scarlet Crusade has already been aligned with the Alliance in a few examples, but their batshit crazy zealotry makes them pretty much the enemy of everyone.  So that already whittles down the list to a point where it just isn’t realizing to introduce all races to both Horde and Alliance.

Faction of Last Resort

So in a conversation with Jaedia she planted another seed in my head…  what if instead of joining the Horde or Alliance, that these enemy groups became a third faction.  Alternative Chat has long championed the cause of a neutral faction, but I think this would end up being a literal third group to act as a foil to both the Horde and Alliance.  When you rule out the groupings that simply do not work you end up with a list that looks a little something like this.

• Defias Brotherhood
• Dark Iron Clan
• Satyr
• Naga
• Leper Gnomes
• Grimtotems

There are currently six unique races in a faction, with Pandaren making up the seventh race that can choose their own side.  This list that I whittled down to fits that pattern, and looks like a pretty damned fun faction to play.  You might ask about the Satyr and the Naga, but in theory they are both races that player characters have reasoned with in the past during quests.  Both of them are essentially two different variants of “corrupted night elves”.  Finally having both in a faction gives players a really unique reason to decide to go for that third faction.  Players have been begging for both as playable races for years.

The combination makes no less sense than the original Horde does.  I still cannot figure out how the Tauren ended up throwing in with the rest of the races that make up the Horde.  Similarly the Undead seem to be thrown in there “by default” and have no real connection back to the group as a whole, and are lead by Sylvanas who is always off doing her own thing anyways.  My theory is these races decided to join together because they were consistently losing their battle with whatever force they happened to be engaged in.  This ends up being the “Faction of Last Resort” as it were, and of course there would be natural tensions between the members.  Mostly I feel like it is time to revive some of these classic themes that they let die in the expansions.  The Defias Brotherhood for example was one of the best quest sequences that we have seen in game, and it is a shame that it essentially dies at the Deadmines.  I doubt Blizzard would ever do something like this, but wouldn’t it be cool if they did.  Would also finally give them three faction combat in player versus player.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Faction of Last Resort