Tales of the Aggronaut

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

Wall Jumping

World of Warcraft feels really damned weird when you have not logged in for over a week.  What I mean by this is that some is strange with the perspective of that game as compared to most other games.  I have noticed this a few times when swapping between the various games I have been playing, but never quite so strongly as last night.  I have no clue what it is, or how to describe it better but something is just “different” with the way the world spreads out around me.  It always takes me a few minutes to get adjusted to the perspective as my eyes freak out a little bit.  I am really hoping someone out there understands what I am talking about… because otherwise I just sound like a mad man.  Life had conspired against me, and for various sundry reasons I missed the last two raid sessions, and even more troubling was that it had been two weeks since I had actually taken a shot at Blackhand.  I would really love to be able to close the Blackrock Foundry chapter of my raiding life with a a kill, and last night we got close.

The biggest adjustment for me is the fact that we were really short on melee dps… which is an odd problem for our group to have.  This meant I got to be on the wall group during phase two.  Every so often Blackhand smashes the current tank, and the wall jumpers need to get behind the tank… but also in the circle of impact so they get knocked up in the same direction the tank is going.  This works similar to the Bladefist crowd group, and the end result being kill as many things as you can and then jump down when your health gets low or you have cleared the entire group.  In the grand scheme of things I guess I am a decent choice for the job because of my self regen and tanky cooldowns.  We have phases one and two down solidly, and right now it is just phase three where everything is falling apart.  On our best attempt we managed to get him to 11% so I am thinking next week given another full night of attempts we might kill us a Blackhand, and there will be much rejoicing.

Storm Surge

Since it had been over a week since I had actually logged into WoW last night, I had to go through the song and dance of making sure I had consuming and collect my “disappointment tokens” to allow me to re-roll on the loot that will never actually drop.  After doing all of that I parked my butt at the entrance to the raid and took up the offer of Damai and Mor to join them in some Heroes of the Storm fun.  Last night my quest was to play two matches as a Starcraft Hero, and at that point I realized… that quite honestly I don’t play a lot of Starcraft heroes in this game.  Probably my favorite of all of the Starcraft Heroes is Sergeant Hammer, but unfortunately I do not “own” her yet because she is a truly silly amount of gold.  Instead I have Raynor, a Hero that I played quite a bit in early alpha so I opted to use him.  The problem being he no longer plays quite like I remember him playing.  Just like my disconnect I had with Muradin, they have changed the way he feels and made him significantly less sturdy.  The end result was me taking a lot of deaths and doing a generally piss poor job playing the game.

Part of the disconnect also was that last night we were playing with actual human beings, and the night before we were playing bots.  Essentially one of our trio had been playing quite a bit that day and managed to cap out on the amount of gold you can earn from bot games, thus pushing him into the solo queue to keep slowly earning gold.  Our first match we managed to win, and then in our second match… we ended up with a team that actually knew how to play together.  This is probably a side effect of the fact that three of us queued together.  Even though we were on voice, this really didn’t make much of a difference in the outcome because we are all not exactly amazing players yet.  I took a screenshot of my defeat screen because it was my very first so far in post release play.  Unfortunately before I had a chance to switch back to my beloved Sonya…  it was time to log out for the raid.  Even though we made a lot of progress on Blackhand I have to admit I probably would have rather been playing Heroes of the Storm.

Who Needs Sleep

Shockingly last night I did not log into Final Fantasy XIV at all, in part because of the other things I had going on like the WoW raid.  Lately I have had two real world friends of mine start playing Wildstar again, and this has caused me to want to try and sort out exactly where I was in questing.  It had been several weeks since I had logged in and I could not remember the level or even what zone I was in, so I wanted to know at least that so I could adequately communicate it.  I am apparently seventeen and in Galeras, in fact as of last nights play session I have just made the transition to the second area of the zone and have picked up that taxi point.  I want to play this game some more, and I am thinking next week while my wife is travelling I might stream it off and on throughout the week.  Last night unfortunately I managed to get sucked into questing and once again did not end up heading to bed until midnight.  I had not played the game much since the last drop, and I think a few of my addons might have broken because I was suffering from all manner of UI issues last night.

All of this aside I had quite a bit of fun running around and causing mayhem on my warrior.  There is part of me that wonders about going over and completing Celeston instead of digging too far into Galeras, but I am managing to stay a few levels ahead of my quest mobs right now so there isn’t much of a problem yet.  I kinda feel bad for joining the Black Dagger Society and then simply not being terribly active.  They seem like a really great guild lead by a great group of people.  This is the problem when you are pulled in so many different directions, and with playing a game that is ultimately not your “main game”.  Right now Final Fantasy XIV is the game I care the most about, and I am absolutely in love with the guild we have there.  They keep me logging in on an almost daily basis if for no reason other than to see them.  Wildstar I feel could be a similar environment, but with the sensory overload that is the world and the user interface… I find it exceptionally hard to follow the chat window.  There is just so much stuff going competing for my attention that I have not figured out how to dial things down enough to where I can actually watch chat.  I hope to get to know more of my guildies however because they really do seem like awesome people.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Storm Surge