Belghast – Page 761

AggroChat #96 – Good Grind Bad Grind

May 21, 2019February 28, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tam talk games that are particularly good at grinding… and those that aren’t at all

Tonight we welcome back Grace to the fold as she has returned safely from her trips out into the hinterlands. Additionally it was a little close but we actually got Tam this week who finished his Infinity Tournament in crazy record time. As a result we talk a little bit about the new Infinity Tournament scoring system and his experiences. Then we delve into a length discussion about crafting systems…. but more importantly the way Warframe seems to make a mad amount of grinding seem completely reasonable. Then I finally manage to understand why people are so enthralled with Dragon Age Inquisition…. because I absolutely hit my click point. We also get into a long discussion about when grinds feel bad, talking about Limited Time Chase items in MMOs that stop dropping after a period of time. Finally we get into a discussion about Sleeping Dogs as Tam revisits it on his backlog list.

Topics

Infinity Tournament Scoring Rules
Warframe Crafting and Grinds
Warframe Sorties
Dragon Age Inquisition
Limited Time Chase Item Grinds
Sleeping Dogs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Iron Banner

February 27, 2016 by Belghast

Modem Death Cry

Last night was a bit of a strange night in that I once again flipped between games like mad. I started off in doing my daily love rocket frustration grind… and once again I have nothing to show for it. Then I popped into Dragon Age Inquisition for a bit, but I am having a hard time remembering just what the hell I was doing when I last played. So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and almost accidentally completed a quest. Finally at the end of the session I realized that I apparently have one of those major quests waiting in the queue where I go off to seal some breach somewhere… and have apparently been just avoiding completing it each time I have played lately. Once again I logged out sufficiently avoiding it, but at some point over the weekend I really need to finish it so that hopefully I can get back on stable ground once more with this game. Throughout all of this my wife and I were trying to catch up on iZombie because at this point we are about five episodes behind. It was around this point when the hulu stream stopped and I started having some issues staying connected to the network. I get upstairs and once again my modem is insanely hot, and my internet connection that normally tests out around 200 Mbps is testing 5 Mbps. I unplugged everything and did the “throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to cool it down” trick once more.

When I finally got everything back up and running… I decided to just hang out upstairs and play some Destiny. So I set forth on a sequence of events that wound up keeping me awake until midnight. Destiny is still that game that I can just play happily without much forethought. Since I had not done so in awhile I opted to do a heroic, and I have to say… it was pretty miserable. For whatever reason I almost always get the restorative mind when it comes to heroics…. which is essentially the destiny equivalent of the Oculus. No one that I know of likes it… because for starters it is a huge mission and involves the damned “move the orb” mechanic to keep pushing forward. Additionally there is a segment with a bunch of Vex Cyclops that are just annoying to deal with. Finally you have this horrible segment at the end, where you have to keep running the ball while trying to avoid the beam of death from the restorative mind… and at the same time avoiding waves of goblins and hobgoblins that spawn in. This is pretty easy to deal with in normal, but in heroic the stupid beam of death is quite literally that. I made it though and ended up with a few purples…. that wound up being disenchant fodder. I continued running 36 strikes from that point on until I finally got an Exotic to drop… which is ironically Truth, the weapon Xur is selling this week… but in a much better 290 version.

Player Versus

It is round about here that my night starts to get a little strange. I don’t hate the crucible but it is one of those activities that I never actually participate in. Similarly I have never done Iron Banner or Trials of Osiris… and I completely missed doing any of the Crimson Doubles. Essentially I am a no show for the player versus player activities, and I have no clue why… but on a whim last night I decided to start doing Iron Banner. Firstly I absolutely expected to be horrible, since Iron Banner is in theory worse for new players than Crucible. In the Crucible all players are scaled down gear wise to a happy medium allowing all players of all levels and gearings to be viable and on somewhat even ground. Iron Banner on the other hand does not scale the players down… and my lackluster 298 ass is nothing compared to the 330 folks that are running around in the zone. The funny thing is however that I seemed to do mostly okay. Sure there were occasions where I just got wrecked from out of nowhere, but there were lots of other occasions where I gunned down my target and even so much managed to get a three streak of kills before finally getting wrecked in return.

I think what makes this feel more enjoyable than a lot of the player versus player combat I have experiences is that it quite literally feels like there is no negative. You play a match, you shoot some people, and at the end of it there is a chance of loot. There are no repair bills, there are no lasting consequences… and even when you die you pretty much instantly respawn. This feels more like the old school Doom deathmatch gameplay that I originally cut my teeth on. Maybe I have shunned PVP all of this time without good reason. Sure I rarely broke 1.0 KDR but as the night went on I got significantly better. I even managed to pull a legendary from the place, and am pretty close to ranking up with the Iron Banner. I have to say I am shocked at just how much I enjoyed myself, and in truth I really need to do more crucible as a result. All of this kinda makes me look forward to the Dark Zone in The Division, because hopefully I can get a team together and we can roll around as a group exploring. Maybe I am not as carebear as I always thought I was.

Brightly Colored Tinker Cart

February 26, 2016 by Belghast

Pixi Packs

Every so often I see something that completely makes my night. Originally I was logged into World of Warcraft to do the Love Rocket grind… and surprise to no one that went exactly as I expected. Another night of running 6 holiday dungeons… only to walk away with another handful of tokens and a few pets. Between two of the dungeon runs, I happened to notice a familiar sight across the trade chat attached to the Garrison system. The server I play on is Argent Dawn, the US version… and it was a day one server, one of two Roleplaying servers at launch. As a result we have quite the history as servers go, and much of it is wrapped up in the individuals that inhabit it. One of those is Pixi the bag making gnome. She has been doing her roleplay shouts since the early days of the server… originally starting out in Iron Forge and now apparently moving to the Garrison system. Now she traditionally charges more than the other bag makers on our server… but there is just something special about buying a “Pixi Pack” as she calls them. She makes a grand gesture about it and gives you a silly amount of summoned mage food to fill the pack up. Even asks you where you are going and offers to Teleport you to your destination. She is one of those constants that has been here since day one… and gives me warm fuzzies every time I see the shout about her little white pony and tinker cart rolling into frame.

This is ultimately the reason why I could never truly play on any other server. I have so many memories of the community and the people that populate it. For years I was one of the forum rats that hung out constantly on the official server forums. When Blizzard released the new forums and tried to force everyone to use RealID… we abandoned that forum and started out own called the Argent Dawn Exiles. There had been some rampant issues of folks getting banned for asking why someone had gotten banned… there was some silly shit going on with the forums back then. For awhile even saying the word “ban” was worthy of a ban…. so instead we made up the code word “Cream Cheese” which we used to horrible effect. The awesome thing about the way the community was is that I got to hang out regularly with folks on both sides of the fence, and I have a lot of awesome friends Horde side as well as my original Alliance side connections. Its when I think about how connected I still am to Argent Dawn, or in FFXIV Cactuar… that I kinda lament the modern game infrastructure with free floating players and no real “servers” to speak of. Sure it makes life so much easier at launch and making sure you can play with your friends, but there was something special about hanging out every night with the same larger population of people.

Viva LFR

One of the trends that I have seen over the years is folks bashing the existence of LFR, or Looking For Raid. I personally think its a great system, or WAS a great system in past expansions. My only beef with it is that currently the gear that you get from LFR is kinda trash… and the set bonuses that exist are pale shadows of the set bonuses that folks actually need. I’ve always thought that the only difference between LFR/Normal/Heroic gear should be item level… and as a result I think that LFR should drop tier. The primary line of thinking is that for those doing normal raiding there is zero reason why we should ever darken the door of LFR other than the occasional Valor farming. Even if in theory we could get slightly higher item level for the occasional slot that is lagging behind the rest of your set… the challenge is in breaking your set. I’ve lamented my inability to get rid of my 670 set of tier gear from BRF for awhile now, when in theory I could replace them with higher item level versions from HFC LFR. The truth is however… that LFR is not for people with access to traditional raiding.

LFR is for the folks who don’t have the social infrastructure to be able to raid on a regular basis. It is also for folks like me, who have an army of alts that make me sad when I see nothing but blue gear on them. So since I had warm fuzzies last night about the server, I decided to stick around and run some LFR on the Shaman. I recently hit 100 and through a mixture of baleful and garrison gear I was able to get up to high enough item level to be able to do BRF LFR. Largely speaking I am just looking to push my item level up enough to hit 650 so I can move once again to the next gear and run HFC LFR, and be able to get decent gear that I might be able to actually function in Tanaan with. In theory I might be able to survive simply because I have crafted 690 weapons, but I know Tanaan is going to be a stretch until I get some decent gear. That is the problem with the current endgame “in world” content is that it is in no way as good as the Timeless Isle. I remember when I dinged 90 with any character I generally had a stockpile of gear laying around to be able to equip and make that character instantly viable. This time around the few BoA Baleful pieces only get you so far, and it relies on you actually being in Tanaan with that character to get the rest. Additionally I find it insanely frustrating that Baleful itself can alternate between completely useless shit… aka 650 items… to the damned near best you can get 695s. In any case I figure over the next few nights I will finish the last two parts of BRF and hopefully at that point will have the item level to continue into Hellfire Citadel.

Rockets and Striders

February 25, 2016 by Belghast

Love Rocket Is A Lie

Last night I did little productive. I think I am still dealing with the after effects of not sleeping terribly well on Monday night, because I ended up going to bed insanely early. I did however get Witcher 3 installed on the new laptop, and it runs amazingly well. The strange thing is…. it almost runs better on the laptop on a mobile video card than it does upstairs on my desktop and a full fledged gtx 960. That has been the oddest revelation is just how little difference there has been in performance, and in some cases it seems to perform better. I am guessing that might be due to the difference of the laptop being a 4th gen i7 and my desktop being an FX-6300…. which if that is the case I guess I will be paying the Intel tax on all future systems. The bulk of my actual game time was switching between my six level 100 characters in World of Warcraft and trying to get the “Love Rocket” mount to drop. Now granted I have done this for several years at this point without luck, and quite honestly I am not sure why. Now the Headless Horseman mount is badass… and I can absolutely see why I chase that every single year I am actively playing during the Halloween event. I would absolutely use the hell out of a flying spectral horse, because it looks amazing.

The Love Rocket on the other hand…. I am largely just chasing because it exists and I don’t have it yet. Now I have had the Blue and Red rockets from the card game for years, and never end up using either of them…. largely because I don’t like the slight wobble while flying. So I cannot see how having a giant pink rocket is going to make that effect any better. That said… the thrill is in the hunt and even though I have gotten like a dozen pets… I am still going after the mount every single day. The best and worst part of the entire experience is when you go to click your Heart-Shaped Box… because for a moment you get a surge of hope… only to have it dashed quickly when you find nothing interesting inside. I think the worst part of the event are the Love Tokens, because seriously…. could they have just not made these BOA? There are some really cool things you can purchase with them like heirloom upgrades but by running the dungeon each day during the even you won’t get anywhere near enough to do something with them. Sure there are a bunch of quests that you can also do… but they are freaking annoying. I have my magenta drake from doing the holiday events, and I made a little promise to myself never to touch them again… well apart from the dungeon encounters.

Water Strider

The other big frustration for the player base right now seems to be the fact that the Water Strider is changing functionality in the latest Legion Alpha build notes. Original its restrictions were simply limited to “non-battleground areas” but it seems like they are greatly reducing its usefulness by limiting it to only Draenor and Pandaria. I absolutely get the frustration that players are feeling over this, because Blizzard honestly makes a bunch of bizarre calls. What I don’t get is why this seems to be the breaking point for some folks, and other even more confusing changes weren’t. What I have to somehow believe is that this is an additive effect of all of the fiddling that Legion seems to be doing… and that for some they are choosing to draw a line in the sand here. To those players… I promise that I understand your frustration. I am losing an entire spec… Gladiator will not exist in Legion and I have gone through the whole “seven stages of grief” thing over that. Being able to be a viable dps with a sword and a shield has always been my ultimate “player fantasy”. There is just something awesome about smashing mobs in the face with my shield, and a huge part of what kept me glued to Warlords as long as I was… was the ability to live out those dreams. The side effect of that however is that it was a horribly fiddly spec, that was difficult to itemize for…. and because of that I can absolutely understand why it is going the way of the Dodo.

To the players who are frustrated over this mount… I hear you… I really do. There have been many times in the past of this blog where I have railed on Blizzard for their failures. On March 25th of 2011 I wrote an article chronicling all of the things I saw as failures in the game in my “Is WoW the WoW-Killer?” post. I read through it yesterday… and it was a lot less ranty than I originally thought it was. The thing is… I’ve learned that it is absolutely okay to play other games. In fact I would say it is pretty damned healthy to shift back and forth between games on a regular basis. That sort of distance has allowed me to see the parts of the game that really are being done well, and learn to ignore some of the things that just out and out piss me off. Sure it means that I often disappear from World of Warcraft, and venture into other lands for awhile… but that distance allows me to blow off the steam and remember when I come back why I liked the game in the first place. I am not meaning this to be trite or offensive…. but if the Water Strider is your line in the sand… then really it might be time for you to go explore other games as well. I am not saying “leave” the game… just go play something else for a bit. The World of Warcraft is a great game, but during these long content doldrums it can also be an extremely frustrating game to be a fan of. Right now I am actively playing WoW, FFXIV, Destiny, ESO…. and planning on picking up The Division when it comes out… and hoping to return and play some more SWTOR at some point as well. Playing all of those games has in truth allowed me to more greatly appreciate the quirks and things that each of them do the best…. and to some extent ignore the faults. The only true statement is that there is no WoW Killer coming…. but instead a bunch of interesting games to explore that have their own rich communities.