AggroChat

AggroChat #208 – E3 2018 Show

May 21, 2019June 16, 2018 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start out with a list of topics to discuss… and never quite make it past E3 2018. This was one packed year with a bunch of interesting titles announced. We talk about most of the shows and some of the titles that interested each of us the most. We jump around a lot so it is more of a free form discussion rather than anything structured. This means we occasionally jump off and talk about things that are not necessarily E3 related.

Topics Discussed

E3 2018
Many titles
Very announcements
Wow
Yes I did just do that

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First allied alt leveled!

June 16, 2018 by Grace

Working on this nightborne mage has been on my goal list for a couple months. I finally finished leveling her this week. Once you get to 90, the rest of the levels just fly. I wish the whole process had been like that. I got her to 100 mostly collecting treasures and doing the occasional WoD “world quest”. From 100 – 110 I relied on invasions and one zone worth of questing. I don’t know why they decided to make the leveling so uneven, but 20 – 80 and 80 – 110 feel like completely different games.

So now I have another 110 mage. The problem I have with her is that she’s too much fun! I want to try to get at least one more alt leveled before BfA gets here, but I’m not excited enough about any of them to push them through. Frost mage is a good fit for my play style and “class fantasy” enjoyment, plus she’s been surprisingly survivable, even on Argus. I even ran part of Antorus with her. My dps was terrible, but then again, my gear was the minimum to get in the door. At least I wasn’t bad enough to get booted after a wipe (several others were kicked that run).

If I want to make my goal I need to set her aside and choose between my highmountain monk, lightforged pally, or velf priest. I love the look of the velf the most, but priest always feels like a dead weight to level. I still sort-of consider my disc priest my main, but I don’t like the way the spec plays right now. On the other hand, I enjoy the monk playstyle quite a bit, but I already have 3 max-level monks sitting around. The pally is just a giant question mark. My belf pally was my first real main, waaay back in TBC. Since then I’ve always leveled her with each expansion, but I’ve never done enough to really understand the class and how it has evolved. Basically I have no idea what I’m doing on a pally these days, and no sense of whether I would enjoy it or not.

So those are my options for my next alt to level. I would flip a coin, but I can’t seem to find one with 3 sides. Which one would you choose?

Upcoming Lapse

June 15, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t really have much of a proper post to make today, but I did want to give my readers a heads up that it is highly unlikely that I make a post before next Tuesday. Nothing bad is happening, it just won’t be reasonable for me to be posting much. This makes it all the more inexcusable that I don’t really have much to say today. I’ve been playing a lot of The Division and have managed to get back into the swing of things after the gear swaps I talked about last night. Unfortunately I am having hell taking screenshots right now because both Fraps and the Nvidia Experience based fall back seem to not be picking up and taking the shots. I am not exactly sure what is up but whatever the case I’ve been going into gaming sessions thinking I was taking a bunch of captures but not ending up with anything in the end.

The one new thing I have been playing around with is Survival mode, which was suggested to me by a lot of people. The premise is you are trying to get to the dark zone in order to extract some cure that was found for the small pox based super bug that started the whole problem in the first place. This in itself would probably be reasonable but there is a massive blizzard hitting New York and upon approach your Helicopter crashes… puncturing your hazmat suit and leaving you stranded with only a pistol. Essentially as you roam around you are fighting two problems… the extreme cold and the fact that you have been infected and are trying to stave it off. Either of those things can straight up kill you.

For the cold you wind up moving from building to building or fire barrel to fire barrel trying to stay warm while wandering out in a whiteout blizzard. For the infection you can pick up medication periodically and use it to pause the timer that is ticking down. On top of this… you lost your filter in the crash and need to gather up enough materials to craft a new one in order to move into the dark zone, get the cure and successfully extract. If you choose to queue into a PVP session you are also up against other players who are trying to compete for the same resources and the same eventual cure. To spice things up… you will also encounter the various factions from the game roaming the streets that will of course start firing on you the moment you come in range.

There are a number of things that you can do to improve your odds, because you drop in with a base set of green gear. Drops occasionally upgrade your weapons or your armor, but everything is limited to this one survival session starting you back at square one. The cosmetic clothing increases your survival against the cold letting you stay out longer before needing to run back and warm up somewhere. The entire process is really interesting because it is basically this intense survival game in the middle of an MMO complete with hunger and thirst meters that you need to keep an eye on. Basically the entire world is dead set against you and you need to keep moving, keep searching and keep looting to gather enough resources to be able to survive for a long periods of time as you attempt to cross New York, get into the Dark Zone and retrieve your cure.

From what I understand there are also a number of other gameplay modes that show up once you reach thirty… and as I am sitting at 28 I am feeling close enough to the finish line to try and push through this. Super thanks to everyone who tipped me off to Survival since there were several of you. I linked a guide video since I didn’t have much in the way of screenshots.

Significant Gear Swaps

June 14, 2018 by Belghast

I thought I would talk a bit about my varied experiences with The Division of late. I wrote the other day about some of the difficulties I had and frustrations that it was not easy to swap gear around to fix those problems. That said I decided to start trying to incrementally improve my lot in life. I sifted through my bag and my wallet and decided that I had enough components to be able to craft a single item… which luckily rolled with stamina on it. After that I found that the base vendor also had an item I could afford that added stamina to a slot I had none in. The above image is the original state of my character before swapping anything around. Notice how heavily I am apparently leaning into electronics… more than likely because that is just what I was able to get through drops.

This image is after that first swap of two items… gloves and mask. Firepower and Electronics obviously took a hit but my stamina went up significantly. This was enough of a change to make the game feel completely different for me. No longer was it feeling like a single shot was taking an entire pip of health off and I did not really notice that much of a difference in my ability to kill things. This little act alone was enough to revitalize the game for me, which makes me question… should stats make that much of a difference in the way the game feels? It basically took something that felt horrible every single time I attempted to play it over the last year… into something that feels pretty good. Sure I still feel squishy if I get caught in the open but so long as I stick to cover I can hold my ground, which is absolutely not something I could do before without swapping out those two items.

After a few more gear and mod drops this is where I am sitting today and the game feels pretty great. I played some last night, but eventually sleep claimed me. I did however managed to knock out a few lengthy side quests including one that had like five phases two it and involved taking down two yellow mobs. Now I am not entirely certain the yellow mobs were connected to the particular quest… but I took then down nonetheless in the progress of doing it. I also seem to have completed some Division Shields mission that rewarded me three pieces of endgame gear that will sit there and wait for me to hit 30. I am just shy of dinging 28 so I sorta can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had a lot of fun playing last night and it just seems weird that two item swaps could make all that difference.

I still have a significant number of quests to knock out in the world and there is at least two areas of the map that I have never even been to. I seem to be getting back into the swing of things and enjoying my time. It is funny how E3 works because it often has these side effects of making me interested in games that I dropped along the wayside somewhere. The coverage of The Division 2 gave me the drive to give the original another shot. Based on some twitter discussion that happened yesterday while I was completely swamped… it seems like there are a handful of other people still playing as well. I still have yet to fully catch up from the threads that went nuts while I was sitting in meetings all day. If you are playing Division however… friend BelghastStern my UPlay handle. I still don’t fully know what I am doing but I am dying a hell of a lot less.