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Winter and Yeti

December 28, 2015 by Belghast

Winter Arrives at Casa Belghast

So something I am realizing yet again is how badly I need a schedule to function. During the work week, I am on super tight time constraints. I get up at 5:30, make coffee, pack my wife’s lunch, and then am usually upstairs sitting at my keyboard by just a little after 6. Then I bang out a blog post, feed the animals… play with the ferrets because they are begging to be picked up… and then am out the door at around 7 am. On the weekends however…. and on this holiday break… I am completely all over the place with my blogging. When I know there is no real time constraints… I feel free to screw around in the morning. I’ve been reading twitter and blogs for the last two hours… and finally it is getting to the point where it is kinda embarrassing that it is 11:30 and I have yet to produce a blog post. While I complain about stress, I am also apparently one of those people who thinks most clearly when the shit is hitting the fan… or at least I am bumping up against a deadline. It is like my creativity flows more freely when I know there is something riding on the line. I know that at pretty much I can start writing and come up with a post… and because of that… it means when there is no deadline I keep putting it off. I am the king of procrastination… and among the list of things that need to do today is book my hotel room for Pax South… which is only a few weeks away.

As you can see in the above image, Winter has finally arrived in Casa del Belghast. For most of the Christmas break so far it has been windy as hell, but still pretty warm. On Saturday, it started raining, but between the showers… it was still nice and warm outside. The thermostat started to turn down yesterday, and overnight the constant rain turned to ice, and eventually as of this morning snow. The Monday morning commute was apparently hell, based on conversations with the folks holding down the fort. This is one of those moments when I am damned happy that I still have essentially another week to go before I have to worry about it, and by then I am hoping that we have returned to the balmy conditions we have been in recently. I am perfectly fine with not having a “real winter” here in Oklahoma, because our normal Ice Storms suck. If we got fluffy and happy snow like the rest of the world seems to, I would be perfectly fine with winter. Instead we get ice… and lots of it… that usually starts out as sleet and then eventually becomes glaze ice that freezes to anything it hits… high means power lines. Why the hell we have above ground powerlines still boggles me… because the ice can snap the aerials like very brittle twigs. Thankfully from what it seems, this is going to be our major day of ice and snow… and then it will warm back up shortly after.

Mission Yeti: Accomplished

I told Lodur last night, that he would have to hold down the fort without me… because I am officially out of the Team 360 No Mount business. I’ve talked over the last few days of my Christmas gift that required a little work. A really good friend of mine read my commentary about the struggle to get the holiday Yeti mount, and when she managed to get two of them… pinged me that she had a gift for me. The gotcha of course was that it was on a server that I have zero characters, so I rolled a level 1 druid and have been leveling like crazy over the last few days. It took me roughly two days of marathoning Star Wars movies to go from 1 to 40 and last night I wrapped it up getting the final two thirds of a level in Feralas. I stopped what I was doing as soon as I dinged and made my way to Orgrimmar to learn Journeyman Riding, and of course learn the mount. From there I fiddled around and got to an interesting vantage point to take a few screenshots. I am super happy to have the mount, but also really enjoyed the “Catte Durid” leveling process. The only problem is… that this character is now stranded on a server that I am not sure if I will play much on.

I talked a bit about the general toxic environment I encountered while leveling the character, which does not give me warm fuzzies about staying there. That said this is the only server that my friend really has characters on. The frustrating part is that to move a character it is $25 each, which seems like a lot of money when you are looking at an army of alts. Considering that at this point moving a character is a scripted process, and requires zero manual intervention… the game as a whole would be a happier place if they just adopted the Rift system of server transfers. In that game you can move one character per week for free, pending that character is in good standing and above the level of 15. That means over time you can move servers with your characters, and sure you have to wait a week per… but it lets you get out of bad situations without being taxed into oblivion for doing it. There are many times that players end up getting stuck on a server that they literally do not know anyone playing the game anymore. So it seems like insult to the injury of losing their friends…. to ask them to cough up another $25 per character to move off of the bad environment. Sure you can always group with Battle.net but there is something you miss by not having access to the friendly green spam of guild chat… and all the while I was leveling this druid… I felt the pangs of not having access to my friends. At some point I will likely delete the druid I have on The Scryers and move this character to that server, but in the meantime it will serve as a sort of hiding out alt… which is largely why I have not mentioned the server name yet.

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015

December 27, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Lagged

There are some mornings when trying to think is a struggle… this is one of those mornings. Last night I suffered from a pretty bad bout of insomnia, and instead of just sitting in bed and hoping for sleep to find me… I got up and played PS4. At which point I realized it was 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to try and sort out how to sleep. The day as a whole today is rainy and nasty and the antithesis of just how delightful the holiday was here in Oklahoma. On Christmas day I was running around in a short sleeved shirt, and were it not for the wind I wouldn’t have needed my hoodie. We were warned however that just after the holiday the temperature would drop, and from the sounds of it the panhandle of the state is now getting lots of ice. Thusfar it has been only rain…. but so much of it that sitting upstairs in my office it actually drowned out the sound of all of the various machines whirring away. I finally got up around 8:30 and attempted to start the day, but the problem being… that I have largely just been staring at the screen unable to get a post started. Then suddenly I remembered…. it’s Sunday… the day I have a crutch to fall back on in the form of the week in review posts. So I am hobbling along on this crutch for all that is sacred in the world… otherwise I have no clue what I would write about.

Return of Destiny

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015 — MIDA In Action

I guess Bungie got the message that it sucks when Xur does not have a weapon option during the Friday festivities. The last four or five weeks he has brought some new weapon each time…. and this week was no different with the newly Year-2-ized version of the MIDA Multitool. During this month he has also brought the Monte Carlo, Hardlight, and Telesto. The only problem here is Friday I have to make a decision… do I care enough about getting this weapon to grind out the 23 strange coins needed to purchase it. The Monte Carlo was a no brainer, because I have heard so many good things about this gun… that I just had to play with one myself. Telesto was similarly a no brainer, because I have gotten two of these to drop… so had no need for it. MIDA and Hardlight however I was left with the decision if it was really worth the needed grinding to pick it up. With the Hardlight I decided… that I already have a lot of Auto Rifles that I really like… between my love of the Zarinaea-D, Zhalo Supercell, Monte Carlo and the newly improved Fabian Strategy… I had no real use for a new Auto Rifle to add to the mix. For the MIDA however I crowd sourced my opinion and got messages back from Sig and Squirrel both saying to pick it up… that it was both amazing in PVE and PVP. So far I am liking it, but I am having to get used to using a Scout Rifle again. I have largely just been using Auto and Pulse Rifles for awhile now, so it is taking some adjusting. The truth is… for the most part there are very few weapons that I don’t like in Destiny.

Last night while dealing with Insomnia I decided to cast aside the Hunter and Titan briefly and instead focus on the Warlock who still need to hit the level cap of 40. I realize I could be leveling through doing the Taken King content, but instead I just ended up clearing out my bounty log. I am finally reaching the point where my Stranger’s Rifle is beginning to show its age, as I finally got some weapon drops that are technically higher than it is. The problem is… I am so damned used to using the Stranger’s Rifle… and the whole fully automatic pulse rifle thing is so overpowered… that I am probably going to keep at it until I hit 40, or at least until I get a purple weapon to replace it with. In the meantime I am left with the decision… do I grind my way to 40 like I am doing in a super chill and enjoyable way… or do I actually start with the quests. On my Hunter I largely waited to do quests until I was at the level cap, so I could revel in the sweet sweet engram drops that seem to happen like candy during missions. I still have all of the House of Wolves and Dark Beyond quests as well… and those in theory won’t be nearly as beneficial gear wise. So I might just start on doing those and see how close to 40 I can get.

Another thing I did this week was get my Ace of Spades exotic on the hunter. I am currently on the First Curse of the step of the Gunsmith quest on my Titan… and I have to say I am simply not looking forward to doing all of the bullshit you have to do to get it. The only problem with Ace of Spades is just how crap hand cannons seem to be right now. I am not sure which I dislike more… the absolute potato range of them… or just how small the magazine and ammunition pool is in general with them. I run out of ammunition while using a hand cannon faster than almost anything else… and I never seem to get enough normal ammo drops to be able to use these in strikes. So instead every now and then I break them out while doing bounties when things don’t matter quite so much. The positive of Ace of Spades however is that it just look bad ass. So in theory it might get some use, but not really likely given all of the other exotics that I have and legendaries that are also equally well stated.

World of Warcraft

The other day I posted about my mission that level a Cat Druid to 40 all so that I could leave the 360NoMount club… and add the Christmas Yeti mount to my collection. It has been two days and I am now getting close to the goal. As of last night when I finally reached the point where I thought it was probably time to attempt going to sleep… I was roughly 2/3rds of a level from 40 and was just now starting Feralas. It has been a fun ride pushing up a new Cow Druid, and went a lot faster than I might had expected. I took a slightly different route than I did with my Warlock and the end result feels like I got a lot more straight forward Kill Ten type quests which I can burn through insanely quickly. The other thing that helped is the fact that my druid is a skinner… and I was constantly jumping random leather bearing animals along the way to level that. Back the in the day all of the leveling guides used to tell you to always be engaged in killing something… like if there was a mob on your way to your objective to always kill it no matter what. Having done that on the Druid and not so much on the Warlock… I have to say that yes in fact that is the superior way to level especially with all of the experience boosted heirlooms that I am wearing. The question is… now that I have almost achieved my goal… do I hit 40 and quit… or do I keep pushing up the druid. I am not a big fan of the server cluster I am on, and the people seem to be insanely rude compared to Argent Dawn so at some point I may transfer the druid over once I finish it. I realize I can cross realm group… but man… some of the stuff I have encountered here I have never run into on AD. That is saying a lot given that I used to always think of Argent Dawn as a pretty horrific place.

The other activity that I spent time this week doing was leveling my Warlock. Basically playing her was my reward for completing my holiday dailies… and in part the only reason why I made so much progress on the druid so quickly, is that I completely started ignoring that holiday dailies existed. At some point I need to go through all of my characters and loot the presents in Orgrimmar and Ironforge before they poof, but I think once I get to 40 on the druid I am going to switch back to playing the Warlock. It is funny how isolating it can be playing on a different server even though you have access to BNet and your friends list. Facepull is just friendly and somewhat active green spam and I love having it around. It is my hope that at some point soon we will get the rumored battlenet channels, which will hopefully let us have guild like chat spanning across multiple games. If there was an addon that existed that gave me access to slack while playing World of Warcraft… I would be in a perfect place.

Best Gift Ever

December 26, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Christmas

There are times when the best gift at Christmas… you are not quite sure if it was intentional or not. I’ve talked about our relatively chill Christmas day plans for the better part of a week, and I have to say after going through it yesterday it was far better than I could have imagined. First off we have all this amazing food… that we will be eating for a week. On the menu….

Chilli-Cheese Rotel Dip
Sausage Cheese Balls
Pulled BBQ Beef
White Chocolate Cranberry Clusters
Chocolate Cashew Clusters
Snickerdoodles
Ranch Pretzels
White and Milk Chocolate dipped Pretzels
Flakey Biscuits to heap the BBQ Beef on

It was not exactly the most conventional meal, but we grazed happily throughout the course of the original three Star Wars movies. You cannot have read my blog over the last few months and somehow missed the fact that Star Wars was a major part of my childhood. I went to see the original when I was roughly 2 years old in the local drive in… and was hooked from that point on. So for Christmas it was a given that I would end up getting a bunch of Star Wars merchandise from my parents. The best gift however was this marathon and the effect it seems to have had on my wife. I am trying to keep my expectations tempered, but maybe just maybe we have another Star Wars fan in the family.

Granted she has always been amazing about my Star Wars thing… and has brought me home various artifacts like Star Wars Legos, or just the other night a cool set of Kylo Ren playing cards. So even though she didn’t get why the movie was important to me… she was always super awesome about putting up with my thing. I remember in college she even used to get into the hunt for new action figures, helping me crawl through the racks of figures to find the one or two that I didn’t already have. The prequels pretty much killed my desire to be surrounded by action figures on my walls… but I do pick up the occasional figure every now and then and on the wall between my monitors I have Dark Jedi Luke, Jedi Leia, Clone Emperor, Mara Jade, Admiral Thrawn, a snow gear Plo Koon, and a badass Savage Opress figure. So yesterday I half expected the desire to watch the three originals and then go see the new one… was at least in part a gift for me. That is until she invited one of her friends along for the journey. After watching the originals and seeing the new one…. she came home with all of these questions that I can’t really answer before she watches the prequels. So right now the plan is to spend today marathoning through those as well… and I am happy as a clam when I say… it was not MY idea to do this.

Keeping it Chill

There are a lot of things I am into that I think she would also like. I mean she was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series and got into it long before I did, and is also a fan of the Star Trek series and has been amped to see the newer movies. So the raw DNA of a Science Fiction and Fantasy fan is there, and I think if I could ever get her interested in say the modern Joss Whedeon Marvel films she would really enjoy them as well. However with those… we would need to start at the very beginning chronologically and do another Marathon since each movie at least in part fleshes out another corner of the Avengers universe. All of this said…. I am trying to keep it super chill and not put any pressure on her to like things more than she actually does. However just having my wife ask me questions about Star Wars… might be quite possibly the best Christmas gift I have ever received. I mean I guess it was impossible to live with me for the last two decades and not have SOME of the Star Wars franchise to imprint on her. She has always liked R2-D2, Chewbacca, The Jawas and the Ewoks… and she used to laugh when I would throw a blanket over my head and say Utini.

One of the awesome things about our marriage has always been that we could have completely different likes… but each of us would be supportive over whatever the other person was into. She has been awesome about the daily blog thing… and the podcast… and this game or that… because I know they really do put dents in our schedule that are theoretically “untouchable” where I need to be at a keyboard. Similarly I am cool with the fact that there are many nights where she works in her classroom until 8pm or has this or that church activity that needs attention. It has always amazed me at just how well we work together, when in truth we don’t have that many shared interests. At the core has always been this willingness to go along with whatever the other person wants to do… because I think we enjoy seeing the other half excited even if we aren’t that excited ourselves. All of this said… I am not expecting a Christmas Miracle… and all of the sudden my wife will be as obsessed with Star Wars as I have been all of these years. I still think its amazing however for her to be asking the same sorts of questions that I pondered all throughout my childhood and even now have nothing more than vague guesses at. I think without a doubt though, there will be no question as to whether or not we will be going to the next several movies because if nothing else… she seems hooked on the new generation of films after watching Force Awakens last night.

Christmas and Catte Durids

December 25, 2015 by Belghast

Chillest Christmas

This year is turning out to be the most chill Christmas, since 2003 when we took a cruise to Cancun. At this point I am honestly not sure how we managed to get away with this low key of a Christmas, but I am not complaining. For most of our married life, my wife and I have spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas running around like crazy, trying to appease every household with an appearance of adequate length. The entire process leaves us not really enjoying any of it, and stressed about the next place we have to go while at any given house. Now the last decade has wreaked havoc upon our family, and with it has slowly whittled down the number of houses we actually have to go to. Previously Christmas Eve was this tradition of going to my home town and going to mass with my mothers side of the family, and then opening presents with them afterwards… and finally ending up across the street at my aunts house late at night. This meant Christmas Eve we often didn’t get home until after midnight, only to need to get up bright and early Christmas morning to be at another house before noon. Unfortunately the matriarchs of both sides of the family have gone, and with it a lot of the traditions.

We are trying to create new traditions among my generation, like getting together the other night at Phat Philly’s here in town just to share a meal and a conversation. But many of these new traditions are not necessarily dependent on a given day, the way the past generation was. In my family it has always seemed that if it did not happen on the actual day… it didn’t count. For me… getting together period and hanging out counts regardless of when it is happening. We originally had plans for Christmas Eve, but those fell through due to illness in the family. As a result last night we ended up going out to dinner with my folks, and then them coming back to our house to open gifts and chill out for awhile. It was really nice, and while we have yet to see my wife’s side of the family… we are somehow ending up with this perfect Christmas day where we get to hang out at home and snack on all the goodies that my wife baked yesterday. As I have mentioned the last few days, we are doing a Star Wars Marathon and then hitting the new movie at 7pm tonight. Since I have been asked… we are only doing 4, 5 and 6 largely because neither my wife nor her friend that is coming over are really big Star Wars fans. When indoctrinating someone into the franchise… I think the prequels do nothing but muddy the water… because they expect you to already know a bunch about Star Wars. I am more than happy to simply not include them for the time being, because from what I could tell they had no real bearing on number seven.

Some Assembly Required

Yesterday I got a message from one of my friends, saying they had a Christmas gift for me. The only gotcha was that I would have to make a character on a specific server to receive it. This message came through at a time yesterday when I was babysitting the kitten… with us both locked in my office (to keep her out of the baked goods) so it worked out perfectly. I created Belgrave the Catte Durid and my friend met me in Newbie Cow Land. Next thing I know she had a trade window open and handed me the item on the right. At once I was both thrilled and understood what she meant when she said it might require some work on my part. On my blog I have talked about my current chase of the holiday Yeti mount, and how Lodur and I founded #team360nomount and unfortunately hunting this mount had kinda dominated my play sessions. Not only was my friend giving me the gift of a mount… but also giving me the gift of chilling the hell out and not worrying quite so much about doing every single holiday daily. The first thing I did every morning was work through my holiday missions, and I knew I would have ended up a ragey mess if I had done all of this… and still ended up without one.

This is proof positive that I have amazing friends, because so many times something like this has happened. One of my friends shows up to save the day… and my sanity. As a result however I am shifting gears and since The MooCowAdin is now my best geared character… I am going to start running up the catte durid instead of my Warlock. Right now the plan is to go a mixture of Kitty and Bear, which lets me tank and pewpewpew. I always say I am going to play Moonkin, but then never actually end up playing Moonkin because it is a super fiddly spec. The strangest thing about playing this character is how vastly different the leveling experience feels on a non-roleplaying server. On Argent Dawn and The Scryers in your open world zones you are playing with lots of other players from Role Playing servers. I have always said that RP servers just attracted a better caliber of people… and it seems like that really is the case. Within the first few minutes of playing my druid I had been spit on and slapped numerous times by other players, and while running around in Azshara last night I had people constantly trying to steal the skins from my corpses as I was looting them. Conversely while leveling my Warlock on the amalgam of Roleplaying servers… I constantly waving and blowing kisses at me while wandering around. There have been many times I was getting low on health that someone just shows up and throws a random heal. So I gotta say… the experience is so night and day that it just seems odd.

Merry Christmas

Christmas is a day that means lots of different things to lots of different people. So my hope is that whatever today means to you… it is in fact an awesome day. I don’t always sync up with my family, and there are a lot of times it feels like they don’t really “get me”. The person they assume I am isn’t always the same as the person I really am, but in the long run…. I think a lot of people feel that way. Otherwise we would never leave the home and strike out into the world. What I will say is that over the years I have carefully surrounded myself with awesome people that do get me. I am blessed with some truly amazing friends, and in the end… your friends are the family you choose. So whatever today means to you, or whatever your traditions happen to be… my hope is that you are spending it with the people that make you happy. I am going to spend the day chilling out with my wife and one of her friends and watching the hell out of some Star Wars while playing World of Warcraft. I feel like it is going to be an amazing day.