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Sith Sorcery

October 12, 2015 by Belghast

Double Fist Caffeine

This morning I cannot guarantee how intelligible my post might be. Granted every morning I could and probably should give that disclaimer, but this morning in particular it is well deserved. I had another one of my trademark nights of insomnia, and quite honestly I am not really sure when I finally fell asleep. At the earliest it was sometime after 1 am, and I have no clue how much additional tossing and turning time was added onto that. That is the worst part about not being able to see anything without your glasses, that not being able to see the clock means you are constantly estimating upwards on a night like last night. Based on my motor skills, I am guessing I probably got around three hours of sleep. The worst thing about nights like last night is the growing sense of dread and anxiety when you realize that what little rest you might have gotten is drifting away from you. The alarm going off is a fixed point that there is no negation with. As a result I am essentially double fishing caffeine with both a big mug of coffee and a monster zero as a chaser. I might even go down and fix another cup of coffee just to give myself that much more of a fighting chance of functioning today.

The problem is nights like last night get no easier as the years go by. Its just that the stakes get higher, and I find myself struggling to bounce back from them even more than I used to. In the past I would take a nap and life would be peachy, the sleep debt would be repaid and I would move on with my life. Now… there is a lingering disconnected state that continues on for essentially the rest of the week. Which means I will continue to need an ever increasing amount of caffeine in order to continue functioning like a normal human being. Not that any of this is really interesting, but it is what is happening in my world this morning and as a result is what is getting written about. Once upon a time I attempted a sleep study… but I am not going back through that again. I went in for insomnia… and the doctor was damned certain I had sleep apnea. Those are two vastly different things… my problem is not that I am sleeping too much or too sleepy… my problem is that I cannot shut my brain off to go to sleep. As a result I am kinda gunshy about trying to resolve these issues.

Sith Sorcery

One of the things about this recent tour through the Star Wars the Old Republic class stories, is the fact that none of these characters are freshly rolled. At some point over the last four years I have created each of these characters and made decisions that I might not have wanted to make. Namely when I rolled a Sith Inquisitor for some reason I decided going Sorcerer was the best possible idea, instead of the more comfortable melee options. In all honestly the class itself is enjoyable and I am having a blast shocking the shit out of things, but the problem is… my tanky companion feels extremely squishy right now. I am not sure if this is a side effect of Khem Val in particular, or if it is more the fact that I am not quite so grossly over leveled on this play through. Tattooine was an extremely short planet, and as a result I am not pretty much sitting at exactly the level of my next quest. I am also a few levels from my traditional mod swapping point, so my gear is getting a bit dated. In fact as I am sitting here sorting this out in my head… I should have swapped gear a level of go if I am going by my normal pattern which in itself might account for the extremely squishy nature. Basically I have been upgrading every other set of mods… so I am using level 21 mods, and was shooting for level 33 to upgrade… when in reality I should have upgraded at 29.

The other thing I am considering is a swap over to using Treek instead of Khem Val. Not sure why but the Jedi style tank companions in this game just feel squishy compared to the trooper style ones. Bowdaar felt similar, when I have tried to use him in the past. Treek on the other hand seems to have this amazingly useful arsenal of attacks as well as a really nice AOE stun effect that helps to reduce her damage intake. Additionally Treek doesn’t actually give a shit what I do, and is not constantly judging my power… or sizing me up to potentially eat at a later date. As well as playing a finger wiggler, the big departure with this character is that I was using it to shoot for my first Dark Five character. I won’t like, taking the force lightning [shock] options in dialog trees is kinda fun. I do however feel a bit more disconnected from this play experience than others. Especially with the Bounty Hunter, I could see a lot of myself in those dialog options, and in the Inquisitor it feels like the class is nothing like me at all. I would never be cruel just for the sake of doing it, but in order to max out my dark side points… that is pretty much what I am constantly doing. It feels like this is going to be a bit of a slog to get through, but I am making decent progress. As of last night I am level 30 and on Alderaan, and should be wrapping up the first chapter shortly. I am sensing a pretty big conflict coming up, and will be interesting to get through it.

Week in Gaming 10/11/2015

October 11, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Week

I am sitting here this morning with my writing buddy beside me. I’ve shown pictures of Allie in the past as she sits on the blanket that I have folded beside my keyboard, and once again this morning she is there purring quietly. She really is the mascot of the week I have had, because honestly other than a bit of an emotional roller coaster surrounding The Beginner’s Guide, I would say that the week as a whole has been one of contentment. I managed to accomplish quite a bit in my quest to push through all of the stories I had not seen in SWTOR, as well as made small bits of progress in Destiny. At work things seem to be largely calmed down, or at least to a manageable madness. More than anything I think it was taking Tuesday off that helped reorient my world to a much better state of mind.

Star Wars the Old Republic

This week was an insanely productive one when it came to Star Wars the Old Republic. As of last Saturday night during the podcast I managed to wrap up the Smuggler storyline, and picked up work on the Sith Warrior. With Tuesday essentially being a day where I did nothing but play SWTOR, I managed to finish up the Sith Warrior. I’ve talked about this already but I have to say at the time the Sith Warrior was one of the most gratifying experiences when it comes to giving you the control to settle all of your vendettas in one ending. Every person that you want to seek your revenge on is laid out in such a way as that you can, and the final events are so damned satisfying. Having played both Sith Warrior and Jedi Guardian… I have to say I am a bigger fan of the Warrior experience namely because it is deeply personal… and not simply the overarching events of the game as a whole.

From there I picked up on my Bounty Hunter, largely because I needed a palate cleanser from playing a force user… and having just wrapped up Smuggler I was not quite ready for another cunning class. I fully expected to not be terribly into the Bounty Hunter experience, largely because I didn’t really enjoy Trooper that much. However I am coming to realize most of my problems with the trooper was the fact that it was my third class within a few months of the launch of games to push to 50… and at that point I was simply bored to tears of all the repeated planet story content. The Bounty Hunter is quite literally the most reasonable person on the imperial side. The game gives you the ability to play the consummate business man, and that is absolutely the path I took. I killed no one for free, and kept my collateral damage to a minimum. As a result people were constantly surprised that no, I was not in fact going to kill them. Generally speaking I almost always took the option to freeze them in carbonite and return them to the client fully intact. I am guessing that quite honestly, Bounty Hunter is probably going to go down as my favorite game play experience in SWTOR.

Destiny

My progression in Destiny has slowed down considerably, with the bulk of my forward movement coming from Armsday packages and any time I level up a faction like the Gunsmith or the Cryptarch. While I am playing the game of equipping my best gear before I decrypt any engrams, I am still ending up with low level blues most of the time that I turn into crafting materials. I’ve developed the nasty habit of buying shaders, emblems, and ships…. and as a result I am generally running low on Glimmer most of the time. I really need to try using some of those glimmer items that increase the drop rates while I work on bounties. My latest toy that I am enjoying playing with is the scout rifle above that came from a package when I leveled up Dead Orbit faction. I had not really played with a scout rifle much since coming back and had forgotten that it was essentially a high payload sniper rifle. Realistically I am to the point where if I want to progress I need to be running Heroic Strikes, and I simply have not messed with getting friends together yet in order to do that. Still having a lot of fun, but trying to keep it super casual so I don’t burn myself out and get bored with it.

Battlefront

Another game this week that I have spent some time with is Star Wars Battlefront. I pre-ordered this game through PlayStation network the moment it was announced because I am super nostalgic about the lineage of Star Wars shooters. This weekend they allowed players to download and play for free in the beta, and I have to say my feelings about it are extremely mixed. The game does an excellent job of giving you the fantasy fulfillment of playing a soldier in the Star Wars universe. Past that however… I think it suffers from the fact that I have been playing so much Destiny lately. The game handles significantly worse in the moment to moment gameplay that Destiny does. The guns feel worse, the movement feels worse, the cover mechanics… feel worse. I think if I spent enough time I could get used to it and even come to like it, but right now I am struggling with the feeling of “I would rather just play destiny”.

The Beginner’s Guide

I’ve said everything I could really ever want to say in my deeply personal post on the game from last week. Last night on AggroChat I to some extent reprised those thoughts in a much more condensed manner. The take away for me is really this. If you are not in an extremely stable position in your life, and if you are at all struggling with your own emotions… don’t play this game. Essentially there are two possible reactions… either you are going to think it is complete bullshit and it won’t effect you in any way. Or it is going to act as a mirror to show you all of your fears and anxieties about yourself. It quite literally took me a few days to recover from the experience of just watching a play through of this game, and not actually playing it myself. I am not unhappy that I went through it, but it is also not the sort of experience that I would suggest lightly to anyone. I know that sounds weird and arcane… but this game does strange things to you. This is honestly the closest thing I have seen to a real life “The Ring”, in that this game will ultimately leave you slightly changed as a result… and not always in a good way.

AggroChat #78 – Fiddly Runic Madness

May 21, 2019October 11, 2015 by AggroChat

This week we once again have the full AggroChat crew, and a long list of things to discuss. The challenge with every episode however is always coming up with a title, and this weeks honor goes to a lengthy discussion we happened to have about the new rune system in Wildstar. We could however just as easily given this a Star Wars title because we spent a huge chunk of the game discussing various pieces of that universe as well between Star Wars the Old Republic, Battlefront, X-Wing Minatures and our upcoming Star Wars pen and paper game. The show ran a little long, but we had what felt like a bunch of interesting conversations about lots of different games.

Star Realms
Star Wars Battlefront
The Beginner’s Guide
Undertale
Eighty Days
Wildstar
Secrets of Grindea
Star Wars the Old Republic
X-Wing Miniatures Game
Fallout New Vegas
Marvel Heroes
FTL
Mega Man Battle Network
Star Wars Pen and Paper
Destiny
Rockband 4
Playstation 4

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On Unexpected Additions

October 10, 2015 by Ashgar

This is me expanding on a podcast comment, so if you’ve already listened, this might be old news.

Recently I started playing the DS release of Mega Man Battle Network 5, which was thoughtful enough to contain both of the Game Boy Advance games released as Battle Network 5 (they started splitting them with 3). As I mentioned on the podcast, Battle Network 5 is pretty good. The Double Soul system returns from 4, and the Navi Customizer returns from the previous two games. Liberation Missions are kind of a drag, but it does kind of break up the Internet -> Dungeon -> Boss -> Repeat cycle of 2 and 3. (4 did something else, but 4 is not a good game.) The DS release also made a few changes to the game, and they aren’t all for the better.

“Battle Routine Set!”

For starters, they added voice acting. The Mega Man series has a bit of a history with the subject, and it’s not much better here. My #1 Objection is the “Jack-in! MegaMan! Execute!” every time you jack into something. It’s not just because it;’s a bit annoying, but because you have to wait for the line to finish, it’s slower than it used to be in the GBA version. It’s an action you do frequently, so this feels like it adds up. Also annoying is MegaMan’s tendency to shout when using chips in battle, especially if you are somewhat good at getting counterattacks in. One place that I actually mind less is the voice acting added to the standard boss battle intro. This is something that happens at climactic moments and not “every time I want to go to the internet” or “Every time I hit the L button by mistake”.

Party Battle System

It’s not all bad. Battle Network 5 is primarily about assembling a team, and Double Team allows you to actually switch between members of the team while on most of the internet. (It doesn’t work in Liberation Missions or in dungeons.) If you’re in Full Sync when you switch, you also get a special attack to go along with it (but this means you don’t get the double damage that Full Sync would normally give you). In addition, during Liberation missions, you have a limited ability to swap a character out for the one filling the same role in the other version of the game. For example: Team Colonel uses KnightMan for defense, so you can switch him with MagnetMan, the defensive option in Team Protoman.

Balance is a Fool’s Master

Battle Network 5 wasn’t exactly the most balanced game to start with, and this feels like it’s even farther out of line. The chip pictured above is new to the DS version, is accessible before you even have half of your team, and instantly ends random battles for a decent portion of the game. The Party Battle System features a Support program, that when installed will make party members show up in battle for specific effects. Instead of dropping the standard 40 damage “Cannon” chip expected near the start of the game, the familiar enemies drop the auto-targeting, 70 damage MarkCannon instead. If you’re playing Team Colonel, this will even be in S code, so you can use it with the Sword and WideSword chips you start with. (LongSword is available in the second dungeon, so you can have the 400 damage LifeSword PA extremely early.) I’m hoping for Battle Network 6 to show up at my doorstep at some point in the near future, but until it does, I’m finding this version of 5 pretty enjoyable.

Screenshot and video taken from the Let’s Play Archive.