Gracie Status Update – Page 31

Season 5: Record Burnout?

January 19, 2016 by Grace

Maybe the title is a little hyperbolic, but I guess time will tell. I had a blast on Friday night. I logged into Diablo 3 and voice chat a little before the season start time and got a group of 4 friends together. We had a few minutes of annoyance when the season began, creating or rebirth-ing characters was very slow and booted us from the game. Fortunately this only cost us about 5 minutes or so. After that we were up and running.

We decided to do bounties together to level. The first few levels where we didn’t have full skills and such were a little slow, but after that we were flying. Over the course of the evening we had a couple people tag in and out of our party, and after about 5 hours it was down to just me and one other friend. I absolutely wanted to get to 70 on the first night, and I’m happy to say that I made it easily. Then, because we had momentum going, we worked on a few of the seasonal achievements to unlock our free class sets. It took me 2 tries to get the level 20 greater rift done because my gear was so bad, but eventually I got it and headed to bed with my 6-piece set bonus in place.

I think that amount of focused play combined with actually playing with other people the whole time did burn me out a bit. For the rest of the weekend I found myself avoiding D3 or setting my status to “busy” so I could unwind alone for a bit. It isn’t that I’m burned out on the game, more that my introverted nature means I need solo time to recharge. I did make some good progress though. I’m now sitting around paragon level 180, and have completed the seasonal journey and received my cute new pet. I’m going to keep putting some time in and hunt for the items I still need to complete my build. Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to really push greater rifts.

The leveling this season felt a little faster than normal for me, probably because I spent the whole time grouped up. Even more than that though, the gearing has felt super fast since you get handed a full set almost immediately. Looking through my bags, I still don’t have a full 6 piece of any other set yet, so in a previous season I’d still be hunting for that and probably struggling a bit. Instead I’m comfortably running on T7 and can pay more attention to things like leveling up my legendary gems instead of stressing about getting a set finished. I’m missing 3-4 items still for my build, but they are more helpful than critical so I don’t feel broken without them. I expect to get a huge boost to survivability once I finally get everything in place.

So how am I doing on my goals for this season so far?

Hit level 70 on Friday night. Done!
Complete the Seasonal Journey for the pet by the end of the weekend. Done!
Reach solo greater rift 50. (My best last season was 45). At 34 so far and there’s plenty of time!
Reach paragon level 400. (Last season I hit around 350). 180 and counting
Complete greater rift 30 with 2, 3, and 4 players. I want to do this soon while people are still active.
Bonus goals: Reach level 70 on a hardcore wizard or complete at least one set dungeon on a witchdoctor. I made a witchdoctor but I don’t want to level her until I’ve completed most of my other goals.

I think I’ve learned that I need to pace myself on group play. A few hours a week is fun but too much makes me want to delete my battlenet friends list and hide. I am making great progress toward my seasonal goals though, and had a lot of fun playing with folks this weekend. Next time around I just need to avoid 10 straight hours of group play…

Underwater Interlude

January 14, 2016 by Grace

Last night was very odd for me gaming-wise. It was one of those days where I got home from work and felt exhausted no matter what I did. My intention was to try out Warframe with the other Aggrochat folks, but it was taking a few minutes to download and I was getting sleepy and impatient. I spent a bunch of time staring at my Steam library and poking at things until I finally settled on Subnautica.

Reusing this image because these giant squid monsters are still amazing.

I talked about my feelings for this game a while ago when I first got into it. I really loved building a cool undersea base and exploring. Unfortunately a bit before the holidays they added an update that changed some of the terrain and messed up my structures. These are the perils of playing a game that is still in Steam early access. On the plus side, they do keep adding new cool things almost every month or two. The newest one supposedly lets you access some new areas of your crashed ship, so I definitely wanted to check it out.

Starting up a fresh game was a bit daunting after all the hours and work I had put in and lost, but it was the only way forward. I waffled for a minute trying to decide between a normal game, or an exploration-mode only setting where you don’t have to worry about silly things like food, water, or oxygen. Eventually I decided to stick with the normal survival mode, since the “story”, such as it is, supposedly doesn’t progress in exploration mode.

This game is perfect for relaxing. The sea creatures, underwater vistas, and even the music are very pretty and for the most part very chill. Sure, every once in a while a sea monster tried to eat me, but that’s a small price to pay. Starting from scratch was a little annoying, but within a half hour or so I had a store of food and water and an all-important O2 tank. By the end of the evening I had a 1-room structure and had even managed to build a mini-sub, so the next time I play I should be good to go exploring and gathering resources.

I didn’t manage to get far enough to start exploring the new stuff yet, but I did see some signs of the changes in the past few updates like new crafting recipes. I am incredibly glad I fired this game back up , it was a perfect calm way to spend the evening. If you weren’t sold before by “sweet underwater exploration plus building cool sea bases and submarines” then there’s probably nothing new that would change your mind. If you were on the fence though, it might be worth checking out. It is definitely more than enough to distract me until Diablo 3 takes over my world tomorrow night!

Old Year New Year

January 8, 2016 by Grace

Hello friends! It is a brand new year so it is a good excuse to try to get back in the habit of blogging regularly. I had some much needed time off over the holidays, and squeezed in a good amount of gaming. Here’s a quick summary:

The Good: Undertale

I’m just a few months late to this party but I have to say I’m very glad I finally got to play. It has been sitting in my Steam wishlist for a bit and a good friend gifted it to me for xmas (thank you, again!). I didn’t go in exactly blind, since I’d seen lots of folks discussing the game, but most of what I knew was focused on how the game is possible to beat without killing anything, and how it remembers and “judges” you if you do kill. I made it my mission to do a pacifist run, and was happy that I made it all the way to the king before I had to break down and look up how to finish a fight.

I played a lot in a hurry. It was that good.

I’m not sure what I can say about this game that hasn’t already been said before. I really enjoyed it, and it definitely gave me some feels. It did not make me cry but it came close. Gone Home still gets the prize for “made Gracie cry the most”. I have mixed feelings about how Undertale plays with the ideas of saved games, but I do understand why it works the way it does. I’m also glad I went in knowing I wanted to avoid killing at all costs. I don’t think my mental state would have dealt well with the guilt of murdering innocent monsters in addition to all the other stresses of the holidays.

Overall I am super glad I played this game, really enjoyed most of it and absolutely loved some of it. If you have interest in it I’d suggest picking it up. I think it is worth a try if the turn-based rpg style isn’t an immediate turn-off. The music alone is worth the price of admission.

The Adequate: SWTOR

I managed to somehow avoid Star Wars hype for the most part. While my friends were getting increasingly excited as the movie premiere approached, I was busy hardening my heart. I guess I had been burned too deeply by the prequels to have much hope. I did still get tickets for opening night, I just tried not to have any expectations. Then I saw the movie and fell in love with Star Wars all over again and all bets were off. No, it wasn’t perfect, but it was fun and funny and had a kick-ass jedi and creepy sith and adorable droid and my entire holiday became colored with Star Wars fever. Thanks Disney, you managed to pry my heart and wallet wide open again for all things Star Wars.

The only screenshot I remembered to take. At least I’m cute.

In a fit of Star Wars fever I did something I had vowed I’d never do again: I subbed to SWTOR for a month. Sure, it is F2P, but the F2P model is so punitive that if you want to play at all you might as well sub or not bother. I rolled up an Imperial Agent because that seems class most folks say has the best story, and I hadn’t seen it yet.

SWTOR was having some sort of bonus XP event, and with their new adaptive level scaling thing I ended up hitting the level cap of 65 well before I had even finished chapter 1 of my class story. This felt very odd, since the game was trying to gently shove me toward the new content, while I just wanted to finish the story without getting it spoiled. Once I hit 65 I stopped doing any quests except the class story ones just to get through it faster, which reminded me how much the game likes to send you back and forth between planets. During normal leveling it isn’t too noticeable but when you’re just doing the story quests it feels like you’re spending more time traveling than questing.

I eventually did finish the main (level 50) story for the agent, and promptly closed the game and have not logged back in since. The story was quite good compared to most of the other ones I had seen, and I still haven’t figured how it ranks in comparison yet. My bottom line seems to be that it was a good story but it didn’t feel “Star Wars” enough for me, especially right in the middle of my movie-fueled fever. The Sith Warrior for example, felt like a fairly strong story and way more Star Wars flavored. In any case I don’t regret the time and money spent, but it didn’t quite do what I wanted in terms of scratching my Star Wars itch. In retrospect, I probably should have picked a class that gets a lightsaber.

The Inexplicably Unsatisfying: WildStar

I love WildStar, and still think of it as my “home” MMO. But for whatever reason over the holidays I just could not get invested in it no matter how hard I tried. I still logged in almost every day, and did some of the holiday Protostar event stuff, but my heart just wasn’t in it. Some of this had to do with me needing some “alone time”, which meant I needed a change of scenery from my usual game. Part of the problem may have also been that I had too many other games vying for my attention, and the attraction of new shiny things is strong.

Bringing holiday cheer, for money!

I think some of it was also due to plain old liking the halloween event better than the xmas one. For me there’s no contest between the two holidays in real life, candy and spooky stuff are just way more fun than trees and snow. In-game, I liked the Shade’s Eve expedition much more. I love the idea of the mall in the sky, and the changing rotation of challenges each time you play through. However I wish some of the challenges were combat-based. it just didn’t feel like the rest of the expeditions to me and after a few runs I got tired of clicking on things in a way that I somehow don’t get tired of shooting things.

I ended up playing far far less than I did during Shade’s Eve, and never even got all of the rewards. I did at least get my rowsdower slippers, because I do have my priorities right.

The “Why am I still here?”: WoW

I subbed for a 2nd month of WoW using in-game gold. I’m not entirely sure why. This is the game that perpetually feels like going to visit your old home town long after you’ve moved away and lost touch with all your old high school buddies. It is technically the same place but everything is changed and even though it is familiar and you can’t help but go back once in a while to see how it looks it mostly ends up reminding you that the good old days are well and truly gone.

I continue to play almost completely solo, mostly running old raids for mounts and such, and messing with the follower system to earn more gold to buy more game tokens. It feels a bit like a self-perpetuating treadmill, but it is familiar and easy and oddly comforting in its way. My goal is to stockpile at least 3 more WoW tokens this month, and then take a hiatus until Legion is on the horizon.

I think a huge part of my indifference to WoW is that I have a huge stable of characters on a server where I have no friends and no guild. I can’t force myself to reroll someplace else because it is too hard to walk away from the self-sufficiency and gameplay options of 6 level 100 characters, and I can’t transfer because the cost of moving one character is prohibitive right now, much less 6-8. To make matters worse, by far most of my WoW-playing friends are Alliance side and my main stable of characters is Horde. So I play by myself because it feels like I don’t have much choice. I’m planning to use my 100 boost to plant a character on a server with my friends once I save up to buy Legion.

The WTF is this Even?: Hatoful Boyfriend Holiday Star

It’s ok, your hunter-gatherer instincts will save you!

I loved me some Hatoful Boyfriend, so when I saw that this holiday-themed addition was coming out in December I knew I’d be on board. I still haven’t finished the whole thing, but so far it has been enjoyable in a “I don’t know what is happening but I like it” sort of way. It feels even more like a visual novel and less like a game than the original, but I’m more used to the style now and am happy to just hang on for the ride. My main disappointment has been that I haven’t actually been able to date any birbs. I will be reporting back on this one once I finally finish it.

So that was my holiday gaming for 2015. Enjoyable. Comfortable. A little weird. Just the way the holidays should be.

Letting go of Healing

December 16, 2015 by Grace

Don’t worry friends, I’ll be talking about Winterfest very very soon! First, though, I have something I need to get off my chest.

My flavor of healing in FFXIV.

My mental image of myself as a gamer includes the idea that I am a healer. It is something that is deeply tied to my gaming identity, but it wasn’t always that way. In the olden times when I played Dungeons and Dragons I stayed pretty far away from cleric types. I loved being a wizard or a ranger or even a fighter. The closest I came to healing was when I played a druid, but even then I always focused on shapeshifting into fuzzy animals and hugging things to death. My few healing spells were just backups in case something happened to our real healer.

Fast forward to my early days in World of Warcraft. I initially leveled a paladin and really wanted to tank. Unfortunately for me this was during BC when “pally” and “tank” didn’t fit too well together in a sentence. I got frustrated by my guild’s requests that I go healing on that toon, and gave up on her. Ironically, I ended up leveling a priest, and eventually fell in love with healing with her.

As I wandered through other MMOs over the years I still gravitated toward classes that had a healing option. Even in the ones where I didn’t have a guild or friends playing with me, like TSW, I still unlocked healing options just in case. But I have noticed a trend over time, where I am less inclined to heal random group content. There was a time when I would cheerfully throw myself at healing random pugs in WoW. When I played RIFT I was excited about the group finder. In SWTOR I had a reputation for constantly pugging, against everyone’s better judgement. More recently I’ve become wary. I still pugged as a healer in FFXIV, but usually only after I had learned the dungeon. In WildStar I’ve only run vet and raid content as a DPS. During my recent return to WoW I’ve been doing LFR a bit…but only on my mage.

I wish I could pinpoint exactly when this change began, or exactly why. I do have some ideas though. Healing is definitely more stressful, which is part of the reason why I love it so much. It is more of a challenge to me than maintaining a DPS rotation. However, it feels like lately people just want to speed run though dungeons. This leads to giant pulls, tanks that can’t aggro everything, and groups that chain pull and don’t stop moving for the entire instance. Frankly I hate it. As a healer, especially one with “casual grade” gear, it is challenging enough for me to keep everyone topped off on a normal run. The “gogogo” mentality makes things a thousand times worse. Dungeons go from an entertaining diversion to more stress than I want to deal with.

I think the other key piece for me is that because healing is such a big part of my gamer identity, I take a lot of pride in my ability. This means that when people speed run and things go wrong I get double frustrated. Once by the horror of chain pulls etc., and once by my inability to cope with it. I’m a good healer! I should be able to handle it! When I can’t handle it I feel awful. Am I getting bad at games? Probably not. But I can tell you I took it super personally when I got kicked out of a random group for my “shitty heals” this weekend. Even though not one person had died that run.

Unchecking that button makes me sad.

Queuing as a DPS is a huge breath of fresh air, and not just because I have to spend more time outside in the world waiting for the queue to pop. It is no longer my problem if the tank chain pulls, as long as I do my best to kill everything. I know for a fact that my skills as a damage dealer are far below my healing reflexes, but I couldn’t care less. I can feel good when I out DPS the tank. I’ve never even been kicked as a DPS, even though I know I’m awful. Nobody seems to notice you if you keep your head down and don’t act like an ass. It’s so freeing! As you know I love expeditions in WildStar, and one of the great things about them is they can easily be done with no tank or healer at all. Just what I need right now.

I know I’ll probably never really let go of the healing mantle. Especially when I actually have a guild or group of friends to run with it will always be my preferred role. As a solo player, though, I’ll be pew pew pewing for the time being. My game time is too precious to spend it stressed out and unhappy.