leveling – Page 6

Contagion and Chill

March 18, 2016 by Belghast

Sofa Time

It’s been a shockingly busy week for me, and most of it was completely unexpected. Monday through Wednesday I had my boss out, which means I get to not only be myself… but also him for all purposes. Which means my “general and administrative” time goes through the roof while attending meetings, and juggling things from the other managers in our department that need resources for this or that. On the gaming front I was equally busy, with Monday and Tuesday largely being either prep time for the raid or actually raiding. Then Wednesday night we had the World of Warcraft raid, and while it didn’t actually make I was ended up getting pulled into tank some Mythic Dungeons for Valor. So when I got home last night, that was the first night of the week when I didn’t already have something planned. After doing a round of exercises in our newly reclaimed home gym in the garage… I plunked down on the sofa and spent the rest of the evening playing The Division. A whole bunch of stuff happened that has greatly improved my outlook on the coming levels.

Firstly I did in fact move on towards the higher level areas, and there I started getting either upgrades for just green drops like crazy. The other big change is that I have started vendoring most of the stuff I get because I am simply not getting enough blueprints fast enough to be able to keep myself outfitted in crafted gear, namely not the weapons. Because of this influx of cash I managed to pick up a nice new marksman rifle, and a brand new LSW that have greatly improved my ability to kill things. The biggest splurge of the night was a purple chest piece I found on one of the vendors that has over 250 armor. At the end of last night I was just shy of level 17 and have been cleaning up on the higher level stuff. I unlocked a security tree perk that allows me to see all of the intel that I missed along the way once I complete all of the side missions for an area. As such tonight I will likely be poking around and picking these up for quick and easy experience boosts, and start cleaning out the low level zones again. I had been concerned about how roaming the low level areas meant I was only going up against lower level mobs… but then I quickly did the math and realized that the bulk of my experience is coming from quests and objectives… and grinding mobs is next to meaningless. I kinda miss the days when grinding lots and lots of mobs was a viable means of leveling… since that is ultimately my instinct anyways.

Focusing In

Right now I think my best path is to try my best to push through to level thirty. I want to run around and spend time in the Dark Zone, but I feel like that is largely useless until I get somewhere near the cap since the items dropping won’t be staying with me all that long. I also noticed that before I upgraded to the 15+ DZ area the mobs were dropping level 11ish gear which really wasn’t that useful. Now that I have moved up to the next tier, everything is way over my level and simply not doable without a group. The fact that you get zero leveling experience while in the Dark Zone really makes me want to avoid it at least until I have capped out my character. So as we go through the weekend I plan on slowly prodding along and picking up as many levels as I can. Now that I am almost 17… 30 seems significantly closer and given that I went from 15 to 17 in essentially a single night. Tonight I plan on picking up the rest of the intel that I missed, and then focusing on going back to higher zone questing. I’ve completely most of Central Park, and then will move on the higher tier zones after that. The side missions and encounters all seem to go pretty quickly, it is the missions that are ultimately the ones that I end up having to rez multiple times while doing.

The game is honestly much more difficult than I expected it to be, especially as a largely solo player. The gear really matters, and when I got the two new weapons I am using… I saw a massive increase in how successful I was in completing encounters. The thing I struggle with right now is how much I like to snipe and how hard it is to remain in cover when there are a bunch of mobs gunning for me. I’ve never tried the turret but I am contemplating using that as a way to draw fire away from me so I can get off a round of head shots to whittle down the opponents quickly. In truth there are simply a lot of time with the Rikers folks that I have better luck just bobbing and weaving in and out of cover while firing my light machine gun. Really it is the other snipers that are the bane of my existence, and the folks who fire off a heavy machine gun. Though the last is largely due to my impatience and not wanting to always wait for them to need to reload. I am still very much enjoying the game, I just wish I had more time to play it. I hope this weekend I will have some more time to just hang out and chill out on Sunday and can maybe get into some grouping time with friends also playing.

Hellfire and Gronnlings

February 18, 2016 by Belghast

Enter the Ramparts

Some things changed between yesterdays post and last nights festivities. Firstly I largely abandoned the notion of playing a Monk tank, because I got to thinking about what my actual “goal” was. That goal being helping Grace get a foothold on my server of choice, and prepping her for eventual raid shenanigans. My general theory was that still the fastest way to do that… would be to push hard on running the outland instances as a duo… with me largely just wrecking thinks with thunderclap. We however lacked the finesse to realize that it seems like the absolute best choice here is to hang out at Hellfire Ramparts until the person you are pulling is around level 65 and thus qualified to run all of the various Outland dungeon quests. Without a doubt, after having done all of the lower level Outland dungeons…. Hellfire is the fastest and in theory you could run it fast enough to push up another character extremely quickly. Sure it slowed down significantly after she reached sixty one, but I think the completion bonus would have been enough to keep pushing forward. Granted we probably would have hit the instance lockout of I believe 10 instances per hour… and had to take a brief break here or there. Still I firmly believe that had we actually stuck to this plan… Grace would have been in Wrath of the Lich King already instead of just on the cusp of it.

All told for the evening we managed to push her from 57 to 67 before I simply lost steam. With the recent illness, I have also largely weaned myself off of caffeine other than my morning coffee. This also seems to mean that my ability to stay awake and keep doing the same thing without getting drowsy… has also been adversely effected. I want to say we started up the dungeon train around 6pm and finished up around 8:30 so I guess 10 levels in that time is not that shabby. Essentially we ran normal and heroic versions of Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, Slave Pens, Underbogs, Mana Tombs, Auchenai Crypts, Sethek Halls, and finally Shadow Labyrinth. There was a period of time where we had to chain run Slave Pens for a bit… which is pretty much the point we realize that we should have been doing that with Hellfire Ramparts instead. Now we simply need to push a little harder to get out of Outland and into Northrend… though if WoWHead is correct we might not be able to do Utgarde Keep until 69. That is the big thing we are realizing through doing this is the strange quirks as to when you can zone into a specific dungeon. They don’t seem to make much sense, and it feels like at some point they just decided to pick random numbers that don’t actually relate to the quests you are receiving. Basically I am realizing that the older content has suffered greatly for all of the redistribution of crap that happened in Pandaria and Warlords.

Gronnback Riding

In other news I finally managed to get the Garrison mission that rewards the Coalfist Gronnling mount. I am honestly just not sure what I think about it… I mean ANY mount is a positive because it increases the total number of mounts I have and moves me closer to all of those achievements… but riding this thing…. it is ridiculously big. Warlords of Draenor has been the expansion of humongous mounts… from the Corehound mount from the 40 man Molten Core, to the Grinch Yeti… this is very much an expansion of irrational land yacht style mounts. As cool as I might think this mount is… I just cannot foresee myself ever riding it. When you ride around on it, the animation is in such a way as it feels like you are just about to fall off of the back… which strangely causes all sorts of anxiety in me. Regardless I am happy to knock another mount off the long list of mounts that I do not have. At some point I would love to get a group together and camp the various world mounts from Draenor, because as of right now I have ZERO of them.

Breakup on Reentry

September 10, 2015 by Belghast

Returning Players

If you have followed me for any length of time you realize I play an awful lot of games. One of those traits also involves going back and re-exploring games that I have long consigned to the dust bin. One of the challenges with this lifestyle however is trying to figure out what the hell you were doing some six months ago when you last touched a game. This morning I want to talk about a problem that most games have. As content is released there is often times no real thought about the folks that will come back to the game several patches behind. While there is generally one game that I stay up to date with, and that game currently is Final Fantasy XIV… the others sit in various states of completion with no real easy route back to where I last left off. What ends up happening generally is that I start a brand new character, because it is simply easier to start fresh than try and sort out the options open to a formerly “level capped” character. As a programmer it seems like it would be easy to create some sort of new features tool that lead you to what has been recently added to the game. Various games have attempted this, and honestly Final Fantasy XIV has one of the better versions of this technology… but it could still use a lot of work.

World of Warcraft has these quest boards in main cities that are supposed to lead you to the starting quests of new areas. The problem being that you level so damned fast in that game that you always are well ahead of the quest completion curve. The worst offender however has to be The Secret World. In that game every single quest is essentially repeatable, so even if you are up to date… it can be a challenge to sort out what quests are new in a given region. The last quest content I completed was the “Last Train to Cairo” from Issue 6, and even then I think I missed most of Issue 5 because I didn’t quite know where to start to find it. Now we are sitting at Issue 12 and I know I have a ton of awesome content waiting on me. As each has been released I have popped in to spend some of the lifetime membership currency that I gain each month. The problem being… without significant research on my part I have no real idea where to start to even begin trying to sort these out. I spend most of my free time consuming MMO content… and if this bothers me… it has to be an impassible wall to more casually interested players.

Content Advisement

With the launch of Cataclysm, the World of Warcraft attempted to solve this problem by creating a series of billboards spread throughout the major cities that are designed to give you the start of a quest chain leading into new zones. The problem there is that you level too damned fast, and I constantly had a back log of these quests telling me to go to various zones that were less than optimal for my questing experience. While I applaud their efforts… I think all of these MMOs need to do a much better job at giving players advisement as to what they should be doing. What I envision is an optional box that says what zone you should be in based on your level and or gear, and provide a series of quest suggestions that you never completed. If there is a holiday going on, it should prioritize this and if you are at the level cap it should guide you to the next patch worth of content that you had not experienced. This would go a long way in making returning players feel welcome and relevant in the game experience. Considering I have done this dozens of times… I can tell you that returning to an MMO that you tucked neatly away into your past… is a completely overwhelming experience.

Firstly you have to sort out your bags, because I have not left a single MMO in a state where I did not have hundreds of items in my inventory with no memory of what was actually useful and what was simply dross that I picked up while killing things. Next you have to sort out your quest log, which also is never really left in a neat state. If you are the level cap you generally have a mixture of quests that you never completed and quests from whatever happens to be the current “daily” hub. Upon returning generally speaking neither of these is much use, but at the same time I find it just as hard to sort through my quest log as it was to sort through my bags. What I really want is some intelligence guiding my decisions. Present me with options of things that players in my level range are normally doing. Help me get back into your game, and set down roots again. It honestly shocks me that no game company seems to have thought this one through. There are a fixed number of new players out there, so many times established games are just trading their populations over time. Anything a game can do to make it more “sticky” for returning players has to ultimately help the bottom line.

Breakup on Reentry

Like I said Final Fantasy XIV does a decent job at this, but their own advisement window is greatly limited based on several factors. The biggest is that most of the items in the list are limited to the zone you are currently in. In the case of a returning player, they may or may not know what zone they should even be in. For years I have been trying to play Star Wars the Old Republic again. The problem being that I always end up playing on an alt character because it is simply too confusing to try and sort out what I should be doing on any of my three previously max level characters. My original instinct has always been to go to the space station hub for my faction. Problem there is that there were no sign of new quests. I have repeated this process dozens of times, until last night it finally dawned on me that I should maybe return to my starship. Sure enough waiting there for me was a quest chain starter leading me to Makeb. The problem being… that since it took me two years to finally find this quest it was anything but obvious, which tells me there is a problem with the way the systems are working.

What got me on this topic was yesterday some friends and I were listing off “must have” features for an MMO. Which got me thinking… that this is the one feature that no MMO really does a decent job of. Please someone out there… put some thought into the experience of returning players. The answer is not to ignore all of the content that came before. The answer is to help players go back and experience the things that they missed. As a result some sort of intelligent system is well worth the time it takes to build. All we are really talking is a handful of database queries based on a few parameters, and then returning the relevant items to a window. This would go so far into making returning players feel like they matter and are welcome in the game. I cannot count the number of games that I have reinstalled… only to leave after a single night of trying to sort out what it was that I was doing when I last played. In each case I “wanted” to play the game, but the game required more out of me than I was willing to give it. When this situation happens all I really needed was a breadcrumb to lead me to what I should be focusing on. On the positive side I did finally start the post release content in Star Wars the Old Republic, which is a thing I have been passively trying to do since the free to play conversion. I would really like to see where that story goes before the launch of Fallen Empire.

Exploring Draumheim

August 14, 2015 by Belghast

Great Sell-Off

Normally this morning I would go into my new game picks for the coming week to serve as alternate writing fodder to Blaugust. However that is not going to happen because I am not really feeling like writing that post today. I am struggling right now with a mix of allergies and asthma that have conspired to make me miserable. One of the things about being sick is that you tend to surround yourself by things that feel comfortable or nostalgic. Just as there is comfort food, there is also comfort gaming… and when I feel like shit I find myself wandered off into games I have pushed to the side. Essentially when I am feeling my worst I am lease capable of dealing with the stress of interacting with other people. As such yesterday and last night I ventured into a realm where almost nobody knows my name anymore… Telara. Rift was one of my games of the week for this past week, and with it comes a series of problems. Namely when I log in I am staring at a bag and bank full of dimension items and crafting materials. I am not sure if you are the same as me in this aspect, but if my bags are a mess there are so many times I will log in and then log right back out because I cannot be bothered to fix that situation. Honestly if I don’t do something quickly in Final Fantasy XIV I will be nearing that point as all of my retainers are clogged and my inventory continues to get more and more semi-permanent additions.

With Rift however I finally did something drastic. Last October Rift released the Nightmare Tides expansion, and I still don’t have a character to the new level cap of 65. During this time I have been accumulating crafting materials from doing the Minions minigame, and quite honestly I have more than I will ever actually use. By the time I actually get around to hitting the level cap I will more than likely have just as much materials I do now. So instead I decided to reinstall BananAH and post every single crafting material on the Auction House. It cost a lot of plat to post everything, but luckily by the end of the night I had managed to quadruple the amount of plat I had going into this experiment, and there are still a bunch of auctions up there that may or may not have sold over night. The money gained was a side benefit, the real mission was simply to clear the shit out of my inventory. At some point I will do the same with the various housing bits, because there are some things I will quite literally never end up using in any design. With the bags clear however I finally felt like I could actually go out into the world questing, and it improved my outlook on the game considerably.

Figuring Logistics

While the great sell-off took care of one issue keeping me from playing Rift, I still had another big one standing in my way. Rift has quite possibly one of the most complicated character creation systems, namely that for a given class you can have any combination of three different souls from a pool of ten potential souls for each slot. If my math is correct… and I would seriously question that… but I believe that gives us 120 possible combinations with a pool of 76 talent points to distribute between your three trees. What I am trying to say is that basically every time I decide to play the game it requires a bunch of research on my part to determine what the current “viable” builds are and what purposes they serve. To say that Rift changes a lot is an understatement… they are constantly patching the game and tweaking things and often times these have ramifications have effects that trickle out and make or break the last patches specs. The class that I tend to care about the most however is the Warrior, and while I have a level 60 rogue and a level 60 cleric… I tend to mostly focus on Belghast first and foremost. So over the last week I have poked around the Class Guide forums and stumbled onto one that looked promising titled: Warrior Solo Leveling (61-65). Luckily it was not too far off from the build that I had tried leveling with before, so I was able to tweak out my hot bars without much issue.

One of the big strengths of Rift is also one of it’s great weaknesses. The macro system is excellent and allows you to do some really interesting things with it. The problem being the game also gives you so many sideways and optional abilities that you feel like you are required to macro everything together for fear that you miss some opportunity for not having 32 fingers to hit abilities with. The big thing I like about this incarnation of the soloing build is that essentially I am really only using one macro, and all that does is chain a series of high cool-down single target abilities onto Empowering Strike. The combo point dump abilities are on my bar separately, as is the main reactionary ability that I hit after using one of them. The feeling is that things are less random than they have felt before when I have played a suggested spec. I am hitting buttons largely because I know what the effect is going to be, and because I want to use it at that moment. Sure I still have one single mixed bag ability, but it feels like it is less important than the things I am not macroing. The other big thing is that it seems like my survival has gone up significantly, which was a huge problem I had previously. I am still under level for the region I am hunting in, but I am wondering if that just means that I missed something important in the previous zone.

Exploring Draumheim

At this point I had a spec and I had clean enough bags to be able to venture out into the world. I had two ports available in Draumheim so I grabbed one and hoped that I had picked the right one. It seems that I did as when I landed there were numerous quests available. The zone is extremely cool with all manner of nightmarish abominations wandering around in the midst of the ocean that is being drained away. The coolest thing about Draumheim is that it seems to be a nightmarish echo of Telara. There are numerous places in the zone that represent areas from the game, for example there is absolutely a version of Meridian and Sanctum as well as a nightmarish version of Port Scion. Similarly I ran into a copy of the great toad-like Greenscale, who represented the aspect of hunger. When I first attempted to play Nightmare Tides I was not sure if I liked it or not, largely because I am not the biggest fan of underwater settings in MMOs. Now almost a year later the subtlety of the expansion is starting to sink in. It is less about us traveling to the physical plane of water, and more about us traveling into the physical manifestation of dreams and nightmares. Nothing in the zones are quite what they seem, and last night I ended up helping out a series of existentially confused hay bales… and I am not making that up… they are quite literally named that.

I still wish we had a more directed questing experience similar to the old world. I know they went in this direction as a way of distancing themselves from the standard questing format of MMOs, but personally I find it somewhat lacking. The story that is there is really good, but there just doesn’t feel like there is enough of it. Mostly it feels like you can’t get through the content by only following the quests. Instead of feeling like questing is optional it feels like I have to do every single quest, and do every single carnage quest that pops up when you kill any mobs… and still do some dungeons or instant adventures or you run into the situation I am in… where I am one to two levels below the content I am trying to do. The leveling experience is much less directed, and this is a change that went in with Storm Legion… but the end result in both expansions was me constantly wondering what I am supposed to be doing next. For most MMOs the leveling experience gets better over time, but I feel like Rift went in the opposite direction. I get it that quest content is fairly expensive to create, and without the subscription model they don’t have that stable source of monthly income to keep said quest content coming. The quests that are here however are really good, and one I did last night took me through a series of “computers” that showed little recorded vignettes from the past, all of them fully voice acted. I like all of the things they have done to make finding quests more interactive… but I wish we had more hub based quests as well to fill in the gaps in content. I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t enjoy myself however, because I absolutely did. I needed a game where I could be anonymous and lose myself in the experience of playing an MMO, and that is precisely what Rift gave me yesterday. I still very much love Trion and the team behind Rift, and it is one of the games I will continue to suggest people check out on a regular basis. I feel like they did the absolute best job of a free to play conversion that I have experienced to date, and I am willing to keep giving them more of my money. I am just nostalgia for the way that questing used to feel in Rift is all.