lfr – Page 2 – AggroChat

Sleepy Raiding

December 9, 2015 by Belghast

Bleary Eyed

For whatever reason this week has been significantly more difficult than most. I’ve been struggling with maintaining consciousness, and by that I mean it feels like I have just been dragging my way along through slowly drying concrete. I am not sure if this is still a side effect of letting me get completely out of my sleep schedule over the Thanksgiving break… or instead just that I slept horribly on Sunday night. It might also be that I seem to be fighting some cold like crap that just doesn’t seem to want to let go of me. Whatever the case, I’ve been tired enough to sleep at 8pm most nights, and generally finally give into its sirens call around 10pm. Since getting the new Kindle I end up reading for a bit until my eyes are too tired to keep propped open, and then finally I sleep. From everything I can tell I am sleeping extremely soundly because I when I finally wake up it feels like I’ve slept the entire night through. The only problem is I have been waking up 20-30 minutes ahead of the alarm clock. I know I should just get on up… but its cold out in the real world and the bed is so comfy.

I keep thinking at some point I will have repaid whatever sleep debt I have built up, but then again… I’ve never slept the supposedly needed 8 hours a night. Maybe I have decades worth of lost sleep waiting to be repaid and it is finally catching up with me. Whatever the case, I am struggling… which means that when I am actually online I tend to be wandering around aimlessly. Over the last several nights I have missed message after message in game by friends, and I always feel horrible when it happens. Sometimes it is simply the scroll of combat, other times I am alt tabbed out looking at something else. In any case right now in this current daze I am struggling to keep moving forward, let alone be functional when it comes to interacting with others. I seriously feel like I could take the day off… and sleep literally all day right now. Unfortunately I am not sure if that would do me a world of good… or simply make this whole situation worse.

Heading for Burnout

Last night one of my friends commented that I was probably heading for a burnout by trying to raid on both Horde and Alliance… and there is at least part of me that absolutely believes her. While I intend on making the Wednesday night raid tonight, I know at some point there is going to be a place where I simply cannot make both raids each week. In truth I have been feeling the desire and need to go off and level something new, instead of doing nothing but level capped content. Right now however it seems like all I have time for is to attempt running LFR on Belghast and Belgrace… and that simply doesn’t leave much time left for the rest of the activities. At least on Belghast I managed to pick up a 695 warforged baleful weapon, which gives me something decent to move forward with. On the cow I have a 690 two hander that has been valor upgraded twice, so once again a completely viable weapon. There are technically slots where LFR gear would potentially be an upgrade, but I am starting to question the logic of running it just for those handful of potential upgrades. I need to run Highmaul on the Cow for abbrogator stones, and Hellfire on Belghast for tomes… but past that I think I am going to cut out the rest of the LFR unless I am literally gearing a new character.

Looking for Raid is cool in the aspect of being on demand raiding with zero commitment. The problem being… it always feels like slamming your face against a wall even when it goes smoothly. Highmaul was really fun to LFR because it went so quickly, and you could pretty much ignore all of the mechanics. Hellfire however… the bosses just feel like drudgery when doing it with a group of randoms. Don’t get me wrong I love the feel of that place when I am running with players that are going to do the things they need to do to make it through the fights. But both Hellfire and Blackrock are both “real enough” to make them frustrating when folks are attempting to faceroll them. I seriously have yet to get a group that has a shot in hell of doing Archimonde. Generally speaking I get grouped into a raid that has already failed a few times… as a replacement, and we then wipe five or six times… and ultimately end up leaving because over half the raid abandons ship. I really think that the perfect LFR fight takes no longer than five minutes to kill, because that seems to be the absolute upperbound of PUG attention.

Timewalking

I noticed this morning that the Burning Crusade era Timewalking event has started, and I have to say… I am kinda amped. Granted I would have rather they simply made Timewalking a permanent part of the game, but I left the game before it actually went in. So I am hoping to be able to do several of the dungeons to get the feel of how they work. I have a whole bunch of nostalgia about the Burning Crusade dungeon running experience, and the thought of getting modern versions of the items I used to love… seems pretty awesome. Then again at the 675 ilevel cap… the items will pretty much just go in the transmog bin. I am not sure which side of the fence I will focus on, but whatever the case I just want to see some of the dungeons. Similarly I really want to experience the Mythic dungeon content, but in order to do that I really want to find a group to go in with. That does not seem like something that would be fun in any fashion to pug. Mostly… I am hoping I get over whatever thing I am going through, and can remain awake enough to function at a high level in content. Today already seems like a pretty sleepy day… so I am not holding out much hope. I guess my general answer is to feed myself enough caffeine until I begin to function appropriately.

Monday LFR

December 7, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Show

I have not been in the habit of linking AggroChat in my blog lately, but I am going to do it this morning. It took for freaking ever for the YouTube version of the podcast to finally upload yesterday, but I feel like this weeks show ended up really good. There were a bunch of topics that branched out but the big one and the one I chose the name the episode was over a discussion about Otome. A friend of mine Pizza Maid and her equally awesome named friend Sushi Geisha have this podcast called Heroines of the Cherry Blossom, where they talk about Otome games. This was not a term that even exists in my vocabulary before this week, when they referenced our Hatoful Boyfriend episode on the podcast. Essentially the side discussion that spawned was about how Tam was impressed with the quality of the writing of these various relatively low budget dating sims that he played in preparation for our Hatoful Boyfriend show. The general consensus was that we would all like to see this deeply nuanced writing make its way into more mainstream titles as well.

Another interesting side discussion centered around the point in which we all tune out when it comes to an open world or sandbox game experience. For each of us there seems to be a point where we are just “done” with the game even if we are not truly finished with all of the content. For me personally I am never really “done” but I reach this point where I have to take a break and play something else for awhile. But then by the time I return to the game I rarely remember what I was doing at that point and end up having to restart the game… usually going in a slightly different direction than the original play through. I know this past week with my focus on trying to chew through the quest content… I am enjoying Fallout 4 significantly less than when I was just wandering aimlessly. For others on the podcast they found themselves HAVING to focus on the story, to keep from losing interest. In any case… we recorded a really content dense episode… which then surprised when editing that it ended up being a fairly short episode at only an hour and fifteen minutes.

Monday Night LFR

I find myself once again in the unfortunate position of needing to run LFR on a Monday night. The last chance crew in any MMO seems to always be the worst crew… and unfortunately due to the push in Fallout 4 I didn’t get any of this done earlier in the week. There are a bunch of reasons why I am pushing last minute raids, but not the least of which is… I am still trying to build out a tank set on the Cow. There was a point in last nights raid where they absolutely would have used me in a tanking capacity had I a set of gear. The problem is largely that I have plenty of armor… but since the Cow was a boosted character… I only went into level 100 with a single set of gear. Normally as I level up, I pick up both a mix of two-handers for dps… and sword and board options for tanking, but I have had zero luck in getting anything I could use for tanking. So I quite literally have a full set of gear that would be viable… minus the sword and shield. So tonight part of the plan is to run through Blackrock Foundry since it mostly features gear lower than what I need… and set the loot preference to protection, hoping that maybe just maybe I end up with a one handed weapon of some sort and a shield. I technically have a 650 shield banked that would work well enough for the time being.

On the other side of the fence I am still using the 670 Blackrock Foundry normal mode weapon that I have for ages… because I never could get any of the heroic bosses we were downing to drop me a weapon. Similarly I have opened dozens of Garrison boxes… all with zero luck in finding a damned weapon to use. So in addition to running Blackrock, I also really need to run through Hellfire Citadel LFR on Belghast. While I feel like BRF is probably going to go smoothly simply because most people have the gear for it… I have a feeling that Monday night Hellfire is going to be pure hell. The only thing that I maybe have gone on my side… is that there are generally more active alliance players on my battlegroup than there are horde, and I can definitely see that still is the case in the difference in my queue times between the two. At very least I am going to struggle through the first few rounds of the raid because that seems to have the best chance of dropping me a weapon. I have a pretty decent shield now, so really all I need is that main hand. I even went so far as to purchase a Baleful Armament with some of my excess stones… and only managed to get a 650. In theory if I save up for a bit I could maybe manage to push that to a 695. The other option is to have my blacksmith start trying to craft me one, but given the silly amount of materials it would take to make that happen… I am hoping I simply have some decent luck this Wednesday during the raid.

Week In Gaming 12/5/2015

December 6, 2015 by Belghast

Sunday Madness

Today my posts and the AggroChat podcast are coming out a little late, because reasons. My wife has this thing at church this morning, and stuff was not going very much as planned. So instead of wrapping up the podcast when I got up, I went into the mode of attempting to support my wife as she flailed around the house trying to get everything ready. I don’t really do the religion thing, but it is important to my wife so I’ve always attempted to support her in whatever way she needs. Normally speaking I would have been further along in the podcast creation process by the time I slept last night, but instead I decided to have a knock down drag out fight with Amazon. There is an item that starting last Tuesday, has been updating daily to tell me it would be there by 8pm the next day. This has drug on for several days… and the FedEx tracking that I finally received shows that there is no way it is going to be here until sometime at the end of next week. Needless to say I was more than a little perturbed, and ended up trying to get to the bottom of it.

Where I feel bad however is that I know I took out some of my frustrations on the agents that were working the case. I realize why companies hide their chat functionality, but overall it is a horrible practice, that only leads customers to be pissed as hell by the time they FINALLY get a hold of a person to talk to about their issues. I know I probably came off as a mad man, but seriously… I’ve been an Amazon customer since around 2000, and been a prime member for I think as long as the program has existed. I keep that active so that I can have items here in two days… and there have been a lot of times in the past where they actually have it here next day. Since the swap to using the US Postal Service however, I have had several delayed orders… and this one just seems to be another in that line of problems. The worst part about it is.. that after spending over an hour last night trying to get someone to tell me where the ball was dropped… no one seemed to have any answers. I did however get two months of prime added to my account apparently to appease me, so I guess that makes up for some of the frustration. I have no doubt that the item will arrive and be just fine… but man this situation has been annoying. It is nothing nearly as bad as Tam and Amazon quite literally losing his shipment.

The Week of Warcraft

For the most part this was in fact the Week of Warcraft as I am attempting to play both characters on Argent Dawn Alliance side… and the joined The Scryers server Horde side. This means there are two different communities that I am trying to be an active part of, and as a result pretty much everything else I am doing has fallen by the wayside. Part of my Sunday ritual is to go downstairs and watch a sequence of television shows until ultimately it is time for bed. However during this sequence I got pulled into the Horde side guild raid with my friends in the awesomely named Facepull. Between some gear upgrades from drops and some crafted gear by the amazing Brerhoof it took me to around the 670 range. Now after some LFR this week I am sitting at 679 so a stones throw away from 680. I have two parts left to do of LFR and my hope is at some point before this evening I can actually get them knocked out and will hopefully see some more upgrades. My lowest piece on the Paladin is his necklace which is still the level 640 boosted green gear. In theory if I get lucky I could get a baleful item to drop while I am doing dailies… which I also need to do at some point. I have everything enchanted and gemmed… at least with cheap enchants and gems so my performance as a whole should be better tonight… that is if they still want me to come and pewpewpew things.

Then Wednesday night I was invited to raid with some twitter folk that I have known for ages. There I brought my Alliance Warrior Belghast, and similarly have made some jumps in gearing as the week went out. I started the week at 680 and have bumped it a little bit up to 684. This is still a long ways off from the 705-710 range that I need to be in order to really function in Heroic for the Friendship Moose fun, but whatever I am enjoying the process. In both cases I was mostly a fly on the wall as the raid went about their business, but I could see myself enjoying both situations greatly. It is my hope that in both scenarios are am invited back for future weeks, and in spite of my crummy gear I still managed to end up I think 3rd in total damage done for the raid. My burst dps is still on the weak range, but I am throwing out a lot of total damage which still is nice. Gladiator is such a fun spec that I am really going to hate losing once the expansion ships. I guess there is hope at a later date that they might revive the spec, but I seriously imagine it was just too hard to balance when it essentially took all of the same gear that tanks did… which means that my overall survival is among the highest of the dps classes. In any case I am having fun… and that is what really matters right?

Reaching Diamond City

The original plan for this week was to record our final Fallout 4 show last night, and because of that I felt this overwhelming need to have completed the storyline. This means that a good chunk of this week I was pushing hard to get through the main story, and I have to say… it was some of the most miserable I have been playing Fallout ever. My play style is very much a “forget the story exists” method, where I wander aimlessly and go explore whatever happens to suit my fancy. This means there is a lot of ADD induced gaming as I see what that building over there in the distance is, or go explore that wrecked vehicle there because it looks interesting. The result is that I spend a lot of time playing, but not a lot of time getting anywhere specific. With the severe content density that is the Commonwealth, it means I had at 70 hours not gotten anywhere vaguely close to Diamond City. I knew where it was, but I was busy wandering around the Cambridge area and exploring lots of little nooks and crannies.

Instead this week I forced myself to follow the storyline, and while it is really awesome… and there are lots of interesting characters… the entire process feels forced. I mean it IS forced, because I am trying hard to play in a style that is not natural to me. I talked about this for quite a bit on the podcast last night, but essentially most of the time I don’t like it when games end. In Mass Effect 2, I enjoyed every moment of the side missions… but it felt like all of my fun was being sucked down a drain the moment I started that sequence of events that lead to the end of the game. I want these worlds and settings.. and characters that I have created to essentially live on forever… and the sooner I “beat” a game… the sooner that fun for me is over. I think in part this is why I like the MMO so much, because my characters never have to go away… they just keep going on and changing and adapting as new content is released. So as it looks like we are pushing off the Fallout 4 show a bit… I am going to try and find a happy medium where I alternate between following story… and also spending some time following my heart.

Tauren Flight Form

December 1, 2015 by Belghast

Rose-colored Lenses

Last night was the night when I finally realized that playing Horde was not some magical and happy place free from assholes. Over the last several days it has been pretty great, and I have casually bumped into people that I have slantwise known on the server. I was beginning to think that the Horde were simply more mature players than the Alliance folks that I had been so used to dealing with. That apparently is not the case… I simply had a really lucky streak. I have to say the Facepull guild has been amazing, and it is actually drawing me out of my own little world that I seem to get stuck in so many times. Last night Laughingly that everyone calls “Gigs” convinced me to join her and Martoxis in a Supreme Lord Kazzak raid. Now me and Kazzak have a long history, namely from the days when people would pull him to Stormwind and he would ultimately need to be despawned by a GM because it got too powerful. So I guess in a way I knew what I was getting myself in for, but Gigs promised this version was no big deal. She even went so far as to give us a Mammoth ride to the location, and everything seemed pretty awesome for a bit.

Then we started summoning people… and I was simply doing my part and clicking the portals to get people here faster. At some point during this rush a mage perfectly summoned a portal to Hillsbrad Foothills… aka where Dalaran USED to be. A handful of us mistakenly clicked it… including myself and Gigs… and we quickly fell to our deaths. At which point someone pulls the boss, locking us out of the loot. So while I was raging inside… I attempted calmly rez and get my way back to Tanaan Jungle. I honestly didn’t even think of that being a thing that someone would do… but I guess now I know to be cautious. It feels like however fate rewarded me for my frustrations, because on the next attempt I managed to get a drop both from the boss and from the token… which gave me not one but two different 705 trinkets: Chipped Soul Prism and Mark of Supreme Doom. Well worth a fall to my death… that honestly I should have survived with a bubble, but I was simply too shocked to react in time.

Last Call LFR

On the Alliance side of the house, there has been a long standing rule… that you do not under any circumstances do Looking For Raid content any night other than Tuesday and MAYBE Wednesday at the latest. The closer you get to Monday the worse the groups get, and you only ever set foot in an LFR dungeon on a Monday night if you have a significant death wish. Once again I thought maybe the rules of the universe simply didn’t function the same on the Horde side, because I did several LFR runs on Saturday and Sunday and had a pretty good time of it. The groups were calm and reasoned, and we simply wrecked stuff and got loot as a result. So even thought I had the shitty experience with the asshole mage in Kazzak, I decided to brave the unwashed masses and venture forth into Monday LFR. My first sign that something was wrong, should have been that the DPS queue was roughly an hour. I however had stuff I wanted to do out in Tanaan Jungle so I queued up and before I knew it… it was popping. At first things seemed to go more or less pretty well. We downed the first boss with ease… then when we got to the second boss… it took two attempts. Finally the third boss took three attempts… so things seemed to be going downhill. However with the miracle of determination we were able to get through it.

Then I queued for Archimonde… aka the Black Gate. Firstly I have to say how awesome I think it is that you are essentially fighting the demons that besieged Mount Hyjal. I’ve been running quite a bit of Mount Hyjal attempting to get that really awesome two handed sword for my paladin. The end game of World of Warcraft or any game… is really collecting outfits for transmogging. Needless to say… Archimonde did not go well. I was assured by my guildies that this fight was a little overtuned even for LFR, and that most groups struggle with it. However after our fourth wipe, we lost literally half of the raid and I found myself exiting as well. So in my first week of really being “back” I managed to raid Normal Hellfire Citadel through Gorefiend, all of Blackrock Foundry LFR, and all but Archimonde in the Hellfire Citadel LFR. The only thing that I wish I had managed to squeeze in there was Highmaul LFR, simply because I am in desperate need of Abrogator Stones. Playing catch up on the legendary ring quest is going to be a massive pain in the butt, because I remember just how many weeks it took me actively raiding Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry to get all the necessary bits to complete that thing.

A Reason for Facebook

Another interesting side note is that it seems Facepull hangs out pretty much exclusively on Facebook. This is the one social media network I have actively shunned over the years, namely because of some bad first experiences with it. I technically have a Facebook account because it is connected to this blog, and I namely use it to syndicate my posts to the Tales of the Aggronaut page. What is going to be interesting is this may give me a reason to actually use it on a regular basis, seeing as they seem to use it in place of the traditional guild forum. The other funny side note is that apparently yesterday they found my blog posts thanks to Nubzy linking it to said facebook group. So hey folks if you are reading this! Apparently Obi was a bit grumpy that I didn’t mention him in my blog post, so I am going out of my way to remedy that today. I’ve known Nubzy and Obi since I believe Vanilla, or at the very least since early Burning Crusade. They have followed me into many games and I have always considered them both to be part of my extended family. I am just happy to finally make good on my threat of playing something on their side of the fence. I still say however that World of Warcraft would be a better game if they just tore the fence down, letting battle.net friends play together regardless of what faction they happened to enjoy the most. That said I really am starting to enjoy being a bull.