mmofps – Page 33 – AggroChat

The King Fell

March 9, 2016 by Belghast

The Ship Boss

Since the launch of Destiny I have had a desire to do the raid content… because that is the sort of thing I would do in any of the MMOs. Unfortunately Destiny never really gained the sort of traction that I would have liked among my circle of friends. Initially Tam and Ash and Kodra all played… but petered out pretty quickly. With the launch of The Taken King there was a bit of a resurgence, but similarly did not last terribly long. Another friend that would have probably happily joined in raid time fun… plays on a completely different console. I had gotten to the point where I kept considering trying to brute force a raid to happen by coaxing various friends who I know that play the game casually into joining me for madness. Then out of the blue my good friend Squirrel almost strong arms me into joining the raid with his clan Axioma, which in truth I jumped at the opportunity. Last night was that raid and I have to say I am hooked. Firstly the group of folks I went in with are amazing, and super chill about newbie failures. I cannot fathom how the first people to do this raid figured out some of the crap that you need to do. I swear it took me a solid thirty minutes to get through the ship encounter, where you have to jump from one ship at the right time as another one is fading from underneath you. All the while Wet was super supportive and coaxing me through the process, and while I felt horrible to taking so long to grasp the jumps… it was kinda awesome that they were willing to let me keep attempting it.

The entire night I was admittedly largely clueless and doing everything I could to listen to the directions and execute them to the best of my ability. When playing with a new group of folks, there is always the strong desire to “not fail miserably”. That said I still managed to cause us to wipe a few times, and regardless of the situation everyone was really relaxed and just kept plugging forward. I have to say this has done more than anything to validate my decision to follow Squirrel and jump clans, because it seems like this really is an amazing group of folks. I am just floored that I have gone from being a pre-raid super casual, to having defeated Oryx in a single night. I fully expected the rookie night raid thing to be a much harder slog, but I am guessing we had more than enough ringers to make the entire process feel more manageable. I would happily sign up for this every week, and while the loot is a huge draw… I really enjoyed the process of doing the fights and want to see them keep going more smoothly. My favorite of the fights was probably Golgoroth just because there is something special about taking down a jump sized Ogre. We managed to do the “challenge” version of Oryx… which suddenly makes me wonder just what the challenge versions of the other bosses are. I somewhat doubt that I will be able to attend the hard mode content, but I have to say normal mode was a freaking blast.

Shining Light

I think the thing that I appreciate the most about the King’s Fall encounter is the way that even though I was a first timer… I was still forced to do “real” mechanics. Sure the fact that everyone else was adept at the fights gave me significant more wiggle room, but I still had to do a job in the encounters. Being “carried” is not nearly the thing that it is in other games. For example when I got my Moose in World of Warcraft… my friends in the Praetorian Guard straight up carried me to victory. You could have completely removed my warm body from the equation and none of the fights would have gone any differently. Last night it felt like I had a purpose and I had a role to play, and when I failed to complete my assigned task… we wiped or at the very list struggled for a bit. I think this is largely because of the small raid size of only having six players. The bigger the raid the more padding, and just like in a ten player raid in WoW everyone has to be on point to succeed at a fight. We apparently took roughly three hours to clear the entire raid, but I have to say that the time flew by because all of it was fresh and new and exciting. I am sure the more you do this the less that will be the case, but for right now I am completely enamored with these encounters.

More amazing than pretty much anything however is the fact that I am finally off high center in this game and now have breached the 300 light barrier. You have to understand that I have been struggling bit by bit to get over the 300 light barrier for roughly six months in this game. Now admittedly that is not six months of constant play, but at very least I am spending a little bit of time on my titan every single week. Honestly after having played this game for as long and as often as I have… I am not sure there really is a viable way to hit 300 light apart from the raid. Above is a gallery of the items that I ended up snagging. The only thing not shown is a 300 ghost shell, which I have subsequently passed on to my hunter since I had a better option already on my Titan. The highlight of the evening however is the two weapon drops from Oryx. I guess because we did the challenge mode we were guaranteed a weapon, and I just happened to roll well and get one from the other chest also. Having both the raid Pulse Rifle and Auto Rifle would have honestly been the two weapons I would have chose had I been able to snag any of the ones available. Those tend to be my two favorite weapon types in Destiny, and while I have heard that the Auto rifle is less than amazing…. I want to give it a shot for myself. Basically over the next week I need to spend some time leveling all the new stuff that I managed to pick up. It was one hell of a night, and I greatly thank the Axioma Clan folks for taking me with them.

Not First Rodeo

March 8, 2016 by Belghast

The Waiting Game

Yesterday marked the official release of The Division… or at least it did in some parts of the country. Most of the evening was a simple case of me waiting around for the servers to unlock. My friend Lonrem apparently purchased his CD Key from a UK reseller, and as a result he was able to get in and play significantly earlier than the rest of us. It was completely unintentional as he was simply shopping around for the best deal, but I guess that is a neat trick for games like this that have a somewhat staggered launch cycle. The rest of us however had to wait for midnight eastern to pop in and attempt to play. I say attempt to play, because as the saying goes… this is not my first rodeo. To the best of my knowledge UbiSoft has never launched an MMO, so as a result I expected the first night to be extremely choppy. My only real complaint is the fact that I had to wait until around 11:50 to begin extracting the game from steam… which was a process that took over twenty minutes. I mean I get why they limit folks, but it seems like they could have flipped that switch about 11pm and let folks get through that step so they were quite literally ready to go when the final switch was thrown at midnight. The bulk of last night was me playing other things while waiting on access to The Division. My goal was simple… stay up long enough to create a character and then head to bed.

I played a little Destiny, and then ultimately retired to the sofa to piddle around. After doing my Garrison chores in World of Warcraft, I ultimately landed in How to Survive 2, which is a game that is really growing on me. It is not going to win any rewards for graphical fidelity, but there is something about it that I find appealing. Sunday I managed to get the first mission that straight up wrecked me, so last night I attempted it again but this time dialing down the difficulty a little bit. That is one of the things that I failed to notice at first is that you can repeat the missions, but each time you can adjust up or down the difficulty. This creates some interesting ways to get easy experience, as the very first mission objective is simply kill 5 undead… which you can do really quickly and if you crank up the slider to maximum difficulty you soak up lots of xp. The mission I struggled with was the very first night mission, which means I had to see everything by either spotty moonlight or by shining my flashlight around. This made exploring buildings as anxiety ridden for me as I imagine it would be for real in this situation. I found myself playing vastly differently… shutting doors after me to buy myself some time just like I used to board up windows in State of Decay. If that mission signals more of the game to come I am looking forward to seeing it, because I expect to repeat that mission a bunch just because it was extremely enjoyable trying to stay alive in a much more infected city at night.

Desert Parkour

I guess I was simply in a zombie mood because after playing a few missions in How to Survive 2, I moved over and booted up Dying Light. Now I have had a copy of this game for quite a while but never wound up playing it. I am not exactly sure why, because at least aspects of this game are right down my alley. The whole parkour thing… not so much, but their particular implementation is pretty great. At base level the game reminds me a lot of the fun I had running around the rooftops in Assassins Creed II, but this time… the citizens were out to kill me and I couldn’t really blend in among them. I feel like I am late to the party, but I had quite a bit of fun running the first several missions. I managed to make it through the tutorial and into the “real” game where I chose to remain offline, because I absolutely did not want some player showing up in my game and hunting me down as the “Night Hunter”. While I didn’t actually make it terribly far before feeling like I needed to log out and watch the clock again… I want to definitely pick this back up the next time I want a single player game. It seems like an amalgam of a bunch of other games that I enjoyed, and it looked gorgeous on my laptop and performed extremely well.

Crash and Burn

I already talked a bit about the frustrations of having to wait for the game to unpack, and while I had not intended to… I popped on voice chat to hang out with Tam, Kodra and Ashgar who were all waiting as well. Ash purchased through Uplay so he was up and running well before the rest of us. Tam, Kodra and I all seemed to get in around the same time and I apparently took significantly longer on the character creator than the other two. I was just about to finalize my appearance when I hit a server connection error. As expected the UPlay servers crashed and crashed hard. It was at this point that I decided to go to bed, because I doubted they would be playable for awhile. My key complaint with this game is that you are not sent to a menu first, so that means you have no access to the graphical settings until after you wade through the introduction. In the multiple betas I have played in and on multiple machines… this game has never once auto selected a viable graphics option. During beta it kept trying to tell me I could run the game on 4k… and this time around it seems to favor running the game in a postage stamp sized window. It is only after logging in and changing the settings that things became usable. Dear UbiSoft… never do this again… in a PC game the first screen you see should ALWAYS be the Graphics/Audio/Whatsit menu. I mean I get what they are going for… wrapping the player in story from the second they launch the game… but this could have been just as easily done from hitting the play button from a menu.

I managed to get into the game this morning, created my character and poked my way around the Brooklyn starter zone that we did not get to see during the beta. So far I am liking it, it feels like a less hectic version of Manhattan. I am not sure if I am simply better at the game than I was when I first played beta, or if the AI is really dumb… but I am mowing down the mobs in the Brooklyn area without issue. I like how often gear upgrades are dropping and at this point in the few minutes I have played I have already essentially swapped out my entire gear set other than weapon. The only frustration is that I really want to get to the rewards vendor so I can make sure all of the items that I supposedly unlocked are really available. I have an 8pm raid tonight in Destiny but it is my hope to pop in and play some Division tonight to maybe get out of tutorial land. If the servers stay stable… like will be golden. I don’t think there was anyone who has ever experiences an MMO launch that did not expect the servers to crash and burn last night. However in talking to my friend Ravener, it seems like they recovered pretty quickly and within an hour the game was completely playable for the rest of the night.

Day of Destiny

March 7, 2016 by Belghast

Axioma Clan

This weekend largely was a weekend for playing Destiny, or at the very least this was the primary activity for Sunday. The whole sequence of events started when my friend Squirrel mentioned that it was Black Spindle day, and that we needed to get that done. Which itself is a continuation of a conversation I had yesterday with him and several members of his clan. I mentioned it at the tail end of Saturday’s post, but one of the activities that I have really wanted to do over in Destiny is the Oryx raid. One of the challenges seems to be that you get stuck trying to get to 300 light level without access to the much higher light level raid items. For what feels like six months I have been hovering around 298 light, with no amount of activity seeming to push me over that barrier. As a result when Squirrel invited me to partake of a Tuesday night “newbie” raid for King’s Fall I jumped at the chance. Granted Tuesday night is also the prime night for playing The Division since it launches what I believe is essentially midnight EST tonight. That said I am more than happy to blow off that first night of a new game to be able to do the thing that I have been really wanting to do in Destiny. It had gotten to the point where I was going to try and twist a bunch of arms to try and get them to build a raid team to at the very least let me see the content. The prospect of being able to attend a more regular thing however… seems pretty great. It probably won’t be something I can do every week, but this week works out nicely.

So we zoom forward to yesterday, and I get the message that it is Black Spindle day. Now when I got this message it was like 8 in the morning and I was still having to wrap up the post production stuff for AggroChat, and then knock out my own Aggronaut blog post. Sadly by the time I finished everything… the Australian leader of the clan had gone to bed, and we were left with the normal non-primetime Sunday morning group of players. That did not stop Squirrel and I from running a Nightfall and a ton of Heroics back to back. From all of those strikes I managed to pick up a couple of decent exotics, and a few blues that are worthy of feeding into other things. I picked up Claws of Ahamkara for the Warlock, which gives me an extra melee attack which is always amazing. For the titan I picked up a new favorite chest piece, the Armamentarium which gives me an extra grenade. Finally I picked up the above weapon, the Thunderlord which fills a hole in my itemization that I had been looking for. I snagged Truth the rocket launcher and am extremely happy with it, but I had been wanting an Exotic Heavy Machine Gun… and bam I manage to pick one up today. Now I just need to go through the frustration of doing crucible with a sword to finish getting my exotic sword there.

The Spindle Hunt

The problem with yesterday is that I had a fixed time frame that I could do things in. I ultimately needed to be downstairs by 8 pm and so I could wrap some things up, and preferably be in bed at a decent hour. That gave me all day yesterday, but unfortunately for most of the time we were online we lacked a viable third. I am so thankful to Squirrel for the constant attempt to stir the chat and try and find someone. You might have noticed that among other things this weekend you will see that I now have the “Axioma” tag under my name, so that is something that happened as well. During all of my running around I also managed to get another level of Dead Orbit faction which rewarded me the sweet ship that you can see in the above image. Both of us ended up needing to take breaks every few hours, to go off and do a small bit of adulting here and there. The funny thing is… it is amazing how fast two hours can just evaporate when you are chain running heroics. It doesn’t seem like each of them takes that long, but when you stack a bunch of them end to end it really adds up. Finally around 5:30 we managed to get a spindle group together, which meant I needed to quickly learn the role of the Defender Titan on the fight. Please note… while I have a Defender spec, I don’t often play in it other than PVP… and even then its just for the Helm of Saint-14 procs that stun people in my bubbles. I am neither proficient or even effective as one most of the time… so I had a lot of ground to catch up.

We grabbed another Axioma member Jex who was also awesome in helping me sort out what I should be doing. For those who don’t understand the Black Spindle, it is an exotic sniper rifle that comes from the end of a daily heroic mission. The gotcha is that you have to do some stuff that is not intended to actually get it, and it is hands down the roughest thing I have done in this game so far. Essentially at the end of the normal mission you have to rush out of the final chamber and down a series of corridors, where you can’t really fight anything… but instead just need to keep moving forward and avoiding taking as much damage as you can. I believe there is some sort of time limit that you are under during that part, and you have to reach another area before it is considered safe and you can ease up a bit. You have essentially moved into the area where another strike takes place… and from there you proceed as normal for a few rooms until finally you take a detour down the path that would normally lead to the Ketch in the Shadow Thief strike. Now is where the difficult part begins… you take the elevator up into the Ketch and when you enter the first room with mobs, a timer starts. You have ten minutes to get to the end of the strike, take down the boss and destroy all of the taken. We were so damned close… and on my last attempt we literally had TWO mobs up when the timer ran out. There are a bunch of things that I can do to help… namely get my damned exotic sword so that the next time this is available it will be a little easier. Similarly I hope I pick up some gear in the raid on Tuesday so that my overall light level will be higher. I was frustrated that I felt like given another attempt or two… we would have gotten it. However I had pretty much all day to make attempts and simply ran out of time before I needed to pop off the PS4. There will always be a next time.

Iron Banner

February 27, 2016 by Belghast

Modem Death Cry

Last night was a bit of a strange night in that I once again flipped between games like mad. I started off in doing my daily love rocket frustration grind… and once again I have nothing to show for it. Then I popped into Dragon Age Inquisition for a bit, but I am having a hard time remembering just what the hell I was doing when I last played. So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and almost accidentally completed a quest. Finally at the end of the session I realized that I apparently have one of those major quests waiting in the queue where I go off to seal some breach somewhere… and have apparently been just avoiding completing it each time I have played lately. Once again I logged out sufficiently avoiding it, but at some point over the weekend I really need to finish it so that hopefully I can get back on stable ground once more with this game. Throughout all of this my wife and I were trying to catch up on iZombie because at this point we are about five episodes behind. It was around this point when the hulu stream stopped and I started having some issues staying connected to the network. I get upstairs and once again my modem is insanely hot, and my internet connection that normally tests out around 200 Mbps is testing 5 Mbps. I unplugged everything and did the “throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to cool it down” trick once more.

When I finally got everything back up and running… I decided to just hang out upstairs and play some Destiny. So I set forth on a sequence of events that wound up keeping me awake until midnight. Destiny is still that game that I can just play happily without much forethought. Since I had not done so in awhile I opted to do a heroic, and I have to say… it was pretty miserable. For whatever reason I almost always get the restorative mind when it comes to heroics…. which is essentially the destiny equivalent of the Oculus. No one that I know of likes it… because for starters it is a huge mission and involves the damned “move the orb” mechanic to keep pushing forward. Additionally there is a segment with a bunch of Vex Cyclops that are just annoying to deal with. Finally you have this horrible segment at the end, where you have to keep running the ball while trying to avoid the beam of death from the restorative mind… and at the same time avoiding waves of goblins and hobgoblins that spawn in. This is pretty easy to deal with in normal, but in heroic the stupid beam of death is quite literally that. I made it though and ended up with a few purples…. that wound up being disenchant fodder. I continued running 36 strikes from that point on until I finally got an Exotic to drop… which is ironically Truth, the weapon Xur is selling this week… but in a much better 290 version.

Player Versus

It is round about here that my night starts to get a little strange. I don’t hate the crucible but it is one of those activities that I never actually participate in. Similarly I have never done Iron Banner or Trials of Osiris… and I completely missed doing any of the Crimson Doubles. Essentially I am a no show for the player versus player activities, and I have no clue why… but on a whim last night I decided to start doing Iron Banner. Firstly I absolutely expected to be horrible, since Iron Banner is in theory worse for new players than Crucible. In the Crucible all players are scaled down gear wise to a happy medium allowing all players of all levels and gearings to be viable and on somewhat even ground. Iron Banner on the other hand does not scale the players down… and my lackluster 298 ass is nothing compared to the 330 folks that are running around in the zone. The funny thing is however that I seemed to do mostly okay. Sure there were occasions where I just got wrecked from out of nowhere, but there were lots of other occasions where I gunned down my target and even so much managed to get a three streak of kills before finally getting wrecked in return.

I think what makes this feel more enjoyable than a lot of the player versus player combat I have experiences is that it quite literally feels like there is no negative. You play a match, you shoot some people, and at the end of it there is a chance of loot. There are no repair bills, there are no lasting consequences… and even when you die you pretty much instantly respawn. This feels more like the old school Doom deathmatch gameplay that I originally cut my teeth on. Maybe I have shunned PVP all of this time without good reason. Sure I rarely broke 1.0 KDR but as the night went on I got significantly better. I even managed to pull a legendary from the place, and am pretty close to ranking up with the Iron Banner. I have to say I am shocked at just how much I enjoyed myself, and in truth I really need to do more crucible as a result. All of this kinda makes me look forward to the Dark Zone in The Division, because hopefully I can get a team together and we can roll around as a group exploring. Maybe I am not as carebear as I always thought I was.