MMORPG – Page 210

A Warm Blanket

August 1, 2017 by Belghast

Today marks the beginning of the whole “Daily Creative Thing” business and while you might have been expecting something from me… unfortunately you can’t really expect me to get up and do creativity by six in the morning. Sitting down and writing out a blog post is challenging enough. I am however planning on making something happen today or tonight depending upon when the muse hits me. The other big thing going on today is that it is my Nineteenth wedding anniversary, and while I am not entirely certain what we are doing to mark the occasion yet I am sure we will come up with something. In truth what it will probably mean is that my wife and I go out to dinner, and then wander around hitting the various stores and checking to see if they have started marking down their back to school stuff yet. “School Supply Season” is like Christmas for my wife, and while this is not exactly the normal thing for people to get excited about… it is for a teacher. I’ve spent many an hour over the years scrounging for one last folder or ruler or package of gluesticks for her classroom.

Work is still madness and I am still finding myself deep in the throes of turtle mode. Honestly more than anything what happens during these times is I resort to comfort gaming. I end up dusting off a game that I had not been playing that much and spend a significant chunk of time roaming around its world. Lately that has meant an awful lot of Rift because much like Phantasy Star Online yesterday… I carry a significant torch for this game as well. In honor of the occasion I decided to vary up my default wardrobe a bit from what I had been running around in the first screenshot… to what I am now running around in… which is honestly mostly just some dye and swapping a few pieces. I never managed to hit the “Prophecy of” level cap and I’ve just been working my way through any of the content that I had left to do in various zones. So far the thing that I am liking the most about the content is the way that each zone has this major event that takes place at the very end of the zone that ties up a bunch of loose threads from various quests and packages it neatly in this really epic fight. In many ways Rift feels like a game from a different time, and this has both good and bad aspects to it. The bad is it feels much slower than other MMOs and the time to kill and time to level can feel a little grating at times. However on the good side this is also this same thing that makes it feel familiar and lived in… and something that I can return to over and over to wear it like a blanket. The main problem that I have with Rift that ultimately causes me to wander away is that I don’t have my social infrastructure here. My circle of friends that I record the podcast and game on a nightly basis with… have moved on past this game and will likely never return. At this point I think I am just too set in my ways to branch out and build new communities, and I also know that I will soon return to the fold and wander away from the game myself.

Another game I have been playing a not insignificant amount of is Fallout 4. This runs pretty damned smoothly on the laptop and it has been a recent go to for when I want to wander around a world and explore a bit. In the theme of carrying torches for games… I have loved Fallout since I saved up my pennies to buy the first game when it released back in 1997. I was going to college at the time and not really buying many games, but still made a beeline to Walmart to pick it up once I knew they had it in stock. Side note… that was literally the only place in town that sold PC games and was before the mass expansion of Game Stop. At that point Software Etc and Babbages still existed as separate entities as well as Comp USA and the unrelated Circuit City and Computer City. When the games made the tradition to the open world format I was skeptical but quickly got on board thanks to my love of the Elder Scrolls games. Now the modern Fallout games serve as this familiar touchstone that I can keep returning to anytime I need solace. I’ve started countless games of Fallout 3 and New Vegas and it seems like now I am carrying that tradition over into Fallout 4 as well. My default play mode tends to be to wander towards a corner of the map and do whatever happens to be there. I am not really big for following larger quests in this game, and I likely would have never actually beaten it were it not for the fact that we chose this as a game club game… and I felt obligated to do so. Gaming in general for me is not ever really about beating the game… but more about existing in that game world for a period of time. The game world of choice is determined by whatever mood I happen to be in. Fallout for me tends to be for when I am in a slower paced mood and want to wander around aimlessly dispensing frontier justice on the raiders.

AggroChat #167 – The Stormblood Show

May 21, 2019July 30, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo

This week it is finally time to record the show for the AggroChat July Game Club Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood. This is one of the smarter picks we have made thusfar as far as club titles, because we knew we would all be playing Stormblood when the expansion launched. As a result we have held back when we talked about the game prior to this show a bit, thinking that we would unleash everything during this show. We talk for almost two hours about what might be some of the best of Final Fantasy XIV. This is a spoilery show so if you have not completed Stormblood I highly suggest you file this away for a later date.

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Assorted Turtling

July 27, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was an exceedingly stressful day, and that combined with the fact that my wife is out of town… lead to a sudden bout of turtling. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature… I go through these periods where I feel like I need to pull my head into my shell to attempt to remain sane. I’m thankful that I have a few friends that get it, and don’t give me too much hassle about it, but every so often I just reach this point where I need to disconnect from humanity. Last night was one of those nights and I cycled restlessly through a whole bunch of games to see if I could find something that would fit well enough to pass the evening in. The negative is that in theory this should have been a night I was tanking in Final Fantasy XIV, but I just could not handle communicating with others… or having anyone I cared about relying on me. The irony is that I wound up for a bit early in the evening in Destiny… and absolutely wound up carrying two other players hard through a random strike. I took a screenshot not because it is impressive… but because it shows the massive difference between my participation and that of the other two. This was on the Wretched Eye strike… and I wound up kiting the Ogre… and DPSing most things down… and resurrecting the other two people constantly. Now I know what Squirrel and Jex feel like when I run with them.

From there I wound up back downstairs and watched the last episode of Handmaid’s Tale… which is maybe not the best idea to watch when you are already feeling depressed. While doing so I ended booting up Rift and playing around some there. I am still level 67 and working on the Gedlo Badlands, which is not exactly my favorite zone so far. Moonshade Highlands is my jam, and I have never been that big of a fan of desolate desert landscapes… especially not ones where everything is on fire. That said I did make a lot of progress knocking out various quests and while it still feels like my experience bar isn’t really moving… the constant ding of planar levels seems to help the feeling of being mired. I have been running around with a heavy Warlord hybrid build, and while I have been absent it seems to have been buffed significantly. Previously I had a lot of problems with struggling to kill a given mob in time before it killed me. Now I seem to be able to run around and wreck things pretty safely. My biggest complaint with Starfall Prophecy now Prophecy of Ahnket… are the legendary morphs of abilities. Each of them seems to read like it is going to be universally better than the original… but after taking a few of them they seem to FEEL worse. The biggest problem here is that you cannot undo them without paying for a respec…and then you have to remember what the hell you chose as a spec down to the point where you screwed up and chose the wrong legendary morph. Personally I think the system should just be a toggle, and that you can have X number of legendaries toggled on equal to the number you have earned.

I also played a little Secret World Legends, which is something I seem to do just about every day… or at the very least I am logging in to get the rewards. I am not completely sold on the game but I am enjoying it enough to keep showing up and experiencing it. The combat feels fresh enough to make going through a bunch of quests I did long long ago feel worth it. My key complaint however is the game still does a piss poor job of clearly identifying which quests you have completed and which ones you have not. That was one of my biggest problems with the game is to log in and roam around through a sea of cutely named quests… that all sort of blend together in my head making it impossible to sort out if I have or have not completed them. This was even worse when it came to expansion content going into the game, and blending in among all of those other quests that I did a year ago. So far blade and elemental is fun enough, but I find myself really missing the shotgun… and with the way gear levels up in this game I feel like I am really not in a great place to switch gears at any point soon. I do have an extremely low level shotgun sitting in my inventory and I might try swapping it out at some point soon just to see if it is viable. I’ve moved on to the Savage Coast but there is honestly still a lot in Kingsmouth that I have never really gotten around to completing. My biggest complaint overall is as compared to the original… the drop rates of anything meaningful in the world is nonexistent. All of your gear seems to come from lootbags gained through doing quests… so I have a feeling that a big part of the “endgame” is going to be repeating quests on the daily reset to get more stuff to fuse into your gear. That doesn’t really bode well for those players that are not a big fan of grindy mechanics.

Four Necros

July 21, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was the beginning of a brand new season in Diablo 3, and once again Grace and myself did our hang out and level new characters thing. Traditionally these season opens happen on a Friday night, so there is always the ability to stay up until we hit the level cap. Granted that has not actually happened in awhile with us usually crashing somewhere in range of 60. Yesterday was a bit of a weird situation with the season open happening on a “School Night” as it were, which curbed our play session around 10 pm my time. I finally called it because I was starting to drift off at the keyboard and when I did none of the other three players seemed to complain much about it. I’ve been on this odd kick of going to bed around 10/10:30 which is significantly earlier than my traditional midnight. Maybe my age is finally catching up with me? Whatever the case… we managed to hit somewhere in the range of 47 before calling it a night.

Considering this is the first season post Rise of the Necromancer… you can probably already imagine that we were a party of four… and an army of dozens and dozens of undead following us around. Can I just tell you how glorious it is to see four Necros doing their Necro thing? We ran a bunch of Neph Rifts as is the traditional best leveling practice… and we got some insane spawns out of the gate that wound up boosting our characters significantly in the few hours we actually played. There was one relatively small rift map that literally had almost nothing but yellow and blue packs which mean’t we had summoned the guardian well before we were actually prepared for it. Necromancers have a really weird power curve in that they still start out a little weak, at least when it comes to raw damage output. That Rift Guardian took forever for us to whittle down with our undergeared level 5 selves… but within a few levels we were easily breaking apart and churning through a full round of bounties solo style. At the point I left the seasonal content last night, I had reached effectively the same build of abilities that I was using on my level 70 necromancer.

Left Click – Bone Spike (Path of Bones)
Right Click – Blood Rush (Transfusion)
1 – Revive (Purgatory)
2 – Command Skeletons (Frenzy)
3 – Command Golem (Bone Golem)
4 – Skeletal Mage (Skeleton Archer)
Fueled By Death Passive
Commander of the Risen Dead Passive
Extended Servitude Passive

Path of Bones is my favorite builder in part because I can sit back a long ways from the targets and still be gaining essense while my bone army chews stuff apart. Transfuion is largely as a reasonable way of getting back some health while also providing an escape mechanism. There is rarely a time when I would need to use it… that I am not going to at least pass through a few enemies during the travel time. Bone Golem just makes for a really nice AOE damage dealer… and it was hilarious when the four of us needed to do a boss and unleashed that all at the same time. Revive becomes the bread and butter way of getting extra attackers and quickly becomes more useful than the meat firework option that is corpse explosion. What I like about purgatory is that it means I can keep recycling targets because when your revives die they turn back into corpses. Functionally what I do is play with Flesh Golem up until the point I get this ability and then thankfully you can switch over to Bone Golem without losing a source of corpses. The necromancer is insanely fun and if you have not played it yet, I highly suggest checking it out.