MMORPG – Page 223

Derpest Dungeon

January 24, 2017 by Belghast

Last night did not exactly go as intended, but it was a pretty great night nonetheless. Originally I had hopes of getting a Mythic+ group together so that I could use my +5 Maw of Souls keystone. That said I didn’t really exert a whole lot of effort in finding it either, and when I finally got settled in for the night after a bunch of idling there were only a handful of us on. Instead I opted to work on my time walking dungeons in the hopes that I might get more of that tasty tasty Essence of Aman’Thul from the weekly quest. When we got a group together it consisted of Rylacus and his son Tinoke who both still needed 2 dungeons… myself who needed 4 and then Bled and Phy just because they are awesome and love me enough to do a bunch of time walking dungeons. In truth I had completely pug tanked one of the dungeons so I could have suffered through it if I had to, but I enjoy tanking for my friends way more than I enjoy tanking for strangers. In any case we got to chit chat back and forth on Discord while doing the dungeons and that made the four go much faster. I had hoped by the time we finished there might be more people around, so we could pull together that Mythic+ but alas that was not the case. In truth I am guessing it was a good thing since a crisis arose while we were doing the Time Walking heroics.

I hate printers, probably more than any piece of equipment ever. They never seem to work as intended and always require an inordinate amount of fiddling. One of the things you have to know is that many nights my wife can print as much as an entire ream of paper for her class. When I am upstairs I am also at least in part the warden of the printer, and get yelled up at to fix issues when they arrise. Now earlier in the evening she was printing perfectly fine… and then all of the sudden things stopped spooling entirely. I tried my best to correctly diagnose the problem, but none of the rampant googling actually provided anything that was useful. Of note… we have a massive workgroup printer that weighs about 200 lbs and is precariously connected to a machine that acts as a print server via parallel to usb cable. It works 99% of the time but is just brittle enough to make me constantly uncertain of what might be causing the problem. We tried a sequence of rebooting the laptop and rebooting the “server” to no luck. She was able to hit file shares on the “server” without issue, but any time she tried to access the printer it said that it did not exist. However I could print to that printer from any other computer on the network so the connection was still there and active. Finally in my destination I started fiddling with home group settings, and changed her share settings because I was literally trying everything I could reasonably think of. Instantly it was like something refreshed her machines permissions and she could suddenly see the printer and life was once again good. Once again… let me express my undying hatred for printers.

Apparently Tam had been trying to get a hold of me while deep in printer diagnosis hell. Over the weekend I made a vague attempt to catch up on the Final Fantasy XIV content, but hit a both literal and figurative wall… in the form of the Baelsar’s Wall instance. I was not about to pug tank it… and it turns out apparently I couldn’t anyways because my item level is too low. I am currently sitting at 220 but apparently need 230 to get there. When I finally got patched up and logged in, Ash was needing to go to bed which left us with Tam and Kodra and seeing as I had not actually run any of the second half of the derpest dungeon, we opted to form a group for that. I have to say… while I have struggled in the past to get in and have fun… the deepest dungeon really hit the spot. The deepest dungeon serves the purpose of being quite possibly the easiest way to get weapon upgrades, with a mini game system that I have talked about in the past that involves collecting “gear” and leveling both your weapon and armor to 30. When you have collected 30 you can turn that in for a very solid 235 weapon which would be a sizable upgrade for me. Now when I entered last night I was sitting at the point where I stopped playing last time… which was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 weapon and 14 armor. By the end of the night if I remember correctly I was sitting at 30 weapon and 28 armor… so pretty close to being able to collect my first weapon. It seems like the 51-100 floors move your item levels considerably faster… either that or we simply got lucky. To be honest, I had more fun in FFXIV last night than I have in a long time… and the above screenshot is there to simply serve as a reminder to just how insane Cactuar is as a server.

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.

Nighthold and Senpai

January 19, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to pull myself out of my recent funk and actually get more than a modicum of excitement about the prospects of raid night once again. On Tuesday The Nighthold opened and since we are a Wednesday night raid we hoped that any weirdities would be resolved by then and we could simply get in and start working on clearing new and interesting things. Thankfully that was the case and we moved forward with only the most spartan scribbled notes to go from as we pushed our way through the boss fights. We are not exactly a super serious raid, but that said it is nice to keep moving and doing things that are at least progression for our purposes. Before the launch of Nighthold we managed to clear both Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor on Normal, and push all of the way through Heroic Emerald Nightmare and even got it on farm status. We have a bit of an odd structure in that we raid a single night each week, and then have a second night on Friday that is completely optional. So up until this week we had been doing Heroic Emerald Nightmare on Wednesdays and attempting to clear Normal Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor all within a pretty compressed Friday night. For the most part it has worked out pretty well for us, because Friday gives us a night to start bringing folks who are maybe not geared enough for the more serious content.

As far as the fights that we saw… I have to say they were really fun. We are very much a raid that learns on its feet, or at least needs multiple attempts to sort out the fight. However generally speaking once we have a fight sorted as such, we then can pretty much repeat it every single week regardless of the exact raid composition. Skorpyron was absolutely a case of me trying to sort out how exactly to do the tether mechanic effectively and I think we managed to get it down on our third or fourth attempt… going pretty much from chain rezzing tanks to clear within the space of a single attempt. Chronomatic Anomaly was its own special hell, but we sorted out how to deal with the tank swaps and the add phases… and the fact that the boss could be moved if only slightly towards the add when it first spawns making the “dunk” go much more smoothly. Sidenote… the dunk absolutely reminds me of a handful of fights in Destiny where you have to pick up an orb and then slam it down somewhere else… so I got a bit nostalgic there. We then moved on to Trilliax… the fight where we get to eat cake… and play with roombas. To be truthful as the tank I am not entirely certain what is going on other than the fact that it sounded like madness, because Art and I spent our entire time worrying about tank swaps and trying to kite the boss around the room… or prepping for the next kite phase. I know it somehow involved eating cake and not eating cake and not allowing the roombas to have any cake. Whatever the case after a couple of attempts we had one of those slow wipes to the finish line that ended up with a boss kill.

@belghast Well done!

— World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) January 19, 2017

Throughout the night I had been tweeting out each time we downed a boss because I knew there were a few people who could not make it last night, and also a good chunk of our guild as a whole is on twitter. Over the years I have sorta adopted people and smuggled them into my guild, and now you have the end result that tends to be an amalgamation of awesome. We were working on clearing the insane amount of trash on the way to Spellblade Aluriel when I got a Battle.net message from a friend of mine that lives on the other side of the faction fence. He excitedly told me that I apparently got a congratz message from the official World of Warcraft account, and when I alt tabbed over to check myself… sure enough there was the above message as well as a handful of favorites to go with it. Senpai apparently noticed us, and smiled upon our progress. I won’t lie… it gave me and still does give me a bit of an afterglow of warm fuzzies. We continued on and put in a little work on Spellblade Aluriel, and managed to at least push into phase 2 before needing to call it for the night. Like I said we are a bit of an odd case when it comes to raiding because we raid 8 to 10:30 EST, and try really hard not to push too far over that line. So in that 2 1/2 hours minus a break in the middle when our first flask wears out we managed to clear 3 bosses and at least reach a point of understanding with the fourth. As is always the case I am certain we will speed up in week too, because it honestly felt like last night we spent more time talking out strategies than actually fighting things. All in all though it was a pretty great night of raiding in a really pretty instance with some seemingly fun encounters.

Honor the Green

January 17, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to wrap up Greenshade and move on to the next zone Malabal Tor. The funny thing about “leveling” through content in the post 50 game is that you lose all focus of how far you have actually come. When I started playing again recently I was sitting about Champion rank 115, but at this very moment after doing the introductory quest line in Malabal Tor I am sitting at 141. Both numbers seem like utter nonsense in the grand scheme of things, other than the fact that I am constantly getting incrementally more useful. That said the mobs around me are getting incrementally more crafty at all times as well, but I am uncertain where the theoretical “max level” at least for gear advancement sits. As of right now the highest level thing I have seen on any of the guild vendors is 160, which doesn’t really tell me if that is the actual max, or just the maximum that is reasonable to craft. I have done a shockingly minimal amount of research so far during this return to Elder Scrolls Online, because in truth… I had a path laid out before me already and that is to simply keep questing. It might be madness but I really would like to finish up Aldmeri Dominion and then quest my way through all of Ebonheart before starting any of the DLC content. Considering that the DLC lets you start it at literally any moment… I am guessing this is pure madness and not something most players do.

Back to the whole having no basis on how far I have actually come in progress… I was absolutely thinking that Malabal Tor was going to be the last zone in the AD content, and apparently I was completely wrong. After this zone I still have Reaper’s March which is fine by me because I am actually enjoying myself in this content way more than I ever thought I would. It is not exactly a surprise to anyone who has read my blog for very long… but I am not a huge fan of elves. My friend Tam has this theory that every player is inherently either a Dwarf of an Elf and the two paths rarely cross. I am absolutely a Dwarf and I tend to love all of the normal aesthetically wonderful things about Dwarfdom. That said the Elder Scrolls setting as a whole does some weird things with what is and is not an Elf… since technically both Dwarves and Orcs are elves in this setting. Essentially in Elder Scrolls you have the races of “men”, the races of the “mer”, and then the beastmen which probably have a similar name or at least should. Now in Skyrim… I go out of my way to kill Thalmor on sight… even if it is ultimately going to cause me issues. In The Elder Scrolls Online I find out that the Thalmor are largely a militant group of “Elven Supremacists” that most people don’t like… and often times actively hate. This subtle difference makes it significantly easier for me to actually like the elves while playing through the elf dominated content.

That said… I have also found a certain Kinship with the Khajiit… which was to be expected, but also the Bosmer which I was not entirely prepared for. I mean I have always liked the concept of the Green Pact and the existence of cannibal elves. However while actually questing through the Bosmer centric story content, it has been interesting to struggle with the same weird thin line that they do… of choosing what is common sense and what is honoring “The Green”. It is a testament to just how damned good the storytelling is in this game to get a notorious elf killer like myself… to convert to if not love… but at least a begrudging respect for the folks that don’t belong to the Thalmor. Of note… if given the chance I would still absolutely run around cheerfully slaughtering Thalmor. I am extremely happy though that the game has given me ample opportunity to at least embarrass a few of them for showing them to be the unsteady zealots that they really are. The only thing that I would have liked to have seen the game do… is throw in additional options for acknowledging the fact that you are an outlander while questing through the other two factions content. The highlight of yesterday however was dealing with Hermaeus Mora, one of my favorite of the Daedra… but also one of the more deadly. He presented me with a deal that I could not refuse… that I really wanted to refuse but felt the ramification of not taking it would be far worse. While at some point I know turtle mode will finish… I have a feeling that I will still remain engaged to the storytelling of this game for the near future and this is about to be my “off night” game of choice.