MMORPG – Page 263

Rockets and Striders

February 25, 2016 by Belghast

Love Rocket Is A Lie

Last night I did little productive. I think I am still dealing with the after effects of not sleeping terribly well on Monday night, because I ended up going to bed insanely early. I did however get Witcher 3 installed on the new laptop, and it runs amazingly well. The strange thing is…. it almost runs better on the laptop on a mobile video card than it does upstairs on my desktop and a full fledged gtx 960. That has been the oddest revelation is just how little difference there has been in performance, and in some cases it seems to perform better. I am guessing that might be due to the difference of the laptop being a 4th gen i7 and my desktop being an FX-6300…. which if that is the case I guess I will be paying the Intel tax on all future systems. The bulk of my actual game time was switching between my six level 100 characters in World of Warcraft and trying to get the “Love Rocket” mount to drop. Now granted I have done this for several years at this point without luck, and quite honestly I am not sure why. Now the Headless Horseman mount is badass… and I can absolutely see why I chase that every single year I am actively playing during the Halloween event. I would absolutely use the hell out of a flying spectral horse, because it looks amazing.

The Love Rocket on the other hand…. I am largely just chasing because it exists and I don’t have it yet. Now I have had the Blue and Red rockets from the card game for years, and never end up using either of them…. largely because I don’t like the slight wobble while flying. So I cannot see how having a giant pink rocket is going to make that effect any better. That said… the thrill is in the hunt and even though I have gotten like a dozen pets… I am still going after the mount every single day. The best and worst part of the entire experience is when you go to click your Heart-Shaped Box… because for a moment you get a surge of hope… only to have it dashed quickly when you find nothing interesting inside. I think the worst part of the event are the Love Tokens, because seriously…. could they have just not made these BOA? There are some really cool things you can purchase with them like heirloom upgrades but by running the dungeon each day during the even you won’t get anywhere near enough to do something with them. Sure there are a bunch of quests that you can also do… but they are freaking annoying. I have my magenta drake from doing the holiday events, and I made a little promise to myself never to touch them again… well apart from the dungeon encounters.

Water Strider

The other big frustration for the player base right now seems to be the fact that the Water Strider is changing functionality in the latest Legion Alpha build notes. Original its restrictions were simply limited to “non-battleground areas” but it seems like they are greatly reducing its usefulness by limiting it to only Draenor and Pandaria. I absolutely get the frustration that players are feeling over this, because Blizzard honestly makes a bunch of bizarre calls. What I don’t get is why this seems to be the breaking point for some folks, and other even more confusing changes weren’t. What I have to somehow believe is that this is an additive effect of all of the fiddling that Legion seems to be doing… and that for some they are choosing to draw a line in the sand here. To those players… I promise that I understand your frustration. I am losing an entire spec… Gladiator will not exist in Legion and I have gone through the whole “seven stages of grief” thing over that. Being able to be a viable dps with a sword and a shield has always been my ultimate “player fantasy”. There is just something awesome about smashing mobs in the face with my shield, and a huge part of what kept me glued to Warlords as long as I was… was the ability to live out those dreams. The side effect of that however is that it was a horribly fiddly spec, that was difficult to itemize for…. and because of that I can absolutely understand why it is going the way of the Dodo.

To the players who are frustrated over this mount… I hear you… I really do. There have been many times in the past of this blog where I have railed on Blizzard for their failures. On March 25th of 2011 I wrote an article chronicling all of the things I saw as failures in the game in my “Is WoW the WoW-Killer?” post. I read through it yesterday… and it was a lot less ranty than I originally thought it was. The thing is… I’ve learned that it is absolutely okay to play other games. In fact I would say it is pretty damned healthy to shift back and forth between games on a regular basis. That sort of distance has allowed me to see the parts of the game that really are being done well, and learn to ignore some of the things that just out and out piss me off. Sure it means that I often disappear from World of Warcraft, and venture into other lands for awhile… but that distance allows me to blow off the steam and remember when I come back why I liked the game in the first place. I am not meaning this to be trite or offensive…. but if the Water Strider is your line in the sand… then really it might be time for you to go explore other games as well. I am not saying “leave” the game… just go play something else for a bit. The World of Warcraft is a great game, but during these long content doldrums it can also be an extremely frustrating game to be a fan of. Right now I am actively playing WoW, FFXIV, Destiny, ESO…. and planning on picking up The Division when it comes out… and hoping to return and play some more SWTOR at some point as well. Playing all of those games has in truth allowed me to more greatly appreciate the quirks and things that each of them do the best…. and to some extent ignore the faults. The only true statement is that there is no WoW Killer coming…. but instead a bunch of interesting games to explore that have their own rich communities.

Bunny Samurai Returns

February 24, 2016 by Belghast

Half Undressed

I am back on the wagon as far as cutting out caffeine during the evening. During my post PAX illness without really intending to, I quit drinking pop. Any time I attempted to it hurt my already ungodly sore throat so I switched to mostly drinking water, juice or fake koolaid. As a result my intake of Caffeine seriously plummeted, causing a few side effects. Firstly my operating range… was greatly stunted, and by that I mean that I am able to stay awake until 10 pm max instead of my normal Midnight to 1 am sleep times. Additionally I noticed that I actually slept better and fell asleep easier… so after all of these years of thinking caffeine had little to no effect on me… I am guessing I was completely wrong. Monday night I was being lazy and ended up drinking Mountain Dew, instead of making something else to drink and when I finally tried to go to bed around 11 pm I found it significantly harder to actually get to sleep. As a result last night I opted to drink mostly water, and once again returned to being able to fall asleep easily. This however has some strange side effects… like my body is still used to getting 4 to 6 hours of sleep a night, and for some reason when I go to bed at 9 pm I end up waking up again sometime around midnight.

So last night I ended up waking up around 11:30 pm and my body apparently thought I had slept a full night. The television was blaring because it seems that I crashed hard and forgot to turn it off. In my brain I am guessing that I equated the television to the alarm clock, and I started going through the routine of grabbing underwear and taking off my night clothes and heading for the bathroom to take a shower…. only to realize that it was not in fact 5:30 am part of the way through that process. It is one of those moments when I was glad my wife was still completely conked out… because I am sure I looked like an idiot… half undressed, holding my underwear stumbling for the door. The point at which I realized was when I went to turn off the alarm clock only for it to finally dawn on me that it was the television. Now I am not saying I am giving up caffeine completely… because I just finished a tasty cup of coffee. I am however trying really hard to not drink anything with caffeine once I get home from work, and I have absolutely cut energy drinks out of my life completely. I am still very much going through the phase where every time I pass a cooler in a store that is loaded with them… I get that desire to purchase one. The positive however is that for the most part I don’t “need” one, and other than yesterday after not sleeping terribly well the night before… I haven’t had any real moments during the day where I was fighting drowsiness.

New Machine Thing

For the next few days I will likely be installing games on the new laptop, playing them once or twice and then moving on to installing another game. This seems to be my tradition when it comes to getting a new machine, because ultimately I am wanting to see how much better everything seems to perform. Last night the first game on the menu was Dragon Age Inquistion, which I finished installing Monday night. It ran beautifully and using the Geforce Experience settings it picked reasonably high settings, or at least high enough to NOT have playdough hair. After that I played some Fallout 4 and once again… it ran beautifully on reasonably high settings. The thing I am noticing is that there seems not to be nearly the gap in performance between the gtx 960m and the gtx 960 as there has been in previous generations. For the most part I am able to run things in the same sort of fashion I have come to expect on my desktop machine upstairs… which honestly makes me even happier. I was fully expecting the 960m to perform something akin to the 760/860 which had always been the case before… where a mobile card was roughly a full generation behind the desktop equivalent. Maybe Nvidia realized that this felt shitty and was also deeply confusing to the customers? The next game on tap will be to install the Witcher 3, which was another in the long list of games that my laptop simply would not play. At some point I will settle down and actually begin to play some of these games… rather than just launch them to see how pretty they look.

Towards the end of the night however I did manage to settle into a single game… that is at least until sleep claimed me. Yesterday was the release of the 3.2 patch in Final Fantasy XIV and I have honestly been fairly scarce in the game since well before the launch of 3.1. I always said at some point I would get drawn back in, and I guess last night in installing the client that started to happen. I am not sure yet if I will stick around for a long period of time… or if this will simply be another one of my “content locust” passes where I gobble up all of the new stuff and move on to something else. I do however want to see the new story content in 3.2 before someone online spoils any of the key plot points, which considering that is already happening to folks… I need to move fast. Last night I didn’t get much more accomplished than the first few steps of the continuation of the main story quest. I did however see several other quests that I am guessing are the new Hildebrand and new dungeon starter, that I will at some point have to pick up. The thing is… there hasn’t been a moment where I didn’t care about this game… I just wanted to play other things instead. I have a feeling that it will be up to the MSQ to determine if I really want to stick around after finishing the content. It seems like they also made some significant changes to the game, that I will have to sort through and determine how they effect me. One of my guildies last night told me to respec out of Strength because apparently Vitality is now literally the only stat that applies for tanking, so thankfully I had enough company marks to do that. This makes me wonder just how deep the rabbit hole of changes actually goes.

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.

Alas Troll Side

February 17, 2016 by Belghast

Changed Plans

Yesterday morning I had every intent of coming home last night and pretty much playing Street Fighter V the entire evening. During the day I did a bit of googling and found out that Game Stop apparently carries the Hori Fight Commander 4 controller for use with PS3/PS4/PC. The Game Stop website indicated that a store not terribly far from where I work had “limited” stock so I decided to pop by over lunch. I’ve been bitten by the whole limited stock thing before, but since this was a wild goose chase anyway… I didn’t really mind it much. The last time I was in a Game Stop was to snap up $5 physical copies of Wildstar to convert into play time and digital goodies. When I got there, it took me a bit to locate the controller… and they did in fact only have one. The goofy thing however is that it was being closed out for $20 unlike the almost $50 price tag on Amazon. This seems like some horrible timing, considering that Street Fighter V was just released… and that folks will be seeking out fight pads…. but whatever… their loss and my benefit. I have to comment that this controller is really damned comfortable… way more so than the default PS4 controller when it comes to dpad and face button feel. If you can find one anywhere near as cheaply as I picked mine up… I highly suggest grabbing it.

When I got home from work I hooked up the new controller and booted into the game, where I honestly was undecided what exactly to do. The game reports cross console play, but as of yet I have yet to find anything even closely resembling a friends list. There is the ability to create a custom lobby of sorts… and in theory that might be the compromise. I know you set up a Capcom ID when you first boot the game, and if anyone needs mine it is once again “belghast” but you will have to be smarter than me in figuring out how to actually friend someone because I could not. For the most part I started working my way through the story mode, which unlocks alternate costumes and color schemes for the various characters. I made it roughly halfway through this when my wife got home from work with a friend of ours… and the three of us decided that the priority was to go find food. After eating silly amounts of Mexican food, I never quite made it back upstairs once we got home. So in theory I will pick up tonight when I first get home and continue unlocking the various story modes. All in all I like what I have seen of the game… which admittedly is not a lot. The game feels more deliberate and less twitchy than many of the other Street Fighter entries, so if you are someone who cut your teeth on Marvel Vs Capcom… you might find the game a little sluggish. For me who started on the original Street Fighter, the less frenetic pace is a big plus.

The Mission

Last night once I got back from eating…. I was a man on a mission. The mission was actually something that evolved over the course of the day, but the goal was pretty simple. Help Grace catch up and level her druid on Argent Dawn. Originally my thought was…. lots and lots of Hellfire Ramparts because well… when I was dual boxing WoW this was pretty much the go to instance for me when it came to pouring on some quick levels. So the first step was to hop on my Mage and port her little druid to Pandaria so she could bind someplace with portals. From there we met up in Shattrath and I flew her on my Obsidian Nightwing over to Hellfire. The only problem… at level 50 she could not zone in… and this is the point at which I remembered that World of Warcraft instances have level caps. So we ported to Stormwind since apparently they closed off the Dark Portal… because our original thought was Sunken Temple. From there we flew over to Blackrock Depths because in theory she should have been able to pick up several of the quests. We proceeded to lay waste to the Dark Iron empire, and through the course of that one instance she managed to pick up three levels. When we got down to the Molten Core gate, on a whim we tried to zone in…. and sure enough she was able to. Thinking “surely a raid gives good experience” we proceeded to lay waste to the entire place, and I did some of my most careful pre-clearing of a zone ever… shockingly she did not die once. Bad news however… she made like 2/3rds of a level in there but did manage to pick up some “moggy bits”.

From there we did in fact head towards Sunken Temple… which is now a completely nerfed joke. Firstly we completely missed the entrance because apparently at some point they moved it up near the top of the sunken pyramid instead of deep down inside the base. We did two clears of the place, and I would say that both times it took well less than ten minutes to clear the entire place. They apparently jettisoned “Troll side” of Sunken Temple and all that is actually there is the Green Dragon Flight stuff upstairs. We also noticed that none of the events actually required you to do anything… like I remember summoning Hakkar required you to drag snakes into the braziers or something of that sort… but this was a simple “click the pile summon a boss” scenario. From there we flew over to Lower Blackrock Spire thinking she was right about the appropriate level, and on our first clear…. I screwed up and forgot to grab the pike… meaning we couldn’t actually summon the optional boss. So we went out, reset and I managed to get that sequence of events right the second time. All in all the night took a little less than three hours, and we got the druid a total of seven levels. In theory… dungeon finder might have gone quicker. I have another theory, that is my Panda Monk is just slightly lower level now than her Druid… so I am wondering if we would be better served with me going Tanky and her going Healy and getting pretty much instant queues all the way to 100. Regardless it was a fun night… there is something relaxing about curb stomping old content and venturing back down nostalgic avenues.