Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk a bit about the arrival to Monster Hunter World of the most annoying griefer… Deviljho… aka Pickle. We also talk a bit about the weapon balance changes. From there we talk a bit about crafting systems in games and what we have liked and where they have fallen short. From there we talk a bit about Eureka in Final Fantasy XIV and how it’s a grind reminiscent of Everquest. Kodra delves into a discussion about Witcher 3 and the game once you get past the cringey bits. Tam talks at length about Star Citizen and how much game is currently available. Then we wrap up with a short discussion about how Demon Souls has not held up the way the others in the series have.
One of the interesting things that has happened over the last few days is that I apparently got invited to the Battle for Azeroth expansion alpha. I happened to notice this Tuesday night when I opened my battle.net launcher and found the World of Warcraft tab was trying to patch something. Sure enough upon further inspection I did appear to have access to the alpha client in my version selector drop down. I also noticed from social media that a few other people seemed to be indicating the same, so I am guessing there was a whole new wave of folks entering the testing. The thing about alpha testing that is legitimately an alpha… is it is as much a burden as it is a privilege. Yes you have access to something that most people don’t and that in some ways is inherently cool… but also it becomes your responsibility to go out into the unfinished world and help stop bugs that you will encounter.
First off let me get this out of the way… Battle For Azeroth Alpha is in fact an alpha in functionality and in name. I’ve been in so many different versions of Alpha programs over the years and even in Blizzard terms occasionally those Friends and Family Alphas feel “almost finished”. This time around BfA feels very much a work in progress and with significant functionality either missing or not entirely working. For example I spent the beginning of my evening testing an area of the game where quest tracking was not functional at all, and I sorta had to wing it given that I could not really see what was required to finish any of the quests. One of the more interesting things of note is that the Kul Tirran side of the house appears to have a flight path system that is in truth a series of extremely high speed boats, example is the one I am on above.
After spending some time bug noting Alliance side I rolled a Horde character and the Zandalari areas seem to be a bit more finished. Those areas had a proper quest flow with tracking working and advisement of where I should be going for the next quest. In truth that probably means that I should not be spending too much time in Kul Tiras until they have had a bit more time to flesh it out. I did however report a ton of instances where things were clipping oddly, or in one case where my camera was being pushed up through a when I stood in a certain spot. I guess that is part of the responsibility side of Alpha testing, that you need to vary your feedback based on what phase in the zone development they are in.
Sure I bug noted the fact that quest tracking was not working… but after doing that it seemed nonsense to keep reporting it each time I turned in a quest in that area of the game. Instead I started working on reporting the base pop and terrain anomalies, since they are likely the parts that are being worked on at that very moment. Ultimately my goal is to spend a little bit of time each night working on testing content, because I feel like since I have eyes on the game… I should be helping to make it better for launch.
The gaming for fun side of the evening was spent over in Monster Hunter World which received a patch. I did not actually defeat a Deviljho last night, but I saw several of them as they interrupted my other hunts. It is in fact as nonsense as everyone seemed to make it out to be and I am hoping that maybe tonight I can devote some time to actually purposefully hunting one or two of them to get used to how those fights go. The focus of my evening last night however was finally getting Thalen through Nergigante. It has been a goal to make sure that everyone gets off high center with this fight in part because it seemed to take me so long to do that myself. Everyone was more than willing to lend a hand in my hour of need so I feel like it is only right to keep paying that forward.
Additionally I like the fact that I now feel pretty comfortable with this encounter and could always use more monster bits. While waiting around for Thalen to finish up a hunt we started talking about our stats… at which point I joked that I changed my guild card title to Pure Long Sword at some point. I really have in fact been focused on only this one weapon for awhile as you can see by the fact I have done 253 hunts with Long Sword and the closest second is hammer with 7. Both Tam and Ashgar have way more spread graphs when it comes to weapons, and in truth I probably should as well. I should make a point of trying every weapon and seeing if there are hidden gems out there that I might ultimately like. My biggest problem has been that I just didn’t want to take resources away from my current longsword crafting projects to create other weapons.
One of the interesting things that has happened over the last few days is that I apparently got invited to the Battle for Azeroth expansion alpha. I happened to notice this Tuesday night when I opened my battle.net launcher and found the World of Warcraft tab was trying to patch something. Sure enough upon further inspection I did appear to have access to the alpha client in my version selector drop down. I also noticed from social media that a few other people seemed to be indicating the same, so I am guessing there was a whole new wave of folks entering the testing. The thing about alpha testing that is legitimately an alpha… is it is as much a burden as it is a privilege. Yes you have access to something that most people don’t and that in some ways is inherently cool… but also it becomes your responsibility to go out into the unfinished world and help stop bugs that you will encounter.
First off let me get this out of the way… Battle For Azeroth Alpha is in fact an alpha in functionality and in name. I’ve been in so many different versions of Alpha programs over the years and even in Blizzard terms occasionally those Friends and Family Alphas feel “almost finished”. This time around BfA feels very much a work in progress and with significant functionality either missing or not entirely working. For example I spent the beginning of my evening testing an area of the game where quest tracking was not functional at all, and I sorta had to wing it given that I could not really see what was required to finish any of the quests. One of the more interesting things of note is that the Kul Tirran side of the house appears to have a flight path system that is in truth a series of extremely high speed boats, example is the one I am on above.
After spending some time bug noting Alliance side I rolled a Horde character and the Zandalari areas seem to be a bit more finished. Those areas had a proper quest flow with tracking working and advisement of where I should be going for the next quest. In truth that probably means that I should not be spending too much time in Kul Tiras until they have had a bit more time to flesh it out. I did however report a ton of instances where things were clipping oddly, or in one case where my camera was being pushed up through a when I stood in a certain spot. I guess that is part of the responsibility side of Alpha testing, that you need to vary your feedback based on what phase in the zone development they are in.
Sure I bug noted the fact that quest tracking was not working… but after doing that it seemed nonsense to keep reporting it each time I turned in a quest in that area of the game. Instead I started working on reporting the base pop and terrain anomalies, since they are likely the parts that are being worked on at that very moment. Ultimately my goal is to spend a little bit of time each night working on testing content, because I feel like since I have eyes on the game… I should be helping to make it better for launch.
The gaming for fun side of the evening was spent over in Monster Hunter World which received a patch. I did not actually defeat a Deviljho last night, but I saw several of them as they interrupted my other hunts. It is in fact as nonsense as everyone seemed to make it out to be and I am hoping that maybe tonight I can devote some time to actually purposefully hunting one or two of them to get used to how those fights go. The focus of my evening last night however was finally getting Thalen through Nergigante. It has been a goal to make sure that everyone gets off high center with this fight in part because it seemed to take me so long to do that myself. Everyone was more than willing to lend a hand in my hour of need so I feel like it is only right to keep paying that forward.
Additionally I like the fact that I now feel pretty comfortable with this encounter and could always use more monster bits. While waiting around for Thalen to finish up a hunt we started talking about our stats… at which point I joked that I changed my guild card title to Pure Long Sword at some point. I really have in fact been focused on only this one weapon for awhile as you can see by the fact I have done 253 hunts with Long Sword and the closest second is hammer with 7. Both Tam and Ashgar have way more spread graphs when it comes to weapons, and in truth I probably should as well. I should make a point of trying every weapon and seeing if there are hidden gems out there that I might ultimately like. My biggest problem has been that I just didn’t want to take resources away from my current longsword crafting projects to create other weapons.
Yesterday I engaged in some serious nonsense, which is not super surprising if you follow this blog in the least. For whatever reason I got it stuck in my head that I would really like to have the Wyvern Blade “Indigo”, which is an alternate line of the poison weapon I have been using off and on for some time. This unfortunately would involve starting over from scratch and building a new base weapon and upgrading it completely. I had no clue what exactly that mean’t part wise so I created a little hit list adding up everything.
To craft the Wyvern Blade Indigo… and all of the precursors I would need…
05 – Rathian Shell
01 – Rathian Plate
10 – Machalite Ore
04 – Poison Sac
03 – Rath Wingtalon
02 – Flame Sac
03 – Rathalos Marrow
02 – Rathalos Shell
06 – Rathalos Scale+
04 – Rathalos Carapace
02 – Rathalos Wing
01 – Rathalos Plate
14 – Azure Rathalos Scale+
04 – Azure Rathalos Carapace
03 – Azure Rathalos Wing
01 – Rathalos Medulla
02 – Teostra Horn+
03 – Azure Rathalos Tail
01 – Rathalos Ruby
120,000 Zenny
I spent some time yesterday streaming and originally thought I would be just clearing out optional content like I have been doing the last few days. However rapidly that descended into madness as I started chasing the bits and pieces needed to craft the Indigo weapon. This meant a significant amount of farming Rathalos and Azure Rathalos… neither of which are necessarily super difficult encounters, but also not exactly quick farms either. Because I am weird and me… I opted to mostly farm these using my method of SOS roulette and in truth this rapidly allowed me to get down to a single item needed.
The core problem there however is that “gems” from monsters seem to drop super infrequently… if you actually want them to drop. I have a string of bird wyvern gems for example, but now that I actually need one it would not drop. I am not honestly sure how many Blues I took down during the stream, but after stopping I continued the madness… and by the end of the night had probably defeated at least eight… potentially more. It was around about this time that Ashgar came in to alter my thought patterns.
This theory was that it would be simply faster for me to knock out the five elder dragon kills needed to do the weekly, than continue farming Azure Rathalaos over and over forever without getting a drop. It turns out you can take the Gold Wyverian Print that you get from the weeklies and turn it into a guaranteed gem from any monster. So this lead to me farming Xeno’jiiva over and over until I had knocked out the five kills. Ultimately according to Ash… Zorah Magdaros, Nergigante, Teostra, Kushala Daora, Vaal Hazak, and Xeno’jiiva all count. The low effort versions would have been to just farm Zorah until I got my five kills but I figured I might as well work on something that had a chance of giving me useful monster parts.
As a result before I went to bed I managed to farm up all of the bits needed to craft the weapon, and then took it on a ceremonial trip to High Rank Great Jagras to see how well it works. The final clock said just a second or two over two minutes for the kill, but I also wandered around aimlessly collecting herbs and honey at the beginning of that fight so I am guessing I actually finished the kill a little under a minute. All in all I am super happy with the end result in spite of the process itself being a little nonsense. Why exactly did I do this thing? Mostly because Kirin is weak to fire… and I will have to ultimately do Tempered Kirin to uncap my level again.
