For whatever reason years ago when I leveled Mining and Botany to 50, I neglected fishing. As a result I spent most of last night chilling out and fishing in a video game, which is fine because I needed some heavy chill. As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, neither my wife or I really got much of a good sleep the night before. This is largely due to the fact that sometime between 8:30 and 9 pm that night it started raining in our living room. We didn’t pick up on it at first because something was on the Television, but the cats were freaking us out which lead us to notice the droplets coming down from the central rafter in our main living area.
This has happened before and through much trail and error we have had the roofers out in an attempt to figure out what was causing it. Up until this point we thought it was the flashing at the top of the roof line that was the issue, and they would come out and tamp that down and caulk it, which would in fact cause it to stop for awhile. However this time while up on the roof the guy noticed an entire segment between this raised area of the roof and our chimney that appears to have no flashing at all. All we can figure out is that maybe when the folks put on the siding, that they failed to put back the flashing in that area. This will of course lead to minor surgery on the roof at some point in the future, but we have temporary flashing and caulk install in a hopes of getting us through the next few days of severe rain.
As far as gaming goes, I am all over the place right now. I am still spending a little bit of time each day in World of Warcraft, but I think I have petered out when it comes to pushing alts to 120. During the course of this run I now have on the Horde Side my Paladin, Hunter, Druid, Warlock, Death Knight, Mage and of course the original Warrior and Demon Hunter that were previously at 120. On the Alliance side right now I have everything at least to level 100 and so far the only 120 is my Paladin. For the moment I am mostly cherry picking World Quests each day when one shows up with an upgrade to any of my army.
Over the weekend I spent some time in Guild Wars 2, and that is something I would like to revisit in the coming weeks as well. I am not sure why it happened, but I logged into voice chat and everyone seemed to be in the game, so I like the dutiful toady I am patched it up to join in. I left the game with my Warrior in a fairly good spot, I just need a lot more points to finish getting Berzerker and Spellbeaker. I did some significant changing around of things because it appears that my Hammer/Greatsword is no longer in the “meta” and instead the money build is Greatsword/Mace and Shield preferably with Spellbreaker which I do not have… but there is another built the uses Discipline in its place. I had some fun fiddling around in Fractals and would like to do more of this.
Minecraft Dungeons released yesterday and I have been spending some time playing with it. I’ve not gotten terribly far in part because I mostly played it prior to heading to sleep last night. I tried it out first on Xbox One through game pass and then ultimately purchased it for Switch which seems to use my Microsoft account. I like it quite a bit but it reminds me way more of Gauntlet Legends/Dark Legacy than it does Diablo. It is quite a bit of fun though and I am interested to see how the game evolves as I level up and move through bigger areas.
Lastly Phantasy Star Online 2 released for Windows 10 PC today and I have it downloading in the background. This is more than likely going to be consuming the majority of my time for the remainder of the week as I try and catch my CAST Ranger to Ash and Tam who have been playing considerably more often on the Xbox One. This game looked horrible on a base Xbox and as a result I just found it a struggle to get into it considering I was also having to learn how to play it with a controller. I had experimented with the Japanese client and it completely spoiled me towards anything other than the Windows release.
What have you been playing lately? Drop me a line below and let me know.
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Phantasy Star Online 2 – Original Xbox One
This weekend was one where I was all over the place on my gaming. There is a huge part of me that wants to be playing Phantasy Star Online 2 since several of the AggroChat crew are currently enthralled by it. The biggest problem I have is that I know how good this game looks on a PC and as a result I am constantly confronted by how awful it looks on my base Xbox One. I know at some point on the near horizon it will be releasing for PC and that the characters will be cross compatible. In theory I should be able to catch up without much issue, and all of this means that my desire to actually play is severely diminished. I did get to level 10 however before ultimately “noping out” of its chunky graphics.
Trials of Mana – Nintendo Switch
I also played a bit of Trials of Mana and progressed the story to the point of being able to my make very first class change choice. On Duran I went light side and became a Knight, on Riesz I went Dark to eventually become a crazy dragoon, and on Angela I went light to go Sorceress because the Dark “blood magic” route seemed like a trap. Still greatly enjoying this game but I am only really playing it before bed, and even then only until sleep claims me. The prolific appearance of golden angel statues seems to help me out in this mission as it never feels like I have to make it much further to get to a save point.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Cactuar Server
I’ve also been trying to ease my way back into Final Fantasy XIV, with minimal success. This is in part because my friends Bells and Zuu are now playing, and I want to be able to hang with them and run content as they get to various dungeons. The other side of this point is that an event is about to start today where you can farm moogle widgets and earn older mounts. I like mounts so it might be fun to poke around and farm up a bunch while the event is going on. Thalen in theory says he can craft a lot of the gear pieces that would potentially make my viable again, so here is hoping I can actually get back in the swing of things. I have no clue what the struggle is with this game, but it is real.
World of Warcraft – PC – The Scryers Server
On the World of Warcraft front, I managed to finish the Death Knight and am in the process of gearing him out. This makes my seventh character to level 120 since the Winds of Wisdom buff went active, and I went from having only a couple of characters horde side to play around to a pretty sizable stable of options. I am still not quite certain what I plan on “maining” come Shadowlands, but ultimately I have narrowed it down to a handful of options.
Warrior – This is my OG love as far as classes go, but ultimately it all depends upon how good tanking feels on it. Last expansion at the start tanking felt like I was being completely ineffective. The positive here is that I really do love Fury as well and gives me an enjoyable DPS alt for running content and raiding.
Demon Hunter – Once the Warrior failed out after getting it to 120, I rapidly leveled a Demon Hunter because tanking felt extremely strong. Over the course of the Battle For Azeroth expansion, I have come to really enjoy it.. but I do not really love DPSing on it.
Paladin – After leveling a Paladin on both Alliance and Horde sides, I have really come to love the class. Tanking feels great and I have always loved Ret as a dps spec. This even would give me the option of healing… which admittedly will probably never happen but of the WoW options this was the only healer I could actually stand playing.
Death Knight – When I finally hung up my Warrior shield at the tail end of Wrath of the Lich king it was for playing the Death Knight and I “mained” this all through Cataclysm. Playing the Death Knight has made me remember what I loved about it, so it now is in the running as well.
World of Warcraft – PC – The Scryers Server
I legitimately have no clue what I am going to choose for a class, but at least for now I am somewhat leaning in the Paladin direction. As far as World of Warcraft projects going forward I will be working on finishing off the Monk since he is in his 80s. That would give me a 120 for every class but Priest, Shaman and Rogue which are not exactly favorites of mine. However I like playing all of them more than a Mage, so that is ultimately why I chose to boost that . Monk is fun, but not nearly as fun as leveling some of the other classes I have had in my stable so far. I should give Brewmaster another shot, but so far leveling as Windwalker has had a pretty high time to kill.
I am all over the place right now when it comes to my gaming habits and I guess for now that is perfectly fine. What have you all been up to over the last few weeks? What games do you find yourself drawn to? Leave me a note in the comments below.
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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
We welcome Grace back after a few weeks away and talk a bit about life in pandemia. Bel talks about the introduction of RTX Voice and its nonsense ability to filter out background noise from your microphone. Kodra and Thalen talk a bit about gaming with youngsters focusing on Mario Kart and Katamari or “The Ball Game”. Ash talks a bit about how bad the storytelling is in Phantasy Star Online 2. We shift over to some talk about flying in Eorzea and some general talk about alting in Final Fantasy XIV. Finally we wrap up with Sea of Thieves as Tam has been recently exploring this title and how PVP apparently doesn’t matter as much as it once did.
It was a really bizarro weekend. First off I opted to talk off Friday afternoon, which in itself isn’t too strange other than the fact that I more or less went home and slept for a couple of hours. I normally can’t take naps but I guess it was a week worth of not sleeping super well catching up with me. For those who have read this blog lately you will know that my wife was on a work trip in Portugal. Whenever she is gone the house and most specifically the bed feel very wrong and as a result it greatly impairs my sleep patterns. She flew in safely during the time when I would normally be recording AggroChat, and due to scheduling problems with lots of people we just skipped doing one of those this week.
She is safe and sound and past the first day of culture shock seemed to really enjoy the trip. I am enjoying having her back and she has adjusted back to our standard schedule a lot faster than I would have expected. We wound up going to bed around 10:30 on Saturday night after getting her home and a rapid round of unpacking. Then she was up around 6 am and managed to keep it together until around 8 pm last night. Then we were up as per normal around 5:30 am and hopefully she makes it successfully throughout the day without crashing. I have a silly belief in the totemic power of the purple coffee mug that I sent her off to work with, and I hope it shields her throughout the day. We have a lot of bright and colorful mugs, but the purple one is by far the most important.
This weekend there was a test for Phantasy Star Online 2 on the Xbox One and I booted up my console for the sole purpose of participating. As I understand it there will be a later test for the Windows client, and I am mostly just going to have to tide myself over until then. For those who may remember I went through the nonsense process of getting set up to play PSO2 some time back and then proceeded to stop playing it after the initial few weeks. The Japanese client jumped ahead four versions and I felt like I was missing so much stuff and had no clue who any of the characters were. I am hoping that when it finally comes here officially we can play it properly from the very beginning. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing but it did make me realize that I am probably going to go back to my good ole fashioned RAcast instead of the HUmar I was playing during the beta this weekend.
As far as traditional gaming goes, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend playing Mars: War Logs. As I have said before there is just something about the way Spiders makes games that I find appealing. I greatly enjoyed Technomancer and Mars: War Logs comes considerably before that game in a timeline and explores an area of Mars that is mentioned in Technomancer but that you can never quite go to. I am somewhat glad that I played the games in the order that I did because there are some interactions that I would have viewed in completely different light had I known things that transpired in this game. Much like the difference between Witcher 2 and Witcher 3… this game is a much more simplified version of the same formula that I have seen in other games like Greedfall and Technomancer. As a result it is way more streamlined and other than the fact that the game has horrible quest advisement… it is way easier to follow what you need to do in the world.
On the cat front, Josie is pretty bonded with me after having spent a week with me being her only human. I am hoping that over the next several days she starts snuggling with my wife again, but all day yesterday she was pretty much glued to me. I mean I guess it makes sense because not only was I the only human around for a week but I am also the human that provides food twice a day every day. The whole feeding thing goes a long way for an animal friend. It is in part why I keep hoping that someday the outdoor cats will let me pet them. The latest Josie trick is that she has learned how to climb the ferret cage that is still in the kitchen, and has also figured out how to climb halfway up and then parkour her way into the windowsill. She is adorable, which is good for her because it gets her out of trouble for all of the messes that she inherently makes during her manic play sessions.
And now to the title of the post. The above thread is courtesy of Thalen who posted it on the AggroChat staff slack. I am completely on board with calling shooters Wolfendooms. Does that mean that Destiny would be a Wolfendoomtribes though? The whole transition from “Doom Clone” to “FPS” is still one that I find interesting. I’ve been struggling to figure out a term for the Bioware Dragon Age/Mass Effect genre since I have been playing so many Spiders games that are desperately trying to fill that niche. I’m also really curious if there are more games out there like that from smaller studios that I just never encountered. Anyways time to wrap this up and head to work, but if you have any Bioware-esc games that you know of that might not be on my radar drop me a line in the comments.
