rift

Game Changer

August 16, 2016 by Belghast

In Another Castle

Last night was my raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, but before hand my key focus was trying to get my Mage to 100. I am not exactly sure what has lit a fire under me, but I am on this mission to have at least one server full with level 100 characters. As you can see in the above image, I am actually extremely close to getting there. Now granted I have the OTHER side of my linked server to start working on… but Belgaoh my Monk remains the only sub-100 character I have on Argent Dawn. The only problem there is he is SIGNIFICANTLY behind the curve sitting at only level 53 right now. I keep thinking that if I can get on at the right time, and have at least one easy to get to invasion event I will be able to push him through to 60 so that he can fly, which is going to be the key to getting more events on him. As of yesterday I thought I was nearing the end of the gear grind and even created a spreadsheet as an attempt to track progress in outfitting my characters in level 700 gear. The take away from that process seemed like I was going to spend the next several days working on my leather wearers to catch them up in progression.

Then this happened. I opened I believe 34 chests that I had gathered up on the mage in leveling from 90 to 100, and out of those chests seven different items came up as warforged. Apparently yesterday during the day at some point they patched in the ability for chests to spawn warforged gear, meaning that all of those characters I thought I had finished with really have only scratched the surface. I still think however my core mission is to get all of my characters outfitted in at least 700 gear, and if some of them get more trips to the candy shop in the hopes of finding warforged… then that is fine too. Ultimately I realize that all of this gear is going to be replaced within the first few minutes of questing in the Broken Isles. However for the time being I think this is probably a brilliant idea. The longer they can keep players actively participating in this event the better, because for the time being it is an amazing source of leveling and gear for everyone involved. I somehow doubt I will be able to get my monk all of the way to 100 in the short time available without focusing ENTIRELY on the monk, but I am definitely going to ride the elevator for as long as I can.

End of Expansion

One of the things I am realizing is that I apparently love the end of expansions. Cataclysm was the expansion that broke me and my desire to be playing World of Warcraft, causing me to fade away and go play other games. However I remember clearly that towards the end of the expansion I came back and really enjoyed myself. There was so much to be doing, and everyone had a great casual attitude about it all. For me personally I knew that nothing I was doing really mattered in the grand scheme of things, because as soon as Pandaria was released every last piece of gear I gathered would be replaced with greens. So in this low pressure environment I allowed myself to piddle around without purpose and had a complete blast. Similarly I remember coming back at the end of Pandaria and having the same fun experience, running around aimlessly on the timeless isle and doing all the little things that were fun but served no major purpose. Here I find myself once again in a similar pattern with Draenor, and I feel completely in my zone. The problem is that I wish I knew how to bottle this feeling and keep it alive during the rest of the expansion.

I am not sure how to take the joy that I feel at the end of an expansion when I am unfettered by expectations and pressures…. and keep that alive during the rest of the game. There is a switch that flips in my brain when an expansion launches that says “okay Bel, you need to be useful… go grind your face off”. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off completely because I think that is the thing that keeps getting in my way when it comes to enjoying an MMO for the long haul. I essentially burn myself out, over and over… game after game… by focusing on some lofty goal that I cannot accomplish without significant help from others. I end up ignoring the goals that are entirely up to me to complete, and those are probably the things that I technically enjoy more. I have had a blast alting my way to 100 over the last few weeks and bringing my own personal army up to snuff. As I look towards Legion, and Starfall Prophecy and whatever the Final Fantasy XIV expansion ends up being… I need to figure out how to keep this magic from the end of an expansion alive every single day I play the game.

Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.

Palladium Find

August 8, 2016 by Belghast

Unsorted Madness

After sitting at home due to the outside generally being rainy and icky Saturday, we ventured forth yesterday out into the extremely muggy world left behind. I managed to wrap up the podcast and get a blog post made all well before my wife made it home from church. By the time she got home I was essentially ready to go do whatever she might need to do. When she told me that she wanted to go to Gardener’s I admittedly had some mixed emotions. For the uninitiated Gardner’s Used Books is this massive place here in Tulsa It takes up the entirety of an extremely deep strip mall and almost every inch of it is covered in bookcases and or collectibles. The problem being that they are also notorious for reorganizing trying to fit new stuff in the store, which means that often times you have to spend thirty minutes roaming the store trying to find it again. The biggest problem I have had recently with Gardner’s is that their stock seems to be aging horribly. When I go to a book store I almost always make a beeline to the pen and paper gaming section, and then from there I wander out into other things. This section at Gardner’s had been shrinking and it felt like slowly, bit by bit we were just picking through the bones of a carcass that had been there since the early 90s. The thing you have to understand about this store is that it is essentially designed to be run at a loss. The Gardener’s “real” business is a Tax Service, and a really damned good one. It has been rumored for years that the family owns several buildings just like this one full of books, that were bought in bulk to dilute the profits to whatever level they needed for tax benefits. Over the last year or so they have been opening up one of these buildings located behind the main store on the weekends, and letting folks sift through the new arrivals. The above image is a single quadrant of this second building… and what you are looking at is completely unsorted books.

So you might see a Chilton manual to a 85 Chevy Pickup, next to a Danielle Steel, sitting beside an oddity like the book in the photo above. “The Ewoks Join the Fight” was part of a series of books that included a record that went with them. The idea was for you to read along with the narration, but the narration itself was this amazing radio play style thing. I loved these as a kid and had them for several different franchises… and I think I even remember there being a set for the Gremlins movie. Now the part I am not remembering is if they came from a restaurant as a limited time giveaway, or if this was something that I ended up getting from the scholastic books catalog. Regardless they were cool and it was a trip down memory lane to see one half buried in a pile of unrelated books. We came with a purpose in mind of trying to find pre-calc books for my wife, who now has that as a prep this year. So as I started going through the piles I started pulling books out because you could walk past the same table three times and see slightly different things each time. Unfortunately nothing I pulled really interested her, but she did find a seemingly nice book on forensics. The challenge of this Gardner’s Annex is the fact that there did not appear to be any air conditioning. We went extremely early in the morning, and it was already getting a little muggy in there. I would hate to go there in the full on Oklahoma summer heat, considering it is basically a giant metal building. The coolest thing in the annex however was this really neat full sized Han Solo in Carbonite sculpture that was hanging on one of the walls. I am not sure exactly where it came from, or if it was an official prop for maybe the re-releases of the original movies back during the mid 90s. Whatever the case I wanted to take it home with me, but like so many of the bigger things they have… like the life sized Hulk statue… it didn’t have a price tag on it.

When we made it over to the main building, I have to say I got more than a little excited. One of the things that I “collect” for lack of a better word to describe it… are Palladium games books. I have talked about this a bit in the past, and it seems like folks tend to either gravitate towards GURPS or Palladium when it comes to a “universal” system for gaming. Later Wizards tried to do this with the d20 system, but the idea is that you have one set of rules that cover lots and lots of different genres. As someone who used to love genre bending in gaming… it would allow you to give players the leeway to play quite literally anything they wanted to in almost any setting. The downside is there are only so many character backstories that can make this work apart from a “band of adventurers” or “mercenaries”. For a period of time Palladium books released a quarterly “magazine” for lack of a better term, filled with various bits of information related to all of the different systems called Rifter. They originally sold for between $10 and $15 in game stores, but over the years I have picked them up whenever I happened to find them cheaply. Sometimes they have really good stuff in them, other times not so much. It seems as though someone had just unloaded a stack of them on Gardner’s sixteen in total. The negative being that they were mostly priced around $6 a piece, which is fine if I only found them one at a time… but more than I would want to pay for a large bulk lot of them. After my wife didn’t find much of anything she wanted from the main store, I decided to see if they could make me a deal on the entire bundle. I had it in my head that I would be willing to pay around $50 for them all… and when the guy said he would sell them to me for $45 I had to stifle the excitement. There are some huge gaping holes in the numbering… and apparently they released physical copies of this up through the 40s so it is far from a complete set. However I have a lot more of them than I did before hand so life is pretty good. I’ve not really done much more than thumb through them, but if nothing else they always have really cool artwork.

Starfall Prophecy

August 5, 2016 by Belghast

Expansion Teaser

For a little bit now there have been rumors about the impending announcement of Rift 4.0, namely due to some data-mined zone names floating around. Nightmare Tide and I had a bit of a rocky start and it was only recently that I managed to level through the content and hit the level cap. Originally I thought that this expansion might be based on the Plane of Fire, given a few of the leaked zone names. However it seems like this expansion ties directly into the last raid of Nightmare Tides the Comet of Ahnket. Based on the teaser information on the Starfall Prophecy promotion page, it seems as though the Comet Ahnket has been picking up bits and pieces of the planes as it hurdles towards Telara, and as a result this inhabitable world has been created that we now need to go to in order to find a way to stop it. This combined with some of the artwork shown on the site makes it seem like this expansion will be an amalgam of elements, or at least Life and Fire.

I have to say some of the new assets that are seen on the site are really damned cool. Prime example is that I have zero clue what sort of machine this thing is, other than it seems to be themed with a similar face to the Comet of Ahnket content. It looks amazing and I will be more than happy to fight it, and I am hoping that this is some sort of zone event boss. Mostly it seems like this expansion is going to be a huge world with lots and places to explore. I think one of my big issues with Nightmare Tide is that in the grand scheme of things… the color palette was extremely difficult to get used to. It isn’t nature to see a landscape of violent purples and oranges everywhere, and trying to read that as something to roam around in. While places like Goboro Reef eventually grew on me with time, it was a long adjustment period. This on the other hand seems more familiar, like the same sort of zone treatment we saw in Storm Legion, but this time instead for a much more fire influenced setting rather than death. Between now and launch however I either need to actually find a group to do Comet of Ahnket raid, or watch a play-through so I can soak up some of the information about what is happening there. One of the things I love about Rift raids is that they are so full of story, that plays out around you as you move through it. Unfortunately there is not a “Chronicle of Ahnket” or Intrepid Adventure for it… so that means I will actually have to try and find a pick up group to see the story-line.

New Features

On the promotion website it lists a whole slew of stuff under the title of “Claim the Power of Ahnket”, and some of them are pretty interesting sounding.

Increased Level Cap: 70
Legendary Powers
New Zones
New Dungeons
New Raid
Planar Assault Adventures
Fortress Sieges
Looking For Raid
Individual Reward System
Active Upgrades
Eternal Item Rarity
Planar Fragments

These all sound interesting, but we don’t really have a ton of information to go on yet. It is my hope that between now and the expansion release, they start showing off various features of the expansion during the Friday streams. Unfortunately I have other plans today, and the time shift means that it is happening while I will be in the middle of a family dinner. However I am fully expecting this weeks stream to be epic, showcasing a lot of new features but in limited detail. Of the above list the two that stand out the most are “Looking For Raid” and “Individual Reward System”. Now these have caused drama in games that implemented them, but I have to say after having lived with them for awhile… I’ve become a fan. There was a time when I was strictly against the whole content of LFR, and probably said some things against it. That was also a version of me that had a dedicated raid team, and access to the best gear said raiding could provide. The current version of me however just wants to experience the content and play all of these various games that I want to play. For example in Rift I don’t really have a large group of friends who happen to be playing the game, or at the very least not in the density that I have elsewhere. As a result it is extremely hard for me to figure out how to get anything started, and I would absolutely lean on LFR like a crutch the same way I do currently on the Intrepid Adventure system. Because of this.. the Individual Reward system only makes sense, that way you are not trying to roll against other players but are instead getting your own personalized loot.

The other things on that list that really interest me are Planar Assault Adventures and Fortress Sieges. The Planar Assault Adventures sounds like absolutely something that would be down my alley, and I am hoping these are somewhat like chronicles in that they can be completed solo or with a group either one. I mean I know nothing about it other than the name, but they give me ideas about leading a strike team of NPCs into various planar tears to complete objectives and get back out. Hopefully the reality is even half as cool as my imagined version sounds. Fortress Sieges on the other hand seem like they might be able to go one of two ways. If they are a PVE siege of a fortified position held by Planar forces, essentially a Planar Stronghold taken to the next level… then they sound completely amazing. The other direction I could see something named like that going is some sort of open world pvp objective, and that is the point where they would lose me. I have enjoyed world objective pvp in the past, but generally speaking when a game does this… it almost always degrades into deathmatching and ganking rather than focusing on objectives. Essentially right now I know next to nothing other than a bunch of names, but regardless I am extremely excited about the prospects of what this expansion might bring. As you can see from the above image.. I have already proudly put in my pre-order and am now riding around on my very awesome drake mount.