Good Morning Friends! I am very much in vacation mode right now because I am off work until the New Year. As we wind down things for 2021, I usually end up starting to think about what is going to be releasing next year. More specifically since months fly by so quickly… I am focused on the games we already have release dates for during the first quarter of 2022. In an attempt to make content happen without talking about Endwalker spoilers… I thought I would spend some time this morning going over some of the upcoming releases that I specifically care about.
Weird West
Technically this is already available if you are interested in playing early access. What really interests me about this game is how much it looks like a classic Fallout game, that is set in the wild west… but with vampires and zombies and such. Essentially two folks from Arkane left to found a new studio and the game is being published by Devolver Digital… which usually means it is going to be some nonsense. I’ve been waiting for awhile for this game to officially launch and I am ready to spend a bit roaming around this setting.
January 11th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox (Game Pass)
Monster Hunter Rise
I get that this has been out for half a year now on the Nintendo Switch, but truth be told… my “console” of choice is likely always going to be the PC. Since I never really got into Monster Hunter Rise before now, I am hoping to give it a spin when it releases on Steam. I’ve played the demo and it controls pretty much like Monster Hunter World did, which felt far better on PC for me personally than it did on console. Mouse and Keyboard makes everything better for me, so hoping that it gives me the desire to actually play the game and experience it all.
January 12th – PC Release – Already available on Switch
Dying Light 2 Stay Human
I loved Dying Light. It was such a great take on the Zombie game and was way more detailed and engaging than I expected it. Since this was first announced I have been waiting for it to release, and now it finally is coming out. This has had an extremely fraught release schedule and gone through development hell… so I have to say I am a bit concerned about how good of a game it is going to be when we finally get our hands on it. I am a sucker for this sort of game though so I figure I am going to be on board for trying it regardless of how big of a mess it might end up being. I mean I loved Cyberpunk 2077 and Mass Effect Andromeda when the rest of society seemed to be panning them as awful… so my tastes may be slightly different than the zeitgeist.
February 4th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
Horizon Forbidden West
This friends is why I own a PlayStation 5, pure and simple. Horizon Zero Dawn was my favorite game of the PlayStation 4 generation, and I am so ready to join Aloy on another adventure. I wish this was coming out on PC at the same time as the PS4/PS5 versions but I know I will probably double dip on this title and play it again when the PC version eventually releases. I enjoyed this so much more with a Keyboard and Mouse, but I was able to enjoy every last minute of it with a controller as well so regardless… I am so damned ready to be revisiting this world.
February 18th – PlayStation 4/5
Destiny 2: Witch Queen
I have to admit that I had all but sworn off this expansion for Destiny 2. I am still annoyed at the vaulting of content, however after coming back to the game recently I have had this whole experience of just how damned fun it can be. There is an almost truly oppressive amount of content that is relevant, so I guess I now sorta get why they are vaulting some of it because it really is almost too much stuff to juggle. I might be a sucker, but I guess I am now on board for this nonsense.
February 22nd – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Stadia, Luna
Elden Ring
I have to admit I am not fully bought into this game. I am nowhere near as hyped as everyone else seems to be. I don’t really like souls games in general but I do really like the world surrounding them. Open World games are my jam and I am curious if the souls formula will work for me… when in a big damned exploration game. I am still not certain if I am going to be playing this game, but it is definitely on my radar at least to be watching.
February 25th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox
Tunic
This honestly is one of the games that I am looking forward to full stop. Tunic is essentially the original Legend of Zelda with a super cute fox character. I’ve played the demo for this game and have waited and watched as it got subtle updates each year… until now we finally have a release date. If you loved the original Legend of Zelda, maybe give this game a look.
March 16th – Windows, Mac, Xbox
Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
So this is one of those games that I am interested in… but maybe not as hyped as some folks are about it. I feel like Tiny Tina is a character that is great in small doses… but can be a bit much at times. I think I am going to dig a Borderlands game but with Melee and Magic. I did not really enjoy Borderlands 3, so that also gives me pause because I am not exactly sure that Gearbox has the same magic that they once did. However I did really like the latest trailer so here is hoping it ends up being phenomenally fun.
March 25th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox
Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons
Me and Guild Wars 2 have had a fraught history. The next expansion is coming soon, and I know I will probably give it a spin to see if it grabs me. There is a lot about this expansion that looks interesting, but also I know how much I have generally bounced off Guild Wars 2. So we will see if this one does it for me.
Early 2022 Release Date – Windows
What did I end up missing that you are anxiously looking forward to? I really only covered the first few months of 2022 since so many other games don’t have definite launch windows. I would love to hear the games you are looking forward to. Drop me a line below.
The post Games of Early 2022 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. If you have followed me on twitter, you probably already know that I am in a pretty broken state right now. I’ve talked a bit on this blog about the recent challenges with Kenzie and I figured I owed it to anyone who ONLY reads my blog to give an update. Kenzie was diagnosed with diabetes in 2017, and from that point forward we have had a nightly routine of “pill and poke” where I feed her some anti-anxiety meds and also give her the nightly shot of insulin. I am so thankful that she took it well throughout the years, because it is hard to fully explain how much of “my” baby Kenzie was. For most of her life she was my partner in crime and was with me constantly. She trusted “daddy” explicitly and knew that I would never do anything that wasn’t extremely necessary for her own benefit. So giving two insulin shots a day, often times caused dirty looks but never any real resistance.
Statistically once a cat is diagnosed with diabetes, the average life expectancy is three years. We managed to get a bit more than four years with Kenzie and I have to say every moment of it was worth it. She was still very much “herself” until last week. I woke up Monday morning and knew something was wrong but wasn’t quite sure what. At first I thought maybe Kenzie was just having a bad day, and she spent most of it curled up in my office. Tuesday she was even more sluggish and we made a doctors appointment for her to be dropped off Wednesday morning. From that point forward she was essentially in hospital care. We don’t know what happened first but theory is… her blood sugar was just a bit off which lead to a bladder infection… which led to diabetic ketoacidosis… which lead to pancreatitis… all of which stressed her liver.
She was starting to go the right direction… when tragedy struck Saturday afternoon and she suffered some form of stroke causing a major setback. At the same time she was going into liver failure and ultimately had to make the call no one ever wants to make. Thankfully I got to snuggle with her one last time, but the entire time she was making these little pained noises while still trying push her head underneath my hand. I am just so heartbroken right now. I’ve lost many animals in my forty five years, but Kenzie meant so much to me that it is very hard to fully express in words. She was a mess… but she was my mess. I had never had a cat that played fetch before, and many a Sunday morning while I was editing AggroChat she would be meowing insistently for me to throw a hairband which was her fetch object of choice. As we started doing telework, she spent so many hours curled up beside me on a PC Case box that I let sit there long enough that she started to use it as a place to sleep.
Right now I am also a bit concerned for Josie, because Kenzie and her were buds. Kenzie had never liked another cat before Josie joined our family. She was part big sister and part surrogate mom to Josie and it was not that unusual for them both to be snuggling on my legs while I sat and played on my laptop. Kenzie and Mollie however did not get along at all… and part of the reason why Mollie tiptoed throughout the house is to skirt the attention of Kenzie. So it will be interesting to see what life is like with Mollie in the coming weeks, and if she may come a bit out of her shell. I’ve had both of them snuggling with me during the weekend because I think they can tell that I am not quite right. Cats seem to know when you need them the most. Losing an animal is never easy, but losing Kenzie is extra hard.
The Vet fought a hard fight over the course of several days and I am extremely thankful for everything they were able to do. I have no clue just how much this bill is going to be yet, but I would have probably paid any amount to keep her safe and at my side. I keep going through this cycle of trying to figure out if I could have done something different, second guessing every decision I made over the past week. The Vet has tried to assure me there wasn’t much else that I could have done, but I also sorta feel like that is part of their job to try and assuage fears. There will always be part of me that feels like I failed to keep her safe and happy, and it even hits home more so since so much of my daily routine centered around trying to keep her alive. I think I am going to be broken for a long while, but I am very thankful for all of the support that you gave me. I do sorta think things have to scab over a bit before I can really engage fully with the world again.
One thing that does bring me no small amount of joy is the fact that Kenzie is permanently part of my blog’s Masthead. When I was playing Monster Hunter World I tried my best to pattern my Palico after Kenzie and named her as such. The truth is that the options were completely incapable of capturing her, so when I asked my good friend Ammo to create artwork of my MHW character, I got her to draw the Palico to look a bit more true to the actual Kenzie. So every time I make a post I will have Kenzie up there, preparing to go to space in her adorable Baan armor set. Goodbye baby, you were a goofball but you were my goofball. I miss you so much.
The post Goodbye Kenzie appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. This isn’t exactly the sort of post that I am going to be syndicating but also since this blog often acts as therapy… I am going to talk about it. This is Kenzie, she is my partner in crime and has been my baby since we rescued her in 2014. She is not doing well and as soon as the vet opens I will be taking her there this morning. Saturday and Sunday she acted like her normal mess of a self, and then starting Monday she was extremely lethargic showing no real interest in food. Yesterday we called and were able to make an appointment for this morning, but I am scared to death that I did not make the right call and should have tried to find pet urgent care yesterday.
She is not doing well this morning. It seems like everything takes a lot of effort for her to do. I made her a water dish so that she didn’t have to go far for water, and she ended up knocking it over this morning. She relocates periodically and seems to be moving okay when this happens, but it is like she has no energy at all. I am scared to death as to what might be going on, and thinking we should have taken her somewhere sooner. This morning she has her appointment so I guess I kept telling myself that we already had that and that she would be okay until then. Her breathing isn’t labored and if you did not know that she was in normally constant motion, you would think she was just tired.
I just want my baby girl to be okay. she has a lot of complications and some years back she developed diabetes. So I give her insulin every morning and evening through one of those clicky pens. That could be getting worse and I noticed she had been losing some weight, which was what had accompanied when we needed to increase her dosage last time. We needed to get her into the vet anyway but life has just been rough lately. I am scared that I fucked up and that my indecision will have caused permanent damage. This is a deeply personal post, but I would greatly appreciate it if you keep her in your thoughts today. Now that I have finished with this I will be bundling her up in the carrying cage and taking her to the vet hoping and praying that maybe just maybe they can help her out.
The post Thoughts for Kenzie appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! This morning I am going to try and write something that I have largely avoided writing for a very long time in part because I was always afraid I would fail to do it justice. I am mostly known as an MMO Tank, and in fact this blog began as a very specific Warrior Tanking blog dedicated to World of Warcraft. Over the years I have tanked in pretty much all of the MMOs that come out because I gravitate towards that style of game play at the core of my being. When I was leveling all of the classes recently in World of Warcraft, I saved a tank as my victory lap because I figured it would be the most enjoyable thing for me to level… and was absolutely correct to do so.
That said when my friend asked me last night if I had any primers on my blog to MMO Tanking… I had to honestly say no. As far as I know it is a topic I have talked around the edges of quite a bit but never really focused on as a proper discussion. I could of course explain how a player tanks in this game or that game, but in reality tanking is more of an ethos and a particular state of mind. Once you have the concept of tanking down, it can pretty much be applied to any game just swapping in various abilities to meet the goals of a tank. To keep it simple I have broken down the role of a tank into five core concepts.
Aggro – This one is pretty straight forward. You want to make all of the mobs in a specific pull angry at your character and as a result focused on attacking you while the rest of the party kills them.
Place – When you pull an encounter you want to place it in such a way as to keep your party out of harm and also allow your DPS to kill the target with as little downtime as possible. Generally speaking this is turning the pack of mobs away from the party and giving easy access to the backside of each enemy for extra damage potential.
Avoid – You want to avoid any damage that you don’t have to take, which means you need to understand the attacks and which ones you can move out of safely without causing damage to the party. It is a juggling act of trying to maintain DPS uptime while also trying to avoid making your healer mend damage that you didn’t need to take in the first place.
Mitigate – One of your key responsibilities as the Tank is to be sturdy and this means not only gearing in a way so that you have a hefty health pool, but also using any active abilities at your disposal to normalize the incoming damage as well as strategically using your “Oh Shit” buttons to avoid fatal damage.
Pace – The tank controls the pace of the party and bad tanks drag their party through the dungeon kicking and screaming. Essentially you need to use the tools that you have at your disposal to figure out how fast you can move through the dungeon and the best path to reach the end objective safely.
I wish that it spelled something clever, but alas at 6 am in the morning I am doing good to have boiled them down to simple concepts. You have to understand that for most MMO Tanks, this is all committed to muscle memory and nothing that we really think about. You can always tell a seasoned tank because it is their instinct to turn the mobs to face away from the party. You can always tell a sloppy tank by them haphazardly trying to fight things in place as the chips fall. What I am hoping I guess with this discussion is to help you develop that instinct of how to navigate a dungeon in such a way as to get to the rewards at the end safety and effectively. After all the entire name of this blog “Aggronaut” was me trying to be clever and coming up with a word for one who navigates aggro.
Aggro
This mechanic may work differently in your target game, but all of them have some sort of concept of a “threat list”. Essentially imagine a spreadsheet with a bunch of names on it, and each encounter is going to focus their attacks on whatever name is at the top of that list. Your goal is to use the abilities given to you to keep your name with as many “threat points” beside it so that monster keeps focused on you. Different games work in different ways, the aggro make swap between targets if a single point of threat is higher than its previous target, and in other games you might need to gain a certain percentage more threat in order to shift targets. Whatever the case your goal is to do as much as humanly possible to keep your name at the top of the list of ALL of the mobs that you are engaged with.
In a game like Final Fantasy XIV or modern World of Warcraft, this is pretty straight forward and you are given tools that cause all of your actions to generate way more threat than any other player on the list. If you have your tank stance buff up in FFXIV and you touch a mob, chances are it is going to be glued to you for a period of time. Other games are more tricky like in World of Warcraft Classic, you have to keep swapping between targets and trying to build threat equally on them all to make sure that your aggro does not “decay”. Many games have a concept of aggro falling off over time, and even if they don’t things like healing the party generates threat equally for your healer on all of the encounters meaning that you need to keep touching the mobs in order to ensure that they are glued to you.
Hard Taunting
Many games have the concept of an ability known generically as a “Taunt”. How this functions depends greatly upon the game, but generally speaking this will raise your threat level to 1 point higher than the highest on the list. Often times there is a debuff applied to the target that will make it focus you for a period of time, and if you have not regained a stable footing by the time this buff fades the mob will revert to the highest threat target. Generally speaking you do not want to rely on taunts because over time a lot of encounters become “taunt immune”, so your goal is to generate threat naturally and save what we often refer to as a “hard taunt” as your ace in the hole for when things are going really south.
Initial Threat
Another concept that is worth exploring a bit is that of initial threat. In some games there is a stickiness applied to the person who generates threat first. Generally speaking you want to always be that person, but often times you are going to have overeager dps hitting the mobs before they can get to you. In older games like Classic WoW, this could mean a death sentence because threat is harder to generate and harder to hold. After all this is the reason why we used to have the “Three Sunder Rule” before the DPS opened up on a boss fight. Even if the game is not that extreme, the fight will go more smoothly if you can be the one pulling the encounters because the entire pack will default to attacking you rather than running around like mad for awhile until you get things under control.
Place
Generally speaking as I stated in the breakdown of these concepts, this is making sure that you are fighting the encounters in a way that keeps the party safe and lets your dps have as much uptime on the boss as humanly possible. Unless there are specific reasons in a given fight, you want to run in and generate aggro while spinning the encounter 180 degrees away from the party. If possible you want to also park your back against a wall or some sort of object that blocks movement. If there is a knock-back, this will mean you are knocked back against something and can rapidly return to the same position you were tanking in previously. Your goal is to hold that encounter still as much as possible which allows the DPS to place themselves in the most optimal way to deal the maximum amount of damage.
Positionals
Often times your DPS may get a bonus to attack when attacking from a certain arc surrounding the encounter. I first saw these in Dark Age of Camelot, but modern games like Final Fantasy XIV heavily rely on attacks that deal bonus damage or produce a combo of attacks when done from a specific axis. It helps greatly if you understand the types of attacks that your party can do, and as a result how best to place the targets so that you can enable the DPS output to be as optimal as possible in the situation.
Line of Sight
Place is not just a concept of turning the mobs but being aware of the specific needs of that encounter. For example if you have a pack of mobs that includes a number of casters or physical ranged, they are not going to clump up neatly giving you easy access to generating threat on all of them. At moments like this you might need to utilize Line of Sight mechanics to generate aggro and then duck around a corner forcing the pack that you just generated threat on to chase you. Breaking Line of Sight will force the encounter to seek you out, and if you utilize this correctly you and your party can set up an ambush spot creating a tight “murder ball”.
Environmental Damage
Another concept of place is being aware of your surroundings. As you move through a dungeon there are often times traps that are set for the players that consist of some sort of avoidable damage or open ledges that the party can be knocked off. When deciding where to fight the encounter, you need to take all of these parameters into account and do your best to find a spot where it is safe for the party to engage the mobs. Again your role as the tank is to limit the damage being dealt to the party, and a big part of this is trying to keep them from having to fight in bad situations. This might mean needing to move the encounter from time to time to get out of acid puddles or something similar. As such while fighting you are often times keep your head on a swivel looking for changes in the field of battle.
Avoid
As I said in the last point, part of your role as a tank is to limit the damage dealt to the party. This also means that you yourself need to take as little damage as possible. This is pretty straight forward in a game like Final Fantasy XIV where clear visualizations are placed on the ground with hard edges allowing you to very easily tell if you are going to take damage or not. This is less easy in games without that predictable level of advisement. Some of this is honestly just learning the encounter, because at the end of the day every boss that you are fighting is following some sort of script. It often helps to think of it in terms as a flow chart and the boss will perform a certain attack under a certain set of circumstances. It may be as simple as learning a dance or it may be as difficult as looking for a specific tell that a boss performs before making an attack. Whatever the case you are seeking out any ways that you can avoid taking damage that you don’t need to take.
Animations
Like I said, life is pretty simple if you are given clear visualizations as to what the attacks do. However even in the scenarios that you won’t be given a clear marker, there are almost always some sort of tell in the animations being performed by a mob. I have to say that learning to play Monster Hunter Online greatly improved my ability as a whole to spot these tells, because that game was entirely about predicting the movement of these gigantic monsters that you were fighting. As you dive further into the tanking mindset, you are going to find yourself drawing inspiration from unlikely sources and another great one is Dark Souls.
Mitigate
One of your jobs as a tank is to be well… Tanky. This means stacking gear that makes you harder to kill and often times just increases your sheer health pool. The more health you have, the more damage you can take before putting yourself into a situation where you are burning out your healer. Tanks need to be cautious of how they are gearing and instead of favoring dealing extra dps, you want to favor reducing the incoming flow of damage. How you do this depends greatly upon a specific game, but often times there are stats to reduce specific kinds of damage, or mechanics like block, dodge and, parry that either decrease incoming damage or cause you to avoid it entirely. The negative is gearing out as tank means you are going to chew through content solo extremely slowly, but it is the price you pay for your chosen vocation.
Active Mitigation
So please note I am using “mitigation” here in the most generic form because technically a block is mitigation, but a dodge is technically avoidance. However generally speaking your character as tank will be given abilities on a cool-down that allow you to reduce your incoming damage. Again this depends greatly upon the game but often times you have weaker abilities on shorter cooldowns and very powerful abilities on long cool-downs. As a tank you want to figure out the best time to use your shorter cool-downs while strategically saving your big ones… aka the “Oh Shit” buttons for times that can save a fight because you are going to take fatal damage or needing to hold on while your party recovers from a particularly damaging sequence.
Tank Busters
Often times there is one specific attack that is designed to kill any character that is not specifically a tank. Tanks even often times need to specifically time a short cool-down ability either directly before or directly after the attack in order to survive. One of your jobs as a tank is to get to know these and learn how to navigate them correctly, and more specifically make sure that the encounter is facing away from the party when they are firing off… because often times tank busters “cleave”. Cleaving is a term for an attack dealing damage to more than one target in the vicinity of the focus of that attack. Final Fantasy XIV made our jobs easier because generally speaking the first big attack that takes place after a pull is going to be your tank buster, so you can memorize that name and then be looking for it to fire at pretty regular intervals throughout the fight.
Pace
The tank is part battle tactician and part cruise director when it comes to leading the party through the encounters that make up a dungeon or raid. Right or wrong the tank sets the pace for the party, but one of the key parts of learning how to be a “good” tank is understanding that this is a symbiotic relationship. A bad tank will run off without paying attention to the party and expect to force their way through a dungeon as fast as possible, often times pulling way more than the party can handle at a given moment. A good tank will pay attention to how well the DPS is performing, how taxed the healer is and the current state of their mana, and then set a pace that is brisk but manageable. The goal is to get to the end of the dungeon in a swift but safe fashion, so that everyone gets good loots and has a low repair bill.
Multi-Pack Pulls
Over the years it has become out of vogue to carefully move your way through a dungeon and to just go haywire pulling everything in sight. One of the responsibilities of the tank is to know when a group can support this sort of play style, and resist doing it when you know that they can not. Generally speaking when tanking pick up groups or “PUGs” I will test the water with a single pack, and pay attention to how quickly it is being dealt with. If it goes well I will start pulling two packs at a time, and if that goes equally well move up to three and so on. Essentially it is better to ramp up than to slam into a brick wall less than five minutes into the dungeon because you got careless. While you might have demands to “Pull Big”, you need to be the adult in the situation and realize when the party just can’t tackle that much at once.
Respect your Healer
There is a lot of focus placed on the tank, because they are the one setting the pace of the group and navigating it through the obstacles of the dungeon. However you have to realize that the healer is actually what enables us to do all of this. Tanks are mostly useless on their own without a good healer backing them up, and as a result you need to pay attention to what your healer is actively saying… and also attention to what they are not saying. If they are pulling their punches and not keeping you topped off, it might be that they are struggling to keep up with the pace you are moving at and should maybe pay a little closer attention to that blue bar if they are struggling. Additionally if they are spending all of their time DPSing, then maybe you should speed up a bit because clearly they are not being fully utilized. The entire party is an ecosystem, but none of the relationships are as symbiotic as that of the tank and the healer as they are effectively two sides of the same coin.
Final Thoughts
There it is folks, my general thoughts on tanking. While certain aspects may not apply to all games… it represents the general mindset that I think is required for a successful tank. For most tanks I know, a lot of these things are just so ingrained in our personality that it has become a sort of instinct or muscle memory at this point. The truth is however that the only real way to learn to tank… is to get out there and force yourself into the tank role. I think keeping all of these things in mind is important, but it is a learning experience and once you fall into that role it will be with you from that point moving forward. I am sure there are some finer points that I have missed, but I was shooting for the most generic take on MMO tanking that is applicable to pretty much any game you might pick up from this point forward. If you have specific comments however I would love to hear them.
The post Ethos of Tanking appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
