warrior

Racing Snail

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Out of Advice

This month is of course the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative… and I have been horrible at supporting it so far.  Normally I have filled my blog with various sundry related information about blogging, and if you really want you can probably still take some of that as completely valid.  I know this event works, but the problem is… at this point I just feel like I am out of advice to give without simply rehashing a bunch of old themes.  The truth is I really don’t know what I am doing, and while sometimes I put on the front that I do…  I spend the majority of my time winging it.  Sure before I wrote a single line on Aggronaut, I had planned a lot of stuff like the domain name and hosting provider, but that is not to say I didn’t have a much earlier not fit for public consumption blog on blogger.  Back then… I just started blogging, and it is I feel honestly good to just go make some mistakes on your own without the intervention of others.  My original blog was a semi-private ordeal talking about my life, my family, and all sorts of random events in large part surrounded on our sudden and bizarre desire to start camping.  I say camping… but what I really mean is hanging out at a lakeside resort in an RV.  It was real and snarky and sometimes raw… but it had a very specific audience of folks who actually knew me in real life.  Those people didn’t care about my gaming, and in most part would probably find it strange.

So when I created Aggronaut it was by purpose designed to be completely divorced from my real life.  The idea was I would have the real world blog for people who knew me… and then the other blog to talk about my passions.  That didn’t exactly work because I’ve found that while I can write in a mostly anonymous fashion talking about people and events from my real life setting…  I can’t exactly keep them out of my topics.  I’ve tried not to name names in my blog as a sort of “protect the innocent” fashion in part because my wife works in a very skittish profession.  I never wanted anything I might say to reflect badly upon her.  I would say that I probably filter myself a lot, but the truth is I really don’t have that many inflammatory opinions.  What I personally consider ranting about subject… I’ve often been told is just polite but impassioned discussion.  So as I sit down and try and thing of advice to give a budding blogger, I am really finding myself completely empty this year.  Just because I have been doing something longer, doesn’t mean I have any better grasp on how things should work.  I don’t know what I am doing… and it is perfectly okay to not know what you are doing.  I’ve somehow made that work for over seven years now, and I suppose I will continue to make it work for the foreseeable future.  I lack the ego however to tell you t hat my way is the correct way, because I know I don’t even know if it is right for me.  Next week I might get new information that makes me question everything about what I have done for the better part of this decade, and that is also okay.  Basically if you want to write…  just go write.

A Good Note

Racing Snail

Over the last few days I have become progressively more active in the Rift community.  There is something comfortable about coming back to this game, and I find myself obsessing with all of these little details.  The experience has been something akin to catching a movie on cable television that you have not seen at decades… and then having a sudden swell of feelings for how much you used to love that movie.  Coming back to Rift this time feels very much like dusting off a favorite tome and reading it again with new eyes.  There are some things I am coming to terms with, namely that unlike so many games… it is unlikely that I will find many of my closest friends interested in joining me.  As I have learned time and time again… Rift is not really their game and especially the AggroChat crew can rattle off a list of reasons why.  That said… it has always sorta been my game, and been something that I supported regardless if I was actually playing with it.  I’ve said time and time again that Rift is essentially all of the features I ever wanted in a video game compiled in one game… and they just keep adding more features as time goes on.  That said it is also a much harder game than I have grown accustomed to, and as a result for the last several years since the launch of Storm Legion I have struggled a bit to find my place in it.  I was extremely slow getting to level 60, and I am just now getting to 65, so the speed and difficulty of leveling was something I had a difficult time reconciling now that I am extremely used to the fast pace and ease of leveling in the “modern” mmo.  I’ve long said that my favorite time period in World of Warcraft was Wrath of the Lich King, and I’ve just realized that Rift is as though you stopped the clock in a time period before content started to get watered down to appeal to a wider audience.  That is not to say that Rift does not have a lot of solo-able features… but if you intend to play at the highest levels of the game you are going to need a group and dedication to your character.

Racing Snail

All of this aside I am in this position where I am really enjoying the depth of this game, and finding myself with this entire list of things that I want to accomplish.  One of the best parts of the game for me personally is the way that they have changed the wardrobe system.  Now when you pick up an item, you collect its appearance and can then assemble outfits out of these appearances without needing to fiddle with any of the actual loot.  The fact that there are also zero negatives like a gold sink associated with it, means I am constantly changing my wardrobes around, and I guess at times this is a positive.  Within the Rift forums and Discord there was a contest called “Planetouched Style”, the idea being that you assembled an outfit that represented a certain planar theme and then went out into the world and found a location that fit the theme to take a screenshot.  The first image was my entry, going for a sort of “Papa Legba” feel for it… and then finding an area out in Seratos that really shows off the deathyness.  Much to my shock… I apparently nabbed second place in the contest.  So I am now the proud owner of the 5th Anniversary edition racing snail…  completely with flames decorating the shell.  This goes nicely with my 4th Anniversary mount that I already spent damned near all of my time riding.  I am excited and humbled to somehow have managed to win, but it was a great note to end the day on yesterday.

 

Bunny Returns

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Samurai For Hire

Bunny Returns

Another happening over the weekend is that I appear to have fallen back into the habit of logging into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis.  It had been roughly six months since I was last regularly playing the game, and in that time I went from being just about as well geared as you could be… to being woefully and insanely behind the curve.  So much so that the gear coming out of the expert roulette is often times an upgrade over the piece I was wearing.  The positive however is that the game does a pretty damned good job of helping you catch up, and I now have a huge amount of content I could be running.  I’ve been trying to do an expert a day to get back into the swing of things, but I still greatly prefer to wait and do said expert with friends.  The other interesting sequence events is something that I talked about on the AggroChat podcast this weekend.  Not long ago I had returned to World of Warcraft and was attempting to be part of a raid group run by some friends of mine.  So much so that I even managed to recruit a bunch of other friends who were not actively raiding.  All of this sounded amazing on paper, until we actually sat down and started raiding.  From the first outing… I kept wondering what I was doing wrong because it just didn’t feel all that fun.

What was happening was this was my first time tanking in Warlords of Draenor other than a times where I had to fill in without notice.  It just didn’t feel the way I remembered tanking in World of Warcraft to feel.  Even more so I had started wondering if I just wasn’t really a tank at heart anymore.  I spent the majority of Warlords as a DPS, and I really enjoyed doing that…  even though I never really hard the drive to put up big numbers.  In fact while we were raiding Blackhand, I even went so far as to uninstall my DPS meters because I didn’t want to be bothered with the guilt of not topping the meters.  Ironically not having meters made my performance go up significantly.  All of this said I started to wonder if I just was not a tank main at heart anymore.  I developed this mental block against tanking, and started looking for ways to avoid it.  Then last Tuesday I participated in the Pony farm night, and the only gear set I was certain of happened to be my tank set.  My hope was that muscle memory would take over and it did… and ultimately I had a blast tanking again.

The Feel Matters

Bunny Returns

The reality is that I still very much like tanking… its just that I don’t enjoy taking in World of Warcraft.  In part I think it is because I have gotten used to a game where the fights are messaged extremely clearly.  In Final Fantasy XIV there is never a question of “did I move far enough out” of this or that effect because there is a clear line on the ground showing you the effected radius.  In World of Warcraft there is never really this line because the areas of effect generally extend out quite a bit further than the graphic being drawn, meaning that as a tank you are constantly second guessing.  WoW also still feels very “mash a bunch of buttons and pray” at least while playing a Warrior, whereas FFXIV feels more deliberate and purposeful.  Maybe its just that I fell into bad habits over the years, and cannot seem to break myself of them.  Whatever the case I have been having a blast tanking in FFXIV and am thinking that while I will probably level tanks in WoW… I won’t return to actively filling that roll in group content anytime soon.  It just doesn’t feel right anymore, however if you need an Expert tank in FFXIV I am your man!

Also as you can see from the above image… I have started down the path of madness that is the relic 2.0 weapon… or 3.0 depending on how you want to count it.  As a result I spent a good deal of my weekend running FATEs and have suddenly remembered…. that I actually LOVE doing FATEs.  I checked and I am actually dangerously close to the 3000 FATEs achievement, which should tell you something.  This step in the weapon is reminiscent of the Atma step in the previous weapon, but it feels a lot less egregious.  You need to get three of each elemental drop… however the drop rate of each individual crystal seems significantly higher than Atmas.  At this point I have 3 earth, 3 ice, and 1 fire…  and have been spending time out in Churning Mists as of last night not having any luck getting a single one yet.  I did however decide this was a perfect opportunity to do something I had been considering for a long while.  As of last night I am not longer an Immortal Flame but now a proud member of the Maelstrom.  I’ve made decent progress already in pushing up my rank and I believe I am currently sitting at the 5000 seal step.  However doing doing these FATEs for the weapon the grand company seals seem to be coming insanely fast.  Hopefully before long I will be sitting at max rank yet again.  The only negative is… all of that awesome Immortal Flames gear is now essentially dead to my alts… until I repurchase the Maelstrom equivalents.

A Gladiator in Hellfire

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Change of Plans

Yesterday when I got up in the morning, I had every plan of coming home after work, hoping that what I was making in the crock pot was actually edible, and then sitting down to an evening of Fallout 4.  I do after all need to finish up the main story line, so that we can properly talk about it for Saturday’s podcast where we in theory review it.  Then I saw the above tweet come across my timeline.  Now I have known Jed for ages, but never really had much of a chance to hang out with him in game.  I can’t be for certain, but I believe our connection dates back to the Blog Azeroth community, and the subsequent IRC channel associated with it.  While he hasn’t really blogged all that often in recent years, I still think of him… mostly as one of the many bloggers making up my twitter feed.  Now we zoom ahead to the above twitter message, and it scrolling across my screen.  Friendship Moose is this awesome thing that was started more or less on accident from what I understand by Thomicks.  The idea was to have a community for running Heroic Hellfire Citadel for the purpose of getting people the moose mount prior to the launch of Legion.

Now I am not technically on any of the lists, but my hope was that if I got one of my characters geared I could maybe just maybe work my way into a raid at some point.  I like the concept of getting that mount, but I am not going to be super disappointed if it doesn’t happen.  Nonetheless when I saw someone that I kinda sorta know, doing an open call on Twitter for folks to join in on an Alliance side cross realm raid for the purpose of getting in training…  yeah I was down with doing that.  Also traditionally Wednesday nights are an excellent time for me to do anything raid related, since until 8 or 9 at night I am pretty much at home alone until my wife gets out of church.  So I signed up, made some flasks and armor potions… and was ready to go.  I was idling outside of HFC when the invites came through…  at which point I was straight up ganked by some hordies while waiting.  I guess it turns out that the folks leading the raid… are on a PVP server, so that was a bit of weird sequence of events since I am pretty much a dedicated carebear who has always played on not even PVE servers… but Roleplaying Servers.

More Fun Raiding

A Gladiator in Hellfire

There was a period of time when as one of the leaders of NSR and eventually Duranub… I used to farm my alts out to other peoples raids to help them when they were running short a person.  One of my great pleasures was seeing how the dynamics of these different raid groups worked, and what their cultural norms were.  I am not completely certain if this was a regular group of people, or a group thrown together specifically for the purpose of Moose practice, but whatever the case it was an enjoyable group to hang out with for the evening.  Since I have been mostly playing my MooCowAdin, it was a bit of an adjustment to get back into playing the very APM based Gladiator spec.  The Retadin feels like it has some breathing room in your attack sequence to chill a bit, whereas as a Gladiator it feels like there is always some button I desperately need to be pushing.  As much as I dislike the fact that I know the Gladiator spec is going away during Legion… I can absolutely understand why.  It is a quirky spec, with quirky gearing requirements… and that requires spastic button mashing to really make work well.  While we were actively raiding last, I made the conscious choice to uninstall recount because watching the meters actually made me play worse.  So I have no clue how I did, but last night Jed said he was going to upload the logs at some point today.

A Gladiator in Hellfire

We made it roughly as far as we managed to make it in the Facepull raid horde side on Sunday.  We had a bunch of issues with Kilrogg, and that fight is significantly more technical than I realized.  During the Facepull run I pretty much just killed adds constantly, stayed out of the poo… and made sure the poo didn’t drop in the raid.  Past that I had no deeper understand of the mechanics, and this time around I actually got to play one of the technical roles of the fight.  Namely there is a phase where three players have to run into these portals and get transported into another realm… where they attempt to deal as much damage as possible to wave after wave of adds.  When they come out they have a large dps buff, and can make stuff dead faster.  I ended up in the third wave of folks going into the portals, and this is something that I absolutely took for granted that folks must have just been handling on Sunday night.  After several tries we defeated Kilrogg, and man when we did it was satisfying.  We hit essentially the same stumbling block that we did Sunday as well… with the Gorefiend encounter, but I am thankful I am getting quite a bit more work in on learning that fight.  The problem with the last fight of the evening always seems to be the same… whatever you raid before you stop, is the point that people are starting to lose focus, and over the course of the evening we had also lost a handful of people.  The problem with raid scaling is trying to keep that appropriate mix of healers and dps… and just like Facepull it felt like we were short one healer from making it feel stable.

Transmog as Endgame

A Gladiator in Hellfire

All in all I had a pretty great night, and the timing of the raid was just about perfect for me.  It started around 7pm CST and ended around 10pm CST… which is just about the ideal parameters for me.  If a raid goes much longer than that, I am honestly going to start fading horribly.  It sounds like this is a weekly thing, so I am probably going to offer my services more often… that is if Jed will have me.  Overall I had a pretty shitty night as far as loot went… I spent a lot of tokens and don’t have much to show for it.  The thing I am in most desperate need of is a new weapon… but unfortunately while we did Heroic Blackrock bosses, I never got any of them to drop me an upgrade so I am sitting on using Taner’s Terrible Skinner the 670 version.  It is my hope at some point this weekend to pop into LFR and focus on trying to get one of those bosses to drop me a weapon and shield upgrade, since both are severely lacking at this point.  I did manage to pick up Warforged Shell-Resistant Stompers and a decent ring… that doesn’t actually sim out to being better than the slightly lower ilvl prismatic slotted ring I was already using.

So babysteps forward in catching up my gear level I guess…  I am still largely sitting at 680 with the ability to jump up to 685 if I really needed to.  However because of the quirks of Gladiator… and how important the Blackrock Foundry four piece set bonus is for that spec…  I will likely be running several ilevels lower than I could be at all points.  This is the point where I actually wish we had managed to raid Heroic Blackrock a bit more…  so that maybe I could have gotten slightly higher ilevel versions of the set gear.  This is the problem with set loot… because if you happen to get one of the few amazing bonuses… you simply cannot upgrade out of it without taking a significant hit somewhere.  I remember that was the problem with Hunter Tier 2 loot back in the day…  that eight piece bonus was so phenomenally good… that even though we were getting Tier 2.5 gear… there was no way we could actually take it and make it viable.  I know my friend Thalen would argue with that point, because he wore a lot of 2.5 back in the day…  but it certainly felt like it at the time.  In any case…  I just hope I was still acceptable dps, because I had a fun time last night.  No matter how much I try and push raiding out of my system… it remains there clinging desperately… just waiting on me to come back to it.

Since I just rambled on for two paragraphs without talking about what I set out to talk about…  after the raid I popped into 25 man Heroic Icecrown to clear it.  Now that I am writing this… I am realizing that apparently I left after Sindragosa so at some point I will have to actually go finish up and do the Lich King.  I guess in my head… I got the item I was hoping to get so it was a successful run for me.  For awhile now I have been collecting the bits of the Red/Fel Green set of Deathknight look alike armor out of there for my warrior.  When mixed with the similarly colored set of armor from Sunwell, it crafts a transmog that I am pretty happy running around in.  I guess this is my nod to all of the fel themed stuff in the tail end of this expansion… and the next one.  Transmogging after all is the TRUE end game of World of Warcraft.  So I ended the night on a really high note by completing an outfit.

Class Previews

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Media Consumption Hiatus

I always wondered which of my features I would break down and not do first.  I have a pretty bad habit of launching a series but only quitting doing it…  a month or so later.  I like the concept of a day like Media Consumption… but the truth is there are some weeks I don’t really consume much media.  This week for example I consumed a lot of Fallout 4 related stuff… because that is pretty much all I have been playing.  The problem is…  any videos I watched on how to get the most out of electricity or general base building theory…  aren’t really all that interesting to talk about.  Nor do I feel really compelled to talk about iZombie that we finally caught up with… or last weeks Walking Dead.  Literally two episodes of iZombie and a single episode of Walking Dead is pretty much all of the television I consumed this week.  So for this week I am cancelling this column, with the option to revive it as soon as I have movies, television or other media worth talking about.

Farwell to Gladiator

Class Previews

This week the previews for the class changes in Legion came out… and for the most part there are two classes that I was really interested in… the Warrior and the Death Knight.  Two big things changed in Warlords that caused me to switch priorities a bit… firstly they made Death Knights feel like shit by making pestilence be part of the ability rotation… giving them a caster feel.  Secondly they gave me Gladiator stance… which pretty much was the thing I always wanted to do as a warrior…  be able to DPS with a sword and shield.  As a result I took Belghast my protection warrior off mothballs… and has quite a bit of fun raiding as Gladiator dps for at least part of the expansion.  Warlords however just didn’t have enough oomph to keep me going… even though I was playing the best possible player fantasy for me.  I guess part of me knew that it simply could not last past this expansion.  I watched as Blizzard developers struggled to figure out how to itemize tanking gear… but not making it insanely overpowering for Gladiators.  Part of this came from the fact that armor was simply a better dps itemization stat than strength.  I gained 1.5 attack power for each point of armor… whereas I gained 1 from strength.  So that mean’t for dpsing… I stacked Armor potions rather than Strength potions and did other fiddly things… like looking for +armor gear with crit on it.

It seems as thought my fears have come true and as they talked about the Warrior class changes I saw zero mention of Gladiator spec.  Even though I knew deep down in my heart that this was coming… it still feels a bit like a sucker punch to the gut.  I liked being able to play Belghast again and enjoy doing so… the problem being… that I still didn’t really feel like DPS.  My heart has never been in the DPS rotation… and as a player when it comes to DPS…  I don’t want to be last place on the meters, but I have zero burning desire to be first place either.  I feel like I am lacking the competitive nature needed to really excel at damage dealing.  Tanking however…  my deep protective streak over my friends always kicks in and I fight my ass off to hold aggro, or stay alive during this attack or that.  Basically tanking feeds off of my instincts in a way that damage dealing never has.  So while I hate the thought of not being able to deal silly amounts of damage as gladiator… and have relatively high survival…  I am totally see why they are getting rid of it for exactly that reason.  Regardless of the fight, I was almost always the last one standing because I had cool-downs a plenty to keep me alive during big problems.  There were numerous times where I could temporarily tank while we resurrected a tank, which tells me… Gladiator was just too strong.

Welcome Back Blood

Class Previews

During the Crusaders Coliseum patch cycle in Wrath of the Lich King… I ended up switching mains from the Warrior to the Death Knight in theory… to give up tanking and do damage instead.  This didn’t actually work like I planned, and instead of DPSing I quickly found myself pressed into the role of Blood tanking.  This was fine by me because from the start of playing a Death Knight I had always been drawn to the high survival nature of blood.  As that turned into the official “tanking” stance I adapted quickly and came to love the class and the spec.  Through Cataclysm and Pandaria I was all about the Death Knight and it was always the first character I would level.  In fact until Pandaria my Warrior sat at level 80… and relatively untouched since I crated him up towards the end of Wrath.  When we were able to become Worgen, I race changed from human… and I felt like I was completely happy and set to be playing that class for the rest of my time in World of Warcraft.

Then Warlords came and made the class just “feel” wrong.  I have talked about this before… but it is more important how something feels to me rather than how numerically it works out.  Death Knights no longer “felt” tanky or even melee in general… but the constant pestilence and death coil usage made it “feel” like a caster… the absolute last thing I would want to play.  With the class changes it at least seems like they understand this problem… and with it is a return to mostly melee abilities for at least the Blood Death Knight.  So while I am losing Gladiator… it seems like I might be gaining back the Death Knight class as a whole?  Admittedly a lot of what harmed my enjoyment of Warlords beta… was how bad the Death Knight felt to play.  My hope is that at some point early in the beta cycle I can get my hands on some play time… and get clarification if this fixes the class.  I am getting more interested in Legion as a whole… but this is going to be absolutely crucial to my enjoyment.  I need my Death Knight back to have fun again.