wildstar

Shiphand Buddy Wrap-Up

August 27, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 27

Time for the money

Whew! We made it through all seven shiphand missions! Time to relax and reap the profit. But first let’s hand out some awards:

Most fun: Fragment Zero

Murdering swarms of things is super satisfying, and it also comes with a healthy dose of jumping around in zero-g. Win-win!

Shortest / Best cash per minute: Infestation/M-13 close call

If I just want one or two quick runs Infestation is my go-to, but if I’m chain running I will always throw some M-13 into the mix just for variety. I find waiting around for the hull breach section in Infestation extra annoying if I’m running them back to back.

Most annoying: Gauntlet

I hate exploding splorg. If the point requirement was a little lower or the timer was a little more relaxed for that section it would be fine. It is otherwise a fairly fun place but I can’t enjoy it knowing how much I struggle trying to get gold.

Yep. Still really hate these guys.

Now for the best part of shiphands: making cash money. Sure, the daily quest rewards a little money which is nice, but really the market board and commodities exchange are your best friends. You’re guaranteed one imbuement-type item, which can sell from 5g to upwards of 1p. If you’ve managed to get gold the reward baggie can have some great stuff. Once you’ve collected the dyes and mounts for yourself, throw those extras on the market! Usually the decor doesn’t sell too well on the market, but they do vendor for 1-3 gold a piece so I don’t complain. The runes were my bread and butter for a while, but with F2P and the stat changes looming on the horizon the market has cooled off quite a bit. They will still sell, but prices are very low right now. You can also hold on to them and exchange them for runes of your choice when F2P arrives!

Ooooooh! Shiny new intro cinematics!

Speaking of F2P – I did get the opportunity to run a few shiphands on the PTR, and there are some changes to keep in mind. First and foremost, they’ve been renamed “shiphand expeditions” or just “expeditions” in the group finder. All of the older missions have gotten fancy new intro videos a la Fragment Zero, which is a fantastic change. Not so fantastic is the re-tuning of the difficulty. I went in with the most badass raid gear I could buy from the PTR vendor, and the enemies were still noticeably more difficult to kill than they are with my normal gear on the live servers. Supposedly this is still being tuned, so hopefully when the drop launches these will still be closer to the difficulty we’re all used to already. The other big difference is that the rewards are being toned down a bit. Currently running quick shiphands is one of the most profitable pastimes in the game, and that will be less true when these changes happen. I’m disappointed, since I’ve been making a tidy profit from these, but I understand why the devs think this change is needed. I’m looking forward to the F2P transition no matter what though!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. I really love the shiphand missions in WildStar for content that is bite-sized and great either solo or in a group. What are you waiting for? Check them out and let me know in the comments which one is your favorite!

Lazy Reset Day

August 26, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 26

Another super quick post today because I’m completely running out of things to say. Blaugust has just a few more days left and I know I can finish but it is not going to be easy.

Last night was a classic case of having way too many things to do on reset day and only feeling motivated to do the “wrong” one. I hopped into FFXIV exactly long enough to do my daily expert roulette and quickly ran away. I still really love that game but there’s way too many other shiny things stealing my attention right now.

The main new shiny is the new patch for Diablo 3. That’s where I really wanted to spend my evening, even though it is a bit of a waste of time right this second. If you’re not familiar with D3, they’ve added “seasons” where you have the option of starting over from scratch without the money and resources you’ve gathered over the years. Completing objectives during the season can earn you cosmetic rewards like transmog and new name plates. Right now season 3 has just ended but season 4 won’t start ’til the weekend, so it feels a little silly putting in much effort knowing that I’ll be starting over from scratch in a few days. Still, it is fun checking out the new stuff, and hopefully I’ll be a little more prepared once the new season starts.

I wanted nothing more than to just chill out with Diablo all night but figured I’d check in to WildStar just to get things started after the weekly reset. One thing led to another and I ended up raiding for the rest of the night. I had a really fun time so I don’t regret it, but now I’m really itching for some more D3!

Too Much of a Good Thing

August 26, 2015 by Belghast

Viva Proactivity

Yesterday I suffered from a bit of a dilemma and could have used the assistance of Hermione and her time turner. Sometimes the stars align just perfectly, and a sequence of patches hit at precisely the same time. This happened once again yesterday with the Final Fantasy 3.0.7 patch and Diablo 3 2.3.0 patch. This also conflicts with the fact that lately I have been trying to make Tuesday my Wildstar night, as it is the raid night of my guild and I am sure to see lots of people on as a result. In truth at some point I would like to get into a rhythm of Tues/Thurs being Wildstar nights much the same way as they were previously World of Warcraft nights. As a result I game hopped a bit. First up I poked my head into Final Fantasy XIV but did not really stay very long. At first glance I didn’t really see the people that I needed to pull together a full guild group expert, so instead of hanging out and waiting I moved on to the next thing. I could have easily relied on the Duty Finder, but since my passions were already deeply split last night I figured I would not really press my luck.

I will be raiding tonight so I figured that I would get plenty of time to explore the changes, which mostly for me included the addition of a TP bar in the party interface. This could be a huge thing if it means that Bards, Machinists and Ninjas start proactively feeding their tank TP when they are starting to get low. I know when I play ninja I always find it hard to time when is the best use of Goad. Traditionally I try my best to time it so that I use it at the mid point in a fight, figuring by then especially if the tank is a warrior they will be struggling a bit. As a Bard I rarely if ever played Army’s Paeon unless specifically asked by a tank because there was no real viable way of knowing when best to time it. Mage’s Ballad on the other hand… I could time easily when I saw that both healers were starting to hurt for mana. As silly as it sounds I think the addition of the TP bar to the party interface is going to drastically change the way the game feels for tanks at least.

Whitevale is Huge

Too Much of a Good Thing — They keep threatening to hug me.

Last night I continued to chew away on Whitevale in Wildstar. I managed to ding 25 which technically would have been a historic level for me… if not for the kitty hoverboard and the snarflex. Those have given me a nice mount to use since the moment I started playing this character, and have honestly spoiled me more than a little bit. I am hoping that there will be similarly purchasable mounts from the in game store when the free to play conversion happens. That would honestly be the number one thing stopping me from alting in this game, is the thought that I will not have my stable of mounts to carry over with me. While I started upstairs last night, I ultimately crashed on the sofa working my way through the various quests in zone. I keep hearing that all of the zones after Whitevale get significantly better but this zone serves to be this endless and impassible white wasteland. I’ve remarked before that ultimately on my Chua Engineer it was the zone that stopped me in my tracks and kept me from progressing forward and I am remembering why now.

I am not entirely certain what it is about the zones design but something just feels bad about it. If you were to ask me what my favorite biome is… and I think I have answered this question as part of the Liebsters… I would probably say snowy zones. If I think back to all of my favorite zones in games, most of them are places like Iron Pine Peaks in Rift. The problem here is it feels like a white desert more than a snowy climate. Maybe it is the fact that the entire zone has a purplish/bluish overtone but there is just something off with the lighting. It has this feeling of vastness that makes me feel like I am making absolutely no progress. That said I have put a big dent in the zone and have whittled down the available quest hubs to only a few left. If I actually devote some time I think I can push through it in a few more hours. I am anxiously looking forward to putting it behind me and never returning again.

Insomnia and Demons

I had every intent of just saying that last night was a Wildstar night and being done with it. I had patched up Diablo 3 earlier in the evening but had not actually popped in to check it out. When I wife decided it was bed time around 9 pm I attempted to lay down with her. Problem being my body intervened and decided that even though I was sleepy… I was not sleepy enough to actually sleep. I have this nasty habit of catching a second wind just as soon as my head hits the pillow. I waited around a bit, attempted to watch some television and lull myself to sleep… but that didn’t actually work. Instead I finally got up and decided to mindlessly kill demons until sleep claimed me. Now that Season 3 is over the pressure is mostly off, and my Crusader is just another normal character that I will eventually get to maximum level. Since it was a Seasonal character, I feel somehow obligated to continue the storyline that I started and I pushed through the never ending series of staircases to get to Azmodan. On Hard difficulty the game is still exceptionally easy, which is fine because I didn’t really want to think much last night.

The real question I guess is that in two days the fourth season starts. Will I finish the Crusader first or start a new character for the season? Honestly I am leaning towards making another Crusader for Season 4 because I really love some of the abilities. The other option is to make another warrior, because while I like my monk… I don’t think I like its game-play enough to run up another one. Crusader seems to hit all of the finer points I love about classes and gives me a highly tanky and defensive character with some ability to damage lots of things at the same time. I might end up making a female crusader just to keep from feeling like I have a duplicate character in my stable. The problem there is I am notoriously unmotivated to play female characters in games. I tend to project myself on every character that I play, and for whatever reason I struggle to get the same “this is me doing this thing” experience when I am playing a female character. Diablo on the other hand… there really isn’t much “you” in the characters that you create. You are playing a stock character and dressing them up in cool armor, but other than that there really is little “personal touch” to them.

Week in Gaming 8/23/2015

August 23, 2015 by Belghast

Stealing Ideas

This morning I am absolutely stealing an idea from Grace who happened to post something today called “What I’m Playing”. Sunday is traditionally a rough day for me as far as posting goes. One of two things has happened, either I have stayed up way late on Saturday night to finish editing and posting the AggroChat podcast, or I am rushing around Sunday morning to finish it. This ends up making the morning feel like a big hassle either way, as my body thinks I just went through this epic struggle to get our podcast posted. My brain is telling me… isn’t that enough? Do I really have to make a blog post too? At which point I tell my brain to shut the hell up and stop being so whiny, and btw give me a topic to write about while you are at it. So now I am latching onto this week in review post idea like a life raft and just going with that.

Final Fantasy XIV

A subtitle for this week could easily be called “failing to accomplish goals” because there is a lot of that going around. Monday night we made solid attempts on Ravana Extreme, and Wednesday we didn’t quite have the people to pull anything together. Other than that I have honestly been pretty scarce in game. I get like this after finishing a grind to accomplish one of my goals, and for awhile now I had been grinding in so many different ways to gear both the Warrior and the Dragoon. I had all intention of capping Esoterics this week, but as of last night I just have seventy five. I could spend my day grinding to play catch up… but I highly doubt that is going to happen. Hopefully we can return to our normally scheduled Final Fantasy XIV play schedule next week.

I am still very much playing Wildstar, but similarly to Final Fantasy XIV I didn’t really spend much time actually playing it this week. I made a minor dent on Whitevale on Tuesday, but I spent more time talking about Wildstar with friends this week than actually playing it. I am not really sure what was up this week but I was overly tired pretty much every day. We had one horrible night where the storms woke me up and I never could get back to sleep fully, and I think this lack of sleep pretty much pushed the rest of the week out of whack. Each night I felt like I lacked the mental fortitude to concentrate on an MMO, so ultimately just ended up playing something else. I want to continue my climb on the Warrior because I am finding the game more enjoyable than I did at launch, and am actually really looking forward to the free to play drop.

Dragon Age Inquisition

I spent an awful lot of time playing this game over the week, but my overarching goal was less about actually playing and more about figuring out how to play it from my laptop. I maybe obsess about stupid shit sometimes. As you can see from the screenshot I finally left the Hinterlands! I am actually enjoying the game quite a bit now, but for whatever reason I am not finding it nearly as “sticky” as the previous Dragon Age games. In Origin and even in 2 I had these moments where every fiber of my being just wanted to see what happened next. It was like turning the pages of a really good novel, and this game doesn’t have that same feel. It very much feels like I am playing levels in a video game and I find I care less about the story than I have in previous games. That is not to say the game is not enjoyable, because I am absolutely having fun… but it is just a different sort of fun.

Diablo III

I apparently worked the Hellgate London out of my system, but instead it has given me a desire to play Diablo III. For most of the week this has been my go to game, as it has just the right amount of friction for my mental state. I don’t have to think about it much, I can just push buttons and kill things… and that works. In the continued theme of setting myself up for failure, I apparently decided that creating a Season 3 character from scratch was apparently a brilliant idea. Now in order to get any of the Seasonal rewards I need to get a character to 70… before 5 pm PST tonight. This is not a thing that is going to happen since I am just now sitting at 27 as the above screenshot shows the ding. The positive is… I am actually really enjoying playing the Crusader. I figure when Season 4 starts I will make another seasonal character and see what I can make it to with a full three months or so of playtime available.

Hatoful Boyfriend

I curse everyone involved for introducing this game into my life. It is so damned crazy, but I can’t seem to stop myself from playing it. At this point I have now seen six different endings for the game. From what I can tell I have yet to actually scratch the surface, but at least I feel like i have a lot to talk about for the upcoming show. I imagine that I will play it some more and go for a few more endings. The ending that I have not seen is the supposed “bad ending”, which I guess means you have to play the game without much thought taking random birds to do things. At this point I have taken the approach of setting my sights on a specific bird during each play session. I have a few more left to do that with, so that is probably going to be my focus in the sessions between now and the aggrochat show.

Heavensward Mega Episode

For awhile now the AggroChat crew has deliberately put off talking about the events of Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward in an attempt to allow folks to catch up on the content. However this week the gloves are coming off and we are dipping into a full spoiler episode where we hash out the events that have occured since the 2.55 patch show. We trace the steps of our characters from setting foot into Ishgard to the final conflict of the expansion, with as much details as we can think about in between. This is a roughly two hour long show because of the truly large amount of content to go over. We considered chopping this into two halves, but figured we would release it uncut. We talk about our favorite characters, our most emotional moments and what we are looking forward to with future content patches.

[AggroChat] [Direct Download] [iTunes] [Stitcher]