For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog. I failed miserably at the last incarnation, because the side bar never actually got updated. Additionally May was a crazy month with all of the weather issues and I never quite got one of these done. Instead I am shifting to a June edition where I attempt to start doing these towards the start of the month instead of the end of the month. I seemingly inhaled my coffee this morning so… lets do this!
To Those Remaining
I continue to truck along happily in Dragalia Lost and especially now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 there is rarely a night that goes by that I don’t at a minimum play through my dailies. I’ve said this before but there is a release cadence of content that keeps me engaged and the fact that another character summon is just around the corner. The whole summoning process feels much better than that Wyrmprints have been completely removed from the mix. After playing effectively the entire time I have gathered up a good stable of five star characters that I have not even bothered leveling yet. I still sorta wish there was a switch version.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
If you have read the blog over the last few days you will know that I am fully engaged with Diablo 3 right now. Last night I attempted to farm some more chests but sleep claimed me. I am however on a mission to get the Avarice Conquest and will get there sooner or later. I love Diablo 3 so much and while I fade in and out of its focus… I will always sooner or later return to it.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
While I am not playing a ton of it… I am still very much engaged with Final Fantasy XIV and am looking forward to the upcoming head start on June 28th for Shadowbringers the next expansion. Pretty excited especially considering the drastic class changes that I think will lead to a more accessible environment. Right now the plan is to level the Samurai through the story quests and then level Warrior with Dungeon Finder given that Tank queues are a breeze. I’ve always done it the other way around and I think a lot of what leads to my burn out is trying to claw my way up to level as a DPS when I could simply go the easy route and level through the story.
Magic the Gathering Arena – PC
While I am not playing it a ton I am still fairly engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena and the War of the Spark expansion seems to be pretty interesting. We talked a bit about this on the podcast but I am really wishing they would make it so that constructed is a format that is always available for play, given that is probably my favorite of the “event” types. It also serves as an amazing way to obtain cards from a specific set.
To The New and Returning
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC
I did a lengthy post about this the other day but I am starting to play Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is as close as we will probably ever get to a proper Symphony of the Night sequel. While I only have the E3 demo version right now, I will be getting access to the full thing on my birthday… June 18th and plan on picking it up for pretty much every console that it will be available for. It is likely going to be a toss up between Switch and PC as to which version I actually play the most.
Destiny 2 – PC
With the Season of Opulence starting I believe today… I’ve been poking my head back into Destiny 2 of late to try and reacquaint myself with the way that the game as a whole feels. I completely missed the Season of the Drifter because I was off doing other things, and the start of a new Season seems to be a good time to get engaged again. I still very much love the game but at this point am so far behind that I am not exactly sure what the most ideal catch up mechanic would be. This is the problem with Destiny as a whole is that there isn’t a painfully obvious way to gain a ton of light levels quickly.
The Elder Scrolls Online – PC
I’ve also of late been spending a significant amount of time playing Elder Scrolls Online. A new expansion released and it has made me want to start playing again… in spite of not actually being willing to start the new content. Instead I am working my way through Vvardenfell… aka two expansions ago? The game is pretty great and ends up filling the same niche that Star Wars the Old Republic does… in that I mostly want to come in and gobble up a bunch of story content and then wander off.
To Those Departing
Grim Dawn
I know I will revisit this game again, but for now I am not playing it and it leaves the list. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have stopped playing sometime mid April. Still a really great game and I expect to get the itch at some point in the near future… but being engaged with Diablo 3 again mostly pushed it off the table.
Marvel Future Fight
I played this a significant amount of time for a short period of time… and now find it really hard to get back into it. I feel like I hit the free to play wall where I have done as much of the content as I want to do before needing to spend a significant chunk of money. The grind set in and all of the things that would offer advancement require either a lot of money or a lot of time.
Mortal Kombat 11
Going forward I am going to try to filter titles like this off the list in part because there are a lot of things that I play furiously for a weekend and then never play again. Mortal Kombat 11 was one of these and while I fully expect to return to it periodically it isn’t really worthy of the moniker of “regularly playing”. Its still a really cool game and you should check it out especially when it goes on sale.
Outward
This again is another example of a game that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the list since I played it obsessively for a few nights and then never again. I’m going to start an honorable mentions section below for some of the games where I play in this manner because I have a few of them this month as well.
Star Wars the Old Republic
I came in… I gobbled up the entire Eternal Throne storyline and then wandered off once I started the content immediately following that. I have no clue why I suddenly stopped playing but I did. I expect honestly at some point soon to add this back to the list especially with a new full expansion on the way. I still really like this game and am happy it found its feet post launch. I would love more of the content along the lines of Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne because both were phenomenal.
Honorable Mentions
Again for those who didn’t read all of the blurbs above, this is a section I am adding in part because every month there are a handful of titles that I play furiously for a few days and then wander away from. They don’t really deserve the title of “regularly playing” but they are also worth noting.
Crowfall – PC
While there is actually a game here I am not entirely certain if it is a game I want to play. This is something I have been poking my head in to check on since the backer alpha began. I had a few fun nights with it but more or less have consigned it to hibernation once again.
Dragon’s Dogma – PC
I have no clue how much of this I will be playing. I randomly installed it and started playing a few weekends back after watching a series of videos on it by Gaijin Hunter. It is a really cool game and I think it might be something that I could settle into as a bizarre “what if capcom had made skyrim” experience. Not quite ready to add it to the regularly playing list, will see if it returns by the end of the month.
Rage 2 – PC
I had a lot of fun with this game right around the time of launch and then I wandered away… and am not exactly sure why? I really need to get back to playing it and at least make my way through the main story. I get easily distracted when it comes to gaming and I am guessing me getting into World of Warcraft Classic beta was the shiny object that caused this one.
World of Warcraft Classic – PC
And… last but definitely not least… we have World of Warcraft Classic the aforementioned shiny object. This is coming in as an honorable mention and not a regularly playing in part because I have forcefully pulled myself away from it. This game launches officially in August and given the amount of time you need to spend leveling in this game… I don’t see a point in burning myself out before that point. We are completely nonsense and are going to be making an attempt at 40 player raiding again. I will give more information about this as time gets closer. However for now it claims a spot on the Honorable Mentions.
Over the last few days I have been doing a number of minor renovations to AggroChat.com which is a site that you may or may not know about. Essentially the site is a mirror of the content that the various members of the AggroChat podcast do on the interwebs along with the resting place of each of our episodes. We use a plugin that is no longer actively supported… but still seems to work… to make a local copy of each post that comes out on the various sites that make up our group. What this means in practice is that the site is mostly filled with Aggronaut posts and podcast episodes given that I am way more prolific than the rest of our crew.
The site itself had been in a weird place for some time, largely due to the fact that the previous web host made it very hard to modify anything as I had to go through a manual install process. So over the last few days since moving the sites over the weekend I have been making small tweaks here or there to the site to refresh it. The main change that I made is to swap from the cumbersome theme that I had been using over to Generate Press, the same highly modular theme that I use with Aggronaut. What makes this theme extra awesome is the fact that the licensing allows you to pretty much use it on any site that you own.
I may be tweaking colors a bit, but I think for the most part things are now in a fairly stable state. The last major changes I made yesterday were to make private any content not related to the current staff, and to re-associate the podcast episodes to the AggroChat account instead of my account. What this gives me is a much cleaner Author widget in the sidebar that shows the last several podcast episodes lumped together as well as the last several posts from each author. Previously I really didn’t make proper use of the sidebar and now it has a much more consistent feel to it as well as linking to the various “AggroChat” branded social media accounts. I’m fairly happy with the current state of things and just felt like talking about it a bit this morning.
As far as gaming goes… I started my night attempting to do some Diablo 3. I say attempting because the thing that I really need to do is a round of bounties, and the thing that I keep struggling to do… is a round of bounties. For some reason over the last few days I have encountered issues where I get disconnected from Diablo and battle.net entirely… so much so that I often have to crash the client and restart it. This happened the other night while Grace and I were grouping up, which didn’t make it that big of a deal because she kept the session active. However when I am playing solo… this means whatever progress I made towards a round of bounties was lost since I only really need the Bounty Caches at this point and not whatever I happen to loot along the way. This also meant that Diablo 3 was not my final resting place for the evening.
My next go to was World of Warcraft Classic, but after screwing around on my newly minted Undead Warrior… I was not having much gusto there either. I think I might be in a holding pattern with this until it officially releases in August. Were they to tell me that they were not going to be resetting progress between now and release… then that would be one thing. However since leveling in Classic is not exactly fast… I am not exactly relishing the prospect of getting to a happy place in beta and then losing all of that progress for live. Classic served to tell me that yes I did in fact want to do this… and now I am more or less ready for launch.
Instead I largely opted to watch some episodes of The Toys that Made Us on Netflix. For the uninitiated this is a docuseries that outlines the various decisions that went into making the toy lines I grew up with in the 80s. I watched the first season when it initially was released, and yesterday was made aware that season 2 was available. So I watched the first of the new episodes on Star Trek toys, and then the majority of the episode on Transformers before I eventually gave up and went to bed. I think a lot of my restlessness from last night comes from the fact that I did not sleep well due to the storms. I was more or less dead to the world until the alarm went off this morning… and then was groggy enough that i couldn’t figure out how to turn the alarm off on my watch. Hopefully tonight will be more fruitful on the gaming front… and if not I will just keep on watching Toys that Made Us because it really is a charming show.
Diablo 3 Season 17 Start
This weekend was the beginning of Season 17 of Diablo 3, and after largely taking off the previous one we were back in the saddle again. I started the season on PC and hope at some point to start playing it on the Switch as well at least far enough to get the various season rewards. To the best of my knowledge this is the first season to double back and start repeating, as I had all of the cosmetics that were handed out this time around. This is both a positive and a negative in that I will be able to pick up the things that I have missed in the past, but it also will lower my overall drive to play a given season if I know I won’t be getting anything brand new.
Low Level Crusading
I am amped for this season however because it allows me to return to my favorite build in Diablo 3… the “stop hitting yourself” crusader. Generally speaking I pick which class I play in a given season based on which class sets are available through Haedrig’s Gift, and this season the one available for Crusaders is Invoker… aka the Thorns build. The inner tank in me just really loves running around and watching the monsters explode when they try and hit me, and apparently everyone is pushing this one up high on their tier lists for long term clearing. Which makes me really want to try and get a bonus stash tab and the cosmic effect bat wings this season. I had a lot of fun this weekend playing around with Diablo 3 and I just wish that my schedule would have synchronized better with my friends because apart from the Friday night push and while recording on Saturday… I never quite managed to group up again. I did however finish chapter 4 and get the full set of Invoker… and am now working on the Slayer chapter.
Undead Warrior – More Fear Breaks, More Better
Also the “Decades Behind” thing is starting to gather steam and I am shocked that for the most part the AggroChat crew seems really interested in it… or at the very least it is a thing that they feel like they are insane enough to do. With that however I decided that maybe I should see if I can get used to playing an Undead Warrior… given that raiding Horde side means you don’t have Fear Ward and having an extra fear break would potentially be worth it. It is weird that I am now thinking in terms of optimization for something that I have literally “been there and done that” for… which is going to make the whole raiding experience feel weird. I know these bosses and the strats to take them down… I know the drop tables and which gear I should seek out. I feel like Classic WoW is going to be a master class in optimization as much as anything else in trying to seek out the items you need. Like for example… I want to tank every single Warlock when they get their Felsteed… because that boss can drop one of the best +defense guns in the game at the time of Vanilla. All of this shit is coming back and my memory is on fire with all of the things I used to do to make things functional. This is going to be a really interesting ride.
Uptime Monitor Spam – Aggronaut Going Down Often
Lastly this morning is the first post from a brand new web host. Over the weekend I uprooted both Aggronaut.com and AggroChat.com and moved them over to a brand new location. For the most part things seem to be going smoothly, apart from a few hiccups here and there. Aggronaut seems to be having more problems than AggroChat but that is largely because I am needing to undo the various customization I made to make it work on the previous host. Like this morning I could not get image uploads to work, but I ironed that out in short order. It was a sequence of events that made me to abandon ship. Firstly I was paying way more than I would need to make… but you can never underestimate the power of my laziness when it comes to avoiding paying money for something. Next there was the problem where at some point automatic upgrades broke completely… which was a big boost for moving but again something I was willing to deal with for the short term.
The final straw however is that the host itself has been wildly unstable… I use a cloud app called Uptime Robot to track if my sites are up or down. The above spam is from my inbox and the messages showing my site is going unresponsive on a pretty regular basis. This finally was enough of a kick to get me to go off and find better options. As it stands I am in the process of moving things over one by one but with AggroChat and Aggronaut both moved that really is the bulk of the work. It took forever to transfer the 77,000 files for AggroChat and the 25,000 files for Aggronaut… which is bizarre considering that the bigger of the two sites is roughly half the age of the other one. I think I have an addon gone awry on AggroChat that we use to cache copies of posts from all of the AggroChat crew’s personal sites. Every so often it will go on a binge and add the same post over and over… and apparently this has happened more times than I realized.
It is returning… time to start planning
Whatever the case I am on new ground now, and if things continue to go as smoothly as they have I will probably write a proper review of the service during Blaugust. That is right folks… I have not forgotten about Blaugust and will begin talking about this years running shortly over on the Discord.
I spent my might roaming around in Mulgore some more and knocking out the various newbie quests from Bloodhoof Village at my own prodding pace that very much fits the animation cycle of the Tauren Male. So the weird thing about World of Warcraft Classic is that I know there is no capturing the feeling of roaming around in Azeroth for the first time back in 2004. I was 28 at the time and the launch of the game was a magical moment that happened to enrapture all of my friends that were MMO inclined at the same time. It was a weird amalgam of people I knew in real life, folks I met through Everquest, the few of us that played Dark Age of Camleot together, a bunch of people that we picked up from City of Heroes and some that came from the larger community of Horizon: Empire of Istaria (now just called Istaria). Everyone was going to be playing the same game at the same time and it was freaking awesome… the only hitch was that the game was divided into two halves and some of us were dedicated to playing Horde and others playing Alliance. I wound up joining the Alliance group and let the horde side of me largely atrophy, but from the beginning I found this to be a very artificial choice as I have never really bought into the faction war storyline.
I cannot fully explain why I am enjoying myself in World of Warcraft right now. I most definitely do not enjoy the current state of Battle for Azeroth, but for some reason playing Classic Beta feels more simple and pure. I am roaming around, surviving on nothing… getting legitimately excited any time I see a copper node or get some linen drops because it means I can advance my crafting. I got a bag drop during the first part of the newbie zone and was absolutely excited to see it… and still several levels later I am hoping to see another one drop. Everything feels to be boiled down to is purest form, of do some quests… kill some monsters… actually read some quest text because otherwise I cannot remember for the life of me where anything is located. I am present in the world because I keep my head on a swivel because one bad pull… one add at the wrong time… and I end up doing a corpse run.
The truth is that I have probably died more in the last two nights than I have died in the entire time questing since the release of Wrath of the Lich King. I am of course not counting raid and dungeon deaths because those are rather “accident prone” settings, but just in over world questing…  most of the time I manage to level my way through almost the entirety of the expansion content before I actually take a death. In Classic I sorta wish that I had been keeping a death count… because seriously I have been dying a lot as I have had to adjust to the realities that we dealt with in Vanilla. I am having to re-learn the dark art of slow body pulling camps… and dragging them back at a safe distance while watching for any roamers. I am having to keep track of the spawn times and as I clear keep moving to what is now guaranteed to be a safe spot for awhile. All of these were skills that I went into World of Warcraft with having developed them in the precursor MMOs… but that have completely atrophied over time.
During Battle for Azeroth I played a Tank Demon Hunter… and on that character if I was not pulling entire camps at a time I was legitimately playing the game wrong. If I move forward to Classic however… if I get more than one mob at a time… I am straight up going to die. There is no safety net for me to fall back on… no Ignore Pain that I can lean on heavily to bring my health back up to full. The in combat regeneration rate is prodigiously slow meaning that I basically cannot do anything to better my situation apart from a healing potion during the fight… and even then that is just a temporary salve to a likely inevitable end. There is a part of me that thought I wouldn’t be as into this as I apparently am. That said I am having a blast and while I know there is no recapturing the things that made World of Warcraft Vanilla special… I am finding that it also still strangely works for me.
All of that said… I am contemplating some nonsense. I want to build a casual Dungeon and eventual Raid guild in World of Warcraft Classic when it releases in August. I realize the futility of naming something when I cannot actually register the guild… but I want to go with Decades Behind because there is a story there. Back during Wrath of the Lich King a bunch of us on the Argent Dawn Forums started a guild called Years Behind when patch 3.2.0 introduced the ability to lock your level at a specific level. I rolled a Gnome Warrior and for a short period of time we ran a bunch of the Vanilla raid content while artificially level locked down to 60. This was fun… but also not exactly true given that most of us were equipping Burning Crusade greens rather than relying on what was actually available back during Vanilla. With the advent of Classic I want to try and do something similar… and given that it has been over a decade since the launch of World of Warcraft I opted to update this name. In the months between now and the release I figure we will sort out information. Right now however I am targeting the Horde for two reasons. First… Grace is a die-hard Horde player and is super sad anytime she is playing something else… and in order to make this work I am absolutely going to need her. Secondly… I remember several bosses that Horde had a way easier time fighting than Alliance (and of course some that horde struggled with as well). The big one… was that there just wasn’t a viable way to take down the Ooze in AQ40 as Alliance. Additionally Horde has bloodlust… and I am stacking the deck as best I can.
I will of course be providing updates as I know more information about all of this.
