World of Warcraft – Page 29

Missing Friends

July 24, 2020 by Belghast

I spent most of last night playing around on my Monk in World of Warcraft. I am still in a somewhat weird headspace and decided to hang out on the sofa and snuggle with the cats instead of doing anything more serious. One of the challenges of being a gamer like I am that hops around through a bunch of games is that you end up losing touch with a lot of friends along the way. Gamer friends right or wrong and largely bound together by the mutual love and adoration of a specific game. When you are not playing that game together, you often end up struggling to find things to relate to because that social lubricant in the form of the shared gaming interest is gone from the equation. Sure you can build lasting friendships that are based on firmer stuff, but those take time and as someone who has formed guilds and raids for decades I have a truly ridiculous number of “surface friendships”. What I mean by that is that you are close within the context of a specific medium, sorta like the friends you might make at a workplace and then never see again once either of you have moved on from that environment. The thing is every so often something reminds you of one of those folks that were lost in the shuffle, and you start to get some pangs of regret that you couldn’t find a way for that friendship to stay evergreen. At some point last night I was searching for something in gmail, and because I never seem to actually delete anything I stumbled across a conversation thread between me and one of these friends. There used to be a time when my means of contact with a whole slew of people was through trading long form emails. The entire thing was peppered with in jokes, because we had this running gag where we both claimed that they hated me… since they constantly avoided my recruitment pitch to join House Stalwart. This is someone that I raided in Vanilla with and then fairly frequently communicated off and on until I ultimately left the game in Cataclysm, and again pretty frequently when we were both playing SWTOR.

It is weird how ephemeral friendships can be at times. We were obviously close because reading back through this ancient gaming history there were all of the markers of a shared language. However its probably been a decade now since we were in regular contact. A lot of stuff happens in a decade, but as I sat there in World of Warcraft I decided to dust off my Battle.net friends list, something I almost NEVER pay any attention to these days and sure enough they happened to be also playing at the same time. The problem with getting out of contact with someone is that the longer it goes the harder it becomes to fire off that opening salvo of conversation. Not knowing what to say I just went with the sheepish “Heya :)”. What followed was a solid hour and a half of catching up about this or that and while yeah a gulf of time had passed, it was still pretty easy to fall back into holding a conversation. I am exceptionally bad at staying in contact with people once whatever shared medium we had is gone. I need to reach out more and try and catch up with more of these people lost to the turning of the tides. The challenge however is that there is no going back really. I’m not the person I was when I was leading House Stalwart and actively recruiting for raids. Mentally I have to realize that this person in question is not the exactly skittish warlock that I knew from so long ago. Time passes and people change and some of those folks that you were once “drift compatible” with are probably not going to be.

The thing is, I need to learn to get over the fear of reaching out and finding out. I have this list of friends in Battle.net for a reason, I guess at some point I should start poking additional people on it to see how they are doing. Right now I find myself in the awkward position of being without a permanent game home, and I tend to flit around madly between a bunch of side projects in different games. It is super hard to build a stable support structure when you yourself cannot seem to commit to any specific medium. Facepull is a delightful home in World of Warcraft, and I adore them all given our long shared history. However there are a bunch of voices out there that I would love to hear from again if only to have a single day of catching up before fading into the mists once again. The funny thing is… there are still a handful of friends that I communicate with mostly through email. Back during the days when everyone was using a single messaging platform, it was a bit easier. I could fire up Google Talk or AOL Instant Messenger and get immediate access to a whole list of people. I still have a fully populated friends list in Google Hangouts, but the only people I ever seem to talk to are Vernie and my Wife. AOL Instant Messenger was the platform I was way more prolific on… but it of course is lost to time. So as a result of all of this email just sorta became the easiest default middle ground. My friend Cylladora and I go through this pattern where completely from out of nowhere we will exchange an email and then go months again without communication. Being an old gamer means you have a lot of old gamer friends out there somewhere. It would probably be good for my mental state to occasionally reach out to a lot of them and at least get into the pattern of talking once or twice a year. The post Missing Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition

June 22, 2020 by Belghast

I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal. It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.

To Those Remaining

Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.

Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.

To the New and Returning

So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.

I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.

I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.

I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.

World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.

To Those Departing

Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.

You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.

I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.

Summary

During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing. The post Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Livingroom Rain

May 27, 2020 by Belghast

For whatever reason years ago when I leveled Mining and Botany to 50, I neglected fishing. As a result I spent most of last night chilling out and fishing in a video game, which is fine because I needed some heavy chill. As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, neither my wife or I really got much of a good sleep the night before. This is largely due to the fact that sometime between 8:30 and 9 pm that night it started raining in our living room. We didn’t pick up on it at first because something was on the Television, but the cats were freaking us out which lead us to notice the droplets coming down from the central rafter in our main living area. This has happened before and through much trail and error we have had the roofers out in an attempt to figure out what was causing it. Up until this point we thought it was the flashing at the top of the roof line that was the issue, and they would come out and tamp that down and caulk it, which would in fact cause it to stop for awhile. However this time while up on the roof the guy noticed an entire segment between this raised area of the roof and our chimney that appears to have no flashing at all. All we can figure out is that maybe when the folks put on the siding, that they failed to put back the flashing in that area. This will of course lead to minor surgery on the roof at some point in the future, but we have temporary flashing and caulk install in a hopes of getting us through the next few days of severe rain.

As far as gaming goes, I am all over the place right now. I am still spending a little bit of time each day in World of Warcraft, but I think I have petered out when it comes to pushing alts to 120. During the course of this run I now have on the Horde Side my Paladin, Hunter, Druid, Warlock, Death Knight, Mage and of course the original Warrior and Demon Hunter that were previously at 120. On the Alliance side right now I have everything at least to level 100 and so far the only 120 is my Paladin. For the moment I am mostly cherry picking World Quests each day when one shows up with an upgrade to any of my army.

Over the weekend I spent some time in Guild Wars 2, and that is something I would like to revisit in the coming weeks as well. I am not sure why it happened, but I logged into voice chat and everyone seemed to be in the game, so I like the dutiful toady I am patched it up to join in. I left the game with my Warrior in a fairly good spot, I just need a lot more points to finish getting Berzerker and Spellbeaker. I did some significant changing around of things because it appears that my Hammer/Greatsword is no longer in the “meta” and instead the money build is Greatsword/Mace and Shield preferably with Spellbreaker which I do not have… but there is another built the uses Discipline in its place. I had some fun fiddling around in Fractals and would like to do more of this.

Minecraft Dungeons released yesterday and I have been spending some time playing with it. I’ve not gotten terribly far in part because I mostly played it prior to heading to sleep last night. I tried it out first on Xbox One through game pass and then ultimately purchased it for Switch which seems to use my Microsoft account. I like it quite a bit but it reminds me way more of Gauntlet Legends/Dark Legacy than it does Diablo. It is quite a bit of fun though and I am interested to see how the game evolves as I level up and move through bigger areas.

Lastly Phantasy Star Online 2 released for Windows 10 PC today and I have it downloading in the background. This is more than likely going to be consuming the majority of my time for the remainder of the week as I try and catch my CAST Ranger to Ash and Tam who have been playing considerably more often on the Xbox One. This game looked horrible on a base Xbox and as a result I just found it a struggle to get into it considering I was also having to learn how to play it with a controller. I had experimented with the Japanese client and it completely spoiled me towards anything other than the Windows release. What have you been playing lately? Drop me a line below and let me know. The post Livingroom Rain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Chunky Robo Ranger

May 18, 2020 by Belghast

Phantasy Star Online 2 – Original Xbox One

This weekend was one where I was all over the place on my gaming. There is a huge part of me that wants to be playing Phantasy Star Online 2 since several of the AggroChat crew are currently enthralled by it. The biggest problem I have is that I know how good this game looks on a PC and as a result I am constantly confronted by how awful it looks on my base Xbox One. I know at some point on the near horizon it will be releasing for PC and that the characters will be cross compatible. In theory I should be able to catch up without much issue, and all of this means that my desire to actually play is severely diminished. I did get to level 10 however before ultimately “noping out” of its chunky graphics.

I also played a bit of Trials of Mana and progressed the story to the point of being able to my make very first class change choice. On Duran I went light side and became a Knight, on Riesz I went Dark to eventually become a crazy dragoon, and on Angela I went light to go Sorceress because the Dark “blood magic” route seemed like a trap. Still greatly enjoying this game but I am only really playing it before bed, and even then only until sleep claims me. The prolific appearance of golden angel statues seems to help me out in this mission as it never feels like I have to make it much further to get to a save point.

I’ve also been trying to ease my way back into Final Fantasy XIV, with minimal success. This is in part because my friends Bells and Zuu are now playing, and I want to be able to hang with them and run content as they get to various dungeons. The other side of this point is that an event is about to start today where you can farm moogle widgets and earn older mounts. I like mounts so it might be fun to poke around and farm up a bunch while the event is going on. Thalen in theory says he can craft a lot of the gear pieces that would potentially make my viable again, so here is hoping I can actually get back in the swing of things. I have no clue what the struggle is with this game, but it is real.

World of Warcraft – PC – The Scryers Server

On the World of Warcraft front, I managed to finish the Death Knight and am in the process of gearing him out. This makes my seventh character to level 120 since the Winds of Wisdom buff went active, and I went from having only a couple of characters horde side to play around to a pretty sizable stable of options. I am still not quite certain what I plan on “maining” come Shadowlands, but ultimately I have narrowed it down to a handful of options.

Warrior – This is my OG love as far as classes go, but ultimately it all depends upon how good tanking feels on it. Last expansion at the start tanking felt like I was being completely ineffective. The positive here is that I really do love Fury as well and gives me an enjoyable DPS alt for running content and raiding.
Demon Hunter – Once the Warrior failed out after getting it to 120, I rapidly leveled a Demon Hunter because tanking felt extremely strong. Over the course of the Battle For Azeroth expansion, I have come to really enjoy it.. but I do not really love DPSing on it.
Paladin – After leveling a Paladin on both Alliance and Horde sides, I have really come to love the class. Tanking feels great and I have always loved Ret as a dps spec. This even would give me the option of healing… which admittedly will probably never happen but of the WoW options this was the only healer I could actually stand playing.
Death Knight – When I finally hung up my Warrior shield at the tail end of Wrath of the Lich king it was for playing the Death Knight and I “mained” this all through Cataclysm. Playing the Death Knight has made me remember what I loved about it, so it now is in the running as well.

I legitimately have no clue what I am going to choose for a class, but at least for now I am somewhat leaning in the Paladin direction. As far as World of Warcraft projects going forward I will be working on finishing off the Monk since he is in his 80s. That would give me a 120 for every class but Priest, Shaman and Rogue which are not exactly favorites of mine. However I like playing all of them more than a Mage, so that is ultimately why I chose to boost that . Monk is fun, but not nearly as fun as leveling some of the other classes I have had in my stable so far. I should give Brewmaster another shot, but so far leveling as Windwalker has had a pretty high time to kill. I am all over the place right now when it comes to my gaming habits and I guess for now that is perfectly fine. What have you all been up to over the last few weeks? What games do you find yourself drawn to? Leave me a note in the comments below. The post Chunky Robo Ranger appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.