Good morning everyone. I need to order a new keyboard because the one I have been typing on randomly seems to repeat characters. So if you ever see a word with one too many of a specific letter I am going to blame it on this phenomena. This week in Blapril is “Get to Know You” week, but I am not really sure what I can tell you that I have not already told you in the other 2312 posts on this blog. I’ve always tried to be open with my readers and share large swaths of my life. There are of course a few edits here and there to hide the identities of the innocent, but the core truth is always there. Anything prior to about 2013 makes me cringe massively when I have attempted to re-read it because I think it was written by a very different version of me.
I will tell you one thing I have been kicking around in my head is whether or not we should do an actual Blaugust this year in addition to Blapril or not. I think there are positives and negatives to it in both ways. That might be a little too much blogging and togetherness in one year, and at least for the folks who are actively participating in Blapril it might feel a little weird to turn around and do it again in another four months. All of that said who knows if we will be getting back to normal by August or not. I will say five weeks into isolation mode, a new sort of normal is starting to settle in and I am not entirely certain if I like it or not.
The only analogy I have for what I am feeling is that I go through something when my wife has a work trip. I go through a day or two of enhanced freedom mode, where I order pizza exactly the way I want to and do other minor random acts of defiance… before I am mostly just wanting her back because I am not sleeping right without another body beside me in the bed. The first few weeks of remote work were really fun… until it set in that this is now the reality rather than the escape from it. There are a lot of days where I would much rather drive into the office and be present there, than work remotely. Like I have said before I have a brand new respect for folks who have been doing this for years. All of that said I am probably way better suited to deal with this than a lot of folks given how generally solitary I tend to be by nature.
On the gaming front I hit 120 with my Hunter and have gotten his item level up to 380ish. The hardest part are the weapons and the trinkets, and I am largely just gearing through soaking up free world quest gear. On the 8th I was sitting in my 70s and on Sunday night I dinged 120. I am not sure how many total hours it took me but it absolutely felt faster than it has any right to be. Legion and Battle For Azeroth were the slowest part, largely because a lot of the quests that you end up doing are more complicated and simply take more time. I am finding that I am really enjoying the Beast Mastery Hunter, and I am contemplating doing further nonsense and trying to farm up missing set pieces from a few Hunter sets.
As far as my next victim goes… I decided to start pushing up my fresh Zandalari Druid. The entire goal here is not necessarily to gear out a single character, but to abuse the fact that leveling is insanely fast right now to build out my stable of horde characters. I spent a decade exclusively playing Alliance characters, so it makes sense that I have one of everything over there above the level of 100. On the Horde side however I have a bunch of “youngins” that my goal is to get several up to the cap before this buff runs out. I spent the better part of last night running around the Barrens doing quests that I have not done in quite some time.
I have to say it is hard to explain how much better the post Cataclysm version of the Barrens is than the World of Warcraft Classic version. This really is driven home by the fact that I spent so much time leveling in it last August during the crush of Classic. The flow of the quests just works so much better and there seems to be much less randomly ping ponging from various corners of the map back to the Crossroads. What is also making this exceptionally fun are the really cool dinosaur druid forms. I am not sure exactly what I am when I am in “cat form” but it looks badass and I am all there for it. I also randomly decided to make my Druid my Alchemist, so I need to spend some time working on that at some point.
I am having a lot of fun leveling random things in World of Warcraft, which is about the level of engagement that I need right now.
Over the extended weekend I played an excessive amount of World of Warcraft. Namely I leveled my Tauren Hunter from 70 to 120… which sounds more impressive than it actually is. There were a lot of those levels that took me only a few minutes and in most cases I never managed to finish the starter zone of any expansion thanks to the bonus currently in place. I’ve been working on creating a stable of horde characters similar to those I have on the Alliance side after a decade and some change of playing there primarily. I now feel significantly more comfortable playing Horde than I do Alliance and as a result I am feeling the absence of that army of alts and have set it into my mind to fix that.
Last week I set forth to tame Arcturis the Spirit Bear and managed to get him on my first attempt. He was just sitting there waiting on me to tame him, and over the course of the weekend I realized something. I was essentially playing with the perfect avatar of Ashgar, who tends to personify with mystical shape changing bears. As a result I thought it would be fun to name my pet Ashgar, and weirdly the act of doing so made me care way more about never letting him die. Weirdly it also made it feel like he suddenly got better at AOE tanking. I know this is all in my head, but it did send me down a rabbit trail of wanting to name pets after my friends.
In my travels trying to find some of the other Spirit Animals, I happened across King Krush… which is probably as close to Godzilla as you get in World of Warcraft. It is an irradiated looking green devilsaur, and since this is also probably as close as you get to a proper Kaiju that is tameable… this personifies my friend Grace. Also I really just like the concept of a giant Devilsaur being named Grace. I just wish it had kept the size of when I originally tamed it, because that would be even more perfect given how tall her Roegadame towers over me in FFXIV.
This is a bit of cheating because I have had this own in my stable for quite a while. I tamed it because it reminded me of the Great Owl from Secret of Nymn. Pulling it back out of the stable made me think of how much I have always personified Thalen as the wise Owl of our group. He was our mastery of strategy back in the Duranub raiding days, and I’ve always considered him to be a source of sage advice. He also never really gets rattled and approaches most situations with a calm and rational head. So it seemed deeply fitting to name this great owl after him.
Kodra required a bit of research, because he is known for the garish color schemes of his characters. In fact he is the reason why we have the Purple/Pink and bright Green color scheme that we do for AggroChat. I set forth searching through pet models that were available on Petopia and landed upon this particular basilisk that is green with purplish pink highlights. So I flew over to Zul’drak and tamed one specifically for the honor of Kodra. The thing about basilisks is that they are tough as nails and make really good protectors… which are also traits that I would align with Kodra as well. Anyone who used to chat-roulette to have political conversations for fun, can take on just about anything in the world.
I will admit, Tam was really hard because there are so many aspects of him that I have gotten to know over the years. However in World of Warcraft terms I will always think about his rogue, and the one that got away. During the heyday of the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, Tam set forth to questing and farming his ass off chasing the goal of being the first person to actually open the gates on our server. I remember contributing a little bit to the cause and going out to Silithis a few times to farm with him, namely because I also needed bits for resist gear. He worked his ass off and the grind broke him, an broke his enjoyment of the game… especially since we ultimately were about five hours too late in pushing across the finish line. However in my eyes, he will always be the Scarab Lord and since he truly is good as gold to every single one of his friends… I had to track down a Golden Scarab Beetle and name it Tamrielo.
Ammo was a situation of trying to figure out which of the many options I would go with. If you know her even a little bit you know she is a tried and true cat person, so without a doubt I had to choose that family. Other things you should know about Ammo is that she is an amazing artist and responsible for most of the artwork associated with Aggronaut and AggroChat both. However there is also a certain low key shyness that she has anytime someone mentions how damned good she is. So in my search for the perfect cat I with with this gorgeous Indigo Purple mana saber… that also spends most of its time stealthed and trying to blend in quietly to the world. In my head at least this fit my good friend Ammo perfectly and hopefully you will all agree.
While I didn’t set forth on this mission for the purpose of doing something for the anniversary of AggroChat, that also sorta just happened along the way. Today marks the release of our very first show titled “Finding the Format” back in 2014. The show is super cringey to listen to these days, but as we near our 300th episode I find it staggering just how long we have kept this ball afloat. It is a thing that has sorta morphed and changed as we have. I am super thankful to have this awesome group of individuals to call my friends, and I also want to thank all of the people who have guested on the show over the years. Here is a quick rundown of the various folks who have joined us:
Dallian
Inky
Nephsys
PizzaMaid
Rae
Shiana
Vexa
Warenwolf
Weiward
Now Dallian and Rae get special shout outs since they were involved an awful lot in the early days of AggroChat. Dallian was sorta the pinch hitter for a long time and was that guest I kept snagging any time it looked like we were going to be short some folks. Waren, Shiana and Neph are semi regular extras because they may or may not be hanging out on the voice chat server we record on and it feels real bad to lock them out of the podcast channel. We have a big village of people that make up the extended AggroChat family, and I am thankful to have all of them in my life. Who would have thought that six years later we would still be doing this thing.
My Appearance in Astral Chain
This morning is technically part of my weekend, and as such I contemplated following “holiday rules” and ignoring a post. However since we are in the middle of Blapril that might set a bad precedent for the various participants. Instead this morning you are going to get a random assortment of blurbs that are sorta left on the cutting room floor. These are things that I don’t necessarily want to devote an entire post to, but still have things to say. For example here is a picture that my friend Storm sent me from Astral Chain because apparently in that universe I am a Toilet Fairy. I can’t say it is a profession that I would have chosen for myself, but I am also not going to fight it terribly hard. I should probably play Astral Chain at some point because it is either going to be right down my alley or I will thoroughly reject it… because I am not sure there will be much of a middle ground.
New Playstation 5 Controller Design
Unlike Microsoft, Sony keeps unveiling their system bit by bit… and up until this point we really didn’t have much to go on as far as stylings for this next generation. However if this controller is any indication for what the final system might look like I am completely on board. This controller reminds me of you took the vibe of Tron Legacy and combined it with the Robotic designs from Portal. It also looks like maybe just maybe they are making a design that is a little bit friendlier to larger hands. There is a problem I have with the Dualshock 4 that my pinky fingers fall asleep when I am gripping the controller because I am sorta having to tuck them back up and under to get all of my fingers on the sides. I’ve written about my favorite large hand controller designs before, but this is definitely a thing for me personally. Thanks to growing up on movies like Bladerunner… this is what I expected the future to look like and I am thankful to Sony for starting to realize that cyberpunk reality. If the new console is inexplicably orb shaped they will even score more points with me.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands Alpha
The Friends and Family Alpha for World of Warcraft Shadowlands started this week, and like I assumed I did not get an invite. There was a time when I was pretty much getting these like clockwork, but I feel like I have said enough bad stuff about the company and the game that I am no longer considered friend nor family. All of that said I am excited it has started because I actually do love World of Warcraft spoiler season. I have a weird stance on spoilers in general, because they actually enhance my enjoyment of the product and hype me up about it. Now I tend to try avoiding some of the story beats, but the various world building products that start leaking out and how the systems are going to work are absolutely candy for me to gobble up. On one hand I have to admit that I would have liked being invited because it would have been fun to test out the various classes. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to burn myself out on a game before it even releases as I have done a few times in the past. I have a lot of hope going into this expansion that it will start to turn the game as a whole around. Having been back the last few weeks I am remembering how fun it is at times, and how much enjoyment I get out of piddling around. The corrupted item system however can die in a freaking fire.
Destiny 2 on Google Stadia Fake Screenshot
Another thing that happened this week that is worth talking about is that Stadia went open to the public. Everyone can sign up for 2 months of free Stadia Pro to get in and kick the tires. The problem I have seen so far is that the tires might fall off. Stadia appears to be actively blocking any third party capture solutions, including even GeForce experience and as such you have to rely on their baked in screenshot functionality accessible by hitting F12. The problem with this is that the above image bears no resemblance to the image that I actually saw on the screen while playing the game. I am guessting that the image is saved on the server side where the fidelity is significantly better. That image is perfectly fine and if the game looked like that while playing I would consider this a rousing success visually at least. What the game-play instead looks like is more akin to what I remember playing Destiny 1 on the PS3 felt like.
The nail in the coffin for me however is how the game performs. I specifically chose Destiny 2 just like I did when I was testing out GeForce Now because it was a game that I have deep experience playing and understand how it is supposed to be performing. I opted not to connect this up to my cross save so that I could experience the New Light intro. In it you pick up the Khvostov auto rifle, a weapon known for its smooth handling and honestly probably the ideal starter weapon. Trying to aim down the sights and take out Fallen felt like my mouse was jumping all over the place constantly. The cursor movement felt exceptionally jerky and random making it near impossible for me to stomach playing through even this first mission. I’ve stopped and restarted it a half dozen times, and for reference I am using the chrome based web client over a wired gigabit connection straight into my router. This machine has full access to my 350 Mbit internet connection, which should be more than cromulent for playing 1080p gaming.
Contrast that to my experience with the same game on GeForce Now and I am questioning how viable Stadia is for pretty much any sort of shooter going forward. I am going to play some of the other game that are less demanding on fine motor skill and see how they work out. However in playing GeForce Now it was not that different than playing over Parsec streaming to my desktop upstairs on the same LAN. The sad thing is… I am pretty close to their ideal customer given that I play games remotely all the freaking time. However the end result just did not feel good… and it could be that the server is just overloaded at this point. However it felt the same at 10 pm at night as it did this morning at 8 am… which should have significantly different bandwidth footprints. Not my jam but I am thankful that I did get to play with it in person.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake
Well folks it is finally here, and as I write this I am hearing the soundtrack playing in the background. I am weird and have all of my consoles connected to a capture card instead of directly into the television. So that means while I am playing games I am actually doing so through the Elgato HD Capture software window maximized. It works for me because it allows me to capture footage directly while playing and just hit the print screen key in order to take screenshots. Anyways all of that nonsense aside I have Final Fantasy 7 Remake up and ready to go and a day off work to play it. However I have to admit now that I do… I am thinking about playing other things. Seven was not the pinnacle game for me that it was for so many others. I originally played it on the PC, and really the game that blew me out of the water was Final Fantasy 3/6 depending on when it was released. The first Final Fantasy game I played on the Playstation was the 8th, and as a result I probably have more affinity for it than I do this one. That said I do plan on playing it this weekend, just not sure how far I will make it.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Soundtrack
With that we bring to a close my random list of topics. I am once again going to spin this around to Blapril for a moment, because quite often you are going to find yourself in this situation where you have a bunch of small bits of content that don’t really fit together. It is perfectly fine to do one of these cutting room floor posts where you clear out a bunch of thoughts that are disconnected. It helps greatly to break things up with images and captions like I have done, or to at least use headings to help the readers shift between them. As time passes and you get more used to creating content on the fly, you can pretty much take any assortment of things and make it work. My readers may however disagree with me and tell me that these sort of posts are crap, but they have always been a crutch that I could fall back on when I didn’t have much else to talk about.
I’ve continued to poke around in World of Warcraft over the last few days. As I said yesterday I managed to get Belgrace my formerly-Tauren now Blood Elf Paladin to 120. After that I have begun the process of gearing through abusing the World Quest system to cherry pick rewards until I get my item level up. I started by mailing all of the Benthic gear I had laying around and then buying whatever I happened to be missing. I am still annoyed that there is no catch up mechanic for weapons, rings or trinkets. Thankfully World Quests seem to reward rings fairly often, but Trinkets and weapons still are a constant problem. In theory it even looks like the highest level crafted option I could find is 400, which is fine but also seems like a waste of resources when you are going to ultimately need to push past that. I look like a mess but I also cannot be bothered to spend the gold to fix that until my item level stabilizes a bit.
I’ve been enjoying tooling around by air as I zip between World Quests, and as a result I have been noticing levels of detail that you just can’t see from the ground. Over on the coast of Zuldazar there is an area near Xibala where apparently there is a giant dinosaur skeleton exposed in the side of the mountain. I would have had no clue about this, as from the ground it just looks like a normal hill. I am wondering what other gems can be seen form the air that are not quite visible from the ground. I will say that air travel helps a lot in the end game, but I still find myself mostly moving around on ground while leveling because you end up getting so much experience killing random stuff while you travel between point A and point B.
I had every plan yesterday to pick up and start leveling my Warlock, which ultimately was my next highest in level. However I am finding it sorta hard to get into the swing of leveling a caster right now. I flipped back to Demonology from Affliction and I think it makes me a bit happier. All of the Warlock specs seem super fiddly at the moment, when I am mostly looking for some “mash button, get reward” classes to level. I am sure I will rotate back to the Warlock at some point, but it is going to require a bit more time “back” in the game for me to get to it. I do not love being squishy.
So instead I flipped over to my Hunter which was level 79 and sitting in Netherstorm. I dinged 80 and swapped over to Pandaria over the other option which was Catalcysm. I do not love Cataclysm, and revisiting Pandaria has made me realize how much I actually like that expansion now that some time has passed. However it did not take long before I realized that due to the pet changes in Battle for Azeroth… I don’t actually have a tanky pet anymore. I WISH pets were account bound, so that you could share them among multiple hunters. Instead I decided to make an attempt at taming Arcturis the Spirit Beast bear. I probably spent every last bit of luck I had in the game because by the time I flew over to Grizzly Hills he was just sitting there waiting on me to tame him. I made passes through to see if any of the other Northrend spirit beast were up, and tamed King Krush along the way but came up empty on the others.
So at least for now I am going to be in a mode of soaking up the loot from World Quests and then swapping over to the hunter and leveling. Having quite a bit of fun right now, and it has made me realize that I seem to really enjoy the end of expansions. I’ve come back at the tail end of most expansions and had a grand ole time thanks to the various catch up mechanics. I sorta wish I could play this mode of the game indefinitely. However I know an expansion will release and I will get caught up in the race of grinding to the top once more. I did not get an Alpha invite to Shadowlands, because I assume at this point they have gone out. Quite honestly I am not really sure if I would want one at this point, because on some level I kinda want to hit the ground running fresh. That said if I ended up getting one I am not sure I would be able to stop myself from logging in and playing with it. I’ve said enough bad things about Blizzard over the years that I am certain I am no longer on the “friends and family” list.
