World of Warcraft

Weekend Hibernation

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Weekend Hibernation

It was a truly bizarre weekend for a whole lot of reasons.  Primarily because whatever illness my wife had seemed to strike with a vengeance during the tail end of last week.  As I said before I was originally planning on going to RiffTrax with work friends on Thursday night but by the time I left work I realized there was no way I could make it through an entire evening.  Instead I begged off and went home and crashed on the sofa in my fuzzy blanket cocoon.  By the time Friday came around I was really doing considerably worse and took a sick day…  which in turn screwed up  our evening plans.  We were originally slotted to do this monthly family dinner thing, but we rescheduled it for next weekend because I was not sure how well I would be to drive.  Instead I returned to the blanket cocoon once more and was as a result available for our normal Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear run.  I wound up tanking it, with the stipulation being that I was not going to talk at all.  In fact to  prevent myself from doing this I muted my microphone…. which lead to a weird run since I am fairly vocal as we make it through the content.  To make it even more odd, we were without the OTHER vocal leader Kylana which meant a whole slew of people had to step up to the plate and help make sure the run went smoothly.  So seriously huge thanks to Mort, Phy, Beist, Bledd, and I am sure a whole slew of other people who also were chatty and helpful but I am not remembering at this very moment.  It was once again a super clean run, and in the end I wound up swapping off for Erry for the final encounter since it generally requires a bit more vocal tank coordination.

Weekend Hibernation

Past that night I spent a lot of time piddling around in stuff by myself.  Namely this meant an awful lot of Final Fantasy XV, and I think maybe just maybe I am finally to the point where I am willing to move on past “world 1”.  As I said before there is a point where the game warns you that if you continue on you might not be able to return for awhile.  I took this warning to heart given that I just came from playing Final Fantasy XIV where this sometimes means that a two and a half hour long cut scene is about to happen.  Instead over the weekend I found out from some of the other folks playing it that at least in this case… the game is talking about a ten minute process and not a thirty hour long one.  In past games these warnings often times meant that you would not be able to return until you found the airship, and I am pleased to find out that this is not the case.  At this point though I am running out of things I can actually do in the starter world, and all of the hunts are of a significant level difference from my current level so I think the game is not so subtly telling me to move the hell on.

Weekend Hibernation

Another thing that took up some time this weekend is that I tore down a chunk of my office and set up my new Xbox One.  For awhile now I have been interested in owning an Xbox One to be able to play the titles that don’t exist on the PS4.  Similarly there is an entire group of friends that I have that are on the Xbox path, and I have not been able to play with them.  Unfortunately there were really no titles that supported Xbox 360 crossplay with Xbox One, so as each of them has upgraded…  my options similarly narrowed.  While I have had this latent desire… I also just could not justify the street price for the console given that I am primarily a PC gamer first… and a Console gamer second.  However on Black Friday I actually partook of a deal on Dell.com for an Xbox One, Extra Controller, Headset, and Five Games:  Halo 5 Limited Edition, Farcry 4, Ryze Legendary Edition, Sunset Overdrive, and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes all for right at $200.  For this I was willing to jump on it and the box arrived at my house Saturday during the day… and I wound up setting it up after editing the podcast on Sunday morning.  There was another deal on Cyber Monday to pick up a copy of the Destiny Collection for the Xbox One for I believe $25 and I jumped on that too, so while I was installing other things…  I ported over my Xbox 360 copy of Destiny.  Firstly since I am largely a digital only gamer on PS4… I did not realize the whole download after installation was as much of a tedious chore as it actually was.  Halo 5 took a good three hours worth of download time, which I found insane and shocking.  Is this what disc copy gamers on the PS4 have to deal with as well? or is this largely just an Xbox One thing?  In any case… I was kinda happy to see that my PS4 clan tag ported over to the Xbox One, and while I will still primarily be playing Destiny on PS4, I want to level something to hang with my friends playing on the Xbone.

I’ve decided to start linking the podcast on Monday mornings in what generally ends up being a weekend rundown post.  Not that I think there is anyone who doesn’t have access to it… but just in case the youtube version embeds nicely.  The other big take away from the weekend was all of the food that we cooked.  We wound up having a weekend full of comfort food, cooked in the crock pot.  So Friday night before going to bed I threw our breakfast casserole on to cook so that when we woke up Saturday morning it was ready.  This dish consists of egg, cheese, potato, ham and sausage and it amazing.  We wound up eating on it for breakfast and lunch on Sunday as well…  and still have a bunch left over.  My wife had the bright idea to turn it into a breakfast burrito with a little salsa.  We also cooked our Chicken and Cheese Tortilla soup, which we only got two meals out of…  well and an extra helping or two.  Finally on Sunday we tried out this Orange Chicken thing…  that is close but not quite there.  It was good enough but it needs something to make it work properly…  and I think I screwed it up by putting the rice directly in the sauce and letting it cook.  I should have simply made a couple cups of rice and then ladled the sauce over it instead.  In any case…  my wife and I are both largely on the mend but we pretty much spent the entire weekend hibernating.  We started taking some OTC meds when it initially hit and I think it helped out quite a bit.

Awards Show and Timewalking

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Awards Show and Timewalking

This morning I am having a minor case of the deads.  I seem to have gotten whatever respiratory crud happens to be going around.  Yesterday morning I was largely doing okay… but then as the day went on I felt worse and worse to the point of begging out of Rifftrax last night.  Thankfully they were able to use my ticket for someone else, but it bums me out that I missed it.  However from the sound of it the double feature… would have completely wrecked me.  They apparently showed two complete movies rather than a short and a movie, and they didn’t actually leave the theater until 10:15 last night from a 7 pm show.  Instead I stayed snuggled up on the couch and had some left over crockpot Tikka Masala for dinner.  The bulk of the evening was spend winding my way through some horrible timewalking pugs.  The piece of this that I realized is simply that folks do not seem to remember the Cataclysm content nearly as well as the other content… or at least Cata still requires you to do actual mechanics to keep from wiping.  As a result I spend another large part of the night running back from wipes and trying to explain to people what went wrong.  I should be tanking…  but I wanted to shun all responsibility and just dps.  The part I didn’t realize is that in my sub 810 form… I would also end up being the carry that did twice as much damage as the others in a lot of the groups.  By the end of the night however I managed to pull my overall item level up to around 817, which now unlocked as of this morning some of the 830 world quest rewards.  In theory that is going to be how I gear my Deathknight, but logging in… doing the Emissary chest and then knocking out any items that look useful.

The other activity last night was a vague attempt at watching The Game Awards.  At some point this seems to have turned into a real awards show, when the first few years sorta felt like trying to make “fetch happen”.  Somewhere along the line it actually became “a thing” and now has significant support from companies.  It was largely something I was doing because I was bummed at missing RiffTrax and happened to see it scroll across my twitter.  The part I was not expecting was the fact that apparently… folks are using this as another opportunity to announce and or show off upcoming games.  There is a post in me somewhere about the never ending chain of promotional opportunities that game developers have right now.  For years it was the CES and that was literally the only place we got information.  Then E3 and Gamescom became significant players… and that was the moment when we found out literally everything that was to know about the upcoming games.  Now we technically have five different PAX shows, and a plethora of other events like the Playstation Experience that is happening this weekend… and individual company based shows like FFXIV Fan Festival and Blizzcon.  It seems like at any given point we are a week away from a potential cache of big announcements… and we as fans expect something important at each and every one of these.  It is almost as though we are expecting executives at EA or Ubisoft to be prepparing their “Thanksgiving game”, or their “Presidents Day” game to announce at any moment.  I don’t want to go on about this much longer… but I blame the constant deluge of things just on the horizon for constantly distracting us from the games we actually have installed and should be playing.  Saying that… here are some things that distracted me from games I should be playing.

We finally got some really good footage of Andromeda that goes into more detail about how the actual game is going to function and play in its final version.  Firstly I have to say I am super excited to see this because I like Mass Effect best when it is allowing me to play Star Trek Away Team.  Of the previous games… my favorite is Mass Effect 2 because it was one the one that allowed me the most freedom to pop around the galaxy doing tiny interesting vignettes.  The part I am hoping is that the moment to moment gameplay is going to be able to keep my attention.  There was just something about the way that Inquisition performed that was a turn off… and then you take the fact that I am now forced to play a faction that I would rather be cheerfully slaughtering…  and it was a recipe for a game that never quite clicked with me.  Andromeda however feels like it is going to be something I can sink my teeth into… especially if it allows me to constantly be recruiting new and interesting people to join my core team.  Also jump packs… are awesome.

Watching this trailer made me realize that no one has really done a good Monster Hunter style game for the PC platform.  I am sure in the comments someone is going to point out one that I missed, but Monster Hunter fills this weird niche between traditional RPG and Diablo.  Since this is being billed as an Action RPG I am hoping that maybe it falls along those lines.  What I don’t want this to be is another asymmetric team versus monster game like Evolve.  I have zero interest in that.  Like if it is possible for interest to go into the negatives…  then asymmetrical multiplayer falls into that category.  It is being billed however as a Free to Play take on Monster Hunter by ex Riot and Bioware devs.  On that billing alone… I am super interested.

If naked stranded on a beach crying Norman Reedus was not strange enough…  we get another trailer for Death Stranding.  Last I heard they had not actually even picked an engine yet, so I am finding it really hard to take anything I see on this game seriously at this point.  That said I am really liking the direction of this trailer.  I love the weird washed out post apocalyptic marsh thing going on… and I like the skele-zombie troopers thing and the Cthuloid tanks.  This feels like it is going to be creepy in all the right ways and we need more Cthulhu in our lives… or at least ones that play on modern platforms after the frustration that was Dark Corners of the Earth recently.  I am entranced and willing to throw money at the screen for this one, even if I don’t know specifically why I am.  Guillermo del Toro makes the best monsters, and I was just commenting the other day about how badly I would love to see another Hellboy movie.  Maybe this creations in this game can satiate the desire, because if nothing else it has me now following his twitter that is full of awesome monstrous stuff.

Awards Show and Timewalking

by

Awards Show and Timewalking

This morning I am having a minor case of the deads.  I seem to have gotten whatever respiratory crud happens to be going around.  Yesterday morning I was largely doing okay… but then as the day went on I felt worse and worse to the point of begging out of Rifftrax last night.  Thankfully they were able to use my ticket for someone else, but it bums me out that I missed it.  However from the sound of it the double feature… would have completely wrecked me.  They apparently showed two complete movies rather than a short and a movie, and they didn’t actually leave the theater until 10:15 last night from a 7 pm show.  Instead I stayed snuggled up on the couch and had some left over crockpot Tikka Masala for dinner.  The bulk of the evening was spend winding my way through some horrible timewalking pugs.  The piece of this that I realized is simply that folks do not seem to remember the Cataclysm content nearly as well as the other content… or at least Cata still requires you to do actual mechanics to keep from wiping.  As a result I spend another large part of the night running back from wipes and trying to explain to people what went wrong.  I should be tanking…  but I wanted to shun all responsibility and just dps.  The part I didn’t realize is that in my sub 810 form… I would also end up being the carry that did twice as much damage as the others in a lot of the groups.  By the end of the night however I managed to pull my overall item level up to around 817, which now unlocked as of this morning some of the 830 world quest rewards.  In theory that is going to be how I gear my Deathknight, but logging in… doing the Emissary chest and then knocking out any items that look useful.

The other activity last night was a vague attempt at watching The Game Awards.  At some point this seems to have turned into a real awards show, when the first few years sorta felt like trying to make “fetch happen”.  Somewhere along the line it actually became “a thing” and now has significant support from companies.  It was largely something I was doing because I was bummed at missing RiffTrax and happened to see it scroll across my twitter.  The part I was not expecting was the fact that apparently… folks are using this as another opportunity to announce and or show off upcoming games.  There is a post in me somewhere about the never ending chain of promotional opportunities that game developers have right now.  For years it was the CES and that was literally the only place we got information.  Then E3 and Gamescom became significant players… and that was the moment when we found out literally everything that was to know about the upcoming games.  Now we technically have five different PAX shows, and a plethora of other events like the Playstation Experience that is happening this weekend… and individual company based shows like FFXIV Fan Festival and Blizzcon.  It seems like at any given point we are a week away from a potential cache of big announcements… and we as fans expect something important at each and every one of these.  It is almost as though we are expecting executives at EA or Ubisoft to be prepparing their “Thanksgiving game”, or their “Presidents Day” game to announce at any moment.  I don’t want to go on about this much longer… but I blame the constant deluge of things just on the horizon for constantly distracting us from the games we actually have installed and should be playing.  Saying that… here are some things that distracted me from games I should be playing.

We finally got some really good footage of Andromeda that goes into more detail about how the actual game is going to function and play in its final version.  Firstly I have to say I am super excited to see this because I like Mass Effect best when it is allowing me to play Star Trek Away Team.  Of the previous games… my favorite is Mass Effect 2 because it was one the one that allowed me the most freedom to pop around the galaxy doing tiny interesting vignettes.  The part I am hoping is that the moment to moment gameplay is going to be able to keep my attention.  There was just something about the way that Inquisition performed that was a turn off… and then you take the fact that I am now forced to play a faction that I would rather be cheerfully slaughtering…  and it was a recipe for a game that never quite clicked with me.  Andromeda however feels like it is going to be something I can sink my teeth into… especially if it allows me to constantly be recruiting new and interesting people to join my core team.  Also jump packs… are awesome.

Watching this trailer made me realize that no one has really done a good Monster Hunter style game for the PC platform.  I am sure in the comments someone is going to point out one that I missed, but Monster Hunter fills this weird niche between traditional RPG and Diablo.  Since this is being billed as an Action RPG I am hoping that maybe it falls along those lines.  What I don’t want this to be is another asymmetric team versus monster game like Evolve.  I have zero interest in that.  Like if it is possible for interest to go into the negatives…  then asymmetrical multiplayer falls into that category.  It is being billed however as a Free to Play take on Monster Hunter by ex Riot and Bioware devs.  On that billing alone… I am super interested.

If naked stranded on a beach crying Norman Reedus was not strange enough…  we get another trailer for Death Stranding.  Last I heard they had not actually even picked an engine yet, so I am finding it really hard to take anything I see on this game seriously at this point.  That said I am really liking the direction of this trailer.  I love the weird washed out post apocalyptic marsh thing going on… and I like the skele-zombie troopers thing and the Cthuloid tanks.  This feels like it is going to be creepy in all the right ways and we need more Cthulhu in our lives… or at least ones that play on modern platforms after the frustration that was Dark Corners of the Earth recently.  I am entranced and willing to throw money at the screen for this one, even if I don’t know specifically why I am.  Guillermo del Toro makes the best monsters, and I was just commenting the other day about how badly I would love to see another Hellboy movie.  Maybe this creations in this game can satiate the desire, because if nothing else it has me now following his twitter that is full of awesome monstrous stuff.

Darth Scrapheap

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Darth Scrapheap

If appearance systems are the “true” endgame… them I am woefully losing right now.  Last night I managed to push my Deathknight across the line and ding 110, to which I immediately abandoned all attempts at questing and instead focused on World Quests.  For those who do not know when you hit 110 all you need do is walk over to Khadgar and you can start up the madness on your alts without needing to do the faction grind.  Now I look like a random assemblage of crap…  or very much like a raiding dps warrior did in vanilla.  I know that helm is supposed to be menacing and Deathknighty… but it just keeps reminding me of a lizard or turtle… or something similar.  After a round of “complete the gear quests” I am sitting at 795 and I absolutely plan on exploiting the hell out of the Timewalking dungeons this weekend to help push that higher.  As much as I wanted to like the Paladin… it was mostly just a choice to push up so that I could have a miner to feed my engineering.  Similarly I started the Rogue with the thought of pushing up a Herbalist/Alchemist but stalled out because Rogues are squishy and annoying.  Instead I started working on my Deathknight because deep down inside I still have a lot of love for the character… the fringe benefit however is that now I have a reasonable Herbalist as well to at the very least feed my Seed-Battered Fish Plate habit.

In other news we had a pretty good night of raiding with us coming in and killing Odyn once again after a weird off week thanks in large part to Thanksgiving.  It still took a few tries and there are a lot of fiddly bits we can improve on to make it less horrible at the end.  From there we had a crazy pull that never ended because we did not learn our lesson properly and or they said they patched something they didn’t actually patch.  From there we set up and changed a few things on Guarm and had an amazingly smooth one shot…  which is pretty damned awesome considering this was only our second night of attempts.  We then continued on to Helya and by the end of the we were pushing her into phase three and phase two was seeming less suicidal.  All in all I will count that as significant progress, the only negative being there just aren’t that many gearing options yet from this raid.  I am super bummed that I am going to have to miss our now “a thing” Friday night Emerald Nightmare clear this week.  I have a family thing that happens once a month, and this just happens to be that Friday.  Thankfully I think we have more than enough reasonable tanking options to make something work in my absence.  I am just bummed at losing a shot at maybe just maybe getting those last three corrupted essences.

Darth Scrapheap

I also played a significant amount of Final Fantasy XV, and I have decided it is far less a boy band simulator and more Final Fantasy Entourage.  All of that said… I still like it quite a bit and it is absolutely priceless when Prompto sometimes hums the class FF battle victory theme after you finish a combat engagement.  Right now I am heavily engaged in a life of murder-hobo-ry as I am roaming the country side looking for baddies to vanquish and looting interesting cooking materials.  The key take away from yesterday however is that I gave the official Sony PS4 Remote Play a shot and man…  have they seemingly improved it greatly.  Sure there are still moments when it wigs the hell out and you are best to simply hold still until it stops struggling.  Those however are few and far between and for the most part the end result is an extremely smooth play experience.  For reference my PS4 is hard wired into my router, and I was connecting into it from my laptop over the wireless network.  I did some tests in Destiny to see if this was simply a “good enough for an RPG” thing or if it really was reasonable for playing other games.  I could notice a little bit of controller lag while running and doing some patrols… but it was more than reasonable enough for me to play.  I am not sure if I would be willing to go into the Crucible or something extremely difficult, but I had a good enough time killing random splicers in the Plaguelands remotely.  In truth it is “good enough” for 90% of the stuff I do in Destiny and I would absolutely be willing to try something like farming Archon’s Forge while remoted in through the laptop.  It is definitely good enough for Final Fantasy XV which greatly increase the range of play options I have…  and I am going to want to test this theory out on the Vita pretty soon.  I still think the performance of the unofficial “Twisted” Remote Play was better… but he has just been unable to keep it updated to function on the latest version of the PS4 firmware… and the bonus features of playing with a keyboard, mouse and xbox 360 controller simply are not worth being behind in the firmware version especially given that it will bar you from accessing the PSN store.  I am super happy though to see that Sony seems to continue to improve performance.