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AggroChat #121 – Fizzylock’s Telekinetics

May 21, 2019August 28, 2016 by AggroChat

Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tam and Thalen have an unplanned show about stuff and things.

This evening we were originally planning on recording the AggroChat Game Club show for The Witness. However as we got close to recording events happened, and we will be rescheduling that later this month. That said the September game is announced in this show, and from that point onwards we charted a destination through madness. This is one of those super meandering shows, that covered a bunch of only semi-related topics.

Things We Talked about: Tales of Maj’eyal – September Game of Month – Nethack – Vampire the Masquerade/Requiem – Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Final Fantasy XIV – The Rising Year 3 – Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Deus Ex Go – Sweetness and Lightning Anime – New Game Anime – Game Development Industry – Orange Anime – Breaking Events – WoW Legion Launch – The Sleeper – Raiding in Everquest – Fires of Heaven – Green Dragons of WoW

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Imaginary Band

August 25, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday a good friend of mine from my Wrath raiding days, showed back up in my life suddenly. Now this isn’t exactly a strange occurrence because folks know that I tend to be the ring leader of a network of gamers. I am the one that tends to be good at maintaining connections with folks regardless of what game we happen to be playing. So an attempt to get in touch with me, generally also means an attempt to get back in touch with a gaming core of friends. The strange part of this whole experience however is when a few years pass between speaking. In this case, it seems like every few years our paths cross, the challenge being that large swaths of time pass between and my memory is often times spotty at best. Thankfully most people are super forgiving about me remembering the super granular details… and I seem to be relatively good at the large picture as a whole. The thing with the impending release of Legion next week is that this has been happening an awful lot in my life. Running around and doing Events, means that I have casually bumped into a lot of folks from my past… some of which I was interested in rekindling friendship… and others not so much. We talked about the mixed bag that playing World of Warcraft since launch is on the podcast this weekend. There are friends that I adored, and would still do damned near anything to help… and then there were folks who were super toxic influences and lead to a lot of the anxiety ridden struggles I had as a raid leader. Coming back to this game… and the server I have played on since the beginning of it all… means I am ultimately going to confront a good deal of both.

I remember thinking yesterday how cool it would be to “get the band back together” because I miss raiding with some of these people. The key word being “some”, because ultimately I don’t really want the band back together at all. I want a revised image in my head of the band. I want this amalgam of a bunch of different raid teams, from a bunch of different eras of the game. I want to create the “All-Star Team” from my memory, but the thing is… my All-Star team is not really the best players. I found out my ideals for who I wanted to play with were vastly different than that of my friends during Cataclysm. We built what we supposed to be the “best” team to raid with, for 10 man… but my best was completely different than their best. Ultimately when creating my team I would want to play with the folks I had the most fun with… some of them were also the absolute worst at standing in fire. They were fun to be around and invigorated my enjoyment of the game, and I didn’t give a damn if we had to take forever trying to learn this fight or another because their presence made me happy. It is moments like these that I realize I play a vastly different game than most people do. I play a game made up of the people sitting behind the screen at their keyboard, hanging out with me on a nightly basis… and not a game of abilities and number crunching. At the end of the day for me at least, playing for victories is ultimately a hollow experience unless I did so with the people I enjoy playing with the most.

In a lot of ways this is what makes the Final Fantasy XIV raid group so special is that it is a bit of an amalgam of the two. These are all people that I greatly enjoy playing with, but at the end of the day are also extremely good at the game. Hell there are so many nights I feel like I am the “bad” that is being carried to victory. While I largely said I would swear off raiding in Legion… there is a big part of me that wishes he could form this same sort of group in World of Warcraft. I want raiding to be a focus on having fun with friends and doing something together that we can’t necessarily do apart. By the same token though, I don’t want to be concerned with damage meters, or reviewing the logs after the raid. I don’t want to care if someone stood in the fire too long… or if we could do something more efficiently. I want to just have a night hanging out with friends, talking on voice chat and killing bosses… hopefully getting some sweet loot in the process. The problem being that I don’t think World of Warcraft is that game, or at least its raid game… isn’t that game. Final Fantasy XIV I can go into a fight not knowing anything about it… and learn everything I know from a series of attempts because it messages the mechanics extremely well. World of Warcraft, I realistically need to read the dungeon guide and some third party sites to fully understand the mechanics of the fight and what I am supposed to be doing to counter them. That is a huge difference, because one I can discover the fight with friends… and the other feels like homework.

Legion launches next week and I really don’t know what it has planned for me yet. I am enjoying the game, and I am enjoying making my own way through it. I am not sure if raiding will be part of that greater picture, but in the end I am going to try going with the flow. So many times I have had a raid that I knew I was gearing for, when an expansion launched. As a result I felt like I needed to push through the content to get raid ready within a weeks time. This time around… I am more focused on which character I am going to level first and which zone I am going to start in. I have never gone into an expansion before with a complete set of characters, and ultimately liking something about each and every one of them. If enough of these old familiar faces stick around… then I think I might want to try my hand at raiding again. I am not super concerned with doing much more than 10 player/flex raiding if I do however. Another thing that I would really like to do is set up a night to work on older raid achievements and get folks some awesome mounts. I know there are several tiers where I am one or two achievements away from my own mounts. The problem being that there just are not enough nights in the week to try and schedule things on, and continue to play other games. Whatever the case I am trying my best to go into the Legion expansion with an open mind, and not really focused too tightly on what I am going to do… and when I am going to do it. This is undiscovered territory for me, and it is going to be interesting to see what comes of it.

Can’t Quit It

August 24, 2016 by Belghast

Finally Finished

For most of this week I have been coming up with events in time when I thought I would be finally finished with the Legion Event. Last night by all purposes should have been the end for me. I managed to get the final item I was missing on my Demon Hunter, and you can now see the pretty spreadsheet is now at least largely complete. Early on I decided that trying to get an offset weapon for everyone was going to be absolute futility. Instead I started focusing on the weapon that I thought I would actually level my character with, so for my Paladin that meant a Retribution Two-Hander and so on. Lodin my hunter I managed to get both a spear and a bow just because on my very first invasion I got the spear and had the foresight to immediately swap loot specs. On all of these characters, I am not squabbling over who has Warforged and who doesn’t because I realize about an hour into the new content everything I am wearing will have been replaced. All I was really looking for out of these events was a way to ease the leveling transition from “just dinged 100” to “ready for legion”.

Most of my characters before this event were sitting in a pretty raw 630ish state because I leveled them up and then never really played them. My goal is to change that with Legion since on every single character there is a spec that I really find enjoyable. The weird part about this for me is how I am suddenly no longer mentally blocked against casters. I had a lot of fun recently leveling my Priest and Mage through the Legion Event, and I had an absolutely blast leveling my Warlock legitimately. For years I have had this thing against “Finger Wigglers” and anyone around me for more than a few minutes in a game is likely to hear about it. I am not sure what changed, but I have a feeling it is related to Final Fantasy XIV. Over there I actually and legitimately enjoyed leveling as an Arcanist, and have been enjoying doing the Palace of the Dead as a Scholar. Similarly I really enjoyed the little bit of time I spent leveling Black Mage, all of which maybe whittled down my resistance to not wearing plate armor and wielding a huge weapon? The only bad part about all of this is that I have next to no good cosmetic gear for cloth wearers, so at some point I will be wrecking old content as a Warlock in the hopes of fixing this transmog gap.

The Keep Pulling Me Back In

So last night for a brief period of time I thought I was good and done with the Legion Event… then I got home and noticed that they were active in all six zones at a time. So I decided to dip my toes into the pool and see how the waters were… and next thing I know it I am running around zones with only a ground mount chasing the wave of folks clearing the content. Doing the events on a low enough level character that cannot fly is frustrating… but shockingly effective. At the beginning of the night, this was my level 24 Orc Warlock named Belghula… and at the end of the night I was sitting at level 54. Remember a few days back when I posted about Lore’s comments? It doesn’t matter if their intent was to allow players to catch up their alts or not, the end result and the subsequent tweaks have made that exactly what the Legion Event shines at. I realize I could be doing something else… and I even should be doing something else… but I am having a really hard time stopping the machine. This elevator ride has such good music and interesting prospects that I keep getting right back on it. I am honestly not sure if I have enough time to get this one all the way to 100 before the end of this event, especially given that I really need to be doing other things… but if nothing else I have leap past the old world content that I find the most frustrating right now.

Cataclysm was not good for the old world, and right now the leveling experience feels extremely disjointed. The clear flow of zone to zone feels broken, given that a few minutes into each zone you’ve leveled to the point where you really should be moving to the next one. There are two sides of me that are in constant competition when I am leveling. The side that wants to finish quests… and the side that realizes the most efficient way to level is to jump zones the moment the Adventure Guide highlights and shows you have a new quest to start a brand new area. I realize I am leveling with full Heirlooms… and that is a side effect of that, but in truth I am largely doing that so that I don’t have to worry about gear until I reach the end of the tunnel. Nothing would make me happier than them releasing heirloom items for the rest of the slots, because that helms me circumvent one of my instincts while leveling characters. I love getting gear… but more than anything it is that I want to be as well geared as I can be at any point in the process. So I keep looking for upgrades so that I don’t feel “weak” while leveling, and the presence of heirlooms means I am at least geared “well enough” at every step in the process. At least on some level though, it would be nice if the experience boost was something you could toggle off if you wanted to “stay awhile and listen” as it were… and experience the content as it was originally designed.

A New Tank Enters

August 23, 2016 by Belghast

Down to Goblin Town

This morning I am having one hell of a hard time getting started, largely because it feels like I don’t really have a whole lot to talk about. It was a Monday night, and that means raiding in Final Fantasy XIV. However it was also a night that I was seeming to have a pretty frustrating migraine headache. So in truth it was a good thing that we were breaking in a brand new tank… or at least one new to our group. Pixel Executioner I am pretty sure is something that once upon a time I knew from the Blog Azeroth community, but thanks to the miracle of the fact that everyone seems to be connected on the internet I am getting to know him again thanks to Neph. Pix had apparently never quite finished the original run of Alex so we started our evening there, with turn four otherwise known as “Burden of the Father”. This went down in really short measure, and so long as you are tanking the boss… you really don’t have a clue there are any mechanics that need to be dealt with. The only thing as the boss tank that you have to worry about is Discoid which signals you are just about to take a ton of damage. As a result this was the absolute perfect first tanking foray of the evening to break him into the rhythm.

After that we moved into the next part of Alexander and ran through the next four turns. The awesome thing about this is that it gave me a nice little break between fights to kinda chill out and try really hard to forget my head was trying to kill me. I am pleasantly surprised where we have come as a group, because I remember struggling a little bit when we first did Alex Midas, but last night it seemed really easy. Well that is until we reached turn seven… which has a significant amount of madness going on. The awesome thing there is that we finally learned how to mechanic one of the phases. Previously the answer to getting through the fire jail was just to have rez ready to go to bring back whoever happened to get locked in it. Instead this time we learned that during the fire phase you just stand still and do nothing until your group brings you out of it. If you move however… you die… and we were trying to do stuff and move… which is apparently a bad idea? The best part about the night is that we managed to actually finish the second Alex for Pix. We were coming down the to the end of our normal run time, and I honestly thought we did not have anywhere near enough time to finish. However we managed to pull a victory out on the final boss… having only gone about five minutes over our normal close time.

It was a really great night and apparently luck was on my side. For awhile now I had been sitting on one of pretty much all of the items needed for the various armors that require two items. Over the course of the evening apparently the game decided it liked me, because I won a significant number of rolls and suddenly shot up in item level. I managed to complete the arms last week, but this week I managed to complete helm, boots and belt bringing my item level up to a respectable 113. At some point I really need to spend some time getting back in game and finishing off my weapon in Palace of the Dead, because there were several moments last night when the fact that Pix my co-tank had one… made it harder to maintain threat. In all honesty I have been struggling to remain interested in Final Fantasy XIV. I am enjoying raid nights, but I am simply not wanting to put any of the other time in to make sure I am geared enough. Which I know has to be frustrating to my raid mates. I feel like I am fairly horribly geared as a whole, at least compared to what I could be. The problem being when I sit down after a long day of work… I keep logging into World of Warcraft instead of Final Fantasy XIV. Especially with the launch of Legion happening next week… my FFXIV time is likely to continue to be in Triage mode for awhile.