World of Warcraft

Regularly Playing: July/August Edition

August 14, 2016 by Belghast

I just realized the other day that it had been a long while since I had done one of my regularly playing posts. The general idea is to true up my sidebar list of games and bring it into alignment with the games that I am actually playing on a fairly regular basis. Some of these might not be every day occurrences but they represent the regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. At some point however I fell off the wagon and went the entire month of July without any form of an update. As a result I am doing this to cover both July and August and get me up to date.

To Those Remaining

I am legitimately playing World of Warcraft more actively than I have in years. More than likely this is the most seriously I have played since before the launch of Cataclysm. I am really enjoying the game, and the changes to the various specs… and even enjoying the Legion launch event more. Over the last few days I have been using this event as a bit of a springboard to help level up some of my sub 100 characters because every two events you participate in seems to be roughly a levels worth of experience, even in the 90s. So I took my Shadowpriest last night for example from 92 to 94 in two full rounds of the event. As far as the rest of the game there is still a ton of stuff I want to do, that mostly centers around running older content and collecting appearances. To say I am looking forward to the Legion Launch is a bit of an understatement.

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand has fallen a little bit by the wayside. It is that game that I am logging into only to raid… which ironically is traditionally my stance with World of Warcraft. I am loving the Monday night raid team, and we are now starting to do more serious content. I still have little to no drive however to level or gear, at least until the content we are doing requires it. That might be a thing that happens soon because we have pretty much defeated all of the “easy” end game content and are now starting down the path of the more difficult stuff. However it feels amazing to have “the band back together” and doing raids together as a team.

Rift

At the very least right now I am logging in every day to participate in the Starfall Prophecy launch event, which is namely collecting prophecies that I can then later turn in for rewards. The pre-order bonus means that we will get access to some awesome stuff like the artifact finding mount, and I want to make sure I don’t miss out on any of that. Otherwise I need to really hunt for a group of players that are more active. I don’t want to disband the House Stalwart guild or anything, but I might consider moving Belghast off to another guild, because I would like to see Comet of Ahnket before the expansion lands since the lore seems like it will give me a headstart into understanding what is going on. Additionally I want to spend a sleepy afternoon at some point doing more Intrepid Adventures. Those things are just absolutely fun as hell and it is a style of “LFR” that I wish more games would look into implementing.

To The Returning and New

Diablo 3

As stated when I originally removed it from the list, I knew that it would be a limited time thing. With the beginning of this month came the launch of Season 7 of Diablo 3, and a return of several of us to actively playing again. This time around we do not have nearly the throng of players that we did with season six, but myself, Grace and Thalen are all fairly active. This time feels a little cheap though because we all seemed to opted for the fastest possible clearing class… or at least our view on that. The Demon Hunter is a powerhouse and one that you can get up and running insanely quickly. By the time we dinged 70 we were already pushing content hard and fast, and after roughly a weeks time I am now clearing greater rifts in the 50s like they are a cakewalk. The only question now is just how serious I am going to be on trying to get that extra stash slot. Right now there is so much going on, that I am afraid Diablo 3 is going to fall by the wayside.

Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go is something that did not even exist on my radar when I did the last “Recently Playing” and has been something that has dominated my life since. I have gone through the stages of grief with this game, and have reached a point where I continue to play it without really understanding why. I wrote the other day about some of my frustrations, and they are very real. However still… anytime I leave the house I check for nearby Pokemon each time I stop and get out of the car. As the heat starts to chill the hell out… and we no longer have 100 degree days I will probably start resuming my evening pokestrolls. However when it is 100 degrees at 9pm at night… it is just too damned hot to go out roaming too far. I hope this game gets some much needed changes, because the ones thusfar feel like they are taking it in the wrong direction. Niantic Labs still does not seem to understand that they made a MMO.

No Man’s Sky

This one is seriously brand new… but I have a feeling that over the coming weeks it is going to be a new obsession for me. I called it Interstellar Skyrim, and it invokes the same sort of feelings in me. The problem being… all of this is pending you can actually get it running on your machine. There are lots of problems ahead of this title before it reaches serious mass adoption, and I hope that in the coming weeks they can push through them. To say it has performance issues is the understatement of the century right now, and I am questioning my original plan to get this on the PC. That said I am committed at this point and still very much enjoying the experience.

To Those Parting

Destiny

I have so much love for Destiny, but for whatever reason I have drifted away from it in the last few weeks. In both the month of July and August I have not really played much, so I am temporarily removing it from the list. I know without a doubt in Mid-September when Rise of Iron hits, that I will be back and actively playing it again. In the meantime however I feel like I have gotten it out of my system for the moment. However if my friend Grace suddenly decides to start playing again, I will likely be right back there with guns a blazing. I think a huge part of it is that I really have not been spending all that much time up in my office where my Playstation 4 is, and instead hanging out on the sofa playing on my laptop. Much like when I remove Diablo 3 from the list… this is absolutely going to change in the coming months and I am sure I will have yet another resurgence.

ArcheAge

I feel like ArcheAge is a casualty of simply too much other stuff going on right now. At the beginning of July I had a bit of a renaissance with this game and managed to push through to fourty six… and then the content seemed to dry up a bit. The quests are still there, but they seem to be generally less plentiful, and the progress I was making felt a bit bogged down. As a result this sort of just fell by the wayside, and I am sure at some point I will reignite my fires for this game because at the end of the day I still very much like it. The biggest thing that came from this last journey is that I realized that PVP isn’t as big of a hurdle as I was expecting. I have technically spent the last dozen or so levels in pvp enabled areas… and really did not run into a single issue. Flagged players avoided me, and I avoided them and we continued questing along happily. At some point I am sure I will return, but for the time being I am removing it from my list of “active” games.

AggroChat #119 – Still Not Prepared

May 21, 2019August 14, 2016 by AggroChat

Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam, and Thalen talk World of Warcraft Legion event, Starbound, No Man’s Sky and Final Fantasy XV

This week we inadvertently have a show about things that are not quite prepared in one way or another. First up we talk about our frustrations with the Broke Shore cinematics for both the Alliance and Horde in World of Warcraft. We also talk about the positive things that this event is bringing, but mostly frustrations about the turn in the story. We talk about the fraught PC launch of No Man’s Sky and how Belghast is the only member of our crew able to actually get it running on his machine. However since he could we talk at length about his experiences. All of the NMS talk got Kodra amped to play some Starbound on our private server. We talk a little bit of Diablo Season 7 and how we were not quite prepared for it with everything else going on… so we ended up rolling an army of demon hunters for speed clearing. Finally we talk about how Final Fantasy XV seems to be delayed once more, as details have been leaked on how to update the date on the big retail standees. So much not preparedness to go around, caused us to record an extremely long show.

Things we discussed: Frustrations with Broken Shore Cinematics – WoW Legion Event – Legion expansion in general – Starbound Launch – No Man’s Sky PC Frustrations – First Several Hours with the Game – Diablo Season 7 Launch – Final Fantasy XV and VIII

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We Are Prepared

August 10, 2016 by Belghast

Unplanned Plans

Last night did not go as I actually thought it would. Yesterday was the patch that allowed folks like me who purchased the digital pre-order of Legion to roll Demon Hunters. Firstly I want to take a step back and acknowledge just how damned brilliant this idea is. Sure there were demon hunters everywhere yesterday, but the total number running through the intro quests felt reasonable. I realize they have gotten much better at instancing since the days of the Death Knight and Wrath of the Lich King… but still it seems rather smart to forcibly split up the population into waves. There are still lots of folks who prefer to do physical copies of games, especially one with a long tradition of having awesome physical copies. I guess the hope is that by letting some folks into the content early, that will mean that there won’t be quite the launch day crush on this single zone. Now stepping forward again, I had planned on playing a completely different Demon Hunter last night… as I continued working on my seasonal character in Diablo 3. This was largely due to the fact that I fully expected the servers to be burning down around me, and the game to be essentially in an unplayable state with Demon Hunters, Broken Shore and the Legion Zone Invasions all starting last night. I got home relatively early, and while waiting on pizza to arrive I thought I would pop in and at least create a character. For whatever reason when I boosted the Mage I just picked a name from the stable of names I have used in other games. Even though it made zero sense… I named said mage Belglaive… a name that would later be ideal for my Demon Hunter. As a result I also did a little renaming yesterday to shift my Mage to be Belglacial since I highly favor frost spec… which freed up the name for my demonic Night Elf. The other name in the running of course was the one I used on the beta server “Belblight”.

What happened in reality is that both myself and Grace spent the rest of the night playing World of Warcraft and participating in the zone invasions. I casually quested my way through the Demon Hunter starter content while eating dinner and then after getting dumped into Stormwind I was given the quest to do a Legion event. For those who have not done them yet, it seems like Blizzard has learned a lot from the past events. The ones that stick out in my mind the most is the Undead Invasion event that happened just ahead of the launch of the original Naxxramas and the release of Wrath of the Lich King. In those events items spawned in a handful of zones, and it was a mad dash for players to scramble over to the area to get enough completion on it to be able to qualify for loot. I ground these hard enough to get a set of gear for pretty much all of the armor types… sadly the leather set is stranded forever on another battle.net account but I still regularly wear the plate set that largely looks like a blue and brown judgement recolor. The problem with the event however was the fact that you were in constant competition with other players for spawns, and that it also caused you to camp zones until you got everything you needed. I spent so many hours out in Azshara… the good version not the one the version the Goblins later wrecked.

Maybe Space Goats Weren’t Unreasonable

What happens in the Legion Invasion event however is that at any given time there will be two “hot zones” in the world where invasions are happening. When I started playing last night those were Tanaris around Gadgetzan and Northern Barrens around The Crossroads. The part that I did not quite catch onto however is that each character can complete both of the active zones, and does not need to wait for the event to “start”. What happens instead is the moment you cross the zone boundary, you are stuck in an instanced version that is currently in phase one of the event. It seems as though all you really need to do is to be in zone as each of the phases shifts, and I am uncertain how much actual participation you need to do. There have been many times I was still flying to my destination when the event transitioned into Phase 2 and I have still managed to get full credit every time. Upon completing Phase Two you receive a Small Legion Chest and upon completing the Final Phase you receive a Large Legion Chest. From each of these a handful of things can drop, but the bulk are item level 700 weapons and armor, as well as some of the currency of the event Nethershards. It also seems like any time you take one of the “bosses” of the event that spawn and are marked with a Skull, you receive somewhere between 5 and 10 Nethershards per kill. In theory if you are wanting to maximize your earning, you would probably want to roll around as a team and focus entirely on killing the skulls as soon as they spawn. The only problem there is that they have mechanics… one of which was an version of old school Kazzak that essentially becomes invulnerable when he kills ten players. All of these Shards can be turned in for goodies including a Pet, full appearance sets, and individual weapons at the Captive Wyrmtongue <Reluctant ‘Quartermaster’> that can be found in Stormwind, Orgrimmar and occasionally out in the field as well. I know for example he spawns in Tanaris near Gadgetzan during that invasion.

Now quite possibly the coolest part of this event is that it appears to be level agnostic. To test this theory Grace grabbed her level sixty mage and brought it over to Tanaris where she was able to complete the event, with every mob appearing to her as though it were around her level range. When she opened the chests instead of rewarding item level 700 gear, it gave her gear appropriate for her level. That means players who are not even at the current level cap are going to be able to participate in this invasion, unlike the pre-launch events in the past. The best part is that it seemed to “just work” and if this is an example of how well their new tech works to auto level players to the content… I am pretty impressed. I know all of the zones in Legion function in this manner, and that you can start in pretty much any place while leveling through and complete the content in your own order. It is my ultimate hope that maybe just maybe this tech eventually trickles down to the older zones. Now the possible negative here is that I still love being able to solo raid content… so the hope is that maybe they can come up with some version of the “unsynched” style of play that we can do in Final Fantasy XIV. In any case it was a fun night of swapping alts and then flying across great stretches of the contents trying to reach where the legion invasions were happening. The two “hot zones” swap out every four hours, and largely right now I am looking at them as a good way of playing catch up on the gear for my characters. Only one of my characters is in the 700s item level wise, so pretty much everything I pick up from this event is an upgrade. Right now I am largely focused on getting the Warlock and the Demon Hunter geared out… because I have this feeling that they are rapidly going to become my alts of choice.

Long Time Coming

August 9, 2016 by Belghast

Bug Squish

At the launch of Heavensward we absolutely wrecked us a Sky Whale, but struggled a bit with Ravana. It was a combination of insane amounts of incoming damage, mixed with the fact that we consistently failed at Final Liberation. As we all faded away and off into other games, the one big regret many of us had was that we never actually managed to take down a bug. Last night we finally set that record straight, and defeated Ravana. In true fashion for our group however, the kill was a complete mess. In fact I managed to get knocked off right before we finished the fight, because some random roofer was knocking on my door. In Oklahoma our version of ambulance chasers are fly by night roofers looking to repair “hail damage”, and this guy had an equally questionable name to go with it. So in my somewhat distracted state I was just a bit too close to one of the attacks that knocks you off the edge. Ashgar somehow managed to survive alone until we finally pushed him over the edge at the last possible moment. There is a final final liberation… and we probably killed him as the bar passed the O and was creeping up on the N… aka seriously the last moment before we all died a horrible death for our hubris. Of course like is usually the case no axe was dropped… but instead we did manage to pick up a pretty spiffy looking book that reminds me of a strange armored butterfly.

After downing a bug, we set our sights on Final Coil since a few of our modern assemblage were not with us when we managed to take this down the first time. We started off with Turn 10… and honestly had to relearn fights as we went. So much of this happened so long ago… that we maybe partially remembered a mechanic here or there but had largely forgotten the bulk of them. We outgeared a good deal of the mechanics, but in truth what this really meant is that we could simply chain resurrect players when they died instead of dealing with the proper mechanics. Ashgar and I attempted to think on our feet and deal with this as best we remembered them… the primary example of this being the giant metal clad hydra that serves as the boss of Turn 11 who happens to have an attack that will straight up oneshot the current tank if it is not taunted off. Traditionally we have a firm cut off time of 10pm CST but we went over a little bit. Tam called our final attempt on Bahamut for the evening, and that happened to be the attempt we pushed across the finish line and got the win. I am so happy to have been able to come back and take on these fights for the folks who had never seen them. While I want to keep progressing into content that I have not seen, it is always good to go back and do the stuff we have, just to remember how far we have come.

Legion Lock

In other news I managed to push across the finish line in a completely different sort of fight. For whatever reason I have had a fire lit under me to level a bunch of my stragglers up to level 100. I pushed the Rogue from 92 to 100, Druid from 95 to 100… and then started on my Warlock that happened to be sitting at level 75. As of last night I managed to nudge him across the line to 100 and even got in a quick LFR before the FFXIV raid. I was honestly shocked to find out that you could queue for Highmaul LFR at item level 615, and I absolutely did just this. I am not sure why I am enjoying my warlock so much. It is just a style of game play that I have never really spent much time doing… and this represents the first “finger wiggler” I have ever legitimately leveled to the current cap. I’ve had a Priest and Mage temporarily at “cap” but in both of those cases it was a boosted character so it really does not count. I think part of it as well is that I really want a proper character to start farming transmog items for all of my cloth wearers. I also want a tailor that I don’t mind grinding cloth on, because the Shadow Priest is absolutely not that character. Now with the launch of Demon Hunters tonight, I fully expect to be attempting to do that madness… however in the meantime I am really looking forward to exploring the world with my army of demon buddies.