World of Warcraft – Page 90

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Return to Greenshade

The Division

Deep Roads

February 29, 2016 by Belghast

It’s Over

At this point I don’t know for certain if my character is weeping tears of frustration or joy. Which ever the case I am just really happy that as of today and by the time I get home from work… the Love is in the Air event will be finished. I felt so damned conflicted this year when it came to this event, largely because I don’t even know why I was participating. I really really do not enjoy World of Warcraft holiday events, because they somehow manage to make something that should feel fun an exciting… into an obligation. Then on top of that… I don’t even like the Love Rocket mount. However because it is the rarest mount in the game, and I do not already have one… I feel somehow obligated to try for it every year. I wish I could understand why I do it… and to the extent of pushing aside other games that I would enjoy more just so I can haplessly farm for a chase mount. Sure it only takes a few minutes to do an attempt at the mount… but I felt obligated to run six different level 100 characters through it. Which by the time you check your garrison and shipyard on each, and queue for a dungeon… you are talking about roughly an hour of your night gone… chasing a mount I didn’t even really care that much about.

We talked at length about this phenomena over the weekend on the podcast, and largely why this works… and why it also frustrates us. Tam suggested that it was because it feels like the game is not respecting our time… and that is absolutely part of it. I think for me personally a good deal of my frustration is that this madness is actually working. This game knows my triggers so well, and it feels as though I have no control in the process. There is a certain measure of excitement in the chase, and were this something I could normally farm on my own… it would fall into the same category as my attempts to get rare mounts from raid bosses. However the fact that it is only available for a limited time… triggers the “fear of missing out” that if we don’t become mindless drones we might miss that one opportunity to get something cool. Even when in this case the something cool is not something we actually wanted in the first place. It is just frustrating to see a company working so effectively against my nature and getting me to follow along in their scheme each year in trying for “the thing”. Now granted I know without a doubt that come Halloween I will once again be chasing like mad in trying to get the Headless Horseman mount. At least I can rest comfortable in the knowledge that it “could be worse”. I mean it could be something as heinous as the Rift cash box chase mounts

Dwarf in the Deep Roads

I don’t have a whole lot to say here, because I didn’t get terribly far into it… however I did manage to start a quest chain leading me into the Deep Roads. The Deep Roads are my happy place in the Dragon Age universe because if it were really possible…. I would absolutely live completely underground. If you venture into any of my Minecraft settlements, you will see a pretty simple structure above ground… that leads to a massive snaking catacombs underneath. I just feel safe underground, and I have loved being down in every cave I have been able to. I still think having a structure that was mostly buried in a mountain would be my ultimate situation. I wonder if some of my reaction of safety to being underground… comes from the fact that I live in a state where the wind comes sweeping down the plains…. and takes out an entire city every now and then. In any case… we also got into a lengthy discussion about the Deep Roads on the podcast…. and I was shocked to find out that pretty much everyone other than me… unanimously hated them. They just seem like a badass concept… here are these roads and warrens deep underground that you have to fight the Dark Spawn which natively live down there. That pretty much sounds amazing… constantly having a fresh flow of Dark Spawn to fight. Then again…. I might not be normal when it comes to combat in video games. The Deep Roads are like the most metal part of Dragon Age, and I am hoping together to get time to venture forth again down there.

AggroChat #96 – Good Grind Bad Grind

May 21, 2019February 28, 2016 by AggroChat

Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tam talk games that are particularly good at grinding… and those that aren’t at all

Tonight we welcome back Grace to the fold as she has returned safely from her trips out into the hinterlands. Additionally it was a little close but we actually got Tam this week who finished his Infinity Tournament in crazy record time. As a result we talk a little bit about the new Infinity Tournament scoring system and his experiences. Then we delve into a length discussion about crafting systems…. but more importantly the way Warframe seems to make a mad amount of grinding seem completely reasonable. Then I finally manage to understand why people are so enthralled with Dragon Age Inquisition…. because I absolutely hit my click point. We also get into a long discussion about when grinds feel bad, talking about Limited Time Chase items in MMOs that stop dropping after a period of time. Finally we get into a discussion about Sleeping Dogs as Tam revisits it on his backlog list.

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