Hey Folks! This weekend was a bit wild. I had a tornado pass within a mile of the house, and then, in my very sleep-deprived state, I decided that it was a good idea to record two podcasts on Saturday. One of them was obviously AggroChat, but the other was sitting down with a long-time friend of mine from High School that I have referred to by the enigmatic title of “The Librarian”. Better known in some circles by Kaleon or others as Jason, this is someone who has known me for an extremely long time, and as a result, this show gets a bit more personal than normal. Every episode ends up revealing something about me, just by the nature of the conversation. This show, however, goes into some extremely “real” places with my past and the past of “The Librarian”.
This is the first episode in what I hope is a series of brand new recordings. Originally, I was going to sit down and record with all of the AggroChat crew, and I still want to finish that out. The challenge is always timing. This took up roughly two hours of real-world time that got edited down into an hour and twenty minutes once I compressed the silence. It is sometimes a challenge to figure out a time when you can spend that much time talking to a person and recording it. Hopefully, you enjoy this episode and will be around whenever the next one drops as well.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down an Ash this week but start off talking about the Path of Exile League launch. Bel and Ace have different opinions of the league mechanic than Kodra, so we talk a bit about that. We also talk about the new holy strike and how it is so much better than glacial hammer. From there, Ace and Kodra talk about Everything is Crab and convince the rest of us that we should also be playing it. Kodra discusses the mixed bag that was Emerald City Comic Con, and Tam ventures forth into more Retro gaming with Kolibri. Kodra discusses Croak and a few other Steamfest demos that he played after last weeks show, and Bel shares some thoughts about how chill the World of Warcraft community seems to be right now. Finally, a quick topic about Pokopia, which we will likely revisit on another episode.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was a lot, and today itself is also going to be… a lot. I have my MRI finally, which I am having to do some prep for because it seems like it is going to be way more “invasive” than the normal MRI. So I took the day off from work to recuperate from that and also to deal with the prep work for today. This whole getting cancer thing is complete bullshit, and I would not recommend it to anyone. As part of the whole cancer thing, I have been put on Tirzepatide to help me lose some weight and lower the potential complications of the eventual surgery. That has been its own wild ride, and when people say that it removes your ability to be hungry… they are telling the truth. I am eating more out of a sense that I should be eating three meals a day rather than a feeling that I need to. It also has had this weird side benefit of clearing my mind and quieting a lot of the anxieties and negative voices. Both are welcome side effects, but it has made me react to certain types of meals a bit differently. You got a picture of a Fungal Strider from Harandar accompanying this paragraph just because I think they are neat.
My focus has been on gearing my main, and I have struggled to find a pair of boots, because in theor,y I was able to fill every other slot through World Quests or by killing random rares in the world. I finally bucked up the courage to start queuing for dungeons, and I have been shocked at how relatively chill this experience has been. The last time I did dungeons in any form was during Shadowlands (other than Panda Remix), and at that point, folks were mostly assholes about everything. There was a rampant number of people who would drop after one boss, and then spend the entire dungeon complaining that we were not going fast enough or doing things in exactly the way they wanted them to be done. This time around… I would swear that most of the folks running random heroics are stoners, because they have all been super chill about pretty much everything. I get that we are on week two and maybe all of the most hardcore players have moved on to Mythics, and are no longer running heroics… but whatever the case, I will take it.
The other possibility is that all of the most hardcore players… got exported to Final Fantasy XIV during the great exodus. I know over there, the previously super chill dungeon running got significantly worse during Dawntrail. It makes me wonder if there is this malignant group of gamers that just sort of make every game worse, and when they move on… “nature finds a way”, and the balance returns. It feels like every older MMORPG that I have played, that is no longer living through its heyday, seems to be this way. Has World of Warcraft finally reached the place of being this niche experience that only people who really enjoy playing it have stuck around? If so, I am freaking here for it. A large chunk of why I had avoided World of Warcraft was due to the stereotypical “WoW Player” and the negative impact that it had on running group content. Panda Remix was a lot of fun, but I mostly decided that was due to the fact that we were effectively playing throwaway characters and nothing really mattered. Maybe the community has drastically changed since I last attempted to play it. Someone can fill me in with some of the details I might be missing, hopefully.
Whatever the case, I am having a heck of a lot of fun, roaming around the world and doing various stuff. The defend the base event in Voidstorm is quite a bit of fun, and most of the interactions I have had with other players over chat have all been positive, or at worst neutral. The game feels like it is just genuinely nice to play, and mostly just really good features to interact with. I love Hunts and hope that functionality continues forward, and I love the fact that it seems like all gearing paths end up in the same place and the same gear levels, regardless of the type of content that you want to interact with. I need to spend more time leveling up Delves, because I have been ignoring them to my detriment, but it also seems like I arrived at the same destination of having full 220 gear in spite of this. Has this normalization of gear acquisition been part of what smoothed out the raised feathers of the community? I guess time will tell when the raid opens, and I get access to the raid finder.
I had been struggling to fill my final slot, which was boots. None seemed to be available crafted on the Auction House and I inspected every other plate wearer in the dungeons I had been running, and they all seemed to be stalled out with 198 ilvl boots as well. Even though killing rares, I had probably gotten a dozen pairs of boots, but they were mail, leather, or cloth, and not a single set of plate boots. The greater internet theory of complaining and drop chances, however, won out again, because the moment I made a public post griping about the impossibility of getting boots… meant that the very next dungeon I ran, capable of dropping boots, dropped a pair. This only ever seems to work when you are genuinely frustrated, and not actually a way of gaming the system. I am sure I will stop playing quite so much when the Path of Exile league drops this morning, but I kind of hope I can keep doing a bit of both.
I am very curious to hear from you all who have stuck around and kept playing WoW, if you have any theories about the community and how it changed since BFA/Shadowlands until now. Is it, as my friend Ace suggests, that we all got old and mellowed out? Whatever the case, I appreciate what I am seeing from the playerbase.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the official launch of Midnight, and I am always shocked at how much of a difference this seems to make. My rotted “deluxe edition” brain feels that if there is a head start… I am probably going to pay the extra in order to enable it. However, there seems to be a large volume of people who do not do this thing, either because they cannot afford the difference or because they are diametrically opposed to the practice. So I will never be shocked at what a difference things make when the flood gates actually open and all of the players show up. All of the zones were way the heck more active last night, but shockingly, the most cogent change was the fact that general chat was way more hopping with activity. It’s been disturbingly quiet the entire time I have been playing, and even the few times I attempted to ping chat for a rare mob… I got crickets.
This morning I had popped in to check on World Quests and saw someone calling out that this dragon named Ravengerus was up and that they were going to take it down. I had attempted this the other day, and even attempted to summon folks to my aid… with zero luck but today… we got the critical mass of players needed to take it down. It dropped nothing useful, and also, seemingly, the rare kill quest is bugged because this thing did not count towards it… nor did any of other named mob spawns that I have taken down count. I like killing big monsters, and I will always be down for taking down a silver elite, no matter if I am likely to get loot from it or not. I took a screenshot in large part so those who have not been around WoW, can see how much better the ground markers and attack visualization are. While this is not the pixel-perfect nature of Final Fantasy XIV, it is so much better than the “every edge is fuzzy” problem that we had for years. Fights are way easier to do because it is so much easier to actually avoid attacks that are avoidable.
Between World Quests and Rare mobs, and a few hunts, I have gotten my item level up to 225, which includes a 220 blue or better in every slot except for my belt and my boots. I picked up a 201 belt for cheap off the Auction House, because I had so little luck with belt drops that I just could not seem to find anything better. I’ve gotten belts to drop from Rares, but it is always a cloth belt. Similarly, I have gotten multiple pairs of boots to drop but they are always Mail, so it makes me wonder if there is some sort of bug happening in the smart loot system. Apparently, you can only get two Veteran rewards from weekly hunts, because the first two “hard” hunts that I completed rewarded a trinket and an amulet, and then all of the others after that rewarded a generic green bag of loot. The 246 trinket hat I got came from the Singularity quartermaster for achieving a specific reknown rating and then completing one of the tower defense things in the Voidstorm. I need to probably grind out dungeons or delves to see if I can get a damned pair of boots, since no one seems to be crafting them and selling them for a reasonable price on the Auction House either.
I also went through the process of unlocking the Haranir, which is, by far, the easiest Allied race that I have seen. Essentially, it just involves completing the campaign in Harandar and then talking to the NPC near the portal in Silvermoon. I create a baby Navi/Troll thingy that is a Druid in large part because the most interesting thing going on for the race is their Druid forms. I played through the tiny bit of story that represents a starter zone, and then moved to the portion where I go through the motions and choose a campaign to go through. I opted to go for Battle for Azeroth because it has been a while since I have seen those zones, and I particularly enjoyed the main story quest for The Horde. At some point, I will need to get an invite to Facepull since I rolled this on The Scryers. I know guilds are both cross-server and cross-faction these days, but I prefer to keep my horde with my horde friends in Facepull and then all of them also on The Scryers, whereas Argent Dawn is for Alliance.
Other than that, I have been making daily trips into Dune Awakening to farm for batteries. I did quite a bit of this during the double resources event over the weekend, and now I am mostly just making a bit lap around the central rocky area that my base is located in. I am up to 17 days of power currently, but keep dipping in to do this to keep extending this time frame. The most recent Coriolis storm seemingly ruined some of the easy battery spawns in my area. However, there are still at least three spawns that I can farm relatively easily, and I dip in periodically to do so whenever I think about it. I am not done messing around with Dune, but I know that my focus is going to be really fraugh after this Friday when the Path of Exile league starts. My base to the south is going to run out of power, though, and I have warned the others on the server to raid the resources if they want anything.
There is a pretty constant trickle of information coming out ahead of the League start this Friday, and I am all on board with it. I’ve decided that I am, in fact, rolling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as my first character, in large part because I really want to get into the endgame as fast as I can so I can start exploring the reworked Atlas. I do want to build a Holy Hammers character and maybe a Guardian minions character, but those will come later once I have a stable financial base in this league. It seems like Kodra is going to be rolling some sort of Holy Strike character, and I will be interested in seeing how that works. Additionally, I have convinced my sibling Ace to give this a go, and they are going to probably be rolling an SRS Necromancer since it is pretty easy to get up and running. I would love to be there to support them as they need gear, but also know that they are deeply aligned with SSF ideology, so it will be a balancing act. I think Carth is going to be giving this league a shot as well and has a friend who will need to be invited to the clan. If we are mutuals and you play POE, you are always welcome in our nonsense.
