Good morning folks. Shocking to no one I spent pretty much the entire weekend playing Anthem. We had some winter weather come in and I became the Oklahoma version of “snowed in”. Aka we could easily get out if we really needed to but the yard was indistinguishable from the streets and figured it just was not worth the hassle. As a result we drew upon our heavy stores of meals and just stayed snuggled inside with the cats. This meant that I spent a significant amount of time on the couch in my blanket cocoon playing Anthem remoted into my gaming machine upstairs via Parsec. I am still shocked at just how damned well that works… but I have found a hitch in the set up. It appears to be blocking voice chat either on the microphone transmission side or the key press side. I need to sort this out, but for the time being it means if I want to do proper group activities I have to go upstairs. Which means 99.9% of the time I am just pugging everything… including Grand Master 1 Legendary Contracts and Strongholds… which in truth is what I spent most of the weekend doing.
As of right now I have a Masterwork or better in every slot other than the support item. I have no clue at all how one upgrades that and gets a Masterwork Muster Point, but I am hoping they add in a new type of activity that has a guaranteed drop for those. For those that did not already know this… if you do a Legendary Contract on Grand Master 1 or higher you get a guaranteed Masterwork Component at the end of the mission. Similarly if you do a Stonghold on Grand Master 1 you get a guaranteed Masterwork Ability at the end, and in my experience you often get at least one additional masterwork somewhere along the course of the run. The best run ever saw me getting 1 off each of the chests and two off the final boss. As such once I burn through my Legendary Contracts, my jam right now tends to be running Hive Tyrant over and over because that appears to be the fastest of the strongholds, or at the very least the one everyone knows the best. Regardless I have collected enough components to feel like I have some semblance of a build working there as well.
I am still relying heavily on my Double Detonator build that I talked about on Friday, and have officially given up on using any weapons other than Ralner’s Blaze which is not necessarily a part that I think I covered. When the perk states that it ignites the target after a hit-streak of 5… what that means in practice is after landing 5 hits on a target you apply the ignited status effect, which means that target is primed and ready to combo. So even though I don’t technically have a primer in my build… I have two solid ways of priming targets either through this amazing weapon or through my melee primer. As such I stopped using a second weapon and instead just run a second Ralner’s Blaze so I never run out of ammunition and can always swap to a backup version to continue priming targets. So often people are running a frost AOE primer… which allows me to swoop in with a frag grenade and get to detonation city… but even if I am alone I can prime single targets all day long. A B D… Always Be Detonating.
The highlight of the weekend was getting my very first Legendary drop… and it was off some random mob in freeplay. I am super thankful in that I got a good lego on my first attempt, and didn’t get something like a sniper rifle like my friend Shadoes did. Even better… I got the same assault launcher I had already been using in my current build allowing me to just swap everything over without changing much. Now if I could get a Legendary Ralner’s Blaze the luck gods would really be smiling upon me. One of my only complaints with Legendaries is that there appears to be no re-roll system in that you cannot learn the pattern in order to craft more of them. That is the thing that I like the most about Masterworks is that you can just keep crafting more until you get the set of inscriptions you really wanted. Legendaries… appear to be entirely on random chance for you to get one to drop in the first place… and even more so you are up a creek if you didn’t get a good role. Like… Sniper is a worthless inscription for me personally… but everything else is pretty reasonable so I still consider myself extremely lucky.
Since it was interesting last week, I figured I would throw this up again this week. This is what my Alliance leader board looks like this week, and quite honestly I am not entirely certain why Wei and Maeka are giving me more gold than the others. The closest I can figure out is that the bar continues to go up even after hitting rank 10… and once it fills one more time you start getting a message that you have reached your maximum alliance rank for the week. I hit this and I am guessing that both of them have hit it as well… meaning they are now worth 2345 instead of 2105… which incidentally I should also be worth that 2345 if you get everyone else to rank 10 on your list as well. That means the if that logic olds… while I have 11,005 incoming for how the board is set up currently… a theoretical “maximum” contribution would be something like 11,725 gold if you could somehow get everyone to that full bar rank 10.
That said I am not expecting the gold train to last that much longer. I am playing a truly silly amount of this game, and I thought I would post my hours played just to prove it. At this point I have put in 132 hours in effectively 16 days that the game has been out… which works out to be 8.25 hours a day. Now there was some heavy skewing there because we have had a few weekends where we didn’t have much planned and also I was fighting some respiratory nonsense so that had me home sick during part of it as well. Regardless of how you slice it though… I have been playing a significant amount of Anthem and really show no signs of letting up yet. I spent some time working up Interceptor and Colossus last night but most of that time has been spent on the Ranger working on getting to the point I am at right now. I still think the game needs a lot of tweaks, but for now I am enjoying the game that is… as well as being hopeful of the game that is to come.