Good Morning Friends. Please join me in mourning the loss of the Tier 5 Workshop in my new adopted hometown of Brightwood. There is a project currently on the town board to complete this, but right now the progress is moving slowly. Ultimately the problem with not having my Tier 5 Workshop anymore, is that I can’t craft any of the Orichalcum and Ironwood items that I had been making to gain skill increases. Yes in another post I proved out that the most efficient use of resources was just to grind level 1 items over and over. However I am on a weird mission and as a result I don’t mind using a lot of Ironwood and Orichalcum in the process.
Essentially three things are happening, firstly I am farming the needed extremely rare drop resources needed to craft a set of Voidbent armor. Secondly I am using all of this Ironwood as a way of leveling my lumber skills which will allow me to refine Ebony wood from said rare resources. Lastly I am trying to craft a perfect set of Orichalcum tools. What I consider to be “perfect” is a very specific combination of traits namely Azoth Extraction, Luck boost, and Yield boost. I have crafted a number of slightly imperfect tools but to date the only thing I have that is in its ideal state is my Mining Pickaxe.
I have been to Myrkgard a number of times but I had never really been to Myrkgard. What I mean by that is I have participated in a number of Zerg runs that fly through the place consuming all of the resources and then move on to the next target. You don’t need much skill or finesse to do that and as a result I have never really learned how to function within the constrains of the zone. Last night around 9 pm I got an invite from a friend of mine to go do the Priest Farm in Myrkgard, and as a result I learned the route that players follow in order to make this farm work. Having experienced this… it feels exactly like farming content in Everquest did.
Now I have made that comparison before and have gotten some extremely funny looks, but what I am talking about are the dungeons that we used to farm repeatably for loot. For those who are unfamiliar with this concept, a big dungeon like Sebilis or Guk would be carved up by players into several camps, generally revolving around a boss or multiple bosses that spawned in the same area. Essentially you would “break” the zone, meaning you killed everything down to the boss you were going to farm. Then you would repeated kill spawns in a specific order in order to make combat the most repeatable and sustainable process.
Priest camp works exactly like this. You are rotating between two spots and catching the spawn of a specific type of mob that is known to drop good loot, and keeping this pattern going as long as you can. Once you have finished one spawn, you loot and use some creative terrain traversal to safely move to the next spawn without having to kill anything in the process. Essentially you are avoiding killing things that would be significantly more precarious and through use of terrain resetting aggro and the encounters if need be when a train comes through. This is sustainable with a five player group, but it seems that inevitably there will be other players with the same idea either as solos or other groups.
Based on my brief experience last night, this means that you more or less need to keep your head on a swivel and adjust to the encounter as the conditions with other players change. One of the “Priest” spawns is down this long bridge filled with other more tricky encounters, and the process is to run down to a monument at the end of the bridge… hop up on it… and then go prone to reset aggro. However if a group of players comes in staggered they easily can bring with them a half dozen enemies that will add to your group doing the fight. So you have to make a call if you are going to just burn and then move on, or if it is enough to require you to reset the encounter completely to keep from dying.
I had a freaking blast and cannot wait to go back. In order news… the march of yellow continues with Planet X knocking green out of Cutlass Keys. I think what we are experiencing more than anything right now is war fatigue. It seems universally the loss of players in the game is making it extremely hard to get fifty people to sign up to fight in a war. Yellow has had this resurgence brought on by the defection of Apex and Planet X and as a result there is a buzz surrounding those battles. Both Green and Purple had had to take part in multiple wars in each week, not to mention at least one invasion… and this fatigue is taking its toll. Even I find myself less excited about signing up for invasions when in reality I have only fought in a eight or so.
Essentially I am curious to see what server mergers are going to look like, because we are in significantly better shape than the majority of servers… and that isn’t exactly great shape. They are deploying a PTR realm today, and with it the Void Gauntlet. I have a feeling that this new weapon is going to bring a resurgence of players as well as the end of the Lost Ark testing phase. I will be curious to see what the coming weeks bring us.
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Good morning folks. Last night was a bit of a mixed bag. While hanging out and eating dinner, I noticed that the Zerg was forming up again and as a result I ended up hopping on that train. Unfortunately it crash landed after the first zone with some trouble up in Caminus. Essentially there was this series of unfortunate events as someone died in a horrible place and a number of us attempted to resurrect them… leading several of having to drop out and regroup at the next objective. It was enough people to cause the group to struggle and the folks on the Zerg apparently don’t actually want to work for their loot. By the time everyone met back up in Ebonscale Reach our numbers had dwindled from sixty or so players… to maybe fifteen. We attempted to head into the Palace areas struggled and as we crossed the zone we dwindled down to only five of us standing at the top of one of the towers which lead us to call it.
The positive is that it lasted long enough for me to have amassed somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred pieces of gear and as a result I saw some incremental progress in my watermark. The negative however is like most situations in New World almost everything I got was complete trash. This is one of the more frustrating aspects of New World is how generally bad its randomized item generation system is. In most games you have a class or role construct that the game can then use to help guide items to drop in a specific manner. Diablo 3 for example is the king of this process, and while not every item you get is going to be useful to your current build… they at least drop with the stat package largely needed by your class.
New World however doesn’t have classes and the roles that exist are largely intangible. I didn’t choose to be a tank, I just started building my character in a tanky manner focusing on Strength and Constitution along with Heavy Armor and then using Sword and Shield. There are no real flags that the game has to latch onto in order to know that this is my intention however, and as a result it has no clue what I am doing. Which leads to the problem of completely useless items being generated and it feeling really bad salvaging an ocean of drops to maybe find a single item that is even close to usable. It would be one thing if this just stopped at Armor Class and the Attribute load-out on it… but additionally there are perks that change the way weapon abilities work and this leads to some truly uncanny valley item generation.
Sifting through the Auction House ends up feeling like visiting one of those factory seconds stores, where everything is just slightly wrong. The question is always if it is close enough to a good item in order for you to waste your time on purchasing it. I think this in part is why so many of us have leaned on the faction set of armor, because it was easier than trying to pick through the detritus. Recently a number of legendary items have shown up on the auction house and each of them… deeply flawed in some way. For example take the Heavy Chest-piece on the far right it has an excellent perk called Sundering Shockwave which would be perfect for a Hammer user… but the stat load-out for the item is Dexterity and Intelligence. The thing is Hammer scales based on Strength alone, and as a result it would never make sense to have Intelligence and Dexterity on an item that includes a Hammer perk on it.
Honestly I was excited as hell last night to actually see a handful of items worth keeping, that were not simply because they had Luck on them. The first item is pretty close to ideal minus Luck, which isn’t a bad thing but also not something that really helps out a build. When I am doing Invasions or Outpost Rush I run a Hammer and Great Axe build and that includes using the Reap ability quite a bit. The second item I am holding onto because while I am not using Leaping Strike in my sword build, I might at some point in the near future. The last item would be perfect… were it Strength instead of Dexterity. However at least Sword does scale based on Dex so those are not completely useless points and lands in the “close enough” pile.
Ultimately what I would like to see happen is for New World to change items so that the perks are chosen first, and then the attributes that appear on the item are forced to align with those perks. For example if you get an item with “Sundering Shockwave” on it, it would essentially have three stat packages that it could have Pure Strength, Pure Constitution, or a Combination of Strength and Constitution. Similarly if you find an item with a Bow perk on it, the item rolls would be limited to Dexterity and Constitution, with “Con” being the universally useful dump stat to add more health to your character. That way the perk on the item always matches up with something that would be usable for a build around that perk.
In other news… Apex one of the two guilds that defected from Syndicate to Covenant managed to win its war for Windsward last night painting yet another zone yellow. I have to admit I am a little bummed about this because the Spartans had held the territory since launch and did a pretty excellent job as stewards of the town. Similarly unfortunate is the fact that Apex immediately cranked up the tax rates a bit and I have maintained a house in that territory since around level 20. Planet X the other guild that defected declared war on Cutlass Keys and an up and coming Syndicate Company made its declaration on Reekwater. We will see what this map looks like at the end of the week, but for now things feel like they are very much in flux.
The post Intensely Imperfect Itemization appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. It was a bit of a rough weekend with my asthma troubles starting on Friday and continuing through the weekend at least on some level. Then of course we got back our long lost missing hour of sleep… which never actually leaves me as refreshed as you think it would. I’ve been in a bit of a stupor and so far this morning doesn’t seem to be any different. I am largely doing fine and I am hoping at some point the coffee kicks in and I can get on with my day. My gaming this weekend was largely limited to New World as I continue to chase a large number of competing objectives. I’ve most recently been farming Orichalcum ore in a mining set in the hopes to getting Void Ore that I can at some point turn into Voidbent armor. With everyone trying to gear up, there has been a bit of a landrun on the stuff and finding an area that is not actively farmed is a pretty significant challenge.
Eight days ago when I posted a picture of the server map, Syndicate held five territories, Marauders held five territories, and Covenant had managed to get back a single territory. Unfortunately things are continuing to go downhill for my purple family, because as of last night we hold three territories, Covenant are up to two, and Marauders are up to six. How did this happen so fast you might ask? Well I talked about this the other day but two of the most PVP focused Syndicate companies defected to Covenant and in doing so left Everfall in shambles repair wise. Apex and Planet X were both at the core of much of the war planning for our faction and them betraying us has left not only a power vacuum but also a debt of knowledge.
I spent Saturday night in a three hour long meeting of the leaders of various Minda Syndicate companies, trying to determine the best course of action in how to “unite the clans”. Essentially what is left is Blades of DaTang that hold down Brightwood and Ebonscale Reach, and I think for the time being there is no real threat to those territories falling. DaTang are great folks, but the problem is that they don’t blend super well with other teams and tend to do things in their own way in large part to the majority of that company does not speak English. They are willing to assist as they can but aren’t really in a good place to be leading a larger war effort.
Once you get past DaTang, there are a bunch of scattered smaller groups that can each field a squad or two which means there is going to need to be coordination at a level that we are just not used to. With Apex and Planet X gone, they also took with them a lot of the folks that had the mechanical knowledge in how to put together a winning team and how to call the shots during the heat of battle. That is not to say that there will not be folks stepping up to the plate and learning, but one single act essentially set us back a month in PVP progress. So I expect in the coming days to see more shifting around on the map with Covenant making a serious bid for Windsward tonight. I would love to see Everfall purple again but in truth we are going to have to accept occupation until forces can be geared and trained to take it back.
I guess for now I am thankful that when Everfall was previously occupied, I shifted to using Brightwood as my hub of operations and ultimately that is where I purchased my first Tier 4 house. It is my hope that DaTang can continue to stand as a bulwark against the other two armies. That said the truth is as a completely PVE player, all of this shifting of tiles on the map is more about faction pride than actual functionality. Sure I can’t transfer items from my banks… but I never actually did that because I am too cheap to pay the transfer fees. Sure teleports are more costly… but I rarely ever teleported with Azoth and instead used my housing and inn network as a way of getting close enough and then running the rest of the distance. With a house in Windsward, Brightwood and Weavers Fen that gave me a cheap teleport to get pretty close to whatever content I happened to be doing.
Currently my Inn is in Everfall but that might shift significantly in the coming weeks… especially once the linked Marketplace goes into the game. Currently there is a bit of an Ironforge and Orgrimmar problem happening in New World, with two cities being the hub of all commerce on the server. Brightwood does a fair amount of trade as well, but nothing compared to Everfall and Windsward. Once the Marketplace can be accessed from any town, there are significant more reasons to spread out from the central corridor of the map. As I get to doing more endgame content it might make sense for me to move my Inn to Shattered Mountain, just to have rapid transit into that zone.
The post Betrayal and Turmoil appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Last week we brought you the Epilogue show for the patch content following the release of Shadowbringers that brings that core story to a close. This week we dive into the content following that, namely patches 5.4, 5.5, and 5.55 that serve as the prologue to the events that we will be experiencing starting November 19th with the release of Endwalker. I feel like we probably know less about what is going to happen going into this expansion than we have previously, but we talk about what takes place and what we do know about the future. We also talk a bit about our mixed feelings regarding specifically the villains that we are going into this expansion with.
Belghast 
