Some days back I said that if I were you, and had not bought into New World that I suggested folks wait. I also said that I would give the all-clear when conditions were favorable for new players to start the game. So you might be asking yourself if the server queues are gone, why have I not told everyone to open the flood gates. Truth be told my general hesitancy as it is, is due to the fact that the server transfers have yet to happen. I am uncertain what state the servers will be in after that occurs. Right now Minda is great with a relatively stable population that allows a trickle of new players to roll on the server. However, I am not sure how that population is going to look after transfers open because it is equally likely that the server gains population as loses it once the great shuffling occurs. I honor the trust you have in me, and while I think mostly it is fine to start playing the game fresh if you were waiting in the wings, I am not entirely certain so I have not proclaimed that publicly in a post.
What have I been doing the last few days? Grinding up furnishing and oh god is it significantly worse than any other profession so far saves maybe jewel craft. The problem with furnishing is it lives in this unique place where you have very few patterns available to you from the start, and most of the ones that you might want to craft are found as world drops. Then when you do get a pattern it takes copious amounts of resources in order to actually craft it. Then there is the problem that in general the patterns only returning wood on salvage… when in truth the hard component to get is always going to be the metal bits. Quite honestly the game could seriously do with an overhaul of the salvage system, either that or allow for monster dropped items to return more than just repair parts. I’ve battled my way up to level 85, which means that I can craft all of the first housing trophies and the second round of storage chests.
Housing trophies make a HUGE difference when it comes to gathering. For example with a single skinning trophy, I was getting 19 rawhide off one of the random level 5 wolves outside of Windsward. The effects are reportedly cumulative, so last night I made the decision to pick up my second home. I’ve developed a certain kinship with Weavers Fen and quite honestly once you get past the swampy climate… it is fairly unique located to be convenient travel to Brightwood, Mourningdale, and Restless Shore. My second hovel is a little sad because currently, it has nothing but a set of the five gathering trophies and a tier 1 chest. Over time I am certain I will bring over some furnishing as I craft them so it feels a little bit homier.
It did make me think a little bit about my general housing strategy. You can buy three homes in the game and my initial home is in Windsward where I still do most of my crafting. Currently speaking my Inn is set to Everfall because I also spent a lot of time in that zone. However, I am thinking that I might be better served to move my Inn southwards to Cutlass Keys given that it is a bit of an annoying run. So that makes me think that I should probably place my third home in Ebonscale Reach to give me rapid travel into that region of the world. It is expected that when the next zone opens it will be a desert zone on the far side of Ebonscale Reach. The idea is to create a network of cheap housing travel points that allows me to move around the map pretty quickly and efficiently without having to worry too much about carrying weight.
At this point, I am just shy of 48 and still need to run the second and third dungeon. Still not really trying to level but the levels keep coming. I need to spend some time in Mourningdale knocking out the faction quest that will let me unlock the Cabalist rank. I need to double-check the number of faction tokens that you get from doing the quest so that I can spend down to where I am not overflowing my token cap. Ultimately I will probably just buy either rune of holding for the second-tier housing storage boxes, or some more material converters since both are always useful. I have to admit I am starting to look forward to reaching level 60 so I can start getting some more permanent gear and beginning the various weapon quests.
The post Quagmire Real Estate appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning folks! Last night was a pretty rough evening. We were under a Tornado Watch turned Warning and that really started to escalate around what is normally our bedtime. So that meant a somewhat fraught evening of sleeping with the channel tuned to our favorite weather station. Oklahomans have developed this skill which is to half-sleep and half-listen to the weather report at the same time. I remember specifically waking up at various points in the evening when the meteorologist cut in with important updates, and then blending back into sleep… to the point where I am not even sure if I was actually waking up or if I was just dreaming about the weather? Whatever the case it is going to be a long day as I am pretty sure that neither my wife nor I got anything resembling restful slumber.
One of the positives and negatives about New World is how easily you can level just by doing pretty much anything. The positive is that the levels come quickly and it always feels like you are making incremental progress. The negative is that there really isn’t a way to actually slow down your leveling in an effort to let friends who started later try and catch up. For example, I spent the podcast on Saturday night fishing, since it was a pretty relaxing activity and wound up putting on most of a full level while doing it. Last night I was trying to catch up with my town reputation in Everfall and wound up doing most of a level as well in town board quests. Then there is crafting which always adds a not insignificant boost to your leveling. Suffice to say at this point whether or not I want to be… I am going to be level 60 and waiting on folks to catch up.
My crafting priorities shifted around a little bit last night when I noticed sitting in my bags the pattern for a Starmetal Storage Chest, or more correctly the Hope Storage Chest. I have been slowly working on my furnishing skill, and I guess I should spend a bit more effort trying to get it up to 145 so that I can start making these. I could have sold the pattern for a pretty penny on the market board, but in truth, I want to be able to craft my own furnishing so I guess this just gives me more purpose in leveling. I’ve reached a point where I am completely out of storage in both Windsward my main crafting hub, and Everfall my backup crafting hub. This means I will need to expand out further into another city… and I am trying to decide if I would rather do this with Brightwood or Weavers Fen. Both are currently held by my faction which would give me rapid (but costly) access to items from that bank.
One of the nights this weekend I happened into a group that was farming Rifts… aka Corrupted incursions or whatever this game calls them. I will always think of them as Rifts because they show up randomly, involve defeating a boss and then go away quickly rewarding you a chest in the end. The key differentiator so far is that Corrupted Rifts are way more rewarding than most of the tears were back in Rifts. I’ve pulled some decent gear from even the minor loot chests, and the majors give you the currency that you need in order to craft dungeon keys. I need to do this more often because it was rather enjoyable and also fairly rewarding.
Over in Final Fantasy XIV, I am working on my last job and have it up to 75 as of yesterday. I completely blew off maps night last night unintentionally. We were downstairs watching the weather and I was slowly prodding along in New World, and simply was not watching the time nor did I have any messaging clients active on the laptop. So I completely missed the message from Waren reminding me, and it wasn’t until we were shutting down for bed that I even began to realize that I had completely missed things. I feel bad, but also given the weather patterns I might not have been the most reliable group member last night anyway. I do need to make sure I make next week because I really do feel bad about completely missing it two weeks in a row.
The post Hope Chest Quest appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we return to some discussion about New World and how the promised server moves don’t seem like they are going to work out as we thought. The end result is the server queues are gone from Minda but we have a handful of people isolated on servers in a different region. We talk about some of Kodra’s woes in attempting to run PVP Faction missions solo. From there we talk a bit about Tabletop Simulator and some of the interesting ways it allows you to play board games virtually during the pandemic. We talk a bit about Tales of Arise and some of the issues it has with not really explaining clearly where a player should go next. We wrap things up with some discussion of Kodra finally beating Celeste and moving on to the modded version of the game including Glyph.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to hit level 40 in New World, which means a bunch of things. Firstly it unlocks the next gear set available from the faction vendor, given that a few days ago I knocked out the quest to unlock access to it. Another thing that unlocks at 40 is the next tier of Azoth Staff which is gated behind the main story quest… which I need to spend some time catching up on in Weavers Fen. The last thing and the one that I personally consider the most important is the 4th tier of the player camp, which functions as though it were a Tier 4 Kitchen for crafting basic foods. This meant that in order to access this I would need to head out to Restless Shore and do the Lupine Observations quest.
In my travels, I unlocked a wayshrine over by the cave needed for that quest, and while roaming around the area I kept hearing what sounded like a major battle, especially when I was in a valley between two rocky outcroppings. One of the triumphs with New World is the way that sound carries. It is absolutely terrifying rolling up on a field of untouched resources, knowing the second that you start mining that everyone in the area will be able to pinpoint your location based on sound alone. This works for folks actively fighting in a region as well, and this sound lead me to the camp that I marked in green on the above map. I am not sure if I was prepared for the experience I was about to have.
There are a lot of glitchy areas in the game, with either way too fast or way too flow of spawn rates. This camp is one of these, and as I rolled up on the spawn I noticed two things. Firstly there were groups of players actively trying to keep the instantly spawning boars farmed down. Secondly that there were tons of precious boar carcasses littering the ground unskinned because no one seemingly had the time to stop fighting long enough to skin them. It was not long before I was invited into a group, and apparently, this was my life for the next hour or so. During that time I took my skinning from 125 to 200, put on an entire level between 40 and 41, and a truly dumb amount of weapon experience so that my Sword and Shield is one level from maxed and I put on about 10 levels into Warhammer and Great Axe as well.
The loot also just kept flowing, and shockingly I got my very first purple items while sitting at this camp. It reminded me of the way that farming camps used to pop up in Everquest back in the day. I keep having to pause and salvage greens in order to make way for more blues and purples. Sadly all of the purples were bind on pickup, or I would have happily shared the wealth. I got a duplicate of exactly the same item which was a level 51 totem of sorts that equips in the trinket slot. The blues I took back to Windsward and threw up on the auction house for pretty cheap prices in an attempt to move them quickly. Most of the weight though was in thick leather, which I admittedly had gotten very little of before this point.
The lack of queues has really cut down on my YouTube time, and after about an hour of farming, I had completely filled my bag and took a teleport back to my house. It was around this time that I finally tabbed out and tried to catch up on any pertinent videos when I saw this. Firstly Demone Kim is great and I have been following him since the early days of Genshin, and now that he is super into New World I have been enjoying his tips and tricks videos. Apparently, this farm is known and has been talked about in the community for the last few days. It was only happenstance and phenomenal audio system that lead me to investigate what in the actual hell was going on.
There has been some talk about whether or not this is an exploit, but truth be told this is far from the only place in the world where spawn rates are jacked up. I remember rolling up on a church in Brightwood to complete this one quest and the NPC was instantly spawning over and over. There was a handful of us in the church there for the quest and we kept killing it over and over, not necessarily to farm it but because it kept respawning and aggroing on it before we could leave. It kept dropping potions and gear, so the boar thing seems an awful lot like that. Now that it is well known it is going to get patched because I noticed in the notes that instant spawn church quest had gotten patched as well. If you need to level your skinning and are in the vicinity of Restless Shores, then it might be worth your time to pop over to the camp for a bit. I might go back out there and level my weapon skills some more pending there is actually an active group.
The post Porkchop Sandwiches appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Belghast 
