anthem

Last night I managed to push through to Masterwork Colossus.  It might not be the most optimal build but I was just mostly going for being able to experience what having a heavily armored Chonky Boi feels like.  It is pretty good but all in all I still feel like it is really sluggish to play as.  I need to spend a night running a bunch of strongholds in an attempt to get better abilities, because the currently batch I am using doesn’t really make sense even in the simplest of terms.  However they are both orange and as a result I am using them…  because based on my experience with the Ranger… it generally makes enough of a difference to make it worthwhile.  I am deeply looking forward to the March 12th patch and seeing how the game feels after that because it sounds as though they are giving the weapons a little loving.  My next goal in the queue is to start branching out and trying other weapon combinations, seeing as I have mostly just used a handful of weapons the entire time I have been playing and I have a vault full of interesting sounding Masterworks.

The truth is I did not have a terribly productive night seeing as I spent most of it trying to fight falling asleep.  I am still coming down off being used to consuming three or more Energy Drinks a day…  and as a result everything feels way harder than it should.  I could have probably gone to sleep around 7 pm last night but my wife was not ready until around 9:30 so I managed to hold out until that point.  I spent a lot of the night doing more passive things like watching YouTube than I actually did running content in Anthem.  My hope is as we clear the weekend I will have distanced myself from the influence far enough that I will once again begin to feel like myself.  The further into this I get… the more I realize how much it was actually needed.  I am going through some of the basic signs of withdrawal…  constant headaches, dizziness, muscle aches, alternating between feeling like I am freezing and feeling like I am burning up.  I realize it is nothing like ACTUAL withdrawal but man it still sucks.

My hope is as we make it to the other end of the weekend that a lot of these symptoms will lessen.  Yesterday however was pure hell to make it through, and there were several times that I contemplating going to the vending machine and just saying fuck it.  So yeah that is my world right now and until I get on the other side of this I am probably not going to be doing a lot of thought provoking content.  I hope you have an excellent Friday and an even better weekend.  Tomorrow I get donuts…  so there is at least that to look forward to.

I have no idea at all what I want to write about this morning.  So for some back story I am struggling a bit to get my shit together right now.  Unfortunately this condition is self imposed.  While I no longer necessarily identify as Catholic, I still find myself doing some of the trappings of my upbringing…  like my wife and I often go through the motions of giving up something for Lent which officially began yesterday with forehead smudge day… aka Ash Wednesday.  Side note…  there was a guy in legal who was completely on point with his smudge because he somehow got the priest to give him a Harry Potter lightning bolt.  That is a tradition that I do not necessarily miss, because growing up as the only smudgehead in a baptist town…  was not a joyful experience.  However the concept of giving something up for the roughly month between the start of Lent and Easter is still a useful practice because it sort of helps me do things that I had been contemplating already.

For me personally…  I gave up pop and energy drinks…  the later being my real crutch that has lead me to my current state of stupor.  I was drinking an excessive amount of them…  often times I had one on the drive into work after having already consumed my morning cup of coffee.  Then if I went out at lunch I would pick one up on the way back to the office.  Then at night I would often times start the evening off with one as well.  Three a day on average is a lot of that to take into your system…  not to mention the actual monetary cost of it given that they are all pretty much $2.50 each (even though we bought flats of them at Sams to blunt the cost a bit).  Yesterday I was doing okay for most of the day but hit a wall around 3 pm…  then was completely out of it last night.  This morning I am feeling groggy as hell, which is in part why I could not come up with anything meaningful to talk about this morning and dove deep into the source of my misery instead.

Right now the wife and I are both trying to do this thing, since she too consumed energy drinks…  but in nowhere near the frequency.  Most days it was still one of them and occasionally two of them.  What we have ruled as “in bounds” are Coffee and Tea, so we can still have that first cup of coffee in the morning.  Also any sort of additive to water is also in bounds like those little drink mix packets.  Essentially the entire purpose was the exorcise the position Energy Drinks have held in my life and also to keep me from just falling back on Mountain Dew as a replacement by also banning pop.  We will see how this goes but the end goal is to get off of them while doing Lent and then hopefully not return to them shortly after?  I gave up Monster a few years back…  but I rationalized that I was specifically giving up Monster…  and not all Energy drinks… and just wound up leaning on the occasional Red Bull instead.  This time around however I am trying not to give myself much wiggle room to simply follow the letter of the law rather the intent.

On the gaming front, I spent some time last night working on Chonky Boi and doing the Legendary Contracts.  From them I managed to pull two different Masterwork Grenade Launchers that represented the last weapon type that I did not at least have one MW for.  Sentinel’s Vengeance is the only one that I can really see myself using in the long run, as the other… Insult and Injury is a bounce type Grenade Launcher.  Functionally how the one I like works is that the grenades stick to the target and upon detonation applies an Acid area effect priming the target seeing as the grenade appears to explode three times qualifying itself for a small hit streak in the process and proccing the perk.  The one I don’t like bounces the grenade once and then explodes meaning that too often you hit the target with a grenade… it bounces off.. and then explodes in a way that doesn’t actually trigger damage.  The core problem I have with heavy weapons right now is how cumbersome they are to reload, and as such I have swapped back to a more normal load-out.

The whole reload thing wouldn’t be so bad if you could reload while sprinting…  because the second you hit that booster to get out of harms way it interrupts the reload animation which is maddening.  Last night I also pulled a Masterwork Heavy Assault Launcher in the form of Black Powder which is far from ideal but I am using anyways because I like seeing orange rather than purple.  It actually does a really good job of mopping up targets that didn’t die from a melee smash.  I still feel like I cannot quite get the swing of Colossus, but I also am on this path that makes me not want to stop until I have filled every slot with a Masterwork.  At some point I am sure I will be doing the same process on both the Storm and Interceptor…  but in part I have been holding off on those for grouping with my friend Grace when she starts the game.  I like the Storm and Interceptor far more than I do the Colossus so in theory this experience of gearing up my least favorite of the suits…  has been interesting.  I like the look of the Colossus and I want to like it as a whole… it just feels awkward and I cannot move in it the way I can with other frames and it feels bad.  I mean I think that is the point, given that you are supposed to be this giant immoveable wall…  but the way that shields have a cooldown makes it feel like I am left sometimes with no real way of dealing with incoming damage.  In a traditional MMORPG…  this character would have a healer backing them up and it would make it feel much better than it currently does.

Now however I need to get to work and try and survive another day caffeinated way less than I usually am.

Monday night after finishing a significant number of contracts and stronghold runs I opted to spend a little time on my Chonky Boi in Hard Mode normal contracts to start building out enough gear to make something functional.  I’ve been spending a little time now that I have the Ranger in a good spot, working on the other javelins and Colossus seems to be the one I struggle the most with.  What I expect is for it to be this unstoppable juggernaut… and what happens in practice is that I am constantly having to run away from the fight and find red chicklets on the ground to heal myself back up.  In my hard mode travels however I came across one of the last “drops in any mode” Masterworks that I did not currently have…  the Fist of Stral which is based on Cloudburst one of the two Autocannons that don’t require much in the way of spin up.

Also in my travels I picked up my second Legendary in the form of Glorious Result a Heavy Pistol.  This is not exactly my jam but I spent a little time checking it out and playing with it.  It is somewhat unique in that it fires two shot bursts and it feels a bit like using the Crimson Hand Cannon from Destiny 2.  That was not really my moment of joy and neither is this weapon, however I do dig the fact that it reminds me of Ghostbusters with its “Scarbusters” paint job.  This is largely going in the vault as more of a collectible than something I am actually going to use, which is a little disappointing for how few and far between Legendary drops are.

After running a bunch of regular contracts on Monday night I managed to cobble together something resembling a decent build and last night I opted to do my Legendary contracts as Colossus to start piecing together a reasonable assortment of components.  I also had time to run one Stronghold as Colossus which was manageable but still as a whole the suit feels unwieldy, especially considered to the much more nimble Ranger that I am used to.  Right now I am running the Fire Wall ability as primer and Siege Cannon as my detonator, and it seems to work for most things…  and thankfully I managed to pick up a Masterwork Rubidium Furnace so I can continue with that build.  That is the worst part about easing your way into Grandmaster 1 is having to abandon what was a build that felt good… and deal with whatever luck of the draw got you.

Overall for the night I got several components including my third Legendary drop…  which I was sorta kicking myself a little bit that it happened while playing my alternate frame.  The biggest thing I am noticing is that as I get better gear I seem to be getting more pips of armor…  which means I can survive significantly more damage before I have to run away and find skittles on the ground to recuperate that health.  Not having and over-shield is still fundamentally weird and feels not amazing…  but I think I am starting to hit that break even point in Grandmaster where it largely feels the same as Hard mode used to.

I’ve not really talked about it much on the blog but I have been using a really cool website called Anthem Archive to look up various gear options.  What I would really love for them to do is implement some sort of a profile system that allows us to either run a tray resident app that uploads our loadouts, or for Anthem itself to have some sort of an API that they can access to pull the same information.  I also wish it would allow you to link to a specific item… so that I could have included links to each one of those components so you could find out what exactly they do.  The site as a whole isn’t quite there yet…  but it is the best that we have and I am thankful to have ANYTHING at this point.  I however have been spoiled greatly by the utility that Destiny Item Manager provides for Destiny/Destiny 2.

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.