Guildhalls and Shield Charge

Guildhalls and Shield Charge

Tonight is the launch of the Destiny 2 console editions.  Technically it is launching on Wednesday but they are starting that clock at Midnight Eastern Time…  which means since I am in Central time I might actually get a chance to poke my head in and check out the game at 11 pm tonight.  I have not plans to do a late night marathon or anything like that, but today I am mostly wanting to show off the new artwork from Ammosart that I commissioned for my blog header.  Since adding “LalaBel” to the header with the launch of Stormblood…  I’ve been plotting to add something up there to balance things out.  With the launch of Destiny 2 and my new love of the Sentinel Titan… I thought it would be pretty great to add a version of me charging with the void shield.  The only problem here is…  Ammo was working off a game that wasn’t out yet.  I gathered up a bunch of screenshots from the PS4 beta, and attempted to augment them with as many relevant screenshots as I could find around the interwebs.  I am super happy with the end result and she did a great job of capturing the whole “covered in void energy” aspect that happens when you are ping ponging between mobs while charging like Captain America.  Now I have a version of myself as a Sunbreaker that she did earlier as my avatar…  and now a really cool version of the Sentinel that emblazons the blogs masthead.  I had hoped she would get it done in time for the launch and like a trooper she pinged me last night with the final version.  I cannot express in words how great Ammo is at this sort of thing.. and like always you should totally check out her website and tumblr for more awesome stuff.  These are of course paid commissions, so please please please don’t go pestering her for free work.

Guildhalls and Shield Charge

As far as other happenings this weekend… I split time between Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft.  In truth I played way more WoW than I expected to be playing, especially working on assorted World Quests and Emissary missions.  That said the bulk of my time was spent working on a bunch of scattered objectives in Guild Wars 2.  About a month ago the AggroChat crew and friends managed to get a guild hall purchased for Greysky Armada the GW2 branch of our FFXIV guild.  The only problem is… saving up the currency and influence was only the beginning because you have to in theory fight to take back the hall from the mo that had invaded it.  We tried this with about five players shortly after purchasing the hall and failed miserably.  I’ve talked about the process before, but functionally there are mobs that spawn in that you have to take out… and you have something like 3 mins from the moment they spawn to defeat them.  The problem is that they could be anywhere on a rather large map.  With five players, if we happened to be close to one of the Maws we could take it out without much problem…  but the run time combined with the time to chew through the copious amount of adds meant that we were always behind the curve.  Each time you fail to defeat a Maw the toxin levels increase… which is functionally a hard timer on how many attempts you have before you have to call it and try again.  Monday afternoon we managed to gather up a bunch of folks and had I believe nine people working on this mission and that seemed to go so much more smoothly.  I think there was one that we failed to get, but shockingly we kept knocking down Maw after Maw until we were rapidly approaching the final boss phase… where you have like 10 minutes to defeat the purple border Legendary mob that you can see me fighting in the above image.

Guildhalls and Shield Charge

We spent the rest of the afternoon pouring through our vaults and dredging up materials to attempt to purchase upgrades.  By the time we called it a night we had a chest full and ready for a couple more upgrades…  and have the guild sitting at Level 5.  Basically at the moment we are favor locked, which is the currency you gain by doing guild quests.  We did the Trek one yesterday which is pretty simple… and failed miserably at completing the bounty task.  That one gives you 15 minutes to kill 3 mobs that are roaming around the world.  Firstly the mobs are not static spawns and you have to go “find them”, and then some are spawned by doing other activities…  like kicking suspicious barrels in a zone with about 300 of them.  The real challenge though was killing the mobs fast enough because these spawn in as champions… and one of them was absolutely straight up one-shotting me as a Hammer Warrior which is pretty tanky in the grand scheme of things.  Basically this again is a situation where we need more people on at a given time so we can spread out and then coalesce on a target when someone finds one and take it down quickly…  then return to the hunt once again.  I also need to see what the specifics about Hard Weekly Challenges are…  to see if this is a thing we can actually manage to do.  I am questioning it however given that it suggests that we have 15 players…  and so far this suggestion number has been pretty right on the money.

Guildhalls and Shield Charge

It feels like opening up the Guild Halls has infused me with new purpose because finally I have a reason to be stockpiling all of these materials.  I am just thankful that none of the materials are the ones that I have been needing for pushing Weaponsmithing up higher…  which currently sits at 486.  The other thing about me is I am notorious for taking the hardest route to get somewhere…  and this has been true with Mastery points.  For whatever reason I decided to keep focusing on the Pact Commander tree…  and then once I realized what was at the bottom of that tree I just kept going.  This put me in the position of needing 8 Mastery points to finish it out and gain “Advanced Logistics” that enables the Auto Loot checkbox in the options menu.  What this does is allow you to stop feeling the need to hit F constantly to try and loot corpses after everything you killed.  I know over the years I have left a lot of loot on the battlefield because I get caught in the heat of the moment and am busy whacking things with my hammer to notice that I had a prompt telling me to loot things.  The only negative here is I am afraid this will be one hell of a way to fill my bags…  but then again I have access to Mistlock for selling and banking anytime I like.  Additionally as we build out the Guild Hall it will serve as a similar option some day.  I’ve known for awhile that there were a bunch of Mastery points that I could get by running around Tyria and communing with certain locations.  The problem is I never really did anything about it… until last night when I literally ran around and collected all of them.  This gave me enough Mastery points to earn Advanced Logistics that I was after as well as enough to pick up the next rank in the Fractal Attunement tree.  Overall this takes my Mastery rank to 29…  which still feels like a complete newbie in the grand scheme of things.  Every time you complete one objective in this game it seems to unlock a dozen more that you didn’t even know existed…  which is I guess how it has kept people engaged over these last five years.