I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.
I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.
Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.
Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.
Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.
I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.
The post Talking to Animals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week we start off the show with some continued Path of Exile Trials of the Ancestor league discussion. From there we talk briefly about the new Guild Wars 2 expansion. Tam has spent some time playing Pseudoregalia and has thoughts about that, which leads into a discussion about our impressions of game generations shifting over time. Tam also spends some time playing Banished Vault and has some things to say about it. This week Armored Core 6 launched and we talk a bit about a Giant Robot game from a developer who has become mostly known for Dark Souls. Finally, we close things out with some more nonsense related to the Path of Exile league.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve now made it through the Black Star, and am working on unlocking both the Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds fights. I have to admit I have a little bit of hesitancy around both, given how hard it was to get through Infinite Hunger and now Black Star. I am just not used to playing characters that fall down if you look at them crossways. I am not sure what else I can do in my current build trajectory that would improve my survival without also losing a lot of killing power. Again I went into this knowing that I was going to be playing a map blaster, and it does that beautifully… but bossing on it is a bit of a pain in the butt. Just like Infinite Hunger I managed to down the encounter with a single portal left, so the “six-portal defense” was definitely a thing.
I’ve never quite played a build like this before where I either completely clear the entire screen… or get one shot. I’m able to wreck red maps in pretty much the same way as I could wreck white and yellow maps… but every now and then there is a single mob that just ruins my day. Mostly the challenge now is to get red maps that have doable negatives by the time I have corrupted it in order to get credit. While I am clearing, everything is peachy. When I have to stop and fight a tanky mob or a boss… things begin to get considerably more dicey.
That said I have made one heck of a lot of progress and am sitting at 68 bonus objectives out of 115, and I just got a Unique Moon Temple drop that will give me yet another point to spend. I think the challenge that I am running into is always before my map blasters were a secondary project. Now it is all I currently have and it is making me miss my super tanky Righteous Fire Juggernaut a bit. I miss being able to do heist and delve with impunity… but again I also knew what I was getting myself in for. I have a pretty thick stash of essences and am almost done unlocking what I need to run Beasts. The truth though is that I have been spending almost all of my time unlocking new maps, and not really a lot of it reaping the benefit of having such a brutal killing machine. Maybe I should pause my progression a bit to remember what I built this character for actually.
That said I did start a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I have to say… it is weird how much slower the character is than I remember it being. I am a bit concerned that the pace of my Lightning Arrow Raider will have adversely impacted my opinion of my old standby. That said I am only in Act 3 and have a lot of points to sink into the tree until it starts to feel amazing. However, I am shocked at how easy it was to get Righteous Fire and pretty much all of the other abilities I use in the endgame version, up and running by around level 20. I am kinda of wondering about going straight for the pseudo-six-link helm for Righteous Fire rather than bothering with the six-link chest. In theory, you are supposed to pivot to that setup eventually, but I have never gone through the hassle on my previous RF characters. By the time I get there, I should have the cash to buy a good helm and then shop for a proper RRRGGG chest instead of the traditional RF BBBRRG.
I did not make it super far yesterday, because I spent a good chunk of the night watching the back-to-back episodes of the new Disney Plus Ahsoka series. Now Ahsoka Tano is probably one of my favorite Star Wars characters, and I am a huge fan of Rosario Dawson. I think she brings a lot to the character and I enjoyed her story arc mingled in amongst the Mandalorian seasons. All in all, I was not disappointed in the show and loved the way it felt. It definitely felt like they pulled out the stops for this one and the cinematography was excellent.
My only complaint… something is just not right with Hera. I don’t necessarily think that Mary Elizabeth Winstead did a bad job playing her. It is more that something is off with the makeup. Like the shade of skin tone seems wrong, and it feels way more like a human in facepaint with rubber lekku than an actual Twi’lek. It makes me wonder if there just was not enough time to go back and fix this in the post. Thankfully most of the time we are just seeing Hera in Hologram form where it isn’t really that big of a deal but it was jarring. Maybe this is just a me thing, and because Hera was another favorite character of mine… but it was this weird offputting moment in an otherwise phenomenal show.
Overall though I am definitely looking forward to seeing more of this show. We also got a new Guild Wars 2 expansion yesterday, but unfortunately with everything else going on I did not make it much further than seeing that the launcher had updated. I really dig the color scheme this time around. The End of Dragons patcher was nice, but this one seems much cooler. Maybe I am just partial to the color purple. Anyway, I think I am going to stop typing now. Hopefully, you are having an excellent week.
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Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.
I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.
Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.
The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.
So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.
I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.
The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.
Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.
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