Good Morning Friends! Last night I largely spent my evening doing some chill gameplay in Guild Wars 2. When I finished up the previous night I had landed on the Airship parked atop Bloodstone Fen, and that is where I picked up when I logged in. I remembered hating this zone because it is just a murder box. The white mantle and bloodstone elementals always seemed to be hyper-aggressive and stacked in such thick layers around the map that it was almost impossible to move around without death following swiftly behind you. There were weird mechanics that I never really fully grasped as well, making everything a bit more challenging than it was probably intended. However with a firm grasp of how the shield absorption mechanic works and a flying mount… Bloodstone Fen was actually a rather enjoyable experience. When I first attempted this I did not even have much in the way of glider mastery unlocked.
From there I moved over to Ember Bay, and I have to say that flight absolutely trivializes this experience. Ember Bay was very much about teaching you how to use things like thermal vents to navigate the zone combined with a lot of gliding trickery, and when you can just hop on the SkyScale you can absolutely soar over top of all of this nonsense. I have to say originally I liked Ember Bay so much more than Bloodstone Fen because it was seemingly more straightforward. That impression largely is intact but I forgot how generally nasty the vinetouched destroyers are as a whole. I made it through the zone without much effort but I was downed a few times because the fire/poison nonsense caught up with me. In all cases, I was able to get myself back up, and in one moment a random stranger swooped down to help out… and I am a bit sad that they flooped away before I could thank them. That is always one of the great parts about the Guild Wars 2 community, which is that so often complete randos will pop over and help you get resurrected.
I finished out my night protecting Aurene from some bad things. I also remembered that fight being way more stressful the first time I did it. I still took a ton of damage, so it is not like I was able to trivialize it. However across the board so far Living World Season 3 seems nowhere near as “murdery” as I remembered it being from my first and only play-through. Again I think I chalk this one up to a better understanding of the game, and even though I might not remember the content blow for blow… having a vague understanding of what needs to be done in the moment. It is weird how exposure to the character has changed my feelings about the character. Like I remember thinking that initially Aurene was hideous nightmare fuel… but now after growing to love the character, I think the lil spud is kinda cute. Originally she reminded me way the hell too much of the botchling from The Witcher 3.
I closed out my night by happening upon the Tarir event at exactly the right time, allowing me to finish the last few precursor events and get in for the vine kill… and treasure chest crawl. Every time I am away from the game for a bit… I sort of forget how much loot this single event is worth. The vast majority of the last three rows of loot in my inventory came from that one event last night… and most of those are bags that contain even more loot when opened. If I was better about doing things on a predictable schedule, I would absolutely feel the need to do this every single day. In theory, I probably SHOULD get back into a rhythm… because Dragons End is also a phenomenal haul of an event as is Dragonstorm. So many of the meta-events are so fun and at the same time so amazingly rewarding. This is really the thing that hooked me on Guild Wars 2.
I’m moving through content way faster than I expected it to be. I guess the reality is when you are ONLY focused on the story bits… and you have already unlocked most of the zone-wide features… the living world content goes pretty freaking fast. I know Path of Fire is pretty long, or at least I remember it being pretty long. Similarly, I think I remember Living World Season 4 being pretty long as well. End of Dragons comparatively felt relatively short, so maybe just maybe… I might actually make it through all of the content before Secrets of the Obscure releases. We also got word that the next Path of Exile league will begin on August 18th… so I know I will be splitting time with that as well. July and August feel like they are going to be really busy months. I am happy at the moment to be back in Guild Wars 2 and feel like I have a sense of direction and forward momentum.
The post Ember Bay Whirlwind appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.
With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.
So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.
I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.
In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.
All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.
Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.
Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.
The post Regretfully Seeking Luocha appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! While I have not been actively talking much about Guild Wars 2, I still end up poking my head into the game a few times a week. I need to properly spend some time catching up and experiencing the “What Lies Within” content update and the second part of the Gyala Delve zone meta. I feel like before I talk about anything that transpired yesterday, I need to talk about the controversial post that the Arena Net team made back in February. Essentially in the Studio Update a new path forward for Guild Wars 2 was outlined, that they would be moving away from Living World and instead doing smaller and more frequent expansions.
With this post, the community sort of spun off in a bunch of directions. Some seemingly now accurately predicted that this would mean yearly expansions. Others went into doomer territory and assumed that this was the beginning of the end of Guild Wars 2. Whatever the case… this shift in direction combined with a somewhat poorly received content update for What Lies Beneath caused some opinions to circulate. I personally thought Gyala Delve and the What Lies Beneath update were pretty enjoyable. I was largely on board with this concept of narrowing the scope of what an expansion meant and then following it up with specific quarterly content drops. In the time since then, we have seen effectively a quarterly schedule which I think is awesome. Mostly for me when it comes to a live service game, the studio behind it needs to nail a predictable cadence and set expectations… and I think Arena Net is now doing both.
Now we move forward to yesterday, and ANet dropped the trailer for the next Guild Wars 2 expansion, Secrets of the Obscure. With the close of the Dragon Cycle expansions with End of Dragons, we now move back to core Tyria and are delving into mysteries that have just been sitting there in the open for a decade now. We’ve had this giant floating Dalaran-esc tower in Kessex Hills that was just begging to be explored, and it seems like the new expansion is going to be taking us there. This is honestly something that Wooden Potatoes predicted in his mega video throwing out mini-expansion ideas that would begin to tie up loose ends in the world. If you look at the map there is already a bunch of areas to expand into new zones, without the need to necessarily build another content island.
With the announcement came a bit of an info dump about the features of Secrets of the Obscure or as the community is already referring to it as just “SOTO”. There is a new expansion site that serves largely as a teaser for the features and a way to pre-purchase. Then there are a number of news blog posts that deep dive into some of the features themselves. More specifically there is one covering combat changes and another talking about some of the more ephemeral rewards structure features. I think what excites me the most are the tweaks to combat, which again everyone was speculating since content creators had latched onto the fact that an Elite Specialization had not been mentioned in either the roadmap or the subsequent Q&A.
Essentially we are getting new build diversity through the removal of elite specialization requirements for weapons. As it stands right now in order to use a Longbow on a Guardian, for example, you have to be using the Dragon Hunter talent tree with your build. In order to use a shield with a Mesmer, you have to be a Chronomancer. The first change with SOTO is that they are removing these requirements and when a class has access to a weapon… all of the specializations have access to that weapon. For ages I have wished I could build a Reaper that used the Greatsword as the main weapon set, and then Pistol as my secondary weapon. Sure I realize that Pistol is largely designed for condition damage… but it plays fine with Power Gear at least in the open-world content I largely do. I will now be able to craft this as well as a bunch of other dumb build ideas that I am sure the community will go wild with.
More than that, however, in one of the quarterly updates it seems like every single class is getting another weapon to play with.
Guardian: Pistol (main and off hand)
Revenant: Scepter (main hand)
Warrior: Staff
Engineer: Short bow
Ranger: Mace (main and off hand)
Thief: Axe (main hand)
Elementalist: Pistol (main hand)
Mesmer: Rifle
Necromancer: Sword (main and off hand)
I am super interested in Staff for Warrior because I am hoping that opens up a healing option for that class. I am also naturally interested in Necromancer getting Sword Main and Offhand… because I wonder what a Pistol/Sword combo would look like. I don’t love Daggers in general… so if a game gives me the option to not use one… I will generally take that option. Ranger getting access to maces could also be interesting. I could see some sort of Hammer/Mace/Mace build being interesting probably with some CC nonsense going on.
Another huge thing that I am looking forward to… doesn’t directly impact me. They are adding in a new way of earning the Skyscale mount, that in theory should be less of a grind and hopefully less of a gold sink. I went through the entire process of getting a Skyscale and while I enjoy it… it is so much of a grind that I would never wish that for anyone. The Skyscale is the single highest quality of life addition I have made to my account, and in truth much like lowering the barrier of entry of getting access to the raptor and gliding quickly… this one is pretty huge and is currently gated behind having to do a mount of content to get it. This is a good change for future generations that might adopt the game later, but I do like that they are giving those of us who unlocked the first track a bit of a bonus when we unlock both tracks.
Another thing that I am supremely excited about is the possibility of an Open World track for earning Legendary gear. Guild Wars 2 is a bit odd when it comes to gearing because Legendary gear is mechanically the same as Ascended gear. The key difference being that you can change the stats on Legendary gear as often as you like, meaning once you have a set for each armor weight… you effectively never need to worry about gearing ever again. The problem with the way this gear is earned currently is that for the PVE variant, you essentially have to raid. While I would love to do this at some point… I don’t necessarily have a pre-baked static team to take with me. I mostly play Guild Wars 2 as a solo adventure, and I figure this is the case for a lot of players. The idea of opening this up to give us a way to earn purple gear makes me extremely happy.
I am also fairly interested in this “Rift” mechanic that they talk about, and I am interested to see how this shakes out. More interesting things in the Open World are always a bonus for me, given that is my primary mode of play in Guild Wars 2. I’ve loved Rift mechanics in other games… like the actual elemental Rifts in the game of that namesake, the anchors in Elder Scrolls Online, and the corruption pillar things in New World. My hope is that this ends up being something of the sort and just adds one more game mode to an already-packed world. I kinda dig the seemingly darker theme of this expansion. There are a lot of threats from Tyria’s past that could easily come back now that the dragons are out of the way. Maybe the dragons served the purpose of guarding against even worse things.
I have no clue what this nightmare-fueled monstrosity is, but I am here for it. Sign me up for dark eldritch horror thank you very much. While I am not really a “Wizard Tower” type of person, I am all here for floating cities and more importantly floating continents. Mostly what excites me is the addition of more vibrant maps into the game. Guild Wars 2 isn’t so much an “Open World” game as it is a dense content map game and I am here for more fun zones to hang out in. I am also interested in seeing what wild zone metas we could have when it is assumed that EVERYONE has easy access to a flying mount. I think that has been one of the challenges with the Skyscale to date, is that it is really hard to design content around having it because the grind was so arduous.
I realize I somewhat buried the lede here a bit and am just now embedding the trailer. The truth is the trailer doesn’t say much of substance. You are far better off reading the blog post, and then the combat and rewards breakout posts. I think what mostly shocked everyone was the date. This is going to be launching on August 22nd. At the time of writing this post, that is only 55 days away. I have to be honest… I wish EVERY game announcement was on this short of a timeframe. Previously my favorite announcement was Fallout 4 when we had it in our hands roughly six months later. This is great because a few months is sufficient time for a hype cycle to build, and spend time theory-crafting new build options. The biggest challenge that ANet has had to date has been the consistency of content releases, and I think a few years of this content model will do a lot to sure up the player base.
What are your thoughts about the expansion announcement? Are you as excited as I am? Drop me a line below with your thoughts and feelings.
The post Secrets of the Obscure Announcement appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I am not entirely certain what it is about the ritual of doing Tequatl the Sunless at server reset that I enjoy so much but it is most definitely a thing. I am honestly a bit annoyed with the time change because it pushes the “start” of my evening back an hour later than it was. There was just something about sitting down with dinner and killing a giant undead dragon as my first activity of the evening that set the tone for the rest of it. It isn’t that Tequatl or “Taco” as I occasionally call it is really that rewarding. There are much better uses of my time, but there is something about the event that I enjoy and the fact that I have managed to pull several ascended weapons from it at this point. There is also a little community of folks who run this every single night and I enjoy the vibe they bring… that is unless I get the map with the Goon Squad on it.
I’ve been working my way through the story with my Ranger and am on the second section of Living World Season 2. In theory, my excuse is to use this experience as a way of knocking out the “Return To” achievements and eventually earning myself a Legendary Amulet as a result. Essentially ANet as a way of buying time for the End of Dragons release threw in a “Living World Return” series that provides a ton of rewards along the way and a legendary item that you can use on all of your characters. It was due to some of these achievements that I was able to finish my Skyscale so quickly because completing segments gave me exactly the amount of zone currency required for one of the steps of that quest chain. I have completed all of the content in Guild Wars 2, but had done so often times out of sequence and over the course of ten years of me playing off and on.
What has been so interesting is seeing this cast of characters that I am already so engaged with… evolving into what they will eventually become. It is like I read the last chapter of the story and now can better appreciate the chapters that are leading up to it as a result. So many of these characters I did not like at all when I first met them through Living World Season 2, because I did not understand what had happened during the first Living World Season. The game just sort of threw you in the middle of something that didn’t make much sense. While I disliked Braham specifically for most of a decade, I now feel like I understand him a bit better as a character and also think that Kas is less of an airhead because I know that both Kas and Jory to some extent are dealing with a lot of shit that went down along the way while still trying to remain a strong couple.
It makes me think that at some point in the future, I should probably start a brand new character and play all of Final Fantasy XIV through from the very beginning. Now that I know where the story is going, I feel like I will better appreciate the journey. I’m not one who is negatively impacted by spoilers and quite honestly most of the time… knowing the destination makes me stop trying to second-guess every decision along the way. I can finally relax and enjoy the ride for what it is without feeling like I need to be wary of each step. I think this is part of why I have fairly regular replaying of games that meant a lot to me like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, or The Witcher 3. It is the same reason why I find comfort in watching Star Wars, Dune, or Blade Runner… it is comfortable to re-experience things that once made me happy and it is something I can use as a bit of solace when I am struggling.
In more current and fresh news… I was in fact able to skip past the game-breaking bug surrounding the Lagon boss fight in Last Epoch. If you get stuck where Lagon will not summon a portal for you to take, you can just teleport to Soreth’ka in the Divine Era. This does in fact cause you to complete the quest you are on and allow you to pick up the next sequence and begin the ninth and final chapter of the game. The last chapter was pretty fun but included maybe the worst possible archetype of creation… a wizard that summons a ring of bad around him so you have to fight him in close quarters… then summons an endless string of bees for you to fight. Bees in ARPGs are just universally awful and end up doing way more damage they you would think they should.
I’ve made minimal progress in the Monolith system, but have finished the first boss and am working on unlocking the second. I am not sure what it is about the game but I’m less driven to keep going not that I have finished the story. Maybe it is that I know I will be poking my head into Diablo IV in a few minutes, or that I am really enjoying Guild Wars 2 at the moment. The monolith just doesn’t seem as “sticky” as I would like it to be. It is really fun with friends, but I sorta find it less interesting when I am running it by myself. The drop rates of gear also feel a bit fickle in that it has been probably 20 levels since I last got an upgrade. I’m just not seeing items that are worth swapping to and would require more crafting than I have forging potential available to fix. I know as I progress upwards in the monolith that I will keep seeing better and better items, but I am in this weird period where nothing useful seems to be dropping. The rewards from each monolith echo feel significantly less important when you know you are just going to be vendoring almost all of it.
I think in the test realm they must have buffed drop rates significantly because it feels like I am only getting a trickle of useful gear. Maybe it is just that I know more specifically what types of items I am after with my paladin build than I did with the necromancer. Whatever the case the game as a whole just feels less rewarding than it did in testing. I am trying not to force myself to play Last Epoch because I don’t want to ruin the experience. I might try playing something else because while I enjoy the tanky nature of the Paladin build I am running, it isn’t terribly exciting gameplay-wise. I sorta miss having my Bone Golem thrashing about. I would also like to try building something with Primalist, and if I do plan on switching classes I should probably do so before I get too deep into the monolith system since that is unlocked on a character-by-character basis and not account-wide.
In the short term however, I am going to be playing a lot of Diablo IV as I try and get used to that game, and get far enough along to unlock the wolf cub backpack. It is sort of adorable.
The post Enjoying the Journey appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
