kulve taroth – AggroChat

Capped for A Day

December 3, 2018 by Belghast

Morning folks… I am struggling today. Both in the waking up department because there is simply not enough coffee in the world… and in the illness department because I seem to be coming down with whatever the hell is going around the office. I’ve yet to decide if I can make it to work today, so we will see what happens between now and finishing this post but I am taking a breathing treatment as I type. As far as the weekend I did a bunch of assorted gaming because that seems to be how I roll right now. Instead of focusing hard on one thing I seem to be splitting my time between a bunch of things, and as a result I spent a good deal of time making tiny images and updated my “Recently Playing” sidebar. It mostly follows the post I made last week with the major exception of me apparently forgetting to include Elder Scrolls Online which I still dip my toes into occasionally.

In the Destiny 2 front I spent a good deal of the weekend knocking out anything that could get me a Powerful/Prime Engram and wouldn’t you know it… I reached 600 light the current cap. This is a cap that I will enjoy for another whole day…. because when the black armor DLC releases on December 4th the cap is going up to 650. The truth is I am fine with this.. because the last cap was quite the stretch to get to from the levels I was sitting at when Curse of Osiris released, which is unfortunately the last time I really seriously played the game. Sure I got in and did the Warmind story content and a little bit of planetary stuff but I really was not pushing myself to cap out at that point. Additionally Forsaken made it way easier for someone to play casually and reach the cap, so I am looking forward to Black Armory and some of the new open world “Forge” content as I have always dug things like the Blind Well or Archon’s Forge and Court of Oryx from Destiny 1. I need to get serious about trying to wrangle folks for the purpose of having a raid night… Squirrel keeps volunteering himself but at my count that still leaves us down four people. So if you are interested in that sort of nonsense on the PC platform drop me a line.

Since this is the first post of December I thought I would talk a bit about InPiPoMo which just finished. For years I had not joined in because I largely considered my blog cheating given the nonsense number of screenshots that I post. I apparently have a problem because the goal was to hit 50 “pictures” during the month of November to parallel NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word count goal… since a “Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. During the month without really attempting to do so I posted 93 screenshots if my quick count was correct, so yeah… that is a thing I do. Like this morning I had a screenshot of Diablo 3 on the Switch that I wanted to post but nowhere really to post it so I sort of shimmed it into this paragraph. Huge thanks to Chestnut for keeping this going this year and you should totally check out her blog Gamer Girl Confessions.

Over in Monster Hunter World the Winter Star festival is going on and with it a set of gear that you can farm. For both PC and Console players this also means that almost every event that has ever been active is active once again allowing you to farm anything you might have missed. That list is considerably smaller for PC players unfortunately, but it does let you get things like the Wyvern Ignition Great Sword and cosmetic nonsense like the Wiggler head. From what I can tell the only event that is not active is the Code Red event tied to the Devil May Cry cross over potentially because it just ended right before this event. You can however farm Kulve Taroth again until your heart is content. There is a set of lackluster armor that you can craft, or you can do what I did and cash in your tickets towards the layered armor set so you can make ANY gear look like Santa Claus. I plan on farming up enough tickets to also be able to purchase the super adorable Snowman Palico outfit… or Snow Woman in the case of Kenzie who regardless of the game is canonically female.

I’ve talked about how awesome the screenshots are at the end of fights, because they always capture you doing something interesting. In this case it is me dodge rolling out of the way of a line of lightning while everyone else is apparently downhill engaged with the monster. When you hit Hunter Rank 49, in order to make forward momentum you have to face this monster in particular… Tempered Kirin. It took me forever to manage to get this on the console and in truth it was probably only because I was getting carried super hard by Shiana that Ashgar and I wound up getting it at the same time. On the PC I’ve been dipping my toes into these waters for awhile now, and I have reached the point where it is not me that is fainting and causing us to fail… but regardless still end up failing out most of the time. Monster Hunter does this thing where the screen freezes and it can mean either you beat the encounter or someone other than you got carted and caused the whole group to fail. When the screen froze at this point… I just assumed we failed it… but in truth it turns out with one life left to go we managed to take down Tempered Kirin. I will probably NEVER fight this again… that is unless someone who has recently started the PC winds up needing help to get through it. Super happy to be moving again on the other side… which caused me to instantly shoot up to 58.

I also spent a good chunk of the weekend fiddling around in Final Fantasy XIV… which frustratingly has started doing this thing where it does not exit cleanly and strands a black fullscreen window that seemingly has the power to block task manager. This is really only a problem for me personally… since I have been streaming every bit of gaming recently from gaming desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs. When this happens I have to go upstairs and fiddling with it in order to restore functionality, which can be a bit maddening considering how regularly I am hopping games in a given evening. Regardless I have reached my first wall gear wise in the Main Story Quest and it requires me to get to 335 I believe which means I either need to buy my way out of that hole or start doing enough content to farm up some gear. I am probably going with the later given that I never was rich in Final Fantasy XIV terms. In the meantime however I have decided to revisit my old friend the Palace of the Dead to push my Dark Knight up high enough to be able to do the Heaven on High content the rest of the way to 70. Probably a significant amount of my time will be spent catching up classes so that they are ready when Shadowbringer releases tentatively next summer.

All Things Geekery is a great podcast by my friends Detached and Victus that among other topics tends to be a great source of Destiny 2 related conversations. They have been doing this thing recently where they highlight a member of the community at the beginning of their show, which I thought was a really great idea when they started this concept with the very amazing Chestnut. However I am now starting to question their mental state because apparently they saw fit to include me in this construct as well. This week I apparently am leading off the show, but really you should probably just fast forward past that and listen to their interesting discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2… a game I am super interested in but waiting to see if it releases on the PC given that is my platform of choice and I have a bad habit of rebuying games for it. You can find the podcast at…

Finally there is of course the podcast we recorded this weekend where we talk about Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World Winter Star event, what happens when MMORPGs close down, Tetris in Virtual Reality and a few other topics shimmed in between. I tend to be really bad about promoting the thing that I actually do, so I should get in the habit of talking about it more on this blog so there is some cross pollination. I am still shocked anyone reads this thing… let alone listens to me ramble on the other thing. At this point I have decided to stay home and crash this morning because I had very few things on my calendar for today. If I had a packed day of meetings I might have struggled through it and probably infected the rest of the office. Now I am going to get in some fuzzy pants and forget the world exists.

Red and Gold

May 1, 2018 by Belghast

One of my favorite aspects of Monster Hunter World has been the constant revolving door of limited time events. It seems like at some point we will run out of brand new ones, and that they will begin cycling through the past happenings… but for right now it seems like every time I turn around there is something brand new and shiny to interact with. Starting on April 27th we got the Code Red event which involves fighting four “red” monsters in the standard arena, one after another. So you have to work your way through Anjanath, Odogoron, Rathalos and then finally the Elder Dragon Teostra. Doing this gives you a special currency that looks like a monster gem called a Red Orb. Collecting seven of these and a slew of parts from all of the monsters included in the quest allows you to craft a set of rank 8 gear patterned off of Dante from Devil May Cry.

What makes this set really interesting is unlike past offerings… this is not a complete suit but instead individual pieces allowing for some interesting Mixed Build options. For the unindoctrinated… armor pieces have specific stats on them and by mixing and matching them you can often times come up with really interesting builds that benefit specific weapons. The boots for example have two levels of weakness exploit which I can see very easily mixing into other sets to achieve the desired affinity boost while hitting weak areas. The other special thing about this event is the fact that we get a brand new Charge Blade that is themed after Devil May Cry as well and starts out Rank 8 without any need to do a follow on upgrade quest. Instead of a sword and shield… it is a short sword with a run that serves as the shield… that then turns into a giant two handed sword giving it a very unique appearance and feel while using. A good chunk of my last week and some change has been spent collecting bits for this set and weapon… and last night I finally managed to craft the final piece when Teostra dropped that last piece of webbing.

The other big thing I have been participating in is the Kulve Taroth “raid” quest that drops materials to create a really awesome set of armor that you can see me wearing in the above image. Other than that it is also a chance for a lot of really interesting semi-random weapon drops. During the course of the runs that I have participated in I have managed to get a purple or better weapon for every slot other than bow… which seem to be extremely stingy for some reason. I had enough blue weapons that when I sold them all last night I jumped from 10,000 zenny to just shy of 300,000 zenny. The keepers have been 9 orange rank 8 weapons and 23 purple rank 7 weapons. Like I have talked about before the real benefit of this quest is it gives you a stable of usable weapons that allows you to branch out a bit. Like I have a decent Hunting Horn now… why not try it out and learn to use it?

Among the weapon drops I have gotten one of the more interesting ones is this Rank 8 longsword with 330 paralysis on it. If a monster is at all susceptible to this status effect… it seems to proc quite often. I was clearing out some of my quests last night and took out a Lavasioth and during the short time it took me to lower it to skull territory and trap it… I managed to proc paralysis four times. While these weapons won’t likely ever outdo a truly tuned weapon… because they are spending some item budget on defense… I like them as well rounded general use options that I didn’t have to spend a lot of materials to create. The Kulve Taroth quest goes away May 5th and the Dante quest goes away on May 10th. I am curious to see what replaces each of them which I guess we will start to see late in the evening on Wednesday? The content release schedule is odd and ends up with some things releasing Wednesday night and others releasing Thursday night. I want to get some more farming in of Kulve tonight for more attempts at shiny gold weapons, but in the grand scheme of things I am pretty happy with the progress I managed to make.

SOS Failures

April 24, 2018 by Belghast

The thing about SOS Roulette is that sometimes you win big… other times you fail miserably. Last night was more in the fail miserably column as I decided to attempt to farm some of the gems I need to create the full Kulve Taroth set of gear. That means I will need a Kulve Taroth Gem, a Val Hazaak Gem, a Xeno’jiiva Gem and a Nergigante Gem. As a result I spent most of the night joining in on Nergi and Hazaak fights without much luck. The truth is these are not the best things to queue into because the elder dragons represent a steep climb in difficulty. More often than not last night we carted out of the fight with someone taking a faint and finishing things out without getting any measurable loot.

The night did however make me realize how desperately I need one more Miasma gem so I can become immune to Effluvial build up and just wreck that fight without much issue. The truth is Hazaak is way easier than I remembered him being, which seems to be a common theme I am feeling as I go back and redo these fights. The truth is I have mostly been in a mindset of fighting tempered or similar things over the last few weeks and as a result all of those high rank “tough” fights feel a lot easier as a result. The truth is I should just be doing these solo where I can predict what is going to happen better…. but that just always feels so lonely. I admit most of the time I do the SOS Roulette thing just because it feels like I am doing things with people… without the need for actual human interaction. I realize I am not normal.

I did manage to get in a really good run of Kulve Taroth where I walked away with two decent items that represent weapons I had not really gotten before. First up is the Taroth “Blitz” Erupter which appears to be pattered off of the Deviljho Light Bowgun… and I have no clue at all if it is even a reasonable weapon but it does give me at least a Rank 7 one to play with. Next up you have the above image of the Taroth Buster “Water” which lets me start playing around with Gunlance, another weapon I have not so much as even equipped. I think more than anything that is what this event represents for me… a way to get a bunch of decent versions of weapons to start playing with and testing out. Sure I could have crafted likely better versions of all of these things… but I feel like I sorta need to know what types of weapons I like before I sink a lot of resources into them.

I think tonight I might start getting used to soloing things again, either that or see what Ashgar is up to because I know he needs Nergi parts as well. I need to get serious about trying to farm that last Kulve gem because when the event is over my opportunity closes there. Shiana has somehow managed to get four of the gems already so has enough to craft both the alpha and beta sets. For me… I am mostly just focused on crafting a single set and unfortunately I only have one gold ticket waiting in the wings to fill out whatever gem I have the hardest time getting. I think I blew my luck the other night when I managed to carve a Wyvern Gem and then get two more from the end of mission loot window…. for a total of three that night.

Gold Dust Woman

April 20, 2018 by Belghast

Right now in Monster Hunter World there is a brand new type of event happening called a Siege. The idea is that an entire 18 player session is working towards one objective… taking down a Zorah Magdaros style massive elder dragon. In order to start the process you need to find a gold pile somewhere out in the wilds. By default this should be somewhere near the start of any of the outdoor zones. In talking to the AggroChat crew last night I was told to do an investigation… which absolutely worked… but I believe that Tam originally intended to tell me to do an Expedition which according to Ash also works. The pile will be very obvious and very out of place and by looting it you will then have a quest as soon as you zone into Astera. From there the quest takes place in the Gathering Hub and will show up as a unique quest type called Siege at the bottom of the quest givers list.

From there you join a party in progress or start your own. There is no SOS Roulette for this so my standard practice of joining a clan session to hang out only really works if you are all focused on doing the event. The AggroChat crew apparently did this with only four players on Wednesday night when it opened, but I largely just kept joining public sessions until I found one with players actively doing the quest. For the most part every instance I joined had two active groups so a total of eight players chipping away at the progress meter for the event. Functionally all groups are working in their own separate instances with progress made each time you meet a milestone… like knocking off a specific part of the body.

There are functionally four phases that I am aware of in the fight. In the first phase Kulve Taroth moves around the zone completely oblivious to the players allowing you to hit it with canon fire perched atop cliffs much like the Zorah Magdaros fight. During the second phase she is still covered in the gold plating but begins to take notice of your actions and will actively but very slowly attack you. During the forth phase she enters a room where there are some magma eruptions that heat the gold up making her go significantly faster as well as allowing for better damage to knock parts off. During the final phase she goes into a room where magma is dripping down from the ceiling and all of her armor is knocked off making her extremely fast and very Nergigante like in damage when she hits you.

Ultimately the goal is to survive until one of two things happens… either she gets bored and wanders off “leaving the area” which counts as success weirdly enough. The other option is that through the actions of all teams that her horns are broken… which allows the team that broke them the ability to carve them for all sorts of tasty loot. The other thing that makes this fight extremely interesting is that she is constantly dropping parts on the ground so you have to juggle fighting with looting on a regular basis. Additionally there is a tribe Gajalaka that will constantly be getting in the way, throwing things at you, knocking you down… so you will be dealing with this in additional to avoiding very wide sweeping attacks. You can take them out however and the ones with gold shielding on their back drop Kulve Taroth bits… and the others have a reasonable chance to do the same.

This is a massive time sink, given that it often takes a full instance two or three attempts to take down the dragon. What makes it worth it however is the interesting semi-randomized loot drops that introduce the relic system that has existed in other games. While you are in the fight picking up drops, there is a chance that you can get a relic weapon. These then are appraised at the quest giver after you have exited the instance in a fashion similar to decorations. Last night I ran three complete Kulve Taroth fights and walked away at the end of the night with 22 blue rank 6 weapons, 5 purple rank 7 weapons and 3 orange rank 8 weapons. The above screenshot is an amalgam of all of the best items that I got from the fights. Apparently that Insect Glaive is good enough to make Tam our resident Glaive master general drool a bit over it.

What I am more interested in however is the fact that this is giving me an infusion of weapons that I might have not actually tried on my own. The truth is I have played with a very small subset of weapons in the game and there are others like lance that I have wanted to try… but had no clue which one to work towards. Last night I got myself a reasonable sleep lance to start taking down things like everyone’s favorite target dummy… Great Jagras. More than this, it is giving me a smattering of different elemental damage types which gives me more leverage when we start looking at other fights in the game. The other big thing I am working towards is being able to craft a full set of the Kulve armor because it too is really nice… but will involve a lot of elder dragon farming since each piece requires a gem.

Lastly there is both new layered armor and palico gear associated with this quest and I am wearing two pieces of the set… shoulders and waist in the above screenshot. Kenzie my palico is wearing the full set of her gear. This is crafted by combining Bushi Tickets that drop upon turning in the Kulve Taroth quest when your instance had defeated it and combining them with a bunch of varied monster parts. I am working towards the Bushi Homare set which involves a bunch of elder dragon bits… whereas the Bushi Sabi set has a broken down battle worn appearance and requires a bunch of parts from alternate high rank mobs like Black Diablos. All in all I love the feel of this event because it is essentially Monster Hunter World doing a raid. I’ve been extremely impressed with the sort of things they are continuing to patch into this game giving us reasons to keep coming back and interacting with content. The event itself runs for a few weeks and I can already tell I will be spending at least some time each night farming Kulve Taroth for interesting weapon options.