paladin
AggroChat #206 – Heroes of Hammerwatch Show
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk about the May AggroChat Game Club game… Heroes of Hammerwatch. This was Belghast’s pick who largely though we needed a much more relaxing game after the deep feels that A Night in the Woods gave us. Additionally the first one was a lot of fun and it was well worth exploring what the indirect sequel had to offer. This leads us down a path where we talk about the differences between Rogue-lite and Rogue-like as well as some discussion about procedural generation versus hand built maps. We also talk a bit about the June game of the month Evoland 2.
Topics Featured:
- Our New Battle Royale Mode
- Heroes of Hammerwatch
- Rogue-lite vs Rogue-like
- Procedural vs Hand Built
- Evoland 2
- Final Fantasy Four Job Fiesta
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Chasing Aloy
It feels odd that it is Wednesday and I am just now getting around to writing one of my traditional “mixed bag” sort of posts. Those are generally a Monday thing given that I have a bunch of gaming time to talk about in general, and almost always it is a shotgun blast across a bunch of different games. However Monday was the anniversary post, and yesterday I wanted to write up my final thoughts upon beating Andromeda… so finally we are where we are writing about the assorted debris of the weekend. If you had talked to me last week, you would have seen someone who was excited to be finishing up Andromeda so I could move back to Horizon Zero Dawn as my primary game. While I have played it a few times… that hasn’t really been what happened because for whatever reason I am having a bit of trouble easing back into the game. Essentially it feels like the skills I had developed early on are painfully rusty, and the section of the game I am in doesn’t have nearly as much call to purpose so I feel a little bit like I am either stuck in “roam around aimlessly and kill zoids” mode, or trying to force my way through the few story quests I have. The last town I reached gave me a slew of side quests, so in theory I will probably spend some time doing those to try and get myself reacquainted with the game. The frustrating part about this is I do not want to be bouncing off of it… but for whatever case it just hasn’t quite fit my mood. Maybe coming off Mass Effect Andromeda… I just sort of need to play a vastly different kind of game.
The game I am playing a truly shocking amount of instead is Skyforge. Pretty much every night I am at least getting in long enough to run a few missions. Right now I find the bite sized gameplay appealing because there is no massive overarching commitment. I can pop in for a few minutes and play a little bit, while feeling like I had a meaningful experience. I had talked the game up to some of my friends and was super saddened to find out that apparently the female models are a boob jiggle mess. I mean I knew that was a thing among the South Korean developers… but I didn’t know it was a Russian thing as well. The other big problem with the game is that you ultimately have a long list of interesting classes…. but no easy way to access them. You functionally have to start the game as a Paladin, a Smite Nuking Healer, or a Ice Mage… and then work your way to whatever class seemed interesting. For me this was just perfectly fine given that I really like the Paladin as a class, and ultimately will probably always play it as my main in the game. However I have a lot of friends who were interested in other classes but are never going to make it through the grind to ultimately get there. I am shocked that you cannot simply buy your way to freedom in the game and unlock whatever class you really wanted to play… or better yet allow characters to pick any single class to start with. I mean the game has some really interesting classes like an Alchemist, the Kinetic, or Gunner… so there is a lot of interesting stuff going on but unfortunately if you don’t like tank, mage and healer… you are going to bounce super hard before you get there.
Finally I have been still popping my head into Final Fantasy XIV on a regular basis and working on my overarching mission… which is to get all of the classes to at least 50 before the release of Stormblood. I’ve set 50 as the goal because it allows me to jettison the bulk of the leveling gear from my bank vault, and reaching that level seems completely reasonable with Palace of the Dead. Over the weekend I managed to push the Monk to 50, and am now sporting the full set of Allagan look-a-like gear that I have been picking up through the dank dungeon. I like the set quite a bit because it is one of the few “armored” looking sets that you can get for a monk. We had this lengthy discussion the other day about how we each favor different styles, and for me… it needs to be symmetrical and heavily armored to really make me perfectly happy. What is left on the leveling track is Machinist and Astrologian… neither of which I had even trained in. I picked up the Machinist from Ishgard and almost immediately hopped back into the Palace of the Dead rather than doing any of the actual class quests. I have to mention that it was a bit of a chore to sort out what all abilities I should actually be using with that class… and how it functions. However once getting used to it, I have to say I like it quite a bit. It is gimmicky and RNG gated… and I still have no clue if I am actually playing it correctly… but for casual dungeon running it seems like a lot of fun.
Let Corruption Flow
This morning I have essentially wasted the time I would have normally written a lengthy blog post… on the mad quest for the Corrupted Ashbringer. Normally speaking each morning I log into Rift and GW2 to claim my daily rewards, and then maybe pop into World of Warcraft to check on my Class Hall missions before finally settling in to write a blog post. This morning I logged into my Paladin and fished a bit, and after a couple dozen casts finally received the item I had been so feverishly hunting for. So for sake of argument, the best I can tell I caught my Shard of Darkness after 1682 casts. Which places me significantly more than my friend Kel that got his in 149, but significantly fewer than the poor soul who was fishing Sunday and said he was somewhere in the 8000s. Of course after getting the shard…. I had to work my way through the rest of the quest chain this morning because there was no way in hell I could work a day without seeing this through. I get on these vision quests sometimes, where I have to do this one thing… and when I do finally get it I have a lapse in goals for a bit. Given how many things i put off doing for the sake of fishing up the shard… I have a feeling I am going to be just fine with finding something else to replace it.
The funny thing is… last night I actually felt the slightest bit of resentment that I was not spending it trying to get the shard while we were off doing a dungeon. In the grand scheme of things however I am largely glad it worked out as it did, because while this quest dominated my life for a few weeks I managed to do so in a fashion that didn’t really seem all that grindy. The final fishing part was only painful because each time I clicked that lure, there was a bump of excitement that only got squashed quickly when I noticed it was “more fish”. As far as finishing up the quest, I thought I would be clever and just manually fly up to Archerus. That however won’t work because it is actually completed in the version of Archerus that hovers over the Broken Isles, which meant another trip back to Dalaran to fly out with a special quest menu item. From here we talked to the modern Four Horsemen who infused the crystal with their powers… and after another trip back to Lights Hope chapel I am wielding my new weapon skin. This finally fixes all of my problems with the Ashbringer weapon, because this thing looks freaking amazing. I have even been sporting a transmog just waiting to get the weapon. Thanks so much for joining me in this journey… and tonight I am going to give it a trial run in some LFR in the hopes of getting some tasty upgrades on the Paladin.