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.
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Good Morning Friends! I figured I would talk a bit this morning about Honkai Star Rail. I’ve continued to play it in the background but have not really talked about it in a while. I’m still finding this an extremely fun game even though I am mostly playing for however long it takes to complete the daily activities and spend down my activity currency. I wish there was a bit more meat on the bones here, but we are in somewhat of a holding pattern for the next major story drop to land. I’ve contemplated picking back up Genshin Impact as my friend Ace has done, but I find just the concept of trying to ease back into that game overwhelming. There is so much content that I missed and it feels weird trying to find a place to even start.
I pulled Silver Wolf off the current banner and immediately adapted my default team to include her. The whole mechanic of being able to make encounters weak to abilities that they were not already weak to seems extremely strong. Natasha though is doing the heavy lifting of this team. Right now I only have one healer and really wish I had a second. Right now that would be Bailu… which is a five-star and not on a banner yet. The next banner is for Luocha, which is a character that I have no thematic interest in at all… but might still try and get just to have a second reliable healer. I’ve reached the point where I need to attempt to maintain two teams in order to keep pushing some of the content and whichever team does not have Natasha on it… struggles quite a bit. As far as my lineup of spare 60s goes… I have Bronya, March, Asta, Gepard, and Serval. Essentially I tend to make a super shield team and then give the healer to the other team and it MOSTLY works.
Right now in lieu of story content, we are getting several events happening in the game. The best of these is a sim game where you take over management of the Everwinter City Museum. It took me 71 turns to complete all of the activities which is probably a bit long, but there were several turns where I let my current actions ride just to build up the resource used to fund renovations. Essentially someone looted the museum and you are helping out Pela track down the culprits and replace the items. You also spend some time tracking down volunteers and convincing them to help be docents at the museum. All in all, it was a really fun event and I am sort of sad that I am done with it.
Another game that is cycling off in just a few days is the Starhunt Game which is associated with Silver Wolf. You are essentially tracking down graffiti that she tagged the space station with, and decoding it. This involves going through some mini-dungeons and completing very specific objectives. There is this cool mechanic where the boss of the encounter is too powerful to be defeated, so you have to find a specific tag somewhere in the zone that will reduce its level significantly so you can take it down. The biggest thing gained from this event though is a Light Cone that is themed for Silver Wolf and the ability to power it up significantly. It was fun, but nothing really to write home about.
The event that started this week is a “research” event where you just supply the researcher with some basic materials. So far nothing they have asked for has been a challenge and are items I have hundreds of sitting in my vault. These sorts of events tend to be a way of removing some resources from the economy, and if you have played for any length of time you tend to have plenty of whatever the resources are. The rewards are nice even though the event itself is rather boring. I can always use more blue materials to either synthesize into purple materials or to power up characters.
Honkai Star Rail, while largely in maintenance mode for me… is still something that I enjoy doing each day. It maybe takes thirty minutes to complete everything for the day, and then move on to whatever my gaming main course for the evening. This is just enough time to feel like I accomplished something, without the game really overstaying its welcome. I do however look forward to the next batch of story content dropping, and I am enjoying the little daily interludes that take place over the in-game text system. I should probably spend some time trying to farm the Space-China currency so I can pick up the remaining Eidolons for Fire Traveller. I’ve almost completed the battle pass for the month as well, so it still feels like I am making constant progress. Honkai Star Rail is one of those games where it was really fun to mainline it until I caught up with the content… and then still fun playing it in daily maintenance mode.
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Good Morning Friends. There is a concept among my inner circle of friends called “Bel Luck” where I am known for having an unnatural amount of luck when it comes to succeeding against the random number generators built within games. My personal theory is that I just play an excessive amount of one game at a time and as a result am just more likely to see better drops. My friends however will swear that it is something other than that. For the most part, I don’t believe them… but I have been party to a long line of exceedingly rare drops over the years. In Guild Wars 2 for example I pulled a Permanent Auction House from one of the random Black Lion Chest keys while leveling my Necromancer and have pulled four Ascended chests from Tequatl. In World of Warcraft, I pulled not one but two Spectral Tiger mounts from the card game and won the roll the one time the mount from Attumen dropped in OG Karazhan.
Last night in Honkai Star Rail… I got something so seemingly rare that I am maybe starting to believe them. I had a good deal of currency saved up waiting on the Silver Wolf banner to start, and while I did not get one night before last when the banner opened… I had gathered up enough 10 pull worth last night from doing various activities and raiding the limited purchases from the currency shop. When I saw Gold behind Pom-Pom I went through a rollercoaster of emotions… first being extremely happy hoping that I got Silver Wolf. Then being sad when I saw the banner image for Bronya instead… then happy again when immediately after clicking off Bronya I saw the banner image for Silver Wolf. The cherry on the top is that I pulled a four-star Light Cone at the same time so essentially 3 rare pulls in the same ten pull. I feel like I have spent down my luck for a while, but that said… I also managed to pick up the 5 Star from the last banner.
I am not necessarily playing the to the maximum right now in Honkai Star Rail because my brain is being dumb and seemingly hung up on Diablo IV. I am at least playing a little bit each night and have made it a bit into the new story content. Essentially where I left off last night this new character Screwllum was asking me to run a Simulated Universe. I knew this would take a bit and my brain was not necessarily in the mood to go through a thirty-minute-long Simulated Universe so I logged in for the evening. My goal is to pop in an do a few of these today given that I need to hit the weekly cap of progress there anyway. This is sort of where I struggle with Genshin or Star Rail, is that if I am not playing it as my primary game… and a new content pack is released… I am just not playing enough to catch up fully and feel like I am floundering a bit.
I legitimately thought that I would be winding down my time in Diablo IV. I am still not entirely certain I am enjoying myself but also seem to be hung up on it. This seems to be a case of “the heart wants what the heart wants” even though I am not sure if it is wise. Essentially I am doing some of the busy work that involves running around and doing various things. I am slowly working my way towards an eventual respec to Whirlwind. I stayed away from that ability because it seemed bugged… but also even after several rounds of nerfs seems to be strong. Upheaval is something that I enjoyed in testing but seems to not really be viable at the moment. I struggle to kill/survive anything in higher world tiers so there is no way I am going to complete the capstone dungeon in my current state. I think as my last attempt at making this game feel good, I am prepping to respec by unlocking the aspects that I need.
Last night I finished up the overwhelming mission of collecting all of the Altars of Lilith spread throughout the five regions of the game. Each region has around 35 of these altars so I spent a lot of time checking a map on my second monitor and attempting to guess where that location related to on the in-game map and putting a pin there. From what I understand, after having done this on my main character… I will never have to get another Altar of Lilith on my alternate characters. My hope is that this progress will carry forward into seasons… because this is part of my hang-up with what a new seasonal experience will look like. There is no way I can see collecting all of these altars every three months. Doing it once was painful enough.
I’ve also launched the beginnings of a Diablo IV Tools section for the website under my Game Tools menu. Right now I am collecting resources that I am using as I stumble across them. I have a few build sites that I regularly reference, a nicely interactive and searchable game map, and then the numbered lists of altars that I followed while collecting the statues over the last few days. As more tools come available I will be adding them to the list, and as I stabilize my builds I will probably start doing what I do with Path of Exile and use this section as a way to catalog what I am playing. I am legitimately not sure if anyone actually uses these pages, but for me, they serve as an external bookmark system for the resources that I regularly consume.
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Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a personal blog post and less of a gaming one. One of my biggest joys over the last few weeks has been evening time with one of the outdoor feral cats that we call Greybie. He has started coming out into the backyard to hang out with us. My wife spends way more time in the backyard than I do, and generally speaking, pings me over messages to let me know when he arrives. I’ve been spending about an hour each night hanging out and loving on Greybie and it completely warms my heart that when I get out there and set down, he comes running across the yard to be by my side.
There is so much of me that wants to adopt him and take him inside, but I have deeply conflicted feelings. Firstly we have three indoor cats already, so we would have to get him tame enough to go to the vet first without freaking him out completely. We are not quite there yet. Secondly, he is a “notched” baby which means he is a community cat. He was purposefully caught, neutered, vaccinated, and then released back into the community. Our neighborhood in general seems to be a collection point for these cats and in theory… you are not supposed to adopt them. So instead we give them safe places to stay during the winter with a few cat shelters and then make sure they are getting food and water to supplement whatever they are catching. Greybie roams around quite a bit and honestly, I am not sure if he would enjoy being an indoor cat… so instead I just give him lots of attention when he wants it.
Right now we are going through a lot of construction… that unintentionally coalesced at the same time. The city is blacktopping our neighborhood, so we have dust being kicked up endlessly by heavy machinery that is sanding the surface of the streets in preparation for the asphalt to come through. Then in our backyard, we are finally dealing with our bedraggled decking. It was never really usefully located and involved having to skim the edge of the pool in order to get over to it. We are hopefully making things work a little more smoothly and it was more economical to have folks just rip out the current deck than to try and do careful surgery and fix the old one. So as a result we have this super awkward empty space in our yard, that will begin to be filled today as the team comes back to begin construction of the new deck.
The negative is that Tripod has disappeared once again. We saw her bound over the neighbor’s fence and into the greenbelt that exists between neighborhoods. This is not the first time that things have gotten “too noisy” for her and she has checked out for a while. It is our hope that once things have settled down a bit, she will return as she has for the last five years. In the meantime, I am continuing to put food and water out just in case she needs to come back for a quick visit before bouncing again. It hurts our hearts to have her gone from the backyard, but this was something that needed to happen with the deck and I am hopeful she will fall back into her normal order eventually. The biggest sadness though is that she and Greybie were slowly working towards getting along together. The above photo is probably the closest we have ever seen them together, and one of the closest times she has been near us as humans. That photo was taken from my chair so she was maybe four or five feet away. I’m hoping by the end of the week we have our new deck and our backyard at least can return to peaceful quiet.
On the gaming front, a new patch dropped for Honkai Star Rail and we get access to the Silver Wolf banner. I spent through my stockpile of pull currency and have not picked her up yet, but essentially I will be spending every bit of free currency to do so until this banner is over. Basically, I want access to her because she has the ability to create a vulnerability in one of your team members, making it a bit easier to push through encounters without changing up your team significantly. My guess is I would replace March with her in my current comp. The arcade graphics of her attacks are also pretty freaking cool.
I’m also still poking around at Diablo IV, namely working at knocking out Lilith Altars in the various zones and getting my renown up to at least rank 3 so I can finish getting the remaining skill points. After I do this I think there is probably a significant respec in my future. Right now I am using Upheaval which seems to be completely out of the current meta of “best barbarian builds”. So once I wrap up this project of finishing the Lilith Statues, I will likely spend time trying to decide what build I want to spec into, and then making sure I have the legendary aspects needed for that build unlocked in my codex of power. At the moment I am leaning towards Whirlwind because that traditionally is my favorite Barbarian build, however, I am going to wait a bit before deciding because they are still pretty actively balancing things. I know Upheaval hit some nerfs going into the previous open test, and it certainly feels weak at times so I am open to other options.
I hope Tripod is doing okay out there. She has left and returned so many times in the past that I feel pretty confident that she is going to be just fine and then eventually return to our home and take up residence again. That said… I still worry about her.
The post Goodbye Deck appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
