Hey Folks. I’m in a bit of a weird place right now with Monster Hunter Wilds. I am 56 hours into the game and HR 66 and essentially “done” with the game. That is not to say that I have stopped playing it, but I am also sort of out of stretch goals. I’ve completed the set of gear that I want and the weapons that I wanted… and have taken down the hardest tempered fight currently in the game. I feel like either Monster Hunter Wilds is a much easier game than Monster Hunter World was… either that or my muscle memory kicked in and I am just much better at the game than I was when World launched in 2018. I am also playing from the beginning on my platform of choice (PC) with my control scheme of choice (Mouse and Keyboard) so I figure some of it has to account for that.
Here is an attempt at a Photoshop image that pulls together all of the relevant data points about my gear load out. I am wearing the full Tier 8 Arkveld Alpha armor set and rocking a Guiding Artorious Sword and Shield and a Binder Mace Hammer. I’ve gone hard into defensive stats because I really enjoy being up in the face of the monster and “tanking it” in a manner that I would normally Tank an MMORPG boss. I spent a good chunk of last night running around with Ace and doing various hunts that happened to be up, and it was delightful. They are far better at breaking parts, and my job was to attempt to hold the attention of the monster as best as possible while they peppered it in the butt with arrows. I remembered there being some form of taunt in this game, and I need to look up to see if there is a gem I can add to my weapon that does that.
The most important part of my daily routine however is going to Suja and petting Poogie. In this version you get random items from petting the recurring pig. So far I have not uncovered any outfits and the only customization seems to be the ability to rename Poogie… which would be blasphemy. Hopefully in future patches we get the proper retinue of outfits to deck out our piggie pal. I do love the frog on head though with this rendition. For those who have not found Poogie yet, you have to get to chapter 3-2 and from that point forward you can port to Suja and pet until your heart is content… pending you know when you stop.
I also spent a bit of time and updated my hunter profile. I was still wearing Chatacabra armor up until this point, which was the first set of gear that I made when I started playing the game. The profile name system is a bit awkward so I attempted to come up with something sufficiently stupid. I think it mostly has a cohesive feel now. I am not sure that anyone actually looks at hunter profiles. I’ve not really checked any out of my friends and squadmates other than Ammo when she first joined. I should really do that, to see if anyone has something brilliant on theirs. At some point I need to finish up all of the optional quests that I have yet to run at least once. I lost momentum when I hit the endgame and focused entirely on getting my gear. Now that I am geared… I am a bit rudderless until more content is added.
Mostly I have been chipping away at various gear sets for cosmetic purposes. Essentially once you hit High Rank, any gear set that is blue, purple, or orange can be used for transmog. There are generally two color channels on each item and there is a wide variety of looks you can choose from, as well as some relatively crappy gear that seems to exist purely for cosmetic purposes. I wish however you could transmog your weapons, and dye them. I find it annoying that I was able to dye the entire Arkveld set, but I still have a glaringly white weapon that no longer matches it. Fashion Hunter is probably the true endgame, and I am slowly chipping away at the Jin Dahaad set. I’ve also crafted the full Odog set which I have always thought looked cool. I do kinda wish the Red variant from Worlds still existed. Maybe in a later update we will get the non-Guardian Odog.
I have no clue why… but in every game I end up with what feels like a default activity. For me it is beating up this dumb chicken. I have no clue WHY I like killing it so much… but I really do. I always “feel like chicken tonight”. It doesn’t hurt that Tempered variants are up almost constantly and they all seem to have really good rewards. This morning for example before I sat down to write this post I knocked one out and got three Wyvern gems from it. Basically the rewards that I have been getting is what has been dictating what monsters I hunt. I think I have largely collected a full set of the Tempered monster Investigations, and the Frenzied variants seem way less common. Maybe as I knock out some more of the two monsters at once optional quests, other things will open up. I should probably set my focus on doing those soon-ish just to see if the landscape shifts at all.
Monster Hunter Wilds is a phenomenal game… but also one that I find myself lacking the desire to grind for grind’s sake. I’ve got a couple of friends in the 70s, one in the 80s… and one that is 119 as of this morning. My guess is that they are playing with a fixed group of friends, because the act of doing group hunts is way more enjoyable than solo hunting. I could happily log in to do group content with my friend Ace every night, but my will to keep pushing just for myself is waning. I am likely going to take a break from the game for a bit, at least until the April update that adds new content. I will probably keep doing weekly quests as they show up. However I knocked out most of those in a single evening. I remember all of this taking me so much longer to get to in World, but again… that was really my very first Monster Hunter game.
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Good Morning Folks. This is a topic that I am really frustrated and sad to have to bring you, because I thought Diablo IV was well on its way to an epic redemption arc. By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion rolled around, Diablo IV was in a pretty great state when it comes to the sandbox aspect of the game. Mechanically the classes felt pretty solid and the expansion added a whole slew of new activities. Season 6 mechanically was somewhat forgettable, but there was so much other stuff going on with the game that we mostly lost focus of the season itself in the midst of everything happening with the expansion. Season 7 was quite possibly peak Diablo as it represented the closest we have seen to the ideal flow of the game. The game still really lacks anything resembling a proper endgame loop, but the leveling and gearing aspects of the game were spot on.
The seasonal mechanic was essentially a retread of the most successful season ever… Season Two and the vampire themed Bloodtide. This new “Witchtide” as I called it represented a super fun repeatable mechanic that made leveling and gearing feel amazing. So much so that it essentially eclipsed every other bit of content in the game. Similar to Diablo III, it took about a week to get geared and capable of tackling Torment IV the highest difficulty and at that point it was mostly just hanging out and running bosses, which always felt amazing because you could pool your resources with your friends and get a ton of loot out of it. All they really needed to add is something resembling a proper endgame with something akin to an Atlas of Worlds from Path of Exile, or a Monolith from Last Epoch and the game would be rocking. Add in some more chase items and and varied repeatable endgame system and the game would have been on good footing.
However this week we got the Campfire Chat for Season 8, and it seems as thought Blizzard is unlearning everything that they have learned and largely fucking everything up. Basically when you lack a proper endgame loop… what do you do? Release incremental upgrades to the game that keep adding more functionality until you reach a critical mass of so much content that the player never lacks something to do? Fuck no. You release another season with a borrowed power system and slow everything else down as to delay the inevitable point of boredom behind a more tedious treadmill. You can see the entire live stream here, or I would instead suggest just watching Raxx’s breakdown video. I am going to talk about some of my points of frustration from the presentation.
What do you do when you don’t have enough bread and too much toast? Well you spread it thinner of course. As such Diablo IV is having its leveling curve slowed down significantly. Why were players leveling so fast? Because of the Witchtide and how perfectly repeatable that endgame loop ended up being. Without that… the leveling curve would have been considerably slower, but it does not seem like the team realized that. Instead they are planning on slowing down the entire progression curve so that you spend more time in the doldrums of the mid-levels instead of zooming to the level cap and then spending the rest of your time working on actually building out your character. Essentially in a seasonal model the level cap is the beginning of the game… not the end of it. The slower you make leveling, the more folks that are just going to give up before they finish it.
It is weird how people can look at the same statistic and take wildly different things away from it. 50% of players made it to Torment IV, which to me seems like a wild success of the game as a whole. Torment IV is again… to me, the beginning of the real game. That is when you can farm things the most efficiently and get the best loot rewards. The fact that 50% of the players made it to that point seems like a real win. The team however wants Torment IV to be an aspirational goal… and that number to be around 10% so as such are cranking up the difficulty curve. Again… when you lack an endgame you have to slow things down so that players don’t realize they have nothing that they are grinding for. Diablo IV has a lot of disposable treadmills, that are not that fun in themselves. They have vehicles for generating loot, but no real fun mechanics that are sustainable in the long run. There is no Betrayal, or Heist, or Delve, or even no surprise content like Essences, Legion, or Breach that make the mundane aspect of playing the game feel more exciting. They have awful mini-events that have no real payoff and apparently the act of leveling is the reward in itself.
We were also apparently getting gear too quickly… so they are slowing that shit down as well. Once you hit level 60.. everything that drops that is not an Ancestral drop is useless. Most of your time dealing with loot is looting things that do not matter at all. They say that they want Magic and Rare items to matter, but in order to do that… Magic and Rare items have to be competitive with Ancestral Legendary items. When your game is effectively collecting the right stat sticks with the correct Legendary Aspects on them… the more stats you have on an item the better it is going to be. In Path of Exile Magic and Rare items can be competitive because they have systems in place to make them competitive through Unique items that have specific parameters and a robust crafting system that allows you to turn exceptionally well rolled Magic items into a Rare with perfect stats on it. Slowing down the acquisition of the Legendary items needed to get your build online is going to feel awful. It legitimately feels like they do not play their own game and most definitely do not play the other games in the same market.
Quite possibly the worst change is one that is hidden behind something that adds real quality of life. Obtaining the right widgets to summon a boss is sort of annoying, and you always end up with a lopsided and mismatched number of items. So limiting it so that every boss is keyed off a single item is a great change. However making it so that you only get loot if you have one of the boss keys… is fucking awful. Additionally it is slowing down the loot acquisition of uniques that are required to make builds work. One of the highlights of the last several seasons has been when Ace and I have pooled our boss materials together and did an entire evening of nothing but summoning bosses chasing the ancestral uniques required to make our builds feel good. It was an amazing feeling because you end up drowning in loot because every summon I did paid off for Ace and vice versa. Now we are going to get half the amount of loot, because in order to get ANY of the drops from any given summon we are going to have to pay our own boss materials. I get that this is designed to fix some hypothetical problem with random strangers not paying their way in boss summoning groups… but wildly fucks over the more likely scenario of friend groups pooling their resources.
I can’t really complain about the seasonal power mechanic because it seems like they have taken to heart the lessons learned from the vampire event, and then reinforced recently with the witchcraft event. Being able to pick and choose which abilities you want to buy is a good model and it appears that there is a currency to spend on unlocks that let you target which abilities you need for your build. However my core complain with borrowed power systems is that they are fleeting and are throw away content. In a game that is lacking content, it feels wildly inappropriate to squander resources on something that does not stick around the bolster the future of the game. This is not how you turn the tide of there being “nothing to do” when you finish leveling. This is why you end up with this design path of slowing things down, because you simply do not have enough content to soak up player attention. You are wasting resources and creating a temporary heatsink for a fire that keeps raging season after season.
All of this feels so much worse because it was released on the same day that Last Epoch dropped this phenomenal trailer. They get it. They get that they need to invest time in broadening the game and making interesting things for players to do once they have finished leveling. Similarly Season 7 was overshadowed by the release of Path of Exile II Early Access. Thankfully Last Epoch Season 2 lands on April 2nd… a few weeks ahead of the reason of Diablo IV Season 8. By the time the season of summoning Belial hits, I will be otherwise engaged and am I guess fine with this one being a stinker. If you are a Diablo IV player, I highly suggest you check out Last Epoch. Unfortunately there is no console version but the PC release is $35 and worth every penny.
I am legitimately really saddened to see that Diablo IV is going in the wrong direction now. I had a lot of hope for the game. Season 7 was a freaking blast and I was legitimately looking forward to spending a week or two playing Season 8 once Last Epoch Season 2 died down a bit. At this point I am probably going to take a hard pass and see if they can pull their heads out of their collective asses by the time Season 9 rolls around. I guess I should be thankful for all of the stuff we are getting in Last Epoch Season 2, and how damned good the Legacy of Phrecia event has been in Path of Exile. On top of that I am still having a lot of fun hunting monsters for parts that seem almost impossible to get. I have plenty of shit going on, but it sucks to see Diablo IV going off the rails. For the last year I had been a cheerleader for the game actually being pretty solid, against a sea of D4 bad memes. Sure I criticized the hamfisted nature of the Vessel of Hatred campaign, but the game-play was solid.
Hopefully they see the error of their ways when this rolls out and no one shows up. I was shocked at how few people were actively playing Diablo IV Season 7… but I can’t see that anything they have announced is going to draw much interest. The ARPG zeitgeist is likely to be playing Last Epoch still, and by the time that fire dies down Path of Exile II 0.2.0 will drop… and then hopefully shortly after that Path of Exile 3.26.
The post Diablo IV: Cooked Not Cooking appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I spent most of the weekend playing Monster Hunter Wilds and I have officially crossed the threshold into mainline feeming over this game. For the first week or so I was also playing a copious amount of Path of Exile, but this weekend that mostly dropped and I am all in on hunting some monsters. I think it was Wednesday night that I hit the credit roll and transitioned into High Rank, and then this weekend I completed the rest of the main story quests. It is weird though because the game ends at Chapter 6.1 which makes me think that as they release content patches, they will add more main story this time around. I remember them adding additional story quests when they added certain major fights to the game. For example I remember a whole story arc surrounding the addition of Deviljho aka Pickle.
The levels have mostly been coming on their own, because I have been focused on gearing. Going into High Rank I crafted a full set of Guardian Arkveld armor and it did in fact carry me all the way through the rest of the main story. I am now turning around and trying to piece together a set of Arkvulcan armor which is built off farming the non-Guardian version of Arkveld. I’ve managed to pull together four pieces of the set as well as upgrading my defensive charm. I am going super heavy into defensive stats because my gameplay right now is to mostly get right up in the face of the monster and do guard attacks hoping to lock them up in a clash.
Going along with this play-style, I have crafted the Lala Barina Tier 8 weapon. This essentially allows me to play more of a support role in fights and build up to a paralyze. I am also working on the Arkveld weapon set and have crafted the Tier 7 version, but lack the tier 3 hunter tickets in order to craft it into the final tier 8 version. I figure for now if I make a full set of Orange gear I am pretty much going to be able to tackle anything content wise for awhile. I did not necessarily intend on building the Kut-Ku hammer but the previous version was available on sale at the shipment vendor which made it super simple to get that most of the other hammers. My REAL Hammer that I am working on is the Jail Hammer series which is also paralysis based. I’m essentially a few t1 hunter tickets and a bird wyvern gem away from crafting the Tier 8 version. I don’t play hammer a ton, but I do like the way it feels if I want to beat down some monster heads.
Right now my biggest goal in the game is to get my Arkvulcan Mail which is the last piece of the normal Arkveld set that I need. I had to take a break though because I was chain farming Arkveld… and there is only so much of that fight that I can take. I spent a bit of time last night farming the Fire Chicken event quest with my friend Ace because it rewards a ton of cooking materials. Additionally there was the chance of getting a drop from that encounter that I needed for crafting something else on my list, but for the life of me I cannot remember which piece. It might have been finishing out my Defensive Charm III, but I am not entirely certain. Mostly we were beating down the chicken for crafting materials since that is one of the current event quests.
Another thing that I have been doing is looking out for good tempered mobs and saving them as investigations. This is your reminder that this is a thing that you can do. Essentially when you make a quest into an investigation it costs a little bit of guild points but allows you to essentially chain farm them forever. Most vanilla versions of monsters have an optional quest associated with them that you can farm over and over for materials, but this is not the case with a lot of tempered or frenzied monsters. For those you have to effectively be on the lookout for them appearing natively in zones… where you can snapshot them as investigations. Last night I found a Tempered Arkveld for example and will probably make a run at it tonight to see how doable it is. I need to farm a bunch of 8 star fights so I can get those tasty Tier 3 Hunter Tickets.
All told though, I am having a freaking blast and feel like Sword and Shield is the weapon I have been looking for all of this time. In Monster Hunter World I was a Mall Ninja… aka a Longsword Andy. I mostly enjoyed it but I really wanted to be able to soak more damage than it allowed. I tried Lance, but it did not have the mobility that I wanted. I saw my friend Pizza Maid playing Sword and Shield to great success, but am not really sure why I never gave it a spin. At some point I want to make another run at Charge Blade, because it feels like it might be the super advanced version of Sword and Shield. For now though I am pretty happy with my combo of SNS and Hammer. I only really use hammer when a monster has gone to sleep because it hits harder than anything I can do with a sword or shield.
Where are you in the progression of Monster Hunter Wilds? Are you enjoying it so far? What weapon and gear are you running? Drop me a line below.
The post Fifty Two and Farming Gear appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I spent most of the weekend playing Monster Hunter Wilds and I have officially crossed the threshold into mainline feeming over this game. For the first week or so I was also playing a copious amount of Path of Exile, but this weekend that mostly dropped and I am all in on hunting some monsters. I think it was Wednesday night that I hit the credit roll and transitioned into High Rank, and then this weekend I completed the rest of the main story quests. It is weird though because the game ends at Chapter 6.1 which makes me think that as they release content patches, they will add more main story this time around. I remember them adding additional story quests when they added certain major fights to the game. For example I remember a whole story arc surrounding the addition of Deviljho aka Pickle.
The levels have mostly been coming on their own, because I have been focused on gearing. Going into High Rank I crafted a full set of Guardian Arkveld armor and it did in fact carry me all the way through the rest of the main story. I am now turning around and trying to piece together a set of Arkvulcan armor which is built off farming the non-Guardian version of Arkveld. I’ve managed to pull together four pieces of the set as well as upgrading my defensive charm. I am going super heavy into defensive stats because my gameplay right now is to mostly get right up in the face of the monster and do guard attacks hoping to lock them up in a clash.
Going along with this play-style, I have crafted the Lala Barina Tier 8 weapon. This essentially allows me to play more of a support role in fights and build up to a paralyze. I am also working on the Arkveld weapon set and have crafted the Tier 7 version, but lack the tier 3 hunter tickets in order to craft it into the final tier 8 version. I figure for now if I make a full set of Orange gear I am pretty much going to be able to tackle anything content wise for awhile. I did not necessarily intend on building the Kut-Ku hammer but the previous version was available on sale at the shipment vendor which made it super simple to get that most of the other hammers. My REAL Hammer that I am working on is the Jail Hammer series which is also paralysis based. I’m essentially a few t1 hunter tickets and a bird wyvern gem away from crafting the Tier 8 version. I don’t play hammer a ton, but I do like the way it feels if I want to beat down some monster heads.
Right now my biggest goal in the game is to get my Arkvulcan Mail which is the last piece of the normal Arkveld set that I need. I had to take a break though because I was chain farming Arkveld… and there is only so much of that fight that I can take. I spent a bit of time last night farming the Fire Chicken event quest with my friend Ace because it rewards a ton of cooking materials. Additionally there was the chance of getting a drop from that encounter that I needed for crafting something else on my list, but for the life of me I cannot remember which piece. It might have been finishing out my Defensive Charm III, but I am not entirely certain. Mostly we were beating down the chicken for crafting materials since that is one of the current event quests.
Another thing that I have been doing is looking out for good tempered mobs and saving them as investigations. This is your reminder that this is a thing that you can do. Essentially when you make a quest into an investigation it costs a little bit of guild points but allows you to essentially chain farm them forever. Most vanilla versions of monsters have an optional quest associated with them that you can farm over and over for materials, but this is not the case with a lot of tempered or frenzied monsters. For those you have to effectively be on the lookout for them appearing natively in zones… where you can snapshot them as investigations. Last night I found a Tempered Arkveld for example and will probably make a run at it tonight to see how doable it is. I need to farm a bunch of 8 star fights so I can get those tasty Tier 3 Hunter Tickets.
All told though, I am having a freaking blast and feel like Sword and Shield is the weapon I have been looking for all of this time. In Monster Hunter World I was a Mall Ninja… aka a Longsword Andy. I mostly enjoyed it but I really wanted to be able to soak more damage than it allowed. I tried Lance, but it did not have the mobility that I wanted. I saw my friend Pizza Maid playing Sword and Shield to great success, but am not really sure why I never gave it a spin. At some point I want to make another run at Charge Blade, because it feels like it might be the super advanced version of Sword and Shield. For now though I am pretty happy with my combo of SNS and Hammer. I only really use hammer when a monster has gone to sleep because it hits harder than anything I can do with a sword or shield.
Where are you in the progression of Monster Hunter Wilds? Are you enjoying it so far? What weapon and gear are you running? Drop me a line below.
The post Fifty Two and Farming Gear appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
