Good Morning Folks! Yesterday we got some great news from Guild Wars 2 that the quick play feature that has been a rousing success during the Fractal Incursion event would be coming for the new combined raid system. Essentially they are taking strikes and raid wings and merging them into a new feature, and then adding quick play functionality for the easier wings and strikes. I am so unbelievably pumped about this, and right now the Guild Wars 2 is on fire with their quality of life improvements. I am just hoping that when the Fractal Incursion event is over in a few days… that we get some version of the quick play feature permanently for Fractals at least. The raid finder tool will not be coming until the first post expansion update, which should land sometime first quarter of 2026 if the pacing of content drops are similar to how they were with Janthir Wilds. I am honestly super pumped about the Visions of Eternity expansion drop in general coming at the end of this month.
In less great news… Microsoft continues down a path of self destruction following their recent massive price hikes on their consoles with a price hike to Gamepass. Ultimate was previously $19.99 and it is bumping up to $29.99 a month…. which at least for me is a bridge too far. I have been a subscriber since Gamepass first came into existence, and have been using it to play various Microsoft stable PC games as they released. However I think I am just going to hard pass on this system even though I did enjoy the Cloud gaming functionality. Immediately following this news I saw reports on social media that the cancellation page was effectively bricked for most of the day as there was a flood of cancellations. It was still a bit wonky last night as I attempted to cancel it.. hanging for over a minute on the final step before finally resolving into a page that allowed me to enter my reasoning. Microsoft has talked at length about them wanting to grow Gamepass, but this is absolutely not the way to do it. With this and many other things… I think we have finally reached the point where we frogs noticed that the water was boiling and are ready to hop out of the pot.
Yesterday I got a message over on Bluesky from my friend Delebrin that the time played in Diablo IV is located on the character profile page at the bottom. This sounds like something that I once knew, but have long since forgotten. I am grateful that they pointed it out however, and my estimate of being around 40 hours into this character was pretty accurate with me having actually played 36. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to do next. This is ultimately the point I end up with in Diablo III and Diablo IV each time I play through a season. None of the content is compelling enough to really keep me diving into it for the sake of doing it… and the gap in RNG drops between Ancestral Uniques and Mythics is so wide that I am just not sure it is worth the effort.
I am close to wrapping up Champion in the season journey, and this honestly has traditionally been my guiding light for when I consider myself done with a season. The final phase is going to be a bit harder as I said in an earlier post, because many of those accomplishments require you to be wearing some piece of chaos gear, and I am not sure what I can actually sacrifice in order to make that happen. I did not get a ton of time to play last night, because I instead hung out with Ace and played Destiny Rising. However today at lunch I should be able to finish up the rest of the stuff on Champion and then begin chipping away at the last rank. I did finish leveling the seasonal event tree and got my mythic shard, and I have a few more steps on the battle pass… so essentially when I wrap all of this up I will probably consider the game “beaten” for the moment.
It is a new month and with that comes a reset on some of the currency exchange shops, allowing me to pick up some more normal banner pulls, and I managed to finally pull Ning Fei, the last of the champions that I did not have. I am still only a few pulls away from getting the Mythic Choice champion so I am not sure if I hold onto this for future use if that is even allowed, or if I pick up a second copy of Jolder. She is by far my favorite of the normal banner mythic champions, though from everything I have heard Ning Fei seems to be pretty awesome. I did pick up two copies of Xuan Wei while spending down my normal banner pulls, but I am just not really playing him that often.
I did pull a really sweet exotic ghost shell called the Cryptex, so that was pretty fun. Most of the night was spent running Morgran’s Hunt because that event ends I believe today. We also did a few rounds of our all Ikora PvPvE nonsense… and honestly… we are getting better at this. We had one match where we took out six or seven players, along with a few clutch kills… but didn’t really score terribly well in general. Ace and I were talking last night about how much better of a Destiny experience this game is, and how they had never really gotten into baseline Destiny as much as this version. I think in some aspect it is the multiple characters, because you can do a bunch of different things, rather than feeling like you are forced to play one of three characters. Grinding up light in Destiny feels like it was way harder than grinding up gear in Destiny Rising, so I think that is at least part of it for me.
I am a bit stalled in my progression, because I essentially need to complete all of the silver achievements on three characters so I can remove the logjam that is my ascension score. Right now in most cases I am gated by my total light score for the characters and not having an easy way to bump that up, and also needing to run 7 minute legendary events, which are single player versions of missions in the game. I do not really enjoy these, so it is something I am going to have to force myself to get good at. The current one sort of sucks because it is all sniper based, and while I have leveled Umeko and Tan-2 a bit… neither feels like they are good enough to rip through this mission quickly. I thought I had gotten it last night but seemingly there is a lag between when you finish the final boss and when it shuts off the timer. I took a death in the middle, and if I had not done that I would have probably been able to finish that one without much issue. However I am going to have to wait for another week because I do not think there is any way I am getting non-snipers through this one.
Anyways! I think that is all of the assorted nonsense I have in my head this morning. I hope your week is going well. I am still fighting this general respiratory crud, but like I said before I think it is just ragweed trying to kill me.
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