Good Morning Folks. I did not blog yesterday because I had an exceptionally busy day… and just never quite got around to it. Last night my friend Ace and I made a date to group up and do some of the more difficult content in Destiny Rising. I find this way more enjoyable than rolling completely random, because we can at least coordinate slightly over Discord while playing. There was a moment last night… that is probably only hilarious to the two of us… but I will relate it anyways. We had just cleared a room… and Ace and the Random player had rushed off… and I did not realize it and over voice coms I hear “Okay, Have Fun!” in a very bright voice. At first I thought Ace was talking to me, but no… their spouse was leaving to go off to a Gunpla event and we have just gotten used to leaving Discord with mics open. I thought they were telling me that I needed to stop wasting time and catch up… and then we spent the rest of the night laughing about this moment and repeating the phrase over and over.
We are deep into the endgame and essentially get a very limited amount of serious mode runs each week. Everything in the challenge difficulty range requires a challenge key, and we get three of these a week… with the ability to spend actual money or the pull currency to get a few additional keys. So essentially last night we ran two Grandmaster mode strikes to reap the rewards for the week. If anything I think this is WHY the player activity is dropping off in the game, because you quickly get pigeon holed into a state where you only really get to play once per week. I think a lot of this needs to be reworked massively, because NetEase really needs to decide if they want this to be a successful game or not. It is good enough to completely replace Destiny for most of the player base, but the pinnacle rewards and limited chances at the hardest content in the game… really pump the brakes on the fun factor.
That is not to say that there are not still fun activities to do. Yesterday I learned that I could bank up the rewards from Singularity Chaos mode and then claim them after the run faster. This is especially good for those situations where you are farming it, but you just want to claim the basic rewards for the limited chance of being able to get an exotic artifact. I wish there was something like this that we could do with a chance of dropping exotic weapon mods. They are way more fiddly than artifacts, but are also way harder to actually get. I am guessing this Reward Retrieval screen exists for pretty much any activity, so that you don’t accidentally forget to loot the chest and then get locked out of that loot forever. It is wild that I am as many hours deep in this game as I am and I am still finding weird quality of life tweaks. For example… did you know that you can shoot heavy ammo bricks with your weapon to pick them up? This is a thing, and it saves you the effort of running over into danger to pick one up.
We continue to progress our pack really quickly, and honestly… I am shocked that we are moving as fast as we are. The highlight of yesterday is that one of the people that I was in the random pack with actually joined after I invited them. They seemed pretty cool, and maybe I have actually made a friend in this random assed grouping system. I’ve had a few conversations with players and they have mostly been good. Someone poked fun at me last night for running laps around Haven, because it is a thing I have done since Dalaran when I am hanging out on voice chat and idling. They admitted that they do it too, and now we have added each other as friends. Maybe my days of meeting random players is not as over as I thought it was, considering that I have also recently made some random friends in Guild Wars 2.
We also managed to get the materials to upgrade our Hangar to the next level. Essentially everything but the very back of the hanger now looks pretty nice. The second floor is still a bunch of random panels, and I am guessing that the next major upgrade will fill in this area. I have to be honest… I never really roamed around the Hangar before so I am not sure what one looks like when it is fully progressed. I am not even sure if the Wanderer packs had the ability to upgrade anything. I am really hoping at some point we unlock the Pack emblem so that we can customize that somewhat. We continue to search for strongholds, but are having zero luck in finding any. I wonder if this is gated by guild level or something, because we have unlocked MOST of the ??? clusters and they never end up being a stronghold.
I finally got enough currency to make my first level 85 weapon, and I went with Trinity Ghoul. I also upgraded it by consuming a duplicate copy of the weapon, and now need to acquire 100 of the exotic currency so I can claim the final catalyst level. This is another one of those really long grinds, because you ONLY get the currency from Grandmaster activities and there are very limited sources of the exotic leveling currency. So all of this becomes the really long tailed grind of the game. I think maybe they need to be a bit more open with this stuff, and maybe make all of the vendors reset weekly rather than once per month or once per season. There needs to be a way to get this stuff rather than spending your limited currency each day on gathering up a handful at a time.
Another thing that I did while hanging out on voice, was several of the heroic legendary missions for various characters so that I could do the requirement of completing one in under 7 minutes. I did this on Gwynn, Wolf, and Ning Fei, and the only things keeping me from finishing silver on both of them… is the ability power levels… which require me to get more of the currency that can ONLY be gained when Calamity Ops resets. Again… there are just too many things that take too long to reset. If this reset every week, we would at least have a shot at hell in getting enough currency to upgrade a character, but the problem is you need 6 of them for the final upgrade tier and you only get 4 from Calamity Ops. The cadence of things is just a bit off and they really need to tweak this. Many of these things are standard Gacha trappings, but if they care about the North American player base… then they maybe need to tweak them a bit.
I do worry that maybe Destiny Rising has lost their chance, because generally speaking you only get one shot at the opinion of players. There are a lot of folks who tried and bounced once they realized that the Pinnacle rewards system was going to be a thing. The only real option to win them back is to release a massive patch down the line that tweaks everything, giving the game a bit of a comeback story. Destiny streamers have given the game a ton of good press, especially around the raid race. So I am hoping we get more content dropping soon, so that it will coax a bunch of players back to the game. It is worrying however because they are merging the servers so that all of them will be available for queuing for activities together. Hopefully this improves the fact that there are just some activities that are hell to get a match for right now.
The biggest challenge facing the game right now is that you are rapidly pushed into a scenario where only certain activities will get you any progression. Since most rewards take 20 Pinnacle currency, and you get 120 per day…. that leaves you with six things that you can do. Those six attempts are going to get spent on Master/Grandmaster activities, Legendary Campaign, or Gauntlet until you have gotten your 3 bonus rewards per week… and then probably not that anymore. So that means that everything else… Shifting Gates, Morgrans, etc are not going to be easy to get a group for. Hell we have even reached a point where Iron Bar takes 15 minutes to form a group on the weekends… which is wild because it is one of those activities that is ONLY available at a limited time. If you put a rare chance of getting the resources that we actually need from these activities that are effectively dead… and put it on the basic reward pool… you will have players queuing for them constantly.
I know there is a major patch coming in 2026, so hopefully some of this will be addressed then. I am still having a lot of fun, but once Path of Exile 3.27 drops on the 31st I am likely going to be logging in and doing my dailies to keep progressing the guild and then meeting up with Ace once per week to do the limited content.
The post Okay, Have Fun! appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a bit odd. I spent a good deal of time out in the garage working on reorganizing things. Right now I am trying to clear the south side so that I can put up shelving there, which will allow me to organize everything that I am moving. Saturday night however I found out that my folks fridge went out, so I was up there after editing podcasts and got the joy of wrestling the fridge out of where it had sunk down into the linoleum over two decades. I’ve reached the point where I am not stronger than my father… probably always was… but it is still just a disappointing realizing how much weaker he has gotten over the last several years. Not that I am exactly Sampson or anything, and a lot of my strength is largely just me putting my weight behind things and pushing like the dickins. We got it moved out however, and Dad can now go shopping for a replacement. Thankfully they have a spare fridge, but it is just less convenient.
In the gaming world… I mostly spent the weekend playing Destiny Rising. My progress is starting to slow down a bit because effectively I am in a state where I largely need master/grandmaster activities to move the needle forward. I did get my third and fourth character to gold so I have pushed Jolder, Estela, Helhest, and Umeko through the hoops required to finish the gold medallion. At this point each one of these that I push up, is mostly just giving me points to spend on a talent tree of buffs on the ascension screen. These are largely things like buffing the exotic artifact and weapon mod drop rates. It is the weapon mods that I need the most right now. They are way trickier than any of the other exotic items because in theory you really want a weapon mod that activates a specific perk on a specific weapon. I put some dead mods into these characters weapons just to push their light up… but at some point I need to replace them with fully functional mods.
In order to participate in Master/GrandMaster level activities you have to get their light up to 64,000 and at this point I have managed to do that with three characters. The thing is you only get to run one GrandMaster activity once per character, so that means I can spend three keys per week getting significant upgrades. This past week Ace and I got together and ran them as a duo, and we should probably keep doing that. I wish we had a third really active player that was compatible with our times…. that also was as progressed as we are currently. Given enough time we probably will have. After doing Grandmaster Gauntlet Blitz… I would love to have a full team of six players, because it would be super fun to queue in together using proper squad tactics. At some point I might have to declare a “Destiny Rising” night, similar to how we have done with Guild Wars 2, but the challenge as always will be finding a night everyone can participate.
In other progression news… I have continued spending every last drop of free currency that I get on Helhest, and have now pulled four copies of her, giving me 3 talent points. At this point it isn’t so much that I am pulling for duplicate copies and thus talent points… and more that I really want to finish getting the parts to her artwork which unlocks a cool Ghost Shell and Sparrow. Helhest will just keep getting more and more powerful, the more points I unlock for her however. All of the points are pretty freaking great to be honest, and as much as like this champion I don’t really mind that I am effectively negatively impacting the next banner, since I won’t have a cache of points saved up to spend on it like I did this time where I had 5 10 pulls banked. I’ve just had better luck pulling for her than any other banner in the past though. I’ve beat pity by a massive amount each time.
In Pack news, we have ranked up the guild for the third time since we started it. This feels pretty freaking good considering we only have a handful of active players. I had hoped more folks would jump on this bandwagon, but I think the whole gacha trappings are a bridge too far for a lot of players. As is evidenced by my free account, you can pretty much get all of the stuff without spending a dime given that account already has every four star, and two of the five stars. Really that is more than enough goodness to play with and be functional participating in even the highest end content in the game. While I spun up that second account to make creating the guild a bit easier, I am kind of glad that I have it because it gives me a good pulse on what playing the game looks like if you do not spend a dime. So far the prognosis is extremely solid for someone coming in as a “zero spender”.
Another thing that I have finished is the Wheel of Fortune event that is going on. The weirdest thing about this… is that I am still collecting spins each day, even though I have nothing to spend them on. I kind of expected there to be some system that allowed me to cash these in for glimmer or something like that, but so far nothing that I can see. I am actually really close to finishing out this event on my second account as well. I am not sure what the math works out to be, but it should be pretty simple for anyone to complete this event just by doing dailies each day. Immediately following this is going to be a rerun of the Morgran’s event, which should in theory guarantee another exotic weapon… and the wording makes me wonder if it is a guaranteed unlock of one that you have not found before. It is specifically referred to as a “Precious Reward” which makes me think it has some custom logic applied to what sort of things it can give you over just a standard Exotic Engram.
Since we now have the firing range in our guild hall, we get to see one of the features which is a hall of heroes time functionality showing the highest scoring champions from the previous cycle. We did not do enough of a few of the things to quality, but Ace dusted me and is the only person showing up with their Helhest and Estela on display. In my wanderer pack guild I was often highlighted, so I have at least gotten to see my own characters in these holos in the past. At some point Ace just leapt past me in progression, mostly because they are way more focused on doing the right thing with their daily stamina as opposed to me… where I sometimes just like spending it on something trivial. I do find it weird why we don’t have anyone showing up for a few of the modes… but it might just be that Calamity Ops for example has a longer than weekly cycle.
To the laundry list of things that I progressed this weekend… add planetary reputation. I now have both the Red Sea Rift and Jiangshi Metro maxed out at 20. This means that instead of rewarding reputation caches I now get these bonus honor chests every 500 reputation. Weirdly it feels like they actually happen more often than those last few ranks of the reputation. Now that I have maxed them both though, there really is no difference between choosing the destinations, because they all give the same rewards. Since I like the Red Sea Rift a bit better, I will probably just keep doing this one each day. I’ve also maxed out world exploration on both areas, so there is nothing really new to find out there as I have found it all. I am really ready for them to add a new area to the game, and hoping it comes in soon with the seasonal reset.
I also finished up the main story quest on my completely free account, and have since pushed it to level 70. The biggest challenge I have with this account is trying to remember what I need to progress when. I am essentially working on getting a few different champions to bronze, but a lot of this is gated by the fact that I have not pushed up to level 80 yet. Right now I am alternating between grinding out artifacts, and doing things that will give me materials needed to upgrade my weapons from 70 to 80 when the time comes. I have Jolder and Ning Fei on this account, and will probably push them up first… and then maybe Wolf so that I have a champion of each element. If I pull Helhest, that might change the calculus a little bit. I also have Rossi-11 on the account and have been playing it quite a bit, but nothing really beats Ning Fei for speed clears.
This continues to be a phenomenal gaming experience. I actually played a little bit of Destiny 2 over the weekend… and I have to say that Destiny Rising just feels better. I am sure I will shift gears soon to the new Path of Exile league, but for the moment I am all in on space magic.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, Grace and Bel start off the show talking about how good Destiny Rising has been now that they have arrived at the endgame. They also talk a bit about Helhest, the new banner character. Grace shares her initial thoughts about He is Coming a roguelike that they have been playing. Bel shares some of the early spoilers for Path of Exile 3.27 Keepers of the Flame, which we are getting a full reveal for on the 23rd and is starting on the 31st. It seems like we are maybe getting a Breach expansion league, with a bunch of quality of life changes. From there, we dive into the topic that got bumped from last week about how there are so many good games… that it makes it really hard to play less-than-excellent games anymore. We also talk about how players are seeing through pointless grinds, and how AA games are back with a vengeance, while AAA games are floundering.
Hey Folks. I’m still on my Destiny Rising bullshit, I think in large part because I don’t really have another game to obsess about. That is going to change a bit towards the end of this month because I will have the first part of the latest Guild Wars 2 expansion to play (28th), and then a brand new Path of Exile league following closely after that (31st). I will likely be ping ponging between those games, while still doing my dailies in Destiny Rising from that point forward. That probably means that I will let the second account that I rolled up to create the guild lapse a bit, because I won’t be mainlining the game quite so hard. I did however give them some more money and bought the Crow outfit for Helhest because I still think it is badass.
The biggest news since yesterday is that I managed to push Helhest up to gold rank which unlocked another significant boost to exotic mod drop rates. That really is the piece that I need to focus on farming right now. I have decent artifacts for most of my champions, but have next to nothing in the exotic mod department. I did manage to get a single pierce exotic mod that would work for Hellhest’s linear fusion rifle, and that was the thing that pushed me over the light cap for gold. The champion that I am probably going to work on next is either pushing Umeko up to Gold, or spending some time focusing on Ning Fei because after getting him on my second account… I’ve come to realize that I actually really like playing him. Umeko is probably my favorite pure sniper though, because of the self healing benefits. However if I need to take a precision champion somewhere… I am probably going to be playing Helhest for the broader versatility.
Speaking of the second account, over lunch I tried to run a bunch of gauntlet ops, and ran into some friction. This is the first time in the community I have been kicked from a group… seemingly because I had low light levels. It happened twice while trying the run the Gauntlet Break In part of the raid. The irony behind this is that in the teams that I managed to get into… I dusted them hard, and was one of the key players doing the mechanics. More so I ran a strike with Ning Fei and was less than half the light level of the other players… but did 71% of the damage. Please for the love of god.. do not judge players for being new lights, because sure everyone wants an easy run… but there are a ton of folks running second accounts in this game and you can never tell when that new light might be a ringer. Additionally it is just a dick move to try and be exclusionary like that.
Part of what has made my alt Ning Fei so powerful so quickly, is that I managed to get the exotic crossbow to drop as well. That account is shaping up to be pretty freaking strong with both Jolder and Ning Fei. Hopefully I can pull a Helhest while this event is still going on. It sucks that it will be a long time before it has access to Gwynn or Estela since those banners are over. I am guessing when the new content goes in early next year hinted in that trailer, that Gwynn and Estela might be joining the permanent banner at that point. I am still having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, even though I know I am probably switching gears especially when the Path of Exile and Guild Wars 2 expansions drop.
Speaking of which we have a name for the expansion, a theme for the expansion, and a reveal date of the 23rd. Keepers of the Flame seems like maybe this is going to relate to the Acolyte of Chayula from Path of Exile II. Then the theme of the expansion feels like it is going to be Breach focused, and maybe a significant upgrade to the way that it works. The hand jump scare, specially looks like the hand shaped “wings” on the back of Xesht who serves as the boss of Breach in Path of Exile II. I think essentially, we are seeing more content that knits the storyline between the two games together a bit, and maybe serves as a gap closer between the events and organizations that appear in the 20 year gap. It That Fled, one of the Betrayal NPCs specifically talks about the Hive, so yeah…. it feels like we are getting a Breach upgrade league. It does make me wonder how sweeping of a change it is going to end up being.
Additionally there are going to be some sweeping changes coming to Diablo IV. It feels like we JUST started Season 10, and that it is way too soon to begin talking about Season 11… but apparently they are just about to start up the PTR on October 21st. Due to this they dropped some big patch notes, and Raxx also released a video talking about them. I am seeing some things that will probably be really good for the game, namely changes to how Masterworking and Tempering functions to be a bit more deterministic. They are however talking about making combat harder… which worries me because really the point of a Diablo game is getting to a place where you can blow up entire screens. The game itself is not mechanically enjoyable enough to really lean into the soulslike direction like Path of Exile II did. However that said… I am not even sure what sort of unique niche this game can carve out. It will always be a shallower version of better games like Path of Exile or Last Epoch, because it is not growing over time.
Don’t get me wrong. Diablo IV is a pretty good game. It is fun in small doses, but there just isn’t really a lot going on… and they are squandering the seasonal model to keep creating thoroughly disposable content. Each season comes with a new borrowed power system, and a new faction to grind… which gives you rewards that will all be washed away the next time a season rolls out. Last Epoch and Path of Exile 1/2 create permanent changes to the game that grow the depth and complexity each time a season/league happens. Not everything goes “core”, but enough does that it makes the game feel like it is growing and changing in interesting ways. Diablo IV more or less feels the same today as it did at the launch of its DLC… because there is nothing really new to do that did not go in with that DLC. Sure they have moved the chess pieces around on the board, by shifting this or that balance…. but at the end of the day you still have to grind the same endgame that existed a year ago when Vessel of Hatred launched. We are about to be eleven seasons deep into this franchise and have very little to show for it. I think more than anything… the game disappoints me, because it could be a better game than it is now.
The other thing that I am playing that I have not really talked much about is Bravely Default, on my Switch 2 hooked to my new television downstairs. This is a super chill activity that I often do when I am winding down for the night, and at the moment I am largely in Act 2 and grinding levels right in front of Ancheim. At some point I am going to swap up the jobs of everyone so that they can learn a second trait line. Currently I have Edea as Knight, Tiz as Monk, Agnes as White Mage, and Ringabel as Black Mage… and I am going to swap my two martial fighters and my two magic users so they are cross trained. I find grinding levels in turn based JRPGs deeply relaxing, and especially since this one has an auto mode where you can set up a set of attacks and just have them follow them over and over. I am not really sure what level I am going to call “good enough” to move forward, but right now I am mostly farming until I have enough gold to buy all of the upgrades available in town. I like overpowering content, and do not really want to have to think about it.
Anyways. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. It is supposed to be cooler again, so I will likely be working on the south half of the garage. Once I have finished with everything I will probably post before and after photos. It was a complete mess, and it is becoming less of one, every time I go out there and work.
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