Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.
It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.
That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.
Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.
Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.
I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.
Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.
Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.
The post New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
