AggroChat #368 – Fallen Earth Gets Up

Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are down a few people for various reasons and Bel is hanging on by a thread because he managed to schedule his Covid booster on Friday.  We start off with a discussion of the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker delay and how in theory we would have all been playing the game in another world.  In news we never thought we would cover, Fallen Earth has come back from the dead and is actually better than any of our memories.  From there we discuss Guardians of the Galaxy, that game we all thought would be another Avengers Flop but has apparently turned out to be pretty dang good.  Bel talks a bit about the Outriders New Horizon patch and the changes it made ot the game including a full transmog system.  Finally Tam discusses his experiences with Star Citizen and how it is way more of a fleshed out game than he ever expected at this point.  Additionally we talk about the free trial that is going on right now.

Topics Discussed

  • Final Fantasy XIV Delay
  • Fallen Earth rises from the grave
    • Better than our memories
  • Guardians of the Galaxy
    • Not another Avengers Failure
    • Fjording the Uncanny Valley
  • Outriders New Horizon
    • Balance Improvements
    • Cosmetic Transmog System
  • Star Citizen in 2021
    • Free Trial Period
The post AggroChat #368 – Fallen Earth Gets Up appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Adjorjan Still Lives

Hey Friends! Still enjoying my recent return to Outriders. I am not playing a ton of it, but I am popping in periodically to collect some loot before scooting off again. Most recently I have been working on my Technomancer… which I apparently call Marksman in my most recent video. I have to admit at this point I don’t remember any of the names of the classes that are not Pryomancer because that one is pretty clear cut. Mentally I think of them as the Hunter, Tank, and Assassin even though those are technically called Technomancer, Devastator, and Trickster. You can obfuscate the holy trinity out but I will always ultimately use it as the lens in which I view online games.
I actually recorded a really quick video at lunch, because while I did one over the loot cave mission I never actually updated it to include the more recent method I use for gear farming. Essentially what I do more often than not is reset the Typhon Hunt mission and run it over and over. Each time it drops at least two epic items and now that I am largely farming gear for cosmetics, it is a great way to get five or six potential unlocks in really short order. I’ve heard that at higher tiers it is possible to get legendaries to drop this way, but I have never actually had that happen. What it is useful for is farming up a bunch of drops to collect mods and appearances which is how I am utilizing it on my alt.
Another thing that happened yesterday is a big new world patch, that had a number of less than awesome consequences. Firstly a number of the items that I carry around in my inventory to swap for equipment got downgraded from Purple to Blue. Additionally something seems to have changed with the way health is calculated and in the process without changing any gear or my attributes I have lost roughly 1500 health. Another super frustrating change is the regeneration from food seems to have been nerfed significantly with the regen tick rate being 1% of your health every 2.5 seconds. I can still do the drinking water trick to trigger slightly faster regeneration but overall it feels like I am struggling to stay alive more than I did previously.
A number of camps have been ruined due to changes in the patch as well, with Priests no longer being as doable because you can no longer skip the corruption portal due to terrain changes. This made me want to go check out our good friend Adjorjan to see if any changes were made to ruin that farm. When I talked about it previously I did not include a map, but he can be found in Edengrove and initially I went out there last night in the hopes of getting a Void Gauntlet to play with. What ensued instead was a combination of Waren, Eliyon, and I ended up farming him for about two and a half hours. He still drops relevant gear and while the watermark increases seem to have slowed they were still happening especially with weapons. So this is very much still a valid camp for watermarking purposes.
I am a little concerned about some of the other things that I heard throughout the night. The zerg on our server starts at 5:30 my time and I was not online and available to do content when it started up so I did not participate last night. However I have heard that there are some sort of anti-zerg mechanics that have more or less made Myrkgard a pain in the butt to run like we used to. Again I did not experience these first hand, but hearing discussion about things being unkillable to a large group of players, but a smaller group could take it out without issue. The zerg and priest farms were honestly the most enjoyable things I had experienced in the game and if both of those are effectively dead… I do sorry about my longevity with the title. Amazon seems to be making sweeping changes regularly that swing between extremes… and I am not sure how on board I am with their master vision right now. I don’t care at all about PVP and if they make PVE content too painful I will just end up wandering off… as will I think most of the less hardcore player base. A lot of what they are doing feels like stalling to me… trying to spread the butter super thin to slow players down and buy them time to release more content. This has happened a lot in other games as the developers have this “oh god they are consuming content too fast!” moment. The watermark system was painful enough as is, but if they are actively ruining the farms we had developed to raise our level… then I am not sure it is worth sticking around. I know in December when Endwalker releases I am probably gone anyway, but was hoping to enjoy the remaining month here.
In other news it seems like at least someone in the guild “Run It” has found my blog post about the fall of Everfall. I feel like I need to qualify my definition of a Slum Lord when it comes to New World. If you own territory but are not keeping the machinery upgraded and keeping a constant flow of townboard quests going for your patrons to complete and assist in the leveling process… then by my personal definition you are a Slum Lord. At the time in which I posted this… most of the towns were running a full compliment of quests but as I myself was using them to level… I noticed that Monarch’s Bluff never really had any other than the default free “Upkeep” quests. Run It has done a perfectly cromulent job of running Everfall the two times they have held it, but Monarch’s Bluff is still unappreciated. So if y’all are reading this blog stop being a Slum Lord and load some damned quests for people to complete. Additionally the Freeze thing y’all were doing WAS an exploit and it WAS patched by New World, so I stand by everything I said. The post Adjorjan Still Lives appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ammo Illustrated Bels

The extremely keen eyed… or those who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that recently the site masthead has been updated once again. For some time now there has been this tradition of getting my good friend Ammo to create artwork of my characters whenever a game grabs hold of me. This all started in part due to the very first commission that I ever had her do for me years ago for the seventh anniversary of this blog. I have noticed over the years that I attempt to create pretty much the same character or as close as I possibly can in each game that I play, and it is only really through looking at a bunch of my characters stacked up next to each other that this trend is obvious. So for the Seventh Anniversary of Aggronaut I had her draw a bunch of my characters around the letters VII, and I even got this made into a t-shirt just for the fun of it. Going left to right you have my Warrior from World of Warcraft, my character from The Secret World, my Exo from Destiny 1 and beneath it my Bahmi from Rift, my Imperial from Elder Scrolls Online, and then finally my Lalafel Warrior from Final Fantasy XIV. Commemorating the release of Heavensward I decided to rebrand this blog and wanted to replace the Chibi Bel that had been adorning the site for awhile. My favorite of the above characters was her rendition of my Lalafel and I had her expand that into a full blown character that I could place beside the Tales of the Aggronaut logo.
I think the next commission that I had her do was a Twitter Avatar that I still use today of actual me as my Sunbreaker Titan from Destiny 1. Then my friend Tam did a commission of a bunch of us the way he sees us, which represents the armored version of me with bluebirds circling my head… to represent my online presence on twitter. It just sorta grew out from there with each time I got super into something… I had her craft another visage of my characters. Then over time I just kept adding them to the masthead and it began to slowly evolve over time.
So now we have the most recent rendition and going left to right we have:
  • Lalafel Bunny Warrior Belghast from Final Fantasy XIV.
  • My character from Monster Hunter World with my Palico patterned to look more like my actual cat Kenzie.
  • The Tam rendition of me that largely stands in for my time in World of Warcraft as it wears the tabard of House Stalwart the guild I founded and lead for a decade.
  • My Imperial Dragon Knight from Elder Scrolls Online in one of the glamours that I wear most often.
  • My RAcast from Phantasy Star Online 2, which is wearing the PSO1 armor set which is in honor of PSO being my very first MMORPG.
  • The newest addition my character from New World wearing the mid tier faction gear which I particularly like.
  • My Titan from the launch of Destiny 2 when I expected to spend most of my time as a void shield charging boy…. but ultimately fell back in love with Sunstriker.
  • Then a bunch of Moogles making mischief with my stuff… and I consider the one lounging in a hoodie to be pretty representative of me as the actual gamer behind all of this madness.
I am extremely happy with how this latest commission turned out. I apparently made it way more challenging than I expected to with that specific sword, shield, and the tricorn hat. This character also includes way more flowing cloth than is my normal for characters. Ammo did an awesome job of bringing to life my sword and shield character.
This is what the character looked like in game when I was rocking that appearance. We made some purposeful tweaks, namely I didn’t much like the belt and blended everything together to make it feel more cohesive. I really hope at some point that New World allows us to create skins out of pieces of gear because I have this set banked. This looks so much better than the actual Tier V set of heavy gear that you ultimately get as Syndicate.
While my level 60 armor looks considerably different, I think it is still very easily identified as the same character. I guess we will see what game captures my imagination next, and spurs me to do another commission. I have contemplated getting a refresh of my Lalafel, now that I am spending way more time as a Paladin than the other classes, and with it a slightly different glamour. I will likely wait until after I have finished the content in Endwalker to see if I am quite as enamored with that class as I am currently. Ammo does some phenomenal work, and has a very recognizable style… that you will probably notice art from other bloggers as well. If you are interested in getting your own creations done check out her web page with various contact details. The post Ammo Illustrated Bels appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Outriders Wants Us Back

Hey Folks! Sorry that a blog post never actually materialized yesterday. I have had a couple of really hellishly busy week, which means I just did not have time to deal with a blog post yesterday morning. By the time I had finally cleared my schedule enough to bang out a post… apparently my host had some significant issues and the database server associated with my blog had died horribly. When this issue was resolved I was back to being busy as hell, and as a result no post happened. What I was going to talk about actually was better delayed because yesterday the Outriders New Horizon update released and I got my hands on it.
I am going to be honest… this year has been a rough year for me and as a result mentally I assumed this game came out in 2020… and not April of this year. So when I heard there were new updates going into the game my first reaction was “wow that took awhile”. I mean it did take over six months to receive our first meaty and substantial update, which I guess makes sense given that they advertised it from the very beginning as not being a “live service” game. What Outriders New Horizon brings is a bunch of tweaks to the way that the game plays along with a few new expeditions, which are the games end game dungeons. Here is a rundown of the features that I am aware of:
  • 4 New Expeditions
  • Timers Removed as Reward Qualifier for Expeditions
  • Improved Relevance of Drops
  • Crossplay Actually Works as Intended
  • New Chase Epic Weapons hidden in each Expedition
  • New Legendary Vendor with “Random” legendary available
  • Full Transmog/Cosmetic Appearance System
  • Worldslayer Expansion coming in 2022
Of these the one that I spent the most time playing with last night was of course the Transmog system. Essentially if you bring up your menu, at any point you can hit L to go into the appearance customization system. From here you have total control over the look and feel of your character, and I say feel specifically because you can customize your weapons to sound a specific way if for some reason there is a gun that you like but cannot stand its timbre. It uses an appearance acquisition system, so as you get drops it will automagically collect its appearance for you to begin using. This means for me who has progressed through the story already… I am going to have to farm content in order to see those drops start appearing. For a new player whoever in theory just playing through the game will make sure a large number of these items are filled out, and given that this is cross account… it might make me suddenly care about playing alts.
It is time once again to break out the handy graphic that I recreated showing mission difficulty as it scales with both Expedition Challenge Tier and Story Mode World Tier. I spent most of yesterday running around on World Tier 15, which is completely manageable. However as I start going into expeditions I am realistically going to need to start doing Tier 9 if I want to start seeing improvements. One of my biggest problems with Expeditions was the timer, and with it gone I am suddenly significantly more interested in that content. Additionally now that they have hidden chase weapons in all of the expeditions, it becomes a more interesting proposition for me to take my time and crawl through the dungeon experience. For pure farming last night I returned to good ole Typhon hunt mission and at some point I will do some of my “loot cave” to see what appearances I can collect easily.
I enjoyed Outriders quite a bit, and returning last night has made me realize who much I actually did. The core problem with the game for me was that all of my immediate circle of AggroChat folks bounced heavily for thematic reasons. The story is bleak as fuck, and it is very hard to chew through. I think of us only Tam actually made it all the way through, and he isn’t the sort to repeatedly farm content for loot. However there are other communities that I am a member of that did play a bit longer, and I am hoping through those I might be able to find some groups and actually try multiplayer content. I would like to actually push my gear level up a bit higher and farm some more legendary gear, but in order to do that I think I am going to need to play with a somewhat balanced team.
For those interested in maybe returning, it seems that you can for at least a little while get a free weapon from Tiago. The weapon that he has currently is The Juggler, which is probably my favorite auto rifle in the game. It has this truly broken ability to fire a grenade at your target that does silly amounts of damage each time you reload the weapon. This means that I abuse this by reloading constantly to get another free grenade. The weapon also comes with Minefield II, which causes a bunch of bombs to drop down each time you kill an enemy. On the version I use regularly I replaced Minefield II with Minefield III which changes the grenade condition from “On Kill” to “On Crit” making it much more reliable for burning down elites with. I will need to take some time to dust off the cobwebs and relearn the basics of the game, but I figure before long I will be spending at least some of my week grinding expeditions. The post Outriders Wants Us Back appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.