Last night I took a break from my Path of Exile Inquisitor shenanigans and played around in Dragonflight Alpha for most of the evening. Up until this point, the testing had been entirely focused on the Dracthyr and their starting area. As I had said before neither the Dracthyr themselves nor the Evoker class was really my jam and nothing that I could see myself playing seriously. I generally crave playing melee classes, and unless I am doing that… it doesn’t really feel like “WoW” to me. So starting yesterday the Alpha testers had access to a new zone and all of the other classes to test it with. So as a result I took my Death Knight that I created last week to play with the talents and ventured forth into The Waking Shores.
The Waking Shores is pretty large. If I had to give an example of scale I would say something in the range of Draenor’s version of Nagrand. The scale of the zone also feels very large and epic, in part because so much of the architecture was designed for dragons. With the introduction of Dragon Flying as a mechanic, it also has way more verticality than I am used to. The only weird thing I have noticed is that the world feels really spartan. Starting with the Timeless Isle, I am used to WoW maps being populated with a staggering amount of little detail to be discovered in the forms of what I am going to refer to as micro-objectives. There were mini-bosses to kill and chests to loot for interesting baubles, collectibles, and gear. This seems to largely be missing from the design of Dragonflight, or at the very least there has not been a pass of development to populate these doodads and widgets.
The world feels way more “Alpha” than I have come to expect from a Blizzard game some five months from release. I’ve been in a number of alpha testing processes for World of Warcraft and just as an example at this point in Warlords of Draenor all of the classes were effectively complete, and the zones felt more or less “finished”. We still have a number of classes without new Talent trees for example, so I have not been able to check out the Warrior and am leaning back on my Death Knight as a result. Granted if the entire studio does a full-court press, they can get this game across the finished line, but it does feel like it is going to be way more tentative than I am used to. I do wonder if we are going to see an impending delay of Dragonflight into 2024. That would honestly probably not be a bad thing given that I am not sure anyone actually expected this game to be released in 2023 prior to the announcement of the release date.
With this update saw another release of the new UI. This time added to the interface are the player and target frames and some additional options for the existing hotbars. I really like that we can turn on a visible grid while editing the UI. I am hoping that means at some point in the near future we will be able to turn on snapping to the grid. It is amazing how much of a difference having these few additions improve the experience. I’ve said it before but if the WoW UI can get to a point where it is at least as detailed as the FFXIV UI, then it is highly unlikely I will install addons in the future. For me the key things I need are the ability to move my player frame and target frame to the center of the screen, and also have hotbars that are slightly below them. Then finally the main addon that I installed every time was one that unified all of my bags into a single pane… all of which are features now of the default UI. Massive kudos to the team working on this.
There is still quite a bit of placeholder text, for example, I ran a quest and the two NPCs were named Left and Right, and were on the left side and right side of an objective. I laughed entirely too much from this giant dialog of menu options as to WHY we are visiting the Dragon Isles. I specifically like “You tell me. I don’t read quests. I just complete them!” because it clearly sounds like a quest developer taking out some frustrations. I really have not spent enough time with the content to get a feel as to how it stacks up against other expansions. So far it very much feels like a WoW Expansion, and honestly feels a bit more like something like Northrend than it does like one of the more modern expansions like Legion. I am not sure if this was the intent, but I do miss a lot of the small zone details that were added starting with Pandaria. Again I am not sure if this is just a case of it being “very alpha” and not finished, or if this is more of a minimalistic design decision.
Right now we are level capped at 62 and I will probably finish out the zone on the Death Knight and then maybe start it again on Paladin so I can test out Protection talents. All in all, it does not feel bad and I am interested to see how this evolves.
The post The Waking Shores appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning but I figured I would spin up another Path of Exile post. Last night I wrapped up Act 10 on my Inquisitor. I still have yet to transition to my final form, but in theory, I will be doing that as soon as I find a reasonable six link. The truth is I was able to breeze through Merciless Lab so I should be able to start running maps without a ton of hassle. The build that I am following is more or less this POB. However I never really evolved past the Wintertide brand phase and am still leaning heavily on that.
What happened along the way is I picked up this Unique, the Bitterdream Shadow Sceptre. My current version has the 3 links that I am using with Wintertide which are Wintertide Brand > Elemental Proliferation > Controlled Destruction. Then in addition to the two support gems, this unique item treats it as though I also have slotted in Bonechill, Hypothermia, Ice Bite, Cold Penetration, Cold Damage, and Inspiration. This adds up to a dumb stack of effects that I could likely never get working all at once. I am having a freaking blast running around and watching entire screens of enemies evaporate in a “cold disease” that spreads from target to target.
I’m also abusing a second unique called Gang’s Momentum which causes me to deal more damage to ignited enemies and also increases my chance of igniting them. So I run around casting Elemental Weakness that curses everything in the radius lowering their elemental resistance, then I drop a flame wall and spread my Wintertide brand and watch things just sort of disappear. I’ve yet to start on maps but I plan on doing some tonight and also trying to heists to see if I remain as tanky as I seem today. Even if I never turn this fully into Righteous Fire, I am pretty damned happy with it in its existing state. So long as there are no major nerfs that would impact this build for 3.19… it is extremely likely that I start the season as Inquisitor.
The last thing that I have been doing lately is listening to a series of lore videos about Path of Exile. There are a bunch of details that I missed while playing through the campaign twice and I appreciate Kitten Cat Noodle doing a deep dive into explaining the finer points of the story. Truth be told the lore behind this game and its gods are pretty interesting. If you are at all interested I suggest popping open this playlist and giving it a list. Each video is around 16 minutes in length and covers a single act at a time with some additional details thrown in as necessary to explain things.
The post Wintertide Madness appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning so I thought I would do a bit of a recap of my weekend. One of those games that I keep returning to no matter what is going on in my life is Minecraft. I’ve not felt the best over the last few weeks because of mystery-ailment-that-is-likely-not-covid. I can always retreat to Minecraft and my research into the NFTWorld fiasco sparked my desire to play the game. What do I usually do when I play Minecraft? Well, I burrow into the side of a mountain and dig one tunnel going up and one tunnel going down. This screenshot was from the beginning of my process of terraforming a mountain top. I’ve now since built a bit of a reasonable structure up top, and my incessant tunneling has served as material for building projects.
What consumed a truly inordinate amount of time is that in the process of digging down… I encountered an underground ocean. I mean I could, of course, have just blocked it off and continued along with my day but instead, I decided to use the particular properties of gates to hold back water… in order to give me access still to this resource if I happened to need it. Granted again I could have done this in a more simple manner with a door… but I set down this path so I trucked right along with this madness. The most quirky thing about this is that later on, I encountered another section of this cave network with the difference this one being mostly dry. My entire focus however became digging down to bedrock… which I accomplished yesterday and now have a ton of deep slate to build things with.
In other activities, I am still working on my Inquisitor in Path of Exile and have just started the final act. I am still running around with Wintertide Brand and have not transitioned my build over to Righteous Fire. I think I still need to finish cruel lab before I can do this thing, so I should probably set my mind to completing that before I finish Act Ten and take another resistance hit. I believe I am sitting at 70 just about to hit 71 so I have long since started getting lots and lots of map drops. My time with Path of Exile right now is more or less trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. What I mean by that is I am trying to figure out what I want my build to be for my first legit season open. I think a few of us are in this holding pattern of trying to click the gears in place because we know we are just about to do it all over again in mid-August.
Lastly, I am still spending time in Dragonflight alpha, and as such spending time poking around on an Evoker. I believe today is the cut-off for this phase of the alpha test and in theory, when I next play the game I will be able to access one of the expansion zones. I have a Deathknight ready to go and I will probably spend some time speccing out a Warrior and trying to build something I enjoy there as well. I am honestly looking forward to seeing the zones because I have heard good things about them. Evoker and Dracthyr are decidedly not my jam and I feel are right now negatively coloring my impression of the expansion so far. I’ve evolved to be able to play “finger wigglers” a bit more than I could in the past, but the Evoker is maybe a bit too on that spectrum for my tastes. I’ve never reconciled my ability to enjoy a Mage, but I dig the heck out of Demonology Warlock.
The post Sometimes You Gotta Dig appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We are back! Bel was sick last week from an unknown illness that is very likely, not Covid and as such we did not record. Tonight we had a wealth of topics and in the end, made it through very few of them. We start off by talking about one of Ash’s comfort games Okami and his recent experiences playing through it on the PlayStation 4. From there we talk about Stray and how Bel and Grace have deeply mixed feelings about it and Tam loved it. Since it is always fun to dunk on NFT projects, we talk about Microsoft decimating NFTWorld by declaring that there will be no NFT projects associated with Minecraft. While this is a bit of an old topic we talk about the return of E3 and how Reed Pop will be running the show in 2023. We also talk about what this might mean for a shift in the show from being largely industry-focused to more fan service. Finally, a number of us have reached the end game of Path of Exile and we talk about those experiences.
