Good Morning Folks! Yesterday about mid day the Visions of Eternity expansion dropped in Guild Wars 2, giving us access to new areas and new elite specs. I’ve not made it past the first zone, but I have to say that Shipwreck Strand is freaking gorgeous. Probably the most interesting thing about the zone so far is how much of it was designed explicitly for the skimmer, and more specifically the ability to use the skimmer underwater, because there are giant swaths of caves believe the surface. Essentially we head to the new far flung locale of Castoria, a sort of rumored island that is shrouded in unnatural fog. I won’t go into too much detail as not to spoil the experience for anyone, but I found the whole navigation sequence of finding our way to the island interesting.
I am not sure if there are some tangible upgrades to the engine for this expansion, or if they are just using artistic flare in new and interesting ways… but the zones look freaking amazing. Specifically the ocean itself looks more alive than it ever has, as it swells and drops in very believable ways. There is this bioluminescent foam-like texture in the water that collects around these tidepools that just looks so good to watch play out in front of you. It feels like they have really pulled out all of the stops of zone design to make something that really looks new and interesting. Greebles are normally a term that is used to describe surface texture… but the sky itself feels like it is greebled with motes of magic and such everywhere, making the entire scene look absolutely enchanted.
I migrated my housing to the new island and that was pretty straight forward. You just talk to the NPC who then warns you that any customization will be reset and that your decorations will be placed in storage when you do so. This was fine for me because while I placed items in my house, I didn’t really do anything specific or intentional with them. I was largely running the default state of the previous island. The only customization that I carried forward was using the aurora borealis themed sky, which really blends nicely with the overall look of the zone. This one feels way more detailed than the previous homestead zone, and honestly there are a few places where I would like to try and erect some custom structures. I’ve not really spent much of any time decorating my homestead and maybe the new island will change that. The default structure feels way less of a “complete” thing as it did with the bearkin area.
Now all of this goodness aside… there is a really frustrating bug at play. Essentially very early on in the quest chain, you are given a collection to finish for an NPC named Pete. It feels bad to halt your progress for this unlocking the wavehawk quest sequence, but I remember them doing something similar for the warclaw in Janthir Wilds. However this time around, I thought they had learned their lesson because I was able to progress past the quest once I had filled the renown heart in the area. DO NOT DO THIS. Currently if you progress your quest past the point where you are given the Wavehawk quest chain, you will no longer be able to complete this chain. This harms you later down the line because you are halted from progressing the story because you do not have a Wavehawk mastery as a result. I’ve tried resetting my quest progress back to this chain to essentially zero luck. I am certain they will resolve this issue at some point, but right now… if you move forward with the quest line called “Solid Ground” you will brick your quest progress sequence seemingly permanently.
The only reliable advice that I have seen on this problem is to break out an alt and progress them up to the point where they receive the Wavehawk quest chain, and then complete the collection on them. This should then in theory unstick your entire account, because mastery unlocks are shared at an account level. Effectively when you are in this broken state, the items just do not spawn in the world that are needed for the collection. Anyways, at some point today I intend to starting this content with my Necromancer, and will be bringing him out of retirement. This is not that big of a deal, given that it has been ages since I have played this character and they were effectively the character that made me fall in love with this game universally.
I threw together a very rudimentary Power Galeshot build and it felt pretty good. I don’t love the disengage shot, but it lives on the same slot as the stealth ability from Longbow, so I was already not in the custom of hitting that button most of the time. Essentially I was able to maintain almost 100% uptime on quickness, 12 stacks of might, and have Aegis up more often than not. This seems like a good kit, and way less selfish than my normal Power Longbow build. I need to play around with it more to get used to it, and probably should also keep tweaking the build a bit to improve it. Nothing much is out there so far for Power Longshot other than a PVP focused build. Hopefully the buildcraft geniuses will come up with something beautiful in the next few days. However for the time being this works well enough to keep rolling and questing with it.
Other than this one egregious game breaking bug… I am pretty happy with everything I have seen so far from Castoria and Visions of Eternity. That said, I am not engaged enough that it is going to stop me from going fully degen mode on Path of Exile come Friday. I’ve done the first zone meta twice, and it is fine… but mostly just felt like a giant bag of hitpoints making the entire thing drag on a bit too long. I had more than enough points on the Necromancer to fully spec out the Ritualist tree so I might see what is available for that before I start questing. I tend to prefer GuildJen over Snowcrows or Metabattle because it seems to favor way less sweaty meta builds, and more general purpose things. I don’t care to run multiple builds for multiple purposes, so am always just looking for something that is fun to play that does “good enough” in most content. GuildJen sort of feels like the spiritual successor to Dulfy now that she has “passed beyond memory” or at very least retired from updating a guide site.
Anyways. Have you played any of Visions of Eternity? What were your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Visions of Eternity Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.
However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.
An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.
Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.
The post Heys for Days appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. It was a weird weekend. I spent a good chunk of it working on the garage since it was much cooler out there than it has been. At this point I have cleaned out the north side of the garage, put up cabinets, and then shifted anything that did not fit from the south side of the garage and acquired and put up the first two cabinets over there. This involved moving out some rather shitty storage options that we have had since college… and have been in place for almost thirty years. One of which I am going to give to my neighbor who sells stuff at craft fairs, because technically it was designed to be collapsible and easy to set up vendor storage that came from a garage sale in college. I could have sworn we had two of these, but I have no clue what happened to the second one over the years. It was bad at doing its job, so it must go and be replaced by nice modular shelving from Sam’s club, because they are cheap, readily available, and something I can buy a few at a time as I have made space for them.
Most of my gaming has been in Destiny Rising. Today is the reset of a new week and I noticed that I finally placed in the shooting range. I did notice that my friend Lociana actually got a space, and Ace kept one placement specifically for Calamity Ops. I have no clue why we do not seem to be getting credit for The Expanse. That one remains empty, and in theory we still need to do the last few parts of the raid so that we can have people showing up on those platforms as well. I like this concept honestly, because one of the cool figures is you can test drive your packmates characters. I mean you can already borrow characters from your friends, but it is extra cool that there is an entire baked in system for this. I honestly wish that there were more of these podiums but one for each character, so you could see how your friends built characters that you might not be playing, rather than just who scored the highest.
I was honestly shocked to see my own character represented on a podium… then I remembered that I actually managed to get a phenomenally good time on Break In, enough to rank my random group 8th on the North American server. If nothing else it was cool to see myself showing up in the ladders for awhile. I have no clue what my final rank was before reset, but it was clearly good enough to get my Jolder riding that podium. While not the strongest or even best character to bring for most content that is focused on damage output… I love my Jolder girl and will always probably be most comfortable playing her. In theory I bring a lot of survival to the team, which makes squishier damage dealers better… but I do second guess some of the activities that I would normally bring her on.
For example, since forming our own pack one of the things that we have been hunting down is a Stronghold, because this is content that I never got to participate in during the wanderer pack. Essentially every member gets 3 attempts at this content for free, before needing to spend pack actions. You are likely going to need this, because the boss that you end up fighting is a giant bag of hitpoints and you have a limited amount of time to dps this down. This is honestly a common gacha trope, and there are a few versions of this that play out in AFK Journey for example, where the entire server or guild joins together to beat down a large health pool. However I question if bringing Jolder on this was a good idea. I did effectively soak a lot of the hate from the boss and keep over-shield rolling on my party… but you can see how much less damage I did overall than Ace did playing Estela. I think in future weeks I am just going to run Estela as well so we can hopefully whittle this down in fewer turns. For the week though we managed to clear two strongholds, which meant loot for everyone in the guild.
We also managed to collect enough materials, and craft enough tchotchkes to upgrade our hangar to rank four. We are burning through the guild ranks pretty quickly, and will be capped out at the final rank of Nightfall before much longer. I am surprised at how fast this goes considering we really only have a handful of players. There are a core group of Greysky folks in the guild, but other than that we have one person that I picked up from my wanderer pack, and another person that seemingly found our guild and joined it on their own. The fact that Ace and I both have second accounts, seems to also be helping the process out, but regardless we are moving through levels quickly.
I honestly still have the pack set to auto approve folks, so if you are playing Destiny Rising and want to be part of our nonsense feel free to join. You have to unfortunately drop your current pack before the game will allow you to join a new one, which made for the whole process of creating this a bit maddening because I could not even throw out an invite until they had left their currently situation. So long as you are going to be pretty chill and relaxed, and don’t do anything wildly offensive… you are welcome. We tend to hang out on my Super Dungeon Friends Discord when we are doing group content, so it is easy for folks to join in the nonsense. There is a Destiny flag in the role assignment channel, but I believe I made it so that once you get flagged for accepting the rules, you can see everything. This tends to be where we organize everything, so similarly if you ever want to join in on our Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans, we arrange that in the Guild Wars 2 channel.
In other news that I am proud of, I am up to five characters at gold rank. I currently have Wolf, Ning Fei, and Tan-2 all in about the same relative position for my next gold. Ning is who I intend on pushing up there, but progress is slow because it entirely relies upon the same limited currency. I got an infusion with the last reset, but am once again stalled out until I can get some more of it. You need six to buy the final rank of abilities, and you can only realistically get four per calamity ops reset. This is the thing that wears on me about the long term viability of Destiny Rising. I feel like they need to give more reasons to run something other than the two seasonal modes… because you can only do so much of that and they reset super infrequently. All of the things that no one queues for… need to be given a reason for folks to queue for them.
Probably the thing that I am most focused on grinding out each day is all of the nonsense needed to upgrade my mentor status. I already have Daybreaker because I run a lot of content, and have run a lot of it with new lights. The more grinding things are “interactions” with new lights which means that you either need to cheer them and get them to cheer you back, or give them an award in a activity… and get them to give you a reward back. Mostly this involves running around haven and aggressively greeting new lights until one of them FINALLY greets you back. The drift bottles and mentor chat is just spamming chat channels… which I feel are counter intuitive to these features. Apparently the next step involves posting things in these same chat channels and begging people for likes. This is dumb, and should maybe be focused on something a bit more conducive to building a successful game.
Ace and I are going to try and knock out a bunch of the new week stuff because the rest of the week is going to be pretty fraught when it comes to playing Destiny Rising. Tomorrow the new Guild Wars 2 expansion drops, and I am probably going to be spending a lot of time playing through that content. Then on Friday the new Path of Exile 3.27 league drops at 12pm PDT, and I took the day off work so expect me to be grinding that like a madman for most of the weekend. Right now I am in the doldrums waiting on those things to drop.
The post Fun with Podiums appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning, Folks! This week we had the entire crew and a stacked list of topics, forcing us to bump several to next week. Tam starts out talking about Time Flies, leading into Grace talking about Ball X Pit. Bel shares his thoughts about the Path of Exile 3.27 reveal stream, and Ash discusses the Session Zero for the Critical Role Daggerheart system. Tam has been playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2… and how it is very much not a sequel to the first game. Bel talks a bit about the CSGO Gambling Crash, where the illicit market lost some 3 Billion dollars of value in a single day. Ash discusses playing Entropy Effect, which is set in the BlazBlue universe, and Bel shares some further bad news about the self-destruction of Xbox, with some new updates and Halo officially being announced for the PlayStation 5. We wrap things up with first impressions of Dispatch and Outer Worlds 2, which we are likely going to be talking about next week.
