Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Last week we brought you the Epilogue show for the patch content following the release of Shadowbringers that brings that core story to a close. This week we dive into the content following that, namely patches 5.4, 5.5, and 5.55 that serve as the prologue to the events that we will be experiencing starting November 19th with the release of Endwalker. I feel like we probably know less about what is going to happen going into this expansion than we have previously, but we talk about what takes place and what we do know about the future. We also talk a bit about our mixed feelings regarding specifically the villains that we are going into this expansion with.
Good Morning Friends! It is the weekend and I am very happy that my wife comes back tonight. She had the opportunity to present at an education conference and flew out Tuesday. I have to say when you get so used to having another human being in the house… things get really weird when the house is empty. Since I have been working remotely for roughly two years my spouse has represented that much-needed anchor to my daily cycle. Last night was a rough night, but mostly because I had an Asthma attack at 1 am and had to get up to take a breathing treatment. I am groggy as hell today, and moving slower than normal but at least I know this evening things will start to normalize a bit when she gets home.
This morning I woke up to some really weird news. I am part of the Minda Syndicate discord and since I am the governor of a company I have access to the leadership chat channel. It seems that yesterday while I was off doing fun things all night… we had a mass migration of some of the Syndicate’s strongest PVPers over to Covenant. Apex Fishing Co. previously held Everfall and kept it on lock for weeks until literally exploits in the PVP system caused them to lose it. Last week they managed to take it back and now that entire guild has migrated to Covenant and formed the Apex Mining Co. Similarly at the same time Planet X which is a strong PVP force even though they have never held a territory did something similar and founded Planet XXX on Covenant.
The reasoning was with the upcoming PVP changes giving more benefit for flagging, they wanted to be on the side that was underpopulated. However, I think they took their own problems with them because I cannot really see that many Syndicates actually running around the world flagged on a regular basis regardless of the luck bonus. I do however fully expect that the map is going to start flipping yellow. Goose the leader of the Minda Syndicate Discord took over as governor of the company now called Mindicate that holds Everfall, and I am hoping that he can muster the support in order to defend it successfully. Not being a PVPer at all, I have a feeling that we will once again lose our chosen Capital city. Brightwood looks to be the strongest basion for team purple since it is defended by the Blades of DaTang which appears to be staying strong on our faction.
I started my evening by participating in a few zone invasions. I have to say there is more than a little fatigue setting in, and it seems like it is harder and harder to get folks mustered to sign up for these events. It used to be a guessing game as to if I would actually get chosen for the team, and now I pretty reliably get chosen for every single Invasion that I sign up for. I view it as 630 gold for about 30 minutes worth of time spent, and it also lets me get out and experience more of the community. Last night I started with the defense of Green-held Reekwater and wound up helping out Cozy Cafe in Mourningdale. I think one of the much-needed changes is to allow players to sign up for events from anywhere in the world. Mourningdale and Reekwater are very out of the way for the standard flow of players through the game, so you have to either burn through a significant chunk of Azoth to teleport there or make a long run.
As I was in Mourningdale I kept seeing messages in recruitment about a “Zerg” run from Give Er from Shadow Wardens. The end of my invasion happened to coincide neatly with them changing locations so I hopped on the train. What ended up occurring was some of the most fun nonsense I have participated in a game in a very long time. It reminded me a bit of the fervor of the Hunt Trains in FFXIV or the big event clearing groups from Guild Wars 2. Essentially I teleported out to Ebonscale Reach and we went through a whirlwind of activities taking down some portals and storming the elite areas of the zone. It is nonsense to see a group of players bounding off a cliff trying desperately not to fall behind. So I followed this army, looted so many boxes, and took down a handful of world bosses.
As a result of my boss farming the other day, along with all of the loot gained from last night’s Zerg run, I have bumped up my snapshot to around 550 on armor pieces and 530ish on weapons. For whatever reason weapons seem to lag behind armor by quite a bit in the gear leveling process. There were a handful of pieces that I kept and I even managed to get a few pieces of the Arcana crafting set that I have banked for when someone needs that. Essentially out in the world, there are drops for each crafting profession, and wearing a full set is what allows the crafter to reliably hit item level 600 weapons and armor. I really need to get more serious about my crafting so that I can ultimately make some of those items.
Due to all of my recent adventures, I have a bank full of legendary crafting materials. That is one of the interesting things about endgame crafting in New World, is that in many cases you don’t “learn” the pattern. Instead, it shows up as something that you can craft when you possess the “Artifact” required to craft the item. I have the Artifacts for a Bow, a couple of Shields, a couple of Spears, a nice Warhammer, and this Hatchet. I’ve also picked up a few items that I think are associated with patterns that may not be in the game yet. What I like about these Legendary patterns is that they craft a fixed item with a specific stat loadout and not something that is randomly generated. There is a handful of these that I would like to have to be honest, but I need to get my refining up to 200 so I can start cranking out the materials.
While I didn’t get any screenshots from it, Eliyon and I ended up roaming around in Edensgrove last night. We started off with the initial goal of taking him to the boss I had been farming and starting to work on his snapshot. However what ended up happening is that we both got a quest to go to Malevolence, which is an elite area in the middle of the zone. On the way we bumped into the not quite sixty Vernie and the three of us spent the rest of the evening clearing out the elite area looking for the boss. We roamed the entire tower looking for Entropy, but it turns out the boss is not spawning at all right now due to a bug. It did prove that even with a small group made up of 2 60s and a 57 we could tackle the 62ish elite areas. In theory, we need to drag Waren along with us next time and try some of the other areas that I experienced through the Zerg group.
My hope is that these Zerg runs become a regular occurring event because it was stupid amounts of fun and we probably had sixty or so players running along. It has made me realize how badly the game needs a “raid group” construct for big open-world activities. We joined together in a bunch of individual five-player groups which worked well enough but would have worked better if there had been a raid group that we could have started.
The post A Zerg Is Born appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The other day when I posted my systems review post, one of the things that I highlighted was how annoying the gear snapshot mechanic was. Since then I have been trying to find a reasonable way to push this number up, and realistically the only way is by grinding something over and over and getting drops to slowly bump the number up. This has lead to me trying to seek out a way to do this reasonably without going insane in the process. Initially I had found a spot in Shattered Mountain with a circuit of a dozen or so Angry Earth and a single boss that had a pretty decent chance of dropping loot. However this took some time to farm the spawn and given that everything was 63 or 64 it had a high chance of leading to me just getting overwhelmed.
While doing some faction quests in Edengrove last night, I stumbled upon a boss spawn on roughly a one minute timer that drops loot almost every time you kill him. The NPC in question is Adjorjan and it is located in the Gasping Summit area shown on the above map. More than anything it also seems to have a higher than average drop rate of gear with gathering luck bonuses. I’ve picked up almost a full set of logging and mining gear and a handful of pieces of skinning. So far harvesting seems to be the most rare of the four, but I have picked up a few of those as well. Additionally I’ve managed to pick up a handful of loot drops that are legendary crafting items.
Last night we even ended up with a small party of four of us that happened to wander by and stuck around to see what all the commotion was. Having a rolling party made the farming go way more smoothly given that it is still a level 62 Silver Elite. Having a few folks there to talk with also made passing the time a bit more enjoyable. At this point I have managed to bump my gear score up to the neighborhood of 525ish and one of the guys I was farming with has pushed it up into the 550s in this one spot. There are a few weird drops however of level 19ish gear, which effectively feels like a wasted chance. However it wouldn’t be New World without irrational bugs.
So essentially if you are looking for a good way of bumping up your gear score, you might check this spot out and see if anyone is farming it on your server. So far it has been well worth my time and I guess I will be here for awhile until I push my gear score up a bit higher.
The post Farming Adjorjan appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! The market is flowing once again and I was finally able to clean out my inventory of debris and list it on the auction house this morning. Compared to the state things have been for the last day that feels amazing. I have a feeling that we still have a proper patch ahead of us at some point, because I believe the downtime last night was just to address the shut off of “wealth transfer systems”. Can we just talk about how weird of a term that is for money flowing through an economy? I mean I guess it makes sense but also isn’t exactly the phase that comes to mind immediately. However given that they eventually shut off player to player trading so not even barter was working… it legitimately was a way of freezing all transfer of any assets.
Last night was a pretty exciting evening because there were four different invasions happening and I signed up for them all. The only one I did not actually get to participate in was Everfall, because it overlapped with First Light. So the irony is I spent the entire night defending territory for people other than the Syndicate. Eliyon and Warenwolf however made it into the Everfall Invasion, and finally got to experience what it is like. I have quite a bit of fun doing these, and it seems as though we made it further in the First Light than I am used to because I got to see the giant skull blimps that folks had been talking about… or as most people refer to them “Terminators”. All told for the evening I managed to pull in 1890 gold for defending three territories.
I tend to go into battle with either Hammer and Great Axe or Hammer and Sword, and the role play is that of Tank but the definition of what tanks do is a little different. Generally speaking we think of Tanks as taunting the NPCs and this absolutely works on a few of the waves. However the real role that we play is to crowd control the incoming encounters so that the ranged dps and folks on cannons can whittle them down before the next wave spawns. That means as things are running in we are trying to time those stuns and gravity wells just right in order to trap everything into a murder ball. I figure this works pretty much the same in War as it does in Invasion, with the key difference there being that you need to stand on the point no matter what happens.
Invasions however are pretty much always a lost cause, and I am not sure exactly what needs to be done in order to juice the outcome. I do wonder if this is scaled in a way that they are expecting every player to have 3 corruption trophies, be using corruption coatings, and stacking as much anti-corruption gear as you can possible get. I mean I would like to think that we have stacked pretty great players during most of these events, and last night several folks were abusing the hatchet bug in order to turn in massive damage numbers… and still we died horribly. I do hope at some point on the horizon there is a tuning patch that actually makes these events winnable. However in the meantime I am going to keep signing up because they are a good source of gold if I get chosen. Thankfully I have apparently not made myself obnoxious enough to Green or Yellow and they are still willing to group up with me.
In other news, yesterday was the Blizzard earnings call and the news was not spectacular. They of course tried to polish the hell out of that turd, but essentially neither Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 are going to be released in 2022. That means that at least over the course of the next year the only thing that can possibly launch is Diablo Immortal, which will be entering another test phase soon. I am not sure how I feel about this honestly because maybe just maybe by 2022 I will feel less shame towards the thought of playing Blizzard games, and be able to partake of Diablo 4 guilt free whenever it releases. It also means however that Blizzard is going to have to spread that butter way too thin over the course of the year to try and keep players engaged without new releases. I don’t think there is any way in hell we get a World of Warcraft expansion next year either.
This news has unsurprisingly not been taken well by investors. The irony is… profits are up which means that they are coasting on micro-transactions. Patch 9.1.5 just landed in World of Warcraft, but I am not sure it is accompanied by as much fanfare as they would have hoped. It is one gigantic fan service patch and ultimately good for the people still playing the game, but I am not sure how many account reactivations it is going to trigger, especially considering FFXIV Endwalker is now 16 days away. There are likely going to be some rough times ahead for Blizzard but I hope that they actually make good on all of the demands by A Better ABK and by this time next year we can actually feel good about supporting them once more.
The post Night of Invasions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
