Morning friends. World of Warcraft appears to be on fire right now, so I am giving it some distance so it can improve itself. Tuesday night I managed to do some makeovers and last night I was going to log in and spend some time roaming around with the freshly redesigned characters. Unfortunately this is what I kept encountering when attempting to log any of them in. It seems that the servers are still struggling, and as a result I am going to I guess give it another attempt tonight. I guess it is a good thing that the expansion was delayed and that the pre-launch event has yet to start. I am just hoping that the fires have died down by the 18th so I can farm the Hallows End event for another round of tries on the mount.
Instead of playing World of Warcraft I ventured back into Genshin Impact and made another attempt at a decent re-rolled alt account. You can create a seemingly infinite number of Genshin Impact accounts because they don’t actually require you to use an email address for any of them. If you can get to level 7 you will have earned a significant number of free wishes and should have a decent shot of pulling something reasonable. As a result my third attempt at an alt account seemed to have born fruit, or at least something that I consider completely functional when it comes to playing with it.
Xingqiu is a character that you encounter in the Liyue storyline and is not a character that I have on my main account. On this account I also managed to pick up Ningguang, 1 constellation Noelle, and a 1 constellation Xiangling. Of the characters on this account, I feel like Xingqiu is the strongest carry that I can build into a DPS Carry. I would have rather had Razor, Diluc, Chongyun or Beidou as a two handed beater but I can make this character work for leveling. To be honest this is a pretty great champion that I am happy I at least have access to now, even though it is on the wrong account.
So for my party right now I am using Xingqiu as carry, Xiangling and Kaeya as support dps and Noelle as a healer. Have Noelle bubble before going into a fight and then use either a pyro to hydro reaction or a cryo to hydro reaction for dps boosting depending on what I am fighting. However all of this said I think I glazed over WHY I would want a secondary account. Essentially if you have alt accounts and can get them to level 16, you can then abuse them for farming world resources… which you start to need in higher quantities as you progress through levels. So in theory I can log this account on… and then have my main join it to run around and collect ore, flora and kill mini bosses that are on a 24 hour respawn timer.
On the main account I have managed to push my Battle Pass up to rank 34 and I should be able to get higher this week pending I can finish a few achievements. The most annoying of these is the farm 20 clouds. Sure you can start and finish a cloud event without taking the rewards… but the cloud sits there with rewards waiting even if you log out and back into the game. I am not exactly sure how long I need to wait before attempting the cloud again… or if I need to wait for reset each day and in essence do two a day until I have gotten that twenty.
This morning with my free primagems I managed to pull yet another Barbara, which means I am one constellation away from having her maxed out. That last constellation is pretty damned sweet because it means she auto resurrects your characters when they fall in battle. The game itself has slowed down considerably because I realistically have only a few things that I can really do to make progress each day. Essentially I get in and do my daily quests and then farm whatever dungeons are up that day for resources with my resin. Now that I have moved to world 4 I need to spend one of the days farming the world bosses for attempts at either a 5 star artifact or even better a claymore pattern.
The core challenge of Genshin Impact is that it is still a Gacha/Energy game at its core and while it feels very open and very free… once you have completed the story content there are a very limited number of ways you can move that needle forward on a daily basis. There is apparently some discussion within Mihoyo about tweaking this, because apparently they had no idea that the game was going to blow up on the level of a “phenomena” like it did. So hopefully they ease some of the restrictions and lean into the whole big open world free to play thing, and shift around to some alternate ways of play. You can still have a really fun time without “whaling out” but from AR35 onwards it slows down again… and I imagine from AR40 onwards it is a very painful slog.
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Yesterday was the World of Warcraft pre-patch for Shadowlands and shocking to no one the servers had a few issues as a result. I fought the retrieving realm list boss for awhile and then went through some issues where I would retrieve an empty character list. What I think was ultimately happening behind the scenes were that all of our level 120s were being interactively squished to 50s. If I waited long enough the entire list would load with my freshly vanillafied max level characters. The reason why I think this is that the folks like me that had an entire server full of 120s… seemed to be hit worse than the folks who only had one or two character sprinkled throughout multiple servers.
What I had not anticipated was the issues patching addons. I mean I should have, but for whatever reason they were crammed in the furthest corner of my mind and I was not prepared for how personally unplayable World of Warcraft is without ElvUI. I feel sorry for the folks behind Elv/TukUI because even this morning the patcher client is a smoldering pile of rubble that seems to be unable to connect into the servers. About halfway through the night I managed to manually download the 12.0 update for ElvUI from the website, and that at least allowed me to limp along until everything was back up and running. With the selloff of Curse Forge by Twitch, that means that the Twitch client is no longer a reliable means of patching. Swooping in to save the day is Wowup.Io which seems to be able to automagically detect where your game is installed, the addons you have installed and patch them successfully. It managed to catch pretty much everything that was not ElvUI and the rest seemed to have updated by this morning.
The highlight of this patch however is the new character models and as a result the only thing I actually did last night was log in a bunch of characters and head to the barber shop. The test of this post will be me exclusively talking about a few of these. First up is Belgrace, my horde paladin and at least for the time being the character that I an intending to main going into Shadowlands. The core problem I have always had with Blood Elves is the lack of beard options. Finally we have one, and while it isn’t an amazing one… it works for now. I also decided to go back to long black hair while I was at it and drop down to smaller ears.
Next up is my Demon Hunter, which is also a Blood Elf because racial locking. I am going to be honest I went with a really similar look because I think it looks badass. I dropped the blindfold because it always made things like eyepatches look odd and went with a more pale sickly skin to contrast against the dark hair. I wish Blood Elves had some “unnatural” skin tones like purple or maroon or something like that, but alas they do not. For now I am happy with it.
Female Belghast didn’t get all that many changes, just a few tweaks here and there with jewelry and some warpaint. I also changed the eye color to be a deeper and more vibrant red and shifted from a “cutefase” to a more serious expression. She spends most of her time as a fury warrior, and she should look downright mean, and I think she maybe does a bit more now. I kept the pig tails because I am used to them but I might shift that up at some point.
Now for the character change that I had been waiting for since first playing World of Warcraft. I got rid of my bones! Belgraft the Death Knight now has I believe the mottled skin appearance, which still looks undead but doesn’t make armor look like complete trash now! I shifted from a very pale/blueish skin tone to the darkest skin available on undead. Mostly I just wanted the glowing eyes to pop more as they stand out against the rest of his visage.
While I did a significant number more, the last change that I am going to talk about this morning is Belgrist my Druid. I originally did a dark skin/pink mohawk thing and it was fine, but I decided to go the other direction and choose the pale troll appearance with bigger pink hair. With this patch they also managed to give access to all of the artifact appearances you have spread out between all of your characters. This meant that I decided to go with the Ursoc appearance for bear form, Firelands cat for cat form and then the only options I had for swimming form were color variants of the Zandalari dinosaur form. I noticed there isn’t an option to customize your flight form, but maybe you just don’t collect appearances for that the way you do for the others.
Other than the growing pains and temporary moments of terror as I logged in to an empty character list… I think things went about as well as could be expected for such a major patch. I’ve not spent any time participating in the event associated with the patch, but I will likely spend some time participating to see if the weapons and gear are worth my time. I am still pretty damned hooked on Genshin Impact but the amount of things that I can reasonably do in a day is being limited by Resin so I will have some free time to spend in World of Warcraft in the coming nights.
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Yesterday around 10 am CST, the Elemental Crucible event started up in Genshin Impact. It appears that it is going to be running for around seven days and it offers a new game mode during that time. Essentially this is the first Co-Op event and you are either match made with three other random players, or you can bring in a full or partial party of your friends. All told the matchmaking goes extremely quickly because it is drawing from players on all platforms including PlayStation 4. The mission it is pretty simple, in that you collect elemental bits that spawn around the arena and run them back into the crucible for credit. Once you have filled the crucible you win.
However before I go into further detail lets cut to the chase since I am not a YouTuber and do not need to pad time and bury the lead. Each time you do an ignition you have the option to spend 40 resin to get some rewards and generally speaking this will be around 30 blue character experience scrolls, 30 companionship xp and 200 adventure experience. To answer the original question… is Elemental Crucible worth it from a resin standpoint? Hell no. No one should be spending their resin in this manner because it is a waste of resources. That said the event as a whole is absolutely worthy of your time.
With this event comes something called the Alchemy Handbook, which asks you to do certain activities while in the Elemental Crucible game mode. Each time you tick off one of these boxes you get some sort of a reward. Additionally there are new event achievements in the Battle Pass that pay out a significant amount of progress there was well. All told if you complete everything that had to do with the Elemental Crucible this week you get the following:
300 Primogems
23 Blue Weapon Crystals
10 Purple Character XP Books
6 Blue Character XP Books
50,000 Mora
1 Blue Elemental Crystal Shard of each type (minus life which isn’t in the game yet)
4950 Battle Pass Progress
That is a significant chunk of stuff that you are getting for running this event a minimum of 20 times. After having run this event 22 times so far, I have completed everything but that is turning out to be the hardest of the achievements. It requires you to fill your elemental energy bar in less than 3 minutes. The closest I have gotten so far is 3 minutes and 4 seconds and in fact we have managed to get that more than a few times. It is absolutely infuriating, but I could care less about the character scrolls and weapon crystals that are rewarded. What I instead care about is the 2250 Battle Pass progress which in theory should be more than a full levels worth.
The event flows a lot like any of the time challenges in the game with multiple waves of mobs spawning in. There will be a wave that includes a few mini bosses at a time… these are often times elemental themed Abyss Mages that are generally of a type that you don’t have a good attack against. There will also be a wave that is one Ruin Guard and Stonehide Lawachurl. In my experience it seems to be best to focus fire the Ruin Guard down and then get everyone focused on the Stonehide to get through them as quickly as possible.
During the event a number of elemental particles will spawn around the arena and you will need to pick these up and run them back into the crucible. There is however a trick to it and you can only be carrying one type of charge at a time. So if you have a fire charge then you can run around and pick up other fire charges until you have three in total before running it back in. You need to avoid getting close to any other colors of charges or it will cause the one you are currently carrying to disappear and the team to miss out on that elemental energy. Additionally you need to avoid getting hit while carrying a charge or you will drop your cargo. All in all it is a pretty fun game mode and sorta reminds me of igniting the forges in Destiny 2.
Other than that I spent some time with friends farming various world bosses that they needed parts from. I also participated in a Wolf kill but did not take loot given that I am really close to AR35 which should bump me up to World Rank 4, and with that a higher chance of better loot. It is my understanding that starting at AR35 there is a very rare chance of getting 5 star artifacts, but what I really really want this week is a Northerner Claymore Prototype so I can refine the Aminus for Razor to rank 3.
Co-Op is actually really fun in Genshin Impact, and I hope they keep adding more content that I can do with my friends. I’ve talked about it before, but I really like the way the lockout mechanic works in this game so that I can keep helping people with content as needed and then choose when I want to receive rewards and lock myself out of loot on my own terms. I do think over time the Resin economy will loosen up a bit, but for now it feels like we are walking a very thin line of what we can actually accomplish in a single day. This is one of those moments when I wish this game were a traditional buy the box model MMORPG.
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Morning friends. I am not entirely certain what to talk about because I had a fairly rough night after which my mind is largely blank. I do know that I spent a good deal of the weekend playing Genshin Impact and at least a chunk of yesterday was spent looking for things to do in it. Since I am struggling to get started, lets do an informational dump of some things I have come to realize. Special thanks to my friend Easha for setting me off in this direction. First off I’ve talked about this a bit, but in Genshin Impact there is Cross Play and Cross Save, and they represent two different things.
Cross Save – This allows you to share the same account effectively between multiple platforms. Right now this works for Android/iOS and PC players and they can shift freely between those platforms. PlayStation 4 players at this very moment are stuck to that specific platform, and when the Switch version releases we are uncertain how it will work. I have my hopes that given how many games on the Switch cross save with PC titles… that we will get to add it to the shared account block.
Cross Play – You can play with players on other platforms so long as they are within the same region. That means even though I am on the PC and that the PS4 is excluded from Cross Save… that I can friend someone with a PS4 account and run co-op content with them. Once again this is pending they are in the same region as me.
Regions – Right now the game has four regions that I am aware of, with one of those that I have next to no information about.
Mainland China – I have no clue at all how to get onto this server. Given that it is the first server I would imagine the numbering scheme would be very low.
America – This server is indicated by a UID that starts with the number 6, for example 600012345
Europe – This server is indicated by a UID that starts with the number 7, for example 700012345
Southeast Asia – This server is indicated by a UID that starts with the number 8, for example 800012345
You can play freely within your own regional block, but there appears to be no way to play across region which is unfortunate.
I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon, roaming around and trying to collect all of the “Air Doodads”, which is what I call them because I never can remember how to spell their real name. In the Game Tools menu there are a number of things that are useful related to Genshin Impact, but one of them is an interact map that folks have been using to collect the location of various data points. Slight problem that I did not realize at the time I made my run from point to point is that apparently you have to be near the elevation in order to get the Star icon to show up on your in game map. This means that while I travelled to the location of every doodad, I failed to get 4 of them… meaning I am going to have to reset the map and start over from scratch. One nice feature of the map though is it allows you to log in with a google account (because it is driven on google maps) and mark various items as “found”.
I’m in a phase of the game where I am needing to judiciously apply my Resin each day so that I can focus down specific materials that I need for weapon and character unlocks. This means that there are a certain number of times when I am just sorta looking for something to do. Last night I made it my mission to put the entire map of Mondstadt and Liyue on respawn for all of the mini bosses. There are a number of encounters that can drop useful bits and that don’t require Resin to earn rewards, and if you go into the bosses section of the adventure log you can even navigate to the nearest instance of that miniboss.
I did this until I put each and every one on cooldown, something that took me pretty much the entirety of two episodes of Fear the Walking Dead and the new Walking Dead World Beyond. This was worth a decent amount of cash, experience and a significant chunk of materials. Speaking of materials… another tidbit of information is that apparently the listed 30,000 inventory isn’t really just one big bag. There appears to be smaller sub containers for each TYPE of thing… and these seem to be somewhere around 1000 items or 150 rows in your inventory. So that would mean 1000 artifacts, 1000 weapons, 1000 collectable resources, etc… which doesn’t seem to actually add up to 30,000.
I would not be shocked if there is a per resource limit to the number of items you can have in a single stack as well. In theory you should be burning through your artifacts and weapons to help power whatever you are using up. However for other resources those might stockpile a bit, and currently the largest single stack I have of anything is Iron Chunks at 439. I will have to watch and see if I reach a point where I can no longer loot any more of these. As far as artifacts and weapons, I am in the part of the game where I need a constant supply of these to fuel into the few weapons that I actually care about keeping so I am no longer at a risk of ever having too many.
Starting today is an Elemental Crucible Co-Op event and I don’t know much about it. It apparently happened on the test servers during the various phases of closed beta and was a good source of resources. I expect tonight to poke my head in, and given that it takes resin I am going to let that stockpile throughout the day so that I can have plenty for whatever this event brings tonight. You can check out the official Mihoyo news post here, but it appears this will be limited to accounts that have hit AR20 and have completed all of the quests in Prologue: Act II.
In other news I managed to pull a 5 star weapon from the normal banner, which means my pity has been reset back to zero. I guess I will have to figure out what to do with this book, given it seems to be dps focused and I am not currently running any DPS casters. I would have far rather had a character, but you get what you get. Something that has come to my attention is that the Pity counter is apparently tied to each individual banner, so there is one for the featured character banner, the weapon banner and finally one tied to the normal banner. I had been spending the little bit of primagems each day on the normal banner, given that I already had venti and didn’t really want to get additional copies of him. However I also am not super interested in five star weapons so I might end up shifting up that lock at some point.
Towards the end of the week I was starting to run out of things to focus on… but with a new reset begins a new week of things to start plugging away at for the battle pass. I am probably going to hold off on doing either the Wolf or Stormterror because I am pretty close to 34, which means it is fairly likely that I will hit 35 before the next reset. I am not sure if this will increase my chance at getting 5 star artifacts but I feel like I should probably hold off regardless. Tuesday will distract me with the release of the World of Warcraft pre-patch so I will need to devote a certain chunk of time to Genshin or else I will probably be spending all of it doing the pre-events in WoW. We are entering a very busy time of the year for releases so we will see how well I keep up with things in Genshin.
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