Good Morning Folks. Tuesday nights are often what we refer to as “Sibling Time,” where my sib Ace and I get together and either play Destiny Rising or just hang out and chat while doing our own thing. Since we are both somewhat down on Destiny Rising at the moment, we are trying to branch out and play some other things. Initially, I thought we might be able to do Dune Awakening, but they were just too new, and if I carried them… they would likely bounce from the game entirely. I did, however, figure out that I can easily retrofit my sandbike to have a booster seat on the back instead of storage. So when the time comes for them to go do some of the stuff in the area of Hagga South, I have built my base, I can zip over and pick them up. Hopefully, a weekend of piddling around in-game will give them the basis of being able to do group content together. I’ve largely finished Hagga South, and am about ready to transition to the zone just North, but I plan on leaving the base largely intact so that Ace can potentially claim it when they are ready to start doing stuff in the northern area of the zone. That is one thing that I wish you could do more easily: transition a base to another player rather than demolishing the control panel and then letting them place one instead.
We have been loosely shopping for other games to play, and one of them that we both enjoyed greatly is Enshrouded. So last night I logged into my level 25 geared out character that I have not played since launch… and tried to figure out how the hell to join a game with each other. Hint… you must be online in Steam in order to see each other in the game, so as two perpetually “Show as Offline” introverted goblins… we had to both show online for a moment while we joined up on Ace’s world. It was at this point that I saw their highly optimized base layout… and also might have given them more than a little bit of shit about not having walls. One of these days we will join my world, and they can give me abundant crap over the severe level of overbuilding that I do on my bases… which are extremely NOT optimized. Real talk, though, coming back last night has made me want to play more, and I am probably going to do so on the level 25 character since I don’t really feel like gearing out another one. Guild Wars 2 has kind of made me wish all games allowed you to reach a point of “forever gear” quickly and then just get to do the fun stuff.
For a while now, Ace had been telling me about all of the updates in-game, in part trying to coax me back to wanting to play it again. One of the feature drops specifically was something called Hollow Halls. These are a series of what can best be described as “Raids” in the MMORPG context, that were patched in with 0.7.1.0 from March 2024. I had done plenty of the more dungeon-like content in Enshrouded, and they were really fun, but also really short, and mostly focused around rushing to a boss and then taking it down and collecting the trophy. Hollow Halls are way more detailed than this, and to start off you have to begin a quest which grants you your key to the first one, and then completing each one unlocks the next Hollow Hall in sequence. Last night we did the Nomad Highlands one, which is the third of four Hollow Halls in sequence.
There are technically mini-boss style encounters scattered throughout the large sweeping dungeon, but the real challenge is the environmental effects, mob spawners buried in frustrating to get to places, and this whole mini game that focuses on finding a bunch of runestones, which then unlock the door to the next area of the place. The huge positive about this place is that effectively each “floor” has a spawner, so that if you die, you can get right back into the action rather quickly. There were a lot of puzzles that involved very careful gliding, and I happened to die on the lava… which was unfortunate because even though Ace was able to resurrect me, I died again before I got control over my character. Due to the spawners, though, I was able to bip right back down to where we were in a matter of seconds. We were playing on their world at the lowest difficulty settings, and even then, it still took us about two hours to complete this place.
One of the really neat things about these massive dungeons is that they have special block types that you can only get by finding chests in them. What was nice, though, was that just by looting the chest, it unlocked the block for everyone in the party. They also had their world set so that each boss dropped a trophy for every party member, which meant that we walked away with multiple trophies by defeating all of the mini-bosses contained within. I dinged level 26 while I was in the dungeon, and I believe when I last played this game, the level cap was 25… so it will be interesting to see how much deeper this rabbit hole goes. I am probably going to run around on my geared character for a while and then build out a world from the start so that I can see all of the content I might have missed along the way. I had a freaking blast last night, and I figure we will probably be doing more of these Enshrouded nights.
Another game that I have been wanting to play again is No Man’s Sky, and it turns out they have also been playing around a bit. So after concluding our Enshrouded time together, I popped over into NMS and started a new, relaxed character. I made it through the initial sequence of getting my ship up and running and am on the second planet. There are tons of games that we both enjoy playing; we just need to set the focus on actually playing them together. I also think that I might have convinced Ace to give Path of Exile another shot with the upcoming 3.28 league, so that will be fun as well. Sibling Time is one of those sacred rituals in my life, and especially after the passing of my partner, I have needed it more and more as a stabilizing force. A few hours doing dumb things with Ace, cures many ills… and there is so much of me that wishes that we had actually gotten the chance to grow up together, rather than being adopted siblings.
If you’ve not played Enshrouded in a while, I highly suggest checking in on the game again.
The post Sibling Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. My new Judgement Paladin has been a bit of a wild ride. Like I said yesterday this was a brand new character on Sunday morning, and as of yesterday I have effectively completed all of the content that is reasonable to complete at this moment. Since factions are shared across your account, I was able to pick up where I left off on my spin to win character at seven of ten harbingers down. I trivially downed the last few harbingers and then was set up for the pinnacle boss fight which is Aberroth. I get that this entirely has been lowered in difficulty with the Tombs of the Erased patch, but it still seems like a significant challenge.
Yesterday over lunch I made an attempt and was shocked to take down the entire encounter in one go. There are some tricky bits that I happened to just luck into doing the right thing. The problem with being able to tank all the damage, is that you don’t really learn the fight until a bit later. At this point I have now done the encounter around ten times and know some of the pitfalls given that not ALL of those were successes. I’ve managed to pick up copies of most of the items that I will at some point want to swap over to… but I either need to cook them in Nemesis Eggs or hope for better drops with more LP in order to really make the transition.
Last night I grouped up with Ace, because the Woven Echo which requires you to kill 10 Harbingers in a row was kicking my ass. Instead of suffering alone… we suffered together because it was STILL kicking our collective asses. Instead we opted to alternate between summoning Aberroth and trying to farm the items we were needing from the encounter. The only annoying thing about doing this is that the only person who gets guaranteed boss table drops is the person who uses the key. There is a chance of getting drops, as we managed to pick up a few items on the table when not being the summoner, but it seemed super rare. That said it is still well worth it to group up for this because you can always gift items that the other person needs, and the encounter goes so much faster with a second person.
The only frustrating bit is that I realized some of the items I was hunting for were unique to the 500 Corruption Uber Aberroth Woven Echo version of the fight. It is highly unlikely that I will get any of those, at least not without them significantly nerfing the encounter which is counter intuitive to the fact that it is the highest difficulty pinnacle fight. I picked up a few items that like i said need to cook in eggs, but I did swap a few pieces of gear out. First up I got a chest piece with good health and t7 Mana Gained on Vengeance which is required to make the Judgement build feel good since that is your way of regenerating your mana quickly. I also farmed up a Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros and slammed T7 Judgement onto it so that I could swap off my weavers will sentinel relic. Lastly I farmed up a Throne of Ambition unique idol which is highly suggested for the build and does seem to significantly increase my damage output, but I did lose a bit of Healing Effectiveness in doing the swap.
More important than all of that however is that I shuffled my gear around and am now 100% Crit Damage Immune. This is pretty massive because during all of my recent boss attempts I was only sitting at around 35% which was VERY noticeable. I’ve also gotten my block chance up to 76% which is pretty solid, though I would love to be able to hit 100% at some point. The shuffling did drop my Increased Healing Effectiveness below 1300, but only barely which still feels pretty solid. My health is also just shy of 2800 and hopefully once I pour on some more levels I will be able to cross that threshold. A lot of my survive comes from stacking ward which I can usually have around 3000ish without much issue during a boss fight.
The four extra points in Judgement has allowed me to pour some additional area of effect and duration making the whole mapping experience feel considerably more comfortable. This actually does now feel like Righteous Fire and chasing down things like Loot Lizards has become trival. For pure boss fights however, I should probably drop the Anointed keystone because which it is great for mapping it is sort of counter intuitive to how bossing works. Since I am not dropping Consecrated Ground on the floor, I can’t stack it up and add multiple layers of damage on the boss and those same multiple layers of healing on myself. It is kind of annoying to have to unspec something and respec it for mapping…. but it might be worth it if I was chain farming Aberroth or something like that. Probably something I am going to play around with a bit. Ultimately I could probably get this effect by just un-equipping and re-equipping my relic… but then I would also have to fiddle with respeccing all of the other points it is giving me.
The only BAD thing about zooming through so many objectives as I have as quickly as I have… is that I am sort of directionless. I just set up a bunch of Nemesis Towers and I will likely be cooking a bunch of items in those eggs tonight, but in the coming days I am probably going to shift my focus to my Beastmaster build that I intend on going Squirrels with. Other than that I will probably offer assistance to anyone that wants help with Harbingers or Aberroth kills. I still need to max out my Weavers Faction, but it seems like chain buying Woven Echoes goes a long way towards that. I spent down all of my Memory Amber so I need to spend the next bit farming it back up.
The post Aberroth Down appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
