Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.
I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.
One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.
I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.
Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.
Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.
The post All Over the Map appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.
With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.
So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.
I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.
In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.
All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.
Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.
Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.
The post Regretfully Seeking Luocha appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I talked about my recent Diablo IV adventures, which are admittedly largely led by a desire to keep hanging out with my friend Cyl. That is the game that she is playing so I keep offering myself as tribute to do whatever shenanigans she has in her mind. We did some Nightmare Dungeons last night and I have to admit… while I enjoyed hanging out I didn’t really enjoy the content. We were doing a variety of 21-23 dungeons and honestly… they just were not that fun. It might be that my level is lagging behind hers significantly, or it might be that the content just isn’t actually that fun… but whatever the case the moment we broke for the night I returned to my comfy standby… Last Epoch. I got my Druid to level 84 last night and am still hunting for a few pieces of gear. I need to sit down and properly sort out what I want for each slot and then adapt my loot filter for those specific stats.
Over the weekend I got the Spriggan build through all of the normal mode monoliths and unlocked Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 Legendary variants of each. I’ve been focused on farming Black Sun mostly for a chance at the squirrel hat aka Herald of the Scurry. I’ve yet to give up on the hope of eventually playing that build. More than anything at the moment I am just farming experience to gain levels. I would really like to have at least one character hit level 100 before the 1.0 drop. This is only the second character that I have hit Empowered Monoliths on so I am still relatively new to the Last Epoch endgame as a whole. That said I already feel like I could use some variety in my life with the content, and my hope is that we maybe see some of the randomization changes sooner rather than later. The Action RPG YouTube channel does a summary of the Friday dev chat live streams and it sounds like something akin to a Loot Goblin is a near-term addition.
I’ve been milking a little bit more experience out of the level 90 normal monoliths because they are so much more chill than empowered. I really need to get back into the habit of throwing on an audiobook while grinding, because when I am doing that… I don’t really notice the repetitive nature of doing monoliths or delve or whatever ARPG grind I happen to be engaged with. The Power sort of broke me as far as books go… and I’ve yet to really dive into another book after that. I tried starting a few but ended up bouncing pretty early. I have a target for the next novel to consume via Audio Book, but I just need to sit down and decide to do it.
At least until the next Path of Exile League, this is going to probably be my gaming happy place. I am still progressing in Honkai Star Rail and got my first character to level 70 last night. I’m going to need to do some devoted grinding in order to get the materials to pull up the rest of my team to 70 as well… then my secondary team after that. I’m pretty happy with the state of my gaming options at the moment. I have Final Fantasy XVI but since it is on console… I just never seem to feel like playing it. I realize I am the weirdo… but the idea of playing a game on a console just feels so exhausting. Controllers are not my natural mode of gameplay and while I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and Genesis… the moment I got access to a 386 computer I was all in on PC gaming. I am honestly somewhat annoyed that Square chose to launch that game ONLY on the PS5 for the time being. If they had done PS5 and Epic Game Store… I would be probably actively playing it on the PC right now.
Anyways hopefully your week is going smoothly. Mine is considerably less hectic than last week was now that the world around me has largely recovered from the storm damage. What are you playing right now? Drop me a line below. Last little note… if you are on Blue Sky you can follow me there now. I had a nice person shove an invite code into my hand. I am not entirely certain what I think about it so far. It feels really really basic, and I still greatly prefer mastodon/gamepad. I am however checking it a few times a day.
The post Spriggan Empowered Monoliths appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend I moved up into World Tier 4 of Diablo 4, which means I have finally entered the proper endgame. This happened largely due to the fact that my friend Cyl told me that Friday night we would be getting through the Fallen Temple, aka the Capstone dungeon blocking World Tier 4. She had been holding off on trying it, and I had failed it a few times… but together we wrecked the place. Essentially the combination of Sorceress and Barbarian was pretty potent and she would freeze things… and then I would spin on top of them with impunity wrecking their life pool. The final boss encounter was a bit tricky at times, and I had to abuse the fact that I am fairly sturdy and resurrect Cyl a few times. There are a lot of things that just having another person really helps for, and I like that self rezzing does not subtract from your life pool.
Nightmare Dungeons in theory probably should not exist prior to World Tier 4. They are a boring mess at low tiers that you can begin running in World Tier 3. As soon as you complete a Tree of Whispers in Tier 4 everything begins dropping at Tier 21 or higher. Completing one of these unlocks your ability to start salvaging and crafting Sigils. You can’t run a low-tier Sigil without dropping back down into World Tier 3, so essentially… everything that had been clogging my inventory was rendered worthless. Nightmare Dungeons in World Tier 4 is actually pretty enjoyable. This is maybe the content that has been missing from the game to this point and seems to be what the game is actually balanced around. It just sucks that it takes over 100 hours of gameplay to really see this content. That said it also still feels pretty grindy to be focused ONLY on Nightmare Dungeons.
Lately, most of my gameplay in Diablo IV has been centered around the boss and legion timers. The best site that I have found so far is D4 Armory, which also happens to be the site that offers the ability to link your character armory. Essentially it seems like bosses either spawn on a 5, 6, or 7 hour timer… and I cannot keep track of this shit so I am offloading that part of my brain to a timer website. Again I still feel like Blizzard needs to sort this shit a bit better than it currently is. If they want to rotate between Bosses, Helltides, and Legions… then in theory one of these should always be happening or no more than 15 minutes away from happening. Over the weekend I tried to catch as many of these as I could, and the Legion events specifically seem to be amazing experience gain.
The World Bosses themselves are not exactly what I would consider extremely fun encounters… but they also feel like something you really should not miss. One of the things that puzzled me is that I thought we would have more of them. As it stands there are three of them… Wandering Death, Avarice aka New Greed, and Ashava whom we fought in beta. Probably my favorite of these is Avarice simply because the teleport mechanic looks really cool. My least favorite is Ashava, mostly because Poison feels wildly overpowered right now as compared to the rest of the conditional damage types. None of them are terribly exciting however and I really feel like the Diablo IV team needs to play some Guild Wars 2. No game does large-scale spectacle fights as that game does, and it would feel better if there was some sort of zone meta that led to the boss encounter rather than just something randomly spawning every six hours or so.
My luck continues to hold… and I think Cyl is starting to get a little salty about it… in a joking way of course. When we took down Ashava the other night I walked away with two unique items, and she pretty much walked away with nothing but some rares to sell/salvage. I’ve not lucked into either of the two uniques that I still need, however. Essentially I need a new copy of Rage of Harrogath as I am still wearing a Sacred version of that and I need a copy of Gohr’s Devastating Grips to drop. I did pick up Temerity though so very happy to have that slot filled. However, as much effort has gone into gearing… does make me start to align with the “no reset seasons” camp. I just can’t fathom going through this much effort every season.
One thing that I do have to give massive credit to for Diablo IV is the cosmetic options. It has been rare that I have played a game with cosmetic outfits… that have felt so much worse than what was available in the game for free. New World comes to mind because a lot of the Twitch Prime drops are so much cooler looking than anything you can purchase on the in-game cash shop. In Diablo IV I am constantly finding items out in the world that are cosmetics for my horse. Similarly, most of the armor sets you find in the world are better looking than the cash offerings. It does sort of make me wonder if this will be counterproductive to the goals of Diablo IV being a more monetized ARPG than Diablo III was. It makes me wonder if they over-corrected into the realm of free cosmetics to try and minimize comparisons to the shit show of egregious microtransactions that was Diablo Immortal.
The one thing that continues to worry me a bit about Diablo IV, is that I am just never in the mood to solo grind in this game. I’ve had a lot of fun recently when playing on a focused activity with Cyl, but when it comes time to actually do stuff on my own… I tend to log out and play something else. I am not sure if this is a side effect of just how grindy everything is and knowing that it will all be for naught when the season starts, or if it is a greater side effect that the game isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I feel it should be. Whatever the case… I am mostly playing in burst when I happen to check the Armory and see that an event is just about to start. Cyl and I have been pinging each other when we notice a boss is just about to come up, and those moments have been enjoyable. However, Cyl is also grinding this as a mainline game and as a result roughly ten levels ahead of me at any given moment. I fully expect to be left in the dust at some point in the future, and I am not entirely certain I will have the desire to catch back up.
The post Diablo IV – World Tier 4 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
