castoria – AggroChat

I am still playing a heck of a lot of Guild Wars 2. Last night I spent my evening doing sibling time with Ace, and I feel bad for how not into GW2 they are…. yet I continue to talk about it. I managed to catch Tequatl last night, which always makes me happy. This is, without a doubt, my favorite event in the game. I think it was legitimately one of the first events that I stumbled onto on my own, and I have loved it ever since. I have also had better-than-average luck at getting ascended gear. In fact, I have a few coffers in the bank waiting to be used by someone. At some point, I need to start properly working on legendary armor sets.

I, of course, had to set loose the Pineapple Choya. These are, without a doubt, the best parts of the Castoria housing, and I have to set them free anytime I am in housing collecting my harvest nodes. Basically, right now I am only playing Belgraves, my hunter, for dailies and assorted reset collection. I have my housing, then three guild halls to collect resources from. Additionally, I have a bunch of characters parked at various chests around the world. These are mostly for collecting rare resources that can only be gotten daily. The level of detail in this game and the systems within systems is one of the things that attracts me. However, in talking with Ace, one of the biggest problems is how far behind you feel when you are just starting out.

I’ve been spending most of my time on Belglorian, my spearbender guardian. At this point, I have completed four of the Human zones, four of the Norn zones, and last night I spent the majority of my time doing world completion. I am currently working on the final Norn zone, and at some point will return to the Human lands and pick up the final zone there. This is still the chillest activity in any game, I swear. There is just something relaxing about following the marker to all of the objectives that I have not completed. I think I am over halfway through the zone I am working on.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have now made it far enough to collect the free passive skill that comes from a player having sacrificed their level 100 character to the void. I really think this concept is cool, that one player in each league can sacrifice themselves to give everyone an extra passive. I have been grinding away on my Raven RF Witch, trying to get it to level 90 and knock out one of the achievements. The build works well enough, but is nowhere near as broken as some of the other popular builds in this league. I had to drop one of my minions, which was a bit of a bummer, but I picked up Morior Invictus to greatly increase my survivability. It is unfortunate that this one chest piece is better than pretty much anything else in the game.

All of this said, I am very likely dropping POE2 entirely tomorrow when the Trial of the Ancestors Returns event happens in Path of Exile. The big thing about this event is that we get back Trial of the Ancestors, but with the Phrecia ascendancies. The big thing about it is that we are getting these alternate ascendancies without the bullshit that is the Gauntlet, and without the Idol-based Atlas passives. I played a Poison SRS build on the Servant of Arakali build during the gauntlet and had a lot more fun, but would have had way more fun if I could have just played it in a normal league. As a result, I am resurrecting BelLovesArakaali and seeing how far I can take it without all of the restrictions. The event starts at 5 pm CDT, and I am hoping I can get back from chemo, take a nap, and be ready for the launch.

Have you made a return to Guild Wars 2? Are you still playing Path of Exile II? Are you going to try the upcoming Phrecia event tomorrow? Drop me a line below.

The post Tequatl and Phrecia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

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.