Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.
I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.
One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.
Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.
I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.
I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.
I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.
The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.
Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.
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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.
The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.
My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.
I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.
New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.
All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.
Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a week, and as a result… I’ve missed several days of blogging. On Wednesday morning I had an issue come up that forced me to stop what I was doing and rush into the office physically to deal with it. Then yesterday from 7 am I was on a conference bridge for the entire morning dealing with a production rollout. In both cases… I could have probably blogged later in the day but the realities of the working world drained any desire to do so out of me. I spent last night hanging out on voice and doing nonsense in Guild Wars 2 and that helped quite a bit. I also spent about 30 minutes on voice with Ace venting about various work related stuff on both of our sides, and that probably helped more. The only problem with not blogging for several days is time gets somewhat squishy in my head as to what happened when and in what sequence.
If my memory is correct, Tuesday I hit the credit roll for the main story of Destiny rising, which means that I have officially entered the endgame. The story was pretty freaking great and in truth much better than all of the core stories in both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Destiny was a game series with a lot of really interesting lore, but if you were not willing to watch a literal 10 hour long Destiny Lore video from Byf.… you were going to not understand 90% of it. Both games were exceptionally bad at explaining the world and telling a coherent story, and Destiny Rising is not. Sure it starts out a little twee at times as do most mobile games… it builds into something rather formidable and I legitimately look forward to the next content drop. This game is essentially a prequel happening in a slightly different universe… allowing them leverage to change whatever they need to change and I think this is a good thing. The speaker for example is a child in this version, which should give you a bit of a reference for how many years before the original game this takes place. Guardians for example do not exist yet as a concept… there are just lightbearers and there is evidence than our character might become the official first Guardian.
Similarly the concept of the various orders of guardians, do not exist either. There are no Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks… even though characters largely follow those same templates in the way that they move. Wolf for example gets double jump as opposed to distinct flavors of boosted jumps that Titans or Warlocks get. A given character is a combination of an Element, two unique abilities, and a unique super that then gets combined with a fixed primary weapon and a fixed heavy weapon. This honestly creates some really unique templating of characters in that two characters with similar loadouts might feel completely different because they have unique abilities to go with those loadouts. I still play way more of Wolf the default character than I do any of the other heroes, but I have become fond of Kabr, and Xuan Wei. None of these are the “meta” which seems to revolve around the 5 star champions of Tan-2, Gwynn, and Jolder.
I do have Tan-2 and just pulled Jolder yesterday off the free banner, so I might actually start investing in that character a bit with my limited resources. That honestly becomes the challenge is that it is really cumbersome to swap characters at some point. I greatly prefer games like AFK Journey where you are buffing one entire class of characters, rather than investing in one specific champion to pour all of your daily resources into. I’ve not really encountered much in the way of things that Wolf cannot do… save for missions that specifically require precision damage to take down what are effectively this games version of break bars. I greatly prefer the Auto Rifle to pretty much every other weapon in the Destiny universe… and swapping to a champion like Jolder means giving that up as their combo is Submachine Gun, and Sword. I am hoping i can pick up Riskrunner which is my all time favorite of the exotic Submachine Guns.
There is a new banner available right now and on that banner are a couple of new characters… one of which I’ve pulled a few times with what available currency I had. Umeko is essentially the Destiny version of a Ninja. She fires off Shuriken and then has a finisher that is essentially a massive one. The loadout is Scout Rifle and Sniper Rifle, which makes her an almost purely ranged champion and one that feels more than a little bit squishy. I really need to have a precision champion that I am comfortable playing, but that is likely going to be Tan-2 instead since I have that 5 star champ who is very much on meta because he also comes with this games version of the well of light. It does not hurt that he also sort of looks like Sektor from Mortal Kombat which is its own coolness factor. After playing an Exo titan for years in both Destiny games, I am partial to Exos as a whole. I wish the game honestly would have allowed me to play one here for the Wolf character.
Right now the game seems to give you about 120 of the daily activity currency, and it costs 20 to run any of the individual activities. When you complete one there is the option of spending twice as much currency when you loot the chest to get twice as many rewards. This is pretty nice and allows you to really efficiently make some progress on farming whatever you need to farm. I’ve been targeting the activities that reward Mythic weapons and engrams as I am trying to collect the full set. The Mythic Weapon Engrams allow you to buy new copies of any mythic weapon you have already found, whereas the Mythic Choice engrams allow you to choose any weapon that can drop from a given activity. There are about a half dozen weapons that I have not seen yet, and it is likely just going to be random chance to come across those.
The game seems to really want me to play Kabr, because at this point I have gotten enough duplicates to slot 4 of his 6 talent points… which means before long I will have him maxed out. This does the whole Genshin thing where getting duplicates of a character gives you currency to spend on buffing that one character. Thankfully I enjoy Kabr quite a bit, because his barrier really takes the pressure off on several boss fights because you can safely stand behind it blocking onerous beam attacks and such. The pulse rifle is not exactly my favorite weapon, but I’ve always liked the Heavy Machinegun because it feels especially good during boss burn phases where you need to do a lot of damage to weak points from range. I am also really partial to the fact that he walks around with a shield all of the time… which is admittedly one of the reasons why I am wanting to invest in Jolder a bit, because she gets the Captain America shield throw.
I am having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, and it seems especially poignant right now how good this game is… when so many players are exceptionally frustrated with how bad the latest content drop is in the mainline Destiny 2. There has already been talk from mainline content creators about swapping over to more of a Destiny Rising focus, and I feel like this is only going to accelerate that. It isn’t really often when a mobile port completely cannibalizes the player base… but I do wonder if we are going to see something similar play out with the Mobile version of Final Fantasy XIV. For now at least I am having a blast and am happy to reach the relaxing daily grind portion of the game. I like consistent grinds way more than I like pushing through story content. I think my brain is just wired that way.
In other news I am contemplating giving the next Diablo 4 season a spin. I’ve skipped the last few but given that I am mostly done with POE2 and Last Epoch and POE 3.28 will not drop until the end of October… there is a bit of a lull where I might as well give it a shot. There is another livestream coming up on the 16th and I think that is really going to seal whether or not I am going to give this a go. Supposedly they are taking a lot of the feedback from players into account and trying to improve things. The problem is… Blizzard is a massive ship and seems to take forever for it to turn and adjust to things. I have no clue what I am going to play. I’ve only ever really played Barbarians, Necromancers, and Spiritborn so I might give something else a shot. I really wish they had a Paladin/Crusader because that is the other traditional Diablo character that I really enjoy. Druid always looks cool, but it is a pain to level at start. That really is the problem with so many ARPG classes is that they feel bad for those first 20 levels… which makes it hard to keep pushing forward.
As far as weekend plans. I really need to start making a pile in the backyard so that I can contact the folks that we have used to haul stuff away in the past. There is just a bunch of shit that I need to get out of the garage so I can have some swap space to start putting up shelving units. I really need to free up space in the garage so it can be more organized… and so that I can be ready to put away all of the furniture in the backyard as the temps start to drop. I also really want to clear off the workbench out there so I can set up at a minimum a FDM printer. There have been so many cases lately where I just want one to build brackets and storage options.
The post The End is the Beginning appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there who might be listening to our show. We are down an Ash and a Grace and have an under-the-weather Kodra, but push on. We start off with Bel asking the question: What is the bare minimum required for something to be called a crossover in a game? Kodra shares his thoughts about his playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and how it gives the impression of time pressure, but that there really is not any. This branches off into a whole discussion about imaginary time pressure and actual hard clocks in games. Weirdly, this also then branches off into a discussion about how “sexytime” is handled in games. In a more pure gaming experience, Tam shares his thoughts about the wildly successful Burrows and Badgers. Bel talks about rolling a Gauntlet character in the Sir Gog led Path of Exile league and hitting a hard stop in Act 8. Finally, we talk a bit about Dune Awakening and then attempt to explain the Dune universe to Kodra.
Topics Discussed:
What Constitutes a Crossover in a Video Game?
Diablo IV x Berserk Collaboration
Cyberpunk 2077 and the implication of time pressure.
