Good Morning Folks. Last night was “Sibling Time ™” and for the majority of the night, we were just hanging out on voice and talking. I was spun up and needed to vent my grievances towards the medical industry… and I am just getting started, but so fucking tired of everything. Later in the evening, we joined up in Enshrouded and ran around together. Ace is way further progressed than I am, and I abused some of their locations so I could see some of the late-game content. I also abused access to some significantly higher-level mobs to get some really fast levels. The irony is that the legendary gear that I am wearing is way more than capable of taking down these mobs that are roughly 10 levels higher than I am. I experienced my first frostbite, or whatever the effect is called, which threatens you with hypothermia. It was quite a bit of fun, even though it was a pretty short outing.
Ace also showed off this location on the map, where they had access to massive fields for growing crops. Among the gardens, they also created this awful bed of shroud plants, which sort of look like demonic wacky waving arm guys. You can’t get the full effect from a screenshot… but it looks so wrong to be standing here and letting them move around you. I am absolutely going to steal this idea from them for one of my forward bases so that I can use it for crops as well. I need to get more serious about progression in my world, rather than just completing quests. I’ve been so heavily focused on collecting all of the bits and bobs that the NPC crafters are acting for, and spending little to no time actually progressing the state of my world and collecting resources. I really wish the game had a better inventory and storage system, because I hate dealing with a bunch of random boxes full of stuff. I am sure I could, in theory, mod this problem away, but it won’t help me for my multiplayer shenanigans.
I seem to have settled in nicely with World of Warcraft, and I spent some time this morning working on my house. I have an octagon room that I have essentially subdivided into multiple rooms. This is more or less “my” room and represents things that I have collected in my adventures, with one side a small bedroom and the other side an office, that branches off this central chamber that is somewhat of a war room. I downloaded the Homebound addon, and plan on using it to back track and sort out what sorts of things I should go out into the world and farm. This essentially tells you every quest chain that unlocks some sort of housing resource. I will likely focus on the drops first since that is a bit more easily done than going and doing bullshit like the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.
I am also enjoying the content surrounding the guild village that I live in. There are specific endeavors that we can do each week to gain points for the guild, and we have already maxed out the bar as of this morning. It reminds me a bit of the Garrison system, but in the best possible way. I honestly wish they would have embedded some of that functionality in housing, to give us more to do here other than running around and collecting beans and luckydoos. Still, it sort of feels neat to have a village of our own. Coming back to the guild has been interesting because I have been gone for so long that, really… at the end of the day, it ceased to be the guild that I ran eons ago. There are a bunch of the same people, but also a ton of new people that I do not know at all. It will be interesting getting to know folks, especially if I stick around for a while. I might actually force myself onto Discord so I can hang out with folks and speed up the acclimatization process.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time leveling characters, and of all of the random things, I am playing Lodin… who was my very first raid main. Hillariously this character is still in the Late Night Raiders chat channel, and I noticed yesterday that Kerrun was as well. It makes me wonder how many of the active crew are still in that channel. I would sort of expect that maybe Erixi and Kylana were both in it as well. I remembered the /chatwho command so I could list out who was in it. It is weird how many muscle memory things come back to you when you are dropped into a familiar environment with a familiar character. I am, of course, leveling Beast Mastery so that I can have two pets. I should, in theory, be pushing through the remainder of the War Within campaign, but I have been enjoying playing alt characters way too much to focus on anything much.
I’ve also spent a little bit of time over on my Horde main from Facepull, which is my Blood Elf Paladin. I was legally required to go over and set up his outfit so he would stop looking like a mismatched mess on my Warband screen. I have done a bunch of different outfits throughout the years, so I went back with this purple and green illidari theme. I swear I had a mace that worked better with this outfit, but when I was setting things up, I could not seem to find it. I wish the in-game cosmetic system allowed you to search by color palette. There is probably an add-on for this, but I could not be bothered to go looking for one. Chances are someone will respond in the comments with exactly the name of said addon if I wait long enough. I am not sure if I will level as prot like I usually do, or instead go retribution.
Technically, Midnight launches tomorrow if you bought in and got access to the head start. I did this thing, but I am uncertain if I will actually start the new content or instead wrap up the War Within. I know the main story beats so it is not like I need to see the content in order to understand it. This is not Final Fantasy XIV, and I am not waiting with bated breath on the conclusion of a ten-year saga. There has been way too much retconning going on in the World that is Warcraft for me to be super concerned about the purity of the story experience. So essentially, there is nothing much stopping me from diving straight into the new content. Both Belghast and Belgraven are sitting at level 80 thanks to the Twilight Highlands event. It is somewhat hilarious that I have two max-level characters… and they are both warriors. I guess tomorrow will see whether or not I join in the reindeer games.
All of this said… I am having a lot of fun being back in Warcraft.
The post LNR Channel Still Exists appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Right now, I am all over the place in my gaming, and cannot seem to land on any particular title as my main grind. I know this is going to rapidly change because we are two weeks out from the drop of a new Path of Exile league, and I am certain I will be devoting all of my time and attention to the 3.28 Mirage League. However, for the time being, I am playing a game for an hour or so and then flipping to a different game. I wish I could mainline Dune Awakening, but the combat is way too focused for me to spend much time in it. I need games where I can turn my brain off, and this is not that game. I am still enjoying myself, but doing things in the world requires too much attention and cannot really be chained with something else like an audiobook. There is a weird bug happening right now where I will consistently log in on top of my base, so I made a rooftop entrance to solve this problem quickly.
The biggest achievement for the weekend is that I expanded my base, made my craft floor two floors high to accommodate some of the larger crafting machines like the vehicle fabricator, and made my very first buggy. We talked a bit about this on the podcast this weekend, but each vehicle that you acquire feels like a massive quality-of-life improvement. I am still working on unlocking the research needed to get the mining rig, but once I do so, I will be taking this out into the desert in hunt for more materials, and rapidly speeding up acquisition. Right now, I am more gated by levels and research than pretty much anything else. I need to really buckle down and focus on taking out some of the bandit camps, especially since I just upgraded to the slavers stillsuit and have a bit more armor. I need higher damage weapons, but that is going to require me to craft a weapons fabricator… which again needs more research points. I might bip over to the Anvil and see if there is anything I can buy there that might help me out.
Tam has a really good base in the North, so I think I might be keeping this one for a while. At some point, I will abandon my Hagga South base, but I have left it up and running because there are still some folks down in the south questing. I know Mor found my base yesterday, and it serves as a great staging location for both the shipwreck and the testing station. Really, I need to push the main story quest forward a bit and need better weapons. I might research where the really good legendary crafting patterns drop in these middle zones and set out to get some of those. I also might flip the style of my base from the standstone dormitory to one of the other appearances. I really like the existence of the “replace” tool for this purpose.
I spent a fair amount of time in Enshrouded, roaming around and unlocking crafting NPCs for my current save file. A lot of this has centered around climbing up to some high point and then gliding long distances since I have one of the really nice legendary gliders. I need to spend some time looking for resources on this game, because surely by now someone has created the equivalent of POEDB for it. I really want to know where some of the good farms are now, and then set out to maybe get a good weapon with a rune socket in it. My armor seems fine, but not having a rune socket means I am missing some critical functionality. It feels like, at least for the short term, that sibling time is going to be in Enshroude,d and I like being overgeared for content.
In the continued focus of trying to find games for us to play together, I reinstalled Wayfinder to give it another spin. I remember us having fun with this, but since we last played it has transitioned from being a server authoritative online service, to a peer-to-peer buy-the-box sort of experience. Legitimately huge kudos to Airship Syndicate for doing this because when they realized it would not function as a live service, they pivoted the game design to being something that can be enjoyed evergreen by players. I wish more games would do this. I spent some time roaming around the world and did a dungeon, and it is still quite a bit of fun. The number of systems in this game is staggering, and I completely forgot that it had housing and mounts and all of that nonsense. It could definitely be fun to check things out further and see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.
Unfortunately, the art style… and the existence of the housing system… made me want to check out the new World of Warcraft housing system. I’ve kept my World of Warcraft account active for years, without really ever playing it. I reactivated it around the time The War Within launched, could not really get into that expansion… and then just never turned it off. I made an attempt to play during the Legion Remix and bounced from that as well. I will probably be talking a bit more about the current state of World of Warcraft in another video, but this morning I am largely going to talk about housing. I have to say… so far, I think this feels like a much better version of the Final Fantasy XIV housing system. At least at face value, it seems like it has gone back and added a bunch of new housing drops into older content, effectively making those evergreen. Giving players a reason to experience older content feels like a massive boost to the game in general. While this is still World of Warcraft, it feels like they are learning lessons from other games out there, and the fact that you collect appearances for your house and do not have to juggle physical objects… immediately puts this a world ahead of FFXIV.
I was surprised that there were still housing plots available in the House Stalwart neighborhood. Essentially, the Alliance gets a bunch of human-inspired housing areas, and I bought my plot in the area that is like a baby Duskwood. I have no clue what the Horde version of this looks like, but I kind of expect there to be areas that represent a bunch of in-game zones similar to how this one is. I seem to already have a massive amount of items unlocked through the content that I have already played through. I spent some time roaming around the housing area, and so far, the best-looking house is probably Kylana, the current Guild Leader of House Stalwart. I handed off to Elnore, Elnore handed off to Rylacus… Rylacus briefly handed it back to me during Pandaria, and then Rylacus got it back and made the very wise choice of handing it off to Kylana, who, to the best of my knowledge, has been the leader since at least Draenor. Ky was always a stable hand at the wheel, and I greatly appreciate him keeping active this thing that I so thoroughly abandoned.
As I said, I will probably talk a bit about my experience of getting back into World of Warcraft in a future post, but so far… thing seeem really well maintained. The new user interface system is shockingly good, and so far at least seems to be a cromulent replacement for all of the addons that I had been using. I purposefully installed the game fresh on my new computer and did not take any time to install addons because I wanted to see what the stock experience looked like. I am honestly also enjoying the single combat button thing, which seems perfectly reasonable for brain-off grinding. I need to spend some time logging in my plethora of characters because each one I have done so has unlocked additional cosmetic appearances and housing tat. All in all, I am pretty impressed with what I have seen so far.
The post Digital Nesting appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, we talk about Dune Awakening and how many updates have been made since we last gave it a spin. Shortly after last week’s episode, Tam fired up the private server again, and we have been enjoying the changes. From there, we talk a bit about Enshrouded and Ace and Bel exploring the Hollow Halls, which is essentially that game’s version of a raid dungeon. Ash, Kodra, and Tam talk about trying to shape their runs in Shape of Dreams, and from there, we talk a bit about Towerbolt. Tam continues to dig deeper into Star Trek Online and begins engaging with proper buildcraft. Lastly, we have a few quick topics as we discuss the Last Epoch Season 4 trailer and the upcoming Path of Exile Mirage league.
Good Morning Folks! I took today off because I had some non-medical business to deal with… and all of my time has been spent dealing with medical nonsense. As a result, I slept in far later than normal, to the point where all of the cats seemed to think I was fundamentally broken. I had some wild dreams, and while they were not all connected, they all shared the general theme of ripping holes in reality. Take what you will of that. Sadly, yesterday was the end of the Phrecia 2.0 event in Path of Exile, and I have to say goodbye to my beloved Minions Servant of Arakaali character. I had so much fun with this build that I honestly might forgo my traditional Righteous Fire starter for some sort of minions character. Either that, or honestly, I had enough fun with my Golem Ice Trap Elementalist that I might try that instead as my starter. There is a teaser that might be hinting that some of the Phrecia classes are going core, and if that is the case… I may literally build the same damned character I played in Phrecia 2.0.
Yesterday, we got our official teaser trailer that revealed the name of the league, and I have to say… so far, nothing we have gotten as teasers has given us any real idea what the league is going to be like. Normally, by this point, we would have gotten at least a few quality of life improvement teasers, but no… all obtuse nonsense. My personal guess is that we are going to be presented with an NPC in maps that allows us to make one of two choices, which will change the way the rest of the map plays out. I am expecting this to be something akin to influence altars that present us with two choices, and each time we make it, we gain some terrible affix on our map… since GGG seems to like to kick us directly in the crotch as often as possible. The one thing I really hope about this upcoming league is that they have figured out a way to make T16.5 and T17 maps less complete ass. Other than that, I would really love to see Abyss from POE 2 come to POE 1, because it is so much more enjoyable than the de facto chase the green orb on your mini map version that we have now.
Other than that, I spent a bit of time in Dune Awakening, and I am working my way up to mining cobalt. I got my welcome back carepackage and it included way more resources than I expected, so as soon as I have the research points for it I will be learning how to make a Dune Buggy. As a result, I went ahead and added a proper garage to my base in the Vermillius Gap. I need to go back down south and farm the shit out of all of the missing intel that I left on the table as a result. I trained some points in Trooper to give me the shigawire claw, which feels like it is honestly required at this point. The nice thing about it is that it allows me to zoom in to the top floor of NPC bases so I can often times get in and out with intel before anyone even notices I am there. The defensive form thing was nice, but really bum rushing them with the knee and then stabbing them through their shield is my go to for dealing with the melee berserker types.
Building the garage has allowed me to expand out the top floor, and now I have so much room for activities. I kind of dig this weird three-story base thing that I have gone on, where the garage is at the lowest level, then the bottom floor has water tanks, blood recycler, and power plants, and then finally at the top floor you have most of the crafting machines and general storage. I also love the location of my base because there is Iron, Copper, Granite, Metal, and plenty of Water to harvest all within a few feet of my front door. Additionally, there are nearby Kirab bases that I honestly just need to get better at killing regularly for other materials. Sure, the welcome back package gave me stupid amounts of rare materials, but I don’t really want to lean on that if I can help it.
Other than Dune Awakening, I have also been playing some more Enshrouded. I am working towards various objectives in my most recent world, because I would like to ultimately see what all of the progression looks like at this point. I am running around on my highest geared character, but it has some minor problems… like all of the legendary gear I am using existed prior to rune sockets going into the game. So I have a great sword, for example, but one that I cannot socket a rune into. It will probably be a while before I find another equivalent weapon because I farmed all of them from the endgame chests to get the gear set that I am wearing now. Right now, I am mostly going through the process of unlocking all of the NPCs so I can finish building out my base properly.
Speaking of bases… I gave Ace shit for their minimalistic design, so I only find it fair to share my maximalistic nonsense. This is as far as I have gotten in my attempt to build all the way down to the shroud from the starter area. Making this even less realistic is the fact that I am carving out floors as I go down by tunneling out the rock from the mountainside with the place and remove trick. As I expand the footprint of my base, I will continue burrowing downwards, and at the same time expanding upwards into the vertical maximum height as well. At some point, I need to actually do something realistic with my design, where it is something more than just a series of empty floors. Right now I have a highly dysfunctional base, but I am not terribly far progressed, so it does not really matter that much.
I am also still occasionally piddling around in No Man’s Sky, and am working on unlocking the ability to process toxic waste. I happened upon a processing facility on the second planet and got the quest to upgrade my multi-tool to be able to handle it. This distracted me from the normal flow of the missions, and now I am largely roaming around the frosty surface of the planet, scanning everything that I can for credits. This morning, I ventured off towards some salvage… only to realize that, apparently, it is underground somewhere, and I could not see any obvious caves to explore. I’ve always enjoyed the super chill nature of this game, especially playing on super casual mode, where I am not constantly battling for my own survival. I like the concept of survival games, but hate the constant feeling that I am making zero progress, so when given the choice, I dial down the survival aspect so I can just enjoy the exploration.
The last monkey wrench to throw into the gears… is that I reinstalled Project Gorgon and decided to give it a look to see how it has progressed. I remember next to nothing about this game, but I do remember it reminding me quite a bit of Vanguard. Largely, I think this part was the fact that there are so many random trades that you can do. I inexplicably enjoy the fact that I can get points for burying my corpses. I played a bit last night… overpulled a half dozen spiders onto me… died and then returned to the spawn point. I think I am going to have to sort out my gear and abilities before I do something like that again. I did laugh heartily as I was attacked by an exploding sheep. I had been getting the itch to play something EverQuest adjacent, and maybe Gorgon will scratch that itch.
Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I need to pick up the house, gather my tax information, and deal with a few other things. Next week, we get our proper preview of the upcoming Path of Exile league, and I am looking forward to it.
The post Goodbye Arakaali appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
