Good Morning Folks. Today is like Rex Manning day… except it is the launch of the Keepers League in Path of Exile. I took the day off… which generally is a mistake to do for the launch of anything. However I have a stack of tasks that I am going to try and accomplish today well before the 2pm CDT launch time of the league. I am still trying to maintain a minimum amount of activity in Destiny Rising, and quite possibly the hardest thing that I do every day… is following around new lights and trying to get them to interact with me. I am sure it seems SUPER creepy to see this person following you around in Haven and doing a “Hey” which in my case is my Jolder dancing in front of them. Most do not have a clue what to do, but I am always super thankful when someone clicks on the bubble and responds back giving me those coveted mentor program interactions.
Since the Halloween event was a complete bust, Ace and I still got together last night and finished out our runs of Morgran’s Hunt. I did not get any more exotic weapons, but I did pull an exotic weapon mod from a silver key. We had what was probably our best run ever running with this trio of Estela. I am not entirely certain what it is about her kit, but she is the absolute best character to run Morgran’s Hunt or honestly any of the Morgran content. I am kind of hoping that we scored well enough to get the chat bubble, though it is not like I actually use chat enough for this to matter. I hate that these things are limited time and go away when the next event starts. Anything temporary like that makes me value it extremely lowly, when it comes to time spent.
We then yolo’d our way through the last two parts of the raid, and while I feel like I firmly grasp the third phase… I still have no real idea what was going on for the second. We ended up splitting up on seperate teams and I think I mostly followed the lead of the other players and we nailed the encounter on first attempt. The final boss aka the third phase of the raid was pretty fun, and I think in the future we will probably just queue for that. I lucked out and pulled the exclusive exotic shotgun from the middle phase, and weirdly enough pulled two copies of it at the same time because I spent one of the extra loot tokens. I can’t see actually using this weapon because Crescendo is just so good for Gwynn, and Jotun is so good for Xuan Wei. That leaves pretty much no one that can use a shotgun for whom this would be a good option. Still I will take the ascendancy points for picking up this. If nothing else it looks really cool.
We finished up in time for me to actually join in the reindeer games for Guild Wars 2. I did not originally intend on doing this, but folks were gathered and I was going to log into GW2 anyways… so I figured I might as well be social. We started the night with some RIBA but quickly transitioned to running Dragon’s Stand because Ashgar needed the Hero Points from it. It was wildly how fast we coalesced from not really having enough people… to wrecking everything in sight. Huge props to Sita for taking up the commander banner so that I did not have to. I was feeling somewhat out of it last night, and I did not really want to take responsibility for anyone but myself… even though being a commander in a meta like this is mostly just being in the correct lane. Folks have done the entire thing often enough that it mostly leads itself.
Right now I am really struggling to find forward momentum in the expansion for Guild Wars 2. The bug that I encountered have put me in a rather undesirable position. I had to hop onto an alt to fix the bugged state of my skimmer mastery. Then that unfortunately put me in a position where I effectively need to grind out two full ranks of the mastery so that I can keep progressing the main story. I hate that mastery points and such get blended into the story. I am very much the sort of person that wants to grind my way through all of the story at once, and any forced faffing about just ends up pissing me off. I get that Guild Wars 2 is trying to expose players to new mechanics and such, but it just feels bad when I have to stop progress to fiddle around in a zone. I love open world content, but I like doing it on my own terms, after I have unlocked everything.
I think the other thing that is harming my joy is that I am really amped for a new Path of Exile league, and mostly just want to be playing that. Visions of Eternity will be there waiting on me, and it is not like I am in any real rush. Hell, most of my crew that I am playing with are not even caught up to the point where I am with other expansions, so it is not like I need to rush in order to keep up with the pack. I’ve unlocked Galeshot, Ritualist, and Evoker and I will probably fiddle around with all three while doing dailies and weeklies going forward. However I doubt I make much progress in the expansion overall until after the newness of the first week of league start wears off a bit.
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Today was the release of the Festival of the Lost event in Destiny Rising, and I have to admit I have been looking forward to this. Festival of the Lost was hands down my favorite event to occur in Destiny 2, and it always had some kind of cool trick or treat theming, and while the masks were entirely cosmetic it was still cool to collect them. So I have to admit I am more than a little disappointed in the event that we got. Since October 23rd when the roadmap of content for the event dropped, it was teased that we would be getting some sort of activity starting on the 30th and continuing through until November 13th. I had hopes this would be really cool, and maybe offer something interesting to chase.
Today is the 30th and the event has started, and effectively what we get… is a rebranding of Singularity in the Realm of the Nine for the Festival called the Haunted Singularity. Over the next ten days they are releasing a new section of the event, and each day you have access to run it once on Normal mode and once on Challenge mode where you can gain limited quantities of bulk resources. You also gain a currency called Eerie Amber that you can collect 15 per day, which then unlocks 8 Moebius Clusters over the course of the event, and at 100 Amber collected you get a Hive Pumpkin mask cosmetic. All of which would honestly be fine if the event were enjoyable.
The problem that I have is that the Realm of the Nine is fun, because it allows you to stack a bunch of overpowered abilities and see just how fast you can decimate the waves. Part of the process of unlocking Trial of the Nine is spending points on this talent tree of sorts, that allows you to reroll modifiers if you get three that are bummers. Unfortunately the Haunted Singularity doesn’t have access to those perks and you pretty much are stuck with whatever you get for choices. Most of these take away powers, and instead replace them with ways to collect candy. So it means you are effectively taking way the fun portion of Realm of the Nine and replacing them with a candy grind. I will do these each day, but largely out of a general feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment. I will chain run Realm of the Nine Chaos mode for the pure love of the event, even if I am not getting good rewards for doing so.
So you are probably thinking… Hey Bel, what about the candy grind? Does it give you anything good? I mean technically you get a Season of Daybreak Engram for each Candy Bucket that you craft. It takes 200 candy to craft a bucket, and these give you one guaranteed Engram and 60 Bright Dust. Both of which feel like they are pretty underwhelming rewards. If you have not opened many Seasonal Engrams, then I guess this might be a way of getting them, Generally speaking however they mostly just reward stickers and weapon shaders, with the rare chance at maybe getting a weapon skin. I hope they improve these for the next season because they have largely felt like a pointless grind. The only thing unique or interesting in this event is that Pumpkin Helmet, which I will get because I am that kind of dumb… but it isn’t necessarily something I am excited to be doing.
The other thing that is somewhat frustrating about the event is that new players are largely going to be excluded from the heroic content. It suggests 65k light in order to run it, and that is honestly not the easiest thing to acquire in the world. New lights are absolutely not going to be able to participate, and for the tryhards… I am not really sure there is anything in this event that is that worth chasing. Admittedly we are all probably going to get the pumpkin hat, because it exists… but I am hoping that maybe they add something else to the later phases of the event because neither the candy grind or any of the rewards from it seem that interesting.
On the more positive side of things, we did get a preview of what the next season is going to look like. We are getting a new map, new gauntlet blitz, and new activities. Additionally Maru, which is a character from the closed testing phases is going to be available. However I believe she has effectively the same weapon loadout as Ikora, so I am not really sure it is going to be worth chasing. It looks like maybe there is an exotic associated with her that we are getting skins for as well. I mean a new map will be pretty great, and that more than anything is what the game needs… new areas to explore and new things to do. However they also really need to go through the content that is not being played, and give it some chase drops that give people reasons to play it. Trials of the Nine Chaos mode is so good because even without any of the daily pinnacle rewards, you still have a chance at getting exotic artifacts… albeit really slim.
In the funny side of things… I spent the pull currency that I got from the event and for the maintenance patch and got my last Ikora needed to have a fully decked out version. Again… she is quite possibly the worst character currently in the game, but we have fun playing her. I also have a fully talented out version of Finnala, which is similarly not a great character and mostly a worse version of Wolf. I am looking forward to my time away from the game playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping when I drop this game down into maintenance mode levels of play… it will get better and I will be excited to come back to it. Likely still going to keep doing dailies, but today I could not be bothered with trying to get three new lights to interact with me for the mentor quest.
I think I might just be grumpy and disappointed. Though that said, I cannot see anyone excited about the Festival of the Lost in this state.
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Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.
However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.
An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.
Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.
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Good Morning Folks. It was a weird weekend. I spent a good chunk of it working on the garage since it was much cooler out there than it has been. At this point I have cleaned out the north side of the garage, put up cabinets, and then shifted anything that did not fit from the south side of the garage and acquired and put up the first two cabinets over there. This involved moving out some rather shitty storage options that we have had since college… and have been in place for almost thirty years. One of which I am going to give to my neighbor who sells stuff at craft fairs, because technically it was designed to be collapsible and easy to set up vendor storage that came from a garage sale in college. I could have sworn we had two of these, but I have no clue what happened to the second one over the years. It was bad at doing its job, so it must go and be replaced by nice modular shelving from Sam’s club, because they are cheap, readily available, and something I can buy a few at a time as I have made space for them.
Most of my gaming has been in Destiny Rising. Today is the reset of a new week and I noticed that I finally placed in the shooting range. I did notice that my friend Lociana actually got a space, and Ace kept one placement specifically for Calamity Ops. I have no clue why we do not seem to be getting credit for The Expanse. That one remains empty, and in theory we still need to do the last few parts of the raid so that we can have people showing up on those platforms as well. I like this concept honestly, because one of the cool figures is you can test drive your packmates characters. I mean you can already borrow characters from your friends, but it is extra cool that there is an entire baked in system for this. I honestly wish that there were more of these podiums but one for each character, so you could see how your friends built characters that you might not be playing, rather than just who scored the highest.
I was honestly shocked to see my own character represented on a podium… then I remembered that I actually managed to get a phenomenally good time on Break In, enough to rank my random group 8th on the North American server. If nothing else it was cool to see myself showing up in the ladders for awhile. I have no clue what my final rank was before reset, but it was clearly good enough to get my Jolder riding that podium. While not the strongest or even best character to bring for most content that is focused on damage output… I love my Jolder girl and will always probably be most comfortable playing her. In theory I bring a lot of survival to the team, which makes squishier damage dealers better… but I do second guess some of the activities that I would normally bring her on.
For example, since forming our own pack one of the things that we have been hunting down is a Stronghold, because this is content that I never got to participate in during the wanderer pack. Essentially every member gets 3 attempts at this content for free, before needing to spend pack actions. You are likely going to need this, because the boss that you end up fighting is a giant bag of hitpoints and you have a limited amount of time to dps this down. This is honestly a common gacha trope, and there are a few versions of this that play out in AFK Journey for example, where the entire server or guild joins together to beat down a large health pool. However I question if bringing Jolder on this was a good idea. I did effectively soak a lot of the hate from the boss and keep over-shield rolling on my party… but you can see how much less damage I did overall than Ace did playing Estela. I think in future weeks I am just going to run Estela as well so we can hopefully whittle this down in fewer turns. For the week though we managed to clear two strongholds, which meant loot for everyone in the guild.
We also managed to collect enough materials, and craft enough tchotchkes to upgrade our hangar to rank four. We are burning through the guild ranks pretty quickly, and will be capped out at the final rank of Nightfall before much longer. I am surprised at how fast this goes considering we really only have a handful of players. There are a core group of Greysky folks in the guild, but other than that we have one person that I picked up from my wanderer pack, and another person that seemingly found our guild and joined it on their own. The fact that Ace and I both have second accounts, seems to also be helping the process out, but regardless we are moving through levels quickly.
I honestly still have the pack set to auto approve folks, so if you are playing Destiny Rising and want to be part of our nonsense feel free to join. You have to unfortunately drop your current pack before the game will allow you to join a new one, which made for the whole process of creating this a bit maddening because I could not even throw out an invite until they had left their currently situation. So long as you are going to be pretty chill and relaxed, and don’t do anything wildly offensive… you are welcome. We tend to hang out on my Super Dungeon Friends Discord when we are doing group content, so it is easy for folks to join in the nonsense. There is a Destiny flag in the role assignment channel, but I believe I made it so that once you get flagged for accepting the rules, you can see everything. This tends to be where we organize everything, so similarly if you ever want to join in on our Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans, we arrange that in the Guild Wars 2 channel.
In other news that I am proud of, I am up to five characters at gold rank. I currently have Wolf, Ning Fei, and Tan-2 all in about the same relative position for my next gold. Ning is who I intend on pushing up there, but progress is slow because it entirely relies upon the same limited currency. I got an infusion with the last reset, but am once again stalled out until I can get some more of it. You need six to buy the final rank of abilities, and you can only realistically get four per calamity ops reset. This is the thing that wears on me about the long term viability of Destiny Rising. I feel like they need to give more reasons to run something other than the two seasonal modes… because you can only do so much of that and they reset super infrequently. All of the things that no one queues for… need to be given a reason for folks to queue for them.
Probably the thing that I am most focused on grinding out each day is all of the nonsense needed to upgrade my mentor status. I already have Daybreaker because I run a lot of content, and have run a lot of it with new lights. The more grinding things are “interactions” with new lights which means that you either need to cheer them and get them to cheer you back, or give them an award in a activity… and get them to give you a reward back. Mostly this involves running around haven and aggressively greeting new lights until one of them FINALLY greets you back. The drift bottles and mentor chat is just spamming chat channels… which I feel are counter intuitive to these features. Apparently the next step involves posting things in these same chat channels and begging people for likes. This is dumb, and should maybe be focused on something a bit more conducive to building a successful game.
Ace and I are going to try and knock out a bunch of the new week stuff because the rest of the week is going to be pretty fraught when it comes to playing Destiny Rising. Tomorrow the new Guild Wars 2 expansion drops, and I am probably going to be spending a lot of time playing through that content. Then on Friday the new Path of Exile 3.27 league drops at 12pm PDT, and I took the day off work so expect me to be grinding that like a madman for most of the weekend. Right now I am in the doldrums waiting on those things to drop.
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