Whelp friends… I screwed up. November, December, and January were exceptionally busy months for me. At some point during that time I was only saved from the repo man by my friend Sol who happened to pop into my house and see that it was set for demolition. She unfortunately could not save me this time, and last night someone on Gamepad posted about the monthly routine of logging in and checking on the houses… which prompted a panic moment. I checked the email bound to that account from bed only to find out that my house in Final Fantasy XIV was repossessed on January 15th. So I had screwed up royally and cost myself my “perfect” house as a result. Weirdly I am not as devastated as I thought I would be. The big reason why this happened is that my FFXIV account is bound to an account that I do not check on regularly and apparently went over two months without logging into it.
On some level, my house was an attempt to capture the magic of a specific time and place when the game was super engaging for me. Our original Free Company house was Mists number 13, and when I was able to get that I thought maybe it would unlock an attachment to the game that I had been missing. It did not. Sure I spent a bit of time obsessing over housing details, but quickly I abandoned that project for more exciting things and my poor house sat for a year with only the most sparse decorations. I thought maybe it would ground me into the community… but in truth, the neighborhood was in was pretty dead. On the day a bunch of us got houses it was pretty hopping, but in each return visit, I saw pretty much no one.
On some level buying a house was like trying to buy my way back to a place and time shrouded in the deep past. This was taken from our old FC house, and our old Neighborhood… with the lively folks that were so community-oriented that we had a neighborhood linkshell. Truth be told… of that old crew of players the only one that I ever talk to on a regular basis is Ayla who is the miquote pictured above. Most of the other folks in that neighborhood are no longer even on Cactuar and have migrated off to other servers. Our Free Company also is nowhere near as active as it used to be. So the game just does not feel the same. I thought maybe owning the same plot of land would rekindle some of those feelings and it maybe did for a short period of time… but not long enough to keep me active.
The other truth is that I have changed. I am just not as interested in MMORPGs as I once was. Recently I returned to World of Warcraft after over two years away from it… and while I had quite a bit of fun for a few weeks I am already on my way out of that game as well. I leveled to the cap, then decided that there really wasn’t anything else that I wanted to do and wound up bouncing hard. This has been the case with FFXIV and the post-Stormblood expansions. I show up… have a lot of fun leveling through the main story quest, and then bounce shortly after hitting the level cap and doing some rudimentary gearing. I am not sure why I changed, but I most definitely did. So while I could be bitter about losing my housing plot and the money that I laid out in buying stuff for it… but in truth, I just can’t seem to muster much ire other than a “well shit”.
Truth be told… I think I am okay with this. Having my own housing plot really didn’t bring me much more happiness than having unfettered access to the Free Company plot does. The biggest change is that I stopped seeing a lot of the familiar faces from Shriogane that I had come to know, like the folks who lived across the street from our Free Company. I had thought if I ever lost the house I would decide that I was “officially done” with the game, but in truth, I am finding it doesn’t really matter that much one way or the other. I am way more attached to my Hideout in Path of Exile than I ever was to the housing plot that I purchased a little over a year ago. Maybe whoever buys the plot will be happier with it than I was. Maybe it will be the act that binds them to the game and makes the feel part of something. Maybe a fledgling Free Company will use it as a base of operations for many fun adventures. I am okay with letting it go, mostly because I have to be. It was my own damned fault and my own lack of focus that caused it.
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Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore.
Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.
Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.
I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.
Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.
Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut.
I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch.
The post Precarious Potty appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.
I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.
Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.
Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.
Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.
I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.
The post Talking to Animals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we start off with a topic about in-game events, and how wildly different they can be between various games. Specifically, this topic was inspired by the Star Citizen IAE 2953 event but we give into many different game events. Ash gets around to playing Armored Core 6 and talks about how awful the intro to the game is. Bel laments how sometimes maybe being a more Open World experience makes a game worse. Specifically, this is inspired by Jedi Survivor and how it is a much less tight game than Fallen Order. Shocking to no one we dive into another Path of Exile topic and more specifically how Kodra and Bel completed some dumb Trial of the Ancestors’ achievements. Bel has finished Alan Wake II and gives the game another hard plug and then talks a bit about how Guild Wars 2 Secrets of the Obscure is really good.
