Good Morning Folks. This weekend I decided to focus on trying to get the pack up and going. We almost have enough to form a pack on our own, and quite honestly… I think once we have a pack going it will be easier to recruit folks to play the game. One of the cool things about MuMuPlayer is that they realize that people are probably going to at some point try playing multiple accounts… like is often the case with Gacha games. So there is a built in functionality to spin up new emulator sessions. This is often done for folks who want to keep playing the game, but have long run out of the “stamina” mechanic for that game.
First you have to enable multi-instance support from the emulator when it is running through the “…” menu up at the top. Then once you get into that you can create new instances of android. I named mine after the accounts that I used to create them so I can keep them straight. Unfortunately this means that you are going to have to go through the process of installing Destiny Rising on each instance, which will also mean that when a patch gets applied… you have to manually patch them up as well. I am MOSTLY doing this so that I can get an extra signature to make sure that the pack gets created smoothly. However Ace’s spouse has recently started playing, so I might start running around on this character, because the grouping we did last night… was a bit overpowered with us playing our mains. That is not to say that I won’t likely catch this account up quickly however.
I decided to roll with a Femme character this time around, but I have to say… just like with the Masculine options… there really were none that I necessarily liked. In both cases they were overwhelmingly soft features… which seemed odd for someone who is this big warrior type. Destiny had somewhat shitty character model options too, and I always got around this by playing an Exo. Unfortunately there are no Exo or Awoken options for Destiny Rising. I am hoping at some point we get the option to reroll our character features, because I kind of hate the void and appearance of my main character. I don’t necessarily love this second character… but the voice I chose is a little less “Golly Gee Willikers” about everything. Green hair is always the correct option… I blame Robotech for setting that preference early on.
The second account is a bit lucky… as I did my first few pulls off the permanent banner and already have a Jolder. I also got Ikora early and pulled Xuan Wei, Attal, and the newest 4 star Rossi-11. That is a pretty decent blend of characters to play. I will not be spending a single dime on this second account, and mostly will find it interesting to see if there is any difference between a purely free account and one where I have bought the subscription and battle pass. Of all of the characters to pull though… Jolder is probably my favorite of the baseline mythic characters. It will be interesting to see if I end up unlocking everything on this account. Sadly the Gwynn and Estela banners are long gone, and those are characters I really enjoy on my main account. Helhest is pretty great, but nowhere near as good as either of those characters.
Over on my main account I am a bit stuck. There is a material needed for high level artifact gilding, and it only comes from the Expanse. I have earned my two for this cycle, and am now stuck waiting another 10 days for the expanse to reset so I can earn another two. I could in theory earn more by clearing another difficulty level… but quite frankly I am getting wrecked. I’ve gotten up to wave 19 in the second tier and am just getting shredded by these hyper melee focused mobs that bum rush me… and the objective that I am supposed to keep from taking damage. I am just not skilled enough to get through it with my current light levels on Estella, but I need to push her to a gold medal in order to unlock the next tier of ascension. I could in theory reset progress on Jolder and claw back those resources… but that seems like a bad idea since I love playing Jolder.
In other news, I pulled Riskrunner from the Legendary Campaign… but unfortunately don’t really have the resources to push it up high enough to be useful. This is a solid option for Jolder to use as a primary weapon. Especially if I take any arc damage, Riskrunner used to be brutal in specific content in Destiny 2. I am going to push it up as far as I can just so I can run a few rounds with it to see how good it feels in this game. Unfortunately when it comes to progression… I am not even in a place where I can buy my way out of the problem by spending real world money. Like good on them for not making spending money the answer to the issues… but also it feels kind of bad that I have reached a point in the end game where progression happens every two weeks… rather than weekly.
I’ve also been playing a bit of Destiny 1 on the PlayStation 5, and it is wild to me how much more atmospheric that game feels as compared to Destiny 2… and by reference the style that Destiny Rising adopted. There is just so much going on in scenes and the weather effects feel like they play a much larger role in setting the scene. The lighting is much moodier and I think it really fits the almost horror elements of the Destiny universe. Of course this is from roaming around the Plaguelands, which is the very last area that was added to the game right before the launch of Destiny 2. But this also reminds me of how Destiny 2 in many ways felt like a step backwards… instead of a step forward. Rise of Iron was such a great expansion, and the game felt so much better at that point than the baseline Destiny 2 experience at launch.
Lastly we have a bit of Guild Wars 2 progress. Yesterday afternoon I was running Fractals to complete one of the weeklies and happened upon completing an achievement that gave me one Core Tyria mastery point. This was the last one that I needed to pick up my final Core Tyria mastery the Scholar of Secrets, finishing out the legendary crafting path. The irony is I have a stack of Legendaries thanks to the starter kits, but I guess if I ever want to craft the Heart of Thorns ones I have all of the necessary training. Running random Fractals is still a heck of a lot of fun, and I really look forward to this system going in for Raids and Strikes. Just being able to hop in on a Saturday afternoon and pop into some instant groups and complete that weekly was an extremely nice feeling.
Hopefully yall had a pretty great weekend. I feel like I need to start crafting a Destiny Rising Tools page like I have for other games, because there is not a ton of infrastructure out there for up to date information. If nothing it will give me a spot to jot things down as I learn them. I am extremely sold on that game, and if you ever liked Destiny at any point in the past, I highly suggest giving it a spin. Soon I hope to have a pack to be able to invite folks to.
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Good Morning Folks. Last night was our usual Guild Wars 2 shenanigans night and we spent most of it running random fractals through the new quick play system. Of our group, I am the only one who has completed all of the steps required to get legendary gloves and finish the 500 dust achievement that gives you 2 bags, 2 bag slots, and a random legendary. I have no clue how many we ran, but we did have a few weird things happen. There was one time when the quickplay system split our party and sent two of us to one fractal with three randoms, and the other two to another fractal with three randoms. It took us a bit to realize this, because we were talking about different fractals with me and Sol ending up in Kinfall, and Sita and Ammo ending up in the Volcano. When I referred to the boss as a bullet sponge Ammo and Sita were a bit confused.
Over lunch I wrapped up the remaining achievements in Champion and have officially moved on to Destroyer. Most of these require me to be wearing Chaos gear… which GREATLY nerfs my damage and survivability. I am still trying to figure out a build I can go with that does not adversely harm my build so I can start knocking these out. I did run around long enough in a Helltide to open 10 tortured gifts and finish that sub achievement, which is always a bit of a pain in the ass. There are other hateful achievements like finish 5 events with mastery in 20 mins… or kill 200 mobs after triggering the spawning of a Harbinger but before it shows up. I am not entirely certain I am finishing Destroyer in this season, because without Ace playing with me… I’ve lost a lot of my forward momentum to actually knock this out.
Over in Destiny Rising I am dealing with a bit of a logjam as I need to get Silver Medals on three characters in order to progress to the next steps of Ascension. The power grind is of course a big problem for each character, but the bigger one for me is the Legendary Campaign completion. This has been an activity that I have been largely ignoring, because the first one I ever did was the current sniper one… and hated every minute of it. There are a few things that I detest in games… the big one is being on a timer. I have deep seated problems with being timed while doing something… and it dates back to elementary school trauma. I also hate the Shinkas in general and having to fight the sniper ones… was just a pain in the ass and as such I have avoided these completely. Unfortunately this means that I have had zero under 7 minute completions of this event.
This morning I knocked out a completion on Umeko, which means I only need to get her light up in order to get a silver medal. I should probably also borrow a Tan-2 and an Attal and complete all of the ones available this week so that I don’t have to wait multiple weeks for the sniper one to come around again. I will probably give Jolder a try, but I am not sure how she is going to kill the sniper Shinka without killing herself in the process. Maybe because I tend to run with a full bar of overshield, I will be able to soak the damage and survive anyways. However I think I am probably just going to have to wait for another week where Jolder is the suggested champion. These rotate through every week and in theory Jolders should be coming up next.
Other than that I had what was quite possibly my fastest clear of one of the raid phases, which rewarded me another copy of the Exotic crossbow that Ning Fei uses. This one thankfully was already level 80, so I was able to just swap over to it immediately. One of the things that you can do in this game is spend some glimmer… which is mostly useless… and reset a champion reclaiming all of the materials that you have spent on them. I think I might do this for a few champions in order to hopefully push the light levels up on the ones that I am trying to push up to silver. I am not sure if this will matter at all, because it is higher end materials that I am currently jammed up on, not low level materials. However it still might be worth a shot. Especially for the ones where I have completed their main story quest… I no longer really care about having them up at higher light levels.
All of this though is going to get sidelined a bit because I bought a stupidly large TV yesterday, and tonight I plan to tear apart the living room and set everything up slightly differently with the new television. This has been something I have wanted for awhile, and the entire reason why we swapped entertainment centers back in June. I figured while my wife is no longer with us…. I should probably finish up this plan we had for awhile. However I think I probably want to also explore curtains to hang over the circle window so that I can block some more light for optimal movie viewing and gaming.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick of late. I am not entirely certain what led me down this rabbit hole but something… prompted me to give Dan Da Dan a shot. It took about three episodes before I was hopelessly hooked, but last weekend I spent most of Saturday snuggled with cats and chain watching my way through season 1 and most of season 2. This afternoon/evening the last episode of Season 2 should be releasing and I am looking forward to it with great fervor. The thing is anime is something that I have always tangentially enjoyed, but it is a world I have never really felt part of entirely. I mean in high school I was tracking down copies of Akira or Vampire Hunter D… which were still shockingly hard to find… or the Final Fantasy V based series. I am also addicted enough to Bleach that I snagged a chunk of the intro to use for the AggroChat opening. However modern Anime is just not something I have indulged, because it was hard to listen to something for hours upon end because I did not want to isolate myself from my spouse for that long, and she was VERY much not into it.
However with me now being entirely alone… for quite literally the first time in my life… it is no longer that big of a deal. I don’t really love reading television… but most everything these days seems to be available in dual language versions. Maybe at some point I will actually attempt to learn Japanese, which is a thing I have wanted to do since I was a teen… and learned that a lot of video games came out in that language first. I will likely never go down the rabbit hole of manga… because reading them in reverse order is something that will always fuck with my head. I tried to do this with Trigun Extreme, because I love Vash the Stampede immensely… and just could not bring myself to stay hooked. I guess the question is… for someone who loves Dan Da Dan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Darker Than Black, Cowboy BeBop, and Ghost in the Shell… what series would you suggest that I give a shot? Drop me a line below.
I’ve also been diving into Pantheon… which brings up the age old question of is it anime if it does not come from Japan? I’ve always said yes. I consider Avatar in its many forms Anime, and as such I consider Pantheon by Amazon to be very much one as well. This is a wild trans-humanism ride in the vein of William Gibson novels, asking the question… what is humanity once it uploads itself into the cloud. I highly suggest giving it a watch. I just wrapped up season one and it was phenomenal, and expect to start on Season 2 probably Friday night… since tonight is our usual Thursday night Guild Wars 2 romp. When a cartoon brings you to the point of tears… you know it is good. Do I think I will ever get to the point of being an Otaku that goes to Anime conventions? Honestly not likely, but I do greatly appreciate the level of joy that folks bring to that world. For example this live action dance/cosplay version of the season two Dan Da Dan intro is phenomenal.
Over in Guild Wars 2 I wrapped up the Fractal Incursion Champion achievement which gives you two bag slots, two 20 slot bags, a host of exotic gear tokens, an ascended accessory with 10 agony resistance, and at the very end an universal legendary weapon starter kit granting you access to any Generation One legendary. I am trying to decide what I want to go for with this thing, and most likely… I am probably going to craft the spear since I generally like using it on almost every character. Right now I have sword, axe, longbow, hammer, and 3 of the two handed swords so that I could craft eternity. The other option that I might go for is a Staff, since I tend to use this on Necromancer and would not mind getting into Druid at some point for support. I am likely going to sit on it for awhile. I just cashed in my eternal ice for volatile magic so at some point I should be able to buy up a bunch of trophy bags to get close to crafting whichever gift I am missing. I am still super low on mystic clovers so I should probably wait until I regenerate those a bit before crafting another legendary.
In another Guild Wars 2 news… I am missing two badges from the investigation achievements. The thing is I know where the two missing badges that I need are, I have just not been randomed into either of those fractals since learning this knowledge. When I was looking for a guide… there are times I forget just how damned good the wiki for this game is. All of the information that you need to know to be able to find the badges is located in the Troubleshooting 1 and Troubleshooting 2 wiki articles. Basically I need to run the Volcano and Snowblind again, and veer off the main path to get both of the badges I am missing. I think maybe in the situation from the other day where most of the party bailed, it was probably that they were just needing the badge as they disappeared shortly after we got to the fireball section on the Volcano where the badge is located at.
In another news, since I seem to be in MMOFPS mode right now with Destiny Rising, I thought I would give EVE Vanguard a shot. There is currently a free trial event going on, and you can download the stand alone client through the EVE Vanguard website. I’ve not made it terribly far but thusfar it does seem to be a very responsive shooter, but I am missing the jumping mechanics from Destiny games. I will probably play through the rest of the extended tutorialization at some point over the weekend. The whole proximity chat thing is a bit weird to get used to, but voice chat felt pretty seamless. I need to change the keybind to my normal push to talk because pressing and holding left alt felt extremely foreign to me. I did not make it super far last night because I was meeting up with Ace to play some Destiny Rising.
One of the things that I found interesting playing with a lower level player in Destiny Rising, is just how reasonable the scaling ended up being. Ace was 38 and I am of course capped at 80 and progressed quite a bit past that, and collectively we could do their content level without it feeling like I was dominating everything. I was not one tapping every single mob at least with weapons, but my ability scaling and better artifacts did seem to make a bigger difference when it came to clearing trash mobs. They pushed past 40 and I think when you hit 46 you can start running heroic content, so at some point we will likely flip to me leading the party and dragging them along in bigger kid stuff. If nothing else it would allow them to start collecting mythic weapons early I think. At some point I need to focus on some of the activities that can award exotic mods for items and exotic artifacts. I am not sure if I have to wait until Acclaim 10 or not for those, but I am getting closer and supposedly the patch that was applied over night sped up the leveling a bit.
I have an awful lot to keep me engaged right now… which is good because I need it. I have Diablo IV Season 10 that I am still contemplating trying out, and then in early October is Legion Remix in World of Warcraft which I will probably also give a shot. Distractions keep me from feeling so painfully alone.
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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a busy day. I went to a new eye doctor, that required a bit of a journey to get there. My family has a history of retina detachment and I have been struggling with floaters… so I figured it was time to get on boarded to a proper doctor and not just the dude that is attached to the local eye glasses place. Some positives of the visit are that my general eye health is good, and my retina looks solid… and that my floaters have settled in place. The negative about that though is that instead of settling at the bottom of my eye they are not basically permanently glued to the back of my eye… so I am largely just going to have to get used to them or try a laser procedure that has a bunch of negative side effects… one of which is potential retina detachment. However she thinks that the double vision I have been seeing is due to the fact that my once “good eye” has gotten far worse… like significantly different prescription, but my left eye the previous bad eye is mostly the same. I have new glasses incoming soon, which I hope will help most of these issues.
I’ve been splitting my time between Destiny Rising and Guild Wars 2, and though some research yesterday I realized that I had a New Light Engram sitting in my inventory… that could produce the last remaining Mythic weapon that I had not collected. I had mostly ignored these because they were level 50 gear level, and almost not worth decrypting… however not that I have unlocked a copy of this weapon I can craft a level 70 engram and choose high level copies of it. So essentially I have been sitting on the key to collecting this last illusive weapon for a week now at least. I guess that is a suggestion, that whenever you hit the end game… use those couple of new light mythic engrams to unlock the weapons that are most important to you so you can craft engrams to get higher level versions of them. For me it just allowed me to complete my set and push my endgame affinity level up to 8.
I also ran a daily Onslaught Blitz and pulled another exotic weapon. I do not plan on using Ikora anytime soon, but if I ever do having this will probably be a good thing, especially since it dropped with the item level already sitting at 70. I vaguely remember Two-Tailed Fox as being an exotic that was fairly solid in Destiny 2, but I also cannot remember much about it. There is a certain Pokemon aspect to collecting Exotics, and I have always cared more about acquisition than actually using most of them. You can make exotic engrams, but they require a currency that I do not have much of. In theory this is going to be the long grind for the game is trying to acquire all of them, given that most of them are just random chance and not specific quests like they were in Destiny 1 and 2.
I also pushed up one of the seasonal journey tracks high enough to unlock the Partridge Sky exotic sword. Again this is a useful item for Jolder but thusfar I have not made an attempt to level it up so that she can start using it. Right now I have mythics that I like for both weapon slots and I am being way too lazy to change that up. You only get one exotic and I am not really sure if I should be running with the Huckleberry or this sword in that slot. I guess the benefit of this exotic is that is is a Solar sword, which replaces an existing Solar sword that I am using… which does not adversely impair my ability to pop elemental bubbles. I really like going into activities with two weapons that are contrasting elements to whatever my abilities do. Since Jolder is void, I try and have one weapon be Arc, and the other be Solar.
The current Fractal Incursion event means I am back spending most of my evening playing Guild Wars 2 and slowly chipping away at things. I had one of the weirdest situations happen last night where we got the Volcanic fractal through a random queue… and then everyone bailed and it was left with just two of us. Since I am a ranged build, I tend to focus on taking out the Grawl adds during the first Shaman boss allowing everyone else to focus on breaking his bubble. So it took me a bit to notice until the other person who stuck it out commented about it. Volcanic is probably the single easiest fractal out there, so it seemed weird as hell that anyone would bail from it. The two of us stuck it out and finished the fractal pretty easily, and since I run a healing pet I was able to keep group healing us to top us off during the final fight. We friended up each other after the run, because we were newly formed friends in the forge of adversity.
At this point I am sitting at 424 Fractaline Dust of 450 for the third recursion achievement. This is the biggest grind, but I will still have to go back and selectively do some of the specific non-rotation fractals and also try and collect the badges from the majority that I have not. I’ve found the badge from Aetherblade and Molten Boss and need four more… so at some point I should look up a video on where they are. I am sure I am running past them in the various fractals and if I knew where they were I could probably make a trip to get them. If nothing else has come from this.. I am way the hell more comfortable with tier 1 fractals than I used to be. Even Kinfall seems to be like a cakewalk anymore having gotten it back to back multiple times.
I think the legendary itself is going to be gated by the entire event. There is an achievement that progresses step by step each week, but after having ground out the worst bits… I am hoping that it will be easy enough to finish it up each week as new sub achievements drop. My goal this weekend is to help the rest of our normal fractal crew knock out whatever they need to knock out so they can catch up. I know I have been grinding this a lot harder than most people have… because in truth it is not like I have anything better to do. After the death of my wife in July, I have latched onto any grind that I can focus my attention towards so that it gives me at least temporarily a sense of purpose. I should be doing stuff around the house probably… but it is easy to latch onto this and hyper fixate for awhile.
Have you been participating in the Fractal Incursion event? What sorts of progress have you made? Drop me a line below.
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