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 am getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning because I had to do a fasting blood draw. Nothing serious, just one of those things that I have to do every year to keep from having to pay a $60 per month surcharge on our corporate insurance plan. I took the day off because there are a bunch of things I should be doing around the house today… namely because I got new glasses and can now properly see how dirty everything is. As I was rushing out the door this morning, this lil fella was hanging out on the inside of my glass storm door. He did not seem to be terribly intimidated by me, and when I got home from the blood draw appointment he was gone. Hopefully he is off living his best life, because I have zero clue what sort of frog this is. Guessing some sort of a tree frog, but given that I have never seen one in my life… I am hoping he did not hitch a ride on a thunderstorm and get rained down. Was a very smol fella, maybe the size of a fifty cent piece.
Over the weekend, specifically during the AggroChat podcast… it rained in my living room… which is a thing that has happened before, but not since we put a new roof on. Thankfully the roofers came out and resealed the top of my roofline, which is where we have generally thought the water comes in through, because it has only ever leaked when we are getting a torrential downpour combined with wind… leading to horizontal rain. It has been raining all morning which is adversely effecting my desire to do anything, but so far no sign of leakage. Due to the pitch of our roof and the odd late 70s architectural decisions, there is a lip of flashing that wind over time will push up… and then the water gets under there and eventually runs down under the shingles until it finds a point of entry. This is generally smack dab in the enter of our living room. The roofers essentially resealed this area and put in longer screws which will hopefully keep it from coming up again. We’ve had the house since 1999… and fought this dumb design flaw many times, but hopefully this will be the trick that finally solves it.
In gaming news, with the roll over of the weekly reset in Guild Wars 2 it allowed me to get my pair of legendary gloves. This is honestly really cool and way easier than I expected it to be in the long run, because essentially you mostly have to just grind out 500 dust which will complete all of the required achievements and then talk to the Mist Stranger, at which point they will reveal who they actually are and give you a choice box for gloves. You get one armor weight for free and then for the other two you have to grind out 300 more dust which will give you 2 Fractalline Spark (150 each), one for each of the remaining weights. You then combine each with a Gift of Magical Prosperity, Gift of Mighty Prosperity, and 200g worth of Icy Runestones to get another pair of gloves. These are permanent additions to the game and not something that you necessarily have to compete before the event ends in October. I am however planning on grinding out a few more sparks so that I can bank them because they are also used for coloring the weapon glow effects granted by the gloves.
Over in Destiny Rising, I have set my sights on knocking out some of the lore achievements. Namely right now I am working on the achievement where you have to get 5 cats to give you a reward back while playing Umeko. The whole feeding the cats thing is a big maddening, namely because the indication of what fish the cats want each day is not great. I need to start fishing up some new areas in the game since I appear to have unlocked a few other locations. However even if the cat does not give you a carepackage, it does seem to count as getting a reward because you get some fishing currency for the first time you attempt it each day. I think tonight Ace and I are going to run amok, so that should be quite a bit of fun. I need to hang out on voice with various groups of people more often, because quite honestly I can get stuck in my head a bit.
I’ve also been fiddling around with New World again and holy crap has it changed significantly, at least in the new player onboarding process. I have a max level character, but also have zero clue what I need to be doing. So I instead decided to roll another new character just so I could play through the early levels and get my feet under me again. Now when you start a character you are asked to choose an archetype, which guarantees a combo of abilities and gives you a bit of a boost to specific tradeskills. I opted for Greatsword and Blunderbuss because it gave me a pretty solid early combo, but have long since abandoned the shotgun like weapon for more twohanders… leveling both Two Handed Axe and Two Handed Hammer. I really like flail for tanking, so I might also start working on that, but more than anything. I am not really sure how long I will end up playing this baby character before moving back to my maxed out character.
The other thing that is wild is just how much more story there is, and it appears to be fully voiced. Like the graphical style of New World is a bit janky, but this does feel like a significantly more enjoyable onboarding process. I know this is essentially the third time I have rerolled from scratch. The leveling process seems to have been sped up considerably, but the tradeskill leveling process is still a bit of a slog. I also remember now that I do not love how much of a nesting doll the entire process is where Tier 1 is needed to make Tier 2 which is also needed to make Tier 3 and so on. I had hoped that maybe they would have streamlined this process a bit, but it seems like that is not the case. I leveled up enough to craft a full set of level 60 armor on both characters, and in theory one should probably not do this thing and just live off drops. I need to figure out how the heck you upgrade items now, because I have not figured that out. I know 700 is the baseline and I think you can go up to 750 item level… but I have no clue how to upgrade my uniques to those tiers.
The introductory mission is way cooler looking, so I will give the game that. Additionally the flow of the quests seems to be a bit more thought out. There seems to be a fairly thriving community, but also it appears to be mostly console based. The number of random strangers talking in the world through proximity chat is very much still a thing. I know Destiny Rising has some of that going on, and I also experienced that while playing EVE Vanguard. Maybe I should get over my aversion to talking to strangers over voice chat… but seriously it still wigs me out. Does no one type anymore? I will always prefer reading the written word to talking over voice unless I am talking to friends. I know this is contradictory to what I said earlier, in that I need to hang out with friends on voice… but the friends bit is the key differentiator there.
Today is also the start of the next Diablo IV season, so I am probably going to get off here and scurry around the house attempting to take care of some business so I can potentially have time to start a new character when that begins.
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