Good Morning Folks. I did not get a blog post out yesterday, because for most of the day my site was bricked. This all started the night before with a deluge of spam, that my spam filter seemingly failed to remove. I cleared it up and decided I would investigate the issues in the morning. It seemed as though my site instance was being blocked from reaching out to any endpoints for WordPress, spam filter, the firewall rules, or even google site kit. After going around in circles with a tech twice, they finally escalated me up the tier and around 6:30 last night I got the above email. Apparently my site had received a blacklist complaint for serving up Malware. However they thoroughly scanned my files multiple times and found nothing of the sort. Weird that they took action without actually contacting me about it. I thoroughly scoured my email and found zero attempt to contact me regarding this issue. Things are resolved now and turned back on, but still highly frustrating.
Yesterday was the start of a new season in Destiny Rising, and with it comes a new mythic character called Maru. She had apparently been available during various phases of the alpha and beta testing for the game, and serves as this important niche that was previously only capable of being filled by Wolf or Ikora. The problem there is that neither of those champions are really worth investing a lot of rare resources into, because even fully kitted out… they will never feel as amazing as some of the later champions that came out. This is the problem with Gacha games, there will always be a concerted effort to make the Free characters feel nowhere near as good as the banner pulled characters. I had banked up a few “pink ship” pulls and managed to get a copy of her in my first 10 pull.
Essentially she is using the same class of primary weapon as Ikora, which is a single shot infinite ammo Grenade Launcher. Then she is using the same heavy weapon type as Wolf, which is a multi-shot Grenade launcher. Essentially she is all about explosions and I am not exactly sure why… but the kit feels so much better on her than it ever did on Ikora. Her first ability fires off multiple void grenades at the target, and the second ability provides a shield that then drops when you fire off a charged grenade attack. Her super is great because she bellows “Spray and Pray” and then lobs a heavy machinegun fire rate of grenade attacks at your target. It doesn’t last terribly long, but is pretty great for burn phases.
I ran the Legendary Story Mission on Challenge Difficulty with her and came in well under the gold timer. Sadly this will not count for either silver or gold, because I have yet to get out of bronze with her due to the limited amount of elemental fruit I had available to take her to rank 9 artifact gilding. I have her up to around 60k light, and she is absolutely going to be the next character I push up closer to 64k so I can start doing the Master/Grandmaster content with her. Essentially she fills a niche that I did not really have. For precision content I have Helhest, and for Rapidfire/Solar content I have Estela, but I did not have anyone that could really handle Spread Shinkas. She wrecks them with great abandon, and I pulled her exotic weapon which only serves to greatly improve her utility because it fires faster than the base grenade launchers do.
With today’s patch we also got access to three new Gauntlet Blitz maps, which are mostly better than the original three. I had to snap this screenshot because this represents what most of the night looked like. We queued into a Grandmaster Blitz and half of the party was playing Estela and the other half playing Maru. The thing that kind of sucks about Grandmaster content is that you can only run it once per character, per day… which means you have to go back and do this content multiple days in a row to burn down your limited access keys. I mean it creates scenarios where Ace and I have to group up together multiple days, which is not a bad thing. However I do loathe artificial impositions for play restrictions.
After running the new content in Destiny Rising, I moved downstairs and popped onto Discord for our weekly Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. We were down a Sita, though he popped in briefly to say he missed us while he was with family at Disney. It was kind of adorable honestly, and we also missed him. We largely ran Rifts in the first of the new expansion zones, which was great for me because I needed to grind out ranks in Skimmer mastery due to being knee capped by an early bug that I have already talked about. I got the needed rank and a good chunk towards the next rank, though I am probably going to to switch mastery tracks just in case I get gated by something in the zone specific one. It was a lot of fun, as it always is and I greatly love hanging out with Ammo and Sol and doing dumb things. Sometimes you just have to “F” it… which is the primary interaction key in Guild Wars 2.
Lastly over in Path of Exile I am wrapping up red maps on my Atlas and I legitimately have not really encountered any major difficulty spikes. I am in an awkward spot where I need a bunch of different gear pieces and things to happen before transitioning to the next phase of the build. I have a solid life gain block shield that has decent flat regeneration on it, and that will come in handy when I transition to block based. However at the same time I really need a six link helm, which I am working on crafting through delve. The challenge right now is I that I do not have much in the way of currency to spend, so I am having to go out and acquire the needed crafting resources myself which is slowing things down considerably. I think I have enough Divine Vessels to finish out my pantheon so that I can drop Purity of Elements and move to Purity of Fire, but I also need to acquire an Enlighten so that I can get to the res cap. Essentially there are a lot of moving parts but at some point I will click them all into place and shift up my tree. For the time being I am pushing ahead and should be able to complete maps and get at least my first two void stones without much issue.
The biggest challenge that I am having right now is that I am dealing with some health problems and have just not felt like myself for the last few weeks. A medication swap ended poorly, and yesterday I ran to the doctor to talk through the symptoms and it ended up with me having an in office EKG, glucose test, urine test, and ultimately doing a couple of different blood tests that I am waiting on results back from. This morning is the first morning of shifting things back to the way that they were and dropping the new med that seemed to be having some adverse reactions. Additionally I am getting a referral to a Cardiologist and getting signed up for a Colonoscopy since I have never had one of those. They are kind of grasping at straws because at face value… pretty much all of the tests so far have come back normal. If nothing else it was peace of mind, and will be further once the other specialists tag in. Basically I am in a weird place right now, and it is negatively impacting my gusto to push hard in games at the moment.
Having my spouse effectively drop dead in front of my eyes with no warning in July, has basically ratcheted up my sense of panic. I already have natural hypochondriac tendencies that my spouse helped walk me down from, so I am trying to not go into a rampant panic attack. Its scary in the world when you are all alone.
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