Good Morning Folks. I am writing this morning largely to make sure everyone is aware that a Fractal Incursion event is going on right now in Guild Wars 2… and it is phenomenal. Not only do you get starter gear sets for new characters from a vendor in the area, but you can essentially run most of the t1 fractals instantly through a really cool group finder functionality. This event started on September 9th and is going to be running for almost a full month ending on October 7th. During this time there are a few things happening. Firstly there is a new quest chain that starts from the Fractal portal in Lion’s Arch where just talking to the Mist Stranger NPC gets you a free 20 slot bag. In addition to this there is a new beta group finder tool for Fractals where essentially you get instant queued with a bunch of strangers and they have specifically narrowed the category down to only the fractals with a high chance of success with no prior knowledge.
They are bribing the hell out of us to get into game and run a lot of fractals. My guess is that they are using this to beta test a brand new group finder functionality, and I am fully on board with this. I want to see this same thing make its way to other parts of the game… specifically strikes. If I had a group finder like this for the easy Icebrood Saga strikes, I would run them every single day without question. The bribes though… are really strong because just by chain running fractals you are going to get access to unlock a set of legendary gloves. I’ve heard rumor that there is going to be a way to unlock multiple armor types during this event, but even if it is only a single armor weight… you are saving countless resources to make this happen. Additionally Fractals themselves are hyper lucrative. I really started participating on Sunday and in the few hours I spent running fractals I easily made around 50 gold.
All of the progress towards this event is tracked in the Incursive Investigation and Fractal Incursion achievement categories. Mostly this involves chain running fractals through the new group finder, or with your own fixed groups. You are collecting this substance called Fractalline Dust and you get this through either running quick play fractals, doing fractal incursions in the world at the top of every hour, or by completing achievements. It seems like you end up with 3 to 5 per fractal and in order to complete the three long grindy achievements you need to gather up a total of 450. In a single afternoon of running a bunch of these I pretty quickly ground out around 200, and that was with frequent stops to clear out by bags and do other things. In theory over the coming nights I should finish grinding out the 450 without much issue. What is awesome though is not only are you given a bag for starting down this path, but when you hit rank 9 you are given an extra bag slot. Additionally you are given tokens along the way that you can turn in for pieces of exotic gear, so this becomes quite possibly the best way to gear out an alt character.
There is zero doubt that this has been wildly popular. That first shot is folks hanging out in Lion’s Arch before 8 am on a North American week day. The above image is folks gathered for the Fractal Incursion boss that appears in Diessa Plateau that was going to spawn at 8 am. Folks are amped about this particular brand of nonsense and it makes me exceptionally happy. Even if you are only a casual Guild Wars 2 player, now is a great time to get in an experience fractals. For World of Warcraft players… think of Fractals as Mythic plus dungeons… but way more chill. Players are likely not going to speak a ton during them, because they are very much solved problems… but just follow the crowd and you will do fine. If nothing else it is going to give you a level of familiarity with the content so that even after the event ends… you will probably feel way more comfortable joining fractal groups. We’ve been doing this as a weekly thing on Thursday nights for awhile and having a lot of fun slowly raising our fractal levels.
I am so on board with this update. If you want to get into the game and need help getting adjusted… feel free to ping me. I should be in most evenings grinding Fractals and am more than happy to have you tag along. My Guild Wars 2 account is belghast.5496, so feel free to friend me up.
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Good Morning Folks. We’ve been dealing with a pretty outrageous spate of weather events over the last couple of weeks. This current batch started on Thursday night we had really bad storms and a few tornadoes that spun up… which are were thankfully not at our house this time. However that does not mean that we have not been getting quite a bit of hail. The worst of it was golf ball sized hail, but Friday afternoon my wife was in the backyard reading and captured this photo of a deluge of pea sized hail. Thankfully none of it lasted terribly long, and to the best of my knowledge we’ve had not damage to either our automobiles or roof. It has just been stressful to effectively be under constant watch for bad weather. We’ve been running the televisions pretty much 24/7 just in case the news cuts in with a tornado warning or something.
What we have been dealing with more recently however is flooding. After over a week of pretty consistent deluge the ground is just completely saturated. This means when it is raining we are highly susceptible to flash flooding.Luckily anything we have dealt with has been minor, and is largely in the form of large pools of standing water on our lawn. However the green belt behind the house is pretty full and all of the nearby lakes and rivers are beyond flood stage. There are several roads in my town that are blocked off from travel due to flooding. With this also comes several deaths as folks foolhardily drive into water flowing over the road. You learn the catch phrase “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” pretty early around here… and clearly these folks did not mind that lesson. We are all safe and well… but are absolutely hoping for a break in this nonsense. Sadly by the end of the summer we will be back in drought territory more than likely.
Ever since realizing that Ammo, Sita, and Sol are timezone compatible with me… I have been joining in their nonsense when possible. We made tentative plans during the day to work on some stuff in Monster Hunter Wilds and I logged in to patch up my machine and make sure everything would load fine given that I had not played it in probably a month. I had to rebuild my shaders, so was thankful that I did some prep work. Ammo unfortunately got caught in this cycle of rebuilding shaders and then crashing out… and in the meantime Sita and I were partaking of barrel bowling in the new grand hub. Then… about the time it seemed like Ammo was stabilizing… I lost my internet. I can technically tether to my phone, but the connection is nowhere near stable enough to actually play much in the way of online games. It came back a few times… but only temporarily and around 9:20 I gave up for the evening. Apparently it had taken Ammo another 30 minutes or so before her situation was straightened out so it seems as though the entire outing was a bit cursed.
I did get to unlock the Grand Hub which was pretty great, which then allowed me to view the new cat cooking animation. It isn’t so much a cooking animation but more a situation where the three adorable palicoes in Tomato hats do a speedy delivery of food from somewhere else. I was using a Kunafa village voucher so they delivered me a meal of cheesy bread. While I will probably forever miss the actual cat cooking animations from Monster Hunter World, this is at least better than cooking my own food. The Monster Hunter Rise scenes were pretty great as well, but World will always be the best. The new scenes though have a heck of a lot of charm so I will accept it.
One good thing did come out of the otherwise cursed evening. Ammo and Sita have the whole grouping together thing down to an art form. That has always been the problem with Capcom online games… is that they seem to have no fucking clue how people actually interact with each other. It is such a clusterfuck to actually get grouped with a friend… but this is essentially the process that Sita taught me, that I will now follow going forward. This requires you to share a squad with the person you are wanting to group up with, but from the start screen you choose Lobby Search and then Squad Lobby Search. Next you choose the squad you share and choose to join that lobby. This is going to give you a private lobby only for members of that squad. Then when someone posts a quest you can go to Alma and choose Lobby Member Quests and find the quest that was just posted. Following these steps made it relatively painless to get grouped up.
Hopefully the next time it is Monster Hunter Wilds night, things will go a bit better overall.
The post Wild Wicked Weather appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I completed my third World Completion since playing Guild Wars 2 and with it came two shiny new Gift of Exploration. This meant that when combined with my Gift of Battle that I farmed up earlier in the week, I could pull together all of the elements and craft a Gift of Mastery, one fourth of the total components needed for Kudzu, the weapon that I have been working towards. That left me with a choice… do I be patient and wait a few weeks buying 10 Mystic Clovers at a time… or do I spend some gold and buy resources to try and craft them and finish out my shiny new weapon right then. Ultimately I had acquired everything else that i needed… but was short by just under half of the clovers needed to craft my Gift of Fortune.
Essentially for those who have never gone down this road… there is a recipe for the Mystic Forge that can produce Mystic Clovers. However 66% of the time on average… it will create something else. Now these other things that get created are generally really useful as well. For example I believe it can generate all of the items required to create a Gift of Magic and a Gift of Might in small quantities, so even if you fail to get a Mystic Clover you usually end up with something of value. Two of the components can be bought from the market, but are not exactly cheap so this is a great way to burn through your gold without achieving your end results. I needed to craft 31 Mystic Clovers… and I decided to go for it instead of waiting the 3 weeks it would take to purchase those in a more reliable fashion. Essentially I was this close to finishing and got impatient… which in Guild Wars 2 is always a costly situation.
So last night I was able to craft my fifth legendary weapon, and added it to my vault. So right now I have a Greatsword, Sword, Axe, Hammer, and Longbow. I have some of the materials to craft the harpoon gun, but it is extremely low on my priority list. I think maybe next up I would like to potentially target a Staff, since that is another weapon type that I find useful on a few different characters. I would also really like to have a spear and I believe there is one that you can get through through Janthir… but I don’t really know all of the details behind it. The easiest staff is probably Bifrost, but I don’t really like the look of it. I would far rather have Nevermore, but it is a Heart of Thorns legendary weapon and seems like it requires roughly twice the materials of a Gen1 Legendary. I should also really work on some of the Legendary armor and accessory slots as well, and figure out what is required to get those.
I admit… I had just planned on transmogging the appearance of my bow because I am generally not really one for the whole Rhok’delar-like appearance. However after playing around with it and seeing it in action… it is growing on me. I especially like the graphical effect when I draw the bow and have a burst of vines and such springing up around me. I wish it had more wood on it… rather than the impossible appearance of just flowers floating out in the air. I will use it until I get tired of using it… and then change it over to whatever other bow looks cool for the moment. Since I am playing my Ranger 99.9% of the time… this is honestly the first Legendary I have immediately swapped over to. I had a few upgrade extractors and swapped out the stuff that was on my ascended longbow and placed them into Kudzu. While I was dealing with it I did the same for my Greatsword and swapped them into Twilight so I had that at the ready as well.
More important than ALL of this… we actually got a group up and running last night in a time-frame that I could participate in. One of the biggest challenges that I have had over the last decades, is that a lot of my regularly party members moved to the west coast and as such… now can only really do things when it is way too late for me to be involved. However apparently there was a team ready to go… that I just never realized. I credit my friend Sita for planting this idea in my head, but it quickly blossomed into us having a group and doing a dungeon. Last night we pulled together a group compatible with central time consisting of myself, Ammosart, Sita, and our “guild mom” Solaria who also just happens to be Ammo’s real Mom. This is a group that I have do so many things in the past, and honestly… makes up a good chunk of our sometimes reoccurring treasure map group from FFXIV… but it just sort of never dawned on me that this was a ready group to go do nonsense with more often than that.
At the end of the night I even snapped a pretty solid group picture of us all. Now if I can just convince Ace to join in these particular reindeer games… we would have a full five player party to do nonsense. I know not everyone plays Guild Wars 2, but apparently Sita and Ammo have also been playing quite a bit of Monster Hunter Wilds so in theory I can probably convince Ace to join in some of that. After running a dungeon we popped in and did a single fractal before I needed to bail and call my father. In theory we only have a few hours to play with, but especially if you do fractals you can make a lot of progress in that time. I would like to run all of the dungeons however so we can unlock exploration mode and try some of that. Additionally there is the possibility that at some point we might even try some strikes.
All told it was a pretty great night, and now I need to figure out my next objective because I have found that at least in Guild Wars 2… when I don’t have some larger goal that I am focused on I tend to fade away. In theory we are also probably about to get the next expansion announced pretty soon, so that will be interesting.
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Good Morning Folks. My new Judgement Paladin has been a bit of a wild ride. Like I said yesterday this was a brand new character on Sunday morning, and as of yesterday I have effectively completed all of the content that is reasonable to complete at this moment. Since factions are shared across your account, I was able to pick up where I left off on my spin to win character at seven of ten harbingers down. I trivially downed the last few harbingers and then was set up for the pinnacle boss fight which is Aberroth. I get that this entirely has been lowered in difficulty with the Tombs of the Erased patch, but it still seems like a significant challenge.
Yesterday over lunch I made an attempt and was shocked to take down the entire encounter in one go. There are some tricky bits that I happened to just luck into doing the right thing. The problem with being able to tank all the damage, is that you don’t really learn the fight until a bit later. At this point I have now done the encounter around ten times and know some of the pitfalls given that not ALL of those were successes. I’ve managed to pick up copies of most of the items that I will at some point want to swap over to… but I either need to cook them in Nemesis Eggs or hope for better drops with more LP in order to really make the transition.
Last night I grouped up with Ace, because the Woven Echo which requires you to kill 10 Harbingers in a row was kicking my ass. Instead of suffering alone… we suffered together because it was STILL kicking our collective asses. Instead we opted to alternate between summoning Aberroth and trying to farm the items we were needing from the encounter. The only annoying thing about doing this is that the only person who gets guaranteed boss table drops is the person who uses the key. There is a chance of getting drops, as we managed to pick up a few items on the table when not being the summoner, but it seemed super rare. That said it is still well worth it to group up for this because you can always gift items that the other person needs, and the encounter goes so much faster with a second person.
The only frustrating bit is that I realized some of the items I was hunting for were unique to the 500 Corruption Uber Aberroth Woven Echo version of the fight. It is highly unlikely that I will get any of those, at least not without them significantly nerfing the encounter which is counter intuitive to the fact that it is the highest difficulty pinnacle fight. I picked up a few items that like i said need to cook in eggs, but I did swap a few pieces of gear out. First up I got a chest piece with good health and t7 Mana Gained on Vengeance which is required to make the Judgement build feel good since that is your way of regenerating your mana quickly. I also farmed up a Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros and slammed T7 Judgement onto it so that I could swap off my weavers will sentinel relic. Lastly I farmed up a Throne of Ambition unique idol which is highly suggested for the build and does seem to significantly increase my damage output, but I did lose a bit of Healing Effectiveness in doing the swap.
More important than all of that however is that I shuffled my gear around and am now 100% Crit Damage Immune. This is pretty massive because during all of my recent boss attempts I was only sitting at around 35% which was VERY noticeable. I’ve also gotten my block chance up to 76% which is pretty solid, though I would love to be able to hit 100% at some point. The shuffling did drop my Increased Healing Effectiveness below 1300, but only barely which still feels pretty solid. My health is also just shy of 2800 and hopefully once I pour on some more levels I will be able to cross that threshold. A lot of my survive comes from stacking ward which I can usually have around 3000ish without much issue during a boss fight.
The four extra points in Judgement has allowed me to pour some additional area of effect and duration making the whole mapping experience feel considerably more comfortable. This actually does now feel like Righteous Fire and chasing down things like Loot Lizards has become trival. For pure boss fights however, I should probably drop the Anointed keystone because which it is great for mapping it is sort of counter intuitive to how bossing works. Since I am not dropping Consecrated Ground on the floor, I can’t stack it up and add multiple layers of damage on the boss and those same multiple layers of healing on myself. It is kind of annoying to have to unspec something and respec it for mapping…. but it might be worth it if I was chain farming Aberroth or something like that. Probably something I am going to play around with a bit. Ultimately I could probably get this effect by just un-equipping and re-equipping my relic… but then I would also have to fiddle with respeccing all of the other points it is giving me.
The only BAD thing about zooming through so many objectives as I have as quickly as I have… is that I am sort of directionless. I just set up a bunch of Nemesis Towers and I will likely be cooking a bunch of items in those eggs tonight, but in the coming days I am probably going to shift my focus to my Beastmaster build that I intend on going Squirrels with. Other than that I will probably offer assistance to anyone that wants help with Harbingers or Aberroth kills. I still need to max out my Weavers Faction, but it seems like chain buying Woven Echoes goes a long way towards that. I spent down all of my Memory Amber so I need to spend the next bit farming it back up.
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