There are so many little things in Guild Wars 2 that you just sort of forget about half of them until you happen upon them again. For example there is a spot in the Crystal Desert where a Meerkat, Warthog, and Lion Cub just happen to cross the path in front of you. Last night one of the daily quests was to do an event in the Crystal Desert, and I roamed around until I found an escort that was about to start. It just so happened that while I was guarding a bunch of refugees the Lion King themed random encounter happened in front of me. I’ve always greatly preferred this style of easter egg as compared to the World of Warcraft slapstick style that just sort of beats you over the head with it. I remember these sort of minor easter eggs in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot as well… and they always felt like a sly nod more than a big sign screaming… “Get it? Get it?”.
In other happenings, Mistlock Sanctuary is sort of where the fancy folk go… because for years it was the best of the VIP clubs because it granted you access to way more stuff. Still to this day it is sort of the place where the folks with wild outfits go to dance and be silly. I had never seen the bow that shoots rainbow unicorns until yesterday… and then I happened upon four of them out in the wild with another one here in Mistlock. I had to look it up because at first I thought it was something new… but no it turns out it is a Generation One Legendary Weapon called The Dreamer. It’s a short bow instead of a long bow, which is in part why it has never really been my focus. At least with Ranger… I am not a big proponent of Short Bows because its a Condition damage weapon and I tend to mostly focus on Power builds. Still really cool… but the sound effect would drive me nuts quickly.
Yesterday I completed several more zones and now have brought my total world completion up to 81% over yesterday’s 72%. The needle moves rather slowly considering I finished I think four zones in total… but in all of those cases I was taking them from roughly 60% all the way to 100% which isn’t as big of a leap as it seems. Mostly I just have to keep my head down and let myself get caught up in the zones themselves… and not really think about how much further I have to go. That is sort of the key to completing anything in a game… allowing yourself to lose focus on the goal and just have fun with the individual objectives. It is wild revisiting all of these zones because each time I do it… I am consistently amazed by just how large they are and how much minute detail there is in each of them. The whole Hylek city that is entirely underwater and hidden in a cave system that you would never find… if you did not specifically go looking for it is pretty wild. However when you are just trying to pick up points of interest, it can be a bit frustrating trying to figure how to get to the dot you see on your map… but see no real path towards.
I made significant progress in World vs World last night and pushed my progress from 13/40 to 30/40 or from roughly 30% to 75%. I could probably AFK in zone and grind out the next pip before I ran out of contribution juice, but I would rather wait until this evening and find a group and do some objectives. On one hand I feel like I should probably seek out a WvW specific guild for my final slot. That said… I have not exactly been super active, nor do I want to switch to a specific build. I like my Longbow/Greatsword Power Soulbeast thing that I am doing now, and I don’t really care how optimal that is. Right now I am using Greysky as my WvW guild, in case someone else from the guild wants to tag along. We are part of Throne of Balthazaar which seems reasonable enough. There are a few pretty decent guilds, but they are all the sort that want you to join discord and run invite only squads. This always feels counter productive, because wouldn’t it be better to just sort of have EVERYONE in the squad?
That is the only real complaint I have about returning to the game, is that the WvW folks seem way more bitter than I remember them being. Seen a lot more folks yelling in map chat and blaming others for letting objectives fall. I’ve also seen a lot of folks baiting others into leaving the Eternal Battleground which seems like a dick move. There is a thing you can do called an Emergency Waypoint, which is intended to get reinforcements into an objective when you are just about to be sieged. At several points last night I saw folks firing these off and spamming chat, trying to get reinforcements… at a node that did not have any activity going on. They were effectively just trying to get folks to leave the battlegrounds that had queues… so that they could get into them. This might just be a problem with my own battle group and not more widespread… but it does seem like a kind of cruel trick to pull. The biggest problem is that we seemed to have no commanders… and while I could tag up… I have no clue what the hell I am doing really. My WvW tends to be to hang out on the periphery and apply pressure to zergs to get them to run into the main force… not actually standing in our own zerg and pushing where the commander should be.
For any annoyances there are with the WvW community… the Open World community still seems pure and genuine. I logged in this morning to get some screenshots and saw someone asking for help with a T3 Rift in Bloodtide Coast. Within a few minutes there were a handful of us over there helping out, and another person threw up a tag to make it easier for folks to find the objective. This feels like the community working as intended, and it always makes me happy when I see it in action. This happens so often as folks ask for help and get it regularly. I helped a random level 7 character out the other day with a Hero Point because they rolled up just as I was finishing it… and asked if they got credit. They did not, so I fired it off again to make sure they could take down the Veteran that spawned. There is just a nurturing aspect to the way the game has been designed and I love it so much.
So I have been allowing myself to think that the Gift of Battle and Gift of Exploration were the only real challenges that I was dealing with. That is very much NOT the case. The problem with crafting four legendaries after going years without crafting any… is that I have effectively decimated my crafting material reserves. I am pretty close to the required 250 Globs of Ectoplasm because I religiously salvage my rares. I am back up to 46 Mystic Clovers… but need 77 so that is going to be a challenge. I can buy 10 per week… but that recipe takes Mystic Coins… which I am completely out of but at least those can be bought on the market. Obsidian Shards are not that big of a deal since you can get them after a specific event with Karma in the Straits of Devastation. I have almost 4 million Karma and will probably convert most of that when I am working on zone completion there. Basically there are things I can do to fix all of these problems but it will be a much slower burn than knocking out these two big components that feel way more satisfying. Really I need to get better about doing a daily Ley-Line Anomaly to bank up some coins.
Guild Wars 2 is a game about long grinds, and the most effective way about doing this… is to do a little bit of a lot of things every single day. GW2 Efficiency is a phenomenal site that shows you roughly how much something would cost to craft, and according to it… with the items that I currently have it is going to take me 224 Gold to finish up Kudzu today. That is the Legendary that I am working towards so that I will have both a Longbow and Greatsword for my Ranger, or honestly any other class that will use them. I am probably going to buy the mystic coins… keep farming the ectos, and then convert karma for the obsidian which will lower the total costs by a bit. The worst part of a Legendary is the Gift of Magic and Gift of Might and you get one of those from each Legendary Weapon kit, so every two kits you buy from the Wizard store… you just don’t have to worry about the Gift of Fortune that much.
Anyways… this is the long game and I am deep into it since I have crafted Frostfang, Bolt, Twilight, and Juggernaut… and am now working towards Kudzu. I also have a starter for Frenzy… but since I stole one of the gifts from it to cobble together Kudzu it will be a bit before I am willing to fund another Gift of Fortune.
The post Hakuna Matata appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Last week I talked about thrashing around in a nothing quite fits gaming mood, as I bounced from game to game. Over the weekend, I found the thing that fits… at least for this moment. Guild Wars 2 and I have a sordid past of being an alpha tester, resigning from said alpha test because I did not understand the appeal of the damned game… and then years later falling in love with its particular blend of free range objective game-play. My brain was very much WoWified and this game was effectively the anti-WoW at the time in the manner in which it structured game-play… or more so didn’t structure it. I played heavily last around the launch of Janthir and through its first patch, and then tagged out in an ARPG fueled haze for half a year before finally returning over the weekend.
I was essentially two patches behind, thought I had at least started on Godspawn a little bit before wandering off last time. I spent a bit of time on Saturday catching up on the story… not necessarily because I wanted to play the story… but because I wanted access to the new zone. Why did I want access to the new zone? To tame this fuzzy chonker of a Bee for my ranger that I named Sir Buzzington. Not only is the Bee pet cute, but it has a rather solid kit of abilities which I am pretty happy with. The best of these is Honey Toss which provides the negative effects of slow and cripple… but is also just sort of funny to think about in the first place. Once I got the bee I hit one of the common walls where I needed to skill up a new faction ability for the zone, and I never quite returned to the quest chain after getting that. I am sure in the coming days I will do so.
I spent a lot of the weekend knocking out things on the daily and weekly wizard chores because I was trying to build up 1000 of the wizard chore currency to buy the current legendary weapon starter kit. I missed the first couple of these, but I have been pretty much buying each additional one as they come out because if nothing else… they give me a free gift of might or gift of magic. Essentially I have everything that I need to craft Kudzu the Legendary Long Bow except for a Gift of Exploration and a Gift of Battle. The first comes from doing a full old world Tyrian zone completion and the second from the World versus World mastery track. Luckily when you do a world completion, you end up getting two of the Gifts of Exploration, but given I have none of them available… that means I have apparently crafted four legendary weapons at this point. Time flies when you are literally burning through gold on crafting.
During the podcast on Saturday I chipped away at world completion and I have pushed the Ranger up to 72%… which is easily the highest of my characters who have not completed it yet. Then last night I spent a chunk of time in World Versus World and ground out roughly a third of the mastery track. This really is the perfect dichotomy of a deeply focused activity, because doing World Versus World means you need to be following a squad and participating in structured game-play for multiple hours at a time. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum you have World Completion which is just ticking off boxes in a zone, and doing a bunch of meandering activities until the tracker stops pointing you in a direction and the game awards you a loot box telling you that you hit 100%. I really like that there are things in this game that scratch both itches for me, where I am laze about aimlessly doing things that also work towards objectives, or I can be super serious and also be ticking off boxes.
I think that is the thing that Guild Wars 2 does better than any game out there… is it gives you a bunch of low barrier of entry “default activities”. One of the challenges that I have with other MMORPGs is easing back into them, because it feels like have to remember way too much about the game in order to be effective at doing anything. In Final Fantasy XIV for example you can always pop back in and start the story… but you will quickly hit a gear check wall where you either have to buy your way to freedom or spend some time grinding dungeons to gear up enough to complete the next quest. In Guild Wars 2… I am as geared as I will ever be or at least at this point gearing is really just a matter of minutiae. I can pop back in and join a World Boss train or choose a zone that is about to start its meta and know that I can immediately and seamlessly merge back into the world and be doing stuff without having to think a lot about it. For others they probably spend time roaming around zones and harvesting resources which again… super chill activity that feels purposeful given how damned well the trade system works.
Most MMORPGs feel heavy and cumbersome… like they require too much effort to remember what the hell you were doing last time you played. I never really have that problem with Guild Wars 2 because it sort of scratches the same itches for me that playing an ARPG does. Sure there is story and absolutely it is well written and enjoyable… but I can also just hang out in a zone and do a bunch of objectives as they pop up and feel like I am doing something… without having to care too much about what it is that I am doing. Granted I am over a decade into this game and have purchased all manner of quality of life improvements… like a device that just shows me what world boss is next to spawn, or infinite use gathering tools or the Copper-Fed Salvage-O-Matic which limits my need to keep going back to town. Even in the base version of the game though… the horizons are pretty broad for what all you can do. Really I need to spend some more time in the map metas for the expansions because there are all sorts of goodies that I could get there that I do not have.
Anyways for now I am having a lot of fun, and it is always shocking to me how much I actually enjoy World vs World. I do get annoyed how many private squads there are and how insistent they are that you join their discord. Instead I tend to just look for the tag and follow it around and assist as best as I can… because I have no interest in joining yet another discord. We had a pretty great series of skirmishes in our home borderland last night as blue kept trying to take Dreadfall Bay from us. Admittedly I spent most of my time up top the rampart either using one of the Arrow Carts or raining down my own AOE arrow attack. Occasionally we would go out and push the nearest objective, because they kept trying to starve us resources from the nearest camp. It really was the optimal farming stance for objective tracks, because it made sure that my participation was maxed out at all times. While I am here for the Gift of Battle, I am trying to still make myself useful by doing some of the non-glamorous work of guarding objectives.
I figure this is probably going to hold my attention at least until the release of Path of Exile 3.26 which is supposedly in June.
The post Tyria Fits Perfectly appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Afternoon Folks. This is a bit of a rare post because generally speaking if I do not make my morning post… I just don’t post at all for that day. I spent my morning up at my folks house helping them with some stuff and now that I am back I figured I might as well knock out a post, because I have some potentially time sensitive information. First off if you do not own Guild Wars 2 or are missing any of the content drops… there is a pretty massive sale happening right now on the official storefront. Coinciding with it there is also a sale taking place on Steam but there is a bit of a higher markup there. If you have never played this game you really should especially now that you can get a decades worth of content for $50. That is legitimately one of the best deals out there.
While I was in game I noticed that they once again had the Cat Angel Jadebot skin up… so I broke into my gem reserves and picked it up. I have gone back and forth about whether or not I wanted this for awhile, but I entirely blame Dungeon Crawler Carl and Princess Donut for making me want this. There is no way that given the chance… Donut would not flap around me with wings. I need to dive into the new content which also dropped this week because there is a new Ranger pet Bee that you can get. I’ve been several different mains throughout the years… starting as a Warrior then transitioning to Necro… but I think my true spirit is that of the Ranger. Longbow and Greatsword for life yo! Regardless of how generally selfish that build is since it doesn’t produce Quickness or Alacrity.
I played some Titanquest II and so far I do not think this game is really my jam. Melee combat felt a bit too sluggish for my tastes and pretty much everything seemed to want me to spam the dodge button instead of engaging with mobs up close and personal. Maybe this feels good as ranged, but so far it is not necessarily my jam. However if you are curious for yourself you might check out the Steam page to see if you can still request access to the playtest. The game seems solid enough but leans more towards the never get hit sort of play style that I do not personally enjoy. I am sure it will find an audience, especially with the crowd that feels like the ARPG genre reached its peak with Diablo II.
Another game that I have been fiddling with a bit is Gunlocked. Essentially this is what if Vampire Survivors was a Bullet-Hell shooter. The game starts out a bit weird in that your only attack for a bit is a radar that sweeps around your ship and then marks targets with a lock on, that your ship then fires attacks at to mostly one-shot. As you pick up power-ups you gain a whole slew of interesting attacks slowly giving you a bunch of different ways to take out the ever present deluge of ships and obstacles on your screen. I found out about this game when the sequel was announced on the fediverse, which caused me to go look at the original since I dug the art style. I also checked out Boons and Burdens which is sort of a similar concept but this time smash tv meets vampire survivor but you play as one of several element themed wizards. There is a bundle for both games that is currently just shy of $6.
Another thing that I picked up from the ongoing steam sale is Dragon’s Dogma II. I had played a bit of the first game but never really got fully into it. I thought given my recent foray back into Monster Hunter with Wilds, I might check this out and see if I can get into the sequel. All in all so far I am pretty intrigued. There seems to be more of a clear story element going on here, whereas I felt like I was largely roaming around aimlessly in the first game. So far it sort of feels like a weird version of a Bethesda game in a good way. Not sure how far I will get but I am liking it so far.
I’m also not entirely done with Monster Hunter Wilds either, and I am hoping this weekend I can connect up with my friend Ace and do some more group hunts. In a perfect world maybe also connect up with Thalen, Ammo, or Sita for shenanigans since they all have compatible time zones. I am not in a massive push to clear anything right now, but do want to try out some Charge Blade nonsense to see if I actually like the weapon.
Do you have significant weekend plans? What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.
The post Guild Wars 2 Massive Discount appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. One of the long running themes of this blog is how much I like the concept of reoccurring posts. Another running theme is how bad I am at actually following through with them. One of these series was “Regularly Playing” where in theory I update the sidebar of my blog with the current crops of games that I am playing on the regular that then show my account information when you mouse over them so folks can find me if they so choose. The general idea is that you have a list of games that you are likely to hear information about advertised on the front page… even though we all know that I tend to fixate on a single game for weeks at a time before jumping to the next one. However behind the scenes I am flipping back and forth between games as my mood hits me.
The core problem with this is… my updates in this series tend to happen way less often. The idea was to have a monthly roundup of things that I was playing but what it ends up being instead is a semi-yearly truing up of the sidebar. For example my last update in this series was June 27th of 2024… when I acted as though I would now make it a regularly feature of the blog again. We can all see that this did not happen. Before that the last update was during the great blur in October of 2022. This is funny given that at least part of my claim to fame is being a consistent blogger. Anyways… I am not making any false promises here but I did think it was far past time to crank out one of these posts and to more importantly update the damned sidebar.
Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
Some of these categories only really make sense if I am doing this on the regular, but we are going to attempt to make one of these happen regardless.
To Those Remaining
Diablo IV – PC
After being very frustrated with the launch state of Diablo IV in 2023, it has honestly turned in to a pretty decent game. This has more or less taken the place of Diablo III as being that short term game that I am happy to play for a week or two before finishing everything up that I want to finish and moving on with my life. It also has some of the easiest group game play out there, and while it lacks the depth of Path of Exile it is a fun time to be had with my friend Ace as we tackle the seasonal journey. I am not saying this is a phenomenal game, but it is far from “bad” at this point and is honestly pretty damned great if you are interested in some super chill ARPG fun. That is not to say that the game does not have problems… all of which can be chalked up to the shitty design practices of Blizzard. Ace and I have a joke about Blizzard design philosophy. They give you this super sweet kitten that is loving and adorable… but it has permanent explosive diarrhea. They have some really cool ideas, but they always come with some shitty downside to them.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Being brutally honest… were it not for the fact that I own a home on Cactuar… and extremely hard world to get housing on… and had lost said home from not logging in previously… I would likely not be actively playing Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much in the mindset of playing Final Fantasy XIV during an expansion… and then at the end of an expansion right before the release of the next expansion. The rest of the time I am just paying yearly rent for the privilege of home ownership. I know this is dumb, and I know that I should stop doing this… but I keep doing it anyway. I think my mind might just be broken when it comes to the traditional MMORPG gameplay model. I enjoy them when I enjoy them… but struggle each time to get reconnected and back into the normal rhythms of logging in daily and treating it as my only game. I also really hate gearing… which is weird given that used to be one of my favorite aspects of playing MMORPG expansions.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
Guild Wars 2 on the other hand… is designed in a way that makes me love it. It has way more of an ARPG design aesthetic and it is so easy to drop in and participate in some epic feeling content… and then tag out without letting anyone down. I love large world group content and I love doing things like WVW where I can just blend in with the crowd and not have to give a shit about human connections. For me it is largely a solo game… that just happens to have lots of friendly and helpful people also playing it. Everything about the design model for this game rewards players for doing the right thing and stopping to rez players or help them out. When you see other players doing something, it is always a positive and a force multiplier. The long tailed grinds also give you projects to focus on when you want to play more seriously. Right now with the way my mind works, this is hands down the best MMORPG.
Last Epoch – PC
Last Epoch is going to be the best ARPG on the market at some point. This is just a fact. It has the best class design, and the best itemization and crafting already. What it lacks is endgame content, but given how solid the foundation is it is only a matter of time before they gather up enough to make this game into a proper rival of Path of Exile. Ten years down the line we will be thinking about EHG and Last Epoch in the same manner that we do about GGG and Path of Exile. I am extremely excited for the upcoming Season 2 launch on April 2nd, and with it a focus on more endgame content as well as a bunch of interesting crafting options. It looks like this is going to be landing in a lull in other games, but I would give up a Path of Exile league start to play this next season. If you have read this blog for the last few years you would know what a bold statement that is for me, given that I practically play every single league and event that comes out for Path of Exile.
Path of Exile – PC
For years when someone has asked me what my favorite video game is, I have always answered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night without missing a beat. While I still love that game with all of my heart, I have to admit the true answer is Path of Exile. I started taking this game seriously in 2019 and since then it has effectively dominated this blog for months at a time. During that time I have dedicated over 250 posts to this game and will likely keep doing so each time new content releases. It is a very hard hill to crest, and getting engaged in the game is going to take a lot of effort and research… but once you finally reach a point of comfort with it the endgame potential is limitless. Each new league also radically shakes up the game and changes how you need to interact with the character building process. I’m easily over 4000 hours into the game… and still feel like a beginner at times. There are almost no games on the market with the level of depth that Path of Exile offers.
To The New and Returning
AFK Journey – Android
One of the things that I am trying to do with this post is be a bit more honest about the games that I am playing. I almost never talk about mobile games on this blog. I think the only ones that I have actually ever really talked about at length are Pokemon Go and Dragalia Lost… the later of which is no longer even in operation. I had more or less stopped playing mobile games because my old Razer Phone 2 was performing so poorly that it almost was not worth it. However when I swapped to my OnePlus 12R, it opened back up the world of mobile games and I started adding them into my pre-sleep rotation. Essentially every night for the last year I have played a little bit of AFK Journey and find it an extremely enjoyable daily activity. I am not a big spender when it comes to games like this, but I have given them a few bucks here or there namely if there is a cool looking costume on their $7 pseudo-battlepass system. Essentially I level up my characters and play a round of all of the various battle modes and whatever events happen to be going on and when sleep claims me put it away for another day.
Monster Hunter Wilds – PC
I know this game has only recently come out, but playing it has made me remember all of the things I loved about Monster Hunter Worlds and how much it dominated my life for a point in time. There are around 150 blog posts that I have made over my time playing that game, and I can already tell that this is going to be a regular rotation for me for awhile. At a minimum I want to get geared up so I can start participating in the event quests as they get released, because Monster Hunter games have some wild collabs and some interesting cosmetic gear to collect. Now that I am in High Rank I am getting back into the swing of finding my own fun in the game and setting my own goals rather than following the main story quest. This is honestly my preferred method of playing and I am glad I am past the forced section of the game. I’m just about to HR 20 and looking forward to collecting the REAL version of the Arkveld armor that I am wearing in the above image.
Path of Exile II – PC
I had so many hopes for Path of Exile II, and honestly… it satisfied almost none of them. I am not actively playing this game but I know with the impending release of 0.2.0 I will give it another spin to see how much I want to keep playing it for the long run. Recently returning to Path of Exile 1 though… has made me realize just how lacking Path of Exile II actually is. Right now there is a battle for the soul of this game happening and depending on how it goes… will ultimately determine if I write this off in the long run. Right now the core game feels like a sluggish mess for anyone not playing one of four builds that are actually functioning pretty well. Even those builds take specific gear and a lot of levels to really make them feel phenomenal. Grinding Gear Games needs to do some real soul searching with this one and determine what sort of game they want it to be. If it is a cumbersome souls-like experience, then I am out. If they improve the leveling experience, add some decent movement abilities, and fix the endgame… then maybe it is going to be a great experience. I am thankful however that they split this game from Path of Exile because at least that game is largely in a great state.
Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket – Android
I will be honest. I am the wrong generation for Pokemon in general. I played Pokemon Blue a few years after it came out on a Gameboy emulator but did not play another game until Pokemon X and Y released. I watched my fair share of the Pokemon cartoon because it was playing while I was getting ready for work. I played some of the early WOTC version of the Pokemon TCG, but only because it was released by WOTC and briefly popular with the MTG community before the kiddies invaded the card shops. I am too old to really be in the core audience for Pokemon. However I do like opening card packs, and have a basic understanding of the card game mechanics. Essentially every night I open a few packs of cards as part of my nightly mobile gaming routine. I occasionally play some hands of the game against the NPC opponents. Calling this a game for me… is questionable. I am not going to spend money on virtual packs, but I do like opening virtual shiny cards every so often… but it will never mean quite as much as if something like this existed for Magic the Gathering that was mostly just a pack opening simulator. If Arena gave me two five card packs each day… I would probably be playing that.
To Those Departing
Diablo III – PC
This one hurts a little bit to admit, but I think I am mostly done with Diablo III. With the release of Diablo IV, this game went into true maintenance mode. There will be no new seasonal mechanics coming out, and since the launch of Diablo IV they have simply been rotating through previous seasons. Diablo IV is finally in a state where playing it mostly feels like playing a fancier version of Diablo III, and as such has completely replaced the niche that this game filled for me. Instead of Ace and I getting together for D3 season launches, it is now D4 seasons. This game will always hold a very special place in my heart, and I am sure every so often I will fire it up again just to revisit it… but there are just better ARPG experiences out there. I am sorry my old friend, but it is time we officially parted and I stop pretending that I am every going to truly play you with the same vigor again.
Fallout 76 – PC
I really love this game, but just have not really been in the mood to play it. I am not sure when I uninstalled it… but prior to that I was only logging in to collect daily freebies. I would absolutely play this again in the future, but never really got into the seasonal loop of this game. I also never leveled anything all the way to the upper levels to be able to participate in the “reindeer games”. I deeply respect the game that this has become, and were I playing on console I would probably be way more into it than I am. However given the choice between mindless grinding in Path of Exile and mindless leveling in Fallout 76… I just always chose Path of Exile. If I had a regular group of friends to play with, it would probably be different but this as a solo experience is not near as exciting. If the AggroChat crew started playing again I would likely happily reinstall and join in the nonsense.
World of Warcraft – PC
Like I said for Final Fantasy XIV… I am just not in the right mindset for playing MMORPGs these days. I enjoyed playing through Dragonflight, but it never really caught my attention as anything other than playing through the Main Story Quest. I loved Pandaria Remix, and when the next one of those type events drop I will probably be back immediately. I attempted to play War Within but never made it out of the first zone. I have all of the social reasons in the world to be playing this game as some of my oldest gaming friends are happily playing it… but for whatever reason it just doesn’t scratch the itch anymore. That is not to say that World of Warcraft is probably in the best state it has ever been since at least Legion, if not Wrath of the Lich King. It really is peak Warcraft, but I think I have just outgrown it. When I think fondly of this game I think about specific people and a specific point in time when it was the center of my world… not the actual game itself.
Wrapping Up
I would love to tell you that it won’t be another year before I sit down to write one of these posts. I am still very much an ARPG gamer and will probably continue to cycle through whatever active season/league happens to be going in between Diablo IV, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, and Path of Exile II. I also find myself with way more affinity for games that are ARPG-adjacent like Guild Wars 2 and now Monster Hunter Wilds. The drop in nature and largely single player focuses progression really hits the spot for me, and will probably continuing doing so for a long while. I marvel that there was an era when I used to raid three or four nights each week and arranged my schedule happily around the schedules of others. I miss playing with other people regularly, but I think I might just be too far gone to ever adapt to doing it again. I am an old gamer that has become very set in my ways at this point.
I hope you all are having a great week and have a good weekend ahead of you. For me… I plan on spending most of it in Monster Hunter Wilds and hope to catch up with some of my friends and do some hunts together.
The post Regularly Playing: March 2025 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
