Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.
This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.
In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.
Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.
I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.
One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.
Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.
Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.
The post Maelstrom Captain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
As I talked about in yesterday’s post, we were essentially in a holding pattern waiting for the announcement to drop for Guild Wars 2 Expansion 5. This sort of leaked out in drips and drabs throughout Monday and Tuesday morning, and then finally landed with the trailer showing up officially on YouTube around 11 am CDT. The leaks seemed to be entirely correct, most of which came from a Polish magazine article that jumped the embargo. I gotta say right off the bat, I don’t love that the expansion does not follow the X of Y naming scheme. It should have been “Wilds of Janthir” but pushing that eye twitch aside… I freaking love the logo. I especially love the animated version that shows up in the trailer. Mostly JW is going to be an awful abbreviation and I am scared of what the community at large is going to call it.
The trailer is super good, however, and I gotta say that they nailed the features of this expansion. I will elaborate on those in a bit. A hype trailer needs to evoke a sense of mystery and make you want to dive into that expansion. It also needs to tease enough features to begin you daydreaming about each of them, and I think this trailer nails that in spades. We got enough of a sketch of the plot to hold us over until the expansion drops in August. I think it is interesting that we saw Caithe and I kinda wonder if each of these micro expansions is going to essentially feature one or two characters that we know from the dragon cycle while introducing characters to new or lesser-known characters. I thought it was cool that we are apparently going to be running around with Malice Swordshadow and Countess Anise again… which should be a hilarious combination. Anise is legitimately one of my favorite characters in Guild Wars 2.
First up… let’s talk about my favorite expansion for the feature. PVE Warclaws are a great idea and I admit that I have found myself riding one around on more than one occasion because “Battle Cat” is a strong desire for anyone who grew up with MOTU. More than this though I feel like this is going to be awesome for players who want to dip their toes into the World vs World game mode. WvW without a Warclaw is sort of miserable. We all did it and we all limped along behind the mass of players trying to collect all of the bits we needed to finally craft ours. This is going to flatten that curve significantly and make it much easier for folks to get started into the fun side of that game mode. Few things feel cooler than riding in a clump of players thundering across the plains on their Warclaws. I would love to see this mount take up a similar role to the Siege Turtle in PVE combat of helping to break down objective obstacles.
Next up we have the Homestead… which honestly I thought was maybe a bit of hopium. ANet has already said that our home instance nodes are going to transfer to this system, which I hope means that we can maybe place them in a single area for efficiency’s sake. More than that I am hoping that we will be able to earn resources for our new “home” instance. I am assuming this is going to essentially be a baby version of the Guild Halls which hopefully means we got a good deal of control over the placement of cosmetic items. It would be cool if these had a similar evolving system that uses the Scribe tradeskill to upgrade your home. From a profit standpoint, this should unlock all sorts of things on the Gem Store for players to buy for their “player housing”. This is a cash cow in other games and I cannot see it being anything but that here as well. I am hoping all of the trophies that you can earn for your Guild Hall, can be placed in your player house as well.
Probably the piece I am the least excited about is the addition of a new weapon for each class. I never really liked using spears in underwater combat, because melee underwater felt like ass. However, it does seem like they are playing heavily with the definition of what a spear can be based on the varied class-specific animations that they show off. Like I am assuming that the charging wolf slash thing has to be a Ranger-specific ability for example. We will have to see how this shakes out in the long run, but as someone commented on Mastodon yesterday… we’ve not really had good spear skins for a decade now so there is going to have to be a lot of catching up cosmetic-wise to rival the feel of other weapons.
As far as the zone look and feel goes… I am getting DEEP Grizzly Hills vibes not just in the types of terrain but also the musical choices of the trailer. I am hoping this was absolutely intended because that is still one of my favorite zones to spend time in while roaming around Northrend in World of Warcraft. I love that we are getting more Kodan goodness… or in this case “Bearkin”. I love me some Stoic BearBois and am ready to help them out. I am hoping this also means we have Quaggan however… because the symbiotic relationship between those two races in the Shiverpeak Mountains is always something I have loved. It feels like there is going to be a lot of verticality to these zones which should be really fun for Skyscale riders, but less fun for pretty much everyone else that has not gone through either process of unlocking that mount. I am amped to see what the zone metas might look like in these areas… because really at the end of the day that is the “special sauce” of Guild Wars 2 that no one has managed to capture.
I am super happy that the team seems to have been able to nail the yearly cadence as the new expansion is dropping on August 20th. The preorders are up with $25 for the Standard edition and $50 for the Deluxe edition which comes with a set of tentacle monster themed unlimited use gathering tools, an extra character slot, and some sort of special table that we will be able to use in our homestead. As always there is a $75 Ultimate Edition available which essentially comes with $50 worth of Gems for the cash shop allowing you to basically get those for half price. I gotta be honest if you are new to the game that $75 pack is probably worth it because you can then turn around and use those 4000 gems to unlock various living world content which is essentially like their own expansions. A set of infinite gathering tools is roughly $30 worth of gems so even there… you are getting a pretty good deal by bumping up from the $25 Standard to the $50 Deluxe. I am probably way more free with spending money on Guild Wars 2 since it does not have any sort of recurring subscription fee.
You will notice that I did not mention raids, and honestly… that is mostly because I have yet to do ANY of the previous seven “wings” as the community refers to them. Maybe at some point, I will get into that, but for now, I don’t have enough friends playing regularly and at times I could participate in order to embark upon that system. Maybe my new found boldness from Pandaria Remix will translate to Guild Wars 2 and I will actually start using my damned Catmander tag. Even without taking Raiding into account and the announcement of some sort of new PVP Game mode… there is more than enough here to make me exceptionally hyped.
Have you been following the Janthir Wilds announcement? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
The post Janthir Wilds Announcement appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I feel like it is important for me to take a brief moment to marvel at just how damned active the Guild Wars 2 community is. This was a screenshot of me waiting on Shadow Behemoth to spawn in Queensdale at like 6:30 this morning. By the time the event spawned, there were even more folks that had shown up. Granted this event happens to be on the weekly wizard chores that reset yesterday morning, but still… it is pretty freaking impressive. It doesn’t really matter what event I happen to show up for, this is pretty much the same story everywhere. Granted if you are trying to show up last minute you might get shunted off to an overflow map where there is not quite the critical mass of warm bodies, but by showing up early you are almost certain to find this kind of outcome.
Today is kind of an important day for Guild Wars 2. Last week they dropped a teaser trailer that set the GW2 pundits aflame with possibilities. This will be the second release in their new expansion model that promises something smaller in scope but delivered in a more reliable cadence for a cheaper price. With Secrets of the Obscure, they managed to land the release cadence of a new expansion and all of its relevant patches landing within a single year. At some point today we will see the full announcement of this next expansion… which they are calling their 5th but I quibble a bit with their numbering. I am guessing they are not referring to Icebrood Saga as an expansion, which would then make this the 5th as per their advertising. If you count living world seasons as expansions it would be something like the 12th.
I am not fully caught up on Secrets of the Obscure because in Guild Wars 2 terms I am woefully behind on pretty much everything. I’ve been doing my wizard chores and had to spend down some of the currency recently to buy some more mystic clovers. My focus has largely been on trying to regenerate my legendary materials enough to the point of being able to craft The Juggernaut, which is a weapon I have wanted since I first started playing Guild Wars 2. Mostly a lot of it is just going to be spending a few hundred gold, but clovers are one of those things that feels rough to brute force. I also need to spend some more time in World vs World and farm up another Gift of Battle.
The major time commitment is going to be doing another 100% Tyria world completion. When you do a full exploration of the old world you get two Gift of Exploration. So the last two Legendary weapons that I crafted, Bolt and Frostfang, ate those up. I did my last full world exploration on my Necromancer when I was leveling that, but I was technically closer to it on my original Warrior character. That is sitting at 91% currently and while we recorded the podcast on Saturday night I attempted to knock out some progress. This was only minimally successful as I got sidetracked by a group of folks doing champion rifts. Guild Wars 2 is pretty much a constant distraction engine.
Anyway, there has been a heck of a lot of discussion in the Guild Wars 2 community about what the teaser trailer the other day might mean. There is a lot of hopium surrounding a return to raiding… which I am not sure is super likely given how few players tend to engage in raiding. Since I personally have not raided in the game, my own brand of hopium is placed elsewhere. What I would love to see is some sort of meaningful rework of the “home instance” to turn it into proper player housing. I would love to see this tied into some sort of a progression system so that you can earn items for your home instance with others that traditionally lived on the gem store being available through bundles on the astral store. I have purchased some items from my home instance through world vendors and a few from the cash shop, but it feels like a woeful mess. I would love to see some measure of agency added to this system because for now… I always go to Rata Sum because it is the most efficiently laid out.
As I am sitting here writing this blog post, I happen to look over at Mastodon and notice a conversation going on between two Guild Wars 2 folks about how they are going to abbreviate the new expansion. This is coming from Reddit so take it with a giant bucket of salt but… apparently at some point the account page seemed to be leaking information about the new expansion including logo and name. So in theory, if this is true the next expansion will be called Janthir Wilds, which honestly makes a lot of sense given that is an area of the map we have not explored and one that has been clearly delineated for a bit.
So in theory we should then have a reason to start seeing zones popping up to the north of Divinity’s Reach. I wonder if they will be free floating as it were, or if they will connect back up to zones like Lake Doric. However, it seems like there is not a really good place in Doric to put a zone boundary. My guess is it will be a disconnected region as we have with some of the other expansion areas and that we will either arrive initially by boat or airship. Whatever the case I am looking forward to the announcement at some point today. I don’t believe there is any sort of an official announcement stream, so I guess I will be watching news sources for when the press release drops.
What are you expecting from Expansion 5? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! Or at least I hope to finish writing this and publish it within a timeframe that could still be referred to as “morning”. Here in the United States, it is Memorial Day and as such I would normally count this as part of my weekend and not blog. However, I found myself feeling weird about it being a Monday and not blogging so here we go! Since I last blogged I’ve hit a few milestones, the first of which is dinging level 100 for the first time in Diablo IV. Sadly I think it also probably denotes the end of my involvement with the game for the time being. I might max out my seasonal reputation but I am not feeling terribly driven to push further into the endgame. I am just not bossing motivated and the “mapping” experience in Diablo IV is sort of boring.
I’ve been actively doing The Pit since around 95 and I gotta say it feels worse than Greater Rifts did. The above is a picture of having cleared a Greater Rift in Diablo III and the comparative loot explosion that you got at the end. Clearly, The Pit just feels lackluster because generally speaking you tend to get four items and it does not seem to scale heavily as you go up in difficulty. Maybe there are breakpoints where it starts to feel more rewarding, but for the most part, it feels like it is a system that entirely exists to get the materials needed to masterwork your items… which again is a system that only really exists so that you can go deeper into The Pit. If The Pit already feels unrewarding… doing more of it so you can do more of it… does not feel like a good experience to me. I am not driven to prove how hardcore I am… I play these games to get cool loot and when I stop getting that I tend to bounce.
On the other side, I have been playing a huge amount of World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix lately and dinged 70 on my first timerunner character. I gotta say this setup is extremely sweet for setting up a character and preparing it for the next expansion. Just creating a character gives you maximum flying speed and a full inventory of 36 slot bags, then you can pick up those same bags for 10 Bronze each and outfit your bank in them as well. From what I understand when the event is over this character will exit the other side as a normal level 70 character with one of those high item level gear cache bundles as though it had been boosted allowing for it to essentially start War Within on a strong footing. Given that every character gets a boost from the current level of my timeless cloak, it is honestly a great way to seed various servers with max-level characters. I’ve always had a slew of friends who play on Drenden so currently planning on leveling a Tauren Paladin and maybe some sort of a Hunter over there.
Here is a crudely photoshopped mess of me attempting to show off all of the stats of my cloak at the same time. I am not sure how to read the cloak rank number, but I think that means I have collected 15k threads so far. I would potentially believe this based on my stat hits, and this is all through legitimate means. By the time I started my first character the “frog farm” had been nerfed, so this is just through normal play patterns. I have enough survival through my gem choices and my cloak stats that I can pretty much roll around in Titan Grip Fury mode. I need to work on earning my rings and necklace which are associated with achievements. Basically doing all the dungeons in Heroic Mode gets one ring, another is associated with doing all of the Heroic Scenarios, and the last is from running all of the raids in Normal Mode. I wish they would nerf this a bit and change it to Raid Finder mode because it is way easier to queue for Raid Finder than to use Group Finder for raids.
All of the World Bosses and Raids are on daily lockouts so that they can be farmed constantly. In fact, one of the popular leveling methods for alts involves getting to 25 and then queueing for LFR wings on each character daily to get a huge boost in XP and threads. I’m focused on this main character though and trying to unlock all of the things I need to unlock before shifting to alts. Given that I am queuing as a DPS, getting into raids should be relatively straight forward. I contemplating tanking them but honestly, I am not sure if I want the responsibility of trying to remember how all of this content worked. Maybe after running through various content a few times, I might shift over to my tank gear and give it a shot.
I did not in a million years think I would be falling back in love with World of Warcraft. If anything I thought I would be limping through the remainder of the story content in Final Fantasy XIV and preparing myself for the launch of that expansion. Early Access for it starts on June 28th which will be here before I realize it. I essentially need to make some hard decisions about whether or not I am going to hop on that train or not. There is a bare minimum amount of work that needs to be done if I am going to attempt to play at all. Essentially I need to get through the MSQ and then do a massive amount of retainer maintenance. Every class is level 80 or higher and as such I really need to spend some time cleaning out gear that I will never wear to free up room for new gear. This would involve a lot of grand company turnins… and probably is a week’s worth of effort at a minimum.
At one point I was pushing up a number of jobs to level 90 and managed to complete Paladin which I leveled during the campaign and then Monk, Dragoon, Samurai, and Machinist through doing daily quests and pvp content. I was pretty close on Red Mage as well so I could probably easily push it up as well. Basically, the new jobs will probably start at 80 which means the only gear I would care about keeping that us below that are things for Sage and Reaper which I could probably easily push to 80 as well. The problem with all of this is that I just need to make the decision to get started. I think at some point I will be in a daily maintenance routine with Pandaria Remix which would leave some room for maybe dipping my toes back into FFXIV.
This is of course on top of any time that I am spending in Guild Wars 2, because I would also really like to finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content there. I picked up my next Legendary starter kit and this is one that I have wanted for ages… so I need to start working towards collecting a bunch of Mystic Clovers and knocking out another Gift of Exploration and Gift of Battle. I need to see which character is closer to 100% World Exploration and then finish that out. I will probably have more fun doing it on my Ranger thought. I would really like to have a Legendary Hammer because it is a weapon that I really enjoy on a bunch of different classes.
Anyways… I got a lot of gaming on my plate. The positive is that I will definitely not be bored for a while.
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