Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.
I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.
One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.
I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.
Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.
Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.
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Good Morning Friends! Last night I largely spent my evening doing some chill gameplay in Guild Wars 2. When I finished up the previous night I had landed on the Airship parked atop Bloodstone Fen, and that is where I picked up when I logged in. I remembered hating this zone because it is just a murder box. The white mantle and bloodstone elementals always seemed to be hyper-aggressive and stacked in such thick layers around the map that it was almost impossible to move around without death following swiftly behind you. There were weird mechanics that I never really fully grasped as well, making everything a bit more challenging than it was probably intended. However with a firm grasp of how the shield absorption mechanic works and a flying mount… Bloodstone Fen was actually a rather enjoyable experience. When I first attempted this I did not even have much in the way of glider mastery unlocked.
From there I moved over to Ember Bay, and I have to say that flight absolutely trivializes this experience. Ember Bay was very much about teaching you how to use things like thermal vents to navigate the zone combined with a lot of gliding trickery, and when you can just hop on the SkyScale you can absolutely soar over top of all of this nonsense. I have to say originally I liked Ember Bay so much more than Bloodstone Fen because it was seemingly more straightforward. That impression largely is intact but I forgot how generally nasty the vinetouched destroyers are as a whole. I made it through the zone without much effort but I was downed a few times because the fire/poison nonsense caught up with me. In all cases, I was able to get myself back up, and in one moment a random stranger swooped down to help out… and I am a bit sad that they flooped away before I could thank them. That is always one of the great parts about the Guild Wars 2 community, which is that so often complete randos will pop over and help you get resurrected.
I finished out my night protecting Aurene from some bad things. I also remembered that fight being way more stressful the first time I did it. I still took a ton of damage, so it is not like I was able to trivialize it. However across the board so far Living World Season 3 seems nowhere near as “murdery” as I remembered it being from my first and only play-through. Again I think I chalk this one up to a better understanding of the game, and even though I might not remember the content blow for blow… having a vague understanding of what needs to be done in the moment. It is weird how exposure to the character has changed my feelings about the character. Like I remember thinking that initially Aurene was hideous nightmare fuel… but now after growing to love the character, I think the lil spud is kinda cute. Originally she reminded me way the hell too much of the botchling from The Witcher 3.
I closed out my night by happening upon the Tarir event at exactly the right time, allowing me to finish the last few precursor events and get in for the vine kill… and treasure chest crawl. Every time I am away from the game for a bit… I sort of forget how much loot this single event is worth. The vast majority of the last three rows of loot in my inventory came from that one event last night… and most of those are bags that contain even more loot when opened. If I was better about doing things on a predictable schedule, I would absolutely feel the need to do this every single day. In theory, I probably SHOULD get back into a rhythm… because Dragons End is also a phenomenal haul of an event as is Dragonstorm. So many of the meta-events are so fun and at the same time so amazingly rewarding. This is really the thing that hooked me on Guild Wars 2.
I’m moving through content way faster than I expected it to be. I guess the reality is when you are ONLY focused on the story bits… and you have already unlocked most of the zone-wide features… the living world content goes pretty freaking fast. I know Path of Fire is pretty long, or at least I remember it being pretty long. Similarly, I think I remember Living World Season 4 being pretty long as well. End of Dragons comparatively felt relatively short, so maybe just maybe… I might actually make it through all of the content before Secrets of the Obscure releases. We also got word that the next Path of Exile league will begin on August 18th… so I know I will be splitting time with that as well. July and August feel like they are going to be really busy months. I am happy at the moment to be back in Guild Wars 2 and feel like I have a sense of direction and forward momentum.
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Good Morning Friends! This weekend I fell out of my ARPG grind and back into some Guild Wars 2. Diablo IV was largely a disappointment and while I got lots of hours out of the game, I can’t say that most of them were really enjoyable. I am still very much engaged with Honkai Star Rail, but there is only about an hour’s worth of play that I can get out of that game on a day-to-day basis without spending additional money or banked resources. I got my Spriggan in Last Epoch up to Monoliths but I can only handle so much of that at once because they end up feeling very repetitive in their current state. With the announcement of the Secrets of the Obscure expansion, it has stoked my desire to get back engaged with Tyria. While my Necromancer has completed all of the content but Living World Season 2, I spend way more time on my Ranger and I am using that character to complete all of the content in the order of release.
Over the weekend I finished up Living World Season 2 and completed all of the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have to say, it is a much more enjoyable experience having played through all of Living World Season 1 then seeing the characters evolve in Living World Season 2… and finally having the major events play out during Heart of Thorns. It all has so much more impact because when I did the content initially… I had no real clue what I was doing and at the same time kept trying to treat Heart of Thorns like a traditional MMORPG expansion pack. I also have a much more stable grasp on the lore of the world thanks to having completed all of it once before. Having already unlocked most of the Heart of Thorns zones through gameplay on the Ranger, it also meant that I could largely focus on only completing the story missions.
The other huge benefit of this playthrough is that I now have access to a SkyScale, which means that most content becomes trivialized by significantly greater movement ability. I thought maybe it would make Tangled Depths more palatable, but that isn’t really the case. I have come to love the zone for what it is, and I greatly enjoy doing the Chak Gerent event… but it is still a nuisance to try and figure out where the quest marker is actually sending me. I still do not feel like games in general do a great job of visualizing the Z-Axis when to quests, and there are many times that I just sort of had to rely on previous knowledge of the game to get me in the vicinity of where I was supposed to go. That said… there are some really cool areas of Tangled Depths like this cavern with glowing mushrooms.
Another thing that greatly enhances my enjoyment of the game has been having BlishHUD turned on. For example, in the Roots of Terror map, I came across this chamber filled with Chak. There was a handy Blish HUD reminder that I could get achievements for killing 1, 10, and 50 Chak… so I spent the next bit of time exterminating every single Chak in the chamber until I got the Mastery achievement. There have been a few cases where I was already doing one thing… that seeing how close I was to completing another achievement caused me to press on and go for it. I generally enjoy playing the Ranger more than I did the Necromancer, and as a result, I feel like I am way more likely to go back and retry some of these maps later to pick up the remaining mastery achievements as a result.
Last night I started Living World Season 3 before deciding that sleep needed to happen. I remember this season really fondly, at least in part because the map designs were so good. Bloodstone Fen is a bit of a butt, but with maxed-out gliding and access to a Skyscale, it should be pretty trivial. This is part of why I am excited about Secrets of the Obscure and giving everyone an easier path to the Skyscale. It just makes everything so much more enjoyable when you don’t have to fiddle around with frustration mechanics. Guild Wars 2 does this amazing job of adding different layers to the map, and then also makes it a bit of a slog to move between them based on Mastery mechanics alone. The Skyscale is admittedly a bit of an easy button, but for me personally, it is making my enjoyment of the content so much higher.
I think my ultimate goal is to get caught up on all of the content on my Ranger before Secrets of the Obscure drops on August 22nd. That is going to be a bit of a rapid pace to go through the content, but I think if I am ONLY focusing on the story… it might be doable. It would also serve as a bit of a nice refresher before the new content drops as well. I get that the new content is supposedly not going to require you to have completed any earlier content to understand, but it would still be nice to have everything unlocked fully on the character I am enjoying playing the most. I mean that might change when I can swap things up with new weapon options in the expansion, but for the time being… I like being a longbow/greatsword dude.
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Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.
With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.
So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.
I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.
In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.
All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.
Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.
Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.
The post Regretfully Seeking Luocha appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
