Good Morning Folks. Today is like Rex Manning day… except it is the launch of the Keepers League in Path of Exile. I took the day off… which generally is a mistake to do for the launch of anything. However I have a stack of tasks that I am going to try and accomplish today well before the 2pm CDT launch time of the league. I am still trying to maintain a minimum amount of activity in Destiny Rising, and quite possibly the hardest thing that I do every day… is following around new lights and trying to get them to interact with me. I am sure it seems SUPER creepy to see this person following you around in Haven and doing a “Hey” which in my case is my Jolder dancing in front of them. Most do not have a clue what to do, but I am always super thankful when someone clicks on the bubble and responds back giving me those coveted mentor program interactions.
Since the Halloween event was a complete bust, Ace and I still got together last night and finished out our runs of Morgran’s Hunt. I did not get any more exotic weapons, but I did pull an exotic weapon mod from a silver key. We had what was probably our best run ever running with this trio of Estela. I am not entirely certain what it is about her kit, but she is the absolute best character to run Morgran’s Hunt or honestly any of the Morgran content. I am kind of hoping that we scored well enough to get the chat bubble, though it is not like I actually use chat enough for this to matter. I hate that these things are limited time and go away when the next event starts. Anything temporary like that makes me value it extremely lowly, when it comes to time spent.
We then yolo’d our way through the last two parts of the raid, and while I feel like I firmly grasp the third phase… I still have no real idea what was going on for the second. We ended up splitting up on seperate teams and I think I mostly followed the lead of the other players and we nailed the encounter on first attempt. The final boss aka the third phase of the raid was pretty fun, and I think in the future we will probably just queue for that. I lucked out and pulled the exclusive exotic shotgun from the middle phase, and weirdly enough pulled two copies of it at the same time because I spent one of the extra loot tokens. I can’t see actually using this weapon because Crescendo is just so good for Gwynn, and Jotun is so good for Xuan Wei. That leaves pretty much no one that can use a shotgun for whom this would be a good option. Still I will take the ascendancy points for picking up this. If nothing else it looks really cool.
We finished up in time for me to actually join in the reindeer games for Guild Wars 2. I did not originally intend on doing this, but folks were gathered and I was going to log into GW2 anyways… so I figured I might as well be social. We started the night with some RIBA but quickly transitioned to running Dragon’s Stand because Ashgar needed the Hero Points from it. It was wildly how fast we coalesced from not really having enough people… to wrecking everything in sight. Huge props to Sita for taking up the commander banner so that I did not have to. I was feeling somewhat out of it last night, and I did not really want to take responsibility for anyone but myself… even though being a commander in a meta like this is mostly just being in the correct lane. Folks have done the entire thing often enough that it mostly leads itself.
Right now I am really struggling to find forward momentum in the expansion for Guild Wars 2. The bug that I encountered have put me in a rather undesirable position. I had to hop onto an alt to fix the bugged state of my skimmer mastery. Then that unfortunately put me in a position where I effectively need to grind out two full ranks of the mastery so that I can keep progressing the main story. I hate that mastery points and such get blended into the story. I am very much the sort of person that wants to grind my way through all of the story at once, and any forced faffing about just ends up pissing me off. I get that Guild Wars 2 is trying to expose players to new mechanics and such, but it just feels bad when I have to stop progress to fiddle around in a zone. I love open world content, but I like doing it on my own terms, after I have unlocked everything.
I think the other thing that is harming my joy is that I am really amped for a new Path of Exile league, and mostly just want to be playing that. Visions of Eternity will be there waiting on me, and it is not like I am in any real rush. Hell, most of my crew that I am playing with are not even caught up to the point where I am with other expansions, so it is not like I need to rush in order to keep up with the pack. I’ve unlocked Galeshot, Ritualist, and Evoker and I will probably fiddle around with all three while doing dailies and weeklies going forward. However I doubt I make much progress in the expansion overall until after the newness of the first week of league start wears off a bit.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday about mid day the Visions of Eternity expansion dropped in Guild Wars 2, giving us access to new areas and new elite specs. I’ve not made it past the first zone, but I have to say that Shipwreck Strand is freaking gorgeous. Probably the most interesting thing about the zone so far is how much of it was designed explicitly for the skimmer, and more specifically the ability to use the skimmer underwater, because there are giant swaths of caves believe the surface. Essentially we head to the new far flung locale of Castoria, a sort of rumored island that is shrouded in unnatural fog. I won’t go into too much detail as not to spoil the experience for anyone, but I found the whole navigation sequence of finding our way to the island interesting.
I am not sure if there are some tangible upgrades to the engine for this expansion, or if they are just using artistic flare in new and interesting ways… but the zones look freaking amazing. Specifically the ocean itself looks more alive than it ever has, as it swells and drops in very believable ways. There is this bioluminescent foam-like texture in the water that collects around these tidepools that just looks so good to watch play out in front of you. It feels like they have really pulled out all of the stops of zone design to make something that really looks new and interesting. Greebles are normally a term that is used to describe surface texture… but the sky itself feels like it is greebled with motes of magic and such everywhere, making the entire scene look absolutely enchanted.
I migrated my housing to the new island and that was pretty straight forward. You just talk to the NPC who then warns you that any customization will be reset and that your decorations will be placed in storage when you do so. This was fine for me because while I placed items in my house, I didn’t really do anything specific or intentional with them. I was largely running the default state of the previous island. The only customization that I carried forward was using the aurora borealis themed sky, which really blends nicely with the overall look of the zone. This one feels way more detailed than the previous homestead zone, and honestly there are a few places where I would like to try and erect some custom structures. I’ve not really spent much of any time decorating my homestead and maybe the new island will change that. The default structure feels way less of a “complete” thing as it did with the bearkin area.
Now all of this goodness aside… there is a really frustrating bug at play. Essentially very early on in the quest chain, you are given a collection to finish for an NPC named Pete. It feels bad to halt your progress for this unlocking the wavehawk quest sequence, but I remember them doing something similar for the warclaw in Janthir Wilds. However this time around, I thought they had learned their lesson because I was able to progress past the quest once I had filled the renown heart in the area. DO NOT DO THIS. Currently if you progress your quest past the point where you are given the Wavehawk quest chain, you will no longer be able to complete this chain. This harms you later down the line because you are halted from progressing the story because you do not have a Wavehawk mastery as a result. I’ve tried resetting my quest progress back to this chain to essentially zero luck. I am certain they will resolve this issue at some point, but right now… if you move forward with the quest line called “Solid Ground” you will brick your quest progress sequence seemingly permanently.
The only reliable advice that I have seen on this problem is to break out an alt and progress them up to the point where they receive the Wavehawk quest chain, and then complete the collection on them. This should then in theory unstick your entire account, because mastery unlocks are shared at an account level. Effectively when you are in this broken state, the items just do not spawn in the world that are needed for the collection. Anyways, at some point today I intend to starting this content with my Necromancer, and will be bringing him out of retirement. This is not that big of a deal, given that it has been ages since I have played this character and they were effectively the character that made me fall in love with this game universally.
I threw together a very rudimentary Power Galeshot build and it felt pretty good. I don’t love the disengage shot, but it lives on the same slot as the stealth ability from Longbow, so I was already not in the custom of hitting that button most of the time. Essentially I was able to maintain almost 100% uptime on quickness, 12 stacks of might, and have Aegis up more often than not. This seems like a good kit, and way less selfish than my normal Power Longbow build. I need to play around with it more to get used to it, and probably should also keep tweaking the build a bit to improve it. Nothing much is out there so far for Power Longshot other than a PVP focused build. Hopefully the buildcraft geniuses will come up with something beautiful in the next few days. However for the time being this works well enough to keep rolling and questing with it.
Other than this one egregious game breaking bug… I am pretty happy with everything I have seen so far from Castoria and Visions of Eternity. That said, I am not engaged enough that it is going to stop me from going fully degen mode on Path of Exile come Friday. I’ve done the first zone meta twice, and it is fine… but mostly just felt like a giant bag of hitpoints making the entire thing drag on a bit too long. I had more than enough points on the Necromancer to fully spec out the Ritualist tree so I might see what is available for that before I start questing. I tend to prefer GuildJen over Snowcrows or Metabattle because it seems to favor way less sweaty meta builds, and more general purpose things. I don’t care to run multiple builds for multiple purposes, so am always just looking for something that is fun to play that does “good enough” in most content. GuildJen sort of feels like the spiritual successor to Dulfy now that she has “passed beyond memory” or at very least retired from updating a guide site.
Anyways. Have you played any of Visions of Eternity? What were your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Visions of Eternity Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.
However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.
An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.
Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.
The post Heys for Days appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This weekend I decided to focus on trying to get the pack up and going. We almost have enough to form a pack on our own, and quite honestly… I think once we have a pack going it will be easier to recruit folks to play the game. One of the cool things about MuMuPlayer is that they realize that people are probably going to at some point try playing multiple accounts… like is often the case with Gacha games. So there is a built in functionality to spin up new emulator sessions. This is often done for folks who want to keep playing the game, but have long run out of the “stamina” mechanic for that game.
First you have to enable multi-instance support from the emulator when it is running through the “…” menu up at the top. Then once you get into that you can create new instances of android. I named mine after the accounts that I used to create them so I can keep them straight. Unfortunately this means that you are going to have to go through the process of installing Destiny Rising on each instance, which will also mean that when a patch gets applied… you have to manually patch them up as well. I am MOSTLY doing this so that I can get an extra signature to make sure that the pack gets created smoothly. However Ace’s spouse has recently started playing, so I might start running around on this character, because the grouping we did last night… was a bit overpowered with us playing our mains. That is not to say that I won’t likely catch this account up quickly however.
I decided to roll with a Femme character this time around, but I have to say… just like with the Masculine options… there really were none that I necessarily liked. In both cases they were overwhelmingly soft features… which seemed odd for someone who is this big warrior type. Destiny had somewhat shitty character model options too, and I always got around this by playing an Exo. Unfortunately there are no Exo or Awoken options for Destiny Rising. I am hoping at some point we get the option to reroll our character features, because I kind of hate the void and appearance of my main character. I don’t necessarily love this second character… but the voice I chose is a little less “Golly Gee Willikers” about everything. Green hair is always the correct option… I blame Robotech for setting that preference early on.
The second account is a bit lucky… as I did my first few pulls off the permanent banner and already have a Jolder. I also got Ikora early and pulled Xuan Wei, Attal, and the newest 4 star Rossi-11. That is a pretty decent blend of characters to play. I will not be spending a single dime on this second account, and mostly will find it interesting to see if there is any difference between a purely free account and one where I have bought the subscription and battle pass. Of all of the characters to pull though… Jolder is probably my favorite of the baseline mythic characters. It will be interesting to see if I end up unlocking everything on this account. Sadly the Gwynn and Estela banners are long gone, and those are characters I really enjoy on my main account. Helhest is pretty great, but nowhere near as good as either of those characters.
Over on my main account I am a bit stuck. There is a material needed for high level artifact gilding, and it only comes from the Expanse. I have earned my two for this cycle, and am now stuck waiting another 10 days for the expanse to reset so I can earn another two. I could in theory earn more by clearing another difficulty level… but quite frankly I am getting wrecked. I’ve gotten up to wave 19 in the second tier and am just getting shredded by these hyper melee focused mobs that bum rush me… and the objective that I am supposed to keep from taking damage. I am just not skilled enough to get through it with my current light levels on Estella, but I need to push her to a gold medal in order to unlock the next tier of ascension. I could in theory reset progress on Jolder and claw back those resources… but that seems like a bad idea since I love playing Jolder.
In other news, I pulled Riskrunner from the Legendary Campaign… but unfortunately don’t really have the resources to push it up high enough to be useful. This is a solid option for Jolder to use as a primary weapon. Especially if I take any arc damage, Riskrunner used to be brutal in specific content in Destiny 2. I am going to push it up as far as I can just so I can run a few rounds with it to see how good it feels in this game. Unfortunately when it comes to progression… I am not even in a place where I can buy my way out of the problem by spending real world money. Like good on them for not making spending money the answer to the issues… but also it feels kind of bad that I have reached a point in the end game where progression happens every two weeks… rather than weekly.
I’ve also been playing a bit of Destiny 1 on the PlayStation 5, and it is wild to me how much more atmospheric that game feels as compared to Destiny 2… and by reference the style that Destiny Rising adopted. There is just so much going on in scenes and the weather effects feel like they play a much larger role in setting the scene. The lighting is much moodier and I think it really fits the almost horror elements of the Destiny universe. Of course this is from roaming around the Plaguelands, which is the very last area that was added to the game right before the launch of Destiny 2. But this also reminds me of how Destiny 2 in many ways felt like a step backwards… instead of a step forward. Rise of Iron was such a great expansion, and the game felt so much better at that point than the baseline Destiny 2 experience at launch.
Lastly we have a bit of Guild Wars 2 progress. Yesterday afternoon I was running Fractals to complete one of the weeklies and happened upon completing an achievement that gave me one Core Tyria mastery point. This was the last one that I needed to pick up my final Core Tyria mastery the Scholar of Secrets, finishing out the legendary crafting path. The irony is I have a stack of Legendaries thanks to the starter kits, but I guess if I ever want to craft the Heart of Thorns ones I have all of the necessary training. Running random Fractals is still a heck of a lot of fun, and I really look forward to this system going in for Raids and Strikes. Just being able to hop in on a Saturday afternoon and pop into some instant groups and complete that weekly was an extremely nice feeling.
Hopefully yall had a pretty great weekend. I feel like I need to start crafting a Destiny Rising Tools page like I have for other games, because there is not a ton of infrastructure out there for up to date information. If nothing it will give me a spot to jot things down as I learn them. I am extremely sold on that game, and if you ever liked Destiny at any point in the past, I highly suggest giving it a spin. Soon I hope to have a pack to be able to invite folks to.
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