Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.
It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.
That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.
Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.
Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.
I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.
Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.
Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.
The post New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week, we start off with some discussion around Path of Exile 3.27, the Keepers of the Flame league, and how we are doing breach to make things with the tree tree. From there, we talk a bit about the murder of Amazon Game Studios and how New World is essentially a shambling corpse now… spooky. After that horror story, we needed something chill, so we talked a bit about Powerwash Simulator and its interesting method for delivering a story. Grace and Bel finally finish the Destiny Rising raid and talk a bit about how good it is at teaching mechanics in lower-level content. Dispatch is a wildly good game that is being delivered in an episodic method that feels like you are playing a really good television show. Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity launched and we talk about some of our early thoughts, namely around the builds introduced by the new elite specs. Finally, we talk a bit about Outer Worlds 2 and how it makes good on the idea of Obsidian’s very own Fallout New Vegas that the first game started.
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.
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