Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a busy day. I went to a new eye doctor, that required a bit of a journey to get there. My family has a history of retina detachment and I have been struggling with floaters… so I figured it was time to get on boarded to a proper doctor and not just the dude that is attached to the local eye glasses place. Some positives of the visit are that my general eye health is good, and my retina looks solid… and that my floaters have settled in place. The negative about that though is that instead of settling at the bottom of my eye they are not basically permanently glued to the back of my eye… so I am largely just going to have to get used to them or try a laser procedure that has a bunch of negative side effects… one of which is potential retina detachment. However she thinks that the double vision I have been seeing is due to the fact that my once “good eye” has gotten far worse… like significantly different prescription, but my left eye the previous bad eye is mostly the same. I have new glasses incoming soon, which I hope will help most of these issues.
I’ve been splitting my time between Destiny Rising and Guild Wars 2, and though some research yesterday I realized that I had a New Light Engram sitting in my inventory… that could produce the last remaining Mythic weapon that I had not collected. I had mostly ignored these because they were level 50 gear level, and almost not worth decrypting… however not that I have unlocked a copy of this weapon I can craft a level 70 engram and choose high level copies of it. So essentially I have been sitting on the key to collecting this last illusive weapon for a week now at least. I guess that is a suggestion, that whenever you hit the end game… use those couple of new light mythic engrams to unlock the weapons that are most important to you so you can craft engrams to get higher level versions of them. For me it just allowed me to complete my set and push my endgame affinity level up to 8.
I also ran a daily Onslaught Blitz and pulled another exotic weapon. I do not plan on using Ikora anytime soon, but if I ever do having this will probably be a good thing, especially since it dropped with the item level already sitting at 70. I vaguely remember Two-Tailed Fox as being an exotic that was fairly solid in Destiny 2, but I also cannot remember much about it. There is a certain Pokemon aspect to collecting Exotics, and I have always cared more about acquisition than actually using most of them. You can make exotic engrams, but they require a currency that I do not have much of. In theory this is going to be the long grind for the game is trying to acquire all of them, given that most of them are just random chance and not specific quests like they were in Destiny 1 and 2.
I also pushed up one of the seasonal journey tracks high enough to unlock the Partridge Sky exotic sword. Again this is a useful item for Jolder but thusfar I have not made an attempt to level it up so that she can start using it. Right now I have mythics that I like for both weapon slots and I am being way too lazy to change that up. You only get one exotic and I am not really sure if I should be running with the Huckleberry or this sword in that slot. I guess the benefit of this exotic is that is is a Solar sword, which replaces an existing Solar sword that I am using… which does not adversely impair my ability to pop elemental bubbles. I really like going into activities with two weapons that are contrasting elements to whatever my abilities do. Since Jolder is void, I try and have one weapon be Arc, and the other be Solar.
The current Fractal Incursion event means I am back spending most of my evening playing Guild Wars 2 and slowly chipping away at things. I had one of the weirdest situations happen last night where we got the Volcanic fractal through a random queue… and then everyone bailed and it was left with just two of us. Since I am a ranged build, I tend to focus on taking out the Grawl adds during the first Shaman boss allowing everyone else to focus on breaking his bubble. So it took me a bit to notice until the other person who stuck it out commented about it. Volcanic is probably the single easiest fractal out there, so it seemed weird as hell that anyone would bail from it. The two of us stuck it out and finished the fractal pretty easily, and since I run a healing pet I was able to keep group healing us to top us off during the final fight. We friended up each other after the run, because we were newly formed friends in the forge of adversity.
At this point I am sitting at 424 Fractaline Dust of 450 for the third recursion achievement. This is the biggest grind, but I will still have to go back and selectively do some of the specific non-rotation fractals and also try and collect the badges from the majority that I have not. I’ve found the badge from Aetherblade and Molten Boss and need four more… so at some point I should look up a video on where they are. I am sure I am running past them in the various fractals and if I knew where they were I could probably make a trip to get them. If nothing else has come from this.. I am way the hell more comfortable with tier 1 fractals than I used to be. Even Kinfall seems to be like a cakewalk anymore having gotten it back to back multiple times.
I think the legendary itself is going to be gated by the entire event. There is an achievement that progresses step by step each week, but after having ground out the worst bits… I am hoping that it will be easy enough to finish it up each week as new sub achievements drop. My goal this weekend is to help the rest of our normal fractal crew knock out whatever they need to knock out so they can catch up. I know I have been grinding this a lot harder than most people have… because in truth it is not like I have anything better to do. After the death of my wife in July, I have latched onto any grind that I can focus my attention towards so that it gives me at least temporarily a sense of purpose. I should be doing stuff around the house probably… but it is easy to latch onto this and hyper fixate for awhile.
Have you been participating in the Fractal Incursion event? What sorts of progress have you made? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks. I am writing this morning largely to make sure everyone is aware that a Fractal Incursion event is going on right now in Guild Wars 2… and it is phenomenal. Not only do you get starter gear sets for new characters from a vendor in the area, but you can essentially run most of the t1 fractals instantly through a really cool group finder functionality. This event started on September 9th and is going to be running for almost a full month ending on October 7th. During this time there are a few things happening. Firstly there is a new quest chain that starts from the Fractal portal in Lion’s Arch where just talking to the Mist Stranger NPC gets you a free 20 slot bag. In addition to this there is a new beta group finder tool for Fractals where essentially you get instant queued with a bunch of strangers and they have specifically narrowed the category down to only the fractals with a high chance of success with no prior knowledge.
They are bribing the hell out of us to get into game and run a lot of fractals. My guess is that they are using this to beta test a brand new group finder functionality, and I am fully on board with this. I want to see this same thing make its way to other parts of the game… specifically strikes. If I had a group finder like this for the easy Icebrood Saga strikes, I would run them every single day without question. The bribes though… are really strong because just by chain running fractals you are going to get access to unlock a set of legendary gloves. I’ve heard rumor that there is going to be a way to unlock multiple armor types during this event, but even if it is only a single armor weight… you are saving countless resources to make this happen. Additionally Fractals themselves are hyper lucrative. I really started participating on Sunday and in the few hours I spent running fractals I easily made around 50 gold.
All of the progress towards this event is tracked in the Incursive Investigation and Fractal Incursion achievement categories. Mostly this involves chain running fractals through the new group finder, or with your own fixed groups. You are collecting this substance called Fractalline Dust and you get this through either running quick play fractals, doing fractal incursions in the world at the top of every hour, or by completing achievements. It seems like you end up with 3 to 5 per fractal and in order to complete the three long grindy achievements you need to gather up a total of 450. In a single afternoon of running a bunch of these I pretty quickly ground out around 200, and that was with frequent stops to clear out by bags and do other things. In theory over the coming nights I should finish grinding out the 450 without much issue. What is awesome though is not only are you given a bag for starting down this path, but when you hit rank 9 you are given an extra bag slot. Additionally you are given tokens along the way that you can turn in for pieces of exotic gear, so this becomes quite possibly the best way to gear out an alt character.
There is zero doubt that this has been wildly popular. That first shot is folks hanging out in Lion’s Arch before 8 am on a North American week day. The above image is folks gathered for the Fractal Incursion boss that appears in Diessa Plateau that was going to spawn at 8 am. Folks are amped about this particular brand of nonsense and it makes me exceptionally happy. Even if you are only a casual Guild Wars 2 player, now is a great time to get in an experience fractals. For World of Warcraft players… think of Fractals as Mythic plus dungeons… but way more chill. Players are likely not going to speak a ton during them, because they are very much solved problems… but just follow the crowd and you will do fine. If nothing else it is going to give you a level of familiarity with the content so that even after the event ends… you will probably feel way more comfortable joining fractal groups. We’ve been doing this as a weekly thing on Thursday nights for awhile and having a lot of fun slowly raising our fractal levels.
I am so on board with this update. If you want to get into the game and need help getting adjusted… feel free to ping me. I should be in most evenings grinding Fractals and am more than happy to have you tag along. My Guild Wars 2 account is belghast.5496, so feel free to friend me up.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about the hidden episode of this season’s Game Changers over on Dropout TV. Bel regales the group with his adventures in the endgame of Destiny Rising and how it really is a better Destiny game than anything we have gotten in years. Grace instantly sells us on Star Birds just by telling us its from the folks behind Dorfromantik. More than that, it has the art style of Kurzgesagt so you adventure the galaxy with adorable birbs. There is currently an event going on in Guild Wars 2 where you can run random fractals with complete strangers, and it is delightful and stupidly rewarding. Bel talks a bit about Borderlands 4, and while it is probably the best Borderlands since the second game… it has some massive performance issues on PC. Kodra talks about the recent board game A Place for My Books, and most of the crew dives into further discussion about Silksong.
Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.
Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.
Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.
Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.
In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.
I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.
Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.
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