Good Morning Folks. We had one of those weird early morning deliveries before I woke up, and I was too slow removing the box from the bar after unpacking it. As a result… Josie now lives here. I spent most of last night snuggling with this goober while Gracie was on my legs. Especially now that it is getting colder, as soon as I sit still for more than a few minutes I end up with a cat. I am perfectly okay with this reality because truth be told I could use snuggles. Mollie pretty much lives in my office and when I got upstairs this morning she was ready for attention and is now sitting beside me. I feel like there is a periodic cat tax that must be paid on this blog and you can never say I did not provide.
I had every intent to spend my evening continuing the process of unlocking maps and progressing my way through the atlas in Path of Exile. That did not happen, because we had an extended maintenance as they attempted to roll out their new account system. This did not go smoothly. Essentially the QA process did not notice that once they expanded the length of accounts… by adding a numerical bit on the end of them for differentiation purposes… it would then jam up the login process that was strictly limited to 27 characters. I greatly appreciate the level of transparency they gave us in this post, and apparently, they are going to make another run at it on Sunday/Monday. These are all requirements for the eventual start of the Path of Exile 2 Early Access next month.
Instead of playing Path of Exile, I fell back into Veilguard and thankfully quickly sorted out what I was doing the last time I played. I did a round of cleaning up companion missions and then played through the Arlathan Forest main story quest that I had been avoiding. This produced the cutscene that I was expecting where essentially I got prior notice that we were just about to reach the point of no return. I’ve always been thankful when a Bioware game gives me one of these not-subtle reminders that I better do anything I might want to do before going into a big world-state-changing sequence. Of course… immediately following this a whole new round of companion quests opened up which will keep me busy for another night or two.
In other news, Guild Wars 2 released this banger of a trailer coinciding with its release on the Epic Game Store. It feels weird that they are specifically launching on the EGS after having already launched on Steam, but hopefully, they are getting some of that sweet sweet Tim Sweeny payola for going through the effort. Regardless of how I feel about the EGS… this is a fucking amazing trailer. This is how they should have sold the game years ago. It really nails the high points of the game as it is today and if I was not already a player… this would have been the sort of thing that would have inspired me to give it a shot.
They also released the trailer for the next content drop called Godspawn. The big part of this that I need to start prepping for is doing dailies in order to build back up my Wizard Chore currency so that I can hopefully buy another legendary weapon box when the store refreshes on the 19th. I had fallen out of the habit of doing dailies, but I really should get back into that habit in the coming week. The currency builds up really freaking fast so I should be able to buy that box pretty quickly after its release. At this point, I have crafted four legendary weapons, and this content drop releases a new Legendary Spear which I am interested to see what that requires.
Other than that… I might be backpedaling on nuking my Twitter account. My friend Ashgar raised a valid point yesterday, and I have until the end of the month to decide one way or the other. Essentially over most of the last decade, I have used Twitter as my defacto home on the internet. As a result, my blog is littered with references to my Twitter account. This means that I need to sift through 3700 blog posts and their duplicates on AggroChat and replace all of those links… or just turn back on my account and lock it down in a state of dormancy. I am not sure which option I will go with yet. My twitter profile has enough search engine traction that it is not unlikely for someone to snag it and put annoying bullshit on it. Apparently, this happened to a bunch of artists when they left twitter and their accounts got snagged by crypto-scammers. This is not a thing I want associated with my name, even on a platform I have moved past.
The post Cats and Companions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. Zone Meta Events are the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 amazing. For the uninitiated, a “Meta” in Guild Wars 2 language is a zone-wide event that takes place on a reoccurring timer. Some of these are straightforward single-shot world bosses, and others are complicated if/then/else chains that start with minor escort events and end up in giant 80+ player raid fights. The popularity of specific zones is often determined by how popular the metas associated with them are. That said… pretty much EVERY zone has at least some player population wanting to complete the meta at any given moment. For example, this is Queensdale this morning at 6:30 am… with folks waiting on the spawn of Shadow Behemoth. We wrecked the World Boss in what felt like record time… all during non-primetime hours.
I’ve personally always struggled with keeping track of what was going on at any given time. For example, you can type “/wiki et” in the game and it will pop open the event tracker page… which does a reasonable attempt at laying this data out but also… causes my eyeballs to fuzz out and my mind to go blank. It seemed a bit mad to try and figure out what I was going to do in a given evening, with the amount of playtime that I had in front of me. This meant that most of the time… I participated in the meta events that I happened to accidentally stumble into rather than approaching any of them with a sense of purpose. I had tried a few plugins for BlishHUD in the hopes of helping me keep track of this nonsense, but honestly, it always felt a bit too cumbersome, and as a result… I defaulted to just roaming aimlessly or following the World Boss train when I could hop on board knowing for example that Tequatl always spawns at server reset.
Over the weekend, I stumbled onto a better solution. I was setting up ArcDPS again, and I went through the process of setting up the Addon Loader Nexus as it supposedly handles some of the problems with ArcDPS on the release of major patches. Nexus works very similarly to BlishHUD and offers the ability to hot load addons into the game while it is running and similarly comes with a library of addons you can install quickly from within the UI. One of these is called World Bosses by Sognus and for me at least it has been a game changer. Essentially it puts little clocks for lack of a better term over the top of the world map zones that contain popular metas, and at any given time you can see what phase that meta is in and what phase is coming next. For example, I blew up a chunk of my screen in the above image showing that Dragon Stand was just about to start a fresh meta train, which would of course be the ideal time to join that map.
What is even better about this is that after playing with this for a bit, it becomes trivial to see the natural synergy between different meta events and how you can easily hop from one to the next one without much forethought. For example, in the above image, the Aetherblade Assault is just about to start in Seitung Province, and then when it is wrapping up… The New Kaineng City Blackout should be starting… and then as it is wrapping up you can pop over and pick up the Echovald Forest Gang War event. Similarly this weekend I rode from Dragon Stand to Chalk Gerent to Octovine without missing a beat, just rolling from one event to the next and racking up the sweet sweet loot. I used to think that either people joined specific Commanders exclusively, or just had some vague sense of precognition about these things… but with this addon, it becomes super easy to follow the meta train.
If you are curious I would check out this general video about Nexus, as it can install a lot more add-ons other than the World Boss one that I am specifically talking about. I am also a huge fan of BlishHUD for marker packs that help with world completion, jumping puzzles, and getting various achievement collections completed like all of the nonsense associated with the SkyScales. Thankfully the two addon loaders play nicely together, and each of them seems to do something slightly different than the other one. There are a few add-ons that can be found on both of them… for example, Regions of Tyria a dumb addon that I enjoy greatly that announces the name of every area when you enter it, exists on both platforms. Add-ons and Guild Wars 2 are a massive rabbit hole, but the World Bosses tool seems well worth diving into because it gives me a level of confidence at being able to join in various Metas that I have not had before now.
Zone Metas are legitimately the best part of Guild Wars 2, and being able to participate in them more predictably is pretty freaking amazing. Sure I might not be in the mood every night to gather together with eighty strangers and mash buttons to take down a big bad, but when I am… this just works so much better. It makes me realize how important add-ons have been to my enjoyment of various MMORPG tropes throughout the years. Generally speaking, they just take information that already exists and present it in a more digestible format that my ADHD-addled brain can consume. While I have completely eschewed them in Final Fantasy XIV, I do get why players use them because I have always found having an interface that I can more directly control key to my enjoyment in games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.
Anyways! I hope this is helpful to someone out there. If you ever want to do Meta nonsense, hit me up in game.
The post World Boss and Meta Add-On appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.
I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.
I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.
Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.
What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.
I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.
Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.
Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.
The post A Jumbled Mess appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a handful of folks but continue pushing forward. We start off with talking about a world where Arcades did not die out… aka Japan and what the 2020 Covid crisis did to them. This leads to a discussion about playing DDR and similar rhythm games at home. From there Bel talks about the upcoming update to Last Epoch where they are doing a mid-cycle reset and some of the reasons why this is happening. Ammo talks about her experiences returning to Guild Wars 2 and Bel shares his frustrations about how obtuse the achievement system is when it comes to trying to find the major unlocks and legendary crafts. Bel also questions whether or not Twitch Drops work, which Kodra refutes with his personal experience. Lastly, we talk a bit about Visions of Mana the fifth official game in the Mana Series.
