Yesterday was a rather rough day, and I never actually got around to writing a blog post. So this morning you get a bit of what I would have written about yesterday and a bit about what I would have normally written about today. So on Monday, I spent a lot of that post talking about how I was largely done with my alts in Path of Exile… then proceeded to spend a bunch of time leveling my Widowhail Deadeye and liking it quite a bit better. The heart wants what the heart wants I guess. Basically, I did some super chill yellow maps… got a bunch of levels… which started to fix some of the issues with the character. I still have awful defenses… and I wasted a ton of regret orbs trying to flip to a more crit-based version… but I am back and happy with precise technique and trying to keep my life totals below my accuracy.
I currently have the weirdest passive tree I have ever had for a bow character. I’m getting a lot of mileage from an Unnatural Instinct jewel currently, which is in part what has prompted some of the weird pathing. My hope is to respec things a bit, gain some more levels, and add in another elemental cluster jewel down in the lower quadrant, freeing up one of my other jewel sockets to maybe add in a Light of Meaning Jewel wherever it will have the most benefit either going for Life, Evasion, or Fire Damage. This build is a bit like trying to make “Fetch Happen” but I am having fun doing my own thing here that again… far as I know no one is actually trying. My life and defenses are still awful but it is softcore and I am mostly okay with dying occasionally on my alts.
In other news, I am creeping ever closer to my shiny pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I have not been doing the daily roulette as religiously as I should, and I might spend some time this coming weekend just grinding it out the rest of the way to victory. I have to be honest… as often as I have run PVP Roulette for leveling… I really wish I had been cognisant of this rewards track before now. There is no telling how many things I just failed to collect and missed out on along the way. I am looking forward to raiding again this weekend because last Sunday we had the original four of Ashgar, Grace, Thalen, and me but then picked up Solaria who was piloted by Ammo because world travel was disabled. In theory maybe this weekend we can get Ammo on her off-server character giving us six of eight total players.
In Guild Wars 2 news, I am largely resigned to not making it through Secrets of the Obscure for the time being. I am basically at the end of the 5th chapter and then had a whole other chapter in Nayos on top of that to finish before moving on. This was such a weird content drop because some of it I liked quite a bit… and other bits I was not feeling at all. I feel like we were supposed to care about the Kryptis, but it reminded me entirely too much of the whole Vampire Courts thing from Dresden Files. In those books, Harry ends up aligned to the White Court at times for reasons that are deeply spoilery, but also in part because they are only sexually and emotionally abusive… as opposed to just straight-up murdering, devouring, and/or potentially wearing victims like fashion accessories. Guild Wars was trying to do something with this story of having a redemption arc for monsters… that just never really landed for me.
Janthir Wilds on the other hand so far seems amazing. I am all about hanging out with a delightful group of furries… err I mean Bearkin. I have a type when it comes to favorite zones… and this is absolutely playing directly into those interests. Grizzly Hills for example in World of Warcraft was such a pure joy to quest through, and I would go so far as to state that maybe Lowland Shore is one of the best zones Guild Wars 2 has at the moment. I’ve not gotten terribly far into it because I spent way too much time being a short-order cook last night for a bunch of hungry bears. I was hoping to get far enough to unlock player housing… but I did not even get far enough to unlock spears.
That is honestly probably my only complaint thus far is that the main story quest chain hits a brick wall when it asks you to level up the mastery that unlocks spears in order to continue. I was already working on the mastery that allows you to do more things with your bouncy kitty mount. So I closed out the evening hopping around the zone doing events, and hunting down a few of these mini-boss tundra beast encounters. I have no clue what the zone meta looks like if it exists, but I have heard it was pretty “spicy”. I am in no massive rush, but I would really like to get player housing as an upgrade to my home instance. I had enough Astral currency to pick up the next Legendary Weapon box… which has Twilight in it… which is probably the next one that I will craft because pretty much every character that can use a Greatsword is currently using one. I am building up a backlog of these because I never crafted the Juggernaut. There is also a weapon quest up on the Astral store, that I will probably devote the next 1000 points towards because from what I understand there is a really cool interaction between the weapon and the gloves that it comes with.
All told though, I am already feeling way more positive about Janthir Wilds than I did about Secrets of the Obscure. The zone design so far is just better. I get what they were trying to go for with SOTO, but flight-required maps are a bit frustrating given that it was not like they just handed you the Skyscale. It still took a lot of effort to unlock it, whereas from what I can tell here… you are pretty much just handed a Warclaw in a similar manner in which you were just handed the Raptor in Path of Fire. I already had my Warclaw from the WVW Track so this mostly amounted to me just getting a new skin to play with. It was cool that I got some cosmetics given to me for having already completed that before Janthir dropped. I will probably be back playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 in the coming weeks.
The post Boisterous Bear Buds appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Kodra
Hey Folks! We are down a few folks who are traveling this week. Happy Father’s day to all the Dads out there. We start off with Bel talking about the recent controversies surrounding New World Aeternum and the general marketing self-own of that announcement and seemingly ignoring the current player base. We roll into a discussion about Steam Next Fest and a few games we have played, namely: Flintlock, Dungeon Clawler, and Beastie Ball. From there we talk a bit about Guild Wars 2 releasing information about the new spear attacks for three more jobs and how fun some of the general off-meta weapons can be. Bel talks about getting his confidence back and tanking once more for the first time in a few years in Final Fantasy XIV. Ash and Kodra talk about their recent experiences playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as a Tabletop Roleplaying Game. Finally, we talk a bit about the influx of monster collection games including some more discussion about Beastie Ball.
Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.
This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.
In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.
Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.
I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.
One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.
Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.
Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.
The post Maelstrom Captain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
As I talked about in yesterday’s post, we were essentially in a holding pattern waiting for the announcement to drop for Guild Wars 2 Expansion 5. This sort of leaked out in drips and drabs throughout Monday and Tuesday morning, and then finally landed with the trailer showing up officially on YouTube around 11 am CDT. The leaks seemed to be entirely correct, most of which came from a Polish magazine article that jumped the embargo. I gotta say right off the bat, I don’t love that the expansion does not follow the X of Y naming scheme. It should have been “Wilds of Janthir” but pushing that eye twitch aside… I freaking love the logo. I especially love the animated version that shows up in the trailer. Mostly JW is going to be an awful abbreviation and I am scared of what the community at large is going to call it.
The trailer is super good, however, and I gotta say that they nailed the features of this expansion. I will elaborate on those in a bit. A hype trailer needs to evoke a sense of mystery and make you want to dive into that expansion. It also needs to tease enough features to begin you daydreaming about each of them, and I think this trailer nails that in spades. We got enough of a sketch of the plot to hold us over until the expansion drops in August. I think it is interesting that we saw Caithe and I kinda wonder if each of these micro expansions is going to essentially feature one or two characters that we know from the dragon cycle while introducing characters to new or lesser-known characters. I thought it was cool that we are apparently going to be running around with Malice Swordshadow and Countess Anise again… which should be a hilarious combination. Anise is legitimately one of my favorite characters in Guild Wars 2.
First up… let’s talk about my favorite expansion for the feature. PVE Warclaws are a great idea and I admit that I have found myself riding one around on more than one occasion because “Battle Cat” is a strong desire for anyone who grew up with MOTU. More than this though I feel like this is going to be awesome for players who want to dip their toes into the World vs World game mode. WvW without a Warclaw is sort of miserable. We all did it and we all limped along behind the mass of players trying to collect all of the bits we needed to finally craft ours. This is going to flatten that curve significantly and make it much easier for folks to get started into the fun side of that game mode. Few things feel cooler than riding in a clump of players thundering across the plains on their Warclaws. I would love to see this mount take up a similar role to the Siege Turtle in PVE combat of helping to break down objective obstacles.
Next up we have the Homestead… which honestly I thought was maybe a bit of hopium. ANet has already said that our home instance nodes are going to transfer to this system, which I hope means that we can maybe place them in a single area for efficiency’s sake. More than that I am hoping that we will be able to earn resources for our new “home” instance. I am assuming this is going to essentially be a baby version of the Guild Halls which hopefully means we got a good deal of control over the placement of cosmetic items. It would be cool if these had a similar evolving system that uses the Scribe tradeskill to upgrade your home. From a profit standpoint, this should unlock all sorts of things on the Gem Store for players to buy for their “player housing”. This is a cash cow in other games and I cannot see it being anything but that here as well. I am hoping all of the trophies that you can earn for your Guild Hall, can be placed in your player house as well.
Probably the piece I am the least excited about is the addition of a new weapon for each class. I never really liked using spears in underwater combat, because melee underwater felt like ass. However, it does seem like they are playing heavily with the definition of what a spear can be based on the varied class-specific animations that they show off. Like I am assuming that the charging wolf slash thing has to be a Ranger-specific ability for example. We will have to see how this shakes out in the long run, but as someone commented on Mastodon yesterday… we’ve not really had good spear skins for a decade now so there is going to have to be a lot of catching up cosmetic-wise to rival the feel of other weapons.
As far as the zone look and feel goes… I am getting DEEP Grizzly Hills vibes not just in the types of terrain but also the musical choices of the trailer. I am hoping this was absolutely intended because that is still one of my favorite zones to spend time in while roaming around Northrend in World of Warcraft. I love that we are getting more Kodan goodness… or in this case “Bearkin”. I love me some Stoic BearBois and am ready to help them out. I am hoping this also means we have Quaggan however… because the symbiotic relationship between those two races in the Shiverpeak Mountains is always something I have loved. It feels like there is going to be a lot of verticality to these zones which should be really fun for Skyscale riders, but less fun for pretty much everyone else that has not gone through either process of unlocking that mount. I am amped to see what the zone metas might look like in these areas… because really at the end of the day that is the “special sauce” of Guild Wars 2 that no one has managed to capture.
I am super happy that the team seems to have been able to nail the yearly cadence as the new expansion is dropping on August 20th. The preorders are up with $25 for the Standard edition and $50 for the Deluxe edition which comes with a set of tentacle monster themed unlimited use gathering tools, an extra character slot, and some sort of special table that we will be able to use in our homestead. As always there is a $75 Ultimate Edition available which essentially comes with $50 worth of Gems for the cash shop allowing you to basically get those for half price. I gotta be honest if you are new to the game that $75 pack is probably worth it because you can then turn around and use those 4000 gems to unlock various living world content which is essentially like their own expansions. A set of infinite gathering tools is roughly $30 worth of gems so even there… you are getting a pretty good deal by bumping up from the $25 Standard to the $50 Deluxe. I am probably way more free with spending money on Guild Wars 2 since it does not have any sort of recurring subscription fee.
You will notice that I did not mention raids, and honestly… that is mostly because I have yet to do ANY of the previous seven “wings” as the community refers to them. Maybe at some point, I will get into that, but for now, I don’t have enough friends playing regularly and at times I could participate in order to embark upon that system. Maybe my new found boldness from Pandaria Remix will translate to Guild Wars 2 and I will actually start using my damned Catmander tag. Even without taking Raiding into account and the announcement of some sort of new PVP Game mode… there is more than enough here to make me exceptionally hyped.
Have you been following the Janthir Wilds announcement? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
The post Janthir Wilds Announcement appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
