Good Morning Friends! I am not entirely certain what it is about the ritual of doing Tequatl the Sunless at server reset that I enjoy so much but it is most definitely a thing. I am honestly a bit annoyed with the time change because it pushes the “start” of my evening back an hour later than it was. There was just something about sitting down with dinner and killing a giant undead dragon as my first activity of the evening that set the tone for the rest of it. It isn’t that Tequatl or “Taco” as I occasionally call it is really that rewarding. There are much better uses of my time, but there is something about the event that I enjoy and the fact that I have managed to pull several ascended weapons from it at this point. There is also a little community of folks who run this every single night and I enjoy the vibe they bring… that is unless I get the map with the Goon Squad on it.
I’ve been working my way through the story with my Ranger and am on the second section of Living World Season 2. In theory, my excuse is to use this experience as a way of knocking out the “Return To” achievements and eventually earning myself a Legendary Amulet as a result. Essentially ANet as a way of buying time for the End of Dragons release threw in a “Living World Return” series that provides a ton of rewards along the way and a legendary item that you can use on all of your characters. It was due to some of these achievements that I was able to finish my Skyscale so quickly because completing segments gave me exactly the amount of zone currency required for one of the steps of that quest chain. I have completed all of the content in Guild Wars 2, but had done so often times out of sequence and over the course of ten years of me playing off and on.
What has been so interesting is seeing this cast of characters that I am already so engaged with… evolving into what they will eventually become. It is like I read the last chapter of the story and now can better appreciate the chapters that are leading up to it as a result. So many of these characters I did not like at all when I first met them through Living World Season 2, because I did not understand what had happened during the first Living World Season. The game just sort of threw you in the middle of something that didn’t make much sense. While I disliked Braham specifically for most of a decade, I now feel like I understand him a bit better as a character and also think that Kas is less of an airhead because I know that both Kas and Jory to some extent are dealing with a lot of shit that went down along the way while still trying to remain a strong couple.
It makes me think that at some point in the future, I should probably start a brand new character and play all of Final Fantasy XIV through from the very beginning. Now that I know where the story is going, I feel like I will better appreciate the journey. I’m not one who is negatively impacted by spoilers and quite honestly most of the time… knowing the destination makes me stop trying to second-guess every decision along the way. I can finally relax and enjoy the ride for what it is without feeling like I need to be wary of each step. I think this is part of why I have fairly regular replaying of games that meant a lot to me like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, or The Witcher 3. It is the same reason why I find comfort in watching Star Wars, Dune, or Blade Runner… it is comfortable to re-experience things that once made me happy and it is something I can use as a bit of solace when I am struggling.
In more current and fresh news… I was in fact able to skip past the game-breaking bug surrounding the Lagon boss fight in Last Epoch. If you get stuck where Lagon will not summon a portal for you to take, you can just teleport to Soreth’ka in the Divine Era. This does in fact cause you to complete the quest you are on and allow you to pick up the next sequence and begin the ninth and final chapter of the game. The last chapter was pretty fun but included maybe the worst possible archetype of creation… a wizard that summons a ring of bad around him so you have to fight him in close quarters… then summons an endless string of bees for you to fight. Bees in ARPGs are just universally awful and end up doing way more damage they you would think they should.
I’ve made minimal progress in the Monolith system, but have finished the first boss and am working on unlocking the second. I am not sure what it is about the game but I’m less driven to keep going not that I have finished the story. Maybe it is that I know I will be poking my head into Diablo IV in a few minutes, or that I am really enjoying Guild Wars 2 at the moment. The monolith just doesn’t seem as “sticky” as I would like it to be. It is really fun with friends, but I sorta find it less interesting when I am running it by myself. The drop rates of gear also feel a bit fickle in that it has been probably 20 levels since I last got an upgrade. I’m just not seeing items that are worth swapping to and would require more crafting than I have forging potential available to fix. I know as I progress upwards in the monolith that I will keep seeing better and better items, but I am in this weird period where nothing useful seems to be dropping. The rewards from each monolith echo feel significantly less important when you know you are just going to be vendoring almost all of it.
I think in the test realm they must have buffed drop rates significantly because it feels like I am only getting a trickle of useful gear. Maybe it is just that I know more specifically what types of items I am after with my paladin build than I did with the necromancer. Whatever the case the game as a whole just feels less rewarding than it did in testing. I am trying not to force myself to play Last Epoch because I don’t want to ruin the experience. I might try playing something else because while I enjoy the tanky nature of the Paladin build I am running, it isn’t terribly exciting gameplay-wise. I sorta miss having my Bone Golem thrashing about. I would also like to try building something with Primalist, and if I do plan on switching classes I should probably do so before I get too deep into the monolith system since that is unlocked on a character-by-character basis and not account-wide.
In the short term however, I am going to be playing a lot of Diablo IV as I try and get used to that game, and get far enough along to unlock the wolf cub backpack. It is sort of adorable.
The post Enjoying the Journey appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Sometimes I get a dumb idea stuck in my head and can’t shake it loose. One of these recently is that I decided I wanted to pick up a commander tag. I’ve dipped my toes into trying to start groups in the group finder, and one challenge is the inability of someone without a Commander Tag to create groups larger than 10 players. Technically you can make strikes work but can do nothing to create subgroups and arrange people. Then there is the problem that technically a group without a commander means that anyone can tag up and effectively take control of your group away from you. I’ve heard anecdotes of folks going into the strikes section… merging groups and then telling everyone that they are now doing raids instead. Even if that does not happen… gating the ability to control a group properly behind a hefty price tag is not exactly great.
However, of my friend group, I am definitely the most “wealthy” because last year I hit the jackpot in opening a black lion crate and getting a permanent banker. Instead of keeping this, I opted to sell it and have been living on the proceeds ever since. So while 300 gold is a heck of a lot of money, it was something that I could afford and figured would definitely make group activities go a little bit more smoothly. The normal commander tag is pretty easy to get and I believe you can purchase it from a vendor in every major city. When you purchase the commander tag… you get a choice of one of these icons floating over your head.
I mean this is perfectly fine and functional… but would be the incorrect choice. There is however a semi-hidden system that allows you to get the “catmander” tag granting you access to these much better symbols floating over your head.
If I was going to spend 300 gold on something so frivolous, I was at a minimum going to get the arguably better version. So this began my quest and planted a seed in my head a few weeks back that I could not seemingly remove.
The problem with this mission however is that the Catmander requires you to do one of three jumping puzzles located in the World vs World borderlands. So not only do you have to be comfortable enough with WvW in general, but also be able to complete some of the most annoying jumping puzzles I have experienced thus far. The problem with these is that they are not so much jumping puzzles… but falling puzzles. The final leg of each of them involves falling gracefully from a perch and trying to land on a shelf below that will ultimately allow you to jump into the opening to the cave where the Catmander is located. After spending an entire afternoon making an untold number of tries, I stumbled upon the above video. Effectively I could use a druid staff ability to catapult myself to the ledge with the Catmander and skip the jumping puzzle entirely… or at least most of the hard bits.
Just like that, on my first attempt doing the above method… I landed on the ledge and made my way to the Catmander’s chamber. I ultimately went after the Blue Catmander, because the quirks of WvW meant that it was functionally easier for me to get to that chamber this week. Inside you are greeted with a delightful sight as the Catmander is obviously training some recruits… with kittens working on training dummies while a lieutenant cat supervises. This scene alone is worth the price of admission honestly.
One of the cute quirks of Guild Wars 2 is that you have a form of player housing called the “Home Instance”. This is used as part of the early story quests and is something that you can collect things for over the course of the game. One of the things you can collect is a series of cats that live in your instance with you. Effectively around the world are various cats and if you have a specific item in your inventory you will be given a prompt to interact with them and feed them that “food”. It seems that you can do this with the three Catmanders as well. The Blue one for example wants a Gift of Battle, aka something that you farm up for legendary weapons and is a rewards track in WvW. So of course I am now farming up another Gift of Battle so I can collect that cat. Thankfully the Yellow Catmander requests something more sensible and wants a Can of Spicy Meat Chili. That would leave only Penelope the Unconquerable in Armistice Bastion… but she resides at the end of a pretty traumatic jumping puzzle and that zone requires paid access so it might be a while before I collect that Catmander.
As much as I love World Boss Trains… I am uncertain if I am going to be finding myself leading them. It seems like a lot of effort, and while I applaud the commanders that go from zone to zone leading the troops… I figure I will probably keep my tag in my back pocket for when I need to arrange instanced content. I just feel like I am maybe not comfortable enough leading most content… that is other than Tequatl. I can do “Taco” in my sleep and have collected many spoons in the process. I guess if you find yourself in need of a commander for something, hit me up.
The post Mander of Catte appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! We start off the show with some random talk about Rick Astley and the history of Rickrolling. From there Bel talks about getting a Commander tag and going for the obvious best choice… that Catmander. Kodra talks about beating Axiom Verge and his struggles with M.A.S.S. Builder not quite being detailed enough. From there we talk about the launch of the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch and the struggles of instant 8X growth. We talk a bit about the challenge of a game launch and scaling servers without overbooking capacity. Then we finish out with some discussion from Tam about the Star Citizen 3.18 patch and its own server capacity issues.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a pretty glorious day at least so far as I knocked out a bunch of things in Guild Wars 2. Sometimes I just stand around admiring the majesty of our Guild Hall from the rainbow bridge. There is this dumb side project I created which is using a bunch of the super adventure box clouds… to create a way up onto the rooftops… then Thalen branched off of this with the rainbow bridge. I heartily approve of this particular brand of nonsense… and honestly, I think Thalen and I may have been the only two people to have placed anything in our guild hall ever. I know I have Tequatl backbones for days if we want to build a pillow fort out of them. I have nothing better to do with those drops so I always deposit anything from world bosses in the decorations bank.
I know I talked about the noodle cart yesterday, but I thought I would bring it up again. I picked one up after experiencing it from a random player in Rata Sum, and last night while waiting on Tequatl I opted to throw mine out there. Notice how the player beside me has two players in their cart and I have two players in my cart, and a third player has also thrown theirs out beside me. Before the start of Tequatl, their noodle cart was full of people as well. I love objects that create casual social interaction like this. Often times folks chat away while sitting on the cart and these are so much better than the “Box of Fun” or the “Bobblehead Laboratory”. I would love to see them create more multi-person chairs like this that have a purpose behind them. It would probably even be cooler if eating the noodles actually gave you something like the birthday cake food buff.
So first accomplishment of the night is that I finally managed to catch the meta event in Seitung and collected that piece of the turtle saddle. I mean I had done this event several times before, but never when I was actively on the correct step on the achievement chain. I managed to catch someone doing a train and caught Echovald Wilds and Kaineng City as well. Not that I needed the other two, but it was a source of some pretty good loot. I have to admit that I have contemplated buying a commander tag many times. When there is one on the map, folks seem to automagically coalesce behind it. The problem is they also expect the commander to have a clue about what is going on, which I do not entirely yet. It does however seem to be a huge boon for actually doing any sort of activity though, so as I delve into making groups I feel like I probably need one.
Shortly after resetting, I decided to check the group finder tool and happened onto someone in Strike Training forming a group for Kaineng Overlook. I was legitimately working up the nerve to do the same thing, so I very happily joined their team. This was the last piece that I needed for the turtle mount, and within ten minutes we had filled our party of ten and shockingly had a pretty reasonable group balance. What is even more shocking is the fact that eight out of the ten of us had never been there before, and we somehow managed to one-shot the encounter without much in the way of training. What helped me specifically is that the markers and warnings used in the fight seem to be pretty standard from what I have seen in other games. There is a mechanic where it puts numbers over the top of your head, and we all spread out to the edges because this was something I had seen several times in Final Fantasy XIV as the boss attacks each of us in that order.
Just like that, I was able to go back to Arborstone and turn in my quest and get my very own turtle friend. In the grand scheme of things, this was a much easier quest chain than I needed for the Skyscale, but it did require actual group activity rather than largely being a solo activity. This means the only mount that I do not have currently is the Gryphon. I’ve started on it, but I guess will actually start devoting some real effort to getting it finished. When we were doing Kaineng City Blackout, the Commander was using the Gryphon and there was no way that I could keep up with them over Skyscale so I absolutely understand the specific use case for that mount. In truth, there is a pretty solid use case for every mount, and since the new meta in Gyala Delve requires a Siege Turtle at times… I figured I would get mine so that I could at least fill that role if none were available.
After getting my Siege Turtle I turned my eyes to my next objective of the night which was to finish out the Battle for Lion’s Arch and more specifically the Breachmaker portion of that quest. I boarded and defeated Scarlet and after a bit of back and forth finished Living World Season 1. I will say that already Living World Season 2 feels so much better than I remember it because I understand the events that led up to that point. I get why Kas is so guarded about letting Jory do anything because she almost died during the battle on top of the Breachmaker. I get why Taimi is so weird about Scarlet and seemingly obsessed with her, and I get why Braham and Rox are being a wet blanket about it. There is also the fact that I care about these characters way more than I did when I was first dipping my toes into this content having not seen much of the Living World Season 1. This is going to help massively for anyone starting out the game now without the wealth of years of experience and understanding of the lore.
I still do not love Dry Top, but apart from the quests I at least have Skyscale to move around it rapidly. I remember unlocking the zone the very first time and having to use the dumb Zepherite crystals. I get annoyed at having to continue to use them for mobility during the story quests, but those at least are limited in scope. I get that someone at ANet put a lot of work into creating those baubles and wanted to show the technology off… but it doesn’t make me like them anymore. I am going to try and burn through Living World Season 2 since I have seen it before so that I can start Heart of Thorns properly soon. My goal is still to play through all of the stories on the Ranger, but I have been cheating a bit when I see a group open in one of the Living World maps and using “Teleport to Friend” to get access to the zone without doing the story.
All told it was a great night and a great place to put Guild Wars 2 to bed for a bit. I know starting tonight I will be spending a lot of time playing the new Last Epoch Multiplayer patch, so it might be a bit before I check back into Tyria. I love my turtle so much and have started working on unlocking its masteries. It still floors me how much I love this game today after spending so much time frankly not understanding why anyone else did. There is part of me that wishes I could teleport back to the version of me that was in the alpha program all those years ago… and make him understand what was special about the game so that I could have experienced everything as the content rolled out. Then again if I could do that… I would probably be just as jaded as the folks who seem to dislike Gyala Delve so maybe it is better that I approached with relatively fresh eyes over the last few years.
The post Siege Turtle Get appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
