Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about how we all dogpiled on Discord and attempted the pre-release version of the MIT Mystery Hunt… and for those completely lost about the show title, one of the clues to one of the puzzles… was just the specific color of the Charlie XCX Brat Album. From there, Bel talks a bit about the Halloween event in Guild Wars 2 and how some folks take the Mad King’s Labyrinth way the hell too seriously. Tam discusses what seems to be a complete rework of how the factions work in Infinity, and Bel discusses the launch of World of Warcraft Legion Remix. We talk a bit more about Hades II, and more specifically playing the game AFTER beating Cronos. Finally, Bel talks just a little bit about his early experiences in Blue Protocol, where he is trying to find the fun in the game.
Good Morning Folks. Last night was our usual Guild Wars 2 shenanigans night and we spent most of it running random fractals through the new quick play system. Of our group, I am the only one who has completed all of the steps required to get legendary gloves and finish the 500 dust achievement that gives you 2 bags, 2 bag slots, and a random legendary. I have no clue how many we ran, but we did have a few weird things happen. There was one time when the quickplay system split our party and sent two of us to one fractal with three randoms, and the other two to another fractal with three randoms. It took us a bit to realize this, because we were talking about different fractals with me and Sol ending up in Kinfall, and Sita and Ammo ending up in the Volcano. When I referred to the boss as a bullet sponge Ammo and Sita were a bit confused.
Over lunch I wrapped up the remaining achievements in Champion and have officially moved on to Destroyer. Most of these require me to be wearing Chaos gear… which GREATLY nerfs my damage and survivability. I am still trying to figure out a build I can go with that does not adversely harm my build so I can start knocking these out. I did run around long enough in a Helltide to open 10 tortured gifts and finish that sub achievement, which is always a bit of a pain in the ass. There are other hateful achievements like finish 5 events with mastery in 20 mins… or kill 200 mobs after triggering the spawning of a Harbinger but before it shows up. I am not entirely certain I am finishing Destroyer in this season, because without Ace playing with me… I’ve lost a lot of my forward momentum to actually knock this out.
Over in Destiny Rising I am dealing with a bit of a logjam as I need to get Silver Medals on three characters in order to progress to the next steps of Ascension. The power grind is of course a big problem for each character, but the bigger one for me is the Legendary Campaign completion. This has been an activity that I have been largely ignoring, because the first one I ever did was the current sniper one… and hated every minute of it. There are a few things that I detest in games… the big one is being on a timer. I have deep seated problems with being timed while doing something… and it dates back to elementary school trauma. I also hate the Shinkas in general and having to fight the sniper ones… was just a pain in the ass and as such I have avoided these completely. Unfortunately this means that I have had zero under 7 minute completions of this event.
This morning I knocked out a completion on Umeko, which means I only need to get her light up in order to get a silver medal. I should probably also borrow a Tan-2 and an Attal and complete all of the ones available this week so that I don’t have to wait multiple weeks for the sniper one to come around again. I will probably give Jolder a try, but I am not sure how she is going to kill the sniper Shinka without killing herself in the process. Maybe because I tend to run with a full bar of overshield, I will be able to soak the damage and survive anyways. However I think I am probably just going to have to wait for another week where Jolder is the suggested champion. These rotate through every week and in theory Jolders should be coming up next.
Other than that I had what was quite possibly my fastest clear of one of the raid phases, which rewarded me another copy of the Exotic crossbow that Ning Fei uses. This one thankfully was already level 80, so I was able to just swap over to it immediately. One of the things that you can do in this game is spend some glimmer… which is mostly useless… and reset a champion reclaiming all of the materials that you have spent on them. I think I might do this for a few champions in order to hopefully push the light levels up on the ones that I am trying to push up to silver. I am not sure if this will matter at all, because it is higher end materials that I am currently jammed up on, not low level materials. However it still might be worth a shot. Especially for the ones where I have completed their main story quest… I no longer really care about having them up at higher light levels.
All of this though is going to get sidelined a bit because I bought a stupidly large TV yesterday, and tonight I plan to tear apart the living room and set everything up slightly differently with the new television. This has been something I have wanted for awhile, and the entire reason why we swapped entertainment centers back in June. I figured while my wife is no longer with us…. I should probably finish up this plan we had for awhile. However I think I probably want to also explore curtains to hang over the circle window so that I can block some more light for optimal movie viewing and gaming.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday we got some great news from Guild Wars 2 that the quick play feature that has been a rousing success during the Fractal Incursion event would be coming for the new combined raid system. Essentially they are taking strikes and raid wings and merging them into a new feature, and then adding quick play functionality for the easier wings and strikes. I am so unbelievably pumped about this, and right now the Guild Wars 2 is on fire with their quality of life improvements. I am just hoping that when the Fractal Incursion event is over in a few days… that we get some version of the quick play feature permanently for Fractals at least. The raid finder tool will not be coming until the first post expansion update, which should land sometime first quarter of 2026 if the pacing of content drops are similar to how they were with Janthir Wilds. I am honestly super pumped about the Visions of Eternity expansion drop in general coming at the end of this month.
In less great news… Microsoft continues down a path of self destruction following their recent massive price hikes on their consoles with a price hike to Gamepass. Ultimate was previously $19.99 and it is bumping up to $29.99 a month…. which at least for me is a bridge too far. I have been a subscriber since Gamepass first came into existence, and have been using it to play various Microsoft stable PC games as they released. However I think I am just going to hard pass on this system even though I did enjoy the Cloud gaming functionality. Immediately following this news I saw reports on social media that the cancellation page was effectively bricked for most of the day as there was a flood of cancellations. It was still a bit wonky last night as I attempted to cancel it.. hanging for over a minute on the final step before finally resolving into a page that allowed me to enter my reasoning. Microsoft has talked at length about them wanting to grow Gamepass, but this is absolutely not the way to do it. With this and many other things… I think we have finally reached the point where we frogs noticed that the water was boiling and are ready to hop out of the pot.
Yesterday I got a message over on Bluesky from my friend Delebrin that the time played in Diablo IV is located on the character profile page at the bottom. This sounds like something that I once knew, but have long since forgotten. I am grateful that they pointed it out however, and my estimate of being around 40 hours into this character was pretty accurate with me having actually played 36. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to do next. This is ultimately the point I end up with in Diablo III and Diablo IV each time I play through a season. None of the content is compelling enough to really keep me diving into it for the sake of doing it… and the gap in RNG drops between Ancestral Uniques and Mythics is so wide that I am just not sure it is worth the effort.
I am close to wrapping up Champion in the season journey, and this honestly has traditionally been my guiding light for when I consider myself done with a season. The final phase is going to be a bit harder as I said in an earlier post, because many of those accomplishments require you to be wearing some piece of chaos gear, and I am not sure what I can actually sacrifice in order to make that happen. I did not get a ton of time to play last night, because I instead hung out with Ace and played Destiny Rising. However today at lunch I should be able to finish up the rest of the stuff on Champion and then begin chipping away at the last rank. I did finish leveling the seasonal event tree and got my mythic shard, and I have a few more steps on the battle pass… so essentially when I wrap all of this up I will probably consider the game “beaten” for the moment.
It is a new month and with that comes a reset on some of the currency exchange shops, allowing me to pick up some more normal banner pulls, and I managed to finally pull Ning Fei, the last of the champions that I did not have. I am still only a few pulls away from getting the Mythic Choice champion so I am not sure if I hold onto this for future use if that is even allowed, or if I pick up a second copy of Jolder. She is by far my favorite of the normal banner mythic champions, though from everything I have heard Ning Fei seems to be pretty awesome. I did pick up two copies of Xuan Wei while spending down my normal banner pulls, but I am just not really playing him that often.
I did pull a really sweet exotic ghost shell called the Cryptex, so that was pretty fun. Most of the night was spent running Morgran’s Hunt because that event ends I believe today. We also did a few rounds of our all Ikora PvPvE nonsense… and honestly… we are getting better at this. We had one match where we took out six or seven players, along with a few clutch kills… but didn’t really score terribly well in general. Ace and I were talking last night about how much better of a Destiny experience this game is, and how they had never really gotten into baseline Destiny as much as this version. I think in some aspect it is the multiple characters, because you can do a bunch of different things, rather than feeling like you are forced to play one of three characters. Grinding up light in Destiny feels like it was way harder than grinding up gear in Destiny Rising, so I think that is at least part of it for me.
I am a bit stalled in my progression, because I essentially need to complete all of the silver achievements on three characters so I can remove the logjam that is my ascension score. Right now in most cases I am gated by my total light score for the characters and not having an easy way to bump that up, and also needing to run 7 minute legendary events, which are single player versions of missions in the game. I do not really enjoy these, so it is something I am going to have to force myself to get good at. The current one sort of sucks because it is all sniper based, and while I have leveled Umeko and Tan-2 a bit… neither feels like they are good enough to rip through this mission quickly. I thought I had gotten it last night but seemingly there is a lag between when you finish the final boss and when it shuts off the timer. I took a death in the middle, and if I had not done that I would have probably been able to finish that one without much issue. However I am going to have to wait for another week because I do not think there is any way I am getting non-snipers through this one.
Anyways! I think that is all of the assorted nonsense I have in my head this morning. I hope your week is going well. I am still fighting this general respiratory crud, but like I said before I think it is just ragweed trying to kill me.
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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.
The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.
My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.
I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.
New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.
All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.
Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.
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