Good Morning Folks. I feel pretty miserable. On Tuesday I had several doctors appointments and spent time in several waiting rooms, and am pretty sure I picked up some dire crud. I was a dumbass and did not wear a mask and am now paying the price. I started feeling awful on Thursday, it got considerably worse on Friday, and then has been backing off slowly over the weekend. I am hoping that by tomorrow I will feel functional enough to work again. It started with an outrageously sore throat, a cough, and some intestinal panic… and mostly what is left is the cough. However it has impacted my ability to sleep with me waking up every 30 minutes or so for a good old fashioned coughing fit. However I did manage to move into the new desktop PC that I talked about last week, and have moved my old one downstairs to eventually be used for some living room big screen gaming. Very much a big fan of the Costco pre-built that I talked about, and it was a massive upgrade over my previous 11th gen intel based system with a 3080 in it.
I honestly spent most of the weekend too miserable to care about much of anything, staring blankly at the wall. When I did feel like gaming I largely played Path of Exile. I am alternating between delving on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, and mapping on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, and both are extremely solid. I am getting close to level 99 on the Chieftain and when I hit that, I am probably going to spend a bit more time taking on bloodline and pinnacle bosses to knock out some more credit towards the various challenges. I need to start doing a lot more Tier 16.5 maps because I need to complete a bajillion of them in order to knock out one of the challenges. Right now I am doing Blue altars juiced on my Ice Trapper, and at some point I will swap things up to Red altars and then later Maven Witnesses because there are achievements for doing all of those. I really hate the act of witnessing the Maven because I hate running random map layouts. I wish there was a keystone that gave you random bosses at the end of maps so that you could run a single layout and always be witnessing a new boss.
At this pint I have completed 24 of 40 Achievements and knocked out a few thanks to Betrayal like the one that requires you to use a bunch of rare crafting materials. I eventually got a syndicate crafting bench with a Divine Orb on it, which counts for the achievement requirements. There is another one for using rare currency, but I am not sure any of that stuff actually shows up on the Syndicate benches. At some point I should try and craft a dual influence life gain on block shield to replace my current one, and that will use an awakener orb which is one of the requirements. I am really close to Cross Contamination and just need to figure out which combination of scarabs I need to run to make some of those conditions happen. It took me four maps before I was able to get a Delirious Beyond boss which surprised me a bit. Sinew Swarms is actually closer in progress than the 0 of 3 would indicate but that one will complete in time with me just running enough maps.
Over in Destiny Rising, we had one of our best weekends ever… but I failed to take any screenshots. Essentially we managed to find Three Strongholds as a clan, and then did all of them on Saturday afternoon before I started feeling considerably worse as the day went on. We did not record a podcast this weekend, because I sort of cratered as we got towards evening. That has happened most nights, where I do better in the morning and then feel progressively worse as the day goes on. Morgran’s Prey is also going on again so we knocked a few of those rounds out as a group, and then I have run it a few more times solo. Now that I have every exotic weapon, the enticement of getting a new exotic is not nearly as strong as it once was. However it is still a good source of general resources and materials, and the combat itself is pretty fun.
I finished out the battle pass and got my 4th copy of the exotic grenade launcher, allowing me to max that weapon out. There are still a few minor points that I can upgrade it, but it did bump my Maru over 70k making her my highest character currently. As soon as I settle up from Calamity ops I should be able to max out her relic abilities and bump her score up again. After that I am either going to work on bumping up Ning Fei or Gwynn and I used some of the excess fruit that I had laying around to get artifact gilding requirement done for Tan-2. I’ve upgraded a bunch of my characters somewhat even levels of progress, whereas my friend Ace has mostly focused on one or two. Their method is probably better, but I personally like having a wide stable of characters to play.
I ran two of the three weekly legendary missions this morning, because I needed the components to bump up Maru’s weapon and completed my first three chest run with Gwynn that I have ever done. I need to do another one of these runs as Wolf because the last step that he has between getting another gold medallion is surviving a challenge mode without dying. The push to get more gold characters stopped being anywhere near as interesting when I was not longer gated from upgrades because I was too low level. Now that I am over Ascension 55 I think I can pretty much do anything in the game. I need to spend some time in the coming days trying to get through some more of the challenge content. I am not sure what day of the week Ace and I will get together and do the Grandmaster stuff, but I am sure it will be one of these first few days of the week before Thanksgiving.
Playing Path of Exile on the Livingroom TV was a bit of a wild experience. One of the things that I want to sort out over the holiday weekend is trying to figure out this doodad that I bought which serves as a USB to Bluetooth adapter and should allow me to remote control the device with a normal keyboard and mouse. A lot of the games that I plan on playing in the livingroom will be controller games, but I do still want the ability to play MMORPGs and ARPGs if I so choose it.
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Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.
It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.
That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.
Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.
Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.
I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.
Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.
Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.
The post New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Starting this morning’s post off with a picture of Gracie being super snuggly. It was a good weekend, but a busy weekend. I spent a lot of time working in the garage and set up the first of the storage shelves, and then cleared the room for the next one… which I will hopefully work on today. Essentially I am trying to get all of my wife’s stuff that I just piled in the center of the garage, up on shelves… and get a bunch of stuff that I will never use that has been in the garage for eons, out into a pile to have hauled off. The thing that is fighting against me, is the fact that we are still having 90+ degree days and the garage is a sauna, so I am trying to limit my time out there to hour long bursts of activity. I just noticed I am covered in bruises from wrestling with items that I probably had help putting out there the last time they were moved. I made it work through and got them into the growing pile in my backyard. There is a service we have used before that will haul it off so long as I pile it up for them relatively neatly.
The big move of the weekend however, was setting up a new television… that again was probably too large for me to be handling by myself. One of the last things that we did together was put together this new entertainment center over my birthday weekend back in June. Last week I added to that a riser, that would allow me to put the cable box, and ultimately my Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 under the TV. The entire reason why we swapped out our entertainment center was to eventually upgrade from our 43 inch television to something larger, and I had been shopping off and on for awhile. The problem is… I did not want to ship a television. There is just too much shit that can go wrong in transit, which meant more or less that I was limited to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, or CostCo for which my membership had lapsed. I was specifically looking for a 120hz 4k 65 inch television… preferably one with Google operating system rather than Amazon Fire. Most of the ones that I had seen were in the $800 range, but I found one on CostCo that was a 4k 144hz panel that also came with a 5 year warranty thrown in… so I renewed my membership and snapped that puppy up.
So as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend enjoying the new larger television. I watched a few movies on Friday and Saturday, and then got reacquainted with both the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. I bounced around a lot on the PS5, but on Sunday night I settled in for some long sessions of Super Mario Wonder and the upscaled version of Bravely Default. I actually got into the last one quite a bit, and stayed up later than I had intended. When I finally made it to bed… Mollie was rather cross with me for not arriving in the bedroom at the correct time and screamed at me for awhile as she demanded attention. I figured it is just me now… I might as well enjoy my life in whatever ways I can, and upgrading the TV was one of those simple ways to get some more quality of life easily. It was also one of the projects we had on our radar, and it felt like actually accomplishing something that my wife and I had already planned. There are a few more of those projects that I eventually want to take care of… but they will require significantly more than $400.
Over in Diablo IV, I landed on a set of Chaos armor that actually works well enough for my build. Vasily’s Prayer is pretty much a requirement for making the build feel good, and I had picked up Chaos version of it on both the gloves and chest. I figured it would be easier to swap out the gloves and then find some other item that can replace Rampaging Werebeast. For now I am running Fleshrender and it seems to be working pretty well, because it makes it so Debilitating Roar deals damage to poisoned enemies… and my Pulverize is always poisoning enemies. So every time I roar I am not just getting a survival boost, I am also doing over 4 million AOE damage to everyone that has already been poisoned by my Pulverize puddles. Now I just need to do massive amounts of farming to knock out the remaining achievements in the seasons journey.
Over in Destiny Rising, I finally bucked up and knocked out several seven minute legendary quests so that I could bump up my ascension level. Essentially I got Silver Medals on Jolder, Estela, and Umeko and now I am stalled out again at 19 Ascension until I get a Gold Medal. For the moment I am closest to getting there on Jolder, but the thing that is going to hold me back the longest is getting my light level up past 65000. I need to run another Legendary mission on Jolder where I take zero deaths… and in truth my previous 7 minute run was deathless… but it did not count because I did not have the quest yet. Other than that I need to upgrade the exotic sword and then swap her artifacts to all exotics, and my weapon mods to all exotics… and I THINK that might get me over the light hurdle. Having long grinds though is perfectly fine, and it is going to take a bit longer because I was later starting the game.
Ace and I got together Sunday afternoon and did some more all Ikora nonsense again. We are still seeking the Trikora as Ammo called it during the podcast, but we did have a really successful run. Largely we just followed around the Umeko that we were grouped with and provided supporting fire. Ikora is actually somewhat powerful if you happen to catch players unaware while you still have your abilities active. When her abilities are down though… you just do not have the tools to close the deal. We are past the halfway point in this nonsense though and we just need to do four more rounds in order to knock out her lore item. We also ran a Gauntlet Blitz as Ikora and that was honestly better than I expected it to be. On top of that I introduced Ace to the frustration that is the raid, and we managed to get through that twice. However we did have one run where people who had no clue what they were doing kept grabbing the keys and then sitting on them, so they also know the frustration of when things go south.
I had enough resources to craft an exotic engram and I pulled Polaris Lance, which is a pretty solid scout rifle that I might work on upgrading for Tan-2/Umeko. I am not sure if this is the play over an Exotic Sniper or not, but I remember liking the weapon in Destiny, so hopefully it is also a solid bet here too. The only problem is that Exotic weapons are so costly in resources to keep upgraded, and I just do not feel like I have the necessary resources to build out every single one of them, much like there are heroes that I am just going to completely ignore. I wish the higher you got up in Ascension, the more common some resources got. So that you could get Mythic resources for example much easier than you previously could… or some of the early Exotic resources. However anything yellow…. still maintains a lot of time gated grinding behind it.
I am hoping everything is setting up for a really good week. I know this week is also the start for Legion Remix, but I am not entirely certain how much I will be engaging with that. I am kinda digging playing some console games, so I might be doing more of that in the evenings. Hoping by this time next week… I have the garage more under control and have at least been able to schedule the folks to come pick up in the growing pile in the backyard.
The post Irrationally Large Box appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Last night instead of our usual Guild Wars 2 nonsense on Thursday nights… I attempted to do some Monster Hunter Wilds again with Ammo and Sita. We have tried to do this a few times… but something always ends up causing problems. The first time Ammo chain crashed until I lost power… and then when the power came back… I lost internet. Last night the entire time we were playing Sita sounded like a robot… and every time we engaged anything one or more of us would get dropped from the linked party. Dealing with Capcom multiplayer is a very specific realm of hell. Then we realized the thing we were trying to unlock and group up for… is a Solo Arena quest. So we had a lot of us all hanging out on voice and being frustrated together as we attempted to “Akuma”. But hey… Barrel bowling is still fun as heck.
Over in Guild Wars 2… I am back on that World vs World grind and so is Sita. Specifically we both bought Legendary Weapon Kits and I am chasing the very dumb goal of making Sunrise. This however is only a means to an end, because it will in turn allow me to make the Voltron of Guild Wars 2 weapons… Eternity. We even managed to drag Ammo along for this nonsense… but in truth… grouping with friends in WvW is pretty much pointless because it is not like you can actually see each other in the giant “Zerg” huddle. The key trait that you need to learn to succeed in this game mode is find the tag and stand on the tag… and then move only when the tag moves. We had a good commander that was flanked by some really freaking phenomenal healers and were able to “OutZerg” the other teams as we captured their stuff.
We were exceptionally successful and in a single average I managed to do half of a Gift of Battle reward track. I believe Sita who had started this grind before me came within a fraction of finishing his up. I am really looking for the WvW Rush event in July and will probably just bank a bunch of Gift of Battles because they are always useful… and also the track in general is a decent way to get Mystic Clovers. More importantly… I passed rank 100 in World Vs World and got the new title of Veteran… which seems weird that this is higher than General was. Why do I care about WvW ranks? Well I kind of want to make the backpack… which itself will require that I have rank 350. Only 248 left to go. I am hoping I can make a massive dent in this during the WvW Rush and hopefully finish that off… and will absolutely probably just be living in WvW during that time. Thankfully I find that whole nonsense shockingly enjoyable… for someone who is traditionally a massive CareBear.
Dune is out… or at least the headstart is out and I played a bit of it last night. Enough to get through the very beginning of the tutorial and out into Hagga Basin which is the first real zone. I watched a video about how limited the Trooper ends up being and how I should probably just play a Mentat which has a turret… so I did that thing. It really probably is the correct decision because very early you can get a bunch of “makes guns better” abilities. The turret unfortunately is kind of shit. I expected something more akin to the pop up turrets in The Division. What it is instead is a grenade that you throw… and then when you “detonate” it, it turns into a turret that maybe fires off three bolts before exploding and if you are standing near it… you take damage. I am not extremely sold on this game yet. I like the vibe and I am a massive Dune geek… but also the gameplay feels more extreme than I like my survival games. Dealing with lack of water is a massive problem… but I have a thing that lets me drain my victims of blood and convert that to water so hopefully that will make things easier. What I really need though is a Literjon so that I can carry water with me.
I am very much in the bumblefucking my way around the desert mode right now, but at least I have a crappy shelter. I strategically set up my shelter in a valley that stays almost entirely in shade no matter what time of day it is, that happens to be right beside one of the vacuum sealed caves. Given that things respawn in the world pretty regularly, this gives me a pretty decent source of scrap metal as well as some lootable chests that have a few materials that I do not have any use for right now… but are flagged as orange in color which makes me think at some point they will be useful. For the moment I am stumbling up the tech tree and the entire game will probably feel much better once I have a way to carry around water, and a way to traverse between the assorted rock outcroppings more easily. I have “walked without rhythm” my way to another outcropping… found a much larger scavenger camp than I am used to…and died without remembering to set down a respawn beacon. Tonight I will probably make my way back over there and try and retrieve whatever I dropped in my backpack.
The other huge benefit of where I decided to set up my base is that on the other side of the sealed cave… is a small scavenger camp. Essentially when it respawns… I can set down my turret, unseal the cave door… and let the turret kill the two Scavengers without me having to lift a finger. This gives me a somewhat reasonable renewable source of blood to then convert into water with my purification machine. There are various lootables around the camp as well, but I am not sure how much value a handful of Solari will have in the grand scheme of things. I have a contract to deliver scrap metal to someone, but it is also way across another open stretch of desert which terrifies me at the moment. I will probably wait until nightfall to cross so that I won’t have to also worry about the impact of direct sunlight. I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it… I just feel like I need to push through the awkward first steps that any survival game has.
Yesterday was also the content reveal stream for the Secrets of the Atlas expansion for Path of Exile and it looks amazing. However if I were to sit down and start talking about it… it would be a whole other blog post. I will probably save that for Monday. I hope you all have a phenomenal weekend and if you too are venturing forth into Arrakis, drop me a line and let me know what you are thinking about the game so far.
The post Wilds is Cursed appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
