Good Morning Friends. I am still dragging ass due to this impossible crud that I cannot seem to kick to the curb, however in roughly an hour I have an appointment with my doctor who will hopefully help with that. I’ve fallen back on the Audiobooks and Chill bandwagon but I will talk about the books portion of that in another post this week. Suffice to say I am mostly spending my time playing Path of Exile. I am still alternating between mapping on my level 96 Ice Trap Elementalist and then diving down into the mines for some relatively safe leveling as I push towards level 100. One of the things that I did not expect enjoying so much is that I have finally properly learned Incursion/Alva and have found great joy in building temples for profit. Essentially if you can craft a temple with a Locus of Corruption on it, you can sell it for a little over a divine, which is meager profit but more than enough to keep paying for the scarabs that I am running and still banking quite a bit for whatever my next project ends up being.
At level 99, I have properly entered the realm of never running without an Omen of Amelioration in my bags. These are going for roughly 120 Chaos at the moment, and is essentially paying for lost time. I took a really dumb death yesterday when I dove into the shadows… did not realize I was out of flares… and then was mercilessly killed by the hubris of using Forbidden Taste as my automated life flask. Thanks to the handy omen though, I did not lose much progress in the grand scheme of things, but any lost progress at level 99 is noticeable. Basically I am going to be pushing hard to hit level 100 so that I can knock another meta achievement off Gear Grinding Goals, and in truth I have hit level 100 in the last several leagues so it feels like a requirement for me to consider myself “finished”. I could buy some 5 way carries or something like that, but it always feels like the wrong sort of cheating. I will happily pay for a Maven carry each league because I fucking hate the memory game and have legitimately beat her myself more than once. Paying for carries for things I can easily accomplish on my own with enough applied time is just a bridge too far.
I continue to chip away at achievements however and knocked out Sinew Swarms yesterday, which required me to do 10 Hive Fortresses or Hive Colonies. This one took so long because they are that much rarer than the other in map breach events. Wierdly since I started running the Ritual and Incursion mapping setup, I have yet to encounter a King in the Mists invitation altar. I did buy an invitation so I have at least beaten him this league, same for Oshabi which I also bought the invitation for off the market. What I really need is a Trialmaster or an Olroth so I can get my last of the bloodline ascendency fights under my belt. I need to also see if I have any of the Vox bros Heist maps so I can knock them off the list of pinnacle encounters. Simialrly I am shocked that I have yet to encounter one of the Kingsmarch fights, which would knock another pinnacle off my list. I am happy to keep my head down and grind for the time being because it pairs so lovely with an audiobook.
Over in Destiny Rising there has been one of the silliest events yet available, called Iron Medley. Essentially it is Iron Banner or as this game calls it Iron Bar, but everyone has to play the exact same character… which produces some really weird end of match shots like this. Essentaily everyone is stripped down to a baseline version of the character with the exact same choices of weapons. In truth… I think this is a better match mode than the default Iron Bar, and should maybe be made into a permanent mode. It feels like running ARAM in League, where your sand off any of the possible advantages and just yolo your way through the matches. I really like when PVP modes in games normalize the advantage so it does not feel like you are getting stomped into the ground because you did not devote time and effort to a game mode that you are not maining.
There is a new character banner starting in roughly two days, and the trailer has been released. Essentially Jaren is just McCree from Overwatch, or whatever the hell they are calling that character these days. All that is missing is Matt Mercer doing the voices. He also gives me BraveStarr vibes, which is not necessarily a bad thing… but also makes me want him to have a talking cybernetic horse companion. My only real problem with him is that I am just not sure if Hand Canon and Shotgun is going to be a fun weapon combo to use. It is really doing to depend on how good the Hand Canon exotic that is going to inevitably come with the character. If the rumors are true… and he is getting Last Word which seems to have been shown during the trailer… he might be super fun. If nothing else this might also revive Attal from being a dumpster tier character for me.
In other news I finally pulled another mythic off the free pulls on the normal banner, and it ended up being my third copy of Tan-2. At some point I should probably build this character out, but I still really prefer Umeko to him. Then again if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to pick Helhest for the utility that she provides. I would have greatly preferred an additional copy of Ning Fei because he is up there in the list of characters that I am going to pump currency into to build out. I maxed out Helhests weapon damage, so now it is really just getting a final copy of her bow in order to push her to the same levels as Maru. I still want to build out Gwynn a bit because she is pretty useful when it comes to running limited content even though she is squishy as fuck. Ace and I are getting together to do Grandmasters tonight so we will see what that holds. Hopefully it is a better week than last week.
I am not playing anywhere near as much Destiny Rising as I was, but I am still enjoying myself enough to pop in and do some of the daily and weekly activities. Unfortunately our guild has grown too big for our britches and are no longer able to maintain the upkeep points to keep the “bitcoin miner” active. I wish I could coax a few more people into playing , because just with minimal play we could probably keep things humming again with maybe five more players. We had another really active player that came from the random clan that I was in first, but I think they have also fallen by the wayside. We have managed to find three strongholds for the last two weeks which has been really nice though.
Anyways. Time to get ready for the doctor visit and it is trash day so I have to deal with gathering that. I hope you all are having a wonderful week back, and hope that the doctor can give me something to make me feel less like ass all the time. I need a few days of feeling great so that I can whip the house back into shape, because I have not felt like doing much of anything lately.
The post Temu McCree appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I did not blog yesterday because I had an exceptionally busy day… and just never quite got around to it. Last night my friend Ace and I made a date to group up and do some of the more difficult content in Destiny Rising. I find this way more enjoyable than rolling completely random, because we can at least coordinate slightly over Discord while playing. There was a moment last night… that is probably only hilarious to the two of us… but I will relate it anyways. We had just cleared a room… and Ace and the Random player had rushed off… and I did not realize it and over voice coms I hear “Okay, Have Fun!” in a very bright voice. At first I thought Ace was talking to me, but no… their spouse was leaving to go off to a Gunpla event and we have just gotten used to leaving Discord with mics open. I thought they were telling me that I needed to stop wasting time and catch up… and then we spent the rest of the night laughing about this moment and repeating the phrase over and over.
We are deep into the endgame and essentially get a very limited amount of serious mode runs each week. Everything in the challenge difficulty range requires a challenge key, and we get three of these a week… with the ability to spend actual money or the pull currency to get a few additional keys. So essentially last night we ran two Grandmaster mode strikes to reap the rewards for the week. If anything I think this is WHY the player activity is dropping off in the game, because you quickly get pigeon holed into a state where you only really get to play once per week. I think a lot of this needs to be reworked massively, because NetEase really needs to decide if they want this to be a successful game or not. It is good enough to completely replace Destiny for most of the player base, but the pinnacle rewards and limited chances at the hardest content in the game… really pump the brakes on the fun factor.
That is not to say that there are not still fun activities to do. Yesterday I learned that I could bank up the rewards from Singularity Chaos mode and then claim them after the run faster. This is especially good for those situations where you are farming it, but you just want to claim the basic rewards for the limited chance of being able to get an exotic artifact. I wish there was something like this that we could do with a chance of dropping exotic weapon mods. They are way more fiddly than artifacts, but are also way harder to actually get. I am guessing this Reward Retrieval screen exists for pretty much any activity, so that you don’t accidentally forget to loot the chest and then get locked out of that loot forever. It is wild that I am as many hours deep in this game as I am and I am still finding weird quality of life tweaks. For example… did you know that you can shoot heavy ammo bricks with your weapon to pick them up? This is a thing, and it saves you the effort of running over into danger to pick one up.
We continue to progress our pack really quickly, and honestly… I am shocked that we are moving as fast as we are. The highlight of yesterday is that one of the people that I was in the random pack with actually joined after I invited them. They seemed pretty cool, and maybe I have actually made a friend in this random assed grouping system. I’ve had a few conversations with players and they have mostly been good. Someone poked fun at me last night for running laps around Haven, because it is a thing I have done since Dalaran when I am hanging out on voice chat and idling. They admitted that they do it too, and now we have added each other as friends. Maybe my days of meeting random players is not as over as I thought it was, considering that I have also recently made some random friends in Guild Wars 2.
We also managed to get the materials to upgrade our Hangar to the next level. Essentially everything but the very back of the hanger now looks pretty nice. The second floor is still a bunch of random panels, and I am guessing that the next major upgrade will fill in this area. I have to be honest… I never really roamed around the Hangar before so I am not sure what one looks like when it is fully progressed. I am not even sure if the Wanderer packs had the ability to upgrade anything. I am really hoping at some point we unlock the Pack emblem so that we can customize that somewhat. We continue to search for strongholds, but are having zero luck in finding any. I wonder if this is gated by guild level or something, because we have unlocked MOST of the ??? clusters and they never end up being a stronghold.
I finally got enough currency to make my first level 85 weapon, and I went with Trinity Ghoul. I also upgraded it by consuming a duplicate copy of the weapon, and now need to acquire 100 of the exotic currency so I can claim the final catalyst level. This is another one of those really long grinds, because you ONLY get the currency from Grandmaster activities and there are very limited sources of the exotic leveling currency. So all of this becomes the really long tailed grind of the game. I think maybe they need to be a bit more open with this stuff, and maybe make all of the vendors reset weekly rather than once per month or once per season. There needs to be a way to get this stuff rather than spending your limited currency each day on gathering up a handful at a time.
Another thing that I did while hanging out on voice, was several of the heroic legendary missions for various characters so that I could do the requirement of completing one in under 7 minutes. I did this on Gwynn, Wolf, and Ning Fei, and the only things keeping me from finishing silver on both of them… is the ability power levels… which require me to get more of the currency that can ONLY be gained when Calamity Ops resets. Again… there are just too many things that take too long to reset. If this reset every week, we would at least have a shot at hell in getting enough currency to upgrade a character, but the problem is you need 6 of them for the final upgrade tier and you only get 4 from Calamity Ops. The cadence of things is just a bit off and they really need to tweak this. Many of these things are standard Gacha trappings, but if they care about the North American player base… then they maybe need to tweak them a bit.
I do worry that maybe Destiny Rising has lost their chance, because generally speaking you only get one shot at the opinion of players. There are a lot of folks who tried and bounced once they realized that the Pinnacle rewards system was going to be a thing. The only real option to win them back is to release a massive patch down the line that tweaks everything, giving the game a bit of a comeback story. Destiny streamers have given the game a ton of good press, especially around the raid race. So I am hoping we get more content dropping soon, so that it will coax a bunch of players back to the game. It is worrying however because they are merging the servers so that all of them will be available for queuing for activities together. Hopefully this improves the fact that there are just some activities that are hell to get a match for right now.
The biggest challenge facing the game right now is that you are rapidly pushed into a scenario where only certain activities will get you any progression. Since most rewards take 20 Pinnacle currency, and you get 120 per day…. that leaves you with six things that you can do. Those six attempts are going to get spent on Master/Grandmaster activities, Legendary Campaign, or Gauntlet until you have gotten your 3 bonus rewards per week… and then probably not that anymore. So that means that everything else… Shifting Gates, Morgrans, etc are not going to be easy to get a group for. Hell we have even reached a point where Iron Bar takes 15 minutes to form a group on the weekends… which is wild because it is one of those activities that is ONLY available at a limited time. If you put a rare chance of getting the resources that we actually need from these activities that are effectively dead… and put it on the basic reward pool… you will have players queuing for them constantly.
I know there is a major patch coming in 2026, so hopefully some of this will be addressed then. I am still having a lot of fun, but once Path of Exile 3.27 drops on the 31st I am likely going to be logging in and doing my dailies to keep progressing the guild and then meeting up with Ace once per week to do the limited content.
The post Okay, Have Fun! appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a bit odd. I spent a good deal of time out in the garage working on reorganizing things. Right now I am trying to clear the south side so that I can put up shelving there, which will allow me to organize everything that I am moving. Saturday night however I found out that my folks fridge went out, so I was up there after editing podcasts and got the joy of wrestling the fridge out of where it had sunk down into the linoleum over two decades. I’ve reached the point where I am not stronger than my father… probably always was… but it is still just a disappointing realizing how much weaker he has gotten over the last several years. Not that I am exactly Sampson or anything, and a lot of my strength is largely just me putting my weight behind things and pushing like the dickins. We got it moved out however, and Dad can now go shopping for a replacement. Thankfully they have a spare fridge, but it is just less convenient.
In the gaming world… I mostly spent the weekend playing Destiny Rising. My progress is starting to slow down a bit because effectively I am in a state where I largely need master/grandmaster activities to move the needle forward. I did get my third and fourth character to gold so I have pushed Jolder, Estela, Helhest, and Umeko through the hoops required to finish the gold medallion. At this point each one of these that I push up, is mostly just giving me points to spend on a talent tree of buffs on the ascension screen. These are largely things like buffing the exotic artifact and weapon mod drop rates. It is the weapon mods that I need the most right now. They are way trickier than any of the other exotic items because in theory you really want a weapon mod that activates a specific perk on a specific weapon. I put some dead mods into these characters weapons just to push their light up… but at some point I need to replace them with fully functional mods.
In order to participate in Master/GrandMaster level activities you have to get their light up to 64,000 and at this point I have managed to do that with three characters. The thing is you only get to run one GrandMaster activity once per character, so that means I can spend three keys per week getting significant upgrades. This past week Ace and I got together and ran them as a duo, and we should probably keep doing that. I wish we had a third really active player that was compatible with our times…. that also was as progressed as we are currently. Given enough time we probably will have. After doing Grandmaster Gauntlet Blitz… I would love to have a full team of six players, because it would be super fun to queue in together using proper squad tactics. At some point I might have to declare a “Destiny Rising” night, similar to how we have done with Guild Wars 2, but the challenge as always will be finding a night everyone can participate.
In other progression news… I have continued spending every last drop of free currency that I get on Helhest, and have now pulled four copies of her, giving me 3 talent points. At this point it isn’t so much that I am pulling for duplicate copies and thus talent points… and more that I really want to finish getting the parts to her artwork which unlocks a cool Ghost Shell and Sparrow. Helhest will just keep getting more and more powerful, the more points I unlock for her however. All of the points are pretty freaking great to be honest, and as much as like this champion I don’t really mind that I am effectively negatively impacting the next banner, since I won’t have a cache of points saved up to spend on it like I did this time where I had 5 10 pulls banked. I’ve just had better luck pulling for her than any other banner in the past though. I’ve beat pity by a massive amount each time.
In Pack news, we have ranked up the guild for the third time since we started it. This feels pretty freaking good considering we only have a handful of active players. I had hoped more folks would jump on this bandwagon, but I think the whole gacha trappings are a bridge too far for a lot of players. As is evidenced by my free account, you can pretty much get all of the stuff without spending a dime given that account already has every four star, and two of the five stars. Really that is more than enough goodness to play with and be functional participating in even the highest end content in the game. While I spun up that second account to make creating the guild a bit easier, I am kind of glad that I have it because it gives me a good pulse on what playing the game looks like if you do not spend a dime. So far the prognosis is extremely solid for someone coming in as a “zero spender”.
Another thing that I have finished is the Wheel of Fortune event that is going on. The weirdest thing about this… is that I am still collecting spins each day, even though I have nothing to spend them on. I kind of expected there to be some system that allowed me to cash these in for glimmer or something like that, but so far nothing that I can see. I am actually really close to finishing out this event on my second account as well. I am not sure what the math works out to be, but it should be pretty simple for anyone to complete this event just by doing dailies each day. Immediately following this is going to be a rerun of the Morgran’s event, which should in theory guarantee another exotic weapon… and the wording makes me wonder if it is a guaranteed unlock of one that you have not found before. It is specifically referred to as a “Precious Reward” which makes me think it has some custom logic applied to what sort of things it can give you over just a standard Exotic Engram.
Since we now have the firing range in our guild hall, we get to see one of the features which is a hall of heroes time functionality showing the highest scoring champions from the previous cycle. We did not do enough of a few of the things to quality, but Ace dusted me and is the only person showing up with their Helhest and Estela on display. In my wanderer pack guild I was often highlighted, so I have at least gotten to see my own characters in these holos in the past. At some point Ace just leapt past me in progression, mostly because they are way more focused on doing the right thing with their daily stamina as opposed to me… where I sometimes just like spending it on something trivial. I do find it weird why we don’t have anyone showing up for a few of the modes… but it might just be that Calamity Ops for example has a longer than weekly cycle.
To the laundry list of things that I progressed this weekend… add planetary reputation. I now have both the Red Sea Rift and Jiangshi Metro maxed out at 20. This means that instead of rewarding reputation caches I now get these bonus honor chests every 500 reputation. Weirdly it feels like they actually happen more often than those last few ranks of the reputation. Now that I have maxed them both though, there really is no difference between choosing the destinations, because they all give the same rewards. Since I like the Red Sea Rift a bit better, I will probably just keep doing this one each day. I’ve also maxed out world exploration on both areas, so there is nothing really new to find out there as I have found it all. I am really ready for them to add a new area to the game, and hoping it comes in soon with the seasonal reset.
I also finished up the main story quest on my completely free account, and have since pushed it to level 70. The biggest challenge I have with this account is trying to remember what I need to progress when. I am essentially working on getting a few different champions to bronze, but a lot of this is gated by the fact that I have not pushed up to level 80 yet. Right now I am alternating between grinding out artifacts, and doing things that will give me materials needed to upgrade my weapons from 70 to 80 when the time comes. I have Jolder and Ning Fei on this account, and will probably push them up first… and then maybe Wolf so that I have a champion of each element. If I pull Helhest, that might change the calculus a little bit. I also have Rossi-11 on the account and have been playing it quite a bit, but nothing really beats Ning Fei for speed clears.
This continues to be a phenomenal gaming experience. I actually played a little bit of Destiny 2 over the weekend… and I have to say that Destiny Rising just feels better. I am sure I will shift gears soon to the new Path of Exile league, but for the moment I am all in on space magic.
The post GrandMasters or Bust appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, Grace and Bel start off the show talking about how good Destiny Rising has been now that they have arrived at the endgame. They also talk a bit about Helhest, the new banner character. Grace shares her initial thoughts about He is Coming a roguelike that they have been playing. Bel shares some of the early spoilers for Path of Exile 3.27 Keepers of the Flame, which we are getting a full reveal for on the 23rd and is starting on the 31st. It seems like we are maybe getting a Breach expansion league, with a bunch of quality of life changes. From there, we dive into the topic that got bumped from last week about how there are so many good games… that it makes it really hard to play less-than-excellent games anymore. We also talk about how players are seeing through pointless grinds, and how AA games are back with a vengeance, while AAA games are floundering.
