Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning because I had to do a fasting blood draw. Nothing serious, just one of those things that I have to do every year to keep from having to pay a $60 per month surcharge on our corporate insurance plan. I took the day off because there are a bunch of things I should be doing around the house today… namely because I got new glasses and can now properly see how dirty everything is. As I was rushing out the door this morning, this lil fella was hanging out on the inside of my glass storm door. He did not seem to be terribly intimidated by me, and when I got home from the blood draw appointment he was gone. Hopefully he is off living his best life, because I have zero clue what sort of frog this is. Guessing some sort of a tree frog, but given that I have never seen one in my life… I am hoping he did not hitch a ride on a thunderstorm and get rained down. Was a very smol fella, maybe the size of a fifty cent piece.
Over the weekend, specifically during the AggroChat podcast… it rained in my living room… which is a thing that has happened before, but not since we put a new roof on. Thankfully the roofers came out and resealed the top of my roofline, which is where we have generally thought the water comes in through, because it has only ever leaked when we are getting a torrential downpour combined with wind… leading to horizontal rain. It has been raining all morning which is adversely effecting my desire to do anything, but so far no sign of leakage. Due to the pitch of our roof and the odd late 70s architectural decisions, there is a lip of flashing that wind over time will push up… and then the water gets under there and eventually runs down under the shingles until it finds a point of entry. This is generally smack dab in the enter of our living room. The roofers essentially resealed this area and put in longer screws which will hopefully keep it from coming up again. We’ve had the house since 1999… and fought this dumb design flaw many times, but hopefully this will be the trick that finally solves it.
In gaming news, with the roll over of the weekly reset in Guild Wars 2 it allowed me to get my pair of legendary gloves. This is honestly really cool and way easier than I expected it to be in the long run, because essentially you mostly have to just grind out 500 dust which will complete all of the required achievements and then talk to the Mist Stranger, at which point they will reveal who they actually are and give you a choice box for gloves. You get one armor weight for free and then for the other two you have to grind out 300 more dust which will give you 2 Fractalline Spark (150 each), one for each of the remaining weights. You then combine each with a Gift of Magical Prosperity, Gift of Mighty Prosperity, and 200g worth of Icy Runestones to get another pair of gloves. These are permanent additions to the game and not something that you necessarily have to compete before the event ends in October. I am however planning on grinding out a few more sparks so that I can bank them because they are also used for coloring the weapon glow effects granted by the gloves.
Over in Destiny Rising, I have set my sights on knocking out some of the lore achievements. Namely right now I am working on the achievement where you have to get 5 cats to give you a reward back while playing Umeko. The whole feeding the cats thing is a big maddening, namely because the indication of what fish the cats want each day is not great. I need to start fishing up some new areas in the game since I appear to have unlocked a few other locations. However even if the cat does not give you a carepackage, it does seem to count as getting a reward because you get some fishing currency for the first time you attempt it each day. I think tonight Ace and I are going to run amok, so that should be quite a bit of fun. I need to hang out on voice with various groups of people more often, because quite honestly I can get stuck in my head a bit.
I’ve also been fiddling around with New World again and holy crap has it changed significantly, at least in the new player onboarding process. I have a max level character, but also have zero clue what I need to be doing. So I instead decided to roll another new character just so I could play through the early levels and get my feet under me again. Now when you start a character you are asked to choose an archetype, which guarantees a combo of abilities and gives you a bit of a boost to specific tradeskills. I opted for Greatsword and Blunderbuss because it gave me a pretty solid early combo, but have long since abandoned the shotgun like weapon for more twohanders… leveling both Two Handed Axe and Two Handed Hammer. I really like flail for tanking, so I might also start working on that, but more than anything. I am not really sure how long I will end up playing this baby character before moving back to my maxed out character.
The other thing that is wild is just how much more story there is, and it appears to be fully voiced. Like the graphical style of New World is a bit janky, but this does feel like a significantly more enjoyable onboarding process. I know this is essentially the third time I have rerolled from scratch. The leveling process seems to have been sped up considerably, but the tradeskill leveling process is still a bit of a slog. I also remember now that I do not love how much of a nesting doll the entire process is where Tier 1 is needed to make Tier 2 which is also needed to make Tier 3 and so on. I had hoped that maybe they would have streamlined this process a bit, but it seems like that is not the case. I leveled up enough to craft a full set of level 60 armor on both characters, and in theory one should probably not do this thing and just live off drops. I need to figure out how the heck you upgrade items now, because I have not figured that out. I know 700 is the baseline and I think you can go up to 750 item level… but I have no clue how to upgrade my uniques to those tiers.
The introductory mission is way cooler looking, so I will give the game that. Additionally the flow of the quests seems to be a bit more thought out. There seems to be a fairly thriving community, but also it appears to be mostly console based. The number of random strangers talking in the world through proximity chat is very much still a thing. I know Destiny Rising has some of that going on, and I also experienced that while playing EVE Vanguard. Maybe I should get over my aversion to talking to strangers over voice chat… but seriously it still wigs me out. Does no one type anymore? I will always prefer reading the written word to talking over voice unless I am talking to friends. I know this is contradictory to what I said earlier, in that I need to hang out with friends on voice… but the friends bit is the key differentiator there.
Today is also the start of the next Diablo IV season, so I am probably going to get off here and scurry around the house attempting to take care of some business so I can potentially have time to start a new character when that begins.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick of late. I am not entirely certain what led me down this rabbit hole but something… prompted me to give Dan Da Dan a shot. It took about three episodes before I was hopelessly hooked, but last weekend I spent most of Saturday snuggled with cats and chain watching my way through season 1 and most of season 2. This afternoon/evening the last episode of Season 2 should be releasing and I am looking forward to it with great fervor. The thing is anime is something that I have always tangentially enjoyed, but it is a world I have never really felt part of entirely. I mean in high school I was tracking down copies of Akira or Vampire Hunter D… which were still shockingly hard to find… or the Final Fantasy V based series. I am also addicted enough to Bleach that I snagged a chunk of the intro to use for the AggroChat opening. However modern Anime is just not something I have indulged, because it was hard to listen to something for hours upon end because I did not want to isolate myself from my spouse for that long, and she was VERY much not into it.
However with me now being entirely alone… for quite literally the first time in my life… it is no longer that big of a deal. I don’t really love reading television… but most everything these days seems to be available in dual language versions. Maybe at some point I will actually attempt to learn Japanese, which is a thing I have wanted to do since I was a teen… and learned that a lot of video games came out in that language first. I will likely never go down the rabbit hole of manga… because reading them in reverse order is something that will always fuck with my head. I tried to do this with Trigun Extreme, because I love Vash the Stampede immensely… and just could not bring myself to stay hooked. I guess the question is… for someone who loves Dan Da Dan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Darker Than Black, Cowboy BeBop, and Ghost in the Shell… what series would you suggest that I give a shot? Drop me a line below.
I’ve also been diving into Pantheon… which brings up the age old question of is it anime if it does not come from Japan? I’ve always said yes. I consider Avatar in its many forms Anime, and as such I consider Pantheon by Amazon to be very much one as well. This is a wild trans-humanism ride in the vein of William Gibson novels, asking the question… what is humanity once it uploads itself into the cloud. I highly suggest giving it a watch. I just wrapped up season one and it was phenomenal, and expect to start on Season 2 probably Friday night… since tonight is our usual Thursday night Guild Wars 2 romp. When a cartoon brings you to the point of tears… you know it is good. Do I think I will ever get to the point of being an Otaku that goes to Anime conventions? Honestly not likely, but I do greatly appreciate the level of joy that folks bring to that world. For example this live action dance/cosplay version of the season two Dan Da Dan intro is phenomenal.
Over in Guild Wars 2 I wrapped up the Fractal Incursion Champion achievement which gives you two bag slots, two 20 slot bags, a host of exotic gear tokens, an ascended accessory with 10 agony resistance, and at the very end an universal legendary weapon starter kit granting you access to any Generation One legendary. I am trying to decide what I want to go for with this thing, and most likely… I am probably going to craft the spear since I generally like using it on almost every character. Right now I have sword, axe, longbow, hammer, and 3 of the two handed swords so that I could craft eternity. The other option that I might go for is a Staff, since I tend to use this on Necromancer and would not mind getting into Druid at some point for support. I am likely going to sit on it for awhile. I just cashed in my eternal ice for volatile magic so at some point I should be able to buy up a bunch of trophy bags to get close to crafting whichever gift I am missing. I am still super low on mystic clovers so I should probably wait until I regenerate those a bit before crafting another legendary.
In another Guild Wars 2 news… I am missing two badges from the investigation achievements. The thing is I know where the two missing badges that I need are, I have just not been randomed into either of those fractals since learning this knowledge. When I was looking for a guide… there are times I forget just how damned good the wiki for this game is. All of the information that you need to know to be able to find the badges is located in the Troubleshooting 1 and Troubleshooting 2 wiki articles. Basically I need to run the Volcano and Snowblind again, and veer off the main path to get both of the badges I am missing. I think maybe in the situation from the other day where most of the party bailed, it was probably that they were just needing the badge as they disappeared shortly after we got to the fireball section on the Volcano where the badge is located at.
In another news, since I seem to be in MMOFPS mode right now with Destiny Rising, I thought I would give EVE Vanguard a shot. There is currently a free trial event going on, and you can download the stand alone client through the EVE Vanguard website. I’ve not made it terribly far but thusfar it does seem to be a very responsive shooter, but I am missing the jumping mechanics from Destiny games. I will probably play through the rest of the extended tutorialization at some point over the weekend. The whole proximity chat thing is a bit weird to get used to, but voice chat felt pretty seamless. I need to change the keybind to my normal push to talk because pressing and holding left alt felt extremely foreign to me. I did not make it super far last night because I was meeting up with Ace to play some Destiny Rising.
One of the things that I found interesting playing with a lower level player in Destiny Rising, is just how reasonable the scaling ended up being. Ace was 38 and I am of course capped at 80 and progressed quite a bit past that, and collectively we could do their content level without it feeling like I was dominating everything. I was not one tapping every single mob at least with weapons, but my ability scaling and better artifacts did seem to make a bigger difference when it came to clearing trash mobs. They pushed past 40 and I think when you hit 46 you can start running heroic content, so at some point we will likely flip to me leading the party and dragging them along in bigger kid stuff. If nothing else it would allow them to start collecting mythic weapons early I think. At some point I need to focus on some of the activities that can award exotic mods for items and exotic artifacts. I am not sure if I have to wait until Acclaim 10 or not for those, but I am getting closer and supposedly the patch that was applied over night sped up the leveling a bit.
I have an awful lot to keep me engaged right now… which is good because I need it. I have Diablo IV Season 10 that I am still contemplating trying out, and then in early October is Legion Remix in World of Warcraft which I will probably also give a shot. Distractions keep me from feeling so painfully alone.
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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a busy day. I went to a new eye doctor, that required a bit of a journey to get there. My family has a history of retina detachment and I have been struggling with floaters… so I figured it was time to get on boarded to a proper doctor and not just the dude that is attached to the local eye glasses place. Some positives of the visit are that my general eye health is good, and my retina looks solid… and that my floaters have settled in place. The negative about that though is that instead of settling at the bottom of my eye they are not basically permanently glued to the back of my eye… so I am largely just going to have to get used to them or try a laser procedure that has a bunch of negative side effects… one of which is potential retina detachment. However she thinks that the double vision I have been seeing is due to the fact that my once “good eye” has gotten far worse… like significantly different prescription, but my left eye the previous bad eye is mostly the same. I have new glasses incoming soon, which I hope will help most of these issues.
I’ve been splitting my time between Destiny Rising and Guild Wars 2, and though some research yesterday I realized that I had a New Light Engram sitting in my inventory… that could produce the last remaining Mythic weapon that I had not collected. I had mostly ignored these because they were level 50 gear level, and almost not worth decrypting… however not that I have unlocked a copy of this weapon I can craft a level 70 engram and choose high level copies of it. So essentially I have been sitting on the key to collecting this last illusive weapon for a week now at least. I guess that is a suggestion, that whenever you hit the end game… use those couple of new light mythic engrams to unlock the weapons that are most important to you so you can craft engrams to get higher level versions of them. For me it just allowed me to complete my set and push my endgame affinity level up to 8.
I also ran a daily Onslaught Blitz and pulled another exotic weapon. I do not plan on using Ikora anytime soon, but if I ever do having this will probably be a good thing, especially since it dropped with the item level already sitting at 70. I vaguely remember Two-Tailed Fox as being an exotic that was fairly solid in Destiny 2, but I also cannot remember much about it. There is a certain Pokemon aspect to collecting Exotics, and I have always cared more about acquisition than actually using most of them. You can make exotic engrams, but they require a currency that I do not have much of. In theory this is going to be the long grind for the game is trying to acquire all of them, given that most of them are just random chance and not specific quests like they were in Destiny 1 and 2.
I also pushed up one of the seasonal journey tracks high enough to unlock the Partridge Sky exotic sword. Again this is a useful item for Jolder but thusfar I have not made an attempt to level it up so that she can start using it. Right now I have mythics that I like for both weapon slots and I am being way too lazy to change that up. You only get one exotic and I am not really sure if I should be running with the Huckleberry or this sword in that slot. I guess the benefit of this exotic is that is is a Solar sword, which replaces an existing Solar sword that I am using… which does not adversely impair my ability to pop elemental bubbles. I really like going into activities with two weapons that are contrasting elements to whatever my abilities do. Since Jolder is void, I try and have one weapon be Arc, and the other be Solar.
The current Fractal Incursion event means I am back spending most of my evening playing Guild Wars 2 and slowly chipping away at things. I had one of the weirdest situations happen last night where we got the Volcanic fractal through a random queue… and then everyone bailed and it was left with just two of us. Since I am a ranged build, I tend to focus on taking out the Grawl adds during the first Shaman boss allowing everyone else to focus on breaking his bubble. So it took me a bit to notice until the other person who stuck it out commented about it. Volcanic is probably the single easiest fractal out there, so it seemed weird as hell that anyone would bail from it. The two of us stuck it out and finished the fractal pretty easily, and since I run a healing pet I was able to keep group healing us to top us off during the final fight. We friended up each other after the run, because we were newly formed friends in the forge of adversity.
At this point I am sitting at 424 Fractaline Dust of 450 for the third recursion achievement. This is the biggest grind, but I will still have to go back and selectively do some of the specific non-rotation fractals and also try and collect the badges from the majority that I have not. I’ve found the badge from Aetherblade and Molten Boss and need four more… so at some point I should look up a video on where they are. I am sure I am running past them in the various fractals and if I knew where they were I could probably make a trip to get them. If nothing else has come from this.. I am way the hell more comfortable with tier 1 fractals than I used to be. Even Kinfall seems to be like a cakewalk anymore having gotten it back to back multiple times.
I think the legendary itself is going to be gated by the entire event. There is an achievement that progresses step by step each week, but after having ground out the worst bits… I am hoping that it will be easy enough to finish it up each week as new sub achievements drop. My goal this weekend is to help the rest of our normal fractal crew knock out whatever they need to knock out so they can catch up. I know I have been grinding this a lot harder than most people have… because in truth it is not like I have anything better to do. After the death of my wife in July, I have latched onto any grind that I can focus my attention towards so that it gives me at least temporarily a sense of purpose. I should be doing stuff around the house probably… but it is easy to latch onto this and hyper fixate for awhile.
Have you been participating in the Fractal Incursion event? What sorts of progress have you made? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks. I am writing this morning largely to make sure everyone is aware that a Fractal Incursion event is going on right now in Guild Wars 2… and it is phenomenal. Not only do you get starter gear sets for new characters from a vendor in the area, but you can essentially run most of the t1 fractals instantly through a really cool group finder functionality. This event started on September 9th and is going to be running for almost a full month ending on October 7th. During this time there are a few things happening. Firstly there is a new quest chain that starts from the Fractal portal in Lion’s Arch where just talking to the Mist Stranger NPC gets you a free 20 slot bag. In addition to this there is a new beta group finder tool for Fractals where essentially you get instant queued with a bunch of strangers and they have specifically narrowed the category down to only the fractals with a high chance of success with no prior knowledge.
They are bribing the hell out of us to get into game and run a lot of fractals. My guess is that they are using this to beta test a brand new group finder functionality, and I am fully on board with this. I want to see this same thing make its way to other parts of the game… specifically strikes. If I had a group finder like this for the easy Icebrood Saga strikes, I would run them every single day without question. The bribes though… are really strong because just by chain running fractals you are going to get access to unlock a set of legendary gloves. I’ve heard rumor that there is going to be a way to unlock multiple armor types during this event, but even if it is only a single armor weight… you are saving countless resources to make this happen. Additionally Fractals themselves are hyper lucrative. I really started participating on Sunday and in the few hours I spent running fractals I easily made around 50 gold.
All of the progress towards this event is tracked in the Incursive Investigation and Fractal Incursion achievement categories. Mostly this involves chain running fractals through the new group finder, or with your own fixed groups. You are collecting this substance called Fractalline Dust and you get this through either running quick play fractals, doing fractal incursions in the world at the top of every hour, or by completing achievements. It seems like you end up with 3 to 5 per fractal and in order to complete the three long grindy achievements you need to gather up a total of 450. In a single afternoon of running a bunch of these I pretty quickly ground out around 200, and that was with frequent stops to clear out by bags and do other things. In theory over the coming nights I should finish grinding out the 450 without much issue. What is awesome though is not only are you given a bag for starting down this path, but when you hit rank 9 you are given an extra bag slot. Additionally you are given tokens along the way that you can turn in for pieces of exotic gear, so this becomes quite possibly the best way to gear out an alt character.
There is zero doubt that this has been wildly popular. That first shot is folks hanging out in Lion’s Arch before 8 am on a North American week day. The above image is folks gathered for the Fractal Incursion boss that appears in Diessa Plateau that was going to spawn at 8 am. Folks are amped about this particular brand of nonsense and it makes me exceptionally happy. Even if you are only a casual Guild Wars 2 player, now is a great time to get in an experience fractals. For World of Warcraft players… think of Fractals as Mythic plus dungeons… but way more chill. Players are likely not going to speak a ton during them, because they are very much solved problems… but just follow the crowd and you will do fine. If nothing else it is going to give you a level of familiarity with the content so that even after the event ends… you will probably feel way more comfortable joining fractal groups. We’ve been doing this as a weekly thing on Thursday nights for awhile and having a lot of fun slowly raising our fractal levels.
I am so on board with this update. If you want to get into the game and need help getting adjusted… feel free to ping me. I should be in most evenings grinding Fractals and am more than happy to have you tag along. My Guild Wars 2 account is belghast.5496, so feel free to friend me up.
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