Good Morning Folks. Today is the head start for Midnight, and it begins at roughly 5 pm CST. I find it interesting that they are specifically choosing that time frame for the start of a new expansion rather than the normal weekly reset time. Since Panda Remix, I have mostly been playing Belgraven, my Dark Iron warrior, as my main because I have always loved Dwarves… and always wanted to be able to play a Dark Iron. Blackrock Depths to this day is probably my favorite dungeon in the game because it was an entire whole-assed city down there, and it felt like a living, breathing, functional place. So while I have Belghast, my original warrior main at the level cap as well… I am choosing to move forward with a new legacy as I am this fiery Dark Iron dude. That feels a bit fitting, honestly, since I am no longer the Belghast that played World of Warcraft. I am Belghast, the blogger, podcaster, and friend to thousands, thanks to the weird fucking life that I have lived. I have a lot of baggage towards World of Warcraft because when I first left the game… I was in a really bad mental state.
There is an addon that has been cycling around the “social medias” called Account Played that visualizes all of the time you have spent playing World of Warcraft and groups it by class. All that is required is installing the addon and then logging in every character on your account, and now that the Warband makes this so much easier because you can see every character from the login screen… I decided to take the plunge and try it. I knew this was going to be a scary proposition, and this does not take into account the fact that I have a second account… nor any of the time I have spent on beta realms and in World of Warcraft Classic. So when I say I have spent two years of my life playing World of Warcraft, all of those extra realms account for the missing days. No wonder this game has such a fundamental effect on me, and why I have so many deep emotions tied to it. There are people that I met through this game who have become some of my closest adult friends. World of Warcraft feels like a high school reunion whenever I play it… and it has all of the same complicated emotions that go along with that. It was a place and a time in my life that felt as fundamental as going to college, and that might seem odd to people who are not steeped in this world, but as I age, it feels less and less weird to me.
As far as the time break-out goes… I am not shocked by that in the least. Since the Warband gives me easy access to see every single character on my account. I have Eight Warriors, Eight Hunters, Five Deathknights, and Three Paladins. Warrior was the very first character that I rolled when I got into beta testing, and it was a Tauren. If I am going to play a random character in a World of Warcraft Event league… I am going to play a Warrior. What would even be wilder is if this could somehow track the amount of time played per spec, because I imagine I have spent way more time in Protection Spec as a Warrior and Paladin than any other spec. I could have absolutely called Mage as my least-played class, and Priest, I knew, would have been pretty low as well. What I was not expecting was Demon Hunter to be as low as it is, given that I mained it for an expansion. However, it also has not been out that long in the grand scheme of things compared to Warrior. I think I have as many Deathknights as I do, largely because it allowed me to rapidly create a functional character on a server, given it started at I think level 25ish? Levels do not mean much after all of the squishing that has happened.
I am looking forward to giving Midnight a spin tonight whenever it launches, and I expect to largely drop all of the quests that I have on Belgraven like a hot rock and move on with my life. I have contemplated dropping Blacksmithing as my profession and going for pure harvesting as I go into the new content. I think maybe herbalism is a good call, because there will always be demand for flower pickers in the world. Especially since I have reached a point of largely wanting to sell whatever I happen to be finding… double harvesting seems like a good call. The other option would be to mirror Belghast proper and go with Enchanting, because there is always a need for enchanting resources as well. I will probably continue to run old content on OG Bel for that precise reason because I can convert all of those purples into shards and sell them on the open market. I’ve never been one to accumulate much wealth in World of Warcraft, and I am going to see if I can change that, especially given that I have enjoyed being a vendor so much in Path of Exile.
Speaking of Path of Exile, today is also the drop of the Mirage League live stream, and with it comes a Twitch drop that works in both Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. This is where my next few weeks are going to get weird because I fully expect to be mainlining POE, and then playing Midnight, Dune, and Enshrouded as a bit of a palate cleanser. It is really hard to gauge what I am going to end up playing in this league until I have seen the trailer and, more importantly, the patch notes. Since I believe I have convinced Ace to take the plunge, I feel like I am not sure I want to go with Righteous Fire in this league as my starter. I might revisit the Golem Elementalist character and either play it with Ice Trap or try to turn it into some sort of Minion character. There is some thought that maybe some of the Phrecia classes might be going core, and if so, I will absolutely be playing Servant of Arakaali minions, because it was too damned much fun during Phrecia 2.0.
As far as a wish list for this league. I would really like to see some version of Mercenaries go core. GGG said that they would like to bring it core, but it would need some sort of rebalance to make it viable. I liked gearing out Mercenaries and really loved that aspect of Diablo III, because you could use the Merc to balance out the weaknesses of your build. I hope the Breach tree is just as powerful as it was during the last league, because it was amazing for crafting early gear. I would love to see Kingsmarch simplified, because the process of building it out still seems like a massive hassle and one that you feel obligated to do since it is effectively free currency. I would really love it if they unbound the spell choices during the acts from your class so that I did not feel required to mule a witch every now and then when I need some of those early abilities. Other than that, I would really love to see a further separation between bossing content and mapping content, and make it so that you do not have to kill Maven and Uber Elder to get your third and fourth keystone… either that or make quest versions of those encounters because it takes too freaking long to gather up the resources for those fights.
I am sure tomorrow I will be talking mostly about the Mirage League reveals. What do you want most from this new league? Are you going to be playing Midnight today? Drop me a line below.
The post Two Years of My Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I took today off because I had some non-medical business to deal with… and all of my time has been spent dealing with medical nonsense. As a result, I slept in far later than normal, to the point where all of the cats seemed to think I was fundamentally broken. I had some wild dreams, and while they were not all connected, they all shared the general theme of ripping holes in reality. Take what you will of that. Sadly, yesterday was the end of the Phrecia 2.0 event in Path of Exile, and I have to say goodbye to my beloved Minions Servant of Arakaali character. I had so much fun with this build that I honestly might forgo my traditional Righteous Fire starter for some sort of minions character. Either that, or honestly, I had enough fun with my Golem Ice Trap Elementalist that I might try that instead as my starter. There is a teaser that might be hinting that some of the Phrecia classes are going core, and if that is the case… I may literally build the same damned character I played in Phrecia 2.0.
Yesterday, we got our official teaser trailer that revealed the name of the league, and I have to say… so far, nothing we have gotten as teasers has given us any real idea what the league is going to be like. Normally, by this point, we would have gotten at least a few quality of life improvement teasers, but no… all obtuse nonsense. My personal guess is that we are going to be presented with an NPC in maps that allows us to make one of two choices, which will change the way the rest of the map plays out. I am expecting this to be something akin to influence altars that present us with two choices, and each time we make it, we gain some terrible affix on our map… since GGG seems to like to kick us directly in the crotch as often as possible. The one thing I really hope about this upcoming league is that they have figured out a way to make T16.5 and T17 maps less complete ass. Other than that, I would really love to see Abyss from POE 2 come to POE 1, because it is so much more enjoyable than the de facto chase the green orb on your mini map version that we have now.
Other than that, I spent a bit of time in Dune Awakening, and I am working my way up to mining cobalt. I got my welcome back carepackage and it included way more resources than I expected, so as soon as I have the research points for it I will be learning how to make a Dune Buggy. As a result, I went ahead and added a proper garage to my base in the Vermillius Gap. I need to go back down south and farm the shit out of all of the missing intel that I left on the table as a result. I trained some points in Trooper to give me the shigawire claw, which feels like it is honestly required at this point. The nice thing about it is that it allows me to zoom in to the top floor of NPC bases so I can often times get in and out with intel before anyone even notices I am there. The defensive form thing was nice, but really bum rushing them with the knee and then stabbing them through their shield is my go to for dealing with the melee berserker types.
Building the garage has allowed me to expand out the top floor, and now I have so much room for activities. I kind of dig this weird three-story base thing that I have gone on, where the garage is at the lowest level, then the bottom floor has water tanks, blood recycler, and power plants, and then finally at the top floor you have most of the crafting machines and general storage. I also love the location of my base because there is Iron, Copper, Granite, Metal, and plenty of Water to harvest all within a few feet of my front door. Additionally, there are nearby Kirab bases that I honestly just need to get better at killing regularly for other materials. Sure, the welcome back package gave me stupid amounts of rare materials, but I don’t really want to lean on that if I can help it.
Other than Dune Awakening, I have also been playing some more Enshrouded. I am working towards various objectives in my most recent world, because I would like to ultimately see what all of the progression looks like at this point. I am running around on my highest geared character, but it has some minor problems… like all of the legendary gear I am using existed prior to rune sockets going into the game. So I have a great sword, for example, but one that I cannot socket a rune into. It will probably be a while before I find another equivalent weapon because I farmed all of them from the endgame chests to get the gear set that I am wearing now. Right now, I am mostly going through the process of unlocking all of the NPCs so I can finish building out my base properly.
Speaking of bases… I gave Ace shit for their minimalistic design, so I only find it fair to share my maximalistic nonsense. This is as far as I have gotten in my attempt to build all the way down to the shroud from the starter area. Making this even less realistic is the fact that I am carving out floors as I go down by tunneling out the rock from the mountainside with the place and remove trick. As I expand the footprint of my base, I will continue burrowing downwards, and at the same time expanding upwards into the vertical maximum height as well. At some point, I need to actually do something realistic with my design, where it is something more than just a series of empty floors. Right now I have a highly dysfunctional base, but I am not terribly far progressed, so it does not really matter that much.
I am also still occasionally piddling around in No Man’s Sky, and am working on unlocking the ability to process toxic waste. I happened upon a processing facility on the second planet and got the quest to upgrade my multi-tool to be able to handle it. This distracted me from the normal flow of the missions, and now I am largely roaming around the frosty surface of the planet, scanning everything that I can for credits. This morning, I ventured off towards some salvage… only to realize that, apparently, it is underground somewhere, and I could not see any obvious caves to explore. I’ve always enjoyed the super chill nature of this game, especially playing on super casual mode, where I am not constantly battling for my own survival. I like the concept of survival games, but hate the constant feeling that I am making zero progress, so when given the choice, I dial down the survival aspect so I can just enjoy the exploration.
The last monkey wrench to throw into the gears… is that I reinstalled Project Gorgon and decided to give it a look to see how it has progressed. I remember next to nothing about this game, but I do remember it reminding me quite a bit of Vanguard. Largely, I think this part was the fact that there are so many random trades that you can do. I inexplicably enjoy the fact that I can get points for burying my corpses. I played a bit last night… overpulled a half dozen spiders onto me… died and then returned to the spawn point. I think I am going to have to sort out my gear and abilities before I do something like that again. I did laugh heartily as I was attacked by an exploding sheep. I had been getting the itch to play something EverQuest adjacent, and maybe Gorgon will scratch that itch.
Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I need to pick up the house, gather my tax information, and deal with a few other things. Next week, we get our proper preview of the upcoming Path of Exile league, and I am looking forward to it.
The post Goodbye Arakaali appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
