Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.
As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.
In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.
In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.
In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.
Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.
Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.
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Good Morning Friends. I regret to inform you that there is no Mixtape Monday this week because I have not felt like fiddling with them over the weekend. I have two that are in progress but neither of them is really ready for primetime. I am playing the “is it allergies or is it covid” game right now as I had to attend high school graduation on Friday and just based on the statistics, more than one person in that crowd was a carrier. However, at the same time, the cottonwood is in full bloom which I am deathly allergic to, so more than likely… it is just allergies given a “general awful feeling” and “lethargy” are my only real symptoms so far. Aligning to my already strange mental state, I apparently booted up New World over the weekend and spent a little bit of time roaming around it.
My Character now apparently lives on Valhalla and I am not sure how many merges have taken place between our origins on Minda and the first merge with Frislandia. Whatever the case it appears that team purple is outgunned, though last night they did manage to take Everfall. In truth, a sequence of changes has more or less made it that I no longer give a shit about the faction balance. At some point the costs of teleports were reduced significantly, and also no longer take your inventory into account so if you are so inclined you can bop around the map at will. The other significant quality of life improvement that I noticed was the fact that there is now “peaceful regeneration” which turns on quick life recovery any time you are out of combat. I would say MOST of the food that I went through was trying to regenerate my health so I could get back into the action, and now there is just a buff that does that for me.
As far as combat in general, as heavy armor, sword, and shield tank… I feel much sturdier than I was previously. I need to do some more tests here but I spent a bit of time running around in Edengrove and fared far better than previously against everything there. I was also able to easily take single pull elites in Shattered Mountain and even managed a few two pulls. Like I said I need to get out into the world and try a few of my haunts that I was clearing regularly when the hatchet bug was in place, to determine just how viable open-world farming is again. If nothing else it was fun to do a good number of the lower level towers in Edengrove for materials.
I made a quick visit to Adjorjan and he still appears to be dropping decent stuff, though I am not sure what level of watermark he is capable of dropping. I only stuck around for a single kill but I got a purple bow around 550, but also did not get a watermark upgrade from him because there is now an animation that plays when that happens. As far as watermarking there seem to be a few reasonable ways to get daily progress namely in the way of bags that drop containing diamond gypsum. The other big change I noticed is that the bottom has fallen out in some of the rare materials. When I last played Void Ore which is a rare drop from Orichalcum, was selling in the neighborhood of 10k gold each. I just bought five of them on buy orders for 150 gold each. Unfortunately, I am nowhere near the skill level required to make a full set of Voidbent armor, but I had contemplated trying to convert my cash stockpiles into armoring levels.
The community seems to be hopping in spite of being MUCH smaller than it was and seemingly gone is the era of the “2k buy in” for a group. I am not entirely certain what quality of life changes lead to this but so far the game seems to be much more playable than it was when I last left. I doubt I will be spending a ton of time in the game, and the crafting system in its current state still feels awful… but maybe just maybe it has found its niche and can slowly start moving the needle in the positive direction. New World was a really fun game up until the point it abruptly stopped being fun, so a few tweaks here or there might be enough to save it. I will of course let you know if I continue to play from time to time and how that process is going.
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I am uncertain what it is about Christmas Vacation that makes me extra antisocial. Maybe it is the crowds and dealing with Christmas shopping, but whatever the case I tend to go through a turtle phase at the end of the year and beginning of the next. This is specifically heralded by me significantly increasing the number of single player types of games that I am engaged with. Last year at this time it was Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order then a foray into Knights of the Old Republic 2 in January. The year before that I was heavily engaged Witcher 2 and 3 and this pattern keeps going back as you look at what I am playing at the end/beginning of the year. Winter break seems to have been the time I actually re-engaged with Final Fantasy VII Remake and finally finished it.
I have to say I really liked what they did with this. Not only did they spend a lot of time fleshing out areas of the game that buzzed by extremely quickly in the original game, but also taking the opportunity to change the story a bit. This is going into mild spoiler territory but if you have not caught on… Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a faithful recreation of the original and more a re-imagining of the game and with that comes an interesting plot device to explain those differences. I think it works well and I greatly appreciate the more action oriented style of gameplay… which again is a non-starter for some fans of the original. I greatly enjoyed the ride and look forward to the next “disc” worth of game when it releases.
I’ve moved on to Intergrade, which is the Yuffie adventure. So far this is extremely enjoyable and it has a completely different feel to the base “Remake”. While it weaves in an out of the story, it has an almost Cowboy Bebop vibe to it… which I think is largely influenced by the deep jazz cuts for the soundtrack. I am not very far into this side adventure but I think it will be an enjoyable way to finish out this week… if it lasts that long. After watching Witcher on netflix… I am having a deep desire to replay Witcher 3 which may end up happening. I also really want to try Red Dead Redemption 2 again to see if it can grab me this time around. I bounced pretty hard the first time but I have a good friend who absolutely loved it… so I might give it another shot. I don’t love the Rockstar style of open world games, but now that I better understand what the expectations are… maybe I can account for that in my expectations.
Lastly I am still poking my head into New World each day for long enough to collect 3 packages, make a gypsum orb, and make a sword cast to get expertise gains. I have to say the merger has had the opposite impact for me… in actually killing my desire to play the game. Firstly there is the challenge that there are exactly 3 covenant territories… and all three of them are the places where I have a home. Second there is the problem that on Minda Brightwood was one of the best late game crafting hubs… and on Frislandia it has been maintained by a bunch of slumlords who have done little to nothing to keep the crafting machines maintained. All of my crafting resources were centered around my tier 4 house in Brightwood… which sorta wrecks any desire to actually try and craft anything since there isn’t the resources I actually need there.
So I am concerned that as people continue to leave the game… we might end up going through another round of mergers meaning that once again the structure of the towns and the machines in them could change. This really harms my enjoyment when I do not care at all about the PVP mini-game. My personal preference would be that crafting resources never downgrade, and once a town is tier 5 in everything… that it just stays that way because this nonsense of mergers downgrading towns has been a significant hardship. I am sure that once the Christmas event is over and I no longer get free upgrades and gold every day… that New World is going to fall by the wayside for me.
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Yesterday was a good day, although it wasn’t a terribly productive one. Some months back one of my good friends… legitimately probably the only friend that I am still in contact with from my High School years… moved into an apartment in the same suburb of Tulsa where I live. I legitimately don’t see a lot of people right now because still fairly leery from Covid numbers in our area. However yesterday I got out of my comfort zone a bit and we got together for about an hour yesterday afternoon. I had a little something for him and he a little something for me… though his little something is pretty phenomenal. Both of our gifts were a little self serving in that I picked him up a Magic the Gathering Commander deck because I would really like to play some in person Commander soon.
He on the other hand went to way more effort and assembled and painted me this start to a Sisters of Battle Army. Again because he would really like to get some war-gaming in soon when things calm down a bit. The only problem that we foresee is that neither of us have a large table, or really the ROOM for a large table to set up and play on. I did wonder about maybe booking a backroom in the local library every so often for a games day. I miss playing games physically and would love to get engaged in more of that… now that legitimately he lives less than two miles away from my house. The photo does not at all do justice to the models as the lighting I snapped a picture under is not exactly optimal for miniatures.
In other gaming news I have passed the Wall Market section of Final Fantasy VII Remake and honestly am not super far off from the point where I left on in my PS5 run of the game. PC gaming is just more conducive to my lifestyle right now and it is super easy for me to drop into a game. I guess I could be playing remotely through my laptop via the third party app that I have been using. That is probably how I am going to play Horizon Forbidden West but there is just something preferable about controlling these games with a mouse and keyboard for me. The only section that has been particularly awful is the motorbike combat section… where I had to contort my hands in such a way as to hit the throttle button while also steering and swinging a sword. It is nothing that changing the keybinds would not fix but I didn’t take that amount of time to figure out a new scheme.
I am poking my head into New World about once a day to loot three packages and create a sword mold for a daily expertise boost. All of the other activities are sort of a bit “much” for me right now. I am very much only tangentially engaged in the game. The servers have merged and as a result I now play on Frislandia instead of Minda given that all of Arkadia Theta merged into a single server. Everything is definitely more lively and I am sure that I could probably go back to farming outdoor content for expertise levels if I wanted to. However I just have not found the drive to return to group activity. Most of the people that I had been playing with from the larger Minda community jumped ship to other servers and the thought of trying to make inroads from scratch again… does not seem terribly compelling.
I am interested to watch the map over the next few days. When the servers merged we inherited Frislandia’s map which was largely dominated by Syndicate. The only non-syndicate territory was unfortunately Brightwood… where I have my Tier 4 house. Over night it seems that a Marauder guild managed to capture Cutlass Keys, and there are a handful of other wars brewing. According to the folks on Frislandia, the server has always been dominated by Syndicate so I guess we will see how well the upcoming wars shake out in favor of that status quo. It seems like at least one of the servers that merged in was Covenant dominant because almost all of the Wars that are queued up are team Yellow trying to seize territory.
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