Good Morning Folks. We’ve been dealing with a pretty outrageous spate of weather events over the last couple of weeks. This current batch started on Thursday night we had really bad storms and a few tornadoes that spun up… which are were thankfully not at our house this time. However that does not mean that we have not been getting quite a bit of hail. The worst of it was golf ball sized hail, but Friday afternoon my wife was in the backyard reading and captured this photo of a deluge of pea sized hail. Thankfully none of it lasted terribly long, and to the best of my knowledge we’ve had not damage to either our automobiles or roof. It has just been stressful to effectively be under constant watch for bad weather. We’ve been running the televisions pretty much 24/7 just in case the news cuts in with a tornado warning or something.
What we have been dealing with more recently however is flooding. After over a week of pretty consistent deluge the ground is just completely saturated. This means when it is raining we are highly susceptible to flash flooding.Luckily anything we have dealt with has been minor, and is largely in the form of large pools of standing water on our lawn. However the green belt behind the house is pretty full and all of the nearby lakes and rivers are beyond flood stage. There are several roads in my town that are blocked off from travel due to flooding. With this also comes several deaths as folks foolhardily drive into water flowing over the road. You learn the catch phrase “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” pretty early around here… and clearly these folks did not mind that lesson. We are all safe and well… but are absolutely hoping for a break in this nonsense. Sadly by the end of the summer we will be back in drought territory more than likely.
Ever since realizing that Ammo, Sita, and Sol are timezone compatible with me… I have been joining in their nonsense when possible. We made tentative plans during the day to work on some stuff in Monster Hunter Wilds and I logged in to patch up my machine and make sure everything would load fine given that I had not played it in probably a month. I had to rebuild my shaders, so was thankful that I did some prep work. Ammo unfortunately got caught in this cycle of rebuilding shaders and then crashing out… and in the meantime Sita and I were partaking of barrel bowling in the new grand hub. Then… about the time it seemed like Ammo was stabilizing… I lost my internet. I can technically tether to my phone, but the connection is nowhere near stable enough to actually play much in the way of online games. It came back a few times… but only temporarily and around 9:20 I gave up for the evening. Apparently it had taken Ammo another 30 minutes or so before her situation was straightened out so it seems as though the entire outing was a bit cursed.
I did get to unlock the Grand Hub which was pretty great, which then allowed me to view the new cat cooking animation. It isn’t so much a cooking animation but more a situation where the three adorable palicoes in Tomato hats do a speedy delivery of food from somewhere else. I was using a Kunafa village voucher so they delivered me a meal of cheesy bread. While I will probably forever miss the actual cat cooking animations from Monster Hunter World, this is at least better than cooking my own food. The Monster Hunter Rise scenes were pretty great as well, but World will always be the best. The new scenes though have a heck of a lot of charm so I will accept it.
One good thing did come out of the otherwise cursed evening. Ammo and Sita have the whole grouping together thing down to an art form. That has always been the problem with Capcom online games… is that they seem to have no fucking clue how people actually interact with each other. It is such a clusterfuck to actually get grouped with a friend… but this is essentially the process that Sita taught me, that I will now follow going forward. This requires you to share a squad with the person you are wanting to group up with, but from the start screen you choose Lobby Search and then Squad Lobby Search. Next you choose the squad you share and choose to join that lobby. This is going to give you a private lobby only for members of that squad. Then when someone posts a quest you can go to Alma and choose Lobby Member Quests and find the quest that was just posted. Following these steps made it relatively painless to get grouped up.
Hopefully the next time it is Monster Hunter Wilds night, things will go a bit better overall.
The post Wild Wicked Weather appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Late Thursday evening Monster Hunter Wilds dropped and I spent a good chunk of time over the weekend playing it. At this point I have racked up just shy of 13 hours and it is weird how fast the muscle memory from Monster Hunter World came back to me. A lot of the controls are different this time around and I have slowly been tweaking things to make them work a bit better. Other than a few wonky performance issues here and there I have mostly had a pretty great time. I’ve been largely focused on the Main Story Quest, but feel like I need to spend a bit more time smelling the roses and exploring the zones. Truth be told my favorite things about the previous game was the expedition zones and tagging in on SOS flares to help folks down bosses. I’ve done a bit of both, but nowhere near as much as I probably should be.
At this point I am down in the third zone and about to fight by my count the fourth major boss. I am not sure if the game is bugged out but I don’t seem to have a quest marker showing me where I should be going next. I roamed around a bit last night and could not figure out where the game was trying to send me. I’ve crafted a bit of gear and trying something that I never really did in the previous game. I’ve equipped a weapon set that causes sleep, so we will see how that bodes for the next major encounter. I took my first death on the Lava Apes and things seem to be ramping up a bit. I think part of the problem was that I did not make a cool drink for the fight, and I think I was taking heat debuffs the entire time. I should probably focus on taking care of those things, which will require roaming around the expedition areas a bit more to collect goods.
One of my only complaints right now is that I miss the Felyne cooking scenes. We have a cute Palico that appears to be wearing a tomato pincushion as a hat… which is pretty great. However I really miss the elaborate cooking scenes and while technically more useful… cooking the food myself is not as fun. Maybe as the game progresses we will get back the kitchen, but I fear that is probably not the case. Even in Monster Hunter Rise they made Dango. Sadly the game peaked at Monster Hunter World and will probably never reach such peaks of Felyne culinary prowess again. This is probably a dumb thing to complain about, but really it was a core chunk of my enjoyment.
I think my new favorite bit from Wilds though are the WudWuds. I have no clue WHAT they are “preslicedly”. Maybe beavers or otters? Whatever the case, I think they are pretty great. So much of my enjoyment of this game come from the non-human characters that we interact with. I had forgotten how much I needed this level of cat adjacent nonsense in my life. We are going through dark times right now, and having a bit of pure escapism is precious. Hunting big monsters with my cat friend that is styled after my own chaos goblin Gracie has been quite a bit of fun. I do sort of get drained by the game, which makes me think I need to spend more time just roaming around the world looting materials. I spent so much of my time in the first game doing that, and I pretty much need to adopt the same stance in this game.
It is definitely a worthy successor to Monster Hunter World. I also dig the ability to be in multiple squads which serve the purpose of guilds. Here is a screen that shows my friend code, if you are playing the game feel free to throw me an invite. So far it seems to be working pretty seamlessly across all of the available platforms. Part of me wants to keep my head down until I hit the end game and then devote the bulk of my time crafting proper gear sets. However I think I will probably enjoy myself if I just mill around a bit and do some nonsense along the way. I’ve yet to actually group up with anyone, and I am contemplating throwing out an SOS for the next boss encounter just to make it go more quickly.
That is really my only complaint about this game is that it continues to provide limited feedback as to how the battle is going. We have a health bar, but what I really want is a boss health bar. The whole system of changing the icon on the mini-map and also getting hints from the guide that follows you along in battle… are fine and all but the game would feel better if you had clear feedback as to how much impact you are actually making during the fight. As it stands now it feels like you are essentially beating a bag of hit points that then randomly falls over and lets you carve it. I get that this is a conscious choice in the design of the Monster Hunter franchise, but I feel like it is the wrong one, especially in the “World” series which is designed to be more approachable.
All in all though I am having fun. I ultimately knew I would because I went completely obsessive about this game series when Worlds released back in 2018. So much so that I played through the progression on PlayStation and then started over from scratch again and leveled everything up on PC when it finally released on that platform. I am very happy that this time we are getting Console and PC releases at the same time with full cross play.
The post Missing Cat Chef Theater appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks. Yesterday I wrapped up the fifth book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and made quite a bit of progress in Path of Exile. Originally I was planning on spending the night playing Monster Hunter Wilds… then realized that it was not releasing until 11 pm my time… when I would absolutely very much be largely comatose. In fact I did not even make it to 9 pm before the siren song of the bed called my name. The above screenshot is mostly so I can show off the fact that I picked up the adorable jellyfish portal mtx, which is something I wanted when it was in a loot box… but now that it is up on the store and on sale… I could not resist. Generally speaking I do not mind spending money on Path of Exile because I get so much joy out of the damned game.
Right now there is a farming method that is likely going to get nerfed… that can cause 36+ Rogue Exiles to spawn on a single map… and then get resummoned forth again via the Ritual mechanic for even more loot. I did however take advantage of the fact that the idols associated with this method are going for upwards of 13 div… and sold the one I had for a quick infusion of currency. I then used this to purchase two banger rings which helped me cap chaos resistance, and gain enough other resistances to be able to drop Purity of Elements. I am now instead running Tempest Shield which allows me to cap my Attack and Spell Block meaning that I am recovering life constantly and generally feel quite a bit more tanky in game. As soon as I can get my hands on an Enlighten Support I should be able to add back in Skitterbots and be effectively in my final configuration. The next big purchases would be an Unnatural Instinct and a Light of Meaning with Fire Damage on it… so I can do a big dumb combo.
Truth be told, if I made no forward momentum from this point in the league I will be happy with where I am. As of yesterday I have unlocked all of the non-unique maps and picked up my first two voidstones. This is pretty much the point where I try and get every league and event and consider this the basic “done” point. Anything I accomplish on top of this is just gravy. I will probably unlock some more of the easy favorite map slots like doing the various guardian maps. I doubt I am in a state where I can do a T17 unless it is rolled EXTREMELY easily. It feels like my single target dps is in a really bad state, but I have a decent base that I am going to try and craft a new sceptre with at some point. All in all though I am pretty happy with the state of where I got in both the Phrecia and Pohx League events.
The extremely keen eyed may have noticed some additions to my blog’s masthead. These are palicos that I commissioned Ammo to create for me which represent Gracie and Josie two of my current cats. She has been doing Palico portraits in the lead up to Monster Hunter Wilds and they have all been delightful. I already had a Palico that represents Kenzie in my masthead, and she will eternally be my Monster Hunting buddy of legend… but it is time to bring a few new cats into the fold. Ammo did an excellent job of capturing the essence of these two with Gracie being the chaos goblin that she is chasing the heal bug, and Josie giving some serious side eye as she carefully places a barrel.
I got in very briefly this morning to create my Hunter and primary Palico, and played long enough to get to the first temporary camp that allows you to choose your weapon. I am going to try and main Sword and Shield this time around, and we will see how long that lasts. I chose to model my Palico after Gracie and named her Graciebutt since that is what I actually call her 99.9% of the time. It is going to take a bit to get used to the controls of a Monster Hunter game again but I fully expect to spend most of the weekend playing this game and giving it a go. I will probably pause my sojourn through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series until I get through at least most of the initial storyline. Monster Hunter Wilds will probably be a perfectly fine audiobook game, but it is going to take churning through some story before I get there.
Are you going to be playing Monster Hunter Wilds? What weapon are you going to main? What did you name your Palico? Drop me a line below.
The post Jellies and Palicoes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Â Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
In a human sense AggroChat just turned 5 years old this last Friday…  but in a more correct sense we have now completely four entire years of this podcast.  I still feel like we really don’t completely know what we are doing here. As the patron saint of bad decisions…  Belghast journeys back into Everquest… not EQ2 but the original and talks a bit about how many of those systems have changed drastically.  Grace and Bel talk a bit about their Mythical Nonsense journey in World of Warcraft as they reached Mythic +10 this past week. We go into a lengthy conversation talking about encounter decision with several examples including Monster Hunter World and Dark Souls.  We talk briefly about the Dominaria expansion for Magic the Gathering and the release of Standard Ready Challenger Decks. Finally we wrap up with a little bit of discussion about the MegaMan event happening in Monster Hunter World.
