Morning folks… I am struggling today. Both in the waking up department because there is simply not enough coffee in the world… and in the illness department because I seem to be coming down with whatever the hell is going around the office. I’ve yet to decide if I can make it to work today, so we will see what happens between now and finishing this post but I am taking a breathing treatment as I type. As far as the weekend I did a bunch of assorted gaming because that seems to be how I roll right now. Instead of focusing hard on one thing I seem to be splitting my time between a bunch of things, and as a result I spent a good deal of time making tiny images and updated my “Recently Playing” sidebar. It mostly follows the post I made last week with the major exception of me apparently forgetting to include Elder Scrolls Online which I still dip my toes into occasionally.
In the Destiny 2 front I spent a good deal of the weekend knocking out anything that could get me a Powerful/Prime Engram and wouldn’t you know it… I reached 600 light the current cap. This is a cap that I will enjoy for another whole day…. because when the black armor DLC releases on December 4th the cap is going up to 650. The truth is I am fine with this.. because the last cap was quite the stretch to get to from the levels I was sitting at when Curse of Osiris released, which is unfortunately the last time I really seriously played the game. Sure I got in and did the Warmind story content and a little bit of planetary stuff but I really was not pushing myself to cap out at that point. Additionally Forsaken made it way easier for someone to play casually and reach the cap, so I am looking forward to Black Armory and some of the new open world “Forge” content as I have always dug things like the Blind Well or Archon’s Forge and Court of Oryx from Destiny 1. I need to get serious about trying to wrangle folks for the purpose of having a raid night… Squirrel keeps volunteering himself but at my count that still leaves us down four people. So if you are interested in that sort of nonsense on the PC platform drop me a line.
Since this is the first post of December I thought I would talk a bit about InPiPoMo which just finished. For years I had not joined in because I largely considered my blog cheating given the nonsense number of screenshots that I post. I apparently have a problem because the goal was to hit 50 “pictures” during the month of November to parallel NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word count goal… since a “Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. During the month without really attempting to do so I posted 93 screenshots if my quick count was correct, so yeah… that is a thing I do. Like this morning I had a screenshot of Diablo 3 on the Switch that I wanted to post but nowhere really to post it so I sort of shimmed it into this paragraph. Huge thanks to Chestnut for keeping this going this year and you should totally check out her blog Gamer Girl Confessions.
Over in Monster Hunter World the Winter Star festival is going on and with it a set of gear that you can farm. For both PC and Console players this also means that almost every event that has ever been active is active once again allowing you to farm anything you might have missed. That list is considerably smaller for PC players unfortunately, but it does let you get things like the Wyvern Ignition Great Sword and cosmetic nonsense like the Wiggler head. From what I can tell the only event that is not active is the Code Red event tied to the Devil May Cry cross over potentially because it just ended right before this event. You can however farm Kulve Taroth again until your heart is content. There is a set of lackluster armor that you can craft, or you can do what I did and cash in your tickets towards the layered armor set so you can make ANY gear look like Santa Claus. I plan on farming up enough tickets to also be able to purchase the super adorable Snowman Palico outfit… or Snow Woman in the case of Kenzie who regardless of the game is canonically female.
I’ve talked about how awesome the screenshots are at the end of fights, because they always capture you doing something interesting. In this case it is me dodge rolling out of the way of a line of lightning while everyone else is apparently downhill engaged with the monster. When you hit Hunter Rank 49, in order to make forward momentum you have to face this monster in particular… Tempered Kirin. It took me forever to manage to get this on the console and in truth it was probably only because I was getting carried super hard by Shiana that Ashgar and I wound up getting it at the same time. On the PC I’ve been dipping my toes into these waters for awhile now, and I have reached the point where it is not me that is fainting and causing us to fail… but regardless still end up failing out most of the time. Monster Hunter does this thing where the screen freezes and it can mean either you beat the encounter or someone other than you got carted and caused the whole group to fail. When the screen froze at this point… I just assumed we failed it… but in truth it turns out with one life left to go we managed to take down Tempered Kirin. I will probably NEVER fight this again… that is unless someone who has recently started the PC winds up needing help to get through it. Super happy to be moving again on the other side… which caused me to instantly shoot up to 58.
I also spent a good chunk of the weekend fiddling around in Final Fantasy XIV… which frustratingly has started doing this thing where it does not exit cleanly and strands a black fullscreen window that seemingly has the power to block task manager. This is really only a problem for me personally… since I have been streaming every bit of gaming recently from gaming desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs. When this happens I have to go upstairs and fiddling with it in order to restore functionality, which can be a bit maddening considering how regularly I am hopping games in a given evening. Regardless I have reached my first wall gear wise in the Main Story Quest and it requires me to get to 335 I believe which means I either need to buy my way out of that hole or start doing enough content to farm up some gear. I am probably going with the later given that I never was rich in Final Fantasy XIV terms. In the meantime however I have decided to revisit my old friend the Palace of the Dead to push my Dark Knight up high enough to be able to do the Heaven on High content the rest of the way to 70. Probably a significant amount of my time will be spent catching up classes so that they are ready when Shadowbringer releases tentatively next summer.
All Things Geekery is a great podcast by my friends Detached and Victus that among other topics tends to be a great source of Destiny 2 related conversations. They have been doing this thing recently where they highlight a member of the community at the beginning of their show, which I thought was a really great idea when they started this concept with the very amazing Chestnut. However I am now starting to question their mental state because apparently they saw fit to include me in this construct as well. This week I apparently am leading off the show, but really you should probably just fast forward past that and listen to their interesting discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2… a game I am super interested in but waiting to see if it releases on the PC given that is my platform of choice and I have a bad habit of rebuying games for it. You can find the podcast at…
Finally there is of course the podcast we recorded this weekend where we talk about Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World Winter Star event, what happens when MMORPGs close down, Tetris in Virtual Reality and a few other topics shimmed in between. I tend to be really bad about promoting the thing that I actually do, so I should get in the habit of talking about it more on this blog so there is some cross pollination. I am still shocked anyone reads this thing… let alone listens to me ramble on the other thing. At this point I have decided to stay home and crash this morning because I had very few things on my calendar for today. If I had a packed day of meetings I might have struggled through it and probably infected the rest of the office. Now I am going to get in some fuzzy pants and forget the world exists.
This is likely going to be a super short post because reasons. Last night was an interesting shift from my personal status quo because I guest hosted on the For the Lore podcast. They were recording their yearly E3 multi-episode and for also reasons… @Samodean was forced to miss. So as a result @ZenBuddhist pinged me over twitter to see if I was willing to join him and @LodurZJ as an alternate. In the past I have always really enjoyed guesting on other podcasts in part because it lets me see how exactly everyone else is doing this recording thing. AggroChat as a whole is largely done almost by accident, and it is sometimes nice to see how those who have a clear purpose actually piece together things. It had also been entirely too long since I had done this sort of thing. The only gotcha was their normal recording time is about 1 hour sooner than I could realistically get to the screen and settled in for the night. Thankfully they pushed it back a little bit and I was able to join in. Hopefully once again I did not make too much of an ass of myself. I am not exactly sure what their release schedule is, because in truth the only release schedule I know is our own. However in the near future you should be able to catch me on the first of a two part episode covering E3 2017 on the For the Lore site.
In other news… Stormblood has officially begun… or at least the head start for those who pre-purchased the game. This expansion had some fairly sweeping changes, and when I first logged in it felt like my hotbars were on fire. Many of the buttons that I had slotted were replaced by a shared pool of role specific abilities. So that mean’t things like provoke and stun now exist in that shared tree from which I was able to slot 5 abilities in total. This is ultimately going to lead to some interesting choices because unlike before with cross class abilities… there were way more than five choices from that pool that I wanted access to. I have a feeling we are going to be swapping up to attempt to tailor for specific fights. For example I now seem to have an AOE taunt… which isn’t that important for leveling… but I could absolutely see needing that on specific fights or if you were taking over the add tank on a specific encounter. For the most part Warrior feels the same with the big change being that we lost the 5 stack resource… that I never can remember the name of and instead get the beast gauge. This swap has a bunch of positive benefits to the class as a whole. For example there were many fights where I would need to hold back using Inner Beast for specific mechanics… but this meant there was the opportunity cost of being capped out at 5 stacks of the buff. Now I have a gauge that goes from 10-100… or functionally 10 stacks of my resource meaning that even while holding back an Inner Beast I can also keep building up at least one more attack in reserve. The other amazing quality of life change is I am not sure if this meter actually decays over time… I have been able to hold onto beast charges for way longer than I could have the equivalent stacks before.
The negative of the launch so far is that the Duty instance system seems to be toast. That means there is a point in the main story quest where you simply cannot proceed past. The folks that habitually skip cut scenes seem to be far worse off because it seems to keep them in a bit of a locked state where they can’t interact with NPCs at all. As a pretty rabid cut scene watcher… I did not have this problem but I did absolutely hit the wall already. There are some that are raging against the machine in chat, and others that keep telling them to calm down. There are of course new Jobs to work on and other things to occupy time until this gets fixed. I am absolutely certain someone somewhere is having a really bad day and working as hard as they can to remedy this. In truth we don’t even know if this is a development thing, but could instead be an infrastructure issue with the hosting environment. Whatever the case… folks are getting stalled out but that sort of goes hand in hand with the release of anything. All in all I am happy that my character largely is going to make the transition without massive horrible feeling changes, and that we get to explore a new part of the world. For the moment I am not bothering to glamour back my helm… and apparently have tiny floppy wings instead of bunny ears.