Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a Grace this week and start off with what seems like a reasonable list of topics… that we immediately have to bump half of because the night ran long. Thalen starts off with a bit of a rebuttal to our Eurovision topic as he shares his thoughts about Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente. From there, we talk about the death of Marathon and potentially Bungie as things keep getting worse for that game and its studio. Speaking of angry crowds… we also talk a bit about the self-own of Star Citizen’s recent round of pay-to-win allegations. Steam OS is officially available for devices that are not the Steam Deck, and we share our thoughts about an eventual future where we are running this on desktops. Somewhere in the midst of the show, we have this entire unintended conversation about how making PVP work for non-PVPers would mean needing to make losing feel enjoyable. Finally, Tam shares his thoughts about what he has played of Dune Awakening so far, and it is probably enough to rope several of us into trying the game on release.
Good Morning Folks! Happy first day back from a long holiday weekend for my fellow United States friends. I took Friday off so as a result… today is going to be rough to get through. I am also still fighting whatever generic crud my wife brought home to me, and neither of us is in great shape. However, I am going to push through it and get shit done today. I spent most of my weekend casually leveling my new Guardian in Guild Wars 2. I am really glad that I did this experiment because Guardian had always been one of those classes that I thought I could really like… but never spent much time playing because I just was not feeling the Asura that I chose to level back in the day. As a Norn however, I have had a freaking blast and last night I pushed through to level 70 and then decided to go ahead and boost the last ten levels so that I would get a full set of gear. We’ve had friends find out the hard way that if you wait until level 80, you don’t get the gear from taking the character boost, and given that I had several sitting around… I did not want to get busy and make that mistake.
On Saturday I ground out another Gift of Battle because the anniversary buff was in place, making it got considerably faster. I am sure there were ways that I could have made it more efficient, but I started around 10 am and wrapped up around 2 pm, taking me about four hours of focused gameplay to get through it. During most of that time, I was in the Eternal Battlegrounds either capturing objectives or defending Stonemist Castle when our group held it. I am still not entirely certain why I enjoy WvW so much, but there is just something about being a ranger and harassing enemy armies at range that I enjoy. More specifically I really enjoy defending objectives and getting up on the wall and raining down arrows on the entire mass of players.
The good thing about grinding out that Gift of Battle was that I ended up with a ton of Jade Heroics as a result. So when I boosted to level 80, I popped over into one of the borderlands and bought seventeen Maguuma Scrolls giving me a huge boost in Hero Points. I then zoned out from the Guild Hall into Seitung Province and after running around and collecting all of the Hero Points there, I was able to unlock Willbender completely. I’ve been super curious about the Hammer Heal Alac Bender for awhile, but based on what I saw from Snowcrows it seems like the ideal version currently is with a spear which makes it even better. I’ve really enjoyed Guardian Spear and as a result, now I am running around with a scuffed version of the build while wearing Celestial Gear since that can kind of do everything… while also not being necessarily the best at anything.
Right now my goal is to complete the original storyline this evening, and then from there, I am not sure if I will keep pushing up through the Living World content or take a break from Guardian and go back to my Ranger main. Based on what I heard from Thalen this weekend, it seems like maybe the Janthir meta is starting to get a bit easier and as such I would probably like to start farming it nightly. I also need to get better at catching the other key metas as they are spawning, because I really should be doing some of the Heart of Thorns content weekly. I really need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Coins and as such I need to start hitting the leyline event each day for a while. I am getting really close to being able to craft the Juggernaut legendary and mostly at this point it is just a matter of deciding that I am willing to buy the rest of the trophies that I need.
In other weekend news, I pushed across the finish line and picked up my ridiculous pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I am now way less under pressure to do PVP each day, and feel considerably better about that… but would have been super sad had I not picked up this monstrosity. PVP Roulette is still a really good way to get a quick experience boost on characters and as a result, I will still probably keep doing it whenever I am in the mood to play some FFXIV. We did not do our weekly raid nonsense in part because we were down an Ash but more so because I was feeling like complete crap. It is a bit of a bummer as I really do enjoy the Arcadion raid. I’m in a bit of a weird place with FFXIV at the moment, because I feel like I have accomplished everything I wanted to do in Dawntrail. I cleared the normal raid and completed a set of gear from it… and am mostly okay with just muddling about aimlessly until the next content drop whenever that happens.
Last week we got news that Last Epoch was going to be doing a cycle reset with some updates, and I figure I will hop on this train on the 19th. I did not really play Last Epoch much this cycle in part because Dawntrail was a thing… and then once that wound down a bit the new Path of Exile League was a thing. Bad timing on both parts meant that while technically I got a character to empowered monoliths I didn’t really play that much. A cycle reset will mean that I can go through the experience of a fresh start mid-cycle and hopefully feel better about the current state of the game because I will be in the mood for it. I am not sure if I am going to go down the same path I did for leveling, but the whole fire warpath smite thing was pretty fun. Any other builds that I am interested in feel like they are way more gear-dependent and while there are a few key items for the build I was playing… it worked just fine without them.
Until then however I seem to be in a Guild Wars 2 frame of mind, and I am going to ride this until it peters out. I am not sure if I will be playing the new Guardian a ton, shift back to my Ranger… or even maybe revisit my Warrior or Necromancer which I still enjoy playing. Ranger is still probably the most fun to do group content on, but he is also one of the more selfish characters that I have given that I am not really providing much to a party setting. That was in large part why I wanted to play around with Heal Alacrity Willbender on the Guardian because it is way more group-centric, but also seems to be a really good solo experience. Anyways that was my extended weekend… hopefully yours was also pretty great minus the whole being sick thing.
The post Celestial Spearbender appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was a rather rough day, and I never actually got around to writing a blog post. So this morning you get a bit of what I would have written about yesterday and a bit about what I would have normally written about today. So on Monday, I spent a lot of that post talking about how I was largely done with my alts in Path of Exile… then proceeded to spend a bunch of time leveling my Widowhail Deadeye and liking it quite a bit better. The heart wants what the heart wants I guess. Basically, I did some super chill yellow maps… got a bunch of levels… which started to fix some of the issues with the character. I still have awful defenses… and I wasted a ton of regret orbs trying to flip to a more crit-based version… but I am back and happy with precise technique and trying to keep my life totals below my accuracy.
I currently have the weirdest passive tree I have ever had for a bow character. I’m getting a lot of mileage from an Unnatural Instinct jewel currently, which is in part what has prompted some of the weird pathing. My hope is to respec things a bit, gain some more levels, and add in another elemental cluster jewel down in the lower quadrant, freeing up one of my other jewel sockets to maybe add in a Light of Meaning Jewel wherever it will have the most benefit either going for Life, Evasion, or Fire Damage. This build is a bit like trying to make “Fetch Happen” but I am having fun doing my own thing here that again… far as I know no one is actually trying. My life and defenses are still awful but it is softcore and I am mostly okay with dying occasionally on my alts.
In other news, I am creeping ever closer to my shiny pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I have not been doing the daily roulette as religiously as I should, and I might spend some time this coming weekend just grinding it out the rest of the way to victory. I have to be honest… as often as I have run PVP Roulette for leveling… I really wish I had been cognisant of this rewards track before now. There is no telling how many things I just failed to collect and missed out on along the way. I am looking forward to raiding again this weekend because last Sunday we had the original four of Ashgar, Grace, Thalen, and me but then picked up Solaria who was piloted by Ammo because world travel was disabled. In theory maybe this weekend we can get Ammo on her off-server character giving us six of eight total players.
In Guild Wars 2 news, I am largely resigned to not making it through Secrets of the Obscure for the time being. I am basically at the end of the 5th chapter and then had a whole other chapter in Nayos on top of that to finish before moving on. This was such a weird content drop because some of it I liked quite a bit… and other bits I was not feeling at all. I feel like we were supposed to care about the Kryptis, but it reminded me entirely too much of the whole Vampire Courts thing from Dresden Files. In those books, Harry ends up aligned to the White Court at times for reasons that are deeply spoilery, but also in part because they are only sexually and emotionally abusive… as opposed to just straight-up murdering, devouring, and/or potentially wearing victims like fashion accessories. Guild Wars was trying to do something with this story of having a redemption arc for monsters… that just never really landed for me.
Janthir Wilds on the other hand so far seems amazing. I am all about hanging out with a delightful group of furries… err I mean Bearkin. I have a type when it comes to favorite zones… and this is absolutely playing directly into those interests. Grizzly Hills for example in World of Warcraft was such a pure joy to quest through, and I would go so far as to state that maybe Lowland Shore is one of the best zones Guild Wars 2 has at the moment. I’ve not gotten terribly far into it because I spent way too much time being a short-order cook last night for a bunch of hungry bears. I was hoping to get far enough to unlock player housing… but I did not even get far enough to unlock spears.
That is honestly probably my only complaint thus far is that the main story quest chain hits a brick wall when it asks you to level up the mastery that unlocks spears in order to continue. I was already working on the mastery that allows you to do more things with your bouncy kitty mount. So I closed out the evening hopping around the zone doing events, and hunting down a few of these mini-boss tundra beast encounters. I have no clue what the zone meta looks like if it exists, but I have heard it was pretty “spicy”. I am in no massive rush, but I would really like to get player housing as an upgrade to my home instance. I had enough Astral currency to pick up the next Legendary Weapon box… which has Twilight in it… which is probably the next one that I will craft because pretty much every character that can use a Greatsword is currently using one. I am building up a backlog of these because I never crafted the Juggernaut. There is also a weapon quest up on the Astral store, that I will probably devote the next 1000 points towards because from what I understand there is a really cool interaction between the weapon and the gloves that it comes with.
All told though, I am already feeling way more positive about Janthir Wilds than I did about Secrets of the Obscure. The zone design so far is just better. I get what they were trying to go for with SOTO, but flight-required maps are a bit frustrating given that it was not like they just handed you the Skyscale. It still took a lot of effort to unlock it, whereas from what I can tell here… you are pretty much just handed a Warclaw in a similar manner in which you were just handed the Raptor in Path of Fire. I already had my Warclaw from the WVW Track so this mostly amounted to me just getting a new skin to play with. It was cool that I got some cosmetics given to me for having already completed that before Janthir dropped. I will probably be back playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 in the coming weeks.
The post Boisterous Bear Buds appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a bunch of not entirely related topics, but there is at least a minor theme of how you end something is extremely important. Bel talks a bit about his experiences with the latest brand name beta in the form of Division 2. From there he also shares some frustrations with the way Assassin’s Creed Origins is ending which leads its way into a larger discussion about what makes a satisfying game ending. We talk about what this means for passive media and how it might be different for interactive media. We then get into a discussion about progression systems and why fixed ones often times feel better than completely random ones. Finally we have some assorted digression about us looking forward to Anthem as a non-PVP mmo that somehow leads its way to FFXIV housing?
