Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.
I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.
Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.
After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.
What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.
What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.
Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.
In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.
With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.
I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.
Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.
The post A Legacy Reforged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Today is like Rex Manning day… except it is the launch of the Keepers League in Path of Exile. I took the day off… which generally is a mistake to do for the launch of anything. However I have a stack of tasks that I am going to try and accomplish today well before the 2pm CDT launch time of the league. I am still trying to maintain a minimum amount of activity in Destiny Rising, and quite possibly the hardest thing that I do every day… is following around new lights and trying to get them to interact with me. I am sure it seems SUPER creepy to see this person following you around in Haven and doing a “Hey” which in my case is my Jolder dancing in front of them. Most do not have a clue what to do, but I am always super thankful when someone clicks on the bubble and responds back giving me those coveted mentor program interactions.
Since the Halloween event was a complete bust, Ace and I still got together last night and finished out our runs of Morgran’s Hunt. I did not get any more exotic weapons, but I did pull an exotic weapon mod from a silver key. We had what was probably our best run ever running with this trio of Estela. I am not entirely certain what it is about her kit, but she is the absolute best character to run Morgran’s Hunt or honestly any of the Morgran content. I am kind of hoping that we scored well enough to get the chat bubble, though it is not like I actually use chat enough for this to matter. I hate that these things are limited time and go away when the next event starts. Anything temporary like that makes me value it extremely lowly, when it comes to time spent.
We then yolo’d our way through the last two parts of the raid, and while I feel like I firmly grasp the third phase… I still have no real idea what was going on for the second. We ended up splitting up on seperate teams and I think I mostly followed the lead of the other players and we nailed the encounter on first attempt. The final boss aka the third phase of the raid was pretty fun, and I think in the future we will probably just queue for that. I lucked out and pulled the exclusive exotic shotgun from the middle phase, and weirdly enough pulled two copies of it at the same time because I spent one of the extra loot tokens. I can’t see actually using this weapon because Crescendo is just so good for Gwynn, and Jotun is so good for Xuan Wei. That leaves pretty much no one that can use a shotgun for whom this would be a good option. Still I will take the ascendancy points for picking up this. If nothing else it looks really cool.
We finished up in time for me to actually join in the reindeer games for Guild Wars 2. I did not originally intend on doing this, but folks were gathered and I was going to log into GW2 anyways… so I figured I might as well be social. We started the night with some RIBA but quickly transitioned to running Dragon’s Stand because Ashgar needed the Hero Points from it. It was wildly how fast we coalesced from not really having enough people… to wrecking everything in sight. Huge props to Sita for taking up the commander banner so that I did not have to. I was feeling somewhat out of it last night, and I did not really want to take responsibility for anyone but myself… even though being a commander in a meta like this is mostly just being in the correct lane. Folks have done the entire thing often enough that it mostly leads itself.
Right now I am really struggling to find forward momentum in the expansion for Guild Wars 2. The bug that I encountered have put me in a rather undesirable position. I had to hop onto an alt to fix the bugged state of my skimmer mastery. Then that unfortunately put me in a position where I effectively need to grind out two full ranks of the mastery so that I can keep progressing the main story. I hate that mastery points and such get blended into the story. I am very much the sort of person that wants to grind my way through all of the story at once, and any forced faffing about just ends up pissing me off. I get that Guild Wars 2 is trying to expose players to new mechanics and such, but it just feels bad when I have to stop progress to fiddle around in a zone. I love open world content, but I like doing it on my own terms, after I have unlocked everything.
I think the other thing that is harming my joy is that I am really amped for a new Path of Exile league, and mostly just want to be playing that. Visions of Eternity will be there waiting on me, and it is not like I am in any real rush. Hell, most of my crew that I am playing with are not even caught up to the point where I am with other expansions, so it is not like I need to rush in order to keep up with the pack. I’ve unlocked Galeshot, Ritualist, and Evoker and I will probably fiddle around with all three while doing dailies and weeklies going forward. However I doubt I make much progress in the expansion overall until after the newness of the first week of league start wears off a bit.
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Today was the release of the Festival of the Lost event in Destiny Rising, and I have to admit I have been looking forward to this. Festival of the Lost was hands down my favorite event to occur in Destiny 2, and it always had some kind of cool trick or treat theming, and while the masks were entirely cosmetic it was still cool to collect them. So I have to admit I am more than a little disappointed in the event that we got. Since October 23rd when the roadmap of content for the event dropped, it was teased that we would be getting some sort of activity starting on the 30th and continuing through until November 13th. I had hopes this would be really cool, and maybe offer something interesting to chase.
Today is the 30th and the event has started, and effectively what we get… is a rebranding of Singularity in the Realm of the Nine for the Festival called the Haunted Singularity. Over the next ten days they are releasing a new section of the event, and each day you have access to run it once on Normal mode and once on Challenge mode where you can gain limited quantities of bulk resources. You also gain a currency called Eerie Amber that you can collect 15 per day, which then unlocks 8 Moebius Clusters over the course of the event, and at 100 Amber collected you get a Hive Pumpkin mask cosmetic. All of which would honestly be fine if the event were enjoyable.
The problem that I have is that the Realm of the Nine is fun, because it allows you to stack a bunch of overpowered abilities and see just how fast you can decimate the waves. Part of the process of unlocking Trial of the Nine is spending points on this talent tree of sorts, that allows you to reroll modifiers if you get three that are bummers. Unfortunately the Haunted Singularity doesn’t have access to those perks and you pretty much are stuck with whatever you get for choices. Most of these take away powers, and instead replace them with ways to collect candy. So it means you are effectively taking way the fun portion of Realm of the Nine and replacing them with a candy grind. I will do these each day, but largely out of a general feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment. I will chain run Realm of the Nine Chaos mode for the pure love of the event, even if I am not getting good rewards for doing so.
So you are probably thinking… Hey Bel, what about the candy grind? Does it give you anything good? I mean technically you get a Season of Daybreak Engram for each Candy Bucket that you craft. It takes 200 candy to craft a bucket, and these give you one guaranteed Engram and 60 Bright Dust. Both of which feel like they are pretty underwhelming rewards. If you have not opened many Seasonal Engrams, then I guess this might be a way of getting them, Generally speaking however they mostly just reward stickers and weapon shaders, with the rare chance at maybe getting a weapon skin. I hope they improve these for the next season because they have largely felt like a pointless grind. The only thing unique or interesting in this event is that Pumpkin Helmet, which I will get because I am that kind of dumb… but it isn’t necessarily something I am excited to be doing.
The other thing that is somewhat frustrating about the event is that new players are largely going to be excluded from the heroic content. It suggests 65k light in order to run it, and that is honestly not the easiest thing to acquire in the world. New lights are absolutely not going to be able to participate, and for the tryhards… I am not really sure there is anything in this event that is that worth chasing. Admittedly we are all probably going to get the pumpkin hat, because it exists… but I am hoping that maybe they add something else to the later phases of the event because neither the candy grind or any of the rewards from it seem that interesting.
On the more positive side of things, we did get a preview of what the next season is going to look like. We are getting a new map, new gauntlet blitz, and new activities. Additionally Maru, which is a character from the closed testing phases is going to be available. However I believe she has effectively the same weapon loadout as Ikora, so I am not really sure it is going to be worth chasing. It looks like maybe there is an exotic associated with her that we are getting skins for as well. I mean a new map will be pretty great, and that more than anything is what the game needs… new areas to explore and new things to do. However they also really need to go through the content that is not being played, and give it some chase drops that give people reasons to play it. Trials of the Nine Chaos mode is so good because even without any of the daily pinnacle rewards, you still have a chance at getting exotic artifacts… albeit really slim.
In the funny side of things… I spent the pull currency that I got from the event and for the maintenance patch and got my last Ikora needed to have a fully decked out version. Again… she is quite possibly the worst character currently in the game, but we have fun playing her. I also have a fully talented out version of Finnala, which is similarly not a great character and mostly a worse version of Wolf. I am looking forward to my time away from the game playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping when I drop this game down into maintenance mode levels of play… it will get better and I will be excited to come back to it. Likely still going to keep doing dailies, but today I could not be bothered with trying to get three new lights to interact with me for the mentor quest.
I think I might just be grumpy and disappointed. Though that said, I cannot see anyone excited about the Festival of the Lost in this state.
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