Good Morning Folks. The one thing that worries me a bit about Destiny Rising is that it is getting a bit harder to fight “New Lights” to harass. Essentially the hardest part of the dailies… are the mentor dailies. This is of course something that I do not actually need to do at all… but I want to upgrade from Mentor to Adept Mentor and this involves jumping through a bunch of hoops. The hardest by far is trying to find 3 New Lights that will respond back to me… so this usually involves roaming around Xiangshi the first area of the game or Haven and looking for new lights… and hoping they know how to respond back with their own “Hey!”. I got my three done super early this morning, so that pretty much sets up the rest of the day well for me. It would probably go smoother if I did this during primetime, but I figure the most serious players are going to be clogging the social areas at that time.
I talked about this a bit yesterday but essentially I am down to three parts of the Adept certification. I am a little over ten days away from completing the Resonator step, which means at that point I can stop trying to find new lights. I only recently started doing the Interpreter and Orator steps which involve posting in the Mentor chat and answering Drift Bottle questions, which are this games version of a forum post. The problem with that last step is… this is mostly mentors answering other mentors… and making dumb posts for the purpose of getting artificial interaction. It feels dumb, but we are all running on this same treadmill, and in theory I should have been focused on this nonsense way earlier than now so I could have been done with it and moving on to the next dumb grind. I believe the step after this is to try and get 200 likes on a post you make in the drift bottle area. Like I said NONE of this is required… it is just something I feel obligated to do, so I can have fancier titles beside my name.
Last night was pretty great because Ace and I hung out on the SDF discord, and before long our friend Mor had joined us. It had been really long since I last talked to him about anything of substance, so it was good to catch up. Though I am sure it sounded like we were speaking some made up language since he is very much NOT into either Destiny Rising or Gacha games in general. We got together and did a Grandmaster Strike… which was exceptionally frustrating because we lacked someone who could take out Spread Shinkas and we had to brute force it. We then treated ourselves to some rounds of Morgans Hunt and they went much better. We are both basically within two more rounds of finishing up the event, and both got our exotic weapons last night. Mine was sadly a copy of the Chaperone… which is a shotgun that I will never actually use because it is quite bad.
Estela is exceptionally good at Morgran’s Hunt and we managed to queue into a group where all three color variants of this skin were represented. It is the weird little moments like this that you cling to and that bring you joy. The round AFTER this one though went exceptionally badly because we had a Tan-2, who has crappy wave clear and I think we only managed to pull a single key from that run. I am left with 5 more keys to get, and I think Ace is left with 4, because at some point they must have done a run without me. I am not sure what night we will finish this up, but maybe on Thursday because that is when the Festival of the Lost event drops. I’ve already begged off of Guild Wars 2 for this week since we have very limited time to do whatever this activity is. I want a dumb papier-mâché mask of a pumpkin, or whatever else is available during the event. Festival of the Lost was always my favorite Destiny 2 event, so I am oddly looking forward to this. I hope it is not a massive disappointment.
Yesterday about mid day was the official end of the Mercenaries of Trarthus league in Path of Exile. This means it was time for me to attempt to straighten and organize my Standard stash a bit, because when you go into the new league its stash will be based on the state of standard. You end up with a stupid amount of remove-only tabs, and I pretty much create a new folder at the end of each league, named after the league that just finished, and shove them all into it. That way if I ever want something to test in standard, I can pull the items out of that folder… and it has the least amount of impact on my limited league stash overall. I am a league player and effectively my standard stash is meaningless. I should probably find a few sacrificial characters and delete them now, so I will have plenty of slots for league characters if the mood hits me.
Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.
However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.
An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.
Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.
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Good Morning Folks. It was a weird weekend. I spent a good chunk of it working on the garage since it was much cooler out there than it has been. At this point I have cleaned out the north side of the garage, put up cabinets, and then shifted anything that did not fit from the south side of the garage and acquired and put up the first two cabinets over there. This involved moving out some rather shitty storage options that we have had since college… and have been in place for almost thirty years. One of which I am going to give to my neighbor who sells stuff at craft fairs, because technically it was designed to be collapsible and easy to set up vendor storage that came from a garage sale in college. I could have sworn we had two of these, but I have no clue what happened to the second one over the years. It was bad at doing its job, so it must go and be replaced by nice modular shelving from Sam’s club, because they are cheap, readily available, and something I can buy a few at a time as I have made space for them.
Most of my gaming has been in Destiny Rising. Today is the reset of a new week and I noticed that I finally placed in the shooting range. I did notice that my friend Lociana actually got a space, and Ace kept one placement specifically for Calamity Ops. I have no clue why we do not seem to be getting credit for The Expanse. That one remains empty, and in theory we still need to do the last few parts of the raid so that we can have people showing up on those platforms as well. I like this concept honestly, because one of the cool figures is you can test drive your packmates characters. I mean you can already borrow characters from your friends, but it is extra cool that there is an entire baked in system for this. I honestly wish that there were more of these podiums but one for each character, so you could see how your friends built characters that you might not be playing, rather than just who scored the highest.
I was honestly shocked to see my own character represented on a podium… then I remembered that I actually managed to get a phenomenally good time on Break In, enough to rank my random group 8th on the North American server. If nothing else it was cool to see myself showing up in the ladders for awhile. I have no clue what my final rank was before reset, but it was clearly good enough to get my Jolder riding that podium. While not the strongest or even best character to bring for most content that is focused on damage output… I love my Jolder girl and will always probably be most comfortable playing her. In theory I bring a lot of survival to the team, which makes squishier damage dealers better… but I do second guess some of the activities that I would normally bring her on.
For example, since forming our own pack one of the things that we have been hunting down is a Stronghold, because this is content that I never got to participate in during the wanderer pack. Essentially every member gets 3 attempts at this content for free, before needing to spend pack actions. You are likely going to need this, because the boss that you end up fighting is a giant bag of hitpoints and you have a limited amount of time to dps this down. This is honestly a common gacha trope, and there are a few versions of this that play out in AFK Journey for example, where the entire server or guild joins together to beat down a large health pool. However I question if bringing Jolder on this was a good idea. I did effectively soak a lot of the hate from the boss and keep over-shield rolling on my party… but you can see how much less damage I did overall than Ace did playing Estela. I think in future weeks I am just going to run Estela as well so we can hopefully whittle this down in fewer turns. For the week though we managed to clear two strongholds, which meant loot for everyone in the guild.
We also managed to collect enough materials, and craft enough tchotchkes to upgrade our hangar to rank four. We are burning through the guild ranks pretty quickly, and will be capped out at the final rank of Nightfall before much longer. I am surprised at how fast this goes considering we really only have a handful of players. There are a core group of Greysky folks in the guild, but other than that we have one person that I picked up from my wanderer pack, and another person that seemingly found our guild and joined it on their own. The fact that Ace and I both have second accounts, seems to also be helping the process out, but regardless we are moving through levels quickly.
I honestly still have the pack set to auto approve folks, so if you are playing Destiny Rising and want to be part of our nonsense feel free to join. You have to unfortunately drop your current pack before the game will allow you to join a new one, which made for the whole process of creating this a bit maddening because I could not even throw out an invite until they had left their currently situation. So long as you are going to be pretty chill and relaxed, and don’t do anything wildly offensive… you are welcome. We tend to hang out on my Super Dungeon Friends Discord when we are doing group content, so it is easy for folks to join in the nonsense. There is a Destiny flag in the role assignment channel, but I believe I made it so that once you get flagged for accepting the rules, you can see everything. This tends to be where we organize everything, so similarly if you ever want to join in on our Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans, we arrange that in the Guild Wars 2 channel.
In other news that I am proud of, I am up to five characters at gold rank. I currently have Wolf, Ning Fei, and Tan-2 all in about the same relative position for my next gold. Ning is who I intend on pushing up there, but progress is slow because it entirely relies upon the same limited currency. I got an infusion with the last reset, but am once again stalled out until I can get some more of it. You need six to buy the final rank of abilities, and you can only realistically get four per calamity ops reset. This is the thing that wears on me about the long term viability of Destiny Rising. I feel like they need to give more reasons to run something other than the two seasonal modes… because you can only do so much of that and they reset super infrequently. All of the things that no one queues for… need to be given a reason for folks to queue for them.
Probably the thing that I am most focused on grinding out each day is all of the nonsense needed to upgrade my mentor status. I already have Daybreaker because I run a lot of content, and have run a lot of it with new lights. The more grinding things are “interactions” with new lights which means that you either need to cheer them and get them to cheer you back, or give them an award in a activity… and get them to give you a reward back. Mostly this involves running around haven and aggressively greeting new lights until one of them FINALLY greets you back. The drift bottles and mentor chat is just spamming chat channels… which I feel are counter intuitive to these features. Apparently the next step involves posting things in these same chat channels and begging people for likes. This is dumb, and should maybe be focused on something a bit more conducive to building a successful game.
Ace and I are going to try and knock out a bunch of the new week stuff because the rest of the week is going to be pretty fraught when it comes to playing Destiny Rising. Tomorrow the new Guild Wars 2 expansion drops, and I am probably going to be spending a lot of time playing through that content. Then on Friday the new Path of Exile 3.27 league drops at 12pm PDT, and I took the day off work so expect me to be grinding that like a madman for most of the weekend. Right now I am in the doldrums waiting on those things to drop.
The post Fun with Podiums appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I don’t have any fresh screenshots because I forgot to fire up ShareX yesterday after a system reboot, and as a result none of the times when I attempted to hit Print Screen did it actually do anything. We are currently having a maintenance downtime for Destiny Rising and the patch is buffing Estela, which seems wild to me given how powerful she already is. It is also ending the current wheel of fortune event, and bringing back the Morgran’s Hunt event, which should in theory give us another free exotic. Ace and I hung out a little bit but I was feeling out of it so we didn’t do anything particularly challenging. We ran with their spouse a few times, but unfortunately realized that you can only get credit for running with a new light… once per person. Still though it is always good to run stuff with people and it always counts towards the pack challenges for running together. We still sadly have yet to find a stronghold, so I am starting to give up on those.
Apparently Destiny Rising is getting a version of Festival of the Lost, but sadly it is a really stripped down version from what I can see. There is no trick or treating in haven, like there is trick or treat in the Destiny 2 Tower. There is going to be a seven day limited sign in event, and something that starts on the 30th where you collect a resource called amber to turn in for goodies on a storefront. It seems like the paper masks from Destiny 2 are making a comeback in some form, and at a minimum there will be a hive pumpkin mask. I am all on board more events happening, and I remember remarking the other night that I wished Festival of the Lost was a thing in Destiny Rising. It was always my favorite event in Destiny 2.
What I am really pumped for however is the Path of Exile 3.27 reveal stream which is happening at 12 pm PDT today on Twitch. If you watch for 45 minutes you will get this hiveborn themed spider pet. Throughout the week they have been dropping some significant quality of life buffs. Not only does it appear as though the asynchronous trade from Path of Exile 2 is arriving in Path of Exile 1, but we are also getting free identification. Previously they had patched this in later in 3.27 but it still took Scrolls from your bank. This new version is going to cost nothing, which is great. There are a bunch of little things to like the fact that Rog in our hideouts will allow us access to the disenchanting interface which was 90% of the reason why I ever went to Kingsmarch last league. Another huge one from yesterday is that you can now itemize Beasts without having to buy the Bestiary Orbs. This is pretty huge because I usually have a tree running Einhar just to try and farm up Black Morrigans to six link gear.
The thing that came out over night is that the Assassin’s tree was reworked, and features the ruthless style node for poisoning which was actually way more effective than the normal mode. SirGog released a video going into the changes more in depth, and I highly suggest checking that out if you are interested. I do wonder if we will get any weird builds like poison tornado shot from this ascendancy rework. It is on my least favorite side of the tree, so it is unlikely that I am rolling anything with Assassin. However I am hoping we see some cool builds with it because in the current trade league, only 0.5% of players on the ladder rolled something on the Assassin ascendancy, and it has been that way for several leagues. So something needed to change, and I am hoping this breathes new life into the class for buildcrafters.
The thing that does concern me however is that we have gotten a bunch of really great quality of life improvements, and part of me thinks that this is just to brace us for the massive nerfs that are incoming. So long as Righteous Fire and Chieftain are viable, I am probably going to roll that again because I love the play style. I had a lot of fun with my Storm Brand of Indecision Golemancer, but that build was entirely being propped up by the fact that I could have a Doryani mercenary following me around and debuffing targets by -200% lighting resistance. I would love to see some other brand build thrive with whatever changes are coming. Additionally I am really interested to see what the spectre rework is going to look like, and how it impacts Summon Raging Spirits. There has been some talk of making thorns actually a viable build in Path of Exile 1, so it will be interesting to see if that happens. Whatever the changes are coming… I am here for it.
I had a really great Mercenaries league to be honest. I got a bunch of good drops, ran a ton of maps, and knocked out enough achievements to get a fancy totem pole and a set of cosmetic gear. That is really all I can hope for. I created to characters that were extremely powerful and fun to play. When this league starts next Friday, I am looking forward to doing it all over again. Expect this blog to swap from mainly being about Destiny Rising to mainly being about Path of Exile again for awhile. I still plan on doing dailies in Destiny Rising, and meeting up with Ace at least once a week to knock out some of the harder content that is fun to group together doing. I am trying to coax them back into Path of Exile, but I am not sure that will actually take.
Are you going to be playing Path of Exile 3.27? What are you looking forward to from the things that we have seen so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Festival of the Lost and Impending POE Reveals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I did not blog yesterday because I had an exceptionally busy day… and just never quite got around to it. Last night my friend Ace and I made a date to group up and do some of the more difficult content in Destiny Rising. I find this way more enjoyable than rolling completely random, because we can at least coordinate slightly over Discord while playing. There was a moment last night… that is probably only hilarious to the two of us… but I will relate it anyways. We had just cleared a room… and Ace and the Random player had rushed off… and I did not realize it and over voice coms I hear “Okay, Have Fun!” in a very bright voice. At first I thought Ace was talking to me, but no… their spouse was leaving to go off to a Gunpla event and we have just gotten used to leaving Discord with mics open. I thought they were telling me that I needed to stop wasting time and catch up… and then we spent the rest of the night laughing about this moment and repeating the phrase over and over.
We are deep into the endgame and essentially get a very limited amount of serious mode runs each week. Everything in the challenge difficulty range requires a challenge key, and we get three of these a week… with the ability to spend actual money or the pull currency to get a few additional keys. So essentially last night we ran two Grandmaster mode strikes to reap the rewards for the week. If anything I think this is WHY the player activity is dropping off in the game, because you quickly get pigeon holed into a state where you only really get to play once per week. I think a lot of this needs to be reworked massively, because NetEase really needs to decide if they want this to be a successful game or not. It is good enough to completely replace Destiny for most of the player base, but the pinnacle rewards and limited chances at the hardest content in the game… really pump the brakes on the fun factor.
That is not to say that there are not still fun activities to do. Yesterday I learned that I could bank up the rewards from Singularity Chaos mode and then claim them after the run faster. This is especially good for those situations where you are farming it, but you just want to claim the basic rewards for the limited chance of being able to get an exotic artifact. I wish there was something like this that we could do with a chance of dropping exotic weapon mods. They are way more fiddly than artifacts, but are also way harder to actually get. I am guessing this Reward Retrieval screen exists for pretty much any activity, so that you don’t accidentally forget to loot the chest and then get locked out of that loot forever. It is wild that I am as many hours deep in this game as I am and I am still finding weird quality of life tweaks. For example… did you know that you can shoot heavy ammo bricks with your weapon to pick them up? This is a thing, and it saves you the effort of running over into danger to pick one up.
We continue to progress our pack really quickly, and honestly… I am shocked that we are moving as fast as we are. The highlight of yesterday is that one of the people that I was in the random pack with actually joined after I invited them. They seemed pretty cool, and maybe I have actually made a friend in this random assed grouping system. I’ve had a few conversations with players and they have mostly been good. Someone poked fun at me last night for running laps around Haven, because it is a thing I have done since Dalaran when I am hanging out on voice chat and idling. They admitted that they do it too, and now we have added each other as friends. Maybe my days of meeting random players is not as over as I thought it was, considering that I have also recently made some random friends in Guild Wars 2.
We also managed to get the materials to upgrade our Hangar to the next level. Essentially everything but the very back of the hanger now looks pretty nice. The second floor is still a bunch of random panels, and I am guessing that the next major upgrade will fill in this area. I have to be honest… I never really roamed around the Hangar before so I am not sure what one looks like when it is fully progressed. I am not even sure if the Wanderer packs had the ability to upgrade anything. I am really hoping at some point we unlock the Pack emblem so that we can customize that somewhat. We continue to search for strongholds, but are having zero luck in finding any. I wonder if this is gated by guild level or something, because we have unlocked MOST of the ??? clusters and they never end up being a stronghold.
I finally got enough currency to make my first level 85 weapon, and I went with Trinity Ghoul. I also upgraded it by consuming a duplicate copy of the weapon, and now need to acquire 100 of the exotic currency so I can claim the final catalyst level. This is another one of those really long grinds, because you ONLY get the currency from Grandmaster activities and there are very limited sources of the exotic leveling currency. So all of this becomes the really long tailed grind of the game. I think maybe they need to be a bit more open with this stuff, and maybe make all of the vendors reset weekly rather than once per month or once per season. There needs to be a way to get this stuff rather than spending your limited currency each day on gathering up a handful at a time.
Another thing that I did while hanging out on voice, was several of the heroic legendary missions for various characters so that I could do the requirement of completing one in under 7 minutes. I did this on Gwynn, Wolf, and Ning Fei, and the only things keeping me from finishing silver on both of them… is the ability power levels… which require me to get more of the currency that can ONLY be gained when Calamity Ops resets. Again… there are just too many things that take too long to reset. If this reset every week, we would at least have a shot at hell in getting enough currency to upgrade a character, but the problem is you need 6 of them for the final upgrade tier and you only get 4 from Calamity Ops. The cadence of things is just a bit off and they really need to tweak this. Many of these things are standard Gacha trappings, but if they care about the North American player base… then they maybe need to tweak them a bit.
I do worry that maybe Destiny Rising has lost their chance, because generally speaking you only get one shot at the opinion of players. There are a lot of folks who tried and bounced once they realized that the Pinnacle rewards system was going to be a thing. The only real option to win them back is to release a massive patch down the line that tweaks everything, giving the game a bit of a comeback story. Destiny streamers have given the game a ton of good press, especially around the raid race. So I am hoping we get more content dropping soon, so that it will coax a bunch of players back to the game. It is worrying however because they are merging the servers so that all of them will be available for queuing for activities together. Hopefully this improves the fact that there are just some activities that are hell to get a match for right now.
The biggest challenge facing the game right now is that you are rapidly pushed into a scenario where only certain activities will get you any progression. Since most rewards take 20 Pinnacle currency, and you get 120 per day…. that leaves you with six things that you can do. Those six attempts are going to get spent on Master/Grandmaster activities, Legendary Campaign, or Gauntlet until you have gotten your 3 bonus rewards per week… and then probably not that anymore. So that means that everything else… Shifting Gates, Morgrans, etc are not going to be easy to get a group for. Hell we have even reached a point where Iron Bar takes 15 minutes to form a group on the weekends… which is wild because it is one of those activities that is ONLY available at a limited time. If you put a rare chance of getting the resources that we actually need from these activities that are effectively dead… and put it on the basic reward pool… you will have players queuing for them constantly.
I know there is a major patch coming in 2026, so hopefully some of this will be addressed then. I am still having a lot of fun, but once Path of Exile 3.27 drops on the 31st I am likely going to be logging in and doing my dailies to keep progressing the guild and then meeting up with Ace once per week to do the limited content.
The post Okay, Have Fun! appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
