Good Morning Folks. I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick of late. I am not entirely certain what led me down this rabbit hole but something… prompted me to give Dan Da Dan a shot. It took about three episodes before I was hopelessly hooked, but last weekend I spent most of Saturday snuggled with cats and chain watching my way through season 1 and most of season 2. This afternoon/evening the last episode of Season 2 should be releasing and I am looking forward to it with great fervor. The thing is anime is something that I have always tangentially enjoyed, but it is a world I have never really felt part of entirely. I mean in high school I was tracking down copies of Akira or Vampire Hunter D… which were still shockingly hard to find… or the Final Fantasy V based series. I am also addicted enough to Bleach that I snagged a chunk of the intro to use for the AggroChat opening. However modern Anime is just not something I have indulged, because it was hard to listen to something for hours upon end because I did not want to isolate myself from my spouse for that long, and she was VERY much not into it.
However with me now being entirely alone… for quite literally the first time in my life… it is no longer that big of a deal. I don’t really love reading television… but most everything these days seems to be available in dual language versions. Maybe at some point I will actually attempt to learn Japanese, which is a thing I have wanted to do since I was a teen… and learned that a lot of video games came out in that language first. I will likely never go down the rabbit hole of manga… because reading them in reverse order is something that will always fuck with my head. I tried to do this with Trigun Extreme, because I love Vash the Stampede immensely… and just could not bring myself to stay hooked. I guess the question is… for someone who loves Dan Da Dan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Darker Than Black, Cowboy BeBop, and Ghost in the Shell… what series would you suggest that I give a shot? Drop me a line below.
I’ve also been diving into Pantheon… which brings up the age old question of is it anime if it does not come from Japan? I’ve always said yes. I consider Avatar in its many forms Anime, and as such I consider Pantheon by Amazon to be very much one as well. This is a wild trans-humanism ride in the vein of William Gibson novels, asking the question… what is humanity once it uploads itself into the cloud. I highly suggest giving it a watch. I just wrapped up season one and it was phenomenal, and expect to start on Season 2 probably Friday night… since tonight is our usual Thursday night Guild Wars 2 romp. When a cartoon brings you to the point of tears… you know it is good. Do I think I will ever get to the point of being an Otaku that goes to Anime conventions? Honestly not likely, but I do greatly appreciate the level of joy that folks bring to that world. For example this live action dance/cosplay version of the season two Dan Da Dan intro is phenomenal.
Over in Guild Wars 2 I wrapped up the Fractal Incursion Champion achievement which gives you two bag slots, two 20 slot bags, a host of exotic gear tokens, an ascended accessory with 10 agony resistance, and at the very end an universal legendary weapon starter kit granting you access to any Generation One legendary. I am trying to decide what I want to go for with this thing, and most likely… I am probably going to craft the spear since I generally like using it on almost every character. Right now I have sword, axe, longbow, hammer, and 3 of the two handed swords so that I could craft eternity. The other option that I might go for is a Staff, since I tend to use this on Necromancer and would not mind getting into Druid at some point for support. I am likely going to sit on it for awhile. I just cashed in my eternal ice for volatile magic so at some point I should be able to buy up a bunch of trophy bags to get close to crafting whichever gift I am missing. I am still super low on mystic clovers so I should probably wait until I regenerate those a bit before crafting another legendary.
In another Guild Wars 2 news… I am missing two badges from the investigation achievements. The thing is I know where the two missing badges that I need are, I have just not been randomed into either of those fractals since learning this knowledge. When I was looking for a guide… there are times I forget just how damned good the wiki for this game is. All of the information that you need to know to be able to find the badges is located in the Troubleshooting 1 and Troubleshooting 2 wiki articles. Basically I need to run the Volcano and Snowblind again, and veer off the main path to get both of the badges I am missing. I think maybe in the situation from the other day where most of the party bailed, it was probably that they were just needing the badge as they disappeared shortly after we got to the fireball section on the Volcano where the badge is located at.
In another news, since I seem to be in MMOFPS mode right now with Destiny Rising, I thought I would give EVE Vanguard a shot. There is currently a free trial event going on, and you can download the stand alone client through the EVE Vanguard website. I’ve not made it terribly far but thusfar it does seem to be a very responsive shooter, but I am missing the jumping mechanics from Destiny games. I will probably play through the rest of the extended tutorialization at some point over the weekend. The whole proximity chat thing is a bit weird to get used to, but voice chat felt pretty seamless. I need to change the keybind to my normal push to talk because pressing and holding left alt felt extremely foreign to me. I did not make it super far last night because I was meeting up with Ace to play some Destiny Rising.
One of the things that I found interesting playing with a lower level player in Destiny Rising, is just how reasonable the scaling ended up being. Ace was 38 and I am of course capped at 80 and progressed quite a bit past that, and collectively we could do their content level without it feeling like I was dominating everything. I was not one tapping every single mob at least with weapons, but my ability scaling and better artifacts did seem to make a bigger difference when it came to clearing trash mobs. They pushed past 40 and I think when you hit 46 you can start running heroic content, so at some point we will likely flip to me leading the party and dragging them along in bigger kid stuff. If nothing else it would allow them to start collecting mythic weapons early I think. At some point I need to focus on some of the activities that can award exotic mods for items and exotic artifacts. I am not sure if I have to wait until Acclaim 10 or not for those, but I am getting closer and supposedly the patch that was applied over night sped up the leveling a bit.
I have an awful lot to keep me engaged right now… which is good because I need it. I have Diablo IV Season 10 that I am still contemplating trying out, and then in early October is Legion Remix in World of Warcraft which I will probably also give a shot. Distractions keep me from feeling so painfully alone.
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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a busy day. I went to a new eye doctor, that required a bit of a journey to get there. My family has a history of retina detachment and I have been struggling with floaters… so I figured it was time to get on boarded to a proper doctor and not just the dude that is attached to the local eye glasses place. Some positives of the visit are that my general eye health is good, and my retina looks solid… and that my floaters have settled in place. The negative about that though is that instead of settling at the bottom of my eye they are not basically permanently glued to the back of my eye… so I am largely just going to have to get used to them or try a laser procedure that has a bunch of negative side effects… one of which is potential retina detachment. However she thinks that the double vision I have been seeing is due to the fact that my once “good eye” has gotten far worse… like significantly different prescription, but my left eye the previous bad eye is mostly the same. I have new glasses incoming soon, which I hope will help most of these issues.
I’ve been splitting my time between Destiny Rising and Guild Wars 2, and though some research yesterday I realized that I had a New Light Engram sitting in my inventory… that could produce the last remaining Mythic weapon that I had not collected. I had mostly ignored these because they were level 50 gear level, and almost not worth decrypting… however not that I have unlocked a copy of this weapon I can craft a level 70 engram and choose high level copies of it. So essentially I have been sitting on the key to collecting this last illusive weapon for a week now at least. I guess that is a suggestion, that whenever you hit the end game… use those couple of new light mythic engrams to unlock the weapons that are most important to you so you can craft engrams to get higher level versions of them. For me it just allowed me to complete my set and push my endgame affinity level up to 8.
I also ran a daily Onslaught Blitz and pulled another exotic weapon. I do not plan on using Ikora anytime soon, but if I ever do having this will probably be a good thing, especially since it dropped with the item level already sitting at 70. I vaguely remember Two-Tailed Fox as being an exotic that was fairly solid in Destiny 2, but I also cannot remember much about it. There is a certain Pokemon aspect to collecting Exotics, and I have always cared more about acquisition than actually using most of them. You can make exotic engrams, but they require a currency that I do not have much of. In theory this is going to be the long grind for the game is trying to acquire all of them, given that most of them are just random chance and not specific quests like they were in Destiny 1 and 2.
I also pushed up one of the seasonal journey tracks high enough to unlock the Partridge Sky exotic sword. Again this is a useful item for Jolder but thusfar I have not made an attempt to level it up so that she can start using it. Right now I have mythics that I like for both weapon slots and I am being way too lazy to change that up. You only get one exotic and I am not really sure if I should be running with the Huckleberry or this sword in that slot. I guess the benefit of this exotic is that is is a Solar sword, which replaces an existing Solar sword that I am using… which does not adversely impair my ability to pop elemental bubbles. I really like going into activities with two weapons that are contrasting elements to whatever my abilities do. Since Jolder is void, I try and have one weapon be Arc, and the other be Solar.
The current Fractal Incursion event means I am back spending most of my evening playing Guild Wars 2 and slowly chipping away at things. I had one of the weirdest situations happen last night where we got the Volcanic fractal through a random queue… and then everyone bailed and it was left with just two of us. Since I am a ranged build, I tend to focus on taking out the Grawl adds during the first Shaman boss allowing everyone else to focus on breaking his bubble. So it took me a bit to notice until the other person who stuck it out commented about it. Volcanic is probably the single easiest fractal out there, so it seemed weird as hell that anyone would bail from it. The two of us stuck it out and finished the fractal pretty easily, and since I run a healing pet I was able to keep group healing us to top us off during the final fight. We friended up each other after the run, because we were newly formed friends in the forge of adversity.
At this point I am sitting at 424 Fractaline Dust of 450 for the third recursion achievement. This is the biggest grind, but I will still have to go back and selectively do some of the specific non-rotation fractals and also try and collect the badges from the majority that I have not. I’ve found the badge from Aetherblade and Molten Boss and need four more… so at some point I should look up a video on where they are. I am sure I am running past them in the various fractals and if I knew where they were I could probably make a trip to get them. If nothing else has come from this.. I am way the hell more comfortable with tier 1 fractals than I used to be. Even Kinfall seems to be like a cakewalk anymore having gotten it back to back multiple times.
I think the legendary itself is going to be gated by the entire event. There is an achievement that progresses step by step each week, but after having ground out the worst bits… I am hoping that it will be easy enough to finish it up each week as new sub achievements drop. My goal this weekend is to help the rest of our normal fractal crew knock out whatever they need to knock out so they can catch up. I know I have been grinding this a lot harder than most people have… because in truth it is not like I have anything better to do. After the death of my wife in July, I have latched onto any grind that I can focus my attention towards so that it gives me at least temporarily a sense of purpose. I should be doing stuff around the house probably… but it is easy to latch onto this and hyper fixate for awhile.
Have you been participating in the Fractal Incursion event? What sorts of progress have you made? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I talked about Guild Wars 2, and while I am spending the majority of my time over there grinding out the Fractal event… I still playing quite a bit of Destiny Rising each day. Essentially you get 120 activity reward currency and I am trying to spend this down every day in order to keep moving the needle forward. Last time I talked about the game I said that I had pulled Jolder from the permanent banner, and at this point… I am playing with that character an awful lot. It really is well suited for my preferred playstyle of getting up in the face of baddies. While the super is purely defensive in nature… it has the side benefit of never needing to reload your weapon while you are standing in it, so it is exceptionally good for burning bosses down quickly. It doesn’t hurt that I really enjoyed the character story of Jolder and as a result she has rapidly become the character I play when I am not playing Wolf.
As the topic alludes to… I now own Gwynn aka the chamption that everyone refers to as Hot Goth Waifu. The thing is… I hate to admit it but the hype is absolutely worth it for this character. I am not sure if she is going to eat a nerf once her banner is over… but right now she feels exceptionally powerful and dual pistols is a shockingly fun main weapon. The character is once again all about getting up close and personal with packs of mobs and being able to decimate them quickly with the scythe attacks. It was at this point that I realize how relatively generous the pity system is in this game. Most other Gacha games have the pity system set to 90 to 120 pulls… aka 9 to 12 10 pulls. Destiny Rising has it sitting at 60 or 6 10 pulls. I was building up another premium pull from gaining currency from the various in game exchanges, and was going to pull for the new character… but realized I was within 10 of just guaranteeing Gwynn, and went for the sure thing instead. This of course reset my chances of getting ANY five star character, but it was worth it.
The game wants me to apparently start building out Gwynn because I was spending some random engrams that I had and managed to pull a four legendary perk pair of the Chushingura dual sidearms. This is the first time I have seen four legendary perks on a single weapon. I’ve got a lot of items that have three on them, but often times that final perk slot is a blue or something lame like that. The game will actually tell you when you pull four legendary perks by showing them on the screen instead of just moving on to the next engram decryption. So it is not like you are going to miss this event if it happens to you. I am not sure how large the vault is… or when I will need to decrypt all of the spare weapons… but right now I have only done so for blues and purples, leaving my hoard of mythics intact.
In other news I pulled the Saizo crossbow… which is largely useless because I do not have a champion that uses this weapon. However it was one of two remaining mythics that I had never added to my armory. The only thing that is remaining is the Scorched Earth Heavy Machinegun, and unfortunately it seems like the only way to get this organically is to pull it from the Gauntlet Onslaught raid event. I do not think that either Ace or Ammo are to the point where they can do the raid, but when they do I am absolutely going to start trying to stack a firetime full of people that are willing to communicate. I don’t really think the raid is that hard to complete, it just takes more coordination than you get with the usual random fireteam of folks.
In the continue journey of weapons that I cannot use… I got this hideous exotic crossbow. I get that this is a historical design… but holy shit is it ugly. It was a random drop however and proved to me that you can in fact get random items when you are out of the rewards currency. Essentially from what I can tell you can get rewards from any activity no matter how many times you run it, just that the only time you are guaranteed anything really good… is when you are spending the stamina currency. So that means if you need materials, you can in theory grind the same activity over and over and you will eventually get everything that you need. You can also still get the super rare drops like exotic weapons doing this as well, and I have pulled a few completely random mythics doing this.
Lastly in new weapon acquisition, I picked up a copy of The Huckleberry but this was gained through the login bonus system. At 7 days and 14 days you get a exotic choice engram that gives you one of three exotics. I believe there is another one at 21 days… but seeing as I already have a copy of the third weapon that I acquired through random drops… I am not really sure what I will do with that one. Huckleberry is at least a weapon type that I use pretty often on Jolder, but I am not the biggest fan of it being a Void weapon. In a perfect world I would walk into every event with two weapons that are different types than the abilities that my class provides, so that I can break shields of every element. Currently my load out is for Jolder is an Arc Submachinegun, and a Solar Sword… which contrasts her void abilities perfectly. The Submachinegun that I am really hoping to pull at some point is Riskrunner, but I am not sure if it is as good in this game as it is in Destiny 2.
All in all, I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with Destiny Rising. The various content types seem to be on a weekly rotation, so you really don’t have enough time to get tired of doing specific strikes and such before they cycle out to another one. The activity that I find interesting is the legendary story missions, which are solo only… and feel like they are roughly on par with the difficulty of what nightfall strikes were. I’ve only managed to successfully complete one of these with enough time to get bonus rewards… and even then I only managed to pull silver instead of gold. This is all time based, and I am guessing that I am just not powerful enough to be able to steamroll these. The grind to raise my affinity level is way harder than the grind to get to 80. Leveling just sort of felt like it happened on its own, but now raising affinity on my account feels like every step is just inching the bar forward. I know there is a lot of power that eventually unlocks when I hit rank 10… but seeing as I am barely into rank 6 that is probably going to be awhile.
I am really interested to see how seasons factor into this game, and what if anything resets on the power scale. It is one of those things where it is somewhat hard to tell what is seasonal and what is just part of the normal endgame. For the moment it feels like the only thing that is purely seasonal are these weird engrams that you get periodically that drop seasonal only rewards. Thusfar, I have gotten nothing that is terribly interesting from them, other than a few stickers that can be applied to your armor… but having done so on Wolf… I am not entirely certain I like the look. Weapon shaders are a thing, but so far they mostly just look like someone crudely spray painted your weapon all the same color instead of being something more bespoke feeling like armor shaders were in Destiny 1. Anyways the characters are cool enough without cosmetics so it is not something I am super bothered by. According to a roadmap they released, there is more content dropping in October and another season starting in November so it seems like maybe seasons are going to be roughly two months long.
Given that I am also getting new ARPG seasons roughly every two months… this is not going to be something I really keep up with in the long term. However for now I am having fun with it while it is fresh and new.
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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a week, and as a result… I’ve missed several days of blogging. On Wednesday morning I had an issue come up that forced me to stop what I was doing and rush into the office physically to deal with it. Then yesterday from 7 am I was on a conference bridge for the entire morning dealing with a production rollout. In both cases… I could have probably blogged later in the day but the realities of the working world drained any desire to do so out of me. I spent last night hanging out on voice and doing nonsense in Guild Wars 2 and that helped quite a bit. I also spent about 30 minutes on voice with Ace venting about various work related stuff on both of our sides, and that probably helped more. The only problem with not blogging for several days is time gets somewhat squishy in my head as to what happened when and in what sequence.
If my memory is correct, Tuesday I hit the credit roll for the main story of Destiny rising, which means that I have officially entered the endgame. The story was pretty freaking great and in truth much better than all of the core stories in both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Destiny was a game series with a lot of really interesting lore, but if you were not willing to watch a literal 10 hour long Destiny Lore video from Byf.… you were going to not understand 90% of it. Both games were exceptionally bad at explaining the world and telling a coherent story, and Destiny Rising is not. Sure it starts out a little twee at times as do most mobile games… it builds into something rather formidable and I legitimately look forward to the next content drop. This game is essentially a prequel happening in a slightly different universe… allowing them leverage to change whatever they need to change and I think this is a good thing. The speaker for example is a child in this version, which should give you a bit of a reference for how many years before the original game this takes place. Guardians for example do not exist yet as a concept… there are just lightbearers and there is evidence than our character might become the official first Guardian.
Similarly the concept of the various orders of guardians, do not exist either. There are no Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks… even though characters largely follow those same templates in the way that they move. Wolf for example gets double jump as opposed to distinct flavors of boosted jumps that Titans or Warlocks get. A given character is a combination of an Element, two unique abilities, and a unique super that then gets combined with a fixed primary weapon and a fixed heavy weapon. This honestly creates some really unique templating of characters in that two characters with similar loadouts might feel completely different because they have unique abilities to go with those loadouts. I still play way more of Wolf the default character than I do any of the other heroes, but I have become fond of Kabr, and Xuan Wei. None of these are the “meta” which seems to revolve around the 5 star champions of Tan-2, Gwynn, and Jolder.
I do have Tan-2 and just pulled Jolder yesterday off the free banner, so I might actually start investing in that character a bit with my limited resources. That honestly becomes the challenge is that it is really cumbersome to swap characters at some point. I greatly prefer games like AFK Journey where you are buffing one entire class of characters, rather than investing in one specific champion to pour all of your daily resources into. I’ve not really encountered much in the way of things that Wolf cannot do… save for missions that specifically require precision damage to take down what are effectively this games version of break bars. I greatly prefer the Auto Rifle to pretty much every other weapon in the Destiny universe… and swapping to a champion like Jolder means giving that up as their combo is Submachine Gun, and Sword. I am hoping i can pick up Riskrunner which is my all time favorite of the exotic Submachine Guns.
There is a new banner available right now and on that banner are a couple of new characters… one of which I’ve pulled a few times with what available currency I had. Umeko is essentially the Destiny version of a Ninja. She fires off Shuriken and then has a finisher that is essentially a massive one. The loadout is Scout Rifle and Sniper Rifle, which makes her an almost purely ranged champion and one that feels more than a little bit squishy. I really need to have a precision champion that I am comfortable playing, but that is likely going to be Tan-2 instead since I have that 5 star champ who is very much on meta because he also comes with this games version of the well of light. It does not hurt that he also sort of looks like Sektor from Mortal Kombat which is its own coolness factor. After playing an Exo titan for years in both Destiny games, I am partial to Exos as a whole. I wish the game honestly would have allowed me to play one here for the Wolf character.
Right now the game seems to give you about 120 of the daily activity currency, and it costs 20 to run any of the individual activities. When you complete one there is the option of spending twice as much currency when you loot the chest to get twice as many rewards. This is pretty nice and allows you to really efficiently make some progress on farming whatever you need to farm. I’ve been targeting the activities that reward Mythic weapons and engrams as I am trying to collect the full set. The Mythic Weapon Engrams allow you to buy new copies of any mythic weapon you have already found, whereas the Mythic Choice engrams allow you to choose any weapon that can drop from a given activity. There are about a half dozen weapons that I have not seen yet, and it is likely just going to be random chance to come across those.
The game seems to really want me to play Kabr, because at this point I have gotten enough duplicates to slot 4 of his 6 talent points… which means before long I will have him maxed out. This does the whole Genshin thing where getting duplicates of a character gives you currency to spend on buffing that one character. Thankfully I enjoy Kabr quite a bit, because his barrier really takes the pressure off on several boss fights because you can safely stand behind it blocking onerous beam attacks and such. The pulse rifle is not exactly my favorite weapon, but I’ve always liked the Heavy Machinegun because it feels especially good during boss burn phases where you need to do a lot of damage to weak points from range. I am also really partial to the fact that he walks around with a shield all of the time… which is admittedly one of the reasons why I am wanting to invest in Jolder a bit, because she gets the Captain America shield throw.
I am having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, and it seems especially poignant right now how good this game is… when so many players are exceptionally frustrated with how bad the latest content drop is in the mainline Destiny 2. There has already been talk from mainline content creators about swapping over to more of a Destiny Rising focus, and I feel like this is only going to accelerate that. It isn’t really often when a mobile port completely cannibalizes the player base… but I do wonder if we are going to see something similar play out with the Mobile version of Final Fantasy XIV. For now at least I am having a blast and am happy to reach the relaxing daily grind portion of the game. I like consistent grinds way more than I like pushing through story content. I think my brain is just wired that way.
In other news I am contemplating giving the next Diablo 4 season a spin. I’ve skipped the last few but given that I am mostly done with POE2 and Last Epoch and POE 3.28 will not drop until the end of October… there is a bit of a lull where I might as well give it a shot. There is another livestream coming up on the 16th and I think that is really going to seal whether or not I am going to give this a go. Supposedly they are taking a lot of the feedback from players into account and trying to improve things. The problem is… Blizzard is a massive ship and seems to take forever for it to turn and adjust to things. I have no clue what I am going to play. I’ve only ever really played Barbarians, Necromancers, and Spiritborn so I might give something else a shot. I really wish they had a Paladin/Crusader because that is the other traditional Diablo character that I really enjoy. Druid always looks cool, but it is a pain to level at start. That really is the problem with so many ARPG classes is that they feel bad for those first 20 levels… which makes it hard to keep pushing forward.
As far as weekend plans. I really need to start making a pile in the backyard so that I can contact the folks that we have used to haul stuff away in the past. There is just a bunch of shit that I need to get out of the garage so I can have some swap space to start putting up shelving units. I really need to free up space in the garage so it can be more organized… and so that I can be ready to put away all of the furniture in the backyard as the temps start to drop. I also really want to clear off the workbench out there so I can set up at a minimum a FDM printer. There have been so many cases lately where I just want one to build brackets and storage options.
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