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Good morning folks. Last night was a bit of a mixed bag. While hanging out and eating dinner, I noticed that the Zerg was forming up again and as a result I ended up hopping on that train. Unfortunately it crash landed after the first zone with some trouble up in Caminus. Essentially there was this series of unfortunate events as someone died in a horrible place and a number of us attempted to resurrect them… leading several of having to drop out and regroup at the next objective. It was enough people to cause the group to struggle and the folks on the Zerg apparently don’t actually want to work for their loot. By the time everyone met back up in Ebonscale Reach our numbers had dwindled from sixty or so players… to maybe fifteen. We attempted to head into the Palace areas struggled and as we crossed the zone we dwindled down to only five of us standing at the top of one of the towers which lead us to call it. The positive is that it lasted long enough for me to have amassed somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred pieces of gear and as a result I saw some incremental progress in my watermark. The negative however is like most situations in New World almost everything I got was complete trash. This is one of the more frustrating aspects of New World is how generally bad its randomized item generation system is. In most games you have a class or role construct that the game can then use to help guide items to drop in a specific manner. Diablo 3 for example is the king of this process, and while not every item you get is going to be useful to your current build… they at least drop with the stat package largely needed by your class.

New World however doesn’t have classes and the roles that exist are largely intangible. I didn’t choose to be a tank, I just started building my character in a tanky manner focusing on Strength and Constitution along with Heavy Armor and then using Sword and Shield. There are no real flags that the game has to latch onto in order to know that this is my intention however, and as a result it has no clue what I am doing. Which leads to the problem of completely useless items being generated and it feeling really bad salvaging an ocean of drops to maybe find a single item that is even close to usable. It would be one thing if this just stopped at Armor Class and the Attribute load-out on it… but additionally there are perks that change the way weapon abilities work and this leads to some truly uncanny valley item generation.

Sifting through the Auction House ends up feeling like visiting one of those factory seconds stores, where everything is just slightly wrong. The question is always if it is close enough to a good item in order for you to waste your time on purchasing it. I think this in part is why so many of us have leaned on the faction set of armor, because it was easier than trying to pick through the detritus. Recently a number of legendary items have shown up on the auction house and each of them… deeply flawed in some way. For example take the Heavy Chest-piece on the far right it has an excellent perk called Sundering Shockwave which would be perfect for a Hammer user… but the stat load-out for the item is Dexterity and Intelligence. The thing is Hammer scales based on Strength alone, and as a result it would never make sense to have Intelligence and Dexterity on an item that includes a Hammer perk on it.

Honestly I was excited as hell last night to actually see a handful of items worth keeping, that were not simply because they had Luck on them. The first item is pretty close to ideal minus Luck, which isn’t a bad thing but also not something that really helps out a build. When I am doing Invasions or Outpost Rush I run a Hammer and Great Axe build and that includes using the Reap ability quite a bit. The second item I am holding onto because while I am not using Leaping Strike in my sword build, I might at some point in the near future. The last item would be perfect… were it Strength instead of Dexterity. However at least Sword does scale based on Dex so those are not completely useless points and lands in the “close enough” pile. Ultimately what I would like to see happen is for New World to change items so that the perks are chosen first, and then the attributes that appear on the item are forced to align with those perks. For example if you get an item with “Sundering Shockwave” on it, it would essentially have three stat packages that it could have Pure Strength, Pure Constitution, or a Combination of Strength and Constitution. Similarly if you find an item with a Bow perk on it, the item rolls would be limited to Dexterity and Constitution, with “Con” being the universally useful dump stat to add more health to your character. That way the perk on the item always matches up with something that would be usable for a build around that perk.

In other news… Apex one of the two guilds that defected from Syndicate to Covenant managed to win its war for Windsward last night painting yet another zone yellow. I have to admit I am a little bummed about this because the Spartans had held the territory since launch and did a pretty excellent job as stewards of the town. Similarly unfortunate is the fact that Apex immediately cranked up the tax rates a bit and I have maintained a house in that territory since around level 20. Planet X the other guild that defected declared war on Cutlass Keys and an up and coming Syndicate Company made its declaration on Reekwater. We will see what this map looks like at the end of the week, but for now things feel like they are very much in flux. The post Intensely Imperfect Itemization appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends! It is the weekend and I am very happy that my wife comes back tonight. She had the opportunity to present at an education conference and flew out Tuesday. I have to say when you get so used to having another human being in the house… things get really weird when the house is empty. Since I have been working remotely for roughly two years my spouse has represented that much-needed anchor to my daily cycle. Last night was a rough night, but mostly because I had an Asthma attack at 1 am and had to get up to take a breathing treatment. I am groggy as hell today, and moving slower than normal but at least I know this evening things will start to normalize a bit when she gets home.

This morning I woke up to some really weird news. I am part of the Minda Syndicate discord and since I am the governor of a company I have access to the leadership chat channel. It seems that yesterday while I was off doing fun things all night… we had a mass migration of some of the Syndicate’s strongest PVPers over to Covenant. Apex Fishing Co. previously held Everfall and kept it on lock for weeks until literally exploits in the PVP system caused them to lose it. Last week they managed to take it back and now that entire guild has migrated to Covenant and formed the Apex Mining Co. Similarly at the same time Planet X which is a strong PVP force even though they have never held a territory did something similar and founded Planet XXX on Covenant. The reasoning was with the upcoming PVP changes giving more benefit for flagging, they wanted to be on the side that was underpopulated. However, I think they took their own problems with them because I cannot really see that many Syndicates actually running around the world flagged on a regular basis regardless of the luck bonus. I do however fully expect that the map is going to start flipping yellow. Goose the leader of the Minda Syndicate Discord took over as governor of the company now called Mindicate that holds Everfall, and I am hoping that he can muster the support in order to defend it successfully. Not being a PVPer at all, I have a feeling that we will once again lose our chosen Capital city. Brightwood looks to be the strongest basion for team purple since it is defended by the Blades of DaTang which appears to be staying strong on our faction.

I started my evening by participating in a few zone invasions. I have to say there is more than a little fatigue setting in, and it seems like it is harder and harder to get folks mustered to sign up for these events. It used to be a guessing game as to if I would actually get chosen for the team, and now I pretty reliably get chosen for every single Invasion that I sign up for. I view it as 630 gold for about 30 minutes worth of time spent, and it also lets me get out and experience more of the community. Last night I started with the defense of Green-held Reekwater and wound up helping out Cozy Cafe in Mourningdale. I think one of the much-needed changes is to allow players to sign up for events from anywhere in the world. Mourningdale and Reekwater are very out of the way for the standard flow of players through the game, so you have to either burn through a significant chunk of Azoth to teleport there or make a long run.

As I was in Mourningdale I kept seeing messages in recruitment about a “Zerg” run from Give Er from Shadow Wardens. The end of my invasion happened to coincide neatly with them changing locations so I hopped on the train. What ended up occurring was some of the most fun nonsense I have participated in a game in a very long time. It reminded me a bit of the fervor of the Hunt Trains in FFXIV or the big event clearing groups from Guild Wars 2. Essentially I teleported out to Ebonscale Reach and we went through a whirlwind of activities taking down some portals and storming the elite areas of the zone. It is nonsense to see a group of players bounding off a cliff trying desperately not to fall behind. So I followed this army, looted so many boxes, and took down a handful of world bosses.

As a result of my boss farming the other day, along with all of the loot gained from last night’s Zerg run, I have bumped up my snapshot to around 550 on armor pieces and 530ish on weapons. For whatever reason weapons seem to lag behind armor by quite a bit in the gear leveling process. There were a handful of pieces that I kept and I even managed to get a few pieces of the Arcana crafting set that I have banked for when someone needs that. Essentially out in the world, there are drops for each crafting profession, and wearing a full set is what allows the crafter to reliably hit item level 600 weapons and armor. I really need to get more serious about my crafting so that I can ultimately make some of those items.

Due to all of my recent adventures, I have a bank full of legendary crafting materials. That is one of the interesting things about endgame crafting in New World, is that in many cases you don’t “learn” the pattern. Instead, it shows up as something that you can craft when you possess the “Artifact” required to craft the item. I have the Artifacts for a Bow, a couple of Shields, a couple of Spears, a nice Warhammer, and this Hatchet. I’ve also picked up a few items that I think are associated with patterns that may not be in the game yet. What I like about these Legendary patterns is that they craft a fixed item with a specific stat loadout and not something that is randomly generated. There is a handful of these that I would like to have to be honest, but I need to get my refining up to 200 so I can start cranking out the materials.

While I didn’t get any screenshots from it, Eliyon and I ended up roaming around in Edensgrove last night. We started off with the initial goal of taking him to the boss I had been farming and starting to work on his snapshot. However what ended up happening is that we both got a quest to go to Malevolence, which is an elite area in the middle of the zone. On the way we bumped into the not quite sixty Vernie and the three of us spent the rest of the evening clearing out the elite area looking for the boss. We roamed the entire tower looking for Entropy, but it turns out the boss is not spawning at all right now due to a bug. It did prove that even with a small group made up of 2 60s and a 57 we could tackle the 62ish elite areas. In theory, we need to drag Waren along with us next time and try some of the other areas that I experienced through the Zerg group. My hope is that these Zerg runs become a regular occurring event because it was stupid amounts of fun and we probably had sixty or so players running along. It has made me realize how badly the game needs a “raid group” construct for big open-world activities. We joined together in a bunch of individual five-player groups which worked well enough but would have worked better if there had been a raid group that we could have started. The post A Zerg Is Born appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to hit level 40 in New World, which means a bunch of things. Firstly it unlocks the next gear set available from the faction vendor, given that a few days ago I knocked out the quest to unlock access to it. Another thing that unlocks at 40 is the next tier of Azoth Staff which is gated behind the main story quest… which I need to spend some time catching up on in Weavers Fen. The last thing and the one that I personally consider the most important is the 4th tier of the player camp, which functions as though it were a Tier 4 Kitchen for crafting basic foods. This meant that in order to access this I would need to head out to Restless Shore and do the Lupine Observations quest.

In my travels, I unlocked a wayshrine over by the cave needed for that quest, and while roaming around the area I kept hearing what sounded like a major battle, especially when I was in a valley between two rocky outcroppings. One of the triumphs with New World is the way that sound carries. It is absolutely terrifying rolling up on a field of untouched resources, knowing the second that you start mining that everyone in the area will be able to pinpoint your location based on sound alone. This works for folks actively fighting in a region as well, and this sound lead me to the camp that I marked in green on the above map. I am not sure if I was prepared for the experience I was about to have.

There are a lot of glitchy areas in the game, with either way too fast or way too flow of spawn rates. This camp is one of these, and as I rolled up on the spawn I noticed two things. Firstly there were groups of players actively trying to keep the instantly spawning boars farmed down. Secondly that there were tons of precious boar carcasses littering the ground unskinned because no one seemingly had the time to stop fighting long enough to skin them. It was not long before I was invited into a group, and apparently, this was my life for the next hour or so. During that time I took my skinning from 125 to 200, put on an entire level between 40 and 41, and a truly dumb amount of weapon experience so that my Sword and Shield is one level from maxed and I put on about 10 levels into Warhammer and Great Axe as well.

The loot also just kept flowing, and shockingly I got my very first purple items while sitting at this camp. It reminded me of the way that farming camps used to pop up in Everquest back in the day. I keep having to pause and salvage greens in order to make way for more blues and purples. Sadly all of the purples were bind on pickup, or I would have happily shared the wealth. I got a duplicate of exactly the same item which was a level 51 totem of sorts that equips in the trinket slot. The blues I took back to Windsward and threw up on the auction house for pretty cheap prices in an attempt to move them quickly. Most of the weight though was in thick leather, which I admittedly had gotten very little of before this point.

The lack of queues has really cut down on my YouTube time, and after about an hour of farming, I had completely filled my bag and took a teleport back to my house. It was around this time that I finally tabbed out and tried to catch up on any pertinent videos when I saw this. Firstly Demone Kim is great and I have been following him since the early days of Genshin, and now that he is super into New World I have been enjoying his tips and tricks videos. Apparently, this farm is known and has been talked about in the community for the last few days. It was only happenstance and phenomenal audio system that lead me to investigate what in the actual hell was going on.

There has been some talk about whether or not this is an exploit, but truth be told this is far from the only place in the world where spawn rates are jacked up. I remember rolling up on a church in Brightwood to complete this one quest and the NPC was instantly spawning over and over. There was a handful of us in the church there for the quest and we kept killing it over and over, not necessarily to farm it but because it kept respawning and aggroing on it before we could leave. It kept dropping potions and gear, so the boar thing seems an awful lot like that. Now that it is well known it is going to get patched because I noticed in the notes that instant spawn church quest had gotten patched as well. If you need to level your skinning and are in the vicinity of Restless Shores, then it might be worth your time to pop over to the camp for a bit. I might go back out there and level my weapon skills some more pending there is actually an active group. The post Porkchop Sandwiches appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good morning folks. I am going to drop my usual “morning friends” business but I will talk about that a bit later. First off I am failing you because the well has officially run dry. I made it through twenty mixtapes for MixTape Mondays, before ultimate running out of juice. You can always view the archives here, but I am uncertain if or when this series is going to return. It was a pretty good run and I am fairly proud of some of the blends of music that I presented, but also more or less out of creative juice when it comes to music. That said it still serves as one of my longest-running series, so I guess there is that. Instead this morning I am going to talk a bit about the nature of friendship and the internet. I had something happen yesterday that once again reminded me that internet relations are not necessarily guaranteed to be a two-way street. More specifically this is referred to as “Parasocial Relationships” and I have even blogged about this construct before in the past. However I myself just allowed myself to get bit by that and I feel this mixture of stupidity, shame, and sadness. This is not a drama blog, so I am not going to go into details… because quite honestly they are pretty boring. Ultimately it was someone I tried to be friends with and has once again shown me that I am not really in that group for them. I am a pretty simple monkey as far as monkeys go. I use the word “friend” pretty liberally, and start off posts with “morning friends” because quite honestly if you are here on the regular it seems like you are at least interested in me as a human being. I’ve never stuck to a single topic long enough to really be a “theme” blogger, even though this blog once upon a time started off that way. Sure when I am on a Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft bender… this becomes a blog where I almost exclusively talk about that one thing. However, if you are going to stick around for more than a few articles here or there, my assumption is that you at least on some level care about me as a human being. If that is the case I count you as a friend, which is a term with a lot of gradation to it. I try to meet everyone with the possibility of making a brand new lifelong friend. I grew up as an only child and worse… an only child living out in the country separated by any possibility for neighbor children to play with. I wanted nothing more than a sibling, but that never came to fruition so while I spent copious amounts of time entertaining myself… I always wanted to be able to hang out with another human being. Granted I am very BAD at doing so because oftentimes my idea of that is “you go do whatever you want to do, and I will do whatever I want to do… but we will technically be inhabiting the same space”. After years of fining that entertaining myself skill, I am usually off doing my own thing but can be summoned forth for shenanigans at a moment’s notice. This also means that I often cast a pretty wide net when it comes to trying to invite people into my world. Where I fail miserably as a human being, is that because I am constantly inviting people into my “monkeysphere“… I am usually doing a pretty shit job of checking in on the people who are already there. This is especially true when more recently I have been in a bit of a funk and I am trying desperately not to fall into one. That means I have reverted into a “speak when spoken to” sort of mode when it comes to human interactions. I’ve kept my head down and focused on my dumb objective of getting everything to level 80 in Final Fantasy XIV and also planning a bit for New World, but otherwise been fairly oblivious to the world around me. I have no idea what necessarily I did to make me unworthy of friendship, but I also don’t necessarily have to know. People gotta do whatever is best for themselves, and that is true even if it means that I can’t be part of that adventure. I am not a great friend. I know this. I keep putting myself out there but once I have made that first contact and invited people into my madness… the whole only-child thing kicks in and I have no fucking idea whatsoever to do with them once I have roped them in. Often times it is a situation of exhausting myself of social energy just in working up the moxie to make that first contact, that I have none left for when they shockingly seem interested. That doesn’t mean I am going to stop trying, however, and I do have a group of folks who have managed to put up with my bullshit for long enough that they are permanent fixtures of my world. I guess I am just constantly searching for more people who might also be “drift compatible”. So mostly this morning’s post is being melancholic, at least trying to get it out of my system. That said I also think it is important that you the reader understand that when I am using the word friend in a blog post I am being sincere… or at least as sincere as I know how to be. I am a deeply flawed human being, but this isn’t some marketing ploy to get you to subscribe to my pyramid scheme… although when I go into recruiting for a new game it very much DOES start to seem like a sales pitch. Ultimately I seek connections because I don’t really want to be alone, even if I have no clue how to actually be the sort of friend that normal human beings are. I wish I did not allow the actions of others, that I have zero control over… to deflate the wind from my sails but I guess that is also part of being me as well. I get my hopes up and also get them dashed… sometimes without anyone realizing they actually did it. I’ve made it to forty-five and am not sure if I know another way to exist. If you’ve made it this far in the post, I salute you. I probably would have stopped reading several paragraphs ago. I hope you all have a great week and hopefully tomorrow I will return to my regularly scheduled nonsense. Today however I had to be a bit sad over something I have no real right to be sad about. My blog is oftentimes how I work through things, and hopefully, after making this post I can toss some topsoil over it and be done with it for a while. The post Friendship is Weird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.