Delving the Sewers

Bloody Happy Place

ARCHEAGE 2015-06-14 01-03-43-47 Last night we were down a handful of people with Thalen and Grace being gone, but by that same token it is mostly a cast of original AggroChat folks.  Kodra is back from his traveling and it was awesome to get to spend the night hanging out with him again.  We have all been spending quite a bit of time in ArcheAge as we have been taking a break from Final Fantasy XIV right before the launch of Heavensward.  We talk about our further impressions of the game, and Kodra talks about his since he quite literally just started today.  From there we talk about our expectations for the coming launch of Heavensward and how Ashgar and I apparently have enough faith in the release of this expansion to have taken the day off work.  From there we meander into talk about the upcoming Four Job Fiesta, and how all of our listeners should really take Ashgar’s money, since he has put up $5 for every AggroChat listener to defeat the game during the event.  There was talk of Wildstar and Tam injuring himself, but we had a grand time just chatting about the games we had been playing.

As promised in the show I also posted a picture of the absolutely amazing Fred from Scooby Doo cosplay by Kodra over on AggroChat so you should totally check that out.  The title of the show comes from the fact that I am apparently a sick and twisted bastard.  One of the happiest moments I have in video games is when I am zoned out and just mindlessly slaughtering stuff for loot and prizes.  This is the reason why I have always been able to grind up levels in video games so effectively and why I so insanely over leveled the various JRPGs I have played.  Last night while recording the podcast I found myself cheerfully wrecking undead for a good hour of the time we recorded.  I slip into this mode from time to time and just got lost in the motion of combat, and as a result I end up over leveled almost all of the time.  It is a happy place…  just a very bloody happy place.

Beach Racing

ARCHEAGE 2015-06-13 14-13-28-18 ArcheAge is this collection of really strange systems, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface of figuring them out.  Yesterday my friends and I took a trip to Mirage Island, which is this strange second life esc showroom allowing you to buy crafting patterns for all sorts of random stuff.  The awesome thing about it however is that you can test drive most of them.  So Tamrielo and I went off on a tour of the island on the roadsters.  The only problem you have a very limited around of time to use it….  and we did not realize that before running off out into the ocean.  There is a giant track around the island… and part of it is a sandbar that cuts out into the middle of hte ocean.  The problem is…. this island is really freaking huge.  I crashed out of the game that apparently dropped me out of Mirage Island, but poor Tam I don’t think he made it around the sandbar before it despawned the roadster.  Luckily we had mounts so at least we didn’t have to walk back home if we got stranded.

The biggest problem I am having with ArcheAge is it seems like there are dozens of currencies that I am accumulating but I have no clue where to spend them.  I thought maybe Mirage Island would give me some idea, but I didn’t really find any traditional vendors.  Some of the kiosks required various currencies that I had not found yet, but I didn’t find any that took any of the ones I actually had.  The takeaway is that ArcheAge is a really strange game.  I am still liking it but I don’t feel any closer to actually understanding it.  The system I want to try and figure out how is that supposedly you can tame named bosses in the world and turn them into combat pets.  There is a tiger in one of the zones I have encountered and I am kinda hoping I can figure out how to trap it.  I remember in alpha I got some sort of a fox pet as a drop and it was insanely fun to run around with.  Not that it was sturdy enough to tank for me, but it did add some additional damage.  Who doesn’t like additional damage right?

Delving the Sewers

ARCHEAGE 2015-06-13 18-12-38-83 A few days ago I stumbled into the first dungeon of the game in the sewers under the City of Towers.  I managed to sneak my way through the dungeon, carefully pulling mobs and cleared my way to the first boss…  only to get my face rocked.  However the trash leading up to that boss dropped some really nice items.  Since I have massively out leveled my friends I figured I would revisit the dungeon when some of them got closer to my level.  So last night after the podcast we thought we would give the place another shot.  Unfortunately after getting Kodra and Tam out there, it looks like the 3 man dungeon had a minimum level requirement of 18.  So at this point I was sitting at 27, and Tam at 20… so we decided to try and work our way through it.  The first room or so was pretty easy because both of us are dual wielding blenders.  The first boss however…. ended up to be just as much of a challenge with the two of us as it was solo.  We managed to make it through it however with both of us extremely low in health.

The second boss was significantly easier mechanically, but involved me running around like a madman and kiting him for a bit while Tam finished him off.  Then we got to the final boss… and quite frankly it rocked our worlds.  It took lots of rethinking the situation and a series of I think ten attempts before we finally just barely managed to defeat the encounter.  Quite honestly I have no clue how someone would manage to do this dungeon at 18 with three people, when we technically over leveled the hell out of it.  This makes me super anxious however to try the next dungeon, because it was an awesome challenge.  The dungeon design like much of the game reminds me of an older era of MMOs.  There were moments when I was taken back to the mob density and layout of the dungeons in Dark Age of Camelot.  We had to very carefully pick our way through the targets and use line of sight to pull things back in order to make sure we only got the one target we needed.  The game is far better than I gave it credit for… and I am hoping to piddle around on the side for awhile.

6 thoughts on “Delving the Sewers”

  1. Some days I wish I had more time for gaming. Because listening to you recant all these stories wants me to try to play even more than the 4 MMOs I currently occupy my time with, haha.

  2. I dipped briefly into Archeage after watching you stream. Looks very odd to me (though my experience of fantasy MMO’s is from LOTRO and GW2 so that might explain it)
    I don’t know how I feel about it otherwise and will spend more time playing about.

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