Helping Shy Lizards Hook Up

Hai Friends! Today is my Friday and I am apparently all over the place when it comes to my gaming. After not having played Outriders for a few days I returned and worked on some monster hunts. I had only really been focused on the Wanted quests since I was seeking legendary weapons. That said I should probably also start acquiring some legendary armor pieces, which are guaranteed for completing a full round of Monster Hunts. Thing I noticed immediately is that it seems Monster Hunts end up scaling more severely than the humanoid based Wanted quests. I struggled a bit at trying to take out the Monsters given their already more bullet sponge nature.

If you are so inclined I recorded another Outriders thing where I track down Bigjaw one of those aforementioned Monster Hunts. Last night I continued this process however and am now two hunts away from my free legendary. While doing this I also leveled the world up to tier 13… and noticed another significant jump in difficulty. I might have to grind for a bit in order to level my gear up to ilvl 40 before making much in the way of forward momentum. I might also swap over and start working on expeditions now that I’ve made some progress from the very raw starting location that I began with previously. World tier activities will take your ilevel up to 42 and expeditions will go all the way up to 50.

After several hunts I needed something a bit more relaxing so I headed downstairs and wrapped myself up in a cocoon of blankets and snuggling cats and finally played some Elder Scrolls Online. After the nonsense of grinding up alts and doing dailies for the anniversary quest, I have now returned to Murkmire and continued trying to help shy awkward Argonians hook up. It is a weird zone with an equally weird main story quest, but I am enjoying it because I am always down with strange lizard people stuff. I needed the super chill nature of ESO last night, and I really would like to keep moving forward that mission of catching up on the story before the impending expansion.

Lastly a reminder that if you are on Windows 10, you can apply for the PSO2 New Genesis Closed Beta but Microsoft had to make it weird. Firstly you have to install the Xbox Insider app… and you can find some directions on how to do this thing here. Next you will find one of the offers being the New Genesis closed beta and it is on a first come first serve basis… but seemingly right now everyone is getting in? The Closed Beta will run from May 14th at 6 pm PDT to May 16th at 7 pm PDT. Not a very long test but should allow us to pop in and kick the tires a bit on this new rendition of the PSO2 game setting. I plan on doing the thing and likely writing about it but you should also do the thing.

Ferrets Names and Bad Deaths

Hey Friends! I slept a little better last night. I ended up going to bed around 9:30 at night and have no clue when I actually fell asleep but I think it was before the evening news. I also woke up this morning remembering one of my dreams, so I am guessing it was basically the last thing I was thinking about before the alarm went off. I somehow ended up on a panel with Loading Ready Run and it was a “show” about best ferret names. It started off with Cori showing a video about how she grew up with a ferret that terrorized her growing upt… I have no clue if this is a thing or just something my brain concocted. After that it turned into a thing where each of us threw out our five best ferret names. Disturbing thing is I even remember my five names:

  • Captain Snuggles
  • Professor Barnabus T. Wigglebottom the Third
  • Dave
  • Lager
  • Shinobi

Naming animals completely banal human names has always cracked me up, so I understand Dave. Lager also makes a weird kind of sense in my head because the Ferret cousin the Stoat… always makes me think of a Stout. Shinobi I guess I was going for Ninja but a much cooler name? I feel like the strongest offering however is Professor Barnabus T. Wigglebottom the Third. I told my wife this mess of nonsense and she decided that Josie’s surname is now Wigglebottom.

As far as gaming goes, I mostly played State of Decay 2 last night. Unfortunately Eli the person that I showed off yesterday is no longer with us. He took a stupid death. I had just moved our base over to a firestation which provides for a good deal more room, and was trying to get the lay of the land. So I went over to a billboard to climb up and look around and one of the problems with ladders in this game is it doesn’t always hook you onto them correctly… ending up with Eli taking a plummet directly onto the concrete. So poor Noemi here had to go finish off Zombie Eli in order to get back all of the stuff he had been carrying around.

I mean ultimately deaths are a large part of the whole State of Decay thing, but so far I have lost two. The first was killed when I got ambushed by some desperados trying to take our stuff, which at least seemed like a fitting death. Poor Eli though deserved better. I am kinda proud of the fact that I have both halves of the original lesbian couple that started this all… Brooke and Noemi. I do find I am somewhat hesitant to take either out adventuring much because it would feel real bad if I lost one of the originals. The sad thing about losing Eli though is he was my strongest melee character and had specialized in swordplay, which was super useful for fighting plague zombies.

Right now I am enjoying my time with a pack of survivors in State of Decay 2 because it is oddly relaxing. Another event that happened last night is the Dead Axel group moved in beside us so literally next door to our base is one of our allies.

Accidents with Zombie Survivors

Good Morning Friends. I have not been sleeping terribly well the last few nights which has lead me to be sorta walking through the world in a fog. I am not sure what is up but whatever the case I hope it passes soon. As a result I am not terribly certain I am up to some epic post, so instead you are going to get some blurbs about various things I am doing. Firstly I am still playing quite a bit of Outriders and am pretty much doing farming runs. Essentially in Trench Town there are two repeatable quests that reward quite a bit of gear in the process. The first of these is the Wanted posters that I have talked about before, but each individual quest rewards you a random epic or better weapon and doing the full sequence of ten quests rewards you a random legendary weapon. The other series is the Monster Hunts, which each reward a random piece of epic or better armor… with the full sequence rewarding you a piece of legendary armor.

I also find myself recording some more videos and I am not entirely certain why. There are just times that it is easier to talk about something while doing it and recording it in video form. One that I am releasing today shows off my favorite “loot cave”, which is actually just the outhouse mission over and over. I’ve also released a video of me doing a single Wanted quest on World Tier 11, and then another where I did two on World Tier 12 and got a random useless legendary weapon from turning in. If watching me do nonsense is your jam then by all means have at it. Like I know I will never have many viewers but I also find recording videos to be this weirdly relaxing extension of blogging? I push myself into the same sort of mindset as when I am writing and pretending that I am largely just talking to myself.

On a whim last night I started playing State of Decay 2 again and I mean I know precisely WHY I did it… but actually going through with reinstalling it and playing it was not terribly expected. One of the folks at Undead Labs, Geoffrey Card aka @Rangutang does these really enjoyable streams where he either plays State of Decay or explores some random game that he finds interesting. More recently he has been on a kick of playing State of Decay 2 again, because Undead Labs is leading up to some open beta on Steam and the combination of hanging out in chat while he played made me want to play. This is the problem I have with streaming… it doesn’t trigger a feeling of wanting to watch more of the stream but instead triggers a desire to just play the damned game myself.

So last night I started a brand new group of survivors. Things were going awesome until they suddenly were not and I wound up losing two people when tangling with some bandits that stole an allied groups meds. I did manage to relocate us to a new base of operations centered around a truck stop. Now I need to find a programmer so I can loot a drop pod that is taking up one of my spaces, so that I can build something useful there for my community instead of it just taking up space.

Lastly I am still playing Elder Scrolls Online, and by playing I mean logging in every night to loot my daily reward cache and train mounts on my four 50s. I allowed myself to get into the bad pattern of just logging in every character and doing crafting writs during the recent holiday event, and I need to actually get back into questing and doing something more enjoyable. The combination of the Jesters Festival and the Anniversary event meant that I devoted a bunch of time to grinding up three characters from low levels to the level cap. This however sorta knocked the wind out of my sails because it got me out of the pattern of logging in and questing each night. I need to get back into that because it is that sort of thing that keeps me engaged in the game. Unfortunately I have been in the pattern of “maintenance gaming” where I just log in to do dailies and then immediately log right back out.

I am not entirely certain what is going to win when it comes to my play time. I had a lot of fun last night playing State of Decay 2 and I expect that I will probably play some more of that in the coming evenings. Then given how exhausted I am right now… it is highly likely that I might just crash at some point rather than spend much time gaming in the first place. I wish I knew why I was not sleeping well, because I sure would love a good nights sleep.

Digesting Expeditions

Well friends, I have reached the end of the storyline in Outriders. I struggled a bit with the final boss and dealt with it by lowering the difficulty and just steamrolling it. This is apparently maybe something specific to my class because my friend Tipa said she had no real issues with it on Trickster. Also she had been farming gear quite a bit so was probably way better geared than I was at the same time. I was wearing mostly blues when I finished the campaign because that is ultimately what I had on hand at the time. I didn’t spend much time farming because it seemed somewhat pointless until I had hit the level cap.

Outriders is this weird blend of Destiny and Diablo 3 and there are a lot of parallels between this game and those two titles. However it seems like it has learned from all of the systems involved the traditional loot grind game model and evolved them quite a bit. For example I’ve had several Legendaries drop, but for me… I largely viewed them as a vehicle to get Tier 3 mods and ended up deconstructing them all so far. Here is an example of the difference between a Tier 2 and a Tier 3 mod. Minefields II causes an explosion of grenades to spawn when you kill an enemy. Minefields III however causes this same effect to trigger anytime you crit an enemy and it can happen every 3 seconds. So this goes from being an extremely effective means of trash wave clear… to an effective means of fighting pretty much anything and STILL being able to do wave clear.

Leveling up Epic and Legendary gear is extremely cost prohibitive, but slotting those same abilities in other items is extremely cheap. So one of my core goals has been to try and collect every mod I come across so that I can shift up my gear as needed. This process works much like the Enchanter in Diablo 3, in that you can only modify a single mod on an item… but unlike the enchanter it isn’t a random roll and instead just allows you to choose whatever mod you want in a given slot. Putting Legendary Minefield III on a blue quality gun cost roughly 400 iron which seems extremely reasonable for the significant power bump that gives you. Granted you are missing a full mod slot that Epic or Legendary gear would have, but for now I am making do with this.

I’ve officially entered the end game at this point since I wrapped up the campaign last night. I am one level away from the cap and from there it is only a matter of leveling my loot up to higher tiers. I believe the highest loot level in game right now is 50 which is a long ways off from where I am currently in progression. When you finish the campaign this game mode called Expeditions unlocks and for the most part these are a weird blend of a Destiny Strike and a World of Warcraft Mythic+ Dungeon. You are presented with a mission and you are timed while completing it. The faster you make it through the better the rewards that spawn at the end. I did not do so well on my first expedition but walked away with something silly like fifteen blues. I imagine those turn into purples and maybe even oranges if you manage to push through in time.

In expedition mode you are presented with a new world map and around it are various locations to reclaim resources from drop pods. It seems like at any given time there are going to be at least 3 different activities available. When I beat one another one showed up on my map, allowing you some freedom of choice as you move around the map knocking them out. It was a little frantic going in solo, but I am sure this is the sort of thing that would be great with friends, especially if you have some synergy between your builds. The one I ran was a standard kill stuff then do a thing and keep repeating this until you win.

It seems that the expeditions have their own leveling system called Challenge Tiers and that the World Tier from before has no impact on these missions. Continuing my converting things into Diablo or Destiny terms… this appears to be the equivalent of running Greater Rifts. The key difference here being that it is through these expeditions that you unlock the higher gear ratings. Challenge Tier 15 for example drops those item level 50 pieces that we will eventually be chasing. Similar to Diablo it sounds like there are absolutely times when you could get stuck in this progression because you lack the quality of gear to progress or your player build is not as optimal as it should be.

Another thing that I am finding out this morning, is that there are apparently repeatable quest chains that will reward a legendary each time you make it all the way through them. I am probably going to do a bit of farming in this department to at least complete a set of the various mods. Supposedly you can drop down to World Tier 1 and burn through some of these quest chains quick given that the only thing that actually matters is the final turn in, which will give you an on gear level legendary pick. For example I picked up The Landlubber last night which I immediately deconstructed to give me access to Legendary Minefield III that I was talking about earlier.

Pretty much every bit of content in the game is repeatable, and as such you can figure out what activity makes you the happiest and farm it indefinitely. I’ve heard folks have had good luck with the “Nature Calls” questline… aka the dude stuck in the outhouse. It is pretty quick to complete and involves a large number of captains in a very short period of time. I’ve run it a few times and didn’t get spectacular drops but I can probably keep bumping up the world tier in order to increase the drop rates and make it worth my time. Now essentially I need to finish leveling the rest of my final level… and then shift focus to gearing.