RPG

Honkai Luck

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Yesterday was the launch of a brand new banner in Honkai Star Rail, and as a result, I had to return and test my luck. I’ve not been playing this game of late, largely because I have been hyper-focused on Path of Exile. That said I had quite a amount of currency saved up given that I completely skipped the Not-Dan-Heng banner and managed to snag Kafka relatively quickly. Probably the most important thing about this banner, in particular, is it gives access to a brand new 4-star healer, making it hopefully much easier to obtain than the other options. I remember desperately pulling against the Luocha banner in the hopes of obtaining him because I needed a second healer.

I snagged Lynx the new healer almost immediately and then managed to get two additional copies so that I now have her with some eidolons unlocked. The challenge with new characters is that you essentially have to level them up from scratch, and I was already strapped for resources. I will have to play with her a bit to see if I like her better than Natasha because for the moment Luocha is just so powerful that I would find him hard to replace.

Pretty quickly I saw the gold glow from the train car and hoped that meant I would be picking up the new character Fu Xuan. However, it seems like I had wasted my pitty on Bailu. There was a time when I really wanted this character, but largely because I was stuck needing a second healer. Now I have four healers… which greatly dilutes the importance of Bailu. I guess it is still cool anytime you can pick up a 5 star though.

Another character that I really need to level is Pela. I kinda developed a kinship with this character during the Museum event, and in truth, she is really freaking strong. Given that she is easy to pull on this banner, I managed to pick up enough additional copies of her to unlock all of her eidolons. So at some point, I really need to get around to focusing on leveling and equipping her.

I had made six pulls on the banner depleted almost all of my saved-up currency, and essentially expected not to get the new 5 Star off this banner. Then I remembered that I have the monthly pass thing, and never converted the other currency it gives you into pull currency. So shifting those 300 whatsits into 300 whosits gave me the 1600 needed for a seventh round. It was then that I lucked into a mega pull picking up another copy of Pela, Hook, and the chase character Fu Xuan.

So I ultimately depleted any reserves that I had but I guess it was well worth it to pick up a 6 Eidolon DPS, 2 new healers, and the chase character. I had what I would consider to be an extreme amount of luck to walk away with two 5-star characters in such a short period of time. Now I return to banking my currency until the next banner that I care about rolls around. I need to get back into the swing of playing each day at least a little bit. I think the challenge that I find myself in, is I have so much story content that I now need to complete that logging in just feels overwhelming.

I kind of think of this as the “bags full” problem. There are many MMOs that I can’t bring myself to return to because my bags are full of crap that I no longer recognize, and I just don’t have the spoons to sort through it. In Honkai Star Rail and Final Fantasy XIV… I have an overwhelming amount of content to do in order to get caught up again… so that when I see that I just log right back out. I wish I had a mental trick to avoid this because it ultimately spells a death spiral for many games. This is most definitely a “me” problem not necessarily something wrong with any of the games that trigger it. Anyways… I hope you have been having a great week. Mine has been inordinately stressful but it seems like things are beginning to calm down.

AggroChat #446 – Hanging with Navali

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Sorry, we were out last week but we ended up with too few folks to feel like it was worth recording a show.  This week we are back and talk about the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile. Grace talks a bit about their adventures in Genshin Impact and exploring the realm of the Hydro Archon. Kodra gets featured again on Cracking the Cryptic with a Sudoku and then talks about his adventures at GenCon.  Finally, we wrap up the show with an attempt at a spoiler-free discussion of Baldur’s Gate 3.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Trial of the Ancestors
    • League Start So Far
    • Grace goes SSF
  • Genshin Impact
    • Visiting the Hydro Archon
  • Cracking the Cryptic
    • Kodra was featured again
  • Kodra’s GenCon Adventures
  • Some Spoiler-Free Baldur’s Gate 3 Discussion

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Getting Lucky with Kafka

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Good Morning Friends! I figured I would break things up a bit and talk about Honkai Star Rail. This is very much a game in my current rotation and I am spending at least a little bit of time every day working on assorted objectives. Yesterday we had the rate-up banner go live for Kafka, the next in the series of Stellaron Hunters. I missed Blade entirely because I didn’t really try for him. I knew Kafka was following up shortly thereafter and wanted to save all of my pulls. After struggling to get Luocha, I fully expected to be spending the next month desperately making a pull every time I got the currency gathered up and hoping.

I had something in the neighborhood of 100 pulls worth saved up, and luckily I didn’t really need it. My very first ten-pull I happened into Kafka along with Serval and a Light Cone. Actually, Serval is now sitting at six Eidolons thanks to this banner. I made three ten-pulls in total and picked up the other unique character on that third pull. That means I am more or less back in currency-gaining mode until the next banner. I had a Light Cone that I picked up somewhere along the way for Kafka, so there isn’t even the temptation to go after the Light Cone banner. Now I just need to get her leveled up so that I can start mixing her into my rotation of characters.

As far as Luka goes… he is probably going to sit there in my graveyard of characters that I have never leveled. He looks cool enough but I don’t feel like I need another bruiser character to do physical damage. If I need that… I am going to level up Sushang as I have her at six eidolons. Though I figure there are going to be some folks out there that go for Luka just because they think the robotic arm looks cool. Maybe I will change my mind if we ever get a character mission for him. Speaking of that I completed the Kafka mission and was somewhat shocked that she won’t visit the Astral Express. I guess technically we are at odds with the Stellaron Hunters, but heck… I really like Kafka. There is a sadness and weariness in her that is relatable.

Another great thing about yesterday’s update is that we got a new event. While this might not be as cool as the Museum Sim was, this is probably my second favorite so far. Essentially we are hunting treasure, in a weird roguelike dungeon crawler minesweeper game. The storybook event was not necessarily my jam, but I kinda love that this one plays out like an alternate reality version of Simulated World, where you can rescue characters while crawling and swap them out to make a few of the fights a bit easier.

Essentially you are trying to find the key to the next floor, and every tile you uncover eats some of your stamina pool. Sometimes you find power-ups or stamina refills in the process, so you are essentially trying to see how far down you can dig and if you can complete all eight floors. There will be monsters that block your path, that require you to do battle… or blow them up with a bomb. So far it seems that more often than not… the door key is in the opposite corner of the grid. This is not necessarily 100% the case but I tend to work my way in that direction by default.

There are a ton of rewards tied to this event, and the various ruins are time-gated. This morning for example the second ruin opened up and there will be completion bonuses tied to getting to certain depths with every ruin. All told I am rather fond of the mini-games that they have been rolling out with Honkai Star Rail and more importantly the fact that you can do them even if you missed their initial rollout. That is one of the problems with Genshin or at least when I last played, was that if you miss an event you are just out of luck.

All told I am exceptionally happy that my luck carried me forward in this banner. It does however make me a little sad that I did not even really try for Blade. It would have been cool at some point to have an entire team of Stellaron Hunters. If I didn’t struggle so much to get Luocha I might have made an attempt, but I could absolutely see that playing out again with Kafka and she was a character I cared way more about getting. Blade is basically just a slightly better Dan Heng, and I could live without him.

Has luck been on your side? Are you pulling for Kafka? Drop me a line below.

A Packed Weekend

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Screenshot from Path of Exile showing a Righteous Fire Inquisitor firing off Scorching Ray with the Shaper Beam Micro-transaction.

Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.

A screenshot from Sir Gog's review of recent 3.22 Path of Exile spoilers showing off the Unending Nightmare atlas passive node.

Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.

My Baldur's Gate 3 Party does a murder of some Gnolls

Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.

Screenshot from the Code: Action mini game in Honkai Star Rail where I have created a movie poster themed after The Matrix called "Super Hacker" featuring Blade as Neo and Silver Wolf as Trinity.

There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.

A screenshot from Palia Beta showing off my plot and the fact that you can have multiple storage chests.

I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.

A screenshot from The Witcher Netflix series during happier times in Season One with Geralt and Yaskier/Dandelion

I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.

Photo of me and Greybie our Tigerstripe Grey Tabby Stray "Community Cat"

Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.

I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.