Mouth of Mordremoth

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Good Morning Friends! While I think it is sort of cute, I don’t really love the springer mount. I mean it has its uses but unlike the raptor or warclaw (the other two mounts I have so far) it is just harder to use “on the go” when running away from a pack of mobs. It’s gimmick is that it can leap up super high, but you have to stop what you are doing and hold down the space bar to make it do this trick. That means you sorta have to have already cleared an area so you can attempt to execute some precision maneuvers. I super dislike jumping puzzles that require the springer, and I just had to do one as part of the Path of Fire main story mission. It made me want to punch puppies, but I suffered through it. Mostly the way this mount works feels way less precise than the raptor is for horizontal jumps. I am working on unlocking more mastery points and hoping it improves over time.

My core focus right now is largely pushing the Path of Fire story forward. Mostly I find myself in a position where I want to unlock more mounts and also at the same time unlock more zones to roam around in. Part of the reason for this forward momentum is that I want to unlock the Icebrood Saga zones so that I can have access to strikes, which are sort of mini “puggable” raids. At some point I hope to be doing the current content in Canta, but my obsession with doing things in the order they were released means that I am enjoying Elona at the moment. Nightfall is the campaign in Guild Wars 1 that I spent the most time in, so it has been interesting seeing the areas again.

One thing that happened last night however is that I needed a break from questing and decided to work on my dailies. One of them was doing events in Dragon’s Stand which is the final region of the Heart of Thorns story area. What happened instead is that I got caught up in the meta progress and instead of bailing after getting my few events completed, I stuck around and attempted to finish the meta. We failed, I think in part because folks were popping in, getting their handful of events completed and then popping out. However towards the very end of the meta we got super serious about trying to complete it. This led us to fail and then immediately restart the timer with most of the folks sticking around for a second go.

I had learned enough during the failed attempt that I mostly knew what was happening and as a result was way more effective at moving things forward. Essentially the entire Dragon’s Stand map is a giant MOBA arena, but we the players play the role of keeping the lanes clear. Essentially the map involves a few phases but most involve escorting a payload to a specific destination, and then holding that location until all three teams have completed their push to that destination as well. There are giant wurm minibosses, a fight with one of three tower guardians, and then eventually it culminates in a giant cinematic fight against the “Mouth of Mordremoth”. During this phase you have to guard a number of platforms and use wind currents to travel between them… that is if you are a scrub like me that does not have a skyscale mount.

I mostly rode one platform until a burn phase happened because each platform had to be protected from a number of events. Flowers would spawn or roots would take hold, and someone on that platform has to destroy that objective to keep the way clear. Every so often the mouth will destroy a platform, which requires everyone to shift quickly… and hope you can get into a wind current in time to pop over to another platform. Like all big meta events the “on death” reset time is pretty quick so when I failed to transfer platforms I was able to get back into the action extremely quickly. The sheer amount of loot that I walked away with was staggering from a failed attempt and a completed attempt. Granted most of it ended up getting salvaged, but I view that as just a mad influx of materials and not as a loss.

I have no frame of reference for how long it takes to drop the Mouth of Mordremoth, but apparently I got an achievement for doing it quickly. This rewarded me an inventory item called Ley-Energy Matter Converter which opens up a vendor screen and gives me access to purchase one item each day. The first tab just contains a bunch of the keys for zone activities, but the other tabs can apparently be unlocked by spending 100 of a given zone currency to open new things that I could purchase. I had a freaking blast and would absolutely do this event again, pending I happen to notice it is firing up. I’ve done Auric Basic a number of times and have done I believe Verdant Brink once. I need to sort out what the other Heart of Thorns metas are and try them as well. Metas are easily one of the coolest ideas that Guild Wars 2 has come up with, and ultimately I get why folks will spend their entire evening popping from one meta to another.

It was a great night. I think the sheer variety of things I could be doing is what is giving this game life for me. I spent a very small amount of time playing around on my Mesmer and putting on a few levels as well. I am hoping at some point I can try some of the more serious group activities and see if I can hang with them. I would love to explore more of the dungeons, do some of the deeper fractals, and maybe even try a raid. In order to do some of these things I would probably need to branch out and add a much larger guild to my repertoire, or at least one with more folks available on my time frame.

The “What Now” Problem

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Good Morning Friends! Last week I finished World Completion on my new Necromancer main, and this weekend I wrapped up the Living World 3 story. I have some deep concerns about where things are going, and I realize that everything is essentially resolved for the players that are caught up on End of Dragons but for me… I am still chewing through years-old content. I just have deep concerns that I might be raising a monster, but that is all I am going to say on that point for now. One of the main things for me and an MMORPG is that I am pretty good at focusing on an end goal. That goal might be pushing through all of the storylines, or doing a damned fool thing like chain leveling all of my jobs in FFXIV to level 80. The problem is once I achieve that goal I am always left asking myself… okay… what now?

Generally speaking this causes me to flail around for a bit trying to find a new purpose, only to end up bouncing shortly after because either I am lacking a good grind or the ones I have to feel too “overwhelming” to tackle. After finishing the Endwalker story I tried to return to pushing through leveling everything to 90 but ran out of steam quickly. This is honestly one of the greatest gifts that Guild Wars 2 seems to have is that it is almost a nesting doll of systems, each one of them filled with a smorgasbord of both short term and long term goals and objectives. I thought maybe finishing up World Completion and getting my Gift of exploration would be an action that stopped me in my tracks, but instead, I just shifted that same drive towards slowly chipping away at my Gift of Battle in World vs World.

I think one of the things that I am finding interesting about the experience is that everything I do, is sort of moving me forward towards my goal of eventually crafting the Legendary Sword Twilight. When I do craft it, that weapon will become available to all of my alts for them to use as well. The thing that makes this fairly compelling is knowing that I am working towards a fixed point that is not going to suddenly become useless by the time I get there. I also don’t necessarily “Need” the item so there isn’t the strong desire to bankrupt myself in the process to make it faster, because I already have access to crafting Ascended weapons (and have crafted them) which share the same strength. This is a mission about opening up new playstyles and opportunities and not necessarily a purely cosmetic mission. That has always been my problem with Relic weapons in Final Fantasy XIV is that I will never be serious enough to do them while they are relevant which means the ones that I seek always just end up being cosmetic fodder.

A highlight of the weekend is that I finally got some time to run Fractals with friends. Since we are not recording the podcast for the next few weeks, we ended up repurposing that same time slot for Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. Fractals are just about the right size to be honest because you can do a bunch of them in a row before feeling like you need a break. Tam and later Ash lead us through a number of them and I saw some that I had done before, and others that I had never experienced. I would like to do way more of these but they require a stable group, though maybe not as many as originally thought. Ash talked about doing several of these with only three people so maybe just maybe I could muster a group to do more during a more East/Central timezone-friendly time.

A cute thing that happened is that I did not even notice that one of my party members had changed their tag until I got this achievement. I really like how this one works in particular because it is just a sort of nice to have fluff thing. In Destiny 2 you got all sorts of rare emblems and such for running with the devs of that game, which meant that it was a highly sought out thing. This is just a simple acknowledgment in the list that is in itself not worth any achievement points. This is really the way this sort of thing should be done, and I applaud ANet for not pinning any rewards to it. I do however want to try and collect the full set of these, which means I am going to have to drag a said friend into other activities.

So my current modus operandi is to keep moving forward in the Path of Fire story, while doing various assorted zone activities. Then once a day I am trying to knock out any of the easier World vs World… which I am finding out is called both “Dub Vee Dub” and “WuvWa”. Knocking out a few achievements gives me both time in zone and the little potions that give you instant progress towards your rewards track. Both of these serve the goal of getting me closer to that Gift of Battle. I am finding out that any one thing in this game can seem overwhelming if you focus on it too hard. However, if you do it along with a bunch of other things, that variety means you are going more progress towards more things at once. Admittedly this was also what I landed on as my best means of leveling characters in Final Fantasy XIV, by doing a bunch of varied activities that made it feel less grindy.

“What Now” is likely always going to be a question I am asking myself each time I finish a goal. However, Guild Wars 2 seems to be exceptionally adept at answering back with something that is just within reach. I went down a whole new rabbit hole this weekend of listening to some videos on the underground economy of Guild Wars 2, and honestly… if I could make the right connections it seems like something I could excel at. I’ve never done a great job of the high-speed trading nature of auction house flipping in a game like World of Warcraft. However what I do excel at is grinding out resources, and Guild Wars 2 seems to be a game about providing the right resources to the right people. If I descend further into this madness I will let you know the results.

AggroChat #383 – FFXIV Endwalker Spoiler Show – Part 2

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

Hey Friends!  It is finally that time where we record our big full spoiler show for Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion.  It has become tradition to record one of these when all of our crew have played through the expansion and yesterday afternoon Kodra finally finished it.  We also ended up recording for far longer than we have EVER recorded for one of these shows.  We started about an hour early and still finished up two hours late for a grand total of around four hours of podcast to edit.  

The end result is that we are chopping this down into three separate shows which is a first for us.  We have a storied history of double episodes but never a triple.  This week we have part two of this sequence.  Hopefully you enjoy the show, and if Final Fantasy XIV is not your jam then I guess we will see you hopefully in a couple weeks for more live shows.

Topics Discussed

  • Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

World Completion Done

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I finished up map completion and it feels great to have finally done this on one of my characters. I did struggle a bit at the very end because I had all of the exploration achievements completed and every zone I moused over was showing 100%. However my World Completion was stuck at 99% so I found a list online of some areas that folks might have missed. I ported to all three of the faction headquarters, which you can zone into and do not seem to count towards map completion for a given area. Then I ported to each of the capitol cities that have a separate chamber used by the ruling body. It turns out it was the council chambers in Rata Sum that I missed and that managed to push me over to 100%.

I now have two Gift of Exploration waiting for me in the bank for Legendary nonsense. I guess at some point I should start working on a Gift of Battle, which I know I will need as well. Now I will probably focus on getting some of the achievements that grant mastery points in the various “expansion” zones like Silverwastes or Dry Top. I also should really push forward in Living World 3 again, but I ended up getting caught up in a pattern of knocking out zones for completion. Doing World Completion made me realize just how much I do not like the Orr zones. My friend Sita talked about that being his favorite area, but I just find them depressing and I am pretty sure the “Quake” color palate is part of it. I would love to see what that area was like in its heyday and I have always wondered if some of the Orr escaped to another area before the fall.

The other thing that I did yesterday was watch the first episode of the Halo television series while eating dinner. I enjoyed it but also you have to understand I have very little connection to this franchise. I know he is a green shootymans that fights purple and blue aliens, and that his name is Master Chief and after that… it all is fuzzy. This series however does not seem like anything I remember from the bits and pieces of the games that I attempted to play, but confession time… I’ve never successfully made it through a Halo game. I hate the mechanics of throw away weapons and all I really wanted was unlimited ammo for the auto rifle that you start with. All of the other weapons felt like trash.

What the series does do is set up an interesting science fiction setting, but I have a feeling it doesn’t come very close to the games. I mean the look and feel seem spot on, and even I have played enough to recognize the shield recharging sound. I also noticed at one point when they were at the UNSC headquarters on Reach that in the background you could hear someone paging “Commander Shepard” which seemed like a nice Mass Effect easter egg. I will likely keep watching it to see where it goes because I went into it expecting next to nothing. I will be curious to hear how the more diehard fans of the series interpret it.