Month: December 2021

Winter Convergence

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Tis the season for holiday events to show up in the games we play and New World was not to be outdone. Yesterday the large December 1.2 update landed and with it a new Winter Convergence event. With it came a whole slew of changes that I will talk about at least in part, but the most noticeable one is that every settlement now has a tree in the middle of it. Once a day you can loot these trees for presents… of which you are able to get 3 good ones per day. The “good” presents have so far given me 1 Diamond Gypsum per, a few Silver Bars, and 100 coins. The subsequent packages after the first three just reward winter tokens which are the currency used in game by the event to purchase items at the winter village.

Scattered around the map are the Winter Villages, which are helmed by an NPC Yeti called the Winter Wanderer. They will send you on a series of quests related to the event which involves picking up packages that spawn around the world near roads, and taking out their evil Yeti brethren in various Ice caves. There is a reputation with the event that works much like the three factions, and with it unlocks different tiers of gear that you can purchase with the Winter Tokens. The armor and weapons are equivalent to the items you can get from the faction vendors with the weapons all offering a luck bonus. For the PVE focused players… now that they made farming the PVP missions for tokens a pain in the ass… this might be your chance to get a set of 520 gear and some 525 weapons.

The biggest change with the patch however is that they have converted the ambiguous “High Watermark System” into something tangible and track-able called Expertise. For those of us who ground up our watermark a bit… this has finally allowed us to actually see where various item watermarks were sitting. Out beside each item is now a purple number which represents what the watermark for that given gear slot is. For me all of my watermarks look a little something like this:

  • Helmet – 576
  • Chest – 577
  • Hands – 576
  • Legs – 576
  • Boots – 574
  • Shield – 562
  • Necklace – 518
  • Ring – 500
  • Earring – 500
  • Sword – 535
  • Great Axe – 545
  • Hammer – 556
  • Hatchet – 544
  • Spear – 539
  • Rapier – 545
  • Bow – 550
  • Musket – 529
  • Life Staff – 554
  • Fire Staff – 562
  • Ice Gauntlet – 556
  • Void Gauntlet – 512

Supposedly more Necks, Rings, and Earrings have been added to the world to make these a little easier to watermark. It was much to my chagrin that I noticed my highest watermark weapon… is also one that I will never use the Fire Staff, while the one I use the most is sitting only at 535. Once again I say that this system is awful… but at least it is more clear how bad we are getting screwed.

They also put in kilns spread throughout the world, which are unfortunately NOT in the main territories. Instead you are going to have to trek out to the unheld north in order to find one of these. Thankfully I still had my inn bound to Mountainhome from the days when farming Myrkgard was actually viable. Various activities drop various kinds of Gypsum and you can craft this into a Gypsum Orb once per day. You can then trade a Gypsum Orb at the Kiln for a Gypsum Cast of a specific item type which acts as a lootbox giving you a guaranteed expertise/watermark upgrade. For example I made a Sword Cast which took me from 533 to 535 so this is not going to be a fast process by any means. Here are some of the sources for Gypsum.

  • Obsidian – Dropped by level 60+ Elite Mobs in the World and requires three
  • Sapphire – Dropped from last boss of Lazarus Instrumentality or Garden of Genesis and only requires one
  • Ruby – Dropped from Outpost Rush Caches and requires two
  • Emerald – Dropped from Trade Skill Aptitude Caches and requires one
  • Citrine – Dropped from Arena Caches (Siren Queen etc) and requires one
  • Amethyst – Dropped from Max Level Corruption Breach/Portal Caches and requires seven also not 100% drop
  • Diamond – Dropped from events, currently the first 3 tree presents you loot each day and requires three
  • Topaz – Dropped from level 55+ mobs in the world after consuming an attunement potion and requires ten

The Topaz is a bit weird because once a day you can craft an attunement potion, which allows for Topaz Gypsum to drop from any level 55 or higher open world mob. The gotcha there is that the potion can only be crafted once per day and requires one of every elemental “animal” aka Fire Snail, Water Fish, etc. I had a stockpile of these but if you were to try and farm them… it would take awhile not only to find all of them but to get the purple animal drop instead of motes.

All told it isn’t a bad update but it also doesn’t really reduce the overall grindy nature of the game. I still question the design decisions they have made to reach this point. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that all of the open world areas for watermarking have been nerfed into the ground. Anything that used to allow for solo watermarking is just not viable anymore. They are pushing players hard to get into dungeons and arenas, which require the crafting of keys. Keys which I am almost certain will eventually be sold on the cash shop to “speed up” the process. I’ve also noticed that every single item now has a greyed out “Upgrade” button claiming it requires something called “Umbral Shards” to upgrade the item. I have a feeling that these also will eventually show up on the cash shop.

The last bit of news that came out yesterday is an official confirmation of which servers would be merging. I had theorized at one point that they might just collapse entire server blocks because if you collapsed the entirety of Arkadia Theta where Minda is… you would still not quite end up with 2000 players based on the trends. They appear to be doing exactly this which means that all of the servers would be merging into Adlivun the most populated server in our block. That means all of our territory will default to whatever was held on Adlivun.

On the Syndicate side, currently the only company holding any territory is Fenris which has two different guilds “holdings” and “acquisitions”. Similarly the majority of Marauder territory is held by Minas Morgul which has three different companies holding territory. In theory all of these companies will be seeing a pretty big payday as a result of the merger and then losing their territory. I would expect that all of these mergers are probably going to take place next week, so if you are on a lower pop server I guess now is the time to farm materials while the getting is good. The real question however is if any of this is going to turn the tide of this game. To that I think the answer is a resounding no. Players have moved on and are unlikely to return unless something drastic happens. We’ve recently dropped below the 100,000 player peak concurrency threshold and I doubt that is going to change significantly.

Man on The Moon

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Good Morning Friends! I finished up the quest for the Zephyr last night and while I absolutely hate the design… it is cool to have a stasis element sword. I am not sure what it is about the whole Dawning design ethic, but it is awful. Like I get what they are going for… a sort of new years festival thing that isn’t dominated by either the Red/Green Christmas colors or the Red/Gold Lunar New Year designs. However there is just some about the shapes of the items that I don’t really like that much. I’ve never really cared for the “Nine” themed items either, and these absolutely seem to share a similar design ethic. I kinda wish you could create weapon skins similar to how you can create universal ornaments for armor, so I could just swap this to a weapon I don’t hate.

I am slow rolling my way through leveling my light, or whatever they call it currently. I am old… I will probably never stop calling it light level. Mostly I have been getting in, knocking out a few objectives and then calling it good for the night. I still really enjoy Gambit probably the most of all of the available modes. There is something about its specific blend of elements that I really enjoy greatly. Essentially I am getting daily bounties for Dawning and then trying to figure out who I can accomplish them the easiest. Last night I had Hive and Scorn bounties and thought since you get both of them regularly in gambit… I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately I wound up finishing the Hive one on Tangled Shore, and the Scorn one in a Dreaming City Lost Sector. Still having a lot of fun but very much not taking anything seriously.

Back over in Final Fantasy XIV, like I have said a few times I have been purposefully avoiding the login queues by playing other games. However I think either over the next few days or over the weekend I am going to start fighting my way in again. I have some dungeons to run that I have unlocked but never done before, and I think my friend Grace also has them unlocked as well. I figure it might be good shenanigans to run around and do them together and then loop in anyone else in the free company who wants to go along as well given that we have tank and heals covered for easy queues. The above image is not a story spoiler but makes me exceptionally happy because so much of the moon is pulled straight out of my Final Fantasy IV nostalgia.

I did stumble across something pretty cool last night if you are looking for something to watch. There is a multi-part docuseries on YouTube about the origins of the Xbox and the various travails that the console went through during inception as well as various missteps. This is edited in the format of a Netflix multi-part documentary so that it almost feels like something created by No Clip. They even got Laura Bailey to do the narration for the series which makes it feel all the more legit. While watching it you almost forget for a moment how brilliant this piece of marketing actually is. It is absolutely evangelism for the Xbox brand and paints it in the light of being this scrappy “by gamers for gamers” rebel. I was not an Xbox gamer, I jumped straight from Dreamcast to playing PC MMORPGs with a brief revisit in PlayStation 2 land. I do remember my friends getting super into it however and my neighbor across the street being extremely into Halo.

I am on part four right now of what is currently a six part series, and it is just self deprecating enough to feel fair. It would never do anything to paint Microsoft in a bad light, because it is produced from within the bowels of Redmond but it does let down the guard more than a few times in very strategic ways in order to feel like the behind the scenes story. Truth is I know a few people who worked on the original Xbox and this syncs up with some of the stories they had told me. I’ve actually seen one of those original metal Xboxes that they show off in the series in person. However never forget that this is absolutely brilliant marketing. I mean I just bought an Xbox Series X which means it is working, because Game Pass and XCloud really are phenomenal deals and my old school 90s VCR model Xbox One needed and upgrade.

Dawning Time

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I have to admit I had completely forgotten about the Dawning Festival being a thing, or how generally satisfying it is. For those who have not experienced it, this is a weird festival where you shoot bad guys to collect materials… to make deeply questionable sounding cookies. You then hand those cookies into people in the tower and other destinations… for reward packages that include in them a bunch of Dawning specific weapons. It ends up forming this really enjoyable loop of “do some stuff”, “get some stuff”, and then ultimately “get big rewards”. For me who is currently grossly under-geared, it also serves as the impetus to actually be doing some grinding which helps to remedy that situation.

Given my present mental and emotional state, this all seems to fit right now. I know I should be fighting through the FFXIV queue and working on collecting some bookrocks, but that right now seems so cumbersome and instead I shoot some dudes for a candy like explosion of materials. It is about all I can really handle engagement wise at this very moment. I am in a very active clan, but I can’t really bring myself to engage much in that either. I know activities are happening on the regular but the emotional toll of losing Kenzie I am afraid has caused me to slip back into turtle mode. I will dig myself out at a later date but for now I am sorta trying to heal.

I am slowly working on a series of dawning quests, and for right now the only weapon that I have unlocked is the Glacioclasm. I am not the biggest fan of fusion rifles, largely because of the very small ammunition pool. At some point Bungie made a massive quality of life change and made all primary weapons have unlimited ammunition reserves. This means I can just run around effectively forever with “white ammo” weapons and just not care about ammunition at all. This means I am way the hell more likely to use double primary instead of a primary/secondary load-out. I did however use this to knock out a few bounties and the weapon is “fine” but probably not better than my Cartesian Coordinate.

The item I think most of us are seeking is a good role of the new Stasis element sword that was introduced with this event. Slowly but surely I am working my way through that quest and once completed I can purchase packages that give me an increased chance of getting more copies of it to drop. For the moment this all seems to be right down my alley and I am going with it. I’ve not abandoned FFXIV or even New World to be honest… though I am mostly in a holding pattern on the later to see if they pull their head out of their ass. With Final Fantasy XIV I am waiting for queues to die down to rational levels to where I can realistically choose to play the game and get in within thirty minutes instead of needing to play my entire day around it.

Bungie 30th Anniversary

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Hey Friends, I have been struggling to attach to games this week… and honestly last week as well. Having finished Endwalker, I have been purposefully staying away from that game in my small way of trying to help with congestion so that more people can get through it. I get that I am just one person… but if more people took a step away for a bit, more folks would get to experience that great expansion. In the meantime I have been floundering a bit to find new purpose and booted up Destiny 2 on a whim… and it more or less stuck. I think mostly my mental and emotional speed right now is “mindless shootymans game”. It doesn’t hurt that there is a 30th Anniversary event going on in game and with it a bunch of interesting drops.

The best of these for my purposes is the BXR-55 Battler which is essentially a pulse rifle patterned off of the Battle Rifle from Halo. The default load out has it burst firing, but I have slotted in a mod that shifts mine to full auto making it a pretty great primary weapon. What I really dig about this weapon is the accuracy and range and the ability to hip-fire it reliably. Which effectively gives me a single weapon that can be scoped for something akin to a scout rifle for picking off targets at range, or hip-fired to give me something that feels like an auto rifle. I have this sneaking feeling that this is going to eventually get nerfed because it seems to be dominating the meta a the moment.

There are a whole slew of other weapons that are in honor of past Bungie games. If you were more of a Covenant person, you can pick up the Retraced Path which is sort of themed after the Carbine. It also serves as the first legendary quality trace rifle, with the rest of weapons in that category taking up your exotic slot. If the Energy Sword was more your jam, the game has two “half” energy swords that make me wonder if we are eventually going to get an exotic quest to join them into the true Energy Sword equivalent. I never played Marathon because I did not have access to a Mac, but apparently the shotgun that drops is in honor of that game. There is a grenade launcher dropping and I have no clue what it is themed after other than it bears resemblance to the Mountain Top.

The new game mode that drops most of these weapons is called Dares of Eternity and is a weird “game show” hosted by the Starhorse and Xur. Essentially you spin a wheel and this chooses what type of enemy you face during that round. You battle your way through multiple rounds and then face a classic Destiny 1 boss at the very end. There is a scoring system which allows you to complete bounties for the Starhorse, and a more general series of bounties that you can complete for Xur. You win at least one key per round and can also get Strange Coins from doing other activities during the Anniversary Event that you can turn in for more keys or other items. If you unlock enough caches and save up enough keys you can earn things like ships or sparrows as well as I believe a full armor set.

All in all it is some “big dumb fun”, and I think that is what my brain needs right now. There is a new DLC dungeon that I would love to get a group for at some point so I can pick up Gjallarhorn which is tied to completing it. Additionally there is a quest chain that unlocks an exotic sidearm that is based off of the pistol from Halo that I would like to get as well. Mostly I am spending my time doing Dares of Eternity over and over, but I have started knocking out some weekly rewards to try and get my light level up there. It is still not the best system in the world, but after New World I know that it could be so much worse.