Destiny 2

Happy Blaugust

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Today is the first day of August and with it comes two things. Firstly my wedding anniversary. My wife and I have been married Twenty One years as of today, which is weird because like I have been married longer than my baby boomer boss. Then again he is on I think his fourth marriage and I only have the one, so even though the age difference it makes sense. We’ve been that “stable” couple in our families and in theory have been the most responsible of adults… even though adulting is occasionally super hard. I am very happy to have a steady partner in this journey.

The second thing is of course the official beginning of Blaugust, though technically on the schedule it goes into July and September a bit as a sort of ramp up and ramp down. However now is the time when the posting counts towards the goal of posting something every single day of August. What you make of it however is up to you. The first year it was a very super serious event and I only really gave credit for “winning” to those who made at least thirty one days. However that had the trickle down effect of burning a lot of people out, and I fear lead to more blogs closing as a result. From that point on we have had a more relaxed festival of blogging thing going on and focusing on simply posting more regularly than trying to meet a fixed target. There are of course awards to be given at the end of the event for people who meet even the most basic of posting requirements.

As far as gaming goes, I spent last night working on the new Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. I decided to go with a gaming image because I have gotten tired of the Blaugust logo leading every post so far this week. I am not sure if I am going to be able to get everything done in order to get the fully upgraded set of armor, but I had some fun last night. The specific screenshot is of me apparently breaking Gambit Prime. We tied the first round and then went into a second round where we filled our motes quickly… and a primal never spawned. In fact nothing spawned at all during the event and we just stood around killing invaders as they came over and any blockers they happened to send. It did allow me to very quickly complete the “kill seven guardians in gambit” task because we legitimately just stood around waiting for someone to spawn in.

So far we have managed to gather up 60 players in this blogging game. One of them is a daily Vlogger but that counts too (we love you Wolfy). Generally speaking we still have a few trickle in after the first of August, so there is absolutely still time to sign up and participate. We are down a bit from our high of 90 participating blogs last year, but then again that makes a bit of sense given that we took a year off from the event and there was a bit of a nostalgic rush of folks signing up. I expect to see a few more sign-ups but I am not sure if we will make up the 30 player gap. The truth is… it isn’t for everyone and I am not going to shame the folks who tried it out last year and decided it wasn’t for them. Without further waffling about… here is the list as it stands today.

On some level what we are trying to accomplish here feels a bit anachronistic, given the shift away from blogs and to new media. However this yearly re-igniting of the fires seems to be helping. Last year was the first year that we started the Blaugust Discord, and for the first time in all of the incarnations of Blaugust, Newbie Blogger Initaitive and the Developer Appreciation Week… we managed to keep something going all year long. At any point you could pop into the Discord and see activity within the last few days, and often times had people actively chatting. I cannot fully explain how happy that made me even when I myself would get busy and fail to chime in on topics.

When I first started this blog it was in the heyday of World of Warcraft blogging, and we were in the middle of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. With that came the extremely active Blog Azeroth community and its outreach to anyone who was interested in writing about the game. My very first twitter folk were attached to that community, and even today there are folks like Jess that I see on an almost nightly basis in Final Fantasy XIV. I made ties that have lasted over a decade and a lot of that was because Fimlys maintained an IRC channel associated with that community and more specifically the Twisted Nether Blogcast. The constant interaction lead to forming some pretty deep bonds that still last today, and it was my hope that Discord could play the same role with our community.

When I stopped blogging about World of Warcraft, I felt like I was falling into a vacuum and a lot of what I dealt with for those first several years was trying to carve out a community of some sort outside of a single game. There were a bunch of us out here on the frontier that would flit back and forth between games and has our own Independent Island States of a sort. Syp was the first to really unite the clans with the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and each time we ran an event we rallied together towards the same cause. Blaugust was born out of that desire to get people together and meld together all of these independent voices into something more cohesive.

I am emboldened by this event because each year we meet brand new people who are out here on the outskirts of other communities doing our own thing. I feel like we do finally have a broader sense of togetherness, a common spirit that we are all laboring towards the same goal of making this community a better place. I am truly happy to share this journey each year with you, but more importantly I am constantly excited to see it keep on happening without my prodding. Each of you that participates is critical to this process, and I want to thank you all for continuing to join me in this madness.

Happy Blaugust Everyone! Now here are the links I keep sharing each time I post the blog list. If you have yet to sign up please make your way to the Google Form and do so. If you have ever wanted to do this, then take a chance and we will be there to support you along the way.

Regularly Playing: July 2019 Edition

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For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing” where I attempt to update the sidebar on my blog.  This is the second month where I am trying to do this at the beginning of the month rather than remembering to do it towards the end of a month. June was a pretty stable month as far as game playing, and effectively there is really nothing much changing in the mix. However I am still going to go through the actions of this post to keep myself in the habit.

To Those Remaining

Bloodstained – PC and Switch

I am completely in love with this game. I’ve written so much about it recently, but effectively this is as thought you had sat down immediately after creating Symphony of the Night and just kept going on and adding in all of the features you ever wanted in the game. The experience is flawless, and while I am hearing there are issues with the Switch port, I am too busy making my way through the PC experience to care. They have all the time in the world to fix that. I have gotten the “bad” ending, and now am trying to work on better endings.

Destiny 2 – PC

I went on a brief binge of playing this game and then once again got distracted by something else. I want to return to playing on a more regular basis, but I am going to have to burn down some of the other games I am working on to free up the mental bandwidth. Bungie is doing a great job of stewarding the game into this new era and I am looking forward to some of the changes that are coming with the new expansion. The game is in a great place, so well worth checking out.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch

This is still very much in the rotation because I have more objectives to accomplish during this season. I’ve completed one conquest which can be seen in the above screenshot, involving collecting a 50 million gold streak. The next up is going to be doing a bunch of GR55s as multiple classes. I still have yet to master any set dungeons so I should probably knock that out soon as well. Essentially I got distracted but I still very much want the penultimate reward this season.

Dragalia Lost – Android

This game is effectively my night cap. I crawl into bed and spend 10-15 minutes playing this on my tablet before eventually closing the lid and going to sleep. Dragalia Lost lives in this weird place where it is just engaging enough to keep me playing on a regular basis… and not engaging enough to keep me playing it constantly to the point of burning out. In part the later part is in thanks to its mobile mechanics which favor short bursts of play rather than extended play cycles. Whatever the case going on two years I am still doing this thing.

Elder Scrolls Online – PC

I am playing nowhere near as much as this game deserves but I am still periodically logging in to move the needle forward. Right now I am deeply distracted by all of the other games that are on the market and calling my attention. I will return to you at some point when a lull happens to continue adventures in Morrowind proper.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I am completely back on my bullshit folks… and loving it. Just prior to the launch of Shadowbringers I found a way to get re-engaged and as a result I think the expansion thus far has been all the more meaningful. I am not sure what else I can really say about this that I have not already said in a bunch of recent blog posts. Final Fantasy XIV is a lovingly curated game experience, and I am enjoying the hell out of the ride.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

This month I have not spent an awful lot of time playing, but it is still on the list of things that I dive into when I want something more quiet and contemplative. I am not entirely certain this one is ever really going to leave the proper rotation, at least not for the time being. The pace of magic sets being released really reinforces the need to keep popping ones head back into the game every so often. Yesterday Core 20 was released, so I need to pop in and check it out.

To the New and Returning

For the very first time in the history of this column of sorts… I don’t have any new games being added to the mix. I reached a point of stasis this month and for the time being it is a pretty great mix of titles to be engaged in.

To Those Departing

Once again… nothing to see here. I didn’t out and out stop playing anything this month but continued largely playing the same things.

Honorable Mentions

Wizards Unite – Android

This one is sliding in as an honorable mention and not something new… because quite frankly I don’t think I will be spending any more time with the game. Wizards Unite released for mobile platforms and represents an attempt to capture the same magic as Pokemon Go… but with the Harry Potter IP. I feel like they have failed to do that, and as a result have created a fairly cumbersome and often times unfun experience. It is worth mentioning, but only just.

E3 As a Whole

A lot of my bandwidth was taken up by watching the E3 coverage unfurl, and as a result I am giving it an honorable mention as well. It was not a great show, but there were several gems. The new Commander Keen game is not really ones of them, but I am just in part happy see ANYTHING to do with that IP. It was probably a toss up between Microsoft and Square for who had the best showing, and then everything else falls down significantly after that.

Avarice and Guns

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Over the course of this week my blog has largely been devoted to E3 show coverage, or at least that thing that I call coverage where I talk about the things I personally cared about. In the background it has also been a pretty crazy week with a good deal of my time going to trying to catch up all on things E3 instead of actually playing games. This was only complicated by the fact that Tuesday night I went to the rebroadcast of RiffTrax live which is all sorts of wrong name-wise. Then on Wednesday night we met some of my in-laws for an early Father’s Day dinner. Which largely left Monday and last night free… but Monday I more or less spent the night cobbling together the footage needed for the Tuesday post.

Over the weekend I finally reached a point where I was ready to make a run at the Avarice Conquest. For the uninitiated this conquest requires you to hit a 50,000,000 gold streak which means every couple of seconds you need to be looting more gold to keep it active. There are a few ways to do this in game, but the most sure fire method requires copious amounts of farming. Since this takes so much time I absolutely went for the overkill method and gathered up a vault and a half worth of stuff… or in my case 8 rows of 7 caches equally 56 bounty caches.

Now the gotcha here is that a bounty cache retains a memory of what difficulty it was looted on and I started banking the caches when I first became able to farm Torment 13 and quickly worked my way up to 15 and 16… and had not really been paying much attention as to which difficulty I got them on. The key to doing this is to dismiss your companion and dismiss your pet… then stand beside your stash and be ever so careful to not touch anything until you are ready to go. I started by loading every bounty I could fit into my inventory and then reloaded the rest without moving at all. For sake of my own sanity I held down the Shift button while opening the Stash to make sure the game would not accept a movement input from me.

The real challenge however… was doing the cleanup. What you see above is somewhat of a lie, because each one of those items actually represents a stack. At this point I had completed a Solo Greater Rift 80 which I believe took my blood shard capacity up to 1300, and I am pretty sure I made twenty trips between Kadala and the bloodshard pile before I finally farmed those down. I probably crunched over a hundred legendaries and I have no clue at all how much I had in the way of crafting materials. Which is good because I also needed the various Kanai’s Cube related achievements as well. I am essentially in a point with Season 17 where I have knocked out a good chunk of most of the remaining steps, but need to spend some time playing clean up and actually start finishing them. I need two more conquests, and I have not even set my signs on what those are going to be yet.

The other game I have spent a bit of time in lately is Destiny 2 and I am largely working on getting my light level up enough to be able to feel like I have some semblance of choice weapon wise. Right now I am largely just using whatever trash happens to drop with a higher level because I do not have a great stockpile of infusion materials. Now the interesting part of this is that I have picked up some weapons that I have found I actually enjoy and probably never would have played with otherwise… like the submachine gun I am current wielding in my primary slot.

I still find it very hard to get into the Crucible, and whereas I played Gambit constantly it feels like the queues for standard gambit are extremely long. I am however trying to plug away at the various tasks that will give me “powerful gear”. Like I knocked out the planetary quest last night and did a heroic adventure… then plugged away a bit at the crucible related bounties. I will say it is really odd getting to the activity tracker off the map screen because I keep wanting to see it on my inventory. Quite honestly I would prefer if they put that tab in both places, because it takes a lot of retraining to stop looking for those items in my inventory. Still having an awful lot of fun in Destiny 2, but I probably should be playing Final Fantasy XIV and prepping for the impending launch of Shadowbringers.

What have you been playing on regular rotation? Drop me a comment below.

Season of Opulence

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There has been a sequence of events that has happened recently that were a bunch of things that were totally out of my control. One of those occurred again yesterday. I was about to go into a 1 pm meeting that I could not miss or else a project was likely going to fail… and I got a call from my father saying my mother had been taken to the Emergency Room. The meeting wrapped early thankfully and I rushed up the highway to the hospital roughly an hour away. The short version is that she has a blood clot restricting blood flow to her lungs.

The prognosis thankfully seems to be good and they are pumping blood thinners into her expecting that to clear the clot within 24 hours. However it is a scary situation because so much could go wrong. I ultimately came home last night in part because I had to take my own meds and in part because she was not sleeping with us in her room and needed some rest. The goal right now is to head up once I finish my morning activities. I’ve texted both mom and dad but given that my dad also went home to take his meds I am wondering if he is still sound asleep.

I obviously did not get much game time yesterday, but I did poke my head into Destiny 2 for a bit since the season of opulence has started. This morning I am going to give you a fairly fragmented view at some of the changes that I noticed. First off when you get into game you will get a quest leading you to Nessus and to visit what appears to be Emperor Callus’s party barge hovering near a cliff face. There is an intermediary step where you have to go visit Benedict the reprogrammed sweeper bot, but quickly you wind up planet side working through a series of quests to refill a chalice. This serves as the progression system for the season and unlocking various talents on the cup give you various in game boosts.

The first interesting thing is that as you are completing steps in the quest you are being given 690 gear as a way of artificially boosting your light level enough to be able to start doing higher level content. Sadly I did not have a stockpile of infusion materials, and as a result I am mostly stuck using the blues in place of the purples that I greatly prefer. It is nice however to see that Bungie built in some sort of a catch up mechanic this time that does not involve auto completing content.

Another interesting thing is that we now have a pursuits tab in the director that has all of those annoying doodads that took up inventory space and effectively this becomes something approaching a proper quest log. I am not sure if you are limited to the number of items you can have in it like you were with bounties. It is however really nice to see an at a glance view of everything you are currently working on and what step in the quest chain you are.

Another thing that i noticed is that they changed the engine for displaying the shaders… which in theory tries to give you a more appropriate display of what they might look like on gear. It still isn’t perfect but it does seem to do a more reasonable job of faking out what the shader looks like actually applied.

The place with the biggest changes is the in game shop… aka the Eververse where they have swapped up a bunch of things. Namely while engrams still exist they are now seemingly removed from priority in advertising them. Right now they have “best of year one” engram that allows you to obtain items from anything that happened during year one. What is more interesting however is that they have a bunch of items that are now available as direct purchases for both Silver and Bright Dust.

For example they have a new seemingly exclusive sparrow with nifty animation effects called The Calypso that is purchasable for 800 silver. The minimum purchase needed to get enough silver is $9.99 for 1100 silver… you can do whatever math you want to dilute the amount of the cost of a single silver because like all cash shops the more you buy the cheaper it gets. However if you have no silver right now and you want this ride you are going to have to spend a minimum of $10 to get it. It is nice however to have a fixed price point rather than the previous answer of opening gachapon engrams until you got whatever it was that you wanted.

There is also a rotating inventory of things available for bright dust which can be obtained by breaking down items from previously opened engrams or from completing engrams. Among these is an exotic sparrow that looks like you are riding a single pod-racer engine. This should in theory give access to a different batch of new stuff rotating every seven days through a fixed stock of hopefully all of the items available during this season.

The gameplay itself feels different and I cannot quite put my finger on it. It might just be that I have been gone long enough that everything is starting to feel fresh again. My shotgun that I picked up from one of the boost packs however seems to be able to do things like one shot Vex Hydras… which is not something that I remember happening before. Additionally I seem to be able to one shot punch Vex Minotaurs… which again is not something that I remember being able to do. I am sure I will be playing more of this in the coming weeks but for now I am wrapping things up and heading to the hospital.

Keep my Mom in your thoughts if you don’t mind doing so. Hopefully everything works out okay but regardless it has been pretty scary.