Destiny Rising

Tricks and Treats

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I officially started the Mad King festivities as we spend our normal few hours of guild nonsense running around the labyrinth. It was a pretty fun time, and eventually we largely followed around a tag. However not before some random idiot seemed to take very hostile offense to us having our own private tag since we outgrew the size of a normal party. I mean we could have dogpiled on the other tag… but technically we were there first, and also after a point it became about the principle of the situation. We were calm and reasonable in map chat, but this other person was actively cursing us out… which does not befit the chill that Guild Wars 2 normally has. I would blame this on the folks filing in from World of Warcraft… but this dude had the God Walking Amongst Mortals title… so they were a special brand of asshole.

That said… it did not really put a serious hamper on our fun, because the biggest component of Guild Wars 2 Thursdays is hanging out on discord and talking about all manner of nonsense. During which Sita the robot… relayed to us some concerning details that deeply concerned me… but then again… that is every week. Joking aside though it is a heck of a lot of fun just to hang out for a bit and do some relatively low effort gaming. This is the part of MMORPGs that I had been missing, and I am glad that I finally got off my ass and tried to wrangle folks to do something together. It doesn’t necessarily happy EVER week, but more often than not we are doing fractals or something similar in Guild Wars 2 every Thursday. If we had more folks… we would try strikes or something that requires slightly more effort. However for now… the Labyrinth was exactly the right amount of nonsense.

Prior to Guild Wars 2 shenanigans I spent a bit trying to catch AFK Journey up on the quest chain. While I don’t talk about it very often, I tend to play this game every night before falling asleep at least enough to do some of the dailies. However I tend to batch the story up and grind it all down in a single go, or in this current case a series of attempts. I think I am nearing the end of this current storyline and I have to say this is one of my favorite so far. I really like the character of Gala and I will kill anyone who threatens to harm her. I’ve started running AFK Journey on the same MuMuPlayer that I use to play Destiny Rising, and it is pretty great for batch doing auto battles to raise various ranks. If you play this game feel free to friend me up and my ID is 39949620.

Yesterday was the release of a new 5 star banner in Destiny Rising, and I had been banking up my pulls for this event. I had phenomenal luck and also spent a little money… and managed to pull 3 copies of her, and 2 copies of the new 4 star which seems WAY harder to get than Umeko was. They also threw Finnala and Ikora on the same banner… which means you are going to get way more copies of them as a result. Sadly neither of them are terribly useful characters other than our PVPVE nonsense. Maybe when we finish with the Ikora madness we should do Nala matches instead. The new champ is pretty cool is both 5 star and 4 star represent the very first bow characters. Thankfully you can pull an Exotic bow, the Trinity Ghoul off the battlepass which greatly improves their functionality. Helhest is ALMOST a great character… but unfortunately the normal drones don’t follow you around. Still it is a solid arc champion that has the ability to make heavy weapon ammo out of thin air… and represents a pretty great support character.

Another cool thing that I think went in with this update, is there are not a ton of outfits available for purchase with ONLY bright dust. This might have been a thing before, but up until this point I thought they required both bright dust and silver. As a result I snapped up outfits for all of the characters that I play regularly. I specifically love this Estela outfit, since green is already one of my favorite colors and green and red is the combination that I tend to build around in Guild Wars 2. My guess is that we were just interpreting the cost of these outfits incorrectly, because I cannot see that so many people spent silver on the green Tan-2 as I have run up against doing events.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Chaos Trials of the Nine, because I desperately need an Exotic Artifact for the fourth slot. This is essentially all that is standing between me and getting my Jolder to gold, and unlocking the next batch of ascension points. I’ve refactored all of my exotic artifacts to 2500+, and I think at this point the process is just wasting resources to go any higher. Essentially I am only getting an upgrade when I max out the pity luck on the refactors. If I had ONE more exotic artifact I could push it up to 2500 as well and get across the finish line. The other thing that is actively hurting me is that I am not using an exotic weapon on Jolder, and have not found any Exotic weapon mods that will fit into the submachine gun. All of the rapid fire mods that I can pull from the mod choice engrams… seem to only want to be slotted into the Autorifle.

Even if they did not make the changes to bright dust in this patch… I still feel like they are getting less stingy with alternate outfits in general. I pulled this alternate outfit for Jolder off the normal banner, and then this alternate outfit for Helhest off the new limited banner. I am not the biggest fan of the yellow and grey look for Helhest, but I love the Pink and Purple Jolder and am pretty much using that all the time now. I would love to pull an updated shield to match it at some point, especially given that Jolder right now is my main character that I am playing. It is weird how I originally thought Wolf was so cool, and then as I have played more of the game I have effectively completely abandoned him for greener pastures. I think the thing that could improve Wolf is if they would do the thing that the Mihoyo games do and allow you to change up his element and weapon loadout. If they made it so Wolf could learn how to use any weapons and any element… it would make them way more useful in the long run.

I’ve got a cookout thing going on tonight, so I am realistically not going to get much in the way of gaming. I also have an in person all day event going on at work, so I am going to be exceptionally work out from the combo of both of those events landing on the same day. Tomorrow I need to get up relatively early and run some errands, but after that I am probably going to grind Realm of the Nine until my eyes bleed… or I get an exotic artifact for the fourth slot. Other than that I fully expect to spend some time doing the Labyrinth grind in Guild Wars 2 and maybe try and knock out some of the other seasonal events. I’ve never attempted the jumping puzzle… so I might give that a spin even though I hate jumping puzzles. Sadly I don’t think you can do the teleport to friend nonsense to bypass this one.

Jotunn and Felblades

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Good Morning Folks. Ace and I got together early in the evening and ran around a bunch of Destiny Rising. Of course we had to do our Ikora nonsense, and we realized there was a clear pattern. We have the first round where we do pretty damned good, and honestly rank fairly high overall. For example once again last night we got 2nd place overall and for most of the match we were running in the first place spot. Then immediately after that… we had a round where we spent most of it dead… and finished in last place. However at this point we only have two more rounds of Shifting Gates in order to complete the objective of running 10 with Ikora. At that point we are probably going to keep doing it… but just play more reasonable characters.

On top of the Ikora nonsense we did two raids last night that went exceptionally smoothly. It makes me wonder if folks are finally starting to grok the mechanics in there, or if there is just no one but hardcore players queuing for it these days. We also did a Master strike, but it was one with Precision Shinka’s which meant that I took one for the team and played Tan-2. I really need to buff him up quite a bit, but I am mostly focused on trying to get Jolder up high enough so that I can get a gold medal and get unstuck from my present light level logjam. Ace managed to move past it with their Estela which of course makes me feel like I am falling behind heh. I did pull a new Exotic weapon out of the master strike, and it is supposedly pretty powerful.

This of course meant I had to drop down to a planet and give it a spin on Xuan Wei, the only character that currently can use a fusion rifle. It is odd… basically instead of firing a spread of shots, you fire one giant grenade like slug. I can see how it would make him significantly more powerful overall and given that there is no spread… you no longer need to get quite so close to a target in order to optimize the damage. At some point I will probably run some Realm of the Nine with him to see how it feels doing proper content. This is something I need to do more often in general, but right now I mostly need to run it as Jolder so I can get void upgrade materials. I think Ace passed me because Destiny Rising is one of the few games they are playing right now, whereas I have a stack of games that I am trying to rotate between.

Speaking of other games… swapping over to a Demon Hunter seems like it was what I needed to get into Legion Remix. I feel like Blizzard has done what Blizzard has always done… and fucked with the formula a bit to make it worse. I feel like Panda Remix was accidentally a great game mode, that was released as a lark as filler content. With Legion Remix they purposefully tried to design this content… and as a result lost some of what made the previous incarnation great. Namely it feels like they have significantly slowed down the progress. What was so great about Panda is that it felt like you were grinding endgame content almost immediately… and this time around it feels like I have to properly level… which delays the enjoyment of grinding raids and such. I am still having fun, the pacing just feels completely off from what it did in Panda.

The flow of things is really weird too, because a lot of the class hall stuff seems to have been neutered, where you cannot run missions anymore. They speed you past the general unlocking phases that were time gated which is a good thing, but it also feels like a lot of the content has been removed. That said there is still a bunch of general unlocking of things content that has to be done, like retrieving your artifact weapons. This morning i started the process of unlocking Suramar and it does not seem to have gotten the timerunner treatment with things being sped up. Legion is still my favorite expansion in all of World of Warcraft, but it also does not feel anywhere near as fresh or exciting as it did with Panda. I think it was just a new concept and now the novelty has worn off a bit.

That said I am still enjoying myself and am nearing level 40 in the first area that I chose to go to, Azshara. I still probably have over half of the zone left to go, and maybe I am making good progress overall… but the pace just feels slower than Panda did. I am not really worrying to much about gear upgrades and I will batch up a couple dozen bronze chests while questing and then unlock all of them and scrap the excess. Of course I have to break out my Yak every time to restore my cosmetic appearance, because that is more important to me than the gear levels currently. I am not sure if I am really getting back into the flow of World of Warcraft, but I am not bouncing as hard as I did with the Hunter or any time I have tried to quest through War Within.

Tonight though is Guild Wars 2 with friends, and the vague plan is to group up and run amok in the Mad King’s Labyrinth. I don’t think any of us have done much of anything from the Halloween event other than maybe opening some trick or treat bags. I remember having a lot of fun with the Labyrinth before, and mostly you just need to run around with a group because it is very easy to get overwhelmed quickly. It has been years since I last participated in this event, so it should be a lot of fun with friends.

Irrationally Large Box

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Good Morning Folks. Starting this morning’s post off with a picture of Gracie being super snuggly. It was a good weekend, but a busy weekend. I spent a lot of time working in the garage and set up the first of the storage shelves, and then cleared the room for the next one… which I will hopefully work on today. Essentially I am trying to get all of my wife’s stuff that I just piled in the center of the garage, up on shelves… and get a bunch of stuff that I will never use that has been in the garage for eons, out into a pile to have hauled off. The thing that is fighting against me, is the fact that we are still having 90+ degree days and the garage is a sauna, so I am trying to limit my time out there to hour long bursts of activity. I just noticed I am covered in bruises from wrestling with items that I probably had help putting out there the last time they were moved. I made it work through and got them into the growing pile in my backyard. There is a service we have used before that will haul it off so long as I pile it up for them relatively neatly.

The big move of the weekend however, was setting up a new television… that again was probably too large for me to be handling by myself. One of the last things that we did together was put together this new entertainment center over my birthday weekend back in June. Last week I added to that a riser, that would allow me to put the cable box, and ultimately my Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 under the TV. The entire reason why we swapped out our entertainment center was to eventually upgrade from our 43 inch television to something larger, and I had been shopping off and on for awhile. The problem is… I did not want to ship a television. There is just too much shit that can go wrong in transit, which meant more or less that I was limited to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, or CostCo for which my membership had lapsed. I was specifically looking for a 120hz 4k 65 inch television… preferably one with Google operating system rather than Amazon Fire. Most of the ones that I had seen were in the $800 range, but I found one on CostCo that was a 4k 144hz panel that also came with a 5 year warranty thrown in… so I renewed my membership and snapped that puppy up.

So as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend enjoying the new larger television. I watched a few movies on Friday and Saturday, and then got reacquainted with both the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. I bounced around a lot on the PS5, but on Sunday night I settled in for some long sessions of Super Mario Wonder and the upscaled version of Bravely Default. I actually got into the last one quite a bit, and stayed up later than I had intended. When I finally made it to bed… Mollie was rather cross with me for not arriving in the bedroom at the correct time and screamed at me for awhile as she demanded attention. I figured it is just me now… I might as well enjoy my life in whatever ways I can, and upgrading the TV was one of those simple ways to get some more quality of life easily. It was also one of the projects we had on our radar, and it felt like actually accomplishing something that my wife and I had already planned. There are a few more of those projects that I eventually want to take care of… but they will require significantly more than $400.

Over in Diablo IV, I landed on a set of Chaos armor that actually works well enough for my build. Vasily’s Prayer is pretty much a requirement for making the build feel good, and I had picked up Chaos version of it on both the gloves and chest. I figured it would be easier to swap out the gloves and then find some other item that can replace Rampaging Werebeast. For now I am running Fleshrender and it seems to be working pretty well, because it makes it so Debilitating Roar deals damage to poisoned enemies… and my Pulverize is always poisoning enemies. So every time I roar I am not just getting a survival boost, I am also doing over 4 million AOE damage to everyone that has already been poisoned by my Pulverize puddles. Now I just need to do massive amounts of farming to knock out the remaining achievements in the seasons journey.

Over in Destiny Rising, I finally bucked up and knocked out several seven minute legendary quests so that I could bump up my ascension level. Essentially I got Silver Medals on Jolder, Estela, and Umeko and now I am stalled out again at 19 Ascension until I get a Gold Medal. For the moment I am closest to getting there on Jolder, but the thing that is going to hold me back the longest is getting my light level up past 65000. I need to run another Legendary mission on Jolder where I take zero deaths… and in truth my previous 7 minute run was deathless… but it did not count because I did not have the quest yet. Other than that I need to upgrade the exotic sword and then swap her artifacts to all exotics, and my weapon mods to all exotics… and I THINK that might get me over the light hurdle. Having long grinds though is perfectly fine, and it is going to take a bit longer because I was later starting the game.

Ace and I got together Sunday afternoon and did some more all Ikora nonsense again. We are still seeking the Trikora as Ammo called it during the podcast, but we did have a really successful run. Largely we just followed around the Umeko that we were grouped with and provided supporting fire. Ikora is actually somewhat powerful if you happen to catch players unaware while you still have your abilities active. When her abilities are down though… you just do not have the tools to close the deal. We are past the halfway point in this nonsense though and we just need to do four more rounds in order to knock out her lore item. We also ran a Gauntlet Blitz as Ikora and that was honestly better than I expected it to be. On top of that I introduced Ace to the frustration that is the raid, and we managed to get through that twice. However we did have one run where people who had no clue what they were doing kept grabbing the keys and then sitting on them, so they also know the frustration of when things go south.

I had enough resources to craft an exotic engram and I pulled Polaris Lance, which is a pretty solid scout rifle that I might work on upgrading for Tan-2/Umeko. I am not sure if this is the play over an Exotic Sniper or not, but I remember liking the weapon in Destiny, so hopefully it is also a solid bet here too. The only problem is that Exotic weapons are so costly in resources to keep upgraded, and I just do not feel like I have the necessary resources to build out every single one of them, much like there are heroes that I am just going to completely ignore. I wish the higher you got up in Ascension, the more common some resources got. So that you could get Mythic resources for example much easier than you previously could… or some of the early Exotic resources. However anything yellow…. still maintains a lot of time gated grinding behind it.

I am hoping everything is setting up for a really good week. I know this week is also the start for Legion Remix, but I am not entirely certain how much I will be engaging with that. I am kinda digging playing some console games, so I might be doing more of that in the evenings. Hoping by this time next week… I have the garage more under control and have at least been able to schedule the folks to come pick up in the growing pile in the backyard.