Destiny Rising

Splitting the Party

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Good Morning Folks. Last night was our usual Guild Wars 2 shenanigans night and we spent most of it running random fractals through the new quick play system. Of our group, I am the only one who has completed all of the steps required to get legendary gloves and finish the 500 dust achievement that gives you 2 bags, 2 bag slots, and a random legendary. I have no clue how many we ran, but we did have a few weird things happen. There was one time when the quickplay system split our party and sent two of us to one fractal with three randoms, and the other two to another fractal with three randoms. It took us a bit to realize this, because we were talking about different fractals with me and Sol ending up in Kinfall, and Sita and Ammo ending up in the Volcano. When I referred to the boss as a bullet sponge Ammo and Sita were a bit confused.

Over lunch I wrapped up the remaining achievements in Champion and have officially moved on to Destroyer. Most of these require me to be wearing Chaos gear… which GREATLY nerfs my damage and survivability. I am still trying to figure out a build I can go with that does not adversely harm my build so I can start knocking these out. I did run around long enough in a Helltide to open 10 tortured gifts and finish that sub achievement, which is always a bit of a pain in the ass. There are other hateful achievements like finish 5 events with mastery in 20 mins… or kill 200 mobs after triggering the spawning of a Harbinger but before it shows up. I am not entirely certain I am finishing Destroyer in this season, because without Ace playing with me… I’ve lost a lot of my forward momentum to actually knock this out.

Over in Destiny Rising I am dealing with a bit of a logjam as I need to get Silver Medals on three characters in order to progress to the next steps of Ascension. The power grind is of course a big problem for each character, but the bigger one for me is the Legendary Campaign completion. This has been an activity that I have been largely ignoring, because the first one I ever did was the current sniper one… and hated every minute of it. There are a few things that I detest in games… the big one is being on a timer. I have deep seated problems with being timed while doing something… and it dates back to elementary school trauma. I also hate the Shinkas in general and having to fight the sniper ones… was just a pain in the ass and as such I have avoided these completely. Unfortunately this means that I have had zero under 7 minute completions of this event.

This morning I knocked out a completion on Umeko, which means I only need to get her light up in order to get a silver medal. I should probably also borrow a Tan-2 and an Attal and complete all of the ones available this week so that I don’t have to wait multiple weeks for the sniper one to come around again. I will probably give Jolder a try, but I am not sure how she is going to kill the sniper Shinka without killing herself in the process. Maybe because I tend to run with a full bar of overshield, I will be able to soak the damage and survive anyways. However I think I am probably just going to have to wait for another week where Jolder is the suggested champion. These rotate through every week and in theory Jolders should be coming up next.

Other than that I had what was quite possibly my fastest clear of one of the raid phases, which rewarded me another copy of the Exotic crossbow that Ning Fei uses. This one thankfully was already level 80, so I was able to just swap over to it immediately. One of the things that you can do in this game is spend some glimmer… which is mostly useless… and reset a champion reclaiming all of the materials that you have spent on them. I think I might do this for a few champions in order to hopefully push the light levels up on the ones that I am trying to push up to silver. I am not sure if this will matter at all, because it is higher end materials that I am currently jammed up on, not low level materials. However it still might be worth a shot. Especially for the ones where I have completed their main story quest… I no longer really care about having them up at higher light levels.

All of this though is going to get sidelined a bit because I bought a stupidly large TV yesterday, and tonight I plan to tear apart the living room and set everything up slightly differently with the new television. This has been something I have wanted for awhile, and the entire reason why we swapped entertainment centers back in June. I figured while my wife is no longer with us…. I should probably finish up this plan we had for awhile. However I think I probably want to also explore curtains to hang over the circle window so that I can block some more light for optimal movie viewing and gaming.

Goodbye Gamepass, Hello Raids

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday we got some great news from Guild Wars 2 that the quick play feature that has been a rousing success during the Fractal Incursion event would be coming for the new combined raid system. Essentially they are taking strikes and raid wings and merging them into a new feature, and then adding quick play functionality for the easier wings and strikes. I am so unbelievably pumped about this, and right now the Guild Wars 2 is on fire with their quality of life improvements. I am just hoping that when the Fractal Incursion event is over in a few days… that we get some version of the quick play feature permanently for Fractals at least. The raid finder tool will not be coming until the first post expansion update, which should land sometime first quarter of 2026 if the pacing of content drops are similar to how they were with Janthir Wilds. I am honestly super pumped about the Visions of Eternity expansion drop in general coming at the end of this month.

In less great news… Microsoft continues down a path of self destruction following their recent massive price hikes on their consoles with a price hike to Gamepass. Ultimate was previously $19.99 and it is bumping up to $29.99 a month…. which at least for me is a bridge too far. I have been a subscriber since Gamepass first came into existence, and have been using it to play various Microsoft stable PC games as they released. However I think I am just going to hard pass on this system even though I did enjoy the Cloud gaming functionality. Immediately following this news I saw reports on social media that the cancellation page was effectively bricked for most of the day as there was a flood of cancellations. It was still a bit wonky last night as I attempted to cancel it.. hanging for over a minute on the final step before finally resolving into a page that allowed me to enter my reasoning. Microsoft has talked at length about them wanting to grow Gamepass, but this is absolutely not the way to do it. With this and many other things… I think we have finally reached the point where we frogs noticed that the water was boiling and are ready to hop out of the pot.

Yesterday I got a message over on Bluesky from my friend Delebrin that the time played in Diablo IV is located on the character profile page at the bottom. This sounds like something that I once knew, but have long since forgotten. I am grateful that they pointed it out however, and my estimate of being around 40 hours into this character was pretty accurate with me having actually played 36. Now I am trying to figure out what I want to do next. This is ultimately the point I end up with in Diablo III and Diablo IV each time I play through a season. None of the content is compelling enough to really keep me diving into it for the sake of doing it… and the gap in RNG drops between Ancestral Uniques and Mythics is so wide that I am just not sure it is worth the effort.

I am close to wrapping up Champion in the season journey, and this honestly has traditionally been my guiding light for when I consider myself done with a season. The final phase is going to be a bit harder as I said in an earlier post, because many of those accomplishments require you to be wearing some piece of chaos gear, and I am not sure what I can actually sacrifice in order to make that happen. I did not get a ton of time to play last night, because I instead hung out with Ace and played Destiny Rising. However today at lunch I should be able to finish up the rest of the stuff on Champion and then begin chipping away at the last rank. I did finish leveling the seasonal event tree and got my mythic shard, and I have a few more steps on the battle pass… so essentially when I wrap all of this up I will probably consider the game “beaten” for the moment.

It is a new month and with that comes a reset on some of the currency exchange shops, allowing me to pick up some more normal banner pulls, and I managed to finally pull Ning Fei, the last of the champions that I did not have. I am still only a few pulls away from getting the Mythic Choice champion so I am not sure if I hold onto this for future use if that is even allowed, or if I pick up a second copy of Jolder. She is by far my favorite of the normal banner mythic champions, though from everything I have heard Ning Fei seems to be pretty awesome. I did pick up two copies of Xuan Wei while spending down my normal banner pulls, but I am just not really playing him that often.

I did pull a really sweet exotic ghost shell called the Cryptex, so that was pretty fun. Most of the night was spent running Morgran’s Hunt because that event ends I believe today. We also did a few rounds of our all Ikora PvPvE nonsense… and honestly… we are getting better at this. We had one match where we took out six or seven players, along with a few clutch kills… but didn’t really score terribly well in general. Ace and I were talking last night about how much better of a Destiny experience this game is, and how they had never really gotten into baseline Destiny as much as this version. I think in some aspect it is the multiple characters, because you can do a bunch of different things, rather than feeling like you are forced to play one of three characters. Grinding up light in Destiny feels like it was way harder than grinding up gear in Destiny Rising, so I think that is at least part of it for me.

I am a bit stalled in my progression, because I essentially need to complete all of the silver achievements on three characters so I can remove the logjam that is my ascension score. Right now in most cases I am gated by my total light score for the characters and not having an easy way to bump that up, and also needing to run 7 minute legendary events, which are single player versions of missions in the game. I do not really enjoy these, so it is something I am going to have to force myself to get good at. The current one sort of sucks because it is all sniper based, and while I have leveled Umeko and Tan-2 a bit… neither feels like they are good enough to rip through this mission quickly. I thought I had gotten it last night but seemingly there is a lag between when you finish the final boss and when it shuts off the timer. I took a death in the middle, and if I had not done that I would have probably been able to finish that one without much issue. However I am going to have to wait for another week because I do not think there is any way I am getting non-snipers through this one.

Anyways! I think that is all of the assorted nonsense I have in my head this morning. I hope your week is going well. I am still fighting this general respiratory crud, but like I said before I think it is just ragweed trying to kill me.

Yon Bus of Struggle

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I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.

I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.

In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.

Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.

Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.

In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.

Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day.

Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading.

Suspicious Dongle

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Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.

I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.

One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.

Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.

I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.

I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.

I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.

The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.

Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.