Destiny Rising

Druids, Strongholds, and The Searing

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.

I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.

Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.

After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.

What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.

What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.

A Legacy Reforged

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.

Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.

In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.

With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.

I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.

Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.

Temu McCree

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Good Morning Friends. I am still dragging ass due to this impossible crud that I cannot seem to kick to the curb, however in roughly an hour I have an appointment with my doctor who will hopefully help with that. I’ve fallen back on the Audiobooks and Chill bandwagon but I will talk about the books portion of that in another post this week. Suffice to say I am mostly spending my time playing Path of Exile. I am still alternating between mapping on my level 96 Ice Trap Elementalist and then diving down into the mines for some relatively safe leveling as I push towards level 100. One of the things that I did not expect enjoying so much is that I have finally properly learned Incursion/Alva and have found great joy in building temples for profit. Essentially if you can craft a temple with a Locus of Corruption on it, you can sell it for a little over a divine, which is meager profit but more than enough to keep paying for the scarabs that I am running and still banking quite a bit for whatever my next project ends up being.

At level 99, I have properly entered the realm of never running without an Omen of Amelioration in my bags. These are going for roughly 120 Chaos at the moment, and is essentially paying for lost time. I took a really dumb death yesterday when I dove into the shadows… did not realize I was out of flares… and then was mercilessly killed by the hubris of using Forbidden Taste as my automated life flask. Thanks to the handy omen though, I did not lose much progress in the grand scheme of things, but any lost progress at level 99 is noticeable. Basically I am going to be pushing hard to hit level 100 so that I can knock another meta achievement off Gear Grinding Goals, and in truth I have hit level 100 in the last several leagues so it feels like a requirement for me to consider myself “finished”. I could buy some 5 way carries or something like that, but it always feels like the wrong sort of cheating. I will happily pay for a Maven carry each league because I fucking hate the memory game and have legitimately beat her myself more than once. Paying for carries for things I can easily accomplish on my own with enough applied time is just a bridge too far.

I continue to chip away at achievements however and knocked out Sinew Swarms yesterday, which required me to do 10 Hive Fortresses or Hive Colonies. This one took so long because they are that much rarer than the other in map breach events. Wierdly since I started running the Ritual and Incursion mapping setup, I have yet to encounter a King in the Mists invitation altar. I did buy an invitation so I have at least beaten him this league, same for Oshabi which I also bought the invitation for off the market. What I really need is a Trialmaster or an Olroth so I can get my last of the bloodline ascendency fights under my belt. I need to also see if I have any of the Vox bros Heist maps so I can knock them off the list of pinnacle encounters. Simialrly I am shocked that I have yet to encounter one of the Kingsmarch fights, which would knock another pinnacle off my list. I am happy to keep my head down and grind for the time being because it pairs so lovely with an audiobook.

Over in Destiny Rising there has been one of the silliest events yet available, called Iron Medley. Essentially it is Iron Banner or as this game calls it Iron Bar, but everyone has to play the exact same character… which produces some really weird end of match shots like this. Essentaily everyone is stripped down to a baseline version of the character with the exact same choices of weapons. In truth… I think this is a better match mode than the default Iron Bar, and should maybe be made into a permanent mode. It feels like running ARAM in League, where your sand off any of the possible advantages and just yolo your way through the matches. I really like when PVP modes in games normalize the advantage so it does not feel like you are getting stomped into the ground because you did not devote time and effort to a game mode that you are not maining.

There is a new character banner starting in roughly two days, and the trailer has been released. Essentially Jaren is just McCree from Overwatch, or whatever the hell they are calling that character these days. All that is missing is Matt Mercer doing the voices. He also gives me BraveStarr vibes, which is not necessarily a bad thing… but also makes me want him to have a talking cybernetic horse companion. My only real problem with him is that I am just not sure if Hand Canon and Shotgun is going to be a fun weapon combo to use. It is really doing to depend on how good the Hand Canon exotic that is going to inevitably come with the character. If the rumors are true… and he is getting Last Word which seems to have been shown during the trailer… he might be super fun. If nothing else this might also revive Attal from being a dumpster tier character for me.

In other news I finally pulled another mythic off the free pulls on the normal banner, and it ended up being my third copy of Tan-2. At some point I should probably build this character out, but I still really prefer Umeko to him. Then again if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to pick Helhest for the utility that she provides. I would have greatly preferred an additional copy of Ning Fei because he is up there in the list of characters that I am going to pump currency into to build out. I maxed out Helhests weapon damage, so now it is really just getting a final copy of her bow in order to push her to the same levels as Maru. I still want to build out Gwynn a bit because she is pretty useful when it comes to running limited content even though she is squishy as fuck. Ace and I are getting together to do Grandmasters tonight so we will see what that holds. Hopefully it is a better week than last week.

I am not playing anywhere near as much Destiny Rising as I was, but I am still enjoying myself enough to pop in and do some of the daily and weekly activities. Unfortunately our guild has grown too big for our britches and are no longer able to maintain the upkeep points to keep the “bitcoin miner” active. I wish I could coax a few more people into playing , because just with minimal play we could probably keep things humming again with maybe five more players. We had another really active player that came from the random clan that I was in first, but I think they have also fallen by the wayside. We have managed to find three strongholds for the last two weeks which has been really nice though.

Anyways. Time to get ready for the doctor visit and it is trash day so I have to deal with gathering that. I hope you all are having a wonderful week back, and hope that the doctor can give me something to make me feel less like ass all the time. I need a few days of feeling great so that I can whip the house back into shape, because I have not felt like doing much of anything lately.

Stubbornness Prevails

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Good Morning Folks. Once a week, Ace and I get together to do Grandmaster difficulty content in Destiny Rising. In general we have had much better luck when we queue together for content, because at a minimum we know that we can rely on each other. This week however is pure butts when it comes to options. For those who have not gotten to this point yet, you are limited in your character options when it comes to Grandmaster activities and everyone has to choose one of six characters that is also over 64k power rating. Really of the options there viable ones are Rossi, Ning Fei, Gwynn, and Jolder. Of those generally the strongest characters damage output wise are Ning Fei and Gwynn… but both of them are very much glass canons that have to get up close and personal with mobs in order to deal the maximum amount of damage.

We started the night with Blitz and I decided to roll with Gwynn and Ace with Ning Fei because they were our strongest options… and quite possibly it was the most frustrating experience we have had in ages. We got one of the new Blitz, and the worst one… where you have to fight the giant eyeball in the center and everything feels super tanky for some reason. After running out of resurrections and only having the boss down to 2/3rds of their health… everyone abandoned and we decided to try something we thought would be easier… and ran a strike. That turned out to also be frustrating and it took us three attempts… with the final being pure spite because we lost our third party member and duo’d down the boss. The biggest problem with the encounter is the fact that the adds are so damned deadly. We had to shift up our strategy from trying to burn down the boss to being on top of the adds as soon as they spawned. It was not the cleanest kill in the world, but we were proud of not giving up.

After that we did some way more relaxing Morgran’s Hunt runs since the event is going on right now. We got quite possibly our highest score yet with a triple Maru setup, and it was a lot of stupid fun. Essentially we got to the round where the game starts to cheat in both runs. I am not sure there is a solid way to get through round eight, because the mob health and mob damage output spikes massively… throwing a bunch of yellow bar mobs at you so that you can’t easily knock out the bonus, often leading to the map ending quickly. That is okay though because we got two four key runs, which are pretty solid. Unfortunately we both got our guaranteed exotics and they were useless ones… with Ace pulling the Old Prefect and me pulling another copy of Two Tailed Fox. Essentially if we get together and do another couple four runs we will wrap up the event with several days to spare.

I finished up my hundred maps running blue altars, and during that time I got one divine altar… unfortunately being one for the boss to drop six divines instead of one for the minions to drop divines. Other than that the only other exciting altar that I got was one for exalted orbs, where I pulled three whole orbs for the entire map. There is a reason why I find myself enjoying red altars more than blue ones, because blue is a pure gamble with most of your maps giving you nothing worth writing home about. Red altars on the other hand end up producing a bunch of Chaos Orbs, which always feels at least somewhat useful. Now I need to shift gears and run one of my atlas trees that can splash in the red altar nodes so I can start grinding out my hundred maps for that.

This has led me to go back to my Alva farming setup with Ritual as I continue my hunt for King of the Mists invitations. I am running the really expensive scarab that makes it so that the last Invasion of each map drops a fully itemized temple. In my experience you end up getting quite a few temples to drop with Locus of corruption, each of which sells for around 100 Chaos, so if you get 3 of these in 20 maps you can pay for the cost of all of the scarabs required for this run. It also is worth quite a bit of experience and should be a good way of pushing up my Ice Trapper in levels. However to make Red Altars viable I think I am going to drop my anti-bleed pantheon and swap over to the one that makes it so burning ground does not hurt me, since you encounter so many burning ground altars.

In other news, my second big splurge should be here shortly. I ordered a Bambu Labs P1S with AMS combo and in theory I should be playing with it within the next week or so. A lot of the work that I have been doing out in my garage has been preparing for the ability to pick up a 3D printer and dive into that world. I have a bunch of things that I want to make and will probably talk about them some on this blog in the coming months. I mostly went with the Bambu Labs option because it seemed the most turnkey and beginner friendly. At some point I would like to also add a Resin printer to my mix, but for the moment I am getting started with what seems to have the lower barrier of entry and FDM with PLA and ABS. ABS really appeals to me becasuse of the ability to use the same plastic cement and sprue-glue that I am used to from plastic miniature kits. I will probably print more stuff in PLA however just for the ease of setup. I stayed out of this world not due to lack of interest, but more that I was waiting for things to stabilize a bit before buying something. We will see how this goes.

In other other news… I am doing considerably better and thanks for the warm wishes from folks over the last few days.