Destiny Rising

Onslaught with Friends

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I had quite a lot of fun running around in Destiny Rising with Ace and Ammo. Since we had last grouped Ammo had managed to finish up the main storyline which opened access to a whole slew of new activities. She had not experienced Gauntlet Onslaught, aka the raid at all and after taking down the Stronghold we had uncovered for the pack, we queued one by one through all of the parts of it. We also did all of the new Gauntlet Blitz modes that are being previewed right now, and have guaranteed weapon drops associated with them. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and while we struggled a bit with Issakkis, in finding a group that could do the mechanic… we cleared everything without much issue. We did fail once at breakin, but shifted our strategy to make sure that I was on the first bridge crew, and Ace was on the last bridge crew… because we had someone take a key on that last round and just mill around killing random stuff.

The big highlight of the night is that I finally pulled the Renegade ghost shell on my main account, which drops from the raid. I also pulled a second copy of Izanagi’s Burden, which will allow me to progress that weapon at some point for Tan-2 and Umeko. Though to be honest, if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to be bringing Helhest. I really love Maru the new champion and am working on leveling her up so that she can become one of my mains for progressing content. I needed someone that I really liked that could handle spread shinkas and she does so masterfully. I think Ace and I are going to hang out tonight and do some of the weekly reset content, and maybe tomorrow during the day a bit since I am off due to the holiday. I have business to take care of in the morning but should be home by noon and ready to roll.

Over in Path of Exile, it was a weekend of finishing things up. I ended the weekend with 115 of 115 maps completed, my four voidstones, and all of the map favorites unlocked except Sirius and the Feared. At some point I will run Sirius, but I have not done enough maps to gain the fragments yet. I just bought fragments for the other ones, and I guess I could do the same for Sirius but it did not feel that pressing. I’ve also completed a t17 which unlocked my six socket map device, and have started running proper maps loaded with scarabs and everything. Right now I am alternating between Shipyard and Toxic Sewer, because both are fairly decent maps for the type of gameplay I play… and not too bad honestly for the breach mechanic. They both offer at least some modicum of bottlenecking for the times when you have to defend Ailith.

When I dinged 96, I devoted some time to running through a bunch of boss encounters and I completed the pinnacle fight for Breach, where you fight both Not-Tul and Not-Esh together. I am not sure if it is always Tul and Esh or if you sometimes get the other combinations of the Breachlords that are not Chayula. The story of this Breach league is really interesting and I love how it is essentially setting up the events that ultimately lead to the coming of Xesht in Path of Exile II. I would love it if we got more of these betweener leagues that move the story forward for each league’s content. For example I would love an updated version of Abyss that brings us closer to what it is like in Path of Exile II, because it is SO MUCH better than defacto Abyss that we currently have. The only league I am scared about them changing is Delve, but that is mostly because I love it so much that I do not want them to fuck it up and make it no longer fun for me.

I’ve been slowly working on my build while leveling my character towards 100, and I picked up a Foulborn Red Dream jewel, which is helpful this league for stacking life. As a result I have almost 8000 life, and there are some other things that I could do to push it higher. Pohx showcased a version of his build running 10k life, and I effectively need to swap from Immortal Flesh to a well crafted Stygian Vise to get there. This was a rather costly swap because the jewel itself was 2 divines, and then each of the five tattoos needed was around 70 chaos. That said… I’ve never run Righteous Fire with this much health so it is at least worth doing for the time being. I feel a bit squishier than I have in previous incarnations of RF, and I am not entirely certain what is going on there. It might be that I currently only have 30% reduced crit damage. I am contemplating swapping in a Taste of Hate to also get more phys to elemental conversion.

I am also still working on getting some better gear upgrades. On the Tree Tree I am working on crafting a new pair of gloves, because while my current ones are pretty solid and I have yet been unable to replace them… I could also have way more life on them. I am still fairly proud of the Archedemon Crown and Shaper Shield that I crafted. I bought a new sceptre which I picked up fairly cheaply, and recently swapped over to a Cloak of Flame with more ignite duration, more fire resistance, and 5% reduced fire damage taken which is super useful. At some point I would love to get a good corruption for Annihilation’s Approach boots, but the best one is super expensive thanks to Pohx’s video about them. My amulet and rings are all sort of trash and could be improved greatly, but it really depends upon how much currency I want to pour into them. Now that I am delving around 200 depth reliably and running t16s easily, I can start generating way more currency.

The other thing that I added was a Light of Meaning, buffing fire damage. I lost some damage in the swap to the Red Dream jewel because I had to give up a jewel with fire multi on it. This single jewel swap pushed me well past where I was originally with the damage and took the entire build up into the 1.5 million-ish range, making the boss fights way more comfortable and the general mapping and delving way faster. Right now I have a jewel with Fire Multi and Max Fire Res on it, and swapping that for one with max life would be helpful… but those are running around 10 div at the moment and I do not have that. I tried the Sir Gog method of crafting Jewels with the Tree Tree for a bit, and didn’t have much luck. I have way more luck printing gloves, so I am back on that path for now. Essentially I am looking for gloves with 21% regen, 100+ flat life, 45+ fire res, 58+ dex… and then anything else that is useful life. I’ve gotten close a few times and have sold the failures. If I get a 21% regen fractured roll I might try either fossil crafting or harvest crafting to get the rest of the way there.

I am basically at the point in the league where I need to start chipping away at achievements so I can get my totem pole. The build is stable and reliable, and I can pretty much do any content on it. I am fishing for an Aul in Delve, but have not had much luck. One thing that I have noticed is that I think they have killed the curse on hit rings from Delve, either that or made them extremely uncommon. I’ve cleared a bunch of the elemental nodes down there and not seen a single one yet. I always beeline for these because they also reward elemental fossils, which I find way more useful than any of the loot other than the curse rings. According to the trade site, they still exist… but have either had their rarity cranked or my luck has just been shit. The death of Hexblast Mines though, pretty much decimated the market for these so it is not like they were selling well anyways. I used to throw 20c on each of them in the hopes that maybe one of them would move, but given the deflation of this league it seems like they are all around 1c each.

In other unrelated news… I have been watching Frieren for the last few weeks and finished up season one on Saturday. This show is extremely delightful and I highly suggest giving it a watch if you like that D&D party vibe. I would say it has thematic notes aligned with Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi except it is effectively the tale in reverse. Frieren was the Mage for a party that defeated the Demon King, and a huge part of the show is going on another adventure to somewhat retrace the steps that the first party made. Elves are effectively immortal in this universe, so the march of time just works differently for her… and the decade spent partying together… felt like a brief interaction for her. Through retracing the steps she is effectively realizing what she missed. You would think this would make the show deeply melancholy but it isn’t really, and through retracing the steps… she realizes how special the first journey was. Super charming honestly, and well worth a watch of the first 28 episodes. I will be anxiously awaiting the drop for season 2.

Blog Woes and Maru Booms

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Good Morning Folks. I did not get a blog post out yesterday, because for most of the day my site was bricked. This all started the night before with a deluge of spam, that my spam filter seemingly failed to remove. I cleared it up and decided I would investigate the issues in the morning. It seemed as though my site instance was being blocked from reaching out to any endpoints for WordPress, spam filter, the firewall rules, or even google site kit. After going around in circles with a tech twice, they finally escalated me up the tier and around 6:30 last night I got the above email. Apparently my site had received a blacklist complaint for serving up Malware. However they thoroughly scanned my files multiple times and found nothing of the sort. Weird that they took action without actually contacting me about it. I thoroughly scoured my email and found zero attempt to contact me regarding this issue. Things are resolved now and turned back on, but still highly frustrating.

Yesterday was the start of a new season in Destiny Rising, and with it comes a new mythic character called Maru. She had apparently been available during various phases of the alpha and beta testing for the game, and serves as this important niche that was previously only capable of being filled by Wolf or Ikora. The problem there is that neither of those champions are really worth investing a lot of rare resources into, because even fully kitted out… they will never feel as amazing as some of the later champions that came out. This is the problem with Gacha games, there will always be a concerted effort to make the Free characters feel nowhere near as good as the banner pulled characters. I had banked up a few “pink ship” pulls and managed to get a copy of her in my first 10 pull.

Essentially she is using the same class of primary weapon as Ikora, which is a single shot infinite ammo Grenade Launcher. Then she is using the same heavy weapon type as Wolf, which is a multi-shot Grenade launcher. Essentially she is all about explosions and I am not exactly sure why… but the kit feels so much better on her than it ever did on Ikora. Her first ability fires off multiple void grenades at the target, and the second ability provides a shield that then drops when you fire off a charged grenade attack. Her super is great because she bellows “Spray and Pray” and then lobs a heavy machinegun fire rate of grenade attacks at your target. It doesn’t last terribly long, but is pretty great for burn phases.

I ran the Legendary Story Mission on Challenge Difficulty with her and came in well under the gold timer. Sadly this will not count for either silver or gold, because I have yet to get out of bronze with her due to the limited amount of elemental fruit I had available to take her to rank 9 artifact gilding. I have her up to around 60k light, and she is absolutely going to be the next character I push up closer to 64k so I can start doing the Master/Grandmaster content with her. Essentially she fills a niche that I did not really have. For precision content I have Helhest, and for Rapidfire/Solar content I have Estela, but I did not have anyone that could really handle Spread Shinkas. She wrecks them with great abandon, and I pulled her exotic weapon which only serves to greatly improve her utility because it fires faster than the base grenade launchers do.

With today’s patch we also got access to three new Gauntlet Blitz maps, which are mostly better than the original three. I had to snap this screenshot because this represents what most of the night looked like. We queued into a Grandmaster Blitz and half of the party was playing Estela and the other half playing Maru. The thing that kind of sucks about Grandmaster content is that you can only run it once per character, per day… which means you have to go back and do this content multiple days in a row to burn down your limited access keys. I mean it creates scenarios where Ace and I have to group up together multiple days, which is not a bad thing. However I do loathe artificial impositions for play restrictions.

After running the new content in Destiny Rising, I moved downstairs and popped onto Discord for our weekly Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. We were down a Sita, though he popped in briefly to say he missed us while he was with family at Disney. It was kind of adorable honestly, and we also missed him. We largely ran Rifts in the first of the new expansion zones, which was great for me because I needed to grind out ranks in Skimmer mastery due to being knee capped by an early bug that I have already talked about. I got the needed rank and a good chunk towards the next rank, though I am probably going to to switch mastery tracks just in case I get gated by something in the zone specific one. It was a lot of fun, as it always is and I greatly love hanging out with Ammo and Sol and doing dumb things. Sometimes you just have to “F” it… which is the primary interaction key in Guild Wars 2.

Lastly over in Path of Exile I am wrapping up red maps on my Atlas and I legitimately have not really encountered any major difficulty spikes. I am in an awkward spot where I need a bunch of different gear pieces and things to happen before transitioning to the next phase of the build. I have a solid life gain block shield that has decent flat regeneration on it, and that will come in handy when I transition to block based. However at the same time I really need a six link helm, which I am working on crafting through delve. The challenge right now is I that I do not have much in the way of currency to spend, so I am having to go out and acquire the needed crafting resources myself which is slowing things down considerably. I think I have enough Divine Vessels to finish out my pantheon so that I can drop Purity of Elements and move to Purity of Fire, but I also need to acquire an Enlighten so that I can get to the res cap. Essentially there are a lot of moving parts but at some point I will click them all into place and shift up my tree. For the time being I am pushing ahead and should be able to complete maps and get at least my first two void stones without much issue.

The biggest challenge that I am having right now is that I am dealing with some health problems and have just not felt like myself for the last few weeks. A medication swap ended poorly, and yesterday I ran to the doctor to talk through the symptoms and it ended up with me having an in office EKG, glucose test, urine test, and ultimately doing a couple of different blood tests that I am waiting on results back from. This morning is the first morning of shifting things back to the way that they were and dropping the new med that seemed to be having some adverse reactions. Additionally I am getting a referral to a Cardiologist and getting signed up for a Colonoscopy since I have never had one of those. They are kind of grasping at straws because at face value… pretty much all of the tests so far have come back normal. If nothing else it was peace of mind, and will be further once the other specialists tag in. Basically I am in a weird place right now, and it is negatively impacting my gusto to push hard in games at the moment.

Having my spouse effectively drop dead in front of my eyes with no warning in July, has basically ratcheted up my sense of panic. I already have natural hypochondriac tendencies that my spouse helped walk me down from, so I am trying to not go into a rampant panic attack. Its scary in the world when you are all alone.

Dancing For Strangers

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Good Morning Folks. Today is like Rex Manning day… except it is the launch of the Keepers League in Path of Exile. I took the day off… which generally is a mistake to do for the launch of anything. However I have a stack of tasks that I am going to try and accomplish today well before the 2pm CDT launch time of the league. I am still trying to maintain a minimum amount of activity in Destiny Rising, and quite possibly the hardest thing that I do every day… is following around new lights and trying to get them to interact with me. I am sure it seems SUPER creepy to see this person following you around in Haven and doing a “Hey” which in my case is my Jolder dancing in front of them. Most do not have a clue what to do, but I am always super thankful when someone clicks on the bubble and responds back giving me those coveted mentor program interactions.

Since the Halloween event was a complete bust, Ace and I still got together last night and finished out our runs of Morgran’s Hunt. I did not get any more exotic weapons, but I did pull an exotic weapon mod from a silver key. We had what was probably our best run ever running with this trio of Estela. I am not entirely certain what it is about her kit, but she is the absolute best character to run Morgran’s Hunt or honestly any of the Morgran content. I am kind of hoping that we scored well enough to get the chat bubble, though it is not like I actually use chat enough for this to matter. I hate that these things are limited time and go away when the next event starts. Anything temporary like that makes me value it extremely lowly, when it comes to time spent.

We then yolo’d our way through the last two parts of the raid, and while I feel like I firmly grasp the third phase… I still have no real idea what was going on for the second. We ended up splitting up on seperate teams and I think I mostly followed the lead of the other players and we nailed the encounter on first attempt. The final boss aka the third phase of the raid was pretty fun, and I think in the future we will probably just queue for that. I lucked out and pulled the exclusive exotic shotgun from the middle phase, and weirdly enough pulled two copies of it at the same time because I spent one of the extra loot tokens. I can’t see actually using this weapon because Crescendo is just so good for Gwynn, and Jotun is so good for Xuan Wei. That leaves pretty much no one that can use a shotgun for whom this would be a good option. Still I will take the ascendancy points for picking up this. If nothing else it looks really cool.

We finished up in time for me to actually join in the reindeer games for Guild Wars 2. I did not originally intend on doing this, but folks were gathered and I was going to log into GW2 anyways… so I figured I might as well be social. We started the night with some RIBA but quickly transitioned to running Dragon’s Stand because Ashgar needed the Hero Points from it. It was wildly how fast we coalesced from not really having enough people… to wrecking everything in sight. Huge props to Sita for taking up the commander banner so that I did not have to. I was feeling somewhat out of it last night, and I did not really want to take responsibility for anyone but myself… even though being a commander in a meta like this is mostly just being in the correct lane. Folks have done the entire thing often enough that it mostly leads itself.

Right now I am really struggling to find forward momentum in the expansion for Guild Wars 2. The bug that I encountered have put me in a rather undesirable position. I had to hop onto an alt to fix the bugged state of my skimmer mastery. Then that unfortunately put me in a position where I effectively need to grind out two full ranks of the mastery so that I can keep progressing the main story. I hate that mastery points and such get blended into the story. I am very much the sort of person that wants to grind my way through all of the story at once, and any forced faffing about just ends up pissing me off. I get that Guild Wars 2 is trying to expose players to new mechanics and such, but it just feels bad when I have to stop progress to fiddle around in a zone. I love open world content, but I like doing it on my own terms, after I have unlocked everything.

I think the other thing that is harming my joy is that I am really amped for a new Path of Exile league, and mostly just want to be playing that. Visions of Eternity will be there waiting on me, and it is not like I am in any real rush. Hell, most of my crew that I am playing with are not even caught up to the point where I am with other expansions, so it is not like I need to rush in order to keep up with the pack. I’ve unlocked Galeshot, Ritualist, and Evoker and I will probably fiddle around with all three while doing dailies and weeklies going forward. However I doubt I make much progress in the expansion overall until after the newness of the first week of league start wears off a bit.

Festival of the Fail

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Today was the release of the Festival of the Lost event in Destiny Rising, and I have to admit I have been looking forward to this. Festival of the Lost was hands down my favorite event to occur in Destiny 2, and it always had some kind of cool trick or treat theming, and while the masks were entirely cosmetic it was still cool to collect them. So I have to admit I am more than a little disappointed in the event that we got. Since October 23rd when the roadmap of content for the event dropped, it was teased that we would be getting some sort of activity starting on the 30th and continuing through until November 13th. I had hopes this would be really cool, and maybe offer something interesting to chase.

Today is the 30th and the event has started, and effectively what we get… is a rebranding of Singularity in the Realm of the Nine for the Festival called the Haunted Singularity. Over the next ten days they are releasing a new section of the event, and each day you have access to run it once on Normal mode and once on Challenge mode where you can gain limited quantities of bulk resources. You also gain a currency called Eerie Amber that you can collect 15 per day, which then unlocks 8 Moebius Clusters over the course of the event, and at 100 Amber collected you get a Hive Pumpkin mask cosmetic. All of which would honestly be fine if the event were enjoyable.

The problem that I have is that the Realm of the Nine is fun, because it allows you to stack a bunch of overpowered abilities and see just how fast you can decimate the waves. Part of the process of unlocking Trial of the Nine is spending points on this talent tree of sorts, that allows you to reroll modifiers if you get three that are bummers. Unfortunately the Haunted Singularity doesn’t have access to those perks and you pretty much are stuck with whatever you get for choices. Most of these take away powers, and instead replace them with ways to collect candy. So it means you are effectively taking way the fun portion of Realm of the Nine and replacing them with a candy grind. I will do these each day, but largely out of a general feeling of obligation rather than enjoyment. I will chain run Realm of the Nine Chaos mode for the pure love of the event, even if I am not getting good rewards for doing so.

So you are probably thinking… Hey Bel, what about the candy grind? Does it give you anything good? I mean technically you get a Season of Daybreak Engram for each Candy Bucket that you craft. It takes 200 candy to craft a bucket, and these give you one guaranteed Engram and 60 Bright Dust. Both of which feel like they are pretty underwhelming rewards. If you have not opened many Seasonal Engrams, then I guess this might be a way of getting them, Generally speaking however they mostly just reward stickers and weapon shaders, with the rare chance at maybe getting a weapon skin. I hope they improve these for the next season because they have largely felt like a pointless grind. The only thing unique or interesting in this event is that Pumpkin Helmet, which I will get because I am that kind of dumb… but it isn’t necessarily something I am excited to be doing.

The other thing that is somewhat frustrating about the event is that new players are largely going to be excluded from the heroic content. It suggests 65k light in order to run it, and that is honestly not the easiest thing to acquire in the world. New lights are absolutely not going to be able to participate, and for the tryhards… I am not really sure there is anything in this event that is that worth chasing. Admittedly we are all probably going to get the pumpkin hat, because it exists… but I am hoping that maybe they add something else to the later phases of the event because neither the candy grind or any of the rewards from it seem that interesting.

On the more positive side of things, we did get a preview of what the next season is going to look like. We are getting a new map, new gauntlet blitz, and new activities. Additionally Maru, which is a character from the closed testing phases is going to be available. However I believe she has effectively the same weapon loadout as Ikora, so I am not really sure it is going to be worth chasing. It looks like maybe there is an exotic associated with her that we are getting skins for as well. I mean a new map will be pretty great, and that more than anything is what the game needs… new areas to explore and new things to do. However they also really need to go through the content that is not being played, and give it some chase drops that give people reasons to play it. Trials of the Nine Chaos mode is so good because even without any of the daily pinnacle rewards, you still have a chance at getting exotic artifacts… albeit really slim.

In the funny side of things… I spent the pull currency that I got from the event and for the maintenance patch and got my last Ikora needed to have a fully decked out version. Again… she is quite possibly the worst character currently in the game, but we have fun playing her. I also have a fully talented out version of Finnala, which is similarly not a great character and mostly a worse version of Wolf. I am looking forward to my time away from the game playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping when I drop this game down into maintenance mode levels of play… it will get better and I will be excited to come back to it. Likely still going to keep doing dailies, but today I could not be bothered with trying to get three new lights to interact with me for the mentor quest.

I think I might just be grumpy and disappointed. Though that said, I cannot see anyone excited about the Festival of the Lost in this state.