Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

Bungie 30th Anniversary

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Hey Friends, I have been struggling to attach to games this week… and honestly last week as well. Having finished Endwalker, I have been purposefully staying away from that game in my small way of trying to help with congestion so that more people can get through it. I get that I am just one person… but if more people took a step away for a bit, more folks would get to experience that great expansion. In the meantime I have been floundering a bit to find new purpose and booted up Destiny 2 on a whim… and it more or less stuck. I think mostly my mental and emotional speed right now is “mindless shootymans game”. It doesn’t hurt that there is a 30th Anniversary event going on in game and with it a bunch of interesting drops.

The best of these for my purposes is the BXR-55 Battler which is essentially a pulse rifle patterned off of the Battle Rifle from Halo. The default load out has it burst firing, but I have slotted in a mod that shifts mine to full auto making it a pretty great primary weapon. What I really dig about this weapon is the accuracy and range and the ability to hip-fire it reliably. Which effectively gives me a single weapon that can be scoped for something akin to a scout rifle for picking off targets at range, or hip-fired to give me something that feels like an auto rifle. I have this sneaking feeling that this is going to eventually get nerfed because it seems to be dominating the meta a the moment.

There are a whole slew of other weapons that are in honor of past Bungie games. If you were more of a Covenant person, you can pick up the Retraced Path which is sort of themed after the Carbine. It also serves as the first legendary quality trace rifle, with the rest of weapons in that category taking up your exotic slot. If the Energy Sword was more your jam, the game has two “half” energy swords that make me wonder if we are eventually going to get an exotic quest to join them into the true Energy Sword equivalent. I never played Marathon because I did not have access to a Mac, but apparently the shotgun that drops is in honor of that game. There is a grenade launcher dropping and I have no clue what it is themed after other than it bears resemblance to the Mountain Top.

The new game mode that drops most of these weapons is called Dares of Eternity and is a weird “game show” hosted by the Starhorse and Xur. Essentially you spin a wheel and this chooses what type of enemy you face during that round. You battle your way through multiple rounds and then face a classic Destiny 1 boss at the very end. There is a scoring system which allows you to complete bounties for the Starhorse, and a more general series of bounties that you can complete for Xur. You win at least one key per round and can also get Strange Coins from doing other activities during the Anniversary Event that you can turn in for more keys or other items. If you unlock enough caches and save up enough keys you can earn things like ships or sparrows as well as I believe a full armor set.

All in all it is some “big dumb fun”, and I think that is what my brain needs right now. There is a new DLC dungeon that I would love to get a group for at some point so I can pick up Gjallarhorn which is tied to completing it. Additionally there is a quest chain that unlocks an exotic sidearm that is based off of the pistol from Halo that I would like to get as well. Mostly I am spending my time doing Dares of Eternity over and over, but I have started knocking out some weekly rewards to try and get my light level up there. It is still not the best system in the world, but after New World I know that it could be so much worse.

Bleeding Earthquakes

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Good Morning Friends! I had a very rough weekend for a few different reasons. The main reason however is that Friday night my wife and I had the Pfizer COVID booster along with the Flu Shot. This was maybe not the best idea because I had all sorts of symptoms over the weekend and had no real clue if it was the Booster or the Flu shot, but absolutely know that both arms were sore as hell Saturday morning. We survived and I am feeling much better so far this morning, but yesterday was a bit rough. Saturday was largely “splitting headache” and everything aches territory, and yesterday was run a fever and feel like I am going to die for a couple of hours in the afternoon then things start to fade away. Interesting thing we heard about the booster is that the efficacy should only take about 48 hours to kick in, which means we should be good for any Thanksgiving shenanigans.

The above screenshot is from Final Fantasy XIV as I dipped in briefly over the weekend to try and start to get back into the swing of logging in again. I managed to finish the Doman Enclave and with it comes a really cool ceremony that reminds me of the similar ceremony from Horizon Zero Dawn. I need to find my footing in the coming weeks in FFXIV again, and spend a good deal of time cleaning out my retainers because a large part of the whole “level everything to 80” campaign was so that I could safely chuck a bunch of unneeded gear into the bin… or more likely feed it to the Grand Company vendor for seals. The other part of this that needs to happen is to cobble together some outfits for my retainers themselves as a number of them are quite high up in various professions.

Most of my weekend was spent playing Outriders and the New Horizon patch is in fact good. I got together with Waren a bit on Saturday and ran through some expeditions where he carried me an extreme amount. The rest of the weekend was spent trying to grind up the resources in order to catch up my gear to where maybe I won’t be quite the “backpack” that I ended up being. I also spent some time exploring various builds, and ended up changing my spec up completely to one focused on earthquake and bleed effects. I’ve never NOT been the center tree of Devastator so it is interesting how little it makes a difference survival wise dropping to what I thought was one of the “DPS” trees.

For those who might be curious here is my current talent choices and skills being used composited together into a single screenshot. Here is a note for developers where build diversity is a key part of your game. Maybe you should create a single screen that someone can take a screenshot of that includes all of the relevant choices made for that specific character. It would be nice if it had a rundown of the various bonuses being applied from gear along with the skills chosen and relevant talent choices. I’ve needed to fake out one of these screens so many times while playing different games when I wanted to share my “build” with my readers. I can’t think that I am the only one who wants to do this thing and surely it would be simple enough to create a screen that summarizes all of the various bits of data you already have access to.

I have also been spending a fair amount of time playing my “main alt” which is the Technomancer. Thing I have learned about Outriders at least, but I am wondering if it applies to all third person shooters… is that apparently I prefer playing a female character model because it takes up less space on the screen. The male character in outriders is kinda bulky, and is occluding a fair amount of the visual area… and honestly I sorta wish I could gender change my main to being something more svelte and taking up less space. I remember having this issue with the Norn in GW2, and why I ended up going with the much smaller Human when I rolled a main after beta. I need to pay more attention to this in the future and see if this is something that carries over to other games.

Lastly I am not going to talk about it much this morning, but I left a heated review of New World on Steam over the weekend. I’ve uninstalled the game and I am not really ready to talk about it in any manner that does not come across as angry gibberish yet. If you are super curious I littered my Twitter account with random threads throughout the weekend. Basically Patch 1.1 killed my desire to play the game with its changes to the end game camps, and after growing steadily more agitated Saturday night while recording the podcast… I decided it was better for my mental health to uninstall and force myself to walk away from it. The only game that I have ever loved this much and see managed this poorly is World of Warcraft, and I think that is probably why my posts on that game often come across as angry drivel as well. Key difference being that anger was spread out over a decades worth of decisions… and this was all crammed in a two month period making it seem so much worse.

Adjorjan Still Lives

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Hey Friends! Still enjoying my recent return to Outriders. I am not playing a ton of it, but I am popping in periodically to collect some loot before scooting off again. Most recently I have been working on my Technomancer… which I apparently call Marksman in my most recent video. I have to admit at this point I don’t remember any of the names of the classes that are not Pryomancer because that one is pretty clear cut. Mentally I think of them as the Hunter, Tank, and Assassin even though those are technically called Technomancer, Devastator, and Trickster. You can obfuscate the holy trinity out but I will always ultimately use it as the lens in which I view online games.

I actually recorded a really quick video at lunch, because while I did one over the loot cave mission I never actually updated it to include the more recent method I use for gear farming. Essentially what I do more often than not is reset the Typhon Hunt mission and run it over and over. Each time it drops at least two epic items and now that I am largely farming gear for cosmetics, it is a great way to get five or six potential unlocks in really short order. I’ve heard that at higher tiers it is possible to get legendaries to drop this way, but I have never actually had that happen. What it is useful for is farming up a bunch of drops to collect mods and appearances which is how I am utilizing it on my alt.

Another thing that happened yesterday is a big new world patch, that had a number of less than awesome consequences. Firstly a number of the items that I carry around in my inventory to swap for equipment got downgraded from Purple to Blue. Additionally something seems to have changed with the way health is calculated and in the process without changing any gear or my attributes I have lost roughly 1500 health. Another super frustrating change is the regeneration from food seems to have been nerfed significantly with the regen tick rate being 1% of your health every 2.5 seconds. I can still do the drinking water trick to trigger slightly faster regeneration but overall it feels like I am struggling to stay alive more than I did previously.

A number of camps have been ruined due to changes in the patch as well, with Priests no longer being as doable because you can no longer skip the corruption portal due to terrain changes. This made me want to go check out our good friend Adjorjan to see if any changes were made to ruin that farm. When I talked about it previously I did not include a map, but he can be found in Edengrove and initially I went out there last night in the hopes of getting a Void Gauntlet to play with. What ensued instead was a combination of Waren, Eliyon, and I ended up farming him for about two and a half hours. He still drops relevant gear and while the watermark increases seem to have slowed they were still happening especially with weapons. So this is very much still a valid camp for watermarking purposes.

I am a little concerned about some of the other things that I heard throughout the night. The zerg on our server starts at 5:30 my time and I was not online and available to do content when it started up so I did not participate last night. However I have heard that there are some sort of anti-zerg mechanics that have more or less made Myrkgard a pain in the butt to run like we used to. Again I did not experience these first hand, but hearing discussion about things being unkillable to a large group of players, but a smaller group could take it out without issue. The zerg and priest farms were honestly the most enjoyable things I had experienced in the game and if both of those are effectively dead… I do sorry about my longevity with the title. Amazon seems to be making sweeping changes regularly that swing between extremes… and I am not sure how on board I am with their master vision right now.

I don’t care at all about PVP and if they make PVE content too painful I will just end up wandering off… as will I think most of the less hardcore player base. A lot of what they are doing feels like stalling to me… trying to spread the butter super thin to slow players down and buy them time to release more content. This has happened a lot in other games as the developers have this “oh god they are consuming content too fast!” moment. The watermark system was painful enough as is, but if they are actively ruining the farms we had developed to raise our level… then I am not sure it is worth sticking around. I know in December when Endwalker releases I am probably gone anyway, but was hoping to enjoy the remaining month here.

In other news it seems like at least someone in the guild “Run It” has found my blog post about the fall of Everfall. I feel like I need to qualify my definition of a Slum Lord when it comes to New World. If you own territory but are not keeping the machinery upgraded and keeping a constant flow of townboard quests going for your patrons to complete and assist in the leveling process… then by my personal definition you are a Slum Lord. At the time in which I posted this… most of the towns were running a full compliment of quests but as I myself was using them to level… I noticed that Monarch’s Bluff never really had any other than the default free “Upkeep” quests. Run It has done a perfectly cromulent job of running Everfall the two times they have held it, but Monarch’s Bluff is still unappreciated. So if y’all are reading this blog stop being a Slum Lord and load some damned quests for people to complete. Additionally the Freeze thing y’all were doing WAS an exploit and it WAS patched by New World, so I stand by everything I said.

Outriders Wants Us Back

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Hey Folks! Sorry that a blog post never actually materialized yesterday. I have had a couple of really hellishly busy week, which means I just did not have time to deal with a blog post yesterday morning. By the time I had finally cleared my schedule enough to bang out a post… apparently my host had some significant issues and the database server associated with my blog had died horribly. When this issue was resolved I was back to being busy as hell, and as a result no post happened. What I was going to talk about actually was better delayed because yesterday the Outriders New Horizon update released and I got my hands on it.

I am going to be honest… this year has been a rough year for me and as a result mentally I assumed this game came out in 2020… and not April of this year. So when I heard there were new updates going into the game my first reaction was “wow that took awhile”. I mean it did take over six months to receive our first meaty and substantial update, which I guess makes sense given that they advertised it from the very beginning as not being a “live service” game. What Outriders New Horizon brings is a bunch of tweaks to the way that the game plays along with a few new expeditions, which are the games end game dungeons. Here is a rundown of the features that I am aware of:

  • 4 New Expeditions
  • Timers Removed as Reward Qualifier for Expeditions
  • Improved Relevance of Drops
  • Crossplay Actually Works as Intended
  • New Chase Epic Weapons hidden in each Expedition
  • New Legendary Vendor with “Random” legendary available
  • Full Transmog/Cosmetic Appearance System
  • Worldslayer Expansion coming in 2022

Of these the one that I spent the most time playing with last night was of course the Transmog system. Essentially if you bring up your menu, at any point you can hit L to go into the appearance customization system. From here you have total control over the look and feel of your character, and I say feel specifically because you can customize your weapons to sound a specific way if for some reason there is a gun that you like but cannot stand its timbre. It uses an appearance acquisition system, so as you get drops it will automagically collect its appearance for you to begin using. This means for me who has progressed through the story already… I am going to have to farm content in order to see those drops start appearing. For a new player whoever in theory just playing through the game will make sure a large number of these items are filled out, and given that this is cross account… it might make me suddenly care about playing alts.

It is time once again to break out the handy graphic that I recreated showing mission difficulty as it scales with both Expedition Challenge Tier and Story Mode World Tier. I spent most of yesterday running around on World Tier 15, which is completely manageable. However as I start going into expeditions I am realistically going to need to start doing Tier 9 if I want to start seeing improvements. One of my biggest problems with Expeditions was the timer, and with it gone I am suddenly significantly more interested in that content. Additionally now that they have hidden chase weapons in all of the expeditions, it becomes a more interesting proposition for me to take my time and crawl through the dungeon experience. For pure farming last night I returned to good ole Typhon hunt mission and at some point I will do some of my “loot cave” to see what appearances I can collect easily.

I enjoyed Outriders quite a bit, and returning last night has made me realize who much I actually did. The core problem with the game for me was that all of my immediate circle of AggroChat folks bounced heavily for thematic reasons. The story is bleak as fuck, and it is very hard to chew through. I think of us only Tam actually made it all the way through, and he isn’t the sort to repeatedly farm content for loot. However there are other communities that I am a member of that did play a bit longer, and I am hoping through those I might be able to find some groups and actually try multiplayer content. I would like to actually push my gear level up a bit higher and farm some more legendary gear, but in order to do that I think I am going to need to play with a somewhat balanced team.

For those interested in maybe returning, it seems that you can for at least a little while get a free weapon from Tiago. The weapon that he has currently is The Juggler, which is probably my favorite auto rifle in the game. It has this truly broken ability to fire a grenade at your target that does silly amounts of damage each time you reload the weapon. This means that I abuse this by reloading constantly to get another free grenade. The weapon also comes with Minefield II, which causes a bunch of bombs to drop down each time you kill an enemy. On the version I use regularly I replaced Minefield II with Minefield III which changes the grenade condition from “On Kill” to “On Crit” making it much more reliable for burning down elites with. I will need to take some time to dust off the cobwebs and relearn the basics of the game, but I figure before long I will be spending at least some of my week grinding expeditions.