MMORPG

Tequatl and Phrecia

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I am still playing a heck of a lot of Guild Wars 2. Last night I spent my evening doing sibling time with Ace, and I feel bad for how not into GW2 they are…. yet I continue to talk about it. I managed to catch Tequatl last night, which always makes me happy. This is, without a doubt, my favorite event in the game. I think it was legitimately one of the first events that I stumbled onto on my own, and I have loved it ever since. I have also had better-than-average luck at getting ascended gear. In fact, I have a few coffers in the bank waiting to be used by someone. At some point, I need to start properly working on legendary armor sets.

I, of course, had to set loose the Pineapple Choya. These are, without a doubt, the best parts of the Castoria housing, and I have to set them free anytime I am in housing collecting my harvest nodes. Basically, right now I am only playing Belgraves, my hunter, for dailies and assorted reset collection. I have my housing, then three guild halls to collect resources from. Additionally, I have a bunch of characters parked at various chests around the world. These are mostly for collecting rare resources that can only be gotten daily. The level of detail in this game and the systems within systems is one of the things that attracts me. However, in talking with Ace, one of the biggest problems is how far behind you feel when you are just starting out.

I’ve been spending most of my time on Belglorian, my spearbender guardian. At this point, I have completed four of the Human zones, four of the Norn zones, and last night I spent the majority of my time doing world completion. I am currently working on the final Norn zone, and at some point will return to the Human lands and pick up the final zone there. This is still the chillest activity in any game, I swear. There is just something relaxing about following the marker to all of the objectives that I have not completed. I think I am over halfway through the zone I am working on.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have now made it far enough to collect the free passive skill that comes from a player having sacrificed their level 100 character to the void. I really think this concept is cool, that one player in each league can sacrifice themselves to give everyone an extra passive. I have been grinding away on my Raven RF Witch, trying to get it to level 90 and knock out one of the achievements. The build works well enough, but is nowhere near as broken as some of the other popular builds in this league. I had to drop one of my minions, which was a bit of a bummer, but I picked up Morior Invictus to greatly increase my survivability. It is unfortunate that this one chest piece is better than pretty much anything else in the game.

All of this said, I am very likely dropping POE2 entirely tomorrow when the Trial of the Ancestors Returns event happens in Path of Exile. The big thing about this event is that we get back Trial of the Ancestors, but with the Phrecia ascendancies. The big thing about it is that we are getting these alternate ascendancies without the bullshit that is the Gauntlet, and without the Idol-based Atlas passives. I played a Poison SRS build on the Servant of Arakali build during the gauntlet and had a lot more fun, but would have had way more fun if I could have just played it in a normal league. As a result, I am resurrecting BelLovesArakaali and seeing how far I can take it without all of the restrictions. The event starts at 5 pm CDT, and I am hoping I can get back from chemo, take a nap, and be ready for the launch.

Have you made a return to Guild Wars 2? Are you still playing Path of Exile II? Are you going to try the upcoming Phrecia event tomorrow? Drop me a line below.

World Completion Still Chill

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Good Morning, Folks. The other day, I talked about easing my way back into Guild Wars 2. In theory, at this point, I am fully back and having quite a lot of fun. I had been playing my Ranger Main and mostly focused on World Bosses. However, last night I swapped to Belglorian, my Spear Willbender Guardian, because I realized that I needed more gifts from world completion to start working through my backlog of legendary weapons. I honestly have a bunch of fun with this character, and I think at some point I started working on zones, because I have more unlocked than I was expecting.

A lot of my nights still focus on the Wizard’s Vault daily and weekly quests. Right now, the reset is at 7 pm CDT, so as soon as that happens I essentially recieve new marching orders as to what to focus on. Last night was pretty straightforward, as the daily quests generally are. The days that I like the least are the days that ask me to go someplace in the world and kill mobs. For whatever reason, this tends to be Cantha a lot, and for some reason, that seems to be the place I am least likely to be. Thankfully, you can get an easy port from our guild hall. It is not that I dislike Cantha; I just like the zone metas far less than some of the other areas of the game.

Last night was Thursday Funday as it has become known, and around reset, we all joined up in Guild Wars 2. It has been a very long time since we were all playing the same game, and it was nice to run around as a group. Since Summer Games Fest and the Weekly both required event completion in Orr zones, we opted to do that for a few hours. This meant that not only did I knock out my dailies, but I also finished up my weeklies. Generally speaking, I dislike Orr… but Sita loves it so he was seemingly happy as a clam to be leading us around Cursed Shore. Mostly, I dislike that everything in the zone is hyper aggro, which makes sense given that this was the original Endgame for the base content.

At some point, I tagged out of the group because my stamina for all things is pretty low right now. At that point, I returned to the super chill process of World Completion. Admittedly, it is only as chill as it is because I have a skyscale. Thankfully, the process of obtaining that mount got a little easier with Secrets of the Obscure. However, even if all you have is the Raptor or Warclaw, you can have a pretty great time zipping through the zones from objective to objective. This is peak Guild Wars 2 for me, honestly, just roaming around aimlessly and completing random stuff. I am wondering how many days it is going to take me to get 100%, because I did not even finish Queensdale last night.

That is what I have been up to in Guild Wars 2. Especially on Thursdays, if you are in the guild and see us doing stuff, give us a holler, and we would be more than happy to loop you in. If you need a good guild home, and we are mutuals in each other’s orbit for a while, hit me up as well. We got plenty of room in [GREY] for new folks, and it would give you a reasonably well-appointed Guild Hall to farm each day.

Easing Back In

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Good Morning, Folks! It has been a while since I played Guild Wars 2. Around the drop of the current expansion, I flaked out and stopped playing. My guess is that this correlated with the launch of a Path of Exile league, but whatever the case may be, it has been a bit. We had a regular Thursday night group for months, and it was glorious, but as we all sort of faded away, we started playing other games. The activity of getting together on Thursdays has continued, but the unified game that we were all playing has mostly stopped. I am not saying that I think we will band around Guild Wars 2 again, but lately I have found myself missing it. The glider gameplay of Spirit Crossing feels very similar to movement in GW2, so it made me nostalgic.

The thing that I love the most about Guild Wars 2 is the drop-in nature of activities. As a result, it was super easy for me to get straight into the action, and I spent a bit of time doing World Bosses. These are probably my single favorite activities in game, and were ultimately the thing that sold me on Guild Wars 2 as a whole. I missed Tequatl, which is hands down my favorite event, but managed to catch the boss in Queensdale and a few others. I figured a good way to ease back in was to focus on the various Astral Ward weeklies. There is apparently a legendary kit up and available that I do not have, so in theory, I should probably pick it up if for no other reason than providing me gifts to complete other legendaries.

I also spent quite a bit of time last night in Desert Highlands, hoping that someone would fire up bounties, but it never happened. I realize I can easily do bounties since I have a commander tag, but I was not feeling social enough to make that happen. Instead, I worked on various events that spawned and slowly chipped away at the alternate conditions for that achievement. I did manage to gather up a bit of a group, but we never formalized it with a commander tag. Again, I love how easy it is for others to tag in and follow along and get completion on events. This is really the strong point of Guild Wars 2, and I am hoping that when we get Guild Wars 3, it will have this same functionality.

I had quite a bit of fun, but ultimately ran out of steam around 9:30 pm when I headed to bed. This is the problem that I have had with gaming under chemo, is that gaming exhausts me in the same way that literally anything else does. I wonder if it is mental exhaustion as much as it is physical. I have two more rounds of chemo in front of me, so the end is in sight. I am just hoping that I bounce back pretty quickly. I know I will be rolling into radiation pretty quickly, but it sounds like it will not be as extreme as chemo has been. I think Guild Wars 2 might be my speed, because it allows me to engage as deeply as I want to or as shallow as I might need.

Spirit Crossing is Great

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I’ve been a big fan of Spryfox games since I got hooked on Alphabear, and have played at least a bit of every game released since then. One of the games that I had looked forward to was Spirit Crossing, right up until the point that I found it was initially going to be mobile only. While I play games on my phone, I have no interest in playing a game as complicated as Genshin Impact on that device. So I waited and have apparently been rewarded with that patience, as you can now join the Steam Playtest. Mo was faster on the uptake on this one, but I joined in starting Sunday morning. Last night we played together during our regularly scheduled sibling time, and the game is a heck of a lot of fun with other players.

One of the first things that happens to you as a new arrival is that you are tossed straight into a storm. These are the only real dangeous encounters in the game, and there are these giant spirits that remind me of the Hollows from Bleach. Essentially, during a storm, your stamina does not regenerate, and I have not pushed my luck to see what happens if I stay out in the storm for too long. During this first storm, a spirit gets damaged, and your initial mission is to try to help her out by collecting fragments that were knocked out of her in the crash landing.

It would not be a Spryfox game if you were not immediately introduced to a rather losenge shaped bear. The lost bear ultimately becomes Roomie, your mildly curmudgeon room mate and guide to helping you figure out how to repair Maya. The only annoying thing about the game is that you are time-gated not only in the collection of resources, but also in questing. For example, I have a quest right now telling me to go somewhere…. but the somewhere is not available to me, and I figure logging back in today will grant me access. This is very much the sort of game where you want to play a little bit of it every single day. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, in that it ultimately limits how much time I need to spend in-game each day.

The collection mostly comes in the form of a harvest mini game, where a small ring will appear on the screen, and you are supposed to hit the E button when another ring appears within that space. Not all collection functions like this, for example, you can just pick up flowers and fruit, but ore and wood specifically require you to play this game. The more you harvest, the more skills you gain, allowing you to upgrade your tools and, as such, harvest more difficult things. The pickaxe and axe have upgraded rather quickly, but others like the shovels, machete, and shears have gotten almost no progress. I need to roam around aimlessly a bit more in the entry lands because I think there is more of the low-level vines that you use with your machete.

I am having a heck of a lot of fun. It very much lives in the “cozy MMO” genre like Pokopia and Animal Crossing. It seems like anyone can sign up for testing currently via the Steam page. However, if that changes, here is a sign-up code that I was able to generate from my account. If you are at all interested in this sort of game, I highly suggest checking it out. Weirdly, it reminds me of Guild Wars 2 if you took out the combat elements. I think this is probably the heavy reliance on gliders to get around, and the core focus on harvesting materials, both of which I do plenty in GW2. Clearly, I need more real-world friends in-game because there are things that need four players to optimize.

Probably my favorite aspect of the game is what happens when a storm comes into the wilderness. Players flock around a fire to wait it out, and inevitably, someone starts playing music. You can then join in with your own instrument and play a jaunty tune to pass the time. The players that show up as shadowy are folks you have not introduced yourself to. I’ve made it my mission to try to introduce myself to every player around the fires so that I can see more friends on the map when I am doing stuff. Making random friends is deeply charming. Eventually, you get the ability to trade gifts with other players, which will increase your friendship levels. What this actually means in the grand scheme of things, I don’t really know, other than some gifts are gated by this level.

Anyway, if anything I have said interests you, then I highly suggest you check out Spirit Crossing.