Dawntrail

The Thousand Theory

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Good Morning Folks. This has been a really weird week for Destiny Rising. Yesterday was “sibling time” and Ace and I did our normal Grandmasters and Hang thing… but it was far less chill than normal. We started the evening with another attempt at Calamity Ops, but still could not get out of the relegation zone. We had what felt like a perfect run, or as close to perfect as we were likely going to be getting… and still came up short of progressing. So in theory on Thursday we will drop down a rank, but so long as we both drop at the same time life should be fine. Hopefully we can have a really good double progression during the next two week period and move back up again. We struggled a bit with our Grandmaster Strike after that but it was nowhere near as bad as our worst week ever so we were doing pretty good. Mostly we both just came off as exhausted and spent the next hour or so chatting while doing random stuff in game.

We’ve also had a really weird week when it comes to the Pack Hunt map. Thankfully we have another guild member that has been helping us out. However until last night, every single three node that could be a stronghold has not turned into one. A few weeks back Ace came up with this theory on how to move around the map and we have been continuing to test that theory, and for the most part I think it works. I can’t say for certain we understand every aspect of it, but there does seem to be a method to the madness when it comes to moving around the map and avoiding large obstacles like mountain ranges and lakes. This is in large part why you see such weird patterns of movement that we have made on the map, because there are a limited number of total moves that we get during a week, so want to try and make as much progress as we can with those.

So essentially the theory is this… the nodes that reward 1000 Energy are always going to lead you in the right direction. This could be just towards a potential stronghold objective, or towards a break in an obstacle wall. if you see 1000 Energy available as a node reward, far as we can tell you ALWAYS want to take it. Next up is if you see three resoruces being rewarded at the same time… this seems to signify one of two things. Either you are going to get a combat node, which often times serve as breaks in obstacles like mountain ranges or lakes… or you are going to for certain uncover a stronghold when you get to a three node block. What you want to avoid however is 500 Energy nodes and single resource nodes, because these often are indicators of a mountain range or another obstacle, or that you are heading towards one. Essentially there seems to be this minesweeper type logic that you can follow to figure out how to route around the map. Sometimes you are going to have to just yolo it and try a node, hoping you find one of the breadcrumb nodes later however because there is not always a good node up to follow.

I have multiple accounts set up for Destiny Rising, in part to help us unlock nodes on the Pack Hunt map, and also gain energy to keep funding the “bitcoin miner” in our guild hall. I spent a good chunk of last night while hanging out and talking with “Erasure” trying to get my second account set up to the point where I have three Iron Commander missions every day, so that I can get an easy 60 pinnacle rewards done for daily progress. At some point I really need to get my third account through the main story so that I unlock more options there as well. I wish we could recruit more people to the cause, so that neither Ace or I felt the need to run alt accounts…. but alas this seems to mostly be a sibling endevour. So long as we can technically keep making things happen with just us forcing it, I am okay with that.

In other news I am probably going to be trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV soon. “Erasure” never got through A Realm Reborn, and I have been drafted to the cause of helping her get through some of the content, specifically the content that does not have trust support yet. Some of this is probably going to be doing a bit of nerves bolstering as we queue together for Crystal Tower, so that I can hang out on voice and explain some of the mechanics to make it a bit less fraught. My hope is that this gets me back into the swing of playing my Warrior main, and can start chipping away at the post patch content for Dawntrail. I’ve picked up some gear so that I can move forward in the MSQ, but just need to get back to the point where my muscle memory will take over again.

Anyways. I hope yall are having a most excellent week. I am starting to get worried for next week because I am out due to a colonoscopy, and it is my first one…. so yeah a bit worried about how that will go. I am not sure how much blogging will happen, because it will ultimately depend on where I am both nerves wise and health wise throughout the week.

The Catch-Up Tax

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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday, because admittedly I am going through a bit of a funk. I’ve been fighting what I think is allergies, because ragweed is booming and it is traditionally my worst allergy. However it has been a struggle to drag myself out of bed in the morning and find the oomph to get up and around. I was looking forward to the launch of Legion Remix yesterday, but was not entirely certain when it would be rolling out. I noticed that the servers were still down when I attempted at lunch, and then after work I was able to get in and create a character. The challenge with Remix in general… is I have multiple copies of every class so I had no clue what I actually wanted to play. Originally I thought I would roll a hunter, but I have to admit I was not feeling it at all last night. I think I have just gotten too used to the action combat style of ARPGs and Guild Wars 2, and the game-play felt so sluggish.

This morning I rolled a Demon Hunter, because it is pretty action oriented and we will see if I can get into Legion Remix with this character. I rolled it on Eonar, which is a server that a friend of mine who no longer plays the game, plays on… but if they ever come back… I will at least have another character to poke around on over there. To be fair, I have also not been able to get into retail wow at all, and am only on the second zone of the War Within expansion… making almost no progress the last few times I have logged in and tried. I am wondering if Panda Remix was just magic in a bottle, and happened to be the right thing at the right time to catch my attention. Legion is without a doubt my favorite expansion, but I am wondering if World of Warcraft is just not for me anymore. I rebound a bunch of keys to try and make it feel better. I will give the Demon Hunter a spin over lunch, and see if I can catch it up to at least as far as I got the Hunter last night.

There is a new event going on in Diablo IV where they are lavishing the players with loot. Essentially each time you loot a whisper cache, you get an extra one and apparently the drop rates of chaos armor have been amped up significantly. Additionally they have finally fixed the Spires in Infernal Legions so that they cause monsters to rush in and attack you, and also spawn monsters from within making them significantly faster to clear. I knocked out one achievement on the seasonal journey last night, namely the one for doing an Infernal Legion with over 1000 aether gained in Torment IV. The remaining objectives are all pretty awful, but at some point I will probably make an attempt at them. Essentially I need to catch a Helltide as it is spawning… that also happens to have the Chaos Rift objective associated with it and then clear as many as I can. The problem with all of this… is that other players are going to get in the way of the remaining objectives. So I essentially need to play at a low population time if I am going to be successful at any of this.

Since I could not play Legion Remix over lunch, I decided to unlock the Monster Hunter Wilds quest in Final Fantasy XIV. There were a lot of things happening to land on exactly the same day… new WoW patch, new FFXIV patch, Legion Remix, and Halloween event starting in Guild Wars 2. The intro quest was pretty short as I followed around a palico in the wild west zone adjascent to Tuliyollal. It did not take long until I had unlocked the duty associated with the quest, which is to fight a Guardian Arkveld… aka the signature beast from Monster Hunter Wilds. There is a weapon set and a cosmetic gear set for doing the quest, as well as the ability to unlock a Seikret mount which are the feathered bird raptor things from MHW. Unfortunately I hit the wall quickly that I knew I would… which is that my gear level was not 725 aka the requirement for doing the duty.

So I did the thing that I have done many times before… and bought my way out of the gear slump. It cost around a million gil total, but I bought all of the left side items… aka weapon, and armor pieces, in order to be able to queue for the duty. I am not sure when I am going to run it, but at some point this week I will make an attempt on the Guardian Arkveld. I have not played FFXIV in eons… but at some point I should probably also start working on the story quest. It is weird how FFXIV is not triggering the same issues I am having with World of Warcraft. Everything about FFXIV is slower paced, and as a result it is like my brain is prepared for that. We will see if I can manage to slip back into the game, or if I am ultimately going to bounce off it as well.

I’ve not participated in it, but there is a lot of new stuff going in with the Shadow of the Mad King patch in Guild Wars 2. Specifically the weapon set looks really cool, and at a minimum I want to collect that pistol graphic to use on my Harbinger. I figure probably Thursday night when we do our normal Guild Wars 2 stuff, we might detour to the Labyrinth and spend our time roaming around it as a group. I did pop into Guild Wars 2 last night, but only long enough to do a round of wizard chores before bouncing. I was legitimately all over the freaking place last night, even playing some Path of Exile 1. I am struggling to find something that is really grabbing ahold of me fully right now. Once again… I think it is that aforementioned funk that I seem to be in. Like I have reason… and it hit me yesterday as an employee was requesting of for Fall Break… something that I would normally be doing as well when my teacher spouse was still with me. I have a cookout on Friday with a lot of her friends… so that is going to be a challenge to get through, but I also feel like I need to make the effort.

Anyways… there is a lot going on, and I am hoping you are enjoying at least some of it.

The Crysta Boss

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a local holiday and as such I got the day off work, and did not really feel like blogging. Of all of the battles that I have had in MMORPGs… by far the toughest that I have ever experienced is the Housing Boss in Final Fantasy XIV. The main problem with this boss however… is that once you have beaten it… you have to keep beating it every few weeks to keep your plot from being repossessed. Thing is… my current plot in The Mists is my SECOND time beating the housing boss. However as is often the case… life got away from me at the end of 2023 and I went two months without logging into FFXIV and my house was demolished. When I finally managed to get a house again around the launch of Dawntrail, I vowed to never let that happen again no matter what I had to go through to keep logging in. I started a weekly ritual of logging in at a bare minimum to play the Jumbo Cactpot, and at that time checking in on my house.

So as a result Sunday morning I had a minor panic attack when I tried to do my log in ritual and encountered this screen. The Credit Card that I had on file had expired, and I apparently did not get around to updating in before Final Fantasy XIV was set to bill me again. This created a whole spiral of frustration as I attempted to renew my card information only to be met with the deeply obtuse “Card Unavailable” error message. There are entire threads on the FFXIV forums talking about this particular error message, and in most cases the answer is either to buy timecards every few months or rely upon the even more obtuse Crysta system. The entire financial processing wing of most Japanese companies seems to be stuck in the 90s, because I can remember jumping through all of this dumb hoops when trying to add money to my SEGA JP account before Phantasy Star Online 2 went to North America.

I remember the Streamer Zepla running up against similar issues of not being able to subscribe to the game, and also not really getting much in the way of resolution. The forum threads are all seeming the blame the issue on Debit Cards, and since I only have one Credit Card and a few Debit Cards… I was really concerned about not being able to dig myself out of this particular hole in time before my house got repossessed again. I was legitimately desperate enough to go down the Crysta rabbit hole… but neither Paypal or Amazon Pay… the two options that were available to me were failing. Thing is… both of those options are also tied to the same Credit Card that was failing out with the subscription. In an absolute last ditch effort I tried entering one of my Debit Cards and it worked. Then I had to go through the process of renewing both my extra Retainers and the mobile app separately. Legitimately dealing with the financial processing boss is far worse than Housing Savage. I think the crux of it is that at some point Square stopped taking my main credit card, but never went through the process of updating all of the information. Because some screens show it as being accepted, and others do not… so I am guessing they swapped processors and they now only reliably take Master Card and Visa. I was legitimately to the point of going down a rabbit hole of trying to set up a virtual credit card that billed back to my main credit card.

My lovely little home is now safe again… at least for a several years. It is now up to me to continue the login tradition and keep checking in on things every week. If you are ever in my neck of the woods swing by and sign my guestbook I am in Ward 28 Plot 3 on Cactuar/Aether. I am yet another one of those folks who only half-assed their home. The front room is nice and cozy… but there is absolutely nothing going on in the basement. The yard is also pretty great, and I am proud of it. Mostly I just did not want to be one of those folks who camped out a home and then never did anything with it. At some point I need to spend some more time and effort decorating the basement, but I am not really sure what to do there. My general idea was the top floor is a store to sell all of the things I have gathered from my adventures, and the bottom floor would be a Lalafellian scaled apartment.

Since you sat through my panic attack… I figure I will share some actual useful information for anyone who does not know this trick. Essentially there is a pattern that I use each day for the Mini Cactpot, that yields the most predictable results. The Cactpot card asks you to reveal specific squares, and then pick a row to submit for the prize. If you punch your card in a Y pattern shown above on the left side, it gives you information about every single slot on the card. Essentially I am mostly gambling on which slots have the greatest chance of either producing a 1/2/3 or a 7/8/9 since they are the biggest payouts. You are always fighting randomization and there are going to be cards that have no good options… but this structured approach feels like I at least have a fighting chance of hitting the big pulls whenever they are available.

Anyways! Now that my home is secured I am way less panicked. I don’t really talk about FFXIV very much, but that is not for lack of me still poking my head into it from time to time. At some point I need to get serious about catching up on the story.

A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.

I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.

I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.

Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.

What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.

Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.

Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.