Janthir Wilds

Four Winds, Toxic Rain, and MyMiniFactory Sale

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Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.

Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.

Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.

Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.

In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.

I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.

Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.

Kinfall and Eternity

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Good Morning Folks. I had a really fun night with Ammo, Ash, Sita, and Sol running fractals and actually attempting to finish our tier 1 progression. The problem with that however is that I took exactly zero screenshots while we were doing things, so instead you get this generic placeholder that I took this morning while finishing off yesterday’s dailies. Our Thursday night shenanigans have been something that I very much look forward to each week. Occasionally they also extend out into Friday night nonsense, but not every single week. I got to test out my new headset which worked pretty well, save for the fact that it blocks out a lot of external sound… making my voice sound odd in my own head while I am talking. I went with a Corsair wireless headset, and the only reason why I had never used something like this previously… is I always tried to keep my headphones pretty open ear in case my wife needed to talk to me about something. If nothing else it beats the heck out of the lid mic on my laptop when I am downstairs.

Since I never shared a photo of me actually USING Eternity, here is that thing. I actually used it quite a bit last night because we tried the new Kinfall Fractal and the final boss is a bit of a damage sponge. I had to rapidly flip between my two weapons so that I could do sufficient breakbar damage to keep us alive. We got better after our first attempt, because we went into the fight completely blind. Mostly it is a melee fight because everyone has to stay stacked up in range of these two bubbles that protect you from environmental damage. Greatsword has two breakbar abilities, and Longbow one… and I needed all of them in order to burn through that bar as quickly as possible, especially in that final invulnerability phase. It was fun… but probably had about 50% more hitpoints than it needed for a Tier 1 Fractal. It wasn’t so much that the fight was complicated… it just got busy over time.

I’ve knocked out all of the weeklies already, but one of the aspects I love of them is there is always one that requires you to kill 100 enemies of a specific type. This often causes me to rack my brain trying to figure out where I could do this most efficiently, and this time around one of the types was Inquest. This immediately made me think of the Living World Season 4 zone Sandswept Isles, which is the last time we had any major involvement with fighting against the Inquest. There is an entire area of the zone that is pretty much nothing but Inquest mobs. While I was out there an event was firing up to defeat a boss named Zohaqan which is something that I had never participated in. The weeklies specifically often put me in these situations where I am getting exposure to content that I have never actually taken the time to do. When I was clearing Living World Season 4, I was burning through the content so that I could move on to Icebrood Saga. This is the thing about playing catch up in a game like this, is that you really do not spend as much time experiencing the content as you would when it is fresh and new. The Wizards Vault is this excellent way of forcing you to go back and focus on things like this.

The bite sized nature of the game makes me way more willing to just lean into content that is happening in whatever zone I happen to be in. That really is the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 so good. You start out with one goal in mind, but then are set down a path of doing a bunch of other interesting things… because you just so happen to be there at the right time for them to be firing off. Events fire off at a consistent enough schedule that you CAN seek out specific events, but you can also just pop into a zone and ride along with the current doing whatever the heck happens to be going on at that moment. I often operate in both modes while playing these games, and I am happy that this one supports a gameplay style where I don’t have to have a fixed purpose… but can still find purposeful things to do.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I will probably be diving into another book and playing some more Path of Exile since I am less than three pips away from level 100.

Relaxing Rifting

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Good Morning Folks. Last night was another return to normalcy. We had been on a stint of doing Thursday night Guild Wars 2 nonsense, and I had tagged out for a few weeks for obvious reasons. We did not do a ton of stuff, but ran the daily fractal which also doubled for the weekly, and then did a bunch of Rift hunts in Lowland Shore. Me talking about it in my blog yesterday apparently prompted the rest of the crew to do some of that since they had never really chained them. So we mostly just had this really chill night of going to the next rift and sitting on discord and chatting for a few hours. We normally stop earlier than we did last night, which I think is evidence of the relaxing vibes we had going on. I was yawning super freaking hard by the time we wrapped up and pretty much logged from voice and went straight to bed. I needed a night like that.

Over in Path of Exile I knocked out four more achievements for the league challenges and upgraded my sad little totem pole a bit. If you are not to this point yet in the league… I highly suggest you rathole corrupted, mirrored, influenced, and fractured items because you are going to need them for the Equipped Elites challenge. The other really easy one is to fully equip a mercenary in unique items. For Elated Exaltation I found that normal Exalt, Tainted, Eldritch, Shaper, Elder, Redeemer, and Warlord exalts were the cheapest options. In truth if you are planning ahead and don’t actually need to use these for crafting purposes… you can use this to complete any holes you have in influenced gear for the mercenary equipment achievement. Scarabs were pretty straight forward and swapping to my tanky single target bossing merc, was in fact what I needed to go ahead and finish up Pinnacles Paired keeping them alive when I downed Cortex. It also does not hurt that my damage output is way higher than it was when I took down the rest of the pinnacles with a merc.

As far as other things… I am still alternating between mapping and mining and have yet to find the damned hideout in Primordial Blocks. Every time I have seen it up for sale on TFT they have wanted 10 Divines to buy a portal… and I just cannot bring myself to spend that much on a stupid hideout. As the league runs on I might get more desperate. If I ever do find it on my own… I will absolutely shout out to the global I hang out in and give away portals to anyone who might want one because I am not hyper capitalist. I really want to swap things up a bit and run another map, because like I have said before… I don’t actually like the layout or boss for Primordial Blocks, I just want the hideout. I do however want to try and find a different Striker with a better setup. I love that I am getting Fortification stacks, but I really would like to have him generating some useful aura in addition to being a endurance charge bot.

I am thinking more and more seriously about the whole streaming thing, and might try a quick foray into that over the weekend. I spent a bit of time creating some necessary screens for like going AFK and swapping games, so that is at least some semblance of forward momentum. I need to spend some time updating my Twitch channel, because all of the info is very outdated at this point. Like my gear section still shows that I had a 980… which is 3 graphic cards ago because I went from that to a 1080 ti to eventually the 3080 that I have currently. At some point I want to burn down my setup upstairs and get consoles back up and running so that they can be streamed. In truth the only console that I have set up currently is my Switch 2 downstairs. At some point I want to get the loft setup with consoles again, but I have no clue how I am going to figure out how to record that. That is a problem for another day. Mostly just wanted to say that I am still moving forward potentially on starting streaming again, just so that I feel less alone while I am doing single player nonsense.

As far as everything else in my life… I had my first counseling session yesterday and it went pretty well. I get four more of these and for the most part this will be occurring every Thursday for awhile. It helped to have a professional validate some of the things I was going through as being perfectly normal. Even the soft hallucinations are normal. She described them as sort of a phantom limb pain thing, that my brain is just getting adjusted to my wife not being there and that it was not a sign of anything more concerning. I feel better just having someone echo back feedback that I had already heard from friends. I took the day off today because I am going up to move her stuff out of her classroom, so that is going to be rough. However her teacher friends are mostly going to be the ones packing up the room for me, and I will just be coming up to truck things back. In theory I am going to come back to the house and haul some stuff out of the garage that needs to be taken care of. I have a few dead tvs that I am going to try and find recycling for just to free up the space.

I’ve legitimately contemplated getting a storage unit so that I can box up and move her stuff into it… until I am ready to deal with it. There are a bunch of things I want to do in the garage, but I have always needed swap space to do any of it. Effectively I have to get rid of the piles of stuff from when she moved out of her last school district before I can do much of anything to improve the situation out there. I use the garage as sort of an extended pantry for the various stuff I order from Sams Club, and I would like to have proper shelving to put stuff on. I also potentially want to get rid of the collection of old door mats that I have out there, because they are so worn down the likelihood that I will use them again is minimal. Decorating our door wreath and the rug… are something that I will probably keep doing because while it was her thing… I do enjoy the whimsy of it.

Anyways… I am doing okayish still. I figure the best indicator of my mental health is that I am still getting up and making the bed. When I stop doing that… it is time to worry.

Holding For Trarthus

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Good Morning Folks. I have an affliction… and it is Path of Exile league start fever. This is how you know I am a mess and fully bought into whatever nonsense Grinding Gear Games is selling, because right before the launch of a new league I get into this pattern where nothing quite works. I’ve never been one to test builds out ahead of a league start… but lord I am pretty close to this level of madness. I am still spending quite a bit of time poking around in Dune, and had a few close calls yesterday crossing the desert between the first area and the second area. I went back south to pick up the remaining intel that I missed, and when I was about to make the run across the gap a worm popped right in front of me forcing me to turn back around immediately. Then after that cleared I made another run at it, and then had a worm pop shortly after I got to the other side.

There is just enough friction that I find I have ground to a halt. The resources that I need… I cannot get, because I am once again deadlocked by the main story quest. However I have apparently not explored enough of the second area to even be able to see where I need to go. Traversal in the second area is just frustrating enough… that I find myself logging in, mining some easy resources… and then logging right back out. Essentially in the second area the biggest problem that I am having, is the increased presence of the Sardaukar. They made my life miserable when I first entered the zone at night, and I wound up getting chain frozen by their stun beams and burning through all of my bandages. This has scarred me a bit and has made me super hesitant to tangle with them again.

There is also just more ground to cover, and it is way more open… meaning that not only do you have to dodge worms, but also Sarduakar at night, and quicksand and drumsand the rest of the game. What I feel like I need is a Stilltent, which exists in the game, but is apparently not unlocked until much further down the tech tree path. Sandstorms are still terrifying and they seem to be of much higher magnitude than they were in the starter area. I am back to questioning if I am enjoying myself enough to deal with the frustrations to claw out of the hole that I am currently in. Tam has a base to the north and in theory I could make a run for it and then attempt to survey more of the area which will hopefully uncover where my next story quest is at. However when I have the time to play… lately I have just been playing more Guild Wars 2.

Side note… my Bi Pride wings have brought me way more joy than I thought they would. I ended up buying a proper game license for my second account during the recent massive sale, in part just so I could claim a set of the wings. I am not necessarily deeply engaged in Guild Wars 2 at the moment, but I am logging in every night just to make sure I am keeping my daily quests farmed down. I’ve bought the Legendary Weapon Kit, all of the Mystic Clovers, all of the Mystic Coins, and am now buying all of the cheap gold sacks and once I have finished with that I will probably pick up the last few items of cosmetic gear from the set that started last season. I’ve knocked out most of the weekly quests and hopefully Thursday we can do some of the Fractals and knock those out as well.

In a move that completely shocked me… I played some Path of Exile II last night. I started up a Crossbow Warrior with the intent of going down the path of trying the Warbringer Armor Explosion build. There was a build showcase three months ago circling around using the Warbringer armor break tech to cause screen wide explosions with a crossbow. It was one of those things that I kicked around the notion of starting, but never actually did. Since I appear to be in a Path of Exile mindset right now, rather than wasting my mojo in the real game… I figured I would pop into the sequel because playing any amount of that… is going to make playing POE1 feel amazing. All in all the leveling has been pretty smooth and I knocked out the first act last night. I would like to push this far enough to get to the point where the tech comes online and I can see how well it works.

However I am very much in this mindset of everything I am doing being very shallow and temporary. Goratha posted a build guide behind the Rolling Magma Mines concept which is worth checking out if you are interested in such nonsense. Right now at this moment I plan on doing a slams start and moving into Righteous Fire Chieftain when I can bring that online early in Act 2. I know that is the boring option… but also it is the predictable option and I know how to get it up and running and farming currency to do other things. There are a lot of builds that interest me, and I cleared out a bunch of available character slots last night so that I can create some of these fringe builds that interest me. I would rather do that from a stable place once I have unlocked my atlas and generated some currency, rather than trying to figure something out… getting frustrated… and then rolling a RF character later.