Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Precarious Potty

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Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore.

Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.

Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.

I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.

Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.

Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut.

I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch.

Talking to Animals

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I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.

I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.

Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.

Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.

Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.

I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.

Sushi and Yuzu

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Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.

I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.

Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.

The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.

So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.

I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.

The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.

Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.

Just Wait it Gets Good

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There will be some potential Guild Wars 2 story spoilers in this post so be warned.

Hey Folks! I have been busy this week with work and finishing up all of the assets so that I could make the Blaugust 2023 announcement yesterday. When it comes to gaming, I have mostly been focused on catching up with my Ranger with the story content in Guild Wars 2 and preparing them for the expansion drop in late August. When last I talked about my replay experience I was wrapping up Lake Doric and diving both literally and figuratively into Draconis Mons. This segment of Living World Season 3 features both my favorite and least favorite aspect of this sequence and I thankfully remembered to unbind my ground targeting before doing so. This area contains the quest where you are flying around and having to bomb things on the ground… which can’t actually be targeted directly. Funnily enough, I encountered the exact same game-breaking bug on the final sequence of this area… which required me to die in order to reset something so that I could finally finish up.

From there I continued onwards into Siren’s Landing… which means back to Orr and dealing with a large number of Risen again. One of the things that has to be stated… having a Skyscale makes all of this content so much easier. I remember that Siren’s Landing was a major pain in the ass to navigate with only a glider. I think this was honestly part of the zone design, making you rely on air currents in order to get to all of the areas of the map. With a Skyscale however, I have an easy button… and the entirety of this zone was pretty quick to progress through.

Finishing Siren’s Landing also meant finishing Living World Season 3… which of course treated me to more amazing cutscenes. Something was lost when Arena Net stopped doing cutscenes in this weird dream sequence thing that they have going on. More recently they have been doing game engine cutscenes and they are fine… and honestly have more room for emotion. However, I will always find the way the visuals in these older cutscenes looked special. They match the amazingly evocative zone loading screen artwork far better. The big reveal from finishing Season 3… is the fact that we are going to the Crystal Desert and Elona… meaning of course it is time for Path of Fire.

I feel like I need to acknowledge something after having played through the content once before (some of it more than once) and now seeing it all laid out in its proper sequence. Living World Season 3 is really when this game gets good. Living World Season 1, especially in its modern incarnation taking lessons learned from years of creating content… is pretty great. The base game story and living world season 2… are not. They are fine but feel like something you suffer through to get to the good parts. Living World Season 3, and Path of Fire… are when the good parts begin. Path of Fire is just so freaking well crafted that I had to stop and marvel at that fact the other night as I begin questing through the Crystal Desert proper.

The sad thing is that once again… we are asking folks to push through a few hundred hours’ worth of content to get to the good part. This seems to be the curse of MMORPGs and we tell our friends “Just wait, it gets really good” and mean it in earnest. I’ve uttered this before talking about getting to the “good” World of Warcraft expansions or showering my friends with just how amazing the story gets in Final Fantasy XIV once you get to Shadowbringers. Unfortunately… I think few players actually get past the awkward cruft that was created while the game was finding itself… to actually push through to greatness. Don’t get me wrong… there are great moments in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Core Tyria, and with the massive zone-wide Meta events in Heart of Thorns… but the story itself doesn’t really get good until Living World Season 2.

This happens so often with MMORPGs that they have to find their footing and determine what the cadence of content releases and style of storytelling is going to look like. In Core, LW1, LW2, and HOT… Guild Wars 2 has this huge problem of either not giving us enough time with a figure in opposition to us to care bout them… or resolving that conflict in some deeply unsatisfying way. Scarlet was a cool baddie, but it feels like we never really got to know her well enough before we ultimately took her down. She felt more like a Villain of the week… and then the game spent precious time in Living World Season 2… trying to make us care about her postmortem. The death of Zhaitan and Mordremoth both felt insignificant in scope based on the great existential threat that they were narratively told to us to be. It isn’t really until Balthazar that we get a baddie with both narrative weight AND mechanical gravitas.

Everything that is to come in this play through of the Ranger is fresh enough in my memory, to know without a doubt that Living World Season 3 is the turning point for Guild Wars 2. Sure the second half of Icebrood Saga, aka the misnamed Living World Season 5, is awful. There are reasons for that… due to the direction, the studio was going at that time. However, no one can deny that they stuck the landing with the zone meta that wrapped up that expansion. End of Dragons felt a little short but was also amazing… introducing us to a whole slew of new characters that I now deeply care about and a central conflict that felt meaty. Living World Season 3 was the point the game got good from a narrative standpoint. Mechanical enjoyment… I didn’t really grok until 2017… and even then I am not sure if it was due to some change in the game or more that I finally understood the type of game Guild Wars 2 was.

Guild Wars 2 is the sort of game where you can absolutely jump around and do content out of order if you choose. So I find myself confronted with the question… should people just jump ahead to Living World Season 3 and be done with it? I don’t really know. I am not sure if LW3 is the point at which the game gets good because it is standing on all of the information that I now know about the game up to this point… or if the experience stands on its own independent of all of that information. Similarly, I am enjoying this replay of the game so much, in part because I know where we are going and how we get there having completed all of this content before one or more times. I will say though… having done all of the content effectively out of order in the past, seeing it laid out in the manner it was meant to be played does improve the entire experience.

So once again… I find myself in the position of being that stereotypical MMORPG player. I still feel like while it is rough around the edges… and downright hamfisted at times… the content from the first parts of the game is important to feeling like you care about the characters and setting. So I found myself again saying to a friend the other day “Just Wait, It Gets Good”. This is the core problem that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of when it comes to an MMORPG. Deleting content and removing it feels awful, but the more content that stacks up over time… the harder it is for anyone to ever feel like they have truly caught up. I’ve never read the Wheel of Time series, even though I know it is supposedly amazing… because I am staring down the barrel of fourteen core books. If we accept Living World seasons as what they truly are… full expansions to the game… a new player is staring down the barrel of the base game and eight expansions worth of content to really feel like they are up to date.

But… Just Wait… It Gets Good.