Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Regretfully Seeking Luocha

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Good Morning Folks! This morning’s blog post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of smaller topics. The first is that the Silver Wolf banner is sadly over in Honkai Star Rail. That means that any attempts at getting this excellent character are diminished for the time being. I am uncertain if she can be pulled on a normal banner, but I am extremely happy that I picked her up while it was available. It cracks me up that when she visits the Astral Express she does so in hologram form. This morning she was hanging out in the parlor car and wanting to play board games… then realized that holograms can’t move physical pieces. Then turned around and berated me for not having any arcade cabinets on the express. She has rapidly become one of my favorite characters for her ability to brute force a weakness onto a target.

With the Silver Wolf banner gone, that means the Luocha banner is now available. I have to admit there is absolutely nothing about this character or his design that interests me. I am however pulling for him just because I need a second healer. I would far rather have Bailu, but as it stands I think you have to be just exceptionally lucky with the default banner to make this happen. Honestly, I am not even that big of a fan of his style of healing, but having a second healer seems like it would make the split runs where you are required to have two teams much easier to complete. I am however hoping to pick up a Pela from the banner while it is available. I bonded with Pela during the museum event and now like the character far more than I originally did.

So far however all I have pulled are multiple copies of Qinqque. Since you got her for free that means I now have her with two Eidolons, which is fine… but she isn’t exactly a character I am actively using for anything other than running assignments. I only had enough currency saved up to do two 10 pulls and the other pull the only thing I picked up was a four-star light cone. Just like in Genshin Impact, pulling a weapon or light cone is always the least exciting possible thing you can pull. I’m close to another 10 pull on the Luocha banner so maybe I will get him so I can go back to the standard banner. As it stands there are probably more things on that banner that I actually care about at this point.

I’m finding the event that went in with Luocha a bit frustrating. It is called Stellar Flare and it is based on defeating a number of mobs during a certain number of cycles aka turns. Since I tend to build teams for survival and not speed… this means that I keep failing these fights. I am going to have to shift things up a bit and pull together a speedy team rather than a sturdy team. The problem is that the fight itself dishes out a ton of damage. So you almost need to come up with a team that can “board wipe” every single cycle. I’m also nowhere near maxed out on my characters so it isn’t like I can just brute force this. I need to devote some time to farming the resources needed to upgrade my newly level 70 character squad the rest of the way.

In very very brief Diablo IV news, I managed to get to level 70 finally. I am just not really enjoying the grind at this point. Barbarian is essentially in a state where if you get crowd controlled once… you are dead almost instantly. This is just about as unfun of a situation as it gets, and while I enjoy hanging out with my friend Cyl… I don’t much enjoy Nightmare Dungeons. Really other than the occasional world boss Nightmare Dungeons are the only end-game activity that is reliably available. I felt very strong when I first got to World Tier IV but I already feel like I lost all of that power and am consistently getting weaker every single level. The thing is… I am wearing about as good of gear as you can get for my level with the appropriate aspects on each item. Sure I could min-max the stats or grind out more paragon points, but it largely feels like a losing battle. I exist in two states… either immortal or instantly dead the moment anything stuns/freezes/poisons me.

All of the news about Secrets of the Obscure has made me renew my focus on Guild Wars 2. Since I have been recording my dumb little videos talking about various game modes I enjoy, I decided that last night I would record myself doing the server reset Tequatl fight. This is sort of the quintessential Guild Wars 2 experience for me personally. It was the encounter that made me finally appreciate how god of a game Guild Wars 2 could be, and was probably my first real large-scale world boss experience. Since then I have done hundreds of boss and meta trains, but Tequatl will always hold a very special place in my heart. It is sort of the pinnacle of how cool the drop in group play can be in this game.

Last night I also started working a bit on the next set of story quests for What Lies Within. I didn’t get super far though because I wound up going outside to hang in the backyard for the remainder of the night. I am sure I will pick up and get through that content drop today. I’m also looking forward to the weapons test beta this weekend. I want to get in and play with Necromancer Greatsword/Pistol and see if I can figure out how to make it viable. Mostly I just want a ranged weapon that feels better than staff to combo with Greatsword. The axe is just too short of a ranged weapon, and I really wish Necromancer got access to Longbow. Maybe eventually someday.

Did you have luck pulling Luocha in Honkai Star Rail? Are you still playing Diablo IV? Are you going to participate in the weapon test beta in Guild Wars 2? Drop me a line with your thoughts.

Secrets of the Obscure Announcement

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Good Morning Friends! While I have not been actively talking much about Guild Wars 2, I still end up poking my head into the game a few times a week. I need to properly spend some time catching up and experiencing the “What Lies Within” content update and the second part of the Gyala Delve zone meta. I feel like before I talk about anything that transpired yesterday, I need to talk about the controversial post that the Arena Net team made back in February. Essentially in the Studio Update a new path forward for Guild Wars 2 was outlined, that they would be moving away from Living World and instead doing smaller and more frequent expansions.

With this post, the community sort of spun off in a bunch of directions. Some seemingly now accurately predicted that this would mean yearly expansions. Others went into doomer territory and assumed that this was the beginning of the end of Guild Wars 2. Whatever the case… this shift in direction combined with a somewhat poorly received content update for What Lies Beneath caused some opinions to circulate. I personally thought Gyala Delve and the What Lies Beneath update were pretty enjoyable. I was largely on board with this concept of narrowing the scope of what an expansion meant and then following it up with specific quarterly content drops. In the time since then, we have seen effectively a quarterly schedule which I think is awesome. Mostly for me when it comes to a live service game, the studio behind it needs to nail a predictable cadence and set expectations… and I think Arena Net is now doing both.

Now we move forward to yesterday, and ANet dropped the trailer for the next Guild Wars 2 expansion, Secrets of the Obscure. With the close of the Dragon Cycle expansions with End of Dragons, we now move back to core Tyria and are delving into mysteries that have just been sitting there in the open for a decade now. We’ve had this giant floating Dalaran-esc tower in Kessex Hills that was just begging to be explored, and it seems like the new expansion is going to be taking us there. This is honestly something that Wooden Potatoes predicted in his mega video throwing out mini-expansion ideas that would begin to tie up loose ends in the world. If you look at the map there is already a bunch of areas to expand into new zones, without the need to necessarily build another content island.

With the announcement came a bit of an info dump about the features of Secrets of the Obscure or as the community is already referring to it as just “SOTO”. There is a new expansion site that serves largely as a teaser for the features and a way to pre-purchase. Then there are a number of news blog posts that deep dive into some of the features themselves. More specifically there is one covering combat changes and another talking about some of the more ephemeral rewards structure features. I think what excites me the most are the tweaks to combat, which again everyone was speculating since content creators had latched onto the fact that an Elite Specialization had not been mentioned in either the roadmap or the subsequent Q&A.

Essentially we are getting new build diversity through the removal of elite specialization requirements for weapons. As it stands right now in order to use a Longbow on a Guardian, for example, you have to be using the Dragon Hunter talent tree with your build. In order to use a shield with a Mesmer, you have to be a Chronomancer. The first change with SOTO is that they are removing these requirements and when a class has access to a weapon… all of the specializations have access to that weapon. For ages I have wished I could build a Reaper that used the Greatsword as the main weapon set, and then Pistol as my secondary weapon. Sure I realize that Pistol is largely designed for condition damage… but it plays fine with Power Gear at least in the open-world content I largely do. I will now be able to craft this as well as a bunch of other dumb build ideas that I am sure the community will go wild with.

More than that, however, in one of the quarterly updates it seems like every single class is getting another weapon to play with.

  • Guardian: Pistol (main and off hand)
  • Revenant: Scepter (main hand)
  • Warrior: Staff
  • Engineer: Short bow
  • Ranger: Mace (main and off hand)
  • Thief: Axe (main hand)
  • Elementalist: Pistol (main hand)
  • Mesmer: Rifle
  • Necromancer: Sword (main and off hand)

I am super interested in Staff for Warrior because I am hoping that opens up a healing option for that class. I am also naturally interested in Necromancer getting Sword Main and Offhand… because I wonder what a Pistol/Sword combo would look like. I don’t love Daggers in general… so if a game gives me the option to not use one… I will generally take that option. Ranger getting access to maces could also be interesting. I could see some sort of Hammer/Mace/Mace build being interesting probably with some CC nonsense going on.

Another huge thing that I am looking forward to… doesn’t directly impact me. They are adding in a new way of earning the Skyscale mount, that in theory should be less of a grind and hopefully less of a gold sink. I went through the entire process of getting a Skyscale and while I enjoy it… it is so much of a grind that I would never wish that for anyone. The Skyscale is the single highest quality of life addition I have made to my account, and in truth much like lowering the barrier of entry of getting access to the raptor and gliding quickly… this one is pretty huge and is currently gated behind having to do a mount of content to get it. This is a good change for future generations that might adopt the game later, but I do like that they are giving those of us who unlocked the first track a bit of a bonus when we unlock both tracks.

Another thing that I am supremely excited about is the possibility of an Open World track for earning Legendary gear. Guild Wars 2 is a bit odd when it comes to gearing because Legendary gear is mechanically the same as Ascended gear. The key difference being that you can change the stats on Legendary gear as often as you like, meaning once you have a set for each armor weight… you effectively never need to worry about gearing ever again. The problem with the way this gear is earned currently is that for the PVE variant, you essentially have to raid. While I would love to do this at some point… I don’t necessarily have a pre-baked static team to take with me. I mostly play Guild Wars 2 as a solo adventure, and I figure this is the case for a lot of players. The idea of opening this up to give us a way to earn purple gear makes me extremely happy.

I am also fairly interested in this “Rift” mechanic that they talk about, and I am interested to see how this shakes out. More interesting things in the Open World are always a bonus for me, given that is my primary mode of play in Guild Wars 2. I’ve loved Rift mechanics in other games… like the actual elemental Rifts in the game of that namesake, the anchors in Elder Scrolls Online, and the corruption pillar things in New World. My hope is that this ends up being something of the sort and just adds one more game mode to an already-packed world. I kinda dig the seemingly darker theme of this expansion. There are a lot of threats from Tyria’s past that could easily come back now that the dragons are out of the way. Maybe the dragons served the purpose of guarding against even worse things.

I have no clue what this nightmare-fueled monstrosity is, but I am here for it. Sign me up for dark eldritch horror thank you very much. While I am not really a “Wizard Tower” type of person, I am all here for floating cities and more importantly floating continents. Mostly what excites me is the addition of more vibrant maps into the game. Guild Wars 2 isn’t so much an “Open World” game as it is a dense content map game and I am here for more fun zones to hang out in. I am also interested in seeing what wild zone metas we could have when it is assumed that EVERYONE has easy access to a flying mount. I think that has been one of the challenges with the Skyscale to date, is that it is really hard to design content around having it because the grind was so arduous.

I realize I somewhat buried the lede here a bit and am just now embedding the trailer. The truth is the trailer doesn’t say much of substance. You are far better off reading the blog post, and then the combat and rewards breakout posts. I think what mostly shocked everyone was the date. This is going to be launching on August 22nd. At the time of writing this post, that is only 55 days away. I have to be honest… I wish EVERY game announcement was on this short of a timeframe. Previously my favorite announcement was Fallout 4 when we had it in our hands roughly six months later. This is great because a few months is sufficient time for a hype cycle to build, and spend time theory-crafting new build options. The biggest challenge that ANet has had to date has been the consistency of content releases, and I think a few years of this content model will do a lot to sure up the player base.

What are your thoughts about the expansion announcement? Are you as excited as I am? Drop me a line below with your thoughts and feelings.

Low Polygon Turtle

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Good Morning Friends! Happy Super Adventure Box! I have to be honest I am not nearly as nostalgic for the April Fools event in Guild Wars 2 as some folks are, but they did manage to pry some more money from my pocket with this amazing Siege Turtle skin. Really the price of admission is entirely worth it for the 1980s arcade sound effects while using it. I love the aesthetics of this event even if I don’t necessarily love grinding through the world. Essentially I tend to easily get up to the frog boss and then fail miserably. What I did not expect is that apparently unlocks for SAB are character bound instead of account bound, so I had to go through the process of rigging up all of the things like bombs and shovels on my Ranger since I prefer to be playing that character currently even though for the purposes of the Super Adventure Box it does not really matter.

For anyone who has no clue what I am talking about, the Super Adventure Box is this weird original one-off April Fool’s event where players could run around in a vaguely Super Mario 64 inspired map. This was so beloved by the player base that it ultimate became a permanent event coming back each year for a week or so around the beginning of April. I’ve talked about it before in the past and even have some screenshots of the world. Essentially you work your way through a series of challenges in a Mario-esc 1-1, 1-2 etc sequence. There are a number of achievements for you to get like finding green and red baubles and a whole slew of items available for purchase through Bauble Bubbles which you can purchase for every 250 baubles collected in the levels. It uses a Zelda-like mechanic where you keep having to purchase larger wallets in order to hold more Baubles through each trip into the zones.

Super Adventure Box requires a continue coin in order to play, and at the beginning of the festival, you are given five of these. They can then be purchased with baubles or I believe found in chests spread throughout the levels. Since I was already making a purchase, I decided to pick up the Super Adventure Pack which includes a convenience item called the Infinite Continue Coin. Essentially when you hit the game over screen, in lieu of inserting a continue coin… you can use your infinite continue coin which will then give you 99 lives to explore the level making the whole process way less tedious. This is essentially a one-time purchase and is only available during the Super Adventure Festival.

Now this is where we get into the long history of Guild Wars 2, because apparently as I understand it… there was a third world teased at one point but never actually delivered. I believe this is in part because all of Super Adventure Box was essentially a passion project of one of the devs, and when they left the company so left the motivation to keep making Super Adventure Box levels. So all of the achievement hunters are currently slavering over a playable “test” of the third world. Essentially this area is missing some of the final polish but allows folks to go through it and collect some of the achievements. I watched a live stream for a bit yesterday afternoon of one of the OG players hunting for the baubles that they were missing.

While the jumping puzzles are not necessarily my jam… I do love this time of year for the neat skins that you can get. For example yesterday out of one of my daily loot boxes from killing Champions, I got this Retro-Forged Rifle which sorta looks like a giant 8-bit era zapper gun. I’ve got a similar pixelated hammer and Legend of Zelda-looking short bow skin. There are also craftable skins for various bosses in the mini-game. I picked up the infinite continue coin because this year I would really like to finish the entire map, or at least beat all of the bosses. I might need to watch a strategy video because King Toad always kicks my ass. It feels like I should be able to dodge or jump over some of the mechanics but I never seem to be able to do so.

Are you participating in Super Adventure Festival? Were you also swayed by the low polygon turtle mount skin? Have you been anxiously awaiting World Three? Drop me a line below.

Goodbye Merigold

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I have this weird superstition when it comes to computers. I will never name the same build the same thing twice. It is almost as though each machine that gets a fresh install is its own “being”, because yes I suffer from the personification of machinery. Generally speaking, the machine gets named after something that I am engaged with at the time. My current gaming desktop is named NormandySR2 and my laptop is named NightCity. My gaming desktop before that was named Serenity, and when I rebuilt the gaming desktop before that into a Plex Server I named it Merigold as I was playing through Witcher 2 and 3 at the time and Triss is legitimately the correct choice. Over the weekend that machine gave up the ghost, and while I could potentially resurrect it with a new system build… I’ve decided to move on. Another proud tradition of mine is to turn my previous gaming desktop into my new “fuck around and find out” system. Merigold was my old AMD FX-6300-based system and when I upgraded to my current i7-10700K-based system a few years ago, I left my previous x99-based i7-5820k system largely sitting there dormant.

The plan is to build this into a Linux Mint based system. Why that distro? Largely it is a case of comfort and familiarity. I’ve built up a few past laptops using it and felt good about it. In theory, I could just run a more server-ly distribution on it, but I often like to use this machine as a secondary desktop. I’ve always built my second machine as a Windows machine, so this is going to be a bit of a first for me. This is going to mean that I will be using Linux a heck of a lot more than I normally do. For decades I’ve had a Linux box as a “toy” machine, that I fiddle with for a few days and then forget about it… and by the time I need it again, I often burn it down and start from scratch. The fediverse however has immersed me more into open source culture… and I am thinking it might be time to test drive actually running one of my primary machines as Linux. I mean I will still likely run Plex on it, but I am also really interested in trying to figure out the best use of it as a remote machine given that I never actually use my second machine with a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse. Previously I had used Parsec as my remote tool of choice, but there is no Linux hosting option for that sadly. In the short term, I will probably use VNC, which I have never loved… but it is functional and easy enough to set up.

I popped in for a little bit yesterday before Diablo IV Beta came to a close and finished leveling to 25, the level cap for that test. I am still a bit “up in my feels” about what I really think about that game. I was honestly not expecting “Blizzard Does Lost Ark” and since I bounced so phenomenally hard from that game I guess I understand the dissonance that I am going through regarding that. Diablo Immortal is also somewhat of a version of that experience, and I liked it just fine because I entered into that with very low expectations. Diablo IV however had been a game I had whether or not I wanted to… been pinning my hopes on as the last chance for Blizzard to really grab me. I’ve always cared far more about the Diablo franchise than anything else that the company has put out, and slowly over the years, I have peeled away from the other franchises. I did not really want to also feel like I had moved on past Diablo as well. I mean I have a copy of it now, so I might sit and watch and see what it evolves into over time.

The experience of the Diablo IV Beta has had the effect of causing me to pour my heart and soul back into Last Epoch. This is honestly the sort of experience I was hoping Diablo IV was going to be. For all of the talk of a return to Diablo 2 from the devs… I sort of expected something that would straddle the gap between Path of Exile and Diablo 3. That is ultimately what Last Epoch feels like, a happy medium between those two games. I got my Sentinel/Paladin up to fairly high levels and while I enjoy it… I also was not really feeling it. So instead this weekend I started pushing up my Necromancer and have now almost gotten up to the same levels that I was sitting at on my Paladin. I’ve not started the Monoliths yet but am working my way through the final chapter of content that is currently in the game. I think I have effectively a fully fleshed-out “kit” at this point and it is just a matter of getting levels and getting better gear.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in Guild Wars 2. Here is one of those Legendary bosses that I compared Diablo IV bosses to. I legitimately hate the Legendary rogues that spawn after you have defeated a Champion rogue. I largely stick around to help fight them because they are such pains in the butt… and I know they can wipe an entire field’s worth of unsuspecting open-world players. It always feels like I spend most of my time resurrecting other players. It is more a case that I don’t want to damn anyone to do this horrible encounter alone, as opposed to actually wanting to fight it myself. That is the weird thing about Guild Wars 2… it makes me want to take action to help other players because it seems like it is the right and proper thing to do. I have a post in me about how Guild Wars 2 is the best game that the mainstream isn’t taking seriously… but that is going to have to wait for another day. The annoying thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is so good… that it turns players into evangelists for it… which only ends up pissing off the unindoctrinated.

So the goal for today is to finish the installation of whatever I end up naming the new box. I spent most of yesterday furiously copying files from a machine that I have not touched in two years… and probably didn’t actually need anything from… but felt like I had to back up “just in case”. I’m currently running it off the bootable image and am just about ready to do the proper install. Linux “live” images are really a godsend, especially given that they just sort of “work” now to let you copy files off an otherwise dead system. That whole world has evolved so far since the first time I installed RedHat in the late 90s.