Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Visions of Eternity Early Thoughts

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday about mid day the Visions of Eternity expansion dropped in Guild Wars 2, giving us access to new areas and new elite specs. I’ve not made it past the first zone, but I have to say that Shipwreck Strand is freaking gorgeous. Probably the most interesting thing about the zone so far is how much of it was designed explicitly for the skimmer, and more specifically the ability to use the skimmer underwater, because there are giant swaths of caves believe the surface. Essentially we head to the new far flung locale of Castoria, a sort of rumored island that is shrouded in unnatural fog. I won’t go into too much detail as not to spoil the experience for anyone, but I found the whole navigation sequence of finding our way to the island interesting.

I am not sure if there are some tangible upgrades to the engine for this expansion, or if they are just using artistic flare in new and interesting ways… but the zones look freaking amazing. Specifically the ocean itself looks more alive than it ever has, as it swells and drops in very believable ways. There is this bioluminescent foam-like texture in the water that collects around these tidepools that just looks so good to watch play out in front of you. It feels like they have really pulled out all of the stops of zone design to make something that really looks new and interesting. Greebles are normally a term that is used to describe surface texture… but the sky itself feels like it is greebled with motes of magic and such everywhere, making the entire scene look absolutely enchanted.

I migrated my housing to the new island and that was pretty straight forward. You just talk to the NPC who then warns you that any customization will be reset and that your decorations will be placed in storage when you do so. This was fine for me because while I placed items in my house, I didn’t really do anything specific or intentional with them. I was largely running the default state of the previous island. The only customization that I carried forward was using the aurora borealis themed sky, which really blends nicely with the overall look of the zone. This one feels way more detailed than the previous homestead zone, and honestly there are a few places where I would like to try and erect some custom structures. I’ve not really spent much of any time decorating my homestead and maybe the new island will change that. The default structure feels way less of a “complete” thing as it did with the bearkin area.

Now all of this goodness aside… there is a really frustrating bug at play. Essentially very early on in the quest chain, you are given a collection to finish for an NPC named Pete. It feels bad to halt your progress for this unlocking the wavehawk quest sequence, but I remember them doing something similar for the warclaw in Janthir Wilds. However this time around, I thought they had learned their lesson because I was able to progress past the quest once I had filled the renown heart in the area. DO NOT DO THIS. Currently if you progress your quest past the point where you are given the Wavehawk quest chain, you will no longer be able to complete this chain. This harms you later down the line because you are halted from progressing the story because you do not have a Wavehawk mastery as a result. I’ve tried resetting my quest progress back to this chain to essentially zero luck. I am certain they will resolve this issue at some point, but right now… if you move forward with the quest line called “Solid Ground” you will brick your quest progress sequence seemingly permanently.

The only reliable advice that I have seen on this problem is to break out an alt and progress them up to the point where they receive the Wavehawk quest chain, and then complete the collection on them. This should then in theory unstick your entire account, because mastery unlocks are shared at an account level. Effectively when you are in this broken state, the items just do not spawn in the world that are needed for the collection. Anyways, at some point today I intend to starting this content with my Necromancer, and will be bringing him out of retirement. This is not that big of a deal, given that it has been ages since I have played this character and they were effectively the character that made me fall in love with this game universally.

I threw together a very rudimentary Power Galeshot build and it felt pretty good. I don’t love the disengage shot, but it lives on the same slot as the stealth ability from Longbow, so I was already not in the custom of hitting that button most of the time. Essentially I was able to maintain almost 100% uptime on quickness, 12 stacks of might, and have Aegis up more often than not. This seems like a good kit, and way less selfish than my normal Power Longbow build. I need to play around with it more to get used to it, and probably should also keep tweaking the build a bit to improve it. Nothing much is out there so far for Power Longshot other than a PVP focused build. Hopefully the buildcraft geniuses will come up with something beautiful in the next few days. However for the time being this works well enough to keep rolling and questing with it.

Other than this one egregious game breaking bug… I am pretty happy with everything I have seen so far from Castoria and Visions of Eternity. That said, I am not engaged enough that it is going to stop me from going fully degen mode on Path of Exile come Friday. I’ve done the first zone meta twice, and it is fine… but mostly just felt like a giant bag of hitpoints making the entire thing drag on a bit too long. I had more than enough points on the Necromancer to fully spec out the Ritualist tree so I might see what is available for that before I start questing. I tend to prefer GuildJen over Snowcrows or Metabattle because it seems to favor way less sweaty meta builds, and more general purpose things. I don’t care to run multiple builds for multiple purposes, so am always just looking for something that is fun to play that does “good enough” in most content. GuildJen sort of feels like the spiritual successor to Dulfy now that she has “passed beyond memory” or at very least retired from updating a guide site.

Anyways. Have you played any of Visions of Eternity? What were your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Heys for Days

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Good Morning Folks. The one thing that worries me a bit about Destiny Rising is that it is getting a bit harder to fight “New Lights” to harass. Essentially the hardest part of the dailies… are the mentor dailies. This is of course something that I do not actually need to do at all… but I want to upgrade from Mentor to Adept Mentor and this involves jumping through a bunch of hoops. The hardest by far is trying to find 3 New Lights that will respond back to me… so this usually involves roaming around Xiangshi the first area of the game or Haven and looking for new lights… and hoping they know how to respond back with their own “Hey!”. I got my three done super early this morning, so that pretty much sets up the rest of the day well for me. It would probably go smoother if I did this during primetime, but I figure the most serious players are going to be clogging the social areas at that time.

I talked about this a bit yesterday but essentially I am down to three parts of the Adept certification. I am a little over ten days away from completing the Resonator step, which means at that point I can stop trying to find new lights. I only recently started doing the Interpreter and Orator steps which involve posting in the Mentor chat and answering Drift Bottle questions, which are this games version of a forum post. The problem with that last step is… this is mostly mentors answering other mentors… and making dumb posts for the purpose of getting artificial interaction. It feels dumb, but we are all running on this same treadmill, and in theory I should have been focused on this nonsense way earlier than now so I could have been done with it and moving on to the next dumb grind. I believe the step after this is to try and get 200 likes on a post you make in the drift bottle area. Like I said NONE of this is required… it is just something I feel obligated to do, so I can have fancier titles beside my name.

Last night was pretty great because Ace and I hung out on the SDF discord, and before long our friend Mor had joined us. It had been really long since I last talked to him about anything of substance, so it was good to catch up. Though I am sure it sounded like we were speaking some made up language since he is very much NOT into either Destiny Rising or Gacha games in general. We got together and did a Grandmaster Strike… which was exceptionally frustrating because we lacked someone who could take out Spread Shinkas and we had to brute force it. We then treated ourselves to some rounds of Morgans Hunt and they went much better. We are both basically within two more rounds of finishing up the event, and both got our exotic weapons last night. Mine was sadly a copy of the Chaperone… which is a shotgun that I will never actually use because it is quite bad.

Estela is exceptionally good at Morgran’s Hunt and we managed to queue into a group where all three color variants of this skin were represented. It is the weird little moments like this that you cling to and that bring you joy. The round AFTER this one though went exceptionally badly because we had a Tan-2, who has crappy wave clear and I think we only managed to pull a single key from that run. I am left with 5 more keys to get, and I think Ace is left with 4, because at some point they must have done a run without me. I am not sure what night we will finish this up, but maybe on Thursday because that is when the Festival of the Lost event drops. I’ve already begged off of Guild Wars 2 for this week since we have very limited time to do whatever this activity is. I want a dumb papier-mâché mask of a pumpkin, or whatever else is available during the event. Festival of the Lost was always my favorite Destiny 2 event, so I am oddly looking forward to this. I hope it is not a massive disappointment.

Yesterday about mid day was the official end of the Mercenaries of Trarthus league in Path of Exile. This means it was time for me to attempt to straighten and organize my Standard stash a bit, because when you go into the new league its stash will be based on the state of standard. You end up with a stupid amount of remove-only tabs, and I pretty much create a new folder at the end of each league, named after the league that just finished, and shove them all into it. That way if I ever want something to test in standard, I can pull the items out of that folder… and it has the least amount of impact on my limited league stash overall. I am a league player and effectively my standard stash is meaningless. I should probably find a few sacrificial characters and delete them now, so I will have plenty of slots for league characters if the mood hits me.

Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.

However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.

An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.

Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.

Tricks and Treats

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I officially started the Mad King festivities as we spend our normal few hours of guild nonsense running around the labyrinth. It was a pretty fun time, and eventually we largely followed around a tag. However not before some random idiot seemed to take very hostile offense to us having our own private tag since we outgrew the size of a normal party. I mean we could have dogpiled on the other tag… but technically we were there first, and also after a point it became about the principle of the situation. We were calm and reasonable in map chat, but this other person was actively cursing us out… which does not befit the chill that Guild Wars 2 normally has. I would blame this on the folks filing in from World of Warcraft… but this dude had the God Walking Amongst Mortals title… so they were a special brand of asshole.

That said… it did not really put a serious hamper on our fun, because the biggest component of Guild Wars 2 Thursdays is hanging out on discord and talking about all manner of nonsense. During which Sita the robot… relayed to us some concerning details that deeply concerned me… but then again… that is every week. Joking aside though it is a heck of a lot of fun just to hang out for a bit and do some relatively low effort gaming. This is the part of MMORPGs that I had been missing, and I am glad that I finally got off my ass and tried to wrangle folks to do something together. It doesn’t necessarily happy EVER week, but more often than not we are doing fractals or something similar in Guild Wars 2 every Thursday. If we had more folks… we would try strikes or something that requires slightly more effort. However for now… the Labyrinth was exactly the right amount of nonsense.

Prior to Guild Wars 2 shenanigans I spent a bit trying to catch AFK Journey up on the quest chain. While I don’t talk about it very often, I tend to play this game every night before falling asleep at least enough to do some of the dailies. However I tend to batch the story up and grind it all down in a single go, or in this current case a series of attempts. I think I am nearing the end of this current storyline and I have to say this is one of my favorite so far. I really like the character of Gala and I will kill anyone who threatens to harm her. I’ve started running AFK Journey on the same MuMuPlayer that I use to play Destiny Rising, and it is pretty great for batch doing auto battles to raise various ranks. If you play this game feel free to friend me up and my ID is 39949620.

Yesterday was the release of a new 5 star banner in Destiny Rising, and I had been banking up my pulls for this event. I had phenomenal luck and also spent a little money… and managed to pull 3 copies of her, and 2 copies of the new 4 star which seems WAY harder to get than Umeko was. They also threw Finnala and Ikora on the same banner… which means you are going to get way more copies of them as a result. Sadly neither of them are terribly useful characters other than our PVPVE nonsense. Maybe when we finish with the Ikora madness we should do Nala matches instead. The new champ is pretty cool is both 5 star and 4 star represent the very first bow characters. Thankfully you can pull an Exotic bow, the Trinity Ghoul off the battlepass which greatly improves their functionality. Helhest is ALMOST a great character… but unfortunately the normal drones don’t follow you around. Still it is a solid arc champion that has the ability to make heavy weapon ammo out of thin air… and represents a pretty great support character.

Another cool thing that I think went in with this update, is there are not a ton of outfits available for purchase with ONLY bright dust. This might have been a thing before, but up until this point I thought they required both bright dust and silver. As a result I snapped up outfits for all of the characters that I play regularly. I specifically love this Estela outfit, since green is already one of my favorite colors and green and red is the combination that I tend to build around in Guild Wars 2. My guess is that we were just interpreting the cost of these outfits incorrectly, because I cannot see that so many people spent silver on the green Tan-2 as I have run up against doing events.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Chaos Trials of the Nine, because I desperately need an Exotic Artifact for the fourth slot. This is essentially all that is standing between me and getting my Jolder to gold, and unlocking the next batch of ascension points. I’ve refactored all of my exotic artifacts to 2500+, and I think at this point the process is just wasting resources to go any higher. Essentially I am only getting an upgrade when I max out the pity luck on the refactors. If I had ONE more exotic artifact I could push it up to 2500 as well and get across the finish line. The other thing that is actively hurting me is that I am not using an exotic weapon on Jolder, and have not found any Exotic weapon mods that will fit into the submachine gun. All of the rapid fire mods that I can pull from the mod choice engrams… seem to only want to be slotted into the Autorifle.

Even if they did not make the changes to bright dust in this patch… I still feel like they are getting less stingy with alternate outfits in general. I pulled this alternate outfit for Jolder off the normal banner, and then this alternate outfit for Helhest off the new limited banner. I am not the biggest fan of the yellow and grey look for Helhest, but I love the Pink and Purple Jolder and am pretty much using that all the time now. I would love to pull an updated shield to match it at some point, especially given that Jolder right now is my main character that I am playing. It is weird how I originally thought Wolf was so cool, and then as I have played more of the game I have effectively completely abandoned him for greener pastures. I think the thing that could improve Wolf is if they would do the thing that the Mihoyo games do and allow you to change up his element and weapon loadout. If they made it so Wolf could learn how to use any weapons and any element… it would make them way more useful in the long run.

I’ve got a cookout thing going on tonight, so I am realistically not going to get much in the way of gaming. I also have an in person all day event going on at work, so I am going to be exceptionally work out from the combo of both of those events landing on the same day. Tomorrow I need to get up relatively early and run some errands, but after that I am probably going to grind Realm of the Nine until my eyes bleed… or I get an exotic artifact for the fourth slot. Other than that I fully expect to spend some time doing the Labyrinth grind in Guild Wars 2 and maybe try and knock out some of the other seasonal events. I’ve never attempted the jumping puzzle… so I might give that a spin even though I hate jumping puzzles. Sadly I don’t think you can do the teleport to friend nonsense to bypass this one.