Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Visions of Flailing

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Good Morning Folks. I have no clue what I am doing anymore. I have my first counseling session this afternoon so we will see how that goes. I am still having the minor hallucinations that my wife is still here in this home, but like it is more a feeling than actually seeing or experiencing anything. Many folks have told me this is normal, and honestly it probably is. My brain is hardwired to expect her to be here and that does not go away in a few weeks time. I also have a meeting with a financial advisor in a few weeks to talk about how best to handle a bunch of stuff that I am dealing with. Most of which is in a holding pattern until we have a death certificate. Everything needs a death certificate and I am mostly just trying to function until that point. Tomorrow I have taken the day off because I have to move everything out of her classroom, so that they can prepare it for another teacher to move in. Thankfully her teacher pals have offered to pack everything up for me, and it will just be a matter of trucking things home and stacking the boxes up in the garage for now.

This morning I am probably going to be wildly flipping back and forth between my real world stuff… and gaming stuff because that is effectively how my brain works right now. I am latching onto distractions like a life raft, and we got some good distractions in abundance this week. Guild Wars 2 released a reveal trailer for their upcoming Visions of Eternity expansion and it looks awesome. Whoever is responsible for the motion graphics for their expansion logos… they need a fucking raise because this one is the best yet. SOTO and Janthir Wilds were both awesome, but the story being told by this logo is freaking phenomenal. I am really looking forward to the updates to the Skimmer mount because right now… it is the one that I use the least unless I have to be doing underwater stuff. I’m also looking forward to more shenanigans with the Inquest because they are one of my favorite bad guy groups. I am not sure how excited I am for more Elite specs, because quite honestly… I rarely change my builds and something is going to have to be really freaking cool to get me to change things up.

Depending upon how the counseling session goes, I might be ready to dip my toes back into Thursday night nonsense in Guild Wars 2. I have not mentioned any of this to Ammo, Sol, Ash, Thalen, or Sita… but I might do that throughout the day. I know there are a bunch of weeklies that we would even work on, like I could tag up and run bounties to knock out that one. I am also down with more Fractals or Dungeons because there are so many of those that I have not run. I’ve come to realize that my go to for knocking things out in Guild Wars 2 is running rifts in the Janthir area, because they are so much easier to get to than the Rifts in the SOTO area. They area great way to knock out general kills, defiance breaks, combos, and a few other general things because when you start one up… you almost always have a large group. Quite honestly Rifts in general are one of the best things that they have added to the game because they are so easy to get going.

Over in Path of Exile I am still slowly grinding up levels. I dinged level 99 yesterday over lunch and am starting to chip away at the large grind towards level 100. For now I am just pouring my last few points into 5% life nodes. They are generically useful, give me slightly more righteous fire damage… and quite a bit of just general survival. I might do something more clever but I can sort that out once I am actually level 100. I am trying to decide if I want to make a second character or not. I was running up an Elementalist to play with the Golems and was contemplating doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation power charge stacker to see how that goes. I would like to have some sort of a bossing focused character just to rip through invitations faster than righteous fire. There are a ton of challenges that I still need to work on to get my sad little totem pole a bit bigger before the end of the league.

There are a bunch of challenges that are pretty close to wrapping up. Some of them I just need some luck, like finding Infamous Mercs that I can steal gear from that I have not already stolen. Then there are things like the fact that I need to do a Cortex where my merc survives, and I think if I switch to my tanky bossing merc I should be good there. Sanctified Scarabs is in theory just me running a bunch of scarabs from various different league mechanics on a map with a minimum of 80% item quantity which should be reasonable enough to do. My Einhar tree makes a pretty decent base for generic usage of other scarabs so I might start working on those tonight. Remarkable Realms is worse this league because it is 40 maps instead of running one of a specific set of maps. I think previously it was 18 maps in total… so I just need to churn through the maps that I have banked up in order to finish that one out. Either that or pick a map that is not heinous and run that one over and over. Most of the unique maps are annoying in one way or another. I should grab Kodra at some point and force him to run them with me so he also gets credit.

The other thing that I have contemplated… is streaming again. Mostly just as a way of interacting with other human beings while I am playing mostly single player gaming experiences like my beloved ARPGs. I have a pretty beefy gaming desktop and it would not be a big deal to stream while playing most of the games that I play. I used to really enjoy doing this, but it always got really weird and made me feel like I was making myself unavailable to my wife while I was doing it. Now that it is just me… I have lots of time to kill before sleep claims me. I can’t say that I would ever be a good streamer, and there is no way in hell that I will ever turn on a camera. Just thinking it might be something fun to dabble in again on the side. Mostly it is just one of those intrusive thoughts that has started appearing in my head and I am not sure if I am going to allow it to take purchase there or not. If I did stream it would be over on my sad little Twitch channel which I believe is still an affiliate. I streamed consistently enough during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online to actually qualify for that. Apparently I have $71.31 in payouts that I am due… that I sort of wish I could just send to a charity somewhere. Accepting subs always seemed really fucking weird.

I legitimately have no clue what I am doing half the time these days. I think once some of the looming things finally are dealt with… I will maybe begin to allow myself to develop a new normal, but right now everything is too damned fresh. I should really spend my weekends working through some of the things that I need to work through. One of my good friends mentioned a pen and paper game, so I might be tagging in on that soon. I also need to sort out a good place to paint and assemble some miniatures for that purpose. I just do not know what I am going to do long term with my life and I am trying to figure out a lot of things. Thanks for sticking around and reading my nonsense as I flail.

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.

Wilds is Cursed

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Hey Folks! Last night instead of our usual Guild Wars 2 nonsense on Thursday nights… I attempted to do some Monster Hunter Wilds again with Ammo and Sita. We have tried to do this a few times… but something always ends up causing problems. The first time Ammo chain crashed until I lost power… and then when the power came back… I lost internet. Last night the entire time we were playing Sita sounded like a robot… and every time we engaged anything one or more of us would get dropped from the linked party. Dealing with Capcom multiplayer is a very specific realm of hell. Then we realized the thing we were trying to unlock and group up for… is a Solo Arena quest. So we had a lot of us all hanging out on voice and being frustrated together as we attempted to “Akuma”. But hey… Barrel bowling is still fun as heck.

Over in Guild Wars 2… I am back on that World vs World grind and so is Sita. Specifically we both bought Legendary Weapon Kits and I am chasing the very dumb goal of making Sunrise. This however is only a means to an end, because it will in turn allow me to make the Voltron of Guild Wars 2 weapons… Eternity. We even managed to drag Ammo along for this nonsense… but in truth… grouping with friends in WvW is pretty much pointless because it is not like you can actually see each other in the giant “Zerg” huddle. The key trait that you need to learn to succeed in this game mode is find the tag and stand on the tag… and then move only when the tag moves. We had a good commander that was flanked by some really freaking phenomenal healers and were able to “OutZerg” the other teams as we captured their stuff.

We were exceptionally successful and in a single average I managed to do half of a Gift of Battle reward track. I believe Sita who had started this grind before me came within a fraction of finishing his up. I am really looking for the WvW Rush event in July and will probably just bank a bunch of Gift of Battles because they are always useful… and also the track in general is a decent way to get Mystic Clovers. More importantly… I passed rank 100 in World Vs World and got the new title of Veteran… which seems weird that this is higher than General was. Why do I care about WvW ranks? Well I kind of want to make the backpack… which itself will require that I have rank 350. Only 248 left to go. I am hoping I can make a massive dent in this during the WvW Rush and hopefully finish that off… and will absolutely probably just be living in WvW during that time. Thankfully I find that whole nonsense shockingly enjoyable… for someone who is traditionally a massive CareBear.

Dune is out… or at least the headstart is out and I played a bit of it last night. Enough to get through the very beginning of the tutorial and out into Hagga Basin which is the first real zone. I watched a video about how limited the Trooper ends up being and how I should probably just play a Mentat which has a turret… so I did that thing. It really probably is the correct decision because very early you can get a bunch of “makes guns better” abilities. The turret unfortunately is kind of shit. I expected something more akin to the pop up turrets in The Division. What it is instead is a grenade that you throw… and then when you “detonate” it, it turns into a turret that maybe fires off three bolts before exploding and if you are standing near it… you take damage. I am not extremely sold on this game yet. I like the vibe and I am a massive Dune geek… but also the gameplay feels more extreme than I like my survival games. Dealing with lack of water is a massive problem… but I have a thing that lets me drain my victims of blood and convert that to water so hopefully that will make things easier. What I really need though is a Literjon so that I can carry water with me.

I am very much in the bumblefucking my way around the desert mode right now, but at least I have a crappy shelter. I strategically set up my shelter in a valley that stays almost entirely in shade no matter what time of day it is, that happens to be right beside one of the vacuum sealed caves. Given that things respawn in the world pretty regularly, this gives me a pretty decent source of scrap metal as well as some lootable chests that have a few materials that I do not have any use for right now… but are flagged as orange in color which makes me think at some point they will be useful. For the moment I am stumbling up the tech tree and the entire game will probably feel much better once I have a way to carry around water, and a way to traverse between the assorted rock outcroppings more easily. I have “walked without rhythm” my way to another outcropping… found a much larger scavenger camp than I am used to…and died without remembering to set down a respawn beacon. Tonight I will probably make my way back over there and try and retrieve whatever I dropped in my backpack.

The other huge benefit of where I decided to set up my base is that on the other side of the sealed cave… is a small scavenger camp. Essentially when it respawns… I can set down my turret, unseal the cave door… and let the turret kill the two Scavengers without me having to lift a finger. This gives me a somewhat reasonable renewable source of blood to then convert into water with my purification machine. There are various lootables around the camp as well, but I am not sure how much value a handful of Solari will have in the grand scheme of things. I have a contract to deliver scrap metal to someone, but it is also way across another open stretch of desert which terrifies me at the moment. I will probably wait until nightfall to cross so that I won’t have to also worry about the impact of direct sunlight. I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it… I just feel like I need to push through the awkward first steps that any survival game has.

Yesterday was also the content reveal stream for the Secrets of the Atlas expansion for Path of Exile and it looks amazing. However if I were to sit down and start talking about it… it would be a whole other blog post. I will probably save that for Monday. I hope you all have a phenomenal weekend and if you too are venturing forth into Arrakis, drop me a line and let me know what you are thinking about the game so far.

Temu Dragon Stand

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the drop of the last part of the Janthir Wilds story called Absolution. It was quite a hefty patch, but not one without some issues. The biggest one that I personally experienced is that for whatever reason they did not successfully reset purchases on the wizards vault, meaning that while I could see a new Legendary Weapon Kit was available… it showed that I had already purchased it. This was fixed early in the evening with an additional patch that required a restart, and from that point forward things seemed to be fine. I have pretty mixed emotions about this patch and there are some things that were phenomenal, others that were pretty disappointing, and then some that was just plain bad. Fair warning, as I get into the new map meta, there are going to be complete spoilers over what is going on there. I will warn you again because at least at the start I have some pretty surface level stuff to talk about.

First up, given that it is June now and Pride Month there are some new wings available this year. Initially I thought that they might be a re-offering of the wings from last year, but nope these are entirely new and pretty freaking amazing. The default rainbow pattern on these wings are significantly more vibrant than the previous macaw wings. Both the wings and the glider are patterned after the existing White or Black wings sets. For me it showed up untextured and brown, but I had to go use the dye eraser tool in order to show the default rainbow colors. I like that they are a much fuller wing than the macaw set and looks way more natural on a “girthy” model like that of the Norn and Char.

What is really cool about these wings however is that they have four dye channels. So you can of course use them in the default red, yellow, green, purple blended configuration. However you can also dye them to match ANY color scheme you might want. So this means you can effectively recreate any pride flag or simply dye them to match your outfit of choice. I turned mine into a recreation of the Bisexual Flag, since that is ultimately what represents me personally. No they don’t really match my outfit in the least but are freaking cool and I am really thankful that they are giving these away for free. The only caveat is that you have to have purchased the game. I tried to claim a set of these wings on my free-to-play account and they were not available.

Another really cool thing that they released on the cash shop is this Shimmering Aurora Homestead Sky. They absolutely got $10 in gems from me to pick this up, because one of my complaints about the existing sky is that I could not permanently set it to either night or day. I don’t like the lighting in the homestead during the day, and greatly preferred the night sky… and it would stick until I logged out and then when I logged in again everything would be back to the default day settings. With the Aurora sky it seems to stick permanently and also gives everything a beautiful lighting overlay. This makes me actually want to start building something properly in my homestead. Part of me wants to tear down everything that exists by default and create something from scratch.

Now for the disappointing. I think a lot of the failures that I am going to talk about in this post, come down to over-hyping and poorly marketing changes. One of the big quality of life changes that was announced was the addition of a universal teleportation tome, that in theory would collect all of your teleportation devices into a single item allowing you to free up a bunch of inventory slots. I don’t have mine fully unlocked yet because it is a long quest chain… but I have collected all of the scrolls that would fit into it and while it will free up a few slots… it does absolutely nothing for the cash shop lounge scrolls. So essentially I still will have multiple slots taken up by portal devices. The gobbler is also somewhat disappointing if only because it costs 100 Gold to buy it… which seems like a big chunk of change for something we have already gone through a lot of hassle to unlock.

Now we are entering the spoiler territory of this blog post, so if you care about such things… maybe stop reading.

The new story was pretty enjoyable, but felt extremely short… and also like nothing much happened. The true resolution of the expansion happens inside of the Bava Nisos meta event, and I will talk about that in a few. Essentially it is going between a bunch of locations, including some of Core Tyria searching for artifacts of the White Mantle. If you did not play through Bloodstone Fen or Lake Doric… most of this would largely feel non sequitur. Essentially the quest chain is effectively this heartfelt goodbye to Mabon… a character who does not really feel like earned the place he holds in the canon of this game. Secrets of the Obscure did not really flesh the character out enough to make me feel much of anything as a player about him. It isn’t like Aurene, a character that we learned to love over the course of several expansions worth of content. Mabon is just this character we are told is important and we are told is meaningful… and then is taken away and are told we should feel something about it. The story does however give us one of the best achievements ever that comes with the title of True Introvert… which I am absolutely using from this point forward… so it is not like I can be super harsh about it.

Where things start to fall apart however is when you approach Bava Nisos as a map. It is essentially a map that only exists to serve as a staging place for the meta event associated with it. The entire place is either monster guts or old crumbling buildings… often times a mixture of both as we are essentially fighting inside of a giant titan named Saevus Saxum. The entire map largely centers around killing the titan by damaging its vital organs. There is a staging area that is sealed off from the rest of the map by a Mursaat Mirror, but weirdly… if you are standing in this area when the map resets… you still die which feels thoroughly dumb. There just is not much going on in this map apart from the meta, and there are areas you cannot reach… until the meta has opened them up. All of the marketing going into this made it seem like this was going to be a rich map with multiple lanes… which of course made us all think we were getting another Dragon’s Stand which is quite possibly one of the best maps ever created.

What we got instead is a meta that feels like they ran out of funding, time, or wandered away like a bored toddler in an ADHD fugue state. The entire thing feels unfinished, and like we have half of a meta. Essentially there are some waves of fight the nonsense leading up to a proper boss fight in the form of a Gorseval clone that feels a little overtuned for pugs. Then you enter the lanes phase, where the groups have to split up and each take out a vital organ. I went down the path for the lungs and it involved us breaking objectives while fighting off waves of titanspawn. I will have to do the other lanes to find out what happened there, but for the most part it felt pretty basic. Then you are told to collapse on the heart chamber and wait for Livia. The timer ticks down and then suddenly Livia gets some dialog options that show up… and the event is just over.

Map chat was legitimately mad about this event last night. We were all sitting there wondering if we fucked something up… did we somehow fail the event and got a bad ending. None of us seemed to get credit in the achievements for the kill, but also that appears to just be a bug. Then another timer started and the map reset with everyone dying after having said we did fatal damage to the titan. The entire thing feels like it was half finished and rushed out the door. Is this why the expansion got delayed? Because if so… maybe delay it again and finish the damned thing. The problem is that we are now stuck with another bad map… that no one is going to actually play other than those who are chasing the backpack or specific achievements. This could have been another epic map that folks play every day… instead we get a non-ending. I guess I just want to know what the folks creating this thought about it… because surely they knew this would not be terribly well received.

The other problem with Janthir Wilds as a whole… is that it was impacted by the current SAG-AFTRA Voice Actors strike. It feels exceptionally jarring that you will have multi-character dialogs happening with a handful of them voiced… and the others relying entirely upon reading fleeting dialog balloons popping up on your screen. I will absolutely look forward to hopefully playing through this content at some point in the future when we have voice lines for all of the actors that were on strike. I will be exceptionally frustrated if this never happens however… because holy shit does it feel bad right now. Like the highlight of having Countess Anise in any content… is experience the full on epic levels of sass provided by Catherine Taber. On one hand I am super proud of Arena Net for not replacing folks… but on the other hand it absolutely underlines the importance of these actors delivering the dialog to make the characters feel real. They were in a rough position… and I don’t think just delaying the content would have been viable. Here is hoping we can play through this with all of the proper audio at some point in the not too distant future.

Janthir Wilds as a whole has been a weird mixed bag of an expansion for me. I wholeheartedly love Lowland Shore and the Bearkin and deeply care about many of the new characters that were introduced through their coastal lives. I did not care for the Greer/Decima meta, and still feel like it needs some improvement to make it a big easier to pull off… because getting anyone to do it at all is pure hell. I like the maps overall for roaming around and doing events however, and really enjoyed Mistburned Barrens. The story is a bit hit or miss because quite frankly… I do not give a shit about the Wizards Court. I like some of the characters associated with it, but I just don’t much care about the whole super secret magical society, and as a result the highlight of this expansion has been when I was spending time with the loveable bears. I would fucking die for Pokey, because he is the Braham that actually works and is not an insufferable ass for large chunks of the content. With both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds however… they feel like unfinished content. They feel like the content we get, because the studio either no longer has the vision or the funding to create the best content they could be. They are a hollow shade of something like an End of Dragons, that really shows the best that Guild Wars 2 can possibly be.

Please do not take this as me saying that I will riot and want to rage against the crappy content we are getting. I got $25 worth of enjoyment out of Janthir Wilds. In truth I got way more enjoyment out of it… because I am still having a lot of fun with various aspects of that content. I think the Metas we were given are poorly designed and just not representative of the best that Arena Net can do… but the intricate details of the zones and certain aspects of the story make up for it. I think a lot of resources went into the creation of the Homestead, and I am really thankful for that. Hopefully without a big system like that looming and eating up development time… we will finally see what they are capable of with the third of these micro yearly expansions. What I want more than anything from whatever comes next… is more evergreen content that players actually WANT to do… rather than something that they feel compelled to do in order to check some box off in the achievement panel. You can do better Arena Net. I have seen it… countless times.