MMORPG

Successfully Merged

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I logged in this morning and it appears that the merger has been completed. I am now on Heliopolis instead of Themiscyra and our old server is no more. Because we were not the server being merged into, it means that none of the companies that held territory on our server kept it. I fully expect the next few weeks to be a time of strife as far as faction conflicts go as the companies from three servers ultimately settle into a pecking order. Sadly I had made quite a few friends in the group that previously controlled Everfall, which is where my tier 4 home is located. Positive however is it seems that Everfall is just as well taken care of on Heliopolis with all but one of the crafting machines sitting at Tier 5.

The map on Heliopolis is seemingly more competitive whereas on Themiscyra it seemed like the heavy hitters were all Marauder or Covenant after the biggest Syndicate company transferred off the server. In truth, I don’t much care about who holds a territory so long as they are not being slumlords and doing nothing to maintain the crafting machines. Sadly on Themiscyra we had reached a point where Everfall and Windsward were the only two territories that seemed to put any effort and pride into maintaining them. My hope as well is that with more players there will be more activity happening in the various open world farms since that seems to be the side of the game that I really enjoy doing.

Speaking of farms, I went back out to the camp with Pit Lord Daeshi and have now picked up all of the gear drops off that loot table. It seems like folks are regularly farming this camp because it is where the legendary corrupted trophy material drops, which is heavily needed for invasions. In fact, at two different times out there I was with groups from major companies on the previous server trying to far trophies. Of those drops the one I was seeking out the most of course was the tanking sword… or at least I am turning it into a tanking sword. I figured with two different life-stealing traits on it and a base constitution stat, that screamed sustain and tanking. It does not hurt that it also looks really cool.

Other than farming gear, I spent part of my last night on Themiscyra doing another invasion. It was doomed from the start but we fought valiantly. We had even less than we had the night before and I think we made it to wave 5 before a boss type made it into the base… which caused everyone to collapse in to deal with it… which caused the other gates to fall. Essentially this is sort of what seems to happen as a cascade failure any time you need to call an all-hands-on-point type scenario. Invasions are very much a “manage everything all at once” type thing but once the plates stop spinning and fall down… everything goes south really fast.

Now to sort of bury the lede… I have been up to some shenanigans or at least I am supporting an initiative that is. A handful of my friends have been working on a brand new Mastodon instance that is gaming-focused, given that this seemed to be a niche that wasn’t really well served. Elekk.xyz is a fine server but it is deeply sequestered from the rest of the Fediverse, and really didn’t seem to be all that gaming-focused in the first place. It is nowhere near ready for sign-ups yet, but those of us who are going to be helping with the day-to-day stuff on the instance now have our accounts. Expect more updates as I have them as to when this is going to be launching. I think for the time being I am probably going to keep my Masto.ai account at least in the short run until we have worked out all of the kinks and have federation relays spinning. At some point in the not-too-distant future however I expect to migrate my account once again, but hopefully for the very last time. I have a lot of faith in this team and it will be nice to have a place to suggest where I very directly know everyone involved.

I’ve known about the possibility of this happening for a while but did not want to say anything until it was actually “for seriously” happening.

Twenty Six Seconds

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Sometimes I don’t go looking for camps… but the camps find me. Last night was a bit of an interesting evening because I started out just returning to semi-casually questing in Shattered Mountain and wound up defending Everfall from an invasion. I’ve talked about the casual nature of rolling up on a “camp” in New World and either getting invited to a group or forming the group yourself. This has been way more commonplace than I ever realized, and now that I am actively looking for it… I find them constantly. This has led to me striking up random conversations will all sorts of players. Last night when I was in the middle of questing through Illurmin Rift, I noticed a handful of players standing around on this pillar pictured above. This sort of thing has now made me stop to investigate and see what sort of shenanigans I could get myself into.

It turns out there is a boss named Pit Lord Daehi that spawns there, and this one little spot on the column shown in the first picture is one of the few places you can stand in the area and not be ticking down a corruption debuff. So I stopped the quest I was working on and started farming with the group of folks that had gathered there. It is similar to most of the camps in New World where the boss respawns roughly every five minutes. It also suffers from the false spawn problem of it almost instantly respawning… but dropping nothing when this happens. So the pattern is… jump down and fight the boss, then scramble back up the column to wait for the next spawn and occasionally have to kill tendrils that can see you while standing on the column.

It turns out there are some pretty tasty drops that you can encounter at this location, and I really want the Pit Lord Dominator sword, which has not one but TWO life regen perks on it once upgraded to legendary. The above image is not a complete list of the drops, but everything that was seen by my farming party. Unfortunately, I saw none of the 590 Named weapons, but I did pick up two copies of Chef’s Shoes, a pair of Mining Googles, and Vengeful Fisherman’s Pants. I was getting a ton of purple drops, just nothing off the named weapon table. Unfortunately, we were only out there for about an hour and a half because in talking to the group… two of them happened to be the company that currently controls Everfall. They have done a pretty great job with maintaining that town and were sharing how low on people they were going to be for the upcoming invasion. Since you can now sign up for an invasion from the world map, I opted to do this in order to help out my new found friends.

So as a result just about 15 minutes before 9 pm, we called the group and all ported out to get ready for the battle. I opted to go into my “Basher” configuration where I am using a Hammer and a Great Axe like I have done before in invasions. Basically, this is the bog standard PVP tank configuration which exists largely to harass the oncoming attackers by slowing them or stunning them. In an invasion, you have to deal with multiple rounds of spawning enemies that all charge the point you are defending. The goal is to keep them away from the gate you are guarding and keep them from dealing damage to it. So when a wave of runners spawns I would throw down a gravity well or a well-timed shockwave to glue them in place while the ranged DPS grinds them down quickly. The basher looks like shit on the DPS charts, but the job of locking things down is critical both in invasion and in PVP wars.

I will cut to the chase… we did not win the invasion last night. We came damned close and far closer than I have ever before. I’ve not queued for an invasion since the early days of the game before folks had really figured everything out. It turns out this company had never lost an invasion, and last night we came within 26 seconds of winning. We were down a full squad and a half of players, which made all of the positions extremely tight. Unfortunately, the last wave was just too much to handle without spare bodies and we had to shift toward the middle to deal with a Spriggan, which is a boss type that can drop a gate down EXTREMELY quickly… and at that point, one of the other gates got overwhelmed. Once the invasion mobs are in the center of the base, it does not take terribly long for them to obliterate the central pillar and capture the keep. We were so freaking close and everyone fought valiantly, but we just could not muster the folks to make it happen. It is at this point that I realize that I should have been queuing for these invasions all this time because we are seemingly needed.

The problem that we are dealing with at the moment however is apathy brought on by an upcoming round of server merges. Themiscyra and Frislandia are being merged into Heliopolis and with that comes a shuffling of the deck as far as companies go. Because we are merging into Heliopolis, this means that no one that currently holds territory on our server will hold territory after the merger. There is of course a compensation package for those companies, but a lot of folks have lost the will to defend territories when they know it will be all for naught on December 2nd. I believe all of the invasions that happened last night failed due to a lack of attendance. Brightwood I heard only had two squads out of ten maximum squads defending the territory. My goal when we merge is to start attending more invasions because while I do not care about Wars… I do at least want to protect the crafting machines in a given territory as much as I can.

In the meantime, however… I do plan on going back out to Illurmin Rift in Shattered Mountain and trying to farm up a sword.

Gone Fishin

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Sometimes my brain latches onto something and just won’t let it go… until I have obsessed my way through completing it. For this particular obsession, I am going to blame my friend PlayerVsHobbies. When she joined New World not too long ago… she sorta made a beeline straight for the fishing system and as a result, ended up in some areas of the game that her level range was not quite prepared for. I know Vernie at one point helped her I think with a run through some dangerous areas and the other day I happened to be on when she was attempting to sneak to a fishing hole in Shattered Mountain. For those unfamiliar with this game, Shattered Mountain is a deeply scary place with monsters well above the maximum level cap of players… so if you are not well geared and max level, you are probably going to struggle out there. So I played guard duty as we made our way to the fishing hole and then farmed Dryad Wolves for Wyrdwood while she managed to get the fish that was required for that step in the chain.

This all planted in my head that I too have been on this quest chain for a while, and never actually completed it on my original server Valhalla. I’ve admittedly never spent that much time fishing in New World, though of my limited experience of MMO fishing systems it seemed to be about the best. So for whatever reason, this flipped some bits in my brain and made it so that this became my all-consuming mission in life… to complete the fishing chain and walk away with a shiny legendary fishing pole. So other than farming my daily Gypsum, this has been the task I set forth in front of myself… and I have to say it was relaxing as hell. There is something extremely chill about fishing in these beautiful locations for the amount of time needed to complete the quest. I’ve never been most of a fisherman in other games, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Another huge benefit of this quest chain is that you pretty much walk away with a full set of Tier 4 and Tier 5 fishing gear, which only serves to help you out as the requests get a bit rare. The only time that I had to rely on bait was when trying to catch fish over 30 lbs, but thankfully what I needed was cheap enough to stock up before heading out into the field. I had always just chucked bait into the bank and in truth, I had quite a good stockpile of various sorts which I now am carrying around on me at all times. I guess I have been bit by the bug because I have found myself flipping over to my fishing set, hitting F3, and doing this while waiting on things to spawn.

I completed the quest chain and you get a random box that includes a level 600 Legendary Fishing Pole. I think PvH got one that was Angry-Earth-themed, and the one I pulled was Ancient-themed. It appears that the stats are largely randomized, which means that in truth… I think the one I crafted and happened to pull 4 tier 3 stats on is maybe a bit better as a daily driver. I know I will be spending a lot more time crafting fishing poles as that seems to be my best option for leveling Engineering, so I might even pull an even better quad/three in my next flurry of crafting. I think if I manage to get geared up enough to start crafting for item level 600 fishing poles, there is the rare chance that I could make my own version of a 5-stat.

What I found somewhat weird though… is that the quest chain only required me to get to level 100 in Fishing, and not 200 which is the maximum before you start getting into aptitude levels. So I also now have the title “Fishing Legend” which I don’t feel like is really something I should equip until I ultimately cap out that skill. It is a fun and relaxing way to pass the time, especially while watching a YouTube video or something like that. So I guess I am thankful to my good friend PvH for getting me started down this path. I wonder what other enjoyable grinds are out there that I have been avoiding.

Voidbent and Other Goals

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a very excellent Thanksgiving weekend for those in the United States. For those elsewhere, I hope it was just an amazing weekend. Last week I wrapped up a series of gear guides, and over the weekend I spent some time formatting that information and adding it to the New World Tools page so that you can find items for specific gear slots. When I started the project the entire intent was for me to be able to find a 590-named weapon for every weapon type so that I could use those for leveling purposes. It morphed however along the way into me documenting every camp I knew about and making sure the weapons shown on the loot tables were actually dropping. I had no clue it would take anywhere near as long as it did, but at least now I have a good series of guides as a result.

The problem with a series spanning three weeks is that there were a lot of other things that took place while that was going on. For example, I accomplished one of the goals that I set out for myself before re-rolling and that was to max out my armorsmithing and craft a full set of item level 600 Void Bent armor. While this isn’t the best set of armor by any means, it is sort of universally good enough for almost any mod of play in the game. The fact that I crafted it myself means that I get to take advantage of the entire item level without experiencing any drain due to my lower expertise. The benefit of the armor has been very noticeable and I can survive the higher-level areas of the game significantly better than I could before.

Out of all of the Greatswords that I saw dropped, I decided that Bloodsucker’s Sword best fit what I want out of a tanking weapon with lifestealing and leeching crosscut on it. Similarly, I happened to luck into a nice sword drop from Rafflebones called Jupiter’s Favor that has Mortal Lifesteal which will give me back a little life each time a mob that I have damaged has been killed. At some point, I would like to replace it with Deeproot, but that would require some more coordinated group farming to get. The shield I crafted from a pattern that came from the Halloween event. I honestly wish I had started farming those items sooner so that I could have collected an entire set of the item level 600 crafting patterns. Other than that I spent time upgrading my bags and crafting a full set of tier 5 tools. Last night while bulk crafting to level engineering I even lucked into a quad tier 3 fishing pole.

My immediate goal has been to continue pushing up my trade skills. At the moment I have been alternating between working on getting Engineering and Cooking up to level 200. I find Cooking way less enjoyable as it just requires large quantities of materials, but if I ignore it for a while I end up gathering up so many materials in the process of just playing the game. Engineering I can focus grind a bit better because right now I need so much Wyrdwood and Ironwood, but the lower level materials are essentially free. I’ve set up a base for this phase in Everfall and I can get enough low-level leather and cloth in order to keep the fishing pole farm sustainable pending I acquire the rarer Ironwood planks. At some point, I will probably end up focusing on other professions. I got furnishing high enough to make a set of trophies but it seems generally awful to level still.

I finally pushed the Everfall faction up to level 30, which unlocked access to a Tier 4 house. I purchased the one in the main town square across from the Inn and Trading Post. I contemplated where exactly I wanted my first home to be, and since I have had my inn bound at Everfall almost this entire time… I decided that was as good of an option as any. Right now my plan is to build back up my gold and then focus on getting a house in Mourningdale and a house in Cutlass Keys since I also spend a lot of my time in those two zones. At some point, I need to actually make my way over to Brimstone Sands, because for all I know I might fall in love with that zone. I am still chipping away at quests in Shattered Mountain because I am weird and obsess over doing things sequentially… I have yet to start on any of the new content.

In another time and another mindset… I would be preparing for the launch of Dragonflight today. I am not however and there isn’t any big reason why. I played quite a bit of the Alpha and Beta and thought the game was pretty solid, but I am just not drawn to the World of Warcraft style of gameplay anywhere near as much as I used to be. However, for all of my friends who are amped to be playing it, I hope you all have an amazing launch that goes smoothly and that the game reignites those fires of joy inside of you. For now, I am still finding myself enjoying my time in Aeternum. I still have hopes that we end up with a group of people at max level and can roam around and do some of the fun open-world stuff. However for the time being I might have to wade out into the broader community and start making some groups happen on my own.