Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Communing with Priests

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I was off due to the Veterans Day holiday here in the United States and the only useful thing that I did was make a lasagna. The rest of the day was spent playing New World, and the vast majority of that was spent in Myrkgard at the Priests camp. I had a lot of fun running around with various groups from my server and getting to know a new batch of people. I felt pretty good about myself because I had a few different groups of people vying for my attention and one person referred to me as “that OP tank” so that was pretty great. I think the reality is that most of the people playing New World don’t come from a PVE Tanking mindset, so I probably approach play from a different perspective because I care about threat and soaking damage and not about making my dps numbers go up.

One of the cool things to come out of yesterday was that I learned a way to very easily mix a third priest into the rotation. I clipped this from Map Genie... which actually required me to composite together several searches to get the complete map of the Priest Farm. Notice that two of the icons are Marked with Skulls, which means that Map Genie has identified those as Elite Bosses. The thing is… the northwest icon is also an Elite Boss and drops the exact same loot table as the other two “Priests”. Technically these are moving Left to Right: Disciple of Disorder, Artifex Faetum, and Archmagister Vocus. Most groups just alternate between Faetum and Vocus, but you can mix in the Disciple with some careful running and still manage to complete the circuit before the last “priest” respawns. At some point I probably need to record a video of me running the route, preferably in the morning when it is relatively empty.

After a day of running the priest camp over and over, I needed to chill out last night… and in part hang out downstairs snuggling with cats and hanging out with my wife. This meant that I queued up for a few invasions… got in all of them and chilled out getting free money. People are just not queuing for Invasions right now it seems, for Monarch’s Bluff we did not even fill half way and notice that I am second in DPS for the entire raid. This only occurred because I was the ONLY person guarding the back gate of the fort and having to burn down entire waves by myself. The good thing about invasions though is the cash and the first one paid off my weekly rent for my Tier 4 house, and the second one will pay off the other two houses. I still wish there was a way to queue for these invasions without having to go to the territory.

In other news…. Syndicate lost yet another territory. This time we lost Restless Shores to East Mindia Co, the group that took First Light from Syndicate originally and was most recently holding Cutlass Keys before losing it to Covenant. Blades of DaTang managed to hold Brightwood which makes me extremely happy given that I have shifted to that as my main crafting hub. Everfall says in Marauder hands, but it was a fairly close fight as I believe Covenant manages to take three flags but ran out of time. It is so surreal that we used to control seven territories at one point… and covenant was not even on the map anymore and a few weeks later we have this mess.

Zergcore Floundering

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Good Morning Friends! Welcome to Myrkgard, or at least the semi-safe camp area near the priests. One of the things I dig about the harder areas of New World is that they leave these areas open so that you can set up a camp in the middle of the zone as a recovery spot. This means if things go horribly wrong, you can always just take the death and respawn in a reasonably safe area to pick back up the pieces. I spent some time last night hanging with my friend Cid and drug Eliyon and eventually Warenwolf out to do the priest farm. As it stands several of my weapons are now up to around 530 watermark and my armor is bumping up towards 570. This of course all depends on the viability of drops and so far I have not found much for myself.

I wound up going to bed around eleven last night or midnight server time, and the group I was with was more or less still going strong. I opted to camp out in the safe spot where we set up our tents and my hope is in a few minutes when I finish this blog post, to attempt to find a morning group for priests. I am off today for Veterans Day, so I of course feel like I should be thanking all of the Veteran readers out there for your service. Both of my Grandfathers were Veterans of World War II, and my wife’s biological father served in peace time and her stepdad was one of the “Chosin Few”. So I was raised with a respect for military service and the sacrifices that have been made.

My evening started with me hopping on the Zerg train for a trip to Myrkgard and in theory the entire gamut of Ebonscale Reach and Reekwater as well. The problem is the Zerg culture has spread a bit and it has ultimately diluted the power. Originally this initiative was started by Give Er, but the Zerg is much like a train of lemmings and they are willing to follow any loud voice telling them what to do. It was due to this that things have fallen apart the last two times I have attempted to ride the train. Things went pretty smoothly through the Mines and was we took down a number of portals on the way to Myrkgard itself and even through the city proper. Things fell apart however when we started trying to tackle the portals northeast of Myrkgard. The party ultimately ends up splitting and going to different portals, which means everything becomes significantly harder… and when things get hard people start flaking out on what is generally “free loot”.

Things went downhill from there… and when it came time to jump zones the goal was to follow the normal progression… Shattered Mountain > Ebonscale Reach > Reekwater. However some idiot in chat started calling for folks to go to Reekwater which once again split the party and confused the Zerg. So what ended up happening was some burning of Azoth as we bounced between the two zones for a bit trying to summon forth a critical mass of players… but failing to do so. I myself hopped off the train and started trying to make other plans. I saw that Give Er kept trying to resurrect the zerg and I think failing. I have however met several cool people through the Zerg and populated my friends list with a few nice folks who are down for nonsense. I ended up joining up with Cid and we went to farm Adjorjan for a bit before eventually the Myrkgard group materialized.

So the good and bad about Zerg culture spreading… is it means that you are only what seems like a few minutes from another Zerg group trying to break Myrkgard. This was super helpful last night as we got set up in place for the Priest farm, and as we had other people coming along after the fact. If a Zerg is running you can often use them as cover to get set up safely. Overall though last night went way harder than it should have because we had a group of folks who had no clue how to break aggro and refused to listen to our pleas for them to just lay on the ground. Additionally they seemingly had no clue how to run the rooftops and just ended up training huge packs of mobs through the streets between the two camps. This meant everything was just more dicey than it needed to be… and as a result we got in far fewer kills than we potentially could have because we had to clear a dozen trash each time we fought a Priest.

You might think that it was an extremely frustrating night, and on some level you would be right. However on another level I got to hang out with friends and do some stupid stuff for loot. That is pretty much the highest form of enjoyment for me, so I am completely down with whatever frustrations we had to deal with along the way.

New World and Everquest Camps

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Good Morning Friends. Please join me in mourning the loss of the Tier 5 Workshop in my new adopted hometown of Brightwood. There is a project currently on the town board to complete this, but right now the progress is moving slowly. Ultimately the problem with not having my Tier 5 Workshop anymore, is that I can’t craft any of the Orichalcum and Ironwood items that I had been making to gain skill increases. Yes in another post I proved out that the most efficient use of resources was just to grind level 1 items over and over. However I am on a weird mission and as a result I don’t mind using a lot of Ironwood and Orichalcum in the process.

Essentially three things are happening, firstly I am farming the needed extremely rare drop resources needed to craft a set of Voidbent armor. Secondly I am using all of this Ironwood as a way of leveling my lumber skills which will allow me to refine Ebony wood from said rare resources. Lastly I am trying to craft a perfect set of Orichalcum tools. What I consider to be “perfect” is a very specific combination of traits namely Azoth Extraction, Luck boost, and Yield boost. I have crafted a number of slightly imperfect tools but to date the only thing I have that is in its ideal state is my Mining Pickaxe.

I have been to Myrkgard a number of times but I had never really been to Myrkgard. What I mean by that is I have participated in a number of Zerg runs that fly through the place consuming all of the resources and then move on to the next target. You don’t need much skill or finesse to do that and as a result I have never really learned how to function within the constrains of the zone. Last night around 9 pm I got an invite from a friend of mine to go do the Priest Farm in Myrkgard, and as a result I learned the route that players follow in order to make this farm work. Having experienced this… it feels exactly like farming content in Everquest did.

Now I have made that comparison before and have gotten some extremely funny looks, but what I am talking about are the dungeons that we used to farm repeatably for loot. For those who are unfamiliar with this concept, a big dungeon like Sebilis or Guk would be carved up by players into several camps, generally revolving around a boss or multiple bosses that spawned in the same area. Essentially you would “break” the zone, meaning you killed everything down to the boss you were going to farm. Then you would repeated kill spawns in a specific order in order to make combat the most repeatable and sustainable process.

Priest camp works exactly like this. You are rotating between two spots and catching the spawn of a specific type of mob that is known to drop good loot, and keeping this pattern going as long as you can. Once you have finished one spawn, you loot and use some creative terrain traversal to safely move to the next spawn without having to kill anything in the process. Essentially you are avoiding killing things that would be significantly more precarious and through use of terrain resetting aggro and the encounters if need be when a train comes through. This is sustainable with a five player group, but it seems that inevitably there will be other players with the same idea either as solos or other groups.

Based on my brief experience last night, this means that you more or less need to keep your head on a swivel and adjust to the encounter as the conditions with other players change. One of the “Priest” spawns is down this long bridge filled with other more tricky encounters, and the process is to run down to a monument at the end of the bridge… hop up on it… and then go prone to reset aggro. However if a group of players comes in staggered they easily can bring with them a half dozen enemies that will add to your group doing the fight. So you have to make a call if you are going to just burn and then move on, or if it is enough to require you to reset the encounter completely to keep from dying.

I had a freaking blast and cannot wait to go back. In order news… the march of yellow continues with Planet X knocking green out of Cutlass Keys. I think what we are experiencing more than anything right now is war fatigue. It seems universally the loss of players in the game is making it extremely hard to get fifty people to sign up to fight in a war. Yellow has had this resurgence brought on by the defection of Apex and Planet X and as a result there is a buzz surrounding those battles. Both Green and Purple had had to take part in multiple wars in each week, not to mention at least one invasion… and this fatigue is taking its toll. Even I find myself less excited about signing up for invasions when in reality I have only fought in a eight or so.

Essentially I am curious to see what server mergers are going to look like, because we are in significantly better shape than the majority of servers… and that isn’t exactly great shape. They are deploying a PTR realm today, and with it the Void Gauntlet. I have a feeling that this new weapon is going to bring a resurgence of players as well as the end of the Lost Ark testing phase. I will be curious to see what the coming weeks bring us.

Betrayal and Turmoil

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Good Morning Friends. It was a bit of a rough weekend with my asthma troubles starting on Friday and continuing through the weekend at least on some level. Then of course we got back our long lost missing hour of sleep… which never actually leaves me as refreshed as you think it would. I’ve been in a bit of a stupor and so far this morning doesn’t seem to be any different. I am largely doing fine and I am hoping at some point the coffee kicks in and I can get on with my day. My gaming this weekend was largely limited to New World as I continue to chase a large number of competing objectives. I’ve most recently been farming Orichalcum ore in a mining set in the hopes to getting Void Ore that I can at some point turn into Voidbent armor. With everyone trying to gear up, there has been a bit of a landrun on the stuff and finding an area that is not actively farmed is a pretty significant challenge.

Eight days ago when I posted a picture of the server map, Syndicate held five territories, Marauders held five territories, and Covenant had managed to get back a single territory. Unfortunately things are continuing to go downhill for my purple family, because as of last night we hold three territories, Covenant are up to two, and Marauders are up to six. How did this happen so fast you might ask? Well I talked about this the other day but two of the most PVP focused Syndicate companies defected to Covenant and in doing so left Everfall in shambles repair wise. Apex and Planet X were both at the core of much of the war planning for our faction and them betraying us has left not only a power vacuum but also a debt of knowledge.

I spent Saturday night in a three hour long meeting of the leaders of various Minda Syndicate companies, trying to determine the best course of action in how to “unite the clans”. Essentially what is left is Blades of DaTang that hold down Brightwood and Ebonscale Reach, and I think for the time being there is no real threat to those territories falling. DaTang are great folks, but the problem is that they don’t blend super well with other teams and tend to do things in their own way in large part to the majority of that company does not speak English. They are willing to assist as they can but aren’t really in a good place to be leading a larger war effort.

Once you get past DaTang, there are a bunch of scattered smaller groups that can each field a squad or two which means there is going to need to be coordination at a level that we are just not used to. With Apex and Planet X gone, they also took with them a lot of the folks that had the mechanical knowledge in how to put together a winning team and how to call the shots during the heat of battle. That is not to say that there will not be folks stepping up to the plate and learning, but one single act essentially set us back a month in PVP progress. So I expect in the coming days to see more shifting around on the map with Covenant making a serious bid for Windsward tonight. I would love to see Everfall purple again but in truth we are going to have to accept occupation until forces can be geared and trained to take it back.

I guess for now I am thankful that when Everfall was previously occupied, I shifted to using Brightwood as my hub of operations and ultimately that is where I purchased my first Tier 4 house. It is my hope that DaTang can continue to stand as a bulwark against the other two armies. That said the truth is as a completely PVE player, all of this shifting of tiles on the map is more about faction pride than actual functionality. Sure I can’t transfer items from my banks… but I never actually did that because I am too cheap to pay the transfer fees. Sure teleports are more costly… but I rarely ever teleported with Azoth and instead used my housing and inn network as a way of getting close enough and then running the rest of the distance. With a house in Windsward, Brightwood and Weavers Fen that gave me a cheap teleport to get pretty close to whatever content I happened to be doing.

Currently my Inn is in Everfall but that might shift significantly in the coming weeks… especially once the linked Marketplace goes into the game. Currently there is a bit of an Ironforge and Orgrimmar problem happening in New World, with two cities being the hub of all commerce on the server. Brightwood does a fair amount of trade as well, but nothing compared to Everfall and Windsward. Once the Marketplace can be accessed from any town, there are significant more reasons to spread out from the central corridor of the map. As I get to doing more endgame content it might make sense for me to move my Inn to Shattered Mountain, just to have rapid transit into that zone.