Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Sniping a Six Link

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a bit of a departure and now I return you to your regularly scheduled ARPG nonsense. Of all of the games that I play on the regular, I think I have the biggest soft spot for Diablo-style games. I remember getting into the test phases of the first Diablo game in college and it represented pretty much everything I had ever wanted in a game up until that point. When Diablo 2 came out, I made the difficult decision of choosing to buy it over Icewind Dale as they released the same week… and I had limited funds to buy a game with. I remember playing countless hours of “also ran” titles like Fate, Sacred, Titans Quest, and Dungeon Siege. Basically, I am a junkie for the pattern of clicking on baddies and getting a shower of loot as a result. I am surprised on one level that it took me this long to get into Path of Exile, and on other levels… not surprised at all because it can be a deeply frustrating game.

In order to move my Storm Brand into the next phase of its evolution, I really needed a six-link chest piece. The base that is most highly suggested for the build I am running is the Sadist Garb, and holy crap have prices been all over the place. I’ve been trying to craft my own and have legitimately used probably close to 200 orbs of fusing so far trying to get the links correct. When I first started shopping the trade league these were going for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 chaos for the right colors and right links. At that time I did not have the funds and by the time I did have some money… they had jumped up to somewhere between 1.5 divines and 4 divines. Basically, the loot changes have thrown the trade economy into a state of chaos where no one seems to know how to price anything.

This morning before sitting down to write this post, I decided to check prices so I could snag a screenshot, and sitting there amongst the expensive options… was this Sadist Garb. It is not the best-itemized thing I have ever seen and is corrupted… which limits my ability to do much of anything to change that, but it was only 10 chaos… which seems like an extreme bargain at the moment. Basically, I decided to jump on the opportunity to get six links, so I could start settling my build in a bit more and shift from my 4 links main spell chain to the 6 links version. The only problem here is that I essentially need to shift around all of my gear to make this work because I am not using my body armor for my main spell chain. I’ve been rat-holing some gear but none of it is quite ready for prime time. However, it is much much easier to get some 4 links as opposed to a single 6 link.

As far as atlas progress goes I am sitting at 45/155 nodes. I’ve been weirdly obsessed with filling out the early rungs of the ladder. I’ve completed the first three tiers and have a map each in tiers 4 and 5, and then 3 in tiers 6 and 7. I suppose I should really check in with the rest of the guild to see what they need because they might be able to plug the holes in my progress and the same with my spare maps. As far as unique maps I have managed to catch 3 available so far from Kirac and have knocked out Coward’s Trial, The Twilight Temple, and Whakawairua Tuaha. Whenever I see one of those I try to complete it just because I am uncertain when I will see it again.

In other news, I’ve also started a character in the new Diablo III season 27. I have some awesome friends who offered me a boost since I did not start until Sunday… but ultimately I thanked them and turned them down. Diablo III has been my “chill” game for when I need a break from the stressful pace of mapping in Path of Exile. Basically, my survival is not amazing so I have to be on point… and lag-free… in order to finish most of the higher-tier maps. I’ve been hesitant to grind through the lower-tier maps for fear that someone in my crew might need them. So essentially I opted to chill out downstairs playing Diablo III the last two nights.

Last night I hit 70 and am slowly chipping away at Haedrig’s Gift. The first three chapters were a cakewalk, but I can basically only reliably do T1 right now with the current state of my gear. I am in mostly yellows minus the four pieces of set gear, so I figure I will do a round of bounties for jewelry patterns to knock that one out, and see how much gear I manage to get them. Hopefully by the time I finish that I will be able to bump things up to T4 and knock out the rest of Chapter IV. Once I have a full set of gear and some viable pieces to go with it, I will be able to escalate quickly through the ranks. I’ve done the “whirlrend” barb thing so many times that it is just a matter of devoting the time to farming in order to get there. Once I am up and running I should be able to knock the rest of the achievements out quickly and get my sword doggo.

Revisiting Wildstar

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Loading Screen from in-game on Emulator Server

Friends I did some nonsense this weekend and I am going to talk briefly about whether or not you should also do some nonsense. Wildstar is a game that I genuinely feel was ahead of its time. Had it launched today, I think that it would be far better received than it was in 2014. Admittedly there are a lot of reasons why I would say that today, not the least of which has been the steady stream of players leaving World of Warcraft and looking for other options. Additionally, I think Wildstar in its combat style is very compatible with what Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy have distilled into a very fun action RPG formula. Wildstar was the slightly awkward pupa that eventually evolved into the glorious hack-and-slash butterfly that is the modern action combat MMORPG. If Wildstar could have launched as a hybrid game on both mobile and desktop today, it would be phenomenally popular.

Screenshot from Wildstar when it was still active

I liked Wildstar quite a bit, but never really managed to engage with it fully. I don’t think I made it past level thirty on any of my characters, and there was a snowy zone where my forward momentum would always die. That said… I had a ton of friends who were super engaged with this game and as a result, I stuck around and kept poking my head into it. I was saddened like so many were when it ultimately shuttered in November of 2018. Starting just before the shutdown of the server was a project called Nexus Forever, with the goal of trying to create a robust server emulator to allow the game to continue to live on after its ultimate demise. While I never fully attached to Wildstar, it was an extremely important game to my friend Ace, and as a result, I have been trying to keep loose tabs on the progress of a potential server emulator. I am not exactly certain when I joined the Discord community, but I believe it was at some point in 2019.

Like so many other things in my life… the pandemic largely caused me to lose touch with the Nexus Forever project. Like most of the discords, I am a member of… I’ve had it muted because the way discord works are extremely bad for spamming you with notifications. Scan forward to this weekend when the YouTube algorithm decided to deliver me the above video from the Lazy Peon. It turns out that not only is the server emulator progressing along nicely, but there is actually a test server where you can log in and play around with the game. Since I am the one of my friend group most likely to do stupid things for minimal enjoyment… it was left up to me to sort this out and determine if it was actually worth playing.

Character creation from in-game on Emulator Server

It turns out that the process as a whole is relatively straightforward. You can see above that I was able to recreate the warrior version of Belghast Sternblade that I played around with on the retail servers. I am not going to post specific links to how to do this thing, because I get the general impression that the community would rather have folks engage with it through Discord. However, for sake of understanding, I am going to outline the steps required to get everything set up and play.

  • Join the Nexus Forever Discord
  • Check the pinned topic in the #help channel for links
  • Download the client patcher and begin Wildstar downloading
  • Download the custom Game Launcher
  • Sign up for an account on the Test Server
  • Hum to yourself while the client finishes installing
  • Open the custom Game Launcher and point it at the Wildstar64 executable.
  • In the launcher, choose the test server you signed up on
  • Launch the game and play Wildstar

While that is quite a few steps, when it comes to getting up and running with emulator servers… that is honestly relatively simple. I remember the first time I started playing around with the Everquest emulator server it required me to set up a Linux server, download the source code, figure out how to compile said source code on Linux, and manually create content in MySQL to populate my own server. Basically, anything that has automated installers for setting everything up and getting running feels simple compared to those early days.

Screenshot from in-game on Emulator Server

Now we get to the “should you do this” part of the post, and I am afraid my answer is going to be no. The emulator team has made some massive strides in getting this game playable. It was fun to run around and experience this game again, but if you are hoping to be able to legitimately play it… like you might play a World of Warcraft emulator… we likely have a number of years before that could be a reality. The game is wildly incomplete and based on my understanding the only content that is really functional is the original starter areas. You can roam and explore freely, and the server has a number of slash commands to allow you to do some things that you would not be able to do otherwise, but it is far from a “complete” experience.

However, if you just want to get in, create a character and revel in the nostalgia of the excellent level-up voice lines… then by all means download away. I do want to spend a bit more time exploring the limits of this experience, and honestly should probably see what sort of help they might need. I used to write code for one of the World of Warcraft emulators back in the early days, so I have minimal experience. Nonetheless, I thought I would present you with the process and let you make your own decisions if you choose to go down this path.

Slow But Steady Mapping

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Good Morning Friends! I am still on my Path of Exile nonsense. We got another update as to what events led to the cascade of issues at the start of Lake of Kalandra. I think it largely makes sense, especially as a software developer myself… there is always room for the law of unintended consequences. The truth is that I feel like I am honestly in a better state this expansion than I was the last. I have way more raw currency than I had during the entirety of the last league, and I am slowly starting to catch up on the total unique count. So when the post talks about the average playing not being impacted… I believe it. In fact, it feels like the average player is probably in a better state now than they have been in the past.

We got another patch yesterday, but the ArchNemesis changes did not make it into it. What did however was a general rebalancing of some of the harvest changes as well as some buffs to the Lake of Kalandra. I think the truth is that the folks who have been most impacted are the currency farmers, who are looking for the most efficient “chaos per hour” farming rates. They are the loudest voices in the room, but also don’t necessarily represent my play style. I’ve never engaged with the trade mechanics other than the dump gear in our shared guild vault. I mostly like killing things until I get something interesting and then maybe tweaking it a bit with the crafting system. That said at some point I am probably going to have to buy some gear, but seem to have a reasonable amount of currency to do this.

Last night I spent a good deal of time running around and doing maps with my friend Ace. I am trying to purposefully swap things up… yall know them as Grace but over time they have shifted more and more to using Ace so I am going to try and do the mental swap as well. All told we ran a bunch of maps and an expedition that I had laying around. The expedition was really interesting but also stressful because I had to route so many charges around the map. All told other than one map that seemed to have modifiers from hell, we had no issues completing them and got pretty solid rewards. On the bad modifier map, it was yellow and seemed to have some crazy poison dot that would just shred me. Ace managed to save the day and finish the final boss which gave us both credit… even though I was dead with no portals back into the map.

It may not look like much but I feel like we had a very successful night of knocking out maps. All told we both now have all of the Tier 1 maps and all of the Tier 2 maps finished, with a few tier 3… and then I have a random tier 5 over there in the corner thanks to Kirac. One of my long-range goals for this season is to complete my atlas which means I am currently sitting on 18 maps completed out of 115 total. That is a long way to go but still feels like progress. On the achievements front, I have finished collecting a full set of rewards, but only the Tier 1 versions of them. I will need to be able to run level 81 maps to qualify for working on a lot of the later rewards. As I am currently sitting at level 78, I have a ways to go before I get there.

In other random news, I’ve been working on a new section for the blog where I track where I am in the games I regularly play. If you have read this blog for any length of time, you will notice that there are specific games that I tend to haunt over and over. For years I had the regularly playing section in my sidebar, but once I remove a game there was no place to store that information permanently. I am still not sure what I will do with this section once I am finished building it out and where I will integrate it into the existing menu structure, but you can check out a sneak peek of it in progress. There are a few more games that I want to add and I also intend to create a section for tracking my accounts on different platforms. Think of it as a social media link page, but for games.

A League Enjoyer

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Last night I tuned into a stream for the person who designed the build that I am currently running and encountered something that I found interesting. She stated a few times that “this is a league enjoyed” stream, as in someone who is actually enjoying Lake of Kalandra and isn’t going to be doom and gloom about the game. I feel like, after the last few days of posts, it might be important for me to reiterate that I also am a “League Enjoyer”. I am having a lot of fun playing Lake of Kalandra and while I am very far behind the curve of everyone “quitting” the game, I think my own personal play style will have very little impact on the problems that folks are running into. There are times I explore topics on my blog because it interests me, almost from a sociological standpoint. The situation that is currently happening with Path of Exile is one of those, and while I am firmly enjoying the experience of running around with sparklers and making mobs explode around me… I still like to keep a pulse on what is happening in the larger community.

Yesterday I started running maps for the first time. I had been holding off on killing Kitava for the final time until I could get through the third phase of the labyrinth and get my ascension. I had a good run that went south on the final boss and did not feel like fighting my way through the labyrinth again. However, I did manage to get a successful run over lunch yesterday and spent the first bit of the evening knocking out some of the early maps. Thankfully I have a stack of strand maps and am hoping to get the last tier 1 map that I have not completed as a drop in one of those. I keep checking Kirac but so far he has yet to sell the map that I need so that I can finish out that first row. I am well into knocking things out on the second row however and even have some banked maps for the third and fourth rows. All told that I have been having quite a bit of fun running around maps and I feel like I have much better survival than I did last season.

There is still a large amount of what I would consider “kooky” loot. For example apparently yesterday the game thought I needed 80 Armourer’s Scraps to drop from the same mob. That said the quantity and quality of loot seem to have improved considerably. So far every single map boss that I have killed has dropped at a minimum a unique. Granted most of the uniques that I am now finding are not what I would consider good, but getting them regardless is “interesting”. I have noticed the “higher bases” on the drops that I am getting as well which does make them something maybe to build into. I got my first six-link, but sadly it was a weird GRRBBB two-handed axe…. that was corrupted so not much we can do about the gem colors.

The other day I posted a screenshot of the currency tab of my stash as an indicator of the “currency drought”. This morning I took a similar screenshot and sandwiched them together. I’ve not really done much differently than I was doing before, and already I have doubled my scouring orbs, and chaos orbs, and picked up a few currencies that I was missing entirely. I have quite a bit more fluid currency for crafting in general, and this is not even taking into account the crafts that I have spent currency on. I know I made a modification to an item the other night that cost 4 chaos for example. Basically, we have arrived at “this seems fine” territory for me at least. Granted I am not “juicing” maps and probably never will to the extent that the folks who are complaining were doing. I am also never going to be a currency trader and if I engage at all with the market, it will be to strategically buy a handful of items needed to finish out a build. Even though I have trade stash tabs… I am not certain I would ever mess with selling anything.

Last night I spent a while working on my hideout, to arrange it in a better manner for running maps since that is ultimately the mode I am going to be in for a while. I moved back to the graveyard and have set up a little corner surrounding the mapping device so that all of the mapping-related NPCs are there as well as the crafting bench, horticulture bench, and my stashes. The only thing that I really wish I could change… is so that the game returns me to my hideout rather than dumping me out in the Act 11 hub when I log back into the game. In theory, the only reason why I ever want to go back to Act 11 is if I am shopping for something from one of the vendors there. Other than that my hideout offers pretty much everything else that I could want.

I also spent a bit of time yesterday with Delve. This is a system that I greatly enjoy and it is a little bit more lag friendly as I have been struggling a bit with parsec and lag spikes that can easily kill me in a map. This morning there is a new thread on the Path of Exile forums talking about nerfing down ArchNemesis and I look forward to seeing how that changes things up tonight. I fought a MetaMorph last night in a Lake of Kalandra map… and it absolutely took me a good five minutes to kill so I can see the frustrations. However as I said at the start of the post, even though I might talk about some of the things happening in the larger community, I am very much still enjoying my time in the game. So if there is a spectrum from “League Enjoyer” to “League Hater”, throw me in the “Enjoyer” column. I still really enjoy the Lake mechanic and since I am not playing this game for profit… I think that is what makes the difference.