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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.

Fun with Podiums

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Good Morning Folks. It was a weird weekend. I spent a good chunk of it working on the garage since it was much cooler out there than it has been. At this point I have cleaned out the north side of the garage, put up cabinets, and then shifted anything that did not fit from the south side of the garage and acquired and put up the first two cabinets over there. This involved moving out some rather shitty storage options that we have had since college… and have been in place for almost thirty years. One of which I am going to give to my neighbor who sells stuff at craft fairs, because technically it was designed to be collapsible and easy to set up vendor storage that came from a garage sale in college. I could have sworn we had two of these, but I have no clue what happened to the second one over the years. It was bad at doing its job, so it must go and be replaced by nice modular shelving from Sam’s club, because they are cheap, readily available, and something I can buy a few at a time as I have made space for them.

Most of my gaming has been in Destiny Rising. Today is the reset of a new week and I noticed that I finally placed in the shooting range. I did notice that my friend Lociana actually got a space, and Ace kept one placement specifically for Calamity Ops. I have no clue why we do not seem to be getting credit for The Expanse. That one remains empty, and in theory we still need to do the last few parts of the raid so that we can have people showing up on those platforms as well. I like this concept honestly, because one of the cool figures is you can test drive your packmates characters. I mean you can already borrow characters from your friends, but it is extra cool that there is an entire baked in system for this. I honestly wish that there were more of these podiums but one for each character, so you could see how your friends built characters that you might not be playing, rather than just who scored the highest.

I was honestly shocked to see my own character represented on a podium… then I remembered that I actually managed to get a phenomenally good time on Break In, enough to rank my random group 8th on the North American server. If nothing else it was cool to see myself showing up in the ladders for awhile. I have no clue what my final rank was before reset, but it was clearly good enough to get my Jolder riding that podium. While not the strongest or even best character to bring for most content that is focused on damage output… I love my Jolder girl and will always probably be most comfortable playing her. In theory I bring a lot of survival to the team, which makes squishier damage dealers better… but I do second guess some of the activities that I would normally bring her on.

For example, since forming our own pack one of the things that we have been hunting down is a Stronghold, because this is content that I never got to participate in during the wanderer pack. Essentially every member gets 3 attempts at this content for free, before needing to spend pack actions. You are likely going to need this, because the boss that you end up fighting is a giant bag of hitpoints and you have a limited amount of time to dps this down. This is honestly a common gacha trope, and there are a few versions of this that play out in AFK Journey for example, where the entire server or guild joins together to beat down a large health pool. However I question if bringing Jolder on this was a good idea. I did effectively soak a lot of the hate from the boss and keep over-shield rolling on my party… but you can see how much less damage I did overall than Ace did playing Estela. I think in future weeks I am just going to run Estela as well so we can hopefully whittle this down in fewer turns. For the week though we managed to clear two strongholds, which meant loot for everyone in the guild.

We also managed to collect enough materials, and craft enough tchotchkes to upgrade our hangar to rank four. We are burning through the guild ranks pretty quickly, and will be capped out at the final rank of Nightfall before much longer. I am surprised at how fast this goes considering we really only have a handful of players. There are a core group of Greysky folks in the guild, but other than that we have one person that I picked up from my wanderer pack, and another person that seemingly found our guild and joined it on their own. The fact that Ace and I both have second accounts, seems to also be helping the process out, but regardless we are moving through levels quickly.

I honestly still have the pack set to auto approve folks, so if you are playing Destiny Rising and want to be part of our nonsense feel free to join. You have to unfortunately drop your current pack before the game will allow you to join a new one, which made for the whole process of creating this a bit maddening because I could not even throw out an invite until they had left their currently situation. So long as you are going to be pretty chill and relaxed, and don’t do anything wildly offensive… you are welcome. We tend to hang out on my Super Dungeon Friends Discord when we are doing group content, so it is easy for folks to join in the nonsense. There is a Destiny flag in the role assignment channel, but I believe I made it so that once you get flagged for accepting the rules, you can see everything. This tends to be where we organize everything, so similarly if you ever want to join in on our Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans, we arrange that in the Guild Wars 2 channel.

In other news that I am proud of, I am up to five characters at gold rank. I currently have Wolf, Ning Fei, and Tan-2 all in about the same relative position for my next gold. Ning is who I intend on pushing up there, but progress is slow because it entirely relies upon the same limited currency. I got an infusion with the last reset, but am once again stalled out until I can get some more of it. You need six to buy the final rank of abilities, and you can only realistically get four per calamity ops reset. This is the thing that wears on me about the long term viability of Destiny Rising. I feel like they need to give more reasons to run something other than the two seasonal modes… because you can only do so much of that and they reset super infrequently. All of the things that no one queues for… need to be given a reason for folks to queue for them.

Probably the thing that I am most focused on grinding out each day is all of the nonsense needed to upgrade my mentor status. I already have Daybreaker because I run a lot of content, and have run a lot of it with new lights. The more grinding things are “interactions” with new lights which means that you either need to cheer them and get them to cheer you back, or give them an award in a activity… and get them to give you a reward back. Mostly this involves running around haven and aggressively greeting new lights until one of them FINALLY greets you back. The drift bottles and mentor chat is just spamming chat channels… which I feel are counter intuitive to these features. Apparently the next step involves posting things in these same chat channels and begging people for likes. This is dumb, and should maybe be focused on something a bit more conducive to building a successful game.

Ace and I are going to try and knock out a bunch of the new week stuff because the rest of the week is going to be pretty fraught when it comes to playing Destiny Rising. Tomorrow the new Guild Wars 2 expansion drops, and I am probably going to be spending a lot of time playing through that content. Then on Friday the new Path of Exile 3.27 league drops at 12pm PDT, and I took the day off work so expect me to be grinding that like a madman for most of the weekend. Right now I am in the doldrums waiting on those things to drop.

Keepers League Revealed

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.27, aka the Keepers of the Flame league and it looks pretty freaking awesome. This is the first time they have revisited a previous league theme, and this time Breach is getting a significant rework. The interesting thing about this, and some of the things from the patch notes… is it seems like they really want to make league mechanics distinct and their own thing. During this league they have effectively clawed back all of the other leagues that could drop breach mechanics, and are making players focus on breach specifically if they want to farm any of these resources. Similarly they clawed by the nodes for Delve that allowed players to passively generate azurite, which makes me wonder if we are seeing more of a design ethic at play. As a Delve aficionado this means that my resonators just go way more valuable and I am on board with this, since players are no longer going to be able to skip delve and passively get them.

Breach itself looks really interesting. There are effectively three versions of Breach that are going to be available. There are scenarios where the hive has already set up shop in a zone and you have to burn down their fortifications and then fight a breach lord. There is a version where it is similar to the current form, but once you have filled a bar through killing breach enemies it locks open and spawns tougher mobs in the center. I love the whole concept of it locking in place, because the fleeting nature of breach was the one thing I didn’t really like about it. I notoriously hate being on a timer. The last version is more of a breach citadel which feels like it is going to be something akin to the way Abyssal Depths feel. Rarely there will be this bonus content that spawns in that you can tackle, and I am pretty on board with this conceptually. I mostly look forward to doing Breach in every map, because Breach rings themselves have been entirely reworked to be similar to how they are in Path of Exile II. This means that we are most likely going to be getting most of our really good resist rings from Breach this league.

The borrowed power system for this league are Grafts, which will allow you to equip two new item slots that do various things. More specifically they showed off these as triggering specific cast attacks, or granting you new spells, or even just passively casting some ability over and over while you are clearing content. These seem like they are going to be really great a low levels, but might peter out as we get into the endgame. Mostly it is going to be interesting to see what all is available here, because if you can have grafts taking on some of the conditional defensive buffs like Molten Shell, it might give you more freed from socket pressure. You start off with one graft socket, but at some point you can end up with two of them. Mostly interested in seeing how these abilities augment and change the way existing builds play.

Similarly there are new ascendancies going in with this patch called Bloodline Classes. You will unlock these by beating various bosses and they will offer you an alternate progression system. Essentially you will use your normal ascendancy points but can spec into alternate abilities. There are a lot of ascendancies that have two to three really phenomenal notables, but at least one choice that you just sort of have to wing and choose the next best thing. We have only seen three of the ten revealed, and I am interested to see how these change existing specs. This feels like the sort of thing that might stick around in some permanent form going forward, because this alternate ascendancy concept is something that they have played with a few times, and tying this to clearing bosses feels like the final evolution of the concept. I also think this might be super beneficial when combined with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels that allow you to get back anything you might skip from your base ascendancy to get new powers.

Another really interesting system going in is the Genesis Tree which is a crafting system that allows you to “birth” uniques, itemized rares, and currency by spending points to skew the results. At first glance this looked a lot like the Weavers Tree from Last Epoch, but instead of socketing items in the tree to get improved chance of drops, you are spending points to skew the results towards generating new items. I think it is going to be interesting to see how easy it is to craft for example a really good elemental bow with this system, since we got a bunch of interesting bow attacks to play with this league. Mostly I think I am going to use this system in an attempt to fuel alternate classes later in the league, as opposed to a progression system for my main build. It seems like it is going to take a lot of investment before this actually becomes really useful. I am however wondering if there are going to be some cracked out alternate versions of Cloak of Flames available through this system, since there is a method of generating uniques with one of the attributes replaced on them with something new and different.

Probably the thing that I am looking forward to the most however is the new trade system. I was already generating most of my league wealth through the currency exchange, and I don’t really see that changing. However I am probably going to dive deeper down the rabbit hole of trying to trade things like Einhar Beasts and other incidental things like that, which always felt too cumbersome to actually trade. For buying items… it is so much nicer just to port to a hideout and buy the item off the vendor than trying to wrangle someone to actually respond. Additionally it is a really good feeling to log in after being gone for awhile and have a stack of currency waiting on you. This tends to benefit the really hardcore you can exploit markets first, and the super casual… who get very cheap items once those markets have crashed. I don’t expect to get rich though this system, but it will be less painful to pawn my shit and in turn buy the stuff that I actually need.

At the core… we got a bunch of interesting stuff and so far it does not feel like the builds that I cared about were nerfed. Righteous Fire did not get any buffs, other than potentially making Nebulis sceptres as a mid league option if they are cheap enough. I will still be able to play good ole predictable RF in order to fund other build ideas. The biggest things that ate nerfs were the entire concept of BAMA aka Blink Arrow Mirror Arrow. It is still possible to play it, so it did not get the nuke from orbit that Hexblast Mines did last league where they effectively said “no, we don’t want you playing those as mines anymore”. Trickster ate some nerfs, but honestly the class feels still perfectly viable. There is enough interesting stuff going on like them leaning into the Physical damage archetype for wanders, that might produce some really interesting builds.

They added a new Bow ability called Conflagration which is essentially Rain of Explosive Arrows. You can get this from playing a Ranger in Act 3 by killing Gravicius, and it looks really interesting. I think this is probably going to be my second build of the league once I have stabilized and built up a base of currency through playing Righteous Fire. I think you will self cast instead of totems, and lean hard into dealing fire damage. I do wonder what it would feel like to have a double six link setup with you self casting Conflagration with maybe Mirage Archer support, and then have a totem setup with Explosive Arrow similarly to how one plays other bow builds. I don’t think you try and do the elemental equilibrium nonsense, because I am not sure what damage you deal other than fire first. You should probably want something converting fire damage to another element though so you could run Trinity support. Anyways it is worth theorycrafting something out. I would probably play this as an Elementalist maybe to get buffs from the golems… which did eat a nerf but they are still phenomenal. Alternately you could do the Champion thing, which I think might still work.

One interesting change that SirGog pointed out in his patch notes review video, is that Hardcore is getting a bit of an upgrade. Namely when you die in Hardcore Leagues, your characters will transfer over to Softcore Leagues instead of transferring to Standard. This is pretty huge for someone who might want to start out with the challenge of Hardcore, but then convert to a Softcore character when they eventually die. Additionally if a player just gets tired of the sweaty gameplay, they can chill out in softcore with the current state of their character. As he pointed out there used to be a lot of weird stuff going on in Hardcore where the Standard players would manipulate the market to get items that were valuable in Standard then take a death and transfer items between the leagues. I think this is a net positive for players in general, but I am still not really at all interested in Hardcore anything. I did my brief Hardcore Minecraft run, and it was fun… until it wasn’t. I also participated in Gauntlet and made it to Act III, but was pretty damned happy when I finally died because I was not enjoying being that nervous all the time.

I am fully amped for this new league and am contemplating taking off next Friday so that I can play with purpose as soon as it goes live. I will likely be grinding it pretty hard throughout the weekend, and seeing if I can hit maps relatively early for my pacing. This is the benefit of having no real life, is that I can go hardcore into something like this. Earlier in the week is the drop of the new Guild Wars 2 expansion, so I am hoping I can wrap the story there before league start so I can give this my undivided attention. I will probably be juggling Guild Wars 2, Destiny Rising, and Path of Exile for awhile, and may end up talking about progression in all three. The other thing that I do find tempting is minions, especially since Spectres got a massive quality of life improvement. However in truth I am probably way more interested in Bows as my second character, but depending on how long I stay engaged I might end up rolling something minion focused as well.

Are you going to be playing Keepers of the Flame? If so what are you leaning towards as your league starter? Drop me a line in the comments.

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