Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Email of Destiny

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Good Morning Folks. I was sort of all over the place this weekend, dipping my toes in a bunch of different gaming ponds. However the absolute highlight of the weekend is attached to some deeply strange circumstances. On the 16th I got an email from Nintendo outlining how the Switch 2 Preorder lottery would work… and in it included the phrase “It’s your time to purchase” which it stated would be in the email you receive if you were chosen. Obviously I immediately turned around and searched for this exact phrase… and while I did not uncover an email from Nintendo it DID include an email draft that I never actually sent to a friend of mine… where I was sending them SWTOR patch notes. Thing is… this is a person that I used to talk to on a near daily basis… but had not talked to in years. We apparently had a brief conversation in 2021 but I have no working memory of this event.

We always had this weird tentative connection, and for the life of me I have no clue how we met because so much of my time in World of Warcraft is crusted with the dusts of time. However we sort of had this dynamic of being friends that went to different schools. Occasionally I would convince her to join in one of my mad schemes… or recruit her to join a raid here or there… but for the most part we operated in completely different circles. So completely out of the blue… and unlike myself.. I decided to email to see how they were doing. What shocked me the most is that I got a pretty quick response, which led to us chatting on Discord off and on throughout the day. I’ve lost contact with so many people over the years from leaving World of Warcraft to leaving Twitter, people who meant a lot to me and were really close friends… but also when it comes to online connections you never know how you are perceived in their eyes and how much of a friend they actually consider you. When I made a break from World of Warcraft I sort of put all of that in a box and shoved it into the back corner of a closet… and I am glad that I made enough of an impression for someone to be interested in reconnecting.

For other non-gaming related stuff, this was Eurovision weekend and it is always a highlight. Ace and I have been watching this for awhile… and then making random often snarky comments over Slack during the show. I feel like it was a bit weaker of a total show than some years, because there were way fewer “fun” acts and way more “serious” acts. It seemed to be the year of the torch song, and I was at least thankful if someone was going to go in that direction… that the best one won out. However the absolute highlight of the show was a collaboration between Kaarija and Baby Lasagna… the 2nd place but significantly better than the winner contestants from 2023 and 2024. They did this amazing fighting game mashup experience of their two fan favorite tracks… and then broke into a brand new song that they created together and dropped on the day the semifinals concluded. Unfortunately the ONLY way to see this if you are not in an EU country… is via this reaction video because the REAL video of the experience is region blocked.

Enshrouded dropped a massive patch that they are calling the Thralls of Twilight update. As a result Saturday I spent most of the morning playing a brand new character and new save file. There are so many immediately noticeable visual upgrades, but I have not really gotten far enough to experience many of the new content updates. I did something that I had never done before… which was place my original base flame on the edge of a cliff and then proceeded to build off the cliff creating a very defense-able location. My idea is that as I expand my base area… I can eventually build down into the shroud below. So instead of actually playing the game and progressing my character… I spent most of the morning carefully excavating the cliffs surface one 2×2 block at a time. I made a decent amount of progress and created this work platform down at the lowest point that the original blueprint of my base would allow. At some point I will start expanding down again to see how far I can get this time. As Ash stated during the podcast… I really am apparently a Dwarf because I do love hollowing out a mountainside.

Another game that I have been playing quite a bit of is Slormancer, which is a 2D ARPG with an art style and quirky animation style similar to Rogue Legacy. It is a really simplified version of the ARPG genre, and uses a dual stick style control scheme that would fit perfectly for a device like the Steamdeck. I’ve not actually tried it yet but that is on my list of things to do in the near future, because this seems like an ideal chilling in the backyard type game. It also has a bit of a feel of the 2D beat-em-ups like Guardian Heroes or Castle Crashers. I’ve not made it terribly far yet, but have gone far enough to unlock all of the characters and fight my first mini-boss. I think I probably prefer the knight to the huntress or mage, but have not really gotten far enough to unlock the various skill specializations. I know the mage got instantly better as soon as I specced into the ability that fires a second bolt after the first. Really cool game and I can see myself poking at it off and on for awhile.

I am also still playing some Last Epoch because every so often I just want to run a map. I feel like I am not engaged in Path of Exile for the moment, or at least not forcing myself knowing that when 3.26 drops I will be back with new force. Eleventh Hour Games keeps releasing quality of life updates, for example I noticed that when you click on an egg and search your bank… it highlights items with no legendary potential so that you can easily see which items that will work. More importantly though is the differentiation between the Tomb marker and the objective marker, making it much easier to complete maps in general. I know that my Not-Righteous-Fire Paladin is going to eat a nerf… because it is a bit too powerful… but I am hoping it lands in a still very playable state for next season. Though since they have already said Season 3 is going to be all about Necromancers… I am probably going to be playing one of those.

Guild Wars 2 lately has become my main game, and I am spending a lot of time in Dragonfall. I am not exactly sure WHY… but when trying to figure out my next project I landed upon Vision. This is an extremely long process that involves doing pretty much everything there is to do in the Season 4 zones, and yields a Legendary Accessory as a result. I figured I would start on the hardest of the zones… Dragonfall and have been slowly chipping away at various achievements. It might be easier to knock some of this out in WvW through using the Dragonfall Reward Track. Since I like WvW quite a bit… that at least gives me something to be working on again since I do not currently need another Gift of Battle. Probably the hardest sub achievement is going to be Championship Bout, which involves killing a laundry lost of bosses that spawn after you finish the zone meta event. In theory if there is a good commander and everyone is working together, you could probably get this in a single go. However without fail… the group fragments and folks start taking on random bosses meaning that no one group gets credit for everything.

I’ve made a lot of progress on various achievements though, and have used the Memory Essence Encapsulator for Dragonfall to finish that bit of the quest. This is going to be the hardest bit honestly, because buying each encapsulator costs a bunch of crafted resources… some of which I cannot make and will have to lean on the market board to pick up. The big problem is the Lesser Vision Crystal which requires 500 skill in either Armorsmithing, Leatherworking, or Tailoring… and I have not hit 500 in any of those. I guess that could be a side quest for awhile… to try and push one of those up. According to GW2 efficiency, my tailoring is the closest sitting at 465 currently. Since my friend that I talked about at the top of the post just started playing Guild Wars 2, and is playing a Necromancer… I might get some levels crafting them some gear which at least gives me a purpose behind spending the resources required.

Anyways… what matters the most though… is that I have objectives. That seems to be my key to sticking with any MMORPG is that I have some goal that I am working towards. When I achieve the goals I tend to fade away, so as long as I can keep grabbing a shiny new objective to work towards… I am way more likely to stick around for awhile. It was a good weekend, and I hope it is going to be a good week… though that is doubtful considering we have bad weather for the next several days. I am hoping no more tornadoes that come close to my house.

Rampant Growth

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I completed my third World Completion since playing Guild Wars 2 and with it came two shiny new Gift of Exploration. This meant that when combined with my Gift of Battle that I farmed up earlier in the week, I could pull together all of the elements and craft a Gift of Mastery, one fourth of the total components needed for Kudzu, the weapon that I have been working towards. That left me with a choice… do I be patient and wait a few weeks buying 10 Mystic Clovers at a time… or do I spend some gold and buy resources to try and craft them and finish out my shiny new weapon right then. Ultimately I had acquired everything else that i needed… but was short by just under half of the clovers needed to craft my Gift of Fortune.

Essentially for those who have never gone down this road… there is a recipe for the Mystic Forge that can produce Mystic Clovers. However 66% of the time on average… it will create something else. Now these other things that get created are generally really useful as well. For example I believe it can generate all of the items required to create a Gift of Magic and a Gift of Might in small quantities, so even if you fail to get a Mystic Clover you usually end up with something of value. Two of the components can be bought from the market, but are not exactly cheap so this is a great way to burn through your gold without achieving your end results. I needed to craft 31 Mystic Clovers… and I decided to go for it instead of waiting the 3 weeks it would take to purchase those in a more reliable fashion. Essentially I was this close to finishing and got impatient… which in Guild Wars 2 is always a costly situation.

So last night I was able to craft my fifth legendary weapon, and added it to my vault. So right now I have a Greatsword, Sword, Axe, Hammer, and Longbow. I have some of the materials to craft the harpoon gun, but it is extremely low on my priority list. I think maybe next up I would like to potentially target a Staff, since that is another weapon type that I find useful on a few different characters. I would also really like to have a spear and I believe there is one that you can get through through Janthir… but I don’t really know all of the details behind it. The easiest staff is probably Bifrost, but I don’t really like the look of it. I would far rather have Nevermore, but it is a Heart of Thorns legendary weapon and seems like it requires roughly twice the materials of a Gen1 Legendary. I should also really work on some of the Legendary armor and accessory slots as well, and figure out what is required to get those.

I admit… I had just planned on transmogging the appearance of my bow because I am generally not really one for the whole Rhok’delar-like appearance. However after playing around with it and seeing it in action… it is growing on me. I especially like the graphical effect when I draw the bow and have a burst of vines and such springing up around me. I wish it had more wood on it… rather than the impossible appearance of just flowers floating out in the air. I will use it until I get tired of using it… and then change it over to whatever other bow looks cool for the moment. Since I am playing my Ranger 99.9% of the time… this is honestly the first Legendary I have immediately swapped over to. I had a few upgrade extractors and swapped out the stuff that was on my ascended longbow and placed them into Kudzu. While I was dealing with it I did the same for my Greatsword and swapped them into Twilight so I had that at the ready as well.

More important than ALL of this… we actually got a group up and running last night in a time-frame that I could participate in. One of the biggest challenges that I have had over the last decades, is that a lot of my regularly party members moved to the west coast and as such… now can only really do things when it is way too late for me to be involved. However apparently there was a team ready to go… that I just never realized. I credit my friend Sita for planting this idea in my head, but it quickly blossomed into us having a group and doing a dungeon. Last night we pulled together a group compatible with central time consisting of myself, Ammosart, Sita, and our “guild mom” Solaria who also just happens to be Ammo’s real Mom. This is a group that I have do so many things in the past, and honestly… makes up a good chunk of our sometimes reoccurring treasure map group from FFXIV… but it just sort of never dawned on me that this was a ready group to go do nonsense with more often than that.

At the end of the night I even snapped a pretty solid group picture of us all. Now if I can just convince Ace to join in these particular reindeer games… we would have a full five player party to do nonsense. I know not everyone plays Guild Wars 2, but apparently Sita and Ammo have also been playing quite a bit of Monster Hunter Wilds so in theory I can probably convince Ace to join in some of that. After running a dungeon we popped in and did a single fractal before I needed to bail and call my father. In theory we only have a few hours to play with, but especially if you do fractals you can make a lot of progress in that time. I would like to run all of the dungeons however so we can unlock exploration mode and try some of that. Additionally there is the possibility that at some point we might even try some strikes.

All told it was a pretty great night, and now I need to figure out my next objective because I have found that at least in Guild Wars 2… when I don’t have some larger goal that I am focused on I tend to fade away. In theory we are also probably about to get the next expansion announced pretty soon, so that will be interesting.

Look at that Turtle Go… Bro

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Good Morning Folks. I decided that I needed to rename my turtle pet in Guild Wars 2. I remember being a big fan of the song Yertle the Turtle from the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Middle School, which of course turned me on to the Dr. Seuss book of the same name. Which of course is a much more obvious name than what I had originally called him aka Thumper because of the big canon on his back. I’ve had a bunch of folks ask me recently about this pet when I am using it, because apparently a lot of people do not know you can tame one. I’ve been using it in Soul Beast form because most of the attacks are ranged based, which flow nicely with being a Longbow main. In WVW it was extra nice because I could run it as a pet beside me instead of merged and pop up occasional shields for the “zerg huddle” when we were being shelled by siege equipment.

I did not write a blog post yesterday, because I get into these phases where I second guess myself. Essentially paying a game like Guild Wars 2 with long tailed objectives… and in which I end up doing a lot of the same things over and over… feels like I am not really generating anything worth talking about. The same is true as I reach the tail end of an ARPG league, and I am no longer making big leaps in progress or getting really exciting drops. Basically… I think to myself… who wants to listen to me talk about maintenance gaming? I guess I ask you my readers… do you care at all in the least about what I am doing on a daily basis if I am not doing exciting things? Each night I am moving the needle towards a goal… but said goal is a really long ways off.

I did however finish up my most recent Gift of Battle since the last time I wrote a blog post. I found a really good group and hung out for a few hours on Tuesday night, taking down objectives and defending others. I have to admit, that I think I enjoy defending WVW objectives more than taking them. The big zergs rolling around are generally all about rapid objective completion, and if you put up any resistance… they tend to flow like water around the obstacles. However lately we’ve had some pretty dedicated groups from the red team and it was a lot of fun to bait them into trying to take various objectives and then slaughter them as they rushed in. I could legitimately see myself playing WVW a lot more if I found the right group. It is also one of the better ways to earn various requirements for crafting legendary gear, and has a few specific items that you can only get there.

After finishing up the Gift of Battle, I renewed my efforts for getting a Gift of Exploration. I believe all that I have left in Ascalon is Fields of Ruin, and last night I suffered through the worst renown heart in the entire game… the one where you are forced to stealth around a Char camp. This is a big part about why I did not really feel like blogging yesterday… is does moving the needle from 81% to 88% really amount to enough to talk about it? I am having fun and in my element right now… but I am also not really doing much that is terribly exciting. Quite honestly I get a bigger kick out of swooping down and helping people with events when they are overwhelmed. I helped someone in Cantha last night who was trying to solo a rather tanky Champion encounter, and we managed to duo it… all the while dodging all sorts of nonsense without either of us getting downed. That felt really good… helping others… feels really good. That is legitimately the best aspect of Guild Wars 2 that other players are always a net positive.

I am also still trying to hit up events when I think about them. Doing the daily reset Tequatl for example continues to be my prime activity in the game. I am not entirely certain WHY this event is so important to me on an emotional level. I think maybe it was the first time I really understood why this game is special. This is the first world boss that really impressed me, and back in the day I just happened to stumble upon it without realizing what I was signing up for. Just like I have all of the lines from Izaro in the Lord’s Labyrinth memorized… I am pretty sure I have all of the lines that the Hylek say during this event. “There’s something in the water” will always be the most iconic however. I also just really like how key of an event it still feels… even though no one really needs anything from it. I mean the community running joke is that we are going there every day to get a spoon.

So I guess I am asking you. Do you give a shit about the dumb things that I do? Would you rather me just not blog until I have something meaningful to talk about? I get into spirals of doubting myself and it has been a few weeks since I have not missed at least one post. So I am opening the idea up for discussion.

Hakuna Matata

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There are so many little things in Guild Wars 2 that you just sort of forget about half of them until you happen upon them again. For example there is a spot in the Crystal Desert where a Meerkat, Warthog, and Lion Cub just happen to cross the path in front of you. Last night one of the daily quests was to do an event in the Crystal Desert, and I roamed around until I found an escort that was about to start. It just so happened that while I was guarding a bunch of refugees the Lion King themed random encounter happened in front of me. I’ve always greatly preferred this style of easter egg as compared to the World of Warcraft slapstick style that just sort of beats you over the head with it. I remember these sort of minor easter eggs in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot as well… and they always felt like a sly nod more than a big sign screaming… “Get it? Get it?”.

In other happenings, Mistlock Sanctuary is sort of where the fancy folk go… because for years it was the best of the VIP clubs because it granted you access to way more stuff. Still to this day it is sort of the place where the folks with wild outfits go to dance and be silly. I had never seen the bow that shoots rainbow unicorns until yesterday… and then I happened upon four of them out in the wild with another one here in Mistlock. I had to look it up because at first I thought it was something new… but no it turns out it is a Generation One Legendary Weapon called The Dreamer. It’s a short bow instead of a long bow, which is in part why it has never really been my focus. At least with Ranger… I am not a big proponent of Short Bows because its a Condition damage weapon and I tend to mostly focus on Power builds. Still really cool… but the sound effect would drive me nuts quickly.

Yesterday I completed several more zones and now have brought my total world completion up to 81% over yesterday’s 72%. The needle moves rather slowly considering I finished I think four zones in total… but in all of those cases I was taking them from roughly 60% all the way to 100% which isn’t as big of a leap as it seems. Mostly I just have to keep my head down and let myself get caught up in the zones themselves… and not really think about how much further I have to go. That is sort of the key to completing anything in a game… allowing yourself to lose focus on the goal and just have fun with the individual objectives. It is wild revisiting all of these zones because each time I do it… I am consistently amazed by just how large they are and how much minute detail there is in each of them. The whole Hylek city that is entirely underwater and hidden in a cave system that you would never find… if you did not specifically go looking for it is pretty wild. However when you are just trying to pick up points of interest, it can be a bit frustrating trying to figure how to get to the dot you see on your map… but see no real path towards.

I made significant progress in World vs World last night and pushed my progress from 13/40 to 30/40 or from roughly 30% to 75%. I could probably AFK in zone and grind out the next pip before I ran out of contribution juice, but I would rather wait until this evening and find a group and do some objectives. On one hand I feel like I should probably seek out a WvW specific guild for my final slot. That said… I have not exactly been super active, nor do I want to switch to a specific build. I like my Longbow/Greatsword Power Soulbeast thing that I am doing now, and I don’t really care how optimal that is. Right now I am using Greysky as my WvW guild, in case someone else from the guild wants to tag along. We are part of Throne of Balthazaar which seems reasonable enough. There are a few pretty decent guilds, but they are all the sort that want you to join discord and run invite only squads. This always feels counter productive, because wouldn’t it be better to just sort of have EVERYONE in the squad?

That is the only real complaint I have about returning to the game, is that the WvW folks seem way more bitter than I remember them being. Seen a lot more folks yelling in map chat and blaming others for letting objectives fall. I’ve also seen a lot of folks baiting others into leaving the Eternal Battleground which seems like a dick move. There is a thing you can do called an Emergency Waypoint, which is intended to get reinforcements into an objective when you are just about to be sieged. At several points last night I saw folks firing these off and spamming chat, trying to get reinforcements… at a node that did not have any activity going on. They were effectively just trying to get folks to leave the battlegrounds that had queues… so that they could get into them. This might just be a problem with my own battle group and not more widespread… but it does seem like a kind of cruel trick to pull. The biggest problem is that we seemed to have no commanders… and while I could tag up… I have no clue what the hell I am doing really. My WvW tends to be to hang out on the periphery and apply pressure to zergs to get them to run into the main force… not actually standing in our own zerg and pushing where the commander should be.

For any annoyances there are with the WvW community… the Open World community still seems pure and genuine. I logged in this morning to get some screenshots and saw someone asking for help with a T3 Rift in Bloodtide Coast. Within a few minutes there were a handful of us over there helping out, and another person threw up a tag to make it easier for folks to find the objective. This feels like the community working as intended, and it always makes me happy when I see it in action. This happens so often as folks ask for help and get it regularly. I helped a random level 7 character out the other day with a Hero Point because they rolled up just as I was finishing it… and asked if they got credit. They did not, so I fired it off again to make sure they could take down the Veteran that spawned. There is just a nurturing aspect to the way the game has been designed and I love it so much.

So I have been allowing myself to think that the Gift of Battle and Gift of Exploration were the only real challenges that I was dealing with. That is very much NOT the case. The problem with crafting four legendaries after going years without crafting any… is that I have effectively decimated my crafting material reserves. I am pretty close to the required 250 Globs of Ectoplasm because I religiously salvage my rares. I am back up to 46 Mystic Clovers… but need 77 so that is going to be a challenge. I can buy 10 per week… but that recipe takes Mystic Coins… which I am completely out of but at least those can be bought on the market. Obsidian Shards are not that big of a deal since you can get them after a specific event with Karma in the Straits of Devastation. I have almost 4 million Karma and will probably convert most of that when I am working on zone completion there. Basically there are things I can do to fix all of these problems but it will be a much slower burn than knocking out these two big components that feel way more satisfying. Really I need to get better about doing a daily Ley-Line Anomaly to bank up some coins.

Guild Wars 2 is a game about long grinds, and the most effective way about doing this… is to do a little bit of a lot of things every single day. GW2 Efficiency is a phenomenal site that shows you roughly how much something would cost to craft, and according to it… with the items that I currently have it is going to take me 224 Gold to finish up Kudzu today. That is the Legendary that I am working towards so that I will have both a Longbow and Greatsword for my Ranger, or honestly any other class that will use them. I am probably going to buy the mystic coins… keep farming the ectos, and then convert karma for the obsidian which will lower the total costs by a bit. The worst part of a Legendary is the Gift of Magic and Gift of Might and you get one of those from each Legendary Weapon kit, so every two kits you buy from the Wizard store… you just don’t have to worry about the Gift of Fortune that much.

Anyways… this is the long game and I am deep into it since I have crafted Frostfang, Bolt, Twilight, and Juggernaut… and am now working towards Kudzu. I also have a starter for Frenzy… but since I stole one of the gifts from it to cobble together Kudzu it will be a bit before I am willing to fund another Gift of Fortune.