Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Accidental Free Company

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So it is no longer morning… but also feels really weird not to start a post with “Morning Folks”. I am still on the mend and struggling a bit, and Covid brain fog claimed me this morning and kept me from making a post. Instead, I thought I would do a bit of storytime because I find this funny. Shortly after the release of Dawntrail, my friend Ace and I started baby characters on the Kraken Dynamis Server. The new Path of Exile League came out which caused me to want to take a break, but at some point, I am sure we will return and pick up where we left off at the end of Heavensward. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and weirdly… it was weirdly enjoyable to actually be playing on a server where everyone was newbies either by new accounts or by fresh transfers.

Moments after logging into my character for the very first time on that server, I got an invite to sign a Free Company Charter. I thought sure… I have been that person trying to get my guild started before and would help out with this process. I half assumed that the moment it got started, I would get kicked out… but that was not what happened. Instead, I was promoted to an officer and later drug Ace into the madness just for funsies. We did not really have any plans to make a Free Company for our shenanigans, but having a few genuine new players around was rather charming. Based on our interactions… it was VERY clear we were the wizened elders of this group, but it was still fun to hang out while we were pushing the content through its paces.

We got busy doing other things, some of them on our mains… others in other games. The thing is, I kept logging in periodically when I thought about it to do the daily MGP grind just to get a reasonable base of currency built up on that character. While I was not actively playing, I was actively checking in on how things were going. There were a lot of fresh recruits that eventually left the Free Company leaving us down to just me and Ace who were logging in regularly, and then a trio including the originator of the FC that had not logged in within two months. I didn’t think much about this because Free Companies come and go in membership. Even our primary Greysky Armada goes through large blocks of time when Sol is pretty much the only person reliably logging in.

Late last week I logged in and saw a message that I had been promoted to the leader of the Free Company. So I guess I have now inherited Darkwraith… a super edgy named FC to keep up and running. I made a few tweaks… firstly I renamed the primary role to Leader, because “Master” squicks me out something fierce. I went with a Leader > Officer > Veteran > Memeber > Recruit naming scheme for the ranks because it felt less awkward and also sort of clearly delineated what each role was for. The only other thing that I am contemplating is shifting the Allegiance from Order of the Twin Adder to Maelstrom… because who the fuck ever wants to be part of team piss yellow? Mostly I plan on keeping the lights on and even inviting anyone else who wants to play on Dynamis. This is still 100% an alt project that I am never going to give my full attention to, but it is weird how this FC that I didn’t even intend on joining fell into my lap.

I am not going to lie… there is at least a large chunk of me that wants to rename this to something involving “Robosquids” given that Free Company renaming is a thing you can do easily. I am pretty sure the original owner of the Free Company is “gonezo”, given that he largely popped over to the server to get housing… and has also long since had that demolished. So at this point, the Free Company is essentially what we make of it. If you have alts on Kraken hit me up, because apparently, I lead a Free Company now. I have another group of friends who randomly ended up on the server so I might snag them to at least get the guild leveling at a decent pace.

World Boss and Meta Add-On

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Good Morning Friends. Zone Meta Events are the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 amazing. For the uninitiated, a “Meta” in Guild Wars 2 language is a zone-wide event that takes place on a reoccurring timer. Some of these are straightforward single-shot world bosses, and others are complicated if/then/else chains that start with minor escort events and end up in giant 80+ player raid fights. The popularity of specific zones is often determined by how popular the metas associated with them are. That said… pretty much EVERY zone has at least some player population wanting to complete the meta at any given moment. For example, this is Queensdale this morning at 6:30 am… with folks waiting on the spawn of Shadow Behemoth. We wrecked the World Boss in what felt like record time… all during non-primetime hours.

I’ve personally always struggled with keeping track of what was going on at any given time. For example, you can type “/wiki et” in the game and it will pop open the event tracker page… which does a reasonable attempt at laying this data out but also… causes my eyeballs to fuzz out and my mind to go blank. It seemed a bit mad to try and figure out what I was going to do in a given evening, with the amount of playtime that I had in front of me. This meant that most of the time… I participated in the meta events that I happened to accidentally stumble into rather than approaching any of them with a sense of purpose. I had tried a few plugins for BlishHUD in the hopes of helping me keep track of this nonsense, but honestly, it always felt a bit too cumbersome, and as a result… I defaulted to just roaming aimlessly or following the World Boss train when I could hop on board knowing for example that Tequatl always spawns at server reset.

Over the weekend, I stumbled onto a better solution. I was setting up ArcDPS again, and I went through the process of setting up the Addon Loader Nexus as it supposedly handles some of the problems with ArcDPS on the release of major patches. Nexus works very similarly to BlishHUD and offers the ability to hot load addons into the game while it is running and similarly comes with a library of addons you can install quickly from within the UI. One of these is called World Bosses by Sognus and for me at least it has been a game changer. Essentially it puts little clocks for lack of a better term over the top of the world map zones that contain popular metas, and at any given time you can see what phase that meta is in and what phase is coming next. For example, I blew up a chunk of my screen in the above image showing that Dragon Stand was just about to start a fresh meta train, which would of course be the ideal time to join that map.

What is even better about this is that after playing with this for a bit, it becomes trivial to see the natural synergy between different meta events and how you can easily hop from one to the next one without much forethought. For example, in the above image, the Aetherblade Assault is just about to start in Seitung Province, and then when it is wrapping up… The New Kaineng City Blackout should be starting… and then as it is wrapping up you can pop over and pick up the Echovald Forest Gang War event. Similarly this weekend I rode from Dragon Stand to Chalk Gerent to Octovine without missing a beat, just rolling from one event to the next and racking up the sweet sweet loot. I used to think that either people joined specific Commanders exclusively, or just had some vague sense of precognition about these things… but with this addon, it becomes super easy to follow the meta train.

If you are curious I would check out this general video about Nexus, as it can install a lot more add-ons other than the World Boss one that I am specifically talking about. I am also a huge fan of BlishHUD for marker packs that help with world completion, jumping puzzles, and getting various achievement collections completed like all of the nonsense associated with the SkyScales. Thankfully the two addon loaders play nicely together, and each of them seems to do something slightly different than the other one. There are a few add-ons that can be found on both of them… for example, Regions of Tyria a dumb addon that I enjoy greatly that announces the name of every area when you enter it, exists on both platforms. Add-ons and Guild Wars 2 are a massive rabbit hole, but the World Bosses tool seems well worth diving into because it gives me a level of confidence at being able to join in various Metas that I have not had before now.

Zone Metas are legitimately the best part of Guild Wars 2, and being able to participate in them more predictably is pretty freaking amazing. Sure I might not be in the mood every night to gather together with eighty strangers and mash buttons to take down a big bad, but when I am… this just works so much better. It makes me realize how important add-ons have been to my enjoyment of various MMORPG tropes throughout the years. Generally speaking, they just take information that already exists and present it in a more digestible format that my ADHD-addled brain can consume. While I have completely eschewed them in Final Fantasy XIV, I do get why players use them because I have always found having an interface that I can more directly control key to my enjoyment in games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.

Anyways! I hope this is helpful to someone out there. If you ever want to do Meta nonsense, hit me up in game.

A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.

I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.

I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.

Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.

What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.

Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.

Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.

First Apothecary

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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.

What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.

I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.

I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.

I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.

I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.