Good Morning Friends. It has been a few days since I last gave an update on our progress on the Dynamis server Kraken. Once again fair warning that I am going to talk about spoilers for ARR and Heavensward during this blog post, so be forewarned. The first thing that honestly shocks me is how fast we ripped through Heavensward. I remember it taking longer than this but on the 19th we wrapped up the ARR post-patch content and as of last night we are one trial away from finishing Heavensward. I am not sure if they reduced the number of MSQ quests in HW or not, but it certainly feels like it. It may simply be that back then we had to do a certain amount of side questing to maintain our level so we did not hit hard walls with the MSQ, and now you can do only the MSQ and still end up wildly overleveled. At the time of writing this blog post, I am sitting at level 76… which is 16 levels over the original Heavensward cap…. and nearing the Shadowbringers cap.
Watching the final events of ARR play out was a bit difficult to get through. Even knowing that everyone is essentially alright, it still hit me in the feels as I had to experience the “death” of the Scions and Nanamo all over again. Mostly I still feel anger that I have not been allowed to murderate Ilberd yet, and I am still supremely annoyed that we essentially have to accept Lolorito’s actions. I always dislike political machinations in video games, because we get enough of that bullshit in the real world. Everything should be a glorious trial by combat… like our amazing legal aptitude at least in the Ishgardian court of law. I will say that playing through all of that content in rapid succession… does not have anywhere near the impact as when we had to get the events doled out to us over time. Having time to dwell on what was happening… made everything feel that more dire. We were super active at the tail end of ARR and the beginning of HW, so I remember many conversations happening surrounding these events. At some point, I want to listen to our spoiler show that we recorded back in 2015.
We did take a break from the story for a bit and burned through all of the Extreme versions of the ARR trials, and then attempted to duo Binding Coil of Bahamut. Everything went pretty smoothly until we got up to Nael… which is going to require a bit more strategery or gear because we kept getting wrecked in the final phase. We did Garuda through the dungeon finder system and it was a bit of a mess… which prompted us to just duo the remaining Extremes. It is pretty cool that even without a multi-year jump on gearing we can realistically do the fights with a small group. None of them were even all that close, and we were pretty much able to soak almost all of the mechanics. Probably the toughest thing that we did legitimately during the ARR era was Chrysalis which took three attempts to get the DPS to finish the final phase.
I think the thing that shocked me the most about Heavensward is how long you could go between dungeons and how few trials there were. I am used to a cadence of dungeon then trial then dungeon then trial, as we have had for the last few expansions. The first dungeon of Heavensward isn’t even part of the MSQ, so is entirely missable at least until you want to fly. I thought the flow of the Aether Current was pretty great because if you followed the MSQ you would be able to get all of the exploration nodes as they were painfully obviously located next to an NPC. We eventually got into a cadence of finishing everything but the final quest based aether current and then upon finishing the last dungeon… being able to fly in that zone. Azys Lla is freaking miserable to traverse without flying…. essentially since you can’t really see where you are going until you remove the fog of war from the map.
Probably my highlight of Heavensward is doing Limitless Blue aka Bismarck which we took care of over lunch yesterday. This was legitimately one of my favorite primal fights because I liked all of the moving parts of it. I remember when we were learning this fight on Extreme the first few weeks after the expansion launch. All of those muscle memories came back… save for not remembering the lighting strike phase. We had all clumped up which meant that a ton of people took damage from a lightning strike at exactly the same time. It is just cool to fight a giant sky whale from the back of a rock… being towed by an airship. Ravana has the coolest music… but this fight has the coolest visuals.
Tonight we will knock out the final trail of the expansion and will have wrapped up Heavensward before the Path of Exile League starts on Friday. That will allow me to take a bit of a break to focus on leveling and gearing there before returning to Kraken to start the Heavensward post content. All in all, I am still having a freaking blast seeing this content for the first time. It is making me remember how much fun I had while leveling in SWTOR when I did so as a fixed duo of characters. Tag teaming the content with Ace has been so much fun and honestly extremely beneficial to my mental health and happiness. It has made me remember that maybe staying by myself and doing everything solo mode… is not really the best possible way to experience things. Ace has generally been way ahead of me, but we seem to alternate between one catching up and the other catching up so it has shaken out in the end allowing us to stay within a few hours of each other at all times.
I used to think that rolling an alt and restarting the MSQ was a fool’s errand… but if you can find a friend to do it with you, it is an amazing experience.
