Good Morning Folks! I have to be perfectly honest… I thought I was done documenting camps. Yesterday I crafted my final level of flame altar and was going to spend the evening poking around the previously deadly shroud areas. However, before sitting down to do this, I saw this video over on YouTube reporting to have the “fastest legendary farm ever”. I am a sucker for this nonsense and given that I documented two other really good farms, I thought I would at least check this one out. Turns out that this is maybe the single best farming spot I have experienced.
The video title was not hyperbole in the least. The farm originally comes from this video by 04AM, but since Glitchiz is the video I first saw and it covers ONLY this one farm I figured that would be the one that I embed. I am uncertain what level of shroud you need to have, but you likely need to have at least found the Kindlewastes spire and have the ability updraft to make it straight forward. During the video, he covers the entire setup of the farm and some tips, like things I did not even think about such as using a grappling point to make getting to the chest a bit faster. I’m legitimately hoping that this is going to be the last time I feel compelled to document one of these chest farms, but in truth pending you want max-level gear, this is the only one you are going to need.
Essentially you are going to fly West South West of the Kindlewastes Ancient Spire, which I have highlighted on my map to show in reference where the spot is. The red bag icon marks where the location of the chest actually is. The only gotchas with this camp is that it isn’t necessarily entirely safe. There are the “giant pterodactyl bird” things roaming around this area, and on very rare occasions one will get close enough to this area to aggro. So either you need to build yourself a safe “hidey hole” that you can duck into around the flame altar, or you need to be able to safely kill one of these. You can see in the first screenshot of this post, that the chest will be sticking half out of the sand by a dead tree on the edge of a set of desert ruins that have no spawns in them.
The above screenshot of my chest represents an hour of farming at this location. I did not keep anything below legendary quality and skipped over most of the duplicates. Additionally, I ignored all of the set gear because I already had two full sets of everything. In truth had I kept everything it would have easily filled up two of the max-size chests, and I got more than a full set of each of the types of armor. What was interesting about this location is that the legendary drop rate chance was so much higher than either of the two camps that I had spent time farming. More than that I saw a lot of items that I only ever saw in epic rarity from the other camps. I am pretty sure this chest is capable of dropping every single legendary weapon in the game. At none of the camps have I seen any legendary shields or rings, and the only thing of the sort I have seen is a magical shield bracelet thingy from the first camp.
What was awesome though is that the camp allowed me to pretty much swap out all of the gear that I was using for an upgrade. The White Wolf Sword has a very bright blue glow, but more important than that is all of the +Shroud Damage it is capable of doing. Similarly, the Ritual Tempest Wand is awesome for all of the +Shock Damage it can deal. Then we have Wolf’s Snarl Longbow, which I had only ever seen a purple version of… and has the highest damage of any bow I have seen in the game so far. That said there were so many drops that you could pretty much find a weapon to suit whatever playstyle you are going for at this one camp. The Iron Cave is still probably easier to get to early on, but after seeing the output of this camp I would completely skip the Cliffside camp that I talked about yesterday.
I have some thoughts about where I would love to see Enshrouded go as a game, but I will probably save those for another day. I hope to try out grouping with some friends over the weekend where I will very likely start a brand new character. I legitimately hope this is the last one of these camps that I feel like I need to document, as spinning the loot table over and over is getting a bit boring.
Good Morning Folks! After having some luck with the chest farm that I showed off yesterday, I decided to try another one that I have seen in literally every YouTube video talking about Level 25 Golden Chests. This one is located in the very Southeastern corner of the map down by Scatterbone and one of the Sun Temples. Of note… this is the Sun Temple which has the legendary glider that I talked about yesterday. It is going to require you to have Flame Level 5 and you are also going to have to take a bit of a leap of faith. There is a ledge just above the deadly shroud where the chest is located, and the easiest way to get there is to run along the cliffside to the west of Scatterbone and then drop down and glide into place.
When you get there the chest is going to be exposed on a pile of rubble, and there is plenty of land for you to be able to set up a Flame Altar just outside of the range of the chest. I am guessing that the original intent for this chest was to be buried down inside of the rubble and that you would have to bomb or dig to expose it. Unlike the chest I showed off yesterday, this one does not require any lockpicks. However that said it seems to have significantly worse drop rates than the Iron Cave chest. The majority of the time you are likely going to get white and blue items, the occasional purple, and very rarely legendary orange items. What is interesting about this farm however is that it has a completely different batch of armor sets, this time the level 25 versions.
Elder Armor Set
I thought I would take a moment this morning to go over the three new armor sets that I found, and photoshop together a little image that shows all of the items as well as the appearance. First up we have the Elder set, and this seems to be the set that I see most of the YouTubers wearing. This is primarily designed for the wand and stave wielders and buffs mana regen and magical damage. It also offers high magical resistance but low physical resistance.
Eagle Eye Armor Set
Next up is the Eagle Eye set which is very clearly designed for ranged combat and specifically folks going down the path of the bow. Most of these armor sets have a bit of a natural glow to them that helps illuminate dark areas, but this one unfortunately has the least amount of glowy bits. I dig the design but I am likely never going to main a bow, and mostly just use mine for pulling. This set has balanced resistance with the same numbers for both physical and magical.
Radiant Paladin Armor Set
This set however is entirely my jam, The Radiant Paladin is a health regen, melee set, offering high physical resistance and decent enough magical resistance. It also has a lot of glowy bits which really helps to illuminate your surroundings. This is going to be the set that I wear from this point forward, or at least until there is an even better set that I find.
Between the two camps, I have spent quite a bit of time opening chests and doing the logout reset game. However, I think for the time being I am mostly done with chest farming. I was specifically seeking the legendary version of the Nova sword and I picked that up last night. I also got a bow that I like quite a bit and have swapped it out for my purple one. Mostly several of the bosses are weak to shroud damage and this will give me a way of plinking them from a distance. You can also see the assortment of legendary weapons that I have picked up in my travels in a shot of my storage chest on the right side of the above image. There is a shield that I got early on in the game that had a lot of glow to it, and I would really like to find a level 25 legendary version of it. So I might do some research to see if such a thing exists. It seems like every item in the game can be found in all four rarities and at most item levels, so I am guessing it is out there somewhere.
I’ve come very close to “beating” the game in its current state. Now that I have finished gearing up, I will likely gather the rest of the bits needed to unlock the final rank of the Flame Altar so that I can explore the remaining deadly shroud areas. Past that, I think the only real things that I have left on my radar is doing some more build projects. I would like to take over a town at some point and try refurbishing it. I also need to finish up the remaining few tradesfolk quests requesting different items from the shrouded areas. All in all, it is a heck of a game. However, it has made me realize how much I would love to see something akin to Enshrouded but with an ARPG build and randomized loot system. Having some chase rare items would make farming content in this game feel a bit more enjoyable, especially if the drops were more focused on individual monster kills rather than finding golden chests. As it stands killing random encounters is a way to farm resources, not actually find anything cool.
At this point, I have gotten over 50 hours of joy from this game so I would definitely say it is worth the purchase and then some. I will also keep returning over time, but it is making me realize that at some point I really need to make my way back to Valheim and give it another go. A few years have passed and I am sure the game is a bit more fleshed out now.
Good Morning Folks! Lately, I have been playing an excessive amount of Enshrouded. At this point I’ve put in around 50 hours and last night I hit the current level cap of 25. I still have a ton of the map that remains in the “fog of war”, and there are still some deadly shroud areas that I cannot adventure into until I upgrade my flame altar one more time. On the building front I have been slowly working on digging underground and at this point have dug out a basement and a sub-basement. I am contemplating starting to move some of my crafters down to this area because with all the bits and bobs associated with each of them the current crafting hall is getting a bit busy. In my travels, I have happened upon a few extra crafting machines so I have been setting them up down there just so I can produce more of the time-gated crafts at one time.
I also set up a new bedroom for myself down in the first basement area. I dug a little room off to the side and have set up some stone-themed furniture down there which is capable of getting my comfort level up to 36. As I can craft more of this stone-themed set I will probably replace the bookcases and then build out some armor and weapon storage in this room. Similarly, I am contemplating digging another side chamber and moving where my magic chests are to a more sheltered area underground. Not that there are really the accouterments of setting up a proper treasure room, but it would be nice to build some sort of hidden vault since there are doors for that functionality in the game. I might swap up the entrance to this bedroom with one of the stone “secret” doors.
Last night in my travels I found a golden chest that spits out max-level gear. For the uninitiated, almost everything in the Enshrouded world respawns on a timer. Currently, that timer is 30 minutes, but if you log out and back in… it refreshes all of those timers. So when you find one of these gear chests, you can in theory farm it over and over and over… which I did. I set up a flame altar just outside of the room with the chest and then played the logout and back in the game until I ran out of lockpicks. I will likely run around today and farm up a bunch more metal scraps and then repeat the process until I have gotten the gear that I want. I am always on team… get the best gear and then finish out the adventure.
Here is a map for how to get to the cave that I found the chest in. Like I said it requires lockpicks so you will have to bring a bunch of those with you. I photoshopped two screenshots together so that I could highlight the location of the two nearest spires. Essentially there is just this cave on the side of the hill and inside there is a ton of iron. There will be a rubble-covered wall, that stands out like a sore thumb because the rest of the cave is limestone and iron nodules. Dig through the wall and the chest will be on the other side. I placed my Flame Altar just outside of the chamber where the chest spawns so that I could keep the rubble wall open and not have to dig it out every time. You are going to need to have your Flame Altar upgraded to level 5 as you will have to cross through some areas that were previously deadly shroud to me at level 4. There are some areas you will need to skirt that are still deadly shroud but I did not have to pass through any of them.
There are a whole slew of armor sets that can drop from this chest. The fancy set that I have been wearing in these screenshots is called the Gloom Monarch set, and is sort of a generic survival/melee damage sort of affair. It looks very DeathKnight-ish which I dig, and I have yet to find anything akin to a proper pure tanking set. The other set that I keep getting is something more akin to a caster set that looks kinda like the Heavensward Black Mage armor from Final Fantasy XIV. Even though this appears to be a max-level chest, all of the armor is dropping at level 23 instead of level 25.
It also has a whole slew of weapons that can drop and I think I have seen most of the loot table at this point in either Epic or Legendary qualities. Essentially my goal is to get the sword and bow in legendary quality so it will have five affixes on it. I’m keeping one of everything that looks vaguely interesting and then sharding the rest for upgrade coins. I really wish that armor could be salvaged but apparently, the only option there is to delete it… which seems wasteful. The main reason that I landed on Nova for my main weapon is that it gives off almost as much light as a torch which makes exploration that much easier since I don’t have to keep swapping to my torch so I can see. The wand also has a decent amount of illumination, but not quite as much as the sword.
Also in my travels last night, I happened upon what is apparently the best glider in the game. This thing is ridiculously fast, almost too fast to actually control your flight. It was the top of a sun temple and I had to fight a giant bird in order to get it. In theory, you could probably loot the chest without killing the bird, but since I was up there I figured might as well get some more “chicken” and feathers. I figure I will farm out the orange versions of the weapons I like the best and then start gathering up the materials needed to upgrade my flame altar all the way to level 6. After that, I think the goal will be to uncover every corner of the map that is currently veiled. Past that… I guess we enter the TRUE endgame… which is crafting some more bases and maybe taking over one of the NPC towns for myself.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve been spending a bit of time over the last few days thinking about a game that could have been, but never really was… Outriders. I reinstalled it recently and it is still an enjoyable looter shooter experience, with its roots in the fundamentals of ARPG build diversity and design. It was the hoped Destiny Slayer that would come along and offer a more interesting gameplay experience. It had some connectivity issues out of the gate as often is the case with most new online games, but it recovered relatively quickly and offered a really enjoyable gameplay loop. Lets talk about some of the high points of the game.
First off it had a pretty freaking long story, at least compared to Destiny or any of its expansions. There was a lot of interesting gameplay wrapped up in that story as well and all of it was repeatable. It became commonplace to grind out your favorite story missions for loot in the endgame. While it told an exceptionally bleak tale that turned off some of my friends, it was a mechanically enjoyable experience from start to finish. It did a good job of easing you into combat and giving you progressively more difficult encounters as you learned the ropes of how to use your new powers. The male voice acting was less than amazing, but the female voice actor was pretty freaking great.
The class design and the powers that came with it were extremely fun. I spent most of my time playing the Devastator which uses Earth powers to “devastate” the enemies. My build of choice was to use Earthquake as an opening salvo, Tremor as a lifetap aura or a sort for everything fighting up against me, and Impale to lock down the biggest enemies while mopping up the weaker ones. The game had a talent point system that allowed you to really accentuate the abilities that you wanted to focus on, letting you lean into a specific gameplay style. For me it was all about being tanky and being able to take a lot of damage while dishing it back out in the form of elemental attacks. Other gameplay styles leaned into stealthy fast killers that flit across the battlefield or maybe being the best sniper you could possibly be. Classes had an identity and this was supported by custom gear sets and such making you feel like you were able to lean into a particular fantasy.
Then there were the weapons that not only looked cool but had some wild unique abilities on them. The craft system allowed you to replace any one node on your weapon with any other node you had unlocked to that point allowing you to craft some wild combinations. What I liked the most about this is that it was pretty easy for me to keep using the same sort of weapon over and over as I leveled through the game because I could keep bringing forward the attributes that I enjoyed the most. I imprint heavily on specific weapons in this sort of game and the fact that I could keep using them was huge for me. This is my big problem with a game like Halo where you end up having to spend most of your time using random trash weapons rather than the really good ones.
With later updates, there was a full cosmetic system that allowed you to swap up what your character looked like. This included weapons appearance swaps so if you had a specific loadout that you needed for your build, but you really liked the look of another weapon you could change that up and run around with whatever you liked. I personally with with a cowboy thing going on with a duster and everything. I think more than anything I appreciated how well the game played and how all of the cosmetics were unlocked through playing the campaign and for completing achievements. That said this is absolutely a game I would have happily paid for microtransactions in similar to how I happily pay for them in Path of Exile.
Now let’s talk about the downfall of Outriders. Prior to the launch of the game, the two biggest talking points were that it would have zero microtransactions and was “Not A Live-Service” which is a weird message for a game that required online connectivity and also was being touted as something that could compete with Destiny. Looter Shooters need content updates to keep bringing players back. You can look at the SteamCharts for Destiny or even The Division and see that there is a pattern. When new content is added to the game, players come back… there is a surge in player numbers and a slow drop off in numbers as players feel like they have gotten their fill and move on to other games. This is how this sort of game survives. Path of Exile has quite possibly the most predictable pattern each time a new league launches, there is a spike, and then after a few months a valley.
The game as a whole was reviewed reasonably well considering there were active campaigns attempting to review bomb the game during the first few weeks of connectivity issues. There were a lot of publications that reviewed this as an overwhelmingly positive game. The biggest concern that kept being raised however was whether or not the game was going to be supported in the long term. The constant drum beak of “Not A Live-Service” set up a bit of a paradox. Players engage in these sorts of games now as live services, as experiences to be revisited every few months each time a new drip of content is released… but as this game is reportedly a “finished product” it was setting up a scenario where it just could not sustain the players necessary to make things like matchmaking function.
Ultimately that is what we saw when it came to concurrent player numbers. There was an impressive peak of just over 125k players, and then by month three a constant fall off down to around 1000 players just before the first major patch, and a bump back to around 10k shortly after that. Then again a a bleed of players down to 1000 players again before some pre-expansions patches that introduced new things to the game and another bump of around 12k players with the release of Worldslayer dropping down to under 1000 players starting in November 2022 and continuing in that state to this point where at the time of pulling these numbers there was a 24 peak of just over 300 players. Without the rhythm of a live service game, there just wasn’t anything to glue the players to this game.
I will always be wistful of what might have been with this game. This game is my new Hellgate London, a game that I greatly enjoyed… felt was far better than the other offerings that were available… but just was not supported and died an early death as a result. The main difference is that I can still revisit Outriders and enjoy it, and at least so far its corpse has not been crudely reanimated by a KMMO company. Outriders is still a damned fun game, but it would be a better game if people actually played it. I go through periods where I reinstall it, and play a bit of it… get my fill… and then wander off again because there is literally no reason to keep playing it after that point. The devs announced to the community/influencer groups in March 2023 that they were not releasing any more content for the game. So it is effectively a “dead” game at this point.
This is a case where you can get all of the fundamentals of this sort of game right, and release a technically proficient and at times phenomenal game experience but if you don’t have the follow-through support the game will flounder. The looter shooter and ARPG genres are all about nailing a release cadence and by publically announcing from the start that there was no “Live-Service” they sort of shot themselves in the foot. There are just certain genres that NEED to be a Live-Service with releases after the sale in order to survive. We’ve seen this backlash against that sort of game, but mostly in genres that did not need to have a cosmetic shop or carefully timed content drops. We are currently dealing with one of those games right now with the Suicide Squad, which everyone seems to wish was just another Arkham game… but instead attempted to be something akin to the Avengers.
Outriders though had everything aligned to be a great game that would grow over time… it had all of the hooks that could have supported a reasonable microtransaction shop in order to fund the development. Instead, it gets added to the list of games that should have worked… but never quite did. I will always lament the death of Anthem in a similar vein, but Outriders was way more technically competent than Anthem ever was and still could not quite make it. All of this said, if People Can Fly came out tomorrow and said that they were making an Outriders 2, and this time it would be given all the support that the first game deserved… I would be there and ready to go. That however is never going to happen because I think Square Enix has a bad taste in its mouth over how Outriders performed, and the IP lives in that murky territory of having too many cooks in the kitchen that would need to sign off on a sequel.
Anyways! I will always have a special place in my heart for this game. If you’ve never played it, it is probably super cheap on every platform it was released on. It is worth a gander because it is doing a lot of interesting things.
