Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Bel was partially dead, and then holiday travel happened, and as a result, we ended up taking a few weeks off without really intending to. We are back and hopefully for more than a few weeks, but given another holiday is looming, who knows? This week we talk about how all of the various ARPGs out there seem to have a contingency of aggro fans, and discuss the reasons why, but also why we are not quite as doomer on them. Bel talks a bit about the release of the Druid and the Vaal league coming up in Path of Exile II. Tam discusses a new Chinese MMORPG called Where Winds Meet, which seems to push Gacha elements aside and produce a really wild experience. From there Grace discusses a Raid Healing Simulator if the form of Wild Growth, and Kodra, an alternate universe Donkey Kong Country in the form of Windswept. We have a revisiting of a topic we have discussed more than once, about why PVPVE fails… this time, how it ruins the otherwise joyful experience of Arc Raiders. We wrap the show up with some rapid-fire topics about various books and media we have been consuming.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.
I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.
Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.
After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.
What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.
What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.
Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.
In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.
With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.
I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.
Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.
Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have talked about before is how much of a happy place it is for me to be playing a mechanically interesting game… that is devoid of narrative, so that I can sit there and listen to an audiobook while I play. I seem to forget how much I enjoy this from time to time. I was doing really good this week until March… when I completely fell apart when it came to books. Then I picked back up a bit after the passing of my wife, because I needed anything to take my mind off what I was going through, but again paused in August for a bit. Then recently Brigands and Breadknives was released by Travis Baldree and I felt bad for not having read it yet, so I chained through a bunch of books that I had gathered up waiting for me to give them attention. I am back in the swing of things and over the course of the last week and a half or so I have gone through three books and am chipping away at a fourth, with a fifth absolutely prepped and waiting. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about each of them.
First up we have Brigands & Breadknives which is the third book in a series of books centered around the universe first created in Legend & Lattes. Though technically this book is much more of a direct sequel to Bookshops & Bonedust, which itself serves as a bit of a prequel to Legends & Lattes. It centers around the character of Fern, a bookseller from a seaside town that has recently accepted an offer from Viv the central character of the first book to move operations to the city of Thune and next door to her Coffee shop. However Fern suffers a midlife crisis and a totally different sort of adventure ensues. I love this series of books and I love its characters… and this book introduces yet more characters that I have fallen in love with like Zyll the Goblin fugitive and Asteryx the Elven bounty hunter. This book is phenomenal… right up until the end… when it sort of goes off the rails. The ending Fern receives is not the ending I expected… nor even an ending I even feel comfortable with. Ace is re-reading the book to see if they feel any different about the ending knowing where things are going… but I somehow doubt that will be the case. There are essentially multiple paths laid out in front of Fern, and she chooses the most boring option. What I want now however is a book centered on Zyll, because she absolutely deserves a prequel treatment like Bookshops & Bonedust was for Fern.
In 2023, on a complete lark, I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, and fell in love with it. I have no recollection of HOW this book crossed my eyeballs, but I am very glad it did. From that point forward I had been waiting for a sequel and thought I had one when A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping was released earlier this year. It is not a sequel, nor is it even set in the same broader world… but thematically it very much fits the same sort of pattern that the first book did. This is the point where I have realized that I actually quite enjoy a romance novel so long as the romance elements are not the central plot point, and the book in general has some sort of fantasy or science fiction setting. They are really nice cozy reads, and I highly enjoyed this one. I do wish that Sangu were building some sort of broader universe with all of these individual vignettes, but I am not going to hold that against them. The main reason why I can tell they are absolutely NOT connected is that the hierarchy of magical societies in the books are wildly different. It was well worth the read though, especially if you enjoyed the Harry Potter series before we realized how much of a harmful person the author is.
Another series I have deeply come to love is the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. I’ve not read anything else from them, and admittedly was originally drawn to this series by the striking cover art. Then I found out Ace was reading them and also loved them, so that sealed them deal when it came to me giving them a read as well. Essentially this whole series is in the vein of gaslight horror, similar to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The first book in the series, What Moves the Dead, is somewhat of a re-imagining of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. From there each of the book dives into almost cosmic horror elements in different settings, and What Stalks the Deep specifically centers around an inherited coal mine in West Virginia and a series of disappearances. I love the character of the Gallacian Sworn Soldier Alex Easton and their companion Angus and the various misadventures that they get involved in within the course of the books. Each of the books is pretty short and more novella than novel, so similar to the Murderbot Diaries you can rip through them in pretty short measure. I HIGHLY suggest this series if you like gaslight era horror or cosmic horror themes.
Another book that I had been holding onto, but had not started was The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi. Firstly I love Scalzi and pretty much everything I have read from him. In 2023 I ripped through the entire Old Man’s War series, so it has taken me a little bit to reactivate the pathways in my brain that remember what the final events of The End of All Things were. This book specifically is told from the perspective of Gretchen Trujillo, best friend to Zoe Boutin Perry, and a former member of the ill fated Roanoke Colony. Twenty years have passed since the events of the Roanoke colony and now Gretchin is in the diplomatic corp, and called forth to assist in another series of pivotal events centered around a colony that has up and disappeared. So far it has been a fun ride, but like I said I am having to active memberberries for where things left off in the previous books since a few years have passed since I read them. I am enjoying it quite a bit and also finding it hard to stop at a reasonable hour. Last night I had multiple cats reminding me that it was well past my bedtime and I should really come to bed.
So that is where I am currently with my reading. I am hoping I can stay on the wagon a bit longer because I have several books that I want to consume. Once I wrap up Shattering Peace, I am likely rolling into Fury of the Gods by John Gwynne which is the third book in another series I really have enjoyed, that I got turned onto by my friend Cuppy. What have you been reading? Is there anything that you think I would enjoy based on the assortment of books that I talked about here? Drop me a line below.
