Lake of Kalandra Day

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It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.

Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.

I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.

Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.

Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.

Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.

If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.

If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.

Titanic Throw Is Amazing

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday we got a new Alpha patch for World of Warcraft Dragonflight and the single most exciting thing about it… is the line about all of the zones being open for testing. Up until this point, we have been focused on a single zone at a time per week, and I am hoping that this is signaling a bit of stability in our ability to progress through the zones. It had been a few weeks since I had last stepped foot in the Waking Shores, but already a lot of elements are starting to feel a bit more polished. I noticed that a number of the formerly silent NPCs have suddenly gained vocal dialog. It is still exceedingly eerie for me personally given that I love in-game music and the zones currently have none. I might have to throw together a World of Warcraft music playlist to use for leveling and testing the content.

I did not make it terribly far into testing last night because I was suffering from a pretty debilitating bug. Essentially my Talents were not saving, and that meant if I needed to log out or got disconnected… my hotbars were wiped back to the default mostly empty state and I had to reconfigure my talents. The positive is that I have become real freaking sure of my path through the tree… but the negative is that it felt like I spent most of my evening reconfiguring things. Ultimately I reported the issue, logged out, and then hoped that it would be fixed quickly. As of this morning, I have successfully reset my talent points, logged out, and logged back in with them still set. Progress! I mean this is the sort of thing that you have to take into account when alpha testing any product, but also there comes a time when you should just walk away for a bit.

I have really focused on playing the Warrior as there are a bunch of fun interactions happening. We had a pretty big shuffle of things on the talent tree between the last patch and this most recent one. If you want to check out the full list of changes… then here are the patch notes. I would simply copy/paste them but they are rather significant. Basically, I love the direction that the Protection Warrior is moving in and I just hope that it doesn’t shift too much before launch. Right now it feels good for questing and seems like it would feel great for dungeons… though I have yet to step foot into any of those. I need to get over my grouping mental block and queue up for some of the new dungeons and see how that feels. I also need to work on my keybinds a bit in order to work rend in maybe as a shift modifier to thunderclap since I mostly only care about rend if I am going to spread it. If you want to look at everything I am currently choosing then here is a link to the WoWHead Talent builder for Alpha.

Mostly it just feels really good to run around as a prot warrior and I can shift into “world tank” mode where I charge packs and tank stuff for other people. The real winner though is Titanic Throw, which is a direct replacement for Heroic Throw. The two class-defining features of a Paladin for me personally are the Captain America shield throw and the Steed Charge. Titanic Throw is essentially a shield throw for warriors, with the difference being instead of bouncing between targets… you just sort of yeet up to five throwing axes at different targets within range of each other. This feels so damned good to use in practice and while the animation currently looks a little goofy… I find I am using it way more often to pull my next pack because with an improved heroic throw I can use it to apply deep wounds to my targets. This is going to be amazing in dungeons because it creates an initial threat lead on ranged targets.

I am in this weird position that I have not been in a very long time. Firstly I am loving the state of Warriors and pending nothing changes in the way that they feel… I will absolutely be “maining” one if I return for Dragonflight. Secondly, I find myself really excited about the prospects of this expansion. I am not sure if you can fully understand what a difference that is, because generally speaking, I have played WoW Expansions because that is just the thing I have always done. I think the last expansion that I was genuinely excited to play was Wrath of the Lich King. A lot of why that expansion felt so good to me is that there were some mechanical changes in the way that Warriors worked that I really enjoyed. Similarly, I am loving the class design so far for the Protection Warrior, and I guess I need to spend some time checking out Arms and Fury to see what I think of those as well. I’ve never really liked Arms, to be honest… but Fury has been my jam in the past and I should at least give it a test run.

I am very interested to see if I maintain this level of enjoyment and excitement as testing continues. I still have complaints honestly, but the core enjoyment of being a warrior is overriding them. Right now the world design feels extremely sparse, and I am hoping that over time this will be fleshed out. I am greatly missing all of the doodads and micro objectives in the zones like treasure chests and mini bosses. The few silver elites that do exist, don’t seem to drop anything meaningful at all. It is in part because of this that I am hoping we just have yet to get a pass populating these objects. Similarly, I’ve stumbled across a few nodes, but trade skills in general seem to largely be disabled. I tried to train mining last night and got a “to be determined” prompt on the dialog. So clearly there is a lot of work that needs to happen before this is ready for launch.

However like I said before I am already seeing signs of progress and zones I have leveled through before are starting to tighten up a bit. My caveat will still be that it seems like the game has a lot of work before it can meet a reported December release date. I worry for the team and the amount of crunch that will be required to meet that, and I hope that honestly, the date moves to next year. However like I have said before, I have a lot of hope for Dragonflight and what it will do for the future of World of Warcraft as a franchise.

Guild Wars 2 Steam Launch

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Yesterday we finally got a release date for something that has been in the works for a while. Guild Wars 2 is launching on Steam on August 23rd, and this announcement has been met with quite a bit of frustration on my social timelines. Guild Wars 2 being available through Steam is a universally good thing, because it lowers the barrier to entry into this game. The frustrations however lay with the fact that if you are already a Guild Wars 2 player with an existing account, you cannot link it in any way to steam. This means that those of us who have been around for a while are going to miss out on the convenience of being able to launch the game through what has effectively become the PC Gaming storefront.

We can gnash our teeth about this decision, but I think ultimately it comes down to financial reasons. If I understand correctly there is certain verbiage in the steam agreement that indicates the 30% cut of sales, is taken for all members playing on the steam platform regardless of where the purchases are made. So even if you went directly to the Arena.Net website and purchased gems… because you are a Steam player 30% of that money will go back to Valve. For a game that has persevered by its bootstraps like Guild Wars 2, immediately losing 30% of funding from a significant chunk of its player base would be brutal. I would have absolutely been open to rebuying the base game and all of its expansions if it meant that I could launch it from my platform of choice, but alas that is not a thing that can happen.

So you might ask yourself, why even bother with a steam release when existing players can’t make use of it? In the short time since the announcement yesterday, there are already over 25,000 players who have wish-listed Guild wars 2. I am not an industry flack so I am not entirely certain what that equates to for a potential conversion rate, but it is nonetheless still impressive to me for a 10-year-old game. The other piece that comes into play is that Guild Wars 2 will now be listed in the Free To Play section of Steam allowing anyone who wants to dip their toes into the game to try it out quickly, with minimal friction. It is a lot easier to convince someone to try a game when all they have to do is click the play button in a client that they already have than to track down the website, set up a unique account, and download an individual launcher.

We also have some data supporting the spikes in sales that come with launching a game on Steam thanks to Satisfactory. Satisfactory originally launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive, a platform with a sweetheart deal for game exclusivity and a significantly lower cut of the profits. It took roughly three months to reach the 500,000 sales mark on the Epic Game store and at the end of their year-long exclusivity period, the game had reached over 900,000 sales. Within the first two weeks of being on Steam the game sold almost 400,000 units and since then has gone on to sell well over 3 million copies. Essentially releasing a game on Steam puts it in front of a larger magnitude of eyeballs than it does on other platforms. So while it would be awful to lose 30% of all of the existing sales… that equation becomes completely different when it could garner millions of new players.

The Steam launch of course coincides with the 10th Anniversary of Guild Wars 2. For those of us who already play the game, while we are not getting the benefit of being able to use the Steam launcher… there are a number of goodies for us as well. There is a “Decade” armor set that can be obtained and starting today there are I believe a series of daily free items on the Black Lion store. I checked this morning and was able to purchase a single Black Lion Key for free, so you might keep an eye on things as the next few weeks roll out. It was also hinted in the update blog that there will be a free mount skin available at some point during the sequence of freebies. Finally on August 23rd at UTC-7 Twitch Drops will be enabled which can net you Transmutation Charges, boosters, a mini, a Glowing Purple Mask, and your choice of a classic Guild Wars 2 character outfit.

Fun With Infinite Climbing

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Good Morning Friends! I am going to start out this post with a reminder to submit questions for the 400th episode of AggroChat Q&A show this weekend. I’ve been spending most of my gaming time playing Tower of Fantasy and I have to say I am more than sufficiently hooked. For the most part, it seems to have an answer to all of the things that used to bother me about Genshin Impact. Namely, with that game, it felt like I only had about thirty minutes of gameplay that was enjoyable each day, before ultimately waiting for the next reset when I got more resin to do things with. Tower of Fantasy on the other hand seems to have plenty of activities that are actually meaningful without spending “vitality” which is the equivalent of resin in the game.

Most recently I have been obsessed with farming Behemoths. Ultimately there are three spawns in the world that I know of, and they respawn on roughly a 3-minute timer. They have the extremely rare chance of dropping “Omnium Beast Right Arm” which is the last piece I am missing to craft the Omnium Beast VII Mount. Why do I want this so badly? Well, it looks like one of the Magitek walkers from the Final Fantasy series and if I am going to start pouring resources into a vehicle, I would love it to be this one. The first two parts are extremely easy and are obtained through hidden quests involving talking to members of the NPC Hyenas faction… aka the dudes that look like they were pulled straight out of the Borderlands series. This last part, however, requires a certain amount of brute force farming and as such, I’ve mostly stalled out on trying to get this item.

What I should be doing instead is working on world completion, and farming up even more Orbs for doing openings. According to one of their maps, there are roughly 100 gold orbs and 500 black orbs out in the world, and it is honestly sorta relaxing to just do the assorted mini-games required to unlock them. For example, this involves finding a colored spore laying on the ground that matches the center of this flower and then tossing it into the center. The flower will close up tight as a result and an orb will spawn nearby for you to collect. Genshin had a lot of puzzles that involved matching various elemental attacks, but Tower of Fantasy seems to have a much wider variety of these things that involve specific attacks or even using a specific relic at the right time.

I contemplated trying to create a guide to all of them… but this seemed like a daunting task considering there are ones in later levels that I have yet to even encounter. Instead, if you are struggling with figuring out how these puzzles work, the above video seems to have recorded footage of how each of them functions. My two favorites are the mushrooms and the musical notes, in both cases if you are doing them correctly there is audio and graphical feedback. In the case of the mushrooms, you essentially have to hop on them in the correct order, causing them to light up. The musical platforms puzzle is similar but hopping on a platform will cause another platform to start glowing… and you essentially have to follow the sequence of always going to the next glowing platform until the treasure spawns.

The most useful tip that I have seen that I feel like I need to share with anyone who will listen… is Infinite climbing. Tower of Fantasy has a number of movement abilities that can be chained together in unexpected ways. For example, if you have a cybernetic arm relic (grappling hook), you can use that while gliding to pull you up to higher destinations. Infinite climbing uses an interaction between the double jump and the normal climbing mechanic. Essentially you push off the wall (the default key is Control) and then immediately double tap your jump button (spacebar) and then push forward to move back into a climbing position (W). The end result is that you essentially double jump up on the face of the wall without it consuming any stamina. Now you want to reserve some stamina because there were points on some walls that have to be climbed over because you can’t fully attach until you are over a lip. Using this technique though, you can essentially scale anything in the game without worrying about your stamina bar.

There are also some interesting interactions with jetboards that effectively allow you to get out of combat quickly. For example, as part of the titan farm that I am doing for the mount piece, there are times I want to get out of combat quickly so that I can teleport again to the next spawn destination. If you hop on the jetboard and take to the water, it seems to instantly reset your combat status flag. I think that is honestly one of the things that I am digging the most is all of the interactions that the various relics have. The way that they have designed the game… it feels like the sky is the limit to the sorts of unique things that they can design in the future. Everything feels very open-ended, especially when it comes to combat and the different sorts of weapons they might be able to create in the future.

The one thing that I wish is that it was more reasonable to effectively level up every weapon. Right now I have mostly had to choose four weapons that I use the most: Scythe, Dual Pistols, Greatsword, and whatever the heck thing Nemesis uses. However, I sort of wish that I had enough currency to level up everything… including all of the purple weapons that I have gotten enough duplicates of to max their stars. None of the weapons feel like copies of something else in the game, so for example the Ice Hammer just doesn’t really have a legendary equivalent that feels quite as good as it does. Then there is the big cannon thing that you can effectively turn into a turret… which still feels great even as you get technically better weapons. Maybe that is something that you can work on during content droughts, but I sorta wish there was a way to upgrade the rarity of some of those purple options to make them mechanically viable long term.

Yesterday was the first day that I fell behind the daily curve. Essentially each day the level cap has increased and more story has been released. I finished the story but because I spent so much time grinding the Behemoths for drops, I did not finish leveling. The truth is I am largely okay with this because I am certain that there will come a point where I just simply cannot keep up. Especially with the new Path of Exile season starting on Friday and then Diablo 3 season starting the Friday after that. This game is going to fall by the wayside a bit as I get my footing in both of those games. However, I think it is going to be something that I have been in the rotation for a long while. I really enjoy the group content as well, even though it would be far better if I actually got to run it with some friends.

That is honestly my core complaint right now. The game does not make it easy for you to play with your friends. The servers once again get in the way of the experience and there needs to be a way to either do cross-server UID-based grouping, or the ability to transfer your character to a new server. I mean we all have this unique identifier associated with our accounts. There should be a way for us to friend each other based on that idea and then invite each other to groups, with the group existing on the leader’s server. The game makes it relatively trivial to reroll, and you effectively get all of the starter currency on every character you create. However with the luck that I have had in snagging six legendary SSR weapons… there is no way I am restarting somewhere else. If your weapon progress was account based, then in theory I would be fine completing all of the content again on another server.

Ultimately it is a problem I hope they can come up with a solution for in the future. I am over on Observer if anyone is interested in checking out the game. Originally I was targeting Solaris, but that appears to be where all of the streamers ended up so I am more than happy NOT being there.