Two Minutes to Midnight

by

Good Morning Folks! Well… I guess I am back in World of Warcraft for a bit. I originally installed it as a bit of a lark, to see what Housing was up to, and wound up getting back into the swing of the game. I missed the majority of the Valentines day event, but I did manage to get a few runs in, which was enough to get this shiny new mount that was apparently available this year. I am missing all of the other mounts, unfortunately. I never got my love rocket, and I never got the broom that they added either. This is not bad luck, however, for having run exactly two queues of the event, I was mostly queueing to see if I could get any of the new housing items, but alas, I did not. However, queuing for this event got me back in the swing of combat, which only further devolved me into the flow of the game. While I have been gone, though the game has been cooking, and it seems like World of Warcraft is in pretty good hands with the current dev team.

I, of course, did what I have always done… and ran a bunch of old raids for gear attempts. I remembered at one point they made it so you could collect transmog appearances from any role, not just the one you were currently on. This makes running these old raids feel significantly better, and all of the tokens that you get for gear sets are warbound and can be dropped in the warband bank. I will be using this later to help fill out missing set pieces on other characters. Yesterday I made quite a bit of progress on Warrior sets, having completed the Destroyer set and the Onslaught set, and then gained a few more pieces of Wrath. There was a time when I had the full Onslaught set, because I wore it back in the day, but apparently, the boots and bracers had gone missing from my bank before the appearance collection became a thing. I need to start working on the Warlords of Draenor sets, because they all looked pretty cool for warriors.

Running all of this content means I am now swimming in old materials and gear pieces. One of the points of realization that I learned in Guild Wars 2 is that the economy there is stable enough that I should really just sell everything and then buy back whatever I happen to need at any given time. Similarly, in Path of Exile, I have actually learned to really enjoy being a vendor and selling stuff to other players. Since World of Warcraft has a much updated Auction House system, I thought I would try my hand at being a vendor here. This largely involved installing and configuring TSM and the tool that stays active in the background and updates the auction house data. All in all, I think it was mostly a success, and on my first day of being a vendor, I sold something in the neighborhood of 28k in gold. This is a pittance compared to the gold that Stargrace brings in regularly, but she is also selling on all of her characters and has done this for a decade now. I am mostly only running auctions on this one character.

In other news, on my Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven, I finished The Ringing Deeps and am trying to figure out how to get the quest starter that sends me to the next zone. All told, the story for the zone was pretty good once I managed to get into it. This was part of why I bounced so hard at the launch of War Within, is that I got to this zone… which, quite honestly, the whole Earthen thing should have been the most “me” story ever, given how much I love Dwarves in general. However, I just struggled to attach to it, and I maybe should have just critical pathed the story rather than trying to do every single side quest in the entire zone. I have been playing too many games that are not World of Warcraft, and got used to the concept that I needed to do side content to progress, whereas this is more like FFXIV in that the side content is entirely for flavor only, and you will get enough experience by largely just doing the Main Story.

Another thing that I got caught up in was doing a meta achievement called Two Minutes to Midnight, which requires you to farm up nineteen rare bosses during the Midnight pre-event that is happening in Twilight Highlands. I was largely obvious to this whole thing and started fairly late in the night… which meant that I stayed up a bit longer than I normally would have yesterday. Essentially, it seems like the Twilight Highlands are on a clock, and every five to ten minutes, a new rare boss spawns, and they all spawn in sequence. So by hopping on this train, I was ultimately able to catch all nineteen of them. The only reason why I did not go to bed at my normal time… is that I did not want to try and coordinate hopping back on the train at exactly the right time. I still wrapped up by 10:30, which is not the end of the world, but it was a lot of flying around the zone and button mashing until I got out the other side.

The benefit of doing this event during prime time is that the bosses and adds go pretty quickly. You have a ten-minute clock that starts when the event spawns, and you have that long to kill enough mobs to trigger the event, then also take down three mini bosses, and the ultimate rare boss, before the timer is up. Each of the encounters has the chance of dropping a set of purple armor and various other resources, but I don’t entirely understand what to do with them yet. Hopping on the train, I was able to farm up every gear slot, plus a cloak, and a ring… and in theory, if the dailies are still available tonight, I will try and knock those out and hopefully pick up the other ring, and an amulet so that this character is relatively well geared going into midnight. Apparently, I purchased a cloak that was not flagged as part of the set piece… which seems like a bug… but if I have more resources left over I will purchase the correctly named cloak.

So at roughly 10:15 last night, I got my last named mob kill and finished the meta achievement. If I had been paying attention to this more I would have tried to run this on multiple characters. I remember an event like this happening in Silithis prior to Battle for Azeroth that effectively worked the same way. I was out there constantly to farm up full sets of gear for almost all of my Horde characters. Maybe it is a miracle that I came in at the last moment and got exactly one set of gear, because otherwise I probably would have burned myself out massively. Grinding is one of those things that I seem to be exceptionally good at, and when there is something like this going on, I can seem to put my head down and push through it. However, once I am finished… I have usually burnt myself out to the point where I just don’t want to play the game anymore, once I have lost that burning focus that was driving me. I seem to have a hard time finding a new focal point once I have accomplished my goal.

As to why I did any of this? A mount of course. You get this shiny new mech suit if you manage to take down all nineteen mini-bosses that are part of this event. I know the head start for the expansion is right around the corner, but supposedly, this event hangs around until the 2nd when the expansion fully launches. I think I will probably be spending that time trying to get through the main story quest rather than grinding up additional characters. I think I have the desire to actually try and play this expansion when it drops now. It is weird how I have gone from logging in on a lark to actually starting to mainline the damned game again. Damn you, Blizzard, for getting your hooks in me at least temporarily. I fully expect to drop this at least for the short term when Path of Exile Mirage launches on the sixth, but given how much I seem to bounce between games right now, and how I played Destiny Rising the entire time during the last league… I might find room for Warcraft as well.

Digital Nesting

by

Good Morning Folks! Right now, I am all over the place in my gaming, and cannot seem to land on any particular title as my main grind. I know this is going to rapidly change because we are two weeks out from the drop of a new Path of Exile league, and I am certain I will be devoting all of my time and attention to the 3.28 Mirage League. However, for the time being, I am playing a game for an hour or so and then flipping to a different game. I wish I could mainline Dune Awakening, but the combat is way too focused for me to spend much time in it. I need games where I can turn my brain off, and this is not that game. I am still enjoying myself, but doing things in the world requires too much attention and cannot really be chained with something else like an audiobook. There is a weird bug happening right now where I will consistently log in on top of my base, so I made a rooftop entrance to solve this problem quickly.

The biggest achievement for the weekend is that I expanded my base, made my craft floor two floors high to accommodate some of the larger crafting machines like the vehicle fabricator, and made my very first buggy. We talked a bit about this on the podcast this weekend, but each vehicle that you acquire feels like a massive quality-of-life improvement. I am still working on unlocking the research needed to get the mining rig, but once I do so, I will be taking this out into the desert in hunt for more materials, and rapidly speeding up acquisition. Right now, I am more gated by levels and research than pretty much anything else. I need to really buckle down and focus on taking out some of the bandit camps, especially since I just upgraded to the slavers stillsuit and have a bit more armor. I need higher damage weapons, but that is going to require me to craft a weapons fabricator… which again needs more research points. I might bip over to the Anvil and see if there is anything I can buy there that might help me out.

Tam has a really good base in the North, so I think I might be keeping this one for a while. At some point, I will abandon my Hagga South base, but I have left it up and running because there are still some folks down in the south questing. I know Mor found my base yesterday, and it serves as a great staging location for both the shipwreck and the testing station. Really, I need to push the main story quest forward a bit and need better weapons. I might research where the really good legendary crafting patterns drop in these middle zones and set out to get some of those. I also might flip the style of my base from the standstone dormitory to one of the other appearances. I really like the existence of the “replace” tool for this purpose.

I spent a fair amount of time in Enshrouded, roaming around and unlocking crafting NPCs for my current save file. A lot of this has centered around climbing up to some high point and then gliding long distances since I have one of the really nice legendary gliders. I need to spend some time looking for resources on this game, because surely by now someone has created the equivalent of POEDB for it. I really want to know where some of the good farms are now, and then set out to maybe get a good weapon with a rune socket in it. My armor seems fine, but not having a rune socket means I am missing some critical functionality. It feels like, at least for the short term, that sibling time is going to be in Enshroude,d and I like being overgeared for content.

In the continued focus of trying to find games for us to play together, I reinstalled Wayfinder to give it another spin. I remember us having fun with this, but since we last played it has transitioned from being a server authoritative online service, to a peer-to-peer buy-the-box sort of experience. Legitimately huge kudos to Airship Syndicate for doing this because when they realized it would not function as a live service, they pivoted the game design to being something that can be enjoyed evergreen by players. I wish more games would do this. I spent some time roaming around the world and did a dungeon, and it is still quite a bit of fun. The number of systems in this game is staggering, and I completely forgot that it had housing and mounts and all of that nonsense. It could definitely be fun to check things out further and see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes.

Unfortunately, the art style… and the existence of the housing system… made me want to check out the new World of Warcraft housing system. I’ve kept my World of Warcraft account active for years, without really ever playing it. I reactivated it around the time The War Within launched, could not really get into that expansion… and then just never turned it off. I made an attempt to play during the Legion Remix and bounced from that as well. I will probably be talking a bit more about the current state of World of Warcraft in another video, but this morning I am largely going to talk about housing. I have to say… so far, I think this feels like a much better version of the Final Fantasy XIV housing system. At least at face value, it seems like it has gone back and added a bunch of new housing drops into older content, effectively making those evergreen. Giving players a reason to experience older content feels like a massive boost to the game in general. While this is still World of Warcraft, it feels like they are learning lessons from other games out there, and the fact that you collect appearances for your house and do not have to juggle physical objects… immediately puts this a world ahead of FFXIV.

I was surprised that there were still housing plots available in the House Stalwart neighborhood. Essentially, the Alliance gets a bunch of human-inspired housing areas, and I bought my plot in the area that is like a baby Duskwood. I have no clue what the Horde version of this looks like, but I kind of expect there to be areas that represent a bunch of in-game zones similar to how this one is. I seem to already have a massive amount of items unlocked through the content that I have already played through. I spent some time roaming around the housing area, and so far, the best-looking house is probably Kylana, the current Guild Leader of House Stalwart. I handed off to Elnore, Elnore handed off to Rylacus… Rylacus briefly handed it back to me during Pandaria, and then Rylacus got it back and made the very wise choice of handing it off to Kylana, who, to the best of my knowledge, has been the leader since at least Draenor. Ky was always a stable hand at the wheel, and I greatly appreciate him keeping active this thing that I so thoroughly abandoned.

As I said, I will probably talk a bit about my experience of getting back into World of Warcraft in a future post, but so far… thing seeem really well maintained. The new user interface system is shockingly good, and so far at least seems to be a cromulent replacement for all of the addons that I had been using. I purposefully installed the game fresh on my new computer and did not take any time to install addons because I wanted to see what the stock experience looked like. I am honestly also enjoying the single combat button thing, which seems perfectly reasonable for brain-off grinding. I need to spend some time logging in my plethora of characters because each one I have done so has unlocked additional cosmetic appearances and housing tat. All in all, I am pretty impressed with what I have seen so far.

AggroChat #558 – Fun with Sandworms

by
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week, we talk about Dune Awakening and how many updates have been made since we last gave it a spin.  Shortly after last week’s episode, Tam fired up the private server again, and we have been enjoying the changes. From there, we talk a bit about Enshrouded and Ace and Bel exploring the Hollow Halls, which is essentially that game’s version of a raid dungeon. Ash, Kodra, and Tam talk about trying to shape their runs in Shape of Dreams, and from there, we talk a bit about Towerbolt.  Tam continues to dig deeper into Star Trek Online and begins engaging with proper buildcraft.  Lastly, we have a few quick topics as we discuss the Last Epoch Season 4 trailer and the upcoming Path of Exile Mirage league.

Topics Discussed

  • Dune Awakening
    • Mea Culpa Patch
  • Enshrouded
    • Hollow Halls
  • Shape of Dreams
    • Run Shaping
  • Towerbolt
  • Star Trek Online
    • Buildcraft
  • Last Epoch Season 4
  • Path of Exile Mirage

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Goodbye Arakaali

by

Good Morning Folks! I took today off because I had some non-medical business to deal with… and all of my time has been spent dealing with medical nonsense. As a result, I slept in far later than normal, to the point where all of the cats seemed to think I was fundamentally broken. I had some wild dreams, and while they were not all connected, they all shared the general theme of ripping holes in reality. Take what you will of that. Sadly, yesterday was the end of the Phrecia 2.0 event in Path of Exile, and I have to say goodbye to my beloved Minions Servant of Arakaali character. I had so much fun with this build that I honestly might forgo my traditional Righteous Fire starter for some sort of minions character. Either that, or honestly, I had enough fun with my Golem Ice Trap Elementalist that I might try that instead as my starter. There is a teaser that might be hinting that some of the Phrecia classes are going core, and if that is the case… I may literally build the same damned character I played in Phrecia 2.0.

Yesterday, we got our official teaser trailer that revealed the name of the league, and I have to say… so far, nothing we have gotten as teasers has given us any real idea what the league is going to be like. Normally, by this point, we would have gotten at least a few quality of life improvement teasers, but no… all obtuse nonsense. My personal guess is that we are going to be presented with an NPC in maps that allows us to make one of two choices, which will change the way the rest of the map plays out. I am expecting this to be something akin to influence altars that present us with two choices, and each time we make it, we gain some terrible affix on our map… since GGG seems to like to kick us directly in the crotch as often as possible. The one thing I really hope about this upcoming league is that they have figured out a way to make T16.5 and T17 maps less complete ass. Other than that, I would really love to see Abyss from POE 2 come to POE 1, because it is so much more enjoyable than the de facto chase the green orb on your mini map version that we have now.

Other than that, I spent a bit of time in Dune Awakening, and I am working my way up to mining cobalt. I got my welcome back carepackage and it included way more resources than I expected, so as soon as I have the research points for it I will be learning how to make a Dune Buggy. As a result, I went ahead and added a proper garage to my base in the Vermillius Gap. I need to go back down south and farm the shit out of all of the missing intel that I left on the table as a result. I trained some points in Trooper to give me the shigawire claw, which feels like it is honestly required at this point. The nice thing about it is that it allows me to zoom in to the top floor of NPC bases so I can often times get in and out with intel before anyone even notices I am there. The defensive form thing was nice, but really bum rushing them with the knee and then stabbing them through their shield is my go to for dealing with the melee berserker types.

Building the garage has allowed me to expand out the top floor, and now I have so much room for activities. I kind of dig this weird three-story base thing that I have gone on, where the garage is at the lowest level, then the bottom floor has water tanks, blood recycler, and power plants, and then finally at the top floor you have most of the crafting machines and general storage. I also love the location of my base because there is Iron, Copper, Granite, Metal, and plenty of Water to harvest all within a few feet of my front door. Additionally, there are nearby Kirab bases that I honestly just need to get better at killing regularly for other materials. Sure, the welcome back package gave me stupid amounts of rare materials, but I don’t really want to lean on that if I can help it.

Other than Dune Awakening, I have also been playing some more Enshrouded. I am working towards various objectives in my most recent world, because I would like to ultimately see what all of the progression looks like at this point. I am running around on my highest geared character, but it has some minor problems… like all of the legendary gear I am using existed prior to rune sockets going into the game. So I have a great sword, for example, but one that I cannot socket a rune into. It will probably be a while before I find another equivalent weapon because I farmed all of them from the endgame chests to get the gear set that I am wearing now. Right now, I am mostly going through the process of unlocking all of the NPCs so I can finish building out my base properly.

Speaking of bases… I gave Ace shit for their minimalistic design, so I only find it fair to share my maximalistic nonsense. This is as far as I have gotten in my attempt to build all the way down to the shroud from the starter area. Making this even less realistic is the fact that I am carving out floors as I go down by tunneling out the rock from the mountainside with the place and remove trick. As I expand the footprint of my base, I will continue burrowing downwards, and at the same time expanding upwards into the vertical maximum height as well. At some point, I need to actually do something realistic with my design, where it is something more than just a series of empty floors. Right now I have a highly dysfunctional base, but I am not terribly far progressed, so it does not really matter that much.

I am also still occasionally piddling around in No Man’s Sky, and am working on unlocking the ability to process toxic waste. I happened upon a processing facility on the second planet and got the quest to upgrade my multi-tool to be able to handle it. This distracted me from the normal flow of the missions, and now I am largely roaming around the frosty surface of the planet, scanning everything that I can for credits. This morning, I ventured off towards some salvage… only to realize that, apparently, it is underground somewhere, and I could not see any obvious caves to explore. I’ve always enjoyed the super chill nature of this game, especially playing on super casual mode, where I am not constantly battling for my own survival. I like the concept of survival games, but hate the constant feeling that I am making zero progress, so when given the choice, I dial down the survival aspect so I can just enjoy the exploration.

The last monkey wrench to throw into the gears… is that I reinstalled Project Gorgon and decided to give it a look to see how it has progressed. I remember next to nothing about this game, but I do remember it reminding me quite a bit of Vanguard. Largely, I think this part was the fact that there are so many random trades that you can do. I inexplicably enjoy the fact that I can get points for burying my corpses. I played a bit last night… overpulled a half dozen spiders onto me… died and then returned to the spawn point. I think I am going to have to sort out my gear and abilities before I do something like that again. I did laugh heartily as I was attacked by an exploding sheep. I had been getting the itch to play something EverQuest adjacent, and maybe Gorgon will scratch that itch.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I need to pick up the house, gather my tax information, and deal with a few other things. Next week, we get our proper preview of the upcoming Path of Exile league, and I am looking forward to it.