Landspear Dreams

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Good Morning Folks! I feel like it is important for me to take a brief moment to marvel at just how damned active the Guild Wars 2 community is. This was a screenshot of me waiting on Shadow Behemoth to spawn in Queensdale at like 6:30 this morning. By the time the event spawned, there were even more folks that had shown up. Granted this event happens to be on the weekly wizard chores that reset yesterday morning, but still… it is pretty freaking impressive. It doesn’t really matter what event I happen to show up for, this is pretty much the same story everywhere. Granted if you are trying to show up last minute you might get shunted off to an overflow map where there is not quite the critical mass of warm bodies, but by showing up early you are almost certain to find this kind of outcome.

Today is kind of an important day for Guild Wars 2. Last week they dropped a teaser trailer that set the GW2 pundits aflame with possibilities. This will be the second release in their new expansion model that promises something smaller in scope but delivered in a more reliable cadence for a cheaper price. With Secrets of the Obscure, they managed to land the release cadence of a new expansion and all of its relevant patches landing within a single year. At some point today we will see the full announcement of this next expansion… which they are calling their 5th but I quibble a bit with their numbering. I am guessing they are not referring to Icebrood Saga as an expansion, which would then make this the 5th as per their advertising. If you count living world seasons as expansions it would be something like the 12th.

I am not fully caught up on Secrets of the Obscure because in Guild Wars 2 terms I am woefully behind on pretty much everything. I’ve been doing my wizard chores and had to spend down some of the currency recently to buy some more mystic clovers. My focus has largely been on trying to regenerate my legendary materials enough to the point of being able to craft The Juggernaut, which is a weapon I have wanted since I first started playing Guild Wars 2. Mostly a lot of it is just going to be spending a few hundred gold, but clovers are one of those things that feels rough to brute force. I also need to spend some more time in World vs World and farm up another Gift of Battle.

The major time commitment is going to be doing another 100% Tyria world completion. When you do a full exploration of the old world you get two Gift of Exploration. So the last two Legendary weapons that I crafted, Bolt and Frostfang, ate those up. I did my last full world exploration on my Necromancer when I was leveling that, but I was technically closer to it on my original Warrior character. That is sitting at 91% currently and while we recorded the podcast on Saturday night I attempted to knock out some progress. This was only minimally successful as I got sidetracked by a group of folks doing champion rifts. Guild Wars 2 is pretty much a constant distraction engine.

Anyway, there has been a heck of a lot of discussion in the Guild Wars 2 community about what the teaser trailer the other day might mean. There is a lot of hopium surrounding a return to raiding… which I am not sure is super likely given how few players tend to engage in raiding. Since I personally have not raided in the game, my own brand of hopium is placed elsewhere. What I would love to see is some sort of meaningful rework of the “home instance” to turn it into proper player housing. I would love to see this tied into some sort of a progression system so that you can earn items for your home instance with others that traditionally lived on the gem store being available through bundles on the astral store. I have purchased some items from my home instance through world vendors and a few from the cash shop, but it feels like a woeful mess. I would love to see some measure of agency added to this system because for now… I always go to Rata Sum because it is the most efficiently laid out.

As I am sitting here writing this blog post, I happen to look over at Mastodon and notice a conversation going on between two Guild Wars 2 folks about how they are going to abbreviate the new expansion. This is coming from Reddit so take it with a giant bucket of salt but… apparently at some point the account page seemed to be leaking information about the new expansion including logo and name. So in theory, if this is true the next expansion will be called Janthir Wilds, which honestly makes a lot of sense given that is an area of the map we have not explored and one that has been clearly delineated for a bit.

So in theory we should then have a reason to start seeing zones popping up to the north of Divinity’s Reach. I wonder if they will be free floating as it were, or if they will connect back up to zones like Lake Doric. However, it seems like there is not a really good place in Doric to put a zone boundary. My guess is it will be a disconnected region as we have with some of the other expansion areas and that we will either arrive initially by boat or airship. Whatever the case I am looking forward to the announcement at some point today. I don’t believe there is any sort of an official announcement stream, so I guess I will be watching news sources for when the press release drops.

What are you expecting from Expansion 5? Drop me a line below.

Actually Rubicante

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did something that I did not think I would actually manage to do… and that is get back into the Final Fantasy XIV Main Story quest. I’ve been saying for months that I left off at Rubicante but in truth apparently, I had played far enough to get right up to the Barbariccia fight. Look all of the vaguely Italian archfiend names from Final Fantasy IV have always flowed together in my head. When I last played the game I was apparently sitting at the Trial fight, so yesterday the very first thing that I did was dive into that. I feel like it is Pandaria Remix that is to thank for breaking my mental block against grouping with other human beings.

I’m actually somewhat into the storyline at this point. I did in fact play through to the point where I just finished fighting Rubicante and have plans to do some nonsense. The other thing that I did not expect is that I am now really invested in the character of Zero. I feel like I had just been very much locked in ARPG gameplay mode and coming back for Pandaria Remix has flipped a switch in my brain so that I am once again in “MMORPG Enjoyer” mode. I had been bouncing pretty freaking hard on anything that was not Guild Wars 2, which sort of sits in a happy medium between the ARPG and MMORPG genres. I figure that I will without a doubt catch up on the story before the Dawntrail head start begins at the end of the month. I am now actually finally in the mood for it I think.

Speaking of Pandaria Remix, I’ve now dinged level 70 on my Tauren Paladin over on Drenden. I’ve tanked a few world bosses at this point but have not gone so far as to tank any of the raids. I feel pretty weak at only having around 500k hitpoints. I still have a number of gear slots that I have not upgraded to the maximum dropped item level and in theory, I should probably do some more questing in order to get some more raw stats on my cloak. I really feel like blizzard screwed up on the cloak because they should have made the stats account-wide. It would have felt significantly better to play alts if everything you played was contributing to the same nonsense stat bomb.

I’ve also created a Viera Hunter over on Eonar that I am now starting to level. I named the default Cobra pet that you get “Smooples” but I think I am going to have to venture forth into the Isle of Giants and tame me some cool Dinosaurs soon. I’ve not had much desire to grind out bronze for the purpose of gearing, but I am enjoying leveling alts which in itself creates a large stockpile of bronze. At this point I am pretty close to buying most of the mounts, and then will start handpicking my way through the cosmetic gear sets that I want to collect. The only thing that I do not really care about in the least are the toys. Toys are one of those things that I completely forget exists in the game 99.9% of the time. However, I did see one that I would love to have so I need to figure out where it comes from… essentially it was a portable ocean allowing you to fish from anywhere.

The new summer-themed mounts and cosmetics are up on the tender store… and I am honestly not sure how I feel about them. Firstly I am throwing some side eye at this mount because it feels pretty much exactly like my memories of a mount that was available in Wildstar. I am weirdly against Fantasy characters wearing “real world” gear. Like Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV have a bunch of non-adventurer citywear and it sort of bugs me anytime I encounter someone wearing it. The other day I saw a Charr in a T-shirt and Cargo shorts and it sort of broke my brain. I don’t talk about it much because I don’t want to harsh anyone else’s fun… but I sort of hate the Fortniteification of World of Warcraft at times. I get that the Korean P2W MMORPGs did it first… but Fortnite was really the game that popularized in the West the “anything goes” style of cramming everything into a single game. Side note that is the preview on the Tender store… I did not buy the mount and likely will never buy it. It just is not my vibe.

Now that my brain seems to have had its switch flipped… I also want to get back into Guild Wars 2 and finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content. I’ve not unlocked Inner Nayos but I think I am getting pretty close to doing so. Hopefully, your week is amazing. We have a bunch of thunderstorms over the next few days but hopefully, they will not produce “twisty weather”.

AggroChat #479 – Froggers

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Featuring:  Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Apologies for another missed show last week but Bel very narrowly missed some Twisty Weather. This week we start off the show with a discussion of Grace’s recent experiences in Diablo IV and how the game has changed for the better. From there we talk about Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and how a number of us are on the fence about playing it.  Ammo shares her thoughts about the expansion.  Bel talks about his recent experience with Pandaria Remix and how it has jarred him out of his stupor when it comes to forming groups and playing with other human beings.  Bel also shares some of the recent happenings with the Frogger incident.  Tam discusses his dive into Warhammer Orks and how they are maybe the best that game has to offer in the vibes department.  We close out the show with some discussion about a weirdly good Random PVP mode in AFK Journey.

Topics Discussed:

  • Grace’s experiences with Diablo IV
  • AmmosArt Explains FFXIV Dawntrail
  • World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix
    • The Frogger Incident
  • Orks are the best of Warhammer
  • Random PVP Mode in AFK Journey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Siege and Throne Down

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It is no longer morning… and honestly, I have no clue why I have struggled to get blog posts out for the last few days. Whatever the case I had a bit of a lucky streak last night. After being largely unable to get a spot in either a Siege of Orgrimmar or Throne of Thunder raid for the last few evenings, I managed to knock both out in relatively short order. I am not sure if getting some jewelry pieces knocked out and bumping up my gear by a single level made my item level look more appealing… or if I just happened to luck into a more open-minded group. In both cases thought I joined when there were very few party members and maybe have just lucked into strong teams. Siege went pretty much flawlessly and I was surprised by just how fast the entire run went.

Throne of Thunder felt a bit more challenging, namely, we struggled a bit with Dark Animus. This was mostly due to the fact that it was VERY hard not to kill everything at the same time and in doing so blow the entire raid up. We had to each choose a robot and solo it… until we finally got it down to a few robots and finally merged them into the big one. Damage never seemed to be an issue, but I did feel sorry a bit for the healers who had to keep up with us. Going through all of this has made me realize that Pandaria really did have a number of very solid raids in it. I think the only reason why it was ever remembered less than favorably is because of how long it was between Siege releasing and Warlords finally coming out.

At this point, I have every slot unlocked for all of my alts going forward, and I think I might be calling it good for this character. I can’t really see myself pouring the bronze into upgrading every slot, so it is likely that I will pop in each day, kill the world bosses, and do the daily quests. I’m already powerful enough to pretty much do anything I might want to do in the open world, but also feel like now is a good place to start tapering down my playtime on this character at least. Blizzard has come out and said that they do not plan on reducing the amount of gold required to upgrade characters all the way to the maximum, and I can’t see myself being willing to grind the 600k Bronze or so that are required to upgrade everything.

I’ve shifted focus over to my Drenden Tauren Paladin character and have been shocked at just how fast I am pushing through the levels. After finishing up Jade Foreset I am basically sitting at level 53. I can see finishing out the leveling process and then maybe doing dailies on two sets of characters to pick up the rest of the cosmetic gear that I want. At this point I have bought three pages worth of mounts and have a few more of those to pick up, and then I will start snagging gearsets that interest me.

I think the part that has been most interesting is all of the random groups I have gotten in, and how I am way more comfortable listing my own groups. I would love this newfound focus to carry over into other games, because I would absolutely love to start using my commander tag a bit more in Guild Wars 2. Weirdly I feel way more confident in leading things in World of Warcraft, because of the scope of what is needed is so much more clearly defined. I still think group gameplay in Guild Wars 2 is a confusing mess, and I am uncertain I will ever truly grasp organized play in that game. At a minimum I would love to be comfortable doing strikes and fractals and getting them started on my own, rather than waiting for that Unicorn of a group to form itself.

All of this return to Pandaria has made me realize how far I have fallen. I used to be the person who was comfortable enough in crafting my own groups that I wrote a guide on doing so. Now I just hate the thought of taking responsibility over others in a video game. I miss being that guy though who was willing to take on that mantle. Mostly because I miss having groups available on demand rather than waiting around for them to form. I need to work on that, and I need to get over my performance anxiety. I would ultimately be a happier person if I did so.