Hot Goth Waifu

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I talked about Guild Wars 2, and while I am spending the majority of my time over there grinding out the Fractal event… I still playing quite a bit of Destiny Rising each day. Essentially you get 120 activity reward currency and I am trying to spend this down every day in order to keep moving the needle forward. Last time I talked about the game I said that I had pulled Jolder from the permanent banner, and at this point… I am playing with that character an awful lot. It really is well suited for my preferred playstyle of getting up in the face of baddies. While the super is purely defensive in nature… it has the side benefit of never needing to reload your weapon while you are standing in it, so it is exceptionally good for burning bosses down quickly. It doesn’t hurt that I really enjoyed the character story of Jolder and as a result she has rapidly become the character I play when I am not playing Wolf.

As the topic alludes to… I now own Gwynn aka the chamption that everyone refers to as Hot Goth Waifu. The thing is… I hate to admit it but the hype is absolutely worth it for this character. I am not sure if she is going to eat a nerf once her banner is over… but right now she feels exceptionally powerful and dual pistols is a shockingly fun main weapon. The character is once again all about getting up close and personal with packs of mobs and being able to decimate them quickly with the scythe attacks. It was at this point that I realize how relatively generous the pity system is in this game. Most other Gacha games have the pity system set to 90 to 120 pulls… aka 9 to 12 10 pulls. Destiny Rising has it sitting at 60 or 6 10 pulls. I was building up another premium pull from gaining currency from the various in game exchanges, and was going to pull for the new character… but realized I was within 10 of just guaranteeing Gwynn, and went for the sure thing instead. This of course reset my chances of getting ANY five star character, but it was worth it.

The game wants me to apparently start building out Gwynn because I was spending some random engrams that I had and managed to pull a four legendary perk pair of the Chushingura dual sidearms. This is the first time I have seen four legendary perks on a single weapon. I’ve got a lot of items that have three on them, but often times that final perk slot is a blue or something lame like that. The game will actually tell you when you pull four legendary perks by showing them on the screen instead of just moving on to the next engram decryption. So it is not like you are going to miss this event if it happens to you. I am not sure how large the vault is… or when I will need to decrypt all of the spare weapons… but right now I have only done so for blues and purples, leaving my hoard of mythics intact.

In other news I pulled the Saizo crossbow… which is largely useless because I do not have a champion that uses this weapon. However it was one of two remaining mythics that I had never added to my armory. The only thing that is remaining is the Scorched Earth Heavy Machinegun, and unfortunately it seems like the only way to get this organically is to pull it from the Gauntlet Onslaught raid event. I do not think that either Ace or Ammo are to the point where they can do the raid, but when they do I am absolutely going to start trying to stack a firetime full of people that are willing to communicate. I don’t really think the raid is that hard to complete, it just takes more coordination than you get with the usual random fireteam of folks.

In the continue journey of weapons that I cannot use… I got this hideous exotic crossbow. I get that this is a historical design… but holy shit is it ugly. It was a random drop however and proved to me that you can in fact get random items when you are out of the rewards currency. Essentially from what I can tell you can get rewards from any activity no matter how many times you run it, just that the only time you are guaranteed anything really good… is when you are spending the stamina currency. So that means if you need materials, you can in theory grind the same activity over and over and you will eventually get everything that you need. You can also still get the super rare drops like exotic weapons doing this as well, and I have pulled a few completely random mythics doing this.

Lastly in new weapon acquisition, I picked up a copy of The Huckleberry but this was gained through the login bonus system. At 7 days and 14 days you get a exotic choice engram that gives you one of three exotics. I believe there is another one at 21 days… but seeing as I already have a copy of the third weapon that I acquired through random drops… I am not really sure what I will do with that one. Huckleberry is at least a weapon type that I use pretty often on Jolder, but I am not the biggest fan of it being a Void weapon. In a perfect world I would walk into every event with two weapons that are different types than the abilities that my class provides, so that I can break shields of every element. Currently my load out is for Jolder is an Arc Submachinegun, and a Solar Sword… which contrasts her void abilities perfectly. The Submachinegun that I am really hoping to pull at some point is Riskrunner, but I am not sure if it is as good in this game as it is in Destiny 2.

All in all, I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with Destiny Rising. The various content types seem to be on a weekly rotation, so you really don’t have enough time to get tired of doing specific strikes and such before they cycle out to another one. The activity that I find interesting is the legendary story missions, which are solo only… and feel like they are roughly on par with the difficulty of what nightfall strikes were. I’ve only managed to successfully complete one of these with enough time to get bonus rewards… and even then I only managed to pull silver instead of gold. This is all time based, and I am guessing that I am just not powerful enough to be able to steamroll these. The grind to raise my affinity level is way harder than the grind to get to 80. Leveling just sort of felt like it happened on its own, but now raising affinity on my account feels like every step is just inching the bar forward. I know there is a lot of power that eventually unlocks when I hit rank 10… but seeing as I am barely into rank 6 that is probably going to be awhile.

I am really interested to see how seasons factor into this game, and what if anything resets on the power scale. It is one of those things where it is somewhat hard to tell what is seasonal and what is just part of the normal endgame. For the moment it feels like the only thing that is purely seasonal are these weird engrams that you get periodically that drop seasonal only rewards. Thusfar, I have gotten nothing that is terribly interesting from them, other than a few stickers that can be applied to your armor… but having done so on Wolf… I am not entirely certain I like the look. Weapon shaders are a thing, but so far they mostly just look like someone crudely spray painted your weapon all the same color instead of being something more bespoke feeling like armor shaders were in Destiny 1. Anyways the characters are cool enough without cosmetics so it is not something I am super bothered by. According to a roadmap they released, there is more content dropping in October and another season starting in November so it seems like maybe seasons are going to be roughly two months long.

Given that I am also getting new ARPG seasons roughly every two months… this is not going to be something I really keep up with in the long term. However for now I am having fun with it while it is fresh and new.

Instant Fractal Groups

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Good Morning Folks. I am writing this morning largely to make sure everyone is aware that a Fractal Incursion event is going on right now in Guild Wars 2… and it is phenomenal. Not only do you get starter gear sets for new characters from a vendor in the area, but you can essentially run most of the t1 fractals instantly through a really cool group finder functionality. This event started on September 9th and is going to be running for almost a full month ending on October 7th. During this time there are a few things happening. Firstly there is a new quest chain that starts from the Fractal portal in Lion’s Arch where just talking to the Mist Stranger NPC gets you a free 20 slot bag. In addition to this there is a new beta group finder tool for Fractals where essentially you get instant queued with a bunch of strangers and they have specifically narrowed the category down to only the fractals with a high chance of success with no prior knowledge.

They are bribing the hell out of us to get into game and run a lot of fractals. My guess is that they are using this to beta test a brand new group finder functionality, and I am fully on board with this. I want to see this same thing make its way to other parts of the game… specifically strikes. If I had a group finder like this for the easy Icebrood Saga strikes, I would run them every single day without question. The bribes though… are really strong because just by chain running fractals you are going to get access to unlock a set of legendary gloves. I’ve heard rumor that there is going to be a way to unlock multiple armor types during this event, but even if it is only a single armor weight… you are saving countless resources to make this happen. Additionally Fractals themselves are hyper lucrative. I really started participating on Sunday and in the few hours I spent running fractals I easily made around 50 gold.

All of the progress towards this event is tracked in the Incursive Investigation and Fractal Incursion achievement categories. Mostly this involves chain running fractals through the new group finder, or with your own fixed groups. You are collecting this substance called Fractalline Dust and you get this through either running quick play fractals, doing fractal incursions in the world at the top of every hour, or by completing achievements. It seems like you end up with 3 to 5 per fractal and in order to complete the three long grindy achievements you need to gather up a total of 450. In a single afternoon of running a bunch of these I pretty quickly ground out around 200, and that was with frequent stops to clear out by bags and do other things. In theory over the coming nights I should finish grinding out the 450 without much issue. What is awesome though is not only are you given a bag for starting down this path, but when you hit rank 9 you are given an extra bag slot. Additionally you are given tokens along the way that you can turn in for pieces of exotic gear, so this becomes quite possibly the best way to gear out an alt character.

There is zero doubt that this has been wildly popular. That first shot is folks hanging out in Lion’s Arch before 8 am on a North American week day. The above image is folks gathered for the Fractal Incursion boss that appears in Diessa Plateau that was going to spawn at 8 am. Folks are amped about this particular brand of nonsense and it makes me exceptionally happy. Even if you are only a casual Guild Wars 2 player, now is a great time to get in an experience fractals. For World of Warcraft players… think of Fractals as Mythic plus dungeons… but way more chill. Players are likely not going to speak a ton during them, because they are very much solved problems… but just follow the crowd and you will do fine. If nothing else it is going to give you a level of familiarity with the content so that even after the event ends… you will probably feel way more comfortable joining fractal groups. We’ve been doing this as a weekly thing on Thursday nights for awhile and having a lot of fun slowly raising our fractal levels.

I am so on board with this update. If you want to get into the game and need help getting adjusted… feel free to ping me. I should be in most evenings grinding Fractals and am more than happy to have you tag along. My Guild Wars 2 account is belghast.5496, so feel free to friend me up.

AggroChat #538 – Mobile Destiny is Great

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

Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about the hidden episode of this season’s Game Changers over on Dropout TV.  Bel regales the group with his adventures in the endgame of Destiny Rising and how it really is a better Destiny game than anything we have gotten in years.  Grace instantly sells us on Star Birds just by telling us its from the folks behind Dorfromantik. More than that, it has the art style of Kurzgesagt so you adventure the galaxy with adorable birbs.  There is currently an event going on in Guild Wars 2 where you can run random fractals with complete strangers, and it is delightful and stupidly rewarding. Bel talks a bit about Borderlands 4, and while it is probably the best Borderlands since the second game…  it has some massive performance issues on PC.  Kodra talks about the recent board game A Place for My Books, and most of the crew dives into further discussion about Silksong.

Topics Discussed:

  • Samalamadingdong
  • Destiny Rising Endgame
  • Star Birds
  • Random Fractals
  • Borderlands 4 Performance Woes
  • A Place For My Books
  • More Silksong – Trobbio!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The End is the Beginning

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a week, and as a result… I’ve missed several days of blogging. On Wednesday morning I had an issue come up that forced me to stop what I was doing and rush into the office physically to deal with it. Then yesterday from 7 am I was on a conference bridge for the entire morning dealing with a production rollout. In both cases… I could have probably blogged later in the day but the realities of the working world drained any desire to do so out of me. I spent last night hanging out on voice and doing nonsense in Guild Wars 2 and that helped quite a bit. I also spent about 30 minutes on voice with Ace venting about various work related stuff on both of our sides, and that probably helped more. The only problem with not blogging for several days is time gets somewhat squishy in my head as to what happened when and in what sequence.

If my memory is correct, Tuesday I hit the credit roll for the main story of Destiny rising, which means that I have officially entered the endgame. The story was pretty freaking great and in truth much better than all of the core stories in both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Destiny was a game series with a lot of really interesting lore, but if you were not willing to watch a literal 10 hour long Destiny Lore video from Byf.… you were going to not understand 90% of it. Both games were exceptionally bad at explaining the world and telling a coherent story, and Destiny Rising is not. Sure it starts out a little twee at times as do most mobile games… it builds into something rather formidable and I legitimately look forward to the next content drop. This game is essentially a prequel happening in a slightly different universe… allowing them leverage to change whatever they need to change and I think this is a good thing. The speaker for example is a child in this version, which should give you a bit of a reference for how many years before the original game this takes place. Guardians for example do not exist yet as a concept… there are just lightbearers and there is evidence than our character might become the official first Guardian.

Similarly the concept of the various orders of guardians, do not exist either. There are no Hunters, Titans, and Warlocks… even though characters largely follow those same templates in the way that they move. Wolf for example gets double jump as opposed to distinct flavors of boosted jumps that Titans or Warlocks get. A given character is a combination of an Element, two unique abilities, and a unique super that then gets combined with a fixed primary weapon and a fixed heavy weapon. This honestly creates some really unique templating of characters in that two characters with similar loadouts might feel completely different because they have unique abilities to go with those loadouts. I still play way more of Wolf the default character than I do any of the other heroes, but I have become fond of Kabr, and Xuan Wei. None of these are the “meta” which seems to revolve around the 5 star champions of Tan-2, Gwynn, and Jolder.

I do have Tan-2 and just pulled Jolder yesterday off the free banner, so I might actually start investing in that character a bit with my limited resources. That honestly becomes the challenge is that it is really cumbersome to swap characters at some point. I greatly prefer games like AFK Journey where you are buffing one entire class of characters, rather than investing in one specific champion to pour all of your daily resources into. I’ve not really encountered much in the way of things that Wolf cannot do… save for missions that specifically require precision damage to take down what are effectively this games version of break bars. I greatly prefer the Auto Rifle to pretty much every other weapon in the Destiny universe… and swapping to a champion like Jolder means giving that up as their combo is Submachine Gun, and Sword. I am hoping i can pick up Riskrunner which is my all time favorite of the exotic Submachine Guns.

There is a new banner available right now and on that banner are a couple of new characters… one of which I’ve pulled a few times with what available currency I had. Umeko is essentially the Destiny version of a Ninja. She fires off Shuriken and then has a finisher that is essentially a massive one. The loadout is Scout Rifle and Sniper Rifle, which makes her an almost purely ranged champion and one that feels more than a little bit squishy. I really need to have a precision champion that I am comfortable playing, but that is likely going to be Tan-2 instead since I have that 5 star champ who is very much on meta because he also comes with this games version of the well of light. It does not hurt that he also sort of looks like Sektor from Mortal Kombat which is its own coolness factor. After playing an Exo titan for years in both Destiny games, I am partial to Exos as a whole. I wish the game honestly would have allowed me to play one here for the Wolf character.

Right now the game seems to give you about 120 of the daily activity currency, and it costs 20 to run any of the individual activities. When you complete one there is the option of spending twice as much currency when you loot the chest to get twice as many rewards. This is pretty nice and allows you to really efficiently make some progress on farming whatever you need to farm. I’ve been targeting the activities that reward Mythic weapons and engrams as I am trying to collect the full set. The Mythic Weapon Engrams allow you to buy new copies of any mythic weapon you have already found, whereas the Mythic Choice engrams allow you to choose any weapon that can drop from a given activity. There are about a half dozen weapons that I have not seen yet, and it is likely just going to be random chance to come across those.

The game seems to really want me to play Kabr, because at this point I have gotten enough duplicates to slot 4 of his 6 talent points… which means before long I will have him maxed out. This does the whole Genshin thing where getting duplicates of a character gives you currency to spend on buffing that one character. Thankfully I enjoy Kabr quite a bit, because his barrier really takes the pressure off on several boss fights because you can safely stand behind it blocking onerous beam attacks and such. The pulse rifle is not exactly my favorite weapon, but I’ve always liked the Heavy Machinegun because it feels especially good during boss burn phases where you need to do a lot of damage to weak points from range. I am also really partial to the fact that he walks around with a shield all of the time… which is admittedly one of the reasons why I am wanting to invest in Jolder a bit, because she gets the Captain America shield throw.

I am having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, and it seems especially poignant right now how good this game is… when so many players are exceptionally frustrated with how bad the latest content drop is in the mainline Destiny 2. There has already been talk from mainline content creators about swapping over to more of a Destiny Rising focus, and I feel like this is only going to accelerate that. It isn’t really often when a mobile port completely cannibalizes the player base… but I do wonder if we are going to see something similar play out with the Mobile version of Final Fantasy XIV. For now at least I am having a blast and am happy to reach the relaxing daily grind portion of the game. I like consistent grinds way more than I like pushing through story content. I think my brain is just wired that way.

In other news I am contemplating giving the next Diablo 4 season a spin. I’ve skipped the last few but given that I am mostly done with POE2 and Last Epoch and POE 3.28 will not drop until the end of October… there is a bit of a lull where I might as well give it a shot. There is another livestream coming up on the 16th and I think that is really going to seal whether or not I am going to give this a go. Supposedly they are taking a lot of the feedback from players into account and trying to improve things. The problem is… Blizzard is a massive ship and seems to take forever for it to turn and adjust to things. I have no clue what I am going to play. I’ve only ever really played Barbarians, Necromancers, and Spiritborn so I might give something else a shot. I really wish they had a Paladin/Crusader because that is the other traditional Diablo character that I really enjoy. Druid always looks cool, but it is a pain to level at start. That really is the problem with so many ARPG classes is that they feel bad for those first 20 levels… which makes it hard to keep pushing forward.

As far as weekend plans. I really need to start making a pile in the backyard so that I can contact the folks that we have used to haul stuff away in the past. There is just a bunch of shit that I need to get out of the garage so I can have some swap space to start putting up shelving units. I really need to free up space in the garage so it can be more organized… and so that I can be ready to put away all of the furniture in the backyard as the temps start to drop. I also really want to clear off the workbench out there so I can set up at a minimum a FDM printer. There have been so many cases lately where I just want one to build brackets and storage options.