Horse Latitudes

by

There is a region roughly 30 degrees north or south of the equator that is characterized by very calm winds and areas of high pressure. Historically this is a region that ships would effectively get “stuck” in for weeks at a time as they drift along listlessly without strong winds. According to legend in order to conserve the rapidly depleting supply of fresh water, some ships would throw the horses overboard. As a result they developed the nickname of the “Horse Latitudes”. There are however multiple competing theories about the origin if you are so inclined, but it is one of those terms from history class that held with me throughout the years.

Right now as I have felt so many times… I am feeling stuck. I feel like I am in this strange valley in between passions and just sort of languishing wildly there. I have the desire to play Genshin Impact, but I have ventured into a realm where I can only play so much at a given time without it feeling largely pointless. I figure at this rate I will probably be AR40 in about two weeks, when I will be even further in the hole on trying to get my characters leveled, ascended, talented and geared… when it doesn’t feel like I have made a significant dent since dinging AR35. As I have talked about before, everything hinges upon Resin and I don’t have the desire to spend the roughly $12 a day in primagems to ensure that I can get the maximum number of refreshes done.

So I find myself logging in every day, completing the daily quests… spending the resin I have available to me and then claiming the various daily login bonus rewards. I am now doing this on two different accounts and still finding myself lacking for something that feels meaningful. I could grind super hard on the second account but I figure that way lies burn out. Everything I am doing on that account already has an extreme “been there and done that” feeling to it, so I am trying to limit my time over there to just knocking out the dailies and stockpiling wish material.

Then there is World of Warcraft and the unknown release date of the Shadowlands expansion. If they came out tomorrow and said, that they were not launching until January, I feel like I could happily move on with my life. However the not knowing when and how it is going to launch feels awful. I’m currently running the Headless Horseman every day in an attempt to get the mount, but I found out yesterday that it only works on characters that are capable of getting the purple loot rewards. That limits me down considerably in the number of daily iterations. I should in theory be working on finishing out my rogue but I am just fundamentally not feeling it.

I created a new character on a new server with the theory of wanting to see the Exiles Reach player experience. However here he sits having never logged it in and started. I am just finding myself having a hard to getting started on anything in World of Warcraft right now, because it all feels lacking in some way. I guess what I want is something with the feel of Genshin Impact but the longevity of a World of Warcraft and the wealth of content to complete. I know someone in the comments is going to suggest Guild Wars 2, and god how I have tried to care about that game over the years. Whatever it is doing is not what I am wanting, even though I do clearly see some of the parallels to Genshin and the way the world is designed in both games.

I could in theory return to Destiny 2 and see if I can slide back into the rhythm of that game. The problem however is that I just feel so woefully behind in the seasonal construct. The fact that there has been so much revolving content that comes and then goes and that fact that we are losing several planets when Beyond Light lands in early November sorta paralyzes me. I have a bunch of Exotic quests that require various things, but I would need a team to do them… and I realize I can make that happen as well but that also in itself feels like a large outlay of energy.

In theory I should follow the lead of my friend Warenwolf and head back over to TQMB, but I am not even sure they would still take me back. I left at the PC launch of Destiny 2 because my long time friend group felt more comfortable if we started our own thing. However most of them bounced and I was never really quite capable of rekindling it once they were gone. My own huge lapses in play time didn’t help either, leaving us with effectively a dead clan. Having a vibrant community would probably help especially if it meant there were various drop in events that I could sign up for. That said I also know how much is going to happen in November as a whole and in theory I have a new console waiting on me as well.

That brings us to the next challenge. I have things that I wouldn’t mind getting back into on the PlayStation, but I am largely in a holding pattern until the launch of the PS5. I am not sure how much further I want to get into various games not knowing with 100% certainty that my save progress is going to carry over cleanly. Anyways I realize this is probably an annoying post to read but sometimes I write for me and my own mental housekeeping. I feel stuck and I need to figure out for myself how to get un-stuck.

Headless Mount Search

by

Good morning friends! We did the thing again and it is seemingly to become a weekly occurrence. Two weekends ago we played Among Us on Saturday and yesterday we did Sunday in an attempt to be open to the folks who could not for some reason make Saturday. As a result we had a slightly different group but it was equally amazing. We didn’t go for quite as long as we did previously, and I had to bail in the middle to run my wife to go pick up her car at the tire place… but I think we are starting to get more in the swing of how this game works. More importantly the Impostors seemed to be more randomized than they were last week when it chose Sita over and over and over.

I am also still playing a lot of Genshin Impact, but as I have stated before I am now down to playing for 20-30 minutes a day and then going on to do other things. The account that I created for farming ore and resources… has turned into an account that I am legitimately and properly playing because it has champions that I don’t own yet on my main account. One interesting tidbit of information is that while I knew chests respawned, I did not realize that the super rarity chests respawn. I thought all of those were surely “one and done”, but apparently even the 200,000 gold chest in the Liyue bank can respawn. So each time a weekly reset happens I guess make your way through the world checking out where chests have spawned previously.

Since I have been so severely throttled in Genshin Impact, I have started trying to ease my way back into World of Warcraft. I gave all of my characters a facelift last week, but for my Paladin that I am currently planning on maining for Shadowlands… I opted to do a outfit change as well. For most of Battle for Azeroth my Paladin has been rocking the “Fel Knight” look, and while I still greatly enjoy it… I wanted something different. Over the weekend I created a similar mishmash of gear pieces to create what one of my friends has called the “Void Knight” appearance/ The actual name of my gearset is “The King in Purple” as a play on The King in Yellow.

Most of yesterday was spent going from character to character on both accounts and farming the Headless Horseman encounter. While I have not done this religiously each year, I have been trying for that stupid mount since it was introduced during Burning Crusade. I have Attumen’s mount which is significantly cooler, but fails hard because it cannot fly… whereas the Horseman mount can. During brew fest I pulled 3 rams and 2 kodos… so I am hoping that by running my army through every single day I will have similar luck. Look at this point all I have to live on is hope.

The entire process took quite a long time as rotating through characters also meant that I needed to sort out their talents and hotbars. Especially on the Alliance side it has been since early Legion that any of these characters really saw much play. I am not sure if it is tank durability, healing throughput issues or just the “bullet sponge” aspect of the Horseman this year… but something is not going as planned. I am chocking this up to the squish, but the encounter seems to be significantly more challenging than intended and as a result I am seeing quite a few parties wipe on the fight. This is not the roflstomp that Coren Direbrew was only a few weeks ago, so I suggest you go in this prepared and do whatever you can do to pick up your dps and get through it quickly.

So that was my weekend… some Among Us, some World of Warcraft mount farming and as much Genshin Impact as the game would allow me to play. How was your weekend? What all did you get around to doing? Drop me a line below and let me know.

AggroChat #319 – The Great Resin Wall

by

Sometimes a show happens without us really realizing it.  That was absolutely the case for this evening’s show because we had what felt like a very limited number of topics that filled up the full hour.  We start off the show with some further discussion of Genshin Impact.  Last week we thought we had been pushed up against a wall, but it turns out that was just the foothills leading up to the sheer cliff that is being resin locked on progress.  From there we talk about random video game cravings and the games that we either return to periodically or consider comfort gaming.  We wrap things up with a discussion of the games that we are looking forward to on the horizon be it literally like with Horizon Zero Dawn Forbidden West or the release of the new console generation.  Whatever the case it seems like we have a very packed November ahead of us.

Topics Discussed

  • Genshin Impact
    • The limiting factors of Resin
    • Limited Progress
  • Random Game Cravings
    • We talk about comfort gaming
    • We also talk about out of the blue game cravings
  • What we are looking forward to next
    • Release of the next generation of consoles
    • Horizon Zero Dawn 2
    • The Packed November

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Genshin Honeymoon Over

by

Genshin Impact has gotten more press than likely any Gacha game to date and with it a whole cottage industry has sprung up of channels devoted the game. I’ve noticed as several Destiny YouTubers have even been bitten by the bug and it is shocking just how wide spread the appeal has been. However I am also starting to watch as folks slam into the wall that begins around Adventure Rank 30 as the breaks get applied to player progress and the huge open world seems to shrink a little bit. During the early days in this game it has boundless enjoyment, but as you gain levels you start being funneled into a tighter and tighter scope of activities that can actually provide progression.

I’ve just dinged AR37 and I feel like it will probably take a week or so for me to finally progress to AR40 and open up the next World Level. I was able to move upwards at level 35, and two levels later I am nowhere near close to having my full team of four characters leveled, their weapons upgraded and their talents purchased. This says nothing to the rest of my squad of characters which are in complete disarray as they got abandoned somewhere around 40 or 50 when the material and gold crunch started. This is a whole that you can buy yourself out of but the amount of money that it would take to restore reasonable forward momentum is not something for the faint of heart.

The challenge is there are three progress bars that essentially need to keep going up for your party of characters as you progress. The first is character level and this is fairly straight forward and mostly involves the acquisition of experience books and the application of gold to train your character with them. The next is the talents on your characters and these require books which come from dungeons that drop 2 or 3 at most at a time as well as a huge resource cost each time you need to ascend to a higher tier. Lastly there is the leveling of your weapon which can be done through the combination of mining resources and gold with a huge outlay of resources when you need to ascend to the next tier of levels much like character progression.

You gain these resources by completing dungeons that have a resin cost associated with them. So for example when I move to the next weapon tier I am going to have to spend 6 purple quality weapon widgets that spawn in dungeons only on a specific day of the week. Right now Domains of Forgery III should in theory be dropping purple items, but the reality is each time I go in I get 3 green resources and 2 blue resources. If I keep acquiring at that rate the essentially crafts up into a single purple resource, which means I am going to need a grand total of 120 resin to ascend a single weapon. 120 resin represents your full rested allotment for a day.

This same pool of resin is used for essentially everything that gives meaning progress in the game. You need it for weapon components, character ascension elemental drops, skill books, as well as it is also a primary source of leveling books, acquiring gear from bosses, and getting additional gold. You get four quests each day and they reward 10 primagem and then an additional 10 for turning all four back in at the adventurers guild. These can of course be saved for wishes giving you a shot at getting more characters and weapons… or you can spend it to buy 60 more resin giving you a few more attempts to farm the resources that you need.

Unfortunately it isn’t a flat 50 primagem per 60 resin and is instead a sliding scale that increases each time you refresh during a day. So you can in theory buy an additional 360 Resin each day on a scale that looks a little something like this:

  • First Refresh – 50 primagem
  • Second Refresh – 100 primagem
  • Third Refresh – 100 primagem
  • Fourth Refresh – 150 primagem
  • Fifth Refresh – 200 primagem
  • Sixth Refresh – 200 primagem

There are also Fragile Resin, which are doled out sparingly either through the Adventurer’s Guild level up rewards or gained through the battle pass, but there is no way to buy more of these once you have spent them all.

The challenge set by the game is that there are really enjoyable things to do, like the various World Bosses which can drop pieces of gear that feeling meaningful. However each and every one of these things requires an expenditure of resin in order to get any rewards from it. So when I killed Stormterror this week and got my very first 5 star artifact, it felt bad seeing how poorly its stat allocation was knowing that it cost me 1/2 of my daily allotment of resin and locked me for other loot from that same encounter.

Part of the challenge with all of this is the fact that Genshin Impact is maybe the first Gacha game that is actually legitimately fun to play. This is also a game that because it is extremely enjoyable is bringing in a lot of people who may have never played a game like this in the past. The itemization, the constant push towards gambling mechanics, and the painfully slow energy recharge mechanics are all part and parcel for the Gacha industry. However none of these games before have really had fun and enjoyable gaming mechanics that pushed players to spend MMORPG type amounts of hours grinding away and exploring.

Most Gacha games look like this and are barely a game at all… and more something that you do out of idle boredom than something that you actually enjoy playing. I’ve spent time poking my head into more than a few of these over the years as I am constantly in search of something enjoyable to do with my phone. The games have this visual overload going on and are loaded with “auto play” functionality that largely just keeps you clicking buttons much akin to hitting spin on a slot machine. Nothing about this is terribly enjoyable but it looks almost like a game and as a result you end up holding on hoping that it eventually opens up into something enjoyable. These games are a trap and Genshin looks and plays nothing like this.

Genshin instead presents this gorgeous world to explore filled with puzzles to unlock. It features extremely enjoyable action combat with complex character designs that interact with each other in unique and interesting ways. It might be one of the best games I have ever played, but it is unfortunately shackled to a series of mechanics that don’t necessarily do it any favors. It is a game designed to limit your play time into small chunks scattered throughout the day, and as a result it is quickly becoming a game where I can only realistically get 15-20 minutes worth of forward momentum each day and then while the world itself is still enjoyable to explore… there is a limited amount of things that I can do that actually impact something that feels like progress.

None of this to this point has really even touched the challenge of how this game goes about allowing you to acquire new characters. Like so many Gacha games you receive characters rarely through “summoning” as it is colloquially called or in this game by spending “wishes” upon the various “banners” in the game. The game has a pity system and will give you something of 4 star rarity every 10 wishes and something of 5 star rarity every 90 wishes. Tenha is a YouTube that covers this game and claims that he spent $7000 chasing Diluc, one of the best and most sought after 5 Star Champions in the game.

There are currently 21 different playable characters in the game and 7 of them are at the 5 Star rarity. Any given “wish” has a .06% chance of pulling one of these 5 stars. As I have gotten free primagems I have been spending them primarily on wishes and managed to trigger the pity system after 90 pulls. Instead of getting a champion like I was hoping for… I instead got a 5 star weapon which also felt awful. So when the game says it is going to give you are 4 star every 10 pulls… you might end up with a weapon instead of a character.

Also extremely likely is that you are going to get multiple copies of the same character, which the game has built around by giving you different “constellations” to unlock. What you are looking at is proof that I have not only gotten Barbara which you get for free by getting to AR20, but have pulled five more copies of this same character unlocking an additional constellation each time. All of which is designed to keep you spinning the wheel and trying to push your luck of maybe pulling what you were after the next time. So I guess I am completely not shocked at all that someone on YouTube spent $7000 chasing a single copy of a specific champion.

Genshin Impact is an exceptionally enjoyable game, but I fear that as more folks hit the wall that is AR30 and beyond… that it is also going to continue shedding players. I’m still enjoying myself but I feel like I am progressing less and less and have reached a point where it doesn’t make much sense to be playing more than thirty minutes a day. I doubt Mihoyo will make significant changes at a fast enough pace to turn this ship of opinion around before it comes crashing into the docks. I accepted the game for what it was, but I look forward to someone taking this formula and making it a little more user friendly. Had they just made it so that champions were outright purchases and removed the resin system… I probably would have actually purchased every single one.

However now I figure that eventually my interest will wain as we get into this season with some really big releases. I am likely going to stick around for the time being because I really want to see how far I can get in the battle pass before it ends in 25 days or so. There however is going to be a point folks reach along this path where they start to check out. For me AR30 was when the resource costs started to bog me down, but for others that might come sooner. I am still enjoying myself, but the honeymoon phase is definitely over. That isn’t to say that I can’t settle into a routine that makes me happy, but the overwhelming excitement that I once felt is now a bit tinged with reality.