Two Goals Down

Destiny 2 – PC

The first goal of the night was to finish up my purple armor set for the Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. Over the weekend I had knocked out everything but the EAZ minibosses component, and I largely stopped there because I knew given yesterdays patch the requirement was being lowered to 50. I was sitting at 56 so my hope was that it would be as simple as logging in, equipping all of the gear and meditating in front of the statue.

What I did not expect was that all of the gear would be 750, which was a nice boost in item level. I just need to get some powerful items to bump things up on the weapon front to 750 as well. The funny thing is… I will probably be farming EAZ over the next few weeks to try and get slightly better perks on each of the armor slots. As it stands the Helm is ideal for the way I play, but all of the other items could use some work. I opened the rest of the boxes I had in my inventory and picked up four additional pieces of the purple majestic armor.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

With the first goal knocked out quickly, I moved on to the second goal of the night which was getting the last little bit of a level on the Samurai and hitting 80. I opted for the short queue of a Trials roulette and got quite possibly the easiest option: Cape Westwind. It legitimately takes longer for the new player to watch the cutscene than it does to kill the boss, so we hung out chatting while waiting on the fight to start. Upon dinging 80 I equipped whatever gear I happened to have available and managed to get my item level up to 425.

From there I picked back up with the 74 Physical DPS Role quest, thinking the easiest and fastest way to gear would be completing the quest and getting the 430 gear from the smithy. It took some time though to chew through the remaining 74, 76, 78 and 80 quests so this consumed the majority of my play time last night. However I have now unlocked a second role and have access to physical dps gear. I wound up buying the 450 crafted blade, so I am now sitting at 435 which is enough to be able to dps Eden. Now that I am getting back into the swing of tanking a roulette or two each night, I should be able to bolster that level with tomestone gear.

World of Warcraft – PC

Finally I spent the last hour or so catching up on the War Campaign quest series given that it appears to be the most coherent manner to catch up on story. I think I underestimated just how much story content had gone into the game since I left, because I keep chewing away at it and seem to be not actually making any headway. I started last night queuing for the pieced of the raid finder that involves the Jaina battle seeing as I needed that for the War Campaign. That was a fun fight overall, but I am not sure how I would feel about the middle section where as horde we are forced to fight Rastakhan? I like Rastakhan a lot.

I think for the forseeable future I will be poking my way along these three different paths of catching up on World of Warcraft in getting back into the swing of the game prior to the launch of Classic. Then working on various objectives in Destiny 2 and probably leveling a healer in Final Fantasy XIV. It has been enjoyable to play for an hour or so and then swap to something fresh and new. It has also been nice hanging out and talking to my friends in Facepull once again.

Fourth Time’s a Charm

Praetorium or Bust Apparently

I talked about Main Story Roulette some time back and it being one of the best ways to casually level a character. Last night I encountered the problem with this system, and weirdly one I had not encountered at any point prior in the process of pushing the Samurai to 80. The challenge is that when you queue for MSQ Roulette you are ultimately hoping to get Praetorium, because it is worth a significantly larger chunk of experience than the other option Castrum Meridianum. I’ve managed to pull Praetorium more times than not, and as a result when Castrum comes up I curse my fate… but largely play along nicely.

Apparently I hit a streak of people who are not willing to waste their daily bonus on Castrum. It took me roughly fifteen minutes to get through the queue each time, and when I got the first group within seconds all but four of us had bailed on Castrum. You can’t really run the place with four players reliably so I bailed as well and re-queued. Another fifteen minutes later I drew Castrum once again… and this time one of the two tanks refused to move until someone dropped from the party. Again once one person left there was a cascade of leaves until I opted to bail rather than run it down over half of the people.

A third time I sat through the queue and a third time I drew Castrum… and once again before I had even loaded in fully we were down a handful of people. The problem there is that no one queues for MSQ Roulette with the party in progress box checked. There is no reason to do this given that you would in theory be missing out on a bunch of experience that comes from the various boss kills. Again I returned to the queue a fourth time and finally this time it was Praetorium and everyone happily powered their way through it.

Unfortunately that does not stop the fact that Square has a problem on their hands, where a Roulette can produce one of two results and one of them is so disliked that folks are willing to take the 10 minute debuff that keeps them from queuing rather than deal with wasting their bonus on it. In theory they should probably buff Castrum to be able to reward the same amount of experience that Praetorium does. However if they do that… it will swing the balance in the other direction given that Castrum takes about half as long to run as Praetorium. There aren’t any great answers to this conundrum, but seeing as I encountered it three times in a row last night… it is a problem.

Belghast the Undead Warrior on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA-PVE RP server

The other thing that I took care of last night was reserving my character names on Bloodsail Buccaneers the PVE RP server that we plan on rolling on. As a result Belghast the Undead Warrior now exists there and is ready to start leveling when the gates open later this month. I also reserved a Belghast on Mankrik as a back up, but I doubt I will be using it. I don’t have a lot to say on this point other than the fact that if you are wanting names, you might want to log in and do this thing yourself. Several of my friends have already missed out on their chosen character names which is frustrating.

It seems as though I have steered a good number of my Horde side guild Facepull towards this server as well. So in theory we should have a decent number of people around at launch. Largely I just want to be able to field guild groups for dungeons and such. I fully expect to be running a bunch of Ragefire and Wailing Caverns. The only negative about playing a Forsaken is that they are so far away from everything. However the pull of having a second fear break is too great not to roll Undead.

Weekend Update: 2019-08-12

Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers – PC

I’ve decided to try a new series of sorts called “Weekend Update” (name shamelessly stolen from SNL) since my Monday morning post tends to just be a rundown of what happened over the weekend. Right now it feels like I have a bunch of competing projects that I have theoretically been juggling reasonably well. At the very least they all appear to be making progress at the same time, which is I guess the master plan behind the juggling.

One of them has been getting a second 80 in Final Fantasy XIV, and this process has largely involved me logging in every day and running the Main Story Roulette. This means that I have seen an awful lot of the cut-scenes surrounding Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum. While it isn’t the same voice actor… every time I hear a Gaius cutscene it reminds me of Dracula from Symphony of the Night. I seem to be the only one because when I type “what is man but a miserable pile of secrets” in party chat I just get confused responses.

As of last night I am just a sliver into 79 and have been taking this opportunity to clean up a bunch of the side quests that I never got around to doing. I’ve finished cleaning up the Dwarven and related areas in upstate Kholusia. I moved over after that to the secret zone that you end up at around 79, and it has a ton of quests to knock out. In theory if I pull another Praetorium I might luck out and get close enough to 80 to be able to ding off of a Trials roulette or something similar. Then begins the process of doing a bunch of dungeon grinding to gear it!

Destiny 2 – PC

On the Destiny 2 front I have reached a point where I just can’t bring myself to push any further. During this weeks TWAB, it was announced that they were lowering the total number of EAZ Miniboss kills from 100 to 50. This means in theory if I just wait for the Tuesday patch, I can log in that night and get my purple armor set without a bunch of mindless grinding. As a result I have spent my time either working on the Hunter to get her the blue set, or working on various other things I have neglected like the loaded question quest. This is why I am rocking a double fusion rifle loadout above.

After I upgrade the armor I will need to sort out what exactly I can do as far as the masterwork quests. However I have heard that these will be something you could complete after the Solstice event is over. I don’t really want to risk it however so I am going to try and knock out what I can while it is going on.

World of Warcraft – PC

I don’t have a proper explanation for this one. I had not logged in since October of last year and then suddenly this weekend I found myself patching my addons up and logging into what had been my main when I was last actively playing. One of the things that I dislike about World of Warcraft when you are several patches behind, is that there is no real way of knowing what content you should be doing short of scouring WoWhead. The main story quest is a point of frustration for a lot of people in Final Fantasy XIV, but I love that there is zero risk of me doing things out of sequence.

I absolutely blindly accepted the quest that the game was trying to send me to… and apparently unlocked Nazjatar instead of all of the content I had seemingly missed between now and then. I guess this makes sense from a World of Warcraft perspective because it is a game that is constantly abandoning what has come before for the new and shiny future. I am going to blame this on the fact that we spent a lot of time this weekend talking about WoW Classic, and on that front we are going to be rolling Horde side on the PVE RP server Bloodsail Buccaneers. If you have interest in this nonsense let me know.

AggroChat #263 – A Farewell to Elves

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have a show where we clean up the trello card and run through a bunch of stuff that has largely rolled over from other shows.  First up we discuss Games Workshop finally putting the pre-Age of Sigmar world to bed and cleaning up the factions. From there we discuss Kodra’s experiences with the very early access Gloomhaven Computer Game.  Kodra talks a bit about Gencon 2019 more specifically the Stellaris Board Game and True Dungeon. We discuss Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and a very brief discussion about Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3. Bel really wishes someone else was reading House of X and Powers of X so he could discuss it.  Lastly Thalen talks a bit about the Gundam Mobile game and how it is still better than New Gundam Breaker.

Topics Discussed:

  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle
    • Putting the Old World to Rest
    • Cleaning up Factions
    • Removing a bunch of Elf Factions
  • Gloomhaven Computer Game
    • Very Early Access
  • Gencon 2019
    • Stellaris Board Game
    • True Dungeon
  • Pathfinder 2E
  • Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3
  • House of X / Powers of X
    • Marvel Mutants Reshaped
  • Gundam Mobile
    • Better than New Gundam Breaker
    • Gundam Breaker 3 still best

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