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Saving the Skyscales

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Good Morning Friends! My life over the last several days has been devoted to Skyscale misadventures. For those who are not initiated, the Skyscale is the closest Guild Wars 2 has to a normal flying mount. It is behind a massive quest chain that takes a truly dumb amount of time and resources and ends up rewarding you with an account-wide mount that performs much like Dragonriding does in the latest World of Warcraft expansion. In order to qualify for the mount, you have to have fully completed the Path of Fire expansion and Living World Season 4 as it requires a lot of specific items sold on vendors in those content areas.

The quest starts on the Dragonfall map, and the early chains will involve you roaming around this area and collecting a lot of resources. Shown above is the map for the locations of the various Skyscale scales which is effectively the first long collection. After completing that you gain enough faction with each camp in Dragonfall to purchase five medicines. From there you have to roam around and treat fourteen sick Skyscales scattered throughout the zone, before twenty-one eggs… which are frustratingly often beside a location you already had to collect a scale at previously. After completing the meta collection the rest of the quest continues in Sun’s Refuge where Gorrick sets up a lab as you attempt to hatch and raise a Skyscale.

The next sequence sees you taking your egg to work with you, as you attempt to expose it to various elements. There are twelve in total and each step in that chain involves four or five individual sub-steps. Most of these are not terribly taxing, but I spent around two hours fully unlocking the Derelict Delve in Desert Highlands. This involved collecting a number of runestones and then slotting them one at a time into doors… which open the next piece of the delve. Effectively you need something in the second delve and the final delve, and something I learned a bit too late is you have to finish each individual delve in a single setting. I thought slotting a rune would be maintained between trips, and as a result, I had to do the final delve twice because I needed to leave halfway through. One positive is that I got really good at navigating the sequence of teleporters while moving around this area.

The quest step that took me the longest by far was the final bit of the Skyscale of Courage. This involved doing what I now know is the entire meta event in Elon Riverlands. You essentially need to fight the boss inside Augury Rock, and I spent quite a bit of time just milling around at the camp where the first step in the meta event spawns sequence spawns. Finally Sunday morning at about 11 am it fired off and I was able to complete the sequence and finish that step in the quest chain.

This moved me on to the phase where I actually spent time raising my newborn Skyscale. Essentially I had to collect a number of special treats by killing specific monsters scattered around the Crystal Desert region and waiting for a “Tasty” item to drop from them. I also had to spend quite a bit of fold buying “Toys” for the newborn, the most expensive of which was the grow lamp that goes for 22g currently on the market. Sadly I did not have my jewel-crafting skill high enough to make the item, nor did I really relish the thought of grinding it up. Lastly, I had to feed the Skyscale specifically crafted food and could feed a maximum of 4 pieces per day. Fortunately, I wrapped up the previous step before the daily reset so was able to get 8 feedings in within a single calendar day. Normally this takes three individual resets in order to get past the feeding step and more time if you did not already have a stash of materials ready to craft the food.

Now I am staring down the barrel of the bane of my existence. I have what is effectively twenty-one jumping puzzles to complete in order to find my Skyscale who has run away from the nest. I can craft something called Extra-Pungent Skyscale Treat to skip a jumping puzzle, but it comes with a hefty cost. Essentially it requires a reagent with a daily cooldown and an item that you can only purchase from a vendor that costs 4g. So in order to brute force my way through this… it would cost me a minimum of 80g as you get one for free when you start the quest chain. I think I am going to at least attempt some of the jumping puzzles and then fall back on making the treat if I get too frustrated by them. I tell reminding myself at any point I get angry, that I will only have to do this once.

I have to admit though, that I never would have made it this far without Blish HUD. There is an addon called pathing that you can install within the Blish HUD interface that marks various items on your in-game map. More specifically the pathing module that I would suggest using is ReActif EN pack as it seems to be the clearest to follow. For example, when doing Scales or Eggs in Dragonsfall I just had to roam around and follow the scale icon on my HUD until I finally found its location. Similarly, now that I am on the jumping puzzle step, it should in theory show me the correct path to follow the reach the top. That is what I tend to have the most trouble with while doing jumping puzzles is determining what areas I can actually stand on versus which areas are not valid terrain.

I expect tonight to start on the first of the jumping puzzles and then determine if I will buy my way out of this frustration or keep at it. While doing this however I am spending a lot of time farming Living World Season 4 content, because I need stacks of zone currency to complete the final step. I know I am lacking Branded Mass, Mistonium, and Inscribed Shards but I have the others already. Basically, I am focusing on this problem in a few ways firstly by doing the hearts each day and buying the amount of currency that I can from the karma vendor. Then I am spending some time roaming around Bjora Marches looking for Eternal Ice, as there is a Karma vendor there that will sell you the season 4 currencies in exchange for that resource. My hope is that by the time I finish chewing through the jumping puzzles, and the steps that follow them… I will have earned enough currency to be able to buy all of the saddle components shown above.

Basically, I guess I reached a point where I was tired of being grounded. So many of the meta events in Guild Wars 2 are just much easier with a Skyscale. As I’ve started working my way through content on the Ranger, I reached several points, especially in zone completion where I wished I had access to one. I knew eventually I would set my mind to churning through this quest, and it seems to be a solid activity to do while I am consuming an audiobook. All of this effort will eventually pay off though, and it will make all of my characters from that point forward much more enjoyable to spend time on. In the meantime, however… I have a lot of pain in front of me before I can settle into the joy of having the best mount in the game.

Primalist is Strong

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of this weekend playing some more of the Last Epoch Beta, largely because it is too much of a pain in the butt to switch back to the normal client on a whim. Entering the Beta required me to input a key and patch my client, which means I cannot easily play the normal game without reversing that process. I have to admit I vastly prefer when a game has a separate test client on Steam as New World did, but I am rolling with it for now. We talked about this game a bit on the podcast. Still, considering I had reached the beginnings of the endgame on the Necromancer, I opted to try out a few other classes rather than grind away and risk burning myself on the game before the multiplayer launch.

As a further sign of my growth as a human being… I opted to give the finger-wiggliest of classes a shot. Mage is actually pretty fun and I leaned in heavily to the lightning bolt that you start the game with. After a good number of upgrades I eventually wound up with a fairly wicked chain lightning attack and arced from enemy to enemy across the field. My core problem with the class however is that at least out of the box it felt exceptionally squishy. I’m wondering if some of the subclasses fix this, but it felt like I needed to zip around the field kiting mobs to keep from getting overwhelmed. I mean that is fine given that is how I expect a pure spellcaster-type class to feel, but it also wasn’t necessarily my jam.

The Primalist however was absolutely my sort of gameplay. What I found in this class is the Diablo III Barbarian-style gameplay that I had been missing with the Sentinel. Essentially I built into a design that focused on dual-wielding axes and running around with a retinue of animal friends. I focused my points on Leap and Swipe giving me good movement around the battle and a powerful area of effect main attack that causes lightning to course through the attackers and spawns little claw totems for added damage. Combine that with some heavy health regen on hit and kill and my Raptor, Wolf, and Crow dealing additional damage along with me make it seem like an extremely strong pure melee option.

Helping this build are some neat uniques that I picked up along the way. First up is a pair of axes called Taste of Blood that makes it so that I cause bleeding on my targets and then additional hits cause those bleeds to tick down even faster. Then there is the chest I found last night called the Doublet of Onos Tull, which gives my minions a chance to create bleeds and increases the duration of those bleeds. These combine to make it so that I am dealing a lot of damage over time to my targets which really helps to whittle down boss encounters. Uniques in Last Epoch often seem to have way less of a downside than I am used to from Path of Exile.

I have to admit the Primalist is giving the Necromancer a serious run for its money when it comes to what I want to play when the multiplayer patch goes live. For the moment I have specialized on Beastmaster, but I could see serious reasons for going druid eventually since that is the mastery path that gives you access to the Werebear. For the moment however, I am more than happy to run around with my pack of animal companions while shredding things with a big cleaving attack. Rift had a warrior pet class that involved running around with a giant cat pet while decimating things with a two-hander and honestly… that is the feeling I am getting for this character so far.

March 9th can’t get here soon enough when I can sorta take off the training wheels and pour some serious focus into this game. It is impressive how far this game has come since the first few times I played it and ultimately turned my nose up in disgust. What I saw of the endgame systems over the weekend, makes me think that this will be capable of holding my attention for awhile.

AggroChat #422 – Excuse to Kill Dinosaurs

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

Hey Folks! This week Bel has been playing Last Epoch quite a bit of late and has roped both Grace and Tam into it.  We talk a bit about how the game has improved over time and how it compares to Diablo III and Path of Exile.  From there Thalen and Tam talk a bit about their further experiences with Lord of the Rings Online.  Kodra talks about his adventures in watching a live stage production of Bluey, and we talk a bit about the show in general.  Tam shares his thoughts on Hi-Fi Rush and dives into a topic about the oddities of Steam Deck Compatibility.

Topics Discussed:

  • Last Epoch
    • Multiplayer Beta
    • Class Design
    • Comparisons with other ARPGs
  • Lord of the Rings Online
  • Bluey Big Play
    • The show in general
  • Hi-Fi Rush
  • Steam Deck Incompatibilities

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Deterministic Crafting

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve now spent more time with Last Epoch and leveled a character further than I had managed previously. Last night I dinged level 50, and am an undetermined amount of progress into the story. I kinda like how Path of Exile has nice clean points of demarcation between content blocks, but Last Epoch is this whole weird timey-wimey chrono-trigger-esc mess of timelines. I’ve been playing the Necromancer and it is pure nonsense. Right now if I am summoning the maximum number of critters following me and doing my bidding I have:

  • 2 – Bone Golems
  • 5 – Skeletal Warriors
  • 3 – Skeletal Mages
  • 6 – Exploding Zombies
  • 3 – Skeletal Vanguard
  • 2 – Wraiths

So at full compliment… which I admittedly only really hit regularly when I am in a boss fight… I am roaming around with Twenty-One Horrible Children. This is what I want in a Necromancer class, just a veritable army of dead friends doing my work for me. Admittedly that is ALL I do… because I effectively keep summoning Exploding Zombies in lieu of casting a fireball or something of the sort. Each time one of my pets die, including my exploding zombies that are designed to die… I have a 10% chance of summoning a Skeletal Vanguard. So while the rest of my pets I can summon up before I get into battle, those I need to effectively get through combat. I guess technically I could probably sit there summoning Exploding Zombies until I procced all three of them.

There are a lot of things that I really like about the game and probably the biggest one of those is the crafting system. Coming from Path of Exile, I think I have had my fill of “crafting gamba” and hate how you have to game that system in order to get what you actually want from it… while at the same time always being on the very edge of “bricking” your item in the process. In Last Epoch, the “random” element is pushed to finding the crafting shards in the wild, but once you have one it is always going to apply a predictable effect to an item. Sure this sucks a bit when you really need Minion Damage on an item and you have not found any Minion Damage shards, but at least you have a fixed item that you need to get as a drop. There are items that let you shatter an item that has a stat you want with a chance of recovering a shard of that type, so at least there are ways around that.

If you really want that “big gamba energy” though there are various rare items that cause your crafts to give you less predictable results. For example, if you have an item with one bad affix on it, you can try your luck with a Glyph of Chaos which will replace it with a random affix that could exist on that item. Rune of Refinement is effectively the equivalent of a Divine Orb from Path of Exile where it rerolls the stat values of all of your affixes allowing you to try and eke out a little bit of extra stat bonus. So there is still some random chance in the system, but if you just want some basic things on your gear that will support your build you can fairly predictably make that happen. The most important thing however is the forging potential of an item in determining whether or not you can shift it to be exactly what you were wanting. That stat ultimately dictates how many modifications you can apply to an item before it is essentially “locked” and can no longer craft on it.

One thing that I desperately wish the game had… was some sort of wardrobe system. My character looks awful right now, and there is no real way I can change that. I am going to look like a mess until I get to a point where I can effectively start wearing better-looking set gear. I am always big into cosmetic systems because if your character looks cool, it feels better to play said character. This is why games with cosmetic microtransactions will always be my weakness because it is pretty easy to get me to pony up a few bucks to feel better about how my character looks. There is a tab in the UI for appearances but it is inaccessible and I am not even sure where on the roadmap those features sit. I would assume that it would be important because cosmetics are ultimately when you can start offering things for sale in the shop and give the game a renewable line of income.

Another thing that I really want is some version of the Diablo III pet that runs around vacuuming up gold and shards. Having to walk over gold gets annoying really quickly after you’ve been used to a game with a pet, and a game without any sort of gold equivalent. The shards all get picked up at once when you click on any one of them, similar to the gems in Diablo III but I wish they went straight to the crafting bank. At any point, you can click a button in your inventory to send them there, so it just feels tedious for them not to do that by default. After a while most of what you are going to be picking up are the shards because you will likely be running a loot filter and ignoring everything that doesn’t have a stat package conducive to your base class.

Speaking of the loot filter… that is definitely something that I like greatly about the game. You can absolutely import a filter from your clipboard and there are plenty of sources for good filters on the internet. I do wish it worked a bit more like a POB and that you could just import from a pastebin URL given that most filter authors seem to store said filters there. The functionality that I like the most about this however is that once you have imported a filter, you can customize it easily in the game. This will allow you to tweak it later on when you are looking for specific items to stylize that loot when it finally does drop. For example, in Path of Exile I was looking for a Gladiator armor base and would have loved if I could simply add a custom rule for that item in the game quickly. In Last Epoch, I will absolutely be able to do that when I am specifically hunting for something that might otherwise get dropped by the filters.

Mechanically it is a deeply enjoyable game, but I think time will tell if I feel like the endgame is good. One of the reasons why I am so damned hooked on Path of Exile is that it has so much content left over from previous leagues that it allows me to narrow in on the one specific thing that I want to spend most of my time doing. I’ve not made it to anything close to the end game, so I will be interested to see what it entails. Essentially I need something that is a fun loop that feels rewarding while also being something that I can mostly turn my brain off for. That is why I stuck with Diablo III for so long because the rhythm of running Rifts and Bounties was something I found deeply soothing. The thing I struggle with in Path of Exile is that for whatever reason the game seems to relish random assed deaths, and there is never a point where you can truly just zone out and chill. Delve has been the closest to that for me, but even then it is entirely possible for me to encounter exactly the wrong combination of abilities from a mob and take an almost instant death.

Shifting back to the negative column for a bit. The story in Last Epoch is “fine” for an ARPG but is largely nonsense. You are shifting back and forth between multiple Eras of the same area and while it is cool the times you have to go back into the past to impact an event in the future, like flipping a switch in a temple before it was ruined to extend a bridge in the future. Those gameplay loops seem to be few and far between and the timescape seems to largely just be a way of presenting different-looking maps as you fight not-demons that might as well be demons as well as copious amounts of the undead. It feels like a bog standard Diablo-like ARPG with some technically and mechanically superior features that have learned lessons from all of the games that came before it. While that makes a deeply interesting game to play, it doesn’t necessarily fix the “not great story” problem that all ARPGs seem to have.

This might be a “feature” rather than a “bug” honestly because ARPG gameplay is largely about mechanical repetition and making that loop enjoyable. If you are forced to stop and deal with the narrative, it makes repeat playthroughs more cumbersome than they need to be. Essentially what I am saying is that if you are a player that primarily plays games for the narrative adventure, this game is probably going to disappoint you in the long run. If you like to play games while doing something else like watching a show, or in my case often listening to an audiobook… then this is precisely that sort of game.

I am currently playing in the Multiplayer Beta Week, and I am really interested to see how this game feels with other players. That can often make or break the overall experience of an ARPG, because while Path of Exile is a deeply interesting game… it sucks to play with friends. I’ve never found a game that feels anywhere near as good as Diablo III does with other players, and I am hoping beyond all hopes that maybe Last Epoch will fill that niche. I know what I am doing on March 9th though, because I will likely be recreating the character I am playing on the beta server. My hope is I can coax a few of my friends to also give it a shot so we can test how it feels to play with others. I like enough of the core systems that I could see really engaging with this game long-term.

Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you played Last Epoch? Are you interested in the multiplayer launch? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.