commander

Failing Can Be Fun

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Good Morning Folks! I did not post yesterday because Thursdays have become a giant mess where I have to pull together this significant report first thing in the morning. I was in a position where it was 11 am and I was still waiting on some of the contributions… for a thing that was supposed to be done and submitted by noon. So essentially… I find myself in a position where I really cannot devote the effort to blogging. In other news today is the “Dateaversary” for my me and my wife, and at this point we have been together twenty nine years. We are old… and are starting to feel it. I got up this morning and got fancy cronuts, and they were delightful. With next year being our 30th year… we should probably plan something more special than chilling out as per our normal.

Last night was another round of Fractals with Friends, and it was pretty delightful as well. I am having a blast doing these each week with Ammo, Sita, and Sol. I think maybe starting this next week we might get a Thalen as well, which could see us turning our focus to dungeons. We actually learned things from the previous round because we did a few that we had already done as a group… and they went SUPER fast. I think we might actually reach a point where we can rip through more than five in our allotted time period. I’ve been scheming about other activities we might do as a group, because I know that Sita specifically needs the Nightmare Tower for Living World 1, which I managed to solo… but was a massive pain in the butt to do so.

I was actually smart and focused on the daily fractals… which means we finished up a several daily achievements and got bonus loot as a reward. At some point I kind of hope that we can manage to get together a group for some strikes and knock out some of the dailies there. In theory I could use my Commander powers to post a daily fractals group and just force them to happen for me every day. I really should get more comfortable being a Commander… or in my case a Catmander. There is a whole lot more than I could be doing in the game were I willing to seize the reigns and lead groups. I always feel like I just don’t know enough about the game to comfortable direct people through it. I am eternally lost… and while I could absolutely lead something like Tequatl that I can do in my sleep… the things I would actually want to do I don’t have a ton of experience doing myself.

I did actually use my Commander tag last night for a brief moment in Dragon’s End. Essentially we were on a map that was going to lose. Zero progress had been made towards buffing the defenses of each area, and there seemed to be only a handful of us on the map. I only really popped into the map to farm void mobs for the weekly quest, so I decided to tag up and see if I could get at least five of us so that we could do the three escort events. By the end I think we maybe had eight total… so not enough to do the meta event, but enough to actually do some stuff and have fun in the process. I made a few new friends, specifically one person who was with me in the notion that we would fail beautifully together. It was honestly a heck of a lot of fun… which is what makes me think I should actually put myself out there more often.

I am really looking forward to the patch drop next Tuesday and the assorted quality of life changes that come with it. The big thing will be reclaiming all of the shared inventory slots that I am currently using for teleporters. It does make me wonder what exactly I am going to use for the rest of the space. Having an all in one “gobbler” makes me actually want to start working on collecting more of these. Quality of life changes honestly are my favorite changes in any game, because I love convenience items. The less friction I have towards doing what I want in a game… the more likely I am to keep playing that game. At some point though I do want to dive into the housing system and actually build some proper structures in my Homestead.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and if you make it into Guild Wars 2 say hi.

AggroChat #495 – Just Let Your Soul Glo

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

Hey Folks! We start the show with a quick discussion about Path of Exile, and how we are now two months into a League, a position where things would normally be dead…  and that the Currency Exchange is still hopping.  This leads to a secondary discussion about Kodra’s woes as he attempts to do the Merchant Guild thing in the Last Epoch.  From there Bel talks about Witchfire with its Hexen meets Destiny meets Hades PVE extraction shooter gameplay. Bel also got an invite to Soulframe Preludes the next game from Warframe maker Digital Extremes and shares some of his early impressions.  From there we dive into the Magic the Gathering Commander situation with controversial card bannings, death threats, and Wizards of the Coast yoinking control of the format away from the players.  Tam shares his thoughts about playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast and Thalen his early thoughts about playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Currency Exchange in a Dead League
  • Last Epoch
    • Woes of Merchants Guild
  • Witchfire
  • Soulframe Preludes
  • The MTG Commander Situation
  • Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
  • Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Mander of Catte

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Good Morning Friends! Sometimes I get a dumb idea stuck in my head and can’t shake it loose. One of these recently is that I decided I wanted to pick up a commander tag. I’ve dipped my toes into trying to start groups in the group finder, and one challenge is the inability of someone without a Commander Tag to create groups larger than 10 players. Technically you can make strikes work but can do nothing to create subgroups and arrange people. Then there is the problem that technically a group without a commander means that anyone can tag up and effectively take control of your group away from you. I’ve heard anecdotes of folks going into the strikes section… merging groups and then telling everyone that they are now doing raids instead. Even if that does not happen… gating the ability to control a group properly behind a hefty price tag is not exactly great.

However, of my friend group, I am definitely the most “wealthy” because last year I hit the jackpot in opening a black lion crate and getting a permanent banker. Instead of keeping this, I opted to sell it and have been living on the proceeds ever since. So while 300 gold is a heck of a lot of money, it was something that I could afford and figured would definitely make group activities go a little bit more smoothly. The normal commander tag is pretty easy to get and I believe you can purchase it from a vendor in every major city. When you purchase the commander tag… you get a choice of one of these icons floating over your head.

I mean this is perfectly fine and functional… but would be the incorrect choice. There is however a semi-hidden system that allows you to get the “catmander” tag granting you access to these much better symbols floating over your head.

If I was going to spend 300 gold on something so frivolous, I was at a minimum going to get the arguably better version. So this began my quest and planted a seed in my head a few weeks back that I could not seemingly remove.

The problem with this mission however is that the Catmander requires you to do one of three jumping puzzles located in the World vs World borderlands. So not only do you have to be comfortable enough with WvW in general, but also be able to complete some of the most annoying jumping puzzles I have experienced thus far. The problem with these is that they are not so much jumping puzzles… but falling puzzles. The final leg of each of them involves falling gracefully from a perch and trying to land on a shelf below that will ultimately allow you to jump into the opening to the cave where the Catmander is located. After spending an entire afternoon making an untold number of tries, I stumbled upon the above video. Effectively I could use a druid staff ability to catapult myself to the ledge with the Catmander and skip the jumping puzzle entirely… or at least most of the hard bits.

Just like that, on my first attempt doing the above method… I landed on the ledge and made my way to the Catmander’s chamber. I ultimately went after the Blue Catmander, because the quirks of WvW meant that it was functionally easier for me to get to that chamber this week. Inside you are greeted with a delightful sight as the Catmander is obviously training some recruits… with kittens working on training dummies while a lieutenant cat supervises. This scene alone is worth the price of admission honestly.

One of the cute quirks of Guild Wars 2 is that you have a form of player housing called the “Home Instance”. This is used as part of the early story quests and is something that you can collect things for over the course of the game. One of the things you can collect is a series of cats that live in your instance with you. Effectively around the world are various cats and if you have a specific item in your inventory you will be given a prompt to interact with them and feed them that “food”. It seems that you can do this with the three Catmanders as well. The Blue one for example wants a Gift of Battle, aka something that you farm up for legendary weapons and is a rewards track in WvW. So of course I am now farming up another Gift of Battle so I can collect that cat. Thankfully the Yellow Catmander requests something more sensible and wants a Can of Spicy Meat Chili. That would leave only Penelope the Unconquerable in Armistice Bastion… but she resides at the end of a pretty traumatic jumping puzzle and that zone requires paid access so it might be a while before I collect that Catmander.

As much as I love World Boss Trains… I am uncertain if I am going to be finding myself leading them. It seems like a lot of effort, and while I applaud the commanders that go from zone to zone leading the troops… I figure I will probably keep my tag in my back pocket for when I need to arrange instanced content. I just feel like I am maybe not comfortable enough leading most content… that is other than Tequatl. I can do “Taco” in my sleep and have collected many spoons in the process. I guess if you find yourself in need of a commander for something, hit me up.