dungeon Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Sibling Time

February 18, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Tuesday nights are often what we refer to as “Sibling Time,” where my sib Ace and I get together and either play Destiny Rising or just hang out and chat while doing our own thing. Since we are both somewhat down on Destiny Rising at the moment, we are trying to branch out and play some other things. Initially, I thought we might be able to do Dune Awakening, but they were just too new, and if I carried them… they would likely bounce from the game entirely. I did, however, figure out that I can easily retrofit my sandbike to have a booster seat on the back instead of storage. So when the time comes for them to go do some of the stuff in the area of Hagga South, I have built my base, I can zip over and pick them up. Hopefully, a weekend of piddling around in-game will give them the basis of being able to do group content together. I’ve largely finished Hagga South, and am about ready to transition to the zone just North, but I plan on leaving the base largely intact so that Ace can potentially claim it when they are ready to start doing stuff in the northern area of the zone. That is one thing that I wish you could do more easily: transition a base to another player rather than demolishing the control panel and then letting them place one instead.

We have been loosely shopping for other games to play, and one of them that we both enjoyed greatly is Enshrouded. So last night I logged into my level 25 geared out character that I have not played since launch… and tried to figure out how the hell to join a game with each other. Hint… you must be online in Steam in order to see each other in the game, so as two perpetually “Show as Offline” introverted goblins… we had to both show online for a moment while we joined up on Ace’s world. It was at this point that I saw their highly optimized base layout… and also might have given them more than a little bit of shit about not having walls. One of these days we will join my world, and they can give me abundant crap over the severe level of overbuilding that I do on my bases… which are extremely NOT optimized. Real talk, though, coming back last night has made me want to play more, and I am probably going to do so on the level 25 character since I don’t really feel like gearing out another one. Guild Wars 2 has kind of made me wish all games allowed you to reach a point of “forever gear” quickly and then just get to do the fun stuff.

For a while now, Ace had been telling me about all of the updates in-game, in part trying to coax me back to wanting to play it again. One of the feature drops specifically was something called Hollow Halls. These are a series of what can best be described as “Raids” in the MMORPG context, that were patched in with 0.7.1.0 from March 2024. I had done plenty of the more dungeon-like content in Enshrouded, and they were really fun, but also really short, and mostly focused around rushing to a boss and then taking it down and collecting the trophy. Hollow Halls are way more detailed than this, and to start off you have to begin a quest which grants you your key to the first one, and then completing each one unlocks the next Hollow Hall in sequence. Last night we did the Nomad Highlands one, which is the third of four Hollow Halls in sequence.

There are technically mini-boss style encounters scattered throughout the large sweeping dungeon, but the real challenge is the environmental effects, mob spawners buried in frustrating to get to places, and this whole mini game that focuses on finding a bunch of runestones, which then unlock the door to the next area of the place. The huge positive about this place is that effectively each “floor” has a spawner, so that if you die, you can get right back into the action rather quickly. There were a lot of puzzles that involved very careful gliding, and I happened to die on the lava… which was unfortunate because even though Ace was able to resurrect me, I died again before I got control over my character. Due to the spawners, though, I was able to bip right back down to where we were in a matter of seconds. We were playing on their world at the lowest difficulty settings, and even then, it still took us about two hours to complete this place.

One of the really neat things about these massive dungeons is that they have special block types that you can only get by finding chests in them. What was nice, though, was that just by looting the chest, it unlocked the block for everyone in the party. They also had their world set so that each boss dropped a trophy for every party member, which meant that we walked away with multiple trophies by defeating all of the mini-bosses contained within. I dinged level 26 while I was in the dungeon, and I believe when I last played this game, the level cap was 25… so it will be interesting to see how much deeper this rabbit hole goes. I am probably going to run around on my geared character for a while and then build out a world from the start so that I can see all of the content I might have missed along the way. I had a freaking blast last night, and I figure we will probably be doing more of these Enshrouded nights.

Another game that I have been wanting to play again is No Man’s Sky, and it turns out they have also been playing around a bit. So after concluding our Enshrouded time together, I popped over into NMS and started a new, relaxed character. I made it through the initial sequence of getting my ship up and running and am on the second planet. There are tons of games that we both enjoy playing; we just need to set the focus on actually playing them together. I also think that I might have convinced Ace to give Path of Exile another shot with the upcoming 3.28 league, so that will be fun as well. Sibling Time is one of those sacred rituals in my life, and especially after the passing of my partner, I have needed it more and more as a stabilizing force. A few hours doing dumb things with Ace, cures many ills… and there is so much of me that wishes that we had actually gotten the chance to grow up together, rather than being adopted siblings.

If you’ve not played Enshrouded in a while, I highly suggest checking in on the game again.

Rampant Growth

May 16, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I completed my third World Completion since playing Guild Wars 2 and with it came two shiny new Gift of Exploration. This meant that when combined with my Gift of Battle that I farmed up earlier in the week, I could pull together all of the elements and craft a Gift of Mastery, one fourth of the total components needed for Kudzu, the weapon that I have been working towards. That left me with a choice… do I be patient and wait a few weeks buying 10 Mystic Clovers at a time… or do I spend some gold and buy resources to try and craft them and finish out my shiny new weapon right then. Ultimately I had acquired everything else that i needed… but was short by just under half of the clovers needed to craft my Gift of Fortune.

Essentially for those who have never gone down this road… there is a recipe for the Mystic Forge that can produce Mystic Clovers. However 66% of the time on average… it will create something else. Now these other things that get created are generally really useful as well. For example I believe it can generate all of the items required to create a Gift of Magic and a Gift of Might in small quantities, so even if you fail to get a Mystic Clover you usually end up with something of value. Two of the components can be bought from the market, but are not exactly cheap so this is a great way to burn through your gold without achieving your end results. I needed to craft 31 Mystic Clovers… and I decided to go for it instead of waiting the 3 weeks it would take to purchase those in a more reliable fashion. Essentially I was this close to finishing and got impatient… which in Guild Wars 2 is always a costly situation.

So last night I was able to craft my fifth legendary weapon, and added it to my vault. So right now I have a Greatsword, Sword, Axe, Hammer, and Longbow. I have some of the materials to craft the harpoon gun, but it is extremely low on my priority list. I think maybe next up I would like to potentially target a Staff, since that is another weapon type that I find useful on a few different characters. I would also really like to have a spear and I believe there is one that you can get through through Janthir… but I don’t really know all of the details behind it. The easiest staff is probably Bifrost, but I don’t really like the look of it. I would far rather have Nevermore, but it is a Heart of Thorns legendary weapon and seems like it requires roughly twice the materials of a Gen1 Legendary. I should also really work on some of the Legendary armor and accessory slots as well, and figure out what is required to get those.

I admit… I had just planned on transmogging the appearance of my bow because I am generally not really one for the whole Rhok’delar-like appearance. However after playing around with it and seeing it in action… it is growing on me. I especially like the graphical effect when I draw the bow and have a burst of vines and such springing up around me. I wish it had more wood on it… rather than the impossible appearance of just flowers floating out in the air. I will use it until I get tired of using it… and then change it over to whatever other bow looks cool for the moment. Since I am playing my Ranger 99.9% of the time… this is honestly the first Legendary I have immediately swapped over to. I had a few upgrade extractors and swapped out the stuff that was on my ascended longbow and placed them into Kudzu. While I was dealing with it I did the same for my Greatsword and swapped them into Twilight so I had that at the ready as well.

More important than ALL of this… we actually got a group up and running last night in a time-frame that I could participate in. One of the biggest challenges that I have had over the last decades, is that a lot of my regularly party members moved to the west coast and as such… now can only really do things when it is way too late for me to be involved. However apparently there was a team ready to go… that I just never realized. I credit my friend Sita for planting this idea in my head, but it quickly blossomed into us having a group and doing a dungeon. Last night we pulled together a group compatible with central time consisting of myself, Ammosart, Sita, and our “guild mom” Solaria who also just happens to be Ammo’s real Mom. This is a group that I have do so many things in the past, and honestly… makes up a good chunk of our sometimes reoccurring treasure map group from FFXIV… but it just sort of never dawned on me that this was a ready group to go do nonsense with more often than that.

At the end of the night I even snapped a pretty solid group picture of us all. Now if I can just convince Ace to join in these particular reindeer games… we would have a full five player party to do nonsense. I know not everyone plays Guild Wars 2, but apparently Sita and Ammo have also been playing quite a bit of Monster Hunter Wilds so in theory I can probably convince Ace to join in some of that. After running a dungeon we popped in and did a single fractal before I needed to bail and call my father. In theory we only have a few hours to play with, but especially if you do fractals you can make a lot of progress in that time. I would like to run all of the dungeons however so we can unlock exploration mode and try some of that. Additionally there is the possibility that at some point we might even try some strikes.

All told it was a pretty great night, and now I need to figure out my next objective because I have found that at least in Guild Wars 2… when I don’t have some larger goal that I am focused on I tend to fade away. In theory we are also probably about to get the next expansion announced pretty soon, so that will be interesting.

Short and Long Game

September 14, 2016 by Belghast

Last night is a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me. When I first got home I piddled around for a bit doing the few world quests that actually had upgrades for me. I managed to pull out another 835 trinket, and a 830 Iron Relic which combined with a 830 necklace that I got much later in the evening takes my overall item level to 834. For the most part every single night I am doing two things. Firstly I am knocking out the four quests that are required to get me the emissary chest with whatever faction is highlighted. After that I check World Quest Tracker to see which rewards might be upgrades, because as my gear level has gone up… the sorts of rewards available to me has also increased. For example when I checked a few minutes ago before sitting down to write this blog post I had an epic chestpiece somewhere in Azuna with roughly 20 hours left on it. For those not familiar with the addon, it gives players a similar view to the mobile app in game and allows for the tracking of individual world quests. This is super handy because when you are tracking one… it then also shows up on your flight map so you can see pretty easily which location is the closest to the quest you are trying to finish. It also color codes the quests so you can see which ones are expiring soon. This way if you are trying to complete every possible quest, you can make sure you get those with a short timer on them done so you don’t risk them expiring.

After hopping on voice chat we organized into a group, because in part we were looking for something to do with Tam who has been working on a Monk healer. I needed a quest for enchanting from Halls of Valor… because even though I have done this place five times now the staggering of quests meant I kept needing something from it. The positive is that we could run a dungeon with him… the negative is that because of his “just boosted” gear score we had to zone in manually. What was awesome about the run last night though is that Grace has done quite a bit of healing on the Monk, so Tam and her talks about which abilities work for which fights as we went through the dungeon. By the end Tam was Mistwalkering like a pro, and I went from having to largely keep myself alive with Ignore Pain to not really even getting close to dying at all. The other thing we noticed is just how ridiculous the range on the Monk healing statue is. It seems to be most of an instance worth of distance… and I am not entirely certain that when it finally stopped healing… that it was due to range and not due to line of sight. We finished the dungeon successfully and it broke up the logjam that seemed to be my enchanting progression. After completing that one quest I got four other quests that unlocked a series of endgame neck enchants. Grace and I were talking a bit about this problem last night, that while I really enjoy the quests… it is going to make tradeskilling on alts a pure nightmare.

After the dungeon run, the group broke up as Mor and Ashgar needed to go off to bed… or whatever it was that they actually did. From there Grace and I decided to work on some of the Gold Dragon Wardens quests. These show up on your map with the traditional elite boss seal around them, and represent tougher group content. Sometimes these are reasonable to solo… other times they simply hit too hard or have too much life to be reasonable. While they are not often soloable, they generally speaking can be duo’d with my protection warrior and her mage. I can keep myself alive mostly long enough for her to burn it down and more often than not when we actually get to a given location… there is already a group starting the fight that we just hop in on. So I started the post with a statement about last night being a perfect example of why Legion is working so well for me, and all of these examples are why. I started off the evening soloing, then pulled together a group and ran a dungeon… then continued the grouping in a much smaller scale with tracking down a bunch of elite world quests. I went from solo, to group, to duoing… all in the same night and it felt seamless and largely effortless to find some objective that felt valuable to do in all of those cases. Eventually I am sure raiding will be added in to that mix giving me a whole new level of things to do with friends, all the while constantly feeling like I am moving the needle forward. Legion is doing an excellent job of giving me small term gains, but still keeping extremely long term goals present and making me feel like I am constantly inching forward towards them. Now I just want them to keep this up for the rest of the expansion and continue this feeling into the next.

Begrudging Enjoyment

July 23, 2015 by Belghast

Even More Clarifications!

Starting to get really amped because two days in we have like two pages worth of signups on the forum thread. Since I guess I am the grandmaster of ceremonies, I am getting random questions and have been doing my best to assuage fears. When those questions seem general enough that someone else might have them… I have taken to dumping them in the intro to a morning blog post to help clarify for anyone else reading that might be interested. One of the interesting questions that I had yesterday was if folks could mix things up a bit. Since I am opening the door to vlogging, it was wondered if you could do a mix of the two. The short answer is absolutely! The long answer is just make sure you post your video embedded in a blog post, and advertise it on the Blaugust Nook with what day it was for, just to make my life less hell when it comes to tracking and tabulating this madness.

Next question is what happens if a given blogger is obligated to be posting every so often on another site? Do they have to also post something new for that day on their personal blog? The easy answer here is yes… but with an asterisk. If you are posting a bigger entry somewhere else, it is absolutely cool to post a stub on your own blog linking to the bigger post. Just do a quick synopsis of the post and let folks click through if they want to read more about it. This way you technically have your daily post, but also are linking to the article that you spent the bulk of your daily writing time working on. This is maybe a strange case, but I know that several of our bloggers do the occasional long form article for another source. The important thing is that we need it tracked through the Blaugust Nook so I can give you appropriate credit.

Night of Alex

Pretty much since its inception I have been helping out with the Wednesday night static in our free company. Initially I had intended it to simply be something that I filled in on, but as I dropped my World of Warcraft raiding… I found that I had time to commit to it more seriously. So presently with the Monday night crew we are working through Final Coil of Bahamut, and on Wednesday nights we have been working on Normal mode Alexander. Last night we had every intention of getting through all four wings, but we struggled a bit with turn two due to some changes in how we were dealing with the adds. As soon as we went back to the way we had previously defeated it, things clicked back into place and we pushed through it fairly easily. That took us to turn three, a fight that I had not actually seen yet. Thanks to the expert tutelage of Wulf or as “Wul” as his friends call him… I was caught up to speed and after the second attempt it started to feel pretty natural.

From here it was just learning this particular dance and getting our dps up high enough to burn through it before we hit the hard enrage. Right now that seems to be a problem in general with what we are trying to do. We struggled with the dps check on Bismarck, and struggled again on turn three. As a Warrior I am personally swapping to Deliverance stance every single time I am not in the main tank role so I can push a little more dps and also trying to keep up Storm’s Eye as often as possible… largely when I don’t actually need the damage reduction effect of Storm’s Path. If we can somehow solve the problems we are having on the DPS end however I think we are ready to rock higher content. The dance part seems to come pretty naturally, however there were still several points last night where folks stood in damage that could have been avoided. Part of this is learning, but part of this is trying desperately to avoid tunnel vision.

Begrudging Enjoyment

I’ve gone through a strange evolution with SkyForge of having some vague interest, but finding the game play largely unsatisfying for my first few play sessions. Now that I have unlocked the core abilities of the Paladin, I am actually finding it rather enjoyable. I think this game suffers from what so many games suffer from… rationing of abilities. I know Final Fantasy XIV has this problem where most classes don’t really feel like they should until you are around level 40. SkyForge for the most part has this problem until you have unlocked your base abilities. Had I taken the time to really spend much time in the virtual matrix thing that lets you test every class, I would have realized that the rabbit hole was so much deeper than I was giving it credit for. Another interesting side note… if you finish the training on a given class you unlock the ability to permanently use its class costume.

I booted up SkyForge after the raid last night, with every intention of just poking my head in and then logging right out. Instead I wound up unlocking three costumes and completing a really cool dungeon like mission on an island full of undead Virds. With all of my abilities unlocked the fights started feel more purposeful in design, and less about simply repeating the same attack over and over. There was a boss that required me to intersect one type of beam while avoiding taking the other… and actually dragging the boss into the path of it so that it would take the damage. This felt fresh and enjoyable, so maybe I simply had not seen the “real” game yet. This is ultimately the frustration of designs that doll out abilities one at a time, is that you can’t really see what the final result is going to be like until you have invested a serious amount of effort into the game. Granted this game DID give me an avenue to see how a Paladin or Knight would play… but I simply did not spend much time doing it. Tonight I plan on trying to unlock a few more of these class costumes, so I can get a feel for how some of the other options play. Right now this is shaping up to be an MMO with MOBA character design… and I think I dig this.