games

Exploring Undecember

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Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.

I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.

As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.

Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.

One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.

For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.

All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.

So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.

I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.

Successfully Merged

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I logged in this morning and it appears that the merger has been completed. I am now on Heliopolis instead of Themiscyra and our old server is no more. Because we were not the server being merged into, it means that none of the companies that held territory on our server kept it. I fully expect the next few weeks to be a time of strife as far as faction conflicts go as the companies from three servers ultimately settle into a pecking order. Sadly I had made quite a few friends in the group that previously controlled Everfall, which is where my tier 4 home is located. Positive however is it seems that Everfall is just as well taken care of on Heliopolis with all but one of the crafting machines sitting at Tier 5.

The map on Heliopolis is seemingly more competitive whereas on Themiscyra it seemed like the heavy hitters were all Marauder or Covenant after the biggest Syndicate company transferred off the server. In truth, I don’t much care about who holds a territory so long as they are not being slumlords and doing nothing to maintain the crafting machines. Sadly on Themiscyra we had reached a point where Everfall and Windsward were the only two territories that seemed to put any effort and pride into maintaining them. My hope as well is that with more players there will be more activity happening in the various open world farms since that seems to be the side of the game that I really enjoy doing.

Speaking of farms, I went back out to the camp with Pit Lord Daeshi and have now picked up all of the gear drops off that loot table. It seems like folks are regularly farming this camp because it is where the legendary corrupted trophy material drops, which is heavily needed for invasions. In fact, at two different times out there I was with groups from major companies on the previous server trying to far trophies. Of those drops the one I was seeking out the most of course was the tanking sword… or at least I am turning it into a tanking sword. I figured with two different life-stealing traits on it and a base constitution stat, that screamed sustain and tanking. It does not hurt that it also looks really cool.

Other than farming gear, I spent part of my last night on Themiscyra doing another invasion. It was doomed from the start but we fought valiantly. We had even less than we had the night before and I think we made it to wave 5 before a boss type made it into the base… which caused everyone to collapse in to deal with it… which caused the other gates to fall. Essentially this is sort of what seems to happen as a cascade failure any time you need to call an all-hands-on-point type scenario. Invasions are very much a “manage everything all at once” type thing but once the plates stop spinning and fall down… everything goes south really fast.

Now to sort of bury the lede… I have been up to some shenanigans or at least I am supporting an initiative that is. A handful of my friends have been working on a brand new Mastodon instance that is gaming-focused, given that this seemed to be a niche that wasn’t really well served. Elekk.xyz is a fine server but it is deeply sequestered from the rest of the Fediverse, and really didn’t seem to be all that gaming-focused in the first place. It is nowhere near ready for sign-ups yet, but those of us who are going to be helping with the day-to-day stuff on the instance now have our accounts. Expect more updates as I have them as to when this is going to be launching. I think for the time being I am probably going to keep my Masto.ai account at least in the short run until we have worked out all of the kinks and have federation relays spinning. At some point in the not-too-distant future however I expect to migrate my account once again, but hopefully for the very last time. I have a lot of faith in this team and it will be nice to have a place to suggest where I very directly know everyone involved.

I’ve known about the possibility of this happening for a while but did not want to say anything until it was actually “for seriously” happening.

Gone Fishin

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Sometimes my brain latches onto something and just won’t let it go… until I have obsessed my way through completing it. For this particular obsession, I am going to blame my friend PlayerVsHobbies. When she joined New World not too long ago… she sorta made a beeline straight for the fishing system and as a result, ended up in some areas of the game that her level range was not quite prepared for. I know Vernie at one point helped her I think with a run through some dangerous areas and the other day I happened to be on when she was attempting to sneak to a fishing hole in Shattered Mountain. For those unfamiliar with this game, Shattered Mountain is a deeply scary place with monsters well above the maximum level cap of players… so if you are not well geared and max level, you are probably going to struggle out there. So I played guard duty as we made our way to the fishing hole and then farmed Dryad Wolves for Wyrdwood while she managed to get the fish that was required for that step in the chain.

This all planted in my head that I too have been on this quest chain for a while, and never actually completed it on my original server Valhalla. I’ve admittedly never spent that much time fishing in New World, though of my limited experience of MMO fishing systems it seemed to be about the best. So for whatever reason, this flipped some bits in my brain and made it so that this became my all-consuming mission in life… to complete the fishing chain and walk away with a shiny legendary fishing pole. So other than farming my daily Gypsum, this has been the task I set forth in front of myself… and I have to say it was relaxing as hell. There is something extremely chill about fishing in these beautiful locations for the amount of time needed to complete the quest. I’ve never been most of a fisherman in other games, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Another huge benefit of this quest chain is that you pretty much walk away with a full set of Tier 4 and Tier 5 fishing gear, which only serves to help you out as the requests get a bit rare. The only time that I had to rely on bait was when trying to catch fish over 30 lbs, but thankfully what I needed was cheap enough to stock up before heading out into the field. I had always just chucked bait into the bank and in truth, I had quite a good stockpile of various sorts which I now am carrying around on me at all times. I guess I have been bit by the bug because I have found myself flipping over to my fishing set, hitting F3, and doing this while waiting on things to spawn.

I completed the quest chain and you get a random box that includes a level 600 Legendary Fishing Pole. I think PvH got one that was Angry-Earth-themed, and the one I pulled was Ancient-themed. It appears that the stats are largely randomized, which means that in truth… I think the one I crafted and happened to pull 4 tier 3 stats on is maybe a bit better as a daily driver. I know I will be spending a lot more time crafting fishing poles as that seems to be my best option for leveling Engineering, so I might even pull an even better quad/three in my next flurry of crafting. I think if I manage to get geared up enough to start crafting for item level 600 fishing poles, there is the rare chance that I could make my own version of a 5-stat.

What I found somewhat weird though… is that the quest chain only required me to get to level 100 in Fishing, and not 200 which is the maximum before you start getting into aptitude levels. So I also now have the title “Fishing Legend” which I don’t feel like is really something I should equip until I ultimately cap out that skill. It is a fun and relaxing way to pass the time, especially while watching a YouTube video or something like that. So I guess I am thankful to my good friend PvH for getting me started down this path. I wonder what other enjoyable grinds are out there that I have been avoiding.

Edengrove Seniab Ruins Farm

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Good Morning Friends! We are closing in on the end now. I have this farm and one for tomorrow… and then we are done. I committed to this process not realizing how many there would be and I have to admit I have gotten a bit tired of this “bit” as I am sure you all have been as well. The end is nigh however so we are going to push through. This is another good farm not too terribly far from the Taedas farm we’ve already talked about, this time focused around another shaman-type Dryad named Cael. This one also has a Void Gauntlet and a Life Staff and I think the jury is out on which are the best set for which purposes. I largely came here because it was a relatively easy bow to farm, and also had another trade skill set item.

To get to this farm we are best off using the spirit shrine that sits smack in the middle of the zone, but it is also a fairly reasonable run from Valor Hold. I would however suggest making a detour and picking up that mid-shrine if you don’t have it. This is a much higher-level farm than most of the others we have been doing, and everything surrounding Seniab is level 60, so adjust accordingly. I would suggest plopping down a tent just outside the area because it is a fairly long run from the shrine if you are trying to recover. If you happen to be there will a full group, at the top of the tower, is a true boss named Baines that is way too hard to be duo’d. If you had four of five people you likely could take him down on the same respawn timer as Cael. Cael however is easily solo’d and if you sneak up the tower you can loot both of the chests behind Baines without aggroing him pending you sneak and watch your approach angles.

I personally find this to be a much easier camp than Taedas, even though the actual level of the mobs inside of it is much higher. There is also more to do if you are willing to do it, in that each doorway to Seniab has a dryad in it, with two warrior-types and two prowler-types. You can get in a rhythm where you kill Cael and the one warrior-type that spawns with it, then go around the room killing the door guardians, and by the time you finish with all of that… Cael is likely to be spawning again soon. Additionally, there are I think four chests in the vicinity without climbing the tower, and even more, if you do choose to climb the tower up to where Baines is. So if you are at the farm for very long it is well worth taking a trip up the tower every hour to get the chests. Let’s dive into the drops:

As I said before this is a really easy camp if you are needing any of the weapons that are dropped and probably the only bow that is very easily solo’d. I’ve been out here several times with friends and the Life Staff seemed the most common, followed by the Void Gauntlet, and lastly, I have only seen a single bow drop. Again with the loot weirdness that happens in New World, it is entirely possible that you will have wildly different luck with what seems to be commonplace for you. Again all of these weapons can be taken up to 625 with Umbral Shards pending you cap out your expertise at 600 for that weapon type. I did not see this boss drop any Obsidium Gypsum, so I am not entirely certain what flags a mob for dropping that. If you need some the easiest way I have found is the Putris camp.

One more of these to go and I will be posting it tomorrow regardless of it being Thanksgiving. I will be EXTREMELY thankful to have this series behind me. Once I have wrapped everything up I will be adding a section to my New World Gametools page with these guides categorized by the weapons that they drop to make things a little easier going forward for someone coming along after this series has finished. I have collected them into a Loot Farms category on my blog. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.