games

Reekwater Mosswater Bourg Farm

by

Good Morning Friends! I still have a large stack of these camps to go through and this morning we are going to introduce a pretty enjoyable one. If you are Syndicate faction and have done all of your promotion quests, you will recognize this location because this is where Lost Alchemist Krockes spawns. However, he is not really who we are focused on because all of the good stuff actually drops from his pet alligator named Putris. Krockes also has a good drop on his table, but the vast majority of what we care about is sitting on the gator… but we will be killing both each time. The only real interruptions out here will be from other folks farming for drops or for syndicate players trying to complete the quest. Please let them do so and if you find them wandering around aimlessly… maybe send them a tell to let them know it is about to spawn again.

This is located due west of Reekwater town, and is on the border of Windsward… but entering in from that direction will just mean you have to clear away more encounters as the density of mobs is thickest along that edge. If you were being very careful you could honestly probably avoid fighting anything on your way to Krockes and Putris. There are a good number of spawns along the road however and if you stray off the path there is at least one of those silver-colored alpha wolves. Both encounters drop a piece of tradeskill gear, so it is actually fairly likely that you might encounter someone else farming with you. As always this is a good opportunity to group up and make a new friend as you while away the hours of farming for that drop you need. Krockes drops Obsidian Gypsum so he is a pretty easy way to farm your daily three.

All told it is a really great general camp especially for Dexterity-focused builds given you can pick up a Greatsword, Rapier, and Spear that are all drift compatible with that lifestyle. For those of you on Team Strength, then there isn’t much at all that is going to interest you. I do really like the Void Gauntlet overall since I tend to go down the tree that it is buffing. However, one thing I have noticed is it is like AGS over-compensated and puts twice as many Void Gauntlets, Greatswords, and Blunderbusses out in the world than they did other weapon types. Let’s dive into a rundown of the notable drops:

Another interesting side effect of this camp is you are very likely to walk away with a bag full of various legendary crafting materials. I think I farmed this for around four hours to get all of the drops. I saw 1 rapier, 1 greatsword, 3 void gauntlets, 5 spears, and around a dozen different legendary materials. You will also walk away with stacks of the highest-tier potions, which is admittedly one of the positives of the farmer lifestyle. I really need to track down a Strength-Based spear, but so far I have yet to find one… at least not from a farmable camp like this.

I believe I have six more of these waiting in the wings now, pending I don’t find any new ones to run off into the world and document. As always I have collected these in a Loot Farms category here on the blog, and I think my plan once completed is to add something to the Game Tools page that breaks the information out by weapon type. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.

Edengrove Tadeas Stronghold Farm

by

Good Morning Friends! Today we continue this mission to document gear farms in New World with one located near Valor Hold in Edengrove. Again this entire mission is to present some options for new to 60 players to go out and farm up some of the 590 named items that won’t degrade in level when you use them. This camp in particular is a little bit on the tougher side because it involves three spawns that are a challenge to split up. The one that drops what we need is Taedas an Angry Earth shaman-type creature, but spawning with it is a prowler melee type and an archer ranged type Angry Earth. Essentially breaking this spawn will always be a bit of a challenge, but in theory, if you can drag out your initial kill so that you leave yourself some breathing room between kills, it will make subsequent loops easier on you as they won’t ALL be spawning in at the same time. All three encounters should spawn in at level 57, which is doable for a reasonably geared level 60 solo.

This one is pretty close to the Valor Hold stronghold in Edengrove, which is the southernmost of the two outposts. You can get there by exiting the west side of town and hugging the eastern bank of the lake until you reach a set of ruins called Taedas Stronghold. The first part of your journey will have a lot of very aggro boars, but then will quickly transition into peaceful ones and the occasional random Angry Earth mob. If you hug the mountainside of the shoreline you can avoid most of these. Sadly there isn’t really anything interesting resource-wise to be gathered along the way other than boar hides. As you get closer to the ruins there will be an increased density of Angry Earth and breaking into the camp will involve clearing two sets of prowler/archer spawns. One interesting thing of note, there is an empty room that you can crawl into on the south side of the ruins if you need to take a break while farming.

It was really at this farm that I began to understand the extent of my madness. In order to verify these drops I wanted to make sure that I was able to get all of them. As I said in my last post, the New World Databases have been notoriously wrong about drops and still have things listed that have not dropped in a number of patches. This means that in many cases I have to spend an extreme amount of time doing the same kill over and over. I think on this camp it took me about four hours to see all of the drops in the rotation but during that time I got 4 of the Life Staff, 1 Void Gauntlet, and 1 Hammer which was the last thing I managed to pick up before dipping. Let’s take a look at the notable drops:

As I said above I spent about four hours at this camp and during that time I saw six drops off the 590 loot table. Four of those were the staff, and I got a single hammer and void gauntlet. This is not going to be a fast way to get gear unless you are exceedingly lucky, but it is predictable and can be farmed without a group. This again can be taken all of the ways to 625 with the use of Umbral Shards and the upgrade mechanic for gear level 590 or higher. Tadeas also has a chance of dropping legendary crafting materials, but during my four-hour stint, I did not see any drop. You will also get a lot of high-level potions and assorted crafting materials that drop from Angry Earth in general. It is a bit of a boring farm especially due to the low-lighting conditions within the temple itself, but if you need any of the items above it is worth your time.

I have at least two more of these documented so far, and plan on trying a few more spots over the weekend so expect to see this series continue at least into next week. Do you know any great spots that I should check out? Drop me a line below.

License Portability

by

Golden Age of Ports

MortalKombatVersions

This morning is going to be yet another stunning example of “Bel Wants a Thing that Will Never Happen”, but I am going to roll with it anyways.  One of my big frustrations over the last several years is when I end up repurchasing the same game for a different platform.  For example I owned Fallout 3 long before Steam existed, but because I wanted the convenience of being able to play that game without having to rummage for discs every single time…  I ended up picking the game of the year edition on a steam sale.  But more often than this there are games that I have on the PC that I wish I could play on a console, or on a console and wish I could play on a PC.  Last night there was a discussion about the new Shovel Knight patch, and one of my immediate thoughts was…  man I kinda wish I had that on my 3DS since I have taken recently to bringing that to work to play.  Sure it isn’t terribly annoying to repurchase a $20 game, but it certainly feels it when you are talking about a $60 game.  Now we get to my wish…  portable licensing.  What I mean by that is the ability to swap licensing between various game systems that a game is available.  Don’t want to play Borderlands 2 on your PC anymore?  Fine trade that license in for the PS4 copy, and when you tire of that the Vita copy.

The problem is you are immediately going to tell me…  “but Bel this is how game companies make money, by releasing their game on every possible platform in the hopes that you will play pokegame with them and buy them all!”  Sure that is how things seem to work currently, but is that really a good model?  For years there was a significant amount of work porting games between consoles.  The Sega Genesis was a vastly different system than the Super Nintendo… and we constantly saw massive differences between the games that ended up on both platforms.  I took the liberty of snagging two screenshots of two different versions of Mortal Kombat II, from the golden age of porting games to multiple platforms.  You can see a bunch of graphical differences between the two based on the limitations of each architecture.  What has changed is the fact that console manufacturers do not have the same sort of pull that they used to.  PC Gaming became a major contender as has handheld platforms, and while console manufacturers still desperately cling to the notion of “exclusivity” this is a dying concept.  Systems are designed from the ground up to be essentially easy to port code to, because they know that the keys to their success is a huge library of popular games.

License Portability

2822353-sk_plagueofshadows_05

There are certain games out there that you know will ultimately end up on every single platform.  Take the example of the new Tomb Raider game that Microsoft claims to have exclusivity over.  They have not so subtly chosen their words every single time they have talked about and used the specific phrasing of “exclusive for holiday 2015”.  That means a few months after Christmas 2015 you will end up with a new launch for the PS4 and PC and whatever other platforms seem to matter at the time.  Essentially what I am proposing is to cut through this bullshit and simply sell licenses that you can move back and forth between the platforms.  I can see this going down one of several different ways, but not all of them are terribly easy to implement.  The best scenario is simply that if you purchase the game directly from a developer, you can create an account that allows you to log in and get a new license for whatever platform you happen to play the game on.  That means you are paying a non-discounted rate for the game, directly to the game developer cutting out the middle man…  and for that you gain the privilege of playing that game on whatever platform you happen to desire doing so.  There are a lot of logistics with this one, but I could see it working for someone like Ubisoft that already has their own gaming infrastructure in the form of UPlay.  That would actually turn that system from being a liability into being a positive for users, because as of right now… there is no reason for UPlay to exist other than to annoy us.

Another option would be some sort of a license swap scenario, where you trade in one license key for a new license key for the system of your choosing.  This honestly would work similar to PC software that allows you to install on a fixed number of machines.  In these cases there is almost always an online tool that allows you to unbind a license from a specific machine and install it fresh on another to allow for things like system rebuilds.  The problem being that right now there is no real way to make sure these licenses are leaving circulation, as in once a game is granted through a system like PSN, it becomes harder to revoke the game since you are having to deal with a third party company doing it for you.  The final option I would suggest is probably the easiest.  When you own the game on any platform you could purchase heavily discounted copies of the game for other platforms.  My theory is that you would ultimately end up paying something along the lines of 15-20% of the cost of the original game to get a new copy of the game for another platform. The problem here is that a system like this would be rife with potential abuse.  What is to say that I don’t buy the game on the PS4, and then get a discount key for my friend to play on their Xbox One.  The worse case scenario is after market sales of said discount keys.  None of these solutions are perfect, but I feel like if someone actually solved this solution… it would be a huge marketing point for any games they produce.  I have several PCs, a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS, PS Vita, Android device, and iOS device if you limit the search to only the more recent systems.  It would be amazing to play the gamesI want to play on whatever systems they are available…  without going bankrupt doing so.

 

Trove Crafting

by

First Winter

One of the things about weight loss that no one really told me is the fact that I would go from being very hot natured, to freezing all of the time.  This is the first winter after losing roughly seventy pounds so far, and I have to say it is a pretty miserable thing.  I am absolutely living in this Carhart black zip up hoodie.  I pretty much wear it over everything, because it keeps me at least somewhat warm.   I keep hoping that eventually my internal body temperature will regulate and I will get used to having less insulation.  It is essentially the same feeling as you have when you have just gotten a long overdue hair cut… but instead of my head being cold it is my entire body.

I am not complaining, the weight loss has had many other tangible benefits.  However as “snowmageddon” barrels down on my area I find myself shivering quite a bit.  We are supposed to get all manner of icy nastiness dumped on us around noon.  I am hoping that either it gets delayed long enough for me to get home tonight, or that it is not nearly as severe as they are expecting.  I am not really looking forward my normally fifteen minute commute turning into an hour and a half as everyone suddenly forgets how to drive.  At least my coffee helps warm me up.

Trove Crafting

 

Released another Trove video yesterday, this time covering the brand new crafting system patch.  I have to say I am impressed with the game so far.  The biggest thing for me was the addition of the ability to craft health potions.  This has enabled me to make some really bad decisions and survive.  I think over the course of the evening last night I much have gone through 30-40.  Each time I saw a bottle plant I made a beeline for it just so I could make some more.  Right now everything tends to drop monster parts, which I am guessing is a generic placeholder material that will eventually be updated to be various specific things.  Currently a Health Potion is 1 bottle from a bottle plant and 1 monster part, which makes them extremely easy to craft.

Similarly they have made bombs extremely costly to craft, and as a result the world is not nearly as marred with bomb holes.  I don’t even make them anymore, because really I don’t find them that useful even in combat with monsters.  In the video I could not figure out for the life of me why I was unable to make bombs… but then upon re-watching it I face-palmed over the fact that I simply could not count.  I want to say I was missing fire flower parts, or something like that.  The crafting system is actually really efficient so far, and I like it overall quite a bit more than I did the Minecraft one..  especially when it comes to bulk crafting.

Acheesements

2013-12-05 06_18_20-Achievements - Community - World of Warcraft

Since today is ending up a bit of a mixed bag update post, I figured I would also talk a bit about what I am doing over in World of Warcraft.  A group of friends and I have been knocking out the various achievements needed for Glory of the Pandaria Hero.  I am within a stones throw now of completing it, but at the same time we are catching up a player that has next to none of them.  What is going to be most time consuming I fear is finishing off Polyformic Acid Science.  Right now I think I have 3 of the 6 kills.  However I just found out that you can go into normal mode, solo the instance, get the vial and then hold onto it to give you double the amount of time to get through all the mobs for the achievement.

Past that I am working on farming Motes of Harmony on my Paladin to make weapon upgrades for my various characters.  That is the glaring flaw I have seen so far with the timeless isle.  You get really nice gear to catch you up, but it lacks anything even remotely similar for weapons.  The weapons you can buy off the timeless isle vendors are only ilvl 476, which are the same as the epic weapons that drop from the early heroic instances.  I feel like what we are missing are the Icecrown 5 mans.  They were a really good way during Wrath of the Lich King to help catch alts up, and the weapons there were viable enough to raid with, at least until you can get something better.  As a result I have several 90s with full timeless gear, but walking around with a 450 blue weapon simply because there is no really effective way to improve that.

I am not looking forward to working through the halfhill farm again, but I am thinking that might be something I just need to bite the bullet and do on my characters that seem to be mote starved.  At least that way you get roughly one spirit of harmony a day guaranteed.  I really wish blizzard would apply a patch and make Spirits bind on account.  On Belgrave for example, I have 5 stacks of them in the bank… because there really is very little you can use them on as an inscriptionist.  However every other crafter is starving for them, and ends up spending them on something the moment they get more.  I hope in general as we go forward into Warlords of Draenor that more things become bind on account.  I feel like the ability to trade items freely between characters can only be a net positive.  The more alts someone rolls, the more time they spend playing the game…  which in generally makes them less likely to unsubscribe and go elsewhere.