Gaming

Gaming post

Machinist to Ninety

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a lot of this weekend catching up on Final Fantasy XIV stuff. I talked a bit about this last week but the character that I took through Endwalker was a Paladin aka a Tank. I did not really want to slide back into the game and experience the content… in a job with quite as much responsibility as a tank. Given especially how much the FFXIV community is on the “BIG PULLS” bandwagon usually… I want to just chill out in the background and play a class that no one respects much from. I like the feel of the Machinist animations, so I opted to push that up. I managed to hit level 90 relatively easily by running a combination of Duty Support dungeons, daily frontline, and starting to chip away at the new combat beast tribe quests in Thavnair.

Rather than pestering friends, I wound up buying a set of gear for a little less than a million gil. This might not have been the most cutting-edge gear but it should be able to take me all the way through the new story content, while also hopefully picking up a handful of pieces along the way. I think my goal is to get caught up on the story and then maybe do some of the additional content like the Alliance Raids that I have missed, and maybe the 8-player content on the easiest difficulties. Pending the next expansion comes with Duty Support… I might just level a DPS character from the start so I don’t run into this problem at the end of the expansion when I want to play catch-up, but don’t feel like tanking.

One of the things that I unlocked over the weekend is the next Deep Dungeon system that is Crystal Tower themed. One of the weird things that bugs me is the gaps in these systems. Palace of the Dead the original Deep Dungeon takes you to level 50 extremely easily… but then Heaven on High does not start until level 61. HoH will take you pretty easily to level 70… but again you have this huge gap between when it stops and level 81 required to do the new one Eureka Orthos. Prior to the launch of Endwalker I managed to get all of my jobs at the time to level 80, so that means I am going to have to put on at least one level before I can step foot into the new Deep Dungeon. This morning I started working on Samurai as my next job to level and knocked out Thavnair dailies and then a set of the Fae dailies from Shadowbringers as that is still reasonable experience.

Mostly I plan on leveling classes that share a gear set, because that way I can get rid of excess gear that I have lying around for them. I really really need to clean out my retainers and just shred any gear that I don’t need to make room. I’ve not touched Reaper or Sage so at some point I will probably level those as well. For the moment though I plan on knocking out Monk and Samurai largely because those were the gearsets that I had completed and did not need to do anything in order to switch to… other classes I will have to sort out what is missing from my inventory before I can swap over to them. Technically leveling bard would make a lot of sense given that I just finished up Machinist, but I think I removed some of the lower-level Dex ranged gear from my inventory while leveling and trying to make room for things.

All in all I have been enjoying myself, but mostly because I am biding my time for the next Path of Exile event. I have a feeling that it is going to take me a while to get caught up in the story because when I am working my way through an audiobook, I can’t really do story content. It was cool to get in over the weekend and get invited to the assorted Fediverse-based Cross World Link Shells, so it will be nice to get to know all of those folks a bit better and maybe even run content with them at some point.

AggroChat #454 – World of Wonder

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Screen Card for Episode #454 of the AggroChat podcast showing Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen with a screenshot of Super Mario Wonder in the background featuring Elephant Mario.

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

Hey Folks! We are back but still down several members of our crew.  This week we start off with some discussion about Diablo IV Season 2 and whether or not the game is good now.  From there we talk a lot about the events of the Star Citizen CitizenCon.  Super Mario Wonder has come out and we talk about the experiences with the game so far.  Tam talks a bit about Endless Dungeon and how it might actually be fun in multiplayer.  Kodra shares some news about an upcoming SudokuCon Fundraiser stream he is going to be part of this week.  Finally, we talk a bit about Cities: Skylines 2 and the changes it brings to the genre.

Topics Discussed:

  • Diablo IV is Good Now?
    • Season of Blood Review
  • CitizenCon
    • Did you hold the line?
  • Super Mario Wonder
  • Endless Dungeon
  • SudokuCon Fundraiser Stream
  • Cities: Skylines 2

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

An Evening with the Scions

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I’ve most definitely reached this place in Diablo IV where my only real progression comes in the form of lucky drops from the World Boss. At this point, I have item level 925 items in every slot but my Chestpiece and Two-Handed Hammer weapon and it is all up to the luck of the draw when I finally replace those. I am using a unique main weapon that is going to be a bit harder to replace than your average hammer. Given that I am getting zero benefit from Whispers Caches and the Bloodtide event… I am guessing that means I would have to grind up to high levels of Nightmare Dungeons to actually find some viable drops again. As a result, I am mostly only logging in for World Boss kills.

I could always fall back on playing some Path of Exile, but I do not really want to burn myself out further knowing that I really want to play next Friday when the Sentinel/Kalandra event starts. At the moment I think I am going to try out leveling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as an alternative for when we start “Bel League” at the beginning of 3.23 in December. Mostly I want to test that out as an alternative to Juggernaut because it is so much easier to get maximum resistances on and we won’t likely have access to Legacy of Fury boots for quite some time. Hinekora’s Wrath gives a nice big explosion that is actually better than the Maven Boots but I will be missing a lot of the bonuses that you get as a Juggernaut for survival purposes. It won’t be as sturdy, but hopefully, the big explosions will make up for it.

What I did instead last night was poke my head back into Final Fantasy XIV and do something more than playing the daily cactpot and reset the demolition timer on my house. I’ve been in this weird place with FFXIV for a while now because I leveled a Paladin through Endwalker. Playing a tank is not really conducive to easing back into a game in a low-pressure manner. I did not last long enough in Endwalker to actually get to the point of leveling a DPS alt, which has made it a bit hard for me to summon the desire to come back in earnest.

Yesterday however I remembered that Duty Support exists, and is no longer the massive pain in the ass that leveling the trust system was. This has allowed me to pick up where I left off on my Machinist and run some low-key chill dungeons with my Scion friends. Sure it is a bit boring to keep running the same dungeon over and over… but that is probably what I would be doing anyway with a pack of random strangers. I might as well ease back into the game with friendly bots that are not going to hassle me over dumb mistakes I make while I get used to the game again.

It has to be said that right now Final Fantasy XIV feels really odd. It has been a very long time since I have played a purely hotbar combat MMORPG. Over the last few years, I have either been playing ARPGs or Guild Wars 2 and New World… both of which are way more closely related to an Action MMO than their earlier hotbar cousins. The first time I needed to get out of an AOE I instinctively tried to hit my usual dodge roll button… and was really sad when I remembered that Final Fantasy XIV does not have something like that. The game feels very “old” when it comes to design… but again I think it is more something that I will have to get used to.

Largely I want to get to the point where I can catch up in the story, and grind out some gear so that I can get ready for the next expansion. I am going to give it a shot even though I largely felt like FFXIV storywise wrapped up in a good place with Endwalker. I think Guild Wars 2 might be more my speed as far as MMORPGs go, because I have gotten used to more active combat but by the end of the evening I did finally start to hit my stride. I know FFXIV is probably never going to be my main game again because my tastes have changed a bit but I do want to get back to a point where I can have fun with it again.

Kalandra Redemption Arc?

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Last night I wound up playing Diablo IV again. I am not really certain how much longer I will be lingering in this game, but I realized after yesterday’s post how close I was to finishing the 90 levels of the Battle Pass system. For reference, I dinged 80 this morning while I was in the game taking some screenshots, and dinged 90 on the Battle Pass around the time I hit 79, so it is easily done on a single character without partaking of the nonsense “accelerated” version. This honestly makes me feel much better about the battle pass as a whole because it seems significantly less grindy than what I experienced with Destiny 2. As far as the seasonal achievements… it is really asking me to get a character through all of the end-game boss fights, and if I actually stick around to grind out the next 20 levels… I might care about those.

While I greatly enjoy Legions and the “Bloodtide” events, I have reached a point in progression where I only really care about the World Bosses. The World Bosses can drop item level 925 gear, and so far I have picked up six pieces in total with a few spares sitting in the bank. No event other than the World Boss seems to be capable of dropping gear that high level, or at least I have not ground up Nightmare Dungeons to the point where they can given that I am around the level 21-25 range with them currently. Legions, Bloodtide, and Helltide all seem incapable of dropping anything decent yet so that puts me in the awkward position of not really caring about much loot that is dropping save for hunting for the handful of legendary affixes that I care about and lining up some spare aspects to extract.

Mechanically the game is still quite fun, but I am reaching the point where I am grinding for the sake of grinding. Otherwise, I can just keep the D4Armory Events page up and pop in right before a World Boss spawn. I ran a handful more Nightmare Dungeons and they are sort of in the “aggressively fine” state where I am getting enough map drops that I can salvage the ones with the affixes that I don’t care for, and then craft more of hopefully the ones that I don’t mind too much. I know I complained the other day about Drifting Shadows… but honestly, that is one of the better options that does not seem to impede too much on the fun of romping through the dungeon. I still do not think the state of dungeons in general is good, but it is at least something to do and I should probably spend more time leveling my glyphs.

Path of Exile released a trailer and some general announcement notes about the November events that will be taking place starting next Friday. There is no Endless Delve as folks had thought, and instead, the first event is a return of the Krangled league… where all of the passive tree and ascendancy nodes are jumbled making it almost impossible to build a viable character. This is going to get a hard pass from me, but the next one is a revisiting of the league mechanics from Sentinel and Kalandra… both of which I actually enjoyed so I am probably going to try league starting an RF Chieftain during this event. Lastly is a league called Shifting Stones where every map will have a super juiced version of the Atlas passives applied to it, and what each map gives you will shift every 15 minutes. If I am feeling up to it I might throw together something quickly just to play with that. If you get a character to at least level 50 in two of the three events, you will get a loot box… which legitimately is not that big of a reward but at least something.

I am legitimately hoping that the Sentinel/Kalandra league means that we might see a revisiting of these two mechanics in Standard with 3.23. I always thought that the Kalandra mechanic specifically was very interesting, but just happened to land at a time when the sandbox state of the game was not great. Had it released in place of say Crucible, when the balance of the league was very strong… I think it would have been significantly better received. It has a really bad taste in most players’ mouths because the game itself was in a bad state at that moment, so maybe this event will give it a bit of a redemption arc. Players have also been begging for Sentinel’s recombinator system to go standard for a while. If nothing else it will be an interesting week to get in and revisit all of this for seven days.

Lastly, I wrapped up The Peripheral by William Gibson last night and enjoyed it enough to start the second part of the unfinished “Jackpot Trilogy” immediately following. I’ve been a fan of Gibson since first reading Neuromancer, but I got out of the habit of rabidly consuming everything he released. I caught part of The Peripheral series on Amazon and liked it quite a bit, which prompted me to try out the novel given that the series was not picked up for additional seasons. All in all, it was a good novel with memorable characters, but maybe not the high point of my year so far. I am going to at least make my way through the second novel and then be sitting and waiting for the release of the third.