Gaming

Gaming post

LNR Channel Still Exists

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Good Morning Folks. Last night was “Sibling Time ™” and for the majority of the night, we were just hanging out on voice and talking. I was spun up and needed to vent my grievances towards the medical industry… and I am just getting started, but so fucking tired of everything. Later in the evening, we joined up in Enshrouded and ran around together. Ace is way further progressed than I am, and I abused some of their locations so I could see some of the late-game content. I also abused access to some significantly higher-level mobs to get some really fast levels. The irony is that the legendary gear that I am wearing is way more than capable of taking down these mobs that are roughly 10 levels higher than I am. I experienced my first frostbite, or whatever the effect is called, which threatens you with hypothermia. It was quite a bit of fun, even though it was a pretty short outing.

Ace also showed off this location on the map, where they had access to massive fields for growing crops. Among the gardens, they also created this awful bed of shroud plants, which sort of look like demonic wacky waving arm guys. You can’t get the full effect from a screenshot… but it looks so wrong to be standing here and letting them move around you. I am absolutely going to steal this idea from them for one of my forward bases so that I can use it for crops as well. I need to get more serious about progression in my world, rather than just completing quests. I’ve been so heavily focused on collecting all of the bits and bobs that the NPC crafters are acting for, and spending little to no time actually progressing the state of my world and collecting resources. I really wish the game had a better inventory and storage system, because I hate dealing with a bunch of random boxes full of stuff. I am sure I could, in theory, mod this problem away, but it won’t help me for my multiplayer shenanigans.

I seem to have settled in nicely with World of Warcraft, and I spent some time this morning working on my house. I have an octagon room that I have essentially subdivided into multiple rooms. This is more or less “my” room and represents things that I have collected in my adventures, with one side a small bedroom and the other side an office, that branches off this central chamber that is somewhat of a war room. I downloaded the Homebound addon, and plan on using it to back track and sort out what sorts of things I should go out into the world and farm. This essentially tells you every quest chain that unlocks some sort of housing resource. I will likely focus on the drops first since that is a bit more easily done than going and doing bullshit like the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.

I am also enjoying the content surrounding the guild village that I live in. There are specific endeavors that we can do each week to gain points for the guild, and we have already maxed out the bar as of this morning. It reminds me a bit of the Garrison system, but in the best possible way. I honestly wish they would have embedded some of that functionality in housing, to give us more to do here other than running around and collecting beans and luckydoos. Still, it sort of feels neat to have a village of our own. Coming back to the guild has been interesting because I have been gone for so long that, really… at the end of the day, it ceased to be the guild that I ran eons ago. There are a bunch of the same people, but also a ton of new people that I do not know at all. It will be interesting getting to know folks, especially if I stick around for a while. I might actually force myself onto Discord so I can hang out with folks and speed up the acclimatization process.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time leveling characters, and of all of the random things, I am playing Lodin… who was my very first raid main. Hillariously this character is still in the Late Night Raiders chat channel, and I noticed yesterday that Kerrun was as well. It makes me wonder how many of the active crew are still in that channel. I would sort of expect that maybe Erixi and Kylana were both in it as well. I remembered the /chatwho command so I could list out who was in it. It is weird how many muscle memory things come back to you when you are dropped into a familiar environment with a familiar character. I am, of course, leveling Beast Mastery so that I can have two pets. I should, in theory, be pushing through the remainder of the War Within campaign, but I have been enjoying playing alt characters way too much to focus on anything much.

I’ve also spent a little bit of time over on my Horde main from Facepull, which is my Blood Elf Paladin. I was legally required to go over and set up his outfit so he would stop looking like a mismatched mess on my Warband screen. I have done a bunch of different outfits throughout the years, so I went back with this purple and green illidari theme. I swear I had a mace that worked better with this outfit, but when I was setting things up, I could not seem to find it. I wish the in-game cosmetic system allowed you to search by color palette. There is probably an add-on for this, but I could not be bothered to go looking for one. Chances are someone will respond in the comments with exactly the name of said addon if I wait long enough. I am not sure if I will level as prot like I usually do, or instead go retribution.

Technically, Midnight launches tomorrow if you bought in and got access to the head start. I did this thing, but I am uncertain if I will actually start the new content or instead wrap up the War Within. I know the main story beats so it is not like I need to see the content in order to understand it. This is not Final Fantasy XIV, and I am not waiting with bated breath on the conclusion of a ten-year saga. There has been way too much retconning going on in the World that is Warcraft for me to be super concerned about the purity of the story experience. So essentially, there is nothing much stopping me from diving straight into the new content. Both Belghast and Belgraven are sitting at level 80 thanks to the Twilight Highlands event. It is somewhat hilarious that I have two max-level characters… and they are both warriors. I guess tomorrow will see whether or not I join in the reindeer games.

All of this said… I am having a lot of fun being back in Warcraft.

Two Minutes to Midnight

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Good Morning Folks! Well… I guess I am back in World of Warcraft for a bit. I originally installed it as a bit of a lark, to see what Housing was up to, and wound up getting back into the swing of the game. I missed the majority of the Valentines day event, but I did manage to get a few runs in, which was enough to get this shiny new mount that was apparently available this year. I am missing all of the other mounts, unfortunately. I never got my love rocket, and I never got the broom that they added either. This is not bad luck, however, for having run exactly two queues of the event, I was mostly queueing to see if I could get any of the new housing items, but alas, I did not. However, queuing for this event got me back in the swing of combat, which only further devolved me into the flow of the game. While I have been gone, though the game has been cooking, and it seems like World of Warcraft is in pretty good hands with the current dev team.

I, of course, did what I have always done… and ran a bunch of old raids for gear attempts. I remembered at one point they made it so you could collect transmog appearances from any role, not just the one you were currently on. This makes running these old raids feel significantly better, and all of the tokens that you get for gear sets are warbound and can be dropped in the warband bank. I will be using this later to help fill out missing set pieces on other characters. Yesterday I made quite a bit of progress on Warrior sets, having completed the Destroyer set and the Onslaught set, and then gained a few more pieces of Wrath. There was a time when I had the full Onslaught set, because I wore it back in the day, but apparently, the boots and bracers had gone missing from my bank before the appearance collection became a thing. I need to start working on the Warlords of Draenor sets, because they all looked pretty cool for warriors.

Running all of this content means I am now swimming in old materials and gear pieces. One of the points of realization that I learned in Guild Wars 2 is that the economy there is stable enough that I should really just sell everything and then buy back whatever I happen to need at any given time. Similarly, in Path of Exile, I have actually learned to really enjoy being a vendor and selling stuff to other players. Since World of Warcraft has a much updated Auction House system, I thought I would try my hand at being a vendor here. This largely involved installing and configuring TSM and the tool that stays active in the background and updates the auction house data. All in all, I think it was mostly a success, and on my first day of being a vendor, I sold something in the neighborhood of 28k in gold. This is a pittance compared to the gold that Stargrace brings in regularly, but she is also selling on all of her characters and has done this for a decade now. I am mostly only running auctions on this one character.

In other news, on my Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven, I finished The Ringing Deeps and am trying to figure out how to get the quest starter that sends me to the next zone. All told, the story for the zone was pretty good once I managed to get into it. This was part of why I bounced so hard at the launch of War Within, is that I got to this zone… which, quite honestly, the whole Earthen thing should have been the most “me” story ever, given how much I love Dwarves in general. However, I just struggled to attach to it, and I maybe should have just critical pathed the story rather than trying to do every single side quest in the entire zone. I have been playing too many games that are not World of Warcraft, and got used to the concept that I needed to do side content to progress, whereas this is more like FFXIV in that the side content is entirely for flavor only, and you will get enough experience by largely just doing the Main Story.

Another thing that I got caught up in was doing a meta achievement called Two Minutes to Midnight, which requires you to farm up nineteen rare bosses during the Midnight pre-event that is happening in Twilight Highlands. I was largely obvious to this whole thing and started fairly late in the night… which meant that I stayed up a bit longer than I normally would have yesterday. Essentially, it seems like the Twilight Highlands are on a clock, and every five to ten minutes, a new rare boss spawns, and they all spawn in sequence. So by hopping on this train, I was ultimately able to catch all nineteen of them. The only reason why I did not go to bed at my normal time… is that I did not want to try and coordinate hopping back on the train at exactly the right time. I still wrapped up by 10:30, which is not the end of the world, but it was a lot of flying around the zone and button mashing until I got out the other side.

The benefit of doing this event during prime time is that the bosses and adds go pretty quickly. You have a ten-minute clock that starts when the event spawns, and you have that long to kill enough mobs to trigger the event, then also take down three mini bosses, and the ultimate rare boss, before the timer is up. Each of the encounters has the chance of dropping a set of purple armor and various other resources, but I don’t entirely understand what to do with them yet. Hopping on the train, I was able to farm up every gear slot, plus a cloak, and a ring… and in theory, if the dailies are still available tonight, I will try and knock those out and hopefully pick up the other ring, and an amulet so that this character is relatively well geared going into midnight. Apparently, I purchased a cloak that was not flagged as part of the set piece… which seems like a bug… but if I have more resources left over I will purchase the correctly named cloak.

So at roughly 10:15 last night, I got my last named mob kill and finished the meta achievement. If I had been paying attention to this more I would have tried to run this on multiple characters. I remember an event like this happening in Silithis prior to Battle for Azeroth that effectively worked the same way. I was out there constantly to farm up full sets of gear for almost all of my Horde characters. Maybe it is a miracle that I came in at the last moment and got exactly one set of gear, because otherwise I probably would have burned myself out massively. Grinding is one of those things that I seem to be exceptionally good at, and when there is something like this going on, I can seem to put my head down and push through it. However, once I am finished… I have usually burnt myself out to the point where I just don’t want to play the game anymore, once I have lost that burning focus that was driving me. I seem to have a hard time finding a new focal point once I have accomplished my goal.

As to why I did any of this? A mount of course. You get this shiny new mech suit if you manage to take down all nineteen mini-bosses that are part of this event. I know the head start for the expansion is right around the corner, but supposedly, this event hangs around until the 2nd when the expansion fully launches. I think I will probably be spending that time trying to get through the main story quest rather than grinding up additional characters. I think I have the desire to actually try and play this expansion when it drops now. It is weird how I have gone from logging in on a lark to actually starting to mainline the damned game again. Damn you, Blizzard, for getting your hooks in me at least temporarily. I fully expect to drop this at least for the short term when Path of Exile Mirage launches on the sixth, but given how much I seem to bounce between games right now, and how I played Destiny Rising the entire time during the last league… I might find room for Warcraft as well.

AggroChat #558 – Fun with Sandworms

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

Hey Folks! This week, we talk about Dune Awakening and how many updates have been made since we last gave it a spin.  Shortly after last week’s episode, Tam fired up the private server again, and we have been enjoying the changes. From there, we talk a bit about Enshrouded and Ace and Bel exploring the Hollow Halls, which is essentially that game’s version of a raid dungeon. Ash, Kodra, and Tam talk about trying to shape their runs in Shape of Dreams, and from there, we talk a bit about Towerbolt.  Tam continues to dig deeper into Star Trek Online and begins engaging with proper buildcraft.  Lastly, we have a few quick topics as we discuss the Last Epoch Season 4 trailer and the upcoming Path of Exile Mirage league.

Topics Discussed

  • Dune Awakening
    • Mea Culpa Patch
  • Enshrouded
    • Hollow Halls
  • Shape of Dreams
    • Run Shaping
  • Towerbolt
  • Star Trek Online
    • Buildcraft
  • Last Epoch Season 4
  • Path of Exile Mirage

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sibling Time

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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.