guild wars 1

Druids, Strongholds, and The Searing

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.

I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.

Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.

After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.

What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.

What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.

A Legacy Reforged

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.

Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.

In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.

With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.

I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.

Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.