gw2 Archives - Page 6 of 7 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Defeating Ranger Personal Story

February 16, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! Over the last week, I’ve found myself fading away from Path of Exile more and more and diving further into Guild Wars 2 again. I am sure the tables will flip when the new Diablo III Season 28 rolls out or the Last Epoch Multiplayer patch drops in March, but I am primarily mainlining Guild Wars. For a while, I have been focused more on my Longbow Soulbeast Ranger as opposed to my far further progressed Pistol/Staff Harbinger Necromancer. I just find the Ranger much easier to drop in and out of content, and the extreme ranger of the longbow means that I can cheese a lot of world boss mechanics by simply standing out of the range of attacks. I still enjoy the Necromancer, but there is just something that I enjoy about the bow-style gameplay as opposed to the much shorter-range pistol I use on Harbinger.

So as a result I have been working a bit on catching up with that character and starting to finally chew through the story content. Essentially my goal in doing this is to be able to unlock all of the content that I don’t currently have access to and in theory, begin doing things like strikes and later zone metas as a Ranger. Last night I pushed through the rest of the personal story and started the beginnings of Living World Season 1. My intent is to burn through all of the story content in the order that it was intended, and while I know I won’t be caught up for a long time it is at least some forward momentum. I’ve been slowly chipping away at upgrading to ascended gear, and the biggest obstacle standing in my way at the moment is leveling Huntsman from 425 where I currently am to 500 so I can craft myself a bow.

I’ve also been logging in every day on the Necromancer and farming some of the zone currencies that I can use to complete a few of my accessory slots. At the moment I am farming Winterberries in Bitterfrost Frontier each day and Blish HUD makes that a trivial process. Essentially it marks the location of every Winter Berry Bush, and you just run around until you have made all those icons disappear from your viewport. In total it takes me maybe fifteen minutes given that you often have to fight a veteran monster at each spawn point. The thing that is a major pain in the ass is just how expensive leveling from 425 to 500 in any trade skill is. It is enough of a pain that I even contemplated just going for the Legendary Kudzu instead given that I have crafted a lot of the sub-components that it would need already.

In Guild Wars 2 your “home instance” serves as this game’s version of housing, and every major city has a home instance that you can access themed around that particular setting. My favorite of these is the one in Rata Sum only because the nodes you can farm every day are much more conducive to quickly gathering them. I’ve started to collect cats for my home instance, and a few days ago when I zoned in… they left me a present by the portal. On the ground was a “Dead Bird” that I could interact with and ultimately clean up after them. Growing up the cats we had used to leave us offerings of crawdad claws on the front porch to show what a good hunter they were. If I was not already in love with this game, this dumb feature would have been the thing that tipped me over.

I also recently had to pick up a microtransaction at the shop. As part of the End of Dragons expansion, you gain access to a fishing skiff and there are various skins you can buy to give it a different appearance. I periodically browse the store to see what new items have been released, and when I saw this Viking Longboat-themed design, I had to pick it up. My two primary characters are both beefy boy Norns and this just feels more natural than the lithe skiffs that I normally see. Not that I use my skiff a ton, because generally speaking the skimmer mount is a much better way to travel across the water. At some point, I might get engaged with the fishing mini-game, but as of yet it really has not grabbed hold of me.

Other than chewing away on story content, I am still periodically dropping into the odd world boss kill. My favorites are Tequatl, The Shatterer, and Drakkar because they are the most epic feeling. Generally speaking, I try and get in on the 6 CST server reset Tequatl kill each day, and then depending on how long it takes me to do my daily quests and farm the home instance and guild halls, I will drop into whatever other bosses sound fun to me at the time and are currently available. For those who are uninitiated, the World Bosses in Guild Wars 2 spawn on a rotating schedule and there are a number of resources you can check to see what is up currently. If you are willing to spend some shop currency there is a World Boss Portal Device that I use which will teleport you to the portal nearest the boss (even if you don’t have it unlocked) and tell you what fights are coming up shortly. This only works on the Tyria fight, but a lot of the heavily farmed ones are on that rotation including all of the ones I mentioned.

I am happy to be back in the swing of Guild Wars 2. I honestly thought it would be Final Fantasy XIV that caught my attention first since I did get a house over there. Right now I just seem to be more into the action gameplay style, and combat in FFXIV feels sluggish. There is also not really a game mode that I can drop into as easily as I can in Guild Wars 2, which also feels like forward momentum. At some point I will catch up on the story there as well, but since I am listening to Audiobooks while playing… I am not sure I can handle the FFXIV story right now.

Yup Books and Games

February 7, 2023 by Belghast

One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.

One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.

I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.

I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.

What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.

All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.

With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.

A Very ARPG Year

February 1, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I spent a bit of time yesterday setting up my bookwyrm profile and loading the books that I have already read this year into it. So far I dig it. Unlike Good Reads it does appear to be an entirely manual process. This morning for example I updated my progress in The Exiled Fleet and it just required me to plug in a page number that I was sitting on. As a result, I am probably not really going to be updating progress that often and simply adding a book when I start reading it and then marking it as read, and writing some general comments about my experience. The other aspect of the tool that I want to explore a bit more is using it as a cache of books that I want to read. Libby does not exactly have the best discovery engine, so my goal is to use the “To Read” section as a sort of memory-jogging mechanism when I find I am looking for something new to consume.

What I had feared might happen… has happened. I am around 60% through The Exiled Fleet and my hold for the last Dresden novel has come open. Essentially as I understand it I have three days from the time of receiving the notice to claim it or else the book goes to the next person in line and I keep my “next in line” spot. My hope is that I can push through the novel I am currently reading in the next few days so that I can go ahead and claim my spot and go back to the gaming/audiobook nonsense that I enjoy so greatly. This is the part of the library system that I do not love… is the inherent pressure of trying to churn through something in a specific amount of time. As a result last night I spend most of the evening reading rather than gaming, which was its own sort of charming. My wife is admittedly a bit flabbergasted by this sudden transformation because reading all night is her jam, not necessarily mine.

That is not to say I am doing zero gaming. I am starting to poke my head back into Guild Wars 2 a bit, because I’ve been craving that sort of gameplay. I seem to be very much in this ARPG/Action MMO mindset right now and after coming from Path of Exile, I have to admit Lord of the Rings Online was a little slow for my tastes right now. I am easing back into Guild Wars 2 by spending some time doing the world boss train. I think ultimately however I will pick up and start working on the main/expansion stories with my Ranger. I am not sure what shifted mentally but I just started enjoying running around with my Ranger a bit more than I did my Necromancer.

I’ve also been playing a bit more Last Epoch and currently am really enjoying the Acolyte class which will eventually become a Necromancer. After decades of avoiding casters like the plague… which admittedly is probably a defunct saying given that we had a plague and no one avoided it… I actually find that I enjoy casters quite a bit these days. Most of the classes that I have played in Path of Exile ultimately end up being some sort of a caster given that melee is just not great there. While I enjoyed my Paladin character in Last Epoch, I think I am enjoying being a Necromancer a bit more. With the upcoming Multiplayer release, I figured it was time for me to finally get a character to the game’s endgame. I don’t think Last Epoch will be anywhere near as rich as Path of Exile but I am hoping it will be a better “with friends” experience.

I do not exactly feel great playing Blizzard games right now. I know that there have been significant changes inside of the company, but so long as Kotick still profits from it… I feel more than a little dirty spending time on those games. That said… I will be pausing my prohibition for a bit and diving into Diablo III Season 28 soon. It looks fucking amazing and this may be the last new season we get for a while, given that Diablo IV will be launching before we see another season. I figure a lot of the live team currently supporting Diablo III will end up getting transitioned. Mostly I am really interested in the Altar of rites which is a system where you sacrifice various things and get permanent account-wide buffs. Some of these give you significant amounts of power and others are just quality of life like the ability for your pets to pick up and salvage white, blue, and yellow items. I am deeply interested in this season, and in theory… once it has run its course I will have either Multiplayer in Last Epoch or another Path of Exile league to focus on.

Basically, it feels like this is going to be a very ARPG year for me. I knew at some point I would be playing Jedi Survivor but with it being bumped back by another month yesterday that gives me a bit more wiggle room to fully dive into this nonsense.

AggroChat #417 – 2022 Games of the Year Show – Part One

January 8, 2023 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks! It is that time again for our multi-part episode as we talk about the games that were important to us specifically during 2022. A bit of a reminder for anyone who has not heard one of these shows before, we are not necessarily only talking about games that were released in 2022. If we were late playing a game but it was extremely important to us, it might still get the nod here.

Something that is working slightly differently this year is generally speaking we record a marathon show that runs about 3-4 Hours and then I crudely carves it up into multiple shows. However, what happens is we have one show that is full of short topics and another show that has all of the long discussions. This year I sorted the list so we got a blend of single honorable mention picks and meaty multi-member picks in the same show. We are also recording it two weeks apart so none of us have to deal with the late night that this show always brought on.

Hopefully, the changes lead to a better listening experience. So in this episode, we are going to talk about the first half of our games of the year, and next week we will continue with the rest.