Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 Post

Praise the Chinchilla

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a pretty great night, but it was one in fairly benign and quiet ways. Due to the holidays and having an exceptionally busy week, Ace and I did not manage to connect and do our normal Tuesday weekly reset nonsense in Destiny Rising. We did however manage to squeeze in a bit of play time last night, which was fortuitous because it also represented the reset of the Calamity Ops period so that we could grind up to promotion status again. We had two really chill Grandmaster Blitz runs, and then a pretty awful Calamity Ops run that knocked the wind out of our sails. However we were determined to at least knock out the 1 million points contribution score and in our second round we got a really solid player that managed to get us over 350k score and unlocked the Calamity Ops title for both of us. We did a few more runs after that and both went pretty smoothly, indicating that really that first player was just awful.

Right now The Dawning event is going on in Destiny Rising, as is it also going on in Destiny 2. However the two events are fairly wildly different… namely because in Rising… we have an animal mascot called the Dawning Chinchilla. We have no clue WHERE the Chinchilla came from or why… but we have a statue of it in our guild hall. In truth it does not look like any Chinchilla I have ever known… and I have had several friends that kept them as pets. Instead it sort of looks like a sheep version of the FFXIV fat cat minion, that has some sort of campfire attached to its back via a saddle. None of this really makes a damned bit of sense in the theme of a holiday event, but I don’t care. I love this thing. It makes me happy when I see it… so I guess mission accomplished. I kind of want to figure out a way to get this model outside of the game and print one.

The other thing that I really enjoy about Destiny Rising is the random names people come up with. Occasionally they really commit super hard to a bit. For example this is Stain, and they were in several of the Blitz runs last night. Notice that they applied the white explosion sticker to the crotch region. There are levels of nonsense applied in this game that I have only seen in the nameplates in FFXIV. We also ran around with a character named “LadyMan” which… I am not sure if it was an attempt to say LadysMan or what… but regardless memorable. It is weird how often I run into the same players over and over while doing content in the game. It does make me a bit concerned as to whether or not this game has much of a population if I keep seeing the same people. I hope it can afford to stay active because I love it very much. It is a game that I did not know I needed in my life, but absolutely do. Because if nothing else it gives Ace and I an excuse to do focused nonsense every single week.

After running around in Destiny Rising, I joined in our normal Thursday night grouping in Guild Wars 2 with Ammo, Ashgar, Sita, and Sol. There is an event going on right now where if you do 5 events in each of the 5 starter zones, you get a weapon and a 20 slot bag. So we ripped through some events in Queensdale, Wayfarer Foothills, and Metrica Province. That will leave each of us up to doing Caledon Forest and Plains of Ashford on our own, because I believe this event will be over by the time we meet up next week… and due to the Holiday I am doubting we are able to meet up anyways. Between spending quality sibling time with Ace, and grouping with the GW2 crew… it helped immensely. Friends really are a delightful panacea and I need to put myself out there more often for hanging on voicechat time. I think I probably need it more now than I ever did, because I live such a solitary life after the passing of my spouse. Sure I talk to my cats… and they talk back… they just don’t say anything that I can actually understand.

In other news I am happy to announce that I have my first STL part to release to the general public. When I was cleaning out my garage I put in these shelving units from Sam’s Club, and they have these little slots in the sides of them so you can either connect them to other units or hang these hooks that they come with off of them. I wanted to design some other utility objects to connect to these slots and made a little buck that I can merge onto existing models that fits the slot. Again this is probably only actually useful to me, but I wanted a broom holder and found a nice one that I then merged my little buck onto the back end of and it printed off beautifully. Now I have a place to store my shop broom and I will hopefully never have to wonder where the hell I put it. I figure I will upload and share any bits that I make, but I am not sure if these are useful enough to actually share with the broader public.

Because of all of the other nonsense that I got up to last night, I did not really make much progress in Path of Exile II. By the time we were wrapping up in Guild Wars 2, it was already 9ish and I just went on to bed. I doubt I will make much progress tonight either because I am doing the semi-monthly pen and paper thing with some friends that I have legitimatley been looking forward to. Mostly I want to get to level 78 so that I can equip my shiny new demon from and play with that a bit. There was a significant patch that dropped yesterday that seems like it might have buffed the league mechanic a bit, so that is welcome. However I am also seeing some reporting about endurance charage generation being bugged for bears… which will suck because I am getting quite a bit of survival from that. Momentum is also apparently not really working for Rampage so I replaced that support gem with Heft for the time being.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I think I did most of my shopping but need to get out and get some wrapping paper because I threw out a bunch of the old wrapping paper that I had while I was cleaning out the garage.

New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs

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Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.

It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.

That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.

Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.

Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.

I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.

Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.

Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.

AggroChat #545 – The Tree Tree

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

This week, we start off with some discussion around Path of Exile 3.27, the Keepers of the Flame league, and how we are doing breach to make things with the tree tree. From there, we talk a bit about the murder of Amazon Game Studios and how New World is essentially a shambling corpse now…  spooky. After that horror story, we needed something chill, so we talked a bit about Powerwash Simulator and its interesting method for delivering a story.  Grace and Bel finally finish the Destiny Rising raid and talk a bit about how good it is at teaching mechanics in lower-level content.  Dispatch is a wildly good game that is being delivered in an episodic method that feels like you are playing a really good television show.  Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity launched and we talk about some of our early thoughts, namely around the builds introduced by the new elite specs.  Finally, we talk a bit about Outer Worlds 2 and how it makes good on the idea of Obsidian’s very own Fallout New Vegas that the first game started.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile 3.27
    • Keepers of the Flame
    • The Tree Tree
  • New World in Zombie Mode
  • Powerwash Simulator
  • Destiny Rising Raid
  • Dispatch
  • GW2 Visions of Eternity Early Thoughts
  • Outer Worlds 2

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Dancing For Strangers

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Good Morning Folks. Today is like Rex Manning day… except it is the launch of the Keepers League in Path of Exile. I took the day off… which generally is a mistake to do for the launch of anything. However I have a stack of tasks that I am going to try and accomplish today well before the 2pm CDT launch time of the league. I am still trying to maintain a minimum amount of activity in Destiny Rising, and quite possibly the hardest thing that I do every day… is following around new lights and trying to get them to interact with me. I am sure it seems SUPER creepy to see this person following you around in Haven and doing a “Hey” which in my case is my Jolder dancing in front of them. Most do not have a clue what to do, but I am always super thankful when someone clicks on the bubble and responds back giving me those coveted mentor program interactions.

Since the Halloween event was a complete bust, Ace and I still got together last night and finished out our runs of Morgran’s Hunt. I did not get any more exotic weapons, but I did pull an exotic weapon mod from a silver key. We had what was probably our best run ever running with this trio of Estela. I am not entirely certain what it is about her kit, but she is the absolute best character to run Morgran’s Hunt or honestly any of the Morgran content. I am kind of hoping that we scored well enough to get the chat bubble, though it is not like I actually use chat enough for this to matter. I hate that these things are limited time and go away when the next event starts. Anything temporary like that makes me value it extremely lowly, when it comes to time spent.

We then yolo’d our way through the last two parts of the raid, and while I feel like I firmly grasp the third phase… I still have no real idea what was going on for the second. We ended up splitting up on seperate teams and I think I mostly followed the lead of the other players and we nailed the encounter on first attempt. The final boss aka the third phase of the raid was pretty fun, and I think in the future we will probably just queue for that. I lucked out and pulled the exclusive exotic shotgun from the middle phase, and weirdly enough pulled two copies of it at the same time because I spent one of the extra loot tokens. I can’t see actually using this weapon because Crescendo is just so good for Gwynn, and Jotun is so good for Xuan Wei. That leaves pretty much no one that can use a shotgun for whom this would be a good option. Still I will take the ascendancy points for picking up this. If nothing else it looks really cool.

We finished up in time for me to actually join in the reindeer games for Guild Wars 2. I did not originally intend on doing this, but folks were gathered and I was going to log into GW2 anyways… so I figured I might as well be social. We started the night with some RIBA but quickly transitioned to running Dragon’s Stand because Ashgar needed the Hero Points from it. It was wildly how fast we coalesced from not really having enough people… to wrecking everything in sight. Huge props to Sita for taking up the commander banner so that I did not have to. I was feeling somewhat out of it last night, and I did not really want to take responsibility for anyone but myself… even though being a commander in a meta like this is mostly just being in the correct lane. Folks have done the entire thing often enough that it mostly leads itself.

Right now I am really struggling to find forward momentum in the expansion for Guild Wars 2. The bug that I encountered have put me in a rather undesirable position. I had to hop onto an alt to fix the bugged state of my skimmer mastery. Then that unfortunately put me in a position where I effectively need to grind out two full ranks of the mastery so that I can keep progressing the main story. I hate that mastery points and such get blended into the story. I am very much the sort of person that wants to grind my way through all of the story at once, and any forced faffing about just ends up pissing me off. I get that Guild Wars 2 is trying to expose players to new mechanics and such, but it just feels bad when I have to stop progress to fiddle around in a zone. I love open world content, but I like doing it on my own terms, after I have unlocked everything.

I think the other thing that is harming my joy is that I am really amped for a new Path of Exile league, and mostly just want to be playing that. Visions of Eternity will be there waiting on me, and it is not like I am in any real rush. Hell, most of my crew that I am playing with are not even caught up to the point where I am with other expansions, so it is not like I need to rush in order to keep up with the pack. I’ve unlocked Galeshot, Ritualist, and Evoker and I will probably fiddle around with all three while doing dailies and weeklies going forward. However I doubt I make much progress in the expansion overall until after the newness of the first week of league start wears off a bit.