Gwynn

Stubbornness Prevails

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Good Morning Folks. Once a week, Ace and I get together to do Grandmaster difficulty content in Destiny Rising. In general we have had much better luck when we queue together for content, because at a minimum we know that we can rely on each other. This week however is pure butts when it comes to options. For those who have not gotten to this point yet, you are limited in your character options when it comes to Grandmaster activities and everyone has to choose one of six characters that is also over 64k power rating. Really of the options there viable ones are Rossi, Ning Fei, Gwynn, and Jolder. Of those generally the strongest characters damage output wise are Ning Fei and Gwynn… but both of them are very much glass canons that have to get up close and personal with mobs in order to deal the maximum amount of damage.

We started the night with Blitz and I decided to roll with Gwynn and Ace with Ning Fei because they were our strongest options… and quite possibly it was the most frustrating experience we have had in ages. We got one of the new Blitz, and the worst one… where you have to fight the giant eyeball in the center and everything feels super tanky for some reason. After running out of resurrections and only having the boss down to 2/3rds of their health… everyone abandoned and we decided to try something we thought would be easier… and ran a strike. That turned out to also be frustrating and it took us three attempts… with the final being pure spite because we lost our third party member and duo’d down the boss. The biggest problem with the encounter is the fact that the adds are so damned deadly. We had to shift up our strategy from trying to burn down the boss to being on top of the adds as soon as they spawned. It was not the cleanest kill in the world, but we were proud of not giving up.

After that we did some way more relaxing Morgran’s Hunt runs since the event is going on right now. We got quite possibly our highest score yet with a triple Maru setup, and it was a lot of stupid fun. Essentially we got to the round where the game starts to cheat in both runs. I am not sure there is a solid way to get through round eight, because the mob health and mob damage output spikes massively… throwing a bunch of yellow bar mobs at you so that you can’t easily knock out the bonus, often leading to the map ending quickly. That is okay though because we got two four key runs, which are pretty solid. Unfortunately we both got our guaranteed exotics and they were useless ones… with Ace pulling the Old Prefect and me pulling another copy of Two Tailed Fox. Essentially if we get together and do another couple four runs we will wrap up the event with several days to spare.

I finished up my hundred maps running blue altars, and during that time I got one divine altar… unfortunately being one for the boss to drop six divines instead of one for the minions to drop divines. Other than that the only other exciting altar that I got was one for exalted orbs, where I pulled three whole orbs for the entire map. There is a reason why I find myself enjoying red altars more than blue ones, because blue is a pure gamble with most of your maps giving you nothing worth writing home about. Red altars on the other hand end up producing a bunch of Chaos Orbs, which always feels at least somewhat useful. Now I need to shift gears and run one of my atlas trees that can splash in the red altar nodes so I can start grinding out my hundred maps for that.

This has led me to go back to my Alva farming setup with Ritual as I continue my hunt for King of the Mists invitations. I am running the really expensive scarab that makes it so that the last Invasion of each map drops a fully itemized temple. In my experience you end up getting quite a few temples to drop with Locus of corruption, each of which sells for around 100 Chaos, so if you get 3 of these in 20 maps you can pay for the cost of all of the scarabs required for this run. It also is worth quite a bit of experience and should be a good way of pushing up my Ice Trapper in levels. However to make Red Altars viable I think I am going to drop my anti-bleed pantheon and swap over to the one that makes it so burning ground does not hurt me, since you encounter so many burning ground altars.

In other news, my second big splurge should be here shortly. I ordered a Bambu Labs P1S with AMS combo and in theory I should be playing with it within the next week or so. A lot of the work that I have been doing out in my garage has been preparing for the ability to pick up a 3D printer and dive into that world. I have a bunch of things that I want to make and will probably talk about them some on this blog in the coming months. I mostly went with the Bambu Labs option because it seemed the most turnkey and beginner friendly. At some point I would like to also add a Resin printer to my mix, but for the moment I am getting started with what seems to have the lower barrier of entry and FDM with PLA and ABS. ABS really appeals to me becasuse of the ability to use the same plastic cement and sprue-glue that I am used to from plastic miniature kits. I will probably print more stuff in PLA however just for the ease of setup. I stayed out of this world not due to lack of interest, but more that I was waiting for things to stabilize a bit before buying something. We will see how this goes.

In other other news… I am doing considerably better and thanks for the warm wishes from folks over the last few days.

Bears and Blunderbusses

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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.

The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.

My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.

Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.

I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.

New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.

All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.

Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.

Froggy Woggy

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Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start to the blog this morning because I had to do a fasting blood draw. Nothing serious, just one of those things that I have to do every year to keep from having to pay a $60 per month surcharge on our corporate insurance plan. I took the day off because there are a bunch of things I should be doing around the house today… namely because I got new glasses and can now properly see how dirty everything is. As I was rushing out the door this morning, this lil fella was hanging out on the inside of my glass storm door. He did not seem to be terribly intimidated by me, and when I got home from the blood draw appointment he was gone. Hopefully he is off living his best life, because I have zero clue what sort of frog this is. Guessing some sort of a tree frog, but given that I have never seen one in my life… I am hoping he did not hitch a ride on a thunderstorm and get rained down. Was a very smol fella, maybe the size of a fifty cent piece.

Over the weekend, specifically during the AggroChat podcast… it rained in my living room… which is a thing that has happened before, but not since we put a new roof on. Thankfully the roofers came out and resealed the top of my roofline, which is where we have generally thought the water comes in through, because it has only ever leaked when we are getting a torrential downpour combined with wind… leading to horizontal rain. It has been raining all morning which is adversely effecting my desire to do anything, but so far no sign of leakage. Due to the pitch of our roof and the odd late 70s architectural decisions, there is a lip of flashing that wind over time will push up… and then the water gets under there and eventually runs down under the shingles until it finds a point of entry. This is generally smack dab in the enter of our living room. The roofers essentially resealed this area and put in longer screws which will hopefully keep it from coming up again. We’ve had the house since 1999… and fought this dumb design flaw many times, but hopefully this will be the trick that finally solves it.

In gaming news, with the roll over of the weekly reset in Guild Wars 2 it allowed me to get my pair of legendary gloves. This is honestly really cool and way easier than I expected it to be in the long run, because essentially you mostly have to just grind out 500 dust which will complete all of the required achievements and then talk to the Mist Stranger, at which point they will reveal who they actually are and give you a choice box for gloves. You get one armor weight for free and then for the other two you have to grind out 300 more dust which will give you 2 Fractalline Spark (150 each), one for each of the remaining weights. You then combine each with a Gift of Magical Prosperity, Gift of Mighty Prosperity, and 200g worth of Icy Runestones to get another pair of gloves. These are permanent additions to the game and not something that you necessarily have to compete before the event ends in October. I am however planning on grinding out a few more sparks so that I can bank them because they are also used for coloring the weapon glow effects granted by the gloves.

Over in Destiny Rising, I have set my sights on knocking out some of the lore achievements. Namely right now I am working on the achievement where you have to get 5 cats to give you a reward back while playing Umeko. The whole feeding the cats thing is a big maddening, namely because the indication of what fish the cats want each day is not great. I need to start fishing up some new areas in the game since I appear to have unlocked a few other locations. However even if the cat does not give you a carepackage, it does seem to count as getting a reward because you get some fishing currency for the first time you attempt it each day. I think tonight Ace and I are going to run amok, so that should be quite a bit of fun. I need to hang out on voice with various groups of people more often, because quite honestly I can get stuck in my head a bit.

I’ve also been fiddling around with New World again and holy crap has it changed significantly, at least in the new player onboarding process. I have a max level character, but also have zero clue what I need to be doing. So I instead decided to roll another new character just so I could play through the early levels and get my feet under me again. Now when you start a character you are asked to choose an archetype, which guarantees a combo of abilities and gives you a bit of a boost to specific tradeskills. I opted for Greatsword and Blunderbuss because it gave me a pretty solid early combo, but have long since abandoned the shotgun like weapon for more twohanders… leveling both Two Handed Axe and Two Handed Hammer. I really like flail for tanking, so I might also start working on that, but more than anything. I am not really sure how long I will end up playing this baby character before moving back to my maxed out character.

The other thing that is wild is just how much more story there is, and it appears to be fully voiced. Like the graphical style of New World is a bit janky, but this does feel like a significantly more enjoyable onboarding process. I know this is essentially the third time I have rerolled from scratch. The leveling process seems to have been sped up considerably, but the tradeskill leveling process is still a bit of a slog. I also remember now that I do not love how much of a nesting doll the entire process is where Tier 1 is needed to make Tier 2 which is also needed to make Tier 3 and so on. I had hoped that maybe they would have streamlined this process a bit, but it seems like that is not the case. I leveled up enough to craft a full set of level 60 armor on both characters, and in theory one should probably not do this thing and just live off drops. I need to figure out how the heck you upgrade items now, because I have not figured that out. I know 700 is the baseline and I think you can go up to 750 item level… but I have no clue how to upgrade my uniques to those tiers.

The introductory mission is way cooler looking, so I will give the game that. Additionally the flow of the quests seems to be a bit more thought out. There seems to be a fairly thriving community, but also it appears to be mostly console based. The number of random strangers talking in the world through proximity chat is very much still a thing. I know Destiny Rising has some of that going on, and I also experienced that while playing EVE Vanguard. Maybe I should get over my aversion to talking to strangers over voice chat… but seriously it still wigs me out. Does no one type anymore? I will always prefer reading the written word to talking over voice unless I am talking to friends. I know this is contradictory to what I said earlier, in that I need to hang out with friends on voice… but the friends bit is the key differentiator there.

Today is also the start of the next Diablo IV season, so I am probably going to get off here and scurry around the house attempting to take care of some business so I can potentially have time to start a new character when that begins.

Estela Get and Battle Pass Done

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Good Morning Folks. I played a truly excessive amount of Destiny Rising over the weekend. One of the big takeaways of the weekend is that while you have a limited amount of pinnacle rewards currency… doing content without this currency is still worth doing. Namely grinding Strikes and Gauntlet Blitz can still reward some really good stuff and I managed to pull more than a handful of level 80 mythics over the weekend, that I could then turn around and infuse into my existing weapons to level them up to 80. I essentially got past the Affinity 10 barrier which gives me access to level 80 everything, and as a result I am slowly chipping away at leveling everything that matters to me up to that point. Unfortunately there do not appear to be craftable engrams that reward anything at level 80… so even getting a god roll now means that you are going to have to push it up from 70 for it to be useful.

Speaking of god rolled weapons, I had three stacks of the mythic engram currency so I have been crafting the choice engrams in an effort to pick up better weapon rolls. Essentially in a perfect world I would get weapons with two recommended mythic stats on them… but for now I am cycling through the weapons trying to get ANY weapon with four mythic mods on it. At this point I think I have knocked out all of the main weapons that I am using on my characters, and now am cycling back through and trying to get four mods for all of the mythic weapons. In theory I should probably be focusing on the characters that I actually use and perfecting their weapons… but I am a weirdo and crave variety over specialization.

This weekend I gathered up enough currency to make another pull on the Estela banner and managed to bit pity by 14 pulls. Not phenomenal but I will take it, and quite honestly… this character is awesome. I’ve poured what limited resources I had available to trying to build her up to the level of my other characters. Right now I am still maining Jolder, but also trying to buff up Gwynn, Estela, Umeko, and of course Wolf. In truth I find it that I really don’t care that much about any of the Arc characters right now. I’ve leveled both Kabr and Xuan Wei, but in truth I should probably start putting points into Attal because she seems generally more useful. There just isn’t really an Arc character that I am immediately drawn to, not in the same way that I have various Solar and Void champs that I dig out of the box. I swear Estela sounds like she is being voiced by Felicia Day, but I don’t think that is actually the case.

The only champion that I have not pulled at this point is Ning Fei, which is seemingly a real powerhouse given how much I see him on the leaderboards. I just don’t know that he is really my play style either though, as I have done the trial and did not really enjoy it that much. However I also felt that way about Estela but now that I have gotten used to that playstyle I am really enjoying it quite a bit. Debuffing targets to kill them faster with weapons… seems like a really solid playstyle that none of the other champions are doing in quite the same way. She deals a sort of damage that almost feels like Chaos damage from Path of Exile in that it is able to sap the health of a target…. even if they are shielded. Thankfully the normal banner currency is easier to get so hopefully at some point I will luck into the final character that I am missing.

Ace and I spent quite a bit of time grouping up on Sunday, which is always fun. They managed to beat the campaign this weekend and as such started entering the proper endgame and the “gotta catch em all” phase of trying to collect all of the mythic weapons. Grouping together allowed me to actually knock out a few MVP triumphs as I am normally not the one dealing the most damage with my particular choice of characters. We ran several Gauntlet Blitz, and Heroic Strikes… and then did some of the legacy content so that we could unlock all three elements. Basically in order to send someone out on Iron Commander missions, you have to have beaten the content once the normal way. The legacy elemental strikes all have a bonus when run as an Iron Commander missions, so it feels like the game is trying to push us to do those.

One of the things that really impresses me with Destiny Rising, is that so far every single character I have actually spent any modicum of time playing… is a character that I have enjoyed. Even Xuan Wei who is HYPER melee focused… is really fun if you spend time playing him. It just isn’t a play style that really makes sense for most of the content in the game. Running around on the planets and looking for secrets has been a great way to get used to these characters, and while I was not sold on for example Umeko… she is a character that I have been playing a lot more specifically in some of the PVX game modes. It turns out that having the longest range attacks are really useful in things like the Iron Bar which is this games annoyingly renamed Iron Banner.

The other thing that I love is how much heart the game has. For example I got this random sequence of texts from Jolder at some point this weekend. I am guessing it triggered off some event or triumph that I got, and it will only make sense if you have played the Jolder storyline. However I found it pretty hilarious. The character interactions and the specific character focused storylines have been so much fun to play through. I have a stack of characters that I need to play more, so that I can unlock more of their story… and I honestly feel the desire to do this thing. The only character that feels a bit like a wet blanket though is Ikora, which saddens me… because she was a character I really liked interacting with in Destiny 2. The main problem with her is that the single shot grenade launcher as your primary weapon thing… is a bit annoying to play around. When you run strikes… it just means you are never going to get credit for doing any damage because she is so much slower than everyone else.

There is a new game mode starting in a week or so, and I am super interested to see what it ends up being. I am hoping it is not just a new difficulty level for existing content. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed when I found out that the new timed raid mode… was just a version of the existing raid and not something new. That is ultimately going to be the challenge for Destiny Rising. If they can keep introducing new content, and not just rehashed content… they are going to win the loyalty of a lot of players. That has been the struggle that Destiny 1/2 has been having, is that they cannot seem to keep up with player demand. I am hoping when we get a new story drop, we also get a new planet to explore, or at least a new region of earth. During some of the story missions you get the hint that it might be the European zones that will be coming into the game next as you run into some folks from that region. I would really love to visit Mars again though, because of all of the planets we have played on… that is probably my favorite setting.

Another side effect of playing quite a bit this weekend is I managed to finish off the battle pass. This and the subscription were the purchases that I ended up making for the game, and in truth both have been good. Given how much time I have spent playing I figured it was worth spending a bit of money. Once I got into the endgame proper, the battle pass levels just sort of flew by because you end up getting a bunch of repeatable quests to do 3 strikes as X role. Given that I am grinding a lot of strikes, even without having pinnacle currency… the levels just sort of happened on their own. I ended up pulling the pink skin for the Furies III weapon which is pretty good looking. I am curious what the post 50 battle pass ranks are going to look like, because it seems like you are going to keep getting rewards chests each time you ding a new rank.

All in all I am having a heck of a lot of fun with this game. I even enjoy the card game, which is wild because I have not spent much time playing most card games that are embedded within other games. Essentially it is a game of making the number go up, and not a game of direct engagement. Sure there are specific cards that allow you to remove units from the board, but it isn’t quite so focused on killing players quickly. Everyone has a fixed number of turns to score as many points as you can, and I dig that. Anyways… at least for now I am deeply engaged in Destiny Rising. I am curious how long this present obsession will last. I know this week we have the releases of Hades 2 into 1.0, and then tomorrow is the start of a Diablo IV season and I have contemplated checking that out again. I also reinstalled New World, because there is an event coming up soon… but I am so hopelessly lost in to what you actually need to do in that game to progress anymore.

For now though Destiny Rising in my comfort game. Did you ever give it a shot? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.