hunter

Jotunn and Felblades

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Good Morning Folks. Ace and I got together early in the evening and ran around a bunch of Destiny Rising. Of course we had to do our Ikora nonsense, and we realized there was a clear pattern. We have the first round where we do pretty damned good, and honestly rank fairly high overall. For example once again last night we got 2nd place overall and for most of the match we were running in the first place spot. Then immediately after that… we had a round where we spent most of it dead… and finished in last place. However at this point we only have two more rounds of Shifting Gates in order to complete the objective of running 10 with Ikora. At that point we are probably going to keep doing it… but just play more reasonable characters.

On top of the Ikora nonsense we did two raids last night that went exceptionally smoothly. It makes me wonder if folks are finally starting to grok the mechanics in there, or if there is just no one but hardcore players queuing for it these days. We also did a Master strike, but it was one with Precision Shinka’s which meant that I took one for the team and played Tan-2. I really need to buff him up quite a bit, but I am mostly focused on trying to get Jolder up high enough so that I can get a gold medal and get unstuck from my present light level logjam. Ace managed to move past it with their Estela which of course makes me feel like I am falling behind heh. I did pull a new Exotic weapon out of the master strike, and it is supposedly pretty powerful.

This of course meant I had to drop down to a planet and give it a spin on Xuan Wei, the only character that currently can use a fusion rifle. It is odd… basically instead of firing a spread of shots, you fire one giant grenade like slug. I can see how it would make him significantly more powerful overall and given that there is no spread… you no longer need to get quite so close to a target in order to optimize the damage. At some point I will probably run some Realm of the Nine with him to see how it feels doing proper content. This is something I need to do more often in general, but right now I mostly need to run it as Jolder so I can get void upgrade materials. I think Ace passed me because Destiny Rising is one of the few games they are playing right now, whereas I have a stack of games that I am trying to rotate between.

Speaking of other games… swapping over to a Demon Hunter seems like it was what I needed to get into Legion Remix. I feel like Blizzard has done what Blizzard has always done… and fucked with the formula a bit to make it worse. I feel like Panda Remix was accidentally a great game mode, that was released as a lark as filler content. With Legion Remix they purposefully tried to design this content… and as a result lost some of what made the previous incarnation great. Namely it feels like they have significantly slowed down the progress. What was so great about Panda is that it felt like you were grinding endgame content almost immediately… and this time around it feels like I have to properly level… which delays the enjoyment of grinding raids and such. I am still having fun, the pacing just feels completely off from what it did in Panda.

The flow of things is really weird too, because a lot of the class hall stuff seems to have been neutered, where you cannot run missions anymore. They speed you past the general unlocking phases that were time gated which is a good thing, but it also feels like a lot of the content has been removed. That said there is still a bunch of general unlocking of things content that has to be done, like retrieving your artifact weapons. This morning i started the process of unlocking Suramar and it does not seem to have gotten the timerunner treatment with things being sped up. Legion is still my favorite expansion in all of World of Warcraft, but it also does not feel anywhere near as fresh or exciting as it did with Panda. I think it was just a new concept and now the novelty has worn off a bit.

That said I am still enjoying myself and am nearing level 40 in the first area that I chose to go to, Azshara. I still probably have over half of the zone left to go, and maybe I am making good progress overall… but the pace just feels slower than Panda did. I am not really worrying to much about gear upgrades and I will batch up a couple dozen bronze chests while questing and then unlock all of them and scrap the excess. Of course I have to break out my Yak every time to restore my cosmetic appearance, because that is more important to me than the gear levels currently. I am not sure if I am really getting back into the flow of World of Warcraft, but I am not bouncing as hard as I did with the Hunter or any time I have tried to quest through War Within.

Tonight though is Guild Wars 2 with friends, and the vague plan is to group up and run amok in the Mad King’s Labyrinth. I don’t think any of us have done much of anything from the Halloween event other than maybe opening some trick or treat bags. I remember having a lot of fun with the Labyrinth before, and mostly you just need to run around with a group because it is very easy to get overwhelmed quickly. It has been years since I last participated in this event, so it should be a lot of fun with friends.

The Catch-Up Tax

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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday, because admittedly I am going through a bit of a funk. I’ve been fighting what I think is allergies, because ragweed is booming and it is traditionally my worst allergy. However it has been a struggle to drag myself out of bed in the morning and find the oomph to get up and around. I was looking forward to the launch of Legion Remix yesterday, but was not entirely certain when it would be rolling out. I noticed that the servers were still down when I attempted at lunch, and then after work I was able to get in and create a character. The challenge with Remix in general… is I have multiple copies of every class so I had no clue what I actually wanted to play. Originally I thought I would roll a hunter, but I have to admit I was not feeling it at all last night. I think I have just gotten too used to the action combat style of ARPGs and Guild Wars 2, and the game-play felt so sluggish.

This morning I rolled a Demon Hunter, because it is pretty action oriented and we will see if I can get into Legion Remix with this character. I rolled it on Eonar, which is a server that a friend of mine who no longer plays the game, plays on… but if they ever come back… I will at least have another character to poke around on over there. To be fair, I have also not been able to get into retail wow at all, and am only on the second zone of the War Within expansion… making almost no progress the last few times I have logged in and tried. I am wondering if Panda Remix was just magic in a bottle, and happened to be the right thing at the right time to catch my attention. Legion is without a doubt my favorite expansion, but I am wondering if World of Warcraft is just not for me anymore. I rebound a bunch of keys to try and make it feel better. I will give the Demon Hunter a spin over lunch, and see if I can catch it up to at least as far as I got the Hunter last night.

There is a new event going on in Diablo IV where they are lavishing the players with loot. Essentially each time you loot a whisper cache, you get an extra one and apparently the drop rates of chaos armor have been amped up significantly. Additionally they have finally fixed the Spires in Infernal Legions so that they cause monsters to rush in and attack you, and also spawn monsters from within making them significantly faster to clear. I knocked out one achievement on the seasonal journey last night, namely the one for doing an Infernal Legion with over 1000 aether gained in Torment IV. The remaining objectives are all pretty awful, but at some point I will probably make an attempt at them. Essentially I need to catch a Helltide as it is spawning… that also happens to have the Chaos Rift objective associated with it and then clear as many as I can. The problem with all of this… is that other players are going to get in the way of the remaining objectives. So I essentially need to play at a low population time if I am going to be successful at any of this.

Since I could not play Legion Remix over lunch, I decided to unlock the Monster Hunter Wilds quest in Final Fantasy XIV. There were a lot of things happening to land on exactly the same day… new WoW patch, new FFXIV patch, Legion Remix, and Halloween event starting in Guild Wars 2. The intro quest was pretty short as I followed around a palico in the wild west zone adjascent to Tuliyollal. It did not take long until I had unlocked the duty associated with the quest, which is to fight a Guardian Arkveld… aka the signature beast from Monster Hunter Wilds. There is a weapon set and a cosmetic gear set for doing the quest, as well as the ability to unlock a Seikret mount which are the feathered bird raptor things from MHW. Unfortunately I hit the wall quickly that I knew I would… which is that my gear level was not 725 aka the requirement for doing the duty.

So I did the thing that I have done many times before… and bought my way out of the gear slump. It cost around a million gil total, but I bought all of the left side items… aka weapon, and armor pieces, in order to be able to queue for the duty. I am not sure when I am going to run it, but at some point this week I will make an attempt on the Guardian Arkveld. I have not played FFXIV in eons… but at some point I should probably also start working on the story quest. It is weird how FFXIV is not triggering the same issues I am having with World of Warcraft. Everything about FFXIV is slower paced, and as a result it is like my brain is prepared for that. We will see if I can manage to slip back into the game, or if I am ultimately going to bounce off it as well.

I’ve not participated in it, but there is a lot of new stuff going in with the Shadow of the Mad King patch in Guild Wars 2. Specifically the weapon set looks really cool, and at a minimum I want to collect that pistol graphic to use on my Harbinger. I figure probably Thursday night when we do our normal Guild Wars 2 stuff, we might detour to the Labyrinth and spend our time roaming around it as a group. I did pop into Guild Wars 2 last night, but only long enough to do a round of wizard chores before bouncing. I was legitimately all over the freaking place last night, even playing some Path of Exile 1. I am struggling to find something that is really grabbing ahold of me fully right now. Once again… I think it is that aforementioned funk that I seem to be in. Like I have reason… and it hit me yesterday as an employee was requesting of for Fall Break… something that I would normally be doing as well when my teacher spouse was still with me. I have a cookout on Friday with a lot of her friends… so that is going to be a challenge to get through, but I also feel like I need to make the effort.

Anyways… there is a lot going on, and I am hoping you are enjoying at least some of it.

Raid Leveling Not for Me

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Good Morning Folks! I am still sort of in this pattern of MOSTLY playing World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix. I’ve come to realize that I do not have the fortitude to play this optimally… which would be to do ALL of the world bosses, a random heroic and normal dungeon, a random heroic and normal scenario, and then complete ALL of the raids. Instead, I think I am going to focus on trying to get my World Bosses done as they are fun and it is pretty easy to find groups in the LFG tool. After that, I think my goal tonight is to start chipping away at the Heroic Dungeons and Scenarios that I need to unlock rings. Then the next stretch goal would be to complete all of the raids on Normal mode, but that is probably going to take all week as I have realized my appetite for that sort of thing is not what it once was.

Related to that I got my Tauren Paladin over on Drenden up to level 25 at which point I tried my hand at one of the leveling theories. The idea is to run raids starting at 25 and level your character through doing that. I’ve personally found this to be a little lacking as I think in total I gained a single level after having done two wings of LFR. Because of this gameplan I’ve also been leveling as Retribution which is fine for playing at endgame levels… but is not my preferred method of leveling. So as a result I think I am going to shift gears with this character and just level it the old-fashioned way while switching over to Protection so I can bounce shields all over the map for fun and profit. I am also questioning my choice of Tauren as I remember now why I don’t like playing them… because they feel painfully slow.

Lastly, I created a little Vulpera Hunter on Eonar where another friend has a base of operations. In theory, my goal is to push this up to 70 before the event is up so that I can have yet another max-level character seeded throughout the cosmos in case I decide that I want to play on that server. I already have an Orc Deathknight that I played during Legion and a few babby characters of various ages. It would be awesome if they made the Stable go cross-character and cross-realm because that has been my core reason for not playing something other than the original Lodin. I did not love the concept of collecting spirit beasts again. I am kind of wondering how the Warband is going to change things up, because in theory, I should be able to have all of the characters that I am playing regardless of server on the same screen.

Now that I have capped my Barbarian, I think I am going to spend some more quality time with my Necromancer. There is a pattern that can be used from levels 20-50 that will allow you to craft legendary caches so that you can get aspects pretty quickly. So my plan is to push this character up to 20 and see how well that process works. Barbarian was a lot of fun, and I might still rework that character to go for the overpowered Dual Swing Twisters build, but I also want to see how the Necromancer world is doing. I also really need to find a bow build that I like because traditionally… tanky brawler, minion, and bow characters are what I tend to play over and over in ARPGs.

Anyways! Today is my first day back this week so I am not looking forward to getting back into the swing of things. I also have to go into the office tomorrow so I am somewhat dreading that as well. Hopefully, you all had a wonderful weekend and an extended weekend if you are in the states.

Three Bananas

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This weekend was an extended weekend for me, having taken two days off to match up with my wife who is on fall break. As a result I had more than my average amount of play time and the timing happened to line up perfectly with the first Iron Banner for the Season of the Undying in Destiny 2. This time around there was a quest chain that I wrote about the other day that walks the player through collecting four weapons and a full suit of the Iron Banner armor. After this however it became my first mission to make sure I had completed that on all three characters. The above collage shows them all in the gear set that I picked up with some shaders applied to make them look cooler.

The most curious part of the weekend is that I somehow capped my Valor twice and reset it… and am now grinding it up a third time presently sitting at the Brave II rank. Partially this is due to the fact that the weekend included a bonus to all valor gained, and partially due to the fact that I played an excessive amount of crucible via the Iron Banner. I am guessing that the bonus valor also somehow equated to bonus XP because I skyrocketed from around 33 at the start of Iron Banner to 60 as of last night. I also managed to hit the less permeable cap of 960… aka 950 gear and 10 bonus light coming from the artifact. From this point on I believe the gains are in single point increments.

I was completely all over the place this weekend when it came to the activities that I dipped my toes into. While podcasting I opted to grind the Menagerie a bit and attempt to get a good roll of the Austringer, something that I had apparently completely failed at doing during the Season of Opulence. I am not even sure what a God Roll looks like, but my friend Teyeger01 suggested either Rampage/Rapid Hit or Rapid Hit/Kill Clip… the later sounds most excellent. I pulled an Outlaw/Rampage which seems like a perfectly reasonable option for the time being and one well worth using. For the time being I am completely out of Desire runes and will probably wait for Thalen to unlock the chalice before grinding some out again seeing as he was not benefiting from my runefinder buff.

Speaking of which, I spent a good chunk of the weekend running around with Thalen and doing whatever he had on his list of activities. I now fully understand why Squirrel always wanted me to drive the activity we were doing, because after a point it doesn’t really matter what it is we are actually doing. It is the act of running around and getting to play big brother guardian that is really fun. I wish I could have somehow carried people to the Iron Banner armor, but the way those objectives were set up to do not exactly lend themselves to being helped out by another guardian. So many of the checkmarks are depended upon getting weapon kills of a specific type, which means you need to be the one that actually finishes the Guardian off. If they were assists… maybe just maybe I could have helped folks like Pix through the Iron Banana because apparently I am better than I realized?

Speaking of killing Guardians… I finished off my Malfeasance… which is a Hand Cannon that I am probably never going to use. Right now I am heavily favoring swapping back and forth between Austringer and Ace of Spades when I want to play with that weapon type. The problem with Malfeasance is its special perk procs an explosion after the fifth hit on a target. Very few targets can handle five hits… even Guardians tend to drop somewhere in the 3 to 4 hit range. This means the only time you are ever going to get use of the perk is on some tanky Majors and Boss type encounters… which are situations you are probably going to use a heavy or a special on. So basically this weapon feels like it needs some tweaking… if it was 3 hits and then an explosion this gun would be amazing. Regardless it is another Exotic quest checked off on my list, and another quest out of my log.

At the start of this week I would have said without a doubt that this was the best feeling Iron Banner I had experienced to date. Then things shifted… and I eventually found out that Bungie made tweaks to the way the matchmaking was working. Originally as a solo queue player I was almost always getting matched with other solo queue players, which felt amazing. The problem is the vocal minority of the “sweaty” pvpers complained that they were sitting in orbit with a full team for hours and not getting matches. Bungie made some tweaks to the system and suddenly on Saturday I started getting matched up with 4 or 5 players from the same clan against my rag tag group of solo queues. Basically I am glad that I got most of my progress towards the armor sets done before that point, because on my Hunter it took way longer than it did on any of the others.

It makes me realize how much better the Crucible would be for me personally… if there was a freelancer play list. I am almost always going to queue as a solo player, because that tend to be how I play crucible most of the time. On the first few days before they applied this tweak… Iron Banner felt amazing. On the days after the patch was applied… I got one of two games… competitive or shut outs that I got “mercied”. Even when you lose in a close game… it somehow feels better because you had a chance. The weirdest realization for me personally… is that even in the scenarios where I was getting completely tromped… I was doing reasonably well. I think of myself as a very shitty PVPer… but maybe just maybe I have improved over time. I did enjoy myself and I find doing the Crucible bounties a little less tedious than it used to be.