Janthir Wilds

Animation Adoration

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick of late. I am not entirely certain what led me down this rabbit hole but something… prompted me to give Dan Da Dan a shot. It took about three episodes before I was hopelessly hooked, but last weekend I spent most of Saturday snuggled with cats and chain watching my way through season 1 and most of season 2. This afternoon/evening the last episode of Season 2 should be releasing and I am looking forward to it with great fervor. The thing is anime is something that I have always tangentially enjoyed, but it is a world I have never really felt part of entirely. I mean in high school I was tracking down copies of Akira or Vampire Hunter D… which were still shockingly hard to find… or the Final Fantasy V based series. I am also addicted enough to Bleach that I snagged a chunk of the intro to use for the AggroChat opening. However modern Anime is just not something I have indulged, because it was hard to listen to something for hours upon end because I did not want to isolate myself from my spouse for that long, and she was VERY much not into it.

However with me now being entirely alone… for quite literally the first time in my life… it is no longer that big of a deal. I don’t really love reading television… but most everything these days seems to be available in dual language versions. Maybe at some point I will actually attempt to learn Japanese, which is a thing I have wanted to do since I was a teen… and learned that a lot of video games came out in that language first. I will likely never go down the rabbit hole of manga… because reading them in reverse order is something that will always fuck with my head. I tried to do this with Trigun Extreme, because I love Vash the Stampede immensely… and just could not bring myself to stay hooked. I guess the question is… for someone who loves Dan Da Dan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Darker Than Black, Cowboy BeBop, and Ghost in the Shell… what series would you suggest that I give a shot? Drop me a line below.

I’ve also been diving into Pantheon… which brings up the age old question of is it anime if it does not come from Japan? I’ve always said yes. I consider Avatar in its many forms Anime, and as such I consider Pantheon by Amazon to be very much one as well. This is a wild trans-humanism ride in the vein of William Gibson novels, asking the question… what is humanity once it uploads itself into the cloud. I highly suggest giving it a watch. I just wrapped up season one and it was phenomenal, and expect to start on Season 2 probably Friday night… since tonight is our usual Thursday night Guild Wars 2 romp. When a cartoon brings you to the point of tears… you know it is good. Do I think I will ever get to the point of being an Otaku that goes to Anime conventions? Honestly not likely, but I do greatly appreciate the level of joy that folks bring to that world. For example this live action dance/cosplay version of the season two Dan Da Dan intro is phenomenal.

Over in Guild Wars 2 I wrapped up the Fractal Incursion Champion achievement which gives you two bag slots, two 20 slot bags, a host of exotic gear tokens, an ascended accessory with 10 agony resistance, and at the very end an universal legendary weapon starter kit granting you access to any Generation One legendary. I am trying to decide what I want to go for with this thing, and most likely… I am probably going to craft the spear since I generally like using it on almost every character. Right now I have sword, axe, longbow, hammer, and 3 of the two handed swords so that I could craft eternity. The other option that I might go for is a Staff, since I tend to use this on Necromancer and would not mind getting into Druid at some point for support. I am likely going to sit on it for awhile. I just cashed in my eternal ice for volatile magic so at some point I should be able to buy up a bunch of trophy bags to get close to crafting whichever gift I am missing. I am still super low on mystic clovers so I should probably wait until I regenerate those a bit before crafting another legendary.

In another Guild Wars 2 news… I am missing two badges from the investigation achievements. The thing is I know where the two missing badges that I need are, I have just not been randomed into either of those fractals since learning this knowledge. When I was looking for a guide… there are times I forget just how damned good the wiki for this game is. All of the information that you need to know to be able to find the badges is located in the Troubleshooting 1 and Troubleshooting 2 wiki articles. Basically I need to run the Volcano and Snowblind again, and veer off the main path to get both of the badges I am missing. I think maybe in the situation from the other day where most of the party bailed, it was probably that they were just needing the badge as they disappeared shortly after we got to the fireball section on the Volcano where the badge is located at.

In another news, since I seem to be in MMOFPS mode right now with Destiny Rising, I thought I would give EVE Vanguard a shot. There is currently a free trial event going on, and you can download the stand alone client through the EVE Vanguard website. I’ve not made it terribly far but thusfar it does seem to be a very responsive shooter, but I am missing the jumping mechanics from Destiny games. I will probably play through the rest of the extended tutorialization at some point over the weekend. The whole proximity chat thing is a bit weird to get used to, but voice chat felt pretty seamless. I need to change the keybind to my normal push to talk because pressing and holding left alt felt extremely foreign to me. I did not make it super far last night because I was meeting up with Ace to play some Destiny Rising.

One of the things that I found interesting playing with a lower level player in Destiny Rising, is just how reasonable the scaling ended up being. Ace was 38 and I am of course capped at 80 and progressed quite a bit past that, and collectively we could do their content level without it feeling like I was dominating everything. I was not one tapping every single mob at least with weapons, but my ability scaling and better artifacts did seem to make a bigger difference when it came to clearing trash mobs. They pushed past 40 and I think when you hit 46 you can start running heroic content, so at some point we will likely flip to me leading the party and dragging them along in bigger kid stuff. If nothing else it would allow them to start collecting mythic weapons early I think. At some point I need to focus on some of the activities that can award exotic mods for items and exotic artifacts. I am not sure if I have to wait until Acclaim 10 or not for those, but I am getting closer and supposedly the patch that was applied over night sped up the leveling a bit.

I have an awful lot to keep me engaged right now… which is good because I need it. I have Diablo IV Season 10 that I am still contemplating trying out, and then in early October is Legion Remix in World of Warcraft which I will probably also give a shot. Distractions keep me from feeling so painfully alone.

Four Twenty Four

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a busy day. I went to a new eye doctor, that required a bit of a journey to get there. My family has a history of retina detachment and I have been struggling with floaters… so I figured it was time to get on boarded to a proper doctor and not just the dude that is attached to the local eye glasses place. Some positives of the visit are that my general eye health is good, and my retina looks solid… and that my floaters have settled in place. The negative about that though is that instead of settling at the bottom of my eye they are not basically permanently glued to the back of my eye… so I am largely just going to have to get used to them or try a laser procedure that has a bunch of negative side effects… one of which is potential retina detachment. However she thinks that the double vision I have been seeing is due to the fact that my once “good eye” has gotten far worse… like significantly different prescription, but my left eye the previous bad eye is mostly the same. I have new glasses incoming soon, which I hope will help most of these issues.

I’ve been splitting my time between Destiny Rising and Guild Wars 2, and though some research yesterday I realized that I had a New Light Engram sitting in my inventory… that could produce the last remaining Mythic weapon that I had not collected. I had mostly ignored these because they were level 50 gear level, and almost not worth decrypting… however not that I have unlocked a copy of this weapon I can craft a level 70 engram and choose high level copies of it. So essentially I have been sitting on the key to collecting this last illusive weapon for a week now at least. I guess that is a suggestion, that whenever you hit the end game… use those couple of new light mythic engrams to unlock the weapons that are most important to you so you can craft engrams to get higher level versions of them. For me it just allowed me to complete my set and push my endgame affinity level up to 8.

I also ran a daily Onslaught Blitz and pulled another exotic weapon. I do not plan on using Ikora anytime soon, but if I ever do having this will probably be a good thing, especially since it dropped with the item level already sitting at 70. I vaguely remember Two-Tailed Fox as being an exotic that was fairly solid in Destiny 2, but I also cannot remember much about it. There is a certain Pokemon aspect to collecting Exotics, and I have always cared more about acquisition than actually using most of them. You can make exotic engrams, but they require a currency that I do not have much of. In theory this is going to be the long grind for the game is trying to acquire all of them, given that most of them are just random chance and not specific quests like they were in Destiny 1 and 2.

I also pushed up one of the seasonal journey tracks high enough to unlock the Partridge Sky exotic sword. Again this is a useful item for Jolder but thusfar I have not made an attempt to level it up so that she can start using it. Right now I have mythics that I like for both weapon slots and I am being way too lazy to change that up. You only get one exotic and I am not really sure if I should be running with the Huckleberry or this sword in that slot. I guess the benefit of this exotic is that is is a Solar sword, which replaces an existing Solar sword that I am using… which does not adversely impair my ability to pop elemental bubbles. I really like going into activities with two weapons that are contrasting elements to whatever my abilities do. Since Jolder is void, I try and have one weapon be Arc, and the other be Solar.

The current Fractal Incursion event means I am back spending most of my evening playing Guild Wars 2 and slowly chipping away at things. I had one of the weirdest situations happen last night where we got the Volcanic fractal through a random queue… and then everyone bailed and it was left with just two of us. Since I am a ranged build, I tend to focus on taking out the Grawl adds during the first Shaman boss allowing everyone else to focus on breaking his bubble. So it took me a bit to notice until the other person who stuck it out commented about it. Volcanic is probably the single easiest fractal out there, so it seemed weird as hell that anyone would bail from it. The two of us stuck it out and finished the fractal pretty easily, and since I run a healing pet I was able to keep group healing us to top us off during the final fight. We friended up each other after the run, because we were newly formed friends in the forge of adversity.

At this point I am sitting at 424 Fractaline Dust of 450 for the third recursion achievement. This is the biggest grind, but I will still have to go back and selectively do some of the specific non-rotation fractals and also try and collect the badges from the majority that I have not. I’ve found the badge from Aetherblade and Molten Boss and need four more… so at some point I should look up a video on where they are. I am sure I am running past them in the various fractals and if I knew where they were I could probably make a trip to get them. If nothing else has come from this.. I am way the hell more comfortable with tier 1 fractals than I used to be. Even Kinfall seems to be like a cakewalk anymore having gotten it back to back multiple times.

I think the legendary itself is going to be gated by the entire event. There is an achievement that progresses step by step each week, but after having ground out the worst bits… I am hoping that it will be easy enough to finish it up each week as new sub achievements drop. My goal this weekend is to help the rest of our normal fractal crew knock out whatever they need to knock out so they can catch up. I know I have been grinding this a lot harder than most people have… because in truth it is not like I have anything better to do. After the death of my wife in July, I have latched onto any grind that I can focus my attention towards so that it gives me at least temporarily a sense of purpose. I should be doing stuff around the house probably… but it is easy to latch onto this and hyper fixate for awhile.

Have you been participating in the Fractal Incursion event? What sorts of progress have you made? Drop me a line below.

Wilds is Cursed

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Hey Folks! Last night instead of our usual Guild Wars 2 nonsense on Thursday nights… I attempted to do some Monster Hunter Wilds again with Ammo and Sita. We have tried to do this a few times… but something always ends up causing problems. The first time Ammo chain crashed until I lost power… and then when the power came back… I lost internet. Last night the entire time we were playing Sita sounded like a robot… and every time we engaged anything one or more of us would get dropped from the linked party. Dealing with Capcom multiplayer is a very specific realm of hell. Then we realized the thing we were trying to unlock and group up for… is a Solo Arena quest. So we had a lot of us all hanging out on voice and being frustrated together as we attempted to “Akuma”. But hey… Barrel bowling is still fun as heck.

Over in Guild Wars 2… I am back on that World vs World grind and so is Sita. Specifically we both bought Legendary Weapon Kits and I am chasing the very dumb goal of making Sunrise. This however is only a means to an end, because it will in turn allow me to make the Voltron of Guild Wars 2 weapons… Eternity. We even managed to drag Ammo along for this nonsense… but in truth… grouping with friends in WvW is pretty much pointless because it is not like you can actually see each other in the giant “Zerg” huddle. The key trait that you need to learn to succeed in this game mode is find the tag and stand on the tag… and then move only when the tag moves. We had a good commander that was flanked by some really freaking phenomenal healers and were able to “OutZerg” the other teams as we captured their stuff.

We were exceptionally successful and in a single average I managed to do half of a Gift of Battle reward track. I believe Sita who had started this grind before me came within a fraction of finishing his up. I am really looking for the WvW Rush event in July and will probably just bank a bunch of Gift of Battles because they are always useful… and also the track in general is a decent way to get Mystic Clovers. More importantly… I passed rank 100 in World Vs World and got the new title of Veteran… which seems weird that this is higher than General was. Why do I care about WvW ranks? Well I kind of want to make the backpack… which itself will require that I have rank 350. Only 248 left to go. I am hoping I can make a massive dent in this during the WvW Rush and hopefully finish that off… and will absolutely probably just be living in WvW during that time. Thankfully I find that whole nonsense shockingly enjoyable… for someone who is traditionally a massive CareBear.

Dune is out… or at least the headstart is out and I played a bit of it last night. Enough to get through the very beginning of the tutorial and out into Hagga Basin which is the first real zone. I watched a video about how limited the Trooper ends up being and how I should probably just play a Mentat which has a turret… so I did that thing. It really probably is the correct decision because very early you can get a bunch of “makes guns better” abilities. The turret unfortunately is kind of shit. I expected something more akin to the pop up turrets in The Division. What it is instead is a grenade that you throw… and then when you “detonate” it, it turns into a turret that maybe fires off three bolts before exploding and if you are standing near it… you take damage. I am not extremely sold on this game yet. I like the vibe and I am a massive Dune geek… but also the gameplay feels more extreme than I like my survival games. Dealing with lack of water is a massive problem… but I have a thing that lets me drain my victims of blood and convert that to water so hopefully that will make things easier. What I really need though is a Literjon so that I can carry water with me.

I am very much in the bumblefucking my way around the desert mode right now, but at least I have a crappy shelter. I strategically set up my shelter in a valley that stays almost entirely in shade no matter what time of day it is, that happens to be right beside one of the vacuum sealed caves. Given that things respawn in the world pretty regularly, this gives me a pretty decent source of scrap metal as well as some lootable chests that have a few materials that I do not have any use for right now… but are flagged as orange in color which makes me think at some point they will be useful. For the moment I am stumbling up the tech tree and the entire game will probably feel much better once I have a way to carry around water, and a way to traverse between the assorted rock outcroppings more easily. I have “walked without rhythm” my way to another outcropping… found a much larger scavenger camp than I am used to…and died without remembering to set down a respawn beacon. Tonight I will probably make my way back over there and try and retrieve whatever I dropped in my backpack.

The other huge benefit of where I decided to set up my base is that on the other side of the sealed cave… is a small scavenger camp. Essentially when it respawns… I can set down my turret, unseal the cave door… and let the turret kill the two Scavengers without me having to lift a finger. This gives me a somewhat reasonable renewable source of blood to then convert into water with my purification machine. There are various lootables around the camp as well, but I am not sure how much value a handful of Solari will have in the grand scheme of things. I have a contract to deliver scrap metal to someone, but it is also way across another open stretch of desert which terrifies me at the moment. I will probably wait until nightfall to cross so that I won’t have to also worry about the impact of direct sunlight. I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it… I just feel like I need to push through the awkward first steps that any survival game has.

Yesterday was also the content reveal stream for the Secrets of the Atlas expansion for Path of Exile and it looks amazing. However if I were to sit down and start talking about it… it would be a whole other blog post. I will probably save that for Monday. I hope you all have a phenomenal weekend and if you too are venturing forth into Arrakis, drop me a line and let me know what you are thinking about the game so far.

Temu Dragon Stand

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the drop of the last part of the Janthir Wilds story called Absolution. It was quite a hefty patch, but not one without some issues. The biggest one that I personally experienced is that for whatever reason they did not successfully reset purchases on the wizards vault, meaning that while I could see a new Legendary Weapon Kit was available… it showed that I had already purchased it. This was fixed early in the evening with an additional patch that required a restart, and from that point forward things seemed to be fine. I have pretty mixed emotions about this patch and there are some things that were phenomenal, others that were pretty disappointing, and then some that was just plain bad. Fair warning, as I get into the new map meta, there are going to be complete spoilers over what is going on there. I will warn you again because at least at the start I have some pretty surface level stuff to talk about.

First up, given that it is June now and Pride Month there are some new wings available this year. Initially I thought that they might be a re-offering of the wings from last year, but nope these are entirely new and pretty freaking amazing. The default rainbow pattern on these wings are significantly more vibrant than the previous macaw wings. Both the wings and the glider are patterned after the existing White or Black wings sets. For me it showed up untextured and brown, but I had to go use the dye eraser tool in order to show the default rainbow colors. I like that they are a much fuller wing than the macaw set and looks way more natural on a “girthy” model like that of the Norn and Char.

What is really cool about these wings however is that they have four dye channels. So you can of course use them in the default red, yellow, green, purple blended configuration. However you can also dye them to match ANY color scheme you might want. So this means you can effectively recreate any pride flag or simply dye them to match your outfit of choice. I turned mine into a recreation of the Bisexual Flag, since that is ultimately what represents me personally. No they don’t really match my outfit in the least but are freaking cool and I am really thankful that they are giving these away for free. The only caveat is that you have to have purchased the game. I tried to claim a set of these wings on my free-to-play account and they were not available.

Another really cool thing that they released on the cash shop is this Shimmering Aurora Homestead Sky. They absolutely got $10 in gems from me to pick this up, because one of my complaints about the existing sky is that I could not permanently set it to either night or day. I don’t like the lighting in the homestead during the day, and greatly preferred the night sky… and it would stick until I logged out and then when I logged in again everything would be back to the default day settings. With the Aurora sky it seems to stick permanently and also gives everything a beautiful lighting overlay. This makes me actually want to start building something properly in my homestead. Part of me wants to tear down everything that exists by default and create something from scratch.

Now for the disappointing. I think a lot of the failures that I am going to talk about in this post, come down to over-hyping and poorly marketing changes. One of the big quality of life changes that was announced was the addition of a universal teleportation tome, that in theory would collect all of your teleportation devices into a single item allowing you to free up a bunch of inventory slots. I don’t have mine fully unlocked yet because it is a long quest chain… but I have collected all of the scrolls that would fit into it and while it will free up a few slots… it does absolutely nothing for the cash shop lounge scrolls. So essentially I still will have multiple slots taken up by portal devices. The gobbler is also somewhat disappointing if only because it costs 100 Gold to buy it… which seems like a big chunk of change for something we have already gone through a lot of hassle to unlock.

Now we are entering the spoiler territory of this blog post, so if you care about such things… maybe stop reading.

The new story was pretty enjoyable, but felt extremely short… and also like nothing much happened. The true resolution of the expansion happens inside of the Bava Nisos meta event, and I will talk about that in a few. Essentially it is going between a bunch of locations, including some of Core Tyria searching for artifacts of the White Mantle. If you did not play through Bloodstone Fen or Lake Doric… most of this would largely feel non sequitur. Essentially the quest chain is effectively this heartfelt goodbye to Mabon… a character who does not really feel like earned the place he holds in the canon of this game. Secrets of the Obscure did not really flesh the character out enough to make me feel much of anything as a player about him. It isn’t like Aurene, a character that we learned to love over the course of several expansions worth of content. Mabon is just this character we are told is important and we are told is meaningful… and then is taken away and are told we should feel something about it. The story does however give us one of the best achievements ever that comes with the title of True Introvert… which I am absolutely using from this point forward… so it is not like I can be super harsh about it.

Where things start to fall apart however is when you approach Bava Nisos as a map. It is essentially a map that only exists to serve as a staging place for the meta event associated with it. The entire place is either monster guts or old crumbling buildings… often times a mixture of both as we are essentially fighting inside of a giant titan named Saevus Saxum. The entire map largely centers around killing the titan by damaging its vital organs. There is a staging area that is sealed off from the rest of the map by a Mursaat Mirror, but weirdly… if you are standing in this area when the map resets… you still die which feels thoroughly dumb. There just is not much going on in this map apart from the meta, and there are areas you cannot reach… until the meta has opened them up. All of the marketing going into this made it seem like this was going to be a rich map with multiple lanes… which of course made us all think we were getting another Dragon’s Stand which is quite possibly one of the best maps ever created.

What we got instead is a meta that feels like they ran out of funding, time, or wandered away like a bored toddler in an ADHD fugue state. The entire thing feels unfinished, and like we have half of a meta. Essentially there are some waves of fight the nonsense leading up to a proper boss fight in the form of a Gorseval clone that feels a little overtuned for pugs. Then you enter the lanes phase, where the groups have to split up and each take out a vital organ. I went down the path for the lungs and it involved us breaking objectives while fighting off waves of titanspawn. I will have to do the other lanes to find out what happened there, but for the most part it felt pretty basic. Then you are told to collapse on the heart chamber and wait for Livia. The timer ticks down and then suddenly Livia gets some dialog options that show up… and the event is just over.

Map chat was legitimately mad about this event last night. We were all sitting there wondering if we fucked something up… did we somehow fail the event and got a bad ending. None of us seemed to get credit in the achievements for the kill, but also that appears to just be a bug. Then another timer started and the map reset with everyone dying after having said we did fatal damage to the titan. The entire thing feels like it was half finished and rushed out the door. Is this why the expansion got delayed? Because if so… maybe delay it again and finish the damned thing. The problem is that we are now stuck with another bad map… that no one is going to actually play other than those who are chasing the backpack or specific achievements. This could have been another epic map that folks play every day… instead we get a non-ending. I guess I just want to know what the folks creating this thought about it… because surely they knew this would not be terribly well received.

The other problem with Janthir Wilds as a whole… is that it was impacted by the current SAG-AFTRA Voice Actors strike. It feels exceptionally jarring that you will have multi-character dialogs happening with a handful of them voiced… and the others relying entirely upon reading fleeting dialog balloons popping up on your screen. I will absolutely look forward to hopefully playing through this content at some point in the future when we have voice lines for all of the actors that were on strike. I will be exceptionally frustrated if this never happens however… because holy shit does it feel bad right now. Like the highlight of having Countess Anise in any content… is experience the full on epic levels of sass provided by Catherine Taber. On one hand I am super proud of Arena Net for not replacing folks… but on the other hand it absolutely underlines the importance of these actors delivering the dialog to make the characters feel real. They were in a rough position… and I don’t think just delaying the content would have been viable. Here is hoping we can play through this with all of the proper audio at some point in the not too distant future.

Janthir Wilds as a whole has been a weird mixed bag of an expansion for me. I wholeheartedly love Lowland Shore and the Bearkin and deeply care about many of the new characters that were introduced through their coastal lives. I did not care for the Greer/Decima meta, and still feel like it needs some improvement to make it a big easier to pull off… because getting anyone to do it at all is pure hell. I like the maps overall for roaming around and doing events however, and really enjoyed Mistburned Barrens. The story is a bit hit or miss because quite frankly… I do not give a shit about the Wizards Court. I like some of the characters associated with it, but I just don’t much care about the whole super secret magical society, and as a result the highlight of this expansion has been when I was spending time with the loveable bears. I would fucking die for Pokey, because he is the Braham that actually works and is not an insufferable ass for large chunks of the content. With both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds however… they feel like unfinished content. They feel like the content we get, because the studio either no longer has the vision or the funding to create the best content they could be. They are a hollow shade of something like an End of Dragons, that really shows the best that Guild Wars 2 can possibly be.

Please do not take this as me saying that I will riot and want to rage against the crappy content we are getting. I got $25 worth of enjoyment out of Janthir Wilds. In truth I got way more enjoyment out of it… because I am still having a lot of fun with various aspects of that content. I think the Metas we were given are poorly designed and just not representative of the best that Arena Net can do… but the intricate details of the zones and certain aspects of the story make up for it. I think a lot of resources went into the creation of the Homestead, and I am really thankful for that. Hopefully without a big system like that looming and eating up development time… we will finally see what they are capable of with the third of these micro yearly expansions. What I want more than anything from whatever comes next… is more evergreen content that players actually WANT to do… rather than something that they feel compelled to do in order to check some box off in the achievement panel. You can do better Arena Net. I have seen it… countless times.