Good Morning Folks. It was a weird weekend. I spent a good chunk of it working on the garage since it was much cooler out there than it has been. At this point I have cleaned out the north side of the garage, put up cabinets, and then shifted anything that did not fit from the south side of the garage and acquired and put up the first two cabinets over there. This involved moving out some rather shitty storage options that we have had since college… and have been in place for almost thirty years. One of which I am going to give to my neighbor who sells stuff at craft fairs, because technically it was designed to be collapsible and easy to set up vendor storage that came from a garage sale in college. I could have sworn we had two of these, but I have no clue what happened to the second one over the years. It was bad at doing its job, so it must go and be replaced by nice modular shelving from Sam’s club, because they are cheap, readily available, and something I can buy a few at a time as I have made space for them.
Most of my gaming has been in Destiny Rising. Today is the reset of a new week and I noticed that I finally placed in the shooting range. I did notice that my friend Lociana actually got a space, and Ace kept one placement specifically for Calamity Ops. I have no clue why we do not seem to be getting credit for The Expanse. That one remains empty, and in theory we still need to do the last few parts of the raid so that we can have people showing up on those platforms as well. I like this concept honestly, because one of the cool figures is you can test drive your packmates characters. I mean you can already borrow characters from your friends, but it is extra cool that there is an entire baked in system for this. I honestly wish that there were more of these podiums but one for each character, so you could see how your friends built characters that you might not be playing, rather than just who scored the highest.
I was honestly shocked to see my own character represented on a podium… then I remembered that I actually managed to get a phenomenally good time on Break In, enough to rank my random group 8th on the North American server. If nothing else it was cool to see myself showing up in the ladders for awhile. I have no clue what my final rank was before reset, but it was clearly good enough to get my Jolder riding that podium. While not the strongest or even best character to bring for most content that is focused on damage output… I love my Jolder girl and will always probably be most comfortable playing her. In theory I bring a lot of survival to the team, which makes squishier damage dealers better… but I do second guess some of the activities that I would normally bring her on.
For example, since forming our own pack one of the things that we have been hunting down is a Stronghold, because this is content that I never got to participate in during the wanderer pack. Essentially every member gets 3 attempts at this content for free, before needing to spend pack actions. You are likely going to need this, because the boss that you end up fighting is a giant bag of hitpoints and you have a limited amount of time to dps this down. This is honestly a common gacha trope, and there are a few versions of this that play out in AFK Journey for example, where the entire server or guild joins together to beat down a large health pool. However I question if bringing Jolder on this was a good idea. I did effectively soak a lot of the hate from the boss and keep over-shield rolling on my party… but you can see how much less damage I did overall than Ace did playing Estela. I think in future weeks I am just going to run Estela as well so we can hopefully whittle this down in fewer turns. For the week though we managed to clear two strongholds, which meant loot for everyone in the guild.
We also managed to collect enough materials, and craft enough tchotchkes to upgrade our hangar to rank four. We are burning through the guild ranks pretty quickly, and will be capped out at the final rank of Nightfall before much longer. I am surprised at how fast this goes considering we really only have a handful of players. There are a core group of Greysky folks in the guild, but other than that we have one person that I picked up from my wanderer pack, and another person that seemingly found our guild and joined it on their own. The fact that Ace and I both have second accounts, seems to also be helping the process out, but regardless we are moving through levels quickly.
I honestly still have the pack set to auto approve folks, so if you are playing Destiny Rising and want to be part of our nonsense feel free to join. You have to unfortunately drop your current pack before the game will allow you to join a new one, which made for the whole process of creating this a bit maddening because I could not even throw out an invite until they had left their currently situation. So long as you are going to be pretty chill and relaxed, and don’t do anything wildly offensive… you are welcome. We tend to hang out on my Super Dungeon Friends Discord when we are doing group content, so it is easy for folks to join in the nonsense. There is a Destiny flag in the role assignment channel, but I believe I made it so that once you get flagged for accepting the rules, you can see everything. This tends to be where we organize everything, so similarly if you ever want to join in on our Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans, we arrange that in the Guild Wars 2 channel.
In other news that I am proud of, I am up to five characters at gold rank. I currently have Wolf, Ning Fei, and Tan-2 all in about the same relative position for my next gold. Ning is who I intend on pushing up there, but progress is slow because it entirely relies upon the same limited currency. I got an infusion with the last reset, but am once again stalled out until I can get some more of it. You need six to buy the final rank of abilities, and you can only realistically get four per calamity ops reset. This is the thing that wears on me about the long term viability of Destiny Rising. I feel like they need to give more reasons to run something other than the two seasonal modes… because you can only do so much of that and they reset super infrequently. All of the things that no one queues for… need to be given a reason for folks to queue for them.
Probably the thing that I am most focused on grinding out each day is all of the nonsense needed to upgrade my mentor status. I already have Daybreaker because I run a lot of content, and have run a lot of it with new lights. The more grinding things are “interactions” with new lights which means that you either need to cheer them and get them to cheer you back, or give them an award in a activity… and get them to give you a reward back. Mostly this involves running around haven and aggressively greeting new lights until one of them FINALLY greets you back. The drift bottles and mentor chat is just spamming chat channels… which I feel are counter intuitive to these features. Apparently the next step involves posting things in these same chat channels and begging people for likes. This is dumb, and should maybe be focused on something a bit more conducive to building a successful game.
Ace and I are going to try and knock out a bunch of the new week stuff because the rest of the week is going to be pretty fraught when it comes to playing Destiny Rising. Tomorrow the new Guild Wars 2 expansion drops, and I am probably going to be spending a lot of time playing through that content. Then on Friday the new Path of Exile 3.27 league drops at 12pm PDT, and I took the day off work so expect me to be grinding that like a madman for most of the weekend. Right now I am in the doldrums waiting on those things to drop.
