monster hunter

A New Sceptre

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Morning Folks. Essentially each night I am progressing a bit in Monster Hunter Wilds, and then wind up back in Path of Exile for super chill mapping and delve time. There is only so much directed combat that I can take in a single evening. Monster Hunter Wilds is cool but also feels like it has zero chill right now because every quest leads to another big boss fight. I did spend some time last night roaming around and picking up materials so that I could upgrade a few things. It is probably weird that Path of Exile is known for being this obtuse nut to crack… but that I also find it my super chill happy place. I’ve been slowly working my way through unlocking all of the Heist quests, which given that I tend to find two to three rogue caches in each map… it is going pretty quickly.

Over the weekend I recorded another one of my dumb little videos where I effectively documented the state of my Righteous Fire Scavenger build. I personally find these useful because as I look back on various builds it helps me remember exactly what the state of the build was when I stopped playing it. This one was especially important I thought because we will not be getting Scavenger for very long, and the whole chaos explosions thing is really fun to experience. Essentially I zoom into a pack and it more or less explodes and then proliferates out to everything else in the area causing them to either explode or at least get whittled down in health so that my Righteous Fire can finish them off. I still prefer RF Chieftain because it is way more sturdy, but this is pretty damned fun.

Yesterday I bankrupted myself and bought a Putrid Cloister which unlocked the 3 Crafted mods benchcraft. Then I liquidated all of my available chaos to buy two Divine Orbs so that I could take the Sceptre I had been sitting on and turn it into a Damage Multi/Fire Multi setup. When Righteous Fire lost its flat damage the whole gem levels thing became way less important in the long run, and you are generally better off just trying for as much damage multi on your weapon as you can get. The other stats are largely just useless but I had a few exalted orbs sitting on my bank and figured might as well slam something on it. I even used an imprint beast on this just in case the regal orb bricked the item, so that I had one more shot at it. I now have an imprint that is mostly useless, but I would rather use it and not need it than need it and not have used it given that I captured the beast on my own.

While I was in a video recording mood I also took a bit of time and documented the final state of my Pohx League build, which was Ice Trap of Hollowness Trickster. I really do want to revisit this build during a proper league to see how far I can take it. Right now I just lack the evasion to make this feel more comfortable. I would really like to be able to hit 90% evasion chance and the limited trade environment made that difficult… or at least unaffordable. During a proper trade league there would be way more gear available, and I would probably be able to find an Ice Trap Dragonfang amulet. I had a search running for a few days and none of them showed up on the market. If this says viable, I may legitimately start it during 3.26 just to see how far I can take it, given that I already know I can run up a RF character as a backup in a few days without much issue if it crashes and burns.

This morning I got the first Tabula Rasa that I have gotten in a few league events. I think Crucible was the last league when I was getting these constantly. I had a bank full of various corrupted versions because I kept getting them, and kept rolling the dice with Vaal orbs. Not that I plan on leveling anything else during Legacy of Phrecia, but a Tabula is always a good way to start out a build. Though over the last few leagues I think I prefer some of the other starter chests if you can throw enough currency on it to get it up to four links. It is really hard to beat Thousand Ribbons for starter gear.

Last night I took out the Black Flame and then continued on and took out a corrupted Doshaguma and then a corrupted Rathalos. At that point I wandered around for awhile until the itch to play some Path of Exile caught me. I seem to only be able to take about three or four boss fights before needing to do something else for a bit. I looked at a quest guide and it does not appear that I am even halfway through the main story quest yet. I am not exactly in a massive rush, but I do prefer the endgame loop of Monster Hunter games to the story driven leveling process. Mostly I don’t love the whole fiddling around with temporary gear sets and would prefer to invest my time in a final build. It is what it is… and I find it bizarre the games that I enjoy the leveling process in like Path of Exile and the games that I just want a skip button to zoom straight to endgame goodness like Monster Hunter.

Anyways! I figure I will be flipping back and forth between these two games at least until April 2nd when the new Last Epoch Cycle lands. Depending on how engaged I get with Monster Hunter I might swap from Path of Exile to Last Epoch and then alternate between LE and MHWilds.

Missing Cat Chef Theater

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Good Morning Folks! Late Thursday evening Monster Hunter Wilds dropped and I spent a good chunk of time over the weekend playing it. At this point I have racked up just shy of 13 hours and it is weird how fast the muscle memory from Monster Hunter World came back to me. A lot of the controls are different this time around and I have slowly been tweaking things to make them work a bit better. Other than a few wonky performance issues here and there I have mostly had a pretty great time. I’ve been largely focused on the Main Story Quest, but feel like I need to spend a bit more time smelling the roses and exploring the zones. Truth be told my favorite things about the previous game was the expedition zones and tagging in on SOS flares to help folks down bosses. I’ve done a bit of both, but nowhere near as much as I probably should be.

At this point I am down in the third zone and about to fight by my count the fourth major boss. I am not sure if the game is bugged out but I don’t seem to have a quest marker showing me where I should be going next. I roamed around a bit last night and could not figure out where the game was trying to send me. I’ve crafted a bit of gear and trying something that I never really did in the previous game. I’ve equipped a weapon set that causes sleep, so we will see how that bodes for the next major encounter. I took my first death on the Lava Apes and things seem to be ramping up a bit. I think part of the problem was that I did not make a cool drink for the fight, and I think I was taking heat debuffs the entire time. I should probably focus on taking care of those things, which will require roaming around the expedition areas a bit more to collect goods.

One of my only complaints right now is that I miss the Felyne cooking scenes. We have a cute Palico that appears to be wearing a tomato pincushion as a hat… which is pretty great. However I really miss the elaborate cooking scenes and while technically more useful… cooking the food myself is not as fun. Maybe as the game progresses we will get back the kitchen, but I fear that is probably not the case. Even in Monster Hunter Rise they made Dango. Sadly the game peaked at Monster Hunter World and will probably never reach such peaks of Felyne culinary prowess again. This is probably a dumb thing to complain about, but really it was a core chunk of my enjoyment.

I think my new favorite bit from Wilds though are the WudWuds. I have no clue WHAT they are “preslicedly”. Maybe beavers or otters? Whatever the case, I think they are pretty great. So much of my enjoyment of this game come from the non-human characters that we interact with. I had forgotten how much I needed this level of cat adjacent nonsense in my life. We are going through dark times right now, and having a bit of pure escapism is precious. Hunting big monsters with my cat friend that is styled after my own chaos goblin Gracie has been quite a bit of fun. I do sort of get drained by the game, which makes me think I need to spend more time just roaming around the world looting materials. I spent so much of my time in the first game doing that, and I pretty much need to adopt the same stance in this game.

It is definitely a worthy successor to Monster Hunter World. I also dig the ability to be in multiple squads which serve the purpose of guilds. Here is a screen that shows my friend code, if you are playing the game feel free to throw me an invite. So far it seems to be working pretty seamlessly across all of the available platforms. Part of me wants to keep my head down until I hit the end game and then devote the bulk of my time crafting proper gear sets. However I think I will probably enjoy myself if I just mill around a bit and do some nonsense along the way. I’ve yet to actually group up with anyone, and I am contemplating throwing out an SOS for the next boss encounter just to make it go more quickly.

That is really my only complaint about this game is that it continues to provide limited feedback as to how the battle is going. We have a health bar, but what I really want is a boss health bar. The whole system of changing the icon on the mini-map and also getting hints from the guide that follows you along in battle… are fine and all but the game would feel better if you had clear feedback as to how much impact you are actually making during the fight. As it stands now it feels like you are essentially beating a bag of hit points that then randomly falls over and lets you carve it. I get that this is a conscious choice in the design of the Monster Hunter franchise, but I feel like it is the wrong one, especially in the “World” series which is designed to be more approachable.

All in all though I am having fun. I ultimately knew I would because I went completely obsessive about this game series when Worlds released back in 2018. So much so that I played through the progression on PlayStation and then started over from scratch again and leveled everything up on PC when it finally released on that platform. I am very happy that this time we are getting Console and PC releases at the same time with full cross play.

AggroChat #514 – Seeking Tribooty

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are down our West Coast contingent this week but carried forth with a relatively short show.  Bel talks a bit about the Anti Sanctum Alliance and how it seems to have actually made an impact at least in the pricing of Sanctum Tomes in the Legacy of Phrecia event. From there Thalen shares his experiences with The Roottrees Are Dead, which is a logic puzzle spiritual successor to games like Return of the Obra Dinn.  We move on to talking a bit about Monster Hunter Wilds and our early experiences so far.  We’ve needed some Palico shenanigans to help us cope with our present dystopia. Last week we got a new feature trailer for the upcoming Last Epoch Cycle 2 coming April 2nd.  We spend a bit of time talking about what has been revealed for the new features and how it appears like the long wait has been worth it.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Legacy of Phrecia
    • Impact of the Anti-Sanctum Alliance
  • The Roottrees Are Dead
  • Monster Hunter Wilds
  • Last Epoch Cycle 2 Trailer

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Jellies and Palicoes

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Hey Folks. Yesterday I wrapped up the fifth book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and made quite a bit of progress in Path of Exile. Originally I was planning on spending the night playing Monster Hunter Wilds… then realized that it was not releasing until 11 pm my time… when I would absolutely very much be largely comatose. In fact I did not even make it to 9 pm before the siren song of the bed called my name. The above screenshot is mostly so I can show off the fact that I picked up the adorable jellyfish portal mtx, which is something I wanted when it was in a loot box… but now that it is up on the store and on sale… I could not resist. Generally speaking I do not mind spending money on Path of Exile because I get so much joy out of the damned game.

Right now there is a farming method that is likely going to get nerfed… that can cause 36+ Rogue Exiles to spawn on a single map… and then get resummoned forth again via the Ritual mechanic for even more loot. I did however take advantage of the fact that the idols associated with this method are going for upwards of 13 div… and sold the one I had for a quick infusion of currency. I then used this to purchase two banger rings which helped me cap chaos resistance, and gain enough other resistances to be able to drop Purity of Elements. I am now instead running Tempest Shield which allows me to cap my Attack and Spell Block meaning that I am recovering life constantly and generally feel quite a bit more tanky in game. As soon as I can get my hands on an Enlighten Support I should be able to add back in Skitterbots and be effectively in my final configuration. The next big purchases would be an Unnatural Instinct and a Light of Meaning with Fire Damage on it… so I can do a big dumb combo.

Truth be told, if I made no forward momentum from this point in the league I will be happy with where I am. As of yesterday I have unlocked all of the non-unique maps and picked up my first two voidstones. This is pretty much the point where I try and get every league and event and consider this the basic “done” point. Anything I accomplish on top of this is just gravy. I will probably unlock some more of the easy favorite map slots like doing the various guardian maps. I doubt I am in a state where I can do a T17 unless it is rolled EXTREMELY easily. It feels like my single target dps is in a really bad state, but I have a decent base that I am going to try and craft a new sceptre with at some point. All in all though I am pretty happy with the state of where I got in both the Phrecia and Pohx League events.

The extremely keen eyed may have noticed some additions to my blog’s masthead. These are palicos that I commissioned Ammo to create for me which represent Gracie and Josie two of my current cats. She has been doing Palico portraits in the lead up to Monster Hunter Wilds and they have all been delightful. I already had a Palico that represents Kenzie in my masthead, and she will eternally be my Monster Hunting buddy of legend… but it is time to bring a few new cats into the fold. Ammo did an excellent job of capturing the essence of these two with Gracie being the chaos goblin that she is chasing the heal bug, and Josie giving some serious side eye as she carefully places a barrel.

I got in very briefly this morning to create my Hunter and primary Palico, and played long enough to get to the first temporary camp that allows you to choose your weapon. I am going to try and main Sword and Shield this time around, and we will see how long that lasts. I chose to model my Palico after Gracie and named her Graciebutt since that is what I actually call her 99.9% of the time. It is going to take a bit to get used to the controls of a Monster Hunter game again but I fully expect to spend most of the weekend playing this game and giving it a go. I will probably pause my sojourn through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series until I get through at least most of the initial storyline. Monster Hunter Wilds will probably be a perfectly fine audiobook game, but it is going to take churning through some story before I get there.

Are you going to be playing Monster Hunter Wilds? What weapon are you going to main? What did you name your Palico? Drop me a line below.