Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! We are down a Tam this week and had some topics that were sitting on our list for a bit. We start off talking about the official end of Anthem and the Mark Darrah video that effectively provides an autopsy for the game. Loosely related, we talk about the impending death of New World in January 2027. This forces us down the path of talking about what the heck even makes an MMO anymore, and how we largely agree that it requires random interaction with other players to count. We decided that the lobby-based games are PSOLikes since the first game we can remember that was that way was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. From there, we talk a bit about Shape of Dream,s another Roguelike that Ash and Kodra have been playing. Bel shares his thoughts on Legacy of Phrecia 2.0 in Path of Exile, and Kodra shares his endgame thoughts about Path of Exile II. We wrap the show up talking about the impending patch in Guild Wars 2 that is going to add quickplay for raids and the new Fashion Plates adjacent system.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week, we start off with some discussion around Path of Exile 3.27, the Keepers of the Flame league, and how we are doing breach to make things with the tree tree. From there, we talk a bit about the murder of Amazon Game Studios and how New World is essentially a shambling corpse now… spooky. After that horror story, we needed something chill, so we talked a bit about Powerwash Simulator and its interesting method for delivering a story. Grace and Bel finally finish the Destiny Rising raid and talk a bit about how good it is at teaching mechanics in lower-level content. Dispatch is a wildly good game that is being delivered in an episodic method that feels like you are playing a really good television show. Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity launched and we talk about some of our early thoughts, namely around the builds introduced by the new elite specs. Finally, we talk a bit about Outer Worlds 2 and how it makes good on the idea of Obsidian’s very own Fallout New Vegas that the first game started.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We had a pretty meandering show where we thought we ran out of topics… and then suddenly remembered a few more at the very end. We start with talking about Grace and Bel’s adventures in All Ikora PVPVE nonsense with Destiny Rising. From there, Grace talks about the full release of Slime Rancher 2, and Ammo some adventures in Mathematics with the Final Fantasy Tactics remake. Xbox seems like it is cooked as they continue their trend of raising the price on everything, this time with Game Pass. Bel talks about revisiting the MySpace 1.0 era with an almost one-for-one clone called SpaceHey. Tam shares some thoughts about why Rise of Ronin did not land for him, but Ghost of Yotei absolutely has. Bel has popped back into New World and was shocked to find some pretty significant updates to the game. Then things go off the rails a bit, and we eventually talk about Hades 2 and the Electronic Arts sale to the Saudi Public Investment Fund.
Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.
I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.
One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.
Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.
I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.
I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.
I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.
The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.
Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.
