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Heys for Days

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Good Morning Folks. The one thing that worries me a bit about Destiny Rising is that it is getting a bit harder to fight “New Lights” to harass. Essentially the hardest part of the dailies… are the mentor dailies. This is of course something that I do not actually need to do at all… but I want to upgrade from Mentor to Adept Mentor and this involves jumping through a bunch of hoops. The hardest by far is trying to find 3 New Lights that will respond back to me… so this usually involves roaming around Xiangshi the first area of the game or Haven and looking for new lights… and hoping they know how to respond back with their own “Hey!”. I got my three done super early this morning, so that pretty much sets up the rest of the day well for me. It would probably go smoother if I did this during primetime, but I figure the most serious players are going to be clogging the social areas at that time.

I talked about this a bit yesterday but essentially I am down to three parts of the Adept certification. I am a little over ten days away from completing the Resonator step, which means at that point I can stop trying to find new lights. I only recently started doing the Interpreter and Orator steps which involve posting in the Mentor chat and answering Drift Bottle questions, which are this games version of a forum post. The problem with that last step is… this is mostly mentors answering other mentors… and making dumb posts for the purpose of getting artificial interaction. It feels dumb, but we are all running on this same treadmill, and in theory I should have been focused on this nonsense way earlier than now so I could have been done with it and moving on to the next dumb grind. I believe the step after this is to try and get 200 likes on a post you make in the drift bottle area. Like I said NONE of this is required… it is just something I feel obligated to do, so I can have fancier titles beside my name.

Last night was pretty great because Ace and I hung out on the SDF discord, and before long our friend Mor had joined us. It had been really long since I last talked to him about anything of substance, so it was good to catch up. Though I am sure it sounded like we were speaking some made up language since he is very much NOT into either Destiny Rising or Gacha games in general. We got together and did a Grandmaster Strike… which was exceptionally frustrating because we lacked someone who could take out Spread Shinkas and we had to brute force it. We then treated ourselves to some rounds of Morgans Hunt and they went much better. We are both basically within two more rounds of finishing up the event, and both got our exotic weapons last night. Mine was sadly a copy of the Chaperone… which is a shotgun that I will never actually use because it is quite bad.

Estela is exceptionally good at Morgran’s Hunt and we managed to queue into a group where all three color variants of this skin were represented. It is the weird little moments like this that you cling to and that bring you joy. The round AFTER this one though went exceptionally badly because we had a Tan-2, who has crappy wave clear and I think we only managed to pull a single key from that run. I am left with 5 more keys to get, and I think Ace is left with 4, because at some point they must have done a run without me. I am not sure what night we will finish this up, but maybe on Thursday because that is when the Festival of the Lost event drops. I’ve already begged off of Guild Wars 2 for this week since we have very limited time to do whatever this activity is. I want a dumb papier-mâché mask of a pumpkin, or whatever else is available during the event. Festival of the Lost was always my favorite Destiny 2 event, so I am oddly looking forward to this. I hope it is not a massive disappointment.

Yesterday about mid day was the official end of the Mercenaries of Trarthus league in Path of Exile. This means it was time for me to attempt to straighten and organize my Standard stash a bit, because when you go into the new league its stash will be based on the state of standard. You end up with a stupid amount of remove-only tabs, and I pretty much create a new folder at the end of each league, named after the league that just finished, and shove them all into it. That way if I ever want something to test in standard, I can pull the items out of that folder… and it has the least amount of impact on my limited league stash overall. I am a league player and effectively my standard stash is meaningless. I should probably find a few sacrificial characters and delete them now, so I will have plenty of slots for league characters if the mood hits me.

Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.

However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.

An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.

Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.

Bizarre Obsession

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This weekend we recorded somewhat of a mega show of AggroChat.  We originally sat down thinking we might not have a complete show…  and then recorded for two hours and wound up dropping a few topics to try and manage the show length.  There were a whole slew of topics but one of which is one that I did not expect to blow up to the level at which it did.  Kodra has been talking magic for a year or so in his adventures in doing drafts through Magic Online for each of the expansion releases that have happened.  Lately however I have found myself obsessing about the game even though I have not regularly played it since the tempest cycle.  Magic the Gathering will always have this nostalgic characteristic for me because I have had a lot of really good times playing it.  The problem is…  once I entered the adult world I stopped having a regular stream people to play with.  I’ve never really gotten involved with a local shop doing the Friday night magic thing, because in truth people just don’t play Magic the Gathering the way I want to play it.  The prevalence of NetDecking and combo magic turned things into a weird cold war…  where you either needed to be playing whatever the new hotness needed to be…  or at least come up with a way to counteract that new hotness.  When I last stopped playing… the format of choice was called “Type II” and I believe this translates to the “Standard” in the current naming of formats.  So when I left during the Tempest cycle it was all about the combo to beat… and either scrambling to get the cards…  or scrambling to get something to beat it.

The style of Magic the Gathering I enjoyed was back when you never quite knew what you might be encountering in a players deck.  Maybe it just took my area while to get super competitive, but in early tournament play I only ever once encountered the “power nine” but instead came up against a lot of seemingly fun to play themed decks.  For me a lot of my decks centered around some card that I wanted to play with… and then blunting the negative effects of that card.  So say I wanted to play with the Lord of the Pitt, I would run some token creatures that I could just keep churning out to feed to it rather than pay the 7 life upkeep.  If I wanted to play with Leviathan I would run Icy Manipulator and Twiddle to keep from having to pay the two island tax to untap it each round, then figure out some way to retrieve islands from the graveyard every so often.  It was fun trying to figure out a way to counteract what was not good about the cards and then figure out how to make them work well enough to be playable.  Some of the most fun I ever had was in college the magic store I used to hang out in had a deep common bin… and we would end up building these $5 decks out of the archives and then pit them against each other.  I guess the modern equivalent to this would be pauper, but even then…  that format takes itself way more seriously than I wish I could when it comes to MTG.  I’ve been trying to sort out a way to play the game how I want to play it…  but also find some people to play with.

The biggest problem right now is availability of people.  There are enough folks who have played MTG at one point in their lives to maybe create a lunch time group at work.  The problem there I am not not sure what sort of format would work best.  I am leaning towards something janky along the lines of Pauper Commander…  without the commanders.  Where you functionally construct a deck of common cards without the ability to repeat any cards.  I would functionally need to probably fund a lot of the commons given that there are simply not enough in any one set to make up a deck of entirely common cards.  I think a format like that however might bring back the random weirdness that I miss from playing Magic.  There were moments where you would sit down and encounter something you never expected to see…  and it would be interesting to figure out how to adjust to that and find a way to either defeat it or work around it.  In truth I love common cards,  because they tend to be the unappreciated workhorses of magic.  It always bugs me a bit when people just dismiss them and toss them aside like garbage…  when you cannot really make ANY deck without relying on a whole slew of them to serve as the glue between those higher dollar cards.  I have no clue how this will end but thusfar it has simply been a case of be re-familiarizing myself with Magic the Gathering and trying to figure out if this is really something I want to jump back into.