wolf

Impossible Mansions

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Good Morning Folks. I hope you had a most wonderful extended holiday weekend. I had to work on Friday, which interrupted an otherwise solid weekend. My neighbor down the street also lost their mother and I have been helping out with some photo editing and stuff to prepare for the eventual memorial service. As far as gaming goes I spent a good chunk of Saturday grinding out things in Destiny Rising. We had a large cluster of potential strongholds and I ran all three accounts trying to utilize their map turns to unlock them. We got three and then ran them as a group on Sunday morning. The other focus of grinding was to finish out the sparrow event so that I would be caught up and ready for the next New Years event that starts in a few days. I unlocked the special sparrow and discovered that you can put stickers on your sparrows… and decorated my snowmobile with a sticker of the cutest couple Beleaguered Gwynn and a very sleepy Attal.

Other than that I have worked on my Jaren a bit and unlocked Gold Medal Certification, pushing him up into the hierarchy of my characters. This is one of those characters that grew on me the longer that I had him. Effectively for me he is sort of a better version of Ning Fei, because he has the same speed boost tech but then a whole kit that makes body shots behave like precision shots. This means I can take him into any encounter with precision shinkas without having to play a fiddly sniper character. Other than that I also finally got off my ass and ran a Legendary Mission with Wolf so that I could push him up to gold medal certification as well, which has now officially unlocked the last two ranks of perks. Any ascension points after this is just gravy because everything is now unlocked that can be unlocked currently.

The next banner has been announced and it is a bit of a dud. They are introducing an alternate universe version of Kabr, likely the one that dies in the Vault of Glass in the Destiny 1/2 timeline. As a result he has a completely different kit which I believe is Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion rifle. The thing is… I already have precision characters that I like… namely Umeko and more importantly Helhest. We are supposed to be getting a free copy of this character, so as a result it is HIGHLY unlikely that I spend any pulls on this banner. I will just bank them up and save them for a future banner. There is also nothing particularly special about the 4 stars on this banner either. Why they keep putting Ikora on these banners is beyond me, because feels like four in a row or something dumb like that. I wouldn’t mind more copies of Attal, but very much not a priority for me since she also comes from the blue perm banner.

I am not sure if I talked about it here or not, but I now have all four ascendancies unlocked on the Bear Shaman. Instead of going down the Furious Wellspring path, I opted instead just to pick up two nodes that were useful on their own right, but did not significantly tweak the way the character performed. If I had gone down the furious wellspring path, I would have likely needed to do way more gear swapping to include a Crown of Eyes to make the Druidic Champion ascendancy notable pay off. I’ve already struggled with resistances a bit and the thought of losing another slot and with it even more armor… is a bit rough. What makes it even worse though is that the Crown has -10% Fire Resistance that I do not believe can be removed by any method. It is probably the more powerful path but I like Turning of the Seasons for free exposure in presence range, and Wisdom of the Maji for essentially extra life and mana on all of my sockets.

I did do a bunch of gear swapping though to fit in a Defiance of Destiny. I picked up a cheap one with only 21% life recovery on it… which I then boosted to 25% with catalysts. This tiny bit of defiance effect was more than enough to effectively make my build feel immortal now for mapping. When you combine this with the physical damage shifting of Cloak of Flame and then combine that with Elemental Damage soaked by armor… it feels like no amount of damage is really that big of a deal for long. I am now putting more points into life regeneration on the tree since I feel like I deal more than enough damage when I go try hard and push all of my buttons. Simply bouncing around the map with molten crash is more than enough damage to comfortable clear all t15 waystones and I am sure t16s even thought I have yet to do one of those. I think really the only upgrade that I might focus on now is trying to get a new version of Fury of the King with a level 19 or 20 copy of Molten Crash in it.

I spent a decent chunk of last night trying to unlock these two mansions that are showing on the map. I think these nodes might be bugged because while I found what feels like more than enough stones in the surrounding maps, the pathways to either of these never seem to unlock. I did find a weird bug though, where because I failed one of the maps with a stone in it… it made EVERY subsequent map that unlocked by clearing one of the other maps… show up as though I had failed it, and not allow me to use tablets on it. Essentially when you are doing this thing where you are chasing stones, it can cause new nodes to appear on your atlas until you eventually uncover three stones and unlock the hidden pathway into the mansions. These nodes however appear to be imprinted based on the first one, so failing one, means you fail all of them. There are still a handful of nodes that MIGHT have stones in them, so I might as well burn through those and see if I can unlock both of these.

I’m also finally starting to try and care about the Vaal Temple. Apparently if you set it up correctly you can use it to print currency, but as Mathil says in a video that he released this morning… that is just the path to disappointment. Trying to compare your own drops, to an edited demo reel of the highest juiced content is always going to feel bad. Ultimately I arrive at this point every league where I have more than enough currency to do anything that I actually care to do with it. I’ve had decked out “Mageblood” characters and I did not enjoy them any more than I do my characters that I push just to the point of being functional. Sure having a headhunter for example is a lot of fun, but only if you also have a character build that can make the best use of it. I’ve learned that I don’t really love the blaster archetype character templates and instead like the quirkier builds that are way more tanky.

By not desensitizing myself… I can also still enjoy drops like this. Sure those exalted orbs have little value against he Divine Orb but it still feels nice when you see a bunch drop at once. Path of Exile 1 and 2 are the sort of games where you have to make your own fun. I am having a lot of fun with my Demon Fire Bear that runs amok bouncing all over the place, and that is good enough for me. However at some point today I need to stop avoiding the things that I don’t want to deal with… like the filament jam that I have in my AMS unit. I also need to spend some time properly setting up the hobby area in the other office now that I have most of the parts either printed or delivered and ready to go. I got a big self healing cutting mat yesterday so I need to clean off the existing area and start setting things up, and then figure out if I want to order one of those magnifying lamps or not.

Anyways. I hope you have a most wonderful week. I have to work today and tomorrow before being off weds… and having to work thurs and friday. Hopefully you were wiser and took most of the time off.

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.

Hot Goth Waifu

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I talked about Guild Wars 2, and while I am spending the majority of my time over there grinding out the Fractal event… I still playing quite a bit of Destiny Rising each day. Essentially you get 120 activity reward currency and I am trying to spend this down every day in order to keep moving the needle forward. Last time I talked about the game I said that I had pulled Jolder from the permanent banner, and at this point… I am playing with that character an awful lot. It really is well suited for my preferred playstyle of getting up in the face of baddies. While the super is purely defensive in nature… it has the side benefit of never needing to reload your weapon while you are standing in it, so it is exceptionally good for burning bosses down quickly. It doesn’t hurt that I really enjoyed the character story of Jolder and as a result she has rapidly become the character I play when I am not playing Wolf.

As the topic alludes to… I now own Gwynn aka the chamption that everyone refers to as Hot Goth Waifu. The thing is… I hate to admit it but the hype is absolutely worth it for this character. I am not sure if she is going to eat a nerf once her banner is over… but right now she feels exceptionally powerful and dual pistols is a shockingly fun main weapon. The character is once again all about getting up close and personal with packs of mobs and being able to decimate them quickly with the scythe attacks. It was at this point that I realize how relatively generous the pity system is in this game. Most other Gacha games have the pity system set to 90 to 120 pulls… aka 9 to 12 10 pulls. Destiny Rising has it sitting at 60 or 6 10 pulls. I was building up another premium pull from gaining currency from the various in game exchanges, and was going to pull for the new character… but realized I was within 10 of just guaranteeing Gwynn, and went for the sure thing instead. This of course reset my chances of getting ANY five star character, but it was worth it.

The game wants me to apparently start building out Gwynn because I was spending some random engrams that I had and managed to pull a four legendary perk pair of the Chushingura dual sidearms. This is the first time I have seen four legendary perks on a single weapon. I’ve got a lot of items that have three on them, but often times that final perk slot is a blue or something lame like that. The game will actually tell you when you pull four legendary perks by showing them on the screen instead of just moving on to the next engram decryption. So it is not like you are going to miss this event if it happens to you. I am not sure how large the vault is… or when I will need to decrypt all of the spare weapons… but right now I have only done so for blues and purples, leaving my hoard of mythics intact.

In other news I pulled the Saizo crossbow… which is largely useless because I do not have a champion that uses this weapon. However it was one of two remaining mythics that I had never added to my armory. The only thing that is remaining is the Scorched Earth Heavy Machinegun, and unfortunately it seems like the only way to get this organically is to pull it from the Gauntlet Onslaught raid event. I do not think that either Ace or Ammo are to the point where they can do the raid, but when they do I am absolutely going to start trying to stack a firetime full of people that are willing to communicate. I don’t really think the raid is that hard to complete, it just takes more coordination than you get with the usual random fireteam of folks.

In the continue journey of weapons that I cannot use… I got this hideous exotic crossbow. I get that this is a historical design… but holy shit is it ugly. It was a random drop however and proved to me that you can in fact get random items when you are out of the rewards currency. Essentially from what I can tell you can get rewards from any activity no matter how many times you run it, just that the only time you are guaranteed anything really good… is when you are spending the stamina currency. So that means if you need materials, you can in theory grind the same activity over and over and you will eventually get everything that you need. You can also still get the super rare drops like exotic weapons doing this as well, and I have pulled a few completely random mythics doing this.

Lastly in new weapon acquisition, I picked up a copy of The Huckleberry but this was gained through the login bonus system. At 7 days and 14 days you get a exotic choice engram that gives you one of three exotics. I believe there is another one at 21 days… but seeing as I already have a copy of the third weapon that I acquired through random drops… I am not really sure what I will do with that one. Huckleberry is at least a weapon type that I use pretty often on Jolder, but I am not the biggest fan of it being a Void weapon. In a perfect world I would walk into every event with two weapons that are different types than the abilities that my class provides, so that I can break shields of every element. Currently my load out is for Jolder is an Arc Submachinegun, and a Solar Sword… which contrasts her void abilities perfectly. The Submachinegun that I am really hoping to pull at some point is Riskrunner, but I am not sure if it is as good in this game as it is in Destiny 2.

All in all, I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with Destiny Rising. The various content types seem to be on a weekly rotation, so you really don’t have enough time to get tired of doing specific strikes and such before they cycle out to another one. The activity that I find interesting is the legendary story missions, which are solo only… and feel like they are roughly on par with the difficulty of what nightfall strikes were. I’ve only managed to successfully complete one of these with enough time to get bonus rewards… and even then I only managed to pull silver instead of gold. This is all time based, and I am guessing that I am just not powerful enough to be able to steamroll these. The grind to raise my affinity level is way harder than the grind to get to 80. Leveling just sort of felt like it happened on its own, but now raising affinity on my account feels like every step is just inching the bar forward. I know there is a lot of power that eventually unlocks when I hit rank 10… but seeing as I am barely into rank 6 that is probably going to be awhile.

I am really interested to see how seasons factor into this game, and what if anything resets on the power scale. It is one of those things where it is somewhat hard to tell what is seasonal and what is just part of the normal endgame. For the moment it feels like the only thing that is purely seasonal are these weird engrams that you get periodically that drop seasonal only rewards. Thusfar, I have gotten nothing that is terribly interesting from them, other than a few stickers that can be applied to your armor… but having done so on Wolf… I am not entirely certain I like the look. Weapon shaders are a thing, but so far they mostly just look like someone crudely spray painted your weapon all the same color instead of being something more bespoke feeling like armor shaders were in Destiny 1. Anyways the characters are cool enough without cosmetics so it is not something I am super bothered by. According to a roadmap they released, there is more content dropping in October and another season starting in November so it seems like maybe seasons are going to be roughly two months long.

Given that I am also getting new ARPG seasons roughly every two months… this is not going to be something I really keep up with in the long term. However for now I am having fun with it while it is fresh and new.