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Goal Wars 2, pt 2023
Yep, still playing Guild Wars 2. About 3 months ago, my goals were:
Play through Icebrood Saga contentPlay through End of Dragons contentTry some of the new Elite specsWork towards completing “Return of” achievements for free LegendaryWork towards unlocking Skyscale mount- Work towards unlocking some Legendary gear
As you can see, I have knocked damn near everything off my list.
ArenaNet introducing the “Return of” achievements with a “free” Legendary amulet carrot at the end (plus Legendary weapon precusor in the middle) has to be one of the most genius marketing moves I have seen an MMO developer take. With the stroke of… uh, some achievement code, they instantly made damn near their entire catalog of Living World content relevant again. The immediate impact was to give the general population something to do before the release of the End of Dragons expansion. But for someone like me, it also generated a means of incremental, meaningful progress that weren’t daily quests.
Plus, it kinda forced me to shell out $10 buying the Living World episodes I missed over the years.
The question is “what now?” I have completed End of Dragons content – and the original story conclusion, 10 years late – so there isn’t really anything left in the plot department. Ostensibly, my goals included unlocking some additional Legendary gear. The options I have been looking at include:
- Weapon (Axe)
- Backpiece (PvP)
- Accessory (Vision)
- Accessory (Aurora)
Of those, the Backpiece has been an interesting consideration. There are three different pathways to a Legendary Backpiece: PvE (Fractals), PvP, and WvW. Right from the get-go, WvW is out – it would take an absurd amount of time just sitting in WvW to accomplish anything. Conversely, PvP is achievable from just about anyone, as none of the requirements involve being particularly successful, e.g. top ranks. The roadblock I have with PvP at the moment though is that you need to complete 50 matches before you unlock the ability to queue into Ranked matches, which the achievements revolve around. It shouldn’t necessary be a “roadblock” for someone who enjoys the experience, but… well, let’s just say I am still figuring that out.
Unlocking the Backpiece via Fractals would perhaps be the most preferred method, but I have not been super successful in finding groups for that. Indeed, I only just recently went into my first Strike Mission, which are sort of mini-raids with just a single boss. It probably does not help that I only play late in the evenings. While the general consensus is to just start your own groups and see what happens, I am not necessarily that committed to the endeavor.
As for the accessories… sigh. To unlock Aurora, you first need to complete a collection achievement for four different items across Season 3 Living World episodes. Just one of those involves finding forty (40!) tokens across a map, some of which are hidden in the infamous Chalice of Tears jumping puzzle. Just look at this Wiki page. That’s just ONE piece. Of four. Then you have to charge the final product up at 21 other locations around the world. Then combine that charged up product with three other collections of materials, which are themselves collections of other materials. The whole thing is rather ridiculous when laid out all at once.
Of course, continuing to play GW2 at all might be considered rather ridiculous.
We’ll see what happens. I am making some headway in other games, and I can see further progress on the horizon if/when I free up extra time by putting GW2 on the backburner/on ice. The tricky part will be actually doing that. It’s seductively easy to log in, collect some easy rewards on each of the characters, and then log off. But before then, oh hey, this meta event is going on, let me just get those rewards. And now I just have an hour left to play “real” games. It’s a rough life, I know.
Post-Magic Apocalypse
I knew it was coming, but it nevertheless stung a bit when Bethesda hotfixed “magic weapons” in Fallout 76.
Made famous by this Angry Turtle video, “magic weapons” were guns that did inordinate amount of damage due to bugs derived from their Legendary affixes. This predominantly affected shotguns (each pellet did full damage) and fast fire-rate heavy weapons like gatling lasers (each hit seemed to hit 4-5 more times). In practical terms, magic shotguns would 1-shot most enemies and magic heavy weapons needed only a few seconds of fire to melt foes. As you might imagine, this was quite fun.
Was it OP though? Maybe. But not especially so considering the overall meta.
“Bloodied” builds have been meta for… if not since release, at least for the last year. A weapon with the Bloodied affix deals up to 100% damage per shot based on your remaining HP – the lower your health, the higher your damage. While you would assume the build makes you a glass cannon, Fallout 76 includes a number of Perks that combo with low HP, such as Nerd Rage (40 DR, +20% damage, +15% AP when under 20% HP) and Serendipity (45% chance to avoid damage while under 30% HP). Power Armor already gives passive damage resistance on top of the armor, but the Emergency Protocol mod further decreases damage by 50% (!!) and increase speed by 25% when under 20% HP. Then there is the Adrenal Reaction mutation that basically adds Bloodied (yo dawg) to your weapons at low health, so you can Bloodied while you Bloodied.
Oh, and did I forget Unyielding legendary affix on armor? That gives you +3 on all your stats per piece (!!!) depending on your low health, which means people running around having 30 Strength, 30 Agility, etc, before even considering buffs or chems. So not only were they dealing insanely more damage, they were also passing all the Speech checks added with actual human NPCs no problem as well. Clearly, this was how Bethesda wanted the Fallout 76 experience to be.
As you might imagine, Bloodied/Unyielding items are in demand and thus expensive when sold in player vending machines (if available at all). Thus, I felt like this short era of Magic Weapons was overall good for the game, or at least more equitable for us plebs than the poorly balanced baseline.
In the meantime, I have been making do. All shotguns get scrapped. I have been cycling through various weapons to gauge their efficacy, and have winnowed down the field considerably. While Magic weapons have been removed, there are still a number of probably-unintended glitches, such as how first-hit Sneak Attack bonus damage is applied to several bullets when shot from automatic guns. Targeting the head amplifies the damage considerably, which takes us back to Magic weapon territory. Indeed, overall auto > semi-auto is the name of the game – if your one shot doesn’t instantly kill your target, you are wasting your time in comparison.
Is Fallout 76 still fun for me? Yes. Well, in that general MMO-grind sort of way. I’m collecting Gold Bullion by doing dailies and Events to unlock the highest tier of armor and a few other weapons to try out. I’m doing the Daily Ops to unlock a CAMP item that would be a convenience option. And otherwise biding my time until the next content drop.
So, yeah, exactly in a MMO sort of way.
Hearthstone Welfare Legendaries
OK, not really. But word is out from the Brodester that as of the next expansion:
- Every time you open a legendary card it will be guaranteed to be one that you don’t have before.
- Everyone will be guaranteed to open a new legendary card within the first ten packs of the new set.
- Both of these changes will start when the next expansion hits.
I have actually received multiples of the same Legendary before, so this is absolutely an improvement of the current system. Also confirmed is that you can go ahead and craft the Legendaries you want right away without fear that you might open it in your next pack – the system will automatically update to skip over a Legendary you already have. There really isn’t a downside here for anyone.
At the same time, it’s a bit tough to say that Blizzard is really giving much away either. If anything, this undeniable Quality of Life improvement might encourage players to buy more packs overall.
And, honestly? This announcement came out in the middle of Shadowverse doing this:
Not all that uncommon.
Logging in once a day results in 5 free packs of cards of alternating sets, or the equivalent of 3 free Arena runs. On top of the normal daily log-in bonuses. On top of the normal daily quests you can complete for additional prizes. On top of the dozens of achievements that unlock goodies.
It’s just kinda a shame that Shadowverse’s current meta is worse than Hearthstone and about a third of its cards are softcore hentai. We could use a bit more competition between the top F2P CCGs.
Legendary Out of the Way
It finally happened last night:
3rd best one, I guess.
My views on legendaries in general hasn’t changed since a month and a half ago. Indeed, in a very ironic sense, finally receiving a legendary at the long end of a hidden pity timer might be the motivation I needed to finally stop doing Emissary Quests, and most World Quests altogether. Lord knows how I would feel if another one drops after I kinda gave up farming Order Resources and thus never unlocked the “You can equip 2 legendaries” bonus. Even if I started right now, the research timer alone is 14 days.
So, yeah. Go me. The legendary’s effect is to reduce the cooldown timer of my 3 minute DPS cooldown that I never use outside bosses anyway. I don’t anticipate that changing anytime soon.
In the meantime, I’ll continue unlocking Draenor flying, farming Ulduar transmog, and perhaps get around to using my level 100 boost on something.
Legendary RNG
I have around 40 hours at the WoW endgame and have not gotten a legendary yet.
Yes, I understand how “entitled” that statement is. The problem is that this is the sort of endgame that Blizzard has designed.
Back in the day, Legendaries were extremely rare drops from the end bosses of high raiding tiers. This made them rare and cool, but effectively nonexistent for the majority of the playerbase and drama-laden for raiders besides. Sometimes the mainhand Warglaive never dropped. Sometimes the rogue got both Warglaives and then /gquit. Sometimes the warrior tank spent his accumulated DKP and “wasted” a Warglaive drop to look cool.
Around Wrath, the Legendary paradigm changed to make things a bit more organized. You had to collect 40 pieces of whatever, perhaps kill a specific boss, get a certain achievement, and then you got your Legendary. There was still a certain amount of coordination necessary though, as the Legendary pieces dropped for the whole raid, and thus had to be divvied up. In Mists and Warlords, the system was opened up further to the point where everyone could reasonably be expected to receive their own personal Legendary items. Drama around Legendaries was essentially removed, being solely a function of an individual’s willingness to grind past the gating mechanism.
In Legion, Legendaries are once again random drops. And there are dozens and dozens of them, for specific classes and even specific specs. The system, in effect, is a huge step backwards.
In principle, I actually like what they are doing with Legendaries, insofar as they are items that make you rethink your talent choices, skill rotation, and possibly even spec. Trinkets and Tier Set pieces traditionally function in this role, and their ability to “change the math” is precisely why getting them are exciting. One can stomach stat sticks only so far. In this sense, perhaps having “Legendary” items perform a similar role outside of Tier Sets and trinkets makes the piece of gear indeed “legendary.”
That said, we are now in a new Blizzard paradigm in which not only does Legendary gear drop from any content – including really dumb World Quests – but also one in which we can expect to see multiple pieces. Indeed, the last Class Hall upgrade for every class is the ability to equip two Legendary items at a time. Ergo, we should expect to have 2+ minimum. That said, there are tens of thousands of people right now with multiple Legendary pieces, and even more who have none. Supposedly there exists a “pity timer” which increases the odds of a Legendary drop the more one fails to receive one (such a mechanic exists in Hearthstone already), but nevermind.
Regardless, I really kinda hate this system. Sure, I see what Blizzard is doing: moving WoW towards a more Diablo 3 looting model, which makes completing otherwise dreary “kill 10 X” more exciting. But I actually enjoyed working towards items. Remember the old Badge system? There is a huge difference on an intellectual level between grinding 1000 mobs for 1000 points to buy a piece of gear, versus grinding 1000 mobs for a 1/1000 chance for a gear drop. I mean, I get it: filling some progress meter is a more defined endpoint than random drops. But for me personally, this level of randomness provides no meaningful sense of progression at all.
And by the way, this system seriously sucks for my situation in particular. I have been playing my Druid pretty much exclusively this expansion, with the understanding that I will need to be Balance if I ever wanted to raid later. However, questing as Guardian is so fucking amazing and quick that doing anything else is folly. And if I ever wanted to play some PvP, say, to capitalize on the Arena Skirmish bonus this past week? That’s either Feral or Resto. So, basically, no matter when or where a Legendary does finally drop (if it drops), I am guaranteed to not be able to meaningfully use it.
If I could work towards a specifically Legendary… but alas. GG Blizzard. GG.
Legendaried
As you may or may not have seen on MMO-Champ, there was an interview with J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer of World of Warcraft, in which he dropped a Legendary bomb:
Brack: There’s one more piece which is an announcement that we’re releasing a rogue legendary weapon. Specific for rogues, so it will be a dagger. There will be some sort of quest, traditionally we’ve done these quests that players need to participate in order to create the legendary weapon in this case we’ll be focusing on rogues that will try to make that happen. […]
We haven’t decided on the name and how it’s going to work, we just know that we really want a legendary weapon to come out of this tier and we really want it to be a rogue dagger. That’s really all we know at this point. As time goes on we get a lot more lore, a lot more story, an “in” to the creation of all the legendary weapons. We really did a lot with the legendary axe that you got out of Lich King and then we’ve had other legendaries with the Cataclysm tiers that have had these storylines, we’re hoping this one’s going to be the most exciting, the most epic legendary quest line.
what is this I don’t even
Where do I start?
- Did no one in the design meeting raise their hand and question how “the most exciting, most epic legendary quest line” can even happen if you don’t have the least-played class in WoW in your raid team? Hey, Brack, you know that cool quest line you did for Shadowmourne? People saw and participated in that because THREE HUGELY POPULAR CLASSES were capable of taking it. Same deal Dragonswrath, same deal with Val’anyr, same deal with every single crafted legendary¹.
- At what point was it decided that legendary weapon quests were good uses of design time while class quests were not? Is the idea that legendary quests are like class quests that only a handful of classes even have access to?
- Legendary quest lines never really made any sense to me in an MMO setting to begin with. Is the collection of fragments of an ancient weapon cool? Yes. Is infusing them with the souls of your fallen foes awesome? Yes. Is a quest line that takes dozens of people weeks to accomplish epic? Yes! Er… unless you aren’t the guy getting the legendary. Don’t get me wrong, it feels great being part of something bigger than yourself. Problem is that an item to just one person is NOT something bigger than yourself. Legendaries in WoW, aside from one brief flirt with sanity in TBC, are designed for RPGs, not MMORPGs. If it has “worked” in vanilla and Wrath and Cataclysm thus far, it is working in spite of the terrible design.
I get that it was forewarned (in the tank Q&A of all places) that the 4.3 legendary “will have much more narrow appeal.” But… really? Remember the blue post back in June that speculated about why rogues are the least-played class? I am almost wondering if this legendary dagger is a cynical attempt at rectifying that discrepancy.
¹ Meaning more than one class could use it, not that all of them had 3 popular classes or whatever.
In An Age 
Things I’ve Learned About Myself via Fallout 4
Nov 19
Posted by Azuriel
I have been playing Fallout 4 pretty much non-stop since last Tuesday, and in that time I have started recognizing a few things about myself and how I play the game. These are not perhaps grand, personal epiphanies caused by Fallout 4 – I have certainly seen the seeds germinating in other games – but there is something about this game that is causing them to be more noticeable than normal.
Voice Acting Makes Characters a Character
Generally speaking, I do not role-play RPGs. By which I mean, I do not construct a character that looks like me, and I do not make decisions based on what I would personally do in that situation. If anything, I role-play the character I am playing as themselves, or whatever idealized form seems more narratively interesting. Which, I suppose, is still technically role-playing, but nevermind.
This predilection means I don’t actually like Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas all that much from a narrative standpoint. In Fallout 3, you are a blank slate, literally controlling your character from birth to presumably mold him/her into something resembling you IRL. Which, personally, just always seems like an easy way to skip writing a convincing narrative. “Let the reader fill in the details.”
The protagonist of New Vegas had a backstory, but the implementation was even more discordant, as I noted in my review:
Fallout 4 reminds me of what I already implicitly knew from Mass Effect: voice acting makes all the difference. Even when you still have the difficult choices to make, a well-delivered line can leave you with an impression of a character, and that impression can serve as your guide to who they “really” are.
Is voice-acting appropriate in every game? No. Does its presence often lead to more railroaded plots (due to the costs of recording twice as many lines)? Yes. But as someone who would rather experience plot vicariously rather than directly, it makes Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style choices a lot more bearable. The characters will tell you who they are.
Even Implied Romance Options Forces Me into Guy-Mode
The first character I created in Fallout 4 was, of course, Azuriel. As in, the wife. Played through the tutorial and even got all the way into Concord before something occurred to me. Could you romance companions in this game? As it turns out, you can.
I immediately rerolled as a dude.
It is a completely ridiculous reaction, but it happens every time in every game where romance is possible. Well, with one exception that proved the rule: I played a lady dwarf in Dragon Age: Origins several years ago. And it was awkward as fuck. Not that romance in any videogame isn’t generally awkward, but there is just something… maybe not immersion-breaking per se, but something personally off-putting about it that I can’t get over. Which makes my reaction to Fallout 4’s version of romance even more ridiculous, since you can romance any gender as any gender. But there it is.
I do plan to play the wife on my next “only pistols, no Power Armor, Renegade” style run though.
Change (in Formula) is Good
For the longest time growing up, I never really understood why all the Final Fantasy games had to have such radically different battle systems each time. Wasn’t FF7 good enough? Innovation, refinement, and so on are all worthy goals, but when you hit a certain plateau of elegance, why not just keep doing that thing?
Well… because then you have Fallout 4’s systems.
I grokked the entirety of Fallout 4 within the first hour or so of playing. The same strategies I’ve committed to muscle memory after hundreds of hours of Fallout 3 and New Vegas were immediately successful. Loot guns, leave the armor. Peek around corner, VATS, hide until AP regenerates. Food > Stimpacks unless you’re pressed for time. If things get dicey, break out the Pip-Boy to stop time and organize your equipment. Shoot X enemies in the face, shoot Y enemies in the legs.
While the out-of-VATS gunplay is much, much improved compared to the prior titles, Fallout 4 is basically Fallout 3/New Vegas all over again. The same tricks work.
As someone who enjoys optimizing the fun out of games, this has left me in a weird spot. All the optimization is basically done. I spent a rather absurd amount of time looking over the Perk tree and trying to figure out the best way to navigate it, but it almost seems meaningless at this point; not only am I near level 30 (and thus am actually hunting for Perks to still take), most of the Perks aren’t actually that good. And even if they were, there is no level cap, so in a sense it doesn’t matter. If I’m going to optimize anything, it’ll have to be a much narrower field, like getting an OP character between levels 2-10 or something.
I feel like the Witcher series has steadily gotten worse from a mechanics standpoint with each iteration, but at least it was different each time. The changes gave me something to mull over and marinate in my mind. And it seems like being able to do that, even if the underlying mechanics end up being worse, is still better than not having to do it at all.
Legendary Items are a Bad Idea
To an extent, I am still conflicted on this point.
Legendary items are cool, generally, in any game they are in. Their rarity gives designers the chance to introduce abilities that might be too powerful to be added to random loot. Legendaries can also facilitate character builds, and thus encourage additional playthroughs. Legendaries are fun in Borderlands, Diablo 3, and Fallout 4.
Legendaries also remove entire categories of loot drops, replacing them with nothing.
In Fallout 4, I have been using the Overseer’s Guardian for the last 30 or so hours of gameplay. The only way I could replace this weapon is if I encounter an even more ridiculous weapon that trivializes the game more than the Overseer’s Guardian already does. Which is sad, because not only does this make all the weapon drops I’ve encountered vendor trash, but it actually discourages me from experimenting with anything new.
For example, I finally saw a Gauss Rifle on a vendor just yesterday. I always enjoy Gauss Rifles in Fallout – mainly due to how cool they were in the movie Eraser (holy shit, 1996?!) – but it “only” deals 125 damage baseline. Even if I could mod the rifle for more damage, it seems unlikely that it’ll beat 137 damage x2 from a semi-automatic sniper rifle. “Maybe I’ll see a Legendary Gauss Rifle drop.”
As soon as that thought formed in my mind, I began massaging my temples. After all, this is the same game that hands out weapons like this:
Guess it’s better than extra radiation damage.
Maybe I’m less conflicted than I thought. Legendaries are a bad idea, even if I enjoy the existence of Legendary mobs in Fallout 4. The latter fills holes in the gameplay, whereas the Legendaries they drop create them.
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Tags: Fallout 4, Legendary, Optimization, Romance, Voice Acting