Monday, the path of the solar eclipse is going to move through my state, pretty close to where I live. Syn is coming to visit in order to view it, and we’re going to have a (hopefully) chill and geek-full time.
Due to that, I probably won’t be back to blogging until sometime late next week. I wish everyone a great weekend, and if you’re viewing the eclipse, a safe time!
So, in between schedules and work trips, our Posse has been able to continue making progress on out longest running 7D2D game in a while. Last time, I talked about how as time passes, we started seeing more dangerous, glowing zombies in hordes. But while designing a base has, up until now, mostly been about function, with the new painting feature and skills, it can now be about form.
Painting is something that was just introduced with this last major patch. This patched in paint brushes, paint, and patterns that you learn from finding recipe books. Paint itself can be found (usually in hardware stores), or by crafting it using the chemistry station and common plants. Thankfully, you make a lot of paint per plant, so there’s lots of room to experiment.
In the picture above, you can see the base concrete block all the way to the right. The rest of the blocks are concrete with a brick pattern painted over them. Keep in mind that when you paint, it only covers one side of the block. Also, if you upgrade that block (ie. from concrete to steel), the paint is overwritten and you will have to paint it again.
This is fine. For years, I’ve had to put up with bases looking like Frankenstein conglomerations of wood, iron, concrete and steel. Like this:
Now, I can make it look so, so much nicer!
And inside? I converted that old log cabin into something fairly nice. Even my team members were joking that they’d walked into some upscale hotel or something. In terms of 7D2D, this is pretty nice looking. 🙂
They also laughed at me because apparently, painting splashes paint everywhere, and makes a loud wet noise. At first, this confused them.
Someone asked, “Do you hear that sound? It’s like water dripping.”
I said, “Oh, you mean this sound?” *paint paint paint*
“Yes, that’s it! What is that?”
“Me painting!”
But the most important thing to know is that you can paint things pink!
If you want to see this in action, here’s a pretty great video that covers painting as a whole. This looks like it’s done in creative mode, so things are a little different in survival mode.
So while I’ve been talking a lot about GW2 this week, the truth is, over the weekend I mostly played No Man’s Sky’s newest 1.3 patch – Atlas Rises. This marks the game’s first year anniversary and it’s still on sale for $24 on Steam right now if any of this catches your interest.
This patch was really an incredible leap forward for NMS. Much of the community now feels that the game is finally at a point where it is what it was originally advertised to be. Yes, it’s bad this wasn’t out at launch. BUT – the devs didn’t abandon the game, and kept working until it was in a much better shape.
Now we have so much, from base building, rovers, low flight on ships, missions, farming, a new economy and trading system, and a brand new storyline. Really, there’s too much to list…
Oh, and yeah. The sorta-multiplayer was added, which really excited players. It’s very rudimentary, but it’s a foundation for something more, I hope.
The universe was also restructured because many new and unusual biomes were added to the planets. This meant that your home base planet may have changed, for better or worse.
I did start to build a base during the last patch, but didn’t get super far with it. When I left the world, it was this pinky-purple planet, which was kinda pretty.
When I returned to my base planet, it had all turned green instead. Which is also kinda pretty.
Thankfully, this was a positive change. I’ve read a lot of people who had a great home base planet that turned into snow or toxic waste biome. So, I can’t complain too much.
The one thing that did eat up a lot of my time was trying to troubleshoot the game’s texture loading issues. The last time I played the game, I was using my old Nvidia graphics card. Since then, I upgraded to a much more powerful AMD card.
I’d forgotten the posts that said NMS had issues with AMD cards. And, well, mine had issues loading the textures that I never had on the previous card. The game played well enough, but all the textures were on low quality, no matter what setting I put the graphics on.
I’d played the game enough to recognize this was NOT how it was supposed to look:
Everything from the grass to the texture on the rocks to the building… yeah.
So I updated my drivers as a first step, and this actually cleared it up long enough to get those comparison pictures above. But after playing a bit, warping around, maybe turning the game off and back on again, it went right back to being blurry.
I started doing research.
Someone suggested a complete driver cleaning and uninstall/reinstall from a manual download. I did this, and again, it helped for a little while.
I went through several suggestions on the Tech Support forum. I got it to work partways, but still not 100% of the textures load. I may go back and mess with some of these settings again, but I eventually just gave up and played with mostly-loading textures.
It was better than none.
So, there’s a new storyline. It’s not super captivating or anything — mostly the story of an alien who has crashed and is stranded. You have to help them out.
But what the storyline does fill is the huge blank where a tutorial or guidance system was missing. In fact, it feels a lot like a tutorial, which is there to introduce the player to all the different features of the game.
It teaches you to build signal beacons, how to find specific locations, how to earn reputation, how to learn language, and (at this point for me) how to find the new mission feature. Eventually, I heard it prompts you to build a base (which gets bugged out if you happen to move your base’s original location, so be careful!).
The game’s writing uses the illusion of mystery and grandiose language to try to make the story feel bigger than it actually is (a tutorial). It does cover this well, but the reality is, it’s just sending you on a bunch of menial tasks.
This is fine. I wish the story was a bit deeper than just a story masking a tutorial. But it’s better than nothing, and players seem to like it. I’m going along for the ride since it’s been so long since I’ve played that I don’t know most of what I’m doing anyhow. XD
It’s nice to have a mission-oriented journal type thing that helps you keep track of where you are and what you need to do, too. This might have been patched in back when bases were introduced, but it’s not until now that I actually started to rely on it consistently.
The community has really rallied behind NMS after this update. Heck, even before this update, this game had a very dedicated group of players who even worked to create a whole Galactic Hub in order to meet up and map a common system. This is very, very cool, and you should check it out!
Even better, the recent Steam review ratings have gone from Mostly Negative to Mostly Positive as players give recognition where it’s due. There will always be haters, of course, but even I tossed in a positive review for the game (I rarely write game reviews on Steam) because I’m impressed by the dedication of the dev team.
Despite the technical difficulties I’ve had, I also had great fun playing over the weekend, and hope that I can maintain a momentum to actually build my base this time around. I found this really cool crashed ship — I discovered it was a Hauler — that took me from 19 slots to something like 32 in one shot. (I wish I had a screen of it.)
I still have to raise the money to actually unlock the slots on the ship, but I was so stoked to repair it and get it flying. It might be a good introduction into learning how to haul and trade materials between systems. Maybe?
I’ll have to find out!
First of all, thanks to everyone who stopped by and left suggestions, thoughts and feedback on possible Ranger builds I could look at! The response I got only reinforced the idea that there are so many different options to try, which is a heartening thing.
Also my apologies to anyone who left a comment that was eaten by WordPress. I went though the spam box and approved the ones I found. I don’t know what’s been up with WordPress.com lately, but it’s been bad on sending stuff to Spam. If that happens again, just send a tweet or contact me.
So the discussion continues about GW2, returning/new player difficulty, and the GW2 preview weekend. Seemed that GamingSF had a similar experience to me in trying out an unfamiliar job and thinking a demo weekend would be a safe place to do it.
All this leads into what I really want to report on: I rolled a Ranger!
So I had exactly two open character slots and two level 80 boosts to use on my account. Seeing I already have one of every class (except Revenant) and duplicates of a few classes (I used to pick up character slots whenever they went on sale), it didn’t bother me to roll a second Ranger.
Why didn’t I just use my first Ranger? Good question.
First, I just wasn’t feeling her character design. Second, she’s already in her low 60’s, and it just seems like a waste to boost on a character less than 20 levels from cap. I wanted to experiment while the discussion was still HoT (pun intended). And I decided I wanted a Charr ranger because it’s been a while since I’ve played a Charr, whom I love.
So I rolled Fletch Wayrunner (because he runs away, right?). At first, I made the Charr a female. But then, when I went back in to fine tune with a makeover kit, I gravitated to rolling my first male Charr. I’ve wanted a male in the past, but never found a look that I liked. There’s a lot more customization options now days, so…
I ended up with this flighty doof who looks perpetually scared of everything. Even his pet.
I want to give ANet kudos on how the level 80 boost system works. You use it like any item in your inventory, but it’s not an instant consumable. Instead, it drops your character in front of a Level 80 Guide in the Silverwastes. There, you can trial the new class boost as long as you like, as long as you don’t leave the zone. Upon leaving, you get the choice to retain the boost and consume the item, or not.
Now, the Silverwastes wasn’t one of my favorite zones in the past because of all the Mordrem, and because it felt overly busy the little bit of time I spent there. But, I decided the whole idea was to see how Ranger fared vs Mordrem, so I went for it.
The boost gave my character a default build and full exotic gear. Checking it out, it looks like Rangers start in all Soldier’s stats with Ranger runes.
That was good enough for me, so I took my Ranger out and did some events. Things went well, and I spent about 20 minutes trialing it before I pulled the trigger and made the boost permanent.
Once that was done, I took Fletch directly into the HoT storyline and hit the jungle. The great thing was that doing events in the Verdant Brink was part of the daily. So, perfect timing, I jumped in and out of story and events all night long.
During that, I gained enough experience to unlock the Exalted Markings mastery, which had been blocking my story progress on Zznaf since last week. I was just too busy with other things to sit down and grind out the experience needed, but now that block has been removed! Allowing masteries to be earned across the account is the best idea ever!
Since I already had a glider and the bouncing mushrooms, life was a lot easier for Fletch in the jungle. I got him all the way up through The Jungle Provides, where you helped the Itzel protect their tree-home.
I can pretty much confirm that after a few hours playing Ranger, and not even an optimal build, surviving in HoT is much, much more leisurely and less complicated than a melee class. As long as I was aware of my surroundings and didn’t get pounced from behind, my pet soaked most the damage and quickly taunted anything that roamed my way.
I played with the longbow I was given from the boost, and because I had no points to put towards Druid yet, I ran with the Beastmaster build that Jeromai suggested. I’ll look into expanding the build and switching out gear stats later, but for now, I’m having no problem.
I also discovered that the path you choose in the story can significantly lower the game’s difficulty. For example, in The Jungle Provides, you have the choice to defend the Itzel within the village or to go into the jungle and take out the enemy before they get to the village.
The first time, I defended from within the village. Doing that, I had to take on this boss enemy (Stavemaster Adryn) who could one-shot you with huge beams of energy. This quickly slaughtered all the NPC backup I had and took me out time and time again. There was no time to rez my companions, so it turned into a frustrating solo death and revive endeavor. Somehow, mostly through learning to read the boss’ cues and dodge his attacks, I managed to whittle him down, but the fight took a LONG time.
It was pretty awful.
I wasn’t looking forward to doing that quest again, understandably, and decided to try the other option. I was shocked when not only did I not have to fight Stavemaster Adryn in the other option (which I fully expected), but there wasn’t even a boss at all! Just waves of normal Mordrem, and nothing difficult about it.
What the heck?
Why make one path face a legendary boss and the other a simple “defeat the trash waves and hold waypoints” mechanic? Here I was dreading that all story instances were going to have terrible bosses in them from now on (I didn’t know the difference).
So, Bhagpuss was right. Ranged gameplay is significantly easier than melee in HoT. In fact, it was so leisurely, I started to miss the excitement of my Reaper (haha – can’t please me, huh?). While I didn’t put out as much damage, even without Druid and with the gear that the game just handed me, I never died, and rarely felt threatened thanks to my pet.
I even went off and tamed one of those Fire Wyverns, which are sub-optimal from what I’ve read. But I don’t care. It got the job done and the fire thing looked cool. I’m never going to take Fletch into Fractals or Raids, and as long as I can wander the open world, I’m content.
But confirming this also shows there’s a disparity for endgame melee players in GW2, especially those new to HoT or are returning, like me. Suddenly you get dumped into this world where even the normal mobs all have mechanics, and these mechanics hit melee the hardest.
While I won’t say that you can’t melee in GW2, I will say that as a casual-kinda-midcore rusty-returning player, I found ranged a breeze in comparison. Heck, I had little to no experience with Ranger at all. I just picked it up, used some of the feedback and suggestions I read, and was romping HoT with so much less stress than the Necro I’ve played quite a bit in the past (yes, Reaver is new to me, though).
I like Fletch a lot, and I like the relaxed playstyle. But, with PoF so close to launch, coming in with a brand new character who is even MORE behind than the one I was working on in terms of story and world completion is a daunting thing.
I think that I’ll keep pushing through on HoT story with Zznaf for now, but with a better understanding that play style and story choices really do effect everything in GW2. I’m looking forward to coming back to Fletch in the future, though, and trying different things with him. If anything, this has opened my eyes to Ranger, which is a class I didn’t play much before.
Thanks so much to everyone for thoughts, feedback and guidance! Hopefully this experiment helps a bit with the conversation we’ve been having in the GW2 gaming community. 🙂
I’m going to look for some feedback from GW2 folks in a moment. Please keep reading!
I had intended to write a post about the PoF Preview weekend, but then a fascinating GW2 discussion came up across the blogosphere. It started over at Endgame Viable where a group of us began discussing the difficulty of the story instance in the Preview Weekend. I’ll talk about that in a bit.
That led to some analyzing of the difficulty level and new/returning folks in a number of interesting posts. If you have any concerns with these topics, I suggest you check them out:
There’s a lot of good conversation in the comments, as well.
Anyhow, the newest discussion of ranged vs. melee has me sorely tempted to roll and boost a Ranger-Druid just to test the difference (since I’m mainly a melee player). I’m not giving up on my Necro, but I am curious to test this out – For Science!
Druid is actually a spec I’m somewhat interested in. But I’m a complete Ranger noob, so I’m looking for a bit of help first:
Basically, I’d have to put my necro progress on hold (and I don’t have a lot of play time as it is), so I want to make sure I go into this experiment knowing as much I can so I can be effective.
Now, with that out of my way, on to my experiences with the PoF Preview Weekend. Because I needed to roll a new demo character for this, and I was curious how Charr sit on mounts when they ride, I decided to roll a Charr that looks similar to Nipp.
Because this was a demo, I thought it would be a fine time to try out the only job I haven’t played yet – Revenant. I mean, certainly, a demo weekend that is partially there to snag the interest of returning players wouldn’t be too hard, right?
Okay, so they shoved endgame story battle into the demo, nearly first thing. All these Balthazar jerks gang up on you… and me having not a clue what any of my skills did… I saw the defeated screen quite a bit.
I know I had no clue about my class, but really? I’d think that this would be tuned so that a new or returning player would be able to pick up the fully kitted out, newly-rolled demo character and enjoy the process.
I also had no clue until later that they put a bunch of armor, runes and food in our bags. Not like I’d have known what to do with them on a class I’ve never played.
But anyhow. I finally got past that to the raptor section — the part I was really there to see in the first place. Actually, Charr ride quite well. There is some tail clipping, as I assumed, when it comes to the raptor swishing its own tail, but not terrible.
I enjoyed my time riding the raptor and getting used to the controls. I know some people reported motion sickness due to the animations, but I didn’t have any issues there. So I hope ANet can find a middle ground that doesn’t take away from the mount too much.
The raptor felt really solid to ride. I don’t know if it had to do with the sound effects (jingling saddle!) or the way it side-hops when you start up, or how it handles. It wasn’t a flighty mount like you get in some games that didn’t have any weight. I felt like my character was on a giant, fast and leaping dino, and this pleased me.
I did finally get to the town, but I didn’t do a whole lot there. I saw a Hero Point off in the bay, but every time I tried to commune with it, I was constantly interrupted by crabs or sharks or whatever. Finally, when I had a vet shark tearing into me, I gave up on it, swam back to shore and called it a night from frustration. I didn’t want to spoil the story anyhow.
tl;dr: Playing Revenant for the demo wasn’t a good idea.
After reading that I wasn’t the only one who found the story in the demo frustrating, I decided to re-roll as a Reaper Necro to see if my troubles were caused due to not knowing my job. This time, I knew that I had runes and gear in my inventory… though interestingly, all of the gear I saw had condition damage built into it.
No power reaper for you!
So my Necro build was sub-optimal compared to what I’d normally run on, but the story instance was still much easier the second time. I knew what to expect, of course, but also playing a familiar class helped so much. I got through the story instance the second time without any deaths. And then, right before the raptor part, I got disconnected.
This was fine, because logging back in sent me to the city (I wish I’d known that before), and I already had my raptor from my previous unlock. So, now I was free to explore a lot more.
I didn’t go too far because I didn’t want to spoil too much, but I really loved riding my raptor, and the desert looked fantastic. There was just enough of a GW1 vibe here, mixed with the new GW2.
I did a heart in the town where you had to use the raptor to catch fireflies, which they adorably like. I experimented with how far the raptor could leap and getting a good feel for how to ride. Besides that, I didn’t delve too much.
I’m glad I came back and gave it a second try, though I still worry what impression that intro story instance will give returning or new players. While I gave it a second shot, that doesn’t mean everyone else will.
This will be the only PoF demo I try out for GW2 because I’m not going to PvP and I don’t really have a lot of interest in the new specs PoF is introducing. I’m still looking forward to mounts in my GW2, though!
So, tonight I was just earning some gold in Splatoon for my new 18K shades in Turf Wars when I saw this pop up on my roster:
I saw the name Murf, and even though he’s on my Switch friends list, I was like, “No way. that can’t be Murf-Murf!”
But, sure enough, right after the match was over, I get a tweet.
So, thus the friendly rivalry begins… in which Murf splats me a whole heck of a lot. I’m just a noob with an oversized paint roller who plays far too recklessly for my own good. So I’m sure he was probably shaking his head by the time the matches were over.
Sadly, we only got put on the same team twice, but both times, our team were winners.
Good game, Murf!Â
I had to go and find you in town to part peacefully. I hope we’re still friends? 😉
So, a number of things have been happening on the GW2 front. First, a huge patch was released this week, setting the stage for PoF, and sending out a bunch of balance tweaks to jobs. This included a nerf to Power Reaper, which happens to be the class/build I’ve been scraping by trying to use.
Now, I’m not much of a min-maxer build maker… in fact, I’m pretty bad at figuring these things out. Even in GW1, I just went to the build site, read through the different builds and how they were meant to work, and picked something that fit my play style.
Yeah, I know. MMO folks like to exaggerate things. But even I could see why this nerf was pretty bad, and it really has the Necro community at their wits end. There’s a feeling that things are getting nerfed at this point in order to make way for the new PoF specializations.
I have no interest in the new PoF Necro spec. Overall, Power Reaper does a lot to check off the boxes that make me a happy player. It’s just quite squishy sometimes. I’ve been struggling to find the right gear and make something where I don’t die while still doing sustainable damage.
So I was really distraught when it felt like the build I was working toward had already been nerfed to the ground, and I’d hardly returned to the game for a week yet. I’m not sure why I decided to turn to CuriousCat for help — maybe because they offered some really good advice and seemed knowledgeable about what classes did what in my previous GW2 post.
I have to send my deep thanks to CuriousCat for taking the time to talk about builds, skills and gear, and determine what might work for me best. It turns out that I didn’t need to abandon the work I’d been doing, that I could keep my Power Necro, the gear I’d scrounged up, and still enjoy it. Of course, there were some changes to make, but GW has always been a series about flexibility and adjustment.
I think the build CuriousCat suggested is going to see me through HoT, and I’m very thankful for the help!
I think I briefly mentioned dailies in my previous post, but I never really got to talk about them in depth. GW2 dailies are much changed from the dailies that I remember, and in a very good way!
It used to be, the game did this scattershot of suggested daily activities and you had to finish something like 6 things on the list to be rewarded…Â This system is so much better.
First, you only need to finish 3 items on the list. Every time you finish an item, you get a reward. Then you get a reward (and 2 gold) for being a daily completionist if you finish all 3 objectives on top of it. So, even if you couldn’t finish everything in one day, you still get some reward for what you did do.
The options are usually pretty simple to complete. When there’s a specific jump puzzle, often you have kind Mesmers who open fast-ports to the end for you. Some of them take tips for the service (I have no idea how much is proper to give for that, though).
When it’s daily event completion, there is almost always a group of folks out in that particular zone doing events. Also, mentors and commander tags (or catmander tags) abound, leading people through event chains. I’ve seen a lot of events I never saw before, and I’ve been working on world completion in those zones, as well.
Speaking of World Completion, I’m slowly getting there. Last night, I cleared a few more zones, and now I’m sitting at 52% map completion.
Seeing that my most played character is at 78%, I’m slowly gaining ground.
Oh, and speaking of maps, here’s something cool that happened yesterday!
Since I got a good chunk of mapping done last night, I also decided to jump into the next section of the HoT storyline. Finally, I’m finding something interesting that’s not just the writers force-feeding us the obvious. Also, finally, my character is doing something interesting and new, all on his own.
SPOILERS
I don’t know if I should mark this as spoilers seeing it came out years ago. But old habits die hard.
So we finally catch up with Caithe, who stole Glint’s egg at the end of Season 2 for reasons that made no sense to me. Well, she reveals the egg is her Wylde Hunt and it’s her job to protect it. Alright, well, that explains a bit… but why Caithe thought running off by herself into a Mordremoth-infested jungle with the egg was a good idea is beyond me.
Anyhow… Mordre-Faolian appears to snag the egg for her new master! I’ve never liked her character, so while her new form was way over the top, at the same time, it’s just deserts. Except… that she’s chasing me, who now has the egg, and can pretty much one-shot me if she catches me.
This instance was one of action sequences where the egg is empowering your character with abilities, much like those seen in the Zephyrite community. So, it’s a bunch of jumping, teleporting and shooting forward through Mordrem obstacles while avoiding Mordre-Faolian. Some of this was frustrating… especially the annoying glider part at the end where you had to think to super jump and THEN glide to make it across (while under pressure and being nudged by an NPC to GLIDE RIGHT NOW!).
Speaking of NPCs. So we’ve got these creatures in the jungle called the Exalted that reminded me instantly of a shinier version of Mursaat. That was kinda cool, and felt rather GW1-ish.
I’m heading towards their city at this point in the story, and I’m actually very curious about who they are and what’s going to happen. I’ve been spoiled for some major plot points in the game, but I still don’t know all the little details. 😉
I really liked the idea that the hatchling in the egg chose Zznaf, connecting with him and giving him dragon abilities. It’s nice that my character is the important one for a change, rather than this hodge podge of NPCs that keep butting in all the time.
I’ll try to pick the story up again tonight and see where it goes before the weekend preview hits.
