Wrath of Acererak

Any quest that asks you to do heroics in Omu is a bit annoying because there is only one, The Tyrant, and it only pops about once an hour. Doing the other quests in the area only takes so much time and if you're unlucky, you can be in for quite a wait.

There is another option though - if you empower all nine shrines on the map, another large heroic encounter called "Wrath of Acererak" is triggered. For a long time, I never saw this even once, as shrines only stay empowered for about five minutes, which means that you need at least three people to work in tandem to trigger the event. While Omu was current content, I did this with my guildies out of sheer curiosity once, but that was it.

However, in the past week I did this heroic about five times and often did my part to empower the shrines too: It was Chult bonus week, and people get bored waiting for the Tyrant to pop. It was actually quite satisfying to see that strangers can work together to launch the event as well - all it takes is a little bit of co-ordination in zone chat. Plus I love the evil cackling sound that plays whenever you succeed in launching it.

Don't Hate Mondays

I have a habit of staying up late on Sundays when I shouldn't, probably because subconsciously I don't want the weekend to end. As a result I tend to feel very tired by Monday evening and usually don't game as much as I would on another day.

I'm starting to think though that I might be missing out by not playing on Mondays more often. The first time I noticed this was when I happened to spend a Monday in Borovia, where the map was being positively depopulated by all the hardcore players running around and slaughtering everything in sight to quickly get their weekly done, and when the big heroic on Yester Hill popped, I never saw Thornspur die so quickly before.

This week I observed the same phenomenon when I quickly jumped into Omu one more time, the Tyrant came up, and people killed everything so quickly that I actually got the achievement for keeping all the beast cages intact. Plus at the end, where the Tyrant is supposed to run away when his health gets low - well, it did still happen because the script commanded it, but strictly speaking his health had already hit zero a long time ago. Just finding a good group to tag along with makes this kind of content so much easier.

Omu Complete

At long last, my pet tank and I completed the Lost City of Omu campaign. I can't wait for Cryptic to add Signets of Patronage for this one.

I previously mentioned the atrocious drop rate for the trophies you need to buy the Omu hunt lures, and we actually managed to make it through the entire campaign, killing hunt marks over and over, without seeing a single drop apart from the ubiquitous Razortyrannus Spines. Only today, on our last day, the umpteenth wisp that we killed actually dropped a trophy. So now that we're fully done with the campaign we'd finally be allowed to go on our first hunt. Ridiculous.

Barovian Hunts

I wasn't too fond of the hunts in Chult, so I was less than thrilled when it was announced that the system would be included in the Ravenloft module as well.

In practice though, the hunts in Barovia are so different from those in Chult that they might as well have given them a new name. No more grinding mobs for a chance at a chance at a chance of a drop (seriously, we've spent weeks in Omu by now and apart from the Razortyrannus Spines we haven't seen a single trophy drop from the rares we killed).

All you need to go hunting in Barovia is a wanted poster - admittedly those are still random drops, but fairly common ones at that - and off you go on a fun little romp in an instance that takes 10-20 minutes. Getting higher rated wanted posters requires you to complete the basic ones first and you're not guaranteed to get an upgrade so there's still some RNG there, but it feels more natural and more like a logical progression system than Chult's randomness.

The hunt target itself again isn't guaranteed to drop much in terms of a reward either, but this is where the zone's tarot card feature comes in, as you can use them to give yourself up to three handicaps per hunt (such as decreased damage output or extra mob spawns), with each one adding a guaranteed reward at the end. Even though Ravenloft has only been live on PC for less than two months, I've already done more hunts in Barovia than I ever participated in in Chult because they are just that much more fun.

Experience Overflow

Overflow experience is a feature that I've liked from the start, however at level 70 it used to take quite long to level up. At 1,785,000 XP a pop, it took me quite a few play sessions to level up even once, and for that much effort the rewards often felt lacklustre.

Since Lost City of Omu was released, I noticed that I was suddenly levelling up much more quickly. At one point I managed to get three level-up rewards in a single play session! A quick Google search revealed that as part of this latest update, Crypic smoothed out the XP curve from 60-70, which apparently also reduced the XP requirement to level up at 70 to a measly 100,000 XP. That's less than 6% of the old requirement!

And I'm absolutely loving it. It makes playing at max level feel so much more rewarding, even more so as you have a chance of getting the 30,000 rough astral diamonds reward multiple times a day if you're lucky. For me that's a considerable cash flow addition!

Of course, knowing Cryptic's modus operandi whenever it has been too easy to earn AD in the past, I expect that this will be nerfed again soon, but I'll definitely enjoy it while it lasts.

Fashion Bag!

I'm making a serious habit out of getting super excited about user interface changes and quality of life features while totally missing the actual content of a new module, or at least not getting to the latter until much later. So of course, upon logging in after the release of Lost City of Omu, I got super excited about the new fashion bag!

I'm still not sure there is even much of a point to fashion these days when you can just make your normal gear look any way you want, but fact is that it's still a system that exists. Sometimes I still get fashion items for free or as rewards, and unlike my pet tank I hate destroying or leaving things, so I've always dutifully stashed them away in my bank while simultaneously feeling bad about the space they were taking up, because I didn't really care about them that much.

Finally this is no longer going to be a problem, as we now have a separate inventory tab to put a whole bunch of fashion items away for free. Despite of me not using them much, the freed up bank space alone really excited me, and to be honest, not having to worry about where to store new fashion in the future might even encourage me to pick up a few more such items and maybe even use them on occasion. Like with the introduction of the stable, the secret to making people want more of something that they can only use one at a time is to not make it a chore to have more than one.