It's really nice to finally have vendors in there, though also a bit frustrating to see that they won't sell gear to us until we've upgraded the market to level two, and who knows when that will happen.
28/12/2015
Market Day
After a prolonged period of inactivity, our mini guild also finally unlocked the market for its stronghold.
It's really nice to finally have vendors in there, though also a bit frustrating to see that they won't sell gear to us until we've upgraded the market to level two, and who knows when that will happen.
It's really nice to finally have vendors in there, though also a bit frustrating to see that they won't sell gear to us until we've upgraded the market to level two, and who knows when that will happen.
27/12/2015
Winter Festival
I decided to check out the currently running Winter Festival event, since - like the Summer Festival - I had never really looked at it before. Like the Summer Festival, it has its own map with dailies and contests that include several non-combat activities which are pretty fun.
My favourite is the race down the icy mountain. I always thought that sliding across that slippery patch of ice in Icewind Pass was funny and that they should do something else with the physics involved in that - turns out that they did! The ice fishing is pretty enjoyable too.
My favourite is the race down the icy mountain. I always thought that sliding across that slippery patch of ice in Icewind Pass was funny and that they should do something else with the physics involved in that - turns out that they did! The ice fishing is pretty enjoyable too.
17/11/2015
Chugging Along
I've been in "passive" mode again, only logging in to invoke and run professions. SWTOR is super appealing again and I've been feeling a bit burnt out on campaign grinding. The new module, Underdark, launches today, but since it just adds yet another campaign, I'm not really too keen on that at the moment either. I expect to check it out later.
Cryptic also posted an update on the State of Astral Diamonds last night. You have to hand it to them, even if I'm not too keen on their business model and feel that they are quite good at putting their foot in their mouth, they do try to communicate with their playerbase. Bioware keep their cards much closer to their chest when it comes to things like design decisions.
Another thing I found interesting about that post was the statement that in October, the average player earned 60,000 AD. I initially read that as the average earned per day and was baffled by how it could be so high. (I'm currently on 12,000 a day purely from invoking on four different max-level characters. Not to mention that the daily refinement cap per character is 24,000.) But if they meant "during the whole month", an average of 60,000 would be staggeringly low, as even my own monthly income purely from invoking adds up to 360,000 AD. So I remain confused.
Cryptic also posted an update on the State of Astral Diamonds last night. You have to hand it to them, even if I'm not too keen on their business model and feel that they are quite good at putting their foot in their mouth, they do try to communicate with their playerbase. Bioware keep their cards much closer to their chest when it comes to things like design decisions.
Another thing I found interesting about that post was the statement that in October, the average player earned 60,000 AD. I initially read that as the average earned per day and was baffled by how it could be so high. (I'm currently on 12,000 a day purely from invoking on four different max-level characters. Not to mention that the daily refinement cap per character is 24,000.) But if they meant "during the whole month", an average of 60,000 would be staggeringly low, as even my own monthly income purely from invoking adds up to 360,000 AD. So I remain confused.
15/10/2015
My 4th Level 70!
I finally hit 70 on my control wizard. She has exactly one round of Spinward Rise vigilance tasks left to do in order to get her artifact main hand (which requires level 70 to equip), so that was well timed.
Now my only problem is: What do I do with her after that? A big part of why I've been spending a lot of time playing her recently was that she was the one character of mine who wasn't already max-level and who therefore had slightly different things to do than the rest. I don't really want to start running campaign dailies on a fourth character.
07/10/2015
Vigilant
I've spent a fair amount of time hating on Elemental Evil's vigilance tasks here, but I have to confess that lately I've actually been doing them again, and even without my pet tank. My control wizard is level 69, has completed the first three zones, and just got started on Spinward Rise. Basically, there are three factors that have made me change my mind, or at least made this way of levelling more bearable to me:
1) Stronghold quests: I like that during your sixties, you get two daily quests from your guild stronghold, one to complete four vigilance tasks and one to kill fifty mobs on the way. This adds some pacing, as four a day feels much more manageable than looking at the total number of quests required to get to the end and watching them reset every hour. Also, the extra quests for doing the same thing make each round of four tasks feel more rewarding.
2) Nerfs: After admitting that they messed up, Cryptic actually went through with nerfing level 60+ mobs, as well as cutting the requirement to progress at each vigilance quest hub in half. Eight missions per hub means that you never have to stay anywhere for long and that you have less time to get sick of an area.
3) Ruthless efficiency: Using past experience, I only pick the easy quests now. (For my wizard in particular this means, anything that requires me to AoE packs of relatively weak mobs is good, while tough single mobs are a bit of a pain.) If a bad bunch is up, I'll just log off and try again later. It makes the difference between a fun half hour romp and spending lots of time dying and running back to where I got defeated.
1) Stronghold quests: I like that during your sixties, you get two daily quests from your guild stronghold, one to complete four vigilance tasks and one to kill fifty mobs on the way. This adds some pacing, as four a day feels much more manageable than looking at the total number of quests required to get to the end and watching them reset every hour. Also, the extra quests for doing the same thing make each round of four tasks feel more rewarding.
2) Nerfs: After admitting that they messed up, Cryptic actually went through with nerfing level 60+ mobs, as well as cutting the requirement to progress at each vigilance quest hub in half. Eight missions per hub means that you never have to stay anywhere for long and that you have less time to get sick of an area.
3) Ruthless efficiency: Using past experience, I only pick the easy quests now. (For my wizard in particular this means, anything that requires me to AoE packs of relatively weak mobs is good, while tough single mobs are a bit of a pain.) If a bad bunch is up, I'll just log off and try again later. It makes the difference between a fun half hour romp and spending lots of time dying and running back to where I got defeated.
30/09/2015
Valindra's Tower
While I've been avoiding epic dungeons and skirmishes after some bad experiences, my pet tank keeps trying them. Last night he was in Valindra's Tower with a guildie, wiping once again. Looking over his shoulder, I noticed that their group was one player short, so I thought I'd surprise them by jumping into the queue on my rogue. If they were that desperate for a fifth, even my poor dps would be an improvement! But I got no pop.
"Try your cleric," my pet tank advised after I had told him what I was trying to do. Aha! On my cleric I got a pop instantly, for a group of four people trying to fill that last spot. So I joined - and landed in a completely different party about to engage the first boss. Oh. Since I hate dropping from groups for no good reason, I thought I'd see what this dungeon was all about.
Having never been to Valindra's Tower before, I ran in circles while the rest of the group killed the first boss. Eventually I managed to catch up though. Everything died really quickly, apparently because we had an amazing great weapon fighter in the group who did twice as much damage as the entire rest of the group combined (something like seventy million over the course of the run). Soon we were done. Meanwhile, my pet tank's group was still wiping and still one person short.
I tried my rogue again. After a few minutes, I got a pop - this time for a completely fresh run. This one, too, contained a seventy-million-damage great weapon fighter who made the whole thing a breeze.
My pet tank's group eventually had to give up. The queue system seemed to have bugged out and was refusing to give them a fifth party member, and they just kept wiping on the last boss (Valindra herself). He then told me that this had been his fifth attempt at this dungeon and that he had yet to complete it even once. While I had just bumbled in like a clueless idiot and got carried to completion twice within an hour. Oops?
Hey, at least both of my characters got silly hats out of it. Behold the horned cleric!
"Try your cleric," my pet tank advised after I had told him what I was trying to do. Aha! On my cleric I got a pop instantly, for a group of four people trying to fill that last spot. So I joined - and landed in a completely different party about to engage the first boss. Oh. Since I hate dropping from groups for no good reason, I thought I'd see what this dungeon was all about.
Having never been to Valindra's Tower before, I ran in circles while the rest of the group killed the first boss. Eventually I managed to catch up though. Everything died really quickly, apparently because we had an amazing great weapon fighter in the group who did twice as much damage as the entire rest of the group combined (something like seventy million over the course of the run). Soon we were done. Meanwhile, my pet tank's group was still wiping and still one person short.
I tried my rogue again. After a few minutes, I got a pop - this time for a completely fresh run. This one, too, contained a seventy-million-damage great weapon fighter who made the whole thing a breeze.
My pet tank's group eventually had to give up. The queue system seemed to have bugged out and was refusing to give them a fifth party member, and they just kept wiping on the last boss (Valindra herself). He then told me that this had been his fifth attempt at this dungeon and that he had yet to complete it even once. While I had just bumbled in like a clueless idiot and got carried to completion twice within an hour. Oops?
Hey, at least both of my characters got silly hats out of it. Behold the horned cleric!
26/09/2015
Life After the AD Changes
Cryptic implemented the announced changes to the leadership profession and to astral diamond gains a little less than two weeks ago.
The leadership changes were a typical Cryptic hack job - they literally just removed astral diamonds from all the missions that gave them as a reward and didn't replace them with anything worthwhile. (I think some of the missions had their XP output increased, but who does leadership for the XP?) The result is that there are a lot of high-level missions now that are very much not worth doing as they simply offer no worthwhile reward whatsoever, while often taking twice as long as comparable low-level missions. There's also at least one rare mission that does still reward AD, which might have been an oversight.
On the plus side, this has inspired me to start levelling some other professions which I never paid much attention to previously. I'm not sure if anything good will come of any of it, but if nothing else it might allow me to unlock another profession slot.
The demand for astral diamonds on the ZAX has remained high, so that one Zen is down to being worth less than four hundred AD by now - never thought I'd see the day.
At least Cryptic took the effect on the economy into account fairly quickly and drastically slashed the prices of marks of potency, which are one of the main astral diamond sinks in the game (they are an expensive reagent required to upgrade high-level enchantments and gear).
I haven't done any dungeons or skirmishes in a while, so my max-level characters are down to an astral diamond income of 3000 per day, which is exactly what they get from invoking six times a day. For the moment that's enough for me since I don't have any major outgoings, but I don't know what I will do when/if the day comes where I find myself running out of in-game currency.
The leadership changes were a typical Cryptic hack job - they literally just removed astral diamonds from all the missions that gave them as a reward and didn't replace them with anything worthwhile. (I think some of the missions had their XP output increased, but who does leadership for the XP?) The result is that there are a lot of high-level missions now that are very much not worth doing as they simply offer no worthwhile reward whatsoever, while often taking twice as long as comparable low-level missions. There's also at least one rare mission that does still reward AD, which might have been an oversight.
On the plus side, this has inspired me to start levelling some other professions which I never paid much attention to previously. I'm not sure if anything good will come of any of it, but if nothing else it might allow me to unlock another profession slot.
The demand for astral diamonds on the ZAX has remained high, so that one Zen is down to being worth less than four hundred AD by now - never thought I'd see the day.
At least Cryptic took the effect on the economy into account fairly quickly and drastically slashed the prices of marks of potency, which are one of the main astral diamond sinks in the game (they are an expensive reagent required to upgrade high-level enchantments and gear).
I haven't done any dungeons or skirmishes in a while, so my max-level characters are down to an astral diamond income of 3000 per day, which is exactly what they get from invoking six times a day. For the moment that's enough for me since I don't have any major outgoings, but I don't know what I will do when/if the day comes where I find myself running out of in-game currency.
20/09/2015
Meanwhile, A Farm
Last time I posted about my guild's stronghold, we still seemed to have some ways to go to unlocking our second building. However, my pet tank decided to plunder his old main's campaign currencies (since he switched to playing his paladin as his main) and apparently that was enough to push us over the edge. (I still suspect that there were some real money purchases involved somewhere...)
So now we have a farm, which produces food, which in turn serves no other purpose than to power the creation of even more stronghold buildings.
The next building however is the one that really interests us: the market. I don't think the NPCs there will sell us anything interesting at level one, however just having a vendor inside the stronghold would be nice, as a lack of somewhere to sell things has been the one major drawback of using the stronghold as a hub so far.
So now we have a farm, which produces food, which in turn serves no other purpose than to power the creation of even more stronghold buildings.
The next building however is the one that really interests us: the market. I don't think the NPCs there will sell us anything interesting at level one, however just having a vendor inside the stronghold would be nice, as a lack of somewhere to sell things has been the one major drawback of using the stronghold as a hub so far.
13/09/2015
Action Combat
I don't like action combat. How come I'm playing Neverwinter? Well, I like a lot of other things about it, and I spend a lot of time pretending that it doesn't have action combat. Which is to say that about 90 percent of my play time is spent grouped up with my pet tank. He holds things (more or less) in place, and I do some damage from behind the mobs or from a bit of a distance, so I don't have to move too much.
Soloing however tends to leave me frustrated after a while. Today I finished Drowned Shore on my control wizard alt and while things had generally been going OK until then, the final boss of the zone killed me five or six times before I got him down. It was always the same thing: one of his red circles one-shotting me. I didn't have a problem dodging out of them as long as it was one on one, but whenever he summoned adds I would inevitably end up getting distracted by them at a crucial moment and boom! Back to the campfire, time to start over again.
Even a lot of the harder content in a game like SWTOR feels positively forgiving when compared to such one-shot abilities in what's supposed to be regular old solo content. But where other people enjoy this challenge, I've never been good at twitchy combat and just find it exhausting.
Soloing however tends to leave me frustrated after a while. Today I finished Drowned Shore on my control wizard alt and while things had generally been going OK until then, the final boss of the zone killed me five or six times before I got him down. It was always the same thing: one of his red circles one-shotting me. I didn't have a problem dodging out of them as long as it was one on one, but whenever he summoned adds I would inevitably end up getting distracted by them at a crucial moment and boom! Back to the campfire, time to start over again.
Even a lot of the harder content in a game like SWTOR feels positively forgiving when compared to such one-shot abilities in what's supposed to be regular old solo content. But where other people enjoy this challenge, I've never been good at twitchy combat and just find it exhausting.
12/09/2015
Panic Buying
The Zen and astral diamond exchange (ZAX for short) has been in a weird place for a long time. Cryptic put a hard cap of 500 on how many astral diamonds you could buy for one Zen, but this hasn't matched up with supply and demand in a long time. The end result was that any Zen that was being sold was snatched up pretty much instantly, while there was always a backlog of millions of astral diamonds waiting for buyers (because they could only be sold at a rate that most buyers would have considered unfavourable).
The leadership changes announced on the forums aren't even live yet and already panic buying has set in. People ask themselves where all their astral diamonds are supposed to come from in the future. Within two days the entire backlog has more or less disappeared as people are trying to buy up AD while they are still available.
The leadership changes announced on the forums aren't even live yet and already panic buying has set in. People ask themselves where all their astral diamonds are supposed to come from in the future. Within two days the entire backlog has more or less disappeared as people are trying to buy up AD while they are still available.
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