Endgame Viable

I see this question or a variation of it pop up fairly often in my Twitter timeline: “I’m thinking about streaming. What do you want to see?” Most recently @Jaedia brought this up yesterday: I'm pretty chill. What would you guys think of chill streams playing like.. story-driven games, things like visual novels, Undertale, etc.? — Jaedia Claus (@jaedia) August 20, 2017 I’m not an expert on this, and I’m sure my preferences on streaming don’t align with the majority of kids today. But here’s what I like: (702 words.)

One thing that happens when you make a conscious effort to post every day is that half of your blog posts turn into diary entries. “Dear diary: Here’s what I did today. Well, yesterday.” Yesterday I completed the Moria Epic Story and officially returned to the world under the sky in Dimrill Dale, attaining level 60 in the process. I got to revisit the Watcher in the Water deep in the bowels of Moria. Volume 2, Chapter 5 ended with having to complete three different skirmishes where you defend various places in Moria from Orc invasions. They were ridiculously easy to the point of tedium. In the end, the dwarves got their precious mithril axe Zigilburk back so I guess they are happy now. (That’s a terrible name for a legendary axe by the way.) (596 words.)

My Hunter reached level 59 and the famous Bridge of Khazad-dûm yesterday-what’s left of the bridge, at least. I was following the side quest of a dwarf Svanr who was on some kind of pilgrimage to see all of the Mines of Moria, and we got to the Bridge. Then my character took his first steps back outside in seemingly forever. It’s surely been over a year of real time since before my Hunter entered Moria. Spent most of my time searching for these. (280 words.)

Another brief post just to post something today. GW2. I did in fact retry Chapter 16, “Hearts and Minds,” and beat it after two more attempts Thursday night, which took another hour. If you leave the instance for any reason, by the way, you have to start all over. So take my advice: Don’t rage quit if you die to the last boss. :) I’ll probably start Living Story Season 3 this weekend although I’m kind of burned out on GW2 already. (298 words.)

Just a brief GW2 update, mainly to keep up my streak of daily posts this month: I completed HoT chapter 15, which went okay, despite the AI bugs and random weirdness that always goes along with GW2 story instances. (My crew ran across an invisible bridge to join a fight on the other side of a chasm, so I glided over to follow them, but the fight was just for show and I couldn’t actually kill anything. Turns out I was supposed to stay on my side of the chasm and free Zojja, which whom I never even saw the first time.) (373 words.)

Contrary to expectations, I was able to get my Nuhoch Mastery point and continue to chapter 12 in record time (one day). I got the Mastery point while I was running around on my Ranger, incidentally. My mastery level is now at the earth-shattering level of-you might want to sit down for this-10! I returned to my Necro for the story. He’s been my main guy for all these years and I have a decent feel for the class-as best as I’ll probably ever get in GW2, at least. I abandoned the Greatsword and went back to Axe/Warhorn and Staff. (603 words.)

I saw Bhagpuss mention an easy-mode “Bearbow” build in one of his recent posts, which made me wonder if I would have any better luck with my Ranger. By coincidence, Aywren was looking for feedback on the Ranger as well. I had a lot of fun playing the Ranger leveling from 1 to 80, but that was back in the months after GW2 launch. Since then, my Ranger has largely been parked, as most of my GW2 characters are when they hit 80. (My most fun experience with Heart of Thorns was leveling a Revenent from 1 to 80.) (765 words.)

Progress! I mentioned going through Heart of Thorns and the Living Story Season 3 in my last post, so I started working on that again. At least until I got to Heart of Thorns, Chapter 12, “The Way In.” This requires a Nuhoch Hunting Mastery before you can access it. Boo. And people complain about FFXIV locking content behind a Main Scenario Quest! I had previously completed up through Chapter 8, “City of Hope.” In that post, I predicted it would take six months to get to Chapter 9, but in fact it took about eleven months. (1413 words.)

I just wanted to announce that my Hunter made it to level 58 in Moria. Gaining another level in LotRO (when you’re not subscribed or anything) is a major accomplishment. I am not really sure what is going on with the epic story here. I am on Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 3 as of this writing. The dwarves are just sort of rooting around looking for chambers and relics and books and stuff. I’m not paying that much attention because none of the characters have much personality. Dwarves are all the same-loud, bombastic, and either Scottish or Russian. :) It’s really difficult to capture the scale of how massive the Mines of Moria is. (137 words.)

This morning I tried the Path of Fire demo again, and it went much better. Thanks for the encouraging comments on my last whiny post. :) In fact, the second time through, I got all the way through the burning village and killed the two Veteran Forged Warhounds without dying. Then … the client disconnected. That was disappointing, to say the least. So I had to go through it a third time. I got through it all again without dying. I put out all the fires in the village, got the Raptor mount, met what’s-her-name and what’s-his-name, and got out into the city. (I actually saw the city before, because if you rage-quit the episode like I did yesterday, it drops you into the city.) (397 words.)