I had a late start today because I went out and grabbed some groceries. Also, I was purely exhausted from the previous night and doing my little walk to my neighborhood market. I’ve been super lazy lately when it comes to physical activities so the walk, while good for my overall health, just took a lot out of me. Nevertheless, after having a nap from a late lunch food coma, I popped on the old Lost Ark and went through my routine.
Probably, the biggest notable achievement today was getting my Gunslinger to ilvl 600. It was painful because I used my Sorceress and Artillerist to run some Tier 2 Guardian Raids to farm up extra materials. I didn’t have much more to go on her but the weapon was being stubborn and failed a few times. After three tries though, I managed to get the weapon upgraded. So the next part of my typical process in moving to Tier 2 is buying some gear. Oddly, there wasn’t a lot of Gunslinger gear available. Or rather the stuff available was pretty expensive compared to other classes. So I only purchased a weapon and chest piece. I figured tomorrow I might try again. If anything, when I run my Scrapper, I’ll save some accessories and just mail them over.
Speaking of my Scrapper, she’s now in Yorn and starting off with some Chaos Dungeons. Unfortunately, I think most of the honing mats have gone either to my Shadowhunter or Gunlancer by now so my Scrapper is literally scraping by. That said, one thing that I noticed was that she felt a lot more tanky in tier 2. Also, I realized that I had been using a few abilities incorrectly. There’s one ability that’s a combo type and another which is a holding skill. I have to look more closely but I recall that one of them might be buffing her with a defense layer. Either way, I’m enjoying the Scrapper far more now.
Along those lines of learning how to play better, I discovered that I was also playing my Berserker slightly wrong. He has an ability called Tempest Slash which had felt bad for a while and I realized the little arrow on the ability key that indicates it’s supposed to be used as a combo. So once I got into the habit of hitting that ability twice, I can see an even bigger output of damage from my Berserker. Also, I think he’s managed to hit level 3 Chaos Dungeons in North Vern. I might eventually stop around ilvl 460 to pull all my resources to my Glavier since I need someone to outgear Rohendel for the rest of my alts.
While I’m on the topic of my Glavier, I might as well just give a small progress report about her. She’s hitting above 500 ilvl now and the failures for honing are starting to show. But I’m finally pretty comfortable playing her. Control was definitely the better spec for my play style since I often would forget to use her Red abilities. Also, the issue of waiting for cooldowns at the moment don’t seem to be an issue for me. The biggest issue has been animation locking and some slowness on her part. But so far I find her to be a lot of fun to play.
My sorceress is just making progress through replacing her gems and finding tripods. I’ve been farming Chromanium on her for the weekly as well as helping out my Gunslinger. So far it’s a lot of fun just going ballistic as a Reflux spec.
Everyone else is just progressing slowly but steadily. I think my Shadowhunter will be able to move up a difficulty level with Feiton’s Chaos Dungeons. I took my sorceress’ old gems (two level 5s) and rerolled them for my Shadowhunter. If all goes well, by the time my Berserker hits Tier 2, I might have quite a few leftovers for him.
Also, I got a little more done on my Deathblade last night. I unlocked the Eastern section of Luterra and hopefully might get a few levels in tonight. Once I obtained Moonlight Sonic, my Deathblade instantly felt a million times better. So I’m looking forward to seeing how she’ll perform in higher levels. I’m still undecided when I’ll pay for the Knowledge Transfer but I know for sure that it won’t be before Thursday just because I’m pretty down on gold.
One cool thing I did the other day was upgrade my Estoque ship to level 8. I practically spent all my pirate coins and used a number of precious Arcturus Coins to get it that high. I’ve been eyeballing some of those sea co-op missions and figure I might eventually have to participate in a few to get more coins overall. But I’ll have to research how those missions work since I haven’t tried any yet.
On a final note, I’ve been watching DatModz do hard mode Valtan. All I can say is that it looks triggering. I’m not sure if I’d have the patience to go through that without the fight being severely nerfed as well as having a super group of people to carry my lazy ass. But I can’t help but think just how difficult SmileGate made it for themselves in creating such an encounter. I know people praise the fight but you have to realize that once you’re farming that kind of boss, the time it takes to successfully get it down pretty much invalidates the first kill’s thrill. I think it’s far better to have short boss fights with 3-5 mechanics tops and just have more variety. Then give people the option to fight different bosses that suit their play style. Otherwise, it’s the same trap that Blizzard had fallen into when they started moving towards catering to so-called hardcore guilds. Overtime, things like this to me kill a game just because people don’t want to waste hours trying to bang their head against a wall only to have to repeat it every week or more.