I started out early today for my session, figuring that the 12am maintenance would give me a nice break. Also, AEW Dynamite was on and I wanted to catch it (debating whether to write a review or not). Had to clean up my sink because it was a big mess after several days worth of bowls containing broccoli cheese soup I was dreading to clean up (still have one bowl left) and went out for dinner at Chipotle which made me happy since I got there near closing time to pick up a spicy burrito. All that to celebrate a day of nothing again.
Pretty much I spent most of the day doing my normal routines. I did less on my Artillerist because I’m at the point where I kinda don’t care since the only meaningful progression I can do at the moment is daily reputation rewards. Everything else is just administration stuff with the guild and there wasn’t much to do with that since tonight is reset night. The biggest thing overall was getting my Deathblade to North Vern and gearing her up. Since I had a bunch of materials, I moved it to her so she could at least get to the higher Chaos Dungeons. I think she’s sitting around ilvl 380 and probably will get to the 4th tier in the North Vern dungeons tomorrow with the reset. I’m planning to add her to the guild so she can start collecting the honing rewards and participate in other activities like logging.
My main comment about playing Deathblade is that she moves around way too much. It’s a little annoying because you’re going back and forth a lot. Part of the reason that happens is supposedly for positioning so she can perform her back attacks. But I think all that movement is awkward because you end up jumping into packs that you might not want to be hitting. This goes for any scenario. Also, her Awakening skill is annoying because you get this stupid close up that moves her and you can’t see your target when it hits. But I’ve found myself missing because it’s a narrow beam. Still a fun class at this stage and I’m eager to turn her into a Lopang farmer soon (seriously).
The two characters that are painfully getting close to their next respective areas are my Gunlancer and Paladin. My Gunlancer failed his one attempt today at honing so I imagine tomorrow he’ll be able to nail it. I’ll probably use the chicken event vendor to fill in whatever he needs before packing him up to Punika. My Paladin hit 580 and can do the final Rohendel Chaos Dungeon. I think he’ll be there for at least two more days depending on how motivated I am. But we are getting reset day so the guild vendor, ship vendor and chicken vendor all reset and neither my Berserker nor Deathblade will be close to moving up anytime soon.
The other person coming close to the end of her area is my Gunslinger in Yorn, I haven’t decided if I’ll immediately send her to Feiton or wait until my Gunlancer goes to Punika. I feel like Punika is the better bet because I can always run Yorn Chaos Dungeons on my Gunslinger and make some progress whereas hitting ilvl 1100 on my Gunlancer means there’s nothing left to do except wait or move on. Also, I’m not all that enthusiastic about doing Feiton once more. Too many tedious scenario dungeons and bad boss fights that increase my apathy because of how annoying, time wasting and boring they are.
The one cool thing I got to do was the only Compass event available, which was Oblivion Isle. I can’t remember if I did that one before but it was easy. I used my Paladin since he was sitting around Arthentine and figured it would be nice to have him give it a shot. The fight was nothing special but there were so many people attacking that the audio became an indiscernible mess so I was scared that something might bug out. Luckily, the fight ended and I collected my 500 gold, which was the only thing I cared about there.
With reset day coming, I’m going to push hard to get my Una’s Tokens fast. So I anticipate tomorrow being pretty full where I run all my dailies, the two Chaos Dungeons and even some Guardian Raids on my two Punika enabled characters. Most likely, I won’t be able to collect until Saturday and I’m hoping to score something huge with the Gold Shop this week. My gold supply is pretty down at the moment and if I can’t get at least 5k gold, I’ll probably just skip out on honing on my Artillerist. I probably will try honing on my Sorceress though just to get her to 1340. But I think my Artillerist is in a bad spot where without lots of gold, books and other crafting materials, he’ll just stay in the 1355 dead zone for a long time.
If I gain more gold, I’ll more than likely just use it to Knowledge Transfer my Berserker and eventually Deathblade into Rohendel. Running these story lines is such a soul sucking experience that I can only do it every now and then. I mean it’s not hard but my alternative is to gear these people up to ilvl 600 and then buy the 802 gear to surpass the Rohendel annoying content fights. Yorn isn’t much better but only the last fight is super annoying.
All this leaves me wondering what I should do with my poor Deadeye. I’m almost at the point where I want to just delete him and create a Destroyer. But that would mean being subjected to doing the whole quest line again. With the Gunslinger, I pushed her fast because her initial class engravings were cheap and I knew enough of her class by already having played a Deadeye which made re-learning more than half her skills pointless (which is why I don’t just start with Knowledge Transfers). In the case of a Destroyer, I’m not familiar with his skills and read he’s another “advanced” class, which may imply he’s not as fluid compared to other classes. But I just can’t see myself doing anything else with my Deadeye besides Lopangs. Playing him and my Gunslinger feel redundant. I could wait for another class to come out but the one I heard which is next in line is the Arcanist and I have no interest in her. I would replace him in an instant if we got the Iron Man class but who knows when that might happen.
The one character I haven’t done much with is my Shadowhunter. I might start playing her again after the reset but I’m taking a small break just because she’s in a weird position where I don’t feel she was moving forward much and I wasn’t having fun. I’d prefer to put the majority of my focus on my Gunlancer just to have another Punika character.
One thing I want to mention about the maintenance thing is that they’re making the stuff from the Chaos Dungeon vendor character bound. All I can say is that SmileGate should never have used the World of Warcraft model as a big part of their base for item design. I know this is supposed to kill the bots but the truth is that all this does is make the game worse in the long run. You can’t stop the bots, they’ll figure out some other method to farm and the average player who does want to make money from infinite chaos won’t be able to any longer. I think the better solution to the bot problem would be to examine the movement between the Chaos Dungeon entrance in places like Vern and the blacksmith and cross referencing that with the names of these characters and whether they’re part of a guild. You can see so obviously the patterns of these bots that I think it’s an easier problem to solve than they realize it. But I don’t put too much faith into the intelligence level over at SmileGate. They’re just a bunch of fanboys that made a rip off game. It’s fun to play without any question but the design has me wondering.