Marvel Heroes revisited

Currently back in the “play grindy games and listen to podcasts” mood, so not only have I played a lot of Guild Wars 2, no, also did more than log in for Login bonuses in Marvel Heroes!
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So, what changed? There’s 5 new 60s I guess. Nick Fury was in the Advance Pack and I levelled him a while ago already (probably in April). This week I spent most of my >2000 Eternity Splinters and bought 5 heroes for 400 each. Ant-Man, Warmachine, Loki, Rocket Raccoon and Moon Knight. All besides Moon Knight were already rushed through parts of story mode and are Level 60 with an absolute minimum of gear. Meh, completionism only for now. Still sitting on a massive amount of G from a ridiculous sale a while ago, will probably be spent on Team-Ups. I also worked on a few achievements, but not really worth mentioning I guess.
To my big disappointment the Fantastic Four were taken out of the game, so unless you got/bought them before, you can’t get them. This sucks quite a bit, as I only have two of them, and could’ve easily grabbed Invisible Woman and Mister Fantastic if I had heard about the change in time 🙁

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Busy in Tyria

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Ranger at 40

Oh wow, I haven’t written about Guild Wars 2 in a while, but I didn’t play much I guess. In December ’15 I wrote “80 Warrior, 80 Thief, 46 Necromancer, 30 Guardian, 13 Engineer and 6 Ranger”.
Trying to retell the order of events: Guardian hit 80, went to be a Dragonhunter. Necro is got to 60, Engineer got to 20. That was in 2016, I guess.
When I started to play again last week (or was it 2 weeks ago?) I did some crafting first. The Necro is now 62 thanks to levelling Artificer to 265. Then I wasted the tasty XP because the Dragonhunter is now at 400 Weaponsmithing. Then I levelled the Engineer to 25 and stopped playing after researching builds and not liking what I saw at all. So I switched to the Ranger, played until Level 13 and used one of the “Get to Level 20” boosts. Then I levelled without any boosts to 40. Didn’t continue the story yet.
 
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Mesmer at 30

Also I finally spent most of the Gems I still had from buying Heart of Thorns on 2 character slots and a crafting mats expension because they were on sale. So I started a (Female Human) Mesmer and boosted her from 2 to 20, then did my story mode quests, finally used a few of my >200 Tomes of Knowledge and am now sitting at Level 30, waiting for the story quests to continue (but I logged out for lunch and writing a post.) So that’s >200 Tomes of Knowledge left, and also one full Level 80 boost. Maybe I got that when I bought Heart of Thorns as well? I think I’m saving this one for a Revenant as I’m not particularly interested in an Elementalist.
So that’s it now. Enough Tomes to boost whatever I like, but playing the Ranger is fun. Mesmer as well, but I think I’ll continue boosting her for now. And I still haven’t levelled Chef, Scribe, or Tailoring at all.

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Diablo 3 – Season 11

Four months since the last post and I didn’t really play many games.
I was persuaded to get the Diablo 3 Necro Pack (is there even an official name? Rise of the Necromancer it seems?) and now I’m Level 70, Chapters I-III finished and 3/12 at Chapter IV. 4h played so far and it’s relatively fun. What wasn’t fun was emptying my S10 char’s stuff into the non-seasonal bank. Took an hour, as usual. We’ll see how far this will go, but at least it’s a fun game after 4 months of only Fallout Shelter and a few hours of EVE.
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Diablo 3 – Season 10

When Season 10 started about a week ago? I wasn’t especially keen on participating, but nevertheless got pulled in. Now I’m just shy of 8 hours /played, finished Chapter IV like an hour ago and can do T7 rifts without problems (but not without dying) and T8 barely. As a duo we did T9 relatively easily, so on to Slayer again, but now the grinding part begins and I might fall off the hype train any day. Not really my idea of fun, but we’ll see. The DH is pretty fun, my original “main” was a DH as well, after the failed Barb at launch.

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AC4: Black Flag – First impressions

After 7h I’m done 10% (so it says) with Black Flag and it’s really good.
Assassin's Creed¼ IV Black Flagℱ2017-3-26-22-4-50
I had first played AC2 in late 2014, and instantly bought Brotherhood, Revelations and III – but after just having completed 2, didn’t start the next one – so typical. When I did start Brotherhood the controls were clunkier than in 2 and overall I still liked the gameplay but some oddities annoyed me. After a while I came back but never finished it. Maybe I was also a little sick of Ezio and his fake Italian accent.
In comes Edward and some things are really a lot nicer in Black Flag. The cities are smaller, you’re not called out by a guard instantly when you get on a rooftop (and this is one of the most fun things, anyway). Maybe it’s also easier, but I don’t have to run ALL the time and sometimes can fight and win. Oh, and I don’t have to remove wanted posters to be unknown again, just wait or do something else – a lot more fun. Also chasing shanties and fragments is nice.
That’s not much, but so far I’m really enjoying it, playing 1-2h per day. Only downside so far is the lackluster save method. You can’t just stop. I do get it that they don’t want you to quicksave/reload “cheat” your way through a level, but oh my, why I can’t I pause for an hour to cook dinner or something, do I really have to keep the game open or finish my objective first?
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Alt-aholic III


So yeah, I did it (and totally forgot to post on Sunday). After the latest big update levelling is quite quick, then add a few XP boosts you have flying around – and you’re up to 50 Level 60 Heroes. If you have too many Eternal Splinters as well, and just buy once your last one reached 60.
Beast and Black Bolt I got from the Advance Pack, Iron Fist was never interesting before (but that changed thanks to the Netflix series) and had +50% XP this week, Kitty was high on my list since she came out (but I was a bit underwhelmed with how she plays so far) and then for Psylocke… well I had 2 costumes, so I chose her.
From how they actually felt:

  • Kitty – ok
  • Psylocke – good
  • Iron Fist – good
  • Black Bolt – good
  • Beast – a bit meh
  • Angela – ok
  • Luke Cage – ok
  • Ultron – ok
  • Doom – good
  • Juggernaut – good, but I’m inexperienced with Movement Heroes
  • She-Hulk – quite good
  • Elektra – quite good
  • Cyclops – meh
  • Green Goblin – ok
  • Thor – ok
  • Jean Grey – quite good
  • Blade – ok
  • Daredevil – surprisingly good


Not missing many heroes until they launch some more:

  • Ant-Man (interesting)
  • Colossus (meh)
  • Emma Frost (meh)
  • Iceman (mhm)
  • Invisible Woman (meh)
  • Loki (half meh)
  • Moon Knight (half meh)
  • Mr. Fantastic (meh)
  • Rocket Racoon (kind of interesting)
  • Vision (meh)
  • War Machine (all builds use his Synergy, so would be the “smart” choice)

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Mass Effect 3 – Completed

Finally made it! (Only a few days before Andromeda is released and which I have not preordered, but still)
After 29-30h of playtime I finished Mass Effect 3 (Digital Deluxe Edition) as an Infiltrator FemShep (with pink armor, which looked totally rad). TLDR: I liked it a lot. Maybe not as good as ME2, maybe roughly as good. Scanning was worse and I had to set down the difficulty from Normal to Casual in the last damn fight. Everything else worked fine with a few deaths here and there (not as many as in ME1 by far).
The DLCs I have are: Reckoning, Retaliation, Earth, Extended Cut, Rebellion, Resurgence, From Ashes, Digital Books, Collector’s Edition Materials and the Soundtrack. Didn’t touch Multiplayer, so I guess half of that was useless. It was recommended I get the Citadel DLC, but so far I haven’t.
Apparently I have either 35 or 36 of 50 Achievements, Origin shows both numbers. /slowclap
This time I managed to do all side quests (besides the one that stays in your mission log if you fail to do it 100% on the planet) and I mostly enjoyed them. The Citadel ones were kinda meh, as it involved mostly scanning the exact planet – which would have been fun without the Reaper alertness mechanic which made any straight-on approach infeasible and killed my enjoyment. Get quest, look up exact location in wiki, scan, done, hand in. Meh. Everything else was ok, good, or really good. I think I got stuck not finding the way on one mission and had to look up the way to go. I did most missions with Liara and James. Liara died all the time, but when I tried Javik or Tali, they also died all the time. I was not very happy with the loadout screen before the missions. More than once I misclicked and started the mission early because the buttons are not clearly labelled. But that didn’t really matter, just a small nitpick.
So that’s 3 BioWare RPGs down (and I liked all of them), now I’m unsure if I will start Dragon Age: Origins (which I own, think I got it for free from Origin) or if I will buy Mass Effect: Andromeda. I’m kind of not in the mood for fantasy stuff right now, but maybe playing something else than an RPG *now* would also be a good idea.

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Mass Effect 3 – First impressions

I finally started playing Mass Effect 3 in earnest (I think I played for 2h late last year, then stopped again), ~14 hours in total so far. It’s awesome. Playing my (imported from ME1 and ME2) female Shepard as an Infiltrator with a Sniper Rifle as usual, but either it’s a lot easier or I somehow managed to learn along the way, because I’m playing on Normal and not Casual and still don’t die all the time (I did die a few times). Quests are mostly varied enough and only some have some “doh” moments where I go look something up.
I think my main point of criticism are the Citadel quests you overhear that are “get me some X” and the X in question is on one of the 50? 100? non-mainline story missions somewhere our there. Also scanning got worse again. Overall nothing big.
Also something about my character’s cheekbones is off. Maybe related to importing and I can live with it, still a little annoying.
I was told to absolutely get the Citadel DLC and maybe I should, but 1200 BioWare points is 15 EUR (twice as much as I paid for the game, but that’s not really a problem) and maybe I’d rather buy Andromeda once I am done here…

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Back on Nexus

Oh wow, I didn’t write about (and I guess also didn’t play) WildStar for 2 years and 2 months. I patched up and logged in yesterday, and today I cleaned out the bags, unlocked some costumes (in order to clean out the bags, mostly), wondered about the general state of my characters and was overall pretty surprised that I wasn’t in any way dismayed or let down by anything I found. Well, except for the full bags and that iirc some of my main’s gear was transformed into tokens – but I couldn’t care less about this.
I dusted off my Human Exile Medic and managed to do 2 levels in Wilderrun- 38 to 40. I even remembered how to play – or they made everything easier. It was only 3h (including the bank sorting), but it’s been a nice diversion and I didn’t feel pressed to shell out money instantly. Not that I would be against giving them money (again) – but the in-game shop is not IN YOUR FACE – I love that. Let’s see if I’ll taper off again quickly or if I manage to slowly make my way to a 3rd Level 50 character.
Open questions:

  • Is there rested XP? Maybe that’s why it felt so quick.
  • Why haven’t I learned to stay away from those elite mobs? 🙂

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Mini rant about EVE events

So there’s this Guardian’s Gala event (to get some SKINs) and that what’s got me to try a bit of EVE Online (not offline, i.e. just training) again and I’m a little let down.

  • Jump in a Thorax I have sitting around (Gallente Cruiser) and try to find a “Guardian’s Gala Rendezvous Point” (cool)
  • Had to fly around a bit and find one of those, visited like 7 systems (cool)
  • Finally found one, yay! Engage!
  • Now I know I am probably the worst EVE player in existence, but as I was just returning and didn’t know what to expect (Don’t fly what you can’t afford to lose)… I maybe chose a badly fitted or badly played ship. There’s 5 Angel Cartel frigates and after killing 3 my drones are gone, I am apparently not cap stable and have to warp off. No clue how expensive the drones were, but ship insurance (as I said I was inactive the last months) + repairs = a few mil (still cool)
  • But so now I was curious how much the SKINs actually cost, so I flew my other toon to Jita to check.

TLDR: It’s easier to fly to Jita and spend 50m on ALL the skins for ALL the Gallente ships I can fly or pay 15m in insurance for a Brutix that MAY enable me to do a few of those events and get a handful of skins. Easy choice. Spent 50m, happy with my SKINs, event failed.
Not a real critique of CCP – I am totally happy that they do these events, but if I compare them to WoW (can login on *any* max level toon, do stuff to a) see the event and b) reap some rewards)… it’s not even worth trying it. It’s PvE content, I am shooting some NPC ships and maybe? get 1 SKIN per successful gate. Whereas my participation already costs a sizable amount of what I would get. I have to say that it might be quite different if I had managed to do one in my Thorax (probably easy) or if I had an insured Brutix or Ishtar ready (also easy for most people). Still not sure how Omega toons would do this. EPIC SKILL?

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