Oh, this GW2 thing

I dinged 80 on my Norn Warrior last Sunday (May 31st) and totally forgot to post, what a shame!

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Before

After
After

The game’s still pretty fun and after I got my last level I instantly went for Tequatl again and also did enough PvP matches to get my Exotic Greatsword. When seeing other classes I’m still not sure Warrior was the correct choice for me as I feel immensely underpowered… but it’s probably a l2p issue. Now to slowly grind towards Exotic and maybe Ascended gear.
My Necro is still at Level 20 and I also started a Human Thief and played to around Level 13 – pretty fun as well.

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Shadowrun: Dragonfall completed

Thanks to the public holiday I stayed up until 3 am and continued after getting up, so I’m finally done with Shadowrun: Dragonfall. It’s so good! I finished it in ~18h according to Steam, which is more than twice the time than Shadowrun Returns – but I think I didn’t skip any side quest this time.
My main character was (again) a Ranged Street Samurai (this time Female Troll named Tar instead of Male Orc named Zip) and I used only Rifles (Assault and Sniper) and a Shotgun near the end. I mostly played with Dietrich (Shaman) on Support, Eiger (Sniper) and Glory (Melee) but sometimes took Blitz (Decker) over Glory. I totally didn’t see the Cyberware menu for the first ~10 hours, so only used the active stuff in the end.
There are two things I didn’t like, first of all the loading times when starting the game. At times it took 2-3 minutes to get into, this is a bit weird (but it wasn’t on my SSD, so ok). When moving from zone to zone (which doesn’t happen that often, maybe twice per hour max) it was a lot quicker, but still a bit slow. And the grand finale was just too easy. Or maybe I minmaxed a little too much, but in the middle of the game I sometimes struggled with fights (had to abandon and reload once), and in the end I was just waltzing through. Didn’t even use my medkits anymore and hardly a heal. Also only used one summon out of three I had.
Everything else was basically perfect, I am so much looking forward to Hong Kong now.
I might even try to get a few more achievements out of this game and play as a non-Samurai, we’ll see.
 
But now I can finally listen to that AggroChat episode without being spoilered 🙂

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Gotta catch ’em all!

I didn’t play too much Marvel Heroes this week because I was busy with Shadowrun: Dragonfall and also GW2, but still:
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As you can see, Winter Soldier is 60 and Wolverine made it to 52 (pic is a few hours old) – for WS I tried something new (not using the cookie cutter build with the most upvotes on marvelheroes.info) but instead opted for this build, which highly favors stealth. Wolverine plays quite similar to X-23, but I liked her a bit better. Levelling those 2 up I got a decent amount of Eternity Splinters and of course I had to gamble again. This time with very good results: Star-Lord and Nova, especially the latter is a hero I am really interested in trying out 🙂
The achievement system has one of those “meh” achievements. While I only had to continue playing Hawkeye for 2h to get to the magic 100h mark (he was my first hero after all, which always takes a lot longer, then for a while my only 60, and now even at purple prestige) the “500h /played on one character” is really harsh and I’ve taken to always log Hawkeye when I let MH run when going for dinner or something. Maybe those 10-20 min increments over a year will help for this achievement…

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Shadowrun Returns completed

I remember buying Shadowrun Returns quite a while ago and promptly started to play. For about 30 minutes and then somehow I never came back.
Now I know that was a huge mistake. Shadowrun: Dragonfall was marked down quite a bit on Steam and I pondered buying it, in the knowledge that the predecessor still sat there unfinished. So I set out to give it another chance (because I actually love the Shadowrun world and played the pen & paper for quite a bit). This resulted in me spending most of Saturday (nearly 9 hours to be exact) playing through from 30min in till the end credits. And I can only say: WOW, it’s so good and so much fun. I think at around the 4 hour mark I alt-tabbed to quickly buy Dragonfall (which I started to play just now, it looks equally well done so far)
It’s not revolutionary, but it’s a solid single player role-playing game with turn-based tactical combat. (Queue memories of Syndicate in the 90s) I think I played on normal and only had to reload once because I lost a fight and I needed to peek into a walkthrough three times. One of those was genuine (at the UB), the other too I could blame on the game itself. First I didn’t know where to go because I didn’t get that “Sure you want to leave the scene?” in combat mode is not a bad thing, just the way to the next zone. And then nothing happened where something should happen, but I should’ve just walked around a bit for a turn or two. So I don’t call those two cheating, only the first thing I mentioned (at the UB).
So yeah – no crashes, perfect difficulty level, it was just a bit short. According to some research it should’ve been around 10-12h and not 9, but maybe I forgot a few side quests. I am quite happy it’s not 20+ because I love to finish a game once in a while.
Still undecided if I grab the preorder for Hong Kong on Steam or if playing Dragonfall is now enough in the near future.. We’ll see.

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More Heroes!

Time for an update on Marvel Heroes I guess:
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BOGO happened and this time I gave in. You might notice that there’s 4 new characters on the roster, which brings me to 21 Heroes, 17x Level 60.
I bought X-23 (and got Wolverine from my Random Hero Box) then Black Widow (and got Doctor Strange). First I levelled Black Widow, as she had recently had a review and she was pretty fun to play. After that I started with Winter Soldier (finally, he was my 13th Hero) but then wanted to try X-23 as I had heard good things. Yes, it was fun 🙂
I also started with Wolverine and actually did more story mode to get some more achievements, but after chapter 1 already decided that this is kind of moot and dusted off Miss Marvel (who can fly) to find all the events and hidden rooms. I haven’t written about achievements yet, but they are fun – so far. I especially like the whacky ones, like Hawkeye’s “Kill 1000 Ninjas with Melee Powers” – which I do by entering the Hand Tower on Normal and killing everything with Ronin Lunge. Should be done in 10-11 runs. Then again there’s this other achievement to kill 1000 Ninjas with a certain Any Hero-Unique equipped, so I’ll probably put that in at the same time, as I only have a third done.
Hawkeye got prestiged twice more after having found the fun with him again (and honestly, the purple name suits his current costume a lot better then white or green…) on Midtown Monday. Captain is blue, which looks good – but Human Torch could use 2 more to be orange, maybe this is not the smartest idea:
Scarlet Witch 5x for red, Hulk 1x for green, Ghost Rider 4x for orange, Deadpool 5x for red, Iron Man 5x for red, Nightcrawler 2x for blue, Wolverine 5+++x for cosmic yellow….
I bought 2 more Hero Stashes I think, so down to 1530G now. I’m also at over 250 Eternal Splinters again, so will probably randomize 1-2 more once I hit 350.
Like Wilhelm, I don’t like the new editor at all, and this is the first post I fully wrote in it. Let’s see if I at least manage to get all the important settings right.

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Slowly levelling in GW2

My Norn Warrior is halfway between 59 and 60 and while I still kind of like the game, I much prefer Marvel Heroes at the moment – and I think I didn’t even try to play another game for a while.
I kind of want to reach 80, and it’s not that I’m stuck, but it seems to drag on a little. I am pretty happy that there’s no rested XP (as far as I know) because something that always annoyed me in WoW was having to find an inn to log out – here I can just stay wherever I am when logging out.

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Marvel Heroes Weekly

Not as much got done, but I’m still happy with the result:
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The tally now is: 17 Heroes, 14 at 60, 5 prestige runs done (so really 19), 2 Team-Ups.
There was a giveaway at MMOGames.com which their servers didn’t really handle that well, but I still managed to snatch a free character box, which yielded me Black Panther. Other than that I prestiged Captain for the second time and Hawkeye for the first time (wanted to play him with the review changes anyway), the +50% XP bonus for the Avengers helped a lot. After that I levelled Nightcrawler to 50. He feels awfully squishy, but he’s very fun to play. Apparently he gets better at max level, with all the powers available – we’ll see.
Again I spent a few millions on Costume Affix rerolling, but I got nearly everything to > 80% of the max roll now, and even ~45% of them to > 90%, fwiw. Everyday I’m spreadsheatin’. Other than that I started a massive cleanup of my bank slots and exchanged a load of Any Hero Uniques for Runes and Relics, and also a ton of duplicate hero-specific ones. Then again a few heroes now already have a “levelling set” of Uniques, mostly the ones I prestiged already, but a few others that I plan to prestige also have a few.
Scarlet Witch is supposed to be really awesome after the 52 review now, but I haven’t tried her again. Still pondering if I should just prestige her at the next event, maybe next Monday…
For now I saved up my Eternity Splinters, I think for the second time ever I have more than 200. Still unsure if I should continue gambling until 20 or buy Domino as a Team-Up, because she’s supposed to be a little better than Clea. Then again it probably makes more sense to wait for a half-off sale again for those few percent of bonuses and just keep ~150-200 splinters ready for this.
I’m still sitting on 1050G and haven’t spent any money lately, I think. That is, because I failed to mention another 20$ purchase in the April 27th post.

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NBI 2015

At the off chance someone’s reading this blog and still missed it in their filter bubble, the Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015 has started. I am absolutely not involved, but I love the idea – so many new Gaming blogs to check out. And as someone who is more likely to stick reading because of the mix of topics mixed with writing style it’s not as easy as “try to find all blogs for game X” to find new reading material.

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Marvel Heroes overdrive

Yes, again I’ve been playing even more Marvel Heroes than anything else.
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First of all, there’s been a few additions to the roster. I bought Iron Man at the 50% Tax Return (US stuff, but who cares?) sale after getting Deadpool from a random box and on Sunday I also got Nightcrawler from there.
Since the last post I first levelled Cable to 60, then Deadpool and then started with Iron Man last week (hooray, vacation).
This weekend I prestiged Captain America because of the Avengers 50% XP buff and maybe I’ll do it a second time. Or prestige Hulk, Hawkeye or Scarlet Witch – but for her I might wait the two weeks when here review is supposed to go live. Speaking of reviews, I haven’t read good things about Hawkeye’s review. He was my first Hero to 60 and he was pretty fun to play – but after playing some other heroes he’s been put on the backburner a bit and I had hoped for the review to bring him up to speed so he’d be as fun to play as my current favorites. Ah well, we’ll see.
On the other hand I dug into theorycrafting now and looking to get some characters raid ready (or at least write down what’s necessary) – so there’s a lot of spreadsheets involved, which “Any Hero” unique should go to whom, which of them are useless enough so I can exchange even the 60 ones for Runes and Relics, and so on and so on.
Especially nasty are the Costume Suffixes. Most builds just go with a default of “+Critical Damage Rating” on all 4 Grades, so that’s what I used for most of my heroes – but this is highly random, so you can either have a lot of rating or not much at all.
Apparently the max rolls without a Costume Core for Grades 1-4 are 70/140/216/302 and with a 60 Costume Core they are 382/765/1177/1668 – so now everytime I am at the 3m credit cap and also have some spare Pures, I’ll start rerolling until I have everything to at least 90% (or 80% if unlucky) of the max roll. I think today I spent like 500k to get like 8 grades to over 90, but with so many characters 😛

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Things I like about Guild Wars 2

I’ve played a fair bit of Guild Wars 2 in the last weeks, my Norn Warrior is Level 47 and my Asura Necromancer is Level 17.
It’s not the best game ever, but I’m really enjoying it – the crafting is nice. It’s possible to craft stuff for your character while levelling, with the materials you gathered. OK, I needed to invest some money to buy cloth, because I did not have enough at all for Armorsmithing. Had plenty of metal though, that was a bit weird. But I’m wearing stuff I crafted – that’s nice.
Map completion is awesome. People sometimes say you shouldn’t use the Renown Hearts as Quests but do as you please… but if I’m running around, doing events, doing hearts, grabbing Vistas and PoIs… I complete the maps I play on. Then there’s world bosses and unlike in WoW where only at the start of the tier the max-level chars form a raid to down that enemy… people of all levels gather every 30mins and down that enemy. And they all get level-appropriate gear! Actually the automatic downscaling is the killer feature here – max-level chars, mid-level chars, and level-appropriate chars all working together on that world boss. Awesome!
Then there’s small QoL things that are better than WoW: you can revive escort NPCs if they die (and the event doesn’t automatically fail) and they usually don’t pull 400 mobs while walking, everyone can tag along even after it started (escort events, and events in general).
I also like the personal story bits every 10 levels. It’s not too much and you especially don’t have to rush there the moment you hit 10, 20, 30, … because this also scales down. But the rewards are kind of fixed level I think, so you should do them in time, but at least you can finish what you started.
So far I didn’t feel pressured into buying anything, after ~50h of play time, I think that’s pretty good. Sure, I could use some gold, or bigger bags, or whatever – but apparently you can easily get to max level without having to buy anything after the initial box – this is very nice. They’ll absolutely get my money for the expansion unless I’ll totally lose the fun in the game over the summer.
There’s probably a dozen things I forgot now, but so far I’m very, very happy.

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