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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Problems with the WoW token

xxxxxxx: so, when are you coming back to wow again?
Armagon: next expansion for sure. maybe if the token comes to europe
yyyyyyy: uhh… Started this week

And so I had a quick look, it’s at 40902 Gold atm, quite on the costly side. wowtoken.info seems to be an easy way to look at it.
My problem now is the UI ingame. I can log in my sub-20 chars, as I wrote in my last post and when I click on a high-level character, a popup appears that lets me buy 30 days of game time for xxx Gold. And that this gold will be evenly deducted from the characters on this account.
Now my problem is that I don’t have a clue how much gold I own on any realm or in general. I could have 200k, I could have just a few hundred Gold more then the buyout price and I could have not enough and it’s buggy and shows the popup anyway. I just tried 3 realms and get the same popup on any of them, I am *pretty sure* I have enough gold on two of those realms, and absolutely sure I don’t have enough on the third – that’s why I find this confusing.
As I don’t want to buy a token right now I didn’t try clicking on it – who knows if there’s a confirmation window and/or how many steps I need to go through to actually activate it, but why o why couldn’t they put the amount of gold on this realm on the char select screen?

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A very quick visit to Azeroth

Some time ago I had read somewhere that apparently nowadays you can log in to your not subscribed WoW account and play low-level characters. This week I was sick and in bed all day, mostly sleeping, so at one point I fired up the Battle.net client, tried to find my authenticator and then patched up WoW.
I could indeed log in, see all my characters and log in with the ones below level 20 (didn’t check if below 20 or below or equals 20 though). I only did 5 jumps in an inn, but it’s nice to know. Maybe I will visit some people in the future. And if the WoW token comes, I might even spend some ingame gold to check back for a month, we’ll see.

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Another month of Marvel Heroes

Oh wow, it’s been nearly a month since I wrote down my progress in Marvel Heroes – guess I’ve been too busy playing the game  – so this means it’s still absolutely fun 🙂
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So apparently since the last post I managed to prestige Human Torch a second time, get Hulk, Ghost Rider and Taskmaster to 60 and, which was the best part, get Punisher from a Random Hero Box and also level him to 60, yay. I also got enough OMEGA currency to buy my second team-up, Agent Coulson. So right now only 2 unlevelled characters out of 13.
Punisher is fun to level and play (probably because he had his review recently) despite his Ammo mechanic being very, very different than the Spirit for most heroes. Ghost Rider was kind of fun, but doesn’t seem to be strong (with my gear and/or spec), same for Taskmaster. Hulk was a bit unexciting, but I think because of levelling only in Midtown and ICP (no story mode at all) I neglected my gear, so I read he should be strong but didn’t feel like that – I probably have to redo some things and practice.
I also spent many hours better equipping some of the characters, with most of them now at least having only 60s epics (not min-maxing really, but I should write down a few slot/hero combos where to save up the cosmics).
I played a lot of Captain America at 60 on last Monday’s Midtown Madness  (a holiday) and earned around 100 OMEGA points, so now I’m just shy of 800. Not too bad for 100 days of login rewards (awesome concept btw) for which  I got the Mini-Ultron pet yesterday. I should tally them up at some point, I think…
So the last todo list looked like this:

  1. Get enough Cosmic Worldstones to buy the Doop pet
  2. Get enough OMEGA stuff to get Agent Coulson (Team-Up)
  3. Get a Legendary on the Heroes that are lacking one: SW, HT, CAP, HULK
  4. If possible, get the Hero a legendary before starting to level
  5. Story mode is incomplete on: HT, STM, MM
  6. Get Domino (Team-Up)
  7. Decide what and if to prestige again, preferably before retroactively completing story mode

So yeah, 1), 2) and 7) are completely done. 6) would need more Splinters and for now I still love Random Hero Boxes (although I got a 2nd SW token yesterday as well)
For 3-5 I need to elaborate. From the St. Patrick’s Day event you could get a massive amount of “levelling” Legendaries, where step 1 gives you 10% XP, step 2 and 3 gives you 10% RIF and SIF and then some more. So all heroes that don’t have a proper Legendary now have at least one of those and the ones with a proper one also have one of those stashed away. I also have enough Cosmic Worldstones and Odin Marks to buy some Legendaries, which I will do once the non-proper ones are maxed-out. We’ll see.
Regarding story mode, it was worse than I thought. At some point I decided to not do full-on story mode for the heroes anymore, so only Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Gambit have 100% completion, for Human Torch, Captain America and Storm I stopped midway on Superheroic. So for those 3 I now at least did the minimal story mode for the rewards and on the newer heroes only this from start to end. So now only Hulk and Miss Marvel are sitting at 154 power points (zero story mode) and Storm needs 3 more, the rest is maxed at 166. Oof.
From a money perspective, I spent 20$ since last month and have 490G left, but I have the hero stash for every hero I own now.
The hero wish list obviously lost Punisher, but gained She-Hulk.
Random fact: I just had to add “Punisher” and “Hawkeye” to Chrome’s spellchecker. Bad Google.

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Trine 2 (AggroChat Game Club 2)

I’m a big fan of the AggroChat podcast and when they revealed the game they’d be all playing in March turned out to be Trine 2 I rummaged around in my Humble Bundle purchases because the name sounded vaguely familiar. I was in luck, because I apparently had a key and so I wanted to give it a try after all.
So like most of the folks from AggroChat I did not finish Trine 2, but I wholeheartedly agree with most of their review points: It’s a nice platformer/puzzle game that looks absolutely fantastic. Most puzzles (up to the point where I stopped, at some point after the 2nd boss) were fair.
I did nearly all my fighting on the Warrior (with a few arrows here and there and crushing a few enemies with a box), did most of the jumping on the Thief and solved most of the puzzles as the Wizard.
I also agree on the shortcomings, meaning that “conjuring boxes” solves too many problems.
I totally couldn’t stop laughing when it came to discussing the pipe puzzles and the perceived lack of means to rotate them – like Bel I spent a minute or two on each puzzle hitting them against the assets and my character to spin them around instead of finding the keybinding to do that.
Oh, and go listen to that episode if you’re interested – I think besides the criticism of it being too easy I agree with mostly everything they said. I’m so out of touch with single player games in general and platformers especially that it was hard enough for me. But I mostly stopped for time reasons (all those Marvel Heroes need to be levelled after all…) and I’ll absolutely try to finish it at some point.
Awesome game – play it!

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Welcome to Tyria

There was a sale recently and so I decided to spend 10 bucks and finally try Guild Wars 2. Trying to remember how I would’ve described without having played it, this would probably include “fantasy MMO”, “frequent content updates”, “no subscription” and “Guild Wars 1 was kind of weird” (but I only saw it for an hour or two when someone showed it to me).
So yes, I’ve started levelling a Male Norn Warrior and managed to get to Level 17 on the weekend. I have 100% map completion in Wayfarer Foothills and Hoelbrak and it’s been enjoyable so far. Relatively unexciting, but that’s not a bad thing I guess. Plus I’d only played WoW for one month in the last ~9 months – so maybe I did miss my Fantasy MMOs?
The game is relatively easy to get into, had to look up a few things on various wikis and websites, but in general it seems newbie friendly, although combat can be clunky I think. We’ll see about this weapon switching and end game.

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Running out of Marvel Heroes post titles

As usual I played a lot of Marvel Heroes, after the letdown in my last post I got a lot luckier again, I drew Ms. Marvel and Cable from random boxes bought with splinters and got Taskmaster from a free code (thanks PCGamesN). Incidentally I was working from home today and got the news of this only 2h after they posted those 5000 keys, now 12h after the post they’re already gone. I’m not terribly keen on either Cable or Taskmaster, but I haven’t played them yet – and I’m sure as hell not complaining.
So yes, I did level Storm since my last post and also Ms. Marvel (a week of Midtown really helped here) – both to 60 and Hulk is also 33.
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I’m pretty surprised that I’m still getting a tremendous amount of fun out of this game, I think I’ve logged in all the ~72 days since I started (for the login bonus) – but of course I didn’t play on all the days, but still quite a lot.
Immediate plans for the future include:

  • Get enough Cosmic Worldstones to buy the Doop pet
  • Get enough OMEGA stuff to get Agent Coulson (Team-Up)
  • Get a Legendary on the Heroes that are lacking one: SW, HT, CAP, HULK
  • If possible, get the Hero a legendary before starting to level
  • Story mode is incomplete on: HT, STM, MM
  • Get Domino (Team-Up)
  • Decide what and if to prestige again, preferably before retroactively completing story mode

Short names grabbed from this site.
Maybe I should track my most sought after Heroes, those would be right now:

  • Iron Man
  • Punisher
  • Rogue
  • Deadpool
  • Nightcrawler
  • Juggernaut

And because I’ve never written it down, if memory serves me right, I now have:

  • 3x normal stash
  • 1x reagents stash
  • hero stash for: HWK, SW, GMB, HT, STM, MM

Money I spent so far, if I remember correctly:

  • 15$ for 1575G in the first week (1 Hero for 450G, 2 Heroes for 225G each?, 1 crafting stash) – 1200G
  • 10$ for 1000G (3 hero stashes) – 1050G
  • 10$ for 1000G (3 hero stashes) – 1050G
  • 10$ for 1000G (2 normal stashes) – 1000G

That’s ~11$/10€ per month (still got some spare G) so far, compared to the ~14$/13€ for other MMOs.
That’s ~14$/13€ per month (still got some spare G) so far, exactly like in other MMOs.

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Not many Heroes

So wow, a month has passed and I didn’t play anything besides Marvel Heroes.
I was just busy levelling Captain America when on Sunday morning I noticed that my bags were exploding with stuff (as usual) and I didn’t have a pet to feed all those delicious cosmic items to, so I set on getting a pet. Not having enough Cosmic Worldstones I first tried my luck with a few Fortune Cards – no luck of course. Then I saw that you can just buy pets for 1m credits but they have a prestige requirement. The cosmic event is going on right now which seems to be the thing to do prestige, so I didn’t hesitate (this would be the perfect moment for a pun that only works in German…) to start a prestige run on Human Torch, who seems to be my most AoE-heavy grindy hero at the moment. I managed to get to 56 until Sunday evening by basically doing Midtown Patrol for 20 levels, then Industrial City until around midnight. I used 3 2h +50% exp potions in the process. Then yesterday after work I finished the remaining 4 levels in Midtown (Monday!) and also brought Captain to from 47 to 60 there.
So this is how it looks. The “Random Hero Token” thing already bit me twice now, I got a 2nd Human Torch (translates to Ultimate token) and now a 2nd Storm. Meh. If I got my statistics math correct this should only be a 3%((8/44) * (8/44)) chance, so I don’t think they are really random – there was another unlikely 8% ((13/44) * (13/44))  case of getting 2 duplicate tokens in a row in the household.
But whatever, 30 more splinters and I can try again, I am not immensely pissed about dupes. Still unsure what to level next, probably Storm, maybe Ghost Rider.
 
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