Day 3: Rise of the Angry Earth (Taking it easy)

Read about all of my Rise of the Angry Earth experiences here.

 Rise of the Angry Earth is approaching its first full week in New World, but I'm only on my third day of my adventure in the Elysian Wilds thanks to a full-day internet outage, offsite work meetups, and then getting sick.  With real life intruding, and my pre-expansion burn out, I've taken a step back and realized there is no need to rush.  It is better to take it easy at this point.

 The first major reason for taking it is easy is that I missed out on some of the gravy train of early "not exactly as intended" features of the expansion.  The main was the story-mode expeditions dropping loot up to 700 GS.  A few players I know were able to spam these expeditions and are 680+ gear score already and since story-mode is a nerfed regular mode there was literally no challenge involved.  Now regular (aka story-mode) expeditions only drop up to 670 GS.  As they say in MMORPGs: "abuse early, abuse often".

 I am not too upset about missing out as I am getting plenty of 670+ GS drops from other methods and I also have a couple artifacts now which are always 700 GS.  I have no problem taking it slow and being deliberate about my gear upgrades.  Also I am finding with my prior 625 gear set that I am capable of holding my own.  I am winning PvP arenas and PvP fights and just tanked a story-mode expedition with it.

 Speaking of tanking an expedition I got the chance to try the new Savage Divide expedition via it's story-mode.  It is a beast-themed expedition with apes, mammoths, and some other beasts.  AGS made it so the story-mode was very low barrier to entry and my group had no issue clearing the expedition; even after locking out one of our DPS on the last boss.  A little disappointing that it was this easy but I can see how in mutations this will be a much harder expedition.

Look who greeted us on the other side of the door!

 Jumping out of expeditions I also got to try the new influence race for territory control.  This was a ton of fun with hundreds of players fighting over a single control point in Monarch's Bluff.  Most amazing was my performance was really good.  I think my graphics upgrade to a Radeon 7800XT is mostly responsible, but still hats off to the team at AGS for making a massive open world PvP fight with hundreds of players something playable.  Rewards were great as well; lots of gear drops, faction tokens, and PvP experience/salt.

Open world PvP fight during an influence race

 While I had fun in this race I do have a few areas of feedback

• Tents need to be disabled during influence races or at a minimum block them around the control points.  You can place tents within spitting distance of the new control points which means any "victory" with pushing players out of the control point is short lived as they re-spawn literally in the middle of the fight.
• The races are popular right now but how long will that last? Will players come back over and over?  The root content is fighting other players vs engaging with the new objectives.  What I've seen so far is one objective becomes the main hub of the fight and the rest are relegated to watching the paint dry unfortunately.
• Players not playing now and farming the hundreds/thousands of players being killed are missing out - the bulk of rewards are oddly tied to number of players that show up and get killed vs the reward at the end of the race.  In the future if you just get a few kills per race because it's not as popular it will be a lot less beneficial as it is today.
• It's a bit irritating to go and pick up loot bags in the mass of zergs.  Lots of loot bags were missed because you can't go out and collect them.

Anyways; back to playing it easy :)  Enjoy some other screenshots from my adventures!

 

After defeating Medusa in the soul trial

The expansion visuals continue to stun

This Minotaur guy is my favorite (though I don't pay any attention to his quest text)

Jumping puzzle?

A big chain.