What'd they do to my boy!?

 Changes to the specialist Irish are coming to Battlefield 2042.  EA DICE announced the changes on their latest Inside Battlefield podcast.  The big change is a significant NERF to Irish's APS-36 Shootdown Sentry.

 Irish's sentry, as it stands currently, takes effect immediately once deployed (i.e. it starts shooting down explosives) and intercepts all explosives until such time that the sentry is destroyed.  Basically it is an infinite explosive defense if it is not destroyed.

 The upcoming changes are:

• There will be a "boot up" time before the sentry is active
• There will be an "active" mode where it can intercept explosives
• There will be a "inactive" mode where it cannot intercept explosives; aka cooldown mode

 Oh boy!

 These are significant nerfs to Irish's sentry and I have some reservations.  One of the long standing problems with Battlefield games is "explosive spam".  Trying to defend a point?  Trying to defend the little bit of ground you took over on attack? Prepare for a never ending flood of explosives being lobbed into your general area; especially in game modes like breakthrough.

 Irish's sentry is critical in the current state of the game to combat explosive spam.  Without the sentry confined spaces or bottlenecks would be unplayable.  Anyone that has played a round of breakthrough without anyone playing Irish know how miserable the experience can be.

 Pushing players into open areas exposes them to other Battlefield detractors such as vehicle campers and snipers.  In modes like breakthrough it may become impossible to either defend or attack some points (attackers rely heavily on Irish's sentry to push forward and hold areas; resetting the sentry position a few feet forward as the push makes progress).

 While the sentry is great for combating explosive spam it also has some areas where it can be abused.  The most egregious abuse is vehicles camping just off the main battlefield protected from any long range anti-vehicle attacks since the rockets are considered explosives.  In modes with out of bounds areas for defenders; attacking vehicles could park, drop a couple sentries, and be impervious to attack.

 What confuses me most about the changes is that it hurts defending against explosive spam in close quarters but is not much of a deterrent against the abuse by camping vehicles.  Vehicles are often far enough away that even with a cool down period the sentry is still a near-impervious defense.  Outside of multiple players coordinating attacks there isn't much risk to vehicle campers still.

 The developers also stated they wanted to improve the pick rate of Irish (and Dozer who they also covered in the podcast).  As I see it there is even less of a reason to select Irish now than there was before.  As an Irish fanboy; I can't see myself picking him if his sentry is gutted.

 So in conclusion: what'd they do to my boy!?  The only change needed was to make it so the sentry didn't stop rockets so vehicle campers couldn't sit untouched, but instead we are getting changes that will actively encourage more explosives spam...

New World Hardcore?

 With the recent buzz around hardcore play in World of Warcraft Classic hardcore it has folks in the New World community talking about alternate game modes.  Of course hardcore (if your character dies its deleted) is the mode that occupies mindshare, but I want to propose a different game mode for New World I'd like to see.

 I call this game mode "Open New World".  The key changes:

• No instanced content (no Outpost Rush, no PvP arenas, no Expeditions, no Trials)
• Factions are optional (i.e. players are not required to join a faction)
• If a player joins a faction; PvP is always on

 The big change here is "no instanced content".  I really enjoy New World's open world content.  I love looping around the open world and doing stuff.  I don't dislike the instanced content but wish there was more content in the open world and more players there doing it.  Removing instanced content will force players into the open world.

 Now that we have players forced into the open world let's enable PvP by making it so joining a faction is electing to be always-on for PvP.  Players can remain faction-less if they don't want to PvP and companies can be either factionless or faction (if faction; all members must be in the same faction).

 Some other changes to go with this:

• Make it so certain resources can only be gathered by faction players so that players compete over resources at the top end.
  
• Update fort captures to be events that encourage players to show up (basically an OPR replacement)
  
• Move OPR caches to fort capture as rewards
  
• Update Elite POIs to have mutations and have former expedition rewards (expedition replacement)
  
• Rewards scale off players in the area; the more players the less the rewards

I'd play this version of the game in a heartbeat :)  Would you?  Leave a comment.

 

Challenging No More

 And we're back (nothing too major; thankfully).

 While I was away New World decided things needed to be less challenging.  Update 1.9.3 is on the live servers as of 5/10 and with it numerous season pass challenges and activities were dialed back making them challenging no more.

As an example; this challenge was reduced:

Outpost Rush Domination
    Reduced required Outpost Rush wins from 100 to 30

 The season is approximately 97 days long (Apr 3 - July 6).  For this challenge at its original goal of 100 it would mean a player would need to net at least one win a day if they play every day.  That seems like a good challenge.  It is not something everyone will get and feels like an accomplishment if you do make it.  But moved to 30; that isn't much of a challenge and many more players will hit the challenge complete.

 If you follow the release notes an axe was taken to many of the challenges.  This is unfortunate for anyone that was pushing for the original targets in the hopes of gaining the coveted "look at what I did!" feeling.  In my own experience I logged into several challenges and season journey steps being completed; netting me 5 pass levels (putting me at 90+; cruising to 100).

 On one hand I am a fan of when things are made easier on players, but at the same time I like actual challenges.  So I'm on the fence with all these changes; though considering I am pretty much done with the season pass and journey it doesn't really matter much.

 My hope is the New World dev team learns from Season 1 and makes future season's and their challenges actual challenges.  Tie unique rewards to them so that players can feel rewarded for hitting the challenges.  These don't have to be game changing rewards, but there is nothing wrong with throwing out some unique housing items or cosmetics or titles.

 With that said I do want to give credit to the devs on other changes that made things less challenging for the better.  My favorite is the reduction of Flame Cores required for a cast; down from 10 to 3.  Also you can now create 6 casts per day - up from 3.  Also the gear you get from the casts is much improved.  This will make the "craft X casts" season challenge really easy now, but there is some great benefits from this.  

 The change opens another path to turn gold into umbral shards as you can just buy 18x flame core each day, craft 6 casts, and each one rewards up to 400 shards for up to 2,400 shards a day (not to mention you get improved Human Ward/Bane gear from the casts as well).  Combine these shards with shards you can "buy" via infused fragments and there is a good path for converting gold into umbral shards for those players that don't want to get them via other means (players like me!).

 Anyways; I am off to grind more named gear drops which is my current kick in New World.

 

Emergency Room; No Gaming

 What a week.  My phone died (original Google Pixel was 7 years old) and then my youngest ended up in the Emergency Room.  No gaming this weekend.  My youngest is good though; just had to rule out something more serious than a common stomach bug.

May the 5th be with you!

May the 5th be with you!

Ha!  See what I did there?  #legend

Cuatro De Mayo!

Happy Star Wars Day

May the 4th be with you!  You'll need the force if you are trying to run Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

New World: Farming The Tangle

Farm. Sleep. Repeat.

 With my Infernus farm build resulting in acquiring Infernus I wanted to look at what else I could farm up using the build.  Fortunately there is plenty of stuff to farm in the general vicinity. Specifically I am now on the hunt for parts of the Corrupted Rage set: specifically the gloves and helmet (as I have Chardis pieces for my other Ancient tank gear set).

 And the helmet dropped for me last night so just need to nab the gloves! 

 So I will be in The Tangle farming away if you need me!  If you have any other recommendations on items to farm for drop me a comment.

Ashes of Creation Looking Better: Mage

Mage Preview

 Ashes of Creation featured the mage class in their most recent monthly update.  This was the most promising look at the game in a while.  

 First, I want to highlight the format to this archetype preview was better than it's predecessors.  There was structure and thought behind what was shown and why it was shown.  Details of abilities accompanied the on screen display.  Abilities were showcased before jumping into content.  I walked away understanding the direction they are headed with the mage.  In past archetype previews I didn't walk away with an understanding of the class.

 Second; USER INTERFACE! We saw USER INTERFACE!  Finally.  The UI is critical to understanding the game.  We saw two stacked hot bars, some indication of equipped weapon, cool downs, and a little bit of the inventory.  UI needs to be featured more.  It is the biggest missing piece to help drive confidence the game is making more progress than just being able to show off animations and basic combat.

 We also got to see a few other things.  Most notably was the gliding (flying?) mount (23:12 in the video).  The animation from take off, gliding, to landing were awesome.  Enemies also aggro'd as the mount glided or walked past and there was quite the train of enemies gathered up.  I am not sure if this is how aggro is intended in long run, but definitely some early-days MMORPGs vibes there!

 Also numerous times in the video we got to see the character traverse various world obstacles. The traversal looked smooth and gave me confidence that they are headed in the right direction for movement and how it feels to the player (i.e. I can climb that rock in front of me vs it being an invisible wall).

 This is the first class preview where I can give a solid "thumbs up".  The more of the various game aspects that are mixed into these previews the more confident I will be that the game is heading towards a test! 

Why New World! Why!?

Wispy Spritz and Fire Motes!?

 New World's new spring event is live: Springtide Bloom.  The event has players zipping around the world killing wasps and picking flowers.  There is a trick to killing the wasps you can harvest the flowers and that trick is having Wispy Spritz on hand.  While plenty of Wispy Spritz is given away in the event the crafting recipe is a head scratcher as it requires fire motes; the most expensive motes in the game... so the price... as expected... is going up (2 to 2.48 gold per on my server).

 This highlights this weird imbalance New World has with some components. Some are overused in many different recipes and then get scooped into event recipes like this situation; and other resources in the same family have significantly less use.  In the mote example; Fire Motes are the most used mote and now is the most-most used because of the event kicking off.  Why New World? Why!?

Why!?

New World Discord

Goodbye New World Forums

 New World is shuttering their forums and moving their community interaction to Discord. I would link to that forum post but whats the point when it won't be there in the future so here's a screenshot instead.

 Maybe I am just an Internet boomer but I liked forums and I am going to miss the New World forums.  I thought the forums were well organized and functionally strong.  I really liked the dynamic timezone conversion capability so that I was always seeing event times in my local time.  It was also easy to search via search engines.

 I enjoy Discord as a voice comm platform but I really have not liked it as a means for replacing a game's website and forums.  I just don't find Discord functional in the way a web sites are.  It is also "yet another" program I need open on my computer.  I get it that many gamers live in Discord but I am not one of them; I live in my web browser (yes... I know you can use Discord in your browser... but that doesn't mean it works like a normal website).

 Either way I didn't spend much time in the forums.  The main use was when I am encountering a bug or connection error and seeing if others were in the same boat.  Discord should be good for this as I am sure folks will pile in with any widespread issues.  So I'll give Discord a try and lament not having the forums anymore.

 What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment.