New World New Drip

 To go with my Frigid Inferno (heavy fire staff / sword and shield) build I updated my transmog in New World.  I wanted to lean into the Frigid Dawn armor set and ice theme.

Stone cold.

  All of the armor pieces are the Frigid Dawn base skin except for the chest which I kept as the Arisen Commander skin with a silver blue dye to blend in the colors.  The firestaff skin is Sizzling Snow (which you can get via crafting one of the event patterns (1, 2, 3) if the patterns are available on your server's trading post).

 Not shown, but similiar to the firestaff the shield skin is Frigid Bulwark from the winter event patterns. The only other change I've thought about is making the sword have the Iceburst skin.  Enjoy!

Ashes of Creation Commissions

 Ashes of Creation released its monthly development update featuring it's version of quests called commissions.  Watch the video and hit the jump for my thoughts.

 I have to admit the game looks visually better with each developer update and that stands out the moment the demo starts.  I am really digging the look of the town (called nodes) and it is still crazy to think most of these towns will be player placed and upgraded.

 The demo shows commissions which immediately brought "quest boards" to mind of every MMO in recent memory.  However, the difference that eventually pays off in the demo is that the commissions feed into more and more of what Ashes is advertising as it's main attraction: a living and dynamic world.

 Think of the commission as a kick start to get players out of town and into the opportunity to unlock a chain of events that contributes to a dynamic change in the world.  Players can of course just skip the opportunity as Steven does in the demo and get a train of enemies rolling around, but more exciting was to see the world change as different actions are taken.  

 In the video we get to see a sudden thunderstorm form as new enemies appear in an open world event.  The event intertwines with other quests in the area before hinting at unlocking a larger transformational world event at the end of the video.  

 Plenty of MMOs have dynamic open world events, but the "revolution" Ashes hints at is that all actions are leading to changes in the world that are stickier than other games.  A real "fear of missing out" model where server 1 will be different than server 2.  Add in the nodes mentioned earlier and the game is starting to show the real possibility to be that revolution we've all wanted in the MMORPG genre.

 This isn't to say all of it was revolutionary.  There was still the same old static -- I will never move from this spot - quest givers.  Enemy AI wasn't all that impressive; easily defeated by the age old tactic of running away.  Combat looks noisy (too many effects) and for a few updates has shown a favor towards kiting enemies.

 While I could nitpick more I won't.  I am cautiously continuing to grow excited about the possibilities of this game.  With only Alpha 2 planned for this year there is still along road to go here for betas and a launch, but its going to be a fun one to check out each month in the developer updates.

 

The hypocrisy of posting on a blog in 2024

 Create a post on X (or whatever social media of choice) and share it on a site like a video game's forums and it's cool.  But create content on your own blog you've run for 19+ years to share and you are just a bottom sucker of the Internet.  Just blogging things.

New World: Season 5 Artifact Changes

 New World has an update on the public test realm (PTR) for the new artifacts coming in Season 5 (March 2024).  The biggest change is to Phoenix (the new amulet artifact).  The changes are covered in the following YouTube video from TrickTrick.

 As noted the big change is to Phoenix.  The initial version had a perk that was a copy of the original Defy Death ability for Hatchet.... which was long ago nerfed out of existence in the game. As expected there was an uproar in the community that it would be coming back on an amulet that anyone could use.  Fortunately the developers changed how it will work with Phoenix.  The new PTR wording is below:

Phoenix Vengeance: When you receive lethal damage, avoid death and become invulnerable for 4s, after which you die. (180s cooldown).

 The last part is the key: the player will die no after the four seconds expires giving them a last hurrah before taking their dirt nap! However, as noted in the video there is a way on PTR using Ice Gauntlet's Entombed ability for a player to avoid the "die" portion.  That has to be fixed or this is going to be abused.  Even with that oversight fixed this is still going to be strong; especially for those players that love diving into piles knowing they are going to die anyways and just want to take a few folks down with them.

 The spear artifact Venom was changed to only trigger on heavy melee attacks from the other equipped weapon.  Previously it included ranged attacks so, as an example, bow heavy attacks triggered Venom.  Ranged weapons are already very strong in the game and this would of made them even stronger.  This is a good change.

 The third artifact changed was the Tempest Fury Great Axe where Keen Speed was replaced with Refreshing Move.  This was a sensible change since the weapon already has a ton of speed boost built into it and didn't need anything extra.  Refreshing Move is a sought after perk on Great Axes for bruiser builds in war and as called out in the video by TrickTrick this will likely see some action in wars.  Personally I am going to try a "spin to win" build with the Fortifying Whirlwind aspect.

No Man's Sky Screenshots

 Just a few screenshots from trying out No Man's Sky this weekend as part of it's free weekend.  The game seems very complex but I was digging it after about an hour of play. I got blown up in space though so ended up on a planet repairing my ship which requires me to build a base first to craft all the repair parts. The systems seem to go very deep so a bit of a learning curve that I didn't get to explore further as the free weekend expired.

Scanning...

Refining

Floating space junk I never got around to exploring

Look ma! I'm a space man!

 

Blue Sky

 Just a quick note today; you can find me enjoying myself over at Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/heartlessgamer.com

 No; this doesn't replace Mastodon (via gamepad.club's instance) for me. As I posted on Mastodon here is how I look at the two:

Mastodon via gamepad.club is my comfy local coffee shop where I can stop in and have a long sit and a comfy chat.

Blue Sky is a busy airport where I whizz by and get whizzed by; when something catches my eye I veer off course to check it out.  I'm as likely to chat about a hot new book release as I'm to be caught staring at the sports game on a TV.

Back to Back First Place in Outpost Rush

 Crushed a couple Outpost Rush matches back to back in New World landing first place both times and walking away with wins in very competitive matches (as opposed to getting rolled or doing the rolling).

W: 1000 to 741 / 13 kills, 43 assists, 3 deaths

W: 1000 to 911 (close!) / 6 kills, 55 assists, 2 deaths

New World PTR Patch Notes: Season of the Guardian

Patch notes!  The best kind of present!

 

 For Valentine's Day we received the patch notes for the upcoming public test realm (PTR) updates for New World's Season of the Guardian update! Lots of exciting changes here so let's read through the finer details.

 First; I had a prior post going over the bigger topics so don't want to rehash them here.  You can read that here: Exciting Changes Coming to New World.  That post covers the new 10 man trial, the new artifacts, controller support, main story redesign, cooking overhaul, and magnify changes.  For this post I'll key into other notes.

 The big one of course relates to fort doors in Outpost Rush (OPR); currently the true invincible end boss of the PvP game mode!  

We are implementing the following changes to address ongoing feedback regarding OPR gate strength, while still being mindful of PvE players who prefer focusing on building up fort structures. We will continue to monitor feedback on this topic and consider further changes as necessary.

• Added a 50% weakness for Siege damage to fort gate doors, allowing siege weaponry (e.g., powder kegs) to deal bonus damage to these structures.

• Reduced the Strike/Slash absorption of fort gate doors from 10% Strike/20% Slash to 0% for both, ensuring that Strike and Slash damage types are not reduced when attacking gates. We aim for melee to have a bit of an advantage on the gates, as Thrust/Elemental damage is more prevalent in ranged weapons than melee.

• Increased build and repair time for fort gate doors by 25% for the T2 gate and 50% for the T3 gate, reducing the strength of each repair tick.

 This change should make doors less invincible and more of a speedbump as they should be.  The change is looking to strike a balance between attacker and defender which is good.

 More changes are coming to equip loads.  The notes:

Equip Load Changes

• Medium equip load is now the baseline, with damage, crowd control durations, outgoing healing, and block stability values adjusted to 0 across the board.
•  Heavy equip load: has a 20% decrease to incoming CC status effect durations and +15% block stability. Trade-offs of -15% damage and -30% outgoing healing. Also has increased threat generation from taunting gems and perks to account for the decrease in damage output.
• Light equip load: has +15% damage and +30% outgoing healing. Trade-offs of -15% block stability and +10% incoming CC status effect durations.

Comments:

Medium: good change.  Medium lacked an identity and while "default" isn't sexy it is at least something.

Heavy: this feels like a damage nerf but I need the experts to break this down for me on what it really means.  The rest seems fine and I am trying to figure out if this means the 55 stamina dodge is gone in favor of 50 stamina dodge again.

Light: similar to heavy; this feels like a damage nerf but need experts to weigh in.  I don't like that the healing boost is so much in light.  Feel sorry for healers being boxed into light so aggressively.

 Another small change I caught in the notes: "Players now have limited rotation while dodging forwards or backwards."  I believe this is related to players being able to pull of some very fancy dodges that are frankly annoying because they defy the logic of the characters current position vs where they can get to with the dodge.  Maybe this will correct that.

 Yay! "Increased the total number of active artifact quests a player can have simultaneously in progress from 5 to 10."

 Boo! My heavy flamethrower build keeps getting beat up! "Ensured mana regen does not occur while Flamethrower is active"

 It's the little things that matter (and now count!): "Killing small prey with a mount now progresses quest objectives and awards XP."

 Also hiding in the notes was an extensive section on changes to PvP ranks and rewards from the track.  Over all the rewards will be better the higher rank you are including higher gearscore of armor/weapon rewards.  Proof will be in the pudding and I feel sorry for lower rank players who will still be getting basically worthless gear rewards since lower ranks will have lower gearscore rewards.  For those of us at Rank 200 this should be a good change.

 The magnify changes are also written out so it is good to read that you can choose between how it works today and the new model where you pick the attribute.  Somewhat confirms we can still use magnify to split stats if you do it correctly (for example  I can get 300/300 with my current build which has 7 magnify pieces).  Exact wording below:

Adjusted how Magnify functions. Magnify now has a drop down on the attribute screen, and players are able to pick between Highest Stat (current functionality) or any of the other core attributes. If picking a core attribute like Strength, all of your magnify points will convert to Strength.

 Next, and maybe I am just hopeful for the future, there is mention of a seal extractor.  I am hoping this lays the ground work for other types of extractors to get valuable resources out of our gear.

Added Seal Extractors to the Faction Shops, allowing adventurers to remove custom attribute seals from their faction armor and revert its attribute back to Constitution.

 And last but not least: "Increased player wallet coin cap from 500,000 to 1,000,000."  Now if I could only get more than 500k gold :(

New World Year of the Dragon Event

 New World's mini event, Year of the Dragon, has been active for a bit.  It is a light weight event with light weight rewards to go with it. 

Burning down the Year of the Dragon with my flamethrower!

 The good thing about the event is it is quick to participate in each day.  The bad thing about the event is that there is no challenge to it; even if you are doing the world event solo.  I don't mind that there is easy content, but this is too easy.  A little more challenge would have been welcome.

 As far as rewards AGS continues to trend of event rewards being 675 GS which effectively makes them worthless as 675+ GS gear is easy to come by.  The skins are not even all that special so there isn't a transmog driver.

 The event does introduce a new consumable, the Spicy Hotpot, that grants bonus faction token gain for an hour.  You can only get one per day so it is a premium consumable and lots of folks are willing to pay a good price for yours if you are open to selling (I sold mine the first day for 1500; now averaging about 800 per day).

 Over all a forgettable event but one I don't mind hitting daily for the minimal rewards.

Exciting Changes Coming to New World

 We don't have the 2024 road map from the New World developers, but we did get news on some other exciting changes coming over the next few months.  The team has rewritten the code for the combat engine, are launching a new 10-man trial, and are bringing back some seasonal events.  Watch the update below and read on for my thoughts.

Too long/didn't watch summary on Reddit: LINK 

 First, the roadmap update has been pushed out to June.  It sounded like something "major" internally is causing the delay.  With controller support coming soon there is a lot of assumptions about a console release and a big update to go with it.

 A new 10-man trial was announced.  It was specifically mentioned to be targeted at pick up groups so difficulty level is expected to be "easy".  I feel this is a miss. There is no shortage of "easy" content in this game (Mutation level 3 and the Sandwurm 20-man raid being the only real challenging content).  The game needs new harder content and the 10-man trial could have been that (or at least bring a mutator system to it).

Phoenix? Broken?

 We will also get a slew of new artifacts.  The one causing alarm is Phoenix; an amulet that grants a two second invulnerability period upon reaching zero life.  This is the same as the original "defy death" on the hatchet which was too strong and nerfed so I am not sure how the team thinks adding it back on an amulet makes sense.  I foresee a lot of complaints if this makes it live as shown in the video (screenshot at right).

 As alluded to up front controller support is coming with this update.  I do own a Steam controller but not sure I will be interested in giving it a try.  The little bit they showed off did not seem like it'd be much fun to have to use (they showed a cursor being moved around by controller like it was a mouse instead of a more controller native interface where you press left/right/up/down to move through items).  It will also bring "aim assist" and "target lock on" which was stated as PvE only.  This is  concerning if in any way it makes it into PvP.

 The main story quest redesign for 1-60 will now be complete.  Personally, as I've shared before, I think this was a waste of time.  I don't like the new narrative as it dramatically differs from the original concept of New World.  Instead of mysterious island in the age of discovery we have morphed into King Arthur and rehashed fantasy. 

 Cooking is getting an overhaul.  I am looking forward to this as most of the cooking recipes are pointless.  Consolidation and simplification of recipes will go a long way to improving the profession.  I am also hopeful recipes will use a wider range of ingredients vs some of the most useful recipes being very strict on ingredients (and thus one ingredient is disproportionately more valuable than others of the same tier/effort to gather).

 Mounts will be allowed in Outpost Rush.  Finally.

 Most exciting in the news is the combat engine overhaul.  This is not a change to skills or balancing, but a code rewrite.  The developers noted that this will allow them to better isolate and troubleshoot problematic areas like desync where the server and client don't match up to what a player sees.  The revamp should also give better performance over all, but it was noted it may take a couple releases to realize that improvement.  I suspect this took a massive effort on the developers part so I am keen to see what this does and while not targeting balance it likely will influence build choices that may have performed poorly before but now are more reliable to play.

 Another exciting change was related to Magnify.  Players will now be able to determine the attribute it applies to.  This will make it easier to use pieces with Magnify.  While not ideal in my view the reality is that Magnify was everywhere and needed a better way to manage it.  Personally I've felt they should dial magnify way back to only few items; had they done this then the current system would of been fine.  I am also worried this new approach will eliminate "tricking" Magnify to split across two attributes which is the cornerstone of my current build.

 We are also getting repeat events.  Rabbit's Revenge where we kill lots and lots of rabbits.  Then Springtime Bloom returns. 

 All of this is expected during Season 5 which will kick off on March 12th (TBD exact changes we get on that patch vs later patches).