Notes from the Mountains of Valheim

With our turn to the mountain biomes of Valheim, there has been a focus on silver, the next critical resource.  As with the turn from copper to iron, going from iron to silver made me wonder how hard or easy it was going to be to find sufficient silver nodes to supply our needs.

Using the wishbone from Bonemass, I have been able to spot enough silver nodes so far that I think we’ll manage.  Some of the silver is pretty close to the surface, but if you get the high pitched fast ping from the wishbone, nodes can be pretty deep.  Fergorin and I dug ourselves at least two viking warrior heights into the rock at one point before we hit the node.

I have also come up with a few items from my experience so far.

• Silver Nodes can be Big

After digging down and finding the silver, I have gone through a couple iterations of thinking “This is the last bit” only to dig a bit more and reveal more silver.  The veins keep going and I have ended up with some large holes in the ground in getting the last bits out.  The mountain is starting to look like Nevada, with open silver pits for people to fall into.

I have take to trying to scrape away and reveal full nodes before I start harvesting, and they can be sizable.

Silver vein exposed

That isn’t as big as some of the copper nodes, but the density is much higher.  You get more ore per bite, and the bites are smaller.  Also, that node ran deeper than it looks.  It is kind of an interesting twist to actually be digging out veins of ore from under ground rather than the surface nodes favored by nearly every MMORPG.

• Silver is Heavy

Well, it is heavier than copper, tin, or scrap iron.  I had optimized myself to being able to carry ~33 of each of those… a full stack plus a couple extra pieces… when mining.  With silver I can manage ~23, which means I am running more relays back and forth to haul silver ore to the smelter down at Dieppe base.

Likewise, after smelting, silver bars are heavier.  So there is a lot more walking back and forth.

• Portals Are Key

Putting a portal up on the mountain turned out to be a huge win.  You still have to carry the ore down the mountain the hard way, but you can get back up the mountain immediately.    That was working out so well we now have a second portal up at the other end of the mountain biome from our first.

Two mountain portals

I found a nice stone tower complex in the south that I cleared out and built up a bit.  As the label indicates, it is also near Moder’s altar, the next world boss we need to fight.

We’ll be fighting down there at some point

Having the portals also makes harvesting stone from your digs very easy.  I haul the silver ore down the hard way, then run stone through the portals for use later.  I have managed to revamp Dieppe base with all of that stone.

Nice new crafting area

I’ve also managed to pave the whole compound, so we’re not tromping through the mud every time we go out.

• Stone Collapse Fun

Digging stone for stone’s sake can be a chore.  But I did figure out a couple of ways to speed things up.  The big dome-like stone outcroppings in the mountains are a good target.  As with buildings, you can mine them out and they’ll stay standing so long as there is even a small connection with the ground.  But if you focus on the base and sever the top from the ground, it will suddenly collapse into a shower of stone.

Stone harvesting time

Then you just have to haul it off.

• Stone Golem Harvesting

An alternative is to use your friendly neighborhood stone golem to do the digging for you.  I have gotten my fighting technique down pretty well now, using the iron mace and shield, and take very little damage if I block correctly… something made easier by the golem doing one attack, then a second, then wandering around a bit before it attacks again.

I just kite the golem over near a stone outcropping, put my back to it… which keeps me from getting knocked back… and let the golem take some shots at me.  He’ll nicely break up a bunch of stone that you can harvest once you’re done with him.

So we seem to be doing okay in the mountains so far.

One change I have noticed since the defeat of Bonemass is the population of hostile mobs down in the meadows.  That gets dialed up with every boss.  Now there are a lot of greys wandering around, up to and including brutes.  But they have also introduced skeletons into the mix.  They are all over now, and they fight with the greys.  Some sometimes I get back from the mountains and find the front yard of the base littered with the remnants of their battles.

Another mess out front

Now I have to go out and clean it all up.  We’ll never lack for resin or skeleton bones, and a bit of extra wood and stone if useful I guess.

Using My EverQuest Heroic Upgrade

With the 21st anniversary event offer of a free heroic character upgrade available for a limited time, I decided I should take advantage of the offer while it was around.  I might scoff a bit at the boost only being to level 85, but it is better than no boost at all I suppose.  And you need to be that level to use the Overseer feature.

And I wanted to use the Overseer with a character I had some connection to, which at this late date in the history of the game, is a very rare situation.  I have a couple dozen characters floating around over a range of servers, but I am hard pressed to name them or when I created them.

But there was one I recalled.  Dolenz, my cleric, who I rolled up last year in anticipation of the 20th anniversary.  I started him fresh, went through the tutorial, and got him all the way to level 50.

Dolenz at 50 about one year ago

It wasn’t like I got him to level 50 back at launch.  The xp curve is much lighter and there was bonus xp for much of the anniversary event.  But I still played him through those levels, light though they might have been, and explored a range of Norrath both familiar and not.

So I pressed the button on at the character select screen and applied the upgrade to him.

Dolenz at 85 this week

The good from the upgrade is that the game does hand you a lot of stuff.  You get a set of gear… in green, so it matches the cosmetic hat I got last year, as you can see above… and a couple of 24 slot bags, which are always handy, as well as some cash, a pile of AA points, and all the spell upgrades for the intervening levels you have skipped.

The downside is… well… dealing with all of that largess is, as always, a bit cumbersome in the EverQuest UI.  You have to find all the gear in your bags… you have to find those new bags in your bags, assuming you had space for all of that… and dole it out to the right spots.  You get a series of packages assigned to you through the rewards interface, which always looks like you only get one of the items, since you can only highlight one, even though it says you get them all.  And you do get them all.  It is just awkwardly presented.

Worst of all though are the spells.  The EverQuest team has always been big on handing out new and improved spells with every expansion, no matter how many levels the cap was raised, so there are a lot of choices.  And this isn’t WoW, where the spells have the same name and you just get a new rank level of it.  So when you are sitting there trying to figure out which spells to assign to your nine spell slots… again, the word “awkward” springs to mind.

The heals available

Those are just the heals which, as a cleric, make for the longest list.  And they are all at least flagged by level.  And you can at least see a pattern, with “light,” “renewal,” and “word” heals being the three main flavors.  But I don’t know what the difference is off hand today.  And those are just the main heals, not the delayed, duration, or quick heals, much less the cures.  Then there are the buffs and the damage and the utility spells.

According to my spell book, which is pretty much useless under the weight of that many spells, the total at my disposal is 393.  I guess it could be worse. There are a lot of spells.  Maybe that is why they only boost to level 85, they are afraid that the rain of new spells is already overwhelming enough.  Who knows.

Getting mired in that for a while pretty much put the kibosh on any plans I had to actually go out in the field to fight monsters and run quests.  So he’ll likely become another permanent resident of the Plane of Knowledge.

But I mostly wanted to use him for the Overseer feature.  And he’ll serve for that.  Though in boosting him up I did also discover that your characters, at least on the same server, share the same Overseer setup.  I had a quest going with the pally I boosted years back and after I boosted Dolenz and brought the Overseer up, I found that quest in progress in the UI.

That makes sense.  They have to limit it somehow.  There is already talk of the whole thing being too generous, with changes coming in to keep things under control, even after the very conservative intent the team started with.

But I’ll keep poking at it for a bit.  What happens there will likely be an indicator as to what will happen with the EverQuest II version of the feature, which remains a very poor cousin at the moment.

My Mighty Norrathian Mercenary

Mercenaries became part of EverQuest with the Seeds of Destruction expansion, which came out back in late 2008.  So as a feature they have been around for a bit over a decade, or more than half of the life of the game.

Where is Firiona Vie?

However, at that time and going forward my relationship with EverQuest was largely nostalgia driven, with my largest concerted effort being around the Fippy Darkpaw era, back when SOE still seemed tentative on the whole retro server idea. (As we saw last week, Daybreak is now all-in on that.)  That was a little over eight years ago.

I did tinker with mercenaries a bit.  When EverQuest went free to play… for live servers at least… an event that is now seven years in the past… a few of us rolled up characters on the brand new Vox server.  There I ran the tutorial with quite a crowd of people.  There is even a screen shot of me in that post with a mercenary.

Healer with a big stick!

And while mercenaries have changed and been upgraded over the years… they got their own gear then their own AA points… I never fully appreciated how strong they can be.

Nor how… uh… varied they can be

That is because I have been foolishly using them in a support role.  My characters on the Vox server tend to be tanking class, so naturally their mercs have been healers.  That seemed the obvious route to me.  I did the same think in EverQuest II when I was last there, traveling around with a healing merc in tow.

Now I am beginning to see the folly of my ways.  My thinking was that I might not be able to trust the game to tank for me, but healing seemed like a simple programming task.

For this last run at EverQuest I rolled up a cleric.  Not a tank this time, but a plate wearing, shield bearing, healer than could take a hit.  I figured I might need that weight since I decided part way into the tutorial to hire a merc to tank for me.  I was a cleric after all, I figured I could keep him alive, at least long enough to be able to run away.

Running away has never really been an issue.  At first I was careful where I went with my merc and, as such, his durability seemed unsurprising.  I never had to heal him.

Fighting safe blue mobs in the Paludal Caverns

Then, when running the Plane of Knowledge armor quest in Nek Forest, I got in range of the hostile guards on the bridge.  They are linked, so pulling one gets you all four.  I figured that would end badly, a reaction that spiked when I saw the sergeant of the guard con’d red to me.

The /con mechanic now nicely gives you the level of the mob, and the sergeant was level 25, while I was only level 17.  I figured I would try to keep the merc alive, but was pretty much resigned to running for the book back to the PoK.

But my merc didn’t have any problem with the encounter.  I didn’t even need to heal him.

A bit later, when I found the greater wisps I was there to slay and they began to pile on… wisps are social and assist their fellow wisps when attacked… I was able to walk a ways away and sit down to meditate when I was out of mana.  My merc was handling a dozen at level mobs, no problem.

But the clincher was the armor quest that sends you off to Permafrost.  I was about level 22 at that point and stumbled into a level 40 frost giant.  Again, the merc was handling it.  And the second one as an add.  I think the fight would have ended well had I not stepped into range and had one of the giants turn and one-shot me.  Oh well.

My tanking merc isn’t perfect.  Just last night, at level 28, I took the level 30 daily hot zone quest which sent us off to the Crypt of Dalnir on Kunark.  That was going pretty well.  The mobs were at level or a few levels above, with one level 35 mob along the way.  Things only went south when my merc went off to chase a runner who resisted my root spell and ended up with a half a dozen more adds.  They managed to kill me before he could taunt them all off of me.

Still, I was being a bit reckless in the crypt and ending up with trains like that isn’t exactly a new thing in EverQuest.

More care on the second run paid off

I suspect, however, that my success with my merc tank might be related to being in older content not correctly scaled to match him.  I suspect as I get higher level… depending on how far I take this trip in Norrath… things might not go as easy.

But now I am a bit bummed I didn’t roll up a druid or a bard.  Having to run across zones in Norrath makes me miss Spirit of the Wolf or Selo’s.

The March Update Brings Big Things, Little Things, and More Guristas to New Eden

The March update for EVE Online is upon us today, and with it comes a pretty long list of updates and changes.

Where do I even start?  The list this month is so long!

For openers, there is a new event in The Agency called The Hunt.

Fatal and The Rabbit’s turn to be loot pinatas

This seems to fall into the now standard pattern of events from The Agency; find a site, warp in, kill NPCs, collect loot, earn points.  The twist here is that you need to harden up against and shoot kinetic and thermal ammo.

For those using capitals, jump bridges, and back ops bridges, there has been a reduction in jump fatigue.

Having both jump fatigue and range restrictions dropped on us with the Phoebe release about three and a half years back felt like a bit of a double whammy.  From my personal perspective I went from being able to do a series of 12ly jumps in my Archon to just a 5ly jump and an accompanying wait which increased with each subsequent jump.  It had to be done.  Capital travel was too easy.  But that doesn’t mean it didn’t feel like a hit, and doubly so when I had to make my way from Saranen down to Delve.

That has been dialed back some in the past and is being dialed back even more with the current update, as detailed in this dev blog.   Jump fatigue will now be capped at 4 hours, down from five days, with the jump timer being similarly brought down from a maximum of 9.6 hours to just 30 minutes.  No longer will this be seen:

The old jump fatigue maximum

We will see what that means for capitals and jump bridges and the like.  People will hopefully feel more free to go on ops as the participation requirement of “no jump fatigue!” fades away.

There is also a change to tethering.  When you jump in to a cyno on a citadel you won’t tether immediately.  There will be a cool down during which you will be vulnerable.

That dev blog also includes changes to entosis operations related to sovereignty warfare.  We shall see if that makes trying to take space more common or not.  Right now you can sit back and build up ISK and material in a single region if you’re willing to care bear it, so grabbing more space or trying to upgrade your own space isn’t much of a motivator anymore.  It isn’t like the old days where the CFC took Fountain because of moons.

There has also been a balance pass for ships.  Tech I battleships get a boost to lock range and cargo space, the Oracle, Naga, Talos, and Tornado can now fit MJDs, and the Ferox and the Machariel have been nerfed a bit while a few ships got buffs.  We’ll see if this leads to Munin fleets or not.

Also part of that is the new FC ship, the Monitor.

The Monitor Flag Cruiser concept

Since it was brought up by CCP last month it has had the ability to fit a target painter and a probe launcher added (along with the ability to hold some probes) so FCs can scan down enemies and get on kill mails.  We shall see if anybody ends up using this thing.

In addition today’s update spells the end for EVE Voice as well as a revamped chat system that features a back end on its own server.

And, finally, there is the Little Things update, where CCP has updated or improved a bunch of small items that should make capsuleers happy.  There are quite a few on there that make me happy, especially being able to see the ship type of people broadcasting for reps.

Who is asking for reps?

It isn’t that logi doesn’t like you frigate pilots, but spending time locking you up to find you’re already dead or have zipped out of range is annoying.  Logi has bigger ships to protect.

So that is what I have to report.  The update has gone live and further details can be found in the Patch Notes and on the Updates page.

Addendum: The game is down while they look into issues that may have come from the new chat system.  The whole thing was troublesome enough during the first mass test that I am surprised that they didn’t push it off to a future release.  This may be a rocky launch.  It is a good thing we all have a skill queue now.

The Next Pokemon Release Will Be…

My guess is that the next Pokemon title will be a remake of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl.

Pokemon Diamond & Pearl is where I joined Pokemon

And when I say “next Pokemon title” I mean the next release of the core RPG game that runs on the Nintendo handheld platform and not some subsidiary title riding on the Pokemon fame like Pokemon Snap or Pokken Tournament.

So why remake Pokemon Diamond & Pearl?

The core Pokemon franchise has been one of patterns over the years.  They are not always consistent, but they seem reliable enough to give one insight into what might come next.

The pattern started off with a release of a pair of titles… Red & Blue, Gold & Silver, Ruby & Sapphire, followed by a third title that represented a revision of the initial pair, respectively Yellow, Crystal, and Emerald.

Once Nintendo moved from the GameBoy and GameBoy Color to the GameBoy Advance and then the DS hardware, GameFreak used that as an opportunity to remake titles.  So Pokemon FireRed & LeafGreen, HeartGold & SoulSilver, and Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire came to be, reviving old locations and old foes (and already existing Pokemon) on new hardware with new features.

Having recently released a pair of titles set in a new location with new Pokemon being added to the Pokedex, it seems logical that the next title they go with will either be a remake of a past title or a third title to go with Pokemon Sun & Moon.

There are actually rumors of a Pokemon Stars out there, rumors that even I have heard, and I don’t pay much attention to much outside the official press releases for Pokemon. But that name sure fits the theme.

However, the rumors seem to be about this title coming to the Nintendo Switch as opposed to the 3DS platform.  If that is the case, it doesn’t count in my book.  Meanwhile, the whole “third title” pattern seems to be in decline.  The last true “third title” was Pokemon Platinum.  Pokemon Black & White got a Black & White Version 2, which stayed in the same region but which was a different story line, so that was sort-of a third (and fourth) title, but not in the spirit of past releases in that mold.  And then Pokemon X & Y, the first 3DS-only title, got no follow on third title, even though they had a Pokemon setup already for feature in a possible Pokemon Z.

Because of this, I think third titles might be out for now, which leaves a remake as an option.  So when I went to look for the oldest Pokemon generation that had yet to be remade, Pokemon Diamond & Pearl was the result.

Pokemon Diamond & Pearl seems about prime for a remake.  It came out in Japan over ten years ago, and is coming up on its ten year release anniversary in other regions soon.  That makes it feel like it is about due, as previous remakes were of titles 8-10 years in the past.

One difference however is that you can still play Pokemon Diamond & Pearl on the current 3DS hardware.  The flip side of that though is Nintendo looks to have stopped shipping the DS only titles, likely because the infrastructure to support those games, the old Nintendo WiFi and such, has been dismantled. Nintendo is up there with EA in closing stuff down as soon as the next title comes out.  So while you can find copies at Amazon or eBay, but they aren’t on the shelves at Target, WalMart, or Toys R Us for a reason.

And when it comes to that Pokemon Bank integrated National Pokedex of which I wrote last week, there is no official way to buy Pokemon Diamond & Pearl (and Platinum as well) in order to obtain the full range of generation 4 Pokemon.  And, unlike the Pokemon Black & White games, even if you have a copy you can’t get your Pokemon straight into Pokemon Bank.

Of course, there is another alternative.  Since Pokemon Diamond & Pearl already runs on the current 3DS hardware, Nintendo and GameFreak might decide to simply spruce the titles up a bit and put them in the Nintendo online store as Virtual Console titles the way they did with Pokemon Red, Blue, & Yellow back at the 20 year anniversary of the franchise.  Then it would be back to the old school look.

Pokemon Diamond back in the day

That wouldn’t be horrible.  I might buy a copy if they included Pokemon Bank integration, which I am sure they would would.  But I would really rather have a remake title the way they have done in the past.

No matter what is coming next for the Pokemon franchise, I bet we won’t hear an announcement until autumn.  I will just have to wait to see if my guess is correct.