Making the Dragur Fang Bow

With every boss defeated there is a new tier of materials and gear unlocked in Valheim.  This is a very MMO-esque aspect of the game, and not one without a hint of peril.  Too much of that and it becomes a grind.

But Valheim’s range of gear isn’t all that extensive, and upgrades don’t leap ahead in stats or protection with each upgrade, so it is a rather calm progression that works for me.

Collecting the resources, on the other hand… well, I seem to enjoy that, but if you’re not an explorer type who wants to see the world, I could see it becoming a bit of a drag.  Logistics as well, with metal being forbidden from portals.  It has become a bit of the challenge of the game for us and where we end up playing is somewhat dictated by that.

We started in our main base, which is pretty much at the world spawn point.  When it came time to refine bronze, much of our work was done in the base we built in the black forest to battle The Elder.  With iron we were back to our main base, shipping loads of iron across the water to it.  And now, with silver as the focus, the base named Dieppe has been upgraded to handle our current crafting needs as it sits at the foot of the largest mountain biome area we have yet found.

And it is there I have been on a bit of a silver binge.  I take the portal up the mountain, run over to the current silver node, mine out 20-22 units of ore, about all I can carry, then run back down the mountain to our base, start it smelting, and take the portal back up again.  This has left us with a couple of chests full of silver and I have been using some of it to outfit myself.

Armor was first, especially since the frost resist effect, so necessary in the mountains, was part of a couple of the pieces.  But after that it was time for weapons, and the first on the list was a new bow.

The Dragur fang bow is currently the best bow in the game and I was happy to get my hands on it as soon as I could.

The Dragur Fang in hand

Making it requires silver, which I was hauling down the mountain, and ancient bark, which we have in abundance, as you find it in swamp crypts as well as in every ancient tree in the swamp.

Then there was guck, a material I had only discovered by accident when I was trying to figure if those green blisters on trees in the swamp might be used for something.  A bit of trial and error with one at blister at ground level showed that a pick axe would pop them after a few blows, and I received one unit of guck, which unlocked the recipe for the bow.

But you need 10 guck to make the bow and 22 guck total for a fully upgraded bow and I wasn’t seeing a lot more guck blisters down at ground level in my swamp exploration.  There are, however, more further up in the trees, though the trees they inhabit cannot be chopped down.  So I built a work bench nearby and then some ladders to get up into the trees to harvest.

Up the ladder for guck

On the bright side, the higher up the blister, the more guck that seems to come out.  Three ladders up I got one that dropped 6 guck, so at least I did not have to find 21 more such blisters.

My guck in the bag, I was able to go back to base and craft my bow… and then immediately upgrade it all the way.  And I am pretty happy with the bow.

It has a bigger knock-back than the huntsman’s bow I was using, which comes in very handy at times, like when I am on alone and I get that “The Ground is Shaking” alert that a troll raid is on the way.  Then I scurry up to the stone tower at the front of the base and start shooting trolls.  The knock-back puts them off balance for a bit so that swapping targets, along with a bit of luck, has kept them from tearing the guard tower down.

Repelling the troll attack

If I remember to swap to obsidian arrows and get a good opening shot, a troll is now down in 3-4 shots.   Maybe 5-6 if I forget and am still using the wooden arrows, which I carry around to shoot lesser mobs.

The poison damage the bow has, which seems to get applied as a DoT, is fun as well.  There have been a few times that I have failed to kill a drake up in the mountains with my second shot, only to see it fall out of the air a few seconds later because the poison finally landed.

The bow has also made sea serpents fair game.  Early on I would run for shore when I heard the cry of a serpent.  With the huntsman’s bow I could drive them off at sea, occasionally killing one before it got away.  The Dragur Fang bow, with obsidian arrows, now makes a serpent a fairly reliable kill.  When I hear the cry I stop the boat and get ready to shoot.

Waiting for the serpent to show

I have started killing them regularly enough when I am afloat that we have begun to build up a supply of serpent stew, which is the best food we have access to right now, and which we save for big fights.

Cooking up some serpent before making the stew

I have even managed to kill a couple close enough to shore to retrieve their scales which, unlike the meat that floats on the water, drop to the bottom of the sea if you’re out too deep.  I collected enough to make the serpent scale shield.

Serpent Scale Shield

It is a tower shield, which slows you down a lot when equipped, so I tend to just use the silver shield I made.  But if I need to go toe-to-toe with trolls, this works nicely.

So the bow has been pretty great so far.  It is accurate, hits hard, and looks good.  But it does have an issue.  That glow on it looks cool, right up until you’re trying to hit a target moving from left to right in front of you.  Then that glow has a bad habit of obscuring the target.

That glow is really annoying in the dark too

But otherwise, the bow has been a very good upgrade for me, and worth the effort in silver mining and guck harvesting.

Archaedas in the Foyer

The past weekend found us all at home.  Since we all live in locales that were under community lockdown guidelines… “shelter in place” they call it… thanks to COVID-19, we seemed to have ample opportunity to play.  Nobody had any reservations for dinner, a show to see, or a sporting event to attend certainly.

So we got together on Saturday afternoon to take another run at Uldaman and met up again in the Badlands.  If nothing else, we still had quests to finish up.  Uldaman is good at keeping your quest log supplied.  Our party for the afternoon was:

• Viniki – level 44 gnome warrior
• Ula – level 43 gnome mage
• Skronk – level 43 dwarf priest
• Moronae – level 42 night elf druid

The still seemed shy of what we might need for Archaedas… but, quests!

Before we went in though, we had to get out quests aligned.  Viniki had gotten ahead with one in the Badlands, so we spent a little bit of time getting everybody back on the same page.  That meant finding a dead dwarf then slaying some troggs.

The troggs are over there

The annoying bit was having to run back to Loch Modan to get the quest update, but three out of four of us have mounts now while the hold out, Moronae, is a druid, which means he has a travel form, so it didn’t take as long as it might of to get the quests set.

Another week in Uldaman

The missing one was Agmond’s Fate, and it was another “collect a few things” quests, in this case it was four urns.  But like the power stone drops and the fungus, there didn’t seem to be many urns about.

It didn’t help that, once again, things were a bit busy outside of Uldaman.  We were not the only ones sheltering at home.  We did find out way to one quest objective outside the instance, a large stone chest.

Well, we got this at least

But otherwise we were in competition with other groups for mobs and drops and harvestables and whatever.  The place was stripped clean, like the paper goods aisle at the store.  So the instance seemed to be our best bet.

So dramatically lit too

Inside we followed what has become the usual path.  We cleared through the troggs, met up with the lost vikings, got the bits for the Staff of Prehistoria, slew Revelosh, and set up to fight Ironaya again, just because.  Seriously, we could just bypass her, but calling her out doesn’t take much extra time and we all live in hope of a nice blue drop.

Fighting Ironaya again

I like that screen shot because Ula’s spell is in flight and because I got off a disarm on Ironaya, which always pleases me for some reason.  Ironaya’s revenge was to drop some mail bracers, and nobody in our group needs that.  Her chamber was, as usual, empty.

Again, the paper goods aisle at the store…

I like that they went so far as to put cobwebs on the shelf to emphasize their emptiness.  I was hoping they might at least have an urn.  But we were denied.

We carried on, following the left wall mostly, taking down Galgann and Grimlok in their turns.  We bypassed the Ancient Stone Keeper and went from Grimlok straight to the Hall of Crafters.  It was time to get things cleared for the big fight.

All those groups in there again

Here is where a couple weeks of practice began to pay off.  After all of the fights… and a few deaths… last week, we had finally settled on a routine that worked for us.  The rhythm for these groups was for Viniki to engage and get aggro and Moronae to call the target marker color the the current DPS focus.  Previously we had tried targeting off of Viniki or having me call the target, both of which have problems.  I use push to talk on coms, and mid-fight my fingers are sometimes too busy to get that extra key, while targeting off of Viniki can fall apart because he has to change targets to hold aggro on whole bunch.  But Moronae taking the lead on that made everything much smoother.

So we plowed through the three groups in the first room, did the golem event easily enough, then did the next set of groups, all without any major issues.  That brought us to Archaedas again.

There he is

On last week’s post Rebeard left a comment suggesting a different strategy for fighting Archaedas.  This involved starting the fight and then running back up to the room with the golem event and fighting Archaedas there.  That was supposed to slow down the arrival of the adds so that, towards the end, when he summons the his final minions you can kill him before they show up and ruin the party.  So we set up to give it a try.

Ready to start Archaedas

The whole thing nearly fell apart seconds into the event.  We started the event and then paused to make sure Archaedas would follow.  As it turns out, the doors to the chamber close and we just barely managed to squeeze out through them.  I believe you can open them up again, but I didn’t stick around to check and even if you can, doing so with Archaedas beating on your seemed like a bad plan.

And then, with Archaedas hot on our heels up the stairs to the golem room, he began beating on Skronk.  Skronk was losing a lot of health and Archaedas seemed to be able to shrug off my taunts.  Somehow we managed to get up to the top of the stairs and into the golem room and get things sorted.  The fight began.

On the plus side Ula, Skonk, and Moronae all leveled up along the way before we started this fight, so we were better equipped.  But being away from Archaedas’ room only slowed down the arrival of the first add.  After that it was the same routine, hitting Archaedas, swapping to burn down the latest add, then on to Archaedas again.  There was a question as to if we would know when we should go all out on him, but his shout of “To my side, brothers! For the Makers!” seemed to be the hint we were looking for.  We focused on Archaedas and were so very close as the big golems arrived and started pounding on me.

Getting so very close

And then he collapsed and the fight was over.

Almost over, one non-elite arrived late

Strewn about us were the corpses of many adds… though they seemed to fade quickly even as the fight was going on.  During the fight we pulled out all the stops.  Moronae hit Skronk with innervate part way through the fight and I managed to consume three superior health potions along the way.  Not a short fight.  So we lined up to take our screen shot by the fallen Archaedas.

Victory in Uldaman

That accomplished, it was time to run back down stairs to the treasure room.

The treasure room has opened

I have to say, the treasure room in Uldaman is one of the biggest teases in the game.  You run into that room and see a giant chest and piles of gold and gems and what not, but what you walk out of there with is… not much.  You go through the final quest bit, get a bit of lore

Ding! Your discs are ready!

The chest contained a couple of leather items, and Moronae only wanted one of them.  Our loot drops for the run were not great.  But we finished the instance, killed the boss, and got into his vault.  One last screen shot there, then it was back to Ironforge.

The treasure is so bright we have a backlighting problem

Back in Ironforge, after a bit of run around, we got the real prize for the whole venture… a 14 slot bag! (Plus some potions to replace the ones from that last fight.)

The best quest reward

And so we were done.  Viniki still has two unfinished Uldaman quests in his log.

Urns and fungus

But I am not sure either is worth finishing up.  After three weeks there it might be time to move on.  Next on the list is Zul’Farrak, home of the famed Carrot on a Stick trinket.  I think I still had that and the Argent Commission in my trinket slots well into The Burning Crusade.

And, as I have done with past instances, here is a replay of the group’s experiences from both the distant and the recent past:

• Uldaman – Round 1 – Feb 2, 2007
• Uldaman – Round 2 – Mar 3, 2007
• Uldaman – Round 3 – Mar 6, 2007
• Going to the Chapel – Feb 4, 2010
• The Uldaman Run Around – Feb 11, 2010
• One Night – Three Instances – Feb 19, 2010
• An Uldaman of Vague Memories – Mar 11, 2020
• Visiting Archaedas – Mar 18, 2020

Oddly, February and March seem to be when we visit Uldaman.  No other months will do I guess.

Quote of the Day – No Porn

So we’re not going to see asset flips, and we’re going to explicitly say no to porn games or other intentionally controversial games

-Tim Sweeney, Gamasutra Interview

I have been waiting for somebody to play the quality card… or at least the “no porn” card… against Steam since the day Valve announced their policy of trying to be as hands off as possible when it came to which games made it onto their service.  A policy that they couldn’t stop from biting themselves in the ass with even after they gave themselves a loophole to avoid just that.

But now Epic Games is stepping up to the plate when it comes to their store.

Not that this is a surprise.  In the online video game storefront market Steam is the undisputed king, and the only way you make gains against an entrenched competitor like that is to play to your own strengths and against their weaknesses.

Epic has been using its generous revenue policy and its control over the Unreal engine to get developers to make the jump to the Epic Store, including some exclusives.  That gets stuff in the store, but the customer doesn’t really care what the revenue deal is unless there it makes the price lower, and Steam sales are tough to beat for those patient enough to wait.

So now Epic is assailing Valve, if somewhat cautiously, on another front.  Now they are playing the quality card, indicating that they won’t be hosting crap or porn or games that just want to be edgy or controversial.  And that is fine.  We get all angsty about freedom of expression in the US, but the constitution only applies to the government censoring you.  A retail outlet refusing to sell your horrible game… or even your excellent game… isn’t a problem at all.  If it were, I doubt WalMart would still be in business.

Interestingly, Tim Sweeney also made the distinction between the Unreal engine side of the company and the store front.  They won’t be policing what people do with the Unreal engine once they license it.  But they are also making it clear that just because you are using the Unreal engine doesn’t mean there will be a spot waiting for you in the Epic Store.

We’ll see how well this plays out.  Epic doesn’t have to become Steam, they just have to grab enough exclusives… and give away enough free titles I guess… to make their store front a must have for some critical mass of gamers.  They still don’t have anything that interests me enough to sign up, but the titles I play tend to come straight from the studios that make them in any case.

Where Would a Level Squish Get Us?

Leveling needs help.

Ion Hazzikostas, Blizzard Twitch Stream

Levels can be both boon and bane for MMORPGs.

On the boon side, they are an easy way to dole new skills at a reasonable pace, they are useful for gating content, and they give players both a sense of progress as they level up as well as a benchmark for where they stand in the game.

Hitting level cap is still an achievement

The downside is that when a game is a success and the company wants to sell more content to players, the go-to approach has been to simply add more levels. If some levels are good, then more levels must be better!  But after a few rounds that leads to the huge gap between new players starting out and the main mass of players, which is usually concentrated in the current high level content.  That can discourage new players and make alt creation a chore.

That has led to some of the work around to which we have become accustomed.  There is the simply expedient of reducing the level curve, allowing players to zip up in levels and through content quickly.  When that isn’t enough, there is the insta-levels plan, where you give out and/or sell level boost that bring you into the current content.  That has become fairly common as some core MMORPGs have passed the level 100 mark.

There have been some attempts in the past to find alternatives to character levels.  EverQuest introduced Alternative Advancement as an option back in 2001 with the The Shadows of Luclin expansion. (Proving that this is hardly a new issue I guess.)  But even with that, EverQuest has crept up in levels, and plans to continue to do so according to a recent quote:

Every three years we do a level increase, and we have changed the way some things work.

Increasing the level cap is just in the DNA of the genre it seems.

And then there is World of Warcraft, which is as locked into levels as any of the genre, but which has also been trying all the options to try and break the curse of the intimidating level cap, which currently stands at 120 after seven expansions. (EverQuest is still only at 110 after 25 expansions, but there is another tale in that.)

Over the years Blizzard has reduced the experience curve for leveling, added classes that start levels into the game (Death Knight and Demon Hunter), offered level boosts, and played with level scaling in older zones in order to make the climb to the level cap less of a barrier.

Last week Blizzard held one of their regular info broadcasts about WoW, and among the items discussed during that broadcast was the possibility of a “level squish.”

That seemed radical enough that I went to go listen to the broadcast over at Twitch, just to make sure I heard exactly what was said.  The question that brought it up is at the 53 minute mark of the replay.  This link should bring you right to it.

The question that brought this up

With that teeing things up, Ion Hazzikostas and Josh Allen went into a brief but serious talk on the problems with levels in the game.  120 is a very big number.  With the current talent system you no longer earn points for your spec tree every level like you used to in the past, so that most level up moments don’t bring much to the player.  And this is especially true in the current Battle for Azeroth content where everything in the zone levels up with you, so you don’t feel any more powerful and, in some cases, weaker.  That situation led me to ask why they bothered with levels in this expansion.

So I suppose it is unsurprising to hear that the WoW dev team has seriously considered a level squish.

The idea sketched out was to take the current 120 levels and squish them back down to the original 60, thus setting the new player just half the distance from the level cap that they were before.  With the work they have done to make zones scale over a broader range of levels, and the stat and ilevel squishes they have done before, the climb to 60 could be quite viable.

Well, technically feasible anyway.

But it would be strange.  Going to Outland at level 30, Northrend at 35, Pandaria at… 42.5 I guess… and so on.  And I guess your fresh death knight would be a level 28 character now?  At what level can I go back and solo old raid now?  In a year when they are releasing WoW Classic I have to imagine they realize the nostalgia impact of certain level ranges.

That is only where the issues begin.  The optics are bad, with everybody losing half their levels… even if levels are meaningless taking things away from players is always a bad draw… and all of the data on the internet about the game being made irrelevant… or at least incorrect… in a flash.

And, of course, the real blocker to my mind is that it doesn’t actually solve the problem.  Not by itself anyway.  The problem is that most of the player base is at the level cap and new players have to walk a long path to get there.  Changing how you measure that path doesn’t actually change the distance one needs to travel.

I get that, in the scope of the talk, they were speaking of more than just a level squish.  This would be a full redesign with probably yet another skill spec plan so that individual levels would feel more meaningful.  That is a noble idea, and I expect we’ll get many more class overhauls and specialization reworks over the years.

But what happens with the next expansion?  And there will always be a next expansion coming, at least every other year for some time to come.  Unless Blizz has something in mind for an alternate advancement path ala EverQuest, they are going to slap 5 or 10 more levels on top of and we’re back to climbing the level ladder again.  With that expansion will have to come a new insta-level booster as well as a further reduction in the experience curve needed to get new characters more quickly into the latest content.

Oh, and by tradition, the next expansion has to break, invalidate, or trivialize the previous content anyway.  New spec changes, new gear, new stats, new whatever… it is just what happens when you heap a pile of new content on top of the old.

All of which is why I was on that no good expansions thing a while back.  We love expansions, because we love the game and just want more of it.  But they inevitable stretch the game out beyond reasonable dimensions and lead to a focus on the new over the past.

Still, I appreciate Blizzard talking about this sort of thing in a frank way and letting us know that they are as aware of the problem as we are and have been exploring even some rather radical solutions.  In the end, however, they are stuck with the system they went with and there are no easy solutions.  If there were, we would have heard about them by now.

Of course, that won’t stop the Monday morning quarterbacks from throwing stones.  Calling Blizzard lazy and stupid for not having a magic solution to a problem that nobody else has solved is the norm.  This is why I am a bit surprised about Blizzard being this frank at times.  We want the company to give us more info, then turn into petulant children when they do, expressing mock outrage as though Blizzard has just now realized that this might be an issue.

In any case, we won’t see a level squish.  It just changes too much for too little benefit.  But I am glad to see they are serious enough about the issue that they would discuss that level of change.  I suspect, in the end, we’ll see focus on making each level in the next expansion seem more meaningful.  But reworking everything… be it 60 or 120 levels… to make each and every one meaningful seems unlikely.