A Full Fireteam

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Aliens: Fireteam Elite has been dominating my co-op gaming time as of late. Last week, Supertoast joined us in the Xenomorph culling fun. Let me tell you, that third person absolutely helps missions go smoother.

Up until last week Brother and I were running missions with the two of us plus an AI companion. The AI isn’t bad, their actually a great shot and seem to be able to heal themselves indefinately but they have a tendency to run into the middle of enemies. Unsuprisingly, that’s not a good thing to do in most situations. We could have done the matchmaking with randoms but the AI seemed like it might be more reliable.

Flamethrowers: good for killing Xenomorphs bad for seeing anything

An actual human third person on the team helps immensely. We told SuperToast that as long as he didn’t run into hordes of enemies he was already doing a better job than the bot. SuperToast chose to play the Technician class which round out Brother’s Demolisher and my Doc classes nicely. The Technician gets can deploy charge coils which slow down enemies as well as a free turret. The turret seems to have unlimited ammo and is on a 15 second cooldown if it’s destroyed. That’s awesome, considering how much we were relying on consumable turrets to help us get past big waves. Less money spent on consumables means more money spent on unlocking weapons and perks.

In order to get Toast caught up we had to run all of the Priority One and Giants in the Earth campaign missions again. I noticed two things as we retread old ground. The first is the overall structure of the missions. Each mission follows a similar pattern: run to the objective, defend against a wave, find an item or two, run to the next objective and repeat. I would think this would get boring but it’s not, atleast not yet. You kind of know what to expect as you hit each mission beat and are a little better prepared for the fight as you get more familiar with the mission. I’m assuming this will be invaluable when we try the missions on higher difficulties. The missions also push you towards the next objective by constantly spawning enemies if you stick around too long. This forces a nice pace where you need to decide if you want to stick around to heal and risk losing more health and ammo to new enemies or push on and heal/ setup later near the new objective.

The second is that challenge cards keep old missions fresh. At first I was skeptical of the Challenge Card system. These are cards you get for completing missions or Tactical Opportunities (Dailies) that grant a multiplier to credits and xp at the end of a mission in exchange for a debuff of some sort. These can be anything from disabling consumable items, only letting you reload when your clip is empty, or my personal favorite, you have a chance of knocking over teammates if you run in to them. The challenge cards make each mission play just a bit differently that it’s not boring running it multiple times. Plus those sweet, sweet, rewards really help.

As a group we were able to finish the last mission in Giants in the Earth on standard. This mission was giving Brother and I trouble on our own. The last room spawns a bunch of Heavey Synths and if you don’t take them down quickly enough they overwhelm you. With three people focus firing on them, and an extra free turret to deal with the little guys, we took them down quick enough that this mission was a breeze on standard.

We’re now halfway through the campaign missions. I have confidence that with three people we’ll be able to complete the rest of the game on standard without having re-run missions to level up.

XCOM 2 Blogger Succession Game: Operation God Giant

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If you’re new to the Xcom 2 Blogger Succession Game or want to catch up. check out the entire series on Time To Loot.

The Avatar Project pips have been reduced even further since my last turn. Our resources are looking well stocked too. I didn’t feel like there was an immediate need to do anything on the Geoscape this turn, probably the first time I’ve felt like this the whole game.

I got to spend time on the Avenger completing various research projects. The main mission would like us to complete research on the Psionic Chamber. This costs a good chunk of resources and I wanted to finish the power armor research first and spend resourses on that. While waiting for the research to finish I continued our effort to make contact with Australia. There’s an Avatar facility over there that will probably need delt with at some point.

I went over to Engineering once the Power Armor research was completed to look at our next armor upgrade. Warden Armor costs a pretty penny at 300 Supplies, 40 Alien Alloys, and 20 Elerium Crystals. The more defense the better though so I went ahead and purchased it.

Magi modelling our shiny new Warden Armor

In the process of making contact with Australia I completed the following research:

  • Acid Grenades
  • Chryssalid Autopsy – Unlocked Hellweave which adds bonus health, damage reflection, and a 100% chance to set the attacker on fire!
  • Gatekeeper Autopsy – Unlocked Alien Psi Amp an upgrade for Psi Operatives. Do we even have Psi Operatives yet?
  • Beserker Autopsy – Unlocked Over Drive Serum which boosts mobility and damage resistance.
Gatekeepers are fleshier than I imagined

Once contact with Australia was made I went to investigate an Alien Wreckage site. One day in to that we got a much needed supply drop. I collected those supplies over a 3 day period. At this point, I felt like I was long overdue for a mission and so did the game. Shortly after the supply drop pickup Advent launched an attack on one of the Resistance havens in New India.

Time to go save some civillians!

Operation God Giant

Objectives:

  • Rescue at least 6 civilians
  • Neutralize the Alien Strike Force

The Team:

  • Black Widow – Specialist
  • Bookahnerk – Speacialist
  • Mailman – Sharphooter
  • Magi – Sharpshooter
  • Silentdeath – Ranger
  • Rakuno – Grenadier

Taking Naithin’s advice from the footnotes of his last turn, I took Ranger Silentdeath on a scouting mission moving one action point at a time. I have a tendency to get our Rangers in some real bad situations by overextending them. This worked out as Silentdeath spotted 3 Chryssalids right off the bat. The team was able to clear this group out in one round with no damage taken. On the enemy’s turn a Gatekeeper started to pick off civilians .

I haven’t done one of these missions before so I wasn’t quite sure how it worked. I needed to save 6 civilians to complete the mission and there were 13 civilians total on the map. On our squads next turn I had Bookahnerk walk over to a civilian to see how rescuing was going to work. I was relieved to find that’s all I had to do to “rescue” them. I was sure I was going to have to round them up, protect them, and get them to an extraction point. That would have ended poorly.

The Gatekeeper proceeded to take out one civilian per turn. At this point, I knew I was going to have to split the team up rescued everyone in time. The good news is the squad is spread out enough not to take an AOE hit. The bad news is everyone is so spread out they can’t cover each other with overwatch effectively. Even worse news, Black Widow goes to save a civilian but it turns into a Faceless. Yikes! Magi had that angle covered though and was able to take it out before it did too much damage.

In this mission I learned that I have no idea how to deal with Chryssalid poison. Both Bookahnerk and Rakuno got poisoned when a few emerged from the ground and then were constantly taking damage for the rest of the mission. Lucky for them, it wasn’t enough damage a round to worry about it taking them out but it wasn’t an ideal situation. Any tips on that would be greatly appetited!

The last pack of enemies containted one murderous Gatekeeper, two Advent solders, and one lone Chryssalid. Bookahnerk and Silentdeath were hunkered down by a pile of burning tires, great place for cover by the way, and were able to take down one of the Advent solders right away. Black Widow and Magi made quick work of the Chryssalid. That left the Gatekeeper and one solider.

I didn’t realize that Klaus “Mailman” Weiss had a rocket launcher strapped to his arm when I took him for this mission. When I found it I just had to try it out and fired it into the Gatekeeper and solider. It didn’t do that much damage but it looked awesome and blew up their cover.

On the enemy’s turn, the Gatekeeper floated right up to Silentdeath, fired point blank, and took her down to half health. Thanks to the Hellweave I equipped it took some damage back and was set on fire. Silentdeath retaliated with the machete. Not quite effective against a big armored ball…but it got some damage in. In preparation for another blast from the Gatekeeper, Bookahnerk sent the drone over to Silentdeath Aid Protocol style to add some extra defense. Rakuno laid down some suppression fire to inflict an aim penalty. Turns out, it wasn’t really necessary because the Mailman himself delivered a critical hit and took down that Gatekeeper no problem.

I apparently already forgot the lesson from my last Gatekeeper encounter. They explode on death. Sorry Easha….Silentdeath wasn’t downed after the explosion but health was looking rough. I was going to pull back to some cover on the next turn but that pesky Advent solider threw a frag grenade.

Silentdeath was down, bleeding out, but not dead yet. Mailman and Rakuno panicked.

Bookahnerk took down the solider on the next turn but the mission wasn’t over just yet. Another civilian turned in to a Faceless. The squad obliterated it completing the mission just in time. Silentdeath only had two turns left before bleeding out.

That didn’t feel like an Excellent mission but I’ll take it.

Aftermath

The only ones who made it out of this mission uninjured were our two snipers: Mailman and Magi. Everyone else was in various states of injury. Silentdeath was the worst at 14 days recovery time followed by Bookahnerk at 8. We probably won’t be seeing them for a while.

Rakuno and Klaus were promoted after the mission. I took Saturation Fire on Rakuno which fires a cone of bullets at enemies doing damage and destroying cover. For Mailman, I took Quickdraw since he already had Lightning hands.

Silentdeath is unfortunately shaken now with reduced will. I guess face-tanking a Gatekeeper will do that to a person.

There doesn’t appear to be an immediate threat in the Geoscape right now. The Psionic Chamber still needs to be completed to continue the main mission.

I leave the next command in the capable hands of UnwiseOwl. Good luck Commander! The save is here.

August Recap

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It’s September which means it’s time to decorate our house for Halloween and buy all things pumpkin spice. Some might say it’s too early, there’s still some summer left, but I say nay! It’s pumpkin spice time!

Of course, August was dominated by Blaugust. I was able to post more and had more gaming time last month than I have in the last few. I made the 25 post cutoff for the Gold Award this year and am quite proud of it. I’m looking forward to slowing down here this month

Sadly, last month I had to reinstall Windows which means I lost my Manic Time/ ActivityWatch data for the month. I didn’t even realize this until I went to write this post…I reinstalled ActivityWatch on my D: drive this time to prevent the data loss in case there’s a next time. It’s a lighter weight than Manic Time and does exactly what I need it to do without the extra bells and whistles.

Top 5 Games This Month

  1. Melvor Idle
  2. The Elder Scrolls Online
  3. Aliens: Fireteam Elite
  4. Generation Zero
  5. TemTem

Melvor Idle is probably going to remain in my top game slot for a while. Between checking in on my phone and PC daily, it’s going to be hard for another game to overtake it in terms of time spent. I’ve also been enjoying tracking my progress in my new This Week In Melvor Idle series. I don’t see a need to discontinue it on Saturdays just because Blaugust is over. Their so fun to write!

High Isle is pretty!

I’ve been racking up some time in ESO this month. It was a game that’s been on my mind for a while and I wanted to give it another good try before shelving it. It’s a game that I’ve spent more time playing than posting about but I’m looking to fix that soon.

The whole Fireteam is here.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite has been taking up the majority of my co-op time with friends. Brother and I have been playing it about once a week since we bought it at the start of the month. We’re currently on the 3rd set of campaign missions and even recruited SuperToast to play with us. It’s been a blast to play with three people though I do worry our excitement might fall off once we complete all of the campaign missions. There is the new Pathogen Expansion so that’s always an option if we get bored.

Generation Zero has been the squads go to game on Saturday nights. I still don’t really know what’s going on story wise but blowing up big robots sure is fun.

When we’re not playing Aliens, Brother and I have been making some progress in TemTem. The issue is, in order to do the campaign together we can’t get too ahead of each other. We’ve been sitting in a spot during the week to level up our TemTem before we play again. This is getting boring though so we might switch up how we progress when we’re not together.

This Week In Melvor Idle: Aimless

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I completed all of this weeks goals fairly early in the week:

  • Upgrade the Ancient Shield to the Dragon Fire Shield
  • Complete the Volcanic Cave 22 more times to unlock additional spells and dungeon
  • Acquire the pet for Volcanic Cave
  • Check out the Air God Dungeon

The Dragon Fire Shield took the longest as it needed 7,050 dragon bones to craft. That means 7,050 dragons had to be culled. I elected to fight Green Dragons to accomplish this as they do the least damage and take the least amount of prayer points to kill with my current set up.

After the Dragon Fire Shield was completed I went back to the Volcanic Cave to get the last completions to unlock the Ancient Magick spell book. This also unlocked a new dungeon: Infernal Stronghold. I also acquired the Volcanic Cave Pet after 411 completions. I opened the chests after getting the pet and looted Ancient Platelegs. I was able to upgrade these to (G) Ancient Platelegs for another boost in defense and damage reduction.

I went to check out the Air God Dungeon to see if I could complete it. With my new platelegs and some damage reduction potions I was able to finish it once. I have enough damage reduction to idle the dungeon now but it eats up prayer points quickly. That seems to be the bottleneck to combat right now. Completing the Air God Dungeon let me purchase Perpetual Haste from the shop which reduces the interval for Crafting and Fletching by 15%.

After my first completion of the Air God Dungeon I had a hard time deciding what to do next. I tried the Water God Dungeon but I didn’t have the damage reduction to idle it and it took way to long to complete it with manual healing. I died a few times in there before I gave up on it. I ran the Infernal Stronghold once to get the Infernal Cape which adds a bit more damage reduction.

At this point, I think I need to continue running the Volcanic Cave and try to look a full Ancient Armor set if I want to melee the next God Dungeons. However, those runs eat a ton of prayer points so I need a way to kill things faster. I think I found it in the high tier crafting rings.

See, after killing seven thousand Green Dragons I had a a lot of Green Dragon Hide. Rather than sell it I used it to craft Green D-Hide Bodies to level up crafting. At level 90 special rings unlock that augment your attacks. The one I think is the answer to my melee issue is the Ring of Blade Echoes. Every attack action performs 3 attacks, the first for full damage and the next two for 20% damage. If all 3 hit not only is this is an extra 40% damage boost but it also has an extra 30% chance to proc the Sunset Rapier‘s special attack which bleeds the target for 200% damage inflicted over 10 seconds. Sure procing the special on the second or third attack won’t do as much damage but it’s extra damage I didn’t have before.

I’m also working on crafting the Ranged (Ring of Barrage) and Magic (Ring of Spirit Power) special rings as well. I purchased the Dungeon Set Swapping from the shop to see if taking advantage of the combat triangle match ups helps speeds up running God Dungeons manually.

Combat Skills

Attack 94/99 (+7)Strength 95/99 (+0)Defense 79/99 (+0)
Hitpoints 90/99 (+3)Ranged 83/99 (+0)Magic 94/99 (+2)
Prayer 98/99 (+4)Slayer 79/99 (+2)

Fighting all of those Green Dragons this week plus the 300+ Volcanic Cave runs boosted my Attack level up quite a bit. One of my overarching goals has been getting Attack to 99 for the best base melee accuracy and now I’m only 5 levels away from it. Level 98 Prayer snuck up on me this week. I didn’t realize I was anywhere close to maxing this skill but it makes sense since prayer is used no matter what combat style I’m fighting with.

There was a point this week where I was out of ideas of what to pursue next. I went to the Highlands Slayer area to fight Griffin’s since they were a decent level for leveling my Attack skill, didn’t do a ton of damage per hit, and used very little prayer points to kill. They also drop Dragon Claw Fragments which are used to craft the Dragon Claw, an item I didn’t have yet. I didn’t realize that just fighting in a Slayer area awarded Slayer skill XP. I thought the monsters had to be part of a Slayer Task to count but apparently not.

Non-Combat Skills

Woodcutting 105/99 (+0)Fishing 117/99 (+0)Firemaking 99/99 (+0)
Cooking 106/99 (+0)Mining 105/99 (+0)Smithing 103/99 (+1)
Thieving 94/99 (+2)Farming 114/99 (+0)Fletching 100/99 (+1)
Crafting 96/99 (+7)Runecrafting 91/99 (+1)Herblore 96/99 (+0)
Agility 99/99 (+0)Summoning 97/99 (+0)Astrology 79/99 (+0)
All skills over 99 are virtual levels based on additional experience gained after level 99 cap.

I did a lot of Crafting this week and it shows. 7 levels gained this week and I think I have enough Green Dragon hides to max out the skill. I also did a fair bit of Thieving this week to generate some GP for the shop upgrades I purchased this week. The Thieving mastery pool is now above 95% which gives me +100 stealth to make thieving easier and triple the chance to get a unique NPC item from Thieving. I used this to acquire the Amulet of Incantation which speeds up Alt Magic cast times and subsequently allow me to generate more prayer points quicker with Blessed Offering spell.

Completion Log: 61.04% (+3.22%)

Skills 94.73% (+1.19%)Mastery 34.60% (+1.47%)Items 54.76% (+3.20%)Monsters 61.11% (+8.02%)Pets 60.00% (+2.22%)

Completion is still chugging along with another 3% gained this week. Again, most of this came from fighting new monsters in the Infernal Stronghold, the Air God Dungeon, and the Water God Dungeon.

I acquired Mac, the Volcanic Cave Pet, which provides +1% damage to slayer are monsters.

Goals for Next Week

  • Level Ranged to 85
  • Run the Air God Dungeon until I’m out of Damage Reduction Potions
  • Try to aquire a full set of Ancient Armor from the Volcanic Cave

I’m planning on another Combat oriented week. I think the new rings will help cut down on prayer points spent and with the Amulet of Incantation I’ll be able to generate more prayer points faster. The Air God Dungeon drops the Aeirs God Set. From my first run I got the Aeris God Boots which provide a good boost to Ranged damage and grant much needed damage reduction for my Ranged set. However I need 85 Ranged to wear them. I’m hoping the rest of the set is Ranged oriented to replace my mis-match of Ancient and Black D-Hide armor. We’ll see how many runs I can get in on that dungeon before my Damage Reduction potions run out, I might even get luck and get the dungeon pet!

A Short Wrap Up of Blaugust 2022

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Another Blaugust is in the books. It really flew by this year!

As always, a huge thank you to Belghast for organizing this event year after year and continuing to make it something to look forward to.

I enjoyed the Blaugchievemnents this year. I ended up with 15/19. Way more than I thought I would get at the beginning of the month.

My Blaugust run this year was quite successful. This will be my 26th post this month making this my second best Blaugust showing to date. Leaps and bounds better than Blaugust 2021 where I only posted 3 times. August 2022 accounts for more than half of the posts I’ve written this year.

Per usual, I’m feeling super positive about blogging coming out of this event. I’m looking forward to continuing to post more frequently in the months ahead. It was such a pleasure to see so much varied content this year and a whole lot of new faces. Though it will be nice to see a small slow down in the torrent of posts next month so I can read everything.

Hope to continue seeing everyone around the rest of the year!

The Lessons of Blaugust 2022

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Another Blaugust is almost in the books. This week’s theme is lessons learned and the day before the event ends is as good a time as any to reflect on this. As others have mentioned this week, collectively we seem to learn the same lessons every year and then forget them until we learn them again next August. This isn’t a bad thing. I 100% fall in to the same pattern every August.

Before I sat down to write, I went back and read some of my earlier lessons learned Blaugust posts. Three things that I always come away with from this event are:

  1. I have time to blog as long as I make time to do it.
  2. I enjoy the blogging process
  3. Posting every day is not for me

This year I did in fact learn some new things:

  1. Scheduling posts ahead of time makes posting every day much easier
  2. I can write more than one post a day as long as I have time
  3. Sometimes I have to choose between blogging and doing something else.
  4. It’s ok to take a break.

You would think in my 6 years of blogging I would have figured these things out by now….but sometimes the simplest things take the longest to sink in.

My start to Blaugust 2022 was strong. I was four or five posts ahead for the first week. By the end of the second week some days I was scrambling to get posts out. And by the third week scrambling was not so fun anymore. For next year, if I want to hit those 31 days or any kind of consistent posting schedule having that buffer is hugely beneficial.

The second lesson seems kind of silly in retrospect but it’s important for the first lesson. I’ve found myself a couple times this month really in the zone and diving in to another post after I finished my post for the day. Usually I would save the idea for the next day but there’s no reason I can’t write multiple posts in the same day and schedule them out.

I have less free time now than I did a year ago and I have to choose how to spend it. You would think blogging might fall by the wayside but it’s been important for me to keep it going. This month, I found myself playing less in order to write more. This only works for so long when your blogging about games though. Sometimes I just have to skip a post to play some games.

Which leads me to my last lesson.

This one is the most important lesson I learned this year. 31 posts over 31 days is an aspiration and a challenge but not necessarily the goal for me. I’m going to end this event with 25 posts this month. Considering that’s almost half of the posts I’ve published this year that’s quite an achievement. I could have probably gotten those extra 6 posts out but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Allowing myself to take a few days off this month really helped me maintain my motivation to finish out the event!

Podcast Sunday: The Adventure Zone

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No Audio Dramas for me this week. Instead, a friend got me hooked on a D&D live-play podcast called The Adventure Zone. I vaguely remember the show having ads at the end of Mission to Zyxx but never took a chance to listen to it because live-play podcasts are daunting to start.

D&D shows are the MMOs of podcasts. They’re large, usually with hundreds or episodes if they’ve been running for a while. They’re also quite a time investment with episodes running an hour or more. I tend to balk at any type of show that have episodes longer than 45 minutes. If you’re not caught up already it’s going to take a long time to do so.

The exception to this is Fool & Scholar’s Dark Dice where a lot of the downtime, table talk, and combat rolls are cut and described by the DM or players in post production. Episodes for this show tend to run under 30 minutes. They add sound effects too which makes this show feel like more of an audio drama which is what Fool & Scholar typically produces.

The Adventure Zone is different from other your typical D&D show. For one, none of the cast are experiences D&D players. I find this extremely relatable. Their first campaign is running in a similar vain to one of my friend group’s campaigns. In the past, I’ve played D&D with a group of people who have a massive amount of knowledge about the game and were very min/max focused but I much preferred the fun that comes with my current group that plays less seriously.

The couple other D&D shows I’ve listened too also have a bunch of voice actors playing characters. Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy host another podcast called My Brother, My Brother, and Me, which I’ve never listened to but have heard many a MaximumFun ad for…they’re podcasters rather than voice actors so it feels like more of a group of people hanging out rather than a stage production. Their dad, Clint, who has no previous D&D experience, also plays with them in and I find the table interactions between all of them to be one of the best parts of the show.

I’m really enjoying it but it is consuming all of my podcast time right now. This style of podcast seems to be easier to listen to while I’m working so I’m getting more time than usual to listen. I’m going to need it, the first campaign alone is 68 episodes and there’s three campaigns in total!

This Week In Melvor Idle: Entering the Volcanic Cave

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Last week, I predicted that this week would be another round of preparing for the Volcanic Cave Dungeon and it almost was. That is until last night when I finished crafting the last of my Damage Reduction IV potions and decided to see how well I would fair in the dungeon with my setup

I completed all of my goals for the week which were:

  • Gather materials for the Agility obstacles I want so I can gear the buffs towards combat.
  • Get the Damage Reduction Potion to Mastery Rank 90 so I can create Damage Reduction Potion IV
  • Gather enough materials to make a lot of Damage Reduction Potion IV
  • Restock Food Supply

I knocked out a few of these easier Agility obstacles early in the week and chose ones more geared towards combat. The higher level ones require a fair bit of Slayer coins to purchase which I had used up last week when tuning the course for XP and leveling up Agility to 99.

My current Agility passives. There’s room for improvement but I’m happy with it for now.

I wasn’t originally planning on pursuing Slayer tasks this week but I’m glad I did. Not only did I acquire enough slayer coins to purchase some more Agility obstacles but I also looted a pair of Paladin Gloves which grant 4% damage reduction. The Dragon Gloves I was wearing offered no damage reduction but had a slight boost to damage stats. I figured I could take the a little hit in the damage department for a nice boost to damage reduction. This is what prompted me to try my luck at the Volcanic Cave to see if I was able to idle through it.

The Volcanic Cave Dungeon is the first of the Elite dungeons. The jump in the Highest Combat Level Monster between the previous dungeon, Dragons Den ( Highest Level 272), and the Volcanic Cave (Highest Level 677) is significant. Clearing the Volcanic Cave once awards a Fire Cape for every completion and unlocks 4 additional God Dungeons, Air, Walter, Earth, and Fire. I was surprised to find it also awards a lore book, A Tale of the Past, a future’s prophecy, which is 1 of 3 books. If you follow the wiki link you can see there’s a lot contained in that little book!

Clearing the Volcanic Dungeon 100 times unlocks the Infernal Stronghold Dungeon as well as spells form the Ancient Magicks spell book.

This dungeon is tough. With 35% damage reduction and 920 hp I was able to idle through and let auto eat heal me but just barely. The boss, Malcs, The Guardian of Melvor, has a max hit on one of its abilities that hits me for 338 health. Auto eat stops kicking in at 368 so I have very little damage reduction to spare. Malcs doesn’t have a normal attack (thank goodness because it would hit for 662!) but has two special attacks instead. There’s a 70% chance it will use Razor-Sharp claws which is that big attack that does 338 damage twice and it has a 30% chance to use Dragonbreath does 39×30 damage over 2.9 seconds. Dragonsbreath won’t out right kill me but it chews through my food supply like no other.

I was able to get away with doing this dungeon without using my Damage Reduction potions. Instead I opted for Melee Accuracy Potions so I could get more hits in and thus complete the dungeon quicker with melee. Even with the Accuracy potions, whetstones, melee prayers, and +12 attack level necklace, I only have a 53% chance to hit Malcs on every attack. As a result, this dungeon run uses up a massive amount of resources, Prayer Points and food in particular. With 100k prayer points I was only able to idle this dungeon for about 2 hours which resulted in 78 kills on Malcs and drained of 1k whales form my food supply. I’ll have to get the additional 22 kills this week to unlock the new dungeon and spells.

I opened the dungeon chests after my run last night instead of waiting until I get the pet to open all of the dungeon chests. I was hoping to get a piece of Ancient Armor to add to my melee setup. I lucked out and got an Ancient Shield which can be upgrade 3 times to the Dragon Fire Shield which offers more defense, damage reduction, +30 hitpoints, and 30% damage reduction from that pesky Dragonsbreath skill. That should make runs on the Volcanic Cave a bit easier.

Combat Skills

Attack 87/99 (+4)Strength 95/99 (+0)Defense 79/99 (+2)
Hitpoints 87/99 (+3)Ranged 83/99 (+6)Magic 92/99 (+2)
Prayer 94/99 (+3)Slayer 77/99 (+4)

There was a ton of opportunities to level up combat this week. Resupplying the food stocks required Raw Chicken which can be obtained in large quantities by running the Chicken Coop Dungeon and opening the chests. I leveled up Defense this way while I collected my chests for chickens.

I did a bit of active Slayer where I changed my equipment set to match the weakness of my Slayer task monsters. Most of the monsters were Magic based so I eventually left the Ranged set on and collected some levels there.

I needed a ton of Long Horns to make Damage Reduction potions which required killing a lot of Raging Horned Elites in the Desolate Plains. I got most of my Attack levels here this week.

Non-Combat Skills

Woodcutting 105/99 (+0)Fishing 117/99 (+0)Firemaking 99/99 (+0)
Cooking 106/99 (+5)Mining 105/99 (+0)Smithing 102/99 (+0)
Thieving 92/99 (+2)Farming 114/99 (+0)Fletching 99/99 (+0)
Crafting 89/99 (+2)Runecrafting 90/99 (+0)Herblore 96/99 (+5)
Agility 99/99 (+0)Summoning 97/99 (+2)Astrology 79/99 (+0)
All skills over 99 are virtual levels based on additional experience gained after level 99 cap.

The question for this week was how to get enough mastery pool XP in Herblore to level up the Damage Reduction potion from 1-90 without using any resources to craft them. That’s because the resources are hard to come by and I didn’t want to waste them on the lower tiers of the Damage Reduction potion. I did this by first crafting enough Herblore Potions to get 99 mastery, then used those potions to craft enough Melee Accuracy potions to get 99 mastery on that item too. Once those were done, I had enough in the mastery pool to get the Damage Reduction potion up to 90 mastery and instantly start crafting tier IV potions. Thanks to 63% chance to reuse crafting materials and the Herblore Potions which have a 6% chance to produce a random tier of the potion your crafting I turned 1.500 long horns into 5,000 Damage Reduction Potion IVs.

Completion Log: 57.82% (+2.94%)

Skills 93.54% (+2.41%)Mastery 33.13% (+0.78%)Items 51.56% (+3.21%)Monsters 53.09% (+10.50%)Pets 57.78% (+0%)

This week saw a huge gain of almost 3% overall completion. I must have fought more Slayer monsters I’ve never seen before than I thought. Also, the additional 8 monsters in the Volcanic Cave probably helped that as well. I’m guessing the item completion gains came from this as well. There was also a lot of levels gained this week across various skills.

Goals for Next Week

  • Upgrade the Ancient Shield to the Dragon Fire Shield
  • Complete the Volcanic Cave 22 more times to unlock additional spells and dungeon
  • Acquire the pet for Volcanic Cave
  • Check out the Air God Dungeon

Motivation or Lack There Of

Kluwes3 Comments

This week’s theme for Blaugust is staying motivated. It just so happens to also be the week where I have found the least motivation. Not to the fault of anyone but my own. Posting every day is a great goal and I’ve done a pretty good job so far this month if I do say so myself. But Posting every day also takes time away from other activities. I was starting to feel like I had been posting more but gaming less and I needed a small break. So I chose to game rather than write the last few days for a bit of a reset.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence for my Blaugust participation. The difference over the years is if I catch it in time before I lapse into not writing at all. I was feeling on the verge of one of those lapses today so I decided to sit down tonight and write something.

I think part of staying motivated is recognizing when your motivation is running dry and making a decision to do something about it. Seeing as it’s Staying Motivated week and I need some motivation of my own I’ll tell you what motivates me (which will in turn motivate me).

Let’s start with my biggest motivator: reading other blogs. It’s what got me in to this whole blogging thing in the first place. I find that, if I read enough posts, eventually I’ll get the urge to write something as well no matter how long I’ve been away from it or how little motivation I have to write. The inverse, is also true, the longer I go without reading other posts the more likely it is that I won’t write. Sometimes I find inspiration from others’ posts to riff off of but other times just the act of reading what other people are up to makes me want to knock a post or two out.

Participating in community events/ projects are another one of my big motivators. Just this month I participated in Unwise Owl’s call for Humble Choice Reviews which I hope continues! Blaugust is sure to get me to write every year to varying degrees. Some years I make the 31 posts, some years I’m done after two weeks, and some years I make a short introduction post and don’t write anything else, but I’ll always attempt to participate. Then there’s the Blogger Succession XCOM Game that’s been going on now for over a year and a half. Last year was one of my biggest blogging slumps but every time my turn came back around I knew I had to write at least one post. Nothing motivates quite like a bunch of people waiting on you to play your turn…

My last motivator is simply writing something, anything really. Preferably something that ends with a published post. Kind of like what I’m writing now. There seems to be about a three day shelf life on my own motivation. Any longer than that, and the chances of me writing decrease significantly. It really is a wonder this blog has been going for so long…

Walkabout Mini Golf: The Labyrinth DLC

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Walkabout Mini Golf may be my favorite VR title. It’s simple, it’s fun, it’s a great game to show people who have never played a VR game, and it has multiplayer that just works. I dusted off the Quest 2, which I’ll admit hasn’t seen much action in a few months, to play the newest DLC course, The Labyrinth,with the squad this weekend. Yes, The Labyrinth, as in the 1986 film starring David Bowie.

Mighty Coconut keeps pumping out DLC for this game. I’ve bought every single one. They’re high quality and you get two 18-hole courses, a normal mode, and a hard mode with each one. To top it all off they’re cheap! Coming in at just $3, it’s cheaper than your average round of actual mini golf.

The squad’s all here!

I was excited for the Labyrinth course as soon as I heard about it. I love that movie. It’s a weird title to put into a mini golf game for sure and I’m suprised it was still only $3. I would think licensing a movie for a game would increase the price at least a little. Maybe keeping Jareth, the Goblin King and David Bowie’s likeness out of the course kept costs low.

I’m always surprised how big and detailed these maps are.

The course takes you through the – ehm – course of the movie. Starting with meeting Hoggle and entering the Labyrinth. On the normal course, the holes start off easy, transition into holes that are a maze themselves, and ends with some truly mind-bending mini golf experiences. If you venture off the beaten path, there are several hedge mazes reminiscent of the Windows 95 Screensaver Maze. We ran around a few of these but sadly, there was nothing to find at the end.

This was my favorite hole. And yes, you do have to take your shot at the whole sideways on the wall. It was not easy!

I’m always surprised at the level of detail that goes into the courses in Walkabout. It could be just a simple mini golf game but each course is its own little world to explore and that’s no less true of the Labyrinth DLC. If you have a VR headset and haven’t played Walkabout before I’d highly recommend it along with all of the other DLC. Even better if you have a few friends to join in!