So, are you excited about Drop 5, and ready to try out the new Adventure, Bay of Betrayal?

You’ve come to the right place! I spent a bunch of time on the PTR focusing on just the Bay of Betrayal with some amazing guild members, and wanted to share my findings/strategies to make it easier for those trying the Adventure for the first time.

Before an information dump, however, it is very useful to note that you will need to be in a group you are comfortable communicating with. This is a very quick Adventure, and you can fail in as little as fifteen to twenty minutes if people aren’t communicating.

Also, don’t get discouraged if things don’t go right the first few times. Even in full raid-gear on the PTR playing classes/specs/roles we main on Live, it took us at least ten hours to get to the point we were in the video below. It is for sure a challenging place, but it feels highly rewarding to get through each challenge.

A disclaimer: We were so involved in things that we didn’t pay attention to spell names. It is that hectic-feeling of an Adventure, especially when you don’t have it on “farm”. I try my best to describe abilities and items. I will gladly edit this with correct spell names if people happen to have them.

First “Hallway”
Kill the mob attacking Herald Anku’mar (hur hur Carbine!) to start up the event, and talk to him to begin after his little spiel.

Keep your DPS (and if you’re feeling confident, your tank and healer) fully charged using the battery rods the entire time (your charge will diminish over time if you do not use it). You want to avoid as many mobs as you can to beat the two other “groups” to the next room. If you do happen to run into mobs, you want charged people (in turns) to activate the various items in the area. Jump spells are also useful to keep moving quickly after killing mobs.

Bombs – These look like a relic node. They will one-shot anybody, including a tank (unless they have a defensive cooldown running). They’re the most effective way to kill mobs.
Tether – There are rods that emit a tether. Most of the time the tether will aggro mobs once it is activated so you should be able to run away from them and leave them there.
Sentry – A folded-up robot that will activate and patrol, aggroing mobs to the best of its ability and smashing them. The second most effective way to kill mobs, as it will help you smash mobs if you have aggro.
Opportunity – There are other rods that emit a circle that provides an elongated Moment of Opportunity (MOO). If you are not fully charged, and you stand in the circle, you will not be able to attack. The best option is to have the tank drag the mobs into the circle, and then stand on the edge. Melee DPS will have to also stand on the edge unless charged.

First “Room” – The Augmented
This is an AoE heavy room. While you can use the Charge to mind-control the adds in the room, we found that just straight burning them down yielded better, and faster, results. This might change depending upon group makeup, gear level, communication, etc.

Mini Boss: Team Alpha
At this point, you have the opportunity to attack one of the two teams if you were fast enough in the first room. Avoid mobs getting to the team, and burn down the healer. We found that one of the teams had an Aurin Esper named Shan Barkheart, and encountered that team as the first group to kill both times we had this opportunity. We don’t know if this is the case every time or not. These are AI mobs, so try to focus down what is doing the most damage/healing like you would in War of the Wilds, or even PvP. The burn order depends on your group makeup, but we found that burning the healer down first made things ultimately easier.

Second “Hallway”
After burning down the team, you encounter more mobs while heading to your next objective. The birds put a debuff on that slows you, so make the most of all the bombs in the vicinity and destroy stuff and run.

Second “Room” – Varmintron and Gopherzoid
There is a battery in the center of the room. Designate two people to be the battery drainer/mind controller–one per boss. We obviously found that marking them and designating symbols was easier for communication purposes.

The object of this boss is to burn down both of them simultaneously, and then mind-control them simultaneously to have them dig a hole to the next area. It sounds simple, but the coordination took a while to establish, especially since the battery regenerates so slowly. This is why we designated two folks as the drainers. The bosses themselves are fairly tank-and-spank.

The battery will fill up three quadrants of the room, and you need to get into the fourth quadrant to stay safe. Once the battery has been drained, this will stop, but it is suggested to wait to drain the battery until the bosses are very low on health so the Charge isn’t wasted (remember, it goes down if it’s not being used).

Varminton casts The Canimid Express every so often where he burrows underground, comes back up, and then shoots a line of dirt and rocks out in front of him. Fairly easy to dodge. He will also cast Eldan Excavationand the group will get a warning that says, “Varmintron is tearing apart the terrain!”. These are huge circles that appear, and are a little more difficult to get out of, but didn’t seem to do too much damage so long as you got out in a reasonable amount of time.

Gopherzoid casts Whirlwind and you will get a warning that says “Gopherzoid is creating a whirlwind!”. He will focus on one member and slowly walk towards them. Easy to run out of the group so long as the person being chased keeps to the edges of the open quadrant. Gopherzoid also seemed to send out lines every-so-often, but it didn’t feel as frequent as Varmintron.

DPS them down until you get the group warning that they’re able to be controlled, and control them simultaneously to dig a hole to the next “hallway”.

Mini Boss: Team Beta
As before, you will have another opportunity to run upstairs and kill the second team if you completed the boss fast enough. Killing teams gets you more time to complete the Adventure, however, it makes the final boss stronger. This is an AI team, like before, so focus down as you see fit. We had a difficult time discerning who the healer was, so we ended up choosing to burn down Lia Zalkadec. From there, things seemed much easier to burn, so we assume she is the healer.

Third “Hallway”
This hallway is completely different than the first two. It requires a lot of communication with your team. Everyone should Charge up and have a jump spell just in case. One person will need to control the first thumper. A second person will need to control the second thumper, and a third person will need to re-control the first thumper just before the first person’s Charge dies. Having a fourth person control the second thumper before the second person’s Charge dies is also useful.

Congratulations, you’ve passed the first part of the hallway. Rinse and repeat all the way through the thumpers! As you can see in the video, we had a more difficult time on the second set of thumpers, but a few tank cooldowns and jump got us past them instead of having to do both sets again.

After the thumpers, rinse and repeat as you had before in the first two hallways–use the bombs and rods to your advantage. Especially since the Shamans do some wicked crazy telegraphs. You can take the third hallway slower than the others assuming you have beaten the other two teams, as it is no longer a race against time.

Third “Room” – The Elder Vault
This is more communication-heavy. We had a difficult time with this because of how short the timer is for selecting items. There are tether balls at the top of the room that you will use to jump to get the first panel. However, you will need to have someone control the middle pillar so one person can use the tether and turn off the Security Control Panel. From here, we had a bit of difficulty figuring out how to get through the red, and resorted to using a jump spell, cooldowns, heals, and a Scientist summon. Of course, we figured out it was much the same as the thumper hallway once we had gotten across. Go up the hallway and turn off the last panels.

Fourth “Room” – The Trial of Endurance
This is essentially a gauntlet. You want to burn down the mobs ASAP, because more come out constantly, and they can get a bit overwhelming with all the red on the floor. We didn’t try mind-controlling the robots, but think it is possible because of the batteries in the middle of the floor. However, you also need to drain the batteries to destroy the panel with the Charge.

Fifth “Room” – Security Hub Sigma
This is the final boss, Calidor Antevian. He’s a tad difficult at first, but we soon realized a pattern in his spells. There are four batteries around the outside of the room, and you will want to assign four people to them to drain for a specific phase of Calidor when he drains them to heal himself. You’ll also need six interrupts for this fight for a specific spell.

Variance Protocol – This centers upon one person. They will need to run out of it and other people will need to avoid the tendrils. Don’t waste your interrupts on this.
Point of Division – This needs to be interrupted with those six IA spells. This gives you a nice MOO to burn him down. If it’s not interrupted it will send very large lines out from him constantly until the spell has finished its channel.
Fractured Symmetry – We called this “Medic!” whenever he cast it. Because it looks like a medic spell. This was the most difficult part of the pattern to figure out. If you watch the video, you see it goes in a “waltz” pattern, almost. Run towards the side ramps for three beats, then back in for three beats. It’s a little difficult to describe, but once you see it (and practice it) it makes a bit more sense. If you get hit by this, it disarms you and does a fair bit of damage.
Siphoning Power – This is when Calidor drains the batteries. Send your designated folks out to drain them and then continue whacking on him. I suggest having the tank and healer as some of the drainers, and keep a DPS on him to help burn through the shield he gets while he casts this to make things easier afterwards.

August 2019 Note: This post is (15/31) of the Blaugust 2019 event! You can find out more about Blaugust over at Belghast’s blog. I (Chestnut) created a Twitter list of all participants. UltrViolet created an OPML file of all the bloggers to import into your feed reader.

Last week I finally had the opportunity to finish the Summerset Zone Story, even though I was rushing a bit to make it to WoW raid on time. I didn’t know when I first started playing ESO that Morrowind wasn’t the starting area. Once I found out, I decided that I wanted to complete the Morrowind > Clockwork City > Summerset arch before going back to the “base game” and doing Khenarthi’s Roost > Auridon > Grahtwood > Greenshade > Malabal Tor > Reaper’s March. While I love the One Tamriel initiative, it does make things a bit confusing on what to do when. Luckily, the forums have been a godsend.

Anyway, I finally finished Summerset. And I didn’t think that the story would wreck me the way it did. I enjoyed Morrowind once I got about halfway through the zone story. And while I was all, ‘SAVE THE CITY DO IT NOW’, it didn’t hit me super hard. Clockwork City was much the same way. I enjoyed the zone story sooner, but it was a very zen ending, and learning more about Sotha Sil was relaxing. Summerset, however. Summerset is where everything comes to a head. The bits of story you get in Morrowind and Clockwork City all convene for the end of Summerset.

Characters that I’d just met (and consequently didn’t know very well) met their endings, and it absolutely wrecked me. It destroyed me. I ended up sobbing on stream. But it says something about the writing in ESO. It helped cement that ESO has become my new main game of choice. Story is one of the most important things to me in a game, and when something hits me hard like that, I become more invested in the game.

So @YouTube flagged the video of my stream for inappropriate content and being against community guidelines due to repetitive-ness.

Um. What? How is a stream video repetitive and against community guidelines? pic.twitter.com/wV3KsHRHan

— Gamer Girl Confessions (@ggc_blog) April 16, 2018

It seems to have been fixed because the video is once again available to link, and my community strike seems to be gone, though I was never notified of it being fixed. Which in and of itself adds to the annoying. I think what was most annoying about it is that it was flagged less than an hour after I uploaded it. Sometimes I wish there was a solid alternative to YouTube so I could diversify a bit more.

I’m not someone who can say “Yes, every Xday I can stream starting at Xtime”, but I can at the very least set up a schedule the week before and say, “Okay, here’s what it’ll be for the week!”. So I’m trying to work out what I can do for this coming week by Saturday, and post it.

I don’t expect to become huge on Twitch, but it’s something I enjoy doing, so I figured why the hell not.

Image from Chic Pixel

Just like last year, January was #DatingSiMonth. This is a part of the Community Game-Along that Chic-Pixel has put on for the past four years! I sort of participated throughout the year last year, but got sidetracked by real life. This year, I’m hoping to be able to participate more. And starting up in January with Dating Sims always gets me in the mood to continue. Because, really, how can you go wrong with Dating Sims, right?

I ended up playing a combination of Sweet Fuse, Seduce Me 2, and Men of Yoshiwara: Ohgiya throughout the month. I totaled only six hours of Dating Sims, but compared to the amount of time I’ve spent gaming and how my time has been alloted, I don’t think that’s too shabby.

Seduce Me Stream

I played two hours worth of Matthew’s route in Seduce Me 2: The Demon War. I plan to continue streaming this route, at least in February. I had initially decided February was going to be the first time I’d stream, but then put one together in January just because.

Initially I chose February for a plethora of reasons: Valentine’s Day means it’s fun to play Dating Sims (not that I ever need an excuse!), and mainly I needed a distraction around the 13th of February for some personal reasons. I figured if I was joking with friends and having fun being raunchy about pixelated men, it’d be a fantastic distraction!

So, if you’re interested in watching me play more of Matthew’s route, join me on my Twitch channel in February! No guarantees about future streams unless Patreon works out, but keep an eye on my twitter for last minute streams when I feel like it.

Get in touch with Frackwell:
WildStar Forums
In Game – Slade Frackwell

Want to be a part of Yardcore Nexus? Contact me with your character’s name on Entity and we’ll set up a time!

Wildcast Podcast Ep. 78

If this title seems familiar, it’s because, well, I’ve used it before… sorta. I hopped onto Episode 77 of Wildcast to discuss ThaydFest, as I linked to in my November Gaming Review post, where I talked a lot about what I’d done relating to my goals, oddly enough.

Wildcast Ep. 78: Winterfest is Here!

And I’m excited to say that I’m back again on Episode 78… as the third official co-host for the podcast! So if you’re into Wildstar, check us out! This episode we talk about Winterfest, cash shop pricing, and more. Next episode will be out on January 15th, so keep your ears out, and I’ll be posting a link to it on the blog, as well.

A couple of changes and additions have been made to the IntPiPoMo list, so here’s the current list! Be sure to let me know via Twitter, or on this post if you plan to participate! ^_^

• Gamer Girl Confessions
• Memoirs of a Lady
• Inventory Full
• Mostly Plushies
• Floor Tank Gaming
• Moonshine Mansion
• Hey, Heatherbee!
• Adamantly Complacent
• Hello Kitsune
• Tyrannodorkus: The Blog World
• MMOQuests
• Ravalation
• Unnexussary
• I Hate Tombs!
• Starshadow
• Digital Backwoods
• Nim’s Adventures
• Soul of the Forest
• Pizza Maid
• Atheren’s Adventures
• GamingSF

Let’s Play!

The second Let’s Play for The Secret World is now up! Short term goal is to get episode 3 started in the next few days, and maybe finishing it by the end of the week. It gets easier to do them as I go, so hopefully I’ll fall into a routine.

Yardcore

Speaking of videos, I am almost done putting together the last Yardcore from before F2P drop. A lot of folks I’ve done Yardcore with previously have updated their plots, such as Green Ghost (who now has a Twitter account if you’re interested in following him!), so I’m not sure if I’ll start with visiting updated plots for the post-F2P updates, or mix them up with new folks… we’ll see who jumps at the opportunity to go next first.

The next episode was actually a lot of fun for me to record. It’ll be on Slade Frackwell’s plot, who happened to be someone that opened my eyes to the wonders of housing, and someone who is always there to help out folks in Housing with ideas and the like.

WildStar

Lots been going on in WildStar, but most of it is related to guild master duties, or ThaydFest. So I guess I’ll just pimp ThaydFest! This is an Entity Exile event that the guild hosts, and we’re already on ThaydFest 3!

ThaydFest is the biggest, baddest, most awesome event our server has ever seen (yet)! It’s a day full of awesome, a chance for you and your friends and your guild to log on and do something fun and different and experience the best part of Wildstar–the community. It is an event brought to you by your fellow players, and done entirely with the resources that the game gives us, and our own ingenuity. No matter what aspects of the game you enjoy, ThaydFest probably has something fun for you to do.

ThaydFest is coordinated by the Black Dagger Society and other community-oriented guilds and players on our server. We’re doing this because we recognize that the community is a huge part of what makes the game so awesome, and this is our way of giving something back to that same community. We hope that you’ll come out, have a great time, and maybe make some friends.

So if you’re in WildStar, check it out! Everyone is able to roll up a toon on Entity, assuming they have the character slots, so come join the fun! Carbine was even kind enough to donate some codes as prizes, so there’s that, too… And there’s more information using that nice little URL and we’re always looking for prize donations!

FFXIV

We’ve been playing a lot of FFXIV, mainly because Chaide is kind of over WildStar (until they make some changes). So it’s become his game-of-choice when we don’t want to schedule in some TSW. I’ve just been super busy with work, interviewing for new positions, and then social obligations on the weekends that I haven’t been able to write much about it.

But the cool thing is that a lot of what we’ve done in the game is easily written about after the fact, including the Hallow’s End stuff. So there will be lots of posts utilizing lots of screenshots for IntPiPoMo in the next few days!

First I wanted to give the list so far of who will be participating in IntPiPoMo. If you’d like to participate, or are just interested in what the heck it is, check out this post, and sign up! I’m giving away three Steam gift cards at the end, so there’s that, too.

• Gamer Girl Confessions
• Memoirs of a Lady
• Inventory Full
• Mostly Plushies
• Floor Tank Gaming
• Moonshine Mansion
• Hey, Heatherbee!
• Adamantly Complacent
• Hello Kitsune
• Tyrannodorkus: The Blog World
• MMOQuests

I’m excited to see how everyone handles the challenge of screenshots–daily; photo-dumps; commentary; no commentary… it’ll be really neat!

Chaide and Chestnut Play TSW (With Cam!)

I finally finished putting together our first Let’s Play for The Secret World! It was definitely a process because the program I use was a little overwhelmed by the size of the original recording… so I had to switch the computer I was creating it on, which limited the time I was able to spend on putting it together.

We started recording all of these back in, oh, May? So there’s a large swath of video to put together and put out before we catch up to where we are… which I kind of want to do because we want to get through all of the Samhain stuff and post it in a somewhat timely manner (before Christmas, maybe?).

Of course, though, most of the recordings are between two and five hours, so I’m going to have to try to figure out how to cut down on the time of them. As well as get better about splitting up our recordings going forward.

We’re also interested in constructive feedback. It is just a bunch of friends bullshitting while they play The Secret World, so there isn’t much structure, and we don’t plan on making it particularly structured, but any ideas or thoughts are something we’re interested in.

Katia was great and stepped up as the eighth volunteer for my project, Yardcore Nexus, where I tour a plot in WildStar and interview the creator!

Get in touch with Katia:
Email – wskatia@gmail.com
Twitter
In Game – Katia Managan/Katia Racer/Katia Storekeep
YouTube
Katia Builder Toolkit (Housing Addon)
The Deku Lodge

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Want to be a part of Yardcore Nexus? Contact me with your character’s name on Entity and we’ll set up a time!

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Due to real-life, this took approximately two months to put together. While I don’t mind that folks would prefer not to speak in TeamSpeak, it really does make things easier on my end to showcase their plots. It also didn’t help that life got the better of me for a few months, either. My new goal for Yardcore videos is to complete one per month. If I get more done, that’s grand! But I’m not going to beat myself up for doing something only once per month that I’m doing because it’s enjoyable. Once it starts becoming unenjoyable, there’s no point, eh?

Green Ghost volunteered to show us his superhero plot for my new project, Yardcore Nexus, where I tour a plot in WildStar and interview the creator!

Get in touch with Ghost:
In Game – Zams Zams or Green Ghost

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Want to be a part of Yardcore Nexus? Contact me with your character’s name on Entity and we’ll set up a time!