Deep Rocks & Janthir Prep

Janthir

I've always got a "home" MMO, and right now it's GW2. I've been preparing for Janthir Wilds to launch in fifteen days, mostly by farming stuff up.

I started selling legendary greatswords last week. I've got a huge supply of EoD currencies and spirit shards, so I've been trying to bang out Cantha lamp achivements. I sold one sword same-day for a cool ~600-700g of profit, then posted another one the next day.

That sale ... has not gone so well. There are six greatswords undercutting me right now, so I'm pretty much at the back of the line. When I posted it, I was hoping for another quick turn-around, but this is day eight. When the festival started, a bunch cleared out and I was #2 in line! But alas, no luck.

I don't want to repost it because the listing fee was something like 115g, so writing that off and spending another 115g will really cut into the profits. I can patiently wait for it to move while I farm up more Gifts of Battle, I suppose.

Deep Rocks

Sometimes, we'll do a 6-ish hour Deep Rock session on Sundays, and yesterday was one of those days. It's a fantastic co-op game to play with friends: there's tons of scaling and long-term objectives to work on.

Galactic

There's a summer event going on right now, so we focused on the two missions for that. We've got most of our classes promoted a couple times¹, so we focused on doing the two assignments for summer.

The first one gave us a ton of resources for overclock crafting. I've made 51 overclocks, but I've got another ~20 in the bank waiting on materials. Making them levels up a crafting mastery, and every time you level that up, there's a choice of some overclocks.

I've yet to see the main overclock that I want: Splintering Shells for my gunner's autocannon, for improved splash when I'm firing into crowds of little bugs. I've got six shooter to make my sidearm into a proper rootin' tootin' cowboy shootin' pistol, but I really need that one for my main weapon.

I've got the minelayer overclock for my rocket launcher, but I'm missing a coilgun upgrade that lets me shoot the pistol I use with that through walls.

We found a couple machine events while we were doing the missions. We did discover that you can put engineer platforms over the modular exterminator's pads. They'll still activate, but the purple beams won't be able to hit you, so you can ignore that mechanic and blow it up faster.

In the end, we got a ton of resources, and also hats.

A krasus detonator showed up early in an aquark mission. We managed to lure it into a tunnel so we could get that sweet, sweet 360° orb of golden walls when it died. But, sadly, this was a haz4 mission where one of the swarms just ... doesn't stop, and we managed to harvest very little of it. 😭

I do wish the promotion assignments worked differently, though. I spent most the whole time on Gunner but XP-capped, since I gotta bang out another promotion assignment. We usually do the weeklies or the deep dive when we play, so it's hard to fit in a selfish "sorry I need to do these 4 missions". It wouldn't be so bad if all the classes would synchronize the missions for the assignment. But for now, I'll continue sitting on a level 25 gunner.

Survivors

Before we started playing DRG, I picked up the other Deeprock game on sale. This is a vampire survivors clone, but it's very dwarfy. All the components of DRG are here, very nearly slotted into an appropriate mechanic for a suvivors-like. It's simple, but somebody put a lot of thought into game design and made sure to translate (almost²) everything.

I'm not sure if this is meant as a prototype for their upcoming DRG-but-roguelike game, which'll be somewhere in the middle of DRG (co-op, FPS) and DRS (roguelike upgrades). But it sure makes me excited for that game, because this one is super fun despite being single-player.

It plays different from Vampire Surivors, since you've got walls to go through. If there's a wall, you've got an escape route or a tool to funnel a huge mass of enemies into a single-file line for blowin' up.

It took a few tries, but I eventually got my scout through the first mission. It's a bit like a deep dive: you descend five levels and if you clear them all, you can leave.

I'm playing gunner now since that's My Class, but the scout's boomstick is available to all classes, and it seems to be really strong, since it'll fire in any direction. My gunner has to face the enemy hordes to fire his minigun, which is not ideal if you're trying to run away.