He’s a zone unto himself.

MHW has 3 phases.  Low Rank (LR), High Rank (HR), and Tempered (T).  Each tends to focus on an Elder Dragon – some mean buggers.  Low Rank is all about Zora Magdaros.

That’s a walking mountain

The missions with Zora are not at all like other hunts.  They start off on his (it’s?) back where you need to destroy 3 cores that do fire damage.  You also have the option of fighting Nergigante – but that is seriously a bad idea.  While roaming on his back, you can mine a few ore spots, for much needed material to craft some decent gear. The next part varies but the repeatable version includes you shooting canons, a dragonator (a giant spike), and ballistae for about 10 minutes until he finally drops.  The only difficulty here is not dying to the magmacore fire attacks.

If you luck out, you can do this quest 2 more times after the first, and that should give you at least 1 HR piece of Zora armor.  Which is a significant boost.

From here you reach the first major interlude.  The goal of which is to enter HR areas and find some Rathian clues.  Just regular exploring will work, but you’ll need to spend a lot of time doing it.  You can boost this by completing some rank 6 quests.  I’m at this spot now.

If I recall, the game then takes a more open approach following this step.  You’ll get a bunch of optional quests, but the main one will be about finding the 3 elder dragons, killing Nergigante (super death mode), killing the 3 elders, then finally Xeno’jiva.  From that point forward you’ll have access to Tempered monsters.

On paper, I’m about 75% of the way there since I have 7 monster kill quests to go.  In reality… not so much since I’ll need to improve my gear to take on those 7 monsters.

Guard Point

My previous playthrough was focused on Dual Blades.  It was extremely visceral and had little to do with thinking.  Sure, there was a skill ceiling higher than just mashing buttons – but mashing buttons was so fulfilling!  That generated a lot of hard walls to climb.  Anjanath, Pink Rathian, Nergigante… those buggers were death incarnate.  I had to really learn the game mechanics to get past them – in particular monster weaknesses, attack patterns, and the i-frame dodge.  That last one is extremely useful for Nergigante’s attacks that can/will 1-shot you.  If your weapon is sheathed, and you dodge, you’ll actually throw yourself to the ground and be immune to damage for about a second.  Given you need to sheath, it’s not something you can quickly react to.

The Charge Blade has that dodge as well as a thing called Guard Point.  I’m pretty sure the Sword & Shield have this too.  The thing here is that you have 3 particular movements that present your shield in front of you, and if the monster hits that shield they take damage and you take none.  It took a while for me to learn the timing of this, and Diablos is the best one to try this with first.

When I figured out how to properly use Guard Point, my gameplay changed.  I tend to be somewhat conservative, looking for an opening, and then striking.  Effective use of Guard Points means I can go all out, and counter 90% of physical attacks.  And with a boosted shield, I can do even more damage, countered with an immediate SAED.

It took a while to figure out the timing, but wow, does it ever make combat more engaging.

Games are a series of meaningful choices.  Meaningful.

Snakes and Ladders, Candyland, games of that type have no choices.  It’s entirely random.  Something like Yahtzee has choices based on statistical chance, so the odds certainly favor someone strong in math than just a random roll.  The rolls in one turn have minimal impact on the next turn, just the overall score.  Compare that to say, Risk, where early decisions (and random luck) will impact nearly every other turn that follows.  The complete other side of that is Chess or Go, with no randomness with players who understand the mechanics.

Then we look at replay value, which is often predicated on the number of choices present.  7th Continent is a really good example of a game with a solid set of meaningful choices, but a limited supply.  Once you know that A does B – every time – then you can choose to pick or skip A.  The choice is effectively removed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful choices lately.  MMOs seem to be going more towards the removal of choice, and focus on randomness.  Single player games are all about choices.  Spider-Man, God of War, Horizon, Zelda… all games where the player is in control of their choices, and there’s a clear line between their actions and the consequences.  In the GoW Valkyrie fights, I never once felt cheated by some random event.  They were extremely hard, and each death was painful, but they were all based on clear choices I made.

Running through MHW anew really brings that point home.  I can remember the large scale items of the game, the systems, the layouts of the maps, the types of enemies, and their general habits.  I know that if I need Ancient Bones… well, I’m only going to find them in one place.  Same with Mosswine.  But the specifics, I don’t remember that part.  For example, I know there’s a campsite in the northern Wastes if you drop down a small cubby hole.  I have no idea what materials are required to actually unlock access to it.  I know that Barroth has a tough armor to crack, but there was a way to get around that without Mind’s Eye that eludes me.

It’s a bit like having a lot of puzzle pieces and the picture on the box is fuzzy.  Knowing something but not quite remembering what it is.  It’s both frustrating since you feel like you should know, and fulfilling when you do get it and get a really solid ahhhhhhh.

Long story short, MHW is more fun now since the frustrations of obtuse mechanics isn’t there anymore.  I can focus on executing my strategy, and then the moment to moment events.  Like having to collect 20 mushrooms and ending up killing a Great Jagras and Pukei-Pukei in the same run.  That just doesn’t seem to get old.  Next up is my previous nemesis, Anjanath.  The fire breathing T-Rex.

I have an aversion to repeating tutorials.  Many of them are built for people who have never picked up a controller before.  While I’m sure those people exist, I am not one of them.  Monster Hunter World however, the “newbie” tutorial lasts about 1 minute and it involves moving up two walls and jumping off a dragon’s head.  There are worse things in life.

The tutorials past that point are almost as obtuse as the game itself.  I still recall my first 10 hours on PS4, still not understanding the basics of just food – let alone elemental effects.  There are even embedded videos to show you how to properly use one of the 14 weapons but not a single one does justice.

I have experience with Dual Blades (by far the most offensively mobile), the Switch Axe (easy controls, decent damage), and the Charge Blade (technical, with highest damage potential).  And that’s with hours and hours of practice.  I decided to give the Charge Blade a go as primary in this run, and woo-boy, do I have rust.

Here’s one of the better tutorials for that weapon.  It’s 18 minutes.

Rust is polite.  The first few fights are simple.  Some generic lizards (Jagras), their ugly uncle (Great Jagras), and then the Kula-Ya-Ku (a slow witted bird).  If you can aim, you can take these buggers out.  And that’s my issue with the Charge Blade – aiming.

MH:W has a dance to battles, a rhythm.  You press buttons in a specific sequence, and depending on the state of animation, you press other buttons.  Charge Blade is really strong on that latter item.  I have a shield charge attack that starts with holding a button… press it too long and it deflates.  Charging my shield requires me actively cancelling another attack.  Charging my sword is the same.  If I time it all perfect, then I get the shield charged, more phials, and can launch ultron mode (super amped elemental discharge – or SAED).  That attack can take out 25% of an enemy’s HP.  And if I time it right, I can get 2 of them off during a single enemy stun.

So the potential is there.  I just need some practice to get back into the groove.   Well that’s a bit of a lie, I was never excellent at the Charge Blade.  Dual Blades were my life source, and I took down every possible enemy with that thing.  The true test for any weapon is Nergigante.  Kill him, and you know how to use a weapon.  I did, but never in a single try.  Always room to improve.

So starts my MH:W journey on PC.  I am 2 quests in, haven’t yet managed to eat dirt, an d have hours and hours of things left to unlock.  Knowing they are there to get, and knowing what the benefits are, that’s making this quite an interesting run through.

With WoW fading from view, I’m looking for something else to fill in bits of time.  I have my PS4 connected to a projector in the basement, but since I’m cheap, I don’t have the online services hooked up.  The time played in MHW on the PS4 was solo only.  I did start a recent replay of Horizons, but that time investment will be in fits and spurts.  God of War is still too fresh for a replay… and I unlocked every bit but 3 Valks in the last run.

The gaming laptop has a wide selection of options.  I completed the new season of D3 in a couple days.  Pillars of Eternity is about half way through.  I have an XCOM2 save that I’m holding off on until some of the interesting DLC stuff is out in a few weeks.  Dead Cells and Cuphead are on the wishlist for a rainy day – which seems to be the only type of day around here lately…

Nope, I’m heading back into the MH World.  It’s been a good 3 months since my last battle, and there are still massive amounts of content that I have yet to see.  It will certainly make the multiplayer aspect of that game an option.  There were quite a few battles that made me tear out my hair.  Tempered Teostra is on that list.  Plus, there’s something about the MH model of continual progression that just works.

The strategic layer of targeting specific monsters and making goals… that hits me right in the good spot.  Unlocking new camps, new pieces of food, finally getting that rare drop… feels good man!  The tactical layer of preparing for a battle, laying out the lines and traps. Then the actual battles have great moment-to-moment energy.  The individual phases of health, the set time periods of a battle in a specific location…it’s hard to get bored on any specific battle since they often have something new to add.

I remember farming a Tempered Jyuratodus (the fish one).  8 battles, 8 different fights.  Bazelgeuse joined a few times to throw me off my game.  The various little bits added make for an enjoyable and repeatable game.

I did dual blades last time.  I’m thinking full switch axe this one.  Always one for the glass canon approach.

Less interesting in the game as I am around the aura of the game.

Love the lens focus trick to make them look like miniatures

Recall that Anthem is launching on Feb 22, 2019.  Also note that while we know there are 4 classes, no one really knows what any of them do.  There are 4 people per server… which is more like Diablo 3 I guess, than Destiny?  No one has seen anything other than the demo level.  There’s been no news since PAX, over a month ago.

Oh, there’s some info on how to pre-order, and that the demo launched on Feb 1, and that early access is 1 week before launch.

I do recall when Anthem was being presented as the bee’s knees.  Not so much a Destiny killer (Destiny did that all on it’s own), but certainly as a competitor in the same vein as say, The Division.

In this age of early access, with media leaks all over the place… it’s easy to have an idea of how a multiplayer game is looking many months ahead of time.  It’s a bit surreal to have no real idea of what’s going on in this game at this point.  I can speculate until my head explodes, but why bother?

While I’m sure the developers are doing all they can to make a great game, we are talking about EA.  The company who makes mint off pre-orders.  Maybe they are waiting until the November rush?

As I mentioned a whole while back, I am just getting some popcorn and watching this story unfold.

Force of habit I suppose, but every new D3 season I make a new character.  More specifically, I re-use an existing one by converting them to season mode.  Long ago I ran out of character slots… and I cannot recall the last time I played in non-seasonal mode.

I usually level 2-3 characters then move on.  Typically the first one is a monk, since they are quite effective at leveling and are very fast in terms of movement with starter 70 gear.  This time, I opted for Demon Hunter, since it’s brain dead easy.

The leveling portion is as simple as always.  Get a Leoric’s Crown, run Nether Rifts until 60, then run bounties.  Or, get powerleveled and hit 70 in 10 minutes.  Going through the process solo, you can see that Blizz has streamlined where possible.  And spending 2 hours or so, doing it alone, isn’t too bad.  By the time I hit 70, I had the Ring of Royal Grandeur (so 1 less item for a set bonus), Kunai’s Cube (the magic making box), and a enough Death’s Breath/gold to upgrade every crafter to max level.

A while back now, Blizz put in Headrig’s Gifts for completing 3 specific steps of a hero’s journey.  Each of those gifts gives 2 drops of a specific armor set, per class, per season.  For DH, this is Unhallowed Essence, which is primarily a Multishot build.  You buff this with a Yang’s Recurve Bow, and a Dead Man’s Shot quiver.

The “trick” here is to craft level 70 gear and clear out the first Gift task.  Very easy.  The 2nd one is a bit tougher, and you’ll need a decent weapon for the damage boost – doesn’t really matter what type.  With the gear from the 2nd Gift, the 3rd task should be doable for most classes.  Worst case, you run some public rifting groups to gear up a bit.

So I ended night 1 with a level 70 DH, and all 3 gift steps complete.  Night 2 was spent initially getting the gems I wanted from Greater Rifts and getting the good ones to level 25.  Each successful run gave +5 levels to a gem, and runs took 4 minutes on average.  It was a bit more than an hour to complete this step.

After that, it’s more about chain running public rift groups, at the highest comfortable level.  That started at T6, then T8, and a while at T10.  T10 was where the big difference was in gear drops.  It was raining legendaries/set pieces.  I easily swapped out my current set for “optimal gear”, found a really good Witching Hour belt (great for any DPS), some Nemesis Bracers (for extra elites at every shrine), a set of 2 rings that had crit%/critdamage + socket, and a near perfectly rolled amulet with dex/crit%/critdamage + socket.  Those last 3 pieces were a massive DPS boost.

What was left was a decent weapon.  No real luck in drops, so I went another route.  I crafted 20 bows and tried upgrading them with Kunai’s Cube.  Of the 20, I ended up with 3 Yang’s Recurve, 1 of which was Ancient (meaning higher stats).  It had generally good stats, but the damage was on the low side.  I enchanted a much higher damage range (from 1400 to 1950), put in a ramaladadingdong to get a socket on the weapon, and proceeded to face melt everything.

T13 (or GR60) is where I draw the finish line for any character.  My DH hit that goal in 2 nights.  At this point, there’s only marginal gains to be had on each piece of gear.  I am quite literally searching for perfection in order to progress.  Even Paragon levels are coming 10+ at a time when I close a GR, so I’m well ahead of that curve.

Did RNGsus gift me with good rolls on the 2nd night?  Darn right!  My Crusader from season 14 didn’t ever get past T10 due to bad luck.  But that’s it now.  The DH is, for my purposes, done.  And with that, I think so is Season 15.  No way I can replicate this luck again.

Wilhelm’s comment was the trigger.  Testing is indeed hard.

I talk a bit about my RL job, without too many specifics.  At a general level, it’s a service for about 130,000 users and deals in particular with smartphones – so one of those things where an issue/outage has a rather up-front-and-personal impact.

Massive project, great team, more stress than is reasonable, less time than we need.  Sound familiar?

Typically, projects in my organization are full bake affairs.  It means that the entirety of all functionality is present before going live.  That makes projects take a supreme amount of time, since the last 10% is of function usually takes 90% of the overall time.  One of the early decisions I took was to take an iterative approach.  There are SDLC methodologies I could go into… but that can get boring quick.  TLDR; the large project was split into 6 releases.  The first 4 were time locked – e.g. what can we do in a month per, and the last 2 were more complicated and took a bit longer.  When version 1.0 launched, and it didn’t have all the bits working, it took a lot of effort to re-train people that this was OK and planned.  End result was feedback from 1.0 fed into 1.1, and so on for the duration of the project.  Not scope creep… but refinement of the functions.

Getting those releases ready was a challenge.  We had to build new testing environments and new processes.  We had to find more people to do the work.  Traditionally, all testing was internal, and it went from Dev — Staging — Production.  That wasn’t all that effective. So we added a new test environment, parallel to Staging, specifically for client testing and modified UAT process to essentially have public alphas.

Alpha vs Beta

Everyone has their own opinion, fine.  My is that an alpha is a release that is not feature complete, while a beta is feature complete.  The first is to test for success, the second to test for failure.  Historically, we’d do all this internally and when clients did do any testing, it was more of a sales show that actual testing.

We turned that around and asked each client to designate a representative for testing.  Huge benefits, since these folks were generally testing things we never even thought of trying.  It extended our testing window by about 20%, but the product bug rate dropped down by a ridiculous margin.

Our bug tracking system was further integrated into our release schedule.  Where previously we would launch with acceptable high impact bugs, we moved that down to medium because we were able to detect the bugs much earlier in the process.  That gave time to either fix it, or apply the mitigation/workaround to smooth out the bump.

Transparency

The other thing we did was publish the bug list.  Well the ones that weren’t security related at least.  It’s was a big file at the start, and quite a few bugs kept with us for multiple releases.  Some are out of our control, as the software developer needs to do some overhauling.

The core benefit here was that people complained a whole lot less if they knew that we were aware and had some sort of plan to address it.   It was a full time job to keep this list up to date and communications open with the clients.  They’d get a report, put it on the list, and another team would do the assessment.

Delays

There were quite a few times where a large release had to be postponed due to a major bug found late in the cycle.  In June we found a critical error that was patched by the vendor.  Our internal tests were clean on that patch, but the client testing found some serious problems.   That extra set of eyes found an issue that would have drowned our support team in tickets.

The thing is, by not drowning in tickets, we were able to resolve the issue faster as our focus was pre-emptive rather than re-active.  Sure, we took it on the chin for a delay to a critical function but it’s always better to be late and working, than early and broken.  And it’s even more important for overall sanity of the team.

Overall

Solid testing is how you get a game like Spider-Man or BotW rather than Alien: Colonial Marines.  Every single one of us has seen a game that didn’t go through enough testing, and yet was released.  In nearly all cases, that was an abject failure that cost that company dearly.  For every FF14 that comes back to the front, there are a dozen or more Hellgates.  People will continue to engage with a company if there’s a relationship, if there’s trust.  Otherwise, they will find alternatives (if they even exist).  And trust takes a while to build, and a fraction of time to lose.

Testing has proven to me to be one of the best ways to build and maintain that trust level, that being transparent and honest with the clients that that their issues are acknowledged and there’s a plan to address them.  It takes an inordinate amount of time and skill to manage this type of relationship, but the results are worth every bit.