smokinsid

[smokinsid]

Seeking help urgently- just trying to live.

(This is an updated version of my original post- I've made CashApp and PayPal accounts on the advice of someone who saw the post and added them as links.)

Hey there, it's Moxie- trans woman, lesbian, and your favorite mutual's fourth favorite mutual. I recently lost my job and have been seeking employment ever since. In the intervening weeks, I've burned through my savings paying for necessities like food, have gone completely off of HRT due to losing my insurance, and my phone bill recently chewed through over half of what I had left.

These are hard posts to make because I'm a stubborn old goat and feel like I'm creating a terrible burden just by asking. But I can't ignore the financial strain any longer, and I need to support my household and uphold my financial responsibilities. That's a pretty serious challenge with no income.

While I continue to file applications and distribute my resume, I need to be able to help with utilities and if possible cover my half of the house. We live in Kansas now, so thankfully the charges aren't as extravagant as they might've been if we still lived in Washington, but they're still impossible to pay with pocket change.

If you're able and it wouldn't be too much trouble for you, I'd be grateful for any help I can get.

https://account.venmo.com/u/robotmoxie https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/moxiegarner https://cash.app/$robotmoxie I'm setting a goal of $500, which accounts for half of utilities and half of the payment on the house for this month. I'll update regularly.

$75/$500

Thank you to those who have already reached out, your help means the world to me.

[smokinsid]

Seeking help urgently- just trying to live.

(This is an updated version of my original post- I've made CashApp and PayPal accounts on the advice of someone who saw the post and added them as links.)

Hey there, it's Moxie- trans woman, lesbian, and your favorite mutual's fourth favorite mutual. I recently lost my job and have been seeking employment ever since. In the intervening weeks, I've burned through my savings paying for necessities like food, have gone completely off of HRT due to losing my insurance, and my phone bill recently chewed through over half of what I had left.

These are hard posts to make because I'm a stubborn old goat and feel like I'm creating a terrible burden just by asking. But I can't ignore the financial strain any longer, and I need to support my household and uphold my financial responsibilities. That's a pretty serious challenge with no income.

While I continue to file applications and distribute my resume, I need to be able to help with utilities and if possible cover my half of the house. We live in Kansas now, so thankfully the charges aren't as extravagant as they might've been if we still lived in Washington, but they're still impossible to pay with pocket change.

If you're able and it wouldn't be too much trouble for you, I'd be grateful for any help I can get.

https://account.venmo.com/u/robotmoxie https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/moxiegarner https://cash.app/$robotmoxie I'm setting a goal of $500, which accounts for half of utilities and half of the payment on the house for this month. I'll update regularly.

$75/$500

Thank you to those who have already reached out, your help means the world to me.

[smokinsid]

Gotta post Rucks's new look- redder and radder than ever before!

She's gonna be the favorite even over her charmingly crusty uncle at this rate. Helps that Healzerker is such a fun build!

Took a lot of work to get boots that work, and even then they're a little urgh argh I'm a warrior graagh spikes plates etc...

[smokinsid]

god i should really knuckle down and make legendary armor in gw2

but i will not

in 12 years i've made 4 legendary items- HMS Divinity, Flameseeker Prophecies, The Moot, and The Bifrost

i have yet to teach myself how to have fun with the "journey" of making a legendary, because i really enjoy the insane resource cost and the related story beats and things of that nature

but then you get to the recipe and it's like "welllllll you'll need a stack of God Damn Everything, twice," and i just don't wanna

if there were alternative conditions for getting those parts of the craft done, i'd do 'em- but then, so would probably everyone else

i don't even have a solution in mind i just wish it were easier

and then if it was, legendaries would be less legendary, so i don't want that

i think it should be a pain in the ass but i personally do not want to go through that pain in the ass, yknow

maybe someone can teach me how to do it the fun way and i'm just missing something, idk

[smokinsid]

bonus:

ME, MOXIE, CHILLIN OUT FRONT TO WELCOME EVERYONE IN!!!!

im having the time of my life LOOK at them all!!!

(my only request is to set them in idle poses/emote loops can we do that for me anet)

[smokinsid]

im having the time of my life LOOK at them all!!!

(my only request is to set them in idle poses/emote loops can we do that for me anet)

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got sick of not having research notes so i just milled 8 fucking stacks of potent svanir slaying potions

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spear is the best thing that's ever happened to sid

you can reach the bad guys

AND hit 'em!

[smokinsid]

@rata-whitz here's that build you asked for:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PegEQjWWADmVxsYxYRPlFrB-DSJYyRVfhkTI0RVESiI8xgiEE7HDoC-e

i think i forgot food but i tend toward beef rendang and a magnanimous tuning crystal

theoretically you could grab trapper runes for flat higher condition damage but i think when i did that i ended up needing a different sigil

also i like to run two of the same weapon on engineer- a "builder" to give me 25 stacks of Corruption, and then I get out of combat and swap to the spear with Bursting on it to really capitalize on those free stats

you also have ample access to condi cleanse, and the 19 seconds of Resolution on Elixir B can keep you from bursting yourself if you get into one of those titan boon corruption pools lol

anyway have fun iterate on this make it glam

for my needs it already rocks but i can see the potential and it's sky high

running full ritualist gear spear mechanist and getting 25k burning ticks in point-blank aoe while having 32k health and my mech has 70k health

you could probably easily get better numbers doing a real serious dps rotation with grenades and whatnot, maybe going holosmith and taking at least one pistol if not two

HOWEVER,

for me, this is the most fun engi has ever felt

i just wade into the middle of a fight, go completely nuts, and everything dies real quick with minimal effort

if the mech synergies weren't so fun, I'd also consider holo for PBM so that approaching me at all causes one zillion fiery explosions

if you haven't played with engi spear yet i highly recommend it

[smokinsid]

running full ritualist gear spear mechanist and getting 25k burning ticks in point-blank aoe while having 32k health and my mech has 70k health

you could probably easily get better numbers doing a real serious dps rotation with grenades and whatnot, maybe going holosmith and taking at least one pistol if not two

HOWEVER,

for me, this is the most fun engi has ever felt

i just wade into the middle of a fight, go completely nuts, and everything dies real quick with minimal effort

if the mech synergies weren't so fun, I'd also consider holo for PBM so that approaching me at all causes one zillion fiery explosions

if you haven't played with engi spear yet i highly recommend it

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it took every ounce of strength in my body to remember Forgal's name

sorry old man

[smokinsid]

Alright, alright, let's talk about SotO. Keep your chin up. This'll be long, but as fair as I can make it. It's not all negative, but it's not all positive either. My hope is to just be real about it. Feedback welcome. Blast me in reblogs if you don't agree, I'm genuinely eager for the conversation.

The kryptis are emotion. It stands to reason that this would be a story focused on emotion. How the commander feels about this or that. How the world reacts when you put your emotions into it. That's pretty cool, and after a decade of more and more personal-feeling dragonslaying, separating us from our friends in order to deep-dive into our Commander's own heart is a really cool move. I have to give credit to what was intended.

There's a sense the entire time of throttled execution that I want to talk about. The story is, at all times, not bold enough to deliver the emotional payload it wants. It's not big enough, bad enough- and it's not a question of stakes, either. I advocated for a lower-stakes jaunt into exciting but less apocalyptic territories at the end of EoD.

Eparch is not a threatening villain. The reveal that he lied about his army and manipulated the stakes was... contrary to what we saw in the map, in one hand- and in the other hand, a deception that undermined him as a threat right before approaching his throne.

I recall when he was first revealed wishing that he was just, physically bigger. Not like Cerus. Like Primordus. I wanted him to be speaking to us from that precipice at the arena and then suddenly loom into view, towering over the columns, taking up the horizon. If he's so full of the strength of others, let him grow huge from it, so I can feel the scope of what he's taken and feel small in his presence. I play Asura- at no point did I feel like I could not beat his skinny ass to a pulp with my own class abilities and absolutely no help.

His timer in the fight still running while he's in his Dipshit Cowardice Bubble did not impress me, and I still beat the clock with like 60% of the limit to spare.

He's weak, he's anonymous- he's revealed only to immediately clam back up in his tower while everyone else continues to just talk about him- and if I'm being perfectly honest, the best parallel for him is our old pal, Zhaitan.

Zhaitan loved to send bits of itself as far as it could reach, while the dragon itself remained in Arah. In some ways I liked that- it was the traditional dragon that hunted goats in the countryside and hoarded treasure, but with a necromancer's minion-mastery twist.

Now imagine falling short of Zhaitan, that much-reviled old lizard, in terms of story delivery. Sure, we fight Eparch toe to toe, but he's weak. If Lonely Tower had released at the beginning of SotO instead of now as a flashback, it might've helped us better understand and respect him as a threat, much like how we had the entire personal story past Claw Island to understand Zhaitan.

But we didn't. So to continue looking at this parallel, we see a relatively short, strained jaunt to Zhaitan, with a couple of hairpin turn deaths to sting us emotionally (they fall flat, alas), and suddenly a Big, Easy Fight against a Guy Who Sucks.

Do you remember the Asura woman in the personal story- if you let her spouse die, she never speaks to you again, even in later expansions? Remember Tybalt, Cieran, and Forgal? That stuff hurts good. This NPC won't talk to you because you let her down and broke her heart. These characters grew to love you in ways that, especially for the time, were uncommon for characters in MMOs. That's the kind of thing that this truncated expac didn't have time for.

And let's reflect on IBS while we're at it. I'm never going to stop laughing at it sharing an acronym with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, but it genuinely felt like the best they could do working in Bellevue, WA, in the midst of serious covid restrictions. They even went back and re-voiced a chapter that it wasn't safe to voice at the time, remember that? It spoke to an interest in doing their damnedest to deliver the best product they could. And it was good! The final fight couldn't be what they wanted it to be, and I'll always laugh at "so, this is Pact justice?" but it was compelling, at least.

We spend a lot of time in SotO standing still. Selecting a dialogue option and listening to NPCs read their lines. Now, I love Peitha and could listen to her talk all day, but so much of what you should know as the player in position of Wayfinder is stowed away in text-only books and collections. Maybe that's a budgetary constraint. Voice acting is expensive. I don't mind reading, personally- but I didn't, because I was already spending so much time standing around!

I'm not one of those people that thinks of my player character as a killing machine or some kind of mercenary being deployed by the higher echelons to do the practical job of killing a way to the boss. Sid is a radio DJ. Enid is a physicist. Rucks is a troubadour. These are conversational, curious characters who are absolutely invested in what's happening in the world around them.

But my tools as a player for engaging with that world are the ten buttons at the bottom of my screen. You have to challenge me to play the game using those buttons, in order to hook me in and invest me. Kick my ass! Make me fight back! That's part of a great story, and I play all three cruise control classes- Necro, Engi, and Warrior. I want you to make me break bars and use my control effects and feel like I'm under threat so that when I win, it feels like winning!

SotO taught my foul little chain-smoking radio gremlin how to dab. It let me unlock a skyscale the easy way. It made me feel gay things for a twelve foot tall woman made of meat and nightmares. For these things I'll always be grateful.

With strictly tertiary stakes- a secret war on the fringes of reality- expressed through random invasions not much different from the random invasions from Joko's boys, a pinched story with lots of standing around, and a truly pitiful, downright un-respectable asswipe of a villain that makes Zhaitan look like a properly-told story, I have to say that SotO only delivered on its emotional payload in the small places.

The relationships between members of the Ward. The way Peitha grows close to you and comes to rely on you so personally. The banter, more than the beats- and that's as much a problem as it is something to be proud of. Some games don't deliver on character personality. In World of Warcraft: Legion, you got Khadgar being smarmy and Illidan being awful and hilarious- but these are integrated into the most important story moments. When Illidan opens the way to Argus right in the middle of the fucking sky, he has the biggest shit-eating grin you've ever seen on his face, because he knows that it's funny. He knows that he just did the craziest shit that Khadgar's ever seen, and Khadgar's been dealing with demons since the Second War!

So why not have that in our cutscenes? Something as simple as coming to the throne room to threaten Eparch, and seeing Peitha curl her hand around your Wayfinder's shoulder. Isgarren is basically our Khadgar, and he's also a big piece of shit, and he gets some good lines reminiscent of "A Wizard appears exactly when he means to," but we can lean more into that- rather than ask everyone around us if Isgarren is coming, why not... have him fail us? Have him tell us that we can call on him, and then we do, and then have him tell us no.

It's not about how these characters harm and help each other, is what I'm driving at. It's how they harm us, on the other side of the computer screen. You, the player, should be provoked into an emotional response because it's motivating! And if you think being motivated isn't a big deal, I want you to consider that the thing that provokes Kryptis portals to higher intensities are items called motivations.

Arenanet has demonstrated a fluency in the language of emotion, and made a valiant attempt at getting inside our player character's heart. But my take is that in doing so, they left the actual player out of the equation.

I can read to my heart's content, and there's good stuff to read. But I can do that without the game, as everything's transcribed on the wiki. If you want me to be part of your world and tug at my heartstrings, you've gotta provoke me.

And if you can't do that with your main villain, you need a new main villain.

[smokinsid]

My friends @mmoxie and @mothwizard need help covering a vet bill + utilities, please share and/or donate if you can! Thank you!

[smokinsid]

hey. asuraheads. yall got a discord? i wanna get my stories in front of more people who'd get a kick out of em, and brainstorm ideas and whatnot

let me know in comments, messages, or an ask or something, i ain't picky- i just wanna talk about these characters some more yknow