Sunday, April 20, 2014

AQW Rants: The Essence of Farming

All good things must come to an end, they say. Fortunately, this also happens to bad things (and games), too. I was dangerously near to a well-deserved quit rage, but after watching a couple of videos and tweaking my clearly under-leveled party, I managed to defeat the final boss in Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2 (watch my previous blog entry if you're curious to know what I think about the whole game). After a rather unfortunate tentative to play the classic dungeon crawler Shining In The Darkness I had to abandon that because of... technical issues.

And that leads to the topic of this journal rant: the magnificent, seemingly unending and incredibly entertaining  (*sarcasm*) quest for the Blinding Light of Destiny in Adventure Quest Worlds. Now, this particular quest involves gathering a massive amount (we're talking about thousands) of specific drops known as Undead Essences and Undead Energies in order to forge a super-cool weapon that gives the name to the quest itself. The craziest thing it's that I'm not actually interested in the weapon itself (which I'll keep anyway, of course) but the achievement and satisfaction that will hopefully come when I'll finish all that insane farming.


                                              "Spirit Orbs x5" ? Better luck next time....
                                         

The quest will take entire days of slaughtering the very same undead enemies in the very same area (that's was farming in every MMORPG means, after all). I'm pretty sure that I won't complete the whole thing in the near future, but at least I'll use this few weeks to give it a good run. My true objective will be trying to collect all those drops and getting to the level cap (which is currently 60) as late as possible. Why, you ask ? Because the idea of not having a level progression as you defeat your enemies anymore is very detrimental to me in enjoying a game like this. For this reason, I will avoid using those X2 Experience Boosts bonuses that those nice guys from Artix Entertainment keep throwing at me every now and then.

After all, one must put some of those Youtube "Epic Music" Playlists at use... right ? ;)