Choose My Adventure: The steady climb upward in Throne & Liberty levels and power

I’ve finally gotten to a point of reasonable comfort in Throne and Liberty. I’ve definitely settled on my weapons, obviously. I’m starting to get a build going in terms of what I consider stat priority. And I have the skills and passives I want equipped. It’s all coming together slowly but surely – always a nice feeling.

I’ve written about this sensation for this column more than a few times, so I’m probably not going to repeat myself too much (ideally), but I am going to report that a few of my concerns that I was harboring in last week’s Choose My Adventure are a bit lessened – largely because I would get some sudden big injections of materials.

Tracking where all of these little gubbins came from wasn’t too easy, I’ll be honest, but mostly that’s because I wasn’t really paying too much attention to begin with. There were many points along my leveling climb when I took a look at some of the skills I accidentally neglected to improve with skill books, which saw me brace myself mentally for a few moments of open grinding in order to hunt down the things I needed, but just as I was preparing myself to do so after I told myself I would finish a quest line step – bam – I was immediately smashed with growth items.

I suppose I should be thankful, but all I’m left with is this still-lingering sense of dread that I’m going to have to bite that grinder bullet and get to harvesting, especially when I look back and realize that some of my buttons haven’t been upgraded. In the end I’m at least trying to do better at using my materials wisely, and the couple of times that I have had to get into that routine still made for an enjoyable experience – or at least they were varied enough that I didn’t feel completely compelled into one or two activities. Even if that makes me wrong and less efficient, I’m OK with that; my enjoyment is always going to trump efficiency.

But I’m mostly summarizing how things went down. Let me get a bit more granular, first by pointing out that the poll decision to seek open world events wasn’t… bad so much as a bit of a miss. The events in question run on a regular schedule, and there’s a list, a calendar, and notifications that can be set to alert me to when an open world event is happening. At the same time, it ended up being the Lost Ark problem in that I wasn’t really willing to set aside a moment in my life for one or two open events.

So I ended up doing the second selected activity: co-op dungeons.

The next in the list – a level 30 delve that would end in a chimera fight – did indeed ramp up things a bit more in terms of difficulty for the final boss encounter. The actual movements from trash mobs to mini-bosses were not exactly what I’d call astonishing, but those mediocre moments were swept away by another mechanically interesting final encounter. This fight involved using the grappling hook to interrupt raid-wide damage splashes and one mechanic where someone would have to stand in front of a stunned teammate to take an otherwise deadly fireball. I sort of wished that last mechanic wasn’t a one-shot, but I managed to sort it out.

Healing is also becoming a bit more interesting if a bit harder to do now. I’ve finally learned there was a good reason to swap to my wand weapon instead of my mage staff (doing so engages a second series of buffs unlocked in the weapon’s mastery track) and the two healing skills I have are being improved enough that they’re making a big impact. Still, it would be kind of nice if I had more than two healing buttons. Chalk it up to my general discomfort with being a green DPS. I’m learning, though.

When I did manage to luckily log in right as an open world event was started, I came away kind of unimpressed. This admittedly was only the second such event I had done before, only instead of killing wolves to bring their tails into hunter camps, I was killing sandworms to use their spittle in order to gather up mushroom chunks. It was still ultimately a race to mindlessly slaughter as much wildlife as possible, all for some rewards that didn’t really seem to make that much of an impact.

Once I got to the next level milestones and their associated narratives, I kept on following along the breadcrumb trails and watching things unfold. The story lines I’ve experienced are once again just fine. I’ve since helped someone get revenge on a gigantic sand worm, and I stopped a sneaky demon from doing something sneaky and demonic. I’m being a realm-wandering hero. C’est la guerre.

Reading over all of this, it’s probably easy to jump to the conclusion that I’m shrugging my shoulders at Throne and Liberty. In a few ways I admit that I sort of am, but I have to acknowledge that I’m enjoying the sensation of gaining power and the ability to keep on taking newer challenges in terms of dungeons, public delves, and the solo Taedal’s Tower. As I said earlier, it’s all coming together.

At the time of this writing, I’m now sitting at level 43 and once again at the point when I have to earn a couple of levels in order to get to the next storyline and the next levels’ worth of advancement. That means it’s time for another poll, only this time I’m not going to repeat the same question I asked last time.

As I’ve been moving forward along the game’s leveling trail, I’ve sort of stopped caring about circling back to the side objectives and other little mini-quests that make up the leveling journey. Usually that’s easy to brush aside, but in terms of rewards, I am leaving a fair bit on the table in my wide-eyed focus on the newer and the next, and that would be a shame to not get all of the goodies. However, the routine I’ve been following – doing current co-op dungeons or sticking to more on-level things like zone missions or contracts, has been serving me well so far. That means you fine folks have to decide what I should do during my next push forward.

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Polls will close down at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, October 18th, as you all know by now. I’m once again going to have to fight the urge to keep playing until I see how the voting shakes down. I suppose that’s a good sign that I’m enjoying my time in Solisium. I just wish I could shake this sensation that I’m going to run face-first into that materials wall.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.