Loot and Mental Breaks

Rainy Weekend

The problem with three day weekends… is that ultimately you find yourself in need of a fourth day.  While I kept a pretty strict schedule, for whatever reason having three days off in a row tends to shift you out of work mode and into vacation mode.  This morning getting up was absolute hell, and my wife is going through the same thing.  I watched her start to get up only to face plant back on the bed…  a move I likely would have tried had I not needed to get up and turn off the alarm.  In the grand scheme of things I managed to get to bed fairly early last night, or at least early for me.  To make matters worse I am supposed to be in this conference call most of the day…  which for those indoctrinated means fighting desperately to keep from falling asleep and snoring as someone on a speaker phone drones on at length about something.

To make matters worse I am freaking freezing this morning.  Not literally but we are going through one of those periods that we do here in Oklahoma where I am uncertain if we should have on the heater or the air conditioner.  So since it is 55F outside I am upstairs with my zipper hoodie on trying to warm up.  We were supposed to have this lovely Easter weekend, but in truth it was cloudy, windy and rained most of the day.  We went out at one point to visit family in the hospital and it only managed to warm up to around 53F.  The highlight of yesterday however was that getting out and about, and it being relatively lousy out meant that we were able to go to our favorite Desi restaurant and not have any semblance of a line.  Their awesome Desi Rice ended up making both lunch and dinner for me yesterday.  There are times I wish we had a place closer, but I think it would lose some of the specialness of having to make a pilgrimage to go eat there.

Guild Runs

One of the simple pleasures of the weekend came from running lots of content with my guild.  I am amped that folks are getting into their 50s and needing content that will actually pay out in tomestones.  This has been a point of internal conflict for me lately, is that I desperately want/need to cap poetics, but I also want to be there to help people when they need runs.  With the influx of people into our guild I could easily spend every waking moment tanking this or that for one of our free company members.  The problem is for the low level stuff it puts me no closer to my weekly cap goals.  Now that the 130 weapon is within sight, I really really want to get one.  This means that I am going to need to gather up 1300 poetics, which in turn means that I am going to need to cap several weeks in a row to reach that.  So it frustrates me that while I enjoy running stuff for the lowbies, that I am spending time on content that won’t get me any closer to that goal.

Saturday and Sunday however, lots of people needed lots of upper level content which allowed me to feel useful and helpful, but at the same time keep inching towards the goal of hitting 450 poetics for the week.  Over the course of the day we ran experts and hardmodes, each of them slowly incrementing that total so that by the time I slept I was only around 100 poetics away, which seems doable tonight between raiding, the daily expert, and potentially running the new trial.  That honestly is my huge hope for tonight is that we will be able to run the Steps of Faith trial really quickly, because I have tried with two random groups only to have half of the group bail on me after a single failure.  That trial is also gumming up the works right now of the trial roulette because the moment people random into it, they are abandoning party and taking the penalty.  The result is that people seem to just be avoiding the trial queue, because we ran a few this weekend and they took forever to form.

Loot and Mental Breaks

I’ve spent what feels like a silly amount of time playing Darkest Dungeon this weekend, and I have to say I am still loving it.  Essentially I have been playing through at least one adventure per day, which seems to be about the right amount for me in one sitting.  After that I log into whatever game I am going to be playing for the night.  At this point I have lost one entire party, a couple of singles and pushed three characters to the point of having a mental break.  That said I am having a blast doing it and I finally defeated the Apprentice Necromancer, the first real objective in the game.  Right now my ideal party would include a Bounty Hunter, a Highwayman, a Jester and an Occultist.  No particular reason other than the group comp seems to work really well for me.  As far as healers go I really really like the Occultist, because I guess I am really good at winning the roll that keeps him from bleeding my characters.  I have seen as much as 16 points of health healed on a single turn by an occultist, whereas the plague doctor seems to only be able to dink heal single points.

The bounty hunter right now is my absolute favorite hero, but that might just be because he looks pretty much like every character I tend to play in games.  I love the whole grappling hook thing, and the ability to use it as either a ranged weapon or to pull targets within his melee range.  Highwayman just seems really strong with his range abilities, and if the target can bleed he has a nice attack there as well.  Jester is really brutal, with two attacks that deal a lot of bleed damage.  The biggest problem I have with them is that one of their best attacks is this jump dirk ability that also places them in the first slot in your party, potentially pushing the bounty hunter out of melee.  So I try really hard not to actually use that ability unless I think I can finish someone off with it, because the person in the first party position tends to soak some of the worst attacks.  So far I am going into dungeons with lots of food, bandages and torches and doing remarkably well.  I am sure as I go further the game is going to get more punitive.