October 2016 - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Plus Anxiety

October 25, 2016 by Belghast

Me and this chest do not get along well. It is not so much that the chest itself offends, or the items that come from it… but instead the process of getting it to unlock. When I first heard about Mythic Plus dungeons… I thought it was pretty freaking great. It sounded a lot like the Greater Rift system in Diablo 3, and I was completely on board with it… until I actually set down to do one. I don’t handle timers well, namely they cause me so much more anxiety than they should. Literally if you put the easiest quest in the world on a timer… I will avoid doing it like the plague because it feels like every fiber of my being has to be concentrated on beating that timer. I mean I should have know this going into Mythic Plus content given that Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 cause the exact same sort of roller coaster of stress. To make matters worse… the first several keystones that we attempted we failed at miserably, which made me feel like the biggest failure of a tank in existence. This mental block against timers goes way back in my psyche, and it isn’t something I can entirely control. Once upon a time when I was a youngin… I went from being in the highest performing mathematics class to the lowest performing one… all because of a timer. There were these worksheets called mad minutes, where you were judged on how fast you were able to do math problems… not how correctly you worked them. The grading scale was skewed in a way that not making it to a problem was twice as bad as missing one. I’ve always been a fairly pensive person, and even though I push myself not to be… that is my nature and when you put me on the clock it puts me into panic mode.

All of this said… last night we ran two Mythic Plus dungeons and we were able to complete both of them before the keystone expired. So I guess I am managing the panic mode, well enough to push through a dungeon in time to get progress. Now I will probably NEVER go for the whole multiple chest bullshit, because I lack the drive to attempt to get multiple chests… when the loot in said chests is more than likely shit. On the positive last night I managed to pull a 5 item level higher version of the trinket I like, getting it at 845… which still seems really low to me given the effort. That however is a completely different rant for a different day because honestly I feel like every tier of mythic plus is 5 to 10 item levels too low for the effort spent in running it. What is the tale of today however is that apparently I am working through my anxiety with being on the timer. I still over prepare for this process and try and make sure there is nothing that could possibly interrupt my focus while running the dungeon. It was a huge boon last night when we got revenge on Halls of Valor… which is one of the early pluses that we attempted and failed at least twice. The entire goal of last night was simply to get the chest from our order hall unlocked that you can see above in the screenshot from Skyhold, however I will absolutely walk away with two victories that beat the timer… one of which was good enough to absorb a wipe on the final boss and still managed to pull out a win. Plus will likely always be a stress factor for me, because that timer… feels so insanely oppressive. I tried my best NOT to watch the timer, because it is one of those situations that so long as I didn’t think about it I was largely fine.

Journey Completed

October 24, 2016 by Belghast

This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey. I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go. Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days. For lack of a better word… Season 8 completely caught me off guard. Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days. Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort. I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab. It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content. I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further. This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build. We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live. Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.

I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner. Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set. This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance. This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance. I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing. Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected. The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season. If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.

However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season. There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season. All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch. I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now… I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them. Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together. This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience. This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew. This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me. In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process. Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements. That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do… collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.

Seasonal Bits

October 21, 2016 by Belghast

Tonight begins the next season for Diablo 3, and I have to admit much like season 7 this one completely snuck up on me. Were it not for my friend Grace the beginning of the season would have passed me by completely. For the last several of these we have done a Friday night vigil as we attempt to grind our way up to 70 on a brand new set of seasonal characters. Once again I think I am going to go with a Demon Hunter, largely because they seemed super easy to push through the seasonal process and at least get high enough to collect the cosmetic goodies. I am just not super into Diablo 3 right now, the evidence being that it just got removed from my side bar. The challenge is that I can only have so many games that I actively care about at one time. Right now I am spending the bulk of my time playing World of Warcraft, and attempting to steal as much time as humanly possible to feed my love of Destiny. From there I am also juggling in some time for Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV… while at the same time trying to keep a foot in Rift for when the expansion lands there. This scattered approach at gaming has a lot to be desired at times, because it ends up leaving me feeling like no one game is getting the attention it deserves. Diablo 3 fell off the radar once I managed to get last seasons cosmetic items, and I had not even realized the season had closed until Grace talked about merging in her seasonal inventory. This in itself is one hell of a chore, but I find myself getting significantly more mercenary about this process as the seasons go along. Pretty much any legendary that is not ancient quality or part of the actively equipped set of gear… gets sharded.

The above screenshot is just because I wound up setting up a new outfit in Rift, and thought it was cool. I’ve loved the whole shade touched effect since the very first world event, and this time around for their “fall” event they are offering a shade touched skull that I could add to my wardrobe collection. I also picked up the scythe made of bone… because I kinda have a thing for scythes. The other interesting thing that I learned this morning is that apparently FRAPs does not handle DSR well. Dynamic Super Resolution is a thing that Nvidia cards can do, where they essentially run the game in 4k on a 1080p resolution. That is an oversimplification of what it ACTUALLY does but we are just going to go for that simplistic definition for the time being. I am going to need to go out hunting and see if I can find another all purpose screenshot program, because fraps apparently only takes a single 1080p panel of the larger image. This wound up with some rather comedic screenshots while trying to capture something for this mornings post. I finally wound up doing Alt+PrintScreen and pasting it into photoshop to get the results this morning… which also caused the FRAPs framerate counter to come along with it. DSR works great for a game like League of Legends or Diablo 3, but it does some weird stuff as a result. I guess I need to do some experimenting with the nvidia screenshot tool that comes with the new version of “Experience” and see if it works well enough to kick fraps to the curb. Thing is that is really all I use it for… dumping screenshots from every game into a single “gameshots” directory for me to sort through for the purpose of this here blog. In any case… the plan is to hang out in Diablo 3 tonight and do another grind ritual with the start of this brand new season. I always have a blast doing it, even when I am not exactly prepared for it.

Two More Fall

October 20, 2016 by Belghast

Last night was a pretty great night. For the last several weeks since Emerald Nightmare released, Wednesday nights have been raid night. At this very moment we are just raiding one night a week, and at first that probably held us back a little. However given the last two weeks I think overall gearing was a bigger issue. Last week we went from only being able to take down Nythendra to adding Elerethe Renferal, Ursoc, and the Dragons of Nightmare to the list. Though admittedly both the Ursoc and Dragons kill felt like sheer dumb luck and bursty dps. This week however we largely added to the mix what felt like repeatable versions of those kills. Myself and Art the other tank finally sorted out something resembling a workable taunt rotation on Ursoc, and the fight went from being insanely spikey…. to pretty damned easy. Similarly with Dragons of Nightmare we just straight up did the fight like we knew what was happening this time… and it went down in a single attempt. Elerethe would have been a one shot were it not for both of us tanks getting knocked off the platform. That was not my proudest moment.

However I am in fact super proud that we managed to get things together for Il’gynoth and added our very first kill this week. Overall it felt like our dps increased between the two weeks, and with it a better sense of what needed to die when. Instead of leaving the Horror up for quite a while we had nice gaps to burn it in… and while we cut it a little close for comfort at around the 10 seconds until wipe mark, it was still a victory. From there we decided to take a stab at Cenarius and actually extended past our normal run time because we made decent progress on the fight. It still feels like there are a lot of levers we could and should tweak to make sure that fight is more repeatable, however we got the kill and hopefully will begin work on Xavius next week. I realize this is “just normal” as the chorus of the more serious raiders might say… but screw it I am happy with our progress. I feel like we are even probably going to start mixing in some heroics before too much longer. Especially with the release of Karazhan on the 25th and it adding some additional gearing options for folks. I am hoping to get a team going there pretty quickly, because I am more excited about that place than pretty much any content in any MMO. I loved the original Karazhan and good or bad, ran it quite literally every Sunday afternoon for what felt like two years to help gear folks and their alts, only to later be replaced by Zul’Aman runs. I think more than anything… most of us are simply going to be happy that before long we can complete the balance of power quest step and move on to the next batch of mythics.