Boosts and Buffs

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I’ve officially reached the point in the Diablo 3 season where I can straight up wreck at least early torment content, which means…  I can boost my friends.  Last night I snagged Byx, Ammo and Sol and drug them through a few Nephilim rifts until they came out level 70s on the other side.  In truth I am rather horrible at boosting people…  I tend to overclear because my tank instincts kick in and I desperately want to protect my fledgling charges.  So that means that the individual Rifts probably take way longer than they should.  However it also means if you are being boosted by me…  you are not only walking away with levels but also with a sizable amount of cash and gems.  Sadly the loot is functionally meaningless until you hit 70.  However since Byx was way ahead of the rest of the crew I am pretty certain she walked with some decent loot as well.  The funny thing with writing about how much I was not feeling this season…  is that it actually made me really want to play.  The moment I posted the blog post I logged in and did a solo greater rift before heading into work that day, and each night since I have at least spent a little bit of time playing.  After the boostery, I connected with Grace and we did a couple of rounds of bounties since we were both in desperate need of the crafting materials.  I technically have everything that I need gear wise apart from one legendary gem, and a single ring….  but everything could be improved by getting some ancients which have been in short supply thus far.

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After playing some Diablo 3 on the laptop, I decided to go upstairs and check out the latest patch for Mass Effect Andromeda.  All in all there have been a lot of subtle improvements to the way that the character models look.  In truth I think there are a bunch of improvements to the game in general because the worlds just feel better looking.  This might of course be the placebo effect, and because they said they patched…. it is making my brain desperately want to see the improvements.  However at the very least my Ryder and all of the characters I am interacting with seem more normal looking.  The Botox face is largely gone… and the fully open surprise eyes seems to be gone as well.  I am pretty pleased with the results because this little bit of window dressing has fixed a lot of my gripes about the game.  On the other side of the equation on non-cosmetic changes… the general inventory increases are also amazing.  I feel like I am no longer needing to deconstruct items in the middle of a planet rather than waiting for me to be back on my ship.  Similarly the ability to tab out of the flight animations while in a solar system makes that just work better, and I am wondering if there is some option I can check in the settings to default to disabled so I don’t need to hit tab.

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I put a few hours in last night and in truth probably played about thirty minutes longer than I should have… for my sanity… and my sleep patterns.  I really like this game and It definitely is up in the game of the year territory for me.  The problem there is…  so is Zelda Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn…  and all of those were released in the first quarter of the year.  I guess in a way I am extremely thankful for all of these games, because with the way the real world is turning out…  this seems to be the golden age of escapism.  It is comforting to be able to lose yourself in a deep and rich game, and completely forget that the world is apparently on fire and someone replaced the fire extinguisher with a can of easy cheese.  There are just so damned many quests that I have picked up and that are littering my inventory that I need to spend one entire night trying to burn those down before I move forward.  I will probably always be grossly over-leveled for the content as a result… but whatever I have my trust Rank V Pioneer Gun.  I just gotta say that once I stumbled onto the weapons provided by the DLC…  or more so I stumbled onto how to GET the DLC items…  I fell in love with the Auto Rifle.  Yes I keep giving mine bizarre names because I’ve had to craft each after the first one…. but whatever it is a freaking awesome gun.  More importantly… Ashgar can be happy that I have finally moved on past the Avenger.

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