June 2018 - Page 2 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Shornhelm Resident

June 25, 2018 by Belghast

When I play an MMO a curious thing seems to happen. There will be one town or public area that I tend to gravitate towards. In World of Warcraft that was Ironforge which makes sense given that was the location of the only Alliance Auction House for years. However long after that fact I still visit it pretty often because as far as a city goes it just feels comfortable. Even when I hang out in Stormwind as the later expansions have pushed us… I tend to hang out in the Dwarven Quarter because again… it feels right for my character. I am sure if you were to ask me to cobble together a roleplaying back story it would involve the fact that Belghast was a human living among Dwarves in Iron Forge as a sort of adopted son.

In Elder Scrolls online… my home is Shornhelm located in the Rivenspire zone of Daggerfall Covenant. While I chose to play an imperial for the bonuses… in my mental canon I am from Shornhelm and grew up there. It doesn’t hurt that I absolutely love the look of this town, but in truth what drew me to it in the first place was the ease of crafting. There is a Wayshrine a few steps from the Smithy and Lumbermill and around the corner from that is the bank. A few steps away is the entrance to the thieves guild, and the only thing that is inconvenient is the Enchanter for breaking down my enchants and jewelry. All told it is just a simple and convenient way to get into town and do my business without needing to run all over the place.

I spent the better part of the weekend playing Elder Scrolls Online chilling on the sofa. At this point I have gone through at least half of Deshaan which appears to be a very large zone in the grand scheme of things. Once I got past CP160 my overall champion rating doesn’t really seem to matter anymore but I believe I am somewhere around 230. This is nothing compared to the players I see roaming around in their 700s. One of the things I find interesting about this game is the fact that the champion system helps to buffer things… but if you are not paying attention and get too much hate from too many targets… you still can pretty easily die. I of course have Green Dragon Blood cheats which helps me recover from dumb things… but it isn’t like I can reliably solo the zone mini boss type mobs yet.

I am still largely playing the same way I always have as a sword and shield dragon knight favoring stamina a bit, but in truth a fairly balanced character otherwise. There are many builds that appear to be faster at killing things than mine, and I am sure I could swap stuff around to get to one of those. However this one makes me happy and it involves me charging in… debuffing the target and then just wailing on them with my weapon. I am perfectly fine with that style of gameplay. Now were I dipping my toes into PVP I am sure I would quickly be confronted with my inadequacies.

The system that I stumbled onto yesterday that I had never experienced before was the Outfit Station. I have largely been wearing an disguise that I picked up from some crates since I really dig the whole platemail robes thing that the World of Warcraft paladins had going on. As a result I have not really worried too much about what sort of gear I was wearing, but eventually wandered past a machine I had not seen before. This allows you to change the appearance of every slot you are wearing and set three levels of color dye. One of the things I deeply appreciate is that the same regions on every piece seem to be the same dye slot. In both GW2 and Rift there are times where the primary item may represent the metal pieces… but in other items it could be the secondary dye slot. In ESO it seemed to be reliable that the first slot represented the metal bits, the second the highlights, and the third any underlayment.

Ultimately what this tells me is that I need a lot more dye pots, but I am not really sure how one gets those apart from buying them on the in game store when they are offering up a color scheme you like. I cobbled together something I am largely okay with however. That said… the real win for the night was learning how to dye my disguise so that I could keep wearing my plate robes appearance but just change up the color scheme a bit. I am having yet another renaissance with this game, and I am wondering how long it will last. As my friend Squirrel said… it will likely last right up until some other game catches my attention since I do tend to flit back and forth between every MMO I have ever played. Really enjoying the story of Ebonheart Pact and it is so much more “me” than what was going on over in Aldmeri Dominion.

One parting comment… if you are out there playing some ESO feel free to add me to your friends list. If you friend @belghast it will do so at an account level, making it easier to track if I am on an alt. The truth is however… I don’t really play alts.

Champion and Stonefalls

June 22, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to do enough greater rifts to push my three gems of choice to level 35… which means I have now finished the second post chapter of Season 14. I am now two steps into Destroyer where the challenges get harder as to the prize amounts. I feel like this is a reasonable place to take a break since my often partner in crime in this Diablo nonsense is having to deal with some real world stuff. I do however intend to keep running the occasional run to farm up some gold. I am completely flat broke at this very moment… or at least 600k gold which FEELS flat broke in the Diablo 3 seasonal post game. I spent a chunk of time transmuting gems for the purpose of trying to slot the best green gem into every item that would take one.

This will be essentially the last performance and damage output boost I can make that does not involving swapping item for item with an Ancient Legendary equivalent. You can see on the profile of my seasonal character that I currently have four ancient legendaries… but of those one doesn’t really count given that I am wearing nemesis bracers just for the purpose of burning through Rifts faster. I’ve been spending all of my blood shards with Kadala on chest pieces in the random hope of getting an ancient version of the Marauders chest, but really at this point it is just picking a slot and grinding on it until luck rewards me for my futility.

I also need to determine what conquest I will plan on going with this season, or technically conquests if I intend to go deep enough in to get the extra bank slot. The conquests available this season are…

Avarice – Complete a 50,000,000 gold streak while outside The Vault and the Inner Sanctum
Speed Demon – Complete a Nephalem Rift at Max level on Torment X or Higher within 2 minutes
Years of War – Reach Greater Rift Level 55 Solo with the full bonuses of Six of the Following Class Sets
Divinity – Reach Greater Rift Level 75 Solo
On A Good Day – Level three Legendary Gems to 65

Of those the two most obvious and probably easiest are Divinity and On A Good Day given that those sorta happen in the normal flow of the game. Figuring out which third one I want to do is probably going to be the biggest issue. Maybe Grace and I could get fast enough to do a T10 Rift together within 2 minutes, especially if we could find some more people to help us out and just sorta go in different directions during each level racking up kills. Avarice is all about building a specific set for it and then gathering up all of the trash in a specific area and trying to kill it all at once. I guess I should be holding onto those gold boosting items just in case I want to go down that route.

The other thing I did last night was run around in Elder Scrolls Online for a couple hours. I gotta say this game is really gorgeous and even thought Stonefalls is probably the worst zone in the game (though Ashgar would probably fight me and claim that Alakir Desert is)… it is still breathtakingly beautiful with its alien mushroom landscapes. I am trying to push through this area because Stonefalls is really the major impediment for almost all of my attempts to level through the Ebonheart content. As a reminder to my readers… I am stubborn as fuck when it comes to Elder Scrolls Online and am not willing to try any of the expansion content until I have beaten the original content. That means I started off in Daggerfall and leveled all the way through those zones. Then I entered the new game plus… which was Aldmeri Dominion on the same character and have leveled through all of that. Finally I am in the process of leveling my way through Ebonheart Pact at which point… I will happily begin gobbling up the expansions.

The primary reason behind this is that I know people who worked on this game and feel like I want to see every last bit of the original content. There is a town in the Rift area in Ebonheart that has namesake characters for myself, Ashgar, Warenwolf, and Audrae… and while I saw them during beta I want to see them legitimately with my main character. I feel like maybe I am ready to buckle down and start pushing through the content and finally reach that goal I have been working on since 2014. Ultimately Elder Scrolls Online is a game I have been playing off and on in one form or another since February of 2013, and the amount of effort that I put into beta testing probably stalled out my eventual post release progress. That said I am deeply proud of being a member of the Psijic Order… what they called the alpha testers and proud of what this game has ultimately become.

Falcon’s Wings

June 21, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was another night in Diablo 3 and I managed to whittle down the remaining objectives in Champion down to one… raise 3 gems to 35. This is more tedium than it is difficult since I can do 45 greater rifts pretty quickly… the challenge is simply not dying and getting that bonus gem level each go round. Demon Hunter is very much a glass cannon and it gets frustrating sometimes when a single hit can send you to the graveyard, but I am getting better at vaulting to safety. The challenge however is now that I have swapped over to the grenades build… there is so much going on with the grenade bounces that it can be extremely hard to actually see incoming attacks that might KO me.

For most of the season so far I have been running the Yang and Rockets build that while it isn’t exactly the same as this one… the one I was running is fairly similar. Last night was all about finishing out the pieces I needed to swap over to the more appropriate seasonal Manticore/Cluster Bombs build that supposedly has a much higher damage potential. The one thing I loved about Multishot is that I could hang way the hell away from my targets and just pepper the screen with nonsense, allowing me to pretty safely clear everything without needing to “get my hands dirty” as it were. This is a play style that absolutely fits the Demon Hunter because it kept me largely safe and at a significant distance to react to incoming damage.

Cluster Bombs however feel like I need to be way closer to the action and as a result spending much more of my time vaulting around the screen trying not to die to poison puddles or explosions. I am adjusting but I still find it less enjoyable overall than the multishot route. That said… Rift Guardians just completely melt at this point when you hit them with a slew of bouncing grenades. I’ve reached the point where the normal mobs are the problem not the bosses because I have enough stacked up boss damage that they just seem to evaporate. By the end of the night I had gathered up all of the pieces of gear I needed for the build and am now working on getting those gems up.

The highlight of the evening however is one specific drop. Grace and I were splitting up and doing a full round of bounties for cube materials, when she was not paying attention and apparently opened the chest in Garden’s of Hope Tier 1… that contained the cosmetic Falcon’s Wings. I thought for certain that they would have only dropped for the people who happened to be in zone at that moment… but apparently that is not the case. I ported to Grace and sure enough the wings were sitting there on the ground waiting for me to loot them. I’ve spent time in the past farming for these without much luck, and it seems to be the way of Diablo 3 that the only time something drops for you… is when you aren’t expecting it at all.

A couple of interesting notes from the Season of Greed double goblins event. Firstly between the two of us we have yet to see a single puzzle ring drop, and the only time we have made it into Greed’s Realm is when a Gilded Baron opened a portal for us. Second note… we have yet to see a single Menagerist Goblin spawn so our dreams of double pet drops have been dashed so far. Similarly we have yet to see any Rainbow Goblins… so no whimsydale nonsense either. We are however seeing a ton of the gem and material goblins… which are awesome but less interesting than the ones that can drop something really rare. All in all I am having a blast and spent from 7 pm onwards last night playing Diablo 3… first solo and then duo’ed up with Grace. I am having more fun this season than I have had in a very long time.

Season of Greed

June 20, 2018 by Belghast

If you have followed my blog for any length of time you would know that I have a deep connection to Diablo 3 and periodically I do the seasonal nonsense. When the concept was fairly new a bunch of us would get together on the Friday night that the season opened and attempt to push as far towards 70 as we could. Over time this group has dwindled from having three teams of four players active during its absolute heyday… to this past Friday just being me and Grace roaming around killing demons. The truth is I often enjoy the more low key seasonal pushes than the bigger groups because you don’t feel like you are letting as many down if you need to take a quick break.

The other thing that has changed is that our speed and longevity does not appear to be anywhere near what it once was. There were several times when we would stay up well past midnight pushing hard to get to 70 as soon as possible, and now.. we often tag out around 10:30. I think this past Friday we managed to make it to 47 before running out of gas for the evening. I picked up Saturday morning and pushed through to I think 68 before Grace and I got back together that afternoon and passed the finish line. Thankfully with a demon hunter… simply passing the finish line to 70 is enough to pretty much finish the seasonal challenges.

Often times double demon hunter seasons start out as ones when we are not super into the process… and are just wanting to unlock the basic seasonal rewards. This season however we both seem to be interested in pushing a little further than those initial steps. For the uninitiated there are four chapters that make up the standard seasonal journey, each including several achievements that you have to unlock like killing a specific boss at a specific difficulty or leveling up the blacksmith and jeweler. These range from trivial to difficult and chapters 2-4 unlock a satchel called Haedrig’s Gift including 2 set pieces each time for a total of the full 6 piece set after completing the journey. Getting to chapter four also unlocks whatever cosmetic rewards are available for a given season… which this time around was a back banner thingy (yes I know it has a name but I am drawing a blank this morning).

However after this initial four chapters you can unlock additional challenges that go through the ranks of Slayer, Champion, Destroyer, Conqueror, and Guardian. At this point I have finished the Slayer step and am currently working on Champion and I am honestly not sure if Grace has defeated that step and moved on to Destroyer or is still working on it. The ultimate reward is an additional bank tab which comes after finishing Conqueror, but this becomes less and less of a thing as you can only get four of these in total. I’ve not gotten my four… Grace has. Demon Hunter with the Marauder set seems to be a reasonable option for pushing higher into the ranks than I normally do in a given season.

Traditionally I play long enough to unlock my set and finish the cosmetic stuff and then check out until the next season. This season started on Friday June 15th and if it goes as it normally does… will wrap up around September 15th. What makes Season 14 special however is there is an event going on called the Season of Greed which greatly increases the number of Treasure Goblins that you encounter. Firstly it feels like the encounter rate has been increased significantly… but when you do find one you will get two copies of the exact Goblin spawned in at once. This means double the loot every time you can get them down, making it feel extremely good to go out and take on things like Nephalem Rifts that already have a fairly high chance of encountering goblins.

I am admittedly a very loot-centric person and the fact that I have hot and cold running goblins on tap… means I am way more likely to spend time roaming around and hunting the good stuff. I’ve already seen myself spending a lot more time in Diablo 3 solo than I ever do during a season. For whatever reason I am finding it extremely relaxing to get in and tear up a rift, but what I need to be focusing on is bounties since I am still down several gem patterns. I think tonight is probably going to be all about doing a full round of bounties and then maybe knocking out some of those Torment 10 achievements needed for Champion. All in all I am still very much a fan of Diablo 3 and I am super amped about the potential for a new Diablo project that they are ramping up the hiring for.