This weekend was the beginning of the 15th season in Diablo 3 and like usual Grace and myself decided to do the thing that we do roughly every three months… and start new seasonal characters. I went with the Demon Hunter because the Unhallowed Essence set is in theory one of the really fun ones… pending I can actually assemble all of the parts of it. Grace went with the Necro because I believe this time is Rathma’s which is another pretty fun set… pending you assemble all of the pieces of it. For most of the season she was way stronger than I was as we ran through the content, but there will be a point where that balance starts to shift the other way. The problem is I have not hit it yet and am struggling a bit with pushing content. I found getting the Greater Rift 20, the last thing I needed for my cosmetic items and last of the Haedrig’s Gift items… but be extremely painful.
This season I seem to have had really bad luck, essentially having NONE of the items I need for my build apart from the Hellfire Amulet. Legendaries seem to be extremely stingy this time around, and often times as I am leveling I start getting some of the drops needed to toss into the cube. That didn’t happen. In theory I am going to start grinding some T1 rifts to try and assemble the rest of the set. I am convinced that Tam stole my luck, because I didn’t even get a single item of my class set to upgrade to Ancient. At a bare minimum however I now have my pet and portrait frame and anything after this is gravy.
In World of Warcraft I mostly spent time this weekend over on the Alliance side leveling my Paladin. Paladins right now seem just as overpowered as Demon Hunters and I have been breezing through content pulling tons of things in a path of destruction… and in truth consecration ends up pulling way more than I had intended most of the time. Originally when I took a stab at playing the Death Knight I had started Stormsong Valley and could not be bothered with that storyline of missing ships. This time around I decided to start Drustvar and its awesome cultist nonsense… and so far I have been enjoying the storytelling way more than a tale of political intrigue. I like big bombastic storylines, like the whole fighting old gods with ghost dinosaurs thing that is going on over on the Horde Side, so Drustvar seems more of that fit.
The only negative is it means at some point I will have to return to the more subtle political intrigue storyline and hopefully I am invested enough in my character at that point to carry me on. I figured the Paladin gave me a lot of options for running stuff… but the truth is I will probably just tank or dps… and it is highly unlikely that I ever heal. While I technically got the healing Artifact weapon, I am not sure if I ever had it equipped. All in all though… just not loving the Alliance content anywhere near as much as I did the Horde. However I will say so far… the War Campaign stuff seems cooler on the Alliance side… even though it feels weird to be retracing steps I know as horde quests. I did not realize that I would be effectively sharing the same space… like Anyport for example in my world is very much a Horde town… but it is seemingly also open to Alliance? Also finding it weird that I am seeing way more Orange names while I am leveling than Blue ones. Maybe there was an initial push of alliance players… or maybe the AIE presence on our shared shard greatly pushes the balance to Horde.
Lastly we recorded another podcast this weekend as is the usual, and this time around we talked a lot about the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise… and the fact that I think of it as Warrior is telling to the last time I actually played one. We also had this unintended deep dive into Hollow Knight after some conversation about Hyperlight Drifter sort of jarred it loose. We are trying really hard to bring the shows in around an hour in length and as such they sort of feel better than they used to. We are trying to limit the number of topics… which has this side effect of causing topics to roll forward to other weeks. The Dragon Quest topic for example had rolled twice before we finally talked about it. I am thinking the Trello system that we are using for show notes seems to work pretty well, as we can drop things into the queue throughout the week easily. Regardless… if you tried listening to us when we often times recorded two to three hour long shows…. you might give it a shot again.