Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Rediscovering Playlists

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Morning Friends! Now that I have finished the Diablo 3 Season 23 grind, that means I have more or less defaulted back to trying to finish my Nightblade off in Elder Scrolls Online. There are still several more days of the Anniversary Festival and with that the double experience buff that comes from eating cake. I personally find this pretty chill and relaxing to just hop in and join one of the auto groups and grind away until my bags fill. While doing this I have been spending quite a bit of time recently listening to music, which is odd to say that I have not done in a very long time. I have no clue what happened because music used to be such a critical part of my life, but over the years I gravitated more and more towards instrumental music… and then just stopped listening to something in the background all together.

This most recent foray has been thanks to my good friend Bells, which I realize is somewhat confusing given that I go by Bel with one L. She has created a handful of really good playlists that are theme based with the most recent one being centered around the music of Generation X, or at least those of us growing up at a very particular age. Listening to this feels like I transported back to being seventeen again and cruising around in my beat up 1977 Honda Civic Hatchback. If you are interested then I highly suggest this playlist, and I also really enjoy her punk playlist as well.

I admittedly am pretty new to using Spotify, which I know sounds weird given how ubiquitous it has become. I am by no means a stranger to streaming audio, I just went down a different path to arrive here. Originally I was a huge proponent of Pandora, because with the closing of Oink’s Pink Palace I was looking for a new discovery engine more than anything else. I was no longer listening to the radio and with it I needed a new vehicle for discovering new music that I might like. From there I shifted over to Google Music and was there until they started screwing with it and trying to turn it into YouTube Music. After that I had a brief stint with Amazon Music but kept running into gaps in their inventory of songs which lead me to finally subscribe to Spotify.

One of the things that I didn’t love about Google Music was the lack of a way to publicly share a playlist with someone else… and actually allow them to listen to it. This is something that is solved with Spotify and recently I have been working on my own stupidly large playlist. It is far from complete and likely never will be… but if you are so inclined I give you Bel’s Confusing Blend. I highly suggest listening to it on shuffle given that there are large blocks of the same artist right now in a row. It is intended more as a radio station style experience and shuffle mostly does that. I sorta wish I had the ability to pre-shuffle the list and at some point I might actually sort it by hand to make it flow a little better but for now it is what it is.

One of the things that I used to love as a kid is creating mix tapes and I might start doing that again. A mix tape was a specific vehicle where the songs flowed in a specific way as to invoke a particular feeling. I miss doing this and if I can find some of the ones I created in the past for friends, I might port them over, but I have no clue if I saved any of that. I lost most of my musical archives at one point which is ultimately what lead me to embrace streaming. Today is going to be a bit of a busy day, but at least I will have a personal soundtrack to nurture me.

Season 23 Done

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Morning Friends! Yesterday involved a significant number of rounds of bounties because that is ultimately what I needed in order to get Avarice done the predictable way. I took a screenshot of this fully cleared map because it was a bit of a rarity. I talked about this a bit but I am having an issue where I am crashing to desktop rather often while playing Diablo 3 this season. Other friends are reporting the same behavior so I am guessing it has something to do with the sweeping changes that were patched in surrounding followers. This however should be a public service announcement to go ahead and close your bounties and collect the caches because it was very rare that I actually made it through all five zones before getting a crash to desktop.

One of the things with Avarice is that I tend to overfarm significantly because I do not trust my own mathematics. Essentially I have developed this habit of running one full round past when I think I have hit my goal. Effectively I had 40 caches divided between 10 T13 caches and 30 T16 caches. This is way more than I actually needed because if you do the math you end up with something like this:

10 Torment 13 Bounty Caches at 1,190,000 gold each = 11,900,000 gold

30 Torment 16 Bounty Caches at 1,640,000 gold each = 49,200,000 gold

Combined gives me a grand total of 61,100,000 gold

In theory I could have stopped at 25 Torment 16 caches and 10 Torment 13 caches because that would have given me roughly 52 million gold but that was cutting it a little close for my tastes so I went ahead and farmed just one more round. The scary thing is… while I was loading up my inventory with caches to go for the final opening… I crashed to desktop. I did not take a picture of the loot everywhere because I was afraid to do ANYTHING until I had locked down all of that random loot.

Once I got Avarice done, all that was really left was to cube a bunch of legendaries to finish out the achievement for collecting 40 legendary abilities. Ultimately this is always the last thing that I knock out because I will end up with such an overwhelming amount of resources from the bounty caches that it just simply becomes a matter of finding enough items in my vault that I have not already cubed. Thankfully I have a bad habit of just dumping random legendaries in my vault rather than dealing with them as I go so I end up with plenty of fodder for the cube.

At this point you might be asking yourself… why do you do this every season? The answer is simple. It is for the pet. This time around it was an adorable angry kitty person that I could not pass up. For the last several seasons there has been a chase pet that you can only get by finishing the entire season and I love them. Will it matter once Diablo 4 releases and everyone migrates over to that game? Probably not but for now I am enjoying my wide array of gold collecting pet options. Now that the season is effectively over for me I am going to return to Elder Scrolls Online as my daily driver apart from popping back into Diablo 3 to help others with their seasonal journey. I had a lot of fun, because it is this super condensed leveling and grinding process. Then again I always enjoy the seasonal ride.

A Cache of Caches

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Morning Friends! One of the aspects of this season that is super hard to get used to is just how prevalent Death’s Breath ends up being. Given that there are a limited number of items that make sense to be equipped on your follower, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be rocking the Sage set for the bonus to DB drops. This is what it looks like when you destroy a slime goblin and the sea of teal that I am not tired of yet. The challenge however is that every other crafting resource seems more scarce, especially the white quality “Reusable Parts”. This however has been a season where I am never having to worry about enchanting or rerolling items because I almost always have a full stock of items waiting to be used.

Yesterday I talked about my hang up with Set Dungeons, but given it was one of the things holding me back I set forth to complete one last night. I remembered Immortal Kings being fairly easy in the past so I cobbled together the set of gear that goes with that build. Thankfully I pretty much had everything I needed already sitting in my vault because I am a horrible packrat when it comes to Diablo loot. At least in this specific instance it really paid off because after all of the hemming and hawing about doing this… I walked in and got mastery on my first attempt. At some point on my non-seasonal characters I really should go through the process of completing all of the set dungeons so I can get those spiffy wings.

That leaves the only real thing left on my seasonal journey gathering enough bounty caches to get Avarice. Right now I have 10 Torment 13 caches and 13 Torment 16 caches sitting in my vault. If you follow the math that i posted yesterday that would give a grand total of 33,220,000 of the 55,000,000 needed for the Avarice achievement. However when it comes to this achievement I always overshoot the goal because I am scared to death that I will start the process and not have enough gold and end up having to farm everything all over again. So my plan right now is to fill up the 12 remaining slots in that vault with Torment 16 caches and maybe start into a second vault just to make certain.

Another part of the seasonal grind is getting Primal Ancient Legendary items and I have to admit my luck has been somewhat spotty in that department. So far I have gotten four with my first one being a Restraint… which would be awesome in any other season where that is a common item needed for a build but significantly less awesome this particular season. The second item was my Bull-Kathos main hand and probably the best possible item I could have hoped for. After that I have picked up two complete trash items in Kymbo’s Gold and Pledge of Caldeum. I WISH that the last of those was a one handed spear instead of a polearm so at least my follower could equip it. This is sorta the way of primals however because they very rarely drop as something that would be useful to you.

The main problem I am encountering right now in progressing is that whatever changes were made to implement follower loot seems to have damaged the overall stability of the game client. I am seeing a significantly higher instance of crashes to desktop and they seem to always happen at the worst possible time. As such I am not holding my bounties open because way too often I end up crashing out on the fifth zone of bounties each time. I have other friends talking about crashing out while doing Greater Rifts and I have had one of those occur as well. I am hoping that maybe just maybe I will farm up enough caches tonight in order to finish the season.

Set Mastery is my Kryptonite

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Hey Friends! This is probably going to be a pretty short post given that I honestly don’t have an awful lot to talk about. I am deep into the Diablo 3 seasonal grind and finding it very hard to focus on anything else right now. I am still trying to make sure I log in at least once a day to do ESO daily stuff because that anniversary event is still going on… but timing has conspired to place this seasonal grind in direct conflict with that. I am nearing the end and am very much in the slow grind portion where there is very little effort required but just a lot ore repetition and grinding bounties.

Shocking to no one who has been on this emotional rollercoaster with me before, but I am once again stalled out on the Set Dungeon Mastery portion of this ride. Something you have to understand about me, I have a massive hang up about when being put on a timer. Like I could go into the emotional scars and explain it all to you… and probably have in the past… but suffice to say this is something rooted deep within my psyche and just something I can’t shake no matter how hard I try. If you put me on a timer I am going to fail at whatever the task is. If you time me without me knowing it I am probably going to execute flawlessly and with plenty of time to spare.

So mostly of my life I have developed coping strategies for this by trying really fucking hard to ignore the fact that there is a clock ticking down and I use this to get over my natural aversion to Greater Rifts. However Set Dungeons are a whole new level of hell for me because not only do they require me to be on a timer, but they also require me to do a little dance that feels unnatural while watching the clock. So as a result I put them off until the absolute last moment. For example when I finally do master a set dungeon… I am going to zoom forward and complete everything but the very last set of the seasonal journey because I have literally completed two full steps that I won’t get credit for until I have finished off Slayer.

Set Dungeon mental fuckery aside… I am super close to wrapping the season up its entirety. All of my gems are above level 65 so a few more Greater Rifts and I will be able to get them all to 70. I can easily do 80s but my survival is still not where I would want them to be so it means that I die quite a bit in doing them… but am killing so fast that there is plenty of time on the clock to spare. Basically today I need to get over my mental block and build a set for the appropriate dungeon and just do the thing.

Last night Grace and I managed to get a Speed Demon clear of a Torment X Rift and I was easily able to get a solo Greater Rift 75 clear for that conquest. That leaves the most likely candidate on the books to be Avarice which is easy enough to complete but just time consuming. Essentially there are two ways to do this… hoping and praying that the stars align with your leveled up Boon of the Hoarder and you can complete this naturally. Then there is the method that I usually do which is farm up a bunch of bounty chests and open them all at the same time so that I can get enough gold to drop to finish this up in one go. I’ve gathered the calculations before in the past but going to copy and paste them here largely for my own benefit later.

A T13 bounty cache contains 1,190,000 gold.
43 T13 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T14 bounty cache contains 1,440,000 gold.
35 T14 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T15 bounty cache contains 1,540,000 gold.
33 T15 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

A T16 bounty cache contains 1,640,000 gold.
31 T16 caches contain enough gold to achieve the conquest.

Right now I have several T13 caches that Grace and I farmed up last night. I will probably switch over to T16 Caches when I start farming on my own later today. As a result I am probably going to end up in a similar situation that I have been before of farming up a page and a half of these in my inventory before attempting to do a mass opening and getting the achievement. I seem to usually land somewhere around 35 caches before doing the open. I have no clue how long it is going to take me to do the necessary farming but that and the mindfuck that is the set dungeon mastery are really the only things standing in my way. I also need to extract 19 legendaries but the bounty farm will give me more than enough materials to finish that off.